The Stars Are Legion(95)

“Get up!” the woman holding the weapon barks.

I raise my hands.

My walking stick is slung across my back, and I have a bone blade at my hip, but I don’t go for either of them. Arankadash is just behind me, but Casamir is at least another twenty paces down, and Das Muni is ten more after that.

“I’m here to see Rasida Bhavaja,” I say.

“I’ll decide who you’re here to see,” the woman says. I’ve had time to search the corridor, and I note that she’s alone. I’m surprised to see a single patrol. She hasn’t yet called for others.

I start to get up.

“Stop!” she says.

“You told me to get up!”

She frowns hard. She’s young, not much past menarche, and I feel sorry for her. I was that young once, following orders.

“I’m going to come up slow,” I say. “All right?”

She jerks her head, and I decide that’s close enough to a nod. I slowly rise to my feet. I’m taller than her by a head.

“I need to see—”

“I don’t give a fuck who you’re here to see,” she says. “Where did you come from?”

“Level below,” I say. “The umbilicus isn’t working.”

What I’m saying is ridiculous, because we’ve come down from the ceiling, but it doesn’t matter. She’s committed a rookie error, and she hasn’t spotted it yet. She’s let me get too close.

I grab the stock of her weapon with my left hand and push it away from my body while punching her hard in the face with my right.

She stumbles back. I wrench the gun free and point it at her, jamming it hard in her face so the tentacles split flesh. She shrieks and goes down.

“Rasida Bhavaja!” I say.

“Outside the hangar,” she says.

“The vehicle hangar?”

She nods.

I try to get my bearings, but the truth is I hardly remember my way around this place. I’ve spent more time underground than I have up here. At least as far as I can remember.

“Take me there,” I say.

Casamir lands behind me. “What the shit?” she says.

“We’ll need more of these weapons,” I say. “Rasida will have people around her.”

My captive looks from me to Casamir. “You don’t know?” she says.

“Know what?” I ask.

“The consort has pinned herself in the heart room with the witches,” the Bhavaja woman says. “There’s a full civil war happening on this ship, and she’s become the focus of it.”

Ah, I think, resourceful Jayd and all of her plans. I remember what she told me when Rasida took her away, about this being what we wanted, what we planned for, and I wonder if this was all part of it: the blowing up of my people; this civil war; even me, here, running after her. What kind of monster was I that I kept her in my confidence, knowing what she had planned? Is that why I have no memory? Did she take it from me so I would go along with this?

“And why are you telling me this?” I say.

“Because we might be on the same side,” she says.

Das Muni slips down from the ceiling too.

“How many of you are there?” the Bhavaja woman says.

“Weapons,” I say. “Take us to a weapons cache first. Then the hangar.”

The woman nods. Blood trickles from the wounds in her face. “Fine, all right.”

I glance back and see Arankadash has made it as well. “We’re getting weapons,” I tell her, “then we’re finding the woman who stole this world.”

*

The Bhavaja woman tries to walk us right into a trap, but Casamir lobs a vial of something at the women springing the ambush and blinds them.

Arankadash and I smash the oncoming women in the face. They go down, and we take their cephalopod guns, but not before one of the women sprints away. Arankadash fires at her, but she isn’t very good with a gun yet.

Casamir pulls at my sleeve as we start again, her face pained. We are a stinking, filthy bunch. The bloody arterial spray has caked our hair and skin and has been slowly flaking off. We have all lost weight, Casamir most of all, and she looks hungry and exhausted.

“We can’t just walk in there,” Casamir says.

“Why not?” I say.

“Because I didn’t come all this way to get shot here at the end,” Casamir says.

“Jayd is right up ahead!” I say.

“And what else is ahead of us?” Arankadash says. “We don’t know.”

“So what, we split up?” I say.

“We take the time to think it through,” Casamir says.

I point my weapon at the opposite wall and fire. The cephalopod rams itself into the flesh of the wall. The wall begins to blacken and crack, making a large circle of rot around its tentacles three paces in circumference.

I point at the rotting wall. “That’s what’s happening to this world,” I say. “All that time we traveled, what did we see? A dying world. We’ve got nothing to go back to, none of us. There’s only up. There’s only forward.”

“We are not arguing with you,” Arankadash says.

“We’re your friends,” Casamir says, “but you shouldn’t have let that woman run away.”