Queen

by Timothy Zahn

  Allyce hesitated. “I—”

  “It’s all right,” Moile said. “You’re correct, Jeff.” He inclined his head. “We also swore her to silence on that point. We didn’t want … a warrior should not receive special gratitude for merely doing his job.”

  “Yet those who gain from their risk should not be denied the privilege of offering such gratitude,” Nise said, bowing low. “Thank you, warriors of the Ponngs. The Thii stand in your debt.”

  “True warriors do not keep such books,” Moile assured him. “We serve the Protector, as we serve each other.”

  “Thank you,” Nicole said. “Thank you all. For everything.”

  “Meanwhile, there’s a battle coming up that all the cyanide-tipped arrows in the universe won’t help,” Jeff said, reaching up and touching Lehigh’s hand. “You want to see if the Wisps can open this door?”

  “Yes,” Nicole said, wincing. “Cambria, Jessup, Lehigh: Can any of you get the Core door open?” she asked.

  She touched Cambria’s arm. No one of us can do so, Cambria’s voice came in her mind. But three of us together can, if the Protector wishes it.

  I do, Nicole said. Open the door.

  And with a kind of old, creaking sound, a sound Nicole had seldom heard on the Fyrantha, the door slid open.

  “Well,” Jeff muttered. “That was easy.”

  “That part was, anyway,” Nicole said. The room beyond was as tightly packed with consoles and displays as Ushkai had warned it would be. The access passageway leading inward was narrow, but with the slight outward flare of the consoles the gap was wider at deck height. “Can you get through there, Jeff?”

  “Sure, no problem,” Jeff assured her. “Told you I’d be lying on my back. Okay. Sofkat and Misgk: you’re on litter duty. You’ll be moving me back and forth in there wherever I need to go. If you get tired of carrying me, help me crawl. Nise: you’ll be the runner, going and getting whatever parts I need that aren’t already in there.”

  “And we need to tell the others about the Wisp communication system,” Nicole added.

  “Already done,” Jeff said, pointing up at Lehigh. “I sent a message to all Wisps to touch the nearest Ghorf and let them know how it works.”

  “Great,” Nicole said, wincing. “I just hope the Ghorfs don’t see it as an attack.”

  “I don’t think Ghorfs scare that easily,” Jeff said. He touched Lehigh’s hand again and nodded. “No problem—they’re already starting to check in. A few more minutes, and everyone should be with the program.”

  “Good.” Nicole took a deep breath and pulled out her inhaler. “Then we’d better get busy.”

  “Hold it a second,” Jeff said, holding out a hand toward her. “I still think you need to stay on top of things. We can call in one of the other Sibyls to help me.”

  “They all have their own jobs to do,” Nicole said. “Until someone else gets free, I’m on this one.”

  “What about me?” Bungie asked.

  They all turned to look at him. “What about you?” Jeff asked.

  “I can help,” Bungie said. His eyes were still on Trake as he got to his feet. He looked once at the Ponngs and their poisoned arrows, then turned to Nicole. “I can help you here.”

  Jeff snorted. “Like hell.”

  “I mean it,” Bungie said. “I was part of the team, remember?”

  “Part of the team?” Jeff shot back. “Not even once.”

  “It’s all right, Jeff,” Nicole said. Suddenly, with a clarity she’d never known before, she understood. “Don’t you get it? Bungie needs to belong to something. Trake’s gang, or the Fyrantha—he doesn’t know who he is unless someone tells him what his place is.”

  “That’s not true,” Bungie protested. But there was a look in his eyes that told Nicole that he, too, now understood. “It’s not.”

  “Yes, it is,” Nicole said. “But you can change. You know that, right? You can make something new for yourself. Make a new life.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to let me help?” Bungie asked.

  Nicole smiled tightly. “Like Jeff said: hell, no. We need competent and trustworthy people. Right now, you’re neither.”

  She lifted a hand. “Cambria? Take Bungie to Q3 and put him in the arena with the Shipmasters. He’ll keep there until this is all over and we can figure out what to do with him.”

