The voice said, “I don’t want to hear any more of that alien noise. I said: Standard.”
“All right. I’ll talk Standard.” Some of her fury might have gotten into her voice. She hoped it had. “Listen to this. The Interworld Fleet and Intelligence and Security expected trouble. You got by them, I don’t know how. But this isn’t going as smooth as you think. They’ve got an idea who to look for. The Uskosian envoys don’t want trouble. They want you to take what you came for and get out. So do I. You come right aboard and get it. We’ll stay out of the way. But believe me, you don’t know what trouble is. Trouble is what you get from Fleet and I&S if you touch an alien envoy. I’m not talking smuggling, Earthside Enforcement, port patrols, that kind of garbage. I’m talking top-level Polity Admin. If you’re smart, you’ll make sure nobody gets hurt. How does that sound?”
The voice said, “That’s fine. Glad you take it like that. Just remember what you said about wanting trouble. The kind you get if you ask for it, is a battery of Fleet surplus wide aperture laser cannon. Give us an airlock and stay where you are. We’re coming in.”
* * *
The approach took an hour. The Bird waited dead and silent. Awnlee appeared on the bridge, apologetic and calmer. He said he did not know what had happened to him. He sat between his sire and Hanna and held Hanna’s hand.
“I thought I was brave as Bistee!” he lamented.
“I don’t think it was an unnatural reaction,” Hanna said.
“But you and my sire did not act so!”
“We are older,” said Rubee.
“Yes,” Hanna said, “and I don’t know about Rubee, but the last time I was in such a position, I was jelly. And I may yet forget myself before we are done.”
“I wish I were like Sirsa of Sa,” Awnlee said with a return of his natural enthusiasm.
Hanna opened her mouth to ask what had happened to Sirsa of Sa, or who Bistee had been, for that matter, and shut it again. This was no time for legend.
She said to Rubee, “We must think of defending ourselves.”
“Do you think we will have need?”
“I think it is very possible.”
“We came with weapons; a small number only; meant for defense against beasts if we met such danger. You saw the weapons destroyed, all of them.” Rubee hesitated. “Did you know then why I did it?” he asked.
“I did. I gave you then my gratitude, even before I gave you my love.”
Awnlee said, “It was a token of good will when ’An-arilporot joined us.”
“It was another thing also,” she said, watching Rubee over Awnlee’s head.
“You had great fear,” Rubee said. “I then knew nothing of your kind of speech, thought to thought. There was no other common language and when words came to you I did not know what they meant. But there were pictures. You stood here, where we are now, and remembered another meeting. I could not endure your memories. And so I put our weapons into space. I knew, because of you, that we would not need them.”
“It was a token of good will indeed, and has been so ever since. But now we may need weapons, Rubee.”
“Is there not an accommodation?” said Awnlee.
“I would not give my trust to these men,” she said. “I do not wish you to have alarm, Awnlee, but I think we had better think of the worst case. We have tools. Perhaps we could use them. Even something to throw would be better than nothing; better still would be tools that could harm from a distance.”
“There is nothing,” Rubee said. “There are objects we might modify, given time. But there is no time.”
The air lock was open. The Bird would announce at any moment that it had been entered. Hanna’s mind was busy with possibilities that she rejected as quickly as they came—close the lock, seal the inner one, trap them inside it—but the cannon that could punch holes in the Bird as easily as a fist smashing through paper rendered all her ideas useless.
Awnlee’s grip on Hanna’s hand felt strange. She looked down and saw his fingers change. He said, “Tell me of this accommodation.”
Hanna could not answer. She had not laid out all her conclusions even for Rubee. But Rubee said, “I think ’Anarilporot and I are of one mind. I think our danger is great.” He touched his selling gently. “We are in a tale, Awnlee. We thought it another telling of the Tale of Erell. That was what we wished and planned. But the Master has come to us. The danger was there always. It is present always, and especially in a great undertaking such as ours. And now we are in a new tale, a dark one.”
“They have entered,” Awnlee said. He moved closer to Rubee, looking at a schematic that showed new points of light where none had been. “There are four. I wonder if that is all?”
Hanna watched the blips of light. When the lock finished its cycle, they moved out and turned for the bridge. She said, “There are probably others on the Avalon, if that is its name. But now that these are aboard, they are not likely to use the cannon. As long as they are here, our only danger is from whatever weapons they carry with them.”
“Perhaps we should attack at once,” Rubee said. “Yet there are four of them and three of us, and we have no weapons.”
He was icy: a good being to have by you in a fight. Hanna said, “Yes. We must wait and find out their intent. It would be foolish to provoke them if there is a chance they will not harm us. If there is no chance—then an attack may give us only a small one, but it will be the only chance.”
The blips were almost at the bridge. Awnlee quivered. Hanna put her arms around him suddenly and said, “Do not be afraid, my friend.”
“I wish you could give me some of your courage!”
“All that I have is yours,” she answered, which was an expression of deep love at any time. She felt Awnlee formulate a response, And all that is mine I give to you, but there was no time to say it; four spacesuited figures came onto the bridge, two by two, and quickly.
