Hunted, page 31
Dade’s voice sounded in my ear, even though he was standing back at the stairwell. “I thought we already were in full paranoia mode.”
Festina sighed and rolled her eyes. “What can you do with a kid like that?”
“Um,” I said, “if you want I can keep an eye on—”
That’s when the cannons started firing.
A real soldier probably wouldn’t call them long-distance guns—they were shooting from the top of the palace toward that kill zone beyond Prosperity Water. Only about a kilometer; in artillery terms, that was practically point-blank range. But from where we were standing, the shells looked like they were zooming past us and heading way off in the distance before they blew up.
Of course, we didn’t stay standing too long.
I dropped flat to the roof. Festina did a dive, then rolled to her feet again, fists up…like it was some pure reflex to hit the dirt and come out fighting. A second later, she threw herself onto the roof again, cursing in a language I didn’t understand. Spanish, I guess. Considering how comfortable she was swearing in English, she must have been really mad this time.
Another boom of a cannon. While its thunder still echoed from nearby buildings, Dade’s voice came over my earphone. “It’s all right,” he babbled excitedly, “they’re firing over our heads. Shelling the enemy.”
“And what happens,” Tobit growled, “when the enemy starts shelling back? If the guns are a few degrees too low, we’re bang in the line of fire. How do you think this building got wrecked in the first place?”
Good point. The front of the embassy could have got hit by a barrage intended for the palace—just a few hundred meters short, that’s all. How long ago would that have been? When the Black Army first surrounded Queen Temperance? Or back earlier in some other battle…maybe when Temperance herself grabbed the palace from whoever held it before her.
“What do we do?” Dade called over the radio. “Leave?”
“No,” Tobit and Festina snapped in unison.
“We’re here to pick up fellow Explorers,” Festina said a moment later. “We stay until we absolutely have to go.”
“Yeah,” Tobit put in. “We aren’t going to get another chance down here.”
He was right. If the palace was firing, the Black Army must be attacking out on the defense perimeter—going for their final offensive. The moment they saw our Sperm-tail, someone must have called the attack.
Someone. Maybe Sam. Whose time of waiting was over.
In a few hours now, the war would end…right where it started, inside the high queen’s palace. There’d be fighting in the halls, just like the night Verity died—loyal palace guards without a queen, just trying to survive till the dawn. It made me feel guilty, realizing I was soon going to run off on them again. We’d pick up the other Explorers, or we’d decide they weren’t coming and hightail it back to Jacaranda. Either way, I was abandoning a lot of warriors, when I should be there with them, helping them, leading them…
Wait a minute—what the heck was going through my head? I was no leader.
The cannons fired again. I covered my ears and tried not to think.
Festina began to crawl on her belly back to Tobit and Dade. It didn’t look very graceful, her in that big fat tightsuit…but she moved surprisingly fast, and if you took your eyes off her the tiniest split second, she disappeared. That camo was good. I started to crawl too, then stopped. The Explorer’s backpack was still lying on the roof behind me; Festina hadn’t had a chance to look at it. I turned around and slithered up to it, sniffing furiously.
It smelled of the same stuff as the tightsuit, plus the odor of a male human. No trace of female scent. Maybe Plebon had been here an hour ago to send the contact beep, but Olympia Mell hadn’t been with him.
Was that a bad sign? I couldn’t tell.
I sniffed at the knapsack again, not sure what I was looking for. Even if the pack was booby-trapped with some kind of bomb, I wouldn’t know what explosives smelled like. Anyway, there were a whole lot of odors jumbled together: Explorer stuff, like a radio transmitter, and food rations, and a Sperm anchor…
My fingers twitched. I didn’t make them do that. Uh-oh…getting possessed again.
I watched as my hands reached out and flipped open the pack. Nothing went boom. That was the good news. The bad news was my hand scrabbling into the mess of equipment and pulling out the little anchor box.
“Edward!” Festina called over my earphone. “What do you think you’re doing?”
The spirit that possessed me didn’t answer. It set the anchor down on the roof and flicked the activation switch.
