The Lost King (65 page)

Maigrey couldn't help
smiling, and felt better. "Yes, my lord."

"Good. Contact the
boy and instruct him to connect with the bloodsword. He's not to use
it, he's not to fight them. The Corasians will want to keep him
alive; they'll need to know everything they can about his plane. Tell
him to submit to them, but to keep his hand firmly attached to the
sword. They won't be able to wrest it away."

No, the bloodsword
could never be taken from a living person. It could be removed only
from a corpse. Maigrey knew how Corasians "questioned"
those they captured.

"We'll be able to
keep in contact with him through the sword, even if he loses
consciousness," Sagan continued. "I don't suppose that
brother of yours taught the boy any techniques to withstand torture."

"I seriously doubt
it."

"Then instruct the
boy to use meditation, submerge his mind, sink beneath the pain. The
bloodsword will aid him, but you don't need to tell him so."

"There's a danger
in that, my lord. We might not get him back," Maigrey pointed
out.

"That will be my
problem."

"He may not listen
to me."

"That problem, my
lady, is yours."

Dion sat in the pilot's
seat, staring at the hull of the mothership looming closer, staring
at the beak-nosed planes towing him nearer and nearer, staring at it
all and seeing none of it. His gaze had turned inward and the dark
horrors he saw in his own soul made those without pale by comparison.

Dion
. . .

The voice came from the
ring, his mother's ring that he wore around his neck. It seemed to
him that the voice had been calling to him a long time, trying to
penetrate despair's infinite shadow. He was sick of the voice. It
irritated him, a pricking of pain that disturbed his comfortable
numbness. Dion reached up his hand, slowly and lethargically wrapping
cold fingers around the ring of flame, ready to jerk it off, snap the
chain, throw it from him.

Dion, we're here.
We're with you. The Guardians, we're here to protect our king.

"King!" Dion
laughed. "King of cowards! King of fools!" His hand closed
over the ring. "I failed the test. I know it now. You just
didn't want to tell me."

No, you haten't
failed. Not yet.

"Not yet? I
suppose you're going to say this is another one! Another test to
pass! What this time? Courage? I've flunked that Maybe stamina,
fortitude? See how much pain I can endure? I've flunked that, too.
I've had enough."

All your life you
will be tested, Dion. Some you'll pass, some you'll fail. You'll
learn from both. If you have the courage to keep fighting, put your
hand on the hilt of the bloodsword. Don't resist your captors. You
can't win against them. Submit to them. It will be terrible for you,
but center your mind on us and we will come to you.

Dion blinked;
cognizance returned. The black hull of the mothership filled the
viewport. The spiders were bringing him to their queen. Her huge
gaping maw opened wide to suck him inside, suck him dry. It was dark
inside—horribly, unbelievably dark. Fear crackled through him;
the will to live had returned, and with it debilitating panic.

God, I'm such a coward!

Your hand on the
sword! came the urgent voice in his mind. Your hand on the sword.

The plane was moving
more rapidly now, or perhaps movement just seemed swifter because of
the nearness of the mothership. Dion thought for a moment he couldn't
obey the voice. The right hand that grasped the necklace was
paralyzed. But fear proved friend as well as foe. Adrenaline loosened
his fingers, moved his shaking hand to the sword. He withdrew the
hilt from the scabbard. The plane's interior lights shone on the five
sharp needles protruding from the side of the handgrip. The darkness
outside the plane grew thicker and denser. The needles gleamed.

The lady's words
sounded good, but he didn't believe them. She was only offering him
an excuse. He had only to drop the sword and he would die—die a
hero.

Angrily, tears welling
up in his eyes, Dion jabbed the needles into the palm of his hand.
The pain was intense, the virus streamed into his bloodstream, and he
cried out, but he held on to the sword tightly.

The maw absorbed him
and boomed shut behind him, and all the lights in the universe went
out.

"He's done it, my
lord," Maigrey said wearily. "He's taken the bloodsword."

"Yes, I can sense
him now. His mental attitude isn't good."

