The Third Eagle

by R. A. MacAvoy

He would look like a sleeper. That was a mercy.

  There were perhaps twenty bodies scattered in the front reception area, including all the Baptists, who had fallen together, praying (probably) in a circle. Edward noticed that these wore more than their share of the scavenged clothing. One young woman wore both a skirt and bra affair made of the heavy puckered paper used to surround glassware in storage. What could be seen of her was very pretty.

  No Red. No Guillermo, either. Edward would have liked to remind the rest to keep an eye out for a small, medium tan man in skivvies, but they were supposed to keep the breather tubes in their mouths. He wasn’t sure just how potent this gas was, and he didn’t want to be carried out himself.

  There were three bays in the facility, each open in front to the reception area. On the left was the examination area, to the right was stores and in the middle were the heavy viral filters and the row upon row of revival units. Edward followed Dr. Kassel toward the neatly ranked coffins.

  It was terrible and daunting to see the coffins yawning open and the bodies that had been in them draped or curled, abandoned at all angles beside them. It was like the remains of a great vampire feast. Edward’s skin tightened and crawled over his shoulders.

  Right at his feet, her head thrown back theatrically over the open mouth of a coffin, was one of the women he had expected to be chosen for awakening. This one had felt no need to cover her breasts, or couldn’t find the material. One of her eyes was imperfectly closed, as will sometimes happen under anesthetic, and the strip of white and brown glittered up at him. He wanted to push it closed for her, but as his hand moved he remembered her as one of those throwing bottles at the camera, and the impulse died in him.

  They had reached the end of the bay and not found Red among the sprawled bodies. Either he was in one of the side bays or he was hiding somewhere. Vain effort: there was nowhere to hide in a place like this. He could be in one of the coffins, or in a revival unit, and if the latter, then possibly he was not asleep with the rest of them. But the revivers had glass doors, and each of the twenty intruders had come equipped with a pocket pulse pistol, so that was really no problem. And if he was not in one of the revivers or in a coffin, then he would have to be… The lights went out.

  No space traveler could be prey to claustrophobia or fear of simple darkness, but Edward Pierce leaped six inches into the air and tried to draw his pistol. Another hand met his on its way and hurt it, badly. He spun around in time to receive a punch that snapped his teeth shut and lifted him once more. In the faint green glow that was emitted by the backup power for the revival units, he saw the fist and the face of the naked woman whose eye he had wanted to close, and who had thrown the bottles. Now her eyes were wide open, but still glittering: green in the faint green light. He came down and saw nothing more for a while.

  Wanbli hopped up from where he had been covered by the bulk of both Garland Medicine-Bear and Henry Larssen. Garland was already in the newborn riot, while Henry held a length of plastic tubing in his hands, garrote style, and was snapping it thoughtfully as he stepped over the empty coffins. Wanbli clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Don’t kill anybody, Hank,” he said into the man’s ear. “It isn’t necessary.” Wanbli himself stepped up onto one neat row of boxes and ran along the top of the walls, like a boy on a board fence, using his stick as a balancing pole. He ignored the fighting around him; there were two or three enthusiastic scrappers from the Commitment to each invader. Help from him would make the odds still more unfair, and would ruin his protectors’ fun too.

  He heard a cry and a snap coming from the front right. The cry sounded familiar and he sprang down at Victoria’s feet in time to witness Edward’s lurch and collapse.

  “Hey, hey!” He yanked on her long hair. His teeth gleamed green. “Take care of my pal Eddie, okay? Tie him real comfortable.”

  “Tie him with what?” Victoria was breathing heavily and rubbing her knuckles with her other hand.

  Wanbli considered. “With your… whatever you call that.” He pointed to the strip of cloth wrapped G-string fashion around her nether parts.

  Victoria glared and snorted, and Wanbli hit her lightly on the upper arm. “Hey, I like you a lot, Vikki. You’re one real flyer!” He walked on.

  There was the snap of a pulse pistol and shadows leaped and fell again. Wanbli heard an angry curse from one of the other bays. He invoked the First and Third Protectors and went on.

