The Orpheus Machine

Chapter 13

Ruiz heard Gejas with a certain relief; at least the tongue wasn’t sneaking up behind him. Nisa turned her masked face toward him. He shook his head and made another shushing gesture. He examined his alternatives, found them discouragingly few. He sighed and made ready. He rolled closer to Nisa and disengaged the latches on her helmet, creating a gap between helmet and seal just wide enough to admit the muzzle of the splinter gun.

“You’re dying, but you’re not dead yet; maybe your tongue still values your stringy carcass,” Ruiz said roughly. He hoped that Nisa would understand without any more explicit hint, and that Gejas, if he was still listening, would be further alarmed.

He shifted the transceiver from his boot to the back of Nisa’s helmet, where he could use it without being seen by the tongue.

“Let’s get up,” he said, lifting her, his arm around her waist. As they rose above the grass, he jammed the splinter gun into the opening in her armor and swiveled her so that she shielded Ruiz from the tongue.

She played her part beautifully, hanging from his arm as if barely conscious, unable to hold herself up — though actually she was supporting a good bit of her own weight.

“What would” you like to talk about, Gejas?” Ruiz shouted in a cheerful brassy voice.

“Look!” said Corean, gazing into the screen, full of amazed delight. “He’s somehow captured the hetman. What a dire creature he is! See, his luck assists us now. Surely whatever treachery they planned for us has been disrupted.”

Marmo seemed skeptical, though he watched with almost as much interest as she did. “Perhaps,” he said. “Though things aren’t always what they seem.”

Gejas felt an ambiguous exultation — The Yellowleaf lived. But how could he free her from the mad slayer? It was clear Ruiz Aw was capable of anything.

To gain time, he shouted, “You don’t know what you’re doing. If you release The Yellowleaf and throw down your weapons, I can promise you an easy death. If not, you’ll live in Hell forever. Once a year, on the High Day, we’ll take you out and let you scream, as a lesson to those who would obstruct Roderigo.”

The madman laughed, a trembling breathless sound. “You paint a vivid picture, tongue. But I’ve got my own ticket to oblivion, right here in my hand. After I turn the hetman’s head to slush, I’ll do the same for myself.”

“We’ll torment your clones, then!”

“You do that, tongue! I’d expect no less from Roderigo. But I’m a man without imagination, so the thought holds no terror for me.”

Gejas felt the truth of it. He bit his lip. “What will you accept in exchange for The Yellowleaf’s life?”

“I don’t know that you possess anything I want more than her death,” said the slayer cheerfully.

“There must be something!” Gejas shrieked, panic clouding his vision.

A silence ensued. Gejas couldn’t really see the madman’s expression in the darkness of the ridge, but he sensed that the man was considering, and hope flared.

“Well,” said Ruiz Aw. “I’d still like to bid Sook farewell — though the idea seems no more than a dim fantasy…. Let’s see. I seem to hold the whip hand. So, cast away your ruptor.”

“How can I do that? You’d just kill me,” Gejas responded.

“No! Tell your man at the weapons arch to blow us all to bits, if I do that.”

Gejas considered. Somewhere there was a flaw in the plan — perhaps the madman just wanted to be sure he could kill both hetman and tongue. But what other choice did he have? He could almost feel the madman’s anger, a black pressure pulsing in the night. At any instant, he might decide to finish murdering The Yellowleaf, or she might succumb to the injuries he had already inflicted on her.

“All right,” Gejas said. “Give me a moment.” He bent over his communicator. “Irsunt. The Yellowleaf has been taken hostage, and I must disarm myself to get close to her. Before I can attempt her rescue. Direct all your weapons at the crazy slayer. If he attacks me, destroy him instantly. If he removes his weapon from The Yellowleaf’s neck, pinbeam him instantly.”

Then he stood up and moved away from his cover behind the boulder.

“Throw the ruptor away,” said his opponent. Now Ruiz Aw sounded just a little less mad, a little colder. More in control.

Gejas took the ruptor by the barrel and smashed the mechanism across the boulder before he cast it out upon the sand.

“Now what?” he asked, folding his hands on top of his head. He half-expected to be cut in half. “What do we do next?”

Ruiz was pleasantly surprised when the tongue stepped into the clear and destroyed his ruptor. Probably the tongue had other weapons hidden about him, but the Roderigan seemed remarkably biddable. Perhaps Ruiz had underestimated the tongue’s loyalty to his hetman.

He sighed. He counted the guards at the weapons arch; all of the remaining Roderigans were there, apparently trusting to the armament of the arch and the cover of the landwalkers.

