A Working of Stars

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  “They’re simple enough,” he said. He pulled the zip cord on the side of the package. “And these aren’t the high-end specialty stuff anyway. I got the lifeboat models. Easy to put on and pretty close to foolproof.”

  “I’ve known some pretty major fools,” Maraganha said.

  Arekhon looked at her.

  “No one’s ever called you one of them, though,” she said, and grinned. “All right, here we go. Pull one out and show us the drill.”

  The last time that young lady ran out on a meeting, the whole building blew up not long afterward.

  Vai’s words remained vivid in Len’s mind as he ran down the apartment-house stairs. Mages could see the luck; everyone knew that. Other people, sometimes Mages and sometimes not, had luck, and it came to them in different shapes and forms. Maybe Zeri sus-Dariv sus-Peledaen had luck of the conveniently-be-elsewhere variety—one of Len’s old shipmates had been like that.

  Without a Mage’s ability to see the eiran, though, he couldn’t tell. He could only hurry to catch up with Zeri on the sidewalk outside the apartment building, and say, “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Some place that isn’t Eraasi,” she said, still walking away rapidly. “Wasn’t that the idea to start with?”

  He stayed with her, easily matching her shorter stride. The street was dark, with a lamppost at each end but nothing in the middle to break the gloom. The apartment buildings along this row weren’t the kind to put up lanterns beside the front door, either. That and the lack of traffic along the one-way street made it a good site for a confidential agent’s backup safe house.

  “Vai and your cousin were planning to—”

  “I don’t care what they were planning,” she said. “I don’t know Syr Vai from the Mayor of Amisket—I’ve never even been to Amisket—and so far I haven’t seen anything of Herin. For all I know, you and Vai were using his name to make me come along.”

  “What do you want, then? You can’t go back to Lord Natelth.”

  “I want—” She stopped.

  He stopped, too, catching at her sleeve as he did so to pull her a little farther into the shadows. Midnight blue made a good color for fading into the dark; he wondered if Iulan Vai had picked out Zeri’s new clothing with that in mind. “What?”

  “Listen.”

  He listened, and heard nothing except for the low rumble of a nearby engine. “It’s a public road,” he said. “Someone’s driving this way, that’s all.”

  “They’re driving this way the wrong way on a one-way street,” she said. “And they’re in a hurry.”

  He listened again. She was right. “I think it’s time to stay in the shadows and not move for a few minutes.”

  They stood close together as a low black groundcar sped past and pulled up to the curb outside the apartment building they’d left only a short while before. Another groundcar pulled up from the opposite direction, and both vehicles began disgorging dark-clad men.

  “It’s a raid, all right,” Len said. “They’re hunting for us now.”

  “What about Syr Vai? Will she—”

  “She’s a professional,” Len said, with more optimism than he actually felt. “And she’s had that house for a long time. Vai can take care of herself.”

  Karil Estisk found herself grateful when Arekhon headed aft to instruct his fellow-Mages in the proper way to put on and wear an emergency pressure-suit. She didn’t outright dislike him—he was kind and pleasant-mannered and not at all hard on the eyes—and she trusted him as much as she was ever going to trust anybody who came from across the interstellar gap and called himself a Mage, but that didn’t necessarily mean she liked him a great deal, or that she trusted him any farther than she could throw him in low gravity.

  He was part of Garrod syn-Aigal’s great working, and the great working had torn up Karil’s life once before. Her first reaction on seeing Arekhon sus-Khalgath standing outside her apartment door a few weeks ago had been a sudden absolute certainty—he’s going to do it again—followed by an equally absolute certainty that all her careful career-rebuilding of the last decade was going to go for nothing. She’d thrown in with his plans out of desperation, a feeling that it was better to jump wide-eyed into the maelstrom than to be thrown in all willy-nilly.

  Which makes you as crazy as the rest of them, she told herself.

