“Oh, what a world of delicious wiggle room that careful statement leaves. You were involved, I am sure.”
“I was not completely uninvolved,” she conceded.
Cally could see his facial expressions, but not her sister’s, and was genuinely frightened by the manic glee that attended Michelle’s admission. If anything she had heard about mentats was true, she had never wanted to be around an unhinged one. This guy was so unhinged his door wasn’t on the same block.
“However, my tangential involvement was in no way my own instigation.” Michelle spoke calmly, but Michelle always spoke calmly. It was sort of irritating. Erick’s delighted skepticism wasn’t making the assassin feel any better.
“I was not consulted, I was required,” she insisted.
“Whatever excuse allows you to sleep at night, Miss Starch,” he said. “He tried to kill you, you got there first. And apparently managed the incomparable feat of not only securing sanction from our ‘pacifist’ peers, but persuading them that it was all their idea, and you their oh-so-reluctant puppet. I will give you points for style, at least. You finally surpass your famously barbaric sire in the art of murder.” He giggled and bowed, the gesture spoiled by the uninterrupted fit of humor.
Cally hadn’t heard a mentat laugh before — didn’t know they could. She could do without hearing it again. Winchon’s giggle could have curdled milk.
“If you knew Pardal was trying to kill me, how do you rationalize helping him do it, I wonder?”
“My dear colleague, I would have forever applauded your self-sacrifice in the advancement of civilization. The death of one of the Wise is always poignant.” He sighed, a hand clasped to his heart. “I have, alas, tired of your charmingly self-righteous and cautious company, Human Mentat Michelle O’Neal. Good-bye,” he said.
Cally felt the hair on the back of her neck try to crawl up her scalp line. Apparently they were through with the talking.
The mentats were locked into perfect stillness, standing apart yet swathed together in sheets of silver light and shadow. Seemingly random portions of the building alternately shook and cracked. In one corner, the ceiling crumbled as an I-beam curled, stretching and deforming like hot taffy. The massive weight of the building above it creaked threateningly. The destruction slowly stilled and froze, air sparkling with an alien haze that strained against some undreamt-of aether, unmoving, stalemated. As if by mutual consent, the buzzing tension stilled, as both took precious moments for deeper breath. They stood, panting, somehow managing to glare at each other and remain preternaturally impassive at the same time.
You have hired the worst sort of barbarians to do your violence, Michelle thought.
Do not be melodramatic, Erick replied. They are all barbarians. My hirelings are killing sophonts for money; so are yours. There is no difference. Barbarians are mutually expendable.
So we come, yet again, to our mutual philosophical debate, Michelle thought. You have never understood that in humans who are not damaged, the embryonic basis of clan loyalty is nature, not nurture. They thus have an inherent value. If you do not find some clan loyalty in an Earth human, you have a defective one.
What clan loy — He stared, as if for the first time, at the frozen Earther combatants. Oh, good grief. The attackers are your clan, either by birth or adoption. And the Darhel thought you were dangerous before. It is the perfect cosmic joke. Fine, you were right, I was wrong. But how truly hilarious!
“Okay, holy fuck,” Cally said, looking out from under the stairwell.
The two combatants had stopped for the moment. The stasis had broken as soon as they started their titanic battle and Cally had tried to get a shot in on Erick. But the round had been absorbed into the swirl of power around the two and never hit.
“Bit of a pickle,” Mosovich admitted. “Do we know each other?”
“I think we met once when I was a kid,” Cally said. “I looked different. Full body sculpt. Cally O’Neal.”
“Oh, I remember you,” Mosovich said. “Pleasure to finally meet you again. I’d mention that I heard from very good sources that you were dead, but…”
“Long story.”
“Perhaps another time,” Mosovich said, raising his arms over his head as the two mentats raised their hands.
This time the power was confined to a small space between the two mentats. A small very strange space. Tremendous heat was burning off of it but every time Cally tried to look into the spot her eyes basically tried to crawl out of her head. She stopped and looked at the combatants instead, noticing for the first time that the weird distortion around them was gone.
“I wonder…” Cally said, raising the Desert Eagle and assuming a careful shooting stance.
Michelle caught the power she was driving before it could do much more than blast the boxes on the far wall. And Erick, whose body burned to ash in a moment.
But the splash of blood on the ground was evidence of why he had suddenly failed.
“What did you do?” Michelle shouted, looking over at her sister.
“I dunno,” Cally said, standing up. “Saved your life? Killed a monster?”
“I cannot understand why you did that!”
“What part of horrible mass murderer of innocent people did you miss? Besides the target part, that is.”
“I never hired you to kill him. You do not kill the Wise!”
“Just did,” Cally noted. “My only regret is that you burned him to ash. I’d hoped to pull out his skull and shrink his head. I figured it would make a hell of mantelpiece.”
“Can it, Cally,” Papa O’Neal said, crawling out from under a desk. “Let me point out that Michelle has a point. There are only a few mentats in existence. The termination of one is going to be big news. Which means big trouble. The flip side is, other Granddaughter, that he was a mass murdering psychopath with enough power, by your own statements, to wipe out multiple worlds. So I have little regret for her actions. The alternatives don’t bear thinking.”
“I do not believe he was that kind of threat,” Michelle said. “The differences were philosophical…”
“So were the differences between the U.S. and the Soviet Union,” Papa O’Neal said. “Millions of people died — all those proxy wars add up. You probably need to get your nose out of the ivory tower and take a good look at history instead of physics. Most wars in the last century have been about philosophical differences.”
“I can, however, present his death in terms of threat, and the heat of the moment,” Michelle admitted. “For the sake of the O’Neals, Grandfather, you need to be very careful whom our people kill. Please pardon my presumption.”
“Your ‘Wise’ need to understand that someone who gives the orders for henchmen to round up and kill human beings in horrible ways no longer has a credible claim to being a navel-gazing pacifist,” Papa O’Neal said definitely. “The O’Neal Bane Sidhe don’t make it a habit to clean up every problem in the galaxy. Not enough days in the week. But we can make an exception. Do you read me, Granddaughter?”
“I… read you, Clan Leader,” Michelle said. “I will make that point quite plainly to the mentats. And I’m sure that the Indowy masters, when they are apprised of Erick’s full actions, will make it even more plain. The issue should never arise again. In any case, you have accomplished the purposes for which I hired your team. Thank you. Now, I need to take the device back to Adenast and construct a credible story for how it got there.” She raised her hand…
And Cally reached out like a cobra and caught it.