by Kate Elliott
“All right,” said Lily. “Then we’re decided. We follow the route of the cruiser, disable it, lift its nav banks, which by definition must be the best Central can supply, and then destroy it.”
Yehoshua smiled, grimly satisfied.
“But shouldn’t we try to take the cruiser intact?” asked Blue plaintively. “We could take it back to Jehane. It’s got an incredibly sophisticated engineering setup. Nothing to this boat’s,” he added hastily. “But still—”
Lily shook her head. “We haven’t got enough people to cover this ship. It’s settled. Four hours rest shift, and then we head in for Landfall Station.”
Landfall Station did not argue with the Forlorn Hope when it appeared and easily blasted out of orbit the military cutter that was all that was left of the government ships that had destroyed Callioux’s tiny assault fleet. Station officials did not know that it had taken comrade Nguyen three tries to get weapons locked on and firing accurately.
They also did not know that the scathingly tight beam of fire that severed the Station second wheel’s main stabilizer vanes was the accidental product of Blue shifting the engine’s rate of fire at the same moment as Yehoshua, at steering, canted the vessel’s placement to allow Nguyen to pick off an empty cargo drone, as a warning measure.
But as a result of the maneuver, Station officials evacuated the second wheel and hastily broadcast the last vector coordinates of the cruiser.
Lily delayed their departure long enough to complete Callioux’s directive: carefully, because of the obvious inexperience of her crew, she directed fire at the second wheel until it was irredeemably shattered. That the painfully slow pace of the destruction might, to the terrified thousands on Landfall Station, seem like deliberate sadism did not occur to her until Stationmaster came personally onto comm and begged her to either finish them all off or cease the game. She regarded the ruins of the military wheel with distaste and ordered the Forlorn Hope on its way.
The Mule rechecked the vector coordinates at the autobeacon beyond Landfall Far Horizon and, finding them honest, began the countdown to window. A sta-ish whistle flowed from under its breath as it worked, calling out coordinates that either Pinto or Yehoshua seconded. Velocity, angle, shift: they got clearance from the beacon, and a concentrated silence froze the breathing of the bridge crew as they came up to “Break.”
They went through.
In the void, the hunter awakens. First, the slight movement of the face, breathing in the flavor of the air. The eyes open. The head lifts, the body rises, and a single hand brushes the skin.
And came out.
A hand, slender, long-fingered, closed on her wrist.
She reacted blindly: pushed up, twisting loose, and punched. Pulled it, barely, so that he could deflect it with a quick snap of his arm.
“Kyosti!”
Whatever congratulations the crew on the bridge meant to give themselves on negotiating their first window successfully died as every head, every chair, turned to face this new and utterly unexpected occupant of the bridge.
Ship’s com lit up on the arm of the captains chair. “Comrade Heredes. This be Rainbow, in ya Medical. Min Hawk hae vanished, comrade. But he were here, unconscious as he ever were, when we hit ya window, and now—”
“It’s all right, Rainbow.” Lily laid a trembling hand on the com. Her voice sounded far more calm than she felt. “We know where he is. Stay at your post. Heredes out.”
“Damn my eyes,” breathed Jenny. “Where by all the Seven Hells of Gravewood did you come from?”
Hawk surveyed his audience with a slight, disdainful smile. “‘For it is no easy undertaking, I say,’” he said softly, “‘to describe the bottom of the Universe.’ Although that seems a bit melodramatic under the circumstances.”
No one spoke, giving perhaps the impression that it did not seem so melodramatic to them. The audio signal from the system autobeacon looped over and over on comm. No one paid it any attention, not even Finch, whose hands, which had been gripping convulsively the arms of his chair, rose now slowly to his throat. He made a noise that was more shriek than gasp.
Jenny stood up. Lily took two steps to stand between Kyosti and the com station.
With shaking hands, Finch attempted to untangle from around his neck a long, thin strand of hard plastine cord. He could not control his trembling, gave up, the black cord still ringing his throat.