  She reached out with one hand and dialed up the magnification and the heat-anomaly sensor on the forward screen, then sat back to wait. The speed of progress was slight, considering, at least compared with a jump run. The black band in the middle of the VU meter grew narrower and narrower as the signal strength went up.

  Karil thought about what might be waiting for her back on Entibor—if, indeed, she was fortunate enough to make it home from across the galaxy a second time. ‘Rekhe might be sneaky and underhanded, not to mention obsessed with Garrod syn-Aigal’s working, but he wasn’t stingy. He’d made arrangements to keep her pay from InterWorlds Shipping coming into her bank account for as long as his open-ended contract for her services remained in force. She might well come home from this journey a wealthy woman; on the other hand, if her last sojourn among ’Rekhe’s people was any indication, she might not ever come home at all.

  “What kind of pilot takes on a job like that?” she asked herself aloud, and tweaked the course a bit to keep the signal in the center of the disk of her HF/DF. “I do. If I’m crazy.”

  That got her to laughing a little. All she had to do was travel to the far side of the interstellar gap to a place where everything was strange, where no one spoke her language, where no one knew the simplest things about hardware or mechanics, but where men could walk through walls and read minds—and then come back alive.

  “That settles it. I am crazy.”

  Karil tweaked their course again. Up ahead, the stars were filtered from the viewscreen. They would be too bright, with the low-light turned up the way it was. But a patch of the image was a different shade of black on black. She touched up the contrast and fed in some color to saturate the field.

  She sent out an active ping, and adjusted course and speed a bit in response. Then she keyed the internal announcement system.

  “We’re coming into visual range of the Daughter. If there’s anything you want aboard this vessel, bring it down to the lock. If you have suits, put them on, but don’t start using air tanks yet.”

  Then she unsnapped herself and removed her own suit from the slide-locker behind the piloting position. She slid it on and fastened the slides along arms and legs, then pulled on the boots and gloves, clamping down the ring seals.

  The dark shape on the monitor had grown in the time she’d not been looking, taking on a flattened disk shape with swooping wings outspread to either side. Even though she’d seen it before, the ship still looked horridly alien to her: its aesthetics wrong; its dimensions wrong; the very assumptions behind its making all wrong. It floated motionless in the vacuum of space, a radio-emitting buoy tethered to it.

  “The hatch on the ventral surface is the one you’re looking for,” Arekhon said. He had returned to the bridge so quietly that Karil hadn’t heard him.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Which side is ventral?”

  “That one,” Arekhon said, tapping the screen in front of her with a fingernail. “Get us close enough to float across, with this vessel’s hatch oriented toward the Daughter’s, and be ready to come along.”

  “Half an hour from the time I leave the control room to the time the automatic homer takes this craft back to Eraasi?”

  “Half a day would be better,” Arekhon said. “I don’t want to be rushed for time. Set it for standard orbit GG-12.”

  “Right,” Karil said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have some maneuvering to do.”

  By the time she’d gotten the shuttle into the position, Arekhon and the others were all properly suited up. Karil came down the ladder from the control bridge to join them, closing the hatch behind her and dogging it shut. She
carried her helmet loose in her hand.

  “All right,” she said. “Time to go.”

  She led the way back through the cargo spaces to the airlock, and walked into it. This was the cargo lock, and large enough to hold a dozen skipsleds’ worth of cargo all by itself.

  “Come on in,” she said, after checking the exterior controls on their panel. “Everyone who isn’t standing on this side of that line when I turn this switch is going back to Entibor.”

  Narin went first among the Mages, then Ty and Maraganha, then Arekhon last of all. He took one last look into the ship as he left its main compartment, and Karil thought she saw his lips move, as if he were saying somebody’s name. Then he too stepped across the thresh-old and into the lock.

  “Right,” Karil said. She held down the safety catch with one hand while she turned the switch with the other. The inner door swung closed.

  “Now we put on our helmets, switch to internal air, and hope there aren’t any leaks,” Karil said, and pulled on her own helmet. She twisted the valve by her right thigh, and heard the hiss of air coming in. The fog on her faceplate cleared.

