Flight of the Vajra (11 page)

The cabins of the
Vajra
was entirely
reconfigurable, like the rest of the ship’s hull around it. Right now I was in
get-us-out-of-here-in-a-hurry mode, so the main cabin consisted of nothing more
than a control surface for the pilot and acceleration couches for up to four
passengers. Most all the fixtures were the greenish hue and watery translucency
of industrial-grade glass, an echo of the water we’d just plowed through.

I caught a look at Angharad as she was settling
into the seat and letting it cocoon her; her lips were moving fast and her eyes
were closed. Enid, on the other hand, had her eyes open wide and her knuckles
grinding hard against each other in her lap.

Everyone’s got their own way of praying, I
thought.

Vajra,
I commanded,
give us an escape
maneuver.

Our stomachs flattened against the backs of our chests
as the
Vajra
’s repulsor field put a crater into the water and sand
below, and the ship trailed a ribbon of mist as it shot upwards. A pity there
was no one below us to see, as they might well have been treated to a nice
rainbow.

Looked like I had been right about whoever was
taking control: they’d seized not only the groundside controls, but the
planetary defense network, too. That network had nodes in orbit from around
three hundred fifty kilometers up all the way out to some thirty-five thousand.
What it didn’t have in sophistication it made up for in sheer numbers: anyone
who flew into all that would be worried to death pretty quickly as each
satellite locked onto you, closed in and bombarded you at close range with
everything from protomic restraints (e.g., my jacket lining, or Gunjita’s gunk)
to hard alpha radiation. Anything that didn’t want to be treated to such a
hard-luck breakfast had to ride one of the planetary elevators like everyone
else. Such defense systems were a great exploitation of the time and effort it
took to traverse the atmosphere of a planet to make an entanglement jump, and
the time it took to approach a planet after making such a jump.

The defense nodes here had three disadvantages,
and I planned on exploiting all of them. One: this particular grid had mostly
been built to stop
external
attacks. It wasn’t as good at keeping
someone from leaving the planet. Such things did exist, but they were that much
pricier and were deployed around worlds that were either a little more
populated, a little more strategically important . . . or home to the
life-plus-twenty-five types. You didn’t find them on resort worlds, where more
people wanted to get in and stay than get out.

Two: those types of defense grids were definitely
not designed to stop someone leaving in a ship made mostly out of black-market protomics.

Three: from what I could tell, the defense grid
was still in friendly hands, and I had a valid exit visa.

By the time we were ten percent of the way through
the defense grid, nothing had happened.

At the twenty percent mark, nothing went right on
happening. Keep it up, I thought.

At thirty percent, I gave into temptation and
switched on the planetary news. It was broadcasting nothing but standby signals.
I said something intemperate out loud that made Enid sock me in the arm and demand
to know what I was getting so uptight about.

At fifty percent, the news feed cut out entirely.
I tasted sweat from my upper lip and blood from inside my cheek from where I’d
unthinkingly chewed it.

At seventy percent, a whole galaxy of dots on the
screen in front of me started to grow brighter and closer.

I didn’t try to duck away. I found the lowest and
nearest orbiter and aimed right at it to cut down the amount of possible
engagement. Since those dumbasses were programmed to let the closest node to an
aggressor take precedence, all I had to do was run up to them, smack them on
the nose and shout
Tag! You’re it!

Two of them took potshots at me with an alpha beam
once they got close enough. Only a minimal amount of the hull boiled off before
it extruded a few strategically-aimed parabolic reflectors and used those to
burn out the
other
nodes chasing us from behind. Twiddle the hull’s
index of refraction a bit, eject a well-timed cloud of tinsel, and I could
confuse any projectiles aimed at us into missing just enough.

A part of me wondered, if this coup failed,
whether or not I’d be billed for making this mess. Somehow I doubted it.

And then finally came the moment when there was
nothing in front of us but space and sun.

Goodbye, Cytheria, I thought. A shame I never got
to go surfing.

I kicked in the entanglement engine and sent the
Vajra
farther from Cytheria than light had traveled in the entire time I had been
alive.

