He found Quinn and Thorne both in the pilot's compartment, along with Kimura the Yellow Squad commander. Quinn had taken over the shuttle's communication station, her gray hood pushed back, sweat-soaked dark curls in disarray.
"Framingham! Report!" she was crying into the comm. "You've got to get into the air. Bharaputran airborne reinforcements are almost on top of you."
Across the flight deck at the station opposite Quinn's, Thorne monitored a tactical holovid. Two Dendarii colored dots, fighter shuttles, dove upon but failed to break up an array of enemy shuttles passing over a ghost city, astral projection of the live city turning below them. Mark glanced out the window past the pilots' shoulders, but could not spot the originals in the sunlit morning smog.
"We have a downed-man recovery in progress, ma'am," Framingham's voice returned. "One minute, till the squad gets back."
"Do you have everyone else? Do you have Norwood? I can't raise his helmet!"
There was a short delay. Quinn's fists clenched, opened. Her fingernails were bitten to red stumps.
Framingham's voice at last. "We've got him now, ma'am. Got everyone, the quick and the dead alike, except for Phillipi. I don't want to leave anyone for those bloody bastards if I can help it—"
"We have Phillipi."
"Thank God! Then everyone's accounted for. We have lift-off now, Captain Quinn."
"Precious cargo, Framingham," said Quinn. "We rendezvous in the Peregrine's umbrella of fire. The fighter shuttles will guard your wings." In the tac display, the Dendarii dots peeled away from the lumbering enemy and left them behind.
"What about your wings?"
"We'll be right behind you. Yellow Squad bought us a first-class ticket home free. Home free is Fell Station."
"And then we head out?"
"No. The Ariel took some damage, earlier. We're docking. It's arranged."
"Understood. See you there."
The Dendarii formation came together at last and began to boost upward. Mark fell into a station chair, and hung on. The fighter shuttles were more at risk from enemy fire than the drop shuttles, he realized, watching the tac display. One fighter shuttle was distinctly limping. It clung close to the Yellow Squad's craft. The formation paced itself to its wounded member. But for once, things ran to plan. Their Bharaputran harriers dropped reluctantly behind as they broke out of the atmosphere and into orbit.
Quinn rested her elbows for a weary moment on her console, and hid her red-and-white face in her hands, rubbing tender eyelids. Thorne sat pale and silent. Quinn, Thorne, himself, all bore broken segments of that arc of blood. Like a red ribbon, binding them one to another.
Fell Station was coming up at last. It was a huge structure, the largest of the orbital transfer stations circling Jackson's Whole, and House Fell's headquarters and home city. Baron Fell liked holding the high ground. In the delicate interlocking network of the Great Houses, House Fell probably held the most raw power, in terms of capacity for destruction. But raw destruction was seldom profitable, and coup was counted in coins, here. What coin were the Dendarii using to buy Fell Station's help, or at least neutrality? The person of Baron Bharaputra, now secured in the cargo bay? What kind of bargaining chips were the clones, then, small change? And to think he'd despised the Jacksonians for being dealers in flesh.
Fell Station was just now passing out of the planet's eclipse, the advancing line of sunlight dramatically unveiling its vast extent. They decelerated toward one arm, giving up direction to Fell's traffic controllers and some heavily armed tugs which appeared out of nowhere to escort them. And there was the Peregrine, coasting in. The drop shuttles and the fighter shuttles all gavotted around their mother ship, coming meekly to their docking clamps. The Peregrine itself eased delicately toward its assigned mooring.
With a clank of the portside clamps and the hiss of flex-tube seals, they were home. In the cargo bay, the Dendarii expedited removal of the wounded to the Peregrine's infirmary, then turned much more slowly and wearily to tie-down and clean-up chores. Quinn shot past them, Thorne close on her heels. As if pulled by that mortal red ribbon, Mark followed.
The goal of Quinn's mad dash was the starboard side shuttle hatch, where Framingham's shuttle was coming to dock. They arrived there just as the flex-tube seals were secured, then had to stand out of the way as the wounded were rushed out first. Mark was disturbed to recognize Trooper Tonkin, who had accompanied Norwood the medic, among them. Tonkin had reversed roles, from guard to patient. His face was dark and still, unconscious, as eager hands hustled him past and shifted him onto a float pallet. Something's very wrong, here.
