Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

A Working of Stars (8 page)

BOOK: A Working of Stars

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“Good idea,” said the fleet-apprentice. Her voice was fading badly now. “For a pirate …”

“You’ve managed to spoil it for them,” Len said. “The
Fire’s
old, but not that old. I can get your word back home a long time before this ship reaches Eraasi.”

“ … family … be grateful …”

Len doubted that; bringing bad news never made anyone loved. But he said only, “I don’t have a proper infirmary on board the
Fire
, so I’ll let the stasis box put you back under for now. You’ve got a long trip ahead of you, but at least you won’t have to be awake to get bored by it.”

The fleet-apprentice’s eyes had drifted closed, but now she opened them again. “Something else … to tell the family. The pirates …”

“What about them?”

“They didn’t wear … ship’s colors. Black and grey, like nobody. Nobody’s. But after I fell … they were careless. I heard them talking. Heard names.”

She stopped talking then, and he thought that she’d run out of breath to speak. The voice of the ship-mind clicked on again and said, “The
aiketen
report vital signs are slipping. They advise resuming stasis maintenance.”

“Not yet!” It was the girl, speaking in barely a whisper. “Wait. The names. I remember … they said ‘sus-Peledaen.’ Natelth sus-Peledaen.”

ERAASI: SERPENT STATION; SUS-PELEDAEN ORBITAL STATION; HANILAT ENTIBOR: CAZDEL

S
erpent Station—blazing hot and dry for one half of the year, chilly and dry for the other—was the main sus-Dariv installation on Eraasi’s antipodal subcontinent. The family did most of its construction work there, having seen long ago the wisdom of not competing for labor and material in the same market with the sus-Radal and the sus-Peledaen. The current fashion among the fleet-families for throwing away money on permanent orbital stations had not impressed the sus-Dariv, who still preferred to lease commercial spacedocks on an as-needed basis; meanwhile, Serpent handled repairs and shipbuilding for the fleet.

Port-Captain Aelben Winceyt, commanding officer of Serpent Station, usually ate breakfast alone. Fleet-family custom prevented anyone of lesser rank from joining him unasked, and Winceyt couldn’t afford to play favorites—or even appear to be playing favorites—with his invitations.

For a while he’d shared the Station’s high table with the commanding officer of
Sweetwater-Running
, before the
Sweetwater’s
repair work was finished and the ship left geosynchronous orbit over Serpent for one above Hanilat Starport. Winceyt had enjoyed the company. These days, for lunch and dinner, he had a list of the other officers at the Station, and was patiently working through it one name at a time. When he finished the whole list, he planned to randomize it and start over.

Setting aside its social drawbacks, however, Winceyt was happy with his posting to Serpent. Combined with his adoption into the outer family, the promotion marked him as a rising officer in the sus-Dariv fleet, one who only needed the seasoning of a ground-based command before being given a ship of his own. Granted, the Antipodean summer temperatures made him suspect that when the senior fleet officers referred to seasoning, they meant “dried, smoked, and heat-cured,” but that was a minor problem as long as the Station’s environmental controls kept on working.

And the food here was good—far better than shipboard rations, and interestingly different from any of the main-continent cuisines. Today’s breakfast was paper-thin griddlecakes wrapped around a filling of salt-apple relish, made by a kitchen staff that could have held its own against any in Hanilat.

Well, maybe not at the Court of Two Colors level, Winceyt conceded. But almost anything less than that.

The thought, and the day’s date, sufficed to remind him of the only other cloud on his contentment, the fact that he was too new in his post as commanding officer of Serpent Station to get away with taking personal leave. Had matters been otherwise, he could at this moment have been attending his first general conference as a member of the sus-Dariv outer family.

That would have been a good way to celebrate his promotion. Now that he was outer-family he could respectably begin thinking about other long-term commitments, such as courtship and marriage-and while the women of the Antipodes were good-looking and superficially friendly, as a group they had little desire to abandon their homes and family altars for a life in distant Hanilat. Fellow-members of the syn-Dariv, though, were unlikely to have such objections.

