Six hours.
Nicole could remember times, usually late-night parties, when six hours had gone past in the blink of an eye. There’d been other times, usually when Trake had her on lookout duty, when those same six hours had dragged out forever. And there’d been far too many times, especially after a bash of heavy drinking, when six or more hours had been lost forever from her memory and her life.
Now, six hours were going to spell the difference between life and death.
By all rights, Nicole knew, she should be on the edge of panic. But to her own vague surprise, she wasn’t. There was simply too much to do for her to stop long enough to think about the horrible task she and the Fyrantha were facing.
She’d expected the Koffren and Shipmasters to resist the imprisonment she’d ordered for them. But the brief battle by the ocean, along with the sudden revelation that the Ghorfs were far more powerful and dangerous than any of them had suspected, had apparently knocked the fight out of them, at least for the moment. She and Jeff were just getting started on the Core when one of the Wisps arrived with word from Wesowee that both groups had been safely locked away and that he, Iosif, and Levi were heading to the Q1 command center with Fievj and Ryit for a crash course in how to fly the Fyrantha.
Another message a few minutes later informed her that the rest of the Ghorfs were returning to gather their work teams, taking a few Wisps with them for support, communication, and transport. A few minutes after that, Kahkitah quietly joined Nicole and Jeff at the Core, clearly intending to be their assistant and guard.
And with that, the race had begun.
The Q1 Core section, as Nicole had feared, needed a lot of work. She and Jeff quickly settled into a pattern: she would use the inhaler to get the Fyrantha’s list of repairs and scribble as much of it as she could onto her notepad. Then she would hand the notepad to Jeff and stand back, feeling helpless and useless, while he got to work pulling and replacing the necessary components and restringing various bits of wiring. Occasionally he needed to tear off some sealing plastic, jobs he could pass off to Sofkat and Misgk while he worked on something elsewhere in the chamber. Mostly, though, he worked alone.
Over and over, Nicole had to fight back an almost overwhelming urge to offer her help. Each time, she stifled the impulse. Even the short, slender Thii had trouble finding room to work together in the cramped space. Two humans would have no chance at all, and she knew that even just bringing up the subject would do nothing but distract Jeff from his work.
Instead, she concentrated her thoughts on the work being done across the ship to restore the Fyrantha’s defense shields. Every few minutes Cambria came up behind her and touched her shoulder, and her mind would echo with a progress report from one of the work teams. It was a new experience, hearing someone else’s voice coming into her mind instead of the familiar flat Wisp voice, and it took a little getting used to.
In some ways, it was also maddening. These were thoughts coming across the telepathic network, not ordinary speech, and while the Ghorfs were pretty good at holding to a straight line of mental conversation, many of the humans were rotten at it.
Nicole had known people back in Philadelphia like that, people who blathered away without any verbal organization, their words tumbling over each other as stray thoughts bounced up and down bunny trails until whatever they were trying to say was completely lost in the weeds. This wasn’t that bad—the people here were at least trying to stay on track—but the end result was still sometimes hard to sift through. The fact that the voices sounded like they were coming from down a long, echoey hallway didn’t help.
Even stranger, the communication itself was surprisingly slow. Nicole would think a question or comment to the person at the other end, and it would be a good four or five seconds before she got a reply. Some of the delay might have been due to the other person having to organize his thoughts, but the rest apparently had to do with the whole Wisp/Oracle connection system. Even when she was talking to the Ghorfs, who had better mental organization, the delay was only a little shorter.
Still, she could hardly complain. Talking through the Wisps was a hell of a lot faster than having to send messengers everywhere or making the Ghorfs use their private tap-code system. And once she had the voices identified she knew each time who it was she was talking to, and could better sort through that person’s own particular style of mental chatter.
Slowly, progress was made. One by one, the defense nodes Fievj had identified became operational, and their work crews were sent to the next one on the list. Levi and Iosif handled all of that from the control center, leaving Nicole free to monitor the progress and keep an eye on Jeff’s work.
Occasionally, one of the crew foremen asked for a rest or food break. Iosif’s invariable response was five minutes for the first, food bars and water for the second.
Four hours into the marathon, one of the foremen apparently got tired of that answer. He insisted he and the others weren’t doing slave labor and threatened to pull his team off the job if they weren’t given a full hour’s break. Neither Levi’s cajoling nor Iosif’s threats had the slightest effect on his defiance, and he wouldn’t even listen to Nicole’s attempts to remind him of the threat facing them.
