Pawn

by Timothy Zahn

  “No,” Bungie said flatly. “Plato sees me like this, and it’s all over. He’ll weld the damn door shut or something. You just douse me with that healing goo, and we’ll call it a day.”

  “And then what?” Sam countered. “You just waltz in at breakfast tomorrow like nothing happened? That salve’s good, but it’s not that good. Especially not with serious muscle damage like this. If it had been bullets instead of arrows you’d have bled to death half an hour ago.”

  “Yeah, getting shot was lucky, all right,” Bungie said.

  “I’m serious,” Sam insisted. “You’re going to have trouble walking for at least a week, and if you don’t take it easy you might end up with a permanent limp.”

  “So I’ll just hang out here for a few days,” Bungie assured him. “Nicole can bring me food bars.” He tapped one of the pipes behind him. “I’ve got plenty of water.”

  “And how is she supposed to explain your disappearing act to Plato?”

  “She doesn’t have to explain anything,” Bungie said. “I disappeared, and she doesn’t know where I am.”

  “He’ll never believe that.”

  “So what?” Bungie said. “What’s he gonna do, lock one of his precious Sibyls in her room until she talks? Not a chance. All he can do is yell and stomp, and she can handle that.”

  Sam looked up at Nicole. “Nicole?”

  Once again, the idea of turning Bungie over to Plato flicked across Nicole’s mind. Once again, she pushed it firmly away. For all the trouble Bungie had put her through, he was still her only connection back to her old life.

  More importantly, even if Plato locked him up for a while, he would eventually be back out with the work teams. Bungie walking free and clear and looking for payback against a betrayer wasn’t something Nicole wanted to face.

  And he was right about Plato probably not punishing her for his disappearance. One of the eight Sibyls had gotten sick a week ago, and Plato had had to frantically shuffle Nicole and the other six around on double duty to cover for her until she was well enough to go back to work.

  He would be furious at Bungie’s disappearance. But as long as Nicole stuck to her story, there wasn’t much he could do. “It’s worth a try,” she told Sam.

  The doctor shook his head. “You’re both crazy,” he declared.

  “Hey, you want to come with us when we leave this damn place?” Bungie asked pointedly. “If you do—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I got it,” Sam interrupted, pulling a hypodermic injector from the bag. “Shut up, and hold still.”

  As he’d warned, the anesthetic was only partially effective, and Nicole found herself twitching with Bungie’s every grunt and groan. But the doctor knew what he was doing. One by one, he cut each of the arrows near the exit wound, then carefully worked the shafts back out through the skin and muscle. Each of the wounds erupted in fresh blood as the arrow plugging it was removed, but Sam had healing salve and bandages ready. In the end, Bungie lost a lot less blood than Nicole had expected.

  Finally, after nearly two hours, it was finished.

  “Here are some painkillers,” Sam said, handing Bungie a small bottle as he stowed his gear back into the bag. “You’re going to hurt like hell when the topicals wear off. Don’t take more than one every twelve hours. I’ll come back tomorrow night and check on you.”

  “Don’t bother,” Bungie said, peering closely at the bottle’s label and then slipping it into a pocket. “Last thing I want is a parade going back and forth for Plato to follow. If I need you, I’ll send Nicole.”

  “Fine,” Sam said. “Whatever. Speaking of parades, I realize a red blood trail on red flooring isn’t all that obvious, but you should still do something about that.”

  “Yeah.” Bungie looked at Nicole. “I think he means you.”

  Nicole suppressed a sigh. He could have said something about this while she was just standing around watching him pulling out arrows. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “You can use these,” Sam said, handing her a packet of small paper towels. “They’re specially treated to absorb blood. Just be sure to get everything.” He closed his bag and stood up. “And if Plato finds out about it—”

  “I threatened to beat you up,” Bungie said impatiently. “Now get lost.”

  “You’re welcome.” With one final look at Nicole, Sam headed off down the hall.

