A Prison Unsought

by Sherwood Smith

  According to Stepan, it was a wickedly clever prison. “They could have dusted the planet to add the trace elements we need,” he had explained. “But this way, there’s just enough metal to ensure that we won’t try to build a civilization without it—just enough to keep us fighting over it, and so never a threat to them.”

  She turned back to the others. “Why couldn’t it have been a man? They’re so much easier to share.”

  “They’d probably fight just as hard over a stud that threw twins—no love lost there,” said Stepan, his precise Douloi accent grating on her ears.

  “Easy for you to say. They’re both staunch supporters of our house, and they’re both right, in a way.”

  “Right!” Lazoro cackled, waving his haunch of roast jaspar. “Right? Since when does that have anything to do with it?”

  The hanging was pushed aside again, revealing the seven-foot bulk of her general, Gath-Boru. Moving with unlikely grace, he took his place at the table.

  “You know what I mean,” she said finally.

  The dwarf had been her mother’s chancellor until her untimely death twenty-five months before; without him, Londri doubted that the Lodestone Siege would still be hers. He was almost twenty, the same age as Stepan.

  But Stepan would say sixty, and call it the prime of life.

  However you reckoned it, she thought, twenty—what they called sixty standard years in the Thousand Suns—was old on Gehenna. Deprived in his youth of the supplements delivered from orbit by the hated Panarchists, he’d fallen victim to one of the numerous deficiency diseases that were the lot of so many on this strange planet. But it hadn’t affected his mind.

  Lazoro smiled at her affectionately. “Of course I know. You’re just like your mother. But she learned, and so will you, if Telos gives you time, that right and might are uneasy partners at best.”

  “And as long as I am here,” said Gath-Boru, his voice deep and resonant from his massive chest, “you needn’t worry about that.” He filled a flagon with beer. “There’s only one real question here,” he continued. “Which one of them do we want to fight? Whichever one of them you decide against will ally with the Tasuroi. Your army is ready, whatever the decision.”

  “You cannot hope to make everyone happy whatever you choose.” Stepan spread his long, pale hands on the table in front of him. “The best you can do is minimize their unhappiness.”

  “As well to say ‘water’s wet’ or ‘iron is rare,’” Lazoro commented irritably. ‘That’s a tautology of government.”

  The chancellor used his short legs to lean his tall chair back, bouncing precariously with his toes against the table’s edge. It was a habit of his when he was vexed; Londri had been waiting for him to tip over backward since she was a little girl. He never had.

  She said nothing as the two bickered. A yawn cracked her jaws open, intensifying the ache behind her eyes; the onset of dawn signaled the usual end of the waking day for the inhabitants of Gehenna, and she had had little sleep in the past few days. Her stomach churned, threatening a return of the nausea that was never far away.

  Underneath the table a hound commenced the rhythmic whimper of a dream, its legs scrabbling in the rushes.

  “There, there, bitling, not to worry.” Londri smiled at the incongruous gentleness in Anya Steelhand’s husky alto. The muscles in the forge master’s arm flexed as she reached down to stroke the animal’s head. The whimpering stopped, replaced by the thumping racket of the big dog’s tail.

  The big woman straightened up and glared at the two men across the table from her, her pale eyes lent even more intensity by the contrast with her glossy black skin. She slammed a big fist down on the table and heaved herself to her feet; the candlesticks danced and the mugs rattled.

  “You two would argue over the Last Skyfall itself!”

  Lazoro’s chair fell forward with a crash as the dwarf threw up his hands to cover his head in mock terror. Stepan blinked at Anya, his round, plump face blank.

  “House Ferric has the right to the third child,” said Anya. “We get that all the sooner if we decide in favor of House Aztlan and divide the twins, but that will leave us facing Comori and the Tasuroi—a larger force than if we decide against Aztlan.”

  She peered at Londri. “That’s the decision, Your Majesty: is getting our hands on a fertile woman that much sooner worth the risk?”

  “Our spies say she is in fragile health,” said Lazoro. “We can’t risk waiting.”

