Lost In Translation (37 page)

It will slow them down,
Jarrikk replied.

That's not what I asked.
But she had already made the choice.

She opened herself fully to him, felt him flinch when he encountered the depth of her doubts, but felt slightly better herself as she discovered that he shared them to a degree. Then all individual thought once more melted away into Kathryn/Jarrikk, and together they plunged into the disturbing darkness of the mind of their guard.

They destroyed his doubts in seconds, filled his mind with the thoughts they wanted him to think—that he had come to rescue them and take them to communications, and could let nothing stand in their way.

Kathryn/Jarrikk withdrew, thinking to conserve their strength to repeat the process with the guard in the hall, whom they could sense clearly through the intervening bulkhead, but their new convert didn't wait for them: he opened the door, and before his colleague could turn around, burned him through with a burst from his firelance.

Kathryn/Jarrikk fell apart into jointly horrified Kathryn and Jarrikk as the inside guard peered both ways down the corridor beyond, then motioned them out.

“That wasn't necessary,” Jarrikk said, his voice echoing in translation in Kathryn's head. “We would have dealt with him.”

“Your way's too slow,” their guard growled. “My way is better. Come on—communication's this way.”

They'd dealt the cards, now they had to play the hand, Kathryn thought.
We've created a monster,
she telepathed to Jarrikk.

Maybe,
he sent back.
But he
has
saved us time. Come on.

Their erstwhile guard dragged his dead friend inside the cell, closed and locked the door, then motioned them off, taking up a position behind them, firelance at the ready, in case they met someone—which they did, at the first intersection, a short, thin Hunter with patchy brown fur. He scuttled past them, pausing only long enough to give Kathryn a bloodthirsty glare quite surprising in such a scrawny specimen.

In the clear again, their guard talked. “There's a communications officer on the bridge, you realize. The instant you start broadcasting from down here, he'll know about it.”

“We won't need long,” Jarrikk said. “The vidchip record is hypercompressed. It will go out in a single burst.”

Ask him how many S'sinn will be in communications,
Kathryn telepathed.

Jarrikk put the question. “Three, I think,” their guard replied. “Unarmed. I'll make short work of them.”

I thought you considered that a form of rape?
an inner voice asked her, but she ignored it. It had to be better than seeing more S'sinn sliced apart by a firelance.

Reluctant agreement. Jarrikk looked around at their escort. “No. Leave them to us.”

The guard growled, but said nothing.

The floor trembled beneath them, some residue of a maneuver violent enough to get through the gravity-and-inertia damping fields.
Kitillikk moving in for the kill,
Kathryn thought.
We're running out of time.

They met no one else as they descended three decks via maintenance ladders, emerging into a short corridor with a door at its end. The guard pointed to it. “Communications,” he said.

 

Jarrikk led Kathryn to the closed door.
Ready?

Ready,
she replied.

Like planets colliding, they plunged into each other's minds.

Instantly they could sense the three S'sinn inside the communications room, as well as the mind of the guard, still slightly confused, like a pool into which someone had dropped a large stone, stirring up mud and sending ripples chasing each other to and fro across the surface. It was an unsettling sensation, but Jarrikk/Kathryn could not spend time worrying about it; they tuned it out and concentrated on the three minds beyond the closed steel door.

This was different than changing a single mind. The three held similar loyalties and beliefs and those loyalties seemed to set up a kind of reinforcing field around each mind. The Guild said that any race which could produce Translators must have some innate empathic ability in all its members, a subconscious ability that did much to explain mobs and riots and politics. Here they could see proof of that. Karak would be fascinated, but it made their task much harder.

Instead of crashing through each mind's barriers as they had with the guard and, before him, with the High Priest and Rikkarrikk, they had to proceed cautiously, slowly, pushing a thought there, prodding an attitude here. It felt like turning the tuning pegs of a three-stringed musical instrument, trying to produce a particular chord. It seemed to take forever, though it must only have been a few beats. They almost had it, almost had the three minds to the point where they could safely open the door and walk in, when something new ripped through their consciousness, like a cymbal crash in the middle of a string sonata.

With a blood-chilling scream, the guard rushed forward, pushing them apart, sending Kathryn crashing against one corridor wall, where she crumpled to the floor, and smashing Jarrikk into the other wall, setting his crippled wing throbbing. But he hardly noticed that in the whirlwind of disorientation that filled his mind from the sudden cessation of his link with Kathryn. He clung to the wall for support, his mind barely registering the sound of the door opening: when it did register, he whirled and lunged for it, but he was far too late. As Kathryn pulled herself up beside him, the guard's firelance sliced through each of the three S'sinn. The room filled with the stench of burned flesh and fur, and the three minds Jarrikk and Kathryn had moments before been delicately tuning fell silent forever as their owners slumped to the floor, hands dropping lifelessly from blood-spattered consoles.

The guard screeched again, not the sound of a rational S'sinn at all, but the sound of a wild carnivore, his mind filled with insane rage. As Kathryn gripped Jarrikk's hand once more, he could sense the guard's mind more clearly. The mud and ripples from the stone they had thrown into it hadn't cleared at all; they had turned into a black whirlpool that had sucked him down into bestiality.

He turned now and saw them.
Down!
Jarrikk cried mind-to-mind to Kathryn, flinging a wing over her protectively and pulling her to the padded floor. An energy-bolt sizzled through the air, but he felt nothing—nothing but the sudden ending of the guard's shattered mind.

Slowly Jarrikk raised his head, as did Kathryn. The guard lay in the center of the room, the firelance clutched in his hand, his head a shattered, smoking ruin, the tip of one wing still jerking spasmodically.

Unintended consequences,
thought Kathryn.
Jarrikk, what have we done?

