"That you are bluffing!" Butla's vibrant voice rang out. Gretta's expression mirrored worry as Arta reacted to those deep ringing tones. A sudden light flashed behind the blazing amber eyes, hope flickering where before there had been only insanity.
"Lord Ret, we've captured Arta Fera. Would you take her word? We caught her trying to bomb our headquarters." Sinklar waited, heart hammering. So much to bet on the sanity of a panicked assassin. I must be out of my mind! But who else would Butla Ret listen to?
Ret's voice was curiously subdued. "I would talk to her." Sinklar looked desperately, pleadingly, at the assassin. "Arta? Are you all right?" Butla asked gently.
Sinklar closed his eyes, oddly touched by the compassion and concern in Ret's voice.
Arta looked haunted, focused on some terrible memory. "Butla!" she shrieked in terror. "Don't listen! They want you to surrender! They can't hold against you! They are bluffing. Vile Regan liars!"
Gretta shook her head, a miserable dullness in her posture. No saving them now.
Sinklar spun on his feet, and Arta laughed triumphantly in his face.
"Do not harm her, Regan," Butla's voice came firmly over the comm. "We are coming for you. As long as Arta is treated with respect, we will act within the accords of honor. Harm her, and the streets will run with Regan blood.
That I promise!"
"Wait!" Sinklar cried passionately, arms out as he faced the comm pickup. "At least talk to me! Butla? Butla Ret?" He paced back and forth while desperation pumped adrenaline into his system.
"He cut the connection," Gretta told him.
Arta smiled, eyes still glazed as she nodded, enjoying her victory. She seemed to gloat at Sinklar's misery.
Gretta craned her neck to glare at the woman, expression filled with loathing.
"Enjoy yourself, you ... wretched bitch. You love Butla Ret? I pray I never experience a love like yours. "
"We have no choice," Sinklar muttered in a dispirited tone. "The Targan forces are within the kill zone."
Gretta nodded and turned her attention from Arta's dancing defiance to inputting instructions to the Sections.
"Attention, all personnel!" Sinklar's voice rang out. "Duck and cover!"
"Shiksta?" Gretta's voice came hoarsely. "Detonate the mine. Destroy the Killing Ridge."
" 'Firmative," Shik's voice came back.
Arta turned to look with the rest. She was still smirking at the culpability of the Regans when a gout of brilliant light lanced beyond the outskirts of the city. Before her disbelieving eyes, clots of black rose in the lurid apocalyptic flash. Seconds later the ground shook. Then the shock wave battered the building, bouncing her couch.
"All units," Sinklar ordered, voice hollow, "Keep cover until the fallout has passed. When you read all clear, commence mop-up. Stay away from the hot spots. We'll begin evacuating casualties immediately."
Mouth open, Arta watched the oddly luminous cloud that rose over the plain.
The air carried an odd rumble as the shock wave Dopplered off into the distance.
Her startled gaze went to the stat board to see the lights now gone dead. The realization broke over her in a cold wash.
Sink pinched the bridge of his nose, disgusted with the woman-disgusted with all of it. Shoulders sagging, he walked wearily from the room. He could feel Gretta's worried gaze, feel the horror that had possessed Mhitshul.
Arta Fera screamed then-the sound that of a demented animal in torment.
Sinklar closed his eyes and staggered, overwhelmed by the memory of his mother's pale face mocking him from her casket.
CHAPTER 23
Skyla Lyma reclined in the control chair surrounded by the cockpit instrumentation of her personal yacht. Her inclination was to space full tilt for Targa, but a cooler voice argued for caution. Staffa would arrive on Targa long after she would, and in the meantime she'd have to pass the Regan ships quarantining the rebellious planet. If she tried that, she might fall into Ily's clutches, which in turn would condemn Staffa to capture when he arrived.
I could space straight for Rega and confront Tybalt. Skyla tapped a fingernail against her teeth as she watched the stars beyond the forward port. They seemed to move as a result of her ship's slight spin. How would Tybalt react to news that his lover had alienated the Companions? And what was Ily's game, anyway? Surely she knew that, lover or not, Tybalt would cut her off at the knees for what she'd done to the Lord Commander.
