Vespera

by Anselm Audley

  ‘Are they waiting here?’ he asked, looking into the trees.

  ‘No. I followed you.’

  ‘Then, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll see what more I can gather before they catch me,’ Raphael said. It was a futile gesture, but he wasn’t simply going to surrender to them, and once he’d collected the information it would be stored in his mind. Perhaps he might have a chance to use it later, to salvage something from the ruin he’d made of his plans here.

  Better to be caught, to lead them a dance, than simply give up now.

  ‘Of course you will,’ Leonata said. ‘I wouldn’t harm anyone, if I were you. Flavia told me about the stiletto, you’ll fare a lot worse if you poison one of them.’

  ‘I’m taking it with me,’ Raphael said. His stiletto only had the knockout drug on its blade, in any case, and that might well wash off in the water.

  ‘Proud as ever,’ Leonata said. ‘Unless you’re swimming in all that, I’ll take your overrobe back for you.’

  ‘Don’t,’ he said.

  ‘You deserve it,’ Leonata replied, her smile vanishing again. ‘But you also deserve a better cause than the Empire. You might find it in the Vespera I intend to create.’

  She turned and walked off into the trees, leaving Raphael alone on the beach to evade capture as long as he could.

  When they returned to the bridge, there was coffee waiting, handed out in closed containers by the cooks on Commander Merelos’s orders. He’d given it to everyone, even the most junior rating, which Valentine approved of. No point the officers being awake if the crew could barely keep their eyes open.

  ‘Position?’ Valentine asked.

  ‘Chalce Deep, four miles north-east of the Corala Channel entrance. We’re holding the gap – it looks like we managed to hit the bigger ship’s engines, she can’t manage full speed. One of the searays went ahead at full speed a few minutes ago.’

  The Chalce Deep led from the channel through the Rim, past where they’d encountered Allecto only a few days ago; Sovereign had to be forty miles or more from Corala by now. But why were the fighter-searays heading out to sea? There were too many of them to fit on a single leviathan, even aside from the question of how traitors and assassins would have managed to get hold of a leviathan in the first place. They were still new technology, as mantas went; the first purpose-built one had been launched only eighteen years before, and the fiercely pro-Empire Korawa shipyard was the only place in the world that knew how to build them.

  Valentine stared into the aether tank, showing empty ocean with the dots of Sovereign and her escorts and the little cluster of enemy ships four or five miles ahead. The magecraft had taken up cloaking positions again – it wasn't much good against the aether surges, but would at least protect them from any more conventional means the enemy employed.

  ‘Give me a chart projection,’ Valentine ordered. ‘Current course and speed, fuel estimates of where they could reach from here.’

  He was still working his way through charts and projections with the cartographers, occasionally stopping to check on the progress of the weapon and shield modification that he had ordered, when the alert light flashed again.

  ‘Contact! Three more searays two points to port of them, incoming. The first group is adjusting course.’

  ‘Sound the battle alarm,’ the first officer said. ‘Admiral, your orders?’

  ‘We find out where they’re going, we record it, and we get out there as fast as possible. Is the third reactor online?’

  ‘Fully functional.’

  Good. That would give them some extra speed if they needed it, and out here they could use the heat lance. He heart the rustling of robes, and saw the Exiles coming back on to the bridge. Their control, the poise he’d been used to all his life, was a ragged veil barely concealing exhaustion and grief. One of the other mages went over to replace the drained Eritheina, who slumped to the floor with her head held in her hands while a physician tried to coax her into drinking some coffee.

  The familiar sound of the alarm was wailing in the rest of the ship, summoning ratings and officers from snatched rest or coffee back to their stations. Regulations prohibited him from having stood them down in the first place, but then regulations hadn’t taken account of the mental barrages of trained mind-mages.

  The enemy had to have some kind of operations ship out here, where else could those new rays have come from? Which meant leviathans, carrier ships, but how?

