Heaven's Queen (30 page)

He broke off with a gasp as a huge clang reverberated through the ship, and everything pitched sideways. For one terrifying second, the enormous battleship rocked like a skiff on a stormy sea, and then the gravity sputtered out at last, flinging us into the ceiling.

Thanks to Caldswell’s bellow, the soldiers had moved out of our way, so we didn’t crash into anyone. Caldswell let me go when we hit, and even my rubbery limbs were enough to catch myself without gravity to weigh me down. The ship stopped spinning after a few seconds, and for a crazy moment, I thought they’d actually gotten the thrusters back online. But then I heard it, the same horrible creaking noise I’d heard on the
Fool
, and even though there was no gravity, my whole body started to sink.

“It’s wrapped around the ship,” I said, my blind eyes darting in the dark.

“I’m well aware,” Caldswell muttered beside me, and then I felt his hand on my arm before he yanked me forward. “Stick to the plan,” he said, dragging me around until I was pointed the right direction. “We go up this hall until we hit the central elevator shaft. From there, we…”

He was still talking, giving directions in that clipped captain’s voice of his, but I’d stopped listening, because I’d just realized I could see. Some part of the ship must still have power, because there was a light up ahead, and it was getting brighter. I grinned and turned to Caldswell to make sure he saw it, too, but the captain wasn’t even looking at the light.

And that was when my sinking feeling doubled, because that was when I realized the captain didn’t see the light at all. Neither did the soldiers I could now clearly see clinging to the walls around us. No one did but me, because it wasn’t a light. It was the phantom.

I’d been unconscious when they’d loaded me onto the battleship, so I’d never actually seen the dark hall we were climbing through. Now I didn’t know if I’d ever forget the sight of that plain, straight, efficient, military ship’s hall lit up with the bluish moonlight glow of the enormous phantom tentacle sliding through the closed off elevator shaft at the far end like a ghost. I couldn’t say if this was the same tentacle that had nearly smashed me earlier, but I didn’t think it was. First, this one was reaching in from the opposite direction, and second, it looked even bigger. That one had been as wide as my bed once it had finished forming. This one was big enough to nearly fill the five-foot-wide hall.

It looked more transparent than the one before, too, but when it had reached in far enough to cross the first of the doors that lined the hall, its rounded tip grew suddenly brighter, and the door exploded inward like it had been hit with mortar shell. Considering it could go through walls, knocking down a door seemed pretty pointless, but when the tentacle turned to slide into the room it had blown open, passing through the screaming soldiers who floated out to root around inside, I suddenly realized what was going on. The phantom was looking for something, something it couldn’t drag through a wall, and I had a pretty good idea what.

“Caldswell,” I said, cutting off his instructions. “The phantom’s inside. We have to go another way.”

He stopped at once. “Where?”

I pointed before I remembered he couldn’t see. “Did you hear the bang up ahead?” I said instead. “That was it blowing out a door. It’s about to hit another one.”

As though my words were the signal, the tip of the phantom’s tentacle brightened again, and the second door flew off its track, slamming into the wall on the far side of the room. Caldswell hissed as the sound echoed down the hall. “What the hell is it doing?”

“Looking for something,” I said.
Looking for me
, I added to myself as I tugged on Caldswell’s sleeve. “We need to get out of here.”

“That’s what we’re trying to do,” the captain snapped.

“No, I mean we have to get out of this hall,” I said, letting him go and pushing off the ceiling with my feet. “Right now.”

Caldswell grabbed blindly, catching my foot by pure luck. “You’re not going anywhere.”

A stab of annoyance hit me, followed by a flash of pain as the remainders of the anti-plasmex drug did their job. Now that I was off the IV, my system was clearing out and the pain wasn’t nearly so bad, but it was still sharp enough to make me gasp, and the light at the end of the hall brightened as the phantom’s tentacle froze. And then, like a hunting snake, it yanked out of the room it had been rummaging through and snapped back into the hall, coming up with its tip pointed directly at me.

The blood drained from my face. “I need to go now,” I said, yanking against Caldswell’s hold, but his fingers only tightened on my foot.

