In any event, there was little to give her new friends such an idea, and much to discourage it, whereas she had grown up haunted by the images of war-steeds.
It was hard to say, but she believed Rakush had come to a halt, relative to the many objects tumbling through the Deep about them. Peering through her §-speculum, she watched the outer margin of his §-field—it was the first time she had observed it from within—as he ingested an otherwise invisible cloud of vapor that local gravity had temporarily gathered together at this spot. Kombi had spoken with her about this very thing. It was ill discipline to let him graze at will like this. He—and all his fellow lamina—would take advantage of a novice handler if they believed they could get away with it. With her knees, she urged Rakush back around in the direction she guessed (for it was only that) that their home asteroid lay in, relying upon him—and upon the healthy appetite he had just manifested—to perform the detailed navigation.
Bretta’s basic plan—provided she survived this first excursion—was to create a kind of Deep-going “light cavalry” to gather equipment and supplies necessary to cobble thousands of derelict spacecraft the fugitives had stolen into a gigantic sailing raft. Having assembled it, they would use the lamina to tow it far beyond the limits of the Aggregate’s instrumentation. Then, in the comparative safety of the Great Deep, they would raise its §-fields and unfurl its sails—which were the real detection problem—and make for the Monopolity.
By “gather equipment and supplies,” Bretta meant to take what she wanted by force from thousands of slaver outposts scattered throughout this system, although before this, understandably, the escapees had tended to avoid them. When her hosts had objected to this aspect of her idea, she had conceded that it established a definite “window.” The Aggregate would no longer leave them alone once they had begun to make a nuisance of themselves. But this was all the more reason, she had argued, to start implementing her plan as quickly as possible.
Bretta privately believed she could ultimately bring an end to the Oplyte Trade. She was certain the Ceo Lia would dispatch an overwhelming punitive fleet to the Vouhat-Letsomo System the very instant she learned what was going on here—had been going on the better part of a millennium—perhaps even enlisting the military assistance of the other imperia-conglomerate. Upon the clean face of the open Deep, the Aggregate would lose any military advantage heretofore afforded by their mindless warrior-slave hordes. The horror and misery that her new friends had endured would never happen again, to anybody else. That might be small comfort to them, but it was all she had to offer at present.
Privately again, she understood that this established a second window: how long before the weakest spirit among these pitiable creatures persuaded himself, for the “good” of his fellows, to betray her to the Oplyte Traders? One legend that had survived a millennium of isolation from humankind’s native planet was that of Joanov Ark, a famous martyr whom Bretta had no intention of emulating.
It was then that she discovered another, more fundamental objection among her friends, to which she had lacked as easy an answer as she had had to the first. Bretta had already grown accustomed to the grotesquely distorted folk around her. Some were tiny—Tarrant was one of these—although they all had normal-sized heads, hands, and feet. A few among them were giants, three measures tall or greater. Most possessed the gray-green skin tone of “normal” Oplytes, and a number had scales or armor-covered hides. There were specimens with too many arms or eyes like Kombi, and even a genuine cyclops, her friend Kanvor. Given the rigors of a precarious existence which tended to weed the dullards out, their minds, however, were little affected by what they had suffered.
Yet most of them, she found—and was ashamed for having failed to think of it herself—had no desire whatever to return to families and friends who doubtless believed them long dead and would only be horrified at what they had become. In the end, all she could promise was that no one would be forced to leave.
Before she altogether realized it—this kind of downgathering certainly would never do in combat, she realized, although it tended to demonstrate the ease and safety of her personal choice of transportation—the asteroid where they both lived loomed large before her eyes and whatever it was that Rakush used for the same purpose. Bretta did see her bedroom window this time—was that somebody standing in it, watching for her?—before they “headed for the barn.”
