A wide smile. ‘Well done, that man. Except – you are slaves. You always have been. You just didn’t know it. Well.’ He rubbed his gloved hands together. ‘I thought that went rather well. Only one fatality. Now. Any questions?’

  And Ulla felt Ashe’s gloved hand slide into hers.

  4

  In the first hours after the taking of Patrol 45, Ulla Breen was confined, alone, to her minuscule private quarters.

  This was at the orders of the ship’s new commander, Ciren Pulet, whose rank in his own culture seemed to vary between ‘senior protector of the Hierarchy’, and ‘senior scholar’, depending, it seemed, on whether he was in what she thought of as his military mode or his scientific mode.

  ‘We must talk,’ was all he had said to her.

  That gave her too much to think about. Having glimpsed the monstrous Hierarchy vessel and its ruthless crew – with its still unknown mission – never mind any theoretical advantage her hasty bluff had won her, for now she only feared for the safety of her people. And their worlds.

  Why had this ‘Sabre Hierarchy’ come here? Why now … ?

  And what could she do about it?

  At first, nothing but throw up.

  When nobody came, she tried to sleep.

  Failed.

  Drank a half-full flask of water.

  Failed to finish a food pack she found.

  Used the bathroom …

  Perhaps twenty-four hours after the taking of the 45, a Hierarchy guard finally came to summon her, wordlessly.

  She followed, wordlessly, through familiar passageways. With the lightsail evidently shrouded, there was no acceleration, and the ship must be drifting, powerless. Drifting just as she was, without the false gravity of acceleration.

  She paused by a work party, 45 crew loading ship’s-issue food packs into sacks, which they yielded to the invaders – two of the heavy-set, black-uniformed ‘guards’.

  Ulla tried to make eye contact with the 45 crew members, but she couldn’t be sure what the guards could see through those visors, usually pushed back from the eyes, but not always. She couldn’t take a risk.

  Now her own guard hurried her along. Hurry along, hurry. The wordless gestures were obvious to read. This was a guard shaped by a lifetime in the role.

  This is what we have to deal with, then.

  The guard let her reduce her speed as they approached something new. Another handful of 45 crew, a couple of Hierarchy guards – and a kind of makeshift tunnel, built of metal panels. With a crude doorway, this had been attached to one of the 45’s cargo hatches, evidently an improvisation hastily erected to mate the two craft with an airtight seal. The panels were of differing quality, the Alliance materials finer made but delicate, the strangers’ work crude but robust. Bolts like staples had secured this bridge, making it permanent.

  This was evidently how the crew of the 45 were going to be taken off their ship. The survivors, at least. Including herself and Commodore Mott, but not the dead captain. And not lost Fels Sedhi. Ulla wondered if Mott and the other surviving officers had already been transferred, perhaps more elegantly.

  But the guards here were efficient in their processing of the crew, shoving them through one by one, without a word spoken.

  And then she was pushed through the bridge herself, and was suddenly inside the Hierarchy ship.

  Which she had heard called Scholar. Another guard waited on the far side. Welcome aboard, she thought sourly.

  Once transferred, her guard hurried her, in zero gravity, through what felt like a curving corridor in some expensive hotel. The walls were panelled with wood, even the doors elegant. The contrast with the efficient but utilitarian design of the 45’s interior was strong. This was officer country, evidently.

  She couldn’t believe the rest of the Hierarchy crew could be housed like this. And what about the rest of the 45 crew?

  As the guard pushed her on, she tried to visualise the layout of the ship as she experienced it, to memorise it. Data that might come in useful someday. As Fels Sedhi’s hasty report had had it – what he had glimpsed as the ship had approached his craft – the alien was a basically tubular structure, a cylinder, to be thought of upright, she guessed. Around the top of the cylinder had run a boxy collar: the head of the ‘bolt-ship’, as Fels had coined it in his sketchy reports. It was this collar through which she was drifting now, she suspected. A circular corridor that led off to rooms on either side – inwards, what looked like an infirmary, and the outer wall presumably led to access to space and the exterior of the hull.

