by Eric Flint
“Cargo?” Captain Pausert wondered, grumpily, why no one ever told him anything.
Irritable, he avoided the hold and the cargo, and went down into the Venture’s crawlway and checked component modules instead. He was, as he often did, following some inner sense, part of his own witchy klatha mastery, which he poorly understood. It made him, generally, a lucky gambler. This time it didn’t let him down either. He let his hands guide him to the units, pulled the ones he found them resting on, and examined them in the light of the crookneck atomic lamp, and then dug out the hyperelectronic surge tester, and checked the readings.
Sure enough, there were telltale flat areas in the responses. He went back to get replacements, and found someone had been restocking the storeroom. Every rack was full.
Karres was plainly doing their very best to prepare him for this mission. Somehow, that wasn’t comforting.
* * *
Goth moved as silently as she could through the deep woods of Karres. Concentrating on the hunt was easier than thinking about other things. There were other ways to bring food to the table, klatha means, artificial means, but Karres had learned: Sometimes the best ways forward were back. And right now, Goth wanted to go back. Back to Nikkeldepain. Back to being Vala, back to Captain Pausert as a teenager, younger than herself. Well. She didn’t really want him younger than herself. Time travel was problematic. She quite understood, now, why age shifts were also problematic.
But that didn’t make sending the captain off on another dangerous adventure any easier. Not without her. And her biggest worry was not telling him where she’d be going, because he’d believe he had to come along. She knew him well enough to know he’d feel it was his responsibility. To feel that he’d be neglectful if he didn’t.
But that would apparently lead to disaster.
She was sick of precogs. Sick enough to want to prove them wrong…
…but experienced enough to know they couldn’t choose what they foresaw. They’d worked out good, systematic means of testing how probable an outcome was. This was apparently rock solid.
That didn’t mean she had to like it.
CHAPTER 1
When the shriek of space-alarms is welcome, things are pretty rotten, Captain Pausert reflected.
He’d been near to dozing in the control chair on the Venture 7333. That was a good thing considering how little sleep he’d had the last few days, and a bad thing when he was in command of a starship.
He blinked to clear his vision. The screens showed that it was a fairly normal problem on the fringes of the Empire’s space, a larger ship following directly down their course. There was only one good reason for that—to try and get in a disabling shot on the Venture’s tubes before they had a chance to flee or return fire or try evasive action. It was the hardest to detect too, with the tubes’ trail disturbing most sensors. The Venture had an advantage over most ships in that she had the latest and best that the Daal of Uldune’s shipyards had been able fit into the ship. Otherwise, ten-to-one he would have been taken by surprise.
It wasn’t too healthy an approach for the following ship. There were some short-lived radioactives in the trail, but then pirates didn’t take a long-term approach to life.
The irony of the situation was that he’d have happily given the pirates his cargo. There were ten thousand pairs of hyperelectronic manacles in the hold. They were not Pausert’s choice of cargo, but an order destined for Karoda. He needed an excuse to go there, but he would have preferred some other excuse!
He toggled the intercom, and woke the Leewit, Vezzarn and Ta’zara. “Got pirates sneaking up astern.”
“Good,” said the Leewit, her mood plainly not that different from his own. “Let’s shoot their front end off, shoot their rear end off, and ram them in the middle!” she snarled, quoting her favorite phrase from the captain’s lexicon.
“We could run,” said old Vezzarn, warily.
That was true. Not only was the Venture more lethal than she looked, but she was somewhat overpowered. She’d originally been built as a pirate chaser, intended to look the part of a small commercial freighter. She’d been sold off, and ended up as just that—a small freighter with high fuel bills and not really enough cargo space for inner-planet work. But for high-risk, high-cost cargos in possibly dangerous localities, she was just the ship a captain needed. Besides, with the Leewit and him aboard they had an ace up their sleeves: the Sheewash Drive, harnessing their klatha powers to outpace any spacecraft.
