He and Roca met Brad halfway down the hall. As soon as Eldrinson saw Brad’s face, he knew they had more trouble. “What happened?”
Brad spoke grimly. “Someone stole a shroud from the port.”
“Shroud?” Roca asked. “You mean the jammer?”
Brad nodded. “The one for individual travelers. Its range is limited, but it gives powerful camouflage, more than enough to hide one person.”
Eldrinson silently swore. “Do you think Shannon took it?”
“It had to be someone who knew it was in a locker at the port,” Brad said. “Shannon does. I taught him the combination to the locker when he worked at the port last year.”
Eldrinson felt as if a weight had settled on him. “Does this mean you can’t find him?” Say it isn’t true. The problem with these advanced systems was that offworlders had equally advanced gadgets to counter them.
“With a jammer like that,” Roca said, “Shannon could make himself virtually invisible.”
“We can still search with the flyer,” Brad said. “But you might have more luck on the ground. The jammer hides him from our sensors but it can’t make him invisible to your sight.”
“Chaniece and I will help,” Del said.
Denric came over, with Aniece at his side. “I can ride with you as well.”
Aniece looked from her parents to Brad. “Shannon wants to be an Archer.”
Eldrinson knew she was right. “We’ll ride toward the Blue Dales.” He turned to Denric. “You and I can take an octet over the pass through the Backbone Mountains to the Rillian Vales.” He glanced at Del and Chaniece, grateful his children could help. “You two take a party north in the Backbone, toward Castle Windward and the Blue Dale Mountains.”
Roca spoke to Brad. “Is the flyer ready?”
“Ready and waiting. The Ascendant is sending a shuttle, too.”
Eldrinson peered at him. “It’s what?” He had thought the Ascendant was a vessel high above Lyshriol.
“The battle cruiser in the orbital defense system,” Roca said. “Its shuttles can do planetary work.”
“The flyer is better adapted to working in the atmosphere,” Brad said, “but any help is good.” He hesitated. “I don’t know if this matters, but I noticed something odd yesterday.”
“Odd?” Roca asked. “What do you mean?”
“A blip in the energy output of the electro-optic systems at the port. It happened about the time Althor’s Jag took off.”
Eldrinson tensed at the mention of the ship that had taken his children. “Was it the fighter?”
“The ship took off fine.” Brad shrugged. “It might be nothing. Energy fluctuations often occur.”
“What made you notice this one?” Roca asked.
“It seemed unusually sharp. But it vanished immediately.”
Roca pushed her hand through her hair, disarraying it around her shoulders and arms. “A Jag has some high-powered systems. Many are classified, which means they might affect your systems in ways you can’t prepare for.”
“Will it affect our search?” Eldrinson asked.
“It shouldn’t,” Brad said.
Eldrinson spoke quietly. “I apologize if my son sabotaged your port.” “I doubt Shannon would know how,” Denric said.
“I hope not,” Roca said.
Aniece was watching her father’s face. “You’ll find him.”
Eldrinson managed a smile. “Yes. We will.” Despite his words, his heart felt heavy. Of all his sons, Shannon seemed most vulnerable. He could take care of himself, yes; he knew the land and mountains better than most people from the Dalvador Plains. But he was still a boy, no matter how much he considered himself a man.
More than anything, though, he feared Shannon didn’t want to be found.
7
The Backbone
Soz woke up when Tahota and Althor switched seats, squeezing past each other in the cramped cabin. Soz had hoped they would let her sit as pilot for a while. If it had just been her and Althor, she might have convinced him, but with Tahota here, she had to behave. She didn’t want to start out at DMA by getting into trouble.
Althor lay back in the recliner. He was even more cramped than Tahota, with bulkheads curving over him. Yawning, Soz stretched her arms. Her seat readjusted, adapting to the stiffness it detected in her muscles.
Tahota was checking the heads-up display above her. “Sleep well?”
“Well enough,” Soz said.
The colonel indicated a heavy lever, silver and black, near the pilot’s seat. It glittered with smart-threads. “Know what that does?”
