The City and the Ship

by Anne McCaffrey

  Amos felt a lurch of fear. They were counting on the enemy's inexperience with guerilla tactics, their arrogance. That was perilously close to counting on the Kolnari being stupid, and that was dangerous.

  Pounding feet came closer: Joseph's heavier tread, and the lighter, faster sound of the folk the hell-planet bred. Joseph flashed between the trees with his head down, arms and legs pumping. The pursuers seemed to float by contrast, loping effortlessly like men on a low-gravity moon. Their eyes and trailing manes glowed lambent in the simulated starlight, and their movements had the aching gracefulness of swans taking flight. They were beautiful, and horrible beyond belief, and he feared them in a way that had nothing to do with the long knives in their hands.

  He stepped out. They stopped with a plunging abruptness. Their heads turned to scan him with the smooth accuracy of gun-turrets tracking under computer control. Joat had counted on that in designing her gadget. A scanner detected the alignment of their eyes.

  The thing he carried strapped to his chest yawped. Then it was red-hot, and he was scrabbling to rip it loose and toss it away. The pirates stumbled as if they had run into a wall of iron. They screamed as if that iron were white hot and dropped their knives to tear at their faces in a frenzy of pain.

  Scream, dogs, Amos thought, gratified. Scream as Bethel screamed, as Patsy screamed, scumvermin filth.

  Cries of pain were not going to attract attention on the SSS-900-C: not while it was held in the Fist of High-Clan Kolnar.

  A dozen men and women edged out of the shadows. Cutting bars and lengths of dull-gleaming synth tubing were in their hands. Amos reached over his back and drew a long curved sword from its sheath with the slender sound of steel on steel: the motion so long practiced from blade-dance training that it was as unconscious as breathing. The heads of the Kolnari turned toward the sounds he made; their ruined eyes were circles of blood-red now, and tears of blood dribbled down their cheeks. They moaned in their agony, but they moved toward him, teeth bared in a rictus of pain and savagery.

  "Quickly, but carefully," Amos said to the others closing in on their victims.

  Afterwards they must throw their clothes into disposal and go through full decontamination cleansing.

  Joseph was behind the blinded pirates, a half-dozen stationers at his back. Two knives glinted in his hands.

  "Now!" Amos said.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  "Shall I perform an autopsy, Great Lord?" the eunuch medico asked in its shrill whine.

  Belazir t'Marid looked down at the bodies in their separate bags. Separate bags, but who knew what went where? One bag might be a few parts short or extra, for all he could tell.

  "Creature," he said to the eunuchs, cuffing one aside, "when men have their skulls crushed by heavy blows—as these have—and their eyes gouged out—as these have—and their throats cut to the neckbone—as these have—and their bodies cut to pieces, as these have, then generally speaking, as a rule, they die. An autopsy seems somewhat superfluous."

  The noble's voice was even and pleasant, as it usually was, but the slave medico sank deeper and deeper into a crouch of abasement with every word, as if they were blows from the powered whip normally used on such. At the last, all the eunuch could do was whimper.

  "Cease," Belazir said. "Now, this other; in that, I have interest."

  The medico sealed the bags containing the body-parts of the two dead Kolnari and hastened to the intact casualty. Relatively intact. He stroked a hand down the opaque material, and the stuff turned utterly transparent.

  "Whatever killed him, he was not pleased with it," Belazir remarked to Serig, looking at the dead man's bulging, staring eyes. Shifting to the interrogative tense: "Creature?"

  "It is uncertain, Great Lord. Either the electrocution or the explosive decompression would be fatal, of course. Here, the dart struck. See, a burned patch, high on the shoulder, towards the angle of the jaw. As he was turning to confront that which killed him, it struck from the rear."

  "Blindingly obvious," Belazir said facetiously. "Go. Preserve the bodies."

  "And what do you propose to do, t'Marid?" the third Kolnari noble present said.

  "Do, lord Captain t'Varak?" Belazir said, turning with an expression of perfect courtesy.

