There were many volunteers snapping crisp, eager salutes to their Emperor. This ship, Krinata belatedly realized, was manned by the Emperor’s own, hand-picked, elite personal guard. They were accustomed to this very private game of his. While the Emperor selected his volunteer, Krinata tried to offer the woman some advice.
The Dushau looked at her as if she were half a worm found in a fruit. There was a wild look to her eyes, and a peculiar purple paleness to her teeth. There was nothing left of the poised Oliat officer they’d rescued from the exploded ship. This was a broken personality, and though it was a desperate tragedy, Krinata’s only thought was not ever to have to see that look in Jindigar’s eyes.
As an athletic-looking Holot separated from the guards and stalked toward Desdinda, the Dushau scrambled to her feet and whirled to face Zinzik. Krinata saw Prey lunge forward as if to forestall Desdinda’s move, but Jindigar caught his arm and held him squirming. She was sure that Jindigar intended to take that lunge in Prey’s place, but just then Desdinda called out, “Stop! / will provide your confession. I, too, have been Oliat.”
Jindigar froze. Zinzik stood, raising his hand to stop the approaching Holot, triumph lighting his eyes. She was sure Jindigar had stopped breathing, but then she heard his inarticulate cry of anguish, frustration and defeat.
At a snap of Zinzik’s wrist, six guards closed in around Desdinda. She was snatched off the floor and pushed along to a chorus of lewd remarks. Their guards gathered them into marching order, Krinata and Jindigar bringing up the rear this time. As they were about to pass out of the audience chamber, Krinata glanced back and saw Zinzik take a beamer from one of his guards. She snatched at Jindigar’s sleeve, making him turn so as not to be shot in the back.
But the Emperor aimed the weapon nonchalantly at the Rashion who’d failed to spot Jindigar’s favored friend and drilled him neatly through the lower abdomen.
The creature screamed and fell writhing. The trainer clenched his fists, but remained unmoving. One of the other guards asked, “Excellency, shall I finish it off for you?”
“I didn’t miss my shot!” replied Zinzik, offended. “Let it die, serving as a lesson.”
“Yes, Excellency.”
Krinata noted the man didn’t ask at whom the lesson was aimed. She, too, was afraid she knew. Hate is unbecoming in a Zavaronne. Her mother had always told her that with pride. This was the first time in her life she wanted devoutly to disobey her mother, and she wasn’t sure she could refrain from it much longer.
That’s not an Emperor. That’s a lowlife!
As they were being herded back to their cells, Krinata and Bell forced to walk naked, clutching their clothes, ogled by every passing male, the Dushau attempted to reorganize so they would be grouped together instead of scattered one to a cell. But as they entered the brig corridor, the guards insisted they regroup with the same cellmates as before.
In the confusion, Krinata saw Rita slinking along the bulkhead and back into their cell. A scurry was just emerging. The scurry put out an ocular to inspect the creature, then rolled around it and went on its way. Oh, if they take her away from Jindigar…
When the guards were satisfied, they were herded into their cells. Krinata suffered a pinch on the rear from a human male who leered when she jumped and squealed. But then the bars closed between them.
As the guards withdrew, Krinata stood holding her breath, waiting for her heart to calm down. But her native armor crumbled, strained beyond tolerance, and she flung herself onto her cot, curled up in a ball and gave in to gut wrenching sobs.
She wanted to become wholly mindless, obliterating all the reality about her, but she was aware of Frey watching in helpless dismay, Storm comforting Bell. Jindigar asked something, and Bell replied that she didn’t know how to help. Krinata was human, and an aristocrat.
Jindigar said, “Some things are universal.”
His whole life has been compromised, and he wants to help me?
The beds, jammed against one another, jiggled as they settled themselves. Krinata didn’t even have the strength to fling a cover over her bare back. She buried her streaming nose and eyes in a bunch of sheet and took an orgasmic satisfaction in uncontrolled weeping, wallowing in the shame of such weakness. There was no point in being strong. All was lost anyway.
Jindigar moved onto the cot behind her and began to knead her back. Tentatively at first, and then with more assurance as she didn’t shove him away, he went after the knotted tension with a medic’s precision. The soft, napped skin of his hands felt warm, not pasty soft like the Emperor’s nor caloused like the soldier’s. The hard fingertips, lacking nails, were perfect. There was no trace of human masculinity about him.