  The guard saw her looking around. To her surprise, he spoke to her in a recognisable argot.

  ‘Bolt-ship,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘We heard you call it, bolt-ship. Good name. Shaft of bolt. The head at the top.’

  ‘How do you know my language? You don’t have a translator—’

  The guard grinned. ‘Study. Protector’s orders.’ He lifted his weapon, what looked like a crude club with a projectile weapon within. ‘But this is all I need to say.’

  They reached a door that opened to a swipe of the guard’s gloved hand.

  She was shoved inside, the door slammed behind her.

  She found herself in a quite plain cabin, sheet metal walls, a stuffed couch presumably serving as a bed, a blanket, a table, a stool … The design was odd, though. The room was wide, but shallow in depth, and curved, true to the architecture of the bolt-ship, she realised, with compartments like this fitting into that broad curving element, the ‘head of the bolt’.

  She and the rest of the 45 crew would soon work out the structure of this ‘bolt-ship’.

  The main body, an upright cylinder – upright as the design was aligned for its occupants – was around fifty metres tall. This cylinder was double walled, with various utilities in the space within.

  The head of the ‘bolt’ was a torus reaching some ten metres back from the cylindrical main body. That contained a circular ‘corridor’ about ten metres deep, a hundred and fifty metres long.

  Some of this space was evidently given over to utilities, and also a string of rooms, a dozen or more, each some ten metres wide and deep – a bridge, a medical centre, cabins for officers, crew, guards – and a room dedicated to the use of the Hierarchy, an ‘observation lounge’, backed up with relatively advanced telescopes and other instruments of various designs and capabilities, evidently mounted on the outer hull.

  Elsewhere in the bolt-head corridor there were access points to external airlocks, as well as access to a pair of staircases and two elevator shafts, all of which were built between the double hulls of the main cylindrical body. It wasn’t hard to see the purpose of this design: the containment of whoever was living within the cylinder.

  In those first few hours after the capture, Ulla tried to stay fully alert, to memorise as many details as she could, preparing herself for whatever came next in this disastrous episode.

  But time wore on. And she was here, alone, in the den of the enemy. She sat, bewildered, with no idea what to do.

  For hours.

  At first she sat in a corner, as if expecting Mason Frith to come storming into the cabin and bawl her out. That initial feeling wore off with time, with the hours. But still she felt utterly inhibited in this space.

  She touched as little as she could.

  After some time, she sensed acceleration. The invader was moving from the point of conflict, then. Its enormous sail spreading.

  She had nothing to do. The single day since the capture of the 45 had felt very long. And the events of the day before seemed to go round and round in her consciousness. She longed for contact with her crewmates.

  Initially, of course, there had been the shock and fear of the boarding. Then this ‘scholar’ had summarily executed the captain of her vessel, and whimsically, it seemed, replaced him with herself, a junior officer, just because he could – just because she had had the guts to stand up to him. Maybe she had been lucky, if not wise. One word out of place and it might have been the end of her – if Pulet’s whimsy had turned from playfulness to vicious spite.

  As might happen at any moment in the future, she reminded herself.

  This violent, lethal intrusion by the Sabre Hierarchy, which seemed to be as ruthless and predatory as its name might suggest, had cut through all the petty local stuff – had cut through the lives of the crew of 45 like a sharpened blade, the good and bad, the competent and incompetent – all of them, leaving everything changed, even for those who might survive this initial intervention.

  Including herself.

  Sitting in this chair, in this drab cabin, as this long day wore on, she tried to cling to a shred of hope that Commodore Mott still survived.

  She had got to that point in her thinking when there was a knock on the door.

  She took one deep breath, and stood up, held herself steady in the low gravity, with one hand on the back of an armchair.

  As boldly as she could, she called, ‘Come in!’

  The door swung back, unsurprisingly, to reveal Ciren Pulet, senior protector of the Hierarchy.

