Part 1 (2/2)

To be honest, his life didn't mean much to him. But others' did. And when you ignored the peril you put yourself in, you risked those around you. He didn't deserve the rank of raider or the accompanying privileges. Especially not in comparison with Taj, who had put the entire community on notice that she intended to use her position as a means of making things better. Safer.

Romjha rubbed his stubbly chin. Could he not do the same? Wasn't a raider as capable of doing good? Couldn't he sh.o.r.e up their defensive installations? Tighten safety procedures? Improve weapons training? Not to mention what he might do to boost morale, which had been flagging lately. And as raider commander, he would have a real opportunity to change policy, to set examples and make their forays topside more than mere scavenging missions.

Raider commander?

Wooziness made the room spin. You're insane, man. Yeah, maybe he was. But he was good with a rifle; he could think quickly under pressure. And it just so happened that the current raider commander had been chosen because the man had been the only one absent when they held the vote! Nothing blocked Romjha from vying for the job. There, he could begin the slow process of helping his people reclaim their world. And more.

His bleary gaze swerved to Taj. The women were surrounding her now, wiping the blood from her face and hands. Anger and deep-seated shame boiled in his belly. Women and children, the weak and the sick-they should be safe from war, he thought, frowning.

Romjha's free hand balled into a fist. He would go after the warlord himself and take him out, if he could figure out a way. But there were a few minor details holding him back, such as not having a fleet of s.p.a.ce-capable craft at his service-or any real tech at all, for that matter. Not to mention his lack of the few million soldiers that might come in handy in an attempt to trounce his people's enemies.

But he vowed to keep his goal.

With a surge of protectiveness, he watched Taj at last allow one of the women to take her hand and lead her away. He himself ought to be holding that hand; he should be the one to gently cleanse her, to calm her. To protect her.

The urge to follow was almost unbearable. But Romjha was not yet the man Taj deserved. One day soon, he would be. And then he would make his intentions known. Body and soul, she would be his.

Another grand goal, he thought. Moments ago he'd had none at all; now he was full of them, it seemed.

He drew in a deep breath, squeezed his crutch until he was sure it would shatter in his hands. ”Destiny is not a matter of chance. It's a matter of choice.” Yes, my young Taj.

Romjha B'kah would no longer wait for the future. No, indeed. From this day forward, he would achieve it.

Chapter One.

The echo of a distant explosion rumbled through the vast underground network of caves. In the weapons lab where she'd worked all night, Taj Sai jerked her head up and listened. She'd never heard an outside- ”topside”-blast from deep inside these caverns.

Her fingers clamped around a handful of bomb fuses she'd been cutting. Her heart thumped against her ribs. She aimed her good ear in the direction of the nearest pa.s.sageway, but hissing burners and bubbling beakers on her worktable and walls of solid rock drowned out everything but the roar of her pulse.

By now, fear and curiosity would have sent the others rus.h.i.+ng to the Big Room at the front of the cave. Every nerve ending in her body screamed for her to drop what she was doing and follow. But Taj didn't feel like pasting charred strips of her quivering flesh all over the walls of her lab.

No, thanks. Not tonight. It wasn't exactly her idea of redecorating.

Taj glared at the fuses in her hand and threw them into their box. Cooling in an ice bath on her worktable was a gla.s.s beaker filled with a solution of radic acid. She lifted it and poured a thin stream of the solution into a large spun-gla.s.s funnel filter. Delicate yellowish-white crystals collected at the bottom: a lethal harvest.

Her skin p.r.i.c.kled with sweat. Radites. In this state the compound was extremely unstable. If it contacted anything but gla.s.s-boom! That little idiosyncrasy had killed her predecessor. Taj knew-she'd had to clean up the mess Pasha made. The mess Pasha became.

It had been four years since the old bombmaker had made that error and killed himself. But he might have killed someone else. That would have been worse.

Sweat gelled on her skin, suddenly icy cold. Five men were topside tonight, honored raiders all.

Her hand shook. Setting the beaker on its stand and wiping her knuckles across her brow, she swallowed thickly. The raiders had taken along her new shaped charges, miniature pipe bombs a hundred times more powerful than their bigger brothers. The men loved the idea: a minimum amount of explosive for a maximum amount of damage. ”More bang for the buck,” went the ancient saying that wasn't as outdated as most thought. Currency might no longer be in use but explosives surely were.

Yet the new shaped charges hadn't been tested. The explosive crammed in those tiny cylindrical casings could breach the strongest armor, including-Taj winced-the skyport's fuel storage facility: hardened underground fuel reservoirs. The explosion she'd heard could have been those reservoirs blowing sky high. Had they gone off at the wrong time in the wrong place? Had she combined ingredients in the wrong proportions, or had the booster charges malfunctioned due to some error she'd made? Great Mother! Had she made a blunder that killed someone? Why had she let those explosives be taken before they'd received more lab testing?