Gradually, she felt the eruption had spent itself, and she knew she couldn’t impose her hysteria on everyone else like this. She held her breath against the hiccups and at last could say, “Thank you. I’m sorry.”
“For what?” asked Jindigar in a whisper.
She turned and saw Bell asleep across Storm’s lap, Storm sitting with his head propped against the wall, eyes closed.
“Bell’s so much more… that was just ridiculous of me.”
“Are you embarrassed?”
“Yes. And it’s all for nothing.”
“I don’t understand. You did the only thing—” He stopped, his eyes going to the ceiling, and he put a finger over her lips. She figured the spy eyes were working, though she could detect no sign of them.
A few seconds later, the eye went off and Jindigar said, “I’m sorry they caught us like this. Krinata, would it help you to know that in another moment, I’d have broken?”
Suddenly, she really was embarrassed. She’d never felt so with him. “I would have, too. Besides, what good did it do? Now Zinzik has his volunteer!” The bitterness choked her. “Damn that woman!”
Again he put a finger over her lips. “No. Poor Desdinda. She suffered so from the destruction of her Oliat. It was her first Oliat, and only her second office. And then, in the midst of that nightmare of loss, she fell into the clutches of the most perverted fiend in her private mythology, an Invert. She couldn’t accept help from me, and there was no one else, so she gradually lost touch with reality. Then she had to watch her pet fiend perform the ultimate perversion: sullying the sacred Archive. From her point of view, everything Dushauni has been wholly soiled and her confession is to a much lesser crime.
That I was opposed to giving Zinzik what he wanted makes it logically obvious that it’s the right thing to do.
“We can’t blame her, Krinata. Desdinda perished the day her Oliat died, because she’d been installed in an office far, far beyond her meager talent. It’s not her fault.”
In that weird state beyond hysteria, Krinata’s mind replayed the fragment of overheard conversation with Frey. Now, the young Dushau was in an upper bunk, curled up facing the wall, trying to ignore his awareness of Jindigar. She didn’t know how she knew, she just knew. “Jindigar,” she asked very softly, “who did you mean to insult that time you told Frey that I had as much talent as Desdinda?”
Puzzled, he asked, “You heard that, too? I’m sorry.” He gazed at his hands, awkward and embarrassed. And then a peculiar look suffused his face, and he glanced over his shoulder at Frey. Frey shuddered and drew in on himself. “No. No, it would never work.” Another Shockwave passed over him, and the look of wild surmise swept back to Krinata. “How did you know cooperating would make Zinzik stop it?”
“It was the most peculiar thing, but then I have this wild imagination. I suppose years of imagining such things coupled with the strain must have—”
“What things?”
Now it was her turn to be embarrassed. She tried to evade, but he pursued until she explained how she often imagined she was an Oliat officer. “Under stress, I guess my mind was playing tricks on me, trying to escape reality. Human minds do come up with intuitive solutions to impossible problems while trying to escape into fantasy.” Increasingly embarrassed, she told him o
f every nuance of her experience evaluating Zinzik. “I must have put it all together from some unconsciously noted details around the palace.”
That was the standard explanation, and Krinata felt he was about to deny it when Rita, cluttering and puffing, dragged an object over and deposited it on Jindigar’s lap, then sat up and preened herself, expecting a reward. Jindigar looked at the oblong box blankly. Then his whole demeanor changed, his eyes lit, and he grabbed the box. Then he saw the piol, set the box in Krinata’s hands, and swept the piol to his chest, murmuring reassuringly.
Krinata turned the thing over and discovered it had a screen on one end. A comunit! Gradually, it came to her, and she wrapped a fold of sheet over it. “Arlai!”
The unit came to life. “I can’t see anything. Krinata, is that you? Jindigar?”
Jindigar tucked the piol under Krinata’s pillow and swept the unit around to face him. “Arlai, listen.” And he reprised their situation in a few terse words. “I’d estimate we have no more than six or seven hours before Zinzik has what he wants of Desdinda and kills her.”
“Kills—” started Krinata.
