Trees. And bloody rain. Trees to get in your way, and rain to wet you. This was how Keilin would have described the western side of the mountains now. It never occurred to him that this place looked very like the pictures he had once daydreamed over. On the other hand, the homesteads and travellers along the road would have described his thieving passage as a plague. The truth to tell, the boy-man was getting cocky. The Westerners were mud-soft. And there was no Marou to cut him down to size.
He'd spotted the hidden fire quite easily. Yes, whoever it was had bothered to hide deep in the woods, and had built it in a hollow where the light could not be seen, but they'd used pine. He could smell it a mile off. He moved closer, slipping silently from tree to tree. Perhaps a wary target would be more of a challenge.
The sleeper wrapped in the tatty blanket did not stir as Keilin went through the meager possessions in the bag. What?! There was no food. Not a damn crumb. But wait . . . what was this lot? His expert fingers read the shape and nature of the bangles. Gold! He was about to relieve the traveller of a few on principle when his fingers encountered another thing. A familiar oily coldness. It was so unexpected that he gave a small gasp. He looked across at the sleeper whose face was now clearly visible in the moonlight, to see if he reacted. And saw his victim was female, young, and by the looks of it, starving. Also, if the disturbance in the dirt on her face was anything to judge by, she'd gone to sleep crying.
It pulled at a cord in Keilin's innermost being. He remembered his own flight and desperation. If she too had one of the stones, perhaps she was as much a victim as he was. Also . . . he had a not insubstantial interest in girls. His brain suggested leaving her and her troubles strictly alone, but his glands called for a more chivalrous gesture. As Keilin was a physically normal young male, his glands won without any effort.
He had a generous amount of the country's finest provender, liberated from a wide selection of now irate citizens, stashed relatively nearby in his kit. Ten minutes later he was back, building up the fire and frying some succulent slices of a stolen side of bacon in a stolen pan.
Her awakening was amusing. Her nose literally twitched as the food smell plucked at it. A small tongue licked out catlike across her lips. Its effect on Keilin's glands was nearly tectonic. However, her reaction on seeing him failed to live up to Keilin's romantic expectations.
She sat up, bleary eyed, took one look at him, scrambled to her feet, and ran. He sat stunned for a moment before taking off after her. "Oi! Come back! I won't hurt you!"
He'd run in the hunt after desert gazelle. She'd had the rapid pursuit of a waddling bee wife for the last nine months. It was not much of a chase. She stood, panting, her back to the rough bark of the tree she'd been trying to climb, broken dagger in front of her. "Come . . . one . . . step nearer, I'll . . . kill you." Her eyes were wild enough to suggest she really meant it.
Keilin was thoroughly irritated by the shattering of his illusions. He'd thought she'd be pleased to see someone, especially with dinner. But the fear in her voice drew sympathy from him too. "The bacon's burning, you daft little girl. Stop being so stupid. I just saw you didn't have any food, so I was cooking some for you. I'm going back to see if I can save that bacon." He turned and walked back. Behind him resentment vied with fear and hunger. One should not call a princess, or possibly anyone, a "daft little girl" on first meeting. It never gets a relationship off to a good start.
The bacon was thoroughly burned. He turned it out, scraped the pan a bit, and sliced some fresh pieces. He was aware that he was being watched. When the rashers were beginning to curl, he tossed in a couple of duck eggs that a farmer he'd robbed a day back was still cursing about.
Without lifting his eyes from the pan, he asked, "Got a plate? I usually eat out of the pan myself, so I can't offer you one."
"Why don't you go away, you horrible boy?" came the fierce voice from the trees.
"I'm going, once I've had supper. You can come and eat, or you can sit up a tree."
"Go away. I've got my own food." The words sounded weak against the smell of the frying bacon.
"No, you haven't. I went through your kit while you were sleeping. You can't eat gold bracelets, you know."
"You've stolen my things, and now you're just trying to lure me out with food. You want to rape me." The voice was suspicious, accusing.
Keilin's mind turned back to an alley and Guard-Captain Kemp. His reply was gentler. "If I'd wanted to rob you, I'd have taken what I wanted and left. If I'd wanted to rape you, I'd have put a knife against your throat while you were asleep, not cooked you supper first. Besides, I've got enough money to buy any girls I want," he said with some pride.