  Here, where the bay opened out, he found the man whom he guessed had been assigned to kill him. He had pressed himself against the wall and was holding off three of Garland’s students with a simple hypopunch. A hypodermic punch was a useful tool for murder but a poor weapon; it had to touch skin and could only be fired once without reload, but such was the respect it engendered that none of the three dared risk approach.

  Wanbli came quietly behind them. “He’s mine,” he said in Wacaan. The three looked, recognized and stepped back, enclosing him within their circle.

  The doctor pointed his hypo and Wanbli raised his stick. “This doesn’t have to touch,” he said in Old Ang. Kassel stared down at the stun stick and Wanbli knew the man thought he was about to be killed. This seemed a proper sort of irony to Wanbli. He pressed the handle.

  At that moment the doctor was moving, throwing the hypo at Wanbli’s chest. The man fell but the poisonous hypopunch came on. Scarcely knowing what he did, Wanbli blocked it with the stick.

  There was a smack and a howl as it hit one of the three fighters behind him: a tall, thin man with a large nose and chin. Lucian. He sank to his knees, staring with glistening face at the deadly thing which had hit him. Wanbli squatted down in front of him. His two companions stared.

  “I… I’m okay,” said the man shakily. “Embarrassed, is all. I think it hit me backwards.” He grinned.

  Wanbli retrieved the hypopunch, which had somehow discharged, and stood again in time to hear the thud as Lucian fell stone dead on the floor.

  Edward felt himself being passed, pushed, booted along. As the woman had tied his eyes as well as his hands, he did not know where they were herding him, until his legs were lifted and he felt the sides of the coffin around him. Then he started screaming.

  In the green glow of the emergencies, the young woman’s blood looked much blacker than her skin, even where it soaked through the absorbent paper of her skirt. She had been perforated by the repeated pulse-fire. Almost cut in two.

  Wanbli looked from her body to that of the revivalist equally dead beside her and up. “Why did you go for him if you’re not allowed to fight?” he asked, keeping his voice level with effort.

  One of the surrounding faces was that of Godslove Thompson. The green glimmer behind gave his round face the look of a moon’s eclipse. “We surrounded him peacefully. I thought if there were enough of us…”

  “It doesn’t work that way.” This time Wanbli had less success in controlling himself. “How’d you dust him, then? Break his neck?”

  The Baptists glanced widely at one another. None of them remembered.

  It was inevitable, he told himself. Unrealistic to expect that these—or any group)—could take on twenty armed invaders without losing some. Without killing some. But it was still new to Wanbli, this business of having friends taken out under his nose. Because of him.

  Now it was over in Medical, and in truth, it had not taken more than two minutes. Twenty revivalists were stored, still breathing, neatly in coffins. The two dead Commitment crew members were laid, not in the coffins, but on a table, and covered with paper sheets. One of these sheets slowly wicked up blood. The dead revivalist had been dragged out of the way. The body had been abused somewhat.

  Garland was in front of Wanbli. In the dim light Wanbli could not see the man’s expression. He was glad of it.

  “Next—the door?”

  Wanbli grunted. “Get Gilly again.”

  The attendant looked lost between the two men who hauled him to the door. He smelled of vomit an
d he had been crying, but now he was very calm. “I can’t,” he said. “If the door has been sealed from outside, it will have to be opened from outside.”

  “So tell them to open it. There’s still a local corn-box on the panel. Speak.”

  Guillermo cleared his throat as Wanbli slapped the speaker on. He called for the door to be opened. He called louder.

  “They don’t believe me,” he told Wanbli, once they had given up on that method. “They must have a code, or someone else has to give the signal.” His head sagged sideways against the shoulder at his right hand. “Let me go back to sleep.”

  Guillermo’s words brought back to Wanbli the fact that he too had not eaten in three days. A quick glance around showed him that his crew of warriors was folding like so many alios. There was Victoria, slumped against the fat-ratio scale, yawning and yawning. It was too damned contagious.

  His shout brought them all upright again. “Hey! Red calling the Commitment. Alert, Commitment. Anyone drifting off now is going to be under a paper sheet himself pretty soon. We’ve still got over a hundred fifty opponents out there, and they’re not about to be happy with any of us. Got it?”

