Year 1130 E. R.
ERAASI: SUS-RADAL EXPERIMENTAL SHIPBUILDING FACILITY
DEMAIZEN OLD HALL
T
he sus-Radal prototype ship waited underneath a closed construction dome, larger than the domes for the cargo shuttles but looking no different on the outside. An orbital observer might conclude from the visual evidence that the sus-Radal were building a new generation of heavier transports—and Iulan Vai would have put money on Theledau circulating rumors to that effect—but would have no clue to what actually lay under the dome’s retractable roof.
“She’s a wonder,” Vai said to the family representative. “I hope Theledau makes you outer-family at least for this. You’ve earned it.”
Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter,
to give her the honor of her full name, was a curving wing-shape in nonreflective black, almost twice the size of a sus-Radal cargo shuttle. Most of that extra volume would be given over to the double power system that the family’s engineers had copied—extrapolated, really—from the reports Vai herself had smuggled out on the sus-Peledaen drones. Some of it, though, would be the ship’s guns, more technology stolen from the sus-Peledaen reports. The ship’s main hatch stood open, with a short ramp leading to the floor of the dome.
Vai frowned. “She’s going to burn this whole place down when she lifts.”
“Not the
Daughter,”
said the representative. “The counterforce units will push her clear before the thrusters fire.”
Vai tried to envision a unit strong enough to hold up a starship. “More sus-Peledaen stuff?”
“Ours, actually. The reports from
Octagon Diamond
and
Forty-two
provided some help when it came to the implementation, but the basic research was already done.”
“The things nobody tells me … you’re sure the
Daughter
will answer to shuttle commands?”
The representative nodded. “As long as you stick to the basic sequences, the ship-mind will handle everything else.”
“Good,” said Vai. She looked again at the sleek black lines of the ship, and squared her shoulders. “If she’s ready as she stands, there’s no point in delaying matters any longer. You’ve been a great help to me, and if luck stays with me I’ll speak well of you in Hanilat.”
She went up the ramp to the main lock. The controls there matched the sus-Radal standard. It took her only a few moments to close and seal the hatch behind her. The ship’s internal layout was similar to that of a fleet shuttle; she found the main control room more or less where she expected it to be, and was pleased to see that the family’s designers had given the
Daughter
a proper window and not just a bank of monitor screens.
Vai settled herself into the pilot-principal’s chair, strapped down the safety webbing, and hit the first control in the standard lift sequence.
The ship’s main power plant came on line with a muted roar, followed by a low grumbling sound that—after a few seconds—she recognized as belonging to the ship’s counterforce unit. The tiny units that lifted Eraasi’s mobile
aiketen
gave off a faint hum that, multiplied several thousand times, was the same noise as the one she heard now. Outside the windows, the roof of the construction dome started rolling back, at the same time as the
Daughter
began steadily rising.
The edge of the open dome slid downward past the windows and out of sight, and the grumbling noise of the counterforce unit grew louder and more labored. Just as Vai thought that the counterforce unit could lift the ship no further, the console beeped at her and she pressed the second control in the basic sequence. The engines roared, and she felt herself pressed back against the padded chair with a long steady pressure.
Standard lift procedure for a sus-Peledaen shuttle went to low orbit as soon as possible; Vai was relieved to see that the
Daughter’s
command sequence did the same. Safe at the end of gravity’s tether, with nothing but the dark of space outside the cockpit windows, she could rest for a moment and consider where she was going. Hanilat was her first thought, where there was a proper spaceport and where she had last spoken with ’Rekhe and the Circle.
Then, in memory, she heard herself saying that she would meet them at Demaizen—and knew, as soon as she remembered it, that the time to do so was now.
Ty helped Narin and Karil move Arekhon’s limp body away from the broken doors of the Hall and over to the alcove behind what remained of the grand staircase. They were almost there when a trio of explosions sounded behind them—for Ty, the sound brought back a sudden memory of standing sweaty-palmed in the
Rain’
s muster bay, waiting for Izar to blow the lock.
“What was that?” he asked.
Karil said something in her native language—identifying the things that had exploded, he supposed—and added, “For stunning. They come in soon.”
“We’ll be gone by then,” said Narin. “Here’s the way down.”
The darkness that surrounded them lit up briefly with the glow of her staff. She touched the staff to the door tucked away behind the staircase, and the slab of charred wood swung in and open. A rush of moldy-smelling air came out. Narrow metal steps led down into the basement.
Ty glanced back in the direction from which they had half-carried, half-dragged the wounded Arekhon. The marks of their progress showed plainly wherever the starlight and the magelight touched. “They won’t have much trouble figuring out where we went.”
“It’s all we’ve got,” Narin said. “Let’s go.”
They went down the stairs into the basement, supporting ’Rekhe awkwardly all the way. The lower reaches of the Hall were cold and dark, and water dripped from a distant place. The sound of the falling drops echoed loudly in the passage. Ty couldn’t rid himself of memories of the fighting aboard
Forty-two
, and finally gave up the effort.
“You and Karil take him from here,” he said. “We’ll be followed. I’ll slow them down until you can find the
aiketen.”
Narin didn’t argue with him. He would have found her agreement frightening if he hadn’t already gone beyond fear, back to the corridors of
Forty
-
two
and the smells of blood and ionized air. The two women took over supporting Arekhon’s body—Narin at his head, with her still-glowing staff tucked through her belt, and Karil at his feet—and headed off down the narrow passageway. They turned the first corner and vanished from sight, leaving Ty by himself in the dark.
