Frey climbed back to his feet, for once without the light saber, and made it very simple, and he was good at being simple.
Loki was a Guard. Loki was responsible for important repairs. Instead, one Loki had booby-trapped a gauntlet which had harmed a Counselor seriously. Guards did not attack Counselors directly or indirectly.
Frey used the big wall screen sparingly and basically to display shots of Heimdall collapsing in a shower of fire and living blood, followed by
another series of the poor assaulted Counselor lying in the Infirmary surrounded with all types of medical-support equipment.
As Frey continued, I realized the dope had been used. He honestly didn’t know, I could sense, that the gauntlet had been double-trapped for me. Only Heimdall knew, and he wouldn’t be saying anything.
That meant I had a chance because I’d recorded my original findings about the way the gauntlet had been tampered with.
Finally, it was my turn.
“Tribunes, my defense is simple. First, Heimdall intended that what happened to him should happen to me. Second, he waited for perhaps seasons for an excuse to administer such an assault disguised as routine maintenance. Third, when my repairs were completed, he knew there was a chance I would still be hurt, and he forced me to test the gauntlet …”
“Can you prove any of this?” rasped Eranas.
“Yes, Tribune. First, I carefully recorded the internal structures I found in the gauntlet I received from Heimdall, and the records from my diagnostic center will show that the gauntlet was altered to focus time energy on the wearer. You might also note that much of the equipment is new. That was because the energies built into the gauntlet destroyed half the original equipment before I discovered Heimdall’s efforts. I suggest you examine both before they become unavailable.”
I took a breath and glanced at Frey and Freyda. I liked the lady, but blood is often hotter than fire.
Eranas might have been thinking about stepping down, but he was nobody’s fool—and a better diver than I realized. He disappeared from the dais, presumably sliding straight to the mech shop.
Kranos sat there and frowned.
“We wait,” noted Freyda. She looked at her son.
I thought she had been unaware of the trickery and was more than a little angry that Frey had been linked to such a blatant scheme.
Eranas was back in place at the center of the Tribunes in a handful of units. He didn’t even ask for more explanation.
“Loki, you are a damned fool, a double-damned fool, to go off on your own. Being a Guard has responsibilities—serious ones. Yes, too often you young ones joke about being gods, but what we do can create or destroy more than many gods of many people. There is no room in the Guard for half-cocked impulses.
“Heimdall had no business pulling a stunt like this either, and he may have gotten what he deserved, but you cannot appoint yourself High Tribune and play god. You cannot slide around trying to blow up scheming supervisors. Without order, the Guard has nothing, and if
your example were followed, there would be no order—”
“But—” I protested. I wanted to say that no one at all was watching Heimdall.
“But nothing,” rasped Eranas. “Heimdall will be in the Infirmary for five more days, and then he will spend five days on Hell. You will spend all ten days on Hell.”
He flipped the black wand out of its holder and jabbed it at me to emphasize his point. Neither Kranos nor Freyda had said a word.
I started to my feet to protest, but didn’t get very far. It felt like the entire Hall of Justice hit me in the face.
I came to in Hell, or rather, on it.
The sky is a scarlet black so blood-deep it curdles your soul. The ground is all sand and rock, and little scavenger rats scurry out from under the rocks to bite with needle teeth anything that is there to bite—insects, grubs, legs, toes, fingers, what have you.
I couldn’t see much of that, chained as I was with rock links to a large black chunk of mountainside. The links are the same stone as the mountain, although the clamps around the stone are steel—they thought of everything. Unlike them, I could barely think, because the Guard hadn’t taken any chances. This time, unlike the period in the cell block, someone had set up an entire bank of restrainer fields and focused them all on me.
I wasn’t thinking the same thoughts twice, but four or five times, and in fragments.
The restrainer fields were supposed to prevent enough coherent thought to keep me from time-diving off the planet of the damned, and the regenerator gadgetry was supposed to keep me in mostly one piece and suffering, but the water tube in the mask that covered most of my face didn’t function. With all that, I still could have dived clear, but clamped as I was to the black stone with the matching links, the whole mountain was one piece, and I couldn’t carry it all with me.
