Bringer of Light (10 page)

Jarek found himself wondering, more than once, what effect tranq might have on the boy’s apparently human body.

He wasn’t sure why he had had to bring Vy with them at all, not once he’d provided Aleph’s coordinates. The ship was heading to a system full of male Sidhe: surely one of them could just reprogram the navcomp to get them home? It also occurred to him that even with Aleph’s coordinates removed from the
Heart of Glass
’s comp, the ship itself was still a liability: once they’d been there, the pattern of Aleph’s beacon would be imprinted on the ship’s transit-kernel; if the females captured his ship then they could probably force it to shift to Aleph without any intervention from a male. Presumably the Aleph males considered that to be an acceptable risk, whilst having the coordinates actually stored in the comp was not. Or perhaps the Minister was a good enough judge of character to know that Jarek would see the
Heart of Glass
destroyed before he’d let it fall into the hands of his enemies. Then again, maybe the Minister didn’t expect them to come back at all – Jarek was pretty certain he hadn’t been telling them everything. But whatever the risks, he was committed to this course of action now.

He did try asking Vy why he had to remain on board, but the boy just shrugged, a gesture he’d picked up from Taro and now used almost constantly, much to everyone’s irritation.

This time they departed the Tri-Confed system by the book. Jarek took a slow, conservative course out to the beacon, then requested an onward transit to Pior-Terrane, a dual system with good trade links and a transit-path on to Hiliap, the hub where they were contracted to take their passenger.

Nual and Taro got Vy into stasis while Jarek prepped for the shift. Perhaps because they were used to one of Khesh’s avatars, the Angels found Vy much easier to deal with than Jarek did. While Nual and Taro viewed the Minister almost like some sort of eccentric uncle, the Minister’s casual disregard for human life turned Jarek’s stomach, and Vy was part of that same being. But the Minister was an ally – or at least, the enemy of his enemies. Jarek still woke up sweating and terrified from nightmares of his time as a captive of the Sidhe females. And now, in order to fight them, he’d sold his ship to a Sidhe male. He’d have been screwed either way – if he hadn’t taken the Minister on as a silent partner, the Veryan Syndicate would have taken every nut and rivet and left him with nothing. At least he had it in writing that the Minister couldn’t intervene in his affairs directly.

A gentle ping from the console told him that shutdown was nearly complete and he looked around, a little worried. He’d have expected them to have got Vy settled by now. He had already received authorisation to depart when Nual finally floated up to the bridge.

‘That took a while,’ said Jarek. ‘Everything all right?’

‘Vy was scared. He didn’t want to go into stasis.’ They were down to basic life-support now and her face was hard to read in the dim light.

‘But he’s the one who insisted we put him in the comabox for the transit!’

‘I know.’ Nual sounded frustrated; had Vy been human she could have coerced him into obedience.

‘Well, we’re locked down and we’ve got our window, so let’s get this over with.’ As Nual turned to go he added, ‘Good luck.’ She nodded an acknowledgement.

When she’d gone Jarek tried to settle into his couch. He always got butterflies immediately before a transit; one initiated by someone else taking control of his ship to propel him into another galaxy made him feel like he had a whole flock of birds circling in his guts.

Then the birds landed all at once and his stomach leapt up his throat. His eyes were filled with the darkness of the void, his ears with the roaring of the universe and he was falling,
falling—

Gone. Everything. Gone.

Nothing. Something? Someone. Me. Yes!

Pounding, grinding, nauseating. Me. There’s . . . me. And I . . . feel like shit. Like . . . the taste of puke. He could sense that, acid and twisted. It was vile, but it was real. He was real. Whoever he was.

It’s only shiftspace. I’m in the shift. Not dying.

Not dying: just in the shift.

Keep saying the words, remember you’re real. This will pass.
Not dying: just in the shift.

What if I
am
dying?

What if I’m already dead and this is Hell?

No. No no nonono. Won’t accept that. Won’t . . . I am someone. Someone, somewhere. There is hope. There is light. Will be light. There is . . .

. . . fading in and out. No. Hold on.
Not dying: just in the shift.

Remember you exist. Have existed. Will exist. Whoever, whatever, wherever, there’s life. You’re alive. Still alive. And . . .

Not dying: just in the shift.

Not dying: just
. . .

Not dying
. . .

Not.

He woke to the stench of dried vomit, but the memory of the nightmare transit was already fading. He’d never had one that bad – then again, what had he expected? This wasn’t a normal transit scheduled via the beevee system and though realspace and shiftspace didn’t map directly – two systems within half-a-dozen light-years might be a dozen transits apart – actually transiting to a different galaxy had to be a whole different ballgame.

He prised himself off the floor before opening his eyes, then spent a few moments confirming that the world was still there, and real. Then he brushed himself clean as best he could and laboriously scaled his couch.

Getting the ship’s systems back online was always a priority after a shift, but it had never been as important as it was now. Fortunately his body knew what to do, even if his mind was still half in shiftspace.

They’d come out of the shift at quite a lick; the plan, such as it was, was to cancel the velocity and come to a (relative) halt, then wait to be contacted on the channel the Minister had provided them with. But as soon as the ship’s systems started to come online again, alarms began going off all over the place. One was the warning every captain making an unscheduled transit dreaded:
proximity alert.

He stared dumbly at the board, even as his hands tried to coax the in-system drive into life. Sensors were still on minimal, but he gleaned enough from the readouts to know that whatever had tripped them wasn’t on a collision course, thank Christos. He had a few minutes’ grace, so he spared a glance at the other alarm flashing away on his screen. Electromagnetic energy pulse? From where?
Why?

