“We don’t win every time,” Dhjerga said.
“Fetch more reinforcements!”
“I’m starting to think there’s a good reason we never messed with the sentrienza.”
“Just overpower the Guns!”
“Our doctrine is quantity over quality. But what about when you don’t have the numbers? There are fucking dozens of Guns on board. I’m only one mage. I can’t fetch enough guys fast enough. They’re getting cut down before they can reach the Guns. Why don’t you help?”
“I can’t.”
“The fuck you say.” Dhjerga spat, and watched the phlegm fall to the distant deck. “I’m out of here. See you again sometime, maybe.”
His body began to fade. Colm grabbed his arm, got a shock of static electricity. “Dhjerga!”
It was no longer a man sitting beside him. It was a ghost. Colm could see the wall through him, the top of the tank, all blurry as if masked by a heat mirage, but the shimmering was cold. Then even that faded.
He was holding onto thin air.
Oh, the fucking bastard fucker.
Colm threw himself flat on the top of the tank. He aimed his .38 at the Walking Gun and loosed off one round after another until the magazine was empty.
He had no hope of damaging the Gun. He was just venting his feelings.
The noise tailed off. The survivors lay dead or bleeding out. Water gushed from the side of a draining vat holed by a bullet, filling the deck with the smell of fish.
Three sentrienza trundled in, wearing head-to-toe armor, like a sleeker version of Marine battlesuits. They surveyed the carnage. The Gun was pointing at Colm’s perch. They turned to look up at him.
“Colm Mackenzie,” one of them trill-buzzed. “Come down. You will not be harmed.”
He wished he hadn’t wasted all his rounds on the Gun. Should’ve kept one for himself. Too late now.
CHAPTER 50
“DO MAGIC FOR US.”
They kept making the same demand in different ways.
Once they even made it in Gaelic, which he didn’t speak, except he knew the word druidheachd.
“Do magic for us.”
They kept asking, and he kept answering in different ways.
“No.”
“Not a chance.”
“Gaun fuck off would ye, ye wee cunts.”
He wasn’t going to do so much as a coin vanish for these genocidal creeps.
The worst was when they sent Meg to talk to him. Maybe they thought the stick hadn’t worked so they’d try the carrot.
It did lift his spirits to know that she’d survived. She looked perfectly healthy, if sad and anxious.
She squatted down outside his cage. “Just do what they’re asking for.” The pitiless light in his cell found new lines cupping the corners of her mouth. “If you cooperate, they’ll let you live.”
“What’s that clabber they’ve got you wearing, Gunny?”
She plucked self-consciously at the neck of her dress. It was ankle-skimming red velvet with droopy sleeves, gold trim, and a long sash. Kind of medieval. It didn’t suit Meg, and she seemed to know it. “This is how they think human women should dress. When I complained, they gave me a couple of kimonos. Really nice ones. My mother would have loved them. But I’m not dressing up in kimono for these—” Her lips soundlessly formed the words fucking bastards.
“So then you know how I feel about doing magic for them.”
“Yeah. But you’re not getting out of here any other way.”
Colm measured his cage with his eyes, for the hundredth time. Small enough to cross in three strides, it stood in the middle of a larger cell, with a meter’s clearance around the sides for his jailers. It held a toilet, a cot, and an untouched box of conjuring props. Colm had been better off in that tower room at Castle Nulth. He said, “This is a Faraday cage, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
A Faraday cage: a mesh box that prevented electromagnetic signals from getting in or out. Faraday cages protected power sources from the Ghosts. There’d been a school of opinion that they ought to be universally used to enclose powered equipment, but that ran slap up against the logistics of everyday life. You couldn’t live your life inside a mesh cage. Or rather you could, but it would look like Colm’s life looked now. “Are they still scared of the Ghosts?” he enquired. “Tell them they can relax. Dhjerga’s gone. He’s not coming back.”
He felt fairly sure of that. Which was a pity, because he owed Dhjerga a punch in the kisser for bailing on him.
“He left his cannon fodder behind,” Meg said. “The sentrienza are still mopping them up.”
