Ruler of Naught (27 page)

No, it did split it,
Osri thought as the lopsided
shape of the shattered moon registered on him, and he saw a dull red glow deep
within the crack. The fragments of the moon were attempting to reunite under
the pull of gravity, heating the rock to a temperature it had not known since
the coalescence of the Charvann system billions of years before.

“Telos—” breathed Lokri, shock widening his eyes. Then his
console beeped. “No traces—wait—” He stabbed at the keys. “Something metallic
at ambient, about a thousand klicks out, 274 mark 33. To you.”

Vi’ya’s console flashed as she accepted the coordinates. The
starfield slewed across the screen, taking the horror out of view. The echo
from Vi’ya’s console on the main screen revealed they were under maximum
acceleration. Moments later the screen flickered and new horror confronted
them.

A terrible moan issued from the intercom. Osri recognized
Jaim’s voice.

It was a ship, as shattered as the moon, seared by plasma
fire, its bow ruptured by a missile strike. It was rotating slowly
end-around-end. There was no sign of life.

“
Sunflame
?” Ivard squeaked.

No one answered. He swayed in his seat.

“Ivard,” said Vi’ya, “go to the dispensary.”

Ivard turned to her, his face sick and one hand clutching
convulsively at his banded wrist.

She added, not unkindly, “Now.”

“I won’t go to the dispensary,” he said, voice cracking. “I
have to know, I have to know.”

“We’ll set up the comm in your bunk,” Marim said.

“I’ll meet you there,” came Montrose’s voice over the comm.

As Marim assisted Ivard out, a tone sounded from the
engineering console. Jaim’s voice floated out, tight and hoarse: “Request
permission to join the boarding crew.”

Vi’ya pulled her hands away from her console and flexed
them. After a long pause she said, “There will be no boarding crew. It may be
rigged for just that.” As Jaim began to protest she continued, “We have
forty-two minutes. Prepare to launch the waldo. Jaim, you can con it from
there. We’ll stand off at one hundred kilometers.”

It took the little machine a surprisingly short time to
reach the wreck of the
Sunflame
. On the screen the picture from its
imagers grew rapidly, then slowed as Jaim prepared to maneuver it through the
gaping hole in the hull near the bridge.

Montrose loomed, seating himself at the empty nav console.
He said to Vi’ya, “I put Ivard under. He’s useless to us now.”

Behind his back, Osri flexed his own hands, which were slimy
with sweat. He gazed up at the viewscreen again.

The jagged edges of the wound in the flank of the
Sunflame
expanded past the sides of the screen, and harsh shadows leapt to life as the
waldo’s lights came on. The interior of the ship was a shambles, the bridge
wrecked. A body hung motionless above one console, its limbs horribly
contorted, its features effaced by vacuum bloat and plasma burn. Over the heart
pocket on the chest of its tattered black uniform was a gold ringed sun.

“Norton.” Montrose’s voice was harsh with shock.

The view rotated as the waldo turned toward the stern and
made its way off the bridge. The rest of the ship was as thoroughly wrecked.
It became increasingly obvious as the terrible remote tour continued that much
of the damage had been done by boarders. Other bodies floated by. Osri
recognized one or two of them from their brief stay at the Rifter hideout, but
as he watched the horror unfold, there was no room in him for triumph.

The imager revealed obscene graffiti scrawled on some walls
in a flaking, black substance that Osri finally realized was blood. His stomach
twisted. He looked away from the viewscreens in the console and glanced at the
others on the bridge: all except Vi’ya exhibited horror or rage. The captain’s
face revealed nothing, though Osri did not like looking at her unblinking
dark eyes.

An occasional click or beep from the instruments was the
only sound, along with the quiet whisper of the tianqi. Finally the little
machine reached the engine room.
“—and Jaim’s bunking with Reth Silverknife
on the
Sunflame
.” Who had said that?

The motion of the machine slowed, then stopped. In the
center of the image was another body, not floating but pinned to an injector
module by a metal rod through its neck. The face was frozen in the distortion
of extreme pain unmasked by the ravages of vacuum. Osri could tell only that it
had been a woman, but he noted the little chimes woven into her hair, like
Jaim’s. A pattern of strange wounds—each consisting of three parallel
gashes—scarred her mostly naked body, with clusters of blackened blood crystals
blooming from them like evil flowers.

