Swords of Waar (43 page)

I breathed a sigh of relief, then squinted at the layout. There were about twenty buttons, each with a handwritten label below it. Some of ’em were related to the turbines, some were related to the cooling coils, some were related to the tank itself, but they weren’t in any order, so I had to read them all.

“Turbine speed, coil maintenance, coil temperature, turbine shut down! Okay! No, wait, that’s for individual turbines. I want to shut ’em all down. Uh, tank maintenance. No. Coil shut down. No. System flush. No. Turbine— Wait. What the fuck is system flush?”

My heart started beating like a drum. Was there a way to give back the water? That would be a fuck of lot better than just stopping the turbines. A lot of people in Ora needed water so bad they were gonna die before the weather got back to normal, but what was gonna happen if I just pulled the plug out? Was it all just going to go down the drain? That wouldn’t help anybody.

I flipped to the page that showed what happened when you pushed the System Flush button. Wainwright had drawn it out like a little flow chart, showing the various options and the ‘how to’ steps. Sure enough, on the left-hand side of the page, there was a procedure called Emergency Flush that showed how to dump all the water into the sewers under Ormolu, but on the right side of the page was something that made me gape.

Wainwright had called it Atmospheric Dispersal Flush, and had scribbled beside it—
Drought Reduction/Spring Rains/Answered Prayers. Only use at night, full dark.
Even better, part of the procedure involved shutting down the turbines in order to reroute power to the pumps.

“Holy fuck. This is it. This is what we need.”

“What is it, Mistress?”

“Look!” I tapped the page. “It looks like there’s a way to put all the water in the tank back into the air.” I pointed to the page. “This says spring rains and answered prayers. It looks like the Wargod used it to make it rain when he needed it to.”

Lhan blinked like I’d punched him in the forehead.

I raised an eyebrow. “What?”

He shook his head, a look of wonder on his face. “One of the great proofs of the divinity of the Seven has always been that their priests could invoke their names and cause the rains to fall. But you say this was done with this machine?”

I grinned. “Whaddaya say we give it a try and find out?”

Lhan blinked again, then mirrored my grin. “Mistress, if you can do this… I….” He looked like he was going to cry.

“Alright. Lemme see.”

I took the book over to the console and spread it open beside the M.G. circle, then pressed it again. The second layout of circles appeared, and I checked the book, then pressed the one that Wainwright had marked System Flush, and from there followed the procedure that he had written down, which had me going through a lot more sub-menus and failsafes and, “Are you sure you want to do this?” buttons, including a screen that asked me how much of the tank I wanted to blow off. I chose “All.”

But then, just as I got to the bottom of the list, a screen popped up that wasn’t on his chart. It was a screen with six buttons in a circle around a seventh, with two circles below which by now I recognized as the forward and back buttons that were on every screen. I checked the page in Wainwright’s book again. There was nothing like the screen anywhere on it. My scalp started to prickle with anxiety.

“What the fuck? Why isn’t this here? What is it? It’s not in the book!”

Lhan leaned over my shoulder, then looked around. “It looks quite like the layout of the representations of the temples.”

I looked at him, then smacked my forehead. “Outta the mouths of babes! Of course. That’s exactly what it is! But what am I supposed to do with it? Wait. Is it to select which one I want to flush? Well that’s easy. All of them.”

I pushed one of the circles. It lit up. I pushed another one. It lit too, and the other one stayed lit. A tingle went up my spine. “Holy shit. Is it gonna be this easy?” I pushed all the rest, so that all seven circles were lit, then hit the “next” button.

Yes! The final screen. There were only two circles on it, and Wainwright’s book said they were Execute and Cancel. With one push of a button, Wainwright’s hold on the people of Ora would be gone. His priests wouldn’t be able to tell ’em what to do, or starve ’em if they went against his view of the world. They wouldn’t be able to punish them for trying new things. The people would be out from under the thumb of the church for the first time in thousands of years. They would be free.

I took a deep breath and held my finger over the Execute circle. “Here goes nothin’.”

CHAPTER FIFTY

SHOW DOWN!

