The Dark Reaches (27 page)

So it had been an all-out rescue operation. Which meant—

Hiso sat back and frowned. It meant that Esayeh had
known
the Cold Minds were coming. Just where. And just when.

Hiso smashed his fist against the arm of his chair.

No longer.

 

 

 

Hiso strode into Tereu’s dark, spice-scented bedroom, its heavy shades still closed tightly against the rising light in the park outside. She lay curled in her cocoon of quilts, and she lifted her rumpled head sleepily as he reached the side of the bed.

He tore the quilts from around her, lifted her by the shoulders, held her helpless in the air.
“What have you done?”

She gave a terrified gasp. Then she planted her feet on Hiso’s chest and launched herself away from him. She flew through the air over the rumpled bed and landed on the rug beyond. By the time Hiso had come around the bed to face her, she was on her feet and stood with her hand hovering over the call button for Security.

Hiso did not waste a glance at it. “Do you think I would not have disabled that before I came in here?”

Her hand lifted away from the button. “Tell me what’s wrong, Hiso.” Her voice was steady, but he knew her: He heard the weakness, the fear.

“You degrade the office you hold,” Hiso said. “You’ve betrayed me. Betrayed your own people.”

He saw the flicker of understanding in her eyes, quickly masked—but not quickly enough. “You made me fail the Cold Minds.” His voice was cold. “Fail them again. Prey has been getting scarce, did you know that? Because of Esayeh and his patrols. My men found a rich target, one that would have satisfied the Cold Minds for a hundred days at least—and they arrived to find five deepsider ships waiting. Five!”

“Did Esayeh’s ships escape?” she asked steadily. “Was anyone hurt?”

“That is of no interest,” Hiso said. “What matters is that now we must find another target, and at once. And if that one, too, escapes them—if they begin to conclude that we can no longer keep our side of the bargain—they will turn on
us
. On our people. Now, at the moment when all is in motion to make us free of them forever.”

That penetrated, he saw. “You’re mad,” she said. “We’re too weak to fight. And we have no escape, nowhere to go. The Cold Minds are in the Hidden Worlds, too.”

“I know your old dream,” he said. “To run and hide with the other cowards—with the Line, in the Hidden Worlds.” He took a step closer to her, saw her shrink back slightly—
good
. “You can’t imagine a fighter’s solution to this. You can only imagine a woman’s. Save everyone, no matter the cost to honor.”

“Last night,” she said intensely, “I saw that thing for myself. The—pilot you took.”

Hiso went still. “Who showed you?”

Her jaw firmed. “Iain sen Paolo.”

Hiso laughed. “Our enemy,” he said. “A man of the Line. He has every reason to hate us. Anything he tells you is a lie.”

“It sounded true to me,” she said, still with the same strange calm. “Was that pilot, what you did to him, was that part of your plan? Because it’s horrible, Hiso.”

“It has always been horrible,” Hiso said. “You saw the reality of our situation, and it broke you. When, if you had been strong for a few more days, a few more weeks, if you had been the leader I thought you were, we might all be on the way to safety and freedom.”

“That is not so,” Tereu said, her face still as a mask.

“I wish I had killed Esayeh, that day when he betrayed the First Pilot’s secret to you,” Hiso said, breathing hard. “And I should have killed
you
. Your weakness has brought us all to our deaths.”

“No,” Tereu said, moving slightly, and when he looked down, he saw that she was holding a weapon aimed at him. A strange one, a small white gun with a black oval opening like a mouth.

He went still. “What is that?”

“A Hidden Worlds weapon,” she said. “A neural fuser. Sen Paolo gave it to me last night. He said it can cook your brain like an egg.”

“You won’t use it against me,” Hiso said. His heart was pounding strangely.
She’s a coward. Remember that. She has always been a coward.

“To save my life, I’ll use it,” she said.

“But both our lives are over,” he said, and with a surge of rage he was on her, gripping and twisting her slender wrist. She struggled to fire the weapon—too late. He twisted harder, and she shrieked and let him take the weapon from her.

