A Working of Stars

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  Then the universe flared up in silver light all around her as she saw Arekhon go down under Kief’s last crushing blow, and she knew why the meditation had not claimed her as it should.

  I’m not part of Demaizen anymore. The insight came down on her with an impact as profound as the strike that had driven ’Rekhe onto the deckplates. I am the one who watches, and who keeps safe what is needed for the finish of the working.

  A few feet away, the woman who had come with ’Rekhe in Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter rose from her kneeling position and stepped forward.

  “Kiefen Diasul,” she said, lifting her staff in salute. “I am the last of Demaizen and the First of all the Mage-Circles, and I challenge you for the great working. Let it be done as the universe wills.”

  To Vai’s amazement, Kief’s battered and bloodstreaked features lit up in a smile of pure delight. “So in one thing, at least, my workings do prevail!” he said—and then staff met staff in a blow and counter that echoed off the walls of the bay.

  Vai didn’t have time to watch them any longer. Arekhon was lying motionless a few feet away from where they fought, and the eiran around him twisted and flickered with a fitful, diminishing light. She got to her feet, her balance awkward with one arm useless, and went over to kneel beside him.

  “’Rekhe,” she said. Then, louder, “’Rekhe!”

  He opened his eyes—barely opened them; his face was swollen from the blows it had taken—and said, coughing, “What? Vai—”

  “Get up,” she said, under the noise of the fighting nearby. She struggled to work her good shoulder under Arekhon’s arm on what looked like his less-injured side. “I’m going to try and move you out of here. Help me as much as you can—”

  “I don’t know if I—I’m hurt, Vai.”

  “You’re damned near dead!” she snapped, and had to shake her head to dash away the tears that threatened to fill her eyes and destroy her vision. “But there’s an infirmary here, and if we can get you in there, you’ll be all right.”

  “Kief—”

  “Your friend is with him. Your fight is over.”

  “It’s not,” he insisted. “It’s just beginning. I should be dead. I should give my power to the working.”

  “Be quiet,” she said. “Save your strength. The universe will need it later.” And as she spoke, she knew that she spoke true.

  He was quiet, which was worse, as she dragged his increasingly limp and unprotesting body across what felt like an infinity of docking bay. She looked back once, and wished she hadn’t—the blood trail stretched out behind them in one long, red streak.

  Inside the infirmary, all the lights were dim. She ignored the medical aiketh that had done the patch-and-go on her arm—it had done better for her than a kit-in-a-box, as Kief had promised her it would, but it wasn’t anywhere near equal to mending the damage Kief had done to Arekhon. The base’s stasis box, an ugly thing that looked like nothing so much as a locker for frozen meat, occupied one whole corner of the room, powered down into resting mode, its lights and telltales dim. That would be her only hope, if she could force it open and put Arekhon inside. Then she could load the box onto a ship and get it under way for Eraasi, making sure that the line current didn’t bobble the whole time.

  Working the clamps and opening the lid one-handed seemed to take forever, and heaving Arekhon up from the deck and manhandling him over the side of the box took even longer, but at last she was done.

  “There,” she said. The controls on this box were automatic—stasis would kick in as soon as she clamped the lid back down and would stay in effect until the medical aiketen in Hanilat unclamped it again. “You’re safe now.”

  Eastward-to-Dawning’s communications officer looked up from the console and said, “The new contact is transmitting in one of the sus-Peledaen ciphers, Captain.”

  “Didn’t I say that we should have invited them?” Hafdorwen said to nobody in particular. “I knew it. Put a spread of missiles out; that’ll get them thinking. Then let’s start fighting this thing.”

  “We’re being targeted,” said his Command-Ancillary.

  “Launch decoys, and give me some speed,” Hafdorwen said. “At least let them know they’ve been in a fight. And put a flock of antiradiation missiles back down the beam at whoever’s illuminating us.”

  “One thing in our favor,” said the Command-Ancillary, as acceleration pushed them all toward the rear bulkhead, forcing the bridge crew to grab the handholds on their seats. “Everything we see out here is a target. Those guys have a different problem. They have to keep from shooting their friends.”

