Scornful Stars Read online

  He slid down from the saddle and walked a few steps out onto the rocky overlook, kneading at the small of his back. Horseback riding demanded very different muscles from just about any other exercise he knew, and he hadn’t been riding in a long time. Behind him, his brothers Gamand and Manvir rode up and likewise reined in to share the view.

  “I always liked this spot,” Manvir said, leaning over the pommel of his saddle. Three years younger than Sikander, he favored their mother, with a light frame and an easy smile. “On a good day you can see all the way to the Pir Panjals from up here.”

  “I remember,” Sikander replied. “A little hazy this morning, though. Too bad.” He’d visited dozens of worlds during his Navy career, but he’d seen few ranges that could match the Pir Panjals. Like their namesakes on Old Terra, Srinagar’s mountains topped six thousand meters and wore a shining coat of snow and ice throughout the year, but the nearest peaks were almost two hundred kilometers from the North family’s corner of the Kharan.

  “The breeze is picking up early today.” Gamand, five years Sikander’s senior, took a long drink from his canteen. While Manvir took after Vadiya North, Gamand was the spitting image of their father Nawab Dayan North in his prime, tall and stern and as taciturn as his younger brother was affable. Unlike the younger Norths, Gamand observed kesh, wearing a full beard and leaving his thick black hair uncut. He never went out in public without the traditional turban, but in the privacy of the North estate he literally let his hair down a bit, pulling it back into a long ponytail he threaded through a Sangrur Dragons cricket cap. “Time we were heading back, anyway.”

  “Soon,” Sikander said. “I want to soak it in just a little bit longer.”

  “When do you go back to your ship?” Manvir asked him.

  “The end of the week. Decisive’s scheduled to finish up her repairs in ten days, and we’ll be getting under way for a shakedown patrol soon afterwards. I’ll have a lot of work waiting for me.”

  “Well, that’s what you’ve got a crew for, isn’t it? Let them handle the details.”

  “I try to, but it’s customary for the captain to make sure he gets back from leave before the ship goes anywhere. The Admiralty thinks that it sets a good example.” Of course, it was more than just setting an example—Sikander wanted to get back to Decisive, to study every square centimeter from bow to stern and reassure himself that the Neda Naval Shipyard had executed every action item on the repair schedule with the diligence and care he thought his ship deserved. Decisive might be an old and well-worn destroyer, but she was Sikander’s first command—in fact, the first major combatant of the Aquilan Commonwealth Navy under the command of any Kashmiri—and during the ten months he’d been her captain he’d come to love her with a depth and protectiveness not even his family could easily understand. He suspected that most officers felt the same way about their own first commands.

  “I’m just glad you had an opportunity to come home,” said Manvir. “Dishu and the children really enjoyed your visit—the kids loved seeing their mythical Uncle Sikay.”

  “Par and Tani are great kids.” Sikander grinned back at his younger brother. Manvir Singh North had gotten married seven years ago, shortly after Sikander’s eventful deployment aboard CSS Hector. He already had a five-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter. Sikander, on the other hand, had no particular prospects for marriage at the moment, nor did he have the slightest idea about when or if he’d ever have children. Thanks to a career that sent him to distant stars for months or years at a stretch, he’d met his newest nephew and niece only a handful of times. Parsan and Tanuvi were young enough to be delighted by everything around them most of the time and easily comforted when things weren’t going their way. “You’re truly blessed, Manny.”

  “Just wait until they’re teenagers,” Gamand warned. His boys were fifteen and thirteen, respectively. They’d both wanted to join their father and their uncles at Chittar Creek for a couple of days, but they were in the middle of their school terms and had some grades that needed improving, so Gamand and his wife Falina had ordered the boys to keep to their studies. As far as Sikander understood things, some amount of domestic strife had ensued before Gamand and Falina prevailed.

