The Rifter's Covenant (62 page)

Finally, exhausted,
she fell out of dataspace.

The rest would have
to be handled in realtime, hand-to-hand.

In the bilge,
Tallis stood on his cot, screaming at the unresponsive console as a foul
ever-rising tide of recycling liquor bubbled thickly out of the disposer.

“Just kill me, you
Shiidra-loving deviant!” he howled at it. Why didn’t Anderic shoot him and get
it over with? He choked as something pale yellow and cheesy curdled out of the
malevolent fountain with a ripe splat, assailing his senses with a new reek
that was almost solid in his mouth.

The console
flickered on, revealing the haggard face of Kira Lennart.

“Anderic’s fighting
the logos. Weapons locker E-5 is coded to you. Get moving.”

“But there’s sewage
everywhere,” he wailed.

“Same stuff you got
in your head, you Telos-damned fool, putting in a logos to begin with. You’ll
be in it over your head if you don’t act. I’m gonna roust the rest of the
execs.”

The image
collapsed. Cursing his fate, Tallis gingerly stepped off the cot. Only when
halfway to the corridor hatch did he remember that his trousers were tucked
inside his boots. He clumped toward E-5 ahead of a creeping tide of excrement,
cradling the Emasculizer’s weight in one hand and moving in the crabwise
fashion he’d found least painful. Halfway there, he paused to vomit rackingly;
the feeling of the recyc sloshing and squidging in his boots was overwhelmingly
vile.

The locker opened
to his palmprint. No one came willingly to this level, so close to the bilge,
so he was probably safe. He grabbed a jac and a neuro-jac. After a moment’s
thought, he laid the weapons aside and detached the slings from two of the big
two-handers. He wrapped one around his waist and rigged the other as a support
for the sphere leeched to his nacker. He knew he looked ridiculous with the
straps outlining the round bulge in his crotch. He picked up the neuro-jac,
setting it just under lethal. Then the jac, wide aperture. He hefted them both
and sidled off.

Turning a corner,
he found a group of five crew, lounging at a hatch with jacs. They gaped at
him, not even bothering to raise their weapons.

Then one snickered.

Tallis shot him with
the neuro-jac; the crackle and snap of bones breaking was the only sound as the
man spasmed in lockjaw rigor.

“Anybody else think
it’s funny?” He reveled in their frightened silence. “Lennart’s given me the
computers. I’m taking back the ship. You join me, I’ll forget the past.
Otherwise . . .” He hefted both jacs.

“What about the . . .
you know?” Una gabbled.

That blunge-faced
fool Anderic had been far too careless
.
But maybe that was all to the good.

“I said she gave me
the computers, and that means the logos, too. I’m the one the Barcans
originally programmed it to.”

Their stances and
the expressions on their faces confirmed the strength of his argument. If he
was master of the logos, he was master of the ship.

Tallis only wished
he believed that as well.

In his cabin,
Anderic had awakened to a headache caused by the reeking air.

He’d realized
immediately what had happened and threw himself at his console, fighting
against two fronts: the logos and Kira Lennart. When he discovered the weapons
locker closed against him, and Tallis loose from the bilge, he abandoned his
cabin and fled through the ship from console to console, releasing all the
Rifthaven phages but one.

But his control
eroded steadily.

He was alone now.
The crew that had been so eager to share his largesse had abandoned him without
hesitation. Even Ninn had skulked away, ready to humiliate himself to regain
his place on the
Satansclaw
.

His only hope was
to reach a shuttle. He refused to think beyond that. They’d slowed the logos
and Tallis, but that was all. His waning control of ship systems barely
sufficed to let him evade his pursuers.

As he tabbed open
the hatch to the portside aft bay, a narrowbeam jac-bolt blasted past his head,
singeing his ear. As he ducked inside, he saw Kira Lennart, her face distorted
with hatred.

Anderic worked
feverishly at a bay console, trying to ignore the glare of the black hole
blazing through the huge e-lock behind him. He cursed the logos handbook for
its lack of a dataport; he could barely get the data out of it fast enough by reading.
Finally, sobbing with relief, he tapped in the last challenge-response for the
final phage and released it.

He tucked the
handbook into his belt pouch as the lights dimmed. The ravenous code parasite
was spreading, freezing systems throughout the ship into their present status.
That would give him the time he needed.