Shael's quick mind assimilated all of this. He could have robbed her. He could have killed her. He could have raped her, too. . . . To her now awake and hungry self it made little sense, but he obviously wasn't planning to do her any harm, even if he was appallingly rude and terribly underbred. "I'm coming down. Try anything and I'll kill you."
He laughed. "Yeah! You and what army?" His experience in the field of diplomacy was not legion. He skillfully speared a piece of bacon on the point of his knife, and dropped it into his mouth. He continued to talk with mouth full. "Come and eat. No sense in letting it get cold." He'd gone from thinking her an object for his gallantry to an object for his pity. It showed in his tone. Shael might be hungry enough to accept his charity, but she did not have to like it. She advanced hungrily on the frying pan with an expression on her face that would have made older and wiser men wary. Keilin, however, knew little about people, and even less about girls. He didn't even notice, which did not improve matters. He just shoved the pan towards her while he chewed with his mouth open.
She was smaller than he'd first thought. Under the scowl and the dirt layer it was quite a pretty face. Some sense of gallantry began to return to Keilin, as he watched her gobble, daintiness and the manners of a princess forgotten in a sudden desperate hunger. "Here . . . don't eat so fast. Your stomach's not used to food. You'll cast it all up again."
The books Keilin had devoured in the library had led him to dream of caring and nurturing a delicate damsel, who would fall into his arms with gratitude afterwards. His experiences with his mother after she'd been on a three-day dream-dust binge stood him in better stead with the reality that followed. When Shael had stumbled up and rushed towards the bushes, he'd followed, held her head and rubbed her back. When she'd finished he handed her a leather water skin. She eyed it suspiciously. Keilin could see her hands were shaking on the flask neck. "Just water. Rinse your mouth out."
When she'd done that, he led her back to the fire, and put her blanket over her thin, shivering shoulders. He put more wood on the fire, took a small pot from his kit, and began shaving dried meat into it. He added water and set it in the flames. "How long," he asked conversationally, "since you last ate?"
The damsel in distress was showing scant signs of appreciation. In fact the hostile, shaky voice suggested that she planned to blame the whole of the indignity and discomfort on him. "I don't see what it has got do with you." Then she apparently thought better of it. "I've had a few berries and purslane leaves. Nothing else for . . . quite a long time."
He nodded. "I thought so. Marou an' me had a few thin times too. He taught me that you've got to start eating again slowly. Soup is best." He pulled the pot from the center of the flames with a stick, and let it stand in the embers on the edge, so just a fuzz of little bubbles buzzed up steadily from the hot metal. He went to his pack again, and emerged with a battered mug, and a hunk of bread.
A few balancing tricks with a hot pot filled the mug, which he handed her. "Drink it. Slowly. The bread's a bit old, so dunk it in the soup. And don't be stupid enough to wolf it again. I'm not making you more food to upchuck in the bushes." The knight in shining armor was supremely unaware that every time his kindness raised him a step in the princess's estimation, his tongue took him two steps back.
The warm soup and the small pieces of bread curdled uneasily in her stomach. For the moment at least, it seemed they weren't going to come back up. With food, her mind began to function along its normal paths. This boy . . . he could be used. She'd been avoiding human settlement so as to leave no trace of her passage. At first it had just been wise, but fear had prevented her from going to buy food. But this boy, well, he could buy her food, and provide some protection too. He was young and not very big . . . not so good for defending her, but also small enough for her to fend off easily. She gave him one of her devastating smiles.
He looked at her across the fire and sighed. "I wish you were my sister." He came from a place and level of society in which incest was unpleasantly normal.
She was stunned. "I'm no relation of yours, you lowborn common boy!"
He shrugged. "Didn't say you were." He lapsed into silence, looking out at the darkness over her shoulder.
At length, having thought the statement over, and reconsidered it in the light of her time with the beekeepers, she decided that it was perhaps not an insult at all; she had the courage to ask why he wished that she were his sister. His reply did him no good at all.
"I dunno, I always thought if I had a sister then I would have been able to join one of the gangs."
"Why did you have to have a sister to join a gang?"
" 'Cause they didn't let you in if they didn't get one."
There was a dangerous silence. "What did your gang want with the girls?"
He failed to read the signals, concentrating on something else in the darkness. "For the gang bosses to screw, of course, and to rent out."
"You are a despicable, revolting disgusting toad, and you stink!"
He looked at her puzzledly. "Why are you so mad?"
"Do you think, you filthy commoner, that I'd be a . . . a prostitute? I'm a princess, you . . . pig!"
