The Broken Sphere

by Nigel Findley

  I’ve got to get us out of this, Teldin told himself, or they’ll slaughter us. He extended the power of the cloak, the ultimate helm, and tested the squid ship’s response.

  With the first touch of power it surged forward responsively, but it resisted turning and rolling as if it were a live thing. It must be the rigging damage, Teldin realized, with a chill feeling in his stomach. Even with the ultimate helm, a ship needs rigging if it’s to maneuver. He cut back on the power and examined the situation.

  It wasn’t good. As he’d discovered from experimenting with the Fool, he could drive a ship with any degree of speed or control only forward. That meant the Boundless’s possible range of motion could be pictured as a flaring cone centered around the line of its keel. In this case, it was a narrow funnel, because he couldn’t turn the ship’s bow rapidly. No matter how fast he drove the ship, he’d still be within the battle dolphin’s fire pattern for several minutes, the last portion of which he’d be at point-blank range.

  Paladine’s blood! he raged to himself. If the battle dolphin had made a normal approach – from the side, or the stern – he’d be able to use the speed of the ultimate helm to escape. But because the enemy was directly on his bow, his choices were cut to few or none. Again, it’s as if the enemy captain knows my situation ….

  At least there’s one thing he doesn’t know about. With his extended vision, Teldin could see Beth-Abz – in human form, he was glad to note – clamber up onto the foredeck. We have one forward-firing weapon left, the Cloakmaster told himself with a grim smile. He watched the black-haired man stride to the front of the foredeck and grab the rail with both hands to steady himself.

  Suddenly Teldin knew the tactics he had to use if he wanted to get out of this alive. He felt his lips draw back from his teeth, his smile becoming an almost feral grimace.

  “Tell Beth-Abz to hold on,” he told Julia. “Don’t do anything until I say so.”

  She nodded, backed out of the cabin – leaving the door open behind her – and took up a position by the saloon’s door that led out onto the deck. Teldin heard her voice as she relayed his instructions to the beholder above him.

  Behind him, around him, he felt the ultimate helm’s energy as he drove the squid ship forward.

  *****

  “They’re moving!” the Sharks second mate called out.

  His cry was unnecessary. Berglund had already seen the target ship lurch forward, directly toward the battle dolphin. Damn, he thought, they’ve got the helm up again sooner than expected. But he was close enough now to see the damaged rigging, the missing gaff boom, the mainsail still flapping uselessly over the squid ship’s starboard rail. He remembered the time, several years ago, when he’d captained a military squid ship, and reviewed in his mind what he knew of that vessel’s maneuverability. With that much damage, the enemy would be about as maneuverable as a heavily laden tradesman – in other words, not much at all. In contrast to his topped-out battle dolphin, it may as well have remained dead in space for all the good an operating helm would do for it. He smiled again.

  “Hold course,” he ordered.

  Then, to his shock, he saw the squid ship leap forward, faster than any ship had any right to move ….

  *****

  Teldin gasped with the exertion – neither physical nor mental, but something totally different – as he poured on the power. In only a few seconds, the Boundless was up to its normal top speed, and still it accelerated.

  Suddenly the heavy vessel lurched, tried to maneuver in a way that Teldin hadn’t intended. He knew that the ship’s major helm was on line again, and knew that the helmsman was trying to take command of the vessel.

  “Get Blossom off the damn helm!” he yelled to Julia, and again heard her echo the order aft. After a moment, he felt the extraneous movement cease as he regained control of the ship. “And tell Beth-Abz to get ready.”

  The enemy battle dolphin loomed ever larger before the Boundless. He altered the ship’s heading by a few degrees – even that minor change taking great effort – and brought the squid ship’s slender piercing ram to bear on the larger vessel. Still the Boundless accelerated.

  He saw the attacking vessel’s two catapults fire again, and watched both shots go wide as the enemy gunners tried to track their high-speed target. That would be their last chance, he knew. There was no way they’d have the time to load and fire again before this was over … one way or another.

