Shadowkill sq-3, page 34
part #3 of Shadith's quest Series
“‘Wouldn’t it be better for him to come here so he can see the place?’
“‘Not possible. Come. You’ll see.’
“And then she left.”
“I quoted the brochure to him,” she told Rohant. “I was irritated; he was belaboring the obvious so I might as well respond in kind: ‘To insure flexibility of response and reaction speed in a casing of reasonable size, memory capacity is limited. The intake must be sorted and downloaded every three hours; the three androids must download in staggered series so that at least one is at full efficiency at the moment when one is taken out of circuit. What’s wrong with that?’ I said, ‘It only takes a minute.’
“‘It means that the jacal has an opportunity to raid every hour of the night. He had already acquired plans for your pens, he knows when the full-response droid is as far away as it’s going to get, he chaffs the half-loaded droid, overwhelming its intake, flips in his scoop and gets the target out before the full-response can locate the trouble and cross the intervening space. He can do it over and over again, whenever he wants. If you add flesh guards, he’ll kill them. I take it you’ve moved the jinnkitt once or twice?’
“‘Yes. First night, it was off its feed, we had it in the infirmary. The second time was just before a client was coining to look at it. We were grooming it and playing with it so it would be in good spirits.’
“‘Right. That’s the only reason you still have it. The first part of the answer is simple. Change the routine. New pattern of patrol every night, for one thing. For another, download after one hour, not three. You keep your droids livelier, time down is much shorter, and the change in pattern will annoy the jacal no end.’
##
“I hadn’t thought of that, Ro, it was such a simple change and so obvious, once he said it. It was worth whatever trouble this chatting business put me to. Besides, I liked the man, I already liked talking to him. I did what he said, we caught the jacal, Digby got enough on the one who hired him, a turd named Tambaedee, to scare him off, and the rest you know.”
##
Omphalos was using the same android every time they came for him; it had a scratch underneath its right vision-lens which gave it a rakish look, almost like a dueling scar. He was sure they were keeping it on full-cycle, twice he’d seen signs it was near saturation, a faint hesitation in its movements, a sluggishness in its responses. The first time was before he had the stunrod, the second time they made him strip in the cell before they took him out, they were taking him to a special session in the lab, so he had to leave the rod behind.
Now he was cultivating a hunter’s patience, waiting quietly till all three factors clicked in.
It would happen soon. Had to be soon. Before they gave up on Miralys and moved him to Black House.
The Grand Chom was away, they said. How true that was Rohant didn’t know. Or where. Or what had happened to him.
There was a restiveness in the place that was connected with the Chom’s absence. Something has gone wrong for them; they can’t figure what, but they feel things aren’t right. He knew that nervousness, it was the kind that passed through a herd when a predator was eying them.
He had to get out of here.
Soon.
2
Savant 4 (speaking to notepad):
Subject 7R (native name: Rohant) has emerged from the fugue state, but continues in a curious passivity. Tech 1 insists this has nothing to do with passivity but is rather the typical huntmode of a predator, the time of waiting before the strike.
NOTE: Tech 1 is showing further signs of deviation, I recommend removal from Mimishay and rehabilitation at the Institute; if his attitude does not improve subsequent to such actions, I must advance a suggestion of termination with prejudice; his skills as a tech are without question; however, his growing insubordination is a corrupting force among his juniors.
FURTHER NOTE: Negotiations with Voallts Korlach are proceeding slowly, but there is no real problem. Another rat is being prepared to increase pressure on the Toerfeles so she will expedite the bargaining and reach the point of decision. Despite the losses, this has been a markedly successful ploy. Congratulations to the planners. May their fertility increase.
Worms In The Walls, Wasps In The Rafters: Wherein Mimishay Learns The Folly Of Messing With Dyslaera And Distorting The Creations Of Dedicated Artists Like Ginbiryol Seyirshi
Shadith / Ginbiryol Seyirsi / Tsipor
Shadith followed the android onto the bridge.
