Read The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds Online

Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds (33 page)

BOOK: The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds

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In the viridian glare from his staff, Ty saw that he had brought down a human-shaped pressure-suited figure, holding a weapon of some kind in its hand. He kicked the weapon aside, out of reach of the two fallen bodies—not that either of them would be reaching for it, he thought. They were bleeding too much where the steel pikes had pierced and cut them.

Ty left them behind and sprinted to catch up with Spiru and Kalan, already moving deeper into the mazy tunnels of the opposing spacecraft. Spiru glanced back over his shoulder as Ty rejoined them.

“Nice bit there with the staff. Can you do it again?”

“I don’t know. Wild luck … it changes.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Kalan, and hefted his pike. The steel tip had blood on it, blood as red as any that ever flowed on Eraasi or Ninglin or Ildaon. “If they want a fight, they’ll have one.”

They came to a junction of two passageways. Kalan was in the lead. He paused and looked back at Ty and Spiru.

“Which way’s forward, do you think?”

Spiru shrugged. “Don’t know. Pick one.”

Luck flared suddenly, a pattern of clear silver to draw the mind and the eye—

“That way,” said Ty, pointing.

The other two followed his gesture in time to see a man come around the bend in the passage. He wasn’t wearing a pressure suit at all. Spiru and Kalan thrust and slashed at once, Kalan’s pike coming over Spiru’s shoulder, and more blood sprayed against the bulkheads as the man went down.

The three surviving boarders from
Rain-on-Dark-Water
left him behind as they had left his companions in the airlock, and ran onward in the direction that Ty had chosen for them.

33:

Year 1128 E. R.

BEYOND THE FARTHER EDGE: SUS-PELEDAEN SHIP
RAIN-ON-DARK-WATER
UNKNOWN ENTIBORAN SHIP

E
laeli had never performed an emergency shutdown of the pilot’s station, except in drill. She knew the procedures—had practiced them, because in theory even the best ship might someday turn unfortunate and fall prey to mechanical disaster or to criminal intent—but such things did not happen in the sus-Peledaen fleet.

Only now they have. Lucky, lucky me, to get to see the day.

She worked as fast as she could, pulling boards and disconnecting power cables with hands that she didn’t dare let shake or fumble, watching the screens go blank and the readouts die. The rest of the bridge was already dim and shadowed. Outside the bridge windows, the white bulk of the Entiboran ship shone with the reflected light of Garrod’s Star.

Captain sus-Mevyan stood at her shoulder, watching. “Are you done, Pilot-Principal?”

“Almost, Captain.” Elaeli pulled out the backup data-wafers for the updated star charts and sealed them into the inner pocket of her uniform tunic. “There. That’s the last of it.”

“Good. Let’s go.”

They hastened through the passages to the muster bay, their footsteps echoing in the unnatural quiet. The floor of the bay was crowded with members of the
Rain
’s crew, some of them armed with boarding pikes but most of them carrying nothing but what they’d had in their hands when the order came.

Elaeli tried to spot ’Rekhe and the other Mages amid the crowd, but no one in the muster bay wore robes or carried a staff. The Circle’s absence both worried and heartened her. She didn’t want Arekhon sus-Khalgath to die lost and forgotten on an abandoned ship, and she didn’t want him to die for the Circle, either—but if the Mages hadn’t given up working to bring the luck to
Rain-on-Dark-Water,
then some of the people aboard her might yet make it back home.

The muster bay’s auxiliary bridge held most of the
Rain
’s officers. Elaeli and Captain sus-Mevyan climbed the narrow metal staircase to join them.

“What’s our situation?” the Captain asked the Chief Engineer as soon as she reached the upper level. “How soon can we effect repairs?”

“Looks bad, Captain,” said the Chief Engineer. Elaeli felt a surge of sympathy for him. He’d already worked miracles to give sus-Mevyan the engine power she’d needed for the chase and interception, and now he had nothing more to give. “Our fuel’s flat, and we’re holed and leaking atmosphere fore and aft.”

If his news discouraged Captain sus-Mevyan, she gave no sign. “What you’re trying to say is that we aren’t going home in this vessel.”

The Chief Engineer nodded wearily. “That’s about the shape of it.”

