by Diana Palmer
“Oh, I will certainly try, Holtstern,” Komak agreed readily, and the green laughter danced in his eyes.
There was no laughter in Chacon’s slit eyes when he heard his aide’s urgent, whispered message. The look on his taut, dusky face caused the young officer to take a quick step backward.
“When was she taken?” he snapped, and his eyes took on a glitter that was all too familiar to the younger Rojok.
“Two days ago, my agents told me,” the aide said uneasily. “I would stake my life that it was not one of your personal guards who betrayed her, Commander.”
“So would I, Lieumek,” Chacon agreed coldly. “The emperor’s spies are legion, and there are loose tongues in any harem.”
“He has summoned Mekkar,” the young Rojok added nervously.
Chacon’s thin-lipped mouth tugged upward in a half smile. “He thinks I will allow myself to be assassinated? By the hour, he grows more groshmot. It is no less than I expected. He has always been unpredictable, and his obsession with the Centaurian Holconcom commander has no logic in it.” He locked his hands behind him and stared sightlessly at the vidscreen of his flagship, where a colorful array of distant nebulae and suns stained the black velvet of space. “Lock in a course for Ahkmau.”
“Ahkmau?” Lieumek gasped. “You are as mad as Mangus Lo! It would be suicide…and even if not…think of your career!”
Chacon turned and looked down at the younger alien. The raw power in those dark slit eyes was part of the warrior’s legend, and it was no less potent now than on the battlefield. The young Rojok saluted smartly.
Chacon watched him march away in a silence that was broken only by the mighty hum of the ship’s engines. Ahkmau. Lyceria, in that place of nightmares! A jewel flung into mud. A Silesian butterfly with its gossamer wings ripped. His tormented eyes closed. He was a warrior, used to combat and death and the horror of the battlefield. He should not have had this reaction to the news. One female was much as another, and he had never felt the need to be bound to one for life. His career was all he lived for. It had been demanding. There had never been the thought of a home other than the deck of his flagship. There was nothing so unusual, after all, about this Centaurian princess. She was expendable. She meant nothing to him, nothing at all…
He waved his hand over the vidscreen control and brought up the helmsman on the bridge. “Throw the lightsteds and give me all speed!” he growled to the officer, in a razor-sharp tone that brought a dozen startled pairs of eyes toward the helmsman’s screen.
The death camp was literally crawling with guards, searching, prodding. Stern watched them in a creeping silence that ended abruptly when the camp commandant came back with death in his whole look late in the afternoon.
“It has been decided,” he told Stern and Komak, “that since interrogation has not produced the Holconcom commander, that a public execution might loosen tongues. There is much…affection…among the human element for Dr. Hahnson. He will, therefore, be the first victim. You may save his life by telling me which of the remaining Holconcom in the internment camp is Commander Dtimun. I have no more time to waste on examinations. Over forty-five have already been conducted with no results and I tire of subterfuge and silence!”
While he was speaking, six Rojok guards armed with chasats entered the cell, thrust the other occupants aside and dragged Hahnson out of it. The action was so rapid that none of the cell’s complement even had time to react until it was too late. Stern and Komak made a grab for the struggling victim, only to be chasated at stun setting and crumpling to the floor before the Rojoks left the cell.
“Fools!” the commandant growled contemptuously. “Resistance will accomplish nothing here. Tell me what I need to know and I will spare the surgeon. You are humans. The Holconcom commander means nothing to you. Save your comrade. Speak.”
“You can’t kill him!” Madeline Ruszel yelled furiously. “It’s in violation of the Malcopian Articles of War!”
“We do not recognize them here,” the commandant said haughtily. “Compassion is for weaker races than ours. Take him away,” he ordered the guards.
“Let him go, you damned sand lizards!” Higgins broke out, leaping toward the dome.
“Strick!” Stern whispered, his fists taut at his side.
Impotent, helpless, he watched them frog-march Hahnson away to a hastily prepared transparent torture cell in the center of the domed complex. It was elevated, visible to the entire camp, and equipped with sound amplification. The latter fact became immediately apparent when Hahnson was slung into it, by the one vibrating word that passed his lips—the last that ever would.