  “Nicole, you need me,” Bungie said, a hint of a snarl creeping into his voice. “You’ve always needed me.”

  “I’ve never needed you, Bungie,” Nicole said. “I never needed any of you.” She waved a hand that encompassed Jeff, Allyce, the Thii, and the Ponngs. “These are the people I need.”

  “You ungrateful—” The rest of Bungie’s insult was cut off as Cambria glided up behind him and wrapped its arms around him. The Wisp turned back toward the heat duct, cutting off Nicole’s view of Bungie’s frozen, angry, hopeless expression.

  “It’s really kind of sad,” Allyce murmured.

  “So is a wounded snake,” Jeff said.

  “I mean it,” Allyce insisted. “We all need to belong to something. Or to someone.”

  “That’s where choice and decision come in,” Jeff said. “We doing this?”

  “We’re doing this,” Nicole said, pulling out her notepad and turning her back to the burst of hot air as Cambria took Bungie into the heat duct.

  Into the duct, and out of her life. Forever.

  “And while I get the first list of repairs,” she continued, “Allyce will do whatever she can to fix you up.”

  twenty-six

  Six hours.

  Nicole could remember times, usually late-night parties, when six hours had gone past in the blink of an eye. There’d been other times, usually when Trake had her on lookout duty, when those same six hours had dragged out forever. And there’d been far too many times, especially after a bash of heavy drinking, when six or more hours had been lost forever from her memory and her life.

  Now, six hours were going to spell the difference between life and death.

  By all rights, Nicole knew, she should be on the edge of panic. But to her own vague surprise, she wasn’t. There was simply too much to do for her to stop long enough to think about the horrible task she and the Fyrantha were facing.

  She’d expected the Koffren and Shipmasters to resist the imprisonment she’d ordered for them. But the brief battle by the ocean, along with the sudden revelation that the Ghorfs were far more powerful and dangerous than any of them had suspected, had apparently knocked the fight out of them, at least for the moment. She and Jeff were just getting started on the Core when one of the Wisps arrived with word from Wesowee that both groups had been safely locked away and that he, Iosif, and Levi were heading to the Q1 command center with Fievj and Ryit for a crash course in how to fly the Fyrantha.

  Another message a few minutes later informed her that the rest of the Ghorfs were returning to gather their work teams, taking a few Wisps with them for support, communication, and transport. A few minutes after that, Kahkitah quietly joined Nicole and Jeff at the Core, clearly intending to be their assistant and guard.

  And with that, the race had begun.

  The Q1 Core section, as Nicole had feared, needed a lot of work. She and Jeff quickly settled into a pattern: she would use the inhaler to get the Fyrantha’s list of repairs and scribble as much of it as she could onto her notepad. Then she would hand the notepad to Jeff and stand back, feeling helpless and useless, while he got to work pulling and replacing the necessary components and restringing various bits of wiring. Occasionally he needed to tear off some sealing plastic, jobs he could pass off to Sofkat and Misgk while he worked on something elsewhere in the chamber. Mostly, though, he worked alone.

  Over and over, Nicole had to fight back an almost overwhelming urge to offer her help. Each time, she stifled the impulse. Even the short, slender Thii had trouble finding room to work together in the cramped space. Two humans would have no chance at all, and she knew th
at even just bringing up the subject would do nothing but distract Jeff from his work.

  Instead, she concentrated her thoughts on the work being done across the ship to restore the Fyrantha’s defense shields. Every few minutes Cambria came up behind her and touched her shoulder, and her mind would echo with a progress report from one of the work teams. It was a new experience, hearing someone else’s voice coming into her mind instead of the familiar flat Wisp voice, and it took a little getting used to.

  In some ways, it was also maddening. These were thoughts coming across the telepathic network, not ordinary speech, and while the Ghorfs were pretty good at holding to a straight line of mental conversation, many of the humans were rotten at it.

  Nicole had known people back in Philadelphia like that, people who blathered away without any verbal organization, their words tumbling over each other as stray thoughts bounced up and down bunny trails until whatever they were trying to say was completely lost in the weeds. This wasn’t that bad—the people here were at least trying to stay on track—but the end result was still sometimes hard to sift through. The fact that the voices sounded like they were coming from down a long, echoey hallway didn’t help.

