The Confluence was the size of a small city.
“We have a green field.”
“Which is useless because we’ll destroy Radko, along with who knows how many innocent people. Tell me about Radko.”
But first, Ean checked with line eight. “Where are your weapons? What do you have?”
The overlay of sound almost knocked him over. There were lots of weapons, all around the ship, although he couldn’t have told Sale where a single one was right now. One of them was the quiet blue hot blood.
“We have weapons. Lots of them.” Breathlessly, for Sale had started to run. It was a long way from the shuttle bays to the bridge. “Radko sent a message.”
He still couldn’t run and talk, let alone sing, but he tried anyway.
“She said. Commodore Bach,” because Sale needed to know that. “Traitor. With Redmond and the Worlds of the Lesser Gods. And then he shot her.”
“Bach shot Radko?”
“Jakob did.”
“What’s Jakob doing there? Never mind, Ean. Tell the rest when we’re on the bridge.”
He was grateful for that because Sale could run as fast as Radko. “You really should ask the ship how to get to the bridge fast.” Or he could ask it himself, but he didn’t have the breath for anything but running right now.
“We haven’t time to experiment right now.”
“Faster. Hurry.”
He had a stitch in his side, and the lines seemed determined to push him off course. He nearly ran into the wall once, had to force himself away.
“Faster,” the lines insisted, battering him with sound. “Faster.”
Finally, he couldn’t fight the sound anymore. He stopped, his lungs burning. All he could do was stand with his hands on his knees and drag in deep breaths.
Sale was a full corridor ahead of him.
The lines didn’t normally push him to do things he wasn’t capable of. They were more likely to try to fix it for him. What was he missing?
“Faster,” and the lines sounded relieved that he’d finally stopped.
“Faster,” Ean agreed, and let the noise push him toward the wall.
Nothing. He was going to walk into the wall. Ean closed his eyes and let the music guide him.
Something jerked, and grabbed him, like the force that grabbed the shuttles. Lines four and three were loud, the other lines finally silent. He opened his eyes. It was dark, but he knew he was moving—horizontally, he thought. Scarily fast. He shot upward, then down, then along again. It was worse than a jump; it was a rushing pneumatic tube, and he was in it.
He shot out the other end, onto the bridge in a rolling heap that he couldn’t stop, in time to hear Sale say to Craik, “I’ve lost Ean. I need to go back for him. Can you manage?”
“Too fast.” Lines one, three, and four seemed to be conferring. “Human. Slower?” As if they weren’t sure they could get it any slower.
Ean hit the wall, bounced off, and finally came to a stop. He got to his feet, choking, trying to catch his breath. His suit had sealed automatically. Wherever he’d been, there was no oxygen.
“He’s just arrived on the bridge,” Craik said. “Get here as fast as you can.”
“But he was way behind me.”
“He’s here now, Sale. Trying not to throw up.”
“Shit.”
When he could finally speak, Ean said, “Sale. You should—”
But she was here now, stopping with a skid at the entry to the bridge. “Status?”
Craik shook her head. “No change on station.” She glanced over at Ean. “Not sure about him.”
“I’m fine.” It was a wheeze, but he was fine. He checked the readings on his suit. Radko insisted he always check before he took the helmet off. The air was clean. “Thank you,” he whispered to the ship.
All he ever had to do was listen. “If I don’t listen next time, tell me ‘faster,’ and I’ll remember.” At least, he’d try to remember.
Sale asked, “Is Radko alive or dead, Ean?”
“I don’t know. Jakob said he wanted to talk to her. That was after he shot her, so I think so.”
Please let her be alive.
Sale said, “I need to see the control center on that station. Anything line eight is involved in. And I need to see Bach, Jakob, and Radko.”
What was the control center on a station? The administrator’s office?
“Bach?” Craik said. “Radko?”
“I’ll explain in a minute. Ean?”
