As soon as he was outside, he touched on the link. “Close,” he said.
The hole in the sphere grew smaller, smaller, swiftly smaller, was a pin prick of darkness again, was gone. He put the link away and began the long run to the interface, buoyed by the knowledge that nothing could go wrong now, nothing could stop the explosion that killed the Bright Sister. All he had to do was sit and wait.
I looked round the interface. “Yeh,” I said. “This is it. He was here.”
Jamber Fausse nodded. Store cabinets were open, some of their contents spilled onto the floor, evidence of a hasty search, there was a bottle of brandy on the console with about an inch of liquid left in it, a bubble glass beside it with a brown smear drying in the bell; the stink of the brandy was thick in there, along with a stale smell that clung despite the labors of the fans in the ducts. “Where is he now?”
“Who knows? It’s a big ship. Keep an eye on the door, will you, the two of you? I’d better get to work. We don’t have that much time.”
I let the bed down, started arming the torp. Didn’t take long. When I finished, I thought a minute, then I opened up the dolly’s motor casing and removed a few vital parts. If-when-Parnalee got back, I didn’t want him driving off with our little surprise. There wasn’t much else I could do. Even if the three of us could muscle the torp off the bed without fatally herniating ourselves, there was no place in here where we could hide the thing.
The young raider left, but Jamber Fausse stopped me at the door. “What if he comes back before it blows? What if he disarms it?”
“You want to stay and argue with him, be my guest,” I said. I wasn’t all that happy with that antique timer; I was sure it’d trigger the torp sometime, I just wasn’t sure when. And I didn’t want to be anywhere around when it turned over. “Look,” I said. “It’s a randomized circuit and not all that easy to counterprogram. Not like pulling a few wires on hope and a prayer. I’ve set the thing to blow in half an hour. If he gets here in a minute or two, maybe he can do something; if he’s later than that, no way. We take our chances, that’s all we can do.”
He didn’t like it, but he was no more into suicide than I was, so he nodded and we took off for the tubegate.
19
I dropped the tug into orbit a quadrant away from the Warmaster and waited there.
Adelaar glanced at her chron. “Two minutes,” she said.
The ship hung motionless in the center of the screen. The Hanifa was standing behind me again, I could feel her hot breath on my neck. When I looked around, I was almost nose to nose with her, but she wasn’t noticing anything but the Warmaster. The rest of them were pretty much the same. Hungry.
The Warmaster trembled. A shine spread over her, then localized at the drivers. She moved. Slowly at first. Ponderously. She began picking up speed, angling away from Tairanna. As soon as she got wound up, it was like she vanished, collapsing to a pinpoint and then to nothing. “Well,” I said. “She’s on her way. Horgul in two hours. Good-bye, battleship.”
“What about the torp? How do we know if it blew?”
That was Jamber Fausse; he was a man to keep his teeth in an idea until it squealed. “We don’t,” I said. “Unless she turns up again. Then we know it didn’t. Back off, everyone. Show’s over. We’re going down.”
Parnalee had slowed to a fast walk by the time he passed through the next to last hatch. He felt the sudden liveliness in the ship as she began to move. He stopped, flattened his hand hard against the wall. He could not have described the difference he felt in her, but he knew what was happening, she was on her way to the sun. He smiled. So they thought. Let them think it, fools. He started moving again, an unhurried trot. He passed through the last hatch, glanced at his chron, smiled again. He’d made better time than he’d expected. Only half an hour. He sighed with pleasure as he thought about stripping down and letting the fresher scrub him clean again, about stretching out on the fur, a hot meal on the console beside him and another bottle of brandy while he waited for the Dark Sister to come alive and take over the ship. He saw the door, open like he’d left it, hurried toward it.
He stopped just inside, his way barred by the dolly and the torp; for a crazy moment he thought he was hallucinating, then that the Bright Sister had somehow developed a mechanical TP facility and flipped his torp back to him, then he knew that the woman had done it, the bitch had found his hiding place, she’d found the Dark Sister, no matter that it was impossible for her to find the Dark Sister, and she’d left this joke to greet him. Furious and afraid he took a step toward it; disarm it, he thought, I’ve got to disarm it.
It blew in his face. He knew an instant of intolerable brightness, of intolerable frustration and rage. Then nothing.
1. Time-span:11 Days (local) after the meeting on Gerbek Island to the evening of the day called Lift-Off.
At the Mines.
When Karrel Goza left Zaraiz Memeli at the Mines, the boy was on fire with excitement, but it didn’t take him long to discover he’d been dumped there to keep him out of trouble while the adults did whatever it was they were going to do. He was furious and hurting, betrayed again by someone who claimed his trust. He poked about, sticking his nose into anything that showed the slightest promise of breaking the tedium. In the middle of his second week there, early one morning before the sun was all the way up, he pulled a rotten board off a window at the back of the convict barracks, wriggled through the narrow space and dropped onto the floor of a holding cell.
The silver sphere came bounding at him, squawling its warning, attacking when that warning was ignored.
He was startled but not frightened. He jumped, swerved, dived, played with it, laughed as he whipped about, elastic as an eel, too fast for the sphere to catch him.
N’Ceegh heard him laughing, took a look.
The sphere stopped chasing Zaraiz and began chatting with him, then it brought him into the workshop.
After a terse welcome, N’Ceegh went back to making the operant parts of one of the stunners he was assembling for the hit on the Warmaster. Zaraiz sat on the stool next to him and watched him work, fascinated by the delicacy and precision of his fingers, by the magnifier he was wearing, the microscopic points on most of his tools. Despite his involvement in the Green Slimes and his ability to dominate the other middlers, he was a solitary boy; he knew the pleasures and value of silence. He asked nothing, volunteered nothing, spoke only to answer the Pa’ao’s questions and kept his mouth shut at other times, not wanting to distract N’Ceegh at a crucial moment. After a while N’Ceegh let him polish and fit together cases for the stunners.
The boy immersed himself in what he was doing, glowing with pride each time the Pa’ao looked a part over and set it down without comment, showing that he thought it was finished, that he saw nothing there that needed fixing. With the resilience of the child he still was, Zaraiz gave his trust again, this time to the Pa’ao, gave it because N’Ceegh was a master craftsman and he wanted very much to be like him, because N’Ceegh was wholly alien, was physically and spiritually Other. He gave his trust and a tentative affection.
N’Ceegh recognized this in his silent way and gave back what he was given.
When they took the Pa’ao, Bolodo’s minions were clumsy and let themselves be seen. To cover themselves they ashed the village where they found him, killing all his kin, blood to the third degree, killing his mates and his children, most of all killing the boychild who was his craft-heir. His species was monogamous for life, patrilocal and powerfully bonded to the family and the family Place. He lived after that only to trade death for death; he escaped from the Palace to find a way of laying his bloodghosts, to feed them blood from the men who did the killing, blood from the men who ordered it. Zaraiz gave him hope of another kind, hope of passing on his craft, of hands to lay his own ghost when it was tired of him and wanted to shed the weary weight of his body.