Chapters (29)
“Yes, sir,” she told him. “Few minutes out still.” She went to lift the elevenstring’s case but the trooper did it for her, hefting it onto one shoulder, carbine swinging round from the other.
“We’re tracking it,” Etalde said as the trooper stepped towards their aircraft. Cossont stood where she was. The commissar-colonel stopped and looked back at her. “Well, come on,” he told her. “We’ll rendezvous with the creature in the air.” He smiled. “Faster.”
“And my flier, sir?” she asked.
Etalde shrugged. “Tell it to go home or wherever it has to go to, Lieutenant Commander; you’re coming with us.” He shrugged. “Orders.”
* * *
“Never heard of it.”
“More commonly known as the Hydrogen Sonata.”
“Still never heard of it.”
“No great surprise, sir. It’s a bit obscure.”
“Renowned?”
“The piece?”
“Yes.”
“Only as being almost impossible to play.”
“Not, like …?”
“Pleasant to listen to? No. Sir.”
“Really?”
Vyr frowned, thinking. “An eminent and respected academic provided perhaps the definitive critical comment many thousands of years ago, sir. His opinion was: ‘As a challenge, without peer. As music, without merit.’”
The commissar-colonel whistled briefly. “Harsh.”
Vyr shrugged. “Fair.”
“Life-task, eh?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time, sir.”
In the ink-black skies above the Kwaalon plains, the military craft decelerated quickly and swung almost to a stop; the rear ramp swung down and wind came buffeting and roaring in before a shush-field calmed everything down.
Vyr was strapped into a wall seat between Etalde and a third trooper. The first two troopers were on the other side of the small cabin with the elevenstring in its case secured between them like some bizarre carbon-black coffin, its nearest extremity close enough to Cossont to touch. An AI was flying the aircraft.
Pyan, Cossont’s familiar, which had the form of a square black cape, flapped its way in from the turbulent darkness outside, bumping into the spongy shush-field and fluttering theatrically to the floor in apparent surprise as the craft’s rear door slammed closed and the flier accelerated again.
“Oh, gracious!” Pyan said on the local open channel, as it struggled against the rearward pull. It used its corners to heave itself along the floor towards Cossont, who tapped into their private link and growled,
“Stop dramatising and get over here.”
The cape flowed along the floor and climbed up to her shoulders with a little help from Etalde and Cossont herself. It draped itself there as best it could given the straps, fastening itself round her neck.
“You’re touchy,” it told her. “What’s all the fuss about anyway?”
“With any luck, nothing.”