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Chapter 5

The sky had been empty for perhaps two or three hundred spins of the asteroid. Harybdartt gazed impassively at the stars—as he had been gazing for most of that time—and he reflected upon the manner in which his life was going to end: in silence, alone, and with nothing more for him to contribute to his race. The silence and the solitude were not so terrible—but he wished that he could find a way to bring meaning to the end.

He had mostly ceased thinking about the mother(ship) and his (fleet)mates. He was sure now that they were gone, destroyed or departed, their job ended. Whatever damage they had inflicted upon the enemy in this empty and useless star system was done. His own role was finished in principle, too, but not yet in fact. He could end his vigil by opening his helmet and gusting his last breath into space; but no. Life was filled with the unexpected; and his duty remained clear—to be prepared, to his dying breath, to respond to any presence or action of the enemy.

With each turn of the asteroid, he scanned the flicker-readings—not with the expectation of finding anything, but because it was the only thing left to do. The readers were on intermittent, conserving power—glimmering from time to time, then going dark. When the enemy actually appeared, he nearly missed it. The asteroid's rotation had carried him into night, away from the pale orange sun. There was a glint at the edge of his helmet. Before he could interpret the signal, the reader blinked off again; by the time it came back on, he could already see with his own eyes what was happening.

It started with a distortion of the starfield, followed by a dull blue glow in the center of the disturbance. A dark speck appeared in the center of the glow; then the light faded out. Whatever it was, it was invisible in the dark; but according to the flicker-readers, an object was approaching the asteroid. It had come out of transient space startlingly close to his location.

It was the enemy. But what had it returned for?

He had precious little time to ponder the question before the asteroid's rotation carried him out of viewing position. By the time it brought him back around, the enemy was in sight, its engines glowing against the night. It braked into a slow orbit around the asteroid.

Harybdartt watched without moving a muscle. The enemy must have known precisely what it was looking for. It circled the asteroid several times before synchronizing its motion with the asteroid's rotation. It moved closer, until it was no more than a dozen body-lengths from Harybdartt. The El watched, and waited for it to destroy him.

He was still waiting, several rotations later.

For lack of anything else to do, he studied the object. It was a small craft for a star-farer, little resembling any Ell(ship). It was one of the enemy's robot fighting units—the first that Harybdartt had ever viewed at close range. It was metal, of that iridescent grey color that so confounded the Ell by absorbing scanning rays and reflecting weapons beams. It was a hard thing to track, harder yet to kill. It bristled with weapons and sensory devices. Behind the weapons bulged an armored propulsion unit. Harybdartt felt a reluctant admiration. It was an efficient and terrible fighter.

The alien and Harybdartt regarded each other in silence.

Why, he wondered, wasn't it attacking?

Had it returned to this system, across unknown light-years, to destroy a single El survivor? Or was it here to make a capture, unlike any of its kind before it?

Harybdartt reassessed his own capabilities. He was unarmed, but he could still maneuver slightly, and he possessed one focusable flare. It was an absurd match. There was no way for him to fight the alien thing, but he might provoke it into attacking and thereby end the standoff.

He had no wish to give his life prematurely; but if the choice was between capture and death in battle, then it was clear which was preferable. If he was captured, the enemy might gain valuable information from him. If he was killed, the possibility would be less. If he was vaporized, it would be nil.

He removed the flare from his belt and held it in position and waited for his opponent to make the next move.

One rotation later, the alien emitted a soft glow. It slowly approached, as though to seize the El in its robot arms. Harybdartt peered through his scope, watched it come, memorized its features and behavior against the unlikely hope that he should live to pass on the information, and held his flare at the ready. The alien grew like a monstrous, dark-clawed land beetle. Harybdartt glimpsed a sparkle of energy in the barrel of its weapons.

In the scoped image, he located a glass-faced sensor on the fighter. He aimed the flare and drew down into a crouch.

It grew enormous in the scope.

Harybdartt leaped and squeezed the handle of the flare. A blaze of light illuminated the enemy—and blazed back into his eyes. He tried to keep it aimed, but he was blinded by the glare, and now tumbling. He corrected the tumble and aimed the flare again—and waited for the counterfire that would reduce him to a haze of atoms.

It came in a convulsion of emerald brilliance.

 

* * *

 

Harybdartt felt a deep, probing pain inside his head as he struggled to focus. Not again. There was a memory of dazzling light and weightlessness. He was still weightless, but the light was gone. His hands—he flexed them tentatively—were empty. He had lost the flare.

But he had not been vaporized.

A soft radiance filled his view. Was it the glow, or his blinded eyes, that kept him from focusing? His muscles were in spasm. Breathing was difficult. He could no longer feel the asteroid against his back. Of course not—he had jumped, to provoke the enemy.

Against the glow, a shadow was taking form. He closed his eyes, performed an internal centering exercise, and opened them again. The light seemed brighter and the shadow more clearly defined. It was the alien; and it was very near, and closing. It was about to seize him.

He raised his hands to loosen his helmet seals. If he could just release the pressure and let his life escape with his last breath . . .

But his hands refused to reach his face. He was not paralyzed, but his efforts were being resisted. A force-field . . . he had not expected this. He exerted greater strength, and his hands rose a little farther but again stopped, held by an irresistible force.

He closed his eyes. He was captured, then, and there was nothing he could do about it, not even take his own life. He was compelled to focus everything he had left, every ounce of his strength, upon just one duty: to keep his knowledge out of the enemy's reach. It was time to begin the torhhatt . . . time to surrender his memories to eternity.

Abandoning the physical struggle, he reached inward in his thoughts, to his center. Quickly, quickly—first came the ordering and defining, the selection of memories to be sealed. Then the tying and the binding; and finally the seal. Once it was done, not even a binder of the Inner Circle would be able to release what was in him.

He worked quickly, but it was difficult; and the shadow of the enemy glared at him through the glow, shaking his concentration. What was it doing? What memories should he bind? The most urgent need sprang out at him . . .

 

*

Location

*

of Home

*

before all.

*

 

He cast a loop quickly around that datum and bound it tight. The process flowed quickly, but he felt an external tingle in his thoughts as he worked, something entering his mind from without, something probing, scanning . . .

Get out! he commanded, and there was a quiver of shifting alignment, a moment of confusion; and in that moment he completed the process, spinning silken threads around the memory and sinking it deep, lost and invisible, into a bottomless abyss in the center of his mind. There was a moment of trembling lightheadedness as he finished.

And then a deep, silent satisfaction.

An instant later, the impulse came, raging up out of his subconscious mind. Instinctively he struggled to recapture the memory. He was Harybdartt. He was an El space-defender. This was not his home. He came from another star.

He could not remember where that star was.

He trembled, quelling the instinct to remember.

There was a burst of activity in his flicker-readers. The enemy was probing, seeking contact. He must resist. Was it possible that they could free what the torhhatt had locked away? He blinked and stared at the enemy and began selecting other memories to hide. The lights in his helmet danced and glimmered furiously. The glow surrounding him brightened.

He worked the binding in haste, gathering elements of his training toward the hidden place.

The light blazed—and that was when the probing fingers of the enemy reached into his brain like a burning poker and the binding threads sizzled and fell away, leaving his mind naked before his foe.

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Framed