Lirrit broke a sob in half, stood in shuddering silence for another few breaths, then she pushed at Karrel Goza’s chest and turned in a grim, controlled silence to watch what was happening on the screen.
“Who?” Elmas Ofka said, her voice soft as thistledown and cold.
Quale straightened, seemed to shake himself, sloughing the detachment that had grayed him down. “Parnalee,” he said.
She swung around, her temper flaring, but before she could say anything, Churri spoke. “Parnalee,” he said. “He played you like a gamefish, Hanifa. That’s his business. He’s good at it.”
“I don’t understand.”
Churri shrugged. “Who does. Crazy is crazy.”
Elmas Ofka closed her eyes, brushed a hand across her face. “I see. Find him. Now.”
Quale raised a brow. “Why bother? Leave him in his hole and let him fry.”
Elmas Ofka trembled, controlled herself immediately. “Find him,” she said. “We can argue what happens afterward.”
Adelaar didn’t wait to be asked; she huddled over her sensor pads, called up strings of words and numbers, scanned them, repeated the process several times, selected some, re-entered them. Aslan watched the image flow, expand, contract, change in little and in toto, the glyphs and figures like minute green demons dancing to the beat of her mother’s fingertips. The schematic filled the screen again, centered on the Bridge, the Navel. It flashed away in pie-slice wedges, a game of jackstraws with Mama’s fingers picking surely through them. Shivering among the green lines were fuzzy red lights and several pale ambers, arranged in clusters. Each time a light appeared, she exploded a small white dot in the center of it and went on without further reaction. One by one she swept through the wedges until she’d done them all; Aslan frowned, there seemed to be more wedges than the geometry of the ship allowed for. Mama’s magic, play the numbers, ah! she bit back a giggle and scribbled on her pad.
Adelaar swung around. “I’ve located all lifesources that the ship can detect. That means exactly what it says. There may be dead areas, this is an antique and badly maintained, and there are places in her deliberately kept off the record; if he knows about those places, well, he knows a lot too much. You’re wrong, Quale. We don’t dare let him wait us out.”
Leaving them to chew that over, she kicked around, touched a sensor and leaned back to watch the screen as the Brain flipped from spot to spot, froze momentarily on a scene, long enough to take in the details, then moved on to the next. Akkin Siddaki and Tazmin Duvvar supervising the tag end of the body-gathering. Flip-flip, body squads walking tiredly to the last few bodies, a whore here, a scutsweep there.
After a short stretch of looking on while the Brain flashed through scenes that she’d seen before, Adelaar moved restlessly, then pushed her chair around and leaned toward Pels; for several minutes she talked in an undertone to him. The Rau listened, nodded, then got busy on the sensor pads at his substation, his eyes fixed on the notation screen. Over their heads the images flickered from the stunned shipfolk in the sleeping cells to the scattered bodies of the dead. Adelaar sat back, satisfied.
The eyepoint jumped to the Hordar and their prisoners marching up from the Drive Sector. Kanlan Gercik and his cousin Zhurev Iavru were the first to appear, scouting ahead for ambushes. The wounded west-coaster came next; he was stretched on an improvised litter being carried by Meskel Suffor and another west-coaster. Then three Hordar from Gercik’s Raiders. Then the captive Drive Gang with more litters, two wounded, one dead. One stunned and heavily unconscious Huvved. Harli Tanggаr had her sister isya Melly Birah with her and two women from another isya on the far side of the captives, all of them keeping a fierce eye on their prisoners. Behind them came the rest of the squad, the rearguard.
The eyepoint left them, whipped to the drive room, hovered momentarily over the cooling corpses, leaped again and focused on an ancient eremite living in a rat’s nest of scraps and paper and scavenged bits of equipment, filthy white hair knotted on top his head, a few threads of beard, vermin crawling in and out of his hair, in and out of his layered filthy clothing.
Quale rubbed his hand along his jaw. “Makes you itch,” he said.
“What?” Elmas Ofka came quietly to stand beside him. She stared up at the image. “What are we looking at?”