It wasn’t until Kahkitah stepped in and spoke personally with the Ghorf assigned to that team that the foreman relented. Even then, the foreman and Ghorf were halfway to the Q3 arena, where the foreman would be forced to hang out for the rest of the day with the Shipmasters, before he finally agreed to go back to work.
They had fixed all but fifteen of the defense nodes when, twenty minutes ahead of schedule, the Koffren warships appeared.
Looks like twenty of them, Iosif’s voice came through Cambria’s touch on Nicole’s shoulder. Big suckers, too—about the size of Nimitz-class carriers.
Nicole winced. But we’re still bigger, right?
She waited through the interminable five-second pause. Oh, a hell of a lot bigger—we’re three thousand meters long to their three hundred, Iosif replied. Problem is, size isn’t the biggest factor here. We’ve got a bunch of gaps they can shoot through. As far as I can see, they don’t have any.
Can we shoot at them?
Another pause. I don’t know. Fievj says they never found a working weapon anywhere on this thing. He still thinks the people who turned it into a zoo scrapped them at the same time they took the fighters out of the arenas.
That’s what he told us, too. Do you believe him?
Not necessarily. Just because they couldn’t find any weapons doesn’t mean there aren’t any. I know that each of the defense nodes has a bunch of consoles that don’t seem to do anything. Maybe they operate the guns.
Nicole thought back to the first time she’d been in one of the nodes. Two concentric rings of consoles, with only the one console that seemed to activate that section of the ship’s shield completely dark. If there are any guns, anyway. Maybe I should go take a look.
Too late, Iosif said. Right now, you need to come up here and talk to them.
Nicole felt her eyes go wide. Me?
You’re the Fyrantha’s Protector, Iosif reminded her. Anyway, someone has to. They’ve been hailing us for the past three minutes, and I’m sure as hell not letting Fievj near the mic.
No, of course not, Nicole agreed reluctantly, peering into the Core room. Jeff looked like he was finishing up the last list she’d given him. Let me give Jeff one more set of instructions. See if you can get one of the other Sibyls down here to take over for me.
Make it fast, Iosif warned. Fievj showed us how to put the shields up, but I don’t want to do that until we absolutely have to. No point showing them where the holes are in advance.
Agreed. I’ll be there as soon as I can.
She pushed Cambria’s hand aside. “They’re here,” she announced to Jeff as she pulled out her inhaler. “Give me back the notepad—I can get you one more set before I go.”
“Never mind the notepad,” Jeff said. “Just reel off the instructions. I’ll remember them.”
“You sure?”
“Positive,” Jeff said. “We’ve got to be getting close to the end, anyway.”
Which was, to Nicole’s way of thinking, the absolute worst time to start missing things or getting sloppy. But there was no time to argue the point. “I hope so. Here we go.” She took a full whiff from the inhaler, and as the Fyrantha’s voice whispered through her mind she rattled off the instructions.
A minute later, she was done. “You sure you got all that?” she asked.
“No problem,” Jeff said. “Go.”
“Right.” Nicole pushed herself up off the floor—
And nearly fell as a wave of dizziness washed over her.
“Are you ill?” Kahkitah asked anxiously, catching her arm before she could fall.
“I’m okay,” Nicole said, leaning against his bulk. “Just a little dizzy.”
Jeff swore under his breath. “Too much of that damn inhaler,” he ground out. “Sofkat, Misgk—get me to the door.”
“No,” Nicole told him. “You stay there and keep working. Kahkitah and Cambria can get me to the control center.”
“Nicole—”
“That’s an order, Jeff,” she said. “Kahkitah?”
“I have you,” Kahkitah said. Shifting his grip, he picked her up in his arms and turned back toward the heat duct door. “Wisps? We need two of you for transport.”
The control center was on level 56 in the ecsisia section of Q1. By the time Nicole and the others arrived her dizzy spell had passed.
The room was smaller than she’d expected, not much bigger than the defense node room near the Fyrantha’s roof. But while there had been a double ring of consoles in the node, here there were four rings, the consoles set low to the floor with chairs facing each of them. Levi and Iosif were seated in two of the chairs in the inner ring, with a Wisp on either side of them. Fievj and Ryit were seated in front of them in the next ring outward, under the watchful eyes of a pair of Ghorfs. The consoles in the two inner rings were fully lit and active, while the third ring had several dark consoles and the outer ring was completely dark.
And here, instead of the thick glass of the node that had first showed Nicole the starry sky outside the ship, the walls were covered with displays.
