Hunted (17 page)
“Teelu
,” Kaisho whispered, “are you speaking of our poor lost Explorers…or someone else?”
Festina looked at her curiously. Kaisho just chuckled. Her legs flickered, as if the Balrog were laughing too.
The crowd let themselves be shooed back, clearing a patch of ground beside the skimmer. Festina walked to the center of the area and set down a small black box covered with horseshoe-shaped inlays of gold. I’d seen such a box before; it was a Sperm-field anchor, designed to attract and snag the tail from a starship. Festina flicked a switch on the box’s lid and immediately skipped back a pace.
For three seconds nothing happened; then, fluttering out of the sky like the funnel of a tornado, a milky white tube swept down and slapped silently against one of the anchor’s gold horseshoes. The tube was filmy and unsolid, with sparkles of blue and green twinkling deep in its creamy body—like a glittery sleeve of smoke rippling up and up into the blue. It was transparent enough that I could look straight through the tail and see boggled Mandasar faces on the other side.
“Don’t worry,” I whispered to Counselor. Which meant I was back in control of my body again—I’d been so busy gawking at the tail, I hadn’t noticed getting unpossessed. ‘Don’t worry,” I repeated, “it’s just a sort of elevator up to a starship.”
“A starship in orbit?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“But the starship must be hundreds of kilometers above us!”
I nodded. “Sperm-tails are really elastic. You can pull them out thousands of kilometers long.”
Counselor swallowed hard “What do we do?”
“Um. If you stick your hand into the tube’s open end, you get…drawn up. All the way through the tail and into the spaceship overhead.”
“Teelu”
Counselor said, “if someone dragged me by my arm for several hundred kilometers…”
“It won’t hurt you,” I promised her. “As soon as you put a single finger into the tube, the outside universe kind of shoves you in the rest of the way. You don’t get pulled, you get pushed! And once you’re inside the tube…well, it feels very strange, but it doesn’t do actual damage.”
Counselor winced. “You’re not filling me with confidence,
Teelu”
“Then watch.”
I walked over to the Sperm-tail. Before reaching down to the mouth, I asked Festina, “Shall I go first?”
“Be my guest,” she replied. “I’ll go last to make sure everyone else is all right.”
I nodded and knelt. If you want the honest truth, I’d never gone through a Sperm-tail before either. Real Explorers shot the chute all the time, but me, I’d always traveled in the company of diplomats. “Diplomats,” Sam once told me, “do not subject themselves to indignities. It’s called a Sperm-tail, for heaven’s sake. The name alone is enough to demolish your credibility. And I understand that riding one is appallingly visceral. Diplomats hate that; we like to remain detached from physical reality at all times.”
Maybe part of that was joking, but Sam still meant it. She and the rest of the diplomats took shuttles from ship to surface, not the slippery white way.
At the last second, just as I was sticking my hand into the Sperm’s mouth, I wondered what my sister meant by “appallingly visceral.” Then I found out.
22
SQUIRTING THROUGH THE TUBE
Gulp.
That was the Sperm-tube swallowing me. Out of the real universe, into an artificial one that fluttered and fish-tailed, taking me with it. My whole body turned to water, pumping through a pipe that twisted, turned, narrowed, expanded, did loop-the-loops. I had no bones; I had no solid parts at all, just liquid and steam, spurting up the Sperm-tail at high pressure.
One other tiling: I wasn’t alone.
I could feel another presence squirting along with me, a blaze of intelligence burning right next to my skin, as if it was only separated from me by a tissue-thin membrane. It had to be the thing that’d been possessing me: a spirit, a ghost, an alien parasite, some entity that hitchhiked in my body and occasionally shoved me aside so it could drive.
What are you?
I thought.
What do you want? Why me?
The answer was a blast of fiery emotions—angers and sorrows, regrets and resolutions, all knotted up in a package of memories.
My
own
memories.
Samantha’s body, her clothes sodden with the blood that kept gushing from her punctured chest. A red pool spreading over the floor. Smears of red on my fingers.
Queen Verity’s head plunked on a platter and placed on the royal dinner table…while the rest of her corpse lay ten paces away, both venom sacs sliced open and spilling dribbles of green.
Me running through the night with a heavy black sack over my shoulder, while shooting echoed in the palace behind me. Racing to a garden shed, lifting up a floorboard, seeing the little black box with the gold horseshoe inlays, and the narrow mouth of a Sperm-tail threading off through an underground conduit. Feeding one end of die sack into that mouth and holding my breath as the bulky load disappeared through the impossibly tiny opening, zipping off heaven knows where. Smashing my heel down on the anchor box, breaking it, releasing the Sperm-tail to slither off on its own so no one could follow…
Could follow…
Innocence. My daughter.
Whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years.
Whom I’d abandoned on a planet at war.
And I was supposed to be “The Little Father Without Blame”? If I hadn’t been riding the Sperm-tail at that second—if I’d had a solid body—I would have thrown up everything in my stomach.