The downside about the Sheewash Drive was that everyone else wanted it. There was no point in using it if it wasn’t an emergency. There were enough rumors about a superdrive and the witches of Karres as it was.
“Run is always better,” said Ta’zara, having silently come into the control room. Ta’zara, who was a human battlewagon in unarmed conflict, could move like a ghost when he wished to. “You fight when you have to, in the place you choose, with the weapons you choose.”
That made sense, although the captain was all for fighting right now. He looked at the screens and did a quick calculation. “There’s an asteroid cluster up ahead. Dirty space, full of debris. Something recently collided with something else and the shattered pieces are still a trap for any starship. Not a great place for us to run at full speed. And three planetoids off to the starboard. Suppose we shift course slightly as if we’re avoiding the debris, dive in on the planetoid, and catch a slingshot off its gravity well. Then we’ll come at them from the flank. The asteroids will give them little space to run.”
“And if we blow one or two of those into space fragments, ahead of their course, they’ll have rocks to dodge instead chasing or shooting at us,” said Vezzarn.
“As well as chasing us, probably,” said the captain. “Right, you’ll all need to get to your gravity acceleration couches and strap in. I’ll unlock the nova-gun turrets, and then set a course to brush past that closest worldlet at full thrust. As soon as we get out of the gravity well, you get to the guns.”
Fun fun piped the little vatchlet, like the sound of sunlight, like seeing a scent, a thing that Captain was aware of, but ordinary senses were not. Klatha-sensitives could “rell” vatch. To others, they weren’t there at all, let alone hearable.
The piece of nothingness whirled about in a delighted dance, around the Leewit. The two of them were rather similar, but the Leewit was at least growing up a little more. Pausert almost groaned. He hoped they’d lost Little-bit, the silver-eyed baby vatch, after their last adventure. She’d disappeared for a while, as vatches often did. They regarded humans and their doings as a kind of entertainment, only worth paying attention to when things could go terribly wrong—often as a direct result of the vatch interference. Klatha use attracted them, like moths to a candle. Pausert shook his head. He was a vatch-handler, able to force some of them to do his will, but Little-bit was of the kind that couldn’t be handled. His klatha hooks merely tickled her.
“We don’t need trouble,” he said sternly, knowing it was a waste of time.
But I do! said the vatch, her tinkling little voice inside his head. Make explosions, big dream thing. I like explosions!
Whatever he did, Captain Pausert knew that playing the little vatch’s game was not a good idea. Neither was directly thwarting the immensely powerful little creature. He had to chart some kind of middle course. That was never going to be easy, but he had years of practice, dealing with the Leewit. She was resisting growing up as hard as any lastborn child ever does, and would have lapses into the hooliganism of her younger years with regularity. But he’d noticed…never when it really mattered. He wondered if that applied to the vatchlet.
He asked it, as he strapped in to the command chair. “Do you ever grow up?”
Almost to his surprise, he got a serious answer, if an incomprehensible one. We go to the *place*. Some never do.
“Do you want to?” asked Pausert, fishing for a handle on the strange, nonmaterial creatures.
There was a longe
r silence. Then the voice in his head said: Sometimes, big dream thing. Sometimes I don’t. Maybe not fun fun.
“Dying’s not fun fun for us either. And that could just happen, no matter how good we are at klatha,” said Pausert, missing Goth badly. Wishing he had her at his side. Wishing he’d just had a chance to tell her…because every space battle actually could just be one’s last, even for a wizard of Karres.
* * *
The battle, if you could call it that, was a short-run thing. The Venture had a good turn of speed to her, and she’d been built as a pirate chaser, long years ago on Nikkeldepain. It was almost as if the old ship loved her work, Pausert reflected. The pirates had plainly been unaware that they’d been spotted in their attempt to sneak up undetected. Their first shot, as the Venture came racing in from their flank, had been wildly astray. The Venture’s return fire from her erratic nova guns had not been. Old Vezzarn had had a misfire, causing some damage to the gun and turret, but the Leewit, whose fire from the nova guns had always been uncannily accurate, was on target. Her purple searing blast had struck the other ship with its full devastating force, destroying what must have been a missile pod. He heard her shriek of glee through the intercom. “Got him! Got him good!”