  T'Varak's presence provided a welcome distraction. A kin-enemy was always more entertaining than outsiders, if more predictable. He waved a languid hand about them, at the dew-cool grass, at the holos far overhead that mimicked the blue cloud-scattered sky of Earth. The temperature was far below what Kolnari preferred, but they could endure anything down to and below freezing without undue discomfort. None of them needed to wear more than briefs and shipbelt for utility. For status, the nobles wore long open-necked robes of watered silk, jewelry of fretted silver, and homeworld fire opals. Their hair was brushed to shining shoulder-length waterfalls, pinned back with combs of sea-ivory and precious metal, and the knife-sharp feathers of Kolnari birds.

  Belazir stretched. His robe was severely plain, dazzling white with gold and indigo trim.

  "I shall enjoy the beauty of this place. So fair, and so tragic because soon it will perish as if it had never been." He added a classical quotation on transience and death in the three-tonal scale.

  Anger glowed from the other man, lambent as hot metal. He might have been Belazir's twin, except for a hair-clip of gold rather than silver and the petulance of his expression. Belazir t'Marid never showed an enemy his frustrations.

  "Three of my men are dead, t'Marid," he said.

  "Dead!" agreed Belazir in a mild tone. "One slain from ambush, another two destroyed hand-to-hand, by scumvermin. Of course, to be caught so carelessly, they became little better than scumvermin themselves. Far better for the Clan that they were cut off before they could breed." Or breed much; Kolnari became fertile early. "Culling by the universe, not so? They will leave no sons of disgrace to propagate lines of weakness amid the Divine Seed."

  For a moment, he thought Aragiz would attack him here, while Belazir was in clear command, with Serig at his side and armored crewfolk from the Dreadful Bride at his back. If he did, he was better culled out of the Divine Seed. That was the point of the delicate insult, of course. Back on Bethel, old Azlek t'Varak had taken off his helmet a moment too soon and lost his head by such precipitousness. That had been a scandal of some note, shadowing the prestige and honor of all his sons—Aragiz t'Varak not least. The t'Varak were always hotheads, Belazir thought, amused at his own pun. Azlek had been all of fifty, though; time enough to be slow and senile. Aragiz should know better.

  He did, though barely. "You should bring the scumvermin here under better control," Aragiz said in a bland tone which matched Belazir's. "Kill a few hundred. A hundred for one."

  "T'Varak, t'Varak," Belazir murmured. He bent and plucked a flower, sniffed deeply of it. "There are fifteen thousand or so scumvermin on this great fat-dripping morsel that the Clan—and Father Chalku, by the latest message—yearns to pop into its ever-hungry mouth. And, if the scumvermin suspect that almost all of them will die when we are done, some one of them will sabotage this station and rob the Clan of that feasting, for all that we can do. Despair makes even scumvermin brave. Hope brings forth their cowardice, each one hoping for himself."

  A songbird swooped by. Belazir's band snapped out like a trout rising to a fly and caught the tiny creature within the cave of his hand. He brought it up under Aragiz's nose as the soft feathers brushed his skin, in rhythm with its heartbeat.

  "I have them in my fist, cousin," he went on. "Shall I open it—" he suited words to action "—and let them go?" The bird flew away.

  "Blood calls for blood," Aragiz said. "Avenge our blood, or you are no Clan leader."

  "Blood-call can wait a few days," Belazir said, his voice flint-hard as the two men stared face-to-face. "Until the transports arrive," he added negligently. "Eight days to load and leave, and watch this station vanish in a spark of fire as we go. Because Father Chalku's message giving me
mandate over all the High Clan in this action has already come, has it not?"

  "It has," Aragiz said. "Be glad, O cousin, be very glad of that!"

  "Be assured I am," Belazir said ambiguously. "And now, Lord Captain, load your ship with choice loot. Let you and your fighters enjoy themselves as they will among the scumvermin, so long as they do not reduce the slave work-output." He dropped his voice to a whisper. "Do not obstruct me, t'Varak. Not until you can bring the Clan a prize like this."

  "No. Not yet."

  * * *

  Belazir watched him go. "Serig," he said, "behold. Never underestimate an enemy."

  "Aragiz, lord?" Serig said incredulously.

  Belazir threw back his head and laughed merrily. "No, no. I should have specified; never underestimate even a scumvermin enemy. As that dolt does. This station's two leaders, they have between them a three hundred percent increment upon poor Aragiz's sum total of wits. He has the technique of a tunglor."

