The Broken Sphere (37 page)

The impact jarred the ship from bow to stern. Teldin’s ears were filled with cries of alarm, his body racked with pain as the keel flexed and cracked. He felt control slip away. The
Boundless
 
–
again! – was no longer a ship under power, but a shattered and drifting hulk.

As the squid ship’s speed bled away, the Cloakmaster saw the nautiloid looming up astern, rotating around its long axis so that it appeared to be capsizing. The spiral ship’s long, piercing ram was a spear aimed at the
Boundless’s
heart.
“They’re ramming!”
he yelled. “Brace for impact!” Only at the last instant before contact did he take his own advice and grab the deck railing with all his might.

The hull timbers of the
Boundless
screamed in torment as the nautiloid struck the hull below and between the spanker fins. The long ram drove through the planking at an upward angle, smashing through the helm compartment to emerge out through the afterdeck.

The impact was enormous. With a dry crack, the mizzenmast broke in two, the upper portion falling aft and outward, ripping away the already damaged starboard spanker fin.

Despite his death grip on the rail, Teldin was almost torn free and flung overboard. His head struck a newel post with a sickening crack, and his vision filled momentarily with drifting stars.

No time, he told himself fiercely, no time for weakness. He shook his head to clear it and forced himself to his feet.

The
Boundless
was dead, he knew that. The impact of the ram must have shattered the keel. Theoretically, with an immense amount of work and colossal good fortune, it might be possible to repair it sufficiently to sail again, but that didn’t matter much now, did it? The illithids from the nautiloid would swarm aboard the crippled squid ship at any moment. How many of them would there be? he asked himself. A dozen? Two dozen? Three? How could his crew stand up to that many mind flayers?

Still, he had to try. “Boarding pikes!” he screamed. “Stand by to repel boarders!”

Teldin clutched Julia’s short sword as he tried to make sense of the situation. The
Boundless
was a bigger vessel than the nautiloid, which meant that the squid ship’s gravity plane would be dominant. That meant that the boarders from the nautiloid would have to climb steeply down their own ship to the hull of the
Boundless.
Then, once they’d reached the gravity plane, they’d have to swarm up the sides and over the rails. Possible, definitely, but quite difficult. “Line the rails,” he ordered as his armed crew poured up onto the deck. “They’ll be coming from below.”

They were coming already. He could hear footfalls on the underside of the squid ship’s hull.

Could he use the cloak to see them, to learn how they were planning the assault? He closed his eyes, let his mind expand to include the cloak at his back, and felt his thoughts expand throughout the ship.

The mental link was fitful, intermittent. The squid ship was dying, as far as the cloak was concerned, but it wasn’t dead quite yet. Through a gray, flickering haze Teldin saw the nautiloid’s hull and the vessel’s crew streaming over the bow and onto the underside of the
Boundless,
fifteen of them, twenty, twenty-five …

But they were humans, not the illithids he’d expected! Teldin’s surprise broke the mental link, and he was unable to reclaim it.

Humans! That made things more hopeful – at least his crew wouldn’t be facing creatures that could fry their brains with mental blasts.

But what were humans doing aboard an illithid nautiloid? he asked himself. So many of them, and seemingly eager to go into battle – infinitely more eager than slaves would be. He forced the question aside. If he and his crew didn’t win the upcoming battle, it wouldn’t matter at all.

So, no illithids – or, at least, none who’d yet put in an appearance. But there were still twenty-five – no, thirty, now– hard-bitten mercenary types, armed with swords, axes, and maces, clambering across the hull. Maybe the enemy didn’t need mind-blasting monsters.

Teldin heard a cry of alarm from the starboard rail. One of his crewmen thrust with his boarding pike and was rewarded by a scream from over the side. Battle is joined, he told himself.

For the first two minutes, the squid ship’s crew was able to block all efforts by the nautiloid’s mercenaries to climb onto the deck. It couldn’t last, however.

“They’re on the afterdeck!” one of Teldin’s crew shouted. The Cloakmaster looked aft. There were four attackers clambering over the aft rail. Apparently they’d given up a direct assault as too risky and, instead of staying on the hull, had climbed onto the port spanker fin, and from there to the upper portion of the stern.

