“I’m well programmed and mature, Rndeel.”
Trassle let out an explosive syllable, and said, “It really is Arlai, Jindigar’s Sentient! I don’t know why I doubted you.”
“Forget it,” said Krinata. “I can imagine what they’ve put you through lately. It’s happening everywhere.”
“They’re about to fire,” said Arlai in the cool, emotionless voice of a professional soldier.
Before he could finish, the craft rocked hard and something scraped the bottom. “When we’re hulled,” said Rndeel, “head for north bankriver, then downstream. Arlai be able pick us up at near wide, flat spot on bank. Anyone not there be left behind.”
Not ten seconds later, another charge boiled the water above them and melted through their upper hull. Cascades of water and steam and mud and creatures flooded in. Imp tore from her grasp squealing.
It had been several years since Krinata had done any serious swimming, though she was in pretty good shape from gymnastics. Yet in the maelstrom, all she could do was hold her breath and let herself be carried upward, through and away from the boiling hot water. Something small and hard slammed into her.
It was the eldest boy, clutching a rucksack, eyes shut, mouth open. A Cassrian could breathe water for short periods, but the youth appeared unconscious though his limbs were set hard about his possessions.
She got an arm about the slender waist, and began to scissor her legs to drive them both to the surface. Despite the low gravity and near masslessness of the boy, Krinata felt the drag was too much. She wasn’t going to make it. She was being pushed along on the current just ahead of searing hot water. And she had to get up to breathe soon.
Then she realized the weight was in the rucksack. With all her strength, she tore it from the pincered grasp and let it fall back into the mud-haze below. Then she struck again for the surface. She made it, but could grab only a mouthful of air at a time as she was swept along by a merciless current. She sidestroked for shore, struggling to keep the boy’s head above water. Swept under again by vicious currents, she surfaced under a slimy network of plants near the steep bank and managed to get her feet set on a narrow ledge of mud while holding the boy’s head above water. Slimy plants plastered themselves to her face.
Hovercraft swarmed in the air, the roar of landers taking off nearby and coming to ground even nearer pounded at her ears. The river was black—she hoped only with muck, not blood. And she couldn’t see anyone else surfacing.
At last, the boy showed signs of life. The water around them was uncomfortably warm, but perhaps it would never get hot since the cold water diluted it. She could feel her skin, raw from the scalding, and she blessed Arlai’s underwear for protecting her body even as it kept her from floating.
Then a cold, slimy hand closed on her shoulder and a head poked up veiled by the same net of plants she was. It was grotesque, and a scream swelled in her throat.
“Captain!”
“Jin—Rndeel!”
“Come, I’ve found an underwater cave.”
Abruptly, five Cassrians charged down the bank, weapons aimed, at them, and a hovercraft settled downstream of them, blocking their progress with a wail of churning water.
“Halt in the name of the Emperor!”
They froze in shock. The squad of trained elite troops spread out, Imperial and Ducal insignia beside the Count’s flashing in the sun, heraldic bandoleers proclaiming their minor nobility, poised stances bespeaking their readiness to kill to enforce the imperial word.
“Come out of there!” commanded the officer in charge.
Krinata and Jindigar moved in the same instant, Jindigar to submerge tugging Krinata and the boy with him, and Krinata toward the shore, reflexively obeying legitimate authority. It was shallower here. A slight movement brought her feet under her, and she stood while Jindigar dragged.
The net result was that neither of them moved for a moment, then Krinata foundered off balance. The Cassrians interpreted that as an attempt to escape and fired.
Krinata was never sure exactly how it happened, for she hit bottom and came up sputtering and coughing where the heat-beams from the Cassrian leptolizers had volatilized something noxious from the surface plants, making her eyes sting and her nose burn.
Lots more Cassrians waded into the water and hauled the three of them up onto solid land. When Krinata got her bearings, she found Rndeel prone before her, his shrinksuit ruptured in the middle of his chest and purple Dushau blood oozing from the nearly cauterized wound. The viewer was no longer secured to his harness.
