This Day All Gods Die (55 page)

The Amnion consider Davies Hyland their rightful property.

I'm dead no matter what happens—

Davies' life hung on a decision he couldn't make.

Morn seemed unaware that everyone waited for her. She was caught in the grip of Warden's appeal. Moisture blurred her eyes. A frown twisted her forehead. She gripped the arms of her g-seat as if she needed them for balance.

She was silent for a long moment as if she were listening to echoes of her parents' voices. Then she leaned over the pickup.

Husky with constricted emotion, she said, "We'll have to talk about it, Director. I can't make these kinds of decisions for other people.

"Stay on this channel. We'll come up with an answer as soon as we can."

With the tip of one finger, she silenced her pickup gently, as if she were bidding the UMCP director farewell.

Davies hardly heard her. His attention was fixed on Min.

He needed to ask her a question which he didn't know how to formulate. The crisis he dreaded most had caught up with him at last. Somehow he had to decide what he was going to do.

Min Donner seemed to be the only person on the bridge who might be able to tell him why he shouldn't put her gun to his temple and blow his brains out.

Warden

Morn said, "We'll have to

talk about it. I can't make

these kinds of decisions for other people." Then her voice clicked silent, leaving Warden Dios alone with Marc Vestabule.

His heart trembled as he drifted at the communications terminal grown into one wall of the small chamber where Vestabule guarded him. Sweat beaded on his temples; prickled along his spine. His human eye throbbed at the strain of the Amnion illumination: his prosthesis told him nothing he could use.

Morn Hyland was in command of Punisher. The scale of that accomplishment—

or the depth of the disaster—

stunned

him. Somehow she'd persuaded or forced Min and Dolph to stand aside. Now she insisted that she no longer served the UMCP. Dolph plainly considered himself helpless. Min had reached some accommodation which allowed her to serve as Acting Director without opposing Morn's command. And Angus was openly hostile—

Something had happened. Something wonderful—

or ter-

rible. With Vestabule looming at his shoulder, Warden was no longer sure he could tell the difference.

Questions seemed to throng at him from the inhuman walls. What would Morn decide? Would Min obey him if he ordered her to surrender Morn and Davies? How had she become Acting Director? What happened to Hashi?

Effectively a prisoner aboard Calm Horizons, Warden Dios had no choice except to trust the people he'd most misused: Min and Hashi; Mom and Angus.

Slowly Vestabule reached past him to deactivate the board pickup. For a moment the Amnioni used his own pickup to address someone—

presumably Calm Horizons' command

center. Warden couldn't decipher the guttural Amnion sounds; but he guessed that Vestabule was making sure the defensive's channel to Punisher remained open.

Then Vestabule turned his attention to Warden.

"Your people do not obey you," he pronounced stiffly.

Like Warden, he had only one human eye. His Amnion side stared at Warden inflexibly; but the human one was moist with distress. "You are not invested with decisiveness. You cannot satisfy our requirements."

Oh, shit.

Alarm labored like the acrid air in Warden's chest as Vestabule continued. "I must open communications with Holt Fasner. Your failure allows no alternative. He states that he is able to command compliance from all effective power in human space."

Anchoring himself on the communications board, Warden turned quickly to contradict Vestabule.

"If that's what he says, he's lying through his teeth." He mustered anger to muffle his panic; raised his voice to force it past the obstruction of his breathing mask. "Ask Center to send you a copy of the UMCP charter War Powers provisions.

You'll see I'm telling the truth. Fasner's authority over the UMCP was suspended the minute you began this incursion.

Right now I am the only effective power in human space."

Damn you, I'm selling my soul for this! Don't throw it away.

Vestabule's strange features revealed nothing. The blinking of his human eye was too ambiguous to interpret. The aura he cast to Warden's IR sight seethed and pulsed with hues the UMCP director didn't recognize.

"I know it doesn't look that way," Warden went on harshly. "Morn Hyland resigned her commission. She doesn't recognize my authority under martial law. And it's obvious Captain Thermopyle broke out of his programming somehow.

"But I'm not done yet."

