TINSORI LIGHT
ONE
The door opened onto desolation.
Jen Sin recoiled slightly from the damp stench of rotting vegetation, and tried not to breathe.
“Station,” Lorith said from beside him, “engage fans in the green room hallway.”
Sluggish and noisy, the fans engaged; the air cleared—enough—and Jen Sin went forward, notepad in hand.
The laws of salvage having recently thrust a space station of some antiquity into Clan Korval’s orbit, the delm naturally wished to know how expensive was this new acquisition. Thus had the light keepers been tasked with doing an inventory.
The price was likely more than the delm was willing to meet, that was Jen Sin’s opinion, letting it be known that Jen Sin yos’Phelium was not the delm, and thank the gods for that.
Not being delm meant following the delm’s orders, however, and so he stepped into what had—very recently, surely?—been a vibrant and functioning hydroponics bay.
In his memory, this space had been filled—perhaps overfilled—with growing things, the air rich and warm, the aisles between the tanks regularly cleaned by the bots. He had eaten from the yield of this room, and taught Lorith to do so.
Now…The aisles were awash with black leaves; the tanks sticky with muck. He did not relish the thought of wading through the rooms, barefoot as he was, and while the robes he and Lorith wore were virtually indestructible, he hesitated to test them quite so stringently.
Happily, the room’s main control panel was along the wall where they had entered, and the floor was only slightly littered with dry leaves and the remains of browned flowers.
He made his way to the panel, and opened it, the skin between his shoulder blades pulling tight in anticipation. The Light did not care to have his control boxes opened, and while he sometimes tolerated such an intrusion from the light keepers, his slaves, more often he did not, and produced a punishment for insolence.
Jen Sin’s breath came short, and he closed his eyes, concentrating on taking calm, even breaths. Tinsori Light was dead. He and Lorith were safer than they had ever been in this place, and it was no very difficult thing—was it?—to access the controls and initiate a self-test?
Having somewhat ordered himself, Jen Sin opened his eyes. All thought of a self-test or, indeed, repair, left its orbit around possibility.
The controls had been melted—fused. Tinsori Light must have been in a particular pet to have called down such complete destruction on mere instrumentation.
He moved slightly, his foot bumping something hidden in a drift of leaves. Bending, he brushed the object off, finding one of the cleanbots lying on its side, its carapace half-melted.
“The Light must have been angry,” Lorith said.
“So it appears,” Jen Sin said, straightening and making a note on his pad regarding the necessity of replacing the hydroponics section. “I don’t recall this. Do you?”
“No,” Lorith said, simply. “But we might not have known. We didn’t come here often, did we?”
“Didn’t we?” He frowned up at her, she being the taller. “When was the last time? Surely we ate from these rooms, after I had decided to stay.”
Thin, pale brows pulled together over large, space-dark eyes.
“We did, once or twice,” she said slowly. “But we haven’t had the leisure this wakening, until now. Before, there were the teams sent to evaluate the Light for repair…”
More likely for termination than repair, Jen Sin thought, but did not say. It had scarcely mattered, after all. The Light had acted with his usual decisiveness, and there had been no need for the light keepers to bother with what remained of the teams, after.
“Before that,” Lorith said slowly, her eyes narrowed with the effort of remembering, “that was the ship with the dead crew, and we were scarcely awake long enough to prevent repairs.”
Jen Sin frowned. He recalled the dead crew. It seemed to him to have been some amount of time ago, not that time had behaved any more reasonably on Tinsori Light than anything else. Still, it seemed that they must have wakened between now, and then—
Didn’t it?
Jen Sin glanced down at the poor, melted cleanbot, then turned to seal the control panel, and made sure of the lock. Nonsensical, really, but he had been trained as a Scout to respect his equipment, and training was a comfort, on Tinsori Light.
“There is nothing we can do here,” he said, turning toward the door.
Something against the wall beyond caught his eye, and he shifted somewhat, in order to see it better.
His chest constricted as the fullness of the shadow came into sight: the image of a leaping man, burned into the surface of the wall.
“Jen Sin?”
Lorith came up beside him, following his gaze.
“Oh,” she said, and turned to him.
“Are we done with tasks for now?” she asked.
“I suppose we might rest,” Jen Sin said, turning to look up at her, though the shadow still teased the side of his eye.
“Then let us do that,” Lorith said, and moved to the door.
As they were walking away from hydroponics, she spoke again.
“Will you share pleasure with me, Jen Sin?”
He smiled at her.
“Of course.”
Some while later, he woke from an uneasy drowse, to find Lorith sleeping yet beside him.
He raised up on an elbow, careful not to disturb her rest, and studied her face. The pointed features, the thin brows curving over large eyes, now closed, lashes pale silk against paler skin—his companion in the effort to keep the Light and all of his malice contained; the universe beyond thereby safe at least from that particular peril.
Lorith had been on the Light far longer than he, her will set against evil.
It scarcely seemed possible that Tinsori Light had died, that the station was firmly situated in the universe, the dust and grit dispersed. He had been present when those things occurred, and still he had difficulty believing the change in their condition.
He sighed softly.
Lorith’s hair was pale, slightly darker than her skin. He extended a hand and ran gentle fingers through the fine curls, feeling the cool slide of crystal beads against his skin.
Sighing again, he settled down, closed his eyes, and slipped back into sleep.