“If he goes on about the glory again,” Sale said, “I’ll kill him myself.” She looked at Craik, who was getting oxygen. “Bring two, just in case.”

  Ean finished his explanation. Tinatin had stopped singing and was listening, nodding occasionally at what made sense. Mael was doing the same.

  The song died away.

  Ean glanced over to Kari Wang, sitting in the Captain’s Chair. He hoped she wasn’t too depressed.

  “Let’s do it for real now,” Sale said.

  “I need to call Helmo and Wendell first.” Ean sang two comms open. “Ready to enter the void, Captains,” he said.

  Even Kari Wang nodded.

  He closed the lines the same way. “Let’s do it.”

  Mael had started to shake again. What if he couldn’t help Mael? Then Ean remembered Helmo’s gift. He pulled the small bottle out of his pocket and handed it across. “Captain Helmo asked me to give this to you.” At least it would give Mael something to think about.

  Mael unstoppered the lid and sniffed at it. He sniffed again, more deeply. “Black fire,” he said wonderingly. “Do you know how much this stuff costs?” He downed it in one mouthful. Then he smiled. His tongue and his teeth were black.

  “What have you done to him?”

  “Tinatin,” Kari Wang said.

  “Let’s go into the void,” Ean said. “Start singing. I’ll take us in when we’re all communicating through the lines.”

  Mael was still smiling, singing his heart out, as Ean took them into the void.

  * * *

  IN the void it was just Ean and Mael and Rossi.

  And line seven. Ean could hear Fergus, linking all the sevens—Ean included—with his song. Could see the interlinked chain of the sevens like twisting ropes of light. It was so amazing he stared at them for a moment. He could feel it—see it—going all the way to the thump-kerthump that was line eleven.

  They hadn’t been there last time.

  Then he remembered. They were only to be in the void for a moment.

  “Take us out,” he sang to line nine, and line nine, as reliable and friendly as it had ever been, took them out.

  THIRTY-SIX

  EAN LAMBERT

  OUTSIDE OF THE void Ean sang a thank you to the lines—especially to line nine, which had not failed him.

  Rossi was on the floor, dry-retching. Ean became aware he was on the floor, too. Flat on his back. The Lancastrians were just starting to react.

  Radko got to Ean first, with oxygen. He shook his head.

  Rossi pushed Sale away. “If you have done anything to my lines, bastard.”

  Mael stood above them, grinning euphorically. “That was amazing,” he said. “It was so clear and close and—”

  His teeth weren’t black anymore.

  “Sing to line nine,” Ean suggested, but Mael shook his head. “Amazing,” he said again.

  Ean rolled over onto his knees. It was like when he’d first gone onto the Eleven and kept blacking out. He was weak, and his muscles weren’t working properly. Radko helped him up.

  “Your hair really has some static in it,” Mael said.

  “I’m used to it.” Radko’s voice had picked up some of the lines. She still always sounded like Helmo’s ship.

  Ean went over to Fergus. “How do you feel?”

  “Me?” Fergus looked at him as if he’d asked something strange. “I’m fine.”

  Kari Wang moved over to ask the same question of Tinatin, with much the same result. Tinatin looked at her oddly. “I’m not the one laughing crazily like they fed me poison. Or lying on the floor being sick. Or just lying on the floor.”

  “I’m not lying on the floor now,” Ean protested.

  “I think,” Tinatin announced to the room at large, “that he’s crazy.”

  Rossi managed to stand up under his own steam. “You only think that. The rest of us know it, sweetheart.”

  Her hero worship of Jordan Rossi was fast dissipating if the look she gave him was anything to go by. “I’m not sure which one of you I’m talking about yet.” She moved over to Mael.

  “I’m fine,” Mael said. “It was amazing, Tinatin. There was this music. Deep and . . . deep and—”

  Tinatin was fine, and Mael would be, too.

  “What happened in the void?” Ean asked Fergus.

  “In the void? Nothing.”

