The New Space Opera 2 (36 page)

Ilugia increased the elastic tension of her leg muscles, and bounded from the cube, propelling herself to the rendezvous from where she would be transported back to the landing field.

The Empress did not waste time. She had a carrier to catch, and she knew it
could not
wait for her.

Australian writer Sean Williams is the author of many novels in collaboration with Shane Dix, including
The Unknown Soldier, The Prodigal Sun, The Dying Light, The Dark Imbalance, Chaos of Earth, Orphans of Earth, Heirs of Earth
, and
Geodesica: Ascent
, along with three
Star Wars
novels. As a solo writer, he's written both fantasy and high-tech science fiction, and is the author of the Books of the Change series, consisting of
The Stone Mage and the Sea, The Sky Warden and the Sun
, and
The Storm Weaver and the Sand
; the Books of the Cataclysm series, consisting of
The Crooked Letter, The Blood Debt
, and
The Hanging Mountains
; and the Astropolis series, consisting, to date, of
Saturn Returns
and
Earth Ascendant
. His stand-alone novels include
Metal Fatigue
(which won Australia's Aurealis Award for 1996),
The Resurrected Man
, and
Cenotaxis
. His stories have been gathered in the collections
Doorway to Eternity, A View Before Dying
, and
New Adventures in Sci-Fi
. His most recent book is a
Star Wars
novel,
The Force Unleashed
, and coming up is a new novel in the Astropolis series,
The Grand Conjunction
. He lives in Adelaide, Australia.

In the intricate story that follows, he takes us on a headlong chase across time and space, where it's hard to tell who is the hunter and who is the prey—or if they're one and the same.

CAPTIVE

The prisoner was both young and male, which suited Master Bannerman perfectly well. She had encountered his type before—headstrong, shallow, visceral—and refined numerous techniques for extracting what she needed. He would give her what she wanted, and possibly more besides. It was only a matter of time.

 

For his part, Braith Kindred was still struggling to wake up. His head ached, and his body was covered in bruises beneath an unfamiliar uniform. The air seemed as thick as honey, but only when he moved in a particular direction, encountering resistance when he sat upright, but none at all when dropping his arms to his sides. That his inner ear told him he was in free fall was another puzzling detail.

He rubbed his forehead, taking in the details of his cell. It was rectangular, six meters long and three wide, with white walls and a square cross-section. The cot he sat on was bolted to the floor. He noted circular holes where furniture had once been mounted at points on walls and ceiling as well. Clearly “down” was variable.

That triggered a memory. He raised and lowered his right arm, testing the honey effect. He had heard about such things. “Weird fields,” they were called. They were never used inside the Structure.

There was only one place he could be.

A Guild ship. In the belly of the beast.

“How did I get here?” he asked the empty room, certain that someone would be listening.

 

“Play him the recording.”

Master Bannerman stood with her arms folded tightly across her chest, watching the prisoner's reaction via life-size hologram.

The sound of his voice filled the brightly lit cell. The strain in the words, the effort it took to get them out.

“I strike this blow against the Guild of the Great Ships in the name of Terminus and all the free people of the Structure.”

The prisoner frowned.

“Now do you remember?” Bannerman asked him.

 

He remembered setting the last of the charges and testing the trigger that would simultaneously ignite them. There had been a break in one of the relays. He had been on his way to fix it when he had stumbled over the intruders: a pair of them, moving stealthily through the empty lower tunnels. They had no business there; Hakham topside had been abandoned for weeks. So he had fired at them, hitting one, and then hurried back to the hub to trigger the demolition ahead of schedule. Faulty relay be damned; he wasn't about to blow the mission on account of Guild agents getting in the way. Fortunately, the hub hadn't been interfered with. He had entered the codes and braced himself to read the script. This was his big moment. In seconds, it would be all over—for Terminus and the free people of the Structure, but most of all for his brother, who had died at the hands of a Guildsman and deserved the honor.

Then what?

His captors played the message again. It was his voice, all right. The words were his, too. The script was so deeply embedded in him that it had become part of his skeleton.

He didn't remember saying it, though. Not on Hakham. Not ever. He had rehearsed the speech in his head a thousand times. It had never once issued from his mouth.

Perhaps, he thought, the shockwave had given him amnesia.

Or perhaps a much stranger solution awaited discovery.

 

“You pulled me from under the wreckage,” the prisoner said. “Or you beat me up. Which?”

She studied him closely. He held himself still, very still, as though thinking for his life. What new treacheries was he planning behind those cold blue eyes?

