A Working of Stars (39 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: A Working of Stars
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“You’ll set the course, then?”
“Maybe,” she said. “You’ve told me how; now I’m waiting for you to tell me why.”
He sighed. “Kiefen Diasul. You don’t know him—he was the Mage I fought with at Demaizen Old Hall, before the
Daughter
came and took us away. He’s looking for me, Vai says—he wants to end the great working, and he needs me either to help him end it or to be dead so I can’t stop him.”
“And let me guess. Instead of heading in the other direction as far and as fast as you could, you talked Iulan Vai into giving you a map to Kief’s location with ‘X marks the spot’ written on it in big red—excuse me, big purple—letters.”
He looked away; but not before she saw the color rise in his cheeks. “Something like that.”
“I still think you’re crazy. But I’ll set the course.”
The tension went out of him like a taut string being loosened at the peg. “Thank you. Because it’s not just the working. Vai didn’t say so, but I think Kief has her with him. And she’s been hurt.”
 
 
For Iulan Vai, the transit to the sus-Radal asteroid base passed in a long, confusing blur. After her walk through the landscape of her mind in search of Arekhon, she lay strapped down and feverish in the ship’s cargo hold, with no clear awareness of the passage of time, or even of whether she was sleeping or awake.
When her head finally cleared, she was still in the cargo hold, but she was no longer strapped down. There were clean sheets on the emergency cushion, and—except for her matted and unwashed hair—she herself was also clean. She was naked under the sheet that covered her, but her clothes lay clean and folded in a neat pile on the deckplates by her head.
Somebody, then, had taken care of her. She didn’t remember who—Kief, most likely, or the unknown person whom Kief had addressed when he first brought her aboard. That would have been the pilot, Vai decided. Kief was a scholar, and his family were merchants; he didn’t know how to handle a starship.
Her staff lay atop the folded clothes, and a ship’s-first-aid-kit standard sling lay underneath the staff. Vai dressed herself slowly and carefully. She was still weak, and her splinted arm hurt whenever she touched it or moved it wrong. The sling helped, once she got it into place. The shirt wasn’t hers—the old one would have been a total loss anyway—but a cheap man-tailored one from a chain of clothing stores in Hanilat. The left sleeve had been thoughtfully slit down one seam to allow for the bulky splint on that arm.
There weren’t any shoes; she had to stand barefoot on the cold deckplates. She clipped the staff to her belt—it had to have been Kief who provided the clothes; leaving the staff was definitely the act of a fellow-Mage—and finished by running the fingers of her good hand through her tangled hair.
I wish I had a hairbrush, or even a comb. My head itches.
She heard the door of the cargo hold opening, and turned toward the sound. As she’d anticipated, it was Kief. He was wearing the loose coat again, and she knew that he was carrying his little handgun in the right-hand pocket.
“Do you have spy cameras in here,” she asked him, “or is this just an example of good timing?”
“It’s timing,” Kief said. “But I don’t know if it’s mine or yours.”
“What do you mean?”
There was a look in his yellow-hazel eyes that she didn’t quite understand. “According to the chart you gave me, we’ve reached our destination.”
“And?” she said.
This is the part where he shoots me dead out of spite. I knew it might happen, but it was going to be worth it, to keep him away from ’Rekhe … then I had to go and bungle even that.
“We’re at an asteroid, or something that looks like one.” Surprisingly, Kief looked intrigued, not angry.
He was a stargazer
, she thought,
before he came to the Circles. He knows what’s natural and what isn’t
. “And there appear to be quite a lot of ships in the nearspace vicinity.”
Vai felt a rush of dizzying relief, so strong that she had to struggle to conceal it. At least one thing had finally worked out right—the sus-Dariv were here as scheduled. She tried to appear curious but not too happy. “Whose?”
“Fleet-families, the pilot says. sus-Radal, and some that he doesn’t know.” Kief gave her a sharp look. “Are you sure Arekhon is here?”
She let out a deep sigh. “He isn’t yet. But he will be. I gave him the same chart that I gave you.”
 