  Ean blew out his breath, then realized it was getting to be a habit. One he hadn’t had before he’d met Abram. “You were in the void. All the sevens together.”

  Fergus shook his head.

  Rossi staggered a little as he joined Ean and Fergus. “We were in the void forever,” he said, and Ean had to look at him to see if he really meant it. “It’s normally over in a blink.”

  “That wasn’t long,” Mael said. “That was friendly.”

  Friendly was one way of putting it. How would Rossi have coped with the earlier time in the void, which truly had been long? Would he have come out of it as well as Mael had, or would he have come out of it worse? Crazy even?

  Ean was glad Rossi had been off fleet, mending a Yaolin destroyer, when Kari Wang had inadvertently taken them into the void the first time. That was something to think about for the future.

  “Did you see the lines?” he asked Mael. “The sevens? All interconnected like someone had tied them together.”

  Mael shook his head.

  “I heard them,” Rossi said. “All green and pink and smelling like Centauran basket palms and icy like dripping water.”

  “You should hear yourself,” Tinatin said. “You sound like you’ve been drinking.”

  Yes, the awe was definitely gone from that relationship.

  “Tinatin.” Fergus’s voice was gentle. “That’s the lines talking. You yourself will start to mix up smells and sounds and sights soon.”

  “And taste and touch,” Radko said. “What does this ship taste like, Tinatin?”

  “Tinatin,” Kari Wang said, when it looked as if she was going to remain silent. “Answer the question.” She was testing the air herself. Ean would bet the ship had a taste for her, too.

  Tinatin opened her mouth to deny it. Kari Wang glared at her, so she said sulkily, “It smells like the sound the waves make on a beach.”

  “Don’t you mean smells like the salt in the waves?” Mael asked.

  Tinatin shook her head.

  They were saved any further semantics by Wendell’s opening a comms. “How long before you start this thing?” He sounded a little irritated. Through the lines, Ean could feel blue edges. Wendell didn’t like waiting around on other people. He liked to be in control. There was a lot of blue in the Wendell lines nowadays.

  Ean should have told them the experiment was over. “We’ve finished, sorry.”

  “So you’re not going into the void?”

  Ean stared at the comms. Even through the lines, it sounded like a genuine question. “We’ve already done that,” he said.

  “I know when my ship goes into the void,” Wendell said. “We didn’t go anywhere.”

  If anyone knew, Wendell would. He and Helmo had both recognized they’d entered the void last time.

  “Hold on a minute.” Ean sang a line open to Helmo.

  Behind him, he heard Mael whisper to Tinatin. “Watch him. He never touches anything when he does that.”

  If they wanted to keep that particular talent a secret, Ean had better start opening the comms the way everyone else did—even if it was faster and you could do more with it when you opened the lines directly.

  “Is there a problem?” Helmo asked.

  Why would he assume there was a problem unless he thought they hadn’t gone into the void either? “Did you feel us go into the void just now?” Ean kept the line three-way, so Wendell heard the answer, too.

  “You haven’t gone in yet.” Helmo was as definite as Wendell was.

  “But we did.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “You didn’t notice anything at all?”

  “No.” The only thing more decisive than a captain’s saying no was two captains saying it at the same time.

  Ean looked around the bridge of the Kari Wang. “Did we go into the void before?”

  Fergus shrugged. Mael nodded. Rossi groaned. Kari Wang nodded, too.

  “We did.” Ean was sure of it. So what had changed between this time and the last?

  The line sevens?

  “Can we try something? Can one of you take the ship into the void?”

  He could hear them shudder through the lines.

  “We need another side to come out,” Helmo said.

  Wendell’s was a flat, “No.”

  Okay, so he was the only one who could take them into and out of the void without problem. They’d put a lot of trust in him earlier then, when they’d let him do it.

  “I’m going to take us back into the void momentarily.” He swallowed, and tried to make his voice normal. “I want to know if you feel this. I’ll make it fast.”

