I felt my throat tighten. But as I’d told Bayta, the cost was always set by the aggressors. There was nothing we could do now but pay it. “You’re welcome,” I said.
“For what do you thank him?” Riijkhan demanded.
“For his trust,” Morse said, his eyes still on me. “For his friendship. For the chance to see the leaves on the tree, if only for a brief time.” His eyes rested momentarily on Bayta, then returned to me. “You will watch over the rest?”
“Yes,” I promised, my thoughts flashing back to the scene at the warship door, and the sudden revelation I’d had there.
No, the Modhri was no longer on my side. Instead, I was now on his. With the failure of my plans, he had taken charge.
Don’t ever ask me to do that, the Modhri had said when I’d once dared to suggest that he order part of a mind segment to die. But he hadn’t said it because he wasn’t willing. He’d said it because he must have suspected even then that it might come to this, and he didn’t want even a hint of that thought floating around where the Shonkla-raa could pluck it from his mind or infer it from my words.
He had taken charge, and was about to make the ultimate sacrifice.
And when the mind segment died, the Shonkla-raa control over his hosts would vanish.
“And you were right,” Morse added with a small smile. “It was indeed the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
“And it still is,” I said quietly. “Good-bye, Modhri.”
I don’t think it was until that moment that Riijkhan suddenly got it. {Attack!} he shouted, and leaped toward Morse.
He never made it. McMicking was ready, stepping between them and dropping into combat stance. Riijkhan snarled something and jabbed a knife hand viciously toward him. McMicking dodged the blow, flashing a side kick into Riijkhan’s abdomen. Riijkhan jolted back with the impact, then slashed another blow toward his opponent. Again, McMicking dodged, but this time he didn’t dodge quite far enough. The clawed fingers caught him across the forehead, gashing a line of bright red and knocking him out of the way.
Just as Morse fired three thudwumper rounds from his Beretta into Riijkhan’s chest.
The four Shonkla-raa at the control board were already in motion. But it was too late for them, too. I snatched one of my jumpsuit’s armor plates from its pocket, snapped it in half and pulled the pieces apart, then hurled them in a diverging pattern toward one of the Fillies. He was watching them go past on either side of him, no doubt wondering at my incredibly inept marksmanship, when the nearly invisible connecting wire sliced through his neck. The second Shonkla-raa died in exactly the same bloody way as McMicking’s wire bolo cut his throat, as well. The third was starting around the edge of the control board when McMicking broke open another plate from his jumpsuit, plucked out the throwing knife created as the metal shattered along its preset fracture lines, and hurled it squarely into one of the Shonkla-raa’s nerve centers. He was howling in blinding agony when my own knife put an end to the pain, and to him.
The fourth was racing desperately toward McMicking when Morse fired two more thudwumpers into him. He sprawled onto his face on the deck, sending a splash of blood in all directions, and lay still. Taking a deep breath, I looked up at the monitors, wondering even now if it had all been for nothing.
It hadn’t. All across the ship, in every room where the isolated groups of would-be conquerors and their newly freed slaves had gathered, the Shonkla-raa were fighting for their lives.
And they were losing. The Hardin security force—not the Hardin pilots and navigators that I’d carefully led Riijkhan to expect, but McMicking’s best combat experts—had had eight weeks of intensive training in the new and undetectable weapons the techs had created and hidden in their jumpsuits. Fayr and his commandos had no such exotic weaponry, but they had their own highly honed combat training plus the intimate knowledge of Shonkla-raa physiology that we’d obtained from Yleli and his late companions aboard the Homshil train.
Five minutes later, it was all over.
Almost.
“Frank,” Bayta murmured, touching my arm, her eyes on Riijkhan. “He’s still alive.”
I looked down. Riijkhan’s breathing was fast and shallow, and the thudwumper holes in his chest were still oozing blood. But his eyes were open, and he was gazing up at me with disbelief and hatred. “Any last words?” I asked, crouching down beside him.
His hand twitched, as if he was hoping for one last shot at me. But the strength necessary for an attack was long gone. “No?” I asked. “In that case, I have a few. You made two mistakes, Osantra Riijkhan. You and the rest of the Shonkla-raa. Your first mistake was in focusing exclusively on what I was planning, and never even considering the possibility that the Modhri might have plans of his own.”
I looked up at the monitors and the dead and dying Shonkla-raa. “Your second mistake was a philosophical one,” I said quietly. “You understood masters and slaves and non-slaves. But you never understood freedom. That’s what people will fight for. That’s what they’ll die for.”
There was a gurgle from below me, and I looked down to see Riijkhan’s eyes close again. “I suppose we should put an end to it,” I said, standing up again. “Morse?”
“No,” Morse said flatly.
I looked over at him. He was standing off to the side, his Beretta still gripped in his hand, staring down at the dying Shonkla-raa. “No?” I asked carefully.
“No,” he repeated, looking up at me.
And as I gazed at his face, I understood. The Modhri, once Morse’s silent puppeteer, had emerged hesitantly from the shadows to become his ally and, eventually, his friend. A closer friend even than he’d been to me. “Because if you don’t shoot it’ll take longer?” I asked.
A small, pitiless smile touched the corners of Morse’s mouth. “And because it’ll hurt more,” he said grimly. “Let him die on his own.”
And we did.
THIRTY-THREE
The victory had been costly. Sixty of our two hundred men and women had been injured, along with nine of Fayr’s thirty commandos. Twenty-one Humans and twelve Bellidos also lay dead. More lives, I reflected bitterly, for me to add to my conscience.
But the lives hadn’t been given in vain. The Shonkla-raa, all of them, were dead.
And the galaxy was once again safe. At least, for now.
“We’ll need to send the defenders back to the Tube as soon as possible,” Bayta said as she and I wearily headed through the now silent tunnel toward the parked vehicles that had brought us here. It was night outside, and I could feel the cool desert air flowing in across our legs. “They’ll be able to organize special transport for the wounded once everyone’s able to travel.” She hesitated. “We’ll need to deal with the bodies, as well.”
“McMicking and Fayr will probably want to handle that personally,” I told her. “They can laser whatever requests they have up to the station, and from there to Earth and whoever’s been backing Fayr’s group.”
“All right.” Bayta paused. “I never thought the Modhri would be willing to do something like that.”
“I was rather surprised myself,” I admitted. “The Modhri as a whole won’t be affected much, of course. But it’s still very impressive that an entire mind segment would be willing to sacrifice himself for us.”
“Because he understood freedom,” she said quietly.
“Yes,” I agreed. “The big question now is whether or not he understands responsibility.”
Bayta hunched her shoulders uncomfortably. “You mean whether he’ll be willing to eliminate the colonies inside people who don’t want them?”
“That’s part of it,” I said. “He may also have trouble with some of his more far-flung mind segments who may resist these changes.”