Second after second, my own memories pounded into my mind like a repeating loop. Sam soaked with blood; Verity dead; carrying young Innocence in that bag; Sam and her blood again. As if the thing riding with me up the Sperm-tail was trying to make me
see
something, but I wasn’t smart enough to understand.
Sam’s blood. Me, reaching down to touch the red stickiness. Lifting my fingers to my nose…
A voice screamed
No!
inside my head: fighting the memory, fighting the thing that was trying to make me remember. The screaming voice didn’t seem part of me, any more than the force pummeling me with my own memories; but I was eager to shout
No!
myself. Anything to escape ugly replays of the most awful night of my life.
So I yelled,
No, go away, stop it, stop it, stop it!
I could feel the memory-thing howl in despair, burning with frustration at my refusal to watch. It pounded away on the thready thin barrier that separated its consciousness from mine; but before it could bash through, I hurtled back into normal space and collided with a mound of soft padding.
I don’t know how long I lay there, trying to clear my head. Not long-—the padding was jelly bagged up in rubbery plastic, nice and yielding on impact but cold and wobbly the longer you stayed on top of it. They must have made it that way on purpose, so you wouldn’t sprawl there forever…especially when other people were coming through the Sperm-tube right behind you.
Other people. Kaisho.
With a surge of adrenaline, I tried to heave myself off the landing pad. The jelly beneath me gurgled and sloshed, absorbing my motion; when I pushed harder, my hand just sank into the folds of the bag.
Like trying to fight a tar baby,
I thought. Forcing myself to be calm, I pulled my hands tight to my chest and simply rolled sideways…off the bag just as Kaisho barreled out of the tube behind me.
Her mossy legs missed me by a whisker. I was sure that’s why she’d come right after me—in hopes of an accidental collision. The Balrog would slam into me, then a splurge of hungry red spores would ooze across my skin…
No,
I told myself.
Don’t be stupid.
The Balrog couldn’t want to possess a person with screwed-up chemicals in his brain. Especially not when I was already half-possessed by something else.
“Help me up,” Kaisho whispered as she sprawled on the jelly pad. “Please.”
On her trip through the Sperm-tail, Kaisho’s hair had got all mussed…which means it’d fallen off her face enough to show what she really looked like. I found her striking in an elegant, weathered way—what people usually call “handsome,” because they won’t call women beautiful after the first wrinkle appears. Kaisho had her share of wrinkles around her soft brown eyes…but the wrinkles had such a well-aged grace, maybe they deserved to be called crinkles instead. Serene and amused, both at once. Strong cheekbones, wide half-smiling lips…
She saw me staring. The half smile froze on her face—not a sudden jolt, but a clamp-down of control, keeping her expression exactly as it was till she could cover up. I could tell she was forcing herself not to hurry; oh so slowly, she shook her hair down over her eyes, then brushed her fingers through a few times to make sure there were no gaps in the veil.
“Maybe someday you should stop hiding,” I said.
“Maybe someday I will,” she answered in her usual whisper. “When the Balrog has ‘elevated’ my consciousness to such heights I can’t feel childish emotions.” For a moment, the fingers she was combing through her hair clenched into fists—gripped by some sudden emotion, rage, shame, I don’t know. She trembled with the power of it; I could imagine her face scrunched in on itself under that hair, her eyes squeezed shut, the serenely crinkled skin bunched up into ridges and hollows.
A long ten seconds passed before she relaxed. Then she shook her head and flung her arms wide toward me, crying, “Help me,
Teelu.”
Not a whisper—a desperate plea.
But in the next instant, a shudder went through her; and though her position scarcely changed, all the pleading passion vanished. Got squashed down. “Help me,
Teelu,”
she said, back to her old staid whisper. “Help me up, if you please. Festina promised me time to get clear, but soon that Sperm-tube will spit out a three-hundred-kilo lobster with big sharp claws.”
I stared at her a moment. What had just happened? The woman herself speaking, “Help me,” then the Balrog choking her off? Or was it all playacting: the Balrog amusing itself by making me worry, or trying to trick me into something I’d regret?
No way to know. But Kaisho was right about one thing—if Zeeleepull flew out of the tube while she was still in the line of fire, his pincers could spear straight through her. I hurried over to pull her away…but realized in the nick of time that if I picked her up face-to-face the way her arms were outstretched, her legs would flop into mine when I lifted her. Instead, I slipped behind her, hiked my hands under her armpits, and dragged her backward off the padding.
“This is a damned undignified position for an advanced lifeform,” she muttered.
I didn’t answer. I was marveling at how light she was…like a child. Whatever was under the moss on her legs, it didn’t weigh half as much as human flesh and bone. Still, it had to be pretty strong—it’d withstood the sploosh into the jelly pad, not to mention me dragging it across the floor. Normal moss would have crumbled to pieces with all that knocking around. Then again, the Balrog wasn’t normal moss, was it?
As I set her down, well clear of the landing pillow, Kaisho reached up and pressed her hand warm against my cheek. “Thank you,
Teelu
,” she whispered.
