Somehow he made it into cover, and his shoulder heaved. The desk crashed over, blocking the deadly beams, and his machine-pistol popped into his free hand.
Someone else had a slug-thrower, and he winced as penetrators chewed into the desktop. Its wood couldn't stop that kind of fire, and he ducked to his left, exposing himself just long enough to find the firer. His disrupter whined, and the fire stopped, but he felt no exultation. He'd seen DeVries in that moment-seen the way her body quivered weakly-and his mind flashed back to Tannis Cateau's briefings.
She was dying, and he swore viciously as he rose on his knees to nail a second gunman with his CHK. The thunder of weapons shook the room, Quintana's guards had to be on their way, more penetrators chewed at the desk, and then someone killed the lights and the chaos became total.
Tisiphone battered at the block with all her might, then made herself stop. She had to get into Alicia's main processor to reach her pharmacope, but the drug Alexsov had used blocked voluntary nervous impulses and sealed the processor's input tantalizingly beyond her reach. She couldn't reach it, yet she had to. She had to!
And then it came to her. The block couldn't cut off its victim's involuntary muscles without killing her, and the processor's output reached all of Alicia's functions! And that meant -
Ben Belkassem cried out and dropped his pistol as a tungsten penetrator slammed through his upper arm, yet he scarcely felt it. Any minute someone else would come in through those windows behind him and he'd be as dead as Alicia DeVries. Someone with more guts than sense rushed him. The flash of his disrupter lit the darkness with emerald lightning, seventy kilos of dead meat slammed to the carpet, and white-hot muzzle flashes stabbed at him as his own shot drew the fire of another machine-pistol. He wasn't afraid as the penetrators screamed past-there was no time for fear-yet under the wild adrenalin rush was the bitter knowledge of how completely he had failed.
But then the man behind the machine-pistol screamed. It was a horrible, gurgling sound … and Ben Belkassem knew he hadn't caused it.
There was an instant of shocked silence, and then someone else was firing. Someone who fired in short, deadly bursts, as if the darkness were light, and the whining disrupters were no longer firing at him. He shoved himself up on his knees and gawked in disbelief.
He had no idea why Alicia DeVries wasn't dead or how she'd reached the man whose weapon she was firing, and it didn't matter. The rock-steady pistol picked off guards with machinelike precision. She was a ghost, appearing in glaring muzzle flashes only to vanish back into the darkness like death's own ballerina, and the screams and shrieks of the dying were her orchestra.
But then her magazine was empty, and there were still three enemies left. Ben Belkassem hunted for them desperately, lacing the smoke-heavy blackness with disrupter fire in a frantic effort to cover her, then groaned in despair as an emerald shaft struck her squarely between the shoulders.
DeVries grunted, but she didn't go down, and his own disrupter fell to his side in shock.
She was dead. She had to be dead this time! But she spun toward the man who'd shot her even as two more disrupters hit her. A vicious kick snapped his neck, and the two remaining guards screamed in terrified disbelief as she charged them. One of them rained green bolts upon her as she closed, but the other tried to run. It made no difference; the fleeing guard got as far as opening the door, spilling light into the death-filled gloom, and then he died, as well.
She spun again, whirling to face Ben Belkassem, and he dropped his weapon and raised his good hand with frantic haste.
"Stop! I'm on your side!"
She slid to a halt, jacket charred from disrupter hits, and frozen eyes regarded him from a face of inhuman calm.
"Ben Belkassem! I'm Ferhat Ben Belkassem!" he said desperately, and saw recognition in those icy eyes. "I-"
"Later." Her voice was as inhumanly calm as her expression. "Get over there and cover the door."
Ben Belkassem scrabbled up his weapons and raced to the door before his dazed mind even considered arguing, and only then did he truly realize how quick and brutal the fight had been. He fed a fresh clip into his pistol, clumsy with only one working arm, and when he looked out into the corridor the first of Quintana's retainers were only now racing towards him. He dropped the three leaders, then glanced over his shoulder as the survivors fell back.
DeVries knelt beside Alexsov, ignoring the blood soaking his tunic and pooling about her knees. She pressed her hands to his temples, leaning over him, her face almost touching his as blood bubbled on his lips, and Ben Belkassem shuddered and turned back to his front. He didn't know what she was doing. What was more, he didn't think he wanted to know.
