Warlord of the Spinward Reaches, page 10
Lukyan nodded. He was using charts that Sterling Huff had updated and improved, even on Fire Diamond.
“It feels wasteful, sitting around waiting for Uly to return,” Anna groused.
Lukyan had spent enough time around the woman to understand that there wasn’t any threat behind it. No anger. Bit of peevish frustration, but she’d worked herself up to spring something big on Uly, and he’d slipped away before she could do it.
Because, Uly.
“I can use the help,” Maks spoke up. “Fire Diamond is heavier than anything else around here save Corsac Fox. You want to go survey a few places we think might be habitable, but empty? Or turn loose some of your crew to help build out facilities here on the station for R&R? Treta Envoy has that stuff, so the working crews are entertained, but they’ll take the ship home at some point and the station needs a replacement. Either we convert some warehouse space, or we buy an old freighter and turn it into a casino resort. Or build something on the surface, but Uly hasn’t identified his future capital city and I don’t want to make assumptions there.”
Lukyan didn’t bother keeping his jaw from dropping open. Anna was the same. Chervonya had seen it coming, but she probably knew this new Maks better than Maks did.
How much better? Not too close. They didn’t have that body language communication. didn’t touch.
Working comrades, but not anything romantic. Smart move on Maks’s part.
Keep to yourself until the woman walks up and grabs you by the horns.
Especially around dangerous women like those two.
Lukyan looked a question at Anna.
He worked for her, after all.
“We have time,” she agreed. “Let’s see what we can do to improve things before Uly gets back.”
Lukyan nodded.
Progress in the right direction.
Because they were following the path Uly had laid out.
And only a fool bet against the Corsac Fox.
KARAŊGILIKKA
TWENTY-SIX
Uly grinned as he saw the sour look on Kadyr Usupov’s face on the main screen.
“Damn it, Uly, why couldn’t you have come along ten years ago, when I was still young enough to chuck everything and go sailing with you?” the Chief of Chiefs of the Isann demanded with a grin.
Uly and most of the folks on the bridge laughed. The last three weeks had done wonders to bring Kadyr around. Bit of jealousy that Aibek might have all the adventures, but nothing bad.
The Chief of Chiefs was a smart man. Could see which way the hurricane was blowing and adjust to handle it.
But circumstances still bound him to his palace.
“Sorry,” Uly replied, still smiling. “Promise that we’ll stop here on the way back and let you know what we find, Kadyr. Assuming that there is anything to find.”
“Anybody but you, I’d assume hydras would get you, Uly,” Kadyr answered. “Or that they’d find absolutely nothing worth the trip. Huff, you’ve got everything programmed?”
“Aye, Chief of Chiefs,” Sterling replied crisply. “Thank you again for letting me mine your nav records.”
“Fair trade, young Human,” Kadyr said. “We now know that there are many places beyond even Bastion that we could travel to trade. The darkness has been pulled back enough to show other islands.”
“There is still one curtain, Kadyr,” Uly noted.
“And you’re going out to map it, Uly,” the Chief nodded. “Discover it. Add it to the modern version of the Karaŋgılıkka.”
Uly shrugged. He didn’t see himself as another Zamir Aytiev, but Suka Kuri had hinted that the legend of the Corsac Fox was likely to fill a particular niche in modern Isann culture. One that had readily turned them from wary strangers to enthusiastic allies far quicker than he might have originally believed possible. But getting them all in a room to talk had worked wonders, as had Aibek explaining that all the ships currently in harbor might be hard-pressed to successfully attack Corsac Fox.
And Uly had come to talk and explore, rather than conquer.
That spoke to the Isann soul.
“We’ll be back,” Uly promised.
“The lighthouse will be visible,” Kadyr Usupov promised soberly, another thing that went to their very soul. “I’ve sent the freighter Surly to Bastion to update them on what’s going on. And loaded them with trade goods.”
Then the comm went blank and Drew brought up a bow view of nearby space. Orbital space above Isann. Uly hadn’t been to the surface, but Dan had taken her team to scout things. Mostly showing off dangerous women, because the Isann tended to be even more chauvinistic than the Khet, separating jobs into things men did, like sailing and fighting, from womanly chores, like running households when the men were away.
Karaŋgılıkka mapped the road they all needed to take.
“Mr. Roscoe, stand by to engage the Variable Pulse Spatial Generators,” Uly called.
Then he paused and turned to Aibek Sulaymanov, seated off to one side between Dan and Suka Kuri.
“Aibek, this is properly an Isann mission,” Uly said conversationally. “You give the order.”
Aibek blinked in surprise and looked at Suka Kuri, who merely smiled and nodded back.
“Steering, take us into warp,” Aibek said in a voice that cracked in the middle with emotion, but Uly wasn’t surprised, even as the stars blinked out and Corsac Fox was in its own pocket universe, moving faster than light could travel as it left Isann and sought out those places where the Yarikh had once lived, so many centuries ago.
He unbuckled and rose, looking proudly around at the bridge and officers he’d assembled. Pure luck, but he’d take that luck. Everyone here had proven themselves in the fire, time and again.
