The Phoenix in Flight (66 page)

(One more thing.)
Brandon tapped furiously at the
console on the little bot waiting next to the hatch, as the chaos in the
kitchen grew. Then bent over and picked up the sedated dog. Placing it on the
tray on top of the bot, he tapped the console one more time and the bot headed
back into the tunnel past others still emerging.

Brandon motioned to the other dog. “
Gay nakh
,” he
said, and the dog sprang up and followed the bot. Then Brandon slipped off his
bandolier and handed it to Lokri.
(The bots will keep this up for a while,
here and in surrounding corridors. The hatch will lock when they’re finished,
but I suggest you set these up to discourage investigation of this tunnel. Give
it fifteen minutes.)

Outside the kitchen, someone was shouting commands.

(
Let’s go.)
Brandon holstered his jac and scrambled
into the tunnel on his hands and knees. As Vi’ya helped Ivard through the hatch
after him, both kitchen doors banged open.

Guards in bulky battle armor thundered in, their servos whining
loudly. The little tray-carriers facing the doors fired a salvo of pies as
nozzled drink dispensers hosed the floor with a thick, curdled-looking grayish
fluid that smelled of spoiled cake batter. The pies had no effect on the
guards’ momentum, but the slimy goop covered their helmets and effectively
blinded them, while the slippery grayish fluid made it impossible for them to
stop.

Lokri backed into the tunnel, alternately slapping petards
into place and watching as, with majestic inevitability, the two squads
collided with a tremendous crash, like vast beasts helpless in the throes of
lust.

Lokri scrambled after the others into the little service
tunnel. There were no more bots coming, but behind him a battalion of bots
loaded with pies or full of liquid trundled off to battle. Lokri’s guts had
turned to liquid; he was laughing almost too hard to propel himself along the
tunnel.

The sounds of the food fight diminished behind them:
amplified roars of rage from the armored guards mixed with the sizzle of
jac-bolts, splattering hisses from the nozzle machines, and the
clang-whizz-splat of the pie-flingers.

A few minutes later they emerged into a large junction where
the ceiling was of normal height. They stood up, Brandon and Ivard whooping.
Even Vi’ya smiled, though she never ceased scanning walls and shadows. Brandon
waved at the squad of little machines that had accompanied them as they
disappeared down the other three tunnels.
(Flank attack.)
The bot with
the dog was already gone.

Brandon motioned them to a ladder that passed from a hole in
the ceiling through one in the floor. They climbed down, Vi’ya supporting Ivard
from beneath. The boy was fading, his complexion pasty where it wasn’t mottled
with fever.

Another corridor, another closet, yet one more ladder down,
the transport station at last. They piled into the waiting carrier and slid off
down the tunnel.

Lokri studied Brandon’s profile as the carrier sped back
toward the
Telvarna.

You knew how to pick them, didn’t you, Markham?

o0o

Montrose reached the station under the gazebo, and slapped
the up key on the pillar.

On the surface the wind was growing in strength. Yet the
shrubs and trees near the gazebo weren’t stirring.

He spun around, almost falling as Omilov’s weight shifted,
and saw a plasma cannon on a ground-effect platform swerve off a pathway and
begin skimming quietly toward the opening in the forest where the
Telvarna
lay,
its barrel swiveling toward the ship concealed in the darkness.

He slapped his boz’l. “RED ALERT! PLASMA CANNON, ZERO
DEGREES, GROUND LEVEL!”

o0o

Osri jerked his head up, bruising his forehead against the
plasma guide, as a soft paw reached out and tapped his cheek.

“Oh, Telos,” he muttered. “Get out of here, you abominable
bag of fur.” The only response was the rumbling, saw-edged sound he’d learned
meant contentment in the big cat.

“What’d you say, Schoolboy?” came Marim’s cheerful voice.

Osri gritted his teeth. “I said that this guide appears
undamaged.”

“Wave monitor says otherwise. Give it a bang at 24-17.”

Osri looked up at the metallic pipe overhead and squinted at
the age-dulled label on it: 24-8. He sighed with frustration. By rights the
little Rifter woman ought to be squirming along in the cramped crawl space
abaft the engines, tuning the guides that channeled waste heat to the radiants.
She was the smallest of them, after all.

