The Rule of Five_Year One Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prelude

  1.01 Iridium Azimuth

  1.02 Between Planets

  1.03 Polo Halau

  1.04 Wheels of Justice

  1.05 The Lost Ship

  1.06 History

  1.07 Blind Justice

  1.08 Reunion

  1.09 Corruption

  1.10 Departures

  1.11 Drops

  1.12 Vault to Fifth

  About the Rule of Five

  THE RULE OF FIVE YEAR ONE

  Melissa Scott & Don Sakers

  Copyright © 2017 Melissa Scott & Don Sakers

  All rights reserved.

  Prelude

  At this hour of the night, the main deck of Broad Increase was all but empty, the lights and music dimmed, and Imric bin Marrick made his way through the relative quiet, grateful for the faint hum of the ship’s systems to remind him that he was not somehow abandoned and alone. The shops were dark—not that they had passengers who could afford to buy, not this trip—and only the all-hours bar that occupied the central podium showed any sign of life. A single tender perched beside the machines, but she was buried in a book. Only two of the tables were occupied, each with a solitary drinker, staring into the cylinder that purported to display their progress through the void. At the moment, they glowed blue, turquoise strands writhing against cooler clouds, a single point of purple at its tip: no other ships in firing range except for their companion, Iridium Azimuth.

  Of course, the passenger display didn’t mean much, wouldn’t show anything until it absolutely had to, but it seemed to provide a certain amount of reassurance. The trouble was, the pirates knew they were there, had picked them up the minute they’d left Nelson’s Keep without Issandro Lasser’s Letters of Passage—the new ones, anyway, the ones that doubled the cost of the voyage and that the captain refused to pay. It had been a short and nasty meeting, the crew gathering in the large mess, three decks below cargo and one above engineering. Lasser wanted new Letters, a new bribe to let the ship pass, and even if they pooled their pay and doubled the passenger fares, they couldn’t come up with the cash in hand. Already there were ten multi-planars in orbit around Nelson’s Keep, and rumor said there were still more at Hag’s Rock and Carolinia. On top of that, there were a good thousand refugees in port, all looking for some way off the Second Plane: presumably there was some political upheaval going on, which Imric guessed was the reason for the increased fees.

  “He wants an excuse to gut some ships,” the captain had said, which to Imric’s mind didn’t seem to preclude politics. Still, they had all agreed that they could neither pay nor stay in orbit until things got better, and if they traveled in company with Iridium Azimuth there was a chance that the pirates might prefer to concentrate on the bigger, newer ship.

  “Of course,” Mac Cattal said, as they were leaving, “Azimuth is probably hoping the pirates will go after the easier target, and leave them alone.”

  “Well, one of us is going to be right,” Imric had answered, and they had both laughed. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

  He wished he could afford a glass or two of something soothing—nothing fancy, just a nip of whiskey to take the edge off—but none of the crew could afford to drink during a transit. During the drop, sure, there was nothing you could do then, but in the run up to the Mouth of Hell, the blazing nebula that surrounded the entrance to the Drop from the Second Plane to the First, everyone had to be ready to act on seconds’ notice. He threaded his way through the tables anyway, the flickering blue lights like reflections on water, and leaned against the serving ledge while the tender put aside her book and came to join him.

  “Evening,” she said, though it was well past ship’s midnight. “Tea? I’ve got some of that ruby-drop you liked last trip.”

  “Thanks.” Imric laced his fingers together, afraid that they might shake. The pirates were after them, that was an absolute certainty, and every prediction showed that three ships would miss and the fourth and fifth would come into range just as they were lining up for the Drop. At that point, it became too close to call, all a matter of which ship the pirates chose to chase, and how closely they were aligned to the grain of space when they reached the Mouth. And there was nothing, nothing at all, that he could do to affect that.

  The tender scooped ice into a tall cup, poured streams of two different teas and added syrup with a flourish, then lidded the cup and shook it briskly. Imric admired her detachment: there was even less she could do about the pirates, she or any of the service crew. He accepted the cup, touched the screen to put it on his tab and to add the usual friend’s-tip to the account, and she leaned toward him.

  “How long?”

  She didn’t need to say until what; there was only one countdown that mattered now. “Less than forty hours. Unless Lasser’s figured out how to bend physics, there’s only one of them left that can catch us.” Or unless he had other ships on converging courses, out of range or hidden in the gases of the Mouth until they got a good deal closer.

  The tender’s smile was wry, and he guessed she had made the same calculations. “Trust physics,” she said, and the old catchphrase sounded less useful than ever.

  Imric turned away, twisting the lid to open the seal, but he barely tasted the sweet tea. In forty hours they would know, one way or another, and until then there was very little they could do except wait. He should head down to his own quarters, he knew, try to get some more sleep so that he would be in the best shape possible when the attack came, but he was too keyed up to sleep easily. Drugs were out of the question, just in case something went wrong with the systems; perhaps the sleep-wave machine would help, but he’d never had great results. He paused at the edge of the central space—the Promenade, it was called on fancier ships—and stood staring blindly at the fountain’s cascade of blue-toned light. If he was honest with himself, the problem was that he didn’t want to climb down through the refugee level, where Cargo Two had been converted to barracks for over a hundred souls. The rows of curtained cots were depressing, and frankly terrifying when you added them to his responsibilities. Maybe he would finish his tea, and then make his way down to the crew deck by maintenance tubes.

