“ ’Tis not what I said, anaryan!” Valka replied. “The Cielcin aren’t as spare with fuel as we are. That ship’s big enough they must make their own fuel somewhere, probably toward the bow.” I knew what she was talking about, had studied forensic analyses of other Cielcin worldships, knew that somewhere in that ruined asteroid the xenobite ship used for a capstone there would be a massive particle accelerator of the sort designed to manufacture the antihydrogen the Cielcin burned for fuel. “ ’Twill vent their supply at the first sign of trouble.”
I saw where she was going a moment before she said it. “You’re saying . . .”
“I’m saying if your man blows the coolant tank and it cracks the Dewar flask the ship will vent its fuel automatically.”
“Are you sure?”
“Damn you, Hadrian!” Valka said. “How many times do I have to tell you?” Her words were like the crack of ice on a lake in winter, and I was falling through.
I glanced back over my shoulder to where Pallino directed our defense. The round counters were dangerously low, and by the look of the monitors the Cielcin were still coming.
“Why don’t they just blow this ship?” Pallino asked, meaning the Merciless. “It were me, I’d have mined the whole thing. Set it up as bait.”
“Food supply,” I said, thinking of the cubiculum and the thousands of men frozen there. “Besides, they didn’t know we were coming.” I swept my gaze across the bank of holograph monitors before me, taking in the severity of the situation. I closed my eyes, murmured one of old Gibson’s incantations to still the ragged beating of my heart. Fear truly is a poison: cortisol, adrenaline.
I clenched my jaw and switched channels again. “Marlowe to Cade. Doctor Onderra says you are clear to blow the coolant tank. She says any damage to the Dewar envelope will force the tanks to vent.”
The reply was a moment coming, but when it came young Cade’s voice was steady and tight as the mechanics of an old timepiece. “Aye, my lord.”
“Then see it done, man.”
“One thing, lord.” Cade’s composure cracked just a little.
“Say on.”
“I’d like to wait until the enemy breaches the door, give my lads a chance to run for it.”
I was nodding, and it took a full three seconds for me to remember the man could not see me. “As you wish.”
“Give them hell, then.” And he cut the line.
I shut my eyes once again. It never got any easier. I prayed it never would. After a moment I opened my eyes, studied the monitors.
“We need to get those scouts back inside,” I said, fingers thick and slow on the terminal controls. “What was the frequency?” I remembered even as I asked, toggling back to the Irchtani band. Speaking only to the trias of auxiliaries who’d taken up their posts on the roof of the prisoned vessel, I said, “You three get back inside through the forward airlocks! We’ve blown the gangways, so you’ll have to climb in.” As I spoke, I watched the Irchtani resistance at the two still-accessible airlocks hold their ground with explosives and the points of their long knives. There was no response over the scouts’ line. “I said all scouts retreat through the forward airlocks, do you copy?”
I found the scouts’ heads-up cameras again on the monitors, each showing a view of the approaching horde of Cielcin soldiery. At the rear I saw the flash of plasma fire where Oro and Doran’s men had arrived from the far side of the hold, splitting the enemy’s attention.
They weren’t moving.
“Do you copy?” I repeated, holding my wrist-terminal to my mouth. “I said, do you copy?”
“Ububonoyu o-okun-do,” came the reply in a voice high and cold as the mountains above Meidua in the deep of winter. There followed the thin scrape of alien laughter, and the words again, “They cannot hear you.”
I turned away so the others would not see the shock in my face. The numb dread. “Who is this?” I asked in Cielcin, and felt the sudden stiffness in the room behind me at the sound of the language and what my using it must mean.
“The Devil of Meidua,” the alien voice said, picking its way over the unfamiliar human words. Switching back to its native tongue, the Cielcin said, “I must admit, I expected better from a yukajji of your repute.”
My distress over Cade retreated, replaced by the white fire of the Marlowe cold fury. “Prince Dorayaica, I presume?”
