by Clayton, Jo;
Skeen looked at the schematic and cursed. “Cidder!” she snarled.
Tibo was gazing intently at the ships. “Mmm.”
Picarefy threw an inset onto the screen, showing the ships in relation to the star and the sphere of Teegah’s Limit. “Quick little viper,” she said. “I’m picking up feelers from three snagships, all of them moving from their parking orbits, two coming toward us, one going away. I assume they’re closing in on the harrier packs.”
Skeen ran her hand through her hair. “We wanted him to notice us, I say we’ve done enough, let’s get out of …”
Picarefy jumped in before she finished. “No, that’s wrong. If we don’t hit him again, he’ll start seining the place, but give him a line, he’ll be on it, coming at us with everything he’s got, giving Virgin and Hopeless a reasonably clear run. That’s what you were setting up, Skeen, you might as well follow through.”
Reluctantly Skeen agreed; they had to twist Cidder’s tail again. “No tricks this time,” she said. “Pic, those missiles go with a full load.”
“Oh, yes, no playing with that pack,” Picarefy said, fervor in her voice, “Bona Fortuna bless us.”
Tibo passed a hand across his face, cleared his throat. “The way the pack is positioned, you can see they are waiting for you to come out of the starglare should you be running this line. Cidder has to have some idea about the Ykx Shield seeing what happened on Pillory, but he hasn’t had the time or data to bust it, so he’s trying to outfox it. Either him or the Lead in the boss harrier. Lead knows he can’t see you before you spit the missiles, but I’d bet the family jewels he’s got someone’s thumb on the panic button in each of those ships, with the orders to squirt past the Limit and drop out the instant anything at all appears on their screens. Him or Cidder, one of them has guessed that you have to lift the Shield before you can fire. Drop out, switch ends, surface again, take out the missiles and pin you against the sun. With a little luck the Lead can do all of that. Look at them, you can almost smell the confidence. Hmm. Which brings up another point. Pic, you think this is one of Cidder’s Fancies? You think he guessed Skeen would break out this direction and put his prime pack here to catch her?”
“This threepack is light-years sharper than that other. That’s all I’d feel happy about saying.”
“Hmm.”
Skeen moved restlessly. “I’m not into suicide, Tib.”
“There’s a way to do it.”
“So?”
“I just haven’t seen it yet.”
“Riiight. So how long do we hang in Limbow waiting for inspiration to strike? There’s two snagships heading this way fast, like you said, Cidder requisitioned the best of them.”
“You want inspiration, hush and let me think.”
Silence on the Bridge. Timka glanced at Rostico Burn, but he showed no eureka signs; he was scowling at the schematics and chewing his lip like a cub at a math test he hadn’t studied for. She agreed with Skeen. Suicide didn’t appeal to her. It seemed to her that all they needed to do was stand off and fire a few missiles at the ships; it didn’t matter if they missed completely, Skeen would have announced her presence and spat in Cidder’s face. Being on the easy side of Teegah’s Limit, Picarefy could drop out and split for The Shoals before those harriers had a chance to get organized. She thought about saying this, but after a few minutes watching Tibo and Skeen she decided intrusion wouldn’t be welcome.
Tibo rubbed his agile actor’s hands along the chair arms, his amiably ugly face blank with the intensity of his concentration. “Ha!” He snapped thumb against finger. “Pic, how close can you get without triggering something?”
“Insplit or realspace?”
“Start with realspace.”
“Visuals and ultramags, where they can make me, the Shield doesn’t count. I can get lost for some distance in the starglare, but about half an AU from the pack most visual systems I know about can filter out that glare. Ultramags will kick in about then, reinforce the visuals. That’s realspace. Insplit is trickier to judge, how far they could pick me up depends on several variables, reading capacity, interpretive skill, experience, and … I suppose you could call it intuition … the ability of the reader to make accurate calls on inadequate data. Given those, they could spot me several lights off. That’s without the shield. With it? I don’t really know. I don’t know how it changes the flow. I’d like to do some testing …” a brief cascade of laughter, “… wrong time, you don’t need to say it. There’s some precedent that says the shield smooths out the knot my mass ties in the flow, so a visual read would miss me. I suspect that a truly talented reader would see something there. What he or she made of it would depend on other factors. That help any?”
