“I wasn’t the one what got hisself caught in a bloody trap!” O’Hara interrupted.
Cortez laughed, and then grimaced with pain. “Then what are you doing in this cell?”
“Why, you ungrateful—”
“Shut up, Seamus!” Akira snapped. “Cortez—take off your shirt. Pronto!”
With a shrug and another grimace of pain, Cortez carefully removed his shirt, revealing the zapgun wound in his shoulder.
“Now turn around,” she said, taking the shirt from him.
Cortez turned, revealing fresh, bloody lacerations across his back.
Makki’s eyes fluttered wide when he saw Cortez’s back. “By Azra and Luzsara!”
O’Hara’s face softened. “I’m sorry, lad. Does it hurt much?”
“Only when I look at you,” Cortez told him.
Resuming his former position on the cot, Cortez sat back and let Makki go to work. The Rhajni corpsman removed bandages, anodyne injectors and antiseptic sprays from his medikit. He used the Diascan Unit to diagnose Cortez’s wounds.
“What did they do to you?” Akira asked him.
“They used some kind of electric whip to make me admit that I am a spy,” Cortez told her. He flinched when Makki cleaned his wounds and gave him an injection. “Por favor, Makki. Be gentle with me.”
“Sergeant one big kitten,” Makki said, bandaging Cortez’s wounds. “There is no infection. Now be still!”
“So what did you tell them?” Akira asked Cortez.
“That I was the king of the universe and they should all die choking on a hairball,” he told her. “I have also learned some things and must inform you of them.”
“Like what?” O’Hara wanted to know.
“The Drakonians have perfected their cloaking gizmo—that is how this place was never detected,” Cortez said. “And all of their equipment, all of their fighter jets and weapons were smuggled onto Rhajnara using a Lavarian freighter.”
“So who’s the top cat in this alley?” O’Hara asked. “That scar-faced tabby what speaks pretty good English?”
“No, my friend,” Cortez replied. “That is Lord Vash. He is one bad hombre with big castanets. But you will not believe who is numero uno around here.”
“Well? Are you gonna tell us or not?” Akira asked.
444
The spectral luminescence of Rhajnara’s three moons bathed Lord Chanori’s sprawling country estate with cold light. Warmer light from inside the manor shone through the amber-hued windows. There was a large fountain with a hexagonal pool, and a long driveway that curved around it. A pair of black groundcars stood parked in front of the entrance to the estate. Heavily-armed guards from the Terran Embassy shared sentry duty with the Rhajni soldiers patrolling the driveway.
A black, armored vehicle rolled slowly toward the manor.
Inside, the massive dining hall was a refined and richly-furnished chamber, with a large table laid out with the remains of an elegant dinner. Tigermen and lionmen cleared away the dishes and silverware while Chanori poured tea for his guests.
Seated to his left at the long, rectangular table was Lord Chancellor Karu Ginjua. He was tall and imposing, with the face of an aging lion. On Chanori’s right sat the young ambassador from Earth, Erik Hassan, a thin man with a bright smile.
Lord Ginjua slurped his tea and wiped his mouth on the back of a paw. “Chanori, old comrade, dinner was most excellent,” he said. “And this tea is superb!”
“Imported from Earth—from India, to be exact,” said Ambassador Hassan.
Chanori stroked his whiskers. “It is a privilege to serve you, my lord.” He turned to Hassan. “Was everything to your satisfaction, Ambassador?”
“Yes, everything was quite good, Lord Chanori,” Hassan replied. “Thank you, and please give my compliments to your chef.”
The explosive sound and electronic hum of tazer and zapgun fire echoed in the night.
“Allah’s mercy!” Hassan cried. “What is that?”
“The winds of change,” Chanori said.
He rose from his seat at the table, walked over to the doors and opened them.
Two Khandra cheetahmen charged into the dining hall, firing their zapguns. Blue zapper bolts sprayed the room. Chancellor Ginjua screamed and fell upon the table, his bright red blood staining the white linen table cloth. Ambassador Hassan called out to Allah and tried to escape, but was cut down in a hail of sizzling zapgun bolts. He crumpled to the floor, dead.