  The battle dolphin swelled in his forward view. “Brace for ramming!” he bellowed. “And tell Beth-Abz to hit them with everything he’s got!”

  *****

  They’re ramming! Berglund felt a sudden chill. The enemy was taking the fight to him. This engagement wasn’t going the way he’d intended it at all.

  But then he relaxed a little. What other choice did the enemy captain have, after all? With no way to maneuver, the squid ship’s tactical choices were cut almost to nil. A successful ram would damage the Shark, perhaps seriously, but it wouldn’t destroy the larger vessel. Then Berglund’s crew would swarm aboard the enemy – his highly trained boarding crew easily outnumbering the smaller, and generally untrained, crew of the target – and that would be the end of the fight. Mentally he reviewed the crew roster the mystery man had given him. There were three people aboard the squid ship worthy of respect in combat: the captain himself and the first and second mates. Everyone else, however, may as well already be dead before the swords of his boarding party.

  No, he remembered suddenly, there was one unknown quantity: the large, curly-haired warrior who’d signed on soon before the squid ship had left port. He might prove to be a problem, so Berglund would order four of his better swordsmen to handle the burly man. No matter how good he may be, he wouldn’t last long against four swords.

  There he was! Berglund could see him on the foredeck of the rapidly approaching squid ship. If Berglund could see him, that meant he in turn could see the armed warriors lining the rails of the Shark. Yet, even seeing the force arrayed against him, the big man seemed undismayed.

  That was something to consider, wasn’t it? That much confidence might be based on some foundation ….

  All this flashed through Berglund’s mind in a heartbeat. Maybe accepting the ram wasn’t a wise decision after all ….

  “Hard to port!” the pirate captain yelled.

  But it was too late. With a sudden pang of real fear, Berglund saw the squid ship – impossibly – accelerate even more.

  Then he saw the large warrior on the enemy’s foredeck start to change ….

  *****

  Teldin growled with fierce exhilaration as he saw Beth-Abz assume its true form. A beam of brilliant green – brighter than the sun – lashed out from one of the beholder’s lesser eyes and struck the battle dolphin amidships. The Cloakmaster saw the heavy wood of the hull flash into dust under the magical onslaught.

  Then the squid ship’s piercing ram struck. The impact hurled Teldin from his chair, into the forward bulkhead. For a moment he was stunned, the ringing in his ears drowning out the sound of shattering timber. Shaking his head to clear it, he forced himself to a sitting position. The glow of the cloak – flickering as he struggled to regain control – flared brightly once more. His expanded perception returned.

  The Boundless’s slender ram had driven deep into the “head” of the battle dolphin, piercing the reinforced wood as if it had been light balsa. Chunks of torn timber, knocked free by the impact, slammed against the hull of the squid ship. Many of the battle dolphin’s crewmen had been knocked to the deck, he saw, but they were quickly readying themselves to board.

  They were too late. Teldin’s own “boarding party” was already moving.

  Beth-Abz floated over the foredeck rail and headed forward along the length of the ram to where it pierced the battle dolphin’s hull. Teldin saw Beth-Abz reorient itself slightly as it adjusted for the slightly different gravity plane of the other vessel. A green beam flicked out again, blowing a gapi
ng hole in the planking. Then Beth-Abz disappeared through the gap.

  “Stand by to repel boarders!” the Cloakmaster yelled.

  *****

  A beholder? A gods-cursed beholder! And it’s aboard my ship.

  From below him, deep in the “head” of the Shark, Berglund could hear his crew members screaming, dying. There was no way they could fight an eye tyrant.

  The Shark was lost; he knew it, and the knowledge was a cold, sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach. And if he didn’t act soon, his life would be lost, too.

  A captain owed loyalty to his crew, as they owed loyalty to him – that philosophy had been drummed into him when he’d served with the military. But that loyalty didn’t extend to sacrificing his own life for them.

  “Separate the shuttle!” Berglund screamed.