He looked the thin, ragged girl up and down. "Yeah. And I'm the Captain of the Cru. Grab your kit. There's somebody out there and we'd better scram. Move!"
Once again the little princess was silenced. She would cheerfully have refused to go, or have gone elsewhere, but she was too scared of what could be out there in the dark. They left the fire, took up their bags and moved off into the night. Keilin led them unerringly to a trail between the straggling brambles, and up to an area of broken rock slabs. "Slip in here," he whispered, pointing to a rock-edged crack. "I'll leave my gear and go back and see what they're up to."
He'd left his pack . . . so he was planning to come back. Time passed. She had felt safe hidden here among the rocks, but the stillness of the night slowly consumed her confidence. Her stomach hurt. She wasn't sure if it was the soup and bread, or fear. He must have been caught . . . of course he'd lead them to her. He was prepared to sell his own sister, after all. Even though her ears were desperately reaching for sounds, she didn't hear him return.
"Phew, girl, you've got some mean folk looking for you. Pity they couldn't find their own bums in the woods in the dark. I've led them on a merry chase. They're feeling right sorry for themselves now. Next time you steal things make sure you take it from folk who aren't going to try so hard to find you."
She was too relieved at his return to react to his presumption that she was a thief, hunted by those she'd stolen from. "What . . . what did you do?"
He chuckled "They thought they'd sneaked up on your fire. They were a little disappointed to find you weren't there any more. They were about to settle down for the night and track you in the morning, when I threw a stone into the fire, and led them off past our hiding place to that swamp down there. They're muddy and miserable and lost by now."
"I must run. W-which way did they go?" There was an edge of panic in her voice, as she started fumbling for her bag.
"Relax. Only one of them was any kind of woodsman. And he'll be too sick to track anyone for a couple of weeks. I put a little arrow in him, with a dab of shargy on it. The others are city men, and they're not going to find their way out of there for hours. And I stole their gear, and dropped it into one of the pools. They'll sleep cold and wet tonight."
"Where on earth did you get shriba beetle larvae?" she asked, delving into her knowledge of toxins.
"On the other side of the pass. My partner showed me. Move up. It's bloody well starting to rain again."
For the first time in two weeks Shael slept well. Keilin struggled, however. The warm body next to him was having a bad effect on his imagination. It was at least an hour later, when the soft rain had turned to a steady blatter that he suddenly thought, How come she knew just what shargy was? He filed the point away in his memory, meaning to ask her about it in the morning.
The morning, however, brought such an argument about what direction they would take, that he forgot about it. Eventually Keilin prevailed . . . but he had a sneaking feeling that he hadn't won at all. The feeling grew with each passing hour. She was manipulating him, dammit. To the extent that he even began to suspect that he was making a prat of himself.
This boy was nothing but a pain. He didn't do what he was supposed to do. He should have been falling over himself by now to do exactly what she wanted. Instead, every time he opened his mouth he had something rude or disparaging to say. She'd lost her temper a couple of times already . . . and then had to work hard on damage control. She had been keen on ensuring her safety, encouraging circumspect behavior. The harder she tried to get him to do so, the more crazy chances he seemed to want to take. Last night he'd raided a campfire, stolen the food off it while the travellers had been beating the bushes for him. And this morning, when she'd been looking at herself in a pool of water, he'd told her she was as vain as a two-silver whore. She noticed, however, that he had washed himself . . . and the water in the mountains was bone-chilling cold.
Here he was, going away from Shapstone City, with a girl who alternated between turning his insides all stupid with her smiles, and irritating the hell out of him by making a complete idiot of herself. And every time he'd made up his mind he'd just had enough of it, she made him feel desperately sorry for her. Which was why he was going south and not northwest. She wanted to go to Polstra, the mountain city. Very well, he would take her there, and then dump her. But first she was actually going to notice how good he was. Heroes, after all, had no trouble with girls . . . at least not in any of the books he'd enjoyed. Tonight's raid would be spectacular.
If Keilin had been less set on a grandstand performance he might have smelled a rat. Their horses were too conveniently downwind, the four travellers were too obviously asleep too early. Their saddlebags hung too much in plain sight. But tonight he was going to count coup. He'd brought Shael to a point she considered far too close, in order that she might watch.
