Queen

by Timothy Zahn

  “Or you can go and I can do my recon,” Levi suggested.

  “I don’t—” Jeff broke off, his lip twisting. “Fine,” he said. “Just be careful. We can’t afford to lose the drones.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” Levi said. “You want to get moving before the Shipmasters figure out they lost and run back home?”

  “I’m going,” Jeff said. He nodded at Nicole, then took off down the cross-corridor.

  “That guy worries too much,” Levi grumbled as he set his spider gun on the deck and took the drone controller in both hands. “Okay. Let’s see what’s at the other end of this corridor.”

  The drone lifted off the floor, hovering at waist height as Levi fiddled with its leveling. The webbing pinning Nicole’s left arm dissolved, and with a grunt of relief she reached up with that hand and rubbed away the nose itch that had been bugging her ever since she’d first hit the wall. Levi got the drone leveled and started it moving down the corridor.

  It was barely past the line of Wisps when the two Shipmasters stepped into view around the next corner.

  Each of them now carrying a long black greenfire tube.

  “Oh, crap!” Levi gasped. “Nicole—!”

  “Get down!” Nicole snapped back, bending her knee to put her left foot against the wall behind her and pushing as hard as she could. No good—she was still pinned to the wall. “You hear me? Get down.”

  There was no response. Levi was still frozen to the spot, his eyes wide, the drone control clutched in his hands.

  Cursing under her breath, Nicole lunged forward as far as she could with her free hand and managed to slap the control out of his grip. “Damn it, Levi—get down,” she snarled.

  “What are you doing?” Levi barked, her action finally snapping him out of his paralysis. He hunched over and dived to the floor, aiming for the drone control. “The drone’s our only chance.”

  “Leave it,” Nicole ordered, throwing a quick look to her right. The Shipmasters were standing side by side in the middle of the corridor, their greenfire weapons pointed at the drone that was now drifting to the deck in response to the sudden lack of a controller. Possibly deciding whether or not the flyer was a threat, and if so whether or not to shoot it.

  But their interest in the machine wouldn’t last long, Nicole knew. The minute they focused past the Wisps and saw her stuck to the wall, she would be dead.

  The drone might be a chance to save her. Luckily for her, it wasn’t the only one. “Wisps, open your wings!” she ordered tersely. “Quickly!”

  She was about to add a belated please when the Wisps’ wings unfurled, stretching out and filling the corridor with butterfly colors.

  And, more importantly, blocking the Shipmasters’ view.

  Again, Nicole shoved at the wall behind her, and this time managed to wrench herself free. She was tumbling toward the deck, her left arm stretched out to break her fall, her right arm still partially webbed, when a flash of brilliant green sliced through the wall of Wisps and slashed a burn mark into the wall right where she’d been standing.

  Levi had reached the drone controller and scooped it up. “No,” Nicole ordered, grabbing his arm with her left hand and finally managing to pull her right arm free of the remaining goo. “We need the drone.”

  “We need to not die!” Levi retorted.

  “Yeah, I’m on it,” Nicole said. She swiveled around on her hip just as a second greenfire blast cut through another of the Wisps, this shot going wild, and snatched up Levi’s spider gun.

  She was peering at the line of Wisps in front of her, trying to figure out how she was going to shoot with them blocking her line of sight, when out of the corner of her eye she saw a figure suddenly loom behind her.

  Reflexively, she flinched away, letting go of Levi’s arm. The figure dove past her, landing on the floor right at the Wisps’ feet. Even as Nicole’s brain registered that it was Jeff, he stuck his spider gun between a pair of Wisp legs and opened fire.

  A third greenfire bolt slashed through the Wisp line, this one slicing through the air just over Jeff’s head. He ignored it and continued to fire. The hiss of the shots kept going—Nicole wondered if he could even see his targets or whether he was just shooting blindly—a fourth greenfire shot cut through the line and burned into the ceiling—

  And then, silence.

  Nicole counted out twenty seconds. No sounds, no spider gun shots, no greenfire blasts. “Jeff?” she whispered.

