Rites of succession

RITES OF SUCCESSION

By

Jane McCaa

In Loving Memory of Geraldine
Chapter 1

The dimmed lights in Lord Constantine’s room flickered briefly. He stirred a little. Lord Constantine carried a heavy burden of expectation for the future of his home planet, Delos, the Delian League of planets which she led, and the wider galaxy which stood to be affected by all that she did. As, however, he was fed, full, clean, fast asleep and four months old, none of this bothered him very much.

His mother, Zoë, in chronological order Heir of Arete, Archon-Heir of Delos and Vicereine of Eirene, moved quietly out and closed the door, setting the speaker to the lounge and bridge as she did so. She walked down the corridor, stopping at the galley to switch on the coffee machine. Her movements had an easy grace and contained power that spoke of years of training, despite inevitable softening, and expansion, as a result of recent motherhood. She rearranged her loose silk overshirt into the black sash at her waist, wondering when the smooth-over-hard contours would fully reassert themselves, and retied her silver-fair hair casually back at the nape of her neck. It was good to be at ease out of the public eye, with time just to be family, despite the official documents that would keep being transmitted. She carefully let her eyes slide away from the alcove which housed the hotlines, and the cupboard they had had added since Eirene.

Zoë smiled down at the elderly man wearing a black embroidered kimono who sat in the broad lounge which was the heart of the yacht, watching a favourite holo.

“Coffee, Uncle Arai?” she asked. He was slight, with close-cropped greying hair, but surprisingly clear, youthful eyes.

“I’ll get it, Zoë, sit down while you have the chance.”

“No, no,” she stopped him with a fond hand on his shoulder. “I’m on my feet. You should get a new copy,” she nodded at the projector. “The colour on that one is shot.”

"It's the player," he answered. "It was fine last time I watched it. The controls seem off."

"Oh well. I'll see if the boys want anything." Zoë continued through the lounge to the bridge controls which opened off it, where two men sat in the pilots' chairs. This was a family yacht rather than an official craft of the royal flight, so that even the pilots' chairs combined function and safety features with the comfort of old armchairs. The bridge was not a separate unit, but rather an alcove at the end of the lounge. The whole space was designed for a relaxed family outing, and that was why they had chosen to make the journey in it. There was enough room for all that they needed for the business of the visit, and the accompanying starfighters, keeping tabs on them by instrumentation rather than close formation, added the necessary reminders.

One of 'the boys' reached out an arm and pulled Zoë down to sit on the arm of his pilot's seat. She relaxed comfortably against him, absently ruffling the thick dark hair in which a few strands of grey were beginning to appear, and about which she occasionally teased him, reminding him of the difference in their ages (which bothered her not at all and him rarely).

"Has he gone off?" Peter, Lord of Minyas, Prime Lord of Delos and Viceroy of Eirene, asked her.

She nodded. "I've put coffee on. Want some?"

"Great." The other pilot turned to grin at her. Just about everybody wanted to ruffle his curls: Lord Leo Arete the golden, Leo the young god, Leo the playboy, the media darling, the object of fantasy for adolescent girls across Delos and the wide, wide galaxy (not to mention the odd matron who should know better), the object of determined speculation for young women of suitable age and conceivable social contact range and their ambitious mamas and papas. To Zoë he was her nearest in age cousin, with whom she had climbed trees, eaten too many sweets, plotted mischief and talked long into the night about life and, soberly, about the burdens it placed on them.

"Loads of cream," he said cheerfully. "It's not long till the next jump point," he pointed to the instrument panel, "and then an easy coast for a while. Let's make the most of it."

Zoë nodded. She unwound herself from Peter and strolled back to the galley, only to exclaim in annoyance at the empty, stone-cold coffee pot. She must have forgotten to press the switch. She reached out, but her fingers made the wrong movement. It had been on. Crossly, she switched it on and off again several times, and then jumped back shaking her stung finger as the switch sparked. "Damnation," she muttered, filling water in an ordinary kettle instead. The coffee was never so enjoyable made without the machine.

She returned to the lounge while it boiled, and saw that Uncle Arai was now standing in the bridge area with Peter and Leo, in a posture of intensity that she could see in his turned back.

"I thought I heard something in the engine." He had cat's ears, easily hearing the footfall of her soft shoes and instinctively light gait on the carpeted floor.

