The next cell I opened was empty. The next cell after that one was occupied by a pair of Fodduan-looking individuals. “You are free to go!” I shouted at them. “We have come to rescue you! Get out of—hey!”
“We may be criminals,” one lamviin said, grabbing at my gun. “But we are no traitors! Get it, Byv!” The other lamviin jumped into the fray.
“I’m trying, Toym! It won’t hold still! What is it, anyway? It’s ugly!”
“Takes one to know one!” I yelled, forgetting all the interspecies civility I’d learned. Hard as I could, I punched the first creature between the eyes. Only my suit saved me from a broken hand. Crowded, hurried, I pulled the trigger when the second prisoner rushed me. It staggered back, only stunned, then came for me again. I fired again—this time it ignored the bullet, began grabbing at me with all three hands.
I shot it in the foot.
The lamviin began hopping around, cursing just like any human being, trying to hold its injured foot, yelling at its cellmate to do something. I waved my Dardick at him in warning, deflecting the muzzle toward his toes. “Get out of here, both of you. Right now!” I fired a shot into the floor. It ricocheted once off the flagging, then fell silent.
“We’re going, already!” He helped his injured companion out the door.
By now, the guards seemed to have lost interest in the outside of the fortress. My idea of diverting them with escaping prisoners was failing. Finding Elsie, with her smoking pistol, I rushed around the corner to see Couper, Rogers, still outside with Mymy, the bomb in Couper’s big hand.
Both portcullises were down.
Howell, apparently, was still inside, trapped.
Our brilliant plan was failing. Poor Howell had been supposed to attract the guards into tight bunch (he’d told me he had border collie genes, whatever that meant) so that Couper, once the coyote had dashed out of range, could knock them all out with the stasis bomb, in theory without hurting any of them. The Fodduans were not cooperating. I ran around, letting several dozen more equally-uncooperative prisoners loose on the remaining two sides of the prison. They all ran out into the field, then stopped a safe distance away to watch what was going on.
We were not impressing them, either.
Leaving the little girl with Mymy for safety, I climbed up to the second level—lamviin stairs are not all that different from those built by humans—tiptoeing gingerly along the widely-spaced slats in the catwalk. There, I opened more cells, skipping the ones without locks.
More gunfire.
I holstered my first Dardick, drew the second, shot back, wounding at least one more guard. Completing a second circuit of the building, I looked down to see that the outer portcullis had been blasted open, most likely with a plasma gun. As I watched, there was an explosion from within the archway. Elsie, Couper, then Rogers stumbled out, his cursing almost coloring the air. He was followed by the surmale lamviin—
—then Howell!
The coyote’s suit was torn, the muzzles of his helmet pistols glowed in the midday twilight. Couper cocked an arm, ducked a big-caliber bullet winging at him on a cloud of blackpowder smoke, then threw.
There was an odd, muffled thump, then—silence.
Without watching any more, I climbed up to the next level. I made it over the catwalk rail just in time to catch a three centimeter lead ball right in the chest. Pain became my entire world for a dizzying moment. I nearly slipped as I passed the rail going the wrong way, but grabbed, hung on, managed to pull myself back. Lucille I could not see, but a huge lamviin with a revolver in each of his three hands, was charging directly at me. I took careful aim. Remembering the hardness of the carapace on these creatures, I shot him right in the eye.
Boom of gun, slap of recoil.
The ruined eye spurted green goo.
The unfortunate lamviin pitched over the railing with the smashing sound of a giant egg when he landed on the cement sidewalk at ground level.
Surprised I was still alive, I glanced at my chest—not even a hole. But it felt like I would have to have my ribs taped. I hopped from slat to slat—they were more like rungs on a horizontal ladder—until I drew even with a guardpost door, not clearly remembering where I was or where this Mav character was supposed to be. There was gunfire inside a large triangular chamber. Peering around a corner, I ran smack into another lamviin, grabbed an outstretched hand, pulled in the direction he had been running. He tripped headlong over the rail.
I did not hear this one hit.
Inside, across the room, Lucille was hiding behind an upturned table of heavy wood, trading shots with three guards. Their soft lead slugs stopped in the table or passed over her head harmlessly to splatter on the wall behind her. She could hardly get a shot in, her small pistol against nine, but when she did, she kept her fire high, showering her adversaries with the hot chips of stone that her plasma gun exploded from the wall. Smoke was coming from more than one carapace, along with the suit-relayed smell of singed fur—plus more cursing.
I picked a victim, shot him in the foot—that seemed to work downstairs. He screamed something impolite which my suit refused to translate, turned all three pistols my direction. I shot him in another foot. He lost interest in me, falling into a toe-massaging heap.
