The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  “The target’s spotted us, Captain,” she reported. “They’re putting on speed.”

  The captain touched a switch on the bulkhead next to the bridge windows. “Engineering, this is the bridge. Give me more power.”

  “We’re at max already, Captain,” came the reply over the bridge speakers. “We can’t push it any harder.”

  Elaeli had her gaze fixed on the display. “Target still accelerating.”

  “Use the maneuvering jets,” sus-Mevyan ordered. “See if we can add some side velocity change into the equation.”

  “Captain, I’m seeing up-Doppler,” said Elaeli a few minutes later. “She’s pulling away from us.”

  “Get me another target,” sus-Mevyan said. “We haven’t got many chances here, people—let’s make the most of them.”

  Elaeli studied the ship-mind’s list of recommendations. “Given the speed we already have on us, we can set up an intercept course for target number two without a lot of extra maneuvering.”

  “Do so,” said sus-Mevyan. “Reset grapnels from optimum range to max theoretical. Shoot as soon as they’re in range.”

  “Changing course to intercept,” Elaeli said. “Readying grapnels.”

  And the waiting began again.

  31:

  Year 1128 E. R.

  BEYOND THE FARTHER EDGE: SUS-PELEDAEN SHIP

  RAIN-ON-DARK-WATER

  Ty made his way through the labyrinthine coils of the ship’s passages to the sally port. He had seen the area before; as one of the Mages on board, he could go anywhere, and people would assume he was on important Circle business and let him pass. He’d taken advantage of the freedom, and of the time in the Void, to explore the Rain thoroughly—making up, he supposed, for that long-denied classroom trip from his days at the Port Street Home.

  If they could see me now, he thought as he entered the muster bay. The boarding party waited, drawn up in three ranks. They looked ominous and alien in their black plastic hardmasks and dark coats, and the pikes they carried gleamed in the artificial light.

  On an upper platform deck around three sides of the chamber the stations and readouts of the fighting bridge glowed violet and amber. A couple of officers were already on duty on that level, talking in hushed voices to each other and to the audio pickups for the main bridge.

  A masked and armored figure detached itself from the front rank of the boarding party and approached Ty. “What are you doing down here?”

  Ty recognized the voice and gait of Izar, one of the Rain’s senior crew members—not a particular friend of his, but no enemy. “The Circle has joined to work the luck,” he said. “Lord Arekhon told me to go with the boarding party.”

  Izar’s posture relaxed. “That’s all right, then. Stand over there in the rear rank with Spiru and Kalan. Did Lord Arekhon say whether he wanted you armored up or not?”

  Ty shook his head. “Just that I should be here.”

  “It’s your choice, then.”

  “I’ll stick with what I’m used to,” Ty said after a moment’s thought, and went to join the crewmembers Izar had pointed out to him. Kalan was from off-Eraasi, the first such person that Ty had ever known on a day-today basis, but Spiru was Hanilat born and bred, with the Port Street accent strong in his voice.

  “Ty,” he said. “Come to wish us luck?”

  “More or less. The Circle loves you so much they sent me down here to hold onto this end of the working.”

  “Fuel’s that tight?” Spiru’s face was only a featureless blur on the other side of the black hardmask, but his voice sounded tenser than before.

  Kalan—he worked in engineering, Ty remembered, and would know—said, “Believe it.”

  “We’re being tested,” Spiru said, after a brief silence. “To see if we’re worthy of being the first ones to make contact beyond the Edge.”

  Ty thought about that idea for a while. The muster bay was quiet, except for the sounds of circulating air and thrumming engines and the occasional murmur of nervous voices.

  “Why?” he said finally. “The fleet-families have contacted new worlds before. I remember they opened up Ninglin while I was still in school.”

  “I’m from Ninglin,” Kalan said. “I remember the celebration after we made contact with the lost brethren. The parties lasted for months.”

