Changing Vision (32 page)

“And you may call me Bess,” I replied, giving him my best smile and ignoring a certain rigidity in Paul’s stance. The Human knew quite well it was traditional to keep the essential sound of one’s web-name, although that was less
a Rule than the comfort of retaining some identity regardless of shape.
Not that I intended to become used to either.

“Bess,” Lefebvre repeated with a smile. “So, what’s with the suits? You aren’t proposing we walk off the ship, are you?”

I raised one eyebrow.

“Close,” I replied. Then explained.

“I REGRET you’ve been inconvenienced, Fem N’Klet—” Kearn began. He’d worn his best uniform for this inevitable and undesired meeting; it always helped his confidence.

“With all respect, Captain Kearn,” the Panacian said graciously, as if she hadn’t practically blackmailed her way into his office, “I believe you underestimate what I have endured while waiting for your disposition to—improve.”

“Have you been mistreated by my crew?”
The note of outraged dignity was perfect
, Kearn told himself,
just perfect.
It paid to rehearse.

She arranged her upper limbs in the position that meant composed determination. Kearn recognized it with dismay. “No, Captain. I have been mistreated by you. Why was I brought along when your ship lifted from D’Dsel? I was a messenger, not a passenger. My absence will distress my family and my Queen.”

“A regrettable misunderstanding, Fem N’Klet,” Kearn said smoothly, wiping his moist palms on his thighs. “Now, as my officer informed you, we’ve arranged a stopover at Hixtar Station—”

“I see no purpose in leaving this ship before I have delivered my message, Captain Kearn.”

He caught himself before his hands lifted to his scalp, instead, picking up some documents to rustle importantly. “Then, by all means, leave your message with me, Fem N’Klet and I’ll get to it as soon as I—”

“It is an oral message, for you only, from the Queen of my family. You had the honor of meeting her before her maturation.”

Despite the urgings of the Feneden to avoid any such messages, Kearn couldn’t help but be flattered. A Queen had remembered their acquaintance? Not that he could pull the name or face out of his own past to match, but that only proved the impact he must have made upon this individual. Kearn sat up straighter.
Was he not the Captain?
he reminded himself.
Since when did Captains obey the orders of passengers?
“Of course, I remember your magnificent Queen,” he said heartily. “Please, give me her message.”

“The Human traitor lives,” N’Klet stated, her faceted eyes on Kearn as if her instructions included memorizing his reaction to this news. “The individual you told my Queen was the one who brought the Esen Monster to D’Dsel, so it could murder Her Glory Sec-ag Mixs C’Cklet.”

“Ragem?” Kearn’s eyebrows rose, creasing his hairless forehead. “Impossible! My dear Fem— Your Queen’s mistaken—”

“Paul Ragem, the Traitor, stood before my Queen in audience the day before this ship left D’Dsel. He had been known to our kin-group for the past twenty-two standard years as Paul Cameron, a business associate of excellent reputation. He came at our invitation to give his aid, and that of his partner, the noted linguist Esolesy Ki, in our negotiations between the Feneden and the Iftsen. Am I speaking too quickly for you, Captain Kearn?”

Kearn was indeed waving at her to stop talking, but it had nothing to do with N’Klet’s measured and capable comspeak, and everything to do with the fact that he was trying not to choke over the name Esolesy Ki.

Esolesy
, he thought, wildly. It could be shortened as Es.

Es
. Ragem’s pet name for Esen.

“We have to go back,” Kearn muttered, fumbling for the com panel on his desk. “I have to find them.”

“You would be unsuccessful. They have left D’Dsel, Captain Kearn.”

“No!” he howled, leaping to his feet and flinging plas sheets everywhere. “No! I can’t have been so close and lost them!”

N’Klet tilted her beautiful head to watch him. When Kearn stopped shouting to draw another breath, she said calmly: “The Queen also wanted you to know that Paul Ragem and Esolesy Ki left D’Dsel on an Iftsen ship. According to Port Authority, this ship was bound for Iftsen Secondus.”

Kearn felt almost dizzy with joy.
This was it!
“Then we’ll catch them there!” He couldn’t wait to tell Timri. They’d have to discuss what to do. There had been some general ideas floating about concerning the best containment systems, weapons—but there must have been some new tech developed in the interim—Timri kept up to date on such things.
Then there was that special package, the one from his backer
, Kearn remembered.