“Malenchar!” he yelled in Centaurian, at the top of his lungs. A second later, the multisonic transmitters were turned on. The next sound was a scream so tortured, so piercing, it turned Stern’s feet to jelly under him.
“Oh, my God,” Stern groaned, his fists hammering impotently at the flexible strength of the transparent dome that held him prisoner. “Oh, sweet God, not Strick!”
Beside him, Madeline Ruszel stood reciting curses like whispered rosaries as she watched, and knew better than the rest just how potent Hahnson’s agony really was.
“Will it kill him quick, at least, just tell me that!” Stern asked her, his eyes riveted to Hahnson’s shuddering body.
She was a professional. But Strick, like Stern, was an old, old friend and comrade of many battles. “The…uh…the unit,” she said, struggling to keep her voice calm, “has a…a self-repairing mechanism. It injects modified stem cells enclosed in nanobots into his…his body. The nanobots repair the disrupted cells instantly, so that it can…can burn them up and heal them and start all over again. He will, eventually, die,” she choked. “But not for a…long time.”
Both Stern’s fists hit the dome at the same time. “I’ve got to stop it somehow,” Stern husked, hating the Rojoks, hating the camp, hating himself for his programming that had brought them all, that had brought Strick, to this hell. His insides felt empty. “I’ve got to stop it!”
In his mind, he was seeing a husky blond soldier at Tri-Fleet HQ, years before Mangus Lo rose to power, years before there was Ahkmau.
“They call this unit the Strategic Space Command,” Strick Hahnson had told the new Lieutenant J.G., Holt Stern, as the two of them boarded the Royal Legion of Terravega ship Bellatrix. “Brand-spanking-new outfit, this. The elite of the space services. They said they needed a few good spacers, and I’m just about the best there is, so I knew they’d want me,” Hahnson had added with a grin. “Name’s Strick Hahnson, Doctor of Interstellar Medicine, homo sapiens division.”
Stern had grinned, too, at the other’s dry sense of humor, and locked forearms with him. “Holt Stern. I figured they could use some good pilots to go along with the troops, and they don’t come any better than me. I fly by the seat of my pants.”
“So do I, occasionally,” Hahnson had laughed, “depending on how many drinks I’ve had when I start throwing challenges at rival crewmen.”
It had been a beginning. From rescue hops to scientific observation jumps, he and Hahnson and a budding medical legend named Dr. Madeline Ruszel, the only Cularian specialist in the fleet, had protected each other against Rojoks, terrorists, wildlife and other rival crewmen for almost ten years. In all that time, he’d never once had cause to regret his friendship with either one of them. Despite the SSC’s rigid policy of mentally neutering coed personnel in the military, the three had formed into something like a family. It was a close-knit, caring family, any one of whom would gladly have died for the other two.
Stern owed his life to Hahnson a dozen times over. Now he was standing helplessly in a cell on a red dustball of a moon, watching his friend die by inches. And there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. On top of that, he had to live with the knowledge that it was his fault. His fault.
Something wet misted his eyes, made a path down one lean, darkly tanned cheek. He tasted salt in the corner of his parched mouth.
Beside him, he heard a broken sob in a woman’s voice. Beyond the cell, he could see Strick Hahnson’s face contort into something so hideous that it was barely human. And still the screams came, piercing through the agonized silence of the cell complex as every crewman of the Morcai and the Bellatrix watched, and every ear listened.
“Now will you tell me?” the Rojok officer demanded of the imprisoned soldiers. “Will you say where is the Morcai’s commander? Each of you who remains silent is guilty of this officer’s torture! Unless you speak, each of you must bear the guilt of his painful death!”
Holt Stern’s tall frame shuddered with rage. “Don’t you buy it!” he yelled in Terravegan Standard, loud enough that his voice penetrated the cell dome, its speaker enhanced so that the occupants could tell the Rojoks what they wanted to know the minute their spirits broke. It was backfiring on the Rojok commandant, as Stern used the opportunity to keep the men quiet. “Hahnson wouldn’t sacrifice even one life to save his own, and you know it! If you talk, the Rojoks win!”
The humans, who all knew Hahnson, gazed toward Stern for a minute and then began to speak to each other in huddles.
