by Chris Bunch
"Although, my friend,” he said sheepishly, “since I've never killed anyone in my life, I really don't know what I would do."
In the meantime, he had learned the Tahn worlds and sent shipments intended for garrisons to the front, and vice versa. He had stolen and then destroyed any protruding bits of military hardware that he could. He had surreptitiously tugged connections loose wherever he could when he was permitted aboard any Tahn ship.
Hernandes hated the Tahn so thoroughly that he was willing to sacrifice the opinion of his fellow prisoners. So they believed he was a quisling, a traitor, a double. Perhaps they might even kill him. That was the risk that Hernandes was willing to take. In the meantime, he was as trusted by the Tahn as any Imperial prisoner could be. He often wondered, he told Sten, how many—if any—Tahn he had killed. He had never seen any of them die.
Maybe he was not really accomplishing anything.
Sten thought that perhaps Mr. Rinaldi Hernandes had killed more Tahn than any Imperial battleship.
And now he had his jack-of-all-trades.
Big clottin’ deal, Sten thought. I'm assembling all these troopies. Giving them a mission.
But so far I haven't come up with any mission.
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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
L'N THUMBED BACK on the joystick. There was a soft whirr as the feeder machine came to life and then two sharp clicks as the tubes dropped into the slots in front of her. She gave a quick double-check glance to make sure there was a pos and neg symbol on each of them, then toggled the joystick forward. The tubes slid slowly toward each other, then gave a quick jump as they mated.
She bent closer to look at the seal. It was so apparently perfect that she could barely see the nth of a hairline where the tubes joined.
All those movements were accomplished in nearly absolute darkness. In fact, it was so dark in the testing room that any other being would have started feeling like a claustrophobe after a few minutes. He would have felt completely cut off from the rest of the world, sensing only the form of his own body. To L'n it was a little bit better than twilight.
She toggled left to apply stress to the seal, pressing down to activate an electric field. Outwardly the seam was still apparently perfect, but L'n's light-actinic eyes could see a dark red stain. The seam was badly flawed. L'n giggled and toggled right to drop the tubes into the discard bin. After only a few hours on shift, the bin was nearly full of rejects. So much for the Tahn's boasts of superefficiency.
L'n liked to think that someday far in the future a really bright historian would trace the Tahn's eventual defeat at the hands of the Emperor right back to the discard bin under her worktable. For the hundredth time L'n smiled at her little private joke, then toggled back to call for the next two pipes. Her small, delicately pointed left ear turned to catch the sound of the machine whirring into life. Instead, there was a loud shout just outside the room. Her ear curled back on itself in pain. What the clot? The shouting went on. It was Cloric, the Tahn work boss. She could not hear what was being said, but somebody was definitely getting it. If Cloric held to form—and she had no reason to believe that he would not—the shouts would eventually lapse into incoherence, followed by heavy blows.
Whoever it was, L'n felt very sorry for him. Still, what could she do about it? She turned back to her work, trying to push the sounds outside her mind. It was a process that seemed to be getting easier every day. That frightened L'n more than anything else—more than Cloric, or the other Tahn, or the war itself. Because until a few years before, violence had not even been a word in L'n's vocabulary.
It was not that L'n came from a race of pacifists. On the contrary, on a scale of amoebic jelly to outright beasts, the Kerrs rated fairly high on the fierce side. They were a slender, soft-furred folk with large, limpid eyes; delicate, highly sensitive ears; and a long, agile balancing tail. The Kerrs’ original homeworld was mostly covered by dense forests. They inhabited the middle levels, where light was as scarce as the food supply on the top tier.
Like many forest beings, L'n's forbearers were intensely jealous of their privacy. The only time a Kerr experienced a feeling even close to loneliness was during estrus. It was a trait that would stay with them through the ages, just like their passion for light.