N’Klet raised her upper limbs in a gesture of negation. “You have a shipful of Feneden who will not wish to go to Iftsen Secondus. Neither do I, Captain Kearn.”

“Ah, but there you are wrong, my dear N’Klet,” Kearn crowed. “The Feneden are vitally interested in my hunt. They take it very personally. Very.”

“How so?” N’Klet asked, head tilted in curiosity.

“Were you not aware that their term “Shifter” refers to the Esen Monster’s species? Oh, yes. The Feneden have been as decimated in the past as I’ve always warned we may be soon. The Feneden—” Kearn paused, imagining the glory to come, “—they’ll want to be in for the kill.”

IT had been such a good plan.

If I ever had a tombstone, such as some Human cultures erected, that could be the inscription
, I said to myself.

All had started so well.

Lefebvre and I had climbed into our suits, then dumped all of the lifepods into space. That was the easy part—the tiny craft were designed for quick, no-questions-asked release.

We’d already helped Paul into his suit; a task made both simpler and more difficult by Paul’s fainting as Lefebvre tried to gently slip his injured arm into its sleeve. According to Paul, the arm wasn’t broken. The shoulder had merely been repeatedly dislocated and reset. I began shunting these moments into my most private memories, into the cold, dark place that held the final thoughts of my web-kin and the taste of Death.

Timing was critical once the pods left the ship. Klaxons had sounded immediately, heralding the pounding of feet as the Tly shuttle crews hurried to launch their three craft. It was irrelevant to my plan if they were being sent to retrieve the valuable lifepods or to search them for us.

I just wanted them launched—especially the one with the three of us hidden in its belly.

This had been the reason for the suits. Our hiding place was the vacuum hold beneath the pilot’s compartment, used for anything from extra fuel to personal effects. There was
just enough room for the three of us—given that I was small and folded easily, and both Humans were reasonably compact.

We had oriented ourselves, after some arguing on my part, so Lefebvre would be the first to leap out. I could see his face inside his helmet, lit by the indicators under his chin. It was serene, as though hijacking a shuttle in flight was an everyday part of a captain’s life. Paul’s face was too swollen to show anything at all, but he’d managed to nod at me. I took that to mean he understood completely that I—as the more resilient life-form here—should have been the one to take any risks, but he appreciated my sacrifice to keep in character.

I didn’t have to like it.

The cruiser used a catapult system, firing its shuttles as though they were missiles. I’d known this in theory, but the reality was quite exhilarating.
Well, it was for me
, being lightest, and more or less on top of our pile of flesh. Lefebvre let out a strangled grunting sound for the few seconds of full thrust, which might have had something to do with the juxtaposition of my foot and his throat. Paul remained silent—I hoped because the medications the Tly administered to speed his healing process were finally dulling the pain.

The instant the force on our bodies began to ease up, Lefebvre had fired the opening pins on the hatch, scrambling out through a cloud of condensation. I slid into his spot, careful to avoid pressing on any part of Paul, and followed.

I needn’t have hurried; Lefebvre was at the shuttle’s controls before I stepped over the nearest body. There were two of them, both male, both—I was relieved to see—still breathing. We hadn’t actually covered that point in the plan. I lifted off my helmet and put it to one side, impressed. “You’ve done this before,” I observed, turning to help Paul climb out.

I could make out the corner of a smile as Lefebvre continued to work the panels, by plan setting us a course to casually swing out of range of the cluster of lifepods and
the other shuttles before kicking in the translight. “Everyone has talents, Bess,” Lefebvre said lightly.

Paul took off his helmet as well, making a soft whistling noise through his teeth. Those, he’d assured me, were intact. “Not everyone can do this,” he commented, studying the unconscious Tly. “Handy.”

I wondered if Paul was thinking the same thing that I was—how fortunate we’d been that Lefebvre hadn’t used this particular talent to its fullest when we’d had our confrontation on D’Dsel. Of course, there had been the small matter of the biodisrupter.

