That Way Lies Camelot (35 page)

* * *

It was Cael, one of the laser crew, who worked out of his bonds first. Lanky, sallow, and looking as if he'd worn the same coverall for a week, he arrived on the bridge in an excited gush of talk. 'Can't find Dak,' he said breathlessly as he cut Jensen's hands free. 'Damned skip-runner must've abducted him, or killed him, or something, because he's not in any of the compartments. Jesus, you should see what's happened down there. Ship's got no guts left, I swear. Stripped down to her coils, which leak, and are useless anyway.'

'Cael,' said Jensen, standing stiffly due to discomfort and an icy vista of fury. 'Kindly be silent and cut your fellow officers free.'

The next thing Cael chose to cut was Beckett's gag, which from Jensen's point of view was a mistake. She never did keep her mouth shut.

'You won't get away with this, Commander,' she said, between hawking sour spittle from her throat. 'That message torp to Fleet won't bring you farts for a citation, because
I'm
going to see you burn. You surrendered a Fleet vessel to a goddamned
skip-runner,
saw her stripped to her pins without a fight, and now you think to profit by it? Guess again.'

Slapped awake from his obsessive desire to see MacKenzie James dead and rotting, Jensen simply stared at her. He did not notice the looks given him by the ensign, nor the baffled curiosity of the gunman who paused in his ministrations to the pilot. In a tone of velvet quiet, the commander said, 'Carry on with your duties.
I'm
going down to free Dak.'

Jensen strode coolly from
Kildare'
s bridge. From the moment he rounded the bulkhead, his crew burst into excited talk, but he did not hear. Sprinting full tilt for the access hatch to the lower level, he thought only upon how to save his career. Beckett was an unanticipated problem. Damn her for having no ambition whatsoever. Damn her for being a stickler for protocol. Old for her post, she'd probably never been promoted because the officers she'd served under hated her.

But deep down, Jensen knew that Beckett was only a fraction of the problem. Even if the other five members of the crew went along with a falsified story, how long before that greenie ensign or that all-thumbs pilot talked over their beer?

Involved in furious thought, Jensen hurried on.

Around the bend, past the gutted remains of the drive compartment, Jensen nearly collided with the other member of his gun crew. 'Rogers,' he said, trying not to wince at the stab of pain from his cracked ribs. 'The rest of the crew are on the bridge. Join them and wait for my return.'

'Aye, sir,' said Rogers, his corpulent, ruddy features showing no curiosity at all. Cael often said he only came alive under his headset, with a live target in front of him.

Just then, Jensen was grateful for one crewman who was content with a stolid outlook. He ducked down a side corridor that narrowed into a tube. The light panels were out, lending a gray, echoing ghostliness to a downward plunge into dark.
Kildare'
s conversion had been too hasty for aesthetics; her gratings were blessedly bare. Jensen found the access panel by feel and tapped out the security code. A panel hissed open. Striped black and yellow, and glinting with reflective tape, the last remaining message torp rested untouched in its cradle, exactly as MacKenzie James had said.

Jensen lifted it out, grunting at the pain as cracked ribs protested the exertion. He hefted the capsule to his sound side, but found the effort a waste. The strain on the muscles called on to hold his body erect against the off-balancing weight hurt him just as much.

Breathing with all the tenderness he could manage and hating the fact his eyes watered from the effort, Jensen inched his way back down the access tube. He'd have to cross the main bay, which was probably unlighted, and that was the moment he'd be vulnerable if any of his crew chanced to stray from the flight deck.

The lights proved to be on, which was infinitely worse; Jensen felt exposed as he crossed the open expanse. His hands shook, and his fingers left sweaty prints on the reflective strips of the message torp. He pressed on, toward the shadowed alcove with its reflective emergency emblem.

* * *

The escape ejection capsule's lock cracked open with a faint hiss and ah escape of stale air. Grunting despite his best effort as he ducked, Jensen pushed his way inside, the message torp tucked across his knees. He elbowed the plate that would light the interior, and saw what looked like a bundle of rags in one corner. The seeping red stains in the cloth belied that assessment.

Jensen set down the torp, shifted, and light from the overhead flooded over his shoulder to reveal the engineer, Dak, bound, gagged, and rolled up in a shivering ball. The knuckles visible through the strapping on his hands and wrists were grazed, and he had a gash on one knee, an elbow, and the curve of one acne-dotted cheek. His eyes, which were blue and bugged out, swiveled in surprise at the sight of his commander. He moaned something that had the ring of obscenity into his gag and thrashed determinedly at his bonds.