Jarrikk didn't reply. Kathryn had been right. They had raped the guard's mind, and they had destroyed it. With the priest, and Rikkarrikk, they had just provided information. With the guard, they had deliberately erased whole structures of thought, structures which had held his mind intact. With the communications personnel, the result might have been less traumatic—or maybe not. They'd never know, because of what they'd done to the guard.

He had telepathed none of that, but Kathryn's thoughts obviously echoed his own.
This power we have,
she sent.
I'm not sure I want it. I'm not sure I want anyone else to know about it, either.

Neither am I. But this isn't the time to sort it out.
He looked around the room.
I think I can operate this equipment. Close the door.
He let go of Kathryn's hand and made his way to the nearest console, trying not to look at the dead S'sinn at his feet or the blood now clotting on the controls.

As he had hoped, the flagship had a channel already set up which would allow Kitillikk to speak directly to every Hunter in the fleet.
She's probably already used it to make a morale-building speech about the imminent attack on the human Fleet,
he thought savagely.
I hope she appreciates this irony as much as I do.

He slipped the datachip out from under his Translator's collar, plugged it into the console, and activated the transmission.

 

Kikks'sarr now filled the vidscreens on the
Bloodfeud
's bridge. Kitillikk's control helmet showed the Fleet's course, an atmosphere-skimming trajectory that would help foul the human's scanners and accelerate the Hunterships at the same time. She'd changed her mind; rather than lure the human Fleet out by attacking Kikks'sarr's cities—cities she hoped to make her own—she'd decided instead on a bold, preemptive move, taking the Fleet straight through the center of the human Fleet at far higher speed than was strictly practical for combat, hitting whatever they could hit on that first pass and, she hoped, destroying the cohesion of the humans' formation. Then the Hunter Fleet would split and double back, attacking the disorganized humans from two directions at once.

The humans had rarely fought a pitched fleet battle in space. The S'sinn had been doing it for a century. She intended to show the humans exactly how it was done—and destroy them in the process.

Sudden movement at one of the control consoles caught her peripheral vision. She glanced to her left, Ukkarr following her gaze. “Communications, report!”

“Your Altitude, we've just sent an uncoded, unguarded hypercompressed databurst to all ships.”

“I ordered communications silence!”

“Yes, Your Altitude, I know, but—Your Altitude, it went out over your personal channel. It will be automatically broadcast to all crews!”

“Countermand it!” In her fury Kitillikk lifted from her shikk and flew the few steps to the communications console.

“I can't, from here—it's being sent from the main communications—”

The planet and the fleet's trajectory vanished from half of the vidscreens. In their place appeared the familiar, grizzled face of the High Priest of the Hunter of Worlds, and her voice boomed out. “All S'sinn, hear my words,” she said. “We have discovered that the plot to kill Supreme Flight Leader Akkanndikk was instigated, not by the Guild of Translators, as you have been told, but by Acting Supreme Flight Leader Kitillikk, in conjunction with a renegade human Translator. For this transgression of the Laws of the Hunter, Acting Supreme Flight Leader Kitillikk is hereby renounced by the Priests of the Hunter. She is stripped of all rank and privilege, and her life is forfeit upon her return to S'sinndikk. All those who serve her are called upon to renounce that service, on pain of death. You will—”

Kitillikk slapped the communications officer away from the console with her right wing and slashed her hand down over the controls, blanking all the comm vidscreens—but even as she did so, she knew she could not stop the damning message from reaching the eyes and ears of every Hunter in the fleet. Even with the bridge screens silenced, she could hear a faint echo of the High Priest's voice from the interior of her own ship.

The bridge crew stared at her. The officer she had knocked to the floor scrambled away from her, clutching his arm. She turned and looked at Ukkarr. He shook his head slightly and pointed at one of the screens that still showed the Fleet.

Most of the ships were still on course, still hurtling toward the planet and the waiting human Fleet: a fleet, she thought angrily, which must have received the open transmission as readily as her own had, if they had a probe anywhere above the horizon of the planet. But a few of the Hunterships had broken formation. More followed. Slowly at first, but faster and faster, the Fleet was unraveling.

If any ships continued on, the humans would devour them like ripe fruit. The Hunter Fleet would be destroyed and with it all hope of ever salvaging S'sinn honor.

Despite the burning fury in her hearts, she managed to keep her voice calm and businesslike as she spoke to the cowering communications officer. “Send this message to the fleet: abort attack. Break formation. Return to S'sinndikk.” She growled something that wasn't really a laugh. “You'd better not put my name on that. Sign it, Acting Fleet Commander Tikkivv.” She turned and looked at the
Bloodfeud
's captain. He bowed to her slightly. Then, as the communications officer, after a glance at Tikkivv, warily approached his station again, she looked at Ukkarr. “I think you and I should go down to communications,” she snarled.

“An excellent suggestion,” he replied, and in his tone she heard the same suppressed rage that burned inside her.

One of the security guards at the door made a half-hearted attempt to block their way, but Captain Tikkivv snapped, “Let them go,” and he fell aside, offering no resistance even when Ukkarr reached out and took his firelance from him.

Everyone in the ship was still battened down in battle stations: the corridors and zero-G flight tube were empty. Kitillikk and Ukkarr said nothing as they flew down to the communications deck, taking a brief side trip to confirm what she already knew: the cell where she had locked the two meddling Translators stood empty, one dead guard inside and no sign of the other one. Ukkarr looked at the guard. “Firelance,” he said.

“I underestimated our supposedly non-violent friends,” Kitillikk growled. “I should have executed them the moment I had them in my claws. This way.”

In communications, they found more of the same: four dead S'sinn, including, judging by his insignia, the missing guard from the cell, his head blown off. Ukkarr looked around in amazement. “I don't understand how they did it.”