by Jaine Fenn
Ifanna forced herself not to panic.
‘Well?’ The Escori’s gaze bored into Ifanna’s soul.
‘I told Gwas Maelgyn what I experienced,’ she said carefully.
‘And that was what, precisely?’
Neither lies nor evasion would serve her now. ‘When the Cariad said she would look into my heart, I felt nothing at all.’
‘Not even the silent voice that witches are said to employ to beguile their victims?’
Ifanna had no idea any man, let alone a priest, knew of that trick. ‘No,’ she said, determined not to let her surprise show, ‘not even that.’
‘So, would you say that, as far as you could tell, the woman who sits upon the throne of the Cariad is mortal, ordinary and not possessed of even a witch’s abilities?’
‘I would say she is nobody of note.’ For a moment Ifanna wondered if the Mothers would strike her down; she had just denied the divinity of the highest power in the land to the face of the second highest!
But they did not. And the Escori merely smiled.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Jarek was expecting the message, when it finally came, to be from the Consensus, so he was amazed and delighted when he heard a familiar voice.
‘Hi there!’ Taro sounded unfeasibly cheerful.
‘It’s good to hear from you,’ said Jarek warmly.
‘Yeah, and soon you’ll see me too. My friends here tell me this ship’ll be at the Consensus in less than three hours.’
‘That’s great news,’ said Jarek, straining his ears: Taro’s voice sounded a bit odd, like he was forcing himself to come across as carefree and happy. Was he under duress?
‘Listen, apparently the patrons don’t want my friends to land on the Consensus hab, so we’ll meet you in orbit, all right?’ continued Taro chattily.
‘Sure, no problem.’ He’d prefer that himself – but what about Nual? Not that he’d any intention of mentioning her on an open com channel.
‘The locals want to see what we’re up to, though, so you gotta stay in orbit around the – whaddya call it, the Egg?’
‘That’s what the lingua call it, yes.’
‘Yeah. So listen, I’ll send you some coordinates then, shall I?’
‘If you like.’ What the hell was Taro playing at?
‘Here they come. I’ll be in touch again when we’re closer. Bye for now.’
‘Bye, Taro.’ As he signed off he received the data-package. The encryption was basic, and he opened it to discover coordinates given in human-space notation, just as Taro had said. But he hadn’t needed a coded databurst for such a small snippet of info; Taro could just have given it verbally. Unless . . . ?
Sure enough, at the very end was another set of coordinates, along with an exact time and one word: tight-beam.
Jarek smiled. Sometimes the boy surprised him.
He made one last attempt to persuade the Consensus to hand Nual over, and when they continued to deny all knowledge of her, he asked, with his voice full of not-entirely-feigned pique, for immediate permission to undock. They granted it without comment or complaint.
At precisely the moment Taro had specified he made sure the Heart of Glass was in precisely the position he had specified, and got ready to receive the tight-beam communication, which would be invisible, and untraceable by any third party unless they were in precisely the right position to physically intercept the transmission.
Taro sounded a lot less self-assured when he greeted Jarek this time. ‘This is gonna have to be quick,’ he started, and went on to explain the plan. Jarek had to resist the urge to call him crazy; he wasn’t crazy, just in love. And getting Nual back wasn’t just about keeping Taro happy. Still, Jarek felt obliged to point out that they were being used by whichever sept Taro’s friends owed their allegiance to, and Taro didn’t bother to argue. They both knew they didn’t have much choice. Taro also told him that Vy was dead. Jarek wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
He had some tricky flying to do if he was to make the rendezvous whilst at the same time ensuring the Heart of Glass’s final position looked like chance, not design. Jarek rolled his shoulders, cracked his knuckles and gave his full attention to the controls. ‘Right,’ he said to himself, ‘time to make this look easy.’
Space made you feel naked – though Taro wasn’t naked, of course: the v-suit Zhian had provided was so thin he could feel his clothes through it. The struts and braces of a lifter-harness encased his limbs like the skeleton of an extra suit, running from the nape of his neck to the soles of his feet. Even though it was currently powered down, he liked having the additional layer between his flesh and the void.