  Twins. A wave of nausea welled up in Londri’s guts, and that decided her, but before she could speak, from the corridor outside came a THUMP, drag, THUMP, drag. As the noise grew louder, it was accompanied by a hoarse grunting in synchrony with its rhythm.

  The hanging in the doorway bellied out at its base and fell back over a naked figure, albino-white and epicene, that leapt clumsily on all fours toward the table like a child-sized toad. Its face was blank of meaning, somehow even less expressive than a corpse.

  It stopped behind Londri’s chair; she twisted around, not wanting to look, but afraid that if she didn’t, it would touch her.

  “Oracle . . . Oracle . . . Oracle,” it piped in a high, thin voice, thick strings of spittle hanging from its blubbery purple lips. Its eyes were pink and crusted with rheum. “Szuri . . . Szuri . . . Szuri.”

  Londri shrank back in her chair as it humped closer, repeating its mindless litany. Anya stepped beside her, one big hand on the Ironqueen’s neck, its horny weight comforting. The forge master kicked the creature away, her voice hoarse with rage.

  “Go away, you wretched abortion!” She bit off the last word—the vilest curse on Gehenna—with disgusted precision. “Go tell your master we will come, and not to send you again.”

  The creature retreated, thump-dragging itself out the door, trailing behind it a wailing cry: “Hurt . . . hurt . . . hurt.”

  Londri caught a glimpse of Stepan’s face. The only Isolate among them, Stepan expressed his horror—the others, born and raised on Gehenna, merely looked uncomfortable or angry.

  They don’t have things like that in the Thousand Suns. They don’t have to.

  “Are you all right?” Anya asked. “We can put him off.”

  Londri shook her head. “Yes. No.” Her voice shook. Her mother had never discussed this with her; her death had prevented Londri from learning the true nature of the link between House Ferric and the exiled Phanist who dwelt in the lowest levels of the castle. She only knew that every time he called, her mother went, and so must she.

  She stood up. “This just confirms that the Szuri Pastures are important. Let’s get it over with.”

  ABOARD THE SAMEDI

  “Ow ow ow! R-run it again!”

  Kedr Five’s squeal of laughter was nearly drowned by the guffaws of the others on the bridge of the Samedi.

  “I can’t watch it again,” Sundiver cried, her slanted green eyes running with tears. “Send it over the hyperwave—Sodality’s gonna love this one.” She bent over her console, still whooping, her thick mane of silver hair hiding her face.

  “Got an idea. Don’t send it yet,” Moob put in, red-filed teeth bared in a fleering grin. She hunched over her console, keying quickly.

  Hestik clumped his fist on his own console, running the com back. Tat Ombric turned her gaze to the viewscreen overhead, her emotions a strange mixture of laughter and guilt.

  Once again they all watched the Panarch and his advisers, all old, dressed in the grimy gray prison garb that Emmet Fasthand, captain of Samedi, wouldn’t let them wash. They sat at their barren table eating. Tat bent her ear, trying to catch the conversation. They talked so quick, in those musicky voices, it was hard to follow.

  Without warning the gravs went off, and anyone in motion floated right off their benches, some reaching hastily for anchor. Food on lifting spoons or in glasses about to be drunk from splashed out in messy globules, which several swam clumsily to catch.

  Two of the old people bumped into each other, gnarled a
rms and legs pumping for purchase, and when most of them were in midair, Sundiver had hit the gravs again, and the prisoners thumped down hard, their food on top of them—that which hadn’t splattered on walls and bulkheads.

  “Look at that old bald one,” Hestik sobbed. “On top of the ugly one with the squint! ‘Wanna chatz?’” He parodied a quivering, senile voice.

  The bridge crew whooped again, all except Moob, who still worked—and Tat, who smiled reluctantly.

  Tat looked away from the tiny old woman on the floor cradling a broken arm. She tried to suppress the discomfort, figuring that these nicks were shortly going to be duffed, anyway.

  Moob and Hestik had decided to belay needling that despicable Morrighon; at some point his Dol’jharian master might find out what they were doing, and no one was certain how he’d react. This was, of course, Fasthand’s ship, but Tat didn’t think even Fasthand was ready to hand out commands to Anaris achreash’Eusabian, son and heir to Jerrode Eusabian of Dol’jhar. Jerrode Eusabian of the Panarchy now.