  He sang to line nine on the ship. “Take us into the void.”

  He was in the void again. The normal eternity that he felt, with just him and the lines. This was friendly, too, and he knew now he could fix any line here in the whole fleet.

  The line sevens, the knots, they were there. Faintly, but there. They’d always been there; he’d just never known what they were till now.

  “Out again, please.”

  They were back in real space. Mael and Rossi were just starting to react. Rossi was saying, “No.”

  “That was the void,” Wendell said.

  Helmo nodded.

  Kari Wang nodded.

  “What about this?” Ean looked at Fergus. “Sing to the sevens. Like you always do. Tell them we’re practicing.”

  “Sure.” Fergus started to sing although he looked at Ean strangely.

  “No,” Rossi said—almost begging—and Ean wondered if he should stop, but the sevens were already confirming back.

  Ean sang to line nine again. “Take us into the void.”

  Inside the void was a strong chain of sevens, linked to each other, linked to the Eleven.

  “Take us out again, please.”

  Outside, he sang his thanks to line nine, patient enough to humor him.

  “You do what lines have to do,” line nine told him.

  “How was that?” Ean asked Helmo and Wendell.

  “Nothing.”

  “This ship went into the void,” Kari Wang said. “Although I don’t have any instruments to tell me that.”

  Ean suspected neither Helmo nor Wendell did, either. Or maybe human ships did have a warning. But they usually warned before they entered the void, not when they did it. It was probably some infinitesimal ship change the captains were attuned to that no one else could pick up on.

  “And it was Burns’s singing that triggered this?” Wendell said.

  Ean thought it out as he talked. “The links were always there.” If he’d been smart enough to notice. “But Fergus.” Fergus couldn’t sing to a single line. He sang to all the sevens. “What exactly did you tell the lines, Fergus?”

  “I said we were taking the Eleven into the void.”

  “Just the Eleven?” Wendell asked.

  Fergus thought about it. “Yes. Just the Eleven. I explained the problem.” He looked apologetically at Ean. “As far as I knew it, anyway.”

  There was no privacy with lines. What one line knew, the others knew. Ean nodded. “I don’t think we’ve ever spoken specifically to the sevens like that before, not going into the void.” Lines and humans had been working together for months now as well. They understood each other better.

  The sevens had always said the void, and communications. And linking. Next time a line said it worked in the void, Ean was going to take it into the void and ask it there.

  Both captains started to speak, stopped together. Ean had never seen either of them so animated—physically, or through the lines.

  “You first,” Wendell said.

  “How can you be certain you entered the void?” Helmo asked. He stopped, a blue snap of instant decision. “Let’s not discuss this over the lines.”

  The lines were as safe as Ean could make them.

  “Let’s meet in my office.” He glanced at a screen. “At 23:00 hours. Burns, are you available?”

  Fergus looked as excited as Wendell and Helmo, and who wouldn’t. This might be where they finally unraveled the mystery of line seven. “I’m available.”

  “Good.” Helmo said to Wendell, “I’ll get clearance for you. Selma?”

  “I’d appreciate that,” Kari Wang said.

  “Linesman Rossi?”

  “I’ll be there.” Rossi sounded as if he’d rather be elsewhere, but Jordan Rossi was never the sort to miss out on major happenings. That meant Orsaya would know before Abram and Michelle did. Although Rossi wasn’t one to share line information.

  “I will see you all at 23:00 hours.” Helmo clicked off.

  Sale broke the silence that followed. “I’ll get you two back to base,” she said, looking at Mael and Tinatin.

  Tinatin looked as if she was going to say something, but didn’t.

  Ean bowed to them both. “Linesmen,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”

  Mael nodded. “It helped.” He took Tinatin’s arm. “Let’s go home.”

  Through the lines, as the two of them walked to the shuttle with Sale’s people in front and Sale’s people behind, Ean heard Tinatin say, “Even he calls you linesman. You’d think, because he was a ten, he should know who you are.”

