by K. Eason
“Shut up!” she bellowed—or attempted to bellow. (It was more like a ferocious wheeze, but Vagabond was small and sound carried easily.) Nevertheless, people listened: Zhang, perhaps from habit, and Crow, from sheer astonishment.
For a handful of rapid heartbeats, the silence stretched over the subliminal hum of the engines like a translucent skin. Three pairs of expectant eyes turned toward Jaed like flowers to the sun. Jaed swallowed. “It’s the Vizier. Our Vizier. Messer Rupert.”
“And Grytt is with me,” said Messer Rupert, in Jaed’s ear. “Jaed. What happened? Is everyone all right?”
He meant where’s Rory. Jaed knew he did. “Grytt’s with him,” he repeated dutifully. “He’s asking what happened.”
Jaed felt the look Zhang flung at him, like a splash of cold dismay on the side of his face. Thorsdottir pressed her lips into a line.
“You’d better tell him, then,” she said.
So Jaed did.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Rory had heard, as have innumerable children, that she need not fear the dark. And, perhaps because she trusted both Grytt and Messer Rupert (who had been the most frequent and vocal proponents of bravery in the face of shadows), she bent her considerable will to overcoming that instinct when the vakari ship went truly dark, and did not immediately panic.
One attentive to details—or intent on eroding Rory’s apparent bravery—might point out she was not entirely bound in pitch black. Her hardsuit possessed the usual power-indicator and safety teslas, and her HUD was functioning. When the ship’s overhead illumination failed, she found herself staring at the tiny cool blue stars that marked the joints of her wrists, and, because of the angle at which she crouched on the deck, those on the backs of her heels, as well. That same attentive critic might also observe that the illumination put forth by those tiny blue teslas was insufficient for more than psychological comfort. She was still effectively blind, and appropriately startled, for the fraction of a second that it took her to register the darkness; then her headlamp, responding to the ambient automatically, engaged, and suddenly there was a sturdy beam carving a circle into the bulkhead across from her.
She stared at that circle of light while she gasped her heartbeat back to normal. She was, in fact, afraid of this darkness. Power failure on a voidship would, if it went on very long, prove fatal to everyone, and neither her HUD nor all the twinkling teslas on her suit would be of any benefit. She leaned forward and put a hand flat on the deck. It was impossible to tell, through the layers of polysteel in her glove, whether the deck still vibrated with a living engine. Or at least, it was impossible for human flesh to ascertain that vibration. But the hardsuit could and, as she stared sternly at her HUD, confirmed her fear. The engines were offline. That meant the life support was, too.
The rational portion of her brain told her that this outage was the likely result of a powerful battle-hex. That same part of her brain insisted that any people so advanced in their arithmancy as the vakari would not skimp on system back-ups and redundancies. Power would return to the ship, probably sooner than later. And besides, it took life support a long time to fail. There would be oxygen yet for hours.
But for the moment, it was dark, except for her hardsuit. The console, with whatever passed for vakari turings, was dark, as was the lock-pad for the door.
Rory sprang up and launched herself across the narrow room. She used the bulkhead for braking, slamming into it with force enough to rattle the teeth in her head and inspire mild alarm in her hardsuit. She ignored both, and, with her headlamp drilling a path through the dark, found the edges of the control panel. The gap was too narrow to accommodate her fingertips, so she abandoned any idea of prying it off and performing a Jaed by ripping out a fortuitous fistful of wires. Besides, she reminded herself, with no power, the door would not magically spring open with its lock released.
But the door would also not magically hold itself shut, either, without power. She directed her headlamp along the seam where door and bulkhead met. Doors, at least on human ships, had emergency overrides. Surely the vakari would include such a thing as well. When she did not find anything that was obviously an emergency release, she reverted to a maneuver she might’ve named the Thorsdottir and slammed her entire body into the door, as if to shift it in its track, and, spreading her hands for maximum purchase of polysteel to polysteel, tried to slide it open. It remained shut.