“With me!” Teldin cried. Flanked by Djan and two other crewmen, he charged up the ladder to the sterncastle.

The first of the boarding party over the stern rail was a huge, black-haired man wielding a crescent-bladed hand axe. With a snarl, he swung a whistling cut at Teldin’s head. The Cloakmaster ducked under the swing and drove the point of his sword into the attacker’s chest. He spun to the right to parry a sword thrust from another attacker and riposted quickly, laying open the man’s left shoulder. Then, as the man howled, Teldin ran him through and pushed him backward, to fall clear of the ship. Teldin turned and looking for another foe.

Djan and the other crewmen had put paid to the remainder of the attackers, not without cost, however. One of the sailors was down, blood pooling around him from a gaping head wound, and Djan was bleeding from a nasty gash in his right forearm.

Teldin heard cries and the skirl of steel on steel from behind him. He spun.

Attackers had made it over the squid ship’s rail and were among the defenders. Their boarding pikes useless in toe-to-toe battle, Teldin’s crewmen were laying about them wildly with short swords, axes, hammers, even belaying pins, any kind of weapon they could find.

“We’ll lose this,” Djan said quietly.

Teldin felt the chill of space invading his bones. “I know it.” Suddenly he clapped the half-elf on the shoulder. “Do what you can here,” he ordered. “I’ve got an idea.”

Djan didn’t ask any questions. Beckoning to the surviving crewman, he charged down the ladder to the main deck and into the fray.

The first mate was right, Teldin knew. There was no way they’d be able to hold off the attackers. The squid ship’s crew would be butchered, and the cloak would fall into the hands of whoever captained the nautiloid, unless the Cloakmaster did something soon.

All right. Static defense wasn’t the answer. He had to take the fight to the nautiloid’s captain, and he thought he knew how. It was a risk – he had no idea how many of the attackers knew the details of their captain’s plans – but any risk was better than the certain defeat of staying aboard the
Boundless.

He forced himself to ignore the singing of steel, the crying of wounded men. He let an image build in his mind: a broad, flat-nosed face, a heavy-set body, short black hair … Dargeth, the half-orc. In his mind’s eye, he superimposed the image over his own face and body. His skin tingled as he felt the cloak make the change.

He drew a deep breath and returned the short sword to its scabbard. Here goes, he told himself.

He swung a leg over the aft rail and lowered himself onto the slightly upswept surface of the squid ship’s stern. Arms spread for balance, he dropped onto the curved wood surface of the port spanker fin. The surface of the fin was almost perfectly aligned with the squid ship’s gravity plane, he knew. He lowered himself to his knees, then to his belly. Cautiously, he crawled to the forward edge of the fin.

From this vantage point, he could see a dozen mercenaries standing – upside down, according to his present orientation – on the underside of the
Boundless’s
hull, preparing to climb down to the gravity plane, then up the other side to the rails. Preparing to board and kill my crew, Teldin told himself bitterly. His hand strayed to his sword hilt, as he fought the temptation to leap into their midst and hew about him wildly.

But, no, he told himself firmly, that wouldn’t help in the long run. No matter how good he was with a sword, no matter how lucky, there was no possible way he could take down a dozen armed mercenaries. He’d just get himself killed or captured, and then he’d have no way of saving his men from their fate. No, the only way he could help them was to follow through with his plan.

He slid himself forward along the fin until his shoulders and chest extended out into space, then he bent forward, down, over the edge of the fin.

As soon as his head and shoulders passed through the plane of the fin, he wasn’t looking down anymore, but up. His balance spun dizzily as his brain tried to make sense of conflicting data. The gravity plane passed through the middle of his body now, with “local down” being toward the plane of the spanker fin. He closed his eyes and struggled to fight the nausea that twisted within him.

He had to move fast, he knew. He bent farther, until his chest touched the other flat surface of the fin. Now he was folded around the forward edge of the fin. He pulled himself forward with his hands and kicked his legs out into space. Again his balance reoriented itself sickeningly. He tasted bile in his throat. He slid forward again until he lay flat on the fin – on what had been the underside of the fin but was now, to his senses, the top. He jumped to his feet.

