Serpent's Reach (31 page)

The signs flashed to the board. No opposition, seven abstentions, four absent.

It was fact.

A cheer went up from Council, raucous and harsh after the long silence.

The shuttle docked, jolted into lock next to one of the Outsider vessels. The azi caught at support, and one fell-shame-faced, recovered his footing. “All right, all right,” Raen comforted him, touching his shoulder, never taking her eyes from the crew. “Squad two, stay with this ship and keep your guns aimed at the crew. They may try to trick you; you’re quite innocent of some manoeuvres, fresh as you are from Registry. Don’t reason. Just shoot if they touch anything on that control panel.”

“Yes, sera,” said the squad leader, who had seen service before. The crew stayed frozen. She gathered up Merry and squad one and rode the overcrowded lift down to the lock, where the other squads and the Warriors stood guard over the Outsiders.

They were free of restraint, Tallen and his folk, huddled in a corner with the guns of eighty-odd azi to advise them against rashness. Raen beckoned them to her and they came, cautiously, across the dark cavern of the hold. One of their own men had Mundy in hand, had him calmed, had restored him to a fragile human dignity, and Mundy glared at her with hate: no matter to her. He was neither help nor harm.

“We’re going out,” she said to Tallen. “Ser, there’s one of your ships beside us and its hatch is open. We’ve warned them. When you’re aboard, take my advice and pull all Outsider ships from station as quickly as you can undock. Run for it.”

Tallen’s seamed face betrayed disturbance, as it betrayed little. “That far, is it?”

“I’ve risked considerable to get you here. I’ve given you free what you spent men to learn. Believe
me
, ser, because from the agents the Reach has swallowed you’ll
never
hear. If it’s clear they’re not azi, they’ll perish as assassins, one by one. It’s our natural assumption. I’ll give you as much time as I can to get clear of station. But don’t expect too much, ser.”

Merry was by the switch. She signalled. He opened up to the ramp.

It was as she remembered the dock, vast and shadowy and cold, an ugly place. Security agents and armoured ISPAK police ringed the area. She walked out, her own azi about her, rifles slung hip-level from the shoulder. She wore no Colour, but plain beige, no sleeve-armour. It was likely that they knew with whom they had to deal, all the same, for all the terseness of the messages she had returned their anxious inquiries.

Next to them, the Outsider ship waited. “Go,” she told Tallen, whose group followed. “Get over there, before something breaks loose here.”

He delayed. She saw in surprise that he offered his hand, publicly. “Kont’ Raen,” he said, “can
we
help
you?
”

“No,” she said, shaken by the realisation of finality. Her eyes went to the Outsider’s ramp, the lighted interior.

To go with them, to see, to know—

Their duty forbade. And so did something she vaguely conceived as her own. She found tears starting from her eyes, that were utterly unaccustomed.

“Just get out of here,” she said, breaking the grip. “And believe me.”

He apparently did, for he walked away quickly then, and his people with him, as quickly as could not be called a run. They leached the ramp, rode it up. The hatch sealed after.

Raen folded her arms within her cloak, the one hand still holding her gun, and stared at the ISPAK security force, which her own azi faced with lowered weapons. Breath frosted in the icy air.

“Sera,” one called to her. “ISPAK board has asked to see you. Please. We will escort you.”

“I will see them here,” she said, “on the dock.”

There was consternation among them. Several in civilian dress consulted with each other and one made a call on his belt unit. Raen stood still, shivering with the chill and the lack of sleep, while they proposed debate.

She was too tired. She could not bear the standing any longer. Her legs were shaking under her. “Stand your ground,” she bade the azi. “Fire only if fired upon. Tell them I’ll come down when the board arrives. Watch them carefully.”

And quietly she withdrew, leaving Merry in charge on the dock, trusting his sense and experience. In the new azi she had little confidence; they would not break, perhaps, if it came to a fire fight, but they would die in their tracks quite as uselessly.

She touched the Warriors who hovered in the hatchway, calming them. “We wait,” she said, and went on to the lift, to the bridge, to the security of the unit which guarded the crew and the comfort of a place to sit.

Likely
, she thought,
they’ll arrive at the dock now, now that I’ve come call this way up
.

