by Jo Bannister
In an attempt to take some of the pressure off his arms he pulled himself awkwardly up the curve of the hull. The effort caused more pain that it relieved, but he ended up more vertical than horizontal, which was good for his self-esteem even if it was bad for his injuries.
Chaucer watched him struggle with no more emotion than he might have witnessed the death-throes of a bug in a killing-bottle. The eyes Paul met were flat and steely-hard, but behind the eyes where only Shah could have seen the Chancellor was wrestling with a kind of admiration. Try as he might he could not but respect the utter stubbornness of the man, his absolute refusal to yield in the face of persuasion, threat, violence, pain and indignity. He not only did not know when to quit, he did not know how. It was not in any conventional sense courage, although a schemer’s brain, a card-player’s nerve and a soldier’s skill combined at times in a convincing simulacrum of bravery; mainly it was his staggering capacity for endurance, not only for survival but for survival on his own terms. He was, thought Chaucer, the sort of man immortality myths were woven around. Death seemed to shadow him like a malvoisin; its aura hung about him but its touch was for others.
When Paul’s eyes, still narrowed against the light, reached him, Chaucer said, “I owe you an apology.”
“Really?” said Paul; but he was too dazed yet for sarcasm, and he got the inflexion wrong.
“I regret I was reduced to kicking you. I did not appreciate the depth of your concussion. When you were still curled up in a corner after an hour and this idiosyncratic ship was still carrying me in a direction I did not wish to go at a speed I did not wish to go at, ignoring totally my attempts to take command, I began to suspect you of malingering. I was very angry with you. I regret to say I not only kicked an unconscious man, several times, I also really rather enjoyed it.”
“I’m glad the trip wasn’t a complete disappointment.”
Chaucer smiled into his beard, aware that admiration was winning. He shook his head and chuckled. “Paul, Paul – whatever am I going to do about you?”
“Untie me?”
“In all the circumstances that would not be a circumspect move, and I am a cautious man.”
“Then you have probably considered the possibility that I can take you out any time I choose, and that short of killing me – which would have the same effect – there is nothing you can do more quickly than I can order my ship to destroy you.”
Chaucer inclined his head. “I concede that possibility. That is why I took particular care over your bonds. You will never free yourself, Paul. If you kill me you will spend the next ten days dying of thirst.”
“Perhaps.” Paul rapped the knuckles of his pinioned hand against the metalwork. “But I have friends in heaven.”
They both laughed. They were two professionals, admiring each other’s skills, enjoying the contest despite its perils.
Chaucer rose from the console and strolled over to the man on the floor and stopped over his outstretched legs, the big black bulk of him shutting out the light. Paul half expected assault and raised an eyebrow in sardonic enquiry. Chaucer frowned. “I have apologised for that,” he said stiffly. “I am trying to find some way out of this impasse. If you have any serious suggestions I would like to hear them.”
“It’s simple. You untie me, I fly you back to Mithras, I pick up Shah and we leave. The status quo is re-established.”
“Amalthea would never agree. She has set her heart on a ship.”
“All right, then. I pick up Shah, you pick up some money and I’ll fly you somewhere you can buy one. It’s not as much fun as stealing, I know, but we all have to make compromises.”
“What guarantee would Amalthea have that you would not kill me and keep the money?”
“None. She’d have a fairly anxious few months. Then, unless in the meantime you’d learned enough sense to launder the money, change your name and head for the furthest star you can think of, she’d wake up one morning and find a new satellite orbiting over her head. And God help the galaxies then.”
Chaucer regarded him curiously. “Have you no wish for revenge?”
“Revenge doesn’t pay bills. You would of course pay for your passage.”
“Let me guess. About the same fee as for shooting down a pirate?”
Paul grinned. “That’s what I had in mind.”
The Mithraian nodded thoughtfully. “It is possible that we could work something out. I propose we return to Mithras and discuss it with Amalthea.”
