A Prison Unsought (22 page)

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Sleeplessness through Ares’ artificial night did not arise
from just duty, passion, or ambition.

Now that the repairs on the
Grozniy
were progressing as well as could be expected, with those
crewmembers likeliest to tongue-wag about the real goal of the slaughter at
Arthelion securely sequestered by the busywork of which the Navy had a copious
supply even in peacetime, Margot Ng had forced herself to withdraw.

After their arrival, the sight of their captain had been heartening,
as she knew from her own days rising through the chain of command. But there
was a point at which her constant presence would shift from benevolent
encouragement to watchful hovering, and she had been careful not to reach it.

The result? Sleepless nights under the weight of the lives
she had spent at Arthelion.

Thus, after the third dream one night of her beloved
Metellus Hayashi evaporating with nightmare slowness on the bridge of the skip-missiled
Falcomare
, she gave up sleep-not-sleep,
dressed, and made her way to the Situation Room.

The guard saluted and triggered the door open for her. She
took in the strange dichotomy of light and darkness now the heart of Ares.

As always, the floor of the Situation Room knew nothing of
the ancient diurnal rhythm of its makers. Here was always and only the high
noon of artificial light and the exhilarating tension of well-trained minds
pitted against the straightforward constraints of space-time and the devious
designs of the enemy.

But above this bright activity, wrapped in a gloomy darkness
born of cunning optics, hung a misty, glittering hologram of the Thousand Suns,
responding with ceaseless ripples of change to the data flowing from the
consoles beneath. The heavy inversion of it, dark over light, oppressed her. It
was too much like the regret that gnawed at her.

She stilled, observed by the officers and analysts at their
consoles, as they took in the Hero of the Battle of Arthelion. Some of them had
seen enough action to correctly identify the dark circles under her eyes and
the tension in her shoulders for what it was. The younger ones, still longing for
glory, sighed inwardly and returned to their screens as Ng crossed to a small
door guarded by two Marines. After the brief flicker of a retinal scan, they
stepped aside and the door slid open. There against a wall, in bizarre contrast
to the clean geometry of humankind’s machinery, crouched the red-glowing form
of the Urian hyperwave, its alien lines looking half-melted, almost organic.

Ng clasped her hands tightly behind her back. She wouldn’t willingly
touch it again following her first encounter with it in the hangar bay of the
battered
Grozniy
after the battle.
She clenched her jaw against the ache of memory: the warmth of firm human flesh
somehow incarnate in a machine that knew nothing of humanity. She had not
expected this evocation of Metellus and their last night together before he was
lost in the fog of war—at her command.

Margot Ng backed away, seeking the bustle of the Situation
Room as an anodyne. She wandered from console to console, looking over the
shoulders of various analysts, asking questions from time to time to gather a
sense of the data flowing from the hyperwave that was slowly building a picture
of Dol’jhar’s strategy. Most of the traffic was coded and still indecipherable,
but enough was
en clair
, the rantings
and boastings of Dol’jhar’s Rifter allies, to build a clear picture of their
movements, and the message headers of the coded communications were yielding to
cryptanalysis to generate even more information.

A number of small analysis
bays opened off the Situation Room, each holding a single secured console. In
one such, a knot of personnel whose unlikely composition underscored the
overturning of centuries of social order clustered tight-shouldered around a
console: young Naval officers and civilian analysts, plus the diminutive Rifter
tech the Marines had captured onboard the Rifter destroyer
Deathstorm
along
with its hyperwave. She had been crucial to understanding the operation of the
Urian comtech.

Aziza.
That was the
Rifter’s name.

What could they find so fascinating? Ng debated asking when
one of the younger techs let loose a snigger. The sound was so unexpected in
this atmosphere of quiet tension that she had to find the source. Surely these
young officers were not risking their careers watching a sexchip in the midst
of the most critical area on Ares!

As she entered the bay proper, coming within the influence
of its acoustic dampers, the noise of the Situation Room diminished, allowing
her to hear the panting moans coming from the console.

One of the officers, a lieutenant, looked up and horror
suffused her when she recognized Ng. She jerked to attention. “Officer on
deck!”