  *****

  Some few of the pirates had swarmed over their own rail and were trying to board the Boundless, Teldin could see. But their attempt was halfhearted at best, and Teldin’s own crew was holding them off with boarding pikes. On the afterdeck, Djan – seemingly little hampered by his arm wound – was pumping crossbow quarrels into the attackers. Dranigor, the secondary helmsman, was doing his part, raking the would-be boarders with magical projectiles that burst from his extended fingertips. The wave of attackers faltered, then broke, fleeing back toward the dubious safety of their own ship.

  Even with his enhanced senses, Teldin couldn’t see Beth-Abz anymore. He could hear, however, the screams from within the battle dolphin as the beholder rampaged around within it. As he watched, a section of the larger craft’s lower hull blew out into space – presumably struck by the eye tyrant’s disintegration beam.

  Something was happening to the battle dolphin’s open main deck, he saw suddenly. The lines of the ship seemed to change, as though it were breaking up …

  But then he realized just what he was seeing. A section of the battle dolphin – most of the upper portion of its “tail,” in fact – was lifting free under its own power. As the gap between it and the rest of the ship opened, he could see it resembled a two-masted, open-decked sailing ship. Much smaller than the battle dolphin as a whole, this new vessel was no more than forty feet long, and couldn’t hold a crew of more than fifteen to twenty, if that. It had to be a kind of lifeboat, a captain’s gig, or perhaps some combination of the two. Obviously the enemy captain was making his escape, leaving the remainder of his crew to their fate. If Teldin had anything to do with it, the pirate captain wouldn’t make it.

  But the Cloakmaster couldn’t have anything to do with it. The Boundless ram was driven deep into the battle dolphin, effectively immobilizing the squid ship and preventing it from giving chase. The catapult was broken, and the lifeboat-gig – whatever was taking care to stay out of the firing arcs of the ballistae. Already the escape craft was out of effective bow range. The captain was going to get away with his unprovoked attack, and Teldin would never know who he was or what his motivations were ….

  Then, without warning, the familiar line of burning green lanced up from the battle dolphin. Angling up out of the space recently occupied by the gig, it struck the stern of the smaller ship, blowing much of it into fragments. The gig instantly began to corkscrew slowly, obviously unpowered and out of control.

  *****

  Berglund rose slowly back to consciousness like a man swimming to the surface of a night-black lake. The side of his head hurt abominably where something – a fragment of his ship, he thought – had struck him. He felt warm wetness spreading down from above his hairline on the right, blinding his right eye. He wiped the blood from his eye, but didn’t bother to tend to the wound, or to any of his other minor injuries.

  The dolphin shuttle was virtually wrecked, he saw at once. The aft quarter of the sterncastle deck was just gone, blown into dust by the beholder’s magical ray. Amidst the wreckage trailing behind the ship, he could see the tumbling body of his second mate. From this distance he couldn’t see whether Rejhan was alive or not. He rather thought not, but there was no way to be sure. Certainly, the helm was down and the ship crippled, leaving him no way of retrieving his lost crewman.

  Or relieving the ones I left behind to die, he reminded himself dully.

  Berglund had never-quite-considered himself a pirate, preferring the term “privateer.” Because of that sophistry, he’d never sailed under the neogi skull ensign favored by many other wildspace pirates. Now he found himself regretful. It would be so much more symbolic to officially strike his colors, so much more dignified. And dignity might be all he’d be able to salvage from this. Everything else was lost, maybe even his life.

  Oh, well …. He sighed.

  “Run up a white flag, if you please,” he ordered quietly.

  One of his few surviving crewmen hurried to obey.

  *****

  The din from inside the battle dolphin’s main hull had fallen silent. Either the crew members left aboard were all dead, or they’d given up their resistance as useless. The Cloakmaster hoped the latter.

  He focused his enhanced senses on the stricken gig, trailing its cloud of space flotsam. As he watched, a crewman ran an improvised white flag – it looked like half a bedsheet – up to the masthead.

  “They’re surrendering,” he called back to Julia. “Get Beth-Abz back aboard. And see what we can do to get the Boundless moving again.”

