Nethereal (Soul Cycle Book 1)

by Brian Niemeier

  Jaren joined in the applause that erupted at regular intervals, though he'd never felt greater misgivings about a job. The speech smacked so obviously of pandering that he could picture Craighan rehearsing it in front of a mirror on his way to Bifron.

  “And more,” Craighan said when the latest ovation subsided, “Exodus will be the flagship of our victory!” Applause broke out again, stronger than before, and Jaren began to suspect that the speaker was going off script.

  A mischievous glint appeared in Craighan’s eye. “This vessel will carry our banner to worlds undreamed-of. Should the inhabitants desire trade, we will oblige them. Should they offer resistance, we’ll oblige that as well!”

  Applause failed to describe what followed. A deafening roar erupted from the sailors, yet their cheer carried for only a short distance before the hangar’s vastness consumed it.

  When the line of senior officers behind Craighan rose to shake his hand, Jaren’s peripheral vision caught Nakvin frowning. He scanned the crowd and saw the closest ranks of sailors eyeing him with open disdain.

  After the keynote address-cum-military rally, Jaren and his senior crew joined other select personnel on a tour of the ship. Lieutenant Wald led the small cadre of VIPs through a broad hallway that branched off into a cluster of winding corridors. Craighan strode confidently at her side as she led the group down one of many identical passages into the Exodus proper.

  To Jaren, the main hull seemed a world apart. Whereas the hangar gleamed like marble, omnipresent gloom filled the inner corridors. The only light was a faint red glow seeping through the tangle of pipes, cables, and ductwork that crowded the walls and ceilings. A damp chill hung in the stagnant air. What were you thinking? he asked his dead father.

  Jaren followed along as the tour passed various points of interest. Luckily, these destinations proved far more pleasant than the intervening spaces. Wald showed off the passenger quarters—sufficient in number to afford everyone a private cabin. Next came the officers' lounge, which featured a fully stocked bar. She led them to the vast cargo holds, larger even than the hangar, where supply crews were busily stowing a small city's worth of consumables. The tour ended at a wide hallway before at a set of double doors.

  Wald turned to face the tour group. “My fellow officers, ladies, and gentlemen: welcome to the bridge.” The doors slid open as if by her word, and she motioned for the group to enter.

  Two security officers stood at attention beside the doors as the assemblage filed through. Jaren tried to peer inside and saw only blackness ahead. Choosing the unknown over the dreary hallway, he fell in with the others.

  The darkness didn’t diminish on the other side, but a number of objects were clearly visible within it. A double row of crimson banners, hanging from no visible fixtures, gave the only indication of a central path running from the entrance to the front of the room, the word being a loose analogy for such a surreal environment.

  Jaren looked up at the banners marching across the bridge. All showed the black silhouette of the ship's hybrid mascot emblazoned on sanguine fabric. At the room’s far end, a single round aperture hung in the blackness. The debris field was clearly visible through the looming window, and the myriad pinpoints of distant stars twinkled beyond. Jaren knew that this wasn’t the huge green lens that had glared at him on approach. The Exodus' bizarre internal geography made orienting himself difficult, but he knew that the great eye stared from the tip of the bow several decks below.

  A raised circular platform stood halfway between the window and the entrance. Craighan had stopped in front of it, and Jaren saw that the top of the dais was level with the large man’s shoulders. A small crowd of civilians—likely the project’s backers—clustered around the navy captain. When their chatter subsided Craighan began to speak, sweeping his arm toward the platform. “This is the Wheel,” he said, “the nerve center of the Exodus.”

  Although he’d already guessed the dais' function, Jaren was taken aback by how normal it looked compared to the grotesquery surrounding it. The only unusual quality of the Exodus' Wheel was its size. Five steersmen could stand on the luminous disc with room to spare.

  Craighan ran his hand along the platform’s edge. “Just like a standard ether-runner, the Wheel sympathetically links the steersman with all navigational systems.”

  “How does it feel to pilot a rig this size?” someone in the audience asked.

  The Mithgarder captain smiled. “Nobody knows yet, but I'll tell you tomorrow.”

