Pawn

by Timothy Zahn

  We journey to the uppermost part of the ship.

  Nicole caught her breath. Or at least she would have if she’d had any control over her chest muscles.

  The Wisp had answered? That hadn’t happened the last time. It had never happened.

  And the answer didn’t even make sense. Why would they be going to the uppermost part of the ship?

  No answer. Maybe she needed to focus her thoughts into a more direct question. With an effort, she forced back the swirling emotion and confusion. Why are we going there?

  Great danger approaches. Only a Protector can help us.

  As if to underline the silent thought there was another thump, this one much louder and closer than the others had been. Some problem with this impossibly dark shaft they were floating in?

  Again, there was no answer. Apparently, she couldn’t just wonder about something, but had to put it into a clear sentence and mentally spit it at the Wisp. What are those thumps?

  That is the great danger.

  She grimaced. That was helpful. What is this Protector you mentioned?

  A Protector isn’t a what. It’s a who.

  Mentally, Nicole rolled her eyes. Who is this Protector?

  You.

  A faint light suddenly appeared above them. It approached rapidly as the Wisp continued to ride on the updraft. A few seconds later, with another moment of turbulence as the wind shifted back from blowing upward to a hard shove against her back, Nicole and the Wisp bounced out through another open panel into a narrow metal-walled space.

  The Wisp unwrapped its arms from around her and took a step back. Nicole collected her balance, took a couple of quick breaths to confirm her lungs were working again, and then looked around her.

  They were at the bottom of a narrow, dimly lit stairway that headed up to Nicole’s right, curving around to the left as it rose, then disappeared around a wide pillar. Beyond the edge of the pillar, maybe up at the end of the stairway, was a somewhat brighter glow. To her left was a corridor like all the others she’d seen aboard the Fyrantha. “Which way?” she asked.

  The Wisp didn’t answer. Which way? she tried again, thinking the question this time.

  Again, no answer. Maybe the Wisp had to be touching her in order to read her mind.

  But the creature was standing in the middle of the corridor, effectively blocking it, and it was facing toward the stairway. The implication was obvious. Turning to her right, Nicole headed up.

  The stairway was surprisingly short, no more than twenty steps. Focusing on her footing in the dim light, acutely aware that twisting her bad ankle here in the middle of Fyrantha nowhere would be bad, she reached the top and stepped out onto more of the familiar soft red flooring. Only then did she raise her eyes to look in front of her.

  This time, she caught her breath for real.

  The room was round, like the teleport room, and about thirty feet across. Most of the space was sunk three feet below the level where she was standing, with a narrow walkway around the rim at her level and three steps leading down from her stairway to the main floor. Filling the room were nine consoles of various sizes arranged in two concentric circles, all of the consoles facing inward toward the center, all of them with rows of muted indicator lights glowing across their surfaces. The entire rim of the room was composed of some kind of thick glass, six feet high, sandwiched between an expanse of hazy blue below and a wide overhang of gray metal that seemed to stretch outward from the room’s roof.

  And between the overhang above and the hazy blue below, visible all around her through the glass, were stars.

  Nicole had seen stars once before, during one of the short trips her grandmother had taken her on. There hadn’t been many of them up there, fighting their twinkling way through the hazy glow from the distant city, but they’d been pretty enough. Her grandmother had tried to tell her that on a really dark night you could see thousands of them, but Nicole hadn’t really believed her.

  One of her schoolbooks had said there were billions. She hadn’t believed that, either.

  Only there were. There were billions of them.

  And every single one of them was out there, blazing with cold fire across the pure black sky.

  They were stunning. They were beautiful. They were terrifying.

  For the first time, in the deepest core of her being, Nicole finally, truly, believed. She was indeed aboard a spaceship, somewhere in the middle of a huge and terrible universe.

  And her home was lost far away in the distance behind her. Forever.

  Somewhere, someone gave a little whimper. A moment later, she realized the sound had come from her.

  But somehow, that loss really didn’t seem important anymore. Slowly, she turned, drinking in the overwhelming display. Stars and more stars; hazy patches that might be clusters of different stars or patches of space fog; a wide band of haze that she guessed was the Milky Way that her grandmother had tried to tell her about—

  And then, right at the corner of her eye, something flashed, and there was a loud, metallic thud.

  She twisted around, grabbing the handrail for balance, peering through the glass into the starlit blackness. Something was out there, a shadowy object visible only as it moved across the stars. From the shadow came another flicker, followed by a swift line of light tracing between the shadow and someplace below Nicole and to her right. The line intersected with the Fyrantha down there, and there was another flash and thud.

  And only then did the explanation abruptly penetrate her awestruck mind.

  The shadow across the stars was another spaceship.

  A ship that was attacking the Fyrantha.

  She blinked once, and in that flick of an eyelid the wonder filling her brain vanished. Looking away from the stars and the attacking ship, she focused again on the room and the consoles below her.

  She’d been wrong before about all the consoles having glowing indicator lights. One of them was completely dark.

  She looked over her shoulder. While she’d been gawking, the Wisp had climbed the stairs and was standing silently behind her. “That?” Nicole asked, jabbing a finger at the dark console. “Is that why I’m here?”