The cold laughter came again, and I felt every hair on me stand on end. “Veih, veih, veih,” it said. “No. You do not have that honor, hurati.” Mouse, it called me. Or what passed for mouse to the xenobite. “Surrender, and you will be so blessed.”
“Sim udantha,” I said. Not today.
“You are surrounded. Soon you will be beaten.” I had nothing to say, and so said nothing. “Perhaps I will bring you to him.”
I saw nothing on the monitors, could not identify the speaker’s location. At the rear perhaps, behind the attacking Cielcin? One look at our tactical monitors told me fully a quarter of the hull defense guns were depleted. A shot sounded in the hall. More of the nahute had broken through the Irchtani defense at the doors.
“I did not expect you to flee when I found you in the hall outside,” the cold voice said. One of the scout’s cameras moved, vision bucking as the helmet—or perhaps the head—was lifted from the place where it had fallen. Vision wheeling across the blackened hold, its single eye came to rest on the speaker. Armor the color of bleached bone encased the head save for the mouth, which leered toothily in the vacuum, its slaver foaming in the airless void outside. Too wide that mouth, shark-like and snarling, twisted into an alien grin that might close about a grown man’s fist. The helmet had no eye holes, no obvious visor. I could not be certain the Cielcin Exalted had eyes at all. Perhaps behind that armored visage there was only machinery housing the alien brain. Perhaps the mouth was only a vestige of the flesh-that-was, left behind to terrify. The lips did not move as it spoke, though its grin widened. “Sikare,” it said. “I confess, I am disappointed. I expected more from the man who killed Aranata.”
“You have me at a disadvantage,” I said, staring at the monitor as if I hoped to make the creature feel the weight of my gaze. “Deni okun tuka o-tajun ne?” Who are you?
The camera feed flickered, but the words came through loud and clear. “Only a Holy Slave. One of a number.” It raised a hand for my consideration. All of jointed steel it was, the fingers backed with zircon delicately embossed, white-on-white. Machine though it was, it was still six-fingered, the digits long as any I had seen. “One of six.”
I felt my lips compress, eyes grow narrow. I was glad the beast could not see me. For a moment the battle around me had dropped away, and there was nothing in my universe except the xenobite and the connection between us.
A Holy Slave.
Vayadan.
The word had an ominous sound even to my human ear. I did not then know it, but the Vayadan were the sworn protectors of a Cielcin Aeta, his last line of defense, his closest counselors, and his concubines—the fathers of his children.
“You do not speak, yukajji. Are you afraid?”
Instantly, I answered, “You have not answered my question, vayadan-do. I asked who you are.”
That impossibly wide grin widened even more. “I am but a finger of his White Hand.”
“Iedyr Yemani ne?” I repeated. Iedyr Yemani. White Hand. I had heard those words before, whispered to me by a demon in the darkness beneath Arae. But the circumstances called for strength and force of will. I would not be afraid, and spat. “That is not a name!”
“I am Iubalu! And I am coming!”
At this, it crushed the camera, the helmet, and the head of the Irchtani within it in its massive metal hand . . . and above I heard—like distant drums—the sound of metal feet on the hull above us.
CHAPTER 26
THE VAYADAN
“PALLI
NO, YOU HAVE THE bridge.”
“Where are you going?” The chiliarch’s words floated after me as I made for the door to the hall.
I stopped, hand hovering just above the door controls. “You heard that thing crawling around on the hull same as me. How long before it gets in through one of the dorsal hatches?”
“Our boys sealed those up!” Pallino shot back.
I shook my head furiously. “It won’t matter.” Earth and Empire knew what sort of kit the chimera had concealed in its body. After the Battle of Arae, the dozen or so intact—but dead—failures the MINOS scientists had created were examined by Legion Intelligence. The demons of Arae had been crafted for war, their bodies augmented with plasma burners in the wrist and shoulders and nerve disruptors in the palms. Ceramic blades lay concealed within each of the chimeras’ arms, and an assortment of explosives, projectile weapons, and other, nastier surprises were doubtless secreted on the creature’s body. And those had only been the prototypes. What Iubalu of the Iedyr Yemani had to hand who could say?
