The Casheline branch of the Spacers’ Aid Society took the survivor in, providing him with fresh clothes to replace the torn and grease-stained garments he’d been wearing at the time of the fatal accident. They also supplied him with a dummied-up ID and a temporary apprentice’s card, to tide him over while Fire and Rescue awaited confirmation of his name and status from Central Records on Wrysten.
Interstellar mail was slow, and the Spacers’ Aid Society lacked the resources for faster linkups. Several weeks after the query went out, a return message arrived from Wrysten: no person using the name Pel Cendart and having the survivor’s physical characteristics had ever passed through Central Records there, much less put in for an engineering apprenticeship.
The Society notified Fire and Rescue, who notified Security. But by the time the team from Security arrived at the Spacers’ Hostel, Jos Metadi was long gone—his share of the insurance money from the wreck of Quorum in his pocket—and was working in the engineering boards of a free-spacer bound for Innish-Kyl.
IX. GALCENIAN DATING 974 A.F.
ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 38 VERATINA
THE ‘HAMMER’S viewscreens filled in an instant with the glowing colors of the Web. Perada thought that she could hear each individual breath and heartbeat in the crowded cockpit. Garen Tarveet, strapped in beside her on the acceleration couch, was shivering and sweating at the same time. His flesh felt cold and clammy wherever her skin touched his. She didn’t think the reaction came from fear, though, or at least not from fear alone; he must not have believed that his family would disown him.
Captain Metadi monitored the few readouts that still glowed on the command console. If Perada hadn’t seen him watching the same board on the way to the Flatlands, she might have been fooled. He reached out with one hand—tension evident in the line of neck and shoulder—and keyed on the intraship comms.
“Engineering, bridge. Take all safety circuits off-line. Give me maximum power.”
A rumble of Selvauran came back over the link.
“Not rated maximum,” Metadi said, his voice preternaturally steady. “If what you give me is even a hair less than the absolute most you can squeeze out, then it wasn’t the maximum. We’re in trouble.”
More rumbling in Selvauran.
“Trust me, Ferrda. They can handle it. Give me the power.” He clicked off the link and spoke to Ransome without turning his head. “Errec, I need another beacon and I need it fast—this is no place to be flying blind. There’s too much hard stuff out there to hit.”
“It’s even worse than that.” Garen’s whisper was a thread of sound in Perada’s ear, but she felt sure that both the captain and the copilot could hear it. “The way the Web warps things, you’ll keep going in circles forever if you don’t find a beacon. Not even inertial navigation works.”
“Don’t worry,” she murmured back. “I’m sure Captain Metadi can get us through.”
She hoped that he could, anyway. In the next instant, a crashing shudder ran through the ship, rattling the ‘Hammer’ s strength members and making the metal deckplates flex and vibrate.
Metadi picked up the intraship comm. “What was that? Anybody get a visual?”
“Something hard nailed us on the ventral side,” came back Nannla’s voice over the link. “Doesn’t look like any real damage—shields took it. How are those fighters coming along?”
“They’re still with us,” Metadi said. “Errec, I need that beacon now.”
Perada glanced over at the copilot. Errec Ransome’s face was pale and intent. One hand kept Sverje Thulmotten’s coursebook balanced on his lap, and the other hovered over the controls on his side of the command console, without quite touching anything. His eyes were closed.
“Fighters gaining,” said Metadi. “Errec …”
“Give me the helm,” Ransome said.
“You got it,” Metadi said. The captain let go the controls on his side and leaned back. “Navigator has the helm.”
Perada heard Garen draw a sharp breath. “’Rada—his eyes are shut!”
“I know. Don’t distract him,” she whispered back.
Ransome’s free hand remained poised over the control panel for a second, then came down. The glowing mists outside the viewscreens blurred and slipped away upward as Warhammer swooped in response. He touched the controls twice more, bringing the ship first left and then right, twisting the ’Hammer like a corkscrew through the dust clouds of the Web.
Tillijen’s voice came over the intraship link. “Beacon in sight. Occulting one-four-three, bearing six two seven plus five, range unknown.”
