Vespera

by Anselm Audley

  The rest of the world laughed at Vesperans because the chymists and their sister guild, the beauticians, had such a high status, but then the rest of the world had no idea how wide-ranging their skills were.

  Including the manufacture of a drug which could block someone’s magic, and could be administered in such a way as to make it undetectable. Had Leonata found the silphium supplier yet? Would she have told him, if she had?

  The path was dry, thankfully – Raphael had forgotten that mud would show where sand wouldn’t, but he’d be hard-put to avoid dirtying the robes if he fell over. The path was steeper now, twisting up the side of a hill past a rock-face and some unusually vocal night birds. Were there any larger animals on the island? Not, he decided, one which had been a manta shipyard for five hundred years. Given Aruwe’s attitude, he was surprised the shipwrights hadn’t managed to exterminate all the mosquitoes, but there was certainly no potential for tigers.

  But then tigers did swim, like fishing cats. Not being able to swim in Thetia was a serious drawback.

  It all depended on how far they were from the next island, and whether it was a chain of islands or an unbroken link. With luck and an accurate chart, he should be able to pinpoint Aruwe’s position. It was the route through the kelp forest which mattered, but it should at leats pinpoint where in the kelp Aruwe was.

  He almost slipped, and decided to stop worrying about tigers and concentrate on the path, and keeping quiet. There was no reason for Aruwe to have left a sentry up here when they had better and higher vantage points. It made more sense to patrol the main compound, or at least it would have done had shipwrights been any good as guards.

  By now the trail had straightened out, and there was enough moonlight filtering through the trees for Raphael to be sure the ground wasn’t swarming with army ants. He could just about make out the silver glint of water on his left, so he was probably within striking distance of the vantage point. He ducked into the trees when he saw the path stop ahead, by part of a white stone parapet. But there was no-one there, only an empty stone platform with the lagoon spread out before it.

  He should be able to see anyone approaching, and if he stood a little back from the parapet whenever possible, he’d be invisible most of the time from below.

  There would be two entrances. Cerulean had entered on the northwest side, at a guess – yes, there it was, the dip between the hills, the defences just visible in the moonlight. The other would be somewhere to the east, but the hills were lower there and it took him a while to spot what was a gap and what merely an unusually low sand dune.

  That was easy enough. The hard part was still to come, because he’d only got a perfunctory look at the lagoon itself earlier on, and distances could be deceptive underwater. Still, there was a difference in the surface of the water when a growing manta was underneath, and he could estimate the distance using those walkways.

  It took over an hour to make a calculation, and even then he wasn't sure, because there were patches of entirely clear water which held batches of mantas within a year of finishing, three or four at a time. Too enclosed by vegetation and they’d be impossible to get out – but why were there seven such patches? Two very remote, on the far eastern side of the lagoon close to the other exit. Were there mantas there at all? The numbers didn’t add up if there were.

  Twelve mantas a year at the moment, his guide had said. But the patches of clear water held room for far more than that. Unless one patch contained searays? Officially, Aruwe didn’t produce any searays, whether commercial searays or fighters. Manta escape rays didn’t count, since they weren’t independent ships and were rarely sold separately.

  If his numbers and his judgement were anywhere near correct, Aruwe was producing far more than it claimed.

  Raphael had most of the night left, and more than enough time to investigate one of the patches, if he swam out. Not something he wanted to do, after planning to keep a safe distance, but the alternative was to force them to show him everything, and guess from what they left out.

  No, much as he didn’t want to get directly involved yet, there was no substitute for swimming out there and investigating those patches close-up.

  He folded the telescope into itself again, made sure he’d memorised the numbers and layout of the yard, and picked his way down the path again. Instead of heading back to the buildings, he headed away, staying just inside the trees to be less visible from the lagoon.

  It took him a quarter of an hour or so to reach the clump of rocks he judged the closest point to his destination, with the added advantage that they’d conceal his entering and leaving the water.

  At least, he realised as he put a hand on the nearest one to pull himself up, from anyone who wasn’t already there.

