The Gathering Flame

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  Soberup pills, thought Errec, with a certain amount of sympathy—he’d been in the admiral’s position himself a time or two. The spacer’s friend.

  He waited for a minute or two longer and then let himself become noticeable again. Lachiel turned her head slowly in his direction.

  “Oh. It’s you. Ransome.”

  “Yes.” He didn’t say anything more for a while. The shadows under the trees moved and shifted as the night wind freshened and grew colder. “Who won the contest?”

  “Damned if I know.” There was another long pause. “About the time we started singing the winebottle song, we lost count.”

  Errec laughed faintly. “I’ve heard that one a time or two. It’s enough to make almost anybody lose count.” He let the conversation lapse again into silence for a while—companionable silence, this time—and then said, “How’s the rest of the party going?”

  “Pretty well.”

  “Is Jos still talking with Ferrda and that crowd?”

  “The last I looked.” Lachiel shifted position in the darkness; Errec could sense curiosity stirring amid the fumes of urraggh that swirled in her brain. “You know him. What’s he doing?”

  Errec shrugged. “I’m not sure. Ferrda was a member of the crew during his young-wandering-time—”

  “His what?”

  “It’s a Selvauran thing,” he said. “Once they’re full-grown, the elders kick them off-world—they can live on the other planets in-system, or on the Selvauran colony worlds, but they aren’t allowed to settle down and raise a family on Maraghai itself until the elders say that they’re ready.”

  “Tough luck if the elders don’t like you, then.”

  “I suppose. But it keeps the home planet empty and primitive, and that’s how they like it. The ones who want to come back—they spend the next three or four decades trying to get themselves killed.”

  “Really?”

  “It works out that way in practice,” he said. “The idea is to gain so much fame that the elders haven’t got any choice but to let you in.”

  “And your Ferrda did that—how?”

  “By being associated with Jos. Jos has some serious fame.”

  “I see,” said Lachiel thoughtfully. “These elders … the ones who make all the decisions … they wouldn’t be a bunch of Selvaurs whose hides have gone all grey and wrinkly, would they?”

  “Like the Selvaurs Jos is drinking with? Yes.”

  Nivome strode into the office of the Galcenian ambassador without waiting for the receptionist to announce his arrival. If the ambassador was displeased by the interruption, the man hid it well. Palace rumor said that the Minister of Internal Security was not one whom it was a good idea to offend, and Nivome took pains to make certain the rumor spread.

  “My lord Nivome,” the ambassador said, rising and coming forward from behind his desk. “To what do I owe this unaccustomed pleasure?”

  “Then you haven’t heard?”

  The ambassador looked blank. “My lord?”

  “That you’re going to be replaced.”

  “I’m afraid not, my lord.” The ambassador had moved to extend his hand to the Interior Minister; now he let it fall, and his expression grew wary. “I shall query my government by the next available Galcenian courier—”

  “The next available courier is landing in Wippeldon right now,” Nivome said brutally, “and the new ambassador is on it.”

  “Your news is certainly … interesting,” the Galcenian said, his voice suddenly formal and cold. “May I beg my lord’s indulgence?”

  “Of course,” said Nivome. His parting bow was deep but not especially respectful. “Of course.”

  Outside the ambassador’s office, he walked down the velvet-hung corridor to the reception area, then out beneath the portico, where his hovercar and driver waited.

  “Where to, my lord?” the driver asked.

  “Take me to—no, take me to the Palace Major,” Nivome said. “Call ahead and request an audience with the Domina.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  Nivome got into the rear compartment of the hovercar. The vehicle rose and started off through the streets of the Embassy Quarter—an elegant, well-groomed district built up outside the boundaries of the city proper, in deference to the long-standing tradition that no power but Entibor had a seat in An-Jemayne. They had not gone far before the speaker from the front seat clicked on.

  “My lord,” came the driver’s voice, “I am unable to reach the Palace Major.”

  “Why not?”

