Inside her mind, the woman beat him.
“Your weapons dropped our trees,” he said. “I’m sure of that much. My people helped you, but the blame rests mostly on you.”
“None of us,” she said.
Merit rocked slowly from side to side, thinking.
A door opened and closed in the hallway, and papio feet walked past the galley, making no effort for speed.
Once again, the woman said, “Sit down.”
“Are you certain?” Merit asked.
“Certain?”
“That they’re trustworthy,” he said, gesturing at the papio soldiers who couldn’t piece together any of this noise.
The woman looked at the three faces.
Another thud was followed by shouting, not close but loud enough to seem loud. A papio had yelled a few words.
“What did that mean?” Elata asked.
Merit hadn’t heard enough.
Nissim had, and he gave Tar`ro a careful glance.
Somewhere in the back of the ship, somewhere past the shop, gunfire suddenly broke out, intense and swift and then gone again.
Echoes and the memory of gunfire lingered. The imprisoned crew jumped to their feet, and the four papio shouted orders at them and each other, waving their automatic weapons. But then nothing else seemed to happen. Normal sounds of engines and life drifted into the galley, lasting long enough that the mind could almost wonder if nothing was wrong. The slayer crew began to sit again. Nobody relaxed, but most of the room was ready to stop breathing fast.
Then another voice shouted, closer than the first.
“Enemy,” a woman called out, in papio.
Gunfire erupted again, and wild shouts, and this time the mayhem didn’t melt into doubt.
Three guns were firing. Soldiers were fighting inside the machine shop, and then they were climbing and shooting. Diamond was almost glad for the distraction. He counted the guns and listened to voices, imagining a single brave crewman who had managed to remain free. He pictured Tar`ro running with his pistol in hand, and then Karlan swinging a huge steel bar. But he didn’t imagine Master Nissim, and he never used Father. Even in his head, those two men weren’t allowed to be heroic.
Eventually the gunfire slowed and then was gone. Shrill papio words wandered through Bountiful. Someone yelled for someone to be careful about the bladders. Corona flesh was strong, but bullets were stupid. If a bullet found weakness and the hydrogen jetted free, they could be screwed. That’s what the papio were shouting in both languages. “Screwed screwed screwed.”
The cabin door had been left slightly ajar, allowing the guarding soldier to keep watch over Diamond. The guard filled the hallway. The boy was lying on the narrow bed, wearing his school trousers again, watching his new thumb emerge. Good was sitting in the cabin’s safest corner, his back to the walls. The hated sack needed to be torn to ribbons. Still furious for being shoved inside that blackness, the monkey punched holes in the sack with his incisors, and he tugged with his arms and with curses, creating long ribbons of canvas.
“Bad evil bad wrong,” he told the growing stack of rags.
Diamond watched his thumb, but he wasn’t thinking about his thumb.
Then a single shot rang out, as far from the cabin as possible.
One very big body ran up to the door and the soldier. An officer looked inside the cabin, staring at the chewed-up hand, and without a word, the newcomer shut the door and used a small key to work the lock.
It was dark inside the tiny room.
The soldier in the hallway said several papio words, including, “Why?”
The officer responded with orders. Listening to papio was different than reading it. Diamond didn’t understand, but the tone and breathless speed of the words made the orders important. Then the officer named the enemy with a word that was the very much the same in both languages.
“Jazzing,” he heard.
“Angry angry angry,” said Good, staring at him.
“I’m sorry,” Diamond said. But he didn’t feel sorry. He had saved the monkey’s life and was bitten for his trouble.
Good had never been this furious with his boy. “Angry mad pissed,” he said.
“They’re chasing a jazzing,” Diamond said.
The monkey’s eyes understood before the rest of him. The eyes grew bigger and scared all over again.
“One of the wild jazzings got onboard,” Diamond guessed.
No monkey was ignorant about jazzings, even if he lived far from the wilderness. Good looked past Diamond, and his arms quit ripping the canvas.
Full-grown jazzings were powerful killers, and huge. But the giant predator wouldn’t be able to climb between the bladders, which was why this jazzing had to be a lost youngster.
Diamond felt sorry for the imaginary animal.
He felt very sorry for himself.
He had been working for a long while, trying to push aside certain awful moments. But his mind was too perfect to cooperate.
A distant shot reverberated.
Then the echo was gone, and a new noise found him. The tapping was light and very quick. Good heard the tapping. Something was striking the cabin’s little window, and the talk of wild jazzings was too much of a coincidence. The monkey jumped up, staring at the shades before deciding to crawl under the cot.
Diamond imagined a fingernail striking glass.
The tapping stopped.
Bountiful was still pushing towards the reef. Branches might have clipped the ship as they passed, although they would never sound so clean and neat, so rhythmic.
Again, the tapping began.
The cabin wasn’t as dark as before. Diamond’s eyes had adapted. His thumb looked too pale but otherwise felt and acted normal. The other wounds needed more healing. What wasn’t pain told him the state of affairs. His brown trousers still had loose buttons, but he didn’t want to touch himself there. He would finish dressing when he wasn’t thinking about the knives or the papio man bent over his exposed body, and maybe then he would be healed.
The tapping became complicated, swift and full of patterns. By the sound of it, twenty fingertips were working the glass.
Diamond stood, the trousers drooping without falling.
From under the cot, Good offered a quiet growl.
The shades were black and heavy, ready to help an exhausted crewman sleep through the middle of the brightest morning. Diamond touched the outer corner of one shade, and the tapping continued. Then a single shot—a loud closer shot—startled him as well as whatever was outside.
Nothing was outside. Clinging to the ship’s skin wasn’t possible.
The tapping had stopped completely.
“Because it wasn’t real,” the boy whispered. And then he grabbed both shades by the touching corners, and he yanked them open.
A face was plastered flush against the flat glass.
Diamond took a step backward.
The face wasn’t human, and it wasn’t a monkey or bird or anything else normal. And it didn’t resemble King either. The only creature that wore any face like this was an insect. A long jointed mouth and various antennae were wrapped around the bulging eyes that covered a substantial portion of the head. But insect eyes were built from hundreds of little eyes. What was staring at Diamond was were smooth domes, clear like glass, and nothing in the world resembled them. Even the coronas were not half as strange as this creature.
Stepping up to the window, Diamond said, “Ghost.”
The glass eyes couldn’t blink, or they wouldn’t.
“It’s you,” the boy said.
And then the face was gone.
The ambush came between pages. Prima was studying the tense account of a dinner with List’s supporters and King’s explosive reaction to some perceived insult. That dinner was three hundred and nineteen days earlier. That King was smaller and angrier than the creature she last saw. How long ago was that encounter? Thirty days. What these files revealed, time and again, was that he was changing. The fiery vindictive King was absent from the later accounts, but Prima doubted that he was hidden very deep under those spines and proper manners.