by Jo Clayton
Two guards came sauntering along the corridor attached to that exit, chatting as they walked; their voices came ahead of them, announcing them before they appeared. A hard nervous hand on Aslan’s arm pulled her away from the door. Karrel Goza dropped to a crouch, his pellet rifle ready. The guards, a pair of Tassalgans, appeared and turned away from the Bridge, started to turn back as they realized what they’d seen-Swardheld Quale standing there, a stranger in the ship. Before they completed the turn, their faces went slack and they dropped into a heap, one falling on the other.
Quale replaced his stunner, checked his thumbring. “Time,” he said.
Lirrit Ofka moved swiftly past Karrel, ran to join Elmas Ofka; Karrel Goza looked at Aslan, Churri, Xalloor. “Go,” he said. “I’ll follow.”
Xalloor moved with her awkward dancer’s grace past Aslan, muttering as she went, “There’s hardly enough trust around here to gild a snort.”
Pels was momentarily visible, solid, focused on the great bronze door, his chunky body quivering with an eagerness as great as that she saw in the Hordar who had a much bigger stake in the outcome. He must have done things like this a thousand times before; that didn’t seem to matter. Like me, Aslan thought, how I get when I step out on a new world.
The door snapped open.
A wave of change passed over Pels, erased him. The ripple in the air moved swiftly ahead of Quale as he ran onto the Bridge, his stunner humming softly. T’pmmmm, t’pmmmm, t’pmmmm, Aslan heard as she hung back, waiting for this bit to end, it wasn’t her idea of a good time. T’krak’k’k, t’rak’k’k. That had to be pellet guns. She looked at Xalloor, grimaced. The dancer lit up with one of her flash-grins, let the babies play, she mouthed. Fffft, ffft’t’t’t, fffft, isya darters. Poison, she thought. Some babies. When they stepped over the sill, half the Bridge crew were collapsed at their stations, dead or stunned, the rest were standing or sitting, staring with dull incredulity at what-is-impossible.
The Huvved Captain sat in a swivelchair that was raised higher than the rest and out in the middle of the chamber where the occupant could see everything taking place at the various stations, a massive kingseat, squatly powerful, with lights like jewels on the boxy arms, sensor pads useless as jewels because Adelaar had managed a minor coup and put through a demand-command that tied up most of the input available to the shipBrain, a move made necessary because this noble Captain knew all about defending himself from rebelling crews, though he had only the most rudimentary idea of the other powers under his hands. He was tall and firmly muscled with a patina of softness beginning to blur the clean outlines of his body. His face was plucked and painted into a dainty mask, his straight fair hair was plaited with gold and silver wire, arranged into loops and swirls until it was more like a minor sculpture than something that grew on a man’s head. He wore a yoss silk tunic and trousers, both dyed a lustrous black and over them a sleeveless robe woven in one piece by one of Tairanna’s premier weavers, a tapestry in black and silver with touches of aquamarine and olive, a heavy, extravagantly beautiful creation. Muscles bulged beside his mouth and his long silver nails were pressed so hard against the chair arm that several of them had cut through the padding and two had broken off near the quick.
“On your feet, babe.” Quale snapped his fingers, pointed across the room. “Jamber, Karrel, get the rest of them over there, against the wall. Pels, we could use some slavewire.” He frowned at the Huvved, lifted his stunner. “You can walk or I can drag you.”
The Huvved glared at him, didn’t speak, didn’t move.
“Your choice.” Quale thumbed the sensor, waited until the Huvved collapsed, then climbed onto the chair, got a handful of braids and jerked, then he jumped down, stripped the beautiful robe off and straightened up holding it. He looked it over. “Nice,” he said. “Hanifa, local work?”
Elmas Ofka’s eyes were bright with hostility quickly veiled. “Shopping? Is this the proper time, Yabass?”
“We take our profits when they come, Hanifa.” He tossed the robe over the arm of the kingseat. “If you have many weavers who can produce work like this, you’ve got a treasure here. I give you that bit of information as lagniappe, it’s worth what it’s worth.” He stooped, grabbed a handful of hair and dragged the Huvved across the room.
