Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn

by Smith, L. Neil

  They had never learned precisely who it was—which of their many and various presumed enemies—that had mounted the attack. Upon the other hand, such a frontal assault upon them had not been attempted again, and events for all of the Islay family had moved afterward in a manner astonishingly similar—albeit associated with a greater degree of caution upon all their parts—to the way they had before. They had been presented formally to the Ceo Lia at the ’Droom. Bretta had discovered that she could not dance—and then that she could, thanks to the unpredictably protean Woulf. They had attended some theatrical performance, which, although it had been presented in the language she thought she had grown up speaking, she had failed to understand one word of.

  They had visited more shops and museums.

  As all things must, however, Bretta’s social whirl upon Hanover, such as it had been, came finally to an end, and to her surprise, the no-nonsense backwoods girl found herself—with the notable exception of being compelled to deal with the mass media upon an almost daily basis—almost regretting it.

  After twelve weeks onboard what she felt was as an overpassengered Osprey, she was beginning to know why. (Reflexively, she rapped a fire extinguisher lightly with her knife handle to determine that it had been refilled up to the proper level, and marched onward.) She would almost rather deal with the media.

  The Islays and their traveling party continued to believe that the real reason for their coming expedition remained a secret. Who would likely have believed what they purposed to do—to undermine and overthrow an institution older than the ’Droom itself in any case? Yet it was unavoidable that they should nonetheless depart Hanover amidst a tremendous clamor. A virtually breathless public interest in most of them reached back more than a decade, and nearly everything about them seemed calculated to excite the general curiosity.

  Captain Arran Islay, for example, was vastly better known to everyone as that (presumably) former interstellar brigand Henry Martyn, who had embarrassed the Monopolity of Hanover fifteen years ago, and yet now appeared to be serving it in some as-yet-unexplained capacity. He had brought with him his wedded wife, the lovely Loreanna Daimler-Wilkinson Islay, herself the former ward of the abdicated Ceo Leupould’s discredited right-hand man. Apparent complications such as these were exquisitely thrilling to the vast hordes of obnoxious media pontificators who wished above all to be perceived as profound and subtle, and had begun following each member of the Islay party everywhere they tried to go.

  Under any other circumstances, their predicament would have been comical. (Bretta had believed it was comical under these circumstances, but wisely forebore to say so.) Both Arran and Phoebus had been compelled to resort to masques, hired decoys, verbal obscenities the parasitic media dare not record, let alone transmit, and outright physical threat, in order to shake the vermin off.

  Loreanna simply stayed home, within the Daimler-Wilkinson establishment, content, for the nonce, exploring artifacts and memories a decade and a half old.

  Bretta, who refused to make of herself a prisoner of the mass media or of the house, could tolerate no such recourse. The already romanticized Islay couple’s eldest daughter, a slim, attractive barbarian wench just old enough herself to become the object of many salacious rumors, had heightened her own visibility to the point of ecstatic unbearability, by thrusting a man to death with a personal kinetic energy projector, a villainous instrumentality that no right-thinking, correctly brought-up young Hanoverian female would even have contemplated possessing, let alone becoming proficient with, and actually using.

  As she reached up to inspect for a particular sort of parasitic dustmote above a doorsill, the villainous instrumentality upon her forearm glittered reassuringly.

  But there was even more to outrage and delight the jaded sensibilities of the capital world. To Hanover, the infamous Captain Phoebus Krumm had brought with him both of his small, plump wives, Tula and Tillie. Although every sort of marriage custom was practiced upon the centerpiece of the Monopolity, which drew its inhabitants from virtually every sapient species and all parts of the Known Galaxy, for the most part, humans—who comprised the media’s principal clientele—were generally monogynous, although, it was to be admitted, not particularly happily, nor yet particularly faithfully. And from the reports of various media rating services, it appeared that all of them loved hearing about the Krumm family, and—even better—imagining what they did in bed together.

