The Phoenix in Flight (30 page)

“NO THREAT PERCEIVED AT THIS TIME,”
replied the logos
in its passionless voice.
“MONITORING BATTLE DEBRIS AS INSTRUCTED. MOVEMENT
IS APPARENTLY RANDOM.”

Tallis tried to relax and leave the tacticals to the
machine. So far, its performance had been flawless. Its advice and tactical
support had kept the
Satansclaw
untouched during the battle, while
accounting for two enemy vessels. Most important, to the crew it had looked
like Tallis’s work. The awe in some of their faces had given him a visceral
thrill that was addictive in its intensity. He leaned back and luxuriated in
the memory, which helped him to ignore the ache in his butt and the grit in his
eyes from running close to three watches in a row. But he didn’t dare rest, or
release his primary crew. Not yet.

An update rippled across the main screen, bringing his
attention back to the display. His eyes ranged anxiously across the many
windows, some of which showed only fast-moving objects or close-up scans, as he
worried that something had moved in the ones he wasn’t looking at.

The
Satansclaw
had been decommissioned from the
Panarchy’s service more than four hundred years before the Karroo Syndicate had
finally restored its weapons, but there still was too much information on the
screen for Tallis to follow comfortably. He knew the logos was dealing easily
with it, but he couldn’t stop trying to make sense of the display. He could
feel a titanic headache building from the strain.

The screen shimmered again as the computer adjusted the
view, and this time Tallis started as some of the light blotches shifted
slightly. He glanced quickly around the bridge; only one of his crew had
noticed his reaction. Anderic’s eyes met his, and the communications tech
raised an eyebrow and nodded faintly toward the screen. He knew what that
quickcode portended, even if the rest of the monitors hadn’t guessed.

Tallis lifted his chin and fixed Anderic with his coldest
and most forbidding frown.
You ugly, long-nosed maggot! You’d better keep
your mouth shut.

The tech dropped his gaze and turned back to his console,
his shoulders tight with tension.

Tallis permitted himself a small moue of triumph.
I wish
Luri had seen that...
Tallis indulged himself for a few moments with
planning a little dramatic interaction designed to remind Luri, Anderic, and
the crew just who was master of the
Satansclaw.
Then, remembering what
had occasioned the recent exchange, he turned his attention back to his screen
and resolved to watch Anderic more closely.

Tallis noted the large faint spot of light that represented
the Node and congratulated himself on having stationed the
Satansclaw
quite
near that central synchronous community— too near, as he had hoped, for the
battlecruiser to risk targeting him with a ruptor. His mind glossed over the
fact that the logos had made the recommendation, with the thought that he had
bought the logos, so the credit was his anyway.

Hreem thinks he’s so smart—but I saw what his bridge
looked like afterward.
Tallis sniffed in disgust and reached with a
leisurely, nicely judged gesture to tap in a close-up of the Node on one of the
auxiliary screens. Once the cruiser had been zapped he had been glad to take up
station away from that looming mass. Not that any synchronous community was
armed—they were too large and fragile to be defendable. Nonetheless, there were
too many hiding places that might shelter a nasty surprise among the Node’s
branching array of cylinders, like a huge crystal of some exotic chemical...

A crystal...
That’s good!
he thought, arrested
by the simile that had just bubbled up. Tallis leaned his head sideways, into
the focus of the pinmike, and started to repeat it into his journal. He was so
taken with his flash of poesy despite the trying circumstances, and was so
enjoying the sensuous flow of his words, that he failed to hear and recognize
the faint rattle of bracelets and the unsteady tick-tick of heels, and to
notice the near-simultaneous head-swiveling of everyone on the bridge that
announced the arrival of Luri. Then a soft-pointed satin-restrained mass of
warm flesh tried to squirm its way into his ear, accompanied by a wave of the
perfume that Tallis thought of as Jungle Luststench.

He grimaced.
She would pick now to get kewpy
.
He
turned to find himself staring at close range at a fleshy expanse with a
notable resemblance to the Canyon on Alta Magnum. His eyes crossed and he
pushed her gently away.

“Tal-lis,” she sighed his name on two separate notes, the
sigh a sweet inhalation and exhalation that seemed to fixate everyone’s
attention on her artfully half-draped attributes.

