Korval's Game (35 page)

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.

BORDERING EROB’S HOLD:
Behind Enemy Lines

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.

LIAD:
Jelaza Kazone

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.

“Tell me the truth, Jeeves.
Were
you a war robot?”

“I was many things, Miss Anthora. As befits the motivating force of an Independent Armed Military Module. Shall I deal with the interlopers on our lawn? It won’t take but a moment.”

Anthora sipped her tea, and extended her thought to the eastern pattern. Idly, experimentally, almost playfully, she exerted her will against the chill ugliness. And felt something move, deep within the construct imposed by the Department of Interior.

Anthora sipped again, shook her head, Terran style, and lazily set the teacup aside.

“No,” she told the robot, “leave them. They won’t be staying long.”

EROB’S BOUNDARY:
War Zone

Jason heard
him out impassively, then got up and walked to the rear of the tent.

“Coffee, boyo? It’s old, but the tea’s older.”

Val Con leaned back in the camp chair, weary, now that there was leisure. “Is there water?”

“That there is.”

There was a slight clink and the sound of liquid running, then Jason settled again at the table, big hands curled around a steaming steel mug. Val Con raised his mug, closing his eyes and concentrating on the sweet feel of water along a parched throat.

Jason sighed, sudden in the silence.

“So, the ’trang’re massing and they’re facing this way. Not the best news we’ve had on the week, but not unexpected. Why else did you spend all that time with Erob’s people, planting those little tokens of esteem around the grounds?”

Val Con opened his eyes. “It would be better, if they did not get this far.”

“Can’t argue with that,” Jason conceded and raised the mug for a swallow of old coffee.

Val Con sipped at his water, and allowed himself for the first time in days to touch the place where Miri’s song lived within him.

For a moment, he simply beheld her essence. His eyes filled and he closed them, bringing all of his attention to her, asleep and distant as—

He opened his eyes and put the mug down so suddenly it thumped on the table.

“Fact of the matter is, ’trang general has his nose outta joint because Kritoulkas and Redhead just threw a bunch of his crack kiddies out on their ears,” Jason said, possibly to himself. “Not only that, but they lost the prize, and a bit of their own armor, to boot.” He shook his head. “Small wonder we’re up for special attention.” He raised the mug, drained it and set it aside.

“We’re as ready hereabouts as we’re likely to get,” he said, suddenly brisk. “Next good thing to do is make sure we’ve done our best down the hill.” He pushed back from the table and paused, eyes suddenly speculative.

“You’ll want to be with Redhead for this next bit, will you, lad?”

Miri had been in battle while he was away from her side. She might have died—Val Con shook his head sharply and glared into Jason’s face.

“I certainly want to be with her so we might usefully plan the best defense,” he said, more curtly than he had perhaps intended.

Jason merely nodded and stood up. “We’re both on the same wavelength. Meet me at the flitter in fifteen minutes and we’ll go on down together. I’ll just call over the Big House and let the general know he’s in charge.”

***

They were met
by an improbably cheerful soldier with a newly healed gash on her chin. She ran a disinterested eye over Val Con and gave Jason a wide grin.

“Morning, Commander. You missed the party.”

“That’s right, Sandy, rub it in,” Jason said mournfully. “I suppose I’m not taking it hard enough that you had such a good time t’other day when I was stuck up the hill with nothin’ to do but watch the tyros train.”

She laughed and turned, guiding them expertly through a series of interlocking trails.

As the lady’s conversation was reserved for her commander, Val Con amused himself by identifying trenches and probable weapons caches, while he kept half an inner ear on the song that was Miri. She was very near now, he could tell from the flavor of the song. He discovered his heart was pounding, though the pace their guide had set was no more than brisk. Indeed, it was all he could do, not to leave his companions behind and run through the forest, into his lifemate’s arms.

“Almost there,” Sandy said, guiding them sharply right, then left, and abruptly there was a camp, and soldiers, and sky shielding strung over the whole.

The sentry went left without hesitation. Val Con, his attention on Miri’s song, looked right, toward its emanation, hoping for a glimpse of copper braiding, or an edge of her face, but the way was filled with leather-clad strangers—

Val Con stumbled, heartbeat stalling. He found his feet instantly, heart slamming painfully into overaction. Breath returned with a shout.

“
Shan
!”

The white-haired man whipped around, pilot-fast, graceful in fighting leathers. His arms opened and Val Con hurtled into the embrace, hugging tight, his cheek against his brother’s shoulder.

In that moment, he was a child again and Shan returning home at last from the long year of contract-marriage. He had been with his music tutor when he heard his brother’s voice in the entry-hall and had leapt from the ’chora to fly down the stairway, into the ready embrace.

“Shan,
Shan
. . .”

“Hello, denubia.”

Beloved voice and oh, gods, to hold his brother to him, to feel the heartbeat beneath his cheek and the lungs laboring so . . .

He eased his hold, leaning back in arms that seemed reluctant to lose him, raised eyes, and then shaking fingers to his brother’s cheek.

“You’re weeping.”

Shan grinned, wavering. “So are you.”

There was a sound quite close at hand, as possibly of a whetstone being drawn slowly down a blade: Jason Carmody clearing his throat.

“Take it you two know each other.”

Val Con flicked a glance to Jason, noting the high color in those portions of the face not hidden by golden beard.

Blushing
, he thought in astonishment.
We’ve embarrassed Jason Carmody, the man who has no shame
. Carefully, he went half a step back, releasing Shan with a reluctance that was echoed in his brother’s withdrawal.

“Shan, this is Gyrfalks Junior Commander Jason Carmody, commanding the forces here.” He lay his hand on the leather sleeve—
merciful gods, to once again touch kin
—gulped a breath and looked up into the big Terran’s face.

“Jason, here is—here is my brother, Shan yos’Galan. Master Trader and—and . . .”

“And captain,” Shan’s voice smoothly covered his emotion, “of the battleship
Dutiful Passage
, in Lytaxin system. Perhaps, by now, in Lytaxin orbit.”

The unnatural color was already leaving Jason’s cheeks, though his eyes sharpened considerably.

“You don’t say. Wouldn’t be that you’re the laddie brought that lifepod down into our quarry, would it?”

“Unfortunately, it would,” Shan said soberly. “I do apologize, Commander, but there really was nothing for it. The pod was all but out of fuel. I had to come down somewhere.”

“Well, and you’re part of my reason for being here. We’re bound for a bit of chat with Sub-Commander Kritoulkas and Captain Redhead, if you’d care to join us?”