The Rifter's Covenant (65 page)

Well, that’s what
you got when you synched up with the Magisterium, he thought. He remembered
Desrien, and the gambling hell he thought he’d found under New Glastonbury,
where human souls were the gaming tokens. Lokri found himself grateful that the
High Phanist hadn’t taken an interest in his murder case; she dealt in a
currency he couldn’t enumerate.

Sedry turned back
to the console, sipping at aromatic Alygrian tea. “Even if my assumptions about
the topology of their arrays are only close,” she continued, tapping at the
keys, “I’ll own that system eventually.”

“If you can get
into it.”

She flashed a grin
over her shoulder at him. “Where there’s the will, there’s a port.”

She returned to her
work; again the rapid, neat movement of her fingers reminded Lokri of a
musician. Until he had seen her at a console, sculpting dataspace with artistic
fervor, he’d not been quite able to believe the duets of laughter and music
heard from Montrose’s quarters once or twice since their departure from Ares.

A nudge at his
shoulder. Marim glanced at the rapid flow of data across Sedry’s screen, and
grimaced. “What’re you narking at?” she said. “You can’t follow that bilge any
better than I can.”

“Don’t need to.
We’ve got Sedry and Vi’ya.” He studied her. “You come in quieter than I’ve ever
heard,” Lokri said. “Are you worried or something?”

“Well, who wouldn’t
be? I still say we should be halfway to the Fringes right now.” She flounced
into a seat and drummed her fingers restlessly.

Lokri’s lips
parted, but whatever his reply would have been was cut off by the arrival of
the rest of the crew. Marim wrinkled her nose at the burned spice and plastic
stink of the Kelly. They were supposed to be so good at controlling scents—why
couldn’t they smell like flowers or something?

She watched as
Ivard settled in among the Kelly at a table they’d modified for themselves. She
still couldn’t figure how he’d gone and changed himself so much. With his
browned skin, the changes in his face, and the muscle tone in the rest of his
body, he was actually pretty nacky now. Even his hair had changed—it was a
deep, pure red instead of ugly orange.

Ivard signed and
honked something at the Kelly, who blatted a mellow greeting at Jaim and
Montrose. Sedry shut down her console with a swipe of her hand and sat down
next to Montrose.

Vi’ya entered last.
Marim was relieved that she was alone, no little brainburners.

“You’ve all had
time to review the data on the Suneater that Sedry DL’d,” Vi’ya said. “But it’s
nearly all just conjecture. We have only three solid facts. First, the data
shows that the Suneater system is surrounded by an energy sink, the source of
its power, coterminous with its skip-radius. No ship larger than a hundred
meters in any dimension can enter that field.”

Marim rolled her
eyes. That much Omilov had probably given them, which made her wonder what he
was getting out of this crazy idea of Vi’ya’s.

“Second, the
skip-radius of the system is two light-hours. And third, the Suneater itself is
in orbit around the blackhole binary at plus seventeen light-minutes.”

Anyone could do
that math
.
All this had been laid out
in the summary Sedry had prepared. “So the Navy can’t touch it,” Marim said.
“We already know that, but so what?”

“The Navy can’t
touch it with any capital ship,” Sedry said. “But the cims on a battlecruiser
can turn out long-range lances practically overnight.”

Marim shook her
head. “Why are you bringing the nicks into this? Even if lances can reach it—”
She laughed. “And what if they bounced? We don’t know what that chatzer is made
from.” She kicked Lokri’s leg as he tried to interrupt. “No. We don’t need
them, do we?” She looked at Vi’ya, her guts dropping to her toes. The was
something Vi’ya wasn’t telling them! “This Unity thing you’ve got. That’s what
you’re counting on. Right?”

“Right, Marim,”
Lokri said sarcastically. “And the nicks will be only too pleased to leave us
in command of a weapon that half-wrecked a galaxy.”

“Only by calling in
the Panarchists once we have wrested control can we hope to survive,” Vi’ya
said calmly. “Otherwise they will throw asteroids at the Suneater until it is
destroyed.”

“And we may need
their help,” said Jaim, exchanging glances with Vi’ya.

“That’s crazy!”
Marim couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “And how would they know when to
come? That damn system’s a hell of radiation from the accretion disc. How are
you going to punch a signal through that?”