Quinn shifted impatiently from foot to foot. Other Dendarii troopers started to exit, herding clones. Quinn frowned, and shouldered upstream past them through the flex tube and into the shuttle.
Thorne and Mark went after her into free fall chaos. There were clone-youths everywhere, some crying, some violently sick—Dendarii were attempting to catch them and get them towed to the exit. One harried trooper with a hand-vac was chasing floating globs of some child's last meal before everyone had to breathe it. The shouts and screams and babble were like a blow to the mind. Framingham's bellows were failing to speed a return to military order any faster than the terrorized clones could be removed from the cargo bay.
"Framingham!" Quinn floated over and grabbed him by the ankle. "Framingham! Where the hell's the cryo-chamber Norwood was escorting?"
He glanced down, frowning. "But you said you had it, Captain."
"What?"
"You said you had Phillipi." His lips stretched in a fierce grimace. "Goddammit, if we've left her behind I'll—"
"We have Phillipi, yes, but she's—she was no longer in the cryo-chamber. Norwood was supposed to be getting it to you, Norwood and Tonkin."
"They didn't have it when my rescue patrol pulled them out. We got them both, what was left of 'em. Norwood was killed. Hit through the eye with one of those frigging projectile spine-grenades. Blew his head apart. But I didn't leave his body, it's in the bag over there."
Command helmets draw fire, oh yes, I knew that. . . . No wonder Quinn hadn't been able to raise Norwood's comm channels.
"The cryo-chamber, Framingham!" Quinn's voice held a high pitch of anguish Mark had never heard before.
"We didn't see any goddamn cryo-chamber, Quinn! Norwood and Tonkin didn't have it when we got to them! What's so frigging important about the cryo-chamber if Phillipi wasn't even in it?"
Quinn released his ankle, and floated in a tightening ball, arms and legs drawing in. Her eyes were dark and huge. She bit off a string of inadequate foul words, grinding her teeth so hard her gums went white. Thorne looked like a chalk doll.
"Thorne," Quinn said, when she could speak again. "Get on the comm to Elena. I want both ships on a total security blackout, as of now. No leaves, no passes, no communications with Fell Station or anybody else that isn't cleared by me. Tell her to get Lieutenant Hart over here from the Ariel. I want to meet with them both at once, and not over comm channels. Go."
Thorne nodded, rotated in air, and launched itself forward toward the flight deck.
"What is this?" demanded Sergeant Framingham.
Quinn took a deep, slow breath. "Framingham, we left the Admiral downside."
"Have you lost your mind, he's right there—" Framingham's finger sagged in mid-point at Mark. His hand closed into a fist. "Oh." He paused. "That's the clone."
Quinn's eyes burned; Mark could feel them boring through to the back of his skull like laser-drills.
"Maybe not," Quinn said heavily. "Not as far as House Bharaputra has to know."
"Ah?" Framingham's eyes narrowed in speculation.
No! Mark screamed inside. Silently. Very silently.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was like being trapped in a locked room with half a dozen serial killers with hangovers. Mark could hear each one's breathing from where they sat in a ring around the officer's conference table. They were in the briefing chamber
off the Peregrine's main tactics room. Quinn's breath was the lightest and fastest; Sergeant Taura's was the deepest and most ominous. Only Elena Bothari-Jesek at her captain's place at the head of the table, and Lieutenant Hart on her right, were shipboard-clean and natty. The rest had come as they were from the drop mission, battered and stinking: Taura, Sergeant Framingham, Lieutenant Kimura, Quinn on Bothari-Jesek's left. And himself, of course, lonely at the far end of the oblong table.
Captain Bothari-Jesek frowned, and wordlessly handed around a bottle of painkiller tablets. Sergeant Taura took six. Only Lieutenant Kimura passed. Taura handed them across to Framingham without offering any to Mark. He longed for the tablets as a thirsty man might yearn after a glass of water, poured out and sinking into desert sand. The bottle went back up the table and disappeared into the captain's pocket. Mark's eyes throbbed in time to his sinuses, and the back of his head felt as tight as drying rawhide.
Bothari-Jesek spoke. "This emergency debriefing is called to deal with just two questions, and as quickly as possible. What the hell happened, and what are we going to do next? Are those helmet recorders on their way?"
