Among thousands of cluttered warecaves his employers casually maintained, crammed as microgravity allows with the rejected booty of a thousand years and a billion hijacked ships, he’d found his weapon—created by an alien race no one had ever heard of before or since—a “death-ray”—in fact, a handheld industrial X-ray, apparently employed in the construction and maintenance of spacecraft. It had functioned well enough when he had tested it upon a few dozen surplus captives, doing its deadly work in utter silence, manifesting a useful range of a hundred meters, horribly killing in hours those he had aimed it at.
They’d been in a rush to have him act, violating all precedent by lending him one of the precious high-speed scouts they’d captured in their endless war with the Coordinated Arm. The little vessel had taken him to Skye—flown by one of the Aggregate officers he’d seen earlier today—in a fiftieth of the time tachyon sails would have required, then to Hanover for some tidying up there.
What a shame all their clever plans had been wasted, failing abjectly to make a visible change at all in Henry Martyn’s—Arran Islay’s—attitude or behavior.
But that was then; this was now. What Woulf had liked most about today’s work was that he had not been forced to sneak about, but did his slaughtering openly, a smile on his lips, a song in his heart. As he gutted them, the look of astonishment upon the faces of the “enemy” officers who recognized him, had been worth the risk of volunteering for the boarding party at the very last instant.
He had liked it nearly as much as what he was planning now to do with Loreanna.
“The good news ye know.” Phoebus spoke softly but without whispering. Nearly everyone aboard the Osprey, from officers to the lowliest deckhand, was aware by now that she was a deeply wounded vessel. Three hours had passed determining how deeply; Arran had still not had his breakfast nor spoken with Loreanna. “We’ve but one fatality an’ no serious casualties t’speak of—a circumstance I’d say borders upon the miraculous, were I the sort t’believe in miracles.”
Arran nodded cautiously, having a fair idea of what was coming next. He, too, had been aloft and belowdecks, inspecting his injured starship. Now he stood beside the tiller ball and binnacle, the former standing askew where it was attached to the damaged quarterdeck. At the moment they were hove to, starsails reefed, to all intents and purposes motionless, permitting Osprey to drift where she might, the nearest navigational hazard billions of klommes away.
Phoebus forced himself to continue, his accent thickest when he was most unhappy. “Well, here’s the other, then, an’ bad news it is.” He shoved huge hands deep into his pockets—among the folk he sprang from, it was a gesture of helplessness—wincing as if he felt pain for the Osprey. “The impact we took fairly destroyed the liftdeck altogether. We had t’bring the lubberlift ye stole alongside t’disembark yer boardin’ party over the taffrail. I reckon the damage below results from no fewer than three simultaneous thrusts. Had t’be accidental; the enemy hadn’t that many skilled projecteurs among his number.”
Arran nodded agreement. “That was the impression I had. I assume you secured the lift at the boatdeck. Pray continue then, and get this wake over with.”
“That weren’t the worst of it, I fear me.” The first officer cleared his throat as if he felt a need to apologize for what he had to say next. “As ye know, the foot of poor Osprey’s mast is stepped within the liftdeck. The truth is that, the mast bein’ a hollow cylinder, three full measures across at the foot, it pretty much is the liftdeck. Given the damage I saw below, I’d guess that, were we taken aback, it’d push the mast straight out, through the bottom.”
Feeling years older, himself, Arran rubbed his temples. He had reached the same conclusions as Phoebus—for who had trained him to begin with?—and, staying as tactically alert as he could (when the fireship burned itself out, the enemy might well return) he was formulating ideas for repairing the damage.
“That certainly is bad news. Why do I have a suspicion there is more to come?”
Phoebus answered him grimly. “Because, Captain, ye’ve seen everything I’ve seen. We are all lucky to be alive—if ye call this livin’. T’begin with, there’s a long, hairline fracture in the mast itself, meanin’ one I can stick me fist into, runnin’ in a lazy spiral from the liftdeck to the maintier crotch.”
