A Working of Stars (43 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: A Working of Stars
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“Yes? Don’t just sit there, Captain Irao—
tell
me!”
“The other cipher is sus-Peledaen. It’s the
Cold-Heart.”
Len said something in his native Antipodean language that Zeri didn’t understand, and added in Hanilat-Eraasian, “Another luck-rotted guardship. Just what we needed.”
“At least Cousin Herin will be happy,” she said, after a moment. “If the
Cold-Heart
is here, then—if you believe Syrs Egelt and Hussav and their chase-and-go-homes—so is Iulan Vai.”
Len was busy donning headphones, and turning his attention to the Fire’s high-frequency direction finder. “In the meantime, all we can do is stay well out of the way of things and listen.”
He pulled back to bare minimum on the control yoke, sending retro blasts forward to bring them to a near halt in space, cutting power and gravity to minimal levels as well. Zeri felt herself begin to float a bit against her safety web every time she moved.
“Now, let’s see how things sort out. As soon as things have calmed down, if our friends are on top, we’ll tell them we’re here. If they aren’t … well, we’ll find somewhere else to be. Do you think I’d look good with a mustache and an eye patch?”
Zeri looked at Len critically. “Neither one would do you a bit of good. I like you fine the way you are.”
“Ah, the sweet promise of youth. But changing our names and habits might not be a bad idea regardless, as long as I can still go into space.”
“Not … wait a minute,” Zeri said. “What’s this light?” She pointed to a flashing telltale on the console beside her.
“Damnation. Something’s shifted back aft. Started drifting when I shut down to minimal. That’s a motion detector. I’ll go secure whatever it is, okay? You keep watch up here. Anything happens,” he pointed to a silver knob, “call me on the intraship comm. Flip that to turn it on, it’ll sound back aft. Just talk normally. Okay?” He was already unlacing his safety webbing.
“Okay.”
“Don’t touch anything else,” Len said, and headed aft, dogging down the airtight door behind him.
 
 
Kief twisted through the vacuum outside the force field. Nothing to hold, nothing to touch, his eyes stabbed agony into his brain as if they were pierced with white-hot knives—he clamped them shut. His lungs … he twisted the corner and dropped, panting and gasping, into the Void. Lost, without a Circle behind him, with nothing to show the way. He could die here, he knew, but perhaps not as soon as he would have with his blood boiling out of his lungs in hard interstellar vacuum.
The grey mist that marked the Void surrounded him, the silence eerily total. He saw nothing in any direction. But then, ahead, a shape moved. A black thing disturbed the chilling mist like a rock disturbing the surface of the sea. It approached. A ship, a spaceship, moving in its Void-transit. In the way the nature of the Void demanded, the vessel seemed to be heading straight for him, at a sedate walking pace. Kief sprinted toward it, the battering he’d sustained in his fight with Arekhon and Maraganha making his legs, arms, and ribs ache, even as the Void sucked the warmth from his bones.
He grasped the leading edge of an atmospheric-control surface on the spacecraft and pulled himself up onto it, pressed against the cold, real-feeling metal, with hands that had begun to lose their strength. Crawling, he made his way to the main body of the craft and closed his eyes. He pressed flat against it and twisted. He was through, falling to the deck, and breathing in the warm, humid air of the ship.
Wherever this ship was going, he would go. It would be a world. He lived.
Abruptly, an alarm sounded. Then he felt the sensation of disquiet that marked a Void-transition. The engines sounded different now, through the deckplates. A dropout, so soon? Kief wondered where they were.
He lay motionless, delighting in having air and warmth. Then the sound of the engines changed again, dying to nothing. He felt himself growing lighter, until the slightest motion was enough to push him from the deck. Gravity had been shut off.
Kief pushed back with his elbows and floated to a standing position, grabbing a handhold to brace himself. A locker was fastened on the forward bulkhead. Kief opened it. It held ship’s coveralls, with patches for
Fire-on-the-Hilltops. Luck,
Kief thought,
has not deserted me.
He pulled the coverall over his torn and sweat-stained clothing, fastening it up the front. He didn’t have a staff—for the first time in years—and that was upsetting. But no matter. There had to be something on board that could be fashioned into a makeshift. He started to move forward, pulling himself from handhold to handhold.
Time to find the crew and introduce himself. He felt lucky. Lord Natelth would reward him well for returning his escaped bride.
 
