The Sorceress of Karres (22 page)

"Like anyone could ever forget you. Ever," he said, trying to smile. "You're really leaving, aren't you?"

Goth nodded again, knowing that talking wasn't going to happen. Not without her saying a great deal more than she should. Some of it about the insipid Illyla.

Then she could bear it no more. She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him. Hard. Then walked away without a glance backward. She knew if she looked back, she'd be lost.

For once the Egger Route was a welcome thing.

Pausert watched the screens, trying to figure out the best possible next move.

The Phantom ships were definitely heading towards an englobement formation and seemed to be able to use their here/not-here nature to counter the speed advantage of the Sheewash drive. He was going to have to try something. The fact that they'd actually succeeded in hitting the Phantoms seemed to have made them even more determined to catch and destroy the
Venture
.

And then there was a distant droning sound. Pausert heaved a vast sigh of relief. That would be the Karres witches, thrumming down the Egger Route to the rescue. The bait had drawn the Phantom ships, which had, in turn, called Karres to his aid. The staccato humming came ever closer, the heavy sound filling his head, covering vast distances at incredible speed. Pausert went to fetch as many blankets as the
Venture
had in her store.

Perhaps they could tell him just where Goth had got to. She was supposed—by their own precogs—to spend at least a year in his company. She'd certainly not been in it for the last few weeks.

And then it stopped . . . and there in the middle of the floor was Goth. Goth bundled up in a turban, a hooded jacket and about four layers of clothing. Eyes unfocused, she turned over onto her knees. Pausert, knowing what was coming, hastily wrapped her up. Plainly the Leewit had been roused from sleep by the klatha sounds and came and helped him with rolling Goth up like a mummy. Mebeckey came in while they were busy, and exclaimed in puzzlement, "What's up?"

"Later," said the captain. Goth began to twitch. And jerk. And vibrate like a tuning fork. It took all the captain's strength to hold her still. By the sounds of it she was grinding her teeth and making small angry jungle cat noises. Well, at least she didn't screech like the Leewit did!

The shuddering slowed and the captain began unwinding. "Hurry up." said Goth. "Hot in here. I'm wearing too many layers of clothes."

They de-cocooned her, and a smiling Goth sat up. She hugged the captain and the Leewit together. "Kept the ship in one piece without me, I see."

She peeled off the hooded jacket. Then pulled off a towel-turban in a scatter of ringlets of wavy red hair.

Pausert looked at her, with his mouth open.

"What's up, Captain?" asked Goth quizzically. "You're looking at me like I suddenly grew another head."

He took a deep breath. "You did. Or at least another head of hair, Goth. Or should I say . . . Vala?"

"Wondered just how I was going to explain that to you."

"You might have told me."

"I only found out myself just before I left."

"I meant back then. I tried very hard to make contact with you again, but I couldn't find any trace of you or your parents. I was hoping you might write to me or something."

"I suppose I could have made a plan. But then you might not have got involved with that wet fish Illyla," said Goth, tartly. "I need to eat."

She looked at Mebeckey, standing nervously in the doorway. "Hello. Who is he?" she asked.

"A xenoarcheologist that got marooned out here," said the Leewit. "We rescued him from some wreck of a planet. Says his name is Mebeckey."

Goth stopped and put her hands on her hips. "Can't be. He's got the wrong face shape, even without the few face-hairs. And he's quite a lot shorter."

"What?" said Pausert warily.

Goth cocked her head on one side and jerked a thumb at the castaway. "Mebeckey. I don't know who this old guy is, but he's not Mebeckey the archeologist. Mebeckey the archaeologist was the fellow who tried to kill you back on Nikkeldepain. He was part of the crowd that kidnapped me, too. Although Franco says they were all under Marshi's control."

"Marshi?" said the castaway archeologist incredulously. "Is the monster woman still alive?"

"I reckon it's probable," said Goth. "What color was her hair?"

"Blond."

"Not the same woman, then. This one is as bald as an onion." Goth took a mug of cone-seed coffee from the Leewit, who had plainly been programming the robo-butler in preparation while the captain had been hauling blankets. "Got to have food too, Leewit. I don't think too much of the food back on Nikkeldepain, Captain."