  “That was different,” said Spiru. “The people on Ninglin and the other homeworlds were like us—like enough, anyhow. The Mages in their Circles had talked with ours. Has anyone from this side of the Edge ever talked with a Circle, Ty?”

  “No,” Ty admitted. “But Garrod says they’re more of our lost brethren all the same. And he certainly has talked with them.”

  “And a damned good thing, too,” Izar cut in. The older crew member had come up unexpectedly behind Ty and the others. “When the sally port opens, keep your mind on the words Lord Garrod taught us: ‘Comrade,’ ‘friend,’ ‘we surrender.’ The last thing we need is for somebody to get carried away and ruin our chances for a civilized exchange.”

  “Captain,” Elaeli said. “We have a solid contact on target number two.”

  Sus-Mevyan had not moved from the bridge window during the long wait, as though by watching she could make one of the host of stars resolve into the ship they hunted. Before the chase was done, they would have visual contact—would come near enough, in spite of the other’s evasions, to grapple and close and make an entry. The maneuvers of a chase-and-board required a skilled and daring shiphandler with a well-built ship. The Rain was the newest, sharpest vessel in the sus-Peledaen fleet; Elaeli could only hope that she had the necessary skill and daring.

  “Get me a position in front of him,” the Captain said. “Match speed if you can, but do not decelerate.”

  “Course laid in,” Elaeli said. “Tracking.”

  Her voice rasped as she said it; tension had left her mouth feeling dry and papery. She caught the eye of the neet-apprentice—the boy looked as tired as she felt—and held up her empty mug for more uffa. “The fuel reserves are yellowing out fast; we can expect to start seeing degraded performance before we finish mating with the target.”

  “How close are we going to come?” asked sus-Mevyan.

  Elaeli squinted at the readouts on her station. “Unless he does something unexpected, it looks like grapnel range.”

  sus-Mevyan flicked on the audio pickup. “Tell the boarding party to stand ready on station. And prepare the rapid-entry system—there’s no reason to think that the target’s airlocks will be standardized to ours.”

  The communications specialist looked up from his station. “What message should I prepare for the target ship?”

  “Use their language—the one Lord Garrod taught us—and try every kind of modulation you can get out of the boards. Say that we’re in need of fuel, and ready to yield our cargo in exchange for it.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Let’s get the negotiations going first,” said sus-Mevyan. “We can’t yield anything until we’ve made contact.”

  The fleet-apprentice returned with Elaeli’s fresh mug of uffa. Elaeli took it, gave the apprentice a smile of thanks, and began to sip at the steaming liquid. Time was crawling again. She watched the readouts at her station because they changed visibly, if slowly, while the starfield outside the bridge windows did not.

  “What happens if we can’t use their fuel?” the fleet-apprentice whispered nervously to Elaeli—but sus-Mevyan was the one who answered.

  “Then we offer our cargo in return for a safe passage to the nearest inhabited planet, and settle down to long and productive lives as natives of these benighted parts.”

  “The Mages—”

  “—will walk home to Eraasi if they can. But I wouldn’t count on seeing another ship come back.”

  The fleet-apprentice didn’t ask any more questions, and for a while longer there was silence. Then a muttered exclamation from the communications specialist drew Elaeli’s attention away from the purple and amber li
ghts on her display panel. She looked up, and saw what had to be the Rain’s second contact, now a bright light amid the starfield and steadily growing brighter.

  He’s coming on fast.

  Elaeli felt a cold apprehension in the pit of her stomach—a sensation that had less to do with the chase at hand than with a future that she couldn’t completely grasp. She wondered if this was what ’Rekhe felt like when he saw the eiran and tried to work with them.

  And this is our slow target. What kind of engine systems do these people have, anyway? Better than ours, it looks like. If their pilot’s any good at evading boarders, this isn’t going to work.

  She put her thoughts aside and concentrated on the chase. Now that the target was visible, it was starting to take on shape. Another few minutes, and it was recognizably a starship.

  “Get the grapnels ready,” said sus-Mevyan.

