The Lost King (19 page)

"Somebody doesn't
think we ought to land," XJ said.

"Missiles?"

"Maybe. You got
those coordinates Dixter transmitted?"

"Yeah."

"Use 'em. No
standard orbit entry. Come in like a ball of fire."

"Which is what we
may turn into. Better fasten yourself in good, kid."

Having learned in the
past week how to operate the safety restraints on the co-pilot's
chair, Dion did as he was told. Despite Tusk's ominous prediction,
the boy was looking forward eagerly to the landing. As Tusk had said,
space flight was, for the most part, intensely boring. You could be
in awe of the grandeur and majesty of flying among the stars only so
long. Then, with the natural perversity of human nature, you begin to
dream of trees and air that hasn't been circulated through your lungs
a thousand times and water that—though it was purified—made
you think about the fact that it, too, had been recycled.

The days in flight had
actually passed relatively swiftly. Dion had spent long, absorbed
hours either with Tusk or XJ studying space flight and learning how
to operate the Scimitar. Tusk had been both amazed and discomfited at
how rapidly the boy learned.

"Why are you
throwin' that stuff at the kid?" Tusk had demanded of XJ one
evening shortly after leaving Syrac Seven. A three-dimensional image
of one of the Scimitar's main engines was slowly rotating on the
computer's screen. "You'll confuse him. He wants to fly the
plane, not build it!"

"I asked to see
it," Dion had said. "It's all right, isn't it?"

"Sure. But why
bother? Most of the systems aboard these craft are designed to repair
themselves if anything breaks down. If it's something that can't be
fixed internally, then XJ reports it to me and tells me what to do.
You'll learn as you go along. No need to study something that doesn't
make sense to you now."

"Oh, but it does
make sense. Look." Calmly, Dion had explained the function of
the myriad complex parts; the computer responding by magnifying,
colorizing, rotating, simulating—whatever was needed.

"How did you do
that? How did he do that?" Tusk had rounded on the computer.

"He has the mind
of a machine," XJ had answered, with an electronic sigh of
rapture.

"No kidding."
Tusk had stared at Dion in awe tinged with uneasiness.

"It's nothing,
really," Dion had said, flushing red with embarrassment. "I
was just passing time. I didn't mean to show off."

"Photographic
memory?"

"More than that."
XJ was enjoying showing off. "Humans or aliens with the
so-called photographic memory can call up images of what they see in
their minds—such as a page from a book, a diagram of an
engine—but sometimes that's as far as it goes. Ask them to
analyze it, explain how it works, relate the meaning of what they've
read, and they can't do it. The kid here not only remembers
everything he's ever seen but he can tell you how it works or what it
means. He has all of Shakespeare memorized. Give Tusk the scene from
Richard II
you were doing for me. The one about the king
deposed—"

"Not now, XJ,"
Dion had mumbled, feeling his cheeks burn.

"A little culture
would be—"

"He said not now!"
Tusk had thumped the computer.

With a vicious bleep,
XJ had killed not only the image on the screen but the lights as
well. It had refused to turn even the emergency lights on, and Dion
and Tusk had been forced to grope and fumble their way to their
hammocks and had spent the rest of the day in bed.

Remembering the
incident. Dion shifted uneasily in his chair. He hadn't meant to
expose his innermost thoughts to Tusk like that. King deposed. Why
had he ever brought that up? The boy was startled to discover how
easily the mercenary saw through him, understood what he was
thinking. Dion realized that he had underestimated Tusk. The boy had
marked the mercenary down as a materialistic, restless adventurer.
Quick to act and act intelligently, Dion had to admit, but that was
probably due to instinct and training. Limited intellectual capacity.

Dion was forced to
revise his opinion. The man was smarter than the boy had originally
thought. Smarter—and therefore more dangerous. Dion set
increased guard upon himself.

The landing on Vangelis
was uncomfortable, terrifying (for Dion, though he took care not to
admit it), and uneventful. Nobody shot any missiles at them, although
the commlink with the planet threatened immediate destruction if they
didn't go into standard orbit until their credentials could be
properly cleared.

