A Working of Stars (33 page)
Read A Working of Stars Online
Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald
“And here I’d always thought—” Egelt paused as a message alarm beeped. “That’s odd. The drone must have come in at Aulwikh before we jumped, and squirted off its messages at the last minute.”
“If the captain’s routing it down here, it’s tabbed for us. What does it say?”
“Give me a moment.” Egelt tapped his authorization code into the table display, then read the text as it scrolled in. “This is damned odd. You know our guy Len? He’s just been spotted leaving Eraasi.”
“Ignore it,” Hussav advised. “Any time you start looking for someone, tips start coming in that put him all over the place. Seen simultaneously on two planets a hundred light-years apart.”
“I don’t know,” Egelt said. “Hanilat spaceport security says that the fingerprints match.”
“No kidding?”
“No. But we don’t know for sure he left on that ship we’ve been chasing. They could have picked up a pilot at Serpent Station for all we know.”
“So what do we do now?” asked Hussav.
“We follow the girl. That guy who helped her out the window—yeah, I want to talk with him. At length. In some detail. But the girl is why we’re drawing our pay.”
Natelth had been working at the desk in his study since early morning, and he intended to keep on working until dinner. His outward demeanor, as far as family and associates were concerned, remained as calm and deliberate as ever, but to himself he admitted the need to keep himself occupied while waiting for news of the missing Zeri sus-Dariv. Inactivity, in his experience, only made waiting more difficult; and if all the news, in the end, turned out to be bad, at least he would have the work that he had done.
Today’s project was an intensive review of the sus-Dariv assets currently in the process of being transferred to sus-Peledaen family control. He was pleased to see that matters were going smoothly, despite the technical hitch of the uncompleted wedding. He’d made a point of offering the hired employees and outer-family members a chance to transfer into the sus-Peledaen ahead of schedule. A good number, he saw from the rosters displayed on his desk, were taking the offer—young workers, mostly, with less time to form habits of attachment to a particular employer; as well as various outer-family members of more than ordinary ambition.
The former would do well, he reflected, so long as they were paid promptly and treated no differently than other hired crew. The latter, on the other hand, would bear close watching, in case their ambition should someday override their family loyalty a second time.
The majority of the sus-Dariv, however, appeared to be holding to the letter of the marriage contract. Until the wedding morning, they would continue to remain separate. Annoying, but not unexpected, and loyalty wasn’t a bad thing. Most of them, once they’d been subsumed into sus-Peledaen, would be equally loyal to the new family. Those who weren’t loyal would doubtless make the fact obvious soon enough, and could be dealt with appropriately at the time.
The few absolute holdouts, of course, would require making an example of. Natelth was worried, though not excessively, about the handful of ships remaining in the sus-Dariv fleet. Based on reports from Security Chief Egelt and from sus-Peledaen sources at Hanilat inspace control, they’d been showing signs of recalcitrance. The example, Natelth had almost decided, would come from there.
It hadn’t been the ships that he’d wanted in the first place, but the family’s other assets. Their policy of leasing yard space and most port facilities, instead of building their own dedicated orbital and heavy ground bases, meant that the sus-Dariv purse was, for a fleet-family in these troubled times, almost unnaturally plump. All the same, if things went on as they had been, the fleet remnant would require chastisement with a strong hand.
His thoughts were interrupted by the gong-tone of the office door. “Come in,” he said—and when the door opened before he had time to properly finish the phrase, he continued, “Ah, Isa. What keeps you busy today?”
Isayana, dressed in her usual work clothes, with a smudge of ink on her forehead and a stylus thrust through her hair, wandered into the office with the distracted air of someone who has forgotten the errand she came on. Granted, Natelth thought, Isa looked that way most of the time, as though she usually had forgotten necessity in favor of an interesting technical problem or an elegant new theory.
“I’ve been tinkering, mostly,” she said. “Tuning the house-mind. We’re here so seldom, these days, that it grows forgetful.”
This was a complaint he’d heard before, and he knew by now the response that was expected of him. “The new-style systems are less so. It might be time to consider purging the old one and doing a complete changeover.”
“Let the orbital station have the new systems; playing with the old house-mind will give me something to amuse myself with when we visit Hanilat.”
“If it pleases you, Isa, we can keep it for as long as you like.” He regarded his sister fondly, while reflecting that she hadn’t been well served by recent events. All the work of arranging the wedding banquet had fallen to her, and the disappearance of Lady Zeri had ruined it all. “I’m afraid you haven’t had the most enjoyable of visits so far. Once the marriage has been regularized, though, things should get better.”
