The Rifter's Covenant (3 page)

Dai Gan leaned down
to pluck the weapon out of Messina’s slack hand.

The rest of
Vidocq’s allies stepped forward, menacing the others with their weapons. Some of
the officers had their jacs out but hesitated.

Tension gripped
everyone while Lochiel struggled against mounting horror. The quarter-hour
poison was painless—until the last three minutes, when its effect reversed from
paralysis to convulsions that tore the victim apart.

“You mean to follow
Hreem?” Ambrose asked quietly, ignoring the weapons trained on him.

“I mean to follow
the winners, and Hreem has the lower orbit with Dol’jhar,” Vidocq said.

Lochiel looked
helplessly at Ambrose, who’d retained his jac, carefully pointing it at no one
in particular.

Just kill me!

But her vocal cords
were locked in the grip of the poison.

Vidocq sauntered up
and bent to gloat directly into Lochiel’s face. “My first order is, we sit here
and watch the show. Another ten minutes, it oughta be a good one. For everyone
except your former captain, that is.”

The snickers of her
closest friends subsided as a strange droning sound filled the rec room.

Shtoink’s
head-stalk pointed at Vidocq. The Intermittor’s eyes had retracted into the
flesh around her lily-like mouth, which had stretched wide open, its
reddish-yellow interior pulsing visibly. With her peripheral vision, Lochiel
could see only one of the other Kelly, but it, too, was focused on Vidocq.

“What’s this? You
greenies don’t understand what’s happening here?” Vidocq said as the drone rose
to a painful crescendo that blurred Lochiel’s vision with its intensity; her
cranial cavities resonated with the noise. “Hey! Stop that chatzing squawk!”
Vidocq’s voice sounded thin and blurred.

She fired her
gasgun at Shtoink, but there was no effect. The drone intensified. Vidocq
looked back at Lochiel, her eyes wild. She raised the gasgun again.

The human members
of the crew on both sides grimaced in pain, some shutting their eyes or holding
hands over their ears, so not all of them saw the thin stream of steaming fluid
the Intermittor spat directly at Vidocq, who inhaled sharply.

Lochiel heard a
brittle, snapping sound as the skin over Vidocq’s sinuses bulged, making her
look briefly like one of the ancient pre-human anthropoids of Lost Earth. Then
the front of Vidocq’s head blew off.

Helpless to fight
it, Lochiel felt gorge rise as the custardy remains of the tech’s brains
dripped down her face; she tasted the salt-copper tang of blood. The dead woman
crumpled to the deck, the back of her skull a mere empty shell, as all around
her the room erupted in a crisscross of plasma bolts, screams, and a haze of
hot blood.

Then silence fell,
broken only by the groans of the wounded.

“Are you all right,
Lochiel?”

She saw Bayrut
leaning over her. She had fallen over without knowing it. The lack of sensation
meant she had very little time.

No! I’m not all right, you big nackerbrain!
she wanted to shout. She wanted to shout
that she loved him, and his talent for stupid questions. She wanted to tell
Messina never to leave him, or she’d haunt her forever.

Then they moved out
of her field of vision as the Kelly Intermittor pushed them aside.

Her ribbons had
fluffed out, and a small patch near the base of her head-stalk was changing
color from the normal green to a sort of stripy mauve. Lochiel smelled a sharp
chemical tang.

“Wethree wondered
why Vidocq wanted the quartan,” Shtoink said. Her head-stalk looped over and
plucked a segment of ribbon from the colored patch. “She never thought to
wonder where wethree got it from.”

Shtoink’s
head-stalk darted down like a striking snake and slapped Lochiel hard on the
side of the neck, causing warmth to spread upward into her head, and down into
her chest. Sensation flowed back into her jaw. Her tongue twitched.

“Wh . . .
wh . . . whaugh?” she managed to gasp. The pain of returning
life needled every cell. She welcomed the pain with equal ferocity, blinking
blurrily up at Shtoink.

The Kelly Intermittor
had made the quartan, and its antidote, in the strange chemical furnaces of its
metabolism.

“We will join the
Navy,” said Shtoink. “For wethree have been called to Ares.”

o0o

Many hours later,
Lochiel sighed as she sank down onto her bunk.