He’d have liked an actual spacecraft around him even more, but he couldn’t argue with Zhian’s logic: quite aside from needing the shuttle as a decoy to (apparently) carry him back to the Heart of Glass, he had to stay out of sight as he crossed the klick or so between her ship to the Egg, and even a powered-up lifter-harness would leave a detectable signature. Angel mods, on the other hand, left him all but invisible, unless someone trained sensors with hi-mag visuals or ultra-sensitive grav pick-up on his exact location.
He spent nearly an hour clinging to an external holdfast on the hull while Zhian’s ship closed the distance to the Consensus. As it adjusted course, his view of the massive habitat swung first to the left, then the right, then the middle, all the time getting closer. So that was – or had been – a Sidhe mothership. He remembered Vy’s words: ‘Back when the rebellion against the Protectorate was kicking off, the free males caught themselves a Sidhe ship: the biggest mothership of all. They kept it, sort of like a trophy, and turned it into one of their habs. No point wasting it.’ Or its crew. . . No wonder they called it the Egg.
The view below him rolled, and the calm, sexless voice of the suit’s com said, ‘Prepare to disembark.’ He unclipped his tether-line. The two ships would only be positioned over the right area of the hab for a few seconds.
Setting this up had required some brain-aching calculations – carried out by Zhian’s patron and transmitted tight-beam to her, then on to Jarek – followed by some snazzy flying by both Jarek and Zhian’s people. So far, Taro had just been along for the ride. Now it was up to him.
A loud double chime sounded in Taro’s ear: on the far side of Zhian’s ship the shuttle would be undocking and heading towards the Heart of Glass.
He flexed his legs and leapt into space, flinching as he broke free of the cover provided by the ship. If he’d felt exposed clinging to the outside of a spaceship, flying through open space made his balls positively shrivel – and that was with the Angel mods working full-out to stop him panicking and keep his innards at a constant gravity!
He focused on the view below. He was already close enough to the hab that its curve was barely visible. Most of the surface was covered in tech-crap – dishes, aerials, and less identifiable lumps and nodules.
Movement drew his eye. Directly below him, a squat tower was swivelling. Shit and blood, what was it? Sensor? Gun? His mods damped down his fear, but didn’t have any useful tactical suggestions.
The tower swivelled further, then stopped.
Nothing happened.
He let go a massive sigh; the hot puff of breath whooshed disconcertingly through the tiny gap between his mask and the skin of his face before the suit absorbed and diffused it. Whatever that thing was, it wasn’t a gun, thank fuck.
In his ear the suit-com instructed him to move a little to his left, and for the next few minutes his attention was focused on course adjustments, while trying to keep an eye on the cluttered surface looming up to meet him.
He blinked as the view went dark; the hab had rotated out of sunlight. He was aiming for a maintenance airlock, slightly recessed in an otherwise clear section of hull. It all looked the same from up here in the dark, and he couldn’t risk turning on his light, so it was a good job the suit knew where it was going.
When he was ten metres away he cut his speed, and
made an ungainly landing a little way from the ’lock. He looked around, and spotted something moving, off to his left. Whatever it was, it was coming this way. He wasn’t going to panic; it was most likely a maintenance bot . . .
Yes, that was it: just a bot, trundling unhurriedly across the hab’s surface. It was quite a big fucker, though, and definitely heading towards him. What should he do? There was nowhere to hide, and if he powered up the harness to use the extra strength to defend himself, that’d blow his cover for sure. And if he flew off, that’d expose him too. Fuck.
He settled for staying very still, while being prepared to jump instantly if he had to. The bot, looking like a rolling pile of animated junk, trundled closer, until it was near enough for him to see that it was a flat cylinder about a metre across, with tracks on the bottom, and a variety of arms, manipulators, sensors and antennae sprouting out of the top. It looked like a pretty lo-tech machine compared to the slick and seamless tech Zhian’s people were so proud of.
