Rift in the Races (30 page)

So he waited. And watched. For nearly a day. And then, finally, he noticed a star moving, its brightness, still dim, increasing incrementally. Or at least he thought it was. He blinked a few times and leaned out over the wall, as if somehow a half span would make the difference in what he saw.

“That one,” he said to himself after watching for a while, “is moving.”

It occurred to him to look for the shape of the picker then, to see if it was shaped by it, or behind it, but the star was now far brighter than any others nearby. Shortly after that, the star became several stars, the single point of light breaking up and making him wonder if he was witnessing a star being blown apart. He’d learned from sitting in on one of the fleet classes at the university that such things could occur.

The smaller lights continued to spread farther and farther from one another, filling a larger patch of sky, each brightening and becoming more and more distinct, as if every one of them was its own new star. A whole patch of them. Enough to count forty-three, though he did not attempt to do so. They were moving too fast for that. The formation was spreading, expanding outward all around, out toward the peripheries of sight. It had to be the fleet.

By the time he realized it, they were gone. They shot past him, bright lights, some larger than others, but all so fast it almost didn’t register. He certainly couldn’t say he’d watched them fly past. One moment they were spreading out across all of space, the next they were gone, so fast that the streaks of them were barely visible. And then they were fading away. Closing back in on themselves. He watched for a few moments more as they seemed to reverse the process he’d just witnessed, collapsing back together like the reconstitution of an exploded firework, the burst of it gathering back inward again.

And then they were gone.

He wasn’t sure quite what to make of that. He did think he’d just learned one thing new. While he might think the speed of the Earth ships seemed slow compared to the distances they traversed, he had just gained a new understanding of how fast “slow” could be. If what he’d just witnessed was those ships moving at a pace greatly reduced from what they were capable of, crippled as they had been described to him, then he couldn’t imagine what full speed could possibly look like. For the first time since hearing the term “light speed,” he finally had some perspective on the scale of motion the Earth people had achieved. If those ships weren’t even traveling at light speed, what must light speed be? Four times light, no less? It was beyond comprehension. It made his earliest analogies and comparisons to the Queen’s sailing ships laughable. Not even laughable. It made them stationary. They might as well still be stacks of lumber in the royal shipyard. Or the trees from which the lumber had been wrought. The seedlings of the trees. Nothing.

He realized catching those ships was going to be more than a simple chore. There was no way he was going to get seeing stones close enough to know the place where they were, not in a way that would make magical seeing possible. Even if he could get one close enough to the path of a passing ship to see it, he wouldn’t be able to make out any detail. They’d just shoot right past, barely a glint of light. He wasn’t going to catch them while they were underway. Not like that.

However, one thing was sure: his divination spell worked. He was more than pleased with that. He had found the ships, even if he had no idea what he was going to do with that knowledge now. It was more information than he’d had. He wondered if he might use it to see if there were any Hostiles in pursuit. If they were chasing those ships, they ought to be coming through the same stretch of space—though he had a feeling they would be much harder to spot, given that they were not covered front to back and on all sides by lights and gleaming things. Rather than light, he would have to look for the absence of it, a spreading stain of ink.

He turned back and scanned the sky for darkness, darkness upon darkness, a conspicuous absence of stars growing in the same fashion as the fleet lights had. He spent several hours looking for just such a thing, both staring out into the stars and pushing about with seeing spells. He tried as he did so to devise some mechanism of magic sight that would allow for speeds similar to those of the retreating fleet. He formed funnels of mana as he had first done when scouring the surface of Prosperion’s moon, Luria, for signs of life, but nothing he fashioned was enough. Not enough to catch them, that was sure. And not enough to cover much space searching for Hostiles chasing after the Earth ships. So, despite finding no signs of them, he could not be sure that result meant there was no pursuit.

Which meant he was back to deciding between doing research at the seers library or asking the fleet officers in orbit around Tinpoa and Prosperion for help. Or, of course, he could skip the former and just risk a couple of quick seeing spells in search of one of the ships he was familiar with. That really did seem like the most efficient way.

Resigned to it, he wasted no time and began the spell immediately, or at least began to begin, when it occurred to him what an unnecessary risk he was about to take. Fatigue was making his mind work slowly. If there was going to be a magical backlash, why not have a mitigating instrument? He was so used to beginning with a seeing stone, he had himself stuck in seeing mode. But he didn’t need to. He could scry to the location instead. He’d already been on the ship. He could simply call it up in the basin. If he could see the ship, good. If not, well … who knew? That was a bit of information he would still have had to go to the seers library to find out. But it was definitely a safer plan. Better to warp the wand than the wizard, as the saying went.

Kneeling before the scrying basin, he gripped its edge and closed his eyes. He drew in a strand of mana and pushed it down into the water. He sent another out across the vast expanse of the mana tides, seeking in the direction of his memory, imagining a middle-aged woman with black hair and almond-shaped eyes standing near a captain’s chair on one of the fleet ships. He could not recall the ship’s name now, but it didn’t matter. It was the chair, that chair, that bridge, that place. It was a place he’d been before, dim as the memory was. He locked that idea into the spell and opened his eyes, staring down into the water, half expecting it to blow up in his face.

The view in the basin arrived on the bridge where he’d once stood with the comely captain. She was seated in the captain’s chair speaking with two women he did not recognize. Satisfied that at least this much of his plan was working, he let the scrying spell go and cast a proper seeing spell instead. His vision leapt from his tower to the bridge of the ship, and in only a moment, he had pushed his sight through the bulkhead and out into the stars, hoping to see the ship in flight, part of the fleet heading back toward Prosperion.

