Guardians of Paradise (47 page)

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Authors: Jaine Fenn

BOOK: Guardians of Paradise
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The room looked like a stripped-down version of a starliner lounge. Two people stood next to one of the couches. One was Nual. She was naked and unconscious - or dead - and the other figure, clothed, had her by the shoulders and was shaking her like a ragdoll. That had to be a Sidhe. From the corner of his eye Taro saw Jarek raise his gun. Something went
pphhhssstt
, and a swarm of silver flashed through his vision.
 
Taro was instantly afraid for Nual in case he hit her, firing without aiming properly in bad light. Except . . . Jarek hadn’t hit anyone. How could he miss at this range?
 
The Sidhe turned to look at them. Something in the way she stared made Taro’s bowels go watery. He’d met one alien in his life - two if you counted Nual - but this was totally
other
.
 
She said, ‘We know you, little mind.’
 
She was talking to Jarek. And she wasn’t a Sidhe. This was one of the avatars Nual had talked about. Taro wasn’t sure if it’d deflected or actually
unmade
the fléchettes Jarek had just fired at it, but the result was the same: they were in deep shit. ‘Fuck,’ he breathed.
 
The avatar dropped Nual, who fell half on the couch, and Taro winced. It turned to face them. ‘You have a link to this one, yes?’ A momentary flick of its hand towards Nual. ‘She is ours now. Leave us and live. Or stay and die. It is of little consequence.’
 
One good thing, thought Taro through the rising panic: it can’t do the scary head stuff. At least, it hasn’t yet.
 
‘
Attention please. An overload in the ship’s power-plant has been detected. All personnel must board the evac-pods immediately. Crew members must follow full evacuation protocols. Passengers kindly remain calm and allow your crew to see you to safety
.’
 
Without Angel conditioning Taro suspected he’d be having a hard time standing his ground right now.
 
The avatar cocked its head. ‘They would destroy themselves to thwart us . . .’ It sounded amazed at this turn of events.
 
Jarek used the distraction to fire again. At the last moment, the avatar noticed the attack. A thin shower of silver rained at its feet. But some of the needles got through, though at reduced power. Pinpricks of red appeared all down its left leg.
 
It’s gonna kill us now for sure
. Taro was more angry than scared. They’d come so far, only to fail in the end!
 
The avatar glanced down at its wounds, then up at its attackers. Taro braced himself. But it just frowned and said, ‘Are you so far in the Sidhe girl’s thrall that you would die trying to save her? A shame time is short, for such displays of loyalty are intriguing. We would have liked to find out more before we dealt with you.’
 
The thing was in no hurry to take them out, presumably because it thought they weren’t a threat.
Was it right?
It couldn’t affect his thoughts - he was free to act. It
could
affect matter, so shooting it wouldn’t work. His blades would probably be equally useless, assuming it didn’t just unmake
him
when he got close enough.
 
But he had another weapon.
 
He’d entered the room with their assassin’s rifle pointed down - waving it at the walls made Jarek nervous - but now he raised the gun and slipped a finger under the trigger-guard.
 
The avatar lifted a hand, reaching towards them.
 
As the firing pads warmed to Taro’s touch the avatar-thing’s gaze went to the gun. It hesitated, hand still outstretched, and said disdainfully, ‘Do you not understand?
You cannot physically harm me
.’
 
‘Wanna bet?’ said Taro, and pulled the trigger.
 
The avatar’s raised hand came off at the wrist. On the weakest setting the laser didn’t cauterise the wound. The avatar’s eyes widened in surprise as blood spurted from the stump.
 
Taro twitched the laser back.
 
The avatar shuddered . . .
 
. . . folded . . .
 
. . . and fell.
 
A grisly assortment of internal organs burst free from the massive wound in its side when the body hit the floor.
 
‘Try some coherent fucking
light
, bitch!’ Taro found himself shouting.
 
Beside him, Jarek muttered, ‘Holy shit!’ Then, a little louder, ‘That seemed to work!’
 
Taro put the gun down and rushed over to Nual. He cradled her head, looking for signs of life. She was breathing, at least.
 
Jarek called over ‘Is she—?’
 
‘She’s alive.’
 
‘Thank fuck for that. Come on, we need to get out of here. Can you carry her?’
 
‘Wait, I’ll—I’m gonna try and wake her.’ He wasn’t sure he could, and given how they’d found her, he wasn’t sure he
should
, but to finally see her, touch her - it was as though the world had come alive again. He held her close, trying to recapture the sensation of their mind-to-mind contact . . .
 
He felt her mind straining towards his, and then she blinked and looked up at him. And it
was
her, not something terrible looking out of her eyes.
 
‘You know what?’ he said, his voice near to breaking. ‘If we’d gone to all this effort only to find you’d died on us, I’d never’ve fucking spoken to you again.’
 
She smiled, then frowned and rasped, ‘Is it dead?’
 
Taro looked down at the mess by his feet. The only movement was a slow spilling of guts. He’d pretty much cut the thing in half. He swallowed hard and said, ‘If it can survive that, then we’re really fucked.’
 
‘Which we will be anyway if we hang around much longer,’ called Jarek.
 
Taro pulled Nual to her feet. ‘C’mon, we gotta go.’
 
Jarek said, ‘Right. Let’s get the hell off this ship before it blows.’
 
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
 
They’d just left the lounge when the ship’s com announced:
 
‘Attention please. A power-plant overload is now imminent. Any remaining crew and passengers must evacuate the vessel with all possible haste. Repeat: power-plant overload imminent, abandon ship immediately
.’
 