The chrono on her HUD ticked off the seconds since commencement of the outage. Surely (and Rory was well aware how often she was thinking that word, and thought that it did not seem to mean what she thought it meant) the power would return presently, and if it did before she had gotten the door open, then she was still trapped.
We may blame desperation and the lingering effects of adrenaline that it took her so long to remember that she was an arithmancer, albeit only a skilled amateur and not a professional in any of the disciplines. Arithmancy was, at its most basic, about seeing what was there, since all the multiverse could be described in mathematic equations. With auras, it was a matter of shifting one’s perceptions to perceive electromagnetic emanations. With turings, the same; but there, one might alter the machine reality, rewriting lines of code.
To open a door, she needed a Thorsdottir, or a crowbar, or more strength than she had. Or a way to manipulate the equations she saw, when she looked, describing the mass, the momentum, the force required to move the door. She knew the most basic inertial equation, and a few more sophisticated variants besides. Surely (let that word mean what it should, this time) she could find some way to change what was into what could be.
Rory recalled Messer Rupert’s somewhat battered copy of Ben’a’di’s Ruminations, which theorized that probability could be actively influenced, not merely observed. In essence, the theory went: if you rewrite the equation, reality will conform. (This theory was also practiced, and is still practiced, by the vakari, but Rory would have known that even less.) Of course Ben’a’di was k’bal; their partitioned brains could perform calculations much more quickly than the human organ. Even the best of the human battle-arithmancers required time to create their hexes. Rory, nevertheless, attempted the impossible, driven by a combination of desperation and hope.
Sometimes that combination proves sufficient for success. In this case, it did not. But, by a fortuitous alignment of probability that we like to call luck, as Rory was attempting to adjust the door’s inertial equation’s variables, the ship’s power returned. And in that moment, when the flux of electricity returned, bringing its own entourage of equations, her alteration of those variables worked. The door moved, and because the locks had not yet received their allocation of power, and had not woken up and reminded themselves that they were supposed to prevent the opening of doors—this door opened.
Only a few centimeters, but enough that Rory could get her hands into that gap and perform a Thorsdottir—pull, push, and drag—to force the door open enough to permit a human-sized hardsuit to squeeze through.
There were no guards or sentries on the other side. The corridor was empty, both directions, as far as her headlamp could ascertain. Power might have returned, but the teslas were even slower than the locks to make use of it.
Koto-rek had promised to return, and had been telling the truth when she’d said it. That did not incline Rory to wait for her.
She made it four meters up the corridor and was in the process of turning a corner before the emergency teslas returned, dim and red and throbbing sullenly. She froze, dropping into a crouch, as if that would somehow prevent observation in an otherwise empty, open area in which any person in a hardsuit would be as obvious as an explosion. And indeed, had there been any vakari in the same corridor at that moment, they would have noticed her. The nearest vakar, however, was scuttling across the cross-corridor intersection a mere two meters ahead, and did not look sideways. Rory remained undetected.
Truthfully, her d
ecreased vertical silhouette proved helpful. The first vakar had been alone, unsuited, unarmed. The next two who passed by were clearly soldiers, weapons held loosely. They weren’t running. That suggested a lack of urgency. That could be both good and bad. Soldiers ready to repel boarders would be more likely to shoot an unfamiliar hardsuit silhouette first, and ascertain who was inside it later. But boarders, once they arrived, would add another group of people prone to shooting at everything that moved. Perhaps the lack of urgency meant boarders were not imminent. Or that the vakari were confident in their ability to repel them.
Assuming the attacking vessel attempted to board at all. Rory supposed they might not, might simply try to destroy Sissten outright. That was also a problem. There was, in fact, nothing about her situation that was not a problem right now.
Her HUD advised of increasing heart rate and respiration. Rory remained in her crouch and tried to breathe more slowly. Panic served no one.
