Hunted lop-4

by James Alan Gardner

  Sam waited a few more moments for me to say something. When I kept my mouth shut, she sighed. "Well, brother, it seems I’ve exhausted your supply of banter. Anyone else want to join the conversation? How about you with the knife — Festina Ramos, right? My father told me you were coming to cause trouble. Do you really think I care whether you slit that man’s throat?"

  "Yes," Festina said in a steely voice. "He’s your son. And your father. And your brother too, for all intents and purposes — he looks the same as your beloved Edward. Quite a trinity in just one package." She slid the scalpel lightly across Mr. Clear Chest’s neck, like she was giving him a dry shave. "And just one carotid artery. Which could very easily get nicked." Festina lifted her head and stared straight at the projected image of Sam’s face. "Don’t consider this an idle threat. It won’t be the first throat I’ve cut." Plebon and Tobit drew in their breaths sharply. Whatever Festina was talking about, both of them must know the story… and their reactions were enough to convince everybody else Festina wasn’t lying.

  "All right," Sam said. "You have a knife to my father-brother-son’s throat. I can match that."

  Suddenly, the vidscreen vanished. In its place, the glass wall went clear and a bright light came on inside the cube — giving us our first view of what the cube really contained. Samantha was there, wearing her dress golds — the showiest uniform a navy diplomat owns.

  To Sam’s left, a gentle perched in front of a control console, monitoring the cube’s flight computer.

  And to Sam’s right was a beautiful queen I recognized as Innocence. All grown-up now, bright glossy yellow, shining with strength.

  Samantha held a gun to Innocence’s head.

  44

  TAKING THE CUBE

  Dade was the first to move. He grabbed the stun-pistol out of Tobit’s holster and fired at Samantha in the cube. Nothing happened. Not to Sam, at least. I felt a tingle as the stunner’s hypersonics bounced off the cube and echoed back… but the effect was so thinned out by the time it returned to the parapet, none of us got knocked for a loop. Nothing more than a scritchy pins-and-needles sensation that passed in a heartbeat.

  Grimacing with disgust, Tobit plucked the pistol from Dade’s hand and set the gun down on the parapet wall.

  "Thanks," Samantha told Dade. "You just demonstrated you can’t touch me." She gave a nasty smile. "Just so everybody knows, Innocence here is the last Mandasar queen in the universe. If she dies, there’ll never be another. You can’t make a new queen without a full year of an old queen’s venom."

  I called, "Are you all right, Innocence?"

  "Quite well, Little Father," she replied in a cold, clear voice. "Do what’s right — don’t worry about me."

  "She’s always saying noble things," Sam laughed, using her free hand to pat Innocence on the shell. "So irrationally heroic. It’s a pity I didn’t find her till last year; if I’d taken her under my wing when she was a girl, I might have brought her round to my way of thinking."

  "You flatter yourself," Innocence said drily.

  "I like flattery," Samantha replied, "and I’m good at it. I rather like your defiance too. If you start getting subtle, then I’ll worry."

  Sam glanced my way. "Innocence has only been with me a few months, but she’s been a tremendous help. My troops fight so devotedly when they think they’re working for Verity’s rightful successor. Of course, I’ve had to make sure the girl doesn’t talk to anyone. Usually I keep her drugged unconscious… with little servomotors to make her body move, and a hidden speaker so my own words come out of her mouth. It’s not a bad system if you keep the room dark, and I’ve passed the word poor Innocence can’t stand bright lights. A result of chemical torture at the hands of an outlaw queen."

  "If Innocence is so valuable," Festina said, "you don’t dare shoot her."

  "She’s useful," Sam agreed, "but keeping her alive is a risk. Always the chance she might escape, or tell the wrong people how I’ve been using her. The sooner I kill her, the safer I’ll be. And why not do it now, when I can blame it on human provocateurs? I’ll put your fingerprints all over the gun, then blackmail the fleet for a few million: ‘Pay up or I’ll tell everyone the last queen was killed by an admiral.’ "

  "The council wouldn’t care," Festina laughed. "They’d shout from the rooftops, MAD DOG RAMOS SHOWS HER TRUE SELF. As for the navy accepting responsibility for anyone but me… you’re looking at expendable Explorers, a woman controlled by alien parasites, and a man who’s never been right in the head. Look up deniability in your favorite dictionary, and you’ll see our pictures."

