A Princess of the Aerie (34 page)

He turned back for an instant, looking out toward the rise of the crater wall in the distance, up along the slope of old melt
and tailings. Why would there be a steel door here? It couldn’t be an escape route—he was more than high enough for a fall
to kill anyone.

It did have a good view through the mouth of the crevice to the surrounding plain. A gunport or sally port, then.

A big rock dropped by the cave mouth, with a cry of “Sorry, heads,” through the headphones. Another party, hunting Jak, was
descending the crevice from above. He was pinned between the two.

He felt the thud at the same instant that the figure silhouetted in front of him. His hand grabbed the first rock that it
came to, a big awkward one, and he shoved it in the general direction of the man in front of him.

The heet had just landed, and the lip of the ledge was narrow and slippery. The rock, too big and too awkward to be much of
a weapon normally, took him squarely in the crotch, and he fell backward into empty space. An alarm scream on the radio announced
that the man’s rocable had activated, and a moment later a “Gotcha!” suggested that they had been able to catch it from the
tower top and save the man—though he’d probably take a hard swing against the wall before he was hauled up.

Jak snatched up a fist-sized rock and whipped it at the next man onto the ledge. It went high and caught the man in the faceplate;
he fell after the first, possibly unconscious, for this time there was no rocable alarm. Jak snatched up another rock.

He felt a rumble in his feet, turned, saw the airlock door open and two heets in pressure suits coming through, continued
his turn, sprang, and bounded into the first one, driving the rock into his front life-support pack, which flashed red. The
heet fell over, twitching, and Jak brought the rock down on his second opponent’s helmet. It didn’t break, but it must have
been like having your head inside a bucket when someone whacked it with a broom handle. The heet staggered, and Jak pushed
past him into the airlock.

The door entry box was pulsing with green lights. Jak hammered on it with the rock. It fell off the wall, and the emergency
override slammed the door shut. Jak was alone in the airlock and with the control for the outer door destroyed, it would take
them some time to get at him from that side.

He switched on his helmet light and saw a big Makita hypervelocity gun, the size of a dining room table. Hyper-velocity guns
threw a half-kilogram slug at around twelve kilometers per second, more than enough to wreck any vehicle up to and including
small spacecraft; in the Military Basics course at the PSA, Jak had had a total of forty-five minutes on one of these, and
it hadn’t been this manufacturer.

At least it was easy to find the main power switch. The gun came alive with lights and began powering up. The plain old optical
site on the thing must mean there was a way to fire it manually. Jak looked it over and threw every switch marked “arm” and
pushed every dark button that said “power.” All the lights were green.

He took a moment with the rock to hammer out the other door-opening control, the one for the inner door; he hoped this would
mean that they’d have more trouble getting in, but probably there was a central control that could bypass the wall box, anyway.
Well, all he needed to do was use up time.

Now that there was air, his external suit mikes could pick up banging and thumping against the outside door. On the radio,
a bunch of heets were all interrupting and shouting at each other about whether the airlock door that the central operator
had just opened was the same as the airlock door that the pursuit party had wanted opened, or whether the pursuit party had
asked for the wrong door.

Jak decided not to wait for them to figure it out. He pointed the gun toward the center of the outer door, punched BURST and
TEN HEX, hoping that those keys meant what he thought they did, made sure it was set to FIRE ON MANUAL, and hit FIRE.

He remembered on Earth, at the Duke’s private preserve, he had once done some plinking, shooting old bottles and cans with
a slug-thrower (it was an aristocratic activity he would never understand), and he’d shot a can that had turned out to have
a lizard hiding in it; the can had flipped over a few times in the air and thudded to the ground, and the lizard had appeared
to break the light-speed limit getting away. He’d felt really sorry for the lizard.

Being in a small closed room with an operating hyper-velocity gun, firing a burst of ten, made him appreciate the lizard’s
situation much more than ever. At least his ears were covered by the suit, and the mikes had cut out, but what conducted through
his helmet was plenty.

In front of him, the outer door now had ten doorknob-sized holes, their edges still glowing, forming two hexagons joined on
a side, across its middle. The voice on the radio—faint in his deafened ears—demanded to know what the fuck had happened and
why nobody was answering.

