The Rifter's Covenant (4 page)

“Perhaps you should
mickey him before he wears us all out,” the Kelly honked softly.

Omilov remained
oblivious. In the captain’s pod, Vi’ya showed little sign of fatigue other than
a telltale darkening around the eyes, and tension in the line of shoulder and
arm as she tabbed her console. The Eya’a stood motionless nearby, their
multifaceted blue gazes fixed on her.

At the rear hatch,
Navy Solarch Emras sho-Rethven stood in the relaxed at-ease posture a Marine
could sustain for hours. She gave a jaw-cracking yawn, caught Montrose’s gaze,
and smiled apologetically at him.

Montrose wondered
how Marim was holding up, back in the engine room. Probably catnapping with an
alarm on the comm.

Omilov broke the
silence. “You are sure of that bearing, Captain?”

“You will have to
ask Ivard,” Vi’ya replied with the harshening of consonants that indicated
irritation.

Omilov glanced at
the slumbering youth and shook his head. “No need, I suppose. It fits the other
readings.”

He tapped at his
console. An image windowed up on the main screen: a faint blue-white smear,
with a spectral band displayed beneath it. All the lines smeared, some out of
phase.

“A black hole
binary,” Montrose said, scowling at the screen. Anyone with even a smattering
of navigational knowledge knew the spectral signature of a black hole binary,
caused by the system’s rotation and the acceleration of matter falling into the
singularity, since the results of running up near one in skip were
catastrophic. But the spectroscopic display didn’t look right.

“Yes, and no,”
Omilov replied. “The widening of the spectral lines and the phase relationships
are correct, but there’s an odd pattern of gaps in it.” He tilted his head
sternwards, toward the storeroom in which the techs on the
Grozniy
had installed a bank of powerful computational arrays, including
a duplicate of the battlecruiser’s science databanks. “The computer says that
it’s actually a fractal spectrum of dimension 1.7, which may be related to its
most anomalous aspect.”

“Ah.” Montrose’s
heavy brow cleared. “Where are the X-rays?”

“Exactly. The
system is putting out only a fraction of the high-end radiation expected from
the accretion disk. Moreover, its position off the main sequence doesn’t
correlate with the other stars in this region, nor does its chemical
composition match its H-R position.”

Portus honked an
interrogative, and Ivard sat up, his finger transcribing an arc to mirror that
depicted on the display. “What does that mean?” he asked, his voice clear, as
though he’d never been asleep.

Perhaps he hadn’t
been
.
Montrose wasn’t sure any more
what the range of Ivard’s consciousness was.

“No known process
could cause such a spectral signature in a star.” Omilov smiled wearily. “It
means, I think, that we’ve found the Suneater.”

The rest of those
gathered on the bridge were so tired there was no sign of much more emotion
than mild satisfaction.

Omilov turned to
Vi’ya. “Can you take us in north of the system about thirty light-minutes out
for a closer look?”

“Belay that,”
sho-Rethven said, coming to the alert. “Have you forgotten our orders, Gnostor?
No closer than a light-day. We don’t know how thickly they’ve sown transponders
around that system—and they emptied three naval storehouses that we know of, so
it could be pretty thick.”

Omilov rubbed his
jaw. “Yes. Thank you. I’d forgotten.” He paused, and his next words filled
everyone with relief. “Then I suggest we break for a watch.” He began carefully
shutting down his console. “Let us recuperate. The next stop will be to execute
a TDVSA, a temporally distributed . . .”

“. . . virtual
sensor array,” Vi’ya cut in. She tapped at her console and a complex geometric
diagram windowed up, along with a wireframe of the
Telvarna
with sensors highlighted on its hull.

Omilov blinked.
“Ahh. It’s obvious you’ve more experience with them than I.” He rose and bowed
to Vi’ya in a sincere deference which had nothing of irony in it. “You must
forgive me, Captain. A lifetime of prejudice is hard to overcome.”

Vi’ya inclined her
chin, a slight smile easing the somber lines of her face. “Granted, Gnostor.”
She swiped her hand across her console, and the screen went dark. “A Z-watch
for us all,” she declared, and with a glance at the rear of the bridge, she added,
“Let the Marines keep watch, if they care to.”

o0o

“Run fifteen
completed,” Ivard said. “Ready for skip to sixteen.”