Lucille took this as an opportunity to set a wall-hanging afire. Huge flaky ashes with brightly burning edges swirled and drifted in the air, settling on the two remaining guards. One of them threw his guns away with a sudden gesture, slapped at his fur. He put his hands up.
“I give up! I give up! Peace, in the name of—”
“Shut up, Viideto, you craven weakling!” His companion beat him about the eyebrows with a pistol-butt. “Just because you’re a little singed!”
I shot this one in what I think was a knee, just as the entire wall-hanging fell over him. There was a muffled screaming as the creature began running blindly about the room, crashing into the walls.
Lucille flung herself on him, brought him to the floor, flipped off the covering, slapped out the coals in his fur with her gloved fingers. Viideto rushed to his side, did the same thing with his bare hands.
“Zimo! Zimo! Are you all right?” he cried.
“Of course I’m not all right, you vesa! Who are you people, anyway?”
“Yes,” said Viideto. “What do you want?”
Zimo and Viideto seemed to have gotten used to the human appearance almost instantly. I could see what Howell had meant by formidable.
“And by the way, thank you for saving what little pelt I have left.”
I stepped forward. “We want your prisoner. Is he in there?”
I gestured with my pistol toward the heavy-looking triangular metal door set in one wall of the room. There were three big padlocks on it. The small, barred, three-cornered window through it had been covered.
Couper, Howell, Rogers, Mymy, Elsie rushed in through the opposite door.
“Missur Mymy!” shouted Viideto, his fur standing on end. “So it is you who has engineered this breakout! What a great mistake you’re making! Mav is safe here, and outside, there’s a war going on. Why I, myself—”
“I am sorry, Viid,” Mymy said, not in an unkindly voice. Rher fur lay smoothly flat, which I took for some kind of calm expression. My own fur would have been straight up. As it was, my heart was racing. “You must release Mav. We are about to end this horrible war, right now.”
Couper bent down, took a ring of keys from Zimo who was lying on the floor, little wisps of smoke still issuing from his hair. “Be good, now, and you won’t get hurt, er ... any more than you have been.”
To me he said, “The stasis bomb worked all right, once we got a chance to deploy it. There are about seventy-five unconscious lamviin down there—more, if you count the cells within the radius of the bomb—who’ll be awake and hopping mad in a few minutes. We’d better skedaddle.”
He reached to unlock the three brass padlocks. Two yielded to keys on the ring. He turned to look at the guards. They looked back at him. M
aybe the ripple in their fur was a shrug. Lucille hefted her gun. I holstered mine, reloaded the first with a (clack!), raised it toward them.
“Oh, for Trine’s sake, Viid,” said a weary Zimo finally, “Give it the trinedamned key. They’ve saved my life. They’re obviously friends of Mav’s. And I’m about ready to give up and become a trinedamned Mavist myself. I don’t think I can take another trinedamned philosophy lecture!”
Reluctantly, warily, the unwounded guard handed Couper the third key. The big man turned it in the upper padlock. The lock clicked and swung loose. Releasing the hasp, Couper swung the huge iron door aside.
Inside the next room, triple moonlight flooded inside through curtained windows. Some kind of incense burned in a brazier on a table.
On a bed of sand in one corner, the wood of its edges decoratively carved, an elderly lamviin glanced up from the scroll he was reading, set the reading material aside, glanced from Mymy to Howell to Couper to Lucille to Rogers to Elsie to me. Then he took what looked like a long cigarette holder from a pocket on the leg of his jacket, dribbled a little clear liquid into it from a silver flask, thrust it into a nostril.
He rose with an outstretched hand. “I say, alien beings from the stars at long last—hullo, Mymy my dear—Agot Edmoot Mav at your service.”
He removed a monocle from the eye that was facing us.
“What the devil took you so long?”
“my friends and gaolers...”
Notes from the Asperance Expedition
Armorer/Corporal YD-038 recording
Page Sixty-nine:
From Afdiar to our next stop is about nine hours, some uncounted number of parsecs, also perhaps an entire lifetime—if I choose to believe that people can change. I am writing this—although I will certainly have to erase it eventually—in order to help me decide. The necessity arose some time before we reached Sodde Lydfe, the planet of the lamviin, just after we were whisked up from the bar in Udobia ...
“I’ve already been briefed,” Lucille grabbed my arm as we reached the debarkation lounge. Others of the field team dispersed to various quarters of the ship. I wanted most to go three rounds with a shower curtain, get back into my smartsuit. She said, “There’ll be nothing but wheel-spinning the next few hours. We’ve got important matters to settle.”
I tried to conceal the limp that she had given me. “That sounds ominous.”
