“What do you mean?”

  “I mean, the Letnev aren’t human, but they’re enough like us that we can talk to them. They aren’t giant murderous spiders, or hungry slime mold, or a burning cloud that’s mad at you for some reason and you don’t know why. They aren’t here to literally eat us, at least, though I suppose they might have come for the caprids. Seems a long way to go for stringy meat, though. The Barony was – let me see, it’s been a while since I read about them – a militaristic, bureaucratic society, big on rules and shiny boots. They spent a lot of time in caverns and tunnels underground. They were involved in some unpleasantness that kicked off a big war, according to the journal the interim governor kept. Something about blockading a wormhole and making a whole lot of people mad.”

  “A wormhole.” The very word was magical to Bianca. When she was little, before she’d read enough to understand what wormholes were exactly, she’d poked her arm (and sometimes head) into every hole she found, thinking one might lead her to another world. All they ever led to was dirty faces and the occasional insect bite.

  “The Letnev enjoyed their rules, but didn’t worry much about following anyone else’s, because theirs were the only ones that mattered. They were also the type to invent new rules to punish people if the old rules weren’t doing a good enough job.” Torvald sighed. “The Barony is fairly high on the list of alien cultures I would hesitate to invite over for a slice of cake and a cup of tea. You might be able to use them as your stepping stone to the stars, but it won’t be as easy as politely asking them for a ride.”

  “It’s worth a try,” she said. “If they even land. Maybe they’re just here to see if there’s anything interesting on the planet, and when they see there’s not, they’ll fly away again.”

  “That might be the best thing for all of us,” Torvald said. “I–”

  The screen flickered to a view of the junkyard again. “New environmental stimulus detected,” the bodiless voice said. A loud, high-pitched keening filled the room, until Torvald said, “Lower volume eighty percent!” and it became a distant whine again.

  “What is that?” Bianca cried.

  “Emergency siren. The one in the burgher’s house. I haven’t heard it since the big fire, and that was, what, five years before you were born? The village elders don’t like using it because they don’t know how many charges the thing has left, and they’re afraid one of these days there will be a real emergency and they’ll hit the button and it won’t make a sound at all. I guess this must be a real emergency. Everyone within the sound of that siren is supposed to go to the village immediately.”

  “We have to go!”

  Torvald nodded. “We should. But I’ll tell you what. I want to do a little more research here. You go down and see what’s going on, and you can fill me in later. There’s a power cell on the table upstairs. Take that with you. Aliens or not, your parents will still want what they sent you for.”

  Bianca nodded, then scowled. “It will take me forever to get to town, I’ll have to run home and get my bicycle–”

  “Take the trailrunner,” Torvald said. “Just be careful and don’t break your head. It’s not a very good head, but I’ve gotten used to it.”

  Bianca grinned, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed his whiskery cheek.

  “Thank you! I’ll bring it back and tell you everything. I bet they’re calling us to talk about the aliens.”

  “I doubt it’s about traders come in from Upper Creek, or somebody who needs a new barn put up,” Torvald said.

  He led her to the elevator and sent her back up to the surface. When she arrived in his shack, alone, she allowed herself a whoop of excitement. Alien spaceships! Emergency sirens! Things were happening! She grabbed up the power cell – about the size of a book, but much denser – and shoved it into her pack. Probably a waste of time. The aliens would probably offer them limitless power and spaceships and all the other wonders of the galaxy soon anyhow.

  Bianca went out into the mech farm. The trailrunner was parked behind the shack, as usual. Torvald had allowed her to ride it around his property, but never beyond the walls. “That thing will be my legs when my legs don’t work anymore,” he said. “I can’t risk you running it off a cliff just because you want to feel the wind in your hair as you fall.” He used the trailrunner when he came to town, or went on scavenging expeditions himself, which he didn’t do nearly as often as he had in his younger days. “You can ride the trailrunner to my funeral, Bee, but I won’t risk you taking it off the mech farm before that,” he’d said once, and no amount of pleading would change his mind.

