Gates of Hell (25 page)

“Well, that’s something posi—” His eyes went hard. A wave of cold hatred shot through him, and over her. She froze, and caught Martin’s gaze. His expression was blank, his voice a quiet command. “When you turn, Physician, do so very slowly. Don’t do anything yet.”

“Where is she?” a rough voice snarled loudly from the center of the room. She recognized the accent.

More than that, she caught a whiff of alien emotions that sputtered through a malfunctioning artificial shield for an instant, then blanked out again. She was sweating by the time she finally turned her head. Only force of will kept her from shaking.

———

Pyr moved to put himself between Kith and Roxanne. He faced the Leaguer, too aware that Kith’s presence disturbed the koltiri deeply. So deeply that all her mental barriers slammed tightly shut at the sight of him. There was a physical presence behind him as he faced Kith, but for a horrible moment Pyr was so alone in the world he wanted to die. The strange sensation waned as quickly as it came. She was there again, and he was angrier than usual at Kith when he said, “What do you want now?”

“I know what you’ve got.” Kith pointed past him. “One of my people saw you take her onboard.”

“You’re not supposed to admit you have people on the ship,” Pyr reminded him.

If Kith noticed the sarcasm, he didn’t show it. “I claim the healer,” he announced. He grinned, showing too many crooked teeth.

“I claimed the woman as booty. She’s mine.” Pyr expected Roxanne to stand up and loudly proclaim that she belonged to no one. That she made no move was another indication of how much Kith disturbed her.

Kith sneered. “I know you don’t want a woman for your bed. I claim her for the League.”

“You took the ships for the League. You can’t change your mind now.”

———

Roxanne only half-listened to what was being said. What the two of them decided about her was quite irrelevant. Everyone’s attention was riveted on the argument. She looked at Martin. He edged away from the table, and slowly got to his feet. She got up to stand next to him as his hand went into his jacket pocket.

She put her hand on his arm. “No. That won’t work,” she whispered. The Trin shield was functioning erratically, but taking it out would be very difficult. His gaze slid to hers. “Not without taking more casualties.”

His look asked her if that mattered. “Your pirate’s working with a Trin.”

He wasn’t hers. “I’ll take care of it,” she told Martin. “I’ve done it before.”

He waited another tense moment before he put his hand down, and gave her a brief nod. Roxy realized she’d been holding her breath, and let it out on a bitter sigh. Oh, yes, she’d done it before. She refused to let herself remember, and made herself look at the Trin. Pyr was not afraid of him. Now, that was a curious thing, not that this was the time for any sort of analysis. With a Trin you had to act, and quickly.

“She’s an empathic healer,” Kith said. “That makes her more valuable than a ship. Than two ships.”

“Empathic healer,” one of the watching crewmen got up the courage to interrupt. “What’s that?”

“Look at her,” a woman said, pointing at Roxanne. “I’ve seen ancient sculptures and temple paintings that look like her. People like her can perform miracles.”

“Healing miracles?” the first man asked. “Can she cure the plague?”

The Trin laughed in Pyr’s face, sharp teeth showing. He pointed at the ship’s captain. “He’s holding out on you, just like he always does. He controls the Rust. You work for Rust. But it won’t last forever. What will you do when the Rust runs out?” He turned to face the crowd as people gathered closer around him and Pyr. Roxanne and Martin hung back and waited, and listened. Pyr crossed his arms and carefully surveyed the crowd. His trio of officers stood at his back.

“We’ll die,” the woman said.

“He won’t let us die,” Kristi spoke up for Pyr. “You know that.”

Roxy took her cue, and moved toward Pyr and the Trin. “No one has to die.” The Trin watched her with ultimate greed. She paid no attention to the pirate captain beside him, though she felt him carefully watching her with all her senses. “I can commit miracles,” she said, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear. “Cure with a touch. I am koltiri of Koltir. I’m sure many of you have heard of koltiri.”

“Look what she did for the captain,” Kristi said. “She can cure all of us.”

“Yes,” Roxanne agreed. She turned her back on the Trin, though she hated doing it. “I am a healer,” she told the avidly watching pirates. “A doctor. Vowed to save lives. Pyr cannot stop me from doing what I do.”