“You should hear it from this side, Whitey.” Was that a nervous tremor I heard in her voice? Whatever it was, she passed it by with a rush, pulling me along in her wake. Leaving the lounge, we toothpasted ourselves through a dizzying series of transport-patches, arriving finally at the beach where we had first ... well, gotten to know each other better. This time, no one else was there. It was very hot. I shed my Afdiarite cloak, the swordbelt, stripped down to the trousers, pulled the boots off. The entire ship seemed busy, almost at battle stations.
We stopped, sat down, leaned against a weed-topped dune.
High above us, white birds soared.
Folding her legs under her, Lucille produced a cigarette, inhaled deeply. Momentarily, I envied her the habit. Not knowing what to do with my hands, I wrapped them around my knees, helped her watch the surf.
She said, “Whitey, how old are you?”
It was a strange way to begin a conversation between two adults. Keeping my eyes safely on the water, I replied, “I am thirty-seven Vespuccian—”
“That would make you ... ” she rolled her eyes back in her head, consulting her damnable implant, “ ... about twenty-eight Terran years old.”
“About.”
“Do you like older women?”
I swiveled to face her, “Look, Lucille, if this is about Edwina again ... ”
“No, you moron, it’s about me.” She buried the burning end of her cigarette in the sand. Her face seemed to be beginning to screw up in a manner that I had never seen before. “I was born in 224 A.L., you see. That’s the year 2000, by the Christian reckoning. This would be 2052.”
I did not see what she was getting at. I brushed a few sand-grains off the hilt of my shortsword where it lay beside me. “That would make you—”
“Fifty-two years old, Whitey. I spent twenty-three years in stasis!”
Suddenly the tears were streaming down her cheeks. She hid her face in her hands while her shoulders shook. Tentatively—odd, since we had been to bed together so many times—I laid a gentle hand on her. She turned, leaned against me, cried a little more, then, nose running, stifled her sobs, sat stiffly as if awaiting something from me.
I did not know exactly what. I did not have a tissue. Far, far away, the brightly-colored triangle of a sail skimmed across the horizon.
“Constitution, Lucille,” It was the first time that I had sworn in Confederate. “If I understand what occured to Malaise’s fleet—that parts of it were hurled back in time—you are twenty-five hundred years older than me, like everyone aboard this ship.” I put a hand on her silver-colored knee. “Do a couple dozen centuries matter, between us?”
The crying really started then, choked laughter wedged into spaces between gasps for breath. “Whitey, if you really mean that, I ... but it’s so hard, trusting ... ” She stopped: “I did once, but all it got me—”
Lucille, having difficulty trusting me? Momentarily scandalized, I folded my arms across my chest, looked away. Then I realized that I was a stranger to her, for all of our passionate intimacy, just as she was to me. Even with a computer pasted on her neocortex, she could not read my thoughts, know how I felt, or understand how much I had come to ...
But she was looking out to sea, as well, going on:
“It was the ‘accident’, of course, the one that got me killed.”
She turned to face me. “You know, I’ve thought of it that way for so long, it’s hard remembering it was an attack by stone-age natives ... not even proper Kilroys, really, during an initial planetary survey.”
I nodded, urging her to go on.
“I was with Praxeology back then,” she produced another cigarette, “So was my husband, who precipitated the attack. Who abandoned me to whatever perversities those savages wanted to commit, using me as the centerpiece.”
Having recently been in similar circumstances, I could sympathize. The worst part isn’t the pain, which eventually goes away, but the feeling of abject helplessness, which stays with you the rest of your life.
“Ship security didn’t believe my husband’s report that I was dead, but there were delays locating me. Coup arrived just minutes too late. Happily, I don’t remember very much of the really rough stuff—just enough of the preliminaries, believe me—but they tell me I was ... I was tortured to death and ... dismembered over a period of several days.”
That is not exactly how she told it. It took a great deal longer. She smoked. She wept. We talked. We touched. We did not make love. That would be for another time. The husband (she never said his name—I later learned it was Dalmeon Geaner) subsequently took their only child while Lucille was in stasis, leaving Tom Paine Maru under a cloud.
“I had words with Mac over this,” she said at last, “He insisted I tell you this. He told me I’d treated you rotten. He said that I’d better—”
“Hold on a minute: Mac?” I asked, jealousy creeping back in around the edges, “Mac who? I’m afraid that you lost me at the last turn, Lucille.”
“You’ve seen him, darling, I’m sure of it. We had only just found each other, after all these years. The tall, blonde, very tanned young man?”
“Oh. Yes,” I said. “The tall, blonde, very tanned young man. Good muscles.”
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