 
Aboard
Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms
, the senior surviving guardship of the sus-Dariv fleet, emergence from the Void came calmly, at least on the surface.
“Passive sensors show fast task element is on time, on station,” the
Garden’s
captain said to Fleet-Captain Aelben Winceyt. “We all made it.”
“Good job,” Winceyt said. The words came out muffled; he had his face buried in the lightshield around the sensor readout, the better to see any low-level traces. He straightened up and added, “I want this approach to be as fast and quiet as I can make it.”
A light on the starboard readout flashed yellow, and the
Garden’s
Pilot-Principal said, “Fleet-Captain—someone’s transmitting.”
“One of ours?”
“No.” The Pilot-Principal remained a bit thinner and paler than she ought to be, but overall the time spent on the Void-transit had done her good. She didn’t look on the verge of collapsing any longer, and her voice was steady.
“I suppose it’s inevitable,” Winceyt said. “If we’ve come out where we’re supposed to be, then there are bound to be people out here. Do you have a position on the transmitter?”
“No, sir,” she said. “It went up and down too fast. We have it to about a hundred-eighty half-sphere.”
“Do you have any ID on it?”
She shook her head. “It’s in a code that we don’t recognize.”
“Get traces on all the background, with permanent recordings.”
“Sir.” The Pilot-Principal turned to the duty logmaster—one of Serpent Station’s handful of fleet-apprentices, who in happier times would have been barely senior enough to carry messages and tend the wardroom
uffa
pot—and the two of them started on the record, in constant hard and soft readout.
The other members of the bridge team, meanwhile, stood and waited. “Well,” said Command-Tertiary Yerris eventually, “we don’t have charts from out here, but this is certainly an interesting—”
The yellow light came on again, and the
Garden’s
communications officer interrupted Yerris, saying, “Second transmission. Attenuated. Short. I expect that it’s a guardship giving orders to a fleet.”
“Background is dropping,” said the
Garden’s
captain, who had replaced Winceyt at the low-light hood.
“Very well,” Winceyt said. “Find the things that vanished when the orders went out. Find their records. Backtrack them, then project their courses outward. That should give us the location of their base.”
“Or not,” the
Garden’s
captain said.
“Or not,” agreed Winceyt. “They know we’re here. So—message to the two outlying couriers. Get me lines of bearing on that last transmission. With those, and our line of bearing, get me a fix on the transmitter. That’ll be the flagship. That’s where we want to be.”
“But whose flagship is it?” said the
Garden’s
captain. “That’s the question.”
“I wish that Syr Vai were here,” Yerris said. “She claimed that she’d cover us.”
“Well, she’s not here, Command-Tertiary,” Winceyt replied shortly, “and she didn’t tell me what she intended to do after we got here. So for now we walk wary, try not to look vulnerable, and remember our pride.”
“And remember that someone in this bright galaxy sold us out and tried to kill everyone in the fleet,” the Pilot-Principal added. “The people who did that are still out there somewhere. And
we’re
still sus-Dariv—we don’t take charity from anyone.”
“Meanwhile,” said Winceyt, “send a narrow beam to the location of that last signal. Tell them who we are, and say that we want a palaver.”
“What code?” asked the communications officer.
“None. We don’t have any friends out here.”
 
 
By the time Kiefen Diasul’s hired ship landed in the docking bay of the asteroid base, Vai was riding in the copilot’s seat, with Kief standing close behind her. The seating arrangement was an uneasy one, made even more so by her awareness that she had a madman with a handgun at her back. She knew that Kief bore her no malice—not that he truly bore anyone malice, not even Arekhon—but she also knew that he was, in his own polite and reasonable way, completely insane.
Her first sight of the sus-Radal base, however, was almost overwhelming enough to take her mind off her problems altogether. She was impressed at how close it had already come to matching the rendered image she’d seen in Thel’s office. Parts of it were still being built: during the approach she saw a number of hard-vacuum
aiketen
moving about, at work transforming the base’s outer surface into something like natural rock. The docking bay itself was huge, as if someone had taken the entire Ninglin Spaceport landing field and shoved it into an enormous vaulted cave.
“They hailed us on sus-Radal frequencies,” the pilot said as the ship settled onto its landing legs. “Well, I’m sus-Radal by current contract, and I’ve got those. So I answered up and asked for permission to land or dock or whatever the local custom might be, and they gave me a beacon to home on. Slick as you like.”
The pilot was talking mostly to Vai; he’d plainly realized by now that she knew more about starships and piloting than his employer did. Vai wondered if he’d also realized by now that his employer was crazy.
If he doesn’t know,
she thought,
there’s no point in scaring him to death by telling him.
“I’m sorry that I can’t tell you exactly how long we’ll be here,” Kief said to the pilot. “I’m expecting someone, and I can’t leave until my business with him is finished.”
“Fine with me,” said the pilot. “There’s something strange going on outside—a bunch of ships jumping and signaling like crazy in a couple of different codes—and I’d just as soon stay in here out of the way until they get themselves sorted out.”
Damn it,
thought Vai.
It’s a battle.
For the first time, she felt true anger at Kief. She should have been out where she could talk to the sus-Radal before all this started, not locked up in a cargo hold; she’d been counting on using her family connections one last time to get safe harbor for the sus-Dariv ships. She felt anger at herself as well: The plans and files she’d taken from Thel’s office along with the secret chart had only mentioned crew transports going back and forth, not armed guardships, and she had believed them.
You believed them because Thel never mentioned guardships when he told you about his secret base
, she said to herself.
And Thel never used to leave out things like that when he told you about his plans.
Kief’s voice brought her back from her interior recriminations. “We’ll wait for Arekhon down on the floor of the docking bay,” he said. “It should be an excellent place for a working.”
“It could be days and days before ’Rekhe shows up,” she protested.
“I don’t think so. The threads of the working are too tight for him to be that far away.” Kief turned to leave the courier’s bridge, then stopped and looked back at Vai. “Come on. If we have a few hours of free time, we can use them to find this place’s infirmary. A proper set of medical
aiketen
can take better care of your arm than I was able to with a handbook and a kit-in-a-box.”
 
 
“We have a message coming in,”
Eastward-to-Dawning’s
Command-Ancillary said to Captain Hafdorwen.
“What code?”
“None.”
“It could be from anyone, then,” Hafdorwen said. “What does it say?”
“Sir,” said the Command-Ancillary, looking startled. “They identify themselves as sus-Dariv.”
“Why not invite the sus-Peledaen to the party, too?” the captain demanded rhetorically. “It looks like Lord Natelth’s using what’s left of his new wife’s people in order to take down our family as well.”
“I don’t know,” the Command-Ancillary said dubiously. “They’re not requesting anything other than that we identify ourselves.”
The captain shook his head. “They want to see how much we have out here, and they want to take or destroy the station.”
“For what purpose?”

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