Thus she was in a perfect position to observe how it all went very wrong. The four of them appeared to be asleep, as Keilin moved into the camp like a lazy shadow. He pointedly ignored the tempting saddlebags and moved toward the sleepers. What he was planning to take from underneath the pillow Shael never found out. Keilin let out a startled yowl as a ham-sized hairy fist closed around his arm. A second hand reached out for Keilin's spear.
And missed. If the muscular, shaven-headed one had not neatly twisted the spear out of Keilin's hand someone would have died. As it was, the other huge hairy hand caught his arm before he could reach for a knife. The woman threw a waiting handful of twigs onto the fire, which flamed up. The tall one sat up and looked impassively at the struggling boy, taking in his features, his cold eyes narrowing.
"I think . . . we have caught more than a core section here. I think we may have a psionic too . . . well, well!"
He walked over to Keilin, who was being held easily at the end of an unnaturally long arm's length by Beywulf. "Where is it, boy?" Keilin said nothing, just writhed more energetically. He could feel the jewel chilling against his flesh. "S'kith. Hold his legs. Leyla. Search him." The shaven-headed one too was immensely strong. Keilin kicked out viciously but in seconds he was effectively immobilized. The woman began methodically searching his pockets.
"Notice," said Beywulf cheerfully, "how she starts on the trouser pockets. She'll search your ball bag next, boy."
However, her hands ran up his body, finding the pendant chain and pulling out the jewel. The captain reached out and touched it. It was biting cold. "Well, sod me!"
He looked closely at Keilin. It was not an overly friendly stare. "Evie Lee's hair. Evie Lee's eyes. And the nose . . . I don't need gene typing to guess at your ancestry, boy."
With a quick jerk he snapped the pendant chain. A terrible feeling of abandonment washed over Keilin for a moment . . . and then more bitter cold sliced up from the ankle pouch. Keilin forced himself to be calm. He'd get away . . . he'd kill the man who'd dared to take it from him. Then a fresh wave of worry washed over him. What if Kim, hiding just back there in the trees touched the stone in her bracelet? Would the Morkth still come?
Keilin was unprepared for the open-handed blow that rocked his head back. His head reeled and swam. The tall man's words, uttered through gritted teeth made little sense. "Something I owed your great-grandmother. Pity I can't give it to her in person." Then he appeared to regain control of himself. "Where is the other one who was with you earlier, boy? Talk, before I use it as a good excuse to beat the living shit out of you."
Back in her tree perch Shael watched with horror. She heard the question, and wished she'd thought to run away as soon as things started to go wrong. . . . But she'd frozen, and now he would betray her.
"I'm alone." His voice didn't even quaver.
The tall man hit him again, with calculated force. "Don't ever lie to me again, boy. Beywulf here can track a breeze. He's been following your little banditry tour for three days now. Talk or get hurt."
"He . . . argued with me. We split up a few hours ago. He went north." Shael closed her eyes before the next blow.
"Obstinate little git. Still, I suppose it's in the genes. Tie him up and finish searching him, S'kith. Beywulf, you and Leyla, go and find . . . her."
Beywulf put his nose to the ground, and followed Keilin's back trail like a hound. It took him all of thirty seconds to find her tree, and drag her out of it, kicking and squalling.
Meanwhile S'kith's rough hands were searching Keilin. Skillfully he removed the knife from the boy's belt, and then the two hidden knives from Keilin's back and sleeve. His hand moved down the boy's leg, and arrived at the ankle pouch. He touched it, and the remote expression briefly went out of his eyes. Casually the bald-headed man looked at the rest of his party, while apparently checking the soles of Keilin's boots. Their attention was held by Shael's antics. He moved to the other side of Keilin so his back was toward them. And put his finger to his lips. Then he went on searching as if he'd found nothing.
They were put down side-by-side in front of the fire. The one called Cap was looking at them down his long nose, the expression in his eagle eyes cold. "Two little pairs of green eyes." He produced Keilin's pendant from his pocket and touched it to Shael's cheek . . . and snatched it away. "Another flipping one. I search for near on twenty years to find one person the core sections respond to . . . and within a month of finding one, I find another two . . . together. Brother and sister?"
"Yes," said Keilin.
"No!" said Shael, vehemently.
His cold stare washed over them. Finally he spoke. "One of you is still lying to me."
Keilin had less experience at facial schooling. "You, boy? You don't learn, do you? Well, you will."
He turned away briefly, and stared into the darkness. Keilin wondered whether he should try to induce panic in himself, whether the contact between his leg and the signet ring in the ankle pouch was sufficient, and whether he and the girl would be able to survive the Morkth attack that would follow. He tested his bonds. There was no give in them at all.
