Jo Clayton - Shadow of the Warmaster

The eyepoint moved, dipped into the sleeping cell. Four bodies on the floor.

The eyepoint dropped to hover over the nearest. It swept from head to toe, raced back to the nape of the Hordar’s neck and focused on a hexagonal black spot half-obscured by a strand of hair.

Elmas Ofka bit a cry in half. After a minute she said, “Dart.” Her hands closed over the back of Pel’s chair, tightening until it creaked under the pressure of her fingers. “All of them?”

The eyepoint continued to move. It searched the other three, centimeter by centimeter. It found more darts. It swept out, sped to the next occupied cell and dived inside.

Elmas Ofka saw Jirsy’s startled, frozen face and stopped breathing for a long frozen moment. Then she shrieked with rage and grief, grabbed at her hair, tore loose hanks of it; Lirrit Ofka screamed, clawed at her face, her nails scoring bloody lines in her flesh. Then Karrel Goza and Jamber Fausse were there, holding them, confining their struggles, muffling their cries, letting them bite and kick and scratch, accepting the pain as part of sharing the grief, a grief that grew more bitter as the eyepoint moved on and they saw the other dead, as Karrel Goza saw his cousin Geres sprawled in the Y-branch.

Aslan watched and automatically noted her impressions on the pad; she felt uncomfortable about writing while this was happening, she’d known little Jirsy Indiz and liked her; nonetheless, she wrote. The isya phenomenon was endlessly interesting. She hadn’t understood before this how powerfully those bonds operated once the isya was formed; the strength of it was suddenly made visible for her; the pain of the severance was apparent in the violence of the women’s reactions. Her stylus flew across the battered page. More than kin , she wrote, closer than lovers. Karrel Goza seeing his cousin’s body, wept, face red, anger and grief. None of this self-mutilation, this loss of control. The difference explainable by isya bonding? Or by culturally determined sex role differentiation? Sex roles complex here. Women powerful/powerless. Huvved/Hordar very different, their ideas about women. Suggest someone come, study isya phenom. Trakkar je Neves? Her subject, yes. Contact, see if interest. Outsiders reaction isya hysteria revealing. Consider. History of? Personality differential? Profession, its effect on…

Quale leaned against the console, his face shuttered. He was looking away from the women, shut off from them by something in his past or in his character that washed out the flashes of strength he could show and left him looking oddly empty, as if he were so tired of living that he’d lost the ability to feel either joy or pain.

Adelaar looked over her shoulder, distaste her most visible reaction. She went back to what she was doing. Jaunniko called you one icy femme, Mama, maybe he was right. No, that’s wrong. We’ve clawed at each other often enough; I can’t accuse you of lacking passion, Mama. You’re just not interested in other people’s passion.

The Rau’s ears twitched, closed in on themselves like fingers making a fist. He kept working.

Elmas Ofka went suddenly quiet. She sucked in a breath, in and in and in, the soft sound seemed to last forever, to mute the other sounds on the Bridge, then she let the breath out. Again out and out, a long rasping sigh. She pushed against Jamber Fausse’s arms. He dropped them and stepped back. “Lirrit!” Her voice was sharp, demanding.

Lirrit broke a sob in half, stood in shuddering silence for another few breaths, then she pushed at Karrel Goza’s chest and turned in a grim, controlled silence to watch what was happening on the screen.

“Who?” Elmas Ofka said, her voice soft as thistledown and cold.

Quale straightened, seemed to shake himself, sloughing the detachment that had grayed him down. “Parnalee,” he said.

She swung around, her temper flaring, but before she could say anything, Churri spoke. “Parnalee,” he said. “He played you like a gamefish, Hanifa. That’s his business. He’s good at it.”

“I don’t understand.”

Churri shrugged. “Who does. Crazy is crazy.”

Elmas Ofka closed her eyes, brushed a hand across her face. “I see. Find him. Now.”

Quale raised a brow. “Why bother? Leave him in his hole and let him fry.”

Elmas Ofka trembled, controlled herself immediately. “Find him,” she said. “We can argue what happens afterward.”

Adelaar didn’t wait to be asked; she huddled over her sensor pads, called up strings of words and numbers, scanned them, repeated the process several times, selected some, re-entered them. Aslan watched the image flow, expand, contract, change in little and in toto, the glyphs and figures like minute green demons dancing to the beat of her mother’s fingertips. The schematic filled the screen again, centered on the Bridge, the Navel. It flashed away in pie-slice wedges, a game of jackstraws with Mama’s fingers picking surely through them. Shivering among the green lines were fuzzy red lights and several pale ambers, arranged in clusters. Each time a light appeared, she exploded a small white dot in the center of it and went on without further reaction. One by one she swept through the wedges until she’d done them all; Aslan frowned, there seemed to be more wedges than the geometry of the ship allowed for. Mama’s magic, play the numbers, ah! she bit back a giggle and scribbled on her pad.

Adelaar swung around. “I’ve located all lifesources that the ship can detect. That means exactly what it says. There may be dead areas, this is an antique and badly maintained, and there are places in her deliberately kept off the record; if he knows about those places, well, he knows a lot too much. You’re wrong, Quale. We don’t dare let him wait us out.”

Leaving them to chew that over, she kicked around, touched a sensor and leaned back to watch the screen as the Brain flipped from spot to spot, froze momentarily on a scene, long enough to take in the details, then moved on to the next. Akkin Siddaki and Tazmin Duvvar supervising the tag end of the body-gathering. Flip-flip, body squads walking tiredly to the last few bodies, a whore here, a scutsweep there.

After a short stretch of looking on while the Brain flashed through scenes that she’d seen before, Adelaar moved restlessly, then pushed her chair around and leaned toward Pels; for several minutes she talked in an undertone to him. The Rau listened, nodded, then got busy on the sensor pads at his substation, his eyes fixed on the notation screen. Over their heads the images flickered from the stunned shipfolk in the sleeping cells to the scattered bodies of the dead. Adelaar sat back, satisfied.

The eyepoint jumped to the Hordar and their prisoners marching up from the Drive Sector. Kanlan Gercik and his cousin Zhurev Iavru were the first to appear, scouting ahead for ambushes. The wounded west-coaster came next; he was stretched on an improvised litter being carried by Meskel Suffor and another west-coaster. Then three Hordar from Gercik’s Raiders. Then the captive Drive Gang with more litters, two wounded, one dead. One stunned and heavily unconscious Huvved. Harli Tanggаr had her sister isya Melly Birah with her and two women from another isya on the far side of the captives, all of them keeping a fierce eye on their prisoners. Behind them came the rest of the squad, the rearguard.

The eyepoint left them, whipped to the drive room, hovered momentarily over the cooling corpses, leaped again and focused on an ancient eremite living in a rat’s nest of scraps and paper and scavenged bits of equipment, filthy white hair knotted on top his head, a few threads of beard, vermin crawling in and out of his hair, in and out of his layered filthy clothing.

Quale rubbed his hand along his jaw. “Makes you itch,” he said.