  “Rigged and standing by,” Elaeli said. “Awaiting your orders, Captain.”

  “Put the grapnel release on automatic. Extreme range.”

  “Range approaching extreme,” Elaeli said. “Four, three, two—”

  The communications specialist broke in. “No answer to our signals!”

  “Grapnels away.”

  Metal hit against metal and the positive contact light illuminated on the bridge as the grapnels locked on. Even after Elaeli’s efforts to match course and velocity, the impact was enough to jar everybody’s neck and make the uffa-pot totter on its brass legs. The Rain’s engines roared under the sudden increase in their burden.

  “Contact,” said Elaeli.

  Sus-Mevyan drew a deep breath. “Boarding party away.”

  Arekhon had lost track of the passage of time.

  Always, for him, the places he went in his mind to seek the luck and work the eiran seemed to lie outside the normal sequence of hours and minutes, or even of weeks and days. He knew that the others of the Circle—his Circle, now—were with him, but in the country of his mind, as usual, he was alone. What that meant, and what the others saw at these times, he couldn’t tell.

  Long before the start of the working, Garrod had warned them of how things stood in this part of space: “Seek luck, rather than order. Luck you may have a chance to find, but not order, no matter how hard you look for it. The people here believe that tending the eiran is wrong.”

  Arekhon had wondered what Garrod meant—would have thought that he was lying, except that Garrod never lied—until he saw the landscape to which he had come for this working.

  He stood amid mountains, massive granite outcroppings of cracked rock overgrown with brush. The few isolated trees, when he came near them, proved ready to fall, all of them rotting in place where they had grown. Nowhere did he see any evidence of proper care.

  Garrod had spoken truly. This country was dangerous in itself. The ground was pocked with holes and pitfalls waiting for the pressure of an unready foot; the bushes along the cliff-edges had roots too shallow to support a grasping hand. Except for the familiar life-strands of his fellows in the Circle, he saw no eiran running through it—and of the luck that had seemed to crowd the universe earlier, he saw nothing at all.

  If we can’t find the luck that’s native here, he thought, we’ll have to make it for ourselves.

  He dropped out of the visionary world far enough to see the Rain’s meditation chamber—a pale and wavery image, like a painting on thin cloth, of Narin and Vai and Garrod kneeling at the other points of the circle, overlaid with an image of Ty standing with the boarders in the muster bay. The Circle’s combined eiran ran from one image to the other, but the cords were pale and thin.

  Arekhon rose to his feet. “The luck needs to be made stronger,” he said. “Who will match me in the working?”

  One of the kneeling Mages stood to meet him.

  “I will,” said Iulan Vai, and struck the first blow as she spoke.

  32:

  Year 1128 E. R.

  BEYOND THE FARTHER EDGE: SUS-PELEDAEN SHIP

  RAIN-ON-DARK-WATER

  UNKNOWN ENTIBORAN SHIP

  Ty felt the deck plates shudder beneath his feet. “What—?”

  “It’s the grapnels,” said Spiru. “They’ve caught.”

  Kalan added, “If you’ve got any luck for us, now’s the time to pass it along.”

  “Luck …” Ty put his hands over his eyes to shut out the lights and distractions of the muster bay. The Circle’s eiran ran somewhere nearby—he felt them, like cables running through the bulkheads, or through the steel of the deck. But the cables weren’t strong enough; there wasn’t enough power coming through them to give the boarding party what they needed. Not yet—

  “Ty?” asked Kalan nervously.

  “Luck,” he repeated. “We’ve begun a working. Soon there will be luck.”

  The Rain shuddered again as he spoke.

  “Positive hull contact,” said Spiru. “We’ll be going across any minute now.”

  At the same time, Izar shouted, “Fast deploy boarding tunnel! Let’s move, people!

  Ty heard a metallic groaning followed by a heavy clunk. That had to be the tunnel, fastening on and settling into position … the eiran extended in that direction, stretching out toward the other ship.

