Rift in the Races (56 page)

“Half our ships are not combat ready,” piped in the captain of the
Pershing
via video link; his ship was in especially dire straits. “I’ve only got one working tube and my lasers are gone. Our shields are barely at quarter strength and might as well not bother being that.”

“We have materials for repairs. We can have you back up as soon as possible,” said Captain Putin of the
Sarajevo
. “That
is
why we’re here.”

“That’s a matter of at least a week, Captain, and that’s just my ship. Some will be several weeks before they can fight, and only that with round-the-clock shifts and crews from other ships.”

“All the more reason to get it underway.” The captain of
Sarajevo
displayed a demeanor nearly as severe as Captain Asad’s.

“We can do both,” said Captain Asad, picking up the gist of the conversation right away. “Metumbe is right. We’ve got fifty-three ships, and all but six can fight. Hardly ‘half.’” The emphasis he put on it was clearly intended for the captain of the
Pershing
. “I agree we should prune them back while there are only eight to kill.”

“We don’t even know if they’ll engage,” said Captain Eugene. “The last of them ran off when we tried to finish them. They’re not stupid. They’ll just do it again.”

“There’s only one way to find out,” said Captain Asad. Both Putin and Metumbe clearly agreed with him on that, as did a number of others aboard the admiral’s ship.

“Three more have arrived,” said Ensign Nguyen, reporting to Captain Asad even as a captain on screen reported the same to the rest of the group.

“Well,” prompted Captain Asad, “how many should we wait for before we act? The whole point of pruning is to stay ahead of the growth. We wait, it will be too late.”

“We could always teleport back to Tinpoa and formulate a better plan while we repair our ships,” suggested Captain Eugene. “Our magician friends have figured out how to do it now.”

Contempt manifested itself in the collision of Captain Asad’s heavy black eyebrows, the two of them coming together like colliding fists. “If you’ve lost the stomach to command a
military
vessel,
Captain
, I will happily loan you my lieutenant here and he can run the ball for you.”

“Captain Asad, that is out of line, even for you,” snapped Admiral Jefferies.

“The enemy is right there,” insisted Captain Asad. “
Right
there.” He pointed twice emphatically at the monitor on his own bridge, but they all knew precisely what he meant. “We’re sitting here arguing while they increase their numbers. Admiral, this is ridiculous.”

The line of Admiral Jefferies’ mouth lengthened as his lips pressed tight. He nodded. “I believe you’re right about that.” At least three quarters of the captains seated with him appeared to agree, their expressions and nodding heads giving the evidence of it.

The admiral stood and straightened himself, looked directly into his conference feed. “Captains, we attack that Hostile group shortly after the last of the ships from Tinpoa are ready for action. I will send battle plans once they are finalized. Captains Asad, Putin, Metumbe and Hawthorne stay online. Colonel Pewter, you stay as well. The rest of you are dismissed.”

Chapter 39

T
he brute with the scimitar came below deck just as the sun bloodied the horizon, giving birth to another bastard day. Orli had somehow managed to fall asleep despite what had befallen her the night before, so her jailor took the opportunity to dump a bucket of water on her rather than a simple prod of his boot. “Get up,” he said as he grabbed her by a wrist and yanked her to her feet. In the scant moments it took her to blink some degree of awareness into place, he’d already wrestled an empty gunny sack over her head. The coarse cloth was still packed with fine wheat dust on the inside, and she began sneezing immediately. She had to resist the urge to rub her eyes. Doing so would only make the burning worse, grinding in even more of the powdery stuff.

He spun her around and jammed her face-first against the bulkhead, the thud of her forehead against the wood causing black spots to swim in her vision, little specks of anti-light that popped in and out of existence against the sandy-grained backdrop of the burlap.

He bound her wrists tightly behind her back and then, with robot-like strength, gripped her by the upper arm and jerked her along behind him out of the cell and up the stairs. For the first time in a long time she could feel the sun upon her skin, though there was little joy in it just then.

She heard the sound of something heavy being dragged across the deck, a gritty scratching across the wood. A fumbling of metal followed, and then a dull
whump
very close to her. She could hear footsteps approaching, booted, gauging by the sounds of heavy heels. Seagulls shrieked from seemingly everywhere.

Her own breathing sounded the loudest of all, panting fear that filled the bag with hot, moist air. The humidity stuck to her skin like sweat in the confines of the sack, giving the wheat dust a place to stick. It itched. It stuck to her lips and dried them out. It cleaved to her tongue when she tried to clear it off her lips. And still her eyes burned.

“Get in,” snarled the jailor. With no interval between command and thrust, he shoved her hard. The side of her leg, just above the knee, struck something solid, an edge, and she began to fall. The bruising grip of the jailor slowed her just before impact, preventing her from landing with the full force of freefall, but hardly more effort than what was required to prevent concussion or broken ribs. He mainly seemed concerned with directing her to fall in the right direction. She struck the side of her head against another edge about halfway down, and then slid into the corner of what could only be some kind of box. Someone grabbed her ankles, lifting them and shoving them forward, driving her knees into her chest, essentially throwing them at her. Then came a dull thud, which she felt through the floor against her back, and then even the light filtering through the sack was gone.

Muffled voices came through the darkness, from the other side of something, the wall or the side of the box, depending where she truly was. She could still feel the gentle rocking of the ship beneath her, but that is all she knew. On a ship. In a container of some sort. She was breathing very loud now, and each exhalation came hot and rapid as fear threatened to move toward terror.

She tried to shift her weight. Lying on her arms in the position she was in kinked her shoulder painfully. She hit her head against a side of her confinement as she tried to execute a whole-bodied hop. The burlap sack itched infuriatingly against her skin for the effort, and the dust made her cough.

