by Philip Hamm
“Indeed, it is, Your Majesty,” he said, though it felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. He wanted to sit down and put his head between his knees.
“We’ll be the envy of every empire,” she continued brightly. “Once the Zarktek are restored, they’ll be so grateful. Think of all the wonders they can teach us; the science that has been banned by primitive and suspicious minds like those in the Tun Empire or the way the rest rely on Ulupan technology instead of making it for themselves. Can you think of anything better than being able to learn from such a noble race?”
“No, Your Majesty,” he said. “But doesn’t it bother you that our Empire, like the Sagan before us, joined with the humans to defeat the Zarktek? What if the only lesson the tsars want to teach us is motivated by revenge rather than gratitude?”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “The Zarktek are not like that. They know Quill was being threatened by the Zamut Empire and had no choice except to join them for the final battles of the Hundred Year War.”
She was wrong on both counts, he thought. There was plenty of evidence to suggest the tsars could be petty and unforgiving over the smallest of infractions let alone a major betrayal. And as for Quill’s brief alliance with Zamut, the worlds of Kvike and Kaimakam had been offered as rewards. There had been no threats just bribes.
“When you get back,” she said cheerfully as he prepared to leave, “You’ll be a proper Rao again and Sapadilla will be yours to rule – won’t that be exciting?”
“Yes, Your Majesty, everything is very exciting.” He bowed and thought she was wrong about that too.
*
On his return to the Apus, Nacyon ignored everybody and ran to the cabin he shared with the captain. He was violently sick in the bathroom and he still had his head over the bowl when Tringa caught up with him.
She had been prepared to tear his feathers out for being rude (again) but when she saw his pale face turn towards her with tears running down his cheeks, she changed her mind. “What’s wrong?” she demanded. “What’s happened? Why are you crying?”
“There will be nothing left,” he moaned.
“What do you mean?”
“Everything will be lost – everything…”
“You’re not making any sense,” she snapped, beginning to worry that it was his sanity that was disappearing.
“She thinks the Zarktek will be grateful. Worse than that, she thinks they’ll win…”
“With the Sagan Army behind them, it’s possible, isn’t it?”
“They’re not going to join with us. Zamut couldn’t persuade them so why should we be successful?”
Tringa shrugged, “It’s not your problem, Nacyon. Leave it to Rao Quern and the rest of the fools on the Aquila.”
Nacyon shook his head and laughed bitterly, “The Queen has asked me to deliver her ‘request’. She thinks it’s a great honour. I might as well kill myself now.”
“If you carry on like this, I’ll wring your neck for you.”
“What am I going to do?”
“Your duty,” she said.
He could feel his stomach churning. “And then…?”
“We’ll worry about that once the message is given. Wash your face, Nacyon – you look a mess. Shall I give the order to set sail for Sagan?”
He stood and nodded reluctantly. “I’m sorry I’ve brought this on you and the others. I thought our Zizania was the monster. But she was just stupid and selfish. If anyone ever discovers what we’ve done, I’ll take full responsibility.”
“What about our two Sagan guests?”
He looked at her and felt sick again. “How did you know?”
“Did you think Driver wouldn’t tell me?” she said, raising her eyebrows at him. “He saw their feet.”
Nacyon sat down on the edge of the bath. “If they’d been caught, they would have been sent to the mines – but it wasn’t their fault they were there.”
“I know – Driver said Rimmon’s men kidnapped them. But why…?”
“I don’t know – perhaps Rimmon thought we might hold them hostage until the Sagan agreed to help us. It doesn’t really matter now.”
“You should have told me.”
“Rani Rhus told me to keep it a secret because we didn’t know how everyone would react. You might have refused or worse, you might have told the priests.”
“When have we ever let you down, Nacyon? You should have explained the situation and we would have kept your confidence, just as we’ve always done.”
“I know,” he said, feeling ashamed.
“Never-the-less, you saved them and that’s important.”
He looked at her, “How so?”
She shook her head at him, “Can you really be so naïve? Those women were Sagan and if the Queen’s message is ignored - which it probably will be - Rhatany will declare war on their people. But they owe you a debt and when there’s a reckoning, at least you’ll have something to fall back on.”
He gave her a smile, “Other than my bottom?”
“That belongs to me,” she said.
21 - The last voyage of the Cissoid Corindon
Fratris asked, “Where were you when Nacyon delivered his message?”
“As I said before, we never made it to the Sagan system. Two days from Nidus, we’d got as far as the Ouroboros Road between Sagan and Cartref when the Cissoid was sabotaged. We were already here in Panadawn while Nacyon and the Quill fleet were travelling along the same route to deliver the Queen’s demand to the Sagan Council.”
Crotal said, “Will you tell us what happened to you and the ship?”
“It’s relevant,” she agreed. “It has nothing to do with Taylia and I defiling the Nidus but it is connected to Zizania.”
“The real one or the fake one?”
“The real one.”
Fratris asked, “What happened to her after Nacyon gave her to the Rickobites?”
“We don’t know,” she admitted. “We assume she was taken aboard the Tax Collector and smuggled away to the north. But she wasn’t the reason we were sabotaged – only the bribe to make sure it was done.”