She was loose in Sissten. Now she needed a destination. Vagabond was the obvious choice. Vagabond was also a labyrinth away, the corridors clogged with vakari troops, and someone shooting at the ship from the outside, which could result in a breach, either of ordnance or an actual boarding team, either of which could prove fatal.
It should be noted here that most individuals—Thorsdottir, Zhang, even Jaed—would have wished for a weapon at this moment. Rory did not, though it is not a marker of moral superiority that the wish did not cross her mind. She was simply unaccustomed to bearing arms and to violent confrontation; her first reflex was not to point and shoot, but rather to converse and negotiate. If words failed—and she had every reason to think they would, in current circumstances—then her preference was stealth and avoidance of confrontation.
She could only hope that confrontation avoided her.
Rory sank her awareness partway into the first layer of aether. She could see the numerical descriptions of the material plane—of the solidity of the bulkheads and deckplate, of the composition of the atmosphere, of the temperature and movements of aether—overlaid on the actual, physical artifacts (or, in the case of gaseous substances, sort of shimmering and floating, which made the numbers much harder to read). The probability of, say, the bulkhead dissolving into liquid was infinitesimal, though she could see which variable conditions would need to change to make it happen. The probability of this corridor remaining empty at this moment was a much more complex calculation, lines and lines of alphanumerics and operations.
Rory attempted to replace variables to squeeze down the probability of will there be a vakar coming this way to almost certainly not. Then she commenced creeping through (as much as one can creep in a hardsuit) Sissten’s labyrinthine corridors.
Whether because of luck or applied mathematics, the corridors remained empty. Rory was just about to congratulate herself, having just reached the final turn into what she was certain was the corridor where Vagabond was docked, when a new siren howled, of a particular stridency and urgency, and accompanied by a new white and flashing light from teslas not part of the usual parade of dull red.
Breach alerts.
If she were part of a hostile boarding party (which she had been, though only a few times, behind Thorsdottir and Zhang) she would choose a section of the target vessel already prepared for access: it was easier to storm an aetherlock than cut a new hole in an enemy ship. She could see Vagabond’s berth, and the glow from the aetherlock that said occupied. She cast a panicked look both directions. There were as yet no vakari troops. But Vagabond was also in the middle of that corridor. If someone caught her in the open—
Then she would be either shot or apprehended. If she remained here, she would not get to Vagabond at all. Rory gathered her breath, drew her awareness back out of the aether, and launched herself down the passage.
And here again we see evidence of either luck or fortuitous probabilities. It is quite possible that Rory’s hesitation, for which she at the time castigated herself, saved her life.
She was perhaps five meters from Vagabond’s aetherlock when the equations drifting across her awareness became alarmingly certain that there would be an imminent hull breach. Time works differently in the layers of aether: the greater the distance from the material plane, the more slowly observed time seems to pass. So it was that Rory had what felt like thirty very long seconds to examine a tangled pair of calculations accompanied by a frantic squirt of code through Sissten’s local automatic safety systems. A voidship possessed reflexes, and the Protectorate vessel was experiencing the equivalent of drop the hot tuber before it raises blisters. The calculations that prompted this reflex seemed to be a vessel currently docked in Vagabond’s berth, which had aimed, locked, and charged its plasma cannons.
Vagabond was going to fire on Sissten. Rory wanted to shout No and Don’t and What are you doing into comms already jammed mute and did, in fact, think those thoughts in rapid-fire succession, while her own reflexes arrested her body’s forward momentum and sent her scrambling back the way she had come. But even before she could finish those thoughts, she saw that the calculations had changed again. Sissten was releasing its clamps on Vagabond, and with some force, essentially ejecting from its hull a potentially injurious passenger. Zhang was abandoning her. And even as she knew that there must be a reason, that she was not betrayed—and even as she felt a fierce relief that at least one of her friends had escaped—a separate despair threatened to overwhelm her. Where would she go now, where would she hide, what would happen? Time seemed to suspend itself (and this was purely a subjective experience), that single horrified moment stretching into forever, even as her body propelled her back the direction she had come.