"Damn right, she knows." Skyla studied the wheeling stars thoughtfully. "And she's got an agenda of her own. Damn it, if I could just have had an hour to talk to Staffa." But what would Ily be after?
Skyla smiled to herself as she remembered the look on Staffa's face when she'd stepped around that crate. Closing her eyes, she imagined his strong arms around her. With a desperate longing, she wished she could be in that crate with him instead of Kaylla Dawn.
"But it's better this way," she assured herself. "Two of us in the box would have meant we depended solely on the good will of the Seddi-which would have been suicide, despite Bruen's promises."
And she hadn't planned on being in the box when the Seddi opened it on Targa.
So what are you going to do, Skyla? You've got a Seddi hostage of unknown potential aboard your ship. The Regans are about to go berserk, and Staffa's in a box headed for a world in revolt to talk to people who've spent fortunes trying to assassinate him.
The long-range sensor tripped, bring Skyla upright in her chair. She adjusted the gain, refining the reading. She knew the reaction signature-Regan military, and pulling about forty-five g's from the radiation dispersion. Ily!
Skyla took a fix, then swiveled her receiver for another. Comparing the data, she frowned, then pulled up the navcomm plot. A cold shiver ran down her spine.
"No doubt about it. Ily's headed for Targa." And in that instant, Skyla knew what she was going to do.
Bruen stared at the hewn stone over his head. An eternal weight, it hung-foreboding and gray, cold and without feeling-a symbol of oppression.
Butla Ret, dead? Their forces in total rout? How had Sinklar Fist managed to destroy them so decisively? Face it, old man. You've played the last gamble.
What's left, Bruen?
The feeble light barely penetrated the gloom in the tiny quarters. The rays cast by the small lamp were absorbed by the gray stone, the illumination set low to reduce the strain on Hyde's eyes. The air lay heavy, warm, and damp as if to mirror Magister Hyde's rasping breath.
How much time do I have with my old friend? It should be a time for memories, for reliving the old days, for sharing jokes about victories and past loves.
This is not a time for revelations-or for the death of dreams.
Hyde's sunken face had become a death mask, sallow flesh sagging over the hard bones of his skull. No flicker of change animated Hyde's expression while Bruen related this latest catastrophe-this defeat at Vespa-in half truths. The dying man listened quietly, sighing between gasping fits of coughing.
Sourness lay heavy in Bruen's stomach, a dead thinglike Seddi hopes.
"We should have killed him when he was a baby," Hyde wheezed, hardly able to lift a bird-thin hand from his sleeping pallet. The tubes distorted his voice into something hollow, ghostlike.
They ran from his lungs up through both nostrils and then to a suction pump which slowly filled a canister with the fluids inexorably draining into Hyde's lungs. The machine made an imperceptible whine-a reminder of mortality and the close odor of death that the dark shade breathed upon Magister Hyde's soul.
Just one more small sorrow for all humanity at this last juncture.
Bruen rubbed his belly and scowled at the forbidding stone above. "It was my decision. He was a babe, a tiny defenseless infant at the time. I took one look at his odd eyes and watched him toddle across the room, pudgy hands reaching for this and that, and I spared him. Sent him to Rega to lose himself in the masses, no one the wiser. " He shook his head, "Maudlin of me, don't you think?"
"The quanta, Bruen," Hyde gasped. "An action, any action, changes reality. Who knows what would have been different if we'd simply cut his throat and stuffed him into a disposal chute to bleed."
"At the time, a Sinklar Fist alive had more bargaining power than a dead baby," Bruen reminded himself. "It was insurance to have him-"
"He was a monster! Even then!" Hyde gasped, breaking out in a fit of coughing.
"A monster, Bruen. You knew what he was ... where he came from! His legacy is ... death!"
"Perhaps," Bruen agreed. ','But what a brilliant monster he is, old friend.
And what little part we had in his development. Perhaps if we had kept him, trained him?"
"He is killing us!" Hyde rasped, coughing again, drool slipping from the side of his sagging mouth. killing ... US.
