by Gini Koch
“They checked the area that had just been nuked?” Abigail sounded worried.
Poofikins mewled at her, purred, then went into my purse. “Yes, they were fast.” And protected. Being Black Hole Universe creatures, they had protections the rest of us didn’t and probably never would. Being Algar’s pets meant they could do what they wanted, when they wanted, so I was personally relieved that they’d all searched for the others. Attached Poofs were attached, so that made sense.
“There were other Poofs,” Reader said. “More than I thought had come with us.”
“Good point. Ah, Poofikins or Harlie, if it’s convenient, could you come to Kitty?”
Poofikins popped out of my purse with a sleepy grumble. The Poofs believed in napping at any and all times when they weren’t needed. Wasn’t sure if they’d picked this up from the A-C’s or vice versa, but it was a trait I was very familiar with by this time. Poofikins mewled, purred, grumbled, and mewled again. Then back into my purse. Apparently the Poofs were tired out from their activities, because, as I looked in, I had a lot of them in there now.
“Yes, those are local solar system Poofs. Here to help us, regardless of their owners’ views.”
“Are you saying Alexander or Victoria are against us?” Reader sounded worried. Couldn’t blame him.
“No, but there are a lot more Poofs now, and therefore, a variety of different owners. Alexander has allowed the Poofs to go to other planets.”
“Why?” Abigail asked flatly. “That seems remarkably stupid or generous. Or both.”
Looked at 2.0 and thought about it. “Because not all spies have to look like us.”
The Poofs were attached to me, but they were also attached to the Alpha Four Royal Family, and had been attached to them first and for far longer than they’d been with me. For millennia, really. And the same was definitely true of Algar. And my husband and therefore our daughter were also part of that Royal Family.
So, the Poofs were going to be on Alexander’s side, and, by extension, ours. Perhaps he had a talent for Poof Chatting like I did, or else the Poofs got their points across to him. But I was pretty sure he was utilizing the Poofs as a spy and defense network. Which was hella impressive, when you thought about it.
And it begged a question—had the Alpha Centauri Poofs come to help us on their own, because of a request from Harlie, or because Alexander had asked them to?
“So, where are the others, then, if they’re not in this castle?” Reader asked, pulling me back to the most relevant conundrum.
“No idea,” 2.0 said. “I only knew you were coming because you came through the tunnel.”
“You’re saying you know of the tunnels?” Fancy asked with a little growl.
“Yes. I let you raid. Because I’m a nice king that way.”
“Dude, seriously, no one here likes you. Stop baiting everyone, or someone’s going to end your life, and, news flash, there is no way for you to make another Ronnie. And even if there was, you’ll be gone.”
“Tell her why you supposedly allowed her to raid,” Reader added. “Or I’ll be happy to agree to let the ocellar and chocho eat you. Because as far as I’m concerned your original murdered my in-laws and I’m really not above taking all our rage and grief out on you. Sure, it’s not fair, but then neither is life, right?”
“James, seriously, I love it when you’re nasty! Now, Ronnie, let’s try this again. Answer the questions.”
“You people . . . you think in such straight lines. Look, can everyone stop threatening me? I’m aware that half of you can catch me and all of you want to kill me. This position isn’t comfortable. Can I at least sit?”
Figured Fancy and Ginger could be getting tired. “Sure. Wilbur, you sit behind the nasty man, Ginger, stay in front, and the rest of us will surround all of you. All campfire cozy.”
Fancy and Ginger backed off a bit, Wilbur got into position, and 2.0 sat on his butt. “Finally. Thank you.”
“So, you were trying to insult us, I think. So do go on.”
“Not an insult. You all just tend to think in straight lines. ‘If I wasn’t caught when I raided, then they don’t know I was here.’ And so on.”
“How is that thinking in a straight line?” Abigail asked. “It makes sense.”
Reader nudged me. “You don’t think in straight lines,” he said quietly. “It’s one of the reasons you always figure out what’s going on.”
He was right and I decided to take the hint and once again toss on my Megalomaniac Girl cape. “I get why you’d let them think they weren’t seen if you were trying to trap them. But you don’t appear to be trying to trap them . . . Oh. Duh.”
“What?” Rhee asked.
“He let Fancy’s Ferrets raid so that he could follow them back. They’re good, and they were cautious, so it took time. Get a little farther each time. Soon enough, you know where Haven is. Then you sneak your spy into Haven and wait.”
“I didn’t have a spy in Haven,” 2.0 said. I shot him a look that said I knew he was a liar. He shook his head. “Seriously. You’re right, I had them followed. And yes, we were ready to attack tonight. That got foiled.” He made the Ate A Lemon Face. “I presume by all of you.”
“Pretty much. But I still don’t buy it. Usha was in Haven and she was trying to open the door to let snakipedes in. If she wasn’t working for you, who the hell was she working for?”
“You mentioned that name before. I don’t know an Usha.”
“Pull the other one, it has bells on.”
He shrugged. “I just thought you were using a common Free Woman name. I didn’t have a spy in Haven. Frankly, if you hadn’t shown up, I wouldn’t have needed one. Open the doors, let in my Horrors, no more Haven.”
