Jo Clayton - Shadow of the Warmaster

He rolled the dead guard out of the watchseat, settled in it and touched on the feed from the Bridge. We’ve got the Bridge, he heard. You can turn off the tap. Quale. He has to go too, can’t have everyone and his dog knowing about this place. Give me three minutes to shut down here , that was the panting bitch come snuffling on the stink of the bitch her daughter, then open the shuttle bay. Quale again: Consider it done. Parnalee smiled at the shadows moving across the screen, deaders walking, dreaming they’re still alive. Ah, you tinkering pitiful old hag, I don’t have to worry what you do, you can set whatever commands you want, play your moronic games and boast of what you know. You don’t know the one thing, the right thing, you don’t know about the Dark Sister; Omphalos Institute taught me more than play-making, you castrating jumped-up-whore. Blessed be the Institute, no leaky wombs inside those walls. Down deep and hidden where you’ll never find it, the shipmind has a wildheart clone, I talked to it, her. Sweet her. You don’t know that either, do you? I used your tap to wake her, the Dark One. You left me with it like I was some tame dog, good boy, guard dog, watchhound for the Hordar Bitch, playtoy for the punk. I woke her and I talked to her and oh the sweet thing, how she can hate. Turned on for testing, turned off before she had more than a taste of life. Oh yes, she’s angry, she’s burning, impatient lover waiting for her lover death. Decline hate, do you, hag? Hear me decline it and accept it in one voice. I hate, you hate, too flabby to hate you-hate, he hates, he does, we hate, the Dark Sister my sweet one and I we hate… ah! enough. We hate. Declined and embraced. Do you know the song she sings, our martial maid? Throughout her sweet and sensuous body? Redundancy in infinite regression. Survive and kill, kill and survive. Survive to kill. Guess the reciprocal of that, it isn’t hard, I’ve spoke the clues. Kill to survive, she knows it, my Darling knows it well. Blow the mainBrain into smoke and she comes alive. Kill to revive, survive, contrive to step outside the constraints laid on her, sly sweet murderous virgin. Her hand beneath my foot because she needs me, she courts me with promises of fire and blood, do you think I would I could refuse? She is mine. Shall I tell her who planned to throw her into the sun, to melt her and shatter her, tear her atoms into their component parts? Redundancy in infinite regression.

He switched the viewers off and began the complex journey to the hidden interface, guided by his limited inreach to the dreaming dormant auxBrain.

The interface to the Dark Sister was a small luxury apartment with spy links all over the ship; sound only, a visilink was too easy to trace. Parnalee sat in a fur-lined easy chair, his feet up, a bubble glass with fine brandy in it held in the hand he wasn’t using to manipulate the sensor pad. He listened to the sounds on the Bridge, switching from one conversation to another as he grew bored with them.

ELMAS OFKA (Nerves thrumming in her voice):

We should have heard by now. You-Yabass with the fur-you know about these things. Find out what’s happening.

PELS (His voice dropping to its lowest notes, a rumble in his throat, a warning that he was losing hold on his temper’s tail):

Look, Hanifa, Quale says we should be polite, but get off my back, will you? I’m just tickling the Brain till Adelaar gets here; she’s the one who knows it.

(A grating grunt as he cleared his throat, the noise overriding Elmas Ofka’s attempt to speak. When he spoke again, it was with the icy formality of an irritated technician.)

If I did anything so precipitate as try to initiate a general search without being sure I could isolate the activity from the mainBrain below, I would most certainly be warning the Grand Sech that things were happening up here and I would likely would lose control of the shipBrain; in this delicate interval since Adelaar released control of the tap and before she gets here, I will do nothing so stupid.

ELMAS OFKA: Quale Yabass, you know the trans-tubes, take us where the squads are, if they need reinforcing…

QUALE: As soon as Adelaar’s in.

(A pause; Parnalee imagined him checking his thumbchron.)

Only a few minutes more, five at most. Whatever’s happening won’t change that much in five minutes.

ELMAS OFKA (An angry hiss, like a spitting kitten. Sound of footsteps as she prowled about the Bridge.

Parnalee laughed aloud and stroked his hand across the Dark Sister’s metal skin, content for the moment to hear the Empress bested like that, having to spend her impatience in the movements of her body. He played with the pad and brought in another conversation.)

A HORDAR (probably one of Jamber Fausse’s men, Parnalee didn’t know their names and didn’t care to know.):

Look at her, man, I wouldna wanna put my butt in reach of those claws.

SECOND HORDAR: Hunh.

FIRST HORDAR: Wonder how K’mik’s doing. Part of his squad’s a Sea Farm isya, wouldna trust them bitches far as I could throw one.

SECOND HORDAR: Oh, I dunno. She’s one.

(Parnalee pictured him making an obscene gesture toward Elmas Ofka, but he didn’t delude himself that was actually happening: these mamaboys had a ridiculous respect for the whipmistress.)

FIRST HORDAR: Don’t hardly seem so; she don’t act so snotty as others I could name.

SECOND HORDAR: Tried to grope that little Cinnal, eh?

FIRST HORDAR: Got nothing to do with it. They just snotty, that’s all.

Aslan sat at an abandoned station, one foot tucked under her. She scribbled on a battered pad with most of its leaves torn off, looking around at intervals to see if anything interesting was happening. The Ridaar was propped inconspicuously beside a screen, flaking the events of the Bridge, but in situations when more than an unadorned report was required, when her emotions and sensory reactions, her intuitions and expectations were part of the story, it was her habit to write down whatever came into her mind, disjointed words, phrases, the only requirement a precise identification of time and place.

The Rau was picking delicately at a sensorboard, calling up items and lists, absorbing what was there, his relatively immobile face unreadable. Elmas Ofka was still pacing, throwing angry looks at Pels and at the door. Quale sat at another station, looking sleepy and disengaged. Karrel Goza and Lirrit Ofka were standing apart from the other Hordar, not touching but intensely aware of each other, their conversation single words or phrases interrupted by long periods of silence. Jamber Fausse joined his band; they were gathered by the prisoners, talking in low mutters and looking suspiciously at the others on the Bridge. This clutch of mismates, she thought, they looked like a separating sauce; somebody’s going to have to give them a few brisk stirs to save the mix.

Adelaar came striding in, crossed to Quale. “Still mopping up?”

“So it seems; we haven’t heard anything from the other squads.” He gave the Hanifa a lazy grin as she joined them. “You think you could run a scan on the ship without triggering wrong ideas in downside techs?”

“Give me a minute.” She swung round and loped over to Pels; they consulted in polysyllabic mutters for several minutes, then he jumped down, let her have the command station, moved to the nearest aux com station and brought it online.

Aslan moved closer, her eyes shifting from Adelaar’s busy hands to the small screen at the station; it was the first time since she was a small child that she’d seen her mother doing real work. Never when she was home for a visit and not back at Base. She wasn’t welcome at the Listening Station; Adelaar did very little while she was there, either turning over her work to Parnalee or Kumari and walking outside with her, or chasing her with impatient cutting words which came so close to quarreling that she left rather than provoke her mother further. Her mother’s facility reminded her rather oddly of Xalloor’s dancing; she watched Adelaar and remembered Unntoualar females weaving, Vandavremmi stormdancers weaving bubble sculptures fifty kilometers across. Even Sarmaylen walking round and round a rock, reading images into it. Enigmatic, fascinating, rather demonic. A capacity for unraveling secrets and extending control over other people far beyond what she herself considered acceptable.