The Phoenix in Flight (37 page)

Abruptly the lights went out and all the consoles went dead.
The whine of the ventilators spun down the scale into silence and the floor
bucked from a nearby explosion. Moments later the sound arrived, a heavy, muted
crump. The red emergency illuminators came on, leaving the distant corners of
the room wrapped in shadows.

The Archon grinned at Omilov, a baring of the teeth that
mixed militant anticipation with amusement. “You should see yourself,
Sebastian,” he commented. “The most unlikely mixture of martial ardor and
gentility one could imagine.”

Omilov smiled back, reflecting that the Archon, by contrast,
looked every inch the warrior. “I’m afraid that this is the first time I’ve
handled one of these.” He hefted the firejac. “I’m not sure I won’t be more of
a danger with it to our people than a threat to the Rifters.”

“Don’t worry.” The Archon chuckled. “That’s why we gave you
a jac. Just make sure it’s set to a medium aperture. If you can handle a garden
hose, you can do as much damage as any of us. They’re unlikely to have heavy
armor, and nothing else will give them much protection.”

The Archon glanced at the door as a muffled, rhythmic
clanking commenced, then frowned. The noise wasn’t coming from outside the
door, but from behind a large metal bulkhead partway down a wall. “They’re
coming through the equipment tunnel.” He snapped out orders, and the defenders
rearranged themselves to meet the new threat.

Silence. Omilov could feel the tension rise, peak. His
throat spasmed with anxiety, and he wondered if he could really pull the
trigger and burn down another human being, no matter how depraved or violent
his attacker was.

A screeching roar arrested his thoughts as a spot on the
bulkhead suddenly glowed white-hot and vaporized. Another screech; a vortex of blue-white
plasma punched through, hovered, then darted viciously toward the nearest
console, which promptly exploded, showering the room with molten glass and
metal.

At the third discharge of the hidden weapon, the bulkhead
blew apart and a finned black muzzle nosed through the hole, the iridescent
glimmer of a shield playing around it. Some of the defenders fired at it, but
their hand weapons had no effect. Then the plasmoid cannon fired again, and the
control dais sagged.

Omilov clutched at the seat in front of him for support, and
his firejac slid across the floor and over the edge. An explosion blasted at
his ears as the door into the defense room blew open; jac-fire from the
defenders met the figures leaping in, but not before they lobbed small black
spheres over toward the dais and an overwhelming blast of sound and light
smashed Omilov into unconsciousness.

o0o

When Osri returned to consciousness, the clock indicated
almost eighteen hours had passed—the drugs must have prolonged the effect of
the trancer.

His body still ached in a slow throb, echoed by his head.
His medical telltale was green, but he did not feel very alert. He sucked in
some water from the tube and blinked a gummy blur out of his eyes as he focused
on his screen which now showed Dis huge below the booster, stars blurred by its
tenuous atmosphere, which was beginning to sing thinly past their hull.

Brandon’s console winked and blinked so rapidly that trying
to make sense of it sharpened the pain in Osri’s head. With disgust, he recognized
the game Phalanx. Typical! Though at least it was second level, which furnished
some absorbing mathematical situations, though difficult to play in any
meaningful sense on the tiny booster consoles. Third level would be impossible.

But, a
game
. There were rumors that Brandon had not
been doing much else between his infamous orgies, often betting obscene sums on
the outcome. From the speed of the interactions, Osri could well believe it.
One thing for certain, Brandon was fast.

A fine example of an Arkad, Osri thought, turning his
attention back to his screen. They wouldn’t know what to do with the
game-playing traitor on Ares—except to stick him in a decently-disguised prison
cell. Osri enjoyed the image until he remembered the previous conversation, and
his stomach churned with the hot acid of righteous indignation. They weren’t
going to reach Ares, because Krysarch Brandon was handing them over to a
disgraced cheat, now a Rifter.

If
they survived their landing.

As they crossed the terminator into daylight, the shrunken
sun picked out a grayish blotch on the distant horizon. Brandon swiped his
console clean and levered his pod back to the crash position. Osri heard
Deralze do the same behind him.