The stars slewed
across the viewscreen as the Rifter captain brought the ship about. Solarch
sho-Rethven felt the lurch as the
Telvarna
skipped. The fiveskip was showing the strain of the frequent hops required to
create a virtual sensor array large enough to resolve a useful image from a
light-day out—it was much easier with the huge baseline of a battlecruiser.

Ivard caught her eye
and smiled.

Sho-Rethven smiled
back. Ivard’s interest in her was obvious. He was a bit young, but interesting,
especially his close relationship with the Kelly. She’d never met a Kelly trinity
she didn’t like.

Of course duty came
first, but these Rifters were a genial bunch, except for the stone-cold Dol’jharian
Captain Vi’ya. Sho-Rethven didn’t trust her at all. The fact that she was a
tempath, and maybe even a telepath, made the situation even trickier.

Her gaze flicked to
the weird little pair of sophonts, whom she tried hard not to think of as ‘the
brain-burners.’ Though that’s what they were. The Eya’a could fry your brains
with their psi, and they were apparently in psi-communication with Vi’ya.

One of the pair
turned multi-faceted blue eyes sho-Rethven’s way and chittered softly.

The sophont’s
weird, twiggy fingers described a symbol. This, she had been told by Ivard,
meant “We see you.” The other added the symbol that they had dubbed her with: “The
one who waits to kill.”

Strangely, there
was no sense of threat implied in their attitude. They seemed to accept that as
her role, but she had no illusions about what would happen if her duty led her
to action against Vi’ya. She only hoped she’d be fast enough to finish the job
before they finished her.

The memory of the
failsafes implanted in both her and Solarch Zhedong flashed up, and she
suppressed it. If one triggered, she’d never know it, and it was best not to
dwell on the prospect, especially if the Dol’jharian’s talent actually did
shade into telepathy.

The ship shuddered
out of skip.

“Vi’ya, this better
be the last for a while,” Marim’s high voice came over the com from the engine
space. Marim was almost as old as big, grizzled Montrose, but you couldn’t tell
unless you got up close. Small and blonde, she seemed no older than Ivard. “The
fiveskip is really heating up.”

Omilov looked as
worried as the others felt: the high-frequency skips required for the extreme
precision of a sensor array created by one ship in multiple locations required
was taking its toll.

“Position sixteen
established,” Ivard called out.

“This is the last
one we’ll need,” Omilov decided as he straightened up from his console. Then
his instruments bleeped. “Yes. That’s it. Now the computer will process it, and
we should be able to see what we’ve searched for so long a time.”

On the screen a
fuzzy blob coalesced, slowly sharpening as the huge computer array reiterated
the complex algorithms that would resolve an image out of the sixteen sensor
readings they had taken from widely separated vantage points around the
suspected location of the Suneater.

Finally the image
stabilized, revealing the savage beauty of a black hole binary. In the center
of the screen was a red supergiant, bloated into oblateness as it overflowed
its Roche volume toward the black hole, an immense plume of gas erupting from
the oblate prominence on its surface and plunging into the accretion disc
around the singularity. The matter spiraling to destruction shaded through the
spectrum from red at the edge to the blue-white fury of disintegrating matter
at the center, where it fell over the event horizon of the black hole and
disappeared from the universe.

The image was
familiar, and not familiar. “Where are the polar jets?” Montrose asked from the
back of the bridge.

“There are none,”
Omilov said in a slow voice of scientific wonder. “I believe that explains the
anomalous spectrum. Somehow, the Suneater is, well, eating them. The amount of
energy that represents is enormous.”

The image shifted,
and a fuzzy shape swam into view. An orbital plot in another window indicated
that it was seventeen light minutes out from the mass center of the system.

“What in Haruban’s
Hell is that?” Marim’s voice came clearly over the com as the image slowly
resolved.

“Something never
dreamed of in our engineering,” Omilov whispered. “Built by a race of which we
know virtually nothing. I wonder how humans can even live in it.”

“Be better if they
couldn’t.” Montrose’s deep voice rumbled with distrust. “Would have saved a lot
of trouble.”

Omilov didn’t seem
to hear him. “So that is the Suneater,” he said reflectively. “At long last.”

