* * *
The gas-giant's equatorial band swelled, a livid smear across the forward sensors. Tensely, Ataine nursed the controls. Stresses multiplied in the Quest's tiny hull, translated across the electronic linkage as pressure against her body. The sensation increased continually, until even her bones seemed to ache. Ahead, a streamer of flame marked where the Sabre's thrusters battered uselessly against gravity. Ataine adjusted course to intercept. Sweat dripped with the tears on her cheeks as the Quest's nose tipped into a deeper arc. The screens pulsed with an unbroken row of danger lights.
Suddenly something snapped. Half her vision dissolved into an electrical crackle. Ataine gasped, choked by fear, until she realized she'd sustained no injury. Only the Quest's starboard sensors had failed. Concerned she might lose the remainder and tumble blindly, she re-oriented the craft's docking gyros to track the Sabre's position. A siren wailed, confirming how little margin for error remained.
Ataine teased more speed from the thrusters. An alarming vibration rattled the deck under her feet. She tried to ignore it. Intent upon her goal, she located the Sabre, now grown to a speck against the planet's bloated mass. A bank of screens flickered under her elbow. The headset recorded the event with a crisp snap. Ataine flinched, swore, and faced the facts; the systems might soon pack up entirely. With closed eyes, she focused total concentration into faltering circuitry and drove the Quest into the final plunge which would match her course with the Sabre.
Immediately she wished she hadn't. Resonance collapsed the aft vane like foil. Ataine cried out, punched through the link by physical pain. The Quest bucked under her, threatening to spin. Ataine wrestled with the controls. Through the electrostatic snow which laced the image from her functional sensor, she noticed something odd about the Sabre's structure ... but the image quickly became unreliably fuzzy. Ataine dismissed the distraction. Dorren's survival, as well as her own, depended upon critical timing.
Ataine adjusted the headset, every reflex pitched for the instant when her fall would carry her abreast of the Sabre. She touched the drive system, relieved to find it still responded normally. As the Sabre's bulk grew larger, she ducked the Quest into a roll and presented her aft thrusters toward her former adversary. Then her vision darkened, eclipsed by the Sabre's greater mass.
Now!
Ataine slammed the drive systems wide open and a rush like surf battered her ears. Her stomach turned, pulled horribly by the force of defied gravity as the Quest swept into a wide hyperbolic curve. The deck quaked. Something metallic rattled loose and clattered across the cockpit. Ataine squeezed her eyes closed and maintained full power.
Let that be enough,
she thought fervently. And somehow, against all logic, she
knew,
the kick from her thrusters had loaned the Sabre angular momentum enough to tear free of the planet's killer hold. Dorren steered a course similar to her own, but in the opposite direction.
'Let that be enough,' Ataine repeated aloud. Her voice shook. The Quest's direct-link systems had been punished to the edge of failure. If Dorren gave chase, she'd be finished.
Suddenly a buzzer shrilled. Ataine opened her eyes to a star burst of alarm lights. Then sharp pains in her chest bent her double. Aware that malfunction of the Quest must be the cause, she blinked back tears of agony and studied the indicators. The Quest's main fuel line had ruptured.
Ataine yanked the headset off. The pain faded instantly. Stressed and tired, she leaned on the console, swore, and killed all power in the drive systems. The move was necessary to prevent explosion, but afterwards she felt as though she'd cut her own throat. She was helpless. Her instruments showed she still had enough momentum to escape the gas-giant's gravity field. Yet without thrust, she had no control over drift.
Helpless.
Despair enveloped her. She cursed her early, impetuous destruction of the transmitter. The distress beam-arc still functioned, if she reconnected the hotwire, yet emergency codes were unselectively monitored. Ataine buried her face in her hands. Rescue would come,
but from Station,
and subsequent examination of the Quest's logs would expose her intentions to the anti-national faction she had left base to destroy.
I can drift,
Ataine thought; drift until the Quest's oxygen canisters could no longer recycle air. She reviewed the gauges. Her speed was considerable. If she could last forty-eight hours before hooking up the distress 'arc', her signal might be received by an outbound transport. Law would compel pick-up, and if the crew was loyal to government, she might yet escape with the Quest's log intact.
