Chapter 38

"All right, Prin—uh, Berry," Thandi said, quietly but firmly. She rose from her squatting position in front of the hatch, where she'd been watching Ruth at her work. "Now you get your butt out of here."

For a moment, Ruth looked mulish. Smiling, Berry hauled her away from the hatch.

"Leave it be, 'Berry,' " she whispered. "You are not trained as a commando."

As reluctant as she might be to break away from the action—it was obvious to Berry that, deny it however she might, Ruth had been having the time of her life—the Princess didn't really put up a struggle. The young royal was adventurous, true, but she wasn't downright insane. She'd already done what she needed to do: break the codes which would enable Thandi to open the hatch leading to the bridge without setting off any alarms. From here, it would be all mayhem and fast-moving havoc. As relatively athletic as she was, Princess Ruth had no chance at all of keeping up with Thandi Palane and her Amazons. She'd just get in their way, and she knew it.

Berry guided her toward the hatch on the opposite side of the small chamber, which led back into the slave quarters.

"Damn," Ruth muttered. "You know as well as I do that once my aunt finds out about this . . ." She made a face. "I'll be lucky if she ever lets me out of my own suite in Mount Royal Palace. Till I'm dead or she is."

"Hush," whispered Berry, nodding meaningfully toward the hatch she was starting to open. "And don't forget that you're still me and I'm still you."

Ruth nodded. She and Berry had managed a quick, whispered consultation after Thandi and her assault team had been welcomed into the slave quarters. They'd both agreed that it would be best to keep the masquerade going.

That had been Berry's suggestion, and she still felt weird about it. There was actually no reason to maintain the subterfuge, from the standpoint of the Masadan enemy. Those enemies would either be dead in a few minutes or they'd all be dead when the ship exploded. So why keep up the rigmarole?

But the simple fact was that—

Weird-weird-weird.  

—by now, Berry had established a peculiar position among the slaves. The combination of the news she'd brought and her assumed identity as a "princess" seemed to settle their nerves. She'd noticed that the steering committee, which had been in continuous—and often raucous—session since they'd learned of the plans for Congo, was now often turning to her to serve as something in the way an informal court of final appeal.

Weird-weird-weird.  

Still, it seemed to work. The steering committee's members were all strong-willed, were by no means all personally fond of each other, did not necessarily share the same political opinions, and had little experience working together—not to mention that the committee itself had been slapped together in the press of circumstances. Even with Kathryn's generally sure leadership, tempers had gotten frayed.

But, they'd never snapped—and not least of all because, very quickly, Kathryn had started using Berry as a calming agent. It didn't even matter so much what Berry said or didn't say in the disputes. As a rule, she said as little as possible, being mainly concerned simply with keeping everybody calm.

It was simply who she was. Or, rather, was supposed to be.

"Princess." What was it, Berry wondered, that gave that term—a fake term, as it happened—such a peculiar magic?

Ruth had seemed to understand it immediately, when Berry tried to explain.

"Oh, sure," Ruth whispered. "It's 'cause your authority doesn't derive from anything really legitimate. Might be better to say, from an arbitrary legitimacy that stands outside of the hurly-burly. Monarchy's really a silly business, when you get right down to it—but don't you dare tell Aunt Elizabeth I said so. I'm going to be in enough trouble as it is."

The two girls shared a conspiratorial glance around the mess compartment. Fortunately, all of the slaves were still completely preoccupied by the presence in their midst of Thandi Palane and her Amazons.

"Amazons." When Thandi and her women had first entered the mess compartment being used for the slave headquarters, Berry had been sure there'd be a brawl right then and there, despite her own efforts to prepare against it. Any slave of Manpower would have immediately recognized the tell-tale genetic traces on the faces of the "Amazons," and within two seconds, prepared or not, they'd been like so many dogs facing off in an alley with their hackles raised and their fangs bared.

Scrags. The self-proclaimed supermen who had, for several generations now, served Manpower as its bully boys. It was enough to be a "Scrag" to be under sentence of immediate death, so far as any member of the Audubon Ballroom was concerned.