The Cassrian youth was folded into a heap beside Jindigar. He looked as dead as Jindigar.
Two strong Cassrians had her shoulders clamped in their chitinous grips, and she was sure their fingers had serrated edges. Her legs were unwilling to support her.
EIGHT
Oliat Signature
“Skhe don’t have purple blood!” said one Cassrian, bending to poke his leptolizer into Rndeel’s wound.
Amid the excited whistle-clicks of Cassrian dialects, Krinata caught the Standard word, Dushau. She dragged her feet under her and took the weight off her shoulders. The sharp chitin of her captors’ exoskeletons dug into her flesh, as unpleasant a contact for them as for her.
Her hair, short as it was, had plastered itself to her forehead and was dripping foul crud into her eyes.
This is my fault. Oh, why did I obey that order like a sub-sentient machine! If she had yielded to Jindigar’s movement, they might have gotten away. He was the field operative, not her. He knew what to do. Oh, Jindigar!
She twisted to wipe her forehead on her shoulder, suppressing a whimper at the sudden void where Jindigar had been. Then she forced herself to look around. She could barely see through the late afternoon brilliance without her goggles, but the contact lenses Arlai had insisted on helped. Behind the troops, she could make out the embankment where tall rushes grew from the mud. She thought she caught a gleam there. Another dead Cassrian?
One of the troops with the medic insignia rose from examining Trassle’s eldest son. “Dead,” he said in cultivated Standard. “Shot three times.”
She had never witnessed violent death before. A detached, clinical part of her knew she was staring, brain empty, too cold to shiver, because she was going into shock. She heard herself say, “He was only a child!”
“Raised on Dushau sufferance!” spat the commander who’d ordered her out of the water.
The commander’s hatred came across the species barrier between them. “What did they ever do to you?” pled Krinata sniffing back bitter tears.
“The Emperor promised my sept a planet to rule, but each one we discovered was ruled out by the Dushau. Now that our new Emperor is freeing us of their tyranny, good talents will be put to work, and there will be jobs and plenty for all!”
As the commander proclaimed this, the other Cassrians clicked their cheers at him. Horrifyingly enough, Krinata was sure they were sincere. Cassrians, Terrans, Holot, or Skhe– all produced some greedy individuals. But Jindigar had not been like that.
Unable to stand the touch of such beings a moment longer, she wrenched her arms out of their grasps, not caring how the sharp edges bit into her flesh. Simultaneously, through clenched teeth, she roared her disgust and defiance, hoping that if they shot her, she’d die instantly. But she was intent only on getting as far away from them as possible.
She was more surprised than her captors to find herself stumbling forward. She put her head down, and with the force of her greater mass, she rammed the nearest guard. As he fell, he fired into the sky, the beam singeing her ear. She staggered on, shoving stunned Cassrians out of her path and gaining speed on a downslope toward a heavy undergrowth surrounding the flat riverbank.
She’d barely reached a full run when zapping crackles erupted behind her. She heard the unmistakable hunting scream of a piol. Trying to look behind her, she fell and rolled, beams crackling through the space her body had just vacated. It was a me
lee.
Imp squealed and she saw his body fly through the sat.
Trassle was rolling with one of the guards, getting the worst of it. His wife had a sport weapon that shot darts, and she was prone in the grass by the riverbank, picking off guards and trying to keep her children from joining the fight.
Then Arlai’s lander roared in over the clearing dumping clouds of glittering soot onto the official vehicles grounded there. Before the murk filled the air, Krinata saw more landers taking off from near the house, heading toward them.
With her last strength, she picked herself up and lunged back into the tumbling mass of Cassrians, determined to drag Jindigar’s body into that lander if she died trying. It was stupid. It was irrational. She never knew why she did it. But in the heat of that moment, it seemed as if she were rescuing her own severed limb.
When she reached Jindigar’s side, Trassle had downed two guards and was taking a beating from the others. Imp was on Jindigar’s chest, snarling and swiping with his long claws at everything moving nearby. His coat was slimy with mud.