Sho-Rethven gazed
at the tangle of reddish tubes and cones. The Suneater looked like a high-speed
collision of brass instruments. Made out of something that looked like
somebody’s gums
.

Near one of the
cones, a smear coalesced into the form of a small ship.

“Looks like it just
took a dump,” Marim commented.

Ivard snickered.
“What’s it been eating?”

“Do you need
anything more, Gnostor?” Viya’s cold tones cut through the banter.

“No, Captain.”
Omilov, tired as he was, radiated immense satisfaction. “It’s all in the
computer.”

“Very well.” She
stood up. “Ivard, take the con and set up the return. You handle the skip.”

She walked past
sho-Rethven without a flicker of acknowledgment and disappeared down the
corridor.

o0o

A few hours later
Montrose walked onto the bridge. A visceral flash of rightness at the sight of
the captain at work at her pod was followed by the jolt of memory. Not so very
long ago it had been Markham’s lanky form lounging in the captain’s pod, his
blond head bent over the console, that gave the crew the sense that all was
well: The Captain Was at Work.

Vi’ya had been so
different in those days—a smiling figure in jewel-toned clothing. Markham and
she always seemed to know what the other was thinking, a relationship that had
had nothing to do with telepathy.

Vi’ya turned his
way, dark eyes assessing; that humor was gone, as were the colors she had worn.
Montrose suspected she’d picked up his emotions, if not his thoughts. So he
said, “Absurd, isn’t it? How we can lull ourselves with a false sense of
security.”

She gave a peculiar
shake of her head that was not quite a twist, not a nod. It was characteristic
of Dol’jharians, he’d found out. Manderian did the same thing. Though it was a
dismissive gesture, he did not find it irritating, as he did the airy, graceful
hand motions of the Tetrad Centrum Douloi, the inner elite of the aristocrats
that ruled—had ruled—the Thousand Suns. With them a fine sense of
condescension, or even of forbearance, was implied toward those who did not
know the subtleties of current fashion in unspoken communication.

“For this moment,”
Vi’ya said, “we feel in control of our lives.” She jerked her chin over her
shoulder toward the bulkhead at the back of the bridge, where the two Arkadic
Marines were housed. “At least they are quiet about their work.” Irony brought
out the Dol’jharian accent in sharper consonants and guttural ‘r’s.

Montrose sat down
in Lokri’s pod. Steepling his fingers, he said, “So what do we do?”

She shrugged. “We
return to Ares. And there we stay until justice is served.”

Lokri.
Montrose knew that the Marines had ears on the bridge, and however
cooperative and pleasant these nicks had been so far on this weird journey, if Vi’ya
damped their narks they would both come running, weapons drawn. And no one wore
boswells, an order Vi’ya had agreed to. He didn’t want to know what arcane
nastinesses the Marines were armed with.

So out loud he
asked a question about the new sensors the Panarchists had had installed on the
Telvarna
for Omilov’s use, but with
one hand he brought the communications console to life, keying it to text mode
and echoing it to the captain’s console. Vi’ya had made it clear that the
bridge consoles were safe.

You still plan to free Lokri before you
leave Ares?

Her answer appeared
on his console:
I do.
Out loud her voice
went on unemotionally about how useless some of the equipment was—but that it
would fetch a fair price on Rifthaven someday.

You’ll have to move quickly, then,
Montrose typed.
Just before we left, Jaim told me that the Archon of Torigan was using
his weight to force a trial.

Vi’ya’s eyes
narrowed. Her hands paused, tense and still, then she typed:
We will use every advantage to delay it,
then.

Montrose thought
immediately of Brandon Arkad, now Panarch of the Thousand Suns. If he couldn’t
delay it, nothing could. But would he?

Vi’ya must have
been thinking the same thing.
We must
find out from Lokri what happened fourteen years ago.

I got it out of him—everything he remembers.

Vi’ya lifted her
chin and ended the connection.

Montrose shut his
console down and got to his feet. Telling her the story could wait: they still
had a long journey ahead of them, and though the Marines had their narks,
Montrose knew this ship better than they did—including where his own monitoring
sensors still functioned. As he left, he wondered what kind of diversion to
arrange, and reminded of the presence of the Kelly as well as the Eya’a, he
smiled. Surely they could come up with something highly entertaining.