Dream Dancer (26 page)

“You don’t like it? It’s your engagement. . . . You act like I thought it up myself!”

“Easy, Valery. It’s not my engagement and I don’t like it, but I’m not blaming you.”

Valery’s rings tinkled as he shook his head. “Better not,” he growled. “Ever since that damn party of yours, something’s been eating at you.”

“It’s not every man that becomes a husband and then a deserted husband in less than a week . . . it’s not easy on my self-esteem,” Chaeron fenced, trying to assure Valery once more that he saw no blame for his pilot in what had passed. “Bring me something back. I’m going to stay here and revel in the fact that for the first time in much too long I won’t be able to hear anyone else breathing.”

“Umn,” grunted Valery, and stalked out.

“Thou protesteth too much,” murmured Chaeron to the doors hissing shut in Valery’s wake.

The man was seriously abrading Chaeron’s nerves. It was not the first time Chaeron had heard conjecture expressed as fact from Valery; he was one of that group of pilots who insisted that the cruisers and the data pools and the smallest wrist communicator had something in common, some shared awareness which made them all privy to one another despite space and sponge. Chaeron, well grounded in the physical sciences, knew that position to be indefensible, that theory to be without substantive evidence. Maybe the Shechem fleet had been dispatched to Draconis on a mission like unto his own, maybe not. There was no way of knowing. Not unless one was privy to Labayan intelligence, which Chaeron had satisfied himself long ago that Valery was not.

If Selim Labaya had had the audacity to dispatch ships in strength to Draconis, they would meet with a score of his father’s cruisers, waiting at the sponge-hole customarily traveled when Draconis-bound from Shechem.

Customarily: i.e., before Marada. Chaeron flipped the switch that activated a com-line between
Danae
and
Hassid
.

“Yes?” came a clipped, irritated response up through the console’s speakers; the monitor stayed blank, noncommittal.

“Just called to say hello,” Chaeron said, laying his head back and closing his eyes, trying to visualize Marada’s face and match it to what the voice revealed.

“Hello.” The voice revealed nothing.

“Valery thinks Selim Labaya’s sent a force out to Draconis.”

“Maybe.”

Chaeron took a deep breath, expelled it while counting slowly. “You think not?”

“Do you think I’m psychic?”

“Just curious as to your opinion.”

“I’ll try to contain my astonishment. Lords, Chaeron, do you want something? You cannot be lonely, with a full complement of your favorite goons aboard. I am busy, if you are not. As for whether Labaya sent ships after me, that is Parma’s problem.”

“I do want something, Marada. I want to change some of the details of the upcoming engagement, and I want you not to interfere.”

“
Slate
,” said Marada, dryly. “I should not have to remind you that I’m running a cube; only the presentation of its results are deferred. I have to register an objection, obviously.”

“Before you’ve heard what I’m going to do?”

“Even so.”

“Then object. But I am in command here and you will take my orders and obey them exactly, or I will consider you in mutiny and take immediate action. Is that clear?”

“Yes, that is quite clear. Anything else?”

Chaeron could not resist the temptation of being first to break the circuit.

When he turned from the console, he saw Valery leaning back against the control room’s doors with a wistful smile on his sharp face so that he looked like a warship’s grinning prow. “I wish I could do that,” Valery teased. “But it was almost as good, watching you.”

“You shouldn’t have been listening.”

Valery handed Chaeron a meal packet. Chaeron hefted it and put its squishy warmth on the console.

“When are you going to give your ‘corrections’?”

Chaeron found himself chuckling, so delicately had Valery stressed that last word: corrections. And in his flood of good feelings he answered Valery that he could not do so until he was sure beyond a doubt that no aggressive action would be forthcoming from Shechem.

With a quizzical look, the pilot tore open his packet with sharp teeth and, holding it high, squeezed the contents into his mouth until only an empty, greenish sack was left. That he crumpled and tossed into the narrow refuse chute.

“How long until you’re sure? We’re within strike range. They surely would have done something by now . . . you want to wait until you’re in there?”

“Don’t push it, Valery. It is certainly odd that we are so close and they have not even queried us, let alone sent out a welcoming committee. It is too odd.”

“You think it’s a trap?”

“I did not say that. Perhaps they are all asleep. Or very stupid. I do not know. . . . I am concerned that if something untoward happens, that it cannot be said that we were all asleep, or very stupid.”

Valery muttered something, eased into the pilot’s couch with an automatic swiveling of his head that circuited every display monitor festooning the
Danae’s
circular waist.

“What?”

“Nothing,” murmured the pilot, reminding himself once more how testy
Danae’s
owner had become, wishing he could call back the grumble of exasperation that had escaped his lips, drawing Chaeron’s attention. That was the last thing he needed, more acidic scrutiny when he must be as unremarkable as X-rays to the naked eye. He held his breath, pulse pounding, in the silent space after his disclaimer, a space which could turn barbed and baleful in a moment, whose phantom thorns even now pricked his nerves. . . .

