A Matter of Oaths (17 page)

“As soon as I’ve finished here,” Rafe agreed. There was no
need for Vidar to know that he had already tried to sleep and failed, beaten by
a vicious nightmare of endless underground tunnels. He had come to the gym to
purge the lingering traces of the dream with physical activity, and to bring
his body to a point where it would overrule his mind. He would rather do that
than take a sleeper.

As he performed another sit-up, he speculated about the echo
that Khisa had reported in her monitor circuit. It had only shown itself once,
faintly, but no fault in the web was taken lightly; lives depended on the
correct functioning of the electro-components that linked
Bhattya
’s webbers together and to the ship’s systems. Only fools —
and dirtsiders, who knew no better — were complacent about the safety of the
web, about the nature of the knife-edge balance between performance and risk.

Hell’s irresistible bargain, Rafe had heard a retired webber
call his once-active web; a passport to soaring power which no sane person
dared reach for. It was an apt analogy. In the web, your brain was linked to
the body of the ship, your nerves carried sensations that nonwebbers would
never know. You only had to loosen the chains of discipline a little to tap the
web’s full potential, to create new sensations, to explore new pathways through
your extended body, a body that encompassed your companions in the web as their
bodies now encompassed you.

And there was the danger: stray from the predefined pathways
and you could not know what your web-mates would experience — pleasure, pain,
or insanity because they could no longer interpret the behaviour of the body
that they shared? Even if you were alone in the web, experiments jeopardized
your own sanity, your own grip on mundane reality. So, you worked to strict
rules in a fully activated web, or played — as in Rallya’s workouts — in a
limited imitation, always aware of the tantalizing possibilities that were
within reach but unattainable. Until eventually, even the possibilities were
gone and you were confined forever within a body with a deactivated web.

The ten minute jump alert sounded, jolting Rafe out of his
reverie. He reached up to check that his bench-weights were secure, lay back to
await the jump and then changed his mind, sitting up and reaching for his
soft-shoes.

“Expecting trouble?” Vidar asked, securing his own
bench-weights.

Rafe shook his head. “It’s unlikely.” He slipped the shoes
on and stood up. “After
Avannya
, I
prefer to see where I’m going as soon as I arrive,” he confessed.

“The EMP-mine was sitting right in your jump point when you
broke out, wasn’t it?” Vidar asked sympathetically.

“Yes.” They had hit it with every sensor wide open and the
web full;
Avannya
could not have been
more vulnerable if it had been planned, Rafe thought bitterly. It would have
made no difference if he had been in the web-room to witness it, instead of
working on a malfunctioning mapping drone, but it would be a long time before
he felt comfortable going through jump out of range of the sensor displays.

The five minute alert sounded as Rafe arrived in the
web-room. Rallya’s team and Lilimya’s were in the web, Rallya in the
key-position. The web-shifts had been rescheduled so that she would be there
when they broke out into the strange system; it was a routine precaution. Most
of the waking crew were gathering in the web-room, with nothing to do during
jump except watch.

Joshim was not there and, looking at the monitor screen,
Rafe identified the nimbus that was an occupied dry-web place. The Webmaster
was taking no chances; if the fault Khisa had reported was symptomatic of a
wider problem, the stress of the jump could trigger an imbalance that could
only be corrected in time by the reflexes of somebody monitoring the web from
within.

“Can’t wait to see what’s on the other side?” Jualla asked,
joining Rafe at the back of the room. “Be a pity if there’s nothing to see
after the effort you expended to get us there.”

“Wouldn’t it?” Rafe agreed easily, ignoring the bite in
Jualla’s voice. Although she would not be ready for promotion for another year
at least,
Bhattya
’s Second was still
jealous of him for taking the berth that she had subconsciously thought of as
hers. And for the relationship that he had with Rallya, he thought with gentle
amusement. A relationship that Jualla would never achieve until she exchanged
blind veneration for respect tinged with a healthy degree of impiety. The
analysis made him feel unaccountably old.

The one minute alert sounded as Vidar came in, fully dressed
in contrast to Rafe’s shorts and soft-shoes and with no sign of his exertions
in the gym. Rafe continued to watch the displays around the main screen, noting
the increased power coming from the drive, the vanes settling into quiescent
sleekness against the hull, their increasing speed through inertial space.

“She really flies, doesn’t she?” he said to nobody in
particular.

“Yes, when there’s nothing to hold her back,” Jualla agreed
proudly. “And she can punch a jump through anywhere.”

The ten second alert sounded. Rafe braced himself against
the seat in front of him. Reality blurred, streaming into chaos, then
refocused. As he blinked at the displays, waiting for his eyes to realize that
reality had returned, he heard the repeated shriek of the primary alert.

“A ship!” Jualla exclaimed, her eyes adjusting an instant
before Rafe’s and identifying the distant shape.

