Farfetch

She desisted. It was his ship, and Arlai his oldest friend.

Limping, blood flowing from a ragged hole in his thigh, he climbed the tilted deck to the astrogator's station, which he had been covering for their dive into atmosphere. In a velvety voice as midnight-deep as his eyes, he crooned to his computer as he worked the controls. "Arlai, I'm sorry. You did your best. I must ask one last service, then I'll give you peace. Please—we must know."

Through his agony the computer responded, "Serving."

"Thank you, Arlai. Can you show me your previous display—the one just before we entered atmosphere?"

"This is the best I can do. Too many circuits out."

The screen before Jindigar flashed. Krinata scrambled up the canted deck to look around the tall Dushau's elbow. Despite the blurs on the screen, she identified the stellar array that had been on their rear viewscreen for days. But near the edge of one blur there was a new symbol—a massive hyperdrive trace—the Allegiancy Squadron!

"We didn't outrun them!" she groaned. A single ship had traced them as they fled the Emperor's flagship and had called the Squadron in on them. They had crossed the galaxy in short dashes to elude the Squadron and had finally lost them just before entering this system.

But they'd known the Squadron would search every system in the quadrant for any trace of them. So they had voted to try for a landing, Arlai insisting he could get the ship and its cargo of colonization materials down safely, though Ephemeral Truth would never make orbit again. When she accused Arlai of volunteering for a suicide mission, he had pointed out that he'd meet a worse end left helpless in orbit.

Arlai had pla

Krinata had been looking for a good colony site when she'd found the official report on the planet. Before, she'd only studied Arlai's other files on the place, coded under the name Phanphihy, confirming Jindigar's statements. If Jindigar had lied to her, if she'd been wrong about him, it was way too late to change her mind. The crimes against the Allegiancy Empire they had committed together had already condemned her to be executed with him. • "Arlai," whispered Jindigar, "can you show us any sort of scan of this planetary system?"

"Atmosphere distorts, and—"

"Anything, Arlai," begged Jindigar.

The monitor cleared and another view sketched across it, one corner of the screen whited out by the planet's sun, for they were on the dayside. The rest was a blurring haze that shifted as Arlai struggled to find functional sensors and circuits. But the hyperdrive trace still showed clearly at the bottom of the screen. "Jindigar," said Arlai, "I'm sure. The Squadron is still there—and I think they're changing course in this direction." Numbers appeared on the screen. "There's the data. You'll have to plot it. I can't."

Jindigar's head drooped as he leaned on stiffened arms, a very human posture of dejection. "They will search every asteroid in this system until they find us."

"Their instruments will find this ship," she agreed, "but I doubt if they have anything that can locate thirty-one protoplasmic beings on a planet this size."

Arlai interjected, "Eighteen living protoplasmic beings—

that I can discern. So many sensories out"

'If it was a livable planet, we'd have a chance," she accused bitterly, grieving for the dead she'd hardly known.

Jindigar twisted his head to focus his midnight eyes on her. The Dushau face was so humanoid, despite its short nap of dark indigo, large midnight eyes, and nearly bridge-less nose, that she believed she could read his expression: excitement and a revivification her words had given him.

"Of course it's livable. I told you that!"

She pointed to the other screen that still held the faint impression of the Raichmat team's report. She knew how those reports were generated because that had been her job.

His eyes held hers from a bare handspan away, and his voice was penetratingly honest, as he said, "That record is in error. We will lose ourselves on this planet until the Squadron leaves, and then we'll be able to live here."

She knew how those records were made and how ships' Sentients accessed the master files. There was no way the record could be wrong—unless a Dushau had lied, just as the Emperor had accused them of doing. A chill shook her. She'd defended the Dushau, sure in her heart the Emperor had persecuted them unjustly. If she was wrong—

She was about to ask Jindigar how he knew the record was in error, when Arlai groaned and his screen went into a pyrotechnic whirl. Jindigar said compassionately, "Easy now, Arlai, it's all over. You've been the very best, and we'll never forget you." As he spoke he moved to the cables Krinata had been struggling with, cables exposed by the sprung seams of the cabinets. "Krinata, help me!"

She gripped, and together they terminated the computer's agony. His last intelligible words hung in the air. "I'm sorry, Jindigar. You were so good to me, and I failed you."

Tears sprang to Krinata's eyes as she remembered all the times she'd felt that she'd failed Jindigar's trust and had been driven to find unsuspected reserves within herself. She couldn't have been wrong about Jindigar.

She sighed as the last of the echoes died away. "Oh, Arlai, I'm so sorry."

"In a way it's for the best. Arlai would have gone mad left alone here while we hide in the hills. He couldn't just turn himself off, you know."

Dushau feared insanity almost more than death. Krinata wiped at a tear. "I know." She'd often wondered if Arlai had been Jindigar's only real friend for the last three thousand years of the Dushau's incredibly long life.

But there was no time to mourn. "Only eighteen survivors," muttered Jindigar, surveying the dead bridge.

She moved her left hand to cover his where he still gripped the cable, needing to comfort him. Jindigar caught her arm, examining the bleeding. "Here, let's tend that," he said, and noticed the blood on her face. He fumbled for a handlight. "Hold still." He shined it in her eyes, searching for signs of .concussion.

She squinted against the ultrabright Dushauni light, protesting, "I'm all right."

"It seems so," he answered, setting the light aside as he fetched down the first aid kit.

In the hours that followed, Jindigar's pragmatic, one-step-at-a-time way of dealing with the emergency got them all over the shock and into motion. Injuries were bandaged, roll call and inventory taken, and the bodies respectfully gathered and laid out, as if it were all routine.

But Krinata saw his face in the unguarded moment after they found the seven dead Dushau in the nearly crushed cargo hold above the landers' docking bay. With a lifespan of well over ten thousand years, death by accident was different for Dushau than for ephemerals. The death of a friend close for thousands of years could be a paralyzing blow. She alone saw how shattered Jindigar was by the seven deaths, and knowing more of what he'd just been through, she alone marveled at his regained composure. He'd pay a price for that stoicism.

Soon after that they assembled outside the ship in the desert afternoon sun to plan their next moves.

Only eighteen survivors gathered in the shade of the half-buried hull of the Ephemeral Truth. The ship's nose was buried deep in a sand dune, the tail stretching out farther than Krinata would care to walk in the loose sand. The bottom of the hull had crumpled, but even so, the ship rose many times Krinata's height. Around them, white sand dunes showed ripples from the action of ferocious winds, and no hint of vegetation as far as the eye could scan. The sky was a vivid magenta behind the blinding copper sun. A pale rosy peach moon was rising near the horizon.