A Matter of Oaths

by Helen S. Wright

  They used the rungs of the emergency ladder to boost themselves along. Rafe counted levels as they passed them, knowing that Peri was doing the same, a precaution against getting lost in the darkness in a strange ship. The restricted view that his beam gave him made the riser walls ahead press in upon him and he knew that, if he looked back, the unlit shaft behind would look like a chasm. Even knowing that he could not fall if he released the ladder, he still preferred not to look back to where Peri followed a few rungs behind.

  “Four,” he called, halting at the last opening as his beam showed the top of the shaft above them.

  “Four,” Peri agreed. “I’ll mark it.”

  Rafe shone his beam through the opening while she did so. It showed him a wall of blank screens opposite. “Web-room,” he announced, widening the beam and increasing its power until only the corners of the room remained dark. “And three dead,” he added harshly.

  They were drifting free, one with a spherical halo of long fair hair that Rafe had a misplaced urge to stroke away from the face it obscured. He pulled himself through the doorway, heard Peri curse under her breath as she followed.

  “Let’s establish the cause of death,” Rafe said flatly, using the backs of the web-room seats to control his crossing of the room. The woman with the long hair was nearest, her tunic identifying her as Hadra’s Cargomaster. Rafe caught her arm, which was stiff with the brittle cold of space, and tugged her into one of the seats, making a mental apology to her for the indignity of it.

  Behind the hair, her face was middle-aged, drained of personality by death but frozen in surprise. As Rafe gave in to himself and smoothed her hair gently, his gloved fingers found what the floating hair had hidden: a wound on her scalp on the top of her head. He looked closely and recoiled in revulsion. A hole had been driven down from the top of her head, deep into the brain.

  “Not decompression, nor asphyxia,” Peri was saying as she examined another of the bodies. “No visible wounds…”

  “Check the top of the head,” Rafe suggested grimly.

  “Gods and Emperors!” Peri exclaimed after a moment’s silence. “His head…”

  “This one too,” Rafe told her.

  “Why kill them that way?” Peri demanded.

  “They were dead when it happened,” Rafe decided, checking the third body and finding the same grotesque wound, the same lack of any other discernible cause of death. “There’s no evidence of bleeding. Either this is some kind of ritual mutilation or…”

  He broke off as an obscene idea suggested itself. The Outsiders were taking samples of brain tissue. Webber’s brain tissue, carrying in it web-seed, the virus that created webbers. Gods, Rafe thought angrily, they might not even be Outsiders, who were unlikely to know the reason for a webber’s enhanced nervous system. But there were certainly people within the Twin Empires who knew, and who resented the Guild’s monopoly of the advantages it brought. Could the raiders be coming from inside the Empires?

  “Report, Rafe?” Vidar came through on the common channel.

  Rafe switched to the same channel. “We’re in the web-room,” he responded cautiously. His unproven suspicions were no subject for discussion on an open channel with the whole of Bhattya’s web-room listening in. “There are three dead here, all with head wounds.”

  “We have two dead, also with head wounds,” Vidar said, the tone of his voice making it clear that he had reached the same horrifying conclusion about the wounds as Rafe had. “There’s nothing missing from the cargo-holds. The seals hadn’t even been disturbed until we broke them,” he added, putting the matter beyond doubt. “We’re going on to the engineering section now.”

  “We’re on our way up to the web,” Rafe replied. He switched back to the private link to Peri. “I’ll get the log first.”

  In the rest-room, he went immediately to the door to the secure space beyond. It was still locked, to his intense relief, and there was no other way in. The R-K-D kept inside had not been taken. The raiders knew about web-seed, but they did not know about the drug that was needed to help the seed establish itself in the body of a new host. As he sealed the log inside a storage pocket on the outside of his airsuit, he wondered how long it would take them to learn that they only had part of the secret.

  There were four dead in the web, tethered in their wet-web places by their web-contacts, surrounded by drifting globules of freeze-dried shub. Rafe checked them each in turn, finding what he expected to find.

