Blaedergil's Host

by C. M. Simpson

  I looked to Mack, and noticed he hadn’t taken his eyes off Skymander and his bodyguards.

  “You could have asked permission to board,” Mack said, and Skymander arched an eyebrow.

  “Now, where would be the strength in that? I told you I was coming. You should have been standing by.”

  “That is not our custom,” Mack told him, but he did not elaborate.

  Skymander chose not to pursue it.

  “We will take you on board,” he said, and I thought we were about to be teleported, but then he explained. “Once your ship is safely in the docking bay, I will escort the Lady Melari aboard the Flag.”

  Mack gave him a look that hid all feeling from his face.

  “As your Lordship wishes,” he said, and lowered his hands.

  Around the control center, the rest of us did the same, but we all kept our hands away from our weapons. We were outgunned, and outmaneuvered, and these boys had us dead to rights.

  The Shady Marie rocked slightly, correcting the tilt. Mack, Tens, Case and I shuffled our feet as it repositioned itself, and then, again, when a shudder rocked through the ship, and the sound of metal on metal sounded through the hull.

  “Docking clamps,” Skymander said, and I tried to access the ship’s feeds to see where we were.

  Well, that resulted in a splitting headache. Looks like the green creeper had gotten through, after all.

  “When you’re quite finished,” Skymander said, and I came out of my head to find myself the focus of everyone’s attention.

  “Sure,” I told him. “Go ahead. Be my guest. I mean—”

  “Cutter!” Mack snapped, and I shut my mouth.

  Boss man looked pissed. Skymander? Not so much. He turned to Mack.

  “Docking is complete. You will take me to my future bride.”

  If she survives, I thought, but what the hell ever. Mack shot me a glance that might have scorched paint, if I’d have cared. I didn’t. Not on this matter, and he knew it. When it came to Melari, I’d never met someone so eager to go to the torture chamber.

  “Cutter!”

  I winced, and Skymander caught the movement.

  “By all means,” he said, indicating Tens and me, “bring your shadows.”

  Shadow, huh? I shot a glance at Tens, but his expression gave me nothing, and Mack just looked bemused. I figured if Skymander had smacked him between the eyes with a large plank of wood, the effect would have been much the sa...

  I caught Mack’s next look.

  Okay, if Skymander had whacked him with a large plank of wood, maybe Mack would have looked a bit different. He shook his head, and turned to our self-invited guest.

  “This way, my lord,” and I’d never heard Mack quite so deferential.

  “I’ll explain it, later, using crayon and a large sheet of paper,” he said, where only I could hear it.

  Mack led Skymander through the corridors to the Lady Melari’s quarters. I was surprised to see she was packed and waiting, even more surprised to discover a female nurse standing to one side of her, and two of Mack’s female security guards standing on the other.

  “My Lord,” Melari said, and dropped into a deep curtsey as soon as Skymander stepped through the door.

  “My beloved lady,” Skymander replied, extending his hand, palm upwards, so that she could take it, “I have come to take you where I need you to go next.”

  The Lady Melari rose out of her curtsey, and slipped her arm through the arm Skymander offered.

  “As my lord commands,” she replied, her voice the barest whisper of sound, and Skymander signaled for Mack to lead him back through the ship.

  “Take us to the main airlock,” he said, “and remain aboard your ship. Full control will be returned to you, when we have returned you to open space.”

  When they had what? But I caught the slight wrinkle to Mack’s brow, and kept my mouth firmly closed.

  36—Mercy Mission

  Skymander was as good as his word. Once he and Melari had left the airlock and crossed onto the Flag, his soldiers escorted us back to the main control room.

  “A new chip for your console,” one said, handing Tens a small flat box, when we had been settled back at our consoles. “Skymander would not have you defenseless.”

  Unless he’s doing the attacking, I thought, and ducked my head so they couldn’t see the scorn on my face.

  “I am going to kick your tail, Cutter.”