Shaking, Ataine straightened in her seat. The odds were like light years, inconceivably long. But no other alternative remained. Resigned to her fate, she dredged her memory for the timetable, and hoped bad luck would roost elsewhere.
Her wish proved futile. She'd barely converted the chronometer reading back to Station time before an uncanny sensation of company invaded her cockpit. The presence was familiar.
'Dorren!' Never had his mental touch been clearer. Ataine banged her fist against the console and shouted angrily, as though he could hear. 'Don't pick me up. Please, Dorren, grant me that much.'
But his contact only intensified. '
I'm
coming for you.'
'No!' Ataine felt her throat constrict. 'You owe me, remember?' If she hadn't spared him, the Quest would not be crippled.
I'm
coming.
Unarguably final, the response seemed graven in stone.
Outraged by his ruthlessness, Ataine laced stiff fingers through her hair and tried desperately not to weep.
Tell them
I'm
dead!
But she knew he was beyond listening to her pleas. He would come for her, and short of suicide, she had nothing left to prevent him ...
* * *
The bump as the Sabre's docking collar made contact jostled Ataine where she sat hunched over dead banks of controls. She reached listlessly for her helmet. Anger had ebbed, leaving resentment no sentiment could thaw, and numbed by the immediacy of defeat, she sought nothing but the chance to hurt the man who had stolen her inner trust, and betrayed her.
She sat, helmet clutched in cold fingers, as seals meshed with the Quest's hatch and locked her craft in tow. A signal from Dorren's console opened the lock. Pressure equalized, rippling the hair against her neck.
'Damn you,' she said succinctly, aware her suit mike would now transmit to Dorren's cockpit. A wave of consciousness probed her barriers in response. Passionless as ice, she rejected him.
A soft, shuddering sigh arose from her helmet, followed by Dorren's voice, thinly and inadequately amplified. 'My dear lady, this time we're in the same boat. Will you let me explain?'
Driven to viciousness, Ataine said, 'Don't try. Just take me back and collect your commendation from the Commander.'
'Ataine.' His breath caught. 'Ataine.' And the quaver in his tone spilled chills down her back.
Something was wrong.
Ataine rose and pushed off for the hatch, unable to stop her reaction. Hatred withered as, incapable of denying the link, she stopped fighting.
Dorren was ill, and in trouble, and afraid for her life.
Too bewildered to analyze, she caught the seal ring and passed through into an air lock no Sabre ever built could possess.
Ataine paused, arrested by shock. 'They sent you after me in the
Challenger!'
'No.' Dorren's voice sounded queerly strangled. 'I stole it.'
He was wrestling nausea, Ataine realized, because he'd forgotten, or had no time, to take drugs against the effects of the direct-link system. He hadn't lied. Puzzled, she left her helmet weightlessly adrift and headed for the cockpit.
The companionway door opened into gloom punctured by the glow of instruments. Dorren shivered in the pilot's seat, drenched in sweat. Ataine fought off an overpowering urge to go to his side.
'Why?' she said quietly. The word carried multiple meanings.
Dorren shuddered, faintly amused even through his discomfort. 'Because if I'd let you close to me, I'd have lost my cover. Government sent me to Station to acquire proof of an anti-national defection
higher up.
They suspect the man responsible for security screening of officers. But you bolted before I had finished, and the Challenger was the only craft left unguarded at Station.' He pressed wet hands against his forehead. His final lines emerged muffled. 'There's an armed squadron of Sabres on my tail. Had I not stood between you, they'd have scorched the Quest out of space. Now,
fly us out of here.
I'm
going to be sick.'
Ataine left the companionway. Bruised by the details left unsaid, she swung herself into the co-pilot's seat. Dorren had wrecked another trust to save her, left anti-nationals free to murder back at Station. She reached stiffly for the headset, wounded by the integrity he had sacrificed because he could not tolerate her death. His self-disgust left her hollow.
At her side, Dorren stumbled to his feet. His hand touched her shoulder, but the contact was dead. 'I'll jettison the Quest.' He moved to leave.
