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CHAPTER 20

CHAMELEON


The guard that slammed the postern hatch behind us kept a hand on my shoulder to steady me. “You all right, lord?”

I waved him off, feeling the tension in the garrison waiting in that lower hold. Men clutched their lances and the short stocks of their plasma burners, eyes wide and twitching. I went to Cassandra, who pressed her back to the bulkhead, chest heaving. There was a scratch on her right cheek where the claw of one Cielcin had torn at it.

Whispering to her in Jaddian, I asked, “Buon es tu?”

She looked as though she did not trust herself to speak.

Gingerly I touched the scratch on her face. She did not pull away. It was superficial. No real harm done. My left leg was burning. It had been a long time—a very long time—since I had run so much or fought so violently. Though I had fenced with Hydarnes and the other masters of the Fire School, the nerves and thews alike know the difference between practice and war, and the toxic juices of stress were in me. Cortisol. Adrenaline.

Life is very long.

“It will be a long night, Anaryan,” I said.

She nodded weakly, never looking more like the child she had been not so long before.

A heavy shot sounded through the bulkhead. One of the Rhea’s turrets had fired on some approaching foe.

“Is Vedi still on the bridge?” I asked.

“Yes, Lord Marlowe,” came the response from one gold-medaled centurion.

I pushed myself off the wall and—swaying—passed between the nearest ranks of the men. They would be the ship’s last defense, should the hull be breached. Cassandra followed after me, footfalls slow and careful on the metal floor.

“Was it the Troglita?” asked one fresh-faced legionnaire. “Is the Troglita lost, my lord?”

“It is,” I said, not breaking stride, my words issuing as from a deep, dry well. I added, “You must hold here. This is not over.”

The same young man called back, “But there’s no help coming?”

I do not think I answered him, which was answer enough.

* * *

Vedi was where we had left him, with Lieutenant Chatterjee and Ensign Dominina and the rest of the bridge crew. Priscian Lascaris was still seated in one corner, his head in his hands.

The commander turned to see us enter, but before he could speak, I said, “Is the NEM weapon ready to deploy?”

“There hasn’t been time!” he protested, “My lord! The Troglita is lost. Captain Clavan—”

“I know the Troglita is lost, damn you!” I roared. “And Oberlin is dead. That means you and I are what remains of command.”

“What of A2?”

“Special Agent Albé is on a mission I gave him,” I said. “You and I are what remain.”

“What mission?” Vedi asked.

“Have you telegraphed Williamtown?” I asked, rather than answer.

The commander did his best to compose himself, even as the Rhea shook from the report of her own guns. “We did. They know our situation here. But the ODF’s tied up with the fighting in orbit. I had reports there’s a whole moon up there.”

“I saw it!” I said, shouldering past him to look over the heads of Dominina and the other junior officers and out the armored windows to the landing field beyond. Gunfire flashed there, and in the skies above, where the Irchtani grappled with the falling Cielcin. “And we’ve still a murderer on the loose.”

Vedi spoke from the holography-well podium, saying, “We pulled security footage, but the cameras in the old man’s quarters and the hall were dead. And in the lift.”

I swore.

“I’ve got a few men trying to piece together a list of likelies based on who all was using the lifts, but it could be anyone.”

“Forget it,” I said. “Whoever our saboteur may be—he’s done his part.”

“If he’s only one man,” said Lascaris, speaking from his corner.

Rounding on him, I asked, “Do you know anything about it?”

Lascaris swallowed. “Only . . . only Friedrich believed there were spies in the department. The Inquisition has been finding spies in the service for years. Even on the Emperor’s Security Council.” The secretary sobbed. “I should have been there.”

Cassandra patted the sad man on his shoulder. “There’s nothing you could have done, sir.”

“How long will it take to deploy the NEM?” I asked.

Vedi cast about in his mind for an answer. “About an hour to run all the preflight checks.”

“So if you’d started it when I ordered you to, it would be nearly ready?”