The ‘where’ he spotted almost at once: something was trying to slow-fry his ship from below – ‘below’ being a relative term. The nav-shields were always the first to come up, and the EM was relatively low-level, so whatever was firing on them wasn’t endangering the ship yet. Before it built up enough energy to be an issue, the drive would be back up and they could take evasive action.

He needed to see outside. Given the EM pulse was aimed at the base of the
Heart of Glass
, he decided to risk opening the shutters on the bridge dome while he waited for the more sophisticated systems to wake up. Sometimes the human eyeball was the best sensor.

He briefly wondered how Taro and Nual were doing before deciding that they’d have to wait until he knew the ship was safe.

The shutters retracted to reveal a sky filled with a curtain of shimmering light, coruscating in shades of red and gold and orange.
What the fuck?

As his eyes adjusted he saw that the light didn’t quite fill the sky; there was darkness at its bottom edge – the darkness of space. So some kind of massive, translucent sheet had been hung in front of the stars. Then he spotted a dark spot, just below the centre, which was visibly shrinking as he sped away, arse-first. A tear in the veil.
Uh-oh.
So that would be the rip his ship had made when it tore through the whatever-it-was. He looked away from the beguiling sight to check his heading.

At least the
Heart of Glass
hadn’t taken any damage; the curtain must be very low-density. But he’d still damaged it, and that explained why the locals were shooting at him. Except—

—except the EM pulse wasn’t coming from the curtain, it was coming from underneath him.

Suddenly he realised what he was seeing:
Holy Christos, it’s a lightship!

And that wasn’t a curtain, it was a
sail
– and what he’d originally taken for a weapon was actually the light-pulse being transmitted from a fixed point to fill the sail and propel the ship. Had it not been for Jarek’s obsessive interest in space history when he was a boy, he’d have had no idea what he was looking at; no one had used lightsails for thousands of years. But Aleph had existed independent of human-space for millennia . . .

He glanced down as another indicator lit up on the board: an incoming message, on the frequency the Minister had called the ‘common channel’. Unsurprisingly, his com system didn’t recognise the tag, but he could guess who the message was from. He hit receive.

‘Enemy! Enemy! Warning: we tell ye, tell ye to consensor! Ye hear us? Ye hear? Aye-okay?’ The strident voice had an accent so thick Jarek wasn’t sure he was hearing the man’s words correctly.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t—’ he started, but the strange voice cut him off almost at once.

‘Query: what sept ye? Tell us wha sept. We tell of ye!’

‘I’m sorry,’ he tried again, ‘I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. I’m a visitor. I’ve come to see—’ But he hadn’t been given a name, he’d just been told to wait until he was contacted. ‘Er, I don’t suppose you’d like to take me to your leader?’

The man responded with an impressive if incomprehensible string of what sounded like swearing, then cut the connection.

Jarek wondered if First Contact situations always went this well. Hopefully the lightship wasn’t armed. He looked out again to check the damage he’d done to the irate local’s sail, but the hole was gone, which was impossible . . .
unless the sail had mended itself.

That meant sophisticated nanotech, the sort not found in human-space. Nanofactories were rare, even on those worlds without religious proscriptions against messing with Creation at an atomic level, for they required massive power inputs and were notoriously unpredictable. No religious proscriptions here, though, and the locals had zepgen and the massive intellects of male Sidhe to overcome any technical difficulties. But if they were that advanced, why the hell were they sailing around in lightships?

Another incoming message. Jarek took a deep breath before accepting.

‘Greetings: be welcomed!’ This voice was friendly and easily comprehensible, if strangely accented. ‘Be warmly welcomed to Aleph, Captain Reen.’ It was also unmistakably female.

Kerin was stuck inside the rocky fastness of the Tyr, and so she did not see the fire in the sky. Urien told her later that citizens abroad in the hour before dawn spoke of light silently blossoming overhead, near the Navel of Heaven, then slowly dying away. Though few actually witnessed it, word spread fast and speculation abounded as to the significance of this strange event.

No one save herself, Urien and Damaru knew the truth: that what those below had witnessed was the destruction of the Sidhe ship. And only the three of them knew that the unmoving star high above Dinas Emrys which people called the ‘Navel of Heaven’ was, in fact, the very non-heavenly structure at the top of the silver thread. Kerin and Damaru had visited that structure, and Kerin’s account of her experiences there had convinced Urien of a truth he had already begun to suspect. For everyone else around them, the world above remained the divine realm of the Skymothers.

Urien, ever the pragmatist, used the appearance of the heavenly light to their advantage, and started a rumour that it was a divine vindication of the changes he and Kerin were beginning to make.

Kerin tried not to consider how big a part luck had played in their victory. What if the Sidhe ship had arrived when Damaru were not present? What if this ‘cutting light’ that he had harnessed had not been something he could turn against their enemies? They knew so little of the technology put here by the Sidhe!

There was one fortunate side-effect of the incident: Damaru grudgingly admitted that he needed to learn his letters; if her son could combine his instinctive understanding of the device with the ability to read the console’s display, they would be in a far better position to deal with future crises.

Damaru attempted to renew contact with the ‘rock throwers’ after the Sidhe vessel had been destroyed, and when the console remained uncooperative, he took it apart, exposing thin smooth tubes of many sizes and colours that made Kerin think of the bloodless guts of some strange beast. He rested and ate only when Kerin insisted. He made occasional odd requests: for blades of skymetal, bone needles, even bowls of burning embers. The monitors did their best to hide any confusion when Kerin conveyed these requests to the guards outside; they knew a skytouched boy shared her room, even if their assumption about his relationship to her was wrong. If their goddess chose to indulge the boy, they would not question – not to her face, at least. Kerin could only hope that Damaru knew what he was doing. The complex workings of the console looked impossible to comprehend, even for a skyfool.