A Dark and Hungry God Arises Read online

  Maliciously he encouraged her to think that he might try to recapture Morn from the Amnion.

  She replied with a shrug of acceptance; but she didn’t hurry away. Carefully she disentangled herself from Morn, checking to be sure that Morn wouldn’t fall when she stepped back.

  Morn wavered as if the muscles of her legs had gone to jelly. She stayed on her feet, however.

  Giving Nick one last black look, Mikka walked away.

  He keyed the inner door of the lock. The tic in his cheek tightened as he paused to evaluate Morn’s condition.

  Even when she’d been with Thermopile, helpless against his brutality, she’d never looked so pitiable. She was still half-drugged, that was obvious. Her face wore its ineffable beauty like a bruise, as if she herself were the source of all her suffering. Her hair stood out from her head like the tag ends of her life. As the cat relinquished its hold, she would begin to suffer zone implant withdrawal. And yet, despite long days of hunger and strain, days which had cut lines around her eyes and carved flesh from her bones, her breasts were still full, still seemed to yearn against the fabric of her shipsuit, and the line of her hips beckoned him to her legs.

  Tension wasn’t enough. If he couldn’t be the Nick Succorso who never lost, sure of himself and his power over her, then he needed anger; pure incandescent rage to sustain him.

  Grabbing her arm as if he were about to beat her up, he drew her into the airlock.

  She made no effort to pull away; but she murmured, “That hurts,” as the ship’s inner door closed and locked.

  At least she was recovering consciousness. Soon she would be awake enough to know what was happening; enough to be appalled. That was something, anyway.

  He engaged the sequence that opened the outer door. Still grinding his fingers into her arm, he took her off the ship to face the Bill’s guards.

  To his surprise, there were no guards. Apparently the Bill had decided to keep his personnel out of the cross fire if the Amnion decided to stage an assault on Nick’s ship. Guards still watched over Reception—the Bill hadn’t abandoned his own security—but none of them took any notice of Nick and Morn. They may have been instructed to ignore anything that took place between Captain’s Fancy and the Amnion sector.

  “Fuck you,” he muttered to everyone and no one as he hauled Morn through Reception into the corridors which led toward the Amnion. Did the Bill like to get paid? So did Nick. Grimly he put this detachment of security, this diplomatic dissociation from Captain’s Fancy’s needs, on the Bill’s tab.

  That tab was getting longer by the hour.

  “Please, Nick,” Morn breathed between clenched teeth. “I’m not going to fight you. You don’t need to break my arm.”

  He tightened his grip for a moment until he heard her gasp. Then he eased the pressure—not because she asked, but because his hand was tired.

  “So you’re awake,” he sneered at her softly. “Good. Do you know where we are? Do you know where we’re going?”

  She didn’t reply. Her only answer was the increasing stability of her strides and the way she carried herself to minimize the strain on her arm.

  “Good,” he said again, nodding as if he were sure she understood. “There are several reasons why we’re doing this.” I want to. You earned it. It’s necessary. “One is that I’ve had another talk with that mutated bastard Marc Vestabule. He issued any number of threats, but one in particular got my attention. He told me they ‘have the means to prevent’ me from defending myself.” The same intuition which had restrained him from challenging Vestabule on the subject inspired him to broach it now. “He said they can ‘paralyze’ my ship. Completely.

  “What do you know about that?”

  She was silent for a few steps. Then she sighed, “God, Nick.” She sounded utterly exhausted, frayed to the ends of her soul; but she didn’t sound scared enough, not nearly scared enough to satisfy him. “What makes you think I can answer a question like that?”

  He didn’t have to grope for explanations. “First, you’re a cop. Before you joined me, you had sources of information I didn’t. You could easily know more about their technological resources than I do. And second”—reflexively angry, he squeezed his fingers into her arm again—“you talked to them when you took over my ship,” my ship, you bitch.

