A Prison Unsought (71 page)

Nothing happened. No subtle, deadly haze of spore-tox, no
sudden flaming burst of neverquench, not even a maddened swarm of sting-flies.
Above, from the weapons platforms behind the parapet, Napier heard the creak of
the catapults swiveling on their platforms, and then the squeal of their
unwinding tendon springs as they discharged, mixed with the dull clatter of the
stutter-bows.

“Cease fire!” The sergeant’s voice
echoed into the silence as Napier paced back into the courtyard, toward the
fallen projectile. Worried eyes followed him from the walls; someone would pay
for letting the forces of Londri Ironqueen and her allies get this close.

The Comori warlord prodded the object fastidiously with one
armored foot. It was the head of his legate, Urman of Lissandyr, maggots
already swarming in the empty eye sockets and boiling up around the hilt of the
broken stone-wood sword protruding from his mouth.
At least we still have his Steel; and the loyalty of the Lyssand is now
assured—or at least their hatred of the Ironqueen.

Napier crossed his arms on his chest and looked up at the
sky as the first rays of the rising sun seared horizontally through the dusty
air above House Comori. The siege had begun. Well, they need hold out only a
short time, if the Tasuroi ambassador could be trusted.

As if summoned by the thought, a waft of greasy fetor
assaulted his nostrils. The stumpy, twisted form of Arglebargle approached, the
feathers and quills in his nose fetish bobbing in front of his rotten-toothed
smile. The Tasuroi was barely a meter and a third tall, but almost as broad,
his soiled robes bulging over powerful muscles and an awesome potbelly that
didn’t jiggle at all.

Arglebargle looked back and forth between the tall Comori
leader and the head in the dust before him. He grinned even wider. “Nice of
Ironqueen to deliver appetizer before breakfast.”

Napier’s stomach heaved, but he nodded pleasantly to the
barbarian. He’d learned very early in their negotiations that the Tasuroi
enjoyed baiting inhabitants of the Splash any way they could, even in their
naming convention. Refusing to reveal their real names to outsiders, they chose
instead for themselves outlandish cognomens. The higher the rank, the more
ridiculous the name, and the greater their delight in forcing their hosts to
pronounce it seriously.

But Arglebargle, whatever his true name, wasn’t really
joking: the Tasuroi lived far outside the Splash, clustered around small
craters left by fragments of the Skyfall where there were sufficient trace
metals for human life, and they were cannibals. They boiled their victims in
huge iron alloy pots that were the sum total of their wealth, which they never
emptied. Napier tried not to think about how five-hundred-year-old human soup
tasted—little wonder the Tasuroi smelled so bad.

“I’m sorry, my lord ambassador,”
the Comori leader replied, “but I fear Urman’s mother would object most strenuously.”

Arglebargle guffawed, assaulting Napier with a blast of
searingly bad breath. “Tell old bitch I give her half the brains.”

Napier turned away in relief as a subaltern ran up and
saluted. “Captain Arbash reports a small artillery force retreating from the
crossroads. He believes they took casualties.” Her gaze strayed to the Tasuroi,
then back to her House’s leader.

“Very well.” He prodded the head
toward the young woman with his foot, noting the caste mark of sterility on her
forehead. “Take this away. Give it to Lyssand Urmanmater and tell her I share
her grief and her anger.”

She saluted, picked up the rotting head gingerly by the
fringe of hair at the back, and trotted away, holding her arm out stiffly,
leaving a trail of squirming bits of insect life dropped from the relic.

Arglebargle shrugged with exaggerated disappointment. “Too
long away from gourmet cooking, I have been.” The elegant term, stuck in the
midst of his grunting speech like a gauma-pearl in a midden, reminded Napier
again not to underestimate the outwardly absurd barbarian—he had a first-class
brain and could speak as well as any legate when he chose to.

“But not to mind,” the Tasuroi
continued. “One of my chatter-bats returned last night; Smegmaniggle and horde
will be here in three days, maybe two—then we return the favor, no?” He
motioned with his chin toward the wall over which Urman’s head had been
delivered. “Tasuroi will eat well!”

And the Crater’s power
will take a blow from which it will never recover
. He glanced down as the
Tasuroi stumped away, looking around shrewdly at the fortifications.
And there will be a surprise for you as
well, my greasy little friend.