"Yes, ma'am," said Sergeant Framingham. "Corporal Abromov is bringing them."
"Unfortunately, we are missing the most pertinent one," said Quinn. "Correct, Framingham?"
"I'm afraid so, ma'am. I suppose it's embedded in a wall somewhere at Bharaputra's, along with most of the rest of Norwood's helmet. Friggin' grenades."
"Hells." Quinn hunched in her seat.
The briefing room door slid open, and Corporal Abromov entered at a jog. He carried four small, clear plastic trays, stacked, and labeled "Green Squad," "Yellow Squad," "Orange Squad," and "Blue Squad." Each tray held an array of ten to sixteen tiny buttons. Helmet recorders. Each trooper's personal records of the past hours, tracking every movement, every heartbeat, every scan, shot, hit, and communication. Events that had passed too rapidly for comprehension in real-time could be slowed, analyzed, teased apart, errors of procedure detected and corrected—next time.
Abromov saluted and handed the trays to Captain Bothari-Jesek. She dismissed him with thanks and passed the trays on to Captain Quinn, who in turn inserted them into the simulator's data slot and downloaded them. She also encoded the file top secret. Her raw-tipped fingers darted over the vid control panel.
The now-familiar ghostly three-dimensional holomap of Bharaputra's medical facility formed above the table top. "I'll jump forward to the time we were attacked in the tunnel," Quinn said. "There we are, Blue Squad, part of Green Squad . . ." A spaghetti-tangle of lines of green and blue colored light appeared deep inside a misty building. "Tonkin was Blue Squad Number Six, and kept his helmet throughout what follows." She made Tonkin's Number Six map-track yellow, for contrast. "Norwood was still wearing Blue Squad Number Ten. Mark . . ." her lips pinched, "was wearing Helmet One." That track, of course, was conspicuously missing. She made Norwood's Number Ten track pink. "At what point did you change helmets with Norwood, Mark?" She did not look at him as she asked this question.
Please, let me go. He was sure he was sick, because he was still shivering. A small muscle in the back of his neck spasmed, tiny twitches in a prickling underlayer of pain. "We went to the bottom of that lift tube." His voice came out a dry whisper. "When . . . when Helmet Ten comes back up, I'm wearing it. Norwood and Tonkin went on together, and that's the last I saw of them."
The pink line indeed crawled back up the tube and wormed after the mob of blue and green lines. The yellow track went on alone.
Quinn fast-forwarded voice contacts. Tonkin's baritone came out in a whine like an insect on amphetamines. "When I last contacted them, they were here." Quinn marked the spot with a glowing dot of light, in an interior corridor deep inside another building. She fell silent and let the yellow line snake on. Down a lift tube, through yet another utility tunnel, under a structure, up and through yet another.
"There," said Framingham suddenly, "is the floor they were trapped on. We picked up contact with 'em there."
Quinn marked another dot. "Then the cryo-chamber has to be somewhere near the line of march between here and here." She pointed to the two bright dots. "It has to be." She stared, eyes narrowed. "Two buildings. Two and a half, I suppose. But there's not a damned thing on Tonkin's voice transmissions that gives me a clue." The insect-voice described Bharaputran attackers, and cried for help, over and over, but did not mention the cryo-chamber. Mark's throat contracted in synchrony. Quinn, turn him off, please. . . .
The program ran to its end. All the Dendarii around the table stared at it, as if willing it to yield up something more. There was no more.
The door slid aside and Captain Thorne entered. Mark had never seen a more exhausted-looking human being. Thorne too was still dressed in dirty fatigues, only the plasma mirror pack discarded from its half armor. Its gray hood was pushed back, brown hair plastered flat to its head. A circle of grime in the middle of Thorne's pale face marked the hood opening, gray twin to the circle of red on Quinn's face from her mirror-field overload burn. Thorne's movements were hurried and jerky, will overriding a fatigue close to collapse. Thorne leaned, hands on the conference table, mouth a grim horizontal line.
"So, could you get anything at all out of Tonkin?" asked Quinn of Thorne. "What the computer has, we just saw. And I don't think it's enough."
"The medics got him waked up, briefly," reported Thorne. "He did talk. I was hoping the recorders would make sense of what he said, but . . ."