Fengtai asked, “Who was bribed?”
“Acromion, our head of security; he was obsessed with her and we believe Rimmon promised to give Zizania to him if he did as he was asked.”
“Do you think Rimmon kept his promise?”
“I couldn’t say but we never saw either of them again so, it’s possible, I suppose. But I doubt if they would have been very happy together – Zizania just used him to escape from his security team whenever we were visiting a planet. She didn’t respect him let alone love him.”
Fratris asked, “What did Rimmon ask Acromion to do?”
“While the Cissoid was being refitted on Kajawah, he gave Rimmon’s agents access to the Exarch disks under the ship. They planted explosives to dislodge the pillars that held up the decks to bring the whole structure tumbling down. They must have been very sophisticated devices because they were not detonated by anyone on board but controlled by a radio signal from a Rickobite ship.”
“How do you know?”
“My husband’s people found evidence in the wreckage and he was able to question Rimmon later. But I’m getting ahead of myself. We were on our way to Sagan to seek sanctuary from the Rickobites who wanted the Cissoid for themselves...”
*
In her own words, Faam said:
There were not many of us left aboard. Even before we left Kajawah, the crew had been pared down to the barest minimum and after we reached Nidus, the remaining students (with the exception of the twenty-two scholarship girls who had nowhere else to go) and the rest of the teaching staff had left with their ambassadors to return to their empires. Apart from Kalmia and her deputy, Vade, myself, and Taylia, there were no other staff on the upper decks and just Captain Jylland, his bridge crew, and a handful of cooks and security below. I don’t suppose we numbered more than fifty in total.
If I’d thought the ship felt strange o
n our way down to Quill, it felt even stranger as we headed away. We moved all the students to the junior staff cabins on Upper Deck Five to keep them together and tried to keep them distracted by researching Sagan in the library. Most of them were frightened. Though we’d been promised shelter by the Sagan Council, the thought of living among mine and Taylia’s people after hearing so many stories about their military ability and their mysterious telepathy, made them feel very insecure. Though we did our best to assure them they would be welcome, most of the girls didn’t really want to go or, if they did, they didn’t want to stay for very long. The Cissoid Corindon was our home and we all hoped Kalmia would find a way to keep the university going.
But it was not to happen. During the ship’s night-cycle, when most of us were asleep, the bombs were detonated. The Exarch disks were separated from the columns and the whole framework of the ship began to twist and collapse. I was thrown out of bed and onto the tipping deck. The noise was incredible, not just the initial explosions and electrical circuits bursting but the screeching sound of metal on metal and the crack and bang of rivets popping.
Taylia, who had been sleeping in my cabin, was on her feet in a second. She grabbed hold of me and hauled me towards the door. “Hurry,” she shouted.
I had no idea what was happening. “Have we hit something?” I screamed.
“No,” she said. “We’ve been attacked.”
The lights flickered and died in the corridor. Stumbling in the dark, she dragged me towards the stairs. Sparks flew as the deck behind us split open and the electric cables were pulled apart. The staircase bucked as we reached it and threatened to collapse. It took all of Taylia’s strength to keep hold of me as I nearly pitched over the bannister. Clinging onto her for dear life, we managed to climb down to the next deck where the girls were staying. Even over the noise of the dying ship, I could them screaming.
The Exarch disks, unbound by the ship’s frame, began to separate and tear the hull apart. At least a dozen must have failed already, unbalancing the field around the ship and destabilising the Claught drive. The mass of iron and steel, travelling at thousands of miles per second, started pulling in different directions.
The girls were running out of their rooms. “Get to the lifeboats,” I shouted at them, pushing the nearest girl towards the exit.
The rest followed. They were dressed in their nightgowns, their bare feet exposed to the jagged edges metal that were dropping from the ceiling. Some had been caught by falling debris and there was blood on the dresses.
It was fortunate for us that Upper Deck Five doesn’t run the whole length of the ship but just a quarter of the forward section. At the stern end is the library building and in between, on either side of the skylight to the ball room, six lifeboats were ready and waiting.
I wouldn’t leave without checking the cabins to make sure nobody had been trapped inside. Taylia helped me and we were joined seconds later by Kalmia and Vade from the deck above mine. Kalmia told us to go but I refused. She screamed at Taylia to carry me to a lifeboat if she had to.
The deck above began to collapse, threatening to crush us in between. None of us had a choice; we had to leave.
Together, we scrambled outside and ran for the nearest lifeboat. The deck planks below our feet were buckling, threatening to pitch us into the dark hole of the ballroom. Its skylight shattered and we heard the glass falling.
Vade reached the lifeboat first and was pulled inside by the students. Taylia and I arrived moments later. Kalmia, distraught at the loss of her ship and the fear of leaving a student behind, hesitated.
The front third of the ship, including the prow, the bridge and the decks underneath, broke free as an Exarch field snapped shut around them and drifted away to the right. The jolt threw me off my feet and I nearly dislocated my shoulder. But Taylia helped me up again. Together, we grabbed hold of Kalmia and dragged her to the lifeboat.