  ‘They’re formed up as escorts,’ the first officer reported. The original ships are heading on, accelerating out of range.’

  Replacing the original battle-weary ships with fresh new ones? How many did Jharissa have? How far did this go? He’d claimed a few minutes on his own to work through some Exile rituals to clear his mind, fury was a bad state in which to command a fleet. It was one thing in hand-to-hand combat of the kind the tribesmen excelled in, but not here.

  ‘Do you have something?’ he asked Aesonia as she sat down again.

  ‘We have some strategies,’ she said. ‘And we’ve summoned . . . something . . . from the abyss. But my people are tired, and that’s dangerous for you as well as for them.’

  ‘If they can get us out of this alive, they can have all the rest they want,’ Valentine said. ‘Just protect my crew and this ship while we do our duty.’

  Her mages were expendable, and all of them knew that. Theoretically, it had always been the way. Exiles would give their lives to protect Thetia if need be, mages in particular, but it had never come down to it in the end. Not like this.

  He stared at the image in the tank again, now returned to show Sovereign’s immediate surroundings. It was no use exploiting Sovereign’s vast depth advantage, because the enemy weapons didn’t need to be close by to operate, it seemed. His mind had been flickering over Defiance’s fate for the last hour, trying to work out what had happened to her, how the enemy’s weapons achieved that kind of range. He’d ordered Engineering and the aether control rooms sealed off, leaving only access to the extra reactor if they needed a burst of speed.

  At least now he knew how his father had died, his ship torn apart in a one-sided engagement with Allecto. If only their ambush on Glaucio hadn’t failed. No matter. Glaucio would pay, and so would the rest of the Jharissa.

  ‘Switch to long-rang pulse sensors,’ Valentine ordered. ‘Full horizontal sweep, let’s see if they’re trying to creep up on us.’

  But the oceans to either side were still empty. The only indication of an enemy presence was that little cluster of ships ahead. He couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being drawn into a trap.

  ‘Detach the two flanking magecraft,’ he ordered, reluctantly. He didn’t want to use them until absolutely necessary, but Aesonia was right to insist on caution, at least. ‘Conceal and take up station halfway between us and them.’

  He watched them glide away into the distance, visible only through Sovereign’s aether filters, and knew he was sending them to their deaths. Two more loyal women lost. He knew they were women; the only man among Aesonia’s mages had been Aelithian, the first to die.

  If Sovereign was destroyed, how many more lives would be lost?

  For a few minutes more the chase continued, then without warning the formation of enemy ships spread out in a starburst, the manta hurtling on into the darkness while the smaller ships spread out and turned round, heading straight in for Sovereign.

  Aesonia glanced across at Valentine, the query plain on her face, and he nodded approval.

  ‘Pyramid!’ she said, and Sovereign’s hull groaned again as the two concealing craft broke off, moved forward to take station above and below while the two scouts spread out, away from the attacking formation.

  Seconds passed, a minute, and nothing happened. Then Aesonia gave another command, and he saw the ripples in the aether tank, waves of high-pressure water racing out from the four magecraft to the point in the exact centre of the pyramid they formed, now occupied by the three leading searays.
They tried to manoeuvre, but they failed, and he watched as the three were crushed by the pressure, their symbols in the aether tank flickering out of existence.

  ‘Another signal astern at extreme range!’ someone called, he didn’t hear whom. ‘Full-size war manta!’

  But almost as soon as the first wave of attackers died, there was another wave beyond, and then something appeared at the very edge of the aether sensors, a cliff where there should be no cliff.

  ‘Thetis preserve us!’ Aesonia said, and Valentine felt a terrible chill sweep across his skin as he saw the shape in the deep, like something out of a nightmare. A vast mechanical titan stretching away into the gloom, dwarfing even Sovereign. A cloud of searays manoeuvred around it, oddly out of place against the behemoth which had disgorged them.

  A Tuonetar arkship.

