by Jaine Fenn
Kerin felt her head whip round. The Sidhe and the pilot looked towards the voice with the same unnatural speed.
Damaru walked into the corridor, just beyond Einon’s body. He looked distraught.
Kerin felt her heart tear. She and Sais were lost, but her boy - surely not him too!
He took a step towards her and she strained to speak, to warn him, though she knew it was futile. Any moment now he would fall to the ground, or freeze, another victim of the Sidhe.
But he did not.
Kerin realised she could move her head again. When she looked at the Sidhe, the sky-woman was looking around, an expression of panic on her face. The Sidhe’s gaze fell on the pilot, standing beside her, his smile gone in a look of confusion. For the first time the Sidhe spoke out loud, a far harsher and more uncertain sound than the voice in Kerin’s head.
‘Shoot it! Shoot it now!’
The pilot appeared to come to his senses. He took a step away from the wall and started to raise his weapon—
Everything stopped.
A heartbeat, drawn out to a lifetime . . .
A flame flaring, then dying . . .
The heart restarts, the fire is rekindled.
Kerin knew who she was, and a fraction of a thought later, where she was.
Everything was as it had been, except for the Sidhe. She was gone.
Kerin found she could move freely. She staggered up the corridor to Damaru, who was sitting on the floor, shaking and keening. There was something on the wall of the corridor beyond him, but that did not matter now. He had exercised his power and saved them.
She embraced Damaru with her good arm, laughing and crying all at once, and murmuring, ‘My son, my child.’
Behind her, she could hear Sais shouting at the pilot. As she calmed down in the aftermath of Damaru’s miracle, she wondered what it was that she had glimpsed up the corridor. She looked over Damaru’s shoulder.
The wall had an imprint on it, a human figure in profile, arms outstretched. The imprint dripped red, and at the base of the wall was a pile of shattered bones, shredded flesh and mangled organs covered in streamers of black fabric.
With nothing left in her stomach, she was reduced to dry heaves of revulsion.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Ignoring the combined after-effects of the Sidhe’s mental lock and the unreality of close contact with shiftspace, Sais made himself stand. The pilot was still facing away from him. The corridor swayed and dipped, and there was a roaring like the sea in his ears. His current state didn’t allow for any clever attacks. He put both arms round the pilot’s shoulders and pulled him backwards.
The pilot crumpled and Sais stepped back to let him fall. Then he bent down and swiped the gun from the man’s limp hand, narrowly avoiding joining him on the floor as a wave of dizziness hit. ‘Don’t move,’ he grunted.
The other man stared up at him blankly. Sais kicked him - gently, compared to the kicking the pilot had given him, which had bruised, if not broken, a rib - and said, ‘On your front, hands behind your head.’
The pilot showed no sign of having heard him.
Further along the corridor, Kerin gasped, then gave a rasping retch. Sais looked up to see her on her hands and knees next to Damaru, who was sitting on the floor looking dazed. Although she was retching violently, neither of them appeared to be hurt. When he looked beyond her, he could see the reason for her reaction. So that was what had happened to the Sidhe. Nice one, Damaru.
‘Are you all right?’ he called.
She waved a hand to show she would be.
He turned his attention back to the pilot, who hadn’t moved. ‘Listen, you prick, I really don’t have time for this,’ he said.
‘Then kill me,’ murmured the pilot. With the last Sidhe gone, he’d lost the meaning of his life.
It was tempting, but he was too useful.
‘No. Stand up,’ said Sais. He took a deep breath and hauled the pilot to his feet, trying not to stagger. The pilot leaned against the wall.
‘Kerin,’ he called down the corridor, ‘can you two walk?’
‘Aye,’ she called back shakily.
‘Then we should get out of here.’
Kerin and Damaru stood, leaning on each other for support. The pilot started to slide down the wall. Sais rammed the needle-pistol into his guts, just below the crossbow wound. The man squealed and his vague gaze sharpened. ‘We’re leaving now,’ said Sais. ‘And you’re coming with us.’