For what seemed like minutes on end
I
heard nothing but the sound of the other two getting their breath. I suspected Enid
and Angharad were too intimidated by everything that had just happened to offer
the first word, but Enid destroyed that theory.

“I need . . . a drink,” she said.

I turned around and got my first look at them
since we’d crammed ourselves into the
Vajra.
Enid looked haggard, but intact:
sweat had run down from her face and streaked her hair, and had made the hollow
of her throat into a shiny little bowl. Angharad looked calm, but her eyes had
the slightly-too-wide look of someone doing their best not to fall right to
pieces where they sat.

“By ‘drink’, do you mean ‘alcohol’?” I said. “Because
I think we all could use a shot after that. —Okay, maybe not you, Your Grace.”
I remotely undid everyone’s seat cushions and let them move a little more
freely. They were still belted in, but they could undo that if they wanted to.

I heard a strange choking noise from somewhere,
over and over. I looked up and realized it was Enid. She was giggling. Hand
over her mouth, she was giggling—and then she pressed her hand down hard when
she started to laugh full-tilt.

Angharad raised a hand, made her trademark gesture
of welcome and peace, and matched it with a limp smile.

Enid was trying to say something, but it wouldn’t
come out between her laugher. Finally, the sibilants and fricatives she was
trying to puzzle together into something like speech started to make sense: “Y-you
s-sure . . . sure earned your d-driver’s fee with
that
one!”

She put her hand back over her mouth and kept on
quaking in her seat. There’s gonna be tears any moment now, I told myself. That’s
how it works: first you’re numb, then you laugh, then you cry.

I undid my straps, toggled on the gravity by
setting the crew area of the ship to rotating, and got up. The protomics in
most people’s footwear would automatically link with the flooring and keep them
from floating around like so many goldfish in a pond, but with guests it’s
always good courtesy to give them a proper 1G field anyway.

I stood next to Angharad to get a better look at
her. She looked a little dazed, but for all I knew she could have been keeping
in a dozen times the fear and trembling Enid was letting out.

“This is the . . . fifth? The fifth time
I have been attacked,” she said, her voice sounding rather rusty from the
gauntlet she’d just run. “But there was never a loss of life before. Mimu and
Wani, and all the rest who died . . . I will need to pray for their
spirits. There were twelve in my retinue when I arrived, and now it seems there
are none.”

“I’m sorry.”

It never sounds sincere to my own ears when I say
that, but when she met my gaze after a moment, it looked to me like she thought
I was sincere. That’s gonna take getting used to, I thought.

“Mimu and Wani were never meant to be my honor
guard,” she went on. “They were originally hired as only my personal
assistants, but in time they . . . they demanded that they take on
that role. They trained themselves for it. It was not something I had
demanded
of them. They gave it freely . . . and both they and I knew that
meant there might come a day like this.” She cupped her hands at her navel and
lowered her eyes.

Enid’s morbid giggling had died down, and she was
now wiping at her eyes and the sides of her face with an extrusion of her
sleeve. “Yeah,” she said a moment after Angharad finished speaking, “but
. . . don’t ever ask me to watch you leave someone behind again,
okay?”

“When people are
shooting
at you, you don’t
always have that option.”

Me saying that only seemed to make Enid angrier,
but at that point I figured she needed to choke it down. She’d had the nerve to
charge the guards herself, to risk her own neck, and whether that was due to
NKF or real-life training or just plain youthful brass, it hardly mattered.
None of those things give you anything to deal with the psychological (let
alone social) consequences of what you do with it, any more than a gun gives
you a way to plug a mistaken bullet hole. There was a reason people said NKF
was short for “Never Killed Flesh.” If she hadn’t learned that yet, it was high
time.

I popped open one of the little storage cubes in
the cabin’s port wall, took out a couple of syringe-sized-and-shaped one-shots
of Killeen Double Malt (aged 14 solar years), placed one in Enid’s free hand
and wrapped her fingers around it. “You being emancipated,” I said, “I figured
offering you the stiff stuff wouldn’t be a mistake.”