  Mack sounded even more pissed, if that was possible, so I rolled my eyes, and picked a point on the view screen to stare at. If I was staring at nothing, then I couldn’t get myself into trouble, right?

  “Pay attention to your boards, Cutter.”

  Right. Of course, I could.

  We dropped into clear space, and watched as Skymander’s Flag cruised by. When it was a comfortable distance between us and High Costral, we watched it do a slow flip, and head back towards the warp point.

  “We will return,” Skymander said, “and you can settle the rest of your contract then.”

  The rest? Oh. And then I remembered the files and serum we’d been supposed to pass over to him.

  “Steady, Cutter,” Mack said.

  The transmission cut out as the big ship passed back through the warp point, heading for Magnus 19, and whatever plague-master had been chosen to complete Melari’s selection. My stomach wound itself into knots, as I thought about it.

  “Don’t,” Mack said. “You can’t save them all.”

  I just wished I could save this one.

  “They have to want to be saved,” Tens replied, and I had to admit he had a point.

  Melari not only didn’t seem concerned by her fate, but she appeared to be looking forward to it. I figured that that took a special kind of special, and Tens snickered.

  “You should know,” he said, and I decided to ignore him—which came a lot more easily than expected, as a call came through from the other side of the warp point.

  “Skymander,” Mack said, allowing it to connect—and the main viewing screen lit up.

  Skymander was, again, seated beside Treivani. Her hands were wound around one of his, and she leant against his side, gazing adoringly at his face. If ever a scene was staged, I thought, it had to be this one. Skymander looked out at us, surveying the control room. When he spoke, he was looking directly at Mack.

  “I apologize for the high-handedness of our arrival,” he said. “I understand that was not your custom, but I have guests on board that needed to be impressed. There will be compensation in your contract for that. It was necessary.”

  “Understood,” Mack said, but his jaw was tight, and I wondered what was going on.

  “Now that I have secured our communications line, would you care to tell my why there was a need to deliver the Lady Melari early?”

  “As I said, Odyssey do not agree with your selection process; they tried to teleport her off the ship.”

  “Several times,” Tens added, “so I had to have port shields in place.”

  “Ah,” and the look on Skymander’s face said that Tens had just explained something that had had him confounded. It was all too quickly gone, however, and he continued, “Be that as it may, your crew was impressive. It has been a very long time since my people have been challenged. I may seek your assistance in training, at a later date.”

  “Please do,” Mack told him, before either Tens or I had a chance to respond.

  “Tell me, why was it important for you to be able to drop your port shields?”

  “Odyssey Agent Delight had to port out. We received a call from Clan Corovan, during which we refuted their claims for compensation for failing to fulfil the Corovan contract. As we were informing the clan leader of the presence of the arach, he suffered an attack and appealed for help.”

  “He did?” Treivani sat forward on the couch, not letting go of her husband’s hand.

  As if remembering he was beside her, she glanced up at him, and I saw when he gave her a brief nod, a
nd the briefest of smiles. The pure delight on her face lightened his expression, but I didn’t have time to wonder how he could love her so much, and still have put her through Blaedergil’s treatment. Treivani was in full High-Clan mode, and it was clear we were speaking with a Hazerna, and not just Skymander’s bride.

  “The Corovani are in trouble?” she asked, rising to her feet and stepping towards the camera.

  “Yes.” Mack’s voice was wary, but I could feel his curiosity through the implant.

  Treivani smiled at his reply, but it was a smile as full of mischief and secrets, as any Delight might have delivered. I wondered what she was up to. Whatever it was, though, she wasn’t telling.

  “Can I ask you to stand-by in readiness?”

  “How long?”

  “No more than a standard hour.”

  “We will stand by.”

  “Thank you,” and Treivani stepped back, as though to resume her seat beside her husband.

  Instead of waiting, he rose to meet her.

  “We will call inside the hour,” he told Mack. “Hazerna and Skymander must consult.”

