“Sir, we have a ship emerging,” said Galton.
“A ship?”
Morev couldn’t keep the relief from his voice, or the surprise. An exploratory drone had been sent back through the wormhole to inform Military Command of their situation, but even with the system of relay stations to boost its signal, any help would have taken time to reach them. Perhaps an Illyri vessel had been in the vicinity of the wormhole when the drone emerged, although Morev had not been aware of any activity scheduled for that sector. Still, any aid that could be offered would be gratefully accepted, especially if it meant that they could mount a rescue on the Tormic surface. If the arriving ship had a shuttle, or its commander was willing to enter the atmosphere of Torma . . .
The Envion’s scanners identified the ship from its contact signal as soon as it came within range: the Dendra, smaller even than the Envion, and with a crew of no more than six. It must, thought Morev, have endured an unpleasant trip through the wormhole. It was a wonder that it was still in one piece.
“What’s a Civilian vessel doing out here?” wondered Morev.
Civilian ships were rarely found far from the vicinity of Illyr. The great Illyri Conquest of the universe was in the hands of the Military and its rivals, the Diplomatic Corps. Civilians merely represented the masses in the Illyri Council, siding with the Military or the Diplomats as the need arose.
Galton pointed at the screen.
“Sir, take a look at that scan. She’s a wreck.”
The Dendra was fortunate to still be in one piece. It had not been designed for long-distance travel, and the wormhole had taken its toll. The ship was barely functioning. An adjustment to the scan revealed further damage to the starboard hull.
“Wormhole?” asked Morev.
“No, those look like weapon blasts, and recent too. She’s been attacked.”
“Hail her,” said Morev.
“This is the Military destroyer Envion calling Civilian transport Dendra,” Galton transmitted. “Respond, Dendra.”
“This is Alis, pilot of the Dendra,” came the reply. “We’re very glad to see you, Envion.”
“And we’re surprised to see you, Alis,” interrupted Commander Morev. “We had no notification of your intended use of the wormhole.”
“We came under attack. It was a last resort.”
“Attack from whom?”
“Unknown vessels. I think we shook them off, but it was a close thing.”
“What is your mission, Alis?”
This time, it was not Alis who answered. Another voice came over the speakers. It sounded unusually calm, despite the aftermath of an attack and an unanticipated wormhole trip.
“I am the mission, Commander. My name is Councillor Tiray, Civilian representative on the Illyri Council of Government, and I request sanctuary on board the Envion.”
Certain rules of behavior governed the Illyri, particularly when it came to vessels in deep space. One was that a request for sanctuary, or for assistance from a troubled ship, could not be ignored. To do so was regarded as a serious crime, and led inevitably to imprisonment. Under the circumstances, Morev had no option but to reply as he did.
“Your request is granted, Councillor,” he said. “Approach at will.”
• • •
Morev and Galton watched the Dendra draw closer. The Envion’s docking bay had been cleared, and the Dendra would land in the space that had once been occupied by the shuttle lost on Torma. The ship was close enough for the cockpit lights to be visible. Galton could almost make out the pilot’s face.
An alarm sounded through the ship, and a voice from the command deck came through to Morev’s receiver.
“Commander, we have two more ships emerging from the wormhole. Scans reveal no identifying markers, but they’re armed.”
The Envion’s artificial intelligence system immediately produced an image of the approaching vessels. They looked battered and old, and even less capable of boosts than the Dendra. They should not have been able to come through the wormhole, but the scan revealed that their appearance was deceptive. Beneath their exteriors, they were heavily shielded, and boasted massive engine power.
“They look like Nomads,” said Morev.
Nomads: those who had rejected Illyri society, either out of idealism or, more typically, because they were outlaws, or deserters. They had bases—little more than temporary communities hidden in forests and mountains—on some of the outlying worlds of the Illyr system, although for the most part they preferred to keep on the move, for the Illyri authorities always raided their settlements when they were found. Nomads scavenged for parts and supplies, their ships resembling floating scrap heaps, but the most daring were not above attacking lone freighters. On Earth, the worst of them would have been termed pirates.