The door to her
cabin hissed shut behind Bayrut and Messina. Dark eyes and light gray eyes
studied her with twin expressions of concern. Although it would be hard to find
three human beings who resembled one another as little as Lochiel and her two
lifemates, over the decades they had assumed many of one another’s habitual
expressions and gestures. Ordinarily it amused them when they noticed. No one
was smiling now.

“
Shiavona
is safely on its way to
Ixpotl,” Messina reported. “I locked in the coordinates myself, as you
requested, and Phu is holding down the nav console.” She hesitated. “I hated to
leave some of the others, Al-Riham especially. We may need all the ships we can
get. And we may end up looking down the missile tube at them at Barca. But
it’ll be half a year before they reach anywhere they can communicate with
Hreem.”

Bayrut twitched the
embroidered cuff of his sleeve. “They have stores for a year, but nothing they can
use to repair the fiveskip. I hope they get along well. It will be a very long
journey.”

“Can’t be helped,”
Lochiel said. “It’d only take one mouth to kill us all. And they’ve seen what
we’ve seen. Which ship did you give them?”

Messina grinned.
“The
Serpent’s Tooth
. It’ll be a
tight fit aboard that old corvette, but I figured it was the one we’d miss
least.”

Messina nodded toward
Lochiel, and Bayrut obligingly began to rub Lochiel’s tense neck and shoulders
as he said, “Got a tightbeam back from Hreem just before we left. He bought our
story. We’ve been given five days to replenish our stores from Charterly’s
cache before we’re to proceed to Barca. I promised to load up with
sneak-missiles and gee-mines. And I’ve got Thusama warming up the reactors. Unless
we’re very lucky at Barca, we’ll lose the hyperrelay when Barrodagh finds out.”

Lochiel saw her own
bleakness in her lifemates’ gazes. She closed her eyes and surrendered to the
euphoria of the neck rub. If they were lucky, they’d be back to an ordinary
Alpha, in a war zone full of enemies armed with the power of the Ur. Unlucky,
they’d be dead—or captured to be used as entertainment by Hreem’s twisted
tempath Norio.

“We have to show up
with Cameron before Hreem starts wondering where we are,” Lochiel said, and let
out her breath. “My report: I had Y’Lassian spaced. Dai Gan swears he was
blackmailed by Vidocq, which might be true. She tried that on a couple others,
it turns out. Anyway, Dai Gan is on probation. One false word and he takes the
long walk. Everything else seems to be settled, and the Kelly wish to consult
with us when we’re ready.” She let out an unsteady breath in what was meant to
be a laugh. “All things considered, we should do that now, don’t you think?”

As Bayrut lifted
his hands, she levered herself up. Whether from a residual effect of the poison
or mere stress, she felt as if the gravs had doubled. But there was no time to
rest until she’d faced the last, and most important, chore.

Messina smiled,
holding out her arms. Lochiel walked into her embrace, and Bayrut closed his strong
grip round both of them. They leaned their heads together; the three of them
breathed together, their pulses in counterpoint. Then they released, all at
once.

“Do threy want all
three of us?” Bayrut asked.

“I think it has to
be,” Messina replied. “Three is so important to them.”

They left Lochiel’s
cabin and took the lift down a level. The few crew members they passed were
sober of countenance, busy on their tasks.

The three found the
door to the dispensary open. A clean scent blew across their faces from the
tianqi. Beneath it, Lochiel smelled a faint tang, like burned mint.

The Kelly came out
of the infirmary, threir constant movement both clumsy and graceful. Lochiel
would never again see threm as comical; she wondered how she could have.

The Intermittor
danced forward, her head-stalk gyrating. “Captain,” she said in her
incongruously sweet voice, “wethree greet you. Are you well?”

Lochiel reflected
on how she’d always seen threm as naive, rather silly beings—lethally shortsighted,
considering just how sophisticated threir biotech really was. The question now
was, how to admit that she and her fellow humans had been ignorant—and now
being enlightened, no longer trusted threm? “I am fine, thanks to youthree,” she
said carefully.

And as Lochiel
hesitated, searching for the right words, Messina spoke with typical
navigator’s directness. “We don’t question yourthree summary justice on
Vidocq.” Her fingers laced tightly into Lochiel’s and Bayrut’s on either side. “It’s
the method.”

Nyuk2 and Wu4
honked and tooted, and Shtoink said, “You now see our skills as a weapon, but
wethree cannot make the rest of our journey secreted in the weapons locker.”