Now he came to the part of his plan where he must rely on a little luck — though surely it was reasonable to assume that anyone who dealt with Roderigo would be untrusting, would come to the meeting armed to the teeth. He must hope so, and hope that the transport was indeed not Roderigan. He keyed in his transceiver code and waited for the transport to answer.

The transceiver burped, and the thin sexless voice emerged. “Yes? Shall we send an autoboat to the beach now?”

“No,” whispered Ruiz Aw. “No, the Roderigans plan a betrayal. They boast of how their fleet will be augmented by your craft, and their stockyards by your crew. If you wish to thwart them, I’ve arranged that their weapons currently bear inland. Destroy the arch, now!”

As he spoke, he shoved Nisa ahead of him, down the path toward the waiting tongue.

Corean leaned over her screens, concentration furrowing her brow. “What do you think, Marmo?”

The cyborg watched Ruiz Aw march the captured hetman toward the beach. “I don’t know. The arch is focused inland; that much is true. But I still fear his luck — and his guile.”

“Yes,” said Corean slowly. “But do you not also fear Roderigo’s treachery?”

The old pirate sighed and turned away. “Of course, of course. Treachery is only another name for Roderigo, and from the beginning of this mad adventure I warned they would never deal fairly with you.”

“Then I suppose we must do as he bids us.” Corean felt a sense of dislocation at that unpalatable thought. It seemed so strange, so uncanny, that Ruiz Aw had again found a way to compel her.

But she unlocked her fire control board and armed her weapons.

“Let’s go up,” she said.

Out on the sea, the light had strengthened enough that Ruiz saw the boil of white foam when the submarine broke the surface.

It was still too dark to see the vessel clearly, but there was some disturbing familiarity to its ominous shape — though it was not the Roderigan sub that had put them ashore on Dorn.

He had time only for a flash of uneasiness before the submarine’s big grasers fired.

Gejas whipped his head around, mouth dropping open. He stood frozen as the weapons arch and the remaining guards were consumed in orange glare. Ruiz wrenched the splinter gun out of the crack between Nisa’s helmet and collar.

For a crucial instant the front sight caught on the collar and the gun refused to come free.

Gejas recovered and dove for the cover of the big boulder, just as Ruiz finally cleared his weapon and snapped off a burst. The spinning wires struck sparks from the boulder and flung the Roderigan’s legs backward, but Ruiz couldn’t be sure he had wounded the tongue seriously, and now Gejas was hidden behind the boulder.

Ruiz pushed Nisa flat and hid behind her armored body; Gejas might have another weapon ready.

He felt a deep sense of regret. He had probably failed to kill the tongue. How could he have been so inept?

He listened. He could hear nothing but the crackle of flames and the groan of tortured metal.

Indecision plagued him. Should he go after the tongue? Or should he wait for the man’s wounds to weaken him? Apparently the transport was not Roderigan, but could he now trust them to do their part? Might they not think it safer to burn all the witnesses? They had breached their contract with Roderigo, a very dangerous thing. He risked a peek above the beach grass. The three surviving prisoners still huddled by the water’s edge, apparently unharmed — perhaps a good sign.

He reached up and refastened Nisa’s helmet as best he could, so that she would have whatever protection it still offered. “Listen,” he whispered. “We have to act soon, before the Roderigans send reinforcements. But I’m not sure I got Gejas.”

“You seem to miss quite often,” she said dryly.

“It does seem that way, doesn’t it? I blame it on the superhuman agility of my enemies.” Ruiz smiled at her and imagined that she was smiling back.

He keyed the communicator again and said, “Send the autoboat. I’m coming down to the beach with a valuable Roderigan prisoner. One of the Roderigan landing party may have survived — destroy him if he shows himself.”

“As you say,” the neutral voice agreed.

Gejas stared at the burning ruins of the camp, shocked. He couldn’t imagine what had gone so terribly wrong. He turned his gaze to the black submarine that now lay just outside the surf line. How could such a potent vessel belong to the slaver Corean? Inexplicable, he thought.

A wave of dizziness broke over him and drew his attention back to his wounds. He peeled back the tattered fabric over his right thigh and saw the pulsing of arterial blood.

He clutched at the medical limpet in indecision. He had intended the limpet for The Yellowleaf — but if he didn’t use it in the next few seconds, he’d pass out and then die. And who would help The Yellowleaf if he were dead? He peeled the limpet’s wrapper off and set it over the wound. He set its parameters to preclude anesthesia or sedation, and activated it. Instantly its probes slid into the ragged flesh and pinched off the artery.

