Hunted, page 32
Or maybe there were just archers—the palace’s cannons had stopped shooting. I doubted the Black Army had called off its attack; more likely, the gunners on the ramparts had run out of shells.
We scrambled up the ramp to the palace’s back door—what my sister called the Sphincter. Since the building was shaped like a queen, and this entrance was smack in the middle of the tail section, Sam always joked that the door led right up the queen’s rectum.
Not very funny you think about it.
The stonework here was free of Balrog moss. That was no accident—a lot of the place looked scorched, as if someone had taken a flamethrower to the walls. I guess the palace guards didn’t know the spores were sentient…or else they didn’t care. The stink of burned vegetation was strong enough that even a human nose would smell it.
The same stink filled the corridor inside. This end of the building had once been painted with scenes from around the planet—the great waterfalls at Feelon, the ocean grotto of Pellibav, the sacred hoodoos of the Joalang Mountains—but now the paintings were charred black, with thick flakes of ash littering the floor. The Balrog must have tried to crawl through here like soul-sucking ivy; and it’d been stopped. For the time being, this part of the palace was sanitized…but with the front of the building swallowed up, the red moss would surely keep trying to work its way back.
So we walked through halls that smelled of cinders and battle-musk. It was just vinegary Musk A at the moment, general tension but not panic. Even that was enough to get to Counselor—her antennas were jerking back and forth in little spasms, and her whiskers were constantly shivering. I adjusted my pace to walk beside her, then put out a standard worker pheromone that said, “Just keep going, it’ll be fine.”
The smell seemed to help: a moment later, she wrapped one of her thin brown arms in mine. “Thank you, Teelu” she murmured, before the guards Jushed her into silence.
We turned down a side corridor and headed for a ramp to the second floor. This was the way to the royal infirmary, where I’d spent my last year on Troyen. As we climbed, whiffs of Mandasar blood began to overpower the stench of burned Balrog. By the smell of it, the infirmary was still very much in business, caring for an awful lot of sick and wounded.
A middle-aged gentle stopped our party at the top of the ramp, scolding the soldiers for bringing filthy humans into a hospital area. Did they want us to infect the place with our awful alien germs? It took our corporal a full thirty seconds to break into her tirade, as he mumbled in Mandasar, “Please, Doctor…please, Doctor…please, Doctor…we must see Gashwan right away.”
“Gashwan’s busy,” the gentle finally said. “She hasn’t got time to waste on trivialities.”
“But, Doctor…but, Doctor…but, Doctor…”
I took a deep breath and stepped forward. “Teeshpodin Ridd ha Wahlisteen pim,” I said, trying not to feel sheepish at putting on airs. I am the Little Father Without Blame. “Gashwan himayja, sheeka mo.” We must see Gashwan, if you please.
The gentle turned to me, anger on her face. It was the first time she’d seen me clearly—our only light came from the corporal’s lantern, and I’d been standing quietly back in the shadows. For a heartbeat I was sure the doctor would start hollering about dirty hume disease carriers; but her eyes opened wide, and her whiskers trembled. “Teelu,” she whispered.
Mandasars gasped up and down the corridor; I nearly gasped with them. It was one thing for Celestian kids to make the mistake of calling me, “Your Majesty”…but this woman should have known better. I wasn’t a queen, I was a consort. Addressing me as Teelu was like prostrating yourself before the royal plumber.
“Please,” I told her, then got all flustered as I tried to think of a nice way to say she should watch her words. But the woman got the wrong idea from my hesitation.
“Yes, Teelu,” she replied, whiskers still fluttering. “At once, Teelu” She scuttled off into the next room.
“Um,” I said to the rest of the crowd. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize, Teelu,” Counselor whispered to me.
“You really shouldn’t call me that,” I told her. “It’s only for queens.”
“And you,” she said, with no hesitation.