“The former,” she said.

“So I did push the button. Good. What are you going to do now? Interrogate me?”

“No amount of interrogation will reopen the shaft. Hakham is closed forever.”

“Execute me, then?”

She let him ponder that possibility for a moment, imagining the fear of ignominious death eating into his certainty like acid. He would reach the obvious conclusion, given time.

“You're soldiers on a war footing,” he said slowly. “If our roles were reversed, if I was the one pulling you out of the rubble, I would've shot you on the spot. You haven't done that, so you must want something from me. What is that, exactly?”

“Just one thing,” Bannerman said. “By blowing those charges, you cut yourself off from everyone you know. More: you stranded yourself a thousand light-years from your fellow conspirators. I've kept you alive because I think you'll come to realize just how stupid that was.”

“You want to watch me suffer?”

“No. There are other ways into the Structure. We know of two, and Terminus has sealed both of them. You're going to help me find a third.”

“Why would I do that?”

“It's the only way you'll ever get back inside.”

“Well, that's true.”

A slow smile crept across his face.

Whatever he was thinking, she didn't like it.

 

Kindred wished he could see the woman addressing him. Guildsmen he was familiar with; they were uniformly compact and handsome, practically indistinguishable from each other, like clones. No one had ever seen a Guildswoman before. What strange hive queen might she be?

She was right about him, anyway, whoever or whatever she was. He did know another entrance to the Structure. More than one, in fact. He had memorized his brother's charts, even added to them himself, once he too had become a Terminus agent. Exits weren't commonplace, and they were sometimes difficult to map, but they weren't impossibly rare.

The truth of his situation was settling heavily into place, like a shipwreck coming to rest on the bottom of a sea. The detonation of the charges, the script, and his own voice reading it aloud—amnesia had nothing to do
with his predicament. There was about as much point fighting it as there was fighting time itself.

“All right,” he said. “I'll take you where you want to go.”

“With the intention of betraying me when you arrive, I presume.”

“I don't doubt that you're planning something similar for me.”

She didn't reply. He sat waiting for a quarter of an hour, elbows holding his illusory upper bodyweight on his knees. Then he gave in to his body's need to rest and eased back flat upon the cot. Closed his eyes on the bright white-ness of the cell and tried his best to ignore the feeling of falling. He had a lot to think about. Whatever his captor was doing, displaying impatience would only give her a sense of satisfaction he intended to withhold forever.

 

The prisoner had capitulated much more quickly than Master Bannerman had expected. She trusted him even less for that, but his verbal concession gave her enough to convince the Grand Masters that her plan should proceed. Once the flurry of FTL packets between her Great Ship and the parent world ebbed back to vacuum noise, Master Bannerman handpicked two Guildsmen and went immediately to where the prisoner lay waiting.

“I am Master Bannerman,” she said. “I speak for this Great Ship.”

She came two long paces into the cell, giving him time to look her over. A full head taller than the average Guildsman, she was easily a match for the prisoner's stature and strength. When he stood up, moving warily through the artificial gravity, they faced each other eye to eye.

“Braith Kindred,” he replied, glancing at her escort, which had taken position by the open door. “But you knew that already.”

“We have a
vedette
waiting.”

“A what?”

“A scout ship.”

“And you've come to ask me for a destination, I suppose.”

“You wouldn't possibly tell me now. The information is all that's keeping you alive.”

She indicated that he should turn around. One of her two Guildsmen moved forward to fasten restraints around his wrists.

“You're going to show me, rather than tell me,” she told him. “So long as you honor the terms of agreement, you will be permitted to live.”

“What about your ship?”

She wasn't about to reveal the intricacies of her existence to him. The Great Ship would be well looked after by another avatar of herself, identi
cal in every respect to the one searching for the Structure. Let him think that she was abandoning her station to go roaming on a fool's quest, and that the treachery he planned would make the slightest difference to the Grand Masters' war.

“Attempt to harm me,” she told him, “and you will be instantly killed.”

 

He didn't doubt that Bannerman possessed that capacity. The Guild might have installed a dozen lethal devices into him while he was unconscious, which she could activate with a gesture.

When the Guildsman working on his wrists had finished the job, he turned to face her again.

“Oza,” he said.

“Explain that remark.”

He enjoyed her puzzlement, just as she had no doubt enjoyed his.

“The place you're looking for. That's its name.”

“It does not appear on our charts.”

“Oza is beyond your borders. Still in the galaxy, but a long hike from Hakham. You'll need a fast ship if you want to get there any time soon.”