More guards came at him. These had found time to scramble into unpowered armor, and the loads in his CHK were too light to get through it at anything above point-blank range. He dropped it and shifted to his disrupter, praying the charge held out. Five more men went down, and then the survivors withdrew to regroup.
Something thundered behind him, and he swore feelingly. DeVries was by the windows, firing someone else's weapon out into the grounds. They were pinned; no matter how many they killed, the others would get them in the end. But he'd seen the way DeVries moved. If either of them could make it … .
"I'll cover you!" he shouted, starting towards the window
"Watch your front," she said calmly, never even turning her head. "These bastards have a surprise coming."
There was no time to ask what she was talking about. A fresh rush was coming down the corridor, and a buzz from his disrupter warned of an exhausted charge as he beat it back. Her "surprise" had better come soon, or -
Something howled in the dark. Something huge and black, borne on a cyclone of turbines, wing edges and nose incandescent from reentry. Chateau Defiant heaved as rockets and plasma cannon shattered its other wings, and Ben Belkassem rolled across the floor, coughing on smoke and powdered stone.
A steely hand grabbed his collar, dragged him out the windows, and hurled him at the grounded assault shuttle. He charged its ramp like his last hope of salvation, DeVries on his heels, and heard incoming fire spanging off the armored hull and the whine of powered turrets and the end-of-the-world bellow as the shuttle's calliopes covered their retreat. He staggered through the troop bay to the flight deck and slumped against a bulkhead, suddenly aware of the pain in his arm and the weakness of blood loss, as the shuttle leapt back into the heavens.
DeVries shouldered past him to the pilot's couch, and he slid down to sit on the deck in fresh shock that owed little to blood loss as he realized that seat had been empty when the shuttle swept down to save them.
He sat there, searching for a rational explanation, but none occurred to his muzzy brain. Disrupter fire had charred her jacket in half a dozen places, yet she was alive. That was insane enough, but where was her crew? And what in God's name had she been doing with Alexsov back there?
"What-?"
He stopped and coughed, surprised by the croak of his own voice, and she spared him a glance.
"Hang on," she said in that same calm voice, and he clutched for a handhold as something fast and lethal sizzled past and she whipped the shuttle into wild evasive action-without, he noted numbly, even bothering to don the flight control synth headset.
And then she started talking to herself.
"Okay. Dial 'em in and take them out," she told the empty air.
He clawed his way forward and tumbled into the copilot's seat just as something carved a screaming column of light through the night. He gaped out the cockpit canopy, then jerked back as terrible white fire erupted far below. Another followed, and a third, and DeVries spared him a wolf's smile. She flipped on the com-he hadn't even realized it was turned off-and an angry male voice filled the flight deck.
"… say again! Cease fire on our shuttle, or we will destroy your spaceport! This is First Officer Jeff Okahara of the starship Star Runner, and this is your final warning!"
"Way to go, Megaira," his pilot murmured, and Ben Belkassem closed his eyes. It had been such an orderly universe this morning, he thought almost calmly.
"Star Runner, you are ordered to return your shuttle and its occupants to the port immediately to answer for their unprovoked attack on Lieutenant Commander Defiant's estate!" another voice roared over the com.
"Bugger off!" Okahara snarled back. "Your precious lieutenant commander just got what he fucking well had coming!"
"What?! What do you mean-"
"I mean you'd better notify his heirs! And anybody else who tries to murder our captain is going to get the same!"
"Listen, you-"
The furious voice chopped off. Ben Belkassem heard another voice, quick and urgent, muttering words that included "HVW" and "battle screen," and looked across at Alicia again.
"Quite a freighter you have there, Captain Mainwaring," he murmured.
"Isn't it?" The turbines died as the shuttle streaked beyond air-breathing altitude and the thrusters took over. "Strap in. We don't have time to decelerate, so Megaira's going to snag us with a tractor as we go by."
"Megaira? Who's Megaira?"
"A friend of mine," she replied with a strange little smile.
Commander Barr couldn't believe any of it. One minute everything was calm, the next a shuttle from an unarmed freighter screamed planetward at insane velocity and reduced Chateau Defiant (and, presumably, Captain Alexsov) to flaming rubble. And when Groundside tried to down the shuttle, that same unarmed freighter blew the engaging weapon stations into next week with HVW!