  Even the Ceo herself, upon whom a disheartened media had long since given up as a source of shocking scandal, titillating rumor, or even mildly interesting innuendo, could never have kept a secret (had she been so inclined, which she was not) of the melodramatic return to Monopolitan civilization of Jennivere Daimler-Wilkinson. For weeks they had reveled in publishing her likeness as it had been almost thirty years ago, radiantly magnificent, before that tragic and perhaps even foolish sojourn with her husband, and as it was now, that of a shriveled hag, half-mad with every indignity that had ever been inflicted upon her.

  It was the very stuff—quintessential, unrelenting misery—that any journalist’s dreams were made of, and it was reiterated so often that it was said (perhaps in jest) that hearing the first syllable of the victim’s name now triggered a regurgitory reflex among those with a weaker constitution than others.

  For some reason that nobody would condescend to explain to the frustrated snoops who had apparently convinced themselves that they had a right to know everything about everybody—and to tell every bit of it to everybody else—Jennivere Daimler-Wilkinson (now known to an empathetic public as “Owld Jenn”) seemed to be accompanied everywhere by a famous high society brain-poker. The media had never been able to make anything of that. But fortunately, for the practitioners of a trade whose watchword for a millennium had been, “If they won’t tell you, make it up!” Jennivere had a grown son with no known paternal connection, who could be linked through prurient insinuation with his very mediagenic and underaged half niece, bringing the whole affair tidily back upon itself.

  Satisfied with her informal inspection of this cargo deck, Bretta took an outboard ladderway to the next deck below. Exactly as upon the deck above, a full circle of black, hulking spherical shapes, each a measure and a half in diameter—the starship’s mighty projectibles presently standing quiet watch at their gunports—lined the outermost circumference of the vessel’s hull. Phoebus always joked that, aboard Henry Martyn’s ship, every deck was a gundeck.

  All that remained for the media to discuss at an interminable length were the mysterious—and undoubtedly corrupt—circumstances under which the Ceo Leupould’s disgraced and exiled Executor-General had suddenly been restored to power, returning with him, to a counterfeit semblance of respectability, his old political crony and apparent mentor in the often-exposed debaucheries of the so-called “Immortal School” (to which, as a point of fact, many a retired and formerly celebrated media personality belonged, as well), none other than the presently stateless former statesman and onetime Jendyne Ambassador Plenipotentiary to the Monopolitan ’Droom, the sinister Frantisek Demondion-Echeverria.

  Quite strangely, Bretta thought as she tiptoed carefully across a gundeck littered with the softly snoring bodies of several dozen sleeping crewbeings, no mention whatever had been made in the mass media of the former Ceo Leupould himself, or, as he preferred to be called these days, “plain old Brother Leo,” although one would certainly think of him, very nearly foremost, as a fertile subject for sensational stories. Perhaps there were decent limits, after all, even for such vermin as found employment within the media. Or perhaps Brother Leo simply knew where too many bodies were buried—or possibly soon would be.

  Arriving at that cylindrical enclosure in the center of the gundeck which was but an extension—and the foundation—of the klomme-high mast of the Osprey, Bretta ducked, lifted her foot, and passed through an oval hatchway, its heavy valvelike door propped open and chained back, and, from a metalloid mesh landing inside, descended a skel
etal spiral stairway to the next deck, below.

  Those two old Deep-raiders, Arran and Phoebus, and their distinguished patron Lia, had not been without certain propaganda countermeasures of their own to fall back upon. In their craftiness, the three of them had finally offered to the media an explanation for the expedition. It was the Ceo Lia’s wish, they announced, that they begin a search for the ancient homeworld of all humanity, the legendary planet “Terror” or “Yurt,” or whatever it had been named.

  Likewise, they set a widely publicized date for their departure, while Phoebus offered an extraordinary display of readying his own starship, the armed carrack Tease, for the historical undertaking to come. Then he and Arran saw to it that they and their several associates departed two full days earlier than anyone in the media had expected of them, and only aboard Arran’s famed corvette, Osprey. Fionaleigh Savage would command Phoebus’s carrack upon a decoy mission to the famed star-raider’s sanctuary of Sisao and Somon.

