by Jo Clayton
She laughed again. Almost hysteria, coming from her. “I hear,” she said. “Time is, Quale. Get yourself in gear or miss the boat.” The screen went dark.
“Right,” I said. “Hop on, Jamo, you and your friend, it’s time to roll.”
17
The curved wall of the massive sphere was a gray-black chimera behind the container shield, there and not there, ominous though not quite tangible, the mass of a small star prisoned in gossamer. Parnalee brought the dolly to a gentle stop before it, lifted the link from the seat beside him. “Open,” he murmured, then waited for the Dark Sister to coax an opening for him.
The surface shimmered, a black pinhole appeared, dilated swiftly until it was wide enough to admit the dolly then pulsed like a wet black mouth, a mouth that could close on him if it chose; he eyed it with distaste, but the bulk of the Bright Sister was in there and there was no other access. He edged the dolly toward the opening, took it through.
Thinking he was a repair tech, the Bright Sister brought up the lights so he could see what he was doing.
He eased the dolly and its burden as deep into her heart as the narrowing serviceways between the Brain’s components would let him go. Then he cycled down the power of the liftfield, let the dolly sink to the floor, gently, gently, don’t crack the egg, not yet. Not. Yet. Off. Yes. He slid the link into his belt pouch, climbed over the bench back and squatted on the bed beside the torp. He activated it, set its timer for an hour on; he needed an interval to get back to the interface where he’d be in touch with and protected from the fury of the Dark Sister. Before he touched the triggering sensor and started the timer humming, he set his hand on the casing of the torp and savored the triumph that was going to be his. One hour. He patted the bomb. Gently. Very gently. “Yes.” He set his forefinger on the sensor and felt the hum in his bones. “Yes.” He slid off the dolly and trotted for the mouth.
As soon as he was outside, he touched on the link. “Close,” he said.
The hole in the sphere grew smaller, smaller, swiftly smaller, was a pin prick of darkness again, was gone. He put the link away and began the long run to the interface, buoyed by the knowledge that nothing could go wrong now, nothing could stop the explosion that killed the Bright Sister. All he had to do was sit and wait.
18
I looked round the interface. “Yeh,” I said. “This is it. He was here.”
Jamber Fausse nodded. Store cabinets were open, some of their contents spilled onto the floor, evidence of a hasty search, there was a bottle of brandy on the console with about an inch of liquid left in it, a bubble glass beside it with a brown smear drying in the bell; the stink of the brandy was thick in there, along with a stale smell that clung despite the labors of the fans in the ducts. “Where is he now?”
“Who knows? It’s a big ship. Keep an eye on the door, will you, the two of you? I’d better get to work. We don’t have that much time.”
I let the bed down, started arming the torp. Didn’t take long. When I finished, I thought a minute, then I opened up the dolly’s motor casing and removed a few vital parts. If-when-Parnalee got back, I didn’t want him driving off with our little surprise. There wasn’t much else I could do. Even if the three of us could muscle the torp off the bed without fatally herniating ourselves, there was no place in here where we could hide the thing.
The young raider left, but Jamber Fausse stopped me at the door. “What if he comes back before it blows? What if he disarms it?”
“You want to stay and argue with him, be my guest,” I said. I wasn’t all that happy with that antique timer; I was sure it’d trigger the torp sometime, I just wasn’t sure when. And I didn’t want to be anywhere around when it turned over. “Look,” I said. “It’s a randomized circuit and not all that easy to counterprogram. Not like pulling a few wires on hope and a prayer. I’ve set the thing to blow in half an hour. If he gets here in a minute or two, maybe he can do something; if he’s later than that, no way. We take our chances, that’s all we can do.”
He didn’t like it, but he was no more into suicide than I was, so he nodded and we took off for the tubegate.
19
I dropped the tug into orbit a quadrant away from the Warmaster and waited there.
Adelaar glanced at her chron. “Two minutes,” she said.
The ship hung motionless in the center of the screen. The Hanifa was standing behind me again, I could feel her hot breath on my neck. When I looked around, I was almost nose to nose with her, but she wasn’t noticing anything but the Warmaster. The rest of them were pretty much the same. Hungry.
