The Phoenix in Flight (52 page)

Greywing watched, amazed. Ivard had never shown anyone but
her his single prize, the only thing he treasured.

Her gaze shifted from the gold-and-silver-striped raw-silk
ribbon to Brandon’s face as he took it from Ivard, and though his expression
did not change, all the muscles in his face tightened.

“You know what this is?” Brandon asked, his fingers closing
over the ribbon.

Greywing watched him grip the highly prized Piloting Award,
an award given out only at the Minerva Naval Academy. The neatly embossed
printing displayed the year that Markham and the Krysarch had been thrown out.

Ivard swallowed, his larynx moving in his skinny neck. “He
told me when he gave it to me. Told me once about some of the stunts you two
pulled.” His eyes narrowed in pleasure. “Gave it to me when we squeaked out of
a bad one. I helped by something I did with a scout craft. He told me I would
have won it myself if I’d gone to the Academy.” Longing quirked Ivard’s almost
invisible brows. “He was teaching me.”

Brandon laid the ribbon back in Ivard’s hand, and Ivard
stuffed it back into his chest pocket.

“How’d you find your way into his crew?” Brandon asked.
Ivard’s pale skin flushed.

“We’re bond-breakers,” Ivard said, and his sister hoped that
this Arkad nick heard the pride in his voice. “Me and Greywing. That’s why she
picked a new name, see? I was bonded over to a mining combine right after I
turned ten, and after I’d had enough of beatings and crawling through pipes I
ran away. Lived as a thief, until Greywing found me. She’d run, too.”

“On a planet? A ship?”

“No. No ship.” Ivard shook his head.

“How’d you find your way off-planet?” Brandon’s voice
sounded interested, even sympathetic.

Greywing had stopped trusting nicks long before she and
Ivard had left their home planet, and if she had been alone she would have
warned her brother not to blab. But they were not alone—
And
if Ivard
doesn’t know what I think about blabbing now, he never will.

She waited fatalistically to see how much he betrayed to
this smiling, blank-eyed Douloi.

Ivard said, “I really wanted to fly, all along.” His face
lifted, as if toward the sky, a gesture that immediately identified a born Downsider,
Greywing had learned. “That’s why I kept my name, Ivard. You ever see
The
Invisibles
? Markham had all these chips. There was one when the Invisible
discovered this boy pilot. His name was Ivard.”

Greywing watched narrowly, reading to intervene if the Arkad
made the slightest noise about chips, or
The Invisibles
, or anything
else. But Brandon Arkad just sat there.

Ivard said, “Anyway, we joined a gang, and Trev—he was our
leader—had a cousin who’d gone with a Rifter crew. When they landed he got us
in with them.” Ivard grinned. “Captain was a Shiidra’s blungehole, which is why
he always needed more crew. But it got us off-planet, and I learned plenty
while servin’ as a scrub-slub.
Watched
everything, especially the
command crew. Loved the numbers on the screens.” He paused, his gaze far away.
“At first it was fun not to know what they meant. Then I started figuring what
they meant. I could, oh, see ’em.” His fingers formed a loose circle. “In four
dimensions. Then captain found out what I was doin’ and brigged me for it.
Jumped ship soon’s we reached Rifthaven. Couple more bad hitches, then we got
hiked by that slime-spitter Jakarr. But we liked the rest of the gang, so we
stayed on.” He shrugged awkwardly, looking embarrassed as he stole a glance at
his sister. “I know I yak a lot.”

“How about the rest of the crew?” Brandon asked. “Where did
they come from?”

Ivard’s blush darkened to crimson. As he struggled for
words, Greywing said quickly, “Isn’t done. They want to talk about themselves,
you ask them.”

Brandon looked her way as Ivard gave a jerky, grateful nod.
“With
us
anyway. Some outfits, captain wants to know. Markham said a
person’s character and skills, not past mistakes, should sync ’em in or not.”

“Markham talked about his past, though, didn’t he?” Brandon
asked.

“A little. We all knew where he came from. He talked nick,
same’s Montrose, and sometimes Lokri when he’s—”

Ivard stopped when an urgent bell-tone interrupted them. A
surge of emotion burned through Greywing’s nerves: they were just about to
emerge into realtime over the Krysarch’s planet—the Mandala.

“Time to go to the bridge,” she said.