Oh, well. No hurry. We have time.

Breakfast done, he left the dining hall for his office—a matter of going from one low concrete building to another, almost identical one. Already the air outside was hot and dry, under a sky of deep, cloudless blue. Today looked like being another scorcher.

Command-Tertiary Yerris was waiting for him in his office with a textpad. “Sir. Summary of the message traffic.”

Winceyt glanced at the pad. Nothing unusual there—most of the entries were copies of messages going in and out of Hanilat. There was only one heads-up for Serpent: A message-drone had come in overnight from
Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms,
letting the family know that the main trade convoy was entering the Void for the last leg of its journey home, with a list appended of ships needing repair and refitting.

“We’ll need to set up a schedule for rotating stuff in and out,” Winceyt said, tapping the message with the blunt end of his stylus. “But the big job is still going to be upgrading the engines on
Golden-Flower-Crown
, and we’re ready for that.”

In fact, he had been requisitioning and stockpiling the necessary parts and equipment for the anticipated overhaul ever since coming to Serpent. The main engine assembly had arrived by ground hauler just two days ago, and now occupied most of Construction Hangar 2. A major refit was always time-consuming, and a cargo ship lost the family money every day that it was in the yards.

“Rigging-Chief Olyesi says that she can start as soon as you give the word,” Yerris said. “All three of the heavy work platforms are cleared and rigged for lift.”

“Excellent,” Winceyt replied.

Turning around
Golden-Flower-Crown
rapidly and efficiently would be a good start for his outer-family career. And maybe next year he’d feel settled-in enough at Serpent Station to take leave for the meeting in Hanilat.

“Finding Narin,” Arekhon said, “isn’t going to be easy.”

He and Maraganha were in a small café near the Cazdel Guildhouse, sharing a midafternoon meal of hot bitter-root tea and sweet pastries. The Void-walker paused in the act of pulling apart a flaky piece of spice-bread, and asked him, “What exactly makes it hard?”

“Well, for one thing, I haven’t heard from her in almost ten years.”

Maraganha winced. “That could make things difficult. Any idea why she decided to vanish?”

“Not in any great detail,” Arekhon said. “She never cared much for writing letters in the first place, and the last message I got from her was a voice-note saying that she was sick of trying to explain the
eiran
to Adepts and was going off to look for honest work.”

“That’s when you lost track of her?”

“More or less,” he said. “She wound up somewhere in the Immering Archipelago, but I don’t know anything more than that. There’s a limit to what the search services and the public datanets can tell you, especially if the person you’re looking for is a powerful Mage—and Ty was right about Narin being powerful. She was the First of her own Circle once, before she came to Demaizen; if she’s vanished deliberately, we may never find her at all.”

“Don’t spook her, then,” Maraganha advised. “Stay away from working the
eiran
unless you have to.”

Arekhon poured more of the bitter-root tea into his cup. There were some days, and this was one of them, when he missed the sharp tang of good red homeworlds
uffa
more than words could tell. “We’ll have to go to Immering, then, and check the local records—and I can tell you right now that they’re going to be a mess. The Immering islands seem to have been everybody’s favorite invasion spot for the last five or six decades.”

“And open warfare has a nasty habit of blowing holes in people’s filing systems,” said Maraganha. “Oh, well. Let’s go to Immering and see what we can reconstruct.”

Inadal syn-Arvedan let himself into his room at the Wintermount Guesthouse and locked the door behind him. The house-mind brought up the lights as soon as he entered, and he saw that the hostelry’s
aiketen
had left him the midnight supper he’d requested, a tray of smoked meats and small breads and relishes set out on the side table along with a flask of wine. He hung up his damp weather coat, then sank gratefully into the deep-cushioned leather chair next to the table and broke the seal on the wine.

It was summer wine, pale and sparkling; he poured some into the glass the
aiketen
had left with the supper tray and drank it off. The drink’s tingling sharpness cut through the fuzz of talk and exhaustion that the day’s business had left in his head, and he set the empty glass aside. He’d finish the wine later, after he’d eaten, when he was ready to sleep. Now, however, he wanted to have the meal he’d been too busy to stop for all day, and he wanted to think.