Jindigar waved her to silence. “You didn’t think he meant any of those lavish promises, did you? How could he turn loose somebody who’ll repudiate every word of that forced confession? Besides, imagine what awaits on Dushaun for anyone who’d make that recording for him!”
She hadn’t thought of that.
Suddenly, Jindigar leaned forward, his head coming down on Krinata’s shoulder as he made a hissing sound.
Krinata froze, and a moment later realized it must be the spy-eye check. Jindigar was hiding the instrument from them. She surreptitiously checked to make sure Rita was asleep under the pillow with all her limbs covered.
A moment later, Jindigar straightened hastily when Storm said, “Uh, I must have dozed. What’s going on?”
Jindigar explained, ending, “Come, you too, Frey, listen to Arlai.”
Engrossed, Krinata didn’t even notice that the Dushau had invited a very humanoid male to share her bed when she was stark naked. They huddled over the comunit, discovering that Arlai had appropriated one of the scurries belonging to Spindrift, Timespike’s Sentient, fabricated this unit in Timespike’s lab and tuned it only to himself. They were private, as long as the spy eye was off.
As Bell slept peacefully, Arlai told them, “My orbit intersects yours every ninety-three minutes, and in six hours twenty minutes, I’ll pass within easy thruster-suit distance. That will be more than halfway through Timespike’s night, and the duty crew will be lax.”
“Can you open these bars?” asked Jindigar.
“Well, that’s the problem. Spindrift is young, passionately
dedicated to the Emperor. I got the scurry by a ruse. He doesn’t
know I’ve got it. But if I use the scurry to open the cells, he’ll
know, and trigger all the alarms.“v
“You could block that, take over—”
“Jindigar, do you want me to destroy Spindrift?”
Surprisingly, Jindigar thought hard. Krinata saw Storm glance worriedly at him. But Jindigar said, “No. No, Arlai, we’ll find another way. Let’s assume we get out of the cells. Where are the thruster suits stored?”
Arlai threw a schematic of Timespike’s interior on the screen and showed them the route.
Storm said, “But look, this is shorter—to the hangar bay. And not all of us are checked out on thruster suits.”
Krinata had been suppressing an urge to yell, No thruster suits!, telling herself not to allow a stupid phobia to develop. Now she seized the rational excuse. “What about the children? Does a battleship carry Cassrian child-sized thruster suits?”
Glumly, Arlai said, “No, but—”
“So what about the hangar bay?” asked Storm, “It’s so close, and time’s our worst enemy in this kind of operation. Those in the other cells will be caught by surprise when we move, and we’ll have to drag them—”
“Storm,” interrupted Arlai, “that bay contains the Emperor’s own yacht!”
“So?” asked the Lehiroh. “After what he’s done, stealing his yacht seems a mild form of justice. I hope his favorite art objects are aboard!”
“You don’t understand,” argued Arlai. “It’s a rebuilt seeker craft, with a class-one Sentient. You’d never be able to get aboard, let alone break the security seals.”
“Arlai, you’ve got that yacht’s modified schematics,” said Krinata. “Surely—”
“He does?” asked Storm. He looked to Jindigar.
“He does. But he’s right, that Sentient is programmed for absolute security. And the Emperor’s own yacht’s Sentient– there’d be nothing to do but enthrall it.”
Krinata saw Arlai’s simulacrum don a stricken expression. “Jindigar,” he pleaded.
“What do you mean, enthrall?” asked Krinata with a sickening feeling she knew. Bogey man stories out of the Corporate League’s downfall came to her: Sentients run wild, fighting among themselves and for various factions.
Jindigar examined his hands in his lap. She could feel the bed vibrating under them with his suppressed emotion, but she couldn’t divine what that emotion was.
Arlai asked for the unit to be turned so he could get a better view of Jindigar. “Krinata, is Jindigar shaking?”
Jindigar said, “No,” as Krinata said, “Yes.”
Without warning, the screen went blank.
The carrier beam was still there, for the thing emitted light. But Krinata felt a surge of panic and had to strangle back a cry of despair. Then Arlai returned, apologizing. Very formally, he said, “I, too, feel a sense of urgency. The technicians have just broken into my starboard inrational circuits. They’re working from my original schematics, mapping the modifications as they go. They’ve already done considerable damage, but when they reach the Oversee-and-Command branching, they’ll mindwipe me and mechanically reimplant Allegiancy conditioning.”
