She watched the T-Synth intently, letting the autopilot worry about the flying for a moment. Any second now . . .
Yep. The yellow lock-warning light started blinking frantically. A couple of seconds later the launch alerts went off. There, there, and there: three anti-rads boosting out. She’d just crossed maximum torpedo-lock range.
“You happy now?” she quipped into the link, finger over the shield button.
“Not yet—”
Jesus! Remind me never to play chicken with you again.
She glanced at the T-Synth’s weapons control window. Come on—lock up. The seconds ticked by, agonizing. Lock up, dammit. The torp-lock indicators lit green. “I’m locked!”
Huron did not reply. Three more launch warnings beeped at her, then a fourth. Seven missiles running out . . .
“Happy now?”
“Ecstatic.”
She hit the shield button. They would take at most two of those missiles, then fold. The forward armor might take a third, depending on the leakage. Might . . .
If you’ve got any more brilliant ideas, Huron, now’s the time.
He had a couple. He dumped some chaff buckets and laid down a barrage of plasma fire. Watching the traces on the T-Synth, she thought he must be heating his guns way up. Two missiles lost lock. Huron started zigging and jagging, blaring away on every frequency his fighter would generate. The missiles seemed to pause in their hunting and then veer towards this more obnoxious target.
Don’t play it too close, I’ll still need your help after this.
She refocused on the weapons control window. Seven seconds to launch. Five. Three . . . She slapped the launch button. The torpedoes ripple-fired, making the little craft shudder and buck. Kris pulled back into a hard lateral skid. Heavy deceleration slammed her into the straps, her vision reddened, and the hull creaked and groaned.
Christ, this thing isn’t built for that kind of launch shock! I hope the next one doesn’t rip something off.
Bottoming out of the skid, she hit full boost. Again, acceleration slammed her—back into the seat this time. The edges of the screen got dim and fuzzy. Blinking as the compensators reacted, she prayed Huron had kept those missiles busy for just another second. Climbing fast, she broke a roll back over the top in a textbook missile-avoidance maneuver. Huron swooped in to take position off her left wing.
“Clear for the moment.” He sounded exhausted.
She glanced sideways; her view screen showed nimbus burns along his spar tips. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” It sounded like a sigh. “Juked all but one. Shields took it.”
“Still up?”
“Recovering. They upped the kilotonnage on those bastards.” Wonderful. “That isn’t the bad news, though.”
Kris hung silently on the last syllable, waiting.
“Check your scan. Ilya’s broken orbit.”
“Well, we can stay out of her way easily—”
“Not with that cloud of fighters around her.”
Kris glanced at the scanner. There Ilya was, a bright yellow diamond enveloped by a cloud of angry red spots. A flying hive surrounded by some very pissed-off bees. No, not good at all . . .
“How much time, you figure?” Her voice was unnaturally calm.
“T-Synth says five minutes, but I don’t think the numbers on Ilya’s boost rates are current. Maybe four and a half.” There was a static-filled pause. “If we call it a day, I think we can still make it out ahead of them.”
Well, maybe . . . “Any of those torps hit?”
“Don’t know. Too far away for damage assessment. I didn’t pick up any transients. You?”
“No.” She should have gotten something if they’d detonated. They must have been shot down or dudded. Maybe Ilya’s hardware had given her a false lock. Shit.
“I’m going back in.” Her voice was steely smooth. “T-Synth gives me thirty seconds to get out of there.” The moment’s pause on the link said: You’re lying—T-Synth says no such thing. The pause was right. What the T-Synth actually said was that Ilya would get within plasma-battery range within twenty-two seconds of torpedo launch.
Huron’s voice, following the pause, was cool and precise—so much so it hinted at things she had neither the time nor heart to acknowledge. “Very well, Lieutenant Kennakris. Start your run.”
Kris punched up her course on the T-Synth, boosted up to max, and started the torpedo lock cycle. On her scanner, the enemy rushed to embrace them.
At least this hell wouldn’t be wallpapered with happy little smiles . . .