"She's overhauled before every flight of any real distance, as well as the routine checks," Leo assured him. "There can't be anything much or they'd never let us near her. But we'll check her over - better to be safe." Leo was possibly not quite so much of a careless gadabout as the gossip press enjoyed suggesting. Safety checks, of course, were not just second but first nature to anyone who spent much time in space.

They all suddenly turned, aware of an absence, as the holo snapped off. Sparks flew out of the projector, immediately extinguished by the automatic dampers. The lights in the lounge flickered. Now they all heard a cough in the engine noise, and felt a judder. A blue flame burst across a series of controls at Peter's right hand, which he snatched away, swearing as the stabbing energy flash caught him. The flame vanished in barely a second, and some of the controls still seemed to be functioning, but others had gone blank. A lightshow of rippling switch telltales began across the bridge as random selections of the ship's systems informed the shocked crew that they were on-line, off-line, overloaded, switching to manual. Leo smashed open the emergency master console cover on his seat arm, and began a frantic search and override.

Peter leapt to his feet, "Check the ship," he told Zoë and Arai. "Let's find out what's actually happening and where."

Zoë stopped to scoop Constantine out of his cot before making her rounds. Peter went aft into the engine room, Arai down to the hold, though not for long. He met Zoë in the central corridor.

"Environment control is gone there," he said breathlessly, "and it looks as if there are meltdowns in the bulkheads."

"Our cabin has blown out its heating system and the coolant gas is leaking. I've sealed it off. I wouldn't spend too much time in the galley either, there are too many things in there that could blow."

"What is this?" yelled Leo from the bridge. "All these systems can't go at once - what happened to the failsafes? And the failsafes on the failsafes?"

"I have a pretty unpleasant idea," Peter replied. He had come back in from the engine room, and held forward a melting, jumbled piece of circuitry. "Keep hold of the controls, Leo!" he snapped as Leo turned to see. A couple of strides of his long legs and he was back on the bridge, followed by Arai, Zoë and a now awake, confused and wailing Constantine. Zoë put a finger in his mouth, which he seized on greedily, not yet noticing that it was not providing anything other than sweat.

"Everything is coming to pieces," Peter said flatly, but not quietly, as the whine of hot metal and grinding of confused machines grew louder. "Main systems and safety systems are all going haywire, the ship is unravelling."

Zoë was still for a heartbeat.

"You mean like the Andromeda?" She shivered, despite herself. "It's computer cancer."

Peter looked at the molten circuitry in his hand. He nodded.

"I've activated the beacon," Leo pointed at his armrest board. "It's on a system of its own, it should withstand anything."

"Assuming we're not blown to tiny little bits of metal dust," agreed Zoë. "Can we get to the jump point? The escort and the traffic controllers could get a fix on us there."

Leo shrugged, "We'll try."

"Get - "

Arai had already gone to the bookshelves just at the corner where bridge and lounge met. He had fetched out a huge, closely-printed volume. The Delians had learned the hard way that you cannot always trust what even a healthy computer tells you. Arai was looking up the planetary gazetteer to see if there was anywhere they might hope to reach, anywhere somebody might see them.

Peter and Zoë, Constantine tucked on one hip, were trying to open the hatch to the lifeboat. There was a manual hatch – they had insisted on that, but a circuit fire in the lights panel nearby had sparked into the decorative wall covering. The damping gases had caught it, but the brief heat had been intense enough, surprisingly, to fuse part of the door. Peter went for a cutter from the toolbox kept on every corridor.

“Don’t bother,” Zoë called after him. He looked back, stomach clenched, as she pointed through the porthole into the lifeboat. Its controls were on separate circuits, for obvious reasons, but the launch controls had to be connected to the yacht systems, and the launch controls were firing. Peter caught Zoë and Constantine as the concussion rocked them.

On the bridge, Leo’s head snapped round. “The lifeboat’s gone, Uncle Arai, look!” Arai glanced through the window just long enough to see the lifeboat tumbling away and then wiped the concern from his mind. It was gone. Next step.

