Glen Cook - Shadowline - Starfishers Triology - Book 1

"I'll be all right."

She enjoyed the ride to Twilight. She had never been outdome before. She saw her world from an entirely new perspective.

Bleak ghosts of midnight landscapes slid by the crawler. Crewmen made garrulous by her beauty and exotic skin color provided her with a running commentary. This had happened here, that had happened there. Over yonder was a fantastic landmark mountain that stuck straight up a thousand meters, but you couldn't see it on account of it was dark. The crewmen were from The City of Night. They did not know her. She rehearsed her cover for them, as Pollyanna, telling outrageous lies about life in Luna Command.

She reached Twilight in a bright and cheerful mood. It quickly soured.

At first glance Twilight Town appeared to be a clone of Edgeward City. She started to say so to Korando. The human factor intervened.

Two hard-faced policemen began checking papers as the passengers started shedding their hotsuits. They were especially nasty to Edgewarders, but only slightly more civil to the Nighter crew and the citizens of Darkside Landing. They were revelers in petty power, the sadists who gave police a bad image everywhere. Pollyanna lost her temper when they started in on Korando.

"You," she snapped, using words as gently as a torturer uses small knives. "You with the face like a pig's butt. Yes. You. The one with the nose like stepped-in dog shit. We know your mother made a mistake when she decided against the abortion. You don't have to prove it. Go beat your wife if you have to mistreat somebody in order to feel like a man."

Korando flashed a desperate "Shut up!" look. She just smiled.

The policemen were stunned. The other passengers made pained faces.

The man she had abused grinned malevolently. He had found himself a victim. "Papers, bitch!"

Malice turned to uncertainty. He looked at her, at her travel pass. White. Meant offworlder. Youth and sex might mean she was the brat of power.

"These better be good, bitch," he muttered to himself.

"Give them here, Humph," his partner said. "And calm down."

"Can you people read?" Pollyanna demanded. "You can? I'm amazed."

She expected more trouble than they gave her. The one officer became very solicitous once he saw the seals on her pass. "Be cool, Humph. This fluff's straight out of Luna Command."

Humph grabbed the pass, flipped through it. His eyes widened slightly. He thrust the booklet at Pollyanna. "I'll be watching you, smartass."

"I do believe you take after your father." She was a little frightened now. She had to concentrate to maintain her snottiness. "He never forgave your mother either."

And, before he could reply, in a gentler tone, she added, "A little courtesy doesn't hurt, officer. If you're nice to people, they'll usually be nice to you." She stalked away.

Korando came over while she was eating a snack at the station canteen. "That wasn't very smart, Polly. But I appreciate it. He forgot all about me."

For possible watching eyes they pretended to become acquainted. Korando told her he was going to stick a little tighter than he had planned. She needed keeping out of trouble.

And stick he did, like a limpet. So tight that he got no chance to interview Blake's agent. He stayed beside her until he had seen her enrolled in the Modelmog.

The trip thither was an adventure, Edgeward having been her whole universe and most of his. The space flies were like a visit to a dome devoted to happy times. The big Star Liners were space-going hotels.

Weideranders Station was different. That vast space-going roundhouse was too alien. Pollyanna and Korando spent most of their layover in their rooms.

Pollyanna remembered Weideranders. She had been there before, almost too long ago to recall anything but the fear she had known then. They had been running from men who had wanted to kill the people she was with. She could not face all those corridors and shops and eating places filled with outworlders, Toke, the Ulantonid, Starfishers, and other strange people. Not without coming apart, without anticipating something dreadful.

She could not have endured it without Korando's help.

She was easing him into the role Frog had vacated by dying. He seemed to accept it.

The Mountain was terrifying too. Though it was the gentlest of worlds, it lacked that without which a Blackworlder never felt secure. It had no dome. Neither she nor Korando ever learned to face the open sky.

Lucifer Storm was almost too easy. She was sleeping with him, loving him, and married to him almost before she herself knew what was happening.

Janos Kasafirek was impressed with her abilities. She was astounded and delighted. He had a reputation as a savage, unrestrained critic.

For a time she was thoroughly content. Life seemed perfect, except that she did not get to see Korando as often as she would have liked. Albin was her sole touchstone with her past and home.

Then, a year after their arrival on The Mountain, Albin announced that he was going home. She protested.

"There's been trouble," he told her. "A skirmish in the Shadowline."

"What can you do?"

"I don't know. Mr. Blake will need me, though. Be calm, Polly. You've got it under control. I'm nothing but excess baggage now."

She cried. She begged. But he went.

Looking back later, she chose that as the day when everything started going wrong.

During her tenure at the Modelmog, Lucifer's father and Richard Hawksblood fought a brief war on The Broken Wings. Lucifer followed the news uneasily. She tried to comfort him, and quickly became engrossed in the action herself, seizing every sketchy report from the Fortress of Iron, skipping from newscast to newscast to find out the latest. It was her first exposure to mercenary warfare. She was intrigued by the gamelike action and by the odd personalities involved. Once she did become enthralled, Lucifer lost interest. He expressed a virulent disapproval of her interest.

She was disappointed because the war ended so quickly.

A few months later Lucifer announced, "We have to go home. I got an instel from my brother Benjamin. Something bad is in the wind."

"To the Fortress?" She became excited. She would be a step closer to Plainfield. And closer to the mercenaries she found so interesting. Lucifer's father had come to their wedding. What a strange, intriguing old man he had been. Two hundred years old! He was a living slice of history. And that Cassius, who was even older, and Lucifer's brothers... They were like nothing Blackworld or The Mountain had ever seen.

What had begun as an ecstatic honeymoon was fading fast. She did not mind leaving a scene that promised to become unhappy—except that she would miss Janos Kasafirek and her studies.

"I don't want to go," Lucifer told her. "But I have to. And it's cruel to take you away from your studies when you're doing so well."

"I don't mind that much. Really. Janos is getting a little overbearing. I can't take much more. We both need to cool down."

Lucifer looked at her oddly.

He changed after they reached the Fortress. His joy, youth, and poetic romance fled him. He became surly and distant, and ignored her more and more as he tried to fit into the Legion. The Legion tried to adjust to him. He could not meld in.

Inadequate to the mercenary role, he would be little help during the grim passage he had returned to help weather. Pollyanna could see it. Everyone else saw it. Lucifer could not. He was a fingerling among sharks, trying to believe he was one of the big boys.

Pollyanna became his outlet for frustration.

Knowing why he was hurting her did not ease her pain. Understanding had its limits.

Loneliness, self-doubt, her own frustration, and spite drove her into the arms of another man. Then another, and another. It became easier each time. Her self-image slipped with each one. Then came Lucifer's father. A challenge at first, he began to remind her of Frog. He gave her moments of real peace. He was gentle, considerate, and attentive, yet somehow remote. Sometimes she thought the body she clasped in their lovemaking was a projection from another plane, an avatar. The quality was even more pronounced in Storm's associates, spooky old Cassius and the Darkswords.