“You got it. That’s what we’ll do.” Mortas didn’t know how to ask the next question. “How are you?”
“On my way out, El-tee.” Coughing, then a loud hawking and spitting sound. “Hey, Lieutenant?”
“Yeah.”
“You get out of here, how about doing me a favor? Get what’s left of the platoon a nice job guarding your dad.”
“Only if you come with us.”
“Now that ain’t fair. Fuckin’ officers, always asking the impossible.”
Mortas reached the spot where he’d left Daederus, but didn’t see him. He dropped to a knee and peered around the biggest rock available, not believing his eyes.
The rocket fire had blown the cloud back thousands of yards. What had been an open expanse of flat ground right next to the sinkhole was now a junkyard. Tanks and personnel carriers covered the narrow lane between the high ground and the mud field, in every variation of destruction. Turrets thrown to the side, long guns twisted backward, some hulls looking crushed straight into the ground. Smoke billowing, fire licking, more crumpled bodies.
Far in the distance he saw a mob of men walking, disorganized, reeling away from the carnage as if drunk. He stood to get a better look, exposing himself and not caring, and that was when he saw Daederus. Seated with his back against the stone, lifeless eyes on the masterpiece of malice he’d constructed, blood covering his trousers, empty dragonfly tubes all around him, and his stilled lips twisted in a smile of pure enjoyment.
An engine revved not far away, and Mortas looked around in confusion. One of the tanks, its treads damaged on one side, turning slowly in place as if nailed to the spot. Whoever was trying to drive it away finally gave up when the straining engine reached a heated pitch, but then the turret began to revolve in his direction. Mortas shook his head weakly, remembering a different tank on a different planet, his own hands directing the main gun so that it could fire one round. He lowered himself to the dirt, sitting next to Daederus, imagining a lone figure inside the armored mastodon loading the gun.
A sharp blast barked from his left, out on the flat, and the tank burst into flame. A human machine gun began rattling, and was then joined by a couple of Scorpions. Filthy figures surged around the tank, using the other wrecks for cover, then they were coming his way, falling back in twos.
Mortas stood with effort because it seemed to be the right thing to do. The figures hustled past him, hands grabbing his armor and pulling him back under cover. Dak’s voice on the radio.
“Hey, we got the lieutenant. Looks like everybody else here is gone. We’re headed to the supply line.”
“Ayliss, can I have a word?”
She looked up from the latest data display on the latest screen, grateful for Python’s interruption. It was afternoon of the second day on Echo, and Ayliss wasn’t sure she was going to be able to feign interest much longer. She promised the researcher she’d be right back, and followed the large man through the buzz of activity on the site’s main floor.
They went up the stairs and emerged on the launch platform, where the sun was shining and the birds were singing in the nearby trees.
“Python, is there any chance we could just get out of here now? I’m sure you and your girlfriends are enjoying the visit, but I’m not sure how much longer I can keep this up.”
“Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk about.” He took her elbow and steered her off to the side, close to the railing where the blast doors would keep them from view. In the sunlight she noticed that he’d cut his beard close and that his hair was freshly washed.
“Cleaned up for the trip home?”
“In a way.” A smile crept onto his lips, and she found it unsettling. Python reached behind him, under his untucked work shirt. His hand came back into view holding a small black box that she recognized as an emergency transmitter. A chill passed through her.
“You had that the whole time.”
“Of course. I needed to be able to send progress reports. And things are progressing so nicely.”
Ayliss became aware that her heartbeat had quickened and that her muscles were tensing. Suddenly she felt quite exposed, standing out there on the platform. Being at the site at all.
“I can’t say I’m much for riddles.”
“Neither am I. Or, really, I didn’t used to be. Not when they drafted me and made me a lieutenant, but after the experience on that island with the Sims, I learned fast.”
“You never said you were an officer.”
“Oh, I still am. Captain Python, at your service.”
“What kind of game are you playing?”
“The same one you’re playing, only I’m much better at it. I told you the truth about that island, about how we got stuck there with the Sims and ended up with our own little truce. Command sure didn’t like that when they found us, so they killed the Sims and locked us up. You can imagine what they wanted to do to me, having been the lone officer there.”
“You rat-fuck bastard.”
“That’s accurate. I was headed for the chopping block, so I just told the bosses that I tried my best to keep the war going, and the troops disobeyed me. So they went to the block, and I stayed in jail.
“You see, they would have killed me too—Command is like that—but I had this one story that the interrogators liked a lot. Every morning when we were done using the island’s water source, I hung back and watched the Sims coming up. I was far enough away that they weren’t terribly worried about catching whatever we humans carry that kills them, and one of them decided to try and communicate with me. Hell, there wasn’t anything else to do on that lousy little patch of sand.
“He’d stick around after they were done, and try to talk to me from a distance. He’d bring something we both recognized, like a rock or a stick, and he’d hold it up and tell me its name in bird-speak. Cawing and trilling away, smiling the whole time, looked like an escapee from a lunatic asylum.