  “I’ve got the web-reck,” Peri announced. “That should tell us something about the scum that did this when we replay it.”

  Rafe assented automatically as he disengaged the web-contacts from what had once been a young man. The skin around the contacts was blistered; the contacts themselves were blackened. Looking at the damage, Rafe was almost reminded of something, something he had seen before if only he could remember where and when, something locked away from him ten years ago. Blackened web-contacts, and the tarnish on the hull…

  “Input overload?” Peri said in puzzlement, seeing what he had found. “The safety circuits should have operated long before that sort of damage happened.”

  “I don’t know.” Rafe gave up trawling his memory, knowing it was useless. “The autopsy will tell, when we get them back to Aramas.” He looked around sadly, knowing they could not take all the dead back with them. “We’ll take this one and the woman from the web-room,” he decreed. “The others will have to wait for the salvage tug.”

  * * *

  “Web-seed,” Rallya said consideringly. “It’s not the first time it’s been tried.”

  “It’s the first time it’s been tried by this method,” Vidar said angrily. “And if the raiders are from within the Empires, where are they getting their ships from?”

  Rallya glanced at Rafe, curious to see if he had the answer to that too, but he was still frowning at something unseen, as he had been since dropping into his seat and making his report.

  “Take your pick,” she told Vidar. “There are decommissioned fleets in every outermost zone, left to rot in orbit when their owners were absorbed by the Empires and found they couldn’t compete with the Guild.” She weighed Hadra’s web-reck and log in her hand thoughtfully. “Time somebody compared what we’ve seen of the raiders with what we know about those fleets. And what we know about the Outsiders with whom the owners of those fleets have contact. Only fools would use ships that could be traced back to them and whoever is behind this, they’re no fools, to have got away with it for so long. Even though they won’t have any success without…”

  She censored the end of the sentence and turned to their silent companion. “I forgot to ask, Rafe. Had they been inside the secure space?” Even if he did not know the significance of everything inside, he would have checked.

  “No. They left the R-K-D,” Rafe answered abstractedly.

  Vidar looked at him in surprise. “How do you know about that?” he asked. “It’s restricted information. Threes and above only.”

  “Is it?” Rafe looked equally surprised. “I don’t know how I know. I must have learnt it before I was wiped…”

  “Over a Webmaster’s pillow,” Rallya suggested, heading off Vidar’s curiosity. “Make yourself useful and play this.” She tossed Hadra’s log to Rafe. “Among the many things we don’t know is how the crew died. There may be clues in there.”

  As Rafe fitted the log into the rest-room’s reader, Rallya thought with satisfaction that his awareness of R-K-D was confirmation that he had been a Commander before he was identity-wiped, in spite of the discrepancy with his apparent age. The drug was one of the Guild’s most closely guarded secrets, its formula known only to a handful of the most senior members of the Webmaster’s Directorate. Had it not been the only effective way to heal a damaged web, even its existence would not be known outside that group.

  Rafe triggered the play-back of the log and the reader’s screen flickered with nonsense and error messages. Looking puzzled, Rafe stopped
the process and took the log out of the slot to examine it physically.

  “No visible damage,” he observed.

  “Let me see it.” Vidar made his own examination. “Looks fine.” He elbowed Rafe out of the way and fed the log into the reader again, as if his intervention would make it work. It did not.

  “Verify the web-reck,” Rallya suggested, passing that to Vidar. They could not interpret the data on it, except using Bhattya’s web’s central monitor, and they required Joshim’s authorization to do that, but they could check that the data was readable and consistent.

  “Unreadable,” he reported tersely almost at once. “Both of them.” He reread the labels on both recks, as if he suspected that Rafe had brought back the wrong ones. “They’ve wiped them.”

  “Easier to take them away,” Rafe said thoughtfully. “And they’re not wiped, just scrambled.”

  “As good as wiped,” Vidar said stubbornly.

  “Be interesting to find out if any of the other recks aboard are in the same state,” Rallya commented.

