"How’s it going?" Festina asked. She sounded like someone trying not to sound anxious.
"See for yourself," Plebon said. He pointed over the parapet wall, across the palace grounds and past the first canal, to a Sperm-tail twinkling down from the black sky. The tail tip lay pressed against the side of the old Hushed Museum, a memorial to every Mandasar who’d died in the last 144 years. (That’s supposed to be how long Mandasar souls stay in the afterlife before getting reincarnated again.) I was happy to see the museum had survived the war… even if it looked like the Sperm-tail had choked up against the building and wouldn’t come any closer.
"Is the tail stuck?" I asked.
"It’s held," Plebon answered. "We increase our power; the tail comes toward us. Then the other side adds more power to its anchor, and we lose ground."
"Okay," Festina said, moving into line with Tobit and Dade. "Cut me… before Queen Samantha finds more juice."
She spread her arms to expose the front of her tightsuit. Plebon hesitated a moment, then picked up a scalpel that’d been lying on the parapet wall — a regulation navy scalpel, taken from an Explorer’s first-aid kit. He skimmed the knife up one side of Festina’s rib cage, across at the shoulders, and down to the waist. A flap of heavy cloth fell open in her suit, baring the electronics beneath. Plebon carefully slipped his hand in among the wires and began feeling around for the power cable.
"Kind of an erotic experience, ain’t it, Admiral?" Tobit leered. "Having your clothes cut off, then getting groped."
"Shut up, old man," Festina mumbled. Her voice sounded like somebody blushing.
While Plebon worked, I looked over the edge of the parapet. The first thing to catch my eye was a Laughing Larry, hovering halfway between the palace and the surrounding palisade. At the moment, the Larry wasn’t giggling its full hyena laugh — just a light chuckle, as if it knew a joke we didn’t. The gold ball spun two stories above the ground, a good height for slaughtering soldiers when the shooting started, but from down there, they wouldn’t hit us up on the roof. Larries fired out the bottom and sides, not the top; they weren’t designed to butcher people who’d reached higher ground.
Another Larry hovered over the first canal, just beyond the west gate of the palisade. In the darkness I couldn’t see more of the metal balls, but I didn’t doubt they were out there — when Tobit had reported four of the nasty things, he’d been using his Bumbler as telescope and IR scanner.
Four Laughing Larries, and the Balrog inching up behind us. Not good. I noticed the five Mandasars had planted themselves at the top of the ramp, between me and the creeping moss. Counselor was grimly holding Festina’s flaming lantern; she obviously had plans to show the Balrog a hot time if it tried to attack her Teelu.
I turned my eyes toward the Sperm-tail, still plastered against the side of the Hushed Museum. The tail seemed to be quivering with excitement… but maybe it was just vibrating under tension as our anchor pulled one way and Sam’s pulled the other. Behind me, Dade yelled at Plebon, "Hey, be careful! If you feed too much power, you’ll fry the whole anchor."
"He knows that," Festina said in a tight voice. "Let the man work."
"Almost there," Plebon grunted. "Here goes."
Suddenly, the tail slithered away from the museum wall. It snapped up into the air, high, high, halfway to the thin clouds, then stabbed down again, straight at us — like a colored tube of lightning, and the anchor was the lightning rod.
Whish. Contact. Locked down.
I lifted my hand to my earphone and waited for someone to tell Jacaranda we were ready. Five seconds passed in silence. Finally, I said, "Um… shouldn’t we call the ship? Say we’re ready for transport?"
"No radios," Festina replied. Her voice came straight out of her tightsuit, with no amplification. "Our suit power is shunted into the anchor. But there’s nothing to worry about: the ship can tell when its tail has been snagged. Give them a few more seconds to establish an air-pressure gradient. Then we can start—"
She was going to say we could start transporting up. But she was interrupted by stuff transporting down: three Laughing Larries and a twentyish version of me.
One slight difference: the younger me had a chest made of glass.
41
GREETING THE NEW ARRIVALS
They came out of the Sperm-tail in a whoosh, spat onto the parapet through the tiny tail tip and suddenly exploding to full size. One of the Larries smacked against the parapet wall with a metallic clang; the other two bounced against the stone floor, then flipped over the outer wall, where they dropped almost all the way to the ground before stopping their fall. They spun down there, howling as loud as banshees… as if they were furiously angry and screaming for someone to kill.
The man nearly went over the side too. He shot out of the Sperm-tail and landed unbalanced on his feet, staggering forward out of control till he lurched over the stomach-high wall. I barely managed to catch him by the tail of his vest. It was a leather one, exactly like Mr. Clear Chest had worn on Celestia.
As I pulled him back to more solid footing, Festina wheeled around, ripping her connection away from the anchor. Her right fist caught the man hard in the jaw; he seemed so dizzy from the Sperm-tail ride, he didn’t see the punch coming. The impact nearly sent him over the wall again, but I kept hold of his vest and hauled him in. That brought him back into range for Festina to hit him with a left in the solar plexus and a knife-hand to the side of the neck. He slumped unconscious, his limp body staying upright only because of my grip on his vest. Gingerly, I lowered him to the ground, keeping a wary eye on Festina.
"Um," I began to say… but behind Festina’s back, the anchor box shot up a stream of sparks that hissed and fizzed in the darkness. When she’d torn herself free, some circuit must have shorted out. With the anchor discombobulated, the Sperm-tail snapped loose and whipped past our faces, making a beeline for the other anchor, somewhere in the middle of the Black Army.
Dade howled, "No!" A moment later, he spun to face Festina. "Do you know what you did? You ruined our chance to escape! They told me you were crazy, but…" He clamped his mouth shut.
Festina only sighed. "Dade," she said, "that wasn’t our Sperm-taiclass="underline" it came from some other ship. Jacaranda sure as hell wasn’t carrying Laughing Larries… and I would have noticed a crew member who looks so much like Edward." She shook her head. "There must have been a second ship in this system. When we arrived, it hid behind an asteroid or something; but as soon as Jacaranda left, the ship came straight to Troyen. Obviously, this pretty fellow didn’t want to miss the final offensive. In so much of a hurry, he forgot to make sure his Sperm-tail had landed on the right anchor."
"But…" It was obvious Dade still wanted to blame someone. "You didn’t have to rip away from the anchor and break it. You didn’t have to hit the guy."
"No?" Festina knelt beside the clear-chest man and patted him down. At his hip, she found a holster holding a standard-issue navy stun-pistoclass="underline" very bad if the man had been given enough time to start shooting. Even worse, Festina opened a zipped inner pocket of the leather vest and pulled out a palm-sized electrical doodad — a control box of some kind.
She held it for Dade to see. "Command module for those Laughing Larries," she said. "Voice-activated. He didn’t even have to pull it from his pocket; all he had to do was shout. One word, and his three nasty pets would have sliced us to ribbons."