A Prison Unsought (62 page)

“That one nearly made old Hurli expire,”
Nilotis said.

Galen’s attention sharpened. Commander Hurli was the chief
Infonetics officer on the
Grozniy;
she had an almost symbiotic relationship with the huge ship’s computers.

“Hurli?”

“
Grozniy
was hard-linked to the Ares Node when Omilov activated his
Praerogacy. The Worm crawled right down the link and took over ship functions,
just like Ares. For a while there, the gnostor could have done anything he
liked with us—fired the ruptors, shoved the engines into supercrit—anything.”

Silence fell as Galen tried to imagine having that much
power, even for a short time.

“How long does the Overt phase
last, anyway?” Tang asked. “He isn’t still in charge, is he?”

“No.” Nilotis stretched and yawned.
“There’s no set limit, but I understand that in this case as soon as the
Aerenarch issued his first command, Omilov relinquished his authority. And
that’s it, for him. The Worm will never answer him again.”

Ul’Derak snorted. “So Hurli can sleep again. You seen all
those Rifters, Tang?”

She nodded. “Have to. The big one who’ll run comm is a chef
and a musician. The little blond drivetech cheats at games, my middy told me.
Watch out.” They all laughed, then she said, “But the young redhead, almost
cadet age—” She shook her head. “You should see him talking with the Kelly! I
swear, the way he moves and honks you’d think he has three arms.”

“The Kelly are fascinating,”
Wychyrski said. “They’re a lot of fun to talk to. What gives me the shillies is
the idea of those little brain-burners around our ship.”

Perriath’s neck was beginning to ache from the uncomfortable
angle he had to hold it at to see, but he didn’t want to miss any of the
officers’ expressions. He was rewarded by a theatrical shudder from Ul’Derak.

“Br-r-r-r! You said it. You ever
seen the data chips on the Eya’a, what they can do to you?”

“Please, not before lunch,” Wychyrski
said with a theatrical gasp, tossing her curly hair. “In any case, they stay mostly
in their cabin, I hear.”

“That Dol’jharian is almost as nasty.”
Tang made a warding gesture. “Bad enough she’s a tempath, but I’ve heard that
with those sophonts she can read minds. Luckily she pretty much keeps to
herself.”

Nilotis laughed. “Can you blame her? Knowing how most of the
people on board feel about Rifters just now, you think mind-reading is a
particularly comfortable thing for her? And I’ve never heard that tempaths have
much luck shutting down their emotional sensitivity.”

“Mzinga said the captain told
everyone in Navigation to stay clear of her,” Tang said.

“What? Why?” Several of the
officers spoke at once.

The young woman shook her head. “Didn’t say, but I think it
has to do with Gehenna. Senior officers are avoiding her, too.”

“They’re the ones with
need-to-know.” Tang’s voice was somber.

Perriath shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Nothing was
known of Gehenna, save that no one ever returned from being landed there.
Beyond that everything was speculation, all of it unpleasant, and some of it
downright horrifying.

“Gehenna,” said Nilotis flatly.
“You think it’s really habitable?”

“Doesn’t make sense that they’d
ship criminals all this way just to shove them out an airlock.”

“You don’t think it’s worth it,
seeing how frightened people are of the place?” Wychyrski sounded thrilled by
the thought of such a bizarre conspiracy. “And you know the other reason
Totokili’s got his trousers all twisted? They’re running the skip at a hundred
ten percent—maybe trying to get there before His Majesty goes out that airlock.
You think the Dol’jharians know any more about it than we do?”

“Telos, Yeo, where do you get those
weird ideas?” Tang sounded almost angry.

“You got any better ones?”
Wychyrski shot back, sounding cadet age. Well, technically she was.

“Null out, you two,” Nilotis said
with a lazy laugh. “We’ll find out when we find out.” He stood up, still a bit
stiff from his brush with death at Arthelion. “Meanwhile, we’re all earning the
Murphy bonus, and I, for one, intend to be around to spend it.” He yawned.
“Which I won’t if I don’t catch some Zs.”

With that, the conversation broke up and the officers
wandered out. As the door closed behind the last of them, Galen heard
Wychyrski’s voice: “Pleasant dreams, Mdeino.”

Galen jerked his shoulders, trying to shake of the doomful
images of Gehenna now crowding his mind as he returned to his manifests.
Pleasant dreams indeed.