Vi’ya’s black gaze
was ice-cold and direct. “The Panarchists have a hyperwave. We will use the
station’s to alert them when the time comes.”

Marim caught her
breath, anger flaring when she saw that no one else seemed surprised. “Was I
the only one who didn’t know?” she demanded, glaring at Vi’ya.

“I didn’t,” Lokri
said wryly.

“You didn’t need to
know,” said Vi’ya. “Would you have cared to bear that burden, watching your
words at every moment during your recreations?”

You could have
asked, Marim wanted to say, but she knew she’d sound like a rat Ivard’s age—or
worse. The fact that Ivard had known, while wandering all over the station,
infuriated her. “You didn’t think I could keep my mouth shut,” she said slowly.

Vi’ya retorted in
that deadpan Dol’jharian way of hers, “I did not want you to have to think
about it. The knowledge would not have helped in your part of our plans.”

She turned to other
subjects, starting with how long it would take the nicks to arrive when
summoned, and ranging to the safety of the Kelly, how to deal with other
Rifters on the station, the possibility of allies, and a host of other details.

But Marim tuned it
out, anger cooling into a hard knot. They didn’t trust me, she thought. She’d
been straight with them all ever since she joined the Dis gang, and they didn’t
trust her. And they thought she was supposed to go on trusting them?

She tried to shake
the resentment. She hated feeling angry, especially with crewmates. It never
made things comfortable. Lokri saw her mood, of course, the way he always had. When
Marim left the rec room, he came with her. “We’ve an hour before we need to be
at our stations,” he said suggestively.

There’d been no sex
after that first desperate watch following their escape. He’d slept for days.
Marim brightened at the offer, and they spent the hour in a way satisfactory to
both, but at the end, when she retreated to the shower, she could not escape
the feeling that she’d been petted. Like you do to a brat Ivard’s age.

Finally their
skiptime dwindled though its last hour. They gathered on the bridge, each
taking their station, with feeds to Montrose in the dispensary and Jaim in the
engine room.

“Emergence,” Ivard
said, his voice barely louder than the muted bell signal.

Lokri looked around
the familiar bridge, then up at the viewscreen, where a faint blue-white spark—almost
a disc—was all that indicated the black hole binary of the Suneater. On another
screen an asteroid glared in false colors printed by the computer. There were
other rocks in this cluster, but they couldn’t be seen.

“Traces?” Vi’ya
said.

“Nothing.”

They looked at the
asteroid, a battered elllipsoid about three kilometers on its long axis. “Strange
to think,” Sedry said, “that this war might be ended by throwing rocks.”

Ivard snickered.

“Lokri, send off
that burst,” said Vi’ya.

Sedry and Lokri had
prepared an databurst outlining
Telvarna’s
offer of assistance with just enough information to guarantee—as much as
guarantees were possible with Dol’jharians—that their first contact would be
peaceful.
“They are looking for
tempaths,”
Vi’ya had said.
“They will
know of us, and they will not wish us blown away by an over-eager Rifter ally.”
Lokri sent it with a jac-point jab of his forefinger.

Vi’ya said, “All
right. We’ve been pushing it, getting the ship into shape. That’s why I chose
to emerge a light-day out. We can assume they know of this rock cluster, but we
don’t know if it’s transpondered or how often their patrols check it. We’ll be
on double watches now, Ivard and me first. I suggest the rest of you grab what
rest you can. Once they know we’re here, it’s impossible to predict what will
happen.”

“Except we know
it’ll be rasty,” Marim groused.

Vi’ya smiled.
“Contemplate the reward.”

Marim groaned as
she flounced off the bridge. “If we’re alive to use it,” she cracked in
parting.

Lokri slaved his
console to Vi’ya’s and got up to follow.

In the rec room,
they discovered that Montrose had prepared a surprise meal. “We may as well use
up the fresh stuff,” he said philosophically.

Sedry sank into a
seat with a sigh. Her plate was loaded.

“Never eaten this
good?” Marim asked, nudging her as she passed.

“Never,” Sedry said
emphatically.

After a short time
Lokri looked down at his plate, surprised at how much he’d eaten.

