Ned became conscious of the dull rumble of the cycler. It seemed louder today, as if it expected to dispose of more waste. Like dead bodies ⦠. He went off to go through the motions of work, in the same patch where he had done the same thing yesterday, trying to watch all sixty-four points of the compass. There were no masses of movement among any of those around him, though the looks were furtive and the greetings mumbled.
Azzah worked her way over to whack at branches beside him. Something about her made him wary, and he knew what: the boiling anger of a slave people had reached a particular intensity in her.
“When I went to talk to my people in the southwest camp I saw a gate, and Rrengha says it opens on a path and maybe leads to an old landing field. What do you think?”
He stood and looked out toward the southwest where he could see no more than milky sky and the dark lines of useless growth, occasionally broken by stands of thin trees. Between the southwest and northwest camps was the gated compound where the self-styled captains and most of the NCOs lived and stored their weapons.
“Eh, the ones that live in the southwest are a lot worse than that bunch you used to serve, you'd have to plough through them before you got out.” Not likely to lead anywhere, either.
But hope, Azzah, hope.
She was a lot sharper than that. “You don't believe in that. I don't know you, do I.” She rubbed sweat off her forehead, smearing her arm as Ned had done. “Some of those worse ones are looking for you, but Spartakos calls you my-friend-Ned, and you came with that other one of us Folk that is gone now. What was he, and what are you?”
Breathing hard, Ned forced himself away from fear and said, “That one of you that you thought was Folk is really a Lyhhrt who was trying to get to Khagodis to stop an attack there, now he's trying to stop a massacre here. Of us, you
and me and everybody else here, even the worst. I'm just a pug who did some work for GalFed and Spartakos was my partner. I was trying to help, and I got us stuck here, didn't I? You may have a better chance if you keep away from me, so you don't get caught in the crossfire.”
She seemed about to say something, but didn't. He turned back to push sticks into the loader and drag out as many as he had dumped, trying to put together a plan at least as good as Azzah's.
We might just get some breathing space if we had distractions. And some weaponsâ
Then he caught a whack on the side of his head, one hand was grabbed and dragged up behind his back and a heavy arm came around his neck.
“Tommy Longjeans, is it?” a voice bellowed. “Let's have some good times together, Tommy!” That was Hummer, recovering from memory loss.
Shit
. Looking in the wrong direction.
Hummer growling: “I'm gonna show you off, Tommy, some people want to have a better look at you, let's have some fun!”
He choked, gasped for air, tried to claw at the meaty arm with his free handâ
âand
whulk,
a sound like a hammer striking a melon. Hummer fell like a grain sack.
Ned fell with her, and when he looked up in terror, he found Grushka examining her cyber arm. “Never did that before.” She pulled him up with her other hand. “I think my shoulder's out of its socket.” Then, “Azzah sent me to keep an eye out for you.”
He stared down at Hummer's bloody head, rubbed his sore neck and couldn't find his voice.
She said, “Ayeh, I know you thank me, now let's get'r out of the way, we can't carry'er far an she's too heavy to boost into the loader, so let's shove her under this stuff.”
Ned found a voice among his painfully swollen throat muscles. “Where's Rrengha?”
“Sleeping. She has to sleep some time.”
Times she picks.
“Who's looking at us?” He didn't dare turn his head.
“Nobody that's gonna tell. Can you give me a hand here?”
“She dead?”
“I'm not gonna ask. Come onâ”
“She's got weapons.” He squatted to examine Hummer's armory.
“What's that little thing?”
He unhooked it carefully and lifted it by the loop. “It's a Zepp.” Zepp dart: agony, madness and death in ten seconds.
Not my kind of weapon.
He dropped it down his shirt front, afraid to handle it, afraid to leave it about. “Nobody uses them but people like her.”
Would she have used it on me?
:Yes,:
Rrengha said, waking from her own dreams in the shadow of the mess tent.
Ned picked Hummer's comm off her wrist, stood up and ground it under his heel. “Got a direction finder. Now she's not anywhere.”
Especially if she's dead.
“Take the stunner and the zap, I'll keep the baton. Tie up her hands with that belt, just in case.” He helped Grushka lift and carry the body, alive or dead, and push it into uncleared brush that was unlikely to be cut down now. “Just don't wave them around.”
As he moved down the line of workers he found Spartakos. Spartakos said, “I was monitoring her comm unit. I see that violence has begun.”
Ned showed the Zepp. “Nobody else has been carrying these.”
They will now, if she's opened up those containers, they'll feel free.
Spartakos touched it with an iridium-plated finger. “Taken from that store of weapons ⦠she stole it.”
“Yeh.” Ned ran a hand through the sweaty mess of his hair.
Violence has begun.
He held out the Zepp. “I'm afraid to carry this around.”
Spartakos took it from him. Lightning flashed between his hands and a drift of powder sifted down.
Violence.
“I will make arrangements for the rest of those,” Spartakos said.
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Cinnabar Keys:
Identity
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While Ned Gattes was eating breakfast, a half-forgotten woman in a safe house on the edge of a small satellite town near Altamir, the other main city of Cinnabar Keys, was wakened by the holstered man who was guarding her.
“Madam Greisbach, a call from GalFed HQ, very urgent.”
She pulled herself up slowly and rubbed her eyes, still shadowed by fear. “They're not supposed to know I'm here.”
“Can't help that, ma'am, someone has to know I'm here, and it's a secure line.”