The tall man turned back to face them again. "We were hunting this," he dangled the broken pendant in front of them. "This is the fourth one I've located. We've been tracking its movement down from the north for two weeks now." Keilin's heart gave a leap. They'd been following Kim. So, it had been another jewel on that bracelet. And their captors had made no effort to find their kit. They might be hunting the jewels, just like the Morkth, but they didn't realize that they had not found one, but three. They'd found his, but they'd been following her. He felt the girl tense up next to him. She'd worked it out too.
Cap continued. "We were going to question you and then kill you." The way it was said, with a chilling lack of any emotion, made it totally believable. "It appears that you're both core-sensitives." He held up the pendant again. "I'm willing to bet you've been manipulated by the backup Compcontrol system." He shrugged. "You may not have been aware of it, but we are working toward the same end. You'll pardon my initial reaction to you. I don't suppose you can help the fact that you are descended from the woman who betrayed the human race to the Morkth."
There was a stunned silence. Then Shael burst out. "That's rubbish. I know my ancestory. I am descended from Queen Lee herself!" Keilin cast his eyes heavenwards. Now she was going to sprout her princess story again. Stupid girl.
Cap nodded, his eyes narrowing. "Evie Lee. So called Senior Captain of the colony starship which was Homo sapiens' last hope. The treacherous self-centered little bitch who betrayed most of her crew to the Morkth, so she could play at being royalty and have a good time instead of doing her duty." He paused, and then added grimly, "You see, doing her duty would have meant she had to die, so that a hundred million people could live. She betrayed the last hope of our species for her own selfish ends.
"We were supposed to scatter the seeds of the human race on so many planets that the Morkth could never find and eliminate them all. Instead, more than three hundred years later we're all still on one damned colony planet which we share with mankind's worst enemy." His voice was full of a barely controlled fury.
Even Shael quailed before this onslaught, but she came up fighting. "That's simply not true. She only just escaped the command center with her life, when she blew up the transmitter core. Her sub-captain betrayed them. She was little more than a vagabond until she reached Arlinn, and the people recognized her as queen."
The tall man shrugged. "She could hardly tell the truth, could she? As for being a vagabond . . . well, let's rather say she was a promiscuous little tramp. She didn't much care where she got or where she dumped her offspring. You, boy, have the look of her command-center lover. The same Sub-Captain Fisher she blamed it on, poor sod. Anyway, what I'm hunting are sections of the supposedly blown-up transmitter core from the starship's control center. Fortunately, it was made to be virtually indestructible. The sections were just scattered across half the continent. This is one of them." He held up Keilin's pendant again. "If I can gather enough of them, then we can take them to the backup Compcontrol in the second landing command center, and reactivate the project."
Despite being tied up, and told that the plan had been to kill him, Keilin was fascinated. He'd seen pictures, and been hypnotized by several stories of starships, back in the library. "You mean . . . my jewel is part of a starship? If you had enough pieces you could fly away from our world to the stars?"
Cap sighed. "It's been a long three hundred years. The ordinary people haven't a clue about reality any more." He pointed upwards. "There is the starship Morningstar. Your `moon.' It's a lot smaller than the moon that used to orbit the world we humans came from. Less than a seventeenth of the size, but still the biggest ship the human race ever made. It's far too big to ever land. And this isn't `our world' either. We humans came from Earth, fleeing the Morkth. The terraforming of this place had been started by robot drones nearly fifty years before we even left Sol. Fortunately, there was an atmosphere with oxygen, but no other life except a lot of primitive mosslike stuff before that. I came here with the shipload of construction crews and equipment a year before the Morningstar was ready. They built your cities or Evie would have dumped millions of people without any shelter onto an alien world."
"So how did people get down here, sir? I mean . . . that's high, there couldn't have been a ladder. Did they . . . um, have flying ships, or did they lower platforms with ropes or something?"
Cap snorted. "You don't even know what you're talking about, but you've put your finger on the basic problem. We had to get nearly one hundred million evacuees onto that ship, and off again. They had to choose between carrying people or enough fuel to ferry the people down. Trotting up and down into a gravity well is a fuel-expensive process, and the sort of loads we could carry on a shuttle would have meant a couple of lifetimes worth of trips.
