Rift in the Races (34 page)

The spectacle of the stars was not the kind of beauty that could hold her for long, not even with him there to share it. He knew it, had known it, and that sigh was proof beyond anything she could say. She didn’t want to be out here. She never would. Deep inside he completely understood. He was selfish to have asked her to come. Always selfish. He was doing it again. Like he always did.

Somehow she detected the change in him, the change her change had wrought. She turned and saw his lip begin to curl, the derision shaping a snarl of self-contempt. She knew him well enough to recognize that much.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s find them.”

An apology began to shape itself on his lips, but she stopped him, reading it in his eyes. “It’s okay, Altin. I’m fine. We do have a job to do. Let’s just get it done, okay?”

He started a different protest, one she intercepted just as easily and dismissed with a shake of her head. She stood firm, eyebrows high and expectant. She cocked her head impatiently toward the stars beyond the battlements. “Let’s go.”

A long breath. Shame dripped inside him like mucus running down a wall. He knew he should take her back, but he allowed himself to take what fate saw fit to give instead. That was the way of the selfish. It came easily to him, like a reflex.

“I have one thing I have to do first,” he said. “I have to see if the Hostiles are in pursuit of the ships, find out if the one I encountered was in the vanguard or just running late. Either way, we need to know. They will need to know.”

“How will you find them?”

“I spent some time at the Seers Guild Hall and did some research on finding missing ships, albeit the seafaring kind. I also did some research on seeing objects in motion. There was an old naturalist by the name of Speekes Beeglethorpe, a C-ranked seer who developed what he called ‘Wake Sight.’ He used it to observe snow drakes a few hundred years ago because he wasn’t strong enough to keep up with them with his seeing spells. It’s a pretty obscure spell, and nobody ever looked at it because he was only a C—a shame, he was a clever man—but I think I can modify it to catch your ships, especially if I use the Liquefying Stone.”

“What’s it do?”

“Well, I have to find a place I know, but I can park my sight somewhere, and if I can catch a glimpse of an object, Wake Sight will attach itself to the object and then, essentially, dangle along in its wake as if the object had been caught by a rope.”

“They call that water skiing where I come from,” she laughed.

“Well, whatever we call it, it’s going to take some time. But I really must do it. We can’t, in good conscience, be so near to your friends without doing what we can to make sure they are as safe as they believe they are. If they are, we go on. If not, we’ll make them safe, and then go on.”

She nodded.

He began by casting the divination spell again. He wanted to get the distance right. He wasn’t sure it would work, but it was worth a try. Orli started laughing when he began singing what she recognized as the children’s song “My Cat’s Paw” with its silly rhymes and even sillier lyrics—she’d learned it from Pernie as part of the child’s having helped teach her the common tongue of Kurr—which broke his concentration on the spell. If it hadn’t been for the shock and the headache the disruption caused, he might have laughed too. He was able to make her feel suitably guilty, for which he got a series of soft kisses on his temples, which made the interruption worthwhile. But in the end, he had to get back to work.

When the divination was done, he sent a seeing stone to the place that fit with the sense of distance he’d divined. He followed that up with another seeing stone, and then with his sight directly, amplified by the Liquefying Stone he held in his hand and further augmented by the cadences of Wake Sight woven in.

His vision, now disembodied from his corporeal form, placed him, as if alone, out in the vastness of space. He turned his view around and stared back in the direction he knew his tower, his body and his beloved to be. And then he waited, peering into the distance, waiting for the sight of a single growing star, the star that would split and become the swarm of fleet ships.

He was suddenly glad for the time he’d spent trying to emulate the speed of the fleet ships when he’d been using this seeing spell to search for Hostiles. He hadn’t gotten anywhere near that remarkable speed, but he had gotten incredibly fast just the same. He felt he might need it to get close enough for Wake Sight to catch hold.

Soon enough, he saw the tiny growing light, the “star” that moved against the rest. As before, and at a particular intensity, it split and the smaller lights began to expand across the sky. He picked the one that seemed to be coming the most directly toward him. He angled himself upwards on a course running away from their approach but on a line that would ultimately intersect with that of the oncoming ship—or at least he hoped it would. The exercise reminded him of playing ball with Gimmel when he was young, trying to run for a ball that had been lobbed too far over his head.

The speed with which he propelled his vision did slow the relative perspective down, but not by much. However, it was enough, and as the ship shot by, barely even a blur, Wake Sight’s effect caught hold and yanked Altin’s vision with it. It happened so fast, for a moment he thought he’d done something wrong. One moment he was alone amongst the stars, and the next, the stars were gone. Or perhaps more accurately, and upon more careful observation, they were different.

When he’d recovered from the surprise, he moved his vision around and oriented it on the ship he’d “caught.” From his perspective, he maintained a distance behind the ship of around one hundred spans and perhaps twenty above the dorsal hull. Even from that distance, the ship looked vast, an enormous length of steel plates stretching away from him for an additional three hundred spans, a seeming cityscape of metal and gleaming lights, a geometry of indescribable alien constructs illuminated spectacularly as if by thousands of brightly glowing gems.

Directly in front of the ship was a cluster of stars, gathered together as if to make a target for its flight, but there were no stars on either side of him anywhere. Those were simply gone. He spun his view around to look behind him. There were stars back there as well. The same narrow sort of patch as could be seen looking out ahead. It was as if all of space had become a giant black tunnel and only at either end could stars be seen. An interesting effect that he credited as some outcome of traveling near the Earth fleet’s “light speeds.” Orli’s people spent a lot of time on that subject, so it seemed likely that it was.

He didn’t have time to marvel at it long, though, for he had work to do. He’d finally caught a ship. He took note of a large disc on the topside of the ship. He studied it and fixed it as a place in his mind. He could use that as a starting point from which he could do the work he needed to do.