  Even stranger, the communication itself was surprisingly slow. Nicole would think a question or comment to the person at the other end, and it would be a good four or five seconds before she got a reply. Some of the delay might have been due to the other person having to organize his thoughts, but the rest apparently had to do with the whole Wisp/Oracle connection system. Even when she was talking to the Ghorfs, who had better mental organization, the delay was only a little shorter.

  Still, she could hardly complain. Talking through the Wisps was a hell of a lot faster than having to send messengers everywhere or making the Ghorfs use their private tap-code system. And once she had the voices identified she knew each time who it was she was talking to, and could better sort through that person’s own particular style of mental chatter.

  Slowly, progress was made. One by one, the defense nodes Fievj had identified became operational, and their work crews were sent to the next one on the list. Levi and Iosif handled all of that from the control center, leaving Nicole free to monitor the progress and keep an eye on Jeff’s work.

  Occasionally, one of the crew foremen asked for a rest or food break. Iosif’s invariable response was five minutes for the first, food bars and water for the second.

  Four hours into the marathon, one of the foremen apparently got tired of that answer. He insisted he and the others weren’t doing slave labor and threatened to pull his team off the job if they weren’t given a full hour’s break. Neither Levi’s cajoling nor Iosif’s threats had the slightest effect on his defiance, and he wouldn’t even listen to Nicole’s attempts to remind him of the threat facing them.

  It wasn’t until Kahkitah stepped in and spoke personally with the Ghorf assigned to that team that the foreman relented. Even then, the foreman and Ghorf were halfway to the Q3 arena, where the foreman would be forced to hang out for the rest of the day with the Shipmasters, before he finally agreed to go back to work.

  They had fixed all but fifteen of the defense nodes when, twenty minutes ahead of schedule, the Koffren warships appeared.

  * * *

  Looks like twenty of them, Iosif’s voice came through Cambria’s touch on Nicole’s shoulder. Big suckers, too—about the size of Nimitz-class carriers.

  Nicole winced. But we’re still bigger, right?

  She waited through the interminable five-second pause. Oh, a hell of a lot bigger—we’re three thousand meters long to their three hundred, Iosif replied. Problem is, size isn’t the biggest factor here. We’ve got a bunch of gaps they can shoot through. As far as I can see, they don’t have any.

  Can we shoot at them?

  Another pause. I don’t know. Fievj says they never found a working weapon anywhere on this thing. He still thinks the people who turned it into a zoo scrapped them at the same time they took the fighters out of the arenas.

  That’s what he told us, too. Do you believe him?

  Not necessarily. Just because they couldn’t find any weapons doesn’t mean there aren’t any. I know that each of the defense nodes has a bunch of consoles that don’t seem to do anything. Maybe they operate the guns.

  Nicole thought back to the first time she’d been in one of the nodes. Two concentric rings of consoles, with only the one console that seemed to activate that section of the ship’s shield completely dark. If there are any guns, anyway. Maybe I should go take a look.

  Too late, Iosif said. Right now, you need to come up here and talk to them.

  Nicole felt her eyes go wide. Me?

  You’re the Fyrantha’s Protector, Iosif reminded her. Anyway, someone has to. They’ve been hailing us for the past three minutes, and I’m sure as hell not letting Fievj near the mic.

  No, of course not, Nicole agreed reluctantly, peering into the Core room. Jeff looked like he was finishing up the last list she’d given him. Let me give Jeff one more set of instructions. See if you can get one of the other Sibyls down here to take over for me.

  Make it fast, Iosif warned. Fievj showed us how to put the shields up, but I don’t want to do that until we absolutely have to. No point showing them where the holes are in advance.

  Agreed. I’ll be there as soon as I can.

  She pushed Cambria’s hand aside. “They’re here,” she announced to Jeff as she pulled out her inhaler. “Give me back the notepad—I can get you one more set before I go.”

  “Never mind the notepad,” Jeff said. “Just reel off the instructions. I’ll remember them.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive,” Jeff said. “We’ve got to be getting close to the end, anyway.”

