Loreanna was furious.
The formal charges were as perfunctory and ridiculous in character as it had been possible to make them, and it was clear that even the bored, unshaven ruffians, in their soiled, ill-fitting rental uniforms, who had delivered the autothille to her did not believe a word of them. The entire situation had been carefully calculated, without a doubt by bitter and long-standing foes of the Daimler-Wilkinsons, the Islays, or perhaps even the Wheelers, merely as an insult. Great men—and women—tend to attract great enemies. The only thing more absurd than the charges themselves—if such a thing was possible—was the attempt to arrest Loreanna at her family’s home in the capital city.
Nevertheless, the document claimed, for some fifteen years, as a citizeness and subject of the Monopolity of Hanover, one Loreanna Daimler-Wilkinson had willingly given “aid and comfort” to a known and self-declared enemy—that would be her husband and the father of her six children—of the imperium-conglomerate.
“Aid and comfort,” indeed!
Loreanna paced the decoratively tiled floor of the foyer, which she had become determined to hold against intruders like a castle keep. In her left hand, she gripped a thrustible that she had yet to strap to her forearm. With her fingers clenched round the long, brightly polished axis of the weapon, the arm and wrist straps flailed whenever she moved, like the thongs of a whip. She had not, however, similarly forgotten the pistol in the pocket of her dress.
When those unkempt louts had first appeared upon her doorstep, enveloping her in the cloud of alcoholic exhalations that accompanied them everywhere, she had surprised their leader (and herself) by giving him a good, solid shove in the solar plexus, sending the fellow tumbling, literally head over heels, down the seven-stepped stoop, onto the pavement. As a girl, she had seen the same thing done by her uncle to a salesman who refused to go away when Brougham had asked him to politely. Their forebears, Sedgeley had told her afterward, had ordered the top step of the stoop fashioned narrowly for exactly this purpose. Salesbeings were expected to apply at a side door, which opened onto a blank brick wall.
While this short-lived excitement had been going on, Loreanna learned afterward, her mother had somehow persuaded Arran’s surveillors to let her know where Bretta and Woulf were. (Loreanna would not previously have wagered a milliclavis upon Jennivere’s ability to tie her own nightgown strings in an emergency.) She had apparently contacted them and they were coming now. Loreanna hoped they would have the good sense to stay clear of the hoodlums outside.
She also hoped they would contact Arran, and that he would soon arrive with Phoebus and perhaps even representation from Lia. She was certain these charges did not originate with the Hanoverian government. In the Monopolity, however, despite the most strenuous efforts upon Lia’s part to discourage it, torture continued as an art form practiced by the aristocracy. Loreanna knew that if she let herself be taken off by these hireling guttersnipes, she would be systematically, scientifically maimed in some hidden basement, by experts who were maintained in luxury by their patrons, the way painters and sculptors once were, until she confessed to the trumped-up charges or died resisting the impulse.
She had borne six children well enough without recourse to drugs, but she was uncertain how much unnatural pain it would be possible for her to withstand.
For once she was almost grateful that going about armed upon Hanover was a privilege of a wealthy and powerful elite. Even the Monopolitan police—invariably recruited from among the lower classes—not to mention goons like these encroaching upon her doorstep, were forbidden the use of thrustibles or other weapons, powered or otherwise, and were forced to rely upon muscle power alone. Clearly they had not expected her to be able, and willing, to defend herself. The fact that she possessed the means of self-defense (and, like the rest of her family, would have, regardless of what law or custom demanded) was something they had not taken into account. Perhaps it would buy her time she needed.
There came another pounding at the door, for perhaps the fifth time in an hour, and a rudely corresponding rattle at the doorknob. What effrontery, she thought. She strapped on her thrustible, adjusted the knurled collar of the collimator for minimum thrust at maximum dispersion, aimed for the doorknob, and squeezed the yoke, delighted to hear a howl of pain from the idiot hanging on to the other side of the knob. Next, she heard a series of seven dull thuds as the same idiot became a victim of her ancestors’ sense of architectural humor.
