by Diana Palmer
But there came with the footsteps the familiar sound of growls and curses and human voices yelling. And then came the sound of quasabeams from chasats, humming like angry bees in the semidarkness. Afterward was silence. Silence unbroken except for the shuffle of marching feet and hoarsely yelled threats. Again, that chant of “Freedom! Freedom!” And then, again, silence. How many lives this time, Stern wondered? How many more lives would be lost to pay for this one life in Madeline’s hands?
“Will you listen to me!” Madeline snapped at him. “Pay attention, Holt! We’ve only got seconds to force the changeover before the lack of circulation does irreparable damage to his brain! Its structure is so radically different from our own…God, I hope the sutures I made will hold! We can’t lose him now!”
Stern rolled away from Dtimun and back to his original position, cardioprobe in hand. He didn’t have time to be relieved, only to act. He thrust the instrument, cold and heavy, down onto the motionless second heart while Madeline counted off the pulses.
“All right, go again, use the stimulator on the even numbers, ready? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,” she droned, massaging on the odd numbers. “That’s good, that’s very good, Stern, nine, ten…”
His mind felt numb as her voice continued the count, and he worked only by reflex, mechanically, efficiently. A life is a life, he thought. A life is a life is a life, and even if he lives, how the hell are we going to get hundreds of our people out of here?
“It’s working!” Madeline said suddenly, sitting up straight, her face flushed but beaming, at peace for the first time since the ordeal had begun. “It’s beating on its own! That’s enough, Stern, you can stop now. We did it.”
He leaned back and slumped, letting the words register. Around him, he heard the enthusiastic murmur of their cell mates as they, too, heard the news.
“I’ll induce regression on the tissues of the old heart,” she droned, “and then it’s just a matter of knitting back the bones and nerves and blood vessels and muscles.”
“Three hundred years ago,” Stern reminded her, “he’d be in a body bag, if I remember old Earth terminology.”
She smiled. “Yes, he would.” She went to work. “When I’ve finished, I’ll bring Komak back around.” She began closing, her eyes intent on her task. The cyberscalpel was very small to perform such a profound task, but it worked quickly and efficiently. The process was so seamless that Stern unconsciously marveled at the beauty of it. “I wonder what happened out there when we were at the critical point?” she wondered apprehensively.
“I’ll see if I can find out.” He eased up to the front of the dome, noting an absence of guards, and caught the attention of one of the humans in a nearby cell. Using the Elyrian sign language, he asked quickly for the outcome of the diversion.
The human’s solemn face was a study in impotent rage as he flashed his hands in answer to Stern’s question. “Simulated riot to divert Rojok guards,” the human “told” the Bellatrix’s skipper. “Guards quasabeamed prisoners inside cell with chasats. Five dead, four badly wounded and carried off to interrogation. We did our best.” It wasn’t possible to send curses with the hand signals, but Stern could read them in the crewman’s face. Damn the Rojoks!
Solemnly he sent out a signal of his own about the commander of the Morcai. The impact on the prisoners as his contact relayed it to his mates in the cell was staggering. Broad smiles broke out like rashes among the humans—the humans—in the cell! The Centaurians’ huge eyes made green laughter so vividly that it was visible in the semidarkness from several meters’ distance.
Stern could hardly believe the sight of humans and Holconcom talking to each other jubilantly, much less the sight of gold-skinned hands clasping white ones as the message was relayed from cell to cell by humans and Holconcom alike. Something seemed to uncurl inside Stern, like a spring wound too tight suddenly letting go. All the aching indecision and confusion passed from him in one long, rustling sigh. His eyes closed as he leaned wearily against the cool Plexiglas, giving in to a feeling of luxurious calm, a paradox if ever there was one.
“I’m home, Maddie,” he said quietly. “I’ve broken their hold. I’m home, at last.”
“What are you muttering about over there?” Madeline asked. “Did you find out what happened?”
“Five dead, four wounded. This has been an expensive operation,” he told her with a tired smile. “But I think it was worth it. They’re shaking hands.”