  Sikander snorted at the idea of his older brother dealing with teenage rebellion. If there was a rebellious bone in Gamand’s body, he’d never seen it. “You know, it’s strange,” he said after a moment. “When I was a teenager, I didn’t really like coming to Chittar Creek. I thought it was boring. I resented leaving my friends in Ishar to spend weeks out of each summer in a hot, windy, orange desert. I wasn’t even all that excited about spending a few days of my leave to come here this week. But now that I’m here, I’m surprised by how much I missed it.”

  “Really? I’ve always loved this place,” said Gamand. “Life’s a little simpler out here. The older I get, the more I appreciate that. And with Father’s illness, well, we’ve all been spending more time on Srinagar. The climate’s more comfortable for him.”

  Sikander glanced over to Manvir. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that, Manny. How is he doing?”

  Manvir doffed his hat—an outbacker with a wide brim—and ran a hand through his hair. “Not as well as I’d like, to be honest,” he said. Like Sikander, he was a younger son, and he’d been expected to use the opportunities provided by his family’s wealth and education to do something with himself. Sikander had chosen military service; Manvir had studied medicine, becoming a doctor. “Modern genetic therapies can handle most cancers pretty easily, thank goodness. But Father doesn’t feel that genetic medicine is in keeping with amritdhari beliefs, so he insists on fighting his lymphoma through chemotherapy and radiation treatments. They’re better than they were centuries ago, but they take a toll.”

  “We’ve tried to persuade him to accept Aquilan genetic therapy, but he’s adamant,” Gamand added. “As long as he can keep the cancer in check with other types of treatments, he wants to remain observant. In the meantime, I’ve been doing what I can to lighten his workload.”

  “Not a day goes by in Ishar without Gam cutting a ribbon on some project or another,” said Manvir. “He sleeps with a pair of scissors under his pillow just in case something comes up in the middle of the night. The other day he accidentally opened a library in Kupwara when he missed a turn on his way to lunch.”

  “I bet.” Sikander suspected that Manvir was more worried than he let on; he’d always been one to deflect difficulties with a little humor. “What about Devin? Has he been in touch at all?”

  “Devindar and Father still aren’t speaking,” said Gamand, scowling into the distance. “It hurts Mother quite a lot. She never gets to see Devin’s girls anymore, and she misses them terribly.”

  Sikander frowned. A small dust devil on the valley floor caught his attention; he watched it for a moment. Of all his siblings, he felt closest to Devindar. They were less than two years apart in age, and they were a lot alike in both looks and temperament. Fortunately neither Devindar nor Nawab Dayan had ever tried to make him choose sides in their seemingly irreparable break, but the fact remained that no gathering of the North family these days was complete. Devindar refused to be under the same roof as their father for even the shortest visit, and Nawab Dayan carried on as if his second son had never existed. Life is too short to be that stubborn, he reflected. But neither of them knows how to give any ground, at least not where the other’s concerned.

  “Sikay? You with us?” Manvir asked.

  “Sorry, just thinking.” Sikander brushed the trail dust from his clothes, returned to his patient horse, and swung himself back up into the saddle. “I’m ready to go.”

  Three more kilometers brought them to the Norths’ desert home at Chittar Creek. Sikander enjoyed a rare lazy afternoon at the comfortable lodge, splashing in the pool with Manvir’s children, visiting with his parents, and playing cards in the evening after a dinner of grilled vegetable kebobs.

  The next morning, Sikander’
s mother headed back to Jaipur with Manvir and his family, while Sikander joined his father and his older brother on a business visit to the city of Mohali Bay, a thousand-kilometer flight from the Kharan Desert.

  Nawab Dayan dozed while Gamand worked, so Sikander entertained himself by gazing out the window; he’d never visited the west coast of Harsha, Srinagar’s smaller continent. While the North family owned estates on both of Kashmir’s terran-type planets, he thought of Jaipur as his homeworld. Srinagar was a place he visited or vacationed in, an older world of dazzling blue skies and white cities that gleamed in the sun, and it always struck him as arid and mountainous in comparison to Jaipur. Long ago, the Anglo-Sikh colonists who’d settled the Kashmir system had chosen Srinagar as their first home because the planet, while uncomfortably hot and dry in its torrid zone, was immediately habitable. Neighboring Jaipur had required two centuries of terraforming to make its smothering atmosphere comfortable; it remained warm and humid in comparison to most other worlds Sikander had visited.