“But I did it right back, mostly because I was bored, and started telling him our names for the same items. He couldn’t make any of the sounds I made, but after a while he could alter the chirping enough that you could understand the word he was trying to say. I never got very far with the bird talk, but it did hurt just a little when Command came in and killed that guy along with his buddies.”
“Where are you going with this?”
“Oh, I’m getting to the point. You see, one of the interrogators was part of this informal group inside the Force. A bunch of guys and gals who didn’t particularly enjoy the Purge. People with long memories, dead relatives, and a taste for revenge. They saw something in me, the way I saved my skin, and so they took me out of that lockup and said they wanted to set up a covert site—this site—and bring some captured Sims there. Much too close to the settled worlds, staffed by people who were convinced they were there at the request of your father.”
He stopped, the smile broadening as the truth sunk in. Olech wasn’t behind this installation at all. In fact, he didn’t know anything about it. Renegades within the Force had set it up, and they’d needed some way to connect it to the Chairman of the Emergency Senate.
His daughter.
“That’s right. I brought you here because we needed somebody better than the Doc to prove this was all your daddy’s idea. And you were so hot to ruin him that you never considered this might be a trap. Not that hard a trap to construct, either, in an outfit like the Force. They kill people for stepping out of line, and they ship anyone who asks too many questions straight to the war zone. You’d be surprised how many different patrol routes go right by this place, how many planetary supervisors know something’s up, but not one of them ever asked what was going on here.
“Which makes the next step really easy. Right now there’s a Force raid party headed here, mostly made up of people sympathetic to our little project, but
just enough of them completely in the dark. They’re going to hit this place and arrest everyone here. And then Doc and the others are going to start yapping about how they were doing this for your dad. Of course, no one’s going to waste any time talking to him or any of the others, if you’re still here.”
The adrenaline was coursing straight through Ayliss, her entire body seeming to throb with it. Mouth dry, feet cold, her mind racing to find the way out. Knowing that Lee was out there somewhere, looking for her, but how far away? Python’s last words finally made it through the tangle of thought.
“If I’m still here?”
“That’s right. You don’t actually have to be captured. We’ve got an entire station’s worth of people who will swear you were here, and lots of tape from the last two days of you getting briefed on how things are going. You really are a great actress, by the way. That tape is going to prove you were very interested in what was happening here and that you were going to take it all back to Daddy.”
“So why wouldn’t I be captured too?”
“Because your new best friend Python has this radio. I can call the orb down here, and you and I can head up to my ship. I’m going to be leaving anyway; my work’s done, and nobody wants me in front of a microphone. You know, it’s going to be so funny, hearing the testimony from Doc and the girls and the rest, swearing there was this mysterious guy who they only knew as Python. Anyway, I’ll run you back to Broda. You’re going to need some friends once your father and his entire apparatus are in jail, and they’ll give you asylum if I ask them. You see, I’m about to take a big step up in the universe. They’re going to start by making me a major, and after that it’s the fast track for old Python.”
“I assume there’s a price.”
“Spoken like poor doomed Olech himself. Yes, there is. First, you agree to confess. It’s a lot smoother that way, and you’ll still get what you were after. Spoiled little bitch, never missed a meal, never wanted for a damned thing, and yet your whole life was one long temper tantrum because Daddy didn’t pay attention to you.”
“The confession is only the first thing?”
“Oh, you’re going to earn your ticket out of here. Many times over.” The radio disappeared behind him, and the smile widened even more. Large hands reached down and lifted the shirt, slowly unfastening the belt buckle. The fatigue pants dropped to the deck, showing him rigid and ready. “Now you know why they call me the Python.”
She’d never felt so rooted to a spot in her life. The cold concrete reality of the deck beneath her feet, the looming structure behind her, the woods and the water and the island loaded with Sims. She could practically feel the approach of the faux raid force, sent by the losers in the Purge, and yet her racing mind couldn’t find a solution. Not a good one, anyway.
Courses of action swirled through her brain, evaluated and then discarded until only two were left. Neither of them desirable, but the plain fact was she’d been outsmarted. She’d forgotten that there were many people who hated her father as much as she did. She could see the report on the Bounce, the footage of Olech Mortas’s daughter being dragged out of the building in handcuffs, then paraded before the reporters and her face flashed all over the galaxy.
Presented with two bad options, she automatically knew what to do. Pick the least objectionable, even if it was an act pressed on her right there on the platform. Try to salvage something, make the best of a bad situation. Ayliss forced a smile onto her lips.
“Why didn’t you let me in on this sooner?” She walked toward him slowly, appraising eyes on his midsection. “I don’t care who gets him, as long as I have a part in it.”
“This is your part.” The voice hard, dominant, cruel. The real Python at last. “Now get over here.”
Ayliss stopped, still smiling. She squatted where she was, two yards away. Telling herself it would be all right, that it wasn’t her fault this was happening. “No. You come over here.”