It didn’t look like the bot had noticed him yet. How smart were these things anyway? The worst-case scenario was that it was like an avatar, an extension of a male Sidhe mind, and if that was the case, he was well and truly fucked. But he knew from his experience with Khesh that even a male built into a massive structure could spread himself only so thin; maintenance bots would usually be well below the threshold of its consciousness. Unless something happened to alert it, of course . . .
The bot was only a couple of metres away now. It drew level with him . . . and carried on, oblivious. It was just heading for the airlock. He hadn’t got in its way, so it’d ignored him. As the lock opened and the bot drove in, its tracks reorienting to tip it over the lip, Taro’s suit spoke again, sounding almost impatient: ‘Stage two should now have commenced.’
‘All right, all right, gimme a moment here!’ Taro touched the controls on the back of his gauntlet, hastily jury-rigged for a user without neurolink implants, and he felt the lifter-harness’s embrace tighten. It constricted his body, but it also enhanced it, giving him strength far beyond that of an ordinary human. His feet dragged slightly as the harness compensated for the hab’s lower grav by sticking him to the deck.
He edged up to the airlock. As he’d expected, there were no controls; only bots used it, and they just had to query the hab-mind when they wanted to come in. He’d just have to make his own entrance. He thumbed the controls to activate the harness’s cutting torch and the visor darkened automatically until the blue-white tip became the only bright point in a world of deep shadows.
After a last check around to make sure he wasn’t going to be disturbed, he began tracing a wide C-shape into the door; it reminded him of the cut fences round the edge of Khesh City: for non-Angels, they were the only way up from the Undertow into the wider world.
Once he’d cut his entrance, he had another look around, then used his harness-enhanced fist to punch the jaggedly cut section in: to a low-intel bot the damage would appear accidental.
He realised he’d forgotten something when his hand started tingling painfully – the moment he’d breached the door, a forceshield had sprung up to preserve the atmosphere inside. He told his suit to activate its own minimal shield – like the one he’d just put his hand through it was designed as an emergency response to a breach, but it would let him pass through the airlock’s field without injury. Then he shook his hand to get some feeling back into it, held his breath and jumped into the hole. He felt the forceshield as a thin line of cold rushing up his body. The rebreather pack on his back caught the edge of the hole for a moment, and his heart tripped – then the pack slid free, the cold line was gone and he was in.
He activated his suit-lights, sending shadows chasing around the inside of the airlock. No doubt silent alarms would be going off, warning of the hull breach, and bots would be heading this way, quite possibly including the one that had passed him earlier. So, no time to hang around. He remembered to switch off the suit’s forceshield – it was an emergency feature with limited duration, and he’d need it again later. He also turned off the lifter-harness; not knowing his own strength in here could be a bad thing.
He stopped just short of the inner airlock, hoping Zhian was right; she’d said most of the hab’s inside doors worked on sensors – assuming the hull breach hadn’t overridden them. After what felt like several seconds, the door opened, and he heaved a sigh of relief: no way did he have time to cut his way through every door he came to. He didn’t fancy encountering any of the bots in this confined space, even though the circular ducting was wide enough to get past them; quite aside from all those scary bits sticking out of the fuckers, he couldn’t afford to be spotted. He needed the hab-mind to stick with the most likely explanation for the airlock problem: that it was an accident, not the result of some crazy human trying to break in.
His suit directed him down smaller, less well-used passages intended for the more delicate bots that looked after the hab’s internal systems. He wondered if the big vacuum-hardened bot he’d seen outside was one of the original ones, from way back when the hab was actually a Sidhe ship . . . but he decided it probably wasn’t the actual machine, given this place had been here for thousands of years; most likely it was the same design though. The hab-mind probably didn’t need the out-of-sight tech to look all prime and sexy: it just needed to work.
He kept to the centre of the tunnel, flying slow and careful, until he came to his goal. It wasn’t much to look at; just a recess in the wall. He flipped up a panel to reveal a line of three holes, then unsealed the hardened cache on the back of his forearm and took out a dataspike. Of course, the unknown patron could’ve given the ’spike to a bot and reprogrammed it to come to this particular override node – hell, a male Sidhe could’ve inserted the command-code straight into the Egg’s systems without all this fucking about . . . But that would be traceable; a lone human crawling through the ducts like a virus in the massive body of the hab wasn’t something anyone would expect – or, hopefully, spot.