  “There seems to be a communications breakdown.” The driver paused a moment. “Consistent with jamming.”

  “Jamming?” Nivome checked his chronometer. The Palace Major was fifteen minutes away, assuming no traffic disasters along the route. He made a quick calculation. “Take me to Fleet Local Command. Do it now, do it fast.”

  “My lord.” The interior comm clicked off. The hovercar accelerated sharply, taking its next corner at a speed that had it heeling sideways, and sped off on a new course. The ride seemed interminable, but it was less than five minutes by the minister’s chronometer before the gate of the Local Command Headquarters flashed past the windows of the hovercar. The driver pulled up outside the main building, and Nivome leaped from the passenger compartment before the car had settled to the pavement.

  He dashed into the building through the closest entrance, where a low-level officer was standing guard. Nivome pulled out his palace credential and brandished it in the youngster’s face.

  “Where’s the duty officer?” Nivome said, speaking loudly but distinctly. “There’s a problem at the palace. I want loyal troops there. I want them there now.”

  The party seemed to go on forever.

  Gala’s impressions melted into a confused blur of drums and music and an endlessly replenished supply of food and drink. She remembered Tillijen shooting an empty goblet off of Nannla’s head with a full-power blaster burn, to the enthusiastic roarings and applause of an audience of Selvaurs, and she remembered joining with the gunner and her partner in teaching the winebottle song to the crowd gathered around the last of the ale barrels. And she remembered watching Jos Metadi and his friend Ferrda talking to one set of wrinkleskinned Selvaurs after another, all night long.

  The moon had gone down and the first pale light of morning was filtering down into the atrium when Metadi left the Selvaurs and came over to join his bleary-eyed crew.

  “Made it,” he said.

  Gala blinked. In spite of the soberup pills she’d taken, her head felt as if she’d stuffed it with some of the cushioning foam from one of the Selvaurs’ landing pods. “Made it how?”

  “The Selvaurs—the elders—they’ve agreed to cast in with Entibor.” Metadi’s tired features broke into a brief, feral grin. “We’re going to take the war to the Mages and show those bastards what a real fight is like.”

  Ships, thought Gala, grinning back at him. Trained engineers, the best in the galaxy … “How soon can we get with their people to work on the details?”

  “Not for a little while yet,” Metadi said. “We have to go back to Entibor first.”

  “So how soon do we leave?”

  “As soon as possible,” Metadi said. “We have to get back home and arrange things to formalize the relationship between the two worlds.”

  Something in his voice made Gala uneasy. “Arrange what sort of … things?”

  “Ambassadors. Port privileges. Giving them my firstborn son as a foster child.”

  “What?”

  “It has to happen that way,” he said. “Family to family. It’s how Selvaurs do things.”

  There was a moment of profound silence.

  “Oh, dear,” said Tillijen at last. “The Domina will not be pleased. That isn’t how Entiborans do things. Not at all.”

  JOS METADI: SAPNE

  (GALCENIAN DATING 966 A.F.; ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 30 VERATINA)

  MERITORIOUS REWARD didn’t lift from Sapne Market on t
he next day, or on the day after. The red wind that had come howling into the open cargo hold, or perhaps the pod of cargo carriers from Sapne H-and-Eco, had carried the plague with it.

  Treece, the master rigger, was the first to show symptoms. He complained at dinner that the sand from the wind-blast had made his skin itch—and indeed, the rigger’s face and hands looked red. He seemed to have no relish for his meal, and left the mess table moving as if his joints and muscles pained him. An hour later, Jos found him collapsed on the deckplates outside crew berthing: still conscious, but too weak from pain to move, with drops of blood running from his nose and mouth and oozing out from beneath his tight-shut eyelids.

  Jos hit the bulkhead button for intraship comms. The Merry didn’t have a real physician on board—only the big shipping lines could afford a luxury touch like that—but the purser had basic training, a full kit, and all the medical data that ship’s memory could hold. For most shipboard problems, that was enough. Jos punched in the purser’s comm code.