“They?” she asked, puzzled.
“The humans and the Centaurians.”
She paused as she worked on Komak to gape at him.
“They’re shaking hands,” she said slowly. “Why?”
“They’ve made peace,” he explained. “Apparently being imprisoned together has done something all the commander’s threats couldn’t.”
She lowered her wrist scanner to Komak’s chest. Odd, one of those readings would indicate human DNA. That, of course, was absurd. Her scanner, under so much pressure, was probably prone to glitches. “Confinement does strange things to people,” she agreed.
“How long before he comes out of it?” Stern asked, nodding at Dtimun.
“Minutes. Hours. Days.” She helped him shove the used bloody sponges into the disposal unit before they could be spotted by any passing guards. She activated the hyperclean function on her instruments and stuck them in her boot. You never knew…
“Will he live?” Stern persisted worriedly.
“That’s out of my experience,” she said quietly. “That he lived through the procedure is a miracle in itself. That particular surgical technique was theoretical, none of the Terravegan surgeons ever having performed it on a living Cularian subject. It was a gamble.”
“Every breath we take is that,” he replied. He studied her flushed face, her flyaway auburn hair curling in the sweltering humidity. “If he lives,” he added, glancing at Dtimun, “we’ve got something for the men to hold on to. Saving the C.O. It’s like a catchy tune that caught on in the sensorama.”
“Love the underdog, and all that?” she mused. “We humans still love a loser, Stern.” She pursed her lips. “Are you really going to tell them about the blue velvet ribbon? You wouldn’t, would you?”
Both his dark eyebrows went up and he grinned. “Keep the C.O. alive and I may be able to find a way around the whole truth.”
Madeline, stretching wearily, managed to bring Komak around. “It would be like giving away the color of Lawson’s Skivvies,” she said to herself. “Or spraying morph gas into the Tri-Galaxy Council chambers.”
“That was a lie. I only threatened to do it. I had to stop Lawson from transferring you back to Terravega,” Stern chuckled.
Suddenly her eyes came up and met his and there was shock in her expression. “Stern?” she whispered.
“Yes,” he replied. “I think it’s really me. Or what’s left of me. Trust me, Maddie,” he added with solemn dark eyes.
A long time seemed to pass before she finally nodded, a swift, curt jerk of her head before she programmed her wrist scanner for a drug to spear consciousness back into Komak’s stirring, but still limp, body.
Lyceria let the Rojok guards lead her from the sand skimmer onto the gray hypoturf. In the dirty tan uniform they had given her, she looked little different from the other prisoners in the compound, except for her huge, unblinking eyes—eyes that rigidly held a solemn, calm royal-blue color while inside her the terror was screaming.
“Well, where do we put this one?” one of the guards growled in harsh Rojok. “They are being sent to us more rapidly than the sonic ovens can dispose of them! We must either build more efficient ovens or find other, better ways of mass execution.”
The other nodded. “It is so. The cells grow more cramped. The latest additions are being held for mind sensings, are they not, since the Holconcom commander has not been found among them.”
“Yes,” the guard muttered. “It is an unforgivable burden on my men,
having to turn extra duty to guard them. Not to mention the expense of pumping the pleasure drugs into them, and the extra strain on our water and sewage facilities. Then, there is the annoyance of feeding them…”
“They do not seem tranquillized, the humans and the Centaurians,” the other remarked, puzzled. “I noticed as I came in, they were jubilant, not quiescent as they should have been in their pleasure.”
His companion shrugged. “I cannot chart the effectiveness of the drugs on each individual prisoner and race, when I have eleven thousand prisoners in this complex alone. The emperor sets me an impossible task, and expects perfection without adequate funding!”
“I thought the camp was operated by recycling,” the newcomer queried.
The older guard shook his head. “The prison wavelength rumored that inmates were eating their dead comrades. We had carefully treated the recycled prisoners, but in the end we had to return to the more expensive chemical diet. It was…unfortunate.”