 
Len moved aft. The motion had been in number-one cargo hold, and he didn’t recall any cargo being in there. Maybe the sensor was wrong. Sometimes—more often than he liked to think—the sensors were wrong, and a realspace translation was often the thing to knock them off.
But here … the dogs on the hatch to number one were moving, apparently by themselves. Something was trying to get out. He stood, holding an overhead ring, amazed. The door swung open, and someone emerged. He saw a man dressed, as he was, in a ship’s coverall. The man had a trickle of blood at each nostril, but his face was oddly familiar. Len wondered where he’d seen the man before. He was about Len’s own height and build.
“Who are you?” Len asked. “How did you get on my ship?”
“Lenyat Irao,” the stranger said.
“You know me?”
“No, that’s my name, and I have your body,” the man said, and launched himself forward, striking Len and bearing him up against the far bulkhead, all elbows and knees and grasping hands.
 
 
Zeri sat back in her chair, looking out the windows. Nothing appeared out there but the stars. They were in unfamiliar patterns, but that didn’t surprise her. She was a long way from home. Len said they were on the other side of the great Gap.
A voice came up on the amplified outside circuit, from
Eastward-to-Dawning
broadcasting in the clear, calling, “Any sus-Dariv.”
“I am sus-Dariv,” Zeri said aloud. “I am
the
sus-Dariv.”
But she didn’t key the external microphone. Instead, she twisted the internal communications switch. Before she could speak, though, she heard the internal pickups.
“Who are you?” Len was asking.
A stowaway?
she thought. How long had the intruder been on board?
Then she heard a voice that sounded a great deal like Len’s answer, “Lenyat Irao.”
Zeri unbuckled her safety webbing. She was certain that if she were more familiar with the ship she’d be able to do something clever, like dialing the gravity in that one compartment up to about three times normal, then going back to sort out what was going on among the people lying flat on the deck unable to move. She could mend her ignorance in the future, she decided. For now, voices had given way to the sound of what could only be a fistfight.
Whatever else Zeri could do, she knew theatre.
“Time for me to make a dramatic entrance,” she said, and headed aft.
 
 
Len struck back, but the stranger with his face had apparently been trained as a hand-to-hand fighter. The two men fought, battered, and screamed, twisting in midair, each movement sending them to one side or another of the compartment rebounding with bruising force from the hard surfaces.
Abruptly, the echoing roar of a slug-gun sounded, and Len was deafened. The man he was grappling jerked and went limp.
Zeri was standing braced in the doorway, the weapon held in two hands before her.
“What?” Len asked.
“A girl has to protect herself these days,” Zeri said. “Herin picked it up for me on Ninglin. You just can’t be too careful.”
“But …” Len said. “How did you know which one of us to shoot?”
“I’d know you anywhere,” Zeri said, and kissed him.
 
 
On board
Eastward-to-Dawning,
Captain Hafdorwen said to his Command-Ancillary, “Now that’s something you don’t see every day, even in space.”
“What is it?”
“That sus-Peledaen guardship who just showed up is shooting at his friends.”
“I don’t know how friendly they think they are, sir,” the Command-Ancillary said. “The sus-Dariv are shooting back.”
“Take the sus-Peledaen guardship under fire,” Hafdorwen said. “And make a signal to the sus-Dariv. Offer them temporary alliance with sus-Radal.”
“What?” demanded the Command-Ancillary. “You want to make alliance with mutineers?”
“Better with mutineers than with the sus-Peledaen. I’ve heard some rumors about what really happened to the sus-Dariv fleet.”
 
 
“I’ll be damned, sir,” Command-Tertiary Yerris said to Fleet-Captain Winceyt. “The sus-Radal guardship is shooting at
Cold-Heart-of-Morning”
“I didn’t think Lord Theledau’s people would trust the sus-Peledaen for long,” Winceyt replied. “Weapons-Principal, take the
Cold-Heart
under fire as well.”
“Sir!” said
Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms’s
communications officer. “Message coming in—the sus-Radal guardship
Eastward-to-Dawning
offers temporary alliance.”
The
Garden’s
Pilot-Principal looked up from the sensor display. Her expression was one of fierce delight. “Fleet-Captain, the sus-Peledaen just took a hit!”
“Whose?” Winceyt asked.
“sus-Radal.”
“Tell the Dawning that
Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms
accepts the offer. Weapons-Principal, keep the
Cold-Heart
under fire.”
 