He doubted it.

The flagstones underfoot gave way to naked rock; the walls
glistened wetly in the light of their torches. Londri shuddered as they passed
near a pulsating colony of cave-spiders clinging high up on one fissured wall,
their grape-sized bodies flexing up and down on their spindly legs in arachnid
unison.

Ahead, Gath-Boru held a stone-wood flambeau aloft, his massive
body bent nearly double. Lazoro walked upright, but in silence, without his
usual chatter. Stepan limped beside Londri, leaning on his cane to spare his
lamed foot. She felt the comforting bulk of Anya behind her.

The only sound was the shuffle of their feet and the
occasional spit and hiss of the flames from their torches.

Finally the narrow gut of rock opened up into a cavern
half-choked with fallen slabs of stone, mute record of the shock wave of the
Skyfall. A path had been cleared among the massive shards; ahead, a dim red
light grew.

Londri wrinkled her nose at the vile smell that greeted them
as they stepped beneath a fissured arch of stone into another, larger cavern.
Ahead, suspended over a chasm in the rocky floor, a twisted stone-wood cage
jutted from a precarious spear of rock. A man squatted in the cage, clothed
only in his own hair; longer than his body, it trailed in wispy lengths through
the bars beneath his feet, fluttering in the draft from the cavernous vent
below. Londri heard a grunt of disgust from Anya; she tried to breathe in
shallow gasps through her mouth. As far as she knew, the Oracle never left his
cage, although it was not locked; indeed, there was no door, the back was open
where it clung to the rock.

They stopped ten paces back from the fissure beneath the
cage. Wisps of vapor rose from the depths beneath; around them, oil fires
burned in hollows carved in the jumbled rocks of the cavern, only dimly
illuminating their surroundings.

Slowly she became aware of movement in the shadows, hints of
twisted creatures even more pitiful than the frog-thing that had summoned her.
Rejected even by the people of Gehenna, who valued almost any human life, they
found refuge here. Anya moved up next to her and put one big arm around her;
Londri leaned into her gratefully.

She looked steadily at the Oracle, more to avoid seeing the
shadows more clearly than to discern his features, which were lost behind his
matted hair and beard, stiff and yellow with filth and bits of food. He’d been
landed in the reign of her great-grandmother. No one now living knew who he was
or what his crime had been, only that he had been a Phanist of Desrien who had
done something so horrible in the shrine entrusted to him that the Magisterium
had commanded his exile.

Finally Londri stepped away from the forge master. “I come
as summoned, Old One. Tell me what Fate would have me know.”

The Oracle motioned with one skinny arm, and several
creatures—one had too many arms—humped to the edge of the fissure, pushing
before them a vast earthenware vessel with a gritty scrape that shivered
through Londri’s teeth. They tipped it over, releasing a silvery spill of water
into the red-glowing depths. A billow of steam shot up, and the Oracle inhaled
in deep tearing breaths. Then his limbs began to shake as the prophetic fit seized
him.

He chanted in a high, quavering voice:

Steel’s mistress, Londri Ironqueen,
When a new star blazes in the sky,
Ferric House against a fallen fortress
Leads both friend and foe to fate defy.
Great the risk, reward is even
greater:
Within your grasp the author of your
woe;
Until betrayal shifts against the Crater.
With wartime friend revealed as true foe.
For then the best may be to cede desire
The traitor’s triumph forcibly deny
See hope consumed in clouds of hellish fire
And wait another chance to end the lie.”

He fell silent, and the echoes of his mantic voice died away
in a susurration of echoes. Londri waited, but there was nothing more.

No advice about the twins. Just war, betrayal, death, and
hope lost. But that was life on Gehenna.

A wave of fatigue threatened to overwhelm her. She was in no
condition to interpret the prophecy. Leaning even more heavily on Anya
Steelhand’s warm bulk, she retraced her steps.

The legates of the Great Houses would be arriving in the
morning, Aztlan and Comori among them, and she had a judgment to render.

o0o

Gnostor Stepan Jiuderik, late of the College of Archetype
and Ritual, Carossa Node, stood in the Ironqueen’s Court and watched the
pageantry that he himself had designed. It had been his gift to Londri’s
mother, Sarrera, lover and sovereign, to strengthen her hold upon the Lodestone
Siege, knowing the Gehennans would be helpless against his knowledge of
archetypal semiotics.

