Oh, well. No hurry. We have time.
Breakfast done, he left the dining hall for his office—a matter of going from one low concrete building to another, almost identical one. Already the air outside was hot and dry, under a sky of deep, cloudless blue. Today looked like being another scorcher.
Command-Tertiary Yerris was waiting for him in his office with a textpad. “Sir. Summary of the message traffic.”
Winceyt glanced at the pad. Nothing unusual there—most of the entries were copies of messages going in and out of Hanilat. There was only one heads-up for Serpent: A message-drone had come in overnight from Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms, letting the family know that the main trade convoy was entering the Void for the last leg of its journey home, with a list appended of ships needing repair and refitting.
“We’ll need to set up a schedule for rotating stuff in and out,” Winceyt said, tapping the message with the blunt end of his stylus. “But the big job is still going to be upgrading the engines on Golden-Flower-Crown , and we’re ready for that.”
In fact, he had been requisitioning and stockpiling the necessary parts and equipment for the anticipated overhaul ever since coming to Serpent. The main engine assembly had arrived by ground hauler just two days ago, and now occupied most of Construction Hangar 2. A major refit was always time-consuming, and a cargo ship lost the family money every day that it was in the yards.
“Rigging-Chief Olyesi says that she can start as soon as you give the word,” Yerris said. “All three of the heavy work platforms are cleared and rigged for lift.”
“Excellent,” Winceyt replied.
Turning around Golden-Flower-Crown rapidly and efficiently would be a good start for his outer-family career. And maybe next year he’d feel settled-in enough at Serpent Station to take leave for the meeting in Hanilat.
“Finding Narin,” Arekhon said, “isn’t going to be easy.”
He and Maraganha were in a small café near the Cazdel Guildhouse, sharing a midafternoon meal of hot bitter-root tea and sweet pastries. The Void-walker paused in the act of pulling apart a flaky piece of spice-bread, and asked him, “What exactly makes it hard?”
“Well, for one thing, I haven’t heard from her in almost ten years.”
Maraganha winced. “That could make things difficult. Any idea why she decided to vanish?”
“Not in any great detail,” Arekhon said. “She never cared much for writing letters in the first place, and the last message I got from her was a voice-note saying that she was sick of trying to explain the eiran to Adepts and was going off to look for honest work.”
“That’s when you lost track of her?”
“More or less,” he said. “She wound up somewhere in the Immering Archipelago, but I don’t know anything more than that. There’s a limit to what the search services and the public datanets can tell you, especially if the person you’re looking for is a powerful Mage—and Ty was right about Narin being powerful. She was the First of her own Circle once, before she came to Demaizen; if she’s vanished deliberately, we may never find her at all.”
“Don’t spook her, then,” Maraganha advised. “Stay away from working the eiran unless you have to.”
Arekhon poured more of the bitter-root tea into his cup. There were some days, and this was one of them, when he missed the sharp tang of good red homeworlds uffa more than words could tell. “We’ll have to go to Immering, then, and check the local records—and I can tell you right now that they’re going to be a mess. The Immering islands seem to have been everybody’s favorite invasion spot for the last five or six decades.”
“And open warfare has a nasty habit of blowing holes in people’s filing systems,” said Maraganha. “Oh, well. Let’s go to Immering and see what we can reconstruct.”
Inadal syn-Arvedan let himself into his room at the Wintermount Guesthouse and locked the door behind him. The house-mind brought up the lights as soon as he entered, and he saw that the hostelry’s aiketen had left him the midnight supper he’d requested, a tray of smoked meats and small breads and relishes set out on the side table along with a flask of wine. He hung up his damp weather coat, then sank gratefully into the deep-cushioned leather chair next to the table and broke the seal on the wine.
It was summer wine, pale and sparkling; he poured some into the glass the aiketen had left with the supper tray and drank it off. The drink’s tingling sharpness cut through the fuzz of talk and exhaustion that the day’s business had left in his head, and he set the empty glass aside. He’d finish the wine later, after he’d eaten, when he was ready to sleep. Now, however, he wanted to have the meal he’d been too busy to stop for all day, and he wanted to think.
The Hanilat Ploughmen’s Club, where he had spent most of this afternoon and evening, had been for almost a century the main meeting place for Eraasi’s agrarian and mercantile families. In past decades, when the powers of the star-lords and the ground-based interests were more in balance, very little had actually gone on inside the club—socializing mostly, and the occasional private business arrangement. These days, however, the conversation at the Ploughmen’s Club had a tinge of desperation in it. The fleet-families were growing ever more powerful; soon now, if nothing happened to stop them, they would overshadow the city and country interests completely.
Talking isn’t enough, Inadal thought. If we don’t work to counter the power of the star-lords, we may not survive them … and we are Eraasi, in the end.
Politics had never been Inadal’s first love, or even his second. He could happily have spent his entire life in Arvedan, overseeing the family estate and only coming to Hanilat for shopping and holidays. But the times weren’t good for that. At least a few of the men and women he’d spoken with at the Ploughmen’s Club had seen things his way; but they didn’t have a plan.
