Judgment at Proteus

THIRTY-TWO

I’d suspected Riijkhan’s grandiose offer hadn’t been driven by magnanimity, or even by some strange nod toward future history. But it wasn’t until the line of Humans and Bellidos began to file through the hatchway under Shonkla-raa supervision that I realized just how low Riijkhan’s motivations really were.

No matter how good the ship looked, it was very, very old. Old electronics and power sources had a tendency to decay over time, and depending on how much power was running through a given system such decay could be lethal.

So the slaves would go first. They would be the ones to turn on lights and power systems, and along the way to also trigger any faults or short-circuits or pressurized chemical tank failures. They would take the risks and die so their masters could live.

Riijkhan went in on the third wave, taking Bayta, McMicking, Morse, and me with him. We didn’t go far, ending up in what looked like a control/monitor room about twenty meters in from the hatchway. The leading edge of Humans and Shonkla-raa had already come by, and had used one of the Vipers to power up the banks of monitors arranged across two of the walls. Most of the screens showed large rooms, though their details could only be vaguely made out in the dim lighting that was still the norm across most of the ship. A couple of the screens also showed wide corridors, and one of them showed the hatchway through which Humans, Bellidos, and Fillies were still streaming. Four of the Shonkla-raa had seated themselves in the chairs at the control board and were gazing intently at the rows of controls or cautiously manipulating dials and keys.

“Probably a security office,” McMicking said, nodding toward the board. “You see those holsters on each of the chairs? Just about the right size for extra sidearms.”

“Looks like a rifle rack over there, too,” I agreed, nodding toward an empty rack behind the desks.

“Shouldn’t a security office also have a set of floor plans?” Bayta asked. “I don’t see anything like that.”

“It’s probably all computerized,” I said. “Or else it’s supposed to be displayed over there,” I added, pointing to the blank side wall.

The words were barely out of my mouth when one of the Shonkla-raa did something to his controls, and the deck plans popped up right where I was pointing. I got a glimpse of a maze of corridors and rooms before the view shifted to another deck with an entirely different maze. That one lasted a couple of seconds and was replaced by another, then by another, and another. Most of the decks, I noted, had one or two bright red spots in various places, usually in one of the larger rooms. About the time the tenth deck came along, I tentatively concluded the dots were the locations of the monitor cameras.

Finally, the series ended. {Excellent,} Riijkhan said. While I’d been busy gawking at the deck plans, I saw now, he’d been recording the whole sequence on his reader. {The monitor locations will indicate the most important rooms. We’ll begin with those.}

{There are sixty of them,} one of the Shonkla-raa at the board reported. {Approximately one for each six of us. How do you wish to proceed?}

{You four will remain here,} Riijkhan ordered. {Divide the rest into sixty search teams, one for each location.}

{And the slaves?}

{Distribute them among the teams,} Riijkhan said. {Instruct each team to make certain one or more of their slaves travels at the front. The slaves will also take the lead in all activation procedures, especially those involving the Psika sculptures.}

{I obey.} The Shonkla-raa pulled out a comm and began speaking into it.

Riijkhan turned back to me. “It won’t be long now,” he said. “Are you hungry? I could send for food if you’d like.”

“I’m fine, thanks,” I said.

“I’d like something,” Bayta said suddenly. “And something to drink, too.”

“Of course,” Riijkhan said. Now that he was about to get everything his evil little heart desired, he was all courtesy and goodwill. He pulled out his comm and gave the order.

I looked at Bayta. She couldn’t really be wanting to eat, not under these circumstances. She held my eyes for a moment, and then nodded her head microscopically across the room toward Morse. Frowning, I looked casually over at him.

He was standing as rigid and emotionless as ever … but as I ran my eyes up and down him I saw that his right forefinger was moving. Not much, barely a quiver, probably the only freedom of movement he’d been able to find within the Shonkla-raa orders.

But it wasn’t random or nervous movement. The finger was twitching rhythmically, deliberately, tapping out code. Tapping out a single word, repeated over and over.

