The Prodigal Sun

by Sean Williams

Torn between her mission, curiosity, and basic Human compassion, she tried to decide what to do with him. If she left him behind, he would surely be captured by the Dato Bloc—at best—and she would never learn who he was, nor why Klose had not wanted her to see him. On the other hand, she knew too little about him to risk him coming along; having a total stranger in tow at a time such as this could prove a threat to her mission.

 

  “Okay, okay.” Cane’s stare hadn’t faded, and she returned it with one of equal intensity. “My name is Commander Roche of COE Intelligence,” she said quickly, collecting as she did a handful of magazine charges for her pistol and slipping them into her belt. “I’m going to try to escape in one of the landers. You can tag along, but only on the understanding that I give the orders. Clear?”

  “I understand.” His smile was slight but genuine. “And I agree.”

  “Good. Because should you so much as cross me once, I swear I’ll shoot you.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  She wrapped the belt loosely about her waist and keyed the door with her palm. “Okay, then let’s move it.”

  The ship lurched as they stepped out into the corridor. Roche swayed, steadying herself with the walls. Ahead of her, Cane hardly missed a step. For the second time she shrugged away his helping hand.

  “That way,” she said, gesturing with the pistol.

  Nodding, he obeyed, and Roche followed a pace behind. His steady pace displayed no concern at the gun at his back, and neither did he stop to question her plans. That sudden—and unreciprocated—trust bothered her more than anything else about him. Whoever he was, he seemed quite content to place his fate in her hands. Perhaps, she thought, the only alternative open to him was worse than mere imprisonment by the Dato.

 

  The Box might have chuckled softly at that, but she couldn’t be certain.

 

  2

  COEA Midnight

  ‘954.10.30 EN

  0710

  Lander Bay Three was one of two on the officers’ deck, situated at the fore of the Midnight. Due to the frigate’s unusual configuration, the ceiling of the uppermost decks comprised the outer shell of the hull; Roche’s quarters, being the last on the officers’ deck, were near the midway point. To reach the lander bay, she and Cane had to follow one of the main access corridors along half the length of the ship—but at least they were not required to change levels.

  The security station at the end of her corridor was empty, the crewman who had occupied it earlier obviously performing battle duties elsewhere. The main access corridor was likewise unoccupied. The occasional rolling boom echoed along its length as Dato weapons exploded near the hull of the frigate. Perhaps it was Roche’s imagination, but the explosions seemed to grow louder, and more frequent, as the minutes passed. If so, the disruption shields were failing, allowing the blink-bombs to jump out of hyperspace and explode a little closer to the frigate every time. It was only a matter of time before one snuck through entirely and detonated deep in the heart of the ship. Although small enough to defeat the constraints that normally prevented matter from slow-jumping in a gravity well, just one contained sufficient explosive to cripple a vessel.

  Gravity fluctuations kept their pace to a steady jog; any faster risked a fall, especially with the weight of the valise to upset her balance. Cane matched her stride easily, moving with the powerful grace of a trained athlete. The occasional lurch of the floor didn’t even break his stride, and it was he who occasionally lent her a hand, never the other way around. Not bad, she thought, for someone who had just emerged from a life-support coma.

  By the time they reached the end of the corridor, smoke had begun to filter in—a slowly thickening blue haze coming from somewhere beyond the abandoned security point. She watched it carefully as they neared it, assessing the inflow. Her first impressions were correct: the buildup was gradual, probably isolated to the local ventilation system, and not a serious problem—yet.

  Roche turned left at the end of the corridor, away from the source of the smoke. A series of doglegs led to EVA control, a large self-contained chamber onto which the two lander bays opened.

  the Box said as they took the first corner.

 

 

 

  There was a momentary hesitation as the AI assessed the available data.

 

 

 

  Turning to Cane, she explained the situation. “We need that lander. If whoever’s got there ahead of us amounts to more than three people, we may have to fight for it.”

  Cane nodded calmly. The idea of combat didn’t appear to faze him in any way. “Understood, Commander. You’ll have my full support.”

  “Good.” Although she halfheartedly listened for accent or anomalies of syntax, there were none. He spoke with the sort of generalized Standard that one heard all over the galaxy. “Not far now.”

  They rounded the last corner slowly. Roche was up front, her pistol at the ready. The all-purpose magazine clipped in the long barrel allowed her a number of diverse selections; before turning the corner, she set it for scatter.

  EVA control was empty. The outer airlock to Lander Three stood open. Beyond the airlock was the lander bay— a round antechamber roughly three times the size of her room—then a steep ramp that curved upward to the lander, doubling back on itself once along the way. The manual controls for the outer airlock were next to the entrance to the ramp. Roche inched forward through the airlock, into the bay. It too was empty, so she kept moving.

  Cane’s hand gripped her forearm, bringing her to a sudden halt only meters from the ramp. Instinctively she tried to pull the arm free, but found she could not.

