Dragons in the Stars

by Jeffrey A. Carver

  There is no safe place.

  Mogurn was insane with rage, insane enough to destroy himself by attacking his rigger. She might have to knock him out, or even kill him. Was it his life or hers now? Had it come to that? If she hadn't been aware before of how much she wanted to live, she was aware of it now.

  Highwing, she thought. You didn't save my life—my sanity—just to let me die like this, did you? Did you?

  But there was no answering thought. Highwing was not here. Highwing was in another space, another reality. Highwing could not help her.

  The ceiling hatch hissed open at the other end of the compartment. She peered over the top of the console. One foot appeared on the ladder; then another. Mogurn descended into view. He turned and spied her at once. "Enough, Jael!" he snapped, from the ladder. "I command you not to move!"

  Her decision was made instantly, without conscious thought. Her feet took her over the hatch to the next deck, and she was dropping, swinging by her hands from the rungs, feet dangling. Mogurn's bellow echoed after her, before the hatch closed.

  She was now on the bottom power deck. It was darker here; the center of the deck was an enormous round chamber, surrounded by a shielding wall. That was the flux-pile, where the energies were harnessed that caught at the fabric of space and drew the ship into the Flux. It seemed to hum, though perhaps that was her imagination.

  The absurdity of her situation nearly made her laugh out loud in bitterness. In the emptiness of interstellar space, she was being forced to defend herself against the only other human in light-years, a madman turned rapist. It made no sense.

  But rationality was not a factor here.

  She had only seconds to hide, before Mogurn would be through that hatch. She circled around the main body of the flux-pile. There were three hatches: to the outer airlock, to the flux-field chamber, and to the cargo hold. She hit the OPEN switches to the airlock and cargo hold, though neither offered much hope. She couldn't go unsuited into the flux-pile, but there was a rack of tools near the maintenance hatch, and a control board to one side. She could threaten sabotage. But that won't stop him; he's mad. From the tool selection, she grabbed a large wrench.

  Fight, flee, or hide. But decide fast!

  She heard the hatch open from the deck above. She ducked into the cargo hold, slapped the hatch closed, and dived to her left down a narrow aisle. It was very gloomy here, with only a single dim safety light near the hatch. It was also very cramped, with solid racks of shipping containers on both sides. The aisle dead-ended; there was nowhere to run.

  Jael walked silently back and drew herself up to the near side of the hatch. She took several deep breaths and cocked the arm holding the wrench. She gripped the wrench so tightly her hand hurt. She waited.

  Her hand began to sweat, her arm to tremble. God damn you, Mogurn—come, if you're going to come! She felt tears welling in the corners of her eyes, and she cursed and blinked them away. No time for that. But how much time did she have? She couldn't hear a sound from the other side of the bulkhead. But he was there. He surely would not stop once he knew she was cornered. But suppose he wanted to frighten her, or make her suffer, waiting. Suppose he—

  The hatch hissed open and Mogurn lunged through, panting, a massive form against the portal. Now—hit him! She found her arms resisting, as though frozen. Mogurn turned. For an instant she saw nothing but his mad, gleaming eyes—and his mouth open in maniacal delight. He stepped toward her.

  She swung the wrench at his head. He grunted, deflecting the blow with his arm. The wrench glanced off his shoulder, and something metal flew from his hand and clattered to the deck. He staggered forward. Jael struck him again on the shoulder, and again. He stumbled against a crate and fell to one knee. She gripped the wrench with both hands and with a groan of rage swung it down again, hitting him at the base of the neck. He went down to both knees. She raised the wrench for a final blow.

  Mogurn swung around, roaring, and dived for her legs. She jumped back, but he caught her left ankle, and with a snarl tried to pull her back to him. "Goddamn . . . little bitch!"

  Terrified, Jael pulled away and hacked downward at his arm until he let go with a grunt. She leaped through the portal to the power deck. Swinging around, she stabbed desperately at the CLOSE plate. This time she was too late. Mogurn lunged and blocked the hatch from shutting. Jael fled.

  The airlock inner hatch was still open. She banged the CLOSE switch and dived into the chamber as the hatch was sliding shut. "Oh, God—please!" she cried, stumbling, almost falling to her knees in the chamber. For a second, she shuddered helplessly, then she looked up, frantic for anything that could save her life. But she had just trapped herself in a place from which there was no escape—except into space. Airless space.

  Hanging behind a clear locker door were two spacepacks. She yanked open the locker and pulled one out. "Please work," she prayed, snapping it around her waist. She reached for the activator, then glanced up, and through the airlock window, saw Mogurn staggering toward her. Grabbing the second spacepack, she clutched it to her side and switched on the one she was already wearing. She was instantly surrounded by a gleaming hermetic forcefield. She reached for the control to bleed the airlock—thinking that if she could evacuate it even partially, the safety interlock would prevent Mogurn from opening the hatch. Never mind that she had nowhere to go; at least she'd be safe for the moment.