As they ran, Greywing understood by the furtive glance Ivard
cut her way that he was scared she was angry. He
knew
she didn’t like
him talking about their past.
As well there are some things he doesn’t know,
and isn’t going to,
she thought grimly, remembering what she’d had to do to
get away—and again to rescue him.

Shaking off memory, and the anger that came with memory, she
made straight toward her pod and hit the control to light it. As her fingers
tapped out an automatic status check, she tracked Brandon, who moved to the
empty fire-control pod and then just stood there, staring down at the console.
Greywing wondered what he was thinking. Would he see that the
Telvarna
had
a lot more firepower than most ships its size, and had obviously been refitted
fairly recently? Did he recognize Markham’s as the hand and mind behind the
redesign?

Marim got up from her pod and sauntered near. “What’s the
matter, you lost?”

Brandon tensed, his brow furrowed as if he was trying to
remember where he was, and who with.
He’s fighting his own shades,
Greywing
thought, feeling a curious sense of satisfaction in that.

Then he gave Marim that polite nothing-smile. “On the
contrary. I think I could run it blind.”

Vi’ya sat down in the captain’s pod.

Marim leaned on Brandon’s console. “Markham was Fire Control
before he took over. Told us what we’d had was as modern and quick as a
pre-Hegemonist surveyor craft. Had this rewired to his own specs. Pretty, eh?”

“Yes—”

The emergence signal sounded, and Brandon dropped into his
seat. Marim hopped back to her own pod and scanned her board.

Vi’ya spoke. “We’ll make a peaceful approach to your
Arthelion. Relay the field ID to Ivard, echo to Lokri. Lokri, reactivate the
transponder, original registry, charter status, auto-query for landing at the
field the Arkad specifies.”

The screens cleared from skip and Arthelion appeared, remote
and lovely, just as it had appeared in countless holos—as
it looked in my
dreams.
Greywing felt a frisson of... what? Trepidation? Longing? She hated
remembering how she’d planned to escape to the Mandala in order to get justice
for those at home who didn’t, or couldn’t, escape.

Vi’ya’s fingers moved on her console, and the screen
shimmered to a close-up. The Krysarch gazed up at the viewscreen, his
straight-shouldered figure tense.

Ivard hissed in a breath, and when he caught Greywing’s eye,
he pointed at the screen, which showed now a gentle sprinkling of clouds
covering the archipelago wherein lay the Palace Major.

“The Mandala.” Ivard’s said, his voice was high with awe and
fear. “We can’t land there.”

“Why not? Just a dirtball like any other.” Marim stretched
her arms up over her head and crackled her knuckles. But Greywing heard the
forced bravado in her voice.

“The Magisterium has done its job well,” Lokri drawled, at
his most hateful. “When every fool believes in all that nonsense about
the
Mandala,
the nicks are more protected by legend than by mere weapons.”

Ivard reacted like he’d been hit. Furious, Greywing
considered just what she could say to strike at Lokri with equal force. But
then the comtech spoke again—as if he hadn’t said anything of importance,
“Incoming query.”

Lokri’s console twittered for a moment, then bleeped.
“Message incoming.” He tapped a key and the comm came to life.

“YST 8740
Maiden’s Dream
, no system pass. Stand by.”

Vi’ya had directed Ivard to use one of the system’s lesser fivespace
attractors for final approach, bypassing the checkpoint at the lagging major Trojan, as was the Unalterable right of any ship that cared to spend the extra fuel and nav effort.

The comm came back to life. “YST 8740
Maiden's Dream
cleared for
approach. Query transfer to near orbit: fast or slow?”

Vi’ya tabbed her console. “Fast. Standard contract
accepted.”

“Stand by for orbital insertion. Estimated time to orbit,
12.5 minutes.”

Lokri lifted his head. “Never’ve had to pay to land or
leave, have you, Arkad?”

Brandon gave him a look of mild surprise.
He’s humoring
Lokri,
Greywing thought.
Like you would a bad-tempered child.

Greywing saw her brother about to ask a question. “Well, we
do,” she said to Ivard—to keep Lokri from baiting him. “If we don’t pay for the
ride through the resonance field to high orbit, they can sell the ship out from
under us.” She waited for the Arkad to say,
Of course we wouldn’t sell
anyone’s ship out from under them,
but he didn’t. His expression was still
curious, as if he were on tour and not going home.

There was no sense of acceleration as the lunar-based
tractor seized the ship in a modified geeplane field and accelerated it at
hundreds of gravities toward Arthelion.

“Maiden’s Dream?”
Brandon said presently.

