"Piloting, you have my mark."
The ship paused, gathered itself and began, slowly, to spin.
"Engineering, when we achieve plus fifty percent on spin, increase power to main engines to three-quarter."
"Engineering. Aye to three-quarter on plus fifty."
"Priscilla," the voice was very soft. "What do you?"
She turned toward Ren Zel, strapped in as ordered at the auxiliary board, caught the edge of his fear with that sense that wasn't Healer sense at all, but a far more frightening Sight, which was the burden of those who had been to the Hall.
She took a breath, banishing her knowledge of his secret terrors.
"The fleas," she said to his worried eyes. "Long-range weapons are useless. We could empty everything we have and still not stop them all. And we don't know how many have managed already to get inside the watch-points. If we increase ship's spin—"
He inclined his head. "Those which have not yet anchored themselves shall be thrown off and those who approach will have difficulty matching vector. As well as gravitational problems." He paused, frowning past her shoulder as the
Passage
tumbled around them.
"If the captain will allow me, there is another item of close-in defense which may be utilized."
She waved a hand for him to continue, saw the flash of the red counter along her fingers.
"The meteor shield. Should we adjust spin to opposite—matched as close as we are to a planetary gravity field, a charge will be built. . ."
. . .and the space between ship and shield would be filled with an effect not unlike an intense aurora. Which would fry everything in its field.
Priscilla looked at her first mate, past the properly expressionless Liaden face to the horror and the resolve within him.
"Necessity, Captain," he said, softly.
She nodded. "Necessity, First Mate." And touched the toggle for Piloting.
A halt was called when they reached the southernmost point of the sweep. Shan bent carefully, set the box between his feet, straightened, and closed his eyes. His bruises had stopped bothering him some time back, swallowed up in a weariness so vast that he considered it perfectly possible that he would fall asleep where he stood.
There were others on the march in worse shape than he—walking wounded. He could see the blood-red glimmerings of physical pain amid the larger matrix of the unit, as well as every conceivable shading of terror, stress, and anguish. Eyes closed, he shifted, thinking muzzily that he should do something about that. He was a Healer. People needed him.
He took a breath, ran a rapid exercise to energize himself—and saw the brilliant pattern of Val Con's lifemate very near at hand, attended by a massive calmness of mauve and mint.
Shan opened his eyes.
Val Con's lady was less than an arm's length away, the tattooless Yxtrang at her back. She was holding out a canteen.
"Thought you might could use a drink," she said. "Since you lost your own jug."
Water
. The thought woke a torment of thirst. He took the canteen and put it to his lips. The water was warm, tasting faintly of plastic, and he savored it more than the most precious wine in yos'Galan's renowned cellar.
He allowed himself two exquisite swallows.
"Thank you," he said, offering the "jug" back to her.
She waved it away. "Keep it," she told him, the wave turned into a point at the scratched and dented stasis box. "What's in the keep-safe?"
He looked at her. "Seedlings."
"Seedlings," she repeated, expressionless, then nodded. "Beautiful here can carry that for you."
Shan froze. "I beg your pardon," he said carefully. "I may not have made myself clear. This box holds half-a-dozen stasis-bound seedlings from Jelaza Kazone. It's my duty, as a pilot of Korval, to carry them to safety."
Val Con's lady held up a small hand. "I
said
," she repeated firmly, "Beautiful can carry the box for you."
It was, in any light, an order. She was Val Con's lifemate, and Nadelmae Korval could certainly order mere Thodelm yos'Galan as she chose in matters of Tree and clan. And in all good soldier-sense, the box was weighing him down, slowing him down, making him a less effective soldier. As commander of this particular military action she could just as easily order him to leave the box, as hand it over to . . . He looked up into Nelirikk Explorer's face, gathered himself for a deeper looking—and saw the big man bow his head.
"Be at ease, Shan yos'Galan," the Yxtrang said in High Liaden. "I am of Jela's own Troop. The seedlings of his Tree are safe with me."
"
Jela's
Troop?" Shan repeated.
Not possible
, he thought first.
