by Wil McCarthy
In less time than it takes to blink, Viktor was thrown against the wall, right beside the open-mouthed Sasha Topuri still standing before the membrane-door. Viktor's feet did not touch the floor.
For a moment, his shock was total. Reality could change on you swiftly and totally, yes, and you had to be ready for it, but things had simply happened too quickly for him to assimilate. He looked down the length of the Olympian's arm, at an upturned face with copper eyes and green hair and an expression he felt sure he had never seen before. The first clear thought he managed to think was that this was going to hurt, that a wave of incredible pain would slam across him in an instant or two, but there was no pain, and there was still no pain, and he began to wonder if maybe he'd been thrown back hard enough to kill him. Was this what death felt like, just a jerk of surprise and the wall suddenly hard against your back?
But then, finally, the pain did come, and it wasn't so bad after all. And though he was held up off the floor by a firm hand on his throat, the gravity here was not so strong, and the grip not so crushing; when he finally gasped in a breath of surprise, it was not difficult to do, nor particularly agonizing.
“That is my Queen,” the Olympian said with slow intensity. “I am her Drone. You are a stranger here, and have no privilege to speak with such familiarity.”
One word? Hi? That one word was worth this show of force? The really crushing pain had still not come, and Viktor recognized that it would not come at all if he behaved correctly, that the attack had been much more a warning than anything else. But a warning against what? It didn't seem to make sense.
“I am very, very sorry,” he gurgled with great conviction. “Please tell me how I should behave.”
The copper eyes bored into him. “With abject surrender,” the Olympian said.
“Done!”
The great hand opened, and Viktor slid down the wall in a trail of nervous sweat until his sandaled feet touched the floor. Then his knees buckled, and he slid still further. He wound up crumpled in a heap, with no immediate desire to rise.
Beside him, Sasha also crumpled. Fainting? Jelly-kneed with fear? Or perhaps just following along because it seemed like a good idea. But Malyene Andreivne stood her ground, and Viktor watched the Olympian turn to face her.
“Your drone has yielded before strength. You are indefensible,” it said.
Malyene's face was tight with controlled, calculated anger. “Is this how you greet strangers? Like the damned-to-Hell Waisters do it, I suppose.”
The Olympian drew a breath, drew back an arm, as if he might lecture Malyene and strike her a backhanded blow at the same time, but the Queen's voice—trilling, fluting, rasping like a musical instrument being sawed in two—froze him in place.
“You, woman,” the Queen said in Standard. “You will face me.”
Slowly, contemptuously, Malyene complied. I've got your code, her face declared. I know you, and I know your kind, and if you think I'm impressed, think again.
“Your strength engenders admiration,” the Queen stated flatly. “I have no wish to crush it for principle's sake. But neither should you, for principle's sake, move to antagonize those who have rescued your life. I trust my reasoning is followed.”
Malyene said nothing. Good for you, Viktor thought, shaking, sweating, peering at the two through the pillar-like legs of the Olympian, the Drone, who had so easily felled him. Play your own game, not theirs.
“It is necessary that we end this confrontation,” the Queen went on, now beginning to sound impatient. “I require at least a token of capitulation.”
“That's unfortunate,” Malyene said dryly, “because you also require my help. Information, yes? The Fall of Sirius, for me only hours past? You may have the one, or the other, but understand: I will not give you both.”
The Queen lifted ponderously from her couch, monstrous in her bulk and suddenly quivering with rage. She advanced slowly, loose skin bobbing with every step like fluid-filled sacs of rubber. Malyene moved not a muscle in reply.
“Will you force me to destroy you, so that these others will submit?” the Queen rumbled, looming over the much smaller woman. Her copper eyes flared wide. “There must be a capitulation. There must.”
Malyene chuckled softly. “If there must be a capitulation, your majesty, then perhaps you should be the one to deliver it. I guarantee I have seen things these others have not. Perhaps I hold the information you seek? I and no one else?