Chancellor Ginjua managed to rise from the table and glare at Chanori. “Why—this way?” he asked. “Why—”
“Because poison is too slow and far less dramatic, my lord chancellor,” Chanori replied, wearing the devil’s own grin.
He nodded to the cheetahmen, and they sprayed Ginjua with another round of zapper bolts. The chancellor tumbled to the floor and did not rise again.
A massive and towering pantherman, wearing the uniform of the Rhajni Armed Forces, entered the room and saluted Chanori.
“Your car is waiting, my lord,” he said, speaking the Rhajni language.
Chanori walked back to the table and picked up his cup of tea. “Thank you,” he said. “Please see that this room is cleaned up and the bodies disposed of.”
The soldier saluted. “As you command, my lord.”
“What of my son’s body?
“It was burned without ceremony, sir.”
Neither a tear nor the vaguest suggestion of sadness and regret crossed Chanori’s visage.
“A fitting end for a traitor,” he said.
He finished his tea and then quit the dining hall.
444
Alone in her office later that night, Colonel Dakota popped another stomach pill and was studying her digital readouts and displays when Major Helm once again entered her office.
“Pardon me, Colonel,” he said.
Dakota looked up from her computer. “What can I do for you, Major?”
“Three of our sergeants have taken an unauthorized leave,” he told her.
Shaking her head, Dakota thought about taking another stomach pill, but didn’t. “Now don’t tell me. The Three Musketeers. Right?”
“Yes, Ma’am. All four of them—and that includes Corpsman Doon, of course.”
“Naturally. Does anyone know where they went or where they are?”
“I’m afraid not, Colonel. But Mister Preston is also missing.”
Dakota slammed her hand on the desk and rose from her chair like a dragon emerging from its lair. “Major Helm, I hereby order you to order four volunteers to remain behind after the regiment bugs out, in case our wayward Marines and their Rhajni cohort decide to show up.”
“I’ll attend to it, Colonel.”
“By the spirits of my ancestors!” Dakota shouted. “When those spacelarks return I want them placed in hack and shuttled to the Iwo Jima brig.”
“Does that include Mister Preston? He’s a civilian, Ma’am.”
“I don’t care if he’s Rudyard bloody Kipling! I want him off this planet!”
Major Helm nearly lost his balance in the face of Dakota’s anger. “Yes, Ma’am!”
Pacing the floor behind her desk, Dakota cursed under her breath. “Those three sergeants are gonna wish they were back in boot camp scrubbing latrines with photon toothbrushes!”
444
Later that night, in the Khandra command center, the main doors slid open with a rush of air. Rhajni and Drakonian personnel paused in their work to look up and see who had entered.
Vash and a pair of Khandra tigermen marched into the room.
Akira, Cortez and O’Hara, each shackled in metal handcuffs, shuffled in behind them. Four more tigermen brought up the rear, tazer rifles charged and ready. When the doors slid shut, Vash signaled a halt. Everyone stopped a few paces behind the elegantly dressed Rhajni lord who stood in front of the viewport, staring out at the night sky.
Lord Taluro Chanori turned and bowed to the prisoners.
“Wel
come to the future of Rhajnara,” he said, smiling at Akira. “A pleasure to see you again, Sergeant, although this is not quite the reunion I had looked forward to.”
Now knowing who was in command, Akira glared at him. “Suck space, Chanori!”
Vash slapped her with the back of one paw. O’Hara and Cortez struggled to break their handcuffs. Four tazer rifles were quickly pointed at their heads.
“I’d like to introduce you to an Irish setter I know,” O’Hara told Vash.
Cortez scowled at Vash. “Did your dear old mamacita not teach you that it is most improper to hit a helpless woman?”
Akira shot an angry look at Cortez. “Helpless?”
“Come now, my good sergeants,” Chanori said in a pleasant tone. “Surely we can converse without resorting to foul language and personal insults?”
With a nasty laugh and a mocking grin, Akira aimed a kick at Vash. Two of the guards held her back. The others kept their weapons trained on Cortez and O’Hara.