“Fine.” sus-Mevyan turned away from the consoles of the auxiliary bridge and pointed down across the muster bay at the open mouth of the boarding tunnel. “Then we’re going home in that one.”

The three survivors of
Rain-on-Dark-Water’s
boarding party stood outside a closed air-tight door.

“I think this is the way to the bridge,” Kalan said.

Ty looked at him. “What makes you think that?”

“Just guessing,” said Spiru. “We found the galley and we found crew berthing, and there wasn’t anyone in either of those places.”

Kalan tried the heavy lever-arm that should have opened the door. “I think it’s locked, though.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Ty. There was still luck in the universe—patterned and focused, the product of the Circle’s labors. He seized on it and directed it into his staff. Then he touched the lock.

Metallic noises came from inside the door. The lever-arm moved down and back up again. With a final groan, the door cracked open.

“There,” Ty said. “We can go in. If this is the bridge, maybe there’s somebody on it who’ll give us a chance to surrender properly before we have to kill them.”

“I sure hope so,” said Kalan, and kicked the door open so hard that it slammed against the limit of its hinges. The
Rain
’s boarding party—what was left of it—leaped onto the bridge through the widening gap.

Ty saw a room full of consoles and displays, and a person in drab clothing standing at the central point. She had an audio pickup link in one hand and what looked like a weapon in the other, and she was raising her hand to fire.

Spiru was in the lead; he brought the butt of his pike around and knocked the weapon out of her grip.

It clattered and spun across the deck. The woman jumped for it, but Kalan moved faster and threw himself on top of her, bearing her down under his weight.

“We surrender,” he said breathlessly. “Surrender … surrender … ah,
lasreno! Het lasreno!”

She kept on struggling. Spiru pointed the tip of his boarding pike at her head.

“Comrade, friend,” he said.
“Idesten …”

The woman spat out a string of angry words and redoubled her efforts at escape. Ty stepped forward, groping in his mind for more of the phrases that Garrod had taught them.

“‘We-are-honored-to-meet-you,’” he rattled off in rote Entiboran. “‘We-come-to-make-a-trade.’”

After a moment the woman started to laugh. It was hysteria, not mirth; she didn’t stop laughing until after Kalan had tied her hands with the belt of his uniform, and her feet with Spiru’s. Then the laughter turned to weeping, and then to silence.

Ty drew a deep breath. “Now what do we do?”

“We wait for the Captain,” Kalan told him. “And we let the Captain figure it out.”

The airlock at the far end of the boarding tunnel was a slaughterhouse.

Elaeli smelled the extent of the carnage even before her eyes took it all in: Blood and filth and cooked meat and melted plastic mixed together into a foul, malodorous slurry. Bile rose in her throat, and she swallowed it back down.

She was the Pilot-Principal; she was syn-Peledaen; she was supposed to set an example for the fleet-apprentices and the ordinary crew. If Captain sus-Mevyan could walk through the ranks of burned bodies, struck down where they stood and lying where they had fallen, then Elaeli Inadi could follow her.

It wasn’t hard to figure out which way to go. Two of the bodies in the airlock hadn’t burned; they’d been hacked apart with boarding pikes, and the blood that ran out of the cuts and slashes in their pressure suits had covered the deck with a wash of sticky red. The bloody prints of boot soles led away from the puddle into the depths of the ship.

Elaeli didn’t want to look at her own feet. She let sus-Mevyan set the course. They came to a place where two passages crossed, but—Elaeli fought down an impulse toward manic, inappropriate laughter—the
Rain’s
boarders had considerately left them another body to mark the trail, and even more blood.

No pressure suit this time, and the man’s face was untouched. He looked scared and surprised, and distressingly ordinary in spite of the wounds that had killed him.

An alien from beyond the Edge, she thought. And if he wasn’t dead I could invite him home to dinner and nobody would even blink. Arekhon was right; the Sundering isn’t a legend after all.

The realization sobered her. She was just as glad that the blood-trail she and the captain followed didn’t lead to any more bodies. They hit a couple of dead ends—empty compartments full of bunks and kitchenware—before coming to the ship’s main control room and the survivors of the boarding party: Two of the
Rain
’s crewmembers, their hardmasks and armored jackets smoke-stained and streaked with red, and one of Arekhon’s Mages in long black robes gone stiff with blood at the hem.