  But Mogurn reached the control panel on the other side first. The hatch slid open, silently it seemed, and he staggered in. She could see him screaming at her, but his voice was a bare mutter through the forcefield. He hit the CLOSE control, then reached for her. His bearded face was purple with rage. She swung again with the wrench, but he stepped past her, evading the blow. She swiveled, her back to the wall near the control panel, and jabbed at him with the wrench. Through the forcefield, she heard the words, "I'll kill you—!"

  With a grunt, she raised her elbow and hit the EVACUATE switch twice and the OUTER OPEN switch twice, the command for emergency fast exit.

  Mogurn saw, and understood, what she had done. He gazed at her in wide-eyed astonishment—then fear—and dived for the spacepack locker. It was empty. He stared at her, frozen, his chest heaving as the pressure in the airlock dropped. His eyes narrowed when he saw the bulge of the second spacepack under the glimmering forcefield of her suit. And she knew what he had to be thinking: there was no way to get that pack from her except by turning off her suit first. And he had only seconds before the air would be gone.

  There was no sound—just a silent outcry in his expression. Mogurn hurled himself at her, hands groping for her waist and for the control on her pack. She struck at him with the wrench, but he ducked under the blow, and she realized that he was groping not just for the control at her waist, but for the airlock control panel, as well. "Get away!" she screamed, and clung desperately to a handhold on the wall, struggling to keep herself between Mogurn and the controls.

  His hands were around her throat now, squeezing, but she couldn't feel any pressure through the suit, she could only see the hands trying to kill her, and the terrible emptiness and horror in his eyes as he fought for his last lungful of air.

  The outer hatch slid open, and Jael's breath caught. She'd been expecting, instinctively, to see the cold blackness of space, and the stars—but of course they were not in normal-space, they were in the Flux. And the Flux was not something that the naked eye was meant to behold. There was blackness, yes; but there was also a swirling mélange of color, a light that tore at the eye somehow, a dreadful vapor of light that was like nothing she had ever seen, a light that somehow streamed out of and through the blackness and disappeared back into it. And it poured now into the airlock.

  Jael nearly succumbed to vertigo in that instant, but she kept a desperate grip on the handhold. She was hardly aware of it when Mogurn let go of her. His eyes were bulging, still alive, as he floated away from her—his hands still reaching, still clutching, but clutching now toward e
mptiness. There was no longer any rage or any plea for life in his gaze; there was no expression that she could understand. It seemed to Jael, as she clung to the wall and watched him float out the hatch, that it was taking Mogurn a very long time to die.

  She saw him reach out—hopelessly, she thought—toward the emptiness of this strange kind of infinity. And then he seemed to shimmer and dissolve, stretching out into the distance like a man of multicolored vapor and smoke, hands first, then head and body and feet following.

  And then he was gone, and there was only the mad, numbing, eye-rending, stomach-twisting swirl of the Flux.

  Several seconds, perhaps several minutes, passed before she managed to turn herself around and touch the control to close the airlock hatch.

  It was longer still before she turned off her spacepack and retreated back into the cold, silent emptiness of the ship.

  Chapter 14: Safe Haven

  FOR THE next forty-eight hours, she scarcely left the net. When she did, it was to face nightmares in her sleep and imagined ghosts in the hallways of the ship. She couldn't eat. Twice, she woke sweating to the vision of Mogurn's face leering at her out of the air. She never turned off the light, but that didn't seem to matter; anytime she allowed her mind to rest, her guard to fall, she was jerked back by visions of Mogurn.

  In the net, it wasn't that much better; but the net, at least, was partly under her control. She flew through thundering, menacing skies, flashing with lightning and rain. The ship was buffeted by winds, tossed by unexpected turbulences. Through it all she flew fast and hard, determined to reach Lexis in the shortest possible time. Fatigue meant nothing to her anymore. Once, she thought she saw Mogurn's face rising through the mists of the Flux, rotating to face her, challenging her with a glassy-eyed stare; and for a long, heart-stopping moment, she thought that she had finally met her match. How could she hope to battle a spirit that had no physical reality? And then, as the fear washed through her and ebbed away, she knew that it was her own thoughts that had placed Mogurn there. And if her thoughts could bring him, they could send him away.

  Leave me, you wraith. You are nothing, she whispered into the mists. And he smiled cruelly and drew closer, or seemed to.

  In the end, it was only by darting past him, by outrunning him in the winds of the Flux, that she managed to escape from the ghostly Mogurn. Once he was gone, though, he never returned—not as long as she remained in the net.

  Hours passed, two days passed, and the dim flecks in the distance drew steadily nearer.

  * * *

  The mists slowly evaporated around her as the ship rose through the layers of the Flux, surfacing toward normal-space. Moments later, Jael and her ship emerged into star-spiked blackness, into the grand emptiness of ordinary night, the infinity into which women and men had been born. At first she didn't even try to take a navigational mapping; she simply gave a tremendous sigh of relief and luxuriated in the view.

  Then she checked, and yes, that yellow star blazing against the night was the sun of Lexis. She had reached her destination star system, or its edge. She called at once to the Lexis spacing authorities and asked for a tow.

