37
MOVING OUT
Footsteps rushed up the ramp. Festina rolled over on her back, stun-pistol held in both hands…but she lowered it when she saw the newcomer was a man, a human man.
Both his skin and his uniform were black: not camo’d up like our party, but still plenty hard to see. Even so, I could tell he was definitely Explorer material. The bottom part of his face just wasn’t there—the skin swept straight down from his cheekbones to the thinness of his neck. His chin was only a little nub, scarcely bigger than his Adam’s apple.
I was kind of glad I couldn’t see him very well in all this dark.
“Festina?” the man said in a deep, very precise voice. You could tell he was making an extra effort to enunciate clearly. “I didn’t expect a rescue party at all, much less my favorite admiral.”
“Don’t count your rescues before they’re hatched,” Festina told him. She’d switched on a small external speaker in her tightsuit so people without radio receivers could hear her. I noticed she kept the volume down to a whisper. “How’re you doing, Plebon?” she asked. “Where’s Olympia?”
“Gone.” His face barely changed, but his eyes showed pain. “When Queen Temperance left, some of the palace guards defected to the enemy. They took Olympia as a bargaining chip—a valuable hostage they could offer to the Black Queen in exchange for their own lives.”
“Shit.” Festina’s fists clenched. “Any chance she’s still alive?”
Plebon shook his head. “Two days later…” His voice caught and he swallowed hard before trying again. “Two days later, they hung her corpse on their front lines. That’s what ‘expendable’…”
He couldn’t finish the phrase. The rest of us were all busy, trying to look anywhere but at him.
“Anyway,” he said after a while, with that hard tone of someone trying to hold himself together, “if it’s any consolation, the defectors were hung on the front lines too. Their bodies looked worse than Olympia’s.”
“Craziness,” Counselor murmured. “Smart armies don’t kill defectors, they show them off: happy, safe, and well fed. That way, you encourage more people to surrender.”
“Unless you don’t
want
your enemies to surrender,” I said softly. “What if you want them to stay right where they are, so the war doesn’t end three and a half weeks too early?”
It’s hard when you feel people’s deaths on your head. Those defectors got killed to keep the war going…delay things till I got here. As for Olympia Mell…it explained how my sister had known
Willow
was in the system. Olympia had told the Black Army everything she knew: maybe under torture, or maybe just chatting with Sam as a fellow member of the navy. Then, after the talk was over, Olympia had been murdered and put on display—to make sure the palace guards stayed at their posts till the very end.
This Black Queen, whoever she was: she could have had an easy victory weeks ago, but she wanted a massacre. And Sam was the queen’s closest advisor. What did that say about my sister? What did that say?
“The anchor’s working just fine,” Tobit announced. “But
Jacaranda
isn’t replying to any calls. They’ve buggered off on us.”
Festina let out her breath slowly. “Damn it to fucking hell,” she said in a controlled voice. “That’s twice Prope has stranded me in some shithole. Next time…”
I never got to hear about next time. Her words were drowned out by a pack of warriors storming onto the roof. It looked like the embassy’s floors were strong enough to hold Mandasars after all.
You can tell a lot about folks from how they react to a bunch of soldiers.
Festina and Tobit cranked up the volume on their tightsuit speakers and shouted in stilted Mandasar, “Greetings, we are sentient citizens of the League of Peoples, we beg your Hospitality,” At the same time, they were drawing their stun-pistols.
Dade gaped a moment, then just held up his hands in surrender. Counselor did the same, except that she folded her arms in a gesture I’d taught her, and cried out,
“Naizó! Naizó!”
Zeeleepull stepped in front of her, flexed his pincers theatrically, and began to pump out a combination of battle-musks. I couldn’t distinguish all the scents he used, but the basic message was clear: “I will not attack, but I
will
defend.”
Hib & Nib & Pib backed to the edge of the roof and whispered as they stared admiringly at Zeeleepull. “Isn’t he strong?” “Isn’t he handsome?” “Isn’t he a teeny bit outnumbered?”
Kaisho said nothing—just standing her ground, with her legs glowing bright as lasers.
