by Timothy Zahn
For a few seconds she continued to kneel there, her knees and soles of her feet wedged awkwardly between the two walls, swearing feelingly as she clutched both of her head injuries and waited for the dizziness to go away.
Finally, the pain subsided and her head started to clear. Pressing her palms against the wall, wishing she’d never let Mispacch talk her into this, she pushed.
The wall didn’t budge.
She stared at the flat metal bare inches from her eyes, a cold sensation prickling across her back. Squeezed in here like this, she didn’t have the leverage to get the wall open. Her legs were stronger than her arms, but it would be impossible to maneuver them into position in the cramped space. There was nothing she could do but wait for the Masters’ emissary to get here. She hoped like hell he wasn’t dawdling.
And hoped even more that he paused long enough in this supposedly empty room to hear her banging on the wall. Otherwise, he might just leave, chew out Amrew for letting her escape, and take the search elsewhere.
Leaving her here to die.
Don’t panic, she told herself firmly. Even if the emissary missed her, the Micawnwi lived in these rooms. Surely she wouldn’t have to wait longer than evening for someone to settle down where they could hear her pounding on the wall.
She frowned as another odd thought suddenly struck her. There were no working lights in any of these between-wall equipment setups, at least none that she’d ever seen. Often there were indicator lights, but with this particular food dispenser shut down there was nothing like that, either.
So how was it she could even see the wall that was pressing in on her?
The faint light seemed to be coming from her right. Carefully, hoping she didn’t whack her head on any of the equipment clustered around and above her, she turned to look.
There was light over there, all right: a sliver of soft glow coming from about twenty feet away along the between-wall space. Probably somewhere behind the room with the functional food dispenser, in fact. Maybe that was where and how the Masters were fiddling with the Micawnwi food supply.
And aside from a few small floor-level cables, there didn’t seem to be any serious obstacles between her and the light. She should be able to work her way over there and see what was going on.
Not that the trip wouldn’t be tricky. Many of these cables had rough-edged sheaths, and there was always the possibility of hidden bits of broken plastic that could slice into unwary hands in an instant.
But anything was better than kneeling here pounding on the wall and hoping someone found her. Maneuvering herself carefully around onto her hands and knees, she started crawling.
For once today, everything went smoothly. The cables were soft and yielding, there were no hidden dangers, and she even managed to keep from whacking her head again on the various low-hanging pieces of equipment.
The light turned out to be coming from a narrow gap beneath a wall section that hadn’t quite closed properly. The segment itself was considerably narrower than the one she’d opened in the other room, no more than a couple of feet wide. Pressing her shoulders against the back wall, she settled her palms against the partially open wall, mentally crossed her fingers, and pushed.
It still wasn’t easy. But unlike the larger wall section in the other room, it was at least possible. She managed to push it open far enough to get her legs up, and a moment later she was out. She let the section back down, being careful not to let it make any noise as it closed, and looked around.
She was in some kind of maintenance room, with workbenches on two of the walls and tool and parts cabinets at their ends. The wall section she’d come through had surprisingly rough edges, as if it hadn’t originally been an access panel but had been cut out of something wider or even from a section of normal wall. Pulling the wall open again, she looked inside.
Just to the right of the opening was the Micawnwi’s food dispenser, the one Amrew had shown her earlier. But unlike the nonfunctional one she’d examined in the second room, this one didn’t have a nice simple pipe leading from the lower processing box to the machine’s hopper. Instead, that pipe’s center section had been cut out and replaced by a length of flexible tubing with a small box in the middle. The box itself had a display and a single knob, both of them marked with alien letters or numbers unlike anything else she’d seen aboard.
Nicole frowned. Most of the systems on the Fyrantha ran with digital electronic controls, though most also had manual backups or overrides. But this one just had a single control, and a not particularly accurate one at that. Something the Masters had cobbled together on their own, then, and not something that had originally been part of the ship?
Regardless, this was clearly how they were adjusting the food supply. Either they stopped by every day and turned the knob a bit to decrease the flow, or else the thing was programmed to handle the slow starvation automatically.
But not for long. A simple crank of the knob back to its original spot, and Mispacch and her children would eat again. She reached for the knob—
And stopped. Turning the knob would certainly change the setting. But which way would increase the flow, and which would just decrease it faster?
There was no way to know. She couldn’t even go by the Fyrantha’s usual convention on such things—the strange markings could mean the device had come from somewhere else and didn’t follow the usual turning convention.
But there was another way. Obviously, the tubing and its attached box were the mechanism the Masters were using to dry up the Micawnwi’s food supply. All she had to do was cut out the box, weld or glue the ends of the tubing back together, and then seal this section of the wall so that the Masters couldn’t get inside to mess with it again.
None of that should be impossible, given time and the proper equipment. Unfortunately, at the moment she had neither.
She hissed between her teeth. She could presumably get hold of a cutter and some of the workers’ heavy-duty glue back in the main part of the ship. But that would take a while, and Mispacch and her children would continue to go hungry. There had to be something she could do right now to at least buy them some time.
