A Prison Unsought (74 page)

Soon it would be time to lead the captive out to join the
Dance and become the feast, the living food of the Tasuroi, lending his courage
to the warriors of the Leaning Rock clan. Strongarm hoped this one would die
well; no one liked the taste of a coward.

The ground shook beneath his feet.

“Ayah!” he exulted. “The World
trembles before the Tasuroi!” he shouted, but the rumble increased, mixed with
a whine unlike anything he had ever heard before.

“The Dragon!” screamed the wizard,
pointing into the sky.

The warriors bellowed in rage, shaking their weapons at the
angular creature roaring overhead, trailing a cloud of fire.

But as the madness drained out of him, the Tasuroi chieftain
knew what it was. “No!” shouted Strongarm. “It’s the Skypeople!” He pointed at
the receding craft. “If we capture the Fallen One, the Raw Ones of Comori will
give us iron and meat!”

And the Fallen One might serve as another lever against
their temporary allies.

Shouting with joyful rage, the Tasuroi poured out of their
camp, following the glowing ember as it descended over the hills ahead.

Commander Totokili glared at the relay screen from the beta
engine compartment as though it were an enemy. He looked, thought Ensign
Leukady, like he wanted to reach through and tweak them himself, but no one
ever came any closer to the engines than that imager relay while they were
operating; their space-straining fields were deadly to anything above the level
of a virus.

Ensign Leukady held his breath; the commander’s jaw was
working, causing the portion of his stiff brush of hair above each ear to
wiggle. When it wiggled as much as now, someone was going to get their ass
swung over the radiants.

Finally the commander exhaled explosively and turned away.
Leukady busied himself with his console, but not fast enough.

“Status!” Totokili barked the word.

From the corner of his eye Leukady could see the other officers
and enlisted crew in the engineering deck concentrating fiercely on their
tasks. “Mass compensation successful, sir. All three engines rebalanced within
one minus fifth.” He essayed a tentative smile.

“What’s there to grin about,
Ensign?”

“N-nothing, sir,” he stuttered;
then, as Totokili raised an eyebrow, he hastened to add, “Except, I mean, we
did it, and faster than Captain Ng asked.”

The corner of the chief engineer’s mouth twitched. “Yes, we
did it.” He glanced over at the main control bank. “But Telos only knows
what’ll happen when the fiveskip engages. We’ve practically doubled the mass of
the ship with that lump of rock.”

Leukady said nothing. Totokili’s pessimism was well
known—the more outspoken it was, the more sure the commander was of success.

The commander turned away and tabbed the com. “Engineering
to bridge, Totokili here. We’re ready, Captain.”

“Good work, Commander,” came
Captain. Ng’s voice. “Stand by for skip.”

Totokili looked up and suddenly roared, “Don’t just stand
there mooning at me, you scut-brains! You heard the captain—any of you slip up
and we’ll have ten-power-twelve tons of rock coming through the forward
bulkhead at us. So jump!”

Margot Ng grinned as the first part of Totokili’s tirade
spilled onto the bridge, before the commander remembered to cut the connection.

Krajno chuckled. “Sounds like everything’s in order in
Engineering.”

She nodded. “SigInt. Any traces?”

“No, sir. They’re probably using
tight-beam and there’s too much trash in-system to pick up any leakage.”

“Very well. Navigation, take us in,
tac-level five, emergence at primary plus 32 at point-one cee.”

“Fiveskip engaged.”

A battlecruiser’s mass usually damped skip transition to a
mild shiver. This time, it felt like a courier-skip, roiling her guts and
making her head feel as though the sutures of her skull had momentarily gaped
wide.

Worse, the fiveskip actually groaned. Ng’s back prickled. She’d
never heard such a noise on any ship, let alone on a battlecruiser with a
kilometer or more of solid asteroidal metal between the bridge and the drive. A
kind of uncanny nausea possessed her entire body, gone so quickly she wasn’t
sure it was real or an empathic response to the protest of the
Grozniy
at the unnatural stress placed
upon it. The ship dropped back into fourspace with a harsh jolt.

“Velocity point-one cee,” reported
Mzinga. His voice trailed off; Ng heard a gasp from several of the crew.

She couldn’t blame them.