Entering the central cavern, the girl was shocked to see Tarrant, Kombi, Kanvor, the kindly one-eyed giant, Nibwelt the albino stilt-man, the cheerful Hornyak, armored and powerful, Shong, with his extra pair of arms, Stengaard the limbless, with his long, flexible nose, and even sleepy Pwee Nguyen, the “idiot savant” who looked like a fowl’s embryo, all waiting for her in an apparently frantic state upon a platform which, had this been the gravity of a normal planet, their weight would have long since caused to collapse beneath them.
Giving Rakush a final, loving slap upon his dorsal ridge, Bretta alighted upon the platform herself, as all of her friends moved back to make room for her.
“To what do I owe this signal honor, gentlebeings?” she asked.
“Where have you been?” Tarrant almost shrieked. “You’ve been gone three hours!”
Squatting beside the late Alliance Leader Shoomer Zero Nine’s decorative fountain now, a dozen violent and profitable raids later, Bretta laughed out loud at the memory, earning her an odd look from Tarrant, who still sat beside her.
But it had not been humorous then. Not when she had felt she was about to die from cold or decompression. (Rakush and his stablemates had eventually learned to put their §-fields up a trifle sooner than they had been accustomed to doing.) Not when she had believed herself lost among the floating boulders of the Vouhat-Letsomo System. And certainly not to Tarrant and her other poor friends when she proved to have been missing three times as long as she had promised. She would discover that what she called “Deep-riding” always had that effect, and always to carry a timepiece so as not to lose count of the hours.
She sighed. Of such trivial bits and pieces was progress fashioned. She arose from where she squatted, despite her age, feeling a residual stiffness in her muscles from injuries still in the process of healing—exactly as she experienced pain, and would for years, where her bones had been broken, when the atmospheric humidity or pressure changed about her, which was often. She dusted off her hands, took up her crossbow and the thrustible that Tarrant had taken: spoils of war, not the first for Bretta Martyn, and certainly not the last.
“Let us saddle up, then, old friend; it is time to go home.”
“Not a moment too soon. I fear me I am not a good thief, which is why I never went into politics. I have endured trips to the dentist that I enjoyed more than this.” Tarrant blew a whistle of his own, then began a long and complicated series of hand gestures, issuing orders to their forces to finish packing and begin to withdraw. At last he nodded. “By your command, imperious Princess.”
She made a rude noise at him, then whistled for Rakush to come fetch her.
CHAPTER XXXVIII:
THE SEVEN-GUNNER
“Mr. Krumm!”
“Aye aye, sir!” Upon the quarterdeck beside Arran, Phoebus, bringing himself to his full imposing height, snapped an uncharacteristic salute at his captain.
Hands together behind his back in a tradition as old as sailing itself, Arran gave his vessel a final glance. “Kindly pass the word to cast off all lines!”
“Aye aye, sir!” Phoebus passed it at the tops of his not inconsiderable lungs. In no lesser hurry to be away from here than he, crewbeings scrambled, fore and aft—meaning aloft and belowdecks—to obey the Osprey’s first officer.
Through a violent storm of conflicting emotions, Arran found that he had been looking forward to this happening for longer than he could remember. For him and for his crew, life over the past several weeks had become a matter of restoring the Osprey to Deep-worthiness, so that he might pursue the course taken by t
he smaller vessel that appeared to have carried Loreanna away from him. It had demanded a will of cast titanium upon his part to remain in this place, to complete the repairs, and not to go triskelling off after the sixteen-gunner while trying to complete them upon the fly at the risk of encountering the sixteen-gunner’s vastly larger and more numerous fleetmates in an unready condition.
He had vowed he would not leave this forsaken system alive without seeing Loreanna. There were those at home upon Skye, friends so close they might as well be family, who could see to the raising of their remaining five children. (Loreanna invariably insisted that he use the word “rear,” which he had always found ridiculous.) To judge from results thus far, he was not doing that good a job of it, himself. To undertake that job without the children’s mother was unthinkable to him. He only wished, at present, that it was unfeelable, as well. His feelings just now were blacker than the shadow this asteroid cast across his vessel, concealing her from the hostile eyes of the owners of this system.