During the past few
days he had not thought himself hungry, but when he smelled the food, he found
that he had a ravenous appetite. Midway through his meal, he saw Montrose’s
eyes on him, his approval obvious.

“Eat more, boy,” he
grated. “You’ve got a long way to go yet.”

Lokri sighed. He
still had nightmares. Not about his imprisonment, which—on the surface—had been
humane enough, or about the trial and its aftermath. In the dreams he still
wandered all over known space, fearing every new stop lest there be an
unexpected ID check, or nicks searching for him. And he still saw every detail
of his parents sprawled in death.

The worst was
knowing that they had parted angry. He stared down into his drink, wondering if
that wound would ever heal. Fierin had been a girl, of little interest to him
fourteen years ago. Now she was a young woman, and though their meeting had
been brief, both tired and stressed, he had seen much of himself in her.

Jaim lounged his
way, his gaze unexpectedly searching. “Finish up,” he said. “And in an hour,
meet me below.”

Lokri nodded. That
was another part of the plan: to be ready for action. He’d had no stamina after
they left Ares, but Jaim’s workouts, short and slow at first, had had an
effect. He was rapidly regaining his muscle tone and speed.

He finished up his
food, listening with half his attention to Marim’s ready stream of jokes,
cracks, and outrageous statements.

Running through all
her old favorites for a new audience, Lokri thought as he got to his feet and
jammed his plate into the recycler.

But the laugh was
from Montrose, not Sedry. This jarred at him off and on through his practice
session, and through the rest of the day, as he worked with Sedry trying to
learn the tenno battle glyphs that Markham had installed a year ago, plus the
Warrigal semiotics she had added.

It wasn’t until he
was falling into his bunk that the anomaly linked up with some other
half-observed oddities, producing a surprising conclusion: Marim wasn’t, in
fact, exerting herself to entertain the new crewmate. If anything, she ignored
her.

She had her jacs
trained on the rest of the crew.

His half-closed
eyes burned open, and he threw off his covers and pulled his trousers on again.
He was about to go out in search of her when the door hissed open, and Marim
sauntered in, yawning hugely.

“What the chatzing
hell are you up to?” he demanded.

“Huh?” she paused
in the act of knuckling her eyes.

“Don’t give me that
nullwit look. I may have been half-asleep the last week or so but I’m waking up
now. I know you, Marim,” he said, “and whenever you play the clown with the
rest of us you’re up to something.”

“Why the bunny for
the first time in ages, all of a sudden?” she retorted as she flung her clothes
off and dropped onto her bunk. “You’re an idiot, Jesimar,” she said snidely,
her sharp little teeth showing.

He wasn’t going to
be sidetracked. “So are you, Marimeth Eleu-Fim.”

Her chin jerked up,
the nearly faded bruises on her face looking like blotches from some strange
disease. “All right. Shut up about my past and I’ll shut up about yours. I’m
just trying to have a good time before Vi’ya gets us killed.”

“If you thought
there was no chance, you would have sabotaged this run from the outset,” he
said, thinking fast—knowing he was right. “What is it?”

Her eyes flickered
at that. “Nothing,” she said again. “Just . . . ideas on gettin’ information,
and maybe how to use it. Just like she’s ordered Sedry—and Jaim too. Only I’ll
do it my own way.”

“You better
remember,” Lokri said, “these are Dol’jharians. They don’t have senses of
humor, they don’t have patience, but they do have machines that will suck your
brain out through your anus, and take a week to do it.”

“As if I’d be
stupid enough to run scam on Dol’jharians,” Marim scoffed. She flung herself
under her covers and turned over, so all he saw was the rounded mound of her
hip, and above the covers, her riot of curly yellow hair. “But there are also
Rifters,” she said to the bulkhead in her airiest voice. And, “You can stop
treating me like I’m stupid.”

Lokri sighed.

Twenty-four hours
later, they reported to the bridge, Vi’ya having figured on an immediate
response once their pulse was received at the Suneater.

They didn’t wait
long.

“Emergence pulse,”
Ivard exclaimed, and everyone’s heartbeat accelerated.

Vi’ya slapped the
go-pad and the fiveskip blipped, taking them out of range of any possible
weapons. When the emergence pulse again reached their new position, Ivard’s fingers
danced over his keys. “Destroyer—signature match—it’s the
Satansclaw
.