“Mornim’s Range Beacon,” Ransome said, opening his eyes. “Jos, you have it.”
“Got it,” Metadi said, as the copilot turned his attention again to the coursebook. “Gunners, look sharp—I’m starting to get a signal off of something that isn’t Mornim’s Range.”
“I have them,” said Tillijen over the link. “Unknowns coming up fast behind. No ID signatures, but they sure look like they’re—”
A purplish-pink light washed over the viewscreens, and the deckplates vibrated. A row of lights on the control panel bobbled as Warhammer’s guns fired in response.
“—hostile,” Nannla’s alto voice finished her partner’s sentence. “If you call shooting at us ‘hostile.’”
“Counts in my book,” Metadi said, not taking his eyes from the control panel. “Keep ’em off us, and stand by for a ride. Errec—where does Thulmotten say we go next?”
“Three five seven,” Errec said. “But it’s calculated for a lot lower speed.”
“Figure me something better, then. I’m not slowing down.”
The steady growl of Warhammer’s engines increased to a roar. Perada felt herself pressed first sideways against Garen, then down into the padding of the acceleration couch as Metadi worked at the controls. Tillijen’s voice came over the intraship link.
“If you’re trying to outfly them, boss, forget it. Those guys are lots more maneuverable than us.”
“Have they fired on us again?” the captain asked.
“Negative, but they’re hanging out there in visual range. I think they’re trying to see what we’re up to.”
“Good luck to ’em on that,” Metadi said. “Right now I don’t know myself. Errec, where’s the next beacon?”
“We should have picked it up already.”
“Negative on beacons,” Metadi said. His voice had an edge to it that hadn’t been there before. “Give me a recco, Errec. Do it now.”
“We’re overshooting Thulmotten’s coursemarks. I recommend we reduce speed.”
“Noted,” Metadi said. “Now, what’s your real recco?”
“Maintaining current speed … Try coming to—let’s see—six-eight-zero in thirty seconds. On my mark. Stand by. Mark.”
Metadi’s shoulders flexed as he hit the controls, pushing Warhammer’s nose down. A fantastic structure of glowing greens and threads of swirling gold passed over their heads in the viewscreen as they ran down into a clearer portion of the Web.
Seconds passed. Perada listened to her heart beating, dividing up the time into even intervals like the strokes of a clock. At last Ransome said, “No beacon. We should have had it by now.”
“We’re lost,” said Garen. He didn’t make any effort to keep his voice low this time.
“At least we’re taking the Happiness Boys down with us,” Metadi said, gesturing with his thumb over his shoulder, back in the general direction of the fighters. “I always wanted to go to Hell with an escort.”
“Beacon in sight,” Nannla called over the intraship link. “Bearing niner-six-niner.”
Metadi straightened. “Where away?”
“Dead astern. Looks like we overshot again.”
“Coming around, then,” Metadi said. “Here we go.”
Again he touched the controls. The streamers of glowing dust outside the viewscreens swirled into a vertiginous blur as Warhammer spun on its vertical axis. The freig
hter slowed, moving stern-first, then started back along its original track.
“Beacon on the scope,” Tillijen said over the link. “You make the characteristics?”
“I have them,” said Ransome. “We’re a long way off track.”
“Put me back on, then,” Metadi told him. “And get it right this time.”
“Working,” said Ransome, at the same time as Nannla said, “Here come the hostiles,” and the ‘Hammer’s viewscreens lit up with the flash and dazzle of energy gunfire.
Perada’s acquaintance with deep-space gunnery was limited to holovid dramatizations. Even that scant knowledge, however, was enough to tell her that the ‘Hammer’s guns weren’t working as they should have in normal space. Beams that should have been straight became bent and twisted, sometimes moving in corkscrew patterns, sometimes appearing as sine waves, sometimes vanishing altogether at one place and reappearing somewhere else.
The guns of the pursuing craft weren’t working any better, but their pilots seemed to have at least some idea of how and where to shoot to get hits. Warhammer’s metal structures rang with the vibration as the freighter’s shields took the energy bolts and held up against them.
