The man poured a cup from an enormous bottle that was more than just half-empty.
Arran found that he was mortally exhausted from the effort of restraining his high-spirited crew and overtaking and seizing this vessel without damaging her. He had surrounded her with two dozen of his fighters, which pushed their §-field-protected bows through the transport’s §-field, nudged them up against the enemy quarterdeck, then brought her to a standstill until Osprey came alongside.
He wondered whether he would feel like this if Loreanna were beside him now, or his Bretta were alive. He sat down at the table opposite the weeping captain and poured himself a glass of whatever the man was having. “Because you were helpless to keep this unarmed, underbeinged, ship of yours from being boarded?”
The transport captain shook his head, looked up, smeared snot out of his whiskers, and grinned. “No, because I was helpless to keep it from happening twice. You’ve fallen into a trap, sir, and let me say that it is of some considerable comfort to look upon the face of an even greater idiot than I am!”
Phoebus chose that moment to stumble into the officer’s quarters. As the door swung open, the Osprey’s first mate brought in with him the noise of a hand-to-hand battle raging out upon the maindeck, where Arran had believed he had just avoided a battle. Phoebus lifted his thrustible and discharged it at somebody outside. “Missed ’im! They were waitin’ fer us, sir, layin’ low, like!”
The collimated energy from an enemy thrustible sang in through the door, just missing Phoebus, and smashing a lamp swinging from the ceiling beside his head as the transport captain cackled insanely. The giant officer roared out a curse, returned thrust, thrust again, and brushed lamp fragments from his hair.
By now, Arran had leapt to his feet and almost into the outstretched arms of Mr. Suprynowicz, who had dashed straight through the cabin door behind Phoebus.
“. . . and now they are boarding us, Captain, they are boarding us, I say!”
Arran opened his mouth to reply, as something that was not a thrustible beam zipped by within a siemme of his face to bury itself in the wall behind Phoebus.
“What in the Ceo’s name is this?” From the wall, with a great effort, Phoebus drew the hollow stainless-steel trajectile that had suddenly seemed to sprout there. The thing boasted no fletching of any kind, simply being heavy in its front half and lightweight in its back. Heedless of the mad thrusting all about him, and the awful danger of this strange new weapon, Arran surged forward. “Let me see that, at once!” He peered at it closely, then looked up.
“We surrender! Pass the word—we surrender!”
Just then, a long-legged she-warrior strode into the cabin, making it a very crowded place, indeed. Setting both fists upon her kefflar-clad hips, and taking a deeply relieved breath beneath the suede vest which was the only other thing—besides the pair of outsize thrustibles—that she wore, she laughed.
“No need to surrender, Daddy. Upon being boarded by a ship of a superior weight of projectibles, we did not resist, but simply waited and exchanged boarders, gaining ourselves the better ship. Did you not teach me that trick, yourself?”
“My Little!”
With that—and utterly mindless of the clash of deadly thrustibles it engendered—Bretta collapsed sobbing, into the arms of her equally tearful father.
CHAPTER XL:
BOBSHAWS AND VULNAVIAS
“Give me that, you cretin!”
Woulf seized the hypodermic syringe from the servitor nominally in charge of the process and laid it against Loreanna’s lovely exposed throat. At the same time, blocking the servitor’s view with his body—the only light in the electronically shielded volcanic bubble from which this neglected dungeon had been fashioned came from the electric torch the servitor brought with her—he whispered to Loreanna.
“Now this will hurt considerably. As you know, it’s a big, fat needle. There’s just no way to avoid it. But I fear that, due in general to a rapidly decaying civilization, and a more specific fact that they’ve recently sent so many precious resources and key personnel out system (I confess it annoys me that I can’t discover why and I’m supposed to be good at these things), our dear Overmoms are about to experience their twenty-third exasperating failure in a row, where your conversion is concerned. Loreanna isn’t going to get to be an Overmom—in effect, a female Oplyte—this time either. Isn’t it simply fortuitous that I’m expected to help out because they’re so shorthanded just now?”