Marim snorted a laugh. “Don’t know what the owner before had
in mind, but I say it’s ’cause it’s long and lean and real good at slipping in
and out of tight places.” She hooted at her own joke, and Ivard turned red and
snickered.

One way to get him to stop looking like a squashed
timtwee,
Greywing thought.
Jokes about sex.
In the last year or so any
mention of sex was funny to Ivard. Did that mean he was ready to bunny?
By
the time I was his age, I already knew it wasn’t any joke.
Greywing
squashed the distraction of memory.

“We got lots of names for
Telvarna,”
Marim went on,
“but that’s the safest one t’use around the nicks, ’cause it’s the only
registered one.”

“We’ve never used it as long as I’ve been around,” said
Lokri. “So we’re just another vessel, coming in nice and polite, on lawful
business.”

“Long’s they don’t ask us what that business is,” Greywing
replied, giving Brandon a doubtful look.

He lifted his hands. “I doubt they will. The field’s only
used by charter vessels—it’s generally understood that most traffic is
high-level incognito. Perfect for us. If we need it, I have a Royal override,
but I think it would be better not to use it if we don’t have to.”

They fell silent, watching the planet slowly grow larger in
the viewscreen. Vi’ya began running a series of checks through each of the
consoles on the bridge, keeping the crew busy.

Finally the com spoke again. “Tractor disengaged. Prepare
for course download. Wait for further instructions after orbit acquisition.”

There was a brief squeal of code before the sound cut off.
“It’s all yours, Ivard.”

Ivard glanced anxiously at Vi’ya, who gave him a confirming
nod. Then he stabbed at a keypad. “Course locked in and executing.”

Marim looked perplexed. “Feels awful weird turning over the
Telvarna
to some machine.”

“Panarchists won’t have it any other way,” said Vi’ya,
“especially here, at the center of their power. There are no doubt heavy
weapons tracking us at this moment, set to trigger on any deviation.”

The others looked at Brandon, who motioned assent with a
gesture. “There hasn’t been an accident for over a century,” he said.

“Makes me feel
real
good,” Marim cracked.

“Would they really zap an innocent ship?” Ivard looked
amazed.

“Innocent ship?” Marim hooted, looking around with wide
eyes. “Where?”

Ivard hunched his head down like a timtwee again and Brandon
spoke quickly, as if to protect Ivard from Marim’s derision. “Marim’s right,
Ivard, though not the way she means. A ship can do an awful lot of damage to a
planet—not to mention the Syncs— even without bad intentions.”

Had the Arkad really done that out of kindness? Greywing
considered Brandon. “Think of it this way, Ivard,” she said to her brother.
“Telvarna
masses maybe twenty thousand tons. Escape velocity for Arthelion would be
over eleven kilometers a second...”

Ivard’s eyes widened, his innate grasp of spatial relationships
and the physics of spaceflight suddenly making the situation quite clear.

Now the planet was rapidly swelling on-screen, the
Highdweller Communities forming a delicate necklace of light around it. A
scattering of other lights indicated other ships in orbit.

When Greywing saw an anomaly on her screen, she hit a tab
that windowed up a magnified view of one of the dots of light along their
course on the main viewscreen. The familiar egg-shape of a battlecruiser took
form, its numerous protrusions of weapons and sensors a mere fuzziness at this
distance.

Greywing gritted her teeth against letting any sound escape.
She turned to Vi’ya for orders.

Marim sat back with her arms crossed and one foot propped on
her console. “Sure feels strange not to be running from that chatzer.”

Only Lokri laughed.

o0o

Brandon felt the crew’s tension in their silence. He knew he
contributed to it, try as he might to hide his extreme ambivalence. Duty had
forced him toward Ares. He’d found himself unexpectedly reprieved, though at
the cost of Lenic Deralze’s life. Now duty drew him back full circle, for
someone must report that attack on Charvann directly to the Mandala and convey
the Heart of Kronos to safety.

Only what was that about Ivory, and plots?

The others either hadn’t heard Deralze, or dismissed his
words as the hallucinatory mumblings of a dying man. Their tension probably
arose out of coming to terms with the reality of the Mandala, which centuries
of legend and tradition, carefully nurtured by the Magisterium and the College
of Archetype and Ritual, had endowed with a mystical hold on the imaginations
of all the peoples of the Thousand Suns. Even Lokri, despite his words, stared
with unblinking gaze at the planet looming larger every moment.