  The yawning spread and there was a sound of faces being slapped. The Reverend Thompson invoked his savior and Henry Larssen uttered the same words with different emphasis.

  “Okay, Gilly. Now you ask them who it is they want their command from. I don’t want them thinking we’ve slaughtered their entire squad here.”

  Obediently, flatly, Gilly spoke his words, to no more success. Nor could threats move him to override the seal on the door; emergency unsealing had not been part of his training. They let him go back to sleep.

  Wanbli tried a pulse pistol against the gasket rim of the door, but such weapons are useful on board ship particularly because they cannot cut through construction materials, and all that he gained was a sizable burn on his wrist. Mary Standing-Shoes, however, came forward with a small bone saw that worked perfectly and with very little disturbance. They left the door in place, hanging by slivers.

  Each of the front row of the assault was to hold a captive as a shield. Wanbli hoped the revivalists would not be so panicked or so ruthless that they would slice up their own people. He himself chose Edward. He took him from Victoria.

  “Up again, Eddie,” he called, flipping the clear lid up.

  Edward Pierce’s blue-gray eyes were wide and glassy, unblinking. Wanbli believed him to be dead, but then his mouth worked and he swallowed.

  “Up, Eddie. No one’s hurt you. Much.”

  His flesh was like a soft plastic, and his skin as cold as wet plastic. There was no way Edward Pierce was going to stand alone. Wanbli slipped his forearm between the man’s back and elbows and hefted him. He could scarcely feel a pulse, even along the man’s neck.

  “These fellows are not in good shape,” called Garland.

  Wanbli used his other hand to slap Edward over the ear. The blow did no good. “What’s wrong with you, Eddie?”

  “Dead,” said Edward Pierce.

  Wanbli glanced back at the empty coffin. This one bore the imprint of the spotted horse. “Huh! I imagine you flyers do feel a little funny being put back in one of those, don’t you? I might say it was a perfect revenge—I mean, if I were the sort of flyer who did say things like that.”

  The taunt roused Edward no better than the slap had done. “… won’t wake me up,” he said very clearly, and then he closed his eyes.

  “Hup! Let’s go,” shouted Wanbli. “While they’re still with us.”

  They got to the door, dragging prisoners in all degrees of shock. Garland Medicine-Bear dropped his weeping captive in disgust, and the man lay where he fell.

  Garland took three running steps, leaped, kicked out the door vanes and landed rolling on the other side. “Howl,” he shouted, and the crew of the Commitment surged through behind him, howling.

  There was no resistance, no battle. First the hall seemed to be empty, but there were at least as many revivalists in it as had entered Medical. They were merely slumped over the floor.

  “Retreat!” shouted Wanbli, and they all piled awkwardly over the broken door again, dragging the feet of the captives.

  “If it were still active, we’d all be knocked out at this moment,” said Victoria. “The air is circulating between the two rooms now.” She was not a front-liner, because Wanbli had taken her human shield. She was inclined to be resentful about it.

  “They wouldn’t try the same trick on us we tried on them,” added the crew member who had pinched Guillermo.

  Wanbli tossed Edward at Victoria and leaped over the shards of the door again. He reached the nearest body, picked it up, let it drop with a nasty thud and finally put one hand over the woman’s throat. “It’s real,” he said. “Pulse about forty.

  “Let’s go.”

  Medical Facilities on the Condor had no direct connection with the ship’s skin because it shared the pod with Kitchen Facilities. Wanbli found the door at the end of the long hall unsecured. He and Garland Medicine-Bear ran into the “You have fucked up our whole settlement, asshole,” shouted Brezhner. “You’re as good as dead!”

  Wanbli had picked up the Old Ang idiomatic for sexual intercourse, but this usage made no sense. “Asshole,” however, was a common insult in every language he had studied, so he got the gist of the statement. As long as Brezhner seemed to know where he was, he saw no reason not to answer.

  “Truth is, you don’t have any settlement, Captain. But I—we—can do something about that.”