  The screen went to black as his lordship cut the call, leaving me to ponder the shift in terms of address.

  “They’re delineating roles,” Mack said. “All the High Clans do it.”

  I wanted to ask him how he knew these things, but found a wall of silence. Mack, for once had left my head, and I wondered why. What was it about his past that he did not want me to know?

  “If I wanted you to know it, Cutter, I’d have let you see,” came into the implant in a voice as tightly restricted as I’d ever heard him use.

  I doubted even Tens was privy to that comment.

  “Tens knows better than to pry.”

  Pfft. Whatever.

  I went over the control boards in front of me, checking to see if Case needed me to lay in a course, and realizing Mack hadn’t given us a destination. Great! Now, we were just hanging about in space, dangling like some kind of live bait right next to a jump point. Because that couldn’t look at all suspicious, could it.

  “Shut it, Cutter.”

  Yeah, thanks, Mack.

  “She has a point.”

  And, thank you, Tens.

  The ping of an incoming call interrupted before Mack could respond to any of us, and he glanced across at Tens.

  “Delight.”

  “Put her on screen.”

  Well, this was going to be interesting. I hoped she wasn’t going to want an immediate intervention, because I figured she’d be shit out of luck until Skymander called, Odyssey client, or not. It never rained but it poured.

  The second she was live, we could see she was in strife. It wasn’t hard; the fact she was backed into the corner of what had been a well-appointed office was a dead give-away. She must have spliced us into the security footage of the building, because we were getting an all-too-clear picture of what was going on.

  Since when did the Corovani have high rises?

  “Since they’re arrogant sons of bitches, who think they’re an exception to Costral rules,” Delight snapped in my head, and began to speak. “Clan Corovan formally requests the assistance of Clan Hazerna and the Lord Skymander, to preserve its bloodline. Request is urgent. Clan Corovan begs for swift mercy at your earliest convenience.”

  She paused, and then looked straight into the camera.

  “That’s the formal part. Now, I’m asking. Mack get your ass down here and do your worst!”

  She pulled a second weapon from beneath the desk, and started firing with a weapon in each hand. Her head snapped from side to side as she sighted targets, her vision moving to the next potential, even as she pulled the triggers. A figure dropped down in front of the camera, and I caught a glimpse of others, and then the feed went dark.

  For a second, the screen flickered to show what Delight was seeing, and I had pulled the Glazer, before I’d registered what I was doing.

  “Stand! Down!” roared across the control center and through my head, and my finger froze on the trigger.

  “Stand down, Cutter. Stand down.”

  I stopped, and then I stood down. I stood down so far, I was sitting on the floor with my back to the console, when Mack spoke.

  “It’s okay, Cutter. We’ll re-run the footage, and try to identify if that was the same clan. After that, we’ll have Delight donate that, and anything else for the training sims.”

  I felt ten times the idiot.

  “After what you’ve faced in the last forty-eight?” Mack said. “That’s a normal reaction. You didn’t see Tens, just then, did you?”

  And he flashed me an image of Tens coming out from behind his console, a very big blade in his hand. I wanted to know where he’d pulled that from... and if I could have one, too, but Mack was having none of it.

  “No—and Tens will be removing the scabbard from under his console, and keeping that thing out of the control center from this point on.”

  “You and whose army?” I heard Tens mutter, followed by a resigned, “Fine! It goes.”

  “Skymander,” Mack said, and it was almost a command.

  The viewscreen went live, and Skymander turned to face it. He did not look pleased.

  “You were told to wait.”

  Mack didn’t bother apologizing, he sent a clip of Delight’s request through, and I watched Skymander’s expression change from affronted annoyance, to action.

  “You will follow the Skymander’s Shadow to Costral,” he said. “Your people will port in using the coordinates the Shadow’s master provides. I will add the necessary clauses and payments to your contract; there will be some room for negotiation.”