"At ease, old friend." Bruen smiled, bestirring himself to take a rag and damp at his dying friend's mouth. "All is not lost by any means.9'
Hyde swallowed, pale hairless head rocking on the pillow. "No, maybe not," he whispered, barely audibly. "A reality changed, Bruen. Somewhere, a reality we all thought crucial has changed. Awareness?. Did someone become aware whom we have n d? Whose observations have ot perceive .
made a new reality? It wasn't ours, nor the Regans', nor Sassa's. "
"The machine, perhaps? We don't know the power of the Mag Comm. Could it, too, be a reflection of God Mind? An interesting statement about the nature of the observer, eh? If it is the machine, so much is changed." Bruen added, one hand on Hyde's shoulders. "But it seems that everyone who has planned, calculated a probability future, sees those very probabilities lying in ruin. Why? Where is the reality shaping coming from? I cannot convince myself it is the machine.
To observe takes a spark from God."
"Fist!" Hyde gasped. "It is Fist! He has no reality. He just seems to react!
He lives in Now. He forges no future! He is the only one predictable ... and all that is predictable is that he will win-not where he will turn or how he will act!"
Bruen frowned, running a tired hand over his own sweatshiny bald head. "God mocks us. Fist has become the major player in this sad game, and we have insufficient data to make predictions about his behavior." He smiled fleetingly. "Would it not be puzzling and paradoxical to learn that he is better at our philosophy than we are?"
"Wretched," Hyde gasped. "Our forces?"
Bruen lifted a shoulder, pulling his lips into a reassuring smile. "We are reforming." I can't tell him Butla is dead. I can't tell him we are prostrate, defenseless, ruined. Let him die without knowing the worst. For the old days, I owe him that much. What a cruel joke life has played on dear noble Hyde-to crush a dream in these last failing moments. Perhaps Ican.... Yes.
Hyde's faded blue eyes held his for a brief instant before Bruen pulled his gaze away.
Hyde barely whispered, "Your smile is a lie. You never could lie outright-at least, not to me. One of your failings, eh? I always caught you at it. "
"There is no lie," Bruen continued, wanting to break down and cry. "We are hurt, true, but not defeated." Hyde hacked and coughed, eyes closed against the rubbing pain of the tubes in his throat. "Even this close to death, I hear between your words, my friend. Very well, I understand." Translucent eyelids flickered as Hyde asked,
"And the Lord Commander? After so much death and horror and disaster? He is. . . . "
"Coming," Bruen said fervently. "Staffa is coming here to us at last." He hesitated. "Perhaps this time ... well, we will see. I am no longer counting on probability." And you, blessed beloved friend of mine, will not live to see our final victory.
"No ... can't count on probability," Hyde wheezed. "Staffa ... sent to us ... by his Wing Commander? Probability is turned upside down, my friend. The machine ... wrong ......
Bruen's strength crumbled, mind roaming to youngerless painful-times, reliving old arguments--and triumphsseeing the past unfolding. He and Hyde had rebuilt the Seddi, kept the vile machine at bay, countered the growing pains of two selfish empires. They had merely prolonged the respite before this final cataclysm which would sweep pestilence and death before it. The last flickers of light were dimming now. Rega prepared to launch itself on Sassa. The last moments of stillness before the storm were troubled by eddies of the coming sirocco.
"We did well, eh?" Hyde managed, as if sharing his thoughts. "All in all, Bruen, we did the impossible, you and 1. Trained generations of young people, added a little brilliance to an ultimately damned civilization."
"Yes, we did very well," Bruen agreed, voice hollow, remembering Hyde: young, vigorous, black-haired, and athletic. Seeing the young women's gazes following that straight virile figure through the corridors, his blue eyes flashing with spirit, his smile infectious.
"Let me rest now, Bruen," Hyde's voice whispered between wheezing breaths. ". . . Rest ... now."
Bruen patted his shoulder and turned to the door, hip hurting again. Outside, an Initiate perched on a stool, watching a monitor set into the stone of the corridor.
"He's dying," Bruen added listlessly, propping his suddenly unsteady bones against the cold unyielding rock. He closed his eyes, aware of what he must do - Weakness bored upward through his soul, hollowing, emptying.