  The announcement struck Jaren like a fist to the ribs. Nakvin was the Exodus' first Steersman. Poaching her office took Craighan’s arrogance over the line.

  Jaren's voice cut through the din of the crowd. “Was that the administrators' decision,” he asked, “or yours?”

  Craighan's grin widened. He licked his lips and spoke to the gathering; not to Jaren. “The project supervisors oversaw the design and building phase. Their authority ends at the dock.”

  “Who's in charge after that?” Jaren asked.

  Craighan eyed him coolly, but his voice took on a sharp edge. “The Mithgar Navy contracted by the Bifron shipyards to complete this project. Now that construction is finished, this vessel will enter naval service.”

  “I didn’t know this was a military operation.”

  Craighan failed to stifle a burst of condescending laughter. “You weren't aware because it's not your place to know. We're a long way from Tharis, Peregrine. You might be a captain there, but here you're just another consultant. This is my command.”

  Jaren kept his face impassive, though Craighan’s hubris made his blood burn. He's trying to establish dominance; to shame me in front of his officers and my crew.

  The navy captain continued. “Be thankful that the shipwrights won a few concessions. If not for the contract, I'd be leaving you at Caelia.”

  “Vernon negotiated my place on the crew?” Jaren asked.

  Craighan pointed at Nakvin, whose silver eyes widened. “He insisted that I take her on. He also said she wouldn't go without you.”

  Nakvin drew herself up. “I wouldn't” she said.

  Jaren quickly assessed the situation. He could pressure Craighan through Nakvin, but the Mithgarder would welcome an excuse to leave her and the other pirates behind. Distasteful as it was, the best solution was to let Craighan think he'd won.

  When Craighan received no further challenge, he rubbed his hands together and stepped away from the Wheel. “If there are no further questions, then I'd say that concludes our tour.” Looking to Jaren he said, “I look forward to your company on tomorrow’s maiden voyage.”

  The tour group filed off the bridge and started making their way down the tenebrous corridors to the hangar. On the way out, Teg fell in beside Jaren. He tapped his mouth to call for discretion and whispered, “I've been counting our steps since we left the shuttle. This ship is supposed to be sixteen hundred feet long, but the walk from the cargo hold to the bridge was farther than that.”

  Jaren nodded. Teg’s observation was strange, but he’d probably just scratched the surface of the ship’s manifold weirdness. Indeed, the first voyage of the Exodus was apt to be far stranger than anyone expected.

  19

  Jaren awoke at five A.M. on the day after Craighan's speech. The Exodus wasn’t scheduled to leave for six hours, but a sense of foreboding more urgent than the vague menace that haunted Caelia thwarted his return to sleep. He lay in silence until he realized that the constant buzz of activity had ceased.

  Jaren quickly rose and dressed. He headed to Teg's quarters, but the mercenary was gone. When his sending went unanswered, he continued down the empty hall and called at another cabin. Nakvin answered the door wearing only a bed sheet.

  “Get dressed and wake Deim,” Jaren said. “Meet me in the hangar in ten minutes.”

  “Why?” she asked, the single syllable drawn out by a yawn.

  “I don't know, but acting on a hunch beats waiting for a threat.”

 
Nakvin stared bleary-eyed at Jaren for a few seconds before shutting her door. Taking her silence as consent, he left for the hangar deck.

  Jaren breathed a curse when he arrived at the mostly empty dock. Not only had the dreadnaughts and frigates left port; the Shibboleth was gone, too. Fear smothered his rage with the advent of a single thought: What about the Exodus?

  Since it wasn’t visible from the hangar, visiting the shipyard became Jaren’s top priority.

  Nakvin strode into the hangar, trailing a disheveled Deim. “Looks like you were right,” she said. “They left us.”

  “Come on,” Jaren said as he headed for one of the last two shuttles.

  “In that thing?” Nakvin asked. “I need a Wheel to navigate the debris cluster.”

  “We're not leaving orbit,” Jaren said. “We’re heading to the Exodus.”

  “If it's still here,” Nakvin said with a sigh.

