The Rifter's Covenant

THE RIFTER’S COVENANT

Exordium: Book Four

Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge

www.bookviewcafe.com

Book View Café Edition
July 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61138-529-8
Copyright © 2015 Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge

Smoothness and order, the manifest
attributes of the teeth, have entered into the very nature of power. They are
inseparable from it . . .

The teeth are
the armed guardians of the mouth and the mouth is indeed a strait place, the
prototype of all prisons. Whatever goes in there is lost, and much goes in
whilst still alive. . . . The readiness with which the mouth
opens in anticipation of prey, the ease with which, once shut, it remains shut,
recall the most feared attributes of a prison. . . . In this
terrible place nothing could thrive, even if there were time to settle there.
It is barren and nothing can take root in it. . . .

[This] narrow
gorge through which everything has to pass is, for the few who live so long,
the ultimate terror. . . .

The road that
the prey travels through the body is a long one and on the way all its
substance is sucked out of it; everything useful is abstracted from it till all
that remains is refuse and stench.

This process,
which stands at the end of every act of seizing, gives us a clue to the nature
of power in general.

—Elias Canetti
Crowds and Power
ca. 300 B.E.

A faith unfulfilled is loyalty’s pyre
For power can only compel, not inspire.

—The Third Polarity of Jasper Arkad

The atmosphere on
the bridge of the Dol’jharian corvette
Acheridol
hummed with tension.

Morrighon swallowed
painfully, wondering how his throat could be so dry while his skin was sticky
with sweat. If we fail the next stage of this struggle, no doubt I’ll have time
to ask Eusabian’s pesz mas’hadni before the tortures begin, he thought with
bleak humor.

The more than
forty-eight hours in real time it had taken the
Acheridol
to approach the Suneater had visibly worn on everyone,
from the three Bori Rifters Morrighon had taken from the
Samedi
before it was destroyed, to the usually impassive Tarkans.

Everyone except
Anaris, in spite of the fact that the duel for the succession was surely now to
begin. And every Dol’jharian, from the lowest gray-clad menial to Jerrode
Eusabian—conqueror of the Thousand Suns—knew it. Any wrong move, wrong word
even, would result in an excruciating and protracted death. Yet Anaris seemed,
if not well-rested or tension-free, at least coolly composed.

Morrighon swallowed
again, forcing himself to look at the tall, broad-shouldered silhouette seated
directly before the viewscreen. The skipradius of the black hole, wherein
fiveskip flight was impossible, was more than two light-hours. It was bad
enough to have to come anywhere near a singularity, but to have to endure the
deadly glare of its accretion disc for fifty hours was almost unbearable.
Still, no one had dared suggest the viewscreens be blanked, for Anaris had spent
most of his waking time contemplating the spectacle: a slash of blue-white fury
shining through clouds of dust, the edge-on view of a whirlpool of plasma
spiraling into annihilation as it passed out of the universe. One end of the
needle of light transfixed a giant sun, the stellar mate whose substance fed
the invisible, insatiable singularity at the center.

And now, looming
large against that glaring needle: the Suneater, their destination.

The only sign of
tension that Anaris betrayed was the more than usually intricate writhing of
the silken dirazh’u in his powerful hands. The strange, complex knots he wove
reflected the strangeness they were approaching.

“Five minutes,
lord,” said Tatriman Ombric, the little Bori noderunner seated at the nav
console.

Anaris did not
reply. He continued to gaze at the Suneater that was now the heart of his
father’s kingdom.

The snarl of curves
and tubes and flaring cones did not resemble any work of humankind. Molded in
some material that looked like inflamed flesh, its curves drew the eyes in
directions they could not follow.

It hung alone in
space, no ships in sight. From the briefing squirted to them upon emergence,
Morrighon knew that the energy sink that powered the station forbade the
approach of ships greater than one hundred meters in any dimension. But why were
no others visible, of any size?

A corvette, twin to
their own, erupted from the open end of one of the cones, its radiants flaring
as it came about and took up position less than a kilometer from the Suneater,
its hull glistening in the light from the flaring gases spiraling to
destruction. The martial angularity of the vessel contrasted with the
unsettling, almost melted appearance of the Urian station.

Then Morrighon
stifled a yelp as the true strangeness of the Suneater manifested itself with
no warning: a pseudopod erupted in slow motion from a section of the station.
It writhed sinuously toward the cone from which the other corvette had emerged,
which bent to receive the pod with a narrowing of the opening in its apex that
suggested a grotesque variety of autosexual behavior.

“Stand by,” came a
voice over the com.

The second cone had
to be the landing bay for which they were heading.

A beam of plasma
lanced from the corvette hovering nearby and struck the pseudopod. A puff of
gas erupted from its surface as the tubular extension recoiled, plunging its
end into a different cone which then closed a sphincter around it and began
throbbing peristaltically. Morrighon desperately suppressed a near-hysterical
snicker; it looked like a decapuss sucking its tentacle after an encounter with
a snapclam. Was the accursed thing alive?

The landing-bay
cone now bent toward the
Acheridol
and elongated, the opening in it gaping wider, as if it had decided that the
corvette would do as a substitute for the wounded pseudopod. Writhing palps
lined the oval hole, reminding Morrighon of the sessile flower-shaped animals
whose analogues were found in the oceans of almost every planet in the Thousand
Suns. Between the palps hazed a lock field, and behind it, ranks of heavily
armed, black-clad Tarkans had drawn up in the brightly lit interior of the
station’s mouth.