  As she spoke, Festina got to her feet, lifting the unconscious man with her. She kept her scalpel to his throat by locking her knife arm under his chin. Then she hiked her other hand under his armpit, around his chest, and heaved straight up. Even though she was plenty strong, it was still an awkward maneuver; I could imagine my sister watching and wondering if there was a chance of killing Festina during those moments, while she was struggling and slightly off-balance with the man’s weight.

  I worried about the same thing myself. It seemed crazy for Festina to take such a risk, hoisting the man up… and for what? To make it easier for Sam to see the knife blade glinting in the starlight?

  Then my eye was caught by another tiny glint: a faint reflection, some star shining on the voice control for the clone’s Laughing Larries. Sometime in the past few minutes, Festina must have slipped the controller out of her belt pouch without any of us noticing; when she stood, she’d left it lying on parapet’s stone floor.

  Now, while everyone’s gaze focused up on her hands, and the scalpel, and the exposed throat, her foot nudged forward a bit and sent the controller sliding toward me.

  Um.

  I didn’t have a clue what she wanted me to do… and she couldn’t tell me. Maybe she didn’t have a plan at all — just hoped the king would dream up something.

  Um, um, um. I had to force myself not to chew my knuckle or Sam would know I was trying to think hard.

  Um. Um. Okay. I had an idea.

  Sam had started talking again. "You think the High Council has deniability? Wrong. You all came to Troyen in the Jacaranda… a ship known to run errands for Admiral Vincence. Dad will have a field day with that at the next council session. By the time he’s through, Vincence will be in disgrace, and the rest of the council will trip all over themselves to pay me hush money. But," Sam said, her voice turning cold and hard, "that’s none of your concern — it’s time for ultimatums. Drop your weapons and lie facedown on the ground. If you surrender right away, I might be in such a good mood I’ll let you and Innocence live a while longer."

  Tobit actually laughed. "How stupid do you think we are?"

  I told him, "You may not be stupid. But I am."

  Slowly, carefully, I lowered myself to the parapet’s stone floor. In the process, I palmed the remote control Festina had shoved my way. As I laid myself down on my stomach, the little voice-controlled gizmo ended up right under my mouth.

  The others kept talking — arguing with Sam, wrangling over treachery-proof schemes to exchange Dad’s clone for Innocence — but I ignored them. I was too busy straightening out in my head where my three Larries were: one still up on the parapet, the other two way down near the ground. Sam wouldn’t be able to see the ones below her; not when she was paying so much attention to Festina and the others. I just had to picture where those two Larries were in relation to Sam’s glass cube…

  Taking a deep breath, I whispered orders into the voice control right under my mouth. No way to tell if the Larries were obeying me — I couldn’t see them for the parapet wall, and anyway, my face was pressed tight to the stone beneath me. I couldn’t hear the Larries either, because I’d told them to run as quietly as possible. All I could do was shift the lower two into what I thought was the right position, and tell the other one to get ready for a fancy maneuver.

  Then: up, up, up.

  I scrambled to my feet fast…
and maybe my movement was enough to distract Sam from seeing the two gold cannonballs shooting up from ground level. They smashed the bottom of the glass cube with a thunderous crunch, both striking on the same side edge — like grabbing one side of a fish tank and yanking up with all your strength. The cube lurched and rolled, knocked over ninety degrees onto its side. For an instant, Sam and Innocence became a jumble of flailing arms, legs, and claws; then both dropped to the new bottom of the cube, Sam falling hard, Innocence falling harder.

  Call it a two-story drop: a long way when you’re too surprised to twist into a good landing position.

  The impact was enough to knock the wind out of both of them. I couldn’t see if Sam had held onto her gun, but it didn’t matter: a human could recover faster from that fall than an alien who weighed as much as an elephant. Innocence would survive — queens are tough — but she’d be in no shape to stop Sam from retrieving the gun and using it at point-blank range.