After all these years
?
If that isn't like Val Con's damnable luck
, he thought second, with a touch of what he suspected was hysteria,
to pick
up this particular Yxtrang, of all possible
—He snapped off that thought as a third occurred to him.
"Do forgive me if I raise a painful subject," he said to the Yxtrang, in Terran. "But I wonder if you had previous acquaintance of my brother. Perhaps eleven or twelve Standards ago?"
"Yes," Nelirikk said.
"And you've sworn yourself to his line?" Shan demanded. "I'd have rather thought you'd try to murder him."
"He tried," Miri Robertson broke in. "But the deal was that whoever came out winner in armed combat between the two of them would be boss, and Val Con won." She jerked her head. "Time to move out. Give Beautiful the safe."
He did as he was told, but it was with a definite pang that he saw the big hands close over the Dragon seal and lift the box away.
He was beyond weariness, into a state of hyperaware numbness, where every leaf-twitch abraded and the taste of emotions around him seared.
It was Healer sense that saved him.
The emotive grid was alien, dark with blood lust, dank with deep-held horrors. Shan felt it in the instant before the twig snapped under the force of the Yxtrang's charge.
There was no room to bring the rifle up, no time to go for the knife. The axe blade descending toward his head was black, light absorbing and wickedly sharp. Shan shouted—what, he had no idea—and
reached
, grabbing for the shield he had used to save him from Priscilla's wine-shower, a far-away lifetime ago.
The axe sang downward. Bounced. Broke.
The Yxtrang screamed rage and Shan
reached
again, into the dank undergrowth of horror, snatched up a squirming, squealing nightmare and threw it with every erg of his will into the Yxtrang's waking mind.
The scream this time was not rage. The Yxtrang threw away the axe haft. Hands clawing at his eyes, he whirled, crashing back the way he had come as gunfire exploded on all sides.
Shan sprang to the left, fell heavily behind a log, brought his rifle up and fired into the Yxtrang charge.
It was a quick, dirty fight, the Yxtrang being armed with nothing more than the standard long-arm and apparently without an officer to command them. The charge into the sweep line was ill conceived—or the last valiant act of desperate men. In either case, there were twenty of the enemy counted dead among the trees when the noise was finally over.
Shan sagged behind his cover, cheek on his arm, wondering, in a sort of foggy apathy, if he would be able to stand when the order came, much less walk.
Behind him, a leaf scraped leather and he rolled, rifle swinging up to target—
"Peace, Shan yos'Galan." Nelirikk Explorer dropped beside him, astonishingly quiet for so large a man. Feeling somewhat sheepish, Shan lowered the rifle.
"The captain sends to find if you are wounded."
Wounded? He tried to focus attention on his body, but gave the effort up after a moment with a frustrated shake of his head.
"Merely exhausted. I think. This is not the sort of outing I'm accustomed to."
Surprise showed on the big man's face. "No? But surely you have been a soldier?"
Shan sighed and dropped his head back on the ground, watching the other through half-closed eyes. "I have never been a soldier," he said, as clearly as his abused vocal chords would allow.
There was a short silence. "And yet you bring glory to the troop, for to capture that rifle was not easy. Unless you made your kill from afar?"
"From all too near," Shan assured him. "It must be noted, however, that the previous owner of the rifle was wounded. And I had a very stout stick."
"Stick." A grin cracked the impassive brown face. "Truly you are of Jela's get, and the scout's brother."
A whistle sounded: three short blasts, pause, one long.
Nelirikk stirred. "That is the call to move on. Stay vigilant a short time more, Shan yos'Galan. We are on the last leg of sweep. When we reach the quarry, there is rest."
The whistle sounded again: one short. Nelirikk grinned.
"My captain calls," he said, and vanished into the trees.
After a moment, Shan pushed to his feet, settled his helmet and stepped back into line.
Thus far, Nelirikk's information had been accurate in the extreme.
Val Con crouched in the slender concealment of an armored landcar's rear wheel-well and peered cautiously out. His time in the generator shed and in the ammunition cache had been well spent, and he flattered himself that his most recent efforts in the motor pool would not be found despicable.
