The Rifter's Covenant

by Sherwood Smith

  Again the frantic dance and fluffing ribbons, but this time the weird sounds coming from the three Kelly reminded Lochiel of giggles. And there was that assumption of childishness again, or rather, Lochiel thought, an unexamined sense of human superiority that caused her to wince inside.

  Then the Intermittor said, “It is impossible to explain.”

  Tired and somber, Lochiel shook her head. “Then maybe we can go into it another time, when youthree have the right words, and I have a clearer head.”

  A triple bow from the Kelly, and Lochiel and her mates left. Again, by mutual and unspoken consent they left her to sleep alone. Bayrut would assume first watch.

  But Lochiel could not sleep, not yet. When she reached her cabin, she moved directly to her desk. After staring at the blank viewscreen, she tabbed the control to window up a picture of her cousin Cameron, resplendent in the uniform of a naval captain. His eyes seemed to bore into her, calmly appraising. He was the only one who hadn’t seemed surprised when she took the Riftskip, the only one of the MacKenzie Family she’d ever heard from afterward.

  “Well, cousin, perhaps your familial loyalty will have a payoff, after all.”

  She’d said that to him before they parted. His reply echoed with renewed force. “If that’s how you think of loyalty, you don’t yet know what it truly is.”

  “Let’s find out if I’ve learned, cousin,” she whispered.

  TWO

  TELVARNA: IN THE RIFT

  Montrose knuckled his gritty eyes and fought a yawn that threatened to unhinge his jaw. He sank back at the communications console; though he’d adjusted the pod cushions, the seat still seemed subtly conformed to Lokri’s long, lean form. Or maybe it was just the complexity of memory and a vague sense of guilt that Lokri still languished in prison back on Ares.

  From the direction of the navigation console came the soft rustle of Kelly ribbons. Montrose smelled the sharp, almost chemical odor that he’d learned was the Kelly equivalent of a yawn.

  The Kelly trinity Portus-Artos-Dartinus stood behind Ivard. Dartinus and Atos leaned against Portus, the Intermittor of the trinity, the head-stalks of all three entwined in a complex knot. Ivard slumped in his pod with the boneless grace of youth, his head thrown back against Portus’s body, his fiery red hair a startling contrast against the deep green of the Intermittor’s pelt. The youth was sound asleep.

  Portus’s head-stalk rotated gently a few degrees, one of her eyes flickering in an acknowledgment that Montrose suspected was the Kelly equivalent of a wink. Then her head-stalk inclined toward Sebastian Omilov, deeply absorbed in some complex task at the console rigged for him at the back of the bridge.

  “Perhaps you should mickey him before he wears us all out,” the Kelly honked softly.

  Omilov remained oblivious. In the captain’s pod, Vi’ya showed little sign of fatigue other than a telltale darkening around the eyes, and tension in the line of shoulder and arm as she tabbed her console. The Eya’a stood motionless nearby, their multifaceted blue gazes fixed on her.

  At the rear hatch, Navy Solarch Emras sho-Rethven stood in the relaxed at-ease posture a Marine could sustain for hours. She gave a jaw-cracking yawn, caught Montrose’s gaze, and smiled apologetically at him.

  Montrose wondered how Marim was holding up, back in the engine room. Probably catnapping with an alarm on the comm.

  Omilov broke the silence. “You are sure of that bearing, Captain?”

  “You will have to ask Ivard,” Vi’ya replied with the harshening of consonants that indicated irritation.

  Omilov glanced at the slumbering youth and shook his head. “No need, I suppose. It fits the other readings.”

  He tapped at his console. An image windowed up on the main screen: a faint blue-white smear, with a spectral band displayed beneath it. All the lines smeared, some out of phase.

  “A black hole binary,” Montrose said, scowling at the screen. Anyone with even a smattering of navigational knowledge knew the spectral signature of a black hole binary, caused by the system’s rotation and the acceleration of matter falling into the singularity, since the results of running up near one in skip were catastrophic. But the spectroscopic display didn’t look right.

  “Yes, and no,” Omilov replied. “The widening of the spectral lines and the phase relationships are correct, but there’s an odd pattern of gaps in it.” He tilted his head sternwards, toward the storeroom in which the techs on the Grozniy had installed a bank of powerful computational arrays, including a duplicate of the battlecruiser’s science databanks. “The computer says that it’s actually a fractal spectrum of dimension 1.7, which may be related to its most anomalous aspect.”