The man blanched. “I . . . my lord, Perseus won’t work unless the target has manifested itself in—”

“She’s here!” I exclaimed. “I saw her in the camp. Like I saw her in the desert.”

“Her?”

I threw up a hand for silence. It fell like a stone. “Do you think it a coincidence the Cielcin have arrived just as Valeriev’s men neared the completion of their work?” Vedi looked nearly so grim as Lascaris, realizing what had been obvious to me from the start. “Our saboteur summoned them here, you may be certain. Doubtless they were lying in wait, a hundred light-years out-system. A thousand.” I rubbed my eyes. The pressure behind them had abated, leaving only a dull ache. “They used us to find her.”

“You’re certain the Monumental is here?” Vedi asked.

“I saw her,” I said again.

“That doesn’t mean it’s within range now,” the commander said, quite correctly. “We cannot simply deploy Perseus. The Monumental can move out of phase with our reality at a moment’s notice. We have to wait.”

He was right. I knew that much, and—knowing it—deflated.

“We still need to prime the weapon,” I said. “It must be ready to launch at a moment’s notice.”

Vedi agreed, and turning his head shouted. “Chatterjee. Ping tactical. Tell them to engage Perseus.”

The lieutenant leapt to obey. Unable to help myself, I said, “Was that so hard?”

As if in answer, the whole ship shook. “Are we hit?” Cassandra asked, steadying herself against the bulkhead by Lascaris.

“No, ma’am,” replied Ensign Dominina. “Earthquake! Magnitude five-point-six.”

“It’s the moon,” Lascaris said, and a weak, strange little laugh escaped him. “The Cielcin ship. Tidal stress.”

Vedi groaned. “As if we don’t have enough problems.”

Out on the landing field, a rosette of bright flame flowered, faded. A rotting scarlet bloom. One of the Cielcin siege towers had struck one of our grounded landers, destroying both ships. The chemical rockets of the Cielcin starship and the depleted reactor in our lander exploded together, sending shockwaves through the landing field.

“Our boys don’t stand a chance out there,” Vedi said. “You said Gaston’s men are coming?”

I didn’t think I had. “He was already suiting up when we arrived,” I said. “He said they have ways to coordinate without comms.”

“They should be here,” Vedi said.

“The Cielcin were assaulting the camp, too,” said Cassandra.

“I ordered them to guard the motor pool,” I said. “They may be fighting their own battle.”

“So long as we are each fighting our own battles, we’re lost,” said the grim commander. As if in answer then, a great rumbling filled the air, a thunder louder than the ever-present sirens. Through the gloom outside, I saw the amethyst beams of particle weapons slice across the night. An instant later, the fangy profiles of Cielcin siege towers erupted in gouts of oily flame. All of us on the bridge were silent, unmoving save for Dominina, who pressed her comms patch to her flesh.

“It’s . . . Manticore Flight!” she said.

A cloud passed from my heart. The Troglita had launched its aquilarii in time, after all!

The lost battleship had carried two dozen Peregrine-class light fliers: two-manned, fusion-burning attack ships with bodies each like a single, great wing. They were invisible, in the night above, marked only by the silent, prolonged stripes of violet energy that strafed the land beneath. Tower after inhuman tower flowered in their wake.

Fire filled the sky as the Cielcin trained artillery on the heavens.

One of Manticore Flight went down.

“I have to go back out there.”

“You can’t!” Vedi said.

“The Watcher is drawn to me,” I said. “I’m the only one who’s seen it.” I looked round the bridge, at Cassandra and Lascaris, Chatterjee and Dominina and the other junior officers. At Vedi last of all. “We can’t well detonate the Perseus inside this ship. If the Watcher comes to us here, we’re dead. Besides, our shields will insulate against the weapon’s pulse. If even a part of the creature were outside the ship, outside the shield envelope, all would be for nothing.”