A howl of rage and sorrow echoed from the intercom.
“Dasura
chatch-nafari tollim nar-Hreem—“
The last syllable rose into a keening
that raised the hairs on Osri’s neck.

Osri remembered the heel-claws on the image in the rec room.

“Lokri. Take over the waldo. Hold it there,” said Vi’ya.
“Jaim—Jaim.” The keening stopped. “Come to the bridge. Arkad, ready a missile.
Fusion, twenty megatons. Rig for impact detonation and target the
Sunflame
.”

Brandon’s hands moved swiftly over his keys.

Would they not attempt salvage?
Then Osri recalled
something Montrose had once said:
“Jaim is a devout Serapisti.”

They worship fire as a sacrament of Telos, and give the
bodies of their dead to the flames to cleanse their soul for the long journey.

The bridge crew was silent as Jaim entered the bridge. He
had a knife in one hand. In the other he clutched several braids of hair with
the little bells still on them. The harmony of the remaining chimes woven in
his hair was mournful now, some of the bright tones missing.

“Twenty-eight minutes. Is that missile ready?” Vi’ya’s voice
was cold, controlled.

Osri wondered if the tempath’s perception of Jaim’s emotions
right now—not to mention those of the rest of the crew—was akin to staring into
the sun.

“Yes,” said the Aerenarch. He moved aside as Jaim came up to
his console, laying his knife and severed hair carefully on the inlay above the
keypads. The lanky Rifter stood there, staring at the screen, which now showed
the
Sunflame
from an imager on the Telvarna.

“Jaim,” said Vi’ya, her voice low. The lanky Rifter turned a
cold face her way, and once again Osri sustained that prickle of danger at the
scarcely-controlled violence in the man’s gaze.

“We can commit her to the flames immediately and flee,” she
continued, “or, with your help, we can seek vengeance.”

Lokri jerked upright at his console, then subsided as Marim
made a sudden movement. Osri guessed that she had kicked him. Marim watched
Jaim and the captain with pursed lips.

“Vengeance.” Jaim’s voice was harsh, his repetition of the
word midway between a question and acceptance.

That’s not the Serapisti way
, Osri thought, the sense
of danger intensifying. Not that Osri gave credence to any religious
suppositions about the universe. But he knew that the Serapisti were supposed
to find the least destructive way through the course of human events, which had
made Jaim seem relatively sane compared to the rest.

Jaim stood there, radiating tension, and whispered,
“Vengeance.”

At a look from Vi’ya Brandon tapped at his console, apparently
taking the missile back off-line.

“Can you rig the
Sunflame
’s engines for a gee-burst
overload? And do it in the next fifteen minutes? If we can cripple the
fiveskip of whatever shows up,
Telvarna
can deal with it.”

Jaim looked back at the viewscreen. “Don’t know.”

He moved to Lokri’s console, and with a gesture of ironic
invitation, Lokri yielded his place.

Only a madman would get in Jaim’s way, Osri thought.

The image on-screen rotated away from Reth’s savaged body as
the waldo drifted over to a bank of controls. The crew watched in silence as
Jaim worked. Less than a minute later he announced, “I can do it.”

“Good,” said Vi’ya. “Then here’s how it will go.”

The
Telvarna
hung over the ruined surface of Dis, hiding
amidst a reef of dust and fragments ripped from the moon by the impact of the
skipmissile. Vi’ya had brought them to rest with respect to the moon, holding
position with the geeplane. The wreck of the
Sunflame
was just visible over
the horizon.

The viewscreen showed a magnified image of the
Sunflame
,
sparkling with imaging artifacts as the computers struggled with the effects of
the moon fragments fogging up the space around them. The faint, actinic glare
of a welding probe flared occasionally from the rents in the ship as the waldo
followed its programmed course. The comm emitted terse comments almost
discernible through static as the recording prepared by the crew ran through
its loop.

The bridge was silent except for the whisper of the tianqi,
which were now emitting a scent Osri had never encountered before. It made him
feel cold and stony, with a feral edge to his thoughts that he didn’t like. The
feeling matched the expressions of the Rifters around him. Even Brandon’s face
had hardened, unexpectedly calling his oldest brother to Osri’s mind.