The Warmaster trembled. A shine spread over her, then localized at the drivers. She moved. Slowly at first. Ponderously. She began picking up speed, angling away from Tairanna. As soon as she got wound up, it was like she vanished, collapsing to a pinpoint and then to nothing. “Well,” I said. “She’s on her way. Horgul in two hours. Good-bye, battleship.”
“What about the torp? How do we know if it blew?”
That was Jamber Fausse; he was a man to keep his teeth in an idea until it squealed. “We don’t,” I said. “Unless she turns up again. Then we know it didn’t. Back off, everyone. Show’s over. We’re going down.”
Parnalee had slowed to a fast walk by the time he passed through the next to last hatch. He felt the sudden liveliness in the ship as she began to move. He stopped, flattened his hand hard against the wall. He could not have described the difference he felt in her, but he knew what was happening, she was on her way to the sun. He smiled. So they thought. Let them think it, fools. He started moving again, an unhurried trot. He passed through the last hatch, glanced at his chron, smiled again. He’d made better time than he’d expected. Only half an hour. He sighed with pleasure as he thought about stripping down and letting the fresher scrub him clean again, about stretching out on the fur, a hot meal on the console beside him and another bottle of brandy while he waited for the Dark Sister to come alive and take over the ship. He saw the door, open like he’d left it, hurried toward it.
He stopped just inside, his way barred by the dolly and the torp; for a crazy moment he thought he was hallucinating, then that the Bright Sister had somehow developed a mechanical TP facility and flipped his torp back to him, then he knew that the woman had done it, the bitch had found his hiding place, she’d found the Dark Sister, no matter that it was impossible for her to find the Dark Sister, and she’d left this joke to greet him. Furious and afraid he took a step toward it; disarm it, he thought, I’ve got to disarm it.
It blew in his face. He knew an instant of intolerable brightness, of intolerable frustration and rage. Then nothing.
XIV
1. Time-span:11 Days (local) after the meeting on Gerbek Island to the evening of the day called Lift-Off.
At the Mines.
When Karrel Goza left Zaraiz Memeli at the Mines, the boy was on fire with excitement, but it didn’t take him long to discover he’d been dumped there to keep him out of trouble while the adults did whatever it was they were going to do. He was furious and hurting, betrayed again by someone who claimed his trust. He poked about, sticking his nose into anything that showed the slightest promise of breaking the tedium. In the middle of his second week there, early one morning before the sun was all the way up, he pulled a rotten board off a window at the back of the convict barracks, wriggled through the narrow space and dropped onto the floor of a holding cell.
The silver sphere came bounding at him, squawling its warning, attacking when that warning was ignored.
He was startled but not frightened. He jumped, swerved, dived, played with it, laughed as he whipped about, elastic as an eel, too fast for the sphere to catch him.
N’Ceegh heard him laughing, took a look.
The sphere stopped chasing Zaraiz and began chatting with him, then it brought him into the workshop.
After a terse welcome, N’Ceegh went back to making the operant parts of one of the stunners he was assembling for the hit on
the Warmaster. Zaraiz sat on the stool next to him and watched him work, fascinated by the delicacy and precision of his fingers, by the magnifier he was wearing, the microscopic points on most of his tools. Despite his involvement in the Green Slimes and his ability to dominate the other middlers, he was a solitary boy; he knew the pleasures and value of silence. He asked nothing, volunteered nothing, spoke only to answer the Pa’ao’s questions and kept his mouth shut at other times, not wanting to distract N’Ceegh at a crucial moment. After a while N’Ceegh let him polish and fit together cases for the stunners.
The boy immersed himself in what he was doing, glowing with pride each time the Pa’ao looked a part over and set it down without comment, showing that he thought it was finished, that he saw nothing there that needed fixing. With the resilience of the child he still was, Zaraiz gave his trust again, this time to the Pa’ao, gave it because N’Ceegh was a master craftsman and he wanted very much to be like him, because N’Ceegh was wholly alien, was physically and spiritually Other. He gave his trust and a tentative affection.
N’Ceegh recognized this in his silent way and gave back what he was given.
