Knight

by Timothy Zahn

  The slug paused. For a moment it didn’t move. Then, it moved forward a few inches, running its front edge over the pile. Another pause, and then it resumed its turn.

  And as that section of ground came into view, Nicole saw that the food was gone.

  “You see that?” Nicole said, pointing at the ground. “And you see that?” she added as the slug stopped its rotation and started back the other way, as if searching for any food it might have missed. “It’s not trying to destroy your food dispensers. It’s just hungry.”

  “Yes, I see,” the leader said. “But the point is that, once we trap them this way, we won’t go hungry.”

  Nicole glared at him. “You—Shooter—what’s your name?”

  Shooter looked at the leader. “My name?” he prompted.

  The leader seemed to glare. “Aiden,” he said.

  Shooter—Aiden—looked back at Nicole, and it seemed to her that he stood a little taller. “I am Aiden,” he said.

  “Nice to meet you, Aiden,” she said. “Go to the nearest dispenser and bring back all the food you can carry. And you”—she jabbed a finger at one of the others—“you go with him. Same orders.”

  “You cannot—” the leader began.

  “You: go,” Nicole said to Aiden. “You: shut up,” she added to the leader. “You want to know how to trap them or not?”

  The leader looked at the slug, still hemmed in. He looked at Nicole as if he very much wanted to say something. Nicole folded her arms across her chest and looked straight back at him, and he remained silent.

  It took Aiden and the other Ejbof less than five minutes. From the direction they returned from, Nicole guessed they’d gone to the dispenser that the slug had also been aiming for. “Go ahead,” Nicole said, gesturing to the slug. “Feed it.”

  The second Ejbof looked inquiringly at the leader. But Aiden didn’t even hesitate. Stepping boldly to the paintball gun fence, he dribbled the nuggets off his palm and fingers the way Nicole had done.

  The slug was faster on the uptake this time, swinging immediately around to the growing pile. “More,” Nicole said. “Make piles on either side of its nose.”

  Aiden obeyed. The slug moved back and forth, eating one pile completely down to the ground before turning back to the next. Aiden ran out of food, and at Nicole’s order the other Ejbof added his collection to the piles.

  Finally, the slug slowed its movements, then stopped completely. “There,” Nicole said. “Congratulations. You’ve trapped it.”

  “But we’d already trapped it,” the leader said, sounding completely lost.

  “Really?” Stepping to the ring, Nicole pulled out the paintball gun directly in front of the slug.

  It made no move to escape. It didn’t move at all, in fact, as Nicole pulled all the rest of the guns out of the ring and tossed them back to their owners. “You gave it what it wanted,” she said quietly. “No; what it needed. Keep it fed, and it won’t attack the dispensers anymore. Do the same thing with the others, and you’ve won your little war.”

  “I don’t think that’s what the Shipmasters meant for us to do,” the leader protested.

  “Do I look like I care?” Nicole countered. “You have food, they have food, and they’re not attacking. That’s as good a win as it gets.”

  “We shall see what they say,” the leader said, still sounding doubtful.

  “I guess you will,” Nicole said. “And I need to go.”

  “How can we thank you, Sibyl?” Aiden asked.

  “I don’t…” She paused, eyeing the paintball guns as a sudden thought struck her. The Shipmasters and the Q1 Wisps were out to get her. But they seemed to operate on sight instead of hearing or smell or something else.

  What would happen if she put a smear of yellow paint across a Wisp’s face?

  All sorts of things might happen, none of them good. The paint might injure the Wisp, or blind it, or even kill it. The very act of firing a weapon, even just a paintball gun, might be all the proof Fievj needed to convince him that humans would make great war slaves.

  But she had to risk it. She and Ushkai held control over barely a quarter of the Fyrantha, and if the Shipmasters got rid of her she had no idea whether Ushkai could hold on to that part alone. Anyway, Fievj had already seen her use the greenfire weapon in the Q4 arena, and was at least partly convinced she wasn’t a typical human. Seeing her shoot a paintball gun probably wouldn’t change any of his opinions one way or the other.

  Most important, Nicole didn’t want to die.

  That was really the bottom line here. She could scheme and plot and rationalize all she liked, but the cold hard truth was that she didn’t want a Wisp to pick her up and throw her down a heat-transfer duct to her death. Whatever she had to do to keep that from happening, she’d do it.

  Even to the point of sacrificing her world?

  She winced. She’d been contemptuous of Allyce’s wish to return to her husband. She’d had nothing but contempt for Bungie and Sam and their single-minded determination to get back to their lives.

  Was she really any better than they were?

  She didn’t have an answer. Hopefully, it wouldn’t come to a point where she needed one.

  If it did, she could only hope she would make the right decision.

  “Yes,” she said to Aiden. “I need one of your paintball guns.”

  “Of course,” he said, handing her his.

  “Thanks,” she said, slinging it over her shoulder by its strap. “Oh, wait. You said earlier you needed my help with something else. What was that?”

  “You’ve already done it,” Aiden said, again drawing up to his full height. “You have redeemed for me my name.”

  “Ah,” Nicole said. If only it was always that simple. “You’re welcome. Good luck, and don’t forget to keep feeding them. Everybody gets grumpy when they’re hungry.”