Another shift. Another mouse in the walls, this one painfully neat and weirder than the rat, he was walking through elaborate square corners, running a folded whiter-than-white cloth over every surface in his sparsely furnished lair, an irregular space created by the intersection of stressbeams and baffles, choosing the areas he dealt with according to a pattern in his miswired head.
“Discard,” Quale said. “Took the measure of life up here and took himself out of it.”
“Why are we looking at this?”
Lirrit Ofka came over, leaned against Elmas Ofka, arm curled loosely about her waist. “Yuk.”
The eyepoint was hovering over a nest of scavenger moles big as hunting cats, the young nosing blindly at the side of one while another heavily gravid female was regurgitating scraps of anonymous meat for half a dozen yearlings.
“Why are we looking at these things?”
Adelaar turned her head. “The Brain searched out lifeforms, Hanifa. We have to see them all before we know if one could be Parnalee.”
The eyepoint continued to jump. More moles, bats, mobile fungi, other, less-identifiable life forms, things mutated into half-glimpsed horrors.
“This is wasting time.”
“No,” Adelaar said, “we’re finding out where not to look for him.”
The large screen went blank, flipped back to the schematic of the Bridge.
“I was afraid of that, he’s in a blind spot somewhere.” She kicked the chair around, taped nervously at the arm. “Probably listening to us.”
“Listening?”
“Were it me in his place, I would be. At the least, listening.”
“So where is he?”
“I told you. A blind spot.”
“Get the others up here. We’ll do it our way, gridsearch this thing till we find him.”
“Fine. If you’ve got a year or two.”
“What?”
“How long would it take to search gul Inci room by room?”
Elmas Ofka frowned at the screen, one arm folded across her breasts, her fingers moving slowly up and down the biceps of her other arm. “Then how…?”
“Let me think about that awhile. And see if I can do something about snoops.”
“Ah.”
Adelaar crossed her legs, tapped her fingers on the arms of her chair. “The holding area for the prisoners is ready and Pels has set the tube to it. It’s near one of the lifepod banks so your people won’t have far to move them once you’re ready to pop the pods.”
9
Parnalee smiled, lifted his glass in a salute. “Clear them out, you oozy whore. Clear them all out, it’s woman’s proper work, cleaning house. Clear out yourself and leave me to fry.” He laughed. “It’s not going to happen, bitch.” He stroked his free hand along the smooth black flank of the interface. “Your time is coming, love. Wait a little longer, until they’ve licked up the vermin and I can move without running into strays.” He sipped at the brandy, his eyes on the lethal gray egg sitting on its mobile bed. “A little longer, love.”
The Bridge cleared quickly. Aslan watched the raiders swagger out, chivvying the Bridge crew before them. The weight of a helpless rage and inturning violence had been lifted from now that they had the Warmaster and she could no longer threaten their families and the land itself; should they happen across Parnalee, they’d tear him limb from limb, but it’d be (marginally) a more abstract action with overtones of justice, not simply the blood boiling up. There were small cruelties as they hustled their captives out, an elbow in the ribs, pinches on arms and buttocks; mostly though, they cut at the crew with a cheerful contempt, a facility of tongue developed to work off anger at wrongs that the law or force of arms couldn’t… no, wouldn’t right, the retaliation for the indifference of the Huvved Fehz to the suffering of the Hordar poor in the cities and on the grasslands, to the pain of Hordar families forced off the land they’d worked for centuries before the Huvved came and claimed it. She cross hatched an area of the pad, no words left, not right then; the Ridaar was flaking this, that was enough. Trouble ahead for everyone. These hill-and-grassers, they were what the Huvved had made them; when the war was over, when Elmas Ofka and those like her were trying to put the world together again, these raiders, bandits more than anything else, they were bound to be provoking, out of control, sources of instability, inviting a reimposition of the injustices that had created them. They had to change. She sighed. It wouldn’t happen. She looked at the crosshatching, a rambling nothing, started writing again, stopping, thinking, no longer noting impressions, being her father’s daughter for a change, poet’s daughter trying a poem of her own.