  Which was, to Nicole’s way of thinking, the absolute worst time to start missing things or getting sloppy. But there was no time to argue the point. “I hope so. Here we go.” She took a full whiff from the inhaler, and as the Fyrantha’s voice whispered through her mind she rattled off the instructions.

  A minute later, she was done. “You sure you got all that?” she asked.

  “No problem,” Jeff said. “Go.”

  “Right.” Nicole pushed herself up off the floor—

  And nearly fell as a wave of dizziness washed over her.

  “Are you ill?” Kahkitah asked anxiously, catching her arm before she could fall.

  “I’m okay,” Nicole said, leaning against his bulk. “Just a little dizzy.”

  Jeff swore under his breath. “Too much of that damn inhaler,” he ground out. “Sofkat, Misgk—get me to the door.”

  “No,” Nicole told him. “You stay there and keep working. Kahkitah and Cambria can get me to the control center.”

  “Nicole—”

  “That’s an order, Jeff,” she said. “Kahkitah?”

  “I have you,” Kahkitah said. Shifting his grip, he picked her up in his arms and turned back toward the heat duct door. “Wisps? We need two of you for transport.”

  * * *

  The control center was on level 56 in the ecsisia section of Q1. By the time Nicole and the others arrived her dizzy spell had passed.

  The room was smaller than she’d expected, not much bigger than the defense node room near the Fyrantha’s roof. But while there had been a double ring of consoles in the node, here there were four rings, the consoles set low to the floor with chairs facing each of them. Levi and Iosif were seated in two of the chairs in the inner ring, with a Wisp on either side of them. Fievj and Ryit were seated in front of them in the next ring outward, under the watchful eyes of a pair of Ghorfs. The consoles in the two inner rings were fully lit and active, while the third ring had several dark consoles and the outer ring was completely dark.

  And here, instead of the thick glass of the node that had first showed Nicole the starry sky outside the ship, the walls were covered with displays.

  Floating in six of them were twenty large, nasty-looking spac
eships.

  “About time,” Iosif said, glancing over his shoulder as Kahkitah lowered Nicole’s feet to the deck. “He’s starting to get a little surly.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Nicole said, working her way through the outer rings and coming to a halt behind Iosif. “Do we have a name?”

  “Near as we can figure, it’s Djit-vis-ees,” Levi said handing her a small mic. “I suggested we call him Djit, just to save time. He didn’t seem to like that. The slider there on the side mutes it.”

  Nicole found the slider switch and put her thumb on it. “Got it.”

  “Ready to key the transmitter,” Iosif said, his hand hovering over a switch.

  Nicole braced herself. This was it. “Yes. Go.”

  “Good luck,” Iosif said, and threw the switch.

  “—will answer me now, or I swear to you your death is at hand,” a harsh Koffren voice came over the speaker and through Nicole’s translator.

  Nicole took a deep breath and unmuted her mic. Back in Philadelphia, her health and safety had too often depended on her ability to talk people into things or talk them out of things. Here, she was about to put those hard-earned skills to their final test. “Hello, Djit-vis-ees of the Koffren,” she called. “This is Nicole Hammond. What seems to be the trouble?”

  “What are you, human slave?”

  “We’re not slaves,” Nicole said. “I’m not, anyway. I’m a Sibyl.”

  “You’re all slaves,” Djit-vis-ees said flatly. “End this nonsense and bring me the ship’s master.”

  “Yes. That’s me.”

  “I refer to the ship’s master. Bring me Vjiu-fusi-suut.”

  “Sorry, but there’s no one here by that name,” Nicole said. “Oh, wait. Are you talking about the Koffren who likes to call himself Justice, Revenge, and Fire?”

  “Speak no more nonsense, slave!”

  “Not a slave, and not nonsense,” Nicole said. “See, I’m afraid Vjiu-fusi-suut is currently locked up. So are the rest of the Koffren.”

  “You will speak no more—”

  “I think there are, what, sixteen of them left alive out of the original thirty-eight?” Nicole continued. “Kahkitah?”