  That was a metaphor for the younger Kolnari, who had never seen homeworld. In Kolnar's seas, there was an animal—more or less an animal—that concentrated the abundant transuranics from seawater in a specialized section of its gut. It sucked in water and sprayed it on the heated chamber that resulted, expelling it behind as steam for propulsion. Tunglor massed in at about the same as the Dreadful Bride, and they attacked by rising from depth at fifty or sixty knots and ramming with their metal-sapphire-fiber prows, never deviating from the shortest course. Belazir's ancestors had made themselves nobles by hunting tunglor, hunting them to gain plutonium for weapons and powerplants.

  "As you do when you take your pleasure," Belazir went on, slapping his companion on the back of the neck in mock reproof.

  Serig grinned slyly. "It's not as if they were women." He omitted the "lord" in this brief instance, speaking man to man. "And how will you take this Channa creature?"

  "With slow care, fool, as all true pleasures should be savored: wine, a woman, revenge. And on the Dreadful Bride, when we have left," Belazir said.

  Serig raised brows in surprise. "You think her worthy of bearing slaves, lord?" he said.

  "Many." The male offspring would be castrated—that was how such as the medico were made—and the females bred back to the Divine Seed. In four or five generations, with careful testing, they could become Kolnari of the lowest caste.

  "I will need some pleasure to relax me after our labors," Belazir added.

  Serig nodded, needing no further explanation. They would have to destroy and leave for Bethel immediately. The Central Worlds Navy would be all over these stars as soon as they learned of the destruction of SSS-900-C. The Clan would run a long, long way, to wait among unpeopled, unsurveyed systems while they assimilated this treasure and bred the strength to use it. Empty systems held raw materials and energy in plenty, if you had the tools, and the universe was unimaginably vast. That voyage would be a giant step nearer the good day when it was the Central Worlds' scumvermin who were the scattering of fugitives, and the Divine Seed the power that bred and covered world upon world upon world. A long, if necessary, flight would be tedious.

  "So, leave me," Belazir said. "See to the preparations for the transports. Now I will speak with the two scumvermin."

  * * *

  Their Kolnari guards seemed incapable of letting them just walk through a doorway. The prisoners were always propelled over the threshold with a hearty shove. Thus far Channa and Amos had managed to keep their feet, which seemed to inspire ever more energetic pushing. Channa wondered if the two guards bet money on which of them would stumble first. Such treatment irritated her and it must infuriate Amos beyond endurance, since he was born noble among a ceremonious people.

  The last door gave onto the nature deck, one of the jewels of the SSS-900-C. Amos straightened then, almost smiling. The deck covered several hundred hectares; lakes, several small wooded areas, and meadows. A stream wandered from savannah to a miniature rain forest, through prairie and into the softly informal confines of a classic country-house garden, here by the entrance. Herons stalked through the reeds by the river, alert for the fish that leaped after dragonflies. The smell was overwhelmingly green. Off in the middle distance, a herd of small deer browsed. The air was full of birdsong. Normally there were parties of picnickers and the shouts of children. Now a plasma gun swung down before them.

  "Wait the Great Lord's pleasure, scumvermin," the amplified voice of the Kolnar said.

  Oh-oh, Channa thought, with a sinking stomach. That sounds bad. She and Amos had discussed what to do under interrogation, but she had doubts about his ability to keep control of his temper.

  As for me, I'll live through what I have to. And I'll dance on their graves, she thought grimly. She had been one of the first to take the new virus.

  "Buck up, kid," Simeon's voice whispered in her inner ear. It had the odd gravelly tone he adopted in tense moments. "Remember, I've got no fixed sensors in there, so the implants will have to do. I'm with you, and I'll give a running translation of anything the pirates say in their jabber. Okay? And from the structure of their language, the phrase they just used means something like 'front and center.' "

  "Got it," she subvocalized.

  They jumped back against the wall smartly when a Kolnari bossman came through, looking as if he would rather walk over them. For a moment, Channa thought it was Belazir, and then caught the few subtle differences which told her he was not. Simeon's voice confirmed it. Serig followed, a minute later. They both cast their eyes down, to avoid showing the raw desire to kill they shared.