“Drew, you take this watch,” Uly ordered. “Sterling, I believe you’re next on rotation?”
“Aye, sir,” Sterling nodded. “Back to normal?”
“As close to normal as we can manage,” Uly said. “I’ll see most of you at dinner.”
He headed back to his working office, off the bridge. Dan fell in beside him, matching his steps with her long legs as he walked.
He looked over, but she shook her head minutely so he kept going. Eventually, they arrived at his office and she closed the hatch behind herself.
“What can I do for you?” Uly asked, watching her eyes.
Not disturbed, but intent, as only she could do.
“Karaŋgılıkka,” she said, summing up a tremendous amount of distance in one, simple word.
If you understood that the printed version of the book was a doorstop that weighed six kilograms. And he’d acquired several for Suka Kuri and her students to translate.
“Sailing into Darkness,” he replied, roughly translating the name itself.
“The Isann aren’t Yarikh, except as intellectual descendants,” Dan reminded him. “We still don’t know what happened to them.”
“We’ll find out,” Uly reminded her. “Sterling and Haydar have been able to synthesize all of Kadyr’s records from their various libraries with older things known to the Emro and the Auga. Both of them date back to an era when the Yarikh were still a thing. What’s really bothering you?”
It was only evident because he’d spent so much time studying her face. Learning every little thing about her that he could, because Uly knew that he needed her more than anybody else anywhere.
“What happens to a civilization when it collapses?” she asked.
The small group of senior folks had chewed on that topic over dinner several times, but come to no conclusions.
“According to the legends Suka Kuri has heard, the Yarikh slowly pulled back over several generations towards the end,” he said. “Presumably emptying some of these worlds of population. Other places like Isann were mostly a single species that stayed put. Or a clan that moved there and claimed it after the Yarikh left. But they fell into a form of barbarism for a long stretch and are only now coming out of it. I suspect without knowing that there might be many such worlds out there ahead of us, where there are people, but they don’t have a stardrive until someone comes along and supplies it. Don’t know who brought the Isann up, but they’ve embraced it and will start trading with the Ugotha and Zuath, plus whoever else they might meet at Bastion.”
“That’s the part that niggles at me, Uly,” she said slowly. Deeply. Contemplatively. “That we might find several cultures, currently locked in on one world or one system, that then get unleashed on the wider galaxy as a threat.”
“I’m given to understand that Humans are still the most violent species out there, for whatever reason,” he nodded. “Auga next, but they have raised bureaucracy to a religion. Most of the rest aren’t as bad. And if they do wake up to aliens and decide to go off on some terrible crusade, then maybe we’ll have to deal with that before we circle back to crush the Auga.”
“You know how crazy that sounds, right?” she smiled. “Us talking about taking this one ship and destroying an empire with thousands of inhabited systems?”
“We could easily live out our entire lives in comfort, over here in Sector Fourteen,” Uly agreed. “Get fabulously rich and live like royalty do back in Danumash. And the rest of the galaxy would keep going slowly to the hell of whatever the Auga will inflict upon them when it finally arrives, however many generations of our descendants will be there to meet it.”
“Our descendants?” she asked with a teasing grin.
“Collectively our,” Uly deflected. “This thing we’re building.”
Much as he might want to reach across that desk and take her hand. Talk about things they’d slid around time and again unsaid.
She nodded, silently acknowledging that today wasn’t the day to have that conversation. Not with yet another mission ahead of them.
When would it be? Uly didn’t know.
“So we have to stop the Auga by ourselves?” she asked, stepping sideways with him.
“And all our friends,” he nodded. “Every day, we find more people willing to help. They just need inspiration. The Corsac Fox provides that.”
“What about Uly?” she pressed. “What’s he think about all this?”
“He sees it as just another grand adventure, doing things he never imagined and meeting folks he couldn’t have dreamed existed, back when he was a mere ensign on Marshall Castillon,” Uly grinned. “Here, he’s making a difference.”
“He is,” she agreed. “What do you think we’ll find?”
Uly shrugged and considered it. They’d spent hours on the topic but that was then.
Corsac Fox was in motion today.
Sailing Into Darkness.
“I’m hoping that the Yarikh are out there,” he said quietly. “Not their homeworld, which the Isann believe was abandoned long ago, but that place they retreated to, up in the mountains where the cold and winds would protect them. I’d like to know what happened at the end. Who they turned into, once they stepped off that stage, assuming some level of cultural collapse. If nothing else, it gives me an idea of how we might weaken the Auga enough that they become just another nation, rather than the grand monolith that will eventually conquer the entire galaxy.”
“Will they, though?” she asked. “Suka Kuri mentioned once that they were having fewer children every generation, even as they expanded outwards. That there might be trillions of them today, but because of the way they had engineered themselves as they saw perfection, that they might vanish on their own.”
“That just means a civil war at some point,” Uly noted, thinking back to his academy days.
“Is that a bad thing?” she asked. “If it stops the Auga?”
He had to remember that Dan, as brilliant and sharp as she was, had enlisted and worked her way up from the bottom, without the breadth of education demanded of an officer in Batyr’s Navy.
