by Peter David
They were coming.
Not just one. Not just two. All of them.
Despite the crush of people facing him, they were moving through with no impediment whatsoever.
Burkitt looked around desperately, tried to see reactions from the others, tried to see if they were as horrified as he. But there was nothing, just blank, even slightly puzzled expressions as they stared at him. He knew he must have looked a sight, with his mouth moving and no words emerging, and his skin was undoubtedly reflecting the absence of blood in his face.
It was still dark and overcast, but here there were no shadows, and here there were no dreams, nothing haunting him in his sleep, no guilty concerns clouding his slumbering brain. Here it was, out in the open, and clearly they approached him with no fear, no fear . . .
What did they have to fear, really? What more could be done to them, now that they were dead?
And they were most certainly dead, there was no doubt about that. Here came the Zarn, blood covering him, and next to him his wife, the beloved Zarna, dead eyes burrowing into him like maggots feasting upon a corpse. From another direction came their sons—the eldest, who would have followed his father, and the younger lads, the ones whose lives he had taken with his own hands. The daughter, the eldest daughter, she was approaching as well, her body looking hideous and broken, reflecting the fall she had taken. But his attention was pulled back to the boys he had slain. Horrifically, they had, frozen on their faces, that same trusting look that they had displayed upon seeing him, that same momentary expression of feeling secure in his presence. There, captured for all eternity, were those looks of benign faith that he, Burkitt, had betrayed. Looks that he had thought he had been able to wash from his mind in a sea of blood, but that were clearly now going to remain seared forever into his brain.
Their skin, their clothes, were burned and bubbling from where the energy weapons had struck them, and the elder daughter was working on keeping her innards from spilling out from the rents in her body that had resulted from the impact of her striking the ground. The Zarna’s mouth was moving, blood trickling from it, and here came the boys, another step closer and yet another, and still those beatific smiles framed in heads that had gaping wounds and portions of their brain exposed, pink and pulsing.
It was a trick. It had to be a trick. They looked so solid, it couldn’t be that they were mere phantasms. Pointing a trembling finger, he suddenly shouted, “You see them! You see them, don’t you?” He whirled on Calhoun, knowing beyond question that he had to be behind it. “You put them up to this! These are . . . these are your crewmen, in some sort of vomitous guise! Admit it!”
Calhoun gaped at him. “What the hell are you talking about?” he demanded, and Burkitt could hear the confused mutterings from the crowd.
“Admit it!” screeched Burkitt, and he lunged at Calhoun. He didn’t get within five paces, because Kebron’s arm swept wide and knocked him back. Burkitt fell and a shocked cry went up from the crowd.
Burkitt scrambled to his feet, whirled, hoping against hope that the specters would be gone, but no, they were that much closer. Their hands were outstretched, pointing at him, and there were sounds in his head now. He could hear, as clearly as if he were back there again, their agonized dying screams mingling with the screeching of blaster fire, and their voices were low and mournful and terrifying to endure. He swung at them then, lunging at the Zarn, who was closest. His hands went right through, up to the elbow, and he didn’t feel flesh or organs, but instead a cold that penetrated his skin, into his bones, into his soul. With a frightened yowl, he yanked clear his arms, and he couldn’t feel anything from the elbow down. He could see his arms, but it was as if they weren’t there anymore, so numb were they.
Burkitt stumbled back, tripping over his own feet, and he hit the ground heavily. Another cry went up from the crowd then, and Burkitt didn’t bound to his feet this time. Instead he was skittering back like a mutilated crab, his eyes wide, staring at nothing that anyone else could see. He twisted around, saw his fellow Counselars, who were gaping at him in mute shock, and he barked, “You see them! Tell me you see them!” Several of them at least had enough presence of mind to shake their heads, while the rest just stared.