“Poor bastards.”
“Poor ...?” Her eyes widened with incredulity. Colm realized that she never had really changed her mind about the Ghosts. To her, they were still the ultimate evil. That’s probably why she could cooperate with the sentrienza without slitting her throat for shame. Colm wished he could tell her some of the stuff Dhjerga had shared with him—empire of slaves, they come to themselves but by then it’s too late. But he knew every word they said was being recorded.
“Anything else you’re allowed to tell me?”
“News from home.” Meg consulted a computer, which hung from her sash on a fine gold chain. “The latest news is ... not all bad, actually. The Ghosts still haven’t got a foothold on Earth. Seven billion human beings turn out to be a pretty great planetary defence force. We’ve lost Mars, the moon, everything, but Fortress Earth is holding out.” Pride flamed in her eyes. Gunnery Sergeant Smythe was still fighting. She was just fighting the wrong enemy.
It was good news, anyway, and Colm grinned at her through the mesh. “That’s brilliant.” A second later it occurred to her that the sentrienza could be faking the news they let Meg see. Then he remembered that even if true, this news was at least a year old, and a lot could happen in a year. But nevertheless, hope burned bright. He pictured his parents’ house still standing, after all. Life in Scotland going on. The Free Church Manse still empty, still waiting for him. He curled his fists on a surge of frustration and longing.
“The Hail Mary ships are still coming,” Meg said, continuing to read from her computer. “But they’re not being allowed to unload. The new policy is to resupply them and send them back.”
“Back?!”
“Yeah. Letting us stay didn’t work out very well for the sentrienza, did it?”
“I suppose not.” It seemed inhuman to send people back to a war zone. Then again, the sentrienza were not human. Not at all.
Meg stood, smoothing out her dress. “I have to go. I was only allowed to be here five minutes.”
“Wait. Meg, can you tell me where I am?”
“Where you are?”
“I know we’re on a spaceship.” The background hum and gurgle of life-support systems told him that much. “But I don’t know what spaceship, or where it is.”
“This is the Ruddiganmaseve. It’s the flagship of the Betelgeuse fleet, captained by King Lugli ju-Sharongat the Third. We’re in orbit around Juradis. Haven’t gone anywhere, not going anywhere until this mess is tidied up.” A strange expression flashed across Meg’s face. Fear, exasperation, and something else Colm couldn’t read. “You’re the last loose end, Collie Mack. They like to dot all their I’s and cross their T’s, and when they don’t get to do that, it makes them twitchy. So please just fucking do what they want!”
She turned away in a swirl of red velvet.
“There’d be no point even trying,” Colm shouted after her. “They took my drugs away.”
“I know,” she shouted back. “I told them to.”
The door banged. Colm let out a long breath. Did Meg know about the way tropodolfin interacted with his implant? He thought not. She just wanted him to get clean, even if it took a Faraday cage. So the sentrienza didn’t know about the interaction, either.
That seemed to present a sliver of a chance, although he couldn’t see the exact shape of it at the moment.
He lay back on the unpleasantly warm floor, and thought up new ways to say ‘no’ the next time they came with their little piping voices and tried to make him dance to their tune.
CHAPTER 51
THE HAIL MARY SHIPS in orbit around Juradis now outnumbered the sentrienza ships watching over them. Resupply them and send them back—it sounded like a simple policy, but it was easier said than done, given the specialized nature of all the components that wore out over a two-year voyage, the life-support requirements of thousands of passengers, and the fact that Juradis hadn’t exactly been a capital of industry before the sentrienza decimated its population.
Some of the Hail Mary ships got sent on to Noom and Barjoltan, Juradis’s sister worlds. The rest remained, loaded with restless and frightened refugees. These tens of thousands, marinating in the accumulated waste of their long voyages, survived on emergency aid boosted up from the surface by the sentrienza’s loyal servants, the Uzzizellans.
“Steady as she goes,” Axel said to the queazel pilot of the Saximmion, a water tanker. He pointed to a blip on the radar plot. “That’s the one. The Unsinkable.”
