Guilt in Innocece

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  But she had little love for Tobi, either, and even less when the buruku promoted that imbecile Apara over her to take over Rufiji.

  With luck, the Ori-Inu and the war chief would kill each other. Two less freaks in the world also suited Morayo just fine.

  As soon as she stepped through the airlock into L'owuro, and right when one of the cavalrymen had stepped into it, the door shut behind her.

  Whirling around, Morayo cried, "What the hell?"

  Over her helmet's intercom, the cavalryman who was actually in the airlock said, "Uh, Cavalry Master? The 'lock's cycling!"

  "Flight deck, this is Morayo. Reopen airlock four, we need to evac the Nide from Olokun before it blows."

  Silence met her query.

  "Flight deck, this is Morayo, respond!"

  "Cavalry Master?"

  "Stand fast, Cavalryman, I'll get you out of there." She entered the override code on the airlock, but it didn't work.

  L'owuro's engines were starting up—Morayo could feel the vibration through the deckplates even through her armored boots. Years of spaceship travel had taught her the signs, and she realized that some idiot on the flight deck was leaving Olokun too early.

  "Flight deck," Morayo said as she entered the override code a fourth time to similar negative results, "you're about to condemn ten cavalry, six Nide, and a bunch of techs and support to death. Put the engines on standby and reopen this airlock!"

  After a fifth entering of the override code, Morayo cursed and ran toward the front of the vessel, intending to personally shoot whoever was in command of the flight deck in the head.

  "Cavalry Master?" came a very un-cavalry-like whimper through her intercom. "Don't leave me here, ma'am, please!"

  Morayo cut the channel. She couldn't bear to listen to the poor man die.

  As she beat feet down the corridor, she was struck by how empty it was. Usually there were always people walking the corridors—off-duty personnel wandering about, on-duty personnel going to duty stations or carrying things from one to another, and so on.

  Then she saw the bodies.

  Two engineers lay on the floor, bleeding from the eyes, nose, ears, and mouth. It was a particularly ugly death, one that Morayo had only seen a few times.

  The more powerful Ori-Inu were able to kill people by mindblasting, which left a corpse like this.

  But the Ori-Inu is with Tobi and all the Nide are in stasis. So who—?

  Oh, mogbe.

  Morayo started running down the corridor even as she activated her armor's HUD.

  She only detected two life signs other than her own on board L'owuro. One was the cavalryman in airlock four. The other was on the flight deck.

  There was nobody else alive on board the ship.

  By the time Morayo made it to the flight deck, L'owuro had already disengaged from Olokun Station, and the number of life-sign readings was down to two. The cavalryman's body would float out in space—or, more likely, be blown to pieces when the asteroid exploded in less than three minutes.

  Her Ayoka at the ready, Morayo stepped in front of the door, assuming it would read her biometrics and let her in.

  It didn't.

  So she shot the door repeatedly, blowing it to pieces. It took two dozen rounds, but eventually the Ayoka made a hole big enough for her to get through.

  "You won't be killing me with that thing, Cavalry Master Morayo," said Oranmiyan from the command chair.

  Morayo had never seen anyone other than Tobi sit in that chair since she reported to L'owuro, and it was a bizarre sight—made more so by the fact that Oranmiyan was cradling the corpse of one of the Nide in his arms, a sight that sickened her.

  She also found that she couldn't move. Oranmiyan obviously had done one of his telepathy things to hold her still.

  "I'll tell you the same thing I told Ama and the other officers, Cavalry Master. I'm taking L'owuro. It's mine now. You come with me, follow my orders, and we're solid."

  "And if I tell you to die a horrible death?"

  "Oh, I won't be the one dying."

  Looking around the flight deck—Oranmiyan had only frozen her arms and legs—Morayo saw many more corpses beyond the Nide in Oranmiyan's lap. Cavalry Master Ama, and a dozen more officers and crew all lay sprawled over consoles and chairs and the deck. They all bled the same way the two engineers did.

  Oranmiyan continued: "You got no loyalty to Tobi. I know that. So decide."

  "You're a telepath," Morayo said. "You know my answer."