They did not. She reached past the frozen crew and punched in station operations, listened to the chatter, that at the moment was frantic. Outsider ships were disengaging from dock one after the other, necessitating adjustments, three, four of them, five, six. She grinned, and listened further, watched them on the screens as they came within view, every Outsider in the Reach kiting outward in a developing formation.

Going home.

A new note intruded, another accent in station chatter. She detected agitation in beta voices.

She pirated their long-scan, and froze, heart pounding as she saw the speed of the incoming dot, and its bearing.

She keyed outside broadcast. “Merry! Withdraw. Withdraw everyone into the ship at once.”

The dot advanced steadily, ominous by its speed near a station, cutting across approach lanes.

They would not have sent any common ship, not if it were in their power to liberate a warship for the purpose. Swift and deadly, one of the never-seen Family warships: Istra station was in panic.

And the Outsider ships were freighters, likely unarmed.

“Sera!” Merry’s voice came over the intercom. “We’re aboard!”

A light indicated hatch-operation.

“Back off,” Raen said to the beta captain. “Undock us and get us out of here.”

He stared into the aperture of her handgun and hastened about it, giving low-voiced orders to his men.

“Drop us into station-shadow,” Raen said. “And get us down, fast.”

The captain kept an eye to the incoming ship, that had not yet decreased speed. Station chatter came, one-sided—ISPAK informing the incoming pilot the cluster formation was Outsider, that no one understood why.

For the first time there was deviation in the invader’s course, a veering toward the freighters.

The shuttle drifted free now, powering out of a sudden, in shadow.

“Put us in his view,” Raen ordered. The captain turned them and did so, crossing lanes, but nothing around the station was moving, only themselves, the freighters, and the incomer.

Raen took deep breaths, wondering whether she should have gambled everything, a mad assault on station central, to seize ISPAK…trusting the warship would not fire.

It fired now. Outsiders must not have heeded orders to stop. She picked it up visually, swore under her breath; the Outsiders returned fire: one of that helpless flock had some kind of weapon. It was a mistake. The next shot was real.

She punched in numbers, snatched a microphone. “Kontrin ship! This is the Meth-maren. You’re forbidden station.”

The invader fired no more shots. He was, perhaps, aware of another mote on his screens; he changed course, leaving pursuit of Outsiders.

“It’s coming for us!” a beta hissed.

Raen scanned positions, theirs, the warship’s, the station’s, the world. In her ear another channel babbled converse with the invader.
Shuttle
…she heard
. One onworld
…
one aloft
…
Plead with you
…

“Sera,” the captain moaned.

“It can’t land,” she said. “Head us for Istra.”

They applied thrust and tumbled, applied a stabilising burst and started their run.

“Shadow!” Raen ordered, and they veered into it, shielded by station’s body, at least for the instant.

“We can’t do it,” someone said. “Sera, please—”

“Do what it can’t do,” she said. “Dive for it.” Her elbow was on the rest; she leaned her hand against her lips, found it cold and shaking. There was nothing to do but ride it through. The calculation had been marginal, an unfamiliar ship, a wallowing mote of a shuttle, diving nearly headlong for Istra’s deep.

Metal sang; instruments jumped and lights on the board flicked red, then green again. “That was fire,” Raen commented, swallowing heavily. A voice in her ear was pleading with the invader. The shuttle’s approach-curve graph was flashing panic.

They hit atmosphere. Warning telltales began flashing; a siren began a scream and someone killed it.

“We’re not going to make it,” the captain said between his teeth. He was working desperately, trying to engage a failed system. “Wings won’t extend.” The co-pilot took over the effort with admirable coolness, trying again to reset the fouled system.

“Pull in and try again,” Raen paid. The beta hit retract, waited, lips moving, hit the sequence again. Of a sudden the lights greened, the recalcitrant wings began to spread, and the betas cried aloud with joy.

“Get us down, blast you!” Raen shouted at them, and the ship angled, heart-dragging stress, every board flashing panic.

They hit a roughness of air, rumbling as if they were rolling over stone, but the lights started winking again to green.

“Shall we die?” an azi asked of his squad leader.

