The Dark Path

by Walter H Hunt

  "Now you tell me I'm a Sensitive, and this is also beyond my understanding.

  "I won't stand for it, Th'an'ya. I won't stand for it. If I am to continue as an officer, if I am to be a . . . Sensitive, it must be my choice and I must have control of my own actions, my own body. Mine, do you understand?" She pointed a thumb at her chest. "No wings, no talons, my own features, my own mind, with me in control. If you are in my mind to be my teacher and . . . my friend, you must do so on my terms, with no tricks of any kind. If you're not prepared to do that, you'd best be pre pared to get the hell out right now."

  "I . . . will do nothing without your consent, se Jackie."

  "Even during this . . . Ordeal?"

  "Even during the Dsen'yen'ch'a, se Jackie. It is your body and your life. I am, I pray, the agent of esLi in this matter: I shall not interfere, but I will always be ready to help."

  Jackie looked down at herself and then at the zor-image. She secured the robe around her and walked forward to stand at the mirror, watching as the image of Th'an'ya did the same, until it overlapped her own reflection. Slowly, as if with great trepidation, she reached up to touch the mirror, watching the zor before her do the same. For a moment it almost seemed as if their hands touched.

  Chapter 14

  He was walking on an elevated platform, a hundred meters above ground level. The noise struck him first: voices, traffic, machinery, the sounds of thousands of people around him.

  The last thing he remembered before that was that he was hurtling through space in his fighter, with an impossibly huge alien craft looming in front of him.

  Owen Garrett turned aside and grabbed the railing as if he were holding on to the whole world. For the life of him, he couldn't connect the two events: the last place he remembered and the place he was right now. In eight years as an officer and a gentleman he'd misplaced a few hours, but never . . . never—

  What am I doing here? he asked himself. How did I get here?

  The answer came back in his mind: You are on your way to work.

  All right, he thought. Get a grip. He'd been a fighter pilot for four years; he was trained not to panic.

  He let go of the railing and began to walk toward work: a power plant here in the biggest city on Center. He looked up at a nearby skyscraper which displayed a chrono; he had thirty minutes before he was due to start his shift. There was time for a cup of coffee.

  A few hundred meters farther on, he stepped into a crowded shop. He reached into a pocket of his overalls and drew out a comp, which he waved at a sensor on the counter. "Small coffee," he said.

  A panel slid aside and a cup of molded plastic appeared. The familiar smell of badly brewed coffee wafted toward him. He drew out the cup and took a sip; it tasted pretty much like he'd expected.

  He drew his comp out again. Maybe there's a clue here, he thought. He checked the time and date; it was twelve days since the battle—

  Battle.

  Oh God, he thought, a terrible feeling in the pit of his stomach. He remembered now: the other pilots in Green Squadron circling and firing on each other, fire blooming in the darkness and reflecting against the rocky alien angles of the huge ship. They killed each other. Aaron Schoenfeld, Devra Sidra. Steve Leung, Anne Khalid, Gary Cox.

  All of them but him. His fighter wasn't pulled into the combat; it was pulled into . . . into—

  "Are you okay, pal?"

  Into the ship. He was pulled into the ship by—

  He felt a hand at his elbow. He jerked it away, but looked up to see another man in similar overalls.

  "I'm fine. Just—just a little tired," he answered. "I didn't sleep too well."

  "Right." The other man was bigger; he was also familiar somehow, though Owen couldn't place him. "Don't worry, we've all had mornings like these."

  "Look," Owen said. "I don't think I belong here—"

  "Sure." The man's face betrayed a moment of alarm, then the look vanished. "Sure, pal. What you need is a breath of air." He took Owen by the elbow and steered him quickly out of the tiny coffee shop and onto the elevated walkway.

  "What's the idea—"

  "Keep walking," the other said. "And keep your trap shut for a minute." He took Owen across a bridge, noisy with traffic from the level below. There he stopped and let go of him. "We can talk here, but only for a few minutes. You almost blew it back there, pal."

