The City Who Fought (39 page)

"Down," he said in Standard. "Spread."

* * *

Yes, Belazir thought, looking down at Channa. In the end, this one is mine. But not at once. With subtlety.

As a child, Belazir t'Marid had been the despair of his mothers and nurses. For all their whippings and shock-rod treatments, for all the day-cycles spent locked in the hotbox, they could never break him of the nasty habit of toying with his "food."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Simeon dropped to the ground, panting. Atop the distant mountain, another wing of the castle crumbled and fell into the gulfs below with an earthquake rumble of rock. The worm screamed triumph and wound itself further around the central tower as flames billowed into the darkening sky. A tiny figure stood on the battlements above the monster, waving a bat that glowed iridescent green. Queasy, Simeon switched viewpoints, just in time to see the open maw engulf his pseudo-construct duplicate. The gnashing teeth ripped it into shreds. The illusion faded and his last sight from it was a rushing universe of light and
onoffonoffonoffonoffonoff
as the code was disassembled and "digested" by the intruder.

Phew,
he thought, shakily turning his Jets cap right-side around again.
That ought to hold him.
For a while, at least. The worm would be here, always probing and testing, as long as the Kolnari battle-computer stayed clamped to the SSS-900-C's system. Even if he destroyed the program and purged his system, that would merely ring every alarm the enemy had. They'd only launch another worm immediately, with a different configuration. Despite its self-modifying abilities, he
knew
this one now!

Gently, stepping backward, brushing his footprints out of the sand, he faded from the blasted landscape of cinders, where pustules in the soil spewed line after line of questing wasps.

"The Knight came home from the quest;

Muddied and sore he came.

Battered of shield and crest,

Bannerless, bruised and lame—"

Channa was weeping.
That was his first thought, as his "other" awareness flared back. Everything was a little murky, but he could see clearly enough down into the lounge. She was sitting on the sofa next to Amos, head cradled against his shoulder, sobbing with slow misery. Both of them looked battered, as if they'd been thrown from a moving vehicle. Amos winced every time he moved.

"Channa!" Simeon said when a few microseconds of a scan told him the room was safe. A little further adjustment put an innocuous scene on the security system the Kolnari and their computers were monitoring. "Channa, are you all right?"

"
Where were you!
" Channa shouted, springing erect. "Where were you, Simeon?"

"I was—"

Simeon noticed what was playing over the general channel, again and again, locked in from the command circuits. Nearing the end of one loop, Channa was kneeling by Patsy's side, trying to staunch the hemorrhage with the scraps of her clothing.

"Please, Master and God, may I summon the doctor?"

"Of course," the pirate chieftain said. "We are a reasonable people." A broad smile. "As you see, you were wrong.
I
am the 'bad pirate.' Serig is the
worse
pirate."

Simeon blinked back to the present. He felt his automatic feeds cut in, damping down hormonal flows and adrenal glands, filtering his blood. Even so, he came as close to feeling faint as he ever had.

"I . . . oh, God,
God,
" he whispered. "
Shit
." There were no words adequate in any lexicon.

"Where
were
you, Simeon?"

"Fighting," he said. "Channa, they put a worm program into the station system. I
had
to fight it, it was—is—a monster. If I hadn't, it would have burrowed right into my brain and eaten
me.
I'd also be under their control and telling them everything they wanted to know. I couldn't even self-destruct!"

"I see," Channa said. "Not that there
was
anything you could have done for us. Excuse me." She walked quickly into her quarters: he could hear water splashing.

Amos stood, left hand clenched around right fist. "Though they be thieves from their birth, for this, they shall pay," he said softly, almost to himself. "For Patsy, for Keriss, for my sister and my father's house and for all they have done, by the living soul of God, they shall pay in full, every jot and tittle."

Channa came back, her face set harder than Simeon had ever seen it. She waved Amos back and turned to the pillar.

"What damage did you sustain?" she asked in a professional tone.