With that, Woulf plunged the needle into Loreanna’s jugular, refrained from pushing its plunger, withdrew it instead, and injected its full contents, mostly a saline-based nutrient solution containing a single nanotechnological device, deep into the upholstery of the wheelchair into which she had been tied. There it would die within the next few minutes, exactly like its twenty-two predecessors.
Through the painful ordeal, Loreanna had maintained an absolute, stoic silence. From both his words and his tone of voice, she believed he was going mad.
“I was promised I would have you, my dear,” Woulf went on as he wiped a drop of blood from her neck with a white fiber ball—then, as a humorous afterthought, paid the same medical courtesy to the chair. “And I will have you. People always keep their promises to Woulf, whether they intend to initially, or not. When our benefactors find I’ve sabotaged their . . . their aspirations, no doubt they’ll decide it’s time to dispense with my services—nine-hundred-year tenure or not—and probably have me converted into an Oplyte into the bargain. So, before they can do that, we must make good our plans to escape!”
“What plans to escape?” she whispered, despising him and hardly daring to hope. If they succeeded getting away from here, what sort of life could she expect?
“Indeed, Woulf,” Hillik’s voice came from behind them. “ What plans to escape?”
“ ‘Ret’nal’—it is trying to say ‘retinal.’ These voice synthesizers sorely need work. For a moment, I feared it was asking us to pull our pants down!”
Pulling an autothille from her pocket for the dozenth time since they had landed upon this asteroid, Bretta referred to notes she had made during long conversations with Andboard and Yiingboard Twenty-five, whose gray mechanics’ clothing they were wearing at the moment, whose places they were taking, and who had tutored them in defeating the aging security machinery deep within the lair of the supreme leaders of the Oplyte Slavers, whom Bretta had learned to call the Aggregate, and whom the two technicians’ insisted upon calling by the absurd name—the absurd name they called themselves, apparently—the “Overmoms.”
“Well, as Hanebuth would put it, ‘we don’ need no stinkin’ eyeballs.’ Authorized maintenance override Alpha Zero Zero One Seven Two Nine Six. Code authorization Hillik Four,” Bretta told the machinery, compelled to repeat herself—her heart hammering—when it failed to understand her the first time.
“Small wonder,” her father replied to her earlier remark. He was letting both his thrustibles’ designator beams sweep the corridor behind them, while keeping an eye out for their own forces—starsailors from the Osprey and Tarrant’s (more correctly, his daughter’s) strange people—following at what he hoped was a discreet distance, along a chain of what amounted to broken locks.
Uncle Sedgeley had violently refused to be left behind. After all, he had argued, Loreanna was his niece by blood, and for all intents and purposes had always been his daughter. Arran believed that the old man wanted to wreak vengeance against those who had destroyed his brother Clive, as well, not to mention poor Jennivere, who seemed to be deteriorating rapidly since Woulf had abandoned her—and upon either of those two accounts, Arran would not deny him.
Demondion-Echeverria and Brother Leo had come along as well, the former having been a duelist within his own imperium-conglomerate, and the latter having demonstrated his proficiency with a thrustible—something Arran had been unaware of until lately—in the several ship-battles they had recently fought.
In theory, they were a
ll waiting for Arran’s signal that the last barrier had been breached, to rush in and take over the place—whatever it happened to be. The map they had, passed on by Andboard and Yiingboard’s predecessors, simply said “audience hall” with an enigmatic marginal notation, “diabetics beware.” In theory: from his many years of practical experience, Arran knew too well how theory was likely to fare where military matters happened to be involved.
“What was that, Daddy?” He wondered whether she realized how incongruous the title sounded now, coming from someone who had proven herself so well. But perhaps, given everything she had survived, perhaps it was more needful than ever.
“Sorry, My Little, I was not aware that I had spoken aloud. I had meant to say, small wonder that everything in here so badly wants repairing. I had only just realized that, although I do not know when we made the transition, precisely, I believe that we have now entered the nine-hundred-year-old hull of the old starship from Earth’s moon, the vessel the authoritarians were all sent away in.”