Computer cancer: unpredictable, unavoidable, unsalvageable, one in a million or less. When it hit the Theban liner Andromeda some years ago the runaway meltdowns, feeding on and sparking one another, engulfing every mechanism on the ship in a raging wildfire, it had taken the life of every soul on board, hundreds of people. It was the worst civilian shipping disaster in half a century, and everyone’s worst space nightmare come true. It took at least one life on land as well – the insurance inspector who let her sail not knowing, with no way of knowing what would happen, and no way to live with it when it did. All but one of the yacht’s passengers knew what they were facing, and how much chance they had when a ship’s dedicated engineering crew had failed. No matter. They must just take the next step.

The starfighter’s eyes widened in shock. This was not meant to happen. “Sir!” he called immediately to the supervising N.C.O. “The yacht’s beacon has come on.”

“Dear Lord.” The Petty Officer’s practised eye swept the screens. The beacon was on all right, and he could detect the wavering course, even though it was barely visible. “Ma’am,” he in turn alerted the young officer who had materialised at his side as soon as she had seen a hint of something out of the ordinary.

“Try to get through to them, P.O. Vasilides,” she ordered quickly, “talk to the other escort ship and warn the controllers at the jump. I’ll tell the Captain. I think he’ll want us to accelerate.”

“I think he might, Ma’am.” Vasilides and his team went swiftly, smoothly, horrified, to work, while the lieutenant strode to the Captain’s day cabin.

“I want lines to the Scylla, the control point and the yacht, and keep them all open to each other as well. And let’s get there quickly.” He shared a look with the girl, her face drained of the emotion they dared not allow themselves to feel. "Very quickly,” he added softly.

For a moment as she had turned her back to leave the cabin he let himself mouth a curse. The royal party would insist on travelling under their own steam this time, and keeping their escort vessels, the Scylla and Charybdis, at a distance. He had made his protest, and accepted defeat.

Yes, he knew, the chances of catastrophic mechanical failure were negligible, and in the current political circumstances the chances of an attack probably less. As things stood now, the Archon-Heir and Prime Lord were too popular, too necessary, for anyone to be stupid enough to threaten them. The trouble with one in a million chances, however, was that somebody or something had to be that one, and the people on the yacht were not the panicking kind. His crew knew how to organise a rescue. He could let them put all the procedures in motion while he had to do the really hard bit: he had to tell the waiting government on Eirene and worse, much worse, somehow he had to keep an even voice whilst he told Delos.

He was reaching out towards his communications console when the lieutenant reappeared at his door.

“We managed a few words with the yacht, Sir.” She was gripping the doorframe so that her knuckles shone white. “The signal was coming to bits, and I doubt we’ll be able to get a contact again.” She caught at her breath for a tiny moment. “They think they have computer cancer.” Her eyes searched his, as if something in the Captain’s face would say this was not happening, and then fell.

“Just get there fast, girl,” he told her, “faster than you’ve ever flown.”

The face of the Scylla’s Captain blinked onto the screen at his side. He turned to it. “You know?" His colleague nodded. “We have to get to them before the jump point. If we lost them there … "

“If we lost them anywhere, my friend,” she replied grimly.

“We’re going to slam into the jump,” Leo fought to keep a grip on the controls, “and I can’t guarantee how we’ll come out. The navigation is scrambled eggs.” He looked up at Peter, standing at his side staring intently at the insane, migrainous jumble of lights on the consoles. “The way I see it we have three possibilities: something seriously explosive catches light or gets the wrong signals and we’re atomised, eventually everything gives up and switches off and we freeze or burst and just keep falling through space forever, or we fall through space and there’s a planet or a moon in shooting distance and we hit something hard.”

Peter took his eyes from the controls to look down at Leo, and his hard eyes were gentle. He smiled sadly. “Good assessment, Leo.” He laid a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“So am I. It’s all right for you. You’ve had a ridiculously exciting life, found your soul-mate and had a son. No-one’s even admitted I’m anything other than a pretty face yet.”

“If any pieces of us get through this I’ll never call you pretty again, “ Zoë promised. She had thrown herself into a chair behind them, knowing the jump was coming soon. She clutched the terrified screaming baby to her, trying to protect his ears from the rising tortured metal noises. “Can you stay conscious when we go through, Leo?” she called to him.