"Nothing crucial—yet," Simeon said. "I've got to keep a fair share of my attention and the system's capacity involved in just watching and waiting. That worm program mutates like a retrovirus: the sort that never gives up. I could clean it out—if I dared. Apart from that, I've lost about a third of the memory and computational capacity. That's what could be termed 'occupied territory' at the moment. With luck, their computer will keep thinking that's all there is. It's powerful but specialized. They haven't hooked up their ship computers to the station, yet. Probably afraid of us hacking in to them.

"But," he went on, "I've got to be really careful. Any action I take in what they think is safe territory has to be elaborately screened. I can jimmy the records. However, even I can't make the impossible convincing."

She narrowed her eyes. "Could you take back those functions in a hurry?"

"Somewhere from seconds to minutes. They'd know pretty quick, and that battle-computer they've got jacked in could . . . hmm. Come to think of it, I could probably take that over, too. But they'd know."

"No problem . . . later. Can we conference?"

"Yeah, I've got all of their people under continuous surveillance."

"We'd better get moving as soon as we can," she said.

Simeon made an affirmative sound. "Our people are going to be pretty shook up," he said.
I sure am.

"We've got to get things in hand, before they start lashing out. It'll take
some
time though, for a cycle when they're all available."

"Good. Let's get, hmmm, Chaundra, the section leaders, and—" Amos began.

* * *

"Everyone's gone," Seld Chaundra said in a low and careful voice. "You sure we oughta do this, Joat?

Joseph said—"

"Joe can wait a minute, 'n so can you, carrot-face," she whispered. "Now keep that thing running, hey?"

He nodded and bent again over the two modules and the jack clipped to the main conduit above them.

This way was very narrow—an adult would have to be a dwarf to get through—but it came in conveniently over the sickbay entrance.

"Look," he went on, without glancing up. He was still breathing hard from the effort of crawling up the axial ventway. "Look, maybe Ms. Coburn doesn't need someone else talking to her right now? It's been less than a day, and—"

"Yeah, I saw the broadcast, too," she said. She had. Seld had fainted. His meds weren't doing him as much good as they should. "You stay here."

She crawled forward, pushing the local sensor-override unit ahead of her. To the naked eye, the cover of the duct was a panel just like all the others. The only real difference was that it was selectively permeable and much thinner. It recessed obediently and Joat looked down into a darkened room. One floatbed, the usual furniture, and a figure under the sheet. She curled herself into a ball and somersaulted slowly through the opening, holding on with her fingertips and then dropping the final meter to the floor.

"You awake?" she said, moving to the bedside. "It's Joat."

Coburn's eyes were open. She lay motionless, but they tracked through the darkness. Joat shone a small light under her own chin. She had procured for herself a very expensive coverall, made of adjustable light-fibers. Simeon had gotten it for her because it was fashionable, but with a little creativity you could rig it to mimic the ambient background color, which was right now a mottled charcoal gray. Her face floated above it in the lightstick's feeble low-setting glow.

"Go 'way, Joat," the woman said in a dull voice. Her face looked old, under the sealant bandages. "I don't need any more sympathy. Leave me alone."

"Great, 'cause sympathy's not what I'm gonna give you," Joat said. She brought her face closer to Patsy's, and her own eyes held the same flat deadness. "Let me tell you something about me." She explained, in a flat, matter-of-fact tone all about her father, her uncle, the captain.

"So I
know,
Ms. Coburn," she went on. "Forget what anyone else's said. They don't know jack shit. But Joat, she knows
exactly
how you feel. And like I said, you don't need sympathy right now. I know what you do need."

Slowly, Patsy raised herself on her elbow. "An' what would that be?"

Silently, Joat reached around and opened her haversack. Her gloved hand came out with Patsy Sue Coburn's gunbelt and arc pistol.

"Payback," Joat whispered steadily. "And here's how it's gonna be—"

* * *

The medical-storage room had its own surveillance subloop. That made it a good place for the clandestine meeting. It was also chilly, bare, and crowded. The walls were gray metal bins outlined with fluorescent paint.

Appropriate, given the state of our morale, Channa thought.

