Linesman (36 page)

JORDAN ROSSI

ROSSI BREATHED IN
oxygen the paramedics had supplied and wanted to lie there forever, but Iwo Hurst was watching him as if he truly believed the ten had lost it, so he scrambled to his feet as soon as he could.

“Line eleven a little too subtle for you,” he asked Hurst, making it sound like an insult.

Most of the cartel masters were lineless. Radeesha Devi, from House of Devi, was a one, and she was the only linesman running a cartel at present. The Grand Master was different. While he or she didn't have to be a high-level linesman—didn't have to be a linesman at all—he generally was, because high-level linesmen had more clout, and the position was voted in.

Hurst gave Rossi an unfriendly look.

Rossi smiled.

Orsaya was on the comms, talking to Captain Wendell.

Behind her, shielded by Hurst, Markan lifted his comms to his mouth. “Fire on the
Lancastrian Princess
,” and the quiet way he said it meant that he didn't mean for Orsaya to hear.

He was crazier than Orsaya. Didn't he realize just how
dangerous that might be? Hadn't he noticed someone had switched the
Eleven
's defense system back on?

MacIntyre's reply was loud enough for everyone in the room to hear. “I can't answer to two people giving alternating orders, Admiral. Right now, my orders say Admiral Orsaya is in charge.”

Markan went a blotched purple. It matched the mottled color of his uniform.

Orsaya turned to look at Markan. She smiled, showing her teeth. “When you plan a coup, maybe you should be sure the stars are aligned favorably first.”

It was another Yaolin proverb.

Markan pressed savagely on his comms.

Orsaya turned away. “Come. Let's finish our work here,” and waited for Rossi to precede her out the door.

Rossi, for want of a better alternative, did so although his back itched until they were well away.

EAN LAMBERT

EVER SINCE IT
had been discovered, Ean had dreamed of coming to the confluence. He'd dreamed that he would be the one to discover its secrets, that he'd be lauded by the other tens as a result.

He'd never imagined creeping in this way. Not that they were sneaking, exactly. The Gate Union soldiers just marched along the corridors, ignoring everyone. If you didn't move, you got trampled.

Some of the people they passed were linesmen. Ean recognized Tomas Teng, a nine from Sandhurst, and the twins from Laito cartel. He would have liked to stop for the twins, to find out if they were really nines or tens. Katida would want to know. But the soldiers marched straight past, and when Ean paused, the guards behind pushed him on.

All the linesmen they saw were having problems breathing.

There were uniforms from every conceivable house, most of which he'd never seen in real life.

Behind it, he could hear the lines of the station, magnified somehow by the presence of the linesmen, crying out to be heard with no one listening. The higher lines hadn't been
used since their initial use to transport the station and were atrophying in place.

He wanted to stop and talk to them, to tell them that someone understood, but the soldiers forced him on.

The factories grew lower lines ad hoc. Ean had seen them on the vids. Vast vats of chemicals that acted as the catalyst for the production of the lines. The ultrathin layer of native line—cloned from the Havortian—that started the reaction. Thousands of lines of light being drawn out of each vat, each one vibrating with the specific set of line energies. One in a hundred lines were pure enough to use.

But when you asked for the ability to move through the void, even once—as when transporting a station—you had to grow a full set of lines, and that process was slow, careful, and expensive. Ten tiny vats, side by side, made from the one batch of chemicals, because if the catalyst was different, the lines didn't meld. Each with the exact same amount of each line added because if that didn't match, you might as well destroy the lines before you wasted expensive catalyst growing them.

Once a full set of lines was grown, you didn't change them.

How many other lonely lines were there like this station?

Partway wherever Grayson and Abi were taking them, they were joined by a woman whose name on her pocket said
AUBURN
. Not much farther along, the woman he had recognized as Jita Orsaya joined them. She had Jordan Rossi in tow. Once Ean had wanted to meet other tens. Now the less he saw of them, the better, and from the look on Rossi's face, the feeling was mutual.

“What the hell was Wendell thinking?” Orsaya demanded of Grayson. “I gave him a slot and the room for one ship, not six.”

Grayson said formally, “Captain Wendell asks me to tell you that the ships are linked, and that apparently even the Alliance doesn't know how to unlink them.”