“Jush,” muttered one of the guards. But he didn’t sound as tough and confident as before. He might have been wondering if he’d get in trouble for bossing around a queen’s consort. In a way, it was funny—Black Epaulettes were coming to slaughter us all, and these guys were afraid I might yell at them.
“It’s okay,” I told them in Mandasar. “No one’s going to get mad at you.”
“York,” Festina said sharply in English, “I’d be more comfortable if you kept to a language I understand.”
She held her stun-pistol not quite aiming at me, not quite aiming away. (The soldiers hadn’t tried to take the gun away from her…lucky for them.) But I wasn’t half so upset by the stunner as I was by her tone of voice—so hard and icy. Festina was mad at me; really, really mad. She’d seen me turn on the anchor then smash it, and she thought I’d betrayed her. Worst of all, I could only have done that bad stuff if I was in cahoots with Prope.
I think that’s what made Festina so furious. She might forgive me if I did something careless or stupid…but not if I was the least little bit tied in with Captain Prope.
Um.
An elderly gentle shuffled out of the infirmary, so old her brown shell had darkened nearly black. Every step she took seemed an effort; she grunted as she walked, and each heaving breath turned whistly in her nose.
Now I remembered: her nose. Dr. Gashwan had always had a wicked scar running the length of her snout, as if someone once stuck a knife tip into a nostril and yanked it all the way back to her cheek. It was an ancient wound from her youth; but even in the dim lanternlight, the ugly mark was still very visible.
Beside me, Festina lifted a hand to her own face.
“Gashwan,” Plebon said. He bowed, but the old woman ignored him. Instead, she shuffled past everyone till she stopped in front of me.
“Edward York,” she cooed in English. “My one and only son.”
Leaning forward, she nuzzled me on the lips.
38
LEARNING SOME UGLY TRUTHS
I blinked. The kiss was almost exactly like Counselor’s back on Celestia—a human gesture imitated by an alien.
I was so surprised I couldn’t speak; but Festina asked die question that was on my mind. “Son? What do you mean, son?”
“He’s my child,” Gashwan answered, her eyes glittering. “I made him.”
“You?” said Festina. “You were the engineer?”
Gashwan lifted one of her wrinkled hands and patted my cheek fondly. If I hadn’t been so frozen with horror, I would have flinched away.
Dad had never revealed who engineered Sam and me…but it only made sense that he went to someone on Troyen. He knew people here; the doctors were the best in the galaxy; and Mandasar medical facilities could ignore stuffy Technocracy laws about gene-tinkering.
Years later, when Sam needed a doctor for Innocence and me, it probably wasn’t coincidence she’d gone straight to Gashwan.
“You’ve turned out nicely,” Gashwan purred. She’d taken my chin in her hands and was tipping my head from one side to the other: examining her work. “Still perfect, aren’t you, boy?”
“I’m okay,” I mumbled.
She smiled. “So much like your father when I knew him. The same look. The same attitude.”
I did some quick arithmetic. My father was a hundred and twenty-one now, still hale and hearty thanks to YouthBoost. He must have been in his mid-sixties when Sam and I were whipped up in a test tube. His original mission to Troyen was thirty years before that…which must have been when he first met Gashwan. Maybe she’d been a young medical researcher, eager to learn about the human metabolism. Mandasar doctors loved to study aliens.
“Well,” Gashwan said, still looking at me keenly, “I’m proud of the way you turned out. Very presentable…for a human.”
“But you made a mistake on me,” I told her. “I’m stupid. My brain doesn’t work right.”
“Your brain works exactly according to specification,” she said. “I agree, it wasn’t fair; but your father promised you’d have a fine life, brought up so you’d never know you were different. That’s the only reason I said yes when Alexander asked to make you the way you are.”
For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. “Dad asked you to make me…slow?”
“Oh, Edward,” she chided. “Do you think I’d mess up your brain by accident?”
“But why?” I whispered.
