Of Fire and Night (29 page)

70

CHAIRMAN BASIL WENCESLAS

I
n the Whisper Palace’s hushed infirmary levels, Basil waited with Deputy Cain and OX. Not knowing where he was going, Sarein had tried to accompany them, but Basil had expressly forbidden it. He did not want her to see this. And now even Captain McCammon seemed to show a tinge of sympathy toward the showboating King; did everyone give up so easily? Basil had to put a stop to this, and right away.

A slack-faced Prince Daniel lay insensate, but that was about to change—not by choice, but out of desperation. Medical specialists set to work reviving the formerly unacceptable Prince: the Chairman’s next best chance. The other alternative Basil had in mind would take far too much time, time that he didn’t have right now.

Daniel is still unacceptable, even if his brain has been punished with nightmares for months,
Basil thought. He clasped his hands behind his back and scowled at the pallid young man.
But he is the lesser of two evils
.

Daniel had proved to be a terrible disappointment, but he had never actively opposed Basil’s policies. He wasn’t smart enough, didn’t have a broad mind. His role was not to think, just to listen and to repeat what he was told to say. With Peter—or Raymond Aguerra, as he’d once been called—they had chosen someone with too much intelligence, too much initiative.
Not a mistake we are ever likely to make again
.

Like window dressing, the Teacher compy waited silently beside his once-plump former student. As soon as Daniel underwent a brief but necessary recovery, OX would try to instruct the Prince again.

After the stimulants and counteractants had been administered, but before the young man awoke, Basil let out a long, disappointed sigh. “I’m convinced King Peter will never learn his lesson, despite many chances and clear warnings.” He began to pace, watching the young patient’s twitchings and moanings as he swam up from the depths of unconsciousness. “Worse, Peter has begun to garner a disturbing amount of popular support. Even when he blatantly goes against our instructions, the people applaud everything he does.”

Cain frowned at him. “Sir, the people are
supposed
to adore him. That is what he’s there for. Doesn’t that mean he’s doing his job properly?”

“Not unless it’s the way
I
tell him to do his job. We’ve done our work too well. The last thing we need right now is a glory hog. Peter made an obvious power play through the media with his grandstanding about the compy revolt. Before that, he somehow leaked the news about Estarra’s pregnancy. I don’t like it when my choices are taken from me.” He shook his head. “I never thought I’d long for the days of that bumbling fool King Frederick.”

“Still, it has turned out for the best, Mr. Chairman.” Cain maddeningly insisted on being optimistic. “And he
was
right about the Soldier compies. It’s illogical to hold that against him.”

“He did it just to spite me. The harder we push, the less he cooperates.”

“Maybe we should try a different tactic. Sometimes pushing doesn’t work,” Cain pointed out, earning even more of the Chairman’s ire.

“Prince Daniel is my different tactic.”

As stimulants coursed through his body, the Prince stirred, groaned, then vomited. Medical specialists rushed forward to clean him up and record his vital signs. The young man’s fingers twitched, his eyelids fluttered. A long, haunted groan drifted from his lips. His body shuddered and writhed as he retched again, but after so many weeks on thin nutrient solutions, his stomach had nothing to bring up.

The medical specialists ignored the conversation as the chemicals were purged from the Prince’s bloodstream and stimulants brought him all the way to consciousness. The young man groaned more loudly and finally awoke. His skin was grayish and damp with fresh sweat. His eyes were yellowed, bloodshot, and unfocused. Daniel stared at the ceiling, as if trying to remember how to see. He squirmed to cast away the gauzy threads of bad dreams. “Where am I?” His voice squeaked like new shoes that hadn’t been broken in.

Basil leaned over, regarding the Prince with a baleful glare. “You are in a room where your future will be decided. Consider it your last chance.” He looked scoldingly at the medical technicians, sniffing the sour smell of vomit and medicines in the room. “Everything always requires more time than I expect. We’ll be in my offices. Call us when he’s cleaned up and coherent enough to hear what we have to say. And I’m a busy man, so don’t take too long.”

When some of the grogginess had dissipated, Daniel sat propped up in his bed, looking like death warmed over twice with a malfunctioning heating plate. First he’d slipped into a near-crash state of metabolic shock from his long enforced coma; when he returned to consciousness, he screamed for ten minutes.

Basil hadn’t been there to watch the unpleasantness; all that mattered was for
Daniel
to remember the misery. The young man’s arms had been strapped down, more as a reminder of his helplessness than as any real preventive measure, since his limp limbs were too weak to cause any damage.