Enid looked at the bottle, then put the end in her
mouth and chased it all down in one go. She let out a long enough breath after
that to fill three of any one of my own lungs.

Angharad raised her head at last. She didn’t look
rattled anymore—no blind stare, no shaky fingers. She was even smiling again,
the same small but serene smile she always seemed to have in reserve.

“Thank you,” she said. “I neglected to say it
earlier, but . . . thank you. You and Mimu and Wani risked more than
I would ever dare ask from anyone. I am in their debt, but I am in your debt by
far more.”

I downed a mouthful from my own bottle of Killeen—I
was tempted to follow Enid’s example, but if someone here had to remain sober
and functional, it was me—and folded myself in half in her direction as a kind
of an in-place bow.

“I take it you’re looking for a way to pay back
that debt,” I said.

“Whatever payment there could be for such a thing,
yes.”

“Okay.” I leaned forward, not a bow this time but
as a way to show her my I-mean-business face. “Just be honest with me. Did you
have even the slightest inkling you were going to go out on stage and then have
all planetwide hell break loose?”

Even with a full dose of Killeen in her, Enid still
seemed capable of feeling enough surprise to twitch like a poked bird.
Angharad, when I looked back at her, had gone back to looking into her
loosely-clasped fingers, but she retreated into that only for a moment.

“That threat has always been a possibility for me
ever since I chose to travel freely and leave Kathayagara behind all the more,”
Angharad said. “We—my retinue and I, and some of the other Achitraka members—we
had discussed the issue before, without formally resolving anything. I did not
want to hide the way my predecessors have, to wall myself up behind privilege
and protection that others could not afford. The Achitraka was of the opinion
that I was risking too much for the sake of making a point. I was of the
opinion that to risk nothing at all was to make an even worse point.”

I’m with you on that, I thought. I just don’t know
how far.

Out loud I said, “And I take it protection from
the IPS was out of the question.”

“On that issue they were adamant, yes.”

I didn’t blame them. Ever since its inception, the
Achitraka had done everything in its power to keep the fine folks of the
Interplanetary Protectorate Service out of their business, up to and including
hiring and training their own bodyguards. The Achitraka cared more about its
sovereignty than the fact that any one IPS officer could provide better
protection than any dozen of their own home-grown men. Judging from the
hesitant tone in Angharad’s voice, I wasn’t the only one mulling the long-term
value of this stance.

“So . . . ” Angharad’s voice fluttered a
bit. “This was, in some ways, the culmination of something I had myself started
some time ago. Now people are dead because of it—because of me. You are right
in that the fact they were aware of the dangers does not make it any less
regrettable.”

Enid had her hand tight enough around her empty
bottle that I worried she was going to try and give her pitching arm some
close-quarters exercise, with someone’s forehead as the target. Probably
Angharad’s. I decided to give Angharad a sanded-down version of the excoriation
Enid was most likely hatching.

“Look,” I said. I almost gestured at her with the
bottle but stopped myself. “
Nobody’s
going to think you’re happy about
what happened.” I let my mouth form a cracked smile. “And if they
do
pull anything that dumb, then Enid here has my permission to kick in their
teeth.”

“I don’t need your permission to do
that
,”
Enid giggled back.

It was comforting to know that Angharad wasn’t
immune from ripping herself up as badly as any of the rest of us were.
Especially me. But it was even better to see Angharad smile again and nod
agreement to both of us.

“We’re lucky, you know,” I added. “The biggest reason
we got out of there was because we got lucky. Next time, you can count on the
other guys being a little more competent and our luck not being anywhere nearly
that profitable. And as long as you’re alive, Your Grace, there’s always gonna
be a next time.”

A lot of uncomfortable silence followed my words,
so I changed the subject.

“The first thing we should do is get you back to
Kathayagara and sort things out there,” I said. “The sooner people know you
weren’t either kidnapped or killed, the better. Especially if it’s you being
the one to bring them the word.” And we might as well do it in person, too, I
thought. Sending a message somewhere via the entanglement relay network (the
“jumpnet”) was only incrementally faster than going there yourself in the first
place. After all, the whole way the jumpnet worked was via a bucket brigade of
entanglement-engine-equipped drones, which leapt between worlds to synchronize
the contents of the different planets’ networks with each other. If you were
headed somewhere on your own, the only reason the jumpnet was faster than you
was because it was unmanned.