  “You’d better get busy with the blood,” Bungie told Nicole, carefully shifting around into a more or less lying position. “And then get me some food bars, huh?”

  There’d been times over the years when Nicole had had to scrub bloodstains from carpets and clothing, and she knew what a long, excruciating chore it could be. To her relieved surprise, cleaning up Bungie’s blood trail was nothing like that. Between the nonabsorbent characteristics of the red flooring and the highly absorbent liquid in Sam’s cleaning towels, a single swipe was enough to completely remove the dribblings of blood. The whole job, all the way back to the testing arena, took barely fifteen minutes.

  She’d finished with the floor, and was checking the door itself for stray bloodstains, when she heard footsteps.

  She froze, her heart suddenly pounding. From the rhythm of the steps it sounded like there were at least two people coming toward her. The long portside hallway was still empty, which meant the footsteps had to be coming from one of the cross-corridors.

  She hissed between her teeth, trying desperately to think. If that was Plato and someone else, probably Carp or Kahkitah, the last thing she wanted was to get caught right here outside the testing arena door. She had to find somewhere to hide, and fast.

  Only there wasn’t any such place. Heading down the hallway toward the rear of the ship and the hive would take her straight across every one of the cross-corridors, and even in the relative darkness Plato would have to be blind to miss her. Taking the long hallway the other direction would be even more useless. As Bungie had pointed out on their first visit, that end of the hallway dead-ended fifty yards away, and there were no rooms along it where she could take refuge.

  But if she went all the way to the end, lay flat on the floor, and held perfectly still, it was just barely possible that a quick look would miss her.

  The footsteps were getting closer. A slim chance, she decided, was better than none. Stuffing the bloody towels inside her jumpsuit, she slipped around the curved wall of the arena and headed as quickly and quietly as she could down the hallway.

  She was maybe twenty yards in, wondering how far into the gloom would be far enough, when the footsteps abruptly stopped. “You,” a voice called from behind her. “Stop.”

  Nicole froze, her heart suddenly thudding even harder. That wasn’t Plato or Carp, or anyone else she’d met aboard the Fyrantha.

  Slowly, carefully, she turned around.

  The other was standing in the center of the hallway near the arena door: vaguely human-shaped, but taller and wider than most people. It was taller even than Kahkitah, with no more than six inches between the top of its head and the hallway ceiling. Its entire body glistened in the dim light—covered with shiny metal, or maybe even made of it. Its legs were thick and flared outward into feet that were more like big round cones than actual feet, sort of like the hairy legs and hooves of Clydesdale horses. The thing had no face that she could see, only a ribbed and perforated plate that reminded her of an old-style knight’s helmet.

  And that face—or that lack of face—was pointed squarely at her. “Yes?” she called back timidly.

  The figure seemed to think about it. Then, it lifted an arm and beckoned to her. “Come.”

  Nicole’s legs were trembling with fear, her whole body screaming at her to turn and run away as fast as she could.

  But there was nowhere to run. The only door that was even within reach was the big one that led into the arena, and even that wasn’t really an option. Not with the metal man standing almost close enough to lean over and touch it.

  Unless Nicole
could get him to move the wrong way, maybe with a feinted attempt to get around him, then get the reset code punched in and the door open before he could change direction and come toward her. Something that big and heavy-looking had to also be slow and ponderous, especially with those ridiculous feet. With enough of a head start, surely she could outrun or outmaneuver it.

  “Come,” it ordered again.

  With an effort, Nicole forced her feet to start moving. On the other hand, the arena was home to people with bows and arrows and no hesitation about using them. Maybe it would be better to forget the feint and just try to duck past the figure and make a run for it. If she could get to the next cross-corridor, and if the metal man was as slow as she hoped, she might be able to lose it in the maze of hallways and rooms.

  Unless it was armed.

