With one last tattoo, the vedette came to a halt. The airlock slid open and a Guildsman stepped up to release his bonds. He stood warily, flexing his limbs, still aching in every joint and sinew, and now tired as well. He wondered what they would do if he asked for something to eat. Luckily, he could survive on internals for weeks, if he had to.
They led him into the echoing complex, which boomed and hummed with ceaseless industry. A short ride on an electric transport brought them to another docking point, and from there to the ship that he assumed would take them the rest of the way. According to the telemetry data he had glimpsed, the vedette’s reserves had been almost completely exhausted crossing barely 1 percent of the distance ahead of them.
The new ship was sleek and silver and small: fifty meters long from stem to stern and barely three wide, its every angle broadcast speed. He doubted there was a single wasted molecule anywhere in its pared-down frame. Light slid off its rolling skin in bizarre curves and knots. It looked brand-new.
“Is this thing safe?” he asked Bannerman. When she ignored him, he pressed, “At least tell me it has a name.”
“Guild ships do not require names,” she stated.
Seals hissed and the variable hull flowed elegantly open. Inside the cramped cockpit were just two acceleration couches.
“Cozy.”
“Get in.” She took his shoulder in a tight grip and propelled him through the airlock. She seemed tense, and he wondered if she was nervous about the mission ahead or just impatient to get going.
The weird fields ceased within, fading out with a chaotic flutter that made him feel briefly nauseous. There was nowhere to step but on the couches and transparent instrument panels. The ceiling was so low he banged his head as he folded himself awkwardly into the seat, telling himself to relish every free movement while it lasted. He would be effectively supine until they exited the coffin-like space. At the velocity the vedette had managed, it would take five hundred days to reach their destination.
“How fast did you say this thing is?”
She ignored him again, taking the couch next to his and activating the ship’s internal systems. Lights flashed in unreadable patterns; the airlock closed; internal life support kicked in, but still no strange gravity. An unnecessary luxury, he presumed.
“Now,” she said, “the course to Oza.”
He gave it to her. The coordinates placed the world on the far side of the galaxy, approximately thirty thousand light-years away in a straight line, almost fifty if they were to curve around the complex foams and tangles of the Bulge.
“Six days, relative,” she said.
He didn’t believe it.
“I told you,” she said. “We have earned the right.”
LONG HAUL
The razee surged away from the staging area, and Master Bannerman turned the cockpit’s interior walls to full apparent transparency, giving her and her prisoner an unparalleled view. The fat, red sun burned balefully behind them, painting the instrument panels in blood. She checked and triple-checked the course, mindful that she was heading into unknown territory at the urging of an enemy combatant.
He covered his eyes when she engaged the ultralights. The sudden acceleration took her by surprise too. Stars leaped out at them and swept past with alarming speed. She fought the urge to take manual control, knowing that this would only make matters worse. One incautious move and they would plunge right into the heart of a sun. The inbuilt navigator could fly better than any mere human, even the Master of a Great Ship.
With shaky commands, she altered the plotted course, urging the razee out of the galactic disk and into the relatively sparse halo. It shed and gained momentum with all appearance of resistance, as though it resented her interference. It was made for near-misses and wild maneuvers. She was fighting its nature.
“I can’t die,” the prisoner breathed as a neutron star crackled past, so close tides rocked and pulled at them. “I can’t die.”
A mantra, she assumed, designed to soothe in the face of his helplessness. Or a prayer, if he was religious. It wasn’t important enough to query.
He instantly relaxed when she opaqued the cockpit walls. Some of her own tension evaporated too. Out of sight remained out of the primitive layers of the human mind, even in this age of avatars and galactic empires.
“If you’re trying to intimidate me,” the prisoner said, wiping a tremulous hand across his brow, “you’ve very nearly succeeded.”
“That wasn’t my intention,” she said, despite knowing it to be an incomplete truth. His admission did please her. “This is simply the fastest ship I could commandeer at the time.”
“I don’t think so. If ships like this were commonplace, you’d have found Oza already.” His shrewd eyes regarded her closely. “You must really be keen. Why?”
“That is no concern of yours.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re the enemy. Everything about you is my concern.”
“You will learn nothing from me.”
“Maybe you’re fighting on another front, worried someone’s going to get into the Structure first and attack you from the rear. Is that what this is really about?” He swiveled awkwardly in his seat to face her. “The enemy of our enemy would not be our friend. You should know that. We resist everyone equally,” he said, “everyone who wants to use the Structure as a weapon.”
“The Guild wants access to the Structure purely for its scientific value.”
“Yeah, right.” His scorn filled the cockpit. “We’ve heard that before. No spacer has ever managed to claim the Structure successfully. What does that tell you?”
“That none of them belonged to the Guild of the Great Ships.”
He laughed.
Bristling, she returned the walls of the cockpit to their former state. A trio of golden suns swept by in balletic silence.
“The instruments of this vessel are linked exclusively to my implants,” she said coldly. “Attempt to take control or interfere with my commands and it will self-destruct immediately.”