“Sorry,” Chaeron sighed, and lay back against the couch’s headrest so that his pulse ticked visibly in his throat.

Amazing, was Chaeron. At all times impenetrable; at any time incendiary beneath his smile. That eternal grin was the worst of it, supremely appealing, embraceable, elusive as sponge. Not like Julian, whose face was a window into his soul. Julian. . . . Valery squirmed in his seat, adrift on the sea of alternatives under a featureless sky showing no hint of north. Julian was with Softa, whatever that could be construed to mean; and with Shebat. What was Spry doing? More to the point, what was he, Valery, doing?

Looking for a break in the clouds, was what: a parting of the mists that would let him chart a course. Damn Baldy, with contingency plans bristling out from him like a power station’s solar collectors; and Chaeron, who had not the grace to be detestable, but must fascinate and obsess where other men need simply breathe. . . . The knowledge of what the consul was about did not protect Valery from it, or even attenuate Chaeron’s effect. It was an attribute of his presence, a thing as much a part of him as his ruddy mane or his sleek manliness which seemed devalued rather than cultivated, saving him from prettiness and pretentiousness both.

Valery checked his thought, opened his eyes, and turned his head toward Chaeron: “Sorry, I didn’t hear.”

“I said, be sure to keep monitoring my brother, alert for any deviation from course. We cannot be sure of him.” This was said with a mere turning of head, so that his cheek lay against the headrest, one eyebrow slightly raised in emphasis.

“Yes, sir.” Valery had intended to do so, would have done so. He awaited only an opening, a moment to act for the guild, to whom Marada the pilot and the memory of his
Hassid
posed almost as great a threat as the missing cruiser who bore the Kerrion prodigal’s name. Or so the second bitch of Kerrion space insisted on proclaiming, both to himself and to Baldy, who was half-convinced that any further struggles were useless in the face of what had already been revealed. Parma, Baldy had wagered, merely awaited a convenient moment to arrest them all.

Whether or not that was true, Valery had argued, a cruiser was a cruiser and in the war of emancipation to come (whether sooner or later), the more cruisers they had, the better. To that end he labored, as he had for a decade. He had a multitude of schemes, each bearing diverse fruit. The best was the acquisition of not only
Danae
and
Hassid
, but the cruisers flanking them, also.

“Here’s what I want to do . . .” Chaeron began, wiping everything but incredulity from his pilot’s mind.

In
Hassid
, Marada found Chaeron’s “corrections” no less astounding.

He spoke them over the arbitrational cube, and its flush deepened.

Chaeron’s stem demand for the capitulation of Shechem rang out through each Kerrion cruiser and through space toward the Labayan family sphere just ahead of a negative hydrogen ion particle beam which in a tenth of a second disrupted every electronic device in its path.

The original plan had called for the deployment of Kerrion cruisers so as to immobilize the whole of Shechem, two cruisers to a hemisphere. Chaeron had altered not only Parma’s strategy in execution, but in feasibility: he kept the other cruisers in tight formation, not encircling Shechem. Likewise, the disruption was not complete, but selectively circumscribed. The meaning of this must be as clear to Selim Labaya as it seemed to Marada: his brother Chaeron would grant no second chance, simply overpowering Shechem’s computerized defenses. No, he would not. Instead, he would increase the power flowing to the cruisers’ brace of turrets, destroying the verdant sphere as offhandedly as he might a migrant asteroid headed into heavily trafficked space.

Marada was incensed. The cube on his console reflected his ire that no clemency shrouded this potent aggression.

But Shechem itself was still. No word came up from the leaves and glens, no silvery spacefish darted out to inspect them or obstruct them.

Shechem did not even quiver.

A hard-fingered hand closed on Marada’s heart, a dreadful thumping began somewhere in his inner ear. Trepidation jumped for his throat, closed its teeth there. He saw Madel’s swollen-lidded eyes, reddened with weeping, her purpled mouth stretched fat in its efforts to hold in grief. He saw Selim Labaya’s grizzled head bowed and shaking. And he saw his son, who neither kicked nor flailed, but lay unmoving, swaddled in some different reality only he could discern.

Marada shook his head savagely, and growled, so that
Hassid
offered a systems check: all was well. She displayed beauteous Shechem, like a carbochon sapphire twirling to catch the light, pendant on some invisible string. Marada was not eased. She displayed a multitude of views not discernible to the naked eye, showing that life, that of machine and man both, still thrived within its beryl shell. She detailed its damaged electronics, and what areas were yet uninterrupted. Marada’s distress, instead of being eased, became more pronounced.

A magnetic aiming device, which guided the beams from each ship in concert, flickered: ready, Marada, reluctant, would not eye the targeting screen, but looked at his hands, gone white and red and greenish-yellow, sparkling with moisture. On the padded console, they trembled.