“I require that my children be revived. There are several others in cryostasis as well, injured people and probably sick ones, and I require that they be revived and healed and permitted to join us before this place is abandoned. I further require that you answer my questions, until I am satisfied you've explained our situation to the best of your ability. These are the conditions, your majesty, under which we will assist you.”
The Queen's bulk shuddered, rippled. Strange noises sang from her throat. It looked for a moment as if she might shake herself to pieces, but then, suddenly, she took a final step forward and grabbed Malye about the waist with her fat, flabby hands. She lifted, twisted, until she was holding Malye up horizontally, straight over her head. Quick, too quick for Malye to react. The Queen screamed then, a deep, booming, unfeminine and in fact decidedly inhuman sound, and dashed the smaller woman hard against the floor.
And stared down at her with wide, copper eyes.
Malyene groaned. She looked dazed, not attempting to rise.
Everything stopped; nobody moved.
Again, it was the Queen who broke the moment, this time by speaking. “I surrender,” she said, in a high and soft and decidedly human voice.
CHAPTER SIX
213::16
PINEGA, GATE SYSTEM:
CONTINUITY 5218, YEAR OF THE DRAGON
“Are you all right?” the repairman asked anxiously, leaning over Malye, offering her a hand up.
Was she all right? Shaken, certainly, though she knew well enough how to hide such feelings. And hurt, her left knee definitely bruised.
“I am not seriously injured,” she speculated, and accepted the hand. Viktor hauled her up gently to her feet. She tested her weight against the knee, but pain lanced up along her leg, and she could not quite suppress a grimace.
Chin down, Viktor cast an ugly, furtive look in the Queen's direction, his face hidden from her by a shoulder. “That bitch,” he whispered softly, almost directly into Malye's ear. “She's hurt you, hasn't she?”
His kindness was touching. In a way, it reminded her of how Grigory used to be, so eager to brighten her world, to share his own. Viktor looked nothing like Grigory, but sizing him up now, she thought probably the two of them would have gotten along.
“I'll be all right,” she said quietly. “Do not antagonize her. Although I thank you, Viktor Slavanovot, for your concern.”
“Such formality?” he whispered. “We seem to be the last two people in all the worlds, you and I, or two of the few at any rate. You must call me Viktor, I insist. Or Vityo, even, though it's mostly my lovers who call me that.”
“I am a married woman,” she replied coolly, closing off that line of speculation for him. And then it occurred to her once again that she was in fact not a married woman, but a widow. Two thousand years a widow, and no doubts about it; she had seen Grig die with her own two eyes. The thought and the memory shook her, shook what little of her had not yet been shaken, leaving her loose and powdery as fine-ground salt within her hard exterior shell. She took care to betray nothing of this. Here and now, she would not weep.
Viktor looked a little irked, though whether at the content of her remark or the delivery or the deliverer herself she could not be sure. There were no colors to listen to just now, no overt cues as to his thoughts. But to his credit, Viktor did not sink so low as to correct her. Instead, he bowed slightly, smiled slightly, took half a step backward to make clear his lack of encroachment upon her.
“We have lost so much,” she said to him. Meaning what? Th
e comment sounded inscrutable, even to her. Grief and stress and anger could make such a jumble of everything!
Suddenly, the Queen's voice, Wende's voice, cut between them like a blade: “What you ask, woman, is difficult.”
Malye and Viktor looked up, and poor Sasha as well. Wende had returned to her couch and her regal posture upon it, returned to her little fog bank, to her look of scrutiny. She did seem less angry, though, and that was good—explosive people were hard enough to deal with even in their good moods, even when they were not giants pretending to alien sensibilities. At first glance Wende seemed laughably easy to read, her ego writ large across her flabby face, and yet the specific words and phrases and actions she chose from moment to moment seemed never to be quite what Malye expected.