An artist, L'n had been nearing the height of her powers when she decided to emigrate from her home system. It was a very bold—or foolish—thing for a Kerr to do. She was abandoning the warmth of personal privacy for what seemed to her friends and family a hostile and patently ugly life on the outside. But the artist side of L'n knew—as sure as she knew the conceptual beauty of polarized light—that the price of continued privacy was too high. To reach the next level in her art, she needed knowledge, a knowledge that could be found only in the great “outside."
L'n thought she was just on the verge of finding her way, when the Tahn struck. She was in her biaxial period, and her strange light paintings were beginning to find a wider audience.
Audience. That was a strange word. There was no equivalent in the Kerr language. It made a being think of large, smelly crowds, pushing in, closer and closer ... L'n learned to deal with audiences. In fact, she was even starting to like being the center of one.
She had also made her first “outside” friend. His name was Hansen. Lance Corporal Hansen, a very large and, at first, very frightening human. When she had met him and Hansen had grasped her small hands in his and grunted on in his ugly low-toned human voice about her light paintings, it was all she could do to keep herself from taking a shrieking leap for the studio's rafters. But she had steeled herself, listened as politely as she could, and then ushered him out the door. L'n had spent hours that night trying to comb the smell of him out of her fur.
Months later, it was one of the things she liked about him the most. He was with her every minute he could spare, admiring her work, criticizing it in ways that turned out to be helpful, and hovering over her when she had a showing—keeping the crowds at a more comfortable distance.
When the Tahn had invaded, Hansen had fought his way to her studio, dragged her from it, and then fought his way back to his lines. They reached safety only moments before the battle-shocked Imperial Forces surrendered. Even then, the Tahn had kept their missiles thundering in.
Hansen and L'n were caught in one such explosion. Sometime later, L'n came to. How very odd. She was barely wounded—while Hansen was messily dead.
L'n had learned many things since she had left her home system. One of them was lying. The Tahn had mistaken her for a member of the Imperial Forces. L'n did not correct them. Out on the streets she could hear them killing the civilians.
The last thing she learned was after Hansen died. L'n learned what it was like to be lonely.
The seam on the next pair of tubes glowed a faint orange. Adequate. Clot! She toggled it to the appropriate bin.
Outside, the shouting had stopped. Instead of heavy blows, she could hear muttering. What was going on?
* * * *
Chetwynd had heard the brouhaha clear across the hangar-sized factory. He quickly checked his guards and their work parties. Everything seemed okay. Wait. Something or someone was missing.
He maneuvered his enormous bulk around a chattering machine and took off at a dead run. Chetwynd dodged the waving jaws of a forklift, skittered around a corner, and came to a stop. It was Cloric—again. The man's face was flushed with anger, and his eyes were bulging out from the intensity of his shouting. It was almost orgasmic. The object of his affection, Chetwynd noticed, was a much smaller man—an Imperial prisoner of war. The reason for Cloric's anger was instantly apparent. The two men were standing in the middle of a large jumbled pile of hydraulic tubing that spilled across the floor. Behind them was the bank of doors to the test labs. On one lab a red light burned, showing that it was in use.
Chetwynd assumed a casual pose and strolled over. Whether he intervened would depend on only a few simple factors. On the one hand
, the prisoner might have done something wrong or, even worse, sneaky. In which case Chetwynd would shrug his shoulders and abandon the prisoner to his fate. On the other hand, Cloric had a reputation even among the most callous of the guards as a person who lashed out for no apparent reason. Not that anyone really cared; it was just considered unprofessional. Chetwynd had a more important reason to be concerned. As he was the shift commander, the prisoners were ultimately his responsibility. And the word had come strongly down that there was a severe shortage of labor, and therefore the prisoners had suddenly gained value. They were not to be wasted. If Cloric were allowed to run amok, they would quickly run out of people for the work parties.
There was one other reason. Chetwynd knew firsthand what it was like to be a prisoner.
Cloric finally spotted him and went on the defensive without a pause.
"I can handle this, Chetwynd."
