Shadow of the Warmaster

9

“Ondar.” A hissing whisper. The Hanifa sprang to her feet as the tall one leaned in the door. “The fuzzy says he hears lots of men coming toward us and he’s going to see about slowing them up, but you should be ready to move.”

I sat where I was, wondering what the Hanifa would do about this. I thought it’d likely be something with flair, she was that kind of leader.

She moved quickly to Adelaar. “Where are you?”

“Covering my tracks.”

“How much longer?”

“Five minutes before I can leave the Brain on its own to finish the job.”

“How much of it can we destroy without negating what you’ve done?”

“Worried about them wondering what you’ve been doing? Don’t. I’ve laid in clues that will tell them you pulled the suspect files; that gives you a reason enough for being here so they won’t look all that hard in other directions. They won’t find the loops, not without some rather esoteric, well, call it logic. Even I’d have trouble undoing what I’ve done.”

The Hanifa examined Adelaar, then me, her jawline hard through the silky knit of the cowl. “Do you need backup to get you out of here?”

“No. Do you?”

“No.” She hesitated. “In case I’m not able to meet you, someone else will be there. Hordar for sure, could be a man or a woman. He or she’ll say…” She looked around, remembering suddenly that there might be ears tuned to this place that hadn’t been there before.

“Don’t bother yourself about snoops. Can’t happen. Del has blocked access to the interface.”

“I hear. Still, um… he or she will show you this.” She jerked up the shoulder drape on her cowl, pulled a medallion on a chain from under her black shirt. She let me look at both sides, then tucked it away again. It was an oval of dark bronze, with an odd bumpy pod on one side and a complicated double glyph on the other. Nice piece. “We’re going to leave,” she said. “Before we’re trapped in here.” She swung back to Adelaar. “What about the scanners?”

“They’re down again, I sent an oversurge through. When they try to fix them, the techs will find I’ve cut them off completely from the mainBrain. The Sech won’t be able to get them functioning again until he regains control of the interface.” Adelaar was looking smugly pleased with herself and so she should, but there was a condescension in her voice which the Hanifa wasn’t appreciating. “If your transport can’t reach you before they get organized up top, you might head for the lakeside wall, either go over it or cut through one of the gates there. Don’t worry about alarms. The melters? The west ^.wall is off the firing circuits for the next two hours. I’ve set up some snares the techs will find, um, interesting. Avoiding them will cost time. If you can reach your pilot, let her know that.” She paused and the Hanifa started to turn away. “One moment more. After you get loose from here, you’ve got a free run for a while. I’ve fiddled something else, blocked all contact with the Warmaster. I can’t shut her out permanently, there are too many possibilities for reinstating the link. As soon as the Sech reaches her, he’ll have her scanners looking for you. Be careful they don’t get a focus on you, they’ll fry you. Once they get a lock, they can track a flea on a dog’s back even if the man operating them has less brain than that flea. It’s not quite as bad as it sounds, when the power is ratcheted that high, the field is very narrow, so if you can get under cover before they do the first coarse scan, you should be safe enough. Questions? No? That’s it, then. Luck kiss you sweet, eh?”

“God’s blessings, Akilla yabass.”

I’ll give our Hanifa this, she wasn’t stingy with her gratitude; she didn’t even seem to be swallowing hard when she called our Adelaar a welcome stranger and wisewoman.

“Nada.” Adelaar went back to work. With a small army about to land on us, she wasn’t wasting more time on chat.

The Hanifa rounded up her women with an imperious sweep of her arm and took them outside. I unlimbered the launchtube, fed it a clip and followed her.

One of the raiders was more squarely built than the others, with broad shoulders and heavy arms; she’d been lugging around a powerful crossbow which I’d wondered about, it seemed a clumsy thing on a jaunt like this. Now she loaded it with a four-point grapple and aimed it upward at one of the windows. Our Hanifa was a lady with flair, no scrambling through ratholes for her. The woman loosed the bolt and it rose through a graceful arc, going up and up, four levels up, until it crashed through the glass and looped down outside, carrying a thin, knotted rope with it. A hard tug set the hooks, two of the raiders went at the rope like it led to the promised land and started swarming up it. The shooter slapped a second ropebolt in the slot, hit the next window over, slapped in a third, put it through the third window, whap, whap, whap, steady as a metronome. She thrust her arm through the bow’s carrystrap and ran at the last rope. The Hanifa sketched a salute in my direction. “I’ll leave this one for you.” She started climbing.

