The Gathering Flame

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  Today she’d kidnapped baby Ari from the nursery staff—dedicated professionals all, whose respectful demeanor almost concealed their unspoken opinion of the Domina as an untrained dilettante—and carried him off to the garden. Ari was toddling now; it amused her to contemplate the grave concentration with which he made his slow, careful progress from one point of interest to the next. He was a quiet child, even-tempered and not given to crying, who seldom wanted anything that she could not provide. For that alone she would have loved him; after hours each day spent talking with diplomats and government ministers and petitioners from this district or that guild, all of them needing her to do the impossible.

  This morning’s report by the Minister of Agriculture had distressed even Ser Hafrey, who normally paid no heed to the work of the various ministries. Sometime during the course of the last few weeks of fighting, a Mageworlds task unit had reached the outer fringes of the atmosphere before being detected and destroyed. Not soon enough, apparently; the ministry reported a subsequent withering of food grains in areas free of drought or natural disease.

  “We are looking,” the Minister had said, “at the possibility—indeed, at the probability—of a biological attack.”

  Perada shivered, not so much from the autumn wind as from the memory of the pictures that had accompanied the minister’s report: bare swaths of muddy, rainwashed ground; fruits and vegetables crumbling into loathsome dust; acres of brown leaves on brittle stalks, in a district where the grain should have rippled like a golden carpet from horizon to horizon. And the blight was growing, following the prevailing winds. The minister had brought a list of recommendations with him—strict quarantines, interruption of on-planet and off-planet movement, stockpiling—but not even his most optimistic projections had contained any assurance of success. The name of Sapne had not yet been spoken aloud, but the plague world was close to the front of everybody’s mind.

  Nobody thought that a whole planet could go down so fast, Perada thought. She took away a lump of gravel that Ari had decided to chew on, and let him use her long skirt to pull himself back up to a standing position. Everybody thought the disasters on Sapne were natural until it was too late.

  And now it’s happening to us.

  She heard footsteps crunching on the gravel behind her, and turned to see who it was that approached. Her heart leapt—An absurd term, she thought, but how else to describe the sensation?—when she saw that it was Jos Metadi who stood there, hatless as always, with the tails of his black long-coat catching and lifting on the rising wind.

  “’adda!”

  Ari didn’t have many words, but that was one of them. He let go of Perada’s skirt and ran toward Metadi. Jos caught the boy before he could overbalance, and lifted him up to sit in the crook of one arm. Perada came forward more slowly, extending her hand and letting him take it in his free one.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t welcome you properly inside,” she said. “But I didn’t know—”

  “Didn’t anyone at Central bother to tell you the ’Hammer was landed? They snatched me off to a briefing the moment I arrived,” Jos said; “surely they had time.” Ari was pulling at the buttons of his coat, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “Central rations its electronic messages these days,” she said. “Out of caution, I suppose—the Mages are probably listening to everything they can pick up.” She gave a nervous laugh. “I’m sure that the letter announcing your arrival will get to me in a day or two.”

  He didn’t smile. The hand gripping hers tightened for a moment. “Let me announce myself, then. I’m back.”

  “I’m glad.” The wind gusted, whipping her skirts around her ankles and tugging at the hem of her cape. “It’s getting cold—let’s go inside, and you can tell me how things went on Maraghai.”

  “If that’s what you want to hear.”

  There was an edge to his voice. She could tell he was tense about something, but he didn’t speak further.

  They walked to the palace in silence and entered through the terrace door. An armed trooper straightened to attention and presented his ceremonial pike as they passed. A modern energy lance, slung from his back with the power cells inserted, showed that the antique weapon wasn’t his major defense.

  One of the nursemaids met them just inside the door. She reclaimed Ari so deftly that the baby was on his way upstairs to the nursery before Perada could raise a protest—it was Metadi’s presence that had done it, she decided. The staff had their doubts about her, maybe, but they had absolutely no doubts whatever about Jos.