“By radio,” said Paul.
Chaucer untied him, but kept the gun. Still labouring under the effects of concussion and constraint, Paul got to his feet like an old arthritic horse. Chaucer offered him a hand. Paul ignored it, sneering round the pain in his eyes, and Chaucer smiled.
Paul called up the navigation computer. At his word dozens of tiny systems which had lain dormant while he slept sprang back to life with a busy chatter. Chaucer marked the contrast of that quiet clamour with the near silence of the racing ship which his best efforts had failed to galvanise. He no longer fostered any real hope of commandeering “Gyr”, but convincing Amalthea would be another matter.
“Well, that’s where we are,” Paul said at length, tapping the screen with a fingernail.
Chaucer looked and saw only random patternless specks. “Where?”
“The devil of a long way from where we started,” growled Paul. “How long was I out?”
“Quite a time,” admitted Chaucer. “How long will it take us to get back?”
“Quite a time.”
Amalthea had watched the shapings of the abortive battle from the pinnacle of the Hive, a tiny finial platform surmounting her private cell. In the early darkness she could pick out the two craft by the reflected light of the set Mithraian sun as they moved deceptively slowly among the still stars. When they disappeared below her horizon she lifted her skirts and trotted purposefully down the spiral to the radio-room to be in at the kill.
She was not sure what to expect. If Paul succeeded in taking the “Quasar Griffin” there would be no dramatic flare of light, no leaping sensors. Perhaps all the watchers would see would be the meek return of the two craft to planetary orbit and the subsequent descent of the shuttle. Amalthea was happy to forgo the thrill of attrition in return for the desired result; especially since she could take her vengeance then.
The Heath Robinson instruments in the radio-room were not the ideal medium for observing extra-terrestrial warfare. They could hear more than they could see, and most of what they could see was diagrammatic. Radio imaging presented a schema of two objects closing, of one weaving sensuously around the other, of the separate outlines merging intermittently as the larger occulted the smaller. A brief flurry of static recorded the firing of shots that went unanswered except by a terse cheer from the avid watching Mithraians.
There was no radio contact with “Gyr”. This annoyed Amalthea, who knew that her equipment was adequate and who would have enjoyed eavesdropping on the curt dialogue of challenge and ultimatum almost as much as she would have enjoyed taking part. But she understood that Paul was a professional mercenary who would not relish such close scrutiny of his methods by a client and, with Chaucer up there standing sentinel over her interests, she was prepared to indulge him to that extent. It would cost her little and the small defiance might be his last pleasure.
During the long minutes in which the two craft held station, so close that the Hive’s instruments could not separate them, Amalthea supposed she was witnessing the actual take-over of the “Quasar Griffin”. The proposal was for both Paul and Chaucer to go aboard and fly her back, with or without her crew’s cooperation, while “Gyr” would return under automatic pilot to her Mithras orbit. Amalthea had wondered about that convenient automatic pilot. It seemed she had done wisely in not putting her doubts to the test.
But when the two craft suddenly flared apart, and the merchantman held steady to her course while the cruiser accelerated beyond the Mithraians’abil
ity to track her and quickly vanished into the stellar night, and did not reappear however much the technicians adjusted their sets, it became apparent that the action had not gone according to plan. At least, not to Amalthea’s plan: the possibility that Paul might all along have intended to trick her, as she had intended tricking him, projected her into a dark rage unrelieved by the most cursory glint of irony. The lady of Mithras had no capacity for laughing at herself, and no tolerance for mirth at her expense. But it was so long since anyone had been so lacking in wisdom as to try it that she had forgotten just how exquisitely angry it made her.
The tension mounted by the minute. It became impossible for her to stay in the close confines of the radio-room, humid with breath, wired with high-pent anxiety. Her hand-picked operators were less concerned with what “Gyr” was doing than with what she would do. They expected her to hit the fan and could not concentrate on their work while she loomed there, simmering. She stalked out and up to her cell, and had her tantrum there in private.