He twisted back, and they were almost upon him, and he knew then what they meant to do. He had felt the uncanny coldness of them, knew what it had done to him just to touch them, and further knew that they were now going to return the favor. They were going to sink their own arms, or even their own forms into him. No longer were they content with haunting his outer senses. They were going to insinuate themselves right into him, invade him not only from without but also from within. The Zarna’s face was closest to his, and her lips were drawn back in a hideous rictus of a smile. She opened her mouth as if to kiss him in a grotesque mockery of passion, and when she did, some sort of thick, gelatinous mass started to emerge. He saw the Zarn approaching as well, and the children, all ready to pile on, and then the smell hit him. He felt his gorge rising, his stomach twisting in protest, and that was when he began to roar, in a voice louder than any could recall in the history of Oratory Point.
“Get off me! Get off me, you dead bitch! Get off me or I’ll kill you, no matter how dead you already are!”
For one moment, one moment, the ghost of the Zarna looked taken aback by his vehemence. That was all Burkitt needed. With a guttural roar of fury, he shoved and rolled, and suddenly, just like that, the Zarna was on her back, looking most surprised. He still wasn’t able to touch her, and the cold of her still iced him to the soul, but the white-hot fury boiling within him gave him strength. Screaming in triumph, he shouted, “I’ll kill you like I killed your sons! Like I would have killed Tsana! You think I won’t?! You think I can’t?! I . . .”
And she was gone, just like that.
Burkitt let out a howl of triumph, for the others were gone as well. He let out a demented chortle of joy and triumph. “That for you, Zarn! That for you, Zarna! That . . . that . . .”
Then his voice started to taper off, and slowly, very slowly, he looked around. Everyone was staring at him with various looks of surprise and incredulity. All except Calhoun, who was looking at him with a grim air of satisfaction, and Si Cwan and Kalinda, whose faces were utterly inscrutable.
Then he started to rerun through his mind the things he had just shouted, for all to hear. There was dead silence in the square.
His thoughts were scattered, like broken glass, slicing him as he tried to gather them up. Forgotten was everything that he had planned, all the grand notions and strategies. Instead he focused all his anger, all his fury on one person. Pointing a quivering finger at Calhoun, he snarled, “This . . . this was all your fault somehow . . . you did this . . .”
“Whatever was done here was done to yourself,” Calhoun said. He appeared to be speaking very quietly, and yet his voice carried across the square.
“No! You did this! You did it—!” His face twisted in hatred, he lunged at Calhoun.
Kebron was ready for him, but Burkitt didn’t get more than half a foot when the shriek of a pulser blast ripped through the air. The shot took him square in the chest, knocking him back with such force that it took him off his feet. He flailed as he went, and crashed into several of the Counselars, who found themselves to be unintentional backstops. A good half dozen of them went down in a pile, Burkitt lying atop them, his legs splayed, his arms hanging to either side. A small spiral of smoke wafted from Burkitt’s chest, and his head was slumped.
The last thing he saw was Tsana, a grim smile of triumph on her face.
I hate that girl, he thought before oblivion took him.
Calhoun couldn’t tell whether Burkitt was dead and, at that moment, he didn’t especially care. Instead his entire focus was on the new source of attack. “Kebron, shield Tsana!” he snapped as he yanked out his phaser, pivoting and trying to see where the blast had come from.
He had no trouble doing so, because the shooter was not maki
ng the slightest attempt to hide. Across the square, on one of the upper levels of a nondescript building, he saw a trooper that he instantly recognized: Commander Gragg. He was frozen in the window, still in the aiming position. Even from this distance, Calhoun could see smoke whisping from the barrel end. Then Gragg slowly lowered the pulser, stepped back from the window, and shut it.
For a long moment, no one said anything, and finally the stunned silence was broken by Zak Kebron.
“Anything around here to eat?” he inquired.
20
EXCALIBUR
“DIDYOU DO IT?” Calhoun, having just spoken, leaned back in his chair in his ready room and fixed his level gaze upon Kalinda. She sat in the chair opposite him, her hands folded neatly in her lap. Si Cwan was just behind her, looking a bit protective, and Kebron was off to the side. Standing to the right of the desk was Burgoyne, arms folded across hir chest.
