by K. Eason
Thorsdottir glanced at Zhang. So now they had a name. Neither of them had ever heard of this Protectorate in any briefing, back when they had gotten such things; nor in their months of confinement on Urse, as Rory’s body-maids, with nothing to do but read and watch broadcasts, had they heard anything about them. They must be a very new problem, or a well-concealed old problem. Thorsdottir suspected the former.
“Ten minutes to the tesser-hex buoy,” Zhang said. She might as well have said forever.
Thorsdottir coaxed the arms-turing into granting her manual control. She primed one of the aft missiles and pointed it in the general direction of back there. She didn’t expect to hit the xeno ship, but she might distract them. Or she might get them to return fire, which would be catastrophic. Then again, she had seen what the xenos did to G. Stein’s crew. It might be kinder to detonate into the void than to be boarded. It was also a very final solution.
Thorsdottir snagged Rory’s eye. “Should I fire?”
Rory shook her head. “No. Disarm.”
Thorsdottir disarmed the missiles. Her hands were trembling a little, and slick with sweat and cold inside the hardsuit gloves. There had to be something that someone could do. Not her, fine, but perhaps Zhang could execute an evasive maneuver, a roll or a jag or something. Then she remembered that Jaed was standing, unsecured and vulnerable to rapid and violent shifts in momentum, behind Rory’s station. She swore, loud enough that Zhang side-eyed her.
“What?”
“Nothing. Nothing.” There was no point in explanation.
The Sissten-blip on the nav-screen sped up suddenly, halving, then halving again, the distance to the Vagabond. The arms-turing squawked indignantly, finding its target entirely relocated and all its careful calculations spoiled. The primary turing wailed about proximity.
That was impossible. Thorsdottir did not pretend to understand all the physics of void-flight, but she knew about objects in motion and mass and acceleration.
“How,” she began to ask.
“Arithmancy,” Jaed said shortly. “Or magic.”
“Give me visual!” Rory said sharply.
The main screen lit up.
A massive shape—Sissten, presumably—shot past Vagabond at ridiculously high speed, laced with threads of multi-colored lights. Then it stopped and spun and suddenly they were looking at it. Or it was looking at them. At least Thorsdottir assumed she was looking at the bow of the vessel. It had that same spear-head quality as the xeno hardsuit helmets, narrow end first. The threads of light became individual teslas studding the skin of a vessel the likes of which Thorsdottir had never seen before. It looked a bit like a ring, hollowed in the center, with several triangular appendages jutting out of the rims. It was big enough to encircle Vagabond several times over, along with G. Stein.
How that massive ship bled off velocity that fast, how it came around that fast—more magic. Clearly.
“Princess,” she said. It was as much of a prayer as a lapse into old habit.
Rory did not answer.
Sissten appeared to shimmer, as if distorted by high heat.
Vagabond shuddered. Thorsdottir was thrown into her harness. Jaed was thrown into something solid: there was a thump, metal on metal, and an unhealthy scraping noise, and an expletive of which Grytt would have been proud. Every tesla and screen went dark. There were only the hardsuit teslas, which everyone wore except Zhang, twinkling in the dark.
“Our primary turing is not responding,” Zhang said faintly. “Neither are the engines. We appear to have lost all momentum.”
Thorsdottir resisted the urge to punch the arms-turing, which had died with the rest of Vagabond. She took a deep breath instead.
Jaed’s tone could have etched metal. “Amazing, isn’t it? This level of arithmancy.”
Rory did not answer. The silence inside Vagabond grew and took on a life of its own, pressing inward until Thorsdottir thought she could choke on it. That massive ship was right outside, right there. What it would do next was anyone’s guess—
Except she did know. The xenos had said very clearly what they intended.
Thorsdottir unfastened her harness and stood up, head ducked against the low overhead. She stepped past Rory and the dead comm station, and unclipped her ’slinger, and paused in front of Jaed. His gaze bounced from her face to her weapon and back. Then he unclipped his own, and nodded.