The pilot looked at Sais’s feet and muttered, ‘No.’
‘The alternative is that I cause you a lot more pain, trash this place, then leave you locked in the cell they put me in.’
Though Sais wasn’t sure he was capable of carrying out his threat, either emotionally or physically, the pilot must have thought he was. He levered himself away from the wall. Sais grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pressed the gun into the small of his back.
The four of them limped back to the cargo-bay. Sais led them the long way round, to avoid the bodies.
Kerin went back into the transfer-station to check on Lillwen while Sais dragged the pilot up to the control panel and sat him on the floor at his feet, the needle-pistol against his neck. According to the countdown flashing on the screen they had just over an hour before the carousel was due to start its descent. And the pilot hadn’t lied: the controls were locked out.
‘Is this automated?’ he asked the pilot.
‘No. Why would it need to be? It’s not like the set-up on the planet, with all those ignorant priests. We knew what we were doing.’ He spoke with an odd mixture of disdain and despair.
‘I suppose there’s no point asking you whether there’s a work-around on these controls?’
‘Even if there was, I wouldn’t tell you, you bastard.’
‘Thought not.’ Sais pulled the pilot upright. ‘Then you’re no further use to me.’
He felt the pilot tense - however upset the man might be about the death of his mistresses, he wanted to live. Good. Sais had no intention of killing him, but neither did he want him hanging around, potentially making trouble. He marched the pilot over to one of the empty comaboxes by the wall and shoved him in. As soon as the lid clicked shut, he started the stasis-cycle. That was one problem solved for the moment.
Kerin’s cry was magnified by the transit-station acoustics. Sais ran towards the cargo-doors and called, ‘Kerin? Are you all right?’
She had picked up the torch and was shining it into Lillwen’s box. ‘I am fine, but Lillwen is hurt.’ Sais came over to find Lillwen lying unconscious in the box. There was blood on the headrest behind her and a large bruise was coming up on her forehead. ‘I think - I think she banged her head,’ said Kerin to Sais as he peered in. ‘I am not sure what to do.’
‘Me neither, but you’re in no state to be treating anyone.’ He had an idea. ‘Listen, Kerin, we passed the med-bay on the way back here. I’m going to see if I can’t do something more permanent about your arm, and maybe find something for Lillwen too.’ And me, he thought. A numbing exhaustion had begun to creep up on him, and he knew he didn’t dare give in to it. The Sidhe might be dead, but they weren’t out of the woods yet.
The med-bay held good and bad news. The good news was that it was a top-of-the-range set-up, able to do pretty much anything short of resurrecting the long dead. The bad news was that, as the pilot has promised, it was control-locked, though he managed to make some of the minor functions work: he got all of them energy replacement drinks, and found Kerin another analgesic patch for when the meds wore off.
‘You two should rest here - these beds are as comfortable as any,’ he told her. And they don’t belong to people we’ve killed or incapacitated . ‘They’ve got condition-monitors on them, so if there’s a problem they’ll start beeping at you. If that happens, you need to ask Damaru to come and find me.’ Not that I can do much about it . . .
Kerin nodded and climbed gratefully onto one of the couches. Sais would have liked to do the s
ame, but he still had work to do. Some serious stim would have helped, but that was also off-limits, thanks to the Sidhe’s gene-lock.
Instead he explored the ship, finding out whether things really were as bad as he feared.
They were. Though he could dim lights, fire up the pilot’s entertainments centre and fix himself a meal in the galley - which he did - every critical system was locked, including the docking clamps on the Judas Kiss, and on the Sidhe shuttle.
So, they had the cure - but he couldn’t deploy it. They had the carousel - but he couldn’t send it down. He had his ship - but he couldn’t leave. He could enable local coms - the pilot would need free access to them to do his job - but there was no one within light-years, and the beevee system was locked down.
While he thought about where that left them now, he disposed of the bodies. He ended up losing his meal while trying to get the Cariad’s remains out of the airlock, but he didn’t want Kerin or Damaru to have to see that again.