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Eyes and ears." The big man looked around: up in the air, left and right. "There's always someone watching and listening. You know that."

  "No, I don't."

  The other didn't reply for a moment, sizing him up. "You don't, huh? Did you just get here?"

  "I don't know. I . . . don't remember. Five minutes ago I walked into that coffee shop and it was like waking up from a dream."

  "You an Imperial citizen? Imperial Navy?"

  "Yes."

  "What ship?"

  "None of your damn business."

  "Look, pal. You play straight with me, I'll play straight with you. We're all here for some reason, and if we wind up enemies . . . it'll be just what they want."

  " 'They'?"

  "The Overlords. The rulers of this world. The enemy, you scan? The people who captured us."

  "All right," Owen said after a moment. "I'm . . . Owen Garrett. Due d'Enghien."

  "The carrier?"

  "Yeah."

  "Rafe Rodriguez. Engineer's mate. From the Negri Sembilan."

  "The Negri? The ship that went missing from Cicero?"

  "Right. I'm guessing something similar happened to the Due and that's how you got here."

  "Not really. The Due was evacuating Cicero and my fighter wing got pulled in by . . ." Owen pressed his hands to his fore head. "I don't know," he said. "I don't remember."

  "There's some reason for you to be here, pal. The Overlords don't leave loose ends. Look, we can't talk here. After your shift"—he gestured toward Owen's work uniform—"come to the Shield. It's a bar where we hang." He named an address. "Looks like you've got a new piece of the story to add."

  ***

  The work shift went by slowly. He'd apparently been here a week or so, working as a machine operator; there were people who knew him and he did his best to seem the same as he must have appeared for the last few days. Of Rafe Rodriguez he saw nothing; all during the shift he had the feeling he was being closely watched, but couldn't place by whom.

  At last he made his way to the place Rafe had mentioned. He located it by querying his comp. Just after he'd looked it up he realized that someone or something could have noted that inquiry—but there really wasn't anything he could do about it. He wasn't sure what he'd find there: A nest of conspirators? Some sort of underground resistance cell? Was he being sent there—as he had been sent here—to root them out?

  He really had no idea, just as he had no idea whether he was spinning this out in his mind because he had no other way of occupying it at the moment. Whatever the case, he tried to compose himself the best he could and made his way across the city, a few kilometers in distance and several levels down.

  The Shield was really a miserable little place, wedged between a hospital dispensary and some sort of dance club, thirty meters below the surface of the city. As he went in, two men and a woman forced their way past him into the crowded street, bouncing along on their way to other distractions.

  Rafe was at the long metal bar, which looked as if it had been fashioned from the hull of a spaceship. There was noise, light, conversation and half a hundred vaguely familiar faces, all of which overwhelmed him. As he wavered in the doorway, Rafe forced his way through the crowd to him, seized him by the elbow as he had done that morning and guided him back by way of the bar—grabbing his drink as he passed—and through a doorway into a private room where several men and women stood, talking and drinking.

  "Skip," Rafe said at the door, and one of the group turned around to face them.

  "Lieutenant," he said to O
wen, "I believe you know Captain Damien Abbas, late of the Negri Sembilan."

  ***

  After the end of the wars with the zor, humans had spread out in every direction, exploring and settling well beyond the edges of the Solar Empire. The official position of the Imperial Government was that civilization extended no farther than the worlds where the sword-and-sun banner flew; everything be yond that was pirates and stragglers.

  The truth was quite a bit different. The century of peace had created all kinds of opportunities. The Imperial Navy decommissioned ships and sold them to enterprising merchants and exploratory societies; corporations invested in expeditions to worlds outside the Empire, seeking new opportunities. Many of these journeys ended in disaster; but some resulted in prosperity and success.

  Sixty years ago, a religious group dedicated to the veneration of technology had set out from Denneva, a heavily populated world in the Imperial Core. They were well funded and equipped with industrial nanofactory equipment, and were searching for a world rich in heavy metals; fifty parsecs beyond the edge of the Empire they found Center, which was more than adequate for their needs. The Imperial Grand Survey had not reached Center in the 2330s; it would be more than forty years before the Imperial Navy built a base at Cicero to organize further exploration efforts in the area.