"They gotta keep
up their image!" Tusk shouted as the small plane rocketed
through the atmosphere.

A fiery orange glow
surrounded them, the heat in the cabin increasing markedly,
life-support doing its best to compensate for the burning hot
temperatures outside. Sweat poured down Dion's face. He gripped the
arms of his chair so tightly that his hands and fingers ached for an
hour afterward. The jolting caused him to bite down painfully on his
tongue.

Once they had entered
the atmosphere and were gliding through sunlit wispy clouds,
receiving landing instructions from a base somewhere below, Dion was
forced to leave his seat hurriedly and race to the head. When he
returned, he was extremely pale. Tusk glanced at him but never said a
word, for which Dion thanked the man deep in his heart. XJ,
fortunately, was too occupied with the landing to comment on the
boy's weakness, though Dion thought he heard a synthesized chuckle
during a momentary interval in the conversation with ground control.

The plane landed and
was towed to a parking place in a spaceport General Dixter had
commandeered for his use, according to whoever was manning the
control tower. Staring out the viewport as they trundled slowly to
their position, Dion saw the strangest and mottliest assortment of
flying craft gathered in one place outside of a museum. There were
several long-range Scimitars (Tusk wasn't the only one to appreciate
and "borrow" one of the Navy's renowned fighters), their
markings either cleverly changed or—like Tusk's—
completely obliterated.

"That's an old
needle-nose!" Tusk said, peering out the port excitedly, in
search of old friends. "They used to fly those in the days
before the revolution. Yeah, they look real sleek," the
mercenary said in response to Dion's admiring gaze, "but the
Scimitars are ten times more maneuverable and practical.

Should be. Derek Sagan
designed them and—so I've heard— he was the best pilot to
ever come out of the Royal Academy."

"Royal Academy?
What's that?" Dion asked.

"There's Zebulon
Hicks, that S.O.B.!" Tusk sat forward.

"Where?" XJ
demanded.

"Isn't that his
plane? Turn your scanner about ten more degrees to the left. Now—"

"You're right! And
stop swearing."

"How much does he
owe us?"

"Sixty-seven
Korelian mandats. I'll have to check on the exchange rate, but it's
somewhere close to eighty golden eagles."

"The Royal
Academy?" Dion persisted patiently. Derek Sagan. The man who'd
killed Platus. The man who was alter him. The Warlord held a strange
fascination for the boy.

"Uh? Oh, that was
a special school they used to run for kids of the Blood Royal. There
were two of them—one for boys and one for girls, each
established on uninhabited planets. The kids were sent there at about
eight or nine. Since these kids were going to grow up to be kings or
emperors or presidents or whatever else form of government they had
back on the home planet, they were given a lot of advanced training
in politics and stuff. XJ, is that Reefer?"

"No, your eyes are
going."

"It is! I'd swear
it! How much cash we got on board?"

"Oh, no, you're
not!" The computer's lights flared. "No ante-up for you,
mister! You lost one hundred and seventy-two—"

"Tell me more
about the Academy," Dion interrupted. "What happened to
it?"

Tusk shrugged.
Releasing his safety restraints, he got to his feet, stumbling
slightly as the plane jolted over the cracks and bumps of the cement
runway. "The President did something with it, I guess. Shut it
down. Turned it into a retirement village or low-income housing. How
should I know?" He staggered toward the ladder. Dion, fumbling
at the safety restraints, noticed his body felt unnaturally heavy and
clumsy, as if somebody had wrapped weights around his wrists and
ankles and stuffed his fingers full of lead.

"You should know
more about it than I do, kid," Tusk said, his voice floating
down from the living quarters. "Open up, XJ. I'm goin' out to
make sure we get leveled off."

"Don't pay any
more than six gilders," the computer warned. "I checked.
That's the going rate. These crooks'll charge you twenty if they
think you're a tourist! Tusk always gets taken," XJ said
bitterly to no one in particular. "He won't haggle. I've told
him and told him—"

Dion was hurrying after
the mercenary. "What do you mean, I should know something about
the Academy?"

"That master of
yours must have attended that school. My dad went there. All the
Guardians did!"