Me, I was watching everybody else, waiting to take my lead from them…but I was also concentrating mighty hard on smelling royal. Half the soldiers had gas masks; half of them didn’t. I still wasn’t great at controlling my pheromones, but I figured if worse came to worst, I could dose the maskless ones and sic them on their troopmates.
But it was Plebon who stepped toward the soldiers: waving his hands and shouting,
“Nairit ul Gashwan!” Friend of Gashwan.
Plebon’s accent was pretty awful, even on three short words; I got the impression he’d memorized the phrase by sound, rather than actually understanding it. Still, the soldiers eased up a bit: they didn’t lower their bows but a few took their fingers off the triggers.
For a moment, I considered walking up to them anyway: use my pheromones ‘to win a bunch of them over to our side. But that wouldn’t work on the masked guys, and they might get really mad about their fellow guards being zonked by chemical warfare. Grumbling to myself, I damped down the smell factory and let the fumes drift away on the breeze.
The soldiers hustled us down to street level, not giving us the tiniest chance to talk among ourselves.
“Jush, jush!”
they kept saying…which means, “Shut up and keep moving.”
Plebon didn’t look too worried about this treatment, so he must have thought we were safe. His Mend Gashwan must carry a lot of clout.
Who was she?
I wondered. Gashwan was a female name, but the only Gashwan I’d ever known was the doctor who looked after me when I had the jaundice…or rather, when I had venom poisoning from all those nanites dosing me up. Could it be the same Gashwan, hanging around the palace for twenty years? Maybe. No matter which queens passed through Unshummin in the past two decades, they could all use a smart doctor. I didn’t know much about Gashwan herself—she was the sort of M.D. who reads medical charts rather than talking to patients personally—but if she’d been on Verity’s staff, she must have been the best at what she did.
Out on the street, another guard ran up and whispered something to the corporal at the head of our group. The corporal looked back at me, his antennas lifting straight up like lightning rods. Um: I think I’d been identified. Either someone remembered me from way back when, or they’d seen my face when
Jacaranda
broadcast my little message. (“Don’t worry, neutral mission, keep calm.”) Now they realized I was the Little Father Without Blame. I didn’t know what the guards would do about that, and the guards didn’t know either. Our platoon of escorts gawked at me when they heard the news, but didn’t say a word.
Sorry. They did say
one
word.
“Jush!”
And they hurried us even faster toward the palace.
We quick-marched up Diplomats Row to an army checkpoint where Aliens Gate used to be. The gate had been a big diamondwood arch in the palace’s outer palisade, nearly a century old and carved with Mandasar artists’ impressions of various aliens. No species would be flattered by the pictures—humans, for example, were shown as stick-thin and frail, men indistinguishable from women, with huge eyes, tiny mouths, and enormous quantities of hair growing from their heads like cedar bushes—but I still kind of liked the figures. This really was how Mandasars saw us, back years ago when we were exotic curiosities rather than day-to-day acquaintances. (Sam always claimed the male human on the gate was modeled after our father, back when he was just a greenhorn diplomat on Troyen. I couldn’t see the resemblance…but my sister loved thinking everything had some connection to her.)
Aliens Gate was gone now—maybe destroyed in battle, maybe just pulled down by armies occupying the palace, because it’s hard to defend a big open arch. In place of the gate was a narrow walkway past a row of arrow slits, then a path with twists and turns and odd little bumps in the concrete floor, probably designed to make Mandasar warriors stumble if they tried to charge through at speed. The path slanted upward too, rising at least two stories above the actual level of the ground; and once you were inside the walls, you had to go down again, on a set of awkward switchbacking ramps that were fully exposed to cannon and arrow fire from the palace.
It made me wonder how recent these defense measures were. Making it hard for attackers to get in also made it hard for defenders to get out for sorties and counteroffensives. I couldn’t help thinking the folks in the palace had abandoned all hope of fighting their way to open territory; this was their last stand, their Masada, their Alamo. If they had no chance of surviving, they wanted to take a ton of their enemies with them.
Our corporal borrowed a lantern from a guard post and led the way across the dark palace grounds. Once upon a time, this area had bloomed with gardens of glass-lily, queen’s-crown and skyflowers. Now there was only bare earth, tangled over with monofilament razor wire: stuff so sharp, it could even cut through a warrior’s carapace. Behind the wire were trenches, behind the trenches were more trenches, and behind them all was the palace, where archers and cannons were ready to fire on anyone coming too near.