Orsaya stretched out her fingers hard, as if she had to do that or she might hit someone. “Understood,” she said finally. “Wendell's just lucky he had enough room.”

She turned to Auburn. “Are we ready?”

“The linesmen are gathering at the viewing center,”
Auburn said. Her uniform had the same number of pips as Helmo's. A captain, presumably. But not a ship captain because the lines didn't echo in her the way they did for Wendell or Helmo. “They're the liveliest anyone has seen them in months. Or they were until they all started having heart attacks.”

“We have to ship them off,” Orsaya said. She frowned at Ean. Why? He hadn't done anything yet. But he would, as soon as he could work out what would help Abram and Michelle the most. “Markan won't give us the time. I didn't even think he'd let me walk out like he did.”

“We're ready for Markan,” Auburn said.

Orsaya nodded, then frowned again. “Galenos doesn't want an escalation any more than we do. He'll hold off until the last moment.” Which gave Ean some room to figure out what to do. He hoped. “If we can hold Markan off, we might all get out of this with nothing more than embarrassment on the Alliance's side.”

Why should his side be the one to be embarrassed? “We haven't done anything,” Ean said. Orsaya's side had kidnapped
him
. “Incidentally, you should know by now that kidnapping doesn't work.”

Orsaya ignored the second part and attacked him on the first. “The confluence is ours. Your people jumped here.”

“That wasn't their choice.”

Orsaya looked at Ean. Her ageless eyes seemed to look right into his soul. She looked to Grayson. “It doesn't matter which ship initiates the jump?”

“No, ma'am.”

Ean didn't need the lines to know what she was thinking. If Wendell could control his ship and keep jumping with it, then the
Lancastrian Princess
and the
Eleven
were virtual prisoners.

He froze, panicked, and felt Rossi's lines leaking amusement.

Should he tell her he had to sing to keep them together? It wasn't really the truth because they'd all been in the void when he'd started singing last time. But it would make her think she couldn't do it without him, and that would give him some time to work out what to do.

“You know that I have to—” But they'd stopped outside the viewing station. Ean recognized it from the vids.

His heart fluttered, and for once, it wasn't due to the lines. He was here. Soon he would experience the confluence in all its glory. He stepped forward.

Orsaya said, “Wait until we have it secured.”

He waited.

The lines of the fleet made music in his head. All was well with the six ships. No one was shooting. No one was threatening anyone. He didn't realize he'd joined in the chorus—or that he'd extended it to include the lines on the station—until Rossi and Orsaya both turned to frown at him.

Not long after that, soldiers started herding linesmen out of the viewing station. An angry, fighting mob, because none of them wanted to leave—although many of them were hindered by breathing problems. Some of them attacked the soldiers. At least two linesmen went down stunned, and another bled from an open wound on his temple.

Ean recognized two tens. Nina Golf from House of Aquarius and Geraint Jones from House of Rickenback. Jones didn't even notice Rossi. Ean couldn't tell how Rossi felt about that. He sang under his breath to the lines he recognized as Rossi to find out.

“Get out of my lines, bastard,” Rossi said, and would have lunged for him, but one of the soldiers guarding them restrained him.

Orsaya watched with interest.

“Sorry,” Ean said, and he was sorry for his rudeness. Sometimes he forgot that human lines—like Rossi's—were different.

If any of the linesmen had noticed the ruckus, Ean didn't see. They were gone before it was over.

“All clear,” one of the soldiers said, and Orsaya stepped aside to let Ean and Rossi go first.

Ean forgot about the others. This was it. He made his way across to the huge Plexiglas area that looked out over the confluence.

Nothing.

Disappointment dropped him to his knees. The back-beat of line eleven was stronger here. It was hard to breathe.

One of the soldiers hurried forward with an oxygen mask. Ean waved them away.

Rossi stared out at nothing, his face suffused with something that looked like hate.

Ean couldn't feel anything.

Failure tasted bitter.

Even the lower lines could feel the confluence. Yet Ean couldn't. Maybe Rebekah Grimes was right. Maybe he was defective.

Or maybe he was another Fergus. As blind to the confluence as Fergus was to everything but line seven.

He sat on the floor of the viewing deck and tried to pull himself together. Right now, he wanted a shower.

Michelle would understand that.

Michelle would understand his disappointment, too, but she wouldn't understand being pulled halfway across the galaxy when her ship was supposed to be in control. Michelle—and Abram—wouldn't be sitting around doing nothing.