Barr had no better idea of what was happening than anyone else, but his drive was working hard, because he knew Harpy didn't even want to think about engaging that "freighter." God only knew what it might produce next, and he intended to be several light-seconds away before it got around to it.
Now he stared into his aft display, wondering who was aboard that shuttle. He could still nail it short of the freighter-which was putting out battle screen now, for God's sake!-which might be a good idea. Except that Captain Alexsov might be aboard it. And, Barr admitted, except that firing on it seemed to be a good way to convince the freighter to respond in kind.
Then he no longer had the option. The shuttle slashed towards the freighter at far too high an approach speed, only to stop with bone-breaking suddenness as a tractor yanked it inside the screen. Barr winced. He'd been through exactly the same maneuver in training exercises, but his sympathy was limited, for the freighter was already swinging to pursue him.
A groggy Ben Belkassem swam back to awareness draped across Alicia DeVries' back in a fireman's carry. It was an undignified position, but he was in no condition to argue, and a part of him apologized for every doubt he'd ever entertained over Sir Arthur Keita's descriptions of drop commandos.
She dumped him gently on the floor of the ship's elevator and crouched beside him, ripping his blood-soaked sleeve apart.
"Nice and clean," she told him. "Got some nasty tissue damage, but it missed the bone." He hissed as she strapped a pressure bandage tight. "We'll take care of that in a minute. Right now we've got other worries."
"Like what?" he gasped.
"Like eight Wyvern Navy cruisers and a Fleet tin can we have to kill."
"Kill a Fleet destroyer?!"
"The one Alexsov came from, HMS Harpy. Her transponder's buggered to ID her as Medusa, but-"
The lift door opened, and she seemed to teleport through it. Ben Belkassem followed more slowly onto what he realized must be the bridge and peered about him.
"Where is everybody?"
"You're looking at everybody. Megaira, give him a display."
He jumped as a holo display sprang to life, hanging in midair and livid with the red-ringed blue dots of hostile Fasset drives. Eight came from the direction of Wyvern, already shrinking astern; a ninth glowed dead ahead.
Commander Barr swallowed bile. Harpy was putting everything she had into her drive … and the cursed freighter was gaining. It was running away from the Wyverian cruisers with absurd ease, shrugging aside everything they and the planetary defenses could throw without even bothering to reply. Clearly it had other concerns.
"Stand by! The instant they flip to engage us, I want-"
"And now …" Alicia murmured beside Ben Belkassem.
Commander Barr and the entire company of HMS Harpy died before they even realized their pursuer had already flipped.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Delicious smells filled the small galley, and Ferhat Ben Belkassem sat at the table. He wore a highly atypical air of bemusement and sprawled in his chair without his usual neatness, but then he'd earned a little down time-and hadn't expected to live to enjoy it.
He felt a bit like the ancient Alice as he watched Captain DeVries stir tomato-rich sauce with a neurosurgeon's concentration. Her dyed hair was coiled in a thick braid, and she looked absurdly young. It was hard to credit his own memory of icy eyes and lightning muzzle flashes as she sampled the sauce and reached for more basil. The lid rose from a pot beside her, hovering in midair on an invisible tractor beam, and linguine drifted from a storage bin to settle neatly in the boiling water.
"And what do you think you're doing? I told you I'd put that in when I was ready," she said, and this time he barely twitched. He was starting to adjust to her one-sided conversations with the ship's AI-even if they were yet another of the "impossible" things she did so casually.
Ben Belkassem had boned up on the alpha-synths after DeVries stole this ship. Too much was classified for him to learn as much as he would have liked, but he'd learned enough to know her augmentation didn't include the normal alpha-synth com link. Without it, the AI should have been forced to communicate back by voice, not some sort of … of telepathy!
Yet he was beyond surprise where DeVries was concerned. After all, she'd survived multiple disrupter hits with no more than a few minor burns, killed eleven men saving his own highly-trained self, taken out a few ground-to-space weapon emplacements, escaped through the heart of Wyvern's very respectable fortifications, and polished off a destroyer as an encore. As far as he was concerned, she could do anything she damned well liked.
