“So you’re misdirecting the predictable theft.” He hadn’t heard about that happening in archaeology—but it was familiar to him regarding xenofauna and xenoflora. He’d once been involved with a feint like this himself. He chuckled. “All I care about is no biota.”
“None of those. But there’s this.” Tai unwrapped a six-tined aluminum fork, holding it up.
That struck Haze as a showy gesture. It occurred to him that the Rift wall would provide plenty of vantage points for watchers to see anything happening right here, in the center of the station courtyard. “Are any potential thieves watching this?” he asked Mercury.
“Very possibly. We have instruments that scramble what they can see, looking like hot-air shimmer is causing distortion, but in this one spot any imaging they see is true, which is why it’s marked with tape and we avoid walking through here.”
These Pastfinders were a clever bunch, Haze thought. Clever enough to outwit thieves, meant easily clever enough to skirt inconvenient planetary laws if Tai decided to do so.
“This is from a disreputable store in the part of Wendis called Tradeway.” Tai waved the fork. “Aluminum and a gaudy fake. I bought it there and brought it here to make it real.”
It was telling that the Ria and Gerro Lee barred the square doors of Site A, a precaution not usually taken when the field station was occupied. Tellus had no large predators. Unless you counted humans—who, all things considered, definitely counted.
Mercury had a sleeping niche on the back wall of the station’s storeroom. Behind a curtain, the niche was small and windowless. That was not a problem for someone used to starships. She found her niche quite adequate, complete with a little shelf for a small figurine of Skance, the lesser god of her people.
The niche would not be adequate if she got lucky with Haze. Not that she usually had that kind of luck! Many potential sexual partners were unnerved by her gift, the sometimes-a-curse gift of Skance. The name of her people for themselves was, not Jinxes, but Chancers. They weren’t tied to bad luck—just luck itself. Haze seemed to understand that. He wasn’t unnerved by her.
Some men thought she was worth a casual encounter only because she was exotic. Haze didn’t seem to be that kind either, a collector of shallow love affairs. And he was so attractively tall and lean, soft-spoken and intense. He made her feel like a sexually eager young girl—or like herself at a certain time of monthly cycle, she realized, adding up the days since the last one. Right. Her sexual interest ramped up when she was fertile. This was one of those times.
She would much rather be in Haze’s tent than here in her niche.
But not tonight. She made sure her communicator worked and placed it on the shelf with Skance, who would make sure that no misplaced atoms made something go wrong with the device.
Probably.
The borrowed tent had a built-in sleeping bag and a transparent dome. As the stars came out, Haze recognized many of them. Brightest were the six other stars of the Faxen union. Positioning himself so as to not pain his bruised shoulder, he thought about this eventful day, from the Faxen bubble to the Rift to Mercury.
It was in his star-traveling past that he’d heard about the Jinxes. It raised his interest level astronomically to meet one. He’d once read something—either a historical account or fiction, and yes, there was a difference—about the Jinxes originating in the Dead Zone, the expanse of stars between here and Old Earth where war had raged a millennium ago, and where humanity had colonized a planet so wildly dangerous that it took extraordinary luck to survive. The survivors evolved a psychic gift for luck. Because as a race they were physically beautiful, some Jinxes had been brought to Starmark in the slave trade. But it brought bad luck to transport them unwillingly. The slave traders had let the Jinxes go.
In the present day there were wealthy citizens of the Faxen Union—syndexecs, consortium players, interstellar criminals—who collected exotic human beings. Haze remembered hearing that the Jinxes weren’t lucky for those people either.
He bristled to think of Mercury in either situation, a slave or a collectable. She was so alive, eyes luminous and hands in fluid motion with the silver bracelet flashing on her wrist. He wondered what it would be like to make love to her. That idea was absorbing enough to damp down his mind’s busyness and let him fall asleep.
A flashback to the scaffold falling jolted him awake. Now his shoulder hurt worse than ever. And the thought of falling things made him suddenly, viscerally uneasy.
The rock walls of the Rift loomed overhead with a river of stars between them. Rocks can fall out of space. It was a disturbing thought. He considered moving the tent into the overhang behind the remaining transport crate. Then he berated himself for that thought. A Traveler not wanting to sleep under the stars? He’d never live it down among the Pastfinders if they found his tent cowering behind that crate in the morning.
But a fear of falling things—falling rocks, ladders, threads—wouldn’t leave his mind. He struggled with it as the night wore on, the river of stars flowing overhead. Finally he dozed off. Then he dreamed about being lost in the wide wild park called Tetra, on Faxe.
Under a cloudy sky, the forest was pocked with pools of water rimmed with slippery slopes and full of bright green shockthreads. Worse, something circled in the air above the trees. The shadow that fell across the pools was twice as wide as he was tall. He dived into the undergrowth to burrow away from the danger in the air.
The Thondor, the apex aerial predator of Faxe, was rare. It had never been documented to prey on humans. Somehow in Haze’s dream that didn’t matter. He sweated, his heart pounding.
Then a dog found him. It was a very familiar dog. As a child in the capital city of Tellus, he’d had a mid-sized, dust-tan dog of no particular breed. In this nightmare, Dusty found him and wagged his tail.
Before Haze could reach out to pet Dusty, the dog turned away and looked back at Haze. The meaning was as clear as though he’d heard it in his mind. Follow me. At a quick trot, Dusty led him through the undergrowth to higher land—a rocky hillside and a cave with a square opening. Sparkspiders lived in holes in the ground. But Haze felt the predator in the air stooping over him. He dived into the cave with Dusty.
A shadow fell on the square mouth of the cave.
“Haze!”
His eyes snapped open. Through the transparent tent dome he saw Mercury’s shape blocking out some of the stars.
“Wake up!” Her voice was low and urgent. “Looters are closing in on us. Come with me.”
Still muscle-stiff from his dream, he pulled on the clothes and shoes that he’d positioned by the tent’s flap where they were easy to find. Mercury led him at a run up the stairs to the observation deck. Starlight washed the deck. Haze could make out the Rift walls above and the plain of sand below. She led him to the east end of the deck, in cold shadow under the overhang of the Rift wall.
“Looters?” he finally asked.
“They’re taking the bait.”
“Bait?”
“Don’t worry, it’s not you. It’s that box. We put it outside the station, ready to load into the copter. Sake thought they might not be able to resist stealing it right away, and she was right. Try these.” She handed him a pair of night-vision glasses.