The Crystal Variation by Steve Miller, Sharon Lee Read Free Book Online Page A

so he had heard it said—they were too independent, too individual, much too prone to use their own judgement. And much too often, Jela might have added—right.
    So, he found himself in the care of the proud yet still-flawed X Strains, and he’d been annoyed in the night to wake as some one of the guardians attempted to enter the room without disturbing him: They were all of the blood, dammit! Would he have assumed them so lax . . . well, yes. He might have.
    “You of Versten’s Flight have no regard for the sleep of your brethren, eh?” He called out in the assumed dark of the infirmary’s night. His reward was a not unexpected flash of light as the woman with a red lance crossing a blue blade tattooed on her right cheek reacted, alas, predictably.
    “Wingleader,” she gasped.
    He’d startled her—and if he’d been of a mind he might just as easily have killed her—been though the transparent enclosure and had his hands around her throat before she’d known he was awake.
    “Wingleader,” she said again, recovering her voice, if not her dignity. “The monitors must be checked manually from time to time, and the calibrations . . .”
    “The calibrations may be made just as conveniently from a remote station,” he said, allowing his voice to display an edge. “It would be well if these things were done during ship’s day, for who knows what one who has been abandoned on a near lifeless world might do in the midst of being startled awake?”
    “Wingleader, I . . .”
    “Enough. Calibrate. I will sleep again tonight, and some of tomorrow day as well . . .”
    Which was unlikely, so he owned to himself, but minor, as he was no longer entirely on ship schedule.
    This was an oddity he considered too minor to concern med techs of any ilk, though interesting to himself. It seemed he was keeping two clocks now. One was the ordinary ship-clock any space traveler became accustomed to. The other . . . the other was the daily cycle of the planet he’d been stranded on, though he’d kept planet-time for so few days he might still be expected to be in transition-timing.
    The X Strain tech finished a half-hearted tour of the sensors, used her light to peer inside his cubicle and satisfy herself that he was not green and leafy, and that the tree was. She left then, without a word to him, leaving him wakeful.
    And that, too, might have been her purpose.
    Jela crossed his arms over his head, his thoughts on the planet of the trees, its sea, and other things he could not possibly remember from the place. No doubt he’d been very close to total exhaustion and on the verge of dementia when he’d been picked up. Perhaps the techs were right to be concerned, after all.
    Because he was a pilot, and an M, with all that Series’ dislike of being idle, he began to calculate. He checked his new sense of time against the trip back to the mother-ship, knowing that the breeze would about right now have been shifting to come at his face if he stood on the hill over the empty sea.
    That established, he calculated the entirety of his journey to his best recall—brief time outbound, to taking on the enemy vessel, to near automatic charting of course to the nearby planet, to the landing . . . likely he spiked this or that spy-sensor as he recalled the grueling and pitiless flight through that eventually life-saving atmosphere—and then the walk. He recalled the walk vividly, recalled the valleys, treasured the long trip the trees had undertaken from the side of a mountain to the ocean so far away . . .
    And that thought he put quickly away, tagging it mentally as a mention-to-none, a category that by now seemed to include half of his thoughts in any case.
    Jela consulted the other clock in his head, saw that it would soon be time for his breakfast, and rose to do stretching exercises. When the techs entered, en masse as they did at the beginning of each of his days, he’d be good for a full schedule of work, sleepless half-night or