Without inflection the Amnioni countered, "Do you not find it difficult to assert that you are 'the only effective power in human space' when it is plain that you have no effect? Even among your kind such clear contradictions must cause distress."

Warden swore to himself.

"I'm not done yet," he insisted. "You're surrounded by our ships. Right now Punisher won't take my orders. But none of them will take Holt Fasner's. Any deal you made with him would be useless because he can't make those ships hold fire.

"I still have more to say to Morn. And even if I can't give her orders, the situation itself is pretty persuasive.

"You talk about how much you remember, but I'm not sure you remember what it's like for a human being to believe in an idea that's bigger than you are. Morn isn't just a cop.

She believes in what cops are for. Her whole family did, and she's no different. She's been hurt and disillusioned, but she isn't capable of forgetting it's her sworn duty to protect innocent lives."

Behind the concealment of his anger, he prayed fervently that he was right.

"But even if she ignores me," he grated, "I'll still give you what you want. For one thing, Morn can't hold that ship if Director Donner and Captain Ubikwe decide to take it back.

The crew will obey them. And both Min and Dolph will obey me.

"On top of that, there are codes I can use that will affect Angus. I haven't done it yet"—

as if involuntarily he burst into

a shout—

"because I'm trying to keep as many of my people alive as I can!" The trembling in his heart spread to his lungs; his voice. His mask seemed to constrict his breathing until he had to pant for air. "As soon as I turn this into a test of what you call 'decisiveness,' there's going to be bloodshed."

In case Vestabule missed the point, Warden explained bitterly, "No matter how careful Min and Dolph are, Davies might contrive to get himself killed."

The Amnioni stared back uncomfortably. The strange contrast between his human and alien eyes gave the impression that he was torn by the irreconciled contradictions of his nature.

"The same thing might happen if Holt Fasner gave orders Punisher was willing to obey," Warden growled. "I'm not in a hurry to take that chance. I don't think you are either.

"We made a deal." His voice shook as if he were furious.

"I get you what you want. You don't try to bargain with anybody but me. And the Amnion are famous for abiding by their agreements." He made a point of shifting the capsule in his mouth. "Leave Holt Fasner out of it."

A slight turn of Vestabule's head suggested that he was listening to the receiver in his ear. He grunted a complex response that seemed to crunch and cut like shards of broken sound; a response full of laceration and death—

In his panic Warden wondered whether he was strong enough to force his capsule into Vestabule's mouth before the Amnioni could bring down ruin on his frantic hopes.

Then Marc Vestabule answered him in a tone like old iron, "Understand this, Warden Dios. I must have satisfaction soon. What I chiefly remember of being human is desperation.

If our requirements are not met, I will have no other re-course."

Warden ached to ask what Vestabule meant. But he could guess.

"You remember desperation," he muttered darkly.

"That's a start. Then maybe you can understand that you don't gain anything by threatening me. I'm already committed to satisfy your requirements.

"If you really want me to succeed, give me something I can use. Tell me what happened to Nick Succorso."

Vestabule blinked erratically. "Of what relevance is this?"

"I just told you," Warden snorted through his mask.

"We're talking about desperation. Morn's. Davies'." Mine.

"The more I know about why they're desperate, the more effective I can be. How much pressure do you think I can put on them if I don't understand what they've been through?

"Not so long ago Nick held Angus' priority-codes. He commanded Trumpet. With Angus to back him up, he ruled that ship. But now there's no sign of him. And Angus is free of his codes.

"Isn't it obvious how crucial that is?"

For a moment Vestabule considered the question. His un-readable study of the UMCP director didn't waver. The process by which he reached decisions—

whatever it was—

didn't

involve any discernible emotion, any alteration in his aura; any consultation with his fellow Amnion.

When he was done, he acquiesced. Without preamble he stated, "Captain Nick Succorso was slain by Captain Sorus Chatelaine. I find this incomprehensible. By some means he contrived to board Soar, where he threatened her with death.

She killed him instead." His head moved meaninglessly from side to side, as if he'd forgotten how humans expressed bafflement. "Then she betrayed Calm Horizons.