“It seems not yet,” squad-leader answered.

Raen fought laughter, that was hysteria, and she knew it. She clung to the armrest and listened to the static that filled her ear, stared with mad fixation on the hands of the terrified betas and on the screens.

Pol
, she kept thinking,
Pol, Pol, Pol, blast you, another lesson
.

Or it was for him also, too late.

“So it’s you,” Moth said, leaned back in her chair, wrapped in her robes. She stared up at Ros Hald, with Tand; and the Ren-barant, the Ilit. “It’s Halds, is it?”

“Council’s choice,” Ros Hald said.

Moth gave a twisted smile. She had seen the four vacant seats, action taken before she had even announced her intent. “Of course you are,” she said, and did not let much of the sarcasm through. “You’re welcome, very welcome beside me, Ros Hald. Tand, go find some of the staff. We should offer hospitality to my partner-in-rule.”

Tand went. Ros Hald kept watching her nervously. That amused her. “What,” she asked, “do you imagine I’ve let you be chosen…to arrange your assassination, to behead the opposition?”

Of course it occurred to him, to all of them. They would all be armed.

“But I was sincere,” she said. “I shall be turning more and more affairs into your hands.”

“Access,” he said, “to all records.”

You’ve managed that all along
, she thought, smiling.
Bastard!

“And,” he said, “to all levels of command, all the codes.”

She swept a hand at the room, the control panels, the records. The hand shook. She was perpetually amazed by her own body. She had been young—so very long; but flesh in this last age turned traitor, caused hands to shake, voice to tremble, joints to stiffen. She could not make a firm gesture, even now. “There,” she said.

And fired.

The Hald fell, the Ilit; the Ren-barant fired and burned her arm, and she burned him, to the heart. Tand appeared in the doorway, hung there, mouth open.

And died.

“Stupid,” she muttered, beginning then to feel the pain. The stench was terrible. She felt of her own arm, feeling damage; but the right one had not been the strong one, not for a long time.

Azi servants crept in finally. “Clear this out,” she said. Her jaw trembled. She closed the door when they had gone, and locked it. There was food secreted about, an old woman’s senile habit; there was wine, bottles of it; there was the comp centre.

She sat, rocking with the pain of her wound, smiling to herself without mirth.

The ground was coming up fast and the sir was full of burning. They broke through haze and came in over bleak land, desert. It was not what the display showed on the screen; the ship’s computer was fouled. The sweating betas laboured over the board, retaining control over the ship, jolting them with bursts of the braking engines. There was no knowing where they were; cloud and panic had obscured that. They might yet land.

And all at once a mountain wall loomed up in front of them, vast beyond reason.

“Blast!” Raen shouted. “Altitude, will you?”

“That’s the High Range,” one of the betas said. “The winds—the winds—the shuttle’s not built for it, Kontrin.”

“We’re on the way home, we’re over East, blast you: take us up and get over it!”

The deck slanted. They were launching themselves for what altitude they could gain for that sky-reaching ridge. A beta cursed softly, and wept. The High Range loomed up, snow-crowned. Jagged peaks thrust up above the clouds which wreathed them. The mad thought came to Raen that if one must die, this was at least a thing worth seeing—that such a glorious thing existed, uncultivated by Kontrin, who hungered after new things: hers.

Istra, the High Range, the desert—all explored, all possessed, in this mad instant of ripping across the world.

The azi were silent, frozen in their places. The crew worked frantically, sighted their slot in that oncoming wall and aimed for it, the lowest way, between two peaks.

“No!” Raen cried, reckoning the winds that must howl down that funnel. She hit the captain’s arm and pointed, a place where needle-spires thrust against the sky—cursed and insisted, having flown more worlds than earthbound betas knew. He veered, tried it, through turbulence that jolted them. Needles reared up in the screens. Someone screamed.

They went over, whipped over that needled ridge and sucked down a slope that wrung outcries from born-men and azi, downdrafted, hurtling down a vast rock face and outward. She saw spires in the slot they had not taken, reckoned with a wrench at the stomach what they had narrowly done.

“Controls aren’t responding,” the captain muttered. “Something’s jammed up.”