“Fancy, you said the Horrors had been here forever, right?”
“Yes, Shealla.”
“Have we, by any chance, destroyed all the Horrors by blowing up the giant pen they were in?”
“No, Shealla. Because where you and the Venida were is not their nesting place. The Horrors nest out of doors, at the far side of the castle. We have never entered the room you and the Venida were in.”
“Huh. So, Ronnie, why were you making Horror Clones? Just not enough bad in the world or something?”
“You actually have to ask? Because I can control them and they are the best fighting force anyone could have.”
“Not quite, apparently. What about the naturally born ones? Can you control them, too?” As the words left my mouth, I knew the answer. Of course he could. And, point of fact, of course he was. Contemplated all my options. Decided to go for the best one. Stood up. “Ginger, please come to Kitty.”
She backed away from 2.0 and came to me. Picked her up and gave her to Reader. Then stepped closer to 2.0 and gave him a nice roundhouse to the head. He went down.
The others stared at me.
“Not that I object,” Rahmi said finally, “but may I ask why?”
“The why is that he was spending his time ‘being helpful’ so that he could call the other snakipedes here. I’d imagine we have a bunch of them really close by, and if they can get inside this castle in some way, assume that they have done and are doing so.”
Sure enough, heard a far-off hissing and what sounded like scales scraping against rock.
“Oh, good,” Reader groaned. “So, we’re once again caught between a rock and a hard place.”
“Figures,” Abigail said, as she and the other girls stood up. “Or, as we call it, routine.”
CHAPTER 70
“FANCY, how well do you know the castle?”
“Not well enough to ensure escape, Shealla, but well enough that we may have hope.”
“Good enough for government work. Rahmi, please carry Ronnie there and be sure to knock him out again if he starts to wake up. Rhee, take the last position and keep Rahmi in f
ront of you, so you can cover the rear and help keep Ronnie unconscious.”
“Yes, Kitty,” the princesses said in unison.
“James, carry Ginger—she’s an attack cat and is trained to fly through the air, land on snakipedes, and do them serious bodily harm. I don’t want us throwing Ginger unless we have to, but since we may have to, you get the honors.”
“Why me?”
“Because I want Fancy focused on tracking and leading us out, Wilbur focused on smelling for danger and sniffing for a way out, and, frankly, I don’t think I can actually force myself to toss Ginger at a snakipede.”
Ginger purred at me, leaned out of Reader’s arms, and gently head butted me. I snuggled her back.
Reader pulled her gently away. “Got it. I’ll only toss her if it’s life or death, or she has the best shot of killing one of those things.”
“Thanks.”
“So, what are you going to be doing? Tossing nukes?”
“No idea what you’re talking about. Fancy, Wilbur, let’s get going, because I could just be jumpy, but I’d swear the hissing and scaly slithering sounds are getting louder, and I also think I hear something that sounds like hundreds of horrible wings flapping at hummingbird speeds. In other words, we need to get moving.”
Fancy and Wilbur took the lead, him sniffing, her slinking cautiously. Next came me and Abigail, then Reader and Ginger, with the princesses at the end.
“How good is their hearing?” Abigail asked.
“No idea.”
“Not as good as ours,” Fancy replied quietly. “But if we choose to make noise and make it easy for them . . .”
We all took the hint and shut up. The long corridor that I’d followed 2.0 down to reach the metal door seemed clear, but Fancy didn’t take us that way. There was another hallway that went to the right, if you were facing the door, and we went down that instead.
The reason for this became clear—the hallway led to a narrow staircase, a staircase too narrow for a full-grown snakipede to fit into. Of course, there were smaller snakipedes, too. However, I hadn’t seen any of them hunting, and hopefully that mean that 2.0 hadn’t called the youngsters over, too.
We could go up or down, and we went down. We’d been on ground level, at least I thought so, when we’d been at the snakipede pens. Meaning we were going underground again now.
But only for a short while. We reached another landing and, though the stairs continued down, we didn’t. Down another dark corridor and into a room that looked a lot like a dungeon. The door wasn’t locked, though, and there were no prisoners in evidence. Rhee stayed at the door, on guard, while the rest of us went in and did a thorough search.
“He may have been telling the truth,” Fancy said quietly as we finished perusing this room. “I felt it was best to verify that the others were not here.”
“No argument here.” Nothing in this area looked too old, meaning that it had probably been furnished once 2.0 was on the throne. “Where to from here, though?”
“Through the torturer’s chambers.” She opened a small door that was behind something that looked very much like an iron maiden, though not the cool band, and trotted through.
Motioned to Rhee to join us, then we followed Fancy through into a rather cheery looking room that was set up for comfort. Nice to know that the torturers were treated well, presumably under the idea that everyone should be happy in their work. Hoped Ronnie would wake up so I could punch him and knock him out again, but then again, had to figure that the person who’d actually set this all up was LaRue.
The cozy torturer’s chambers led to another corridor. This one had a lot of hallways crisscrossing each other. Wilbur sniffed a lot down here and took the lead. Once again we were in Maze Central but since I hoped to never have to come back this way, chose not to care.
