The Sardonyx Net (58 page)

 

 

 

 

Chapter Twenty

 

 

Dana suited up to go into the Net.
 

Most pressure suits were brightly colored, on the same principle that made mountaineers use fluorescent, orange gear. Lamonica's suits—she carried four of them in storage besides her own—were maroon-and-silver striped. They were one-piece suits, from crown to crotch to boot-soles; they contained an air supply and a moisture recycler. They were designed to withstand pressure and temperature extremes of both hot and cold, but you could not wear them for very long; once in one, you could neither piss, shit, nor eat.
 

Hole Four would not engage with
Lamia
's extensible lock. Dana swam through and fastened it by hand. The lock walls stiffened as atmosphere hissed into it and it acquired gravity.
 

The outer lock door was jammed. Dana went back to
Lamia
. “I need tools.” Tori pointed him at the tool locker: he took a variety, including a cutting laser, hooking them to the suit's magnetized patches. None of them were especially heavy. The outer air gauge appeared to be functional; at least, it claimed there was air in the inner lock. Dana unjammed the door. Whoever had jammed it had done a hasty job. It slid up. There
was
air in the inner lock. The inner lock door, luckily, was harder to damage and the vandal had left it alone. Dana closed it behind him but made sure before he moved that the outer lock door stayed up.
 

“I'm in,” he said through the suit communicator.
 

“Clear, Dana. If you need anything, yell.”
 

“You'll hear it,” he said. He stepped into the Net. Gravity was normal. He was standing in an unadorned, white-walled corridor. He flipped through the pictures in his mind of the Bridge, fitting labels to spaces; this was Transverse Corridor Four: the Bridge was reachable through the corridor which would be coming up to meet this one on the—left. The Net was very quiet. He remembered his first impression of it as a Möbius strip or a giant treadmill. Now he felt it to be something alive, sensing him as he moved, an interloper, through its gut; a metal-and-plastic intelligent worm. In the neutral confinement of the pressure suit, the hairs lifted at the back of his neck.
 

He damned his hyperactive imagination, kicked the wall, and went on.
 

At the entrance to the Bridge, he stopped, wary. The huge wraparound vision screens were blank. Shields covered them, the cameras were off. The room was just a big control room, filled with com-units, screens, computer panels, buttons, dials, gauges, and pilots' and navigators' chairs. It curved. Portions of the room were separated from other parts by waist-high partitions. Dana walked toward the communications units. Three meters from them, he saw what the partitions had hitherto concealed. The body of Jo the Skellian was lying on the floor. She was wearing a silver-and-blue uniform with the Yago “Y” on the shoulder. He started, with difficulty, to turn her over. She weighed, he guessed, one hundred thirty kilos, and dead weight she seemed to weigh a ton. She was limp and rubbery; finally he got her on her side and saw what had killed her. There was an odd-shaped hole under her left armpit; about fifteen centimeters long, and about two centimeters wide, it was horizontal, and as precise as if it had been cut with a surgical knife. Dana wondered how far in it went. Far enough to touch something vital, lungs or heart. It had been made with a laser gun; he wondered if he should return to
Lamia
for a laser or stun pistol. He had been thinking in terms of an engineering emergency, not a human one.
 

Unsealing the seam of his pressure suit, he peeled it open, and let it fall down his back like a hood. He needed all his senses; and the pressure suit dimmed both taste and smell, though it left sight, hearing, and balance—the important ones. Now he could smell what his imagination had been trying to explain away: excrement, the death smell. He stood. Adrenalin speeded his heartbeat. He needed to find Zed Yago. He started once again toward the com-units, and again stopped. Assuming the ship's intercom was working, and it might not be, he still couldn't use it, not with someone with a laser pistol loose in the ship.
 

As he walked back to the doorway through the maze of partitions, he tripped over legs.
 