Right now, Ean could have done with Michelle beside him, smiling her wry smile, cheek curving into that dimple. Or Radko, telling him the void was messing with his mind again.

Rossi blinked and came back from whatever private hell he'd been in. He stared at Ean. Ean kept his face impassive but couldn't stop his disappointment leaking into the lines.

Rossi's mouth curved upward in a malicious smile. “Confluence a little underwhelming, Linesman?” He emphasized the “Linesman” as if it left a dirty taste in his mouth.

Even dressed in casual clothes, he looked like a poster boy for the cartels. Tall and straight, the light gleaming off his bald head, the shirt emphasizing the muscular arms, the wide Plexiglas window with space and the confluence behind him. He could have been posing, but he wasn't. He fitted here. Ean didn't.

Ean looked out into space and didn't deny it.

Then, unexpectedly, Rossi got angry. “You have no idea what you have, and you are disappointed.
Disappointed.
”

He stepped close, crowding Ean, so that Ean was forced back against the Plexiglas. “You make me sick with your tainted lines and your music and your crazy protectors and
six ships following you around. Then you come here and have the cheek to say you are disappointed.”

Two of Orsaya's guards pulled him away.

“I hope your precious line eleven is disappointed in you, too.”

Line eleven probably was.

Even restrained and forcibly held back by the two soldiers, Rossi still looked far more a linesman than Ean ever would. Looks weren't everything, and Ean was making a place for himself, despite what the other linesmen thought of him.
He'd
discovered line eleven. He didn't need to explain himself to Rossi. So why did he say, “I didn't expect to be deaf to it.”

“Deaf to it.” Rossi lunged forward, and the guards lost their hold momentarily. If the glass had been any thinner, Ean would be breathing space by now.

They snatched Rossi back roughly, so that he banged his face against the window hard enough to cut his lip and draw blood.

But Rossi seemed to have lost any fight. He stared at Ean speculatively. “You really can't hear it?” and hope made his face brighten.

Ean shook his head.

Then the light died out of Rossi's face. “But you can hear line eleven?”

“Of course.”

Rossi spat blood. “How many lines eleven?”

“Just the one, but there's something—” Wrong, Ean had been going to say. Part of line eleven was stuck in the void.

Rossi shook his head.

What if it wasn't his line eleven?

Ean started to sing. If they stopped him, he would fight them. He had to know.

Line eleven—his line eleven—surged in with its own song. Clear and strong enough to bring Rossi to his knees. Ean would have fallen, too, except he was already down.

The echo in the void didn't respond. Ean widened his song and finally received in reply the lost, lonely wail of a totally different line.

When he could breathe again, Ean said wonderingly, “There's another line eleven out there.”

“Of course there is, sweetheart. Only out here we don't call it line eleven. We call it the confluence.”

Line eleven was a beat. A metronomic thump-kerthump that had nothing to do with the glory and the ecstasy that everyone felt about the confluence. Line eleven
couldn't
be the confluence.

Rossi laughed at Ean's expression. “If you'd paid attention, you would have known that a while ago. It hasn't been the best-kept secret. Why do you think you are here?”

He'd assumed Orsaya wanted the
Eleven
.

Didn't she? But as he gazed at her, then at Rossi, Ean realized that wasn't what she wanted at all. She wanted the ship stuck in the void.

“Bright,” Rossi said.

He was an imposing man, Jordan Rossi. Big in size, big in confidence. If Ean hadn't met Michelle first, Rossi would have overwhelmed him. If he hadn't heard Rebekah Grimes take on “crazy Ean Lambert,” he would have been cowed by the brooding way Rossi glared at him. Two short weeks ago, he'd have been like the apprentices in the cart.

Ean laughed grimly to himself. Two weeks ago, he'd been a different person.

“What's so funny?” Rossi demanded.

He needed to clear his mind of what had happened today and work out what to do. He needed a shower.

He didn't realize he'd spoken aloud until Orsaya said frostily, “A shower?”

He didn't particularly mean a shower here, right now. “I think better in the fresher, and I have to work out how to rescue the line.” And how to prevent Orsaya's getting it once he'd done it.

“Do your work here, and you can spend as long as you like in the fresher.”

“Unbelievable,” Rossi said.