Osri shifted on his feet, still leaning against the
bulkhead. Jaim and Montrose had gone to the engine room, so the nav console was
empty, but the captain had not invited him to sit there. There was no other
place for him to sit, but he didn’t want to be locked up in the dispensary, so
he kept silent.

A pulse of bluish light bloomed in the viewscreen.

“Emergence,” said Lokri. “Reads like a frigate. Two thousand
klicks out from
Sunflame.
”

Vi’ya tabbed her comm. “Jaim, take the fiveskip the rest of
the way down, now.”

Osri gritted his teeth, finding that his jaw already ached.
This was the most dangerous part of the trap that Vi’ya had set. Cold-starting
a fiveskip resonance was an iffy thing—and if it didn’t catch they’d be
helpless against the greater speed and firepower of the frigate. But there was
no help for it. Jaim’s work had turned the ruined ship into a gigantic gee
mine. When the
Sunflame
’s engines blew, radiating a sharp-edged
gee-pulse with all their remaining power, any fiveskip within a thousand kilometers
would be crippled, knocked into an unstable resonance that could take up to an
hour to quell.

“Fiveskip off.”

“Target vectoring toward
Sunflame
. Minus eighteen
hundred kilometers.” Lokri’s drawl tightened incrementally toward normal.

Osri felt a spurt of disdain.
Only a Rifter would fall
for this trap.
A naval vessel would stand off at a safe distance and use a
missile or its beam weapons—but not Rifters, with the propensity for savagery
illustrated by what they’d found on board the wreck.
They want more of the
same sadistic fun, and they’ll pay for it.

“Sixteen hundred kilometers. I’ve got an image.”

A window swelled on the viewscreen, revealing the predatory
form of a frigate, molded in the archaic, angular form of the Techno-Mannerism
Revival of 550 years previous. Despite its age, its flourish of projecting
weaponry looked lithe and deadly. On its hull was blazoned a white rose with an
eye in its center, with red flames writhing from between the petals, and in
stylized script its name.

Lokri tapped at his console. “
Hellrose
. Harl Lignis
is captain.”

Marim snorted. “So I guess old Terelli is breathing Void.
Better for us. Lignis’ll want to play before he kills. He’s even more twisty
than Hreem.”

“Is he...” Lokri smiled. “A Dol’jharian?”

Marim jumped, nearly strangling on a laugh of surprise, and
Osri caught his breath when Vi’ya’s black, unblinking eyes turned Lokri’s way,
then back again.

“Fourteen hundred kilometers.” Lokri’s drawl was back.

He think he’s won something.
Osri looked away, his
guts churning.

Brandon’s hands tapped precisely at his console, which still
had Jaim’s knife and hair lying across the top, like a strange kind of
offering. The Tenno glyphs echoing across the top of the main screen rippled
through a series of configurations as more information built up about their
enemy.

“Twelve hundred kilometers.”

The tension on the bridge increased. No one made any unnecessary
movements. Their attention was bent on the frigate, willing it into the killing
radius of the
Sunflame
’s trap.

“One thousand kilometers.”

Vi’ya did not move.

“What are you waiting for?” Lokri snapped, his bravado gone.
“Blast him before he gets wise.”

“The closer he is, the more damage it will do,” Vi’ya said,
her eyes on the screen. “We wait.”

Lokri’s fingers drummed lightly on his console. “Nine hundred
kilometers.”

Osri’s mouth felt dry, but his hands were sweaty. Even if
the trap worked, the frigate bristled with weaponry far outclassing that of the
Telvarna
. He slid a glance at the Aerenarch, but he was impossible to
read, armored behind the Douloi shield.

Lokri tapped at his console, his breath hissing between his
teeth. “Eight hundred kilometers and slowing.” He hesitated. “He’s vectoring
off.”

“Then it is time,” Vi’ya said, and tabbed a key on her console.

There was a faint sparkle from the wreckage of the
Sunflame
and the looped conversations fell silent. The ruined ship crumpled inward, as
if in the grip of an invisible fist; a few hull plates spun away into space. Nausea
surged through Osri and then was gone, so swiftly he wasn’t sure it was the
effect of the gravitational burst from the
Sunflame
’s engines or the
sudden release of tension.