Charlotte Boyett-Compo- WIND VERSE- Hunger's Harmattan (25 page)

Weakly he rolled over and managed to pull himself
up by leaning heavily against the slick titanium walls. He was naked and
defenseless, without the energy to form clothing on his trembling body. It was
hard to walk for his vision was wavering, the floor undulating beneath him like
rolling waves. The motion made him sick to his stomach and increased the
headache that threatened to make his temples explode. He didn’t think the
visual disturbance was a residual effect of the ghoret toxin but he didn’t know
for sure.

With his shoulder sliding along the wall,
he went out into the corridor and tried to regulate his bearings to what he
remembered of R-9 when he and the others had been set free. He had wandered
about the facility, unable to believe the size of it since his world had been
relegated to his small cell for all those years. He was so thirsty his tongue
was sticking to the roof of his mouth and trembling so violently from
withdrawal it was hard to think.

Propped against a doorway, he tried to
locate in his mind where the main lab was in relation to where he was standing.
He wasn’t sure and his mind was a jumble of acute pain and his body burning,
itching from lack of the narcotic.

“Think, Ailyn,” he said aloud. “Think.”

He was fairly sure the main lab was behind
him so he forced his body around, expending even more energy that was waning
fast. Sluggishly putting one foot ahead of the other, he began moving in that
direction. His breathing was slow and labored, his lungs feeling singed from
the high heat of his body.

He stopped and listened and thought he
heard the sound of a refrigeration unit kicking in. He concentrated on the
humming noise and was reassured he was going in the right direction. As he
passed one of the rooms he saw a jumpsuit hanging on a peg and paused. Though
his body was fevered, he was so cold his teeth were clicking together. The
jumpsuit would help to warm him so he dredged up enough strength to detour into
the room and drag the garment from the peg. It took him a long time to get it
on and it was a bit too tight for him but it helped to block out the cold.

The lights had been left on in what he
thought must be the lab and the brightness spilling out into the corridor from
its open door began to hurt his sensitive eyes the closer he got to it. He was
squinting against the glare but when he reached the room, he was relieved to
see it was indeed the lab and sitting on the far wall was the massive
refrigeration unit that was his goal.

Stumbling now for he was rapidly losing
what energy he had left, he bumped into the lab tables, knocking beakers and
flasks to the granite floor. He stepped on shards of broken glass—cutting his
bare feet—but he didn’t even notice. He was licking his dry lips, anticipating
the Sustenance that waited on the other side of the thick stainless steel
doors. By the time he reached them, he was giddy with need.

It took several tries before he was able to
jerk open one of the doors and he whimpered when he saw the deep shelves bare.
The next door revealed more empty space as did the third and the fourth. By the
time he yanked the fifth of the six doors open, he was crying like a baby and
so terrified he could barely stand. When the fifth door revealed neatly stacked
beakers of Sustenance and boxes of vac-syringes filled with what he prayed was
tenerse, he sank to his knees in thanksgiving, burying his face in his hands as
he sobbed.

The Sustenance called to him and his queen
scraped along his backbone to remind him She was in need too. Though She did
not hurt him, She was insistent and with the last of his rapidly draining
strength, he managed to grab a beaker. He slumped down in front of the open
refrigeration unit and drained the Sustenance, gulping the thick black
liquid—some of it dripping from his lips to stain the beige jumpsuit. He
finished that beaker and drank two more before he had even a semblance of
energy to reach for a vac-syringe. Plunging it into his neck—barely reacting to
the terrible burning of the thick med—he waited for the pain to subside, the
withdrawal to ease, but it didn’t.

“Not enough,” he said, and fumbled for
another vac-syringe. Once again he administered the caustic narcotic and felt
just a twinge of relief. “Give it time, Ailyn. Give it time to work,” he
mumbled aloud.

As the last of his strength faded away, he
slumped there with his chin to his chest, waiting for his world to be made
right again.

* * * * *

“Eighteen life forms are on the ship,”
Quinn reported as he stood behind the com officer, reading his screen. “Six
joining the ship’s crew. Two Reaper heat signatures, one very weak.”