She flinched when the bony hand touched her shoulder and swung her back around. The Trin was pasty-faced but for the red knobs on his forehead, pock-marked and scrawny, but wiry and strong with it. He was shorter than her, and she could see his resentment that he had to look up to her. Trin preferred people on their knees. “Pyr is too weak to control you,” he told her. “He’d know that if he really knew anything about your kind. What you do can and will be controlled.”

She forced a smile, and made her tone gentle when she spoke. “You want me to heal you first, I take it.” She shrugged, but without trying to throw off the bony hand that clasped her shoulder. She knew Pyr wanted to break that hand, but he stood back, waiting to see what she was doing. She wished Pyr wasn’t so aware of her less-than-docile nature.

Pyr was very, very annoyed with Roxanne, more so than he was with Kith, but he didn’t show it yet. Her public show of defiance was not unexpected, and he’d deal with it in private. Right now, it was more to his advantage to let this go on a few moments longer. If she was going to heal Kith, Kith would have to lower his shield.

“If you want me to heal you, you have to lower your shield,” Roxy told the Trin. Trins were mostly mindblind, and the shield helped deflect telepathy as well. But she didn’t have to be a telepath to look deeply and earnestly into the bastard’s eyes and openly show the gentle, compassionate side of her nature. And empathy, well, it wasn’t something that could be shielded against when someone with her kind of power knew how to project it. She was harmless, he could feel that. Weak. All she wanted was to help. Needed to help. Him.

Trins were attracted to weakness, and so very good at taking advantage of it. This one finally reacted to her obvious frailty with a snarling smile, and switched off the shield that separated him from the rest of the universe.

With that protection gone, the rest was quite easy. She was fast, and well trained in more than the healing arts. Anyone who served on board the
Tigris
learned a great many different ways to kill. A swift-fisted blow to the Trin’s heart came first, a stiff-fingered jab to the throat next. Then, while he gurgled and gasped and tried to fall forward, Roxy grabbed the bastard’s head, pulled it back, and twisted hard. The loud crack as his neck snapped was the most satisfying sound she’d heard in a long time.

Her mental shields snapped up hard as she let the body fall to the deck, and allowed herself only the shortest moment to look at the dead thing at her feet.
First do no harm
, was her bleak thought, but she turned a fierce smile on the gaping roomful of pirates and gestured them forward. “All right,” she announced with brittle brightness. “Who’s next?”

Pyr didn’t know if his roar of outrage filled the room, or if it only filled the space inside their heads. It was no telepathic gesture when he grabbed the woman, shook her hard, and demanded, “What the demons did you do?”

She looked calm, though inside she was nothing of the sort. Her huge dark eyes were full of horror, and a terrifying sense of righteous triumph. He dealt with what he saw before him: a dead body, and a healer who had—”Murder. You murdered him.” That he had been only an instant away from killing Kith himself made no difference at the moment. That he wanted Kith dead made no difference. “A healer shouldn’t be able to commit murder.”

“An act of war isn’t murder,” she answered evenly.

“War?”

“We have no cease fire with the Trin. No treaty. The war has abated. It isn’t over until they’re all dead.”

Pyr held Roxanne in a firm grip as he turned his head to look at her companion. The look the boy gave him was cold, and counted Pyr as an enemy. Around him was a room of very frightened pirates, people who did not frighten easily. They had seen a saint, and salvation, and she’d shown them that she was more dangerous than any of them. She’d killed Kith, for demons sake! Many were heading for the door. Some had drawn weapons. Most were staring at Pyr. He concentrated on Roxanne. His men could handle any necessary crowd control.

“What are you?” he demanded, and wasn’t sure which one he expected to answer.

“Citizens of the United Systems.” It was Martin who responded. “What are you?”

Pilsane stepped over Kith’s body to face Martin. “What does the Systems have to do with the Pirate League?”

“What are you doing serving with a Trin?” Roxanne asked Pyr, and it was a very personal question.

For an instant he felt that he had failed her somehow. Then he came to his senses and shook her again. “What are you talking about?”