Preternaturally aware of the access hatch gapped open at his back, Jensen whispered urgently for silence.

'Hostiles are still aboard,' he lied as he stooped over the battered engineer. He began with the wrist bonds and whispered into the ear that poked over the edge of the gag. 'We're in very deep trouble.'

Dak flexed his freed hands and gave Jensen a wide-eyed look of sarcasm. His first words, as his gag came loose, were 'No kidding.'

Jensen let some of the anger he felt toward MacKenzie James leak into his voice. 'Crew's all dead. Without quarter.'

That shut Dak up, fast. Sealed in the escape capsule, he'd had no clue as to what had befallen. He stared in shocked horror as his senior officer continued.

'They spared me so they could pump me for security codes and information,' Jensen fabricated. He paused, made a show of staring at his hands, which were abraded and raw from his constant twisting at the ties that lashed him to the crew chair. 'I talked some, mostly as a ploy. The skip-runners thought I was scared and didn't view me as a threat. They tied me less carefully than they might have, and I managed to work free.' Now Jensen raised his eyes and stared ingenuously at his engineer. 'We need to blow the ship,' he confided. 'Take out those skip-runners before they have a chance to use my codes against the Fleet, or to make off with
Kildare
as a prize.'

'They were going to leave me to suffocate!' Dak burst out in a fury.

Nervelessly, Jensen played along. 'No doubt.' He allowed a moment for the unpleasantness of that concept to register, then gently prodded for what he wanted. 'I need you, Dak. We're stripped of all energy sources but that cracked coil unit, and somehow we need to destroy
Kildare:

Dak's face grew thoughtful, almost boyish as he considered the problem. 'Shouldn't be too difficult,' he surmised, his knobby fingers tapping his agitation. 'The crack's making the unit unstable anyway. All we need to do is play a current through it. Should create a critical imbalance on short order.' He ruminated for a moment, chewing his lip. 'Trouble is, once I start the sequence, there won't be any fail-safe.
Kildare
will explode, and nothing we do could stop the process.'

'You'd rather die at the hands of the skip-runners?' Jensen said brutally.

Dak shrugged. 'Rather not die at all, truth to tell. But I guess this is our best chance.'

Jensen settled back with a show of relief that was not entirely feigned. 'I'll see you commended in my report, for courageous duty to the Fleet.'

For a moment Dak looked wistful. 'My mom would appreciate that. If we ever get through this alive.'

Jensen nodded.-As his back settled against the console of the escape capsule, he made a point of wincing over his cracked ribs. 'I've brought a message torp,' he said thinly. 'When you get back from sabotaging the coils, we'll launch the capsule without engines. If we're lucky, drift will carry us clear before the skip-runner notices. When we know we're away, the torp will call in a rescue.'

At the crucial moment Dak's childish face looked uncertain. 'I hate to go out,' he allowed. He dabbed at the gash on his knee and made a face. 'That damned skip-runner's mate fights dirty;'

Cloaked in the icy air of command, Jensen held back a sigh. 'I won't remind you of the need to keep out of sight.'

'I don't ever wake up their husbands,' Dak admonished dryly. 'Be sure of it, I'll be
damned
quiet.' He folded his awkward assortment of limbs, slipped past, and sauntered off into the main bay with his lips curled in a nervous grimace.

Left alone in the stuffy confines of the capsule, Jensen readied the panel for takeoff. Mac James had left all the systems operational, which was well, for he had no intention of leaving the
Kildare
by drift. He'd go under power, and fast as he could manage, and he'd watch his command blow from space. That his crew were to die without quarter caused his hands to shake only slightly.

He'd weighed his options and decided without regret. The ghosts of a greenie ensign, and that dried-up bitch Beckett, a gun crew, and an incompetent pilot would not haunt him half so much as a career despoiled by court-martial.

That Dak had to be duped was a pity. The kid was a gifted engineer. .. .

* * *

In a cubicle office of Special Services, a thin man with a dry complexion thumbed through the report. The lines that described Jensen's story were straightforward enough - that
Kildare
had been commandeered by the skip-runner MacKenzie James, her crew murdered without quarter, and only her commander kept alive, for purposes of interrogation. With his vessel taken in tow to rendezvous with the Syndicate fleet, Commander Jensen had contrived escape, fired off the warning message torp to Admiral Duane's fleet, then arranged to scuttle
Kildare.
He had been rescued from his escape capsule, forty-eight hours after the battle off Khalia, in battered condition with several cracked ribs.