The Initiate nodded her resignation. "I think he only has a few hours left. We could increase the pumping capacity, but his lungs are already stressed by the suction. A hemorrhage now would...."
"And how are his ... his dreams?"
The young woman pointed to a series of lines on the encephalogram. "Pleasant, Magister."
Bruen worked his tongue over worn teeth. "Then it: would be good now." With faltering resolution, he reached out and moved a switch. He stared at the tiny piece of; metal, numb at what he had done.
"Magister? That switch. . . ."
"Yes," Bruen whispered as he turned his attention to the encephalogram. "That switch controls the pump. See how happy he is, my girl? See how he's dreaming of good things? Pleasant things? Is there a ... better . . . better way . . . to. . . ." The monitor went oddly misty in his vision. A hot throbbing knot grew in his throat.
Bruen hardly felt the woman's warm arm go around him. The words she called into the comm echoed meaninglessly in his head. He cried openly as Initiates and a Master carried him through the winding maze of passages on a stretcher he didn't remember being placed on.
He ignored them for the moment. He might never get another chance to live in his memories with Hyde—never get another chance to see his best friend healthy, smiling, strong, and young. Oh, so wondrously young!
"So I tried my best for him, for my Praetor," Staffa explained. Nothing remained but to talk. The featureless gray walls of the box pressed around them like a prison. Time had slipped sideways in this new reality measured only by sleep, talk, and eternal sameness. Nothing else intruded into their world. No sound, no vibrations. Time had ceased to exist in the eternal gray reality of the packing crate.
Kaylla sat in the corner, propped and supported by wadded insulating wraps.
She stared fixedly at the far corner as Staffa talked.
Staffa hesitated. "After the wreck that killed my parents, I didn't have anyone left. No other family that I know of. The Praetor found me in the wreckage and took me, gave
me a home and food and a reason to be. I lived for that man. He gave me everything."
"And took everything from you, it would seem." Kaylla watched him through hard eyes. "You never tried to find the rest of your family? I mean, people don't just spring from the air. Your parents had parents. There must have been someone . . . somewhere."
"Maybe there was. When I got older, I tried to access the net once. I thought I could find someone. It puzzled me that the data was sealed. The Praetor showed up shortly after that and gave me that sad smile he used to have. I remember, he asked it as a personal favor. 'Please,' he asked me. 'Don't pursue this. It would only hurt you . . . and through you . . . me.' "
Kaylla gave him
a narrow-eyed frown. "And that didn't make you suspicious?"
Staffa leaned back and sighed. "Suspicious? I loved him. I ... I trusted him."
"It sounds like your life as a child was a living hell."
Staffa shrugged and tapped a knuckle against the thick plastic of the box.
"Maybe. The Praetor—and everyone else for that matter—always told me I was something special, always rewarded me when I excelled, led me on, caused me to push myself harder."
"And your parents? Didnt you have some good times with them before the aircar crash?"
"What can I say about them? Both were genetic scientists—quite bright in their fields." A sudden pain came lancing out of his memories. "But now I've watched you talk about your children." He pursed his lips, curious at the longing ache below his heart. "You talk about them with warmth. My . . . mother, well, she ..." He gestured his incomprehension.
"No warmth?" Kaylla probed.
"Her voice never softened. You know, no emotion. She talked to me . . . well, academically. Like I was a student. Always, I was challenged. Did I know thus and such? Could I solve this problem?"
Staffa took a deep breath and closed his eyes as he struggled to remember. "I recall one occasion. We had gone to a party. At least that's what Father told me it was. I was very excited about the whole thing. Lots to eat and drink.
Games they wanted me to play. Machines to outsmart and puzzles to solve. There were lots of people—maybe even the Praetor. I was. . . . Damn! It was so long ago!" He shook his head. "The memories keep fading."
"Think, Staffa, you were there; make it come out," she prodded, voice earnest with interest.
"People," he repeated, willing himself to see it all again, to remember the giant adult forms who bent to study him. ". . . And they all talked about me.
Yes, that's right. And I answered questions. All kinds of questions."
"Any other children there?"
Staffa frowned as he thought. "I don't think. . . . No, no other children.
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