As he worked his mischief, he counted—air transport, land transport, foodstuffs and stocked ammo. The count had confirmed Nelirikk's theory that the 14th Conquest Corps, in its stretch for glory, had perhaps over-reached itself.
And would soon be overextended more seriously still. Footsteps sounded, loud in the night. Val Con ducked further back into his hiding place. Two sentries tramped by half-a-foot from his nose, eyes straight ahead, long-rifles resting on broad Yxtrang shoulders.
Val Con held his breath, exhaling very softly when finally they were past. His internal clock gave him two hours until the generator shed opened the evening's festivities. Time enough to create conditions productive of even more consternation before he removed to the flitter.
Carefully, using all of his senses, he checked the immediate area for watchers. Finding none, he eased out of the motor pool and melted into the shadows at the edge of the troop-way.
Some minutes later he entered a barracks, ghosting down the cot-lined aisles. He paused here, there and briefly by the soldierly caches of battle gear at the base of each cot—silent, quick and unhesitant.
The luck was in it, that he encountered no wakeful trooper, though he was forced to freeze in place for a time his heightened senses demanded for hours when a long form shifted in its nest, muttering an irritable order to one Granch to have done and fire the damned thing.
The trooper subsided without coming to a sense of his true surroundings, and Val Con ghosted on, out of the barracks and into the night.
The communication center was his last call of the evening. Deliberately so, for anything he might contrive there would need to go forth quickly, and at an increased risk of his capture.
Val Con sank into the thin dark place between a water tank and a metal shed bearing the Yxtrang symbols for "Danger: High Voltage" and assessed the situation.
Communications Central was well lit and very busy, indeed. There were two sentries at the entrance and a constant hubbub of coming and going. Val Con frowned, noting the abundance of officer's markings on the scarified faces of those frequent arrivals and departures.
Something had happened. Something big had happened. He
knew
it.
He sank back in the shadow of the two buildings, watching the crowd come and go. He checked his internal clock. Fifty Standard minutes before the first explosion took the camp by surprise. Not enough time, good sense argued, to listen at Yxtrang doors in the hope of hearing something worthwhile.
And, yet—If the 15th had arrived?
He slid to the very edge of the shadows, held his breath, chose his path across the brightly lit roadway, and waited. His patience was shortly rewarded by the simultaneous arrival of three agitated officers, whose jostling at the door distracted the sentries' attention just long enough for him to dart through the dangerous light and into the shadow behind the flimsy temp structure, where he followed the wires to his goal.
On the sunny eastern patio, Anthora yos'Galan looked up suddenly from her breakfast, and frowned as she scanned the empty lawns.
"Jeeves. . ." she murmured and the hulking robot standing near her chair replied, its voice proclaiming it a male of Terra's educated class:
"Working, Miss Anthora."
"I . . . believe . . . we may have company. Four individuals?"
"One to each compass point," yos'Galan's butler said smoothly. "Shall I deal with it?"
She was silent a moment, biting her lip and considering the patterns of the intruders. Coldness, imbalance, disharmony and ugliness—each so like the other that one nearly became persuaded they thought with one brain. But, no. She had seen the like of these before. The work of the Department of Interior was impossible to mistake, once seen.
"How did they get in?" she asked the robot.
"Accessing perimeter files. I have an anomaly, sixty-three seconds in duration, one-half hour ago. My apologies, Miss Anthora. They came through a particularly resistant section of perimeter. I see that stronger measures are called for, though one dislikes employing coercion."
She turned her head and blinked up at the featureless ball of its "head," momentarily diverted from the threat of potential assassins.
"Coercion? Jeeves, my brothers told me you were a war robot before they reclaimed you to be our butler. Surely you've practiced coercion in the past."
"One may be practiced in an art of survival without necessarily enjoying it," Jeeves commented, moving a pincher arm toward the teapot. "May I warm your cup?"
"Thank you," she said and held it out, silent until the tea was poured and the pot replaced.