The old FTL carrier had been decommissioned after the fall of Majriti IV. Now, most of its 118 decks housed refugees from Gna.
The Uzzizellan tanker descended from its looping launch trajectory, burning to catch up with the Unsinkable. It glided into the open doors of Flight Deck 2. The pilot set it down neatly on a turntable. Clamps thudded into place. “Nice flying.” Axel said.
The pilot wriggled happily at the praise. Gilliam Tripsilion Nulth said with affected weariness, “We were a spacefaring people before we ever met the sentrienza. The mara and shablags were still planet-bound primitives when they were first contacted. You yourselves had barely reached your own inner planets. We, however, have a thousand-year history of doing this sort of thing.”
The Saximmion had launched from Haravalding. The spaceport was back in operation with a skeleton staff of queazels and sentrienza. In addition to its all-important cargo of water, the tanker carried barley and dried meat from the south pole. The queazels down there had escaped the sentrienza’s punishment blitz, as they had had nothing to do with the Organization. Nevertheless they acknowledged Gil’s status in the queazel community, and had given him what he asked for.
Or rather, what Axel told him to ask for.
Axel retrieved this item from the cargo hold as the Unsinkable’s rampies unloaded the food and water. The flight deck was in freefall. Rampies flew up and down on tethers. Axel clung to handholds.
“What happened to the AG?” he asked them over the radio.
“Switched it off to save power,” one of the rampies said in a need-you-ask? tone of voice.
The flight deck showed more wear and tear than Axel remembered from his own months aboard the carrier. Deck plating and wiring, and even some of the launch catapults, had been scavenged to make repairs elsewhere. That hurt to see. But Axel zeroed in on something intriguing. Among the queazel aid ships stood several human ships, sporting the familiar needlenosed profile of Axel’s own late, lamented Shady Lady.
“What are those?” Axel said.
“Private yachts. Waste of fucking mass.”
Axel agreed. In a previous life, he might have been one of the entitled SOBs bringing his private yacht on board a Hail Mary ship. But he had changed. He left the rampies to their work. “Lead on,” he said to Gil.
The interior of the Unsinkable was scarcely recognizable. In many places, the floors had been ripped out to reduce mass, leaving only girders and symbolic sheets of plastic to protect the interdeck wiring and plumbing. Not that it mattered, when the whole ship was in freefall. Refugees stared at Axel and Gil. The queazel was still wearing his EVA suit, which made him look like a huge silver caterpillar. He might be the first alien these people had ever seen. But the sullen stares, Axel thought, had little to do with xenophobia, and everything to do with their chilly welcome at Juradis. The atmosphere was explosive. Marines patrolled with electrotasers.
“So,” Axel murmured. “Where are our traitors?”
Gil had promised to take him to meet his contacts in the Human Republic, but had so far refused to name them. Possible candidates cycled through Axel’s mind, while nostalgia competed with sadness at the Unsinkable’s decay. It seemed to symbolize the fall of humankind.
“Why are we going to the engineering decks?” He still didn’t trust the queazel, was prepared for trickery.
“That’s where he works,” Gil grunted.
Deck 16. Deck 15. Axel reluctantly crossed most of his candidates off the list. No one important worked back here. Even when the ship was not burning, these way-back decks were noisy and hot, and you got a higher-than-average load of radiation. And still Gil floated on, down one companionway after another, past ramparts of life-support machinery, past the reactor deck, all the way to the drive deck.
Unexpected activity filled the echoing space. Engineers were assembling huge steel components, purpose unknown. Most surprising of all, the artificial gravity was functioning. Axel and Gil thumped down to the deck. Marines blocked their way, fingers skimming the butts of their electrotasers.
A man strolled over. He was in civvies, but his bearing said senior officer. “What do you want?”
Axel resisted the impulse to salute. He was no longer in the Fleet. And technically, neither were any of these people. They had been demilitarized along with their ship, as a condition of seeking refuge on Juradis. That hadn’t changed now that they’d been told they had to turn around and go back. They were just pretending. Acting out familiar roles with stage props. Electrotasers, for fuck’s sake.