“I am not—”

I kicked. Hard. Slamming his hand into the ceiling. If he’d been human, I would have broken his fingers, but since Caldswell was a tried and true monster, I was just aiming to weaken his grip. And for a second, it worked. His hand opened enough for me to snatch my foot away, but before I could pull more than an inch, he grabbed me again, his fingers locking around the arch of my bare foot in a vise.

“Morris!” he snarled, but I barely heard him, because that was when the phantom’s tentacle lunged at me.

“No!” I screamed, writhing out of the way. “Let go!”

The tentacle was fast but not agile. It must have been hard for such a huge creature to move such a tiny part of itself, because even though Caldswell had ruined my dodge, it missed me by a mile, landing with a flat thump on the ceiling beside us. Part of it actually phased through the metal before it brightened again, ripping a fair-sized chunk out of a support beam when it pulled back for another try.

It was such an odd sight I actually paused for a moment. The phantom must have to concentrate to interact with the physical world, I realized. That was what the brighter glow meant. Maybe if I aimed for the dimmer parts, I could pass through the phantom just like it passed through everything else and get away?

It was a crap plan to be sure, but I ran with it. There was nothing else to do. The phantom’s tentacle was already racing toward me again, knocking floating debris out of the way as it flew at my stomach like a spear.

Funny enough, it was the lack of gravity that saved me. In a move I never could have pulled off otherwise, I braced my leg against Caldswell’s grip and swung sideways, using his hand on my foot as a pivot for my entire body. The tentacle missed me again, but this time, instead of slamming into the ceiling, it slammed into a soldier I hadn’t noticed coming up behind us. It was glowing at the time, and it hit the poor woman like a missile, throwing her all the way back down the hall to slam against the far wall so hard I heard her bones crack.

“What the hell is going on?” Caldswell shouted at me.

“The phantom!” I shouted back, reaching out to grab the wall so I’d have something to push off. “It’s after me. You have to let me go!”

Caldswell’s grip tightened on my foot, and I bit down against the stream of swear words I wanted to lay into him. Satisfying as chewing him out would be, I didn’t have the time. He had ample reason to think I’d run. I’d run from him every time before. What I needed was to make him understand, so with a will I’d never known I possessed until this moment, I forced my voice to be calm and reached up to grab his shoulder.

“Listen,” I said, squeezing hard. “I swear to the king this isn’t an escape ploy. But there’s a phantom tentacle in the hall with us right now that’s already grabbed for me twice, and unless you let me go, I don’t think I can dodge it again. So would you
please
release my foot and help me get out of here?”

Though I knew he couldn’t see me, Caldswell turned toward my voice in the dark, his face set in such a scowl I didn’t think he was going to listen. But then he nodded, unlocking his death grip on my foot. “Which way?”

Since he couldn’t see, I grinned in triumph. “Back,” I said, scrambling over him.

At this point, my fight-or-flight instinct was pinned firmly on flight, and the corresponding adrenaline rush was rapidly cleaning the remaining drugs from my system. Instead of hurting, my body felt wired and ready as I wedged my hand against a support beam and shoved myself backward, flying down the hall away from the phantom like a shot.

Other than my short jaunt in the Church of the Cosmos, I hadn’t been weightless outside my suit in years, but the need to get away filled the void left by experience. Caldswell followed right behind me, kicking off the walls with practiced ease. We’d nearly made it back to my busted door and the rest of what I could now see was the medical area when the tentacle attacked again.

This time, I was ready. I flattened myself against the wall to let it pass, already plotting my next push to get around the corner into the next long, drab hall. I didn’t even know where I was going, other than away, but as I prepared to jump, the tentacle snapped back and up unexpectedly, brushing against my leg in the process.

The first thing I felt was cold. Even through the fabric of my scrubs and the tape beneath, the phantom’s slick surface seemed to leach the heat right out of me, making me gasp. The touch must have surprised the phantom as well, because the tentacle froze against me.

Looking back, that should have been my chance. I should have kicked off, dropped down, anything. But I was too shocked by the chill to move, and that was my undoing.

Quick as a whip, the tentacle wrapped around my leg and plucked me off the wall. I saw Caldswell’s hand shoot out for me when I yelped, but he was miles too late. The tentacle was already dragging me up the hall toward the elevator, its slimy, freezing coils sliding up my body until they’d wrapped me to the neck.

