The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds (35 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds
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Arekhon—I have placed a copy of this letter aboard the Entiboran vessel that we will someday capture, with instructions that it not be opened. Once it is in your hands, you should use this vessel’s “return home” navigational setting to bring yourself to the planet Entibor.
There you will take an orbit that the ship’s charts will identify as standard orbit GG-12. Should anyone local question you, tell them that Grand Councillor Demazze commands it. I will send a vessel to convey you, Syr Inadi the pilot, and my younger self to the planet’s surface. I do remember that this ship’s primary external lock sustained heavy damage in the boarding action, so the courier that I send to meet you will be prepared to deal with it.
I know that I will die mad. Though I have reconciled myself to the prospect, I am in no haste to encounter the day. Therefore, do not tell my younger self that you have received this message. Nothing good, I am certain, could possibly come from such foreknowing.
(signed) Garrod syn-Aigal sus-Demaizen.
 
Arekhon slipped the letter back into the envelope. His name across the front of the envelope was smeared with blood from his cut hand, and he’d left red fingerprints on the letter as well.
“You never watched me read this,” he said to the fleet-apprentice. “And you have no idea what was in it. In fact, you aren’t interested in knowing what was in it. And if you’re in the habit of talking in your sleep, you’re going to tape your mouth shut at bedtime. Do you understand?”
The apprentice nodded. “Yes, Lord Arekhon. I understand.”
“Good. Now go. Tell Captain sus-Mevyan that I will be coming back aboard directly.”
The apprentice took a few steps backward, turned, and all but ran into the boarding tunnel. After he was gone, Arekhon dropped the clasp knife from
Path-Lined-with-Flowers
into the puddle of drying blood.
“Leave us in peace,” he whispered. “We never meant the harm that we did.”
 
Year 1128 E. R.
 