 
In a hidden room in Hanilat on Eraasi, the empty shell of Kiefen Diasul stirred and his eyes opened. His wandering self, bound to his body by a silver cord none but he could have seen, had finally returned. This body was weak, damaged by its prolonged emptiness. He raised his hand and pushed himself upright, pulling free from the tubes and lines that had fed his shell.
Staggering—both from the weakness of this long-unused flesh and from the fight that his mind had sustained—he stood and pulled on a robe, and made it to the doorway one halting step at a time. He leaned there against the doorjamb for a minute, his breathing ragged and heavy, then stumbled on.
“Isayana,” he said to the first
aiketh
that he encountered. “I need Isayana, now.”
And so she found him that morning when she entered the laboratory. “Diasul,” she said, in shock, and he raised an emaciated hand to touch her face, flesh against flesh.
In that same moment his mind flowed into hers, and she knew his memories as though they were her own, childhood and the love of learning and the fellowship of the Circles—and one memory more strong and bitter to her than all the others, of the night among the ruins of Demaizen Old Hall, when he had betrayed ’ekhe his Circle-mate into the hands of gunmen at the behest of Natelth sus-Khalgath sus-Peledaen.
Isa was helpless then; Kief’s will overrode her own. She was aware that he was seeing through her eyes, and that the words that she spoke, for all that the voice was hers, were his words.
Her body bore Kief’s mind within it as she left her laboratory and returned to the sus-Peledaen town house, where her brother Na’e was finishing his breakfast and going over the morning messages from the orbital station.
“Isa,” he said, surprised. “I thought that you were gone.”
Isayana didn’t answer, except to pick up a silver jelly-knife from the breakfast table and drive it through his right eye into his brain. Then, speaking aloud, she said to the part of her mind that was Kiefen Diasul and not Isayana sus-Khalgath, “I will make a new body for you to fill, a fresh replicant seeded from the wreck of your corpse, so that our work may continue.”
Kief’s mind fled back then, to his own body, leaving Isayana alone. “I see now,” she said, “that it’s one thing to suspect the truth, and something else to know it.”
Then she summoned the household
aiketen
and told them, “Lord Natelth has met with an accident; see to it that his body is dealt with according to the customs of our family.”
 
SUS-RADAL ASTEROID BASE
FIRE-ON-THE-HILLTOPS NIGHT’S-BEAUTIFUL-DAUGHTER
 
Y
ou’re safe now.” The lid of the stasis box closed over Arekhon, and he struggled vainly against panic for a drawn-out, excruciating moment—he had to get out, he had to push open the box, but his body didn’t have any strength left in it and he hurt too much even to move—before a grey lassitude swept over him and he was …
Nowhere at all.
I am. Here. I am here. I am here I am here I am here.
Grey mist around him. Cold.
A place, then. This place.
The Void.
This was the Void, and someone, once, had shown him the way to go through it.
Look for the marks, and go through.
Movement now, ahead of him in the mist. Movement and light. He stood and walked forward—this was the Void, where what he willed became what was real, and if he willed himself into health and wholeness then it would be so—and found the first Void-mark, and stepped through.
The mist vanished. Arekhon stood on the observation deck of the asteroid base, looking out at the stars as he had when he and Maraganha set the Void-marks on Ophel. The starfield beyond the half-dome of armored glass was alight with flashes of energy and sudden bursts of colored light.
“It’s beautiful,” said a voice at his elbow. He turned, and saw Ty standing there beside him, looking up at the stars with the light of the
eiran
silvering his face.
“Yes,” Arekhon said. Part of him would always be sus-Peledaen, and the sus-Peledaen were star-lords above all; the glory outside the observation deck was part of his inheritance. “So beautiful it hurts to leave.”
“People will die out there,” said another voice. “People have died.” Narin Iyal stood at his other side, and her face was full of an old sorrow. “They’ll die out there, and their ships will be their graves, because there’s nobody left to bring them home.”
“Their lives go into the working,” Arekhon said. “Someone will bring them home.”
“Not if it fails for lack of tending,” Narin said. “And who can tend a working over half a thousand years?”
The question struck him like a knife into the heart. “I would,” he said, “if there were any way that a living man could do such a thing.”
“Do you give us your word?” Ty asked. “Your life to the working, from now until the galaxy is mended?”
“My life to the working,” he said. “I swear it.”
Narin smiled then, and her square plain face was beautiful in the starlight. “Then our lives will go with you and keep you through all the years of the working, until the end of it brings us home. We will keep the working, with our lives, while you are gone.”
He embraced her, and Ty embraced him, and they stood for a long while in companionship under the roof of stars. At last Narin said, “You have to go now, and see to the working. Live in honor, ‘Rekhe, and be well. I must rejoin my Circle.” ’Rekhe noticed then that when she talked her mouth did not move.
A trickle of dried blood ran down Ty’s chest. “I have my family altars to attend, with at least one memorial tablet,” he said.
Once again, the Void-marks shone brightly in the starfield beyond the glass. Arekhon withdrew reluctantly from the closeness of his friends, and stepped through.
 
