Five Planes by Melissa Scott & Don Sakers

Author:Melissa Scott & Don Sakers [Scott, Melissa & Sakers, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Speed-of-C Productions
Published: 2018-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

It was shaping up to be a long Drop. Imric took the pilot’s seat in the control room of the Last Fair Deal, nodding as Derrian Hina recited the changeover litany and queued the work files ready for use. They were still inside Quintile Illumination’s Dropspace, the pair of them forming a mathematical simultaneity in the midst of the hyperspatial flux, but the larger ship didn’t seem to have noticed them. Not that there was much it could have done if it had—there was little ships could do during Drop that wouldn’t upset their calculations—but Imric felt better thinking that they were unobserved.

“Has the capa been up?” He asked, sliding into the takeover chair as its screen lit and mirrored.

Derrian shook his head. “She’s kept to her cabin, mostly. That’s what she usually does.”

That was also good news, and Imric risked another question. “Has she said anything about what she’s after?”

“Not yet.” Derrian hesitated. “Morcant might know, but she’s not saying.”

“She can’t really mean to attack a transplanar,” Imric said. He scanned the first page of data, seeing nothing but a sea of green, paged through to the next. “Can she?”

“Probably not?” Derrian sounded less certain than his words. “Or let’s say probably not a direct attack.”

That wasn’t as reassuring as Imric would have liked. He flicked through the next two screens, frowning. “Has she done something like this before?”

“Not since I’ve been with her.”

“And how long is that?”

Derrian sighed. “Three—no, it’s four years, now. I was in your shoes, got taken off a transplanar that didn’t pay the passage fees, and then the capa picked me for her personal transport”

“So I can hope she’s not going to get us into a pitched battle?”

“We can all hope,” Derrian said, grimly. “My transfer’s complete.”

Imric scanned the last screen. “All green here.”

“Right.” Derrian pushed himself up out of his chair with a crackling of joints. “The watch is yours.”

“I have control,” Imric answered, and shifted to the command chair as the hatch slid closed behind him.

Once again he was alone in the control room. He stared at the main screen, the white dot that was the Quintile Illumination vivid against purple and scarlet swirls of hyperflux. Surely there had to be a way to warn the other ship that they were being stalked, that ap Farr was targeting someone on board, but once again every possibility that occurred to him proved fruitless. Everything that he could think of merely brought ap Farr’s wrath down on him directly, and he wasn’t yet ready to make that sacrifice, particularly since he didn’t know what ap Farr actually wanted. Follow the Quintile Illumination, she had said; that wasn’t enough to act on.

There was little enough to do while the ship was in Drop. Once the course was fully established, the safest thing was to let the ship run its course, emerging from the Drop once the calculations were complete. He touched keys to make sure that everything was still running, saw nothing but green in the Drop computers.

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