"I see you still carry the one I gave you at Akard."
"It has been a faithful tool. Like me, though, it is getting old and cranky."
Marika swore. The other darkship was aloft now. The first had dwindled to a speck, its Mistress driving it hard. And she had not yet gathered her ghosts. "You meth strap down good," she said. "Everyone strap down. This is going to be the ride of your lives."
Bagnel was strapped already. He began disassembling the weapon Grauel had given him. The huntress nodded with approval. Seated, she and Barlog did likewise with their own weapons.
Marika snatched the bowl from the senior bath, gulped its contents, then bounced to her place at the tip of the wooden dagger. She went down through her loophole and snagged ghosts, lifted off, and continued gathering ghosts as she rose, dropping smaller specimens as she snatched ever bigger, stronger denizens of the otherworld. She pressed mercilessly.
She overhauled one darkship at fifty thousand feet and the other before it made orbital altitude. All the while she caressed the void with the touch, tracking the Serke darkship as it fled toward where it could clamber into the Up-and-Over. She soon had its line of retreat clearly defined in her mind.
It pointed toward a section of cloud she had not yet explored. She sketched an imaginary circle around that line, finding only four stars within it. She discarded the one farthest off center.
She reached with the touch and told the other two Mistressess of the Ship, We will pursue. There are three stars close to their line of flight. I will take this one. She sent a picture of the stars and indicated which she had chosen for herself, then assigned each of them one of the two remaining. Push yourselves. Try to arrive before they do.
That was unlikely, she thought. Even for her, with her advantages. Though time lapses in the Up-and-Over depended on the strength and talent of the individual Mistress of the Ship, the Serke Mistress had a long start and death raving behind her to motivate her.
Marika began pushing down her chosen course before she reached orbital altitude and began gathering ghosts for the Up-and-Over long before she reached the traditional jumping distance. She grabbed at the Up-and-Over only minutes behind the Serke-long before she should have. Echoes of silent terror came from her bath, whom she had pushed near hysteria already with her demands.
Blackness, twisting. A sensation of infinite nothing. A hint of a deep space ghost, a great black ghost, startled by the voidship's passage.
Then light again. The target star lay nearby. Marika struggled to gain her bearings, groggy from the violence of her plunge through the Up-and-Over.
The bath recovered more slowly than she. While she waited on them Marika reached into the surrounding void, searching for the Serke darkship.
Mentally righted, the senior bath left her station to prepare another silver bowl.
Marika's probe revealed that the star had no planets. It might have had at one time, but something had happened. Perhaps too close a brush with another star. The surrounding void teemed with rocky fragments, some of them bigger than the moon Biter back home. None were big enough to retain an atmosphere, and nowhere could Marika sense the betraying glow of life.
There were no Serke bases here.
And no Serke darkship.
She stalked up the blade of the wooden dagger to see how Grauel, Barlog, and Bagnel had fared. She had drawn upon them as well as upon the bath, though the strength they had to lend was feeble.
Bagnel looked sick, like he might vomit any second. He was down, clutching the framework with his eyes sealed. Grauel and Barlog looked strained and a little stunned by the savagery of the passage, but they had been with her long enough and had been through enough to be accustomed to the occasional violent passage. Though this had outdone everything that had gone before.
Marika touched Bagnel briefly, gently, encouragingly. The one silth ability for which she had very little talent was healing, but she tried to let well-being flow from her to him. He nodded. He was all right. He was just shaken.
She suspected, in her more dark moments, that she was a poor healer because she was not sufficiently whole and at peace within herself.
She started back toward her station.
Plop!
It had the feel of the sound of a pebble falling into water as heard from beneath the surface, only it fell upon the silth part of her mind.
The Serke darkship.
Where?
She searched, found a line, drove toward the enemy darkship. If she could strike before they recovered ...
They sensed her coming, turned, gained velocity rapidly. Marika swept into their wake, skidding like an aircraft in a tight turn, began gaining, began snapping up stellar landmarks as she went. Those were few indeed. This deep in the cloud only a dozen stars were visible in any direction.
The Serke ship vanished. Marika fixed its line of flight and a target star and grabbed for the Up-and-Over herself.
She did not press as hard this time. She guessed she need not strain so to arrive first.
Correct.
From that second system, in the dense heartstream of the dust, only three stars were visible. One was that from which Marika had come.
There was no life in that system. Nor had there ever been any, for the star was a dwarf of a type never associated with planets. Marika scanned star and system only casually. Then she concentrated upon those two farther stars.
One was a red giant.
The other was a yellow, like the meth home sun.
Elation filled her.
She had sniffed out a hot trail at last.
She gathered everyone at the axis and had the senior bath pass the silver bowl again. Once everyone had sipped and taken a few moments to relax, she pulled the darkship into the Up-and-Over again and returned the way she had come. Back to the base world.
Let the Serke think they had eluded her.
Chapter Thirty-Five
I
Bagnel left the wooden darkship at the Hammer. Marika scanned the surrounding void. The Hammer was just one of a dozen huge orbital stations now, and far from the largest. Near space seemed almost uncomfortably crowded. There had been many changes during the years she had been gone. Some she had heard about, of course, but the seeing was nothing like the hearing.
She wanted to make a pass by the leading trojan, to see her brainchild, but responded to the anxieties of Grauel and Barlog. They had not set foot on the homeworld in nearly seven years. It was time to be attentive to their needs. Time to take the darkship down. The mirror would be there forever.
Too, the huntresses wanted to move fast, lest some unpleasant welcome be arranged.
Marika did not arrive ahead of the news of her coming. Bagnel had not been able to keep her return quiet simply because there were meth who had known he was with her. Random touches, mostly unfamiliar, brushed her, curious. She descended toward Ruhaack, ignoring the touches, sending only one of her own ahead, to warn the Reugge cloister that she was coming in.
Most Senior Bel-Keneke herself came out to meet Marika. Marika fixed her gaze upon the Reugge first chair, ignoring the amused silth studying her wooden darkship and the firearms that she and her companions bore. She tried to read Bel-Keneke.
She had been gone so long. This would be a changed world, perhaps a different world ...
Assuredly a different world. She could feel the difference. There were new smells in the air, smells of heavy industry, such as had plagued Maksche when the air was still. But Ruhaack was far from any industry. The smell must be everywhere.
Had it become a world remade in the image of a brethren dream? Had it become what she had battled to avoid, simply because that was what had to be to escape the grasp of the grauken winter?