Vedi protested. “Perseus’s pulse blast should propagate through the entire body of the creature, so long as even a part of it is exposed.”

“But across a shield curtain?” I asked. “Do we know?”

Vedi was silent.

“I’ll take a flare gun,” I said, having only the barest semblance of a plan. “Oberlin wanted me to play the foxhound, but I’ll play the fox instead. Watch for my signal.”

“Alone?” Vedi asked.

“Call down the Irchtani,” I said. “Annaz can get me clear of the landing field.” My gaze lingered on the burning beyond the bridge’s windows. Out there, the labyrinth awaited—and after more than six hundred years of wandering its halls, I had come upon the minotaur in its heart at last.

Theseus . . . I thought. Perseus . . . 

“I have to go!” I said. “Cassandra!”

“Abba!”

I had been about to tell her to remain on the bridge, but something in her voice caught my attention. A tension and a sudden fear. Turning to look, hand flashing to my sword from old reflex, I saw my daughter pressed against the bulkhead at the rear of the bridge, her head turned to one side.

A knife-missile—identical in every way to the one that had killed Oberlin, a sliver of shining steel—floated microns from her bare throat. The sight of it boiled every dram of blood in me, and I cast about for a solution, for a way to do something.

I imagined all the ways I might cross the space between us, peered across time to find a space where I could reach Cassandra before the knife-missile did its bloody work. Such spaces there were in the infinite weft of lateral time, but they were all so remote that I felt them slipping through my fingers, fading into the distance with each passing picosecond.

“You will be going nowhere, gentle lord,” came a deep, cold voice. Laughter followed, just as cold. “I ought to have stopped you before you left the last time, but it was too early. Almost I feared you had slipped through my fingers entirely.”

The voice was unfamiliar, but it issued from the crumpled secretary in the chair beside Cassandra.

“Lascaris?” I asked, taking one step nearer the man and my daughter.

“Priscian Lascaris is dead,” the man said, looking up. The secretary looked up through his tangled black hair, gray eyes shining. “He has been for a very long time.”

“What are you, then?” I asked, sword unkindled in my hand. “A SOM?”

“Nothing so primitive,” he said. Gray eyes blinked. Became black. With a groan, he sighed, stood, lifted one bony, long-fingered hand to brush the hair from his face. The hollow cheeks were still stained with tears, but all other appearance of sorrow had left the man’s face. The hair he brushed aside—which at first appeared black as my own had in my youth—turned gray as winter cloud, then white as bone. The skin—which had always been pale and sallow—went whiter still, and the very bones of the face seemed to shift as the gross musculature that covered them plumped and shifted.

Where before the tall and somber secretary had been, there stood a creature smooth faced and white as death, white almost as the Cielcin. It smiled at me, revealing small and curiously sparse teeth.

“Put the gun down, Commander Vedi,” the creature that had been Priscian Lascaris said.

Glancing aside, I saw the young commander had drawn his sidearm.

Vedi fired instead.

The shot caromed off the creature’s personal shield—it must have activated the curtain as it stood, for I was certain Lascaris had not been shielded the prior instant.

The secretary raised an arm in reply. Something silver and arrow fast darted from its sleeve, and I heard the hum of repulsors and felt the static thrill as the second knife-missile lanced forth. Anticipating Vedi’s shield-curtain, the thing decelerated as it reached him, then punched him hard in the chest.

Dominina screamed, and the knife-missile rushed from between the ribs of her commander and through her open mouth. The other junior officers were too slow. They died in their chairs. Chatterjee, to his credit, found his feet and made it three loping paces toward the thing that had been Lascaris before the knife-missile caught him between the shoulder blades.

All this happened in less time than it takes to write about it—in less than the space of a breath.

“There, that’s better,” the creature said. Not taking the blade from Cassandra’s throat, it took a step nearer. “Your sword, my lord. Indeed, all your effects, if you please. I’ve no desire to harm your daughter.”