  “You think they were affected by whatever killed the crew?” Vidar asked.

  “Could be.” Two mysteries aboard the same ship had to share a single solution. Rallya studied Rafe, who had withdrawn back into his silent preoccupation. “Care to share what you haven’t told us yet?” she challenged him.

  “I would, if I knew what it was,” he said bitterly. “My memory isn’t what it used to be.”

  “You remembered about R-K-D,” Rallya reminded him, “and this is more important.”

  Rafe smiled sardonically. “Importance doesn’t seem to have dictated what they left me. Knowing about R-K-D obviously wasn’t personally significant to me. Knowing the connection between that tarnished hull, and the damage to those web-contacts, and the way those recks have been scrambled…” He shrugged expressively. “If I remember, I’ll tell you. But I doubt that I’m going to remember.”

  “Some sleep might help,” Vidar suggested. “You’ve worked right through your sleep period. Turn in. Joshim won’t expect you to join him in the web for what’s left of your shift, and Rallya and I can cover your next duty periods without you.”

  “It might help.” Rafe sounded unconvinced. “If you’ve finished with me here, I’ll get something to eat first.”

  When they had both gone, Rafe to eat and sleep, Vidar to set up some tests on the sample of hull metal that he had brought back from Hadra, Rallya put the log back in the reader and played it through slowly, looking for anything decipherable amid the nonsense. Not that she expected to find anything helpful: the placing of the bodies Rafe and Vidar had found—in cabins and workshops as well as in the web and the web-room—indicated that, when the raiders had attacked the ship, there had been no warning, no time to record the attack in the log.

  The web-reck might be more useful, if Joshim could dredge anything from it, but that would have to wait until he came out of the web. And Rallya was not hopeful that either Joshim or Vidar would find a solution to the mystery, or even an intelligible clue. Perhaps the autopsies would help, but they would not take place until Bhattya reached Aramas, and Rallya would not be the first to learn the results.

  Rafe’s belief that he knew—had once known—something relevant to Hadra’s fate was interesting. Rallya had not given much thought to the way that identity-wipe worked; she had not realized that Rafe was aware of the gaps in his memory. Of course, they could not erase memories completely, not without destroying the skills and knowledge that they sought to preserve. All they could do was make the memories inaccessible, like unseen rooms behind locked doors. Finding a door revealed the existence of a room, and the paths to the door were clues to what lay beyond. It raised the possibility that Rafe could be brought to remember what he had forgotten, both about the connection between Hadra’s multiple mysteries and about the truth of his past.

  Rallya locked the log away in a storage drawer and rubbed absently at her hip. Rafe would continue to worry away at the missing memory without prompting, but a few new pointers might help, if she could come up with any. And she could not discount the possibility that he would never remember, or that what he remembered would be of no use. Although he would not be so distracted by it if he was not sure of its importance, and she was beginning to value Rafe’s judgement. Her instincts and what she had seen of him said that he must have been a damned good Commander in his time, almost as good as she was…

  Predictably, the gathering in the web-room was talking its way around the same questions. It had not been possible to keep secret the raiders’ purpose, not when Peretya and Nikur had seen the head wounds, and to suppress the idea that the guilt lay within the Empires would have wasted the slight chance that somebody in the web-room would put the pieces of the puzzle together. The initial mood of fury had simmered down into determination, Rallya was pleased to find; they would think more clearly that way.

  “You were told to go to bed,” she reminded Rafe mildly, breaking into his conversation with Jualla.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  It was said to pacify her, not as a statement of intent, but Rallya let it go; Joshim would chivvy Rafe into compliance when he came out of the web. She moved on to the cook-unit and filled a plate with fish stew. Rasil’s effort, by the delicate smell of it; raised on a water world, he knew more things to do with fish—and even mock-fish—than anybody else aboard, including Joshim, who shared the same sort of upbringing but disclaimed all knowledge of food preparation.

  “Do you think we’ll find more of the missing ships in this system, ma’am?” Jualla asked.