One of the Cassrian guards she’d knocked down came at Krinata, and she kicked out at him. Imp screamed and went at the Cassrian’s eyes, all claws and teeth. Krinata couldn’t spare energy to control Imp. She got a grip on Jindigar’s shoulders and began to drag the body toward the lander’s hatch, yelling at Trassle and his family to hurry aboard.
Somehow, they managed a retreat of sorts. As she reached the ramp, an official craft attempted to land in the billowing clouds of soot, and apparently came in on top of one of the other craft, exploding in a sheet of fire that seared Krinata’s already boiled face. She didn’t even stop for the pain to recede, but just kept dragging and yelling at the top of her ragged voice.
Her whole universe became a slanting ramp, black scintillating, choking, stinging particles, and oozing purple and red blood mixing to make her grip slippery. She could no longer smell or taste, and she couldn’t feel anything but the pain in her upper arms that screeched brightly with every tug. Her hands were numb, her feet increasingly clumsy, but she’d set herself, and she insanely refused to give up.
That was all she remembered. She never knew when she reached the interior of the lander. She never remembered scrabbling feebly onward after she fell. She never heard Trassle’s desperate plea to Arlai to get them out of there.
The next thing she knew she was in Truth’s sickbay, amid sterile green sheets on a low platform surrounded by thick drapes and orange healing lamps. The sound of Jindigar plucking his whule echoed richly through the chamber. Her right arm was tightly gripped by Arlai’s telemband, and the upper arms were bandaged, though they didn’t hurt as much as she thought they ought to.
“Arlai, what happened?” It came out a thready whisper even she could barely hear.
A bright projection appeared beside the bed, Arlai’s Dushau image. “Your biceps have been sliced halfway to the bone. I’ve repaired the nerve damage. But you’ve lost a lot of blood which I couldn’t replace because I don’t stock human blood, nor can I trust my synthesizers just now. You have some bad burns, and your eyes took a bit too much radiation. Overall radiation exposure is not alarming. I’ve forestalled all infection. Your injuries are painful, debilitating, but essentially trivial. I can’t determine why you’ve remained unconscious for nearly three days.”
She sat bolt upright. “Three days!”
The simulacrum patted the air urging her to lie back. “We are on course for Khol, but avoiding the main traffic lanes. You have several days before anything will be required of you. For now, it is enough you are awake. Is there anything I could do to make you more comfortable?”
“Turn off that music!” she said, beginning to assimilate it all. She turned to bury her face in the mattress since there was no pillow, though pain kept her arms from wrapping around her head. She’d given her life, and it had not been accepted. “Jindigar’s dead!” She remembered Arlai’s plea to her to accompany Jindigar and bring him safely home. And all she’d brought was a corpse. Now Arlai was prattling about going on to Khol, expecting her to continue the mission. Was she trapped, the victim of an insane Sentient? She hardly dared let out the sobs of grief that washed through her.
The music ceased. Moments later the whisper of a scurry’s wheels approached the bed. She had to peek through a veil of tears, over her shoulder.
Flash of yellow, indigo, silver. She blinked. Jindigar sat in a silver chairmobile, dressed in the yellow sickbay gown and robe, a white bandage wrapped thickly about his chest. As he came up to the side of her bed, he was grinning, teeth pale but actually blue.
Her throat constricted. A projection? She forced herself up and reached to touch him, gasping as her fingers met warm Dushau nap, silken-textured, real. “Jindigar?” His hand closed over hers, firm, living flesh. “But you were dead. I know you were dead.”
“I thought so at the time and regretted it.” With a puzzled frown, he asked, “Krinata, if you thought I was dead, why did you risk your life to drag me into the lander?”
She said the first thing she thought of. “Because I promised Arlai to bring you back.” But that wasn’t the whole reason. She could still feel her infinite relief at obeying the imperial trooper’s order to come out of the water. At the same time, her nerves still screamed with the shock of amputation at seeing Jindigar dead at her feet, because she’d obeyed. “Besides, I guess you weren’t dead.”