Raising my left hand to show that it was empty, I slid my sword back into its hasp at my waist. “You’re a painted man,” I said, using the same hand to depower the shield pack and undo the ratchet that held my belt in place. “Aren’t you?”

The thing smiled, and its lips stretched farther than those of any true man, baring its teeth to the remotest molar. “You know us?”

“I killed one of your kind,” I said. “A very long time ago.”

“An older model, no doubt,” it said. Voice growing sharp, it said, “Your effects, Marlowe. Now.”

I hesitated. “You’re MINOS.”

“And you are trying to keep me talking. It won’t avail,” the creature said. “Your effects!”

I dropped the belt, and on the painted man’s instructions kicked it over.

The androgyn stooped to collect it, draping it over one shoulder. It raised a finger, and the blade that had done for the bridge crew swung into orbit around my head, recalling the constellation of drones that had accompanied Kharn Sagara at all times. “One false move from you and I’ll kill the girl. I’ve only orders to bring you to the general alive.”

“Which general?” I asked, fearing the answer would be Vati, Dorayaica’s strong right arm.

“Muzugara,” the painted man replied. “You know him, I believe?”

Muzugara . . . It was not the answer I’d expected. My Red Company had bested Muzugara at the Battle of Thagura. Our first mission together following my investment as an Imperial knight. We had broken the Cielcin fleet in orbit, and Muzugara had retreated, leaving Thagura to mankind. The then-prince had carried with it the name of the young Hadrian Marlowe, and had taken the story of how he had slain Aranata Otiolo in single combat back to share among its kind. I had seen Muzugara in passing at Akterumu. It had been among the princes to swear itself into slavery at the feet of Syriani Dorayaica—one of the few. With Attavaisa and Peledanu and a scant dozen or so others, it had survived the Prophet’s poison and the Aetavanni that hammered the thousand-and-more Cielcin clans into a single rod of iron aimed at humanity’s heart.

“I do,” I said.

“He will be most pleased to see you,” the painted man said, circling round me, moving toward the holography well. “He will be landing soon. Shall we go and meet him?”

Cassandra spoke. “You’ll never get us off this ship. There’s hundreds of men on board.”

“There are, aren’t there?” mused the homunculus. “But there are thousands of Cielcin outside. Why don’t we open the doors?”

“Don’t!” I lurched toward him.

Lascaris raised a finger once more, and the blade orbiting my head bristled an arm’s length from my face. I knew Cassandra’s must have pressed against her throat, for she hissed.

The painted man stepped neatly over Vedi’s cooling corpse and keyed something into the captain’s console. A diagnostic box appeared above the holography well. The sirens stopped, and in that strangely sweet silence, I heard the hissing of distant pneumatics as every ramp and hatch upon the Rhea opened wide.

Sabratha shook as her new moon convulsed her, and I pictured stones falling in the deep places of Phanamhara, dunes rushing in like the tide. An instant later, the tide rushed in indeed. The sounds of gunshots and shouting men resounded through the grounded ship. Calm as may be, the homunculus traipsed back toward Cassandra and removed her shield-belt and the twin swords Master Hydarnes had given her.

We stood there a while, the three of us, as though we waited in a lift. The shouting gave way to screaming, and I saw Cassandra shaking, tears in her eyes, on her cheeks—but I knew I could not go to her. I prayed that Edouard had found Neema, prayed Gaston might rally some defense.

But in my heart, I knew that all was lost.

The painted man shook back its sleeve, revealing the silvered gauntlets that housed and threw its knife-missiles. Doubtless some device embedded in its motor cortex controlled the machines. It adjusted some knob there a moment before smoothing the garment into place, looking for all the world like a man without a care.

New silence deafened us, then broke.

There were footsteps in the hall outside.

The door opened, revealing a sea of Cielcin armored in scarab black, the White Hand emblazoned on their inhuman breasts.

“Gentlemen!” The painted man bowed, a murderous harlequin. “The day is ours!”


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