  Swallowing, she studied the figure’s hands and hips as she approached, looking for signs of a gun or other weapon. There didn’t seem to be anything there, but all the glinting from the metal made it hard to see details. The figure turned its head and shifted position—

  Nicole caught her breath, her feet grinding to a halt so fast that she nearly fell on her face. Stretching out from the figure’s back was another whole section of body, also covered with metal. This part was long and thick like a horse’s, and had a second pair of thick legs with the same conical ankles and feet at the rear.

  The thing facing her wasn’t just a big man. It was a nightmare straight out of her grandmother’s tattered Greek mythology book.

  The thing was a centaur.

  “Come,” the centaur said. It cocked its head. “Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you.”

  Once again, Nicole’s body screamed for her to do something—anything—that would get her away from the impossible creature standing before her. Once again, there was nothing she could do. Fighting back sudden tears of fear and helplessness, she resumed walking.

  She made it to within ten feet of the centaur, decided that was close enough, and stopped. “What do you want?” she asked, fighting to keep her voice steady.

  There was another pause. Nicole clenched her hands into fists at her sides, her fear briefly punctuated by a flash of anger. Some of Trake’s friends liked playing this same silent-stare game, probably figuring it made them look like the boss in some overblown gangster movie. To her, it just made them look like pretentious half-wits. For a huge armored man-horse to pull that same trick was just plain stupid—

  “You were inside the testing arena tonight,” the centaur said.

  —and with a sudden creepy flash of belated insight, Nicole suddenly understood. The centaur wasn’t playing games. He was simply doing what Nicole and everyone else aboard the Fyrantha did every day: waiting for someone’s alien speech to be translated before replying.

  What had thrown off Nicole’s perception was that she wasn’t hearing his own form of speech first, before her translator kicked in and gave it to her in English. Either his voice wasn’t audible to human ears, or else his helmet was handling both ends of the translation.

  And with that, suddenly, the creature somehow seemed less scary. He might be big and alien and covered in metal armor, but he couldn’t get through a simple conversation without a translator any more than she could. “Yes, I was,” she acknowledged. “A friend and I both went in.”

  A pause—“We were informed humans don’t fight,” he said. “Why then did you go into a field of battle?”

  Nicole felt her lip twitch. Plato’s ominous warning about not fighting flashed to mind, along with his warning of what would happen if anyone strayed across that line. “May I ask who you are?” she asked, stalling for time. “Names are important to us.”

  There was the usual pause—“My name is Fievj,” the centaur said. “I’m of the clan and the people of the Lillilli.”

  “I’m Nicole,” Nicole said. “I’m a human. But I guess you knew that. Were you in the arena? Because the only person I saw in there didn’t look anything like you.” She grimaced as something that hadn’t sunk in at the time suddenly struck her. The figure had been so still … “In fact, I’m not even sure he was alive.”

  “He wasn’t,” Fievj confirmed calmly. “He had died in battle earlier in the day. The Micawnwi propped him against a tree as a decoy. They hoped to lure the Cluufe defenders into an attack, thus betraying their archers’ positions.”

  Nicole stared at him, a chill running up her spine. The idea itself was creepy enough, but Fievj’s cold-blooded description made it even creepier. “Are you one of the—that first group you said?” she asked. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember the name.”

  “The Micawnwi?” Fievj waved a hand. “No. Neither am I of the Cluufe. I’m an observer, watching their battle from afar.” He cocked his head to the side. “You do not fight, either, or so we’ve been told. Yet your companion risked his life to steal a weapon from the arena. Why?”

  “He didn’t know he was risking his life,” Nicole told him. The moment of distraction had passed, but it had bought her enough time to come up with a story. It wasn’t brilliant, but it was at least plausible. Hopefully, that would be good enough. “He didn’t know it was a weapon, either,” she continued. “You see, there are a lot of times when we have to open whole sections of wall to get to the machinery behind them, and sometimes the locks that are supposed to hold those sections against the ceiling don’t work like they’re supposed to. Bungie saw the pole and thought we could use it when we needed something to prop up one of those sections.”

