her instruments 03 - laisrathera

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  Sascha hissed, “Now if someone finds them, they’re going to know we’re here!”

  Narain glanced over his shoulder and said, “They’d know if they found them tied up too, arii. And I hate to say it, but at least dead they can’t be used against us. It’s a billion to nine, remember?”

  “I know, just…” Sascha growled and rose. “Never mind. Let’s go.”

  Go they went, and as they did, Hirianthial’s sense of the ship grew with it. Or perhaps not the ship entire, but only this section. He felt the caress of air from the vents like breath on his bare neck and glanced up at it, distracted. “Narain,” he murmured. “Is there aught special about an Engineering section?”

  “Special?” The Harat-Shar paused, consulted a data tablet, tucked it away. “Wait. We’ve got five moseying on this way. We can catch them at the cross-corridor if we move.”

  They moved, and there was a silence, in which the ship seemed to listen. Then they attacked, and Hirianthial did not spare attention for his comrades because the sword he had only used in practice woke in his hand and beheaded his opponent without any effort on his part at all—only to swing, and then a death. The backswing took his second foe from shoulder down, slicing the collarbone and leaving the man with a mouth to scream, so he suggested as the sword sheared through: Don’t.

  And the man didn’t.

  Bryer had slain his as well, with hands gone ruddy halfway to the elbow. The two down with palmer burns were also dying, if less messily.

  Hirianthial stared at the sword, which was a revelation. Lighter than steel and more deadly, and more obedient as well, it suggested its own demeanor immediately. His House swords had been proud weapons, demanding discipline and hardship before yielding their power to a bearer. This sword was retiring, the perfect servant, waiting to see if he would be a cruel or gentle master, but resigned to either. It made him feel an overwhelming urge to protect it.

  Things that are loved, live, Urise’s memory insisted. Turning the blade off, Hirianthial said to Narain, “The section? Do people care about it? More than perhaps the rest of the ship?”

  “What? Oh. Yes.” Narain chuckled: true humor, for while his aura was subdued there was no horror in it. This was work to Narain, even the killing. “A good part of a ship’s complement does science and research. They’re just there for the ride. The command team… their thing is the people, all the people. But Engineering keeps the ship running. They get a little fanatic about their ships.”

  And these pirates had ripped the ship from its devoted crew.

  “What was her name?”

  The Harat-Shar was once again scouting the corridors, checking his data tablet as Bryer pulled the bodies into a nearby room. “Pardon?”

  “The ship’s.”

  Startled, Narain met his eyes: bright blue, wide. Paler than Reese’s, and that she might come to mind now… he flexed his hand on the hilt of his demure blade, reminding himself to be present.

  “Oh. Of course.” The Harat-Shar nodded. “The UAV Moonsinger.”

  “Romantic name for a warship,” Sascha said.

  “The battlecruisers all have names like that,” Narain said. “They’re not just warships, after all. They do other things. This way. There’s another group, we can ambush them.”

  Narain found the trespassers alone or in groups of two if he could help it. When he couldn’t, Hirianthial helped, and the sword answered him easily, almost too easily. He found himself distracted by it as they made their way toward the core of the section. When had he ever had a weapon that had cost so little physical effort to employ? Even his mind asked more of him when he used it to attack. And yet how lacking in pretension! The bare hilt, the unremarkable color, the naked socket awaiting a pommel, as if born longing for a master.

  And if the sword was not distraction enough, the sense of the walls around him breathing grew more intense the further in they went. There was distress to go with that life. The ship missed its crew. Had it hunted pirates in its day? For it loathed them, the way one loathed disease. The ship had bones, and he felt its grief in the hollows of them, and they all led back to the Engineering core.

  “You’re good with that thing,” Narain said after they’d dispatched another two stragglers. “Maybe you won’t need to use your head at all, ah?”

  “Wouldn’t that be simpler,” Sascha muttered, helping Bryer drag their latest bodies into yet another room. “Had no idea Fleet ships had so many conference rooms. What do they do, have meetings all day?”