He did not.

His vision filled with the green glow of Naotatica instead, the sun just peeking around the eastern rim. He turned and saw the small rocky globe of Tinpoa down below. He was dimly aware of the vibrations disappointment made in his throat and chest, in his physical body atop his tower far away.

He let his vision linger a moment as he stared down at the little moon. Orli was down there. He had to resist the temptation to run his vision down and find her, just to steal a look. He could get there quickly now. He wondered what she was doing, wondered if she was thinking about him. He hoped she wasn’t still mad at him.

He caught himself daydreaming and forced himself to concentrate. He was getting tired. He cut off the seeing spell.

The next ship in line was the one where there’d been two bald men working at the station where Orli and Roberto always sat when on the
Aspect’s
bridge. He remembered the two men sitting there with the lighting reflecting from their heads when he’d first appeared to deliver the Combat Hop. They had smiled and laughed a lot. Warm and welcoming. He recalled absently wondering if they were brothers. That was enough to give him a sense of the ship itself. He took a few deep breaths, concentrated and started the scrying spell again. The blast of energy that came out of the scrying basin felt as if he’d been staring into a cannon as it was being fired. It blew him all the way over onto his back, the fact of which he was only dimly aware before the impact with the stone floor knocked him out.

He woke up over an hour later, cold, wet and shivering. His head throbbed, and his robes lay heavily upon him with the weight of the water that had been blasted into them. They clung to him like skin as he got up and staggered to the small stool near the table. He sat down and put his head in his hands. It hurt so bad it made his ears ring. He had to close his eyes to keep the floor from spinning.

He sat motionless for a long while, focusing on his breathing and trying to keep nausea at bay. He couldn’t muster the energy for a thought for the longest time. But at length, as the pounding began to abate and the phantom sound to subside, he knew exactly what had gone wrong.

The ship he’d sought was gone. Just as he had feared. Those two men with their shiny bald pates would never laugh again.

Altin thought about them for a moment, mourned them, but eventually their smiling faces faded from memory, beaten out by the thumping inside his head.

How could that have been such a powerful backlash? He’d known there was a chance the spell would fail, but not like that. That was a total failure. As if that place he’d tried to go was no more. As in not anywhere. At all. Since when had a place ever completely ceased to be, even on a ship? No amount of research would have ever made him think such a thing was possible. Even sunken ships and burnt-out buildings remained a place to
be
in some small way. At least in part. There was always something left of them, even if casting seeing spells to them might be made painful, even dangerous, by the alterations to the original sense of place, the box broken open. Something had to have gone seriously wrong for there to be no vestige of the place at all. But Altin was not sure precisely what. At least not yet. He was definitely glad he’d decided to go with a scrying spell rather than direct sight.

He thought he might black out again.

He closed his eyes once more and forced himself to relax. He wasn’t thinking clearly now. He probably hadn’t been for an hour or more. Dangerous. He considered pulling the fast-cast amulet out from where it hung beneath his robes and tossing this mission in. There was enough mana in it for this distance he was fairly sure. But if he used it, replacing it would add further delays. If he went and got a new one from
Citadel’s
quartermaster, who had them readymade, he might draw questions and unwanted scrutiny for what he was up to; plus he would still have to augment the spell in it to work for his tower and not just himself, which would cost him time. And if he simply made one himself from scratch, as he had the one he wore, he would lose even more time. He didn’t want to do either if he didn’t have to. And he could still use the amulet later if required.

He felt like his mind was wandering, and he realized he was in no condition to be making decisions at all just then. What he needed was rest.

Feebly, he rose and teetered down the stairs. He’d figure out what to do next when he woke up.

Chapter 18

C
itadel’s
war room was designed to suit the needs of both magicians and officers from Earth. While just like the Palace war room in having at its center a fine space for the casting of illusions, this war room also had mounted on one wall a huge expanse of mammoth leather, smooth and perfectly cured, stretched taut in a long rectangular wooden frame, held in place by a crisscross of leather cords stitched around the edge. In a narrow tray that ran like a shelf along its lowest edge were long sticks of charcoal with which speakers could write, draw or make charts. If the shapes were not too complex, and all the corners and arcs were connected properly, parts and pieces of the images could be dragged around the surface of the leather with the tip of a finger, thanks to a particularly advanced enchantment put upon the mammoth hide. And it was on this that the newly anointed
Admiral
Jefferies was drawing his diagram, a crude but effective approximation of a fleet starship.

Given the present circumstances, the fleet captains had agreed that it was worth the risk to allow the magicians to try teleporting one of the fleet ships. They were going to go for a short distance, from orbit around Tinpoa to a location deemed safe outside the Prosperion solar system. The decision, and the risk, were based upon the dire situation of a few of the ships traveling with the main body of the fleet. Several of them were in deteriorating condition and lacked the materials to make suitable repairs. Without supplies, they were not going to make it back, and there was not enough food production capacity and life support to absorb the transfer of that many extra bodies even spread amongst the undamaged ships, at least not safely. So, if the Prosperions could get a ship loaded with necessary materials teleported out to them, or even close, it needed to be done.

And it opened up other possibilities as well.

The test flight, as the teleportation experiment had been deemed, was to determine if the magic could be done without damaging the ship in some way. The effects of magic on electronics were well known, and yet, from desperation comes hope, and from both of these come invention and bravery.

The first stage of the test flight would be to try it with a shuttle manned by a minimal crew. If that worked, a starship would be chosen to try it next. And it was for the working out of the final details that the planning session on
Citadel
had been called.