“So you wouldn’t get in your sister’s way,” Gashwan answered. “If you were smart enough to figure out how the admiral wanted to use you…” She shook her head. “You’d never have gone along. But things turned out all right, didn’t they? You’re here and you’re fine.”
“But…but…”
There were no words inside my brain. No words. They’d been burned clean out of me.
No one had made a mistake. It’d all been completely deliberate. Premeditated. Carefully planned. Yet my whole life, my father had called me a disappointment: rejected me for being the way I was, when he was to blame.
It didn’t make me mad. It made me sick.
But Plebon had lifted his head. “Gashwan—you’re talking about an admiral named Alexander. Do you mean Alexander York?”
“Yes,” Gashwan said, “Alexander York is Edward’s father.” With a ghost of a smile, she added, “And I’m his mother.”
Plebon turned to Festina. “Alexander York was the admiral who sent Willow here to Troyen. He wanted us to pick up a queen and take her to Celestia. York has some shady business deal with a group of people there, called ‘recruiters’…”
Oof. I should have guessed—who else? who else?—but I was beginning to realize my greatest skill in life was denying the evil around me. My father was the one behind it all: Willow, the recruiters, the terrible inertia of my brain.
Festina said nothing, but nodded to herself…as if she’d suspected the truth for some time.
In the silence, a distant sound drifted up through the bleak stone corridors—possibly from outside, possibly somewhere in the castle.
Hyena laughter. Cackling and crazed.
“What’s that?” Gashwan asked.
“An old friend,” Festina answered grimly. “His name is Larry.”
Part 5
TAKING THE CROWN
39
BECOMING AN EXPLORER
“A Laughing Larry?” Dade blurted out. “There weren’t supposed to be any…” He closed his mouth sharply.
“There weren’t supposed to be advanced weapons on Troyen?” Tobit asked. “Looks like our navy researchers weren’t the only ones who got around the Fasskister Swarm.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions!” Festina snapped. “Quick,” she said to Gashwan, “who’s in charge here?”
“I am,” Gashwan answered.
“In charge of the whole palace? The defense?”
Gashwan nodded. “Ever since Queen Temperance left.”
“Willow took the queen away,” Plebon put in. “To help the recruiters on Celestia control—”
“We figured that out,” Festina said, then turned back to Gashwan. “The laughing sound comes from a killing machine…maybe more than one. Your arrows are useless, and your troops will be slaughtered. Surrender now before there’s a bloodbath.”
Gashwan patted Festina on the arm. “Dear child, I’m not a fool. I tried to surrender as soon as Temperance abandoned us. The Black Army refused.”
“They wouldn’t let you give up peacefully?”
“They ignored my broadcasts and killed my envoys. The Black Queen doesn’t want capitulation—she wants to take the palace by force.”
“Who is the Black Queen?” I asked. Knowing the answer.
“Your sister, of course,” Gashwan said. “She started the war, and she’s about to end it.”
I wished I could go all outraged: yelling, How could you say such a thing? But no. Sam had called herself an “advisor” to the Black Queen, but my sister had always been a leader, not a follower. And she’d led Troyen straight into this war. She’d been in a perfect position to incite hostilities, using diplomacy to pump up tensions rather than ease them. The footprints at the Cryogenic Center had been just her size. And Samantha had murdered Verity before faking her own death.
When war came, I could imagine her killing the fifteen queens one by one: getting on their good sides then murdering them, just as she did with Verity. She could have claimed to be a secret envoy from the Technocracy and promised navy support for the queen’s cause—that would be a quick route to royal favor. Then she’d betray the queen to some convenient enemy, or slit the royal throat personally when the time was right. It’d taken twenty years, but so what? And every time a queen died, Sam would try to keep control of the queen’s armies, giving orders to generals who still trusted her as the late queen’s closest ally.