Lyceria shuddered in her mind at the calm discussion of such barbarism. For so long, she had dreaded even the thought of this monstrous place. Her mind had trembled at the sound of it, as if her fingers had touched death every time she heard the name Ahkmau. It was, she knew now, the certainty that her destiny was entwined with this place. It was a premonition of many years. She had always known it, felt it, as if she had looked into this life from still another life and seen what would be.
“For now,” the Rojok guard said, “you may place her in with the Holconcom prisoners in the greeshmah sector.”
As she started to sigh with relief, the other Rojok interrupted.
“That will not be agreeable. This one was sent by the emperor himself.” He moved uncomfortably. “It was his wish,” he added, “that she be treated to the full capabilities of Ahkmau.”
The guard looked bored. “As you wish.” He checked a compudisc in his six-fingered hand. “There is a sense-cell free on the upper level. I will have the technician bathe her with subsonics for a day or so before she is placed in total sensory deprivation. The shock of transition,” he added with a meaningful, cold smile, “is enough to rip even a Centaurian’s mind apart. It was used today on five of the Holconcom prisoners. They got down on their knees and begged for death. Interesting, is it not, when the Holconcom is rumored to be the terror of the Tri-Fleet vanguard.” He laughed.
Lyceria stiffened. Her heart had lifted with hope when she heard that the Holconcom commander was still missing. Now, it fell heavily in her chest. If the Holconcom could succumb to torture, Dtimun must truly be dead. His will, as much as the secretive technology of the microcyborgs, kept the Holconcom strong. It came to her uncomfortably that the microcyborgs must have been removed by the guards. She closed her eyes with a shudder. Poor soldiers, to have their great strength ripped from them in such a place…
Never had she felt such hopelessness. She bowed her head and let them march her away to the cold, gray Plexiglas building that would soon become her tomb.
13
Three days had passed. One by one, two by two, the Holconcom of the Morcai and the humans of the Bellatrix had been taken away by armed guards, never to be seen again. As the numbers began to dwindle, the Rojoks became more determined in their search for Dtimun. They began to look for the Holconcom soldier that the humans had carried into the cell block, claiming he was inebriated. The emperor was making terrible threats. He was not convinced that the commander of the Holconcom was dead, and ordered that every single crewman be tortured until someone told the truth.
In the cell with the Morcai and Bellatrix execs, Dtimun still lay unconscious on his pallet. Despite Madeline’s frequent checks and attempts to revive him, he never moved. His pulse, however, was strong and regular, his Centaurian blood pressure normal. He was breathing regularly and without effort. But he wasn’t moving. Despite the surgery and all their sacrifices and their hopes, he lay like the dead. Madeline grew more depressed.
Strick Hahnson, who was now free of the effects of the Rojok drugs, conferred with her, but neither could think of a technique that might restore Dtimun to consciousness. Nor did Komak have any hope to add.
“If something doesn’t happen, and soon,” Strick said quietly, “there won’t be any of us left to salvage from this red death. They took another thirty of our people away to the interrogation sector this morning. It’s hell.”
“Tell me about it,” Stern growled, hitting his fist against the Plexiglas dome. “My God, how do you think I feel? Those are my people they’re stuffing into those damned ovens, Strick. I trained those men. I know every one of them by sight and name. Here I stand while they go out there to stare hell in the face. And I put them there!”
Hahnson moved closer. “The Rojoks put them here,” he corrected. “The Rojoks, Holt.”
“He’s right, you know,” Madeline seconded.
“Recriminations will not help now,” Komak said, adding his voice to the others as he faced the humans. “We must find a way to get the men out of here. It appears that we must do it without the commander, since we can spare no more time to see if his condition improves or worsens. Perhaps…”
Before he could finish the thought, the Rojok officer who was in charge of this sprawling complex marched toward their cell with deliberation in every step, and Stern knew why he’d come.
“You,” he said, indicating Stern as guards suddenly flanked the slit entrance the sprung magnalock had created. “Come.”
Stern stood his ground, folding both arms across his chest. “No,” he said stubbornly.