  * * *

  Earlier, Nicole hadn’t been up to heading all the way back to Q4 and the Caretaker. Now, after her nap, it still wasn’t fun, but it was at least possible.

  She might as well have saved herself the trip.

  “The drug may be administered any way you wish,” Ushkai said helpfully. “It may be injected or swallowed, or the aroma may be inhaled. The effects will be the same.”

  “Yeah, great,” Nicole growled. “The instructions could have mentioned that.”

  “They did,” he said. “You merely had to read with understanding.”

  Nicole glared at him. Trake had been like that, too, minus the flowery language. He liked to hide information so that people would have to ask. That let him not only make them come to him, but gave him the chance to mock the fact they hadn’t seen the answer the first time.

  She always figured Trake did it because he liked watching people flounder and grovel. Why the ship’s Caretaker did it she couldn’t guess.

  Though now that she thought about it, the computers at her school had been a little like that, too.

  “You intend to make them incapable of fighting, then?”

  So Ushkai wouldn’t offer any answers, but he was fine with asking useless questions. “We’ve already been through this,” she reminded him.

  She frowned. Or was it useless? Her mind flashed back to their last meeting and her sense that there was a question he wanted her to ask … “Or do you have a better idea?”

  Again, there was that look. But no answer. Apparently, that wasn’t the right question. “You are the Fyrantha’s Protector,” was all he said.

  “Yeah, I got that,” Nicole said. The hell with this. She didn’t have time to stand around playing Twenty Questions. “Okay, one more thing. Do you have a”—she paused, trying to remember what Jeff had called it—“a schematic of the Q1 arena area?”

  “The Fyrantha can guide you where you wish to go.”

  “If I’d wanted the Fyrantha to guide me I’d have said so,” Nicole growled. “I want something I can look at and show other people.”

  For a moment Us
hkai just stared at her. Nicole stared back, a creepy feeling running up her back. It was almost like he was having a quiet conversation with someone.

  The rest of the ship, maybe? Maybe even the part Fievj and the Shipmasters had under their control?

  For a second she wondered if she should tell Ushkai to forget it and just drop the whole idea. But it wasn’t like Fievj didn’t already know she’d be coming back to Q1. Besides, even if one of the Shipmasters was listening in on the conversation it didn’t tell him what she was planning.

  “You have your pad?” Ushkai asked.

  “Yes,” Nicole said, pulling it out.

  “Go to the console and—”

  “I already told you I don’t want to use the inhaler.”

  “And lay it down on the blue glow.”

  Nicole frowned. There hadn’t been any blue glow on the console the last time she was here. “Okay,” she said cautiously, watching Ushkai out of the corner of her eye as she walked to the console.

  To find that there was indeed a soft blue light coming from a flat part on top, a section that had looked like normal metal the last time she’d seen it. Pursing her lips, she laid the pad down on the glow.

  For a moment, the blue light pulsed gently, just visible around the pad’s edge. Then, the light turned bright green. “Pick it up,” Ushkai said.

  Nicole did so, and the green light disappeared. She punched for the pad’s data records.

  There they were, stacked right above the carefully scrawled instructions Kahkitah had written down for making Setting Sun: ten pages of diagrams of the Q1 arena, covering the arena itself, the surrounding decks, plus a couple of extra decks above and below it.

  “Will that be sufficient?”

  Nicole pulled up the deck she wanted and peered at it, a small part of her brain noting the fact that a few months ago she would have been completely overwhelmed by something this complicated. Now, after watching Jeff and the others trace through dozens and dozens of wiring layouts, she knew how to break things like this into little pieces.

  There it was, exactly where she’d expected it.

  “Yes,” she told Ushkai. “This will do just fine.”

  “Then go. Protector.”

  She looked up at him again. There was still that feeling that he was expecting something else from her.

  But she was on a tight schedule right now. Later, maybe, she’d have time to figure out what was going on here. “Yeah,” she said. “Thanks.”

  A few minutes later, she was back in Q2. So far she’d tried coming in right beside the Q1 arena and from way above it. Fievj had seen both, and he’d be ready for her to try one or the other of them again.

  This time, maybe she could do something he absolutely wouldn’t expect.

  And if he did, and if he or the Wisps got in her way …

  Nicole winced, freshly aware of the weight of the paintball gun slung over her shoulder. If anyone of them got in her way, she would do whatever she had to.

  fifteen

  She started again from the top of the ship, having a Q2 Wisp carry her across the heat duct to Q1. This time, though, she crossed much farther back from the arena, with the goal to come up on it from behind.

  And not only from behind, but through one of the horizontal air vent levels.

  She’d heard about them from the Q4 Wisps when they were first showing her around that part of the ship. But there was so much else for her to see and learn she’d never bothered to figure out how to get to them. Now, with the Q1 schematics in hand, it was time to see how useful they would be.

  The vents were similar to the vertical heat-transfer ducts she used to get up and down, with the same idea of mixing air through the whole ship, except that these were aimed front and back instead of up and down. Unlike the vertical ducts, though, the horizontal ones were narrow and low ceilinged, too small for the Wisps to travel through.