“Well? Did you, Kalinda?” demanded Calhoun again. His face was so controlled, so neutral, that it was difficult to tell whether he was upset or not, which was exactly the way he wanted it. “I’ll tell you right now, the one thing I have trouble dealing with is lying. Say what you will to me, but lying is not acceptable. I won’t tolerate it, and you won’t get away with it in any event.”
“I cannot say, Captain, that I appreciate the tone you’re taking with my sister,” Si Cwan said.
“How fortunate, Ambassador, that I was not requiring you to say so.” It was the kind of comment that Calhoun might have made tongue in cheek, except in this case he didn’t sound remotely amused. “Kalinda . . .”
“What do you think I might have done, Captain?” asked Kalinda. She didn’t seem particularly intimidated by Calhoun’s mood, and he didn’t know whether to be pleased by that or not. “What strange and mysterious power do you think I have?”
In a tone that seemed to say, “We’ll play it your way,” Calhoun smiled politely and said, “All right. My understanding is that you have been known to have a certain amount of—what’s the best way to put it . . . ?”
“Congress with the pulse-impaired?” she suggested.
“From what I hear, yes. At least that was the report that was given to me by my chief of security and my science officer, in viewing the interaction with alleged spirits they observed in the region known as the Quiet Place. They reported. To me.” His comment could not have been more pointed. He wanted to remind her—because apparently it needed clarification—just who was running this ship.
“Now, Captain,” Kalinda said silkily, “I have trouble believing that an educated, knowledgeable man such as yourself would believe in ghosts. The tortured souls of the undead, wandering about, hoping and praying that someone would come along to aid them in their quest for justice? Certainly that’s the sort of thing that Xenexian older brothers use for the purpose of scaring their younger siblings at bedtime.”
“Kalinda, you’re talking to someone who watched a giant, flaming bird break out of the core of your homeworld as if it were an oversized egg. I think you’ll find there are very few things in this galaxy that I am willing to dismiss out of hand as being impossible.”
She paused, considering his words, and then said, “Wouldn’t you say that guilty consciences are far more common than unhappy spirits? And being overwhelmed by one’s guilt to be a much more commonplace occurrence than to be tricked into it or terrorized into it by rampant ghosts?”
“Why don’t you tell me?” said Calhoun.
Then Burgoyne stepped forward, and s/he said, in a tone that didn’t really seem to be a question, “Captain, permission to speak privately?”
Calhoun’s gaze flickered from Burgoyne to the others, and then he said quietly, “Very well. The rest of you can go. But don’t go far, if you please.” There were nods of acknowledgment, and within moments Calhoun was alone with Burgoyne. He leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers, his face a question.
“I asked her to do it, Captain,” said Burgoyne.
Allowing a moment for that pronouncement to sink in, Calhoun let some time pass before he said, “What did she do . . . exactly?”
“I’m not sure . . . exactly,” admitted Burgoyne. S/he moved across the room in that customarily silent manner s/he had and eased hirself into the chair that Kalinda had been seated in. “As you yourself are aware, she has certain . . . abilities. Given the situation presented us, I asked her whether there would be anything she would be able to do to, uhm . . .” S/he seemed to be searching for the best way to describe it.
Calhoun, however, didn’t give hir the opportunity to do so. “I am, indeed, aware that she has certain abilities. What I was not aware of, Commander, was that you had been having private discussions with her in regards to using them.”
“That is correct, yes.”
“And why was I not aware of these discussions?”
“Because,” said Burgoyne, as if it was the most reasonable response in the world, “I chose not to tell you.”
“You chose.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Not to tell me.”
“Yes, sir.”
Calhoun’s face was a mask. “You made this choice, freely and of your own will? A choice to pursue alternate options without seeing fit to keep me apprised?”
“Yes, Captain, I believe we’ve covered that,” said Burgoyne.