  “Ah.” Montrose’s heavy brow cleared. “Where are the X-rays?”

  “Exactly. The system is putting out only a fraction of the high-end radiation expected from the accretion disk. Moreover, its position off the main sequence doesn’t correlate with the other stars in this region, nor does its chemical composition match its H-R position.”

  Portus honked an interrogative, and Ivard sat up, his finger transcribing an arc to mirror that depicted on the display. “What does that mean?” he asked, his voice clear, as though he’d never been asleep.

  Perhaps he hadn’t been. Montrose wasn’t sure any more what the range of Ivard’s consciousness was.

  “No known process could cause such a spectral signature in a star.” Omilov smiled wearily. “It means, I think, that we’ve found the Suneater.”

  The rest of those gathered on the bridge were so tired there was no sign of much more emotion than mild satisfaction.

  Omilov turned to Vi’ya. “Can you take us in north of the system about thirty light-minutes out for a closer look?”

  “Belay that,” sho-Rethven said, coming to the alert. “Have you forgotten our orders, Gnostor? No closer than a light-day. We don’t know how thickly they’ve sown transponders around that system—and they emptied three naval storehouses that we know of, so it could be pretty thick.”

  Omilov rubbed his jaw. “Yes. Thank you. I’d forgotten.” He paused, and his next words filled everyone with relief. “Then I suggest we break for a watch.” He began carefully shutting down his console. “Let us recuperate. The next stop will be to execute a TDVSA, a temporally distributed . . .”

  “. . . virtual sensor array,” Vi’ya cut in. She tapped at her console and a complex geometric diagram windowed up, along with a wireframe of the Telvarna with sensors highlighted on its hull.

  Omilov blinked. “Ahh. It’s obvious you’ve more experience with them than I.” He rose and bowed to Vi’ya in a sincere deference which had nothing of irony in it. “You must forgive me, Captain. A lifetime of prejudice is hard to overcome.”

  Vi’ya inclined her chin, a slight smile easing the somber lines of her face. “Granted, Gnostor.” She swiped her hand across her console, and the screen went dark. “A Z-watch for us all,” she declared, and with a glance at the rear of the bridge, she added, “Let the Marines keep watch, if they care to.”

  o0o

  “Run fifteen completed,” Ivard said. “Ready for skip to sixteen.”

  The stars slewed across the viewscreen as the Rifter captain brought the ship about. Solarch sho-Rethven felt the lurch as the Telvarna skipped. The fiveskip was showing the strain of the frequent hops required to create a virtual sensor array large enough to resolve a useful image from a light-day out—it was much easier with the huge baseline of a battlecruiser.

  Ivard caught her eye and smiled.

  Sho-Rethven smiled back. Ivard’s interest in her was obvious. He was a bit young, but interesting, especially his close relationship with the Kelly. She’d never met a Kelly trinity she didn’t like.

  Of course duty came first, but these Rifters were a genial bunch, except for the stone-cold Dol’jharian Captain Vi’ya. Sho-Rethven didn’t trust her at all. The fact that she was a tempath, and maybe even a telepath, made the situation even trickier.

  Her gaze
flicked to the weird little pair of sophonts, whom she tried hard not to think of as ‘the brain-burners.’ Though that’s what they were. The Eya’a could fry your brains with their psi, and they were apparently in psi-communication with Vi’ya.

  One of the pair turned multi-faceted blue eyes sho-Rethven’s way and chittered softly.

  The sophont’s weird, twiggy fingers described a symbol. This, she had been told by Ivard, meant “We see you.” The other added the symbol that they had dubbed her with: “The one who waits to kill.”

  Strangely, there was no sense of threat implied in their attitude. They seemed to accept that as her role, but she had no illusions about what would happen if her duty led her to action against Vi’ya. She only hoped she’d be fast enough to finish the job before they finished her.

  The memory of the failsafes implanted in both her and Solarch Zhedong flashed up, and she suppressed it. If one triggered, she’d never know it, and it was best not to dwell on the prospect, especially if the Dol’jharian’s talent actually did shade into telepathy.

  The ship shuddered out of skip.