“I could have killed you,” said Kyosti in a languid voice. “But I did not. There.” He shifted his gaze to Lily. He looked relaxed, but the grip of his hand on the arm of the captain’s chair betrayed him. “Are you satisfied?”
“Get out of here,” she said.
He smiled, gave a mocking bow in Finch’s direction, and left the bridge.
“What in—”
“How did—”
“Void bless, he must be—”
“Silence,” Lily snapped. “Comrade Seria, get that—that junk off Caenna’s neck. The rest of you—plot our course. We can’t afford to lose any more time tracking down that cruiser. Is that understood?”
There was a brief pause. Then the Mule began to call in the beacon’s calculations, and Yehoshua got Blue on com and asked for a new velocity.
Lily left the bridge. Kyosti was waiting for her in the corridor. She marched past him, on into the empty tac conference room. He followed meekly.
When the door shut behind them, closing them into the half-lit, still room, she turned and abruptly flung her arms around him and embraced him tightly.
“Lily, my love,” he said softly as he cradled her against him and kissed her dark hair. “This is the first utterly spontaneous gesture of affection you have ever made toward me.”
She pushed away from him as suddenly as she had hugged him, and paced the length of the room to stand at the far end, the unlit table between them. “I thought you might die,” she said harshly.
He pulled out a chair and sat down, leaning his elbows on the table, his chin on steepled fingers, regarding her with a mocking expression. “What? Are you sorry I didn’t?”
“You know damn well—” she broke off. Stood quietly a moment and just breathed, willing herself to relax. A tumult of joy and fury and sheer shocked fear made it difficult for her to think clearly. The dim shapes of chairs and table seemed like unanswered questions: she could make out their substance, but none of their details.
Kyosti watched her, but did not speak.
“Don’t you dare mock me!” she cried. “After your second attack on Finch, I could have gotten you transferred, or detained. And no one would have blamed me had I done it.”
He lowered his hands, looking abruptly serious. “But you didn’t,” he said softly.
Since there was no answer to the truth, she did not attempt one. “You must know,” she said at last, “that no one on this ship is going to feel safe, not after that.”
He dismissed the comment with an impatient gesture. “Tell them to lock their doors.”
“Would it make any difference?”
“No, not unless they can lock-code it on manual. But how are they to know that if you or I don’t tell them?”
“I refuse to lie about something this serious. Is it true? Were you still unconscious when we broke into the window?”
He shrugged, untroubled. “I suppose I must have been.”
“You were badly wounded.”
He put a hand on his tunic, over the spot where he had been shot. “Was I? I’m not now. Do you want to see?”
“No. I don’t.” She stood perfectly still. “How? Not only did you somehow get off the stasis couch and somehow walk all the way from Medical to the bridge without knowing the layout of this ship—”
“Oh,” he said easily, “it follows the standard layout for League exploratory vessels. They’re very efficiently designed.”
“—but,” she continued more forcefully, “you are evidently completely healed of a potentially mortal wound.”
He considered this
thoughtfully. “No, I don’t think it would have been mortal. Bloody, yes, and quite a bit of damage to the outer tissue, but I expect that loss of consciousness came from blood loss rather than—”
“Kyosti!”
“Lily.” He stood up. “I told you once that I no longer experience windows the way others do. Temporality as you understand it does not exist inside a window; thus I can heal, or walk, or love—”
“Or kill.”
“Or kill,” he agreed pleasantly, “in a space of time that to you is only an instant.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why.” He went to stand by the door. “And that is the truth. I will remind you again that I did not kill Finch, when I could have. Now if you will excuse me.”
“Where are you going?” she asked sharply.
It was too dim to see his expression, but she thought he smiled. “There’s a magnificent lab attached to Medical. I think it’s time that I begin serious work on the Hierakis Formula. I don’t intend to lose you, Lily, not before I die.” He made a gesture toward her, thought better of it, and left, his words hanging almost like a threat behind him in the quiet room.