When the storm-front of her anger had spilt most of its thunder, in a raging cataract of sound and fury that could be heard through three floors and, like elecricity in the air, felt where it could not be heard, Amalthea began to think of revenge. She immediately calmed down, and her purple eyes grew cunning.
Had there been any likelihood of Paul’s return the opportunities for satisfaction would have been many and obvious and her only dilemma where she should begin and how long she could defer the end. But it seemed plain to Amalthea that she had seen the last of the mercenary, at least until she should finally acquire a ship and address some time to tracking him down. For now she was resigned, though by no means demurely, to his having escaped her ambit.
It would have mattered less if the girl had still been in the Hive. From his abandonment of her Amalthea inferred that the relationship between them was more tenuous than she had supposed. But if they no more than casual bed-fellows, scratching each other’s animal itches, he must sometime – safe in his distant speeding ship – wonder at the fate of the girl he had left among his enemies, and thinking of him thinking so Amalthea would have gained comfort and no small pleasure from acting out his guilty fancies.
But Shah was already dead. Balrig had shot her and tumbled her body permanently out of sight into the forest. (Or so he had reported. He had no reason to suspect that his lie, rather his anticipation of the truth, would ever be discovered. He had shot the witch woman and she had fallen back into the trees, and it was Balrig’s experience that those entering the forest seldom returned.) It was a pity, thought Amalthea, to be denied an apposite vengeance. But sooner or later, however carefully they trod the eggshells, one of her men would provoke her displeasure and she would take out her frustration on him.
She brooded darkly in her cell until the fuming silence and the quaking inactivity began getting on her nerves as much as the pregnant hush in the radio-room. Then she found her fury, while no whit shrunken, had grown chill and biddable, capable of confinement within the cold-storage of her implacable personality, and she took to prowling round the galleries of the Hive like a grim spectre, venom-eyed, contemplating murder down the endless spiral slopes.
So it was that when something finally happened to lighten the thunderhead benighting the Hive and electrifying its atmosphere with poison, the genius of the storm was not to be found. One of half a dozen runners, breathless with middle-age and unaccustomed exercise, checking again where he had already looked, found her in the golden hall, wrapped in her cloak, a shadow behind one of the alabaster slaves.
“Lady, you are wanted in the radio-room!”
Amalthea slowly rounded the figure, substance growing from shadow in an unearthly, inexplicably sinister fashion, and she fixed the messenger with snakes’eyes. “Wanted, Drach?” she asked with lambent menace.
The runner realised with a shock that he could have chosen his words more carefully, but decided that if he could rush out his message before Amalthea passed sentence he could neutralise her acid, even turn it sweet. “My lady – the radio-room – a call. The ship. ‘Gyr’. She is back!”
Amazement startled Amalthea’s grape eyes wide. She jerked them at the gold and enamel ceiling. “Up there?”
“The lord Chaucer begs to speak with my lady.”
She gathered her composure swiftly about her, and the grape-bloom fury yielded to a honeyed brilliance that might have been gayer than the rage, that might have contained more warmth, but was hardly in her face holier. “And there are things I wish to say to him, too.” She swept past the messenger and into the corridor at a pace that gave Drach palpitations, but Drach did not care. She had smiled at him.
Paul let Chaucer do the talking until Amalthea began to shout, at which point he cut her off with a ruthless flick of the switch. “Now just you listen to me,” he rapped, “because if I don’t get exactly what I want out of you I shall flatten that overgrown molehill to a smoking ruin knee-high to a Drone. I’d have done it already if you didn’t have two things I want: my money, and the girl. Once I have those two things we’ll talk about what you want, but the position right now is that your deception broke our contract and if you don’t come up with compensation pretty damn fast I shall start shooting bits off your planet.”
A sound like defective plumbing burbled up through the ether. Even this far removed, Chaucer winced.
