The Horseshoe Nail (The Donn Book 1)

by S Thomson-Hillis

  Meow? A cat? They had a ship’s cat? Jenson owned a pet? No...

  He paused by the entrance to E-Blue-7, his head cocked, frowning.

  Meow? It triggered memories better forgotten.

  Tam’s history with meow was not good. Lent had been the first partner he’d been assigned in UC-I and she’d become his wife and his life. Then one day, on a rim planet that Tam’d rather forget, she’d trodden on a buried T-1 dirty device. As she’d died, slowly, she’d made noises not unlike that meow, and he could do nothing but hold her while the meows got fainter, until, finally, they’d stopped. She’d died. Lent had died and left him alone with two daughters to bring up. That was the day he’d stopped cutting his hair and bound it into the Scolosian mourning plait, worn to honour a dead wife. Tam had sworn he never would cut it off. After that he’d requested a deep-space UC-II posting, which would pay the school bills and leave something for his sister who’d taken in his daughters. Krystie had refused his request and instead given him Sim Edger to babysit. Now Edger was dead as well.

  Meow.

  His daughters had made sounds like that after he’d told them about their mother. Not in front of him, of course, but later when he’d checked their rooms to say goodnight he’d heard them, in the dark, holding each other first and then their father. He’d deemed Imperious too dangerous a billet to keep Lent’s girls safe and sound and secure. Their life was stable, they attended good schools and kindly Aunt Kasta looked after them as if they were her own children. Sisters, Tam had three of them. An only son and a devoted brother, he’d been well trained in detecting the most subtle feminine distress call since the moment of birth.

  Those pathetic meows screwed him into the deck. He was helpless.

  No, he wasn’t. This time was different. Meow.

  It yanked him forward like a puppet, jerked him through the defence coupling stacks and on into the devastation beyond. There and where and there. Meow.

  Meow was a boneless heap of flesh, each meow marking a vain effort to rise.

  Kicking away shreds of insulator, he flung the incriminating wires well clear and glanced up at E-blue-7 seeing right away the miracle she had achieved. He whammed the nearest emergency alarm. It didn’t work. He knelt and checked her out. No broken bones so he moved her into recovery position. Her breathing was fast and shallow. Motion revived her and she opened glazed eyes, confused and fearful, and saw and recognised him.

  “Tam?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m here, it’s all right, Ellis, easy, you’ll be fine now.”

  Harris automatically fell into a familiar routine, it’s-ok, daddy-is-here-now, all-better-soon, shhhh, all-better-soon. Oddly, Ellis focused. He had been a natural father figure all his life and her father had been as dark as he. She didn’t want her father, she wanted Mark, but Mark would only get angry. Tam and Kai, the two personalities inextricably combined.

  She clutched his jacket. “Kai,” she announced imperiously. “I’ve had enough. I want to go home, now. Please.” She’d been going home, to Typhin to meet Kai and join the last stand against the Autocracy, but instead she’d been trapped in a nightmare. Typhin was long dead, there was no home, there was no father, but paternal techniques hadn’t altered in a millennium and Ellis was a little girl who wanted her daddy to make it all better.

  “I know, I know, hush now, we’ll be home soon enough.” Clumsily, anxiously, he tried to make her more comfortable. Suddenly some small noise, a crunch of an unwary foot at the entrance, bade him look round and up, straight into Macluan’s troubled eyes.

  “Who’s Kai?” asked Mark groggily. “Are you Kai? Why does she call you Kai?”

  A double-take showed Harris bad news. Macluan was as confused as Ellis.

  He rose, unable to believe his bad luck and his back creaked uneasily.

  “Can you walk?” he asked Mark.

  After a moment considering, the swaying figure clinging to the door frame nodded.

  “Good,” decided Harris. “Then you walk, I’ll carry. Medical. Now.”

