Starship Ragnarok

by Alex Oliver

  "It was good having a clear and very simple command," Sasara had her eyes closed and her head tilted to one side as though she was listening to the wand. "It provided a... an anchor point." She looked up, found everyone watching her, and laughed. "I hope so, yes. I am getting a feel for it."

  "Good," Harcrow gestured for Yas to go.

  Yas took hold of the melted edges of the hole and stepped up to the companionway that was a good foot above them, like exiting a lift stuck half way between floors. He was so used to the gloom now that the corridor with its threads of luminescent lichens seemed bright and he stood blinking in it, trying to see if anyone was coming. The quiet was eerie. No sound of engines or of footsteps. He looked up and down the passage and found the remora slowly inching its way to the left, nosing across the plating in search of food.

  Vasto, following it, beckoned, and Yas came up behind him, trying to be very silent. "Do we know where they are?" he whispered.

  "I'm just following Lassie here," Vasto said, looking fondly at the toothy tentacle. "I think it knows where its master is at least."

  So it proved. They followed slowly along behind the squirming thing until it turned left down a corridor, past two intersections and then out into a smaller, service duct. Desultory waited there, looking positively turquoise with satisfaction, and Dr. Wakes was right beside him.

  "You guys get an award," Harcrow congratulated them, slapping Dr. Wakes on the shoulder with a clang. He scooped up the remora and set it down gently on Desultory's back where it clung on tight with relief. "But how the hell are we going to get all the way across the ship to the hangar through the corridors like this without being spotted?"

  "We don't!" Yas said, the idea coming to him late, given how obvious it was. "We just burrow through the body of the ship. We make a hole ahead of us, close it up behind us. Basically unless we accidentally knock into someone coming the other way, no one ever needs to know." They were going to do this, he thought, amazed. Maybe they were actually going to get away with this after all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Hijacking the Hawkbat

  Moving through the ship was slow progress initially, but Sasara seemed to attune herself to the use of the wand as she went on, and their speed rapidly increased. Before long, Yas found himself crouched in a hole on top of the hangar, looking down onto a long drop on top of a smaller elvish ship.

  Jumping jarred his ankles and made a loud metallic clang that must surely have alerted every alf in the vicinity. There was silence for a moment as he got down, but as the rest of the crew followed with their own bangs and rattles the hangar's darkness was stirred as onlookers began to materialize out of the corners.

  Yas dropped to the floor and tried to hide, but it was too late. A shrieking like the yowling of mating cats pierced the air, and blue-gray lightning crawled across the hangar's ceiling in a pattern of regular pulses that told him it was the equivalent of a red emergency light. They had been seen.

  "How do we get inside?" Zardari asked, leaning up against the side of the small craft with their hands splayed on the sides as if listening to it. "There's no door."

  "Let me," Sasara moved beside them and adopted the same posture, leaning in as if to whisper to the ship. She tilted her head as if she was listening to its voice and replied something Yas couldn't hear. "I think I'm getting the hang of this now. I wish I had the chance to do over the meeting with Kelkalyn. I might even be able to reach him now."

  "No one can reach that guy," Yas huffed. Behind Sasara, the shades of the hangar seemed to be swirling and reaching out for her. "But the enemy are about to reach us. Any chance you could hurry?"

  Sasara leaned her cheek against the scout ship and smiled at the contact. Its side slowly melted open and a set of steps appeared.

  Harcrow went up first—he had ultra-violet and infra-red receptors in his cameras and saw better in the dark than any of them.

  Leaning out, he beckoned them up.

  "It's empty. Quick!"

  Yas ran up the steps just as the first tendrils of darkness reached his heel. The door irised closed just in the nick of time—a piercing pain on his ankle as he wrenched it out of someone's grasp. When he leaned down to check it, there were claw marks right through the leather of his boot and his heel was bleeding.

  Outside, someone was shouting—maybe calling for a control wand of their own. They had mere moments until the door opened again and let through a wave of alfr in their monstrous battle forms.

  "Let's get going!"

