by Rich Horton
“You never know,” she says. “It could be some lone, awkward deputy hoping to impress the sheriff with his police work.”
“Doesn’t feel like that. This is something else.”
“Something like?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the actual law on the station. Somebody who could get away with leaving, this long after the breach, when all departures would have been shut down.”
“The cartel. Jathyx’s employers.”
“Possible,” Draiken says. “But that doesn’t feel right either.”
Stang glances at the holo display. To human eyes, the two distances are still what they were at the start of this conversation. A set of numbers below the pursuing vessel continues to count down, establishing that the distance between it and them is narrowing at a rate that can be measured.
She says, “I don’t think they’re using their top speed. I think they still think they’re sneaking up on us. And that brings up the parable of the boy and the lion.”
“I’m not familiar with it.”
“Lions were a legendary, and no longer extant, predator species from the homeworld. They were known as the king of the beasts, and they . . . ”
“I know what lions were.” During his classical education, references to them had been as common as references to dragons and klingons. “Go on.”
“A boy native to the region is crossing the savannah on foot when he becomes aware of a lion following him. There is no cover, no rescuers he can call to. His one advantage is that the lion is in no hurry. As long as his own gait remains unhurried, the lion’s gait is unhurried. It only gains one step for every ten he walks. Of course, he could run, but then it would run—and there is no contest between them. If it runs, it will bring him down in seconds. He can just barely see a tree in the distance, one that might permit him to evade the lion, if he can get to the higher branches capable of supporting his weight, where the lion would be too heavy to follow. So the problem becomes algebraic. Given the variables, can the boy cover that distance, losing one pace out of ten, and still have time to climb before the lion reaches him?”
“I don’t know. Can we?”
“As it is, they’ll be on us in five hours.”
There’s nothing they can use for cover, no gravity well they can use for tricky maneuvers, not within the next five hours. There’s just emptiness, all the way to Henry, making them the equivalent of that boy trapped on the savannah.
He says, “Let’s make sure what we’re talking about.”
Stang plots a radical course change, almost perpendicular to the current heading. It is a move so sudden and so nonsensical that to any observers not intent on bringing them to heel, it would look like the people aboard were having a violent argument. The Dart does not alter its course immediately, there being a number of light-seconds between their position and its own, but within thirty seconds of the intelligence aboard being able to know, it changes course, not to parallel, but to intercept.
She tries to take advantage of the built-in delay, faking another course change and then, just before the delay built in by the other vessel’s reaction time, cutting hard in the opposite direction. This trick regains some of the seconds lost. But the pilot of the Dart compensates and is again in less than a minute on track for interception.
She tries zig-zagging. But the chief problem with a zig-zag is that it averages out to a straight line. In open space, a three-dimensional version of Delia’s hypothetical savannah, any real course change only steers them further away from where they need to be. Whoever’s piloting the Dart reacts to the first couple minutes of this, but then appears to realize that there’s no point; over the next few minutes of that he just maintains course, drawing a beeline that gains for several minutes.
Whoever’s chasing them might not be a genius at this sort of thing, any more than the lion of the mind-problem. But he doesn’t have to be. The circumstances only require basic competence.
“That’s enough,” Draiken says. “Give us as much time as you can.”
She restores their original heading to Henry, a place that they will now never reach without a confrontation. “We’ll have to decide what to do, soon.”
“After lunch,” says Draiken.
• • •
People unused to crises have a common question, “How can you think of food at a time like this?” Draiken has spent his life being confronted by one crisis or another, and he knows that when you have a moment of peace before the inevitable eruption of an emergency, you damn well force yourself to think about it. This is especially so when you don’t know if you might be facing capture by enemies who might not obey scruples about feeding you regularly. You take care of your nutritional needs while you can.
He brings Stang one of those super-spicy, semi-curdled stews she unaccountably loves, that she has identified as comfort food from her childhood, but which completely disgust him, a man who once crossed a desert without supplies and had nothing to eat but the occasional carrion so old that it had been abandoned even by scavengers. Honestly: in the pursuit of survival he’s eaten stuff not fit for human consumption, and he would still even in the final extremity hesitate about resorting to one of her stews. He can only wonder about the conditions of a childhood that would foster enthusiasm for them. His own meal is not much better. It’s emergency rations and designed to motivate survival, because nobody in the universe would ever willingly choose it for a ceremonial final meal: a kind of simulated fish loaf that Draiken, who still mourns the years he spent in a sunlit place eking out a living from the sea, cannot help but consider a war crime.
They dine together, watching the Dart grow closer. Then he gathers up and disposes of the leavings, and makes a more appetizing meal for the prisoner.
He slides open the panel in the door. “Food.”
Jathyx collects the tray, and returns, stooping to position his narrow eyes at slot altitude. “And why are you still here, dead man? Have you decided you have more to say to me?”
“Somebody’s chasing us. Somebody not station security. Are your friends trying to rescue you?”