Soz had never seen the device on the Jag schematics she had dug up on the interstellar meshes. So she guessed. “It’s manual control for navigation, in case something happens to the EI brain.”
“Not for navigation. Weapons.” Tahota tapped the lever and brought up a menu of small holos that floated parallel to the vertical column. She indicated a miniaturized display of statistics. “You can choose Annihilators, tau missiles, or MIRVs.”
Soz’s pulse leapt. She hadn’t known Jags carried taus. That had to be secured information; it certainly wasn’t in any public schematics. She studied the column. “Is the manual control as accurate as the EI?”
“Almost never,” Tahota said. “But it’s a good last resort.”
Soz glanced at her. “Have you ever flown a Jag in combat?”
“Not a Jag. I piloted Starslammers, Thunderbolts, and Ram stealth tanks.”
Whoa. “Those are some big ships.”
The colonel’s gaze glinted. “Yes.”
Soz had no doubt she would never want to go against Tahota in battle. “Do you still fly?”
“Not anymore.” A hint of disappointment showed on her face.
Based on her first impressions, Soz thought Tahota was wasted behind a desk, directing academy admissions. Perhaps Kurj was grooming her for a higher position.
A shiver went up Soz’s back, the sort that came with her rare flashes of precognition. Her thoughts about the colonel evoked it. Why? The Kyle traits involved empathy and telepathy, abilities that resulted from an enhanced interaction of the brain waves of one person with another. The fields produced in the brain fell off rapidly with distance, so the people involved had to be close together. Even then, they usually only noticed the effects if both of them were psions, so that each had the specialized neural structures and transmitters that interpreted the fields created by neural impulses.
Given that precognition involved sensing future events rather than fields, it shouldn’t have been among the Kyle traits. Yet in rare cases the strongest psions showed sparks of the ability. It came as a mood, an interaction yet to happen. Researchers believed it resulted from temporal uncertainties in spacetime, especially for a ship in inversion. Soz knew only that she suddenly had a vivid impression: someday Starjack Tahota would do a thing of great importance, something so dramatic it created spacetime ripples that reached her even now.
Then the sensation passed. Soz blinked at the colonel, wondering if she had imagined it all.
“Is something wrong?” Tahota asked.
“No.” Embarrassed, Soz changed the subject. “Do you know when we will reach Diesha?”
“It shouldn’t be long,” Tahota said. “Jags accumulate fewer temporal errors during inversion than other ships. The time it takes us to reach Diesha should be roughly equivalent to our flight time during inversion, plus however long we travel at sublight.” Her eyes took on the inwarddirected quality of a pilot accessing her internal node. “Redstar says ETA in about one day from now.”
“Redstar?” Soz asked. “Do you mean the Jag?”
“Its EI, actually.”
Althor spoke from behind them. “Redstar uses that name for both itself and this ship.”
Soz turned around. She had thought he was going to sleep.
He grinned at her startled expression. “I know my ship.”
That intrigued her. “Have you been flying
it long?”
“A few months, since summer.”
“That late?” Soz had thought cadets began working with their ships in their junior year.
“It’s not unusual,” Tahota said.
“It took me a while to find the right match.” Althor shifted his long legs and settled himself as comfortably as was possible in the restricted recliner. “This is the third Jag I’ve worked with. I had trouble linking with the El on the first. The second one didn’t like me.”
Soz smiled. “How can an EI not like you?”
“Hell if I know,” he growled. “It said I was too aggressive.”
Her laugh sputtered. “You’re a fighter pilot! You’re supposed to be aggressive.”
Althor crossed his arms. “It claimed I made impetuous decisions based on an ‘overly developed instinct to kill without exploring nonviolent options.’”
“What are you going to do, stop in the middle of a battle and say ‘Excuse me, can we explore some options first, before we blast each other apart.’”
Althor smiled slightly. “That’s how I felt.”
Tahota spoke. “Of course in combat, you do whatever is necessary to survive. But a large percentage of battles are fought by uncrewed drones and controlled from standoff platforms. It makes sense that an EI would prefer to analyze its options first.”
