Four and a half hours after breakfast, the shuttle bearing those four Second Bo lieutenants home from their leave docked.
They’d been drinking for three days, and had continued right up to the moment they left Shis’urna Station. The first of them through the lock staggered slightly, and then closed her eyes. “Medic,” she breathed.
“They expect you,” I said through the segment of One Bo I’d placed there. “Do you need help onto the lift?”
The lieutenant made a feeble attempt to wave my offer away, and moved off slowly down the corridor, one shoulder against the wall for support.
I boarded the shuttle, kicking off past the boundary of my artificially generated gravity—the shuttle was too small to have its own. Two of the officers, still drunk themselves, were trying to wake the fourth, passed out cold in her seat. The pilot—the most junior of the Bo officers—sat stiff and apprehensive. I thought at first her discomfort was due to the reek of spilled arrack and vomit—thankfully the former had apparently been spilled onto the lieutenants themselves, on Shis’urna Station, and nearly all of the latter had gone into the appropriate receptacles—but then I looked (One Bo looked) toward the stern and saw three Anaander Mianaais sitting silent and impassive in the rear seats. Not there, to me. She would have boarded at Shis’urna Station, quietly. Told the pilot to say nothing to me. The others had, I suspected, been too intoxicated to notice her. I thought of her asking me, on the planet, when she had last visited me. Of my inexplicable and reflexive lie. The real last time had been a good deal like this.
“My lord,” I said when all the Bo lieutenants were out of earshot. “I’ll notify the hundred captain.”
“No,” said one Anaander. “Your Var deck is empty.”
“Yes, my lord,” I acknowledged.
“I’ll stay there while I’m on board.” Nothing further, no why or how long. Or when I could tell the captain what I was doing. I was obliged to obey Anaander Mianaai, even over my own captain, but I rarely had an order from one without the knowledge of the other. It was uncomfortable.
I sent segments of One Esk to retrieve One Var from the hold, started one section of Var deck warming. The three Anaander Mianaais declined my offer of assistance with their luggage, carried their things down to Var.
This had happened before, at Valskaay. My lower decks had been mostly empty, because many of my troops had been out of the hold and working. She had stayed on the Esk deck that time. What had she wanted then, what had she done?
To my dismay I found my thoughts slipping around the answer, which remained vague, invisible. That wasn’t right. It wasn’t right at all.
Between the Esk and Var decks was direct access to my brain. What had she done, at Valskaay, that I couldn’t remember, and what was she preparing to do now?
13
Further south the snow and ice became impermanent, though it was still cold by non-Nilt standards. Nilters regard the equatorial region as a sort of tropical paradise, where grain can actually grow, where the temperature can easily exceed eight or nine degrees C. Most of Nilt’s large cities are on or near the equatorial ring.
The same is true of the planet’s one claim to any sort of fame—the glass bridges.
These are approximately five-meter-wide ribbons of black hanging in gentle catenaries across trenches nearly as wide as they are deep—dimensions measured in kilometers. No cables, no piers, no trusses. Just the arc of black attached to each cliff face. Fantastic arrangements of colored glass coils and rods hang from the bottoms of the bridges, sometimes projecting sideways.
The bridges themselves are, according to all observations, also made of glass, though glass could never possibly withstand the sort of stress these bridges do—even their own weight should be too much for them, suspended as they are with nothing for support. There are no rails or handholds, just the drop, and at the bottom, kilometers down, a cluster of thick-walled tubes, each one just a meter and a half wide, empty and smooth-walled. These are made of the same material as the bridges. No one knows what the bridges and the tubes beneath them were for, or who built them. They were here when humans first colonized Nilt.