“And now if it pleases you, Mr. Krumm, instruct our crew to set all plain sail.”
“Aye aye, sir!” Slowly they started separating themselves from the rock to which they had been moored for what seemed a lifetime. His Osprey, Arran found himself reflecting, had come to this place a broken, crippled bird. She departed it as competent as she had ever been for travel—and for combat—upon the Deep. Quite the opposite of his family, which, momentarily, excepting the awful loss of his daughter, Bretta, had arrived quite intact and departed separately.
“Tr’gallants and stun’sails, as well, I think me, Mr. Krumm.”
“Aye aye, an’ gladly, sir!” One order he need not give was to being the projectibles. Upon what was likeliest his enemy’s home ground (he had begun assuming that from the first, which he now realized was quite uncharacteristic of him) even the most extreme precautionary measures seemed called for. He, himself, wore both outsized thrustibles upon his arms—many of his crew had weapons, as well—and he carried a little something extra, tucked into his waistband.
A little something extra that also happened to be his single particle of hope. And, at that very moment, Osprey broke out of the cold, black shadow of the asteroid, into the brilliant sunlight—and the promise—of a better day.
“Our course is sunward, Phoebus,” Arran informed him, suddenly relaxing and setting fingers upon the tiller ball, “sunward toward the center of this system!”
“ ’Twould be me own choice as well,” Phoebus answered, eyeing the artifact pushed into Arran’s waistband. This was the first he seemed to have noticed it.
BOWMM!! Arran ran a hasty hand through his hair, then used it to wipe dirt out of his eyes. Every time he triggered that enormous projectible—a small ship’s chaser, to be accurate—occupying most of the available volume inside the fusion-powered attack launch he piloted, that vauntedly recoilless weapon rattled dust out of every crevice of the vessel, sifting into his face, into the controls before him, or simply set it dancing in the air before his eyes.
BOWMM!! This time he watched huge fragments of the enemy’s two-decker, a ship of perhaps sixteen projectibles’ strength, breaking off, floating away from the spot he was thrusting at. There was satisfaction in that, he thought, and in watching her mast crumple and collapse under the combined onslaught of the eleven launches he commanded at the moment. Over Phoebus’s strenuous objection, he had made a point of taking a regular turn at piloting one, as well. As a kind of flanking vanguard, he used them alternately as harriers in aid of Osprey, and as hunters in their own right—it was important constantly to change his tactics so as to prevent his being predictable to the enemy—toward whom the larger and more conspicuous Osprey drove her victims, as if into a waiting fishnet.
BOWMM!! Once again, he thought, and to an enemy’s dismay, the infamous Henry Martyn—Arran often felt the need to disassociate himself, personally, from the legendary character he had become, if merely to maintain an accurate notion of his capabilities’ limitations—had brought technological innovation to an area of endeavor in which it had been altogether absent for hundreds of years.
Like a ship’s garbage canisters, steam launches employed minor, passive crystalline §-field generators that fed off of the mother vessel’s §-fields as they passed through it—by a §-process analogous to electrical induction—simply to permit them to leave the ship intact. Now, driven by a need he had always felt, to provide more power for the projectibles he had ordered fitted into them, Arran had equipped them with larger, active generators, salvaged from those vessels he had lately destroyed, which had the happy side effect of increasing speed and maneuverability—that latter, principally, by reducing gravitic stresses upon their pilots—while minimizing the need for reaction mass.
BOWMM!! The boat in which Woulf and Loreanna had left him had not been modified; a projectible’s bulk would have precluded its use by two passengers, and Arran had only recently thought of equipping his auxiliaries with §-field generators.
Because the launches had no sails, their onboard fusion reactors supplied the particles required by the §-field generators, there being no way to employ the reactor’s output directly, since the operation of a §-field prohibited the flow of currents within a conductile. It was this phenomenon, of course, that made the working of any starship, even in the thirty-first century, a labor-intensive undertaking. Arran’s innovation brought Osprey’s auxiliaries uncomfortably close, it would eventually occur to him, to the nacyl technology he believed had killed those four hundred Jendyne naval cadets whose faces haunted his dreams every night. Just now, lacking the time, he could not permit himself to think about that.