Now, it was almost over—nothing to do except take the palace. In the process, she’d kill me because I was a loose end. She probably thought I was too stupid to figure out things on my own, but she didn’t want me talking to anybody else. Sam couldn’t afford that: my very existence was evidence against her.
“It’s me Sam wants,” I said. “She’s afraid I know too much. If I give myself up, maybe she won’t kill anyone else.”
“Dear boy,” Gashwan replied, “I know too much too. A lot more than you do. But if we both give ourselves up, Samantha will worry we might have talked to someone or hidden a message somewhere. Besides, Edward, she can’t leave witnesses who’ll say you surrendered peacefully. You know she has to kill you and destroy your body. You know that, don’t you, dear?”
“Yes.”
“And it will look suspicious if she does that to a voluntary prisoner. Your human friends will make a fuss. From Samantha’s perspective, it’s tidier if we all die accidentally in the heat of battle. Then she’ll lament the horrors of war, and make an apologetic donation to the fleet’s Memorial Fund.”
Gashwan’s whiskers quivered with amusement…even admiration. She was truly tickled by the way Sam had worked things into a neat package—a mother’s pride at how clever her daughter turned out to be.
Festina snapped, “We’re wasting time. Plebon, can you find your way to the roof?”
He nodded. “You want me to look for Larries?”
“And anything else you can see. Tobit, you and Dade go with him. Take a Bumbler and check what the Black Army is doing. Keep trying with the Sperm anchor too—maybe Prope will have an attack of conscience and come back for us.”
“Prope?” Tobit snorted. “Conscience?”
“It’s a long shot,” Festina admitted. “Try anyway.” She put her gloved hand on the sleeve of his tightsuit and gave a little squeeze. “Get moving, you old sot.”
“Right away, your magnificence.” He gave her something that was nowhere near a salute, then grabbed Dade by the arm. “Come on, Benny, we’re off to fulfill the glorious Explorer tradition: getting our asses shot for no good reason.”
“That’s what ‘expendable’ means,” Dade replied.
Tobit cuffed him in the helmet. “Asshole—you say that after we die.”
As Tobit, Dade, and Plebon hurried up a nearby ramp, Festina said, “All right—the rest of us need to get organized. Let’s get Kaisho to…Kaisho? Where the hell are you?”
I looked around: lots of Mandasars, but no wheelchair. While we’d been distracted, Kaisho must have drifted quietly out of the lanternlight and vanished into the darkness.
“Bloody hell,” Festina glowered, “I knew there was a reason she ought to stay in the ship.”
“Perhaps,” Counselor suggested, “she wants to make contact with the moss at the front of the palace.”
“She’s made contact already,” Festina fumed. “Likely while she was still on Jacaranda—no one knows the range of the Balrog’s mental power, but there’s so much damned moss down here, it probably has the combined strength to talk with someone in orbit. Hell, it may have been able to contact Kaisho while she was still on Celestia; some experts think the Balrog is a single hive-mind, with instantaneous communication between every damned spore in the universe. Willpower stronger than the laws of physics. If that doesn’t scare the piss out of you, you haven’t thought about it long enough.”
“But if she’s already talking to the other Balrogs,” Counselor said, “why did she need to go off on her own?”
“Because the moss has an errand for her,” Festina answered. “Something it can’t do for itself, while it’s stuck to the palace walls.” She lifted her hand and pressed it to her helmet’s visor, as if she wanted to cover her eyes. “I really hate being manipulated,” she growled. “Kaisho used me to bring her here. And so did you, Edward.”
“My sister manipulated me,” I told her.
“So did your father,” Gashwan put in, way too cheerily. “From the very start.”
“To make Edward a king?” Counselor asked.
“Exactly,” Gashwan smiled. “What a clever young girl you are.”
“King of what?” I asked.
“Of whatever you want,” Gashwan answered. “Mandasars. Or humans. Possibly both.”
“Because of the pheromones,” I mumbled. “Because I’m like a queen and can simulate…” I didn’t finish the sentence.
