Coalition 02.5 - The Kingbird Read online

  Dax leaned over to scan the diagrams. “Any ideas? You know if it doesn’t fly or shoot, I’m no help.”

  Dare gave him a sideways look, one corner of his mouth quirking upward. “Then it’s fortunate you’re so bedamned good at those.”

  Dax grinned. “Makes me worth keeping around.”

  “Many, many things accomplish that.” Califa spoke from behind him, and the low rumble of a well satisfied woman in her voice made him smile.

  “I’d be happy to demonstrate again,” he offered as he pulled her into his arms, fighting the urge to take her right back to bed even after the night they’d had. For the moment he settled for a kiss, which only strengthened the urge.

  “Don’t let me get in the way.” Dare’s voice was laced with dry amusement.

  “Before you laugh,” Califa said with a wide smile, “I should tell you I have seen your mate this morning. She looks like a leecat who’s found a permanent patch of sun and a lifetime of sweet milk.”

  Dax burst out laughing at Dare’s expression. “Oh, you’ve done it now, snowfox. Don’t you know you’re not supposed to embarrass a king?”

  “If we don’t, who will?” she asked lightly. “Besides, he looks rather smug, don’t you think? For that matter, so do you.”

  “As well they both should,” Shaylah said as she approached them. Dax had glimpsed her coming downstairs, but had said nothing when she had paused to simply watch them. He knew how much it meant to her that Califa and Dare had so thoroughly put the past behind them. The exchange he’d overheard shortly after they’d returned from Arellia flashed through his mind.

  Your mate is the most forgiving of men.

  He is, but you have earned it. And he knows this.

  He didn’t quite understand it, but he knew that friendship between women was a different thing, fluid, requiring maintenance and effort. He’d told Califa once he was glad men didn’t require such work.

  “I see,” she’d said, in that tone that he’d learned early on meant he was about to get a sizeable lesson. “Is that why you take such care never to laugh at old Paraclon? Why you never forget Glendar’s birthday? Or Rox’s, Larc’s, Nelcar’s? Why you make sure every man who was ever on your crew is well and not in want, even if they no longer fly with you?”

  He tightened his arms around her now, as Shaylah went to stand behind Dare, draping her arms over his shoulders.

  “Have you deciphered your father’s intent?” she asked.

  “I see what it is meant to do, but not with what.”

  Shaylah studied the papers for a moment. “Some kind of power system?”

  Dare flashed his mate a smile. Shaylah was, Califa had always said, very clever when it came to mechanical things.

  “So it appears. By these figures, it would seem to be quite efficient, creating a great deal of power out of a small amount of raw material. But there’s nothing here that indicates what raw material it converts.”

  Shaylah scanned the diagrams again. She reached out and tugged at one that had slipped behind the largest. She frowned at the sketch on the page. It was of an irregularly edged three-dimensional object spattered with dark shapes.

  “It’s a rock,” Dax said helpfully. “Not much help.”

  “And yet King Galen felt strongly enough to draw it, in some detail,” Califa said. The respect in her tone when she said the late king’s name earned her a smile from Dare.

  “And the rest of it,” Shaylah said. “He came here for respite, did he not? And yet he spent much time on this.”

  “Yes.” Dare turned back to the drawings. “So he must have thought it important.”

  Dax wondered for a moment what it must feel like for Dare, to look at these things drawn and written by his father’s hand. He had little left of his own family, their home had been destroyed and most of their belongings with it. He had a hologram or two, and of course the little white snowfox he’d recovered, carved exquisitely out of Triotian marble by a delicate hand. He—

  “Fair warning!” Rina’s words echoed down the staircase as she ran lightly down. “They’re up and about, and ready to go at the world anew.”

  Dax looked at her. She seemed to have shaken off the melancholy, and her laughter made him grin back at her.

  “What’s all this?” she asked as she halted beside them, giving Califa a morning hug and him a warm smile. For an instant the image of the child he’d found in that cave, cowering against the dank wall, bruised, dirty and frightened, with the image of her father sacrificing his life to allow her to escape still haunting her, flashed through his mind. That was, he thought wryly, the bad side of time to relax. It also meant time to think. Too much time.

  Dare explained the drawings to her. Dax felt anew the tightness in his chest at his king’s demeanor. He had accepted Rina from the moment he heard her story, and learned she was the only survivor of her family.

  All Triotians are your family now Rina. But I would take it as a great blessing were you to consider us your home.

  Those words, spoken so gently to a wary, skittish girl, had told Dax more than anything just how far Dare had come. Had told him he would be a king perhaps greater than his father, who was counted among the greatest.

  He had, Dax thought now, underestimated.

  The noisy clatter on the stairs proved Rina’s warning true. The energy in the room suddenly changed as two livewire, excited children raced over to see what all the adults were clustered over.