  The last sounds Morayo would ever hear were Oranmiyan sighing and saying, "Yeah."

  One moment, Folami was trying to wear down Tobi's psionic defenses.

  The next, she was curled up in a corner of the small room in Olorun's sanctum where she slept.

  Olorun was standing over her, smiling. It wasn't the friendly, pleasant smile on the holographs for the people of the Oyo Empire, no, this was a vicious, brutal, hateful smile.

  For a moment, Folami feared that she was back on Yemoja, that everything that had happened to her in the years since her parents turned her over to their monarch had been a dream from which she had only just awakened.

  But only for a moment.

  Folami knew from dreams, and from nightmares. They were never this detailed.

  To prove it, she grabbed Olorun and threw him against the wall.

  "You're joking, right, War Chief?" she asked the air. "This is the best you can do?"

  Then she was in the soccer stadium, the so-called enemies of the state—in truth, people who Olorun found annoying—lined up for her to mindblast one by one.

  Now Folami laughed heartily. "This is how you plan to beat me, War Chief? I relived this moment the whole time I was in training, and I've done nothing but relive it ever since I was exposed to that gas of yours back on Oshun."

  The stadium melted away, replaced with the rocky corridors of Olokun Station and the armored figure of Tobi in front of her.

  "All you're doing is reminding me why I want to kill you."

  "Fine," Tobi said. "No more subtlety."

  Folami and Tobi had been exchanging psionic blasts. It was one of the first tricks Hembadoon had taught her, because it was so basic. All a telepath really did was stimulate the pain centers of the brain.

  But what Tobi was doing right now was several orders of magnitude worse than anything Folami had learned from the Orisha. Every cell in her body felt as if it was on fire. Even her hair hurt.

  She did not scream, however.

  "You feel that, Ori-Inu?" Tobi was asking, no doubt because she didn't scream. "I figured I'd go for psychological pain, but that's a little harder than I figured. But hey, I'm flexible. You think that stupid Orisha taught you how to inflict this kind of pain?"

  "No," Folami managed to say through clenched teeth.

  "Yeah, I didn't think so. I'd love to keep this up, but we've only got another couple minutes before this station goes boom, so I think it's time I finished you off."

  "You can try." Her answer to Tobi had not been a lie. She hadn't learned how to inflict that kind of pain.

  But she had learned how to function while feeling that kind of pain.

  So she was able to reach into the pocket of the coat. And then she was able to shrug off the coat and toss it toward Tobi.

  The war chief looked down at the long leather coat that was now right at his booted feet and smiled. "This is what you're reduced to, eh, Ori-Inu? Throwing your clothes at me? I'm going to enjoy—"

  Whatever Tobi was going to enjoy was cut off by the explosion of the second grenade that Folami had in the pocket of Hembadoon's coat. She had feared that the coat would fall to the floor in such a way that the shaped charge would blow downward, but instead it was facing a direction that sent the blast right through Tobi's shins, tearing through his armor and the flesh and bone under it.

  Tobi screamed in agony, and even as Folami's own pain subsided, she could feel the agony he suffered as the explosive splintered his shin bone, p
ulped the muscles in both legs, and utterly destroyed the war chief from the knees down.

  Folami walked over to Tobi and stared him in the eye. Unable to stop her nose from twitching, she telekinetically raised Tobi's own Bayo to the man's face.

  "Permission to disembark, War Chief?" she asked with a sweet smile before she mentally pulled the pistol's trigger and had it blow the top of Tobi's head off.

  Then she turned and ran for the airlock. There was only another two-and-a-half minutes before Olokun exploded.

  She arrived at the airlock to find Hembadoon standing outside it. "What—?"

  "It's locked down," Hembadoon interrupted. "And you'll be stunned to learn that our priority won't override it."

  "We don't need overrides," Folami said as she telekinetically forced the airlock door open.

  She could feel the blood oozing out her nostrils, and her leg muscles felt like so much rubber. When she tried to walk into the airlock to board Ebun, she collapsed.

  Luckily, Hembadoon was there to catch her. "It's okay, Folami," he said in a soothing voice that she last heard him use in the early days of training. "I got it from here."