  “I’d trade problems with them in a heartbeat,” Hafdorwen said. “Get me into fifty percent hit range on somebody. Anybody. Now.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Out in the asteroid base’s docking bay, Llannat Hyfid circled Kiefen Diasul, her staff blazing green in her hand. Narin and Ty knelt to either side, backs against the outboard bulkheads, marking the entire bay as a circle, the ground upon which they did their work.

  Arekhon says this man has stolen another’s body, Llannat thought. But I know the truth. He is a replicant—perhaps the first of them all.

  That was bad and good at the same time. Kief was strong and fast, and the new body he wore was unmarked by the accumulated subtle damage of living—on the other hand, it didn’t yet have the reflexes of staff combat built into its neural pathways through years of painful practice. She could make herself open, and let her body think for her. He would have to make a conscious decision for everything he did. She threw a series of rapid blows at him, not attempting to hurt him as much as to tire him, to keep him from thinking of anything more than his own defense.

  “I will break the great working,” he said. “Even if the last of Demaizen has come from the other end of time to keep it whole.”

  “I’ll follow you to the other end of time if I have to,” she said.

  “Not if I end it here.”

  Kief launched into his own series of blows, attempting to use the power of his wrists and shoulders to overmaster Llannat’s defenses, forcing her back, smashing through. She slipped and turned his blows, but with each one she gave up ground, a pace at a time, backing toward the archway where the force field kept in the air. One cracking, stinging blow sent pins into the palm of her hand, and she gasped and leapt backward.

  “You’ve seen the interstellar gap. What could be more broken than that?” she asked, regaining her breath and slashing under Kief’s guard to crease his abdomen, nearly losing her weapon as it caught in the fabric of his shirt. She took a step back, away from the deep recesses of the station, closer to the force field and the stars. “Why keep apart what needs to be drawn together?”

  “Knots and threads and cords and ties,” Kief snarled. He slashed down with his staff against her exposed forearm, at the same time taking her wrist in his free hand, grasping cruelly, fingers digging into her flesh. He pushed her and she staggered back a step, farther still from where Narin and Ty knelt, closer to the bay’s opening. “They’re all snares to catch and bind us, to keep us prisoner and force us into the working. I want none of it.”

  “And the galaxy bleeds for centuries because one man stood aside and said, ‘This is no work of mine.’” They were almost at the force field now. Llannat twisted her wrist outward, breaking Kief’s grip, at the same time laying her staff into the crook of his elbow, where it caught like a toggle—and let herself fall backward.

  Her booted foot caught him in the abdomen as she lifted him up and over and threw him, flailing, into and through the force field at the mouth of the docking bay. Designed to let through spacecraft and other things larger and slower than molecules of air, the force field let him pass. He fell out and away, continuing his arc freed now from the station’s artificial gravity. His staff clattered to the deck.

  “May the Void take your refusal, and all of your workings with it,” Llannat said at last. She lay on the deck, panting, and did not stir.
/>   “The sus-Dariv always were a sneaky bunch,” the Cold-Heart’s captain said. “Who’d have thought they were tight enough with the sus-Radal to use their base for a fallback position? We should have suspected.”

  “We’re being targeted,” said the Cold-Heart’s Pilot-Principal. “Someone’s got fire control on us.”

  “Launch decoys, and gang all the controls to my panel,” the captain said. “Put some antiradiation missiles back down the beam at whoever’s illuminating us. Centerline pod. At least let them know they’ve been in a fight.”

  “One thing in our favor,” the Cold-Heart’s Command-Ancillary said. “Everybody we see is a target. The sus-Dariv have to keep from shooting each other.”

  “I’d trade problems with them,” the captain said. “Because let’s be honest, they’ve got some powerful incentives to miss each other and hit us—most of a fleet and half a family’s worth of incentives. Do you think they’ll care that we were on pirate-chasing duty over by Aulwikh while their fleet was getting destroyed?”

  “Say what?”

  “Word is, Fleet-Captain sus-Mevyan was wiping out all of their friends and drinking buddies.”

  “How do you know?” asked the Command-Ancillary.

