Ruler of Naught (86 page)

“Got an idea. Don’t send it yet,” Moob put in, red-filed
teeth bared in a fleering grin. She hunched over her console, keying quickly.

Hestik clumped his fist on his own console, running the com
back. Tat Ombric turned her gaze to the viewscreen overhead, her emotions a
strange mixture of laughter and guilt.

Once again they all watched the Panarch and his advisers,
all of them old, dressed in the grimy gray prison garb that Emmet Fasthand,
captain of
Samedi
, wouldn’t let them wash. They were sitting at their barren
table eating. Tat sat forward slightly, trying to catch the conversation. They
talked so quick, in those musicky voices, it was hard to follow.

Without warning the gravs went off, and anyone in motion
floated right off their benches, some of them reaching hastily for anchor. Food
on lifting spoons or in glasses about to be drunk from splashed out in messy
globules, which several of them swam to catch.

Two of the old people bumped into each other, gnarled arms
and legs pumping for purchase, and when most of them were in midair, Sundiver
had hit the gravs again, and the prisoners thumped down hard, their food on top
of them—that which hadn’t splattered on walls and bulkheads.

“Look at that old bald one,” Hestik sobbed. “On top of the
ugly one with the squint! ‘Wanna chatz?’” He parodied a quivering, senile
voice.

The bridge crew whooped again, all except Moob, who still
worked—and Tat, who smiled reluctantly.

Tat looked away from the tiny old woman on the floor
cradling a broken arm. She tried to suppress the discomfort, figuring that
these nicks were shortly going to be duffed, anyway. Moob and Hestik had
decided to belay needling that despicable Morrighon; at some point his
Dol’jharian master might find out what they were doing, and no one was certain
how he’d react. This was, of course, Fasthand’s ship... but Tat didn’t think
even Fasthand was ready to hand out commands to Anaris achreash’Eusabian,
Jerrode, Eusabian’s son and heir.

Tat looked down at her hands, small and square on her
console. Moob and Hestik loved perpetrating jokes while Fasthand was on his
Z-watch, the crueler the jokes the better, and if they hadn’t realized that
those nicks were theirs to play with, they might have turned on the rest of the
crew—like Tat herself—who were too weak to defend themselves, or to get a
clique to defend them. The smallest on the crew, Tat felt anew the ambivalence
of being posted to the bridge: her cousins couldn’t help her here.

“Let’s watch this,” Moob said, baring her Draco teeth.

The viewscreen flickered to what the imagers in the
prisoners’ cabin were recording right then.

The nicks had picked themselves up and straightened some of
the mess as best they could, with the sparse linen Fasthand allowed them. A big
old nick crouched over the tiny woman, trying to wrap her arm with strips torn
from a sheet.

Suddenly they all looked in one direction, their bodies
tight with alarm, their faces varying from disgust to blank. Moob reached over
to Sundiver’s console and hit the gravs again, and moments later a nasty
brownish cloud of matter rolled into the room.

Kedr Five wheezed, pounding the back of his pod. “You
backed... up... the... disposer!” he squealed.

Renewed shrieks of mirth made the walls ring. Tat wondered
if the damned Dol’jharians were watching and laughing as well. No one knew for
certain if they had the imagers programmed to send to their quarters; they all
assumed that Morrighon was spying on them, but no one knew to what extent.
Almost his first action after coming on board was to designate a huge block in
the ship’s computers for his own use, and as yet no one could break his codes.
Tat kept trying, on Fasthand’s orders; he wanted to know how much of the ship’s
functions the Dol’jharians had interfered with.

“You’re a Bori,” Fasthand had snarled at Tat. “You been
twisty with systems for years. Get around that ugly popeyed zhinworm.”

Tat had just nodded, not pointing out that Morrighon was a
Last Generation Bori. Any of those who had survived cullings, purges, and the
terrible training one must endure in order to serve the Dol’jharian lords had
to be exponentially much twistier.

She glanced once again at the viewscreen, then let her eyes
unfocus. Bile tickled at the back of her throat; it was too easy to imagine
what that room smelled like.