Pels came scooting down the ramp, back in hull^. mode, little more than a ripple across the stone. “On my tail,” he yelled, his whoop filling the chamber with echoes. He’d been rambling around that maze interfering with the arrangements of the guardforce and he’d won us the extra few minutes that let the women get a good start up the ropes.

I put a couple of darts into the tunnel opening and blew down enough rubble to close it off. I started plinking the other exits, one by one, blowing out their sides and ceiling; things got touchy after I’d done five of them, the roof started groaning and shifting, it was an open question whether it’d come down on us before I finished sealing off the inlets. There was a lot of yelling and cursing coming through the noise of the falling stone and someone in one of the tunnels managed to get off some heatseeker missiles, but Pels knocked those down before they got anywhere.

Adelaar came out. “Peculiar, Quale, I didn’t believe it till I ran it twice, the Warmaster’s mainBrain is slaved to this one. I set a passive tap, one I can juice from the tug, tell you later.” She eyed the billowy pouf of dust with disfavor. “How do we get out of here?”

“The Hanifa left us a rope.” I pointed to it and swallowed a grin. She’d opted out of some of the last-phase planning, too impatient to sit through another bullshit session, so she didn’t know the emergency bolt hole we’d come up with.

“How nice. I’m supposed to go up that thing with this load?”

“Nope, we’re taking Pittipat’s private route. Pels?”

“All clear, just dust and cobwebs. All praise to paranoia.” Pels came from behind the throne, grinning and brushing at his ruffled not-fur.

The hole was a stupid breach in security; when we saw it the first time, we thought it had to be some kind of subtle trap. Kumari flaked that part of the EYEfeed and went over it cell, by cell, tracing out every branch. All she found was dust and dark.

Pels tripped the lock on the panel, circled around us and led us up a wormhole that was barely wide enough to clear our elbows and so low I was almost bent in half. It split and split again, but the direction sense he was born with and the practice he got as a scruffy cub scatting about his native subterras kept him on course. You couldn’t lose him anywhere underground.

We fetched up at the theater close to where we started, emerging through the back wall of the Imperatorial box. The tiers of seats were groaning and shivering as they would at the tail end of an earthquake and the flags in the well shifted under our feet, but the theater wasn’t going to collapse; there was a lot of hoohaw in the gardens outside it, parachute flares bursting over us, spotlights stabbing through fog that was even thicker than it’d been when we came in, yowling cats and howling men rushing about, god knows what they thought they were doing. Nothing much in here with us, just one guard and his brace of cats. He tried potting me, but I suppose I wasn’t much more than a moving blot, because he didn’t come close; that’s the problem with pellet guns, when you miss you miss completely.

I got him with the stunner and Pels took care of the cats. We swung onto the stage. I was worried about the miniskips, briefly afraid the cats had sniffed them out, but they were where we left them, the only problem was they were slimy with condensation. We strapped ourselves onto the belly pads and took off for the canyon.

I was tired enough to sleep a week and I suspected the others were about the same, though Adelaar would never admit it and Pels hid everything under his fur. On second thought, maybe he was just getting unlimbered and was sorry the fight was over, it wasn’t often he had a workout that used him up. Not that this skirmish had. We were going to lay up at the canyon for a few days, let things cool down and the Warmaster go back to sleep before we left for base. I spent a minute or so thinking about the Hanifa and several more minutes savoring the memories I had of rosepearls and the taste of all that lovely gratitude that was going to grease the way when I came back to open this market. The rest of the trip I drowsed, letting the miniskip fly herself.

10. In Windskimmer/slipping away from the swirling swarm of hornets at the imperatorial Palace/over Lake Golga/storm breaking about them.

The airship plunged south through what felt like the heart of the storm, though it wasn’t quite. Everything Karrel Goza knew about flying said get out of there, but he stayed over the, lake in spite of the danger so he could minimize the chance someone would hear the motors and talk about it. From what he saw when he dipped to the jetty and dropped the ladders for Elmas and the others, there was going to be trouble for anyone the Grand Sech found someplace they had no business being. He didn’t want to drag a trail to Inci.