“I have no friends.” This sounds less like defiance than a simple statement of fact. “What do you think of me? That I would sit and drink, take topical euphorics, share jokes, with men I might be ordered to kill tomorrow? Enjoy the companionship of those who might be ordered to kill me?”
“Whatever you want to call it,” Draiken says. “Would they come for you?”
“We have a saying, those of us who kill for them. We are not men. We are knives, with men attached. Break a knife and it can be replaced. Break a man and he can be replaced. We admit to no friends, no brothers: just our own strong grip on the blade, the rewards of money, power, living on our feet instead of our knees. No, dead man: my employers would only come for me if they had some reason to turn the blade against my own throat. To rescue me? Eh, not so much.”
This lines up with all the intel about the ethos of the cartel on Piithkarath. It sounds psychopathic, but Draiken knows that he has no right to feel superior to it, not after his years working covert operations for agencies with much the same attitude toward the disposability of their agents.
“Perhaps,” Jathyx says, with what appears to be genuine fascination, “they come for you? Or your giant bitch? Those who have done the kind of things you can do, do you not also have stalkers who will take to stalking you?”
“I do,” Draiken says. “Enjoy your meal. I’ll be back with another, if I’m still alive.”
He slides the panel shut, stands for a moment with his forehead pressed against the cold metal of the door, and for a few seconds bats his forehead against the unyielding surface, miming a form of self-harm that might well be appropriate.
Then he returns to Stang, receives confirmation that the Dart is still following, and says, “As long as it’s inevitable, might as well find out what they want.”
“I’m sure that if you phrase yourself politely enough they’ll let us g
o.”
“It would be nice, but I’m not hoping for that. Just a clear statement of intent. Start with requesting identification.”
Stang composes a text signal and sends it flying.
They wait two minutes for it to be received, for possible replies to be considered, for a response to be composed and sent.
None arrives.
“Ask them if they want us to release the knife.”
“Not ‘Jathyx’?”
“I’d rather not send any signals with his name, to bounce around Juje-knows-where. Say ‘the knife’ and if they’re after him, they’ll know who we’re talking about. Nobody else will make any sense of it.”
She complies. Another two minutes pass. No response. But the numbers on the position map continue to count down.
“One last question,” Draiken says. “Ask them if they’re looking for the last free man.”
She gives him a look of frank skepticism. “Full of ourselves, are we?”
“It’s sarcasm,” he says. “Something my enemies used to call me, in the old days.”
“So they’re the ones who thought you were full of yourself.”
He grins a little. “You have absolutely no idea.”
“Were they right?”
“Whatever ground I was able to gain against them, I gained by being the most aggravating, self-righteous bastard alive. Drove a number of them around the bloody bend. In any event, they’re more likely to connect that title to the person I used to be, than this name, ‘Draiken.’ I didn’t start using it until much later.”
She composes the message and fires it off.
One minute and thirty seconds later the reply arrives, and it’s nothing they could have expected: a few seconds from some ancient dramatic presentation, culled from Juje alone knows what obscure archive. Four beings, a human woman and three apparent aliens, or rather, three unmistakable human beings made up to resemble creatures who might be alien or might be beings out of myth or might just be eccentric dressers, stare up at the sky in horror as some woman piloting a personal transport of some kind uses the vehicle’s exhaust to write words in the air. It is not any alphabet Draiken knows. It must date back to the era of the original artifact. But from the reaction of the woman on the ground and her oddly-attired friends, whatever those letters spell is supposed to reduce them all to despair.
The image freezes, and two words in the more recognizable lettering of Hom.Sap Mercantile appear, providing the translation
(surrender dorothy!)
before the image fades.
Stang says, “I’ve got to hand it to you, Draiken. You have some interesting enemies.”
“That I do.”
He doesn’t elaborate. He doesn’t tell them how often their interrogations of him had included such irrelevant bullshit, including the calculated use of outdated iconography, leaving him with little to cling to but his own crumbling sense of self. It’s this, if nothing else, that persuades him that this is something he’d almost given up on encountering, a direct connection to the very same people who’d once devoted so much time and energy to breaking him.
And so he feels something that he hasn’t permitted himself to feel in some time.
Rage.
She says, “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that there is a way to deal with a lion stalking you on the savannah.”
“Yes?”
“You drop some raw meat.”
A little less than thirty minutes later, their transport drops a potato sack from its rear cargo bay.
Not that this matters much, but it is not the same potato sack they earlier used to haul Jathyx around. Standard protocol requires the material to be inspected at length after each use, to eliminate any possibility of undetected micro-punctures turning it into a death trap for your next passenger. Otherwise, re-using a potato sack, if it cannot be avoided, is a good way to risk hauling around a corpse, or delivering an oxygen-deprived idiot. No, it’s better to use another sack straight out the package; better still if you also strive for redundancy and only carry passengers clad in vacuum suits, which is not always possible if you’re evacuating casualties in a hurry. But it sure as hell makes sense if your living cargo is both competent and ambulatory.