  Deim mumbled something about Thera passing from night to day, but Jaren dismissed it as remnants of the steersman’s dreams.

  The shuttle hadn’t gone far before the shipyard came into view. Jaren breathed a sigh of relief to see the Exodus still moored in its oversized drydock. Nakvin followed the course they’d taken to the previous day’s rally. Flying through the ship’s gigantic door heightened Jaren’s sense of isolation even though several more shuttles dotted the cavernous hangar.

  “They must’ve had the same idea as you,” Nakvin said upon landing.

  “Good. They can answer my questions.”

  Jaren bolted from the shuttle; his two steersmen close behind. He set a breakneck pace across the hangar and through the main hull’s stagnant maze. When they reached the bridge, Craighan and a handful of his officers rounded on them. “What are they doing here?” he asked as though the pirates had crashed his garden party.

  “That’s my question,” Jaren said. He stormed down the banner-flanked aisle till he was close enough to smell Craighan’s aftershave. “You should learn to respect others’ property.”

  Craighan met Jaren’s glare with a scowl. His nostrils flared.

  “Captain!” a sailor stationed beyond the line of banners called out. “The enemy has destroyed our first dreadnaught, and the second is in retreat. They're advancing.”

  With no hesitation, Craighan disengaged from Jaren and took the Wheel.

  “What enemy?” Jaren asked.

  “I don't have time to hold your hand,” Craighan said from the dais. “We’re heading into combat. Make yourselves useful unless you want to spend this voyage in the brig.”

  Jaren noticed that several banks of consoles now glowed on either side of the center aisle. Keeping an eye on Craighan, he made his way to a gunnery post.

  Craighan winced as the great Wheel flared to life. Lit from below, his roughhewn frame took on a spectral cast. “All hands make ready for departure,” he sent via intercom, groaning as if under a heavy burden.

  Jaren didn’t know that the Exodus had pulled free of its drydock until the bridge window canted to frame the hellish chaos of a war zone. Where the hell are Teg and the Shibboleth? he wondered with rising dread.

  Despite Bifron's debris field, Jaren made out the hulls of eight combatants. He identified the closest ships as a pair of navy frigates flanking a larger dreadnaught. A narrow stretch of empty space stood between the Mithgar ships and the five vessels advancing on them. The four smaller hostiles had squared-off hulls typical of Guild corvettes, but it was the ship they escorted that captured Jaren's attention.

  The behemoth bore no resemblance to the corvettes flying beside it. Its hull—a cross between an arrowhead and an elongated clam shell, was a darker grey than theirs. Two elbow-jointed pylons swept backward and upward from the stern at forty-five degree angles. Each pylon terminated in a convex disc that pulsed with blue light. Distance and debris made judging proportions difficult, but seeing that the dreadnaught looked about one third its size, Jaren figured that the Guild giant approached the Exodus in scale.

  “Entering the debris field,” Craighan said between labored breaths.

  Jaren set his teeth. Navigating the chaos of rock and lightning seemed impossible for so large a ship. His own breath caught when the Exodus' aura simply repelled the smaller chunks of cosmic detritus, allowing Craighan to focus on steering between the larger fragments.

  Despite the peril of their situation, Jaren couldn't help but smile. The Exodus wasn't graceful, but it moved with a power that testified to the genius of its design. This is my father’s work, he thought with mixed pride and indignation, and I’ll see him honored for it.

  “All gunnery stations make ready!” Craighan gasped from atop the Wheel. “Fire a volley across the lead hostile’s bow. That should scare them off.”

  The command shocked Jaren out of his reverie. “They came to destroy us,” he said. “The debris is hiding our approach. Attack while we have the advantage!”

  “Save your advice till it's asked for,” Craighan wheezed. “I won’t provoke bloodshed unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  You might not have a choice, Jaren thought, but he held his tongue.

  Marshal Malachi stood at the Wheel of the Serapis and savored his renewed sense of purpose. I must remember to thank Peregrine’s masked friend, he thought. The cloaked freak had driven him into the ether, where a strange rift plunging into cold blackness occupied his enemy’s place. Fortunately, Malachi’s terror hadn’t banished his logic. He’d fashioned a simple effect that diverted a small stream of prana into the rift. Invisible in the Strata, the slender cord had unerringly guided Malachi to his prey.