Tallis was torn between annoyance at her disregard of his
orders and gloating awareness of the palpable desire she engendered in just
about the entire crew.

“What is it, Luri?” he asked crisply.

Her widely curved, slightly petulant lower lip pouted a
little, then Luri slowly shaped her mouth to form a loose and soft kiss.
“Mmmm,” she crooned, “don’t be angry with Luri, I just thought you might like a
little
shakrian,
you’ve been up here sooo... long.” She ended with
another of those fleshy tsunamis that accompanied her sighs, and shifted her
weight in a series of eye-transfixing rounded movements until she was standing
behind him. “You must be sooooo tense...” Her fingers drifted over the back of
his neck above his stiffly embroidered collar, and pressed with delicate
urgency into the muscles at the base of his skull.

Everyone on the bridge except Anderic had swiveled around to
stare at Luri; Anderic was watching her, too, all right, but only he was
self-possessed enough to position himself so that any change on his board would
catch the edge of his vision.
They’re all fools, and Anderic’s the worst
because he’s a clever fool,
Tallis thought grimly.

Ordinarily he would have sent Luri from the bridge,
thoughtful gesture notwithstanding, but he felt a distinct urge to enact that
little reminder now, in full view of Anderic’s damned ferret eyes, and so he
lounged further on his chair, stretching his glossy boots out a little, as he
watched the reactions of the crew through half-shut eyes. Ninn, the balding
polliwog at Fire Control, swallowed visibly, and Lennart at Damage Control
stared, her mouth hanging open. Tallis transferred his gaze back to the screen
with no small amount of pleasure.

“Tal-lis,” Luri sang softly.

“Yes,” he responded with just a hint of impatience for the
crew’s benefit.

“You’ve been here so lo-ong.” Those two notes again, wistful
and sulky. “When are you coming to Luri’s ca-bin?”

Tallis had to fight to keep from smirking in triumph at the
blatant invitation in her voice. “Soon, soon,” he answered carelessly. “And
remember to turn the gravs back up!” he added in a much lower tone.

“Ohhh,” she made a pouting little noise, “but there’s so...
much...
one can do in quarter-gee.”

Including stand up straight.
She insisted on keeping
her cabin in low-gee, which lent a rather startling enhancement to her figure.
“There’s nothing if one’s gravsick,” he muttered.

Her fingers continued their sensuous pressures on his neck
and jaw as she went on, meaning exuding from her soft voice, “Luri’s been
sooooooo bored, she has thought of many... new... games... All she wants is
company...”

The length of this intimate conversation was beginning to
make him a little uncomfortable. Sitting up slightly, he said with unfeigned
impatience, “We can’t do anything until something happens, or that greasebag
Hreem gives us the sign, and he’s apparently taking his time out there.”

At Hreem’s name Luri gave a soft sound of disgust. Tallis
reached back to pat her hand, and he said in a deep, protective baritone, “Don’t
give that bloated slub another thought. I promised you he won’t get near you.”

There was a slight diminution in the airiness of her reply,
but a note of truth withal. “As long as he thinks Luri’s willing he won’t try.
He likes the chase, that one.”

She gave a great sigh then, which he felt as well as heard,
and resumed her hypnotic pressing on all the tension points of his neck and
skull. After a long pause she also resumed her litany of loneliness, in that
same sweet, longing moan. Tallis’s replies became more sporadic until, all at
once, it occurred to him she was still embroidering her theme with no
encouragement from him. Then the astonishing thought hit him that she might not
be talking to him at all!

He jerked his head up—and caught sight of Anderic turned
completely around, hot gaze locked on a point over Tallis’s head, his mouth
stretched in a loose grin that made Tallis leap out of his chair.

“Tal-lis!” Luri jumped back, her purple-lidded eyes round
and reproachful, as if she hadn’t just been seducing every one of these slubs
with her eyes while supposedly talking to him—especially, from the lust on his
damned face, that Anderic!

Stung into honest outrage, Tallis glared silently back at
her, at a loss for words. None of the artistic Dol’jharian curses he’d
carefully memorized to roll out so sonorously would suit.
“
Cheat!
”
he
yelped, red with rage, completely forgetting to keep his eyes half-shut so they
assumed something less than their natural prominent state. “Damn you! Get off
the chatzing—”

A flare of ghostly red light from one of the tactical
windows gave him an instant’s warning before a flickering glare ripped at
everyone from the screens, followed by a shock as though a giant hand had
swatted the ship. The screens filled with streaks of garbage as the computer
overloaded, unable to cope with the flood of data the missile’s lasers had
painted the ship with before it exploded.