Calhoun felt a cold rage beginning to burn within him. What the hell did Burgoyne think s/he was doing? Where did s/he come up with the temerity to operate in secret? The temperature in the room seemed to drop as Calhoun said, “May I ask, Commander, where you got the impression that a captain and first officer being less than candid with each other was somehow a permissible manner in which to operate?”
Burgoyne never hesitated. When Calhoun thought back on this conversation—and he would—he would remember how quickly Burgoyne responded, as if s/he’d been anticipating the question long before Calhoun posed it.
“From you, sir,” s/he said.
Calhoun stared at hir. “From me?”
Burgoyne nodded. “Captain, as large as starships may be, they’re still no bigger than the average small town, and everyone knows everyone else’s business sooner or later. The simple fact is that I know there were any number of occasions where you developed some sort of backup plan, some sort of strategy, and you kept it to yourself. You did not tell your first officer, Commander Shelby—”
“And this is some sort of tit for tat?” Calhoun was stunned; he had thought more highly of Burgoyne than this. “I didn’t tell her, so you didn’t tell me . . . ?”
“You determine the command style, Captain. You determine what’s acceptable behavior by your own behavior. And if I—”
Calhoun leaned forward, and he could not recall the last time he’d gone to such effort to repress pure fury. “What I choose to tell my subordinates, Commander, in my position as captain, is my prerogative. The chain of command goes down, not up, and you are not entitled to keep plans, strategies, or passing notions from me.” He leaned back, shaking his head. “I would like to think after everything we’ve been through, Burgy, that at the very least I would inspire that much confidence.”
“Captain,” Burgoyne said with obvious sincerity, “I have never served under a commanding officer who inspired more confidence than you. But . . .”
“But what?”
“You don’t inspire trust.”
Calhoun wasn’t entirely certain what to say in response to that. “I see,” was all he could think of.
“I was just . . .” S/he hesitated, then pushed forward. “I was just trying to show you that I could be an independent thinker, like you. Operate on my own. I mean . . . here you had Commander Shelby, someone on the command track for the longest time. Someone whom you had once actually intended to marry. And yet you didn’t seem to trust her enough to bring her into the loop on all your plans. So my concern was, if you didn’t trust her, how much less likely are you to trust me: someone who wasn’t looking for c
ommand, and whom you didn’t sleep with.” S/he frowned and amended, “At least to my knowledge. Although I did get fairly drunk last New Year’s, and there was this one fellow who might have been—”
“It wasn’t,” Calhoun assured hir.
“Ah. So the point was, I felt it imperative to show you, early on, my ability to take charge. To take initiative. To—”
“Act like me, yes, so you’ve said.” Calhoun sighed heavily. This meeting hadn’t gone even remotely in the direction that he’d intended for it to go, and he wasn’t entirely sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. “Commander, in the future, if you have any thoughts on an issue, any strategies . . . I want to hear them. I want to hear them because I may find flaws in them you haven’t considered . . . or I may decide that they’re so brilliant that they could save countless lives. Most of all, I want to hear them because if I didn’t want to hear your opinions, I never would have chosen you to be my Number One. Are we clear on that?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“And I shall . . .” Calhoun smiled ruefully. “I shall endeavor to be more inspiring of trust in the future.”
“Thank you, sir. I appreciate that.”
“Do me a favor: Tell the others they can return to their stations.”
“Yes, sir.”
Burgoyne rose and started to head for the door, only to stop when Calhoun said to hir, “Oh . . . and Burgy?”
“Yes, Captain . . . ?”
“If you ever . . . and I mean ever . . . pull anything like this again, I will bust you down so far that they’ll have to invent a new rank low enough to accommodate it. Unless, of course, you think I don’t mean it. . . .”
Burgoyne quickly shook hir head. “No, Captain, I absolutely believe you.”
“Because I hear tell that I don’t inspire trust. . . .”
“Actually, Captain, I feel abundant trust in this room at the moment . . . far more than I could possibly have believed existed.”