Chapter Five
36 hours later
IHS Ilya Turabian, orbiting Asylum Station
The electrodes ripping off her skin snapped something awake in Kris’s brain. Pain was a dying echo along her nerves. Outside the cool, protective numbness, she sensed the white-hot fires just now dimming, writhing sensations like steel wool being rubbed on raw naked nerves. She’d never guessed the uses to which a neural splicer could be perverted. The last flickers barely touched her here, down in the darkness, deeper than she had ever gone, fleeing from pain without boundaries—but they touched. They must have pumped her full of endorphin inhibitors to make it go on for so long. Slowly, voices became intelligible over the pounding in her temples, the roar of blood in her ears.
“. . . catatonic. Shit.” A thin, weasely voice. The one they called Manes.
She began to drift upwards through the heavy layers of oppressive consciousness, out of the private internal bastion she’d built piece by painstaking piece over the long years of captivity on Harlot’s Ruse, particularly on those nights when Trench came back in an especially ugly mood. Her own little hole in hell. Trouble was, you had to go through hell to get there. Sometimes you had to go through it again getting out . . .
“. . . do anything with that? She can’t resist, now.” The other man’s patrician tones rolled over Manes’ muttered curses. Heydrich. The two men seemed to be arguing.
“Shit, yeah,” Manes answered sarcastically. “I can give you a map of every fuck’n synapse in her brain. Could you read it? Cuz there wouldn’t be much left.”
The noise in her ears was receding now, slowing to the rhythm of a heartbeat. Her tortured mind began to unfurl a little, trying to fit meaning to the hollow-sounding words, words that drifted down to her in pieces . . .
“. . . attempt at humor, Sergeant, I’m afraid I’m unimpressed. If a technical suggestion—even less so.”
She heard the clanking of equipment being stowed and the creak and bang of a cabinet slammed shut as Manes answered, “Nah, Admiral. For your purposes, she’s fuck’n useless.” He came down hard on the syllables. “She don’t know shit.”
True, the thought shook itself free. Why are you doing this to me?
“. . . beg to differ. You have merely failed to find it.”
A silent cry wrenched loose, echoing between the narrow borders of her pain-blasted mind: No! What do you think I know that I Don’t Know . . .
* * *
The descent into hell had been a gradual one. She’d punched out just as a plasma battery from the pocket dreadnought had reduced her fighter to a cloud of fragments—the proverbial use of a sledge-hammer on an ant. The shock wave created by her craft resolving itself into debris had knocked her unconscious inside the armored escape capsule. She’d come to in the brig of the IHS Ilya Turabian, whose tractor beam had swept up her capsule and reeled it in. The cell was spacious by POW standards; they appeared to have a lot of room on the pocket dreadnought and didn’t mind wasting a little. She had been allowed to keep her uniform, and after the queasiness from being shaken around in the escape capsule had subsided, they fed her an adequate meal.
Sometime later, a short, round, shiny-pated fellow—Hi, Tweedle-Dum, where’s Tweedle-Dee?—came in and introduced himself as the interrogation officer. The nameplate on his undress whites said “Grinnell” and identified him as being from Med Lab. With him was a trim, compact older man with wiry s
alt-and-pepper hair and a terrier-like demeanor. The gold stars on his neat black uniform proclaimed him a senior captain—Ilya’s commanding officer, she must suppose. Tweedle-Dum did not introduce the captain, nor did he make any comment during the brief and unenlightening conversation that followed.
Tweedle-Dum asked all the usual questions (name, rank, and serial number), and she answered them. Her age—twenty-two—she added in a spirit of cooperation. Yes, she’d explain the meaning of her attack on an installation in Halith Imperial space: she’d been on an unauthorized and unassisted mission—well, not quite unassisted, but that hardly mattered now with Huron’s ionized atoms mingling with the cosmos—acting on her own initiative. It was a court-martial offense, perhaps a capital one. She wouldn’t be surprised if Mertone had her shot after she was exchanged. Not that she cared much, given Quillan’s plans.
Tweedle-Dum had not believed her, but she’d expected that and wasn’t too worried. An orderly came in and strapped her down while Tweedle-Dum broke out his gear. They hooked up the brain scanners and ran an IV. She did not resist. A standard interrogation was unpleasant in its practice and aftereffects, but that was all—unpleasant. They’d hit her with something, probably levocol, and when they found out she didn’t know any useful secrets, she’d go on the prisoner-exchange roster. The drugs kicked in and she blanked out.
