"The Broken Sphere" - читать интересную книгу автора (Findley Nigel)

Chapter Thirteen

"Battle stations!" Teldin yelled again, and heard the pounding of feet as the crew leaped to their stations.

Djan was beside him in a moment, taking in the tactical situation in a glance. "Load ballistae," he barked, "but hands off the catapult."

Teldin nodded. He'd forgotten about the new sabotage.

"They think you're dead." The first mate spoke quietly, for Teldin's ears alone. He gestured at the approaching nautiloid. "They think all the helmsmen are dead."

Of course they did, the Cloakmaster thought. That was the purpose of the fire set in the hold-not to threaten the Boundless, but to provide a smoke signal to the illithid vessel that the squid ship was dead in space. Smart, very smart. May the gods damn them to the Abyss forever.

Brutally, he suppressed his anger. He had to think clearly if he and his crew were to survive.

AH right. The nautiloid crew might think the Boundless was dead, but it wasn't, not while the Cloakmaster lived. He drew a deep, calming breath and let himself feel the cloak around his shoulders. He let his thoughts merge with the ultimate helm.

Then he was the squid ship. He could feel its grievous damage, the rents in the hull blasted by the dying beholder, the cracks in the keel, and the ripped and shredded rigging, only partially repaired. He frowned. It was as Djan had told him soon after Beth-Abz's death: the ship could sail- slowly-but it was in no shape for a fight.

That left Teldin with a difficult choice: push the ship to a speed high enough to guarantee escape from the approaching nautiloid, and risk tearing the Boundless apart, or keep to a speed that wouldn't kill the ship, and risk getting blown out of space by the illithid vessel. He sighed. Well, there was no way of telling which was the best course until he'd tested the ship's responses. He extended his will and felt rather than saw the cloak glow with power.

The Boundless surged forward. Teldin gasped with pain as he felt the cracked keel shift, threatening to tear apart. He backed off on the acceleration slightly, as he started to maneuver the ship to bear away from the attacker. Although his wraparound perception still let him see the nautiloid, most of Teldin's attention was focused on the squid ship's internal condition. Thus it was Djan who spotted the next development. "They're firing!" he screamed.

Projectiles-three massive ballista bolts, plus a catapult missile-hurtled through space at the squid ship. Quite a salvo, Teldin thought grimly. With his extended senses, he could easily pick out the incoming shots against the blackness of wildspace and mentally project their courses. In the few seconds before impact, he forced the Boundless into a wide barrel roll-a maneuver he'd heard called "battle evasion." The strain on the keel, and on the entire hull, screamed through his nerves. He gritted his teeth against the pain, desperately willing the ship to hang together.

The maneuver was partially successful. Two of the shots-the catapult missile and one of the ballista bolts- flew wide. The Cloakmaster gasped as the other two bolts ripped through the hull, one tearing another breach into the cargo hold, the other striking farther forward, near the crew compartments. He slowed the Boundless for a moment as he evaluated the damage. Bad enough, he decided, but still not critical.

Now I've got time to react, he told himself. It takes time to reload catapults and ballistae-one or two minutes at least. We've got that much time to get out of here.

He stopped the squid ship's roll and poured on as much speed as he dared. Gingerly, he brought the ship's bow around, curving away from the attacker. The nautiloid appeared to drift aft, hanging like an ersatz moon over the deck rail, until it settled almost directly astern. "Ballistae away!" the Cloakmaster yelled.

He heard the two great bows sing; with his cloak-mediated senses he felt the vibration of their firing communicated through their mounts to the structure of the vessel. He watched the missiles hurtle silently through space. One missed, passing scant feet to the port of the nautiloid's spiral hull. The other struck the ship cleanly in its open battle deck, shattering the catapult and felling the barely glimpsed figures of the weapon crew. Teldin smiled grimly. One heavy weapon down, he told himself. "Reload," he cried. The weapon crews jumped to obey.

The Cloakmaster poured on a little more speed. He felt the damaged keel start to twist sickeningly under the strain, and he backed off again. Paladine's blood, he cursed to himself. Not enough speed. The nautiloid was still closing. The tactical situation had turned into a stern chase, which was always a protracted proposition, and the speed differential wasn't great, but the illithid vessel was slowly overhauling the abused squid ship. This wasn't supposed to be the way it worked; after all, didn't he possess an ultimate helm? It didn't matter much now, he had to admit, with a ship held together by little more than paint and determination. How in the Abyss was he supposed to get out of this one?