  She held her breath as her explanation worked its way through Fievj’s translator. “What about your Ghorf?” the centaur asked. “He was brought to the Fyrantha for precisely that reason. Isn’t he strong enough to hold up those wall sections?”

  “Oh, definitely,” Nicole assured him. She’d seen Kahkitah do it, too, once pressing a wall section against the ceiling for two straight hours. “But sometimes we’re working two jobs at the same time, and if both sets of locks are broken we’re kind of stuck. Anyway, like I said, Bungie saw the spear-axe thing and figured it might work.” She shrugged. “He didn’t count on getting shot at.”

  The pause this time seemed much longer than any of the previous ones. Nicole stood as still as she could, feeling fresh sweat breaking out on the back of her neck. Maybe Fievj’s translator was just taking its time.

  Or maybe the centaur was doing some hard thinking. That was never good.

  “Why did he go into the arena the first time?” Fievj asked.

  “That was mostly by accident,” Nicole said. “We were working on the lock and the door popped open. We’d never seen anything like it before on the ship, and we wanted to look around.”

  A shorter pause—“Yet when the battle began, he moved into danger instead of away from it.”

  “I know,” Nicole said, trying for a mix of rueful and exasperated. She had no idea whether Fievj could pick up on her tone of voice, but better to be safe than sorry. “He told me afterward that he panicked and got himself turned around. He was mostly crawling with his eyes closed—didn’t realize he wasn’t heading toward the door. If Kahkitah hadn’t gone in and grabbed him, I don’t know what would have happened.”

  “It might have been instructive.”

  Nicole frowned. That was an odd comment. “Or he might have been killed.”

  “Perhaps. Why did you go inside this second time?”

  Nicole hesitated. This part of her story was going to sound a lot less plausible than the excuse she’d spun to him for Bungie. But it was all she could come up with on the fly. “The first time I was inside people were shooting into the bushes near the door,” she explained. “When we went in tonight, I wanted to see how much they’d been hurt, and if I could do anything to fix them.”

  Another too-long pause. Fievj was doing way too much thinking tonight. “You wanted to fix the bushes?” he asked, sounding incredulous.

  When a lie was teetering on the edge, sometimes the only way to get through it was to say it
again louder. “What’s wrong with that?” she countered. “I like plants. They’re part of nature, and we humans like nature. I used to keep plants in a box at my home, and I took them with me whenever I had to move.” She waved toward the arena. “I’d go in there every day if I could. And if there weren’t always people shooting at each other.”

  “The other humans have expressed no interest in such things,” Fievj said.

  “Most of them probably don’t even know about it,” Nicole said. If repeating the lie didn’t do the trick, the next best strategy was to try to change the subject. “What’s all that shooting about, anyway? Is it a school? Are they training for a war or something?”

  “Where’s your injured companion?” Fievj asked. “He needs medical attention, does he not?”

  Carefully, Nicole let out the breath she’d been holding. Apparently, Fievj knew the change-the-subject ploy, too. And he didn’t want to talk about what Nicole had seen. Which was totally fine with her, as long as it got her out of here. “The doctor’s already treated him,” she said. “He said he’ll be fine once he’s had some rest.”

  Fievj seemed to straighten up. “Then I take my leave,” he said. “Perhaps someday I shall speak to him in person.”

  “Maybe,” Nicole said, frowning. Change the subject and then cut the questioning short?

  Not that she wasn’t just as happy to see him go. But there was something here that felt wrong. “Will I see you again?” she asked.

  Fievj took a step backward, the movement of his four legs reminding Nicole more of a big dog than of a horse. “We shall meet again,” he confirmed. Without waiting for a response, he walked past the arena door and headed down the cross-corridor. Nicole strained her ears, listening as his four feet thud-thudded along the dark red flooring and faded into silence.

  She took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. There was no way to know if he’d completely bought her story, but he’d apparently bought it enough to at least put an end to the questioning. She took another deep breath—

  Something touched her shoulder.