Floating in six of them were twenty large, nasty-looking spaceships.
“About time,” Iosif said, glancing over his shoulder as Kahkitah lowered Nicole’s feet to the deck. “He’s starting to get a little surly.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Nicole said, working her way through the outer rings and coming to a halt behind Iosif. “Do we have a name?”
“Near as we can figure, it’s Djit-vis-ees,” Levi said handing her a small mic. “I suggested we call him Djit, just to save time. He didn’t seem to like that. The slider there on the side mutes it.”
Nicole found the slider switch and put her thumb on it. “Got it.”
“Ready to key the transmitter,” Iosif said, his hand hovering over a switch.
Nicole braced herself. This was it. “Yes. Go.”
“Good luck,” Iosif said, and threw the switch.
“—will answer me now, or I swear to you your death is at hand,” a harsh Koffren voice came over the speaker and through Nicole’s translator.
Nicole took a deep breath and unmuted her mic. Back in Philadelphia, her health and safety had too often depended on her ability to talk people into things or talk them out of things. Here, she was about to put those hard-earned skills to their final test. “Hello, Djit-vis-ees of the Koffren,” she called. “This is Nicole Hammond. What seems to be the trouble?”
“What are you, human slave?”
“We’re not slaves,” Nicole said. “I’m not, anyway. I’m a Sibyl.”
“You’re all slaves,” Djit-vis-ees said flatly. “End this nonsense and bring me the ship’s master.”
“Yes. That’s me.”
“I refer to the ship’s master. Bring me Vjiu-fusi-suut.”
“Sorry, but there’s no one here by that name,” Nicole said. “Oh, wait. Are you talking about the Koffren who likes to call himself Justice, Revenge, and Fire?”
“Speak no more nonsense, slave!”
“Not a slave, and not nonsense,” Nicole said. “See, I’m afraid Vjiu-fusi-suut is currently locked up. So are the rest of the Koffren.”
“You will speak no more—”
“I think there are, what, sixteen of them left alive out of the original thirty-eight?” Nicole continued. “Kahkitah?”
“Sixteen is correct,” the Ghorf confirmed.
“Right,” Nicole said. “The other twenty-two didn’t make it. They were—I think the term is casualties of war.”
“You lie,” Djit-vis-ees bit out. But it seemed to Nicole that some of the fire had gone out of his tone.
“If I’m lying, how come I’m the one talking to you instead of Vjiu-fusi-suut?” Nicole countered. “Oh, and just in case you’re interested, we didn’t lose any of our side at all. Anyway, the point is that we’re holding sixteen of your people. Shall we discuss what you need to do to get them back?”
There was a short silence. “Who are you?” Djit-vis-ees asked.
“I already told you,” Nicole said. “I’m Nicole. I’m a Sibyl.” She paused. “I’m also the Fyrantha’s chosen Protector.”
“Yes,” Djit-vis-ees murmured, his voice gone dark and thoughtful. “Yes, I remember now. Vjiu-fusi-suut spoke of you. He promised you would be eliminated.”
“Yeah,” Nicole said. “I always hate it when people make promises they can’t keep.”
“His promise has not yet failed,” Djit-vis-ees said calmly. “We may yet bring it to truth.”
“I guess we’ll see,” Nicole said. “So about the prisoners?”
“Prisoners?” Djit-vis-ees made a sound like someone spitting. “You hold no prisoners. You hold failures. Embarrassments. The dead.”
Nicole sighed. She’d been afraid that would be the Koffren attitude. “So you’re saying you don’t want them?”
“Their failure has brought shame on us all,” Djit-vis-ees said. “Kill them and be thanked for it.”
“Nice,” Levi muttered.
“Fine, if that’s what you want,” Nicole said. “I just thought you might want to talk to them first. There are things you really should want to know.”
“We already know all we need.”
“I’m talking about stuff that would keep you from doing something stupid,” Nicole said. “Like getting yourselves blown up. Maybe your whole world, too.”
“It’s you who is about to die, Sibyl, not us,” Djit-vis-ees scoffed.
“Really?” Nicole countered. “I thought you wanted to take the Fyrantha intact. How do you expect to kill me without destroying the whole ship?”
“Once more you attempt a foolish bluff,” Djit-vis-ees said. “I give you one chance. Surrender now, accept Koffren mastery over you and the ship, and you and your companions will live.”