When they took the Pa’ao, Bolodo’s minions were clumsy and let themselves be seen. To cover themselves they ashed the village where they found him, killing all his kin, blood to the third degree, killing his mates and his children, most of all killing the boychild who was his craft-heir. His species was monogamous for life, patrilocal and powerfully bonded to the family and the family Place. He lived after that only to trade death for death; he escaped from the Palace to find a way of laying his bloodghosts, to feed them blood from the men who did the killing, blood from the men who ordered it. Zaraiz gave him hope of another kind, hope of passing on his craft, of hands to lay his own ghost when it was tired of him and wanted to shed the weary weight of his body.
By the end of the week Zaraiz Memeli divorced his family and swore loyalty to N’Ceegh, taking the name Zaraiz Pa’ao. N’Ceegh adopted him as his son, his craft-heir. And he began teaching Zaraiz Pa’ao the Torveynee, the way of the Pa’ao and the way of honor, the way of vengeance.
Ten days before Lift-Off they watched Ehnas Ofka and her isyas leave for the Chel, carrying with her the stunners they’d built for her. They watched the fighters from the Mines being ferried out to her, one night, two nights, three, until the chosen were all gone.
They spent the day named Lift-Off in the shop, working on the housing of a hunting rifle, one that killed with exploding darts no larger than a mosquito. N’Ceegh set delicate scrolls of inlay into the dark fine wood of the stock, then passed it over to Zaraiz for polishing while he etched shadow patterns into the metal parts. They worked all day, talked about nothing but the work.
Around sundown they went to the Smelter and sat in a corner eating fries and fish and drinking tea, listening to the music, watching the youngsters and the middlers dance.
Thirty minutes later Belirmen Indiz came in, banged his fist on the bar, then scrambled onto it, his age and stoutness forgotten. “The Warmaster is taken,” he bellowed into a sudden silence. “She is taken and gone, sent into the sun. Do you hear me? The Warmaster is gone.”
Noise and confusion, shouted questions, Belirmen’s booming voice as he tried to answer them, shoving elbows, stomping feet, triumphant flourishes, trills and squeals from the musicians, crying men, women, youngers. Rebels crowding closer to the bar to hear more, rebels forcing their way against the tide to get out and spread the news. Everywhere movement and emotion, a heady yeasty mix. A time when dreams no one quite believed in were suddenly made real.
N’Ceegh looked at Zaraiz, nodded at the door. Zaraiz got to his feet and followed him out.
Riding souped-up yizzies protected by miniature cuuxtwoks, N’Ceegh and Zaraiz Pa’ao left the Mines an hour before dawn. They circled wide through the mountains and went clacking and whirring across a stretch of barren Chel, not far from where the raiders had camped. By nightfall they were on the lower boundary of the Eastern Duzzulka, where tendrils of grassland reached into the scrub. They landed, tethered their yizzies, ate, slept a few hours, climbed into the saddle again.
2
I put Chicklet into a dive, flicked her around so the gunport Pels had improvised in her repair lock faced a melter station; I balanced her on her tail while he got off a missile that a second later blew out the station and a hunk of tower under it. We went swing, balance, boom around the circumference until the wall looked like beavers had been at it.
Swarms of yizzies were converging on the Palace; when we came over from Base, we’d seen hordes of them, flying in from every corner of the Littorals like locusts on the move; they even sounded like locusts when I turned on the external ears and listened to them. The news of the Warmaster’s end was out everywhere, that was obvious. The com net, I suppose; if I were Huvved, I’d have shut down the net till I had some sort of control in the cities. Aslan said it was survival-fear that triggered Surges; looked to me like survival-hope was doing the job just as well. Airships were drifting loose over the city, abandoned by their pilots and passengers, loads of Hordar dropped to melt into the Surge that was forming there. As we flew over, I could see the devastation starting, like the destruction in gul Ukseme multiplied a hundredfold, a million Hordar as a single deathbeast striking down the thousands of Huvved living there, burning, trampling, bursting in doors and windows, destroying everything their hands and feet could smash or torch. The yizzies came clicking and clattering over them, airmarching with the landswarm moving in a blind fury toward the Palace.