 
Aboard
Fire-on-the-Hilltops,
Lenyat Irao tore the headset from his ears. “Ow, dammit! That hurt!”
“What?” Zeri asked.
“Major noise.” He looked at the high-frequency direction-finding sensor, and touched the maneuvering jets to swing the
Fire’s
nose around, so that the cockpit windows pointed to one side. The needle on the sensor swung to centerline.
Zeri pointed at the needle. “And that—?”
“Energy burst. And that means …”
Outside the
Fire’s
bridge windows, a pinprick of light appeared, blue at the center, then white, then large, larger, then fading back through red to darkness.
“ … someone isn’t coming home,” Len finished.
“What—who—was on that bearing?” Zeri asked.
Len checked back through the ship-mind’s sensor readouts. “sus-Peledaen guardship
Cold-Heart-of-Morning,”
he said finally. “No going home for anyone now.”
 
 
“I promised Arekhon that I would see the survivors back to safety on Ophel.” Karilen Estisk’s voice was courteous, but her expression was immovably stubborn. “And what I promised him, that I will do.”
The sus-Radal asteroid base was an artificial construct. It had conference rooms, engineering spaces where power and life support were maintained, machine shops, and berthing compartments, as well as the infirmary. It was still unstocked and unmanned, nor were most services on-line, but what they had was good enough—in the aftermath of the space battle, a conference turned out to be sorely needed, and one of the upper rooms, adjacent to the observation deck, was finished and furnished.
Representatives from the sus-Radal and sus-Dariv fleet elements, as well as the remnants of the Demaizen Circle and the leader of the sus-Radal construction team, had all gathered there for discussion and negotiations. An
aiketh
supplied
uffa
from the general mess, in cups with sus-Radal house crests. Len sat beside Zeri, his hand resting over hers on top of the table, between the sus-Radal and sus-Dariv sides, opposite Ty and Narin. Herin leaned against the wall, behind the remnants of the Demaizen Circle, and Maraganha stood beside him.
Iulan Vai still sat on the sus-Radal side of the table, though from the way Captain Hafdorwen regarded her, Vai didn’t think she would be enjoying that honor for long after she returned to Hanilat. Stealing family charts and handing them over to the sus-Dariv was not something that Hafdorwen—nor, she suspected, Theledau himself—would take lightly.
It doesn’t matter,
Vai thought.
I’m not planning to wait around for fleet-family justice anyhow. As soon as I hand over ’Rekhe’s stasis box to a really good medical center, Zeri’s cousin Herin and I are going to be long gone—to our own Circle and our own workings, somewhere a long way away from the great Magelords in the big city.
At the moment, however, that resolve still left Vai with the problem of
Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter
. The black wing-shaped craft had been given to her by Theledau, and no one here, she resolved, had the authority to take it away from her. She needed the craft for the purpose of taking ’Rekhe home, and now she said as much.
“He may be sus-Peledaen,” she said, “but he’s also Demaizen, and he’s never played anyone false.”
“He’s Natelth sus-Peledaen’s own brother,” Winceyt said. “And that family is no friend to anybody here. There isn’t a person in this room who hasn’t lost family, friends, or livelihood to them.”
“I’m as much sus-Dariv as you are,” Herin reminded him. “I’ve lost as much to the sus-Peledaen as anyone who wears the fleet-livery.
But this man himself has done us no wrong. From what I’ve heard, he left his family altars years ago.”
“Taking him to Eraasi, any one of us, would expose us to more danger,” Len said. “Why there? Aren’t there a hundred other worlds where he could be healed?”
“My understanding is that there were promises given,” Herin said. “And isn’t it true, Syr Vai, that you yourself have urgent business there?”
“I do,” she said.
“Family business?” Fleet-Captain Hafdorwen asked. He was the spokesman for the sus-Radal, and had been watching Vai narrowly since the conference began.
“Yes.”
Fleet-Captain Hafdorwen sat back, and sipped his
uffa.
“That this base’s existence is compromised is due to you. I say that taking the lot of you back to Eraasi is the proper thing to do, all right—aboard my ship, to be turned directly over to house security.”
“No, let her go,” Herin said. “She’s a Mage, like Arekhon sus-Peledaen, and they do their own work—so why not give the whole ship to the Mages? Who would risk their luck to do anything else?”
“That’s not your decision to make,” said the sus-Radal construction boss. “It’s a family ship, and I say we should put our own crew on it and take it back to the family.”
“Captain Estisk, syr.” Zeri sus-Dariv was far more polite than Vai had thought of being.
Of course
, Vai added to herself,
she’s still fresh and well groomed by comparison with some of us in here—I look like I’ve been mud-wrestling with a mortgaunt.
“Can you answer a question for me?”
“Perhaps,” Karil said. “Or not—I have no answers for some things.”
“Did you promise Lord Arekhon that you would take the
Daughter
back, and call her by name in the promise?”
“I told you. I promised to take care of the survivors.”
“Not people by name? Just ‘survivors’?”
A reluctant half-growl. “No names.”
“Then, if you’re willing, you can keep your promise by sharing your Ophelan charts and Void-marks with us. We’re all that’s left of the unbroken sus-Dariv, and we need a place where we can settle and carry out business, away from the grip of the sus-Peledaen.”
“Arekhon would approve,” Maraganha added in her low-pitched, lightly accented voice. “Having the sus-Dariv on this side of the interstellar gap is one more thing to further the great working.”
“Always the working,” said Karil. “I am sick to death and beyond of this working. It sucks the life out of everyone who touches it.” She sighed. “Very well—I will guide the sus-Dariv to Ophel. And you can bring who you like with you, your ships and your people, even those two that sit to one side and say nothing.”
“Syr Egelt and Syr Hussav,” Zeri said. “They were in sus-Peledaen employ, but that’s no shame—they did their work honestly, and left it when the sus-Peledaen stopped working honestly with them.”
“I will return to Eraasi,” Herin said. “Iulan
etaze
is returning, and I’m a Mage in her Circle now.”
“That’s done, then,” said Vai. “If Captain Hafdorwen will provide a pilot for the
Daughter
for courtesy’s sake—and because I’m only qualified to handle a ship’s controls in normal space—then I think we part ways here, sus-Dariv and sus-Radal, for Ophel and Eraasi.”
“The pilot will be mine,” Hafdorwen said. “And that makes the ship mine, and so honor is satisfied. Lord Arekhon will heal in the house of sus-Radal, and afterward Theledau sus-Radal himself can judge what should be done with him.”
 
