Carnelians (40 page)

Aliana tried to sound nonchalant. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Gods,” he muttered. “On the trip to Delos, I want you both to stay away from everyone. Stay in your cabin. Don’t interact with anyone if you can help it.” With difficulty, he added, “Keep each other company, if that’s what it takes to hide you.”

There it was again, his pain. Aliana wished she understood what hurt him. He had his life back now, even better than before. Why would she and Red matter? They were nobody.

“He already say why,” Red told her. “You child. Off-limits. To him.”

Tide’s forehead creased. “What?”

“It’s nothing,” Aliana said, flustered. She had no idea what Red meant, either. Too much was happening too fast. “This summit can’t be safe.”

“It’s all confused.” Tide paced away like a boxer full of agitated energy. “The Skolians claim Prince Del-Kurj didn’t release that song and their military didn’t attack our merchants, that these are set-ups by people trying to disrupt the peace process.” He turned and came back to them. “The Allied Worlds of Earth claim these Minutemen have nothing to do with them. ESComm says it’s all nonsense, that the Allieds and Skolians are in collusion.”

Red squinted at them. “Why they bother to have summit?”

“Gods only know,” Tide said wryly. “Hell, maybe even they have no idea.”

“Why does the emperor want Red and me?” Aliana asked. “We can’t help.”

Tide spread his arms out from his body. “Truthfully, I’ve no idea.”

Neither did Aliana. But they might soon find out, if they were leaving at dawn.

Their respite here was coming to an end.

XXIII: Rocked Star

XXIII
Rocked Star

“Damn,” Dehya said. “We were right about ESComm training telops.”

She and Kelric were in the Mentation Room, bathed in starlight, playing the latest Quis session Jaibriol had sent them. Except this time the verbal message hadn’t been a bland non-statement. He had sent a detailed proposal: Meet on Delos. Their governments would build the amphitheatre for the summit together, each side monitoring the other, with the Allieds mediating.

The Quis told a different story: ESComm had infiltrated the Delos mesh through Kyle space, using providers who had little idea what they were doing. The fact that ISC didn’t know gave ESComm a large advantage, one they intended to exploit.

“So ESComm ripped that hole in our mesh,” Kelric said.

“We need to decide whether to sew it up or leave it as a trap,” Dehya said absently, intent on the dice. “The intricacy of these patterns, the details—a lot is here, if we can figure it out.”

Kelric shifted several dice. “Something is different. I’m not sure what.”

Dehya worked with him, manipulating real dice while she ran Quis simulations in her mind. So many possibilities. So many paths.

“Gods all-flaming-mighty,” she suddenly said. “This isn’t about the summit. It’s about Del!”

Kelric looked up with a start. Then he returned to the game and worked his magic. As they deconstructed the patterns, a new story became clear.

Jaibriol knew what had happened to Del.

The siren jarred Del out of sleep. He sat up too fast and nausea surged over him. The hold was as dark as always, but an alarm screamed through the air.

Del scrambled to his feet. “That’s an ESComm warning siren for a military attack!”

Mac’s voice came from near him in the dark. “ESComm? As in, Eubian?”

“Hell, yeah,” Del said. “These people are Traders!” He turned in the darkness, trying to orient himself. “We have to get out of here.”

“No kidding.” The clang of a fist hitting metal came from the direction of Mac’s voice. “Hello!” he shouted. “Is anyone there? Can you hear us?”

Del walked forward, holding his hands in front of him, striving for calm despite his racing pulse. His palms hit a bulkhead and he felt his way along it. When he reached what he thought was the place where their food came, he scraped the surface, dug at it, pounded, but nothing worked.

“Come on,” he muttered. The siren kept screaming. Del hit the bulkhead with his fist. “Let us out!” he yelled. He kept waiting for a new siren to add its voice to the clamor, the warning that the hull had been breached, the whoosh of air rushing out of the cargo bay out into space—along with him and Mac.

“I can’t hear a blasted thing over that alarm,” Mac said.

For lack of a better idea, Del shouted in Highton. “Ship, answer! What is the emergency?”

A booming metallic voice spoke. “This ship is under attack. Proceed to the lifeboats.”

“We can’t proceed,” Del said, startled that it had actually answered. “We’re locked in here.”

“You are prisoners.”