“That’s him, Sir,” the com officer said,
pointing to a very weak blip on the screen as it split, showing the facility on
R-9.

“You’d better get in there stat, Rory,”
Leveche said. “Don’t worry about shutting down alarms. Just get to him and
bring him back up here.” He looked at the other two
Scaans
. “Get over to
that ship and disable their Web then get your asses back here pronto!”

“We’re on it!” Quinn said, he and his men
heading for the elevator.

“Throw the Net around that ship, Raoul.
Don’t let it leave,” Leveche ordered his half brother.

“Can’t,” Breva reported over the vid-com.
“They’ve got a clear tube all the way up.”

“Could they know we’re here?” Polemusa
asked.

“No way,” Bakari said. “Can we move a ship
into position over them to block?”

“Negative,” Breva replied. “We’ve got them
surrounded but no one thought to block the airspace above them. They’ve got
energy pulses shooting straight up to clear a path. Sorry, Gabe. My fault.”

“Can we lock on to the hag and her little
bastard?” Shanee asked. “That’s all I care about. Get them on board and let the
LRC fly. Shoot her down as she attempts to power up to hyper drive.”

“Now that we can try,” Breva stated. He
asked for retinal IDs of the two Harmattans from the Coalition data banks so
his engineer could lock on to mother and son and snatch them off the Ceannus
ship.

“I want Cean,” Bakari said. “Can you lock
on to her slimy ass?”

“I doubt it unless you have a retinal for
her,” Breva replied.

“The gods-be-damn it, I don’t!” Bakari
said.

“Then you’ll have to content yourself with
blowing her to space dust when that ship attempts to leave R-9 airspace,”
Leveche advised.

“It’s just not the same,” the ex-Burgon
complained. “I wanted to use my scytheblade on that bitch.”

“Poor little guy,” Leveche said, making a tutting
sound. “There will be other people you can behead with your new little sword.
Don’t worry.”

“They know we’re here,” the com officer
reported. “It’s chaos on their bridge.”

“Are the
Scaans
over there yet?”

“Aye and the Web is powering down.”

“Where is the bitch and her pup?” Polemusa
asked.

“We’re locking on to them…now!” Breva
answered from the vid-com.

“Transport her to the gym,” Shanee asked.
“She’s mine.” She gave her mother a faint grin then turned and made for the
elevator that would take her to engineering.

“What about the male?” Breva inquired.

“Send him on to the transport room. They’ll
take him into custody,” Bakari replied. He frowned at Leveche. “Can’t I just
whittle him up a bit?”

“If it would make you happy, Ryden,”
Leveche said. “You don’t need my permission. This is your ship.”

Bakari’s face lit up. “It is, isn’t it?” He
fingered the handle of the scytheblade at his waist.

* * * * *

Rory Quinn materialized in the corridor
outside the main lab. He had slightly miscalculated but with all the alarms
going off around him, he didn’t think he’d done too badly. Hurrying into the
lab, he made straight for Ailyn Harmattan, his heart thudding hard as he saw
the Reaper collapsed on the floor.

Dropping down beside him, Quinn put two
fingers to the carotid artery in the other man’s neck and felt the faint pulse.
He slapped his hand on the vid-com badge on his shirt. “I’ve got him but he’s
barely alive.”

“Then hurry, Phantom!” Leveche ordered.

Quinn slipped his arms under Ailyn’s legs
and behind his back and lifted, grunting with the effort. He started to turn
away when his
Scaan
sixth sense kicked in and directed his attention to
the bottles of Sustenance and vac-syringes in the refrigeration unit. Not one
to dismiss the warning that was quivering down his spine, he knew he’d be back
for samples.

“Lock and load, guys,” he said. “I’ve got
him!”

As he and his burden began to
dematerialize, Quinn’s gaze stayed on the opened refrigeration unit and the
neatly arranged bottles of black blood.