Rallya had the shields up already, must have raised them the
instant they emerged from jump without waiting for a reason, just as she had
primed the weapons. It was the caution of an veteran who intended to grow
older, Rafe reflected grimly, pushing his way through to the front of the
observers in Vidar’s wake. The displays were showing multiple views of the
strange ship — mass-scans, light-scans, heat-scans — as Rallya gathered all the
information she could.

“Only one,” Rafe decided after a moment’s scrutiny. They had
emerged into a relatively empty region of space, with no close masses large
enough to hide any other threats. The nearest star of the binary was a garish
red circle beyond the stranger, its partner a smaller disk beyond that.

“Who’s got comm control?” Vidar asked, sounding as
frustrated as Rafe by his inability to influence events, by his forced reliance
on others. No webber liked to be out of the web at a time like this; it was
almost like being deaf and blind.

“Dathir.” Jualla triggered the link that routed incoming
messages to the web-room, was rewarded only by star noise as Dathir searched
the frequencies for EM messages. She reduced the volume, continuing to study
the screens avidly.

“We’re slowing,” she said after a moment.

“And changing course directly toward them,” Rafe agreed.
Rallya could not be intending an attack; she would not reduce speed if she was.
The stranger was growing slowly in the screens as they approached, but showed
no obvious reaction to their presence. Rafe frowned at the displays, trying to
prize from them detail that the screen’s resolution was too coarse to show him.
What was Rallya’s enhanced view showing her that he could not detect?

“It’s a derelict,” he announced, at last recognizing the
significance of the nearly featureless heat pattern of their target.

“Are you sure?” Jualla said dubiously.

“He’s right,” Vidar said with confidence. “Rallya’s taking
us in for a rendezvous.”

“Is it a Guild ship?” Rasmallya voiced the obvious question.

“Could be,” Vidar said cautiously. “From this distance, I
can’t tell. Can anybody else?”

Nobody responded as they continued to watch the screen,
looking for a clue to the derelict’s origin or fate.

“Boarding party, sir?” Rafe asked the next obvious question.

“Yes.” Vidar looked around, noting who was present. “You,
me, Peretya and Nikur,” he decided. “Jualla, pick three more and be ready to
come find us if we find trouble.”

They rode across the gulf between
Bhattya
and the derelict on a drone; Rallya was too cautious to
take them close enough to spin over on a line. As they approached, details of
the wreck which had been reported by those in the web became visible to the
naked eye: the Guild insignia above the name
Hadra
, familiar from the list of cargoships lost in the zone; the
short gash in her side, seemingly cut to gain access to her interior; the
curious tarnish on the surface of her hull. Heat damage, Vidar had suggested as
the cause of the discolouration, and Rafe had not disagreed, because he had
nothing concrete with which to support an instinct that said otherwise.

“Only the one opening in the hull,” Vidar reported over the
comm for the benefit of the listeners aboard
Bhattya
as the drone completed a careful circle of the ship,
examining the side that had been hidden until then. “No sign that the E-boats
were launched.”

Rafe grimaced inside his airsuit at the implications of
that. Corpses inside, unless the crew had been taken prisoner. He was not sure
which was a kinder fate to wish for them, not knowing what use the Outsiders
would find for prisoners.

“We’ll go in the obvious way,” Vidar decreed.

They anchored the drone to the hull a few lengths from the
opening. Rafe attached one end of the guideline from his belt to a ring-bolt on
the drone.

“I’ll fix the other end inside,” he promised, setting out
carefully across the smooth surface.

The heat-curdled edges of the opening showed how it had been
made. Rafe examined them closely, noting where the sharp edges had been made
safe. Those responsible had been no happier about breathing vacuum than he
would be.

Shining a beam around inside revealed an engineering space
through which a pathway had been cleared. Rafe pushed a cutter from his belt
through the entrance, aiming it into the centre of the space. It moved under
his impetus alone, confirming what he had suspected. There was no gravity field
operating inside the cargoship.

“Going in now,” he reported. “There’s machinery just inside
which will make a good anchor.”

He snagged his cutter from where it drifted as he passed,
then unfastened the guideline from his belt and tied it around one stanchion of
a storage rack, tugging hard to be sure it was secure.

“Come on in,” he invited the others.

“Nikur, you come with me to the engineering and cargo
levels,” Vidar decided when they were all inside. “Rafe, you and Peri cover the
cabin and command areas.” He flicked his beam at the open hatchway that led to
the rest of the ship. “We’ll meet back here in two hours. Progress reports
every thirty minutes.”

Outside the hatchway, a short length of corridor led to a
riser shaft. Vidar sprayed a colour splash on the riser wall opposite, a marker
for their exit. Rafe oriented himself from the now-dead lights on the corridor
ceiling, shone his beam towards the unseen top of the riser.

“We’ll start at the top and work down,” he told Peri,
switching to the private channel between them. “Web, web-room, rest-room,
comms-room. Carry away anything we can, visi-reck the rest.”

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?