A Covenant of Justice (34 page)

The Dragon at the back of the room stood up then and grunted. Everyone turned to look at Kask. He said, “I will stand with my friend, Ibaka. If he gives blood, then so will I.”

Ota resolved its inner torment then and turned around to face the others. “I too will volunteer my blood. Sawyer and Finn Markham helped rescue me from the Vampires, even though I had resigned myself to the inevitability of their appetites. I will donate blood.”

Sawyer looked to M'bele, hopefully. The dark man shook his head. “We'll need more than that.”

Nyota tugged at his sleeve. “Father, you must donate too—”

“After what they did to you—?”

“Father, they gave me a life! They made it possible for me to speak to you and tell you how much you mean to me, how much gratitude I have for everything you've done for me. I would donate if you'd let me, but because I can't, you must donate for me. Please, I beg you—”

M'bele started to object, but he couldn't resist his daughter's pleading look. His expression crumpled and he dropped to his knees in front of her. “I grieve for the daughter I think I've lost even as I celebrate the wisdom that comes out of your mouth now. I'll do what you ask.”

Three-Dollar stepped forward. “As will I. I feel shame that I did not step forward first. The dog-child truly understands the Alliance of Life better than any of the rest of us aboard this ship.”

“Oh, hell—” said Gito. “Me too.”

Arl-N raised an arm, grimly. Azra, the quiet woman, lifted her head. “If my TimeBinder will allow me, then I will serve this cause too.”

Robin spoke up. “I don't know if android blood will help, but if it will, I'll donate mine.”

Harry shrugged and added, “Well, count me in—” He glanced over to Captain Campbell. “You have anything you want to say?”

Captain Campbell smiled wryly. “Some people have called me a bloodless bitch. I guess I should prove that I have some blood after all.”

And then, only Lee-1169 remained standing alone, arms folded, looking resolute and unmoveable.

“Y'know,” said M'bele, “I seem to remember something about the Alliance of Life guaranteeing Sawyer and Finn's lives in return for their services. And correct me if I misspeak this, but Sawyer renewed that contract on Burihatin-14; so this effort to save Finn Markham by keeping the Lady Zillabar alive does serve the Alliance—”

“I hear you,” Lee snapped.

“When we commit ourselves to the Alliance, Lee,” Three-Dollar said softly, “we commit ourselves to the sacredness of life everywhere—”

“I know, I know—”

Harry rapped softly with the gavel. “Lee, I cannot require any member of the Alliance to honor this obligation with his or her blood. Only the specificity of Madame Zillabar's obligation to the Markhams allowed me to rule in favor of Finn's treatment, but I cannot extend that ruling to include anyone else without setting a dangerous precedent. The process remains voluntary. But, let me give you a gift—a thought to consider:

“At its most basic level, a crime—any crime, all crime—exists as an offense against your body and what you can do with it, what you can put into it, where you can take it; it always comes back to the body. Conversely, all laws exist as restrictions on what you may do to other people's bodies. Therefore, a just law cannot fairly compel anyone to donate their blood or their organs or anything else unless they have already promised to do so. So whatever else happens here, it no longer happens as an issue of law, but as a demonstration of our commitment to our belief in the sacredness of life. Everywhere.

“Look around, Lee. All of us here—all of us but you—have taken a stand to share our blood for Finn's recovery. Perhaps Finn Markham will not need your blood, and you will not have to take this on as a personal dilemma. On the other hand, you still might want to consider where you stand in relation to the most essential tenet of the Alliance.”

Lee met Harry's gaze unashamedly. “You speak well, old man in a white robe. But I have my angers, and I have my memories, and I don't choose to let go of either of them yet.”

The Golden Fury
drifted. A derelict. Empty. Dead.

The Black Destructor
approached it warily.