The nautiloid was ready to fire again. He could see the three medium ballistae-two on the upper battle station, one on the lower-cranked back and loaded. He started to maneuver the ship again, but felt the strained keel ready to give way.

Damn it to the Nine Hells! What did he do now? Throw the ship into another battle evasion maneuver and tear the keel apart? Or keep a steady course and let the nautiloid blow the squid ship to fragments?

The enemy ship's weapons fired simultaneously, a salvo of three missiles hurtling silently through the void, all heading straight for the mark. Damaged keel or no damaged keel, he knew that to let all three shots hit was to doom the Boundless. Desperately, he threw the bow down. His stomach lurched with the changing acceleration.

It almost worked. One of the iron-headed spears hissed past the ship, vanishing again into the darkness. The second grazed the starboard spanker fin, carrying away only a couple of square feet of wood and canvas. The third slammed squarely into the underside of the stern, tearing through the bilges and driving into the foot of the mizzenmast.

The impact jarred the ship from bow to stern. Teldin's ears were filled with cries of alarm, his body racked with pain as the keel flexed and cracked. He felt control slip away. The Boundless-again!-was no longer a ship under power, but a shattered and drifting hulk.

As the squid ship's speed bled away, the Cloakmaster saw the nautiloid looming up astern, rotating around its long axis so that it appeared to be capsizing. The spiral ship's long, piercing ram was a spear aimed at the Boundless's heart. "They're ramming!" he yelled. "Brace for impact!" Only at the last instant before contact did he take his own advice and grab the deck railing with all his might.

The hull timbers of the Boundless screamed in torment as the nautiloid struck the hull below and between the spanker fins. The long ram drove through the planking at an upward angle, smashing through the helm compartment to emerge out through the afterdeck.

The impact was enormous. With a dry crack, the mizzenmast broke in two, the upper portion falling aft and outward, ripping away the already damaged starboard spanker fin.

Despite his death grip on the rail, Teldin was almost torn free and flung overboard. His head struck a newel post with a sickening crack, and his vision filled momentarily with drifting stars.

No time, he told himself fiercely, no time for weakness. He shook his head to clear it and forced himself to his feet.

The Boundless was dead, he knew that. The impact of the ram must have shattered the keel. Theoretically, with an immense amount of work and colossal good fortune, it might be possible to repair it sufficiently to sail again, but that didn't matter much now, did it? The illithids from the nautiloid would swarm aboard the crippled squid ship at any moment. How many of them would there be? he asked himself. A dozen? Two dozen? Three? How could his crew stand up to that many mind flayers?

Still, he had to try. "Boarding pikes!" he screamed. "Stand by to repel boarders!"

Teldin clutched Julia's short sword as he tried to make sense of the situation. The Boundless was a bigger vessel than the nautiloid, which meant that the squid ship's gravity plane would be dominant. That meant that the boarders from the nautiloid would have to climb steeply down their own ship to the hull of the Boundless. Then, once they'd reached the gravity plane, they'd have to swarm up the sides and over the rails. Possible, definitely, but quite difficult. "Line the rails," he ordered as his armed crew poured up onto the deck. "They'll be coming from below."

They were coming already. He could hear footfalls on the underside of the squid ship's hull.

Could he use the cloak to see them, to learn how they were planning the assault? He closed his eyes, let his mind expand to include the cloak at his back, and felt his thoughts expand throughout the ship.

The mental link was fitful, intermittent. The squid ship was dying, as far as the cloak was concerned, but it wasn't dead quite yet. Through a gray, flickering haze Teldin saw the nautiloid's hull and the vessel's crew streaming over the bow and onto the underside of the Boundless, fifteen of them, twenty, twenty-five…

But they were humans, not the illithids he'd expected! Teldin's surprise broke the mental link, and he was unable to reclaim it.

Humans! That made things more hopeful-at least his crew wouldn't be facing creatures that could fry their brains with mental blasts.

But what were humans doing aboard an illithid nautiloid? he asked himself. So many of them, and seemingly eager to go into battle-infinitely more eager than slaves would be. He forced the question aside. If he and his crew didn't win the upcoming battle, it wouldn't matter at all.

So, no illithids-or, at least, none who'd yet put in an appearance. But there were still twenty-five-no, thirty, now--hard-bitten mercenary types, armed with swords, axes, and maces, clambering across the hull. Maybe the enemy didn't need mind-blasting monsters.

Teldin heard a cry of alarm from the starboard rail. One of his crewmen thrust with his boarding pike and was rewarded by a scream from over the side. Battle is joined, he told himself.

