Authors: Jaine Fenn
Ifanna stared at the pair, wondering if striking her head had addled her senses. The priest handed the light to his companion, then bent down to help her up. His gentleness surprised her.
Ifanna had no strength to resist. She let him lead her down the side-alley.
The priest whispered, ‘You are safe now.’
Safe?
she thought.
In what way is this safe?
People were talking, somewhere nearby, and like everything else that had happened since she hit her head, the words made little sense. After a while, the voices stopped. The priest was still holding her arm.
The monitor came back a few moments later. ‘I told them I saw nothing,’ he said, ‘so they should not come back this way. Still, we should not tarry.’
Jarek found himself muttering under his breath,
Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up!
He wasn’t sure whether he was haranguing the ship, which was slowly coming to life, or Nual, who was even now flying through the corridors of the hab towards him.
He spotted movement on a monitor; Nual was in the airlock at last. On the vid feed he saw her reach out to close the door. Jarek activated internal coms and said, ‘Hold on! Ain’s on her way.’
‘Do we have time to wait for her?’ Nual looked over her shoulder.
‘If I get a green board before she shows up, I’ll rethink, but I don’t want to abandon her if I can avoid it.’
‘Wait, she’s coming.’ A few moments later the lingua arrived in the ‘lock, flushed and breathless. Nual closed the door behind her. Now all they needed was the ship to show a state of readiness . . . and . . .
Yes!
Jarek hissed in triumph as the console flashed.
Time to get the fuck out of here.
He undocked, and they headed away at max acceleration.
He’d set up a full sensor feed to the holocube while he was waiting for the
Heart of Glass
’s flight systems to warm up. Once they were speeding away there wasn’t much else for him to do other than stare at it, willing something to happen – or nothing, preferably.
Because the approaching mass was on the far side of the hab, he didn’t see it hit. The impact showed as a faint tremor in the image, following by a spray of debris exploding out – no:
two
sprays, one behind and one in front. Then the side of the hab nearest them deformed and burst as a blunt spike thrust out from the ruined structure. Whatever it was, it had skewered the entire hab.
‘
Holy Christos!
’ breathed Jarek. He heard someone behind him, and turned to see Nual rise up through the hatch. ‘Get Ain,’ he said. ‘We need to talk to her.’
The lingua’s usual calm expression had been replaced by blank shock by the time she arrived on the bridge.
Nual followed, hovering silently behind her.
Jarek turned to Ain and asked ‘So what the fuck just happened?’
‘Th— It was a ship, a mining barge, according to the core’s sensors. There are many ships observing the hab from the exclusion zone radius. They are not allowed to make contact or approach, but people wanted to see the visitors – you – even from a distance.’
‘And this ship just broke away from the other watchers and rammed the hab?’
‘Aye-okay. That is what appears to have happened.’
‘Why didn’t someone do something?’
‘No one expected anything like this! There would be no time to react. Besides, what could they do? No doubt the other ships tried to send a warning, but the hab’s external coms are – were – inoperative. It was lucky you saw the attack.’
It was down to paranoia more than luck, but what mattered was that he
had
seen it. ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘this mining barge – did it have a crew on board?’
‘I would imagine the ship came from a lo-tech domain, probably an out-system scavenger colony—’
‘How many people, Ain?’
‘That sort of ship generally requires a minimum crew of eight,’ she whispered, ‘but unless they had the opportunity to let some of the workers disembark – which is unlikely – then there were probably between seventy and eighty people on board.’
‘Shit! What the hell was the captain thinking? No one could’ve survived an impact like that!’
‘Clarification: Captain Reen, you do not yet grasp the full relationship between a patron and his populace.’
‘Call me Jarek, for fuck’s sake, Ain – I just saved your goddamn life! So what you’re saying is that they trashed the hab, wiping themselves out in the process, just because their patron
told
them to?’
‘Aye-okay. Many patrons are as gods to their populaces. The patron may have assured those aboard the mining barge that they would receive their reward in the afterlife in return for their sacrifice. Or he might have said he would kill their loved ones back in his domain if they did not obey without question.’
‘Talk about the old carrot and stick!’ Jarek said. ‘And you don’t know which particular patron ordered the ship to fly into the hab?’
‘This lingua –
I
– do not.’
‘But you have your suspicions,’ Nual said, her voice a husky murmur; she concluded, more forcefully, ‘Which you will share with us now.’
Ain looked taken aback, then said, ‘Of course. Though I cannot be sure, evidence suggests that the patron responsible for the suicide attack is a member of the Sons of the Silent Age, or possibly a smaller but closely allied sept. Of all the septs based in this region, they are the most strongly isolationist, and they maintain a tight control over their populaces.’
‘How many males are there in this Silent Age sept?’ asked Jarek.
‘Allegiances shift, and are not always revealed until called upon in the Consensus, but that sept is a large one, with a core membership of fifty or sixty.’
‘So at least fifty Sidhe males want us dead badly enough to sacrifice their people and seriously piss off the Consensus. Great.’ Oddly, Jarek found he was more angry than afraid: he was angry at himself for being too trusting, and angry at the local males who treated their human charges with such contempt – though perhaps it wasn’t so different from the Three Cities, with their democracy by assassination . . .
He found his eye drawn back to the cube, where the image of the ruined hab was just starting to lose definition as the
Heart of Glass
sped away. It was no longer venting debris, and the nose of the ramming ship had emerged through the section where the hab’s airlock had once been. ‘Except that we weren’t the real target, were we?’ he said, half to himself. ‘They were trying to destroy this ship – trashing the hab, and us, was secondary. They probably blindsided the
Heart of Glass
because we had working sensors, while the hab’s were still flaky after the datastrike. Coming in from the far side didn’t matter because they used a vessel hefty enough to punch right through the hab and into my ship. And if I hadn’t been on board and watching out, that’s exactly what would have happened.