“It is as he says,” Komak said suddenly, his loud voice, in Centaurian, echoing behind Stern. “Hahnson gave the war cry of the Holconcom—Malenchar! Our honor demands that we not betray his sacrifice!” He turned to the Rojok commandant, standing confused at the dome. “You will find no traitors in the ranks of the Morcai Battalion, Rojok! We live or die together. We will not, ever, surrender!” It was an echo of Stern’s own speech, almost verbatim.
The Holconcom made odd sounds in their throats as they turned, angrily, to face the Rojok commandant of the camp. Weak from self-enforced hunger, from lack of water to escape the Rojoks’ drug, torn and ragged and weary, still they fought back in the only way left to them.
“Free-dom,” they began to chant in Terravegan, deliberately drowning out Hahnson’s agonized screams. “Free-dom! Free-dom! Free-dom!”
The humans quickly joined in the chant, gathering with the Centaurians at the part of their cells that faced the platform where Hahnson was shivering with pain. “Free-dom!” they chanted in unison. They stood at attention, defiant and proud, daring the Rojoks to come and get them.
Stern felt a pride that overwhelmed him. “By God, that’s doing it!” he whispered hoarsely, his eyes never leaving Hahnson. “They’re drowning him out. Now maybe the Rojoks will get tired of hearing us and put an end to it. Oh, God, maybe they’ll let him die now. Maybe they’ll let him die!”
Madeline was less hopeful. Tears ran helplessly down her face, but her green eyes blazed up like living flames. “The inhuman sons of bitches,” she bit off coldly. “If we ever get out of here, that commandant is mine. I’ll filet him like a Tiranian goldfish!”
“I’ll lend you a knife,” Stern gritted.
Higgins came up beside Stern and hesitatingly laid a hand on his shoulder, very gently. “We all liked Dr. Hahnson, sir,” he said unsteadily.
Stern drew a deep breath and managed a wan smile for his sandy-haired exec. “Thanks, son.”
“Sir?”
“Yes, Higgins?”
The young first officer of the Bellatrix drew himself up proudly. “I don’t give a damn whether you’re a clone or not,” he said abruptly. “I’ll follow you straight to hell if you want to go there, sir,” he added with a pale grin.
Stern couldn’t manage an answer. There was one hell of a lump in his throat. He nodded his gratitude, turning his tortured gaze back to the cell suspended above the panorama of domes.
“You will not talk!” the Rojok commander growled, as the chant continued. His thin lips twisted into a demoniacal smile. “So you choose to condemn your comrade to death. Very well. Then watch what your refusal has caused. See what you have condemned this poor human to!”
Every eye snapped to Hahnson’s cell. The chanting stopped as the Rojok commandant gave a signal to his underling. At the sign, the Rojok began, slowly, deliberately, to hack away at Hahnson’s sensitive hands with a chasat. A half an inch at a time, he sliced away flesh and tendon and nerve and bone as the husky doctor screamed and screamed and screamed, writhing in agony, kept conscious by the damned alien machine as the chasat whined.
“Damn you!” Stern yelled hoarsely, tears of impotent, unbearable rage streaming down his face. “Damn you to hell and back again! I’ll kill you!”
“His hands,” Madeline ground out. “Dear God, not his hands!” She beat her fists against the dome, as Stern had done earlier. “You cowards!” she raged at the Rojoks. “You cowards!”
Inside the cell, Hahnson was still conscious, his screams hoarse now, as the damned nanobots repaired damaged cells so the disruptors could begin again to rip him apart.
Madeline hit the cell wall one last time, her eyes drowned in tears. With a husky sob, she began to pray aloud, the last resort of the doomed. They were light-years away from the Tri-Fleet. No SSC commander would be reckless enough for a suicide mission like the rescue of the Bellatrix’s crew. The Holconcom were indispensable to the defense of their homeworld, but no one knew where the crew of the Morcai was. She wondered if the old Centaurian emperor would even believe it, if someone told him his crack, elite troops had been captured and tortured.
Her eyes drained tears of absolute anguish. As Hahnson’s voice rose to a nerve-shattering peak of agony, there was a sudden murmur of Rojok voices, followed by quick, frantic activity.
Frowning, Madeline strained to see what was going on. Several Rojoks were moving toward the platform where Hahnson was being held. Even as she turned to ask Stern who it might be, a voice as commanding as Dtimun’s rose above the murmurs. It had the ring of steel hitting rock.