I didn’t even see the Sperm-tail coming—it was somewhere behind my back, still flipping and flapping, swishing aimlessly across Unshummin and far out into the countryside, like some cat-toy bouncing on a string. One second it was a dozen kilometers away; the next instant, it had snapped into place against the anchor, plastered to the side of the little box with only the tip of its mouth hanging free.
Festina’s voice rang loud in my ear. “Turn off the anchor, Edward. Turn off the anchor!”
Too late. The Sperm-tail’s tiny mouth suddenly became a nozzle squirting out a crowd of newcomers: Counselor, Zeeleepull, Hib & Nib & Pib, exploding out of the tube, smacking down hard on the crystal-brick roof. I could feel the impact under my feet; it must have jarred the Mandasars to their very bones. Right behind them was Kaisho in her hoverchair, shooting forward, spinning sideways, almost flipping over in a somersault…till the chair’s stabilizers kicked in and pulled upright with a whine of engines.
They must have been waiting, I thought. They must have been right there in Jacaranda’s transport bay, all set to come through the moment the anchor came on.
How did they know what would happen? Had the spirit possessing me set this whole thing up?
But the spirit had one more trick to play. Before I could react, my own foot lifted high and smashed the anchor box under my heel.
Electronic guts spilled onto the bricks. The glittering Sperm-tail whipped away and disappeared from sight.
“Dade, quick, Dade!” Festina yelled. “The other anchor—turn it on.”
“What?” the boy asked. “Why?”
“Turn on the fucking anchor!” Festina roared.
He’d set it down on the roof back near the stairwell. Dade threw himself across the bricks, bounced once on his tightsuit stomach, then landed within arm’s reach of the box. He slapped his hand on the switch…and nothing happened.
Nothing happened for a long time.
I lifted my head. The Sperm-tail was nowhere in sight.
“Ohhhh, fuck!” Tobit groaned. He skittered across the roof toward Dade, pulling his Bumbler with him. With the Bumbler’s scanner, he started a quick once-over of the anchor box…maybe checking for malfunctions.
Meanwhile, Zeeleepull struggled to straighten himself up to his usual height. He and his hive-mates looked winded from their landing—slapping down hard on the unforgiving roof. With all their weight, Mandasars fall a lot more heavily than humans. “Teelu” he gasped, “help how?”
“Help?” I asked. The spirit possessing me had quietly let go. “Help how who?”
“You, Teelu. Radioed you for help.”
“I didn’t radio for help. I don’t even have a transmitter.”
“But the captain said—”
“Oh, The captain.”
I didn’t need to hear more. If Prope had lied to the Mandasars about receiving a call for help—if she’d hurried them and Kaisho into the transport bay and waited for the Sperm-tail to get anchored again—she had to have known the spirit inside me would turn on the anchor, then smash the box to free the tail.
Which meant Prope was working with the spirit. She might have been pheromoned into doing it…but more likely, the spirit had used my father’s access codes to send instructions in the Admiralty’s name. That’s what I’d done when I’d found myself sitting all dopey at the captain’s terminal: the spirit had given Prope orders to maroon us here.
But why? I thought the spirit was on my side. Back on Celestia, it had helped me—pretty well saved my life and Festina’s. So why turn against us now? Unless its purpose had just been to keep us alive till we got to Troyen…
I scanned the night sky again. No dancing Sperm-tail anywhere…as if Jacaranda had reeled up its fishing line and headed for home. Across the roof, Dade and Tobit were poking at the anchor box, but I knew there was nothing wrong with it. Jacaranda had simply flown away. With Kaisho and the Mandasars down on Troyen, no one on the departing starship would raise a fuss that we’d all been abandoned.
From the start, Prope had been ordered to dump me someplace nasty. I just never suspected I’d help her do it.
37
MOVING OUT
Footsteps rushed up the ramp. Festina rolled over on her back, stun-pistol held in both hands…but she lowered it when she saw the newcomer was a man, a human man.
Both his skin and his uniform were black: not camo’d up like our party, but still plenty hard to see. Even so, I could tell he was definitely Explorer material. The bottom part of his face just wasn’t there—the skin swept straight down from his cheekbones to the thinness of his neck. His chin was only a little nub, scarcely bigger than his Adam’s apple.