  Delaying his retreat to fashion the tether had been a gamble. Surely even a pirate steersman would have discovered such a simple Working. But the ethereal thread remained, implying that the masked freak was either prana blind or leading Malachi on a fool’s chase. He’d feared as much when the tether led straight into an impassible debris cloud, but his intuition had borne fruit against all reason. The fugitives were here at Bifron, alongside ships of the Mithgar Navy. Such a scandal would shake the halls of power at Ostrith.

  No matter. Malachi had dispensed with diplomacy along with the dreadnaught in his path. Between the Guild ships and the asteroid field, his quarry were caught in a perfect trap. It all seemed so easy that he’d wondered whether Peregrine and his band were there until a perimeter group reported detaining the Shibboleth. The news was a mixed blessing. It meant victory, but the Master begrudged Peregrine’s capture by lesser men.

  The Serapis shook as a shaft of blue light burned red afterimages into Malachi’s vision. “Did the traitorous halfwits fire a warning shot?” he asked, scanning the line of wounded Mithgar vessels.

  “No, sir,” a crewman called out from the tactical station below the Wheel. “Every ship in our group reports being fired upon without damage. The shots came from thirty degrees to starboard—within the debris field.”

  Malachi set his Wheel-magnified sights on the shots’ point of origin. At first he saw only a riot of tumbling debris. Then something began taking shape in the blackness between the rocks. His eyes insisted that the ominous shadow was too large to be anything but an asteroid, but for once the guildsman doubted his senses.

  Suppressing his excitement through heroic effort, Malachi addressed the bridge crew. “Send word to our escort,” he said. “The corvettes will advance in echelon formation with the Serapis on point. Starboard ships, prepare to disengage on my order.”

  His face impassive, the Master of the Serapis advanced on the Mithgarder dreadnaught and its two surviving frigates.

  Craighan wiped an arm across his brow, soaking the sleeve with sweat. “They're moving off,” he panted. “They must think our volley came from the other ships.”

  Jaren eyed the battle skeptically. The big ship had outdistanced its vanguard of corvettes, and somehow he knew who stood upon its Wheel. “You're making a mistake,” he said. “They know we're here.”

  Except for his ragged breathing, Craighan
kept silent as the Exodus neared the debris field’s edge.

  Nakvin planted herself at the foot of the Wheel and fixed a withering glare on Craighan. “Shortness of breath and sudden fatigue are signs of ether-runner induced stress,” she said. “You need to get off the Wheel.”

  Craighan set his jaw. “So you can relieve me?” he asked without looking down. “No chance.”

  “The interface is disrupting your nervous system.”

  “I don’t need a pirate to tell me what ERIS is,” Craighan snapped.

  Nakvin’s gold-edged sleeves retreated up her arms as she gripped the railing. “How about a Magus with a medical degree?” she asked. “And since attacking a Guild ship voids your steersman’s license, you’re the pirate; not me.”

  The argument over the Wheel passed from Jaren’s mind as the Guild behemoth closed with the battered navy ships. He would’ve thought twice before charging a dreadnaught, even with such a clear size advantage.

  Three hidden turrets emerged from the Guild giant, revealing spinning drums that filled the sky between it and the dreadnaught with intermittent amber lines. The Mithgar warship erupted in compact explosions that left its dorsal surface riddled like a sieve. It began a crawling retreat, and the two frigates moved between the beast and its wounded prey.

  “That monster makes a dreadnaught look like a freighter,” Nakvin said.

  Fortunately, Craighan seemed to have reached the same conclusion. The Exodus burst from the debris field, and Jaren understood that the captain hoped to reach the ether before the Guild gave chase.

  The two corvettes flying behind and to starboard of the Guild giant changed course for the Exodus as soon as it left the rocks. Jaren's heart sank. The enemy’s rapid response had vindicated his warnings, but he wished that he’d been wrong.