  Tat looked down at her hands, small and square on her console. Moob and Hestik loved perpetrating jokes while Fasthand was on his Z-watch, the crueler the jokes the better. If they hadn’t decided that those nicks were theirs to play with, they might have turned on the rest of the crew—like Tat herself—who were too weak to defend themselves, or to get a clique to defend them. As the smallest of the crew, Tat felt anew the ambivalence of being posted to the bridge: her cousins couldn’t help her here.

  “Let’s watch this,” Moob said, baring her Draco teeth.

  The viewscreen flickered to what the imagers in the prisoners’ cabin were recording right then.

  The nicks had picked themselves up and mopped some of the mess as best they could, with the sparse linen Fasthand allowed them. A big old nick crouched over the tiny woman, trying to wrap her arm with strips torn from a sheet.

  Suddenly they all looked in one direction, their bodies tight with alarm, their faces varying from disgust to blank. Moob reached over to Sundiver’s console and hit the gravs again, and moments later a nasty brownish cloud of matter rolled into the room.

  Kedr Five wheezed, pounding the back of his pod. “You backed . . . up . . . the . . . disposer!” he squealed.

  Renewed shrieks of mirth reverberated sharply against the dyplast walls. Tat wondered if the damned Dol’jharians were watching and laughing as well. No one knew for certain if they had the imagers programmed to send to their quarters; they all assumed that Morrighon was spying on them, but no one knew to what extent. Almost his first action after coming on board was to designate a huge block in the ship’s computers for his own use, and as yet no one could break his codes. Tat kept trying, on Fasthand’s orders; he wanted to know how much of the ship’s functions the Dol’jharians had interfered with.

  “You’re a Bori,” Fasthand had snarled at Tat. “You been twisty with systems for years. Get around that ugly popeyed zhinworm.”

  Tat had assented, not pointing out that Morrighon was a Catennach Bori. Any of those who had survived cullings, purges, and the terrible training one must endure in order to serve the Dol’jharian lords had to be exponentially much twistier.

  She glanced once again at the viewscreen, then let her eyes unfocus. Bile tickled at the back of her throat; it was too easy to imagine what that room smelled like.

  Behind Tat’s console, she heard Hestik choke. Sundiver wiped her eyes, but Kedr Five and Moob avidly drank in every disgusting detail, gibbering with such delighted abandon they missed the hiss of the door opening behind, and those first thumping steps.

  Heart pounding, Tat scrunched low; though her father had skipped off Bori when she was small, before the Panarchists defeated Eusabian’s forces, she still felt terror whenever she sighted a Dol’jharian, and this time it was two of the big black-clad Tarkans, Anaris’s personal guard, who strode in.

  Silence fell, Kedr Five hiccupping, as the Tarkans made their way to Moob.

  She was up at once, teeth bared and her knife out, but the Tarkan swatted her arm aside and grabbed the front of her tunic. Big as she was, he lifted her right off her feet, as the second one grabbed Sundiver’s arm.

  “I’m coming,” she said, getting up fast. “What’s the problem?”

  Neither of the Tarkans spoke; Tat wondered if they even understood Uni. They walked out in silence, their boots ringing on the deck plates, the one carrying a choking, cursing Moob, and Sundiver hurrying in the grasp of the other with a total absence of her usual arrogant sashay.

  The door hissed shut behind them. Overhead, the viewscreen showed that the gravs had come on again, and Tat saw a corresponding green light on Sundiver’s console: Interesting, she thought. I was right, they do have access to ship’s functions. She watched as several gray-clad Dol’jharians efficiently herded the nicks out of the disgusting cabin.

  Then the Tarkans showed up; Moob hung limply, blood running from her mouth. Sundiver’s hair stood out around her face, which was beautiful even in anger. She managed a defiant stance as without warning Anaris himself appeared, taller even than the Tarkans, with a face like some carving of a warrior king out of the long-lost past. Tat hunched down further in her pod, even though he was only on the screen.