  “What are you looking at?” Nawab Dayan asked.

  “The mountains.” Sikander had thought his father was asleep. God, when did he become so thin? he asked himself. He’s lost twenty kilos since the last time I was home. Nawab Dayan had always been the very picture of health—tall, strong, sick not a day of his life until his cancer diagnosis. Well-off Kashmiris routinely lived to see their hundred-and-tenth birthday, so Sikander had always assumed he wouldn’t have to worry about losing a parent for another thirty or forty years. Now … now he was not so sure. He concealed his concern with a small shrug. “I’ve never been over this part of Harsha.”

  The nawab peered out the window, getting his bearings. “It looks like we’ve already crossed over the big peaks. Hmm—I must have been napping.”

  Sikander glanced back at his father, and found himself remembering another flight they’d shared years ago. It was when I came home after my transfer off Adept, he recalled. Thirteen years ago, right at the end of the Bathinda Strike. We were on our way to Ganderbal. Summer thunderstorms had marched their way across northern Ishar that day, and the turbulence—

  —jars Sikander awake. He glances around, getting his bearings after his catnap, and realizes the other Norths in the cabin—his mother Vadiya, his sister Usha, and of course his father Nawab Dayan—are watching the large vidscreen at the front of the cabin, now tuned to a news channel. It shows a parliamentary building surrounded by grav tanks and soldiers in the uniforms of the Chandigarh Lancers; more soldiers escort civilian prisoners in restraints down the courthouse steps, leading them away. The crawl at the bottom of the screen identifies the scene as the Bathinda State Legislature.

  “What’s going on?” Sikander asks. “What did I miss?”

  “Devindar’s been arrested,” Usha tells him.

  “Arrested?” He comes fully awake at that news. “Why? The strike’s over!”

  “Yes, but…” Usha glances at their parents; Sikander’s mother watches the news feed with silent worry, but Nawab Dayan turns away from the screen and picks up his dataslate, ignoring the newscast. Usha sighs, and continues. “A group of armed KLP activists occupied the state legislature building an hour ago. They issued a statement condemning the agreement that resolved the strike, and then surrendered when the Chandigarhi soldiers arrived.”

  Sikander sits up, watching the screen. Sure enough, the very next activist escorted down the steps is his brother Devindar, holding his head high. The text crawl identifies him for any viewer who doesn’t know him by sight: Nawabzada Devindar Singh North of Ishar. His mother hides her face, but says nothing. “This makes no sense,” Sikander says, speaking more to himself than to his family. “Taking over a government building by force? He’ll go to prison for certain!”

  “That appears to be the point of this exercise in stupidity,” Nawab Dayan growls. It seems he is listening, after all.

  “Can you do anything, Father?” Usha asks him.

  The nawab shakes his head without looking up. “If Devindar chooses this path, then it’s not for me to pardon him. I will not intervene.”

  Sikander begins to protest—Devindar’s been married for less than a year, and he and his wife Ashi are expecting their first child. A warning look from his mother stops him before he speaks. Vadiya North can say more with a simple glance than some people convey in a ten-minute speech, and for once Sikander is wise enough to pay attention. What Devindar has done isn’t simply a family matter; it’s a political question for the nawab, and his father must address it as such. “Damn it, Devin,” he growls under his breath. “Why do you have to make everything a fight?”

  Nawab Dayan coughed loudly, bringing Sikander back to the present moment. Sikander and Gamand both looked over in alarm, but the nawab cleared his throat and shook off whatever had troubled him. “I am fine,” he said with a flicker of annoyance. “Are there mountains on Neda, Sikander? What is it like?”

  Sikander relaxed again. “Neda? It’s mostly ocean, so its mountains are islands. The naval base lies in the tropics. The beaches are nice, and the fishing is excellent.”

  “What is Aquila’s interest in the place?” Gamand asked.

