Rift in the Races (43 page)

As if reading her thoughts, Tytamon relented.

“You are tired. You’ve been through a lot. You need rest. Change into something more comfortable if you like. Have something to eat. I know this is a burden, and I know it’s not one you sought. But we need you. All of us.” He stood and walked to where she sat, squatting down on the floor in front of her, taking her hands into his unexpectedly, shockingly. “Orli, your face was the one certainty in my divination spell.” His brows rose and his head tilted some, a barest of movements like the single tick of a clock, the lone movement of a hand keeping time until unspeakable ruin came. “I don’t know how or why, but I believe you are the
one
hope for all of us.” He said it with such sobriety it sent a wave of chills bristling up her arms and down the back of her neck. She shuddered as it passed and let go the disheveled semblance of a laugh.

“The
one
hope,” she muttered ironically. “Wow. But no pressure, right?”

He smiled, muted but warm. “You’ll do fine.”

She nodded, looking down at his parchment hands in which her young smooth ones were held. Hers seemed so small by comparison. His were old, wizened, the skin like so many thin layers of film, blotchy with time, his fingers like knotty willow sticks. He was the physical manifestation of wisdom if ever there was one. If his reckoning of things were wrong, who could she possibly count on as a better source?

No one came to mind.

“But I don’t even know what I’m doing,” she said at last.

“None of us do.”

Chapter 28

R
oberto sat next to Ensign Nguyen, the new transfer from the
Abraham
, as the two of them readied the shuttle for a kind of flight they’d never trained for: a magic one. Mainly they were triple- and quadruple-checking systems they’d already double- and triple-checked. Nervousness is what it really was. They weren’t the only ones. Admiral Jefferies and Captain Asad talked in low tones outside the open shuttle door as they waited for the magicians to appear, both officers doing their best not to let anxiousness show through.

The rush of displaced air announced the arrival of eleven people from Prosperion. Roberto recognized two of them right off, the Earl of Vorvington and his nephew Thadius Thoroughgood. The rest, five men and four women, he did not know. Of these unfamiliar figures, Roberto guessed by their attire that all but one of them were magicians, their raiment showing a variety of styles, which suggested taste to a degree, but socioeconomic status obviously. They ran the gamut from simple to spectacular, with a young woman of around twenty in drab gray robes that were plain as concrete at one end of the spectrum and, at the other, a tall, middle-aged fellow in whispering silks embroidered at cuff, collar and hem with silver and gold thread to match his rings and what seemed hardly less than an anchor chain hanging around his neck. The one stand-out among these unknowns, as if the lean figure of wealth were not spectacular enough, was a short, pudgy man with a pug nose, bright red cheeks and a ring of hair around his head that grew in unruly gray tufts that bespoke a long-learned disregard for personal grooming. The only one of the six not in robes, he wore leggings and a long tunic, both crimson red, and Roberto could not help notice that, unlike the robed magicians, he wore a weapon, a long knife tucked in a sheath stuffed through his belt and turned nearly horizontal to accommodate the wealth of extra flesh an opulent lifestyle had grown around his middle. It was this man who stepped forward to greet the admiral and Captain Asad.

“Admiral Jefferies,” said the man in red, greeting them first and taking the admiral a bit by surprise given the presence of the earl. “I must assume this is the ship you’ve asked us to come destroy. I can hardly wait.” He glanced briefly at the shuttle as he spoke, stepping forward as he did to offer a satin-soft hand that appeared to have some leftover apricot sauce in the webbing between his thumb and index finger. The smirk that greased his round face was either a smile or a threat, and there were none present who could tell which, including those who had come with him from Prosperion.

“Conduit Huzzledorf,” said the admiral with the slight inclination of his head, in keeping with the newly learned custom of greeting a conduit of Kurr. He saw the streaks of sticky apricot on the conduit’s hand, but he did not hesitate to grip it firmly and give it a hearty shake. “Thank you for coming. Let’s hope we can do better than that.” He smiled. He’d been briefed on the disposition of the man, which was, to be fair, typical of conduits across Kurr.