  “If you haven’t heard, then you weren’t listening in the right places. sus-Mevyan was off on some secret mission at the exact same time as the sus-Dariv had their problems, and in the same sector. When she came back, she wouldn’t talk. I know her, and that isn’t like her. I can add two and two as well as the next man, and so can the sus-Dariv. There are no secrets.”

  “If that’s what was done, it was badly done,” the Command-Ancillary said. “People can’t go breaking custom like that.”

  “We not only could; we did,” said the captain. “No one asked me up front. But it’s our problem now. sus-Dariv’ll fry us the second they get the chance. Engines, stand by. And get a report drone ready to launch.”

  Zeri sus-Dariv was sitting in the second seat on Fire-on-the-Hilltops when Lenyat Irao dropped his ship out of the Void. “I know I don’t know anything about starships,” she’d said earlier, when Len looked dubious. “But neither does anybody else on board now, except for you. And I am the head of the sus-Dariv.”

  That had been several minutes ago. Now Len said, “Stand by for Void-emergence,” and she felt the ripple of internal disquiet that had accompanied all of their dropouts so far. The swirling iridescent grey pseudosubstance of the Void fell away from the bridge windows, and she saw the stars.

  “Now I know why you like this job,” she said, after her breath returned.

  “Nothing like it,” Len agreed. “The first time I ever saw it, I said to myself I was damned if I was ever going to look for dirtside work again. And so I—wait a minute.”

  Zeri didn’t like the sudden change in his voice. “What’s wrong?”

  “Too many ships out there,” he said, “and the ship-mind is reporting signals in at least three different ciphers. sus-Dariv and sus-Radal—”

  “Syr Vai said that the rendezvous was technically in sus-Radal territory,” Zeri said. “I don’t think she expected to find a ship here, though.”

  “Well, for once Iulan etaze guessed wrong,” Len said. “The ship-mind says that we’re looking at sus-Radal’s Eastward-to-Dawning. A guardship, damn all the luck. And the other cipher—”

  “Yes? Don’t just sit there, Captain Irao—tell me!”

  “The other cipher is sus-Peledaen. It’s the Cold-Heart.” Len said something in his native Antipodean language that Zeri didn’t understand, and added in Hanilat-Eraasian, “Another luck-rotted guardship. Just what we needed.”

  “At least Cousin Herin will be happy,” she said, after a moment. “If the Cold-Heart is here, then—if you believe Syrs Egelt and Hussav and their chase-and-go-homes—so is Iulan Vai.”

  Len was busy donning headphones, and turning his attention to the Fire’s high-frequency direction finder. “In the meantime, all we can do is stay well out of the way of things and listen.”

  He pulled back to bare minimum on the control yoke, sending retro blasts forward to bring them to a near halt in space, cutting power and gravity to minimal levels as well. Zeri felt herself begin to float a bit against her safety web every time she moved.

  “Now, let’s see how things sort out. As soon as things have calmed down, if our friends are on top, we’ll tell them we’re here. If they aren’t … well, we’ll find somewhere else to be. Do you think I’d look good with a mustache and an eye patch?”

  Zeri looked at Len critically. “Neither one would do you a bit of good. I like you fine the way you are.”

  “Ah, the sweet promise of youth. But changing our names and habits might not be a bad idea regardless, as long as I can still go into space.”

  “Not … wait a minute,” Zeri said. “What’s this light?” She pointed to a flashing telltale on the console beside her.

  “Damnation. Something’s shifted back aft. Started drifting when I shut down to minimal. That’s a motion detector. I’ll go secure whatever it is, okay? You keep watch up here. Anything happens,” he pointed to a silver knob, “call me on the intraship comm. Flip that to turn it on, it’ll sound back aft. Just talk normally. Okay?” He was already unlacing his safety webbing.

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t touch anything else,” Len said, and headed aft, dogging down the airtight door behind him.

  Kief twisted through the vacuum outside the force field. Nothing to hold, nothing to touch, his eyes stabbed agony into his brain as if they were pierced with white-hot knives—he clamped them shut. His lungs … he twisted the corner and dropped, panting and gasping, into the Void. Lost, without a Circle behind him, with nothing to show the way. He could die here, he knew, but perhaps not as soon as he would have with his blood boiling out of his lungs in hard interstellar vacuum.