He sang up the lines. Station “Ship,” anywhere with line-eight activity, then had to flick through each of the cameras to get Radko—and Bach and Jakob—because none of them were linesmen, and the station lines weren’t as strong as ship lines. Maybe there was something in Wendell’s theory that the more you went through the void, the stronger the lines became.
But speaking of lines.
Ean stopped. “There are a lot of linesmen on that station,” he told Sale. “They’re all strong, and . . . a little strange.” Crazy was the word that came to mind, but you wouldn’t have a station full of crazy linesmen. Maybe they’d been trained by a secret line guild on the Worlds of the Lesser Gods and were different. “They’re very strong.”
Many of them were reacting badly to the presence of line eleven.
“Show me.”
Ean put them up on the screen on the wall, a matrix of five images by four, room by room. He brought a new one up every five seconds, replacing the one that had been there the longest.
Radko would be in the prisons. He could see two people locked in cells. One was a middle-aged woman who was inspecting the walls of her cell with care, looking for a way to escape. The other was a bulky younger man who sat in the center of the featureless room, staring ahead.
The rest of the station seemed to be a minibarracks. A warren of living areas, offices and meeting rooms, some training rooms. They had a huge medical center. The first rooms were empty, but the rest had patients. All of them were linesmen. Some of the linesmen were being attended to. They had the strongest lines. And felt the craziest.
Ean tried not to shudder. It was an insane type of crazy, unhinged almost.
Most of them wore the uniform of House of Sandhurst.
There, finally, in a room on the sixth level. A woman strapped to a chair, with two men standing nearby. One of the men wore the uniform Ean recognized from the Factor’s entourage. Jakob. The other wore the gray of Lancia. Commodore Bach.
The woman in the chair moved slightly, and Ean could have cried.
Radko.
TWENTY-SEVEN
DOMINIQUE RADKO
RADKO WOKE TO cramps, and pins and needles.
Jakob hadn’t killed her. He’d stunned her.
She was bound to a chair, arms by her sides, strapped at the shoulders, the waist, the wrists, and around her ankles. The bindings were tight all the way down. She couldn’t slip out of them. The ties were behind her, and the seat was fastened to the floor.
She might not be dead yet, but it was difficult to see how she would get out of this.
“Those useless Redmond lackeys,” Jakob said. “Their security is full of holes. Look at this.” Something spun. She caught the movement out of the corner of her eye, and moved her eyes without moving her head so she could see it better. It looked like a comms. “We didn’t even know this was gone until Martel found it among your girl’s belongings.”
Radko kept her head down. The longer Jakob thought she was unconscious, the better. She could see one pair of polished boots. Worlds of the Lesser Gods boots were a deep navy. These were black. Lancian boots. Commodore Bach was here.
Please let Vega have received her message.
“What is it?” Bach sounded almost disinterested although Radko would bet he wanted to know.
“The r
eport on experiments Quinn is doing on the linesmen. It was stolen two weeks ago. Redmond and TwoPaths Engineering didn’t plan on telling us.”
Surely they knew it wasn’t the original report that had been stolen. Or maybe only Dr. Quinn did, and if no one had said the original report was missing, would they admit to a second one going missing? Probably not.
Radko knew secrets she couldn’t afford to give away. Even if Jakob didn’t kill her, she couldn’t stay alive to blab those secrets out. The question was, how to do the most damage to Jakob and Bach on the way. And somehow steal the comms and get it to Vega.
Jakob must have turned to face her, for his voice got clearer. “We’re in a hospital full of doctors, and they can’t even administer a drug properly. This time I’ll give her the truth serum myself.”
“I never thought much of Dromalan truth serum, myself.” That was Bach, and the bile rose in Radko’s throat just thinking about him.
“It’s not my favorite, either,” Jakob admitted. “I prefer something faster acting. But there are gallons of this stuff lying around on station. They use it for experimenting on the linesmen.”