Stall.

“Fine,” I said with a sigh. “If you’re ordering out for Bayta anyway, I suppose I’ll have something, too. McMicking? Morse?”

“Morse has already eaten,” Riijkhan said. “And McMicking may not wish to weigh himself down.”

“I agree,” McMicking agreed evenly.

I felt my eyes narrow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I may yet need you, Compton,” Riijkhan said. “You’ve proved your value today, and there may be other small matters on which I’ll wish your advice. Bayta, as we both know, I’ll need to control you. Morse’s training also makes him of unusual value as one of my soldiers.”

His eyes glittered as he looked at McMicking. “McMicking, though, I don’t need.”

A shiver ran up my back. I’d hoped Riijkhan had forgotten about his casual offer of single combat with McMicking. “So make him one of your soldiers, too,” I said, a small part of my brain noting the incredible irony of me even suggesting such a thing. “You must still have some Modhran coral around.”

“Isantra Yleli was a loyal member of my force,” Riijkhan said. “So were the others of his group. McMicking killed them.”

“McMicking had nothing to do with Yleli’s death,” I insisted.

“No matter,” Riijkhan said. “He’s killed other Shonkla-raa. I’m curious to see his fighting technique.”

“It’s mostly just subterfuge and tricks,” McMicking said. “I’ll probably be a disappointment to you.”

“Do you refuse, then?”

“Not at all,” McMicking assured him. “Whenever you feel ready.”

For a moment they gazed at each other, Riijkhan looking like a tightly coiled spring, McMicking looking preternaturally calm. The room had gone very quiet, I noticed, not just because everyone had stopped talking but also because the sounds of men and Bellidos and Shonkla-raa in the corridor outside had faded away. A movement caught my eye, and I looked up at one of the hallway monitors to see a cluster of Fillies and their slaves walking briskly past on their way to their target room.

I looked at Morse. Almost, his twitching finger spelled out. Almost. “There is one problem with this,” I spoke up. “If you kill McMicking now, Osantra Riijkhan—or if he kills you, for that matter—one of you will never get to hear why I wasn’t surprised that you knew about these ships. Because I did know you were going to be told about them. In fact, I was counting on it.”

Riijkhan gave a snort. “You seek to stall,” he said. “You hope to save the life of your friend.”

“No, my friend is going to die today,” I said quietly. “And you’re going to die with him. Because I know who your agent was, the agent you had planted on us. I also know that you lied to me earlier. Usantra Wandek’s plan wasn’t to overthrow the Shonkla-raa leadership. He had something much more subtle in mind.”

Reluctantly, Riijkhan finally turned to face me. “Then tell me, since you’re so eager to do so,” he growled. “What in fact was this subtle plan?”

There was more movement on the monitors, and I looked up to see a couple of the screens grow brighter as the Humans handling the Vipers powered up the rooms’ main lighting. “You were right about the pointlessness of creating Human slaves through telepathic manipulation,” I said, looking back at Riijkhan. “But there’s no point in trying to make them Shonkla-raa shock troops, either. We may have the voice to control the Modhri, but we don’t have the muscle to take down Filiaelian or Shorshian warriors.”

“Then what use did he see in you?” Riijkhan asked.

“You see, you slipped up, Osantra Riijkhan,” I said. “Just a little, but enough. Back when you first tried to recruit me, you said that Humans would be given free run of the galaxy, and that we would be roaming wherever we wished.”

I smiled tightly at him. “We were going to be your secret police, weren’t we? We were going to roam, all right, roam around the galaxy watching for slave revolts or other dangers to the Shonkla-raa master race.”

For a moment Riijkhan was silent. “I was right,” he said at last. “You’re indeed very clever.”

“All it took was knowing how you think,” I said. “You would never offer to leave Earth alone unless you had some better use planned for us. Your big throats are a dead giveaway. But Human spies would be completely anonymous, drifting casually along among all the rest of the ordinary tourists and businessmen, completely undetectable until they suddenly commandeered a group of Modhran walkers.”