“Yeah, well, we’re going to be dead prisoners pretty soon.”

“Entrance opened,” the ship said.

The wall glowed as a hatchway appeared nearby. It wasn’t rectangular or oval, like on Earth ships, but an elongated octagon. Harsh light slanted into the cargo bay. Squinting, Del held up his hand to protect his dark-adapted eyes.

“Come on.” Mac grabbed his arm. “Let’s
go.
”

They ran through the hatchway and into an octagonal-shaped corridor with bulkheads like burnished white gold. Glowing blue rails ran along them at waist height. At regular intervals, red tiles flashed in the walls, pulsating with the vibration of the siren.

“Do you recognize any of this?” Mac asked as they ran, shielding their eyes. “Is it like Tarex’s yacht?”

“Not at all. It’s bigger, a rotation ship maybe.” Del pointed ahead, where the deck sloped upward until the disappeared behind the curved ceiling. “I think we’re in the wheel.”

“It looks military to me,” Mac said. “Definitely
not
Allied.”

The ship’s metallic voice spoke. “You will find shuttles in bay six on this level.” The blue rail on the wall turned emerald. “Follow the green pointers.”

Del kept running. “I haven’t seen a single crew member.”

“My guess?” Mac said. “This entire ship is being run by the five people who took us.”

“That’s nuts. They wouldn’t jeopardize the mission with such a small crew.”

“It was probably that or nothing.” Mac was breathing hard. “If this is ESComm, it must have taken years, decades even, to infiltrate Allied Space Command with agents high enough to position themselves on your guard detail. That could make this a desperation move, the hope that they can succeed in kidnapping you even without a full crew.”

Del continued to run, though he held back his full speed so Mac could keep up. “This ship could stop us.”

“Right now, I’d bet its priority is getting you out of here alive and still a prisoner.”

“And we’re helping it,” Del muttered. His eyes had recovered enough that he could see the hall without squinting. The ceiling looked exactly like the deck, with gold and silver panels. If the ship stopped rotating, the “gravity” would cease and bottom could just as well be top.

They reached an intersection where corridors branched off right and left, up and down. The green rail curved into a shaft above them like a glowing emerald pathway.

“Ship!” Del said in Highton. “Can you give us a ladder?”

The chute above them whirred, and a ladder slid down from its rim until it clanged the deck at Del’s feet. He climbed upward with Mac right behind him. At the top, they clambered out into a docking bay filled with small, gleaming ships, silver and blue, each with a black puma emblazoned on its hull.

“Gorgeous,” Del said as they jogged across the bay. He spoke to Mac in English. “You were in the Air Force before you retired, right? Can you fly one of these?”

“I’ve no idea.” Mac slowed down as they ran into the midst of ships. “These aren’t lifeboats. Some look like single-pilot reconnaissance craft.” He paused by a sleek beauty. “This is a racer. It’s meant to go fast.” He ran his hand over the hull. “I don’t see a way inside, though.”

Del spoke in Highton. “Ship! We need to board this craft.”

“You may board,” the ship said. A molecular airlock shimmered in the racer’s hull and vanished, revealing an interior crammed with equipment and seats for a pilot, co-pilot, and two passengers. “I’m coding your travel route into the racer’s AI.”

Del swore under his breath. Although an AI wasn’t as smart as an EI, it could easily take him and Mac to wherever the Traders wanted.

“We can pilot the racer,” Del told the mothership.

“That is unacceptable,” the ship answered.

Sirens continued to blare, and somewhere a clanging vibrated through the ship. Mac paused in the hatchway. “If a battle is going on out there, we may have a rough ride.”

“We won’t have any options,” Del said. “The mothership is locking us out of the racer’s controls.”

“If we stay here,” Mac said, “we could be killed by whoever is attacking this ship.”

“Maybe they’ve come for us,” Del said. If they launched into space, they
might
wrest control away from the racer AI. Then they could go where they wanted, assuming no one shot them down. But if they couldn’t control of the racer, it would take them away, either saving their lives or stealing them out from under the noses of their rescuers.

“We don’t know who is attacking,” Mac said. “Allieds? ESComm? ISC?”

“If someone has come to rescue us,” Del said, “we can meet up with them better if we’re in the racer than if we’re running around this ship.”