“It doesn’t work that way, bitch. I own you. You’re going to do everything I say, for a very long—”
Ayliss leaned forward, just a bit, feeling her weight shifting toward the big man, the tall man with his back to the short railing. Just as her balance passed the tipping point she pushed off with every muscle in her legs, the fibers singing with frenzied energy, terrified he’d get hold of her hair as she lunged, arms out in front, and her hands were against his shirt and her legs were driving and his eyes were enormous and then his feet, tangled in his trousers, kicked her in the chin as he went over backward.
She still came on, fingers scrabbling for the tube of the railing, moving so fast and so hard that her momentum almost carried her over. Her torso hanging out in the absolute nothingness, her feet leaving the deck for a gut-clenching second, then she was suspended, looking down, seeing the flailing arms and the ridiculous shackles, then Python slammed into the grass below so hard that he didn’t even bounce.
She stared down at him, vibrating with rage, unable to stop looking and not knowing why. Urgent commands bounced through her consciousness, but she kept staring until the true sensation revealed itself. A cold, competent joy radiated through her, and Ayliss Mortas smiled at the crushed body below. Her enemy. Her conquest. Her kill.
An escape ladder ran the length of the building, not far from where Python lay, and finally one of the orders screaming in her brain got her attention. The radio. She took the few steps necessary, looking all around to make sure the event had gone unnoticed, then she was over the railing, feeling the deadly pull of gravity, rushing down the rungs to the grass. The populated floors of the station were far overhead, and there were no windows anywhere nearby.
Walking slowly then, thrilled beyond belief, then becoming ecstatic when she saw Python twitch. Standing over him, taking in the blood that ran from both nostrils and his mouth, not sure but imagining his head was swelling, finally sure he was conscious and aware of her presence. Kneeling now, reaching under him, yanking the small radio off his belt.
“Lucky for me these things are designed to survive all sorts of accidents.” She turned it on, then switched it to an emergency frequency taught to her as a child. Her mind was performing perfectly now, and so she didn’t risk having her voice caught on tape somewhere. Standing over the dying Python, Ayliss Mortas began whistling into the radio, a love song popular just a few years earlier. She stopped after the first stanza.
“Oh, but I’m being rude. This is our song, Lee’s and mine. No matter where he is, he’ll have some kind of device listening for it on this frequency.”
The radio began whistling back, the next stanza of the same song, and she smiled. “See? He’s close.”
The radio’s thin screen blinked, and a message appeared saying Selkirk would be there in minutes.
“I’m sorry, but I have to go now. Apparently Lee’s very close.” She glanced around, found what she sought, and walked over to get it. When she returned, Ayliss was holding a skull-sized rock. She raised it, testing the weight, seeing the fear in the dying eyes.
“I want to thank you for this experience, Python. It really is quite exciting, isn’t it?”
Later, standing on the bridge of the Force cruiser responsible for patrolling that sector, Ayliss watched the erasure of the thing to which she was undoubtedly connected by surveillance footage and audiotape. None of that would be of any value at all, if the site itself was gone and the island’s unusual tenants were eliminated. The calculation was exact, cold, and logical.
Selkirk had been in touch with Hugh Leeger since hearing of the plot from Harlec, and so every clearance necessary had been put in his hands long before he’d brought Ayliss up from the planet. The cruiser’s commander was a living, breathing example of the Force officers Python had mentioned, the ones who knew that asking questions got people sent to the war zone. He couldn’t have been more complimentary, already accepting the story that Chairman M
ortas’s daughter had uncovered a nest of unspecified treason that had to be eradicated posthaste.
A single rocket was sufficient for the station, where she’d last seen Kletterman running across the launch platform, waving frantically as she and Selkirk had ridden the transit sphere back up to the station. Perhaps they’d been baffled by her sudden departure and thought Python was with her, or maybe they’d found his body and had been pondering what it meant, but the ship’s sensors said no one had left the station. The tall building disappeared in a circle of light on the cruiser’s main viewing screen, the shock waves flattening many of the trees when they rebounded off the hill.
And then the gunships had gone in, providing much closer footage, the bizarre traitors on the island appearing to welcome them at first. Running from their huts, arms waving, jumping up and down, some embracing, all of them looking so human that no one ever thought for a moment that they were anything else.
The miniguns tore them to pieces, even the ones who tried to swim away, and when the sensors finally indicated nothing was left alive, a thermal bomb flew in and made sure.
Standing next to Ayliss, stone-faced because of the proximity of the ship’s bridge crew and its commander, Lee Selkirk couldn’t ask the question that he later decided to simply forget. Watching out of the corner of his eye, sure in the knowledge that Ayliss had never witnessed real violence, he couldn’t help but wonder just why the carnage seemed to have no effect on his paramour at all.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“They gave him a sedative, so he’ll be asleep for hours.” Reena stood outside the door to the suite she shared with Olech. Leeger stood before her, pain and remorse evident on his face.
“I shouldn’t have let him go off alone like that, not with Jan’s unit in that kind of a spot. He’s had the same reaction so many times in other battles that I honestly thought he was just going back to work.”
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