As I finished the firing run, I saw that mass of Hordar crossing the waste land between the city and the Wall. I swore. I did not want to go down there in the middle of that mess. Pels came up from the lock and slid into the co’s seat. He inspected the mob. “Rrrr,” he said.
“Yeh.” I took the tug up and got ready to set her down inside the walls. “Looks like half the Hordar on Tairanna.”
“Maybe we should come back tomorrow. Or next week.”
“I doubt the relatives would pay for stewmeat.” I took another look at the mob. “Which is what’s going to be left tomorrow. Well, let’s set her down. Faster we finish, the better shape our hides’re going to be in.”
I put Chicklet down in an elaborately ugly garden which was the only space large enough for her fat little tail that was within a reasonable walk of the slavepen. The EYEs Kumari sent sniffing around told us that the techs were collected around sundown and put in the pen, the rest rounded up by midnight; that didn’t include bedslaves, but they weren’t targets anyway; ordinary girls however lovely were too common to be pricey; mostly their parents, husbands, lovers, whatever, couldn’t afford to offer the kind of reward that would get them on ti Vnok’s list. We were early; it was barely dusk, the end of a cold windy day with shreds of fog coming off the lake. On the other hand, there was the attack by the Hordar; maybe the slaves would be locked down early, if Luck happened to look our way. Pels and I, we set the barriers and the shockers to keep the locals out, rode the lift down and started at a quick trot for the pen.
I nearly bumped into a guard running for the wall. The man stared at me, lifted his rifle, but changed his mind and went loping past me. Several of the guard cats were pacing about, their leashes flopping; they put their back hair up and their tails twitched when we came along. One of them charged at us, the others followed her. Pels got the leader and I stunned the others. After that we kept an eye close to scan roof edges and the shoulders of the sturdier statues, any high place a cat could perch on. We got half a dozen more cats that way.
The situation inside the walls was getting hairier by the minute; the Huvveds and Tassalgans on the intact sections of the Wall were firing down at the Surge with hand-held melters and pellet rifles. They killed hundreds and yet more hundreds, but the Hordar came on, walking over the wounded and the dead (a distinction without much difference because anyone wounded badly enough to be knocked off his feet was trampled to death
by the feet of his neighbors). Tendrils of the Surge peeled away from the main mass and fought their way into the gaps Pels had knocked into the walls. Other units had ropes with grapples knotted onto them; the Hordar climbed the ropes faster than the guns could cut them down, swarming up and over, tearing the guards to bits as they passed over them, destroying everything they got their hands on.
I was frowning as I ran, there was too much confusion inside the walls; I could understand some of it, there didn’t seem to be a helluva lot you could do to stop a Surge coming at you, but this chicken had its head cut off; talk about ineffective. Where was the Grand Sech? Was Pittipat stupid enough to execute him when the Warmaster went? Was the Sech stupid enough to let that happen? I shook my head as I pulled up before a heavy door; it was barred and locked, but there wasn’t a guard in sight.
I sliced through the bar and the lockbolt and shoved the door open.
3
As N’Ceegh and Zaraiz Pa’ao got closer to Gilisim Gillin, the air went thick with airships and yizzies; since the cuuxtwoks hid them from eyes as well as probes, they had to stay alert and do some fancy dodging to avoid being run over. They reached the Palace close to sundown, slipped past the Wall without triggering the melters and touched down in the garden atop the Palace tower.
N’Ceegh wore armor covering his torso, arm and leg sheaths with knives of assorted lengths and purpose in them; on his back he had a battery pac attached by cable to a heavy-duty cutter that needed both hands to hold it level when it was in use. The smaller cutters that Zaraiz Pa’ao wore were keyed to his hands. All he had to do was point, then tap a thumb against the side of a crooked middle finger. He had no armor; he counted on his agility and speed to protect him. The door from the roof garden into the palace was a bronze slab elaborately etched over all its surface. N’Ceegh melted it, jumped the runnels of congealing metal and the cooked meat of a hapless guard, went slatting as fast as his thin legs would carry him down a lacy spiral ramp.