  By the time Valentine had recovered from that split-second of horror, the weapons of twelve enemy searays and two warships were locked on Sovereign, and there was no more time to wonder.

  CHAPTER XIV

  Raphael lowered himself down the side of the rock, testing for any sharp spikes underwater, but the bottom dropped away immediately. The water was warm, free of strong currents, and there was more than enough moonlight to guide him. With luck, he’d be able to swim most of the way underwater, though much of it would be through or round the sargassum.

  He submerged as soon as he could, settling into a steady stroke in the clear water, following the sandy bottom until it became too deep to see, and then navigating by the moon.

  It took him only a few minutes to reach the edge of the sargasso field. He hesitated for a moment, wondering if the sargassum were dangerous in any way, then remembered the figures swimming through it earlier on, the absence of any skin diseases among the shipwrights. Perhaps they’d built up immunity, but he didn’t have time to worry about that.

  It was like swimming through silk, waves of it brushing against his skin, gliding around his hands and the stiletto strapped to his forearm. He swam towards the first available space, and thereafter steered clear of the sargassum, except for the first time he found a manta – the skeleton of a fighter searay, with room for a single pilot. The frame was barely complete, still soft to the touch, and the shipwrights hadn’t even started training weed on to it yet. He dived down low enough to swim through the interior, under the ribs and out along the wing. An indulgence, but one he granted himself because this was something he’d only do once in a lifetime. If only it were daylight . . .

  It took an age to swim through to the clear water where the shipwrights had pruned the sargassum to prevent it interfering with the final stages of grafting polyp armour on to the still-living hulls. He broke out quite suddenly between two weeds to find empty water in front of him and the shape of a searay in the gloom not fifteen feet away. There was just enough light to see another one beyond it, and to his left, the pilings of a walkway plunging down into the seafloor. No sign of pursuit yet, though he could hear voices carrying across the water. How much of a wake was he leaving?

  He felt a stab of disappointment. What had seemed like an anomaly from above was a perfectly ordinary batch of fighter rays, their hulls a mottled green and dark blue where the polyp was still growing. He counted six before he encountered another walkway, and surfaced, hidden by the planks and posts, to look around.

  There was still a lot of open water in front of him, and to the left, storage spaces for one of the huts – what were those things piled up? Could they be the odd weapons Iolani and her people had wielded at Saphir? He’d have to come back and look at them later on, there were voices too close for comfort, searchers calling to each other along the walkways.

  He struck out again between more rows of searays, these ones much newer. Fighters took only three years or so to grow, Anthemia had mentioned earlier, which was hardly quick when one considered that the Arsenal of the Republic had been able to complete a war galley in a day, but still much quicker than a full-sized manta. And fighters, like frigates, were much more effective in the shallow seas of Thetia, where endurance wasn’t an issue.

  There were a great many searays which looked ready to go, several of them surrounded by weighted scaffolding, and a large patch of water which must have held another sixteen or so until very recently. Aruwe wasn’t even supposed to produce fighter searays, and it certainly couldn’t build leviathans. They were orders of magnitude more complex than even the biggest war-mantas, and Korawa remained the only shipyard to have perfected the art of their construction.

  There wasn’t much more to see here, so he struck further outwards for the next walkways, along the edge of a patch of weeds where his breaking surface would be less noticeable. He reached the walkway much further along than he’d intended, where the weeds were growing through and underneath it, and was about to surface and see which was the storage building was when he heard a low rumble in the water.

  He’d spent enough time in the sea to recognise the sound of a manta’s engine. It was still in the distance, and too quiet for him to work out whether it was a full-size manta or a searay. There was another sound, too, one he couldn’t identify properly because it was so distorted, but it faded after a while, as the manta’s engine became louder. He could feel the pressure waves created by its wing beats now, but he had no idea where it was.