  * * *

  They herded off men a score at a time as if they were animals at an abattoir, or less, as if they were mechanicals destined for the scrap heap. Each man was run under an arch, clearly testing the subcutaneous Ident chip, and then they were packed off in different directions. Sam followed the pack, remembering that he and Soren had been injected when they’d first been taken. Discards, those who staggered or fell or (rarely) ran, were shot and disposed of, and another dummy soon stepped up. These were the final remnants of the experimental batches testing the elite processing. If it worked, well and good, and if it didn’t the incinerators were efficient and there were plenty more to practise on. These were older men, or younger, or those considered unstable, not prime meat. They were expendable.

  It was a sanitary place, specialising in docile insanity, biometric humanoids and mesmerised terror. For what seemed like agonising hours, Sam forced himself to watch. What he saw scorched onto the back of his skull and could never be totally erased.

  The deft pinions of the mechanical servitors cut fine adjustments through the skin-tight mesh caps, and command cones were drilled into the fine bones behind the ears. The men didn’t scream much though they bled a lot. Some woke up. Then they screamed.

  Cast-offs, with lolling heads, inane grins and clumsy shuffles, were driven to the deep drains at the edges and shot so they toppled directly into chomping incinerator chutes. The executioners were often others who had been in the same soulless line mere hours previously.

  At first Sam couldn’t take it in.

  The men were like mechanicals. Mechanical servitors were common and programmed to preserve sentient life and health. The mechanicals would have had nervous breakdown after breakdown before carrying out such dreadful commands. They would’ve shut down.

  But men just did it.

  Men with fresh blood seeping from the shiny implants in their ears.

  On the way back to his hidey-hole Sam stopped, shaking so hard even his bones jolted. Then he vomited. Creeping a few paces on, he crashed down and did the same again.

  He still didn’t understand; he couldn’t. It was too big.

  Too horrible.

  Something stopped him going mad, some gracious saviour kept him sane.

  Later, crouched in his secret place, cold, shivering and so far from reality, life grew dark. In the end all he knew was that time was running out. And it had to stop.

  In the name of sweet, weeping mercy someone had to stop it.

  There was no one left but Sam Nevus.

  And all he wanted to do was run away, but he couldn’t.

  Whatever he decided to do, it needed to be done soon.

  Very, very soon.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  A space had been cleared in the docking bays over by the inner vacuum-shields; it was fringed by mechanics, servo-mechanicals and a medical team. The junked up ZR-3 was coming in fast, still cold from the Bylanes, on sub-power and, apparently, with a crew just about as junked as she was. She swung in, long and low, and dropped like a rock.

  As the ramp fell there was a collective tidal surge.

  The Duty Medical Officer took the lead towing Biotechs and a humming survival-gurney, a floating bug with a viscose lid, its lights already blinking. At the hatch, he cannoned into a tall Scolosian, with grey-speckled hair straggling from his mourning plait. As they danced the DMO suddenly stopped, professional alarm bells ringing.

  “You?” he frowned.

  “No.” Tam Harris shook his tousled head. “She’s back there. I can walk.”

  “Fine, so you walk straight down to the Medical bays.” With a curt gesture the DMO indicated that one of his Biotechs should stick with Harris. “We’ll catch up later.”

  The cavalcade trundled deeper into the ship’s narrow gangways, ending in a scrum at an open cabin door. On the bunk at the rear was a body wrapped in a thin survival cloak and looped over it possessively was a tall, fair man with his back
to the medical crew.

  The DMO bullied into the cabin, narrowly missing a collision with Jenson, who was propping up the wall behind the entrance. The man on the bunk flung a protective arm in front of the body on the bunk causing DMO Ajal Kelsey a knee-jerk reaction to some dipstick accidentally rearranging a casualty’s innards. “Don’t move him.” It was a roar.

  The fair man whipped round. Even out of uniform the DMO recognised that glare.

  “Her,” Mark growled. “You took your time.”

  He sounded slurred and Kelsey did a double-take as he slithered past. “Right, Captain Macluan, if you could just tell me what you know...” Running the detector down Ellis’ arm, he found a likely vein, corrected the coder minimally and locked the hypo on, raising an unsubtly appalled brow at the observant team behind him.

