“What do you remember?” I asked.
“Not enough. Unfasten me!”
“There was some sort of accident.” I watched her a moment longer as she batted at quick-release buckles with numb hands. “You were very badly injured. Dennett put you in here to regenerate, supplied a huge transfusion of free-market ’cytes from somewhere . . .”
Cybelle swallowed. “My hands don’t work properly.”
“They’re newly regrown.” I began to loosen the straps holding her to the couch. “You probably don’t have full reflex control yet.”
Something metallic banged against the exterior hatch. I turned to the porthole and froze. A huge, dark eye pressed up close to the glass, occluding the view. It stared at me for a moment, then it blinked.
“What’s happening?” Cybelle demanded. She wasn’t in a position from which she could see out.
“Space pirates, I think.” The locking wheel in the center of the hatch began to turn. “They want in.”
The hatch swung open before I could force the ancient quick-release buckle on Cybelle’s harness. A toothy muzzle covered in dark bristles poked inside, sniffing the filthy air suspiciously. “You! Be gettin’ yourselves out here now!” A whirring knife, screws humming at the air, pointed its deadly blade at us from behind the hijacker’s webbed left ear. “We’s taken this vehicle! Resistance be futile!”
The pirates had boarded the chapel well ahead of their declared schedule.
Dennett’s mistake was to assume he had plenty of time because he was receiving their transmissions from a slowly accelerating vehicle dead astern of the chapel. Not being a soldier, he’d failed to account for the short-legged high-acceleration boarding craft lying dead ahead in our line of flight. Evidently it had been sent there as soon as the chapel’s flight course became apparent upon its departure from Taj Beacon; at the time, I did not know how the pirates evaded the deacon’s radar, but when all is said and done, churches are not renowned for their military-grade sensor suites. Regardless of how they did it, there was no warning: One minute Dennett was worrying about the large vehicle that was slowly overhauling us from astern, and the next minute the distinctive exhaust plume of a nuclear-thermal rocket was melting the lead flashing on the steeple. While I was force-feeding Lady Cybelle so that she wouldn’t turn her appetite on me, Dennett was trying to evade the incoming boarding craft. To give him his due, he made a decent attempt to dodge the pirates: But the chapel was not built for the wild gyrations and evasive maneuvers required to resist a forced docking. Eventually, our assailants tired of the game, at which point they shot away the chapel’s high-gain antenna and issued a harsh ultimatum—be boarded, or be blown apart.
“Get here! Not there, here!” The pirates—four of them, all armed—hovered above the Soyuz in the crypt, intimidating us with beats of their leathery wings. Escape was not an option: With their chiropteroid low-gee adaptations, they’d have no trouble running me down if I tried to flee. Moreover, I had to carry Cybelle, for she could barely control her arms and legs. Their leader shrieked, his (or her: I could not tell) voice a high-pitched rasp: “Respect! Get down, Churchling! Get down there, not here!”
“I’m getting, I’m getting!” I tried to move to the indicated spot without accidentally kicking myself halfway to the ceiling. “What do you want?”
“This way! Not that way!” The seniormost pirate gestured, making short stabbing indications with his (or her) power blade. “To the storage room, third door along! You wait there! You try escape, we cut neck.” (Punctuation: an unmistakable sawing gesture. Hovering behind his shoulder, one of the quadrotor blades echoed his motion.)
I hauled Cybelle in the direction indicated: neck-cutting did not appeal. In what appeared to be an outbreak of playful spirit, the pirates had decorated the storage-room hatch with a chain of Gould’s skulls: they buzzed and clattered their jaws angrily as one of our hijackers chittered and yanked at the wheel of the field-expedient dungeon. I slid Cybelle through the opening, then (with a glance at the pirate leader, who bared his or her fangs at me) followed her inside.
“Your Grace—” It was the deacon. He recoiled as he saw me, a very strange expression on his face. “They captured you both?”
“You didn’t leave me any opportunity to escape,” I said, as Cybelle simultaneously announced, “I demand to know what is going on! Why aren’t we at Taj Beacon yet?”
“Gruffle,” mumbled Father Gould. He was hanging upside down from an air-conditioning duct, his habit wrapped around his torso, as if imitating our captors’ leathery wings. As situationally unaware as ever, he wore an expression of rapt concentration: His eyes were screwed tightly shut. “Grumming bat crypt belfry.”
“What are they going to do to us?” I asked. I noted the absence of certain parties—the Gravid Mother and Cook in particular.
“I don’t know.” Dennett twitched, then swiveled his gaze toward Cybelle. “Do you remember the accident?”
“There was an accident?” Cybelle might have regained the power of speech and relinquished her insensate appetite for flesh, but she was still coming up to speed. “No, I don’t remember any accident. When do we arrive at Taj? Who are these people?”
“We’ve been hijacked.” Dennett glanced sidelong at Father Gould, then back at Lady Cybelle. “I should warn you that they’ve broken his remote network and are most certainly monitoring it—including his eyes and ears. He’s trying to subvocalize and not look at any of us, but you should assume that anything you say will be overheard. As I was about to say . . . the accident was a total disaster. We were forced to put in at Taj Beacon, where Sister Ang and the three engineering officers deserted. I had to petition the vicar-in-residence for a line of credit to buy new techné for your regrowth, and six hundred kilos of plutonium for the second reactor—it wasn’t cheap. Shorthanded and damaged, I also advertised for additional crew: That’s where Ms. Alizond comes in.” Another strange look. “And Willard, the new life-support engineer. Cook. Oh, and there’s a stowaway. Looks just like Ms. Alizond, but is less talkative. Seems to want to kill her for some reason, which is why I put Ms. Alizond in the sarcophagus with you.”
I startled. “You saw her?” I asked.
“Saw her?” Dennett raised an eyebrow: “She was a much more diligent cleaner than you, and didn’t even ask for pay. Not a very interesting conversationalist, though—a bit too focused on murderous thuggery. But I diverted her away from your celclass="underline" You should be grateful,” he added, offhandedly. “Don’t worry, I’ll look after you.”
“I should be—” I forced myself to stop.
“I don’t understand this.” Cybelle raised her arms ineffectually, framing her face. “Who are these hijackers?”
Suddenly, the hatch swung open. “Which of you is Alizond?” barked one of our captors. “Boss want talk you right now! Come, or I cut neck!” As if to emphasize this, one of the quadrotor knives whirred menacingly into our midst, causing the other captives to scatter. “Come! We go now!”
There didn’t seem to be any alternative options on offer. So I went.
Kidnapped!
The pirates hustled me away from the improvised brig, toward the refectory, where their leader had established his office. They had dragged the tables together and plastered their tops with retinas, displaying black-and-white text that marched in pleasingly regular patterns across their eating surfaces.
“Ah. You must be Krina Alizond-114.”
I stared at the pirate chief with mixed apprehension and curiosity. In body plan he resembled his minions: furry and sharp-faced with low-gee batwings and spindly legs. He hunched over the largest retina, a stylus clutched in each hand. I noticed that he wore gold, chain-link bands to hold his wings in place at elbow and wrist and a visor above his eyes that shone with a pale green light. “Um.”