  “The prisoners are to arrive at Gehenna alive, and unharmed,” he said, in his incongruously accent-free Uni. If anything, he sounded like the nicks. He smiled slightly, then indicated cleaning gear being dumped on the floor by another of the silent gray soldiers. “When this chamber is habitable again, we’ll discuss this further.”

  The Tarkans let go of the two women and went out. The door shut on them; Sundiver bent over, retching. Moob leaned on a table, unheeding the brown-green slime she sat in.

  Hestik tried to kill the viewscreen—and failed.

  The remainder of the bridge crew exchanged looks. On the viewscreen the women painfully began to clean up; some on the bridge watched, or busied themselves at their consoles, trying not to watch.

  Unseen by them all, Morrighon tabbed the volume down on the communicator tuned to the bridge, laughing as he set it neatly in its place on the row.

  Leaning back, he watched on his personal screen the pleasant sight of the Draco and her companion scrubbing bilge off the walls. He wondered whether he ought to insert a worm into the ship system, that would cause the tianqi to waft an occasional breath of fetor—a little reminder—into their cabins.

  Reluctantly he abandoned the idea and logged the entire scrubbing session under his personal code. Enjoyable as it would be once, he knew they’d just force some other luckless slub into those cabins, and while all the Rifter trash crewing this ship deserved to be spaced, some were much worse than others.

  He had not come this far by being unsubtle. Enough for them to find this coded log in the system—they would know that he had the session recorded, and could send it over the hyperwave at any time. That at least would clip the Draco’s wings: to be shamed publicly was worse than death for Draco.

  As for the silver-haired Shiidra-sucker . . . He tapped his nails on the edge of his console, thinking with renewed fury of the disgusting things the Rifters had done to torment him. He knew that she had been the one to spray the clearmet on the wall above his bed and tap it into ship’s power. He flexed his feet within his shoes: the burns still hurt. And it was she and that boil-faced blit at the nav console, Hestik, who had released the plasphage into his tianqi vents, so that his bed linens had dissolved into a disgusting pink slime.

  They were not united, Morrighon knew. He smiled, getting up to pace about his cabin. Of course he could never tell Anaris about this silent war going on: the assumption that he could not defend himself against a pack of Rifters would destroy his future as Anaris’s right hand. Instead, he would use his subtlety to divide them against themselves.

  The com at his waist vibrated: Anaris’s personal signal. Morrighon activated the new security locks on his cabin; the next intruders would encounter a nasty surprise, which they migh
t, if particularly unlucky, even survive.

  He hastened down the narrow corridor, wondering if Anaris had decoded some new data from over the hyperwave—or if he had decided to hold another private converse with the Panarch.

  Morrighon gnawed his lip, finding the idea of discourse between those two strange and unsettling. He longed to discuss the meetings with Anaris, but as yet Anaris had not indicated to him that they were a topic of discussion. Further, he wanted them utterly private, so it was Morrighon and not one of the Tarkans who brought the old man when Anaris wanted him, and waited outside until they were done.

  Morrighon’s step quickened, and he turned his thoughts back to the best ways to deepen the discord in Fasthand’s crew, and how to amuse himself while doing so.

  o0o

  Caleb Banqtu drank deeply of his mug of caf, then sat back, enjoying the burn on his tongue and in his throat and stomach. Sitting across the table—the clean table—from him, Gelasaar sipped at a steaming mug, eyes closed. Tiny Matilde Ho cradled hers in her one good hand, the broken arm now secured in a proper cast.

  Caleb had ceased to feel surprise at anything. Torment by the Rifters had been predictable. Unforeseen, and perhaps more sinister, was the rescue by the Tarkans followed by a dramatic improvement in their maintenance.

  The Panarch, by his pose, invited discussion, so the others shifted a haunch, turned a shoulder, adjusted their seat so that each could see the others. Padraic Carr limped to the bench and sat down on Matilde’s other side, moving easier since the visit to the medic. Until this surprising rescue, his pain had been obvious in every step, every harsh breath, though his long, craggy face had shown nothing. The admiral had not told any of them what the Tarkans did to him that first terrible week after they were captured, but Caleb knew they had exacted their own kind of vengeance for the defeat at Acheront twenty years before.