Maybe there was. If the food supply was set to steadily decrease, and if the position of the knob was a direct reflection of that process …
Back when she’d been getting used to the translator on this side of her head, she’d sometimes accidentally run a finger along a sharp bit of metal and drawn blood. Now, reaching in under her hair, she did it on purpose. She squeezed a small drop of blood from her fingertip, then carefully touched it to the edge of the knob.
The blood wasn’t very visible in the relatively dim light, and it should be even less so once it dried. If the Masters missed it, she should be able to come back tomorrow and tell which way the knob had been turned. Once she knew which way shut off the food, she would know which way turned it on again.
Of course, now that she’d done that, it was absolutely vital that whoever the Masters had sent to collect her didn’t find her here. In fact, it would probably be best not to let them find her anywhere in this general part of the ship.
Crossing to the door, she pressed her ear against it. All seemed quiet. She touched the release, and the door whooshed quietly open.
The corridor outside was deserted. She listened for another couple of seconds, then slipped out and headed down the soft red flooring toward the arena door she’d seen as she and Mispacch approached the Micawnwi hive. Celenso or another guard would probably still be on duty, but if she was lucky he would be distracted by the Masters’ emissary and she would be able to slip past him through the trees and bushes and make her way back across the arena and out the far door.
She hurried along a corridor that had the usual well-spaced doors on her right and flat wall on her left—the latter marking the cluster of Micawnwi rooms, she guessed—and finally came to another long corridor that headed off in the right direction. She stepped to the corner and looked carefully around it.
The door was there, all right, no more than fifteen yards away. Even from here she could read its oversized ID plate: lefnizo-four Door One.
She took a deep breath. Almost home. Now, if the access code for this door was the same as the one at the other end, and if she could get past the Micawnwi guard, and if she could avoid the Masters’ emissary …
She was bracing her feet for a sprint to the door when she heard the sound of heavy footsteps coming her way.
She ducked out of the intersection, cursing silently. If she hadn’t wasted time scoping out the Micawnwi food system … But it was too late to fix that mistake now. Nothing was visible down her cross-corridor, so the emissary must be approaching along the long hallway leading to the main arena door. She needed to find a place to hide, and fast.
Only there wasn’t any such place, at least nothing she could get to fast enough and quietly enough. All the doors along her cross-corridor were currently closed, and all of them were the kind that whooshed when they opened. She didn’t know how good the Masters’ hearing was, but she didn’t dare risk it. The nearest other corner was too far away for her to reach in time, not at the rate the footsteps were clunking toward her.
There was only one chance. Crossing to the other side of her corridor, the side toward the approaching emissary, she pressed herself against the wall, hoping desperately that he didn’t have good peripheral vision.
The footsteps were nearly here. She froze …
And suddenly, there he was, striding purposefully past Nicole’s position, his attention clearly on the door ahead, his even stride giving no indication that he’d spotted her. He continued on, disappearing past the cross-corridor as he made for the arena door.
Only then, when he was fully out of sight, did Nicole allow her lips to mouth a fresh curse.
Because the Masters’ emissary wasn’t Fievj or even another centaur, like she’d been expecting. The figure had been dressed in metal armor like Fievj, but this one was just a normal human-shaped person without the horse’s body stretching out behind it.
And suddenly all her tentative assumptions as to what the hell was going on had gone straight down the flusher. If this new person-shaped thing was one of the Masters, then who was Fievj? Were there Masters and Shipmasters running around the Fyrantha? And if so, were they working together or were they enemies?
And which group was on her side? Or did she and the other workers and the Micawnwi not have a side?
From down the hallway came the sound of the arena door creaking open. So much for getting out of here ahead of the Masters’ emissary. Now she would have to find someplace to go to ground until he left.
And hope that her disappearance didn’t spark a frenzied search for her. Which, if the emissary had any brains at all inside all that armor, it probably would. On her side of the ship, where she was familiar with the layout of rooms and storage closets, she might have had a shot at eluding a search, or at least avoiding capture long enough to come up with a decent story to spin.
On this side of the arena, though, she didn’t have a chance of finding something fast enough. She didn’t know the rooms; she didn’t even know the numbering system over here—
She frowned as something suddenly struck her. Provided the emissary in there spent enough time yelling at the Micawnwi for letting her escape, she might still have a chance.
Because the door the emissary had gone through was labeled Door One. The one at the other end of the arena, the one she’d come in through, was labeled Door Three.
Somewhere, there had to be a Door Two.
With the trees and hills obscuring the view, Nicole had never actually seen the far side of the arena beyond the stone building. But she’d seen how the sky curved down in that direction, and she now had a pretty good estimate of how big the place was. Given the positions of Doors One and Three, the logical place for Door Two would be somewhere at that end.
Her estimate was right on the money. Half a dozen hallways and turns later, she came to a short corridor that led straight to another of the massive arena doors, this one’s tag identifying it as lefnizo-four Door Two. Slipping around the last corner, she ran to the door, her hand shaking with exertion and nerves as she punched in the code the Fyrantha had given her earlier that morning. The lock snicked; gripping the edge of the door, she pulled it open.