She staggered back against the window by the head of her bed, cradling her wrist, her eyes wide. “What are you?”

“A man of honor,” Hiso said.

“Honor that has destroyed you,” she said.

“I,” he said pridefully, “have kept our world alive for all the years of my service. I will defend it to my death.”

“Do so,” she said coldly. “But you will never touch me again.”

“Nor will Iain sen Paolo,” he said. He pulled out his comm to summon Security, to order Tereu’s confinement out of communication range; but that instant the priority alarm began to flash. He touched the comm, and said, “Kimura. Report.”

The voice over the comm was unsteady with poorly concealed terror. “Proximity alert from Nereid, First Pilot. From the research station. Seventeen unknown contacts, big ones, just jumped in—they ID as Cold Minds.”

Hiso froze.
Then they know. They’ve known all along that it was I who took their pilot.

Hiso ran.

 

 

 

I ain was searching a tool-storage locker in the bitter cold of the docking bay outside Linnea’s jumpship, looking for the meter that would let him continue some maintenance the ship badly needed, when the bay’s alert sounded its high trilling note. A light in the ceiling began to flash red, and Iain saw the status lights over every docking tube in the bay—except his own—flick from blue to yellow.

Someone in Port Control had set the jump engines to warm-up.
The pilots are going out.
Iain’s heart thumped—he never forgot for a moment how close they were to the Cold Minds here. And that Linnea was out there, somewhere—vulnerable.

He closed the locker carefully and stood with his back to the docking tube, waiting. One of the first two pilots to arrive was Gareth, almost flying through the icy air—he gave Iain a frightened, half-guilty glance and vanished into the docking tube of his ship. The other pilot nodded curtly at Iain. “What is it, brother?” Iain asked.

“Ships jumped in,” the man said. “A lot of them. Can you come out with us, brother? We could use that ship of yours today.”

“Locked down, sorry,” Iain said, but at that moment he saw Kimura Hiso and felt himself go cold. He had never seen the man so angry.

“Pilot sen Paolo,” Hiso said. “You’ll ride in my ship.”

There was something in Hiso’s hand—Iain had to look twice to understand. The neural fuser he had given to Tereu. He wondered for a painful instant whether she was dead, whether that had killed her—then set the thought aside. “Where are you going?”

“Out,” Hiso said, unsmiling. “We have visitors. You’re going to meet them.”

“Cold Minds—” Iain shook his head. “Hiso, we can’t fight them off.”

“There won’t be any need to fight,” Hiso said. “Get along.”

When they entered the close, dim space of Hiso’s ship, Hiso made Iain kneel on the deck, taped his hands together behind him, taped his ankles, then bound his hands to his feet. Trussed like an animal, Iain could not move. Hiso strapped him down against the thin acceleration padding, then started connecting himself to his ship.

A long acceleration. When silence fell, when Iain guessed that they had jumped into the orbit that would take them to the research station, Hiso turned at last to Iain. “I’m going to tell you two things before we arrive there.”

Iain waited silently.

“First. I know what you did to my wife,” Hiso said.

Iain sighed. “I did nothing to Perrin Tereu.”

“You corrupted her,” Hiso said, his voice hard. “You seduced her.”

“That’s not true,” Iain said. “She is honest and honorable. And I’m bound, for my life, to Linnea Kiaho.”

“You seduced Tereu’s mind,” Hiso said. “You broke her loyalty, not just to me, but to our people. She has given her body to other men before, and I forgave her. This I cannot forgive.” He seemed oddly calm. “Now that I know of it, though, she’s no threat. Nor are you.” He touched his board lightly. “The other matter you should know is the arrangement I’ve made. You’ll be part of it, for a while. . . .”

Iain waited.

“You’ll help me finish what you helped me begin,” Hiso said. He opened a pocket in his tunic and drew out a single-dose spray injector. “This is the result of our work with the Cold Minds pilot,” he said. “It will reproduce the abnormal chemistry of the thing’s blood, in your own.”

