by S. L. Viehl
“Why didn’t you tell us this from the beginning?” Drefan demanded. “We would have helped you.”
Davidov gave him an ironic look. “I did that at the outpost. I told them everything, and they thought I was crazy and locked me up again. By the time they stopped squabbling about it, the Sovant had taken the body of a trader and his ship. It was gone.”
“So you went after it.”
His shoulders moved. “I hired a new crew, bought the Renko, and started hunting them. That was ten years ago.”
Drefan leaned forward. “Why did you enslave Tya?”
“Enslave her?” Davidov laughed. “I saved her life. She was the Hsktskt’s prize arena fighter for years, the one they called TyalasVar.”
“‘Soul eater,’” Reever translated for me.
“Tya had been fighting death matches since she was able to walk. One day she threw her weapons down on the sand and refused to fight again. When I found her, her owner was in the process of beating her to death—and I needed a shifter to help me kill the last Sovant.”
“She didn’t want to help you,” I reminded him. “You put an implant in her body that kept her from shifting. You lied to her and told her it would kill her if she didn’t do as you said.”
He looked unconcerned. “I never said I was perfect. Once I knew I had the last of them cornered here, I needed Tya to stir things up.”
“So you made her shift into a Hsktskt and then trapped her in that form.” Reever shook his head. “After everything that happened to us in the arena, how could you?”
“Odnallak use fear to survive. I wasn’t asking her to do anything she hadn’t done on her own before. It was unfortunate that she despised the Hsktskt so much that she refused to take on the form voluntarily. I didn’t have time to persuade her to get over it.” He smiled. “I saw the implant as a kindness. Much more humane than beating her the way the lizards did.”
“Mercy,” Drefan said softly, “give me that trigger.”
Davidov looked up and grinned as he touched his chest. “If you think you can bluff me . . .” He felt something, frowned, and tore open his tunic, running his hand over the flesh above his heart. His gaze turned lethal. “What did you put inside me?”
“Nothing new, blade dancer.” Mercy took out a small handheld device and showed it to him. “Recognize this? It’s the trigger for a cardiac implant. Just like the one I put inside your chest last night, after you ate your last meal. Which was drugged, by the way.”
Reever turned to her. “You know what they do to blade dancers.”
“Oh, yeah, I’ve tumbled a few in my day.” She ran her thumb around the only switch on the device. “So one push, and no more Alek Davidov.”
“Go ahead.” Davidov stretched out on the berth. “I’m not afraid of dying.”
He fears nothing, Tya had said.
“Mercy,” my husband said quietly. “You know Alek only for what he’s done here. He was once a good man. He smuggled slaves with me, and returned them to their homeworlds and their families. He saved thousands.”
Davidov bared his teeth. “Shut up, Duncan, and let the lady take her revenge.”
“After he lost his wife, he lost a great deal of his humanity,” my husband continued. “He became obsessed with avenging her death. He loved her very much.” He glanced at me. “I don’t approve of his methods, but I understand his motivation.”
Davidov made a disgusted sound. “Can you believe that he was the most savage, ruthless, unbeatable arena fighter the Hsktskt have ever owned?”
“What do you want me to do, Reever?” Mercy asked, ignoring Davidov’s jeer. “Let him walk away?” When my husband nodded, she sighed. “So we go with the backup plan.”
Mercy opened the cell door and pulled aside the inhibitor webbing. “We repaired your ship, and put what’s left of your crew on it. You have one hour to get off Trellus.”
Davidov got to his feet. “You’re letting me go?” He sounded uncertain.
“We’re throwing you off our colony,” Drefan said, his voice cold.
“Remember how you lied to Tya about her implant? That inspired me to do a little tinkering,” Mercy told him. “There’s a locator beacon in your cardiac implant, along with a pressure-triggered cache of Tingalean venom, for which there is no antidote, by the way. We’ll always know where you are, Aleksei. If you try to remove the implant, you’ll be dead in ten seconds. And if you ever come back to Trellus again, I’ll hit the trigger.”
Davidov took a step toward her. “What’s to keep me from taking the trigger from you?”
“Nothing. Here, you can have this one.” She smiled and tossed the device at him.
“Lights,” Drefan said.
The emitters flared to life, illuminating every inch of the detention area. On the walls someone had hung hundreds of brackets. In each bracket sat a trigger identical to the one in Mercy’s hand.
“We took the precaution of replicating some spares,” Mercy said. “I have some back at my place, and we’ll be sending a few offworld to some friends. If anything happens to me or Drefan, they’ll be distributed to everyone in the colony. That includes every relative of every colonist the Sovant killed.” She cocked her head. “How long do you think it will take before one of them hits the button?”
