A Working of Stars

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  “I see. Where is he now?”

  “No!” she said. “’Rekhe, you can’t fight with him. He’s crazy—he doesn’t even have his own body anymore; he’s gotten hold of somebody else’s somehow—and by the time he finds you he might not even give you the chance to fight.”

  “Then I need to find him now,” said Arekhon, “before it gets worse.”

  Anger rushed through her, hot and sudden. “I came all this way to warn you—to tell you to stay away from Kiefen Diasul no matter what—and now you tell me you’re going to find him? I’d forgotten what an ungrateful bastard you can be sometimes.”

  He hung his head, and the long dark hair fell across his bare shoulders to hide his face. “I know. But I can’t let Kief destroy the great working—if he keeps on like this, he’ll pull it apart whether he fights me or not. Tell me how to find him, Iule. Please.”

  She felt it now, as she realized he must feel it all the time—the inexorable weight of the working, pressing in.

  “All right.”

  Vai reached with her good hand into the inner pocket of her jacket, and took out the star chart she’d kept there ever since leaving Hanilat. She put it on the pillow next to where his head had lain.

  “This will take you where you want to go.”

  “Thank you.”

  He lifted his head, and looked again at her face. In another heartbeat, she thought, he would reach out a hand and touch her.

  But there was no time for it; there was never any time. The world of her meditation was coming apart around her, and she was falling, falling, down and through and backward into the glaring bright emptiness of the cargo bay.

  Bertan Hafdorwen syn-Radal, captain of the sus-Radal guardship East-to-the-Dawning, was sleeping in his bunk when the Dawning’s Command-Ancillary sounded the message call. Hafdorwen pushed the Answering light on the bulkhead next to his pillow and listened.

  “We have contact from the listening posts in the BK-two area,” the Command-Ancillary reported. “Someone’s come out of the Void.”

  “Someone? Who? A man or a ship?”

  “Ships, sir. The listening posts went dark after one challenge, per doctrine. We have three contacts, at least. No reply on the family channel.”

  “I’ll be right up,” Hafdorwen said. He was already sitting up and pulling on his trousers, and had the lights up to half-intensity to enable him to find his way.

  Command of East-to-the-Dawning was a prestigious position, and meant that the fleet-family had trust in him. Bertan Hafdorwen knew that he was one of perhaps half a dozen people in the entire galaxy who possessed the secret charts needed to reach the refuel and repair station Theledau sus-Radal was building, here on the other side of the interstellar gap. Hafdorwen suspected that there were other stations—he would certainly build more than one of them, if he were Theledau sus-Radal—but he had no way of knowing for certain, nor any need to know. He didn’t think about it often in any case; that sort of decision was fleet-family policy far above his present level.

  But duty at the station was a long journey out of the way, and aside from the return trips to Eraasi to replace the crews and pick up supplies, it was dead boring. Ship’s-day in and ship’s-day out, the little line of fabrication drones picked at the substance of the smaller asteroids nearby, and refined them into building materials. Then they transported the materials to the larger asteroid that was being converted into a base.

  The routine had gone on for months so far—months that were rapidly turning into years. Only Captain Hafdorwen saw the charts, or knew where the ship was jumping to; the crews were never told, and since one piece of space looked much like another, they had no way of finding out for certain where they were located.

  But now, apparently, someone had found them. Someone who wasn’t responding on the family frequencies.

  Hafdorwen arrived on the Dawning’s bridge, and looked at the stack of intercept reports.

  “Everyone dark?” he asked the Command-Ancillary.

  “We broadcast once, narrow and compressed. The drones have shut off. The base is silent. So yes, we’re dark. Our friends—” and here the Command-Ancillary tapped her fingernail against the intercept on the top sheet “—know that at least one listening post exists, because they would have heard the challenge, and they know that at least one ship exists, because they would have heard our broadcast.”

  “And from that they’ll logic out that there are more ships,” Hafdorwen said. “Because we wouldn’t be talking to ourselves, eh?”