Every so often—I didn’t keep track—a large night eagle would come screaming out of the scarlet night that was day and rip a hunk out of me. I didn’t see much, not with the face mask protector, the partial helmet, throat guard, and extended breastplate.
Not mercy, but practicality. The regeneration gear can’t keep a body together if the eagles get the eyes, head, throat, or some large mess of guts.
Strapped there to suffer as these lovely beasts and birds rip away, most victims have a tendency to scream. I did—until I was too hoarse to continue. Then I whimpered.
Who in Hell wants to be proud and silent while your extremities are being tortured?
The rats, scorpions, eagles, give their dinner guests periodic rests. Not because they’re merciful, but because the restrainer fields scramble their pea brains as well as the victim’s.
Gravel-throated, sandy-whisper-voiced, unable to move, unable to scream, unable to dive, I built a cold fire within me, focused on the absolute injustice of Guard justice, and between the lapses of consciousness, between the stabs of pain as a scavenger rat nipped off a toe, snipped through an Achilles tendon, I concentrated on my future, my destiny …
There was the course of diligence, errand boy to barbarians, the path of out-and-out resistance, and the path of desertion. But was there another course?
If I had to strike, strike I would not until I wrenched bloody suns from their orbits … by god, by Hell, by the eagles of the night that screamed and ripped, and ripped and screamed … and my screams from a dry throat, my whimpers from a savaged body, merged with theirs and the blackness within that drowned me …
I WOKE UP in the Infirmary, alone, cellular regeneration equipment attached to both arms and legs and with heavy wrapping around my too-tender midsection. My fingers and toes burned, like they were being roasted.
Glowstones and slow-glass, white panels and sunlight, all came out gray in my sight.
I slipped back into hot sleep, dreamed.
A man in black, the black singlesuit of the Guards, and a man in red stood on mountaintops across a cloud-filled chasm from each other. Gray clouds framed the scene; no sunlight intruded.
The black man threw thunderbolt after thunderbolt at the red man, who never responded, never ducked, accepted each blast without moving, without effect.
With each cast, the man in black laughed. Each laugh infused the clouds beneath his feet with a darkness, a growing ugliness. The clouds of darkness began to climb from the depths below, to tug at the feet of the man in red, who stood, as if asleep, untouched, unmoving. But his eyes were open, unseeing.
With a laugh that echoed through the gray skies, that shook the
clouds until they trembled, the black figure leaned forward and released a last thunderbolt, terrible in its power, a yellow sword that shone with blackness, mightier than all that had come before.
The sound of the laugh reached the man in red, and his eyes filled with knowledge, and, as they filled with understanding, that last thunderbolt struck his shoulder, and he staggered, dropping to his knee, swaying on the mountain tip. And as he swayed, the black clouds clutched at his arm …
Someone touched my shoulder, and I woke.
Loragerd was sitting in the stool next to the high bed.
I tried to croak something.
“Not yet,” she said softly, laying her hand on my forehead.
There was plenty I wanted to know. I knew, just knew, I hadn’t spent any ten days on Hell, that no Guard, especially me, should have lost it that quickly.
I couldn’t say much. Loragerd filled me in, sensing the well of questions.
Simple enough. The Guards who had dragged me off to Hell had been Heimdall’s tools and hadn’t been especially careful about the breastplates or throat guards, or the water tube, or the regenerator fields.
Eranas, crafty old schemer, had figured as much. He, Kranos, and Freyda had waited until the damage to me became apparent, until I had suffered about as much as I could take, recorded the scenario on holo, and rescued me before I joined the ranks of the departed.
Evidence in hand, they’d held another Guard hearing, discharged the Guards involved, one of whom was my ferret-faced acquaintance of years past, gave them a dose of Hell, and subjected them to that surgical procedure that ensured they would never dive again.
Underneath my cocoon of bandages, I shivered.
The Tribunes had let me go to the point of death, destroyed the lives of the Guards who had blindly followed Heimdall, and never let it go beyond the Guard. But the word would filter around. People could just disappear.
I drifted back into sleep, exhausted, sweating, with Loragerd stroking my forehead.
Another four days drifted by before Hycretis let me out of the Infirmary. Baldur insisted I take another four before showing up in Maintenance. Loragerd and I spent the last day on the beaches beyond Southpoint.