  So I had to get inside the cube before that happened.

  The two Larries that had smashed into the cube were out of the picture; one had hit so hard it embedded itself into the cracked glass, while the other was showering down onto the ground in a hail of broken pieces. That gave me one Larry left — the one waiting on the parapet walk, ready and raring to travel.

  I ran and jumped, shouting into the remote control, "Go!"

  Good thing I’d given instructions to the Larry before I threw myself on top of it — the moment I leapt on board, I was whirling so fast I could barely think. Scrabbling to hold on, I dug both hands into flechette slits. Even then, I nearly spun off before we reached the upended cube; if the ride had been a single second longer, I wouldn’t have made it.

  I hung on just long enough for the Larry to dump me in the middle of what was now the cube’s top surface. Too dizzy to move, I just lay on the glass while the Larry carried on with the orders I’d given: flying straight over my head and unleashing every last flechette in its magazines.

  Back on the parapet, Festina shouted "Get down, get down!" But I’d told the Larry to make sure no shots got as far as the castle. Everything was aimed at the cube… with me lying in the middle, at the calm eye of the razor hurricane.

  Remember how crossbow arrows hadn’t even scratched the glass surface? High-velocity steel flechettes were a whole other story.

  Thank heavens it wasn’t real glass; things got nasty enough with blunt chips of plastic flying in all directions. I wrapped my arms around my head as the Larry sliced a ragged ring around me — deeper and deeper into the cube’s wall, a circumference of shredded plastic, like a buzz saw cutting out a hole in a patch of ice… till I felt something shift under me and shouted, "Stop!" into the remote control. For a heartbeat I stayed lying there, on an untouched circle of glass surrounded by a slashed area cut almost all the way through. Then my weight finished the job: with a noise halfway between a rip and a crack, my whole chunk of wall broke free and plunged, like a glass plate with me in the middle. I tucked, rolled, and kicked — the tuck and roll to save myself with a breakfall, the kick to aim the huge chunk of plummeting glass straight at Sam.

  It was quiet as I got to my feet — no sound but the whistle of the Larry hovering far overhead. The glass walls around me cut off almost all noise from the outside world.

  The cube was still flying, and stable as stone underfoot: just as happy to float on its side as right way up. That was a lucky break — I didn’t know how to operate this thing, and the pilot hadn’t been wearing any safety straps when the cube tipped. She’d fallen almost as heavily as Innocence, and gentles aren’t built to take damage. Her body lay crumpled at the far end of the cube, her shell split wide open all along the spine. Puffy brown skin pushed up through the break, the way meat sometimes does when you crack open a lobster. I didn’t know if she was alive or dead, but I concentrated a moment and produced the worker pheromone that’s supposed to dull pain. Maybe it would help. Sam groaned. She lay under the slab of heavy glass like a lab specimen on display. At the last second she must have seen the slab coming, because she’d thrown up her arms to protect her face.

  It may have helped her face, but it sure didn’t help her arms.

  I tried to heave the glass off her, but it was way too heavy to lift — several hundred kilos at least. It took all my strength just to slide it to one side; I tried not to hurt Sam again, but I could see there wasn’t much left to hurt.

  Sam’s eyes flickered open. "Edward?" she whispered.

  "Yes."

  "I think you got me."

  "You were going to kill Innocence."

  "Was I?" She let her head slump, as if holding it up took too much effort. "How do you know Innocence wasn’t in cahoots with me all along? My troops will tell you she’s been giving them orders for the past few months."

  "But you drugged her… and rigged her up so your words came out of her mouth."

  "That’s what I said," Sam whispered. "But how can you know if it’s true? I could’ve been lying."

  "Or you could be lying now. One last chance for you to cause trouble."

  "Always a possibility." She coughed… very lightly, but a bead of blood dribbled out the side of her mouth. "Neither of us got very good brain chemicals, did we? Even now, I’m trying to think of ways to trick you into giving me the gun." "Who would you shoot?" I asked. "Me? Innocence? Yourself?"

