Hunted (37 page)

44

TAKING THE CUBE

Dade was the first to move. He grabbed the stun-pistol out of Tobit’s holster and fired at Samantha in the cube.

Nothing happened. Not to Sam, at least. I felt a tingle as the stunner’s hypersonics bounced off the cube and echoed back…but the effect was so thinned out by the time it returned to the parapet, none of us got knocked for a loop. Nothing more than a scritchy pins-and-needles sensation that passed in a heartbeat.

Grimacing with disgust, Tobit plucked the pistol from Dade’s hand and set the gun down on the parapet wall.

“Thanks,” Samantha told Dade. “You just demonstrated you can’t touch me.” She gave a nasty smile. “Just so everybody knows, Innocence here is the last Mandasar queen in the universe. If she dies, there’ll never be another. You can’t make a new queen without a full year of an old queen’s venom.”

I called, “Are you all right, Innocence?”

“Quite well, Little Father,” she replied in a cold, clear voice. “Do what’s right—don’t worry about me.”

“She’s always saying noble things,” Sam laughed, using her free hand to pat Innocence on the shell. “So irrationally heroic. It’s a pity I didn’t find her till last year; if I’d taken her under my wing when she was a girl, I might have brought her round to my way of thinking.”

“You flatter yourself,” Innocence said drily.

“I like flattery,” Samantha replied, “and I’m good at it I rather like your defiance too. If you start getting subtle, then I’ll worry.”

Sam glanced my way. “Innocence has only been with me a few months, but she’s been a tremendous help. My troops fight so devotedly when they think they’re working for Verity’s rightful successor. Of course, I’ve had to make sure the girl doesn’t talk to anyone. Usually I keep her drugged unconscious…with little servomotors to make her body move, and a hidden speaker so my own words come out of her mouth. It’s not a bad system if you keep the room dark, and I’ve passed the word poor Innocence can’t stand bright lights. A result of chemical torture at the hands of an outlaw queen.”

“If Innocence is so valuable,” Festina said, “you don’t dare shoot her.”

“She’s useful,” Sam agreed, “but keeping her alive is a risk. Always the chance she might escape, or tell the wrong people how I’ve been using her. The sooner I kill her, the safer I’ll be. And why not do it now, when I can blame it on human provocateurs? I’ll put your fingerprints all over the gun, then blackmail the fleet for a few million: ‘Pay up or I’ll tell everyone the last queen was killed by an admiral.’“

“The council wouldn’t care,” Festina laughed. “They’d shout from the rooftops,
MAD DOG RAMOS SHOWS HER TRUE SELF. As for the navy accepting responsibility for anyone but me…you’re looking at expendable Explorers, a woman controlled by alien parasites, and a man who’s never been right in die head. Look up
deniability
in your favorite dictionary, and you’ll see our pictures.”

As she spoke, Festina got to her feet, lifting the unconscious man with her. She kept her scalpel to his throat by locking her knife arm under his chin. Then she hiked her other hand under his armpit, around his chest, and heaved straight up. Even though she was plenty strong, it was still an awkward maneuver; I could imagine my sister watching and wondering if there was a chance of killing Festina during those moments, while she was struggling and slightly off-balance with the man’s weight.

I worried about the same thing myself. It seemed crazy for Festina to take such a risk, hoisting the man up…and for what? To make it easier for Sam to see the knife blade glinting in the starlight?

Then my eye was caught by another tiny glint: a faint reflection, some star shining on the voice control for the clone’s Laughing Larries. Sometime in the past few minutes, Festina must have slipped the controller out of her belt pouch without any of us noticing; when she stood, she’d left it lying on parapet’s stone floor.

Now, while everyone’s gaze focused up on her hands, and the scalpel, and the exposed throat, her foot nudged forward a bit and sent the controller sliding toward me.

Um.

I didn’t have a clue what she wanted me to do…and she couldn’t tell me. Maybe she didn’t have a plan at all—just hoped the king would dream up something.

Um, um, um. I had to force myself not to chew my knuckle or Sam would
know
I was trying to think hard.

Um. Um. Okay. I had an idea.

Sam had started talking again. “You think the High Council has deniability? Wrong. You all came to Troyen in the
Jacaranda
…a ship known to run errands for Admiral Vincence. Dad will have a field day with that at the next council session. By the time he’s through, Vincence will be in disgrace, and the rest of the council will trip all over themselves to pay me hush money. But,” Sam said, her voice turning cold and hard, “that’s none of your concern—it’s time for ultimatums. Drop your weapons and lie facedown on the ground. If you surrender right away, I might be in such a good mood I’ll let you and Innocence live a while longer.”

Tobit actually laughed. “How stupid do you think we are?”

I told him, “You may not be stupid. But I am.”

Slowly, carefully, I lowered myself to the parapet’s stone floor. In the process, I palmed the remote control Festina had shoved my way. As I laid myself down on my stomach, the little voice-controlled gizmo ended up right under my mouth.

The others kept talking—arguing with Sam, wrangling over treachery-proof schemes to exchange Dad’s clone for Innocence—but I ignored them. I was too busy straightening out in my head where my three Larries were: one still up on the parapet, the other two way down near the ground. Sam wouldn’t be able to see the ones below her; not when she was paying so much attention to Festina and the others. I just had to picture where those two Larries were in relation to Sam’s glass cube…

Taking a deep breath, I whispered orders into the voice control right under my mouth. No way to tell if the Larries were obeying me—I couldn’t see them for the parapet wall, and anyway, my face was pressed tight to the stone beneath me. I couldn’t
hear
the Larries either, because I’d told them to run as quiedy as possible. All I could do was shift the lower two into what I thought was the right position, and tell the other one to get ready for a fancy maneuver.