Bretta nodded. “Which means that they constructed this asteroid by hand, piling small rocks all around the outside of the ship. I had noticed a while back that the corridors had suddenly become straighter, and wondered about it. We are through, now—quiet as the door opens—on to our next objective!”
“Well,” Hillik chirped, “here we all are, together once again.” Like all those of their ilk, Loreanna observed—and there were plenty upon Hanover—the Overmoms seemed willing to settle for appearances when they were denied the substance.
Having made a dramatic flourish of arresting Woulf (even now an enormous, rank-smelling Oplyte held on to each of his arms, although she had noticed that nobody excepting she, herself, seemed aware of the great knife that he still carried upon his hip) and brought him and Loreanna to their repulsive audience chamber, they had left her tied up in the chair they had employed to wheel her in.
At that, even with the softdrink stream below and the cotton-candy clouds above—not to mention the evolutionarily overspecialized vermin—it was vastly better than the last time, with all of those humiliating needles in her flesh. Loreanna wondered whether she would ever know what that had been all about.
“As you have already been told,” a contented Hillik continued, “it is our intention and fondest hope that, fully converted into one of us, you will take the place of our dear, departed Elnerose. And despite the evil self-serving work of this hormone-soaked male obstructionist, here, that is precisely what you will do. I promise that it’s simply a matter of time—the merest formality—and meanwhile, we have decided that you should participate in all of our deliberations.”
The rest of the Overmoms, simpering Patteesh, skeletal Saraber, oxlike Janareen, always a heartbeat or two behind, nodded in that hideous manner of theirs.
“The first thing we believe you should know,” Saraber told her as they wheeled Loreanna into line to the right of Janareen, “is that six weeks ago we dispatched an armada of a billion Oplyte warriors halfway across the galaxy to the Coordinated Arm, to finish our Thousand Years’ War in one final, decisive blow.”
“You mean a million, surely,” Loreanna replied, immediately regretting it.
“No,” Patteesh corrected her, “our sister meant a billion—a thousand million. Breathtaking, isn’t it? It will take them three years to get there, and the estimated attrition rate from the voyage is twenty-five to fifty percent, but they will do more than finish the war, they will finish off the Loonie civilization forever!”
Hillik smiled. Save for Patteesh, she was perhaps the only one among the Overmoms still physically capable of doing it, and to Loreanna, the result was overwhelming repellent. “Elnerose, whom you will replace, was the last of the previous generation of Overmoms. Like all of them, she opposed this brilliant and daring policy of ours, warning, in her exaggerating manner, that it would strip the Aggregate of its defenses, and possibly destroy it altogether. She was one-oh-four when she finally left us—personally, I thought she would never die.”
I could say the same for you, thought Loreanna.
“The second thing that she ought to know,” Saraber could not smile, but there was an evil gloating in her voice which was probably as close as she could get to it, “is that Woulf s silly notion of taking her away from us is futile.”
“That’s right,” Janareen put in dully. “There will be no place left to go!”
Hillik nodded. “At the same time that we have struck such a telling blow to the congenital rebels of the Coordinated Arm, we have dispatched another billion Oplytes to your vaunted Monopolity, to stem the evil selfishness that is festering there. In fact, they should be arriving just about now. And, my dear Loreanna, their estimated attrition rate is slightly less than one percent.”
“It’s too late for anyone or anything to stop them!” Janareen crowed exultantly.
“Is there a need to remind you, Loreanna, what Oplytes do to a world?” Hillik was quivering at the prospect of so much blood-shed and destruction. “Systematically deprived of any rations they cannot provide for themselves, as spoils of war, our troops will rape, kill, and eat virtually any living thing in their path until, in ancient, classical terms, every structure will have been razed to the ground, so that not a single stone will be left standing on another.”
“Even the soil” Saraber intoned, “will not support growth for a million years.”
