* * *
He wakened, choking. Water and blood had soaked his hair and clothing. Callused hands shook him.
'Death, 'e looks like the sharks been at 'im,' said a voice from above.
Jaiddon opened his eyes, blinked. He lay in a boat. Two strangers stood over him with faces bearded, gaunt, and peeling from overexposure to the sun. He struggled, craned his neck, and tried to see over the gunwale.
'Easy, lad,' said the man. His fingers tightened on Jaiddon's shoulders, making dizziness flood back. 'Ye come near to drownin'. Best stay still a bit an' catch yer breath.'
Jaiddon closed his eyes and wrestled despair. He had fallen into the hands of the Renders. Why was he not dead? Where was Circadie?
'Let me be,' he said softly as soon as he could speak. The hands fell away.
Jaiddon sat up, gripping the boat with bloody fingers. His body burned like fire, it was cut in so many places. When he stared outward, a triple image assaulted his eyes. If he looked with a Shaper's perception, the hills of Circadie appeared, churned and distorted where the Renders' thoughts had warped its form. The Pattern of Solidity glowed through, serene and blue where it remained whole, black and gapped where the Renders had broken through. On top, pale and insubstantial as a ghost's drawing, moved the heaving, restless shoulders of ocean swells that stretched in endless ranks to the far horizon.
Jaiddon fell back, suddenly weak. In his last moment of awareness, he had sought to Shape himself a form beyond the Void. He should have died. Instead, his dying act had transformed him close enough to Reality that the Renders could perceive him. When the sun rose, his flesh would cast shadow, as did all Substance.
Jaiddon dared a look at the Renders. Two stared at him with eyes that bore the haggard stamp of hardship.
The third lay grotesquely sprawled and still in the stern. Jaiddon recognized the Render he had inflected with a fragment of the Pattern. Remembering, also, the demon that had fallen beneath his sword, Jaiddon drew a painful breath and spoke.
'What happened to Alaric?'
The Renders started. One of them blanched with fright.
'Dead,' said the larger of the two. ' 'E woke up raving an' died. It was madness that done for him, but how did ye know his name?'
The other Render started forward and shouted. 'He knew because Satan sent him! Didn't he appear at the moment of Alaric's exorcism?' He pointed an accusing finger at Jaiddon. 'You come from Hell, your purpose to tempt us from faith. God will punish us for bringing you aboard.'
The large Render spat. 'The devil, Chaplain? Do ye smell brimstone?' Laughter followed, but it was forced.
Jaiddon raised himself onto the seat in the bow. Dizzy, sick, and weak as he was, it was evident the Renders distrusted his Reality. They might kill him, in their misunderstanding. Jaiddon thought quickly. Though he knew nothing of Hell, the devil, or exorcism, they were obviously powerful images to the Renders. Perhaps even these might be Shaped to advantage.
'I did not come from Hell.' His voice startled both men. 'I would help, but if you have no faith, I am powerless.'
'Christ have mercy,' said the Chaplain.
Jaiddon ignored him. 'You suffer greatly from hunger and thirst.' Both men stared, speechless. Jaiddon plunged ahead and hoped their confusion would last long enough to weaken their disbelief. 'Fetch me a container. I will provide you with food and drink. Then give me your oarshaft, and I will Shape you a sail to carry wind, that you may return to the land you desire.'
The larger Render laughed. 'Would ye make miracles, lad?' He rummaged among the floorboards, and after a moment, extended a wineskin. 'Ye've got my faith, what there is of it.'
'Fill it with seawater.' Jaiddon's eye fell on the Chaplain. 'Do you have faith?'
The Chaplain swallowed and crossed himself uneasily. 'I pray four times daily.'
'Pray, then.' Jaiddon accepted the dripping wineskin. Its rough leather stung his torn flesh unpleasantly, but that did not deter him. Every kitchen drudge in Circadie knew how to pattern the salt from the water they drew to wash their pots. This was the simplest form of Shaping, and it took Jaiddon the space of seconds. He copied the Chaplain's motion over the wineskin for effect, and offered it to the Renders. 'Drink. If you have faith, you will be refreshed.'