Lily sat down. The soft cushioning of the chair seemed to shift, to mold itself to her contours, altering each time she moved. She contemplated the darkened room for a while, torn between a fierce joy that Kyosti was well enough to be maddening, and the growing fear that she was far out of her depth in trying to deal with him. And if it was his unpredictability that endeared him to her—or bound her to him, rebelling as she had against the predictable living and lines of Ransome House—
I must be sick in the head to find that quality attractive, she thought. She had brought a man on board this ship who could walk through windows, and whose very unpredictability could be a threat to the entire crew. And yet, he had not harmed Finch, this time. And he had never threatened anyone else.
“And I’m already making new excuses for him,” she muttered to herself. Grimacing, she called up the charts in the tac table and began to consider their options.
In this system it was easy: there was one way in and one way out. Over the next two fleet days, much to her surprise, they passed through four more such systems—single roads that led in one direction. The cruiser had left Landfall on an obscure but direct route toward the fringes of Reft space. Because the Forlorn Hope’s charts for the Reft were incomplete, it was difficult to estimate where they were headed, but the beacons and tiny manned stations they hailed and left behind gave them one piece of inadvertently welcome information. They were gaming on the cruiser—and they had a name for it: Heart of Lion.
Jenny laughed, hearing it. Even Pinto found the irony moving enough to smile, briefly. Blue spent most of his off-shift hours reconstructing the specs of the cruiser that he had managed, more by luck than by skill, to get a look at on Landfall’s computer net. Lily studied them with Yehoshua and Nguyen, formulating a plan.
To the unspoken, but unsubtle, relief of the bridge crew, Hawk spent most of his time in the medical lab, and he carefully sealed it when he was gone, letting no one, not even Lily or Bach, enter. He put comrade Wei in some modified form of traction; in five days he declared the broken femur cleanly knit and let her out to walk, albeit gingerly. When others professed amazement at this swift recovery, Paisley going so for as to start a rumor among the other Ridani that he had supernatural powers of healing, Kyosti merely looked indignant, and let Lily know in scathing terms what he thought of the medical technology of the Reft if it had fallen so far as to have no better means of dealing with fractures than to let them heal at the agonizingly slow rate of unaugmented osteogenesis.
And after six days following Heart of Lion’s trail, the Mule turned to Lily and informed her, with a slight, sardonic, and very human inflection of the brow, that the next window would bring them to Remote.
“Remote!” A rush of memory engulfed her: the escape from the ship of the alien Kapellans; her separation from Paisley; her brief conversation with the strange sta imprisoned next to her whom she now knew was not truly a sta at all.
“We’re receiving contradictory information from the beacon here,” said Finch. “Evidently there’s some kind of strike on Remote downside. I’d guess that Heart of Lion was sent in to put it down.”
“What’s the contradictory information?”
Finch frowned. “Central seems to have slapped a cease trade order on Remote system. I would suppose they’re trying to cut it off by stopping supply. But embedded in that loop is a second message asking for help, with two references to Jehane.”
Lily tapped her fingers on the console, measuring her crew with a sweeping glance around the gold sheen of the bridge. “Looks like help is coming. Let’s go in at the highest velocity we can run.”
They came into Remote system screaming, alarms on, comm silent, cutting close as only Pinto could so that they emerged far closer to Remote planet itself than any normal vessel would, and covered the remaining distance at accelerated in-system speeds.
They shifted course when they got their first fix on Heart of Lion, and plotted a close targeting run past her orbit. But after three unanswered identification hails, and two threatening ones, Heart of Lion pulled out of orbit and ran.
They chased her past Dairy system, braking hard for hours in-system to try to match velocities. Heart of Lion eventually banked and tried to shake them by veering at the last minute into an unexpected vector, but Pinto caught a sharper angle and they came through the window close enough behind her to corner her just sunside of the asteroid belt that ringed Unruli system.