Around him the light of the cressets and candles flaring
above sparked to life the glittering flecks of mica in the granite pillars and
vaulted arches of the Skyfall Chamber. The wall tapestries’ faded colors were
enriched by the flickering glow; the flayed skins of traitors and failed
challengers to the rulers of the Crater stared down with empty eyes that seemed
to follow the ceremony below.

But Stepan Ruderik remembered the Mandala and the Tree of
Worlds—and Gelasaar hai-Arkad seated there, dispensing justice. Pain seized
him, and he tried to banish the memory of the man he’d once called friend.

The legates of the Great Houses and their attendants entered
in solemn procession, following the Ironqueen and her honor guard. Each of the
vassal Houses was preceded by the standards of their heritage—scythe, sword,
griffin, eagle, a star made of bones, a glass flower—all thrust aloft and
waving, like a wind-tossed forest of heraldry. The rich garb of the nobles
threw back the yellow light in subtle tints; their iron jewelry glinted dully,
highlighted here and there with gems or the hypnotically iridescent blue-green
pearls of the gauma.

Memory delivered its customary scourge as Stepan Ruderik
recalled the Douloi and their subtle dance of a power sovereign over trillions.

The Ferric Fanfaronade pealed forth from the immense wooden
hydraulics behind the Lodestone Siege, ringing from the stone walls in
battering echoes that drowned the hum of conversation and the clattering of the
boots of the attendant guards. But Stepan Ruderik remembered the Phoenix
Fanfare blazing forth in the bright harmonies of brass; to his ears the Ferric
Fanfaronade sounded dull and reedy. On Gehenna, metal was for war and the
maintenance of political power; no one would squander it on a musical
instrument

With an effort he focused on the present. The Oracle’s
messenger and the ensuing visit below House Ferric had upset him deeply. Even
after nearly thirty years in Gehenna, there were aspects of the planet he could
not adjust to. That he had been a Highdweller merely made it worse.

Sarrera had mocked him
affectionately for his refusal to reckon in Gehennan years, his flawless
Carossa-accented Uni, and his other affectations, as she called them. He had
never been able to make her understand that without them, Gehenna would long
ago have devoured him. He thought he’d have better luck with her daughter.

My daughter.
He
clamped down hard on the emotion that had no place in Gehennan life, for the
harsh mathematics of infertility here made families matrilineal—a father was no
more than an uncle. Londri could not understand the depth of feeling between a
father and his offspring that was the norm in the Thousand Suns.

The hydraulics stopped and the ringing of steel pulled from
scabbard snapped his attention back to the Skyfall Chamber as the Ironqueen’s
honor guard drew their weapons. Bright steel, the wealth of the Crater, drew
all eyes as Londri Ironqueen mounted the dais and faced the assembly.

Behind her crouched the Lodestone Siege, a twisted lump of
meteoric iron wrought not by human hands but by its flaming descent from space
in the Skyfall so long ago. Only vaguely throne-like, it was hers alone to sit on.
Beside her, massive Gath-Boru stood rigidly, holding the Sword of Maintenance
upright.

“Hear ye, noble Houses of Gehenna
and all the realms within the Splash, and all that desire justice of House
Ferric here assembled.” Londri’s high, clear voice rang against the stone
walls. “By bright steel and established custom, by the courage that preserves
life against heaven’s hate, and by the wisdom of our mothers and their mothers’
mothers, I declare this court of judgment open to petition.”

She seated herself on the Lodestone Siege, her white robes
spilling in a graceful fall across its pitted surface; Gath-Boru carefully laid
the heavy broadsword across her knees. She seemed distracted, her motions
abrupt. Stepan turned a mute question to Lazoro, who shrugged fractionally,
looking worried.

The machinery of justice proceeded with deliberate grace.
The legates of Comori and Aztlan stepped forward, accompanied by their
standards, and presented their cases in measured tones. There was no hint of
the passions the case had aroused.

Stepan grimaced. This was the true measure of Gehennan
poverty: that a war might be fought over a biological fact that people in the
Thousand Suns took for granted. Out there, if you wanted twins, you had twins,
a simple task for obstetric technology. In here, no one alive remembered the
last time twins had been conceived.