He inventoried his weapons: a knife, a couple of stun grenades, a short-range one-shot pinbeam, a carbon-fiber cestus, a chemical interrogation kit. He cursed his improvidence. How, injured and with such pitiful armament, could he hope to best a man as deadly as Ruiz Aw?

He was barely clinging to consciousness. It occurred to him that he’d better hide or Ruiz Aw would find him helpless as a rabbit. He gritted his teeth and squirmed off through the boulders, careful not to expose himself to the sub’s eyes.

He eventually found a place beneath a tumble of eroded concrete, from which he could watch the beach. He lay there, trembling on the edge of a blackout, wondering what new disaster would assail him.

A sponson on the sub’s armored flank lifted up to reveal a small automated longboat. The longboat sped toward the beach, bursting through the surf in a high plume of spray and then grounding on a bar a few meters off the sand.

Gejas saw Ruiz Aw and The Yellowleaf running across the beach toward the other prisoners.

Then he saw how he had been deceived. The black-haired primitive woman wore the hetman’s armor; she ran at an awkward shuffling pace, completely unlike the easy predatory lope of The Yellowleaf. Apparently the armor fit her poorly.

The Yellowleaf was dead — how else could the locator beacon have been extracted from her brain? That was his last desolate thought before darkness came down to cover him.

Ruiz felt NAKED. As they ran, he tried to keep Nisa between his unprotected body and the boulders Gejas had taken refuge in. Her armor might turn away the tongue’s fire; if not, Nisa wouldn’t long survive Ruiz’s death.

But nothing happened. They reached the others, and Ruiz shouted, “Into the boat, everyone!”

Molnekh and Dolmaero gaped at him, bewildered by the apparition of The Yellowleaf trotting obediently at Ruiz’s side, but Gunderd jumped up and began wading out toward the autoboat.

“Come on,” Ruiz urged, and, taking Nisa’s arm, splashed through the knee-deep water.

The others finally began moving, just as Gunderd pulled himself over the gunwale. The scholar turned and held out a hand to help Nisa aboard, and Ruiz boosted her in unceremoniously.

Dolmaero was a little harder to hoist, but between them, Ruiz and Gunderd managed. The instant Molnekh and Ruiz clambered aboard and settled on the metal benches, the longboat shuddered and backed off the bar with a grating sound.

“Where are we going?” Dolmaero asked.

“I don’t know,” said Ruiz. “But it’s almost certain to be better than Roderigo.”

Gunderd rubbed his chin in a now-familiar gesture. He looked over his shoulder at the grim shape of the sub. “On any other world but Sook, I would have to agree with you, Ruiz Aw.”

Ruiz shrugged. “What else can we do? Even if we’re giving ourselves to some ordinary slaver, it’s still an improvement over Roderigo.” He saw that Nisa was struggling with the latches of her helmet and he laid his splinter gun aside to help her.

She pulled the helmet off with a gusty sigh of relief. “It stank in there,” she said.

The neutral voice came from a grill built into the forward bulkhead. “Welcome.” It sounded slightly less anonymous, as though the unseen speaker had cut back the filtering. Perhaps, Ruiz thought, a person who knew the speaker well might guess his identity. “We’ll have to get you aboard as quickly as possible; the Roderigans got off a distress call before I destroyed their comm unit. Their vessel is just over the horizon, coming fast.”

The speaker seemed businesslike and unthreatening, but Ruiz felt the anxiety in his stomach twist a few turns tighter. He detected a tantalizing familiarity in the disguised voice.

They were halfway to the sub, moving rapidly. Ruiz put his hand down for his gun and it wasn’t there.

He looked up slowly. Molnekh, two benches forward, held the splinter gun in a steady hand. The cruciform eye of the muzzle watched Ruiz, unwavering. Molnekh wore an odd smile on his cadaverous face, an expression compounded of happy achievement, faint embarrassment, and caution.

Dolmaero shook his head in bewilderment. “Molnekh? What are you doing?”

“My work, as is proper,” said the voice from the grill.

Molnekh nodded contentedly, but his attention never left Ruiz.

Ruiz finally recognized the voice. “It’s Corean,” he said. “It’s Corean on the sub.” Shock made him breathless. How had he been so easily translated from the uncertain reality of the desolate island, into this familiar nightmare? His thoughts slowed, seemed to linger over irrelevancies.

“Molnekh?” asked Dolmaero.

“Molnekh belongs to Corean now,” Ruiz said to Dolmaero in a faint voice. “The Gencha remade him.”

Dolmaero put his hand to his mouth and regarded Molnekh with an expression of fascinated loathing.