Bach shuddered, and Radko wanted to do the same. The serum made a linesman more receptive to the lines, but the stronger the linesman, the more damage it did. And you never sent a linesman who’d been doped with it through the void. You destroyed his lines.
“Some of the experiments strike me as barbaric.”
“Barbaric or not, they’re working. Redmond has done more with linesmen than your world or my world would do in a lifetime, and they’ve done it in fifteen years.”
“We’ve done some exceptional work of our own, recently,” Bach said.
“Not like this. Wait till we get those ships. You’ll see what—” Jakob broke off as his comms sounded. Radko saw the shadow of his hand move as he flicked it on. “I told you not to disturb me.”
She listened hard, but didn’t catch the reply.
“Talk sense, man.” Jakob pushed the call onto the wall screen. Radko looked up properly, and saw that was to free his hands so he could fill the syringe with green liquid from the jar on his desk.
The caller was Martel. “The alien ship is here.”
“Here?”
“Right in our space.” The volume rose as Martel spoke, until he was almost shouting. “Which stupid idiot thought that would be a clever trick? Because it wasn’t. It was downright dangerous.”
Bach pointed his blaster at Jakob. “This is supposed to be a three-world initiative. The ship was to go to Redmond. Does the Worlds of the Lesser Gods plan on going it alone?”
Jakob waved him away. “It was supposed to go to Redmond. But who cares. We’ve got the alien fleet. All of them?” he asked Martel.
His comms was going crazy with people trying to call him. He ignored them.
“Isn’t one enough?”
Jakob looked at Bach. He ignored the blaster. “They only brought the one ship? You said we take one ship, and it brings the whole fleet. It didn’t matter which ship.” He lifted the comms to talk into it again. “Which ship is it?”
“Which bloody ship do you think it is? It’s massive. And it’s close. Oh, and it’s threatening to use a destructive green field.”
Radko started to hope.
“Contact your man,” Jakob said to Bach.
Bach opened his own comms. “Status report, Rigg.”
There was no answer.
Bach would only be calling the ship if it was his people who had stolen it. How many Lancastrians were involved in this betrayal?
“Come on,” Jakob said. “How hard can it be to steal a ship and send a message?”
An alarm sounded. First in the corridors outside, then over the speaker. Jakob clicked back to Martel. “What’s happening?”
Martel glanced sideways. “It’s an internal alarm. I’ll call you back.”
“I hope it’s not someone panicking about the ship. We have captured it.” Jakob clicked off, then added under his breath as he waited for Bach’s call to be answered, “We’d better have, anyway. Come on, it can’t take this long.”
It could if Rigg wasn’t in charge of the ship. The lines would be blocking the calls.
Martel called back. He had Dr. Quinn on split screen. Quinn started talking almost before the call was open. “They’ve attacked our linesman.”
“We’re not under attack.”
“They’re all out cold, or screaming, or . . . Do something. Get rid of it. Now.”
Radko grinned. The ship out there was one of the eleven ships. Probably the Eleven itself. And she knew which linesman would be on it.
Time for a rethink on her action plan.
She spoke softly, under the noise. “Ean. Can you hear me? Flash the lights once if you can.”
The lights blinked.
Good. “I need someone to free me.”
Bach turned his head to watch her, but he didn’t raise his weapon or stop her. Hopefully, he wouldn’t realize what she was doing until it was too late.
“I have at least two people on the station with me,” Radko said. “Hopefully, three. They’ll be in cells. Or two of them will.”
“Calm down, Quinn,” Jakob said. “You know how the lines on the alien ship affect the linesmen.”
Quinn was working himself into his own heart attack. “That’s why the ship wasn’t supposed to come here. Look at them.” He brought up visuals of rooms and corridors. Dozens of linesmen, most of them on the floor, all of them trying to breathe. One of them didn’t look to be breathing at all.