  He ran down the one corridor, following the gleam of the doctor's metal legs. At the end, a small bridge opened out, with seats that were more like bowls arranged around a black, gleaming console with no visible controls.

  The crew were throwing themselves down in the seats while Sasara and Vasto seemed once more to be communing with the silent instruments.

  "I can't fly it if I can't—" Vasto began, but Sasara made a commanding gesture, cutting him off.

  "I can understand the mechanisms," she said. "They work on the same principles as the wand, and I am attuned to that now. You are the pilot. You can pilot."

  "But I can't see!" Vasto protested, as a scrabbling began outside the hull. Maybe an intimidation tactic, or maybe the alfr were actually capable of clawing their way inside, but the sound of it alone was like nightmares brought to life.

  "I can see," Harcrow put in, calmly. "Maybe I can talk you through it?"

  "Better," Sasara said. "I will form a mental bridge between you. Captain, you will be the crew's eyes. I will reassure the ship that we belong on board and activate the drives. Once we are out, I will add into the communion all the rest of the crew, so that we will have gunnery, comms and telemetry. But let's just concentrate on getting out of here first."

  Harcrow blinked and leveled a long, puzzled look at Sasara, as if he was barely holding off on asking, "Can you do that?" Then he seemed to realize there was no time, or he decided to trust her to know her own abilities, and sat back. "Link me up."

  Sasara closed her eyes, her breathing slowing. Simultaneously, Harcrow and Vasto took in little shocked gasps and then Vasto's hands were flying over the console, stabbing at controls Yas still couldn't see.

  A sweet humming noise said the engines were on line. The gravity seemed to twist out and up for a moment and then settled on slightly less than one g—they were under ship-board gravity generators. With a sigh, the ship dipped a foot and settled—that must be the landing struts folded away.

  Yas couldn't see any view-screen, or any instruments to tell him if they were flying through a forcefield or towards a solid wall, but he felt a gentle forward acceleration that pressed him into the bowl of his seat. It arranged itself around him like the deep moss of a forest floor, letting out a scent of autumn leaves and rain that didn't quite fit with the Gothic aesthetic.

  Swallowing, Yas felt the ship pick up speed, bank and turn. Then Sasara opened her eyes, and her half focused gaze fell on him. "Time for sensors," she said breathlessly. A faint dew of sweat was beading up on her face, as if she was making a great effort, but her breathing was still slow and even and her body was so still it was uncanny.

  "What do I do?" Yas asked, the sense of wrongness now like the cage the alfr had fastened around his forehead. Something was trying to do the same—trying to press in from outside.

  "Relax and let me," she whispered. "Let me in."

  Taking her example, Yas closed his eyes and tried to fall into the sort of half-dissociated, out-of-body trance-like state he normally associated with the sacred dances. At once, he could feel her there, her mind warm and brighter than everything outside him, a tiny, yet infinite bubble where everything made sense, like a reverse tower of Babel.

  He stepped into the warmth and opened his eyes. Now, the ship's cockpit seemed brightly lit, and the array of instruments in front of him were self-evident. He activated the view-screen.

  Their ship, the Hawkbat, was fleeing from the elven mothership at three gee
s acceleration, curving to get the bulk of a moon between it and the mothership.

  Yas's stomach lurched into his throat, because he recognized the moon. That was Ko, Nahasdzáán's moon, red as coral from its iron deposits, and surrounded by thin threads of bronze surmounted by twinkling lights—the quays of the orbiting dockyards.

  There was a gate in the center of Ko, so here came all the trade of the sector in their slow impulse driven, or micro-hopping vessels to offload their wares to the gate-chamber in the core, where they could be taken and sold all over the galaxy. And here the tugs and shuttles docked when they weren't bringing the exchanged goods out of the well and flying them to Nahasdzáán and the other worlds of the sector.

  From when he had been a tiny child, Yas recalled lying on his back in the grassland, looking up at the poppy moon, and watching the firefly streams and flickers as clusters of spaceship running lights departed and arrived.