  This was an unprecedented day in a lot of ways, though.

  The trailrunner was a mech of Torvald’s own design, cobbled together from pieces of mining robots, broken-down transports, and miscellaneous junk. The machine consisted of a padded metal chair surrounded by a set of multi-jointed legs, each as long as Bianca was tall, with a little control panel you could reach while seated. The controls were just used for inputting directions and preferred speed, though; the trailrunner mostly drove itself, thanks to the computer brain and cluster of sensors underneath the seat. Torvald had taught her to use it, and she’d even helped him tinker with it a bit over the years to improve its performance.

  Bianca got her pack situated in the little cargo crate behind the seat and made sure it was secure and well padded. Power cells could crack if they took a fall, and sometimes when that happened there was a flash of light, and sometimes they leaked goo that smoked and ate holes in the ground… but at least once a dropped power cell had caused an explosion that blew off both a roof and a local boy’s head.

  She climbed into the chair, fitted on the straps, and punched in the eighteen-digit code required to unlock the controls, a level of security she thought was a bit much, but it made Torvald happy. He’d been surprised she could remember the code after he rattled it off just once, but Bianca had always been good at remembering important things. It was just boring things she forgot.

  The trailrunner hummed to life and stood up tall on its six legs. She punched in a course to the center of the village and set speed to “maximum.” The vehicle jumped, leaping over the shack in a single bound, but Bianca stayed steady in her seat; there were things called “gimbals” and “shock absorbers” and “gyroscopic balancing mechanisms” to ensure that even if the trailrunner tilted sharply or landed with a hard thump, she’d still keep her head pointed at the sky, her feet at the ground, and wouldn’t get whiplash. Unless the landing was hard enough to smash the whole apparatus, but the trailrunner was programmed with preset tolerances, and its computer brain translated “maximum speed” as “maximum safe speed.” Too bad. Sometimes it was fun to be a little unsafe.

  Bianca didn’t bother with opening the gates, just leapt nimbly from junkheap to junkheap and sailed over the top of the wall. The sensors it used to detect the environment could tell which structures made stable launching points, and which would collapse under its weight. Bianca whooped when they cleared the wall, full of the joy of motion, but she did wish she’d thought to put on goggles. She’d never been in the trailrunner when it was going this fast before, and her eyes were watering. She kept her mouth firmly shut against the possibility of swallowing bugs. She did like the feeling of the wind streaming through her hair, though.

  She landed on the path outside the gates and didn’t even slow down, just rushed toward the village, legs a whirring blur. There was that meandering road, but the trailrunner didn’t bother to stay on that for long: it had a local survey map and a compass, and it took the most direct possible route instead. Bianca raced across the high meadows, leaping over rock walls and fences, dancing down rocky slopes, never stepping on a field under cultivation (Torvald knew better) but ducking low and hurtling through the trees of the orchard on the Glinnis farm. The trailrunner reconnected with the road not far from town, startling groups of people walking or riding on bikes or trundling along in various forms of transport, come down from their own scattered farms and holdings to answer the call. Some people shouted at her: “Torvald, slow down,” and, “I wish I had one of those,” and, gratifyingly, “Is that Bianca Xing?”

  Bianca leaned hard to the right, as the trailrunner dashed off to the side of the road to avoid the traffic, picking up speed, so she arrived well ahead of the other newcomers. The mech slowed down a bit as it approached the central square, an open green space surrounded by the village’s largest buildings: the elegant arched roof of the Halemeeting hall, the imposing two stories of the burgher’s house, the general store with its wide porch full of chairs, and the dusty and neglected façade of the Traveler’s Rest, an inn and way station hardly ever used since they didn’t attract many visitors, and weren’t on the way to anywhere in particular. At least the alarm wasn’t going off anymore. As loud as it had been up at the mech farm, she couldn’t imagine how ear-splitting it would have been right here at the source.

  The mech stopped at the edge of the square, since Bianca hadn’t specified a particular destination. The trailrunner hummed quietly to itself as Bianca stared at the Halemeeting hall. Something had changed. It was a small change, but it felt big.