By the time Basil, Deputy Cain, and OX returned, the disgraced Prince remembered full well what he’d done to earn his punishment. He had defied the orders of the Chairman, run away from the Whisper Palace, and (most unforgivably) behaved in an unspeakably foolish fashion while in the public eye. Thus, his drugged stupor, the long limbo of nauseating nightmares, and his pathetic bodily deterioration had all been a fitting sentence. Henceforth, Prince Daniel would never be more than a breath away from remembering how easily he could be squashed.

The young man literally trembled with fear as the Chairman stood over his bedside without saying a word. Basil didn’t need to speak. He turned to look at the Teacher compy, then at his deputy. “Mr. Cain, remind me again why we brought OX here. We’ve had enough problems with compies lately.”

“Sir? OX was constructed centuries before Soldier compies and their Klikiss instruction sets. No need to worry about him.”

“But why is he
here
?” Basil insisted.

“Because we need him to see this. OX is going to teach our Prince how to conform. Trust me, it’s for the best, Mr. Chairman.”

Breathing so fast and hard that he skated on the edge of hyperventilation, Daniel listened while OX mechanically explained the current situation in the Hansa, summarizing what had happened since the recalcitrant Prince had been placed in an artificial coma. The second round of drugs was wearing off, leaving behind a general malaise and a bad taste in the young man’s mouth. Daniel was much thinner than before.
A good start
.

Shifting his gaze from the compy to the Chairman, struggling to control himself, the terrified young man blinked more than was necessary. He shook his head like a dog drenched in water and tried to focus on what had happened to him. As he gratefully sipped from a glass of fruit juice, absorbing electrolytes and sugar, he had to be wondering why he was still alive.

When the compy finished with the explanations, Daniel stammered, “So . . . so what happens to me now?”

“That depends. You have already proved to be a disgrace.” Daniel flinched. “The question is, are you salvageable, or should you be discarded? I’d prefer not to waste time starting from scratch with another candidate. But I don’t want to waste time with you, either, if you haven’t learned your lesson.”

“I’ve learned my lesson!”

As he scrutinized the shaky young man, Basil wondered what kinds of nightmares the boy had experienced while asleep.

“Please, just let me out of here.”

“Easy enough to say. But have you fundamentally changed? Learned your place in the Hansa down to the marrow of your tiniest bone?” Basil’s voice cut like a surgical instrument. “If you force us to remove you again because of your intractability, we’ll turn you into fertilizer for a colony world. No sense wasting resources on life support.”

“No! You won’t need to do that. I promise.” Basil studied Daniel’s eyes. Fear dripped from the young man like icicles from a wintry rain gutter.

“Can you be the King that Peter isn’t?”

Daniel swallowed hard, rallied his courage, and sniffed. “I can be the right kind of King. He’s had his chance. Now it’s my turn.”

“It’s your turn if I
say
it is.”

“Then say it, Mr. Chairman. Please.” His lips trembled. “Just please don’t kill me. I want to be a Prince—
the
Prince.”

“It’s not a Prince I’m looking for, Daniel.” Basil walked around the bed. “I need a new King.”

OX spoke up. “Mr. Chairman, I have the proper instructional programming. All I need is cooperation from my student.”

Basil gave the compy an annoyed glance. “I wouldn’t start keeping score, OX. Peter was your student, too, and look how he turned out.”

Daniel swung his gaze quickly to the compy, whom he had previously hated. “I promise to do whatever OX says! Really. I mean it this time.”

The young man’s complete surrender and cooperation was a good sign—Peter had never shown such submissiveness, not even in his earliest days. When Daniel began to whimper, Basil frowned. “Stop that. It isn’t very regal of you.”

In response, Daniel sat stiffly on the infirmary bed, barely able to keep his balance. In a few days the boy should be able to walk again. He composed himself, dredging up everything OX had taught him. It was an impressive show.

Basil smiled at Pellidor and Cain. His voice was warm and gracious. “All right, Daniel, you’ve convinced me.”

71

OSIRA’H

A
cutter bearing forty-nine Ildirans arrived at Dobro, sent directly from the Prism Palace. The courier asked to speak to the Designate, though he could not specify whether he meant Daro’h or Udru’h. Ildirans and freed humans had come to the spaceport to watch.

Scanning the gathered crowd, the courier recognized the half-breed girl. “And the Mage-Imperator requests that Osira’h also hear my words.”

Within the hour, they met inside the new Designate’s private residence, where the courier delivered his dark message. “The hydrogues have returned to Ildira with their demands. Adar Zan’nh will be dispatched with a message to Earth offering Solar Navy warliners. He will claim they are for protection.”

“And they are not?” Udru’h asked.

“That is not for me to say. Most of the Solar Navy’s warliners have been summoned back to Ildira, gathering for the massive deployment.”