The Hanilat Ploughmen’s Club, where he had spent most of this afternoon and evening, had been for almost a century the main meeting place for Eraasi’s agrarian and mercantile families. In past decades, when the powers of the star-lords and the ground-based interests were more in balance, very little had actually gone on inside the club—socializing mostly, and the occasional private business arrangement. These days, however, the conversation at the Ploughmen’s Club had a tinge of desperation in it. The fleet-families were growing ever more powerful; soon now, if nothing happened to stop them, they would overshadow the city and country interests completely.

Talking isn’t enough,
Inadal thought.
If we don’t work to counter the power of the star-lords, we may not survive them … and we are Eraasi, in the end.

Politics had never been Inadal’s first love, or even his second. He could happily have spent his entire life in Arvedan, overseeing the family estate and only coming to Hanilat for shopping and holidays. But the times weren’t good for that. At least a few of the men and women he’d spoken with at the Ploughmen’s Club had seen things his way; but they didn’t have a plan.

The room’s communications console sounded its two-note chime, interrupting his thoughts.

“House-mind. Answer the call and play it aloud.” The console speaker clicked on. He said, “Hello?”

“Inadal?” It was his sister Ayil’s voice. “I tried calling you at home first but they said that you were here in town.”

“Business meetings,” he said. “Very dull ones.”

“Don’t patronize me. I know exactly how dull those meetings really are.” Her tone changed. “I learned something last night, and I think you need to know it.”

“What?”

There was a pause, as if Ayil were collecting her thoughts. “You do know that one of my old officemates left the Institute to be a Mage in Delath’s Circle.”

The name of their late brother, killed years ago in the destruction of Demaizen Old Hall, still had the power to cause Inadal a brief, sharp pang. “I remember you telling me something like that once.”

“Well, I saw him again last night.”

“Alive?”

“Of course alive. Del was the one who could see spirits, not me.” Her voice caught a little, and Inadal reflected that he was perhaps not the only member of their family who could be stricken with unexpected grief. “Kief is with one of the sus-Peledaen Circles now.”

“He’s no friend of ours, then. The sus-Peledaen are star-lords to the bone.”

“I don’t think this is one of their fleet-Circles,” Ayil said. “It’s something else, I’m almost certain.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was with the Institute Circle last night … they always meet then … and he slept on my couch afterward because he was too tired to go home. I think there was a great working, Inadal; I saw the blood on his robes.”

“They’re Mages, remember. It’s what they do.”

He heard her give a faint snort. “Not the Institute Circle. It’s common knowledge they haven’t done a great working in over a century.”

“Are you saying that your old officemate is up to something that his sponsors don’t know about?”

“I’m not sure,” Ayil said. “But Kief never thought that highly of the star-lords back when I first knew him—his family were all merchants—and I can’t see him changing his opinion of them now.”

Isayana and Natelth sat in their private withdrawing-room aboard the sus-Peledaen orbital station. Far below them, in Hanilat, it was night; just as it was ship’s-evening here on the station. They were listening to music after dinner—not recorded or synthesized music, but local talent, an amateur consort drawn from instrumentalists among the resident fleet-family and hired crew. The actual musicians were several decks away, playing for a small audience in one of the recreation lounges; the music in the private withdrawing-room was piped in over ship’s audio.

Isayana was only half-listening, if that; she liked music as a background to thought, but didn’t care much for nuances of performance. Tonight she was fiddling with a draftsman’s pad, idly sketching and erasing designs for
aiketen
and other specialized devices that might never get built.

She looked up from her pad and glanced over at her brother. Natelth was going over the sus-Peledaen convoy and construction schedules, trying to fit everything together so that the orbital yards produced enough guardships to run all the trading voyages the family needed. The process didn’t seem to be working tonight. He swept his stylus through the latest entry, frowned, and shook his head.

“Problems?” she asked.

“Complaints. The orbital yards claim to be stressed by the pace of new construction.”

BOOK: A Working of Stars

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