After a few twists and turns, I realized we were in the underground working area of the castle. That no one was here was beyond strange. One didn’t reign as a monarch with no servants, no workpeople, and no one hanging about trying to curry favor.
“How has this place been functioning if there are no people in it?”
Fancy shook her head. “There have always been many Lecanora working here when we have raided.”
“In the torture chambers, too?”
She shook her head. “I have only seen those used to hold prisoners, and not too many. He may not be a good king, but he hasn’t stooped to that.”
“Then why are they there?” Abigail asked.
“Maybe because others planned to use them and never made it back or got around to it. At any rate, if Ronnie’s had a full staff before, where are they now? I find it hard to believe that he sent them all away to protect them, and since there are no bodies or evidence of people being murdered, where are all those who work here? We had to avoid people when we came in.”
“They were all the ones you call Amazons,” Fancy said.
“Curiouser and curiouser. James, any thoughts?”
“Many, but the main one is that a lot of people appear to have disappeared. More than we were expecting and more than makes sense. If we think in straight lines.”
“You think Ronnie’s staff were spirited away like our people were?”
“I think that if he’s telling the truth and he didn’t take Jeff and the others, then someone else did. And if that someone else is working against Beta Eight, they might have taken the king’s staff with the idea of making said king more vulnerable to attack.”
“He wasn’t joking about thinking we were assassins,” Abigail said. “When we appeared in front of him he freaked out, screamed for guards, and basically acted like the biggest baby in the galaxy. He put us into a cage in with the Horrors because he said he thought we could escape anything else.”
“So, our question is—is the enemy of our enemy our friend, or a worse enemy?”
“Figure we’ll find out the hard way, girlfriend. You know, like we always do.”
“Ain’t it the truth?”
We forged on. Wilbur found stairs up so up we went. We were much more quiet and cautious again, because we could hear things above us. They sounded slithery. And big.
Reached a landing and Fancy motioned us to stop while Wilbur backpedaled as quickly and softly as possible. Didn’t take genius to guess that we’d come up around snakipedes.
“Do we go back down and try the other route?” I asked her as quietly as possible.
She shook her head. “We avoided the exterior walkway this way, which we want to continue to do. We need to reach the tunnels we used to enter. They will be our only safe passage out.”
“How many are out there?”
“Two. But the room is small.”
“Safe to take a peek?”
She nodded, so I slunk over and checked the situation out. There were indeed only two snakipedes in the room, but they weren’t flying. Meaning they were blocking the door we clearly had to get to which was, naturally, on the opposite side of the room. Hadn’t thought these things could be more horrifying but, strangely enough, being on the ground and looking the most snakelike that they had so far made them much, much worse.
We all backed down the stairs a ways. On the positive side, the stairway was too narrow for the snakipedes to get through. Shared the situation with the others.
“Go back and risk it or try to get through this and probably die?” Reader shook his head. “I pick going back and taking our chances.”
Heard a noise and realized 2.0 was coming around. Managed to stop Rhee before she could club him. “I have a plan,” I said to her surprised look.
We sat him upright and sort of gently slapped him awake. He glared at me. “I hate you.”
“Feeling is beyond mutual, Ronnie. But here’s the thing—we’re going to get out of your creepy abandoned castle full of snakipedes and—”
“Wait, what? What do you mean, ‘abandoned’? I have a large staff. They might be hiding because of the Horrors, but they’re here.”
“There’s no one here but us and the snakipedes, dude. We’ve checked, as have the Poofs. And before you suggest it, the Poofs didn’t eat everyone else.” Looked in my purse. “Did you?” Harlie looked up and gave me a hurt mewl. Petted the Poof. “Sorry, just had to check.” Turned back. “No, the Poofs didn’t eat anyone. And there was no one else here when they searched.”
2.0 went pale. “Could the Horrors have killed them all?” He sounded genuinely upset. “I didn’t want that. My people who work here are good people.”
Reader and I exchanged a look. “I hate it when they show humanity,” he said.
“Dude, it’s like you read my mind.” Wondered if that meant a katyhopper was nearby. Kind of hoped so, but on the other hand, didn’t want any katyhoppers to become Snakipede Chow, so better that it was just us being on the same wavelength. “Ronnie, the people were gone before you called the Horrors from outside to come in and kill us.”
This didn’t reassure—his face drained of more color. “You have to protect me.”
CHAPTER 71
“EXCUSE ME?” Abigail asked, speaking for all of us.
“If they’ve taken my retainers, it’s to get to me.”
“You’re amazingly paranoid for a guy on a planet that appears to be pretty darned peaceful. Who is out to get you? Aside from us, I mean.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I never see them. But over the past few months, I know I’ve been watched.”
“That’s it? You think you’ve been watched? For this you’re all freaked out? You, the guy speaking to snakipedes? Speaking of which, we’ll deal with your paranoia along the way—we need to get past your pets. In an extremely unscathed manner. So you’re going to call them off or put them into a stupor or whatever you did when James threatened your life before. And we are all going to walk out of here together. Or we’ll kill you before they can kill us. You follow?”