Not I, but I would face it anyway.
“Had,” Pallino said, dropping all rank and formal designation, “stay here.”
I checked the fit of my coif over my forehead, keyed a sequence on my wrist-terminal that desynchronized the device from the holography booth’s projectors. For a moment, I saw my gaunt face reflected in the dull, dark metal of the door. Hollow-eyed, high-cheekboned. I threw the hard switch inside my suit collar, and the helmet components unfurled, opened like a flower and shut about my head. I shut my eyes a moment—just long enough to avoid the familiar panic as all that titanium and black ceramic closed over my face.
Momentarily blind, I punched the door controls. An instant later my suit’s entoptics flickered on; projectors aimed at my eyes showed me my men standing guard in the hall, the wreckage of a dozen or so nahute at their feet. I saw my reflection at the end of the hall, black mask and black armor, the white cape hanging limp in the still air. All turned to look at me, blank white arcs of ceramic where their faces ought to be. Reaching up, I unclasped my cape and tossed it at one of the men, who caught it clumsily. “Siran, with me.”
She didn’t ask questions. Not in front of the men.
“Malag, take command,” she said to her optio. The fellow saluted.
While this changing of the guard was happening, I gestured to a knot of three men standing to the front and left of the little knot. “You’re a trias?” I asked. Their triaster nodded. “Good. You come, too.” And then I began walking, sword unkindled in my hand. As I walked, I signaled, “Udax. Report.”
The Irchtani centurion almost shouted over the line, making me wince, “We’re losing the port side! Your men aren’t getting through fast enough!”
“Then blow the port gangway. Pull your men back to the inner airlocks. Are you there?”
“Aye!” Udax replied. “But if we cut them off from the ship, I don’t know what they’ll do next.”
“We’ll worry about that later! Do as I say, man!”
Something thundered in the distance, a great clamor like the crash of a bus through a crowded storefront. I expected alarms to sound, but the Merciless was so badly damaged she could not even muster up the energy to scream.
“He’s here,” I said.
“Who’s here?” Siran asked.
“Our friend from the tunnel.”
I fancied I could hear the color drain from Siran’s face as she asked, “The demon?”
“Be on your guard,” I said, and turning to her raised a fist. “With me now?”
My centurion and faithful armsman nodded and knocked my fist with her own. “Just another Colosso match, eh?”
“Just another day,” I said. “Come on.”
As my little unit pounded up the corridor, I tracked the sounds of fighting in the halls below. The cough of plasma fire echoed through the ship and men’s cries resounded on the line.
“Enemy in the hold!”
“Contact! Contact!”
“Gods in hell, the size of him!”
“O Mother, deliver us . . .”
Screams.
Then another voice whispered in my ear, high and cold and entirely too close. “Come out! Come out, hurati. Where are you hiding?” The others froze. They had not been on the bridge. They had not heard. The Cielcin spoke Galstani, its affect flat and unfeeling, the product—I guessed—of its machine design. Just as Kharn Sagara had spoken through his machines, the xenobite general spoke with a voice not its own.
“It can hear every word we’re saying,” I said, horror blossoming in me. “It must have hacked the comms.”
“You cannot hide forever,” the vayadan said. “I will find you.”
“Can we lock it out?” Siran asked.
A more pressing question occurred to me, but I did not voice it. Can it access the Tamerlane? Rather than answer her question—for fear of being overheard—I answered, “We need to move quickly.”
* * *
The doors to the hold had been left open when the Cielcin pillaged the vessel. The air had gone, and much of what had been inside was lost and taken away. Loose cables sparked from the high ceiling, and the bodies of dead men—our men—lay strewn on the floor.
They’d been torn apart, and their still-warm blood boiled in the vacuum, orange fading to gold on my suit’s infrared. To pale blue.
“Where did it go?” one of the men asked.