A static burst rustled on the com-line; then a voice came up from the habitational sphere. It was a faint voice, a thick voice, a voice whose owner was barely in control of his tongue, so that Marada in
Hassid
and Chaeron and Valery in
Danae
and every man in every cabin in the four Kerrion cruisers leaned forward, staying breath and motion, to make out what the voice of Shechem authority had to say:

“Kerrion Five, this is Shechem Authority, or at least it was, . . . Come on in, we’re not in any shape to stop you . . . it’s rather a relief . . . after everything else . . . we . . .
(static)-
struct you,
(Static)-
render. Entry-coordinates as you like ‘em, we can’t do anything much with what you’ve left us, just open the door. . . . Shechem Authority out. . .
(Static).”

“What in the womb of Chance is going on?” breathed Marada, whose flat palms pressed gently over his eyes, as if in the darkness so constructed he could find shelter.

“We are queuing up for docking procedures,” replied
Hassid
, gently, to make him smile.

Failing in that, the cruiser growled subliminally as cruisers do when their outboards malfunction, growled so softly that only another cruiser might hear.

Danae
heard; she was in touch with each subordinated cruiser, alerted by her pilot to be especially cognizant of what was going on in
Hassid
. She did not relay that information to her outboard, however, for Valery himself was acting as strangely as
Hassid’s
pilot. Instead, she sent a trill of condolence to her sister cruiser, and by that means felt better herself.

It was an ugly business, attacking helpless data pools, unarmed communications nets, life-support systems and quiescent defenses that were in no way threatening. These would not have waxed threatening, no matter what the outboards controlling the cruisers’ death-spitting turrets had done. But
Danae
could not object—she could volunteer no such information to her pilot: Valery kept strictly to business with his ship. There was little affection offered by her outboard, little enough of anything . . . it was like having half an outboard, or so the others said. Valery, though an outboard of high repute, was cold, distant, unwilling or unable to enter fully into communion as did Marada with
Hassid
. Yet,
Danae
lived to please him, to shiver under his touch, to surge and sport on the tundra between the stars. Perhaps Valery was right, to keep so distant. At least, it was that distance that allowed
Danae
to offer condolences to
Hassid
, who suffered her outboard’s every distress.

It was better thus.

It was good to ship point into Shechem, perfectly, with all the others streaming out behind. It was good to nestle up to the dock, to be grasped in supergravity’s dreamy embrace, to spiral inward, then inward again toward Shechem’s heart without ever once descending from the pinnacle of precisely executed commands. Without flaw, the four cruisers made dock and slip in Shechem. Under
Danae’s
aegis, each had come to safe harbor. The cruisers purred to each other, sweet wordless praises dear and warm.

They had not been powered down; they would not be. Through their aft cameras, they watched the scramble of intelligencers out of their hatches, the slow, ragged promenade of Shechem officials toward them along the slipbay.

The cruisers did not need the reactions of their pilots, not Chaeron’s open puzzlement, not Marada’s grinding of teeth and cracking of knuckles, to tell them that something was wrong among the outboards of Shechem.

In the brightly lit slipbay, preternaturally quiet, half the Kerrion force awaited its Labayan welcoming committee. As a precaution, Chaeron had ordered the relief pilots and five intelligencers to remain aboard each ship. As a second precaution, he stood close beside his brother Marada, in case of the unforeseeable.

Marada knew, by then, what was to Chaeron yet a mystery. He knew it by the presence of certain faces in their welcoming committee and by the absence of others. He waited only to hear with his ears what his heart told him, so that the hand squeezing it would leave off, so that spiny conjecture would be replaced with certainty, and some relief gained in that exchange.

Not caring any longer for protocol, he walked forward to meet the captain of the Shechem Guard, whose face was without expression but whose shoulders told the tale, bent and bowed by the weight of words yet unspoken.

Chaeron, after a moment’s hesitation and a second moment quelling his intelligencers, went after his brother, gained his side.

“Wait,” urged Chaeron.

“Why?” snapped Marada from bearded lips that hardly moved.

And then there was no time for argument.

The Shechem Guard, each in green, undulant dragons rampant over their breasts, stopped before them, so that both Chaeron and Marada must stop, so that there was ample time to notice that every dragon’s head had been sewn over with black thread.

“Marada,” said the captain, extending his hand while his chin pulled back to make dimpled ripples of flesh between it and his tight uniform collar. There was no accusation in the speaking of the arbiter’s name, but there was some emotion . . . resignation? . . . rehef? “It’s all yours,” the man continued, “just treat my people well, if you can.”

“I can.” Marada assured him, blackly. “This is my brother, Chaeron Ptolemy Kerrion, consul of Draconis, leader of this punitive expedition and warlord of Kerrion space.”

The sneer in Marada Kerrion’s voice was only partially hidden. The captain said, stone-faced: “Do you want to see the bodies?”

“What?”
It was Chaeron who exploded.