Serpent's Reach

  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.

  ix

  “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.

  x

  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.”

  “Take what you can,” Raen said.

  The man asked help; the co-pilot lent a hand, muttered something about hydraulics. Raen set her lips and stayed still the while the frantic crew tried their strength and their wits. The rocks flew under them, tamed to gold and Grey-green, and ahead, the white-hot flare that was water under beta Hydri’s light, serpentine, the River, and horizon-wide, the Sea.

  Poor chance they had if they were carried out into that maelstrom of Istran storms, of endless water, and glare.

  The captain made the right decision: retros jolted them, and they began losing airspeed with such abruptness it felt as if they were halting mid-air. “Hold on,” she shouted at the azi, trying not to think of belowdecks, nigh a hundred men without safety harness. The engines continued to slam at them in short bursts, until they were lumbering along at a wallowing pace and dropping by sickening lurches.

  Beyond recall now, with the controls locked up.

  “Merry,” Raen called to below, “brace up hard down there; we’re going to belly in i
f we’re lucky.”

  Another lurch downward, with alternate trees and grassland before them, with sometime bursts of the engines to give them more glide, and wrestlings by manual at the attitude controls.

  Hills sprang up in their path. We’ll not make it, Raen thought, for the betas were at the end of their resources; and then the jolt of braking engines nigh took the breath out of them and they lumbered into a tilt, feathered with the attitude jets.

  She braced then, for they were committed beyond recall, and the valley walls were right in front of them. The engines jolted, one and then the other, compensating for a damaged wing.

  The nose kept up. Raen watched the land hurtle toward them, waiting for the contact; it hit, slewed—the straps cut in. Then the nose flew up, slammed down, and somebody hurtled past Raen on his way to the control panel. Another hit her in the back. A gun discharged.

  And she remained conscious through impact, with azi bodies before her and about her, while sirens screamed and the shriek of metal testified what was happening below. She cursed through it, watching horrified as the azi in front of her bled his life out on the control panel and the betas screamed. The worse horror was that the azi did not.

  And when the ship was still—when it was evident that the feared fire had not taken place, and the shriek of metal had died—there was still no outcry from the azi. Two of the betas were unconscious, a half dozen of the azi so. Raen gathered herself up on the sloping deck and looked about her. Azi faces surrounded her, calm, bewildered. The betas cursed and wept.

  “We can manual this lock,” Merry’s voice came over the intercom. “Sera? Sera?”

  She answered, looked at the betas, who had begun working at the emergency chute. Hot air and glare flooded the opened hatchway. Merry, down below, was attempting his own solution. Fire still remained a possibility.

  “Get supplies,” she said. “All the emergency kits.” They were not going to be adequate for so many men. She opened a locker and found at least a reserve of sunsuits, lingered to put one on the while azi clambered out, and slid down—her own men, she thanked her foresight, with such clothing, and with weapons. Her own suit was in her luggage, and one of the azi had brought it, but at the moment she had no idea where it was…cared nothing.

  Injured azi moved themselves; the betas she left to betas, and made the slide to safety, into the arms of her azi below, steadied herself and looked about: the hold chute was deployed, and men were exiting there. She staggered across the grass, angry that her knees so betrayed her, found Merry, whose battered face wept blood along a scraped cheek. “The hold—many dead?”

  “Six. Some bad, sera.”

  So few hours, from the null of the pens, and to die, after eighteen years of preparing. She drew a deep breath and forced it out again. “Get them all out.” She sat down on the grass where she was, head bowed against her knees, pulled up the sunsuit hood, adjusted her gloves, small, weary movements. They had to get clear of the ship. The ship was a target. They had to move. She shut her eyes a moment and oriented herself, slipped the visor to a more comfortable place on her nose, adjusted up the cloth about her lower face, as anonymous as the azi.

  Warriors living-chained down from the hatch, hale and whole. She called to them and rose, bared a hand to identify herself. They came, humming and booming in distress at their experience, offered touch. “Life-fluids,” they kept saying, alarmed by the deaths.

  “Watch,” she said, gesturing at all that empty horizon of fields, thinking of raided depots and murdered azi. “Let no majat come on us.”

  “Yess,” they agreed, and hovered never far away.

  An azi brought her luggage, her battered brown case, and she laughed with the touch of hysteria for that, extracted her kit of lotions and medicines and jammed those in her side pocket, cast the rest away.

  The azi were all out, she reckoned. She walked among them, saw that Merry had taken her at her word, for the dead lay in a group, half a dozen not counting the one above, on the bridge; and a little apart from them were four with disabling injuries; and apart from them was a large group of wounded; and a group which bore virtually none. She looked back that course again, suddenly understanding how they were grouped, that the wounded, huddled together, simply waited, knotted up as she had seen Jim do when he was disturbed.

  Waiting termination.