The other officers sprang to attention, the horror spreading
like a subliminal pulse, while the two civilian analysts looked up in mild
confusion. Only the Rifter paid no attention, grinning at the action on the
screen.

Ng stalked around to the screen side of the console, the
young officers melting out of her path. She looked at the screen. It
was
a sexchip. Anger flared, hot as the
plasma she too often saw consuming Metellus in the long watches of the night.
But then she saw the overlay in one corner of the screen.

REAL-TIME.

“What
is
this?”

“Sir,” replied Lieutenant Abrayan,
knowing that as senior officer of the group, she must assume responsibility.
She watched Ng take in her name tag as she said, “It’s a real-time feed from
two Rifter ships, about five hundred light-years apart.”

The little Rifter Aziza chuckled, a light, infectious sound.
“It’s a first, Captain.”

Ng looked back at the screen, which was split into two
windows. In one a man, in the other a woman. Both were obviously in
quarter-gee, and both were clad from head to foot in a slick, formfitting
dyplast bodysuit. Clutching a life-size doll made of the same substance, each
writhed in the throes of extreme sexual excitement.

“They’re wearing telegasms,” said
one of the civilian analysts helpfully, his round face shining with sweat.

“Ohh, lower, ahh, in there, ohh!”
said the woman on-screen. Ng noticed that her doll was rather more formidably
endowed than her distant partner.

“The gasms transmit the sensations
of the simulacra to the other partner,” said the other analyst. He had puffy,
badly chapped lips in a long, bony face.

“The captain knows what a gasm is, nullwit,”
snapped the newly-minted lieutenant at Abrayan’s right.

“Unnh! Unnnh! Unnnnh!” said the
male Rifter on the console. The dyplast doll squeaked furiously in his
impassioned grip.

Abrayan groaned inwardly, wondering how it could get any
worse as the poor blit realized what he’d implied and got that
jac-up-your-crack bulge-eyed look, blushing furiously.

Ng’s anger collapsed abruptly at the piteous expression on
the young officer’s face. His Naval pride had tripped him up.
Let him wriggle for a while, it’ll do him
good.

“It’s a first,” Aziza repeated, snickering again.

Ng raised an eyebrow.

“They’re the first people to bunny while being a zillion
systems apart.”

“Umm.” Ng let the silence stretch.

“We’ve verified that the communication is instantaneous by
comparing their responses,” volunteered the moon-faced analyst.

“At least within the reflex-response limits of human norms,”
said the other analyst.

“Harder! Faster!” shrieked the female Rifter.

“Unnnnh! Unnnnnnh! Ooooooogh!” bellowed the man.

“Squeaka-squeaka-squeaka,” went the dyplast dolls.

“I see,” said Ng. Abrayan fought hard to suppress laughter
at the exquisite dryness of her superior’s comment.
Who needs thud and blunder when two well-timed words will do?

The console emitted a sudden blip.

“There’s another channel coming on
line,” Moon Face exclaimed. He tapped at the keypads, and another window popped
up. A narrow, pale face stared out, disdain in its dark eyes.

“Oh, blunge,” said Aziza. “That’s
Barrodagh, the Mouth of Eusabian. What’s he doing?”

The analyst tapped again at the console, expanding the
window. Barrodagh sat at a desk on which was a pair of miniature dolls like the
full-sized ones now writhing in squeaky passion in the grips of the two distant
Rifters.

“He’s overriding the gasm
channels!” Chapped Lips shouted.

Barrodagh picked up one of the dolls and tweaked it
viciously. The man on-screen screamed, flung his doll from him, and clutched
his groin. Then Barrodagh picked up the other doll. Ng felt her insides twist
at what he did next; the female Rifter shrieked and curled up like a crushed
insect.

Then Barrodagh began to play the two hapless Rifters like Haruban’s
pipe organ, whose voicing is the screams of the damned. They tried frantically
to reach their consoles and disconnect, but Barrodagh gave them no chance. His
rictus of vicious pleasure made Ng’s stomach lurch.

“He’s gonna play this back to every
ship, as a warning not to chatz around on the hyperwave,” said Aziza. “He’s
been screaming about that since the attack began—this’ll shut them down for
sure.”