Pausert grinned. "You used to drink enough of that caram juice, though. Great Patham. Some of those incidents make sense now. Klatha tricks! I haven't thought about them for years!" He shook his head. "I can't say how glad I am to see you, Goth. I had quite a crush on you back then."

Goth was having enough problems with her own feelings right at the moment. She was delighted to see the captain again, and delighted to see Pausert also—and trying to merge the two people into one. It wasn't easy. She wished that the Leewit and this arbitrary stranger—who wasn't Mebeckey, whoever he thought he was pretending to be—would just go away and leave them to talk privately for a bit. "You did, huh?"

"It's very strange. You're Vala . . .  But I'll swear you've shrunk. Yet for Goth you've grown."

"Grown, I reckon," said Goth, swallowing a mouthful of seed-cake. "Both of us. You were pretty short back then. Now, what's the problem, Captain?"

"We're being followed by some vessels. Phantom ships. They're trying for an englobement," said the Leewit. "I shot up two of them and the captain . . ." She glanced at Mebeckey. "He did some real hot-shot flying. But they've caught up with us again. Weird ships."

"Yeah? Well, I reckon you'd better have everyone strap in. Because we're going to do some more." said Goth. "Including you, mister whatever-your-name-really-is. Scram."

But the new supercargo did not move. "This person you call 'Mebeckey.' Was he a tall man with a hooked nose and white, spiky hair? A little goatee beard?"

"Pretty much, yes. Except no hair to speak of. The beard's a few wisps. Like you."

The man sighed. "That's my former first mate, Bocaj. He must have taken on my identity. How did you meet him? And how did you get here?"

"Enough questions," said Pausert. "Get to your stateroom and strap in. The Leewit, wake Vezzarn. We'll see if we can break out of this before they take action. Man those guns. Fire on my command!"

"Yes, sir!" said the Leewit happily. "Get on with it, Mebeckey," she said, pushing him down the passage. "There'll be time to answer questions later."

The captain smiled at Goth, almost shyly. "Not having you around here for a while has made me appreciate just how badly I need you."

"It worked both ways, Captain," said Goth. She was feeling a little shy herself. Not often that happened, huh!

They went to the chairs on the bridge and strapped in. "Didn't the Leewit take care of stuff?"

"She's been better than good. To the extent that I was quite worried about her," said the captain. "Even bathing by herself. Helping with everything. Working hard on the astrogation math. But . . . I missed you, that was all. And even with the Sheewash drive we haven't been able to shake these ships. They're . . . well, at least most of the time they have no apparent mass. You can shoot them and it has no effect."

"But the Leewit got two?" asked Goth, smiling inwardly at his missing her.

Pausert nodded. "Just as they launch their missiles they become objects of mass. She had to time her firing right. They've kept at greater range since then. But they're following in greater numbers. And it seems like they're going try a classic englobement. Those torpedoes of theirs are slow, but the warheads are pretty bad news. And if they're all around us, we will get a radiation soaking that the hull-metal can't keep out, even if the Leewit shoots them well before impact. We may have to try the Egger Route with the whole ship . . ."

Goth shuddered. "It's a bit soon after the last time for me. Not good for the body, you know. Maybe if we worked the Sheewash together—all three of us?"

"Maybe if you explained how I'm supposed to do vectors in the Sheewash. I was all over the place on my own. Whizzing and bouncing about like a piece of popping corn in a closed pot. I must have wasted light-minutes of power."

Oddly, under the circumstances, Goth felt gleeful all of a sudden. All her unease at being back with the captain after six months with his younger self had vanished. They were a team. She just understood him better, now.

"Forward nova gun turret manned and ready for action," said the Leewit over the intercom.

Pausert clicked the bridge manual firing relays off. "You have fire control, forward turret," he said formally. "Stern turret?"

"Stern turret ready too, Captain," said Vezzarn over the other channel. "Let's go get them. Only I hope we aren't going to fly so wild this time, Captain. It was all I could do not to lose my lunch, let alone keep shooting."

"We'll try a steep dive toward that star cluster there. The colorful one on the starboard bow. We're going to try to skim the gravity well of that white dwarf on—"

"Captain," interrupted Goth. "Do you recognize that star cluster?"