  “Vi’ya, this better be the last for a while,” Marim’s high voice came over the com from the engine space. Marim was almost as old as big, grizzled Montrose, but you couldn’t tell unless you got up close. Small and blonde, she seemed no older than Ivard. “The fiveskip is really heating up.”

  Omilov looked as worried as the others felt: the high-frequency skips required for the extreme precision of a sensor array created by one ship in multiple locations required was taking its toll.

  “Position sixteen established,” Ivard called out.

  “This is the last one we’ll need,” Omilov decided as he straightened up from his console. Then his instruments bleeped. “Yes. That’s it. Now the computer will process it, and we should be able to see what we’ve searched for so long a time.”

  On the screen a fuzzy blob coalesced, slowly sharpening as the huge computer array reiterated the complex algorithms that would resolve an image out of the sixteen sensor readings they had taken from widely separated vantage points around the suspected location of the Suneater.

  Finally the image stabilized, revealing the savage beauty of a black hole binary. In the center of the screen was a red supergiant, bloated into oblateness as it overflowed its Roche volume toward the black hole, an immense plume of gas erupting from the oblate prominence on its surface and plunging into the accretion disc around the singularity. The matter spiraling to destruction shaded through the spectrum from red at the edge to the blue-white fury of disintegrating matter at the center, where it fell over the event horizon of the black hole and disappeared from the universe.

  The image was familiar, and not familiar. “Where are the polar jets?” Montrose asked from the back of the bridge.

  “There are none,” Omilov said in a slow voice of scientific wonder. “I believe that explains the anomalous spectrum. Somehow, the Suneater is, well, eating them. The amount of energy that represents is enormous.”

  The image shifted, and a fuzzy shape swam into view. An orbital plot in another window indicated that it was seventeen light minutes out from the mass center of the system.

  “What in Haruban’s Hell is that?” Marim’s voice came clearly over the com as the image slowly resolved.

  “Something never dreamed of in our engineering,” Omilov whispered. “Built by a race of which we know virtually nothing. I wonder how humans can even live in it.”

  “Be better if they couldn’t.” Montrose’s deep voice rumbled with distrust. “Would have saved a lot of trouble.”

  Omilov didn’t seem to hear him. “So that is the Suneater,” he said reflectively. “At long last.”

  Sho-Rethven gazed at the tangle of reddish tubes and cones. The Suneater looked like a high-speed collision of brass instruments. Made out of something that looked like somebody’s gums.

  Near one of the cones, a smear coalesced into the form of a small ship.

  “Looks like it just took a dump,” Marim commented.

  Ivard snickered. “What’s it been eating?”

  “Do you need anything more, Gnostor?” Viya’s cold tones cut through the banter.

  “No, Captain.” Omilov, tired as he was, radiated immense satisfaction. “It’s all in the computer.”

  “Very well.” She stood up. “Ivard, take the con and set up the return. You handle the skip.”

  She walked past sho-Rethven without a flicker of acknowledgment and disappeared down the corridor.

  o0o

  A few hours later Montrose walked onto the bridge. A visceral flash of rightness at the sight of the captain at work at her pod was followed by the jolt of memory. Not so very long ago it had been Markham’s lanky form lounging in the captain’s pod, his blond head bent over the console, that gave the crew the sense that all was well: The Captain Was at Work.

  Vi’ya had been so different in those days—a smiling figure in jewel-toned clothing. Markham and she always seemed to know what the other was thinking, a relationship that had had nothing to do with telepathy.

  Vi’ya turned his way, dark eyes assessing; that humor was gone, as were the colors she had worn. Montrose suspected she’d picked up his emotions, if not his thoughts. So he said, “Absurd, isn’t it? How we can lull ourselves with a false sense of security.”

  She gave a peculiar shake of her head that was not quite a twist, not a nod. It was characteristic of Dol’jharians, he’d found out. Manderian did the same thing. Though it was a dismissive gesture, he did not find it irritating, as he did the airy, graceful hand motions of the Tetrad Centrum Douloi, the inner elite of the aristocrats that ruled—had ruled—the Thousand Suns. With them a fine sense of condescension, or even of forbearance, was implied toward those who did not know the subtleties of current fashion in unspoken communication.