  She bit down on another gasp. She hadn’t looked at him since he’d taken her from Mikka; she didn’t look at him now. But she was listening. “All right,” she said through her teeth as if she, too, were threatening him; as if even now, on her way to the Amnion, she thought she could still oppose him. “I’ll trade you. You tell me why you were talking to the UMCP before we ever went to Enablement. Tell me what your deal with them was. What they hired you for. Tell me why they let you have me in the first place. And I’ll tell you why the Amnion think they can paralyze your ship.”

  She astonished him; surpassed him. Why wasn’t she terrified?—stricken to the core? She should have been sobbing in revulsion and supplication, not trying to bargain with him.

  The corridor was empty in both directions. The Amnion kept themselves apart from the rest of the installation—and nobody with any sense went looking for them. The Bill’s bugeyes were watching, of course; but they probably couldn’t pick out voices at this range. Nick let go of Morn’s arm, clutched her by the shoulders, and swung her around to face him.

  “Look at me, damn you.” Why aren’t you out of your head with fear? “Look at me.”

  Her gaze came up to his slowly. When he saw her eyes, the mad, dark passion in them almost made him flinch. The extremity of her suffering, the depth of her abuse, was matched by a focused, absolute, and predatory conviction. She looked like a woman who could come back from her grave—or from Amnion mutagens—to destroy him.

  Roughly he shoved her away. Helpless to defend her self, she stumbled against the wall; he caught her on the rebound and compelled her into motion again. He needed movement to control the dread rising in his guts.

  “I already told you,” he said as soon as he trusted his voice. “I was dickering for you. I wanted the damn cops to pay me for not selling what you know to the Bill.”

  “Bullshit,” she retorted. “I knew that wasn’t true when you first said it. Now I’m sure.

  “You knew how to contact them. You knew where the listening posts are. That means you were dealing with them long before you headed for Thanatos Minor. And I finally figured out that you must have had their permission to take me off Com-Mine.”

  “How do you get to that conclusion?” he demanded.

  His question was unnecessary: she was already answering it. “You needed a source in Com-Mine Security to frame Angus. But you needed more than that. You and your source needed a contact at UMCPHQ—somebody who could give you the codes to make that bogus supply ship look genuine. So the UMCP knew what you were doing. You had their cooperation. Maybe you were just following their orders. Maybe that’s what your whole precious reputation is based on. You do what the cops tell you, and they make sure you look good in the process.

  “So you weren’t trying to dicker for me. As far as I was concerned, your deal with them was already set. Why were you talking to them? What did they hire you for?”

  Nick tried to laugh, and couldn’t. His mouth was too dry; his throat was too tight. A spasm in his cheek tugged at his scars as if they were fresh.

  Nearly panting against his tension, he said, “Hashi Lebwohl wanted me to do a job for him here.”

  “What job?” she insisted.

  He was going to tell her; he was suddenly eager to tell her. He wanted to hurt her with it, wanted to do anything in his power that might erode the lunatic conviction which protected her from her fear. And he was going to hold her to her bargain.

  “The point,” he said, although he could hardly breathe, “was to do Billingate some damage. Maybe enough damage to put the Bill out of business. I already had Lebwohl’s immunity drug. He wanted me to sell it to the Bill.”
/>   This was the truth. Nick hoped that it would crack her heart.

  Morn didn’t gasp or protest; but he had the satisfaction of feeling her go rigid in his grasp, as if she were in shock.

  Gradually the knots in his chest loosened, letting him inhale more easily.

  “I was supposed to give the Bill the real thing to test on a live subject, and then supply him with an inert substitute to duplicate in his labs. He could sell his substitute to the illegals or the Amnion, it didn’t matter which. As soon as the truth got out—he was selling an immunity drug that didn’t work—he would be in deep shit.”

  Live with that, you bitch—while you can. That’s the kind of people you work for, the kind you believe in.

  “I may still do it,” he continued, “if I can’t get the Amnion off my back any other way. But if I do, I won’t bother with substitutes.” Like the truth, this lie was intended to do Morn as much harm as possible. “When I told Lebwohl I was in trouble, he cut me off. Now I don’t mind selling him out.”

