Six looked down at the inert figure of Atheron, and felt a quite disproportionate sense of elation. “What I didn’t tell you, however,” he said savagely, “is how long you were going to be out for.” He grabbed Atheron’s feet and started to drag him to the nearest stasis pod in the second of the stasis holds. His hands and wrists were now free of pain, he found, although he could see ugly boils on the hands and the blood still dripped out of his wrists. But he felt nothing; he was so filled with adrenaline he felt as if he could have flown by himself all the way back to Valhai.
It seemed to take only a moment to get all four men into stasis pods, and turn on their systems. He laughed as he saw the pods fill up with the gas released, and the cryogenic monitors creep up to optimum. Euphoria was heady, and releasing, and good to feel. Life could sometimes be sweet. “Take that, your worshipfulness!” he told an absent Diva. “Thought I would never be able to do it, didn’t you?”
After waiting to make sure none of the Sellites woke up before the cryogenics were completed, he made his way back to the cabin, cleaned himself up as best he could, and dressed in some clothes he found in one of the store cupboards, only to come to a horrified realization. There was now nobody to navigate the ship, and one of the few things that the Sellites had omitted to teach him when he had been interred in the orthogel bubbles was how to pilot a spacecraft.
Chapter 9
DIVA WAS ON one of her overnight visits to Valhai, trying to trace Sellite spaceships on the interscreen on the 21st floor of the 256th skyrise when the screen gave a few jumps and produced a sudden burst of static. She frowned, and prodded an irritated finger at the controls.
“… ssschkchkchss … in contact … chkkkkchsss … Diva?… skchks … anybody?” Then it dissolved into a hiss of static.
Diva gave a start. That was a voice she knew well! “Six?” she queried, “Is that you?”
“ssschkchk …”
Diva snarled, and began to punch buttons indiscriminately, whilst calling for Grace and Arcan at the same time. There was no way she could reestablish contact – she had no idea how Six had managed to patch into an interscreen in the first place.
“Can’t you do something, Arcan?” she demanded.
“What do you expect me to do?” the orthogel entity replied in her head. He managed to convey an aggrieved tone to a silent communication.
“Get him back?” Diva rolled her eyes, and stared in a way which would have made her father’s servants leap into action.
“I can’t ‘see’ him, Diva,” Arcan explained in a patient tone, “which means that I can’t localize him. Which means that I can’t travel to where he is.” He shouldn’t expect too much of beings with minor brains such as Diva, he thought to himself.
“Great!” snapped Diva. “Then what on Sacras is the point of having a friend who can travel anywhere in the system instantaneously, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Of course I don’t mind.” Arcan was confused. “Should I? It would be most extraordinary, given my capacity for mental calculation, but I suppose I might find one of your questions difficult to answer …” The voice inside her head trailed off. Arcan clearly found the possibility extremely unlikely.
“Tskk!” she said. Only a silence greeted her, and she found herself missing Six, who would undoubtedly have had a reply for that. Not that she needed the Kwaidian, of course. She was far too independent to need anybody. Just that … sometimes … it was pleasant to have a friend to tease. Grace was a friend too, but – well – Six was easier to bait.
Grace came running in. “Whatever is the matter, Diva?”
When Diva had told her about Six’s call Grace put a hand to her mouth. “Does that mean …? Yes, of course it does.” She looked around excitedly. “He must be free! That is fantastic news …” She noticed that her listeners didn’t appear to share her enthusiasm. “… What?” Her brow wrinkled up. “What’s the matter?”
“We can’t get him back, we don’t know where he is, and Arcan can’t find him,” Diva summed up.
“So?” Grace opened her hands. “All we have to do is find a spacecraft and go and get him. If he is trying to get through to us at least we know he is out there somewhere!”
Diva burst out laughing. “Trust you!” she said. “All we have to do is steal a spaceship and head out into the unknown to find him. Of course!”
“Easy!” Grace spread her palms again. “Is there a problem?”
“Do you know how to fly a spaceship?”
“No,” Grace bit her lip, “but I know somebody who can!”
“WHAT!” VION STARED at the two girls once Arcan had carefully deposited him on the 21st floor of the 256th skyrise on Valhai. “You expect me to drop everything, steal a spaceship and abscond with the pair of you into space?”
“Yes.” Grace was pleased he had picked it up so quickly. “Exactly.”
“And you have no idea where you are going?” He found he was having difficulty grasping the intricacies of the idea.
“He must be somewhere in the binary system,” Diva pointed out helpfully.
“Oh, no problem then – are you both MAD?”
“What do you expect us to do – leave Six floating around out there all on his own?”
“How do you know he is all on his own? He may have a full ship’s complement working for him by now. After all, I wouldn’t put it past him! That Kwaidian will end up being the leader of the whole system, mark my words.”
“He must have been trying to ask for help – otherwise why would he being trying to patch through to an interscreen. Be reasonable, Vion!”
The doctor gave a gasp. “Reasonable! Me?”