Behind, she heard Hestik choke. Sundiver wiped her eyes, but
Kedr Five and Moob avidly drank in every disgusting detail, gibbering with such
delighted abandon they missed the hiss of the door opening behind, and those
first thumping steps.

Heart pounding, Tat scrunched low; though her father had
skipped off Bori when she was small, just before the Panarchists defeated
Eusabian’s forces, she still felt terror whenever she sighted a Dol’jharian,
and this time it was two of the big black-clad Tarkans, Anaris’s personal
guard, who strode in.

Silence fell, Kedr Five hiccupping, as the Tarkans made
their way to Moob.

She was up at once, teeth bared and her knife out, but the
Tarkan swatted her arm aside and grabbed the front of her tunic. Big as she
was, he lifted her right off her feet, as the second one grabbed Sundiver’s
arm.

“I’m coming,” she said, getting up fast. “What’s the
problem?”

Neither of the Tarkans spoke; Tat wondered if they even
understood Uni. They just walked out, their boots clunking on the deck plates,
the one carrying a choking, cursing Moob, and Sundiver hurrying in the grasp of
the other with rather more speed than she usually displayed.

The door hissed shut behind them. Overhead, the viewscreen
showed that the gravs had come on again, and Tat saw a corresponding green
light on Sundiver’s console:
Interesting
, she thought.
I was right,
they do have access to ship’s functions.
She watched, her thoughts
speeding, as several gray-clad Dol’jharians efficiently herded the nicks out of
the disgusting cabin.

A moment later the Tarkans showed up; Moob hung limply,
blood running from her mouth. Sundiver’s hair stood out around her face, which
was still beautiful even in anger. She managed a defiant stance as without
warning Anaris himself appeared, taller even than the Tarkans, with a face like
some carving of a warrior king out of the long-lost past. Tat hunched down
further in her pod, even though he was just on the screen.

“The prisoners are to arrive at Gehenna alive, and
unharmed,” he said, in his incongruously accent-free Uni. If anything, he
sounded like the nicks. He smiled just slightly, then indicated cleaning gear
being dumped on the floor by another of the silent gray soldiers. “When this
chamber is habitable again, we’ll discuss this further.”

The Tarkans let go of the two women and went out. The door
shut on them; Sundiver bent over, retching. Moob leaned on a table, unheeding
the brown-green slime she sat in.

Hestik tried to kill the viewscreen—and failed.

The remainder of the bridge crew exchanged looks. On the
viewscreen the women painfully began to clean up; some on the bridge watched,
or busied themselves at their consoles, trying not to watch.

o0o

Morrighon tabbed the volume down on the communicator tuned
to the bridge, laughing as he set it neatly in its place on the row. Leaning
back, he watched on his personal screen the pleasant sight of the Draco and her
companion scrubbing bilge off the walls. He wondered whether he ought to insert
a worm into the ship system, that would cause the tianqi to waft an occasional
breath of fetor—a little reminder—into their cabins.

Reluctantly he abandoned the idea and logged the entire
scrubbing session under his personal code. Enjoyable as it would be once, he
knew they’d just force some other luckless slub into those cabins, and while
all the Rifter trash crewing this ship deserved being spaced, some of them were
much worse than others.

He had not gotten as far as he had by being unsubtle. Enough
for them to find this coded log in the system—they would know that he had the
session recorded, and could send it over the hyperwave at any time. That at
least would clip the Draco’s wings: to be shamed publicly was worse than death
for Draco.

As for the silver-haired blunge-eater... He tapped his nails
on the edge of his console, thinking with renewed fury of the disgusting things
the Rifters had done to torment him. He knew that she had been the one to spray
the clearmet on the wall above his bed and tap it into ship’s power. He flexed
his feet within his shoes: the burns still hurt. And it was she and that
boil-faced blit at the nav console, Hestik, who had released the plasphage into
his tianqi vents, so that his bed linens had dissolved into a disgusting pink
slime.

They were not united, Morrighon knew. He smiled, getting up
to pace about his cabin. Of course he could never tell Anaris about this silent
war going on: the assumption that he could not defend himself against a pack of
Rifters would destroy his future as Anaris’s right hand. Instead, he would use
his subtlety to divide them against themselves

The comm at his waist vibrated: Anaris’s personal signal.
Morrighon activated the new security locks on his cabin; the next intruders
would encounter a nasty surprise, which they might, if particularly unlucky,
even survive.