They held stunguns, which gave her a moment’s hope. Then she saw that each also had in his belt a disrupter or a laser pistol. So they were prepared to wound and kill. That was not good. Worse was the transparency of the faceplates of their suits. They did not care who saw their faces. They were not worried about being identified.
Hanna said to Rubee and Awnlee, silently: They mean to kill us. We will have to fight. Rubee made no sign, but Awnlee started and looked at her, and one of the men stepped forward.
“D’neeran,” he said, and she almost shrank away; this was the man with the voice. But the face was not the one she had expected to see.
He said, “We don’t like D’neerans. We don’t like what they do with their heads. You have anything to say, say it out loud. Or else you’re dead. Understand?” He looked at Rubee. “You. How’s your cargo secured? Open it up.”
Hanna said, “He doesn’t understand Standard very well.”
“I will translate,” Awnlee said in a steadier voice than Hanna expected to hear from him, and he did so.
Hanna listened to their conversation and assessed them. The man I&S had expected to be here was not here, but he might have remained on the Avalon. There was the man with the voice, red-haired and fair-skinned; there was a towheaded giant; there was a thin brown-black man whose fingers were nervous on his weapon; and—hanging back a little—there was a smaller man with a straggling mustache and eyes that looked anywhere except at her and the Uskosians. The red-haired man talked with authority and clearly was the leader. I&S might have been wrong. They might have wasted all their worry on Michael Kristofik, and while they researched and watched him, this other man with the empty eyes might have crept in undiscovered. Which did not change the basic situation, and Hanna wished I&S had been right. She would rather face the man who had taken the Pavonis Queen with sleepygas and stun-guns, rejecting a massacre.
Rubee went to a work station and began the procedures for releasing the cargo hold locks. His back was to all of them. Hanna said to him: Rubee, if they are divided, if some go to the hold and others s
tay here, it may be our best chance. His hand moved in a way that meant assent. It would be meaningless to the intruders.
She said to the red-haired man, “What is your name?”
“Castillo,” he answered, his eyes on Rubee. Hanna’s skin prickled. It was a lie. But there were overtones she was not used to finding in the perception of a simple lie; a glimpse of a depth not uninhabited, into which she would not care to descend. It went with the voice.
She said casually, distractingly, “You’ve done this very well. I&S was looking in the wrong places, and at the wrong man, too, I think. You can laugh about that when this is done. But there is one thing you might have forgotten that might increase your profits. I meant what I said about trouble from the top. We’re worth much more to you alive than dead, especially the aliens. You could name your price for their safety and the Polity would pay instantly. Have you thought of that?”
He said without looking away from Rubee, “Hanna ril-Koroth bargains for her life.”
“That’s right. Half of what you’ve heard about me—you’ve obviously heard of me—isn’t true. I don’t want to be hurt and I don’t want my friends hurt.”
Rubee stepped back from his station. Awnlee said, “It is done. The hold is open.”
The red-haired man put away his stungun and drew the disruptor. He did it casually and with no trace of emotion at all, so that Hanna had no warning, she did not even know the moment had come until he lifted the disruptor and fired it at Rubee. The beloved ugly body jerked and fell. It happened in only a second, which for Hanna was an eternity of paralysis. The muzzle turned toward Awnlee and she threw herself at it, but she was too far from Castillo to reach him and he fired at once. She heard a single sound from Awnlee, higher-pitched than anything she had ever imagined coming from an Uskosian throat. It was not as clean a shot, and Awnlee’s shock hit her like a wavefront, and then so did something else. Not a disruptor beam, though she thought it was at first. In a heap at Castillo’s feet, still trying to think in the moment of terrible grief, she felt Awnlee die crying for his sire, felt the weakness and tingling that meant light stun, and tried to get up again. Something else hit her, in the side of the head: a boot. Her vision swam.
Awnlee, Awnlee! she called hopelessly, knowing there would never be an answer.
The voice said, “She’s dangerous. I told you to knock her out.”
The last thing she saw was the thin man standing on the command platform, bending over the golden column, attracted by the jewels. A heavier blast from a stungun hit her, and all of them went away.
* * *
She thought of the ship ever after as the Avalon, and of the events that occurred there as things that happened on the Avalon, though that was not its name any more than the red-haired man’s name was Castillo. In memory, later, the ship and the man would be unreal. That was because during her time on the Avalon, Hanna held on only to the edge of the real.
She had been stunned so heavily that it was many hours before she woke. When she did, at first, she was aware only of bodily misery. All her muscles were cramped from the stun effect and hours of not moving. She was cold, frozen. Her head was a weight of pain, and trying to move made it worse; the throbbing started where she had been kicked and radiated outward to fill her skull. She was also desperately thirsty.
When she had identified these things, she remembered the rest: Rubee and Awnlee. She called to them from her misery, without hope, and though thinking minds surrounded her, the dear shapes of Rubee and Awnlee were not there. She had known they would not be.
Finally she moved. She was not a stranger to suffering. She did not welcome it, but she knew what could be endured: more than she had once thought possible. She also knew the value of hope. And so she moved.