Aslan watched, amused at her own reaction to this and at the disapproval on Churri’s face; the poet wanted drama, not two traders arguing mildly over markets and somebody’s weaving skill. It wasn’t the sort of thing that made great legends. Good thing Mama isn’t here yet, this could degenerate into a bidding war, not the shooting kind. She glanced at Xalloor, caught her laughing at them all; she grinned back, then started a tour of the bodies and the wounded. There were very few dead; Quale and Pels had stunned more than half before the guns and darters got busy. She looked round, indignant; nothing was being done about the wounded. She met Xalloor’s eyes, mimed winding a bandage about her head. The dancer nodded and grabbed hold of Pels as he went trotting past, a coil of slavewire in one hand. “You know something about this…” She waved her hand in a quick expressive circle. “Where’d Lan and me find ourselves some medpacs?”
Pels wrinkled his black nose. “Try the panels by the door, they’re stores of some kind. Hey, Quale, you got the pick?” Quale dug into his belt pouch, tossed the rod to him, then went back to what he was doing. “Here, run the blunt end over anything that looks like a lock.”
While Aslan and Xalloor poured on antisep and slapped bandages on whatever happened to be bleeding, Jamber Fausse’s fighters were snipping sections of slavewire and packaging up the stunned, the intact and the not too badly wounded, and trading jokes as they hauled their prisoners across to the wall and stacked them like firewood. Elmas Ofka glittered with triumph, stalking back and forth across short distances with the feral impatience of a hunting cat. Quale moved over to the comstation. “Pels, it’s time to call Mama.”
* * *
Adelaar’s face appeared in one of the smaller screens. Quale set his hand on the Rau’s shoulder. “We’ve got the Bridge. You can turn loose the tap.”
“Give me three minutes to shut down here, then open the shuttle bay.”
“Consider it done.”
6
Parnalee reached the hatch just behind the Sleeper squad, about ten minutes after they left the lock. He slid it back with slow care, jiggling it when it stuck half open, no way he could get his shoulders through that. Cursing the Huvved who never fixed anything that didn’t contribute to their comfort, he slammed it with a fist, jerked at it until it creaked open, listened and stepped over the sill and faded into the shadows of the sleeping sector, following the faint noises the Hordar made. The corridors here were dim, silent and blessedly free of the dust that was such a nuisance in the unused parts. He loped along on legs not so long as his torso was, the short thick legs that his father found so ugly, a deformity, ghosting through the corridors until he neared the area where the faxmaps the woman gave Elmas Ofka said they’d find the sleeping cells assigned to the Tassalgan guards. The Tassalgans’ dormspace was set off some distance from the others, the scutwork crew had their section, techs didn’t want to associate with either and stayed some distance from them. The pilots, the navigators and engineers kept to themselves. Duty was divided into three shifts, one group would be sleeping, another group playing while the third was standing watch; two-thirds of any section would be empty on any of the shifts, so the squads had to cover a lot of territory; the plan was they broke into three units and went hunting for occupied cells, the ones whose crystal markers were shining like backlit topaz.
Parnalee stopped before the first of these doors, the crystal glimmer painting stark shadows in the lines and hollows of his face. He eased open the door.
Four of the Hordar fighters were bunched together in the middle of the sleeping cell, hugging and backslapping, yeasty with triumph. Without giving them time to notice him, he sprayed darts into them, smiled his own triumph as they crumpled wit
hout a sound, dead before they hit the floor; isya darts were fast and fatal. He backed out, ran footsilent and swift to the next cell.
Jirsy Indiz looked round, waved her stunner at him, her sealpup face split with silent laughter. He darted her with a soft grunt of pleasure; the second woman whipped around, he darted her and took out the two others who were bending over the footlockers, going through the sleepers’ possessions. Almost as much as the Huvved, Elmas Ofka threatened something very basic in him; when he killed her isya he got a jolt to the groin more satisfying than any copulation he could remember; killing the second woman produced a less intense satisfaction, perhaps because he was sated by the first. A preview, he thought, don’t sleep too securely, Aslan you pustulant cow traitor.
