by R. M. Meluch
Alone, Alihahd held the gun close across his chest, one hand around its barrel, trying not to shake and trying to hold inside what must remain inside.
They were going to admire him to death, his crew. They wanted him to live. But at what cost? He pictured himself aboard the shuttle, staying apart like a leper, meeting no one’s eyes, reaching haven, and answering the question, “Where is your crew?” He felt sick. He knew this feeling. He breathed with his mouth open as if there were no air left in the ship. A slickness filmed palms that never sweated. He did not relinquish the gun until the last shuttle was launched.
The little fleet of twelve shuttles separated from the mothership, moved off, and disappeared. Alihahd turned off the bright docking lights and leaned back against the bulkhead, his head back, hands loose at his sides. From here there were few decisions, and few mistakes that could bring worse results than success.
An odd elation came over him along with the first peace of mind he could remember.
He put on his spacesuit, secured himself into his seat at the ship’s controls, and waited. One minute.
The countdown was still at thirty seconds when blips appeared on the computer tracker with simultaneous visual contact. Six ships of metallic blue sublighted for attack, their hulls ablaze with the red twin symbols of Galactic Dominion/Human Supremacy.
The computer pilot engaged, and the Liberation shot away past the Na′id ships. The stars disappeared.
Before leaving the squadron behind in the sublight universe, Alihahd had recognized the flagship, Jerusalem.
I am being chased by Jerusalem. He found that thought horribly funny. Horribly.
Alihahd knew who commanded the flagship Jerusalem. That man was not a mindless destroyer. General Atta″id would try to catch Alihahd if he could. A high price had been put on Alihahd’s head—something the Na′id did not do as a rule, but how else to combat someone they could not recognize on sight and who left no tracks and tripped no alarms? And, in the end, the price had done it. Alihahd’s fall had come through no mistake of his own. He had been betrayed.
How fitting.
Six ships they sent after him. They had greatly overestimated him, the reputation grown bigger than the man. They thought him capable of anything.
At length the pursuit ships became visible again, gradually closing the million-mile gap their second’s hesitation had made between them. They came into range for weapons. None of the ships flew directly behind the Liberation, fearing what might be dropped back in its wake. They never guessed that the rogue ship might possibly be unarmed. Their caution threw off the accuracy of their fire, and the Liberation was able to lure them farther and farther away from the shuttle convoy.
• • •
Alihahd had made no pretense to his volunteers of having the slimmest hope of getting away. If he could have done without his crew, he would have. He wished they were not with him. Did they expect another miracle?
I told you this was suicide. And—do you guess?
I want it.
The first close salvo came from the flagship. The next would find its target.
Alihahd touched the intersuit com switch at his throat and gave an order. “Brake.”
There was a click in his headset. “Braking, sir.”
The engines reversed. The chase ships overshot and disappeared, and the stars returned as the Liberation dropped back into sublight.
The end came in an instant.
Lights, sound, pressure, gravity—even the vibration of the ship’s engines—suddenly ceased. Arms and legs flailed with the outrush of air. Stomach jumped. Muscles contracted. Alihahd felt himself come off his seat, pulling against the straps, and he hit the self-destruct switch in the dark.
Nothing happened. He clutched the console with both hands, swallowing, his eyes wide and sightless. He wondered if he had been blinded.
In a moment, when everything was abolutely still again, he reached down, unlocked a catch, and swiveled his seat around.
And he saw stars where the hatch and most of the deck should have been.
No.
He turned on his headlamp. The command platform with him on it, had been sheared clean off. The great bulk of the ship Liberation, with the engines, was gone.
One by one, the crewmembers who remained turned on their headlamps. They were three. They stared at one another in shock, waiting for the circling sharks to board.
To Alihahd, it was a nightmare of nightmares—one of the few things that could go wrong. The thought of facing Na′id mortally terrified him. He knew they wanted him very badly. The only alternative now was suicide by vacuum, which also terrified him or he would have done it long before this.
But the Na′id did not board. They were not circling. They were nowhere to be seen, and it took some moments to realize that when the Liberation had broken in two, the Na′id had chased after the other part.
There came a blue-white flash in the distance like a quick nova. That would be the Liberation’s engines exploding.
Minutes passed. Half an hour. The Na′id did not come back, and the surviving rebels knew they had been overlooked—left alone, without power, light-years from anywhere.
This was not what they had expected at all. They were supposed to have been in that nova, making a statement for the Resistance. The Liberation had made the statement without them.
Here was no end in a blaze of glory. Rather a slow and cold grave.
A creeping feeling of smallness grew in the quiet, nothing between the four small human beings and the inconceivable vastness of space. The gaping breach in the deck let the emptiness in.
Alihahd did not look at the others—knew they were looking at him.
At last, because he had to, he steeled himself to turn and face them. He nodded. He held out no hope to them. They accepted their fate. All they wanted was his approval.
He turned away.
He could not tell if their scrap of ship was moving. The stars did not appear to move. Nothing did. At least they were not spinning.
