Dragon Rigger (19 page)

Kan-Kon whooped and grinned at his unhappy partner. "How much you got?"

* * *

Even after the answer came back from Flaire on Vela Oasis, approving the sale price, it was no easy matter to work out all of the details. Jael gratefully left most of that in Ar's hands while she completed her research on the fastest course from Cargeeling to the distant mountain realm.

When the dust had settled, Jael and Ar were listed as first and second in command, respectively. Kan-Kon, or rather, AAA Refitting and Resupply, Unlimited, was listed as minority shareholder. Kan-Kon could have demanded more, and they would have given it to him, but as he said, "Hell, you think I want it on my shippin' record that I
ordered
one of my ships to fly the mountain route? It's outta my hands—outta my hands. Just pay me my share o' the profits." There was some discussion about a cargo manifest for the trip—which might, after all, recover the costs of their voyage once they reached Lexis or another port. Jael was reluctant to take on the responsibility for a cargo, but they finally settled on a small manifest of surplus optronics parts that AAA had purchased at auction some time ago and had been unable to get rid of.

There was one more thing that seemed to be on Kan-Kon's mind, but he seemed to be having trouble getting around to saying it. Jael thought perhaps she knew what it was. "Would you . . . Kan-Kon, are you changing your mind? Would you like to come with us?" She glanced at Ar, who merely looked puzzled.

Kan-Kon turned white. "By the holies, no!" he whispered. "But—" and he hesitated and swallowed hard, and Jael realized that she had, perhaps inadvertently, touched upon what was bothering him. "There is somethin' I want to say before you go," he murmured. "And that's . . ." He swallowed again.

"What is it, Kan-Kon?" Jael asked softly.

"Well . . . it's about when I was there. With Hoddy. When I . . . when I let him . . . die." Kan-Kon's hands were moving in small circles around one another, wringing and clasping; Jael had never seen him look so nervous before.

"You didn't
let
him die," Jael whispered. "You couldn't have stopped it."

"Couldn't I?" Kan-Kon said plaintively. "Couldn't I? You don't know that—"

"But the dragons! What could you have done against the dragons?"

Kan-Kon nodded and wrung his hands some more. "I don't . . . exactly know.
But Jael—remember
this!
You
can change things in the Flux!
You can change things!
" He groaned, almost whimpering. "I forgot, Jael. I forgot that. Don't let the same thing happen to you, okay? Okay?"

Jael nodded. "Okay."

He seemed to brighten, and looked from Jael to Ar and back again. "Good, then. Good!" He picked up a hardprint from his desk and waved it in the air. "Shall we go give our new ship a look-over?"

Jael jumped up without answering. She didn't have to. It was all she could do to keep from running across the spaceport field.

* * *

By the beginning of the second week following,
Seneca
was reregistered, fueled, provisioned, and waiting on a liftoff pad. They would depart in the morning.

Jael could scarcely wait. Tonight they would sleep aboard ship. Tonight, she knew, she would sleep the restless sleep of a soldier before battle.

Space!

Liftoff came precisely on time, at 0842 local. The tow carried them swiftly into space and left them on an outbound course, rising out of the plane of the ecliptic of Cargeeling's sun. After a check of the rigging systems, Jael took up her station in the starboard rigger-alcove. Reclining in the couch, she took a deep breath. Her vision of the console overhead darkened, and her senses sprang outward into the net, into the mists of the Flux. She was floating in space, the ship invisible behind her. There appeared to be a white layer of fog below her, a morning mist clinging to the surface of an infinitely deep sea. It was a mist that no morning sun would ever burn away.

Ar joined her in the net like a swimmer slipping silently into the water. They exchanged glances, and together they took the ship down, a gleaming silver submarine dropping beneath the waves into a world that knew no limits in time or space. The Flux seemed at once quieter and vaster, and yet more alive, than the realm of normal-space. Once they began moving, Jael became aware of the distant whisper of worlds moving through the currents of the water, far, far away.