“You could come up nose to nose with the boss harrier if you stayed in the insplit and under shield?”
“I wouldn’t mind trying it.”
“They’re waiting for you to jump out of the starglare; if you don’t, you’ll have a few milliseconds before they can shift mind set. Here’s what I suggest. Start above the plane, slide over to Teegah’s Limit, going fast as you can without making waves in the flow, translate to realspace, coming down top speed, steep slant, one limb of a hyperbolic, hold the shield in place until you’re on their tails, drop it, get the three missiles off, drag the shield on, hit the other limb, whip through the Limit and split. I think you can do it and get clear.”
More silence on the bridge as Picarefy thought it over. Skeen had her chair almost flat; she was stretched out staring at the ceiling, her face unreadable. Rostico Burn was grinning, he had his hands wrapped around his chair arms holding himself down, his body shouting yes yes go for it. Timka wrinkled her nose at him, but he was too involved to take notice of her. She sighed, bored rather than frightened, convinced to her bones that those harriers, however expertly handled, were no match for Picarefy. She wriggled around until she was as comfortable as she could make herself, she was getting very tired of this chair, pulled the crashweb over her and locked it in place. There might be some more quibbling, but Tibo had set the game and Picarefy would play it out, so she might as well be ready for what was probably going to be a rough ride.
Picarefy laid on the acceleration, feeling the flow begin to pile against the Limit. She drove as close as she could, translated to realspace, spat like a melon seed from the insplit, body straining, her passengers pasted into their chairs (she spared a fraction of herself to tend the chairs and keep her internal symbiote Skeen reasonably intact). Her own brain and body a silent scream of effort, she whipped through the point arc of the hyperbola, nose toward the harriers’ tails like a comet whipping around a sun. She snapped down the shield, released the missiles, covered herself, wrestled herself around and scooted for the Limit.
She hit the Limit a hair ahead of half a dozen harrier missiles, dropped out and accelerated again until she was slicing the flow at her personal best.
Limit plus 15 seconds. Diminishing whistle of a message rat.
Limit plus 20 seconds. Twitch in the fabric. Scratch one harrier.
Limit plus 21 seconds. Twitch in the fabric. Scratch second harrier.
Limit plus 22 seconds. Glitch. Scratch one wasted missile. Mala Fortuna rain shit on that harrier and cover him with sores.
Limit plus 30 seconds. Diminishing whine of a rat.
What the hell? who’s that for? First was to the snagger, this has to be for Abel Cidder. Ouch.
Limit plus 39 seconds. Powerful probes ranging the flow. Djabo’s lazy gonads, as Skeen would say.
Limit plus 45 seconds. Disturbance in the flow. Harrier coming after her. Mala Mala Mala Fortuna, looks like he’s got a reader.
Limit plus 50 seconds. Probe ranging stops, ripple coming behind, tracking her wake.
Limit plus 55 seconds. Ripple dropping back, but hanging on.
Picarefy cut some of the powerdrain to the shield, brought up the argrav to .6 g, set the mice to working, activated the medasource, everything as before, gnashed
her nonexistent teeth at the persistence of that ripple in the flow. When the medasource had dealt with the wrenches, bruises and small rips invading the organic fabric of her passengers and her symbiote, (Timka took care of her own body as before, shifting twice and returning to her Pallah shape with all damage repaired), she made a throat-clearing sound. “Skeen.”
Skeen yawned, blinked at the screen, saw nothing there. “So?”
“We’ve got a tail.”