“Tallis!” Luri shrieked. “I can’t see—”

“Sneak-missile!” Tallis roared. “Oolger! Get the sensors
back on-line! Everybody on visual!” He jumped back into the command pod and
poised his hand over his jump pad, ready to skip out at the slightest sign that
the Panarchists were following up the missile with something more deadly. Only
his fear of Eusabian, and of Hreem, kept him from jumping immediately.

“Report. Tactical.”
He was so shaken that he almost
spoke aloud.

“FREEJ-NEESH WALLA ZOO-OPOSH NREE FAZEMPT,”
replied
the logos in a squeaky falsetto. Its voice dropped three octaves.
“REPAIR
ALGORITHMS ENGAGED. PLEASE STAND BY.”
Then it began singing lugubriously
and far too loudly in a language Tallis didn’t recognize,
“MAZOO, MAZOO, MEE
VRAMESH BOLGOYATNEE. . .”
rattling Tallis’s sinus cavities and making his
eyes water.

He slapped at the code pads until he succeeded in making it
somewhat quieter.

The screens cleared partially to reveal the Shield curdled
into a whirlpool of spinning light. Well above its center, a dazzling point of
light hurtled up at tremendous speed. “Cap’n, the Shield’s irised!”

“VRAMESH NEENOR PUNGLI PUNGLA...
”

Tallis shook his head to dislodge the manic voice of the
logos. “Ninn! They’re boosting! Target them and charge up a missile!”

The squat Rifter keyed in a command, then banged a fist on
his console in frustration, yelling back, “Charging! But I can’t do a chatzing
thing more if that stupid pinch-face doesn’t give the computer its eyes back.”

Oolger stabbed angrily at his console and was rewarded by a
violently flickering moiré pattern overlaid on the direct visual that blotted
out the view of their escaping quarry. The scantech gave a blurred shout as his
angular body arched back sharply, and his heels drummed against the base of his
chair in the senseless rhythm of a seizure.

Anderic pushed him brutally to the floor and slid into his
seat. Tallis opened his mouth to bellow a reprimand, then paused as the screens
began to clear.

“Come on...” coaxed Ninn, hunched over caressing his
controls, gaze fixed on his screen. “Come on... my lovely... open your eyes
now,” he crooned. It almost looked as if he was bent in devotion to the little
Gorgon’s head he had affixed above his station. It glittered coldly above its
apparent worshiper, its dead eyes disapproving as the seconds slipped by,
accompanied by harsh snoring noises from Oolger.

The sounds reminded Tallis of a ritual strangling his
sponsor at Karroo had shown him once, with the demented burblings of the logos
furnishing an idiotic counterpoint.

“BOOZHA LARRIM NIESHH TI-CHRAMEN—”

Tallis watched the screen anxiously as the booster climbed
steadily toward freedom, still obscured by overlaid patches of random data.
Luri pushed close against him and with one shaking hand straightened out her
filmy gown. “Is this an attack?” she asked in a subdued voice.

Tallis shot her a glance of annoyance. He didn’t need
additional distractions; he could barely think straight with the idiot machine
maundering away inside his head. “No.” He aimed the word over one shoulder. “It
was a trick, a trap laid by those karra-cursed Panarchists.”

He gave the Dol’jharian word
karra
a harshly
theatrical twist, but noticed Anderic’s face pruned in scorn at the scan
console. Tallis remembered that the tech had watched the same vid where he’d
heard Eusabian say the word, and he knew Anderic recalled the hint of distant
thunder carried by the Dol’jharian accent, which he couldn’t reproduce.

Luri had never heard Eusabian speak and had freely expressed
her wish that she never would. She stroked the back of Tallis’s head. Tallis
remembered overhearing her saying that he was never more interesting than when
he was angry—at someone else. He felt a tingle of renewed lust at the touch of
her hand, despite his anger and anxiety, and he wondered, not for the first
time, if she had been gennated for pheromonal production, or something similar.
How else to explain her overwhelming sexuality?