B
ut then I stopped. My hand just hovered over the button, frozen, because all of a sudden, my brain had started churning. Wainwright and the church had been greedy bastards. They’d only used the water to hold onto power, but right now, this very second, that power was mine. I had all the water the church had stolen, and I could do whatever I wanted to with it. And if I was smart, I could use it to make things better.

Visions of what I could do started whirling in front of my eyes. I could dole out the water more equally, so poor farmers got as much of it as the rich bastards did. I could use it to encourage people to do the right thing. If you freed your slaves, boom. You get some water. If you stopped treating your wife like shit and let your daughter go to school, boom boom. More water. Shit, I could make the Aldhanan pass new laws, even if it was Sai. Fuck.
Especially
if it was Sai. He could make women equal to men. He could make slavery illegal. He could make a treaty with the Arrurrh and give them back some of their land. He could get rid of the fucking nobles and Aldhanans and have elections. He could have equal rights for gays so Lhan’s pals wouldn’t have to hide in the closet anymore. And if he didn’t, no water for him. He’d be sitting in his big fancy castle, dying of thirst because he didn’t have anything to drink. Ha!

My god, it was perfect. I could drag this backward hellhole into the twenty-first century and make it into a fair modern society like it was supposed to be, with equality for everyone and responsible government and no more honor-killings and wars, and… and… and a big, red-headed dictator at the top of it all, manipulating everything behind the scenes and taking naps in her rejuvenation machine so she could hold onto it all forever.

I snapped out of my trance to find Lhan looking at me, concerned.

“Mistress, are you well? Why do you hesitate?”

“Because I’m a fucking idiot, that’s why.”

Man, that absolute power stuff was bad shit. One sniff and I went from being ready to give the water back to the people to wanting to keep it all for myself so I could make them do what I wanted. I’d become Wainwright in four seconds flat. Oh, sure, my Waar would be different from his. It would be a lot more about taking care of the common folk than his was, and makin’ sure the women didn’t have to kiss ass to their men folk anymore, but it would be just as much of a snow globe as his was. I’d use the water to set it how I wanted it, then I’d try to freeze it that way, forever, killing or starving anybody who disagreed with me or tried to change it, and never able to let go of the power, because I couldn’t trust anybody else to use it like I did.

I felt sick just thinking about it, but I knew myself too well. If I started down that road, I wouldn’t be able to help it. I’d become the bad guy. No question about it. The only way to stop it was to put it out of reach, like leaving my Marlboros back on Earth.

I stabbed the Execute circle.

Lhan said something, but the temple started to shake and roar like the world’s biggest air compressor, and I couldn’t hear him. It felt like an earthquake. Was it the turbines shutting down? Was it supposed to feel like that?

I stepped back, heart pounding. What had I done? I’d already set the place on fire. Was I gonna shake it apart too? I backed into Lhan and we held each other, eyes going everywhere, wondering what was going to happen next.

The booming and shaking kept getting louder, and Lhan and I had to grab the consoles to stop from falling over. Then all at once, everything smoothed out into a deep vibration and the booming became a deafening roar, like a rocket blasting off.

Fuck! Was that it? Had I somehow hit all the wrong buttons and caused the temple to take off into outer space?

It was Lhan who saw what I’d really done.

“Mistress, look!” He pointed to the holograms.

I looked, then gaped, then laughed my ass off. Apparently, “Atmospheric Dispersal Flush” meant squirting all the water in the tank into the sky, ’cause all seven temples were going off like the money shot from a gang-bang porn movie. Huge jets of water were shooting out of the tops of them and going straight up into the air further than the hologram could show.

“Jesus Christ on a vibratin’ bed! It’s a mega-temple circle jerk!”

“A—a what, Mistress?”

“Uh, never mind. Doesn’t matter. What matters is, we did it! We stole back the water!”

I gave Lhan a hug that had him gasping, then kissed him harder than that. It was a pretty sexy moment, actually, holding and kissing each other in the middle of the seven temples all going off like Old Faithful. I think, if we hadn’t been interrupted, we might have patched up our difference and done our own Old Faithful impersonation, but Wainwright chose that moment to break through the door and run in, sword out, with a handful of guards at his back.

Halfway to the platform he just stopped dead and stared at the seven ejaculating towers. “Damn fool girl. What have you done?”