Time passed, as they reacclimated themselves to the net and to the Flux. For Jael, it was her first time rigging in fourteen weeks, and she felt like a swimmer whose muscles had tightened from disuse. Even Ar had to reorient himself to the ship. Not only had he just come from flying another ship; but
Seneca's
flux-pile systems had been completely overhauled, resulting in a different feel to this once-familiar net. Together, they flew carefully, testing the ship's movements, until they were sure they were ready for the faster layers of the Flux.

Ed was another matter. Ar favored waiting until they were well under way before bringing the parrot into the net, on the theory that the more smoothly they were flying, the easier it would be to merge his rigging personality with theirs. Jael thought it better to sort out any problems now, while they were still in the easy waters. Soon enough, they would be flying for all they were worth. Ar conceded, and soon afterward Ed was flying around in the net, happily scrawwwwing and screeeeing as he exuberantly tested the limits of the bubble surrounding them, and pausing occasionally to pluck at the fruit of a tropical cybertree that Jael had introduced into the net for him.

They kept the submarine-bubble image for a while, extending large ghostly fins into the currents to carry them along. The image was of their making, but the actual currents were objectively real, sensed by the rigger-net and transformed through their personal intuition into images that they could craft and control. That was one characteristic which distinguished the mountain realm of the dragons from other regions of the Flux. The landscape there was far less mutable, their control over it limited mostly to the altering of their own physical form. Why this was true, she could only guess: perhaps it was because of the living beings there—the dragons, ifflings, and who knew what else. She in truth knew little about life in the dragon realm, or the rules by which life was lived there.

In her rigger-school training, when the subject of the dragons-in-space legend was first raised, the instructors had spoken at length of the dangers of taking legend too seriously, of mistaking one's own prejudices and expectations for realities inherent to the Flux. That was good wisdom; but those instructors, she guessed, would never have believed the truth of her experiences along the legendary "mountain route."

Just the thought was enough to remind her of the urgency of their mission. Without a word, she began pushing herself harder. The faster, deeper currents beckoned, and time was fleeing. . . .

* * *

The surviving iffling-child nearly missed its opportunity to follow the human rigger. While keeping its distance from the dangerous false-iffling, it had been trying to save its strength, drawing energy from the distant light of this world's sun, while keeping a silent watch on the human rigger's spirit-presence. It felt fairly confident that its message to her had been heard. But it was shocked when it realized that the rigger-spirit was suddenly rising away from the surface of its world. The iffling shot upward in pursuit. Outside the atmosphere, the sunlight was stronger, giving it just enough strength to pursue and intercept the speeding vessel in which the rigger Jael had clothed herself. Should it continue to follow at a distance? the iffling wondered. Or should it try to penetrate the conducting enclosure of the vessel? Something odd was happening around it, some sort of disturbance in the flow of space and time. What was the human doing?

As the iffling-child wondered, it saw the enemy-spirit appear, momentarily, from
within
the vessel. The thing darted back into the ship, no doubt having spotted its adversary. That left no question: the iffling streaked forward to catch the gleaming ship. Wary of the enemy, it slipped in through an opening where energy pulsed, gaining a breath of strength as it did so. It darted through the shadow-structure of the ship, seeking a place of safety from which to watch the human.

It found a spot near the focal point of the disturbance. Hardly had the iffling settled into place when the disturbance deepened without warning. Dizzily the iffling clung to the structure, aware of the enemy also watching from the far side of the vessel. The web of space-time opened in the center of the disturbance, the threads separating from one another, the vessel sliding into the underrealm of this strange human reality. The threads closed behind it as the vessel plunged deep into the underrealm.

The iffling was both terrified and relieved. An instant later and it might have been left behind, alone in human space, the rigger out of its reach forever. The iffling clung to its position ever more guardedly, watching the enemy, watching the human in its ship, waiting to see where it would go.

Home, perhaps. Home.

* * *

Jael, do you want to
rest
awhile?