“Not if the racer won’t let us communicate with them. They might blow us up.”

“They might blow up this entire mothership!”

Mac clenched the side of the hatchway. “If they came to rescue us, they won’t do that.”

“Then they wouldn’t blow up a racer, either,” Del said. “If this really is a Eubian ship, it would rather kill us than let us be rescued. It’s that gruesome death-before-capture Trader thing.”

Mac smacked his palm against the hull. “I wish that damn alarm would stop screaming! It’s impossible to think straight.”

“What the hell,” Del said. “Let’s go! We’ll take our chances.”

“Deal.” Mac strode into the racer and Del jumped up after him. The moment he was onboard, the airlock reformed behind him, solidifying into the double-layered hull.

The racer spoke, sounding less metallic than the mothership. “Seat yourselves in the pilot and co-pilot’s chair. I will activate your exoskeletons.”

Del dropped into the co-pilot’s seat. He wasn’t sure he wanted his “exoskeleton” activated, whatever that meant, but he understood too little about star ships to know whether or not he needed it. His chair whirred and a cage folded around his body, enclosing him in a flexible network of struts, equipment, and virtual reality gear. A heads-up display lowered over his head, flooding him with data. He shoved it back so he could see the cockpit. Three-dimensional glyphs formed in the air, along with star maps and confusing displays of graphs and machine parts. One panel glowed with what looked like a weapons manifest.

“Uh, Mac,” he said. “This is military.”

Mac was studying the panels around his seat. “It’s fast. That’s what we need.”

“Yeah, fast and
armed.
It’s a freaking warship.”

“That, too.” Mac was toggling panels on the pilot’s controls, running through displays. “It’s been two decades since I’ve flown a fighter. Back then, we had even less data about ESComm space craft than we do now, and what little we knew then doesn’t match what I’m seeing here.”

“Can you fly this thing?”

“I can’t even get into the nav system. Look at that!” Mac pointed to a display of stars and numbers evolving in the air. “The AI is plotting our course. I can’t make it stop.”

The hum of engines rumbled through the craft, while lights pulsed in green, red, gold and blue. Mac swung his seat around to Del, ensconced in his exoskeleton like a fighter pilot. “If that’s your people out there, they would have brought Jag fighters, yes?”

“Hell, yeah.” Even with as little familiarity as Del had with the military, he knew Jag squads were the most effective units for in-close military operations. He ought to know. Four of his siblings had been fighter pilots: his sister Soz, his brother Kelric, his brother Althor, and his half brother Kurj, his namesake.

“Jagernauts are all telepaths, right?” Mac asked. “With their abilities enhanced by neural implants and links to their ships.”

“I’m not supposed to tell you anything about that,” Del said.

Clangs came from outside as the racer slid along its launch rail.

“Del, listen,” Mac said. “When we’re out of the mothership, nothing solid will be blocking your mind except the racer’s hull. I want you to drop your mental barriers and blast this area with a message. If any telepaths are out there, you might reach them.”

“I might,” Del said. “But the chances aren’t great. The electromagnetic fields of our brains fall off as the Coulomb force. That means that within a few meters of wherever we are, our reception of other people’s minds goes essentially to zero.”

“For normal people, yes. But don’t other telepaths have a better chance of picking you up? Especially Jagernauts, with all that augmentation you’re not supposed to talk about.”

Mac had a point. “They might.”

“Prepare for launch,” the racer said. Its front screens activated, showing the docking bay. The bay doors opened like mammoth jigsaw puzzle pieces pulling apart and a rumble shook through the ship. With a jerk that shoved Del back in his seat, the racer surged forward, hurtling along its rail. As the g-forces increased, the exoskeleton compensated, cushioning Del’s body. In a roar of engines, the racer shot past the bay doors and into space.

They hurtled out of a huge ship, a wheel rotating around a hub. Projections covered its hull, weapons ports and other structures Del didn’t recognize.

They were in the midst of a battle.

Small ships were firing on the wheel, gold and black vessels that darted around it, making up in speed what they lacked in size. Among them, deadliest of all, were four single-pilot fighters that glowed like alabaster. Jags. Smart missiles raced through space and beams flared. An incandescent explosion silently burst on the wheel and sent debris hurtling out into space.

“Those are Skolian ships attacking the wheel!” Del said.