  “You have no idea,” Narain said, long-suffering. “It’s a cultural weakness. We love consensus.”

  “How many more of these people do we have to deal with?” Sascha asked, expressing the fatigue Hirianthial thought he should be feeling, rather than the curious serenity.

  “Looks like… sixty?”

  “At least we’re making a dent in them.”

  “Next group?” Bryer asked, interrupting.

  “Right. This way.”

  They resumed their cautious progress, and Sascha fell back to pace him. “Doing all right?”

  “Fair,” Hirianthial said. “I think I may be less healed than I’d hoped.”

  Sascha snorted. “Like we all told you.”

  “Just so.” He smiled. “Perhaps I merit the stubborn label after all.”

  “You’re the only one who didn’t know it, if you doubt it at all.” Sascha glanced at the hilt in Hirianthial’s hand. “And… um… no regrets? You know, from the healer half of you.”

  “Do I look it?”

  “No. No… that thing with the sword… you’ve been doing that forever, haven’t you.”

  “It feels like it, some days.” Hirianthial glanced at him. “Does it distress you?”

  Sascha managed a wan grin. “Actually, it’s kind of sexy. Who doesn’t like a man who can handle himself?”

  “Or a woman,” Narain added.

  “Or a woman.”

  Hirianthial thought of Liolesa, of Araelis, of Reese, and smiled a little. “Indeed.”

  “We’ll see them again,” Sascha added, quiet. “We will.”

  “I know it.”

  “Next group should be up—” The hall flooded with red light, strobing, and a great shudder rocked the floor beneath his boots. A distant grinding noise interrupted the heart-throb beat of his awareness of the ship, and then a voice began to speak, echoing, repeated endlessly down the corridors.

  “Alert. Alert. Repel Boarders.”

  “Rhack!” Narain hissed, ears flattening. “They’re locking down Engineering. Something went wrong.” He touched his telegem, tail lashing. “No answer there, either. Battlehells!”

  “Can we get out?” Sascha asked, balling his fists.

  “Not with the bulkheads down. If it was an environmental alert the Pad access would work, but not for intruders. Come on. We’ve got to find a bolthole and regroup—”

  Two of their enemies sprinted into view and halted, lifted their hands. And there was no time, and far too much distance. The flashing lights slowed as Hirianthial reached toward them, hand open. He felt the pulse of their nervous systems like a web he could grasp and he did, stilling it. They breathed. Their hearts flexed. Blood rushed through their arteries, spilled into capillaries. But the higher functions were his, and his mind ran through the silver net, dendrite to axon, clouding the synapses.

  Stop, he whispered, and they froze, and he held their lives in his hand.

  Two palmer bursts killed them where they stood, and the shock of it staggered him. He would have fallen had Sascha not thrust a shoulder up under his, taking his weight. “Easy there, lean on me.”

  “You might… might wait to kill them until I have done with them,” he gasped.

  “Is it bad for you?” Sascha peered up at him, his worry a cold cowl draping him.

  Was it? He felt his heart skip several beats. He was disoriented; the shift in the color of the light and the constant message repeating didn’t help. “Yes.”

&
nbsp; “Then you’ll have to kill them faster—or let go of them faster. Pick one.”

  Bryer said, “Lecture later. Keep moving.”

  Sascha tried a step forward and they staggered. Hirianthial grimaced.

  “Not the first time we’ve done this,” Sascha said. “We’re gonna be fine.”

  “Right.”

  “Because otherwise Reese will kill you.”

  That made him smile. “Right.”

  They found an empty briefing room and paused there; Hirianthial was grateful for the chance to lean on the table and try to draw his shattered concentration back within the limits of his skin. As he breathed through the strangeness and the cold, Narain and Sascha bent over their stolen tablet.

  “They’re not answering at all?”

  “No, which means we have to assume they can’t.” Narain was flicking through displays on the tablet so quickly Hirianthial couldn’t read them. “So it’s up to us to stop them.”