  Still saying nothing, they passed through the antechamber into the private reception area known—from the tall, narrow windows that lined it on both sides—as the hall of light. The afternoon sun slanted through diamond-shaped panes to fall onto the polished floorboards. Except for a table and chairs of pierced fruitwood that had stood in the hall since the day the first Rosselin heir had assumed the Iron Crown, the room had no furniture; it had all been taken to augment the display in the public rooms.

  Finally Perada couldn’t put off asking the question any longer. “Did the mission go well?”

  “We got what we went for,” Jos said. “The Selvaurs are willing to make an alliance.”

  The wave of relief that washed over her was so strong that she had to sit down in one of the delicate carved chairs. She hadn’t realized until now how much she had wanted—how much she had needed—to hear that Entibor was not alone.

  “Thank fortune,” she said. “And thank you. You couldn’t have brought me a better gift if you’d ransacked half the galaxy for it.”

  Jos didn’t smile back at her. His expression—his whole bearing—was tense and edgy. “It looks like you haven’t done too badly in that line yourself.”

  “You’re talking about the Galcenians?”

  He gave a curt nod. “They were all over system space when we came in. The briefing at Central was long on speculation but short on facts. My commanders insisted on calling them our ‘allies.’”

  “I wouldn’t really call them allies,” she said. “They want something a bit more permanent than that.”

  “You could do worse.”

  “It’s hard to see how,” she said. “Strip away the fine words, and Galcen wants to make Entibor into a client world—a colony, is more like it. At least the Mages are honest about what they’re after.”

  “The Galcenians are good fighters, though. Better to have them on your side than not.”

  “I suppose.” She looked at him. He stood near the foot of the carved table, too far away for their hands to touch, and his face had not lost its lines of tension. She licked suddenly dry lips and went on. “But I want them with us on our terms, not theirs. This alliance you’ve brought back from Maraghai sounds like enough to tilt the balance.”

  “I hope so. It’s an arrangement between equals—Selvaurs don’t make any other kind.”

  “Under whose command?” she asked. “Ours or theirs?”

  He gave a quick, tight shrug. “We haven’t settled that.”

  “I want you to run it. I’ve said so from the beginning.”

  “I could.” It was a statement of fact, not a boast. He wasn’t looking at her at all; instead, he was gazing with intense concentration at the patterns of light and shadow cast onto the tabletop by the leaded window-glass. “But it won’t work unless the Entiborans and the Selvaurs come to the same conclusion on their own.”

  “I can speak for Entibor,” she said. “As for the Selvaurs … you know them, Jos. Knew Ferrdacorr, anyway. Will they accept a—a thin-skin leading them?” “I hope so. Under certain circumstances.”

  He still wasn’t looking at her. Perada felt a strange, unexpected chill. “What kind of … circumstances … are you talking about?”

  Jos lifted his head to meet her gaze, and she saw that his face was pale and set. “I’ve promised to give them Ari as a foster child.”

  “What?” She stood up so fast that her chair fell backward and hit t
he floor with a clatter. “You had no right—!”

  “Do you want an alliance?” His voice had an edge to it like a knife. “If you want the Selvaurs to fight on our side, that’s their price: family bond with me and mine.”

  She felt like she was choking. “Family? You think a bunch of scaly, green, bad-tempered—”

  “Ari will be safe with Ferrda’s people. Can you promise me that much if he stays on Entibor? I had to shoot my way in, and I suppose that in order to take him to safety on Maraghai I’ll have to shoot my way back out.”

  Perada had to grip the edge of the table with both hands. The rush of anger was so strong it was making her dizzy. She drew her breath in through her teeth to keep from screaming.

  “You had no right,” she said again. “If the Selvaurs want your blood kin, you’ll have to look some place besides here.”

  His face was like a carving out of ice. “What do you mean?”

  “You are the Consort,” she said. “Ari is your son by law, and by my command. But your gene-child, he is not.”