Iain felt his heart begin to race. Surely not—

“And then,” Hiso said, “we’ll test whether it can protect you from the bots.”

“It won’t work,” Iain said. His voice sounded rusty and strange.

“And won’t that be sad,” Hiso said. Still he did not smile. “But in time—you won’t be there to know it, but in time, we’ll learn how to use Cold Minds ships for ourselves. We’ll adapt some larger vessels for our own use, when our people are protected from the bots and can travel in them—we can evacuate Triton. Travel to the Hidden Worlds—not as beggars and refugees, but as conquerors.”

Hiso woke his board again, and through his fear Iain felt the quick, short taps of the maneuvering jets as they docked. The clamps took hold with sharp metallic raps on the hull, and Hiso disconnected the piloting leads, then pushed himself over to Iain.

“You won’t do this,” Iain said. “You won’t have access to our ship.”

“That’s no longer a problem,” he said. “Your woman will let me in.”

“You don’t know where she is.” His heart was pounding.

“But she will come to me,” Hiso said. “You know she will—to save her wounded lover.” Carefully, he set the injector against the side of Iain’s neck and triggered it.

Icy strangeness in his blood. Hiso unstrapped him, freed his hands and feet. Iain caught a glimpse of Hiso’s control board, the proximity screens—saw the markers for the Cold Minds ships, hanging back, waiting—for what? “Linnea won’t come,” Iain said, brave words whose emptiness he was sure Hiso could hear. He did not even reply.

Hiso pulled on an isolation suit, sealed it. Behind its visor he seemed even more remote. He opened the hatch and pushed Iain through first. He had the neural fuser again, steady in his hand, but it hardly mattered. Iain was beginning to feel weak, strange, distant. The drug, whatever it was. Or grief for Linnea—for what, it now seemed, Linnea would have to endure without him.

Or plain fear of what was coming.

“I see you understand,” Hiso said. “There’s going to be a tragedy.” Hiso’s voice was remote though the filter mask. “You’re going to fight valiantly to defend your brother pilot”—he almost spat the words—“from being retaken by the Cold Minds.” He shoved Iain along the familiar passageway to the observation room, tapped out the code for admittance. “And you’re going to be badly wounded.” Before Iain could turn, resist, try to escape, he felt a hard blow against his lower back, an impact that sharpened into burning, driving agony. He grunted in pain, feeling cold air against the skin of his back, and then cried out as Hiso withdrew the knife.

Behind him, the hatch slammed shut.

Something dark, shining, floated up in front of his eyes. Small glittering blobs of blood. One splashed against the door, and he saw through the small port at its center Hiso’s ironic wave of farewell. Then nothing.

Then the inner door of the lock opened.

Iain’s arms and legs would not obey him. He floated, loose and limp as a corpse, out into the space the Cold Minds pilot inhabited. Brightness, painful to his eyes. . . . And a voice, not quite human, breathing high and fast in fear. There, in a corner, the Cold Minds pilot hunched in clear but voiceless terror.

Iain heard the thump as Hiso’s ship boosted away from its docking cradle—and then after endless minutes the great grinding roar of one of the Cold Minds ships seizing on.

They were coming.

They were coming, and Iain had only a few fluttering rags of strength left, of thought left.

Now he heard the Cold Minds pilot crying wordlessly in its rough, cawing voice—saw it still pressed into its corner, hiding, hiding, shivering in terror as metallic
clicks
skittered along the outer hull of the station, toward the lock.

I’m afraid too, brother. . . .
Iain could not shape the words to speak them.

He was so thirsty, spinning and spinning. So cold. More of the dark blobs filled his vision—how much blood could he lose before it killed him, or—

Fluttering darkness appeared at the edge of his vision, spread.
Too late,
a voice sang in his mind.

“No,” he said thickly. “No. Linnea—”

Blackness.