Rory broke her silence, finally. She twisted to look up at them, elbow and shoulder grinding against a seat and station inadequate to accommodate the bulk of her hardsuit.
“Sit down, both of you.”
Thorsdottir’s heart beat hard and fast, and not because there were xenos inbound. “They’re going to board.”
“Yes. So they said. Sit down.” Rory took a bite of air. “You saw what happened on G. Stein. We can’t meet them with force.”
Thorsdottir swallowed her argument. She clipped the ’slinger back to her hardsuit with unnecessary force. It felt like retreat—no, it felt like surrender—to return to her seat. But she did, because Rory had asked, and because although Thorsdottir harbored a vague conviction that she would rather die fighting than sitting, she had a firm conviction that she did not want to die at all. Rory was usually right with her hunches.
Jaed stared at Thorsdottir with a mixture of defiance and disbelief. Then he, too, stowed his ’slinger. It took him two tries to clip it in place. Thorsdottir felt a stab of sympathy. She wished she could tell him that the shaking hands improved, but she did not think he would appreciate the knowledge.
“I don’t think they want to kill us,” Rory offered.
Jaed jerked his gaze off Thorsdottir’s face and scowled at Rory instead. “How can you even say that?”
“Because they would have already. Be a leaf,” Rory said cryptically. Then she closed her eyes as if something hurt. “Seal your visors, though, in case of atmospheric incompatibility. Zhang—”
Zhang was not wearing a hardsuit. “It’s all right.”
Rory’s composure slipped. “No, it’s not. Get back into the cabin. Close the hatch manually and get suited, fast as you can. But unless I call for you, stay there.”
* * *
—
Zhang did not ask why; Zhang was not given to asking. She jumped from her chair, and after a moment, Rory heard a hardsuit rattle off its rack.
Rory felt a certain relief for that. One of her crew was unmutinous. Thorsdottir radiated disapproval, silent and spiky and very reminiscent of Grytt, which almost made Rory smile, which led in the next breath to a sharp pain beneath her ribs, somewhere near her heart. Messer Rupert had asked her to stay on Lanscot where it was safe (as if anything could be, in the midst of a multiverse-splitting civil conflict). Grytt had said only that sheep-farming was a good occupation, if one did not want excitement, which was really the same thing as safe.
She had wanted—not adventure, exactly, nor excitement, though privateering was both—but to do something not dictated by protocol or birth. And because of who she was—because declaring herself unprincess did not make her anyone other than Rory Thorne, she had had to go very far from Lanscot, from the Free Worlds of Tadesh, from anywhere she might be recognized by anyone who cared.
Of course Thorsdottir and Zhang had gone with her. She had told them it was not required, that they, too, had a choice. But she’d known what they would say, even as she said it. They hadn’t joined the Royal Guard to settle on Lanscot and tend sheep.
Nor, she thought now, with a pang, had they joined to die in a small, stolen ship in the hinterlands of settled void. She could be very wrong about the xenos’ intentions. They might peel Vagabond open as soon as come knocking at the hatch.
Vagabond’s teslas came back, in a ripple of color. The life support coughed back to consciousness. The engines appeared to be dormant, still, and when Rory looked, so did the primary t
uring. The tesla bank beside the smaller of Vagabond’s two aetherlocks lit up in a countdown to pressurization.
The xenos appeared to be coming the civilized way, by pre-existing aperture, rather than making a new one with their plasma-beam weapons. How nice.
“I’m suited,” Zhang reported, in something close to a whisper, as if helmet-comms could be overheard by invading xenos. She was clearly hoping that Rory would relent and command her to emerge from the cabin.
Rory did not. “Good. Stay there. Assuming they don’t notice you, you can reboot the ship’s powercore once we’re gone.” Rory had no clear notion of how one did that; her only experience thus far had been Jaed ripping at wires on G. Stein. That principle of destructive restoration would work on Vagabond too. She trusted Zhang to figure out how.