  “Strategic, mostly. Neda’s near the border between the Caliphate’s Zerzura Sector and the Velar Electorate. It’s a good spot for a fleet base on the rimward side of the Caliphate, and it protects important shipping routes. There are a lot of old quarrels in the region—systems that aren’t happy with their Caliphate or Velar overlords, independence movements, that sort of thing. The Admiralty believes that an Aquilan presence helps to stabilize the area. Plus, pirates are a problem. I expect we’ll spend most of our underway time engaged in antipiracy patrols.”

  “Pirates?” Gamand snorted. “I’ve never understood how a ship with a warp generator could let itself be boarded. A few seconds in a warp bubble should be enough for even the slowest freighter to escape.”

  “Charging a warp ring takes time, Gamand. On Decisive it usually takes us an hour or more. Freighters are bigger than destroyers, so they need larger rings, more time, and more charging matter—which is quite expensive, I might add. Commercial vessels don’t like wasting a charged ring. Anyway, a freighter threatened by attack may need several hours before it’s ready to establish its warp bubble. That’s the window during which a pirate can make his approach, and the first thing he does is fire on the freighter’s warp ring to make sure it doesn’t bubble up.”

  “Fine, then. So why don’t the powers in the region hunt down the pirates?”

  “They lack resources,” said Sikander. The Terran Caliphate stood in the very heart of human-controlled space, but it hadn’t been a significant military power in a hundred years; its entire fleet would barely make a single squadron in the navy of a major power like Aquila or Dremark. The neighboring Velar Electorate was in little better shape. “They don’t have the ships they need to secure their systems, but Aquilan shipping lines expect someone to do something to keep the starlanes safe. The Commonwealth Navy seems to be that someone.”

  “One might question whether a two-year assignment to a demonstration of resolve in a distant frontier is worth your time,” Nawab Dayan observed. “There are things here in Kashmir that I could use your help with. I never meant for you to spend the rest of your life in the Aquilan navy, Sikander.”

  That’s new, Sikander realized. Each time he visited home during his fourteen years of active duty, his father asked how his career was going or what assignments he looked forward to, but they’d never spoken about what he might do when he was finished with his service in the Aquilan navy. If he were to be perfectly honest with himself, he felt intimidated by the prospect of walking away from the only career he knew. What would I do here? he wondered. Spend my days cutting ribbons and giving speeches like poor Gamand?

  The flyer’s pilot saved him from the necessity of deciding on a reply. “Your Highness, we’re beginning our final approach to Mohali Qila,” he announced over the cabin circuit. “P
lease secure your safety belt. We’ll be on the ground shortly.”

  Seventy minutes after leaving Chittar Creek, the nawab’s transport overflew the city of Mohali Bay, favored with the usual priority traffic routing a ruling nawab and his escorts enjoyed. Colorful sails dotted the turquoise water below, but they continued past the white beaches of the bayfront to the harbor district on the other side of the city’s crescent-shaped peninsula. Sikander caught a glimpse of a steep island with concrete dry docks in the middle of the harbor before the flyer banked in that direction and he lost the view. A moment later, the flyer flared gently and set down on a large landing pad in front of a boarded-up administration building. No one else was in sight—Mohali Qila was a mothballed military facility that had been out of service for decades.

  Sikander waited while the cabin steward opened the flyer’s door and secured the short set of steps to the ground, then followed his father and Gamand outside, blinking in the bright glare of the Srinagaran sun. The smell of the salt air and the distant cries of seabirds struck him at once; they were no longer in the Kharan, that was for certain. Around them, the escort flyers alighted to disembark a dozen Jaipur Dragoons in their resplendent uniforms. Nawab Dayan went nowhere without an armed escort—something else that had changed for the worse in the years that Sikander had been away from home. Kashmir’s politics had always been unsettled at best, but it seemed that the situation grew more troubled every year.

  “The base looks like it’s in good shape,” Gamand observed. “And I like the fact that it’s on an island with a bit of distance from the city proper. That should help with security concerns.”