Michael Flynn - The January Dancer

Not all the trade ships came back.

So the statistics said, and although Fir Li was aware of the shortcomings of all statistics—“They are first written down by the village watchman, and he writes what he damn well pleases!”—he found the figures troubling. As troubling as the cruelty of Those of Name, who had uprooted entire peoples of the Old Commonwealth and scattered them beyond the edge of space, Ngozi’s grandparents among them.

Nothing compelled a ship departing Sapphire Point to obtain her return frank there, save the commercial regulations of the League. But the Hound of Fir Li had obtained the customs information from all of the crossings and had cross-tabulated them, and…

…not all the ships came back.

Many of the crossings were narrow, and a ship ill-piloted might run afoul of the shallows and beach catastrophically into the subluminal mud. The god Ricci, who caresses each point of space, had graced the roads with a “speed of space” far greater than flat space, and a ship might slide down them comfortably below local-c yet far above Newtonian-c. A ship at translight speeds that found itself suddenly in Newtonian space would become a brief but spectacular burst of Cerenkov radiation. Such mishaps were not common, but they did occur. Yet models existed that related that probability to the local properties of space, and the number of disappearances exceeded the expected value at the five percent risk level.

The Dao Chettians had exiled their defeated foes with deliberate disregard for cultural homogeneity. A Babel of exiles could not combine and conspire if they could not even understand one another. Like all the others finding themselves far from home in the company of strangers, Ngozi’s grandparents had tried to maintain the old country customs—but there were too few compatriots and they were scattered too widely and over too many worlds. “The center cannot hold,” an ancient poet had written, and so things had flown apart. Ngozi herself had lived at just the right moment in history and could look back upon her grandparents’ struggles to maintain the old, and forward upon her grandchildren’s struggles to create the new.

How to explain the excess in the number of lost ships? Those of Name had become decadent—Fir Li had seen this for himself—and they had forgotten many things; but they had not forgotten how to be cruel. The code that had allowed them to disperse whole peoples, to dissolve living cultures into artfully re-created and inward-looking archaisms, would not forbid the seizure of an occasional ship for no better reason than the joy of it.

And so each faculty of his attention came to rest upon the same object. From settlement days on the Old Planets to the disappearance of ships in the present to the sight of the starless abyss, the menace of the Confederation ran like the drone note of a bagpipe.

“Yes, Pup,” he said, for three channels did not exhaust his paraperception. “What is it?”

Greystroke always stumbled a bit when he entered his Master’s quarters. It was not so much the three-fourths’ gravity as it was the sight of the Rift. The span of the wall screen played with one’s peripheral vision and so it seemed as if the ship’s hull had been stripped off and the emptiness without had poured within. Fir Li’s quarters were deep within the vessel—no architect was so foolish as to put a commander’s suite at the very skin of the ship—but the illusion always caught some part of a man’s mind off-guard, and no one ever entered the suite when the screen was active without a sudden and unwitting hesitation in his step.

Greystroke was no exception, and the momentary stumble was a source of great vexation to him, for he tried to school himself against it. It irritated him that an illusion would catch him up.

He was a young man the color of his name, so average in appearance and demeanor that he had achieved an operational sort of invisibility. This could be advantageous for a journeyman Hound. When he desired so, he could remain unnoticed for a very long time. “Cu!” he said.

Fir Li scrolled a page on his viewer. “Something unusual.” Fir Li’s voice was a bass rumble, something between a growl and the grinding of rocks.

“Aye, Cu.”

“But not an emergency at the crossing, or I would have been summoned by the alarms.”

“Aye, Cu.”

The Hound scrolled another page on the reader. “Traffic control, then. A ship on our side of the Rift approaching the Interchange, but not a typical merchant or you’d not disturb my rest at all.”

“Cu, the pickets have detected the bow waves of a large fleet coming up the Palisades.”

The Hound was about to turn another page, but paused in thought for a moment. “A fleet,” he said. “How many ships?”

“The swift-boat counted twenty. All corvette class.”

The Hound bobbed his head side to side. “Too small for a colony fleet; too many for a survey expedition. A war has started somewhere.” He turned off his viewer and stood gracefully from his chair. “I will be in the command center shortly. Such a grand fleet, I must dress for the occasion.”

The command center in the heart of Hot Gates was a broad, ovoid room, the dome of which was a display screen of impressive and subtle scope. Staff were arranged by units and sections around the room’s circumference—clerks manning the consoles, department heads standing inboard from them at podiums.

Greystroke entered, fastening a red-and-gold dress jacket. “Point Traffic,” he said, “alert me when you spot Cerenkov glow from the Parkway exit. Swift-boats are fast, but that fleet won’t be too far behind.”

The supervisor in charge of Sapphire Point Navigation and Tracking Section acknowledged. “Timer says four metric minutes until arrival.”

“I assume they’re heading for the Silk Road. Communications, hail their commodore as soon as they are subluminal. And Fire Control?”

“Aye, Pup?” The captain of Battle Management Section turned at her podium.

“We’ve gotten no swifties from Hanseatic Point, but we cannot discount the chance that a Confederate fleet has forced the crossing west of us. If so, they’ll come off the ramp firing. Be alert.”

“On it,” said Fire Control; and she directed her staff to key off Traffic’s bearings.

“Customs,” Greystroke said dryly, “prepare for maximum likelihood.”

The supervisor of Customs Section grinned as he set his screens. “Maximum likelihood; minimum impact. Boring.”

“Boring,” said the Hound of Fir Li as he entered through his personal door, “but preferable to the more exciting alternatives.” He wore a tight-fitting suit woven of thread-of-gold, bearing no insignia of rank and but a single decoration: the red-and-blue lapel ribbon of the Appreciation of Valency. It was the only one he ever wore. He strode through a chorus of greetings to the dais in the center of the room and stood behind the rails, gripping them with both hands. “Status?”

“Two metric minutes,” said Traffic.

“Cu,” said Greystroke. “Squadron is dispersed and all ships on amber alert.”

The Hound nodded. “Sensors, dome view. Palisades at focal.”

The ceiling dome darkened to the outside night. To the right and rear of the command station: the emptiness of the Rift. To the left, the frontier stars of the League with the haze of the Periphery beyond them. At the forward focal point, enclosed in red-line crosshairs, the exit from the Parkway. Invisible, an anomaly in n-space, limned in false colors so as to resemble the mouth of a tunnel.

“Ninety beats,” said Traffic. “Sir, a swifty exiting the Parkway.”

“Message from incoming fleet,” said Comm. “Screening for viruses. Clean.”