  JOS METADI: DEEP SPACE

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

  THINGS WEREN’T good aboard Wandering Star. The combined crews worked together as well as could be expected, but the sick ones continued to die at an astounding rate. Two days in orbit over Sapne saw four more cycled out the airlock. During those two days, Jos and Maert and Covain worked over the manuals for the navicomp—a model far different from the one Jos had used on Meritorious Reward—and discussed where they should go.

  “We can’t bring plague to a civilized world,” Covain insisted. “That wouldn’t be right.”

  “I’m not planning to, but there are places,” Maert said. “And maybe by when no one else is sick, no one is infectious.”

  “Maybe,” Covain said, but he didn’t sound convinced.

  “How about Yasp?” Jos said, looking up from the text-files in the Merchanter’s Guide. “It says here they’ve got orbiting reception areas, including quarantine berthing.”

  “You don’t feel up to a ground landing?”

  “I can do it,” he said. “But I think maybe Captain Covain has a point.”

  “I’m the captain,” Maert said. “On my ship there is no other.” She paused for a moment. “You will make course for Yasp. Seek the quarantine berthing.”

  Jos did the calculations, once with the navicomp, then again using ship’s memory as a check. Later that day, Maert called the crew to acceleration stations, they made the run to jump, and Jos took Wandering Star into hyperspace.

  When the stars had flared and died outside the bridge windows—actual armor-glass, not viewscreen projections—and the view had changed to the grey pseudosubstance of hyper, Maert leaned forward and handed him a piece of paper. It was a full pilot’s license, with the name of the last holder masked off and Jos’ own name lettered in its place.

  “Here,” she said. “You’re an accredited, certified pilot now.”

  Jos looked at it.

  “You wonder if other ships will take this? Look.” Maert pointed to the bottom, where one signature had been crossed out and another added. “That’s my chop. Everyone knows me. Anyone doubts it has to fight me. No one will dare.”

  “Two weeks to Yasp,” Jos said.

  That ship’s-night on the midwatch, Sedver—one of the supply clerks from the Merry, who’d contracted a mild case of the plague and then had seemed to recover—relapsed. He fell to the deck, blood running from every orifice, and died before his shipmates could carry him to a bunk.

  Number-two cargo bay was pumped clear of air, taken down to freezing, and turned into a temporary morgue until they got to realspace and a chance to use the airlocks. Sedver was only the first occupant. Before the night was over, Berud—the engineer off the hopper, whom so far the plague had spared—came down with the fever, cramps, and rash that marked the first stages. In four days he was dead, screaming in pain. The Star’s medical locker had expended all its painkillers.

  By then Covain and three crew members from Wandering Star had relapsed too, and died. The ones who remained—there wasn’t any shortage of berthing spaces now—gathered around the mess table, their faces haggard, and wondered which one of them would be next. That night Captain Maert opened the grog locker, and they held a noisy, drunken free-spacer’s wake for those who had died already, and for themselves.

  The plague walked through the ship, and this time mortality was complete. Jos used the engineering skills he’d picked up in his short turn aboard Quorum, and everything that he’d learned since, to keep the freighter’s engines running. They weren’t too different from Quorum’s, though far simpler than Meritorious Reward’s. Between checking the course—the autopilot was old and cranky—and checking the engines, he barely had time to eat, and what sleep he got he took in the pilot’s chair or on the spare acceleration couch down in the engine room.

  He knew that the number of the ship’s crew was steadily diminishing, but not until Captain Maert stopped him as he made his endless cycle from the bridge to engineering and back to the bridge again did he realize how far it had gone.

  “Come, young Jos,” Maert said, laying a hand on his arm. She opened the door to the captain’s cabin—the only single on the little ship, to starboard off the common room—and gestured him inside. In the better light of the cabin, Jos saw that Maert’s eyes were fever bright, and the plague’s telltale rash had started on her forehead and her hands.