She murmured something else to the empty air, too softly this time for him to hear, and he sat very still as plates and silverware swooped from cupboard to table like strange birds. Yes, he thought, very like Alice, though a bit more of this and he could qualify as the March Hare. Or perhaps DeVries already had that role and he'd be forced to settle for the Mad Hatter.
He smiled at the thought, and she spared him a smile of her own as she set the sauce on the table and produced a bottle of wine. He raised an eyebrow at the Defiant Vineyards label, and she sighed as she filled their glasses.
"He really was an outstanding vintner. Too bad he couldn't have stopped there."
"Um, you are speaking to me, this time, Captain?"
"You might as well call me Alicia," she said by way of answer, dropping into the chair opposite him as the pot of pasta moved to the sink, drained itself, and drifted to the table.
"Dinner is served," she murmured. "Help yourself, Inspector."
"Fair's fair. If you're Alicia, I'm Ferhat."
She nodded agreement and heaped linguine on her plate, then reached for the sauce ladle while Ben Belkassem eyed the huge serving of pasta.
"Are you sure your stomach's up to this?" he asked, remembering the tearing violent nausea which had wracked her less than two hours before.
"Well," she ladled sauce with a generous hand and grinned at him, "it's not like there's anything down there to get in its way."
"I see." It was untrue, but if she cared to enlighten him she would. He served his own plate one-handedly, sipped his wine, and regarded her quizzically. "I don't believe I've gotten around to thanking you yet. That was about the most efficiently I've ever been rescued by my intended rescuee."
She shrugged a bit uncomfortably. "Without you I'd've been dead, too. Just how long have you been tailing me, anyway?"
"Only since Dewent, and I had a hard time believing it when I first spotted you. You know about the reward?" She nodded, and he chuckled. "Somehow I don't think anyone's going to collect it. How the devil did you get so deep so quickly? It took O Branch seven months to get as far as Jacoby, and we still hadn't fingered Fuchien."
She looked at him oddly, then shrugged again.
"Tisiphone helped. And Megaira, of course."
"Oh. Ah, may I take it Megaira is your AI?"
"What else should I call her?" she asked with a smile.
"From what I've read about alpha-synth symbioses," he said carefully, "the AI usually winds up with the same name as the human partner."
"Must get pretty confusing," another voice said, and Ben Belkassem jumped. His head whipped around, and the new voice chuckled as his eye found the intercom speaker. "Since you're talking about me, I thought I might as well speak up, Inspector. Or do I get to call you Ferhat, too?"
He spoke firmly to his pulse. He'd known the AI was there, but that didn't diminish his astonishment. He'd worked with more than his share of cyber-synth AIs, and they were at least as alien as one might have expected. They simply didn't have a human perspective, and most were totally disinterested in anyone other than their cyber-synth partners. When they did speak, they sounded quite inhuman, and none of them had been issued a sense of humor.
But this one was an alpha-synth AI, he reminded himself, and its voice, not unreasonably, sounded remarkably like Alicia's.
" 'Ferhat' will be fine, um, Megaira," he said after a moment.
"Fine. But if you call me 'Maggie' I'll reverse flow in the head the next time you sit down."
"I wouldn't dream of it," he said a bit faintly.
"Alley did … once."
"A base lie," Alicia put in around a mouthful of food. "She makes things up all the time. Sometimes-" she held Ben Belkassem's eyes across the table "-you might almost think she's shy a brick or two."
"Point taken," the inspector said, beginning to wind linguine around his fork. "But you were saying she and … Tisiphone helped you?"
"Well," Alicia waved at the bulkheads, "you certainly saw how Megaira-by the way, that's 'Star Runner's' real name, too-got us off Wyvern."
"So she did, and most efficiently, too."
"Why, thank you, kind Sir," the speaker said. "I see he's a perceptive man, Alley."
"And your modesty underwhelms us all," Alicia returned dryly.
"Oh, yeah? Just remember, I got it from you."
Ben Belkassem choked on pasta. Definitely not your typical AI. But his humor faded as Alicia replied to Megaira.
"I'll remember. And you just remember I'd still've been dead if not for Tisiphone." She looked back at Ben Belkassem. "She was the one who jump-started my augmentation after that bastard knocked it out."