It was a joke,
which Lochiel found oddly steadying, as if the Kelly really were simply jolly
creatures with absurd names who had a passion for cheap, gaudy human trinkets. Well,
maybe threy were, but she’d discovered threy had another side. Which was more
human than not.

She didn’t know
whether to find that steadying or more unsettling.

“Wethree only use
our skills for the good of the vessel,” Shtoink said. “It is a vow wethree
keep.”

And that, Lochiel
reflected, was as good a promise as she was going to get that threy wouldn’t do
whatever it was threy did in order to take over her ship.

But did threy need
to? This was the worry she’d been debating inside her head as she faced the
grim task of Y’Lassian’s judgment and execution, then overseeing the cleanup of
the rec room.

“You said that youthree
were summoned.” Lochiel’s voice came out hoarse. She paused to clear her
throat. “By whom? How?”

The question
prompted a cacophony of discordant blats, tweets, and weird drones. Shtoink
whirled back to her partners, her ribbons fluffing out. A complicated scent
tickled the back of Lochiel’s nose—like overcooked gripple mixed with dusty
tombs. Bayrut rubbed watery eyes, then the tianqi shifted into max, bathing
their faces with cool air smelling of fresh-cut grass.

The Intermittor
whirled again, her head-stalk inclining directly toward Lochiel. “Be at peace. Wethree
have no desire to take control of this ship. And we have no wish to cleave to
Eusabian. You saw on the hyperwave what he did to the Eldest. It is to Ares
that wethree must go.”

Lochiel nodded.
“And if we had voted against throwing in with the nicks?”

“Then wethree would
have regretfully resigned as physician to
Shiavona’s
crew. Another way would have be found to reach Ares.”

Lochiel sighed,
some of her tension leaching from her. “A last question, then. How were you
summoned?”

Again the frantic
dance and fluffing ribbons, but this time the weird sounds coming from the
three Kelly reminded Lochiel of giggles. And there was that assumption of
childishness again, or rather, Lochiel thought, an unexamined sense of human
superiority that caused her to wince inside.

Then the
Intermittor said, “It is impossible to explain.”

Tired and somber,
Lochiel shook her head. “Then maybe we can go into it another time, when youthree
have the right words, and I have a clearer head.”

A triple bow from
the Kelly, and Lochiel and her mates left. Again, by mutual and unspoken
consent they left her to sleep alone. Bayrut would assume first watch.

But Lochiel could
not sleep, not yet. When she reached her cabin, she moved directly to her desk.
After staring at the blank viewscreen, she tabbed the control to window up a
picture of her cousin Cameron, resplendent in the uniform of a naval captain. His
eyes seemed to bore into her, calmly appraising. He was the only one who hadn’t
seemed surprised when she took the Riftskip, the only one of the MacKenzie
Family she’d ever heard from afterward.

“Well, cousin,
perhaps your familial loyalty will have a payoff, after all.”

She’d said that to
him before they parted. His reply echoed with renewed force. “If that’s how you
think of loyalty, you don’t yet know what it truly is.”

“Let’s find out if
I’ve learned, cousin,” she whispered.

Montrose knuckled
his gritty eyes and fought a yawn that threatened to unhinge his jaw. He sank
back at the communications console; though he’d adjusted the pod cushions, the
seat still seemed subtly conformed to Lokri’s long, lean form. Or maybe it was just
the complexity of memory and a vague sense of guilt that Lokri still languished
in prison back on Ares.

From the direction
of the navigation console came the soft rustle of Kelly ribbons. Montrose
smelled the sharp, almost chemical odor that he’d learned was the Kelly
equivalent of a yawn.

The Kelly trinity
Portus-Artos-Dartinus stood behind Ivard. Dartinus and Atos leaned against
Portus, the Intermittor of the trinity, the head-stalks of all three entwined
in a complex knot. Ivard slumped in his pod with the boneless grace of youth,
his head thrown back against Portus’s body, his fiery red hair a startling
contrast against the deep green of the Intermittor’s pelt. The youth was sound
asleep.

Portus’s head-stalk
rotated gently a few degrees, one of her eyes flickering in an acknowledgment
that Montrose suspected was the Kelly equivalent of a wink. Then her head-stalk
inclined toward Sebastian Omilov, deeply absorbed in some complex task at the
console rigged for him at the back of the bridge.