  She lay back on the bunk. From the way she moved, he could tell how much the effort of rising from it and fetching him had cost her. “It is only the two of us now,” she said, “and soon it will not be me.” She pointed to the cabin’s fold-down desk. “All the account numbers are there. Now I give this ship to you. It is yours. You are captain.”

  She held up her hand. “Now you shake my hand. I say ‘Done?’ and you say ‘Done.’ That’s how it is among free-spacers. Come now.”

  Jos took her hand. It was hot and dry, but her grip was still firm. “Done?” she said, and, “Done,” Jos replied.

  “Now, Captain, I ask you to leave me,” Maert said. “You have your ship to fly.”

  Two days later, Jos put Maert’s body into the morgue. While he was securing it to the deck, the navigation alarm buzzed in the headset of his pressure-suit. He made his way to the bridge, and was ready in time for dropout from hyper. When he checked the navicomp readouts, he saw that he was near the Yasp system, but not yet in it and not yet in communications range. He set course for the star, clicked on the autopilot, pulled off the helmet of his p-suit, and went back to the galley for a cup of cha’a.

  As he reached for the cup, the muscles in his arm throbbed. He felt lightheaded. The room swam before him. “Too tired,” he muttered. “Only me left.” He reached up to rub his eyes, and his hand came away with a smear of blood. His hand was showing the beginnings of a crimson rash.

  “Only me. Not even me.”

  He went forward again and picked up his pilot’s license, the one Maert had given him. He unsealed his p-suit, put his license into the internal pocket, and sealed up the suit again. Then he picked up the external comms. Setting the link to automatic repeat, he spoke one word, “Plague,” and began transmission.

  That done, he made his way back to the captain’s cabin, strapped himself into the acceleration couch, and sealed the faceplate of his p-suit. The suit’s air would give out in less than the two to four days it usually took for the plague to run its course, but—considering how all the others had died—perhaps that would be a mercy.

  The fever came over him, and he shook, and sweated, and the nightmares came. At one point in his delirium, he saw the door open, and a man came into the cabin. Jos would have thought he was a ghost, except that none of the many dead, on Sapne or in space, had looked like him: pale and dark-haired, and dressed in plain black.

  The stranger carried a polished wooden staff in one hand, and when he saw that, Jos knew his visito
r was an Adept, a member of the powerful and mysterious Guild. Rumors of the Adepts and their powers were all over dockside, and once or twice back on Gyffer Jos had even seen Adepts, quiet black-clad figures going about whatever business such people had to do.

  “Don’t worry,” the Adept said. “I’m here now, and I’ll take care of you.”

  “There’s no one on the ship but me.”

  “You’re right,” said the other. “But don’t worry. I can handle it.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  The Adept smiled—somewhat ruefully, it seemed to Jos. “I owe you a debt, I suppose. I don’t really remember. But it doesn’t matter. You rest, and I’ll take care of the ship.”

  Jos gave up and closed his eyes.

  When he opened them again, he wasn’t in the Star’s forward cabin anymore. He was in a brighter, larger, whiter space, lying on a soft bed. He felt weak, but his head was clear.

  “Good morning,” said an older man in a pale blue uniform. “Glad to see you with us.”

  “Where am I?” Jos asked.

  “Infirmary Three, Yasp Reception,” the man said. “And you’ve been very ill—you spent a week in the isolation pod before we could be sure we weren’t going to lose you.” He produced a clip-pad from some place Jos couldn’t see. “Now, if you don’t mind, there are a couple of points to clear up. You had some papers on you which gave the name Jos Metadi?”

  “That’s right. I’m Metadi.”

  “Ah. And who are you, Gentlesir Metadi? And what is the name of the ship you were on? I’m afraid the log was incomplete, and the registry here doesn’t list a vessel of her description.”

  “Warhammer,” Jos said—a name out of Gyfferan legend, and maybe better luck for the old ship than its former name had been. And definitely not on anybody’s list of ships that had ever touched dirt on plague-ridden Sapne. “My ship is called Warhammer, and I’m her captain.”

  XIX. GALCENIAN DATING 976 A.F.