  "Now, scumvermin," the guard said.

  "Ohhhhh, am I getting sick of hearing that word," Channa subspoke.

  "You and me and Simeon-Amos both," Simeon agreed. The Bethelite had the button in his ear, but he hadn't been able to train a sub vocal level that was inaudible. The Kolnari didn't hear all that well at the margins of audibility and had no reason to use sensitive hearing devices.

  Belazir had set up his command post beneath a huge oak tree. He lolled at his ease on a reclining chair, a wreath of fresh wildflowers adorned his hair, dappled shade moving on his sleek skin and the priceless silks of his clothing. On one side of him was a mobile console and a table scattered with notescreens, printouts, small pieces of equipment. Also some artwork which Simeon recognized, garnered from galleries and the museum.

  One piece Channa did not remember and the brain could not name, a flamboyant carving in some bone or ivory of a . . . submarine with fangs? jet-propelled spearfish? Whatever, it had the same air of ruthless speed that a striking hawk might.

  "Ah, your eyes light on the tunglor," Belazir said affably. As always, the sheer physical presence of the man struck her like a blow. "From homeworld . . . Kolnar."

  The guard behind them reached out an arm to force them down.

  "No, to one knee will do," Belazir said easily. His Standard was better, even in these few days. "Do you wish refreshment?"

  He waved to his other side to the table where food and bottles of wine rested, patently supplied by the Perimeter Restaurant. The young waitress was from the Perimeter, too, although there she had worn clothes.

  "No, Master and God," Amos and Channa said in meek unison.

  Belazir smiled and held out his hand. The waitress put a water-glass tumbler of Mart'an's famous apricot-brandy liqueur into it. He drank it off in ten long swallows and Channa knew a moment's wild hope.

  Simeon's voice was sour. "No joy," he sent. "I checked with Chaundra. They metabolize ethanol so fast he'll only be mildly buzzed."

  "Well," the pirate said in that voice like a bronze bell that purred. "There is business. The matter of the attack on the Divine Seed of Kolnar."

  "He's not too upset, I think," Simeon told them. "Heartbeat absolutely Kolnar-normal, no pupil dilation. Got an idea the victims may have been from one of the other ships. Play it polite-firm."

  "Lord and God," Channa said. "The criminals will be found and punished."

  Subvoc
al from Simeon: "You hit his funnybone with that, Happy. He's killing himself laughing inside."

  Channa went on. "I've made several general broadcasts calling for obedience, Master and God."

  "So you have. I notice, too, that it is always you and not your companion . . . colleague?"

  "Simeon-Amos is—" Channa fell silent as the Kolnari's hand indicated that Simeon-Amos should answer.

  "I am the junior, Master and God," Amos said, eyes fixed on the ground.

  "Look at me, Simeon-Amos." The stares met for long seconds. Then Belazir gestured again, turning his attention back to Channa. "Well and good. As we expect to hold the station in our fist for some time, these acts of stupidity must cease."

  "Lying through his teeth, babe."

  "You sent messages desiring audience, Channahap," Belazir went on. He rose, like a black fountain tipped with white gold, the loose sleeves floating back from his arms like wings. He looked down from his near two meters of height. "Continue."

  "Master and God," she said, in a tone as empty of any but the formal semantic content as she could make it, "your troops fornicate like—" she paused to search for a word "—rottweilers."

  "Big chuckle at that one, Channie." Simeon was furious.

  Belazir crossed his arms. "Why does this not seem complimentary?"

  Channa looked up at him. "They bite," she said emotionlessly, covering her disgust, "all the time."

  "Then the sc—the chosen ones should not resist their fate," Belazir said. "It is our custom when we meet resistance."

  "They don't resist!" Channa said sharply, then managed a taut smile. "Should we bite back?"

  A rustle went through the line of armored troops behind Belazir and the cluster of officers with feathers and jewels in their hair. The noble silenced them with a toss of his head.

  "I would not recommend it," he said sardonically. "The custom to which I refer is that of enjoying the fruits of victory. A most ancient custom, surely, even you must know of it? Make another of your speeches. Outline their duties. A hard, sincere effort to please. Then they shall be caressed as they labor, not savaged."