“Didn’t you say …”
“Mostly I said I suffered from congestive ignorance. It’s a visual tag. I couldn’t get far enough fast enough to break clear. They’ve got a flow reader, Skeen, and he or she or whatever is the best I’ve seen, almost as good as me. I’ve got legs on that harrier but not enough to lose him before we hit The Shoals. As for the rest, two dead harriers and one wandering missile, ours, way behind and washed out, missed the third harrier, our tag, Mala Fortuna gift him with boils. Um. Dead or gone, those harriers got off half a dozen missiles. Bona Fortuna’s pretty thumbs, they missed me by a hair. Tib, you were right about them, that wasn’t your ordinary pack, reactions that fast when I popped out at them from a place they didn’t expect. Ah, well, a hair’s as good as an AU, considering.”
Tibo drew his hand along his jaw, scowling at the play of irridescence on the screen; Picarefy hadn’t bothered throwing up schematics of the pursuing harrier. “You can lose him in The Shoals?”
“That I’m sure of. The turbulence there will cancel out the blip we’re making in the flow. What I’m not sure of is getting out of the Shoals intact. I … do … not … like … that … place. It’s apt to open a mouth that wasn’t there a minute before and bite large pieces out of me. How’d you like to be the garnish for one of those pieces?”
Skeen snorted. “You’re getting giddy, Pic. I think that shield is making you drunk.”
“So?”
“Hmm. Spare a cell or two to fix dinner for us? It’s been a while since we ate, me at least, I’m hungry.”
“I hear and obey, O mistress sublime.”
Minutes creeping past, changing imperceptibly into hours. The harrier is left farther and farther behind until its knot slides off the screen and out of Picarefy’s perceptions, but neither she nor Skeen have any hope that it has given up the chase. Turbulence growing ahead, the flow knotty and swinging in dizzying swirls, enough to give one vertigo watching it. Picarefy is tense, afraid of that morass waiting for them, she slows, begins to curve away from the densest of the twists, slows yet more, tiptoes along, sensors ranging as far as she can reach, ready to swerve at the first sign of threat.
On and on, hours hanging imperceptibly into a day, a night, ship time, lights bright, dimmed, bright again. Threading between scattered knots and whorls, Picarefy with her elbows tucked in, her eyes wide and straining, hoping she’d cast the tail, unsure, pushing a little farther to make herself more certain, a little farther, a little.…
She slammed into a wall. Addled for an instant, she shivered, sparks leaping wildly, bits of her twisted and jarred, more breaks, blankness. Garfish on a sharkhook, struggling.…
“Pic!” Skeen’s voice in the blankness, shouting a string of syllables that cued the mice and remotes to furious activity. By the time the snagfield had stabilized her in realspace, pinning her there with its enormous pseudo mass, Picarefy was almost back to full capacity.
Tibo was on his feet, acrobat still, tough and nimble, flashing from the bridge. He came back a few breaths later with a remote hauling a large locked case, hand weapons for the boarding fight. Ross was gathering himself, his face registering a raging helplessness, hands fisting and opening, he’d been through this before that time the Herren snagged him, took his ship and dropped him into Pillory. Timka stripped off her kimono, shifted to her cat-weasel form, the boarders coming after them might discount a beast. She couldn’t do anything about the snagger, but she was going to make the Imperials pay for every inch of ground gained.
Picarefy did some fishtailing and twitching to test the strength of the hold, but the Hook was set solid. She wasn’t going anywhere. The snagger was an anchor, holding her until the much slower mauler arrived to peel them open, until the harrier who’d tracked them and pointed them out to the snagger came up to watch the peeling. Snagships were shells built around the Hook and immense drives, (the newest snags were pushing at the limits of speed, even in the peculiarities of the insplit), they had no armaments or defenses, they needed neither. This snagship couldn’t get at Skeen and the rest, but with the gravity sink between it and Picarefy, she couldn’t get at it. If Petro’s Shear didn’t work, Cidder had them all and there was nothing they could do about it. The old Ykx had worked out a theoretical method of inducing waves of instability in the field that produced the gravity sink; they built the device, tested it, found it gulped power and couldn’t be used for more than a few seconds, but it blew Hook generators seven times out of ten. With the help of Picarefy and her remotes, Lipitero had built and installed this device; they did some minor tests on it, enough to make sure it did SOMETHING when a twitch of power was run through it, but there was no guarantee the thing would work against a real rather than theoretical Hook.
