Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

A Working of Stars (21 page)

BOOK: A Working of Stars

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The bright lights revealed a compartment empty except for the baled cubes that held the suits. Arekhon reached for the nearest bale and unslipped it from its cords. In the lower gravity it lifted easily from the deck. It was clumsily shaped and its mass made it awkward to maneuver, but he had no trouble hauling it forward into the passenger compartment.

Maraganha said, “You’re the man with the local knowledge. Care to educate us on the finer points of Entiboran pressure-suits?”

“They’re simple enough,” he said. He pulled the zip cord on the side of the package. “And these aren’t the high-end specialty stuff anyway. I got the lifeboat models. Easy to put on and pretty close to foolproof.”

“I’ve known some pretty major fools,” Maraganha said.

Arekhon looked at her.

“No one’s ever called you one of them, though,” she said, and grinned. “All right, here we go. Pull one out and show us the drill.”

The last time that young lady ran out on a meeting, the whole building blew up not long afterward.

Vai’s words remained vivid in Len’s mind as he ran down the apartment-house stairs. Mages could see the luck; everyone knew that. Other people, sometimes Mages and sometimes not,
had
luck, and it came to them in different shapes and forms. Maybe Zeri sus-Dariv sus-Peledaen had luck of the conveniently-be-elsewhere variety—one of Len’s old shipmates had been like that.

Without a Mage’s ability to see the
eiran,
though, he couldn’t tell. He could only hurry to catch up with Zeri on the sidewalk outside the apartment building, and say, “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Some place that isn’t Eraasi,” she said, still walking away rapidly. “Wasn’t that the idea to start with?”

He stayed with her, easily matching her shorter stride. The street was dark, with a lamppost at each end but nothing in the middle to break the gloom. The apartment buildings along this row weren’t the kind to put up lanterns beside the front door, either. That and the lack of traffic along the one-way street made it a good site for a confidential agent’s backup safe house.

“Vai and your cousin were planning to—”

“I don’t care what they were planning,” she said. “I don’t know Syr Vai from the Mayor of Amisket—I’ve never even
been
to Amisket—and so far I haven’t seen anything of Herin. For all I know, you and Vai were using his name to make me come along.”

“What do you want, then? You can’t go back to Lord Natelth.”

“I want—” She stopped.

He stopped, too, catching at her sleeve as he did so to pull her a little farther into the shadows. Midnight blue made a good color for fading into the dark; he wondered if Iulan Vai had picked out Zeri’s new clothing with that in mind. “What?”

“Listen.”

He listened, and heard nothing except for the low rumble of a nearby engine. “It’s a public road,” he said. “Someone’s driving this way, that’s all.”

“They’re driving this way the wrong way on a one-way street,” she said. “And they’re in a hurry.”

He listened again. She was right. “I think it’s time to stay in the shadows and not move for a few minutes.”

They stood close together as a low black groundcar sped past and pulled up to the curb outside the apartment building they’d left only a short while before. Another groundcar pulled up from the opposite direction, and both vehicles began disgorging dark-clad men.

“It’s a raid, all right,” Len said. “They’re hunting for us now.”

“What about Syr Vai? Will she—”

“She’s a professional,” Len said, with more optimism than he actually felt. “And she’s had that house for a long time. Vai can take care of herself.”

Karil Estisk found herself grateful when Arekhon headed aft to instruct his fellow-Mages in the proper way to put on and wear an emergency pressure-suit. She didn’t outright dislike him—he was kind and pleasant-mannered and not at all hard on the eyes—and she trusted him as much as she was ever going to trust anybody who came from across the interstellar gap and called himself a Mage, but that didn’t necessarily mean she liked him a great deal, or that she trusted him any farther than she could throw him in low gravity.

He was part of Garrod syn-Aigal’s great working, and the great working had torn up Karil’s life once before. Her first reaction on seeing Arekhon sus-Khalgath standing outside her apartment door a few weeks ago had been a sudden absolute certainty—
he’s going to do it again
—followed by an equally absolute certainty that all her careful career-rebuilding of the last decade was going to go for nothing. She’d thrown in with his plans out of desperation, a feeling that it was better to jump wide-eyed into the maelstrom than to be thrown in all willy-nilly.

Which makes you as crazy as the rest of them
, she told herself.

She reached out with one hand and dialed up the magnification and the heat-anomaly sensor on the forward screen, then sat back to wait. The speed of progress was slight, considering, at least compared with a jump run. The black band in the middle of the VU meter grew narrower and narrower as the signal strength went up.

Karil thought about what might be waiting for her back on Entibor—if, indeed, she was fortunate enough to make it home from across the galaxy a second time. ‘Rekhe might be sneaky and underhanded, not to mention obsessed with Garrod syn-Aigal’s working, but he wasn’t stingy. He’d made arrangements to keep her pay from InterWorlds Shipping coming into her bank account for as long as his open-ended contract for her services remained in force. She might well come home from this journey a wealthy woman; on the other hand, if her last sojourn among ’Rekhe’s people was any indication, she might not ever come home at all.

“What kind of pilot takes on a job like that?” she asked herself aloud, and tweaked the course a bit to keep the signal in the center of the disk of her HF/DF. “I do. If I’m crazy.”

That got her to laughing a little. All she had to do was travel to the far side of the interstellar gap to a place where everything was strange, where no one spoke her language, where no one knew the simplest things about hardware or mechanics, but where men could walk through walls and read minds—and then come back alive.

“That settles it. I
am
crazy.”