The room’s communications console sounded its two-note chime, interrupting his thoughts.
“House-mind. Answer the call and play it aloud.” The console speaker clicked on. He said, “Hello?”
“Inadal?” It was his sister Ayil’s voice. “I tried calling you at home first but they said that you were here in town.”
“Business meetings,” he said. “Very dull ones.”
“Don’t patronize me. I know exactly how dull those meetings really are.” Her tone changed. “I learned something last night, and I think you need to know it.”
“What?”
There was a pause, as if Ayil were collecting her thoughts. “You do know that one of my old officemates left the Institute to be a Mage in Delath’s Circle.”
The name of their late brother, killed years ago in the destruction of Demaizen Old Hall, still had the power to cause Inadal a brief, sharp pang. “I remember you telling me something like that once.”
“Well, I saw him again last night.”
“Alive?”
“Of course alive. Del was the one who could see spirits, not me.” Her voice caught a little, and Inadal reflected that he was perhaps not the only member of their family who could be stricken with unexpected grief. “Kief is with one of the sus-Peledaen Circles now.”
“He’s no friend of ours, then. The sus-Peledaen are star-lords to the bone.”
“I don’t think this is one of their fleet-Circles,” Ayil said. “It’s something else, I’m almost certain.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was with the Institute Circle last night … they always meet then … and he slept on my couch afterward because he was too tired to go home. I think there was a great working, Inadal; I saw the blood on his robes.”
“They’re Mages, remember. It’s what they do.”
He heard her give a faint snort. “Not the Institute Circle. It’s common knowledge they haven’t done a great working in over a century.”
“Are you saying that your old officemate is up to something that his sponsors don’t know about?”
“I’m not sure,” Ayil said. “But Kief never thought that highly of the star-lor
ds back when I first knew him—his family were all merchants—and I can’t see him changing his opinion of them now.”
Isayana and Natelth sat in their private withdrawing-room aboard the sus-Peledaen orbital station. Far below them, in Hanilat, it was night; just as it was ship’s-evening here on the station. They were listening to music after dinner—not recorded or synthesized music, but local talent, an amateur consort drawn from instrumentalists among the resident fleet-family and hired crew. The actual musicians were several decks away, playing for a small audience in one of the recreation lounges; the music in the private withdrawing-room was piped in over ship’s audio.
Isayana was only half-listening, if that; she liked music as a background to thought, but didn’t care much for nuances of performance. Tonight she was fiddling with a draftsman’s pad, idly sketching and erasing designs for aiketen and other specialized devices that might never get built.
She looked up from her pad and glanced over at her brother. Natelth was going over the sus-Peledaen convoy and construction schedules, trying to fit everything together so that the orbital yards produced enough guardships to run all the trading voyages the family needed. The process didn’t seem to be working tonight. He swept his stylus through the latest entry, frowned, and shook his head.
“Problems?” she asked.
“Complaints. The orbital yards claim to be stressed by the pace of new construction.”
“Well, are they?”
Natelth’s frown deepened. “Their performance is not deteriorating.”
“Not yet,” she said. “If our supervisors are any good, they’re spotting the warning signs before the decay sets in, not after.”
“We don’t promote and adopt incompetents. But we can’t afford to halt our shipbuilding efforts, either—not when the sus-Radal and half a dozen other families are fattening their fleets.”
“There’s always farming out the nonsecret work to commercial shipyards,” she said. They’d had this argument many times before, in one form or another, but she still felt obliged to try.
“No.”
“It works for the sus-Dariv.”
“We are not the sus-Dariv,” he said. “We are the sus-Peledaen. I don’t want outside interests getting involved in our fleet construction.”
“We’ve used commercial yards for repairs and refitting.”
“Only when there was no time and no alternative. If I’d had a choice, we would have brought all the work in-house four decades ago.”
“We don’t always get the choices we want,” she said. “And we surely didn’t get them back then.”
She hadn’t thought about those days for a long time. It had been a dark, violent period, when she and Natelth had been fighting hard just to keep the control of the fleet-family in the hands of the sus-Khalgath line. Their parents were suddenly, unexpectedly dead; their late-born sibling Arekhon was an orphaned infant thrust into Isayana’s care; and all of Hanilat seemed firmly of the opinion that Natelth sus-Khalgath was by virtue of his youth unfit to rule the sus-Peledaen.
Showing people otherwise had taken the greater part of a decade, but they had done it, she and Natelth against the world. He ran most of that world, these days, but sometimes Isayana thought that he had absorbed those early lessons in control and suspicion a bit too well.
In the service lot behind the Court of Two Colors, a Ridge Farms produce truck was backing up to Loading Dock 3. Inside the truck’s canvas-shielded rear compartment, five men sat beside a metal drum, some four feet high and two across. These were men who took no chances: they had their own handcart with them.
The truck did not contain tenderwort. That cargo had been dumped unceremoniously by the roadside some twenty miles outside the city limits of greater Hanilat—as had the driver and his assistant. They would not be found before dawn, by which time bigger news would already be filling the morning feeds.