The explosion that set off was enough to break the other ship in half. One moment it was a pirate, the next two hulks and debris flying off into space in separate directions. Very soon after a small lifecraft detached from what had been the front half of the ship and fled, as Captain Pausert swung the Venture away from the target. There’d be metal fragments moving unpredictably and at speed, as they ricocheted off each other.
Vezzarn came down to report on the damage to his gun turret, as the Leewit came bouncing off the walls down the corridor. “Did you see that shot, Captain? I guessed exactly right. We blew his aft right off!”
“So you did,” said Pausert, with all the pride of the man who’d taught her to shoot. “Well, if you take the helm for a bit, I need to go and inspect Vezzarn’s pod. Lucky you didn’t get hurt, old fellow,” he said to the old spacer, who was looking a bit shaken.
What happens to the other ones? asked the little vatch-voice in their heads.
The Leewit and the captain paused…and Vezzarn, who was terrified of “witchy stuff,” fled, saying something about needing a hot drink.
“What other ones?” asked the Leewit. “So you’re back, are you? Huh. Just leaving me like that.”
Pausert looked anxiously at his instruments, but except for the fleeing lifecraft, they showed nothing.
The other dream things. In that piece of the ship.
“Pirates left their friends, did they?” said the Leewit. “Just like you left me.”
But you are not tied to a pole. They make almost as much air-vibration as you, but there are lots of them.
Captain Pausert had had enough experience of the Leewit’s “air-vibration” to work it out. There were prisoners on the pirate ship, screaming. “Which half of the ship?” he asked, pointing at the screens. “That one? Or that one?” As he said that, the front section spun off with another small explosion.
The first one, said the vatch-voice in his head.
That was the larger aft section, still mostly intact. The ship had plainly been an old obsolete Empire C-class merchanter. The cargo holds were just above the tubes—rather like the Venture’s own structure. Pausert had heard that some of the merchanters had been modified, using some of that space for extra engine capacity. It made them less commercially viable—and they’d already been outclassed, but a lot faster. Ideal for little, except piracy. And that hold, or what was left of it, could well be full of prisoners. “I’ll start matching trajectory,” said the captain. “Ta’zara. You need to suit up and the Leewit can get old Vezzarn down here, so I can suit up too.”
“I should go with you!” protested the Leewit, her lips beginning to purse.
Fortunately, the captain had thought that through in advance. “If there is anyone alive there we’ll likely need to carry them. We have one shuttle-bag; we could cram two people in with a suit pony-tank. And if we need…special help on either ship, best there is one klatha operative on each. Besides, if something goes wrong, I want someone who can do astrogation here, in charge. And that’s you. Between you and Vezzarn you can fly the ship. If I took Vezzarn, you and Ta’zara can’t. If I took you, they certainly can’t Sheewash. Besides, it’s the captain’s decision. Get on with it. I need you here.”
She sighed. “Right, Captain.”
“And we’ll all need blasters from the arms cabinet. Get them and check charges. There might be prisoners there. There might also be trouble.” The Leewit didn’t answer. Just nodded and ran off, and left the captain to the difficult task of getting the Venture into close proximity of the slowly tumbling hulk of the stern end of the wrecked pirate. Captain Pausert could only be grateful that her rocket tubes had also stopped firing with the Leewit’s lucky shot or it might have been worse.
The Leewit came back with Vezzarn, and handed the captain a blaster. Captain Pausert noticed the old spacer had strapped one on himself, even if he wasn’t going across to the other ship. “Risky business, Captain,” he said looking at the screens. “A bit above my pay grade, this sort of piloting.”