Karil tweaked their course again. Up ahead, the stars were filtered from the viewscreen. They would be too bright, with the low-light turned up the way it was. But a patch of the image was a different shade of black on black. She touched up the contrast and fed in some color to saturate the field.

She sent out an active ping, and adjusted course and speed a bit in response. Then she keyed the internal announcement system.

“We’re coming into visual range of the
Daughter.
If there’s anything you want aboard this vessel, bring it down to the lock. If you have suits, put them on, but don’t start using air tanks yet.”

Then she unsnapped herself and removed her own suit from the slide-locker behind the piloting position. She slid it on and fastened the slides along arms and legs, then pulled on the boots and gloves, clamping down the ring seals.

The dark shape on the monitor had grown in the time she’d not been looking, taking on a flattened disk shape with swooping wings outspread to either side. Even though she’d seen it before, the ship still looked horridly alien to her: its aesthetics wrong; its dimensions wrong; the very assumptions behind its making all wrong. It floated motionless in the vacuum of space, a radio-emitting buoy tethered to it.

“The hatch on the ventral surface is the one you’re looking for,” Arekhon said. He had returned to the bridge so quietly that Karil hadn’t heard him.

“Thanks,” she said. “Which side is ventral?”

“That one,” Arekhon said, tapping the screen in front of her with a fingernail. “Get us close enough to float across, with this vessel’s hatch oriented toward the
Daughter’s,
and be ready to come along.”

“Half an hour from the time I leave the control room to the time the automatic homer takes this craft back to Eraasi?”

“Half a day would be better,” Arekhon said. “I don’t want to be rushed for time. Set it for standard orbit GG-12.”

“Right,” Karil said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have some maneuvering to do.”

By the time she’d gotten the shuttle into the position, Arekhon and the others were all properly suited up. Karil came down the ladder from the control bridge to join them, closing the hatch behind her and dogging it shut. She carried her helmet loose in her hand.

“All right,” she said. “Time to go.”

She led the way back through the cargo spaces to the airlock, and walked into it. This was the cargo lock, and large enough to hold a dozen skipsleds’ worth of cargo all by itself.

“Come on in,” she said, after checking the exterior controls on their panel. “Everyone who isn’t standing on this side of that line when I turn this switch is going back to Entibor.”

Narin went first among the Mages, then Ty and Maraganha, then Arekhon last of all. He took one last look into the ship as he left its main compartment, and Karil thought she saw his lips move, as if he were saying somebody’s name. Then he too stepped across the thresh-old and into the lock.

“Right,” Karil said. She held down the safety catch with one hand while she turned the switch with the other. The inner door swung closed.

“Now we put on our helmets, switch to internal air, and hope there aren’t any leaks,” Karil said, and pulled on her own helmet. She twisted the valve by her right thigh, and heard the hiss of air coming in. The fog on her faceplate cleared.

“Okay, everyone good?” This time her voice came across the radio link. “Last chance for anyone to get cold feet.”

“We’re all doing fine,” Arekhon said.

She waited a minute longer, but nobody spoke up to contradict him. Karil turned the switch for the outer door of the lock—the door was as wide as the entire chamber—and watched as it slid up. She stepped out, and attached a light-line to the ringbolt beside the door, then switched off the magnetic pads in her boots and pushed away, floating across to where
Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter
—huge compared with the craft they were in, tiny compared with a real deep-space merchant—swam above them.

Her boots clicked against the far hull, and she walked—
click-step, click-
step—to the airlock there. She tied off the line to a section of raised hull plate, and said, “Okay, ’Rekhe, you know this ship and how to open the door. Come on over.”

Evening drew on, dimming the sky outside the sus-Peledaen town house. Natelth sat alone in his study, waiting for word. He would have paced the floor, except that he had schooled himself decades ago not to do such things. Out beyond the bay window of the study, the lights of the city shone like distant stars.

No reports so far, no sightings. If one of the liveried guards hadn’t thought to check all the trash bins within a half-mile radius, the searchers wouldn’t even have had the dress and the bridal crown. And nobody had touched those, so far as could be determined, except for Zeri sus-Dariv herself. Somewhere between the empty withdrawing-room and that muddy alley, Natelth’s missing bride had apparently changed clothes, wiped her face clean of cosmetics, and vanished.

She could have been under duress. It was possible—the sus-Peledaen had enemies, a bountiful supply of them, men and women and whole worlds who would like nothing better than to deprive Natelth sus-Khalgath of something that was his.

Or she could have gone willingly.

Could she?
Natelth wondered.
Would she?

He realized that he didn’t know. He knew that Zeri sus-Dariv had blue eyes and yellow curls because he’d seen her twice—once at the formal marriage negotiations and once this morning at the wedding. He knew that she played at drama and the theatre because his intelligence operatives had included that information in the portfolio they drew up for him. He knew that she was coolheaded enough to understand that bringing what remained of the sus-Dariv into the sus-Peledaen was the best way to help them survive, and he knew that she’d been clever enough to see it on her own and send Fas Treosi to make the approach.

Did that mean she was clever enough to understand other things as well?

He knew one other thing—she was lucky. Lucky enough to escape the Court of Two Colors, when there should have been nobody in her position left alive. Clever and lucky—but if she was part of the plot, why was there blood on the carpet?

The chime of his voice comm halted the restless circling of his thoughts. He pressed the speaker button. “Yes?”

“Na’e, this is Isa. I have something for you.”

He felt a surge of relief. Isayana, at least, he knew. “What is it?”

BOOK: A Working of Stars

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