Arlai said, ‘Technically, he was. Minutes—seconds even– and I wouldn’t have been able to revive him short of Renewal, and even that would have been chancey. Jindigar owes you his life—everyone aboard does—and so do I.”
“Krinata,” said Jindigar, “I never meant for you to risk your life like that. Arlai’s right. We owe you more than we can ever repay. It’s a debt—”
She waved that aside, subliminally uncomfortable about it. “It’s enough for me that we all survived.”
And with that, she felt an overwhelming weakness drag her back to the bed. “Are you drugging me?”
“No,” answered Arlai. “Your body demands rest. Everything is in order. We will care for you.”
Over the next few days, Krinata slept a lot. At odd intervals, she heard Grisnilter and Jindigar talking in the next room. She could never follow the gist of it, but the tone was clear. Jindigar held the old Dushau Historian in deep affection, but steadfastly refused to do whatever it was Grisnilter wanted of him. Once, just once, she heard the old Dushau’s voice soften with affection. But just after that, Jindigar played Lelwatha’s last composition. That evening, she heard Arlai banishing Grisnilter from Jindigar’s room. She cursed the weakness preventing her from going to him.
But then Jindigar was released from sickbay, and there were hours of solitude in which to brood over the events of the last few days. She made many discoveries about herself.
She was astonished how quickly she came to chafe at Arlai’s insistence on bedrest. Between naps, she’d force herself to stagger about the room from bed to drawers to closet to chair and back to bed. Forcing her strength to the limit was an adventure. She was always sweating and shaking when she returned to the bed, but the exhilaration of that small triumph echoed the heady feeling of being awake, alive, and real to the self she’d known during those moments of heightened terror or all-out striving.
In a perverse way, she was looking forward to their next planetfall, if only for that tremendously alive feeling. She wasn’t going to be left out because her body was weak.
Yet at the same time, whenever she lay still, the ugly scenes of carnage played through her mind, no matter how she squirmed away from them. When she told Arlai her nightmares, he explained he’d spread a sensor disrupting dust over the battle field, harmless in itself. He hadn’t expected any pilot to be crazy enough to try to land in it.
“But you were!”
“I was using a different sensor system, and there was a risk, Krinata. But it was within acceptable limits.”
She hoped
, but refused to ask, that Jindigar had set up those risk limits. No Sentient should be free to make such judgments alone. And that brought back all she’d seen of Jindigar’s Sentient. Sentients weren’t supposed to be able to break the law, either.
Later, when Jindigar strolled into her sickbay room, looking more fit than ever, and saw her stagger across the floor to fall onto the bed, panting, he helped her lie down and asked, “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Getting ready for Khol.” But she knew it was this activity alone that kept the mounting conflict within her manageable, but she wasn’t going to tell him that.
“Khol?!” he repeated, offended. “Krinata, I can’t ask anything like that of you again.”
She pulled herself up, folded her arms across her chest, and said, “Why not? You can ask anything of me; I can always say no. In this case, I agreed to help you rescue your friends. Are you giving up like Grisnilter wants you to?” It was a stab in the dark; she hadn’t understood their private arguments, only the tone.
“Grisnilter?” He eyed the open door to the adjoining room where he had stayed. “That’s the least of what he wants of me. He wants me to become a different person. He has good reasons, but I have rights.”
“What kind of a different person?” / like him as is.
“Well, for one thing, less interested in the kind of a person you are. Krinata, do you want to go down to Khol with me? Or is it your sense of honor?”
She couldn’t answer the question. Part of her remembered how good it felt to obey that imperial trooper’s order. Her inner core was still unshakably loyal to the Empire, which would soon excise Zinzik for the madman or criminal he was. Was she just indulging her new adrenaline addiction, committing ever more criminal acts for the fun of it? Or was she driven by some absurd need to win Jindigar’s special loyalty? To live up to his expectations of her? And if so, what did she really know about this man? Was her image of him some sort of wishful fantasy born of her overactive imagination? Why was he doing all this?
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