  “Her name is Ellis.” Mark was numb and dumb and cold, trapped in a straight jacket of not knowing what to do. He could feel her leaving him, dissolving…

  “Not quite what I meant.” Ejecting the empty cartridge, Kelsey flung his lead Biotech a sharper look. The Biotech noted the reader’s red blip and returned a quick grimace over his shoulder. “Listen,” Kelsey reasoned urgently. “I need your help and so does she. How long has she been like this? How did she get so poorly? Do you know what’s wrong?”

  “The burns? A few days, no more. We did what we could.”

  “Yes, I can see that. Good patching, whoever did it, but they’re not her,” catching a spark in Mark’s eye and slowing down, “Ellis’ problem. How long has she been sick? How long is it since she’s kept food down and how long has she been unconscious?”

  “Take-off? On and off?” It wasn’t like Mark to be so woolly. “Harris thought she was space-sick,” he dredged out of the slurry. “Take-off, I think. Maybe. A bit before too.”

  The watching Jenson’s brows lowered into a scowl.

  “How long ago was take-off?”

  “Four or maybe five days? There was the shock too, E-blue-7, I think...”

  No help there then. The Biotech flipped the lid of the ominously humming gurney, and jostled Mark out of the way while they lifted her in. Something shrill complained from deep inside. The medics’ eyes met. “Damn,” Kelsey muttered without meaning to.

  That was a mistake. Slumped at the end of the bunk, Mark stiffened.

  Jenson blew out a silent whistle, and peeled off the bulkhead.

  The survival-gurney and Biotech glided away down the passage.

  “What’s wrong?” demanded Mark, rigid as a board.

  Kelsey’s second mistake was to walk away. As he left he ran a professional eye over Jenson and marked him up as a tad singed but well able to look after himself.

  Dazed he might be, but Mark wasn’t used to people walking off without answering his questions, he grabbed the Medic’s arm and spun him round. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  Jenson tutted and straightened up. Some people yell before they pan the living crap out of you, but Mark went all soft and sly and glassy-eyed. Just like that.

  The startled Kelsey made no attempt to disentangle. “As far as I can tell there’s something screwing up her entire nervous system. Her auto-immune is failing.”

  “How so?”

  “Captain,” snapped the exasperated Kelsey, “when we know, we’ll tell you.”

  Wrong answer. Without any noticeable effort or change of expression, Mark coiled Kelsey’s uniform collar in his fingers and began to twist. At the same time he snatched the man’s gaze and trapped it. There was a gasp and Kelsey went limp. “You’ll tell me now.”

  “Back off, Mark,” warned Jenson. “He has a job to do and you’re not helping.”

  Blood pumped. Once. Twice.

  Mark dropped the choking Medic but held his eyes.

  The DMO sagged. “My readings suggest,” he faltered, sounding as if he was talking through a fog, “she should be dead, she’s been surviving on willpower for some time.”

  “No,” Mark denied. “You will help her. You will not let her die.”

  Ok, that was enough. Hastily pushing between them, Jenson severed the link.

  Kelsey’s ears buzzed. “Did he…?”

  Don’t ask, warned Jenson’s steady gaze, don’t ask and don’t push your luck. “You might be right about surviving on willpower,” he said. “She’s Donn too.”

  “She’s what?” And nobody had mentioned it so far? Physiologically it made little difference, but to treatment and analysis, to resistance to drugs... And then two and two made five and suspicion clicked into certainty. “She?” He jerked his head at Mark. “He?”

  “Oh yes, she went down and he fell right after her. The word you’re looking for is fascinating, I believe.” Jenson looked purposefully at the exit. “Weren’t you just leaving?”

  The DMO licked dry lips. All he needed was a mystical mind-meld to wind up an already complex case but it certainly explained the Captain acting out. Cut one and the other bled... Once the Donn had been famous for it. Would they have to duplicate treatment on Macluan? “We’ll need him too,” he looked at Mark but spoke to Jenson. “Stat. Ok?”

  Jenson nodded, waiting until the sound of steps died away. “That was clever.”