  “By…”

  “If we can get to one of the core control panels, we can use the mass ejection routine. That’ll kill the power to the ship, once the batteries drain. Failing that, we blow the section.”

  Hirianthial felt Sascha pale; the energy drained out of his aura, leaving it flush to his pelt. “I’m guessing we don’t get out in some kind of miraculous life pod escape in that case.”

  Narain looked at him.

  “How many?” Bryer said. “People left.”

  “About fiftyish here in Engineering,” Narain said. “But the rest of the crew’s going to be converging here now that they know where to look.”

  “We are trapped,” Hirianthial said, quiet. “Between those approaching and those already here.”

  “About the size of it.”

  “Then we make for the core,” Hirianthial said. “And do what we must.”

  Sascha shuddered. “Right. Let’s get on with it, then.”

  Narain glanced at his tablet. “And… there goes the lock-down on non-essential access.” He tossed it aside. “We’re going to have to play it by sight.”

  “Mine,” Hirianthial said, lifting his head. “And we can go now, and best we do so.” He flexed his fingers on the sword hilt and pushed himself upright. “I will take point.”

  “You sure?” Narain asked, as Sascha said, “I’m not sure you—”

  “I can, and I must.” He smiled, faint. “The ship is in distress. We go.”

  Bryer rustled his wings and stepped past the two Harat-Shar. “Wasting time.”

  “Right,” Sascha said with a sigh.

  The klaxon, the red lights, the sense of urgency that seemed to throb in the very walls… it made him raw even before he stretched himself out to sense their enemies. It blunted the length of his reach. But a corridor he could do, enough to keep them from happening onto their enemies, and he guided them inward, stopping only to kill, with sword more often than mind. Every death scored him though, too close, too violent, and him too open to all of it. Bryer was his anchor, for the Phoenix remained calm, a cool void at his back. The two Harat-Shar cycled through fear and adrenaline and rage so quickly it gave him vertigo.

  Over all of it, the ship called him toward the core. Yearned for him, as a patient did a surgeon bearing the scalpel. It needed so badly that he found himself walking toward a bulkhead more than once, as if he could pass through it straight to the heart of the vessel.

  “Stay on target, alet,” Narain murmured, catching him once.

  “Forward,” he said, and found the corner.

  There were injuries, inevitable ones, palmer burns and bruises; Narain took a blow to the nose that bled carmine streaks onto white and gray fur, and the pain that lanced Sascha’s wrist was so bright it bled through his aura into Hirianthial’s. “Sprain,” he said. Shook himself. “Immobilize it, if you can.”

  “Us and what Medplex.”

  “We’re almost there,” Narain said, tired.

  “Think we can make it?” Sascha asked, cradling his hand.

  “Honestly I’m shocked we got as far as we have.” The pardine flexed his fingers on the wall. “If we can get in… and if we don’t get shot at… and if I can get into the system before they lock me out….”

  “That’s a lot of ifs.”

  Bryer said, “One at a time.” When they glanced at him, he gaped his beak in a grin and said, “We handle them. One ‘if’ at a time.”

  Narain guffawed. “Humor from a Phoenix. Now I know we’re in trouble.”

  “We need to move,” Hirianthial interrupted. “They’re coming.”

  They moved, then. They kept moving, until the pattern pushed through his confused hyper-awareness, shoving aside the ship’s distress and his companions’ dense auras. He paused, weaving until he caught his balance.

  “What is it?” Sascha hissed, ears flattening.

  “They’re herding us.” Hirianthial glanced at Narain. “Can they communicate with one another?”

  “Of course. We’re the ones they shut out.”

  “Then they know where we are, and they are herding us toward an ambush.”

  A pause that stressed the lack of silence. The computer’s automated alert sawed against the ship’s ethereal distress in his head.

  “And that ambush is…?”

  “Ahead of us. In a large open space.”

  Narain nodded. “Which is where we have to go. The core. Of course.” He shook his head. “I’m not sure we’re going to make it out of this after all.”