I was kind of glad I couldn’t see him very well in all this dark.
“Festina?” the man said in a deep, very precise voice. You could tell he was making an extra effort to enunciate clearly. “I didn’t expect a rescue party at all, much less my favorite admiral.”
“Don’t count your rescues before they’re hatched,” Festina told him. She’d switched on a small external speaker in her tightsuit so people without radio receivers could hear her. I noticed she kept the volume down to a whisper. “How’re you doing, Plebon?” she asked. “Where’s Olympia?”
“Gone.” His face barely changed, but his eyes showed pain. “When Queen Temperance left, some of the palace guards defected to the enemy. They took Olympia as a bargaining chip—a valuable hostage they could offer to the Black Queen in exchange for their own lives.”
“Shit.” Festina’s fists clenched. “Any chance she’s still alive?”
Plebon shook his head. “Two days later…” His voice caught and he swallowed hard before trying again. “Two days later, they hung her corpse on their front lines. That’s what ‘expendable’…”
He couldn’t finish the phrase. The rest of us were all busy, trying to look anywhere but at him.
“Anyway,” he said after a while, with that hard tone of someone trying to hold himself together, “if it’s any consolation, the defectors were hung on the front lines too. Their bodies looked worse than Olympia’s.”
“Craziness,” Counselor murmured. “Smart armies don’t kill defectors, they show them off: happy, safe, and well fed. That way, you encourage more people to surrender.”
“Unless you don’t want your enemies to surrender,” I said softly. “What if you want them to stay right where they are, so the war doesn’t end three and a half weeks too early?”
It’s hard when you feel people’s deaths on your head. Those defectors got killed to keep the war going…delay things till I got here. As for Olympia Mell…it explained how my sister had known Willow was in the system. Olympia had told the Black Army everything she knew: maybe under torture, or maybe just chatting with Sam as a fellow member of the navy. Then, after the talk was over, Olympia had been murdered and put on display—to make sure the palace guards stayed at their posts till the very end.
This Black Queen, whoever she was: she could have had an easy victory weeks ago, but she wanted a massacre. And Sam was the queen’s closest advisor. What did that say about my sister? What did that say?
“The anchor’s working just fine,” Tobit announced. “But Jacaranda isn’t replying to any calls. They’ve buggered off on us.”
Festina let out her breath slowly. “Damn it to fucking hell,” she said in a controlled voice. “That’s twice Prope has stranded me in some shithole. Next time…”
I never got to hear about next time. Her words were drowned out by a pack of warriors storming onto the roof. It looked like the embassy’s floors were strong enough to hold Mandasars after all.
You can tell a lot about folks from how they react to a bunch of soldiers.
Festina and Tobit cranked up the volume on their tightsuit speakers and shouted in stilted Mandasar, “Greetings, we are sentient citizens of the League of Peoples, we beg your Hospitality,” At the same time, they were drawing their stun-pistols.
Dade gaped a moment, then just held up his hands in surrender. Counselor did the same, except that she folded her arms in a gesture I’d taught her, and cried out, “Naizó! Naizó!”
Zeeleepull stepped in front of her, flexed his pincers theatrically, and began to pump out a combination of battle-musks. I couldn’t distinguish all the scents he used, but the basic message was clear: “I will not attack, but I will defend.”
Hib & Nib & Pib backed to the edge of the roof and whispered as they stared admiringly at Zeeleepull. “Isn’t he strong?” “Isn’t he handsome?” “Isn’t he a teeny bit outnumbered?”
Kaisho said nothing—just standing her ground, with her legs glowing bright as lasers.
Me, I was watching everybody else, waiting to take my lead from them…but I was also concentrating mighty hard on smelling royal. Half the soldiers had gas masks; half of them didn’t. I still wasn’t great at controlling my pheromones, but I figured if worse came to worst, I could dose the maskless ones and sic them on their troopmates.