  5

  Pulet took one pace into the room, leaned through the doorway, smiled, then low-gravity pulled himself inside, torso, legs.

  ‘Not disturbing you?’

  She hesitated, then shrugged. We must talk, he’d said.

  In the time she’d had to think, she’d decided that if Pulet, or any of the Sabre ship, tried to get anything out of her, she’d be subtle. Pulet seemed talkative – playful, even, if in a cruel way. If she amused him, playing the brave, mouthy junior, then fine. She could develop a conscious habit of not replying to information-rich exchanges with him. Small talk, though, was OK. Listening to him was fine. And if there was any useful information to be gleaned in anything he said, she had decided, she would record or remember as much as she could and pass it on to Commodore Mott, her superior officer. If she lived.

  All of which was good in theory.

  Once through the doorway, Pulet swivelled and kicked the door closed. A very clumsy move, Ulla thought – and with a touch of unconscious aggression to it. His clothing was heavy and expensive-looking. He oozed confidence and control. She envied him that.

  Whereas Captain Frith’s apparent confidence and control had been based on nothing but the petty authority his own role gave him, it struck her now that Pulet was a far more impressive figure than poor Frith had ever been.

  She only hoped that Commodore Mott would someday get a chance to face him down.

  ‘So,’ Pulet said now, low-gravity settling down in a heavily stuffed chair. He waved a hand, indicating she should sit.

  She paused, just for a second or two, before seating herself opposite him, maintaining eye contact all the way through.

  And he smiled, evidently reading her, effortlessly, wordlessly. I see your subtle challenge. I admire you, but there are limits …

  When the pause lengthened, Ulla decided she might as well speak first. ‘Is there something specific you want from me, Protector Pulet?’

  He smiled wider. ‘You use the correct title – that’s a step up from most of your crewmates, your fellow conscripts. The commodore, your evidently senior officer, being an exception.’

  Ulla recoiled at the words. She suspected that conscript implied a much tougher regime than it did in her own background. Downright sinister.

  Pulet nodded. ‘Oh, you frown. You don’t like the word “conscript”. What would you prefer – umm, volunteer?’

  ‘We certainly aren’t volunteers here. Are your other prisoners?’

  ‘Ouch.’ He recoiled theatrically at that. But he continued his point. ‘It’s ironic, isn’t it, and fascinating, that our cultures should have evidently developed from similar roots planted far apart, but having evolved independently over time. Long enough for us to have – well, to more or less have forgotten the other existed. And yet the commonality endures, we have retained so much. As we have learned, our languages, of captors and prisoners in this little confrontation, have turned out to be quite similar – easily translated. We are evidently from the same root stock – and a common root that can’t be so terribly far apart, a divergence not so deep in time.’

  She noticed his tone of voice had changed – become less theatrical, she thought. She saw there was a mind behind the posturing – besides the unhealthy authority he seemed to wield.

  Why not talk? He might say something useful, advantageous. And what he was saying was actually interesting.

  ‘There could be other reasons for that,’ she said. ‘For the languages not to evolve so much as you might think.’

  And he, in turn, was intrigued. ‘Reasons such as?’

  She hesitated. It could surely do no harm to tell him what he must already know. ‘There are many worlds of mankind in this part of Hearthspace—’

  ‘As in my origin.’

  ‘And so, many isolated colonies. I think there has probably always been a drive, a conscious policy, to maintain communications between the colonies, the worlds, a way to sustain unity. And in case of emergencies, at any level. A common language can only help at such times.’ She thought about that. ‘Shared, not imposed.’

  He nodded. ‘So this is a conscious policy of your worlds, going back generations?’

  She eyed him. ‘I’m just guessing. I think so. It’s not something I’ve ever studied. And yours?’

