The Gathering Flame (25 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Gathering Flame
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“They won’t talk to you.”
“I think they will,” he said. “Come on, Admiral. I’ve been stuck on-planet for months. Let’s go.”
 
(GALCENIAN DATING 966 A.F.; ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 30 VERATINA)
 
E
MANA MARKET on Sapne had never been a good port for free-spacers. The powerful merchant combines that handled most of the off-world trade preferred to deal with the shipping lines running out of Gyffer or Mandeyn. Independent carriers like
Meritorious Reward
—whose pilot/apprentice was a hazel-eyed youth giving his name, truthfully, as Jos Metadi and his age, somewhat less truthfully, as twenty years Galcenian—had to make do with onetime deals, mostly stuff either too small or too irregular for the big firms to handle.
Sometimes, if rarely, an independent could make a high profit carrying material that was risky to work with or that needed emergency delivery. The
Merry
had picked up one such cargo on Kiin-Aloq, a load of self-replicating antiviral agents in sealed metal crates, each crate stenciled with a fearsome list of handling instructions and a warning: IF NOT USED BY—a Kiin-Aloqan date in the perilously near future—DESTROY UNOPENED. To
Meritorious Reward
’s captain and crew, the bonus paid for a successful delivery in half the usual time more than offset the danger involved in making a high-speed run with hazardous cargo.
Not until the
Merry
set down at Emana market did anyone learn the truth of the situation: there was plague in the spaceport, fast-acting and deadly, and the shipping firms out of Mandeyn, Gyffer, and Cronn no longer stopped there at all.
“Pulled out and gone home,” said the
Merry
’s captain to the members of the crew. “No reps left in port. The Red Shift Line lost a dozen crew members off one ship the last time they came in here, and that was all it took. Nobody’s coming to Emana Market now but the little guys—and once the word gets out, they won’t be showing up either.”
He took a long drink of his cha’a. “
I
certainly won’t be.”
“That’s all right for next time,” said the
Merry
’s first mate. “But what do we do about the cargo?”
Silence fell over the mess table. The sealed metal cargo crates in the main hold suddenly took on an ominous, if invisible, presence at the meal. Jos Metadi paused in eating his reconstituted water-grain frumenty and tried to convert Kiin-Aloqan dates into the Galcenian ones used on the
Merry
.
“Two and a half ship-days,” he said aloud when he’d done.
The others stared at him.
“Until the cargo turns bad,” he explained. “That’s all we’ve got.”
The first mate looked at the captain. “The kid’s right. And Sapne runs point-seven-five ship-days to one planetary. If we don’t off-load those crates before close of local business hours, the buyer is likely to refuse delivery. And there goes our bonus. Hell, there goes our pay.”
“It’s consigned to Sapne Health and Ecology. I’ve been trying to raise them for an hour now,” the captain said. “Nobody answers at the local office. I’m going to try the branches next. Meanwhile—” He turned to Lenar Covain, the
Merry
’s purser. “—you start talking to bankers on another comm line. I want the bonus transferred to our account as soon as those crates touch dirt.”
“We can’t lift without fuel, Cap’n,” the chief engineer said. “Not and get anywhere useful after. This high-speed run took more than I liked.”
“Sapne doesn’t take off-world credit,” the purser said. “Says so in the port guide. Until we get that bonus we can’t pay for anything.”
“Order it anyway,” the captain said. “We’ll pay ‘em when we get paid. Now you all have jobs to do. Do ’em.”
It was two hours, ship-time, before any response came in from Sapne H-and-Eco.
Meritorious Reward
remained ramp-up and lock-sealed. Jos occupied himself down in the main hold, helping to lash the heavy crates onto nullgrav cargo sleds and steer them into position near the loading doors. As the
Merry