After a time, the crew began to talk in short, muted murmurs through the suit intercoms. A voice, click, silence. Answer, click, silence. An attempted joke, click, silence. A long pause. A voice, click, silence.
Alihahd was still mercilessly alert. It would be a while yet until their air ran out. And in the silence his thoughts moved in. He was aware of what was left to him. Endless dark, endless void, a floating tomb, the stars’ indifferent steady light.
There was some comfort in knowing that he had made his last mistake. He had discovered he had a tremendous capacity for being wrong.
And he was never in a position to be wrong. He was one of those who always rose to the top. Leadership came easily to him. Power fell into his hands. He need only stand somewhere and a line formed behind him.
The problem with power was that one’s mistakes became catastrophic. Alihahd lived in perpetual fear of a false step, perpetual regret of past false steps. He wondered if he would be better off blind drunk in an alley.
There was an alley in old Cairo on Earth he knew. He never should have left.
He found himself in vacillating prayer to a God he did not rationally believe existed; first asking to live, then, realizing he did not actually want to go on living, he would recant and start over—not that Anyone was paying attention either way. The idea of a benevolent, prayer-answering deity went against logic. Alihahd usually avoided thinking about it. But adrift in the eternity between the stars, it seemed a natural thing. The line between logic and illogic thinned and snapped.
He thought seriously of all the nonsensical religions, impossible to believe. They even found each other absurd.
The Na′id were much more sensible on that score. They combined rational and humanistic bits of many religions—which, of course, was unacceptable to all of them. The devout still di
ed by the millions for their dogmatic and antiquated doctrines.
Alihahd had read their books—a few used the same one—in an effort to understand their people. He found words now in one, words spoken in a garden.
It was easier to pray in borrowed words. Alihahd was not adept at talking to God in his own words—he did not know what to say—and these fit his changing mind.
He remembered the garden. There had been much blood, none of it his.
Old skeletons rose. A lot of blood. Flame and smoke billowed. A summer day. A woman in a boat. God was suddenly near, very real, and it scared him.
Reality unhinging, time uprooted, space frayed and folded. He was going to panic.
Why had he picked those words connected with that place? His galloping heart shook his whole body.
The others were sleeping, and he was alone. With God.
Stop.
He held on to the armrests of his seat. They were hard and substantial. Only the ship and the stars were real, and all this other stuff was nothing but panic, pure panic. Just a man going mad inside his spacesuit. He tasted salty beads on his upper lip.
Stop thinking. Hallucinations lurked round the edges of the light from his wavering headlamp.
Circulating air in his suit cooled the sweat on his heaving sides. At this rate his oxygen would run out first of the survivors.
His hand trembled, uncoiled his suit’s life cable. He hooked the cable to his seat, then unstrapped himself and made a floating prowl through the remains of the bridge and found a stashed container of wine. He returned to his seat and drank himself into a stupor—so that he would not notice when he passed out for want of air.
2. Iry
WHEN ALIHAHD WOKE, he was in a strange place—a spaceship—and he was no longer in his spacesuit. The air pressure was less than he’d kept Liberation’s but was still safe.
He was lying on a deep-colored carpet spread over a hardwood deck. There were straps around his head, his shoulders, and between his legs, and for a terrible moment he thought he had been captured and bound. But he sat up and found that his limbs were free, and that the ship was not of Na′id design. The strap around his head held a tubed mask to his face. He was breathing pure oxygen. He lifted the mask and sniffed the ship’s atmosphere. It was depleted of free oxygen, poisoned with carbon dioxide, and unbreathable. He fitted the mask back to his face.
The other straps made up a harness that did not fit at all well with Alihahd’s tunic. He fumbled at the buckle and was going to take it off as soon as he figured out how, but his wine-dulled mind was easily distracted and shifted to something else.
What caught his attention was the damage. This ship had been in an accident. Or battle. There were signs of fire and buckling in what he hoped was not the outer hull. The overhead lights were flickering, cold and blue. Electrical burns, scorched metal, and ozone censed the cabin, whose mahogany fittings were charred. Frostily tinted lamp covers lay shattered in pieces on the black-fringed carpet.
Beside Alihahd, his three crew members lay sleeping—or drugged. Closest to him was the athletic spokesman of the mutineers, his muscles smoothed in unconsciousness. Long lashes grazed his youthful cheek. His name was Neal. Alihahd lightly brushed an auburn curl out of his face with the back of his hand. I could kill you for what you tried to do to me.
Next to him was the Liberation’s engineer. Yuko, her petite form curled up like a puppy, her little mouth drawn down into a frown as in a bad dream. Her black hair was clipped so short it stood on end. Bleached into it behind one ear was a white pentagram. Yuko was a witch, she said, but Alihahd had never seen her magic work. She was a better engineer.
Beside her was a pale youth whose name Alihahd didn’t remember. He was also fitted into a harness.
And there was a fourth person. Alihahd hadn’t noticed him immediately because he had stood apart, unmoving in the semidark. He’d looked like an empty spacesuit set ceremonially to one side like a suit of armor. The viewplate was opaque one-way glass and Alihahd couldn’t see the face. This would be the owner of the ship.