  Won’t see my kin again. Shimmering memories, like fish seen beneath the surface of clear water: Soly, Tomas, Jasper, Lune. A pastiche of camaraderie as fierce as a family’s love. It sank beneath the spear-point wound of Sascha’s anguished, My sister…! So much pain there, not only for himself, but for her, for abandoning her.

  Bryer’s serenity stole through the grief. It will be good to see the Eye with open eyes. It will be good to be free to fly.

  And all around him, the Moonsinger’s urgent grief: COME COME TO ME

  With a shudder, Hirianthial said, “There is a chance. We must be swift.”

  Corel had killed an army. Surely he could manage the enemies crowding them in. If he could only get to an open space… he couldn’t concentrate with the racing pulse of the ship urging him inward.

  “It’s your game now, alet,” Narain said. “Lead. We’ll guard your flanks.”

  Where now? he asked, and the ship urged him on. He led, and they followed, and as much as possible he avoided the people converging on them. It needed running, and he was already short of breath: tired of gripping the sword that submitted, tired of seeking with outstretched mind, tired of danger and odds too great for any one person to best. He was tired, he realized, sudden as the piercing of a blade to flesh, of losing.

  Not this time.

  Narain grabbed him and threw him back, away from the palmer shot that would have hit him, and fired past him. He felt the Harat-Shar take a searing shot, glancing off the arm. Sascha caught the other male, steadied him. “Keep moving!”

  They kept on, but now they truly were running, and there was no safety in flight if they were not running towards something—

  —what had he said to Sascha once?

  Running doesn’t solve anything.

  That depends on which direction you run.

  They burst from the final hall and into a vast chamber, milling with people, and none of it mattered because in the center of the room was the beating heart of a battlecruiser, and the moment he was in range it reached for him, met his spectral fingers, knitted him into a matrix larger than any single person. Power from this room ran to every inch of the ship, from head to stern, and his awareness exploded outward on those arteries. All around him he sensed not just the people in the chamber, but everywhere else: on the way here, on the bridge, in the weapon bays.

  Time paused between breaths as the knowledge smashed into him, and with it the flames of all those distant souls.

  I cannot! he thought, astoni
shed. Couldn’t possibly be feeling it. Couldn’t possibly control it. Couldn’t possibly live through manipulating it, when the control needed to incapacitate a handful of people had laid him out so completely.

  And yet, the power was there, and so was salvation.

  You can, a whisper answered.

  You must! the ship seemed to plead.

  Around him, Sascha and Narain and Bryer were inhaling. For how much longer, if he did nothing?

  It’s not about you. Chiding. The voice of a loving if exasperated father. It was never about you. It was never about your ability to shoulder things alone. IT IS NOT FOR YOU TO DO ALONE.

  Stunned, he held a breath.

  The silence that Urise had taught him to descend to… the silence of the Divine, Who was listening because He had fashioned others to speak for Him. The ship, waiting for a voice, offering to show him the way.

  Not you, the priest whispered. You did not give yourself this gift. You take too much on your own shoulders alone, my son, but it was the Divine who gave you the gift. Make yourself the instrument of that Voice, and be not alone!

  Time shivered, lurched forward. Hirianthial opened himself to the gift, and to the One working through them, and the silence filled with a great and endless YES. He lifted his face to it as he closed his fists on the flames, and snuffed them.

  Silence. The heart skipping? No, time had contracted again to a single point. He felt the wonder of it, and slid to a knee, and then to both… and to the ground. Beneath his palm, the ship sang a thankful lullaby, and he let it.

  CHAPTER 16

  The next time they opened the cell door they were pointing their palmers straight at her. Reese eyed them balefully, every limb trembling with the need to dart past them, and maybe also—a little—with weakness from the last time they’d hit her. She was waiting, she told herself, for the first flinch, the first hint that they might lower their guards. It was a good story. She kept telling it to herself as they set a bucket on the floor, along with a crust of bread and a cup of water.

  “Drink first,” the guard said. Eldritch, she noticed, but he spoke Universal well enough. “Use the bucket. Then we leave you with the bread.”