Dangerous. Best to keep her at a distance, yet without showing fear...
“My name is Malyene Andreivne Kurosov'e,” she instructed. “Malyene will do.”
“What you ask, Malyene, is difficult,” the Queen said, in the same tone as before. “In the past fifty months, Finders ring has endured considerable inconvenience to reach this place, to interface your equipment with our power distribution systems, to revive you, to keep the other rings appraised. Medical apparatus sufficient to help the sick and injured would represent an additional and considerable strain on our resources.”
“I understand,” Malye said.
Wende glared at her again for a few moments, and then sighed and shrugged elaborately. “I grasp your point, Malyene. This circumstance lacks convenience.”
“The Waisters are returning,” Malye said, now letting a share of her inward exhaustion show through, letting her voice move a step closer to the shrill tones toward which they seemed pulled. Which was a relief, really, because even a monster had limits. Even a monster could face only so much before screeching and folding up and refusing to face any more. “And we all know what bastards they are. Time is short, and you're hoping that we can give you crucial information of some sort, I don't know what. But think, Wende: we are only just awakened from the destruction of our homes. We need rest, privacy, information to help us feel a little more grounded here. And we need each other, we need to huddle together like frightened children, because really that's all we are. An hour or two, that's all I ask. That and the revival of my children.
“All these threats, all this violence, it's crap and you know it. It's not going to work.” She drew a breath, glared hard at the Queen, and spoke pointedly: “You have got to treat us, your majesty, like human beings.”
The Drones on either side of the chamber stirred, looking unsure of themselves, looking angry, looking... what? Malyene couldn't place it.
“What you ask is difficult,” the Queen replied once again, her expression flat and strange. “I am here, at the nexus and interface of these events, the fate of both ring and the colony placed solidly in my hands, but understand, these decisions are not particularly my own to make. Not particularly. I am the sum of all interests through which I am constrained to operate.”
Malye sniffed. “I lack the context to make sense of that remark. Is there something clear and specific you'd like to tell me?”
“No,” Wende said. “Not at this time. You shall have the privacy you seek, and access to the Congress of Advisors. They can deal with you, perhaps, more gently than I.”
She turned to Crow standing tall and straight beside her couch, and made noises at him, noises that were not quite musical, not quite mechanical. Fluting, rasping noises that did not quite sound like speech.
In reply, Crow ducked his head, raised his arms in a fluid gesture, and wiggled his fingers like so many loose, flexible wires.
~~~
They were brought to another chamber, empty but otherwise identical to the first.
“Is this adequate?” Crow asked indifferently.
“It will do,” Malye conceded. “What is this?”
He was handing her an object, small and black and shiny, contoured like the handgrip of a pistol or a joystick. It had a stud on the top of it, something clearly intended to be pressed with the thumb.
“The Congress of Advisors,” Crow said. “Be careful with it; it's very old. A relic of vanished times, like you.” Then he stepped through the white membrane and was gone.
At least they did not appear to be locked in here. Perhaps they really weren't prisoners after all, but could come and go through this new Pinega as they pleased. But no, Malye's desire to explore was nil, and her desire to curl up into a ball and do nothing was very great indeed. Sasha, she saw, had done exactly that: he'd sat down by the door and hugged his knees and begun to cry once again, staring out at nothing.
Viktor threw himself down on one of the Drones' couches with an easy leap, and eyed Malye with interest. “You were magnificent,” he said mildly. “You were born to give that bitch a hard time. I say that, you understand, as one who groveled at the feet of her servants.”
“You seem awfully cavalier,” Malye observed.
“Yes, don't I? I think it must be the shock. How is your knee, by the way? I noticed you limping.”
“It will heal. Or they will fix me, I suppose.”
Viktor grinned. “If they had their way, they'd probably just ask a few questions and throw us back in the freezer. Instead, they have you to deal with. Giving them orders! You really were magnificent.”