Garen was right, Perada thought. The Web changes everything. No wonder so many Pleyverans are isolationists, if they’ve got all this between them and the rest of the galaxy.
The intraship link clicked on, and the cockpit filled with an agitated roaring from the engineering compartment. Metadi broke into Ferrda’s rumble of complaint in midstream.
“I don’t like this either. But we have to live with it. Keep up the power!”
Tillijen’s voice cut in—“What’s that coming at us from the starboard?”—followed by Nannla‘s—“I don’t know, it looks solid”—and a heartbeat later the viewscreens filled with something that looked like, but probably wasn’t, a sheet of green marble shot through with polished copper strands. It was enormous, threatening, and eerily beautiful, all at the same time. Perada held her breath as Metadi hit the controls and the ’Hammer veered left and downward while the looming wall of color kept on coming at them like the face of a cliff—and then they struck.
There was no impact, nothing but a dazzling cloud of tiny points of light, green and orange and white like a many-colored blizzard. They passed through into an area of clear space with the fighter craft barely out of range behind them.
“Vela’s Curtain,” said Ransome. His voice sounded relieved but a bit shaky. “Not the usual angle to take for passage, but it worked this time.”
“You did good,” Metadi said. “We even pulled a bit ahead of the opposition. All we have to do now is stay ahead of them for the rest of the run.”
How long the Web-run out of Pleyver lasted, Jos was never quite sure. Sverje Thulmotten’s coursebook gave a time of fourteen Standard hours for the jumpbound leg, but Sverje hadn’t had Errec Ransome to find the beacons for him. When Warhammer emerged from the Web near the Farpoint beacon, the console chronometer gave their time-in-transit as eight hours, Standard, and the beacon’s time-tick put them at six point five.
Split the difference and call it seven, he decided uneasily. The Web did things like that to chronometers sometimes; nobody knew why. The coursebooks and navigation manuals talked about “unstable space-time anomalies,” which as far as Jos could tell meant that the supposed experts didn’t know why either.
One of the fighters had stuck with them all the way. Jos spared a moment for admiration of the pilot’s skill and persistence. Then he put the ’Hammer onto a straight-line run for the nearest possible jump point into hyper. The Pleyveran didn’t try to follow; like most craft of its kind, it had no hyperspace capability. Warhammer made the jump, and the stars outside the viewscreens blurred to opaline nothingness.
Only then did Jos relax enough to start putting the nonessential systems back on line. He turned around to address Perada and her friend Garen Tarveet, crowded together under their safety webbing on the navigator’s couch. The Domina appeared pale but cheerful; young Tarveet, on the other hand, looked wretched—not surprising, considering he’d just been emphatically disinherited.
“Life support’s back on for the common room and the berthing spaces,” Jos said. “You two might as well go aft and make yourselves a bit more comfortable. I’m going to drop out, set course for Entibor, and make another jump.”
They both started hastily unstrapping. Jos thought he heard Perada murmuring something about getting to the ’fresher cubicle, but he couldn’t be certain. He’d already turned his attention back to the command console—the board was lit up from top to bottom with damage-control reports from the reactivated sensor system.
We got off easy, he conceded to himself. A hell-run like that one could have shaken loose a lot more than it did.
He glanced over at his copilot. Now that the white-knuckle work was over with, Errec looked sick and exhausted.
“You, too,” Jos said. “Go sack out before you fall asleep at the console and I have to get Ferrda to carry you out of here. I can handle the drop-and-jump and get us on autopilot by myself if I have to.”
Errec hesitated for a second, as though he might protest. But he lacked the energy even for that, apparently; he gave a weary shrug, unbuckled his safety webbing, and left the cockpit.
Working alone, it took Jos some time to bring the starship out of hyperspace, get a good jump point for Entibor, and make the run. Finally, though, he was able to engage the autopilot and unstrap his safety webbing.
He stretched and sighed. All the others were probably sacked out by now, and he was almost as tired as Errec himself. After the adrenaline charge of the Web-run, though, he’d need a mug of cha‘a in order to wake up enough to get to sleep. He headed for the ’Hammer‘s galley, where the cha’a pot should have a few drops left in the bottom.