“You shouldn’t really call me that,” I said. “It’s only for queens.”
“Ah,” she said, kissing her fingers, then brushing them against my lips. “Thank you for clearing that up.
Teelu”
As we waited for the next person to shoot through the Sperm-tube, I had a chance to check out our surroundings. We’d arrived in the transport bay of a navy starship: a big empty room with an irising entry mouth at one end. The mouth was wide-open, showing the ghostly white Sperm-field outside as it stretched off into the distance—all the way down to the planet. At the moment, the starship would be orbiting tail down; if you pictured the Sperm-tube as a big tornado sucking up things from Celestia’s surface, the transport bay was like a bucket at the top of the funnel, ready to catch anything the wind brought us.
The upper part of the bay’s back wall was transparent pink-tinted plastic, a window into the control room where someone would be monitoring the transport process. From my angle down on the floor, I couldn’t see if anyone was actually up in the room; but safety regs required a qualified operator at the console whenever people Spermed in or out.
It kind of surprised me the person in charge hadn’t said a word: no hello, not even a warning for us to get off the landing pad and clear the way for others. I told myself it must take lots of concentration, keeping track of technical details—aligning the Sperm-tube properly so folks flew straight into the ship, maintaining the proper air pressure in the bay so that it was balanced with Celestia’s surface—but still, a simple welcome would be nice.
For one thing, I wanted to know what ship this was. There were rainbow-colored trees painted on the walls of the transport bay, but I didn’t recognize the trees’ species. Something tropical and flowery. At least they weren’t willows; and this wasn’t one of the conifer ships (
Jackpine, Sequoia, Golden Cedar)
used as flagships for admirals. That was good. If this’d turned out to be my father’s ship, the
Royal Hemlock,
I would have stood in the entry mouth, just praying for Zeeleepull to come through and skewer me.
“Wondering where we are?” Kaisho whispered. Either she’d read my mind, or noticed me staring at the trees painted on the wall. “It’s Festina’s old ship,” she said. “The
Jacaranda.”
Jacaranda?
Where Prope was captain? With orders to dump me someplace forgettable? For a second, I wondered if this had all been a giant trick, a way to make me disappear. If they’d decided they couldn’t just kidnap me because the Mandasars would make a fuss, why not engineer an excuse for taking me away? Pretend I was going on an important mission, wait a while, then tell the kids on Celestia, “Sorry, your poor
Teelu
had an accident on Troyen, and he’s never coming back.”
My father would have considered it a neat strategy—get the results you want without causing a public hubbub. But Festina was a different sort of admiral, wasn’t she? Someone who’d be honest with a fellow Explorer?
“You don’t look so good,” Kaisho whispered. “What’s wrong?”
“Twenty-four hours ago, the
Jacaranda’s
captain had orders to get rid of me. Do you think anything’s changed since then?”
“Yes,” Kaisho said. “Festina has taken charge. She’s commandeered the ship using an admiral’s Powers of Emergency—
pursuing the vital interests of the Outward Fleet.
Which means she’s bailing the council’s ass out of hot water. Basically, if Festina thinks the top dogs have screwed up so badly they’re risking a League crackdown, she has the authority to do
anything
to put things right.”
“The other admirals don’t mind?”
“The other admirals practically chew out their own livers, but they can’t stop her. The League of Peoples demands that our navy behave in a sentient manner. That doesn’t mean acting good or moral or decent in human terms; your average high admiral is a loathsome criminal bastard.” She looked straight at me. “As you well know, little Jetsam.”
My father’s not-so-pet name for me. Which meant the Balrog knew exactly who I was. Not that Kaisho seemed to care; she went straight back to telling me what was what.
“The point is,” Kaisho said, “the High Council has to obey the letter of the League’s law…and that includes policing themselves for non-sentient behavior. Last night, Festina contacted Admiral Vincence and said, ‘I have reason to believe an inner-circle admiral has condoned coldblooded murder, and I require the immediate services of a ship to investigate the matter.’ In such a situation, the council simply can’t stand in her way. If they block her or silence her or even try to slow her down, it’s deliberately abetting a possible non-sentient.”
Kaisho shrugged. “The most the council can do is work their tails off to prove Festina wrong. If they conscientiously look into the matter and decide her fears are unfounded, they can pull the plug on her. Maybe even demote her or throw her out of the service. But until that happens, they have to let her follow her conscience…and they even have to cooperate with her. Festina wants a ship? She gets the closest one available.
Jacaranda.
And to hell with any previous orders that get in the way.” She turned her head toward the pink-tinted window high above us. “Isn’t that right, Captain?”
There was a three-second silence. Then a voice came over the transport bay’s speakers: a voice I’d heard before. “My orders are to cooperate with Admiral Ramos for the duration of the emergency,” Captain Prope said frostily. “If those orders cease to be operative, I can’t speculate what new instructions I might receive. Or what old instructions might be reactivated.”
In other words, I could still get chucked onto an uninhabited planet if Festina got overruled. I was thinking about that when Hib came flying through the Sperm-tail.