  ‘In effect, I suppose. I would have to admit we impose rather than encourage. In many walks of life. Call it a philosophy. Makes for efficiency, you see. We have other … cultural relics in common, though, I have already learned. Your crew and mine. We count the passing of time by years. Or centuries, hundreds of years. These units are the same, in duration, definition. But I imagine these “years” don’t map cleanly to the rotation of any single world here, the Earths, the Marses, the Jupiters, the Neptunes, all the rest. Or, indeed, to any of the Hierarchy worlds.

  ‘A relic of our common origin, it’s thought. The clock, the calendar. As if all humans arose on one world, spread out from there, came here – but remembered their mother. By the way – I know that you map time in days, years, as we do. And I overheard a conversation in which the term “month” was used. As we do. Now, I’m intrigued.

  ‘I can imagine that we inherited definitions of year and day from the obvious properties of our common world of origin – a visible phenomenon. A year can be defined by the planet’s orbit around its sun; a day can be defined by its rotation of period. But – month? In between the two. How could that be defined? My own theory—’

  Of course he would have a theory, Ulla thought.

  ‘My theory is that the “month” could be defined by the period of a natural satellite of an Earth – a moon – another primordial period painted in the sky. And even the name is suggestive. Moon, month, you see?’

  Despite herself, she grinned. ‘I’ve used the word month all my life and that never occurred to me.’

  He glanced at her. ‘In some ways you are an ideal student, Commander. Ignorant enough to have knowledge gaps easily filled; intelligent enough to understand such new knowledge. But you should know that in the Outer Worlds, wars have been fought over these issues.’

  She forced a smile. ‘That’s one way to resolve a debate, I suppose.’

  ‘The other being—?’

  She was out of her depth. ‘I’m no scientist, Protector. I just ferry scientists around, and other passengers. But I pick up some facts, hear a lot of theories, just by listening—’

  ‘Well, the mystery behind your “facts” is deep. And I am a scientist, or so I like to believe. Here, let me show you.’

  He stood, beckoned her to follow. He led her a short way along the curving ‘bolt-head’ corridor. They passed two, three doors, all closed, all ornate.

  She was aware of a guard almost out of sight around the curving bolt-head passageway.

  They reached a fourth door and Pulet beckoned the guard over to unlock it – achieved by turning a key from a cluster held by the guard, who then pushed open the door.

  Without thanks, without acknowledging the guard, Pulet led Ulla into this second room – a suite, furniture, what was evidently a viewscreen covering one otherwise bare wall.

  Pulet waved his hand at an empty chair, towards which Ulla drifted. Then he swiped a hand over a bare desk.

  And—

  And the walls disappeared, leaving Pulet himself, Ulla, the table between them, the chairs they sat in.

  As if suspended in space.

  A gaudy light shone across the dark. A smear of illumination, of tremendous clouds lit from within. Lit from a single, dazzling point source of light.

  Planets hanging like fruit from a Venusian orchard. Illuminated by the pinpoint of the distant Hearth. Then, larger worlds, glowing ice blue, or striped with multichromatic bands …

  Hearthspace. Into which she was falling.

  She grabbed at the desk with both hands.

  Pulet laughed, at ease in his own chair.

  ‘Sorry! Sorry. You didn’t know I could do that, did you? I’ve pulled that trick so many times in this room. Can’t resist it. This is my one indulgence, my private toy. In this room, which I call my observation lounge, I can view whatever is outside the hull of the ship at this moment, without disturbing my rest, you see – or I can visit, or revisit any part of the known Hearthspace. Everything is virtual, of course …’

  Ulla listened to this carefully, wondering how she should react. On the one hand she felt patronised, irritated by this bullying blow-hard. Battering at a captive just because he could …

  But on the other hand he had come to her home space in his ugly sail ship, not the other way around. And to be able to cross such distances must necessitate a deep and wide understanding of Hearthspace itself.

  She realised with chagrin that she didn’t even have any idea how much she didn’t know. Not compared to this.

  And, she vaguely sensed, if she and her people were ever to get out of this lightsail prison-ship, let alone get back home, they would need to learn as much as they could of their gaolers, their environment. Their mind-set.