I took a deep breath and began stripping off my suit. It wouldn’t fit either of the Humans lying at my feet, but taking it off gave me more room to move as I put them into their own. We had no particular interest in taking crew from
The Black Watch
with us, and it had been Paul who suggested the option of simply suiting up the crew and leaving them behind. This wasn’t the callous act it seemed; the suits carried emergency beacons which would guide their shipmates to recover them.

Before we could accomplish this final step, the shuttle’s interior lights flickered and died.

The console lights remained, reflecting patterns of gold, red, and blue over Lefebvre’s arms and hands as he lifted them slowly from the panels. “Disabler,” he hissed. “Everything’s knocked out.”

A disabler was a pirate’s weapon of choice and highly illegal. “Look,” Lefebvre said, pointing out the front viewport.

I went to his side.

We had a spectacular view of the ominous, self-illuminated tube that was the
’Watch
, including the sparks of moving light as the pods we’d released tumbled blissfully in every direction. I could spot one of the other two shuttles, busy pursuing a target.

But much closer, and coming closer still, was the silvery sleekness of a ship I knew very well indeed—her grappling arms at the ready. Hands settled on my shoulders as Paul came to stand behind me.

“The
Vegas Lass
,” he said, something in his voice I thought Logan would have enjoyed causing.

I would
, I told myself bitterly,
have preferred to be wrong about Captain Janet Chase.

“HUNTER Kearn, we have disagreement,” Anisco’s voice, through her translator, held no emotion, but waves rippled down the cilia from forehead to shoulder as if she stood within a waterfall.

A very pretty effect
, Kearn thought, imagining those silken strands between his fingers. It was a fantasy he kept very guarded—the more one knew about alien species, the less likely it was to have such fantasies be anything but dangerous. For all he knew, the cilia were feeding mechanisms that could strip the flesh from his bones in an instant.

“There’s no need for concern, Fem Anisco,” he said soothingly, unable to resist shooting worried glances between each word at the other Feneden despite the presence of the two largest members of the
Russell
’s crew at his back. “I’m sure we can resolve any disputes.”

“I concur,” this from the second Feneden carrying a translator, Sidorae. Kearn was still uncertain who led the group—or even if they had a leader—but he had noticed Sidorae and Anisco usually disagreed on every topic. There was no consistency, however, no way Kearn had found to predict which side of any issue each Feneden would choose. It was as if they argued by convention, not conviction.

Regardless, Kearn suspected the two of them of a perverse enjoyment when they could put him in the middle of their debates, as now.

He sighed deeply, pulling his heavy coat more tightly
about himself as he looked around the transformed cabin. It had been Lefebvre’s, a choice made in the captain’s absence but before he had been declared missing. Timri’s choice, in fact. She’d noted—quite reasonably—that Lefebvre’s was the largest space available after Kearn’s and that the furnishings had been significantly upgraded. She’d been emphatic about how Lefebvre would himself agree. And not only to this, but to her taking the comp system from his room to add to her own.

Kearn doubted this, but was willing to let Timri face the daunting Lefebvre about the loss of his quarters and equipment.

Timri had supervised the refit to suit the Feneden’s requirements. They’d liked the huge jelly-bed, but apparently used it for dining, not sleeping. The ceramic tables now graced Kearn’s own quarters, as the set of five swings—part of the odd requests they’d had to fill before leaving D’Dsel—required quite a bit of space to use safely. At the moment, the three silent Feneden were rocking back and forth gently, bare feet just touching the floor.

The floor.
Kearn sighed again. The Feneden had brought some of their slimy carpeting along. It appeared to grow outward, and with dismaying enthusiasm, from patches they’d fixed at intervals throughout the cabin, already meeting in several spots. He’d insisted that Timri have the crew assigned to the door check regularly to be sure the stuff didn’t grow into the rest of the ship.

There weren’t chairs. When Kearn suggested he bring his own, Anisco and Sidorae had concurred, amazingly enough, that he must not. Kearn had ventured several times to have their meetings in his office, a place where he felt much more at ease—not to mention significantly warmer.

The Feneden preferred to meet here. In fact, the guard at the door might have been unnecessary, since their guests refused to leave their room at all.
Not that he’d want either the Feneden or their carpet left to their own devices
, Kearn told himself.