  Because she could read his mind, she knew that the thought was sincere. So she allowed herself to, at last, pass out.

  EPILOGUE

  Oranmiyan sat alone on the flight deck of L'owuro.

  No. Not L'owuro. That was Tobi's name. This is no longer a Hegemony ship.

  Right there, he decided to rename the vessel the Abeje. "You like that?" he asked the woman he named it after.

  But no.

  She was dead.

  He finally had to admit to himself that Abeje was dead. When Olokun Station blew up, Folami probably died, too—he wasn't sure. He didn't feel her die, but Abeje was far enough from the asteroid when it exploded that he might not have.

  And if Folami was alive? Well then Oranmiyan would probably have to kill her.

  The dream was dead.

  Time, he thought, to find a new dream.

  Finally letting go of Abeje's corpse by setting it down amidst the dozen other corpses on the flight deck, Oranmiyan stood up and said, "Computer, set course for Orunmila."

  When Folami woke up, she found herself sitting up against the bulkhead of Ebun and wearing another one of the Orisha's leather coats.

  "Hembadoon?"

  "Right here," he said from the vessel's only seat. "Sorry for dumping you on the deck, but we aren't exactly roomy in here."

  "It's okay. How long was I out?"

  "Approximately one hour."

  She nodded. "I'm still exhausted."

  "Hardly surprising, all things considered. We left in the proverbial nick of time. Olokun is just a bad memory, and we were far enough away to avoid any damage." He turned around to regard her with a serious expression. "Which leaves the question: where do we go from here?"

  Folami blinked. Her instinctive response was to go back to Ife and report to Oba Isembi.

  The same buruku who authorized all those mindwipes during training, who sent me to Yemoja…

  But what else was she to do? For all that she now remembered her life on Oyo and during training on Ife, she was still an Ori-Inu, and she had a duty to report to her superior. For this mission, that superior was the Oba himself.

  Of course, he was Hembadoon's superior, too. "Haven't you reported in?"

  "I was waiting to discuss the matter with you. For one thing, I do not know the whole story—remember, while you were off gallivanting, I was tied to a bed."

  "Right." Folami sighed. "I guess we should report in. Did anyone else get off the station?"

  "L'owuro disembarked in plenty of time, but Ebun only read three life signs on board."

  "Three?" That didn't make any sense. L'owuro's complement was for over a hundred. Even accounting for casualties on Oshun, there was no way the ship could have disengaged from the station with only three people on board. "Are you sure the readings were right?"

  Hembadoon nodded. "I checked one more time before they were too far away from Olokun to scan."

  Letting out a long breath, Folami said, "Well, not much we can do about that. I guess—I guess we should report in."

  "You don't want to." Hembadoon wasn't asking that as a question.

  The response practically exploded out of Folami's mouth. "I don't know what I want to do! Everything's turned upside down!"

  "So what's the alternative? Join the Oyo rebels?"

  "Never," Folami said with utter disgust. Though she held Isembi and his Hegemony is plenty of contempt, it was as nothing compared to how she felt about the Oyo Empire, who whored out her mother to create a pet telepath for their god.

  But where does that leave me? Where does any of this leave me?

  "No," she said. "We report to the Oba."

  "Very well, then. I'm setting course for Ife."

  She noticed that he wasn't activating the communications systems. "Shouldn't we contact the Oba first?"

  "No. Let us give him the report in person." He smiled. "I think we've both earned some of Isembi's awful gin, don't you think?"

  Folami smiled. "Fair enough, Orisha. Let's go."

  The debris field created by the destruction sequence for Olokun Station left very little intact. The bodies, both living and dead, were pulverized. Identifying who was on the station when it exploded would require the use of a very fine DNA scanner.

  Computer parts that weren't atomized were magnetized by the explosion. No information would be left in a single chip or circuit, if anyone could even find such a unit in anything like an intact condition.

  But then there were the stasis chambers.

  Designed by the best scientists that Tobi's money could buy, the stasis chambers were designed to survive an attack of much greater destructive capacity than the Olokun destruction sequence.