Kernel Sleestak d'Vashti stood on the command bridge of his vessel, studying the slowly rotating image in the display. To all outward appearances,
The Golden Fury
seemed undamaged. But repeated high-level scans detected no activity of any kind aboard the vessel. Even the ship's autonomous systems had shut down.

d'Vashti kept his outer face blank. He seated himself in his command chair and pretended to boredom. Inwardly, he seethed. The Dragon Lord had abruptly taken
The Golden Fury
off on some wild chase after an errant freebooter—and then just as abruptly, all communication had ceased. The idea that the freebooter might have taken some successful action against
The Golden Fury
had so little merit to it that d'Vashti could only assume that the silence of the Imperial starship represented some kind of dangerous ploy.

He wondered if he'd miscalculated by embarrassing the Dragon Lord so baldly in front of the command officers of
The Golden Fury
. He'd known for years that the Dragon Lord intended his own rebellion against the Vampires. He'd admired the warrior-lizard's skill at seeming to relentlessly track down the leaders of the human rebellion while in reality allowing it to grow and become ever more solid. The Dragon Lord clearly intended to use the human threat as a justification for seizing power over the Phaestor. d'Vashti wondered about that. Had he misjudged the Dragon Lord's timing? He'd hoped to consummate the relationship with Zillabar before dealing with the human rebellion and then the Dragons.

Idly, he gestured to the captain of
The Black Destructor
. “Dreegel, Send a boarding party over. No Phaestor. Only lizards. And give us a full remote video feed.”

“Yes, sir.” Captain Dreegel turned away and began issuing orders.

Shortly, an armed shuttle eased itself across the intervening space and locked onto one of
The Golden Fury
's exterior ports. A few moments later, the view from the lizards' helmet cameras filled the display on the bridge of
The Black Destructor
.

The image moved warily through the airlock, into an antechamber, into a corridor. Nothing looked amiss. Captain Dreegel stepped up beside him, also studying the massive wall-sized image. The view swam through several more corridors, poked into storage rooms and chambers, finding nothing.

Then, suddenly—

Dreegel retched and turned away from the display. Cries of shock and outrage swept across the command bridge. d'Vashti kept his face stony and implacable, but the horrific image before him had a compelling power all its own.

Everywhere lay the remains of slaughtered Dragons and Phaestor, the bodies shredded and seeping, barely recognizable. The walls of
The Golden Fury
dripped with gore.

And everywhere they looked, they saw fresh green pfingle eggs. Industrial grade. Carnivorous. Pfingles had swarmed here, eaten everything they could, laid their eggs and died. Here and there, dying pfingles still moved feebly. Others lay torpid, too swollen to move, eggs slowly oozing out of their bodies, one after the other. As the camera view panned, more and more active pfingles came into view, crawling directly toward the camera-wearer. The image began backing away hurriedly.

Abruptly, terrible screams came from the remote channel. Lizard screams. For barely an instant something horrible flailed across the display. The image careened, rocked violently for several long intolerable moments—betraying flashes of the boarding party covered with still-ravenous pfingles—and then suddenly the image toppled over sideways and became still. In the distance, the sounds of thrashing faded away, replaced by the more terrifying noises of insect-like crunching. It filled the channel. A single pfingle crawled curiously across the display, leaving a trail of eggs behind it.

d'Vashti's face had gone pale. He had heard of such things. He had never believed them possible—certainly not on an Imperial starship. But he knew instantly what had happened. He said softly, “That goddamned lizard and his goddamned appetite. I knew he'd eat himself to death one day.”

And then he allowed himself an inner-smile. Now he had one less problem to deal with. His salivary glands began pumping furiously. He could almost taste the triumph awaiting him at the Gathering.

“Dreegel,” he said. “Destroy
The Golden Fury
. Hit it with maximum force. Use full-strength disruptors to kill everything aboard, then nuke the carcass. When you've done that, take us into
otherspace
. To the Gathering.”

Finn Markham lowered himself gently onto the operating table of the starship's sick bay. He still felt weak, and experienced spells of dizziness every time he exerted himself too much. He took a deep breath and allowed his fatigue to sink in again. The blood-cleansing process would leave him nauseous and upset, but ultimately it would cure him—he hoped. He stared resignedly at the paneled ceiling while M'bele plugged him into the cross-dialysis treatment.