He turned quickly round to her, trying to keep a mask of aristocratic control over his young features. “We’re going in at the wrong angle, Zoë, the navigation is playing pinball and I don’t know how it’s going to take us, but I’ll try. Buckle in, Peter!” he snapped, turning back, just in time to see a rescue ship bursting through the jump from the control centre at the other end. Leo and the rescue pilot rolled away from each other, but that left Leo taking the ship into the jump broadside on, with a berserk navigation system. “I’d feel a whole lot better with a priest on board!” he yelled. “Say one for me.” His companions were already praying for them all.

And they hit the jump.

And they came out the other side. An other side.

The ship was spinning crazily like a top, Constantine, not aware enough of what was going on to be disoriented, was at least shocked into a miserable silence. Oda Arai was unconscious, Peter and Zoë dimly conscious, Leo felt very, very ill. With any luck there was enough control left in the giros to stop the stars spinning quite so hard around them. He retained enough grip on reality to realise they were not actually inside his head, even if it felt like it. Peter stirred sluggishly and ran his tongue around his dry lips. "So far so good,” he croaked at Leo, reaching out his longer arm to the switch at which Leo was feebly aiming. At least something still worked – the crazy dance of stars began to settle.

“Well,” Zoë’s voice came from behind them. “It’s a safe guess we’re not where we’re meant to be. No control station.” That meant no quick rescue as well, but there was not much point in saying it.

“There is a sun though,” Leo pointed, as the slowing of the spinning ship brought dazed eyes and battered minds to focus.

“If we can get a spectrographic analysis we might be able to figure out what it is.” Without much hope, Peter opened a panel on the main console. A few blackened instruments fizzled almost derisively at him. “Oh well, it was worth a thought.”

Arai had pulled himself around and was now out of his chair, gripping onto the back of Peter’s, standing more by will than ability. He was not a young man and this was hard. “I think I’ve been here before,” he said.

“I know you’re supposed to be a magic man, but how the Hell do you know?” demanded Leo.

“I don’t do magic, Leo, and being young and afraid doesn’t excuse being rude.” Arai spoke mildly, but no-one ever mistook him twice. Leo blushed. “A Grand Master does a lot of travelling. I’d been half-way round the galaxy and back before I settled with Zoë. I remember a jump point with a yellow star lying off it at this angle. There are some planets. If I’m right, that is Sol Ignotus.”

Having strapped Constantine into her seat as best she could, Zoë searched the floor of the now wrecked lounge for the gazetteer. “Well, let’s see. Let’s at least try.”

The ship was bucking now under the strong hands of both Peter and Leo as more and more elements misfired, read the wrong messages, switched off, shut down or exploded. The damping gases might start taking a toll on them soon if nothing else got them first, Zoë thought. She found the large book and knelt on the floor, whipping through it.

“There’s a chance,” Zoë called up at the men on the controls. “It’s almost never used, but there is a description of a sun and a jump point. If we can hold together long enough there’s one planet in the system with an atmosphere. They call it Lethe.”

“Lethe? The river of oblivion? Oh thanks, cousin, great omen.”

“Where does it lie?” Peter asked, yelling as they had all had to do and suddenly hearing the volume of his voice in a silence more horrible than the noise. The lights went out. Constantine squealed in terror and his mother felt her way back towards him. A selection of dim red lights which operated off their own self-contained charges came on after a moment.

“I don’t think it matters where it lies.” Peter answered his own question. “There’s not much we can do about it.”

“We haven’t exploded yet, and I still have some guidance, even if the engine’s gone,” Leo gripped his controls harder than ever, as if it would make a difference.

“We’re going to get very cold very soon,” Zoë warned, hugging her baby. “I have the survival packs at the hatch, but we can’t get to spacesuits or many of the supplies because the cabins can’t be entered.”

“It’s there,” Leo pointed excitedly at a jewel dot rushing towards them. “If I can just keep her going on this path … "

“Good man, Leo, fight for it.” Peter punched him lightly on the arm and went behind to Arai, who was at the, admittedly useless, government communications console. “Is that any use?” he jerked his head at the Eirenian cupboard.

“I don’t know,” Arai answered. “None of us has the professional talent and the system only worked for us before because of me and Zoë.” He examined Peter’s face gravely. “Could you? Is there anyone?”

Peter shrugged. “I don’t know, Arai. Grishka maybe, someone on our staff or his.”

“It’s worth a try.”

Peter opened the chamber door, and behind its cover he spoke softly. “Arai, I don’t want to see my wife and son freeze to death or burn up.”

