Conquerors' Pride (4 page)

The office door slid open again. Aric looked up, muscles tensing and then relaxing as he saw it was just Hill. "About time," he told the security guard, mock-severely. "Here I am, risking my life with an angry Meert, and where are you?"
"Outside," Hill replied calmly. "Keeping out the other eight who were demanding to get in to see you."
"Really." Aric cocked an eyebrow. "You didn't mention there was a whole delegation out there."
Hill shrugged. "I didn't want to worry you," he said. "Besides, it didn't seem important, given that I wasn't going to let more than one of them in anyway. I figured even you could handle a single Meert."
"I appreciate the confidence," Aric said dryly. At least that explained why his visitor had been so relatively easy to deal with. Expecting to be part of a nine-man complaint committee, he'd already been thrown off stride by having to go it alone. "Have they all left?"
Hill nodded. "This group mad about the layoffs, too?"
"Mad about the threat of layoffs, anyway," Aric said. Privately, he was still hoping they could persuade the paranoids at Commerce that no Peacekeeper military secrets were being risked by letting nonhumans work with CavTronics computer components. "Has the evening-shift director arrived yet?"
"No, sir," Hill said, stepping over to the desk and holding out a card. "But this was just transmitted in for you. Via the skitter from Earth, I think."
"Must be from Dad," Aric said, taking the card and sliding it into his plate. The two of them had come up with a little scheme that might create an end-run precedent around these new restrictions. This might be the word on whether Parlimin Donezal was willing to play ball on it. Keying for the proper decoding algorithm, Aric watched as the message came up.
It was very short.
He read it through twice, a sense of unreality creeping through him. No. It couldn't be.
"Sir? Are you all right?"
With an effort Aric looked up at Hill. "Is the ship back yet?"
"I don't think so, sir," Hill said, frowning at him. "You weren't planning to leave until tomorrow."
Aric took a deep breath, trying to drive away the numbness in his mind and body. "Call the spaceport," he said. "Get me a seat on a liner to Earth. You and the ship can go back to Avon when it gets here."
"Yes, sir," Hill said, pulling out his phone. "May I ask what's wrong?"
Aric leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. "It's my brother," he said. "He's dead."
"Dr. Cavanagh?"
Melinda Cavanagh looked up from the large high-detail plate and her final run-through of the upcoming operation. "Yes?"
"Dr. Billingsgate is in prep," the nurse said. "Room three."
"Thank you," Melinda said, mentally shaking her head. He could just as easily have paged her or called her on her phone, but instead he'd sent someone else scurrying off to find her. She'd never worked with Billingsgate before, but the Commonwealth's surgical community was by necessity a small and tight-knit group, and she'd heard enough stories to know that this was typical of the man. Opinion was split as to whether it was arrogance, stinginess with his own time, or just a simple preference for human interaction over the more impersonal electronic sort. "Tell him I'll be there in a minute."
She finished tracking through the plan and pulled her card from the plate. Prep Three was just down the corridor, and she entered to find Billingsgate poring over the high-detail plate there. "Ah-Cavanagh," he said distractedly, waving her over. "Ready to suit up?"
"Almost," she said, sitting down in the chair next to him. "There are a couple of minor points I'd like to discuss with you first."
He frowned at her from under bushy eyebrows. "I thought we'd settled everything," he said, his tone dropping half an octave.
"I thought we had, too," she said, sliding her card into his plate and keying for the marked sections. "Number one: I think we should reduce the use of markinine in the third phase. We certainly want to lower blood pressure at that point, but with the shorozine drip only four centimeters away, I think we should consider lowering the dosage by at least ten percent."
The eyebrows frowned a little harder. "A ten percent cut is rather drastic."
"But necessary," Melinda said. "Number two: in phase four you have two separate neurobinders being applied at each of four sites. This one"-she pointed to it on the plate-"strikes me as being just a shade too close to the optic chiasma. Particularly given your revised dosage numbers."
"You think that, do you?" Billingsgate said, his voice starting to shade from annoyed to intimidating. "Tell me, Doctor, have you ever performed this operation yourself?"
"You know I haven't," Melinda said. "But I've consulted on five similar operations."
Billingsgate's eyebrows lifted slightly. "For five different surgeons, no doubt?"