There was a breath of air on the back of Nicole’s neck, and she turned to see one of the Ghorfs standing behind her, a Wisp at his side. “That sounds fair,” she said. “Let me discuss it with my companions.” She thumbed the mute slider. “What is it?”
“News from Q4,” the Ghorf said, his birdsong whistles soft and intense. “One more defense node has been reactivated.”
“Thank you,” Nicole said. One down; fourteen still to go. This was going to take a lot more stalling. “We’ve got crews on all the others, right?”
“There are two crews working on each,” the Ghorf confirmed. “Miron determined that more than two would add little in the way of speed, and likely get in each other’s way.”
“That was his evaluation, anyway,” Iosif added. “I haven’t seen the rooms myself.”
“No, he’s probably right,” Nicole said. “What about the crews that have already finished?”
“I told them to stay at the nodes they’d just fixed,” Iosif said. “Miron didn’t have anything else for them to do, anyway, and I figured that nodes that broke once might break again.”
In which case, it would save a lot of time to have a repair team already on hand. “Good idea,” she said. “Do we know where the holes are?”
“Yeah,” Levi said. “Ryit, pull up an overview.”
At the console in front of him, Ryit keyed in a command, and one of the screens changed from a view of space to a schematic of the Fyrantha.
Nicole ran her eyes over it, wincing. She’d hoped the remaining shield gaps would be clustered together in such a way that they might be able to keep the ship between the Koffren ships’ guns and the holes. But the openings were scattered all over the place, in all four quadrants. “Any idea when the rest will be fixed?” she asked.
“No,” the Ghorf said. “They’re working as quickly as they can.”
“I know.” Nicole studied the schematic another moment, then nodded. “Okay, Ryit, you can put it away.”
The Wisp reached forward and touched the Ghorf’s arm. “Carp also wishes to know if Tomas and Shantal arrived.”
“Arrived where?” Nicole asked, frowning.
“I don’t know,” the Ghorf said. “Neither do the Wisps. Tomas said you wanted him.”
“Yeah, hang on,” Nicole muttered, pushing past the Ghorf and touching the Wisp’s arm. Where are Tomas and Shantal? she asked it.
They are in the teleport room.
Nicole felt her eyes go wide. The teleport room? How did they get in?
Tomas ordered the Wisps there to open the door. He said you had told him to go in.
And no one bothered to ask me about that? Nicole demanded.
You gave the Sibyls authority to command us.
Nicole ground her teeth. Yes, she’d done that, all right. Are the other Wisps still there? And how many are there?
There were three. Three Wisps together can open security-sealed doors.
Yes, I know, Nicole said. What’s Tomas up to?
I don’t know. But he told Shantal he would need more Wisps when he was finished.
Nicole frowned. Tomas had wanted more Wisps? What the hell was he up to? Well, you can tell all the Wisps—
She broke off her order. Down in the Fyrantha’s basement, after their raid into Q1, Tomas had bitterly argued that they should have killed the two Koffren when they’d had the chance. Then he’d stomped off, and had avoided Nicole ever since.
But before he’d left he’d said something. What had he said? Nicole strained at her memory, trying desperately to pull up the image of that moment.
Do you wish access to a memory?
Nicole started. What?
Do you wish access to a memory? the Wisp repeated. Events involving the Protector are all recorded.
There were a whole bunch of unpleasant implications of something like that, Nicole knew. But right now she had more important things to worry about. Yes, let me see the memory of my last conversation with Tomas. It was in the Fyrantha’s basement—
And then, there it was. Tomas and Jeff and the others, talking and arguing after their escape down the heat-exchange duct—Just the last part, she told the Wisp. The last thing Tomas said about the Koffren.
Better yet, call me when you’ve got the bastards lined up against the wall.
A horrible certainty flashed into Nicole’s mind. “Iosif, take over,” she said, pushing past the Wisp and heading for the door. “If Djit-vis-ees calls back tell him I’m still talking to people.”
“Where are you going?” Iosif called after her.
“He knows you’re stalling, you know,” Levi added.
“Well, stall him back,” Nicole called over her shoulder. “Tomas is in the teleport room, about to do something stupid.”
“What kind of stupid?” Levi asked.
“I think he’s going to teleport all of the Koffren out there into the Fyrantha and kill them while the Wisps still have them frozen. Line them up against the wall, is how he put it.”
“Damn,” Levi said. “Yeah, that sounds like his brand of stupid. You want me to come with you?”
“No, Iosif needs you here,” Nicole said. “I can handle it.”