  "Yes," she said, with a weak grin. "In that order."

  She coughed again. The sound had a choking gurgle to it. "Kiss me," she whispered. "Kiss me good night."

  I wondered if she had some hidden weapon she could kill me with if I got close, or perhaps some suicide pill she’d pop into my mouth instead of her own. No sign of anything like that; no smell either. She must have guessed what I was thinking, because she said, "Do you really think I’m that evil?"

  "Yes."

  "You’re right. But kiss me anyway."

  I knelt beside her and leaned forward, only intending a little peck on the cheek. But she turned her head at the last moment to meet my lips with hers, and she reached up to hold me — hold me with her crushed broken arms. It must have hurt hideously but she didn’t even wince. For a long moment, there was only her mouth pressed desperately against mine, my sad, scared sister…

  Then she became the second woman to die kissing me. I’d barely known either of them.

  45

  FINDING INNOCENCE

  Something went CLONK above my head. Looking up, I saw Festina had heaved out a grapnel attached to a rope and caught it on the hole in the cube’s glass. As usual, the Explorer Corps had come prepared for any contingency… even for snagging a floating cube and hauling it closer to the palace. It took everybody up there to get the cube moving — all five Mandasars as well as the Explorers — but centimeter by centimeter, they began dragging me in.

  I couldn’t help them, so I went to check on Innocence. The glass slab had missed her, but she’d hit real hard when the cube rolled. All eight of her legs looked broken and a tiny ooze of blood had begun seeping through a crack in her tail. Still, she was breathing pretty evenly. Like I said, queens are tough.

  Her eyes were shut as I approached… but the moment I came within grabbing range, the eyes snapped open and one of her front claws whipped toward me, I dodged and slapped it aside, which shows how badly the fall had hurt her — under normal conditions, humans just aren’t strong enough to block a queen’s pincer.

  Then again, maybe Innocence had pulled her attack at the last instant.

  "My apologies, Little Father," she said in a soft voice, "but I didn’t know it was you. You smell exactly like your sister." "My sister’s dead," I told her.

  "Good. Then you won’t smell alike much longer."

  Um.

  "How badly are you hurt?" I asked.

  "I’ll live," Innocence replied. "I hope."

  "Don’t worry," I told her, "there are good doctors in the palace infirmary…"

  "Later," Innocence said. "First, I have t
o call off Samantha’s troops."

  "Oh. Right."

  I thought that would be an easy job, considering we were in the command cube with that fancy sound system for talking long-distance; but we hadn’t heard a peep from outside since I’d dropped in. Worried, I looked through the glass wall, trying to see the parabolic dish… but the only bit left was the dish’s metal support stand. The rest had been shredded to shrapnel by a barrage of razor flechettes.

  Oops.

  Still, there must be some other way for Innocence to speak to the Black Army — maybe the palace had working broadcast systems. Even just a big megaphone.

  Except that Sam’s soldiers were used to hearing Sam’s voice come out of Innocence’s mouth. If Innocence spoke in her normal voice, her troops would think it was a trick… that we’d captured their beloved queen and were projecting our own words through her. The black warriors would go screamingly berserk, killing everybody in the palace till Innocence was "rescued."

  Oops again.

  With a thud, the glass cube bumped against the palace wall. Immediately, Festina hopped across from the parapet; I could see the soles of her boots walking cautiously across the glass ceiling above me. "Are you all right?" she shouted down.

  "Some are, some aren’t," I answered… not looking toward my sister. "Our biggest problem now is the Black Army," I said. "No way to call them off."

  "Just fucking wonderful," Festina muttered. "Can we use this cube to get the hell out of here?"

  "Maybe — it’s still in the air. Do we have any decent pilots?"

  Festina turned and yelled, "Tobit! Get your ass over here."

  His gravelly voice shouted back, "What now?"

  "You like flying alien aircraft," Festina said. "See what you can do with this one."

  "Oh goody," he grumbled. "My favorite type of airplane: anti-aerodynamic and totally made of glass. Who the hell keeps building these things?"