  The beholder was back aboard the squid ship in a matter of a minute or two. Using its disintegrator ray to carve pieces of the battle dolphin’s hull away, it freed the squid ship to back away from the drifting hulk.

  Teldin kept the Boundless moving dead slow, maneuvering gently toward the wrecked gig, where the white flag still flew. As he came in alongside, he turned to Julia. “What in the Abyss do we do now?” he asked. “I don’t know the protocol for this kind of thing.”

  “I do,” she said grimly. “Send a prize crew aboard and bring the captain back here so you can accept his surrender personally.”

  The Cloakmaster nodded slowly. That’d give him the chance he wanted to question his attacker. “Do it,” he instructed.

  *****

  Teldin was waiting on the foredeck when Julia, Djan – his forearm heavily bandaged – and two others escorted the enemy captain aboard the Boundless a couple of minutes later. He wasn’t a particularly prepossessing man, the Cloakmaster thought, a finger’s span or two shorter than Teldin, but with a similar build. His hair and beard were a couple of shades darker than the Cloakmaster’s own. Blood from a scalp wound was drying on his right cheek. Teldin found himself staring into the man’s eyes, looking for some flash of hostility, some taint of evil, but there wasn’t anything like that to be seen. His opponent looked like any other tired, wounded, defeated man, desperately trying to ding to those, shreds of his dignity that remained.

  “I’m Teldin Moore,” the Cloakmaster said. “And you are …?”

  For a moment, Teldin could see the steel of command in the man’s manner. “Captain Henric Berglund,” the other answered formally. “I offer you my surrender.”

  “Accepted.”

  “What will happen to my crew?”

  You weren’t thinking about that when you escaped in your gig and left so many of them to their fate, were you? Teldin thought. He suppressed his distaste for the man and said simply, “Their lives are spared.”

  “Are any still alive in the hull?” Berglund asked.

  “Some,” Teldin responded. “Those who surrendered.”

  Berglund accepted that without comment. “Prisoners?” he asked.

  The Cloakmaster shook his head. “I’ve got no space for prisoners, and nowhere to take them. You should be able to repair your gig” – he gestured to the small vessel alongside the squid ship – “and you’re free to take it anywhere you want.” He paused. “If you answer some questions.”

  “Like what?”

  “Why?” Teldin asked earnestly. “Why attack my ship? You were after me, weren’t you?”

&nbs
p; The shorter man shrugged. “It was a contract,” he answered. “Business.”

  Teldin pointed to the four cloth-wrapped bodies lined up along the port rail – Allyn, Merrienne, and two others slain by the battle dolphin’s catapult shots. “Business!” he spat. “You killed my crew!”

  “You killed mine,” Berglund shot back.

  “It’s different.”

  Berglund remained silent.

  It took immense effort, but the Cloakmaster forced himself to calm down at least a little. “All right,” he allowed, “business. So who contracted you for this business?”

  The pirate’s lips twisted in a sarcastic smile as he shook his head.

  Teldin ground his teeth. “Then what – exactly – were you contracted to do?” he asked. “Blow us out of space? Take us prisoner? What?”

  Berglund still didn’t answer.

  “Interesting,” Julia said. Teldin turned in surprise to look at his second mate. She was examining Berglund curiously. “Interesting that you have such loyalty to the people who hired you. After all, they sent you into battle against overwhelming odds, didn’t they?” She nonchalantly indicated Beth-Abz, who was easily visible on the afterdeck.

  “Your masters, the ones who hired you … they’re the ones who killed your crew, aren’t they?” she pressed. “I think you owe them nothing, least of all your loyalty.”

  The pirate was silent for a moment; Teldin could almost feel the intensity of his thoughts. Then he nodded. “I don’t know who hired me,” he said quietly. “I didn’t recognize him, and I didn’t ask. All that mattered was that his money was good.”

  Teldin took a step forward, intent. “What did he want you to do?”

  “Take you prisoner,” Berglund said flatly.

  “And the others?”

  “Put them to the sword, then scuttle your ship.”

  Business, Teldin thought. He struggled to keep disgust out of his voice. “And what was to happen to me?”