But it was Plebon who stepped toward the soldiers: waving his hands and shouting, “Nairit ul Gashwan!” Friend of Gashwan. Plebon’s accent was pretty awful, even on three short words; I got the impression he’d memorized the phrase by sound, rather than actually understanding it. Still, the soldiers eased up a bit: they didn’t lower their bows but a few took their fingers off the triggers.
For a moment, I considered walking up to them anyway: use my pheromones ‘to win a bunch of them over to our side. But that wouldn’t work on the masked guys, and they might get really mad about their fellow guards being zonked by chemical warfare. Grumbling to myself, I damped down the smell factory and let the fumes drift away on the breeze.
The soldiers hustled us down to street level, not giving us the tiniest chance to talk among ourselves. “Jush, jush!” they kept saying…which means, “Shut up and keep moving.”
Plebon didn’t look too worried about this treatment, so he must have thought we were safe. His Mend Gashwan must carry a lot of clout.
Who was she? I wondered. Gashwan was a female name, but the only Gashwan I’d ever known was the doctor who looked after me when I had the jaundice…or rather, when I had venom poisoning from all those nanites dosing me up. Could it be the same Gashwan, hanging around the palace for twenty years? Maybe. No matter which queens passed through Unshummin in the past two decades, they could all use a smart doctor. I didn’t know much about Gashwan herself—she was the sort of M.D. who reads medical charts rather than talking to patients personally—but if she’d been on Verity’s staff, she must have been the best at what she did.
Out on the street, another guard ran up and whispered something to the corporal at the head of our group. The corporal looked back at me, his antennas lifting straight up like lightning rods. Um: I think I’d been identified. Either someone remembered me from way back when, or they’d seen my face when Jacaranda broadcast my little message. (“Don’t worry, neutral mission, keep calm.”) Now they realized I was the Little Father Without Blame. I didn’t know what the guards would do about that, and the guards didn’t know either. Our platoon of escorts gawked at me when they heard the news, but didn’t say a word.
Sorry. They did say one word. “Jush!” And they hurried us even faster toward the palace.
We quick-marched up Diplomats Row to an army checkpoint where Aliens Gate used to be. The gate had been a big diamondwood arch in the palace’s outer palisade, nearly a century old and carved with Mandasar artists’ impressions of various aliens. No species would be flattered by the pictures—humans, for example, were shown as stick-thin and frail, men indistinguishable from women, with huge eyes, tiny mouths, and enormous quantities of hair growing from their heads like cedar bushes—but I still kind of liked the figures. This really was how Mandasars saw us, back years ago when we were exotic curiosities rather than day-to-day acquaintances. (Sam always claimed the male human on the gate was modeled after our father, back when he was just a greenhorn diplomat on Troyen. I couldn’t see the resemblance…but my sister loved thinking everything had some connection to her.)
Aliens Gate was gone now—maybe destroyed in battle, maybe just pulled down by armies occupying the palace, because it’s hard to defend a big open arch. In place of the gate was a narrow walkway past a row of arrow slits, then a path with twists and turns and odd little bumps in the concrete floor, probably designed to make Mandasar warriors stumble if they tried to charge through at speed. The path slanted upward too, rising at least two stories above the actual level of the ground; and once you were inside the walls, you had to go down again, on a set of awkward switchbacking ramps that were fully exposed to cannon and arrow fire from the palace.
It made me wonder how recent these defense measures were. Making it hard for attackers to get in also made it hard for defenders to get out for sorties and counteroffensives. I couldn’t help thinking the folks in the palace had abandoned all hope of fighting their way to open territory; this was their last stand, their Masada, their Alamo. If they had no chance of surviving, they wanted to take a ton of their enemies with them.
Our corporal borrowed a lantern from a guard post and led the way across the dark palace grounds. Once upon a time, this area had bloomed with gardens of glass-lily, queen’s-crown and skyflowers. Now there was only bare earth, tangled over with monofilament razor wire: stuff so sharp, it could even cut through a warrior’s carapace. Behind the wire were trenches, behind the trenches were more trenches, and behind them all was the palace, where archers and cannons were ready to fire on anyone coming too near.