The main screen filled with the dark mass of the asteroid
now held firmly in the focus of all three forward ruptor turrets in tractor-pressor
mode, its edges flaring brightly as stellar dust and ice tore into it at 31,000
kilometers per second. Sun-bright plasma plumed off on all sides, dissipating
instantly; it looked like the eclipse of a sun at the moment of totality, only
raggedly elliptical rather than perfectly round.

“Ablation within expected
parameters,” reported the ensign at one of the engineering consoles.

“Telos!” Rom-Sanchez breathed. “I
wonder what it looks like in-system.”

“‘The third angel blew his trumpet,
and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch. . . . ’”
Sebastian Omilov’s voice was gravely resonant. As Ng swiveled her pod around,
he smiled at her. “Forgive me, Captain. I’ve been dipping into a book the High
Phanist gave to me, and that sentence stuck with me. At the time it didn’t seem
proleptic.”

“That’s AyKay, Chival Omilov. It
does fit.” She felt the tension on the bridge relax a little at the
distraction, so she asked, “What’s the book about?”

Omilov laughed. “The High Phanist told me people have been
arguing about that for several millennia. But this particular part is about the
end of the world.”

“Very appropriate,” Krajno said,
smiling grimly.

Omilov quirked an eyebrow. “How is that, Commander?”

He motioned forward. “In about ten minutes, when the wave front
from this ‘great star’ reaches them, there’s a whole shipload of Rifters who
will probably feel that the same way.”

Tat’s fingers shook as she picked up the ampule for what
must have been the tenth time in the past hour and rolled it between her
fingers. The minute red-striped dyplast cylinder glinted in the subdued light
of her cabin. She hated using brain-suck for noderunning; not only was it
dangerously addictive, but the feeling of isolation from all things human was
terrifying for a Bori.

But she might not have any choice. She looked up at the
imager relay from the bridge. Even at this remove, she could almost smell the
tension and fear. Fasthand was compulsively cracking his knuckles; Moob’s
shoulders jerked at every minor detonation of the captain’s joints.

Creote’s console bleeped. “It’s Neesach.”

“What’s wrong?” the captain snarled
as the shuttle navigator’s face windowed up on the main screen.

“We got engine trouble here,
Cap’n.” Neesach didn’t speak to the imager. “Lufus says we’ll get it down but
we’ll need a few hours before we can lift.”

Everyone knew she was lying.

“Put Kaniffer on!”

Neesach looked away, then shook her head as the pilot’s
voice came through. “Gotta get this thing down.”

“Kaniffer, you blunge-sucking,
logos-chatzing son of a Shiidra brood-fouler, if this is one of your damned
angles . . .” Fasthand’s voice choked off as another window
bloomed on the screen, revealing Morrighon’s face. “Is there a problem?”

In the other window, Neesach’s long face blanched.

“Just a little engine trouble,”
Fasthand replied between his teeth. “Everything’s under control.”

Morrighon turned away from the screen; Tat heard some
rapid-fire Dol’jharian. He was talking to someone on the shuttle, using a
parallel com-stream over ship’s systems! She stabbed at her console again;
another code-splatter, and another! Maybe now she’d have enough to work with.
She launched two more sniffers and threw them into the node-space pointed to by
her monitors.

On the bridge, a panicky shout erupted in the background,
relayed through the shuttle’s bridge from its engine compartment. Tat
recognized Bugtul’s voice. “What’re you doing, you chatzing . . .”
His voice choked off; she heard a dull thumping sound, then another voice in
heavily accented Uni.

“Shiidra-blunge, you would to say?
Little finger? Here are ten for you!” That was followed by a crunching noise,
and the thumping stopped.

The voice then spoke in Dol’jharian.

Morrighon said smoothly, “Your Rifters sabotaged the
engines, hoping to gain time to record the death-throes of the Panarchists. The
dead tech was only moderately successful. It will require no more than four
hours to repair.”

On the screen Neesach Kaniffer shifted her frightened gaze
from side to side, her green-dyed hair wild, then leaned forward. Tat guessed
she was desperately keying her console.

“Locking down will do you no good,”
said Morrighon. “But if you return the shuttle with our people, I will turn you
over to your captain for discipline, instead of to the Tarkans.” His attention
shifted to Fasthand. “Captain, ready a missile, surface
detonation, twenty megatons. Assuming they do indeed manage a safe landing, if
they do not lift off in four hours, destroy the shuttle.”

Then his twisted features sneered. “Let them make their
recording. It may have some value.” His window dwindled and vanished.