“Just let me suit up and I’ll finish the closing maneuvers. All you’ll have to do is hold her there and deal with any problems.”
“It’s the problems you and the little Wisdom seem to find that worry me,” said Vezzarn with a crooked smile, settling into the command chair. “You always get me into jams, Captain, but you always get me out of them, too. I don’t forget that.”
Pausert suited up and checked his equipment, then checked Ta’zara’s and let him run a seal check on his, before taking the Venture in on the nerve-jangling final lock-on, with the electromagnetic grapples. He and Ta’zara exited through the airlock, and then, one at a time, roped together, made the jump across to the pirate hulk with their reaction pistols. That was easy enough.
The question now was how to get in. The hold doors didn’t have airlocks. If there was anyone alive in there, opening the doors would kill them. The only possible way was through the torn metal of the massive explosion. That was too dangerous to hurry through—suit fabric was super-tough but it still could be damaged. Besides, it was a mess, a tangle of twisted I-beams and hull metal, and all sorts of drifting debris in the stark dark shadow and silver glare of new-sheared metal. Their headlights on, Pausert let his instincts lead him into the explosion hole. He found a passage which led to a door crusted with ice crystals from air bleeding though the seals. The ice did a fair job of jamming it up, and not all the pulling and thrusting could open it. The door opened toward them, but despite the fact that the air pressure inside was also pushing, it wouldn’t budge.
“If I was there I could whistle and shatter it, Captain,” said the Leewit, on the radio, with a cross edge in her voice.
“And probably break your helmet, if not your ears,” replied Pausert. “Let’s get a lever, and have another try, Ta’zara. I don’t want to use the blaster.”
They found a section of beam, and, with Ta’zara’s considerable strength added to Pausert’s, they cracked the ice. What was left of the air within wasn’t enough to have much effect, puffing out. They went in and closed the door again. It was a scary thing to do, considering how hard it had been to open. But if they were to open any other safety doors, every bit of pressure counted. They kept up the radio chatter to the Leewit so she at least knew they were alive and roughly where they were. The captain wasn’t sure what she could do about it, though, if something went wrong.
The first thing Pausert noticed was that the crystal emergency lights on the floor still glowed. Touching the wall, there was a vague vibrating hum of machinery. Some of the ship’s system was still alive—and there was mist forming around an air duct. Most of it was iced over, but plainly something was still leaking in. The two of them advanced cautiously, blasters ready. If they
met anyone here, common sense might be for a pirate to surrender, but sometimes common sense was scarce in a disaster. Besides, if a pirate had been stalking the corridors of a dead ship in their place, he’d be looking for loot, and would try to kill them.
The next door was easier, and the third definitely had air pressure—and a dead man. The fourth had lights. Weak, flickering, but lights. There was air, but it was thin, probably not enough to breathe. The only remaining door was the door into the tube shaft, engine room—by the door symbols—and into the hold. They cracked that one and went through into the darkness there, the suit lights again providing all the light there was.
See. I told you, said the tinkling little vatch-voice.
They weren’t screaming, or not anymore, but indeed there were people, leg-shackled to a long pole. Some of them were definitely alive and gasping for breath. Looking at them, Pausert realized he hadn’t thought this through very well. There were a lot of people trapped there! Even if they went back to the Venture and fetched the Leewit and Vezzarn’s suit and the four spares from the suit locker, that would take at least ten trips or more. Pausert wasn’t sure these people would last very much longer—let alone dealing with cutting them loose. Once one end of the pole was cut, they’d have a lot of panicked and terrified people, not inclined to take things in due turn and with the calmness it would take to get them suited up and ferried out along the corridors, losing more air every time, through the dark and chaos and sharp metal. Even with Ta’zara at his side that could be tough.
He couldn’t see how he could do it.
Yet the alternative was to leave them here to die. He couldn’t see how he could do that either. It was unlikely the pirate ship had had sufficient suits for all these people.
