Rift in the Races Read online

  “Two minutes twenty-seven seconds,” Roberto announced, watching the autopilot controls to confirm trajectory and attitude. “All systems normal. No signs of interfering magic.”

  “Be ready for it,” said Captain Asad.

  “Aye, sir.”

  Orli slid two slender fingers down a long white line of light near the top of her console to darken the windshield. The computer wasn’t dimming it fast enough, and the glare was making everybody squint.

  Behind the pair piloting the landing craft, Captain Asad turned to the assemblage of fellow captains seated around him, nine in addition to himself. “I spoke to Admiral Crane just before we left,” he began, “and he asked that we look suitably impressed regardless of what we see today. He considers it a matter of etiquette that, no matter how primitive this contraption turns out to be, we show respect for the effort. This Queen of theirs is vain, pompous and self-indulgent, and there is nothing to be gained from angering her. Particularly given that we still know very little about their technology.”

  “It’s magic, Asad,” said Captain Jefferies of the fleet ship Utah. “When are you going to relax and call a spade a spade? Talk about nothing to be gained. You deny what you’ve seen with your own two eyes over and over again. We’ve all seen it at least a hundred times.”

  Several of the others nodded in agreement. Orli wanted to say something as well, but Roberto saw her about to open her mouth and kicked her under the console.

  Captain Asad shook his head and made an irritated sound in the back of his throat. He felt as if he were trying to reason with a room full of five-year-olds determined to believe in fairytales. Whatever the Prosperions did, the thing they called magic, worked, yes. He granted them that. He’d seen enough of it since the first encounter with Altin Meade eighteen months ago to know that something was real. But magic? That was ridiculous. That was a notion that encouraged lazy fantasy rather than prudent inquiry. He resisted the urge to make that point to his fellow captains yet again, and pressed on instead with conveying the admiral’s last-minute remarks instead.

  “Also, please have an eye for detail, and have the video feed on your com badges set to record. I’m sure I don’t have to tell any of you the tactical value of taking good mental and recorded notes, in case these people turn out not to be as sweet and neighborly as everyone is so hell-bent on trusting they are.”

  Roberto kicked Orli again, and even with that, she had to bite down on her bottom lip to keep her remark in check. She knew her friend was right to silence her, but she scowled at him anyway, as if he were the one with the terrible attitude.

  “Asad, you are something else,” said Captain Jefferies, shaking his head. A few others clearly agreed, though not all.

  “Yes, I am something else,” Captain Asad sent back. “I am the last man in Troy trying to prevent a gullible populace from opening the goddamn gates because they are so dumbstruck by the pretty wooden horse they just can’t stop themselves. Now if you will all please acknowledge the admiral’s last communication, then this … medieval show-and-tell can be over, and we can get back to work repairing our ships.”

  “Twenty seconds, Captain,” said Roberto.

  The ship finished its fiery descent through the upper atmosphere and leveled off. Orli brought the windshield back to standard transparency as Roberto took over manual control.

  “All right,” he said. “Here we are. So, where is it?”

  “Over there, on the other side of those hills,” said Orli, pointing. “Just like it shows on the map they gave us. That set of hills just below that mountain range, where it forms a bowl.” She pulled a rolled-up sheet of parchment from under her chair and spread it out on the console. “See, look.”

  “These people need to learn how to give coordinates,” Roberto muttered as he glanced at the map.

  “They’re working on it,” she said. “They’re learning our ways as quickly as possible. Unlike some of us.” She lifted her foot, causing Roberto’s kick to hit the bottom of her boot rather than the soft flesh of her calf.

  “As I said,” said Captain Asad, ignoring her but tipping a sideways movement of his head toward the parchment map. “Primitive.” He straightened himself and faced the other captains squarely. “I know there’s been a great deal of build-up and secrecy around this project, and to talk to their monarch, you’d think it was the greatest achievement in all of history, but let’s make sure to keep our expectations in check. Smile and act impressed.”