Skeen frowned at the screen. The snagship, the pseudo mass and the surround were drawn in pale green contour lines about a green square that represented Picarefy. “Status, Pic?”
“Repairs complete, fuel level down, close to half mark. Not much margin, Skeen.”
“Petro’s Shear?”
“Intact, whether it’ll work or not …”
Skeen glanced at Tibo, bit her lip. “Ti, Ross, web in, I don’t know what the fuck’s going to happen. Ready, Pic?”
“Ready.”
“Go.”
Picarefy shuddered and shook, the surges pulsing through her blinded her, pulled silent screams of deep hurt from her tortured mind/brain; she concentrated on holding herself together as the torment went on and on.
Skeen clung grimly to consciousness, driven alternately into the chair and the web (the shaking was so intense it produced a play where there should have been none), mouth bleeding where she bit through her lip, nose bleeding, sphincters giving way. SOUND battered her. WILD COLORS crawled out of the screen and wheeled round her.
Tibo and Ross writhed and groaned, bled and leaked from all orifices.
Timka was thrown into compulsive and uncontrolled shifting, losing all sense of herself as individual. Parts of her broke away, shook out through the web and went into independent shifts, like drops of water flung from a weightless swimball, tiny reflections of the main mass. Bit by bit she oozed through the web and went caroming about the bridge, flung apart, crawling painfully together, drawn by bodyNEED into reforming the whole.
Picarefy noted this as she noted the rest of the damage within her, she suffered for them all, but she couldn’t do anything about what was happening. She struggled to keep awareness flowing through her body, drawing in what data she could, keeping it reasonably free of distortion. She held on until she felt the snag field throb … throb … THROB, felt it swelling, attenuating.…
She cut the Shear, kicked in the sublight drive and scooted away, the edges of the snagfield yielding with the reluctance of old gelatin. As soon as she was completely clear, she pulled the shield over her though she continued to draw in data, swerved round a sucking sump and began easing out of The Shoals.
The throbbing stretching field reached critical, hung for an instant that seemed to last an eternity, then BURST. The field collapsed so suddenly that space itself seemed to implode, creating an expanding suck in realspace and insplit that tugged at Picarefy. But she was far enough away for the Ykx shield to deflect the suck, she dropped out and split for elsewhere as fast as her depleted fuel store would let her.
Skeen recovered first. “Status, Pic?”
“I’m running low on parts, Skeen. This is the third time I’ve had to sew myself together since we left the Veil. Fuel near redline, not much leeway on where I
get topped off. Ah, Timka is in trouble, you’d better see what you can do about her. I’ll deal with Tibo and Ross.”
“What the fuck.…” Skeen clicked off the web and tumbled from the chair. She ran to Timka who was a shuddering amorphous lump, all the scattered bits had been resorbed but the Min was in Chorinya, being wrenched through uncontrollable shifts. “Pic, get me Ti’s bag, fast.” She caught hold of Pallah hands before they could change again, held onto them when they went boneless and slippery. Her grasp seemed to help Timka regain some sense of herself, the shifting slowed and became less radical. When the remote reached her, Skeen freed one hand, dug through the bag till she found what looked like a tuning fork, the thing Timka had used to stop the Min Skirrik boy’s Chorinya, banged it against the remote and held the base to the next head that appeared, took it away, watched until she saw Ti’s Pallah face, then she set the humming fork against it and held it there. The shapeless body quivered into shape, and the Pallah Timka lay panting on the floor. She sighed and managed a weary smile.
Skeen sat on her heels, the fork on her thigh. “It needs a bit more work. The Shear, I mean.”
Timka looked up at her. “You could say that,” she whispered. She started to push herself up, collapsed. “I think I’ll stay here a while.”