Malye was silent, unsure how to respond to that. She simply refused to be outmonstered; it wasn't a noble thing. “I'm very tired,” she said finally, and moved to the other Drone's couch. Feeling lonely, counting off the dead in her mind.
Grigory's name was, of course, at the very top of her list. He would never hold her again, never whisper soft words to her in the darkness. Ialah, she should have been nicer to him, that her memories might not be so ashen, so damning. The love of a patient man, spurned at almost every step, put off for some indefinite future when she would have the leisure to deal with it.
Well, that future was here.
The thought fogged her eyes over with tears. Not for her own suffering, Ialah knew, nor for the Thousand Worlds all gone to slag, but for poor Grigory himself, who had had the misfortune to fall in love with Andrei Brakanov's little girl.
She remembered him in the observatory on the night of their engagement. Fussing with the telescope screens, muttering to himself... He wanted to give her the universe, to share its vastness with her, but she'd settled for his smile and his ring. Those, at least, she was large enough to contain.
“You know,” Viktor said to her back, “after all that fuss, Queen Wende will be pretty upset with the depth of my ignorance. I was right here the whole time, cooped up in the bowels of Pinega. Sasha, too, I believe. We never saw a thing. Did you?”
Malye shuddered, her eyes on the blank white wall beside her. “Not... not enough to know what was going on, but yes, I was outside for part of it. I saw... more than you, I expect.”
“Really? Do tell.”
“Names of Ialah, man, will you leave me alone?” She did not want to talk right now, did not even want to think. The events were so clear in her mind, so brilliantly, unshakably clear. And damning.
She heard Victor rustling, rolling over on his couch. Saying nothing, making no further noise, making no effort, suddenly, to hold back the awful silence. Leaving Malye alone with her memories.
CHAPTER SEVEN
TYUMEN, SIRIUS SYSTEM:
11 FEBURY, YEAR OF OUR LORD 3125
“Destination?” she shouted hurriedly at the ferry pilot as she crowded into the bridge, waving a pair of frightened flight attendants out of her way.
“Batamay,” the pilot replied crisply, then turned, saw her uniform. He did not appear alarmed.
“Changed,” she said to him. “Official business. Your new destination is Pinega, flight time not to exceed ten hours.”
“Authorization?” he asked calmly, rummaging for a flatscreen and then holding it out to her as if this sort of thing happened to him every day.
<
br /> Malye took the screen from him, traced for an ID check, thumbed the appropriate square when it appeared, and handed the screen back again. This is it, she thought, this is the end of my career. Commandeering a ferry full of passengers for her own personal business... But Grigory was right; she must return home. Her father's distant laughter was like thick, soft folds of velvet against her brain.
More then just her career was ending this day.
“Okay,” the pilot said. His calm sang through the tiny bridge in a high, clear note. “You'll have to sit in back with the other passengers, at least during boost. Ignition in two hundred fourteen seconds.”
“Understood.”
She crowded back through the narrow hatchway again, turned to look down the aisle. Not surprisingly, the “Full to Capacity” lights of every cabin were lit. Everyone wanted to get away from Tyumen before the Waisters arrived to destroy it—she checked her palm chronometer—about forty minutes from now. The first door she came to folded aside at her touch. Three men and a woman, strapped into their acceleration cribs, talking nervously among themselves. They looked up at her intrusion.
“One of you will have to leave,” she said without preamble. This idea didn't seem to click with any of them right away, so she simply picked out one of the men and moved to help him undo his straps.
“What...” he protested.
“I'm afraid this flight is full,” she said to him. “You'll have to take the next.”
“But I'm going to Batamay,” the man said.
“Then you're on the wrong flight. This one has been rerouted to Pinega.”
Of the four, he was the only one who appeared upset by this. Most of the people aboard, she suspected, didn't care where they were headed, so long as it was not toward the approaching armada. Pinega would do just as well as any other place. And for those others who did care...