"Snarl at me once more, Cloric, and I'll show you what I can handle."
Cloric took in the mastodon that was Chetwynd. Cloric was big but not that big. Chetwynd had at least fifty kilos on him, a great deal of which was muscle. And although as the boss of the work gangs he was not Cloric's immediate superior, Chetwynd had a great deal of clout, even with the muckity-mucks of factory security. The source of the clout was a bit of a mystery, although talk was that Chetwynd was a dispenser of many favors. As for what he got in return, even Cloric was not dumb enough to ask.
All those thoughts took a great deal of time to lumber through the man's mind. Chetwynd waited patiently and was rewarded with a slump of shoulders and a stubborn but still hangdog expression.
"He was tryin’ somethin',” Cloric muttered, waving at the prisoner and the jumble of tubing. “See. He's got all the good ones mixed up with the bad ones."
Chetwynd did not bother letting Cloric finish explaining. It would take much too long and consist mostly of lies. The prisoner, he was sure, would be much more creative. He turned to the man, who had been looking back and forth as they talked, obviously wondering what was going to happen to him. The prisoner was Sten.
"What do you have to say for yourself?” Chetwynd asked.
"It was sort of an accident,” Sten said. “See, I was moving the reject bin out of the way, and the officer grabbed my shoulder. Scared the clot out of me, I can tell you. Knocked over that bin and the other—"
"That's a lie,” Cloric protested. “I was watchin’ him the whole time. He was gonna mix ‘em together. I could tell."
"But sir,” Sten said. “Did you actually see me doing anything like that? Where were you standing?"
Cloric was so confused by Chetwynd's presence that he found himself actually discussing the matter with the prisoner instead of smacking him for his insolence. He pointed to a position about twenty meters away; he had obviously been lurking behind a gravlift. Sten studied the indicated spot with great seriousness. After a moment, he shook his head.
"No, sir. I hate to disagree with you, but I don't think you could have seen much over there. Those plascrates would have been in the way."
"They were at first,” Cloric said, “but I moved some, see?” He pointed at a gap in a large stack of crates waiting for shipment.
"Gee, sir. That is pretty good,” Sten reluctantly admitted. “But wouldn't my back have been turned to you, sir?"
Chetwynd waved them both to silence. The discussion was not getting them anywhere. Besides, there was something else preying on his mind. The prisoner looked very familiar. He could not quite put his finger on it, but he was sure he knew the man from someplace. And that someplace was cop!
"Don't I know you?” he asked.
Sten peered up at him. He, too, saw a vague kind of familiarity, but he kept it hidden. “No, sir. The prisoner doesn't believe so, sir."
Chetwynd looked closer. He could not shake the feeling that somewhere, sometime he had seen the man in the uniform of a Tahn cop. But what was he doing there acting like an Imperial prisoner? If Chetwynd was right, then the man was a snoop, and he and Cloric could find themselves in deep drakh.
"What's your name?"
"The prisoner's name is Horatio, sir,” Sten said.
He was worried. Chetwynd's face had finally clicked into position. It was when he and Alex had been on the trail of that little bomber, Dynsman. Sten remembered clearly the attack of the gurion. The thing had rushed through the surf at them on its six legs, its tooth-lined stomach reaching out of its body at them. And the whole time, the man in front of him had lolled laughing on the beach, surrounded by a score of lovely female prisoners. Sten and Alex had been posing as Tahn prison guards, so they really could not blame Chetwynd for his lack of concern for their fate. He wondered how Chetwynd had ever gotten off the prison planet. More importantly, how in the clot had he gone from prisoner to boss guard?
Wars produced strange things, Sten had noticed. He had also noticed that those things were rarely funny.
"Okay, Horatio. We'll let this go. This time. Next time your butt is ground meat!"
"Thank you, sir,” Sten said with some amazement.
Before Cloric could protest, Chetwynd raised a hand to silence him.
"Get these parts loaded,” he told Sten. “We'll run ‘em back through again."