"I have two hundred fifty-seven people down with the virus," Chaundra said. "The symptoms are spectacular but not life-threatening, as long as they stay hooked to the machinery. I have also treated sixty-four patients for traumas and wounds of various sorts. No fatalities, so far. One or two are in critical condition, but they should recover. This total includes several of my medical aids who have been assaulted by Kolnari coming to check up on our 'sick.' They seem to find the sight disgusting and . . . exciting at one and the same time. Several of the
patients
have been assaulted."

So
much for scaring them off with the virus,
Channa thought. "Patsy?" she asked aloud.
She's my
friend.
Patsy hadn't wanted to talk to her or anyone else, which was understandable.
But I want to
know about her.

"She . . . there were no broken bones, apart from the foot. I internally splinted that—" gluing the bones together in a synthetic sheath stronger than the original material, to give them a matrix to heal "—replaced the lost blood, and plas-sutured all the soft tissue injuries. Ms. Coburn is mobile although in some . . .

physical . . . discomfort. With the usual growth stimulators, full recovery should take no more than a week."

He licked his lips nervously. "I cannot answer for her mental state. I fear catatonia. I have administered the usual psychotropics, but the mind is more than the brain and its chemistry."

Channa nodded jerkily. "Anything else?"

"Yes. I now have . . . abundant tissue samples from the Kolnari. There are things we should discuss privately."

Amos looked at the faces in the screen. "Continue as planned," he said. "The enemy are pushing you to work. Be as stupid as you dare. Make mistakes as often as you dare. Above all, keep as much material half-disassembled as you can."

"When are we going to
fight
them?" somebody burst out. "You and Simeon talked a good fight, about Cochise and the Viet Gong—"
Cong,
Simeon corrected silently "—so far all we're doing is rolling over!"

"There is the virus," Simeon said. "That's working, they're catching it. I've begun psychological operations. Most important, I've deciphered their language." That brought a rustle. "It's not much like the ones in the survey files—both are pidgin Sinhala-Tamil, but . . . anyway, I've got it. They've ordered sixty units here."

"Oh, great!" the man barked. "More of them!"

"Shut up," Channa remarked. "That means they're not just going to strip the station of everything they can carry in their warships and then blow it up. You can't kill a cow and milk it. It'll be at least a week before the transports arrive. There ought to be about sixty of them. You know how long it takes us to load sixty freighters with homogenous ore when we're
trying
to work fast. Imagine what it will take to remove and load fixed equipment, with everyone dragging their feet. And the more of them that are here, the more will be caught when the Fleet arrives."

"And," Amos said, with a feral smile, "that means we can be more direct in the interim. Do not worry, my friends. They, too, will suffer, know fear and pain."

That brought a chorus of satisfaction.

We think revenge is primitive, Simeon thought, until we need it to satisfy indignity and humiliation. He was feeling considerable desire in that direction himself.

Amos lifted a hand. "Wait. We want to lure as many of them into the station as possible—as insurance, and so we can wear them down. But we
cannot
risk key people who know a good deal about our plans and our station prisoners being dragged in for interrogation because they thought they could be clever.
No
action
is to be taken save on my express orders. The personnel to effect those orders will be fitted with a suicide tooth and have psych profiles which assure its use. Wait until you receive orders. We have a fine general—" he nodded in Simeon's direction "—and we must follow his words."

That brought silence.

"We'll try levering them to cut back on the atrocities," Channa said. "Say it's reducing working efficiency—that's true enough. Stay tight, endure! We'll see them all fried yet! Out."

One by one the faces vanished from the screen, except for Chaundra's.

"The bad news, Doctor," she said.

This meeting was a fleeting thing, time stolen as they were all supposedly on their way somewhere else.

They could fool the sensors for a while, but nobody could explain being in two positions at once, one of them under the real-time eyes of the enemy. Only the fact that there were fifteen-thousand odd of the stationers and less than a tenth that number of Kolnari made it possible at all. That and the invaders'

imperfect control of the surveillance computers.