“Oh, Arlai,” groaned Jindigar.
“Your troubles are by far worse,” said Arlai staunchly, “but I tell you this so you may understand why—Jindigar, I wouldn’t—I don’t want to—if there’s any other way—” He stopped, as if realizing he was sounding most un-Sentient. “Jindigar, if you order it, I’ll enthrall the yacht’s Sentient. But don’t ask me to sear-out Spindrift.”
“I kept you out of the wars, Arlai—” started Jindigar. But then he seemed to recover, weighing alternatives. The shaking became worse as he came to a decision. “All right, on my responsibility, at my command, enthrall. But do it carefully. Don’t harm.”
Storm chewed his lower lip, regarding Jindigar warily. But
Krinata thought he was evaluating the Dushau’s remaining strength, not fearing him as anyone else might after hearing such an order. Storm asked, “We still have the problem of getting out of these cells.”
Jindigar put his face in his hands as if to wipe away something vile, men faced Arlai squarely.
Softly Frey said, “Jindigar, no.”
The older Dushau looked at the younger, and an immense chasm opened. “We can’t do it without you.”
Prey’s eyes went to Krinata. “She hasn’t agreed.”
Fixing Krinata with his eyes, Jindigar asked, “Arlai, could your scurry insert a message in the food delivered to the other cells?”
Comprehension dawned on Arlai, who nodded and asked, “Could you? With just three?” Krinata was bewildered.
“If Frey agrees and Krinata is willing to try.”
“What?” asked Krinata at last, sensing that the test she had just undergone was by no means ultimate.
“Zinzik is driving us all to the brink of the unthinkable,” said Jindigar. “If there’s any hope of saving Desdinda and, and everything, then this is the least immoral of our options.”
“What?” demanded Krinata.
THIRTEEN
Predator
“Krinata,” said Jindigar, twisting his long fingers together
and contemplating the tangle, “the insights you experienced into Zinzik’s attitude and function were no fantasy. I didn’t realize … I don’t know how I could have missed it. But I did. It was very unprofessional.”
She put her hand on his knee. “Jindigar,” she prompted.
He searched her eyes. Storm and Frey watched silently. “I didn’t feel you tie into us. Please believe, the first I knew of it was when you looked directly at me—something about weighing relative values. I don’t know what you were evaluating. Right then, I sliced it off. I wouldn’t endanger you, certainly not without your consent.” He broke into some obscure Dushauni self-condemning invective.
It finally dawned on her. Not imagining that? It was real? It was the Oliat experience? But there was no time to think about it now. Jindigar had a plan to get them out of here, and he was disintegrating before her eyes. She gripped both his hands firmly, calmly.
“Jindigar, that little vision you gave me saved my life. I couldn’t have—I couldn’t. I’m sorry my cowardice put Desdinda on the spot, and I’m sorry she couldn’t brazen it out. But being sorry won’t get us out of this. Your plan—however wild—might. I’m willing to try anything. You can only die once, and I don’t want to be meat for Zinzik’s perverted tortures. I’d rather go down fighting.” -
“You don’t know what you’re asking. Every time you’ve done something for me, you’ve nearly gotten killed in some gruesome way. This would be the worst of all.”
She tried to be hard and commanding. “Let’s hear your plan and let me judge whether I’ll go for it. And let Frey judge whether he’ll go for it. You’re not our elected conscience, you know.”
The Dushau looked at her strangely. Frey shrugged, a beautiful rendition of the gesture, that said Krinata had just made self-evident all the arguments against the scheme. “Jindigar, you can’t be serious. No Ephemeral ever—”
“Do you know how many things I’ve done in my life that had never been done before?” asked Jindigar rhetorically. “Besides, she’s right. We’ve nothing to lose but integrity and self-respect, and Zinzik will snatch those before killing us.” He looked to Frey, leaving his hands in Krinata’s possession. “You have the most to lose. You understand part of the theory, and some of the risks. Are you willing to become an Invert? It’s a long life ahead of you, boy—”
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