  Thinking that he’d finally broken her, he put his arm around her and pulled her ear close to his mouth. “Now it’s your turn,” he whispered almost companionably. “Tell me how the Amnion think they can paralyze my defenses.”

  “Oh, that,” she muttered as if she hadn’t felt a word he said; as if she were too numb or blind to be reached by his malice. “You should have figured that out for yourself.”

  Here it comes, he thought. Now she would try to get back at him.

  “Back on Enablement, I needed to show them Captain’s Fancy’s self-destruct was real. If I let them believe I was bluffing, they wouldn’t have returned Davies. So I dumped a copy of everything in the auxiliary command board into my transmission. Including,” she finished like an act of violence, “your priority codes. They can override every instruction you key in.”

  Nick thought his heart was going to stop.

  Of course, he also had those codes. He could override their override. And they could override again—

  Paralysis. Eventually the computers would shut down to protect themselves from burnout.

  For a moment the shock left him white and blank. She wasn’t trying to hurt him. Her revelation didn’t damage him: it helped him. What the Amnion knew about his ship was only dangerous as long as he didn’t know they knew it. Once he got back to Captain’s Fancy, he could simply write in a new set of priority codes. The whole job would take less than an hour.

  Morn had given him an unexpected and imponderable reprieve.

  “Why?” Surprise seemed to leave him naked beside her. “I might not have figured it out. Why tell me?”

  Why help me?

  Her exhaustion had returned. “Because,” she answered as if she were too tired to fight anymore, “I don’t want them to get you. I don’t want them to get anybody. If you were in that pod, I would have done exactly what I did. Otherwise my own humanity wouldn’t be worth having.”

  Defensive and bitter, he snarled a curse. “And I suppose it never entered your head that if you gave me the answer, I might feel grateful enough to change my mind?”

  Even in his own ears he sounded petulant, petty.

  “No,” Morn said flatly. “I know you better than that.”

  Nick couldn’t reply. Grinding his teeth to steady himself, he pushed her on down the corridor.

  Another hundred meters along an empty passage brought them to the Amnion sector.

  The entrance was nothing more than a faceless door in a blank wall. He’d never been inside; but he assumed that the door was the outer opening of an airlock which protected the sector’s atmosphere. With a shudder, he remembered the acrid taste of the air on Enablement, the pain and coughing—His lungs still felt tender. He had no intention of going through that ordeal again.

  Tightening his hold on Morn in case she panicked at the last minute and tried to get away, he reached up a hand to the intercom beside the door.

  “Nick, please.”

  For one wild instant he thought she was going to beg him to release her; spare her.

  But she didn’t. Instead she murmured, “Just tell me why they let you take me.” She’d returned to her original question, to her escape from Com-Mine Station. “It can’t hurt you—and I need to know. Why didn’t they try to rescue me themselves?”

  “Shit,” he sneered because he was disappointed. Even here, standing on the threshold of hell, she refused to break. “What makes you think you were worth the effort? You’d already spent too much time with Captain Thermopile. The cops knew there wasn’t enough of you left to rescue.”

  But then he saw that the truth would be harder for her to bear; so he continued, “They let me take you because you’re what I wanted for pay. I don’t mind doing their dirty work sometimes, especially when the target is a fucker like Thermopile, but I like to get paid. I didn’t know I was about to lose my gap drive, so I didn’t ask for credit. I took you instead.” He forced out a harsh chuckle. “They probably considered it a steal. They got to nail Thermopile, and all they had to give up was a piece of his wreckage.”

  She hadn’t looked at him since he’d forced her to; she didn’t look at him now. Nevertheless her damaged voice seemed to drive straight through him.

  “If you believe it’s that simple, you’ve been trusting them too long.”

  She was more than he could stand. Hitting the intercom with his fist, he snarled, “I’m Captain Nick Succorso. I’ve brought the fucking ‘recompense’ you fucking wanted. Her name is Morn Hyland—she’s the mother of that ‘human offspring’ bastard you’re lusting after. Open the door. I’m going to put her inside and leave her. I’ve got other things to do.”