"No, he's too
young to know that sometimes it takes more courage to live than to
die."

"A lesson I hope
you've taken to heart, my lady."

"I'm going in
there
for him
, my lord."

"But you're going
in there
with me
, my lady."

"I'll be right at
your side, my lord, you may be certain of that."

"I hope so, for
your sake, my lady. I wouldn't trust you anywhere else . . . say at
my back, for instance. Start your rifn."

Maigrey's plane
rocketed out from behind the brain, soaring upward with such
ferocious speed that she didn't pay any attention to where she was
going and two Scimitars had to scramble to get out of her way. She
attacked the Corasian mothership wildly, blindly, not remembering
that this was a feint. She needed to vent her rage, wanted most
desperately to destroy something. She was only sorry she couldn't do
it with her bare hands.

Explosions bursting
around her plane literally knocked sense back into her. Her plane
rocked and bucked and began to spin. Instinct screamed to her to
bring it back under control. Maigrey yanked the needles from her
hand, fearing she wouldn't have the discipline to remain attached to
the plane. The computer automatically took over, and Maigrey had to
force herself to shut down all systems, including the plane's
life-support, and rely solely on those in her helmet and flight suit.
For a terrifying few moments, she spun wildly. The other fighters had
been warned to watch for the maneuver and to keep clear, but it
seemed to Maigrey that she must careen either into one of them or the
enemy.

The dead ship routine.
They'd used it before, but never against Corasians. Maigrey couldn't
stand it. Her hand hovered over the controls; she was within a
centimeter of snatching them up and inserting the needles into her
flesh. A bone-jarring thud and then a jolt. The spin stopped, nearly
jarring the teeth out of her head.

Glancing to her left,
fearful to move too much, Maigrey saw Sagan's plane tumbling wildly
through space and saw it, too, come to an abrupt and sudden stop as
an enemy tractor beam locked on to it. Slowly, like her plane,
Sagan's was being dragged inside the mothership. Maigrey started to
breathe a sigh, but caught herself. She didn't dare make even that
much noise. The Corasians had opened the city gates and were wheeling
in the wooden horse. Hiding inside, she had to be very, very quiet.

Closing her eyes,
Maigrey banished fear, banished anger, banished love. She centered
herself and then she pulled herself from her body and walked into her
mind and took all visible, outward signs of life with her.

Character is what you
are in the dark.

Earl Mac Rauch,
Buckaroo Banzai

Blazing flame and
hideous night. The creatures plucked at Dion with steel pincers,
gouged and tore his flesh, and herded him before them like a sheep to
the slaughterhouse. Their horrid bodies burned inside plastic
shells—that fire was the only light and he'd rather be struck
blind than look at it any longer. He stumbled through a corridor and
down another, some part of his mind registering where he was going,
where he'd been, acting on old instinct, acting according to how
Platus had taught him. He held on to the bloodsword tightly.

Synthesized voices
questioned him:
Tell us how the plane operates. Tell us this, tell
us that!

He couldn't. He wasn't
being heroic. He didn't know. His mind had shut down. He couldn't
have told them how a dry-cell battery operated.

Claws gripped him,
lifted him, and he was lying on a steel table in a small room, lit
only by the fire of their bodies.

Tell us, yes? Now,
you tell us!

Clamps closed over his
wrist and ankles. A whirring, buzzing sound went off near his right
ear. He twisted his head to see, fear churning inside him. His
captor's pincerlike hand had been removed. In its place was a
razor-edged round saw blade. Dion couldn't cry out. He grasped the
bloodsword tightly, but it wasn't going to matter.

The saw blade zinged,
lowered, and cut off his arm.

A thin filament of
consciousness attached Maigrey to reality. She felt the spaceplane
settle and was aware of noise, aware that sensor probes were
investigating the plane, confirming— no doubt—the
presence of a human corpse. Slowly, she brought herself back to life,
steadily increasing her heartbeats per minute, agonizing in silence
at the tingling pain of blood resuming its flow. These were the tense
moments, the moments when you were helpless. If the sensors were
still on, still registering, the enemy would know they'd been
tricked, know that what seemed dead was really very much alive.

