Joshua heard the scream, a scream like no other he could remember, beyond even the terror of his own loved ones dying at the hands of those long ago pirates, and he immediately unhooked himself, put the shuttle on auto, and rushed back to help his master.
What he saw was not too different from what he expected to see, with a few startling differences.
There was blood all over. There always was. The place had the look and feel and stench of a slaughterhouse. The difference was that there were two bodies covered in blood and excrement in the center of the cabin, and it was Georgi Macouri who was on the bottom, clearly dead, the look of abject terror in his wide open but unblinking eyes and on what was left of his face giving no doubt. The small girl had seemed dead on top of him, her long hair caked with blood and her tiny form covered with it, but, slowly, carefully, she backed off and away from Macouri’s dead form and sat back in a kneeling position. Her face was all too intelligent, and all too filled with a look of pleasure. It was as if, as if…
As if it was the face of someone possessed by demons.
The two surgical knives she’d used to make such a mess of Georgi Macouri were in each hand, held the way one would hold them before stabbing a victim.
An Li was no more than a hundred and fifty centimeters high and, combined with the weathering and semistarvation of the months on Melchior, she could not have weighed more than thirty-five kilograms or so, yet there was an energy and force inside her that made her seem like a giant to the nearly two-meter-tall muscular man, who easily had a hundred kilos on her, and who now stood there gaping at this sight.
“You need to clean up this mess,” she said with a firm tone. “Or would you join him now?”
“He is dead. There seems no point to joining him,” Joshua commented. “I pledged my service to him, not to his causes.”
“Will you pledge yourself to me, now?”
“I do not know who I am addressing,” he told her. “If it is for my life, I would prefer to simply die quickly.”
“You are many times my size. Do you think I can do it to you?”
“He was larger than you as well. I suspect that you might. You are not the girl we brought here.”
“No, I am not. I am going to clean this body up in the back while you do what you can here. Once we have tended to the basics, turn this thing around and head back for the destroyer. I have much business there.”
“I will do it,” Joshua told him. “Not out of fear, but out of respect.” And perhaps a bit of curiosity as well, he added to himself. If the soul did exist, he had long ago forfeited his. If this indeed was who held claim to it, then it was time they got to know each other.
“Very well. And collect the stones. Don’t worry, they won’t do much to you if you just collect them and put them out of the way.”
Joshua nodded and gave a slight bow. It was going to take a lot more than he had to make this cabin presentable, but he would do the best he could.
The creature in An Li’s body went back to the showers and took a look at herself in the mirrored reflection before beginning what was obviously going to be quite a chore washing this stuff off. Well-toned, superior reflexes, but this was going to take some getting used to.
As it turned out, it wouldn’t be much of a trip back to the Agrippa. As soon as the missing shuttle was discovered, Chung had initiated a close-in search of the immediate vicinity and had no trouble finding it parked in orbit around Balshazzar. It was a curious thing to do, after all this time and trouble, but she lost no time in pursuing it with the intent of bringing it back aboard or shooting it if need be.
Maslovic didn’t want it damaged, since after the stripping it was the only space-capable vehicle that could handle more than two people, but neither was it any good to him in enemy hands.
They approached cautiously, but saw no signs of the shuttle building up power or taking any action at all.
“I don’t like it,” Darch commented. “Macouri’s crazy, but why steal it and get away, however the hell he managed it, and then just park? He’s a sitting duck.”
“Could be a trap,” Maslovic warned. “You never know.” He was very much concerned with the fact that Macouri now had a defenseless young woman with him. The little man had only one history with that kind of person.
Randi shook her head. “Somehow, I just don’t think so. It’s hard to explain, but when you’ve been practically saturated by those stones for so long you get a kind of sense of them. Something’s wrong. Not for us. For them. I can sense it.”
Before they could close to capture range, Darch turned and called, “We’re being hailed!”
“Put it on.”
“This is Joshua. I am bringing the craft back and will dock. Do not fire on us, please,” came the somewhat familiar voice of the big man.
“Joshua, where is Macouri? Put him on.”
There was a pause. “I don’t think that’s possible, sir. In fact, I doubt if that will ever be possible again, unless he is correct about an afterlife.”
“He’s dead?”
“Yes, sir. It is difficult to explain. Far easier for me to just bring the craft back. I simply cannot imagine how I personally could clean this up. It will have to be your ship’s maintenance systems.”
Randi was suddenly alarmed. “What about An Li? Did he hurt her?”
“No, ma’am. Not that he didn’t try. It is simply going to be much easier to show you. There is no threat here that I can determine, except for an incredible number of those execrable stones.”
“Shit! The portable stash! I don’t even know why I bothered,” Jerry Nagel said, mostly to himself. “I’d forgotten all about them.”
Maslovic wasn’t buying anything until he had the full story. “Sanchez, Nasser. Cover the shuttle when it docks in Bay One. Take no guff from anybody. Understand?”
The truth was, neither they nor he did understand. Why quit and give up when you walked through security and a cyberlinked ship without being noticed? Did Joshua kill Macouri? Had they misjudged him? Or what?
The truth, such as it was, was soon plain when the shuttle docked and the hatches hissed and then opened. Joshua emerged first, and was clearly both unarmed and no threat. In fact, he looked to the marines as if he had suddenly grown very tired and very old and beyond any of this.
Nasser gestured for Sanchez to keep a watch on Joshua and went inside. He wasn’t gone long, and when he emerged he had a look that no marine had shown for a very long time.
“It’s a butchery in there,” he told his partner and by extension the others waiting above. “I’ve been in a few nasty fights, but I’ve never seen anything like that.”
Behind him, a tiny figure emerged, dark, weathered like the others of Melchior and, like them, almost a stick figure in spite of long and still messy-looking matted hair trailing down its back.
The one who was once An Li looked neither shocked nor traumatized in any way, although she did have a little bit of that pissed-off look she’d had from the start.
“I may have to get used to this for a while,” she said, “but I don’t have to sacrifice. Anybody on this tub smoke cigars?”
“That’s not Li,” Nagel commented. “It may be her body, but that’s not her. Not even before. The face, the walk, the movements, all different.”