Melinda looked him straight in the eye. "That's unfair," she said. "And you know it. The two operations weren't identical-no two operations are. Trying to bypass me that way and just blindly following the first plan was totally irresponsible. And it could have been fatal."
"It most likely wouldn't have been," Billingsgate pointed out.
"Would you have wanted me to take that chance?" Melinda countered.
Billingsgate's lips pursed tightly together. "You didn't have to humiliate Mueller publicly."
"I tried talking to him privately. He wouldn't listen."
Billingsgate turned back to his plate, and for a minute the room was silent. "So you think we should cut the markinine by ten percent, do you?" he asked.
"Yes," Melinda said. "The lower dosage should do the job perfectly well. Particularly given the patient's metabolic baseline."
"I was going to ask if you'd checked on that," Billingsgate said. "All right; but if the blood pressure doesn't respond properly, we're going to jack the dosage back up. Fair enough?"
"Fair enough," Melinda agreed. "Now, what about the neurobinders?"
The discussion was short and civilized, and in the end he acquiesced with reasonably good grace. Like most surgeons Melinda had dealt with, Billingsgate had strong proprietary feelings toward his operation designs, but he was also experienced enough not to simply ignore the recommendations of a good consultant. With more and more routine operations being handled by semisentient computerized systems, the only ones that still required human surgeons were those that were as much art as they were science. Writing required editors; sculpture required texturers; surgery required design consultants. Or so the theory went.
"All right, then," Billingsgate said at last. "We cut the markinine by ten percent and shift the gamma-site neurobinder three millimeters right-lateral. Is that it?"
"That's it." Melinda closed down the plate. "Is everything else ready?"
"Just about. We just have to-"
He broke off as the door slid open and a nurse stepped in. "I'm sorry, Dr. Cavanagh, but this just came for you," she said, holding out a card. "It's marked urgent."
"Thank you," Melinda said, taking it and pulling out her own plate.
"Make it fast," Billingsgate said.
"I will," Melinda promised, frowning at the scrambled symbols. She'd expected it to be a job assignment or something equally official; but this was in one of her father's private codes. Keying for decoding, she watched as the lines reformed themselves....
And felt her heart seize up. "No," she whispered.
Halfway to the door, Billingsgate turned back around. "What is it?"
Wordlessly, she swiveled the plate around to face him. He stooped to read it. "Oh, my God," he murmured. "Who's Pheylan?"
"My brother," Melinda told him, her voice sounding distant in her ears. She'd had a chance to see Pheylan three weeks ago, when they'd both been on Nadezhda. But she'd been too busy....
Billingsgate was saying something. "I'm sorry," she said, forcing herself to focus on him. "What did you say?"
"I said you don't need to stay," he repeated. "The team can handle things without you. Get yourself a flight over to the spaceport and get out of here."
She looked back at the plate, the words dissolving into blurs before her. "No," she said, wiping at her eyes. "I'm the design consultant. I'm supposed to see the operation through."
"That's a recommendation," Billingsgate said. "Not a requirement."
"It's my requirement," Melinda said, standing up. Her mind was starting to function again, spreading out the possibilities and necessities in her usual surgically neat lines. "Give me a minute to get in touch with the CavTronics plant in Kai Ho and I'll be right there."
"All right," Billingsgate said, not sounding convinced. "If you're sure."
"I'm sure," she told him. "I can't bring Pheylan back. Maybe I can help prevent someone else from dying."
She didn't realize until the words were out of her mouth how easily they could be interpreted as a slight on Billingsgate's surgical skills. But the older man didn't even seem to notice. "All right," he said again. "Nurse, tell the team to get suited up. We'll be starting as soon as Dr. Cavanagh is ready."
4
The blue light flared through the honeycomb's viewports, jolting Pheylan out of a troubled sleep. The light faded, flared again, faded again, flared again, faded again-
"All right!" he shouted, slapping the pod wall. "Enough, already!"
The light flared one last time and went out. Pheylan swore under his breath, wincing at the rancid taste in his mouth as he checked his chrono. He felt as if he'd just barely closed his eyes, but he'd actually been asleep for four hours. That made it twenty-two hours since the alien ship had come up behind his pod and swallowed it like a big fish snaring its lunch. Roughly sixty-six light-years, assuming the aliens hadn't discovered a stardrive that ran on a different theory from the Commonwealth's. A long way from home.
