Ray Aldridge - The Orpheus Machine

But before he could make the first joyful sound, he felt the lust of a million greedy souls, and realized that all over SeaStack fighters would be loading into assault craft, preparing to attack the stronghold he had just won.

“Oh,” he groaned. “Oh, no.”

“Exactly,” said the commander. “Roderigo commands you to defend the fortress until they can get reinforcements to us. Prevent any other force from gaining control. No matter what it costs.”

Ruiz Aw was lost. He and Junior had wandered through the endless maze for an hour, meeting no one. Occasionally they’d heard the sounds of rapidly retreating feet, but always distant and distorted by the twisting tunnels. Sometimes the sounds seemed closer — the clank of machinery or high-pitched voices. The floors of the tunnel were slippery, the walls gave off the same dim red light. Uninteresting rubbish lined most of the tunnels.

Apart from those mysterious sounds, there was an air of long disuse about the areas they had passed through.

Ruiz paused at a wheel-spoke nexus, where there were seven possible choices of route. He looked at the dataslate and could find no correspondence with the map Somnire had given him. “I have the feeling that we really haven’t gotten into the main enclave. I’d swear we were in an abandoned network.”

“You’re lost,” said Junior sourly.

“Maybe so,” said Ruiz. “How’s your oxygen?”

“Down to sixty percent. You?”

“Worse than that.” Ruiz felt a twinge of resentment, that his clone excelled him even in so minor a thing as breathing — but then he reminded himself that breathing, after all, was not so insignificant an accomplishment.

“What should we do?” The clone leaned against the side wall.

“Let’s rest and think,” said Ruiz, and sat down on the nearest dry spot. He laid his ruptor across his knees and closed his eyes.

“You rest,” said Junior. “I’ll think. While I’m at it, I’ll wander around a bit. Don’t worry, I won’t go so far I can’t get back.”

Junior went away down the corridor, his armored head twitching from side to side — a beast scenting its prey. Ruiz opened his mouth to protest, then closed it. Let his younger self try.

When they arrived at the bottom of the pit, Nisa was almost afraid to look, for fear that she would see Ruiz’s body lying on the platform… or in the sump.

But if he were one of the huddled forms half-sunk in the pink slime, she couldn’t tell. Corean seemed confident that Ruiz had survived. She unloaded her prisoners briskly and attached throat leads to each, linking them into a coffle. Nisa found herself staring at the thin dirty neck of Flomel; behind her was Dolmaero.

Molnekh held Flomel’s lead in one bony hand and gave the conjuror his most cheerful smile. Muscles jumped in Flomel’s shoulders; Nisa almost felt sorry for him, treacherous fool though he had been.

Corean finished conferring with her Deltan commander, a man called Kroone.

She came toward the prisoners, bouncing lightly on her feet, a look of ferocious happiness on her perfect mouth.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” she said. “We have fish to fry, slayers to skin.”

So they moved off, the coffle in the center of a formation of armored men. Nisa would have pinched her nose shut, had her hands been free. The stink at the bottom of the pit was so intense that she felt a bit dizzy. In fact she was beginning to get a strange wavery head-swimming sensation, as if the unpleasant reality about her had begun some subtle shift toward a new configuration. It reminded her a bit of the way she’d felt on the few occasions she had smoked snake oil.

She glanced back at Dolmaero. The usually stolid Guildmaster wore a faint nostalgic smile, and Nisa remembered that he had been an oil addict, back on Pharaoh.

She noticed that Corean and her escorts had all closed the faceplates of their armor.

Already the pirate Lords had brought force to bear on Gejas. The Roderigan destroyer had taken significant damage defending the Yubere lagoon, though it sank two pirate vessels in the lagoon’s entrance. The pirates could easily have disabled the destroyer had they coordinated their attacks — but they were fighting each other at the same time they were trying to fight their way into the fortress. At the moment the pirates were busy outside. Gejas’s forces had used the respite to improve the lagoon’s defenses.

Gejas began to think that he might indeed be able to hold the fortress until reinforcements arrived. And then he would be free to follow Ruiz Aw, down to the place where he would begin the slayer’s punishment.

He discounted the possibility that Ruiz Aw would actually carry out his threat and destroy the treasure; the man would have to be stupid as well as mad.

But the pirate forces gradually filled the channels outside, and then one of them put sappers to work on an angled tunnel, driving it into the far side of the stack, trying to bypass the fortress.

Gejas cursed violently and dispatched a squad of cyborgs to an upper level of the stack, with instructions to drop satchel charges on the tunnelers.

Most disquieting of all was a report from his observers topside. Two large Shard vessels hovered above the stack, apparently monitoring the battle for infringements of Shard law.

When Corean called a halt, Nisa at first was unable to drag her attention away from her feet, on which she had concentrated all of her attention in an attempt to avoid seeing the frightening changes in the others. In the last few minutes, she had seen Corean and the other armored persons lose their humanity, become dire insectile creatures, stalking along on legs that moved too quickly. The Moc, ranging ahead, had become an even more demonic shape, as dreadful as Bhas the Dry God. Flomel’s narrow back had become the back of a rodentlike creature, and Molnekh a walking corpse, dry bones covered by tatters of dried skin.

When finally she looked up, she saw, coming down the tunnel toward her, a great crowd of grotesquely disfigured humans, surrounding a trio of Gencha. The Gencha appeared to be the only solid objects in a sea of shimmering misperception — as though the drug that filled her head ceased to affect her when she looked at those ugly heaps of alienness. So she kept her eyes on the Gencha.

Corean went to the head of her group of fighters, pushing them out of her way in her eagerness. “Stop! Or I’ll set the Moc on you,” she shouted to the crowd of approaching grotesques, which did in fact stop, though they continued to mill about uneasily.

Eventually a woman came forward, a woman with ears set like feathers along the backs of her thin arms, and a tuft of red hair growing from the tip of her long nose. “What do you want here?” she called in a trembling voice.

“The cooperation you owe me, as Alonzo Yubere’s heir.” Corean took off her helmet and shook back her black hair. “Look at me; memorize my face,” she said. “In every way Yubere protected you, I will protect you. In every way that you aided Yubere, you must aid me. Yubere is dead; only I can stand between you and the universe, which hates you.”

The disfigured woman put her hands to her face; Nisa noticed that on the back of each hand was a large pink nipple. “How can we know the truth of this? Already this dayperiod, two men have come to kill and steal. And now you, with your monster and your shells.”

Corean’s nostrils flared. To Nisa’s drug-dazzled eyes, she seemed some sort of hunting beast. “Yes,” said Corean. “Those men are my enemies. Take me to them, and I will dispose of them for you.”

The woman wailed, a thin sound of confusion, and looked around at the Gencha, as if begging for direction. “No, we must know the reality of this. Too important a decision, this, to risk on the currents of chance.”