“If I remember correctly,” Arran remarked, “the expression is ‘shiver me timbers.’ ”
Neither man laughed. “It’ll keep travelin’, higher an’ higher, right up to the figurehead, do we take much strain upon it gettin’ wherever we’re goin’ next.”
“Plus the usual broken spars and rigging,” Arran added to his officer’s report. Suddenly aware of how long it had been since his last sleep, he arose stiffly, determined, whatever happened, to stay upon his feet as long as he possibly could. His first duty would be to order Phoebus below for food and rest.
“Aye, plus the usual spars and rigging,” Phoebus repeated needlessly. Of a sudden, there was a crafty glint in his eye, and he spoke quickly. “I’ll take the conn, now, sir. Ye’re in need of sommat to eat and some sleep, I’ll wager. Tell me where t’go an’ I’ll see that we get there, if in a gingerly fashion.”
Arran laughed. So much for his own strength of character. “Very well, my old friend, you win. And I surrender. But, before you set any course, was I correct in assuming that we continue to carry our stolen lubberlift—which may well prove to be the silliest captured prize in the history of Deepsailing—under our proverbial wing, with all of its lengthy cabelle tidily coiled up somewhere?”
“Aye, sir, that we do, at the level of the boatdeck, as ye guessed. An’ failin’ anything better t’do with it, I had the hands wind the cabelle—all thirty thousand klommes of it—about the lubberlift itself. There is a port in the top of the contrivance that, fitted with a flexible tube, still allows us access.”
Arran nodded. “Very well. Then have them pay out our old cabelle, which cannot be in good shape after the pounding undergone by the liftdeck, and wind it, one turn laid neatly atop the previous, about the mast upon each of the decks above the damaged one, including the maindeck, and aloft to the maintier crotch.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” That had been Phoebus’s plan, as well.
Arran arose stiffly, unaware that he had sat down in the first place. “I will be awake, well before you have finished, but in case I have misestimated, when the winding has come within half a measure of the uttermost extremity of the crack, have somebody cut a perfectly circular hole in the mast, finishing the crack off in order to prevent it from traveling further. Then finish the winding.”
“Aye, sir, and then . . . ?”
“You ought to have our dorsal forespar fished; I believe we have spares, and as I say, no dearth of cabelle to do the winding. Then we will discuss what it is best to do next. Keep a sharp eye for the enemy and a crew at each projectible.”
At present, beyond such repairs as he had ordered, he had not an inkling of where they should go or what they should do. All his charts were useless; Osprey had sailed beyond their lavishly embellished margins. In her present condition, their poor vessel could not even pursue the fleeing remnants of her vanquished foe (and a good thing it was they did not know this) to whatever port they called home. He was uncertain whether his broken ship could reach a planet of whatever star was nearest. All they had to steer by were time-and pain-blurred memories of an aged madwoman who happened to be his mother-in-law.
While Phoebus hurried off to do his bidding, Arran had a word with those among his officers who fancied themselves navigators. Some, for lack of any better employment, had already been making stellar observations. The nearest system was that toward which they had been headed before the fight, the same to which his enemy had just escaped. He was interested to learn that it was composed entirely of asteroids—averaging less than a thousand klommes in diameter—and there was not a single major planet within reach of Osprey’s, instruments.
Such a phenomenon
was not altogether unique within the Deep as Arran knew it, but it was far from commonplace. The system was unusually large, as well, almost a light-year from one readily discernable edge to another. After only a moment’s consideration, he decided, at least for now, to steer his injured vessel, once she had regained some strength, toward that portion of the system furthest from the enemy’s apparent objective. She would hide there, among the rocks.
As soon as a course was laid and appropriate orders given pending repairs to the mast, Arran, not willing to face the noise and confusion the news was bound to generate, sent Mr. Suprynowicz below to explain to the passengers how Osprey had managed to drive off her assailants and escape into a nearby star system with only minimal losses to her own side. However, as his trusty comm officer would be pointing out just about now, even minimal losses are still losses.