The ship was descending rapidly now. A jagged range of
mountains rose, twisted by the battle between the internal forces of the moon
and the tidal forces of Warlock, then fell astern. Before them, Lao Shang’s
Wager gleamed dully.

An overlay popped up over the image on the screen: a
short-range radar scan revealing a series of lumps and mounds distorting the
surface of the waxy plain. The positional thrusters began a stuttering sequence
of discharges, then ceased. The groaning of the engines rose to a crescendo as
the computer overloaded the geeplane to
cushion the impact, and the
moon’s surface rose up and swatted them from the sky.

The impact was devastating. All three cried out as their
suits wrung their limbs, trying to cushion an impact that seemed to go on and
on without end. A flare of light washed through the cabin. The air began to
fill with smoke. Osri could feel the gee-forces fluctuating wildly as the
gravitors attempted to compensate for the savage deceleration. On the screen
the surface whipped past and under them at an insane speed; the thrusters
burped and stuttered as the computer labored to avoid the worst of the
obstacles. It was failing, and the ship started to come apart.

The viewscreens exploded, plunging the cabin into darkness
punctuated by a surfeit of red lights on the consoles. Then a knife-edge of
rock tore through the side of the ship in a shower of sparks, opening it to the
sky and narrowly missing Osri’s pod. The smoke in the cabin writhed into
fantastic shapes as it was sucked out with the air, and the thunderous noise of
their ongoing collision with the moon’s surface diminished abruptly. Now it was
perceptible only through his suit’s contact with the pod. The ship was spinning
wildly, all control lost; through the gash torn in the hull the waxy plain spun
around them.

The ship had slowed when it finally hit something too large
to skim over, and abruptly somersaulted. For a moment the gravitors held, so
that the ship seemed a point of solidity in a rotating confusion of ground and
sky. Then they failed and it was the ship that was gyrating end over end. With
one final crushing blow the ship came to rest and Osri blacked out.

When he finally came to, he wished he could escape back into
unconsciousness. Every part of his body ached. He was afraid to move. Then he
forced himself to go through the medical litany familiar to every pilot trained
at the Academy, where humans and vessels were driven to their limits:
Toes?
fingers? turn the head... slowly now... side to side.
Everything seemed to
work, but everything hurt.

He tried to lever his pod upright, but fortunately it didn’t
respond, since that would have left him canted over facing down. The ship, or
what was left of it, had come to rest on its nose. If he wasn’t careful he
would fall into the remains of his console when he unstrapped himself.

He tongued his com. “Krysarch? Your Highness?”

There was no response, not even a hiss of static.

Slowly Osri worked himself out of his couch, grateful for
the lower gravity of Dis, and struggled over to Brandon, who still lay supine
in his pod, his head wagging from side to side. Osri bent down and grabbed
Brandon’s helmet to hold it still, and touched his helmet to it. “Brandon! Can
you hear me? Are you all right?”

Brandon groaned. “Yes. No. I think I’m going to puke.”

Osri shuddered. He wouldn’t wish that on his worst enemy:
although vomiting in a suit was such an ancient and well-founded nightmare that
it was well provided for, it was still horrible. He found Brandon’s medical
telltale and triggered a spray of nonauz.

A few minutes later Brandon was free, which meant Deralze
was also able to struggle out of his pod. Unsurprisingly the hatch was jammed.

They retrieved their personal effects from the locker and
put them in their suits’ belt pouches; Osri was relieved that his father’s
artifact had come through the disastrous landing without a scar. When Brandon
had carefully stowed the Archon’s ring in his pouch, he triggered the blowout
timer. They crouched behind their pods as the hatch bolts exploded and threw it
away from the ship.

The twisted hatch spun across the waxy surface of Lao
Shang’s Wager and fetched up against a low outcropping of wax-encrusted rocks,
provoking a small avalanche. The ship rocked and shifted, threatening to come
down on the open hatchway; they scrambled desperately for the opening, spilling
out onto the ground and slipping wildly away from the ship, which teetered for
a moment, finally collapsing with a soundless crunch Osri felt through his
feet.

Osri leaned over and touched his helmet to Brandon’s. “What
do we do now?”

