I gave him an exhausted look. “You can’t make me. They can’t make me do this. I’m not even Jacques McKeown.”
“No, neither I nor they can make you do it,” he said, nodding reasonably. “So your other option is to go to those people out there, tell them the opposite of whatever Mayor Sanshiro is telling them, that you’re not Jacques McKeown and you’re going to have to come back in here and start your lengthy jail sentence.”
I hung my head, and raised one foot to step over the cell’s threshold. “Second on the left?”
“Second on the left.”
When I was ten yards away, I hesitated and looked back. “I don’t suppose, during my daring escape, I was forced to tragically gun you down?”
“I think not,” said Honda. “But I’m negotiable. I’m willing to go as high as being rendered unconscious from a blow to the head.”
Chapter 25
Four days later, the Neverdie completed the trebuchet jump to Salvation sector—knocking another handful of months off her operational lifespan, but I’d resolved to stop counting—and resumed occupying actual physical space. I leaned all my weight into the sticks until the stars stopped spinning madly around me like insects gathering to feed on a corpse.
I turned on the local scanner and it went through its usual routine of reporting everything from an incoming supernova to an entire battle fleet of rampaging Colossadroids before calming down and reporting actual reality. Salvation Station appeared as a little gray ring on the edge of detectable range, about half an hour’s flight away. There were no other ships around.
I wasn’t surprised. The pirate clans and hostile alien races of the Black had been effectively driven out of the area around Salvation thanks to the efforts of the station’s residents, and those residents themselves were presently concerned with a hostage situation. Still, the loneliness did nothing to improve my mood as I closed the distance between the station and me. It would have been gratifying to at least draw a little crowd as I made the journey to my public execution.
The atmosphere became a lot more energetic as I entered Salvation Station’s defensive range and my control bank lit up with warning readouts. In her new role as station administrator, Warden had done an excellent job of calling in old favors with weapon manufacturers, and all the results of her hard work were powering up and pointing directly at me.
I hurriedly slapped the communication system into life, scattering old coffee cups and crumbs with my flailing arm. “This is . . . Jacques McKeown,” I declared, with faltering confidence. “There’s no one else with me. Scan my ship.”
I fancied I could feel the invisible probes running invasively across my ship. My skin felt hot and prickly where they passed through my body. Eventually, a high-pitched voice came through the speaker. “Are you armed?”
“No,” I said, truthfully, as the empty space in my shoulder holster made my armpit itch.
“We’ll scan you when you get here, so you had better not be,” promised the speaker.
I let out a long sigh. By now, the giant broken bicycle bell of Salvation Station was filling the view screen, its cargo bay sneering open for me like the mouth of a Scalion chimpsnake. It had been a long time since I’d had to negotiate a ship through Salvation’s contours, and I took it as slowly as I could, putting all my focus into each maneuver. Even so, the operation was over all too quickly.
There were numerous Biskottis waiting for me in the cargo bay, carpeting the surface with quivering yellow. It would have been the easiest thing in the universe to land a bit too quickly and pancake a good six or seven at once, but I didn’t see it ultimately helping matters. I touched down slowly, giving them the chance to get out of the way.
After a few peaceful seconds, which was apparently the length of time it took to run a close-range scan over my ship and cockpit to confirm that I was unarmed, I heard hands scrabbling at the outside of my airlock door. I pulled the lever to remotely open it. Letting them force it open was another thing that I couldn’t see ultimately helping matters.
I remained exactly where I was as I listened to the pitter-patter of little yellow feet, then closed my eyes and held out my arms as they burst into the cockpit.
That was my last chance for any dignity. Both my arms were seized and yanked in opposite directions, and I was pulled back and forth like a disputed rag doll until some wordless communication took place and both parties agreed to pull me backwards instead, hauling me over the backrest of the chair onto the floor.