  The captain strode over to the bank of bridge windows and looked out. The brilliant, unblinking stars were as they’d always been: no sign of intruders, not that he’d have been able to see them in any case. The unimaginable distances of space would have swallowed them whole.

  “Whoever it is,” the Command-Ancillary said, “they know that we’re here. Otherwise a fleet would hardly pick here to drop out of the Void. So we have to assume that they know everything, including the location of the base.”

  “They must be unsure of themselves at best,” Hafdorwen said. “For all they know, there’s another layer of secrets, and a whole fleet waiting to gobble them up.”

  “So,” the Command-Ancillary said. “What are we going to do?”

  “Prepare for battle, of course,” Hafdorwen answered. “That’s why the family put us out here.”

  In the spaceport at Sombrelír, Karil Estisk sat in the pilot’s chair on the bridge of Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter. Outside the Daughter’s bridge windows, the sky was turning rosy-grey with the coming dawn.

  Everybody else on board was still asleep; they’d boarded the starship last night for a morning departure. The Daughter was fueled up, resupplied, and ready for Karil to take her back across the interstellar gap, to the home of Arekhon sus-Khalgath’s murderous relatives and entire fleets of space pirates. All for the sake of a working Karil had never seen and didn’t especially believe in.

  That settles it. I am crazy.

  The door behind her slid open with a click and a sigh, and footsteps sounded on the deckplates. She turned around in the pilot’s chair and saw Arekhon.

  The Eraasian looked like he’d experienced a severe shock. His pupils were so dilated that his grey eyes appeared almost black, and there was feverish red color along his normally pale cheekbones. He was carrying something in his hand—she couldn’t tell what.

  “’Rekhe,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “Do you have the course for our Void-transit?”

  “Worked out and laid in,” she said. It wasn’t like Arekhon to be so abrupt; something was definitely wrong. “Just like you asked for.”

  “Scrub it.” He held out the thing he was carrying. “Use this instead.”

  Karil looked at it, and saw a stiff flat piece of card plastic with no distinguishing marks. Light danced off it, quick flashes of brightness there and gone again, and she realized that Arekhon’s hand was shaking.

  She took the card. “I’ve never seen one of these before. Use it how?”

  “It’s a star chart. An Eraasian star chart.” He was fretting now, gazing wildly about the bridge—he had to be looking for something, only she didn’t know what. “There must be a reader on board that will interface with the Daughter‘s systems; they would have intended her to use the family charts … aha!”

  He’d found a shallow sliding drawer under the edge of the main console. Karil had seen it before, but she’d never understood what it was for—the Daughter was full of inexplicable things, and she’d forgotten that one almost as soon as she’d first noticed it. Arekhon placed the flat piece of plastic into the drawer and slid it closed.

  “There.” His voice held a note of satisfaction, and some—though not all—of his visible tension went away.

  An image was forming over the main console. It was flat, like a rumpled grey carpet, full of folds and ridges and valleys. Colored lights shone here and there on the carpet: a big bunch all on one side, and a white one sta
nding alone a long way off. And also a long way off from the main group, a single light colored a deep, pulsing violet.

  A few seconds later, a new light—bright golden this time—winked into existence and joined the others on the grey carpet.

  “What is that?” Karil demanded.

  “The new light—the gold one—that’s Ophel. The chart picked it up from the Daughter now that we’ve set a Void-mark here.”

  “That’s what you and Maraganha were doing the other night?” she asked. “Setting Void-marks?”

  “Yes,” he said. “The white Void-mark, that’s Entibor—Lord Garrod set it, at the start of the great working.” He pointed to the cluster of lights. “And those are the homeworlds. Eraasi, there, and Ninglin and Cracanth and all the others.”

  “Uh-huh. And what’s that purple one, over here on the same side as us?”

  “That’s the place we have to go.”

  Karil stared at him. “What?”

  “You need to scrub the old course,” he told her, “and set up a new one for that mark.”

  “’Rekhe, I can’t even read this chart of yours, let alone interface it with the navicomps!”