Ruiz glanced at Nisa and saw that she was very pale. Her mouth was a taut line, her eyes huge. He felt a sort of abstract relief that she was still herself, still human — and at the same time a great regret. That they should have struggled so, across the hostile face of Sook, only to return to Corean… it seemed a sad dreadful futility. For a few heartbeats, he lost all will to resist.

Gunderd, who sat just forward of Ruiz, looked at Molnekh, and his face showed nothing but a sort of bland curiosity. Always the scholar, Ruiz thought, with a touch of bitterness.

The boat was no more than fifty meters from the sub, and slowing to come alongside, when a pneumatic hiss sounded across the water. The sponson armor lifted to reveal the old cyborged pirate, Marmo. Marmo waved his ruptor in an oddly comradely manner.

Ruiz almost waved back.

Gunderd turned to Ruiz, so that Molnekh couldn’t see his face. The scholar smiled and winked, to Ruiz’s puzzlement.

Gunderd looked forward and pointed. He spoke in a voice brimming with pleasurable discovery. “So that’s the beautiful Corean!”

Molnekh turned to look, as if compelled.

Ruiz went over the side.

As he plunged down in a thrash of bubbles, he heard the thrumming sound of the splinter gun.

Nisa closed her eyes as parts of Gunderd’s left arm spattered her and a few splinters ricocheted from her armored torso.

Gunderd screamed, a dreadful throat-tearing sound — but a moment later he was drowned out by the giant amplified voice of Corean. “You idiot!” she roared. “Oh, you worthless dirtworld moron.”

Nisa slowly opened her eyes, afraid of what she might see. It was bad enough. Gunderd, white with shock, clutched at the stump of his arm, trying to stop the blood that spouted from it.

But Ruiz was gone. When she started to lean toward the gunwale that he had rolled over, to see if there was any blood in the water, Molnekh jerked his gun toward her. His eyes weren’t human, not at all. Apparently he had taken his owner’s criticism to heart. “Sit still,” he hissed.

Ruiz swam downward through the black water, trying to get as deep as he could. He didn’t know why. Shortly he would be forced to surface and Corean would take him; he was only postponing the inevitable.

He took some small comfort from the fact that he had at least been decisive. His old self wasn’t entirely gone, apparently, even if in this case he hadn’t made a very good decision.

When he crashed into a crumbling slab of ancient melt-stone, he cracked his wrist painfully enough to force a cloud of bubbles from his straining lungs. He flailed helplessly for a moment, disoriented; then his hand caught the edge of the slab and he held on. Barnacles cut his hand. He floated to an angle that suddenly allowed cold salt water to fill his nose. He almost choked, but some long-ago training supplied a reflex that allowed him to clear his nose without losing all his air, and he managed to keep his grip on the slab.

He began to feel the chill of the water. His ears hurt and he swallowed to equalize the pressure. His chest was already aching with the need to breathe, and he felt a dismal certainty that he had only prolonged his freedom by a few insignificant moments. He attempted to investigate the underside of the slab, to see if he might somehow wedge himself under it and stave off capture until he was thoroughly drowned, but his hand encountered something unpleasant, a stringy mass of pulp — and he drew back hastily. Then he wondered how salt the sea was on Sook. Were it no saltier than Old Earth’s, his densely muscled body would sink, once he had filled his lungs with water. No, he would probably float to the surface. Sook was a very old world, her seas thick with antiquity…. Ruiz realized his mind was wandering, and tried to focus his attention outward.

He listened. At first all he could hear was the pounding of his own blood, and then an odd squeaky sound. It was, he realized, his own throat, trying to open and let the sea in.

Corean watched her exterior screens in familiar disbelief. How many times would Ruiz Aw escape her before he gave up, before he realized who he belonged to?

“He won’t get far,” she told herself. She consulted her infrared detectors and quickly located the slayer fifteen meters below, his body a hot crimson shape against the cold blue-green of the rubble-strewn bottom. He floated head down, clinging to a stone like a man-shaped oyster.

She smiled at the image. “I can wait longer than you can hold your breath,” she said.

She glanced back at the exterior screens and saw that Marmo was hustling the survivors aboard. The wounded man tried to climb up onto the sponson shelf with the others, but the old pirate shoved him casually back into the sea and secured the longboat.

She touched the switch that carried her amplified voice on deck. “Wait,” she said. “We’ll pick up the slayer when he comes up for air. Take a catchwire and a stunner.”

Marmo looked up at the camera, and his head gave a slight weary shake. Still, he started to follow her directions, though without any visible enthusiasm.