The larger Render pulled the stopper, peeling features stiffly expressionless. He raised the wineskin to his lips, filled his mouth, then swallowed greedily. When his thirst was eased, he knelt before Jaiddon in awestruck silence while the Chaplain, also, drank his fill. ...
* * *
The tale is still told, in dockside taverns, of how a chaplain and a deckhand survived the wreck of the ship
Saint Helena
by saving a holy man from the teeth of a shark. In turn, he rewarded them, changing seawater into cheese, bread, and wine by miracle. There were witnesses who observed the two tacking into the harbor, their sail the bare shaft of an oar. The holy man was not with them. He was said to have left the boat by walking on the face of the sea.
Somewhere, over the horizon on the isle of Circadie, Jaiddon's ballad is still sung. It tells of a young novice who took a Master's Colors to defend the Pattern of Solidity from Renders, and how he accomplished his purpose and returned, bleeding and weary, the only Shaper since the Founders to cast a shadow.
No Quarter
The laser hit burned through the
Kildare'
s shields and vaporized the aft attitude jets in an instantaneous burst of explosion. The ejection of debris and gaseous propellant created recoil that the damaged system failed to counter.
On the bridge, in the act of rising to visit the head, Commander Jensen was spun sideways into the com console. The impact left more than a bruise. Over the stabbing pain of cracked ribs, and through the high-pitched, excited curse from the pilot on helm duty, the officer assigned charge of the
Kildare
strove against a mind-whirling onrush of vertigo to muster the necessary attitude of command.
'Damages?' he gasped on an intake of air that was all he could manage, being winded.
Across a narrow aisle banked on either side with instrumentation, the ensign still strapped in his seat recovered from surprise. 'Aft attitude thruster's gone, sir, portside. Also the rear screen sensor. Burnt clear out. Hull's intact, but we'll need the engineer's report to know if it's stable.'
That explained the horrible dizziness: inertia, not pain. The
Kildare
tumbled from the hit, her guidance units unable to compensate with one quarter of the system blown out. Left gray and disoriented from his own hurts, Jensen fought the buck of the deck and crashed back into his command chair. 'Find out if she's stable,' he rapped out in reference to the hull. Then he glanced across the gloom of the V-shaped control bridge toward the silhouette of his still
-
swearing pilot. 'Get this hulk back under control, fast.'
The pilot, the fair-haired son of somebody's father in the Admiralty, was nowhere near as good as the rating sewn onto the starched sleeve of his coverall. Neat to the point of fussiness he might be, but his hands were slow, and his touch, far from unerring. Trembling, he fumbled the controls.
Whiplashed by a second round of inertial force all the more aggravating for being unnecessary, Jensen shut his eyes in forbearance. The last pilot he'd been assigned had been a sloppy son of a bitch when it came to appearance; but he could by God fly.
Kildare
rolled, bucketed, lurched, and finally wobbled out of her tumble.
By then the young ensign had recovered his curiosity enough to voice the obvious. 'Damn, Commander, who would be firing on us out here?'
Jensen ignored the question until after he had queried his one competent bridge officer, a wary middle-aged woman named Beckett who'd been born without the instincts of motherhood. 'Gun crews intact, sir, and your engineer gives the drive systems a tentative okay,' she answered in her husky baritone. The sandy hair pulled back from her forehead emphasized bushy eyebrows, and square, oversize front teeth. If homely appearance had stifled her social life, Beckett poured her frustration into her work. She'd already confirmed the engineer's next check. 'Dak's testing the coil regulator for signal overload, but adds it's an outside possibility.'