“I hope so.” Isa paced over to the bay window and back again, her hands shoved into the pockets of her working coat. She was frowning. “Na’e—what are you going to do if they can’t get her back?”
This was a new worry, not one of the old ones already worn smooth by time and use. “I have every trust in Syr Egelt’s capabilities,” Natelth said. “He’ll find her.”
“Even the most capable man can sometimes run out of luck. This could be Egelt’s time, and what will you do then?”
“If Lady Zeri can’t be brought back,” Natelth said, “then she’ll have to be dead.”
“But will that work?”
“There’s a precedent for it,” he told her; “I had the legalists make certain. ‘If one party or the other should die between burning incense at the family altars and greeting guests on the wedding morning, it shall be assumed for the purpose of inheritance that the marriage was in all things made complete.’”
In the main office building at Serpent Station, all the lights were out. The only illumination came from the outside sunlight. There wasn’t even the usual background flicker of displays and readouts and I’m-alives—Port-Captain Winceyt had purged the station’s house-mind hours ago, as soon as he remembered what Iulan Vai had told him before she hid the memory from the sus-Peledaen. He’d copied the new star charts onto data wafers and personally hand-carried them to the ships’ captains, and then had given the house-mind its last command.
“You are the house-mind of sus-Dariv’s Serpent Station. Now we release you from your service and set you free. Initiate sequence. Go.”
After that, there was nothing left except a large quantity of quiescent mind-gel, possibly salvageable for remaking into low-grade
aiketen
or cheap data storage, but probably not. There was certainly nothing left of the sus-Dariv in it anywhere.
aiketen
or cheap data storage, but probably not. There was certainly nothing left of the sus-Dariv in it anywhere.
With step one done already, Port-Captain Winceyt turned to Command-Tertiary Yerris and said, “Are all the charges set?”
“Everything’s wired and ready, sir,” Yerris replied. “Even the plonkball court.”
“We definitely wouldn’t want to leave that for the sus-Peledaen,” Winceyt agreed. “How are the constructs coming?”
“Rigging-Chief Olyesi says they’re done and ready to lift. They’ll go off with a bang as soon as you give the word.”
“Noise isn’t important. We need them bright and flashy and eye-catching.”
“She’s got all that covered, Captain,” Yerris said. “A bright light and a long burn. Nobody’s going to miss it.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
They left the office—Winceyt didn’t bother locking the door, in spite of regulations about the proper way to leave an empty building—and crossed the field to the grounded ships, the two shuttles and the fast courier. The repairs on the courier weren’t finished, but it was good enough to lift. Also waiting on the field were the huge tangled masses of metal and plastic and scavenged engines that Olyesi and her work crews had labored on without rest ever since the sus-Peledaen inquisitors had departed. Winceyt ignored the constructs for now; their time would come later, when they would lift and then self-destruct to provide cover for an escape into the Void.
Once aboard the courier, he strapped in and gave the orders that would take the small ships into orbit where the larger ones waited. There weren’t that many of the large ships, either: the guardship
Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms,
that had been orbiting above Serpent since limping in under control of the ship-mind after the sus-Peledaen attack; and two space-only heavy-cargo carriers and one light lander, currently shifting their orbital positions from Hanilat to Serpent.
Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms,
that had been orbiting above Serpent since limping in under control of the ship-mind after the sus-Peledaen attack; and two space-only heavy-cargo carriers and one light lander, currently shifting their orbital positions from Hanilat to Serpent.
Iulan Vai had been worried that not every sus-Dariv ship would choose to go along with the plan. Syr Vai was a Magelord and a very dangerous woman, Winceyt reflected, but she wasn’t part of the fleet. The word brought in by
Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms
’s lone survivor might not have made the public news channels, but it had gone through the family’s surviving ships and crews like a rushing flood. And like a flood, it had washed out all desire to be sus-Peledaen. Even most of the hired crew had chosen to stay, and the ones that hadn’t chosen knew only what all of Eraasi would know before tomorrow morning.
Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms
’s lone survivor might not have made the public news channels, but it had gone through the family’s surviving ships and crews like a rushing flood. And like a flood, it had washed out all desire to be sus-Peledaen. Even most of the hired crew had chosen to stay, and the ones that hadn’t chosen knew only what all of Eraasi would know before tomorrow morning.
The courier ship broke free of Eraasian gravity; Winceyt felt the homeworld let them go. This was the turning point, these last minutes spent on the journey between the old life and something strange and new and only half-planned. For a while, he felt outside of time and space, existing in neither one place nor another, in a state where all things remained possible.