"Really?"
"Don't sound so dubious." He felt himself blush-something he hadn't done in years-and she snorted. "Of course she did. Who do you think put me back on line after Tannis and Uncle Arthur shut me down? I don't exactly have an on-off switch in the middle of my forehead!"
He took another bite to avoid answering, and her eyes glinted.
"Of course, that's not all she does," she continued, leaning across her plate with a conspiratorial air. "She reads minds, too. That's how I know just who to look for as my next target. And she creates a pretty mean illusion, as well-not to mention sticking the occasional idea into someone else's brain." He gawked at her, and she smiled brightly. "Oh, and she and Megaira do a dynamite job of raiding other people's data bases … or planting data in them, like 'Star Runner's' Melville Sector documentation."
She paused expectantly, and he swallowed. It was too much. Logic said she had to be telling the truth, but sanity said it was all impossible, and he was trapped between them.
"Well, yes," he said weakly, "but-"
"Oh, come on, Ferhat!" she snapped, glaring as if at a none too bright student who'd muffed a pop quiz. "You just talked to Megaira, right?" He nodded. "Well, if you don't have a problem accepting an intelligence-a person-who lives in that computer," she jabbed an index finger in the general direction of Megaira's bridge, "what's the big deal about accepting one who lives in this computer-" the same finger thumped her temple "-with me?"
"Put that way," he said slowly, easing his left arm in its sling, "I don't suppose there should be one. But you have to admit it's a bit hard to accept that a mythological creature's moved in with you."
"I don't have to admit anything of the sort, and I'm getting sick and tired of making allowances for everyone else. Damn it, everybody just assumes I'm crazy! Not a one of you, not even Tannis, ever even considered the possibility that Tisiphone might just really exist!"
"That's not quite true," he said, and it was her turn to pause. She made a small gesture, inviting him to continue.
"Actually," he told her, "Sir Arthur never questioned that she was 'real' in the sense of someone-or something-in your own mind." He raised a hand as her eyes fired up. "I know that's not what you meant, but he'd gotten as far as worrying that something had activated some sort of psi talent in you and produced a 'Tisiphone persona,' I suppose you'd call it, and I think he may have gone a bit further, whether he knew it or not. That's the real reason he was so worried about you. For you."
The green fire softened, and he shrugged.
"As for myself, I don't pretend to know what's inside your mind. You might remember that conversation we had just before Soissons. I can accept that another entity, not just a delusion, has moved in with you. I just … have trouble with the idea of a Greek demigoddess or demon." He smiled a touch sheepishly. "I'm afraid it violates my own preconceptions."
"Your preconceptions! What do you think it did to mine?"
"I hate to think," he admitted. "But even those who accept something exists can be excused for worrying about whether or not it's benign, I think."
"That depends on how you define 'benign,' " Alicia replied slowly. "She's not what you'd call a forgiving sort, and we have … a bargain."
"To nail the pirates," Ben Belkassem said in a soft voice, and she nodded. "At what price, Alicia?"
"At any price." Her eyes looked straight through him, and her voice was flat-its very lack of emphasis more terrible than any trick of elocution. He shivered, and her eyes dropped back into focus. "At any price," she repeated, "but don't call them 'pirates.' That isn't what they are at all."
"If not pirates, what are they?"
"Most of them are Imperial Fleet personnel."
"What?" Ben Belkassem blurted, and her mouth twisted sourly.
"Wondering if I'm crazy again, Ferhat?" she asked bitterly. "I'm not. I don't know who hit Alexsov-it may even have been me, though I was trying to keep him alive-but he was pretty far gone by the time we got to him. But not so far that we didn't get a lot. Gregor Borissovich Alexsov, Captain, Imperial Fleet, Class of '32, last assignment: chief of staff to Commodore James Howell." Her mouth twisted again. "He still holds-held-that position, Inspector, because Commodore Howell is your pirates' field commander, and both of them are working directly for Vice Admiral Sir Amos Brinkman."
He stared at her, mind refusing to function. He'd known there had to be someone on the inside-someone high up-but never this! Yet somehow he couldn't doubt it, and the belief in his eyes eased her bitter expression.
