Outside, the atmosphere was wet and hazy, without the cooling relief of a true rain. Light from the streetlamps made the sky beyond the windows into a dark grey smear. In the still air, the noises of the city had a distant, muted clarity: the steady background purr of traffic from the center of town; a drift of voices mixed with dance music; the deep boom and long, growling rumble of a ship landing at the port.
Sighing, Klea pushed aside the sheet and got up. She went to the kitchen nook and filled a glass with cold water from the sink. After a moment’s thought she took a couple of ice chunks from the cool-box and dropped them in as well. She drank half the water straight off, then carried the glass with her over to the balcony—the air was a little cooler there—and set it on the wooden railing while she stood looking at the night sky.
Between the low haze and the glare from the port, she couldn’t see any stars. Thinking back, she realized that she hadn’t seen them properly more than a handful of times in the years since she’d left the farm. In the hinterlands, where the farms were miles apart and the houselights went out early, you could look up on almost any clear night and see all the stars you wanted. Not here, though. You had to look at the flat grey-blackness overhead and take it on faith that somewhere past it the starfield glittered … .
Glittered in constellations whose names she could still remember after all these years in the city: the Yoke, the Tree, the Leaping Frog.
And now the clustered stars broke apart. The patterns above her altered and took on shapes she’d never seen before. She was looking at the sky of another place—she knew this, somehow—but whether it represented time past, time present, or time to come she didn’t know.
As she watched, an insignificant star suddenly flared into a ball of blue-white light. Reflexively, she threw up her arm to shield her eyes … .
The glass of water she’d put down on the balcony railing tipped over when her elbow struck it, and a second later she heard it smash against the sidewalk below. Slowly she brought her arm down again to her side. The sky over Namport looked as flat and hazy as ever.
Klea gripped her rough wooden railing with both hands. “That wasn’t just somebody’s stray nightmare,” she whispered.
Her voice sounded tight and shaky, even to her. She had a right to be scared; she could tell the difference between the hallucinatory images that meant she was picking up on the thoughts of other people, and something like this.
“I need to talk to Owen.”
But Owen wasn’t home yet; he was still at the portside bathhouse, operating the big laundry machine that kept the establishment supplied with clean sheets and towels. She went back into her apartment, brewed a pot of hot ghil, and sat at the kitchen table drinking cup after steaming cup in spite of the humid weather.
Something bad is happening somewhere. Something really bad, and I just watched it begin.
Llannat was doing the ShadowDance again in the Naversey’s passenger compartment. She knew that the others were watching her—either covertly, like the med service captain and the two warrants, or openly, like Govantic the data specialist—but she went through the familiar movements anyway. If things in the Net had happened as she feared, keeping herself calm and well practiced was more important than what people thought.
Lots of floating metal. Ebannha gone. Nobody answering on comms. Only one thing it could be, and we all know it.
The Mages have broken through the Net.
The voice on the bulkhead speaker cut through her concentration. “All hands, strap in for a high-g burn. We’ve spotted something promising and we’re going to scoot over for a closer look.”
Clipping the staff back onto her belt, Llannat made her way to the acceleration couch and strapped herself in. The bulkhead speaker said, “Stand by for acceleration,” and a second later inertia pressed her down into the cushions.
Pilot doesn’t believe in messing around, she thought breathlessly. Her weight increased and increased until she could feel each separate bone in her body. Five gravities, maybe even six. The weight stopped for a moment as the pilot executed a skew-flip, came back again as the courier ship decelerated, then ceased.
The speaker crackled on again. “Lieutenant Vinhalyn, Mistress Hyfid, to the bridge.”
She unstrapped and accompanied the reservist-historian forward to the Naversey’s cockpit. The starfield outside the viewscreens appeared the same, to her untrained eye, as the one she’d seen when the courier popped out of hyper, but the pilot and copilot were looking considerably more sure of themselves.
Vinhalyn, it seemed, had noticed the change as well. “What have you got?”
“Well,” said the pilot, “when we couldn’t find Ebannha anywhere we started doing a helical scan Netward—Mistress Hyfid said ‘go on,’ and that was about as ‘on’ as we could come up with—”
“Yes, yes,” the historian said. “And?”
“Now we’re picking up some more scrap metal on the scans. We thought maybe you could give us some guidance on which bits we should look at.”
Vinhalyn glanced over at Llannat. “Mistress?”
I don’t know anything about interpreting sensor data, Llannat thought. I got “familiarized” with the readouts in basic training, but that doesn’t count for much … .
She stepped forward and looked at the monitor anyway. Several different contacts were showing up, and all of them looked about the same.
“There,” she heard herself saying. She tapped the screen with her fingernail. “That one.”
“That’s outside of the path we’re checking,” the pilot protested. He indicated two other marks. “I was thinking of these two things, here and here.”
She shook her head. “No. You need to check the other one.”
“It’s only a little out of our way,” said Vinhalyn to the pilot. “Take the time and look it over.”
“Your call,” said the pilot. “Here we go.”
