The Gathering Flame (5 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Gathering Flame
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“I don’t think so,” Hafrey said. “Professionals don’t bother with using low power unless they want the target to stay healthy. You’ve only been stung, not hurt.”
“I might have known,” grumbled Nivome, as he rolled up onto his knees—and stared, wide-eyed, at the carnage around him. “Lords of Life! What happened?”
“I am the Armsmaster to House Rosselin,” Hafrey said. His voice was cold. “Did you think it was merely a customary title? I tell you now, do not play tricks like this with me again. Try it on Entibor, and it won’t be your hirelings that suffer.”
 
(GALCENIAN DATING 959 A.F.; ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 23 VERATINA)
 
S
UNSETS OVER Telabryk Spaceport were always a dirty red from the smoke and debris that the belching jets threw high in the atmosphere, and the twilights sparkled with more than stars as the orbiting dockyards and constructories caught the last of the falling sun. Josteddr Metadi, age twelve and newly enrolled in local politics as a ward heeler’s apprentice, didn’t have the time or the inclination to appreciate the harsh beauty of the Gyfferan sky-scape. Jos had responsibilities to consider: passing out flyers in the neighborhood elections; putting up stickers and posters on walls, utility posts, and recycling bins; tearing down or covering up similar posters for the political opponents of Rorin Gatt.
Jos considered himself lucky to be employed, not caring that his job existed only because under Gyfferan law a minor couldn’t be forced to give testimony in court. He didn’t need the work—the Citizen-Assembly wouldn’t allow a legal resident of Gyffer to starve or freeze or go homeless—but the Citizen-Assembly made no effort to keep anyone from getting bored, either. And even at the age of twelve, Jos Metadi found boredom intolerable.
Running errands for Gatt provided more than enough novelty to keep anyone happy and occupied. Today Jos’s route took him to the shuttle platforms of Cronin Ogilvid, where he would scout out locations for one of Gatt’s cronies to give a speech and organize the shuttleboppers.
Jos stood outside the automatic gate of the shuttle platform and wondered how to get inside without an authorization. He looked up at the gate—no, that wasn’t any good. Too many ID scanners and spy-eyes for Jos’s comfort. He circled the platform, checking the perimeter fence line in hopes that the barrier might turn out to be more symbolic than real.
This fence, though, looked tight all the way around, probably to keep Ogilvid Enterprises from being sued right down to its socks if an unauthorized visitor happened to get fried in the exhaust from a shuttle’s engines.
Jos went back to the front entrance and took a second look at the autogate. Maybe he didn’t have the right ID-scan to get through, but that didn’t matter. He knew lots of ways to beat an ID lock. Which trick he used would depend on what sort of traffic went through the gate.
He could watch for someone to show up with a day pass, then steal the pass—but that risked detection and capture and a prolonged social-development session in the hands of Telabryk’s Underage Client Services Department. Or he could wait until the gate opened for somebody legit, then duck through before it closed; that way was safer, but likely to require more than one try before he achieved success. Safest and easiest was to make friends with someone who would let him in … .
“Here now, lad,” came a voice. “What are you doing here?”
The accent wasn’t local—not Telabryk dockside, or Telabryk District, or even the smoothed-out speech of the politicians and holovid news announcers.
Off-worlder,
Jos thought, and smiled up at his ticket through the gate. “Please, my daddy works in there, and I have to take him a message. Will you help me look for him?”
The worst the man could do was say no. But if he said yes, Jos was in, and free to fade from sight a moment later, then scout the place out and slip away.
“Yes,” the man said. He had to be a spacer, Jos thought—the local dockhands and mechanics wore the same kind of loose, drab-colored coverall, but all of them talked straight Gyfferan. “I think you should look for your daddy. Come with me.”
The man palmed the lockplate and the gate swung open. Jos stuck close as they walked through.
Give it a twenty-count,
he decided;
then run.
He’d reached “eighteen” when the man’s hand came down on his shoulder and caught him in a tight grip.
“Come with me,” the man said. “If you don’t yell you won’t get hurt.”
Jos tried to pull away, but the man’s grip was too tight. Another fractional amount of pressure, and the bony fingers would meet under his collarbone.
He’s got to let go soon,
Jos thought. But he didn’t. The cruel pressure never let up, forcing Jos into a half-run to match the man’s longer stride.
They were heading for a shuttle, an ugly, battered craft. Jos made one last effort to twist away before he was forced inside, but it didn’t do any good. The grip on Jos’s shoulder tightened so fiercely that tears of pain started in his eyes; then the man half-marched, half-pulled him up the shuttle ramp into the craft’s dark, evil-smelling interior.
Jos had seen enough and read enough, in his sporadic and eccentric self-education, to know that the padded bedlike thing the spacer strapped him onto was an acceleration couch. He heard the man speaking over a comm link to somebody called Gyfferan Inspace Control. Then an enormous roaring sound filled the shuttle, and a vast weight pushed him down onto the couch.
After a long time the weight lifted, and he felt another, different kind of sensation, as though he were infinitely light and not connected to anything. If this was what spacers meant when they talked about breaking loose from dirtside gravity, he wasn’t surprised that they seemed to like it so much. He’d have enjoyed the feeling himself, if he hadn’t been so worried about what was going to happen next.
He heard the man speaking over the comm link to a merchant ship called the
Quorum.
They were talking in spacer-talk—whatever the language was that gave the man his distinctive accent—but it sounded enough like dockside Gyfferan that Jos could pick out some of the words. Or maybe dockside lingo was half spacer-talk already, since everybody else on Gyffer made a big deal out of not being able to understand it.
The shuttle docked with
Quorum,
and the man unstrapped Jos and took him aboard the merchant ship. The ship had gravity, but not much. Jos kept taking steps that were too big or too forceful, so that only the man’s pincer grip kept him from floating up and colliding with the ceiling. The grip hurt more than it helped, and it made him angry as much as it hurt: what was the point of it, now that he had nowhere to run?
Another man was waiting for them on board the ship. This man looked Jos over, then spoke rapidly to his captor in spacer-talk—too rapidly for Jos to follow, this time. Then he turned back to Jos.
“You listen, boy,” he said in badly accented Gyfferan. “You do what we say, you get along. I’m selling you to a good master somewhere else and you’re doing fine. You don’t, you remember: food on my ship belongs to me, water on my ship belongs to me, air on my ship belongs to me. You want me to take ’em away, you piss me off. Once is all it takes.”
 
ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 38 VERATINA
 
T
HE HEAVY push of acceleration eased off at last. Perada felt a momentary sense of dislocation, a kind of sliding sideways without any physical motion, and recognized it as the privateer ship’s translation into hyper- space. The pilot had gone straight from boost to orbit to a jump without pausing. She drew a deep breath, unstrapped her safety webbing, and sat up on the acceleration couch.
Hafrey, she thought, would be pleased. The side journey to Innish-Kyl hadn’t gone entirely according to the plan she had worked out soon after leaving Galcen—she was forming the distinct impression that other people’s plans didn’t work too well once Captain Metadi became involved—but her situation was already better in several respects than it had been a few weeks before.
“Matters are approaching a crisis
,” she remembered Hafrey saying after he told her that Great-Aunt Veratina had died. “
You may find that presenting yourself as the late Domina’s acknowledged heir is not enough. The people of Entibor must be convinced that you are capable of taking active measures.”
“Well,” she muttered as she swung her legs down to the metal deckplates, “I’ve certainly made a decent beginning.”
She stood for a moment with her feet apart, getting her bearings in the ’
Hammer
’s common room. The air in the ship smelled recycled—the same faint, persistent odor of sweat and grime that she’d noticed aboard Ser Hafrey’s courier, but stronger here. Scratches and dings marred what she could see of the dull-grey bulkheads. The glow of the overhead light panels failed to penetrate into all the corners—or where the corners would have been, if the room hadn’t been circular.
Perada was, for the moment, alone: Captain Metadi and his second had left the compartment as soon as she’d strapped herself in, heading through the forward passageway to what she supposed must be the bridge. Similar exits led away to aft, port, and starboard along the starship’s horizontal plane, and an opening in the bulkhead near the acceleration couches gave access to a fifth, vertical passage. Two more openings—one with a door, one without—pierced the bulkhead between the forward and the starboard exits. Ladderlike handholds for zero-g work ran along the tops and sides of the passageways.
In addition to the acceleration seating, the common room held a circular table with chairs bolted to the deck around it. From the table, she could see that the nook beside the forward exit held a cramped galley. Somebody aboard
Warhammer
took an interest in cooking, she decided; the light panels were brighter inside the galley, and all the surfaces were clean.
The smell of cha’a reminded Perada that she hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since Hafrey’s courier had touched down on Innish-Kyl. In the excitement of the past few hours she’d forgotten about such mundane matters, but now that she had the leisure to notice them, she became aware that she was both hungry and thirsty. Thanks to the mysterious assailants at the Double Moon, she was also grimy, ragged, and slightly bruised. Not at all the picture of a proper Domina after Great-Aunt Veratina’s manner—but that was all right. She wasn’t planning to be another Veratina anyway.
In the meantime … cha’a.
She went into the galley. The cha’a pot was easy enough to locate—its red On light was glowing. That left finding a cup or a mug of some kind. She tried one of the cabinet doors. It was unlocked, but instead of cups the shelves inside held square flat boxes of commercial space rations and smaller, oddly shaped jars and bottles of condiments, some of them labeled in Standard Galcenian, others in languages she didn’t recognize. She knelt down to open one of the lower cabinets.
Maybe in here—
A deep, wordless roaring interrupted her search. She tried to stand up and back away at the same time—a pointless exercise, given the dimensions of the galley, but considering the huge, scaly creature that stood blocking the entrance, she felt compelled to try. The creature advanced a step toward her and she took another step away, hoping without much optimism that she didn’t look as scared as she felt.