He didn’t have much time. But he knew the layout of Demaizen Old Hall almost as well as he’d known the Port Street Foundling Home. Two long steps took him into a side-room that the Circle, like the sus-Demaizen before them, had used for long-term storage of things they didn’t need but didn’t want to throw away—old clothes, boxes of books, children’s dolls and broken toys. Ty faded back around a corner, into the shelter of a pile of bundled papercopy magazines.
Voices sounded at the top of the stairs, two men having some kind of whispered conference. Trying to decide who went first, Ty guessed. Then came a metallic clink followed by a pair of crashing explosions. His ears rang, and powder from the ceiling sifted down like flour on his face and hair. After a few more seconds, a light slanted down across the darkness outside the open door. Someone was coming with a hand torch.
Ty couldn’t hear the footsteps—he still couldn’t hear anything over the loud roaring that filled his ears—but the light was getting closer. He reached around the corner, found cloth under his fingers, grasped, and pulled.
The attacker had been an excellent fighter with his projectile weapons and his explosives, but Ty had trained long and hard at close-in fighting with a wooden staff. Without pause—almost without thinking—Ty struck against a vulnerable point on the man’s neck, then swept the other end of his staff into the man’s nose, crushing the sinuses. The man fell and lay still.
Ty bent and flicked off the dead man’s hand torch—he didn’t need it, and there was no point in helping anyone outside who did. The man’s projectile weapon had fallen to the floor only a little further away; still stooping, Ty picked it up and curled his own hand around the metal grip.
He knew about such weapons from entertainments and the news, though he had never had an opportunity to use one before. The feel of the releasing studs under his fingers reminded him of what he needed to do next. He stepped into the hall, pointed the weapon toward the stairway, and fired until the device stopped bucking in his grip.
Still holding the empty weapon, he faded back down the dark passage. He shut and locked the doors behind him whenever he could, hoping to slow down the marauders by that much at least, until he came to the portion of the basement that housed the Circle’s infirmary. One glance told him that the medical gear, with its self-contained power units and standby shutdown mode, had survived the fire intact. Arekhon lay on the main infirmary table, his pale skin bathed in the eerie blue glow of the low-power lights, while the
aiketen
worked over him. Narin and Karil stood watching nearby.
“How’s he doing?” Ty asked. His ears still hurt, and he couldn’t tell whether he was speaking too softly or too loud.
“Garrod didn’t believe in buying cheap equipment,” Narin said. “He’ll make it.”
Karil shook her head glumly. “No use mending him … we all die soon.”
As if to underscore her words, another explosion rattled the room and knocked down more dust from the ceiling, making a dim layer of haze in the blue light. On the worktable, Arekhon coughed twice, a faint dry sound, and tried to sit up.
“Help me.” His voice came out in a papery whisper. “The working isn’t finished. We can’t stop until it’s done.”
The silver cords overlaid the dim infirmary with a network of light. Arekhon saw the pattern in them. It was a only a reflection, or a shadow, of the single pattern he had seen in the nonmaterial world, but carrying out the lesser pattern would further the greater.
He pushed himself up into a sitting position—he was surprised at the effort it cost him, even now that the
aiketen
had completed their work—and swung his feet off the table onto the floor. His head spun as he stood, and the network of silver cords whirled about him.
“We have to finish the working,” he insisted. “There’s no other way.”
A muffled explosion sounded in the basement outside the infirmary, and the floor vibrated. Arekhon, still dizzy from standing up, swayed a little on his feet. Narin reached out a hand to steady him.
Ty said, “There’s only one door left, and then they’ll be in here.”
“The root cellar,” Narin said. “If they don’t know about it, we’ve got a chance.”
The
eiran
flared with dazzling silver as she spoke. Arekhon said, “Yes.”
They left the infirmary in a group, with only the blue worklights from the room behind them for illumination on the way. Arekhon leaned on Karil for support—he’d lost a great deal of blood, he knew, and most of his strength along with it. What he had left, he would need for the working.
The Entiboran woman spoke to him under her breath in her native language. “What is this ‘root cellar’ that she says we’re going to?”
“A storehouse for keeping vegetables through the winter,” Arekhon said in the same tongue. “From before there was electricity at the Hall. This is the back way into it, for when nobody wanted to go out into bad weather.”
The entrance to the root cellar lay behind a deep closet lined with empty wooden shelves. It had never been intended as a secret passage, only as a convenience for the domestic staff, but if the men behind them didn’t know the Hall’s interior layout they would be unlikely to guess its existence in a hurry. The entire back of the closet—shelves and all—pivoted when Narin shoved on it, and they edged through the opening into a stone-lined tunnel.
Ty pushed the wall back into place. They were walking down the narrow tunnel by the light of Narin’s staff. Arekhon, still light-headed from his injuries and from the medicines the
aiketen
had pumped into him, saw the
eiran
running through the tunnel in cords thick and twisted together like cables made of silver wire. The strength of the cable reassured him: They were going in the right direction for the final pattern.
Another door, and they were standing in the root cellar itself, a deep, square chamber cut out of the earth, full of bins and flat, traylike shelves for storing bulbs and tubers over the winter. A half-dozen stone steps led up to the heavy wooden cellar door. Narin beckoned to Ty, and the two Mages together heaved its dead weight open.