Conduits were rare, nearly as much so as magicians with ranks of X, Y and Z. They were considered by many to be aberrations, half human and half something else. Magician and blank both. Freak and friend. They were notorious alcoholics and abusers of the many pleasure-inducing herbs that could be found in nature by those who knew where and how to look. They were often perverse and combative, sometimes cruel, and even when they weren’t, they were garish, gross and extremely self-indulgent. At least the good ones were. Conduit Huzzledorf was one of that sort, though he was the most disciplined of those in the Queen’s employ. Which wasn’t saying much.

“Conduit,” said the admiral, “this is Captain Asad of the
Aspect
. He has volunteered the shuttle and provided us a pilot from his crew, one of the finest in the fleet.”

“A shame to lose such a valuable asset, Captain,” said the conduit, tilting his own head back to the admiral before shifting porcine eyes to Captain Asad. He studied the captain with a long, curious expression, intelligent and calculating, with no attempt to conceal it, a pair of green glares lurking like thieves behind the fat curtain folds of the man’s pink-rimmed eyelids. “Are you sure you shouldn’t like to sacrifice a less proficient member of your crew?”

Roberto, listening intently from his place inside the ship, couldn’t help shaking his head at the exchange. He’d never heard Captain Asad at a loss for words.

The admiral jumped in with an appropriate remark. “I’m sure Lieutenant Levi and Ensign Nguyen will be up to the task, Conduit.”

An awkward silence followed, awkward for the Earth men at least, until finally the conduit recognized it too. Or else his mind returned to the moment from wherever it had gone. It was hard to know with conduits. Either way, he turned and waved a hand toward the group of Prosperions standing behind him by way of an introduction. “These are the rest of us,” he said. “The fat one is Vorvington, the Earl of
et cetera
. The fop is Lord Thoroughgood. The rest don’t matter as much, as they won’t get pissy if I don’t point them all out. This isn’t a luncheon after all.”

The Earl of Vorvington exchanged looks with the Earth officers that confirmed everything the two of them had learned about conduits was in fact true and universally understood, even by the upper echelons of Kurr, and that it could not be helped. The silent dialogue with Vorvington on that front considerably relaxed the tension that had been rapidly mounting within both officers.

“So, what’s to be done?” the admiral asked, doing his best not to irritate the conduit in some accidental way.

“Just stay out of my way,” said the conduit. “We don’t need you from here.”

“Well,” injected Lord Vorvington, “we might find some exchange of information useful.”

To that, the conduit waved his hand in the air as if someone had just puffed smoke in his face. He pushed himself between the captain and the admiral and went straight to the ship, uninterested in any questions the earl was going to ask or answers the officers might give. He climbed the ramp and, stooping in the low doorway, looked back and forth inside the ship. “Pretty fancy,” he remarked. “Shame to wreck it.” He looked up at Roberto and the young ensign next to him. “You sure you want to do this? You’re probably going to die.”

Roberto smirked. “I’m taking you with me if I go.”

The conduit seemed to approve of that, but he couldn’t spare a grin to acknowledge it. He entered and went back to the rear of the small transport ship. He gripped one of the chairs by its arms and gave it an upwards yank. When it didn’t move, he yanked on it more violently. Still nothing.

He stooped and looked under it. He saw that it was bolted to the floor.

“What kind of idiocy is this?” He gripped it and shook it twice as hard as before, employing his whole body in the exercise and whipping his already unruly fringe of hair into a wispy mess.

Roberto watched for a few moments, exchanging a pair of bemused glances with his copilot. “The blue light on the left arm. Push it. You can swivel it anyway you want. The yellow light will raise it or lower it some. Orange will tilt it back.”

Conduit Huzzledorf halted his wild rattling and pawed at the controls for a time, watching the seat move in its various trajectories. He frowned at it, then made a protracted show of wriggling his broad backside into the chair. “Not very friendly to a commodious arse, young man. Damn rude architecture.”

“I guess it is,” Roberto agreed. “But since we’re all going to be dead shortly, you won’t be uncomfortable for long.”