He levered himself forward with his elbows and heels,
fighting not to let his sense of confinement erupt into full-blown
claustrophobia. A claw reached out and snagged his hair, and he banged his head
again.

Osri cursed and struck out at the cat with the tuning hammer
in his right hand, and flushed with anger as he missed and hit something else
with a resounding clang.

“Watch yerself, Schoolboy,” Marim shouted. “Put a dent in
the wrong place and you’ll be in there another hour.”

“My skills would be better applied on the skip cavity,” Osri
snapped as he struggled toward the location she’d given him. “I
was
trained
at the Academy in—”

“Yeah,” Marim interrupted. “Day I let a nick anywhere near
the fiveskip, that’s the day Vi’ya plays ring-around-the-spin-axis with my guts
as the guide rope.”

“How’s it coming?” Jaim’s laconic voice was blurred with
fatigue.

“Eh. How’s the fiveskip?”

Osri struggled to bend himself around a particularly tight
corner.
24-15. Almost there.
Then he froze.

“. . . Palace. The loot oughta be the score of all time.”
Marim’s voice was sharp with resentment. “Those nicks been collectin’ things
for hundreds of years, and the Krysarch said he knows where all the best stuff
is. And here we’re stuck.”

Loot? Palace?
Osri’s head jerked in protest, and he
smacked his forehead on a coupling. She had to be saying it to annoy him.

Except that he had seen them arming, the Krysarch among
them, which they wouldn’t do unless they trusted him. And Marim had said
something about saving “some of the take.”

He thought back to the ship’s actions over Arthelion.
Evasive action, definitely. Had Brandon identified himself to the authorities,
only to be told to surrender himself for trial?
It would be no more than he
deserves.

But if so, he had obviously refused, and the
Telvarna
had
attempted to flee. That was the free-fall, diverting all power to the engines.
And
the authorities would go to almost any lengths to avoid killing a Krysarch of
the House Royal, no matter how debased.

So a carefully aimed ruptor had smashed their drive and
forced them down. The Mandala was probably the only place Brandon had a chance
of pulling off an escape: rumor had it that all Royals possessed override codes
to the Mandalic defenses.

And to get the Rifters’ help—
Osri shook his head
again. It was too hard to credit, despite the way it hung together. There had
to be another explanation. Marim and Jaim were baiting him. They had no love for
the Douloi—nicks, as they called them.

He found the label he was looking for, and under Marim’s
relayed directions, banged a series of small dents into the wave guide,
retuning it so that it could carry an intensely hot thread of plasma from the
engines to the radiants without overheating.

He’d reviewed chips about the effectiveness of ruptors, but
now he had a visceral understanding of just how much damage they could do, even
if they didn’t pull a ship apart. Their rapidly alternating gee fields made a
hash of the finely tuned innards of a ship’s engines and fiveskip.

Marim finally pronounced herself satisfied and Osri
painfully edged back the way he’d come. Back in the engine room proper, he
pulled himself to his feet, suppressing a groan as his cramped muscles
protested. Marim and Jaim had their heads together over a control console as
they discussed some problem, the little Rifter sitting perched on a console
with one leg propped across the knee of the other.

Osri’s eyes were drawn to the black at the bottoms of her
feet. Light reflecting off them showed what he had assumed was dirt was
actually microfilaments. He winced, fighting revulsion. She had obviously been
gennated.

Osri stretched his cramped back, then jerked his leg away as
the ship’s cat rubbed up against him. He looked down into the glacial-blue
eyes, which were slitted with pleasure at his attention.

Osri looked away. On another console, a security scan of the
ship’s surroundings played lazily, switching from view to view. Marim stepped
toward him and gave him a swat on the arm.

Osri caught a whiff of some kind of flower scent mingled
with heat-sweat, and he stepped back, turning his head. He could smell them
both.

“We got more for you, Schoolboy,” Marim said with a laugh,
clearly misinterpreting his response to the offensiveness of the Rifters’
proximity. “But that’s the worst of it. Next we’ll—”

The security console blared with Montrose’s voice, colored
by the odd tonality that indicated a boswell relay.