The stranger was tall, very tall, clearing even Alihahd’s height. He—Alihahd assumed it was a man from his imposing frame—stood dead still, observing in silence, arms at his sides.
Alihahd rose to his feet and stood up straight—the oxygen tube barely reached—facing the stranger who was equally still and unspeaking. Alihahd wasn’t accustomed to looking up at people, and he hadn’t realized that it could make such a difference. The dimensions of the ship were slightly big as well and gave Alihahd the vague, uncomfortable impression of being a child again at the control and beck of others.
Behind the visor he sensed a familiar stranger—someone he had never met but knew as if he’d always known him. He was an adversary.
Alihahd didn’t try to communicate. If the ship’s master wanted to talk, he could talk first, and he could say who he was and why he had taken the Liberation’s survivors aboard. Did he know whom he rescued? Was this a rescue at all? The man could be a jackal of war, a slave trader picking up Na′id leavings. He could be a Na′id private citizen who had found what appeared to be a Na′id wreck and had rescued what he thought were compatriots. He could be a neutral from uncharted space.
Or was this the master of Marauder?
How to know?
The ship spoke much but answered little. Its large dimensions were either a custom design for a tall man, or the standard of a tall race. It was an expensive craft, fitted out and detailed with somber luxury in colors of wine and gold, rose, amber, black, and deep brown wood. There were no nationality or planet markers anywhere in sight, and the man himself was totally obscured in his steely gray suit.
Alihahd gazed steadily at the smoky visor, trying not to look as weak as he felt. His head throbbed. He tasted stale wine.
At last the man turned away and beckoned with a slow wave of his hand for Alihahd to come with him.
Alihahd hesitated, limited by his oxygen tube. The tall figure retreated down the corridor without looking back and disappeared through a hatchway. Alihahd took a deep breath, held it, dropped his mask, and followed.
Alihahd stepped through the hatch into the ship’s control room. Two great iris-apertured viewports were wide open on either side.
Stars. There were stars. The ship was traveling sublight.
The pearly white river of the Milky Way cascaded across one viewport. The vast glowing galactic hub filled the other.
Bright in the foreground shone a single yellow sun.
Alihahd drew closer to the port and looked down.
The ship was orbiting a moonless planet of muddy-green continents and blue seas. The equator was wreathed in thick white clouds that spiraled and thinned to the north and south. Even from this distance Alihahd could see mountains. A permanent haze of vapor steamed off the ocean’s surface.
The ship’s master drew Alihahd’s attention to the control console, where he traced slowly on the smooth surface with his forefinger in Roman characters—symbols used by many languages, including Universal—a single word and question:
IRY?
A thrill of discovery awakened in a mind Alihahd had thought too jaded for wonder.
Iry was one of the lost worlds. There were many places known in the First Historical Age that had been lost after the Collapse. But this one was a fantastic place. Not everybody was convinced that Iry had ever existed.
Yet here was a living planet, beyond recivilized space, its yellow sun hidden in the Great Rift where it was supposed to be, and it looked right.
The Eyes of Iry stared back at him, two impact craters peeking clear of the shroud of clouds. He couldn’t see the encircling River Ocean, but the computer diagram on the ship’s screen said it was there beneath the clouds.
The computer diagram also revealed this to be a peculiar little solar system in keeping with th
e myth of one sun, one planet, and no moons.
This last was the telling point. In Alihahd’s experience, one was an extraordinarily odd number of planets for a normal yellow star, and there were few mid-sized worlds anywhere orbited by no moon at all.
Alihahd looked up to the ship’s master and answered with a downward nod, which would tell him yes if this man understood nods. Then Alihahd left the cabin to return to the makeshift contraption that was his oxygen mask. This ship wasn’t designed for guests or for emergencies.
It wasn’t a slaver either. Slavers didn’t pick up anything they couldn’t sell. This ship couldn’t even get itself to a familiar port.
Iry. The name summoned visions of Itiri warrior-priests who lived on mountaintops, attended by familiars. They flew on wings with the eagles of Iry. Itiri warrior-priests journeyed on quests between the stars, armed with their magical double-curved swords that never dulled. Legends always had their special weapons. It was required of them. For the Itiri it was the double-curved sword.
Of course, the Itiri were beautiful: humanlike, tall and fair, golden-haired and emerald-eyed—a distinctively un-Na′id concept of beauty.
The legend was popular outside Na′id circles. It dealt with what the Na′id dreaded and insisted could not exist—a superior sapient species.
But if the Itiri were anywhere near as prodigious as their reputation, where were they now and where had they been hiding for the two thousand years of the human Dark Age? Truth was that when Earthling ships had ceased to fly, so did the Itiri, which told Alihahd where the stories were coming from—human imaginations. He didn’t believe in the Itiri’s superhuman exploits any more than he believed that Atlantis had developed atomic power.
For him the great significance of the stories about Iry’s natives was not that they gave any insight into Itiri nature—Alihahd believed they did not—but that they suggested the planet itself—the core of the myth—was habitable.