There was something familiar about it, about the reddish-brown dust haze of space debris and dust that hung about it, in the blackness of space. "I should," said Pausert. "I know I should. What is it, Goth?"

"I reckon it's the Megair cluster, Captain. From the other side."

Pausert looked again and nodded. "You're right. That's what . . . ? About four ship days from Uldune controlled space at normal cruising speed, I figure. I didn't realize we were this close to being on the far side of the Chaladoor."

"It's also a pretty bad neighborhood, Captain."

"We don't have a lot of choices, Goth."

"Guess not." She started assembling the wires as the Phantom ships edged closer. "I've seen those ships somewhere before. Weird shape they've got."

"Mebeckey said they were Melchin. Or maybe even Illtraming."

Goth paused in her laying out of the lattice of black wires. "Illtraming! That's what Marshi and her crew of thugs were looking for. The Illtraming map. And she said finding the Illtraming was more important than life."

Pausert tugged his chin. "There has to be a tie-in somewhere."

"They're closing on us, Captain," said the Leewit. "Nearly in firing range. And two more bandits coming in from twelve o'clock."

"Time to Sheewash," said Goth firmly. She reached out and took his hand. The wires rose and twined like snakes, forming a truncated cone. A ball of incandescent orange fire sparked into existence above it, roiling with wild energies. The
Venture
leapt like a stag and the starscape blurred. Distantly, the captain was aware of the nova guns with their shivering blue fire sheet-lightning. There was a burst of retina-searing amber incandescence to the portside. Chatter from the radiation meters.

"Got that torpedo a bit late, Captain," said Vezzarn apologetically.

"Keep firing!" yelled the Leewit.

The ridged, spiky hull of the Phantom alien ship was very close in the viewscreens, with them driving a straight line towards it, alive with the electromagnetic dance of the nova gun lightnings. Goth seemed to twitch them over at the last moment, sending them diving in an escape curve toward the Megair cluster, where the stars loomed out of the debris.

Debris at this speed would be hard to dodge. But then they were among them, jinking . . . and the Sheewash pattern wires collapsed. "Can't do it too long, Captain. Tired after the Egger Route," said Goth.

She looked exhausted. Pausert still could not get over the fact that he'd never realized that Goth had looked like Vala. One just didn't see what one didn't expect to see.

Abstractly, he understood what had happened. When he'd first met Goth, she'd been only ten years old. Very intelligent, precocious—sometimes even disturbingly so—but also clearly still a child.

Vala and the Goth of today, on the other hand . . . 

Uncomfortably, Pausert finally accepted something he'd been almost studiously ignoring for months now. More than three years had passed since he met Goth, and she was well into puberty by now. Her figure was still girlishly lean, but there was no longer any way she could possibly be mistaken, even at a distance, for a boy.

Neither could Vala—and, for the Pausert of the time, a fourteen-year-old boy who was himself undergoing puberty, that had made for a very different emotional introduction. Years had passed, and the memory of what Vala had actually looked like had gotten fuzzy. Between that, and the red hair, and most of all meeting the two girls on either side of puberty, he could understand why he'd never spotted the identity. As Goth had changed, in the years she'd been with him, he hadn't seen her growing resemblance to Vala. She'd just been Goth . . . growing up.

And grown up a lot more than he'd realized! The kiss that Vala had given him as she left was something he'd never forgotten. Now, it came with a real jolt to realize that for Goth—today's Goth—that kiss had happened just yesterday.

He wondered for a moment if their looks had had anything to do with that fateful decision so long ago now, back on Porlumma, when he'd rescued the witches of Karres. Being fair to himself, though, probably not. He didn't like to see anyone abused. Anyway, he'd already rescued Maleen and the Leewit before he'd even set eyes on Goth.

Not long after he'd met Goth, she'd announced her intention to marry him once she reached marriageable age—which was sixteen for the people of Karres. Pausert hadn't taken the whole thing seriously, of course. At the time, the difference between ten years of age and sixteen had seemed enormous. But it came with another jolt to realize that more than half that time had already elapsed.

And Goth still seemed as determined as ever.