With any luck, he had broken his neck.
They groped their way through sheet after dusty, musty-smelling sheet of cobwebs within the unlit garden tunnel into the basement. More of a gentleman than either of them had suspected he might be, Woulf had squeezed past her and preceded—before them, he shone a tiny electrical torch no bigger than her little fingernail, which had been hidden inside the hollow handle of his knife—through a warped tube of timeworn bricks oozing with nitre, gleaming in the lamplight.
The notion came to Bretta, as she followed with her weapons at the ready, that Woulf’s rough urban background differed greatly from her own childhood. Yet he seemed much more like the Skyan boys she was accustomed to than anyone else she had encountered upon this vaunted capital planet. She had discovered that she was having difficulty remembering that the individual in question was in fact her mother’s half brother. Then again, she had found it impossible to think of Owld Jenn as her grandmother. More and more she wished she had never had occasion to meet the irrational, unpleasant old woman. But “Uncle Woulf”—somehow this phrase piped falsely whenever she thought about it. Of course the fact that he was a dark, smooth-skinned, muscular young man of about eighteen or twenty, with regular features and a wicked eye, had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Absolutely nothing.
Woulf’s tiny torch, in fact, lit very little round it. The further they went, and the more damp cobwebs they accumulated in their hair and upon their faces and clothing (how she longed for rough-and-ready attire of the kind—perhaps excluding shorts—she had been accustomed to all her life upon her native world!) the larger grew the spiders skittering through Bretta’s nervous imagination.
Despite her better judgment, Woulf had begun to intrigue her the longer she compared him with Hanoverians. The young fellow was fully as city-bred in his own peculiar manner as her great uncle. Yet he was without question very different in countless ways from the elderly, charming, urbane, witty, but—at least in Bretta’s view—neither very masculine nor very admirable Sedgeley.
Woulf was no prancing sissy like those she saw all round her. She was embarrassed by their recent, trendy affectations to her father’s youthful profession, and several times she had caught Woulf attempting to conceal his own expression of contemptuous disgust. This seemed to happen whenever they came face-to-face with some egregious example of Hanoverian foppishness. They would catch each other’s eye and laugh, while passing strangers looked at them oddly.
At long last, they reached the end of the tunnel. To their dismay they found no door—it might have been worse: they might have found yet another brick wall—but a thick, age-darkened expanse of the local hardwood that colonists, new to Hanover a millennium ago, had decided to call “oak.” Their eyes and knives and fingers found no hidden catch or hinges. The thing appeared to have been nailed into place. Woulf had to kick at the heavy panel again and again, raising clouds of moldy-smelling dust that choked and blinded them, and there was no room in the passage in which Bretta might lend him her assistance
She was surprised when the wooden wall gave way of a sudden, and made a mental note to avoid getting upon Woulf’s bad side. They made their way through the splintered doorframe—and their own personal cloud of dust—into the mansion’s enormous cellar. Bretta felt a trifle guilty about the havoc they had wrought. This was not some dark, dank subterranean recess, not in any house kept by Brougham and his staff, but a warm, dry, relatively welllit space for storing various foodstuffs and supplies. The stone floor was even,
the walls sealed and whitewashed, and there were no vermin. They might have made a fine meal, down here, of what they could find sitting upon the shelves.
This was not the first time that either of them had ventured into such a place. Woulf was unaware of it—at least she hoped that he was—but in the weeks since he had first begun escorting her out into the city, upon more than one occasion she had followed him and watched from hiding as, deep within one of the mansion’s many cellars like this one, the young barbarian warrior had practiced strenuous martial exercises for hours without resting, or thrown one improvised bull’s-eye after another with the massive knife he carried at all times. Afterward, she had watched him honing its razor edges with a hard white stone. Unlike the overly sophisticated innocents all round her, Bretta had recognized at once the stark significance of the long, heavy black slab of heat-treated steel he wore upon his hip. In his hands, it was as if the great edged weapon were nothing more than a toy dart that he had taken from a pub somewhere.