He hastened down the narrow corridor, wondering if Anaris
had decoded some new data from over the hyperwave—or if he had decided to hold
another private converse with the Panarch.

Morrighon gnawed his lip, finding the idea of discourse
between those two strange and unsettling. He longed to discuss the meetings
with Anaris, but as yet Anaris had not indicated to him that they were a topic
of discussion. Further, he wanted them utterly private, so it was Morrighon and
not one of the Tarkans who brought the old man when Anaris wanted him, and
waited outside until they were done.

Morrighon’s step quickened, and he turned his thoughts back
to the best ways to deepen the discord in Fasthand’s crew, and to amuse himself
while doing it.

o0o

Caleb Banqtu drank deeply of his mug of caf, then sat back,
enjoying the burn on his tongue and in his throat and stomach. Sitting across
the table—the clean table—from him, Gelasaar sipped at a steaming mug, eyes
closed. Next to the Panarch, tiny Matilde Ho cradled hers in her one good hand,
the broken arm now secured in a proper cast.

Caleb had ceased to feel surprise at anything. Torment by
the Rifters had been predictable. Unforeseen, though perhaps more sinister, was
the rescue by the Tarkans followed by the dramatic improvement in their
maintenance.

No one spoke, but he read their intent clearly.

The Panarch, by his pose, invited discussion, so the others
shifted a haunch, turned a shoulder, adjusted their seat so that each could see
the others. Padraic Carr limped over to the bench and sat down on Matilde’s
other side, moving easier since the visit to the medic; until this surprising
rescue, his pain had been obvious in every step, every harsh breath, though his
long, craggy face had shown nothing. The admiral had not told any of them what
the Tarkans did to him that first terrible week after they were captured, but
Caleb knew they had exacted their own kind of vengeance for the defeat at
Acheront twenty years before.

Separated without warning; imprisoned alone for unknowable
periods of time; always, always spied upon, they had learned to read one
another’s thoughts in subtle movement.

At first the semaphores were mere signs, meant to cheer one
another during those rare encounters. Heightened awareness, the need to
communicate, to reassure and be reassured, invested a whispered word, a glance,
with a weight of meaning. Those first signs were simple: a fist for
interrogations, a sniff for drugs used; lifted fingers for times compatriots
had been seen, and later, their positioning indicated levels of well-being. A
brush against one’s side meant hunger; a scratch on the ass signified
Barrodagh. And a nod meant news, whether real or not they had no way to
discern.

Many backsides itched in those early days. Caleb wondered if
all Barrodagh’s recreational time was spent in dreaming up new torments for the
prisoners in his charge.

Caleb himself had to endure vids of the rape of Charvann,
and the use of his island home as target practice by a squad of Rifters. He
told himself that it was not real—why would Eusabian bother with Charvann at
all, which had no vestige of strategic importance?

But his sense of reality had become unhinged until waking
and sleeping seemed alternate forms of a dream state. Rage, sorrow, grief,
anger again, despair, all haunted him like a pack of howling specters. But
specters were unreal; reality intruded just once, in the Ivory Hall, when he
was forced to watch his mate die just after the Kelly Archon. The floor ran
with red before a halt was called. Eusabian made it clear enough that Caleb and
seven Privy Councilors were spared not because of any merit, but because they
were deemed too old to be worthy prey.

After that, solitary confinement once again, interspersed
with Barrodagh’s vile persecutions. Caleb endured it all by rebuilding his
wind-skimmer, one stick at a time, in the sunny refuge of his imagination.

He had nearly finished stitching seams on the broadcloth
sails when they were abruptly transported aboard the Fist again and told they
were to be taken to Gehenna.

Then, finally, they were imprisoned together. And despite
the reverberations of battle, and the prospect of Gehenna, they were with
Gelasaar again, whose gaze lifted with visionary intensity when he said, the
moment they were locked in a small cell together: Brandon is alive.

The lights in their cell had dimmed to the night setting,
and in the gloom they had talked, quickly.