  “For this moment,” Vi’ya said, “we feel in control of our lives.” She jerked her chin over her shoulder toward the bulkhead at the back of the bridge, where the two Arkadic Marines were housed. “At least they are quiet about their work.” Irony brought out the Dol’jharian accent in sharper consonants and guttural ‘r’s.

  Montrose sat down in Lokri’s pod. Steepling his fingers, he said, “So what do we do?”

  She shrugged. “We return to Ares. And there we stay until justice is served.”

  Lokri. Montrose knew that the Marines had ears on the bridge, and however cooperative and pleasant these nicks had been so far on this weird journey, if Vi’ya damped their narks they would both come running, weapons drawn. And no one wore boswells, an order Vi’ya had agreed to. He didn’t want to know what arcane nastinesses the Marines were armed with.

  So out loud he asked a question about the new sensors the Panarchists had had installed on the Telvarna for Omilov’s use, but with one hand he brought the communications console to life, keying it to text mode and echoing it to the captain’s console. Vi’ya had made it clear that the bridge consoles were safe.

  You still plan to free Lokri before you leave Ares?

  Her answer appeared on his console: I do. Out loud her voice went on unemotionally about how useless some of the equipment was—but that it would fetch a fair price on Rifthaven someday.

  You’ll have to move quickly, then, Montrose typed. Just before we left, Jaim told me that the Archon of Torigan was using his weight to force a trial.

  Vi’ya’s eyes narrowed. Her hands paused, tense and still, then she typed: We will use every advantage to delay it, then.

  Montrose thought immediately of Brandon Arkad, now Panarch of the Thousand Suns. If he couldn’t delay it, nothing could. But would he?

  Vi’ya must have been thinking the same thing. We must find out from Lokri what happened fourteen years ago.

  I got it out of him—everything he remembers.

  Vi’ya lifted her chin and ended the connection.

  Montrose shut his console down and got to his feet. Telling her the story could wait: they still h
ad a long journey ahead of them, and though the Marines had their narks, Montrose knew this ship better than they did—including where his own monitoring sensors still functioned. As he left, he wondered what kind of diversion to arrange, and reminded of the presence of the Kelly as well as the Eya’a, he smiled. Surely they could come up with something highly entertaining.

  o0o

  Manderian woke when a near-blinding light flashed through his dreams. He groped in the darkness and found the bedside console. Light filled the tiny cabin, illuminating the chrono: 03:55.

  Manderian sat on the edge of the bed, and though his robe lay within reach, he did not touch it. To a follower of the Sanctus Lleddyn, dreams carried truth; understanding them was a matter of intuition and openness to the currents of Totality. He identified the flash: the Eya’a, moving somewhere in close proximity. The rest of the dream required little contemplation. It was a warning.

  He stepped into the tiny bain and doused himself with cold water at stinging force until his blood coursed through his body, heightening his thoughts to alertness. Then he donned his robe.

  Outside his cabin, he nearly collided with Ivard, clad only in trousers, with a small bag hanging from a long chain around his neck, one hand resting on the huge wedge-shaped head of the cliff-cat Lucifur. The bright green stripe bonded forever around one of Ivard’s arms contrasted with his warm brown skin and red hair. Ivard fought back a yawn then said, “You awake? Can you punch up the Suneater for the Eya’a? They’re jumpy for some reason and won’t let me sleep.”

  Manderian bowed his acquiescence. Yawning again, Ivard shuffled back to the cabin he shared with the Kelly, throwing up a hand in silent greeting to the Marine who glanced out of the rec room. Wondering if Ivard felt crowded with four beings in a space meant for two, Manderian moved to the bridge.

  The Eya’a waited, their faceted eyes gleaming. Their attenuated, brittle-looking fingers sketched out the semiotics for “We see you,” followed by the sign for “Nivi’ya” (Another-One-Who-Hears), which was their name for Manderian. Term, not name, he thought, recalling a recent conversation with Vi’ya. Though he had spoken little with her since they left Ares, she had been a lot more forthcoming about what she had learned of the Eya’a than she had been on the station. “They now recognize us as individual entities, but they will never understand the arbitrariness of names. As near as I can describe it, they identify one another with memory images, but even that doesn’t quite comprehend it. Remember, they are in some sense in constant contact with their hive. There’s a lot they just don’t consider relevant, like our genders, time, or distance,” she’d said.