  The traveling company they carried with them aboard Osprey was a most peculiar assortment of individuals. Arran commanded both the starship and the expedition, Phoebus assisting as his second-in-command and gunnery officer. Representing the Monopolity of Hanover officially, Lia had sent her Executor-General, and at Sedgeley’s urging, she had also promised DemondionEcheverria certain rewards, political and otherwise, should he acquit himself well in her service.

  She had also sent her own father and predecessor—although with what understanding between them, nobody knew. Jennivere was to act as a kind of “native guide” to the expedition, a hypnotist having helped her to recall the way.

  Even here, many light-years away from that personage, Bretta felt an urge to shudder at the memory. They had only met upon a few occasions, but the hypnotist had disturbed her deeply, in many ways. Firstly, she could not be certain which gender the creature favored, a phenomenon altogether different in quality from the merely effete manner of Hanoverian men. The hypnotist had offered no clue whatever to whether he, she, or it was male, female, or even something else. To a straightforward girl raised upon a planet of equally straightforward farmers and foresters, such uncertainty was more than merely disconcerting.

  The woman (at some point, Bretta had arbitrarily decided that it was a female) had been unpleasant to look upon, as well, possessing coarse, stringy hair that stuck out upon every side, except for an obscenely naked forehead—ornately tattooed—that seemed to reach almost to the crest of her skull. Her eyes bulged from their sockets like halves of the lightweight balls Bretta and her sisters batted back and forth with paddles across a table. She never seemed to blink. Her irises and pupils never left the precise centers of her eyes. She never spoke above a whisper, or without slow, melodramatic gestures entirely unlike those Bretta had been brought up making. Perhaps the creature was not even human, but some variety of alien that someone working for Lia had discovered.

  The worst of it, she thought, was the way that the Ceo’s hypnotist had with her grandmother. Bretta did not care at all for Jennivere, and was not in the least ashamed to admit it, at least to herself. But at the same time, she was human enough to pity the old woman. To have somebody like that brain-sifter nudging, nuzzling, whispering in one’s ear continuously, from morning until night, to have somebody’s damp, spidery fingers lying upon one’s arm or skittering across one’s cheek . . . Bretta shuddered again, just thinking about it.

  The creature might as well have come with them; it felt as if she were here.

  Having left the central shaft, crossed another of Arran Islay’s gundecks, taken a ladder below to the next deck, and successfully avoided stepping upon anyone for a third time, Bretta made her way through another oval hatchway cut through the ship’s hollow mast. Resting her hands upon the metalloid railing upon either side of the spiral stairway, she slid downward and around, making a full circle before she reached a similar hatchway leading to the next deck below.

  One by one, this ill-assorted handful of individuals had started to make whatever adjustments they were capable of making to one another. To give them proper credit, each of them occupied quarters, at the moment less luxurious and far more crowded than most of them—with the notable exceptions of Woulf and his mother—had ever been accustomed to. They had all been compelled, as well, to accommodate themselves to the unique rhythms of the ship herself, rising with her daywatch, eating by her rigid schedule, learning to stay out of the way of her complement of more than three hundred hard-driven, busy sailors.

  At the same time, Arran and Phoebus drilled their crews without ceasing, insisting upon the highest possible standard of performance—a standard upon which the survival of all might soon come to rely. The primary emphasis, naturally enough, lay upon the speedy and accurate employment of the vessel’s unusual number of projectibles, and the accompanying tactical aspects of starship handling. From moment to moment, the girl believed that she was seeing her father “come alive” again. He flourished under the strains, pains, and disciplines of a shipboard command. He even unbent sufficiently to let her take an occasional watch, serving as an unofficial member of the officers’ mess.

  It was all that she had ever wanted, and even now, she smiled at the thought.