Althor gave her an incredulous look. “Fine for the EI. If someone blows it up, it can restart from a backup. I only have one life. I can’t be reactivated from some copy.”
A light on a front control panel lit up and cycled through red, yellow, and green. Althor suddenly laughed.
“What was that?” Soz asked.
His lips quirked upward. “Redstar says if an enemy ever tries to blow me apart, it will reactivate my brain from a copy.”
A ship with a sense of humor? Soz could see why Althor was more compatible with this EI. When faced with his fear of dying, the other Jag decided he was too aggressive and this one made jokes to reassure him.
“I never realized how much the personality of your Jag could affect how you work with it,” Soz said.
“It’s crucial,” Tahota said. “It’s one of the only reasons senior cadets wash out of DMA. By that time, those who can’t cut the academic, physical, or discipline requirements have left. But if you can’t link with an EI, you can’t fly a Jag.”
“I had always assumed you just start flying,” Soz said.
“We don’t publicize the difficulties,” Tahota said. “But if it were that easy, the link wouldn’t be so tight nor the pilot-Jag hybrid so effective.”
Soz slanted a look at her brother. “At least you found one that will put up with you.”
He smirked. “Gods know what will happen when you try, Soz. All the Els will run in terror.”
“Ha, ha. Very funny.” She glared for good measure, though her lips twitched upward. She looked forward to starting her studies.
If only this hadn’t all come with so much loss.
Night Charger was a huge lyrine, dark violet, with strong legs and a beautifully proportioned body. As much as Eldrinson admired the animal, though, it felt strange to ride him. He had always taken Moonglaze.
He and Denric started out with Del and Chaniece. They brought two octets of men with them. Four extra lyrine carried ISC tents with all sorts of equipment, including comm devices, climate controls, medical syringes, and monitors, and food for both themselves and the lyrine. Denric had slung a laser carbine over his shoulder.
Eldrinson would have rather done without it all; he was happy to camp out by himself, without a tent, and what the blazes would Denric do with the carbine? Threaten Shannon into coming home? Hardly. But ISC insisted they take weapons and his doctor insisted he go with ISC supplies, especially after he had suffered such a serious seizure last night. He had no doubt Colonel Majda and her people were also tracking them from the redoubtable Ascendant up in orbit.
Their two groups soon parted, the twins going northward into the mountains with one octet of men while Eldrinson and Denric headed west with the other. They rode across the plains, and their group spread out, searching for signs that Shannon might have come this way. In the sky, Aldan hung to the side of Valdor, but soon the larger sun would eclipse his smaller brother. It took less than four hours for them to orbit each other.
For the octet, Eldrinson had chosen men he had ridden with during the war. They were farmers now, but today they had swords at their hips. He had worn his as well, though it seemed superfluous in a mission to bring home a runaway teenager. Still, they could never be certain whom they might encounter. Rillia lay beyond the mountains and had always been at peace with Dalvador, but they had long fought Tyroll, which lay farther to the west. The chance always existed of a skirmish with wandering Tyroll soldiers adrift after the war.
The ride invigorated Eldrinson. On another day, he would have loved the meditative quality of their journey. They traveled at an easy pace, slow enough to check the countryside for signs of Shannon.
The octet captain, a husky fellow named Jannor, rode up alongside him. His yellow and bronze hair tossed in the wind and his eyes gleamed with mirth. Eldrinson remembered a night on the Plains of Tyroll when he and Jannor had lost touch with the rest of the men. They had crouched in a ditch, stranded and freezing, while Tyroll soldiers patrolled the area. Delirious from a wound, Eldrinson had suffered a grand mal seizure. Jannor stayed at his side throughout the convulsion, tending him, protecting. He had been Eldrinson’s strength that night, the light that helped him make it to dawn, when they finally escaped back to their own army.
“A fine morning you brought for us,” Jannor said.
Eldrinson smiled. “I can’t take credit for the weather.”