Heart of Lion banked for fire, but Lily watched this show of force dispassionately as she set her plan in motion. It came down to three tangible aspects; even after factoring in an inexperienced and overtired crew, the Forlorn Hope had better shields, better speed, and more firepower.
“Take out their engines,” she said as she wondered what, after more than two centuries, the so-distant League fielded as battle cruisers these days. With this ship, she might someday be in a position to find out. Except that the Forlorn Hope belonged to Jehane’s revolution, not to her. She smiled, fingering the smooth ends of the console arms, and wondered at her own presumption in sitting in this chair.
“They have returned fire,” said Jenny from scan. “I’m tracking it—damn, I lost it.”
“I’ve got it,” said Finch.
On the screen above, Lily could see a faint, magnified image of Heart of Lion; between them—only the void of space, and the drifting bulk of an asteroid. The sight of it, rough-hewn, tumbling like a mote in a vast, unseeing eye, reminded her to her surprise of the asteroid miner who had been her lover for one season. He had not been unlike Yehoshua, burly and cheerful and a little short of temper, a quality she had mistaken at the time for unpredictability—and to her disappointment he had proved as predictable as the other men she knew. What had his name been? Evan something? She could not now remember.
A distant flare, an explosion.
“Number two engine disabled,” said Nguyen.
“We are receiving fire—now,” said Finch, sounding nervous.
“Evasive,” ordered Lily. She felt a shudder through the hull, but it was slight.
“Number four engine disabled. Number three engine—”
“We are receiving on comm,” said Finch. “Heart of Lion wishes to surrender unconditionally.”
“Tell them they have one fleet hour to evacuate their vessel. Unconditionally.” Lily pushed herself up to stand. “Yehoshua.”
He stood also, nodded at her, and left the bridge.
“I still think,” began Jenny, “that at least one more person ought to go with him.”
“I can’t afford to risk more than one. I already had to argue down Blue when he wanted us to carry the boat intact to Jehane. And anyway, this was Yehoshua’s idea. Something to do with an old Filistia House custom.”
Jenny looked skeptical. “For what? So he can revenge himself pers
onally for Alsayid’s death? I’ve always thought revenge a ridiculously impractical notion. Or maybe I’ve just been too busy surviving all these years to have the leisure to indulge myself in it.”
“Heart of Lion is complying with the evacuation order,” said Finch. “They request that their shuttles be allowed to set a course for Unruli Station.”
Lily walked across to the console Yehoshua had vacated and sat down in the chair. “Tell them affirmative. Give them the coordinates Bach plotted. That should give us plenty of time.”
“I don’t understand,” said Finch darkly, “why we have to stop at Station. Or why you want to go downside.”
“Unfinished business,” she replied, short, concentrating on the information flowing across the three screens controlled by steering that she only imperfectly understood. “Are you sure you don’t want to go downside with me to see your father?”
“No.” Finch’s voice was hard and unforgiving. “I don’t want to see my father. Why should I?”
“But I’m—”
“Your father didn’t betray you. Don’t expect me to be generous. Not after Grandmam. And—Swann.”
Figures tracked on across the screens. She waited a silent, pensive moment before turning to Nguyen. “Fix on those two asteroids in quince quadrant. I need a better feel for this. Let’s do some target practice.”
The first proved a sloppy job, but the second they pulverized neatly just as the signal came in from Yehoshua that he had gained Heart of Lion in the two-man short-hop bus whose controls he and Blue and Bach had figured out between them.
“Heart of Lion is fully evacuated,” he said across the delay of space. His voice faded in and out, caught in a loop of static. “I have dismantled their nav bank and loaded it into the bus, together with three duplicates copied onto wire for backup. Detonators are set for point three two.”
Lily rose from steering and returned to the captain’s chair. “You are cleared to return, comrade. End transmission. Jenny, what about Heart of Lion’s shuttles?”