Patteesh apparently thought of herself as the practical one. “In a single ingenious stroke, we shall have ended our war with the Coordinated Arm, put an end to the growing nuisance of the Monopolity of Hanover, and made of it a shiningly intimidating example for the edification of all the other imperia-conglomerate.”
Saraber concurred. “At last the full fury of our Thousand Years’ War against vile, recalcitrant individualism is about to be felt as far away as Hanover!”
Loreanna found that she must fight, now, to keep all of this real in her mind. These creatures were delighted to send billions to slaughter other billions. They reveled in it, all in the name of some collective, altruistic good.
“But first things first is the order of the day,” Hillik reminded them sweetly. “There is the matter of our once-loyal servant Woulf. For my part, I think the sentence he anticipated we might decree against him is precisely the punishment to suit his crime—he expressed a fear that, even after nine hundred years of ‘faithful’ service, we would have him converted into an Oplyte—and I believe that, for once, I should like to see it carried out here. We’ll put his cage right over there, next to the lemonade waterfall. Guards, send for a servitor!”
At that moment, the door burst open and the Oplyte who had turned to obey Hillik was torn to shreds by the collimated beams of four thrustibles. Arran and Bretta stepped into the room, followed by Tarrant and Brother Leo. Others of both groups, sailors and refugees, were all crowded into the doorway behind them.
Hillik’s eyes widened as she watched a crimson designator beam splash her chest, rise quickly, then flash blindingly in her eyes. She could not scream. Before anyone could react, her head exploded from a single, well-delivered thrust. In an enormous, scarlet cloud, everything behind her in the room, mushrooms and outsized candy canes, suddenly dripped with blood and liquefied brains.
A dozen Oplytes raised their thrustibles in response, but were cut down in deadly cross-thrusting from half a hundred different sources. As the battle raged, for the few seconds it lasted, the Overmoms died, one by one, as Hillik had.
“That,” asserted Leupould, “was for what they did to me fifteen years ago!” The former ruler looked about him, remembering. “I know this place! By all the Ceos who ever lived, I know this place! I do not know how they got me here—”
“You feckless moron!”
Leupould was interrupted by somebody laughing in a voice that bordered upon madness. Somehow, Woulf had discarded his pair of Oplytes—both of whom were now lying broken and dead upon the floor with all the rest—and stepped in front of Lorea
nna, perhaps to protect her from all the thrusting. However, he now stooped directly behind her, with his big black knife at her throat.
“What you experienced happened upon Hanover, not here, and was merely an hallucination, induced by the injection of a nanothille. Another one of my missions!”
At once, Woulf found that Bretta had materialized beside him, slapped the knife away from her mother’s throat, and wrapped her hands about his upon the handle.
He swiveled to face her, and the weapon disappeared low, between their bodies.
“Don’t be a complete jackass, girl,” he warned her as they struggled over control of his knife. “I’ll kill you again! I’m a well-trained, powerful man—you’re not even a full-grown woman yet! I’ve got twice your upper body strength!”
“So you do,” she agreed. With a knee, she rammed the pommel up, into his belly.
He collapsed upon the floor with an unbelieving look frozen in his eyes, eviscerated.
CHAPTER XLI:
LARGE, IRREVOCABLE STEPS
Before the day was over, Jennivere had died in her daughter’s arms. It was Loreanna’s decision to consign her body to the Deep, but not until the Osprey had sailed far from the Vouhat-Letsomo System where her life had been destroyed.
Loreanna wept but little, for her mother’s life had brought her little but pain.
She and her family—her husband Arran, her daughter Bretta—had much to say to one another privately, and little privacy in which to do it, with a reunion of the original traveling company—less both Woulf and Jennivere—and the addition of new friends, Andboard, Yiingboard, Tarrant, and the others. She found that she was particularly fond of Kanvor, the kindly one-eyed giant. They had little time, as well, for the Osprey would soon race to Hanover to see if anything remained of it after the Oplytes were through and if Lia still lived.
Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn Page 43