Cloth rustled as a short man seated in the corner shifted his weight. 'The boy's lying outright. Mac James never kills unnecessarily.'

The thin man's silence offered agreement. He thumbed the corner of the report for a moment before shuffling the pages straight.

The short man felt moved to clarify. 'The security codes on the warning torp were Jensen's, but Mac James's personal cipher was appended. I say he's still alive, and that Commander Jensen destroyed his ship to hide evidence detrimental to himself.'

The thin man stirred at last. 'MacKenzie James is undoubtedly still alive. But the promotion to captain that's coming to Jensen cannot be stopped without blowing Mac's cover. With the Syndicate families being the threat that they are,
I'm
reluctant to call down a public hero. The people need the morale boost. And Mac's far too valuable a contact to waste just to bring a murderer to trial.'

'Let it pass, then?' the short man concluded.

'No.' The word held the hardness of nails. 'Give Jensen a file in our records. He might prove useful someday.'

That Way Lies Camelot

The May sunlight that fell through the window was serene enough to trigger a violence of resentment and hurt. Lynn Allen hurled a sodden, crumb-gritty sponge in the sink and ran her fingers through hair that fell thick to her shoulders, in neglected need of a cut. Childless, still single at thirty-three, she held little enough in common with a younger sister whose pretty, homey kitchen reflected family cheer at every turn. And what could anybody say to comfort a sibling who was divorced, a mother of three, with her eldest just barely twelve and lying in a coma, not expected to last out the day?

Words failed. Despair raged in like flood tide.

Wretched with the helplessness that overran them all over Sandy's terminal illness, Lynn blinked and roused and wiped damp palms on her jeans. She tried to regroup, to recover a grip on the immediate, while at the end of the gravel drive outside, a school bus slowed to a grind of gears; stopped to a squeal of brakes.

The front door banged.

'Damn it!' Raw with exasperation, Lynn repeated the same check she'd completed five minutes earlier. There'd been no forgotten books or sweaters in the breakfast nook then; she hadn't overlooked a misplaced brown bag lunch. No dab hand with kids, she'd thought she'd done miracles to get her nephews out the door on time for school without their incessant bickering firing her temper.

In typically eight-year-old smugness, Tony hollered bad news from the hallway. 'Dog pen's empty, Aunt Lynn! Grail's run off again.'

And the front door, left open, wafted air strongly scented with bursting pre-summer greenery. The patter of the boy's running sneakers diminished down the porch stair as he raced headlong toward the waiting bus.

'Damned
stupid
flea-bag of a mutt!' Lynn clenched her fists, feeling sloppy and out of synch in clothes more suited for weekend picnics. The dog's timing couldn't be worse; and worse, couldn't be helped. He would have to be rounded up before he finished dining from the neighbor's upset trash cans, and nosed out more original mischief that would incite some busybody's complaint to the county dog catchers. Ragged already from grief and exhaustion, Ann was shortly going to be coping with the funeral of a son. Given hassles with the insurance company over hospital expenses worth more than her house, the last thing she needed would be another fine for an unleashed pet.

The dog was Sandy's, after all. Obligation to a child, who could not be spared by all the torments of modern medicine, would invoke motherly sentiment by the bucket. The scrofulous yellow hound, with its torn ear and its ridiculous shambling gait, would be redeemed. An ounce of common sense suggested the creature should be better off abandoned to be humanely destroyed.

Through the window, washed in early, blinding brightness, Lynn saw Tony's neon jacket disappear inside the doorway of the bus. Brian, just ten, had boarded already. One problem less, with the boys off her hands; which left the damnfool dog. Lynn moved mechanically to the closet and snatched the first jacket to hand, an anorak that was baggy and grease-stained enough to have belonged to Annie's ex. She grimaced and pulled the thing on. It felt worse than her face, which any other day would have been tastefully made up for her work as design manager for a New York advertising firm.

But her job, as well as the tacked together appointments she called a social life, had been wrenched to a halt by Sandy's relapse. The event had impelled her to acts of insanity: to cash in her unused vacation time and leave the office in a hair-pulling rush.

Her boss's shouting troubled her yet. 'There might not be any job here for you, whenever the hell you get back!'