Her mind clouded with possibilities, scenarios. All the errors she'd ever made returned to haunt her.

She was mostly deaf in her left ear, her eyelashes and brows had been singed off a half-dozen times, and once, the year before, she'd been flash-blind for a week. Consequences of honing her art. If one could call ma.s.s destruction an art.

She, the legendary taskmaster for reducing accidents, had screwed up in that quest more than anyone knew. But the only one she'd ever injured was herself. People trusted her. Had her precarious track record just blown up in her face?

Taj stared at the sweat glistening on the back of her hand but saw bones poking out of scorched flesh, b.l.o.o.d.y fluid oozing from a socket where an eye used to be, violent convulsions driven by a fatally swelling brain, accompanied by the last hoa.r.s.e screams of agony before death silenced the suffering.

Her mother had died silently, Taj was told, but the woman's battle with blood cancer, a disease curable in the long-ago days of tech and medical miracles, had gone on for the better part of a year. Taj had been two.

Her father-he'd died valiantly, too, his fight to survive far shorter but no less heart-wrenching. Taj had been fifteen when it happened, and his pointless death had changed her life forever.

Joren had been a raider-”the best of the best” according to Romjha B'kah, the current raider commander who had been then only a c.o.c.ky recruit. The man's brisk, gruff statement at the death vigil had bemused Taj. All that had been required of him as a raider was to pay his silent respects to Joren's kin. But as a boy Romjha had idolized her father more than most, and so he must have felt obligated to console her.

The community had reached out to Taj, too, but their wealth of kind words had only exacerbated her awareness of her loss.

Grief. She hated it. More than that, she detested being afraid. Fear meant helplessness, and helplessness meant you had no say in your fate. But she'd found the antidote to that vulnerability-not in the protective arms of a mate, as was usual, but in her job: the manufacture of pyrotechnics.

Frowning, she blew several long strands of hair off her face and reached for the beaker. Her hands were steady enough to resume pouring acid and filtering radites.

There was another rumble, and this time the entire room shook. Great Mother. Another explosion. It sent stones and powder sprinkling down from high above, plunking onto Taj's head and worktable. She slapped her left hand over her beaker. A pebble bounced off the knuckle of her middle finger. Her stomach muscles clenched. Her pulse pounded in her throat. The beaker's cold rim bit into her palm. If she'd reacted a heartbeat later and the pebble fell into . . .

Don't think about it. She manufactured explosives; solids, liquids, powders, pastes, she mixed them all. She took on death daily, face-to-face, hand-to-hand. She wasn't supposed to care if she lived or died.

Sooner or later, she'd figure out how not to.

The familiar and oddly comforting red haze of anger returned. She let her temper smolder, let it stamp out the unwelcome signals transmitted by her raw nerves. With banked wrath, she forced herself to concentrate on emptying the beaker of acid. Her brain screamed at her to hurry, but she gritted her teeth until her jaw ached and took the time to clear her worktable of anything that might kill her, now or later.

At last, she abandoned the lab to see what horrific news awaited her in the Big Room.

Chapter Two.

Sprinting, Taj moved blindly through the shadowy maze of tunnels she'd memorized so early in her life that she had no recollection of doing it. The inner pa.s.sages of these caves were neat, swept clean. Dust had a tendency to congest the lungs of the elderly, making the final years a ch.o.r.e for those lucky enough-or unlucky enough, as the case often was-to make it to old age, and so such dust was eradicated now. She'd helped see to that.

An occasional torch lit her way. One mustn't waste precious fuel on illumination. In between the lanterns it was pitch-black, seeming to amplify the thumping of her boots over the unseen floor. Her pants were snug, allowing her full strides that a dress wouldn't. Her s.h.i.+rt hem fluttered with the pumping of her arms. Only high-quality fabric whispered over skin like that, left her free and comfortable to maneuver. But that was as far as her interest in clothing went. Weaving and sewing she left to those who had patience for such things. She made explosives. In exchange, the raiders' women made her clothing from the best synthetic fibers they had. It was a good arrangement.

Taj pushed her way through the people gathered by the entrance to the Big Room. It was a dead cave, old and dry. Natural columns imparted a feeling of stateliness upon the central meeting area. Farther in, the odors of perspiration, warm bodies, and stale breath thickened the air. Underlying the usual smells was the tang of fear.

Romjha B'kah, the leader of the topside raids, was easy to find in the crowd. Soon after Taj had found Pasha dead, the tall, broad-shouldered warrior had seemed to come out of nowhere and taken the position of raider commander. After four years working with him, side by side, Taj couldn't imagine her life without him. He was intense, driven, tireless. He always knew what to do when the others spun in circles. He never risked a man unnecessarily; he thought things through before he acted, and he didn't show off.

”Stay low, stay alive to survive,” he always said. And, like her, he worked to eliminate the accidents that had at one time been eating away at their meager population. They'd made great strides.

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