Serpent's Reach

They would not have sent any common ship, not if it were in their power to liberate a warship for the purpose. Swift and deadly, one of the never-seen Family warships: Istra station was in panic.

And the Outsider ships were freighters, likely unarmed.

“Sera!” Merry’s voice came over the intercom. “We’re aboard!”

A light indicated hatch-operation.

“Back off,” Raen said to the beta captain. “Undock us and get us out of here.”

He stared into the aperture of her handgun and hastened about it, giving low-voiced orders to his men.

“Drop us into station-shadow,” Raen said. “And get us down, fast.”

The captain kept an eye to the incoming ship, that had not yet decreased speed. Station chatter came, one-sided—ISPAK informing the incoming pilot the cluster formation was Outsider, that no one understood why.

For the first time there was deviation in the invader’s course, a veering toward the freighters.

The shuttle drifted free now, powering out of a sudden, in shadow.

“Put us in his view,” Raen ordered. The captain turned them and did so, crossing lanes, but nothing around the station was moving, only themselves, the freighters, and the incomer.

Raen took deep breaths, wondering whether she should have gambled everything, a mad assault on station central, to seize ISPAK…trusting the warship would not fire.

It fired now. Outsiders must not have heeded orders to stop. She picked it up visually, swore under her breath; the Outsiders returned fire: one of that helpless flock had some kind of weapon. It was a mistake. The next shot was real.

She punched in numbers, snatched a microphone. “Kontrin ship! This is the Meth-maren. You’re forbidden station.”

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 sca

“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 a

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, begi

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.