From his new vantage point, the
Boundless
looked as though it had capsized. The nautiloid, its ram still buried in the squid ship’s hull, appeared the right way up – thanks to its final maneuver before impact – but angled upward at fifteen or twenty degrees. He ran to the illithid ship’s open lower battle station and vaulted over the rail, onto its canted deck.

Three mercenaries faced him, weapons drawn and faces grim.

For a second, Teldin’s sense of vulnerability was almost more than he could stand. He wanted to snatch his sword from its sheath and at least go down fighting. Instead he kept his hand clear of the weapon’s hilt and forced a look of urgency onto his face. “Where’s the captain?” he grunted.

One of the mercenaries tightened his grip on his sword and stepped forward. I’m dead, the Cloakmaster told himself. They don’t know who Dargeth is and don’t know his significance. All I’ve done is kill myself.

Then another of the mercenaries grabbed the man by the shoulder, pulled him back. “No,” he grunted, “he’s with us.”

Relief flooded through Teldin’s body, threatening to weaken his knees so that he couldn’t even stand. With a titanic effort, he kept his face and traitor body under control. “Where’s the captain?” he repeated.

“Grampian’s on the bridge deck,” the first mercenary said, pointing vaguely upward. “Why d’ya need to talk to him?”

“News,” Teldin replied, keeping his voice hoarse, exhausted-sounding, in case these men had heard Dargeth speak before. “For Grampian’s ears only.” He held his breath, waiting for another question – a question he couldn’t answer, that would reveal his deception and end his life.

But the mercenaries had other things on their minds. They paid him no more attention as they brushed past him to vault over the rail, onto the underside of the
Boundless.

Teldin’s knees felt weak, his heart pounding so hard that it threatened to burst. Still he managed to force himself on, up the sloping deck of the battle station. There were three ladders – one, in the center of the deck, leading down –, two leading up. The mercenary had pointed upward when he’d mentioned the captain’s – Grampian’s – location. The Cloakmaster sprinted up the starboard side ladder.

He found himself in a large, open area that filled the complete width of the nautiloid. To his right, as he reached the top of the ladder, was the ship’s main catapult, smashed by the
Boundless’s
ballista shot. Two human bodies, twisted and broken, lay sprawled over the wreckage. The Cloakmaster looked away.

The area was empty. Directly ahead of him were another two ladders, these wider than the one he’d climbed, one leading up, the other down. To the port side of the ladders was a door; to the starboard was a corridor leading aft. There had to be cabins back there, maybe storage compartments.

Where in the Abyss would he find the captain? He didn’t have time to search the whole ship. His crewmates were dying ….

Where would
he
be if he were the captain? Somewhere he could see what was going on, of course. That eliminated the cabins, didn’t it? He ran to the ladders and climbed up to the next deck.

More than halfway up the shell-like hull of the nautiloid, this deck was considerably shorter and slightly narrower than the one below. But it was much higher, extending right up to the curved upper surface of the hull. Above him, like the galleries in some strange theater, were observation decks of some kind. And, even higher, a kind of narrow causeway extended from the aft to the center of the open space, supporting a large chair. Teldin stopped in his tracks, fascinated by the spectacle.

“What in the hells are
you
doing here?”

He spun. Facing him across the open deck, a dark, bearded man stood, fists balled and set aggressively on his hips.

By all the gods, it was Berglund, the privateer captain who’d attacked the
Boundless
outside Heartspace!

Teldin struggled to keep his recognition from showing on his face. “Gotta talk to Grampian,” he gasped harshly.

Berglund scowled. “Why?”

“It’s important,” Teldin grunted. “Where?”

Berglund hesitated, and the Cloakmaster thought all was lost, then the pirate’s face cleared and he pointed toward a circular, red-glass portal on the starboard side of the hull. “Out on the observer station.”

Teldin grunted his thanks and hurried over to the portal. Just aft of the large, multipaned porthole was a small door. He grabbed the knob and pulled it open.

And there was Grampian (or so he assumed), a tall, nondescript, brown-haired man with a build slightly more slender than Teldin’s. He stood on a small, semicircular gallery – open to the stars – leaning on the rail for a good view of the underside of the squid ship’s hull. Apparently he was too absorbed in what was going on below him to have noticed Teldin’s arrival.