“I agree.” Angharad looked towards Enid. “And I
have not forgotten about your father, either.”

Enid blinked and realized she was on the spot.
Still
want to go it alone?
I almost said, but held it in and let her cobble
together an answer.

“I did promise you that much,” Angharad went on.

“Damn straight you did!”

Oh, you spacebrats, I thought. When the whole
universe is your hometown, you don’t think twice about, oh, saying things like
Damn
straight
to the Kathaya Herself. Who was it that said the reason spacebrats
don’t have tact or manners is because they don’t fit in a single-unit cargo
bin? But that petulance only made Angharad look all the more heartened.

Enid looked at the bottle, probably checking if
there was anything left she could pour down her throat before saying what came
next. “But if there’s something more important you have to do—I mean, there’s
probably two hundred other more important things
you
have to do—far be
it from me to get in the way, right?”

“This is what’s important.”

“You don’t have to.”

“No, no. There is no ‘have to’ here. I would go
with you because I choose to.”

I dove in before Enid had a chance to get even
more petulant. “Let’s check in with home base first,” I said. “Not just for the
sake of figuring priorities, but also getting straight any story we’d want to
tell the rest of the universe.”

“I imagine the truth will more than suffice.”

“It’s not just that. If anyone takes too close a
look at this ship, they’re going to start asking some deeply nosy questions
about what I was doing on Cytheria, and whether or not I was taking advantage
of the chaos to do other things, and all the
other
paranoid stupid
questions that are the stock-in-trade of law enforcement.”

“Then let me ask: were you attempting any such
thing?”

“No.”

“Good
grief
, no,” Enid declared.

“Then consider the matter settled; they must take
my word about your good intentions on face value. Although I must ask: what precisely
was it that prompted you to involve yourself?”

It was my turn to sit under her gaze and say
nothing for long seconds, something Enid looked like she was enjoying. The only
answer that came to mind was the one nobody alive would believe: that sometimes
you find yourself facing a situation from which there’s no turning away, and in
those moments you act because the prospect of
not
doing anything would
eat you alive.

No, nobody would believe that if I said it—except
maybe the one person asking me right now, I thought. And she’s asking because
she wants to see if her instincts about me are spot-on.

“There are some things you just don’t
. . .
not
do,” I finally said. “You know I’m an apostate, but
that doesn’t mean I can pretend you’re disposable.”

Enid put the bottle, empty as it was, to her
mouth. “You’d sure get a beating from
someone
for it if you did.”

Angharad shook her head. “For all of those who
believe I am indispensable, there are just as many—if not more—who are
indifferent or hostile. I will let the truth of me be found in the actions of
others—such as yourselves.”

Enid handed me her empty bottle instead of,
thankfully, flinging it somewhere. “Half the time, you make it sound like you
don’t even
exist.
”

“In some ways you are entirely correct.”

The left half of Enid’s faced scrunched in
disbelief. I bet she has no idea how unintentionally amusing she looks when she
does that, I thought, and then immediately dragged myself back into line.

“The Supreme Kathaya is a role to be filled,”
Angharad went on. “Others filled it before I was here and others will fill it
after I have left. I knew as soon as I took this role, there would be nothing
left of ‘me’. People would no longer see ‘Angharad’, but only ‘Her Grace the
Supreme Kathaya’. I expected this. In fact, I welcomed it. I welcomed it
because I knew there would be no other way to properly express the Old Way except
by such an embodiment. Every Kathaya before me has been an embodiment of the
Old Way—a living incarnation of what it means to be such a thing. We have any
number of writings that defend the Old Way, but citing them is not the best
defense of it. The best defense of the Old Way is in living it, and living it
well. In the position I am in, I have no choice but to live it completely—even
perhaps if that leaves nothing of the old ‘me’ behind. And I do not shrink from
it. I welcome it.”