“By Azra, woman!” Chanori said. “You certainly have a fiery temper.”
“Up your airlock!” Akira cursed him, unwilling to let go of her temper. “Remove these cuffs, and I’ll show you a temper that’ll curl your whiskers!”
Vash snarled and drew his zapgun.
“Not yet,” Chanori said to him.
With a frustrated hiss, Vash reluctantly lowered his weapon. “I hope you’ll allow me the pleasure of cutting off their heads.”
“All in due time,” Chanori promised him. “All in due time.”
“Why isn’t Makki with us?” Akira demanded. She was worried about her young friend, fearing what these Khandra terrorists might do to him. “What’s going to happen to him?”
“Makki will not be harmed,” said Chanori.
“So you say. But he is a Felisian, a Rhajni like you—as were the millions of Felisians the Khandra enslaved and murdered,” Cortez said.
Chanori arched one bushy eyebrow. “They are vermin—and not of my breed.”
“Racial genocide is an old and unpopular song, Chanori,” O’Hara said.
“But it’s an anthem that stirs the blood in my veins.” Chanori looked past his prisoners and smiled. “Ah, here comes someone I think you all know.”
Akira, Cortez and O’Hara turned and glared menacingly at the newcomer.
O’Hara spat out his words. “Son of a—”
“Filthy alley cat!” Cortez interjected.
Corporal Flix marched up to Chanori, clicked his heels and bowed. He handed Chanori a pair of data flashchips.
“From Colonel Dakota, my lord,” Flix said.
“Thank you, Corporal,” Chanori replied.
“I’ll bet old Flix there had something to do with what happened on Cindar—and maybe even with the ambush on Acheron, too,” O’Hara said. “Didn’t you, Flix?”
Flix smiled like a mutant hyena.
“I’ll rip your head off!” Akira shouted at him. She made a play to wrap her shackled hands around the Rhajni corporal’s neck, but the guards hauled her back.
“You three belong in the brig,” Flix told the sergeants.
444
Left alone in the prison cell after the Khandra had come to take his friends away, Makki stood on the cot beneath the tiny window, using the red beam of the laser scalpel to try cut to through the titanium bars. Fools! he told himself. That stupid Snark did not recognize a Whistler Bomb for what it is—and does not even know how powerful a laser scalpel can be! He licked his chops as he worked, but was aware of the possibility that the battery chip inside the scalpel could die out at any time—and there was no way to recharge it.
At the sudden sound of footsteps echoing in the corridor outside the cell, Makki hopped down from the cot and replaced the laser scalpel in his medikit. He sat on the cot just as the cell door slid open and two Khandra panthermen entered.
Reacting instinctively, Makki snarled, leapt from the cot, and threw himself at the guards.
With a chorus of growls and howls, they tumbled to the floor in a whirlwind of fists and claws and gnashing fangs.
Sixteen
The Unconquerable Spirit
Inside the Khandra command center, Chanori studied the onscreen information uploaded from the flashchips Colonel Dakota had given to Flix for delivery to Ambassador Hassan. Vash and his six tigermen stood off to the side, guarding their three prisoners. When the Rhajni lord finished reading the information, he turned to the three Marine sergeants.
“Your Colonel Dakota has decided to take my advice and move the regiment into Jaipur Pass tomorrow morning,” he said.
“Why would she go and do a thing like that?” Akira asked, afraid to hear the answer.
Chanori’s smile was pure arrogance. “Since there’s nothing you can do about it, I see no harm in telling you that a Drakonian task force is on a direct course for this planet, my dear.”
“You tellin’ us there’s gonna be a Drakonian invasion?” asked O’Hara.
“This I refuse to believe,” Cortez told Chanori.
Pressing a button on his computer, Chanori received an instant celluloid printout of the information stored on the flashchips. “It’s all right here,” he said, handing the printout to Cortez.
The Spaniard hardly glanced at it. “Then this means there is to be an interstellar war!”
Akira’s temper was near the boiling point again, but she controlled it by stalling for time so she could figure out a way to escape. “Of course it does—and it also means that the Drakonians have made a secret alliance with the Khandra,” she said.