“Shut up in there,” someone said. The command was followed by a loud thump that she felt where her back and arms pressed against what had to be wood.

She rolled over and scooted as far as she could, squirming backwards like a trussed-up snake. Reaching behind her with her tied wrists, she found the far side of the container she was in. With her feet and head, she managed to trace all around the edges.

Definitely a box. Or a crate. Something. Not quite high enough for her to sit up. It occurred to her that she was ‘in a box’ as Tytamon had explained to her before, the only thing required to teleport the unwilling anywhere. Or perhaps worse, it might be a box like the tarwood box in which Altin had hidden the mirror. What if they were going to shrink her down like some living wedding ring? Was that possible? Could she survive it? Was it already done? The thought sent cold waves of terror coursing through her.

The voices outside continued for a few moments, followed by the sound of footsteps walking off. She could feel them more than she could hear them.

More talking. Two voices again, one new, different than before, much lower, but too far off and impossible to make out. They might as well have been talking with their faces muffled in pillows. She wished they were muffled in pillows. Wished someone was smothering them to death.

Altin would find her. They were going to die so horribly at his hands. So horribly.

Or her father.

Or the Queen.

Someone.

A third voice joined the conversation. She could tell it was a woman’s this time. She hadn’t heard it before. She hadn’t felt the footsteps either.

Orli made out one of the male voices saying, “About time.” Clearly agitated. Louder, “Get on with it.”

The woman replied with something inaudible. Then silence for a moment, followed by footsteps coming closer to the box, lighter tread than any of the others had been. The woman’s voice sounded again, mumbling this time, barely audible. And then the floor beneath Orli wasn’t rocking anymore.

She lay there for a moment trying to calm herself. Obviously she was off the boat, but she stared into the unremitting darkness, blind gaze darting about, side to side, upwards, seeking reflexively for something to latch on to. There was nothing. She knew what had happened, though.

New sounds came to her then, plenty of them. Too many. Some were voices, many of them, a few nearby, though none distinct, all lost in the general din of what sounded like a crowd gathered beyond the box. Occasionally she made out a squawk or other inarticulate noise, animal certainly, more than one sounding very loud. Angry, she thought. Or scared.

Like Orli was.

She focused on picking out words from the voices closest to where she lay curled up in her tiny prison. She could make out some of it, for they had to speak loudly sometimes to be heard over the rising ruckus of some outraged creature or another nearby, but not enough to make sense of anything. “Hard to orchestrate,” she heard from one of them, a very deep voice. Someone else said, “What difference does it make?” That one had a heavy accent, entirely unlike any she’d heard before. Then another voice said, “Just sell your part if you expect another contract.” That voice was barely audible, perhaps farther away, but vaguely familiar. Then the accented voice mumbled something else, of which the only word Orli caught was “irregular.”

Whoever was out there must have left after that because Orli could hear nothing nearby for quite a while. If hearing could be stretched, reached or forced in any way, she tried them all. But all she could pick up was the wood-muffled drone of some considerable cacophony beyond.

The bag on her head drove her to fuming as she lay there in the dark, its scratchy surface now a fixation in the absence of anything else to focus on. She shuffled around, trying to mash her head against the side of her confinement in such a way as to at least push the material off her face, even just a little. The dust only made the itchiness all the worse, so eventually she stopped thrashing and just lay there listening.

Slowly, smells began to seep into the darkness, filtering through the now-familiar scent of the sack. Something rank. The acridity of sweaty bodies and human excrement. Manure too, and animal smells, lots of them. And others, odors foul and, occasionally, exotically perfumed. Slowly these made their way into her small box. She grabbed on to each one, tried to isolate it, tried to recognize what it meant. There was one, a floral scent, that pleased her. It came wafting in, a brief reprieve of beautiful, tropical fragrance. Somehow it managed to raise itself atop the rest, a sweetness floating upon an ocean of bile and filth. She closed her eyes and clung to it, held it like the last line preventing her from a fall. She let it pillow her as she drifted off.

Something dark was before her. Great and dark, a darkness that somehow gave light to the regular darkness. As if black had only seemed black until this arrived. It was angry, but not malevolent. She knew that somehow. But angry. And very sad. It seemed to swell at her, to bloat the darkness in a rounded way, like a black sun viewed against a starless sky, a corona of pink limning it in a gentle glow akin to the silver lining of a cloud. She felt sorry for it. Felt sad. Wronged.

Someone kicked the side of the crate and woke her. She blinked uselessly into the darkness. Present darkness. Another blow struck the side of the box. “Wake up, darlin’,” came the heavy accent she recognized from earlier.

The sandy-hued light that had filtered through the sack suddenly came back, and dim as it was, she had to blink a few times as her eyes adjusted to relative brightness. Someone reached into the box as she was doing so and pulled off the bag, nearly blinding her with new levels of brilliance before she’d acclimated to the last. She still couldn’t see clearly as she was roughly hauled to her feet and dragged up and over the edge of the chest in which she’d been.

She looked down at it. A trunk. A great travel trunk, built just the right size to make carrying people around convenient and compact. There were scratch marks on the roof and several of the sides. She was not the first person to be dumped inside.

Strong hands spun her around to face a rough-hewn wall. Fingernails dug into her arms as she was manipulated in this way, though not quite enough to break the skin. “Now don’t try anything stupid,” said the accented voice from behind her. “I can’t afford to hurt you, now.”

Orli’s hands were suddenly free.

She spun and took a swing at the speaker, but he caught her wrist as easily as if she’d simply handed it to him.