  He had drunk the last of the tea, and was rattling the ice against the sides of the cup as though that would force more to appear when he caught the movement among the giant ferns that divided the Fifth-Plane coffee lounge from the rest of the Promenade. The lounge was closed, its service counters sealed tight, but sometimes passengers preferred to use its more comfortable chairs. He pasted on his most neutral expression as he turned.

  “May I help you, Sen?”

  He recognized her by sight, though he didn’t remember her name: one of the actual paying passengers, and one of the Fifth-Plane suites, too, a tall woman with unusually pale skin and hair bleached snow-white. He guessed she was somewhere in her forties, though from the way she leaned on an ebony cane she might be older.

  “The Chief Data Engineer, is it not?” Her voice was Fifth-Plane, too, mid-range and accentless, educated to be unremarkable.

  “Acting Chief,” Imric corrected. He remembered now, he had spoken to her briefly at the departure dinner—the captain had been determined to preserve as many of the amenities as possible—but he still couldn’t dredge up her name.

  “The original chief chose to stay behind?” It was just barely a question, and Imric sighed.

  “Yes, Sen.” It was a tricky topic, particularly if she wanted to talk about the reasons behind that choice, and it was somehow worse not knowing her name.

  She smiled as if she guessed his dilemma. “L
lian ap Farr.”

  He blinked, for a moment unable to match the spoken words to the printed list of names that rose obediently in his memory, then realized that the sound he had heard as an aspirated L had been transcribed with the double letter. On the Second Plane, they would write it with a dotted H, and on the Third and Fourth with an apostrophe… He forced a smile. “Imric bin Marrick.”

  She folded her hands and made a politely social bow. She was dressed very plainly for the Fifth Plane, her ankle-length gown dark-blue and unpatterned, though he guessed that the fabric was polished linen—not exactly cheap. “I wonder if I might ask you a question.”

  “Of course, but I may not be able to give you an answer if it’s ship’s business.”

  Her smile widened. “My question is more of a personal nature. Though of course I will understand if you don’t choose to answer.”

  “Very well.”

  “You were one of the crew bringing refugees aboard.”

  Imric nodded.

  “I had already come aboard by then—already booked my passage,” Llian said. “But I couldn’t help watching. There was a family, a man and two children. You turned them away.”

  “I didn’t turn them away. I got them passage on Iridium Azimuth instead.” He glanced sideways to see her regarding him politely, her expression unreadable. “They—Milos is one of my ex-husbands. I divorced them five years ago, pretty much amicably. It was a large household, and I didn’t really get along with the person they voted in after Zofia was born. And I’m vertically born anyway, and wanted to go back to space—” And why am I telling this perfect stranger my life’s story? Other than to keep me from thinking about worse things. He put on his company smile, the one he used for dealing with passengers. “It seemed like a better idea.”

  Llian’s eyebrows rose. “You couldn’t bear to be on the same ship as your ex-husband and his children?”

  “No! No, I thought—” And there he stopped, because the true answer was entirely too revealing. He had called in favors to get them onto Iridium Azimuth because he thought they had a better chance of survival there.

  Llian nodded as though she’d read his thought. “You thought they’d be safer there.”

  “You know I can’t say that,” Imric answered.

  “No, I suppose you can’t,” Llian said. “Well. If we’re taken…”

  For the first time, her voice faltered, and Imric took a careful breath. If they were taken, any passenger who could afford Fifth Plane passage stood a good chance of being able to pay their ransom. Except that Lasser seemed to have stopped doing sensible things, or asking for possible ransoms. “We may yet get through ahead of them,” he said, but the words were hollow.

  The alarm came just as he was preparing to go on watch. He didn’t need to wake the screens to know what it had to be. Instead he grabbed his crew jacket—its pockets already stuffed with mobile and ID and cash-equivalents and a handful of ration bars—and flung himself into the emergency lift that would take him directly to control. There were others ahead of him, he could see boots and legs ascending in the column of light, and at the top Mac Cattal was waiting to grab an arm and steady him off.

  “Pirates?” Imric dropped into the data engineer’s seat and unfolded the keyboards, already typing access codes.

  “As predicted,” the captain said loudly, overriding the rising mutter of questions and answers, “we’ve got the Mouth in sight, and two pirate ships are coming into range. Iridium Azimuth is ten seconds ahead of us and broadcasting course corrections.”

  “We’ve had it,” Mac Cattal said under his breath, and dropped into the seat next to Imric. He was internal systems, and Broad Increase was already in optimum defensive configuration: nothing for him to do until the shooting started.

  He was right, too, Imric thought, opening input screens and setting them aside as quickly as he could rouse the ship. The AI was dumping data into his channels without screening, all its processing power turned to calculating their approach. If they could make the Drop, the pirates wouldn’t pursue—but if Iridium Azimuth was ahead of them, her passage would change the coordinates fractionally, and make it impossible for them to make the Drop after them.