  They forgot, and Jenson forgot too for a lot of the time, that Mark wasn’t human he just looked that way. And when it happened, as it sometimes did no matter what, that Macluan caved in before internal hard-wiring and reverted, it threw everything out of kilter and left Jenson shaken and empty. This time he was angry as well as shaken and empty.

  Mark had locked down. “She can’t die, H,” he breathed. “I can’t let her die.”

  “Mind-screwing the medical staff is not helpful.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Tell him,” said Jenson briskly. “Now, we walk nicely to Medical, or I knock you out and feed you to them. After that prize-prat performance, they’d love it. March.”

  * * *

  The creature behind the double lock seethed.

  Oh, that wretched, wretched early beacon that pulled the plan forward. It seemed there was not enough reserve power saved for the Wheels to take their original Bylanes route and they would have to cross the final system in real-space. Sightings, inevitably, could not be avoided, and might lead to premature attacks. Carolli said it did not matter. There was nothing that the Seven Sisters could not withstand. The threat didn’t matter?

  Of course it mattered.

  It mattered because it meant change to the plan, additional risk, stemming from error.

  Carolli preached flexibility. That made the creature even angrier.

  If Carolli believed himself its mentor, eventually sharing its power, he was delusional.

  When he’d woken it he had promised it ultimate power. Ultimate power is ultimate power, and nobody shares ultimate power otherwise it’s not ultimate power.

  Carolli said there was no possibility of a Donn threat. Only one known Donn in the entire galaxy lived, an only, lonely male, and the Baron had promised to ensure that his wings were well and truly clipped. He believed that too, but, wondered the creature, was it true?

  Long after contact was cut, it simmered as it waited for the diagnostic tests to begin.

  When it saw those results, then that would be the telling moment.

  Until then, wait.

  * * *

  Carolli’s Diplomatic XT-1 returned to Imperious two days after the ZR-3 docked, and as predicted Eban Krystie found multiple reasons to keep the Baron busy in the diplomatic suites. The Baron scanned reports and constantly lied about his admiration for High Council philosophy. It was amazing how much information Eban Krystie believed vital for High Council comment and reaction. It changed nothing. It was a tiresomely obvious reaction.

  War Games? Oh Krystie, so predicable, you tedious amateur.

  Carolli discovered the location of the Games and smiled. It actually simplified his life as Krystie was giving him a lift to where he wanted to go. After that he saw just how much of the fleet was
involved and the smile faded. That was a lot of potential firepower in a most awkward location. Everyone from the rest of the fleet, it seemed, was playing War Games except the deep research-squads from Evermore and they’d sent over a mobile observation team. Carolli was very tempted to ask Krystie if he’d sold grandstand tickets.

  Life calmed down. Until he discovered the ZR-3 was home with survivors.

  The female they’d got out was called Ellis.

  Kai Matheson had never called his daughter Ellis, it had been Mellisand, yet outside the family others had. It was her common name not her given name, and the Donn had peculiar customs about names. That rankled. Not so much the name thing but that he didn’t understand it. Carolli had never grasped why each used at least two or even three names.

  If Minon had been half-way competent this could never have happened.

  Just for a few minutes his rage blazed white hot.

  She should have died over two centuries ago.

  All trace of Kai Matheson’s family had gone. Matheson had been Typhion Donn, but the Typhion longevity gene was incompatible and Donn talents did not tolerate mongrel nodes. Autocracy genetic specialists had failed to splice them successfully for years.

  Nobody knew that better than Emir Carolli.

  So how had she survived?

  Then he remembered... She’d been last heard of on the final recall to Typhin.

  And he realised... Harth Norn and the traps his masters had set.

  She’d been trapped in the Dome.

  The irony was not appreciated.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  A stately battleship, Biotech Sellars steamed straight into the office of the resident DMO with only a perfunctory tap on the door. Ajal Kelsey gritted his teeth as his stylus continued to slide its tranquil way across his pad. Most medics used secure voice encryptions, one of the few bits of Autocracy medical technology not banned during the cleansing, but Kelsey didn’t trust A-tech and had very old-fashioned notions. Besides a stylus gave the illusion of control, a survival trait when you worked with Eunice Sellars.