The loud noises and jarring sensations of the shuttle docking broke the illusion. Time was passing again, and passing quickly. Winceyt sat through the docking process with suppressed impatience, and unstrapped as soon as possible to go aboard the hastily repaired and recrewed
Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms.
The
Garden
’s captain—two days ago, he’d had been Pilot-Principal on the grounded courier, and new in the rank at that—was waiting for him outside the lock.
Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms.
The
Garden
’s captain—two days ago, he’d had been Pilot-Principal on the grounded courier, and new in the rank at that—was waiting for him outside the lock.
“Welcome aboard, Fleet-Captain.”
Winceyt struggled briefly with cognitive dissonance. The
Garden
’s captain was not the only person suddenly holding down a job far above his rank and training. But this was in sober fact all that remained of the sus-Dariv fleet, and he, Aelben Winceyt, was in command of it.
Garden
’s captain was not the only person suddenly holding down a job far above his rank and training. But this was in sober fact all that remained of the sus-Dariv fleet, and he, Aelben Winceyt, was in command of it.
Very well, he would act the part. He and the
Garden
’s captain were already heading for the guardship’s bridge—they both knew time was short. Everything was moving fast now. So little a span of time remained in which to take such an irrevocable step.
Garden
’s captain were already heading for the guardship’s bridge—they both knew time was short. Everything was moving fast now. So little a span of time remained in which to take such an irrevocable step.
“Are
Sweetwater-Running, Blue-Hills-Distant,
and
Path-Lined-with-Flowers
in position yet?” Winceyt asked.
Sweetwater-Running, Blue-Hills-Distant,
and
Path-Lined-with-Flowers
in position yet?” Winceyt asked.
“They’re taking station now. The
Path
says inspace control was frothy about the move from Hanilat to Serpent.”
Path
says inspace control was frothy about the move from Hanilat to Serpent.”
“Any movement yet from the sus-Peledaen?”
“Not so far. But Fleet-Captain sus-Mevyan is nobody’s fool. She’ll be after us as soon as Lord Natelth gives the word.”
“It’s time to do it, then,” Winceyt said. “Send a message to all ships in the fleet: Stand by to jump on my command.
Sweetwater, Distant,
and
Path
will take their course from
Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms
they’ll get their copies of the new charts once we reach the rendezvous point.”
Sweetwater, Distant,
and
Path
will take their course from
Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms
they’ll get their copies of the new charts once we reach the rendezvous point.”
The
Garden
’s bridge, when Winceyt and the captain got there, looked disturbingly bare and thin of crew for a guardship. The customary depth and redundancy were absent; the handful of command-ranked officers at Serpent were spread out to cover all the ships that had to lift. The
Garden
’s Pilot-Principal—and only surviving original crew member—was pale and thin in her newly tailored officer’s livery. She’d been a mere fleet-apprentice only days before, and was barely half-recovered from her near-death at the hands of the sus-Peledaen.
Garden
’s bridge, when Winceyt and the captain got there, looked disturbingly bare and thin of crew for a guardship. The customary depth and redundancy were absent; the handful of command-ranked officers at Serpent were spread out to cover all the ships that had to lift. The
Garden
’s Pilot-Principal—and only surviving original crew member—was pale and thin in her newly tailored officer’s livery. She’d been a mere fleet-apprentice only days before, and was barely half-recovered from her near-death at the hands of the sus-Peledaen.
We’ll have time later to even things out
, Winceyt told himself.
We don’t have time now.
, Winceyt told himself.
We don’t have time now.
Outside the armored glass of the bridge windows, he saw the darkness of space and the curved bulk of Eraasi below: a view of baked red Antipodean earth, blue-green coastal ocean swirled with clouds, inland vegetation in patches of jade and emerald. Home.
“Pilot-Principal,” he said.
“Yes, Fleet-Captain?”
“What’s the status on the jump into the Void?”
“All ships have the course laid in and ready to execute, sir.”
“Signal to all ships: Commence jump run now.”
A vibration began in
Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms
’s deckplates; her engines were putting on speed for a straight-line run into the Void. The vibration grew stronger and louder, and Eraasi began to fall away below the bridge windows, so that what had been a great curving shoulder of the world dwindled rapidly in the bridge windows to a distant particolored sphere.
Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms
’s deckplates; her engines were putting on speed for a straight-line run into the Void. The vibration grew stronger and louder, and Eraasi began to fall away below the bridge windows, so that what had been a great curving shoulder of the world dwindled rapidly in the bridge windows to a distant particolored sphere.
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