Fortunately, Thandi's glower had intimidated everyone for just long enough. And a very intimidating glower it was, too, coupled to that fearsome physique. Berry had made an immediate private vow to make sure that Thandi remained her "big sister." Had given that priority, in fact, precedence over her vow to start exercising and taking political lessons from Web Du Havel.

(It had been an easy vow to make, of course. Being on close personal terms with Thandi Palane did not fall into Berry Zilwicki's definition of oh, yuck.)

Just long enough—for Berry to pitch in and capitalize on her own earlier spadework to settle it all down.

"Thandi!" she'd exclaimed, leaping from her seat and practically hurling herself into a embrace. Then, quickly, disengaging the embrace and hurling herself upon the nearest Amazon.

"Yana! S'great to see you again!" Disengage; embrace another—quick, quick, quick.

"Lara!"

"Hanna!"

"Inge!"

Lara even had the presence of mind to exclaim "Princess Ruth!" when she returned the embrace. Granted, the woman's grin tended to detract from the solemnity of the occasion.

Still, it was enough. By the time Berry resumed her seat, if nothing else, she'd muddled up the slaves' automatic reactions to the point where immediate mayhem was ruled out. And, thereafter, she was relieved to see that Kathryn had the good sense to continue using Berry as her combination sounding board and social relaxant.

Did it more than ever, in fact. Berry suspected that Kathryn was even more relieved than she was at the way things were remaining reasonably harmonious. And she was beginning to understand, concretely and not abstractly, what Web Du Havel had meant when he explained the political pitfalls awaiting newly liberated slaves.

Like open wounds, all of them, she thought. Never being given enough time to heal before being lacerated open again. Be nice to each other, boys and girls. Oh, and here's another crisis. More salt to rub into your bleeding flesh. 

Too, there was this: Berry was by nature a very empathetic person. So, within a short time, happening almost like a gravitational attraction, she found herself emotionally identifying with the slaves and their predicament. Not the immediate one—Thandi Palane would either save their lives, or she wouldn't—but with the very uncertain future which faced them all.

"Freedom." A splendid word, especially in the abstract. A sanctified and hallowed one, even, when the person uttering it has no immediate prospect of escaping bondage. Like a mantra, or the name of a saint whispered in prayer. But once it loomed as an imminent reality . . .

Freedom to do what?

Starve? What does a slave do, when he or she gains her freedom—having been bred and trained to do nothing except a master's bidding?

Historically, the answer had generally been bleak. "Freedom" meant the freedom to fight over the scraps—or sell yourself back into another form of bondage, to someone who would give you the scraps from his table.

And so, in the time that followed, Berry was almost oblivious to her friend Ruth, perched nearby on a chair a little back from the central table where the deliberations and arguments took place. She was much too intent on the discussion itself, bending all her will and attention to the task of keeping it steady and as relaxed as possible.

Ruth, on the other hand, was not oblivious to her. She was fascinated, actually, watching Berry at the table. She'd come to cherish Berry's friendship, but realized now that—like everyone—she'd never really thought of Berry except in terms of friendship.

Now, studying her friend in action, "on her own" as it were, Ruth Winton applied to the task all the intent scrutiny and thought of which she was capable. Which was a great deal, indeed. Ruth had not been boasting when she told Thandi that she always studied the things she loved and the things she hated.

Here, she could do both at the same time. It did not take her long to reach a conclusion, and she resolved to raise it with Web Du Havel at the first opportunity.

The opportunity to do so would come, not long after. That didn't surprise Ruth, knowing Thandi as she did. Du Havel's reaction, on the other hand, did surprise her. Astonished her, in fact. She'd been expecting either a long lecture on girlish folly or a simple sneer of disdain.

But, he simply grinned. "Join the club, Ruth Winton. There are now two of us in the universe who are crazy."

This is crazy, thought Thandi. Pure lunacy. 

She tried her very best glower on the Amazons.