Grace put her fingertips together and touched her lips. “Look,” she told them both. “We have to go after Six. He wouldn’t leave us if we were in danger, and we can’t leave him now he is. There isn’t really anything else to be said.”
Vion thought of the threat his father had made, and of the reactions of his family if he went so openly up against Atheron. He would be risking his whole family if he agreed to go on this … this insane expedition. If Mandalon and his cronies found out, the medical family would be expelled, and their artifacts impounded.
“I can’t go,” he said flatly.
The disappointment in Grace’s eyes bore into him, and he looked away evasively.
“Then we shall just have to find another way.” Diva turned on her heel, and made her way out. Grace was left, staring at Vion. There was a pause and then she, too, turned and left.
Vion glared around him at the medical skyrise. A muscle shifted in his jaw. He stood where he was for several minutes, looking down at the polished skyrise floor, waiting for Arcan to transport him back to Coriolis. It was all very well for Diva and Grace, he thought to himself savagely. They had burnt all their bridges long ago. Both girls were outlaws on their own planets. There was no reason at all why he should be feeling so guilty, he told himself firmly. How could they demand that he make the same sacrifice? His family had done nothing wrong to deserve being deported from Sell with no artifacts. It was too much of them to ask. Nobody would do it. There was no reason to feel bad about it. Definitely not.
“IF YOU HAVEN’T got a pilot you aren’t going anywhere!” Cimma, who had been briefly transported over to help solve the problem, was simply reiterating what everybody knew.
“Don’t we know anybody else who has a pilot’s license?” demanded Diva.
Grace shook her head glumly. “We could just work it out on our own?” she suggested, but her voice was unconvincing.
“Sure!” scoffed Diva. “And we can work out five solutions to the general theory of relativity before breakfast too! It is supposed to be a rescue mission, you know. Fat lot of help if we end up floating around lost, too.”
“I can come with you.” Arcan’s voice interrupted them.
Diva tipped her head to one side. “Now that,” she said slowly, “might change things altogether. If Arcan is with us, he can alw
ays transport us back here if anything goes wrong.”
“… And we have the use of his giant brain to help us fathom out how to fly the thing!” Grace gave a little dance on the spot. “Let’s do it!”
Both girls looked at Cimma. She bit her lip. “But how … I mean … you might … Oh, very well!”
“Yes!” Diva punched the air with her hand. She looked sideways at Grace. Vion was an idiot, she thought. He didn’t know what he was missing. There was simply no understanding any of these Sellites.
STEALING A SPACESHIP was the easy part of the operation. The girls were transported effortlessly up to the space station above Valhai by Arcan, and found themselves back on the preboarding platform.
Diva gave a sweep of her hand. There were still six spaceships left in dock: three traders, two freighters and one drone. “Which one takes your fancy?”
Grace pretended to consider. “The trader on the left,” she said. “I like the sign that says it has been refueled!”
“This one it is, then.” Diva pulled out her dagger and gave a complicated wave in front of her. “I hereby name this spaceship – sorry, this space trader – the ‘Variance’”
“Variance?” Grace stared.
“Yes, from statistics, remember?”
“I try pretty hard not to remember statistics,” Grace told her cautiously. “And it seems to work well.”
“I know what you mean,” replied Diva, “but this is just something that happened to stick in my memory. Can’t think why.” She gave a frown, considered, and then shook her head, giving up. “Anyway, it is something to do with numbers being a long way away from where they should be, which fits in with our going to find Six. And it means something that is different from expectations, too. I bet the Sellites didn’t expect us to steal this ship! Great name, isn’t it?”
“Do you remember a lot about statistics?” Grace asked. She found this academic excellence rather worrying.
“Sure. Heaps of things.” Diva waved an airy hand. “You can’t help remembering things after you have had to put up with Atheron droning on for twelve hours every day.”
“No. I suppose not.”
“Amazing, really. I never thought I had a brain capable of taking in so many facts.”
“Perhaps the more you learn, the cleverer you get,” mused Grace.
“Must have been a bit late for me, then. After a year of Atheron’s classes I ought to have been megasmart, and we know how that worked out!”
They were both silent after that, remembering what had happened on Valhai.
They opened the airlock, let themselves into the starship and initiated the preflight check, using a weighty handbook which had appeared beside them on the bridge. Arcan had arrived and was hovering behind them both as a sort of cloud, making useful and not so useful suggestions.
“If you don’t stop interrupting, we will never get out of here,” Diva told him severely. “And anyway, where is the starter button?”
“It is on the left,” Arcan told them, “next to the on-board computer for automatic flying.”
“Automatic flying? Why didn’t you say so before? For a lake that is supposed to be intelligent you sure don’t know much!”
“I have been attempting to explain it all to you for the last twenty minutes—”
“I never heard you say ‘automatic’ once in all of those twenty minutes!”
“You told me you wanted to know how to pilot this ship!”
“Ye-e-es”
“I thought you meant pilot it yourself.”