And her reply, as filled with female bitchiness as any chauvinist could wish, to find fault for firing her later: 'My nephew is ill, and
I'm
driving to New Hampshire to help my sister. If you've got a problem with that, then take my resignation in writing, sideways, down the first orifice you can reach.'

She'd slammed the office door upon a thunderstruck, stupefied silence; and although she'd stayed absent for a month and sent no word, nobody from the firm so much as phoned.

Presently on her knees in the silvery pile of Annie's living room carpet, Lynn smothered a halfway hysterical laugh. Just now the convolutions of high-pressure employment seemed a picnic, beside the daily management of young boys, and keeping tabs on one alley-bred mutt. She scrounged under the coffee table, careful not to upset the empty pizza box with its cache of stale crumbs, and stretched to rescue her sneakers. These had somehow been kicked so far underneath the sofa they were wedged against the back strut. Grunting other inexpressible frustrations in epithets over the dog, she sauntered across waxed wooden floors and expensive orientals to the doorway, still open and decorated with a wreath that had Easter eggs wired in withered sprigs of hemlock.

The decoration had stayed up, forgotten, in the crush of concerns that followed Sandy's sudden onset of infections and the ugly, inescapable diagnosis that every agonizing scientific remedy had bought little more time, and no cure.

Lynn crossed the white and green painted New England porch, squinted through light that hurt, and dissected the muddle of shade cast by a privet hedge whose wild growth reflected the absence of a husband. Though the fence wasn't torn, and the wire gate on its sagging hinges was still wrapped shut with chain, the dog's pen stood deserted. The infamous Grail had departed on another of his happy gallivants.

She sighed. Grail. What a stupid name for an ungainly mutt that loped like a roll of discarded shag carpet, propped askew on four legs. A creature nobody would have wanted, in right mind or not; but as a shambling stray towed home on a length of twine that showed signs of its salvage from the gutter, he had not been easily refused. Not when his plight had been championed by Sandy, who had sneaked outside unseen, still shaky and pale from the effects of his chemotherapy treatments. The huge eyes and gaunt face of leukemia in remission had overturned practicality, which would have been fine if the idiot dog had been content to enjoy his good fortune.

But the mongrel was friendly and brainless, and possessed by a penchant for wandering. He chewed through ropes, dug under wire fences, then progressed to other escape methods as unfathomable in their art as Houdini's. It had been grandfather Thomas who had called the creature Grail; the name stuck because of his young owner's obsession for Arthurian legend, and for the hours the whole family spent in Godforsaken searches that seemed as regular and futile as crusades.

'Do us all a service and charge in front of a delivery truck,' Lynn grumbled to the creature's absent spirit. She kicked a stone and hiked after its savage ricochet down the drive. Over the grit and sparkle of gravel left mounded by the melt of last season's snowdrifts, she rounded the hedge toward the neighbor's yard.

Charlie Mitchell still wore his bathrobe, sash and hem flapping as he ill-temperedly chased down a bread wrapper caught by the wind. The trash can stood righted amid a chewed litter of The Colonel's colored packaging. Obviously Grail had feasted and departed. Poised to beat a quick retreat, Lynn moved too late.

White hair askew and pajama cuffs grayed from the dew, Charlie pounced on the plastic. He gave a crow of triumph, swiveled around, and realized in embarrassment that his antics had been observed. Flustered by his unaccustomed burst of exercise, he called in carping irritation, 'Damned dog lit off for the woods an hour ago! Get wise and buy him a chain, can't you? It's illegal to shoot dogs out of hand in this state. Or by God, I'd have loaded my shotgun and blown the mutt to the devil.'

Lynn choked back excuses that a chain had failed already. Grail's brainless skull was narrow like a snake's, and collars slid off him like so many layers of shed skin. The chain, hacked off a foot from its swivel clip, now fastened an equally useless gate. She produced a polite apology for her sister's sake, and returned in resignation toward the house.

Inside, cut off from the gusty freshness of bursting azaleas and tulips, the rooms were sun-washed and silent. The waxed antiques and stylish hardwoods seemed too warm with life, their expensive comforts disjointed by a wider setting of tragedy. Lynn gritted her teeth unconsciously as she passed by Sandy's room, with its counterpane bedspread and clutterless floors, all too painfully neat. Unlike Tony, who slept like a hot dog in a bun, Sandy tended to rip his bedclothes off wholesale and leave them tousled in heaps. Photos of medieval castles lined the walls, as well as an old poster, lovingly framed, from a stage production of Camelot. The books and toy knights were not scattered across the rugs, nor arrayed for a charge against Saxons. They sat ranked in rows on the shelf, helms and ribboned trappings dulled by a layer of soft dust. As if Sandy's boisterous presence had been subdued, reduced already to a shadow that diminished the vibrance of his memory. Lynn pressed a hand to her mouth and hurried the length of the hallway, her track automatically bending to avoid the clutter of the younger boys' toys.