Davidov inclined his head. “Brilliant and beautiful. “ He took the pack she tossed at him before he turned to me and Reever. “It seems that I’m in your debt again, old friend.”
“I no longer count you as a friend.”
“That’s a shame, because I can be useful.” Davidov shouldered the pack. “While I was transmitting my phony bounty around the quadrant, I received several inquiries. One came from a mercenary who was already hunting you. He offered me eight million credits to turn you over to him.”
“Who was it?” I asked.
“I don’t have a name,” Davidov said. “Only a relay code.” He recited a series of letters and numbers. “I wouldn’t contact him directly, unless you have a death wish. Drefan, I wish you luck.” He reached over, grabbing Mercy and jerking her to him for a quick, hard kiss, and dodging her fist. “Enjoy your Omorr, madam.”
She clipped him on the jaw with her follow-through punch. “Get off my colony and stay off, you bastard.”
And that, I thought as I watched him walk down the corridor and disappear around the corner, was the only thing that I was sure Davidov would do.
As soon as the Renko took off from the surface, I suggested we find Tya and let her know that Davidov was done and she was free of him.
“I talked to Swap last night,” Mercy said. “He found her and tried to talk to her, but she slipped away into another pipe. He thinks she’s lost it.”
“Even if she has, we can’t abandon her,” Drefan said. “We owe her our lives.”
“I don’t think she’ll let anything living get near her,” Mercy said, and then gave him a speculative look. “Of course, she wouldn’t be afraid of a dred. Especially one that was a little more human than the others.”
Drefan turned his glidechair around. “I’ll suit up.”
I caught Mercy’s arm. “That mindset that recorded Posbret’s thoughts and feelings while the Sovant was inside him—you are going to destroy it.”
“Do I have to?” She laughed as she saw my reaction. “Doc, I was bluffing. Cat ran the playback through a remote unit for us to view, and there was nothing recorded. It was completely blank.” The amusement faded from her expression. “The Sovant didn’t have any thoughts or feelings.”
“But you let Davidov believe . . .” I shook my head. “That was a terrible thing to do.”
“That,” she corrected, “was what he really deserved. “
Reever and I went down into the tunnels with Drefan to help look for the Odnallak. We started at the substation, where my husband used the water temperature sensors to check each pipe.
“Here.” He pointed to one section where the water was twenty degrees warmer than anywhere else und
er the colony.
Drefan’s halo glowed green as he bent down to look at the schematic. “There’s an old retention reservoir under the pipes there. The original colonists built it for their children to play in.”
We went to the reservoir, and Reever and I stayed back out of sight while Drefan went in. There was no sign of Tya, but he lowered himself down to sit by the reservoir, as if he meant to wait.
An outlet valve on one of the pipes turned, and a long, gray figure slid out and dove into the standing water. She swam toward Drefan and then hoisted herself out, rising to face him as he stood.
I wrapped my arms around my waist. They looked exactly as the drednoc and the vral had in my nightmares.
“What are you doing down here, drone?” Tya reached for the drednoc’s central panel, and then went still as Drefan raised his face shields and revealed himself to her. “You.”
“Me.” He caught her arm when she tried to dive back into the reservoir. “I want to talk to you.”
“I have nothing to say to you, Terran.”
“That’s a shame, because I have a lot to tell you.” He released her. “I never knew about the slaves being used in my mines, Tya. Had I known, I would never have allowed it.”
“Why would you care about slaver meat?” Her orange eyes regarded him steadily. “They made you a wealthy, rich man.”
“No amount of credit is worth a single life.” He stepped back from her. “It’s why I never tried to escape from the mines after I was made a slave. I believed that it was justice for what had been done in my name.”
“Then you are a fool.”
“I made friends with the other miners. I saw how they lived, and struggled. I watched them suffer, and some of them die in stupid accidents. I came to the point when I would have done anything for them.” He lifted his artificial arm. “I should not have survived the accident that crushed my limbs. I didn’t want to. It was supposed to be my final penance.”
“I started to like it,” Tya said in a hollow, faraway tone. “Killing other slaves. I couldn’t wait to get onto the sand. It was the only time I felt alive. That’s why I cast down my sword. Not because I was a coward. Because they made me into a killer. When they tied me up and started beating me, I knew I would die. I welcomed it. And then Davidov came.”
“Mercy took me in,” Drefan said. “She wouldn’t let me go.”
“Do you know what I can do, Terran?” The white lights in her hair swirled around her, and changed her shape into that of Alek Davidov. “I can read your thoughts and shape myself into what you despise. “ She shifted a second time, growing into the burned, tortured image of Posbret. “What you dread.” The lights spun again, and she became a mirror image of Drefan, his body trapped in ill-fitting prosthetics. “What you most fear.”