  “What?” she hissed, uneasy in his firm grip.

  His gaze was fixed on the open doorway, and for the first time she noticed that his head was cocked slightly. He was listening to sounds coming from within the lander.

  “Someone’s coming,” he said. “Down the ramp.”

  “Are you sure?” She could hear nothing.

  Instead of answering, he pulled her away from the entrance to the lander, back into EVA control. Moments later, the sound of soft footsteps padded toward them.

  Cane let go of her arm and put his mouth close to her ear. “Only one. I’ll draw that one’s fire while you shoot from here. Can you do that?”

  “Of course I can,” she said with some annoyance, although whether that annoyance came from his questioning her ability or from his suddenly taking charge of the situation, she wasn’t sure. “But you’re putting rather a lot of faith in your speed, aren’t you?”

  “No,” he said, the faint trace of a grin splitting his dark features. “I’m putting it in your ability to hit them before they hit me.”

  She opened her mouth to voice her doubts, but got no further. An explosion shook the ship, the shock wave slamming through the bulkheads and snapping her head back into the wall. Cane maintained his balance and caught her with astonishing ease, held her until she regained her footing.

  The tang of smoke in the air thickened almost immediately, and the lights dimmed.

  said the Box.

  As though he had heard the Box’s words, Can
e let her go and inched sideways to the entrance of the bay. “We haven’t got time to play it safe, Commander,” he whispered back to her. “We have to go in now, while they’re still reeling from that explosion.”

  Raising the pistol to her chest, she nodded once. Cane immediately leapt through the door with a speed and agility she would not have believed possible—so fast that her own movements seemed belated and slow in comparison.

  Following the small of his back with her eyes and swiveling her entire body to face the airlock, she covered the interior of the bay with one sweep, gun held at shoulder height in her right hand.

  The first thing she saw was the light: the flash of blue laser fire from somewhere to her left, slicing through the air toward Cane’s back. Only his speed saved him, kept him ahead of the beam.

  Then she was through the door herself, the Box tucked up against her rib cage, cushioned from the Armada-trained roll that she executed with a sureness her instructors would have been proud of. All the time her eyes were focused left, her free hand and the pistol clear of the floor, tilted toward the expected target—

  —a thin figure in a grey transportee uniform, definitely an Exotic Caste, Eckandi perhaps, with white hair, a gaunt face, and an industrial laser held in a double-handed grip, arms swinging to follow Cane’s progress across the open bay floor, the trigger held tightly down, blue light arcing lethally toward Cane’s retreating back—

  Roche’s scatter-fire took the transportee full in the chest. The man crumpled where he stood, then fell forward onto his face. The blue beam flickered out, but not before scoring an ugly black line across the floor of the bay, terminating in a rough interrogative just short of Roche’s toes.

  Cane’s momentum carried him up the ramp and out of sight into the lander, his feet soundless on the metal deck. Roche lingered for a moment to ensure that the transportee had not been unduly harmed. An Eckandi prisoner on a COE ship was rare enough to be treated delicately under any circumstance. The elderly man—perhaps over a century in age, middle-aged, but not infirm—had fallen awkwardly onto his side. His respiration was even, if a little slow, and his staccato pulse regular. Although no expert in Exotic physiognomy, she suspected he would recover before long.

  With a grunt, she rose to her feet and went to run up the ramp to see what Cane was up to. Barely had she taken a step when something dark and cold thrust itself into her mind.

  She stopped in her tracks, reeling with panic and confusion as the force squeezed her entire brain in an invisible psychic fist, sending a retching wave of sickness and self-hatred deep into her gut, where it blossomed into a bitter flower of bile.

  The muscles in her hand relaxed involuntarily, and the gun clattered to the floor.

  A reave.

  She wasn’t sure if she spoke the words or thought them. The mental intrusion had caught Roche unaware, not allowing her to employ the epsense resistance techniques she had been taught at Military College. She slipped to her knees, clutching first at her stomach, then her head, wanting desperately for the intrusion to cease. This was different from anything she had ever experienced before— much more intense.

  Her vision greyed, became cluttered with images that confused her: the inside of the lander, and huddled within its shadows the reave—a Surin, not more than fifteen years old by the sheen of her fur. She was small of stature and, cowering, looked deceptively vulnerable. And frightened, Roche noted through her own suffocating anxiety. The girl was terribly frightened. Which perhaps explained the intensity of the intrusion.

  And her face—

  A narrow, stained bandage wrapped about the girl’s head hid her eyes from view. Fully developed reaves “borrowed” the eyes and ears of the people around them rather than using their own senses, and communicated purely by thought. Roche sucked air sharply in sudden revulsion as she recalled that some fundamentalist factions of the Surin Agora actually forced their latent psychics to do so by a mutilation ceremony that accompanied the completion of their training. It was either that or go mad from sensory deprivation. This Surin girl, Roche guessed, was eyeless behind the bandage—probably declawed and a deaf-mute as well.