She did not let herself think about whether or not Vagabond’s turing was dead in the same way that G. Stein’s was, and if it was, how Zhang would be able to do anything with the ship to run nav calculations for high speed maneuvers.
“Prin—Rory,” Zhang breathed, as close to arguing as Zhang ever got. “I don’t like this.”
“I know.” Rory was aware that her conversation with Zhang was as much for Thorsdottir and Jaed’s benefit. “But I have to believe, if they intended to kill us outright, they would have. And if they intended some kind of violence, they wouldn’t be coming in through the aetherlock.”
“If they—did you see what they did on G. Stein? Weren’t you there?” Jaed’s voice, low and furious, filled her helmet.
“I suspect the Tadeshi shot first.”
“I wonder why.”
“I don’t. The Tadeshi thought they could win, and they were wrong. We know we can’t.”
Jaed sputtered.
“Leaf, Jaed. Be a leaf.” Rory did not exhort him to trust her. He did anyway, and besides, it was Rory’s experience that telling someone they had to have faith defeated the purpose.
Thorsdottir had been sitting at her station. Now she stood up. Jaed, who had taken Zhang’s seat in her absence, also stood, and Rory saw that they meant to maneuver her into the back, somehow, and put themselves between her and the aetherlock.
“No,” she told them. “I’ll go first.”
Rory wanted to believe Thorsdottir did not argue because she saw the wisdom of Rory’s decision.
“All right,”
You’re being stupid
said Thorsdottir.
The thirteenth fairy’s gift had never been a comfortable thing. Rory had thought it would grow easier, the farther she distanced herself from princesshood. But it was the opposite. Friends, it turned out, had more divergent opinions than Royal Guards did, and except for Jaed, tended not to voice them aloud.
“It’ll be fine,” she said, though the fairies had not granted her predictive powers. She wished they had. Pretty and kind were all well and good, but not as useful as precognition.
The aetherlock chimed. The tesla panels shifted from red to green.
Hands slick inside the hardsuit gloves, heart trying to crawl out her throat, Rory positioned herself in front of the lock as the iris flexed. A puff of atmosphere came in first, accompanied by a hiss like a dead comm channel. Rory’s hardsuit, ever diligent, identified the incoming atmosphere as breathable, if not exactly the human-standard mixture. It wasn’t toxic, like the mirri’s, who needed their suits and their own aether supply. More like the multicranial, long-limbed k’bal, who could share human atmosphere, even if they found human gravity standards uncomfortable.
Except these xenos were not at all like the k’bal, when the hatch opened. They were as tall—Rory had ascertained that much from the G. Stein footage—but they had the correct (by human standards) number and disposition of limbs, and only one head. They entered the narrow aetherlock in a spear-tip formation, one taking point, two flanking. The latter pair held the plasma-spitting, long-barreled weapons leveled. The one in the front carried no weapon. Their hands were empty, open, with four digits: three overly jointed fingers and a thumb, all of which seemed to end in talon-points. Those might be features of their battle armor, or features of the hands which the armor accommodated. On one level, it did not matter. Rory had seen footage of what those talons could do to Tadeshi battle armor. They would have no difficulty at all with a standard civilian hardsuit.
The xenos stopped just inside and appeared to regard her, the wedge-shaped helmets pointing like fingers. Their visors were entirely opaque. The light slid off their hardsuits, fracturing into oil-slick hues, or settling into resinous black. That was armor, almost certainly hexed for that effect.
Someone—Jaed, she thought—caught their breath.
Rory had thought about whether to meet the xenos palms open and up, to demonstrate their emptiness and forestall any precipitous fingers on triggers. She revised her intentions and reached up instead to open her visor. The faceshield was transparent, but she hoped a bare face would signal openness, and not (she thought, as the visor retracted) offer a hideous insult. Her gesture had the simultaneous effects of rendering her intersuit comms listen-only, and of exposing her to whatever contamination might be possible with an alien atmosphere. It was the latter, she supposed, that incited Thorsdottir to swear with impressive creativity. Jaed only said, “Rory, no,” and groaned.