  “It’s probable that they’re here,” Rallya answered. “I don’t believe in the kind of coincidence that would bring us out of jump exactly on top of the only one. Whether we’ll find them is another matter. We’re on a tight schedule; we’ve only just enough time to drop the drones and jump on to Aramas to meet the convoy. We won’t be making a search and, if we do come across another by chance, we won’t have time to board.”

  She noted that Rafe was frowning intently at something she had said. It could not be their lack of time that had caught his attention; he already knew about that. The coincidence that had brought them out of jump almost exactly on top of Hadra … The raiders were unlikely to move the ships that they captured any great distance from their point of entry to the system, she realized.

  “Bring the gravity stress chart for this system up on a screen,” she ordered Jualla. “Focus on the area where we found Hadra.”

  The chart was a patchwork of minor anomalies. Jualla highlighted the point where Hadra was still drifting. Rallya shovelled stew into her mouth as she studied it. There was a pattern to those anomalies, almost centred on Hadra…

  “Trans-space breakthrough point,” Rafe said crisply, identifying it from his survey training a second before Rallya did. “Hadra came here through trans-space.”

  It fitted: the damage to a hull never designed for exposure to trans-space, the input overload in the web as the sensors went wild and the safety circuits failed, the sudden death of the crew. Humans could not survive in trans-space, the dimension or dimensions that underlaid jump-space; experiments many years ago had demonstrated that. Rallya had never heard of any species who could.

  “Who are they?” she asked Rafe, seeing that the frown on his face was deeper than ever, as if trans-space was not the answer he sought, only another pointer to it.

  “I don’t know.” He shook his head to emphasize his frustration.

  “If the raiders are making trans-space jumps, our drones aren’t set to pick it up,” Jualla pointed out. “Ought we to adjust them?”

  “Good thinking,” Rallya told her. “Although the gods know how we’ll interpret the results when we get them. There are only a handful of people in the Survey Directorate who know enough about trans-space to calculate a jump through it. Unless Rafe…”

  He shook his head again. “If I could only remember…” he muttered.

  “Remember wha
t?” Jualla asked.

  “I know of a species who use trans-space,” Rafe explained. “I can’t remember who, or where.”

  “How do you know about them?” Jualla asked impatiently. “Was it something you read, or something you heard? If you can remember even that much…”

  Rallya saw the tension in Rafe’s back as he realized the dilemma into which a combination of tiredness and preoccupation had brought him. Jualla would badger him ceaselessly until he remembered, or convinced her to give up. Rallya was curious to see how he would extricate himself.

  “It isn’t that easy,” Rafe told Jualla ruefully. “I’m an Oath-breaker. I was identity-wiped ten years ago. Anything that happened before that…” He spread his upturned palms in a gesture of hopelessness.

  The admission took Rallya by surprise, but only for a moment, not long enough to make her miss Elanis’s hiss of dismay. Emperors, if she had needed proof of Rafe’s tactical skill, this was it. Even if he did not know that the rumour had already reached Aramas zone, he must know that it would eventually. Prevarication now would harm him when the truth did come out, whereas his frank, unsolicited, admission would take the sting out of many of the criticisms that Bhattya’s web-room might make. Witness the looks of shock, not outrage, on the faces of his audience.

  “Why?” Jualla was the first to find her voice, albeit one an octave higher than normal.

  “I presume, for being unwilling to swear allegiance to the Old Emperor.” Rafe looked at her without flinching. “I can only guess, of course.”

  “Of course,” Jualla echoed uneasily. “And you really can’t remember about…” She gestured at the gravity stress chart.

  “I can’t remember how I learned about them,” Rafe corrected her, moving the discussion further away from the realm of ethics into the realm of facts. “I might be able to remember what I learned, but it’s difficult. I can’t guarantee it.”

  “You’re not going to let it go like that, are you?” Elanis demanded. “He’s an Oath-breaker. He’s admitted it. Don’t you care?”