greenish light.
Rrowl-Captain lay on his side, back broken. His legs were numb, useless. The force-shields kept the blazing nothingness of hyperspace from consuming them for now, but he could feel the ship shift and turn as the Zealot spacecraft pulled them into its central bulk.
No chance for a clean death, to honor the One Fanged God. At least he had done battle. The human knelt next to him, afraid to touch Rrowl-Captain. 'It doesn't look good,' the monkey mewled, voice as flat as any machine. 'We did our best, though.' The human with the impossible name was speaking English; the translators were no longer working. Still, the kzin had a slave-owner's knowledge of the puny language.
Rrowl-Captain coughed a chuckle. 'You not coward,' he managed in his broken English. 'Even with machine ch'rowling your brain, you almost Hero.' 'Hero?' the human repeated.
'Yes,' he coughed with blood instead of humor. 'Warrior Heart not give up.”
The human eyes held his own. 'Be still. It will be over soon.”
Rrowl-Captain reached up and took the human's hand. The small pink fingers vanished into his huge black grasp. 'Take Name,' he spat. 'I don't understand,' replied the human with the impossible name. 'Take Name of C'mef.' A spasm passed through his body. He turned his head and vomited noisily. The taste was foul as defeat. The human said nothing. 'Someday,' Rrowl-Captain hissed in a whisper, 'Heroes and monkeys fight together, as we now.' He closed his eyes. 'If not we eat you and your offspring first.' The kzin thought that he felt the human squeezing his hand in response. A roar filled the cabin as the force-shield failed. He opened his eyes and saw a black shape reaching for them, silhouetted against the bright muddled insanity of hyperspace.
The shape seemed to have many arms and a flexible, squirming bulk. To the kzin, it had the fearful dark face of the old Stalker in the Night from long ago. Green laser light blazed behind it. Eyes open this time, Rrowl-Captain screamed defiance at it in the name of his litter-brother. He had found his Warrior Heart.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
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The sky was wine dark, Homeric.
The sun beat down mercilessly, an unforgiving foe on the field of battle.
Theosus (Bruno) stood tall, his shadow stark and black against the hard packed soil. He lifted his spatha to the sky with a muscular arm – salute! Yellow light ran like butter down the glittering blade. The bronze chain mail he wore moved warmly against his skin in the hot afternoon. Scents of dust and iron blood stung his nose and made his eyes smart.
Theosus (Bruno) looked around for the foe he knew he must face. It was his Fate.
But I'm not an ancient soldier, his mind started to object. The thought whirled away, like Rrowl-Captain's body parts had before everything went blank. When the Zealot spacecraft had attacked, destroying even the cyborg Guardian puppeteer.
The images swept from his mind, flying away, like… birds? Theosus (Bruno) shook his head.
Suddenly, Colonel Buford Early was standing before Theosus (Bruno), carrying a pike. The head of the pike blazed like a sun, making him squint in pain. The UN Space Navy uniform the image of the other man wore was matched by a legionnaire's helmet.
'Son,' the old man's face rasped, 'your very thoughts betray you. I can read you like a book.' Early's features began to sag and melt, then reform, like hot wax.
'So can other things, and more closely than any book,' added a new voice from behind him. Theosus (Bruno) turned quickly, his own plumed helmet almost falling from his head. Carol Faulk stood there, hair incongruously long and red, a flowing gown covering her Belter-thin body.
'Carol?' he asked incredulously, his mind in two places at once, thirty centuries and thousands of light-years apart. 'Less, and yet more,' the figure replied cryptically. Her hair changed color, became black, then shortened to the familiar Belter crest. In an instant it reverted to its earlier state. Her eyes kept changing color, as did her skin.
'Why am I here?' Theosus' (Bruno's) mind hurt, like the time he had hung upside down in a crashed aircar, with a crushed skull, and… and… Even those thoughts and images flew away, leaving a gaping hole in his mind. His thoughts probed gingerly around the ragged holes in his memory, like a tongue exploring the hole left by a missing tooth.
A tooth ripped from his jaw against his will.
The figure of Buford Early spoke again. 'Your thoughts are no longer your own, son. Protect them, until it is Time. The center cannot hold, boy, unless you make it.' Theosus (Bruno) was puzzled. A few verses of Yeats' poetry seemed to leap from his brow like birds, flapping away like his other thoughts. Vanishing into the green clouds and blue humming air.
Were all of his thoughts going in the same direction? What did it mean? Theosus (Bruno) could not be certain. Was he losing his mind? 'Nothing is being lost, Tacky,' whispered the Carol figure in his ear, though she was standing some distance away. 'Your thoughts are being taken, read, analyzed.”
'Why?' he managed, confused, looking from one to the other of the two shifting figures. He could no longer remember how Carol smelled, or where they had met. His mind was being taken from him, a bit at a time. Theosus (Bruno) would have to stop whatever was doing this to him. Before he lost all of the contents of his mind. And there was something more he had to do. 'Where?' he repeated. The image of Buford Early pointed with his blazing pike, which lengthened, stretched long, and seemed to touch a crumbling ruin on the plain before him.
The sun illuminating Theosus (Bruno) with such hot bright light began to flicker and dim. A cool wind brushed his skin, making him shiver. He turned. The Early figure was gone. Theosus (Bruno) could no longer remember the first name of the vanished man; that too had flown away into the growing darkness. The image of Carol, now with skin as red as the sky was dark, returned his gaze sadly.
Theosus (Bruno) swallowed, his throat dry with the dust of the arena he knew he was to face.
'Will you come with me?' he asked Carol's image.
'I cannot.' Tears welled in her eyes, and glittered like jewels in the dimming light. 'You must do this alone, Bruno.”
He turned and walked away, unseeing. Part of Theosus (Bruno) knew that all of this was simply an image inside his head, the most sense his mind could make of what was happening to him in reality.
He had a job to do. Spacecraft controls or the hilt of his spatha; what was the difference, really?
Fate waited for him in both places.
His sense of unreality grew as he walked across the darkening plain toward ruins the color of sun-bleached bone. Toward the figure that he somehow knew waited there, moving unpleasantly, as if with many arms.
Whatever it was, it awaited him. Theosus (Bruno) left his spatha unsheathed, and began to hurry toward the opening he saw between fallen blocks of stone. The gate was broken, bordered with stones jagged as cruel teeth. He didn't want to be there in the dark.
Theosus (Bruno) entered the long-abandoned palaestra. The arena was deserted. There were no murals or carvings to adorn the walls.
The Hydra was waiting for him, as he had expected. Known.
It stood twice as tall as Theosus (Bruno), like a great black cylinder topped with dozens and dozens of black ropy arms, all squirming toward him. Each arm ended in a mouth, filled with whirling lamprey teeth.
He felt a memory – skin sliding across his legs, a smell of clean sweat and desire in his nostrils, as his lips met Carol's – tear loose from his mind, and take flight.
An arm snatched it from the air, teeth crunching on a part of Theosus (Bruno). Gone forever.
Rage filled him as he set upon the Hydra, his spatha screaming challenge in the air as it swung. The flesh of the thing was insubstantial, but sizzled and popped as clean steel sliced into it.
'You will take no more from me,' Theosus (Bruno) grated as he swung his broadsword again and again, pulpy