"Yessir. Right away, sir."
Sten was a blur of eager motion as he began picking up the scattered tubing as Chetwynd and Cloric walked away.
"Whyn't you let me thump him?” Cloric asked. “He deserved it."
"Probably,” Chetwynd said. “But do us both a favor. Keep your eye on him. But your hands off. Got me?"
Cloric nodded. He did not know what was going on, and he was pretty sure he did not want to find out. As for Chetwynd, he still thought he recognized Sten. But the cop business was probably pure foolishness. Probably. Still, he was not taking any chances.
* * * *
L'n went at her rote tasks with new interest. She even hummed a Kerr lullaby to herself as she worked. She had been startled and badly frightened when the man Horatio had slipped into her lab. She almost had not flipped on the small blue light that was just barely comfortable to her eyes but would have allowed Horatio to see. For a moment she had almost let him bump around in the dark while she found a place to hide.
But the man had stayed perfectly still and whispered her name. Finally, she had responded. Without hesitation, the man walked directly to her, as if he could see in the dark as well as she could.
Horatio seemed to understand her right away: He made soothing noises at her and talked about things that interested her, like the geometric pattern and colors produced when light was refracted in a certain, special way. He said he had heard about her art, although he had not actually ever seen one of her light paintings. He promised to help her set up a studio at the prison.
He had also asked her for help. Not in return for any favors he would do. Of that she was quite sure. L'n had the idea that Horatio would provide the studio no matter what she did.
Why did she trust him? Well, he had trusted her, hadn't he?
He had confessed that he was Big X. That information alone was a death warrant in her hands. And the things that he had asked her to do also depended on his absolute trust in her.
She would be the forger. She would use her many skills as an artist to produce fake Tahn documents and ID cards and a host of other things the prisoners would need when and if they escaped.
L'n had only one hesitation. There was no way she could escape with them. In the Tahn sunlight, she was blind.
Hansen had said—No. Not Hansen, she corrected herself. Silly me. Horatio had said that as Big X he could not escape, either. So they would work together and help the others.
L'n liked that. She also liked the second thing he had asked her. It also involved danger, but not as much. He wanted her to do a little sabotage, to approve as many sections of flawed tubing as she could. That would be a pleasure. In fact, she had thought about it before but had been afraid to try it.
S
ince she had met Horatio, she was not afraid anymore.
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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE THIRD GATE in the center sanctuary opened, and Security Major Avrenti stalked into the prisoners’ courtyard.
The base of the triangle—the support for the escapers—went into operation.
Sergeant Major Isby leaned on his stool and lifted the bandage away from the stump of his leg to get a little more of the dim sun above.
Lance Corporal Morrison, on the second-level balcony, dropped his propaganda leaflet.
Major F'rella, at the far end of the prisoners’ courtyard, curled one tentacle under—another Tahn recorded as entering—and, with her second brain, continued puzzling over whether that unusual archaic Earth tune written by someone named Weill could be poly phonically hummed using six of her eight lungs.
Technician Blevens yelped—supposedly at the heat of the caldron he had just touched—and dropped the caldron on the floor of the prisoners’ kitchen.
The klang rang through the courtyard.
And the word was out.
* * * *
"Great One protect us,” Cristata said. “And now it is time to go."
Instantly Markiewicz dropped her improvised spade and began slithering backward, away from the face of the tunnel. She, like any sensible tunneler who might have to pass inspection at a moment's notice, worked naked.
Cristata grabbed her legs and helped yank her back toward the nearest way station. He looked at her body, interestedly. He was wondering why some, of the religious humans he had met saw shame in a body without covering. And suddenly he had a flash. Of course. They realized that their bodies should have been fur rather than pale flesh. They were ashamed of what they should have been instead of what they were.
Cristata, finding that thought worthy of his next meditation with the Great One and thanking the Great One for one more enlightenment, scurried back up the shaft after Markiewicz.