Bay!
Morrighon corrected himself uneasily.
Landing bay.

The hum of a
docking tractor seized the ship and drew it in, rings of light fleeing outward
as the ship nosed through the lock field. It came to rest with a faint bump.
The engines whined down into silence.

Anaris stood up and
left the bridge. Morrighon scurried after.

The interior of the
Suneater was even more unsettling. Its walls, floors, and ceilings flowed into
each other in organic confusion, with no straight lines anywhere. Worse, the
substance of the station glowed with a reddish internal light that seemed to emanate
from below the surface, as though it were not an effect but an aspect of the
material. Despite the apparent brightness of the light, it cast no shadows.

It’s like being in something’s intestines.
The human machinery at the periphery looked
fragile and out of place, and around the points where cables penetrated the
walls, the light faded, leaving a small portion of wall a sickly porous gray.

At the back of the
bay, behind the ranks of Tarkans, an opening dilated with a disgusting sucking
noise. Eusabian stepped through and approached, followed by Barrodagh.
Morrighon was shocked by the change in Eusabian’s lieutenant: Barrodagh was
thin and haggard, the pinpoints of reddish light reflected in his eyes giving
them a feverishly feral cast as they ferreted continuously from side to side.
Already short and slight, as were all Bori, he seemed to have shrunk.

Eusabian appeared
unchanged. He stopped in front of the first rank of Tarkans, and Anaris stepped
forward. He drew his
peshakh
out of
his sleeve; Eusabian’s eyes narrowed slightly at the sight of it. Anaris
slashed the base of his right thumb with the little sleeve knife. “Even as I
shed the blood of our lineage here and now, have I shed the blood of your
enemy. As you commanded, so it is done: that part of your paliach is complete.”

Morrighon noted
with fascination that the blood did not pool on the deck. Instead, it vanished
without a trace. He thought, too, from the angle of Anaris’s head, that this
had not escaped his notice, either.

Nor Barrodagh’s. He
was staring at the point on which the blood dripped, a look of horrified
anticipation on his face.

The rolling
gutturals of the Dol’jharian ritual continued, and Morrighon remembered the
ceremony in the bay of the
Fist of
Dol’jhar
, when Eusabian had dispatched his son to see to the exile of the
Panarch.

Then, the severity
of the battlecruiser’s metal bulkheads and equipment had underscored the
Dol’jharian ritual of revenge, the paliach. Now, in the alien surroundings of
the Suneater, abandoned ten million years before by an alien race of awesome
powers about which almost nothing was known, the ritual lost much of its
meaning.

He wondered if
Eusabian sensed this. He was certain that Anaris did.

Barrodagh glanced
fearfully up at the ceiling, where a sort of gland or blister had begun to
swell, its tear-shaped surface rippling with internal tension. Morrighon could
tell that the Tarkans had seen it, too.

Morrighon thought
of the imagers recording this for hyperwave transmission. Cleverly placed
scrims had been set to block any real view of the bay’s interior, and whatever
happened next, Barrodagh would make certain that only an uninterrupted ritual
would be seen by anyone outside this bay.

Eusabian and Anaris
continued the ritual, oblivious to whatever the protrusion portended. They
interwove their
dirazh’u
, the
curse-weaving cords, in a complex knot that stretched between them as they
stepped apart.

“Your vengeance was
my vengeance,” Anaris said, his low voice carrying in the weird room, “as your vengeance
will be my vengeance.”

The cord stretched
quivering between them, humming with tension.

Then, with a ripe,
fruity noise, the gland in the ceiling ruptured, and what appeared to be at
least five liters of blood spewed down, drenching the intertwined dirazh’u, dashing
them from the two Dol’jharians’ hands. Blood, or whatever it was, splattered
the clothing of both Anaris and Eusabian; the red-soaked silken cords lying the
deck between them looked like the entrails of some messily-deceased animal.

During the ringing
silence, Barrodagh looked like he was going to faint. Morrighon clenched his
teeth to keep them from chattering as fear of the Dol’jharian reaction made him
weak.

Then Anaris spoke.

“It appears that
even the Ur would share our vengeance on the Panarchy.” He bent over and picked
up the dirazh’u. “A fine omen for the final completion of your paliach,” he
continued, bowing to his father.

Eusabian showed his
teeth briefly in what might have been a smile. “Well spoken,” he said.

Morrighon sensed a
slight easing of tension in the ranks of Tarkans, though no one moved as much
as a millimeter. Anaris’s improvisation had turned a disaster into, if not a
triumph, at least not an omen of failure.

But as father and
son left the landing bay, heralded by the awful sucking noise of the Urian
equivalent of a door, Morrighon wondered what kind of omen it really was.

And of whose blood.

A message from
Hreem the Faithless was always a harbinger of death and destruction. Captain
Lochiel’s despair intensified as she watched the unfolding tragedy on the
viewscreen; her two lifemates watched with equal intensity, Messina in growing
fury, and Bayrut with a wary eye not on the screen, but on the shipmoot comprised
of the Rifter destroyer
Shiavona
’s
officers and shareholders.