The Rojok officer’s eyes narrowed, if possible, even more. “You have no choice,” he told Stern. “It is part of the programming. You cannot refuse.”
“The hell I can’t,” Stern replied coolly, although the effort the refusal was costing him was evident in his strained expression. “It’s going to take more than those two lizard-faces to get me out of this cell.”
“If you do not come now,” the officer warned, “you will be interrogated with the others. You will die with them.”
Remembering the Holconcom officers marching proudly to the ovens, the humans standing at attention while they were mowed down by chasats, the pain and agony in the faces of his men while man after man was taken off to the interrogation section—his body straightened suddenly as rigid as steelex. “I belong to the Morcai Battalion, Mister,” he said in his best military tone. “I win with it, or I die with it. But I will not, ever, surrender!”
Something in his carriage, in his voice, in the strength of will in his tone, carried to the others in the nearby cells. None of them knew yet that he was a clone, but they knew he was a fellow prisoner and that was enough. Like blood calling to blood, it made them move to the front of the domes, their eyes watchful, angry. And, man by man, slowly, very softly, the hundreds of humans and Centaurians who had been forced together on the Morcai to this place of tortures, began to chant. The sound of it grew like a prayer in intensity, stronger and louder and deeper and prouder until it made a roar of emotion loud enough to shake the pillars of the gigantic dome itself. “Free-dom! Free-dom! Free-dom!”
Stern raised his fist and chanted with them.
The dusky-skinned Rojok shut the door to the cell again, and with a red-hot glare of hatred at Stern, who was smiling, he whirled on his heel and marched his soldiers out of sight, with the chanting war cry dogging every step he took.
“That,” Madeline remarked seconds later, “was a damned stupid thing to do.”
Stern grinned. “Would you rather I’d gone with him and spilled my guts?”
Hahnson chuckled steadily. “Threw them a curve, didn’t you?” he asked. “That wasn’t in the plan, apparently. You were planted here as a spy, weren’t you?”
“Dead-on, my friend,” Stern replied quietly. “For the moment, anyway, I seem to have thrown off the Rojok influence on my mind.”
“With a vengeance.” Hahnson grinned at Komak. “How do you like the unit’s new name—The Mo
rcai Battalion?”
“Our numbers do make a Battalion as Centaurians reckon it, Strickhahnson,” Komak agreed, “and we were together as a unit on the Morcai, so the name does suit. However, the commander’s reaction to it may be more…emotional…than mine,” Komak added with a flash of laughing green eyes. “He—how is it said?—finds humans distasteful.”
“He leaves a bad taste in my mouth, too,” Madeline retorted, smiling at Komak’s puzzled expression. Colloquial expressions were lost on aliens. Her eyes went to the commander’s lithe form on the covered floor. “I really am going to expect a knighthood for this, you know,” she said, tongue-in-cheek. “Furthermore, I expect to throw it up to the commander for the rest of my life that his hearts belong to me—every time I see him, that is, which I hope is only over an interstellar vidscreen every fifty years or so.”
“When you throw it up to him,” Stern told her, “please make sure that I’m in the next solar system. As your skipper, he’ll hold me responsible. I’ll be lucky if I get off with less than eighty years of forced labor when he runs through my court-martials.”
Komak frowned. “Holtstern, why should you be court-martialed?”
Stern looked weary. “How’s treason for a start? Followed by aiding and abetting the enemy, attempted murder…”
Komak shook his head, an oddly human movement not common to Centaurians. “I will not allow you to be court-martialed,” he said quietly. From his imposing height, he seemed as formidable as the commander had been. His eyes mirrored blue solemnity. “Without your cooperation, the commander would be dead. And the trap of the Rojok would have been sprung, even had you not been with us. Karamesh,” he added with a soft green smile in his eyes. “It means, in your tongue, fate,” he translated.
The living shadow of Holt Stern smiled at the Morcai’s exec, oblivious to the glances of the other occupants of the cell. “Do you think you could save up that speech,” he asked Komak, “and recite it quickly to the commander when he comes out of the coma—you know, just before he snaps my neck?”