  No answer. Cursing, Nicole bounded down the three steps to the main floor and hurried toward the console. Obviously, the console wasn’t working. Obviously, the Wisp had brought her here to fix it.

  Only she wasn’t one of the fix-it people. She was just a Sibyl. “You need to go get Jeff,” she called back over her shoulder. “Wisp? Go get Jeff.”

  There was no answer. Nicole reached the console and glanced back at the stairs.

  Predictably, the Wisp hadn’t moved an inch.

  Maybe it wasn’t rushing off to fetch Jeff or Carp because it knew there wasn’t enough time. Maybe, like she’d thought earlier, it couldn’t hear her unless they were touching.

  Maybe it was just stupid.

  Cursing again, Nicole shoved the console’s chair out of the way and dropped down into a crouch.

  There was a wide access panel stretching across most of the rectangular pedestal, she saw, running almost the entire height from the deck to the underside of the control board. Hooking her fingers into some of the ventilation slits, she pulled, and the panel popped out. Behind it was the usual collection of junction modules, function pips, modulators, and neatly laid-out wiring. Racked along one side of the main circuit board was a collection of spare parts, while the other side sported an equally impressive assortment of small tools. Apparently, whoever was supposed to man this particular group of consoles was also supposed to do their own repairs.

  If the repair was anything complicated, the Wisp was out of luck. But if it was just a matter of swapping out a damaged component or two, she’d seen that done enough times that she could probably do it.

  Unfortunately, there was only one way for her to figure out which of the components needed replacing.

  Her inhaler.

  There was another flash from somewhere out of Nicole
’s view, and another hard thud. Her choices seemed to be either slow death by inhaler or fast death by whatever the hell the attacker was shooting at them. Clenching her teeth, she dug into her vest pockets.

  Only to find that both inhalers were gone.

  “Damn it,” she muttered, patting furiously at her pockets. No mistake. Somewhere along the line, probably during that long crawl along the tracks, she’d managed to lose both of them.

  There was another thud. Grabbing a small work light from the tool section of the pedestal, she flicked it on. Fine. If she couldn’t figure out which component to replace, she’d just replace all of them.

  The first step was to pull out all the replacement components from the spare parts rack and lay them on the floor beneath their counterparts. Fortunately, they were all types she’d seen dozens of times before and she was able to grab the right ones without even having to cross-check their component numbers. With that finished, she selected the proper tools, which she’d also seen dozens of times, and set to work.

  To discover that the procedures were harder than they had looked.

  The junction modules weren’t as easy to pop off their connections as she’d expected. The pips tended to drag their attached wires or get hung up on their mounting screws. The modulators and rectifiers and various types of simplex ellies all had hidden connectors that she never seemed to find the first time. And the solder gun’s little liquid drips could glue the dispenser tip right to the wiring if she didn’t get it away before the drops hardened. A dozen times in those first five minutes she wished like hell she’d sent Jeff out of the Cluufe hive to investigate the noise instead of going herself.

  But she hadn’t, and he wasn’t here, and the flashes and thuds were getting worse. Swearing pretty much constantly now, she kept at it.

  She’d replaced about a third of the components, and was starting to get the hang of the soldering gun, when the console suddenly came to life.

  “Whoa,” she muttered, twitching her hands back from the suddenly glowing components and the flashing power-alert indicators. The damn thing had been left on?

  Probably just as well that it had. Otherwise, she would have wasted time replacing components that weren’t broken. Climbing out from under the control board, wincing as legs that had gone to sleep started tingling, she gripped the edge of the board and looked outside.

  Earlier, the area below the windows had been glowing a faint blue. Now, instead of a glow, the whole thing seemed to be blazing with blue fire.

  And while the shadowy attackers were still firing their flickering pencils of light at the Fyrantha, there were no longer any thuds accompanying them.

  For a moment she continued to watch. Then, struck by an odd impulse, she crossed the room again, climbed up the steps to the narrow walkway, and walked around the edge of the room. Jeff had suggested that the area in front of the arena had just been a few corridors deep. Nicole had insisted it was bigger than that. Maybe from here she could figure out which of them was right. She reached what she figured was the proper vantage point and peered through the glass.

  The blue glow stretched out in front of her, as far ahead as she could see. She turned and looked behind her, just for reference, then turned forward again.

  And as she did so, she felt the blood slowly draining from her face.

  She could see what appeared to be the end of the blue glow behind her. Just barely, but she could see it. That distance should represent their work area, plus the other teams’ work areas, plus the arena she’d just left.

  But in the other direction, the blue glow just seemed to keep going. She couldn’t see any end to it at all.

  Which meant that not only was there as much ship in front of the arena as there was behind it, but there was considerably more ship in front of it than behind it.

  The Fyrantha wasn’t just big. It was huge.

  For a long minute she stared out at the blue glow, trying to wrap her mind around this sudden revelation. As she did so, an odd thought occurred to her. The portside hull hallway was supposedly the leftmost edge of the ship. Tearing her eyes away from the blue glow stretching out toward the billions of stars in front of her, she looked to her left.