’s pilot/apprentice he didn’t have to work cargo, but sitting still and doing nothing had never been his idea of a good time.
Besides, the view from the pilothouse had spooked him. The grainy flatscreen monitors up there relayed images from the port outside, and the prospect wasn’t encouraging: no atmospheric-craft activity in the open sky above Emana Market, no ground or low-level vehicles, no dockworkers. He’d seen ships, though, too many ships in port for the landing area to seem so dead. Time wasted dirtside was money lost, and the spacecraft on the landing field should have bustled with furious activity. Instead they were silent, ramps up and dark.
An hour before five-time, local, the captain and the loadmaster came down to the hold looking worried.
“All right,” the loadmaster said. “We’ve got some people from H-and-Eco coming over to make pickup. They want those crates out on the field and ready when they get here, so get moving.”
The crew swung into action. The loading gang took their places, two to a crate, and Jos hit the switch that opened the cargo doors. The multiply layered metal wall that was the hull of
Meritorious Reward
split and came gaping open. The stark blue sky and glaring sunlight of equatorial Sapne blazed into the shadowed hold, and the first of the cargo sleds began its rumbling progress forward.
A pod of high-speed cargo haulers from H-and-Eco roared onto the field as the last of the sleds cleared the hold. A driver and a freight handler—both wearing full protective gear, all the way down to masks, spats, and gloves—jumped out of the lead cab and started wrestling the crates into the back of their hauler.
“Come on!” the driver yelled at the
Merry
’s master rigger, a big Casheline named Treece. “Wind’s gonna change. We better be gone before the dust starts blowin’ or none of this stuff’s gonna do any good.”
“Then why the hell couldn’t you be ready when we set down?” demanded the rigger.
“Nobody’s left in the office here. We’re from the next district over; came soon’s we got word.”
Treece swore aloud and turned to the other members of the cargo team. “All right!” he shouted. “You heard the man. The wind’s gonna change—I want this job finished.”
As each hauler was loaded it headed off to the east. The last of the crates went into place not quite a ship’s hour later. Off to the west, a line of red, like a moving cliff, appeared—a dust storm, a big one, heading down. The last cargo hauler pulled away from the field so fast that its nullgravs howled under the strain.
“Seal her up!” Treece shouted, and Jos hit the button to bring the doors of the hold groaning shut.
The wind hit them before the hold could close and seal completely. To Jos, standing by the doors, it seemed as if an ocher curtain swept across the sky in a single instant, blocking out the sun. The red dust that the wind carried blew into the hold with enough force to scour metal. For a few seconds the entire cargo space was full of swirling, stinging grit; then the doors slammed and the plates interlocked and the wind died.
For a moment there was silence in the hold. Then somebody—Jos never remembered later exactly who—said, “You know, this is going to be a bitch to clean up.”
Jos had to agree. Red sand lay drifted everywhere in lines and curls and whorls, like a message written in some exotic script. They could get rid of the stuff on deck without too much trouble using push brooms and vacuum hoses, but the grains that had worked their way into the cracks and joints of the cargo machinery would have to be gotten rid of the hard way, with hours of hand labor after the captain lifted ship.
But the
Merry
didn’t leave port. At the mess table that night, Jos learned why.
“No money yet,” said Covain the purser succinctly. “They can’t put the chit through until local noon tomorrow, earliest.”
“Why the hell not?” the first mate wanted to know.
The purser shrugged. “Most of the banks on Sapne are only working quarter-days. They say there’s not enough staff left to keep them open any longer than that.”
“Where’d they go?”
The purser took a sip of his cha’a. “Well, the way I understand it—they’re all dead.”
 
ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 3 PERADA
 
D
ROPOUT. Now.”
Jos pulled back on
Warhammer
’s hyperspace engines and brought up the realspace engines in the same move. The grey quasi mist of hyper vanished like a morning fog under the sun, replaced by a deep blackness studded with stars. The ’
Hammer
’s navicomp chittered and bleeped. Jos leaned back in the pilot’s seat and stretched.
“We’re out.”
“I noticed.” Fleet Admiral Galaret Lachiel was sitting in the copilot’s place more out of courtesy than as a practical matter—though Jos had to admit that she’d handled her share of the work capably enough to hold down a free-spacing berth if she ever wanted one.
Jos bent his attention to the switches on the main console, bringing them into the proper configurations for realspace running: life support, power, control. All the relays and monitors appeared satisfactory; he flipped on the intraship comms to check on the rest of the crew. “How’s everything?”
“Looking good ventral,” Tilly said over the link, followed by Nannla saying, “Clear dorsal. No targets.”
“This is Maraghai,” Jos said. “In this system there are no targets, except on my direct command.”
He heard Nannla’s faint alto chuckle. “Roger that, Cap’n. No vessels in sight or on the scopes.”
“Good. Engineering?”
“All. satisfactory, Captain,” Errec replied.
“Very well.”
It sounded odd, Jos reflected, to have Errec’s voice coming up from engineering, instead of the familiar growling roar—but somebody had to take Ferrda’s place now that the Selvaur had gone home. Jos thought again about getting another round of ship’s-memory upgrades and adding some automation to the engineering spaces. He didn’t trust machines as a rule, but he’d like to be able to fly
Warhammer
single-handed if he needed to. Even stripped to the bone, the ship needed at least three to lift, and from five to seven in the crew to make any kind of distance in safety, let alone comfort.
Fleet Admiral Lachiel stirred restlessly in the copilot’s seat. “Where exactly is Maraghai?” she asked.
Jos tapped the Position Plotting Indicator screen where the navicomp data was being displayed. “Out there. Beyond sensor range. The navigational instructions for Maraghai are explicit. They don’t want unannounced drop-ins.”
“The way things are these days, I don’t blame them.”
“Neither do I—but everybody I’ve ever talked to says the Selvaurs were like this even before the Mages showed up.” He touched the intraship comms again—“Stand by for braking”—then hit the lateral jets to spin
Warhammer
around her vertical axis. “Braking, now.”
The engines fired again: a low rumble and a steady pressure, while Metadi watched the readouts on the panel.
“And … cut.” He pulled the throttle levers to their closed positions. “Steady in space via maneuvering jets.”
“Engines zeroed,” came Errec’s voice over the intraship comm. “Request permission to secure.”
“Secure engines. Gunners, zero and secure your guns.”
“Zeroed,” Nannla said, and Tilly echoed her a moment later.
“Very well. I’ll see you all in the common room in a few.”
He clocked off the internal comm link and glanced over at Lachiel. The admiral looked back at him curiously.
“You know,” she said, “I’ve read the instructions for Maraghai. You’re going a long way beyond what they require.”
“I’m playing this based on what I know about Selvaurs. I’m letting them know that I’ve come in peace, that I trust them completely, and that I expect us to be treated as their guests.”
“‘Guests’?” The admiral laughed. “That’s optimistic.”
“Maybe. And maybe they’ll leave our offer lying on the table, but if they take it up … Ready.”
He picked up the external comm link. “Maraghai control,” he said, speaking not in the Galcenian he and the admiral used for Fleet business, but in his native Gyfferan. “Maraghai control, this is Freetrader
Warhammer
.”
A static-distorted roaring burst out of the external comms, making Lachiel flinch back. “What was
that
?”
“That was their reply,” Jos said in Galcenian. He keyed the link again and switched back to Gyfferan. “Roger, Maraghai Control. Six humans on board. Request transit to the surface.”
Another burst of noise filled the cockpit. Lachiel winced. “You can understand all that?”
“Yeah,” he said. “They’re testing me. Selvaurs trust their own kind first, people who speak their language second, people who understand their language third, and everyone else a distant fourth.”
“So you’re all the way up to third?”
“That’s right. Near as I can figure it, they think that anyone who’s learned to understand the Forest Speech has spent a lot of time around a Selvaur without getting killed, and that means they don’t have to kill you out of hand as a bit of unfinished business.”
Lachiel shook her head. “And the Mages attacked
these
planets too?”
“Looks like,” he said. “Maybe the Mages want to keep us guessing about their intentions, or maybe they just don’t know any better … .” He let his voice trail off.
“You forgot the other possibility,” Lachiel said. “Maybe the Mages really are that strong.”
“If I’d forgotten it, Admiral, we wouldn’t be here.” The external comm link came alive again before he could say anything more. After the noise stopped, he keyed open the link. “This is
Warhammer
. Roger, out.”
He clipped the handset out of the way on the overhead and flipped on the ’
Hammer
’s main beacon. Then he unstrapped himself from the safety webbing and stood up.
“Now what?” Lachiel asked.
“Now we go have some cha’a. We won’t have to do anything for a little while. Not until they get around to sending a shuttle out for us.”
“We won’t be landing?”
Jos shook his head. “No one goes to Maraghai itself except in a Selvauran ship. If we were trading, we’d be on our way to one of their other worlds or moons. On Maraghai—there’s nothing there but Selvaurs. They like to keep things simple.”
“I thought there were some people living there too.”
“Humans, you mean,” Jos said. “The Selvaurs
are
people. In fact, if you ask one of them, he’ll tell you that the Forest Lords are the
only
people. If he hasn’t already ripped your face off for asking.”
Lachiel smiled briefly. “With tempers like that, they must be a trial to the local authorities on other planets.”
“Not really. Selvaurs never start fights.”
 