My shoulder hit the metal grille with a jarring impact, but the Biskottis yanking on my arms weren’t in the mood to let me stop for a quick massage. I tried to get my legs under me before they could pull me down the metal steps, but they really were in a hurry and shortly my back gained a new appreciation for the plight of laundry being pulled up and down a washboard. My ankle got caught on the external airlock door as I was being hauled through it, and the Biskottis collectively thought that the best approach would be to keep pulling until my ankle became twisted enough to fit.
At that point, I went with my usual instinct when caught in a losing brawl: I let my entire body go limp and waited for a chance to flee, unlikely as it seemed that any would come soon. The Biskottis seemed to have a natural gift for coordination, and the five tiny, fragile hands clutching my left arm were just as impossible to remove as the jaws of a Tinarian fangsheep.
I let them pull me along and took in the whirlwind sightseeing tour of the station. I noticed Daniel’s ship in the landing bay, parked without landing legs at the end of a long skid mark. The hull was marked with circular scorches and bullet holes, so the station must have made some last-minute attempt to shoot it down as it landed.
I wondered why Warden hadn’t ordered the station to blow it out of the sky the instant it came into range. It seemed unlikely that she wouldn’t realize it was Daniel Henderson’s ship. Then again, Daniel Henderson wasn’t his father, and Warden’s relationship with him was slightly more complex than immediate attempted murder. She acquired complex relationships with even greater ease than she did weaponry.
My pondering had to take a break after that, because a ringing blow to the head on the side of a door frame indicated to me that we had left the cargo bay. I admired the cheerful sight of spinning stars for a few moments before they drifted away and I discovered we were already on Salvation’s main concourse.
A lot of the infrastructure had been stripped out, probably to be used as part of the makeshift cage that Blaze and the others were being held in, but the Biskottis hadn’t had enough time to add much of their trademark religious graffiti. Most of the shops and stalls that lined both sides of the wide walkway were relatively unmolested, if deserted and sporting the occasional smashed window.
The exception was the souvenir shop that was directly across from the big Quantunnel gate, placed to immediately sucker in fresh tourists. Blaze’s open-minded policy toward Jacques McKeown meant that it had been a veritable cathedral to his books and merchandise. It was completely sacked. Windows broken, stands smashed, the words DEATH TO THE ANCIENTS daubed across the front in multiple hands, and I could just about see a couple of Jacques McKeown cardboard cutouts in there hanging from the ceiling by their necks.
The mob of Biskottis slowed, and I felt myself being conveyed across their heads like a crowd surfer. Shortly the hands went away and I was unceremoniously dumped onto the floor, making my forehead crack ringingly against the tiles.
I lay there for a moment, enjoying the cool sensation of the floor against my face and acknowledging the little pains being registered by every part of my body. I slowly pushed myself up onto my hands and knees with all the haste of an overloaded cargo transporter trying to escape high-gravity orbit, but a sharp blow to the ear arrested my attempt to stand. I looked back and saw a row of five Biskottis, pointing spears made from Salvation Station–branded steak knives taped to the ends of mop
handles. Any escape to the rear had been cut off.
In front of me was Terrorgorn’s throne. In a prime example of panicky Biskotti logic, every chair, stool, and bench on the concourse had been thrown into a gigantic pile that reached halfway to the lofty ceiling. They’d even thrown in a few things that were only tangentially related to sitting, like the piles of discount underpants from the clothing stores being used to cushion the actual seat of the throne.
Terrorgorn was sitting on it, his knees held tightly together and his spindly fingers drumming on them. He offered me one of his uncomfortable half smiles.
In front of his throne was a row of Biskottis, all pointing guns straight at me. They were projectile guns, the kind that fired actual bullets, not blasters or stun beams. The kind of thing that’s less concerned about cleanup and cauterization and more about making little unfeeling balls of blunt metal rip through the flesh and arteries of a thinking, feeling life form. Warden must have kitted out the station’s security team on the cheap.