ENTIBORAN SPACE:
SWIFT PASSAGE FREIGHT CARRIER
NUMBER FORTY-TWO
ERAASI: HANILAT
 
T
he name of the Entiboran ship, Arekhon learned, was
Swift Passage Freight Carrier Number Forty-two.
He wondered what her builders had been thinking of, to give her a name like that, where any luck that came to it would have to be shared with forty-one sisters. Or maybe more … there was no telling when a forty-third might show up, or a hundredth.
All the removable contents of
Rain-on-Dark-Water
had been brought on board
Forty-two
, and room had been found for all the
Rain
’s surviving crew members. It was a tight fit, even with the reduction in numbers;
Forty-two
was as large as the Eraasian ship, but she ran with a fraction of the crew. Most of her extra space went to engines and cargo, and to mechanical devices that did the work of the missing people.
“They’ve got some kind of double-engine system,” Elaeli told him, soon after he came aboard. “One set for normal space and another for the Void … that’s how they get their speed, it looks like. The chief engineer is in love; he thinks we can retool the orbital yards to make something like that for ourselves and outrun every fleet-family in the homeworlds. If we can get a prototype home with us, that is.”
“Getting home is going to be a problem,” Arekhon agreed. He leaned wearily against a bulkhead in the space that until recently had served as
Forty-two’
s galley and dining hall and recreation space combined. Now it held rows of sleepsacks and bedrolls, most of them occupied by exhausted, slumbering bodies. “Have you figured out how to make our charts talk to their ship-minds yet?”
Elaeli ran her hands through her hair. “’Rekhe, we haven’t even figured out what makes their ship-minds work! Everything we’ve taken a peek at is inorganic, like the junk they used to make on Ayarat before they started buying good-quality components from us instead. You might as well try to hook up a side of meat to a sledgehammer—you’d get better results and you wouldn’t ruin the meat.”
“How about manual input?”
“Sure. Ten, fifteen years from now, when Garrod’s finished translating all of their manuals into Eraasian so we can understand them, and all our data into their lingo so we can punch it in. But hey, we’ve got the time.”
She closed her eyes and drew a deep, shaky breath. “I’m sorry, ’Rekhe. It’s just … I’m tired, and I don’t know what we’re going to do, short of calling on some of these strangers for help and getting ourselves hauled in for salvage. Us, the pride of the fleet!”
“We’re not quite that desperate,” Arekhon said. “At least, I don’t think so.”
He thought about the letter from
Forty-two’
s strongbox. Somebody on Entibor was expecting them—had even prepared the way for their arrival—somebody who claimed to be Garrod himself. Arekhon wished he knew whether he believed in the letter or not. The Garrod who had joined the Circle at the midpoint of the
Rain
’s journey had never mentioned planning such a thing, and the Garrod who had come back after the working had been incapable of speech or thought.
Sighing, Arekhon pushed himself away from the bulkhead. “I’ve got some work waiting to be taken care of,” he said to Elaeli, and went off to ask the prisoner about
Forty-two’
s Return Home navigational setting.
He found Iulan Vai standing guard outside the berthing compartment that was serving as a cell—it was locked, but there was no way of telling if the prisoner had access to some kind of emergency override. Vai had changed out of her Circle robes and was back in her plain black tunic and trousers. Her eyes had dark smudges under them, and like everyone else Arekhon had seen recently, she looked tired.
“I need to talk with the prisoner,” Arekhon said. “This is important.”
“Give me a minute, then.” Vai wrestled with the unfamiliar lock mechanism until the door swung open. “There. Go on in. If she tries to throttle you or something, give a yell and I’ll come charging to the rescue.”
The prisoner didn’t look to be up for throttling anybody at the moment. She lay on the cabin’s single bunk, hands flat beside her on the mattress, gazing up at the metal plates of the overhead. The arrival of a visitor brought no reaction on her part.
Arekhon pulled up the compartment’s only chair and sat in it. Then, speaking to the air somewhere above the bunk, he said in halting, careful Entiboran, “Who do you think we are?”
“Pirates,” she said. Her voice was a dull monotone, but the words were slow and clear. “Criminals. Thieves. Murderers. Scum and degraded
seg-linry
…”
“Yes. Where do you suppose we are from?”
“Does it matter? From Galcen or Khesat or farther, what difference does it make to me?”
“No one has told you?” he said. “We come from farther even than that.” Even though the place names she had given were unfamiliar to him, he hoped he was not lying. He waited for a reaction; when she said nothing, he went on. “Do you know about the gap between the stars—the dead plane, where there are no worlds?”
“No. I don’t care.”
“You should,” he told her. “There are people on the far side of that gap, and we’re them.”
This time she did react, turning her head on the pillow and regarding him with angry grey eyes. “Go back, then. And take your murdering ways with you.”
“We’re trying,” he said. “There’s nothing we want to do more. We came for trade, did you know that? All we wanted to do was trade.”
“You have a strange way of going about it.”
“I’m sorry. We’ll go back as soon as we can. But first I need to learn about the Return Home navigational setting.”
She gave a harsh laugh. “The Return Home will take us straight back to Entibor. Once you get arrive, you’ll be torn limb from limb and hair from hair. We don’t like pirates.”
“I thought you’d approve,” said Arekhon. “But I want to use it anyway.”
“Why should I trust murdering scum
eru tarraquin lindeleos lindela latanque …
” The invective trailed off into a string of terms that Garrod hadn’t bothered to include in his instructional vocabulary, or perhaps didn’t know himself.
“You will not need to trust anyone,” Arekhon said. “But my Captain trusts me, and I will trust you.”
Her eyes were puzzled now, instead of angry. “I don’t understand.” “A simple matter. I will trust you to press the Return Home setting, rather than the self-destruct.”
“Your ships have a self-destruct?”
He nodded. “Sometimes they damage themselves in chase-and-boarding, and it’s better to destroy them than to leave them adrift for salvage. We’ll be disposing of the
Rain
that way tomorrow—would you like to watch?”
A flicker of vindictive interest crossed the prisoner’s face, the first reaction that she had shown other than dull anger. “To see your pirate ship destroyed, yes.”
“Then I’ll arrange for you to be on the bridge with us tomorrow,” he said. “You can watch everything.”
 
