Balance of Power (21 page)

Jan’s eyes flashed with sudden anger—the same sudden anger that seemed to be the curse of all his kin. But he masked it quickly. Long practice of being a younger brother is the ideal trainer in self-control. It may not damp the aggression but it short-circuits the action well enough.

“To the Ore’l,” said Jan slowly, “you may be a messenger from Y’su. But what are you to us? In a few short days.... How much more is there to come? Can you destroy us all before we reach Lambda? Is any of us ever going to see Ak’lehr again? Have you special seats in hell reserved for the whole family? Tell us, please...?”

“Jan,” said Christian, softly, “You’re talking like a lunatic.”

“Like Piet?” asked Jan, his voice jagged with suppressed pain.

“Piet will be all right,” said Christian.

“All right!” exclaimed Charles. “How in Y’su’s name can he ever be all right? He’s lost everything he had, including Anna, whose throat he cut himself in a moment of blind anger. How can he ever be all right? He’s under lock and key now—do we have to keep him that way forever, just to protect this one from being murdered?”

The wave of his hand was, of course, directed toward me. Yet again, my temper outweighed my sense of diplomacy. “Wouldn’t it be rather a waste,” I snapped, “if Anna got killed trying to stop Piet murdering me, and then he went and did it anyhow.”

“You killed Anna,” said Jan, flatly. “Your coming here. Your determination to interfere. You were the cause of his anger.”

“He was the cause of his own anger!” I spat. “His fevered imagination! He thought himself a dictator when he’d long since lost any real power. He thought himself injured when everything that happened was inevitable. He saw Anna and me together and out of his mind flooded all kinds of crazy thoughts. What I did was to precipitate a crisis that had been coming for years. What I did was to provide something that might bring together the colony and the empire into a relationship which has at least the prospect of peaceful coexistence. You’re so wrapped up in the microcosm of your family loyalties you’re blind to the real issues here. Without my arrival, my chance to stop this plague before it takes off again next year and decimates the southern reaches of the empire, what kind of future do you think this world could have had? Piet’s policies were heading straight for some kind of confrontation with the colony, and then to war. It’s up to you—all of you—to do what Anna did and get in his way, to try to undo what he’s done. You have to get out of the stupid way of thinking your father left you and start thinking about everyone else, human and Ore’l alike. If you can’t find another way of thinking during the next half-year, you’ll take back to the empire exactly the same seeds of destruction that we have locked up in a cabin right here on board. Can’t you for one minute strip away your blinkers and realize the importance of getting this virus back to Ak’lehr and using the opportunity it provides to begin all over again. You can still be ilah’y’su if that’s the game you want to play but the message has to change.”

The sheer vehemence of the tirade left them somewhat at a loss. Only Christian found words, and what he said was: “He’s right.”

My speech hadn’t been a masterpiece of tact. That brief comment, however grateful
I
was to hear it, was the thing that really killed the argument. It killed the argument because it brought out a stock response—a response I’d already seen in Piet and Anna. It was a formula that allowed Jan to dismiss every last thing I’d said without further contemplation. Instead, he rounded on Christian, and said:
“You
would!”

Every time the chips were down, the sons of Bernhard Verheyden had that ready: the accusation of betrayal, aimed at the brother who was not their father’s son.

Christian came to his feet, ready to fight. Jan was even readier. Charles stood up too, and I never found out whether he was going to do the sensible thing and try to separate them, or whether he was going to turn it into a free-for-all.

The reason I never found out is that there was a sudden violent knocking on the door. It was thrown open without the benefit of a pause for a reply.

Al’ha’s shaggy head appeared in the gap, and he said: “‘Ere’s a shi’! We unner a’hack!”

Even as he spoke I heard the muffled crack of a rifle. “Oh Jesus,” I moaned. “It’s the bloody
New Hope
. That stupid bastard Ogburn’s trying to hijack us!”

There was a long pause while Ogburn discussed the new development with his officers.

“What weapons do we have aboard?” I asked Al’ha. He shrugged. “Cross’ows,” he replied.

“They can’t have many rifles,” I mused. “And hardly any ammunition if they’ve been shooting up the coastal villages. Lots of knives and the like—plus my dart gun. But given the advantage of our crewmen in hand-to-hand encounters, I reckon we can....”

Then a nasty thought struck me.

“You threw the contents of the armory overboard?” I said to Mariel.

“Most of it,” she confirmed. “But there were at least half a dozen guns ashore, with some ammunition.”

“And then you went to the hold?”

“That’s right.”

“You didn’t by any chance abstract from there the case containing the dynamite?”

“Oh!” she said. “No. No, I didn’t.”

“In that case,” I said, “we’d better pray that they haven’t rigged up a catapult.” It was meant to be a joke, however feeble. All they’d really need would be a man who could throw an object weighing a couple of hundred grams a couple of hundred feet. Not difficult.

The
New Hope
was edging closer. Jan was still on top, waiting for an answer. It came in the form of a loud
crack!
and a little dart that struck the outer rail of the ship. It missed Jan by twenty feet, but it was the thought that counted. I decided that it was no use pretending any longer, and I swung myself out of the wheelhouse up on to the roof to join Jan.