  Taking a long metal pole from its brackets upon a bulkhead, she poked it upward, deep into a ventilation shaft. There was a kind of, well, of moss the crewbeings called it, that dropped from such recesses, and made a short meal of any unwary sapient it fell upon. The stuff was rather rare, but very dangerous.

  As a direct but unfortunate consequence, however, of Bretta’s newly found usefulness aboard her father’s starship, more and more, in her vacant off-duty hours, she had found the crowded passenger quarters of the interstellar vessel unendurable. Try as she might, she could not learn to abide her grandmother, the merest shell of a human being who, to all appearances, never bathed, whose rare, lucid moments were completely unpredictable, and whose behavior at other times was . . . well, absolutely disgusting. It seemed only natural to detest her.

  And then there were certain other annoying little exercises in the art of interpersonal relationships. From the manner in which he seemed to leer at her whenever he thought that she was unaware of it, Bretta believed that Frantisek Demondion-Echeverria—a “dirty old man” if she had ever seen one (which she had, in old dramathilles)—would have loved to trap her in some dark corner somewhere.

  Even her great-uncle Sedgeley’s urbane, witty, and ingratiating manner was beginning to rasp upon her country girl’s nerves. And the silent Brother Leo was beginning to seem more sinister to her than charming. She wished that she could be quartered among the Osprey’s junior officers, some of whom were female, rather than with her suddenly—and quite unwelcomely—extended family, distributed in cabins about the torus formed by the rise from mainto quarterdeck.

  Upon the other hand, few ordeals actually last forever, and after three and a half endless Skyan months (not a minute soon enough for Bretta, nor for the remainder of the ship’s company, she was willing to wager) the Osprey had arrived at last at her initial destination, an unexplored stellar system within a reasonable margin for calculatory error from the statistical center of historic Oplyte distribution, a location within the Deep that agreed roughly with the information the Ceo’s hypnotist had been able to extract from Owld Jenn.

  Now, in the cabelle tier, deep within the lowest reaches of the starship, where kiloklomme after kiloklomme of neatly coiled skyline was stored for the Osprey’s lubberlift, Bretta suddenly heard a grating noise, as if something hard and heavy had been dragged across a sandy surface. Startled at first, she immediately wondered what crew member of the nightwatch had cause to climb down this far belowdecks, to a portion of the starship that remained all but completely unused except when she stood in orbit about some portworld—and why.

  Believing herself safe aboard her father’s own corvette, where she had once teethed upon belaying pins and learned rough-edged work chanties for her nursery rhymes, it
never occurred to the girl to draw her knife or ready her thrustible.

  All at once, a visage that she very nearly failed to recognize, that of a strangely transformed Woulf, flashed into view, catching her by surprise. Without passion or expression, he snapped his knife upward, directly out of its scabbard, and struck her a vicious blow upon the temple with its steel pommel.

  Bretta never knew that there could be so much pain. It flooded through her body, weakening her at every joint, turning her stomach, making colored lights flare behind her eyes. Woulf struck her again before she could sag to the deck at his feet, and again after she had done, reducing her to a floating semiconsciousness that left her paralyzed while failing to relieve her of her agony.

  “This is just to remind you that incest is a game the whole family can enjoy!”

  He then began to slash her meager garments until she sprawled unclothed before him, a torrent of blood beginning to redden, and then to blacken, what little vision remained to her. Bothering only to expose the necessary part of his anatomy, he took her brutally, comprehensively, and, at astonishingly brief intervals, again and again. Bretta quickly learned that there could be vastly more pain than a simple, smashing blow to the head. No portion of her body did he leave private to her, or untorn, no portal left unbroached. Had she been able, she would have screamed, or fought, or vomited, or wept, or died.

  She was helpless to do any of those things.

  At last, believing her dead or seeming not to care in any case—in fact she had felt and heard everything that had happened to her with a clarity and poignancy that she would have previously believed impossible—Woulf lifted Bretta’s broken body and stuffed it into a canister meant for trash disposal.