But Ataine caught his wrist and looked up into drawn features. 'Salvage the log canister, first.' And she told him why.
'You filmed them?
Dorren stared incredulously. 'Blazes, woman, I should have guessed.' And slowly, his expression changed to chagrin. 'Could you forgive me? I think my superiors are going to want you in the co-pilot's seat. This time, I think I won't argue.'
Silverdown's Gold
Trionn the scullion could never pause anywhere for more than a minute without attracting a heap of cats. It did not matter whether his clothes reeked of the midden on those days when he raked out the garbage, or if he was simply sitting, huddled against the wind, awaiting his turn at the privy. The cats always found him. They settled, arranged comfortably in his lap, or stretched across his feet in sprawls like dropped knitting. All too often they betrayed him by leading those very people to him that he fervently wished to avoid.
That was how he came to be lying prone in high grass on an afternoon when he should have been helping to butcher a pig.
The blood and the smell of the slaughter pen made him sick; the cook knew as much, and cursed him for a puling ninny. There had been too many pigs killed for the table since the new Lord had inherited the rule of Silverdown; as if a feast must grace the tables each night until every pasture was emptied. The squalling as helpless animals were dragged out for the knife made Trionn sweat and turn pale. The heave of his stomach always followed, until lately, no meat sat well in his gut. Discomfort held him prone, though he knew today's victim was by now far beyond feeling; the tripes would be boiled and the last ham set up in the smokehouse. Pots left over from the rendering waited in the scullery for washing, stuck with grease, and crusty with charred rings of gravy. He would earn another beating for his shirking.
Trionn did not care. With one cat curled between his shoulder-blades, two more nestled against his flank, and the white female who was heavy with kittens flopped over the backs of his knees, he sucked at a grass stem and stroked the ears of the t
om
who gnawed at his thumb. He was safe enough here, where the cook would never venture, in the neglected field that was the demesne of the blue dun stud.
The stallion that was a killer, that hated everything alive.
Mad creature that he was, the horse disdained to step on cats. Trionn basked, protected, under a warmth of beasts and autumn sunlight. No one would look for anyone here, far less the most tongue-tied of Silverdown's kitchen staff.
'There he is!' someone shouted.
Trionn started in alarm. The cat on his back was dislodged onto the turf where, with arched spine and crooked tail, it glared at hi
m
in feline displeasure. Had apprehension not held Trionn rooted, he might have laughed at its injured dignity. But the voice that had raised the outcry was the new Lord's own, and for any man of highborn stature to go beating the fields for a scullion bespoke worse than a cook's irritation.
Trionn levered himself up on one elbow and peered over the grass tips. He dared not spring to his feet, whatever the Lord's displeasure; did he rise, the cats might leave, and the vicious dun would take note that a man had invaded his turf. His ears would flatten, and his nostrils flare warning, just before he thundered into a charge.
Fear of the stud saved Trionn an embarrassment, since the Lord intended a different errand altogether. He was leaning on the fence in his velvets. Combed blond hair tousled in the wind as he conferred with a balding companion, less finely dressed, a leathery appearance to him that bespoke hard living. Both men watched the horse, which spied them and bowed up his neck. He blew a snort in challenge, his nostrils a flash of scarlet linings against the seal black of his muzzle. Then he flagged his tangled tail, struck once at the air, and galloped.
Trionn flattened himself against ground that shook to the impact of hooves. His peril promptly compounded as the stud's rampage upset the cats, who bounded away through the grass. Caught in the open, he risked getting trampled to a pulp. The sick fear inside him no longer for the pig, he crawled on his belly toward the fence. He escaped under the bottom rail, just barely, but his troubles did not end outside the pasture. Silverdown had never been kept like a manor, until now, when even the weeds that flowered in the hedgerows were unwelcome. The new Lord had ranted and waved his whip and found fault until servants set to with sickle and scythe. Trionn cowered down in the razed-back scrub that edged the meadow, and prayed the two men were given no cause to glance aside. Did they so much as turn his way, they could not help but catch him skulking.
Escape was impossible. Trionn dared not risk the noise of movement, even to cover his ears. Despite the spirited charge of the stud, neither could he help but overhear every word that passed between Lord and crony.