“Not far,” came the alien reply, whispered in our each and every ear. “Not far. Not far.” Still it spoke the tongues of men, spoke that my men might understand and so fear it.
Remembering the way it had attacked our men in the hall by the dormitory block, I cast my eyes upward, expecting to see the beast crawling spider-like along the ceiling, hands and feet magnetized or perhaps clawed onto the roof. But there were only the fingered shadows of catwalks and crane gantries criss-crossing the dark above like a smaller version of the alien hold outside.
“I want to get a look at you,” it said, and I sensed that it was speaking to me. It confirmed this suspicion a moment later, saying, “Killed Otiolo, did you? And Ulurani? You are smaller than I expected—but then your kind are so small.”
I took a few steps away from our group, careful to keep my thumb on the trigger to kindle my blade. “You serve Dorayaica?”
“The Makers lit the stars for him, yukajji. They burn so that you might see what he achieves.”
“We’ll see,” I said.
Iubalu’s voice sounded in my ear, and beneath it I thought I heard the distant tapping of metal on metal carried through the bones of the ship, barely discernible beneath the sounds of gunfire and battle above and around us. “He will light your worlds on fire. He will drink their blood!”
With any luck, Udax would join us soon. “Show yourself, creature!” I said. The memory of the tower of bones still blazed in me, of the man on the dining slab. Tired as I was, anger animated me. I was ready.
“We had hoped there would be more of you coming, but even I did not dare hope it would be you.” The vayadan’s voice dripped venom like snowmelt. “He has long desired you for his collection, Devil of Meidua.”
I felt a chill steal down my spine, and almost kindled my blade. But that was fear talking. I could not afford fear in that moment. I had fought one of these demons before, on Arae, but it had been a crippled thing: only somewhat functional. Here we faced a monster in the fullness of its strength. I remembered the Exalted, Calvert, in the dungeons of the Undying. How fast he had moved, faster than my human reflexes could track.
We need to get it back into the halls, I thought. I could not afford to speak the words, lest it hear us. It will kill us in the open. Keeping to the wall of the hold, I moved toward one of the many side entrances. The way to the cubiculum was through there, by many winding passages. Some of our men were there, guardin
g our living dead in their icy coffins. The reinforcements would be of some help. But we had to get there. Coming down to the hold had been an error, and I’d allowed myself to be lured by the death cries of the men that had been in that place.
But we had a chance . . . so long as it kept talking.
“What does he want with me?”
Cold laughter sounded over the line, and again I heard the faint tapping of metal claws. I cast my eyes around again. There was nothing. Not in visible light or infrared. Whatever the Extrasolarians had done to the vayadan, it no longer glowed with the heat of living fire.
It may as well be dead, I thought. And I fancied a chorus of voices answered me from my depths. Undead. Undead. Undead.
The tapping sounded again, and I had visions of the thing crawling on the walls like some pale spider, or else lurking behind the heavy loading equipment where it sat bracketed to the floor.
“Want with you?” the Cielcin general echoed. “You are his enemy! He wants to break you. And to thank you.”
“Thank me?” I gestured to Siran and the others to fall behind me, to keep their backs to the wall as they pivoted to take up positions nearer the door. “Thank me for what?”
“You have destroyed two of his enemies. Shortened the path to his goal.”
Two? I was being slow. “Otiolo and Ulurani?”
“He will be Aeta Ba-Aetane, the first since Elu brought us to the stars.”
“Aeta Ba-Aetane,” I repeated. “The Prince of Princes?” There was a chilling thought. If the Cielcin clans could unite with a common purpose and strategy, the war would become hell. For the moment, the disparate clans pillaged where they would, burned worlds and took slaves as they wished. For the Legions, it was like rushing to put out fires as they were lit against a city palisade . . . but only one fire at a time, or two. United, the clans could burn the stars.
I remembered Carax of Aramis, then, him and the Pale King he’d met above Hermonassa.
Demon in White Page 25