He was halfway to
the nearest ship when he heard Tallis’s voice booming through the comm.

“There’s no
fiveskip, you chatzing weasel. Where do you think you’re going?”

Better a clean
death from a lazplaz or skipmissile than what Tallis surely had planned,
Anderic thought savagely, and snarled a response over his shoulder.

Luri watched avidly
as Tallis lumbered after Anderic. She held a heavily scented silk to her nose
and suppressed a giggle. Tallis looked so funny, his legs soaked in reeking bilge,
and that silly arrangement of straps to hold up the chastity sphere.

She tingled with
pleasurable anticipation at the thought of taking it off of him. Maybe she could
try some of the settings Emma had told her about, before they got serious about
removing it. It could be fun.

“Look,” Tallis said
to the com. “I’ll give you the same deal you gave me. Minus the Dyzon thing if
you’ll take it off.”

Was that why Tallis
was hesitating to finish him off? But there was no guarantee. Anderic kept
walking, fearing that to run would trigger Tallis into action. He was almost to
the ship when he realized what Tallis wanted from him.

His eye. Was a deal
possible? Could he hold Tallis’s eye hostage to preserve his life long enough
to get to another ship?

He turned to reply,
and behind him, with a snapping sound, the lockfield barring the bay from
vacuum vanished.

Elsewhere—unheard
by Anderic—Tallis shouted, “No, no, no, no! My eye, my eye, my eye! Stop!”

But a gale of wind
picked Anderic up effortlessly and swept him into space. His blood-dimmed
vision showed him a last view of the eternal hunger of the black hole before
red-shot darkness claimed him.

Luri watched
Tallis, thinking that he was never more interesting than when he was angry, and
he was incandescent now. She hoped the frayed patch over his eye socket, lumpy
with the blank that kept it from collapsing, wouldn’t slip; she shuddered
delicately.

Then Tallis screamed.

Edging closer, Luri
watched, horrified, as the screen showed the lockfield vanishing, opening the
bay to space and sweeping Anderic away.

Stepping back,
Tallis bellowed with rage and triggered his neurojac into the console. The
electrical explosion knocked him flat. He lay there weeping.

Kira Lennart bent
down, holding her breath against the bilge stench, and took his jacs. She saw
the crew gathered at both ends of the corridor, and issued a few terse orders,
which were obeyed with alacrity. Then she motioned to Luri to help her pick
Tallis up and, with each of them gripping one of his arms, they dragged him
back to Luri’s cabin, where they tranked him. Kira got him into the disposer,
where they got his clothes and boots off, scrubbed him down, and put the
garments through the cleaner twice.

Tallis kept his
hands pressed over his eyes, muttering incoherently, even when they got him to
the bed.

“Shall we give him
another dose?” Kira asked doubtfully.

“No, no.” Luri
chuckled deep in her throat as she glanced down at Tallis as if he were a work
of art. “Emma said there are settings on it for this.”

Kira sat back,
gaping. Luri wanted to try to remove the Emasculizer! Now? She looked down at
Tallis, who slept fitfully. Even cleaned up he was an unappetizing object to
her, with or without that disgusting thing on his nacker. Kira had never found
men attractive, and could not see what Luri saw.

But one thing she
could understand. He’d paid for his foolishness—maybe he did deserve a little
pleasure. And if there was some pain with it, so much the better for
remembering the lesson.

Her own exhaustion
tipped her over into a weirdly surreal hilarity as she and Luri stripped their
clothes off; Kira looked hungrily at Luri, who was caressing the Emasculizer
gently. She grinned back at Kira, her soft lips curved in her entrancing smile,
her dark eyes half-shut. “Why don’t you wake him up?”

“You do it.”

“Luri wants to
watch,” Luri crooned.

When she was in
that mood, Kira could not deny her anything.

A short time later
Tallis opened his eyes and peered in confusion at Kira, who raised her head
from his chest and returned his gaze. He smiled wearily and sat up, woozy in
the micro-gee.

“Just a minute,” he
said. Then he winced and looked past Kira at Luri busy with the Emasculizer.
“Be careful!”

“Luri is very
careful,” she whispered in a singsong. “Luri would never, ever hurt Tal-lis,
oh, no! There is much fun ahead . . .”