He sighed. “Six days, huh? It’s going to be a longer trip than I thought.” Folding his arms and easing back into the couch, he closed his eyes on the ever-changing view. “Wake me when we get there.”
His nonchalance needled her as much as mockery. “Aren’t you afraid that I will jettison you the moment I confirm our destination?”
“Not at all, Master Bannerman.” One eye opened a crack. “You can’t kill me.”
“I could stop your heart with a thought.”
“You could try. It wouldn’t happen. Trust me.” The eye closed again. “I can’t die.”
Those words again. His confidence was both irrational and infuriating. She stilled her tongue behind a cage of grinding teeth, and let him go.
Six days of dreams.
His brother featured in them, of course. There was no escaping him, not even now that he was dead. Their childhood on Alalia had been a hard one, and their relationship had been strained. Not for them an easy bond in the face of hardship. Huw, the eldest, had fled shortly after his eighteenth birthday, seeking his fortunes down a mineshaft and never returning.
Braith Kindred had followed him, less out of loyalty than from a need to compete that found itself without expression, then as now. He supposed in his more self-aware moments that the Guild of the Great Ships had become the focus for all the fears his brother had once embodied: of being ignored, of coming last, of being unworthy. Learning of Huw’s death had stripped his life of meaning, until Terminus had given him a chance to fight against the spacer incursions.
The sabotage on Hakham had very nearly killed him, judging by the hammering his body had endured. It wasn’t supposed to have gone that way. Neither, of course, was collaborating with the enemy—but life was nothing if not interesting. In one dream, Braith tried to explain to Huw why it was so important he stay dead. If Huw wasn’t dead, Braith wouldn’t have set the bombs, and if Braith hadn’t set the bombs, the Guild wouldn�
�t have captured him, and if the Guild hadn’t captured him, he wouldn’t now be coming back. Huw wasn’t getting it, though, and wouldn’t lie back down. Sometimes, just to confuse the issue, Huw looked like Master Bannerman. Sometimes he looked like Braith himself.
In his dreams of Alalia, the sky was never blue. It was gray and heavy, like an ancient marble roof on the verge of collapse. He had seen other skies on other Structure worlds, but never the stars as Bannerman had shown him. He dreamed that they leaked in through the crater on Hakham and filled the Structure with thousands of glowing sparks. He pursued them with a net but couldn’t catch them all. When they touched him, they burned. Fleeing in flames, he trailed new stars behind him in their thousands.
The view from Bannerman’s couch was no less spectacular. Passing over the Bulge, she appreciated the galaxy from a perspective few people ever saw with their own eyes. She wept on realizing the boldness of the Guild of the Great Ships’ aspirations. Its present tally of ten million stars was of no significance at all against the total number in the galaxy. Were the Guild to disintegrate that very day, the arms would go on turning, the bar wouldn’t shred and dissipate, the thick dust lanes would coil unchecked, spawning still more stars with their cold, hard light.
That mood lasted less than a day. The Guild had once claimed just three suns, and would maintain its present growth until something stopped it. Some other power, perhaps, or the internal rift that the Grand Masters feared. Their architects warned of a time when even cutting-edge ultralights, of which the razee was a prototype, would be insufficient to knit the aspiring empire together. Lacking the means to bind the stars, all would unravel and turn to ash.
The Structure would unite such an empire, allowing it to expand beyond all projections. If the architects could only fathom the principles behind its transcendent shafts, there would be no limit to the Guild’s reach. Great Ships would explore every corner of the universe, and her avatars would be among them.
All that stood between her and that grand dream were people like Braith Kindred.
She watched him sleep, learning the planes of his guileless face and the angles of his limbs. His bruises faded to yellow and disappeared like clouds on a summer day. Pristine, he looked even younger and all the more vulnerable for it. Over three days she tested his body’s defenses, searching for the source of his bizarre confidence in her inability to kill him. Something new, she thought, something developed by Terminus that the Guild had not seen before. Proceeding carefully, wary of sentinels and snares, she explored every vein, every muscle, every synaptic pathway, and found absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. He was defended, yes, but no more than she.
Tendrils of her will reached the valves of his heart. He had dared her to do this, to try to kill him, and now she had the capacity. How long would his brain last if she shut down his circulatory system? An hour or two at most, less if she began severing links in his brain stem and cortex as well. She could rewire his glands to produce neurotoxins instead of hormones, if she chose, or send powerful acids coursing through his stomach wall into his chest cavity. There were a thousand ways to end someone from within.
The only certain way to test his assertion was to actually try. She came close on several occasions. A mixture of fear and excitement welled in her, tugging her in both directions. Each time, she backed away from the brink, following the call of duty. She might need him if his directions proved unreliable. The Guild might need the knowledge still trapped in his skull.
She was glad she had refrained when the razee reentered the galactic disk and began detecting signals of an unknown government in the vicinity of their destination. They were rapid-fire, sharp and powerful, like radio spikes during a thunderstorm. And there were a lot of them.
The razee decelerated like a tiny sun, drawing attention from all sides.
COMPLICATIONS
“Wake up, Kindred.”