  Someone had climbed up to the roof of the hall and put a pole up there, and on top of the pole there was a big flag now, all black and trimmed with silver, with a red circle in the center, like a planet hanging in a starless void.

  Chapter 3

  “Bianca!” Her mother hurried over from the porch of the general store. Her hair was pulled back in a hurry, and she was wearing trousers and a work shirt – she’d never come to town looking so disheveled, but things were happening, weren’t they? “What are you doing on that thing?”

  Bianca directed the trailrunner to park itself on the side of the road and shut down, then clambered out of the seat. “Torvald let me borrow it.” She hated how sulky and defensive her voice got around her ma. Bianca was old enough to be pair-bonded, so why did she always feel like a child when the two of them talked? Maybe because I still live in her house and eat her food and mostly wear clothes she made me, Bianca thought. Could you really grow up when you were still in the same place, and in the same context, where you’d spent so long as a child?

  “Torvald isn’t coming?” Her mother seemed distracted, her eyes skittering up to the flag and then back down to Bianca’s face again.

  “He said he had too much work to do. He said I should go, and tell him what happened. We… we saw a ship go by overhead, and–”

  “We did too,” she said. “I did, anyway, your father just heard it. Oh, Bianca.” She put a hand on her daughter’s arm. “I’m so nervous. What does it mean? What does that flag mean?”

  “I don’t know.” Bianca squeezed her hand. “Let’s go in and find out.” She looked around. “Where’s Dad?”

  “He couldn’t leave the caprids – they were all out grazing.”

  “How can he think about livestock right now?” Bianca said. “There are aliens here!”

  Her mother looked at her like she’d grown an extra head. “Aliens or not, we still have chores to do, don’t we?”

  “I guess so.” It seemed like something this big should transform the whole world, all at once, but that wasn’t how things worked, was it?

  By now others were drifting toward the Halemeeting hall. The interior was one big room, with ranks of benches arranged in curving rows to face the stage at the far end. This was the place where weddings and wakes were held, dances and festivals, auctions and trials (not that there’d been a crime worthy of a trial in Bianca’s lifetime). There was also a small weekly fellowship meeting and a big monthly one, just so people on the far-flung farms and orchards could remember they were part of a community, with people around to help them through the hard times and celebrate the good. In theory, the Halemeeting hall could hold just about everyone within fifty kilometers, though Bianca had seldom seen it more than a third full. She thought it might get a lot closer to capacity today.

  Bianca and her mother took seats near the front; her mother’s eyesight wasn’t very good anymore. The burgher was there, fine yellow sash across her chest. Her family was charged with maintaining the Halemeeting hall, and they owned the general store, too, and were in more frequent contact with neighboring communities than anyone else. The burgher helped organize the Five-Year’s Fair, when everyone from the six nearest villages gathered in a distant field and built a temporary festival city, trading food and art and fine goods and, quite often, mingling and falling in love and bonding with strangers. A few people almost always left the Fair to make their homes in other settlements, and before today it was the most exciting thing in Bianca’s world. The next Five-Year’s Fair was in the spring, and she’d been toying with the idea of falling in love with someone from as far away as possible, or convincing herself she had, just for an excuse to live in a new place… but she knew the other settlements were much like her own, just in a slightly different configuration of hills and valleys, so what was the point? That fear that every place would look the same was the same thing that kept her from putting on her best shoes and filling a sack with food and setting out on her own. Darit was just Darit, and how could it satisfy her when there was so much more beyond? Wherever she went, her eyes would still be drawn to that dark spot in the sky and the wonders it promised.

  “So many people,” her mother said. Bianca looked behind her and goggled. Every bench was full, and there were other people standing, lining the walls! There must have been three hundred people there! She’d only seen that many at once at the Fair, and even there they weren’t all jammed in together, breathing and shuffling and muttering. The sound of the crowd was like the susurration of waves against rocks.