She stopped in the doorway, shuddered. It was the ugliest place she’d seen since Stavver stole the diadem from the RMoahl towers: what wasn’t starkly utilitarian was, heavily, disastrously ornamented. The cabin Ginny gave her was stripped to the bones, nothing there but toeup furniture and gray walls. As she looked around, she decided he had redeeming qualities she hadn’t noticed before since he hadn’t put her in a suite with this sort of decor.
Ginny was seated off to one side, working at the comspec’s station, a habit she remembered from the first time he’d hauled her off somewhere.
He braced his prosthetic hand against the sensor board and pushed the chair around. “You slept a long time.”
“I was tired.”
“Apparently. Tell me something, Singer; was Ajeri Kilavez among the prisoners in the hold? You do remember her?”
“She was there, in the pod beside yours.”
“Ah. I thought so. The Omphalite told me she died at the Hole.” He brooded for a moment, staring down at the unflesh hand, watching the fingers and thumb twitch; then he looked up. “I had to replace my crew. The pilot is one Mertoyl. There are two mercs in crew quarters, they will handle beams and missiles, and I have acquired a Sikkul Paem in bud to tend the drives. I prefer Sikkul Paems as engine crew; they do not interfere in what is not their business. It is an attitude I recommend you adopt.”
“Tui-tui, where’s all this cooperation you flourished when you roped us in?”
He contemplated her a moment, produced a small tight smile. “Cooperation? I do not think I mentioned the word. My recollection is that we have agreed not to kill each other for the moment.”
“Right.” She settled herself in the co-seat, crossed her legs, and rested her hands on her knees. “So. What now?”
“We will talk in a moment. I must finish what I am doing here.” He pulled himself around, bent over the slantboard and went back to tapping the sensor plates, watching the hexa cells in front of him as the half-dozen he was working with flickered through image after image.
Shadith rubbed at her eyes, let her head fall back as she considered the new pilot.
Mertoyl was a thin, fair woman with wispy ash blonde hair and gray eyes so pale they were nearly colorless. Her trousers were gray leather, its shadow diamond texture identifying the leather as murraskin which meant it was contraband and almost as expensive as her tunic. That tunic had the deep subtle sheen of avrishum, probably cost more than many people earned in a year. A single earring dangled from her left ear, a teardrop of silver with a gray shimmerpearl in the cut-out center. She was a ghostimage of a woman, but a ghost with very expensive tastes.
Where does he get them, these etiolate blondes? These peculiar pilots with their penchant for absolute loyalty? Because she has it, too, bad as Ajeri. Has it already, though she can’t have been with him more than a few months. Is it catching? Gods, I hope not.
Tsipor was squatting by the back wall, her arms crossed on her knees, her dark red eyes empty of expression. Though she was hard to read, her rhythms so alien they only rarely approached Cousin norms, she seemed powered-down, almost dormant.
Shadith glanced at her, shivered, looked away. During the nights and days of the ride across the Brushland she’d felt close to the Raska; their shared needs and the solitude they were locked into had overcome instinctive dislike. Mutual dislike-Tsipor found the monkey Cousins as repellent as they found her and had no difficulty making that revulsion apparent. That closeness… pseudo-closeness… whatever… it was gone now. Probably because Tsipor had transferred her loyalty, such as it was, to Ginny as the one most likely to see Omphalos rolled in the dust.
A hexa cell pulsed, widened until it touched top and bottom of the forescreen. A world image swam in the center of the cell. “Arumda’m,” Ginny said. “That is where we are going.”
Shadith blinked.
Coincidence? That’s the world where Tinoopa’s son is. Hope he’s not in this, if he gets killed, what am I going to tell her?