  Roberto guided the ship toward the low-slung set of foothills, which, to the cartographer’s artistic credit, were rendered perfectly on the map. He brought their small ship closer to the ground as they approached the hills, in position for a quick landing if a magical pulse from something the wizards were doing forced him to set it down fast. In a matter of moments they crested the edge of the little vale, revealing as they did an area roughly three miles long and a little more than half that wide.

  To the northeast, where the vale melted into foothills crowding up against the mountains, the shuttle occupants could see a shanty town. It wasn’t very large, comprised of several rows of wooden outbuildings that appeared hastily built and leaned one against the next. It obviously stood in service to the great pit just east of it, which opened out from the base of the mountain for a half-mile and ran along it for two. The ship was too far away for its occupants to see down inside, but the sensor readings indicated it was nearly a half-mile to the bottom of the pit.

  “Well, there’s a backwoods set-up,” Roberto commented as he surveyed the shanty town.

  “That’s the quarry,” Orli said, pointing to the corresponding area on the map. “Which means Citadel should be somewhere over there.” She pointed out across the vale, indicating the vast carpet of greenery spreading between the encircling foothills.

  At first the area appeared empty, a wide bowl-shaped expanse of verdant plain nestled within a ring of low hills, but then Orli noticed something odd, something of a blur several hundred meters up ahead. “Do you see that?” she said.

  “See what?” asked Roberto and Captain Asad together.

  “Up there, look, that smear of blue. It’s right below where the hills are kind of warping against the horizon. See? Something’s funky over there.”

  Everyone in the ship craned forward, squinting and focusing as the lot of them tried to spot what Orli was pointing at. Despite Captain Asad’s admonition about keeping expectations in check, they were all quite curious to see the War Queen’s new spaceship.

  Captain Asad moved to stand between Orli and Roberto, his hands braced on the backs of their seats. He stared out like the rest of them as he scanned the rise and fall of the horizon, looking for the distortion Orli had described. Finally he saw it. From the hums and ahas of his comrades, they saw it too.

  “That’s weird,” said Roberto. “It’s all shimmery.” He checked the sensors while the other passengers voiced similar ideas, some suggesting it was merely a heat effect, common enough in deserts and on hot roads, even though this locality was neither desert nor hot road. They all had an opinion of some sort or another, but everyone saw it, regardless of how they tried to make sense of the distinct smearing of grass and air that shaped itself before them. The closer they got, the easier it was to see. A circular expanse that seemed to be a tumultuous shuffling of sky and greenery, light warping and doing strange things within the visible confines of a perfect sphere. A very large perfect sphere.

  “What is it?” demanded Captain Asad as he motioned for Roberto to stop and hover where they were, still a few hundred meters away.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Orli.

  “I asked for an analysis, not an opinion, Ensign.”

  “It’s damn huge, is what it is,” said Captain Paxton with some trepidation in her voice. “Look at that thing. It looks like a giant crystal ball.”

  “It does!” Orli agreed, her voice filling with enthusiasm. “That’s exactly what it is. A giant crystal ball.”

>   “Giant ain’t the word for it,” said Roberto, tearing his attention away from it long enough to tap up a sensor scan. “It’s…,” he had to wait for the reading, then tap in a different set of commands. “It’s not letting me read it directly, but the sensor shadow says it’s 731.52 meters in diameter. Perfectly spherical.”

  “What’s it made of?” demanded Captain Asad.

  Orli leaned over to look at Roberto’s screen. She saw it even as he said it out loud. “Unknown. Sensors aren’t picking it up.”

  “What do you mean they aren’t picking it up? You just said it’s over seven-hundred meters.”

  “It could be a million meters, sir, and we still wouldn’t be reading anything from it. I’m using the edge of the light distortion to measure it, kind of like gravitational lensing. Here, look.” Roberto leaned away from his console so the captain could see.

  “And so it begins,” said the captain after the barest glance at Roberto’s monitor.

  Roberto kicked Orli again, but not before it came out: “And so what begins, Captain?”