  A voice came out of the shadows. ‘You’re playing a dangerous game.’

  CHAPTER XIII

  ‘Reduce speed two knots.’

  Captain Aldebrando’s crisp voice cut through the tense silence on Sovereign’s bridge, but a green light on the steersman’s panel was the only answer; he was too deeply absorbed in the fiendish navigational task at hand to reply any other way.

  ‘Hull clearance two fathoms and falling,’ called the sounding officer from the navigator’s station. He was a naval oceanographer rather than a regular officer, but to manage this they needed all the skills they could get. The captain’s eyes stayed fixed on the table, the aether image of the strange procession making its way through the shallows of the Corala Channel. It was night on the surface, so they had nothing to go by except the aether image and the faint silver of moonlight on the water above them, which was hardly a help.

  ‘Steady as she goes.’

  In the admiral’s circle of the bridge, Valentine sat perfectly still, watching their progress in the personal aether tank in front of him. His battle armour wasn’t uncomfortably hot, for once, since the Sovereign was a brand-new ship and the engineers seemed finally to have got the air recyclers right.

  Thetis, it was good to be actually doing something again. He’d spent far too long sitting in Vespera dealing with Iolani and Leonata and the Council. Waiting for the assassins to make their next move while Silvanos flitted around spinning shadows. Not that he had any doubt in Silvanos’s abilities, but the man didn’t seem to appreciate the urgency of the situation. He was too cold-blooded, too remote.

  Well, it was time to give Silvanos a whole new set of conspirators to interrogate, and send some evidence back to Vespera to show them how this ought to be handled. How it would have been all along, if they’d showed the faintest hint of a backbone.

  A white light flashed on the edge of the aether tank.

  ‘Contact at extreme range, full-size manta,’ the comm officer called a moment later.

  ‘Beyond the channel turning?’ Valentine asked.

  ‘Channel turning is seven minutes at current speed . . . estimate strange manta will reach position in nine minutes.’

  ‘Are there places to hide between here and there?’ Valentine asked the oceanographer.

  ‘Not for something this big, Lord Emperor,’ he said apologetically.

  ‘Call me sir, Lieutenant. We’re not back in the City now.’

  He’d abandoned his whites for the familiarity of his proper admiral’s uniform, cobalt blue with silver, worn over his fish-scale battle armour. Sea battles could still degenerate into bloody melees of hand-to-hand fighting if ships boarded each other, and even armour as thin as this could turn a blow or stop a lethal fragment of manta dislodged by an explosion.

  Besides, there was nothing in the world to equal Thetian fish-scale armour, except perhaps the new threaded steel the Mons Ferratans were producing.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Increase speed three knots,’ Valentine ordered.

  ‘Sir, at that speed we won’t be able to avoid collision if the seabed rises too much.’

  ‘If the seabed rises too much, Commander, we can deal with it when we come to it. Whereas this chann
el definitely isn’t wide enough to avoid colliding with that manta which can’t actually see us.’

  They speeded up again, though the difference was barely perceptible in the aether tank. The depth window for a four-decker battle cruiser with magecraft attached to its hull on the topside and underside was even narrower than he’d expected, since they had to travel deep enough not to leave a wake. The other ships, Defiance and Courageous, were normal-sized war mantas, and they were having an easier time of it, but both lacked the crucial aether recorder.

  And without an aether recorder, no-one would believe him if they found anything.

  The scout magecraft had reached the entrance to the overgrown Corala channel now and turned in, shielded from their aether sensors by kelp. The mage in its companion craft would still be in touch, to relay commands.

  ‘Mage Aelithian reports channel clear half a mile beyond opening,’ said the contact mage, sitting beside Aesonia. ‘First half-mile impassable to Sovereign.’

  ‘Cut the kelp,’ Valentine ordered. ‘Position another mage at the channel turn to conceal it from that merchant manta.’ A thought occurred to him. ‘Is it impassable to Defiance and Courageous?’

  There was a pause, then . . . ‘Negative. There’s clearance enough for Defiance. Possibly not Courageous, she’s a little bigger.’