  Being outside the Empire gave the settlers of Center wide freedom in developing their society just as they wanted it. It also made them vulnerable. There were no naval vessels to protect against attacks by pirates . . . or, as it turned out, by conquerors.

  ***

  There were officers and crew from the Negri Sembilan and also from some of the ships that hadn't made it back from Sargasso. The Imperials had gradually made contact with each other, adopting the Shield as their meeting place; neither the technophiles of Center nor the Overlords who had taken control of the world seemed to take much notice of them.

  "We didn't know what we were dealing with at the time. We'd heard there was a free port in our survey area—a place the free traders called Crossover. We planned to visit there, show the flag and get a look in case there was something happening that might pose a threat to the Empire."

  "And you didn't find a free port."

  "No," Abbas replied. "We didn't even find the solar system we expected. It didn't match the survey data at all."

  "Sounds familiar." Owen described the discrepancy that had been found at Cicero Op.

  "The Sensitives on board had already changed sides—or had been replaced by Overlords."

  "Aliens."

  "That's right," Abbas said. "Nobody knows what they really look like—except they can take human form . . . or at least look like they've taken human form. We tried to fight but . . . they could make us do whatever they wanted.

  "They made us take out the Gustav. They jumped here and left us behind, at least some of us—I don't know why. Every day I see someone else from the Negri: same story. As for the other ships—we know something else happened at Sargasso, some admiral who came out with the Cicero squadron."

  "I didn't see the report, but the commodore did. She man aged to take the Down base back from the aliens."

  "How'd she beat them?"

  "No idea. The Due was out flying high guard and was only ordered to Cicero Prime orbit to retake the base. We were barely in the air when the Down CAP patrols turned aside and gave us control of the airspace. It happened so fast—less than a Standard day—then we were ordered to evacuate."

  "You evacuated Cicero? Jackie Laperriere evacuated Cicero?"

  "It was that or . . ."

  The huge alien ship crossed Owen's mind again. They'd taken him inside it and—nothing. He didn't know.

  "And you got left behind somehow."

  "Not quite." He explained what had happened to Green Squadron and to his own fighter, as far as he remembered: the sudden quiet on the comm, the other Green fighters turning and fighting each other, and his controls going dead as the other alien ship grew larger and larger in his forward screen.

  "You were inside?"

  "I must've been. I don't remember."

  Damien Abbas' face grew very serious. He took a moment and cracked a few of his knuckles, then leaned forward and said, "Now hear this, Lieutenant. You've got to remember. It's the most important thing in the whole damn world: You've been to a place that no human has ever seen. If we can get that intelligence back to the Empire, maybe we'll learn something to help us beat these bastards. Do you read me?"

  "Aye-aye, Captain," Owen replied.

  ***

  "ha T'te'e, the commodore has arrived."

  The High Chamberlain opened his eyes slowly and let his gaze travel from object to object in the chamber, finally resting on the young alHyu standing near the door.

  "Very good, little brother. Show her in." T'te'e HeYen recited a few verses in his head to calm himself, surprised that his meditations had been unable to dispel the tension about what was to come.

  It was not a comfortable position to be in. He had left Zor'a and the High Nest after a lengthy and distressing interview with his cousin the High Lord, whose prescient madness was deepening with each passing day. He had arrived at Adrianople to find the Gyaryu'har without his blade, trapped in a coma-like trance that seemed impervious to his ministrations. He had expected it of course, but the reality of the situation was still disturbing.

  T'te'e was not afraid of decision or of action: His life had depended on these things more than once, before he had pledged his chya and his hsi to the dignity of the High Nest. But with little assistance or advice, either from the High Lord or the ranking human in the High Nest, it made it a difficult route to fly.

  The alHyu showed the human into the chamber and the door slid softly shut, leaving them alone.