  “Stay there,” he whispered back. Easing forward, he pressed his face up against the filmy Wisp robes and carefully moved them aside to look between the Wisps’ legs. He nodded and got to his feet. “They’re gone,” he said.

  Nicole swallowed. Gone, or maybe just waiting for a better shot? “Wisps, lower your wings,” she ordered.

  The wings folded back out of the way, revealing an empty corridor with a dozen black spider globs scattered around the walls, ceiling, and floor. Nicole braced herself, ready to order the wings back up if the Shipmasters reappeared. But the corridor remained empty.

  The battle was over.

  And then, even as she started to breathe again, she belatedly realized that four of the Wisps hadn’t furled their wings. She frowned, shifting her gaze from the wings to their faces.

  And felt a horrified chill run through her.

  Wisp faces were always somewhat blank. These faces were blanker. Wisps were always quiet. These four were quieter. Wisp skin was clean and pure, white with an overlay of silvery threads. The skin of these four were marred by ugly black greenfire burn marks.

  Nicole didn’t know how it was she could tell one Wisp from another. But somehow she knew such things. It was the same way she knew what she was looking at now.

  “Nicole?” Jeff asked softly.

  “Yes,” she said, the ache in her throat settling into an ache in her heart.

  “They’re dead.”

  fifteen

  “It was half a victory,” Jeff insisted quietly from across the dining room table. “That’s what you have to hang on to. Half a victory.”

  Nicole didn’t answer. The plate in front of her was loaded with food, and before she’d headed out to meet Fievj and Nevvis she’d promised herself a good meal when it was over.

  Now, even with her stomach rumbling, she had no appetite.

  What had she done?

  “This is the part when you tell me I’m right,” Jeff said into the silence. “You can also add that I’m usually right if you want. I’ll wait.”

  He was trying to cheer her up, Nicole knew. Trying to ease some of the pain choking her heart and mind.

  In some ways his attempt at humor was an insult, as if he were brushing aside her failure and ignoring the terrible consequences of her actions. But she was too weary and heartsick to even feel offended.

  “Nicole, you have to snap out of it,” he said. “You can yell if you want, or cry if you want, or even call me a coldhearted bastard if that helps. But you have to come back.”

  “How?” Nicole asked, feeling fresh tears welling up in her eyes. “I killed them, Jeff. All of them.”

  “You didn’t kill anyone,” he said firmly. “It was all Fievj and Nevvis.”

  “Was it?” Nicole countered. “What if I’d let Levi throw the drone at them like he’d wanted to? You were right there, ready to fight back. Maybe if they’d had to take a moment to dodge the drone you’d have gotten there before they had a chance to shoot the Wisps.”

  “First: You didn’t know I’d heard the ruckus and was on my way,” Jeff said. “Second: You don’t know that they’d even have bothered with the drone. They came to the meeting wanting to eliminate you, and there’s a 90-plus-percent chance they’d have ignored anything that got in the way of that.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Trust me. I do.” Jeff hesitated. “And third: We need those drones. Both of them. If they’d taken the time to shoot it, okay, maybe they would only have had enough time to take out two or three
Wisps instead of all four. But it would have cost us.”

  “So you’re saying that our plans and our gadgets are more important than people’s lives?” she snarled.

  He held her gaze without flinching. “Our plans are for freeing the Fyrantha and saving the lives of everyone aboard,” he said. “There are certain things we need for that plan. You had to make a choice between something we absolutely need and some lives that the plan could manage without.”

  Nicole shivered. “You make me sound like a monster.”

  “No,” Jeff said quietly. “I make you sound like a general.”

  The tears filling Nicole’s eyes flowed over and down her cheeks. “I don’t want to be a general.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Jeff said. “Being the leader in a war is a huge burden. But it’s the job—and the burden—that the Fyrantha’s given you. And whether you like it or not, you’re pretty damn good at it.”

  Nicole huffed a half laugh, half sob. “Really? I was supposed to trap Trake’s men, get their spider guns, then hit the Shipmasters hard enough to get their greenfire weapons. The whole World War II Liberator gun thing—remember?”