Gil uncoiled to his full height. He swayed back and forth, his little vulpine face sticking out of the collar of his EVA suit. “I am Gilliam Tripsilion Nulth, and I have an appointment.”
The staff officer grumpily led them across the deck. Axel tried and failed to work out the purpose of the machinery in mid-build. Engineers argued over 3D holo schematics, so intent on their work that they didn’t even notice the queazel.
“Sir,” the staff officer shouted, knocking on a nondescript door in the far wall. He showed them into an office whose lean, scarred occupant looked out of place among the masses of blueprints, computers, and prototype components covering every surface.
“Gil!” the man exclaimed, rising. He came around his cluttered desk and shook the queazel’s front paws in both hands.
Axel stared, speechless with astonishment.
This was the man who had betrayed Earth, and indirectly killed millions?
The stars and medals on his chest proclaimed his distinguished record of service. His name was Bastian Hyland. But when Axel served on the Unsinkable, Colonel Hyland had been universally known as the Rat.
“And Captain Best,” the Rat said to Axel, as if he had been expecting him, too. “Your father will be glad to see you.”
Axel reached into the pocket of his second-hand leathers. Velcro ripped. He raised the item Gil had procured for him. Its targeting laser painted a dot on the Rat’s forehead. “This is a flechette pistol. Sentrienza tech. Breathe on it and it’ll go off.”
The Rat did not move a muscle.
“Anything you want to tell me?” Axel said.
“Regarding what?”
“Nulth told me about CHEMICAL MAGE, but he’s fuzzy on some of the key details.”
At his own name, Gil whimpered and bundled himself under the Rat’s desk. Axel shifted a step sideways, out of ankle-biting distance. Queazels could move very fast when they wanted to.
“Just out of curiosity, I’d like to know what was in it for you. What makes a man betray his own species? What did the sentrienza offer you?”
The Rat smiled thinly. “The sentrienza have never offered me anything other than lies.”
Axel let the Rat see his finger tightening on the trigger. “Try again.”
“There’s someone else on board who can answer your questions better than I can. Ma
y I make a call?”
Axel deliberated a moment. “Yes.” Might as well get them all at once.
He kept his aim on the Rat as he spoke into a handheld computer attached to the desk by a cable. “Yes ... Nulth’s here ... So is Best ... All right.”
A few minutes passed. Gil whined under the desk. Axel’s arms started to get tired.
The door opened.
Axel’s father walked in. A little thinner, a little grayer, wearing jeans and an oxford.
The red targeting dot wavered over Philip K. Best’s heart.
CHAPTER 52
MEG WAS TAKING EMNL through her katas in the Ruddiganmaseve’s leisure grove when the ship shuddered from end to end.
“What was that?” Emnl said, freezing in the middle of Heian Godan.
Meg shrugged. The truth was, it had felt like something hit the ship. But that was impossible. Wasn’t it?
The AG in the grove faltered for a moment, and then went back to normal. Even that qualified as a major event in this place, where nothing ever changed. Mottled leaves rustled on twisted trees. The ‘sky’ ceiling drenched the grove in the flat gray light of a winter afternoon. Little green snakes shimmied up and down the trunks. Glistening brick-red land urchins clogged the spaces between the tree roots, oozing trails of slime as they jostled for position with all the vim of sloths. If this was what the sentrienza’s homeworld looked like, Meg was glad she’d never see it. She scrunched the bristly yellow grass between her bare toes, holding herself in, controlling her breathing.
“Come on,” she said. “Heian Godan.”
Emnl nailed the first few moves of the kata. She was improving. But she got tangled up on the tobikomi jump. As Meg corrected her footwork, she caught sight of King Lugli coming through the trees. She inwardly sighed and braced for a confrontation. She knew the king still didn’t approve of his daughter studying karate.
The king surged across the clearing where they were practising. He did not slow down. Meg started to bow out of habit. Then she saw the stubby golden scepter in the king’s hand.
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