  “I’ll help you. My fleet-family days were a long time ago, but ’Prentice-Master syn-Lanear wouldn’t have turned me loose if I couldn’t set up a straightforward course from a standard chart.”

  “I am never going to understand you people.” She looked at him with concern. “Listen to me, Arekhon. Last night you were bound and determined to head home to Eraasi, the same as you’ve been ever since you showed up on my doorstep and talked me into making this trip. Then this morning you come bounding onto my bridge with a star chart you’ve apparently pulled out of your left ear, and you point at a blob of purple light and tell me that we have to go there instead. Before we do anything, I think you need to tell me what’s going on.”

  Arekhon sat—no, collapsed—in the copilot’s chair. “Iulan Vai—remember her?—”

  Karil nodded slowly. “Dark hair, wore black a lot. One of your people, not the, whatever you call it, the family.”

  “‘Fleet-family.’ Yes. That’s Vai. She stayed behind on Eraasi. And she brought the chart to me last night.”

  “If anybody else in the galaxy said that to me, ’Rekhe, I wouldn’t believe them.” She looked again at the star chart, and the glowing white light that was Entibor. “But I’ve seen what you can do.”

  “You’ll set the course, then?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “You’ve told me how; now I’m waiting for you to tell me why.”

  He sighed. “Kiefen Diasul. You don’t know him—he was the Mage I fought with at Demaizen Old Hall, before the Daughter came and took us away. He’s looking for me, Vai says—he wants to end the great working, and he needs me either to help him end it or to be dead so I can’t stop him.”

  “And let me guess. Instead of heading in the other direction as far and as fast as you could, you talked Iulan Vai into giving you a map to Kief’s location with ‘X marks the spot’ written on it in big red—excuse me, big purple—letters.”

  He looked away; but not before she saw the color rise in his cheeks. “Something like that.”

  “I still think you’re crazy. But I’ll set the course.”

  The tension went out of him like a taut string being loosened at the peg. “Thank you. Because it’s not just the working. Vai didn’t say so, but I think Kief has her with him. And she’s been hurt.”

  For Iulan Vai, the transit to the sus-Radal asteroid base passed in a long, confusing blur. After her walk through the landscape of her mind in search of Arekhon, she lay strapped down and feverish in the ship’s cargo hold, with no clear awareness of the passage of time, or even of whether she was sleeping or awake.

  When her head finally cleared, she was still in the cargo hold, but she was no longer strapped down. There were clean sheets on the emergency cushion, and—except for her matted and unwashed hair—she herself was also clean. She was naked under the sheet that covered her, but her clothes lay clean and folded in a neat pile on the deckplates by her head.

  Somebody, then, had taken care of her. She didn’t remember who—Kief, most likely, or the unknown person whom Kief had addressed when he first brought her aboard. That would have been the pilot, Vai decided. Kief was a scholar, and his family were merchants; he didn’t know how to handle a starship.

  Her staff lay atop the folded clothes, and a ship’s-first-aid-kit standard sling lay underneath the staff. Vai dressed herself slowly and carefully. She was still weak, and her splinted arm hurt whenever she touched it or moved it wrong. The sling helped, once she got it into place. The shirt wasn’t hers—the old one would have been a total loss anyway—but a cheap man-tailored one from a chain of clothing stores in Hanilat. The left sleeve had been thoughtfully slit down one seam to allow for the bulky splint on that arm.

  There weren’t any shoes; she had to stand barefoot on the cold deckplates. She clipped the staff to her belt—it had to have been Kief who provided the clothes; leaving the staff was definitely the act of a fellow-Mage—and finished by running the fingers of her good hand through her tangled hair.

  I wish I had a hairbrush, or even a comb. My head itches.

  She heard the door of the cargo hold opening, and turned toward the sound. As she’d anticipated, it was Kief. He was wearing the loose coat again, and she knew that he was carrying his little handgun in the right-hand pocket.

  “Do you have spy cameras in here,” she asked him, “or is this just an example of good timing?”