He changed Naversey’s course to bring them closer to the sensor contact. A couple of minutes later the target showed up in the courier’s viewscreens, first as a bright dot, then as a shape that grew darker and lighter in the starlight as it tumbled.
“Fighter,” the pilot said. “No emissions. Another damned starpilot’s grave.”
“One of ours, too,” said the copilot. “Poor bastard. Let’s get back onto our scan path.”
“No,” said Llannat. She touched the sensor readout screen again. “What’s this new bit of stuff here?”
“Probably just another chunk of scrap metal,” said the pilot. “But we might as well check it out too.”
This time, when the courier ship came into visual range, the sensor target wasn’t tumbling in space. It was stable and undamaged, a sleek, dark-hulled starship with a shape like a flattened teardrop: a Magebuilt Deathwing.
As soon as the sun came up Klea began watching for Owen. She didn’t want to go out onto the balcony again; she was half-afraid that if she did, she’d have another uninvited vision like the last one. Instead she listened for Owen’s footsteps on the stairs—nobody else in the building had his characteristic light, even tread—and as soon as he had come home, she left her own apartment and hurried up to knock on his door.
He opened it almost the moment her knuckles struck against the wood. “Klea—what’s wrong?”
“I saw something last night.”
“‘Saw’?” he said. “Are you sure?”
He moved aside to let her come into his apartment as he spoke, and closed the door behind her. The room was just as bare as the last time she’d been in it, and still didn’t have any furniture that hadn’t come with the lease. Even the sheets and towels, although clean, had a threadbare look to them, as if they’d been purchased secondhand as an afterthought.
Klea sat down on the wobbly chair. Owen leaned against the counter in the kitchen nook and said again, “Are you sure?”
She could tell from the way he spoke that he meant something more than the usual kind of seeing. “I
t wasn’t a hallucination,” she said. “I haven’t had one of those in weeks, not since you showed me how to keep other people’s thoughts from leaking into mine. This was different.”
“How did it happen?”
“I was on the balcony,” she said. “It was hot, and I couldn’t sleep, so I was out there drinking ice water and looking at the stars—at where the stars would have been, anyway, if you could see them—and then I really was looking at them, only the patterns were all wrong. Then one of the stars went all bright and too hot to look at, and I was back on the balcony again. But that wasn’t what scared me. What scares me is that I know it really happened. Or will happen, or is happening. But I don’t know the time, and I don’t know where.”
He looked at her for a while without saying anything, his expression serious. “That was a seeing, all right,” he said finally. “Congratulations. You’ve got a rare and very inconvenient talent.”
“Inconvenient?”
He nodded. “An Adept I once knew used to compare it to getting anonymous notes in the mail. Reliable enough to be upsetting, but not trainable enough to be useful.”
“Can you … ‘see’ … like that?”
“No,” he said. “I can follow chains of probability and tell you which way they lead, and I can tell you when somebody is or isn’t in synch with the flow of things—what most people would call having good luck, or bad—but when it comes to knowing something, the way you just did, then I’m as future-blind as the next person.”
“Oh,” she said.
She sat without talking for a moment, one hand rubbing the old white scars on the other wrist, and wondered why she got to see trouble coming for people somewhere she’d never even been, when she couldn’t see it for herself.
If I’d known what I was heading for when I left the farm, I’d probably have stayed home and done the cooking and mending like a good girl … no food and no place to stay and nothing I knew how to do except for the damned farmwork, and then along comes Freling with his “business proposition” …
“‘Inconvenient talent,’” she said. “Yeah.”
His eyes were dark and sad, as though he’d caught a glimpse of her thoughts without meaning to. “I’m sorry,” he said.
She shrugged. “Not your fault.”
She paused, and spoke aloud the other thought that had come to her while she sat there. “The thing is—now that I know that something bad is going on, what am I supposed to do?”
The Deathwing for which Naversey had come so far was hanging in the courier’s viewscreens like a nightmare given shape. In spite of the name, Llannat Hyfid saw nothing avian about the Magebuilt vessel. It made her think instead of some dark, hungry creature of the deep ocean, gliding silently through the cold water and searching for prey.
“There it is,” she said.
The pilot nodded. “Whatever you say. Let’s hope it’s the one we’re looking for, and not part of whatever took out Ebannha.”
“Visual configuration and sensor profile match the data we got from the first investigation.” said the copilot. “So it’s either our ship, or another one from the same class.”
“It’s an archaic design,” Lieutenant Vinhalyn said. “A raid-and-reconnaissance vessel—similar to the ones the Mageworlders used at the start of the last war, but much older.”
“‘The last war.’” said the pilot. “I don’t think I like the sound of that … . We’ll make a standard spiral pass around the thing and investigate. See if we get our silly heads blown off.”
The courier ship began the graceful maneuver designed to take it within visual range of all sides of the target vessel. Several minutes in, the copilot spoke up again.
“We’re picking up something anchored to the ventral surface—a small craft of some kind.”
The pilot was already feeding close-range sensor data to Naversey’s on-board comps. “Looks like Mistress Hyfid was right,” he said after a moment. “Analysis makes the additional contact a Pari-class short-range surveyor-scout. Probably belonged to Ebannha’s boarding party.”