 
The sus-Dariv fleet was gone in the morning, with Karil Estisk acting as Pilot-Principal for them all. Vai watched their departure from the asteroid base’s control room. Then came time to load the stasis box into
Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter
as she sat in the landing bay. But when the construction workers arrived in the infirmary with a portable generator at the ready to maintain stasis until the box was hooked to ship’s power, they found the lid open and the box empty.
“Didn’t anyone bother to stand watch?” Vai asked.
“Apparently not,” Narin said. She was stoic as always. “The best of plans can fail when the
eiran
pull them strongly enough awry, and the
eiran
pull strongly on ’Rehke.”
“He’s gone to Ophel with Karil, most likely,” Ty said. “Then back to Entibor. His lover is still there, and if he told her that he would come back, he would do a great deal to keep his promise.”
Narin turned, and walked back to
Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter
without a word. Vai followed a moment later.
Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter
departed later that same day, but without a stasis box on board. Captain Hafdorwen had indeed supplied a pilot, and the transit, while long, was unremarkable.
 
 
Once across the interstellar gap, Vai, Herin, and Hafdorwen’s pilot took the
Daughter’s
own shuttle to
Eastward-to-Dawning,
as she orbited Eraasi near the sus-Radal shipyards.
“I have to settle accounts with Thel somehow if I’m going to live on Eraasi and make myself a new Circle,” Vai said to Maraganha Hyfid before departing. “He’s going to have to build another asteroid base now that the old one is compromised, and that’s all my fault. On the other hand, Natelth sus-Peledaen and his most powerful Magelord are both dead, and the sus-Dariv are going to need a homeworlds trading partner once they’ve set up shop on Ophel, so with any luck he’ll think that the family’s gained more than it’s lost from what I’ve done.”

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