The Gem Lords

Suddenly Mortal - Part 5

     Thomas and Lirenna, meanwhile, had gone through one of the airlocks to stand on the walkway circling the ship. Partially to see what was going on, but mainly to find a spot where they could escape from the crowd of fellow crewmembers. To find a little breathing space, so to speak.

     As they emerged from the airlock, though, they saw that not a few of the other crewmembers had had the same idea, so that the walkway was scarcely less crowded than the corridors they'd left behind. Drenn Pietar was a few yards away to their left, standing beside Karog Gunlubber, and Clawdus, now wearing nothing but a tiger skin now that the felisians were finally earning the trust of the University wizards, was off to their right, rubbing shoulders with one of the shae folk. A few moon trogs were sitting in wheelchairs, visibly uncomfortable in the Tharian level gravity, and one of them had already had enough of it and was carefully making his way past the two wizards back to the airlock, wanting to get back to deck six. The weightless outer shell of the ship, where he could swim gracefully and effortlessly in the zero gravity.

     No-one was talking, of course, speech being impossible in the vacuum, but Lirenna was reading Thomas's mind and they'd worked out a system of hand squeezes by means of which she could reply to his thoughts. They stood side by side with clasped hands, therefore, looking out at the planet growing before them, as beautiful as every other living planet they'd seen. They saw cyclonic swirls of white cloud, between which they could see a thousand shades of blue where the oceans glittered in the sunlight, and a thousand shades of green and brown where the continents rose in high mountain chains, between which lay forests, deserts and grassland.

     Like every other time Thomas had seen a planet from space, the wizard thought he could just stand and stare at it forever, hypnotised by its beauty. "How can something so lovely contain so much horror and hatred?" he wondered, forgetting his wife could read his thoughts until he felt her hand giving his the long, continual squeeze that signified her inability to answer the question. He turned to look at her, and saw the same pained bafflement on her face that he was feeling himself.

     Looking back at the planet, growing visibly before them as the ship decelerated into orbit around it, he saw that there were points of light on its night side. Points of light that formed a wavy line as if a drunkard had dropped a trail of diamonds behind him as he'd staggered home. The lights of cities along the coastline? he wondered at first, but no city he'd ever seen gave out that much light, unless they were...

     "Oh Gods!" he gasped. "They're on fire! Look, those cities are ablaze. Burning so brightly we can see them even from way up here!"

     Planet four must have launched a counter attack, he thought, or perhaps their ships had already been on their way even as the ships of planet three were delivering their payloads of death. He felt Lirenna's hand tightening in his. Not a message as such, merely her response to her husband's terrible discovery. She moved closer to him until she was pressing herself against him, taking comfort from the familiar solidity of Thomas's body, and he felt her shivering in horror and sick fear. He pulled his hand out of her grasp to put it around her shoulder, taking her hand with his other hand so she could still talk to him.

     They didn't hear the airlock door opening behind him as Saturn emerged, wearing a Helm of Telepathy. "Ah, there you are," he thought at them, making them both jump with surprise. "We'll be pulling up alongside one of their ships soon. Keep your eyes open. Every detail might be important."

     Thomas and Lirenna both nodded and focused all their attention on the ships they were beginning to be able to see ahead of them.

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     Saturn turned to aim telepathic thoughts at the ballista crew, telling them to stand by to defend the ship in the event they came under attack.

     The great weapon, like the other three around the ship, was already loaded with a six foot bolt of solid ashwood tipped with a five pound head of sharp steel, and the tension bars were bent almost to splintering with the force that would, when the trigger was pulled, send it off with enough force to punch it through six inches of solid oak. If that wasn't enough to deter an attacker, the bolt could also be set ablaze to set the enemy ship (the enemy wooden ship, thought Saturn in amazement) on fire, or spells could be cast on it to make the bolt explode with great force on impact. Compared with the rather crude weapons the people of this system seemed to use against each other, it was a devastatingly effective device that, together with the Jules Verne's steel hull, had to make them a match for at least half a dozen local ships attacking at once. Saturn prayed to himself that it wouldn't come to that, however. Being a match for six ships wouldn't help them if they found themselves surrounded by twenty.

     There was a ship ahead of them now, he saw. One of the tiny specks of light was growing, resolving itself into sails and hull. One side brilliant in the light of the sun, the other an impenetrable black, visible only by the silhouette it cast against the blue and white orb of the planet beyond. The Captain had chosen a ship that wasn't part of a fleet. A ship sailing alone on an unknown mission to one of the planet's moons. A moon which, they'd seen in the scrying mirror, had a surface gravity fully as strong as that on the surface of the planet below and was alive and verdant with vegetation despite being smaller than Kronos. The planet's three other moons were the same, as were the five moons of the fourth planet that orbited in a loose cluster like an archipelago of islands.

     The ballista crew turned the heavy weapon to point at the ship as they drew alongside it, and Saturn was relieved to see that its crew gave no sign of being aware of the Jules Verne, despite the fact that it would have loomed over them like a strange white planet had it been visible. An officer was standing on the upper deck, looking with hard, cruel eyes over the scrawny, sunburned men scrubbing the main deck below. Another crewman was aiming an instrument of some kind at the stars, probably checking their position, while another group of men were sitting on coils of rope stitching a large sail with needles of thick steel that took so much effort to push through the dense, heavy fabric that they'd put thick, yellow callouses on their fingers.

     The whole scene was one of peace and mild boredom, of around a hundred men in cramped, squalid conditions trying to while away the long days of the voyage any way they could. They would probably have welcomed the arrival of the Jules Verne as a break from the tedium, Saturn thought with a moment of rare amusement.

     He used the Helm of Telepathy to communicate with the Captain on the bridge. "We must get closer if I am to read their minds. We must get to within a couple of dozen yards of them."

     "The Orbmaster says that kind of precision is very hard to achieve," replied Strong. "That ship is moving erratically, like an ocean going ship rolling on the waves. If we get too close, we risk a collision. I'll take us to within fifty feet. That'll have to be good enough."

     "That's extreme range for this particular artifact," replied the wizard, "but if that's as close as we can get then I suppose that'll have to do."

     A moment later the ship loomed even closer until one of the sideways jutting masts was only half a dozen feet from the Jules Verne's railing. Saturn closed his eyes and concentrated, and his frown deepened as he failed to make telepathic contact with any of the busily toiling sailors, now so close that the Jules Verne crewmen crowding the railing could see every scar on their faces. Every souvenir of past conflicts with the ships of the fourth planet. This ship had evidently seen its share of the action, as was also evidenced by recent timberwork on the deck and railing where battle damage had been repaired, and they would no doubt fight fiercely if battle broke out between them and the crew of the Tharian ship. The ballista crew, seeing this, kept their weapon pointed at the base of the most exposed mast, just as they would do in the event of an ordinary sea battle. If they brought the mast down, its loss would limit the ship's speed and manoeuvrability, and the falling sails and rigging would encumber the crew on the main deck.

     The ship was rocking and rolling, however, as if sailing on an invisible ocean, and as Saturn was about to give up it gave a sudden lurch towards the Jules Verne. The sideways jutting mast hit the Jules Verne, piercing the micrometeorite cladding and scraping a ten foot gash in the light, porous tiles to slide along the metal hull beneath...