If only one ship was here, Ean had used line seven, and they would still be in contact with the other ships in Haladean space. “Vega will identify my team for you,” Radko said.
“It felled half the linesmen,” Quinn cried.
“See if you can rescue them,” Radko continued. “If you can, get them to come here. But tell them I’ve two armed men here who are as good as any of our own people, and not to underestimate them. If you can’t get them here, get them to the shuttles.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
EAN LAMBERT
EAN STARTED TO sing open Vega’s comms, then realized that the lines were already open to the fleet ships.
“You heard that?” he said to Vega.
“The whole fleet heard it,” Vega said. “And you might mention to Sale that instead of ignoring us, she’d do well to leverage off our experience. She has four experienced battle captains here, plus the crew of the Lancastrian Princess and Fleet Admiral Orsaya. You have two teams, and a whole station opposing you. Not to mention that based on the rankings on those uniforms, the station is likely to be armed. As soon as they realize they don’t have control of the Confluence, they’ll start firing.”
“Heard and understood, ma’am,” Sale said.
Ean didn’t have time for this. “Vega, do you have—”
“Coming through,” Vega said, and it was, finally.
Three images. Ean pushed them up to the screen on the wall.
“The man on the left is Yves Han,” Vega said. “The young man in the middle is Arun Chaudry, and the woman is Theodora van Heel.”
Ean remembered Chaudry and van Heel. “The prisoners.” He sang up the camera views in their cells for Sale and everyone else on the bridge of the Confluence, then sang the doors to their cells unlocked.
“Let me talk to them,” Sale said.
He turned on the speakers to each cell, sang a comms line open, and connected it between Sale’s comms and the speakers. “On your comms.”
“Thank you.” Sale picked up her comms. “Chaudry, van Heel. Can you hear me? This is Group Leader Sale, on the Confluence.” She spoke Lancian.
“Yes.” Van Heel looked around warily.
“We can see you through the cameras in the room, but we can’t hear you. Nod if yo
u can hear us.”
They both nodded.
Ean could hear her. Why couldn’t Sale? “Sound on the security feed?” he asked the station.
“Sound? No sound?”
So however Ean was getting it, he was getting it straight through the lines; from line one, not through the feed he’d redirected for Sale. Who didn’t put sound on a security feed?
“Ean. Ean.” It was Captain Helmo, as insistent as Abram could be. “Are you listening to me?”
“Listening,” Ean said.
“Good. You cannot send those people unarmed into Radko’s room. Get them some weapons before they get there. There’ll be weapons around. Find some.”
Weapons? Right. Line eight would know.
He sang to line eight on the station. “Show me your weapons?” Much like he had earlier on the Confluence, and again, like the Confluence, he got an overwhelming overlay of weapons. “I don’t know what’s what? Or what’s where.”
“We have unlocked the doors for you,” Sale said to van Heel and Chaudry. “We’ll unlock them all the way to Radko. First, we need to arm you.” She glanced at Ean. “Are you ready?”
“Working on it,” Ean said, cold with sweat. What if he couldn’t get them anything? Think. What would Radko suggest?
Get a plan to use with the overlays.
“I need a plan of the station,” he sang. To all the lines, for he didn’t know which line would be responsible for it.
He got his schematic, and still didn’t know which line had given it to him. Maybe all of them.
“And Lambert.” Vega’s tone was caustic. “Don’t sing the station into the fleet. We’re in enough trouble as it is without adding theft to our list of crimes.”
It wasn’t her crime. It was his.
“Understood.”
“Understanding isn’t necessarily equivalent to not acting, in your case.”
Ean tuned her out by singing his request again to line eight. “Show me your weapons. Only this time, put it on the station plan.”
The various weapons were overlaid on the schematic. Captains and seconds conferred, but it was Admiral Orsaya, listening in on Confluence Station, who said, “Level five, that looks like a bank of lockers. It’s where we keep the blasters on station here. Might be worth a try.”
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