  From a tactical point of view, if the Dark alfr destroyed that gate, they would cut Nahasdzáán and all the rest of its sector off from the rest of the galaxy, perhaps forever. But Yas wasn't thinking of that. He was thinking of a child's simple love for the planet. It was his, his memories, his childhood, and they wouldn't touch it if he had anything to say about it.

  His couch jostled him, and he flipped over to the rear scanners. There the elven mothership was, a triangle of deeper darkness against the stars. As he watched, a beam of bone white energy lashed out from it and all the readouts on his desk turned gray-blue as if in shock.

  "Um," he said, getting lost a moment in the translation network going on in his mind. "We're taking heavy fire from the mothership. It's..." he double checked, not sure he was seeing this properly. "It's mostly splashing off the Hawkbat's outer coating... I guess they build their ships to be resistant to whatever they can throw out themselves. That makes sense. But I'm seeing hull degradation after each blast. We're not going to be able to repel it forever."

  "Timings, Mr. Sundeen," Harcrow said, his calm voice a rebuke.

  "Um..." the way the alfr measured time was such a foreign concept that even with Sasara's help Yas couldn't understand it. He took his best guess. "If they keep hammering us like this we've got ten minutes, tops, before it really hurts."

  In the shadow of the moon, a single bright star had begun to glow golden. Yas corrected himself. It couldn't be a star—it had only appeared a moment ago, and it was growing more rapidly than any ship should be capable of.

  Something about its light was familiar, that honey-gold, pouring amber light that spoke of riches and warmth, summertime and harvest. A part of him had recognized it even before it passed out of the moon's shadow and the sleek black panther-like cats who pulled it could be seen.

  In the light of the alfr' sensors, the cats looked far more like constructs than they had to human sight. The steel in their spines registered through their skins, and the electrical currents of their nerves were more obviously transmitted through cables rather than neurons. The Hawkbat's sensors registered a power-source deep in the heart of them like the spinning singularities in the hearts of great galaxies.

  "They're hailing us," Sasara panted. She was beginning to look harried, biting her lips, her eyes now scrunched up as she tried to keep track. "Desultory, I'm going to try to patch you in."

  "What are they saying?" Harcrow asked, a deep growl in the back of his throat as though he wanted to bare his teeth.

  "They want to know why the mothership is firing on us," Desultory said. It was a strange experience having the Ocuilin's thoughts touch the rest of the crew's. They added a strange syncopation, an inhuman rhythm that faded in and out, so that his mental voice seemed to be coming from a long way away and then right in Yas's ear from one moment to the next. "They say if we are the enemy of their enemies, does this mean we are their friends?"

  "What do they want from us?" Harcrow asked.

  The chariot was visible now in all its baroque splendor, it's tiny captive star shining above it, its atmosphere like a blue soup in the bowl. From below it came streaming warriors on horseback. Beyond tiny, they looked against a backdrop of stars, Kelkalyn's ship like a mountain of shadow behind them. They gathered above the chariot like a shining swarm of wasps.

  "They say if we are friends..." for the first time, Yas could recognize the emotion in Desultory's voice without having to look it up in a dictionary of color-patterns. Desultory was contemptuous and yet afraid. Friends, he was thinking, remembering the execution chamber, remembering no one in the Raggy's crew lifting a finger to help him but Yas.

  An overwhelming sense of guilt fed back from the group in apology to the thought.

  "If we are friends, we will allow ourselves to be boarded and brought on board the chariot, into Freya's protection."

  The elven mothership scored a direct hit. A beam of destructive energy smashed into the Hawkbat's aft thrusters, fire tearing through half of them. The bridge lights grew so bright for a moment Yas might have been able to see properly without Sasara's enhancement. A disturbing smell of scorched meat replaced the scent of autumn leaves, and Sasara groaned as she extended her consciousness to add Keva to the gestalt.

  "We're okay," Keva reported. "Failsafes have kicked in. We've still got minimal maneuverability and we're not going to blow up this time. Try not to let that happen again though. Next time may be the last."

  "I, uh," said Harcrow. "Now that I remember what it was like on the chariot, I don't wanna go back. Who knows if we'd ever get away again?"