Lightning crackled around them.

He’d had the cuuxtwok on this far, afraid the techs would get the Palace scanners working again, but there’d been no pulse wigglers slipping along its surface so they hadn’t done it yet; he shut the field off, he didn’t know its properties, but he thought it might attract a strike. Windskimmer didn’t have sufficient lift to rise clear of the storm; she was taking enough of a beating without the threat of being crisped by lightning.

Turbulent aircurrents battered at them; even worse, there were sudden pockets that dropped them into sheeted rain which pounded on them and drove them toward the icy water invisible below them.

Karrel Gaza’s body was battered and bruised from the restraining straps; he’d jammed his fingers repeatedly as he fought to keep Skimmer upright; one nail had a deep tear. The panel in front of him jerked and vibrated, impossible to read anything on it, he was working from feel and memory, blessing the Prophet’s benevolence for giving him so much flying time in this airship that he knew her like he knew his own body. Dimly he was aware of the isyas squealing as they were flung from side to side; even when they tried to hang onto the weatherstraps, the yawing lurches sent them rolling into each other. Elmas Ofka was cursing in spasms as she tried to get control of her chair; from the corner of his eye he saw enough to realize the brake had snapped and the chair was wobbling and swinging erratically; it could come loose and do someone serious injury if he couldn’t get this lumbering yunk to climb higher.

All things end.

Two hours later the airship beat through the fringes of the storm and settled into a steady drone. Karrel Goza clicked on the autopilot and went limp with relief. He turned his head.

A trickle of blood at the corner of her mouth, Elmas Ofka was struggling to sit up. Holding the chair steady with her shoulder, Harli Tanggаr crouched beside her working at the jammed clamps on the restrainers.

Lirrit Ofka came and leaned on the back of his chair, her breath warm against his ear. “There were times…”

“There were.” He clicked off the straps, began sucking at his torn finger. He watched Harli wipe Elmas Ofka’s face and tip some visk into her mouth from a pouchflask. He tilted his head back, smiled up at Lirrit. “You got one of those?”

She laughed and passed him her flask.

The thick, sour drink ran down his throat and warmed some of the soreness and fatigue from his aching body. He snapped the lid down on the leather covered bottle and returned it to her. “What happened back there?”

“You remember those things that went past us?”

“Aliens?”

“Outside aliens. Where the slave ships come from.”

“Uh.”

“They were after the mainBrain too. One of them lost her daughter, she’s here to get her back.”

“You talked to them?”

“Talked and talked. There was time for it.”

She was almost glowing she was so excited, she was teasing him with it, making him ask. He caught one of her hands, put her finger in his mouth and bit down on it. She giggled, and pulled his hair.

“So tell me,” he said.

“We are going to take the Warmaster. We are, are, are.”

“How?”

“Elli did it. She hired them. Rosepearls, Kar. They’ve got a ship, they’ll ferry us up and get us in.” She pressed her forefinger against his cheek. “One’s a man, big man, if I danced with him I’d bang my nose on his beltbuckle. He did the bargaining.” Middle finger. “There’s the woman; she plays tunes on that Brain like Jirsy does on her shal.” Her breath tickled his ear as she laughed in little soundless gasps. “She doesn’t know it, Elli didn’t tell her, but her daughter’s living at the mines. You’ve met her, the one called Aslan. The teacher. We’re keeping her as a kind of hostage, Elli doesn’t trust them much.” Third finger. “There’s the cutest little furry being.” She reached over his shoulder and flattened her hand on his stomach, below the spring of his ribs. He’d come about here on you.” She brought the hand back to his shoulder, began kneading the hard tense muscles there. “You ought to see him, Kar. Big brown eyes, the softest sweetest fur, makes you want to pick him up and cuddle him.” Her hands stilled for a moment. “Except it isn’t really fur. When he wants, it changes color… and everything, so you just can’t see him. He went across a floor like he was part of it and whap! the guard was down and out, didn’t see a thing.”

“Doesn’t sound very cuddly.”