  “I remember,” Jeff said. “So we only got the spider guns and not the greenguns. Like I said, half a victory.”

  Nicole wiped at her tears. “So if we’d gotten the greenfire guns, we could have paid another four Wisp lives for them?”

  “It doesn’t work that way, and you know it,” Jeff said, the first hint of annoyance creeping into his voice. “Forget about the guns and the Wisps for a minute. You played the Shipmasters, Nicole—played them perfectly. You convinced them that you understood them and could anticipate their moves, and that they needed something new to throw at you. You guessed they’d go to Bungie for advice, and you knew he’d tell them that Trake was the one person you never understood. You had them, Nicole, all the way down the line.”

  “Then why didn’t it work?” Nicole demanded. “Why are four Wisps dead?”

  “You’re missing the big picture,” Jeff said. “Remember what Iosif said? No battle plan survives contact with the enemy? Well, yours did a lot better than most. That fact gives me a great deal of confidence that you’ll be able to pull off the rest of the campaign.”

  He reached over the table and touched the back of her hand. “I know you’re hurting about the Wisps. So am I. But we’re in a war, and war requires choices. No general worth an honest salute likes making the decisions that will cost people their lives. But they keep making the choices, and the sacrifices that go with them, because if they don’t a lot more people will die. Understand?”

  “I suppose,” she said, turning her hand over and getting a grip on his. “Did you ever have to make that kind of decision?”

  “Me personally?” Jeff shook his head. “I never got anywhere near that kind of rank. But I knew people who did, and almost all of them came back feeling the same way you are right now. Especially the first time they had to send someone to their death.”

  “Almost all of them?” Nicole asked. “What about those who didn’t come back feeling that way? Were they handling it better?”

  “No, they were handling it like bastards,” Jeff said. “Probably why we called them that.”

  “You didn’t.”

  Jeff shrugged. “Well, not to their faces.”

  The dining room door slid open, and Nicole looked over to see Levi and Iosif come in, followed by Moile and Teika.

  “Well, they’re here,” Iosif announced as he headed toward the food dispenser. “Not exactly happy campers.”

  “Not surprised,” Nicole said. “One of the empty rooms, right?”

  “Six of them, actually,” Jeff corrected. “Figured we didn’t want them talking and plotting together. Did the Wisps take up guard positions like I’d ordered them to?”

  “Yep, two on each room,” Levi said. “Don’t worry, they’re well buttoned up.”

  “Good,” Jeff said. “You checked for hidden weapons, right?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Iosif said. “We got three shiny new knives out of the deal.”

  “Any good?”

  Iosif shrugged as he punched in his food order. “If we want to cause mayhem we’ve got better things in our tool lockers.”

  “Figured.” Jeff looked at the two Ponngs. “You two all right?”

  “We’re fine,” Moile said, holding up a red-blotched arm. “The reaction seems to be largely superficial.”

  Nicole winced. The chemical that dissolved the spider webbing had unexpectedly turned out to be an irritant to Ponng skin. Just one more small glitch in her great plan.

  “So what are we going to do with them?” Iosif asked.

  Nicole started, belatedly realizing that the question had been to her. “I thought we’d put them in the arena,” she said. “The Shipmasters have all pulled out of Q4, and we’ve checked the place for weapons. If we program the dispenser for human food, they should be okay until we figure out something more permanent.”

  “Bungie eating dog kibble,” Jeff said with an evilly satisfied smile. “I like it.”

  “It’s more trail mix than dog kibble,” Iosif pointed out.

  “I’ll still tell him it’s kibble,” Jeff said, turning again to the Ponngs. “Speaking of which, are you two hungry? We’ve got the dispenser here programmed with your stuff if you want to give it a try. Real food, too, not just your version of trail mix.”

  “Really?” Teika asked. “How did you learn Ponng recipes?”

  “We didn’t, really,” Jeff conceded. “But Joaquim fiddled around and combined a couple of our food varieties with your nutritional needs. He claims it will be good, but none of us really knows.”