* * * * *

Shanee knew the doors to the gymnasium were
locked as she walked toward them. There would be no way for Elspeth
Harmattan-Jost to leave. With the new acute hearing she now possessed, she
could hear the other woman slapping her palms against the pneumatic doors, trying
to make them open.

“Anything that could be used as a weapon
has been evacuated from the room.” Her mother’s face suddenly appeared on the
vid-com screen beside the main door into the gym.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Shanee said.

“It will be a fair fight,” her mother
replied. “May the Wind be at your back.”

* * * * *

They were waiting for him as Quinn appeared
on the transporter pad. A gurney had been rolled close and he hurried to lay
Ailyn down. “I’ve got to go back. Something isn’t right,” the Phantom said
before stepping back and disappearing again.

“Get him down to sickbay,” Bakari said. He
was stunned at the strange gray pallor that covered Ailyn Harmattan’s face.

Leveche and Bakari were right behind the
gurney as it was rolled into the elevator. On the way up the two decks to
sickbay, they didn’t speak but there was no need. They recognized impending
death when they saw it.

The healer and his assistants took over
charge of the gurney as soon as the elevator doors opened, grabbing the rolling
bed and rushing into the diagnostic room with it.

“What I wouldn’t give for one of those TAOS
units off the
Sláinte
,” the healer said, speaking of the Tissue Artery
Organ Skeletal diagnostic and restoration unit he’d heard about.

“Wouldn’t do any good with a Reaper,”
Leveche reminded him. “Only the hellion can heal him.”

Quinn suddenly appeared next to the
healer—effectively scaring the poor man. “Sorry,” the
Scaan
apologized
then thrust a beaker of the black blood and a vac-syringe at the healer. “You
might want to analyze these. Something tells me they are tainted.”

“Tainted how, Rory?” Bakari asked.

“With that gods-be-damned nephrotoxin,”
Leveche snarled. “I’d stake my kingdom on it!”

“You mean what’s in here could be shutting
down his kidneys?” the healer asked, handing the beaker to an assistant with a
command to run it through analysis.

“Aye and if that’s true, there’s only one
thing we can do about it,” Leveche said. His hand went to his tie and he
started jerking it from its knot.

“Ship’s leaving, Burgon!” Polemusa said
from the vid-com.

Bakari hesitated. He wanted to be there for
Ailyn but he desperately wanted to make sure the Ceannus LRC was destroyed.

“Go,” Leveche said. “There’s nothing you
can do to help right now.” He was stripping off his shirt.

“You’re going to give him one of your
fledglings?” the healer asked.

“No,” Leveche said with a grimace. “I’m
going to give him my queen.”

* * * * *

Shanee put her hand on the panel to slide
the gym door open and strolled inside as though she had not a care in the
world. Across the room, the woman she intended to kill was trying to find a way
out. As soon as the Amazeen entered, Elspeth spun around, her face turning hard
as flint.

“Well, if it isn’t my son’s whore,” she
hissed.

“Well, if it isn’t my husband’s
soon-to-be-dead mother,” Shanee flung back at her.

Elspeth sniffed and a slight hint of fear
darted across her face as she recognized the Reaper scent. “Is he dead yet?”
she asked, wanting to hurt the Amazeen.

Though those four words drove an ice-cold
dagger of pain through her heart, Shanee forced herself not to react. “He’s
very much alive,” she said.

The older woman laughed. “Oh I doubt that,”
she said, and began moving to the side, away from the advance of the unarmed
Amazeen. “Cean took all his fledglings though she left the useless queen.”

“The queen isn’t as useless as you thought
she was,” Shanee said. She could feel the blood pounding in her temples.

“Cean didn’t take the queen from him
because it was dying,” Elspeth declared. “Between the ghoret venom and the
nephrotoxin, the hellion didn’t stand a chance of surviving.”

Shanee had to believe Leveche and Bakari
would take care of her ailing husband. She could not afford to allow her
opponent to put doubt—and fear—into her mind. Ailyn would be all right. His
friends would save him. The important thing was to rid the megaverse of the
likes of Elspeth Harmattan-Jost.