It looked like the three of them would be spending the foreseeable future up here.
Parked and running on minimal power, the Setting Sun was more-or-less self-sufficient, so they’d have enough air, water and food to survive for years. Long before their supplies ran out, the Sidhe would wonder why their latest shipment of adolescent shiftspace savants hadn’t checked in. If they sent a ship, then the three of them were screwed. Most likely they’d call first - so would an incoming call unlock the beevee system? If so, perhaps he could get a message out—
Idiot! He was tired, not thinking straight. The Judas Kiss’s coms weren’t gene-locked; even if he couldn’t use his ship to leave, he could use its beevee, and once he’d got his message out to Elarn and Nual, he could maybe call for help. He had a few favours owing, though unless he could find the beacon ID of this system, a physical rescue would not be an option.
He ran back to the Judas Kiss and sat at the console, working the familiar controls without thought—
—and without result. The manual lock-down was still in effect. That might be the pilot’s doing, in which case the pilot would know how to take it off. He could wake him up and ask. At the thought of sleep, sweet sleep, he found himself yawning.
Before he did anything else, he needed to rest, but he’d better check on Kerin first.
When he got back to the med-bay he found Kerin sitting up, the couch locked into a semi-upright position. Damaru was standing at a monitor station, his hands splayed over the panel, a look of happy concentration on his face.
‘You got the bed to work, at least.’
Kerin said, ‘Aye. Damaru says there are devices here that can help me, but he does not know which ones I need. Do you?’
‘Devices that can help . . .’ echoed Sais dumbly. ‘I - well, yes, there’s everything here from regeneration baths to a bone-moulding vat. But none of it’s working.’
‘Damaru says it is now.’
‘What? Let me have a look.’ He went over to Damaru and said, ‘I need to get in here, please.’ The boy looked up, a bright, faraway expression on his face. ‘Damaru? I know how to use the devices that can help your mother, all right? But you need to let me find out what we’ve got.’ The skyfool nodded and moved off, though he continued to watch Sais as he worked.
Sais ran a basic inventory and analysis program. Kerin was right: they had full control. ‘This is amazing. What did you do, Damaru?’
The boy shrugged.
‘Right. Never mind. It’s working now, so let’s make the most of it.’
He got Kerin over to the smaller gel-bath and took the dressing off. The bleeding had stopped, though the flesh hung in pale tatters around the open wound. Kerin stared at the ceiling and sucked air in sharply, but she didn’t complain. He programmed the bath for a basic cleanse and stimulate; he didn’t have the knowledge or time to set up a full muscular rebuild, but he could at least guarantee the wound would heal cleanly.
‘You need to stay here with your arm in this tank of goo for at least four hours, ideally six or eight. The longer we give it the better chance it’ll have of mending itself.’
‘But the Edefyn Arian! It was due to return to the Tyr.’
‘Shit, I forgot about that. It should have gone by now.’ He had a sudden thought. ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’
He stumbled to the cargo-hold as fast as he could. What if, once the countdown completed, some systems came online again? He wasn’t sure why that would happen, but he couldn’t think of any other reason why the med-bay had suddenly started to co-operate.
When he reached the cargo-bay he found everything as he had left it, with the exception of the countdown, which was flashing on zero. He tried the carousel controls, but he was still locked out. It looked like they’d had their luck for the day. But why would the med-bay start working by itself?
He went back to see if they still had control there. Kerin and Damaru hadn’t moved: she was reclining with her arm in the gel while he fiddled with a console. She raised herself on her good arm and asked, ‘Has it gone?’
‘The carousel? No. If was it was going to go by itself, it would have done so.’
Kerin fell back. ‘When it does not return at sunset, people will panic, wondering if Heaven has abandoned them.’
‘There’s not much we can do about that.’
Sais took advantage of the med-bay’s sudden unexplained cooperation and ran a portable diagnosis unit over his ribs. They were just bruised. Then he sorted himself something to keep him going for a bit longer.