“Yes, my dear,” Chanori told her. “A storm is brewing—a tempest that will sweep your species from my planet and usher in a new day for the Khandra Regime.”
O’Hara snatched the celluloid sheet out of Cortez’s hand and crumpled it into a ball. If the Irishman’s scowl were a laser beam, Chanori would have been fried on the spot. “And the Draks are gonna help you overthrow the Rhajni Republic?”
“Naturally. We will finally eradicate the Felisian vermin from the face of Rhajnara, as we were destined to do by the Maker of All Things.”
Taking the printout away from O’Hara, Cortez threw it in Chanori’s face. Vash drew his zapgun and placed the barrel between Cortez’s eyes.
Cortez grinned defiantly. “You get only the one shot, Vash. Make cer-tain you do not miss.”
Chanori grabbed the zapgun and returned it to Vash’s holster. Vash growled with painful frustration and trembled with pent up rage. Chanori bowed to his prisoners.
“I really must apologize for my son,” he said. “Patience is not one of his virtues.”
Akira was totally caught off guard by this revelation. “Your son?”
Vash bared his teeth in a fierce snarl and caressed the scar on his face.
“Yes, he is my oldest son and the light of my Pride,” Chanori replied. “A pity his brother did not live up to our expectations and had to be executed. But his reckless disregard for orders concerning the Acheron affair forced us to move up our plans.” He turned to the tigerman. “Bring the prisoners to the roof.”
Akira clenched her fists and bit her lips in anger as the Khandra guards escorted her and her two companions from the command center. Her mind was a jumble of thoughts and fears, wondering if Makki was still alive, and if so—where was he? And how were they going to escape and send a warning to Colonel Dakota?
444
Rhajni personnel wearing white smocks or green scrubs passed through a pair of steel doors leading from a stairwell to the science lab located on Level 3 of the Khandra fortress. Scientists and technicians labored over a vast array of medical and electronic equipment. Massive screens displayed three-dimensional images of charts and graphs. Various electronic instruments glowed with multi-colored lights. The hum of generators and the slow beep-beep-beep of monitoring devices echoed in the lab. Drakonian doctors worked diligently at examination tables, performing experiments on small creatures from all parts of the galaxy.
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A hunchbacked Rhajni doctor with the face of a puma bent over a bank of computers lined up on top of a row of diagnostic equipment. Attached to these were cables and wires leading to an apparatus that resembled a cross between an iron lung and a medieval torture rack.
Makki carefully studied his surroundings, taking in and noting every little detail as two ocelotmen strapped him into this apparatus.
The main doors leading to the outer corridor slid open, and Corporal Flix strutted arrogantly into the lab. He walked over to the torture-like device and smiled at Makki.
“Shall we see if you truly have what it takes to be a Marine?” he asked.
Beads of sweat dampened and matted the short fur of Makki’s brow. His ears laid flat against his skull in distress. But he refused to show any fear in the face of his enemies. Instead, he snarled and tried to bite Flix.
Flix moved just quick enough to avoid losing his nose. “You’re going to regret that, you insolent tabby!” he growled.
“Go lick yourself,” Makki told him.
Flix grinned and nodded to the hunchback.
“You may begin, Doctor Morgele,” he said.
444
Rhajnara’s three moons illuminated the night, the Baroda Mountains, and Jaipur Pass. White light from a stairwell hatch spilled out onto the roof of the Khandra stronghold. The lunar glow from the Three Sisters glistened on the metallic dome concealing the laser cannon.
Chanori and Vash leaned against the parapet, enjoying the crisp night air. The tigermen surrounded their three prisoners, who stood with their backs against the steel dome of the cannon. A faint hum and tremor from the electronic machinery inside the command center beneath them could be felt through the soles of their boots.
“You Marines,” Chanori said in a friendly voice. “You think loyalty is a creation of your beloved Corps. But I, too, know something of loyalty. For the past three years I have been loyal—loyal to my cause, my beliefs, and to myself—waiting for the moment when I shall lead the Khandra to a glorious victory.”
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