Brandon shrugged. “We wait. Markham said they had very good
sensors—”

“A blind man could have seen that landing,” Osri cut in.

“—so we just sit here and wait and hope they get here before
our air runs out.” Brandon turned to Deralze, touching his helmet to the big
guard’s so that they could talk.

Osri seated himself on a little knoll of wax, his elbows on
his knees, holding up his helmet with his hands. It felt like his head was
about to come off.

Brandon finished his conversation with the guard, then stood
up and looked around. The sun was nearing the horizon, small and almost dim
enough to look directly at.

A few wispy clouds slid across the sky overhead, where the
brighter of the stars could be seen against a deep indigo backdrop. Around them
the Wager stretched interminably in every direction, a gently undulating plain
of dirty gray wax mixed with rocks.

In the distance, a low range of hills jutted against the
sky. A light glinted from that direction. Brandon peered at it, then took a few
steps toward the crumpled hatch lying amid the rubble it had shaken loose from
the outcropping. Above it a clean white wall of wax was revealed, as yet
unaffected by outgassing. It was distorted into a strange shape, like a globe
positioned atop a twisted pillar. Brandon picked up a shard of rock and began
to scrape at the globe. A layer of wax abruptly separated and fell away,
revealing staring eye sockets behind the faceplate of an archaic helmet.

Lao Shang had lost his wager.

Osri recoiled, disoriented into an extreme sense of
unreality from the combination of physical trauma and psychic shock. Brandon
dropped the piece of rock and saluted the silent figure whose blind eyes now
confronted the dim daylight of Dis for the first time in 350
years.

Osri reluctantly shuffled over to join Brandon, leaning over
to touch helmets. He heard Brandon say, “Wish us better luck, old one, and we
will be back for you someday.” Then he turned slowly, his helmet grating
against Osri’s.

Osri spoke, his voice sounding strange in his own ears.
“It’s Lao Shang, isn’t it?”

Brandon nodded.

After a long pause, “Brandon, do you think my father—” He
couldn’t finish the thought, much less the words. “Never mind.”

Brandon shrugged again. “Wherever he is, it’s undoubtedly
more comfortable than this.”

Then he turned away and joined Deralze, who was scanning the
distant hills.

o0o

Sebastian Omilov sat alone in a jac-scarred room, trying to
forget the events of the past hours, but the two bodies lying across from him
forced memory into a merciless loop.

He had awakened to a shocking scene. The Rifters had
hamstrung the Archon at wrists and knees and turned him loose in the room,
laughing uproariously as Hreem savaged him with an iron rod. Tanri’s white
uniform had slowly turned crimson as the Rifter captain crushed his bones, but
somehow Tanri Faseult had never lost the dignity that was his real uniform.
Omilov would never forget the look on Tanri’s face as he turned toward him,
near the end, one eye lying across his cheek, but the other steady with
unconquerable courage. In the end he had defeated the Rifter: unable to provoke
more than a grunt of pain from the dying man, Hreem lost his temper and crushed
his skull with a terrible blow.

A few minutes later a Rifter dragged Bikara in and flung her
across the room toward the body of her Archon. She fell to her knees and began
a terrible keening wail, unbinding her hair as she rocked to and fro. The
language was unknown to Omilov, but something in it raised an atavistic thrill
in him. It spoke of loss, and coming darkness, and a retribution that would
never rest, a vengeance that would reach beyond the grave.

The Rifters felt it, too. Hreem snarled a vicious curse and
another man grabbed Bikara’s hair and jerked her to her feet. Quick as a
striking snake, Bikara whirled around, a little knife materializing in her
hand. Before anyone could react, she had gutted the man as efficiently as a
cook preparing a fish for dinner. The Rifter stood still for a shocked moment,
staring stupidly at the greasy coils of his bowels spilling out onto the floor,
then crumpled as another man cursed and triggered his firejac, burning Bikara
down to collapse in charred ruin across the body of the Archon.

Hreem directed the others to drag the body of the Rifter
out, then snarled at Omilov, “I’d gladly do worse to you, you chatzing
blunge-kisser, but someone else’s got first claim on you. Wait here—if you even
stick your head out the door you’ll wish you’d died like them.”