Hunted, page 18
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.
23
MAKING OURSELVES AT HOME
One by one, the Mandasars came up the tube, each in his, her, or its special way.
The workers enjoyed it. They buzzed excitedly among themselves, probably comparing how much they loved getting turned inside out and pulled through a tube five hundred klicks long. (I couldn’t tell for sure what they said; they were speaking their own personal patois, made from English and Troyenese, plus words that were likely invented out of the blue. Workers who are raised together always develop private languages that no one else can understand. It drives warriors and gentles crazy.)
Counselor couldn’t decide what to make of her trip up the tube. It obviously disturbed the heck out of her, but she wanted to see it as a religious experience: zipping through a universe where her carapace bent like rubber. Gentles have a sort of mystic fear of getting their shells stripped off. If a gentle loses a sizable chunk of armor through disease or injury, she’s considered “blessed by the stars” and treated as a prophet…the terrifying kind of prophet who’s nine-tenths crazy and one-tenth cosmic bliss. (The Troyenese word for “blessed,” ullee, also means “naked” and “dangerous.”) So when Counselor got herself twisted every which way, as if her husk had turned to taffy…well, she must have felt scarily, vulnerably open to the Five Gods. I think she believed they’d planted some great revelation inside her, if only she searched her soul hard enough.
No such spark of divine truth for Zeeleepull—he just hated the sensation, pure and simple. A split second after he hit the landing pad, he launched into a long tirade of Mandasar cursing…and on those words, his accent was perfect. Next thing you know, he’d ripped open the landing pad and there was jelly slurped all over the transport bay. Zeeleepull got real huffy about it being an accident—his claws had spiked through the rubber bag when he landed, and it wasn’t his fault how the Sperm-tail spat him out. Me, I think he might have given the bag a deliberate snip during his blue-streak tantrum; but considering Zeeleepull’s temper, I kept my opinion to myself.
Festina was the only one left on Celestia…and now instead of a nice soft landing pad, she had a wobbly blob of cold wet jelly to smack into. Not a dignified entrance for an admiral, getting buried and glopped up with goo. I hurried forward to clean things, trying to push the slop back into the torn bag; but Kaisho told me not to bother. “Wait,” she said. “You underestimate our noble leader.”
“But she’s going to fly straight into the—”
“No,” Kaisho promised. “Not with Prope watching.”
And she didn’t. The rest of us had come out of the Sperm-tail like people shot from a cannon, no control at all; but Festina emerged like a gymnast nailing a perfect dismount. Two feet slammed on the floor without the tiniest stumble: Festina Ramos, standing straight and calm and balanced, well short of the guck that trembled with the thunk of her impact.
She lifted her eyes to the pinkish window at the back of the transport bay. “Captain Prope,” she said evenly. “Admiral on the deck.”
“Yes, Admiral,” came back Prope’s voice. I couldn’t see the captain, but I could tell she was gritting her teeth.
The entry mouth of the transport bay irised shut. Moments later, a door in the back wall opened and Phylar Tobit thudded forward, pouchy face beaming. He was half a second away from giving Festina a bear hug when Prope’s voice snapped over the speakers. “Explorer Tobit! At attention for greeting an admiral.”
Tobit didn’t exactly stop, but he slowed down. Then he did a passable job of faking a trip—catching his right foot behind his left leg—so he could tumble into Festina anyway, wrapping his arms around her shoulders as if to break his fall. She laughed and whispered, “Happy birthday, you dirty old man,” before giving him a light kiss on the cheek.
“Never the kisses for aliens,” Zeeleepull muttered.
I tried to give him a peck on the forehead, but he ducked.
Over the next hour, we got settled in. The two Explorers, Tobit and Benjamin, showed us to our rooms; Captain Prope and an oily lieutenant named Harque put in a token appearance (“Welcome to Jacaranda, always an honor to host an admiral, a consort, and a sentient parasite…”), but the captain and lieutenant disappeared again almost immediately. (“Needed on the bridge, have to get started for Troyen.”) After they were gone, I think Festina murmured, “Good riddance,” but I might have misheard.
So the Mandasars got five separate cabins, and left four of the rooms empty so they could all squash into the fifth; Tobit and Festina went off to talk about unspecified old times; Kaisho got a new hoverchair, and amused herself discussing intimate details of her condition, while a terrified Benjamin tried to lift her into place without touching her legs. (“A hundred and ten years old, but I’ve started menstruating again! I suppose it means I could have a baby…if I found the right man. Dear lovely Benjamin, what would you think of having a fuzzy-haired child whose head glowed in the dark?”)
Me, I found myself in an exact twin of the room I’d occupied on Willow. No big coincidence since cabin design was standardized throughout the fleet, but it still felt a little creepy. As I sat there alone, wondering why I’d agreed to all this, Prope’s face appeared on my vidscreen with that half-light half-shadow trick she’d used before. “Attention, all passengers and crew. Now leaving Celestia orbit. Next stop…” (dramatic pause) “…Troyen.”
I was such a bundle of nerves, even such cheap theatrics could give me the chills.
There’s a routine you’re supposed to follow when you’re stationed on a new ship. I wouldn’t have remembered it, except that I’d gone through the same thing recently on Willow—two women from Communications Corps had walked me through the whole procedure, taking every possible chance to brush against me accidentally on purpose. (The more I thought about it, the more I realized how everyone on Willow had been keyed-up to the point of craziness: ten times more wild and impulsive than you got from mere boredom.)
So I went to the cabin’s terminal and introduced myself to the ship-soul. Gave my name, rank, and access code so the computer could fetch my records from Navy Central—not that I had much in the way of records, but at least there’d be stuff about the Coughing Jaundice and my allergy to apples. (That ran in the family—my father and sister too. The doctor who engineered Sam and me offered to fix the problem, but Dad ordered it left in. He didn’t want his kids snacking down on a nice juicy apple when he couldn’t. That tells you something about my dad…and it tells you something more that he told us what he’d done: “I could have made you perfect, but I didn’t want you little brats enjoying yourselves in a way I can’t.”)
Once I’d given my ID to the ship-soul, I figured it would take a while to get any response—the closest copy of the navy archives was Starbase Iris, a full light-minute away. But the instant I finished the identification process, the ship-soul announced I had a personal, confidential, eyes-only recorded message.
Um.
“Eyes-only” meant no one could read this message before I did…despite the long-standing fleet tradition that if you belonged to the navy, so did your mail. The only people authorized to send eyes-only messages were admirals; and there were only two admirals likely to care about Explorer Second Class Edward York:
1. Lieutenant Admiral Festina Ramos. But if she wanted to pass me a note, she could just walk down to my room.
2. Admiral of the Gold, Alexander York. My father.
If Jacaranda carried a recorded message from Dad, when had he sent it? Probably a while ago…when Jacaranda’s mission was to make me disappear. I wondered if the message could possibly be an apology: “Sorry we’re forced to do this, son, but the Admiralty can’t let you go home.” No, not much chance of that. More likely, he wanted to call me a disappointment one last time—his final chance before I got dumped somewhere cold and airless.
Well, only one way to find out. “Ship-soul, attend,” I muttered. “I’m alone, so you can display the message.”
When the video flicked on, I found there was another possible sender I hadn’t considered. “Surprise!” said Samantha from the screen.