 
Seyo Hannet had returned to Eraasi full of the satisfaction that comes from a piece of work neatly done. Now that a plausible amount of time had elapsed, he sat at a secured communications line in the Hanilat office of the League of Unallied Shippers and made ready to tackle the next item on his list.
He had already tied off one set of inconvenient loose ends at his employer’s behest. The people on the Ayaratan end of the conspiracy, with the exception of Jaf Otnal, had always been lukewarm in pursuit of its goals, as well as—in Hannet’s private opinion—insufficiently ruthless. With the game moving into a more active phase, the Ayaratans had known too much for safety.
Their demise was only fair, was Hannet’s opinion. Those who were unwilling to take risks and act vigorously in a project’s early stages should not expect to see a reward at the end of it.
The next job was different. Some people were dangerous because of what they knew and whom they might tell; others were dangerous in and of themselves. Like knives, once those had done their cutting they had to be put away. Those who made luck could also destroy it, if their minds should change … but not even a luck-bringer could survive in the face of overwhelming force.
It was better, Hannet decided, not to inform Felan Diasul about this stage of the plan in advance. Family loyalty might prove stronger than ambition, in a direct contest between the two; and there was no point in forcing Diasul into a choice while he still had useful contributions to make to the greater project. How to carry out the present agenda, though … Hannet’s fingers tapped out quick, disjointed rhythms on the desktop while his mind considered methods and alternatives.
A stanza from an old song came to him, weaving through his thoughts on a fragment of music:
O tell me should I slay this one, or should I slay them all, or should I take you from this place and burn this curséd hall?
He stopped tapping and called up the desk’s address book instead. A quick access code later, he was scanning the entries in a select roster.
That one—a mercenary outfit belonging to a prominent fleet-family, recently formed and now on training maneuvers in the hinterlands north and west of Hanilat. They would get a change in orders, for a live-fire exercise, coupled with an infusion of cash sufficient to quell any doubts in their minds about the ethical grey areas in what they were hired to do.
Hannet circled an area on a map of the Wide Hills district, labeled it “Free Fire,” and sealed it in a courier envelope along with a bearer bond convertible to securities anywhere, with no questions asked. He rang for a messenger, then turned his attention to the other matters.
Some hours later he heard—on a communications channel which he should not have been able to monitor—of how a ship of the sus-Peledaen, in response to certain atrocities committed in deep space, had struck against selected sites on the planet Ildaon. Hannet wondered if his employers had been among the multitude of casualties. After a few minutes’ thought, he dismissed the question as irrelevant.
By the time the shuttles and relays that allowed for communication between the worlds were able to bring him an answer, the current phase of operations would be long over.
 
 
The members of the Circle were quartered together in one of
Forty-two’
s pressurized cargo bays, surrounded by crates and containers marked in strange alphabets. Narin snored; Ty had nightmares; and the Entiboran night-cycle was shorter than the one the fleet-families used. Arekhon slept poorly, and woke up feeling disoriented and oppressed.
For an instant he couldn’t remember where he was, or why he should be in such heavy spirits. Then he remembered. He was aboard an alien ship, on the far side of the Edge from home, and today they were going to set free the
Rain
.
After putting on clean clothes, the best ones he had with him, and finding the nearest
uffa
pot, he felt somewhat better. An hour after ship’s-rising, he went to the prisoner’s cabin where Garrod, this time, was keeping watch.
“I promised her she could watch the self-destruct,” Arekhon said. “I’ll send down an apprentice from the bridge when everything’s ready.”
Garrod raised his eyebrows. “What does the Captain have to say about that idea?”
“She agreed when I told her it would raise the prisoner’s spirits.” And when he had told her about the Return Home device. Arekhon felt uneasy about keeping back part of the truth, but the letter that he still carried on his person, sealed in the inside pocket of his tunic, had been specific. Garrod should not know.
Arekhon continued on to the
Forty-two’
s bridge, where others of the crew—Elaeli and the Captain among them—were already watching the bank of flatscreens. In all of the displays the looming shape of
Rain-on-Dark-Water,
tied to the Entiboran ship by its boarding tunnel, hung black and silent. It wasn’t as good a view as would have been afforded at this range by proper bridge windows, but it was impressive nevertheless.
“Is it time yet?” he asked.
“Everything’s in place and armed,” sus-Mevyan said. She turned to the fleet-apprentice. “You can send for the prisoner now.”
The apprentice hurried off, and returned a few minutes later with Garrod and the prisoner. The Entiboran was glum and silent; she regarded the
Rain
’s hovering, enscreened image with undisguised hostility. Arekhon gave her a polite nod of greeting, but she didn’t respond.

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