He had a bit of trouble getting the short, fat ’spike in, but on his third attempt he managed it. Now that the code it contained was loose in the hab’s systems, the crap would be heading towards the whirly-thing, and nothing he could do would stop it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Jarek hesitated, his hand stretched out over the console. If this went wrong, then even if Taro got Nual out safely, they might not have a ship to come back to. Normally an incoming vessel would dock with the Heart of Glass using the main airlock, but the Alephan ship’s airlock didn’t mesh with his human-space tech, and the local humans didn’t have an all-purpose docking-tube like those on the Consensus. Instead, he had to open the Heart of Glass’s massive cargo-hold doors, usually used for loading only when the ship was inside a station, and let the Alephans physically fly their shuttle inside. He’d have to repeat the manoeuvre twice more for other incomers, assuming all went to plan. The last time would be the killer.
His external vid-feed showed the approach of a plain, rectangular vessel with rounded edges, the smooth grey surface relieved only by a small cluster of instruments on the top at the front end.
A synthesised, asexual voice came over the com: ‘Permission to board requested.’
Jarek checked, yet again, that the ship’s forceshields were at max, then keyed the control to open the doors. ‘Permission granted,’ he said out loud.
The shuttle took its time. The moment it had finally settled on the floor of the hold Jarek closed the doors and switched to internal cameras.
Then he allowed himself to breathe again.
The Alephan shuttle sat quietly in his cargo-hold, looking for all the world like actual cargo.
Jarek sprang out of his couch and headed down off the bridge and through into the hold. As he approached the shuttle, a door opened in one end and a homely-looking woman in a one-piece emerged, followed by a youth about Taro’s age.
‘Welcome aboard,’ said Jarek.
‘Than
k you,’ said the woman. ‘Query: are you monitoring the Consensus in order to respond when they ask about the delay?’
‘Oh yes. Soon as they call, I’ll tell them all about those minor technical difficulties we’re having due to incompatible tech, and how I’ll be running a few minutes behind schedule as a result.’
There were no technical difficulties, of course – not that the Consensus would be able to tell, now the doors were closed – but the manufactured delay would buy Taro the time he needed.
Jarek didn’t particularly like having visitors on his ship, though he’d had to get used to it in recent times. These people were risking a lot to help him and his crew. ‘Would you like a look around,’ he asked, ‘then maybe I can offer you some refreshments?’
‘Thank you,’ said the woman.
The boy asked, ‘Query: do you have caf?’
‘Caf? Yes, I do. Is that what you’d like?’
‘Okay-aye. Statement: Taro has told me of it and I wish to try some.’
‘Yeah, why not?’ At least making a round of drinks might distract him, and stop him worrying about the part of the plan he had no control over.
Now the hack was in place Taro really was up against the clock. As soon as the light on the end of the dataspike flashed amber he pulled it out and stashed it carefully. Whilst he didn’t much care if the males fought amongst themselves, he didn’t want to get Zhian’s people into trouble. They might have their own agenda, but they’d kept their word, and he wouldn’t leave anything to implicate them, not even an empty dataspike.
As he followed the new instructions from his suit-com his thoughts returned to his final conversation with Vy. He’d still been digesting the revelation about males being able to download into beacons, and he’d asked, ‘So if you do manage to imprint on the beacon, then you’ll be linked back to Khesh – to the City – all the time, even if the beacon’s at Serenein, right? That means you’ve got some sort of opening into shiftspace active, permanently like.’ Jarek had described beacons as doors left ajar, to allow ships from the realspace universe to escape from shiftspace; he hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but if beacons contained downloaded male consciousnesses— He looked down at Vy. ‘Won’t that fuck you up? It certainly don’t do transit-kernels much good. I’d’ve thought being inside tech that’s always open to shiftspace would leave you well screwed!’