And several events appeared to happen simultaneously:
In the aether, the Vagabond-is-about-to-fire calculations ran back to nothing, as that ship sprang away from Sissten and ceased to be a threat. On the deck, the sound of tearing metal jerked Rory from her introspection. Reflex made her head turn and look back. As a result, she stumbled and careened into the bulkhead, shoulder first, which caused her to rebound across the corridor and sprawl on the deck.
So it was that Rory was both prone and lying crossways, and thus able to see both directions in the corridor, when the first Tadeshi breach team came through the hull on a blank stretch of bulkhead just past where Vagabond had been berthed. Smoke curled off the metal, accompanied by the blinding flicker of a plasma cutter licking through the alloy, perhaps two meters off the deck, and two thirds of the way to the overhead.
The location and the amount of smoke suggested a small cutter, which in turn told her that the breach team was coming in a pod, not a small ship. Rory had grown up reading reports of the war between the Thorne Consortium and the Free Worlds of Tadesh before her mother and Vernor Moss negotiated their ceasefire, and she was familiar with tactics and equipment and the massive Tadeshi troop-carrying dreadnoughts. Unless she was very much mistaken (which no one thinks unless, paradoxically, they are almost completely certain of their own correctness), then the invaders must be Tadeshi royalists.
At the same moment, motion on her other side summoned her attention. By now she was as flat on the deck as her hardsuit would permit. From that vantage, the Protectorate troops rounding the curve into what had been a vakari-free zone seemed particularly tall and imposing. Their rifles seemed especially nasty. And the probability of them bounding gracefully over, while ignoring utterly, a lone, prostrate human in a corridor about to be invaded did not need arithmancy to calculate.
Rory’s flattened vantage afforded her another discovery, as her frantic gaze skittered along the blank inner bulkhead. There was a door, in the direction of the breach pod, which presumably opened into either another corridor or a cargo bay of some kind, and which she couldn’t hope to reach without being shot. But there was a grated panel down where the bulkhead met the deck, directly across from her. It was smallish, narrow, likely too small for an armor
ed vakar, but perhaps just the right size for a human in a hardsuit. It clearly led somewhere, into the guts of the ship or into a compartment of some sort. And the panel lay scant centimeters from her helmet and within easy reach, should she stretch out her hands and push.
So she did.
A flare on her periphery told her that the breaching pod had completed its forcible entry. A section of Sissten’s bulkhead detached from itself and, still smoking and white-hot on the edges, clanged onto the deck. She felt, rather than saw, the Tadeshi troops dropping down, and spared all her attention for the panel, which, as evidenced by the fine mesh overlaying it, covered some sort of ventilation shaft. The panel had so far resisted her push. There must be another way to detach it from the bulkhead. She just had to find it, and quickly.
’Slinger bolts and whitefire from the Protectorate rifles began stitching the space above Rory’s head. She ignored them as best she could and continued to pry at the edges of the panel. The gap had been made for vakari talon-tips, not the blunter, broader human hardsuit, and refused accommodation. She blinked sweat from her eyes and willed herself flatter and therefore invisible, which was impossible, but, like the k’bal probability theory, a comfort to imagine as reality. The bolts and beams would not strike her because no one would shoot down at the deck. They had not even noticed her. She would find access to this damned panel in just a moment—
She did, suddenly: a depression in one corner, which, when pressed, initiated the panel’s withdrawal and retraction into the bulkhead. Rory squirmed headfirst into the gap as it opened, scraping her hardsuit and earning alarmed reproaches from her HUD. Her hopes of finding a maintenance shaft, as she and Jaed had managed on G. Stein, were immediately dashed. Her headlamp illuminated a narrow space, no wider than the bulkhead itself, which, though it appeared hollow from deck to overhead, was both crowded with cables and filaments and insufficiently tall for her to stand up. She was effectively trapped, with (as Grytt might say) her assets hanging out in a crossfire.