The laser hit must have grazed them, Jensen determined, and concluded further that if their shields had been breached, the attack weapon was more powerful than any small vessel should pack. Still, reassured that the main drive systems of his vessel apparently remained intact, Commander Jensen stared across an undecorated expanse of grate flooring to the junior ensign who had questioned inopportunely; a boy so fresh from his Academy training that he still wore his
hat
on the bridge; hunched in earnest over his board, the kid had a clear, pudgy complexion that ran to acne, and ears that stuck out from under spikes of silvery fair hair. He was currently gazing, rapt, at the image of drifting fragments on the main analog screen.
'I thought I asked you to check on the status of our hull?' Jensen snapped, pained by more than his ribs. He resisted an impulse to blot sweat from his brow, then silently pondered the self-same issue. His ship was a converted yacht, a rich man's toy hastily revamped for Fleet service in the face of threat from the Syndicate. She was armed more for scout duty than defense; and with her untried crew and recently promoted senior officer, Admiral Duane had stationed her as far from any probable site of action as possible. Why
had
the
Kildare
been fired upon? And by whom, when they were just a patrol sent out for observation, in case the battle that currently centered around Target proved to be a feint?
'Beckett,' Jensen said belatedly, 'initiate a scan.'
The communications officer nodded her leathery face, eyes underlit by the scatter of lights on her board. She did not belabor the point that she had done so, long since, but the blown aft sensors left her blind to near half of the analog grid.
* * *
On the bridge of the
Marity
, by appearance a hard-run merchanter, and by trade a skip-runner ship, a bearish, blunt-featured man scratched at the mat of chest hair through the opened neck of his coverall. The flight deck of his vessel was too cramped with instrumentation for a man of his size to stretch. This did not seem to trouble him as he turned deceptively lazy eyes to the mate who worked the console beside him. 'They found us yet?'
Slender, elegant as an antique rapier,
Marity's
mate, Gibsen, turned his head with a half-raised brow. Framed by a vista of illegal electronics and signal lights of alien design, he said, 'No. And their pilot's a kid who can't fly.'
In the half gloom of
Marity'
s flight deck, MacKenzie James didn't speak. On the graying side of thirty-five and muscled like a wild beast, he made no move. But the corner of his mouth that lifted toward a smirk said 'incompetent' more plainly than words. His scarred hands stopped their scratching, and his gravelly, basso voice phrased orders with a sparseness that hinted at exasperation. 'Forget subtlety. Show them.'
As if blowing the hell out of the ass end of any Fleet ship hadn't been questionably unsubtle, Gibsen set tapered fingers to the controls and tweaked.
The
Marity
changed position.
* * *
Which meant Beckett, bent yet over a console set for a fine-screen search, suddenly got an eyeful of side vanes and struts where a second ago her instruments had shown emptiness. The impossible happened. She got flapped, screeched a startled oath, and jerked back before she thought to step down the magnification. 'Dammit to hell with a hangover!' she repeated, sounding more like her gender than she ever had. 'We're being messed after by a goddamn merchanter.'
'What!' Jensen half sprang from his command chair, then sank back with a grunt of pain. Plagued by echoes of his own startlement reflected back at him by bare, metallic bulkheads, he went suddenly cold to the core. The only 'merchanter' he could imagine near the site of a major battle against the Syndicate would be the
Marity,
command of the skip-runner and criminal MacKenzie James. 'Get me a registry number,' Jensen snapped through stabbing discomfort. 'Or lacking that, scan for specs.'
Beckett read back the requested information in her usual sexless voice.
'Marity,'
Jensen confirmed. And his manner held an edge that his crew had never known.
* * *
On the dimly lit bridge of the
Marity,
the mate Gibsen raised baleful hazel eyes to his captain. 'Mac, they aren't minded to be sportsmen, this morning. The portside plasma turret is rotating our way.'
'Beats hell out of being overlooked,' Mac James said laconically. 'Now give 'em something to chase.'
Gibsen's narrow features lit in a grin, red-tinged by the lights of his console. 'Lead them on by the nose, you mean.' His delight did not fade through the split-second interval as he played his controls with a touch his Fleet counterpart aboard
Kildare
would have sworn on his scrotum was wizardry.