  “It’s timing,” Kief said. “But I don’t know if it’s mine or yours.”

  “What do you mean?”

  There was a look in his yellow-hazel eyes that she didn’t quite understand. “According to the chart you gave me, we’ve reached our destination.”

  “And?” she said.

  This is the part where he shoots me dead out of spite. I knew it might happen, but it was going to be worth it, to keep him away from ’Rekhe … then I had to go and bungle even that.

  “We’re at an asteroid, or something that looks like one.” Surprisingly, Kief looked intrigued, not angry. He was a stargazer, she thought, before he came to the Circles. He knows what’s natural and what isn’t. “And there appear to be quite a lot of ships in the nearspace vicinity.”

  Vai felt a rush of dizzying relief, so strong that she had to struggle to conceal it. At least one thing had finally worked out right—the sus-Dariv were here as scheduled. She tried to appear curious but not too happy. “Whose?”

  “Fleet-families, the pilot says. sus-Radal, and some that he doesn’t know.” Kief gave her a sharp look. “Are you sure Arekhon is here?”

  She let out a deep sigh. “He isn’t yet. But he will be. I gave him the same chart that I gave you.”

  Aboard Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms, the senior surviving guardship of the sus-Dariv fleet, emergence from the Void came calmly, at least on the surface.

  “Passive sensors show fast task element is on time, on station,” the Garden’s captain said to Fleet-Captain Aelben Winceyt. “We all made it.”

  “Good job,” Winceyt said. The words came out muffled; he had his face buried in the lightshield around the sensor readout, the better to see any low-level traces. He straightened up and added, “I want this approach to be as fast and quiet as I can make it.”

  A light on the starboard readout flashed yellow, and the Garden’s Pilot-Principal said, “Fleet-Captain—someone’s transmitting.”

  “One of ours?”

  “No.” The Pilot-Principal remained a bit thinner and paler than she ought to be, but overall the time spent on the Void-transit had done her good. She didn’t look on the verge of collapsing any longer, and her voice was steady.

  “I suppose it’s inevitable,” Winceyt said. “If we’ve come out where we’re supposed to be, then there are bound to be people out here. Do you have a position on the transmitter?”

  “No, sir,” she said
. “It went up and down too fast. We have it to about a hundred-eighty half-sphere.”

  “Do you have any ID on it?”

  She shook her head. “It’s in a code that we don’t recognize.”

  “Get traces on all the background, with permanent recordings.”

  “Sir.” The Pilot-Principal turned to the duty logmaster—one of Serpent Station’s handful of fleet-apprentices, who in happier times would have been barely senior enough to carry messages and tend the wardroom uffa pot—and the two of them started on the record, in constant hard and soft readout.

  The other members of the bridge team, meanwhile, stood and waited. “Well,” said Command-Tertiary Yerris eventually, “we don’t have charts from out here, but this is certainly an interesting—”

  The yellow light came on again, and the Garden’s communications officer interrupted Yerris, saying, “Second transmission. Attenuated. Short. I expect that it’s a guardship giving orders to a fleet.”

  “Background is dropping,” said the Garden’s captain, who had replaced Winceyt at the low-light hood.

  “Very well,” Winceyt said. “Find the things that vanished when the orders went out. Find their records. Backtrack them, then project their courses outward. That should give us the location of their base.”

  “Or not,” the Garden’s captain said.

  “Or not,” agreed Winceyt. “They know we’re here. So—message to the two outlying couriers. Get me lines of bearing on that last transmission. With those, and our line of bearing, get me a fix on the transmitter. That’ll be the flagship. That’s where we want to be.”

  “But whose flagship is it?” said the Garden’s captain. “That’s the question.”

  “I wish that Syr Vai were here,” Yerris said. “She claimed that she’d cover us.”

  “Well, she’s not here, Command-Tertiary,” Winceyt replied shortly, “and she didn’t tell me what she intended to do after we got here. So for now we walk wary, try not to look vulnerable, and remember our pride.”