  The reply was a burst that rang the storage table like a gong. It did not seem to be coming from the same angle. Either the Captain was moving—more quietly than Wanbli thought the big man was capable of moving—or there were more than two of the Condor crew in the kitchen. Wanbli thought perhaps it was time to find another spot. He flung himself in a long, low frog leap, away from Garland, back in the direction from which they had come, and a shot burned hair on the top of his head.

  The man was hiding behind a tread-wheel plate caddy. He fired once more, wildly, as Wanbli came on, and then two hundred white dinner plates smashed out of their stacks and onto his head. Wanbli grabbed the gun in one hand and smacked the fellow unconscious with a back-knuckle from the other. He heard a shot, not directed at him, followed by a horrifying whoop, a scrabble and a thud.

  Garland, he thought with some satisfaction. Probably got the flyer alive too.

  Wanbli took cover again before calling, “Captain. We don’t want to hurt you. We actually have a proposition for you—for us all.”

  “Bullshit!” Evidently the Captain had moved further back. Did he have more guns at his command? Wanbli fingered the squeeze of his captured pistol gingerly. It wasn’t his sort of weapon, especially held in the left hand. And he didn’t want Brezhner dead.

  “Indian!” Wanbli leaned forward, then realized that Brezhner was addressing the man who spoke no ’Indi. “Indian. What did this guy tell you? We didn’t mean your people any harm. It was only him we were after.”

  Garland answered from far back in the kitchen, almost behind Brezhner. “No harm at all. You just meant to murder us.”

  “Not true. That’s a lie!” The Captain spoke with spontaneous anger.

  “They don’t call it murder when it’s sleepers,” called Wanbli. He felt and heard a buzzing back at the entry door, and quietly he began to creep toward Captain Brezhner.

  Garland laughed. (He had such a great sense of humor, thought Wanbli. They all did. And they laughed at the strangest things.) “They didn’t used to call it murder when it was Indians, either. But I know who to believe, Captain, and I’ll put my money on the Eagle.”

  Wanbli was only ten feet away from the Captain, who was crouched behind the inadequate protection of an aluminum barbecue. He raised the pulse pistol and aimed it at Brezhner’s wavering gun hand. The Captain was still trying to locate Garland. He spoke again. “That way you’ll wind up spaced along with him, fellow. Loo
k. We were all sleepers here. It takes understanding…”

  Wanbli raised the pistol, which felt odd and unpracticed in his hand. He decided against it. He tossed the pistol away as he leaped for the Captain bare-handed.

  The rest of the Commitment’s crew had the door sawn open before Garland could open it for them.

  “I want to speak to everyone aboard the Ball,” said Wanbli into the ship communicator. There was no response, so Wanbli blew into the ear of the thing and tried again, louder.

  The speaker popped on. “Everyone in the Ball does not want to hear from you, Red.” It might have been Khafiya talking.

  “I know that. You should know that we have taken your little ‘boarding party’ hostage. We’ve got Captain Brezhner. We’ve got Eddie.”

  Again there was silence. Wanbli, out of the corner of his eye, could see Garland begin to slump against the wall. The burst of activity, following three days of fasting, was telling on him. Wanbli put his damaged hand over the primitive little pickup and told him to go eat some bread, like the rest of the Condor’s crew. They were making a great deal of racket at it.

  The man did not move. “I want to see how things go,” he said. “Besides. I’ve got to keep an eye on your captain here.”

  Brezhner’s hands were tied with kitchen twine in front of him. He looked ready to make trouble.

  “You can look with one eye while…”

  The speaker sounded again. “I don’t believe you,” it said. “Pierce, yes, but not the captain. He wasn’t involved.”

  “He is now,” Wanbli said, and pushed the man forward. “Talk,” he whispered into Brezhner’s ear, but the Captain was as silent as if he had been gagged. Wanbli pinched his ear, but the strangled grunt that issued from Brezhner’s throat was not identifiable.

  Wanbli laughed. “He won’t talk. That alone ought to be enough to identify him, Khafiya. But if you won’t believe me about the Captain, you can’t deny twenty assorted revivalists, all tied up neat and under the care of some very impetuous flyers.”

  “How did you sweet-talk them into helping you do this, Red? They themselves were in no danger from us.”