Jak tried to rotate the gun with the idea that he might be able to do something similar with the inner door, causing more
havoc and delay, but the gun would not swing any farther than the edges of the outer door, and whatever stops or intelligent
controls blocked it, they weren’t visible or accessible. He tugged at the gun, yanked, pushed and kicked it, but it swung
no farther.

Riveroma’s voice spoke in his headphones. “So, now that you’ve killed five men and badly injured three, and established that
I cannot trust you under any circumstances, perhaps you’d be willing to just sit still until we get you out of that airlock.
We have you under surveillance and we can tell whether you move or not, so I would advise you not to. One of my clever technicians
figured out we could use your dead purse as a null connection, and he has hacked into the life support and other controls
for your pressure suit. By way of a demonstration—”

Jak doubled over in agony.

“You see? We can give you a pretty good shock anywhere you’re catheterized. Don’t worry. It does no permanent damage. I might
yet decide to release you, and you can go back to amusing the princess with that. But meanwhile do keep in mind that I can
make it feel as if you would rather lose it. Also—”

Jak’s ears hurt, his eyes felt sore, he was choking and could not breathe. He thrashed around the room, crashing against the
gun and back against the wall, before falling sideways to the floor.

He could breathe again. His eyes and ears felt normal.

“
That
was the argument that persuaded your friend Dujuv,” Riveroma said, very casually. “Just turning off the air supply for an
instant and power-venting the suit. And I’m still exploring other unpleasant things I can do. Now, are you going to sit on
the floor, with your legs extended in front of you, perfectly still, with your hands away from your body?”

“Yes.” Jak had complied with each direction as Riveroma spoke it.

“That’s a good boy.”

Presently Jak felt a heavy thump through the floor plates. They must be mounting a temporary airlock on the other side. When
the door opened, two men came through, grabbed him, forced him to his feet, frog-marched him into the airlock, and pressurized
it. One of the men removed his own helmet, then grabbed Jak and tore the helmet off him.

The man said, “You killed Preal Shafaritz with that stupid stunt. Remember that name, Preal Shafaritz. Repeat it.”

“Preal Shafaritz.”

“Thank you. He was my brother.”

The man hit Jak, hard, in the face, the rough suit glove scraping his cheek and his head slamming back over the mounting collar.
He hit Jak four more times, taking careful aim each time, making sure that he was hitting fresh skin, and spat on Jak’s face.
“Put his helmet back on him,” he told his pizo.

The other heet yanked the helmet back onto Jak as if dressing a mannequin.

As soon as the helmet was on and the pressure came back up, Jak tried to switch on the face wipe. It didn’t work. “Hah,” Riveroma
said, in his earphones. “You can live with that on your face for a while.”

The two heets conducted Jak down a long corridor to an airlock elevator, shoved him into it, and took him all the way to the
top. The doors opened on the treacherous, deep-pitted top of the central pinnacle. From here you could see all the way to
the crater walls, five kilometers in all directions, and even a little beyond. They led Jak to the edge of a steep drop; Riveroma
stood there. Beside him, Dujuv knelt at the very lip of the fifty-meter drop.

“Kneel beside your friend and make sure you’re at least as close to the edge.”

Jak did. He felt coldly certain that each of them was about to receive a laser cut across the back of the neck, and he was
miserable to think he’d gotten Dujuv into this.

“Well,” Riveroma said. “Well, well, well. Very impressive. You know, Jak, if I were Dujuv, I don’t think I would like you.
He’s been taking a beating on your behalf more or less continually since you pulled your stupid little pointless stunt. And
I think he rather believes you were just trying to save your own hide. Now that he’s seen you as you are—and since your entire
record shows you don’t care in the slightest for or about Dujuv—this whole process will go so much more quickly.”

Bex Riveroma is a slick liar, the master of Principle 204,
Jak kept reminding himself.
He always tells the lie that gets in under your skin and that’s hard not to believe. He gives your own worst thoughts back
to you and makes you believe them.

He hoped that Dujuv was remembering that too.

