Smoldering blood hide dauntless3/20/2023 ![]() ![]() She might have been a duke’s consort had she remained in society, or even dowager-duchess of some cluster of lucky planets. ![]() Were there women this controlled, this powerful, even among the silk-walled drawing rooms at the core of the Empire? I strongly doubted it. Even in the face of our pleas for you to keep your distance.”ĭespite myself I nearly bowed, so elegant was her manner. “So, Captain de Vere,” she said, her voice like vacuum frost on a lander’s struts, “you are come among us. Her eyes gleamed bright with genius as any worthy man’s, her charming chestnut hair in an unbecoming style fit only for such a primitive place, shot through with a silver when lent her gravitas beyond her gender. Had it been her footprints which disturbed the bright, brittle dust outside as she found whatever resources had sustained them all these years? At any rate, she was yet slim as any message torpedo, her rough-spun tunic cut in homage to a uniform doubtless long worn to raveling threads but still hinting at womanly charms beneath. Now I cast my eyes upon this woman who had served as sort of a shadow idol to me in the months of our journey to this unnamed place, Girl Friday to the great Captain’s Robinson Crusoe. In the time I had studied her file, I had developed a fond respect for her, nurtured amid the hope that she had been one of the survivors mentioned in the desperate longwave help signal which had finally arrived at Gloster Station after laboring at lightspeed across the echoing darkness between the stars. Not for Commander Cordel these sharp-nailed sham combats. Most of the girl officers who came into the service under the Navy’s occasional outbreaks of gender-rebalancing soon enough yielded to destiny and their biological imperatives and found more suitable work as service wives, competing as hostesses to aid their chosen man’s rise to Admiral in the no-less vicious battlefields of the salon and ballroom. Our own records, copies of dusty personnel files laboriously thermaxed from ancient microfilm, had shown that despite the natural disadvantages of her sex Cordel had risen to Executive Officer of Broken Spear before that late ship’s collapse from heaven. “Just like his ship.”Īllison Cordel, a woman still beautiful amid age and hard use, stood yet beside her commanding officer, loyal as any starman’s wife though it was the two of them together lost so far from home. ![]() “Golly, skipper, he’s a real mess,” whispered Deckard behind me. That mankind had bent our way around the speed of light was miracle enough, but we had not yet broken past the photons cast so wide in nature’s bright net, and so must live with the twinned constraints of relativity and simultaneity. Finding the balance of her remains was critical, of course, in the niggardly time allotted our expedition by Sector Control and the unsympathetic laws of physics. We did not yet know where the rest of his benighted vessel had come to her grave, but she had certainly fulfilled her ill-starred name. The place had a gentle reek of aging plastic laying over the dank dance of stone on shadowed stone, but otherwise was little different from a cavern fitted out for the habitation of men. The baroque pillars which had once bounded the great rays of energy required to leap between the stars now served to do little more than support a roof to keep off the rare rains, and cast a penumbra against the pitiless glare. The old man was king of all he surveyed with his blind eyes, soul shuttered behind milky shields, ruling from his seat in a shattered palace comprised of the main hull frame series of INS Broken Spear. How he and whoever yet lived among his crew had survived this hellish gravity well for close to half a human lifetime was a mystery to me, which yet remained to be truckled, but survive they had. His eyes were marbled with a blindness which had come upon him in the long years, victim perhaps of some alien virus, until his blank visage appeared to be chiseled from the planet’s sinews as much the very rocks themselves. Still, one could see the spirit of command which had once infused him, present even now in the lines and planes of his face as rough and striated as the great, crystalline cliffs which marched toward the horizon sparkling azure and lavender under the hard light. The angry star, a rare purple giant, dominated the daysky with visible prominences that sleeted hard radiation through every human bone and cell that walked beneath its glare. Captain Lehr’s face had been ravaged by decades under the coruscating emanations of this forgotten world’s overbright sun.
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