“RED ALERT! PLASMA CANNON, ZERO DEGREES, GROUND LEVEL!”

Marim cursed violently and leapt to the console while Jaim
spun around, a jac materializing in his hand. “Don’t move, nick. Now lie down
on the deck and put your hands behind your head.”

A little confused by the contradictory instructions, and
frightened by the sudden intensity shown by the normally easygoing engineer,
Osri hesitated. Under Marim’s hands, the console came to life, the screen
displaying a mobile plasma cannon emblazoned with the Sun and Phoenix, its
barrel coming to bear on the
Telvarna.
The screen flared even as Marim
slammed her hand down on the console.

“Chatz!”
she shrieked as the ship rocked. “For’rd
cannon’s not responding. Chatzing blunges got us.” Her fingers raced across the
console. “And the teslas are still off-line,” she wailed.

The
Telvarna
was defenseless.

On the screen, the mobile cannon rocked back, its defensive
fields flaring. Then its barrel came to bear again and it raced toward the
ship.

His face twisted with frustration and rage, Jaim strode
forward and slammed the barrel of his jac into Osri’s head, knocking him to the
floor. He raised the weapon, and Osri realized that when the cannon fired on
the
Telvarna
again, his life would end.

Montrose watched as a blue-white bolt of plasma reached out
from the cannon and was answered simultaneously from within the forest. The
cannon’s shield flared and it slewed and drifted backward for a moment, then it
swiveled back for another shot. A bright, flickering glow marked the position
of the
Telvarna,
but no further bolts from its cannon. Montrose groaned.
The ship had taken a hit.

The mobile cannon skimmed across the grass toward the
Telvarna.
The Eya’a faintly shrilled the high, eerie note they only used when frying
someone’s brains. Montrose heard faint screams before the cannon veered and hit
a tree. The impact apparently damaged its ground-effect skirt. It fell to the
ground with a momentary snarl as the fans dug into the duff beneath the tree.
The engines cut out and it rocked to a halt.

Montrose shifted the gnostor’s dead weight and ran heavily
toward the ship, followed by the Eya’a. As he reached the ship he could hear
the sound of the engines already winding up to readiness.

o0o

Barrodagh was panting and breathless when they arrived at
the kitchen where the intruders were trapped. He had been rehearsing
explanations for the Lord of Vengeance, handicapped by ignorance of just what
he’d find when he arrived. The guard, sensing his impatience and anxiety, had
upped the pace until the shorter Bori could hardly keep up.

Now he could hear the sounds of battle: the sizzle of
jac-fire, shouted commands, amplified roars of anger, and heated Dol’jharian
curses. But he also heard a noise that puzzled him. What kind of weapon went
clang-whizz-splat
?
Then he remembered the kyltasz’s report and he slowed as his skin crawled.
Explodes
their brains through their eyes—
Where could Hreem have found such a thing
?
Was it some secret Panarchist weapon?

A strange smell tickled his palate: heavy, greasy, with an
unfamiliar bitter-sour tang to it. Barrodagh’s imagination threw up a series of
gruesome images of splattered brains dripping from the walls and sliming the
floor. His stomach heaved and he stumbled to a halt. His escort had stopped,
too, his firejac pointing this way and that as he tried to find whatever caused
that stink.

Twenty meters off were the double doors into the kitchen,
with the blue-white glare of jac-fire flickering through the crack in the
middle. A tide of some lumpy, scummy grayish substance was slowly bubbling out
from under the doors. Bile spurted into the back of his mouth and he swallowed
repeatedly, fighting the urge to vomit as he backed slowly, trembling
violently.

Something made a whining rattle behind him.

Panic gripped Barrodagh. He whirled—and heard a sound that
nearly stopped his heart—
clang-whizz-splat
.

Barrodagh screamed as the world turned green and his eyes
burned. His brain was being boiled away by some horrible Panarchist invention!
He clutched his skull, trying to hold it together. He could feel his eyes
coming out of their sockets as the glop oozed into his mouth, burning and
stinging. He screamed and screamed.

Clang-whizz-splat
. Another blast from the terror
weapon caught him square in the chest. Barrodagh’s panic reached an
insupportable level and he passed out.