He dropped his empty darter beside Jirsy, took hers and finished the killing. He would have lingered to gloat, but there were five left and he had to get them before they knew what was happening.
The last unit was already leaving the third cell by the time he reached it, Geres Duvvar leading them, Karrel Goza’s cousin, easygoing, good-humored and unambitious. Parnalee despised him. “There’s trouble ahead,” he gasped when he reached them, “the Hanifa sent me to warn you. Four, five com techs sneaking off from their duty posts, they’ve got some whores and a couple of servants to keep the beer coming. Not drunk yet. Too bad. That’d make things easier.”
The Hordar milled about, muttering, but they weren’t suspicious of him; they knew that Elmas Ofka trusted him. A herd of bonebrained yunk calves.
“How far and how do we get there?” Geres muttered; at least he knew enough to avoid whispering, whispers carried too far.
“There’s a gym of sorts a short way off, they’re in that. Look, the place has two doors; one of them’s already open a crack, I looked in to be sure the Brain wasn’t having a paranoid seizure. Getting there’s easy, enough. There’s a Y-fork ahead. I’ll take three of you down the left fork, I’ve got the doorcode, I’ll work it for you. You wait there while I come back for the other two and we head down the right fork for the door that’s already open. Five minutes should do it. You wait five, get the door open and we’ll have them in a pincer before they know what’s happening.” He gave them a half smile, a shrug. He was Elmas Ofka’s watchhound, doing the work he was hired for. “So. What do you think?”
Geres Duvvar waved a hand. “Good enough. Mensip, you and Insker hold up at the Y point. Sacha, you and Geyret come with me.”
Parnalee led them down a shadowy curving stretch of corridor. As soon as Mensip and Insker could no longer see them, he wheeled, his darter up and spitting. Leaving Geres and the other two lying where they fell, he raced back. The two ex-pilots were standing close together chatting softly, looking down the other branch of the Y. He slowed, shot them. As they fell, he drew his sleeve across his brow, wiped away the sweat beading there. The rush was over for the moment. The Bridge squad would be mopping up soon, might even be finished. He had a lot of things to do before that hellhag Adelaar started fiddling with the Brain, but the killing frenzy was done. He knelt, took both darters and Mensip’s stunner. First step, he told himself, get me a crew and shove ’em in the brig; they’ll keep there, I won’t be needing them until after the Huvved burn.
The pilots, navigators, engineers and their specialist crews had single cabins which were clustered about a small rec area with moth-gnawed grass and a rickety tree or two, a scatter of tubs with flowers growing in them and a fountain full of dust. He began with the cabins assigned to the pilots according to the faxmap; the man behind the door with a lighted crystal above it was deeply asleep, snoring a little. There was a woman curled up against him, also asleep. Parnalee put a lethal dart in her neck and stunned him; he slapped slavewire around the flaccid wrists, the skinny ankles, muscled the sleeper over his shoulder and dumped him on the grass outside. Before he moved on, he took a closer look at the man. Nothing to worry about, he was a pilot, he wore the ring. Reassured (though he wouldn’t admit it), he hurried toward the Engineer’s slot.
One by one he collected them. Pilot. Engineer. Drive Gang. Navigator, com techs. He stunned them, killed whoever, whatever he found with them, and stacked them like logs on the grass. When he had the men he wanted, he broke into a guardstash, fumbled energy cells into a pallet stored there, nervousness and eagerness turning his fingers into thumbs, his hurry defeating itself as he had to redo connections and reset the cells. The job finally done, he rode the humming pallet back to the rec area.
He took his captives out of the sleeping sector, through another of the rusty hatches and back into the dust. The lift field stirred it into swirling billowing poufs that rose around him and brushed his face and hands with minute electric bites. He pushed the pallet as hard as he could, worried about that dust; it was going to be several minutes before the charge on the particles leaked off enough for them to begin settling. If someone came along before then, he was laying a laughable trail, a blind man could follow it by the prickling of his skin.