Her expression didn't change. “You are testing the capabilities of the Guild.”

“I'm giving you what you asked for. Take it or leave it.”

He waited while she thought about it. The Guild had searched all its worlds for other entrances to the Structure, and found only Gevira and Hakham. Any obvious destination, therefore, she would likely recognize as a lie. That didn't have to make her happy, though. When she met the Decretians, her unhappiness was certain to compound, but he wasn't about to tell her about them yet.

His fear was gone. It had been replaced by a cool, confident certainty. She would accept the deal and they would go to Oza. Or if not Oza, then somewhere more distant still. They would get in, and she would not kill him. She couldn't kill him, and neither could the Decretians or anyone else. He was protected by the Structure now, no matter how far he roamed from it.

If she turned him down, another possibility would present itself. The universe had, for him, become a maze with a multitude of paths and only one exit.

“The
vedette
is ready,” she said. “Come.”

Master Bannerman moved off with long, confident strides. He found his field-legs after a dozen steps and did his best to keep up.

HARDWARE

More FTL packets flashed. More decisions were made. Master Bannerman secured the ship she needed—the Guild's fastest
razee
—and received in return a warning that, should she fail, her surviving avatars would be stripped of Ship privileges and demoted to brood service. That risk was acceptable. She was asking a lot, after all. If the
razee
were to fall into the wrong hands…

She quelled that misgiving and pressed on.

The
vedette
was waiting for them with airlocks open and a complement of twelve Guildsmen at the ready. A mixture of astrogation, maintenance, and security, they saluted as she entered and made space for her and the prisoner in the forward passenger compartment. Kindred didn't struggle as he was secured to an acceleration couch. Master Bannerman took a couch opposite him, and sat patiently as the small shuttle craft disengaged from the Great Ship.

Over the staccato drumming of reactionless thrusters and the rising hum of ultralights, the prisoner broke his silence.

“Don't you want to know the course?”

“Eventually, yes.”

“But not now, so we're headed elsewhere. Care to tell me?”

“No.”

Artificial gravity shifted with a lurch as the
vedette
switched to internal life support.

“You may view our departure, if you would like to.”

“Yes, I would.”

She instructed the forward bulkhead to present an illusion of transparency, and together they watched the looming, star-shaped bulk of the Great Ship recede. There was nothing over Hakham that he had not already seen. The world was drab and reddish, made remarkable only by the ancient mines its citizens had stumbled across three centuries earlier. Apparently bottomless, their mysteries had only begun to be fathomed by the Guild before Braith Kindred and the terrorist organization called Terminus had destroyed the uppermost levels and the machines maintaining the so-called “transcendent shafts” that led to far more mysterious spaces.
The crater left in their wake was just visible from orbit, a yellowish dimple several degrees south of the equator. Now Hakham had returned to being utterly uninteresting, and she was glad to be leaving.

The
vedette
's thrusters propelled them a safe distance from the Great Ship, at which point the ultralights kicked in. She felt a giddy sensation in the pit of her stomach as life support worked hard to preserve her from the unnatural forces at work around the
vedette
. Furious energies, understood in full only by the Grand Masters and their architects, smashed the usual laws of physics and propelled the
vedette
at speeds not possible since the moments of creation, when the universe had boiled and time and space were one.

The prisoner was fascinated, although he tried to hide it. His eyes never left the bright points of light gliding smoothly by: the stars of the Guild in all their glory, as fragile-seeming as glass baubles.

She took the time to tell him that, were he ever to be exposed to their radiance as it truly struck the perpetually regenerating hull of the
vedette
, he would be destroyed in an instant.

He nodded distantly, no longer smiling, and she was satisfied.

 

Their journey lasted six hours, relative, while, outside the
vedette
, two days passed. Kindred had access to basic telemetric information—granted, he supposed, in order to awe him into submission. In that time, they crossed twenty light-years, which accorded well with the intelligence Terminus had gathered about the Guild's technical know-how. Stars shifted smoothly around them, forming and breaking constellations with eerie transience. One star became brighter and ballooned into a vast red sun. Cool by stellar standards but seeming hot to a human's eye, it boasted no habitable worlds, just a complex tangle of asteroid and cometary haloes. Among the cosmic debris, he saw an orbiting construct that was to the Great Ships as a mighty tree was to leaves. The ships jostled alongside its many tapering limbs, docking, refueling, undergoing repairs, exchanging material and personnel—doing everything the vessels of an interstellar empire needed to maintain their functionality.