  “Then we should address your uncertainties,” Moile said. “Only yesterday we were discussing some of our favorite foods from home.”

  “I’m afraid this probably won’t be anything close,” Jeff said.

  “Perhaps it will become one of our favorites,” Moile said. “Show us this food, that we may examine it.”

  “I like your sense of adventure,” Jeff said, standing up. “I’ll show you how to program it.”

  He headed between the tables to the food dispenser, the Ponngs close behind.

  “Can I talk to you a minute?” Levi asked quietly as he sat down beside Nicole.

  “Sure,” she said, eyeing him. Levi was never exactly outgoing or flamboyant, but even for him this seemed unusually subdued. “What’s up?”

  His eyes flicked to Jeff and the Ponngs at the dispenser, then to Iosif eating his meal alone at a table halfway across the room. “That thing back in the corridor,” he said, looking back at Nicole. “When you tried to take the control away from me. You didn’t have to do that.”

  Nicole frowned. “What?”

  “I know I froze,” he went on hurriedly. “But I was coming out of it. I just hadn’t expected them to surprise us that way. But I was all set to ram the drone down their throats.”

  “Of course,” Nicole said. That was what he thought she’d been trying to do? To take over the drone from him?

  “Really, I was,” he insisted. “It would have worked better than the tangle gun you tried.”

  “It’s all right,” Nicole said. “We were all improvising there.” She swallowed hard. “And it didn’t come out as clean as I would have liked. But we’re all okay, and we got the spider guns, and that’s what’s important.”

  “I suppose,” he said. “I just wanted to say you won’t have to do that again.”

  “I’m sure I won’t,” Nicole said. “You should probably get something to eat.”

  He looked over at Jeff and the Ponngs. “Yeah, I think I’ll wait until they’re finished. Not really interested in sampling old-style Ponng cooking. I’ll be in my room if anyone needs me.”

  “Okay,” Nicole said. “And, you know … thanks for everything. I know you weren’t enthusiastic about this plan.”

  Levi shrugged. “Like you said, we got some weapons out of the deal
. That’s better than I was expecting.”

  “And we’ll do even better next time,” Nicole promised.

  “Yeah, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Levi said, standing up. “See you later.”

  “Right. Rest well.”

  With a nod, Levi headed back out into the corridor. Nicole watched until the door closed behind him, then turned back to the mostly untouched food sitting in front of her. She still wasn’t hungry, but starving herself wouldn’t bring back the dead Wisps. She scooped up a bite and forced herself to eat it.

  She was halfway through the meal when Jeff and the Ponngs returned, the latter with trays piled high with different-colored variants of the food Nicole had been eating since she first arrived on the Fyrantha. “You’re certainly confident,” she commented, eyeing the masses of food.

  “I pulled up a sample tray first,” Jeff said, waving at their trays. “These are the variants they liked the best.”

  “Not precisely like the food of home,” Teika said. “But the taste is that of the ground food we had in the arena, and it and the texture are quite satisfying.”

  “At least that’s one thing we got right today,” Nicole said.

  “Come on,” Jeff chided gently. “Half a victory, remember? Okay, so what’s next?”

  “We need to get Bungie and Trake locked in the arena,” Nicole said, dragging her mind back to the problems of the present.

  “We’ll need a code to unlock the door,” Jeff reminded her.

  “I can get it for you,” Nicole said. “While you do that, I should go over to Q3 and check in on the Thii.”

  “When’s Nise due to check in?”

  “Not really sure,” Nicole said. “He has to gauge his movements to what the Shipmasters are doing. But it should be soon, and I don’t want him having to wait. I should probably take them more food and water, too.”

  “Tell you what,” Jeff offered. “How about you go take a nap, and I go find Nise?”

  “He’ll be expecting me.”

  “He’ll be expecting someone with fresh supplies,” Jeff said. “And all things considered, it might be better if it’s someone the Shipmasters aren’t desperately trying to kill. Besides, you need to get some rest.”