  The blue glow didn’t stop at the line where the portside hallway should be. Instead, it kept going, once again stretching out toward the stars. It didn’t go as far as the ship did toward the front—she could see the edge of the glow out there to the side. But there was most certainly a lot more ship in that direction than she’d thought. At least as much as there was on this side of the corridor. Maybe more.

  The Fyrantha wasn’t just a flying ship. It was a freaking flying city.

  Only every city she’d ever heard of had people living in it. The bigger the city, the more people.

  So where were the Fyrantha’s people?

  From somewhere behind her came a soft thud. She tensed, her eyes flicking back to the area where she’d seen the shadows flying across the stars. But if the attackers were still there, they’d stopped moving and she couldn’t spot them. The sound came again, and to her relief she realized it wasn’t another attack, but merely someone coming up the stairs.

  An instant later, her brain suddenly caught up with her. Someone coming up the stairs?

  Her first impulse was the one that years with Trake’s group had sharpened to a reflex: run, or hide.

  But the room had only one entrance, and that was already blocked by whoever was approaching. And with the room as open as it was, there was only one possible way to hide. Vaulting over the railing, she dropped down behind the nearest console. She pressed her back against the pillar, pulled her knees and elbows as tightly to her as she could, and froze.

  The footsteps grew louder, and there was a subtle change in the sound as the intruder reached the outer walkway and headed down the three steps into the room proper. The sound continued on another few steps, and Nicole realized there were actually two of them. The second set also topped the rise and stepped into the room, and for a long moment there was silence as the intruders walked across the soft flooring.

  Nicole clenched her hands into fists, hardly daring to breathe, trying to make herself as small as possible. If the intruders decided to take a walk around the room, or if they even just walked straight ahead to this end of the walkway, she was done for.

  There was a sudden chattering as someone spoke in an alien language. Nicole twitched.

  And then frowned.

  “There,” Fievj’s voice came to her through her translator. “See the components scattered on the floor? It was a failed cross-link, all right. And someone beat us to it.”

  There was another chattering, this one in a different voice. “You’re sure they couldn’t have just fallen out of the replacement rack? The impacts were sending vibrations through this part of the ship.”

  “Vibrations hard enough to knock off the access panel and set it neatly alongside the support pedestal?” Fievj scoffed. “For someone in your position, Ryit, you sometimes have terrible powers of observation. No, someone was here, all right. The only questions are who were they and where did they go.”

  “Whoever they were, they left in a hurry,” Ryit said. “Otherwise they would have put everything back.”

  “Unless they don’t care about neatness,” Fievj said. “But no, you’re probably right. And of course, the most likely reason for them to hurry away is that they knew we were coming. That means the Wisps.”

  “Or the Fyrantha itself, speaking to a Sibyl,” Ryit pointed out. “That’s the most likely explanation, in fact. It could have warned one of the Sibyls, who then brought a human work crew here to repair the console.”

  “I don’t know,” Fievj said uncertainly. “That would require that one or more of the Sibyls was listening at the crucial moment. And that the humans could get here this quickly from their work areas. Neither seems likely.”

  “Well, I doubt it was the Wisps,” Ryit said. “I’ve never seen any of them do the slightest
bit of mechanical work.”

  “Though we’ve never seen the Fyrantha under such a severe attack, either,” Fievj pointed out. “Even if they won’t fight—”

  “Can’t fight,” Ryit corrected.

  “Even if they won’t or can’t fight,” Fievj growled, “it’s possible that repairing something crucial, like a shield generator cross-link, is within their design parameters.”

  “No,” Ryit said firmly. “I’ve run the matrix, and they’re absolutely incapable of such work. I mean, come on, Fievj—if we could get them to refit the ship, would we be bothering with these damned humans?”

  “The humans may yet prove more useful than you think,” Fievj said, suddenly thoughtful. “So: not the Wisps, and not the humans. Could there be someone else aboard? Some tech-capable group we haven’t run into before?”

  Nicole felt a small shiver run through her. An hour ago, she would have dismissed such a suggestion as ludicrous. Now, having seen the Fyrantha’s true size, the idea that a whole army might be lurking undetected didn’t seem nearly so impossible.

  “I suppose,” Ryit said, sounding doubtful. “But we’ve been under other attacks and had to run. Why show themselves now?”

  “They haven’t exactly shown themselves.”

  “True,” Ryit said. “I suppose it’s time to give the Caretaker a call.”

  Fievj made a rude-sounding noise that Nicole’s translator couldn’t decipher. “Is that really necessary? Surely you realize he’s not nearly as truthful as he acts.”

  “Of course not,” Ryit said. “But you can often learn more from liars than they realize, simply by paying attention to how they dance around your questions.”

  “Maybe,” Fievj said with a sniff. “I’ll wager you a planet he won’t be the least bit useful.”

  “I’ll take that wager,” Ryit said. “Let me find a call switch … there’s one.”

  “I’d love to see you do a matrix work-up on him sometime,” Fievj said darkly.

  “I’ve tried,” Ryit said. “I can never get a proper fix on—”

  “Good morning, Master Fievj and Master Ryit,” a voice suddenly boomed. “I see you’ve again successfully evaded destruction at the hands of your allies.”