  The captain turned on her so quickly Roberto had to stop the reflex that had him reaching to pull the captain back. Fortunately, he caught himself in time. The captain wasn’t going to hit her. He wouldn’t, but it had been a while since Roberto had seen how the two of them got when stuck together on the bridge. What with her spending so much time at the mining base back on the Naotatican moon, they hadn’t had to suffer one another much lately.

  “Don’t start, Pewter,” Captain Asad said. “Your service has been halfway decent for the last few months, but I won’t tolerate regression. Whenever you get near this planet or that bare-footed native, Meade, you lose your discipline. You’re down here on special permission, and on my good graces alone. Don’t make me regret it.”

  She started to say something, but Roberto kicked her yet again, this time in full view of the captain. She shot her long-time friend a look that suggested he would pay for the bruises he was giving her. “Yes, sir,” she said at length.

  Captain Asad’s eyes narrowed, his sharp temper glinting in them like the edge of a knife, but after a moment carving at her, he looked back out at the enormous crystal sphere.

  He could only assume that this was the thing they’d come to see. A big ball of what might simply turn out to be glass. He was not impressed. However, from the eager conversations behind him, many of the other captains felt the trip had suddenly become far more interesting. While a few of them had, like Captain Asad, expected something ridiculous made of wood, the more optimistic among them had anticipated something else, the medieval approximation of a steam engine or perhaps some other leap forward in technology as measured by the gauge of Earth’s history. Clearly the Prosperions had done none of that, and for more than a few on board, a giant crystal ball was an interesting and unexpected development.

  Altin Meade’s first voyage into space, while groundbreaking for his people, had not been carried out in a vessel that would inspire technical awe in a person from planet Earth, nor had it been carried out in anything as grand as a giant crystal globe. He had done it in nothing more than a lonely, old, weather-beaten tower made of stone, and that only three stories high, nothing majestic at all. This, on the other hand, was magnificent, or at least some of them thought so.

  Captain Asad, however, was not impressed. It took more than a few sparkles and some bending light to do that. But the object had gotten his attention, which he remarked on as he returned to his seat. “So, captains, we have our first bit of reconnaissance. We now know they’ve figured out how to avoid our sensors. That didn’t take them long.”

  “Not bad for a pack of primitives, eh, Asad?” jibed Captain Paxton.

  “As I recall, Paxton, you were among those who thought sending our people down to that college to teach them how our technology works was a good idea. So I guess we can’t give them all the credit for figuring out how to circumvent our defenses, can we?” He shook his head as the thought of that decision still rankled him. “Take us down, Lieutenant,” he said.

  “Taking us down, sir,” said Roberto. He maneuvered the ship closer to the giant crystal ball—although not too close, given the troublesome effects magic often had on electrical instruments.

  As the ship neared the ground, sunlight struck the enormous crystal sphere at an angle, sending a blinding beam of light into the shuttle like a golden laser shot, a flash so bright it seemed for a moment as if the sphere had become a star. Orli gasped as she turned away, raising her forearm reflexively to shield her eyes, but the blast of it was gone a moment later as Roberto shifted the ship to starboard just a bit. Despite his great care, however, an unexpected increase in aft thrust came with his adjustment, which sent them lurching toward the monstrous thing on a head-on collision course—the effects of ambient magic, he was sure. He quickly compensated for it, his fingers dancing across the controls with the reflexive speed of one who’s done something a thousand times before. He managed the override and stopped them, though just short, less than forty meters away. “Goddamn magical bastards,” he said as he backed the ship to a safe distance again.

  “Are we going to have a problem, Lieutenant?” asked the captain.

  Roberto shook his head. “Nothing I can’t handle, sir.”

  “What’s that in the middle?” asked Captain Paxton, as everyone let out the breath they’d sucked in during the excitement of the moments just before. She pointed toward the center of the massive crystal sphere. “That thing there, the gray cube inside.”

  “That’s what it looks like,” confirmed Captain Jefferies. “A gray cube.”