The captain swallowed,
a gulping sound echoing in his chest under Kira’s ear. He stretched out his
hand to his pouch on the bedside console, and extracted a small case. Kira
looked away as Tallis removed his eyepatch, popped something opaque out of the
empty socket, and inserted the dyplast eye they’d obtained on Rifthaven. It
didn’t quite match the other, but Kira thought it a vast improvement anyway.
With two eyes and his skin clean, she could see that he was handsome. In a weak
sort of way.

“Well, how does it
look?” he demanded, not hiding how awkward he must have felt. Then, before she
could reply, his good eye crossed and he began to grunt gaspingly.

“Found it!” said
Luri happily. “And that tells me how to get it off.” She looked at Lennart
slyly. “When it’s time.”

She hit the control
for null gee.

Kira levered
herself up as Tallis commenced a rhythmic thrusting. She giggled. “It looks
like he’s trying to put his nacker into orbit,” she gasped, provoking snickers
from Luri. They both choked with laughter as they strapped him down to keep him
from floating off the bed. Luri touched Tallis’s face just under his new eye.
“Oh. That’s much better.”

A thought hit Kira.
She reached over and tapped the console, activating the imagers. She needed
something to balance Tallis’s command of the logos. Fortunately his pride was
very fragile.

Now Tallis was
almost singing his ecstasy. The breathy moans, rising and falling to some tune
known only to him, caused Kira and Luri to clutch each other, laughing
helplessly in amusement that soon mutated into something far more satisfying,
while Tallis rocked helplessly next to their interlocked bodies.

Then Luri screamed
in abject horror and twisted away, propelling Kira in the opposite direction.
Kira twisted back to look and surprised herself with a hysterical snort. This
image would be priceless.

Above the helpless,
thrusting, worm-like spasms of the naked man, and Luri curled in midair with
her knuckles jammed into her mouth, a blue eyeball hovered disembodied,
observing the scene with inanimate dispassion as a vagrant air current carried
it in a slow circuit over the bed.

While Tallis’s
utterances slowly turned to moans of pain, Kira captured the offending orb and
put it away. Luri carefully removed the Emasculizer, and Tallis slumped into
unconsciousness.

Kira looked aghast
at the man’s inflamed and shriveled nacker, then grinned. She’d have Luri to
herself a while longer, it seemed.

Eloatri received
the Panarch in the Cloisters garden. In the aftermath of the riots, the
authorities had advanced the oneill’s weather to High Summer, which was gradually
transforming the sense of exhausted lassitude that pervaded Ares into one of
lazy well-being.

The air was heavily
scented with jessamine and jumari; a chimeblossom tree tinkled in a vagrant
breeze, counterpoint to the plashing of the fountain springing from a
gargoyle’s mouth in an ancient stone wall. In the bushes nearby, an unseen
flock of small birds quarreled, cheerfully shrill.

Brandon could have
summoned her, but had instead requested permission to visit. As she sat waiting,
she ran her hand up and down the vine-covered support next to her chair as she
reflected on her vision.

Then Tuan appeared
and announced the arrival of the man whom that vision had led her to betray.

Brandon looked
tired and stressed. She rose and bowed deeply, not in the mode to which she was
entitled, but in the simple subject-to-sovereign mode. That abjuration of her
prerogative was as close to an apology as she could honorably come.

His bow confirmed
his understanding, for the deference he returned was the unique Royalty-to-Numen
mode paid only to the High Phanist. This time, however, there was no modulation
of implied doubt, as had been the case at their first meeting, on far-away
Desrien.

A steward brought a
tea service with a selection of small seed cakes. The Panarch accepted a cup
and inhaled deeply of the fragrant brew. “I’m not familiar with this. What is
it?” He sipped.

“Oolong’s Child.
It’s cultivated in Heaven’s Mandate on Desrien.”

“Ah.” One sip, then
he set the cup down on the table. The musical ching evoked memory; Eloatri let
it wash through and past her as the Panarch continued. “How did you divert the
inspections on the
Telvarna
?”

“Sedry Thetris is a
Christian, worshiping the face of Telos I now serve,” she replied. “She
confessed her complicity in the Srivashti plot to me some time ago. When the
time came, she was willing to employ her noderunning talents to make what
restitution she could.”