“Yes, sir!” they replied in ragged chorus, their rifles swinging downward.
“But sir!” the original kid piped up, his laser still aimed in the general direction of Marakit and Kan-Zin Tel. “It’s Marakit! We’re supposed to kill her when we find her!”
“Who are you, warrior?” the older Tahni demanded. Marakit looked back at Kan-Zin Tel in time to catch him raising his visor.
“You know me, Lothan-Dor,” Kan-Zin Tel said.
He maintained the sort of calm only a warrior who’d faced death and passed through the other side could muster in this situation. I’d yet to meet a Tahni who I would have considered a coward, but there was a qualitative difference between the ability to charge into enemy fire and the wisdom to keep your head while doing it.
“I do,” Lothan-Dor agreed, “and yet I wonder why I find you bringing Marakit to us. If any of us were to stay out of this, I would have expected it to be you and the other outsiders.”
“If we stay outside,” Kan-Zin Tel told him, “then we have nothing to bargain with. We’ll be shut out of your decisions and turned into cannon fodder. I have no desire for my children to grow up as orphans on a world that hates them.”
Lothan-Dor didn’t look convinced to me, but he motioned for Kan-Zin Tel to follow.
“Bring her in here.”
“Move,” I told Deke, pushing against his shoulder.
He scuttled forward, the tunnel narrowing as it curved around the edge of the control room. This was the end of the line, or so Marakit had told me, and the by the time we reached the end, it had gone from a meter wide to narrow enough we had to turn sideways to keep going.
Here’s the door, Deke told me, apparently as concerned with being overheard as I’d been earlier now that we were only separated from the Tahni by a thin sheet of metal. What do you see?
The control room was huge, bigger than the garden, and crammed with monitoring equipment. Most of it was obsolete to the point of being antique, probably dating back to the First War with the Tahni, bulky flatscreens and manual keyboards and not a hologram projector to be seen. Which made the one advanced piece of technology stand out even more.
Marakit stared at it, ignoring Pol-Kai striding toward her, ignoring the twenty-five or thirty other Tahni clustered in the room staring at her. Her eyes were on the device. I’d seen the like before, a neural halo like the ones we’d used in the Vigilantes to compensate for the Vergai recruits lacking ‘face jacks. That wasn’t so cutting-edge, but the quantum-core computer it was plugged into sure was, not to mention the haptic hologram floating above it. The whole setup was about the size of a fifty-gallon drum, tucked into a niche between flatscreen monitors near the center of the room. It was hard to see what was in the projection from the angle she had, but I thought it might be some kind of geometric pattern, probably part of the security code she’d programmed into the thing.
“Marakit,” Pol-Kai said, stopping just out of arm’s length of the cyborg. “I hadn’t expected to see you again alive.” His eyes flickered to Kan-Zin Tel. “And I hadn’t expected to see you at all.” Pol-Kai looked the other Tahni up and down. “Where did you acquire armor and a weapon?”
“Let’s just say you’re not the only one with trust issues,” Kan-Zin Tel told him from over Marakit’s shoulder. “I brought her to you because I heard you needed her.”
“And what do you wish in return, heretic?” Pol-Kai snapped. Unless I read the Tahni commander wrong, he didn’t seem to hold much more love for Kan-Zin Tel than he did for Marakit or the other Evolutionists. “Do you want us to overlook the way you’ve mutilated yourself? To tolerate the unnatural perversion of living with a female?”
“None of us give a damn about your opinion of how we live our lives, Pol-Kai. All we seek is your guarantee that you’ll leave us alone. You’ve already shown that you have no loyalty to your oaths, nor to those who’ve sheltered you and called you ally.”
Pol-Kai choked out a laugh, gesturing at Marakit.
“And what of you then? Was she not your friend as well?”
“I never swore an oath to her,” Kan-Zin Tel corrected him. “She and I were once enemies, and after the collapse of the human civilization merely allies of convenience. She thought otherwise and came to us for help. I trust she’s seen the error in her logic.”
Damn, this Kan-Zin Tel was good. I was ready to believe him myself.
“What about the error in your own logic, Kan-Zin Tel?” Pol-Kai asked, motioning to his men. A half a dozen laser carbines raised, leveled at Kan-Zin Tel. “Now that you’ve brought her to us, where is your bargaining power? Why should I not simply have you executed?”
Uh oh, Deke said, somehow putting a tsk into his mental transmission. Didn’t see that one coming.
But Kan-Zin Tel had. He moved, the action enough to draw Marakit’s eye to him, but he was so close to her all I could make out was the muzzle of his KE rifle… pointing straight at her face.
“Then there’s no reason,” Kan-Zin Tel said tautly, “that I shouldn’t kill her myself.”
Oh, shit.
[ 20 ]
“And what do I care?” Pol-Kai asked, waving a hand dismissively. “You kill her, we kill you, and what have I lost?”
Though the fact he hadn’t ordered it already put the lie to the words.
“You need her to unlock Illyana,” Kan-Zin Tel said, still so utterly calm. “Without Marakit, you have this base and nothing else worth having. No warships, no fleet, no force to conquer the human worlds. Without Illyana, we have even less than we did before, since we’ll have lost the trust of the colonies, and you’ve already killed off our most effective ground troops.”
Should we go in? Deke asked, and I marveled that he’d turned that decision over to me, since he hadn’t shown much trust in my tactical judgement so far. Then I realized he couldn’t see what I was seeing, since he wasn’t looped into Marakit’s video feed.
No, I decided. Give him a minute.
I trusted Kan-Zin Tel and God only knew if I was right to do so, but charging in now would only get both of them killed. Pol-Kai sighed and relaxed, lowering his weapon and proving my instincts right.
“What do you want?”
“I simply wish the status to remain quo. We live where we live on the surface and no one comes to bother us. You want off this world anyway, you want to conquer the human worlds, and I wish you luck. But leave this place to us.”
It was an utterly reasonable demand, yet Pol-Kai’s expression clouded over, and I sensed if he could have gotten away with denying it, he would have.
“All right. As cleansing as it would be to rid the galaxy of deviants such as yourself, I suppose leaving you stranded here, light-years away from anywhere, is close enough.”
Kan-Zin Tel pulled his gun away from Marakit’s head and pushed her forward into Pol-Kai’s arms. She’d left her makeshift cane behind and she nearly tumbled to the ground, but the Tahni caught her by the arm and shoved her away from him toward the quantum core. She toppled to the ground, the metal of her limp leg clattering against the floor, fierce anger in her eye as she glared back at Pol-Kai.
“You have two choices, you metal monstrosity,” Pol-Kai growled, leveling his pistol at her head. “You can either input the passcode to unlock the imprinter and die quickly, painlessly… mercifully, or you can be stubborn. If you choose the path of pain, I’ll have you immobilized, of course… your arms and legs burned off at the elbows and knees. Then, I’ll have you chained to a pair of industrial diggers and rip the damned metal right out of your body until all that’s left is the husk of bloody flesh that you were meant to be. And once you’re reduced to a pile of quivering jelly, then we’ll start slicing that into pieces until all that remains is your diseased brain. And if you die before you tell us the code, we’ll still break it… but the days you’ll save me are worth a quick death.”