It was Zed, slumped in a contoured chair, head lolling, eyes closed, his breathing deep and even. He was out, not hurt, but drugged. The slackness of his facial muscles made his face look heavier. His big hands hung limp, nearly to the floor. The someone had a laser gun
and
a stun gun. Dana knelt and levered Zed's body across his back. As he pulled on the dangling arms, Zed shifted and muttered something. Dana almost dropped him. But the Net commander did not wake. Dana tried to estimate his weight. Eighty kilos? Eighty-five? He was heavy. The Starcaptain tensed his stomach muscles and straightened his legs, the unwieldy burden hoisted across his shoulder.
 

A cold voice said, “Put him down.”
 

Dana turned his head. Stooped as he was, he could see very little by just turning his head. He saw a woman in a pale green jumpsuit, reddish hair, brown eyes, right hand holding a laser pistol pointing at him.... He let Zed's body slide back into the pilot's chair. Slowly he straightened, palms out and away from his body.
 

“Move away from him.” The pistol moved a centimeter to the left. Dana stepped in that direction. He was out in the open now, directly in her line of fire, with neither chair nor partition to hide behind. His back ached and he wanted to piss.
 

“Which did you get first?” he asked.
 

“Zed,” said Darien. “The Skellian hit the distress signal key. I couldn't risk the stun pistol on her; it might not have worked. Skellians metabolize drugs differently than other people. I had to kill her.”
 

“Why?”
 

“Because she would have stopped me from completing my assignment. What are those implements on your suit?”
 

“Tools to open the lock.”
 

“Take them off. Drop them on the floor.”
 

Dana obeyed. He tossed them from him, not watching where they landed, but when he threw the cutting laser, it landed two-thirds of a meter from his foot.
 

Darien's hand did not relax.
 

“What was your assignment?” he asked, wanting to know, wanting to keep her talking because it would give him time to think. She didn't know what the cutting laser was, that was good, but she could cut him in two with her own pistol before he had time to get to it.
 

“To destroy the Yago Net.” She leaned back against a bulkhead.
 

“How are you going to do that?”
 

“I'm a computer technician,” she said. “That part's real. It took me two hours to program this monstrosity to blow itself up.”
 

“What are you?”
 

She smiled. “I'm a cop.” She still sounded like Rhani.
 

He snorted disbelief. “Since when do cops run around destroying sector property?”
 

Her eyes glittered anger. “
You
say that? You were
on
it. It's a symbol of power and of evil, it facilitates a vicious trade, it serves only to increase the profits of a slaver family—its very existence is immoral!” She glanced for a split second at the drugged man.
 

Dana said, “It's no worse than other prisons.”
 

“No other prison is Zed Yago's private playground.”
 

Dana edged a centimeter closer to the cutting laser. “I thought you loved him.”
 

“You were supposed to think that. So was he. I didn't love him; I fucked him. It's different.”
 

“Is your hair really that color?”
 

She laughed. “Of course not. Though it's close. My skin isn't this color, either, and I don't usually sound this husky. It takes a while for the dyes and the conditioning to wear off. I'm a weapon, Starcaptain. I'm an Enchantean, and I was a computer tech at Federation Headquarters till I was picked and primed and pointed at Zed Yago.”
 

“Pointed by—”
 

“It was Michel's idea. He figured: to destroy the chain, break the strongest link. The weak ones will fall apart of their own accord. Rhani Yago is the strongest link in the slave trade, and the way to break her is to take Zed away for good. At first they were going to send a man to do it, but the psychologists decided that would be too dangerous. Zed hurts men, but he's never hurt a woman. The man, of course, would also have looked like Rhani Yago.”
 

“Why not just assassinate him?”
 

“That wouldn't have done it. We considered it, but the psychologists said she would have remained only more determined to keep the slave system going.” Dana edged two centimeters closer to the cutting laser. “If we'd assassinated
her, he'd
take over, and he would be worse, don't you think so?” Dana could not help agreeing. “Besides, killing is immoral.”
 