  “Treece is sick,” he said as soon as the link clicked on. “He looks real bad.”

  “He’s not going to be the only one,” the purser said. “I just got through processing a slug of messages from over on Wandering Star. This thing’s been hitting their crew too. It’s fast and nasty … . Is Treece bleeding?”

  Joe swallowed. “You got that one right.”

  “Damn. Looks like our luck’s run out. Get him into his bunk and I’ll be down as soon as I can get the kit together.”

  Jos half-carried, half-dragged the rigger to his quarters in crew berthing, a four-person cabin Treece shared with three other men from the senior crew. The purser showed up a few minutes later, looking worried.

  “Whatever this is,” he said, “it’s new. There’s nothing coded for it in the standard kit, and I can’t find it in the on-ship data bases.”

  “Do the dirtsiders know anything about it?” Jos asked.

  He couldn’t help staring at Treece. The red flush on the rigger’s face had worsened. He was burning with fever, and his skin had begun to peel and split. Blood oozed from his cracked flesh, and sweat mixed with blood stained his clothing and the sheets.

  “I don’t think so. It’s spreading too fast for them to get a grip on it. In fact—” The purser selected an ampule from the medical kit, frowned at it with a dubious expression, and pressed it against Treece’s arm. “—I’d say those pharmaceuticals from Kiin-Aloq were somebody’s best guess at a solution. And offhand, I don’t think they’re going to work.”

  The purser was justified in his pessimism. Nothing in the Merry’s medical kit turned out to be of any use. Neither did the captain’s attempts to reach somebody—anybody—from dirtside medical. Treece’s fever climbed higher, his muscles cramped until he screamed, and shortly after ship’s-midnight he vomited black blood and died.

  By that time, three other members of the cargo-handling team had collapsed. By morning, two of those three were dead.

  Jos still hadn’t fallen ill. And since he was alive, he was detailed to help the purser—and when the purser himself fell sick, the first mate—take care of the rest of the crew.

  It was a hellish time. One by one, the men and women aboard Meritorious Reward collapsed, bled, screamed in pain and delirium, and died. A few of those who were ill recovered, including the purser; and two or three people, like Jos, stayed unaffected, but those were the exceptions. The Merry’s first mate was one of the dead; a few hours later, the Merry’s captain was another.

  But the time came at last when the sickness, if it hadn’t yet ended, seemed at least to abate. When a full ship’s day had passed without any fatalities or anyone new falling sick, the purser—as senior surviving officer—called a meeting of the handful of people who remained on their feet.

  The surviving crew members of Meritorious Reward sat at one end of the long mess table; there were no longer enough of them to fill the seats around it. To Jos, they looked like a convocation of skeletons. He swallowed a mouthful of the high-energy rehydrating drink that the Merry’s medical data base had not very helpfully suggested for all hands, and tried to fix his weary attention on what was going on around him.

  “What it all comes down to,” the purser said, “is that there’s not enough of us alive to lift ship even if we had the fuel. Our pilot’s on the sick list. Maybe he’ll get better, and at least we have his apprentice, but there’s no way we can muster enough hands to cover everything else.”

  Jos knew that what the purser said was true. The Merry was a big ship for an independent merch, with enormous cargo space coupled to a massive power plant, and she needed her full complement to run. They could have worked it, maybe, for long enough to reach a safe port, if anyone from engineering had remained alive. But without the crew members who kept the Merry’s engines running on the good side of uncontrolled disaster, lift-off was impossible.

  “So what do we do?” one of the other crew members asked finally. “Stuck in a plague port with a ship we can’t lift—”

  “We do the best we can under the circumstances,” the purser said. “I’ve been talking to Wandering Star—”

  “They’re still here?”

  The purser nodded. “Still here, still on the air. Same problem as us. Not enough hands. They’ve got an engineer—well, he signed aboard off a little short-hopper when his partner died, so I guess he’s one of theirs now—but no pilot or navigator. We’ve got a pilot”—he nodded at Jos—“so they’re willing to take us on as well.”