The hatch whirred open.
XJ's attention focused on shutting down systems that wouldn't be
needed once they were on the ground. Dion, anxious to get outside and
breathe fresh air, climbed the ladder, his feet and hands feeling
clumsy, as if they'd grown too large during the night.

No, Platus hadn't said
anything about a Royal Academy. Just one more thing he'd never
mentioned, kept secret. Why? Was it just too painful to talk about,
to remember? Or had he been afraid it might give the boy ideas?

Emerging from the
spaceplane, Dion drew in a lungful of air and immediately began to
cough. A couple more breaths and he felt dizzy and light-headed and
wondered if there were some sort of deadly chemical in the air that
the computer's analysis had missed. He started to go back for his
oxygen pack but noticed that Tusk—though he was breathing
rapidly and heavily—hadn't keeled over yet and didn't seem to
be afraid that he might.

Real sunshine felt good
on the boy's skin. Slowly he slid down the ladder that ran along the
hull of the spaceplane and came to stand beside Tusk, who was peering
beneath the craft, yelling instructions to the man who had towed them
and was now preparing to detach his vehicle from theirs.

"What's wrong with
the air?" Dion asked, panting.

"Nothin',"
Tusk said, glancing at him with a grin. "You're used to the
healthy, pure stuff we breathe on board the plane. You'll get used to
this in a day or so. Just take things kinda easy for a while. Do too
much and you'll pass out cold."

Dion nodded. Tusk
disappeared under the plane and the boy—out of curiosity—was
about to follow when he felt a touch on his arm. A green tentacle had
wrapped around his wrist.

It was the first time
the boy, raised in total isolation in a barren desert, had ever met
an alien life-form, and his heart rate leapt so that he came near
fainting, as Tusk had warned him. The large blob of green regarded
him with apparent concern while another tentacle wrapped itself
around his other arm and held him upright.

"Xrmt!" Tusk
cried, coming out from beneath the plane, or at least that was the
approximation of the sound he made.

Another tentacle snaked
across and gripped Tusk's hand (the other two still keeping firm hold
of Dion) and a fourth tentacle made what seemed to be a pointing
gesture while a sound like a buzz saw came from the blob's interior.

"What? Wait. I
forgot my translator. No translator!" Tusk shouted, pointing to
his chest. The alien understood and released Tusk. The mercenary
scaled the ladder, disappeared inside the spaceplane.

Dion tried to call to
him, but Tusk was gone before he got the chance. The boy thought
about attempting to free himself from the alien's apparently
solicitous grip, then wondered if that might not offend it. Dion's
initial surprised fear had eased; his mind was running through
classifications of alien life, attempting to place this one.

Tusk reappeared, a
small black box hanging around his neck. Placing a disk attached to a
wire at the base of his skull, the mercenary listened attentively to
the alien's buzzings.

"Dixter's looking
for me, huh? Yeah, I'll report right away. The kid? Naw, he's all
right. First time for him, that's all. He just needs to get his land
legs."

The tentacles released
Dion gently, and the boy managed a bow and gave the creature a
greeting in its own language.

The blob appeared
delighted, if tentacle waving indicated delight, and Dion thought it
did. The alien buzzed and crackled loudly and excitedly.

"That's the only
words I know—" Dion turned to Tusk. "Tell the Jarun
that I know only how to greet him, in his language."

Tusk was staring at the
boy wide-eyed.

"I never learned
to speak it," Dion said in apology, thinking that this was why
Tusk was looking at him strangely. "Platus told me it could
damage the human vocal cords."

"Uh, right."
Tusk cut into the alien's torrent of words that sounded vaguely like
a lumber company removing half a forest. He relayed Dion's message.
The alien, listening on its own translator, bobbed up and down.

"He understands
and says that, anyway, it was a great pleasure to him to hear the
words of the Jarun spoken by an alien race and he hopes you will join
him for dinner."

Dion bowed. The alien
bobbed, waved several tentacles, said something to Tusk, and went on
its way.

"Reefer, huh? I
knew I recognized his RV," the mercenary said in satisfaction.
"Ante-up game there tonight. Uh, don't mention it to XJ, will
you, kid? And say, how did you know that stuff?"