He looked down. A simple roll forward would send Jak into a long enough fall to die instantly on impact.

“Are you listening, Jak? Are you listening, Dujuv?”

They both agreed they were.

“Well. I’m going to make use of my control of your suits. And I’m going to do things to each of you. Either you can endure
it or you can say the magic phrase—Jak, for you that’s ‘Do it to Dujuv,’ or Dujuv, for you that’s ‘Do it to Jak.’ Then while
I do, you will tell me what your friends in the other party are doing, and what I need to do to stop them.

“You will tell me what I want to know, while your friend endures whatever it was that bothered you so much. Then I will kick
your suffering friend’s back, hard, and he will fall to his death, and you will live because I will decide to let you.

“You might notice, Jak, that although it’s not ideal for the sliver to undergo a heavy impact and sudden decompression, it
is very conveniently safely wrapped in a few kilos of meat—that would be you—and is likely to survive the process. Not that
I actually expect any noble self-sacrifice of you, and I don’t think Dujuv does, either, but it did seem like something that
ought to be pointed out to you, just in case you have some tiny saving moment of decency and loyalty right at the end.”

Jak looked down into the drop again. It must be at least fifty meters. In Mercury’s gravity, that would take more than five
seconds to fall, and there would be a horrible first second in which you didn’t fall much farther than your own body length.
The miners called it the “wake-up second,” when you had time for a last look at the place where you had been safe, a moment
before.

But at the end of fifty meters, with no air to slow you, you’d still hit at eighty kilometers per hour. In the back of his
mind all of his math instructors seemed to gabble together in a nightmare of precision; doing ballistics in one’s head was
normally a skill anyone who worked in space needed, but just now Jak would have been happy not to have it.

Riveroma tried a big jolt of pain, like a roaring flame, through the urinary catheter, first. Jak managed not to roll forward
into the chasm nor sideways into his friend.

Abruptly it stopped hurting. He sucked in a good, sweet lungful of air before his chest exploded with pain; Riveroma must
be messing with the cardiac stabilizers. Another interval of almost-comfortable almost-sanity; then his guts roiled in brutal
cramps.

Uncle Sib said you could always sow some confusion—“Do it to Jak,” Jak said.

Riveroma laughed. “Oh, Sibroillo, Sibroillo, Sibroillo, the stuff you teach your nephew. Jak, I know where the transmission
comes from, it’s right there on my display. If you were trying to save your friend, which I very much doubt, it was a nice
little thought, I suppose, but I would bet you were just trying to sow confusion because that is what your uncle taught you
to do whenever the situation was hopeless. He always had such faith in—
What?
”

The “what” was shouted on the general channel, probably in response to something Riveroma had heard, but Jak couldn’t stop
to analyze yet; he was too relieved by the sudden, complete cessation of pain. After a few deep breaths, without thinking,
he triggered his face wipe. To his surprise the soft sponges moved across his face in the familiar, comforting way. He could
hear Riveroma and the others all shouting at each other as he scanned frequencies.

His face and faceplate were clear and, since no one seemed to be paying any attention to him, he stood up, moved away from
the cliff, and looked around.

Dujuv raced past him. Obviously no one was watching them.

Still trying to get oriented, Jak looked in the direction Shadow and the boys had gone. Motion in the shadows all along that
side of the crater—a vast rockslide, at least two kilometers wide, was pouring down the inside of the crater. The dead man
switch had turned on the slagger. Shadow’s group had been captured too—or they had lost their tight-beam link to the
Spirit of Singing Port
—or for some reason they had decided to let it happen. There was no way of knowing which.

Jagged rock along the crater edge began to tumble inward; the slope itself exploded with puffs of steam from frost deposits,
which had lain under boulders for gigayears, vaporizing as the positrons heated the rock around them.

Half a kilometer of the upper crater rim glowed dull red, then sagged like butter in a microwave. The glow turned orange,
and a white line appeared at the base of the bulge. Along that half-kilometer section, the upper third of the crater rim fell
inward, and white-hot magma was now pouring over the still-tumbling slide and flooding onto the crater floor. The wide pool
was already half a kilometer beyond the edge of the slide, racing across the crater floor.