  “Okay, everyone good?” This time her voice came across the radio link. “Last chance for anyone to get cold feet.”

  “We’re all doing fine,” Arekhon said.

  She waited a minute longer, but nobody spoke up to contradict him. Karil turned the switch for the outer door of the lock—the door was as wide as the entire chamber—and watched as it slid up. She stepped out, and attached a light-line to the ringbolt beside the door, then switched off the magnetic pads in her boots and pushed away, floating across to where Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter—huge compared with the craft they were in, tiny compared with a real deep-space merchant—swam above them.

  Her boots clicked against the far hull, and she walked—click-step, click-step—to the airlock there. She tied off the line to a section of raised hull plate, and said, “Okay, ’Rekhe, you know this ship and how to open the door. Come on over.”

  Evening drew on, dimming the sky outside the sus-Peledaen town house. Natelth sat alone in his study, waiting for word. He would have paced the floor, except that he had schooled himself decades ago not to do such things. Out beyond the bay window of the study, the lights of the city shone like distant stars.

  No reports so far, no sightings. If one of the liveried guards hadn’t thought to check all the trash bins within a half-mile radius, the searchers wouldn’t even have had the dress and the bridal crown. And nobody had touched those, so far as could be determined, except for Zeri sus-Dariv herself. Somewhere between the empty withdrawing-room and that muddy alley, Natelth’s missing bride had apparently changed clothes, wiped her face clean of cosmetics, and vanished.

  She could have been under duress. It was possible—the sus-Peledaen had enemies, a bountiful supply of them, men and women and whole worlds who would like nothing better than to deprive Natelth sus-Khalgath of something that was his.

  Or she could have gone willingly.

  Could she? Natelth wondered. Would she?

  He realized that he didn’t know. He knew that Zeri sus-Dariv had blue eyes and yellow curls because he’d seen her twice—once at the formal marriage negotiations and once this morning at the wedding. He knew that she played at drama and the theatre because his intelligence operatives had included that information in the portfolio they drew up for him. He knew that she was coolheaded enough to understand that bringing what remained of the sus-Dariv into the sus-Peledaen was the best way to help them survive, and he knew that she’d been clever enough to see it on her own and send Fas Treosi to make the approach.

  Did that mean she was clever enough to understand other things as well?

  He knew one other thing—she was lucky. Lucky enough to escape the Court of Two Colors, when there should have been nobody in her position left alive. Clever and lucky—but if she was part of the plot, why was there blood on the carpet?

  The chime of his voice comm halted the restless circling of his thoughts. He pressed the speaker button. “Yes?”

  “Na’e, this is Isa. I have something for you.”

  He felt a surge of relief. Isayana, at least, he knew. “What is it?”

  “A face and a body. Suitable for identification.”

  “How did—?”

  “Blood can tell you all sorts of things, if you take the time to ask it politely.”

  He thought she sounded amused, though he couldn’t imagine why. Isa’s sense of humor had always been a little strange, just as Arekhon’s had been. No, not quite like Arekhon‘s—with ’Rekhe, part of the joke would have been knowing that his older brother was missing some of it.

  That didn’t matter, though. Not anymore.

  “Send me everything you’ve got, Isa. As soon as possible, if not sooner.”

  “You’ve already got it—ask the house-mind.”

  He was querying the main node as she spoke, bringing up a nonverbal display, a three-dimensional image of a man, hovering in the empty space above the desk: Antipodean; somewhere in the indefinite span between youngish and middle-aged; thin face; long bony blade of a nose; yellow-brown eyes. A table of data floated in the air next to the image: probable height, probable weight, numbers and yet more numbers to describe and identify a single living man.

  “I knew I could count on you,” he said. He closed down the display and set to work with the files, getting them moving to the right places, to people who could put names to faces, put out the word, find out who had dared—“Tell the staff that under the circumstances, we’ll be staying here in Hanilat for some time to come.”

