Kiru thought about what he’d just said—“… till I get there…”
“Where,” she asked, “are we going?” She tried not to emphasise the word “we.”
Eliot Ness gestured toward the planet that filled the screen. “Caphmiaultrelvossmuaf,” he said.
Kiru had heard the name once before.
“You changed the lifeboat course to here,” she said.
“As a precaution. This should have been the nearest inhabited world.”
“And while the Xyzians were chasing me, you navigated their ship here?”
“Yes.”
After Eliot Ness had told her she would masquerade as Princess Janesmith, there was a gap in Kiru’s memory. She couldn’t remember anything about the escape pod being found and the aliens taking it on board their own ship.
“You made me forget who I was,” she said.
“I was helping you with your role,” said Eliot Ness. “As soon as they realised you weren’t worth a ransom, you could have been dead. I didn’t want you dead, Kiru, and I didn’t want the aliens dead.”
“You mean you could have killed them?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“What for?”
“Because of what they did to me!”
“They didn’t even touch you.”
“Only because I was too fast for them.”
“Good. It’s all worked out perfectly.”
“Perfectly?”
“Yes,” said Eliot Ness. “We’re alive. The aliens are alive. We’ve almost reached our destination. After a minor detour, they’ll eventually reach their destination.”
Kiru slid the table from the bulkhead, collected her food and put it down, then pulled out a seat and sat herself down. Eliot Ness had said that their rations might have been basic, but they should be treated like a banquet. Instead of stuffing their mouths whenever they felt hungry, they had always dined together at regular intervals. Until now.
Eliot Ness said he wasn’t going to eat, but he slid out another seat and sat opposite Kiru.
But she no longer felt hungry. She pushed her food away and folded her arms.
“Is something wrong?” asked Eliot Ness.
“No, nothing. I absolutely loved being chased by a pair of slimeball aliens who wanted to use me as a sex toy in their obscene games.”
“You said it, Kiru. Games—they were only games.”
“Food games? Sex games?”
“The most important things in any society. Food is essential for the survival of the body, sex is essential for the production of the next generation of bodies. It seems that the Xyzians, or Zxyians or Yxzians, evolved underground, where they were safe from hostile predators. Their primal courtship ritual involved food, which was very scarce on their world. Females fought their rivals over scavenged food, then left it as a gift for the males. When the male emerged from his lair, the female would pounce—and the male could only eat as a reward for sex. They evolved into the dominant species on their world, but their atavistic instincts are deeply rooted in their ancestral psyche and cannot be suppressed.”
“And when that happens?” said Kiru. “They forget everything else?”
“Exactly.”
“Such as checking the course of their ship.”
“Exactly.”
Kiru had been pursued throughout the alien ship; she’d been forced to hide; she’d thought she would starve to death—either that, or provide a meal for the Xyzians. All because Eliot Ness needed her as a decoy. She’d been used again, just as she had throughout her life.
Eliot Ness was looking at Kiru, but she didn’t want to look at him or her food. She turned her head toward the screen and the planet that was displayed there. It was red, or half of it was. The rest of it was dark—the half of the world where it was night.
“This is where I was heading when I left Hideaway,” said Eliot Ness. “Or where I thought the ship was heading.”
He’d never spoken about this before. Perhaps he realised Kiru was upset, and that was why he felt he had to explain. She said nothing, not wanting to distract him. For a while, he also said nothing.
“But it was all a trick,” Eliot Ness continued. “It was a death ship. With me as the victim. I didn’t know I’d be the only person on board. Not that it happened like that, as you know. There was you, there was Grawl, there was—”
“Grawl!” said Kiru, and instinctively she glanced anxiously around. “I knew it! I knew it was a convict ship.”
“It wasn’t. It was my ship.”
“Why was Grawl on board?”
“I guess he wanted to leave Hideaway. He was smart, heard about my ship, managed to get on board. Because he wasn’t one of the pirates, he—”
“He was a pirate!” Kiru interrupted again.
“No. He was on Arazon, but he wasn’t a space pirate. He was on their base when the Algolans attacked, so he was rounded up with the survivors and sent to Clink. He deserved to be there, of course, but for other reasons. Like I said, he was smart, smart enough to pretend he was a pirate. He hated them, but he knew his best chance of escaping from Arazon was to stick with them. And it worked. He escaped and took you with him when the pirates raided Hideaway.”
“You know all this,” said Kiru, “because you were one of the pirates?” That must have been why Eliot Ness had seemed so familiar when she first saw him; she already knew him on Arazon. “You took part in the raid, and that’s why you had to escape from Hideaway?”
“I was there to do a bank robbery,” said Eliot Ness. “A databank robbery. The pirate attack was a cover, a diversionary tactic. It all worked out perfectly. Until my ship was sabotaged.” He paused. “I thought it must have been me they wanted to kill, but perhaps the ship was destroyed to kill Grawl.”
Killing Grawl was a good enough reason to destroy a whole galaxy, thought Kiru.
Grawl had rescued her from Arazon only because he wanted something from her later. And what he wanted was everything, all of her.
Eliot Ness could have abandoned Kiru on the alien ship. It was only because of him that she had escaped. What price was he going to demand from her later?
“Or,” continued Eliot Ness, “could it have been you? Who would have wanted you dead, Kiru?”
The whole universe, she thought.
“No,” added Eliot Ness, shaking his head. “You were only there because of John Wayne.”
“Who?”
“You’ve forgotten him already?”
“Forgotten who?”
Eliot Ness smiled.
“Forgotten who?” Kiru said again.
“John Wayne. You were with him when the reflexants captured him. The ghostly aliens. Remember?”
“I remember his name was James.”
“He told me it was John Wayne.”
Kiru shrugged. John or James had been lying to one of them. Or both of them. “He told me he was born three hundred years ago,” she said, which was another of his lies.
“Yes, he was.”
“Oh,” said Kiru, and she wondered if Eliot Ness was also lying. “That explains why he seemed so…” She shrugged again.
“Old?”
“Different.”
John or James, Kiru didn’t care. Their time together had been very brief. She’d spent far, far more time with Eliot Ness; although she knew far, far less about him than she did about James.
But James was gone, dead, history, over, part of her past. She didn’t ever think about him. Or hardly ever.
She had never mentioned James to Eliot Ness, but he was aware they had been together on Hideaway, then on the suicide ship.
“You met him on Hideaway?” she asked.
“No, on Earth. But it’s because of me he went to Hideaway.” Eliot Ness paused, thinking. “And it’s because of him I’m going to Caphmiaultrelvossmuaf.”
“James said you should go there?”
“No. I’m sure he’d never heard of the planet. Very few people have. Yet. He was working for me. In fact, he was working as me. That must be why the reflexants arrested him. They thought he was me, so they put him on the same ship to make doubly sure I was killed.”