Alarms wailed, and most of Corean’s screens shifted viewpoint to show the Roderigan submarine rushing up over the horizon. Almost immediately, she saw the twinkle of ranging lasers from the Roderigans’ deck guns.

They hailed her. A harsh voice demanded her surrender.

She slapped at the main touchboard, closing the sponson armor, charging her heaviest weapons, cranking up her defensive screens.

One last longing look she gave to Ruiz Aw, still clinging to his rock. None of her weapons were small enough, delicate enough, to use against him. The water was too shallow; her vessel could be damaged by reflected energies. Besides, that wasn’t the sort of death she wanted for Ruiz Aw. She wanted the slayer to die from the touch of her hands, with the sound of her laughter in his ears. She would have to let him go, this time. What a sorry thing, she thought.

“Don’t die yet,” she said to him, almost tenderly, before she engaged her engines and fled.

Ruiz’s awareness had contracted to the burning in his chest. His fading volition struggled to keep his throat closed. He had almost decided to breathe the sea, to attempt to die purposefully, rather than in an unconscious spasm… when he heard the rumble of engines. He was only dimly conscious, but it seemed to him that the sound meant something, that he might as well try to live.

He let go and rose with agonizing slowness toward the surface, now silvered by the strengthening daylight. He tried to relieve the pain in his lungs by allowing the air to trickle from them, and it was almost a fatal mistake. By the time his lungs were empty, he was still several meters below the surface and with the loss of buoyancy his ascent had slowed. His vision darkened, but he thrashed upward with the last of his strength.

He burst through the surface and the sweet air shrieked into his lungs.

Of all the breaths he had taken in his long strange life, this, he was sure, was the finest. He marveled that he had never before truly noticed what a wonderful thing it was to breathe. Just to breathe.

At that moment he didn’t really care about anything else.

But after a few blissful moments, he regained his sanity and swirled around, trying to find Corean’s sub.

A glare lit the sky to the west, drawing his attention, and there he saw the larger Roderigan vessel pursuing Corean’s sub, both boats speeding over the sea on hydrofoils, throwing plumes of spray high. Occasionally a beam would flash between the two combatants, to no obvious effect.

Corean’s sub had apparently reached the edge of the offshore trench, because it came off its foils and sank below the waves. A moment later the Roderigan followed.

Ruiz floated alone, two hundred meters off the beach.

Was he alone? He heard an odd gasping sound, and his mind filled immediately with thoughts of margars and other large pelagic predators. But then he saw a head bobbing amid the waves. After a moment, he realized that it was the scholar Gunderd.

It took Ruiz three minutes to approach the scholar, who, without his gold sailor chains, was apparently floating without great effort.

When he reached Gunderd, Ruiz noticed with dismay that a red cloud stained the water, spreading from the ragged stump of the scholar’s left arm. “Gunderd?” Ruiz said.

Gunderd lifted his eyes, and Ruiz saw that the man was almost dead — he wore that look of calm regretful acceptance that the best soldiers took into oblivion.

Ruiz wondered how many times he had seen that look. Far too many, he thought.

He swam close to Gunderd, ignoring the possibility that predators might be attracted to the blood. He put a supporting arm across Gunderd’s chest.

“Ruiz,” said Gunderd, in a voice almost inaudibly faint. “Glad you survived.”

“For the moment, anyway,” Ruiz said, and started to sidestroke toward the shore.

Gunderd struggled feebly. “No,” he whispered. “Don’t drag me… foolish waste of strength.”

“I’m just trying to get you away from the worst of the blood,” said Ruiz. “I don’t want the margars to eat us.” And maybe, he thought, you’ll live to reach the beach, and can die a less frightening death. He remembered that conversation he’d had with Gunderd on the Loracca, when the scholar had explained why he wanted to die swiftly if he were ever lost overboard. The long slow falling away from the light… Gunderd had said.

“Ah,” said Gunderd. “For a slayer you have a good heart.”

Then he died.

Ruiz felt the transition from life to death, a sudden weight, an unmistakable laxity. He stopped swimming, turned Gunderd to face him, saw the emptiness in the scholar’s face.

“Well,” he said aimlessly, and released the body. It floated facedown, leaking blood at a much slower pace.

Ruiz swam toward shore, as fast as he could.

When he reached the waist-deep shallows and stood up to wade ashore, he heard a thrashing flurry. He looked around to see something scaly take the body down. The sight stimulated him to a mild panic, and he splashed the last few meters, knees pumping high.

Once on dry land, he kept running until he had reached the cover of the boulders at the high water line.