Maigrey opened her
eyes, looked—without moving her head, without moving a
muscle—out the viewport. She could see the red-orangish glow
given off by the Corasians trundling about, the flaming molten mass
of body and mind encased in clear plastisteel robots. Impulse energy
operated the hands that had taken their civilization from crawling
across the ground to blazing paths among the stars.

Corasians are not
particularly frightening to look at unless you've seen the robot body
suddenly open wide, the burning molten mass slide out and go in
search of food. Maigrey had seen it; she'd seen the Corasians devour
trees, plants, humans, anything with life energy. She counted six of
them in this area, surrounding her plane, and she shuddered.

Moving slowly, with
excessive caution and in absolute silence, Maigrey inserted the
needles that were the plane's controls back into her palm. The
spaceplane—all parts of it—were now a part of her, an
extension of herself. The Corasians apparently suspected nothing.

The last time she'd
flown the dead plane routine had been, what—eighteen years ago?
During the so-called Battle of the Celestial Throne. A well-meaning
scientist had programmed several million droids on his particular
planet to have only one object—that of making human life forms
absolutely happy. The droids attempted to do just that, but had
eventually come to the unfortunate conclusion that the only truly
happy human was a dead human. Even then the frustrated droids weren't
certain humans were happy, but at least they didn't appear to have
any more complaints. The droids set out to bring happiness to the
galaxy.

Maigrey picked up two
disrupter grenades in her left hand and, fumbling at them awkwardly,
managed to align the switches so that she could operate each with a
flick of her thumb. She paused a moment to concentrate her mental
processes and to hope, briefly, that somewhere on this god forsaken
ship Derek Sagan was doing the same thing. Maigrey couldn't spare the
time or the mental discipline needed to try to link up with him.

Swift as her thought,
the hatch whirred open. Maigrey flicked on the grenades, bobbed up
out of the hatch, tossed the grenades, and dove back down, closing
the hatch behind her. Two near simultaneous explosions rocked the
plane and pelted it with plastisteel debris and blobs of molten,
flaming Corasian.

Maigrey opened her eyes
and raised her head. Another grenade was in her hand, but she didn't
need it, apparently. Everything had gone dark.

"An
understatement," Maigrey muttered, shaken.

It was a darkness
unlike any she had ever before encountered, a darkness that had no
memory of light, could not even imagine light. The darkness blotted
out sight, seemed capable of blotting out existence. Maigrey's hands
groped for the reassurance of the control panel of the plane. She
wouldn't have been much surprised if it had been swallowed up.

She found the switch
for the interior lights and flipped them on, but they made her feel
horribly exposed. Hastily, she made her instrument readings, then
shut off the lights again. The atmosphere was safe to breathe.
Corasians, in their robot bodies, could exist anywhere under any
conditions. On board their ship, they didn't need oxygen-rich air,
but their human-copied computers and other instruments—as well
as their prisoners—did.

She removed the
controls from her hand, feeling a reluctance to detach herself from
the protection of the spaceplane. It was this damn darkness. It was
unnerving. But she couldn't stay here forever. Those explosions were
bound to have set off alarms. Hurriedly she removed her helmet and
wriggled out of the bulky flight suit.

Beneath it, she wore a
black, lightweight body armor that fit almost skin tight. It would
not stop a direct laser hit; that wasn't necessary. The shielding
capability of the bloodsword provided that. The armor offered
protection against flying debris and projectile weapons, however, and
it allowed her freedom of movement—something Maigrey had the
distinct feeling she was going to need.

On her breast sparkled
the Star of the Guardians.

The light of the
starjewel always gleamed more brightly when in complete darkness. It
glistened radiantly now, with a dazzling blue-white brilliance.
Maigrey closed her hand over it, starting to hide it away beneath the
body armor. But she found the light comforting. The enemy was bound
to discover her with or without a beacon.

Her fingers lingered on
the starjewel, and Sagan's voice came to her mind.