“Ogburn!”
I yelled, still kneeling and trying to get some of the bulk of the mast between myself and the
New Hope
. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Ogburn had never been a talkative man. The next dart struck the wheelhouse only half a meter from my hand. I jumped down to the deck, and Jan jumped with me. He shouted a stream of orders in the language of Ak’lehr, and Al’ha spun the wheel to turn us away. Someone went below, presumably to mobilize our defenses, such as they were.

“No firearms at all?” I asked Jan.

“The army has first call on firearms,” he said dryly. “The entire supply is bought up as it leaves the factories. It’s a big army and it keeps busy.”

“Why is he attacking us?” asked Charles, from the shadow of the wheelhouse.

“Because he’s scared,” I replied. “He’s found out that the empire is bigger than he is, even though he has no idea
how
big. He wants to go home. My guess is he daren’t try to raid on shore any more, so he intends to plunder local shipping. The fact that there are humans aboard doesn’t alter his plan one way or the other. He must be pretty desperate.”

“If it comes to a fight,” said Jan, “we can win.”

“It
is
a fight,” I assured him. “But we’re going to have to play dirty to stop him using the explosives. We’re going to have to offer to surrender. Offer him our supplies—once he knows we’re fitted out for an ocean voyage he’ll have to bargain. It’s his best chance of getting home. He won’t mean it, we won’t mean it...but we can both pretend long enough to get us into a better position. Get your men ready, Jan. I’ll do the talking.”

All the while the
New Hope
was taking the best of our wind. She was only forty or forty-five meters adrift of us, though she was almost directly behind us now, rocking in our wake. At any time she could drift to one side and come up abreast of us again, but Al’ha kept us turning while he could. There was only so far we could go without losing the wind altogether and setting ourselves up as sitting ducks. We only had minutes to play with—theirs was the better ship and they were probably the better sailors.

I edged my way toward the stern, to get into a better position to hail the
New Hope
. Nobody followed me.

“Ogburn!” I shouted. “Hold your fire. We’re unarmed. If you sink us you’ll lose our supplies. We have all your instruments and supplies for a journey to Lambda. You can have it all if you’ll let us go back to the river mouth unharmed.”

That sounded like a reasonable proposition for an unarmed idiot to make. Ogburn would murder us anyhow, but if he thought we were at his mercy he might think we were stupid enough or desperate enough to try to buy him off. The prospect of getting Nieland’s instruments and all our food—not to mention his compass needle—must have really made his mouth water.

“Heave to, then!” came an answering voice. “We won’t hurt you. Get the supplies and the instruments into your boats. We’ll take it aboard. Then you can go back.”

I expressed my true feelings about that statement with succinct disgust, but silently. I shouted back instant agreement.

Jan shouted more orders, and we came about to port, letting the
New Hope
come broadside on again. Long minutes passed while they maneuvered into the position they wanted. They didn’t approach much closer than they already had. They were taking no chances. There was less than fifty meters between the two ships, though. And we were unobtrusively drifting closer.

“Come on!” howled the man in the rigging of the
New Hope
. “Start loading your boats! Move it, or we start shooting!”

I moved back to stand beside Jan. We both stood clear of cover, as though accepting the situation. Along the deck, several Ore’l were poised out of sight, with crossbows ready. We couldn’t move them right up to the bulwarks, or even into any position from which they’d be able to move with the requisite speed. They were just too big.

“Take it slowly,” I said. “Inch by inch.”

“Al’ha knows what he’s doing,” he replied.

He barked out further orders, and a couple of crewmen emerged from the hold carrying casks and boxes. They placed them ostentatiously in the boat on the port side—facing the
New Hope
. Jan and I went below with them, and Charles and Christian joined us. With six of us working it wouldn’t take very long to load up the boat, but it would take at least three trips to transfer the stuff from one ship to the other. It wasn’t a very big boat.

When I brought out my second load I could see that the gap between the ships had shrunk perceptibly. And now there was an Ore’l, with a bolt already fitted to his crossbow, crouched in the shadow of the boat. As we carried the bulky bundles out of the hold we provided a shield for two more to get into the same position.

“Use the other boat!” shouted the man relaying Ogburn’s orders. He was dangerously close, now—he was only a few meters up in the rigging, but soon he’d be able to see too much as he looked down and across at the deck of
Ilah’y’su
. Next time I went below I took Mariel with me.

“Get ready,” I said to Jan, as I paused just beneath the hatchway.

Jan looked out over the rim, judging the nearness of the other ship. He called out to Al’ha in a perfectly normal voice, safe in the knowledge that the crew of the
New Hope
couldn’t understand a word. Then he picked up a bundle and walked slowly out to the boat, letting Ogburn’s men watch him every inch of the way.

Al’ha swung the wheel, and we headed straight for the
New Hope
on a collision course.

They opened fire.

I kept my head down and waited out the long, long seconds. At any moment there might be a bang loud enough to spell destruction. But none came. They had been too confident. Bullets and darts hit the wood of the deck and the wheelhouse, but did no damage at all. Arrows crossed the water in the other direction, and the man on the rigging tumbled from his post, screaming.

The time seemed to drag on forever while we cut on and on through empty water. And then there was an appalling grinding sound as the timbers of the two ships met. Howling like a madman Jan leapt from cover behind the loaded boat and led his crewmen leaping across the sealed gap. Our men came out from everywhere, firing as they came and fighting to get an opportunity to board the enemy. I don’t know how many got across before the gap opened again, but it must have been seven at least, and one who didn’t make it landed in the water and began to swim through the loose weed to clamber up the side of the New Hope.