Back in Maintenance, I found the backlog wasn’t bad.
“That’s because Baldur came over every night and whipped of a bunch of repairs,” Brendan explained.
I wondered about that. I couldn’t ever recall seeing Baldur at night, and yet he often looked tired in the morning. He didn’t have a special someone, and he never talked about his life outside the Guard.
In my absence, despite Baldur’s help, Brendan and Narcissus had been in a dive-or-die situation. Narcissus had done neither, just plodded along, polishing away.
Brendan had dived, right into the business end of Maintenance, and learned plenty more on his own, though he was still strangely lacking confidence in his abilities.
I settled back into my work space, back into the routine.
Somehow, the backlog didn’t seem quite so impressive, quite so overwhelming, not that I took it at all for granted or didn’t keep whittling it down—or looking for new trainees who even understood the word “mechanical.” Unfortunately, most of them made Narcissus look like a brilliant engineer.
I shrugged, so to speak, and waited. A new perspective, I guessed.
Some scars heal quickly; some do not.
For days and days after I returned, I was sore, especially by the end of the day, but with daily sessions under the regenerator the exterior scars from Hell faded.
But the memory of Heimdall asking me to fix that trapped gauntlet, and of the scarlet skies and black rocks of Hell, was as vivid as when the events had exploded upon me.
Heimdall had set me up. If I’d done as I’d been told and goofed, I would have been dead—or one badly injured Guard. If I’d fixed it properly, played it straight, then Heimdall would have delivered the message that he was the one in charge—even that he could dispatch me at any time.
Except that my stubbornness and Eranas’ craftiness had changed the equation. By giving an even greater punishment to Heimdall’s tools, Eranas and the Tribunes had tried to put the conflict on a personal basis between the two of us. The message had to be clear—get involved with Heimdall or Loki and you’ll end up worse than dead.
I didn’t like it. In fact, the more I reflected, the angrier I got. Heimdall had gotten a slap on the wrist for plotting to commit murder, and the only one who’d stood up to him they’d almost let die on Hell.
That meant that I’d face another confrontation with Heimdall, and another, and I intended to be ready in more ways than one.
I set myself the goal of mastering every piece of equipment in the entire Maintenance Hall—even the old stuff dating back to the Twilight /Frost Giant Wars. That would be one step.
The second step would be more difficult, but I put some stock in the
dream Loragerd had interrupted. I identified with the man in red. I needed to wake up, but that meant becoming vulnerable, and if I did, I needed to learn my own full capabilities.
Besides spending more time badgering Baldur, I petitioned Sammis to tutor me in everything he knew about hand-to-hand, weaponry, and that vague field he called “individual resources.” Not only had he done the attitude adjustment course, but he had also led more advanced training in our final year of study.
Sammis had been around a while, so long that no one remembered when he hadn’t been there. He also didn’t have a Locator tag code—or not one on record—and the only codes that weren’t on record were those of Counselors and Tribunes. Had he been a Counselor centuries before? I wondered. It was certainly possible. With him, there was more than met the eye.
The basic hand-to-hand instruction was where I had discovered that I could half time-slide and speed my movements while staying in the now. Sammis could not only do that, but detect and anticipate that skill, I had discovered, much to my chagrin. I had tried to catch him with a partial slide, and he’d caught me, flipped me on my shoulders, and delivered a solid thwack to my rear as I’d gone down.
“First,” he had lectured me, “you learn how to fight. Then you combine it with undertime abilities. Right now, a really good hand-to-hand fighter could beat you without too much difficulty, no matter how you jumped through time.”
I hadn’t believed him, and it showed on my face. As a trainee, particularly after that attitude adjustment test, I’d been pretty cocky.
Sammis challenged me. “Go ahead. I’ll stay put. Go on.”
I had been upset at being put down in front of Ferrin and Patrice, perhaps because they’d done so well with the classroom stuff. I hadn’t thought, just charged Sammis, sliding at the last instant and figuring to come out behind him.
Instead of surprising him, my chin had arrived on his open palm. I could have ended up with a snapped neck. From that point on, I had listened to what he wanted.
Now, with Heimdall waiting in the shadows to do me in if I gave him half a chance, I needed more than basics or the smattering of better techniques. I wanted everything Sammis could give me.