Warden herself was in the giant impromptu cage I’d seen before, a huge rounded shape just behind Terrorgorn’s impromptu throne, like the shell to a trodden-on snail. She was at the front of the crowd of star pilots that had, until recently, been the station’s entire staff and population, so she was still looking as out of place as a sex toy in a cucumber patch.
I followed the occasional worried glance she was making, and saw Daniel Henderson sitting on the floor just in front of her, staring at me through eyes as wide and frightened as his puffy bruises would allow. He was beaten up, but still in possession of all his parts, so Terrorgorn must still have been psyching himself up for the main atrocity.
After sitting on my calves for a few moments, taking in the scene, I saw some clamor rise up among the Biskottis, who had now more or less encircled the space. I saw Ic, the female Biskotti, take up position halfway up Terrorgorn’s throne, puff out her chest, and prepare to speak. From the haggard look in her eyes, I could see that Terrorgorn had fully brainwashed her through his usual method of horrendous violence combined with his paralytically boring company.
Through her fear, I saw the disgust in the corners of her mouth when she looked at me. The devotion she had reserved for worshiping the Ancients had been efficiently turned the other way.
“Jacques McKeown,” she announced, her small voice carrying well in the terrified silence of the hall. “As foremost representative of the Ancients and chief chronicler of their lies, you have been brought here to answer for their crimes against the divine adversary Terrorgorn, as well as the abandonment of their people. That is all right, isn’t it?” She looked back at Terrorgorn worriedly.
“Yeah, it’s fine,” mumbled Terrorgorn.
“Yes.” Ic turned back around and leveled a fiery glare at me. “It is fine.”
I met Terrorgorn’s gaze, which he almost immediately broke with an embarrassed smile. In that moment, bad at communicating as he was, I understood his angle. He wanted his revenge on Jacques McKeown for the book and on star pilots as a community for the whole cryonic-imprisonment thing, and he was going to get it through the Biskottis. I couldn’t imagine the Biskottis having a terribly long life expectancy after that revenge was complete, even by their standards, but trying to talk down angry fanatics with rational argument is like trying to put out a fire by whipping it with dry straw.
“The Ancients,” said Ic, her mouth curling with disgust around the words as if she were chewing a couple of rabbit turds. “Terrorgorn has enlightened us to their true nature. We are descended from their slaves, stolen from our ancestral homeland to serve in the Ancients’ temple to themselves.”
I had to wonder how long it had taken for Terrorgorn to communicate all of that to the Biskottis. I suspected it would have been the most lethal game of twenty questions ever played in the history of the universe.
Ic’s pause for effect drew on until her lips started quivering too much to be kept closed any longer. “Do you deny this charge?”
“Look, the Ancients . . . star pilots never intended to be taken for gods,” I said, settling back on my heels and putting my hands on my knees, as if I were dining at a traditional Japanese restaurant. “They didn’t ask to be worshiped. They were just people. Like you. With longer lives and better technology. You all just . . . got them wrong.”
From the grumbling all around me, I sensed I wasn’t exactly getting the audience on my side. It was high-pitched Biskotti grumbling reminiscent of a cageful of puppies just before feeding time at the pet shop, but hostile nonetheless.
“We got them wrong. Immortal giants descend from the heavens and carry our people up to their glittering sky cities. They introduce them to their miraculous machines that convey them between the stars and produce food from thin air. And yet our ancestors were at fault for mistaking them for gods.”
I opened my mouth and held up a finger, then I put the finger back down and closed my mouth.
“And then to abandon them,” continued Ic, standing on tiptoe and staring madly into the middle distance as she worked herself into a proper religious froth. “To elevate them to your level, corrupt them with technology and lies, only to leave them to fend for themselves?! Is this how the Ancients treat all their subjects?”
“They weren’t trying to elevate you! And you weren’t their subjects!”
“Then we were slaves!”