Bretta found herself wondering whether he might ever have killed anybody with that big knife of his, perhaps in order to save his own or his mother’s life. Rather like her father, Woulf appeared to be uneager to volunteer such information, and she had been brought up with a strong disinclination to ask. She also wondered how and where he had planned to carry it if the tailor had been permitted to finish him a suit of clothes. But she discovered, to her self-embarrassment, that although she had been well trained in the use of primitive weapons herself, the idea that he might have killed with it aroused her.
She might have to talk with her mother about that. More than likely, Loreanna would tell her, matter-of-factly, that, just as men were inclined to prefer young, pretty women—”pretty” representing an estimate of a female’s reproductive health—so a woman tended to be attracted to that male with a demonstrated capability of defending his mate, their offspring, and the family cave. Anyone offended by such a basic, visceral fact was probably unfit to reproduce.
Finding their way as quickly as they could, upward through the building’s underpinnings, they hurried through rooms and down corridors, always heading toward the entrance foyer at the front door where they expected the most trouble.
They were proven correct. As they slammed into the entry way, Loreanna whirled. Her eyes grew wide but her jaw was firm and the set of her mouth was positively grim of purpose. She did not recognize them, but aimed both pistol and thrustible at them. Bretta saw red light from the thrustible’s designator and knew she would be the one to absorb the brunt of the weapon’s pure kinetic energy, while her mother’s antique Walther stitched Woulf’s body like a rag doll. If everyone in ancient times had been able to thrust—no, the proper word was “shoot”—like Loreanna Islay, mankind would never have given up firearms.
“Mother, no!”
Woulf, covered unrecognizably from head to foot in a filthy shroud of cobwebs, and waving his long black knife, came to an immediate halt. Bretta crashed into the back of him and barely avoided stabbing him with her own fighting blade. Sliding, instead, she knocked his legs from under him. He slipped upon the tiled floor, somehow landing atop Bretta who had fallen just behind him.
“It’s only us!”
In the meantime, old Jennivere had suddenly materialized from nowhere and seized Loreanna’s elbow, attempting to push her thrustible upward. “Do not thrust my boy!” she cried, but her quivery voice was drowned out by a great thundering crash as the heavy front door was smashed inward, the fragments nearly hitting Loreanna. Upon the threshold just outside, beside a kneeling figure manipulating whatever device had been used to shatter the door, stood a pair of ill-uniformed hoodlums, improvised truncheons raised high over their heads.
One of these thugs leaned in to strike Bretta’s mother a killing blow to the back of her head, but reeled backward himself an instant before he could connect, crashing against the broken doorpost as if he had been struck by an invisible vehicle. Blood streamed freely from his mouth as he slid down the wall. From where she lay, Loreanna’s daughter had thrust the invader nearly through.
The second hireling made a similar attempt, but there was a dark blur in the air between him and the foyer floor, and he stood, abruptly, staring down in astonishment at the middle of his torso, where it appeared that a knurled blue-gray metal handle had blossomed. Woulf’s laborious practice sessions in the cellar had fulfilled their purpose. A great length of razor-sharpened steel now impaled the invader like an insectoid in a collection. He toppled forward and landed across the threshold with a thump, his shirt standing in a peak high above his shoulder blades like a tent. Bretta could only imagine (feeling ill as she did) what falling upon the handle of the knife had done to him.
Woulf was back upon his feet within an instant and, with a sucking noise, recovered his weapon, cleansing its blade upon his victim’s clothing. He had pulled the second body inside while making sure the first had fallen down the stoop, and was about to secure what was left of the door when Bretta got in his way. The technician she had briefly seen had vanished, but he had left his infernal device upon the stoop. As she retrieved the object, she saw at least a hundred men outside upon the street, apparently milling about in confusion.
She let Woulf slam the door then, and helped him brace it with the foyer coatrack.
“Well,” he observed, “at least that is over with!” Of a sudden, the young man discovered that he was completely covered with a solid blanket of cobwebbery and other filth. Making noises to articulate his disgust, he tried to wipe the stuff off, which only served to pass it from one hand to the other.