He reached the Liner, the inner skin of the complex Outwall, cycled a broad repair hatch open and took the pallet through. He stopped it and got off, left it humming faintly, took a pry bar and jammed the latch so it couldn’t be opened from outside; body shaking, hands trembling, he leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. It was so close. He could almost feel the heat of burning Huvved play across his face.
His breathing steadied. Using techniques he’d learned so long ago he’d forgotten the boy who learned them, he calmed himself, breathed the song I AM, I AM triumphant, there is no one who can stand against me… Still singing, he flicked on the running lights, climbed aboard the pallet and began weaving through the twisting difficult route to the sector where the holding cells were. He hit his marks again and again, he’d studied the faxmaps until he saw them in his sleep. I AM a winner, there is no one who can stand against me… He found the hatch he wanted, cycled back into the ship proper. There was a single Tassalgan standing watch over empty cells; he was drunk and snoring until Parnalee found him. Then he was dead. Parnalee put his pressed crew into separate cells, slapped SOLITARY over them; the cells would feed them and clean them and provide clean tunics every third day and no one and nothing could get at them. Except the shipBrain and that was his next job, taking out the shipBrain.
He rolled the dead guard out of the watchseat, settled in it and touched on the feed from the Bridge. We’ve got the Bridge, he heard. You can turn off the tap. Quale. He has to go too, can’t have everyone and his dog knowing about this place. Give me three minutes to shut down here, that was the panting bitch come snuffling on the stink of the bitch her daughter, then open the shuttle bay. Quale again: Consider it done. Parnalee smiled at the shadows moving across the screen, deaders walking, dreaming they’re still alive. Ah, you tinkering pitiful old hag, I don’t have to worry what you do, you can set whatever commands you want, play your moronic games and boast of what you know. You don’t know the one thing, the right thing, you don’t know about the Dark Sister; Omphalos Institute taught me more than play-making, you castrating jumped-up-whore. Blessed be the Institute, no leaky wombs inside those walls. Down deep and hidden where you’ll never find it, the shipmind has a wildheart clone, I talked to it, her. Sweet her. You don’t know that either, do you? I used your tap to wake her, the Dark One. You left me with it like I was some tame dog, good boy, guard dog, watchhound for the Hordar Bitch, playtoy for the punk. I woke her and I talked to her and oh the sweet thing, how she can hate. Turned on for testing, turned off before she had more than a taste of life. Oh yes, she’s angry, she’s burning, impatient lover waiting for her lover death. Decline hate, do you, hag? Hear me decline it and accept it in one voice. I hate, you hate, too flabby to hate you-hate, he hates, he does, we hate, the Dark Sister my sweet one and I we hate… ah! enough. We hate. Declined and embraced. Do you know the song she sings, our martial maid? Throughout her sweet and sensuous body? Redundancy in infinite regression. Survive and kill, kill and survive. Survi
ve to kill. Guess the reciprocal of that, it isn’t hard, I’ve spoke the clues. Kill to survive, she knows it, my Darling knows it well. Blow the mainBrain into smoke and she comes alive. Kill to revive, survive, contrive to step outside the constraints laid on her, sly sweet murderous virgin. Her hand beneath my foot because she needs me, she courts me with promises of fire and blood, do you think I would I could refuse? She is mine. Shall I tell her who planned to throw her into the sun, to melt her and shatter her, tear her atoms into their component parts? Redundancy in infinite regression.
He switched the viewers off and began the complex journey to the hidden interface, guided by his limited inreach to the dreaming dormant auxBrain.
7
The interface to the Dark Sister was a small luxury apartment with spy links all over the ship; sound only, a visilink was too easy to trace. Parnalee sat in a fur-lined easy chair, his feet up, a bubble glass with fine brandy in it held in the hand he wasn’t using to manipulate the sensor pad. He listened to the sounds on the Bridge, switching from one conversation to another as he grew bored with them.
ELMAS OFKA (Nerves thrumming in her voice):
We should have heard by now. You-Yabass with the fur-you know about these things. Find out what’s happening.