I laughed at him. “I broke your ant-farm, Jack. The experiment’s over. The ants can do what they want now.”

There were literally tears in his eyes. I didn’t expect that. You kinda expect the super-villain to know he’s the super-villain, but I guess Mad Jack thought he was the hero.

“You ruined it. You evil white trash jezebel. Everything I’ve done. All my work. You ruined it!”

And with that he raised his sword and sprang up to the platform. And when I say sprang, I mean he went from the bottom of the stairs to the top in one leap, then kicked straight at me. Suddenly I knew what it was like for everybody else when I did it. It was scary as shit!

I blocked his slash and nearly dropped my sword. He hit like a pile driver! Shit! I woulda thought being a hundred and fifty years old woulda weakened him a bit, but no. He was as hard as his robots. Or maybe he
had
weakened. Maybe this was him being feeble. What the hell had he been like when he was twenty-five? Holy hell! No wonder he’d conquered the planet!

I staggered back, blocking like crazy as he hacked at me with a sword almost as long as mine. It was shaped like the traditional Waarian sword—curved blade, rounded knuckle-duster, curliques around the hilt—but about a foot longer and a lot heavier—a sword for a guy with the strength to swing it. And he was good too, as good as Lhan. There was no way I was going to win this fight by makin’ like a helicopter.

Lhan saw I was in trouble and came at Wainwright from behind, thrusting for his spine, but the old man had eyes in the back of his head. He whipped his sword back without looking, and Lhan parried with about an inch to spare. That only saved his neck, though. The hit smashed him back and he crashed to the floor, stunned.

“No, you fucker!”

I swung for Wainwright’s ribs as he exposed his side, but his sword was back in front of him before I could connect, and then snaking for my face the next second.

I backflipped off the platform on the far side, trying to buy myself some breathing room, but as soon as I did, Wainwright’s guards started blasting at me with their wands and, just like I’d guessed, one of ’em was a fucking cannon. It shot out a stream of blue-white energy as big around as a fire hose, and I had to do my hide under the platform thing again to keep from getting barbequed.

Fortunately, Wainwright didn’t like it anymore than I did.

“Leave off, you monkeys! No fire in the control room! I done told you! And nobody kills the hellion hussy but me, hear?” He leapt down after me as they held their fire, then pointed back at Lhan. “You wanna kill something, kill the pantywaist.”

“No!”

I leapt out at Wainwright, fanning him back, then zigged left and up, hopping back onto the platform just as the old man’s goons were coming up the stairs and starting toward Lhan, who was still shaking it off. They scattered back down as I hacked at ’em, but Wainwright was sticking to me like a wet shirt. I couldn’t finish ’em off. I had to face him or he’d stab me in the back.

I kicked off a console and spun, hoping to catch him as he jumped after me. He turned my blade in mid-air, then came down swinging as we landed by the far wall.

Lhan’s voice came to me through the clang and clash as Wainwright drove me back. “Fear not, Mistress. I have them.”

I hoped he wasn’t lyin’, ’cause Captain Jack was taking all my concentration. He mighta looked like the mummy, but he moved like a cobra. I couldn’t get a hit in on him for love nor money. Then something he’d just said came back to me. No fire in the control room? How ’bout some steel?

On his next attack, I jumped back like I was caving, then leapt for the platform again. Lhan was at the top of the stairs, fencing the four guards—actually only three now—like he was Errol Flynn.

I landed inside the hologram Temple of Ormolu and turned. The whole top of the thing was burning like a torch. I had no idea why we weren’t on fire too. The control room must have been extra protected or something.

Wainwright came after me, sailing high over the consoles to come down at me like a thunderbolt. I didn’t stay and fight. Instead, I dodged right and slashed, not at him, but at the console. The glowing face of it shattered, sending shards and sparks everywhere. Its lights fizzled and died.

Wainwright charged, foaming at the mouth. “What d’you think yer doin’, you trollop? Leave off!”

I ducked another attack and bashed another console. “I’m already burning the place down. Whadda you care?”

“The fire’s goin’ out as soon as you’re dead! But I can’t replace these controls! Now get away!”