  Aesonia glanced over at Valentine and smiled slightly. No channel left untended for forty years would have space to allow a manta through.

  They inched onwards, the black shape of the merchant manta drawing closer at an alarming speed. It was going faster than either of them, hampered as they were by the pair of magecraft which were shielding them from aether sensors and enemy eyes.

  ‘Two minutes to turn. Merchant manta will be there in five. She’s Clan Decaris.’

  No hope of persuading her crew to be discreet, then.

  ‘Should we stop her?’ the captain asked.

  ‘Sir, with all respect,’ It was Sovereign’s first officer Commander Merelos, born to a Vesperan clan. ‘If she doesn’t arrive on time, the clans will make more trouble.’

  ‘They’ll also be more amenable to suggestion,’ said Aesonia.

  ‘No,’ Valentine decided. ‘We can’t spare the magecraft. Speed up as much as you dare. Send a signal back to Unity to get out of the way.’ Unity was their picket, the link to the rest of his task force two hours behind them.

  ‘If we go much faster the mages will have difficulty cloaking our turbulence,’ Aesonia said.

  ‘Very well. Order Defiance and Courageous to close to minimum separation.’

  The minutes ticked by, and then finally they reached the bend in the channel where the old path to Corala had been, now opened up by the magecraft cutting strands of kelp to clear a path for the battle cruiser and her escort. Four miles to the ruins from here.

  Sovereign turned, accelerated slightly into the channel. There were still some strands being cleared ahead, but the magecraft should have the path free in time. A moment later the other mantas turned behind them, and the rear magecraft turned to take position in the channel, holding the displaced kelp in position with water-magic until the Decaris manta had gone past. A stroke of bad luck, that, but he’d allowed for it in the planning.

  ‘Corala outer reef two miles and closing. Hull clearance four fathoms, rising . . . Admiral, the Corala entrance is too shallow for us to fit through. It’s two fathoms shallower than on the charts.’

  Damn. They’d lose the element of surprise at the last moment, though of course there was an alternative. The two other mantas were much weaker – Defiance was an old manta, coming to the end of her useful life, but with an excellent crew and captain. Courageous wasn’t a taut ship, but she was modern and better-armed.

  ‘Is there space for Defiance and Courageous to pass us?’

  ‘Yes, just about. Three-quarters of a mile in.’

  ‘Slow five knots and order them to pass us there. Defiance first.’

  More creeping forward, following the edge of the old deep-water channel round the bend, and thankfully out of sight of the Scartaris manta, and then stopping, pressing themselves against the kelp as the other mantas edged past, Courageous’s wingtips barely ten feet from Sovereign’s. If they touched, the magecraft would be hard put to conceal the noise.

  But then they were past, and the opening in the outer reef of Corala’s lagoon was less than a mile ahead.

  ‘Contact!’ the comm officer said, sitting bolt upright. ‘Defiance reports five, no, six . . . eight searays in the lagoon, in battle formation.’ And then a moment later. ‘Sir, gantries are active, I repeat gantries are active!’

  Valentine smiled and punched down on the arm of his chair. So they’d found the Jharissa base!

  ‘Have they spotted us?’

  ‘They seemed to be . . . they were waiting for us!’ He cried out, shockingly loud in the confines of the bridge, and jerked his hands out of the aether pads.

  ‘They’re using mindswimmers!’ Aesonia said, a moment later. ‘All mages block! Companions, hit back!’

  She must have put a shield around Valentine’s mind, because he didn’t feel anything. He saw two of the mages look at each other, one shake his head hesitantly. ‘No . . .’ one of them began, but Valentine had to cut him off.

  ‘All units, full speed! Break and attack!’ Valentine ordered. ‘Take out those searays. Tell Defiance to force landing as soon as possible.’

  ‘Defiance experiencing reactor problems!’ the contact mage reported as the two mage-craft detached themselves from her hull, and Sovereign shook with her own limpets doing the same. They still hadn’t cleared the entrance to the lagoon, but Defiance was inside. ‘Reactor core rising. I can’t raise them!’