“Bluffing?” echoed Paul. “I’ll show you bluffing.” His lip curled in a queer amalgam of ferocity and pleasure as his deft fingers played staccato anthems on the keyboard of the battle computer. Chaucer, wondering if he should intervene, deciding reluctantly that he could more easily do harm than good, thought there was as much intrinsic cruelty in the harsh planes of the mercenary’s face, his wary angry eyes and his inapt smile, as would distil from all the Hive if it were boiled down and strained through muslin. Even Amalthea’s viciousness seemed petty and domestic beside Paul’s epic capacity for mayhem.
All Chaucer felt was a tiny shudder, a faint quiver like anticipation, coming at him through the deck as “Gyr” let slip her monstrous children; but what Mithras felt, after an agony of waiting, registered as a great explosion of light on the screen, and a flat crack like sudden thunder swallowed then in its own tempest roaring like static up the radio waves. While the wild threnody persisted Paul muffled the communicator-grill with his hand. He looked at Chaucer without emotion, only with coals in his eyes.
Chaucer was appalled at what he had unleashed. In his long career with Amalthea he had seen her tyranny met by dismay, fear, subservience, resistance and bloody rebellion, but none had been a match for the Empress’s peculiarly potent compound of imagination, brutality and personal power, and he had come to think of these attributes as invincible. Now they had invoked a pedlar in the same wares, and Chaucer could not see any possible outcome to the confrontation that did not climax in a cataclysm which would destroy both the principals and all those caught in the pull of their terrible magnetism. Chaucer was afraid. He recognised the alien state with a shock, more of surprise than shame, and then guilt because one of these world-eating monsters he had helped to create and the other he had conjured out of the stars.
He looked at the dying glare on the screen, dry-eyed, dry-throated, with a bigness in his chest and the still, awed solitary feeling of witnessing the beginning of an end. He said softly, “Was that the Hive?”
“The forest. About ten kilometres from the Hive. Close enough to rattle the windows,” Paul added with grim satisfaction.
“There are no windows in the Hive.”
“There may well be now.”
Amalthea agreed to his conditions, with a bad grace. Paul prescribed the details of the exchange. Not wanting a Fifth Column on his flight-deck if Amalthea tried more trickery, he sent Chaucer down in the shuttle which would then return with Shah and his money. He had spoken briefly to Shah on the radio. She had sounded as relieved to hear his voice as he had been to hear hers. He told her what was happening but reserved
a full explanation until they could talk privately.
Perhaps for the same reason Shah made no mention of Michal, although Paul had half expected that she would want to bring him up with her. If that was her intention, he thought, meeting contingencies in his head even as he talked, the boy could come up when Chaucer returned with the price of the Mithras ship. With “Gyr” on station above them and the forest still smoking from the recent demonstration of her firepower, Paul did not expect much trouble from the Mithraians. He thought any residual revolt would be put down by Chaucer’s first-hand account of the enemy: not so much Paul himself as his black ship. All the same, he kept his guns trained on the clearing and all his senses on his instruments.
When the shuttle, remote-controlled, was on its way down to the surface he sat quietly among the softly humming machines, alone in his ship, and watched the screen and relished the stillness and wished it would end.
In a matter of hours, he thought, “Gyr” could turn her burners on Mithras for the last time. The prospect of deep space was attractive. It was a pity that he would have to share it with Chaucer for a time, but at the first planet they came to with a space mercantile economy the contract would be complete. Paul would be glad to see the back of it. It had worked out all right in the end, but it had left a sour taste in his mouth that he could neither wholly explain nor wholly swallow.
He had been a mercenary soldier all his adult life. He knew that clients were more dangerous than adversaries. He realised that he had expected better of star-dwellers, and he now recognised that as naïve to the point of foolishness. The recognition surprised him. He had seen himself in many lights, most of them unflattering. He knew he was cold, arrogant, implacable, occasionally vicious, always intolerant and habitually unkind. He had not realised he had weaknesses too.