  “I’ll make sure they know. And Na’e—don’t worry if I’m not back home right away. I have some cleanup to take care of first.”

  Natelth keyed off the voice comm and went on to summon his chief of security—a man currently not so secure in his position as he had been this morning. Inside a few minutes, Grif Egelt was standing before Natelth’s desk, looking as if he would prefer to be in any other place in Hanilat.

  “My lord?” Egelt said.

  “Why haven’t I received a report yet?” Natelth demanded.

  “An investigation like this moves slowly during the first few hours, my lord. The kidnappers have all the advantages. One interesting development—”

  “Yes?” Natelth said. He crossed over to the copper uffa pot on the side table and poured himself a cup of the sharp, red liquid. He didn’t offer one to Egelt.

  “We got word through informants of a woman who could be Lady Zeri going into an apartment building in the northern suburbs of Hanilat. The house was raided.”

  “And? Why wasn’t I informed of this beforehand?”

  “The information could have turned out to be a false lead—we’ve seen hundreds of those so far already, and I expect we’ll be seeing more of them. In any case, the house was raided, and while the woman was not found, we have reason to believe that she was there. And that she was there with at least two other individuals.”

  “Did one of those individuals look like this?” Natelth snapped a switch on his desk, so that the image that Isayana had sent to the house-mind appeared full-sized and floating in the air above them, rotating slowly—like a hanged man, Natelth thought.

  “I don’t know, my lord,” Egelt said.

  “Then find out,” Natelth said. “And find out who this man is, in any case. I need him. I want him. I shall have him. Is this as clear as I can make it?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  And bowing, the security chief departed.

  12:

  ENTIBOR: STANDARD ORBIT GG-12 ERAASI: HANILAT

  Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter was built of good steel and stout aluminum. Llannat Hyfid—Maraganha, she reminded herself yet again; I have to be Maraganha—was the first of Arekhon’s Mages to abandon her pressure-suit, as soon as the airlock had cycled and the ship was safe. Her sturdy leather boots rang on the metal deckplates as she left the entrance bay for the narrow, curving passagew
ay beyond. For these first few minutes, she didn’t want the members of Arekhon’s Circle to see her face.

  I never thought I’d board this ship again. And I certainly never thought that I’d find her waiting for me at the other end of time.

  She knew the layout of the Daughter by memory; she could have followed the ship’s corridors all the way from the cockpit in one direction to the engine room in the other. She thought for a while of going to the cockpit, where a much-younger Llannat Hyfid had found—would someday find—two long-dead crew members strapped into their seats, with their throats slit and a message written on the forward viewscreen in their blood: “Adept from the forest world: Take this message to the Domina. Tell her what you have seen.”

  But they wouldn’t be there now. In this time, Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter was still a living ship, and whatever had happened to set her adrift on her course through the interstellar gap was yet to come.

  Llannat returned to the entrance bay instead. The two Mages already waiting in there—intense young Ty, who carried an Adept’s staff in spite of his Circle training; and Narin, whom they had pulled by main strength out of salt water and the Void—gave her odd looks when she entered the compartment.

  Llannat shook her head ruefully. They all thought of her as something not quite human, even ’Rekhe, who certainly ought to know better; a wonderworker, perhaps, or their own private oracle. She wished that they would stop. Not a sensible wish, since she was in this position of her own will, but good sense never stopped anyone from wishing yet.

  The airlock cycled one last time, and Karil and Arekhon came aboard through the sliding doors. The starpilot turned to Arekhon and said, “Where to next, Captain?”

  “Eraasi,” he said. “Ty, find us food supplies if you can. The ship should be fully stocked, but if it isn’t we’ll have to stop somewhere before the interstellar gap to replenish our larder.”

  “We have to be on our way before any of the in-system ships get antsy and fire on us, or we may be permanently delayed,” Karil said. “I’m going to move off a ways before I calculate the run we need.”