While the Osprey had managed to inflict rather an astonishing amount of damage upon her erstwhile foe (especially given the overwhelming odds against her surviving any exchange of discourtesies at all), they would all be greatly dismayed, below, to learn from Suprynowicz that the starship had been severely injured by the fight, and that the poor, battered vessel would now be forced to seek some sort of temporary shelter in order to render herself Deep worthy again.
There would be endless fuss originating principally with three among the passengers, former ambassador, former Ceo, former right-hand henchman, used to giving orders (and who might even prefer following them rather than having patiently to endure their consequences) until they had resigned themselves to the situation.
Even that, Arran knew, would not end it. There would follow debate, far in advance of necessity, with regard to what they should do after repairs were made to the Osprey. Should they return to Hanover? Or continue their illfated—and so far futile—expedition? There was no question in Henry Martyn’s mind. He would brook no disagreement, nor hesitate to become the first captain to toss a former Ceo (to contemplate but one example) into the §-field.
Arran grinned to himself. Osprey’s liftdeck was destroyed and, with it, her facility for trash disposal. All that remained was the §-field. He had an idea how to occupy the energies of his otherwise worthless passengers in a more constructive—and instructive—manner than he had previously thought. Why throw the former Ceo into the §-field when you could enjoy the luxury of commanding him—and his overdressed colleagues—to throw the garbage out, instead?
Chuckling with satisfaction, Arran handed the conn over to a helmsman upon deck, thrust his hands into his pockets—among his people, an expression of lighthearted nonchalance—and, whistling a sprightly tune he’d learned upon Hanover, climbed down the narrow steps from gallant Osprey’s, war-splintered quarterdeck to her cluttered maindeck, and, from there, stepped into his own quarters.
CHAPTER XXXIII:
A NEGLECTED SPOUSE
Loreanna sighed.
How peculiar appearances can be, she thought to herself as she gazed out through the mullioned windows of the captain’s quarters into the apparently bottomless—and to all appearances empty—Deep presently surrounding the Osprey.
She half knelt upon the upholstered lid of a window seat, heedless of the unsightly creases it was pressing into the fabric of her dress, attempting to avoid wishing consciously that her lost daughter were here beside her to talk to. She found that she missed Bretta—and she knew that the girl would have been gratified to learn it—quite as much as an adult companion, as a daughter.
Yesterday, from half a light-year away, this planetless asteroidal system—for so it had been described to her—to which their badly broken vessel had limped so painfully in order to lick her wounds, had appeared to be a very solid and substantial thing, a bright, sparkling, lenticular disk whirling in slow motion against the velvet blackness of eternity. Yet now that they had found their way into the heart of it, there seemed to be nothing left of it at all.
Loreanna was perfectly aware, of course, of all the scientific reasons for such an impression. It was all a matter of perspective. Viewed from half a light-year away, each of those millions of points of light blended into one vast, beautiful shape, brightest at its center like any solar system, divided by conflicting forces of gravity within it into colossal multicolored bands exactly like those that comprised the moonrings of her beloved homeworld, Skye.
Viewed from within itself, this system—millions of tumbling stones varying in physical magnitude from the minute to the gigantic, and averaging a thousand klommes’ distance from one another—seemed not to exist at all. As the Osprey hung well inside the outer boundary of the system, Loreanna knew that did she but cross the diameter of the starship and gaze out through identical bevel-edged windows gracing the quarters occupied by Phoebus and his wives, she would discern a hazy band of light lying across the sky, but that it would bear next to no resemblance to the splendid disk she had seen the day before.
Upon the other hand, at least in terms of the instrumental limitations of the day, the basically unsurveyable distances involved, and the sheer number of objects that must be minutely scrutinized, the Osprey was as well hidden among the acrobatic boulders of this odd system as any wild Skyan tuskporker lurking in deep cover. Surely that was well worth giving up a splendid vista for. They could be hove to within only a few minutes’ sailing of the enemy’s greatest strength—instead of the entire diameter of this system, as they presently reckoned themselves to be—and neither see them nor be seen by them.