Rory, for her part, ignored them. The xeno atmosphere tasted a little more metallic than that to which she was accustomed, and seemed both warmer and drier. She took several deep breaths. There was a peppery odor, and an eye-prickling discomfort like raw onions that quickly vanished.
The xenos made no reciprocal gestures. The one in the front cocked their head slowly, as if they had spotted something interesting and wanted a closer look. Then they raised their empty left hand and the two in the rear lowered their weapons.
“You will come with us,” the foremost xeno said in accented GalSpek. The syllables, compressed (Rory supposed) by the helmet’s ex-comms, still sounded strangely doubled, as if there were a fractional lag between the beginning and end of a syllable.
Rory stabbed her gaze at the imagined eyes behind that visor. Then she peeled off a fraction of her attention, and dipped into the first layer of aether, and tried for her first look at a xeno aura. Tried, because she saw nothing at all. The aura of each xeno was as blank as mecha. What if they were? Her gut congealed around that possibility.
Then she saw the glimmer of an equation, flicker-fast, and realized she was looking at a deflecting hex meant to block exactly the sort of exploration Rory was attempting.
There was an arithmancer under one of those hardsuits, or maybe under all of them. Rory suspected, however, that it was only the one in front who was running the hex, if only because if she had been the leader of a hostile boarding party, that’s what she would have done.
She also suspected her own aura had just flared into a rainbow of realization. She considered deploying her own concealing hex, but another arithmancer might notice that, at which point these xenos would have information about her, perhaps too much.
Be a mantis-lion. Look like a leaf. Speak like, if not a princess, then at least a diplomat. She had no protocols for first contact (which this clearly was not, if these people spoke GalSpek), but she thought courtesy might bridge the gaps in custom of which she was unaware.
“How kind of you to invite us onto your vessel. But among my people, it is customary to perform introductions, first. I am Rory Thorne, citizen of the Confederation of Liberated Worlds. These are my crewmates. Our species is human. Whom do I have the honor of addressing?”
The rifle-wielding xeno on the left jerked, as if surprised, and turned to their fellow. The leader tipped their head the other way. Then they hissed, two short bursts of sound, soon echoed by the others.
They were . . . laughing. That might be a good sign; humor, and the ability to experience and express it, was something over which species coul
d bond. It was also unnerving, since laughter, at least among humans and the mirri (the k’bal did not laugh), could indicate a great many unpleasant things.
Rory’s teeth clenched. She had never particularly enjoyed being laughter’s object, whatever its flavor. Her aura flared in response.
The foremost xeno took a quick, sharp step closer. Rory was forced to look up, if she wished to stare at their visor and not their torso, which, rather than being humanly flat, pinched into a vertical ridge starting just below the suit’s collar and extended almost to the waist. It seemed to be a physiological cousin to the other strange fins that ran just past the joints on each limb, and along the top of what should have been hips.
The xeno’s visor retracted, and Rory got her first look at a face—two eyes, what one might uncharitably call a snout or, less pejoratively, a wedge-shaped nose-and-mouth arrangement, where the nostrils were expanding slits. The xeno’s skin was charcoal-dark, roughly textured and apparently hairless. Several ridges of what looked like skin-covered bone ran along the sides of its skull, ending in a spiked fringe jabbing off the back. There were no ears in evidence; Rory supposed them somewhere in the creases between ridges, or perhaps in some more novel location. The most startling features were the mobile plates, hinged to the skull at the rear of the jaw, which flared out as the xeno leaned over Rory. Then the lips pulled back with surprising flexibility to reveal a great many triangular and pointed teeth which were etched with elaborate carvings in varying shades of blue, from cobalt to cerulean.
Rory managed not to flinch back as the xeno dipped low and close to her face. The etching on those teeth really was very fine and precise. Lovely, even. And those teeth were very, very sharp. A carnivorous species, then. Or primarily so.