'Will you look at his stride!' the bald man exclaimed in boyish excitement. 'He can cover ground, for a marvel.'
The stud reached the fence, dropped his hind-quarters underneath himself with a grace that could stop the breath, and whirled in pirouette. Trotting now in taut-muscled extension, he resumed his patrol against invaders. His neck was high set, and curved like a bow, capped with a mane whipped to elflocks that no groom dared to unravel. The last one to try had suffered a broken wrist. Trionn had been assigned the clearing of the supper boards at the time the late Lord, who had been young and a cripple, had gently made disposition.
'Cordiar was never bred to be gentled, but to ride to the fields of war.' The Lord raised shaky hands and worried at the shawl that covered frail shoulders. His flesh was pale with ill health, the skin nearly transparent against the blankets piled in layers over his lap; his smile seemed the grimace of a death's head. 'My father might have mastered him, had the fighting not sent him to the grave. Leave the horse to his field. Nail the gate closed and let him live as his nature allows. He is wild and filled with hate, but beautiful. He will run free, as I cannot, and give me simple pleasure by watching him.'
And so the dun stallion had matured, handled by no man, left to gallop and kick up his heels as he pleased for the two years before Silverdown's master had succumbed to his wasting disease. Unmarried at the hour of his death, leaving not one bastard as issue, his inheritance had fallen to a cousin who was also young, but thick-set and muscled, and vigorous.
'You were right to have me come,' the bald man was saying to the new master. 'Everyone brags on the virtues of their horses, but this one - he's more than magnificent.'
'A treasure,' the Lord allowed with an offhand cuff at his cloak. Grass chaff ripped up by the stud had clung and sullied his velvet, and he fussed until the last damp stems had whirled away on the wind. Eyes narrowed against lowering sunlight, he watched the stallion reach the corner and whirl. 'A good thing, too. Silverdown's treasury is empty.'
Surrounded by a wealth of bearing fields, the bald man raised eyebrows in disbelief.
'Oh, yes,' the Lord affirmed with a bitten-off snap of contempt. 'Spent out to pay the King's levies, until war took the old man's life. The cripple who survived him had too soft a heart. Left the tenants their harvests, and ran the household on profits from the orchards. Apples and pears!' The Lord gave a laugh not meant to be pleasant. 'What a fool's game! The manor house might not leak, through a miracle, but the tenants are sullen and spoiled. They'll have to be taught better manners, if
I'm
to win Tanemar's daughter. This stallion is all of Silverdown's gold, can we break him. If his bloodline is any judge, his get should look as fine. As a gift he will be unmatched. Duke Tanemar will take notice of my suit, and the hand of his daughter will be mine.'
The bald man stroked his chin, while Trionn cowered. 'Large plans,' he mused, the direction of his gaze never shifting. In the pasture, unaware his wildness was at risk, or that he was being discussed as an item for barter, the stallion kicked up his heels. Hooves sliced across wind with a force that whistled the air. 'He's fast enough for a fact, and made well as any man must envy. I'll start on his breaking tomorrow, right enough, but tonight, we'll settle on a fee.'
The Lord banged the fence with such force that the planking rebounded with a rattle. The stallion flung up in a rear at the noise, his shadow scything across his admirers. Hooves struck out in a dancer's grace that masked blows as murderous as assassin's cudgels. 'No fee,' came back the clipped answer. 'As I told you, the treasury's empty. Break the great brute so he can be caught and stabled. Then send in three of your broodmares. There's fee enough. While my war captain rides the beast fit so he can be shown off under saddle, the foals will be yours to increase the dun's reputation.'
The horsebreaker slapped thighs clad in worn and dusty leather. 'I break other people's stock,' he declaimed. 'I don't keep any for myself.' As the Lord beside him left the fence, the horsebreaker remained riveted by the stud, who pranced and stamped in tight circles. The longing on even that man's jaded face was fresh and bright and transparent as at last he turned to catch up. 'Still, we'll see. Would you consider a split? Payment in silver, and one foal?'