  Despite her own discomfort, Roche couldn’t help but feel pity for the girl. The ritual mutilation usually occurred in the very last stages of the transition from latent talent to full-fledged epsense adept—a process that often took decades. Yet the Surin in the lander was less than half Roche’s age. Power at such a price had to be a dubious gift.

  “You’re reading my mind,” said a familiar voice, disconcertingly nearby. It belonged to the reave’s primary subject.

  Cane, Roche realized. The voice belonged to Cane!

  The reave’s words reached Roche’s mind as thoughts rather than sound. She could feel the creeping tendrils of the Surin girl deep within herself, holding her at bay, their very presence aching dully. Yet the will that had so incapacitated her hardly seemed to be affecting Cane.

  “Why?” he said, taking a step closer, his eyes—and thus Roche’s—fixed upon the girl. “You have no reason to be afraid of me. I have no wish to harm you.”

 

  Roche winced as the Surin’s grief twisted at her mind. “Your friend fired upon us first. My companion was merely defending herself.” Roche felt the reave’s tentacles tighten a little at that, searching for the truth, as Cane took another step forward. “Listen to me; we haven’t much time. We need this ship to escape. If we can just work—”

  The Surin hesitated, and Roche realized that, despite the clarity of mind generally required to enable epsense transfer, the reave was close to panic.

  Roche hissed through her teeth as the pain increased. She swore she wouldn’t scream, no matter how bad the pain. Half-formed words blossomed in her throat, but were stifled by the reave.

  She’s bluffing! she wanted to scream. Reaves rarely killed someone they were riding. The personal consequences were too great.

  Cane either suspected this or simply didn’t care what happened to Roche. Taking another step forward, he came within arm’s reach of the Surin, who turned her face away.

  Roche sensed fear and timidity in the girl’s words.

  The view of the cockpit vanished as the reave switched from Cane’s point of view to Roche’s. The lander bay was filled with dense smoke, billowing through the airlock leading to EVA control. The fire had either worsened dramatically or spread to the corridor outside. Through the pain in her head, she could hear klaxons wailing.

  The reave’s voice superimposed itself over everything—pervasive and irresistible:

  Cane’s response was prompt and without concern: “No.”

  Roche felt the pain in her head increase once more, slicing through her thoughts as though it were a red-hot scalpel.

  The tone was cut with panic and confusion.

  Roche clenched her mouth shut, using every iota of Armada training to resist replying.

  Even as she struggled, a series of small explosions, quite near, rumbled through the hull. Then, with a sudden high-pitched screaming noise, the smoke began to fly away from her back down the corridor.

  The pressure from the reave suddenly vanished, and full control of her body returned. Gasping, she fell forward onto the deck, scrabbling for the pistol. Her muscles felt spastic, jerky, as she struggled to her feet and staggered for the airlock controls. She thumped the SEAL prompts in quick succession, hoping that her training would overcome the fogginess in her head.

  The outer door slammed shut. The sound of klaxons diminished.

  said the Box,

  Fighting the haze, she tried to concentrate. “He’s what?”

  ock. It may be a ruse, of course. Either way—>

  “I understand.” Blinking to clear her vision, she stumbled for the ramp and the lander. Cane met her halfway, raised his arms in mock surrender as her pistol swung at him. Then he smiled. The calm with which he did that, his ability to instantly relax once a moment of tension passed, disturbed her. It was more than control. It was almost inhuman.

  His resistance to epsense was no less remarkable. Armada cadets received a basic training in mental defense, but no one she knew of, least of all herself, had the degree of control necessary to resist a reave as he had—and she hadn’t—without actually being an epsense adept as well.

  “Hull’s punctured,” she said with a calmness she didn’t feel. “Not far away. The airlock is sealed. We’re here to stay.”

  “Understood.” He steadied her with a hand on her arm, then continued down the ramp. Moments later he returned with the semiconscious Eckandi draped over his shoulder. “The mind-rider will need him when she regains consciousness,” he explained in response to her sharp look.

  “Mind—? Oh, the reave.” The outdated term threw her for a moment. He was making sense, though; the Surin would need someone to give her sensory input, preferably neither her nor Cane. “What did you do to her?”

  “Nothing serious. She will awaken shortly.”

  Roche wasn’t sure how she felt about that, and couldn’t fight the sensation that she was being backed into a corner: first Cane, and now two others. Her mission was in enough jeopardy without complicating things further. But without saying anything, she hurried the short distance to the lander itself. When Cane had ducked through the inner airlock, she keyed it closed and made sure the seals were tight.

  A short companionway led to the cockpit and its standard, if slightly out of date, hemispherical layout: five acceleration couches, centrally placed in rows of two and three; main controls located ahead of the front row; pilot’s position right and backup to the left, auxiliary systems away to either side and rear. There were no viewports this far forward; heat shields covered the nose completely.