There was a loud groan from deep in the ship, as though the Envion were crying out in agony.
“Lieutenant.” It was Galton again. “I wasn’t joking when I used the word rapidly. We’re in real trouble. The hull is coming apart.”
“Please, Lieutenant,” said Tiray. “I’m asking you not to send a distress call, not yet. If I must, I’ll order you not to.”
“Order me?” said Paul. “Under what authority?”
“Under the authority of the Council of Government of Illyr, which requires all Civilian representatives to be offered every courtesy by Military and Consular personnel, up to and including the use of ships, equipment, and any resources deemed necessary for the successful pursuit of a governmental mission. Article 15.21, I believe.”
Paul glanced at Peris.
“He is correct,” said Peris, although he had the decency not to look happy about it.
“But I don’t want to use Article 15.21,” continued Tiray. “So I’m pleading with you, Lieutenant: get us off this ship, hear me out, and then decide upon the best course of action to take. For now, though, I guarantee that if a distress message is sent through the wormhole, the response will not be a rescue.”
Paul ran his fingers through his hair. Okay, so they weren’t dead, but their situation had somehow still managed to worsen. He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t been there to see it.
“All right,” he said. “Galton, how long have we got?”
“Twenty minutes, but I’d be happier if we were gone in fifteen.”
Paul instructed Rizzo and Steven to gather as much food and water and as many medical supplies as they could lay their hands on, and take them to the Nomad ship, while he and Thula returned to the armory. Peris was left to take care of Tiray and Alis.
“We leave in ten,” Paul told them all. “Galton, do what you have to do, then get to that ship.”
“Understood, Lieutenant.”
Paul and Thula headed for the armory, but when they were out of sight of the others, Thula took Paul aside and showed him the pulser that he’d found on the Nomad vessel.
“It’s not locked,” he said. “I used it to kill one of those Nomads, or whatever they were.”
Paul took the pulser from him, set it to its lowest charge, and fired. The blast struck one of the dead bodies on the deck, causing it to shudder slightly.
“Who knows about this?”
“Only Steven, and I told him to say nothing.”
“Help me to gather as many of these weapons as we can from the dead, both pistols and rifles, then find a crate to put them in. We’ll seal the crate, store it with the other ordnance, and hide it in the cargo bay of the Nomad ship. You share this with no one else, you understand? And whatever you do, don’t let Peris see it.”
Paul left Thula to his work. From all of this chaos and bloodshed, something useful had emerged.
They had moved one small step closer to retaliation against the Illyri.
CHAPTER 22
As they often did, Ani and Syl sank into peaceful silence, picking up their books as if they were of the same mind. Syl smiled to herself as she watched her friend frowning over a dense tome entitled The Science of the Mind, Volume 1. The other five in the series were piled next to the sofa, gathering dust mockingly. Ani had never been particularly interested in reading until they’d come to this knowledge-infused place, but her lack of fingertip facts in their first classes had shamed her, particularly as the Gifted were watching—they were always watching—so she’d set herself the task of remedying the gaps in her education, plugging them with as many details as she could.
Syl herself was reading a dated but oddly alluring memoir she’d found forgotten in the largest library in the Twelfth Realm a few days before. It was called The Interplanetary Pioneers. The fat little volume had been crammed behind a pile of hand-tooled, leather-bound books she’d been instructed to alphabetize during her work duties. As with any library, even a repository as rarefied as the Marque suffered from the carelessness of its users, who would yank out volumes in haste and then haphazardly shove them back onto the shelves with scant regard for their order. Syl had pulled the tattered book from its hiding place, shaking her head at the carelessness of whoever had discarded it there. Absently she opened it and flicked to the first page, but soon she was sucked in, lost to those working around her, for it read like an adventure story, though it was in fact a true-life account of the Illyri’s first exploratory missions beyond their homeworld, which were either brave or foolhardy given the clunky, dangerous craft they appeared to have set out in. It was just the sort of thing she was interested in, for surely the organism she’d encountered on Earth, the parasitic dweller in an Illyri skull, was not of this world, was not of her world.
She’d stood there reading until a Sister had clucked at her, nodding meaningfully at the disordered shelves. Reluctantly Syl had set the book to one side, but she’d taken it with her when she was dismissed from her duties, along with some other books about the early explorations. That was one thing that she actually did approve of on the grim old Marque: there was a seemingly unlimited supply of books, even here in the Novice libraries. Knowledge was prized, and the students were encouraged to read even more in their own time.
In this, at least, Syl was happy to oblige.
• • •
After a bit Ani slammed her book closed meaningfully.
“Hungry?” she said.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Should we go get dinner?”
“I’ll meet you there. I just need to take a load to the laundry or I’ll have nothing to wear tomorrow. I’ve already worn this robe twice.”
“Slob. Imagine what Althea would say.”
They both looked toward the tiny kitchen with its sink piled with dirty cups and giggled.
“Maybe one of us had better do that tonight,” said Ani.
“Help yourself,” said Syl.
“Or maybe not,” said Ani. “Anyway. See you there.”
