Into the Void

would be on a seagoing vessel, the ropes went slack. The longboat bobbed slightly as though it were floating on the ocean. Teldin looked over the gunwales at the blackness and distant stars below and tightened his grip on the thwart.

'Free the lines,' Horvath called… and after a moment added, 'Teldin, that means you.'

Teldin glanced back over his shoulder, then looked at the bow rigging. The lines in the block-and-tackle were slack, but the large iron hook was still engaged with the eye on the bow. With a conscious effort he loosened his grip on the thwart and started to stand. The boat swayed alarmingly.

'Keep low!' Horvath shouted. 'It's a long way down.'

Needing no second urging, Teldin crouched in the bow and reached upward to release the hook. The lines swung free.

'Clear?'

'Clear,' Teldin answered, as did Saliman from his position aft.

'Good. Now push us off.'

Two gnomes wielding long poles with padded ends pushed on the longboat's hull. Slowly it moved away from the dreadnought. Even when the smaller vessel was too far away for the gnomes to keep pushing, it continued to drift slowly outward from the other ship.

'Oars out,' Horvath said crisply. Dana and Miggins lifted the long oars, swung them outboard and mounted them firmly in the oarlocks. They held the oars as if ready for a stroke, but didn't pull on them. 'Saliman, take us out… oh, a spear cast should do it. Oars parallel to the hull, please.'

The older gnome nodded at Horvath's order. He closed his eyes and settled his hands more comfortably on the arms of his throne… and the longboat began to move. Slowly picking up speed, it drew farther away from the huge dreadnought. When they were about a hundred yards away, Teldin judged, Dana and Miggins changed the angle of the oars they held. The longboat maneuvered to a course parallel to that of the Unquenchable.

Teldin watched in fascination. He knew that the main motive power for a spelljamming vessel came from the 'spelljamming helm.' Somehow this device absorbed magical energy from any spellcaster who sat in it, and converted it into another form that drove the vessel. What purpose, then, did the longboat's oars serve… or for that matter, the almost-transparent sails used by the neogi deathspiders? After a few minutes of observation, of correlating the movements of the oars with the maneuvers of the longboat, he came to a conclusion. Although the helmsman had control over the vessel's motions, that control was only on a gross level. For finer maneuvering, the oars-and presumably the sails-were required. This conclusion still didn't answer everything, he knew-like, what did the oars push against?-but it did allow him to start to make sense of what he was seeing.

As the longboat maneuvered again, Teldin could see the dreadnought in all its glory… if that was the right word. He'd seen it before in the lake at Mount Nevermind, but this perspective made it look even more impressive… and even more outrageous. Its broad-beamed hull was several hundred feet long, constructed of planking for the most part but patched and reinforced here and there with large plates of metal. A little aft of amidships were the huge paddle wheels, turning slowly as though to propel the vessel across a nonexistent river. Both forecastle and sterncastle loomed huge over the deck, massive constructions of wood and metal that would surely overturn any true seagoing vessel. Even to Teldin, who admitted he knew little to nothing of ship design, the structures looked fundamentally wrong. Chaotic they seemed, as though built piecemeal by multiple crews of artificers who weren't on speaking terms with each other.

Signs of battle were everywhere. The hull was marked and cracked here and there where it had been struck by catapult missiles, and splintered pieces of wood hung by fraying ropes from the rigging. To Teldin's unpracticed eye, the ship looked somewhat mauled but still 'spaceworthy.'

Horvath ordered course changes as he continued his inspection of the ship. As the longboat cruised on, Teldin felt his gaze drawn once more to the world they were leaving behind them.

Krynn was now a full sphere, half in sunlight, half in darkness. The day side had taken on a brilliant blue color, mottled over much of its surface with abstract patterns of white. The night side was dark, but not pitch black, and once he saw a flash of dim, cold radiance that could only have been the light of one of the moons reflecting off some body of water. It looked so beautiful and serene. How could this… this work of art, be a world where conflict had killed so many? he wondered.

Light caught Teldin's eye from an unexpected direction then. The brilliance of the sun reflected off a metal plate on the Unquenchable's hull. Had the longboat changed course again?

No, it was the dreadnought itself that had maneuvered. As he matched, the massive vessel completed a turn. Its course was no longer parallel with that of the longboat, and the sidewheeler was picking up speed.

Teldin looked back. Horvath's eyes, too, were locked on the Unquenchable. 'What's happening?' the human asked the gnome.

'Don't know,' Horvath replied shortly, then snapped, 'Saliman. Get us up to speed. Oars-' he gestured his confusion '-follow that dreadnought!'

The longboat surged and began to accelerate, but Teldin knew it would never catch the Unquenchable if the larger vessel maintained its present speed. Teldin shifted his position on the thwart, and his foot struck something that rolled on the planking with a metallic sound. He reached down into the scuppers and extracted a brass tube almost as long as his forearm. Although it was rare on Krynn, Teldin recognized the object immediately: a sailor's glass. He raised it to his eye and pointed the tube at the receding ship.

The dreadnought seemed to leap closer. Through the glass he could easily see the commotion on deck. Gnomes were running everywhere, swarming into the rigging.

'Ship ho!' The voice was Miggins's, booming from the midships thwart. The gnome was pointing generally forward and upward. 'High on the port bow,' he called, 'ahead of the 'quenchable!'

There was a cold prickling on Teldin's brow, and the flat, coppery taste of fear was in his mouth. He strained to make out the ship, bringing the glass around in the direction in which the gnome was pointing, but could see nothing against the blackness of space. You don't need to, his fear told him, you know what it looks like: a black spider, coming to kill you.

'Can you make it out?' Horvath asked.

'Is it neogi?' It took Teldin a moment to realize it was his own voice that had asked that.

In answer, the younger gnome reached forward and snatched the glass from Teldin's hands. 'No, not neogi,' Mig-gins replied after a dozen heartbeats, 'not a deathspider. Wasp. No, three wasps.'

Relief washed over Teldin like a wave. For the first time, he realized that his forearms were knotted from the death grip he had on the gunwale. With a conscious effort, he opened his hands and flexed them to restore the circulation in his fingers.

Once again he looked up into space in the direction that Mig-gins had indicated. He could see the ships-still too distant for him to pick out details, but recognizable as shapes totally different from the neogi spiderships he'd imagined. He sighed and smiled at Horvath.

'Any colors?' Horvath asked.

'None,' Miggins answered, then immediately corrected himself. 'Hoisting a flag now. Black field…' The young gnome's voice took on a harsher edge. '… red device. It's the neogi skull.'

Teldin felt the sudden tension amid the rest of the crew. 'What's happening?' he demanded. 'You said they're not neogi.'

'No, they're not neogi,' Horvath confirmed flatly. 'The neogi skull flag is universal. They're pirates.'

Chapter Two

Teldin stated at the three ships closing rapidly with the dreadnought and spreading out into a line-abreast formation. In the harsh sunlight he could make out their angular, somehow brutal configuration. They seemed so small in contrast to the bulk of the dreadnought.

'Three wasps are serious trouble,' Horvath said as if in answer to Teldin's thoughts. 'They've got the