Ginny tapped in a code, took the POV in a rapid slant downward until it hovered above an island shaped like a tadpole trying to bite its own tail, a curving ridge of mountains the bony protrusions of the tadpole’s spine. “Haed Nunn,” he said. “The Mimishay Foundation is there.” He tapped a sensor and a small red light began flashing at the back of the circle of water the tadpole’s head on one side and tail on the other. “There is some manual capacity, but its defenses are mostly controlled by the kephalos. I intend to infiltrate EYEs into that kephalos; once I have control of it, I can turn their defenses against them and slag the place.”
“Sounds simple enough. What about Rohant and the Dyslaera? They’re in there, aren’t they. How do we get them out?”
“Even before I left, half of them were dead and the others in such misery they would welcome death. Why complicate things?”
“Complicate! One tooth and a fingernail left, they’re coming out…”
##
As the ship swam through the insplit, the argument went on and on, taken up and dropped, taken up again.
##
Shadith stalked restlessly about the bridge; she stopped beside Ginny, fists on hips. “Why’d you bother coming for me? You don’t need what I do. You don’t listen to me. Why?”
“You are the one who will not listen. I have told you again and again, I do not know why I need you. That will only become apparent when you do something.”
“Do what?”
“You see? You do not listen. Is it too simple for you? I have no idea what. I will not know until you do it. I do know this. You will destroy either Mimishay or me. Because I am no threat to you at present, I can hope it will be Mimishay that will receive the force of your… aah… presence.”
“So I’m some goddam primal force?”
“Precisely.”
“You’re crazy. I suspected that and now I know. Primal force? Gah!”
He smiled at her, that characteristic small tight twitch of his pale lips; he was undisturbed by her skepticism and felt no need to defend himself.
Shadith went stomping off the bridge before she drowned in her own futility.
##
“Look, getting Rohant and the others out, that comes first. Then you can do what you want with Mimishay.”
If I’m a Primal Force, I might as well make it mean something. Ginny, you worm, I won’t let you fool with me. Sar! you want to see primal force, just keep this up.
“You cannot even know that any of them are alive.”
“If they aren’t, then there’s no problem, is there? If you go on with this the way you’ve planned it, you better call off the truce and shove me out a lock, because I’m going to use everything I’ve got to stop you.”
He stared at her a long moment, as if he considered that option, then, abruptly, he gave in. “Very well. How close must you be to control large beasts?”
“It depends on the beast and the circumstances, but say a circle of radius… um… twenty kilometers.”
“Then you can’t work from a synchronous orbit.”
“No. Certainly not.”
Tsipor stood up, came across the bridge with the short-legged sinuous walk that was like no other. “She lies.”
Ginny opened his eyes wider. “Really?”
“Linked to me her range is extended a hundredfold.”
“Well, Singer?”
Shadith scowled at Tsipor. “All right, she’s right, it’s certainly extended, I don’t know how far. Hundredfold? I doubt it. And in any case I don’t intend to try the limits. I mean to be on the ground when I work.”
“Very well.” He recalled the image of Haed Nunn. “Most of the… aah… pirate swarms are in the south, but there are several that make forays into northern waters. Mimishay has set up a rather primitive defense against attacks from these infested flotillas. It is primitive but effective since the ships are wood hulls and the weapons on them pitiful. Mimishay has strung a cable net across the mouth of the bay. There.” A red line leaped across the open section of the circle of water. “It can be charged with enough current to electrolyze the seawater and char any hull that slams against it. It usually is not. However, Mimishay does keep a certain number of sensors alert for intrusion.”
He shifted the POV down the curve of the world until Haed Nunn vanished and a string of rocky islets occupied the center of the cell. “Haedsa… that’s island chain… Chavada. Barren, not much fresh water, a few fishing families. I will take the ship down, land her there.” Yellow light flashing on one of the midsized rocks. “This is a free-trader world, ships come in all the time, many use the Field at Tos Tous, but others land wherever they take a notion. Mimishay notes but ignores them.