  "se T'te'e," she said, inclining her head slightly. She had no wings to assume any posture of deference; it made her even more difficult to read. He knew that she was a warrior of the race of esHu'ur—therefore he could accept that she had honor—but without being a part of the Flight of the People, he could not understand where her duty lay. This is what we have come to, he thought. Did se S'reth and si Th'an'ya foresee this?

  "se Commodore. Be welcome to the High Nest," he replied ritually. Wherever he traveled, the High Nest traveled with him.

  "Thank you, sir. It is an honor to make your acquaintance and to be allowed to participate in the Ordeal."

  "It is my brother se Ch'k'te's decision, se Commodore, not mine."

  "Sir?"

  "It is rare that any naZora'e participates in this sort of event, Commodore. I advised my brother se Ch'k'te strongly against it. If it were my choice, I would have forbidden it."

  He could feel a powerful, unformed anger radiating from her.

  "Are you telling me that I should get the hell out?"

  "I cannot tell you such a thing without becoming idju."

  "I'm afraid I don't completely understand."

  "se Ch'k'te . . . said he would transcend the Outer Peace if I forbade your participation. To forsake his rights, especially on those terms, would have dishonored me. Therefore . . . I have permitted it."

  The anger subsided somewhat. "He said that?" she asked.

  T'te'e inclined his head and postured his wings to convey the Oath of Truth Before esLi, but she did not seem to notice.

  "So I'm to remain, though you don't like it."

  "My feelings in this matter have been rendered irrelevant."

  "I hardly think so, since you chose to bring them up," she retorted. "You're telling me I don't belong here, and that you'd be more than happy if I volunteered to withdraw, since Ch'k'te won't back down. I don't think your feelings are irrelevant at all, se T'te'e.

  "I'm to trust my . . . hsi . . . to you. After what I went through at Cicero, I'm not happy about doing so in the face of such hostility."

  This was hardly the mode of speech a warrior of the People would use toward an official of the High Nest, and he was not exactly sure what to
make of it.

  " 'Hostility' is not the proper word," the zor replied. He closed his eyes and perched there for several moments, while Jackie stood at parade rest, forcing her anger down. She could read something from him . . . Was it disgust? No—it seemed a lot more like confusion.

  "What is the proper word, then, sir?"

  ***

  T'te'e's eyes opened and looked at her once more, his proud head seeming to droop. " 'Trepidation' is a closer description of what I feel. Perhaps 'fear' might be appropriate, though my training lets me put most of that aside.

  "I have seen what the High Lord has seen, se Commodore Laperriere. I understand why he is slowly losing his sanity, as his clan-father hi'i Sse'e did: He knows with terrible certainty that the legions of esGa'u have the power to destroy all that the People and our human friends have built, in a way that would make the conquests of esHu'ur seem as nothing."

  "But didn't Marais—esHu'ur—nearly exterminate you?"

  "There are worse fates than death, se Commodore."

  "I am aware of that, se Chamberlain." She watched him settle his wings in another pattern, but she did not understand its significance.

  "But you do not truly understand it as one of the People."

  "I—" She fought down anger again. "I understand it more thoroughly than you can imagine, se T'te'e. My mind was invaded by them, just as Ch'k'te's was—and I have linked my hsi to Ch'k'te. I have been shattered against the Icewall. Do not tell me I do not understand."

  ***

  At the mention of the Icewall, T'te'e shivered slightly, as if he felt a cold breeze waft through the room.

  Perhaps, he thought, I have underestimated her. se Ch'k'te is one of the People; He knows well what is to come. For him to be willing to transcend the Outer Peace for a naZora'e . . .

  And there was something else about her that he simply could not read.

  "se Commodore," he said at last, "I recognize your worthiness to participate in the Ordeal and ask eight thousand pardons if I have offended you in some way. No offense was meant, nor dishonor intended. As with any one of the People, I give you an assurance upon my honor that I will extend the wing of the High Nest over you during the D'sen'yen'ch'a."