“Whole worlds might be bombed out of existence,” he said. “There have been records of the Auga sitting in orbit and bombarding the surface, when folks resisted being absorbed into the Empire. It will get worse if they want to leave.”
“If they didn’t want terrible things to happen, maybe they should have been nicer to people along the way?” she asked.
It sounded polite and friendly, but the look on her face was fierce.
And she was right. If the Auga Empire hadn’t turned out to be more or less just like the Combined Crowns of Danumash, he might feel bad.
In Danumash’s case, an inherited aristocracy of blood that controlled everything and everyone. For the Auga, it went another step down the scale, as the elite were all Auga, and only Auga. At least the Danumash middle classes could harbor the fantasy of being lucky enough to marry into one of the ruling clans.
The Auga ruled. Everyone else accepted.
Or not.
Exactly the opposite of what he was trying to build here. What he’d asked Dan to create, where everyone was equal.
If the two of them in charge were Human, that had been the luck of the draw, and he still had advisors from every direction that he could listen to. Or even seek out.
What a proper republic was supposed to be, rather than another form of aristocracy.
“Tomorrow’s problem,” he decided. “Today, we’re going to seek the Yarikh, and hope they can teach us things from the far end of history. We’re just starting out. Maybe we can make decisions today that stretch that endpoint as far out to the horizon as possible.”
“With you all the way,” she said quietly.
“That’s the only reason I think I can do it,” he nodded.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Anari had wanted to be Sabre School. Had studied for it. Trained for it.
Stupid Auga had taken her test results and announced that she was too intelligent to be Sabre and had assigned her to become an engineer instead.
Which really, at the end of the day, told you all you needed to know about how they saw learning, but she kept that opinion to herself. Nobody around here liked the Auga, but nobody had as much reason to hate them.
Except maybe Ethir and the Cousins. And Yeong-Suk and her clan.
Okay, maybe a lot of folks had been mistreated. All the more reason to help Uly break them.
This morning, she was deep into her project of translating the Karaŋgılıkka. Suka Kuri had made electronic copies available, but Anari preferred having that heavy paper edition in her lap as she fought her way through it.
Mechanical translation was dumb. Mechanical. It lost all the nuance of idioms, making the results look like something a child had written. You needed brains and literature and poetry and art to make it prety. And she supposed that she might have been a candidate for Moss School, in a different lifetime.
Good thing she had an Exemplar who told her she could do both, because this paragraph was driving Anari utterly sideways. It didn’t make any sense at all. She’d even put it into the computer and asked for that stupid mechanical translation, and it hadn’t given her anything better.
Anari closed the book and her tablet, sliding them into a bag as she checked the clock.
Early, but Suka Kuri rose early. Said that it was the time of day most peaceful for contemplating deep and serious things. Or simply enjoying your tea before anyone else rose.
She should be at tea. Anari exited her cabin and headed aft to where she expected to find the Exemplar.
Sure enough, back in a corner of the wardroom, with part of a muffin dismantled on the plate in front of her and an Emro-sized tea pot.
Anari snagged a muffin. Looked like the Spatula knew Suka Kuri’s schedule, and pulled them exactly as she walked in, since they were still warm. She filled a mug with coffee and approached.
“You look like a woman on a mission,” Suka Kuri grinned up at her.
“Confused, elder,” Anari replied.
“Sit, and perhaps we can share it,” Suka Kuri gestured.
Anari did, taking time to nosh on warm muffin and coffee. Those little things that should be appreciated by both Moss and Sabre.
Warm muffin. Nuff said.
“What troubles you this morning?” Suka Kuri finally asked.
Anari opened her bag and filled the table with book, notebook, and notes. She opened the source to the page driving her to distraction and located the offending paragraph.
“Here’s what it says,” Anari replied. “And this is the best guess I can translate, but it makes no sense, even poetically.”
Suka Kuri studied the page.
“You’re farther along than I am,” she noted simply, causing Anari to blink.
Was she going too fast?
“No, at the speed you find appropriate,” Suka Kuri said, so apparently Anari was muttering this morning.
She bit on the muffin to shut her mouth.
“I see your confusion,” Suka Kuri said. “This almost reads as if it came from a third language, and was reproduced almost verbatim here in Isann.”
Anari blinked. Cycled back through that chapter of the book.
“Yes,” she breathed heavily. “Something older. Something original? The poet who composed this piece? I know it was once passed down orally rather than written. Did someone try to render this directly from Yarikh and had to rely on a machine to do it? And why write it like this?”
Anari had anguished over the paragraph. Directions for sailing, but written as if one were in a boat on the surface of an ocean, rather than in the stars, in spite of this being part of a tale where Zamir Aytiev was out having yet another crazy adventure.
Dan had mentioned a Human legend of a similar hero, undertaking a series of impossible labors because he was busy trying to clear his name from some crime. Or others like Aytiev who got sidetracked on the way home from a war and took decades to make it.
Nowhere else in the Karaŋgılıkka did anyone sail on water.
At least so far? Anari hadn’t read the rest, merely sat down and began her translation, because Suka Kuri would eventually take several versions and assemble them into a definitive copy that would be transmitted to the Emro. And others.