"Are you all insane?" she hissed, hooking a thumb toward the bend in the corridor. She was trying to speak as quietly as possible while still being forceful—a difficult task, to say the least.

"If the schematics Ruth pulled out of the ship's computer are accurate, we're less than fifteen meters from the bridge."

As she whispered, Thandi continued stripping off all of her gear except her armored skinsuit itself. Now that she had been able to size up the tactical situation concretely, she'd decided speed was the key. She'd make the assault armed only with a hand pulser. Thandi was an expert with just about any kind of handheld weapon, but she was particularly proficient with sidearms.

"There's only one hatch leading into it," she pointed out. "How in the hell do you think you're going to pull off a 'mass charge'? And what's the point, anyway, beyond giving the bastards a lot of targets? If it can be done at all, I can do it alone."

It was no good. Great Kaja or not, the Amazons seemed to think there was a matter of honor at stake. And they were making clear that they would stick to it. Grimly, Thandi realized that no matter what she said—even if she threatened them—they would just follow her anyway.

"All right," she muttered. "But you will still do it my way, understood? You follow me onto the bridge. If a single one of you tries to push ahead of me . . . I'll break her neck, I swear I will."

The blood-curdling threat was met with grins.

"No problem, kaja." Lara nodded with exaggerated obeisance. "You may lead, so long as we may follow."

The last sentence had the flavor of ritual about it. Thandi realized that she knew very little, when all was said and done, of the strange subculture the Scrags had developed in their long centuries of social isolation. Given their obsessive preoccupation with "superiority," however, she suspected that they'd developed—to a very high degree—a sort of human equivalent to the dominance rituals of pack animals.

A wolfess will respect the preeminence of the alpha female in the pack, true enough—so long as her own canines are acknowledged. And nobody tries to suggest she's actually a rabbit with pointed teeth.

Thandi chuckled. "Maybe Berry can civilize the lot of you. I give up. All right, then. My plan is about as simple as it gets."

Thandi had already used a Marine spy-eye to peek around the bend—nothing more than a very thin and flexible optic cable attached to a tiny viewer. There was no guard stationed at the hatch, and the hatch itself was unlocked. So she assumed, anyway, since the tell-tale light above it was green. Unless slaver ships followed a different protocol than any other ships she'd ever encountered, she'd be able to get through it within a split-second.

"As soon as I start, Yana, you give the signal to Inge."

Yana nodded. She'd been appointed the one to stay in communication with Inge and the three Amazons who'd gone with her. Their job was to take out the men in the engineering compartments. Thandi had delegated that job, since she had the personnel to carry out both assaults simultaneously. The Masadans wouldn't have jury-rigged a blow-it-up-now switch in the engineering compartments in addition to the one she was sure they'd set up on the bridge. There would have been no reason to, and two switches more than doubled the chance of an accidental explosion. The Masadans were fanatics, but they weren't careless.

The men in the engineering compartment could still blow up the ship, true. But not quickly, with all the safeguards that would have to be removed. That was assuming the Masadans could even do it at all, without having to force the slaver crew to do most of the actual work. They certainly couldn't do it before Inge and her women had them all down and dead.

The real problem—the only problem, so far as Thandi was concerned—was the possibility that one of the Masadans on the bridge could reach the suicide switch before she killed them all. That was the reason she'd planned all along to lead the assault on the bridge. She could move faster than any of them.

Faster still, she thought sourly, if I didn't have to worry about a bunch of honor-besotted cretins insisting on stepping all over my heels. Oh, well. Just move even faster, Thandi girl. 

The thought was sour enough to impart an acerbic edge to her final orders.

"As for the rest of you, just come after me and do what's needed. I warn you—even one of you steps on my heels and slows me down, I'll break her neck. See if I don't."

The only answer was so many grins. Thandi snorted, came out of her crouch like a tigress out of ambush, and was around the bend.

There never was any danger the Amazons would step on her heels. The point of honor having been satisfied, the women were sensible enough to understand that Thandi would just be hampered if they crowded her too close.