  And so a half-dozen stasis chambers floated amidst the debris of Olokun Station, completely intact, and each occupied by a Nide.

  Some of them began to wake up…

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Keith R.A. DeCandido is the author more than forty-odd novels, a mess of short stories, a smattering of comic books, a bunch of novellas, and the occasional essay. His most recent work includes the novels Unicorn Precinct, the long-awaited sequel to his 2004 high fantasy police procedural Dragon Precinct, and SCPD: The Case of the Claw, first of a new series of novels about cops in a city filled with superheroes; short stories in the Liar Liar, Tales from the House Band, and More Tales of Zorro anthologies; the monthly Farscape comic book, written in collaboration with the TV series creator Rockne S. O'Bannon; and more. Coming in 2012 are Goblin Precinct, Tales from Dragon Precinct, and SCPD: Avenging Amethyst, as well as more stories of the Olodumare Hegemony for The Scattered Earth. Keith is also a black belt in Kenshikai karate, a contributor to the pop-culture podcast The Chronic Rift (www.chronicrift.com), the percussionist for the parody band Boogie Knights (www.boogie-knights.org), and a lifelong fan of the New York Yankees. You can listen to his twice-monthly podcast Dead Kitchen Radio, or go to www.DeCandido.net, which is a gateway to his blog (kradical.livejournal.com), his Facebook page (www.facebook.com/kradec), his Twitter feed (@KRADeC), and pretty much everything else.

  ALSO FROM KEITH R. A. DECANDIDO

  The Case of the Claw : SCPD #1

  PROLOGUE

  SUNDAY

  11.45pm

  A yellow streak flew overhead, stirring up the litter on 20th Street. Officer Sean O'Malley didn't even notice it until the sonic boom rattled the windshield of the blue-and-white police car he was driving.

  O'Malley steered the cruiser down 20th. From the seat next to him, Officer Paul Fiorello stuck his head out the window. "Was that Spectacular Man?"

  Shaking his head and hitting the brake as the cruiser approached a red light at Jaffee Avenue, O'Malley said, "Christ, Paulie, how long you been livin' in this town? If it was him, it'd be blue and red. It was yellow, so that means the Flame."

  This late on a Sun
day night in the SimonValley neighborhood, the streets were dark. Nothing was open, plus the street lights hadn't been repaired since the Bengal tangled with the Dread Gang last month.

  "I can never remember," Fiorello said, "is he Ms. Terrific's brother or husband?" Flame and Ms. Terrific were two-thirds of the Terrific Trio.

  O'Malley grinned as the light turned green and his foot moved from the brake to the accelerator. "Hope it's her brother, 'cause that lady's hot. I'd do her in a cold minute. Y'know, there's nude pictures of her on the Internet, right?"

  "Gimme a break, Sean." Fiorello shook his head. "That's some skank they found at Bitches With No Brains dot com and Photoshopped the Terrific lady's head on it."

  Frowning, O'Malley asked, "Seriously?"

  Fiorello rolled his eyes. "Yeah. And Santa ain't real, either."

  "Damn." O'Malley let out a long breath. They were some fine pictures.

  "So yellow's Flame?" Fiorello started counting on his fingers. "Spec Man's, like you said, blue and red."

  "Nice rhyme."

  Fiorello gave O'Malley a nasty look before continuing. "So green's who? Major Marine?"

  "Yeah. And purple's Amethyst and if it's all rainbow-y, then it's the Prism."

  Shaking his head, Fiorello said, "I don't know how you keep track of the costumes like that."

  "In this town, it's the job." O'Malley couldn't believe that his partner was still having trouble keeping it straight after all these years.

  Fiorello's face looked sculpted: perfect Roman nose, dark hair that never got mussed no matter how crazy things got on the street, and friendly brown eyes that always calmed down the craziest of citizens. Which meant, of course, that women paid more attention to him than to O'Malley with his bad skin, messed-up nose thanks to an attempt to stop a bar brawl when he was a rookie, and crappy hair.

  Still, Fiorello was good police, and he always had O'Malley's back—certainly more than the other assholes he'd been paired with over his six years on the job—so O'Malley put up with him as best he could.