  She cast about in distress, reckoned what would be the lot of any left in beta care. “We carry those that can’t walk,” she told Merry, and cursed the luck, and her softness, and turned it to curses at the hale ones, ordering the emergency litters, ordering packs made, until men were hurrying about like a disturbed hive.

  And the beta captain limped to her…she recognised the greying brows through the mask. “Stay with the ship,” he urged her.

  “Stay yourself.” Her head throbbed and the sun beat through the cloth; she forced herself to gentle language. “Take your chances here, ser. Kontrin feud. Stay out of it.”

  And seeing her own folk ready, she shouted hoarse orders and bade them move.

  North.

  Toward Newhope, toward any place with a computer link.

  xi

  Morn Hald paced the office of the ISPAK station command, waited, settled again at the console.

  Such resources as the Family had at its command he called into use; a code number summoned what vessels waited at Meron, and long as it would take for the message to run via intercomp, as long as it would take those ships to reach Istra—they were as good as on their way.

  He relied on the Hald for that.

  The Meth-maren had provided the overt provocation the Movement needed, the chaos she had wrought at station, that elevated the matter above a feud of Houses. Panicked Outsiders were running, refusing all appeals to return—had fired on a Kontrin vessel. Morn’s thin hands were emphatic on the keys, violent with rage.

  His witness, under his witness the Meth-maren had managed such a thing; and he was stung in his pride. Outsiders were involved. He had hesitated between destroying them and not; and the thought of embroiling himself with that while the Meth-maren found herself escape and weapons—for that he had pulled away, to his prime target, to the dangerous one. There was no knowing in what she had her hand, where her agents were placed by now.

  Revenge: she had never sought it, in all the long years, had wended her insouciant way from dissipation to withdrawal, and retaliated for only present injuries. The Family had tolerated her occasional provocations, which were mild, and seldom; and her life, which crossed none; and her style, which was palest imitation of Pol’s.

  Morn read the comp records and cursed, realising the extent of what she had wrought in so few days: the azi programs disrupted, export authorisations granted, winning the allegiance of ITAK, which was therefore no longer reliable—she knew, she knew, and Outsiders, perhaps not the first to do so, were scattering for safety in their own space. News of that belonged in the hands of the Movement before it reached Council: he sent it, via Meron, under Istran-code, which would be intercepted.

  So she might have launched instructions to Meron, to Andra, to whatever places an agent might have become established over two decades. They had worked to prevent it, had found no agent of the Meth-maren in all the years of their observation; and that, considering what she had done on Istra, disturbed all his confidence.

  Betas hovered distressedly in the background of the command centre, as yet simply dazed by the passage of events—betas who had learned to avoid his anger. But any of them—any of them—could be hers. His own azi stood among them, armoured and armed, discouraging rashness.

  To disentangle a Kontrin from a world was no easy matter. It was one which he did not, in any fashion, relish. His own style was more subtle, and quieter.

  He put in a second call to Pol, waited the reasonable time for it to have relayed wherever he was lodged, and for Pol to have responded. He kept at it, sat with his chitined hand pressed against his lips, staring balefully at the flickering screen
.

  SALUTATIONS, the answer came back.

  He punched in vocal, his own face instead of the Kontrin serpent that masked his other communications; Pol’s came through on his screen, mirror-wise, but Pol’s was smiling.

  “Don’t be light with me, cousin,” Morn said “Where are you?”

  “Newport.”

  “She’s been here,” Morn said. “Was here to meet me, as you were not.”

  Pol’s face went sober. He quirked a brow, looked offended. “I confess myself surprised. A meeting, then, not productive.”

  “Where is she based?”

  “Newhope. You’ve not been clear. What happened?”

  “She cleared in a shuttle and station picks up nothing.”

  “Careless, Morn.”

  Morn gave a cold stare to the set’s eye, suffered Pol’s humour as he had suffered it patiently for years. “I’m holding station, cousin, and I’ll explain in detail later why you should have taken that precaution. It may not please you to learn. Get after her. I’d trade posts with you, but I trust you haven’t been idle in your hours here.”

  He had sobered Pol somewhat “Yes,” Pol said. “I’ll find her. Enough?”

  “Enough,” Morn said.

  BOOK EIGHT

  i

  Jim went about the day’s routines, trying to find in them reason for activity. He had washed, dressed immaculately, seen to a general cleaning for what rooms of the house were free of majat. But the sound of them filled the house, and what jobs could occupy the mind were goon done, and the day was empty. One frightened domestic azi held command of the kitchen, and together they prepared the day’s meals on schedule, two useless creatures, for Jim found himself with no appetite and likely the other azi did not either, only that it was routine, and maintenance of their health was dutiful, so that they both ate.

  There was supper, finally, with no cessation of the frenetic hurryings in the garden, the movements at the foundations. Night would come. He did not want to think on that.