I decided to do it formally. I went to Baldur and asked his permission to spend part of each day training with Sammis to improve my skills.
“That’s no problem. I’ll enter it on your training record in the proper doublescript,” Baldur said, almost kindly.
I was confused.
“Loki, you’re feeling that you’ve neglected something, and that you need more skills. Your work here is superb, and I think the Guard would benefit from your efforts to broaden your capabilities. Let’s leave it at that.”
Baldur must have gotten to Sammis before I did, because Sammis said “Of course” … with a catch. The catch was that he and Wryan worked as a team, and that as a team they would train me.
“Besides, it would take two or more to really force you to upgrade your skills,” Sammis noted.
Always the veiled hints, the messages within messages … I had never thought how many times this sort of information was passed in the Guard.
Working with Sammis and Wryan, even for just a hundred units a day, was more pleasure than toil. Each of them sensed what the other was about to do and reacted. According to the rumors, they’d always been together. No one could remember them not teaming.
One night at Hera’s, Verdis told me that they predated Odin Thor in the Guard. I hadn’t thought that much about it, didn’t have a chance to draw out Verdis because of the noise, and didn’t get back to it because for a while our schedules just didn’t coincide. At the time, Ferrin was delivering a formal oration in high Weindrian about the subject of uncovered ankles, which had most of the juniors in stitches. It was funny, but not that funny.
Verdis, Tyron, and Loragerd were all enjoying it when I left.
The next afternoon I broached the subject to my tutors. “Odin Thor has been hanging around the Tower for centuries. When did he last take a diving mission?”
Wryan screwed her elvish features into a wry gesture. Sammis stroked his chin and looked at the equipment room floor. Finally, he answered. “I couldn’t say exactly, but I think the follow-up work to the Frost Giants. He had some problems then.”
Wryan gave a tiny headshake, but my jaw dropped open. Two million years back. How could anyone retain sanity over two million years even with memory therapy and the regenerator?
“How … his mind … I mean …” I stammered.
“Not that bad,” commented Wryan. “Even when he started he never had much of one.”
Sammis glared over at his partner. I wasn’t certain if the glare were real or fake.
I faced Sammis. “You’re older than Odin Thor.”
“No.” He grinned. “But she is.”
I looked at Wryan. Never would I have guessed it. With Freyda, and
I thought Freyda was only a couple of thousand years old, I could see the darkness of age behind the clear eyes in a way I couldn’t precisely explain.
Wryan seemed just a bit older than I was, and Sammis looked like her brother, sort of.
“You two are still taking missions.”
They glanced at each other, then back at me.
Wryan spoke next. “Who wants to sit around and let their minds rot in front of a useless fireplace or an unused console? You keep young by doing.”
“But … you could be Counselors, Tribunes …”
Dead silence. Sammis pointedly stared at the floor once more. Seemed embarrassed. Why did he seem so flustered?
“Loki, you rush in … don’t you?” Wryan asked gently, humorously, but her smile held a trace of sadness.
“You two confuse me. My span is measured in tens of years, not hundreds of thousands, like yours.”
I was missing something, but the more I tried to pin it down, the more it skittered away.
“Perhaps … perhaps we are confusing,” concluded Wryan briskly. “But now,” and she changed the subject, “you’ve got more to learn about knife work.”
She and Sammis started buckling on protective armor. I stood there holding mine.
Tribunes … Sammis and Wryan … when … and then it hit—the Triumvirate! Odin Thor and the two others, the first three Tribunes. I swallowed. I’d always thought that the Odin Thor who rattled around was just named after the first Odin Thor, not the original article. But that meant that Sammis and Wryan were among the first of the Guard.
I started to strap on the armor, but my motions were slow because my thoughts were stirred up.
The legend was all I had to go on, because the Archives records, at least those which were open, were sketchy at best. There was a sealed section, but that had been sealed by … Sammis and Wryan and Odin Thor.
According to the tales, the Triumvirate had created the structure of the Guard, with the Counselors and the Tribunes, to fight the menace of the Frost Giants. More than half the Guard had perished in the long battle, and in the end, entire systems had been reduced to molten slag. But the legends never really dealt with afterward. The war had been won.