Nevertheless, it struck Loreanna as extraordinarily peculiar that they should consider themselves concealed, hanging nakedly out here in the Deep as they happened to be at the moment. At the least, she thought, they ought to have moored themselves to one of these floating monoliths—not one of which had she so far seen as anything more than another little star in an impossibly star-filled firmament—hauled in and huddled close beside it, if that proved necessary, pretending to be a part of it. Although she trusted the tactical judgment of her husband and his formidable and accomplished first mate, the entire matter flew straight into the face of common sense. But then, so did most of the facts of a presumably objective reality, in particular all those associated with traveling through the Deep, did one but examine them closely enough.
The odd thought suddenly struck her that they might not be the only ones in hiding out here. It was quite impossible to tell, and no one would ever know: there might very well be millions of similar refugees similarly hove to within this system, concealing themselves among an equal number of its “flying mountains.”
Loreanna had neither seen nor spoken with her husband—nor even with Phoebus, for that matter (there were moments when the expression “first mate” felt more than a bit ironic to her)—for more than a hundred hours. Since they had set course for this system, both men had labored ceaselessly—and as strenuously as the crews that they drove—first to hold the poor Osprey together, for she was a horribly wounded vessel, then to try and heal her many injuries.
Overhead, upon the surface of the quarterdeck that served these chambers for a roof, she could hear members of the battlewatch pacing back and forth. All the while their weary shipmates drudged and strained at spars, lines, and cabelles, these crewbeings, the worst hurt in the recent clash, were charged with keeping a wary eye out for more of the marauding slave-raiders. She had heard that Phoebus was keeping all projectibles fully manned belowdecks, as well.
All of this meant that for many of the noncombatants aboard the Osprey, an unusually hectic period had ensued. It made Loreanna very angry to be left out of things when she knew the ship so well and they were as shorthanded as this.
What injured and disturbed Loreanna most was that, upon many a previous adventure—that frightful business last year of the “quantum leapfrog,” for example—she had been accepted as her husband’s full partner, sharing all of the risks, bearing her fair share of the hardships. She could not imagine why Arran saw fit to limit her now, in such a manner, when he had never done so before
.
For the sake of their survival, above everything else they must return the Osprey as rapidly as they could to her former fighting condition. Even some of the ship’s passengers, supernumeraries whom Loreanna had long since grown accustomed to thinking of as completely useless, had been recruited by her husband or his officers to assist in the struggle to repair the damaged vessel.
It turned out, for instance, that the former Ceo Leupould himself had been considered a first-rate yachtsman in his youth, racing small ships from point to arbitrary point within the confines of the Hanoverian system against the grown-up children of wealthier and more powerful families than he had come from.
Even the foppish former ambassador, Frantisek Demondion-Echeverria, had once commanded a small, armed, single-tiered sloop-of-war, boasting of perhaps nine projectibles, helping patrol the frigid outermost frontier of the Jendyne home system he had later represented as an interstellar diplomat. Service of this kind was required of anyone who sought higher office within the Empery-Cirot.
Thus, with the dubious assistance of these oddly assorted companions in misadventure, a greatly preoccupied Arran and the indefatigable Phoebus had begun laboriously to set their broken ship to rights. Just now, they were either aloft somewhere, pretending to be regular crewbeings, or deep within the hull of the hurt vessel, doing what they could about her battle-smashed liftdeck.
Loreanna, meanwhile, had found herself left to herself for too many long stretches of time. Although perfectly capable within her own milieu, there was little here usefully to occupy her hands or mind, and it was all that she could do to keep from plummeting into a state of paralyzed mourning over the most tragic loss any parent can suffer. Why was it that men invariably—and so utterly selfishly—reserved all of the most reliable distractions for themselves?
If poor Bretta had only lived, she and Loreanna might well have put up a united front, demanding and receiving their rightful portion of the vessel’s duties. However, as it was, ever since the girl’s disappearance and presumed death (there must be something unlucky about the name Robret, Loreanna thought for a moment, then chided herself for having given rise to such a superstitious thought) she had experienced a considerable difficulty feeling any enthusiasm for anything, let alone continuing the human female’s endless struggle against irrational societal conventions that had occupied so much of her previous existence.
Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn Page 35