  "They are the lesser evil," Yueh pointed out. "They don't want to wipe humanity out."

  "Just enslave us and wipe out the Ocuilin," Yas said. None of them had really felt what it had been like to be on Freya's bad side. If they thought they were going back, they could damn well do it without him.

  Harcrow shook his head. "We don't choose the lesser evil," he said. "We don't choose evil at all. Tell her we are the crew of the NXA Ragnarok, representatives of the Human/Ocuilin alliance. Tell her that we believe the Ocuilin are not less important than the humans and until she can deal with both races as equals, we're not her friend. But we're not her enemy either. Invite her to come talk to the government as an equal."

  Yas breathed out a sigh of relief. As much as he wanted to comb the chariot for Dezba, he was terrified of getting the crew back in its clutches again. Dezba was undoubtedly perfectly happy where she was, basking in her new goddess’s approval, and well, she was safer in the chariot than she was at home. He could try to free her later, when Nahasdzáán was saved for her to come home to.

  Freya's not going to like that," Vasto commented. He looked drawn and fidgety in a way Yas hadn't seen on him before. Perhaps he was taking separation from the transformer beam badly, and actually it was Mari in there. He certainly didn't look as healthy or as centered as he had done.

  "I know," Harcrow agreed. "Try to plot us a course behind the moon. See if you can get us into a dock placement. We'll abandon the ship above the moon and take the skyhook down to the surface. Try and lose ourselves in the general population."

  "Um," Yas laughed nervously. "The alfr are coming for the general population, sir. It's a case of being blown up in the ship or blown up down there."

  "We can assist with evacuations through the gate," Harcrow said, watching as Vasto seemed to play the Hawkbat's controls like a piano keyboard. Even with the artificial gravity on board, Yas could feel the abrupt changes of vector and acceleration as the pilot dodged the next and last bolt.

  Speaking of the gate, something was happening down on the moon. Yas trained the sensors out into the desert, beyond the domes of the trading posts and houses of the dock workers. Here where the moon was as pristine as it had been for all time, two massive construction ships had teamed up and seemed to be drilling through the moon's surface, throwing up plumes of massive rust-red dust clouds. It was an odd thing to do when an enemy fleet approached.

  From the far side of the moon, a steady stream of civilian vessels were d
eparting, evacuating or running away, depending on how one chose to phase it. The fragile tubes of the skyhooks and space elevators down to the planet were choked with people trying to get to safety, as though any armada that would attack the moon would somehow spare the planet.

  Yas's parents had friends who worked in the greenhouses on the moon. He had grown up with children who grew up to work on the freighters that were hurriedly fleeing from the docks. He discovered with an almost pleasant shock that if he died defending them, he would consider his life to have been well lived.

  "Yas? How is Freya taking it?"

  Yas shook his head to clear it and refocused his sensors. The swarm of horsemen above Freya's chariot had divided into companies and were galloping straight for the Hawkbat.

  "They're coming for us, sir."

  The Valkyries aimed their glowing spears and a dozen beams of light shot out, playing across the Hawkbat's reflective surface. Most of them bounced back off, but the hull began to crystallize faster, growing more organized, more stable and more brittle. Meanwhile, behind them, the elven mothership was charging its own beam, flickering silver light curving over its surface to gather at its tip.

  "We can't survive another hit," Keva yelled. "We must return fire at the Valkyries, or--"

  "No!" Yas yelled, all his previous calm falling away, panic filling its place. "No, my sister could be one of them. We'll hit the alfr. Just them, okay!"

  "We're trapped in the crossfire," Harcrow said. "I get not wanting to risk your sister, but while they're firing at us and at each other, they're not firing at the cities. We've got to stall them long enough that the moon base can clear out through the gate."

  He gave a small, annoyed compression of the lips, but said, "Return fire on the mothership."

  Zardari leaned to their desk, and the Hawkbat began to thrum like a harpsichord as they took shot after shot, Vasto still turning and corkscrewing the ship through defensive maneuvers.

  Then the white beam made contact again.