“W—”
“Confession!” announced Ic, as one of the Biskottis behind me hit me across the side of the head with the flat of their steak knife. “The Ancients admit to the crime of slavery! We are the voices of the stolen generation! The Ancients are the adversary! Death to the Ancients! Praise Terrorgorn! Oh, praise him!” She interlaced her hands beside her face, eyes shining. The gathered Biskottis squealed and hopped up and down in excitement as a thin red line of pain throbbed across my ear and jaw.
“Look . . .” I said, composing myself.
“Silence!” cried Ic, still in something of a trance. Another spear swatted the other side of my face to give me a nice matching pair of red lines.
I pushed the spear away irritably and got to my feet before anyone could stop me. “Star pilots were heroes!” I declared loud enough to silence the raised voices of the Biskottis, which didn’t actually take much; they all had lungs the size of ketchup packets. “Star pilots were the ones willing to risk everything to come out here and fight injustice when nobody else would. Sure, something went wrong here, but there are peoples like you all over the galaxy who are better off because of something a star pilot did!”
Terrorgorn recrossed his legs uncomfortably as he scrutinized Ic’s reaction. Her eyes unglazed and focused on me through a curious frown, and she lowered her arms. “Other peoples like us? On other worlds?”
I considered clarifying that some of them were different colors and different sizes and that there was quite a broad range of limb arrangements, but I could only sense a small opening and it didn’t have room for a biology lesson. “Yes! People like you. If they were being oppressed, or hunted, or hit by some natural disaster, and had nowhere else to turn, it was star pilots who came to help them.”
“And what did the Ancients . . . the star pilots . . . get in return?”
“Nothing!” I said, taking a dynamic step forward to press the point. “They did it because it was the right thing to do.”
Ic cast her gaze down, picking thoughtfully at the skin on the back of her wrist. “And they just wanted to do the right thing . . . because it felt good to do it?”
“Pretty much!”
Her gaze snapped back up to meet mine, and she rose back into her preacher stance. “Confession!” she yelled in triumph. “The Ancients confess to the crime of spreading their corruption to the innocent peoples of the universe for no reason other than their own sick gratification! May the executions commence! May the mighty seed of Terrorgorn rupture the hearts of
the Ancients and germinate his offspring on a thousand worlds!”
A sharp swipe across the back of my legs sent me onto my knees again, and another blunt edge of a steak knife hit me across the back of the head, completing a continuous line of pain that wrapped my entire skull like a laurel wreath. Biskottis rushed to my sides and seized my arms, holding my torso perfectly vertical as the Biskottis with guns took aim for my heart.
I looked around. The Biskottis were in uproar. Robert Blaze and some of the star pilots were yanking at the “bars” of the cage, but Terrorgorn had built it too firmly. Terrorgorn himself was sitting forward, still drumming his fingers on his knees in anticipation.
In other words, I was the only one who was getting myself out of this. I opened my mouth, flicked the switch in my head, and let my subconscious figure this out on the fly.
“All right!” I shouted, again easily louder than the Biskotti mob. “You win! You want the truth? I’ll tell you the truth.”
The uproar died down, although my arms weren’t released. Ic looked fearfully up at Terrorgorn, who replied with an unconcerned shrug. “Go on,” she said.
“Star pilots . . . star pilots were people who went out into the Black because there was no one there to tell them what to do. They did some helping out. They were even important to the human race, because no one else could transport things through the Black, but they didn’t do it to be helpful. If they did, they’d have stopped doing it the moment it was easier to do with Quantunnels. They did it to look good. I stopped. I stopped because I remembered . . . I couldn’t remember why it was so important to me. So you can’t execute me as a representative of star pilots because I’m not one. Not anymore.”
Over the course of my statement my body sagged and the tone and volume of my voice slipped down from “defiant speech” to “reluctant admission of guilt.” In the corner of my eye, I could see Robert Blaze clutching the bars of the cage, no longer pulling, and I didn’t have the bottle to look directly at his face.
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