Then a pleasant soprano voice spoke up from farther back in the common room. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Ferrda, let her find her own cup.”
The scaly one rumbled something in reply and backed out into the shadowy common room. He—or she; Perada couldn’t tell—was replaced by a thin, birdlike woman wearing a black velvet vest over a loose white shirt, and dark trousers tucked into high leather boots. The woman also wore a matched pair of medium-weight blasters, rigged with the butts turned forward.
Perada reminded herself forcibly that these people were, after all, privateers.
What was it Ser Hafrey said? “Only one step up from pirates, and that a short one.”
She inclined her head politely. “Well met, gentlelady.”
“I suppose you’re the passenger the captain mentioned,” the woman said. There was a faint accent to her Galcenian, as though she’d been speaking the common language of the spaceways long enough to lose all the identifying marks of her native tongue, but not the last lingering traces of it. “I’m Tillijen, number-two gunner. That was Ferrdacorr, ship’s engineer. Come on out, and I’ll introduce you.”
“I’d be honored,” Perada said—this was no time, she suspected, to stand on precedence and insist that any honor from the encounter was likely to flow the other way. She made a vague gesture at the cha’a pot. “But—”
Understanding lit up the woman’s features. “That’s right—you were looking for cha’a. Cups are in that cabinet over there. Take one of the ones with blue rims. They don’t belong to anyone.”
“Thank you.”
The woman faded out of the compartment as silently as Ferrdacorr had done. Perada found a cup and poured some cha’a. She didn’t want to bumble around hunting for fixings—she looked undignified enough already—so she took it brown. With the mug in her right hand, she headed back into the main compartment, trailing her left hand against the bulkhead as she went. Ferrdacorr and the woman were sitting at the mess table, watching her.
“I see you’ve been under way before,” Tillijen said.
“I’ve been in space, yes,” Perada said. She took one of the empty seats at the mess table. “To and from school on Galcen, mostly.”
“Well then. Welcome to our merry crew. Like I said, this is Ferrdacorr, son of Rillikkikk. Ferrda, for short.”
The green scaly one made a rumbling bass noise.
“He says he’s pleased to meet you,” Tillijen said.
Ferrda said something else, this time directed to the gunner.
“It was a loose translation,” she replied. “She’s new here.”
Again a deep noise.
“Oh, all right.” Tillijen turned back to Perada. “He says, ‘Another damned thin-skin. I hope she doesn’t get in the way.’”
Perada gave the scaly crew member a polite smile and pretended she hadn’t heard the translation. “Well met, Gentlesir Ferrdacorr.”
“Just a hint,” Tillijen said under her breath. “If you’re going to smile at him, for heaven’s sake don’t let him see your teeth. Ferrda’s used to us, but some of his people are a bit touchy about things like that.”
Ferrdacorr leaned back, smiled, and showed his teeth.
Perada sipped her cha’a and said nothing. School life on Galcen had taught her a number of lessons—among them, that deliberate provocations were best ignored. Maybe
Warhammer
’s engineer had a real problem dealing with anyone who wasn’t big and green, or maybe he had a warped sense of humor. Either way, she didn’t gain anything by rising to the bait.
Moments later, the sound of boots on the ladder rungs in the vertical passageway heralded a new arrival, a slender woman with ivory skin and a great deal of curly dark hair. She swung out of the passage and leaned up against the bulkhead beside it, hands thrust in trouser pockets, and sang in a clear alto voice:
“Come all ye remittance men, listen to me
I’ll give you advice of such use as I may,
That you will be guided and not go astray
When you enter the life of a spacer.”
 