“Hey, Gesri,” said one of the men in the back. His current name, adopted for the occasion, was Daryd—his mother had certainly never called him that, but then, he hadn’t used his birth-name in years. Daryd was an older man, dressed in the impeccable clothing of a legalist or an administrator. In addition to being the leader of the men in the truck, he also functioned as the team’s outside interface: If his people ran into someone officious, Daryd could official back until the others got clear. “What’s eating you? You’re sweating, man.”
“I’ll be all right,” Gesri said. “It’s the way this truck is moving. I get sick.”
“I hope that’s all it is.”
The truck eased to a stop with a light bump. The driver hit the back of the cab twice. Daryd stood up.
“It’s showtime,” he said.
“Then let’s move,” said the bombmaker. He also had a true name, but no one had called him by it for a long time now. In the shadowy world where the team functioned, he was known only by his expertise. “There’s three hundred pounds of nasty in that thing. Until it’s armed, we’re in deep if we’re caught, and with nothing to show for it.”
“Where do we want it?” asked another of the men.
“Down low as we can get,” the bombmaker said. “And as close to the center as we can get, over in the wing with the main ballroom.”
Two of the men opened the canvas back of the truck while the other two rolled the drum onto the handcart. Working together, they backed the handcart gently onto the dock. The metal door rolled up and they were in.
“Fish sauce,” the no-longer-ill Gesri said. He passed over a clipboard to the lading-clerk. “Where do you want it?”
“Larder A-Twelve,” the clerk said, not looking up from the work on his desk.
“This way,” Daryd said to his crew. The four of them, with Daryd leading, walked down the corridor to the right. “Ahead should be a door, then a ramp down to the left.”
Once they were out of sight of the people at the loading dock, Daryd brought out an inertial tracker. He’d gone over the Court’s floor plan before the start of the operation, but he hadn’t dared do a recon, for fear of getting caught. Getting caught would have boosted security, and maybe moved the sus-Dariv conclave to some other venue. So this live run was also the first and only.
The door they were looking for—which was not the door of Larder A-12—was where it should be, and the lock was simple. Now they were where no honest delivery man would ever be, so speed was even more essential.
They closed the door behind them, relocked it, and jollied the handcart and its burden down the ramp into another corridor. This one was all white, full of bright incandescent glows, with pipes for steam and chill-water running overhead, along with the gas lines and the communications feeds.
Down the ramp—to the right—another set of corridors. Daryd was counting the paces and watching his inertial. The main supports for the building would be near here. An explosion would take them out, would take out the building, collapsing it. An outside bang with much bigger fireworks wouldn’t have half the effect.
“Here,” Daryd said finally.
He stepped back, and the bombmaker stepped forward. “Take off the cover.”
Gesri whisked away the drum’s canvas traveling robe. Thus revealed, the metal of the container gleamed in the light. The drum had no top. Inside it was a simple circuit with a timer, and beside the circuit a chemical vial, and beside that a drop bolt. The electric timer was the main component. It had batteries and an electric blasting cap, sunk into the explosive bricks ranged around the inside circumference of the drum.
“Time,” the bombmaker said.
Daryd checked his chrono. “Fifty-eight minutes.”
“Fifty-eight minutes, check,” the bombmaker said, and dialed in the number. He pressed the button.
Nothing visible happened; but slowly, internally, the timer began its count.
In fifty-eight minutes, if nothing went wrong, the hollow shape of the drum’s explosive load would turn into incandescent gas moving at many times the velocity of sound, wi
th a volume far too large for the corridor to hold without cracking. And even if the timer didn’t work—things go wrong, after all, and luck holds for some people and not for others—there remained a second, chemical circuit.
“Fifty-eight minutes on the primary.” The bombmaker selected a sixty-minute chemical timer from a group in the leather roll he pulled from a pocket. The timer was a slender metal cylinder made of copper at one end and white steel at the other, divided at the midpoint circumference by a brass ring. He checked the printing on the chemical timer. “Sixty minutes, as advertised.”
Daryd checked his chrono again. “Let’s move it. We don’t have all night.”
“Patience,” the bombmaker said.
He pulled a pliers from another pocket and crimped the copper end of the chemical blasting cap. That would break the vial of acid inside. After a while the acid would eat through to where the initiator was, and much else would follow.
The bombmaker punched the steel end of the timer into a soft blasting brick, placed opposite where his electrical timer was counting down. Two initiators, more luck.
One more thing to do: the mechanical, the failsafe, the booby trap. In this case, a gravity bolt that would fall if disturbed. The bombmaker pulled back the spring-loaded hammer of a mechanical initiator, and held the hammer in place with a long piece of flat metal.
“Now,” he said. “And be careful. If I lose my grip on the shim, none of us will stay alive long enough to notice what happened.”
The other men—except for Daryd, who couldn’t get his hands dirty, in case somebody should notice that the grime under his fingernails didn’t match his respectable business garb—rocked the drum off of its cart and turned it over. Carefully, they lowered the open end of the drum, with the metal shim across it, down onto the floor.
A Working of Stars Page 7