I lifted a finger. “But Wandek knew he could only risk giving Human agents that kind of power if he had rock-solid control over them. Hence, the telepathy experiments and Wandek’s plan to set up a genetic farm with Martin von Archenholz on Earth.”

“So you reach the truth,” Riijkhan said. “But you reach it too late.”

I shook my head. “You aren’t paying attention. I’m not just coming to this conclusion now. I already said I’ve been on to you since Venidra Carvo. Because your spy was Terese von Archenholz’s unborn child, whose partially developed auditory apparatus was nevertheless capable of picking up muffled conversations going on near his mother. Your receivers of those relayed conversations were the scrawny little Fillies, whose physique is presumably a side effect of the genetic manipulation that made them able to link telepathically with properly prepared Humans.”

The four Shonkla-raa at the desks, I saw, had abandoned their own work and were listening intently to the conversation. “That’s why you always had one of them dogging our trail,” I continued. “That’s also why, whenever there was any kind of confrontation between us, the scrawny ones were never around. They were always stuck in their compartments, as close as they could get to Terese, hoping to get something useful.”

“Not always,” Riijkhan corrected, his voice unnaturally quiet. “On Venidra Carvo one of them joined our encirclement attack.”

“Because he was already on the scene, and because you needed everyone you could get to make the encirclement look real,” I said. “And I’m quite sure you knew at the time what a horrendous risk it was, given his value and knowing that he was the one we’d probably charge through on our way out of the circle. But you had no choice. He was on the scene because he’d been ordered to stay near Terese, and you needed to create a big, obvious threat in order to move us over to her before her attempt to poison herself robbed you of your inside man.”

“And so you spoke of these ships at Terra Station, knowing we would learn of them,” Riijkhan said, a growing edge to his voice. “You sought to draw all of us here, then set up an ambush with your Humans and your Bellidos allies.”

“Exactly,” I said. “The ships were the bait. You were the catch. And it worked.”

“Did it?” Riijkhan waved a hand. “Your ambush has failed. We remain in full control of the ship and the situation. How do you then speak as if we have failed?”

“Because you have,” I said. “You’re not in control of the ships. You’re not in control of anything.” I looked at Morse. Now, his tapping finger confirmed. “I believe Agent Morse has something to say.”

Riijkhan looked at Morse. “He will remain silent.”

“Fine,” I said, shrugging. “If you want to die without even knowing why, go ahead.”

Riijkhan flashed a look at me— “Compton,” Morse said, his voice gasping a little as the control over his mouth was suddenly released. “Thank you.”

I felt my throat tighten. But as I’d told Bayta, the cost was always set by the aggressors. There was nothing we could do now but pay it. “You’re welcome,” I said.

“For what do you thank him?” Riijkhan demanded.

“For his trust,” Morse said, his eyes still on me. “For his friendship. For the chance to see the leaves on the tree, if only for a brief time.” His eyes rested momentarily on Bayta, then returned to me. “You will watch over the rest?”

“Yes,” I promised, my thoughts flashing back to the scene at the warship door, and the sudden revelation I’d had there.

No, the Modhri was no longer on my side. Instead, I was now on his. With the failure of my plans, he had taken charge.

Don’t ever ask me to do that, the Modhri had said when I’d once dared to suggest that he order part of a mind segment to die. But he hadn’t said it because he wasn’t willing. He’d said it because he must have suspected even then that it might come to this, and he didn’t want even a hint of that thought floating around where the Shonkla-raa could pluck it from his mind or infer it from my words.

He had taken charge, and was about to make the ultimate sacrifice.

And when the mind segment died, the Shonkla-raa control over his hosts would vanish.

“And you were right,” Morse added with a small smile. “It was indeed the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

“And it still is,” I said quietly. “Good-bye, Modhri.”

I don’t think it was until that moment that Riijkhan suddenly got it. {Attack!} he shouted, and leaped toward Morse.