She glanced from the bow position, where the bubble was spearing through the fast-flowing waters, back toward Ar, who was sitting at the stern wielding a long-handled tiller. The image was absurd: a submarine with a sailboat's tiller. But it was working. Their course was taking them over a rising and dipping bottom surface, following the contours of a strange abyssal plain as the light-years flowed around them. Jael shook her head.
This is no place for one person to try to handle the ship
, she answered, focusing her control on the steering planes at the prow of the ship.

We could ease off and drift higher for a while
, Ar said.
We need to rest sometime, you know.

He was right, of course. Nevertheless, she shook her head. The current was moving in the precise direction she wanted, and she didn't want to lose any time because of something like a need for rest. She knew she was being stubborn—but sometimes, she thought, stubborn is the right way to be.

Ar didn't ask again, though they had been flying for most of a shipday. They both knew it was a question not only of how long it would take to get there, but how tired they wanted to be when they arrived. Would they be flying into a fight? Would they find Windrush on trial for his life, the way they had found Highwing—or would they find something they couldn't even imagine? Whatever the answer, Jael knew this: she didn't want to mourn over fallen friends because she had answered the summons too late. She could forgive herself for many failings, but not that.

* * *

They fell endlessly downward through an atmosphere of pastel clouds. It was their third day of flight, and the deep-sea imagery was long behind them.
Seneca
was dropping like a floating seed through an atmosphere reminiscent of a gas-giant planet. In reality, they were crossing downward through the galactic plane, seeking new currents that would angle back upward from the south, toward Lexis and the other Aeregian worlds. She had no interest in reaching those star systems; but somewhere below, coursing upward toward them, were currents that swept past a landscape filled with images of mountains. Even farther to the south, and outward on the galactic radial, lay a small backwater planet named Gaston's Landing, where Jael had been born and raised. She had not been back there since her fateful trip with Mogurn.

Heads up, Ed!

The parrot responded to Ar's call by banking left, then right, as a billowing cloud fled by them. Ed was driving, leading the way now and doing a superb job of steering them through the patchwork of clouds. But he had a tendency to be hypnotized by his own flying.
Arrk,
he muttered, bringing them back on course.
Air
so
deep! Rawk! Hit bottom soon?

Jael had been wondering the same thing. They had been dropping for a long time now, and it was hard to be sure of their progress. The nav libraries were helpful, but only up to a point. The currents and forms of the Flux changed constantly—as did the galaxy itself, of course—but on a much faster time scale than the normal-space galaxy. One took note of other riggers' flight reports, but one also expected to be surprised.

Jael was plagued by a recurring fear that her intuition about the Flux, and about their course, was not entirely clear, that she was being subtly influenced by . . . she didn't know what . . . momentary waking dreams, perhaps, or by her imagination of what might be happening in the realm in her absence. There was a voice that seemed to speak to her in the silence of the net, telling her there was no reason to hurry, or to be going at all. And yet at other times another voice seemed to whisper that the need had never been greater.

She wondered, sometimes, if she was descending into madness. But she knew which way her heart spoke, and it made her want to fly faster than ever.

* * *

The bottom of the atmosphere came up like a fist, flat and massive and dark. Ed saw it first and squawked, and Jael called at once for a new image.
Ar!
Aerobat!
she cried, extending her arms.

The ship sprouted the stubby lifting surfaces of an aerobatic aircraft, and she began hauling up hard on the nose, taking care not to overstress the wings. The net shuddered but held, as Ar and Ed joined her in the effort.

It was going to be close. The ground rose to meet them. Their dive slowly flattened out.
Hawwwk! Hawwwk!
Ed cried, beating his wings fiercely in an effort to pull them into a climb.

Ar
,
hold it steady!
Jael cried, pitching the nose up still harder.

They were in level flight now, but a series of hills loomed up before them. The wind screamed in her ears. They began to climb, turning their speed back into altitude. But the hills seemed to grow as they loomed closer. She had only moments to decide: go around, or over? In her instant of hesitation, she felt Ed give a powerful kick upward. Grimacing, she held the wings level. The hills rose . . . and the ship rose just a little faster . . . and the hilltops flashed beneath them with a
whump!
of turbulence.