Bretta stifled a giggle and a feeling of euphoric hysteria which she was certain must be mostly a nervous reaction to having been in a real fight for the first time in her life, and having killed a man—but Woulf did look very funny.
“I am afraid that you are wrong,” Loreanna told him, wiping splattered blood from her face, “although I am more than proud of both of you and very grateful into the bargain. My eldest daughter and my newfound brother have together saved my life. But Woulf, my dear, I greatly fear that this is only the beginning.”
They were startled by a noise.
In a foyer corner, Owld Jenn drooled and cackled.
CHAPTER XXII:
THE SHADOWS BETWEEN THE STARS
Bretta I slay moved like a shadow through the quiet lower spaces of the Osprey.
All she really sought here, belowdecks, was blessed solitude. And yet, although the places she explored during this period reserved for sleeping—termed, for the sake of everyone’s convenience, the “nightwatch”—were as familiar to her as her own bedchamber back at home, they always remained new to her. She adored the way they felt to her, the way they looked, and especially the way they smelled. It was only one of the ways she knew she was in love with her father’s ship: her fascination with the Osprey never faded.
A continuous inspection of the smallest recesses belowdecks was a stark necessity of survival upon the interstellar Deep, and not only because vessels wore themselves out or people grew lax. Despite bitter cold and hard vacuum, there was a surprising number of vile things that spawned and grew and bred within the darkest shadows between the stars which, attaching themselves to any passing, ill-kept starship, were likely to feed upon her, or upon her crewbeings.
Although Bretta’s desire was sincere, to assure herself, as a responsible crewbeing and member of the Ceo’s expedition, that everything was as it ought to be aboard the Osprey, she also relished the opportunity to climb out of her stifling Hanoverian garments and get back into the vest and cutoffs she wore at home. No absurdly pleated, lace-trimmed velvet sleeve concealed her thrustible now, where its engraved and polished axis gleamed upon her forearm in the lamplight. Her trusty hunting knife slapped openly against her naked thigh.
A very great deal had happened over the past 107 days, with little time or space (a peculiar but genuine necessity, she had discovered) in which to subject it to the full reflection t
hat it merited, and she had much to think upon.
To begin with, Bretta had killed a man, another human being, when she, Woulf, and her mother had held the arresting minions at bay while help was being summoned in a rather roundabout manner—thanks to Fionaleigh Savage aboard the orbiting corvette—from the ’Droom. Within only a few minutes, Bretta’s father and Phoebus Krumm had come swerving and swooping up the boulevard, each of them hanging from an open door of the vehicle they had commandeered, thrusting enthusiastically at a startled and demoralized enemy who had broken at the sight of the two Deep-captains bearing down upon them, and cravenly scattered. Uncle Sedgeley had made the only live capture of the day, adroitly employing his own thrustible to break the leg of an escaping villain.
Otherwise, eight disanimated bodies lay upon the pavement before the house.
Unfortunately, their single captive had proven to be nothing more than a drunken hooligan hired straight out of an alcohol emporium, and possessed not the least scrap of information useful to them, although it made Bretta shudder to imagine how, precisely, that fact had been ascertained with any degree of assurance. Somewhat to her surprise, any amount of remorse or of emotional distress she was supposed to have suffered upon having successfully defended herself, her mother, and their ancestral home had so far failed utterly to manifest itself.
Halfway down a ladderway, Bretta paused in her ruminations. Within its special niche, a ship’s glowlamp had apparently gone out, a rare occurrence aboard a vessel of this type and vintage. Opening its transparent case upon reluctant hinges, she found that the lamp’s core had rattled loose somehow from its connection to the meshfed power supply. Tightening it carefully until it glowed once again, she closed the case, turned the catch, and moved on.
Eventually, the matter of Loreanna’s putative “crimes” of treason against the Monopolity had been settled when it was discovered that the arrest warrant displayed the electronic signature of a Hanoverian colonial magistrate who had never set a foot upon the capital planet, and had been deceased, according to the outraged Ceo Lia who had inherited him from her father, for at least three years.
Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn Page 21