The first time she came to, skull throbbing with the famed levocol headache, Tweedle-Dum was still there, hunched over his monitors and muttering, “No neural taps, no blocks, no imbedded chips. No chemicals that I can find. Damfino what’s doing it, sir. She looks clean . . .”
That was a very bad sign. Before her eyes cleared, they injected her with another dose and she went down again.
The second time she broke through the chemical haze, she knew instantly that things had gotten worse. Much worse, and it wasn’t just the levocol headache squared either.
Tweedle-Dum was gone, her wrists and ankles were cuffed, and she lay stark naked on a pallet in a room the POW inspectors had never seen. But it wasn’t until she saw the two men in the room with her that she realized just how much worse it actually was.
The first man was short, bald, and definitely not Halith. His face was remarkable in its ugliness: slit-eyed, beak-nosed, and turtle-mouthed—a gargoyle’s face. A not-quite-human face. Something inhuman too about the way he hunched in his baggy sergeant’s uniform, a suggestion that his bones didn’t fit together quite right. His narrow, red-rimmed eyes held a hard, wary expression. They skittered around the room, nervous out of habit. It seemed his relationship with reality was a strained one.
Half-Max, she knew, despised and outcast from that xenophobic civilization for the taint of his mixed genes. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to pity him. He reminded her too much of something that might crouch above the gates of Hell to welcome the inmates.
His companion, however, was the real Halith article, as tall and handsome as the half-Max was short and ugly. He had a narrow, economically fleshed skull and steel-gray hair, immaculately styled. A long saber scar—a pride-mark among Halith aristocrats—ran from under his left eye to the corner of his mouth. He wore medal-encrusted dress whites with the gold eagles and elaborate shoulder braid of a full admiral.
Looking at him, Kris felt icy little fingers of dread patter along her spine. The composed face seemed to her a mask with reptilian eyes, glassily concealing a range of twisted appetites. Hastily, she glanced away.
Seeing her stir, the admiral cleared his throat and politely introduced them. What he said turned the pattering little fingers into cold metal bands vising around her guts. “Lieutenant Kennakris, I am Admiral Heydrich, Lord Meremont, Head of Halith Military Intelligence. This is my aide, Sergeant Soho Manes. It has become necessary for us to undertake your interrogation personally.”
Oh Shit. She dropped her head jarringly back against the pallet. Hell’s doorman and the Devil’s butler.
Heydrich nodded gently. “Sergeant . . .” Let the screaming begin . . .
* * *
“ . . . tellin’ ya, sir—she fuck’n wore me out. We been at this all goddamned day. Nobody can take that. If them bastards is up to somethin’, they didn’t tell her.” More rattling and clanking, the creak of a cart being wheeled away from the pallet. Evidently Manes and Heydrich were still arguing.
“Possibly. But she must have known something. Her fighter was heavily modified. Carrying that number of torpedoes, she could hardly have believed it was an ordinary mission.”
The words fell more evenly on her ears now, close and immediate. Her nostrils tasted the air, sharp with the smell of fear-tanged sweat. She had a wracked feeling in her joints, and pain began to blossom in throbbing patches on her skin—little residual fires . . .
Manes was talking again. “. . . sure she weren’t just trying to take us out like she said? She’s fuck’n cracked enough to go for it. She did go for it.”
“The CEF does not believe in suicide missions, Sergeant Manes.” Heydrich’s voice was palpably disdainful. “Even if she does. Besides, we have a line on the second pilot—they never would have wasted him in such a fashion. Very odd they risked him at all.”
Yeah, odd, the memory flared with a sudden, deeper pain. You were a dumb fucker to come along, Huron. Why’d you do that?
“. . . was he?”
“Commander Rafael Huron.” Heydrich’s voice took on a peculiar tone of distaste.
A loud bang. Kris twitched slightly as Manes slapped his palm on some piece of equipment. “Mothafucker! You bagged the wrong guy, Admiral.”