Arai had long thrown off his kimono. He touched the black sash that he too had belted around his jacket. “If we explode none of us will know about it, son,” he said gently. “But if it comes to the point, I’ll do anything to prevent them dying badly. Any of us.” A winter’s breath of a sad smile touched his features. “I expect it won’t surprise you that Zoë and I have already had this conversation about you and Leo.”

“Constantine – “ Peter began, but choked on it.

“He has never known anything in his life but to be surrounded by love. If this has to be, then better by far that you should all go together and quickly. His mother knows that,” Arai gripped Peter’s arm, looking up intently into his eyes, “and so do you.”

Peter nodded. No more words needed to be wasted. He entered the sensory deprivation chamber and attempted to still his mind in its enveloping quietness, more eerie than ever given what they had just been living through. Maybe they already knew on Eirene, maybe someone was already looking, reaching out into the unknown, seeing them as the yacht fell through the endless space towards the very small target of a planet he had never heard of.

Zoë wrenched the door open. “Strap in, Peter. There just isn’t time.”

“At least we’re going in the right direction,” Leo told them on the bridge. His blond curls were dark with sweat now, and his eyes beginning to glaze with the stress. “We need a real nutter to pull this one off though.” The planet was getting bigger, and they could see the line of the atmosphere.

“Can you get the angle, Leo?” Zoë asked him. “I don’t fancy playing ducks and drakes off that.”

“I don’t know.” For the first time he let himself sound subdued. “Look, Zoë, you’ve been an aircar racer – you’ve got the wrists and the reflexes, maybe you should do this.”

Zoë shook her head. “No. This needs somebody stupidly reckless, and I have an instinct to protect my baby that won’t let me be.” She planted a kiss on top of his damp curls for luck. “This is one for a selfish, thoughtless, devil-may-care playboy.” She went back to her chair to strap herself in with her helpless, whimpering bundle.

“Oh dear, so you know about that then?” Leo tried a grin over his shoulder.

“Of course.”

“Does Mother?”

The planet came rushing up towards them. Peter kept his eyes on the few controls that operated purely on mechanics, hoping to get some hint of their angle of descent. Sunlight was now flooding in, painfully, but at least they could see.

“I don’t know this planet,” Leo muttered to Peter. “I don’t know how high the atmosphere is or whether there are any currents. I’m just going to have to guess.”

“Then God guide your hands, Leo. We’ve done what we can.” Peter flexed his wrist to let a knife slide down into his hand. He concealed it against the armrest. He knew that behind him Arai was ready.

“We’ve made it this far,” Zoë said to them all. “If God wants us to make it the last few miles, then we shall.”

“I’m sure He doesn’t want me till I’ve owned up to a few more things,” Leo tried to say lightly, praying in his mind, “Please, please not now, not all of us, not the baby.”

They were in atmosphere. They had not bounced, they not burned, not yet. They also did not have any retros to slow them down.

“Any ideas, Peter?”

“We’ll just have to try a low orbit and a slow decay till we can glide in, and hope it’s not over sea or mountains.” Peter surreptitiously slid his knife back under his sleeve. If anything went wrong now it would be over too quickly to notice.

The noise was back, the fabric of the yacht screaming alarmingly as they juddered down through the atmosphere.

“They must have built her well,” remarked Arai, as if nothing much were happening.

“Except for every system on the ship failing at once, you’re probably right,” snapped Zoë.

“We’ve come a long way against the odds.”

Abruptly they came out of cloud into sunshine and clear view.

“Pull her level, Leo!” yelled Peter, seeing the angle at which they were now diving. The pair of them managed to bring her more level, though insecurely, and they searched the ground now rushing below them for an area where they might hope to land when the yacht had finally dropped far enough.

It took a long agonising time, as they held the yacht against gravity as long as they could, to slow her descent and spy the land. Their concentration was so intense that even the cooling and failing air was hardly noticeable to them, though Zoë wrapped herself ever more desperately around her child. At last, crossing a sea, making a last prayer not to come down in water, Leo and Peter nosed the yacht down towards what looked like an old, wide, glacier-cut valley. “Now or never,” Peter assured his co-pilot. Leo nodded and screeching, bouncing, shuddering and complaining, the yacht finally threw itself to earth and skidded its long path to a halt.
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