  Which, considering the situation in Q1, was a definite plus. As Nicole worked open one of the access covers and dropped into the vent she wished she’d thought of this sooner. It would have made her last couple of trips to Q1 so much easier.

  It took her fifty feet to realize that easier was the completely wrong word for this.

  It wasn’t just the narrowness of the tunnel, or the low ceiling, or the bits of equipment and occasional thick cable that jutted out into her path at odd places. She’d been smart or lucky enough to pick one of the tunnels where the wind was blowing at her back, pushing her toward the arena, instead of directly into her face, which would have made the trip almost impossible. But even there, the extra wind assist often betrayed her as it created eddies around some of the protruding equipment that jostled her around, sometimes right into something solid that she’d been trying to avoid. The vent was much darker than the rest of the ship, too, with only a few lights spaced along the ceiling. There were also none of the segment or level markings that regular corridors had to tell her where she was.

  Worst of all, she realized that she wasn’t any safer here than she was anywhere else. While the Wisps couldn’t get through the vent, there were plenty of access covers spaced along the ceiling that they could open whenever they wanted to. Once they did that, all they would have to do was reach down and grab her as she passed by. Even if she saw that coming in time to keep away, their next move would be to simply open the two covers on either side of her, trapping her between them. Once they’d done that, they could just sit and wait until she either surrendered or starved.

  Still, even if Fievj caught on afterward, this should be the last time she needed to sneak into the Q1 arena. As long as he didn’t spot this back door until she was inside, she should be all right. Assuming, of course, that once she was there she could dodge the Wisps long enough to get this over with.

  According to the schematic, the vent she was in was supposed to end in a T-junction at the edge of the arena, branching off to both sides. There was also supposed to be a service door into the arena at that junction. Unfortunately, the schematic had been a little vague on how big the door was. If it wasn’t big enough for her to get through, she would have to come back up into the regular corridor and dodge Wisps while she figured out something else.

  The end of the vent and the service door were visible a hundred feet ahead when she began to hear the sound of rushing water.

  She picked up her pace. As best as she could figure, the pipes carrying the water into the river were directly below her. Depending on how narrow the river was at that point, she should hopefully be able to leap across to either Jeff’s or Bungie’s side.

  The hatch was much smaller than a regular door, but to her relief it was more than big enough for her to get through. She opened it—it swung outward into the arena—and leaned cautiously out.

  And with the water now thundering in her ears she discovered to her dismay that she’d miscalculated.

  The river was indeed directly below her, close enough for the spray to reach her hands and face. But it wasn’t the three or four feet across that she’d hoped for, with the riverbanks within easy jumping distance. Instead, it was a good twenty feet across, wider even than the section Duncan and Kahkitah had helped her across earlier, and flowing nearly as fast as it was farther down.

  Worse, there were no pathways along the wall to either side: no ledges, stairways, or even handholds. Clearly, no one had ever expected anyone to come into the arena this way.

  At least, not while the river was flowing.

  Nicole chewed at her lip. She’d only done this a couple of times, and there was no guarantee it would work. Still, at this point she was going to have to back out and try a different door anyway. She might as well give it a try. “Fyrantha!” she called, wondering if the ship could even hear her over the noise. “Protector says turn off the Q1 arena river.”

  For a long moment nothing happened. Nicole studied the wall and riverbanks, trying to figure out what her next move would be if the ship couldn’t or wouldn’t obey. Probably go down
the branch of the T-junction toward Jeff’s side, try to find another access door there, and hope it wasn’t too high for her to drop down without breaking something.

  And then, like someone had turned a faucet somewhere, the water flow began to ease. The edges of the riverbanks came into view as the pressure and volume decreased and the water level went down. The banks here weren’t the same dirt-covered slopes she’d seen in the riverbed separating the Thii and Ponng in Q3, but were made of a bare white ceramic that sloped a bit inward. The slopes seemed to be the same angle as the sections she’d climbed across, which might mean the whole channel was that way.

  Except with rocks. She remembered the roiling of the water where she’d crossed, the twisted currents and little whirlpools that had marked hidden boulders. She watched as the level kept going down, wondering when she would start seeing them.

  To her surprise, no rocks appeared. The white swirling water bubbled away as the level continued to drop, showing nothing but more flat ceramic beneath it. Barely thirty seconds after her command, there was nothing left but a wet, tapered channel leading down from the pipe like a water slide. It disappeared under the tree branches and continued on its way toward the ocean at the other end of the arena.

  There was no time to wonder where the rocks had gone. If the Shipmasters overhead in the balcony hadn’t noticed what had happened, they’d figure it out soon enough, and Nicole had to be under cover on Jeff’s side before they sent someone to check it out. She pulled herself the rest of the way through the hatchway, eyeing the six-foot drop and the angled slope beneath her as she maneuvered the paintball gun barrel through the opening. The slope was pretty steep, and there was no way to know how slippery it was, and the last thing she needed right now was a pair of broken ankles. Hanging from the edge of the hatch, she took a deep breath and let go, shoving the hatch closed behind her as she dropped. She hit the ceramic, bent her knees to absorb the impact—