The voice intruded on his dreams, wrenched him from the well of unconsciousness with an urgency that was utterly irresistible.
“Damn you, Kindred, wake up!”
He woke gripping the arms of his acceleration couch. Powerful forces were tugging him from side to side. Stars rolled and flared through the cockpit’s transparent walls. Something bright that he had mistaken for a nearby sun exploded with a flash of blue light, sending the ship tumbling like a twig in a waterfall.
“What the hell—?”
“You didn’t tell me there would be people waiting for us.” Bannerman was rigid beside him, all of her conscious mind focused on what was happening outside the ship, apart from the small segment talking to him. Her hands twitched as she brought the ship back under control. “You dropped us right in the middle of an ambush!”
That couldn’t be right. He thought desperately, trying to make sense of the situation. Oza was abandoned, bombed by the Decretians and left to lie fallow. The idiots didn’t know what lay hidden below the surface levels of the mine. If they were attacking now, it had to be for another reason.
A second missile exploded nearby. The view blacked out for an instant as a blast of hard radiation struck the ship. He fought a wave of automatic fear. There had to be a way out of this. There had to be.
The prisoner reached out with his implants and found that she had revoked his small telemetry privileges.
“Don’t be an idiot, Bannerman,” he said. “You woke me to see if I could do something. At least let me try.”
She relented. There were three short-range fighters on their tail, with a long-range raider of some sort bringing up the rear. She didn’t recognize the design, but he nodded on seeing them.
“They’re Decretians,” he told her. “Very nasty sorts. We have no contact with them, but there are Terminus agents stationed on Oza to keep an eye on them, ready to blow the shaft if they ever look too close. The Decretians must have left a monitoring station in the area, which spotted us when we powered in.”
She nodded. That theory matched her observations. “We can outrun them, but that won’t help us get any closer to the Structure.”
“I know. Give me a minute.”
She wasn’t certain they had a minute. On a 3-D grid, blue-gray Oza was receding behind them as the Decretian fighters drove them away. The drumming of the razee’s reactionless thrusters was relentless and numbing.
“Are we armed?”
“Not for heavy or sustained combat.”
“I didn’t think so. A ship like this, on the cutting edge of your technology, must be for covert surveillance, not attack-runs.”
She didn’t grace that with a reply.
“Whatever. We’ll work with what we’ve got.”
“You are suspiciously unconcerned,” she said. “You planned this.”
“I swear I had no idea what was waiting for us. The empire, yes, but I hoped to get in unnoticed. Whatever happens now, though, I do know we’ll make it. Trust me.”
“You say this, but I have no reason to do it.”
“Your choices are limited, Bannerman.”
She fumed in silence for a second, and then gasped as another missile detonated dangerously close to the ship.
When the spinning starscape had stabilized, she found herself agreeing to at least hear his suggestion, if he had one.
“I think I do,” he said, hoping against hope that his wild plan would succeed. “Here’s what you’re going to do. This ship accelerates faster than anything I’ve ever seen. I presume it can decelerate just as quickly. When I give you the word, I want you to hang on the brakes as hard as you can. Drop us back level with those three fighters. Come in firing.”
“We can’t defeat all three at once.”
“Not with conventional weapons. I know.” He studied the disposition of the fighters, wondering if he was insane to place so much trust in something over which he had so little control. He wasn’t a space combat expert, and he certainly didn’t know how the Structure did what it did. All he could do was take a chance. “Once we’re in the mi
dst of them, you’re going to turn the ultralights on full.”
“Are you insane?”
“Maybe, but it’s either that or abandon Oza and go somewhere else. What’s the range of this thing, exactly? Fancy another hop across the galaxy with me in tow?”
She answered neither question, not with words. Furious—at him, he supposed, for getting her into this mess and at herself for letting him—she looked forward again, at the starscape ahead, and prepared the ultralights for activation.
“I don’t know what this will do,” she confessed. “So close to a gravity well, the ultralights could explode, taking us with them.”
“If it makes you so nervous, why don’t we try ramming instead?”
“Now you are testing my patience.”
He smiled, wishing he could banish the butterflies from his stomach. “It’s a serious suggestion. Given the speed this thing flies at, its anti-impact shields have to be pretty effective. A collision or two could be survivable, especially if—”
The ship’s thrusters hammered deafeningly, cutting him off in mid-sentence. Light blurred around him. His seat shook, throwing him from side to side. For a small eternity, it was all he could do simply to hang on.
Master Bannerman felt utterly disconnected from the actions of her body. She knew that Kindred’s plan was madness of the highest magnitude. Activating experimental ultralights in the middle of a solar system was a recipe for instant annihilation. No sane Ship’s Master would ever put a vessel at such risk. It couldn’t, therefore, be her behind the commands that were even now dropping the battle-hungry razee back into the midst of the Decretian fighters. It couldn’t be her laying down a pattern of covering fire intended to mislead the enemy. It couldn’t possibly be her locating the optimum point to activate the ultralights, in the hope of taking out the heavy-raider as well. She felt as though there were two avatars in her head at once, wrestling for control of her fate.
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