“I expect so.” A dismissive remark. Heydrich paused, and through her closed eyelids, she imagined him scrutinizing her. “But their presence together on this mission indicates it was an affair of importance. These are not two disobedient junior pilots on a lark, Sergeant.”
She could hear the smile on the tight lips as he said it. He stepped near; she heard his boot scuff as he moved, felt a slight breath of air scented with his cologne—a faintly musky fragrance, sharpening the smell of fear even as it masked the familiar, faint sourness of the ship’s recycled air. A finger trailed down the inside of her naked thigh, over the front of her shin, down towards her ankle.
“ . . . smacks of a diversion of some sort,” he was saying, finger stroking her taut skin. “And the point of a diversion is, of course, to direct attention away from a true threat. We need to discover that threat, Sergeant. I trust I need not emphasize how crucial that is. Especially now.”
“Uh, no. Sir.”
“I thought not. Still,” his voice softened, almost purring, “this is a fascinating study in character, yes? Perhaps their plan would have succeeded had she kept her head.” His finger caressed her ankle, the light, tickling sensation heightened by the hot blotches on her skin. The soles of her feet began to tingle and itch.
Shit! If he touches them, I’ll jump. I won’t be able to help it. Shit shit—
“. . . supposed to launch close enough to be convincing but far enough away to avoid identification. Failure of nerve, you know.” He patted her knee. “But not her,” his voice purred on. “She wanted a kill—”
You got no idea how much.
“—she couldn’t waste a full spread of torpedoes on a diversion.” His hand dropped away, the motion stirring the fine erect hairs on the skin of her thighs. “Interesting, is it not? Enough nerve to take on the mission—too much to successfully complete it. Amusing how our virtues trip us.”
Manes grunted. “Wouldn’t have been too fuck’n amusing if she’d got that second salvo off. She hammered base good with the first one.” A muscle jumped in her solar plexus. She’d hit? She’d done damage? “ . . . can’t even dock this fancy tub. We got no fighter cover, fleet’s gone. We’re fuck’n naked here, sir.”
“All situations that will be rectified within a few days, Sergeant,” Heydrich remarked with a tinge of exasperation as he turned away. “Unlike the one that may result if we fail to discover what she kno
ws. Understood?”
“Yessir.” Manes sounded sullen. “But we gotta give it a rest, sir. Even if I could get her eyes open, we ain’t gonna get shit now. Maybe some goddamned V-show plots or what she ate for her third birthday.” He laughed, high and cackling. It shivered through her—a ghost’s laugh. Which ghost? “That sorta bullshit. Interestin’ maybe, but not useful.”
“Very good, Sergeant.” Heydrich sounded resigned. “Give her something to keep her down for a while and take her to my quarters. That is all.”
She heard the boot-squeak of Manes approaching. Forewarned, she lay perfectly still as he placed a hand—dry, hot, rough with calluses—against her arm and hit the inside of her elbow with a hypospray. Warmth spread along her biceps, but before it reached her shoulder, her mind was filling with dark blue fogs. They closed around her consciousness, and it closed with them.
Chapter Six
IHS Ilya Turabian
orbiting Asylum Station
Kris awakened slowly, with all the normal sensations of rousing from a long and deep sleep, wondering where she was. The air against her face was cool and lacked the sour astringency of ship’s air, but the subacoustic thrumming of power plants left no doubt she was still on board a ship. Not a brig cell, she thought, and at least I’m not naked this time. But the clothing against her skin felt strange, not a uniform and not prisoner’s fatigues. It was soft, lightly scented, and velvety supple. Very strange . . .
She opened her eyes cautiously and yawned, stretching to relieve the lingering ache in her stiff joints. She heard the liquid clashing of metal links as her arms and legs abruptly halted in their motions. Oh hell, what now?
She raised her head to look about the room and realized she’d awakened into a nightmare—a literal nightmare. The room was decorated in pale peach and cream with burgundy and mauve accents; the furnishings were reproductions of old Earth antiques, right down to the ivory silk bed hangings. Replicas of antique paintings on the walls included a large central piece in a heavy golden baroque frame, looking for all the world like real oil paint applied to actual organic canvas, except that the pictures mutated periodically—and she’d seen it all before. Years before . . .
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