He never made it. McMicking was ready, stepping between them and dropping into combat stance. Riijkhan snarled something and jabbed a knife hand viciously toward him. McMicking dodged the blow, flashing a side kick into Riijkhan’s abdomen. Riijkhan jolted back with the impact, then slashed another blow toward his opponent. Again, McMicking dodged, but this time he didn’t dodge quite far enough. The clawed fingers caught him across the forehead, gashing a line of bright red and knocking him out of the way.

Just as Morse fired three thudwumper rounds from his Beretta into Riijkhan’s chest.

The four Shonkla-raa at the control board were already in motion. But it was too late for them, too. I snatched one of my jumpsuit’s armor plates from its pocket, snapped it in half and pulled the pieces apart, then hurled them in a diverging pattern toward one of the Fillies. He was watching them go past on either side of him, no doubt wondering at my incredibly inept marksmanship, when the nearly invisible connecting wire sliced through his neck. The second Shonkla-raa died in exactly the same bloody way as McMicking’s wire bolo cut his throat, as well. The third was starting around the edge of the control board when McMicking broke open another plate from his jumpsuit, plucked out the throwing knife created as the metal shattered along its preset fracture lines, and hurled it squarely into one of the Shonkla-raa’s nerve centers. He was howling in blinding agony when my own knife put an end to the pain, and to him.

The fourth was racing desperately toward McMicking when Morse fired two more thudwumpers into him. He sprawled onto his face on the deck, sending a splash of blood in all directions, and lay still. Taking a deep breath, I looked up at the monitors, wondering even now if it had all been for nothing.

It hadn’t. All across the ship, in every room where the isolated groups of would-be conquerors and their newly freed slaves had gathered, the Shonkla-raa were fighting for their lives.

And they were losing. The Hardin security force—not the Hardin pilots and navigators that I’d carefully led Riijkhan to expect, but McMicking’s best combat experts—had had eight weeks of intensive training in the new and undetectable weapons the techs had created and hidden in their jumpsuits. Fayr and his commandos had no such exotic weaponry, but they had their own highly honed combat training plus the intimate knowledge of Shonkla-raa physiology that we’d obtained from Yleli and his late companions aboard the Homshil train.

Five minutes later, it was all over.

Almost.

“Frank,” Bayta murmured, touching my arm, her eyes on Riijkhan. “He’s still alive.”

I looked down. Riijkhan’s breathing was fast and shallow, and the thudwumper holes in his chest were still oozing blood. But his eyes were open, and he was gazing up at me with disbelief and hatred. “Any last words?” I asked, crouching down beside him.

His hand twitched, as if he was hoping for one last shot at me. But the strength necessary for an attack was long gone. “No?” I asked. “In that case, I have a few. You made two mistakes, Osantra Riijkhan. You and the rest of the Shonkla-raa. Your first mistake was in focusing exclusively on what I was planning, and never even considering the possibility that the Modhri might have plans of his own.”

I looked up at the monitors and the dead and dying Shonkla-raa. “Your second mistake was a philosophical one,” I said quietly. “You understood masters and slaves and non-slaves. But you never understood freedom. That’s what people will fight for. That’s what they’ll die for.”

There was a gurgle from below me, and I looked down to see Riijkhan’s eyes close again. “I suppose we should put an end to it,” I said, standing up again. “Morse?”

“No,” Morse said flatly.

I looked over at him. He was standing off to the side, his Beretta still gripped in his hand, staring down at the dying Shonkla-raa. “No?” I asked carefully.

“No,” he repeated, looking up at me.

And as I gazed at his face, I understood. The Modhri, once Morse’s silent puppeteer, had emerged hesitantly from the shadows to become his ally and, eventually, his friend. A closer friend even than he’d been to me. “Because if you don’t shoot it’ll take longer?” I asked.

A small, pitiless smile touched the corners of Morse’s mouth. “And because it’ll hurt more,” he said grimly. “Let him die on his own.”

And we did.