I fought them the whole way, but it was like trying to wrestle an icy current. The phantom’s flesh was slick as oiled gelatin under my fingers and even colder than the one I’d touched in the xith’cal’s asteroid. My whole body was numb in seconds, but even though I couldn’t feel my hands, I kept punching anyway. There was nothing else I could do.

“Let me go!” I screamed, my voice shrill with fear and frustration. “Goddamn you, idiot monster! I’m going to kill you if you
don’t let go
!”

And I was, too, because the drugs were gone now. Numbed by the phantom’s cold, I couldn’t feel the pins and needles, but I didn’t need to. I could see the black stain spreading up my arms in the monster’s light, and my heart began to hammer so hard I thought I’d pass out.

“No!” I screamed, writhing against its grip harder than ever. I absolutely refused to die this way, but I didn’t see how else this was going to end. Already the phantom had yanked me around the corner and away from the elevator Caldswell had been going for, dragging me through a pair of blown out doors into a huge open space, but it wasn’t until we passed the first row of neatly arranged single-pilot ships that I realized it had taken me into the battleship’s fighter bay.

My heart began to pound even harder. The lights were out here, too, but I could see the bay’s enormous doors clearly in the phantom’s glow, the stars glittering like pinpricks in the dark through the huge exterior windows, and I knew what it was doing at last. The phantom was going to drag me outside, kill me with the vacuum before the virus could touch it.

That thought made me go absolutely insane. I hadn’t gone through all this shit, hadn’t lost Rupert, hadn’t swallowed my pride and gone back to the Eyes, to die like
this
. It insulted every sense I had, and I fought wildly, snarling like a trapped animal. I was getting ready to bite the damn thing when the phantom stopped moving.

I stopped as well, blinking as I looked around. We were at the very edge of the battleship’s fighter bay, right beneath the huge doors that opened when they scrambled the fleet, the ones I’d expected the phantom to smash open. But though the tentacle passed through the jointed metal in front of me, it remained semitransparent, incorporeal as a projection. In fact, the only part of the phantom that was still shining bright enough to be physical was the bit wrapped around me. Apparently, we weren’t going outside, at least not yet. I was wondering why it had brought me here, then, when the phantom jerked me up.

The move came without warning, snapping my neck painfully. By the time I recovered, I was twenty feet in the air, flying up past the doors toward the huge observation windows above them. As the phantom lifted me past the window’s bottom edge, harsh white light broke like a sunrise, and my panting breath vanished completely.

Through the huge window I could see the full sweep of the ship’s port side, as well as a second battleship floating in formation with ours. The other ship was unexpected, but they could have had the entire Republic Starfleet out there and I wouldn’t have given them more than a passing glance. My eyes were only for the phantom.

As I’d told Caldswell, it was indeed wrapped around the ship, though not like I’d expected. I’d imagined a giant squid clutching the battleship in its tendrils, but the emperor looked more like a nest of beautiful, glowing snakes that had simply cozied up to us. There were so many overlapping parts, I couldn’t actually tell where the phantom began until the shimmering mass in front of me shifted, and its head came into view.

Normally, I had a hard time determining which part of a phantom was which. They seemed to follow no rules, at least none I was familiar with. But while I’d seen phantoms with thousands of jointed legs and phantoms that were little more than blobs, I’d never seen one with eyes until right now.

Its head was clearly delineated, a huge and majestic sweep of glowing flesh leading up to four perfectly round spheres. They were bulging and beady, like the eyes of a shrimp, but they glowed the most beautiful, deep blue I’d ever seen. And though, since they had no pupils, there was no way I should have been able to know they were looking at me, I felt that fathomless gaze locked on my face, all four eyes glittering with intelligence as they looked me over.

As we stared at each other, a bolt of pure cold slid into my chest, making my heart stutter. Even with that, I had to struggle to tear my eyes away from the phantom’s in order to see what had stabbed me. But when I looked down, my chest was uninjured. What I’d felt was the tip of the phantom’s now transparent tentacle passing through my ribs into my body.