The Lord snatched his cuff from the clutch of a briar the mowers had missed. His mouth turned down. 'Certainly not. Duke Tanemar's enough man to please, for setting such store by a daughter who's nobody's beauty. It's the foals or nothing, for you. Press too hard, and I'll send for a gypsy.'
'What, and see your treasure stolen the moment it's tamed enough to halter?' The voices of the two men dwindled, amiably contentious as they hammered out terms for their bargain. Trionn sat up in the brush, feeling whitely shaken. He wished all the cats had not left. In balled up, tongue-tied frustration, he watched the stallion storm out one last gust of air, then settle his head down to graze.
A sadness near to pain ached in his chest at the thought that such a beast should ever be trapped or taken.
Distressed beyond concern for the slaughtered pig, Trionn saw the sun gone, and the sky turned silver at twilight before he trudged back to resume his neglected chores. The first thing he noticed as he approached the haphazard cluster of frame buildings that made up Silverdown's manor was that lights burned in nearly every window. Reflections of a hundred flames danced in the boggy, sediment-choked ditch that fronted the tumbledown breastworks. Trionn might have a clumsy tongue, but he was exceptionally quick at balancing. He crossed the ditch by footing across a slime-caked log, last remains of the decrepit palisade. He reached what the servants called the yard, a narrow, irregular court whose cobbles were furred in moss; or had been. A fresh, dirt-colored scar sliced one corner, where a drudge labored by torchlight to scrape the paving bare.
More of the new Lord's fussiness, Trionn concluded. Stones could not grow clothes of moss, and wax lights and tallow dips could be burned without care, as the animals were slaughtered for the table; as a great dun stallion could be torn from his freedom and used as a bribe to court a girl. Wrapped in unhappiness, Trionn failed to notice the cat that had found him already. It trotted up .and shouldered between his shins, joined at a run by two more.
The alley past the stables bustled with activity. Horseboys jogged between stalls with buckets and grain to tend a half dozen strange mounts. Notes spilled in haphazard arpeggios from the gallery window as a minstrel tuned up to entertain. A woman laughed and a hound howled, while guards who normally would have argued over dice stood up straight and silent at their posts. Their weapons had never been less than sharp, and they had stayed alert enough to challenge intruders; yet their past rows had enlivened their duty watch, ending always in companionable laughter. The change in Silverdown's rule had seen new uniforms with badges at the shoulder. Trailing streamers adorned each man's polearm, as if they were bedecked for a tournament.
But the occasion was no holiday. The servants had little cause to celebrate. All of Silverdown had been swept into change, until Trionn no longer felt at home. He hurried between a drudge with a basket of soiled linens, and the fowler, who carried the cranky old goshawk hooded, and muttered that his dearie should be mewed up and asleep to keep her health.
Trionn threaded a practiced path through the turmoil, until the orange tabby streaked across a patch of torchlight to join his impromptu escort. The cat's arrival drew the eye of the cook, en route from root cellar to bakehouse to chastise the Lord's page for dawdling.
'You! Trionn! Where've you been all afternoon, and the pots all stacked up for washing? You're a wastrel, boy, and due for whipping. Get inside and back to work, or it's the Lord's own war captain'll be the one who stripes your back.'
Trionn ducked his towhead between his shoulders and ran. The cats obligingly followed. Clumsy all of a sudden, he tripped over the door stoop and crashed into a servant with a basket.
'Boy! There's good bread you've close to spilled and wasted, and the new Lord with a hall full of guests to feed! Say you're sorry now!'
Trionn bobbed his head. He did not answer, though he was capable; speech did not always tie his tongue up in knots. His silence had long since branded him half-wit, and shy to the point of cold sweats, Trionn did not argue the misconception. Let Silverdown's staff think him stupid. The sting of their scorn was less than his dread of using words to correct them. He talked to the cats well enough when he wished, and had held very halting conversations with the old Lord, before his illness had brought physicians who would bar the master's door rather than admit a scullion presumed to be a simpleton.
With the cats, now four, trailing on his heels, Trionn left the bread girl to her curses. He zigzagged past the spits into the pantry to avoid the butcher's notice, lest his absence at the slaughter pen cause contention.
For all his care, he was spotted.