Only two ambushers left. One was Greenstalk.
For ten seconds there was no more firing. Yet things were not completely silent. The slumped, glowing metal of his arm popped and sputtered as it cooled. High above, there was the susurrus of air escaping the hull. Fitful breezes whispered around ground level, making it impossible to keep position without constant tweaking at his jets. He paused, letting the current carry him silently out of his little valley. There. A ghostly hiss that was not his own. Another. The two were closing in on him from different directions. They might not know his exact position, but they could obviously coordinate their own.
The pain faded in and out, along with consciousness. Short pulses of agony and darkness. He dared not fool with more anesthetic. Pham saw frond tips peeping over a nearby hill. He halted, watched the fronds. Most likely, there was just enough vision area in the tips to sense motion… Two seconds passed. Pham’s last midge showed the other attacker floating silently in from the side. Any second now, the two would pop up. At that instant, Pham would have given anything for an armed midge. In all his stupid hacking, he’d never gotten around to that. No help for it. He waited for a moment of clear consciousness, long enough to boost over the enemy and shoot.
There was a rattle of fronds, loud self-announcement. Pham’s midge caught sight of Blueshell rolling behind slatted walls a hundred meters away. The Skroderider rushed from protection to protection, but always closer to Greenstalk’s position. And the rattling? Was it a pleading? Even after five months with the Riders, Pham had only the vaguest sense of their rattle-talk. Greenstalk—the Greenstalk who had always been the shy one, the compulsively honest one—rattled nothing back. She swung her beamer around, raking the slats with fire. The third Rider popped up just far enough to shoot at the slats. His angle would have been just right to fry Blueshell where he stood—except that the movement took him directly in front of Pham Nuwen’s gun.
Even as Pham fired, he was boosting out of his hole. Now was his only chance. If he could turn, fire back on Greenstalk before she was done with Blueshell—The maneuver was an easy head-over-heels that should have left him upside down and facing back upon Greenstalk. But nothing was easy for him now, and Pham came around spinning too fast, the landscape dwindling beneath him. But there was Greenstalk all right, swinging her weapon back toward him.
And there was Blueshell, racing from between pillars that glowed white in the heat of Greenstalk’s fire. His voice was loud in Pham’s ear: “I beg, don’t kill her. Don’t kill—”
Greenstalk hesitated, then turned the weapon back on the advancing Blueshell. Pham triggered his gun, letting his spin drag the beam across the ground. Consciousness ebbed. Aim! Aim right! He furrowed the land below with a glowing, molten arrow, that ended at something dark and slumped. Blueshell’s tiny figure was still rolling across the wreckage, trying to reach her. Then Pham had turned too far and could not remember how to change the view. The sky swung slowly past his eyes:
A bluish moon with a sharp shadow ’cross its middle. A ship floating close, with feathery spines, like some giant bug. What in the Qeng Ho… where am I?… and consciousness fled.
CHAPTER 29
There were dreams. He’d lost a captaincy once again, been busted down to tending potted plants in the ship’s greenhouse. Sigh. Pham’s job was to water them and make them bloom. But then he noticed the pots had wheels and moved behind his back, waiting, softly rattling. What had been beautiful was now sinister. Pham had been willing to water and weed the creatures; he had always admired them.
Now he was the only one who knew they were the enemy of life.
More than once in his life, Pham Nuwen had wakened inside medical automation. He was almost used to coffin-close tanks, plain green walls, wires and tubes. This was different, and it took him a while to realize just where he was. Willowy trees bent close around him, swaying just a little in the warm breeze. He seemed to be lying on the softest moss, in a tiny glade above a pond. Summer haze hung in the air above the water. It was all very nice, except that the leaves were furry, and not quite the green of anything he had ever seen. This was someone else’s notion of home. He reached up toward the nearest branch, and his hand hit something unyielding just fifty centimeters above his face. A curved wall. For all the trick pictures, this was about the same size as the surgeons he remembered.
Something clicked behind his head; the idyll slid past him, taking its warm breeze with it. Somebody— Ravna—floated just beyond the cylinder. “Hi, Pham.” She reached past the surgeon’s hull to squeeze his hand. Her kiss was tremulous, and she looked haunted, as if she’d been crying a lot.
“Hi, yourself,” he said. Memory came back in jagged pieces. He tried to push off the bed, and found another similarity between this surgeon and ones of the Qeng Ho: he was securely plugged in.
Ravna laughed a little weakly. “Surgeon. Disconnect.” After a moment, Pham drifted free.
“It’s still holding my arm.”
“No, that’s the sling. Your left arm is going to take a while to regrow. It almost got burned off, Pham.”
“Oh.” He looked down at the white cocoon that meshed his arm against his side. He remembered the gunfight now… and realized that parts of his dream were deadly real. “How long have I been out?” The anxiety spilled into his voice.
“About thirty hours. We’re more than sixty light-years out from Harmonious Repose. We’re doing okay, except that now everyone in creation seems to be chasing us.”
The dream. His free hand clamped hard on Ravna’s arm. “The Skroderiders, where are they?” Not on board, pray the Fleet.
“W-what’s left of Greenstalk is in the other surgeon. Blueshell is—”
Why has he let me live? Pham’s eyes roved the room. They were in a utility cabin. Any weapons were at least twenty meters away. Hm. More important than guns: get command console privileges with the OOB… if it was not already too late. He pushed out of the surgeon and drifted out of the room.
Ravna followed. “Take it easy, Pham. You just came out of a surgeon.”
“What have they said about the shoot-out?”
“Poor Greenstalk’s not in a position to say anything, Pham. Blueshell says pretty much what you did: Greenstalk was grabbed by the rogue Riders, forced to lure you two into a trap.”
“Hmhm, hmhm,” Pham strove for a noncommittal tone. So maybe there was a chance; maybe Blueshell was not yet perverted. He continued his one-handed progress up the ship’s axis corridor. A minute later he was on the bridge, Ravna tagging behind.
“Pham. What’s the matter? There’s a lot we have to decide, but—”
How right you are. He dived onto the command deck, and made for the command console. “Ship. Do you recognize my voice?”
Ravna began, “Pham, What’s this—”
“Yes, sir.”
“—all about?”
“Command privileges,” he said. Capabilities granted while the Riders were ashore. Would they still be in place?
“Granted.”
The Skroderiders had had thirty hours to plan their defense. This was all too easy, too easy. “Suspend command privileges for the Skroderiders. Isolate them.”
“Yes, sir,” came the ship’s reply. Liar! But what more could he do? The sweep toward panic crested, and suddenly he felt very cool. He was Qeng Ho
… and he was also godshatter.
Both Riders were in the same cabin, Greenstalk in the other copy of the ship’s surgeon. Pham opened a window on the room. Blueshell sat on a wall beside the surgeon. He looked wilted, as when they heard about Sjandra Kei. He angled his fronds at the video pickup. “Sir Pham. The ship tells me you’ve suspended our privileges?”
“What is going on, Pham?” Ravna had dug a foot into the floor, and stood glaring at him.
Pham ignored both questions. “How is Greenstalk doing?” he said.