Which they couldn't have done, anyway. They hadn't witnessed the killings in Tube Epsilon, only the aftermath. So the Amazons had never really seen her moving at top speed.

They did now, and even they were astonished. The Amazons weren't halfway down the passage before Thandi was through the hatch leading onto the bridge. All that came crowding on her heels was a shrieking cry of adulation and triumph.

Great kaja! Kill them all!  

For the past hour, Victor had been keeping an eye on that hatch. A corner of his eye, rather, since he couldn't afford to make his interest obvious.

By now, he was feeling bleary-eyed. Not so much from the strain of trying to watch something without actually doing so, but from the mental strain of keeping what had become a completely absurd concoction of lies and half-truths and sheer gibberish from collapsing under its own weight.

A collapse which, he was quite sure, was imminent. Even the Masadans, as prone as they were to conspiratorial paranoia, were now obviously suspicious.

"That does not make sense, Cachat," said Kubler, almost growling the words. He didn't quite heft the pulser in his hand, but the hand did twitch. "In fact, not much of anything you've said in the past—"

Kubler's head exploded.

Despite the watch he'd kept upon it, Victor never did see the powered hatch snap silently open. Neither did anyone else. All of their attention was focused on the obviously growing tension between him and the senior Masadan. Which made the sudden carnage erupting in their midst even more horrifying and stunning.

For a split second, like all the Masadans, Victor simply gaped at the demon flowing onto the bridge with a pulser in her hand. Then—he'd planned this all through, which they hadn't—Victor was up and moving.

There was no need to push Kubler aside. Thandi's first shot had done for that. First three shots, in fact. Somehow, she put them all into Kubler's head without so much as scratching Victor.

She was still firing, not from a marksman's crouch but striding forward onto the bridge and blazing away. She was moving so fast she seemed to flicker. Stride-stride-stop-fire; stride-stride-stop-fire. Three-round bursts, every time, as the pulser in her hand picked out targets like a machine, or one of the legendary gunfighters from ancient films Victor had seen.

Bad films. Silly ones, where the hero takes on a saloon full of cutthroats and never misses a single shot.

Victor almost cackled, as that absurd image flashed through his mind in the middle of his desperate lunge to do the one and only thing he was concerned about.

Get that bastard AWAY from the switch. Die in the doing, if need be—but GET HIM AWAY FROM IT.  

Later, he would realize it all happened within a few seconds. At the time, his lunge toward the Masadan by the suicide switch seemed to take an eternity. Sailing through the air, at the last, his only purpose in life to tackle the man and take him down to the deck before he could destroy them all.

Victor felt a moment of elation, then. The Masadan had been as shocked as any, by Thandi's sudden and unexpected assault. Victor could see the determination beginning to congeal in the man's face, as realization replaced surprise. But even a Masadan does not commit suicide without a moment's hesitation—and he no longer had that moment. Victor would reach him in time, and no matter how he struggled, Victor was quite sure he could overpower the man. Certainly with the force of his lunge to give him the edge.

And so he did. But no overpowering was needed. By the time he brought the Masadan out of his seat and onto the deck, he'd tackled a corpse. In the final split-second, he saw a snarling fanatic face disappear in an explosion of blood, brains, and very tiny splinters of bone.

Yet another three-round burst, he realized, then grimaced as he drove headfirst into the expanding cloud of gore which had been a man's face. And then, as he sprawled onto the floor atop the dead man, Victor was mostly just puzzled. How had Thandi managed that—without, again, putting a scratch on him?

"Idiot," she muttered, hauling him to his feet by the scruff of the neck. "Biggest damn problem I had was trying not to kill you. Worse than the Amazons."

But he didn't miss the love in the voice, or in the smile that faced him when he finally saw it.

"I'll try to remember that," he croaked. Piously: "Never interfere with a professional at her work."

Then he smiled himself. He had no trouble doing so, despite the carnage on the bridge, or even the blood coating his own face. Other men might have quailed at the prospect of falling in love with a woman who could kill eight men in half as many seconds.

Not Victor Cachat. Perhaps oddly, he found it quite reassuring.