  “Engines,” the captain said, his voice tight. “Decrease power point two percent.”

  “Decrease?” the engineer echoed, and the captain’s voice rose to a shout.

  “Yes, decrease! Point two percent—now, damn it!”

  “Decreasing power point two percent,” the engineer said. “Confirmed.”

  Trying to buy time for the AI to recalculate after Iridium Azimuth dropped, Imric knew. His screens were steady, primaries showing nominal and secondaries coded green to let him know he could ignore them for now. A new window opened, the AI dumping supply and noncritical internals to his control, freeing up processing power for the last-second calculations.

  “Damn, it’s close,” Mac Cattal whispered, but Imric couldn’t spare a glance for the main display. He touched keys, prioritizing the messages and clicking off the ones that could be delayed, diverting the passenger systems to lockdown mode and setting the control linkages to their compartmentalized versions. Light flashed on the main screen, a flare of color washing through the room.

  “Azimuth?” Surely that had been the Drop.

  Mac Cattal shook his head, his face ashen. “They’re shooting. The pirates.”

  No hits yet, or at least none that registered on Imric’s systems. There was a brighter flash, blue-white and blinding even with his head down, and someone said, “Azimuth has Dropped.”

  “Recalculate!” the captain called, and another set of Imric’s windows flashed from yellow to red: the AI had dumped the rest of the internals into his lap, but they should stay stable a little longer.

  “Incoming communication,” Pedra said. “The pirates are trying to contact us.”

  “Don’t answer,” the captain said. “Buy some time—”

  The ship shuddered, like a speeder crossing rough ground, and somewhere in the outer structures a depressurization alarm began to sound. A window shot to the top of Imric’s screen, messages cascading down the screen: breach in the outermost hull by the X-positive engine. That area had been evacuated long before, and Imric touched keys to tell the automatics to shut down the alarm and seal the affected corridor. It wouldn’t even be that expensive a fix, if they could just make it to the First Plane…

  Broad Increase jolted again, a heavier blow this time, and new alarms sounded: local depressurization again, power loss, environmentals. Imric’s screen filled with windows, each one competing for priority. He flicked the least important away, trying to focus on the things that would slow the ship, things that would kill crew and passengers, but the others kept struggling back, demanding attention even as he dismissed them. “Captain! Sound general stand-by?”

  That would tell the paying passengers to seal themselves into the bunks that doubled as escape capsules, and send the refugees scrambling for the lifeboats. Of course, none of those were safe unless the pirates decided to pick up survivors, and he was not surprised to see the captain shake his head.

  “Negative. No alarms yet.”

  “Copy that.” Imric bent over his keyboard again, shuffling through menus. Power was starting to fluctuate, the engines pushed beyond capacity; if the oscillation wasn’t damped down, he was going to trip the breakers and lose control of the secondary systems. He brought that window to the foreground, its warnings strobing scarlet, and began working his way down the fault chain. Shut down the weakest links and damaged sections, route everything through the heavier boxes at the ship’s core—that would hold, but now four other systems were screaming for attention.

  “Drop calculation?” the captain called, but there was no response from the AI.

  Active environmentals screamed at him, warnings scrolling across the bottom of his screen: one of the shots had taken out a central junction box, and the feedback was threatening to overwhelm the rest of the sys
tem.

  “I’m shutting down active environment, going to stand-by!” He typed the commands without waiting for acknowledgment: they’d have about two hours’ control from the stand-by system, and if they made it to the Drop they could worry about it then. Half a dozen screens vanished, but they were instantly replaced by a dozen more. “Damn it…”

  He grabbed the internal network screen as marginally more important than the rest, began working his way down the failure tree. Before he could clear the first round of error messages, the ship shook again, the hull groaning, a dark, ugly sound just at the edge of hearing. His screen filled again, red on red on red, too many messages to sort. He shook himself, tried to isolate something, anything, and heard the captain swear.

  “That’s it, people. We’re fucked. Engines, close her down. Comm, tell them we’re heaving to.”

  Imric sat back, unable quite to believe what he’d heard, and saw the same expression on Mac Cattal’s face.

  “We are so screwed,” Mac Cattal whispered, and Imric could only nod.

  1.01 Iridium Azimuth

  Iridium Azimuth was on the last day of the transition clock, finally aligning ship’s time to the planet’s, and that meant that was the last time the secondary bridge was likely to be unoccupied during his free watch. Val Millat let the door close silently behind him, and only then took a step forward to wake the local systems. Lights flickered across the screens and the work lights strengthened, forming a ring that echoed the broken circle of consoles. Val settled himself in the navigator’s chair, frowning at controls subtly shifted from their usual positions at the pilot’s station, then entered his personal key to light the screens. That was a risk, of course—there would be no pretending he hadn’t been here—but he hoped no one would bother to look. And, after all, it wasn’t unreasonable of him to want to know what had really happened on the Drop from the Second Plane to the First…