“Stop him,” Ng ordered. “We need
that chatter to continue.”

“We can’t,” Abrayan protested. “The
consoles are locked; we’re to observe and report. Incoming only.”

“We can do it without detection,”
Moon Face put in. “We’re sure now that the broadcast nature of the hyperwave
makes it impossible to know where a signal is coming from.”

Ng tapped her boswell,
signaling the duty officer.

(Cuatemoc here.)

(This is Ng. I need
Console 28 unlocked. Emergency Command Override.)

(I’ll have to clear
that with Admiral Nyberg.)
She heard the click of disconnection; she’d put her
reputation on the line with the override, which would ensure that Nyberg would
be interrupted no matter what he was doing or where he was.

A particularly gruesome scream clenched at her gut. “Cut the
sound on that,” she ordered, noting heads turning outside the bay despite the
dampers.

An endless moment passed, then a window swelled on the
console, revealing the heavy features of Admiral Nyberg, tight with distaste.
She could see a reflection of the same real-time feed from his console in his
eyes.

“What is this?” he snapped.

She explained the situation tersely. “If we don’t stop him,
the
en clair
hyperwave traffic may
diminish dramatically.”

“Do it.” His image vanished.

A red light above the keypad on the console turned green.
Aziza bent and tapped at the keys. The two analysts crowded in next to her; the
three of them muttered back and forth in disconnected sentences that Ng
couldn’t follow.

“I think . . .” said
Moon Face.

“Grab that channel, heterodyne them. . . .”
said Chapped Lips.

“Got it,” Aziza said, and, shoving
the two analysts out of the way, seated herself and started tapping at the
keypads.

The screams ceased abruptly. The two Rifters drifted weakly
over to their consoles and slapped at them, and their windows vanished, leaving
only Barrodagh’s image, which expanded to fill the screen. He looked surprised
and disappointed.

Barrodagh put the dolls down and reached for his console,
but the dolls stuck to his hands. A moist sucking noise slurped from the
screen, and a look of panic widened his eyes, making his already pasty
complexion blanch to the color of old cheese. He shook his hands frantically;
the sucking noise got louder and the two dolls flowed up over his hands, up to
his wrists.

The two analysts shouted with laughter. “She’s put their
sphincters in reverse!”

The fierce grin now belonged to Aziza.

Abrayan made an abortive movement toward the young Rifter,
but Ng smiled her way, and motioned with her hand. The lieutenant subsided.

The rhythmic sucking increased in tempo, now combined with a
ripe fruity sound.

“Sounds like the Thismian Bloat,”
Moon Face muttered.

In horrified fascination, everybody watched the dolls
balloon as they sucked in air faster and faster.

Barrodagh flailed at his console, but the dolls had swollen
into great bladders larger than his head and he couldn’t reach the keys.
Suddenly, with a deafening pair of reports, the dolls burst, tipping Barrodagh
over backward in his chair.

There was silence. Then, slowly, a hand dripping with
iridescent fluid groped its way over the edge of the desk and tapped the
console. The screen went dark. Moments later the console locked again—Cuatemoc
had been watching.

An equivalent silence blanketed the bay, then Ng heard a
small choked gasp; Abrayan was valiantly trying to control pent-up laughter.

Ng gave vent to her own chuckle as tacit permission to
release their mirth, provoking laughter to the point of tears among everyone
else in the bay even more forceful for having been so strictly controlled. Everything
of this sort was much funnier when a superior officer was in effect caught in
the crossfire.

Ng smiled for entirely
different reasons as she moved out. She knew, as the others would realize when
they regained control, that this erosion of Barrodagh’s authority would be
seized upon eagerly by his Rifter allies. Even more important was the import of
the covert and not-so-covert looks from those at the desks outside the bay. This
would spread faster than light through Ares among those under both the Articles
of War and the Silence of Fealty.

Let it,
she thought.
We’ve little enough to laugh about
recently.

“Carry on,” she said at the
threshold.

Barrodagh.
She reviewed
what she knew of the Bori at the top of the Catennach hierarchy that executed
Eusabian’s commands as she made her way to Nyberg’s office to prepare a further
explication if required.