• • •
The laundry room was empty, the silent machinery set neatly into the carved rock. The only other furnishings were a pair of hard stools, and a lone sock lay forgotten and forlorn on the floor. Syl went to the largest machine and was hauling all the pale yellow and white washing from her bag, when there was a clatter on the floor.
Something sharp bounced off her soft slipper.
“What the . . . ?” She cast the pile to one side and looked down. At her feet rested an elegant set of keys, slim and shiny as dropped pins. Baffled, she bent to pick them up. Where had they come from? Clearly from within her dirty washing, but neither she nor Ani had the need for a clutch of keys such as this.
It took her a moment to place them, and then like the proverbial lightning bolt she understood: these were Cale’s keys, the keys she’d been sent to fetch from Elda. The memory drifted back to Syl woozily, a poor copy of reality. Yes, there had been keys, of course there had: Oriel had handed Syl a bunch of keys to return to Cale, and then she’d tried to open Syl’s mind.
And Cale had asked her if she’d found them the next day, while Oriel still lay unconscious in the sickbay, but the entire altercation had had a strange fuzziness to it, soft focus and liquid after the mind dueling, and Syl had not been able to recall any keys. The issue of the keys was just one of the many troubling factors about Elda’s disappearance. From whispers she had overheard, Syl knew that Cale and many of the Sisters believed Elda to be hiding somewhere in the older sections of the Marque. It would not be the first time that a Novice—or, indeed, a more senior Sister—had retreated into its depths, for whatever reason: a fight with another Sister, perhaps, or bullying, or even madness. There was no shortage of hiding places in the old labyrinth. That was one of the reasons secure doors were installed.
So Cale had decided Elda must have taken the
keys with her when she went off—“damned stupid girl”—and that had been the end of it. But now here they were, lying on the floor.
Syl snatched them up, her heart thumping with excitement and fear. She glanced around nervously to make sure nobody had witnessed what happened, her hand tight around the bunch as she slipped them into her pocket, then she leaned back against the wall, taking slow measured breaths to calm herself as she considered what she’d nearly done, the chance she’d nearly lost, for a wash cycle would surely have destroyed the electronic key codes embedded within each pin.
Time and again, Althea had drummed into her the importance of checking her pockets before washing her clothes, but since her governess had gone, she’d fallen out of the habit. Now Syl sank weakly onto the nearest stool and bowed her head, running her fingers through her hair and licking the sweat from her lips. The keys might only open cupboards, but even drawers and cupboards could hold secrets, especially if they were locked.
And secrets were exactly what Syl was looking for.
“My God,” she said in English, just as the human staff at the castle in Edinburgh sometimes did, and she smiled to herself and thought now of Earth. She thought of her father; of his security adviser, Meia, who had proved to be so much more than that; of Althea; and of Paul, always Paul, and everything that had gone wrong and everything she had sworn to do.
And she remembered too the humans fighting in the Resistance, and the earthly gods, the old gods that the Illyri defector Fremd had spoken of, the gods he claimed were part of the soil and the sky and all the natural world. Normally she would have laughed off such superstitions, but right now she felt she had to thank somebody—or something—for she had just been very lucky indeed. She shook her head in wonder, her heart still thumping as she bent to finish loading the laundry, running her hand carefully through all the other pockets first.
While her clothes sloshed around in the laundry room, Syl went to the dining hall. Ani was at a table in the far corner with the nasty little Blue Novice Mila, but Syl wanted to be alone, to think, so she quietly filled a plate then sat by herself as inconspicuously as she could, eating a perfectly palatable stew made from some of the vegetables that were native to Illyr. The food in the Novice dining hall was typically Nairene: nutritious and healthy, but also bland because food was viewed primarily as fuel on the Marque—functional and necessary but nothing more, nothing less—so it tended to look worryingly like two-day-old roadkill. Most mealtimes Syl found herself fantasizing about the most ridiculous things: fries drowning in salt and vinegar, battered sausages from the café off the Royal Mile, a crunchy red apple, tea drunk with a sweet boy in a kitchen, a glass of milk from a cow, just a plain, earthly cow, the very notion of which would have sent the Novices around her into paroxysms of disgust. Again.
“Imagine!” one of them had squealed when Syl had requested milk for her tea when she’d first arrived. “Just imagine drinking juices pumped from the teats of an alien!”
They’d gathered around asking what else Syl and Ani ate on Earth, wide-eyed and all too ready to be revolted as they learned of hamburgers, cheese, sushi, and even haggis. Ani threw the haggis in as a joke, though the pair of them had never even tried the stuff, and it elicited just the reaction she hoped for. She had elbowed Syl, amused.
“What does it taste like?”
“How can you even swallow it?”
“A burger is mashed cow? No!”
“Cheese is fermented cow juices?”
“Milk—gross!”
“What does milk smell like?”
Mila had appeared, and stepped between Syl and Ani, leaning in close and sniffing Syl theatrically.
“Oooh, you smell weird,” she said. “Maybe it’s the milk.”
She was speaking Illyri and her pronunciation of the English milk was completely wrong—she said “mil-ik”—but that didn’t deter the other girls, who gathered around, sniffing Syl and wrinkling their noses. Ani was squeezed out until she stood to one side with Mila, bemused as the sea of yellow robes made an island of her best friend.