“I prefer your true form.”
Tya spun herself into her tall, ghostly shape. “Why do you bother with me?” she asked, turning away from him. “I am broken, useless. A coward. I couldn’t even let Davidov kill me with his poison.”
“I hated my body so much I tried to make myself into a drone.” Drefan looked down at his armored chassis. “I built this place so that I could use the games to take slaves from their owners and give them new lives. But my anger and my self-hatred will never leave me. The only time I feel alive is when I’m the drednoc, and I can fight simulations. I remove all the safeties.”
She stared at him. “So do I.”
“Davidov is gone,” he told her, “and he will never bother you again. You are free to leave Trellus.”
Tya’s hair coiled around her face, hiding her expression. “I have nowhere to go. My people are scattered across the galaxy, and they would have no use for an Odnallak who will not use fear. Other species do not understand my kind and would attack me, or would try to control and use me, as Alek did.”
“You could stay here, with me.” Drefan held out his gauntlet. “I understand you, Tya. I will protect you. Perhaps together we can at last find some peace.”
For a long moment the Odnallak said nothing, and then she took a deep breath. “Will I have to become a Hsktskt again?”
Drefan smiled. “Never, unless you want to.”
“I hate them, you know.” Slowly she took his hand. “I will stay.”
I let out the breath I was holding, and then took Reever’s hand and silently retreated.
It took a few more days of caring for the wounded and helping repair the damage to the domes before Reever and I felt ready to leave Trellus. Mercy came to our quarters early that day with a parting gift.
“This is an old Aksellan mining map for this quadrant that my parents and their friends brought with them,” she said, spreading out the fragile, cracked sheet of plas on our table. “They bought it off a trader, and used it to pick the site for the colony.”
“It is an interesting relic,” my husband said.
“It’s a little more than that. These maps were never archived because the Aksellans didn’t want anyone else using their surveys. Most of them were destroyed when they left the quadrant and moved on to richer territories. This one was probably stolen.” Her mouth quirked. “The occupied worlds are marked with symbols for species, type of climate, and mineral content.” She pointed to one planet with a dark triangle marked beside it. “That is the symbol for the black crystal.”
I looked at the map. There were hundreds of tiny planetary systems depicted, and thousands of black triangles. It was a survey that must have taken centuries to complete.
“I want you to have it.” Mercy rolled it up carefully, replaced it in the tube she had brought, and handed it to me. “All I ask in return is that you promise never to tell anyone about Tya and Swap.”
I exchanged a look with Reever. “We would do that without the map, Mercy.”
“Then let it be a bon voyage present.” She slung an arm around my shoulders and gave me a hug.
We made our last stop at Gamers central control.
Keel sat in Drefan’s glidechair and monitored the games, while Cat prepared some sort of beverage. The new prosthetic eye I had fitted for it glittered as it turned its head to greet us. “I was hoping you’d drop in. Come out onto the hover view, Cherijo. You’re going to love this.”
Cat handed me a server of a bubbly liquid. “Champagne,” he said as he passed more of the same to Reever and Mercy. “Terran fermented-fruit juice, used for celebrations. It’s vile, but if you breathe through your mouth, drinkable.”
I sipped some of the drink, forgot to breathe through my mouth, and sneezed. “What are we celebrating? “
Mercy touched the side of her server to mine. “Life, Doc. Life.”
Cold air kissed my face as we entered the grid, which had been programmed to simulate a very familiar-looking ice world. Towering plateaus of blue and white loomed against a kvinka-torn sky. Below us a series of snow bridges, methane fields, and ice caves formed an elaborate playing field.
The humanoid who entered with a dozen guards wore the garb of a slaver. He swatted the frosty air with an oversized sword and far too much enthusiasm.
“What are you waiting for?” he bellowed at Keel. “Initiate the program.”
I looked over at the drednoc who stepped out from one of the largest ice caves. His halo threw a circle of purple light on the ice. The jlorra beside him was a massive female who lowered her head and growled, her blue claws digging into the snow crust, her orange eyes burning as if from a fire within. A beautiful icestone collar glittered around her neck.
The drednoc briefly rested one of his gauntlets on the top of the feline’s head, and I smiled as I saw her rub against his palm. Then they began walking slowly toward the gamer and his guards.
I glanced at Keel’s console, and saw that the slaver and his guards were the simulations. “An interesting game.”
Keel grinned. “We hope it will appeal to the real slavers who stop by the colony.”
“We need a toast,” Mercy said. “Duncan, will you do the honor
s?”
“To life,” Reever said, raising his champagne. “And to those who choose to live it.”