His friend snorted. “You do for everything else.” When Eldrinson laughed, Jannor held up his hands. “Wasn’t it you who claimed he had brought the suns down from the sky to deliver him a fine wife and children?”
“I had perhaps drunk too much reed juice,” Eldrinson admitted.
Denric was listening with undisguised fascination. “Really? I’ve never seen you drunk.”
Eldrinson scowled at his son. “I wasn’t drunk.”
Jannor burst out laughing. “You were rolling nose to the stone.”
Eldrinson made a rude noise and stared straight ahead. Then his mouth quirked upward. “It was good wine.”
“Aye,” Jannor said. “That it was.”
They rode in silence for a while. Denric gradually pulled ahead, until Eldrinson and Jannor were riding by themselves.
The husky farmer spoke in a more serious voice. “We will find him.”
Eldrinson pushed locks of blowing hair out of his eyes. “Yes. We will.” He prayed it was true.
The Stained Glass Forest rose up out of the rippling plains before them. The tree trunks were columns of hollow glasswood, translucent, glistening in the sunlight. Smaller tubes branched out from them, and filmy, glistening disks hung from the branches, some a handspan in diameter, others smaller. Each tree was one color, but the forest had many hues: a red as vivid as the ruby necklaces that had come down to Eldrinson from his ancestors; blue like the glass bowls and goblets in the castle; an emerald so deep it brought to mind a lake high in the mountains, under the shade of a rock overhang; yellow and gold like the suns; and a violet as pure as Lyshrioli eyes.
They slowed down as they entered the forest, and Denric fell back to ride with Eldrinson again. As Jannor went on ahead to check on the octet, his shoulder brushed a translucent red disk hanging from a branch. It inflated into a sphere and rose into the air, detaching from the tree. When Eldrinson passed it by, he poked at the sphere and it popped, spraying him with ruby glitter.
Denric smiled at his father, then nudged a yellow disk, making it inflate into a sphere that drifted away through the trees. Stained-glass light dappled in ever-changing patterns on his face and the curls that spilled down his neck.
“I’ve been thinking,” Denric said. “Ab
out what Vyrl wants to do, attending the university as a virtual student.”
“He seems happy with the idea,” Eldrinson said. Vyrl had avoided his studies whenever possible in his youth, but since his marriage to Lily, he seemed to have buckled down.
“I can do that, too,” Denric said. “I can study literature here in Dalvador just as well as if I went offworld to Parthonia.”
His words made Eldrinson ache with an emotion warm and painful at the same time. He had already alienated three of his children; he didn’t want to make another mistake. “You’ve dreamed about going away for years. I appreciate your offering to stay home, but I would never ask it.” He had tried that with Soz and brought on a disaster. “Go to your university, son. Go see the sights.” At least no one would be trying to kill a boy whose goal in life was to read books.
Denric’s shoulders relaxed from a hunched position Eldrinson hadn’t realized they had taken. They rode on in companionable silence.
After a while, Denric said, “I wish I understood Shannon.”
“I also,” Eldrinson said.
“I thought I did. But I had no idea he would leave like this.” His forehead creased. “I knew he was lonely, that he felt out of place. We used to talk about it, but he’s kept more to himself this past year. I should have said something, drawn him out more.”
“It’s not your fault, Denric.” Eldrinson thought of the boy’s restless spirit. “He wants to find his own kind.”
“We’re his kind.” Denric looked up as a blue sphere drifted by them. He tapped it and the sphere deflated, trickling blue glitter. “The Blue Dale Archers don’t exist. He’s chasing a dream.”
“We need to seek our dreams.” With difficulty, Eldrinson added, “Even when they hurt us.” Soz and Althor had gone after theirs knowing they might die. He couldn’t bear the thought of his children in pain. Better not to think of it at all than to dwell on what might happen. An image of Kurj came to him, that giant with his implacable face. Yes, Eldrinson knew Kurj showed great honor to Althor and Soz by naming them as his heirs. But he could hate Kurj for that honor.
Schism: Part One of Triad (Saga of the Skolian Empire) Page 9