He was a thin sharp man with a sneering voice. Eufemia Greisbach was a gentle-faced but hard-headed woman who did not like Secret Service agents even when they were cheerful and polite, or safe houses, for that matter. She took the comm from his hand and waited until he left.
A mechanical voice said, GIVE PASSWORD.
She pressed the long series of keys on the pad. The voice that came through the earpiece said: “Greisbach, is that you?”
((Greisbach is that you))
The words in the Lyhhrt vodervoice echoed and reechoed, she felt blood reddening and then draining from her face.
That evening days and days ago, she had not heard those
words addressed to her at the GalFed Headquarters in Montador. Her friend and colleague Willson had spoken them, his last words, and the answer had come from his Lyhhrt murderer:
No, but I will do instead.
That exchange had festered in the mind of the surviving Lyrhht and forced itself into her mind while he waited for her along with his dead Other and Willson's body to give his burden of information.
She said, “Yes, this is she. You have survived then. Where are you?”
“Headquarters is rerouting this call but I am not there. You needn't know, any more than I need know where you are.”
“Is it really you? How do I know you aren't the killer?”
“Galactic Federation is content with my genome sample.” She was silent, and he added, “Would anyone else know how much you desired Willson, and respect you for not taking him from his family?”
She felt her face flaming again. “Not the respect, no.” Nor the agony she and the Lyhhrt had shared over their losses. No more powerful password could ever have been uttered. “Why have you called?”
“Galactic Federation accepts me as I am. Your identification will give me access to help from World Police.”
“I see.” She did not want to know what for.
“The murderer is dead, and you will be free soon,” he said, and the line clicked.
The mechanical voice said: REPEAT PASSWORD IF YOU ACCEPT THIS IDENTIFICATION, and after she had done that the line went dead.
The agent came to collect the comm. She said dully, “He said I'd be free soon. I guess that's good enough.”
He stood looking at her for a moment. “There's a good breakfast for you, waiting.”
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Bonzador:
Seek and Hide
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:They are missing the woman and the hunt is beginning,: Rrengha said.
Ned saw only moving figures grunting with effort, some working as if they had not heard any of the news and others as if they might be spared for obeying, still others beginning to collect in threes and fours; the O'e had gathered into separate orchestrated groups that kept sight of each other as they moved. Spartakos was shepherding them; Azzah was their leader.
He caught sight of Ned, approached him through the clustering workers who did not know quite where to go, and called out, “Keep filling that loader!”
One of the women, who had stopped working to ease her back, yelled, “What's the fucking good of that? If all the stuff we've been hearing is true they'll cut us down while we're doing their work!”
Spartakos said, “I need the loader. It's a weapon.”
Ned stared at him, wondering if he had gone mad, like his maker. He had dulled his surface by rearranging its infinitesimal plates so that light did not jump back from them, and looked almost like a stranger.
The woman who had been yelling at Spartakos said, “You got a plan?”
“I have a course of action,” Spartakos said. “Stay away from meâand Ned, my friend, you too. Go find Azzah.”
Ned, dazed, limping from his fall under Hummer's weight, went to find Azzah. The sun beat down hard now, the insects swarmed to drink the sweat of the laborers, and the O'e group were looking as dazed as he.
“I don't know what,” Azzah said. “He told me to move
southward and take as many as I could with me. That's farther away from the main gate ⦔ She called out to her cohort, “Come with, come with!”
Ned stared back the way he had come but could not see Spartakos. He was very far away â¦
What's going on with him?
:Why ask me?:
Rrengha said. :
I cannot esp him.:
He had not asked, but was relieved to connect with her worldview, because he could feel his group unraveling. “Go ahead, Azzah, do it!”
Azzah cried, “Spartakos has a plan! Let's do what he wants, come on!” Each of the O'e looked ragged, skin puckering with heat, but they followed in ranks and files. “Bring others!”
Cawdor, the real one, drove up screeching and kicking dust in a wheeled pickup and began yelling, “I told you goddam dumb oinks to stay in your own camps!” He was redfaced and his words slurred.
Azzah suppressed her rage and said, “We do your work better on our own.”
“You giving me orders you piece of shit! I'll show youâ” He jumped out of the carry-all with stunner sprung to fire, Ned threw himself between the two with his baton swinging at Cawdor's wrist but could do no more than graze his elbow.
Cawdor sneered,
“You!
Got something else for you!” and unholstered something that Ned could not identify except that it was a gun, raised and cockedâ
âCawdor did not see the crew of Oâe at his back, and the O'e had knivesâ
âand his face wrenched with shock, then went blank and he fell, knees, hands, head. The crew picked his body clean of weapons, and Azzah pulled at Ned's arm, urging him, “Come with us! Come!”
But Ned could not. He pulled away. “You go and I'll be with you in aâ”
Turning back he could just see in strobe blinks among the moving friezes of trampling bodies that Spartakos was unhooking the auxiliary fuel tank from the loader.
Oh my God.
Before he could move again he felt a savage pain in his left shoulder, one of the few places he hadn't been battered. No one was near him, his shoulder was untouched, but he found himself looking through Rrengha's eyes as she licked at a bloody wound in her shoulder. The eyes shut for a moment and his heart jumped, they blinked on again with the bass rumble of a snarl,
alive right now,
he closed his mind to it and ran after Spartakos pushing bodies to right and left, shouting, “No, for God's sake! Don't!”