“But Nomads wouldn’t dare—” Galton began to say.
Morev was no longer listening. His soldier’s instincts had kicked in.
“Battle stations!” he ordered, his voice ringing through the ship. “Prepare for combat!”
CHAPTER 12
Ani wasn’t sure what to do about her friend Syl. Yes, they’d come here together, joining the Sisterhood to escape certain death, and yes, they knew something wasn’t right about Syrene. But they’d barely seen the Red Witch since they’d arrived, and even then she’d been surprisingly pleasant once they’d landed on the rock over which she reigned. Syrene herself showed them to their quarters, pointing out the fine Egyptian cotton sheets that she personally had supplied, direct from Earth, “so that you’ll feel at home,” and the soaps that were in the bathroom, scented with real French lavender. She’d even placed a mounted photograph of Andrus beside Syl’s bed, and another of Ani’s parents beside her own, but Syl had turned the antique silver frame facedown for the first few weeks, until finally Althea had wrapped it in tissue and put it away.
No, Syrene wasn’t all bad, even if Syl couldn’t see it.
The rest of them were only trying to help, to educate them in the Sisterhood’s ways. Yes, even Tanit. Honestly, if only Syl could see how gentle Tanit had been earlier, how kind, or how hard the tutors were trying to teach them everything that they knew; if only she could see how much being here could benefit them both, but Syl seemed determined to hate everyone and everything that was the Sisterhood. Sure, it didn’t help that there were those who insisted on calling Syl “Smelly,” but it was a childish slight, and Ani felt worn down by Syl’s constant suspicion and negativity.
Did Syl not listen in history class? Why would she not acknowledge the great bravery and immense sacrifice the Sisters had made in the name of all that was good about the Illyri?
In the early days, the Nairene Sisterhood had been based on the homeworld, Illyr, where the order had started as something of an asylum for women who did not fit in, a refuge for unmarriageable females, awkward females, the argumentative, the opinionated, and all who might cause a ruckus in a gender-segregated society. The Sisterhood quietly provided a shelter and a home, and thus troublesome females were safely shut away from their world, where they could not question its ways or sow their dissent.
But the Sisters were not content with seeing out their days idly, and so they read. They read everything. (And Syl loved books, reasoned Ani; she loved learning, just like the Sisterhood. So why couldn’t she just fit in?)
Those crones and shrews of old had collected manuscripts, memoirs, and histories, cataloging and filing, and then they gathered more words still, and they wrote their own. They drew intimate family trees, and studied bloodlines, ancestry, genetics, and heredity.
They mapped the stars and the orbits of the moons above them, and they analyzed the soil and stones beneath their feet. They nurtured plants in the extensive gardens of the original Convent of Arain, and dissected them until they understood their workings, and then dissected in turn the creatures that made their
homes among the roots and leaves. In time the Sisters extended their expertise to the plants of other worlds, growing, reaping, learning, creating miniature alien environments crafted from crystal and quartz. The Sisters built, they experimented, they explored ideas, they made extensive notes, and gradually the convent grew into a library, and the library grew into a repository, and the Sisters could ask any price for access to their vast store of information. Scribes, leaders, and philosophers came to them for their wisdom, and the Sisters and their growing network of convents became essential to the world that once shunned them.
In time, the Sisterhood’s beginnings as a cloister for burdensome females was forgotten, and it became revered. Its convents attracted only the most brilliant Illyri girls, and while the Sisters were willing to offer advice and access to their records, they preferred to have as little as possible to do with outsiders.
And yes, Ani was happy to admit that bad elements may have crept in, but surely they could be eradicated, given time, and there was still so much to marvel at, so much to admire. After all, look at what the Nairenes had already achieved; look at the troubles they’d overcome!
Because things had changed for the Sisters with what became known as the Fall, when tyranny overtook the Illyri. At the time it was decreed that all knowledge was to be eradicated—books, recordings, moving images, art, music—and the Illyri Empire rebuilt from fire and ash. Academics, writers, musicians, artists, all were executed. Anyone with an education beyond the most basic was imprisoned, exiled, or killed. Many were worked to death. Families were torn apart. Whole cities burned.