  Jos let the unexpected promotion pass without comment. If he could handle the work, getting his papers changed to make him a full pilot wouldn’t be any trouble. And at the moment, he had other things to worry about.

  “Why not take Wandering Star’s people on board with us?” he asked. “She’s a Libra-class—it’s going to be a tight squeeze if we go over there.”

  “Their engineer isn’t qualified for work on anything bigger than a short-hopper like the one he came off of. He can handle a Libra’s power plant—just barely—but that’s about the best he’s good for.” The purser shrugged. “Sorry. I’ve been all over this, and it’s Wandering Star or nothing.”

  “What do we do about the Merry?” asked another of the surviving crew members.

  “Leave her,” said the purser. “Post a message for the bank to transfer our pay and the delivery bonus over to Wandering Star’s account—we can sort out who owns what shares later—but if it comes to a choice between getting paid and getting off this planet alive … well, I know which one I want to take.”

  XV. GALCENIAN DATING 976 A.F.

  ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 3 PERADA

  PERADA SAT in the informal reception room of the Palace Major, listening to the gentle plashing of the indoor fountain and the uncertain soprano voices of the An-Jemayne Children’s Choir. Her mother’s branch of House Rosselin had long been one of the choir’s traditional sponsors, and the choir had customarily repaid the family’s patronage with a private performance each year at the manor house in Felshang. Now that Perada was Domina of Entibor, the yearly recital had moved to the palace, and the young singers were so overawed by their surroundings that they could hardly keep on key.

  Gentlelady Wherret and the Delaven Academy Glee Club, Perada reflected, could have done better any day of the week—they’d worked on most of the same pieces, in fact, and Perada knew the descant line of the Lightbearer Canon considerably better than the current singers did. But it wasn’t done for the choir’s patron to say as much; and if she broke from custom and did anything as radical as opening her mouth and singing along with the music, the choir director would die of mortification on the spot.

  A quick flash of red light alerted Perada to a message coming up on her infoscreen—a discreet panel set into the wall of the reception room at an angle not visible except from the chair of state. She turned her attention from the recital and watched the words forming out of the background mist:

  HAFREY SENDS. NEW DEVELOPME
NTS. NEW AMBASSADOR FROM GALCEN. YOU SHOULD MEET HIM PRTVATELY/INCOGNITO BEFORE ANY FORMAL PRESENTATION.

  The time-tick on the infoscreen—and a quick glance at the elegantly calligraphed program in her lap—told her that the recital had at least an hour yet to run. Arranging her features into a regretful expression, she rose and made the demi-bow that even a Domina could give to art. Then she left the room by the side door that led to her private apartments.

  Ser Hafrey was waiting for her by the doorway to her sitting room. “My lady,” he said, with a bow of full respect. “I’m honored that you could come.”

  Perada returned his courtesy with a brisk nod. “Your warnings and suggestions have proved their worth more than once already … . You said something about an ambassador?”

  “Yes, my lady,” he replied. “Though in truth we do not know anything for a certainty, except that a ship approaches with someone identified as such on board.”

  Finally she thought with a thrill of excitement. A response from Galcen!

  “What do you think they want?” she wondered aloud, taking care to keep the emotion from showing on her face or in her voice. An arch-conservative like the armsmaster was unlikely to approve of her plans—her hopes, really; “plans” was too definite a word—for a permanent alliance of all the worlds threatened by the raiders.

  “It’s no secret that you’ve been seeking a mutual defense pact with Galcen, my lady,” the armsmaster said. “And their current ambassador is not a man I, for one, would entrust with negotiations for anything more vital than a dinner engagement.”

  Perada smiled in spite of herself. “He does that much well enough, from the look of him.”

  “Indeed,” said Hafrey. “But I suspect that he will find himself put out of his office by this new arrival—and that you will find yourself facing someone with both the authority and the skills to negotiate with you.”