  The grey mist that marked the Void surrounded him, the silence eerily total. He saw nothing in any direction. But then, ahead, a shape moved. A black thing disturbed the chilling mist like a rock disturbing the surface of the sea. It approached. A ship, a spaceship, moving in its Void-transit. In the way the nature of the Void demanded, the vessel seemed to be heading straight for him, at a sedate walking pace. Kief sprinted toward it, the battering he’d sustained in his fight with Arekhon and Maraganha making his legs, arms, and ribs ache, even as the Void sucked the warmth from his bones.

  He grasped the leading edge of an atmospheric-control surface on the spacecraft and pulled himself up onto it, pressed against the cold, real-feeling metal, with hands that had begun to lose their strength. Crawling, he made his way to the main body of the craft and closed his eyes. He pressed flat against it and twisted. He was through, falling to the deck, and breathing in the warm, humid air of the ship.

  Wherever this ship was going, he would go. It would be a world. He lived.

  Abruptly, an alarm sounded. Then he felt the sensation of disquiet that marked a Void-transition. The engines sounded different now, through the deckplates. A dropout, so soon? Kief wondered where they were.

  He lay motionless, delighting in having air and warmth. Then the sound of the engines changed again, dying to nothing. He felt himself growing lighter, until the slightest motion was enough to push him from the deck. Gravity had been shut off.

  Kief pushed back with his elbows and floated to a standing position, grabbing a handhold to brace himself. A locker was fastened on the forward bulkhead. Kief opened it. It held ship’s coveralls, with patches for Fire-on-the-Hilltops. Luck, Kief thought, has not deserted me. He pulled the coverall over his torn and sweat-stained clothing, fastening it up the front. He didn’t have a staff—for the first time in years—and that was upsetting. But no matter. There had to be something on board that could be fashioned into a makeshift. He started to move forward, pulling himself from handhold to handhold.

  Time to find the crew and introduce himself. He felt lucky. Lord Natelth would reward him well for returning his
escaped bride.

  Len moved aft. The motion had been in number-one cargo hold, and he didn’t recall any cargo being in there. Maybe the sensor was wrong. Sometimes—more often than he liked to think—the sensors were wrong, and a realspace translation was often the thing to knock them off.

  But here … the dogs on the hatch to number one were moving, apparently by themselves. Something was trying to get out. He stood, holding an overhead ring, amazed. The door swung open, and someone emerged. He saw a man dressed, as he was, in a ship’s coverall. The man had a trickle of blood at each nostril, but his face was oddly familiar. Len wondered where he’d seen the man before. He was about Len’s own height and build.

  “Who are you?” Len asked. “How did you get on my ship?”

  “Lenyat Irao,” the stranger said.

  “You know me?”

  “No, that’s my name, and I have your body,” the man said, and launched himself forward, striking Len and bearing him up against the far bulkhead, all elbows and knees and grasping hands.

  Zeri sat back in her chair, looking out the windows. Nothing appeared out there but the stars. They were in unfamiliar patterns, but that didn’t surprise her. She was a long way from home. Len said they were on the other side of the great Gap.

  A voice came up on the amplified outside circuit, from Eastward-to-Dawning broadcasting in the clear, calling, “Any sus-Dariv.”

  “I am sus-Dariv,” Zeri said aloud. “I am the sus-Dariv.”

  But she didn’t key the external microphone. Instead, she twisted the internal communications switch. Before she could speak, though, she heard the internal pickups.

  “Who are you?” Len was asking.

  A stowaway? she thought. How long had the intruder been on board?

  Then she heard a voice that sounded a great deal like Len’s answer, “Lenyat Irao.”

  Zeri unbuckled her safety webbing. She was certain that if she were more familiar with the ship she’d be able to do something clever, like dialing the gravity in that one compartment up to about three times normal, then going back to sort out what was going on among the people lying flat on the deck unable to move. She could mend her ignorance in the future, she decided. For now, voices had given way to the sound of what could only be a fistfight.