“Too bad,” Dana said. “If it weren't, you could have assassinated them both.”
 

“You're right,” she said, with evident regret. Her eyes narrowed. “If you feel like that, why are you here?”
 

“Rhani Yago sent me here to find out what was wrong.”
 

“Oh. Then you're still a slave.” She glanced at the wall behind his head. “This station's going to blow to pieces in twenty-five minutes,” she said. “I'm shinnying on the shuttle. You want to come along? I'll take you. You can't have any loyalty to the Yagos.”
 

Dana looked at Zed, still slumped in the chair. He hadn't stirred again. There was a trace more color in his cheeks than there had been before. “What about him?”
 

“He can stay here.” Darien Riis' voice was very cold. “The Net blows, he blows with it.”
 

“You don't care at all? You feel nothing for him?” As he asked it, Dana wondered why he cared to know. “He loved
you
.”
 

“No!” said Darien. She pushed her hair back with her left hand. “I feel bad about the Skellian. I didn't want to kill her. But him"—she looked at Zed for more than a second before fixing her eyes on Dana—” he didn't love me. He loved the image I was, he loved his sister in me.”
 

“But wasn't that exactly what you wanted him to do? If they made you look like Rhani—”
 

“Yes. That's what we wanted. The Enchanter labs are good, aren't they?” She regained her pedantic tone. She tilted her head a little. “It worked perfectly, too. He was very easy to manipulate.”
 

Dana wondered at the courage it must have taken to turn Zed Yago into a sexual tool. The thought of it—of willingly sharing the bed of a man you knew to be a practiced sadist—made his balls hurt and his skin crawl.
 

“Well,” said Darien Riis, “are you coming with me or not?”
 

Dana smiled. “I don't have much of a choice,” he said. “I don't want to be dead.” When was she going to ask him how he had gotten to the Net? Maybe he could knock her out, carry her to
Lamia
, carry Zed to
Lamia
, get the fuck out of range in twenty minutes ... Part of him whispered: Never mind Zed. Leave him. Warn Tori and go. If you have to rescue someone, rescue the cop...
 

Why? he wondered. Why this terrible hatred of the Yagos, of the Net, of Zed? Michel A-Rae had created it, fueled it—he wondered what had birthed it in
him
. Darien Riis wouldn't tell him if she knew, which he doubted...
 

Tori Lamonica's voice came clearly through his suit communicator. “Dana, are you still alive in there?”
 

Darien's pistol swung for him. Leaping at her, Dana grabbed for her wrist, pinned it. She fought him. He leaned close to yell in her ear, “That's just—” He gasped and leaned backward, almost losing his grip on her hand, as her elbow aimed for his throat.
 

“You son-of-a-bitch!”
 

“Listen to me,” he said, starting to close with her. She stepped back and nearly took his head off with a sweeping side kick. He leaped backward and nearly tripped. She kicked him again. Sweet mother, she was fast! Tori was shouting at him through the suit mike. He moved in and trapped Darien's wrist again. She yielded, and her right arm relaxed. He heard a thud, as if something had fallen. Suddenly Darien's left hand blurred upward, laser in her fist, the pistol pointing not at him but out at the room. Dana saw Zed on the floor. He was aiming the cutting laser. Dana dived out of range. Light beams flashed, and Darien dropped. Zed Yago screamed and curled his body in agony, his head straining on his neck. He breathed in huge gasps, “Ah-hah, ah-hah.”
 

“Shut up a minute!” Dana shouted into the suit mike. Tori shut up. He stood, rubbing his knee where it had hit the floor. He limped to Zed. The Net commander looked up, and Dana swallowed. The light beam had struck Zed's outstretched hands. They were claws, blackened and burned, bizarre skeletal things. The pain from them had to be unbelievable. He could not see why Zed was still conscious.
 

He knelt. “Zed, can you hear me?”
 

Amber eyes blazed into his. Zed croaked, “Get out.”
 

“I've got a ship,” said Dana lamely.