As we slammed the door shut, Vade pulled the lever to release us from the deck and we floated away from the ship. I could hear my ears ringing in the sudden silence.
I did a head-count. Twenty-two students stared back at me, their faces grey and their eyes red. All had cuts and bruises but nothing more serious.
Through the portholes, we saw the Cissoid breaking into sections. There were other lifeboats, from the hold and the main deck, floating among them. I didn’t know if there were people on board or if they were just debris.
I saw smoke from a fire filling the Exarch bubble that surrounded the remains of the stern. A moment later, the heat cracked the crystals in the disk and the field suddenly disappeared. Air exploded out of the cabins, classrooms and corridors, ripping the structure to shreds. The same happened to a section of the hold. But the rest just drifted away with pieces of the hull inside, like insects caught in amber.
Nobody made a sound for a long time; Kalmia seemed too shocked to speak and the rest of us didn’t know what to say to her. Taylia and I found a medical kit and tended to the students. Vade found the boat’s supply of bottled water and handed it around, telling the girls, in a whisper, not to drink too much.
Nobody asked the obvious question: what were we going to do now? The lifeboat was protected by an Exarch disk but it didn’t have much motive power. It could move us from one ship to another but not across the great volume of space needed to reach our destination. We were safe but we weren’t going anywhere quickly.
We counted the emergency supplies, tins of food and packets of dried fruit, but it was obvious they wouldn’t last long – perhaps a week at the most. We were okay for air; the filters were working properly and the boat was designed for more than forty people. Even if we starved, we wouldn’t suffocate.
When we were finished reassuring the girls, Taylia and I sat together and wondered what we could do next. The lifeboat did have a beacon, which Vade had switched on, but was there anybody out there to detect it?
“The Quill fleet will be coming this way soon,” Taylia pointed out. “There’s no reason to suppose they won’t stop for us.”
“That’s one way to get to Sagan, I suppose,” I said. “At the head of an invasion…”
“Their armada can’t do anything to the planet and it would be suicide to try and land on the surface. Our army would cut them to pieces in seconds.”
“That’s true – even Zamut never sent more than fighters to strafe the ground.” One of those fighters had killed my mother, I thought. “But they’re gone now. It’s ironic, isn’t it? While the IZN was blockading Sagan, it was also keeping everyone else away. And now they’ve left, Quill wants to replace them.”
“They won’t be successful.”
“It’s strange though, Zizania never showed any interest in the politics of Evigone and now she wants to rule it. And there was something odd about her voice too; she didn’t sound like our Zizania.”
Taylia agreed, “The tone was different. There wasn’t that sneer that always made me want to punch her in the face.”
We heard Kalmia speaking to the other lifeboats on the short-wave radio. When she was finished, she turned to us and looked relieved. “Nobody was killed or left behind,” she said. “One of the chefs has a broken leg and a security officer was cut by falling glass but everybody is accounted for.”
The girls clapped and I felt relieved too. “It looks as though all those drills finally paid off,” I smiled.
Kalmia nodded, “And thank goodness there were only a handful of us left on board.”
“That’s why they did it,” said Vade, looking sour. “They couldn’t destroy the ship with the children of so many different worlds and empires still inside.”
“But who wanted this?” I asked.
“The Rickobites,” said Vade.
Kalmia agreed, “This is revenge for not giving the ship to them.”
“But how did they do it?”
“I asked Acromion to check every level before we left Kajawah and he told me he’d seen to it personally. He should have
spotted the bombs easily but either he lied and didn’t do what I asked or he knew they were there and said nothing.”
I shook my head, “I never imagined he could be bought.”
“I never trusted him,” said Vade.
“You don’t trust anyone,” said Taylia.
I looked out at the remains of the Cissoid. They were drifting apart quickly and would soon be lost in the depths of space. It was a sad end to an illustrious career and the end of an era. The ship had done more for women than any other institution and now there was nothing to replace it.
As I watched, I saw a movement. A black shape passed across a section of the white hull. “There’s a ship out there,” I said.
Everyone hurried to look through the portholes. “I can’t see anything,” said Vade.
“It was just a glimpse but it wasn’t debris…”
Kalmia said, “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” said Taylia. “There is something…”
“Is it a Rickobite vessel?” said one of the girls.
There was a murmur from the others as they wondered if she was right. “Have they come to finish us off?” said another.
The boat filled with noise as they began to panic. I confess, I felt it too and wondered how long it would take the searchers to find our lifeboats and snuff us out.
“No,” said Taylia, breathing a sigh of relief. “There is a Sagan among them.”
I said, “But how did they know we were here?”
She looked at me, “Did you really think he would just send me to watch over you?”
“I don’t understand…?”
“Those are Panadawn ships,” she said and just at that moment one of them appeared beside our lifeboat.
The short-wave radio crackled into life and a voice said, “This is Voralia – do we have a Faam and Taylia on board or do I have to search whatever is left of the Cissoid?”
*
Fengtai smiled, “She rescued you.”
“Yes,” Faam said. “Voralia returned to Sagan to visit her children after escorting us from Kajawah but she left a piece of Panadawn’s technology behind – just in case. As soon as the bombs went off, she knew and brought my husband’s people to save us.”