Кристофер Банч - The Return of the Emperor

Otho had drawn away and was conversing with Alex Kilgour. Cind saw Sten look absently around the room. She thought she had never seen a being so lonely. Her heart went out to all the imagined horrors the great Sten must conceal in his breast. She ached to coax them out, to comfort him. Sten's eyes swept over her… then… Ohmigod… He's looking back! At me! She grew uncomfortably warm, and then his eyes moved on. Oh, dear, oh, me, if only they had lingered. Would he see her worth? Understand her passion for her only true friend—the long-range rifle? Of course he would. A great warrior like Sten would immediately know her feelings about such matters. Cind determined that somehow, some way, they would meet.

She turned back to her meal, unaware of how nasty an affliction youth could be.

Alex drained the horn and let Otho refill it. The Bhor chieftain had pulled him aside and was drunkenly quizzing him. Sten's manner was greatly troubling him, Otho said. His mood was so dark, and Otho was at a loss to dispel it. He told Alex he had only gotten a thin smile when he had reminded Sten of their first meetings, back when the Bhor had been handing out Jann captives to all the ships and bloodily executing them in the ancient, joyful Bhor rite of The Blessing.

"Remember that clottin' Jann's face as we stuffed him in the lock?" Otho said. Alex remembered. "By my mother's gnarly beard, was that a funny sight. He was so scared his face was screwed up like we'd given his nose a dozen twirls.

"It was only two or three—and we'd hardly tortured him at all. Then we fired him out to ice up his guts and drank his soul to hell! Ah, those were the days."

He clapped Alex on the back with a paw like a half-ton club. Even Kilgour was ruffed a mite by that. "Aye," was all he said. But before Otho could think that he shared Sten's glum disease, Alex remembered to roar with laughter at the thought of those gory times.

"What's wrong with our Sten?" Otho asked. "There's no fire to him. Point out the being who has wronged our brother and I vow we will slay him now!"

Alex would have been delighted if the matter were so simple and Sten's dilemma could be cured with an old-fashioned Bhor Blessing. Right now, the thought of guts in space was far more cheery than any Sten had entertained since they had fled Earth.

Kilgour had run like the gates of hell had been unlocked and all the demons in it were at his heels. This was not much of an exaggeration. If Kilgour had not acted so quickly, not only would they have been pursued, but they would have been caught. Alex threw caution and the laws of physics to the wind. He jinked and jolted and veered the little tacship about until every joint pairing gave a tortured scream of pain. He used every trick he had been taught and invented a few, besides, to elude detection. Once clear, he transmitted a fast "run like bleedin' drakh" to Mahoney, then shut down and made like a ghost.

Mahoney would have to take care of himself. Th' braw gr't clot's used't' it, Alex thought, although not unfondly. Kilgour liked Mahoney. Considered him a Gaelic kin. Alex hoped Ian made it intact. But there was little else he could do about it. If they all survived—and that was certainly an immeasurable "if"—they had a fallback, emergency rendezvous point. Not Poppajoe's. They had agreed, if the mission went awry, not to test their luck twice there. But all that would be in the very doubtful future.

Kilgour assumed the wrath of the privy council would be so great that they would go to any and all means to bring them to bay. He was correct. So—where to hide? Where could they go to ground? There were two crucial elements the hiding place would require. The first was that no one was likely to look for them there. The second—and far more important—was that if anyone did look, he and Sten would not be betrayed.

It took awhile to figure it out. Sten was no help. How could he be? The lad was definitely bad off. Alex had strapped Sten to the medtable in the tacship's tiny treatment center and punched in a trauma program. He could hear the little hisses and tricklings of the medic bots at work. The sounds were far too busy for comfort. Eventually, as he dodged in and out of warp to throw off pursuit, they calmed a bit. He looked into the small cabin and saw Sten lying on the medtable. A little less pale. But still out—puir, wee lad.

The perfect hideout finally dawned on him. It involved calling in a debt, but there were few beings who owed Sten more. He punched in a course for the Lupus Cluster—and the Bhor.

They were a bit more than halfway through the journey when Sten was finally able to get about feebly. As company, he was clottin' awful. Stone face. Absolute silence. He conversed rarely, and then it was confined to a few grunts. At first Alex thought it because he was still on the road to recovery. Then the trauma-center computer informed him that no further treatment was necessary and gave Sten a dean bill of health. At last, Kilgour had to admit that his friend had suffered a far greater wound than the physical ones that had temporarily incapacitated him.

He hadn't the faintest idea how to deal with it, or even how to bring the topic up. So he gritted his teeth and left it alone.

Then one day Sten broached the matter himself. They were eating dinner—in total silence. Sten had lately formed the habit of staring straight into his dish while he ate. Never speaking, never looking to one side or another. And certainly never raising his eyes as he shoveled in food—more as if it were fuel than anything potentially flavorful. Kilgour watched him out of the corner of his eye.

Sten popped in a hunk of something. Chewed. Swallowed. Another hunk. Another mechanical repetition. Suddenly he stopped midchew. His face grew dark with inner fury. Then he spat the food out as if it were poison, slammed to his feet, and slammed just as loudly out. That time, Alex decided not to ignore the incident. He waited a few moments and then went to Sten's quarters. The door was open, and Sten was pacing back and forth, working off the angry energy. Alex waited at the door until he was noticed. Sten saw him, stopped, then shook his head.

"I'm sorry, Alex," he said. Kilgour determined to bite the bullet and shake Sten up if he could.

"Y' aught't'be," he said, forcing irritation in his tone. "Y' clottin' aught't'be."

He went on, reaming Sten's butt. Sten was told that once again, he had spoiled Alex's dinner. And he was such terrible company that he had driven Kilgour to thoughts of murder, or suicide. He had been behaving like an adolescent, Alex said, and it was time he grabbed himself by whatever pride he had left and started thinking about how he was affecting others, such as his longest and dearest friend, one Alex Kilgour.

Alex felt like drakh when he started—hitting the lad while he was down. But as he went on he warmed to the task. Sten had been getting to him, dammit! And he needed to be told. Then he saw that Sten was not listening—or was only partly listening. His head was down and his fists were clenched until the knuckles were white.

"I blew it!" Sten hissed. "I clottin' blew it!"

"Aye," Alex said. " We did thae, lad. I' spades. But y'ken, 'tis nae th' first time. Nae wil't be th' last."

He had known all along what was haunting Sten. And with the opening he had just achieved, he tried to put it in perspective. He talked about all the other missions that had gone awry, the heaps of corpses left behind. They had suffered far worse things in the past, had witnessed and been partly responsible for far more dead. Alex knew he was pissing in the wind. But he had to try, just the same.

This was not just a sudden case of the guilts. It went back to Sten's reasons for abandoning his career more than six years before. The Tahn conflict certainly had been the costliest in terms of lives, as well as credits, of any war ever. Even on their own infinitely unimportant level, Sten and Alex had been forced to sacrifice so many lives that the foul taste of blood could never be washed out.