For the first two minutes, the squid ship's crew was able to block all efforts by the nautiloid's mercenaries to climb onto the deck. It couldn't last, however.

"They're on the afterdeck!" one of Teldin's crew shouted. The Cloakmaster looked aft. There were four attackers clambering over the aft rail. Apparently they'd given up a direct assault as too risky and, instead of staying on the hull, had climbed onto the port spanker fin, and from there to the upper portion of the stern.

"With me!" Teldin cried. Flanked by Djan and two other crewmen, he charged up the ladder to the sterncastle.

The first of the boarding party over the stern rail was a huge, black-haired man wielding a crescent-bladed hand axe. With a snarl, he swung a whistling cut at Teldin's head. The Cloakmaster ducked under the swing and drove the point of his sword into the attacker's chest. He spun to the right to parry a sword thrust from another attacker and riposted quickly, laying open the man's left shoulder. Then, as the man howled, Teldin ran him through and pushed him backward, to fall clear of the ship. Teldin turned and looking for another foe.

Djan and the other crewmen had put paid to the remainder of the attackers, not without cost, however. One of the sailors was down, blood pooling around him from a gaping head wound, and Djan was bleeding from a nasty gash in his right forearm.

Teldin heard cries and the skirl of steel on steel from behind him. He spun.

Attackers had made it over the squid ship's rail and were among the defenders. Their boarding pikes useless in toe-to-toe battle, Teldin's crewmen were laying about them wildly with short swords, axes, hammers, even belaying pins, any kind of weapon they could find.

"We'll lose this," Djan said quietly.

Teldin felt the chill of space invading his bones. "I know it." Suddenly he clapped the half-elf on the shoulder. "Do what you can here," he ordered. "I've got an idea."

Djan didn't ask any questions. Beckoning to the surviving crewman, he charged down the ladder to the main deck and into the fray.

The first mate was right, Teldin knew. There was no way they'd be able to hold off the attackers. The squid ship's crew would be butchered, and the cloak would fall into the hands of whoever captained the nautiloid, unless the Cloak-master did something soon.

All right. Static defense wasn't the answer. He had to take the fight to the nautiloid's captain, and he thought he knew how. It was a risk-he had no idea how many of the attackers knew the details of their captain's plans-but any risk was better than the certain defeat of staying aboard the Boundless.

He forced himself to ignore the singing of steel, the crying of wounded men. He let an image build in his mind: a broad, flat-nosed face, a heavy-set body, short black hair… Dargeth, the half-orc. In his mind's eye, he superimposed the image over his own face and body. His skin tingled as he felt the cloak make the change.

He drew a deep breath and returned the short sword to its scabbard. Here goes, he told himself.

He swung a leg over the aft rail and lowered himself onto the slightly upswept surface of the squid ship's stern. Arms spread for balance, he dropped onto the curved wood surface of the port spanker fin. The surface of the fin was almost perfectly aligned with the squid ship's gravity plane, he knew. He lowered himself to his knees, then to his belly. Cautiously, he crawled to the forward edge of the fin.

From this vantage point, he could see a dozen mercenaries standing-upside down, according to his present orientation-on the underside of the Boundless's hull, preparing to climb down to the gravity plane, then up the other side to the rails. Preparing to board and kill my crew, Teldin told himself bitterly. His hand strayed to his sword hilt, as he fought the temptation to leap into their midst and hew about him wildly.

But, no, he told himself firmly, that wouldn't help in the long run. No matter how good he was with a sword, no matter how lucky, there was no possible way he could take down a dozen armed mercenaries. He'd just get himself killed or captured, and then he'd have no way of saving his men from their fate. No, the only way he could help them was to follow through with his plan.

He slid himself forward along the fin until his shoulders and chest extended out into space, then he bent forward, down, over the edge of the fin.

As soon as his head and shoulders passed through the plane of the fin, he wasn't looking down anymore, but up. His balance spun dizzily as his brain tried to make sense of conflicting data. The gravity plane passed through the middle of his body now, with "local down" being toward the plane of the spanker fin. He closed his eyes and struggled to fight the nausea that twisted within him.

He had to move fast, he knew. He bent farther, until his chest touched the other flat surface of the fin. Now he was folded around the forward edge of the fin. He pulled himself forward with his hands and kicked his legs out into space. Again his balance reoriented itself sickeningly. He tasted bile in his throat. He slid forward again until he lay flat on the fin-on what had been the underside of the fin but was now, to his senses, the top. He jumped to his feet.