  “Are you coming, or not?” Spiru demanded. “Because we’re going to be moving out in another couple of seconds.”

  “Luck,” said Ty for a third time. The cords of his own eiran were part of the Circle’s larger cable, and where he went, the working would follow. “Yes, I’m coming.”

  He took his hands from his eyes in time to see the first two ranks of boarders swinging into the open mouth of the tunnel at a trot. Spiru and Kalan entered with the third rank a few seconds later, and Ty was with them. The tunnel was dark, lit only by amber battle-lanterns, and the hatch at the far end had no shape to it that Ty understood. The boarders drew up in their ranks again before it, temporarily thwarted.

  “It’s an airlock,” said Kalan. “No external controls, though—some—body must have skimped on the design. Now they’re going to lose the whole thing.”

  “I sure hope they’re ready for this,” Spiru said nervously. “If the inner door on their side isn’t closed, we’re all going to get sent to the star-road by the wind.”

  “Stand by to blow the door,” ordered Izar a moment later, and a crewmember whose voice Ty didn’t recognize said, “Door coming up.”

  A brief, silent flash of light came from the hatch, Ty felt a shivering in the soles of his feet, and the hatch was open. A puff of air flowed out from the newly opened space, bringing with it tiny fragments of plastic and metal floating in a cloud of smoke.

  “What do you see?” Izar demanded.

  “We’ve got light,” said the crewmember who had spoken earlier. “And the inner door is still intact.”

  “Right. Formation, in the lock. Overpressure the tunnel from our side.”

  The boarding party moved forward again and took station inside the lock. They stood in three ranks, their pikes grounded, with each crew member positioned half an arm’s length from the people to either side and a full arm’s length from the person in front.

  “They can’t say we didn’t do them right and honor,” Spiru commented under his breath as Izar and another crew member huddled over the controls of the inner door.

  Kalan said something in reply, but Ty didn’t catch the words. He was concentrating on the work going on up ahead of them. That inner door had to open soon, or else the boarding party would force it open with more of the white explosive. Ty was fairly certain that this would not be good—either for the Rain or for the ship they were trying to board.

  Luck, he thought. The luck of the Circle, coming through me to the door and convincing it to open. Opening it … now.

  Lights came on above the inner door, a row of them, one at a time. Red … red … red … red … green. Izar stepped forward, pike at the challenge position. And the door slid open.

  Light poured out of the opening—boilin
g, hot-colored light that wrapped itself around Izar and the whole front rank behind him, burning and blackening whatever it touched. The air was full of the smells of ozone and cooking meat.

  Ty lay where he had fallen, half under Spiru and Kalan where they had thrown themselves down as the first rank of boarders fell.

  Garrod was right, he thought, as he drew a choking breath. There is no order on this side of the gap. Only pure, untouched chaos. Evil.

  The weight on top of him lessened; he pushed himself up with his hands until he could look ahead. Spiru and Kalan were crouching like sprinters, their pikes in their hands.

  “They shouldn’t have done that,” Spiru said. His voice sounded quavery and unnatural behind the dark plastic of his hardmask.

  “No,” said Kalan. “Ty—are you with us?”

  No order, only chaos. “Yes.”

  “Then on three, on my count, we’re going in.”

  The curving flank of the Entiboran ship filled the bridge windows and blocked out the stars.

  The vessel’s white-metal hull, blank except for a dull black row of unfamiliar symbols, gave no indication of what might be happening inside. Elaeli and the others on the Rain’s bridge listened to the reports coming over the audio pickup from the muster bay, and tried to force them into making sense.

  It shouldn’t be taking this long, she thought. Her fists clenched as she struggled to keep up at least the semblance of a fitting demeanor. She was the pilot, the one whom even the Captain depended upon to bring Rain-on-Dark-Water safely into the proper place at the proper distance. It would not do for her to become disturbed.

  I put us alongside them clean and smooth … . I swear we didn’t even scratch the enamel once the grapnels locked on … they should have opened up smiling by now.