The two crewmembers took off their hardmasks as the Captain approached. sus-Mevyan looked at them, her mouth bracketed by hard lines and her face revealing nothing.

“Spiru and Kalan and”—the cold eyes paused for a moment on the young Mage before lighting briefly in recognition—“Ty. Are there prisoners?”

“Yes, Captain.” Kalan pointed toward a bound figure slumped against the far bulkhead. “That one.”

“Are there any others?”

“No, Captain.” Kalan’s voice wavered. Elaeli realized that he was close to breaking down. “Should we have—”

“You did well,” said sus-Mevyan firmly. She stepped over to the control panels, but was careful not to touch them. A chair was bolted to the deck on the right-hand side of the compartment, and she sat in it. “Now we have to go on. Let’s get a temporary lock rigged, and start salvaging the
Rain
. I’m going to need the charts, the communications rig, and as much else as we can carry and will fit.”

Kalan looked relieved to have something more to do. “Aye, Captain.”

“And fetch Lord Garrod. I need him here.”

The working was over.

Arekhon knelt, exhausted, on the deck of the meditation chamber, waiting for his head to clear. Vai leaned against the bulkhead a few feet away, breathing hard. The working had been a strong one, building to a great rush of focused power, and Arekhon felt a faint surprise that it hadn’t gone so far as to call for a life. He was tired, and bruised in a number of places, but in spite of everything he had come out of the experience without serious injury.

He pushed himself back onto his feet and looked over at Vai. Her black hair was slicked into flattened tendrils against her cheeks and forehead, and when she lifted her hand to wipe away the sweat, the sleeve of her robe fell back enough to show a discolored welt above her wrist. Except for that, she was as uninjured as he was.

Narin and Garrod remained on the perimeter of the circle. The working hadn’t called on them to do anything more than steady the pattern; odd, again, seeing that the luck had been so strong.

Unless I misdirected it
, Arekhon thought.
Unless I only
thought
we’d made enough luck …

“The engines have stopped,” said Narin. “Is that good or bad?”

“Not good, usually,” he said, coming back from his worries with an effort. His voice sounded hoarse, and his throat felt sore and scratchy. “In our case, it probably means that we’re out of fuel. Which is why we did the working in the first place.”

Vai shoved herself away from the wall and came over to join him. “I suppose one of us should go see what’s up.”

“We should all go,” he said. “We’re finished anyway.”

Before anyone could reply, a frantic hammering came at the locked door of the meditation chamber, and a voice shouted something urgent but unintelligible on the other side. Narin sprang to the door, working the lock mechanism and pulling the door open before the shouting and the pounding stopped.

Ty stood on the threshold, one fist upraised to strike again at the metal door as it swung inward. He rushed—almost fell, in his haste—headlong into the meditation chamber, and dropped to his knees in front of Arekhon. The younger Mage’s face was greyish-pale underneath a mask of soot and perspiration, and his pupils were wide and black.

He drew a ragged, shuddering breath. “Lord Arekhon—”

“Ty?” Arekhon reached down to take Ty by the arms and help him back to his feet. One touch was enough for him to feel how Ty was shaking. “What’s wrong?”

“The Captain.” Ty swallowed. “She wants Lord Garrod on the bridge of the other ship. Right now.”

“Then we should go there. Can you show us the way?”

Ty nodded jerkily. “It’s … not hard to find.”

“Good.” Arekhon summoned Vai and Narin with a glance, and Garrod with a quick but respectful inclination of his head in the direction of the door. “Let’s go.”

Outside the meditation chamber,
Rain-on-Dark-Water
was silent, the narrow passages lit only by dim amber lights. Garrod strode on ahead of the other Mages, his dark robes billowing. Arekhon didn’t try to stop him—Garrod might not be the First of the Circle any longer, but neither was he truly one of Arekhon’s Mages to command. The Captain had asked for him by name; if she wanted the rank and not the man, they would soon find out.

Meanwhile, Arekhon had Ty to deal with. The younger Mage hadn’t said anything since the Circle left the meditation chamber, and Arekhon was beginning to feel worried all over again. He drew closer to Ty and spoke to him in what he hoped was a nonthreatening voice.

“What happened? Was the interception successful?”

“Yes. They … we … used the boarding tunnel.” Ty stopped, wet his lips, and started again. “The other end didn’t open.”

BOOK: The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds

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