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Or, as it happened, right now.
“Ship incoming,” she reported to the officer in charge, Luc Desroches. “JumpShip. Big.”
“Any idea who they are?” he asked.
“It’s a Clan configuration,” Cecy replied, after a quick look at the system’s onboard database. “Maybe Clan Sea Fox—they’re traders, or what passes for traders with those people anyhow. It’s hard to tell.”
“We don’t have any Sea Fox ships scheduled to turn up about now,” said Desroches with a frown. “Unfortunately—”
“The schedule doesn’t count for squat these days. I don’t think this is one of our regular visitors, though. None of them are that big.”
“Whoever they are,” said the communications tech at the adjacent console, “they’re keeping quiet. Shall I hail them?”
“Not yet,” said Desroches. “Let them talk first.”
“Looks like they’re deploying the solar sail to recharge their drive,” Cecy said after a few minutes. “They probably don’t have any business on Saffel at all.”
Desroches shrugged. “As long as they stay over there and leave us alone, they can gather all the sunlight they want.”
4
Outer Islands Resort
Dalton Archipelago, Kervil
Prefecture II
February 3134; local summer
Kervil—being mostly water, with its landmasses broken up into a multitude of small islands and a handful of larger ones not quite large enough to qualify as continents—was a planet of many beaches. Even the public parks and seashores seldom witnessed overcrowding. A pundit at the local university had once proclaimed that the world’s ten larger islands alone sufficed to provide each citizen of Kervil with a kilometer of private ocean frontage. Natural human gregariousness, of course, meant that most of those citizens frequented one or another of the popular resorts instead and, on a warm summer day, the sand and the surf alike would be thronged with people.
Jonah Levin liked people, and regarded helping people as the largest component of his life’s work and the entire reason for his job’s existence—but he did not find them, in large numbers, restful. The more people who were gathered in any one place, the more likely it became that one or more of them would recognize him and, inevitably, turn out to have a problem that only the immediate personal attention of a Paladin of the Sphere could solve.
Over the years, A
If that wasn’t enough, there was always his A
Jonah’s torso, and his arms and legs as well, were marked all over with the silvery traces of old scars—relics of the desperate battle on Kurragin that had first brought a simple captain in the Hesperus militia to the attention of then-Exarch Devlin Stone. The skin there remained sensitive, even after all these years, and stress or exhaustion would cause the muscles underneath to knot and ache.
They had come to the island cottage for a family picnic—Jonah, A
“Ah,” he said. Already his tense muscles were relaxing under the gentle pressure of A
“You’re all tied up in knots.” She put pressure on a particularly tight and aching spot, and Jonah groaned pleasurably into the terry cloth beach blanket. “You work too hard.”
“Only because there’s so much that has to get done. Believe me, I’d like nothing more than to spend the next five or six months right here.”
A
“I have to do it, A
He heard her give a gentle laugh. “That’s quite a catalogue.”
“There’s a lot more to it than that,” he said. “Those are just the highlights—or the lowlights, if you want to look at them that way.”
“Taken all together, what they mean is that you’re going to Terra.”
“I’m afraid so, yes.”
Her fingers were still working on the muscles of his back, separating out the scars left by metal fragments and laser fire and—at the very last—by edged weapons in close melee, and he felt himself relaxing into the pleasure-pain. She said, “You’re going to miss Passover with the family, you know.”
“I’m sorry, A
“Yes. And you wouldn’t be the man I married if you didn’t do your duty.” He felt a slight hesitation in the steady movement of her fingers against his skin. “How long do you think you will be away?”
“I don’t know. Given transit time, three months at the very least. Maybe more. I’ll come back as soon as I can, I promise.”
He didn’t say what they both knew—that the unsettled state of The Republic might drag out his absence for much longer than three months. He knew that it was superstitious to think that speaking of a thing might make it happen; he kept his mouth shut just the same.
“Your promise is good enough for me,” A