  “Oh. Those drawings,” Shaina said, sounding disappointed.

  “Respect, my girl,” Dax said. “Those drawings were by the hand of King Galen.”

  “Oh.” Her tone was instantly very different. She looked at Dare. “I’m sorry. They were really done by him?”

  Dare smiled at her genuine contriteness. “Yes.”

  “What are they supposed to be?” This from Lyon, who had clambered into his father’s lap to get a closer look.

  Again, patiently, Dare explained. And ended as before, wondering what the design was supposed to utilize to produce the power it clearly was meant for.

  “Why is this with it?” Shaina asked, pointing at the sketch.

  “Another thing I don’t know,” Dare said. Dax wondered if there was another royal anywhere so honest as to freely admit such a thing.

  Lyon was staring at the drawing, frowning. “Wait,” he said, and scrambled down. He dashed for the stairs, making as much racket as the two of them had coming down. Dax looked at Shaina, who shrugged, clearly claiming ignorance of what her companion was up to.

  Moments later Lyon was back, a fist-sized rock in one hand, and something else Dax couldn’t see in the other.

  “See? This is that.” Lyon set the rock on the table next to the drawing. And it was clearly the same sort of rock, complete with the dark splotches shown in the sketch. Except Dax could see now that the dark spots appeared much different than the surrounding stone. Even as he thought it Dare reached out to touch it, pressing a finger down on one of those spots.

  “It gives,” he said.

  Dax followed suit. The dark blotch indeed gave slightly beneath the pressure of his finger.

  “Strange,” Dare said.

  “They must be connected,” Califa said. “The stone and the design, I mean. Why else would he have stored them together?”

  “I agree,” Dare said. “But why, I have no—”

  “I do!”

  Lyon’s exclamation silenced them all. He lifted his other hand and showed them what had been hidden before. Now that Dax could see it, his brows rose. “Now that’s an old piece of work.”

  “What is it?” Shaylah asked, looking at the small metal device.

  “An old holo-filmer,” Dare said. “One of the first hand-sized ones. I’m not sure I remember how to work it”

  “I figured it out,” Lyon volunteered. “Here, I’ll show you.”

  The boy picked up the device, twisted a small knob, then balanced the thing on end, on the table.

&nbs
p; “I had to use the power cartridge from the lights upstairs to charge it,” he explained. “I was afraid it wouldn’t, because it’s so old, but it worked.”

  Dax drew back slightly, then glanced at Dare, who looked as impressed as he felt at the boy’s ingenuity.

  “Dallying with Paraclon clearly has its good side,” Rina said with a laugh.

  Lyon steadied the device, then pushed a button on one side. A small image appeared in the air a few inches away. An image of a rock that was clearly the same kind as the one on the table now, the one in the sketch.

  For a moment nothing happened. And then another, much larger stone, in fact a small boulder, fell into the image. It had clearly been dropped from above. It struck the small stone with the black sections, crushed it.

  The small stone exploded with a force clear even in the soundless image. A force that seemed much too large for its size. The boulder shattered, flying in every direction. Apparently including toward the holo-filmer, for the recorded image vanished.

  Everyone except Shaina and Lyon, who had clearly seen it before, drew back sharply, startled.

  “See?” Lyon asked anxiously. “That must be it, where the power comes from.”

  Dax, suddenly aware he was gaping, snapped his jaw shut. Just moments ago he and Dare had been handling that rock as if it were just ... well, a rock.

  “A bit of warning?” he suggested wryly. “Hard to fire the flashbow with fingers missing.”

  “But I’d already poked it,” Lyon explained calmly, “so I knew touching it wouldn’t set it off.”

  That boy, Dax thought with a sigh, was sometimes too smart—and curious—for his own good. There was a fine line between protecting and smothering, and Dax was never quite sure exactly where it was.

  His mate, on the other hand, merely grinned at him. She was much better at moving past possibilities that never actually happened.

  “If that could be controlled ...” Califa began.

  “That must be what this is,” Shaylah said, gesturing at the diagrams.

  “Do you think he found a way?” Rina asked, paying the drawings more attention now.

  “I don’t know,” Dare said.

  “Paraclon could figure it out,” Lyon said eagerly.

  “Perhaps he could,” Dare said as he picked up the stone to give it a closer look. “But ... I wonder where this came from?” Dare mused aloud. “I’ve not seen this kind of stone on Trios before.”

  “Nor have I,” Dax agreed.

  “I have!”

  Shaina had been quiet longer than usual, as if she’d been waiting for this moment. Dax wouldn’t doubt it. His girl had a knack for good timing.

  “Where?” Dax asked.

  “I’ll show you!”

  She raced for the door, Lyon at her heels.

  “So much for our restful, quiet morning,” Shaylah said with a laugh.