  Would aether sensors pick him up? He was a very small target, but fighter searays had finely tuned instruments to pick up swimmers – in theory, they could rip a wave of marines to pieces in shallow water. In practice, it had never been tried because strategists and tacticians were agreed that beach landings were to be avoided if at all possible.

  Reluctantly, he edged back into the sargassum, letting it fold around him until only his face was sticking out, trying to ignore the tingling like gossamer silk against the skin of his calves and forearms. At least he’d kept his silk undertunic on.

  The sound became louder, but the pitch was jarringly dissonant, and the wing beats seemed wrong. It took Raphael a few minutes to realise that there were two searays very close to each other, not one, and they were heading his way. He drew back as far as he could into the weed, behind a piling.

  They came terribly, terribly close before they stopped close to the storage building, engines idling.

  Raphael levered himself up the pole very, very slowly until he broke surface, putting himself almost completely in its shadow. The slats of the walkway were close together, there was no light at all on him, so he let himself surface properly. Sensors were very bad at detecting things above the water’s surface.

  The searays were big ones, he could see that much. Manta escape craft, which meant that there was a larger ship waiting. Outside the gate? That would explain the unidentifiable noises, if they’d opened the sea gates long enough to let two searays through.

  ‘Successful?’ Anthemia said, as someone climbed out of the hatch.

  ‘Yes,’ Corsina said, but she sounded worried. ‘They’ve had word from Vespera. The Emperor is on his way to attack Corala.’

  ‘How did he know?’

  ‘Worked it out, apparently,’ Corsina said. ‘We’ll have to take this next delivery to Saphir instead. Where’s our guest?’

  ‘We haven’t caught him yet,’ Anthemia said.

  ‘He’s loose?’ There was a note of alarm in Corsina’s voice.

  ‘He got past the sentries. He knows we’ve got him, but he’s too proud to let us catch him.’

  ‘Then find him!’ Corsina ordered. ‘We can’t waste time searching every ship that leaves. I want him secured within the hour. This isn’t a game, wake anyone up you have to.’

  ‘With pleasure,’ Anthemia said. Raphael heard her footsteps receding into the distance, and more voices as Corsina and her people disembarked from the searays, heading along to the nearest building.

  Raphael stared at the searays, vague shapes only a few lengths away. Would they search those? Would they believe he was this close? It was the faintest hope, but it was a po
ssible way out, his passport through the gates to the sea, where he stood more of a chance.

  He slipped back down the pillar as quietly as he dared, diving back under the surface and swimming along line line of the walkway, picking his way between pillars and trusses. There was too little light down here to see properly, so he navigated with his hands as much as his eyes, trusting to his sense of distance to know when he was close. There would be moonlight, but he couldn’t afford to go wrong.

  There. The nearest searay, a looming shape in the darkness. He’d have to get inside it, there was no way to hang onto the outside, and in any case he’d be spotted by the sensors at the gates. But how? Both hatches would be open, the challenge would be to slip inside without being seen, and then . . . what? They’d search the searays before leaving, if they still hadn’t found him.

  Even as he considered, a harsh buzzing sounded very close to him, and lights flickered on underwater along the length of the gantry, silhouetting him against the surface. The nearest one was very close, and painfully bright. Raphael dived, instinctively, down to the weed-slick base timbers, where the glare of the lights would hide him from watchers above. He hadn’t even noticed the lights! Carelessness. He could already hear Silvanos’s viperous tongue berating him.

  The lights had outlined the two searays, but they would also reveal anyone trying to approach, from whatever direction. He should have moved faster.

  Now he was trapped at the bottom, and eventually he’d have to come up for air – even water-breathing Thetians couldn’t manage more than about an hour submerged. Where to go? He swam along, quicker now light reflected from above was showing him the way, past the searays and along towards the building which marked the end of this walkway. Twenty yards or so beyond it the weed started again, a thick mass that would conceal him and even the odds against a pursuer – but those twenty yards would be in the full glare of the lights. Why did they have lights, for heavens’ sake? Certainly not to catch fugitives.