Not only that, but last night the chirurgeon had gleefully
told him that the Isolate was expecting again, and this time, too, he thought,
it would be twins!

As the actinic rays of Shaitan blasted the top of the wall
with brilliant heat, Napier Ur’Comori squinted into the light and breathed in
with delight.

Success would be his, he could feel it.

“Emergence.” Lassa’s voice barely rose
above the bells that duplicated her announcement.

Tat squinted blearily at the screen relaying from the
bridge. The captain had arranged this feed at her suggestion.

“Moob!” Emmet Fasthand snapped. The
imager surveyed the rest of the crew over his head, so Tat couldn’t see his
expression, but his voice was anxious.

“Scanning.” The Draco tapped
swiftly. “No traces.”

Tat sucked in a breath. Her argus had spotted a code-spatter
that correlated with emergence.
Morrighon!

Energized by a burst of adrenaline, she threw a web of code
across the addresses the argus pointed to, a gossamer of abstract sensation too
fine, she hoped, for detection.

“Primary plus 35.2 light-minutes,
33 mark 90.” Lassa’s fingers worked. “Navsearch initiated.” Tat could hear the
twitter of the navigator’s console as the navcomp began looking for the fourth
planet—even if the Gehenna system had a beacon, they couldn’t rely on it.

Meanwhile, her search, at least, triggered no alarms.
Another window on her console pulsed with the rhythmic probing of the keyword
generator; she had it cross-linked to the Bori history chip Lar had given her
when she told him of her supposition.

“Sounds right to me,” he’d said,
rummaging in his locker and handing her the chip. “No Dol’jharian’s going to go
snooping into Bori history—Rifters neither.” His lip curled. “Not this crew,
anyway.”

She looked closer at the window. The search was already
crossing over into second-order conceptual associations generated by the
neuraimai
cognitive mapping circuits. No
results yet.

On the screen, Lassa’s console chirped. “Planet located,
system mark 270. Orbital radius 23 light-minutes.”

“Lay in a course for system 270
mark zero, plus 35 light-minutes,” Fasthand commanded. “And use as many zigs as
you need to keep us clear of the Knot. Moob!”

The Draco’s voice was surly. “I see anything, you’ll be the
first to know.”

Tat’s attention returned to her work. She was barely
conscious of time passing as the
Samedi
made
a series of skips that brought it to the point on the plane of the ecliptic
closest to Gehenna, thirty-five light-minutes from the system’s sun. Her
stomach burned from too much long-steeped Alygrian tea, the standard
neuro-booster for noderunners when they didn’t want to use brainsuck, and her
eyes throbbed. But she was close, so close. She could feel Morrighon’s
presence.

Suddenly her console chattered at her and a window bloomed
over her work. A surge of adrenaline brought her upright in her seat: one of
her trolling phages had snagged a nonstandard scavenger worm. It had to be one
of Morrighon’s—he’d camouflaged his workspace by making it invisible to the
system’s standard scavengers. But no program could work without reclaiming used
space.

Tat tapped at the keypads. Yes! She’d caught one of
Morrighon’s. She threw it into stasis and gingerly began to tease apart its
header, wary of suicide code and bit-bombs. As it unwound, she linked the
bit-stream to the neuraimai. Now she’d see something!

The emergence bells chimed again; Fasthand sat upright in
the command pod. From the angle of his head, she could tell he was staring at
the main screen.

“Thirty-five out, 270 mark zero,”
Lassa announced. “Course for Gehenna laid in.”

“System’s real dirty,” said Moob.
“Over to DeeCee.”

At the damage control station Galpurus hunched over the
console, his narrow hands incongruous at the ends of his bulky arms as they
tapped at the keys. He looked up after a time. “Shields can take maybe
point-oh-one cee, or a shimmy more. Beyond that we’ll ablate pretty bad, take
some heat, even.”

The strangeness of their situation pulled Tat away from her
task—the dissection of Morrighon’s scavenger was largely automatic, anyway. The
Samedi
would be making a Realtime Run
into the Gehenna system at one percent light speed, trusting to the shields to
protect it from the dirt and ice which, in obedience to the laws of orbital
dynamics, were concentrated in the ecliptic. Nobody ever voluntarily made a
Realtime Run: a ship was just too vulnerable in fourspace, and so slow!