“They’re going to meet us on Gerbek Island nine days on, you can see what I mean then.”

He grunted, saw Elmas Ofka watching them. “You don’t trust them.”

“It’s not ^.a question of trust. Greed, young Kar.” Her mouth moved into a twisted grin. “Greed. We’ll give them enough this time to make them hungry for more. They won’t, be so apt to cut us down if they plan on coming back. And there’s always the daughter.” She frowned. “We’re not lost anymore, Kar.” She sounded troubled and uncertain, not at all the Dalliss Elmas Ofka who walked in power, unfettered and formidable. “That man and his crew are just the first wave. There’s going to be a lot more like him before we’re dead and gone/born and back. I don’t know how anything’s going to turn out any more. I used to know.” She closed her eyes, started to lean back but changed her mind when the chair started to wobble. “Atch! Even this.” She slapped at the chair arm. “Everything’s bound to change. Tidal wave of change. How am I going to ride it, Kar? How are any of us going to keep from being drowned in it?”

He stared at the knotty darkness rushing past outside. Not lost any longer. People knowing about us. Outsiders coming here. Changing us. Changing everything. It was like standing naked on the Speaker’s Minaret with a mob muttering in the Circle below. He shivered, then winced as his bruises stung him. Lirrit Ofka muttered something he didn’t catch, her hands were warm on his shoulders, working more of the tension out of him. “Was Lirrit right? Are they going to ferry us to the Warmaster?”

“Yes.”

“So, what do we do when we get there?”

“What do you think?”

“Take it, I suppose. Somehow.”

“According to the Brain there’s only a handful of techs, a few Huvveds to run things and a squad of Noses to keep them all honest. The rest are support. Two hundred, counting whores.”

“Take a big hand to close round two hundred.”

“Shifts, Kar. Like the retting shed where you’re working now. One third on duty, one third playing, one third sleeping. None of them expecting trouble. A score of us could take her. I could lay my hands on twice that many in less than a week.”

He nodded. “I know. Them at the mine, Jamber Fausse’s raiders, the Dalliss web. Give you two weeks and you’d have a hundred or more. Thing is…” he smoothed his thumb over and over the torn nail, “who can you trust once they’re up there?” He scowled at her. “And what are we going to do with that horror once we’ve got it?”

“I know.” She sighed, shook her head. “If it weren’t so pathetic, it’d be funny. We can’t kick Pittipat out if we don’t take the ship. So we have to take the ship. But we can’t operate her and we can’t trust anyone who can operate her because they’d take her away from us and we’d be worse off than we are now. And we can’t stay put and hold her because we don’t know how to work the defenses so any rockbrain bitbit who’s been up there and knows how to push a button could take her from us. And we can’t tell the aliens thanks but some other time when we know what we’re doing because the next clutch of visitors might be types that’d make a Huvved Torturegeek look like a nursery nana.”

Karrel Goza leaned into Lirrit’s hands, comforted by her strong fingers. “We’ve talked a lot about taking the ship, but whoever expected us to do it?” After a moment’s heavy silence, he said, “What about N’Ceegh? From what I saw, all he wants is to get back to his workshop.”

“He does now, but what would happen if he had all that power in his hands? That changes everything, Kar. Tell you true, I wouldn’t trust me with that ship if I knew how to work her. Would you? Trust yourself, I mean?”

He didn’t try answering her; he didn’t have to. “If there was some way we could get rid of her…”

“We’ve got a month to think of something, the man said he wouldn’t take us up until he finished collecting the folk he’s come for. Kar…”

“Yeh?”

“Don’t tell anyone about this. Not yet.”

“Geres Duvvar and some of my cousins know about the raid. If I don’t give them something, it’ll be worse than kicking over a karints nest; we’ll have them swarming about us trying to find out what happened.”

“Mm.” She stared past him, fingertips tracing a merm scar. “Tell them this, the female alien pulled all the suspect files from the mainBrain, then she wiped them out of Memory so whatever the Grand Sech doesn’t have as hard copy is gone. She’s printing the files for us so we’ll know how much he knows and what he suspects. And she’s set up some safe corridors into the Palace, we’ll be getting the stats for those and passing them on to whoever’s interested. That ought to satisfy anyone who cares to ask. What time is it? The board clock has quit on us.” She frowned. “And where are we?”