On the table next to his, Zillabar rested impassively.

Finn tried to ignore her, but after M'bele stepped out of the room, it became impossible. He glanced over toward her several times. Each time, he noticed that she too stared silently at the ceiling as she waited for the process to reach completion. Every time he looked to her, she glanced back at him for a moment as if waiting for him to speak, then returned her gaze to the scanning panels above.

At last, she spoke first. “The irony of it does not escape me either,” she said. “Every situation has come back to me turned inside out. Now I suffer as victim and you humans torment me.”

“Karma,” said Finn in explanation. “The karmic chicken has come home to roost.”

“The Phaestor don't believe in karma,” Zillabar said, effectively ending that line of discussion. “And you might want to notice something. After all the discussion has ended, I still get to drink the blood of all of you. That should tell you something.”

“Yes, it does. It speaks volumes about the generosity of humans—even to those who have made themselves our enemies.”

Zillabar didn't answer that. Finn assumed from her silence that she had decided to end the discussion. But a moment later, she spoke again. This time her voice had a quality he'd never heard before. Honest curiosity. “Tell me something—?” she began tentatively.

“What?”

“Why did your companions willingly donate their blood to save your life?”

“You don't understand it, do you?”

“A Phaestor would not act this way, not unless he saw an advantage for himself in the situation. . . .”

“Yes, I know,” Finn said with more compassion than coldness. “That particular quality of Phaestor thinking has brought us to this situation.”

“You didn't answer my question. About the sharing.”

“We call it
cooperation
,” Finn said. “I can see why you would have so much trouble comprehending it.”

“Explain that,” she said, as if giving an order to a servant.

Finn dismissed the apparent rudeness of her tone, recognizing it as ignorance more than intent. He took a breath while he gathered his thoughts and said, “It comes from the way we breed—and from the way you breed too. We bear our young in our own bodies. We nurture our young; you hatch from eggs. You do not bond as we do, you depend on pheromones and lust for loyalty. You don't have the same feelings we do—and we don't have the kinds of feelings you do.”

Zillabar considered that. “So you believe that the Phaestor lack the ability to care.”

“I believe you lack the ability to care as we do. Perhaps I believe mistakenly, but if my belief has any accuracy at all, then I can't even hate you for what you've done. You have no choice in the matter but to act the only way you can.”

Zillabar's voice betrayed her startlement. “You
pity
me?” On her inner face, astonishment fought with rage.

Finn didn't answer immediately. He considered the import of her question—not simply the question itself, but what it meant to both of them. He'd never really thought about Vampires this way before and it left him uneasy. He might have to give up his hatred too.

At last, he said, “Yes, I do. Because whoever designed your species cheated you out of a whole range of emotions that make life worth living. They didn't give you the capacity for love. And I don't know that what they gave you instead serves as any kind of useful substitute. From my point of view, I don't think so. I've always doubted the myth of Phaestor superiority. Now I know why.”

“But—” said Zillabar, allowing just a trace of her old self to smile through, “—you should notice that even as we lie here sparring, my blood serves your body, and not the other way around. You have succeeded in reducing me from master to servant; so perhaps you have demonstrated the superiority of your race after all—and maybe even this bizarre hormonal phenomenon you call
love
.”

“You wouldn't say that if you still held power over us,” Finn chuckled back. “But I do appreciate your attempts at diplomacy. At least, while we remain tied together like this, we don't have to torture each other.”

“And I appreciate your kindness. Thank you.”

For a moment, neither said anything more.

“Tell me something else,” Zillabar said abruptly. “Do you think a
Vampire
can learn this thing—?” she said the word with audible discomfort. “Can a Phaestor learn how to
care
the way you people do?”

Finn thought about it. “I don't know,” he admitted. “I don't even know if I'd want to try to find out. I don't think I'd ever feel complete trust in any Phaestor. I don't know that many others would either. The history of the Phaestor doesn't encourage enthusiasm for the prospect.”