14
“Cleemaah!”
The clear, piercing authority in that harsh Rojok command spread a silence like that of decaying tombs over the complex. The humans and Centaurians, diverted, stopped raging about Hahnson. The Rojok commandant, recognizing the other Rojok, turned white and ran, ran, to the platform where the newcomer was standing beside Hahnson’s cell. The guard who had been conducting the torture suddenly stood at rigid attention with the blood-spattered chasat still clenched in his hand. The camp commandant and his two other guards hastily followed suit.
Stunned at the Rojoks’ unexpected timidity, Stern and Madeline watched a tall, powerfully built Rojok soldier, with many slashes of mesag marks on the sleeves of his black uniform, signal to his bodyguard. He was abruptly flanked by six of the burliest, most military-looking Rojok soldiers Madeline had ever seen. The raw power of the newcomer was evident even in his posture, as though he commanded by his presence alone. His long, straight blond hair gleamed like pure honey in the glaring reddish light of the other two moons, burning like the slit eyes that seemed to glitter even at a distance as they took in the evidence of the prison commandant’s handiwork.
“Most honorable visitor,” the flustered, flushed Rojok commandant began in a nervous, respectful tone.
Before he could finish the sentence, and without a single word, the towering newcomer pulled a chasat from his belt and cut the officer in half with it. Mercilessly, with a savage contempt, his highly polished black knee-high boot lobbed the dead man out of his way. Before the guard who had been torturing Hahnson could react, the same muscular officer had whirled and, in a single graceful motion, separated the murderous guard from his head.
A guttural flow of Rojok followed the snap executions. The tall Rojok gestured toward the cell imperiously. It was opened and Hahnson’s handless, bleeding body was lifted, gently lifted, and carried out of it by two members of the newcomer’s bodyguard.
“By the ten plagues,” the tall Rojok cursed at the two remaining compound guards on the platform who were staring at him with dawning horror, “I will have your heads for this! Lieumek, have these barbarians thrown into their own sonic ovens! Both of them, now!”
Not one of the guards made a single protest. Nor did the b
odyguards. The tall Rojok waited until the order was carried out, standing like a statue as his slit eyes scanned the cells, the dehydrated bodies, the undernourished prisoners crammed together without so much as a blanket.
Another flow of orders followed the first flurry, and Madeline caught something about bringing in fresh water and food and blankets, and gathering medical personnel from among the prisoners to treat the survivors—the rest was urgent, but too fast for her to translate, even with her meager store of Rojok verbs. She could hardly believe her ears.
“What the hell is going on?” Stern asked for all of them, shocked at the staggering pace of unlikely events. “Who is that Rojok?”
“Excuse me,” Komak apologized quietly. “I thought you would have recognized him from battle vids. He is Chacon. He commands the Rojok fleet.”
Chacon! Stern and Madeline exchanged puzzled glances as they watched Rojok medics scattering among the cells to seek out prisoners with any medical experience to help treat the sick and injured. They saw the individual cells being given rations of water and food—quite obviously from the field marshal’s own stores. Madeline began to believe the legend of the Rojok commander whose code of ethics had earned him the respect of the worst of his enemies. He had been known to halt a successful attack long enough to let medics evacuate the dead and wounded of the vanquished. He had never fired on a medical transport.
“Why is he here, though, Komak?” Madeline asked the tall alien beside her. “We’re the enemy, and this camp is Mangus Lo’s pride and joy. Surely he isn’t acting under orders?”
“Hardly,” Komak returned curtly. “Although, it is possible that the Rojok emperor sent him here to identify the commander,” he added uncomfortably. “He alone of all the Rojoks will know the Holconcom commander on sight.”
“Well, that’s lovely,” Madeline said shortly. She ran a hand through her sweaty, dirty auburn hair. “After all we’ve gone through to try to save him. And then to lose Strick…” She swallowed, hard, and turned away, ashamed of letting her tears be obvious. She cleared her throat as she stared through the dome at the flurry of activity. Bodies dressed in red Holconcom uniforms and green Strategic Space Command uniforms were pulled from the sonic ovens while the prisoners watched. “What a waste of lives!” she bit off.