He let go of the spell and once again found himself standing atop his tower, Orli nearby gazing out over the battlements. She heard the rustle of his robes and turned to him. “Well,” she said, “did it work?”

“It did. I think I have a location I think I can use, at least for a scrying spell. Let us find out.”

He went to the scrying basin and quickly conjured up the disc that he had seen at the back of the ship in whose wake he had been following. He locked the image in place and stood to face Orli triumphantly. “And just like that, we have a ship.”

Orli peered into the scrying basin, and nodded, recognizing the ship. “That’s the
NTA II
,” she said. “I love those guys. Their captain is reasonable and very sweet. Unlike the asshole my captain is.”

“Was,” he corrected. “Unlike your captain
was
.”

“Oh, he still is an asshole,” she said, grinning wickedly. “But I know what you meant.” She smiled, happy at the thought of life forever free of Captain Asad.

“What do the initials stand for? Most of your ships have names, as I recall.”

“Northern Trade Alliance. It’s a big corporate exo-nation. They pretty much own everything on Earth now.” She could tell immediately from the look on his face that he had no translation for that. It was too complicated, and too boring to explain, so she added simply, “Trust me, you can figure out everything you need to know just by asking yourself what kind of people would name a ship something like that.”

He nodded, making a mental note to learn more when they had time. For now, he wanted to get to the business of ensuring the ships were safe from Hostile pursuit. He could peek inside, see what was happening on the bridge, and then, if there was no panic there, he could anchor his vision to the hull of the ship and trail out on a cord of mana to ever-increasing distances behind it like a fisherman letting out line. It wouldn’t be perfect, but once he found the distances between ships, he could make a reasonable survey of the space behind them. But it was going to take some time.

“I need to go see it now. I have to do some new things, playing back and forth with the scrying spell being where it is, and place, and some other things. It’s going to be tricky, and I won’t be able to speak to you for a while. It’s best if you don’t break the spell.” He felt guilty saying it, as if he were scolding her for having a bit of fun at his expense earlier.

“I know,” she said, feigning petulance. “I pay attention.”

“I’m sorry. I did not mean to imply—” He knew he shouldn’t have said that last part.

She laughed, putting a pair of fingers on his mouth to stop the apology. “I’m just teasing. You don’t have to be so nice
all
the time. I’m not made of glass, you know.”

“You do that a lot,” he said.

“I know. It’s fun.” She grinned. “Now cast your spell.”

He did. And he spent so long in the complex seeing spell that eventually Orli went down stairs and began poking around, which in turn led to her settling down on his bed to read one of his magic books picked at random from the shelf.
Advanced Transmutation: Changing, Change and Reverse Metamorphoses
. She couldn’t make out the language of the incantations themselves, but she could read most of the spell descriptions. She flipped through the pages, becoming more and more amazed with each turn. On page sixty-two she discovered that Altin really could have turned Roberto into a dog that first day in sick bay. Or a toad. The thought made her mind wander to the young boy, Peety, whom she had met her first day on Prosperion. He’d had a toad. She wondered if maybe that toad had once been human. What could bring it back? A kiss? Just like a fairytale!

It seemed impossible, but it was real, or at least it appeared to be real. Which meant there had to be some explanation for how it all worked. She wondered what her people were missing in the same sort of way that Altin grumbled about his world lacking so much scientific experience. Whatever Altin’s magic was, she knew there were scientific reasons for it. Some kind of physics. There had to be. But regardless of whatever that was, the possibilities were fascinating.

She scoured the rest of the spell description, shaking her head in awe and disbelief. A lot of what she read, even the parts that made sense, made little sense in the broader context of meaning. Still, it was mesmerizing to read. The more she read, the greater the discussion of mana and transformation of shape got, the more she marveled at the accumulation and dissipation of mass and energy these people were capable of. She was not a physicist, but she had also grown up on a spaceship. There really shouldn’t be a way to turn a hundred-and-seventy-pound pilot into a seventy-pound dog, much less into a toad that would likely weigh less than a pound. Where did the extra mass go? And the stuff about direct dissipation of mass frightened her too much to even contemplate. If she read it right, a transmuter could actually unbind a person’s energy. What the hell did that mean? Fission? If it even remotely meant what she thought it meant, it was too much power to be trusted to a single person. Wasn’t it?

She determined to ask Altin about it when he was done, not because she was afraid he’d do it someday, but more because she was envious. If she was honest, she wished she could do it. Not to dissipate people into oblivion, of course, but just to be powerful, to be able to dictate her own destiny. To unmake things that she didn’t like. How incredible would that be? She knew she probably wouldn’t understand any answers that Altin gave—the blind woman asking him to explain the color blue—but if nothing else it would be fun to watch him try.

She went back to leafing through the book. Eventually, by the time she’d reached page two hundred and six, he came down looking for her.

“There you are,” he said. “I wondered where you’d gone.”

“Not like I could get very far,” she said. “That took a while. Won’t your people be scandalized when they find out we’ve been up here alone in space all this time?”

His eyes widened in horror, and the color began to drain from his face. She’d only wanted to make him blush, but this was far more fun. Besides, waiting had put her in a mood.

“Your reputation!” he gasped. “My selfishness will ruin you. I can’t believe how stupid I am.”

She grinned and let him panic for a moment before relenting. “You’re such a worrier,” she said. “You can send me back alone. Nobody knows I am here, remember?”

“That is true,” he agreed. “But still. The impropriety. I should have sent you back before I started all of that. You encourage me with your teasing. Make me forget myself. And it’s not me that need worry. It’s you who has the highest stakes. We jeopardize your relationships, especially with people as powerful as the Queen. You are in a rare position; it would be unwise to risk connections of that kind.”