“We’ve got around an hour till dawn. The storm slowed us a lot, we haven’t reached North Bayshore yet.”

“We can’t make the mines before sunup?”

“No way. We’ll have to find someplace to lay up. Unless you want to risk day flying.”

“Too dangerous. If we ran straight east for an hour, where’d we come out?”

“Can’t go straight east. Skimmer can’t go head on against the wind out there, it’s blowing a gale still.” He tapped the glass over the fuel readout. “Look at this. Even beating to the southeast, we’ll be running on fumes in the emergency tank before we have land under us. We’ll have to leave her anchored somewhere until we can pack in fuel. Why not let the wind take us to the west shore?”

“That’s Daz Musved, the Fehdaz there has a strangle hold on his people. I don’t dare show my face anywhere around. Remember the price on my head? Besides, the land is too open close to the coast, we couldn’t hide Skimmer and hope to get her back. And we need her.”

“What’s all this about hiding her? Why can’t we just find a spot where people don’t go and anchor her?”

“Because once the Grand Sech strips the blocks the woman set in the Brain, he’ll order the Warmaster to scan the country around Gilisim. She warned me that would happen, that we’d better go to ground as soon as we could. If we can tuck her out of sight, there won’t be anything for the scanners to see. That reminds me, they’ll probably rake through places like the mine. Jirsy.”

“Um?”

“You’ve got kin round the north end of the Bay, haven’t you? In Daz Kanath?”

“I’ve got some Peltic-Indiz cousins living at Kuntepe Cove. You know where that is, Kar?”

“Close to where the Incis drop down to the sea, isn’t it? I took a girl there for a daysail the week before I was adulted. I think it was Kuntepe.”

“Right. Why, Elli?”

“I want you to get to a com where you can send a warning to Ansla Civa at the mine so she can spread the news to keep their heads down. Can you do that?”

“Sure. Kar, put me down near the point, I’ll walk round to the House. They’ll take me in and ask no questions.” She was a tiny thing with a face like a sealpup, and when she grinned her eyes almost disappeared. “They’ve been stilling teshfire on the sly since Settletimes and no Fehdaz or any of his Noses has ever caught them at it or anything else they feel like doing and no stinking bitbit’s about to do that now.”

“Good. Will your cousins help you get back to gul Inci?”

“Oh yes, one of these days I’m probably going to marry Imro Peltic. And even if that wasn’t so, none of them down to little Emin who’s just starting to talk would say anything to any outsiders, Huvved or Hordar doesn’t matter.”

“Well, tell them what you have to, Jir, and warn them to keep close to home. If you can avoid it, nothing about the Warmaster.”

“Elli, no no. It’s true this time, what they don’t know won’t hurt them. Telling them that could hurt a lot.”

“I see.” Elmas Ofka fell silent for a moment, tracing over and over the merm scars on her arm; she was thinking hard. “Kar, you said hide hunting?”

“Derrigee Bol’s paying two to five alvs for erkelte hides. When I messed up my hand, Goza Ommar said go and don’t come back till you’ve walked the maggos out of your belly; if I could bring back a hide or two, that’d be froth on the beer, but she didn’t expect it. I could stay out another week, no problem.”

“Good. It’ll take at least that long to get Skimmer refueled and flown home.” Her mouth twitched into a half-smile. “Maybe you’ll come across an erkelte and get your hide while we’re walking to the mine.” She looked down at her hands. “We’ll have to expel the ballonets and let the wind carry them off, collapse the bag so we can get it and the gondola under cover. Kar, if you can nurse her that far, take her up the K’tep. The closer we hide her to a waterway, the easier it’ll be to resupply her.”

“Depends on the wind. And a favor from the Prophet wouldn’t hurt.”

“Do the best you can.”

“Don’t I always? Find another place to sit before I swing round. This could get rough.” He reached for the restrainers, clicked the catches shut, wincing as the straps pressed against his bruises. He waited until Lirrit and Elmas were settled, then he began easing the nose around, heading toward the northeast bend of the Bay and the Inci Hills.