Grail - Elizabeth Bear [116]
At that moment, she thought indeed she might do anything to stay. Even let them perform brain surgery on you? And take away your colony?
Tristen was already picking his way, hunchbacked, around the copilot’s chair and toward the rear of the lighter. Some few minutes later, the doors opened and a stairway rolled up outside.
With Tristen at her shoulder, Perceval clutched the handrail. Woozy under heavy gravity, she stepped out into the rain. “Doesn’t this conduct electricity?” she asked, head craned back to the clouds so that falling water—magical, explicable, incomprehensible water falling from miles above her in the sky—could wash her face.
“The stair is insulated,” Amanda said, as Danilaw pulled up behind her, “as is the lighter. Still, it can’t hurt to get down it quickly. And out of the rain. Our greeters are waiting under that awning.”
When she pointed it out, Perceval noticed it. She’d registered it before, but having no knowledge of what an airfield—a spaceport?—looked like, she hadn’t realized the red-and-white-striped tent was unusual for this place and time.
“Oh, boy,” she said. “A reception committee.”
Hair plastered to his face and neck, drops of beaded water running across the high cantilevered planes of his cheekbones, Tristen laughed. “Come on,” he said. “I can already see how this is going to get cold.”
They squeaked down the stairs in wet shoes, carefully, and stepped out a moment later onto puddle-dressed something-black. Behind them, Amanda’s and Danilaw’s footwear clicked and slapped and splashed. Now that they were lower, no longer obscured by the tent, Perceval could see the dark shapes of greeters through the slanting rain. She turned to make sure Amanda and Danilaw were at her heels—Danilaw offered a comforting nod—and, squaring her shoulders, started forward.
The puddles splashed underfoot; the black substance she walked over was hard and inabsorbent—and rippleless in its smoothness, because the puddles joined and flowed into one perfect, shallow sheet of water rather than collecting in the low spots.
Water stung Perceval’s eyes, plastered her hair across her face, and trickled into the corners of her mouth.
People were walking out from under the tents now. Perceval saw a woman and a man in the forefront, and behind them two sets of others. A little more than half of the group—six, exactly—were obviously security. Self-effacing, arranged around the border, watching in opposite directions in pairs. The other five were mixed men and women.
The whole crew wore coats of some tight-woven cloth the rain beaded up on. They had hats and tiny portable fabric tents on sticks, and the thing that fascinated Perceval most was the earthen rainbow of colors their faces came in, from ivory-gold to one almost as dark as Danilaw.
Danilaw, who leaned over and whispered “Gonna make it?” as two of the security types detached themselves from the advance and came to flank him. The other four, it seemed, were tasked with keeping the first man and the woman safe, and possibly Tristen and Perceval, based on the way they enforced a perimeter and took up positions.
The woman came forward. She angled her tent-on-a-stick so the rain drummed against it rather than against Perceval’s skull and extended the opposite hand. “I’m Gain Kangjeon,” she said. “Welcome to Fortune, Captain Perceval.”
Perceval read her stance, her expectations, and stepped forward to return the clasp. But whatever Perceval might have said next was lost in the flash of lightning, and the punch of something against her ribs that at first she thought was thunder.
22
wounds
If his children be multiplied, it is for the sword: and his offspring shall not
be satisfied with bread.
—Job 27:14, King James Version
Under the roof of a pavilion in a Go-Back Heaven, before an audience of cobras and Go-Backs, Dust’s patron prepared to conquer the world.
She had arrived hours before, slipping away from Engine in the confusion of Perceval and Tristen disembarking for Fortune. She had brought the paper Bible. Dust, curled inside