Nannla and Tilly were waiting for him in the common room. “Boss,” Nannla said, “we’ve got to talk.”
“Now?”
The two gunners looked at each other. He thought he saw Tilly nod slightly at her partner.
Then Nannla nodded at him. “That’s right, boss.”
“It’s important,” Tilly added.
“Let me get some cha’a first, then.”
He moved past them to the galley nook and poured the last of the cold cha‘a into his favorite mug, a rough piece of blue-glazed pottery from a Mageworlds tradeship. He’d taken the ship years ago, on Warhammer’s first privateering foray, and had sold all the loot but that. He carried the cha’a back to the mess table and sat in his usual chair.
“All right,” he said. “Tell me what’s up.”
This time Nannla nodded at Tilly, and Tilly spoke. “It’s about the Domina.”
“What about her?” Jos asked. “Is it bothering you that she’s from Entibor?”
“It’s not that. It’s—Captain, she’s pregnant.”
Jos took a careful sip from the blue-glazed mug. He’d hate to drop it and break it, after all this time … it was a lucky souvenir, almost … “What do you mean, ‘pregnant’?”
“The usual, I suppose,” said Nannla. “You know, going to have a baby. Roughly nine standard months after we left Waycross.”
“Nine,” said Jos.
“Give or take a week or two.”
He put the mug down on the table, and his hands down flat to either side of it. He didn’t need to ask why the gunners thought he might be interested in the news. But there were still questions.
“How did you find out?” he asked. “If it’s true.”
Tilly produced an envelope from her jacket pocket and dropped it onto the table. “She sent us a formal announcement, that’s how. And before you ask me why—it’s because that’s the way things are done on Entibor.”
“We’re standing in for the female relatives you haven’t got,” Nannla explained. “That’s what Tilly says, anyhow, and she ought to know.”
“Right.” Jos shook his head slowly. “Would you believe me if I said
I asked … and she said I didn’t have to worry about it? Otherwise, I would have—”
“We believe you,” Nannla said.
“She was telling the truth,” Tilly added. “You don’t have to worry about it. She’s the Domina of Entibor.”
Jos gave up and put his head in his hands. “I’m missing something,” he muttered. “Tilly, you’re going to have to tell me what it is that I don’t get, because I can’t figure it out for myself. I think the Web must have scrambled my brains.”
Tillijen sighed. “I’ll do my best, Captain, but it’s complicated. The first thing you have to know is that the old Domina—Veratina—didn’t leave a direct heir. Not for lack of trying, either. But she couldn’t. Nothing ever lasted more than a couple of months, if it got that far.”
“Barren as a brick, in other words,” said Nannla. “Which Tilly claims is seriously bad luck for Entibor in general.”
Jos looked at Tilly. “I didn’t know you believed in luck.”
“I don’t. But a lot of people on Entibor do believe in it. And if people think that a thing is so, they’re going to act like it’s so. Public morale on Entibor’s been twitchy as hell for, oh, the last twenty-five or thirty years, maybe more—and now here comes a brand new Domina, right when the Mageworlds raiders are starting to show up in force. If this new Domina turns out to be barren, too …”
“Riots in the streets,” said Nannla. “Sabotage in the factories. Dry rot in the roofbeams—sorry, I got carried away there.”
“What’s important is that people are worried,” Tilly said. “And the best way for the new Domina to reassure them is to come up with an heir … or at least a—the closest word for it in Galcenian would be ‘placeholder,’ I suppose—a firstborn who doesn’t inherit for some reason … as soon as possible. But she needs to prove that she can reproduce.”
As soon as Metadi came into the captain’s cabin, Perada knew that the gunners had told him everything. She felt a certain amount of relief and satisfaction—she’d thought that Tillijen could be relied upon, and was glad to see herself proved right—but more than that, she felt worried. Metadi was a Gyfferan, after all; even if he understood what had happened, that didn’t mean he understood why it had to happen according to the proper form.
The Gathering Flame Page 15