The blue light flashed again, twice this time. Reflexively, Pheylan reached for the shutter control, stopped with another curse as his sleep-fogged mind remembered that none of the pod's equipment was functional. They'd done that to him early on, scuffling furtively around the base of the pod where he couldn't see them and knocking out his power supply. He'd been in silent darkness ever since except for the dim light and muffled sounds filtering in from the shuttle-bay-sized room around him.
Without power, of course, his dioxide/oxygen converter was also useless, and there'd been a couple of tense hours when he was debating with himself how close to suffocation he should get before he risked popping the hatch. But while the air inside the pod had slowly grown stale, it hadn't gotten any worse than that. Clearly, the aliens had arranged a supplementary air supply to him, probably funneling it in through the valve he'd weakened earlier when he dumped the pod's reserve oxygen.
For a couple of hours after that he'd worried about bacteria or viruses against which his immune system would have no defense, wondering if his captors had had the foresight to filter such things out. But there was nothing to be gained from such speculation, and eventually he'd abandoned it. Under the circumstances alien variations of influenza were probably going to be the least of his worries.
Outside, the blue light flashed twice more, and as it did so Pheylan noticed that his body was beginning to press into his seat again. Weight was returning; and unless the aliens had belatedly decided to spin the ship, that could mean only one thing.
Wherever they'd been heading, they had arrived.
It was fourteen minutes before the sudden rumbling vibration that indicated they'd made planetfall. The noise and motion died away, and for another fifteen minutes Pheylan sweated in the dim light, his survival-pack flechette pistol gripped in his hand, waiting for his captors' next move.
When it happened, it happened all at once. The pod's exit hatch at his left was abruptly rimmed with light, and with a crackle of superheated metal and a cloud of brilliant sparks the hatch cover blew outward, landing with a muffled clang on the deck below. A cool breeze flowed in through the opening, carrying with it the stink of burned metal. Setting his teeth, Pheylan pointed his gun into the air flow and waited.
No one tried to come in. But then, no one had to. Sooner or later he would have to come out on his own, and waiting until he ran out of ration bars would gain him nothing. Sliding his pistol into the inner pocket of his jacket, he unstrapped from his chair and worked his way through the cramped space of the pod over to the blackened opening. The edges were still warm, but not too hot to touch. Getting a grip on the handholds, he looked cautiously out.
The light outside was too dim to see very well, but he could make out a row of indistinct silhouettes facing him from three or four meters away. Worming through the opening, he dropped to the deck beside what was left of the hatch cover. "I'm Commander Pheylan Cavanagh," he called, hoping the quaver in his voice wasn't as noticeable to them as it was to him. "Captain of the Commonwealth Peacekeeper starshipKinshasa. Who are you?"
There was no reply, but one of the shadowy figures left the line and stepped toward him. He stopped a meter away, and Pheylan had the impression that even in the dim light he was having no trouble looking the prisoner over."Brracha," he said in a deep voice; and as he did so, the lights in the room came up.
And Pheylan finally got a clear look at the creatures who'd destroyed his ship.
They were roughly human in height, with slender torsos and a pair each of arms and legs in more or less human arrangement. Their heads were hairless, the faces roughly triangular in shape as large brow ridges over the deep-set eyes narrowed to hawklike beaks. They were dressed in tight-fitting footed jumpsuits of a dark shimmery material, with no insignia or other ornamentation that Pheylan could see.
Nor were there any obvious side arms in sight. Pheylan eyed them, wondering if it was possible that the basic concept of hand weapons could somehow have passed them by. If so-if that meant they might miss the flechette pistol in his jacket pocket-
There was a movement to his right, and he turned to see another of the aliens step through an archway into the bay, a long folded towel of what looked like their jumpsuit material draped around the back of his neck. He came up to the alien facing Pheylan, who turned and took the material. Their heads, Pheylan saw now, extended farther back than he'd realized, curving back and under to the neck and to a low spinal ridge that jutted out from their jumpsuits. The ridge terminated just above the legs in a flat, eellike tail that seemed to twirl continually in a tight corkscrewing spiral.