  “Done. We will await the...” Mack’s voice dwindled, as the screen went blank, and proximity alarms began to sound.

  Case swore, and I felt the ship’s attitude make a swift adjustment as Case banked steeply to the left.

  “Heaven’s balls! Where the fuck did that come from?”

  “Tens!”

  I might have found that funny, except I was too busy plotting a path for Case to follow. I’ll give her this, she was fast, adjusting the ship’s attitude and course so that we fell in to the starboard lee of the battle cruiser that had been sitting, cloaked, a hairsbreadth off our flank.

  It was smaller than the Flag, but it still dwarfed us. I was very glad Mack had ordered our weapons kept off-line. We’d never have known what hit us. Starmander’s Shadow, indeed. I wondered if this meant the Flag was unprotected.

  “Unlikely,” but I didn’t have time to explore that, because the Shadow set a hard pace, and I had to keep us on a course that kept us on station. We were lucky that Case flew like a maniac.

  We hit the sky above Costral, in less time than it had taken to reach the gate, not surprising, given we’d been returning from chasing arach in the opposite direction at the time. As we settled into orbit not far from the Shadow, the screen went live.

  “Mackenzie Star?” The man on-screen looked towards Mack, but not before his gaze had swept the room with a military precision that told me he had seen, and noted, each and every one of us.

  “Master of the Shadow?”

  “Master Manreiden. My Lord Skymander says you will be joining us on the raid?”

  “It is in our contract.”

  I watched as Manreiden’s lips tightened, and he looked Mack up and down, as though assessing him for combat. He must have approved of what he saw, for he continued.

  “Our instructions are that two of you will join us in administering Corovan mercy, and rescuing Odyssey. Which one is Cutter?”

  I lifted my hand in a half wave of acknowledgement, and received the same assessment, he had given Mack. It was a relief to know I’d passed, when he spoke, again.

  “Have your communications officer insert the following coding where it can be seen in a scan of your equipment,” and he hit a button, as though executing a send command.

  “Received,” Tens confirmed. “They’ll be fla
shing when they arrive.”

  Manreiden dipped his head in acknowledgement, and then turned to Mack.

  “We port in five. When will you join us?”

  “Five,” Mack confirmed, and I forced my expression to blankness.

  Five? Was he crazy?

  “See you on the ground,” the commander said, and the screen went dark.

  Mack looked at me.

  “Gear is in the port center. Run,” and we both bolted from the control center, Tens jogging in our wake.

  Five minutes?

  “We have to show that we are as prepared as they are.”

  “But we’re not.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  37—Pest Control

  I have to admit: I was surprised. Not only did we make the teleport center in less than a minute—which was easy with Mack taking point, and the crew still in their pods—but our gear was waiting, and we were dressed and kitted in another three.

  Tens had gotten his teleport team out of their pods, and into the center ahead of us, and they knew what help we needed. We had thirty seconds to spare when the silver light wrapped about us and sent us down to Costral’s surface.

  We ported in as a pair, only to find ourselves suddenly surrounded by green-lit figures.

  “Nice,” Tens murmured. “I wonder if they’ll share the secret.”

  “Ask later,” Mack told him, “and make sure they know it’s us.”

  That much was evident, when the half dozen soldiers nearest turned their weapons towards us, and then abruptly pointed them to the sky. We took the hint from the fact they were kneeling, and in firing positions, and dropped down. We hadn’t expected to be in the center of a double-layered protective circle, but we adapted.

  We pointed our Blazer 54s skyward, as well, wondering what the soldiers knew that we didn’t. The outer ring had also landed in a crouch, but their weapons pointed outward. I guessed there to be about twenty-four in all. Not a bad number for a rescue mission, but wouldn’t more have been better?

  “Master Manreiden will reassess troop requirements once contact is made,” said the soldier nearest, and I worried that the coding Tens had attached to our equipment might have provided our allies with more access than we’d wanted.