“Captain! You gotta do something!”
Kaniffer’s face finally windowed up; his voice was almost a sob.

“I gotta do nothing, Lufus, until
you bring that shuttle back.” Fasthand slapped the com off.

Tat put the ampule down and turned back to her work. She had
more time now; she’d hold the brain-suck until she truly had no choice.

o0o

The whine of the shuttle engines suddenly changed, growing
rougher, and the little craft bucked, provoking another coughing fit from
Padraic Carr. Gelasaar held him until the spasm passed, as one of the Tarkans
tabbed the com and spoke into it without taking his eyes off his prisoners.

From the communicator burst a stream of Dol’jharian.
Gelasaar cupped his ear to clarify it; what he heard accelerated his heartbeat.
He glanced at the others. They, too, had understood.
Four hours!
The only question was, what would the Dol’jharians do
now?

“Should be one of the more
successful vids in history,” Padraic Carr commented. “I wouldn’t mind my share
of the royalties at all.”

“I don’t think the Dol’jharians
care about vids,” Ho said softly.

The Tarkan at the com began pounding at the inner lock
controls, cursing.

“The Rifters seem to have locked
down,” said Kree. “It may not be up to the Tarkans now.”

The guard turned away from the lock and motioned with his
jac. “To your feet,” he said. His heavy accent made the words barely
comprehensible.

They stood, their heightened alertness conveyed in subtle
sign. The time had come.

Kree stepped toward the Tarkan, his hands palms-out. “You
want me to take a look at that lock?” He spoke in Dol’jharian.

The Dol’jharian glared at them; the other backed away
slightly, his weapon tracking the group.

“I know this type of shuttle,” said
Kree. “Surely you don’t want the Rifters remaining in control?”

The shuttle bucked again, more violently. The Tarkan jerked
his chin toward the lock and backed away.

Carr squeezed the Panarch’s hand, stepped away from his side,
and began coughing painfully. He stopped and put his hands on his knees,
breathing heavily as he finally controlled the cough. The Tarkan watching Kree
glanced over, while the other watched dispassionately.

Carr wiped his mouth and addressed the Tarkan. “Do you know
who I am?”

The Tarkan jerked the muzzle of his jac upward in warning.
“Yes. You are Carr.”

“Firez’hreach
i’Acheront,”
the admiral corrected. “The Soul Eater of Acheront.” The
Tarkan’s eyes widened; Carr smiled. “Oh, yes, that Carr.” He stepped
deliberately toward the Tarkan. “I ate many souls at Acheront. None of them
walk the Halls of Dol. I hear them crying out, at night, but I do not answer
them.”

The Tarkan’s jac wavered, then he raised it, pointing it
straight at Carr’s chest. The other Tarkan watched, his face blanching; he
didn’t notice little Matilde Ho inching closer, while Mortan Kree worked
noisily at the lock.

Carr slapped his chest. “Yes. They’re all in here,
tarku ni’retor
, and I grow tired of
their mewling. Will you let them out for me?”

He opened his mouth wide and emitted a gargling hiss.
Gelasaar’s scalp prickled: it was a horrifying sound. The Tarkan stood stone-still
until Padraic Carr calmly reached out, as though he had all the time in the
world, and grasped the muzzle of the Dol’jharian’s jac, pulling it into his
chest.

The Tarkan pulled the trigger convulsively. The jac
discharged, a spot of light flared in Carr’s back. He threw his head back in
agony, his hand welding to the finned radiants in a sizzle of flesh. The Dol’jharian
stepped back, his face drained of color, pulling Carr toward him as the
admiral’s hiss became an eerie shout forced from him by the explosive boiling
of the blood in his lungs and a red spray shot from his mouth, blinding his
killer.

The Tarkan yanked futilely at his weapon, horror distorting
his red-smeared face as the flaming corpse of the Soul Eater stumbled after
him. Then Gelasaar moved.

The Ulanshu Kinesic was swift and merciful. The Dol’jharian
slumped to the deck with a broken neck at the same moment Mortan Kree turned
away from the lock and shouted to distract the other.

Caleb launched Matilde through the air at the guard. She
twisted, lithe as an acrobat despite the sling on her arm, and slammed one heel
into his throat. His jac flew wide as he fell dying, choking on his broken
larynx. Kree knelt by the Tarkan and twisted his head quickly.