"Your `jewel' as you call it, was the answer. It is part of the matter-transmitter system. We could move passengers up from Earth, frozen, conditioned and ready to be good little settlers, zip-zap. We brought them down here the same way. Easy, although signal attenuation limits the use of the matter transmitter to a couple of thousand miles.
"The only trouble was that we needed a psionic to make the damn thing work. A transmitter system has miles of bloody electronic amplifiers, but triggering the whole thing still needs something else. This `jewel' of yours. As well as some nanocircuitry, there is an unstable crystal lattice inside it. When you have perfect alignment in that lattice, right down to the atomic level . . . it works. That alignment is right, by chance, about once in every fifteen thousand attempts. Yet a stupid psi can make the thing work every time, without even knowing how they're damned well doing it! So, one decent psionic, and we had no need to carry loads of fuel and landing craft. We could pack in a lot more corpsicles instead. We just had a couple of shuttles for the crew."
He sighed. "We lost those when the Morkth atmospheric craft hit Morningstar's principal control center. Now, the only way back up to the ship is to get the matter transmitter working again. Even the Morkth can't get there. The battleship that deployed their landing craft got taken out kamikaze-style by our one and only screening cruiser. Anyway, the defenses up on Morningstar should be able to trash the sort of piddly little ships the Morkth managed to drop. At least, I hope that's what they think. I presume they must, as they haven't tried a direct frontal assault on her. They obviously don't know that the crew are very dead, and that the ship is in shut-down mode, thanks to one of Evie's last little tricks."
He ground his fist into his palm. The pendant swayed wildly. "One live human up there would be all it takes to get the ship up and running. One human being . . . and we can't even do that."
Keilin remembered the burned-edged pages in back of the old book, Geophysical Survey of Planet IV, which his mother said their family had always had . . . so that was what it had been about. It made sense now. "Log of the Starship Morningstar"! But the events Cap talked of were different from those described . . . not totally different, just, well, not quite the same.
Cap held up the pendant. "But if I can get all of these . . . get into Morningstar II, the second control center, with one psi, and we're away. There is a spare crew up there, frozen. We can be off looking for a wormhole nexus before you can say `knife.' "
He looked at the bemused faces. "Hell! I might as well be talking Greek to you! Just take my word for it. That is a starship up there. It was once an asteroid called Juno. It had two detachable control centers, the size of small mountains themselves. Both of them were deployed, because a Morkth battleship managed to pick us up and follow us in the flight from Earth, despite the fact that Earth threw everything she could spare into that last `diversionary' attack. Our weakest link was those control centers. Without them to handle planetside matter transmission, we couldn't discharge passengers. Captain Fisher decided it would be safer to have them both down on the planet. It was one of the few orders of his that Evie Lee didn't countermand, although she insisted that the second one, Morningstar II, stay in inactive mode."
He ground his teeth. "Computer's awake in there, but nothing else. The bitch had it all planned. She did a data dump at the last minute, programming the thing to exclude anything but her type. But I think I can get around that . . ."
Keilin looked up at the full moon. Half of what the man said was beyond him, but he knew what a spaceship was supposed to look like. There'd been several pictures on book covers. "That's really a spaceship? I thought, I mean in the pictures I saw they were all pointed and, um, shiny metal."
"Streamlining's pretty pointless for something that never enters an atmosphere. And a big asteroid had the plus of providing lots of raw material that we didn't have to lift out of the gravity well. Ceres was supposed to be next. I doubt if the engineers got there. You see, we never even got the seventeen years they'd predicted we'd have, before the Morkth invasion hit the solar system. So that is it, above us. Mankind's last hope. A forlorn hope. The good starship Morningstar."
Beywulf chuckled and turned to Leyla. "On board the good starship Venus
whose figurehead
was a nude in bed
sucking"
There was no approval in Cap's voice as he interrupted. "That's enough, Beywulf. For all that it's bloody accurate, and that it was a common enough joke among the non-psi crew. The figurehead captain's name was your Evie Lee." The last word was said with overt hatred.
He shook himself, visibly clearing away the excess emotion. "So. I need to collect these transmitter-core sections, and one psionic of sufficient power, and the starship can move on from star to star. We can finally see that it carries out its original mission: to scatter the seeds of Earth far and wide, beyond the reach of Morkth xenophobia." He spoke with such conviction and power that Keilin wanted to be part of it. It was only the bonds that stopped him leaping to his feet and cheering. Being tied up poured cold water on his enthusiasm, allowing him to ask in a fairly steady voice, "What is a psionic, sir? Are you going to find one?"
