'I gave you an order, Commander,' Howell said, and his eyes flicked over Watanabe's shoulder to Rachel Shu.
'Please, sir,' Watanabe whispered. 'I … I don't …'
'You don't want to execute it?' The commander's eyes darted back up at the almost compassionate note in Howell's voice. 'That's understandable, Commander, but you are one of my officers. As such, you have neither room for second thoughts nor the luxury of deciding which orders you will obey. Do you understand me, Commander Watanabe?'
Silence hovered on the command deck, and the commander closed his eyes. Then he stood and jerked the synth link headset from his temples.
'I'm sorry, sir.' His voice was hoarse. 'I can't. I just can't.'
'I see. I'm sorry to hear that,' Howell said softly, and nodded to Rachel Shu.
The emerald beam buzzed across the bridge. It struck precisely on the base of Watanabe's skull, and his body arched in spastic agony. But it was a dead man's reaction-a muscular response and no more.
The corpse slithered to the deck. Someone coughed on the stench of singed hair, but no one moved. No one was even surprised, and plastic and alloy whispered on leather as Shu holstered her nerve disrupter with an expression of mild distaste.
'Commander Rahman,' Howell said, and the senior gunnery officer straightened in his chair.
'Yes, sir?'
'Execute Phase Four, Commander.'
Book Two: Fugitive
Chapter Eleven
Alicia lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and chewing her lip while she tried not to stew. It was becoming steadily more difficult.
In one sense, things weren't actually that bad. Tannis's diagnostics were reporting exactly what they ought to, now that Tisiphone knew what results they were supposed to get, and Alicia wasn't worried about revealing anything she chose to conceal. Tannis had tried direct neural queries, chemical therapy, even hypnotic regression, but Tisiphone was an old hand at controlling human thoughts and responses. She might not be able to do it to anyone else these days, but Alicia's brain and body were her own front yard, and she allowed no trespassers, so that side was secure enough.
Unfortunately, that didn't help against her boredom. Tisiphone might enjoy fooling the medics or roaming Soissons's planetary computer net, but Alicia was going mad. The thought woke a sour smile, but it had stopped being funny when she realized what was really happening to her grief and hatred.
They were still there. She couldn't feel them through Tisiphone's shields, but she sensed them, and she hadn't dealt with them. She couldn't deal with them, because she couldn't touch them, and that left an odd, dangerously unresolved vacuum at her core. Worse, she thought she knew what Tisiphone was doing with all that raw, oozing emotion. The Fury had no interest in dissipating it, for she knew only one catharsis. At first Alicia had suspected she was absorbing it like some sort of strange sustenance, but a worse suspicion had occurred to her, and the Fury had refused to deny it
She was storing it. Distilling it into the pure essence of hatred, reserving it against some future need, and Alicia was afraid. Drop commandos had few self-delusions- they couldn't afford them-and she knew about her own dark side. She'd demonstrated it, without a trace of regret, on Wadislaw Watts, and there had been times in the field when her killer self had threatened to break free, as well. It had never happened, but it had been a near thing more than once, and a woman stayed clearheaded in combat or she died-probably taking other people with her when she went.
Thoughts of what the sudden release of all that pent-up rage might do to her judgment terrified her, but Tisiphone refused even to discuss it despite requests which had come all too close to pleading before pride drove Alicia to drop them. She was helpless in the face of the Fury's refusal … and Tisiphone had reminded her-not cruelly, but almost kindly-that she had agreed to pay 'anything' for her vengeance. That was nothing less than the truth, and the fact that she'd thought she was mad had no bearing. She'd given her word, and like Uncle Arthur, that was the end of it.
And now a fresh disturbing element had been added, for Tisiphone was clearly up to something. There was a pleased note to her mental voice which made very little sense, given their total lack of achievement. Alicia was astonished that the fiery, driven Fury hadn't insisted on making their break long ago. To be sure, she'd gleaned a tremendous amount of information- including everything Colonel McIlheny and even Ben Belkassem knew about the pirates-but there had to be something else… .
'Indeed there is, Little One.' The comment was so sudden she twitched in surprise, and Tisiphone chuckled silently. 'In fact, the event for which I have waited has now occurred, and the time has come for us to depart.'
'Are you serious?!' Alicia jerked upright, then gasped as Tisiphone answered without words. Her augmentation came spontaneously on line, her boosted senses spun up to full acuity for the first time in more than two months, and she twitched again as Tisiphone activated her pharmacope. The first ripple of tension ran through her as the tick reservoir administered its carefully measured dose to her bloodstream and the world began to slow. She bit her lip, confused by the speed with which the Fury was moving, and a faint, familiar haze hovered before her eyes. It cleared quickly, and her ears rang with the high, sweet song of the tick.
'We will go now,' Tisiphone said calmly. 'I have placed commands in their computers to reroute their sensors, deactivate the door security systems, and summon the floor nurse elsewhere, but I cannot control who we may meet along the way. Dealing with them will be your responsibility.'
Alicia rose with the tick's floating grace. The drug increased her reaction speed only slightly but accelerated her mental processes enormously, and if her responses came little faster they were absolutely certain, for she had all the time in the world to think about each of them before she made it.
The door oozed open with syrupy slowness, and she floated through it. The corridor beyond was empty, the nurses' station unmanned as Tisiphone had promised, but there was a permanent guard on the elevators. She'd met the night guard, and though the earnest young man had been very careful never to say so, she knew why he was there, for he, too, was a drop commando.
But the elevators were around a bend in the corridor, and she flowed down the hall like a spirit, riding the tick's exaltation. The ability to ride the tick was one of the main drop commando requirements. So was a high resistance to all forms of addiction, but no one could avoid the tick's sense of godlike omnipotence-nor the violent, tearing nausea when she finally came down again. Indeed, Alicia suspected the medics deliberately enhanced that side effect to help discourage the commandos from over-indulging.
She stepped around the bend, and the guard looked up. She smiled, and he smiled back slowly, so slowly. But then his smile changed as he recognized the precise, gliding movement that turned simply walking into an exquisitely choreographed dance.
His hand started for his stunner, and Alicia wanted to laugh in pure exultation. He was too far away to reach before the stunner cleared its holster, but Old Speedy wasn't racing through his veins. Though he got the stunner up before she reached him, he didn't have time to reset its power.
The green beam struck her dead on-with absolutely no result. The neural shields built into drop commando augmentation could resist even nerve disrupter fire, to a point, and a stunner blast which would have downed an elephant or a direcat had no effect at all on her.
He really was young, she thought tolerantly as her hands started forward. Perhaps he'd been confused by the fact that he knew her augmentation-including the shields-had been disabled. On the other hand, he'd obviously