She didn’t answer, but merely looked at him with concentrated contempt and hatred. Then he realized that explanations didn’t matter. Controlling her mattered. Kith had certainly been right about that one thing. She was a telempath whose strengths and weaknesses he had yet to understand. She could cure or kill on a whim. Kith had paid with his life by trusting her for one brief moment. Uncontrolled, she put his people and his mission in danger, and that could not be allowed. At least he had a means readily to hand that let him control her. Damn.

“Mik,” Pyr said to his engineer and torturer. “I need the room. Get it ready.”

She had cold-bloodedly taken a life. Roxy was almost too involved in controlling her reaction to what she’d done to pay attention to where Pyr was taking her. The biggest of his three officers hurried ahead of them, and eventually disappeared from view. Pyr dragged her down a corridor and into a lift and then down another hall, one where the thrum of the ship’s engines filled her ears and the lighting was brighter than on the other decks. The brightness made her blink, but her concentration stayed fixed within herself. Even the mental roar of Pyr’s fury and resolve was background to her.

She felt good, goddess damn it. That was the worst part. She hated that she felt so good. The fierce joy she took from conquering disease was an acceptable outlet for her aggressive nature. The hunt and slaughter of a sentient being should not bring the same rush of delight as killing the things that caused death to sentient beings. As hungry as she still was, she’d barely been able to stop herself from absorbing the Trin’s life energy as he died. That was the difference on a basic level that had nothing to do with ethics and morality—sentient energy was nourishing, while healing drained energy even as it satisfied the koltiri’s predator instinct.

Maybe she was a throwback to the ancient koltiri, but at least she wasn’t so bad that she gave in to the urge to be an energy ghoul. She’d taken nothing from the bastard but his life. She wanted desperately to be able to regret taking life, but all she felt was guilt that she’d had to break her vow as a physician to fulfill her vow to the United Systems one more time.

She fought to keep from giggling as she remembered the gaping crowd in the common. They’d been afraid of her, all those hard-eyed, wicked pirates, and she’d eaten it up in the moment before Pyr grabbed her and got her focused again. She was almost thankful to him, except that he was the captain of a ship that had had a Trin on board. She couldn’t remember if she’d laughed in their faces or not, just that she’d wanted to. Bad Roxy. She hadn’t wanted to laugh at Pyr, not when his hands were on her and his anger burned through all her barriers. She’d wanted explanations, reassurances, wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.

There was no room for that. Special Order One was very specific. Special Order One required that Pyr’s life be ended as well.

Special Order One?

After he picked up her thought, Pyr stopped in his tracks and pushed her, face-first and hard, against the corridor wall. He held her pinned there, hands immobilized, his weight pressed firmly against her back. He had one arm around her, the tip of a knife touching her throat. His thoughts probed at hers; she made him work for it.

“Special Order One?” His lips were very close to her ear, his breath hot across her cheek.

From her current position, Roxy wished she hadn’t had to demonstrate her unarmed combat skills in front of him. She couldn’t blame him for not taking any chances. The knife point was pressed into her flesh, encouraging her to speak. “No one outside the United Systems MilService is supposed to know about SO1.”

“I see. So you’re going to tell me about Secret Special Order One.” There was something almost erotically suggestive in his tone, and the way his big, hard-muscled body pressed against hers. This jarred with the biting pain as he shifted the knife point deeper. The dichotomy was meant to confuse and rattle her, and it did a pretty good job.

Blood welled from around the small wound, reinforcing the threat, while Pyr’s body heat surrounded her and sent signals as primitive as fear through her. Roxy cut through this crap and decided to tell him the official policy, because he might as well know why she was under obligation to kill him. “It was decided in Council, and by a Full Systems’ Star Chamber Vote, that there is only one viable solution to Trin aggression and the Trin program of galactic conquest: complete extermination of the Trin genetic subset. And the execution of all known Trin allies,” she added, just so he would know. “I am an officer of the United System Military Service. I took the oath to carry out Special Order One.”

Pyr’s body came pressing down even harder against her. His gasp was loud in her ear. His shock was communicated to her, body to body. His repulsion was enough to twist her soul, but she made an effort not to show it. She had taken the oath, never mind her personal opinions when she’d taken it. Experience had taught her that it was the only way.