  “Set us down another hundred meters back, Lieutenant. We have no idea what that thing might do,” said Captain Asad.

  “I’m sure it will strike us out of the sky the moment we get close,” Orli muttered under her breath, just loud enough for Roberto to hear. Or so she thought.

  “Pewter, if you’d like to spend the rest of this visit here on the shuttle, keep that up, request of the Queen or not.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  Roberto shook his head at her as he set the ship down a presumably safe two hundred meters from the crystal sphere. A few moments later, the lot of them were making their way through the knee-high grass toward the towering luminosity.

  “So where are they?” Captain Paxton asked, scanning all around. “Did we get the date on the invitation wrong?”

  Several of the others laughed.

  “We’re right here,” said the Queen, appearing from seemingly nowhere and standing on a wide wooden dais that had materialized to the right of the sphere. She was surrounded by a small group of dignitaries and military notables, and behind them stretched a large camp. Several large pavilion tents dominated the scene rising up from amongst orderly rows of smaller varieties. Cook fires burned high throughout the camp, roasting on slowly turning spits the sizzling masses of huge boars or the giant portions of creatures too large for the Earth people to identify. The sights and sounds of the camp came upon the fleet officers in a wave as the invisibility illusion dropped, and more than a few of them recoiled from the unexpected arrival of it all. The scent of the food brought them all around, however, and grins soon abounded. Prosperion cuisine was remarkable, especially when compared to the largely processed fare upon which the fleet had been living for more than a decade now.

  The Queen waited for them to recover from the shock of her sudden appearance and then greeted them with joyous laughter in her voice. “Welcome, friends from Earth. Welcome to Citadel.” She turned and presented the immense crystal sphere to them with a grandiose sweep of her arm. The sun glinted from her golden plate armor almost as brilliantly as it did from the object she introduced.

  The group from Earth came near enough for propriety and stopped. The lot of them issued the deep bows that they were still only slowly becoming accustomed to giving—and still not properly. Fortunately, the Queen understood such things, and she smiled graciously, though a tall and
somewhat skeletal-looking woman standing next to her made no effort to conceal the fact that she did not approve. The spindly woman stood to her full height, her bearing nearly as regal as Her Majesty’s own, and made a point of showing her disapproval via the scowl upon her white-powdered face. Queen Karroll ignored it and came down the wooden steps to greet them personally.

  “Captain Asad,” said the Queen, “it is a delight to have the boots of such a distinguished warrior once again standing upon my world. Be welcome, you and your companions all.” A fine dignity she offered him in that. Orli wanted to snort but was smart enough to keep that one in check. No kick from Roberto was required.

  “Your Majesty,” Captain Asad replied, inclining his head and giving a second, somewhat shorter bow. He might not have been a fan of what he deemed “ridiculous and primitive monarchy,” but he understood his duty well enough.

  She greeted the rest of the group, each in turn, and pronounced each captain’s name and title as Captain Asad introduced them, even deigning to shake their hands in keeping with the customs of planet Earth. Orli saw the haughty woman on the dais exchange glances with a portly older man standing next to her. She recognized the man as the Earl of Vorvington, whom she had met at the Royal Earth Ball and encountered twice since then, back in the mines beneath Tinpoa Base. The two royals exchanged glances, making it clear that the angular woman was horrified by the behavior of the Queen.

  As the War Queen and sovereign of Kurr made her way down the line of fleet officers, Orli looked up at the dais, hoping for a sight of Altin somewhere in the group. He was not among those at the front who’d been standing beside the Queen. Of those, there were several figures Orli recognized: Baron Thoroughgood and his dashing son Thadius; the Queen’s elven assassin, Shadesbreath, with all his black leather armor and bristling knives; and a pair of military men she’d encountered a time or two over the last few months, General Darklot and his right-hand man, Lieutenant Andru of the Queen’s cavalry. Between that assemblage, the earl with his wide body and the others in their various armors, fineries or vacuous gowns, Orli could not make out any of the handful of people behind them, even though she knew that Altin had to be up there somewhere.