  It was two days now since Mogurn had attacked her. They had been two of the longest days of her life, and during them she had learned several things. She had learned that she still wanted the pallisp, though it was gone; and she didn't know if she ever would be free of the yearning. And she had learned that she could still combat the desire—as long as the pallisp was broken, and the temptation out of reach. Her determination to be free of it was as undiminished as her desire for it.

  She prayed to be freed of the nightmares, too. In some of them, it was she who died, not Mogurn. In others, it was not Mogurn she killed, but her father. And she wondered, had her father been as mad as Mogurn? She remembered times when he had stood before her, ranting incoherently, "Master your demons, Jael, master your demons or they'll rule you," babbling advice he'd never taken himself. In the ship's log, she had recorded an exact description of Mogurn's attack and her own self-defense—partly for the record, and partly in hopes of purging her mind of the horror. It had helped a little, but not much.

  One question still unresolved in her mind was, what were the chances that anyone in the starport would believe her about the dragons—or should she even tell them? She felt somehow that her relationship with Highwing was a private thing, not to be shared with strangers; there was much about it that she didn't understand herself. She might have her hands full convincing the authorities that she was telling the truth about Mogurn's death. Would they be more or less likely to believe her if she added a fantastic-sounding story about dragons in the Flux?

  She would just have to wait and see. The planet Lexis was light-hours away, on the far side of its sun.

  It was, in fact, more than another full shipday before the tow appeared; and by that time, with nothing to do but worry, she was in a state of almost complete emotional exhaustion. Then the tow appeared, an angelic emissary glowing golden in the night. It locked itself to her ship and sped inward toward Lexis. During the ride in, there were administrative questions to be answered, since the tow service and landing rights were not free. Jael tried for a time to avoid questions about why the ship's master was unavailable to speak for himself. She wasn't sure how her word would stack up against presumptions in favor of a ship owner, and she was fearful that the tow might simply disconnect and leave her here at the edge of interstellar space if its master began to suspect that he might not be paid for his towing services.

  Inevitably, though, the questions from Lexis became more pointed, and finally she sent a com-squirt containing the relevant portion of the log. That shocked the spacing authority into near silence until the tow had brought her into orbit around the pretty blue-and-white, but cold-looking, planet; and until they'd descended into the swirling atmosphere and landed, and the tow had detached and moved on to its next fare.

  Jael was met at the airlock by police officers and driven to the nearby administration building. She had about a minute to enjoy the view—the spaceport was situated atop a broad plateau, and ringed by beautiful, snow-covered mountains—before she was hustled into the spaceport police station, a small office in one corner of the building.

  The feeling of unreality did not go away then; it simply changed. Numerous officers interviewed her, together and in shifts, so that she could hardly keep track of who was who. At least one, she thought, was a mind-prober. She hadn't anticipated that. They questioned her for hours. They asked how Mogurn had died, and repeated the question, again and again. She told them, and retold them, in excruciating detail. They asked how Mogurn had happened to harass her to the point that she'd felt it necessary to kill him. They asked whether she had provoked him. She answered that she had refused his attempt to use an addicting device on her. They pressed, asking whether she had done anything else to anger him. She hesitated, then answered that she and Mogurn had disagreed on some navigational decisions. One officer cocked his head and gazed at her, but the others seemed satisfied by that. For an instant, she was tempted to mention the dragons, but she held her tongue. They asked about Mogurn's criminal record, and about her criminal record. She didn't have one, she answered heatedly. She told them to look in Mogurn's cabin for evidence of his. Asked about the ship's cargo, she said she knew nothing about it. Eventually an officer brought her something to eat. A while later, they told her that they'd checked the cargo, and at least a third of it was quasi-med equipment and drugs, all illegal under this jurisdiction, and probably on the planets of origin. They asked her what she thought about that. She didn't know what to think. She wasn't surprised, though. Mogurn, she told them, had been a thief and a madman. But she couldn't tell whether or not they believed her.

  Eventually she was installed in a small dormitory room and told she would be staying there until her case was disposed of. The officer who locked her in gave her the closest thing she'd had to reassurance since her arrival. He smiled—just fo
r a second, before the door opaqued—and told her not to worry.

  Easy for you to say, she thought, though not without a flicker of appreciation. She. collapsed onto the bunk and fell at once into a dreamless sleep.

  * * *

  "Miss LeBrae? Wake up."

  "What?" She sat upright with a start, prepared to leap to safety. She blinked, trying to reorient herself to the strange surroundings. A light blue room; someone standing in the doorway. Mogurn?

  "Take it easy," said the uniformed woman, entering cautiously. "I didn't mean to startle you."

  "Oh," sighed Jael, remembering where she was. Her mind was whirling already. She was a prisoner here, and she didn't know when she'd be free again. But it was safe here, at least. Almost certainly it was safe.

  "It's time for breakfast, and then they want to talk to you again." The woman's eyebrows arched, but it wasn't clear whether it was a friendly expression or a suspicious one.