This sack comes from a different manufacturer and is larger, less padded, more amorphous, than the lumpy parcel previously occupied by Jathyx. Stang has inflated it only enough to give it some semblance of shape, and so it undulates like an oversized soap bubble with every movement Draiken makes. He tries to stay near its center, touching its interior walls as little as possible, though of course he cannot avoid his own minimal movements and the resulting air currents making him drift into those walls far more often than he would like. It does no harm. It’s just annoying.
The sack does not slow down just because it’s been jettisoned. Nothing exists to arrest its forward progress; it continues heading in the general direction of Henry, at the same speed their transport had been. It’s still moving faster than most vehicles have, for most of humanity’s history. But Stang had braked by about half their prior forward rate, before ejecting it, in order to leave room for accelerating to leave it far behind. Had the walls not been opaque, Draiken would have seen their transport transition from being almost motionless in relation to him, to being a distant speck of light among many, dimming to nothingness.
The assumption, of course, is that he has interpreted the Dart’s message correctly, that it will match velocities to collect him, and not let him spin in the void, an untenable distance from rescue, rather than continue to chase Stang. It also assumes that his pursuers won’t accelerate again, once he’s been collected, to resolve that loose end afterward. Given their greater acceleration potential, both strategies would work, rendering this sacrifice pointless.
Either way, he will soon be in a great deal of trouble. All that remains to be decided is what form of trouble that will be: slow suffocation, or capture.
And again he thinks what he thought in that narrow corridor on Piithkarath.
He is going to die.
Either by their hands or by his own; because he will not permit himself to fall back into their hands, to be tortured and poked and prodded, the way they once had.
Once, he’d been confined to a place even smaller than this. It was one of several cells where he’d been brought to, after one attempt at escape, or another. This one was a little circular hole glowing with pink light from no visible source. It was not tall enough to stand in nor wide enough to lie down in, not unless he curled into a fetal position, an undignified measure he would not resort to.
So he sat with his knees drawn up in silence until the pink light flared and a familiar voice known to him from many interrogations spoke to him, through some unseen speaker. “We don’t enjoy this, you know.”
The words were peevish and sorrowful, the tone that of a put-upon parent, tired of constantly having to discipline a child who refused to learn.
The man not yet known as Draiken said, “I am not concerned with what you enjoy.”
“We are people like any other. We have friends. Families. Life outside this place. We are human. We feel pity. We cannot help feeling sorry for you, at your dogged refusal to surrender to the inevitable.”
“There is nothing inevitable.”
“We have given you something many dispossessed throughout history would have killed to obtain: a home. It is comfortable, and it is secure, and if we your caretakers sometimes go to extreme lengths to break you, it is no more than the solicitousness of a new pet owner, trying to teach a puppy the rules of the house. That is love, whether you recognize it or not. We are prepared to indulge you, to see to any needs you might have. All you need to do is love us back.”
“I give you nothing, not my love and not my hate.”
The voice said nothing for a long time. Then he resumed: “You are aware that to catch a powerful fish from an open boat, one allows it just enough freedom, at the end of the l
ine, to spend itself to exhaustion. We apply this knowledge to recalcitrant men. We let them escape, let them deplete their failing strength on a fruitless attempt at distance, then draw them back. If they escape again, we let them go farther; then farther still. Always they end up in the hands of us, their benefactors. You play the role of the fish, whether you know it or not. We let you go and we catch you again, and any freedom you enjoy in the middle is just illusion, a necessary fiction to aid in your housebreaking. It is routine.”
“I killed three of you this time. You did not take it as routine.”
“No one can be pleased by the failure to learn. The ones you killed were once as stubborn as yourself, but they learned to take their orders with enthusiasm. You will be one of them, before long. You will come to know the value of acceptance and cooperation.”
“I accept nothing. I cooperate with nothing.”
The owner of that voice is dead now, he has heard; not by his own hand, but by the mortality that afflicts all men, even those who live at a time when rejuvenation is a thing. No one lives forever, not even those who can enjoy more than one taste of youth. Draiken is not only willing to die, not only resigned to it, but there are times like now when he looks upon that prospect with a rancid eagerness, as long as he can wound the part of the Universe that is home to such voices.
And so he waits, and so he is calm, even in his inability to control what happens next. He just waits, and thinks of Aletha, and of Thorne, and of the Porrinyards, and of Stang; of Andrea Cort, who had been a strange alien thing he’d regarded as a puzzle that, had he obeyed different priorities, might have been a puzzle worth solving; and of many others before them who he had known and could have loved, had he ever been able to feel safety in love.
Not for the first time, he regards himself with an honesty too brutal to be taken from other men, and he tells himself, you are too stupid to live.
In this way he occupies his time until the abrupt jolt advises him that it is time to return to survival mode.
Something’s pulling at the sack. Claiming it.