But the desk in the corner of the master bedroom offered no haven at all.

Lynn sat, elbows crackling in stacks of envelopes that showed not a curlicue of Annie's idle doodles. The mail lay as it had come, unopened, or else torn apart in fierce bursts, contents rifled for information. North sky through the casement blued the oblong, windowed cellophane; the return addresses of medical labs and oncologists, printed starkly in thermographed typefaces only preferred anymore by doctors, lawyers, and funeral homes.

Off to one side, bent-cornered and half buried, lay the unsent application for the charity that granted the wishes of terminally ill children. Only the blanks that related to Sandy's condition were filled out; the doctors' signatures meticulously collected in heavy-handed, near illegible scrawls. The last sentences, in defiant schoolboy printing, requested a visit to the Round Table of King Arthur. After that, unfilled lines stretched in rows. The memory still cut, of the aftermath, with Ann driven to the edge. 'My God, Lypn. Sandy's old enough to know that a trip to the past is impossible!'

At this desk, in this chair, Ann had sat white-faced over the pens and the papers gathered up from the kitchen table. She wept in despairing exasperation that the one wish her boy chose to long for was beyond human resource to fulfill.

Later, around the rubber-soled tread of busy nurses and the unending interruptions of hospital routine, they tried to coax Sandy to reconsider. Donated funds could send kids to Disney World, let them play with circus clowns, allow them to meet famous rock stars, or tour the set of a movie. But sending a boy back to King Arthur's court was just not a practical aspiration.

Too thin, too pale, his scrawny hand clenched on the wrist that had bruised red and purple from too close acquaintance with needles, Sandy stayed adamant. He would see Camelot, or go nowhere at all.

Lynn swore and blinked back tears. It wasn't as if they couldn't have sent the kid to a Renaissance fair, or a summertime re-creation staged by the Society for Creative Anachronism. Yet Sandy scorned the idea of a staged joust. He wanted real chivalry, and swords that drew blood, as if the savage bright danger of a legendary past could negate the horrors he endured through his illness.

'You know,' he confided to his mother, 'men got hurt in Arthur's time, and suffered wounds, and it was for a
cause.
Knights died for other people, Mom. I hurt, and I'll die too, but nobody will be better or get saved.'

A boy's view: more than just desire, that leapt reason's restraint and became dreaming obsession. The tissue of tears and salvation for him; agony to the family he'd leave behind. Ann had pulled a tissue from her purse, blown her nose, and put the subject behind as best she could. She gave Sandy a hug and insisted it probably didn't matter anyway, as grants to bring joy to terminally ill children usually were awarded to cystic fibrosis cases. Leukemia, these days, was considered the less devastating disease.

Not Sandy's aggressive form, this was true.

Battered by platitudes that even the child could sense were meaningless, Sandy never complained. Colorless as the pillows he lay on, his features made over into an eerie, premature old age by the hair loss caused by his treatments, he had comforted his mother by pretending most diligently to forget.

Now, stung to useless fury by this fortitude, Lynn plowed aside the paper clutter that mapped a child's last month of life. She grabbed the phone and jabbed numbers fiercely.

The line rang once. Ann answered. She sounded beat to her socks.

Lynn made a failed attempt to sound cheerful. 'Still there?'

A wrung out sigh came back. 'Still there. At least he still shows breathing and a heartbeat.' A pause, as Annie roused enough to take worried notice of the time. 'Did Brian miss the bus?'

Lynn blinked faster, and felt tears trace hot lines down her cheeks. She could not, so easily, brush away the vision in her mind, of Sandy lying lost in a sea of adult-sized sheets, his wasted form diminished by the monitors and the tubes, overhanging his bed like modern-time carrion vultures awaiting his moment of death. 'Brian and Tony are at school, and fine. I called because Grail's got out.'

An interval of shared exasperation. 'That dog. He's probably picking the chicken bones out of Charlie Mitchell's trash. You'd think the old coot would spend a few bucks and buy cans with lids that fit. The ones he hangs onto are a lunch invitation to coons and every other passing animal.'