Burning Bright

It didn’t take her long to pack: her jump bag was easily large enough to hold a couple of changes of clothes, plus her Gameboard and the thick plastic case that held the half-dozen Rulebook disks. She seized a hat at random, this one black, with a wide brim, shrugged on a jacket—her favorite, heavy blue-black workcloth with a flurry of Game pins across the lapels—and tapped into the local comnet to find a taxi-shuttle to take her across to the customs station. Kerestel was nowhere in sight when it arrived, and she hesitated, but called her good-byes into the shipwide intercom. There was no answer; she shrugged again, caught between hurt and annoyance, and pulled herself through the transfer tube to the taxi.

The landing check was strict and time-consuming. The officer on duty went over her papers with excruciating care, and ran the Rulebooks through a virus scan twice before grudgingly allowing her to carry them onto the surface. She made the orbiter with only minutes to spare, and collapsed into her seat, resolved to sleep for as much of the descent as possible.

She woke to the unfamiliar noise of air against the orbiter’s hull, sat up in her harness to see fire rolling across the viewport. The orbiter bucked and fought the sudden turbulence, and then they were down into the atmosphere. Servos whined underfoot and in the cabin walls, reconfiguring wings and lifting surfaces, and the orbiter became a proper aircraft, banking easily against the heavy air that held it. The engine fired, a coughing explosion at the tail of the taxi, and the craft steadied further, came completely under control. Lioe released the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, and craned her head to look out the viewport again.

“We’ll be landing at Newfields in about fifty minutes,” the steward said, from the front of the cabin. “It’s day thirty of High Spring, the end of High Spring—that’s day ninety-four of our four-hundred-day year. Burning Bright has a twenty-five-standard-hour day, and you should program your chronometers accordingly. If you are keeping Greenwich Republican time, the GRTC factor is eighty-eight B-for-bravo one hundred fifty-two. Ground temperature is twenty-three degrees. If you need any assistance, or further information, please feel free to ask. Your call buttons are on the cabin wall above your head.”

No one seemed to respond, and Lioe turned her head back to the window. Clouds flashed past beneath them, thin wisps that only partly obscured the glittering water. Burning Bright was mostly water; the main—the only—landmass was largely artificial, the new land built on the inner edges of the giant atoll’s original islands, guarded from floods by a massive network of dikes and storm barriers. The city of Burning Bright—city and planet shared a name; the two were effectively identical—was one of the great engineering achievements of the nonaligned worlds: even in the Republic, and even in Foster Service schools, Lioe thought, you learn that mantra. And it was pretty much true. In all the time she’d spent in space, piloting ships between the Republic and the nonaligned worlds and HsaioiAn, she’d never been anyplace that was at all like Burning Bright.

“Can I get you anything?”

Lioe looked up to find the steward looking down at her, balancing easily against the movement of the orbiter, one hand resting on the back of the empty couch beside her. She shook her head, but smiled. “I can’t think of anything, thanks.”

The steward nodded, but didn’t move. “I couldn’t help noticing your pins.”

Lioe let her smile widen, grateful she hadn’t had to set up this encounter herself. “I saw yours, too.” She glanced again at the pair of Game pins clipped just below the company icon: one was the triangle-and-galaxy of the Old Network, but the other was unfamiliar. “Local club?” she asked, and was not surprised when the steward shook his head.

“Actually, it’s a session souvenir,” he said. “It was a Court Life variant, run by Ambidexter about five years ago.”

“I think I saw tapes of that,” Lioe said, impressed in spite of herself. The steward didn’t look old enough to have been playing at that level five years ago. “That was the one that featured Gallio Hazard and Desir of Harmsway, right? The one that really made Harmsway a Grand Type.”

“That’s right.” The steward glanced quickly around the cabin, then lowered himself into the couch next to her. “I’m Vere—Audovero Caminesi.”

“Quinn Lioe.” They touched hands, awkward because of her safety harness.

“You wouldn’t be the Lioe who wrote the Frederick’s Glory scenario,” Vere said.

“As a matter of fact, I am.”

Vere grinned. “That was a great session. There’s been a lot of talk on the net about it; I’m still trying to find someone at the club who’ll run it. Are you going to be doing any Gaming while you’re here?”