“Oh, you do smell curious.”
“Come smell her. It’s odd.”
“Is that what milk smells like then?”
Xaron had appeared at Ani’s other side—startlingly like a stretched version of her stouter younger sister—and had smiled nastily at Syl over the throng of Novice heads, nodding approvingly.
“Yes. She’s smelly all right,” said Mila loudly, glancing at her older sibling for blessing.
“Very smelly,” agreed Xaron.
“No, she isn’t,” protested Ani, “and if she is, then I must be too.”
But the other blue-robed girls silently gathered as well, forming a barrier around Ani, shielding her from the slur. In this, Syl would stand alone.
Unfortunately, the epithet had stuck—Smelly Syl—and it was still occasionally whispered or giggled in her presence even though the faint Earth odors that seemed so strange to the others had long since faded away. This evening it didn’t matter, though, and she didn’t even notice the lazy, unimaginative murmurs of “Smelly” from the others at the table when she plopped herself down at the end, for Syl could feel the treasure that was in her pocket, the clutch of keys that had the potential to open a whole new world of exploration and discovery, featherlight yet weighted with all her hopes. Where would she begin? When? How?
She ate the rest of her food quickly, barely tasting it, then all but skipped to the laundry, hauling her clean clothes from the big machine and bundling the warm, sweet-smelling robes and sheets together messily.
She couldn’t act rashly. She had to think about it, consider her options, make smart decisions. She would begin her search on another day, a better day, and then she’d see how far these keys could get her beyond the Twelfth and Thirteenth Realms. Soon she would tackle the Sisterhood afresh.
CHAPTER 23
It was clear now that the raiders who had arrived through the wormhole were something more than Nomads. Paul and Thula took the time to search the dead in an effort to find any identifying marks or papers, but they came up entirely empty. Like soldiers everywhere, the Illyri had a fondness for adorning their skin, often with details of campaigns or unit names, but the bodies that had fallen aboard the Envion were as devoid of such markings as they had been on the day they were born.
“Here,” said Thula, pointing a finger at a series of tiny scars on the head of one of the dead Illyri. The Nomad was female, her scalp almost entirely shaved except for a tuft of hair at the crown arranged in a kind of ponytail. She had been strong and muscular. It hadn’t saved her from a bullet, though.
“What is it?” asked Paul.
“Laser scarring, I believe. I would bet a lot of money that, until recently, this Illyri had a tattooed scalp.”
Paul examined the marks, and realized that he had passed over similar scars on some of the others.
“They were wiped clean, just in case any of them were caught or killed,” he said.
“Exactly.”
Thula reached into a pack at his feet and drew from it a hand scanner, used to diagnose internal injuries.
“What are you going to do with that?” asked Paul.
“Make another bet with you.”
“Which is?”
“That they’ve all had their Chips removed.”
Thula activated the scanner. He didn’t need to scan all of the dead to win his bet: after three came up negative, Paul conceded. Chips both carried and transmitted essential data about their carriers. They were as individual as fingerprints; there would be little point in erasing all other identifying marks while leaving Chips in place.
“You want to hazard a guess as to who they were?”
“You first,” said Thula. “You’re the officer.”
“Forces of the Diplomatic Corps, not the Military. It’s har
d to get soldiers to turn on their own.”
“But we’re not Illyri Military. We’re Brigade troops—human cannon fodder.”
“Even so, the Envion was a Military vessel, with Military crew.”
“Okay, accepted,” said Thula. “I’ll see your Corps, though, and raise you Securitats.”
“Explain.”
“A feeling, and no more than that. But the Corps always uses Securitats for its dirty work. If it’s torture, deception, murder, it will have Securitat prints on it somewhere.”
“Okay, then: Securitats, but not their A-team. We took them too easily.”
“They weren’t expecting to have to deal with the Military, human or otherwise,” said Thula. “They were just hunting a politician. You don’t need hardened fighters to kill politicians. And they were working without Chips. After years of relying on their input, they were probably a little rusty.”
It made sense, but then most things Thula said made sense.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to be the lieutenant around here?” asked Paul.
“It’s above my pay grade. Also, I like to be in a position to blame someone else when things go to hell.”
“So you’re just a grunt?”
“That’s me.”
The Envion groaned again, but this time there was also a grinding sound from deep in its bowels as metal began to separate from metal. The ship was in its death throes.
“Well, grunt, get those unlocked pulse weapons stored away before we both end up floating home.”
Thula piled the crate of pulsers onto a transport platform, along with the other guns, grenades, and ammunition gathered by Paul, and directed it toward the Nomad ship. Paul took one last look at the dead Illyri, all of them now stripped of their blast masks and a good deal of their clothing. If they were Securitats, there was no telling what kind of vengeance their superiors might try to visit on those responsible for their deaths, justified or not. Paul was now glad that he had listened to Councillor Tiray, and had refrained from sending a distress message through the wormhole. He could only hope that the two Nomad ships had not managed to send back any messages of their own.