Or maybe there were just archers—the palace’s cannons had stopped shooting. I doubted the Black Army had called off its attack; more likely, the gunners on the ramparts had run out of shells.
We scrambled up the ramp to the palace’s back door—what my sister called the Sphincter. Since the building was shaped like a queen, and this entrance was smack in the middle of the tail section, Sam always joked that the door led right up the queen’s rectum.
Not very funny you think about it.
The stonework here was free of Balrog moss. That was no accident—a lot of the place looked scorched, as if someone had taken a flamethrower to the walls. I guess the palace guards didn’t know the spores were sentient…or else they didn’t care. The stink of burned vegetation was strong enough that even a human nose would smell it.
The same stink filled the corridor inside. This end of the building had once been painted with scenes from around the planet—the great waterfalls at Feelon, the ocean grotto of Pellibav, the sacred hoodoos of the Joalang Mountains—but now the paintings were charred black, with thick flakes of ash littering the floor. The Balrog must have tried to crawl through here like soul-sucking ivy; and it’d been stopped. For the time being, this part of the palace was sanitized…but with the front of the building swallowed up, the red moss would surely keep trying to work its way back.
So we walked through halls that smelled of cinders and battle-musk. It was just vinegary Musk A at the moment, general tension but not panic. Even that was enough to get to Counselor—her antennas were jerking back and forth in little spasms, and her whiskers were constantly shivering. I adjusted my pace to walk beside her, then put out a standard worker pheromone that said, “Just keep going, it’ll be fine.”
The smell seemed to help: a moment later, she wrapped one of her thin brown arms in mine. “Thank you,
Teelu”
she murmured, before the guards
Jushed
her into silence.
We turned down a side corridor and headed for a ramp to the second floor. This was the way to the royal infirmary, where I’d spent my last year on Troyen. As we climbed, whiffs of Mandasar blood began to overpower the stench of burned Balrog. By the smell of it, the infirmary was still very much in business, caring for an awful lot of sick and wounded.
A middle-aged gentle stopped our party at the top of the ramp, scolding the soldiers for bringing filthy humans into a hospital area. Did they want us to infect the place with our awful alien germs? It took our corporal a full thirty seconds to break into her tirade, as he mumbled in Mandasar, “Please, Doctor…please, Doctor…please, Doctor…we must see Gashwan right away.”
“Gashwan’s busy,” the gentle finally said. “She hasn’t got time to waste on trivialities.”
“But, Doctor…but, Doctor…but, Doctor…”
I took a deep breath and stepped forward.
“Teeshpodin Ridd ha Wahlisteen pim,”
I said, trying not to feel sheepish at putting on airs. I am the Little Father Without Blame.
“Gashwan himayja, sheeka mo.”
We must see Gashwan, if you please.
The gentle turned to me, anger on her face. It was the first time she’d seen me clearly—our only light came from the corporal’s lantern, and I’d been standing quietly back in the shadows. For a heartbeat I was sure the doctor would start hollering about dirty hume disease carriers; but her eyes opened wide, and her whiskers trembled.
“Teelu,”
she whispered.
Mandasars gasped up and down the corridor; I nearly gasped with them. It was one thing for Celestian kids to make the mistake of calling me, “Your Majesty”…but this woman should have known better. I wasn’t a queen, I was a consort. Addressing me as
Teelu
was like prostrating yourself before the royal plumber.
“Please,” I told her, then got all flustered as I tried to think of a nice way to say she should watch her words. But the woman got the wrong idea from my hesitation.
“Yes,
Teelu,”
she replied, whiskers still fluttering. “At once,
Teelu”
She scuttled off into the next room.
“Um,” I said to the rest of the crowd. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,
Teelu,”
Counselor whispered to me.
“You really shouldn’t call me that,” I told her. “It’s only for queens.”
“And you,” she said, with no hesitation.
“Jush,”
muttered one of the guards. But he didn’t sound as tough and confident as before. He might have been wondering if he’d get in trouble for bossing around a queen’s consort. In a way, it was funny—Black Epaulettes were coming to slaughter us all, and these guys were afraid I might yell at them.