The Sisterhood, by their very nature, became targets for the Fallen. Their sanctuaries were sacked, the Sisters raped and killed, their beautiful old volumes and carefully preserved documents providing fuel for their funeral pyres.
It was then that the seven most senior Sisters decided to leave. They filled seven shuttles with the most valuable items from their collection, and digital copies and downloads of everything else. They had no room for any of the Novices or the other Sisters, but none complained, not even the youngest of them, for they understood the necessity of their sacrifice.
The shuttles blasted off from Illyr as the Fallen stormed the gates of the Convent of Arain, and headed for Avila Minor. One was shot down before it could leave the Illyri atmosphere, and another crashed on the moon and was utterly destroyed. The other five landed just as the sky was fading to dusk. The moon was cooling after the scorching heat of the day and the night creatures had not yet begun to feed. The Sisters, who had studied the geography of the moon, hid themselves in an ancient cave system. They survived on rations, and by hunting, and thus began the Marque. Of course, the Fallen sent troops to find them, but they had not studied Avila Minor as the Sisterhood had. The sun burned them to blackened bones by day, and at night the creatures that lived below ground came out and fed on the remains.
In class, when the Novices were told of the Sisters’ triumph, spontaneous applause had broken out, and even Syl had joined in the cheering.
But it had quickly died down when they had learned that two of the First Five had also perished in that first year.
The remaining three planted seeds, and cultivated the seedlings, growing them beneath the ground in the small ecosystems they’d perfected on Illyr. They scavenged their shuttles for equipment, and slowly they created a home for themselves.
The Fall could not last. The Fallen’s primitivism did not spread to the outlying colonies, and in time those colonies came to the aid of the homeworld, but the Fallen refused to surrender, and even in captivity they vowed to keep fighting. Mass executions followed, and some still believed this final bloodletting, while ending the war, had scarred the Illyri soul forever.
Eventually a shuttle was sent to rescue the Sisters and return them to Illyr, but they refused to leave, knowing full well that what happened once could happen again, for history repeats itself. So they sold the land on which their ruined convents once stood. They demanded compensation for their losses from the new Illyri government, and received it. They poured all of their wealth into extending and fortifying the Marque, utilizing the complex system of caves and underground passages that riddled their moon’s rocky strata like a honeycomb. The First Realm was duly constructed, housing the earliest library, along with living quarters for the Sisters. This was said to be where the five most senior Sisters, successors to the First Five, still lived to this day, led by Ezil, the oldest of them all. They had become hermits, devoted to learning, and nobody had seen Ezil or the other four leaders in public in many years.
Still, Ani thought about them often, and sometimes she felt their presence in her dreams, and wondered about the fantastical knowledge they must possess and the things they could teach her. But while Ani wondered, Syl scoffed and sneered. Syl’s attitude made Ani feel lonely and isolated, and forced her to turn to the other Gifted for company and support.
Had she been a little older, and a little more mature, Ani might have realized that this was precisely the Sisterhood’s intention.
CHAPTER 13
Night fell. Outside the Marque, the scorched red desert of Avila Minor came to life as the sands cooled. The moon was utterly dark. Only the Marque held light, glittering in the windows of the buildings and towers above the surface, and, in the older Realms, shining from mountains and hills that had been transformed within, hollowed out in the earliest years of its construction.
In the blackness, the hunting began.
• • •
The shuttle descending toward the moon was heavily shielded, its technology so advanced that even the majority of those at the highest levels in the Military—and certainly those in the Diplomatic Corps—had no idea of its existence. It came in low, invisible to the radars of the Marque, and landed within sight of the Twelfth Realm.