As the stims cut in he felt the fog lift and found himself thinking clearly for the first time in hours. ‘Kerin, when did it start working?’
‘When did what start working?’
‘Everything in here.’
‘I - I am not sure. Damaru woke me up and said he had found devices that might make me better.’
‘Found, how?’
‘While he was playing with the buttons and switches here some of the lights came on.’
‘He was what?’
‘Playing. With the devices.’
‘Holy shit. Kerin, can I borrow Damaru?’
‘Borrow him?’
‘I need him to try some of the other controls for me.’
‘Feel free to ask him. He seems fascinated by this stuff.’
He certainly was. When Sais managed to get the boy’s attention, he suggested that they go and find some other devices to play with. Damaru looked over at his mother, then at Sais. ‘Other devices,’ he said slowly. Then he grinned. ‘Aye.’
Sais led him to the bridge first. Damaru took about twenty minutes to get everything working, from full coms to the docking overrides. It was all Sais could do to stop him from firing up the engines.
While he watched the boy’s hands fly over the console, his vision blurred as exhaustion fought the wake-up shot he’d given himself. He wondered if he was imagining this. No, he wasn’t.
Damaru only agreed to leave the bridge controls alone when Sais promised he would find him more devices he could investigate after they’d been back to see his mother.
‘Is everything all right?’ asked Kerin when he returned. The colour was already coming back into her cheeks.
‘I think it will be. Your son, he’s - well, the technical term is “machine empath”.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means he’s a genius with technology.’
‘Technology, like the devices in this place?’
‘That’s exactly right.’
‘But I thought the pilot said only a Sidhe could make everything here work. Or did I remember that wrongly?’
‘No, you remembered right, and that implies Damaru is Sidhe.’
‘Do not be ridiculous! He is my son.’
‘The lock on the controls is to do with what race you are. It takes either knowledge like mine or a talent like his to understand how the tech works, but the machines won’t actually respond unless the person touching them is Sidhe.’
&nbs
p; ‘You must be mistaken.’
‘I don’t think so. It makes sense: according to legend, the male Sidhe were machine empaths, but they had a monumental battle of the sexes with the females. As far as anyone knew, the women wiped them out. But it wasn’t easy because Sidhe are meant to be partially immune to each others’ powers; that’s why the Cariad - the one Damaru killed - told the pilot to shoot him, rather than just turning him into a puppet like she did with you and me. She couldn’t affect his mind. And that explains why the Cariad needs the guardians to come to the final test to look after the boys, and why she uses that helmet to get them onto the bridge; she can’t control skyfools like she can everyone else.’
He could see Kerin was having problems with this, and he didn’t blame her. Damaru had gone back to examining the med-bay tech. ‘Damaru?’ she said softly. He looked up again, mildly annoyed to be distracted, then seeing who it was, spared a smile for her. ‘Damaru, do you remember the woman who you put in the wall?’
He frowned, then said, ‘I wanted to make her leave. The wall got in the way.’
‘Aye, so it did. Did she - did she try and hurt you?’
‘She tried to grasp my pattern. I did not let her. She was hurting you. So I made her go away.’ He stated it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Kerin still looked unconvinced.
‘Kerin, it makes sense,’ said Sais. ‘Sky-cursed women, like your mother, they have Sidhe-type powers - nothing so extreme, but the same sort of thing. Even the priests, the way they can spot lies: that’s a Sidhe trait.’
‘You are saying that I am Sidhe? That all of my people are?’
‘There’s a hell of a lot of misinformation out there about the Sidhe - dozens of theories, hundreds of stories. Some people believe the Sidhe weren’t a different race at all, that they were humans who were changed somehow, and that they didn’t always breed true - Sidhe sometimes had human children. In theory, I suppose it could happen the other way around. In some ways it’s a bit like the upland cattle and the dales ones: they’re very different animals, but they’re all cows.’
‘Cattle do not build devices they alone can use. Or steal the will of other cattle!’