"We didn't get everything, but we got a lot. Brinkman's in it up to his neck, but I think he's more their CNO, not the real boss. Alexsov knew who-or what group of whos-is really calling the shots, only he died before we got it. We still don't know their ultimate objective, either, but their immediate goal is to get as much as possible of the Imperial Fleet assigned to chasing them down."
"Wait a minute," Ben Belkassem muttered, clutching at his hair with his good hand. "Just wait a minute! I'll accept that you-or Tisiphone, or whoever-can read minds, but why in God's name would they want that? It's suicide!"
"No, it isn't." Alicia's own frustration showed in her voice, and she set aside her fork, laying her hand on the tablecloth and staring at her palm as if it somehow held the answer. "That's only their immediate goal, a single step towards whatever it is they ultimately intend to accomplish, and Alexsov was delighted with how well it's going."
Her hand clenched into a fist, and her eyes blazed.
"But whatever they're up to, Tisiphone and I can finally hit the bastards!" she said fiercely. "We know what they've got, we know where to find it, and we're going to rip the guts right out of them!"
"Wait-slow down!" Ben Belkassem begged. "What do you mean, you 'know what they've got'?"
"The 'pirate' fleet," Alicia said precisely, "consists of nine Fleet transports, seventeen Fleet destroyers, not counting the one we destroyed, six Fleet light cruisers, nine Fleet heavy cruisers, five Fleet battlecruisers, and one Capella-class dreadnought."
Ben Belkassem's jaw dropped. That was at least twice his own worst-case estimate, and how in hell had they gotten their hands on one of the Fleet's most modern dreadnoughts?
Alicia smiled-as if she could read his mind, he thought, and shuddered at the possibility that she was doing precisely that.
"Admiral Brinkman," she explained, "is only one of the senior officers involved. According to the record, most of their ships were stripped and sent to the breakers, but that was only a cover. In fact, they simply disappeared-with all systems and data bases intact. As for the dreadnought, she's the Procyon. If you check the ship list, you'll find her in the Sigma Draconis Reserve Fleet, but if anyone checks her berth-"
She shrugged.
"Dear God!" Ben Belkassem whispered, then shook himself. "You said you know where they are?"
"At this particular moment, they are either at or en route to AR-12359 /J, an M4 just outside the Franconia Sector. Alexsov was supposed to rendezvous with them after completing his business on Wyvern, and unless Alexsov was wrong, Admiral Brinkman-" the rank was a curse in her mouth "-will be sending them new targeting orders there within the next three weeks. Only they won't be able to carry them out."
Her cold, shark-like smile chilled his blood.
"Alicia, you can't take on that kind of opposition by yourself-not even with an alpha-synth! They'll kill you!"
"Not before we kill Procyon," she said softly, and he swallowed. Fury or no Fury, there was madness in her eyes now. She meant it. She was going to launch a suicide attack straight into them unless he could dissuade her, and his mind worked desperately.
"That's … not the best strategy," he said, and her lip curled.
"Oh? It's more than the entire sector government's managed! And just who else do you suggest I send? Shall we report to Admiral Brinkman? Or, since we know he's dirty, perhaps we should take a chance on Admiral Gomez. Of course, there's the little problem that I don't have a single scrap of proof, isn't there? What do you suppose they'll do if a crazy woman tells them 'voices' insist the second in command of the Franconia Naval District is actually running the pirates? Voices that got the information from someone who's conveniently dead? Assuming, that is, that they forget their shoot on sight order long enough for me to tell them!
"Those bastards murdered every single person I loved, and Governor Treadwell, the entire Imperial Fleet, and even Uncle Arthur can go straight to Hell before I let them get away now!"
Her eyes glared at the inspector, and he shuddered. The amusement of only minutes before had vanished into a raw, ugly hatred totally unlike the woman he remembered from Soissons. And, he thought, unlike the woman he'd observed on Dewent and Wyvern. It was as if learning who her enemies were had snapped something down inside her … .
"All right, granted we can't inform Soissons. Hell, with Brinkman dirty, there's no telling how far up-or down-the rot's spread." He was too caught up in his thoughts to notice he was taking Brinkman's guilt as a given. "But if you go busting in there, the only person who knows the truth-whether anyone else is ready to believe you or not-is going to get killed. You may hurt them, but what if you don't hurt them enough? What if they regroup?"