Arran felt a need to be cautious in another respect, however, although it was the caution of a man running downhill, faster than he was actually capable of running, striving desperately just to keep his feet beneath him. Not only were he and his gallant Osprey in-system now, where sheer distances did not prohibit rapid electromagnetic distress calls, but for some considerable time, he had nursed a sneaking suspicion that the slavers—like the nacyl, and unlike the imperia-conglomerate—possessed some method of faster-than-light communication.
BOWMM!! The sanguine trade he plied as Henry Martyn was only possible—had only been possible through the whole history of his species—when the quickest means of sending a message was to place it onboard the quickest ship. Arran took elaborate pains to attack his victims only by surprise, to strike first at what he believed their greatest possibility of calling for help, and to leave nothing behind, afterward, to give the enemy a clue about him or his companions.
Arran eased back on the throttle to avoid colliding with another of the launches. They were, all of them, in the process of buzzing about their enemy like stinging insects, making broad loops that allowed them to discharge their projectibles without doing damage to their fleetmates, and to recharge their weapons (it only took a moment, these days) while their fleetmates discharged theirs.
The pilot he had passed so closely grinned broadly at him and gave him a cheerful gesture, although Arran knew it for the cheer of comradeship-in-arms. He and his people took little delight in battles such as this. The ship they had run across today had merely made the mistake of standing between Arran and where he wanted to go. Although Osprey would make use of whatever remained of her victim. Arran waved back, then shook his head in something resembling disappointment.
These people he had been fighting were hopelessly easy to vanquish. They had not a starsailor among them, nor a projecteur. They possessed no tactics and less strategy. They were commanded by no officers worthy of the name. He had expected something better—by which, of course, he meant something worse—of the fabled slavers. These sorry creatures represented no more than the corrupted, necrotic heart of a great dying beast waiting to be put out of its misery by the first living, breathing, thinking adversary who happened along. That did not imply, of course, it did not need to be done or that he would balk at doing it. It only meant there was l
ess satisfaction in it than he had anticipated.
It was his turn again, already. He pivoted his steam launch (they needed another name for these things, he thought, incongruously) into a steep, diving turn, blasted as close to the enemy as he dared—he could see officers upon her quarterdeck, cowering under broken spars and fallen sails, covering their heads—and unleashed the projectible which he steered by aiming his . . . his fighter, that was it! By steering his fighter at the base of the truncated mast. At this range the result was more than gratifying. The vessel lurched, its entire §-field collapsed, and hundreds of officers and crewbeings, many of them with their arms and legs still flailing wildly, came floating helplessly away from their ruined and dying ship, to die horribly themselves of explosive decompression.
Arran felt not the slightest qualm. These were his mortal enemies, taken where they dwelt, almost in their sleep. They would not merely have delighted in doing the same thing to him, but would have taken even greater pleasure doing it to his wife and children and forcing him to watch. He knew these creatures by their nature; he had always known them. These heartless animals had, in one manner or another, twice stolen away from him virtually everything he loved in life. Let them die, then, he resolved, let them die and everything they stood for die with them, just as slowly and as painfully as his dire need for haste permitted.
Out of the silent depths of the Abyss they had come, raiders the Alliance had not been warned of, this time, prepared to spread more terror, death, and destruction. From the first moment Arran’s steam fighters had broken through this asteroid’s not very protective §-field, something had appeared very, very disturbing.
Their first hint was the color of the plaza flagging outside the entrance into the administration burrow: a rusty maroon, the color of soaked-in, dried blood. Estimating from splashes of it here and there, no fewer than a hundred victims—at least a dozen of them Oplytes, from the aroma alone—had been killed in disorganized fighting, and recently, by all the signs Arran knew so well.
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