Christos!
’
Nual said drily, ‘It appears that at least one of your septs will do pretty much anything to stop a ship with Aleph’s location in its comp returning to human-space; I think they may have overestimated the number of rebel Sidhe females who would be willing to navigate such a ship.’
‘Of course they have,’ said Ain with surprising fire in her voice. ‘They will always assume the worst of you, because you are female.’
For a moment Jarek wondered whether Nual, still holding in her grief and anger, would do something unfortunate, but she just said tightly, ‘Believe me, the distrust is mutual. However, I am trying to overcome my natural instincts.’
Jarek changed the subject back to their immediate problem. ‘So what do you recommend, Ain? Run away and hide behind a quiet moon until all the fuss dies down?’
Despite his sarcastic tone Ain took him at his word. ‘There are no quiet moons. Every solid body here is a heavily populated domain. No, your safest course would be to rise up out of the ecliptic. There are far fewer domains up there, and they mostly belong to introvert patrons who will ignore you unless you enter their territory.’
‘But once we’re out of the high traffic areas we’ll be easier to spot.’
‘Affirmative. But a potential enemy will not be able to do anything about it unless they break cover to pursue you, which they should think twice about. Even if they do try and give chase, most of our ships are designed to cross small distances in a crowded system; please correct t— my assumption if it is wrong, but was your ship not made to travel long distances quickly, to get between planets and their beacons? If so, you should easily outrun anything sent after you.’
‘True: that’s something. So, back to my original question: what the fuck do we do now?’
‘We could go to the Consensus and demand an Extraordinary Session—’
‘Ah, right, so we’ll unleash the full force of Alephan bureaucracy on the bastards who just tried to murder us, will we?’
‘Please, hear me out! The Consensus is the site as well as the mode of government. There is a large habitat in a close polar orbit around the sun – known to lingua as the Egg – and all important decisions are made in the Star Chamber at its heart. The Consensus hab is also the site of the beacon manufactory. And, most importantly for you – for
us
– it is the only truly neutral inhabited territory in the system: any patron who launched an attack on the Egg would be condemned to shiftdeath.’
‘Shiftdeath?’
‘It is the ultimate sanction, not used for many centuries. A group of patrons force the condemned patron into shiftspace, permanently.’
‘Nice. Okay, so it sounds like we need to head for this Egg of yours. I’ll need some coordinates.’
Ain looked uncomfortable. ‘Navigation and logistics data was stored in the— in my ship.’
‘And where’s your ship?’
‘It— When I was chosen to liaise with you, it was built into the core of the habitat intended to receive you.’
‘Ah. Guess we won’t be using that then. And I don’t suppose you can remember much without your ship’s comp?’
‘I am sorry. I am not used to operating without access to my comp. If there had been time to download the data— But there was not . . .’ She looked distraught.
‘It’s all right, that wouldn’t have been my priority either.’ Jarek thought for a moment. ‘Can we com the Consensus to get directions, once we’re a bit closer? Or were the Consensus’ com frequencies and encryption algorithms all in your ship’s comp too?’
‘They were,’ said Ain, her voice small.
‘It’s not your fault. I’d be lost without the
Heart of Glass
. We could broadcast a wide-beam request for aid, but that would confirm our location to our enemies. I guess the only option we’ve got is to run away and hope to shake off any pursuers, then swing back in towards the primary and hope we can locate the Egg.’
‘I wish I could be of more use,’ said Ain miserably.
‘No, you’ve done everything you could. If you don’t mind, you can check over the data I’ve gathered so far from this system. You’ll know more than I do even without your comp.’
‘Of course; please tell me what I can do to help.’
‘I’ll be in my cabin,’ said Nual out loud. When Jarek glanced at her she added silently,
‘Sure,’ said Jarek, ‘see you later.’
He chatted to Ain for a while longer, keeping half an eye on the sensors, and once he’d concluded that if anyone was coming after them, they weren’t doing it quickly enough to make their intentions obvious, he discussed the ship’s course with Ain.
They had to make sure they headed out of the disc on the correct side, Ain said. She had been on secondment to the out-system sector nearest Aleph’s beacon and was not entirely sure where the Egg currently was in its orbit, but she had an idea it was passing through the disc of the ecliptic about now. That was good news, because they wouldn’t have to go right through the disc and out the other side if they got it wrong; though if the Egg was just one domain amongst many, they might have trouble spotting it.
By the time Jarek had chosen a course, the lingua’s attempt to maintain a calm and equable facade was failing, and when her voice broke as she let slip that the ship at the heart of the now-destroyed hab had been her home for the last few years, Jarek took pity on her and suggested they take a break.
After their little chat, Device told Taro to go back into the cell ‘for the moment’. Just as he turned to leave, he asked, ‘How is my idiolect?’
‘Your idiot-what?’
‘My speech patterns and vocabulary, Taro. Would it pass for human? I have studied linguistic drift in human-space, but I find slang and casual speech do not come naturally, and I have had only a reduced dataset – until now.’
‘You sound great, Device. Very convincing,’ he said as casually as he could.
And I’m not your fucking dataset
.
Back in the cell, Taro turned and squinted at the near-invisible outline in the white wall. A handle would be too much to hope for. The door probably only opened on Device’s command.