At a drop-point near Entibor, the infinitely thin interface between reality and hyper rippled and spread apart. Sleek dark warships entered realspace one by one in good order, took their places in a cylindrical formation, and set course inward toward the planet.
Their arrival did not go unnoticed. The interceptor vessels that circled Entibor in high orbit moved without delay into gun and missile range. More ships headed in to join them from waiting stations throughout the system. The surface of the planet bloomed with a myriad small fires as yet more Entiboran warships lifted to form a shield around the planet and its orbiting web of power generators, communications repeaters, and industrial platforms.
High above Entibor’s south pole, the first vessels of the local defense forces came within range of the newly arrived ships. The Entiboran commander on-scene, Captain-of-Corvettes Orisa Graene, sent out a signal, blanketing all frequencies: “Stop and identify yourselves.”
The reply came back in heavily accented Entiboran: “This is a diplomatic mission from Galcen. We wish to land.”
“Maintain your position relative to Entibor,” Graene ordered. Then she passed the word to her own gathering flotilla: “If even one of those ships gets any closer to the surface, shoot without warning.”
Captain-of-Corvettes Graene used a low-security cipher for her second message, to make sure that the Galcenians had the chance to read it. Entiboran intelligence workers had long since broken all of Galcen’s low-level material, and Galcen had undoubtedly returned the favor with interest. At least these days Entiboran Central Headquarters was giving its frontline people part of the overall picture, rather than none at all—the flow of information had picked up since the accession of the new Domina and the sudden retirement of an entire echelon of senior officers. Fleet gossip wasn’t clear on what had happened that day; and Graene, who came from a respectable middle-class family on the colony world of Ghan Jobai, didn’t have enough connections at Central or at court to get the real story.
She directed a grateful thought toward whoever or whatever had been responsible for the change, and got ready to send out a third message, this time to the planet’s surface. She wasn’t sure who would be making the decisions on the receiving end. Fleet Admiral Lachiel was absent from the planet, gone off on some sort of mission with the General of the Armies. Lachiel’s second, Trestig Brehant, was currently inspecting the frontier defenses out beyond Parezul, a long way by courier from Entibor. Graene didn’t know which officer at Central was third in line—but she hoped whoever it was hadn’t left the office for a leisurely dinner.
She looked down at the datapad on which she had been enciphering her request for instructions.
If this is a diplomatic mission, she thought unhappily, leaving an ambassador to cool her heels on the doorstep might not be a good idea.
“They can only shoot me once,” she said aloud, and cleared the datapad. Quickly, before her nerve failed her, she wrote out a new signal: “Unless otherwise directed, I intend to escort the Galcenian ambassador to the surface.”
Then she turned to her aide. “Get in touch with the Galcenians. Tell them that they can bring one ship to the surface, the one with their ambassador. Then make a signal to, let’s see,
Gladheart
and
Bright Prospect
. Tell them to escort the ambassador’s ship to the field at—” She paused, then shrugged. “Wippeldon is as good a place as any. If the ship deviates from its assigned path of approach, tell
Gladheart
and the
Prospect
to use their best judgment.”
The aide raised his eyebrows, but said nothing. Graene caught his change of expression and gave him a rueful smile in return.
“And here we thought garrison duty was going to be dull and boring,” she said. “By this time tomorrow, we’ll probably wish that it had been.”
 
Still feeling a bit bemused by their reception in Selvauran space, Fleet Admiral Lachiel followed General Metadi into the ‘
Hammer
’s common room. One of the gunners was already there—the Entiboran, Tillijen, whose family name Gala had yet to hear—sipping at a cup of cha’a.
“There’s more fresh in the pot,” she said as they came in. She spoke in Galcenian, but something about the faint underlying accent convinced the fleet admiral that Tillijen’s Entiboran would be as proper as her own, or better. “Might as well grab a mug and get ready for the wait.”
“It’s not as if we’ve got a choice,” Metadi said, heading for the galley. Over his shoulder, he added, “Time to pack a carrybag if you haven’t already. We could be away from here for quite a while.”
Gala nodded, but didn’t leave the common room. She’d been living out of a carrybag since the
‘Hammer
lifted from Entibor, and packing up again would be a simple matter of sealing the closure. In the meanwhile, she could drink her cha’a and watch the rest of the crew drifting in from their stations: the dark-haired topside gunner who was Tillijen’s partner, and Errec Ransome, copilot and acting engineer. Ransome had barely spoken to anyone during the voyage—he was not so much taciturn as invisible—but as far as Gala could tell, for him this was normal behavior. At least, the others never mentioned it.
After a while the silent waiting began to pall. Nobody seemed to feel like making idle conversation. The Entiboran gunner was closemouthed whenever Gala was around, and her partner followed her lead, while Errec Ransome was monosyllabic even at the best of times. Eventually Tillijen flipped on the holoviewer, but that didn’t help either—there were no local signals. She turned the set off again.
Metadi drank his cha’a, keeping one eye on the bulkhead panel where local repeaters echoed the sensor readouts from the main console in the cockpit. Finally he set the empty mug aside and disappeared into his cabin. He didn’t come out for some time—not until a steady beeping from the repeater showed a vessel inbound. Gala checked her chronometer, and noted with surprise that most of the apparent delay had been subjective. The Selvaurs hadn’t taken long after all.

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