Jarek cursed the infuriatingly calm voice.
How
imminent exactly? A minute? Twenty? At least a countdown would’ve told him how screwed they were. He glanced back at the others. Nual was in a bad way, but she’d activated her flight implants, and Taro had grabbed her arm and was towing her along. ‘Ready to run?’ Jarek asked.
 
Taro nodded.
 
And they ran, Taro dragging Nual behind him like some bizarre child’s balloon. Jarek forced himself to slow down whenever they passed a junction and checked his com. Getting lost now could be fatal.
 
As they turned into the corridor where he’d killed the first Sidhe the lights went out. Though the guidance decals stayed illuminated, conveniently pointing to the airlock, they didn’t give enough light to see obstacles and Jarek almost tripped over the dead Sidhe. He could feel by the way his feet slid around that he’d stepped in blood, but he slowed just enough not to lose his balance.
 
When they reached the airlock he punched it closed and carried on up to the bridge, leaving the other two to fend for themselves.
 
He powered up the engines - he’d had the wit to leave everything on standby, ready for a quick getaway - then undocked and shot off from the doomed ship at top speed.
 
When they were safely under way, the little moon receding rapidly behind them, he sat back in his couch. Nothing was happening to the Sidhe ship, and for a moment he felt oddly cheated. They’d gone balls-to-the-wall to escape, only to have the Sidhe ship not blow up after all.
 
Then it did.
 
He’d left the bridge shutters closed, and he hadn’t bothered to select a projection to simulate the view, so the explosion registered as a simultaneous spike on all his sensors. He ran a quick diagnostic, letting out a relieved sigh when he confirmed that the
Heart of Glass
hadn’t sustained any damage.
 
A few seconds later, traffic control hailed him.
 
Jarek’s hand hovered over the ship’s com. Of course they’d want a word with him. But if he answered, then things could get complicated, and they weren’t home and dry yet. He ignored the incoming message, though he did moderate his speed so it didn’t look quite so much like he was fleeing the scene of a crime.
 
With no further need for stealth, he fired up all his remaining sensors, focusing every instrument at his disposal on Kama Nui, watching for signs of a ship heading his way. It was a good job beacons operated independently of traffic control; if they’d had any way of blocking his transit, they might just have done so now. As it was they had about ten minutes to despatch pursuit, after which time he’d be out of range of even a fast interceptor. And once he was in the shift, he was safe; just being in the wrong place at the wrong time shouldn’t be enough to invoke Treaty law against a freetrader, not unless the locals wanted the Alliance on their case.
 
He gave it fifteen minutes, just to be sure.
 
Once he was certain no one was coming after them, Jarek returned to the rec-room. Nual was lying on the couch, Taro sitting beside her. They helped her stand, and Jarek guided her to the med-bay. Its diagnosis was that she was experiencing the tail-end of a severe adrenalin come-down and had recently been shot with some sort of low-level neural disruptor, though the effects were already wearing off. Her main problem was lack of food and liquids. She refused Jarek’s suggestion that he hook up a drip for her, but let him adapt a favourite hangover cure, adding a few extra ingredients suggested by the med-bay. Whilst she was physically better off than she had any right to be, it didn’t take Sidhe intuition to work out that her recent experiences had left her severely shaken.
 
As his com hadn’t relayed any further incoming messages, Jarek got himself a drink. Then the three of them sat in the
Heart of Glass
’s rec-room and swapped stories.
 
When they’d brought each other up to date Taro, who was sitting with one arm around Nual, asked Jarek, ‘So, we found out what you wanted to know, even if we can’t do much about it. What now?’
 
‘We need to get back to Xantier and find out what Bez’s got for us. What we do next depends partly on that: I’m hoping that with the data she can provide, plus what you’ve unearthed here, we can start to act against the Sidhe, and actually begin to undermine their power-base - though we’ll have to be careful.’
 
‘What about the avatar thing?’ asked Taro.
 
‘Hopefully the Sidhe themselves took care of that when they blew their ship up. And if not . . . well we need to avoid it, but we need to avoid direct confrontation with the Sidhe anyway.’ Jarek had enough on his plate without worrying about where the infected Sidhe fitted in; the way he saw it anything that killed Sidhe had to be a good thing. ‘My priority is to get hold of a shiftspace beacon, then try to get back to Serenein and open a new transit-path there.’
 
‘I know you wanna help those people,’ said Taro, ‘but if the consorts didn’t end up here, then don’t that mean your friends managed to see off the Sidhe by themselves?’
 
‘For the moment, yes they must have. But I doubt the Sidhe will give up. And there’s something at Serenein that can help us fight the Sidhe.’
 
Nual spoke up for the first time since she’d finished recounting her adventures. ‘What sort of thing?’
 
‘Well, not a
thing
as such. People. The consorts themselves, actually. There’s thirty-seven of them in stasis on the
Setting Sun
, which is parked up at the top of the planet’s beanstalk. Those boys have powers the Sidhe can’t counter. We can use that.’
 
Nual said softly, ‘You are correct, of course. But have you thought through the full implications of cutting off the source of shift-minds?’
 
‘I’m setting a world free. And I’m ending a lie.’
 
‘True enough. But in the long run, you are also taking away humanity’s ability to travel the stars. No more transit-kernels means no new shiftships.’
 
‘Yeah . . . I know. Believe me, I know. But I still have to do it.’

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