  They followed as the pair headed into the thick trees behind the cabin. They had been playing there yesterday, Dax remembered.

  “Trou-ble,” Rina trilled a few minutes later, as they passed the boundary of acceptable play and crossed into the area the children had been warned to stay away from.

  “Indeed,” Dax said dryly. “Not that that would stop them.”

  But he said nothing for the moment, just kept following. They reached the reason for the warning, a spot where Coalition explosives had done the only damage in this otherwise pristine place. A yawning crater many yards across, ringed by trees felled by the blast, the rim still blackened after all these years. Dax’s jaw clenched reflexively, as it always did at the evidence of the wanton destruction wreaked upon his once peaceful world.

  “See?” Shaina said, pointing into the pit of the crater.

  The blotchy rocks were everywhere. Some had clearly reacted to the explosion as the one in the holo had, and lay apparently fused and useless, but many more had apparently been broken loose by the shock wave. A layer of the rock several feet thick was bared, some twenty feet below the surface.

  Dax’s gaze shifted to Dare, who glanced back. It was clear his mind was racing with possibilities, just as his own was.

  “How much of this rock do you think your new ship could carry?”

  “Enough to keep Paraclon busy for quite a while.”

  “I think our respite just ended,” Califa said.

  “Does this mean we’re not in trouble for passing the boundary?” Lyon asked, wearing that slightly-too-innocent look they all knew well.

  “It means, cub,” Dare said, ruffling his son’s hair, “that you and your cohort here will be carrying a lot of rocks shortly.”

  Shaina grimaced. “Can’t we just go down and throw them up?”

  “That’s silly,” Lyon said. “They might explode.”

  “Don’t call me silly, cub,” Shaina said fiercely, hands on her hips.

  “I didn’t. Wouldn’t. I called the idea silly. Let’s go.”

  That quickly the contretemps was forgotten and they were scrambling down into the crater.

  “I see our son has his father’s knack for peacemaking,” Shaylah said with a laugh.

  “Good,” Dax said, watching them go. “He’ll need it.”

  * * *

  DAX HAD FLOWN them home with two massive crates of the stones in the cargo hold, the test of the water landing system postponed for the moment. Dare had kept his father’s drawings in his own pouch, to be turned over to Paraclon when they arrived. The inventor’s first two efforts had ended up with the lab in nearly the shape those two imps had left it in with their rocket experiment. Seeing the destruction, Shaylah was thankful for Paraclon’s uncharacteristic awareness when he had then scanned the diagrams to be projected on his work screen, and returned the originals to Dare. There was little enough of his father left to him, and every bit was treasured.

  She had thought as the days passed that Lyon would gradually forget about the project, but he never failed to report to Paraclon’s lab, even long after he had been freed from penitence there. Shaina hadn’t been quite so diligent about it, so wild was she to be free from the duties their recklessness had earned them. But still she came frequently, until Dax had laughingly called them Paraclon’s best inducement to succeed.

  Tonight she had found Dare looking at the drawings, as she had several times before. Whether to see if he could divine the proper function—or where Paraclon was going wrong—or simply to touch something his father had touched, she didn’t know.

  She stood behind him, resting her hands on his shoulders, drawing strength and warmth and pleasure from this simplest of contacts.

  “If this should work ...” she began tentatively.

  “It would be close to a miracle,” Dare finished.

  “Yes.” She leaned forward to look once more. “I am no designer, but does this not seem as if it should work? Yet it does not. Or Paraclon is not getting it right.”

  Dare sighed. “I worry about him. He is brilliant beyond anyone, but sometimes ...”

  “Sometimes the eccentricity seems ascendant.”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps when Pavel finishes his schooling, he can help.”

  Dare gave her a sideways smile. She knew he would always have a soft spot for the young man who had, as a boy, been the first one to find them when they had returned to Trios. Nor would she ever forget the gentle way he had allowed the “scout” who had barely come up to his elbow to “capture” them and take them to the surviving Triotian rebels. The boy had been the first proof for Dare—Wolf then—that he was not the only one of his people left alive.

  And at the time, she’d had no idea of who her companion, the man she had already lost her heart to, really was.

  She saw in his eyes the memories were flowing through his mind as well. She knew the bad ones—the memories of being a slave, of the collar that had controlled him body and mind—had haunted his dreams for a very long time. But eventually the enormous job he had to do here took over, and his exhaustion helped hi
m rest more peacefully. And the old memories, the harsh memories had been replaced with those like the day a young boy led him through the rubble of his world and showed him he was no longer alone.

  New memories, and their mating helped him rest, she thought with an inward, satisfied smile. Which grew ever more amazing as time passed and their bond strengthened.

  “Sometimes,” she said softly, “it is good to think of that time. You need to remember just how far you’ve come, how far back you have brought the people you love.”