Then: up, up, up.

I scrambled to my feet fast…and maybe my movement was enough to distract Sam from seeing die two gold cannonballs shooting up from ground level. They smashed the bottom of the glass cube with a thunderous crunch, both striking on the same side edge—like grabbing one side of a fish tank and yanking up with all your strength. The cube lurched and rolled, knocked over ninety degrees onto its side. For an instant, Sam and Innocence became a jumble of flailing arms, legs, and claws; then both dropped to the new bottom of the cube, Sam falling hard, Innocence falling harder.

Call it a two-story drop: a long way when you’re too surprised to twist into a good landing position.

The impact was enough to knock the wind out of both of them. I couldn’t see if Sam had held onto her gun, but it didn’t matter: a human could recover faster from that fall than an alien who weighed as much as an elephant. Innocence would survive—queens are tough—but she’d be in no shape to stop Sam from retrieving the gun and using it at point-blank range.

So I had to get inside the cube before that happened.

The two Larries that had smashed into the cube were out of the picture; one had hit so hard it embedded itself into the cracked glass, while the other was showering down onto the ground in a hail of broken pieces. That gave me one Larry left—the one waiting on the parapet walk, ready and raring to travel.

I ran and jumped, shouting into the remote control, “Go!”

Good thing I’d given instructions to the Larry before I threw myself on top of it—the moment I leapt on board, I was whirling so fast I could barely think. Scrabbling to hold on, I dug both hands into fléchette slits. Even then, I nearly spun off before we reached the upended cube; if the ride had been a single second longer, I wouldn’t have made it.

I hung on just long enough for the Larry to dump me in the middle of what was now the cube’s top surface. Too dizzy to move, I just lay on the glass while the Larry carried on with the orders I’d given: flying straight over my head and unleashing every last fl6chette in its magazines.

Back on the parapet, Festina shouted “Get down, get down!” But I’d told the Larry to make sure no shots got as far as the castle. Everything was aimed at the cube…with me lying in the middle, at the calm eye of the razor hurricane.

Remember how crossbow arrows hadn’t even scratched the glass surface? High-velocity steel fléchettes were a whole other story.

Thank heavens it wasn’t real glass; things got nasty enough with blunt chips of plastic flying in all directions. I wrapped my arms around my head as the Larry sliced a ragged ring around me—deeper and deeper into the cube’s wall, a circumference of shredded plastic, like a buzz saw cutting out a hole in a patch of ice…till I felt something shift under me and shouted, “Stop!” into the remote control.

For a heartbeat I stayed lying there, on an untouched circle of glass surrounded by a slashed area cut almost all the way through. Then my weight finished the job: with a noise halfway between a rip and a crack, my whole chunk of wall broke free and plunged, like a glass plate with me in the middle. I tucked, rolled, and kicked—the tuck and roll to save myself with a breakfall, the kick to aim the huge chunk of plummeting glass straight at Sam.

It was quiet as I got to my feet—no sound but the whistle of the Larry hovering far overhead. The glass walls around me cut off almost all noise from the outside world.

The cube was still flying, and stable as stone underfoot: just as happy to float on its side as right way up. That was a lucky break—I didn’t know how to operate this thing, and the pilot hadn’t been wearing any safety straps when the cube tipped. She’d fallen almost as heavily as Innocence, and gentles aren’t built to take damage. Her body lay crumpled at the far end of the cube, her shell split wide open all along the spine. Puffy brown skin pushed up through the break, the way meat sometimes does when you crack open a lobster. I didn’t know if she was alive or dead, but I concentrated a moment and produced the worker pheromone that’s supposed to dull pain. Maybe it would help.

Sam groaned. She lay under the slab of heavy glass like a lab specimen on display. At the last second she must have seen the slab coming, because she’d thrown up her arms to protect her face.

It may have helped her face, but it sure didn’t help her arms.

I tried to heave the glass off her, but it was way too heavy to lift—several hundred kilos at least. It took ail my strength just to slide it to one side; I tried not to hurt Sam again, but I could see there wasn’t much left to hurt.

Sam’s eyes flickered open. “Edward?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“I think you got me.”

“You were going to kill Innocence.”

“Was I?” She let her head slump, as if holding it up took too much effort. “How do you know Innocence wasn’t in cahoots with me all along? My troops will tell you she’s been giving them orders for the past few months.”

“But you drugged her…and rigged her up so your words came out of her mouth.”

“That’s what I said,” Sam whispered. “But how can you know if it’s true? I could’ve been lying.”

“Or you could be lying now. One last chance for you to cause trouble.”

“Always a possibility.” She coughed…very lightly, but a bead of blood dribbled out the side of her mouth. “Neither of us got very good brain chemicals, did we? Even now, I’m trying to think of ways to trick you into giving me the gun.”

“Who would you shoot?” I asked. “Me? Innocence? Yourself?”

“Yes,” she said, with a weak grin. “In that order.”

She coughed again. The sound had a choking gurgle to it. “Kiss me,” she whispered. “Kiss me good night.”

I wondered if she had some hidden weapon she could kill me with if I got close, or perhaps some suicide pill she’d pop into my mouth instead of her own. No sign of anything like that; no smell either. She must have guessed what I was thinking, because she said, “Do you really think I’m that evil?”

“Yes.”

“You’re right. But kiss me anyway.”

I knelt beside her and leaned forward, only intending a little peck on the cheek. But she turned her head at the last moment to meet my lips with hers, and she reached up to hold me—hold me with her crushed broken arms. It must have hurt hideously but she didn’t even wince. For a long moment, there was only her mouth pressed desperately against mine, my sad, scared sister…

Then she became the second woman to die kissing me. I’d barely known either of them.