Listening in angry silence, Osira’h felt a dull knife of disappointment pierce her heart. She wanted to weep for how easily her father had surrendered.

“So the Mage-Imperator agrees to this?” Daro’h, too, seemed disbelieving.

Udru’h was gruff. “It is the only way he can save the Empire. It is what Osira’h helped him to achieve.” When her uncle smiled at her, she felt nauseated.

“Why did my father want me to hear this?” she asked.

Udru’h said, “I assume the Mage-Imperator felt you would be overjoyed to know that you have succeeded, that your work had a true purpose, and that our breeding program was not a waste.” She forced herself not to glare at him.

Osira’h felt a thread inside her mind, knowing that she still had the potential to touch the hydrogues. But she walled it off, refusing to let the deep-core aliens glean this information from her. She hoped never to touch those appallingly disturbing minds again. If Udru’h could keep secrets from the Mage-Imperator, then she could keep secrets from the hydrogues.

She turned to Daro’h. “And now that you’ve torn down the fences, Designate, now that you’ve let these people free, are you going to tell them that the rest of their race is doomed? Or will you just let them keep happily working until the hydrogues come here to wipe them out?”

Daro’h spread his hands. “I cannot control what the hydrogues do!”

“There is no purpose in telling the humans a truth that would only make them unruly.” Udru’h turned to the courier. “Your ship will depart soon for Ildira, and I wish to be aboard it. My work here is done, and the Mage-Imperator needs my assistance. He requires advice when it comes to difficult matters.”

When Dobro’s darkness drove the Ildirans into their well-lit dwellings, the former breeding subjects gathered in private. The
Burton
descendants spoke in hushed voices.

The communal buildings were scrubbed clean and had new beds and new furnishings. All the men, women, and their purebred children now had the option to construct dwellings outside the settlement perimeter. They could also have real families with whomever they chose, instead of the best genetic matches as determined by medical kithmen. But just because Daro’h had torn down the fences did not mean they were free.

Osira’h now knew their hopeful future was nothing more than a cruel illusion. She had tried to hold a thread of belief, but her father had failed her as badly as she’d feared. The courier’s revelations were the final straw for her. Though their race might soon be extinct, these captives should at least know the truth. Finally.

The new Designate had never shown them the secret records, images of the enormous generation ship that had carried their ancestors from Earth, how Ildirans had introduced human bloodlines to the gene pool for hybrid vigor, hoping to achieve their long-sought telepathic intermediary. All those generations held captive . . . all unnecessary.

My parents accomplished with love what no amount of forced breeding and genetic slavery could achieve
.

And for what? So she could facilitate the extermination of the human race?

Now even Nira listened in horror as Osira’h told the whole story and recounted the recent decision Jora’h had made. The
Burton
descendants had been abused for many years, but now they understood they’d been deceived as well. They were pawns, used to bring about the end of their own civilization.

“The big question is what do we do now?” Stoner said.

“We should be grateful to the new Dobro Designate,” said an older woman. “Look how things have gotten better. This other matter is out of our hands.”

Osira’h replied angrily, “Is that enough?” She looked at the others, trying to incite them. Raised in captivity, they had never known anything other than fences, their women taken away and raped, their men harvested for sperm. “You will never be allowed to leave Dobro. In fact, you will probably be killed—along with all humans everywhere.”

“But we’re free now,” a balding man said. “We all heard what the Designate promised.”

Nira turned from the darkness outside the barracks window, miserable. “Can we trust what a Dobro Designate says? Think of what Udru’h did to me and to all of you. And now, what Jora’h has planned . . .” She closed her eyes. “It can’t be true.”

Osira’h touched her mother’s arm. “It is true.”

The girl sensed a mood shift as the people began to grasp the enormity of their situation. Struggling with anger and disbelief, they tried to balance a need for retribution against their own desire for peace, freedom, and a fresh start.

Stoner ground his teeth together, lowered his head, and said in his deep voice, “But how do we do anything against this? We don’t know how to fight. How can we have any effect on his scheme? Do we go see Designate Daro’h? Demand that he take action?”

Nira raised her voice like an iron blade, as if she had finally gotten a grip on vengeance. “Daro’h may be the new Designate here, but he is not the person responsible.”

Osira’h closed her eyes, forcibly drove back any fond memories she still had of her uncle and mentor—every remnant of pleasant times, every hint of love and devotion Udru’h had once shown her. He would be leaving for Ildira soon and had asked her to join him for a quiet dinner tomorrow. That would be a perfect time for them to move. The former captives had to make their plans swiftly.

“We all know who guided the program,” Osira’h said, “and we know who is to blame.”