The singer’s accent was different from Tillijen’s, as well as being a good deal broader. Like the number-two gunner, though, the dark woman had on what Perada guessed were port-liberty clothes—emerald spidersilk and black moire satin, this time—and another matched pair of blasters. She nodded to the three sitting at the mess table, and kept on singing.
“First mind you don’t stay down in Waycross too long; The water is bad and the liquor is strong;
As you have to drink something, you’re sure to go wrong,
And ruin your-life as a spacer.”
 
She pushed herself off of the wall with her shoulders and walked over to the table. “I’m Nannla,” she said, putting out her hand. “You?”
Bemused, Perada took it “Perada Rosselin,” she said; and added, prompted by what impulse she wasn’t sure, “My friends call me ’Rada.”
Tillijen gave the other woman a curious look. “So what was the concert in honor of?”
“Our sudden departure,” Nannla said. “And our new guest.”
“I didn’t have time to ask, before,” Perada said. “Where are we supposed to be going?”
I hope I haven’t miscalculated everything, she thought. If it turns out I’m being kidnapped instead of rescued, Ser Hafrey is never going to let me forget about it.
Ferrda rumbled something short. Tillijen shrugged.
“We’ll find out soon enough,” Nannla said. “When the captain tells us.”
The door leading from the common room to the forward areas opened with a snick and a thud. Perada turned toward the sound, and saw the door sliding closed again behind Jos Metadi and Errec Ransome. Errec headed into the galley and emerged with two cups of cha’a. Metadi took one of them and slid into a seat at the mess table. Ransome remained standing, cup in hand—nobody at the table looked surprised or offended, so Perada guessed that the practice was customary with him.
“So, Captain,” said Nannla, after the two men had settled themselves. “What’s the good word?”
Jos took a long swallow of his cha’a. “The good word is, we’re on our way to Ophel.”
She stared at him. “Ophel? Are you crazy? We were just
at
Ophel. We stole a bunch of stuff from there, and we blew up everything that we couldn’t steal—do you think we’re going to be welcome?”
“I thought you and Tilly might be wanting to go back,” Jos said. “Because we’ll be going to Entibor soon, and, you know …”
He made a vague gesture with one hand that Perada didn’t have any trouble interpreting:
Let’s not talk about it in front of the passenger.
Nannla shrugged, and the discussion might have ended on that ambiguous note—if Tillijen hadn’t half-risen in her seat, her pale eyes bright with indignation.
“Is that how it is, Captain?” she demanded. “When things get interesting, you want to jettison us?”
Metadi shook his head. “That’s not it,” he said. “I didn’t want to make the two of you uncomfortable, is all, or get you in some kind of trouble.”
“Who’s going to notice me in this rig, after all these years?” Tillijen asked.
The woman’s faint accent had gotten stronger and more familiar as she spoke—in response to stress, maybe, or to the subject matter. Strong enough to recognize, in fact. With an effort, Perada kept her reaction from showing on her face; privateers came from everywhere, after all, and what did it matter that the ’
Hammer
’
s
number-two gunner was Entiboran?
“Depends on what you mean by ‘notice,’” Metadi said. “You may not be able to get out of … social obligations.”
Tillijen laughed. “You know me, Captain. I can get out of anything.”
“It’s your call,” said Metadi. “But if you honestly don’t have a problem, I’d rather keep you and Nannla both. I’ve never seen a better pair of gunners, and that’s a fact.”
Nannla gave the captain a half-bow; hard to do from a seated position, with one hand wrapped around a cup of cha’a, but she managed. “And we’ve never seen a better captain.”
“That’s right,” said Tillijen. “So what’s the new plan—straight on to Entibor?”
“We might as well. I’m sure the Domina wants to get there as soon as possible.”
Perada looked down for a moment at her cup of cha’a.
This is it, she thought. Now’s when I find out whether I’m a passenger, a prisoner, or a—a business partner
. She looked up again, and took a deep breath.

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