The man laughed, a rich bass rumble that sounded, and smelled, as if it came from the deepest recesses of some dark ham-filled cave, the wind of it blowing across the space separating him from the pilots and giving them cause to grimace some. He kept pushing the control keys on his chair as he did, rising up and down as if it were a child’s ride at a carnival.

Finally, he pried himself up and went to the front, squeezing between Roberto and the ensign. He thrust a hand toward one of the navigation controls, quick as an arrow shot. Faster still, Roberto’s hand darted out and caught the conduit by the wrist, stopping him short and holding his arm in check, a thick finger hovering a half inch above the controls. “Those are not for play, sir,” said Roberto, fixing the conduit straight in the eye. “Your operation. My ship. Don’t touch.” The grim line of his mouth made the boundary clear, and the conduit, used to having his way wherever he went, spent several long moments probing Roberto’s dark eyes with his pink-rimmed ones.

He abruptly turned and walked out of the ship.

“This will be fine,” he said, speaking directly to Vorvington. “I expect it will go without the least hiccup. You may tell Her Majesty that we might actually survive.” Vorvington arched an eyebrow, somewhat bewildered by the sudden turn of events, so the conduit clarified with the jerk of a stubby thumb over his shoulder, back toward the interior of the ship. “There are no sacrificial goats in there.”

Admiral Jefferies spent barely a moment fathoming the nature of the test the conduit had put his pilots through, but when he’d gathered the meaning of it, he nodded. While he was happy that the conduit found the ship and its crew satisfactory, it also abated similar concerns of his own, concerns voiced often enough by Captain Asad. Clearly the Prosperions believed the teleportation part would work, but it made sense not to risk their people if the fleet felt it had only marginal hope of success based on what they knew of their own technology. The conduit had done a nice job of ferreting out the truth of it. Clever. But sneaky. The look on Captain Asad’s face suggested he thought it was more of the latter.

The robed magicians boarded the shuttle and seated themselves around the passenger compartment, choosing seats that kept them all apart, some at the opposite ends of the center rows and others across the front and back rows, a few seats between. They did so in such a way as to make a rectangle of themselves, two wizards on a side. Conduit Huzzledorf came in after them and sat in the middle of their rectangle. As soon as he sat down, he once more began to grumble about the confining nature of the chair.

“I can’t work like this,” he complained, sounding more like a child than the pushy authority he’d seemed only moments before. “Don’t you people eat?”

“Not like you guys do,” said Roberto, then hastily added, “sir.”

“Well, if we don’t die doing this,” the conduit said, “I shall have to thank you with a fine meal and rob you of all that wiggle room you have up there. Then you’ll see what it’s like. I feel like a plum pudding stuffed in a shot glass.”

“I’m going to hold you to that,” said Roberto. “Now, let’s do this.”

Once everyone was settled, the shuttle doors were closed and the cabin pressurized. It was time to find out what, exactly, would happen to an Earth ship after a long teleport. The probes they’d tested had been all right. So had the unmanned shuttles they’d sent from Little Earth into space just beyond Luria. A brief flickering of the lights, no worse than had been the effects of Altin’s Combat Hop. So this was the big test. Manned, and going for distance. A real trial of power, courage and capacity for the people of both worlds.

Roberto and the young ensign were each given fast-cast amulets, pulled from the pocket of the youngest mage and handed out before takeoff. The amulets were set to carry them back to a safe location in the Teleporters Guild Hall in Crown City, which, while not precisely back where they belonged, was quite good enough, as everyone agreed, should something go wrong. “Straight back to Crown if it looks like tea time on Duador,” said the conduit. Neither Roberto nor Ensign Nguyen got a very good translation of that, but the intent was clear enough. They both gladly put on the amulets, grateful for the courtesy.

As a precaution from the fleet’s side, pressure suits were placed in the seats next to each member of the team, compressed in shrink-wrap and with a helmet placed on top. The Prosperions were instructed on how to put the suits on via a brief training video Roberto played for them. It was a last resort, and an unlikely one, but they were not taking any unnecessary risks. A lot was riding on this experiment. When each of them nodded that they were confident in their ability to get into the suit, it was time to go.