"What did he say?"
"He said when they reached this building," Thorne pointed, "they were cut off. Not yet surrounded, but blocked from a line to the shuttle, and the enemy closing the ring fast. Tonkin said, Norwood yelled he had an idea, he'd seen something 'back there.' He had Tonkin create a diversion with a grenade attack, and guard a particular corridor—must be that one there. Norwood took the cryo-chamber and ran back along their route. He returned a few minutes later—not more than six minutes, Tonkin said. And he told Tonkin, 'It's all right now. The Admiral will get out of here even if we don't.' About two minutes later, he was killed by that projectile grenade, and Tonkin was knocked loopy by the concussion."
Framingham nodded. "My crew got there not three minutes after that. They drove off a pack of Bharaputrans who were searching the bodies—looting, looking for intelligence, or both, Corporal Abromov wasn't sure—they picked up Tonkin and Norwood's body and ran like hell. Nobody in the squad reported seeing a cryo-chamber anywhere."
Quinn chewed absently on a fingernail stump. Mark did not think she was even conscious of the gesture. "That's all?"
"Tonkin said Norwood was laughing," Thorne added.
"Laughing." Quinn grimaced. "Hell."
Captain Bothari-Jesek was sunk in her station chair. Everyone around the table appeared to digest this last tid-bit, staring at the holomap. "He did something clever," said Bothari-Jesek. "Or something that he thought was clever."
"He only had about five minutes. How clever could he be in five minutes?" Quinn complained. "Gods damn the clever jerk to sixteen hells for not reporting!"
"He was doubtless about to." Bothari-Jesek sighed. "I don't think we need to waste time rationing blame. There's going to be plenty to go around."
Thorne winced, as did Framingham, Quinn, and Taura. Then they all glanced at Mark. He cringed back in his seat.
"It's only been," Quinn glanced at her chrono, "less than two hours. Whatever Norwood did, the cryo-chamber has to still be down there. It has to."
"So what do we do?" Lieutenant Kimura asked dryly. "Mount another drop mission?"
Quinn thinned her lips in non-appreciation of the weary sarcasm. "You volunteering, Kimura?" Kimura flipped up his palms in surrender and subsided.
"In the meantime," Bothari-Jesek said, "Fell Station is calling us, pretty urgently. We have to start dealing. I presume this will involve our hostage." A short nod of thanks in Kimura's direction acknowledged the only wholly successful part of th
e drop mission, and Kimura nodded back. "Does anyone here know what the Admiral intended to do with Baron Bharaputra?"
A circle of negative headshakes. "Don't you know, Quinnie?" asked Kimura, surprised.
"No. There wasn't time to chat. I'm not even sure if the Admiral seriously expected your kidnapping expedition to succeed, Kimura, or whether it was only for the diversionary value. That would be more like his strategizing, not to let the whole mission turn on one unknown outcome. I expect he planned," her voice faded in a sigh, "to use his initiative." She sat up straight. "But I sure as hell know what I intend to do. The deal this time is going to be in our favor. Baron Bharaputra could be the ticket out of here for all of us, and the Admiral too, but we have to work it just right."
"In that case," said Bothari-Jesek, "I don't think we should let on to House Bharaputra just how valuable a package we left downside." Bothari-Jesek, Thorne, Quinn, all of them, turned to look at Mark, coldly speculative.
"I've thought of that too," said Quinn.
"No," he whispered. "No!" His scream emerged as a croak. "You can't be serious. You can't make me be him, I don't want to be him any more, God! No!" He was shaking, shivering, his stomach turning and knotting. I'm cold.
Quinn and Bothari-Jesek glanced at each other. Bothari-Jesek nodded, some unspoken message.
Quinn said, "You are all dismissed to your duties. Except you, Captain Thorne. You are relieved of command of the Ariel. Lieutenant Hart will take over."
Thorne nodded, as if this were entirely expected. "Am I under arrest?"
Quinn's eyes narrowed in pain. "Hell, we don't have the time. Or the personnel. And you're not debriefed yet, and besides, I need your experience. This . . . situation could change rapidly at any moment. Consider yourself under house arrest, and assigned to me. You can guard yourself. Take a visiting officer's cabin here on the Peregrine, and call it your cell if it makes you feel any better."
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