But I guessed Quillin probably didn’t care.
“Why are you hurrying, Spirey?” she asked between harsh grunts as she propelled herself forward. “The ship isn’t going anywhere.”
The edge of the open airlock was a meter above the ice. My fingers probed over the rim, followed by the crest of my battered helmet. Just lifting myself into the lock’s lit interior seemed to require all the energy I’d already expended in the crawl. Somehow I managed to get half my body length into the lock.
Which is when Quillin reached me.
There wasn’t much pain when she dug the bayonet into my ankle, just a form of cold I hadn’t imagined before, even lying on the ice. Quillin jerked the embedded blade to and fro, and the knot of cold seemed to reach out little feelers into my foot and lower leg. I sensed she wanted to retract the blade for another stab, but my suit armor was gripping it tight.
The bayonet taking her weight, Quillin pulled herself up to the rim of the lock. I tried kicking her away, but the skewered leg no longer felt a part of me.
“You’re dead,” she whispered.
“News to me.”
Her eyes rolled wide, then locked on me with renewed venom. She gave the bayonet a violent twist. “So tell me one thing. That story—bullshit, or what?”
“I’ll tell you,” I said. “But first consider this.” Before she could react I reached out and palmed a glowing panel set in the lock wall. The panel whisked aside, revealing a mushroom-shaped red button. “You know that story they told about Wendigo, how she lost her arms?”
“You weren’t meant to swallow that hero guff, Spirey.”
“No? Well, get a load of this, Quillin. My hand’s on the emergency pressurization control. When I hit it, the outer door’s going to slide down quicker than you can blink.”
She looked at my hand, then down at her wrist, still attached to my ankle via the jammed bayonet. Slowly the situation sank in. “Close the door, Spirey, and you’ll be a leg short.”
“And you an arm, Quillin.”
“Stalemate, then.”
“Not quite. See, which of us is more likely to survive? Me inside, with all the medical systems aboard this ship, or you all on your lonesome outside? Frankly, I don’t think it’s any contest.”
Her eyes opened wider. Quillin gave a shriek of anger and entered one final, furious wrestling match with the bayonet.
I managed to laugh. “As for your question, it’s true, every word of it.” Then, with all the calm I could muster, I thumbed the control. “Pisser, isn’t it.”
I made it, of course.
Several minutes after the closing of the door, demons had lathered a protective cocoon around the stump and stomach wound. They allowed me no pain—only a fuzzy sense of detachment. Enough of my mind remained sharp to think about my escape—problematic given that the ship still wasn’t fixed.
Eventually I remembered the evac pods.
They were made to kick away from the ship fast, if some quackdrive system went on the fritz. They had thrusters for that—nothing fancy, but here they’d serve another purpose. They’d boost me from the splinter, punch me out of its grav well.
So I did it.
Snuggled into a pod and blew out of the wreck, feeling the gee-load even within the thick. It didn’t last long. On the evac pod’s cam I watched the splinter drop away until it was pebble-sized. The main body of the kinetic attack was hitting it by then, impacts every ten or so seconds. After a minute of that the splinter just came apart. Afterward, there was only a sooty veil where it had been, and then only the Swirl.
I hoped the Queen had made it. I guess it was within her power to transmit what counted of herself out to sisters in the halo. If so, there was a chance for Yarrow as well. I’d find out eventually. Then I used the pod’s remaining fuel to inject me into a slow, elliptical orbit, one that would graze the halo in a mere fifty or sixty years.
That didn’t bother me. I wanted to close my eyes and let the thick nurse me whole again—and sleep an awfully long time.
PARDON OUR CONQUEST
by Alan Dean Foster
Alan Dean Foster is the bestselling author of several dozen novels, and is perhaps most famous for his Commonwealth series, which began in 1975 with the novel Midworld. The most recent in that series, Quofum, was published in 2008, and a new Commonwealth book featuring the popular characters Pip and Flinx—Flinx Transcendent—should be out around the same time as this anthology. Also forthcoming is The Human Blend, the first book of a new SF trilogy for Del Rey. Foster’s short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and in magazines such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, and Jim Baen’s Universe. A new collection, Exceptions to Reality, came out in 2008.
Like the forthcoming Flinx Transcendent, this story takes place in Foster’s Commonwealth milieu. Foster said it was inspired by the idea that there are various ways to conquer. “Sometimes simply persuading an opponent that your way is better can achieve the desired end,” he said. “I always thought killing an opponent was a poor way of convincing him of the rightness of your argument.”
Admiral Gorelkii shifted his seat on the meter-thick, jewel-encrusted, ceremonial golden cushion that rose behind the sweeping transparent arc of the solid crystal crescent moon, and fumed. His substantial pale gray bulk was draped in a bloom of multihued embroidered standards, each one representing one of the ancient Great Hordes that together comprised the Empire of the Three Suns. They weighed on him physically as well as historically. The wearing of the standards was a great honor accorded to a select few only on the most extraordinary occasions.
Unfortunately for him, today’s extraordinary occasion was one of surrender.
His courage and willingness in accepting the responsibility for heading the disagreeable negotiations was recognized on all five inhabited worlds of the three systems that comprised the Empire. That did not mean he looked forward to the impending ceremony. What the exact details would consist of he did not know. What specific protocol was to be followed he did not know.
No doubt the conquerors of the Empire would be enlightening him in due course.
The Falan had never been a species to hesitate. Imbued with the heady wine of discovery and an assurance of their own superiority, they had looked forward to the steady expansion of their Empire in the direction of the arm of the galaxy that held a greater density of star systems than their own immediate vicinity. Following initial exploration they had discovered, explored, charted, and engaged in the successful colonization of two new habitable systems.
Then they had found Drax IV.
So it was called by the short, multi-legged, hard-carapaced creatures who inhabited the cities and towns they had excavated beneath its jungles and forests. Mild in temperament, absurd in appearance, they claimed to be part of a vast interstellar dominion called the Commonwealth. Vast, small, or imaginary, their polite insistence did nothing to deter the aggressive Falan. It was announced that the system of Drax would be incorporated into the Empire forthwith, and any foolish resistance met with fire and destruction on a planetary scale. Declaring war, the Falan proceeded to open hostilities by unleashing a small example of their firepower on a little-populated corner of the planet.