From the sands nearby, drawn by the vibrations of the vessel, emerged a heavily armored arthropod known as a cascid. It was the size of a large dog, the tracheae through which it breathed fed by the oxygen-rich atmosphere of the low-gravity moon, thus enabling it to grow bigger than comparable species on Illyr or, indeed, Earth. Its mandibles were large enough to crush the head of a full-grown Illyri, and sharp enough to cut through bone and metal. It approached the shuttle curiously. It had no conception of fear. There was only hunger.
But the shuttle was too large for the cascid to attack alone. It released chemical secretions, summoning others of its kind to overwhelm the prey, and soon the desert around the shuttle was alive with the creatures, each releasing its own secretions in turn until the whole swarm was driven into a frenzy. Finally, seemingly in unison, they moved in to attack the shuttle.
A series of small vents opened in the shuttle’s underbelly. A low hissing emerged from them, followed by jets of white gas expelled at high pressure. Within seconds the approaching swarm was enveloped in clouds of liquid nitrogen, freezing them in place, creating a bizarre arthropod sculpture, as though the creatures had been hacked from ice. The panicked secretions of their dying were enough to discourage others from approaching.
The gas dispersed.
The shuttle waited.
• • •
Elda’s quarters were among the smallest and most basic in the Marque, as befitted a Novice who was little better than a servant. She had a bedroom, an adjoining bathroom that was barely larger than an upright coffin, a single crate that served as a rough table, one hard chair, and a bed that was more comfortable without its mattress than with it. A closet for her possessions took up so much of the remaining space that she had to turn sideways to move between it and her bed.
Elda had lived in that room for four years, but she would live there no longer. The backboard from her closet lay on the floor. From the space behind it she had retrieved a small locked box, and now its contents were spread out on the bed. They included an ultrathin darksuit that had been squeezed into a cylinder li
ttle bigger than her thumb; a short, sharp killing blade; and a pulse weapon disguised as a pen, with an electronic beacon built into it.
Elda caught sight of herself in the mirror above her table. Oh, Tanit, she thought, if only you could see me now. The Elda who had haunted the tunnels and corridors of the Marque—cleaning, scrubbing, watching, listening—was no more. The young female in the mirror stood tall. The look of perpetual fear that she wore as a mask was gone, and in its place was only grim determination. Four years, now about to end. Four years of making herself so inconsequential, so unambitious, so mundane, that the Sisterhood had virtually ceased to notice her. And because she was entrusted with the filthiest, most boring of tasks, the kind given to only a handful of others apparently like her—the slow, the clumsy, the talentless, the ones who, in a different age, would have been painlessly killed for failing to live up to the Sisterhood’s high standards—she had been allowed access to areas of the Marque forbidden to other Novices. Elda possessed keys and codes shared only with the ordained Red Sisters, and she had used them wisely. True, she had failed in one of her tasks—to discover the precise whereabouts of Ezil and the other four senior Sisters, or even if they were still alive at all—but she would bring from the Marque other information of value and importance. Most of all, she now knew that Syrene was working to develop the psychic abilities of young female Illyri, something previously unsuspected outside the Marque. Elda also believed that she understood the reason why Syrene had initiated this program.
Finally, she had succeeded in mapping most of the Marque, and also possessed the details of its security systems and the disarm codes for the shields. For the first time in centuries, some of the Marque’s deepest secrets would be revealed, and the great labyrinth would be vulnerable to its enemies. All this, achieved by a female who had known only contempt in that place.
Her true name was not even Elda, although she wore Elda’s face. The real Elda had died seven years before, taken from her loving parents by a weak heart. But before her death could be announced, Elda’s parents received visitors in the form of a pair of senior Military advisers. Elda’s father and mother were both loyal members of the Military who had watched the rise of the Diplomatic Corps with unease. Even in their grief, they lived only to serve. They agreed to hide the fact of their daughter’s death, and to accept another in her place: a young Illyri female who looked exactly like their lost child thanks to the wonders of ProGen skin; whose genetic profile had been manipulated to pass even the most sensitive of tests; who spoke and acted just as their own Elda had done. In fact, so brilliant was the replication that, in time, they almost forgot she was not their own child, and when at last she was accepted into the Sisterhood, they mourned their daughter for a second time.