  “So far as I can tell, he’s not a ten,” Mael said. “Not from what everyone’s saying.”

  “He’s got ten bars on his shirt.”

  “Linesman Rossi called him a twelve.”

  “Linesman Rossi should know better.”

  Oh yes, the luster had well and truly gone.

  “And it’s cruel, calling you a linesman all the time. They should know better.”

  “Maybe they do know better.” Mael sounded thoughtful. “Maybe we’re the ones not listening, Tinatin.”

  Ean was definitely going to find the Aratogan who’d recommended Mael and see if he had more single-level linesmen to recommend.

  “And they didn’t even invite us to their meeting,” Tinatin said. “Even though you’re the one they poisoned, and they made you go into the void like that.”

  “Tinatin.” Sale was one of the soldiers behind them. “You wouldn’t want to chat with Captain Helmo even if you could. He’s one scary bastard.”

  * * *

  EAN was glad Helmo had arranged the security. He could imagine what Vega would have said if he’d asked if Wendell, Rossi, and Kari Wang could come aboard.

  The meeting room was crowded. Helmo and Wendell between them exuded so much energy, the room seemed too small for anyone but them. Kari Wang was quiet, taking everything in. Rossi looked to have a headache, and he took the glass of wine Helmo offered him with more alacrity than politeness.

  Fergus couldn’t stop smiling. “I don’t know what I did,” he’d told Ean as they walked up to the meeting together. “I have no idea what to tell them.”

  “Tell them the truth,” Ean said. “They can’t do anything but listen, can they?”

  Wendell and Helmo pounced as soon as they arrived.

  “Linesman Burns, can you do it again?”

  “Do you think you can do it on this ship?”

  “Give him some room,” Ean said. “If you scare him into a heart attack, he won’t be any use to you.”

  “He’s a single-level linesman,” Wendell said. “He doesn’t have heart attacks.”

  “You know, there are more than just line-related heart attacks,” Ean said. “There’s the old-fashioned kind. The one where you scare someone to death.”

  Helmo and Wendell looked at each other. “Apologies,” Wendell said to Fergus, while Helmo said, “Let’s start at the start, shall we, and work out exactly what happened?”

  “I wanted to go back into the void,” Ean said. He hesitated. This was the awkward bit.

  “You don’t have to explain,” Helmo said. “We understand the reasoning. You were on the Eleven, you called to tell us you were going into the void. What happened next?”

  That was easier than he’d expected. “We sang. We started singing before we went into the void. There was Fergus, Mael, Rossi, Tinatin, and myself. Mael’s a single nine,” he told Wendell. “Tinatin’s a one.”

  Wendell nodded.

  “Inside the void it was . . . different.”

  “Lit up like pleasure planet,” Rossi said. He shuddered. “And the music. That deep tone of line nine. The baritone of line seven. And behind it all, the beat of eleven.”

  It was the first time Ean had ever heard Jordan Rossi admit to hearing music.

  “And knots everywhere.”

  “Knots?” Ean hadn’t seen any knots.

  “Tying everything together. This ship to that ship to that ship.”

  “They were lines to other ships,” Ean said.

  Wendell thrust his comms at him. “Draw it. You, too,” to Rossi. “Who else saw it?”

  “I didn’t,” Fergus said hastily, and no wonder for it looked as if Wendell would snatch his comms out of Ean’s hands to get Fergus to draw it instead.

  “What about Mael? You say he’s a nine. He was in the void.”

  “He didn’t see anything.” He’d said it was awesome, but he hadn’t seen or heard the sevens. “He heard line nine.”

  “But you two, having both lines, did.”

  Ean nodded, and began sketching the approximation of what he’d seen. Lines, coming out of each ship, going into other ships. Line seven to line seven. And a thicker, heavier line from each ship, going to line eleven.

  He finished around the same time Rossi did. Helmo put them both on screen.