“See what I mean?” Diva looked at Grace and shook her head. “Brain the size of a minor planet, and he thinks I want to learn every rule and regulation in a tome of … two thousand five hundred and sixty-one pages.” She spread her fingers. “You have got to be joking!”
“If you are interested in automatic flying the process is much easier,” informed Arcan.
“No!”
“Yes, I assure you. Great effort can be saved.”
“You amaze me. Continue.”
“All you have to do is enable the on-board computer, and press the engage button. It will ask you if you approve the manoeuvre suggested and then calculate all the mechanics and orbital paths necessary.”
“Let me get this straight—” Diva pursed her lips, “—so that my meager brain can cope with the complexities. I press this button here that says ‘on-board computer’, and then press ‘enter’ when it suggests something I want to do, like take off?”
“I believe so. You appear to have satisfactorily assimilated the concepts.”
“Your teaching capacity overwhelms me.”
“My pleasure. Glad to have been of help.”
“Definitely a male.” Diva muttered under her breath.
“I am sorry, what was that?”
“I am not surprised you didn’t want to be considered a girl.”
“No. I do not possess the tendency to theatrics which I have noticed all you ‘girls’ seem to possess.”
“Theatrics, eh?”
“Quite.”
Diva nodded. “You are undoubtedly right,” she told him. “Which is why I am now no longer going to talk to you for the rest of the day.”
“You confirm my observation.”
“We always try to live up to expectations.” Diva’s eyes met Grace’s, which were full of glee, and the Coriolan girl mimicked a knife being drawn slowly across a throat. Grace giggled.
“I find I do not understand that sign,” observed Arcan plaintively, but there was no reply volunteered.
IT TOOK THEM two hours to extricate the Variance from the space station platform, and set a course.
“When do you think they will follow us?” asked Diva.
Grace shook her head. “We were lucky there was nobody up there. I have altered the manifest so that it looks as if Kylon has taken the ship over to the Sacran system.”
“Won’t they find out he hasn’t?”
“Oh, sure, but we will be long gone by then. Kylon is out on one of the asteroids at the moment, and I don’t think he will be back for a couple of weeks. They won’t set out after a space trader that has been missing for two weeks.”
“Good job!”
Grace grinned. “We try to please. Where shall we try first?”
Diva raised a thoughtful eyebrow. “Well, he can’t be in the vicinity of Valhai,” she hazarded. “The signal was far too weak for that. And I don’t think he would be on the main trade routes to anywhere, because Atheron will have wanted to avoid detection by other ships.”
“Then you think he would have travelled out in the Nomus direction?”
“I think that is the first place to look, yes.”
“Nomus it is then.” Grace examined the screen in front of her, and pushed the down button several times. “Nomus. Estimated arrival in two months.”
“Two months! What are we supposed to do in the meantime? Can’t Arcan transport us there?”
Arcan’s voice sounded regretful. “I have not ‘seen’ the failed star, and neither have either of you. I am afraid I cannot help. I could take you over to one of the Sacran planets of course, but with the current conjunction Nomus is closer to the Almagest system, so that wouldn’t be very much help.”
Grace looked behind her doubtfully. “We could go into suspended animation …”
“Not me! I had enough of that on the way over from Coriolis to Valhai. I haven’t forgotten the boy who died! Those stasis pods are dangerous.”
“I suppose they are. Anyway, somebody should stay awake to monitor the long range scanner.”
“That’s the job for me. You can go into one of the stasis pods if you like,” Diva informed her generously.
“Not a chance. I have never used one before, and this is not the time to start.”
“So how are we going to while away the time?”
Arcan had some ideas for that. “I expect you would like to get a thorough background on piloting spaceships such as this,”
he suggested.
Diva covered her eyes. “Your expectations are always so high,” she informed him. “Is that all there is to do on board a Sellite starship?”
“I don’t understand. Is there something else you would rather do?”
“Somethi … I should jolly well think there is!”
“Really? What would that be?”
“Anything would be better than spending two months studying orbital mechanics, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t know. I like orbital mechanics. I am unsure of your criteria for enjoyment.”
“Very simple,” said Diva, “no studying, no work, nothing boring.”
“Clarify please,” said Arcan. “I find things which are not studying or work boring.”
“Don’t you ever have fun?”
“‘Fun’?”
“You know, things that make you laugh …” Diva narrowed her eyes. “Oh, you can’t laugh, can you, Arcan?”
“Show me.”
The girls tried to produce a peal of laughter, and failed, which made them both giggle about it for several minutes.
“That is ‘fun’?”
“Exactly.”
“It seems very silly to me,” Arcan told them severely. “I do not think I am capable of it. It appears similar to ‘joking’. Six was always trying to show me this idea of ‘joking’. It is something he values very much. I could never see the point of it, myself, but then I am very different from you flimsies.”
“You have no idea.”
“No, Diva, I have many ideas. More than you, certainly.”
“And none of them fun, just think …”
“You are quite right there. I just think. What could possibly be better than that? If you had been almost comatose for about thirty thousand of your Coriolan years then you would appreciate a bit of thinking too.”
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