"I remember desperation, but I can remember nothing which would account for her actions."

Apparently it was Sorus Chatelaine he didn't understand, not Nick—

a woman who'd served the Amnion for years before turning against them.

Under other circumstances Warden might have been fascinated by this hint of how an Amnion mind worked. Now, however, he hardly noticed it. He barely absorbed the information that Nick was dead. The manner of Nick's death distracted him.

Abruptly he recalled Hashi's discovery that Soar had once been known as Gutbuster. In her previous identity Soar had killed Morn's mother, Bryony Hyland. And she'd also destroyed the original Captain's Fancy, leaving only her cabin boy, Nick Succorso, alive.

A fatal coincidence, for Sorus as well as Nick. And yet the outcome was that Morn and Trumpet remained alive.

Something in the tangle of hunting Trumpet, being hunted by Nick, and serving the Amnion had turned Captain Chatelaine against her masters.

Hashi had theorized that Nick and Sorus were working together; but he was wrong. Nick had hated Captain Chatelaine too much for that; hated her so much that even after he'd lost everything else he'd "contrived to board" her ship so that he could try to kill her: an act of such raw need and loathing that it took Warden's breath away—

In some sense, Hashi Lebwohl—

like the Amnion—

didn't

truly understand desperation.

But Vestabule wasn't done. "Remembering desperation,"

he continued, "I will tell you another thing for the sake of your effectiveness with Trumpet's people. I am acquainted with Captain Angus Thermopyle."

As soon as he heard the Amnioni say Angus' name, Warden's attention snapped back into focus.

"In my former life," Vestabule explained, "I served as crew aboard a human ship named Viable Dreams. Perhaps your records have revealed this to you."

Warden nodded slowly while a strange new alarm bloomed in his heart like an evil flower.

"Our ship was captured," Vestabule said. "It was taken to Thanatos Minor, where its surviving humans were sold to the Amnion. I was one among twenty-eight men and women delivered for experiment and mutation." His tone didn't waver. "This was done by Captain Thermopyle."

Then Warden Dios needed every gram of discipline and abnegation he could muster to conceal his reaction. In brutal self-denial he kept his expression flat and his gaze hooded while a singularity grenade of dismay went off in his chest.

Angus had sold twenty-eight men and women to the Amnion.

Vestabule didn't say what Angus had purchased with so much human blood and horror, but Warden could guess.

Twenty-eight—

Somehow Angus had concealed that fact during his interrogation by Hashi and DA. Despite the intrusion of zone implants into his head, the mental rape, he hadn't let slip any hints: he'd only answered the questions which his tormentors had known to ask. Even when he was helpless, he'd found the strength to preserve one secret. And Warden, who'd guessed the existence if not the nature of that secret—

Warden had said

nothing to put Hashi on the track of this appalling revelation.

Angus had sold—

And now he had the sheer effrontery to say, We're waiting for you to keep at least one of your promises; the malign and colossal gall to suggest, Personally, I want to see you keep the one where you stop the crime you've done to me.

So he could do what? Help deliver Trumpet's people—

Morn as well as Davies and Vector—

to Calm Horizons so that

he could escape himself? Thumb his nose at everything Warden had hoped for from him? or from Morn?

Twenty-eight men and women!

He wanted to be set free?

While a black hole of nausea and chagrin ate at his heart, Warden asked himself whether he had any choice. Millions of lives hung in the balance. He and no one else had chosen Angus; arranged his capture; designed his welding; maneuvered him into his plight. There was no one else Warden could blame. Or hold responsible. Or ask to make this decision for him.

Blinking unsteadily, Vestabule inquired, "Is this information of use to you?"

Apparently he remembered more about being human than Warden would have thought possible.

But the UMCP director was determined to conceal all his personal desperation. He had no intention of letting the Amnioni watch him shrink and die inside himself. And he'd promised years ago that he would bear the full cost of his mistakes, regardless of how high it ran.

"It helps," he told Vestabule through the baffle of his mask. "Now I have a better idea what I'm up against."