From his new vantage point, the Boundless looked as though it had capsized. The nautiloid, its ram still buried in the squid ship's hull, appeared the right way up-thanks to its final maneuver before impact-but angled upward at fifteen or twenty degrees. He ran to the illithid ship's open lower battle station and vaulted over the rail, onto its canted deck.

Three mercenaries faced him, weapons drawn and faces grim.

For a second, Teldin's sense of vulnerability was almost more than he could stand. He wanted to snatch his sword from its sheath and at least go down fighting. Instead he kept his hand clear of the weapon's hilt and forced a look of urgency onto his face. "Where's the captain?" he grunted.

One of the mercenaries tightened his grip on his sword and stepped forward. I'm dead, the Cloakmaster told himself. They don't know who Dargeth is and don't know his significance. All I've done is kill myself.

Then another of the mercenaries grabbed the man by the shoulder, pulled him back. "No," he grunted, "he's with us."

Relief flooded through Teldin's body, threatening to weaken his knees so that he couldn't even stand. With a titanic effort, he kept his face and traitor body under control. "Where's the captain?" he repeated.

"Grampian's on the bridge deck," the first mercenary said, pointing vaguely upward. "Why d'ya need to talk to him?"

"News," Teldin replied, keeping his voice hoarse, exhausted-sounding, in case these men had heard Dargeth speak before. "For Grampian's ears only." He held his breath, waiting for another question-a question he couldn't answer, that would reveal his deception and end his life.

But the mercenaries had other things on their minds. They paid him no more attention as they brushed past him to vault over the rail, onto the underside of the Boundless.

Teldin's knees felt weak, his heart pounding so hard that it threatened to burst. Still he managed to force himself on, up the sloping deck of the battle station. There were three ladders-one, in the center of the deck, leading down-, two leading up. The mercenary had pointed upward when he'd mentioned the captain's-Grampian's-location. The Cloakmaster sprinted up the starboard side ladder.

He found himself in a large, open area that filled the complete width of the nautiloid. To his right, as he reached the top of the ladder, was the ship's main catapult, smashed by the Boundless's ballista shot. Two human bodies, twisted and broken, lay sprawled over the wreckage. The Cloakmaster looked away.

The area was empty. Directly ahead of him were another two ladders, these wider than the one he'd climbed, one leading up, the other down. To the port side of the ladders was a door; to the starboard was a corridor leading aft. There had to be cabins back there, maybe storage compartments.

Where in the Abyss would he find the captain? He didn't have time to search the whole ship. His crewmates were dying….

Where would he be if he were the captain? Somewhere he could see what was going on, of course. That eliminated the cabins, didn't it? He ran to the ladders and climbed up to the next deck.

More than halfway up the shell-like hull of the nautiloid, this deck was considerably shorter and slightly narrower than the one below. But it was much higher, extending right up to the curved upper surface of the hull. Above him, like the galleries in some strange theater, were observation decks of some kind. And, even higher, a kind of narrow causeway extended from the aft to the center of the open space, supporting a large chair. Teldin stopped in his tracks, fascinated by the spectacle.

"What in the hells are you doing here?"

He spun. Facing him across the open deck, a dark, bearded man stood, fists balled and set aggressively on his hips.

By all the gods, it was Berglund, the privateer captain who'd attacked the Boundless outside Heartspace!

Teldin struggled to keep his recognition from showing on his face. "Gotta talk to Grampian," he gasped harshly.

Berglund scowled. "Why?"

"It's important," Teldin grunted. "Where?"

Berglund hesitated, and the Cloakmaster thought all was lost, then the pirate's face cleared and he pointed toward a circular, red-glass portal on the starboard side of the hull. "Out on the observer station."

Teldin grunted his thanks and hurried over to the portal. Just aft of the large, multipaned porthole was a small door. He grabbed the knob and pulled it open.

And there was Grampian (or so he assumed), a tall, nondescript, brown-haired man with a build slightly more slender than Teldin's. He stood on a small, semicircular gallery -open to the stars-leaning on the rail for a good view of the underside of the squid ship's hull. Apparently he was too absorbed in what was going on below him to have noticed Teldin's arrival.

Silently, the Cloakmaster stepped out onto the observation gallery and shut the door behind him. He drew his short sword, felt the sharkskin grip slick with the sweat of his palm. He took a step forward….

Suddenly he was struck by a vision. Superimposed on the tall human ahead of him he saw an even taller figure-gangling, slender to the point of malnutrition, standing twice Teldin's own height. Instead of brown hair, he saw a bald skull, strangely domed, covered with tightly stretched powder-blue skin…

An arcane.