Colonel Carson had been selected by agents of Shadow as absolutely the worst possible officer for the job.
“Bull!” Carson shouted.
For a moment, Prossie thought Carson was replying to her unspoken thought, but then she realized he was simply denying that his appointment was a mistake.
Prossie felt lost without her mind reading. She knew what everyone wanted; the Earthpeople wanted Elani to send them home, Elani wanted to send them. Raven wanted to take command of the rest and take them to join the underground. Elani and Valadrakul and Stoddard trusted Raven and would support him in whatever he had planned against Shadow.
Most of the fifteen troopers just wanted to finish whatever the job was and go home; they had no idea of what they had gotten into.
And Carson wanted to prove that he was a great leader and a true man among men, but since he was not, in fact, either one, he had no idea at all how to accomplish that.
She knew what they all had wanted, up to the moment they hit the space-warp-but what they intended to do about it, she had no idea. Why hadn’t the Earthpeople taken Elani aside? Amy had been talking to her, but nothing had come of it, so far as Prossie could see.
Why wasn’t Raven playing along with Carson, as he had with Hart? Didn’t he see that the man was an arrogant fool who could be coaxed into doing anything, so long as he thought it was his own idea? If Raven didn’t see it, what about Valadrakul or Elani?
Prossie wished she could take Raven aside for a few moments, or Elani, or almost any of them, but instead here she was, trapped between Raven and Carson in the most public manner possible. She regretted, now, that she had taken time to look around and admire the trees.
“It’s bull, I said,” Carson repeated, and Prossie realized that everyone was looking at her. She stared back at Carson. Even without her telepathy, Prossie could almost feel the hate Carson felt for her.
“Maybe I misunderstood something,” she said.
“Nay, lady,” Raven protested, “’twould explain much, if this man was sent in error. ’Tis plain he’s no master of subtlety, and ill-fitted for our task here. What, then, shall I, as a rightful lord, take the charge? What say you all?”
“I say it’s bloody treason, you barbaric fop!” Carson bellowed. He reached for his sidearm.
Raven stepped back and reached for his sword-hilt-but he had no sword. The weapon was lost long since, somewhere back in the Galactic Empire. “Valadrakul!” he called.
Carson’s blaster was out and pointed, and Prossie stared at it in horror.
Didn’t they know it wouldn’t work here?
Carson pulled the trigger as Valadrakul raised his hands; the wizard’s fingers twisted strangely as he spoke a word.
For a moment, Prossie thought the blaster had worked after all, as something flashed, pale and quick as heat lightning, between Carson and Valadrakul. Then she realized that the weapon was pointed at Raven, that the shimmering flare had traveled from the wizard’s upraised hands to Carson’s body.
For an instant the colonel stood motionless, an expression of astonishment spreading slowly across his features; then it turned to a rictus of pain, and he crumpled to the ground, still holding tight to the useless blaster.
The sound of his fall into the dead leaves seemed impossibly loud and prolonged. Accustomed to a constant telepathic echo behind every voice, the eternal hum of other minds drowning out the ordinary noises of the inanimate universe, Prossie rarely heard mere sound so clearly, but here, in this telepathically dead environment, there were no distractions. She thought she could almost hear each individual leaf crumbling, each separate impact as first one knee, then the other, then a hand and the blaster and the other hand struck, his belly and finally his face landing in the rustling detritus.
And when the sound of the impact had faded, she heard a strange arrhythmic chorus of faint clickings. At first she took it for leaves settling, but then she realized it came from the wrong direction.
She turned, and saw a dozen blasters, drawn and aimed, triggers clicking uselessly against copper contacts. Carson’s men were avenging their fallen commander-or trying to.
“Men of the Empire!” Raven called, his hands upraised in an orator’s gesture. “Yon usurping fool is dead; drop your arms, an you’d not taste the same!”
“The hell you say,” someone called.
“Raven,” a quiet voice said-a woman’s voice, speaking from the side, not from the line of men by the ship.
Startled, Raven turned, and found Susan Nguyen standing straight, legs braced, her pistol held out before her, gripped firmly in both hands. Her black handbag, whence the revolver had come, lay open at her feet.
The barrel of the little gun was pointed directly at Valadrakul’s head, from a distance of perhaps four feet away. The wizard was utterly motionless, his hands hanging stiffly at his sides.
“This gun works here,” Susan said, speaking calmly but emphatically. “You’ve seen it.”
“Aye, mistress, I do so recall,” Raven replied warily.
“You are not going to hurt anyone else. Neither is Valadrakul. If anyone else is harmed, your wizard dies. Clear enough?”
Raven flicked his gaze to Elani; Prossie’s own eyes turned to follow, and she found that Pel and Amy stood one on each side of the female wizard, each gently restraining one of Elani’s arms.
“Now,” Susan said, “we are all going to sit down quietly, and talk this out, and settle what we’re going to do, and we’re going to do it without any sort of violence, because the first person to use violence is going to get a bullet in his gut. Is that clear?”
“Aye, mistress,” Raven said, “’tis plain as the day. And it pleases me well-I’d no wish for strife. Yon fool drew ’gainst me, and I’ve no blade; am I to perish undefended by the hands of such as he?”
“You know perfectly well that blasters don’t work here.”
“Ah, but mistress,” Raven protested, “in the heat of the moment I misremembered.”
Susan did not reply to that.
She didn’t lower the gun, either.
For a moment, no one spoke; then Ted Deranian burst out giggling.
“What an anti-climax!” he shouted. “No gunfight, no wizard war! My subconscious is wimping out on me.”
“Shut up, Ted,” Pel said.
Ted ignored him, and turned to Susan.
“Lady, if you’re a real person and I didn’t just dream you up,” he said, “I sure hope you don’t try this sort of thing in the courtroom!”
Chapter Five
“But I tell you, I am your rightful lord!” Raven shouted.
The Imperial soldiers shuffled their feet and cast uneasy, mocking glances at one another.
“The hell you say,” one man muttered.
“Mr. Raven,” the lieutenant explained patiently, “leaving aside that you killed the colonel, or at least your man did, and while it may have been self-defense, I’m not saying it wasn’t, still, that ain’t the approved procedure for promotion, and as I was saying, even leaving that aside, you aren’t in the chain of command.”
“And I have the word of General Hart that I am,” Raven insisted.
“You got the paperwork, the signed orders, you let us see ’em,” the lieutenant answered. “Otherwise-you don’t have the uniform, you don’t have the rank, you don’t have anything. You’re a civilian.”
“I am a nobleman born!”
“That don’t mean shit to us, sir. Our oath is to the emperor, nobody else. You could be the bloody King of the Franks himself, and we’d still have to tell you to call your Dad and get the papers.”
Pel, watching and listening from a few yards away, could see that a couple of the soldiers were not happy with that particular claim; he wondered who the King of the Franks was. He supposed it might be a title given to the heir to the throne, like the rank of “Prince of Wales” in Britain. It seemed a very odd thing to him that there would be such archaic titles in an interstellar empire.