Very slowly she got up, holding on to a wall because her knees kept giving way. The room where she was had one dim light overhead. It was not large, and all the surfaces were bare metal, but there were outlines on the metal showing where fixtures had been stripped away. There were two doors. She tried them both, feeling her way from one to the other along the wall. The first was locked. The second opened into a claustrophobically small bathroom with no other exit. So probably at some time this had been some kind of crewmen’s quarters.
She splashed cold water on her face and drank from her cupped hands with gratitude, though when she bent over she thought her head would tear apart. Still, she could think more clearly.
About Rubee and Awnlee?—no. She would think about them later. Instead she must think of questions. Why was she still alive? Where was the Avalon taking her, and why? She could not answer the questions. Her head was only clear enough for sorrow, not for reason. Now if ever was the time to put to use the disciplines of the D’neeran Adept. But entering trance would not be easy. Once pain had begun, attenuating concentration, it was harder.
She went back to the icy cubicle that had once been someone’s room and eased cross-legged to the floor. Tremors ran through her from the cold. She closed her eyes and prepared to control breath and blood. But then the door opened and she knew the room had been watched, they had seen her wake, and she would not get her chance, not yet.
She opened her eyes and looked up at Castillo. The blond giant was behind him, and the thin man from the boarding party. All three had stunguns pointed at her. It was flattering—and devastating to any hope of escape.
Castillo squatted in front of her. There was an empty smile on his lips. The pale blue eyes were empty, too. He said, “You said I&S knows about this operation. Tell me about it.”
She thought it might be a good idea not to tell him. She thought that if he had kept her alive in order to ask her that question, it would be advantageous to put off answering as long as possible. She said as much.
He said, “You’re going to stay alive for a while anyway. If Fleet’s tracking us, you’ll come in handy. I don’t want to play games with the Polity, but D’neera might pay well for you—without getting the Polity involved.”
He did not go on, but in the minds of the other men she saw that there would be another, sexual use for her. Because she was there and helpless, had been thrown into their path like a bonus and there would be no retaliation because no one would ever know; that was all.
She was sick, and knew it showed in her face. She knew also that Castillo lied casually, indifferently, about D’neera. She would never see it again.
“Now tell us about I&S,” he said.
“No,” she said, as an experiment, to see what kinds of threats he would make so she could learn more about him.
He did not waste time with threats. He stood up and stepped back. The blond man jerked her to her feet and held her upright while the other man, the thin man, beat her. He enjoyed it; after a while his eyes glazed, and he panted. Castillo watched, the smile unchanged on his lips. She threw at him once a desperate silent plea for mercy, a cry of stark pain. He still smiled and she did not do it again, she would not beg again, never in what was left of her life. But she had not known that unaided hands could bring the unendurable so near. Her flesh broke under the fists, her body felt as if it disintegrated. “Yes, yes!” she cried long before it was over, but the only thing that happened then was that Castillo said, “Don’t break her jaw.” So when the giant dropped her on the floor she could have talked, if she had had breath to talk with; but then there was another boot that smashed into her right side so hard that she heard a crack, felt the balanced structure of bone shift, and passed out again in agony.
* * *
The little man with the mustache was a medic of some kind. When he brought her back to consciousness she answered questions in a wilderness of pain, unable to think clearly enough to lie. Castillo held out the promise of painblocks as a reward. She was lucid enough to know he lied, that they were still afraid of her and would do nothing to make her competent. Strangers had joined the group, the room was full of silent men. They would not make it better, but they could make it worse. She did not want
that to happen. And it did not matter if they knew the truth. I&S had been wrong, they would look for the wrong man, Castillo had done what he set out to do and it made no difference if he knew it.
When she said Michael Kristoflk’s name, Castillo laughed aloud. “Him! We’re clear,” he said. So he knew Michael Kristofik. There was a connection after all. That made no difference either.
Then Castillo got up and went out. The little medic disappeared, too; the others stayed. Her clothes came apart under more hands, her legs were forced apart and agony ran right up into her chest and choked her. The pain in her side stopped everything, rage, disgust at this casual rape: “Nothing personal,” she thought one said, and the pain in her side held her down so she could not even move to kick him. It could not get worse but did so in improbable peaks, until it was finally, surely unendurable and she escaped into darkness again. She was unconscious when the last one left.
* * *
“Be quiet, don’t say anything, don’t move—!”
She turned her head at the whisper. Her head seemed to be full of something thick, so that she could not hear or think very well. She was not cold any longer; she burned. There was a dull ache in her side.
“Be quiet, be still, I can’t stay long…”
It was hard to focus her eyes. The face of the little medic danced and divided and came back to being one face. She said something in a drowsy mumble.
He said, “That’s all I can do. I’ll come back if I can. If I can!”
He edged away from her. She tried to call after him, but her tongue was as thick as everything else in her head. She could still think to him. Wait, wait! she cried, and he did, compelled by something in the thought, maybe despair.
He said, “I gave you enough for a few hours. I can’t do anything about the fever. I don’t know what it is. In a few hours we’ll be on Revenge.”
She listened with more than her sluggish ears. Revenge? The end: a place to die. That was where it would happen.
The D’neeran Factor Page 54