  ‘Defiance has fired, she . . .’

  ‘Light filter!’ the captain barked a moment later.

  But there was no time, and Valentine instinctively looked away as a painfully bright fireball blossomed in the water in front of them. He knew what it would look like, had seen it before. Gouts of flame, expanding spheres of water and fire, the hull consumed.

  Valentine looked forward again, and his skin felt like a layer of ice. The fireball was dying away, fragments of Defiance floating outwards across the lagoon.

  There had been a hundred and fifty good, loyal men on that ship.

  ‘Courageous reporting . . .’

  But then Courageous too was ripped apart, and lines of charged aether slammed against Sovereign’s shields. Damn! If Courageous’s captain had the smallest sense, he’d have dropped his shields as soon as he saw what happened to Defiance.

  They were waiting for us. He had a traitor to contend with.

  ‘Two searays down, Defiance got torpedoes off!’ the weapons officer reported in the shocked silence. ‘And a magecraft!’

  A brilliant flash of blue-white light, and the contact mage screamed and staggered back against the bulkhead, clawing at his eyes until one of the tribesmen leapt over the rail to restrain him.

  ‘Pilot-Mage Aelithian is dead,’ Aesonia said, in a strangled voice. ‘Protect Engineering!’

  ‘They’re not using magic!’ another of the mages shouted. ‘It’s aether surges! We can’t cope with too much aether!’

  Valentine clenched his hand into a fist. Enough of this senseless murder. There would be a reckoning for this, as long as he had breath left in his body. ‘Full speed ahead. All stations, fire! Drop the shields the moment they try to surge us.’

  Sovereign accelerated through the gap, the clearance just enough now her magecraft were ahead attacking the searays. He watched two more crumple, crushed by water pressure, and then Sovereign’s torpedoes were lancing out, eight at a time, scoring lines through the aether tanks. But there seemed to be even more searays closer inshore, and that ship docked with the inner gantry was a full-size manta. Warship or transport? Too far to see at the moment.

  The searays were doggedly persistent, making run after run and concentrating their conventional fire on Sovereig
n as Aesonia’s mages struggled to shield against whatever had destroyed her consorts. The other ships had had no mages.

  He’d have given anything for a leviathan right now, or rather its complement of fighter searays to deal with these deadly little craft and their mind-mage pilots. They were too small for the Exiles to be effective against them, that was the problem. The faster the craft, the harder it was to use water-magic.

  And they were buying time. What should have been a grossly inferior force had, thanks to treachery and superior weaponry, inflicted appalling losses on Valentine’s force. Two war-mantas he could ill-afford to lose, and their crews.

  ‘Launch the landing ship,’ he ordered. ‘Head in towards the outer gantry.’ They themselves couldn’t risk docking, not till he was sure all of the searays had been destroyed and there was no danger to Sovereign. Otherwise a well-placed strike on the gantry tube could flood the entire ship and kill any landing party who hadn’t made it past the seal at the landward end.

  Sovereign dived lower, pushing down one of the searays and leaving too little space for any of them to fire at her exposed underbelly while the landing craft was launching. The Exiles began stirring up little maelstroms of sand from the bottom, and after a moment Sovereign followed suit, her underside cannons firing bursts into the seabed.

  The searays’ numbers were dwindling now. With their aether surges blocked by the mages, they had nothing like the firepower needed to penetrate Sovereign’s armour, and the battle cruiser’s fire was telling.

  Then he saw another wave of eight or nine launch from inside the harbour, in a tight attack formation.

  ‘Cluster torpedoes,’ Aldebrando ordered, but then light flared in the water around the hull, and Valentine saw the Captain spasm in his chair, his arms ramming far too deep into the aether pads as energy crackled up him, bright white light flaring in the bridge and dancing across the ceiling in lines. Aldebrando screamed, a sound so horrible it barely appeared to come from a human throat, and then the scream was cut off and he slumped, smoke rising from his clothes and blackened skin.