Beyond it, just as she’d hoped, were the trees and grassy hills of the arena.
She stepped inside, a sense of relief rolling over her as she pulled the door closed. One of the stone paths like the kind she’d seen on the Micawnwi side was directly in front of her, winding around a clump of bushes and disappearing over a low hill ahead. She had no idea where it ultimately led, but it hardly mattered. This wasn’t greater Philadelphia, where a wrong turn could take you into a bad neighborhood or get you hopelessly lost. All she had to do was walk straight ahead, leaving the path and slogging through the grass if necessary, until she reached the far wall. At that point, a simple right-hand turn would take her to Door Three and back to the hive.
She’d gone about twenty yards, and had just noticed that there was an open door back behind some trees to her right, when there was a sudden rustle in the bushes ahead. One of the weasel-like people she’d seen on her first visit stepped into view, planting himself in the middle of the path in front of her. His dark brown smock was covered with leaves and small branches, and he was gripping a halberd just like the ones the Micawnwi had. He spat something—
“Halt!” the stern translation came. “Who are you?”
Nicole sighed. She’d been wrong. There was a bad neighborhood in here.
And she’d just found it.
ten
The rooms the guard took her to were laid out the same way as the ones in the Micawnwi hive, with a large round area in the middle and a group of pie-piece-shaped rooms extending outward from it. Here, though, the whole area seemed deserted. No one was in the round room, and she could hear no conversation coming from any of the other rooms, either.
The weasel with the halberd behind her gave a short, soft whistle.
There was another moment of silence. Then, a voice came from one of the rooms to Nicole’s right.
She turned to see a second weasel walk into the round room—“Well, well,” the translation came. “If it isn’t the Blue-clad.”
Nicole frowned at him. Blue-clad?
And then it clicked. This was the same weasel who’d been shooting from the row of bushes during that first battle, when Bungie had sneaked off to try to grab one of the greenfire weapons.
The weasel who’d threatened to kill him.
“I am Sibyl, not Blue-clad,” Nicole told him. She had no idea whether the bravado she had used on the Micawnwi would work at this end of the arena, but it was worth trying. “I speak for the Fyrantha, the ship we travel within.”
The weasel bit out something. “Your ship must enjoy seeing blood, Sibyl,” he said darkly. “I wonder what color yours is. Perhaps we’ll find out. I am Hunter of the West Waterfall Narvae. I speak for this gathering of the Cluufes. What do you want from us?”
“Nothing,” Nicole assured him. “I’m just passing through, heading across the arena to return to my people.”
“The people who tried to steal our weapons?” Hunter countered pointedly. “The people who even now conspire against us with our enemies?”
Nicole blinked. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t feign innocence,” Hunter said, his voice suddenly hard. “Do you think we don’t keep close watch on our enemies? You were seen, Sibyl of the Fyrantha, first speaking with the Micawnwi and then traveling to their stronghold.”
“Their strong—? You mean their hive?” Nicole snorted. “You must be joking. That place is no more a stronghold than this is.”
“Do you think me a fool?” Hunter said contemptuously, waving a hand around them. “Despite the limited space available in a room of this size, they nevertheless cleverly practice their drill
ing and maneuvers inside, so that our observers cannot watch. That bespeaks both cunning and military skill, qualities this sorry collection of Cluufes sorely lacks.”
He took a step closer, glaring up at Nicole. “And yet, despite that ranging of odds against us, you deliberately tilt those odds further by conspiring with them?”
“I’m not conspiring with anyone,” Nicole protested. “Or against anyone, either. I came in looking for a missing person, Mispacch asked me to see if I could fix their food dispenser, and I went. That’s all.”
“Ah, yes—the food dispenser,” Hunter said with the coldly triumphant air of someone who’s just had his darkest suspicions confirmed. “Your weapon of choice. What kind of evil beings use the threat of hunger to force their victims to dance to their tune?”
Agree with him, a small voice in the back of Nicole’s head urged. Agree that it’s unfair, promise you’ll have a talk with the ship about it, and get the hell out of here.
But even as she opened her mouth to make whatever soothing noises were necessary to get her out of this, that last image of Mispacch’s children looking up at her from the path bounced unbidden into her mind’s eye. “I agree,” she said. “But even worse is when that threat is leveled against the helpless and powerless.”
Hunter snorted. “We’re all helpless, Sibyl of the Fyrantha. None of us came here of our own will or purpose. We’re all slaves.”
“But at least you have weapons and strength with which to fight,” Nicole pointed out, nodding back over her shoulder at the guard still standing there with his halberd. “Others aren’t nearly so—”
“You call these weapons?” Hunter spat. “These pathetic axe-spears? Phaw. The flash-flickers that we were given before—those were true weapons.”
“Others aren’t nearly so lucky,” Nicole continued doggedly, wondering if Hunter’s flash-flickers were the greenfire guns she and Bungie had seen. She wondered briefly what had happened to them, decided that for the moment she didn’t give a damn about either question. “The Micawnwi women and children over there are being starved.”