Ray Aldridge - The Orpheus Machine

“As you say,” the neutral voice agreed.

Gejas stared at the burning ruins of the camp, shocked. He couldn’t imagine what had gone so terribly wrong. He turned his gaze to the black submarine that now lay just outside the surf line. How could such a potent vessel belong to the slaver Corean? Inexplicable, he thought.

A wave of dizziness broke over him and drew his attention back to his wounds. He peeled back the tattered fabric over his right thigh and saw the pulsing of arterial blood.

He clutched at the medical limpet in indecision. He had intended the limpet for The Yellowleaf — but if he didn’t use it in the next few seconds, he’d pass out and then die. And who would help The Yellowleaf if he were dead? He peeled the limpet’s wrapper off and set it over the wound. He set its parameters to preclude anesthesia or sedation, and activated it. Instantly its probes slid into the ragged flesh and pinched off the artery.

He inventoried his weapons: a knife, a couple of stun grenades, a short-range one-shot pinbeam, a carbon-fiber cestus, a chemical interrogation kit. He cursed his improvidence. How, injured and with such pitiful armament, could he hope to best a man as deadly as Ruiz Aw?

He was barely clinging to consciousness. It occurred to him that he’d better hide or Ruiz Aw would find him helpless as a rabbit. He gritted his teeth and squirmed off through the boulders, careful not to expose himself to the sub’s eyes.

He eventually found a place beneath a tumble of eroded concrete, from which he could watch the beach. He lay there, trembling on the edge of a blackout, wondering what new disaster would assail him.

A sponson on the sub’s armored flank lifted up to reveal a small automated longboat. The longboat sped toward the beach, bursting through the surf in a high plume of spray and then grounding on a bar a few meters off the sand.

Gejas saw Ruiz Aw and The Yellowleaf running across the beach toward the other prisoners.

Then he saw how he had been deceived. The black-haired primitive woman wore the hetman’s armor; she ran at an awkward shuffling pace, completely unlike the easy predatory lope of The Yellowleaf. Apparently the armor fit her poorly.

The Yellowleaf was dead — how else could the locator beacon have been extracted from her brain? That was his last desolate thought before darkness came down to cover him.

Ruiz felt NAKED. As they ran, he tried to keep Nisa between his unprotected body and the boulders Gejas had taken refuge in. Her armor might turn away the tongue’s fire; if not, Nisa wouldn’t long survive Ruiz’s death.

But nothing happened. They reached the others, and Ruiz shouted, “Into the boat, everyone!”

Molnekh and Dolmaero gaped at him, bewildered by the apparition of The Yellowleaf trotting obediently at Ruiz’s side, but Gunderd jumped up and began wading out toward the autoboat.

“Come on,” Ruiz urged, and, taking Nisa’s arm, splashed through the knee-deep water.

The others finally began moving, just as Gunderd pulled himself over the gunwale. The scholar turned and held out a hand to help Nisa aboard, and Ruiz boosted her in unceremoniously.

Dolmaero was a little harder to hoist, but between them, Ruiz and Gunderd managed. The instant Molnekh and Ruiz clambered aboard and settled on the metal benches, the longboat shuddered and backed off the bar with a grating sound.

“Where are we going?” Dolmaero asked.

“I don’t know,” said Ruiz. “But it’s almost certain to be better than Roderigo.”

Gunderd rubbed his chin in a now-familiar gesture. He looked over his shoulder at the grim shape of the sub. “On any other world but Sook, I would have to agree with you, Ruiz Aw.”

Ruiz shrugged. “What else can we do? Even if we’re giving ourselves to some ordinary slaver, it’s still an improvement over Roderigo.” He saw that Nisa was struggling with the latches of her helmet and he laid his splinter gun aside to help her.

She pulled the helmet off with a gusty sigh of relief. “It stank in there,” she said.

The neutral voice came from a grill built into the forward bulkhead. “Welcome.” It sounded slightly less anonymous, as though the unseen speaker had cut back the filtering. Perhaps, Ruiz thought, a person who knew the speaker well might guess his identity. “We’ll have to get you aboard as quickly as possible; the Roderigans got off a distress call before I destroyed their comm unit. Their vessel is just over the horizon, coming fast.”

The speaker seemed businesslike and unthreatening, but Ruiz felt the anxiety in his stomach twist a few turns tighter. He detected a tantalizing familiarity in the disguised voice.

They were halfway to the sub, moving rapidly. Ruiz put his hand down for his gun and it wasn’t there.

He looked up slowly. Molnekh, two benches forward, held the splinter gun in a steady hand. The cruciform eye of the muzzle watched Ruiz, unwavering. Molnekh wore an odd smile on his cadaverous face, an expression compounded of happy achievement, faint embarrassment, and caution.

Dolmaero shook his head in bewilderment. “Molnekh? What are you doing?”

“My work, as is proper,” said the voice from the grill.

Molnekh nodded contentedly, but his attention never left Ruiz.

Ruiz finally recognized the voice. “It’s Corean,” he said. “It’s Corean on the sub.” Shock made him breathless. How had he been so easily translated from the uncertain reality of the desolate island, into this familiar nightmare? His thoughts slowed, seemed to linger over irrelevancies.

“Molnekh?” asked Dolmaero.

“Molnekh belongs to Corean now,” Ruiz said to Dolmaero in a faint voice. “The Gencha remade him.”

Dolmaero put his hand to his mouth and regarded Molnekh with an expression of fascinated loathing.

Ruiz glanced at Nisa and saw that she was very pale. Her mouth was a taut line, her eyes huge. He felt a sort of abstract relief that she was still herself, still human — and at the same time a great regret. That they should have struggled so, across the hostile face of Sook, only to return to Corean… it seemed a sad dreadful futility. For a few heartbeats, he lost all will to resist.

Gunderd, who sat just forward of Ruiz, looked at Molnekh, and his face showed nothing but a sort of bland curiosity. Always the scholar, Ruiz thought, with a touch of bitterness.

The boat was no more than fifty meters from the sub, and slowing to come alongside, when a pneumatic hiss sounded across the water. The sponson armor lifted to reveal the old cyborged pirate, Marmo. Marmo waved his ruptor in an oddly comradely manner.

Ruiz almost waved back.

Gunderd turned to Ruiz, so that Molnekh couldn’t see his face. The scholar smiled and winked, to Ruiz’s puzzlement.

Gunderd looked forward and pointed. He spoke in a voice brimming with pleasurable discovery. “So that’s the beautiful Corean!”

Molnekh turned to look, as if compelled.

Ruiz went over the side.

As he plunged down in a thrash of bubbles, he heard the thrumming sound of the splinter gun.

Nisa closed her eyes as parts of Gunderd’s left arm spattered her and a few splinters ricocheted from her armored torso.

Gunderd screamed, a dreadful throat-tearing sound — but a moment later he was drowned out by the giant amplified voice of Corean. “You idiot!” she roared. “Oh, you worthless dirtworld moron.”

Nisa slowly opened her eyes, afraid of what she might see. It was bad enough. Gunderd, white with shock, clutched at the stump of his arm, trying to stop the blood that spouted from it.

But Ruiz was gone. When she started to lean toward the gunwale that he had rolled over, to see if there was any blood in the water, Molnekh jerked his gun toward her. His eyes weren’t human, not at all. Apparently he had taken his owner’s criticism to heart. “Sit still,” he hissed.