A ting, and Fasthand’s
voice came to her flatly through the neural link.
(You got anything yet?)

(I’m on the edge,)
she
replied, wondering if he could sense her fatigue and excitement over the boz’l.
(Soon.)

(Better be. It’ll take
us twenty hours to make the run to Gehenna—if a cruiser shows up, their
shields’ll take ’em through a hell of a lot faster. I want those Dol’jharian logos-lickers
out of the comp before that.)

The link terminated. On the screen Fasthand ordered the
fiveskip up to tac-level four. The engines burred harshly, then cut out,
hurling them into the Gehenna system—into the jaws of the Knot—at 3,100
kilometers per second. On the main screen the shields fluoresced under the
impact of stellar dust; flares of light blossomed here and there as the teslas
dissolved larger particles.

Tat shivered; that was something she could have lived the
rest of her life without seeing. She turned back to her console. If she didn’t
break Morrighon’s hold on the computer, Telos only knew what else she’d see before
she died.

The alarm blasted through the high-stress racket of Margot
Ng’s dreams, and she woke up gratefully. A sense of duty had forced her to grab
a few hours’ sleep; though it had been a good idea, her body still ached.

She rose, ran hot
water over herself to clear her head, then pulled on her uniform. With a
peculiar sense of unreality she made sure all her tabs were fastened correctly
and that no flaw marked the fit of the uniform. If
Grozniy
survived this
mission, it would be carrying a Panarch.

High Politics.
She shook her head, turning away from the
mirror. One couldn’t get any higher. Despite one’s personal inclination, she
reflected with grim humor as she went out in search of coffee.

By throwing herself behind the Aerenarch, she had made
enemies of some of the most powerful Douloi in the Panarchy. She felt no
vestige of regret, especially when she considered that cabal running what
remained of the Panarchy.

She sighed, eyeing the breakfast she found she couldn’t eat.
If you’re going to be involved in
politics, do it right.

Leaning over to tab her com, she said: “Would you inquire if
Gnostor Omilov is free for a few moments’ consultation?”

Her ensign would scrupulously word it just that way, she
knew, avoiding all semblance of a command.

Her com lit. While she forced a few bites down, Krajno
briefed her on their progress. All systems were functioning; less than an hour
to emergence.

Omilov appeared a few minutes later. The man looked tired
but alert.
The remarkably restorative power
of action,
she thought wryly.

“We will soon be emerging into the
Gehenna system,” she said after they exchanged greetings. “Would you like to
join us on the bridge?”

His eyelids lifted, betraying surprise and, she thought,
pleasure. His lips parted, but then his expression fused into a polite
gratitude that indicated second thoughts.

Wondering what he’d been about to say, Ng tried to encourage
him. “It’ll be a trifle crowded, of course,” she said. “As the Aerenarch will
also be with us. My first thought had been to open a feed to your cabin, but on
consideration I thought if our positions were reversed, I would want to be
there.” She ended on a faintly apologetic note.

Omilov bowed. “And so I do,” he said. “I really am grateful;
I had not dared to ask. But . . .”

“But?” she prompted.

He drew a deep breath, then said decisively, “I had intended
to beg for that feed, and also for the company of, mmm-hah, certain persons to
witness with me whatever will transpire.”

Ng laughed. “Not the Rifters.”

Omilov answered with a rueful smile. “Well, a couple of
them. It was Manderian with whom I discussed this. He expressed a wish that the
emerging unity represented by the Kelly, the Eya’a, and two of the Rifters be
able to observe, if they wished, what happens when we reach Gehenna.”

Despite the summer setting of the tianqi, a chill crepitated
down her back and arms. Behind Manderian stood the High Phanist, who held a
power Ng didn’t like to contemplate, confirmed by the image of the Digrammaton
seared into her palm after its impossible, instantaneous leap from her dying
predecessor’s chest on Arthelion to Desrien. Obedient to that power’s command,
impossibly conveyed as well, Mandros Nukiel, as pragmatic an officer as any
she’d known, had bent his course from Rifthaven with the rescued Aerenarch toward
Desrien before continuing to Ares.