A wintry smile touched one side of Cap's mouth. "You are one. So is the girl. So is S'kith. A psionic has the ability to do things by mental power alone, like read minds or move things without touching them. Such people are very rare. One in fifty million, perhaps. Which is why Evie Lee's little clique of nutters were able to insist that she was given overall command of the starship, in spite of her having the same capacity for command as I have for childbirth."
Keilin had a retentive mind for details and he was nothing if not stubborn. "Sir. I'm sorry, but you're wrong. I can't do anything just with my mind. If I could I wouldn't be here."
Cap looked at him keenly. "More guts than sense. You keep arguing with me, boy. The core sections can only be activated by psionics. Did you notice the stone going cold . . . during sex for instance?"
Keilin blushed and very carefully didn't look at the girl next to him. "Er . . . yes."
"Typical of Evie Lee's descendants. She had a couch right there on top of the transmitter chamber. Did any little thing pop out of thin air when you did it?" Cap carefully ignored the guffaw from Beywulf and the snort from Leyla.
Keilin thought of the Patrician's treasury. Hardly a "little thing." Just the biggest flipping phallic symbol in the city. He nodded, hoping he would not be asked for details. To lead off the subject, he added. "The Morkth came just after that too. Every time."
"You're making the thing work . . . even without amplifiers, although you've no chance of getting sufficient range to get someone back up to the ship. The Beta-Morkth have instruments that sense the power flux. They're trying to collect the core sections too. You say this has happened more than once?"
Keilin nodded again. Cap looked at him with a little more respect. "So you and the core section survived a couple of attacks by Beta-Morkth warriors. Not bad, boy." There was grudging approval in his voice.
"I've lived through a couple of attacks myself. You've got a few moments. You've just got to run," said the Princess cooly.
Keilin twisted to look at her, in time to see her going very red in the firelight. "It . . . it had nothing to do with sex! I was scared and it happened."
"Shane Tomo."
She looked puzzled. Cap continued, "It appears that the psionic ability runs in certain families. Shane Tomo was a handsome young blond paranoid manic-obsessive. He was psionically active when he was scared. Which was whenever he wasn't planning a murder. He is the so-called Tyrant's maternal great-great-grandfather. I knew the blond bastard well. He also escaped the crew massacres . . . because he expected them to happen."
He turned to Beywulf. "Cut them loose."
Keilin sat rubbing circulation back into his feet as he listened to Cap speak. He was not sure he could run yet . . . and he hadn't made up his mind if he ought to. The man was using mighty fine noble words and promising them the moon, with the sun and stars thrown into the bargain. Keilin was carried along by the tide of the words, but he still remembered the blows. He was covertly watching Kim, too. At the end of the speech she clapped.
"Very good. I am sure half the peasants in the duchy would rise at your call. However, I am not a fool, or new to power speaking, Cap, or whatever your name is. You offer us any reward we care to name. What authority do you have to do so?" Keilin had never heard her doing the ice princess before. She did it quite convincingly.
For a moment a red light burned in Cap's eyes. Then he laughed. It was a humorless sound. "This is my authority." He touched the badge on his shoulder. "I am, as far as I know, the only crew member that survives. All of you colonists are mine to command. I am First Mate Jacoob Ahrens and, as the surviving senior ranking crew officer, I intend to do just that. Besides," he looked at them with scorn, "what else do you think you can do? A Captain Jaine is hot on your heels, as is a large posse of local folk. They're failing to track you . . . but your raids have been so predictable they know where you are. That's how we found you." He looked at Keilin's stricken face. "Didn't think that far, did you? Too busy showing off, eh? What do you have in your head for brains, boycheese?"
"Very well. I accept your offer. I'll join you. I want the Tyn States as my reward," Shael said coolly.
"You can't be one of the Cru!" blurted Keilin. "Why, you'd be hundreds of years old then."
"Three hundred and eighty-seven Earth years, to be precise. Longevity treatments for the crew can stretch my lifespan for at least six or seven hundred years, son. I'll make it clear, I might need you, and if need be I'll take you along in chains. And don't think you can run, because Beywulf will track you down. You can, however, try to kill me." The wintry smile that accompanied this final comment suggested that the man didn't think this much of a threat.
Keilin shrugged. "I'd rather come along. I don't like the idea of chains. Can I get my kit?"