“Good,” said Lieutenant Vinhalyn. “This is where we’re supposed to be. Make ready to rendezvous.”
The pilot looked uneasy. “We’ve got a mint-condition Magebuilt Deathwing out there. Are you sure you want to get that close?”
Vinhalyn’s lips tightened, and he gave the pilot a withering glance. “A Pari-class scout has no hyperspace engines,” he said, “and no guns. If this one’s crew is still alive, they are surely desperate by now. Take us in.”
The pilot shrugged. “Have it your way. Coming in.”
Soon Naversey had matched course and speed with the Deathwing. The courier ship hovered just above the Pari-class survey vessel clinging to the dark ship’s hull, their relative motion zero.
Vinhalyn nodded to himself—a quick, decisive motion. “Time for somebody to suit up and get over there,” he said. “Mistress Hyfid, will you accompany me?”
“Of course,” she said. She didn’t look at the waiting Deathwing as she spoke.
Several minutes later, moving awkwardly in their pressure suits, Llannat and Vinhalyn approached the airlock of the survey ship. The lock’s outer door stood open, but the inner one was closed; they entered and, cycled through to the ship’s interior. A quick search of all the compartments on the small vessel showed it deserted, with power levels at minimum. The log recorder’s last entry had been made two days before: “Transferring operations to salvage ship.”
“Wonderful,” Llannat muttered. “They’re aboard the Deathwing. I used to have nightmares about those things when I was a kid, just from the holopix in the history texts, until my mother told me they’d all gotten blown to pieces in the War.”
Vinhalyn’s voice came to her on the suit-to-suit comm link. “Cheer up. If this vessel’s crew managed to cross over without destroying both ships, we can probably do the same.” She heard the click that meant he was switching in the suit-to-ship link. “Survey ship deserted—crew appears to have transferred aboard the Mage vessel. I intend to follow. If we haven’t returned in two hours, use your best judgment.”
They cycled out through the survey ship’s airlock and clambered down onto the black hull of the Deathwing. Their magnetic boots clicked and shuffled as they made their way across the metal surface to the Mageship’s ventral airlock.
It was closed.
“Now what?” said Llannat. She’d never liked pressure-suit work all that much; being this close to deep space and hard vacuum made her twitchy, prone to the irrational fear that the laws of the universe would suddenly decide to repeal themselves and the plates in her boot soles would become no more magnetic than ordinary shoe leather. “How are we going to get in?”
“There should be a secondary access port around here somewhere,” Vinhalyn replied. He pointed to a spot a few feet away from the main lock, where a row of angular yellow symbols stood out in sharp contrast to the sleek black hull. “And that looks like it.”
He click-shuffled over to the area with the symbols on it and bent clumsily to put one pressure-gloved hand onto the deck. Llannat saw him push down against the hull, then twist—and a small but workable hatch opened in the side of the ship.
“Don’t tell me,” she said. “That yellow writing says, ‘Press here and rotate.’”
“Well, yes,” Vinhalyn admitted. The reservist-historian was already climbing in through the hatch, but the suit-to-suit link brought his voice back to her clearly. “Rotate leftward, to be precise. Of course, the important point was that last symbol on the end … .”
By now he had disappeared into the small airlock. Llannat, following him through the hatch, said nervously, “What about the last symbol?”
“Ah, yes … a very interesting character, linguistically speaking. In the older dialects of Eraasian—which served as the spacefarer’s common-talk for most of the Mageworlds—it represents the imperative premonitory suffix.”
“The what?”
Llannat
and Vinhalyn were standing together now inside a half-size airlock, or at least one that would have been half-size on a Republic ship. The wall of the lock was covered with dials and other old-style monitoring devices, the unfamiliar notation on their glassed-in faces illuminated by the lights of the pressure suits.
“A syllable tacked onto the last word of a warning or command,” Vinhalyn said as he frowned over the rows of dials. “In spoken Eraasian, it was used to emphasize an order by raising the possibility of negative consequences: ‘Do this or else!’ In the written language—especially when we take into consideration the explicit directions to rotate the latch mechanism leftward, and the Mageworlders’ known predilection for incorporating self-destruct mechanisms into their vessels—”
Llannat glanced back at the now-closed outer door of the lock. “I get your point,” she said. “Wonderful language, Eraasian. I’m glad you speak it.”
Vinhalyn peered more closely at one of the dials. “It is, alas, an academic knowledge only … Ah. Here we are. No pressure inside the Deathwing, either. This won’t be as tricky as I was afraid it would be.”
He pushed and rotated another yellow-labeled plate on the Deathwing’s bulkhead—Llannat didn’t bother asking what this one said; she didn’t really want to know—and the inner door of the minilock cycled open. They climbed out into a narrow, slightly curving passageway near the main airlock.
Llannat played the light of her suit around the deck and the bulkheads: a lot of standard shipboard construction—basic solutions to basic engineering problems, she supposed; a lot of notices and labels in the Eraasian script; and a chalked arrow drawn on the metal paneling at about eye level, pointing to the right.
Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds Page 29