  The response from the intercom was immediate. “Captain Nick Succorso, the delivery of the female is acceptable. Your departure is not. You will enter with her. Suitable breathing masks will be provided. She will be taken from you. You will remain.”

  “The hell I will,” Nick growled in instant fear. Automatically he backed to the far wall, pulling Morn with him. “That wasn’t the deal. Your fucking emissary didn’t say anything about keeping me.”

  “You will not be kept.” The Amnioni voice sounded mechanically flat, imperturbable. “You will not be harmed. That is unconditional.”

  Abruptly the door slid open.

  Marc Vestabule stood in the airlock.

  He had two other Amnion with him; but there was nothing humanlike about them except for the masks over their faces and the weapons in their hands.

  They aimed their weapons squarely at Nick and Morn.

  “Please, Captain Succorso,” Vestabule said as if his vocal cords were incapable of inflection. “We wish only to talk to you. If the thought of entering our sector frightens you, we will talk here, although the place is less convenient.”

  “Don’t you mean less secure?” Nick pointed at the nearest bug-eye. “Out here the Bill can see and hear everything.”

  “No.” Vestabule appeared certain. “Our agreement with the Bill empowers us to neutralize these surveillance devices at our discretion. The question is solely one of convenience. If you choose to enter, we will provide you with the comfort of a seat. And guards will not be necessary.”

  That surprised Nick. He ached for a gun. Maybe if he shot someone the tension building in his chest again would be released. The tic under his eye felt like the stress of a valve with too much pressure behind it.

  “What the hell have we got to talk about?” he demanded. “We’ve already made a deal.” He brandished Morn’s arm. “I’m keeping my part of it right now.”

  Vestabule didn’t nod; only his human eye blinked. “As we have said, her delivery is acceptable. However, we wish to relieve the confusion which makes our negotiations with you dangerous. It has occurred to me that there may be questions which you would consent to answer if none of your own people—also none of Billingate’s personnel—were present to hear you. If our confusion can be relieved, perhaps the ways in which we make it ‘impossible�
�� for you to satisfy our requirements may be diminished.”

  For the first time, Nick thought that Marc Vestabule was more human than he looked. The emissary had retained some portion of his ability to think like a human. Pure Amnion lacked the tools to understand intraspecies duplicity or manipulation.

  “In other words,” Nick countered, “if I’ll consider answering your questions, you’ll consider unrevoking my credit-jack.”

  “I promise nothing.” The emissary’s alien knees, rust-coated arm, and distorted face promised nothing except the destruction of humankind. “The possibility exists.”

  Nick didn’t hesitate. Shoving Morn toward the Amnion, he growled, “Get her out of here. Then I’ll listen to your questions. ‘The possibility exists’ that I’ll answer them.”

  An Amnioni caught her with one of its arms. She didn’t struggle, made no attempt to break away; didn’t look back. Without protest, as if she’d accepted her ruin long ago, she let the Amnioni steer her into the airlock.

  Her escort touched the interior controls, and the door swept shut, as silent and fatal as an ax.

  At the sight, Nick felt unexpectedly savage. Before he could stop himself, he began to yell at Vestabule.

  “And tell that piece of shit to point his fucking gun somewhere else! I’m not going to answer your goddamn questions while you’re threatening to burn holes in me if you don’t like the goddamn answers!”

  Vestabule made guttural sounds that meant nothing to Nick. At once the other Amnioni lowered its weapon. After a further word from Vestabule, the Amnioni clipped the weapon to a harness at its waist and moved its hands away.

  Shaking with useless anger, Nick bit his lips so that he wouldn’t go on shouting. His scars seemed to be pulling at his cheeks as if the skin were about to tear. Between one heartbeat and the next, his loathing for Marc Vestabule and all things Amnion became so intense that he could barely swallow. “I swear to God,” he rasped harshly, “this is the sewer of the universe.”