  The burgher stood up on stage and cleared her throat. “Everyone!” she said. “Thank you for coming to the call.” The acoustics of the hall were perfect, and Bianca could hear the strain in the woman’s voice. She was the richest person in town, and she’d always seemed effortlessly in control, but today… Things are happening. “Some of you may have noticed, ah, something strange in the sky earlier…”

  Someone stepped out of the wings and onto the stage. He was not just a stranger, but strange – wearing shiny black clothes, his skin an unhealthy-looking bluish hue, his mouth set in a hard line. He walked across the stage, stiff-backed, boot heels clicking on the boards. He stood beside the burgher, then turned his head to stare at her. He was half a meter taller than her, and she was not a small woman. She shrank away, then hurried to a seat behind him on the stage. The man followed her with his gaze until she was seated, then looked back at the crowd.

  He sniffed. “I am Undercommandant Voyou.” He spoke in the local language, but his accent made it sound like he was building a wall of rough stones. “It is my privilege to welcome… what is the name of this charming settlement again?” This last to the burgher.

  “We – this is Lowcliff, it’s–”

  He returned his attention to the room. “Lowcliff. Welcome, denizens of Lowcliff, to the glorious and eternal Barony of Letnev. No longer will you suffer lives of lawless anarchy. The Barony has returned to reclaim Darit. You are home.”

  “What do you mean reclaim?” someone shouted.

  “I did not intend to take questions,” Voyou said. “Impertinence is not appreciated in the Barony. But, because this is new to you, and you are simple country folk, unaccustomed to the uses of power, I will answer. This planet was once a mining colony, a cherished possession of the Barony of Letnev. We lost track of you for a little while – as you can imagine, we had more pressing concerns than this place – but the Baron remembers you now. He has reached out his hand, and gathered you to his bosom. Your… burgher, is it? She will explain to you what this means in terms of taxes and so on. Glory to the Barony.” He turned smartly and walked off the stage.

  The audience waited until he was out of sight before they erupted.

  The burgher stood and called for silence. “I know!” she said. “I know. I was just as surprised as you are. I’ve heard from Highcliff and Midcliff and some of the other towns we trade with on the wireless, and they’ve all had visits like this too. I think these, ah, Letnev are visiting every settlement on the whole planet.”

  “Why are they here?” someone called.

  “We’re still figuring that out,” she said. “They don’t seem to want much, apart from making us put up a flag, though they said they’re doing a survey and will announce any, ah, necessary reallocations of resources.”

  “We’ve always governed ourselves just fine!” That was Bianca’s mother, and Bianca was almost proud of her.

  “I agree,” the burgher said. “My hope, my expectation, is that these Letnev won’t care much about us in particular, or how we run things here. We can go on as we always have, more or less, with some… some small changes. They’re imposing a tax, to be collected twice a year, from every household. They want a tenth part of whatever we produce.”

  The crowd roared at that, with shouts, curses, and, “Let them come and take it!”

  “They will come and take it,” the burgher said grimly. “I have no doubt of that. They… showed me some of their weapons.”

  “They’re just bandits!”

  “Worse,” the burgher said. “They’re the government.”

  “What do we get out of this?” someone called. “If they’re our new leaders, what are they offering us?”

  “Protection,” the burgher said. “From the Barony’s many enemies. Who are now our enemies, since we’re a Barony colony world. I know!” She held out her hands, trying vainly to quell the uproar. “I don’t like this any more than you do! Maybe they’ll lose interest and go away! Maybe they won’t even bother to send tax collectors for a few bushels of wool and baskets of apples! They…” She closed her eyes. “They wanted me to tell you, specifically, that they are forgiving all of our back taxes. Meaning, they won’t try to collect what they say we owe from all the years we’ve been out of their control.” She gave a jagged, broken little laugh. “Which is good, because as near as I can tell, that’s been thousands of years, and that’s… that’s a lot of taxes. It could be worse, people. They could have burned our farms. Or even just nudged the orbital mirrors out of true by a few degrees, and turned our little bubble of green into frozen tundra. They could kill us all without even firing a shot–”