“It is my intention to approach Haed Nunn on miniskips and come through the mountains rather than take the easier approach on the bay side. Mimishay has been undisturbed on that Haed for at least two centuries, so the Brothers and the Powers are careless about security; they depend on those kephalos-driven defenses. Because these neither sleep nor lose their edge, they forget that such things have their limits and if focused in one direction will ignore a small, nonthreatening intrusion coming at their backs, as it were. We will need a distraction. If you are able to locate and mind-ride a number of large sea beasts, drive them against the net at the mouth of the bay, that should be sufficient to cover us. Can you do this? Remember, you will be straddling a miniskip while you work.”
“Can you put my emskip on a lead? I can’t boot whales and navigate at the same time.”
“Yes. We can do that.”
“Then you’ve got your distraction.”
##
The storm wind beating at their backs, they rode the heavily-laden miniskips across the water, flying so low the spume whipped from the wavetops slapped into their legs. Clouds boiled low overhead and phosphorescence ran in crooked green lines through the troubled swell.
Shadith felt the storm as a distant discomfort; the greater part of her consciousness was in the calm deeps, split between three megaforms, great black creatures half a kilometer long from blunt nose to the tips of the massive tentacles, whose slow steady beats drove them through the water. They were solitary beasts, uneasy so close together. Again and again, she had to herd them back as they struggled to turn aside, to put a more comfortable space between them. She was troubled by what she was doing, riding them to their deaths, but Rohant was her friend and he needed her help. Her eyes were squeezed shut and tears leaked from under her lids, yet each time the beasts tried to peel off, she tightened her grip and drove them on.
The beasts hit the net as the miniskips passed from water to land and began the steep winding climb through the jagged cliffs on the stormside of the mountains.
Shadith shivered and groaned as a massive jolt of electricity fried one of the beasts before she could free herself from his brain; she heard the hooming roars of pain and fury as the other two exploded with killing rage and flung themselves against the lethal net.
The winds snatched and shoved at the emskips, tried to drive them into the walls of the ravine they were sweeping along. The tether joining her emskip to Tsipor’s whipped her about, threatened to wheel both of them into a down-spiral that would turn them into bloody meat.
Shadith struggled back into herself, fought with the clip connecting the tether to the emskip shaft, finally managed to trip it.
The minute she was loose, the emskip swerved wildly, her left leg scraped along the stone; part of her trousers tore away, a flap of skin ripped loose, then off; the skipfender squealed and threw up a fan of sparks, the noise hammered at her, the winds hammered at her, the skip bucked under her.
Grimly she fought for control.
After what seemed an eternity of confusion and noise, the drive bit, the emskip straightened out; she pushed the speedlever down and hurried after Tsipor and Ginny who were both nearly out of sight.
##
The place Ginny had chosen for their base was a moraine flat with a tumble of huge boulders and a litter of stones from the size of eggs to sofa pillows; the flat was halfway up the tallest mountain west of the Mimishay compound.
They labored to clear a space for the domes, a figure eight with one lobe twice the size of the other. Though the wind had abated once they reached the eastern slopes of the mountains, the rain lashed at them, coming down hard and cold as they bent and lifted the stones, carried them to the ragged wall they were building about the site. Bent and lifted and carried. Jammed fingers in the dark against stones they couldn’t see and scraped off skin and worked their backs until even their bones ached.
In the bay below, the tumult was, calming as the last two black beasts died and their bodies heaved against the net, lifting and dropping with the storm swell, nearly invisible in the dark water. After one look, Shadith bent to the stones and labored with a desperate intensity, using pain and fatigue to shut out the things she didn’t want to see or think about.
Ginny inflated the shelters into mottled gray domes that shed light even more efficiently than they shed the rain, then he exploded anchors deep into the mountain to hold them steady despite the snatching of the wind.
##
Shadith crouched in the backcurve of the larger dome using a small handpump to blow up an air mattress. Her head was wrapped in a towel and now and then she stopped her pumping to shiver; the thin silken undersuit she’d put on was dry, but no barrier to the drafts the air machine was blowing through the domes.
