The Lost King (58 page)

Now, where was Blue
Squadron?

It is a basic rule that
if you're ever somewhere you're not supposed to be and you don't want
to get caught being there, you must look like you belong. Walk
purposefully and swiftly and always carry something in your hand.
Picking up a stray clipboard a crew chief had left lying around,
Maigrey tucked it under her arm and began shoving through the crowd,
muttering imprecations at anyone who got in her way and darting swift
glances left and right in search of her squadron. This was rapidly
getting her nowhere, however. Blue Squadron was not to be seen, and
time was running out.

"Hey," she
demanded angrily, stopping to confront a flustered mechanic. "Did
they relocate Blue Squadron?"

"Where the hell
you been?" The mechanic glared at her. "Sure they relocated
it. What did you expect? Bay Six." He gestured with a greasy
thumb.

Nodding her thanks,
Maigrey congratulated herself on her ploy and hurried to Bay Six.
Ducking beneath the wing of a Scimitar, she stepped out into the open
and nearly ran her helmet right into Sagan's broad shouldered back.

Maigrey retreated,
hiding in the shadow of a winch, and leaned weakly against a girder
until she was able to breathe again and convince her heart it
belonged in her chest and not in her throat.

"It's what you get
for being so smug," she said to herself, sweat rolling down her
forehead, dribbling down her neck and into her suit. She didn't dare
remove the helmet to wipe it away. "Of course,
that
was
why they relocated Blue Squadron. Dion's flying in it. Marcus told
you that, if you'd been paying attention. But now," she added,
heart rate and blood pressure returning to near normal, "what
the devil is Sagan doing here?"

A large crowd was
gathered around the Warlord. It was easy to keep out of sight.
Hovering on the fringes, Maigrey saw a flaming patch of red-gold and
recognized Dion. And then she saw why Sagan was down here when, with
the enemy in sight, he should have been ten other more important
places. The serpent was bombarding Eve with yet another apple.

Maigrey drew in a deep
breath of longing, let it out with a sigh that fogged up her helmet.
She wasn't the only one. Every pilot standing around Bay Six was
gazing with envy and desire at the glistening, sleekly shining, newly
redesigned and modified Scimitar. Maigrey, in her studies, had come
across this updated version in the files, but she had no idea the
Warlord had built a prototype.

"I test flew it,"
she overheard one pilot say to another. "It's a beauty. Got more
moves than a six-legged dancing girl."

"Why's the Warlord
giving it to a kid?"

"Not
a
kid.
The
kid. That's the true heir. The one we're gonna set back on
the throne." The men put their heads together, their voices
dropping.

Damn, Maigrey thought,
was everyone on this ship talking sedition? She edged her way closer
to overhear.

"I'm glad I'm not
in Blue Squadron. They're being sent out to babysit. The Warlord
wants to let the kid get close enough to the fire to feel the heat
but not get scorched."

The two walked away,
continuing on to their own urgent duties. The crowd was dispersing,
the Warlord hurrying off, probably heading for his own spaceplane.
Maigrey had read about the Bloodspear, as he called it, and she
longed to see it. It was a plane designed to function like the
bloodsword, operating off the pilot's mental and physical impulses.
The plane literally became a pilot's additional appendage, reacting
directly to a thought instead of wasting time translating thought
into motion. Sagan would be out there fighting, leading the battle,
and—

"I'll be
babysitting!" Maigrey sighed. Well, she was a Guardian, after
all. Her hand stole to the starjewel she wore concealed beneath the
flight suit. She had pledged her life to her king. She would do her
duty. Perhaps this was why God had brought her here.

"Spoilsport,"
she muttered, and went off to find plane number six.

"You the
substitute for Captain Hefter?"

"Yeah."
Maigrey nodded, going through the routine of checking out the
aircraft. Blue Squadron, it turned out, was one of the last to take
off. Surreptitiously she watched Dion climb into the cockpit, his
face illuminated by excitement. She wished she could speak to him,
but she didn't dare risk it. Eve and the serpent were getting far too
chummy.

"What's the matter
with the captain?" asked the crew chief.

"Mumps."

"Mumps? At his
age?" The crew chief shook his head.

"He was swelled up
so, he couldn't get his helmet on."

"That a fact? Hey,
you're feelin' all right, ain't you, Capt'n— Capt'n—
What's your name?"

"Penthesilea."

Maigrey hoped devoutly
she hadn't come across a flight mechanic who was also heavily into
the Trojan Wars. Sagan would recognize the name, but he was—please
God—far away.

The man shrugged.

"I ain't even
gonna try to pronounce that one, Capt'n. There something wrong with
your voice?"

"Laryngitis,"
Maigrey said huskily. "Slight touch. I'll be fine. Things look
good here. Guess I'll go aboard."

"Good flying,
Capt'n." The crew chief torched his hat in respect. "What
did you say that name was again?"

"Penthesilea."

"That's a strange
one."

Shaking his head, the
crew chief walked off to the front of the Scimitar to confer with one
of his men.

Penthesilea. An Amazon
queen who had brought her women to fight for Troy. Inside the plane,
Maigrey relaxed into the pilot's seat, shut the hatch, sealed it, and
began to believe she might actually pull this off. She'd never been
inside a Scimitar before, but she'd spent her months on
Phoenix
preparing for just such a moment. She'd read every scrap of
information, played through all the simulations. It wouldn't take her
long at all to get accustomed to the feel of the plane in flight.
Humming to herself the triumphal march from
Aida
, she
activated the computer, introduced herself as Captain Penthesilea,
and began running through the preflight checks.

Penthesilea. She was
rather pleased with herself for using that name—her old code
name. It had come glibly to her tongue; she hadn't thought, until the
crew chief asked the question, what she would give as an alias.
Everything on board checked out. There was nothing to do now but sit
and wait for the command.

Penthesilea. The Amazon
queen stands on the walls of Troy, taunting the Greek hero, Achilles,
on the field of battle below. Her women shout for her to come down;
she is in the line of fire. But Penthesilea has come to the siege of
Troy for the honor and the glory, as has Achilles, and she scorns the
pleas that she return to safety. Achilles draws his bow and fires at
her, but even as he looses the arrow, he knows that he will slay the
only woman he could ever love.

Funny, it had been
years since she's thought about that old legend. Maigrey was suddenly
extremely annoyed with herself that she'd thought of it now.

Dion eased himself into
the cockpit of the new Scimitar and looked around with delight.

"I wish Tusk could
see this," he said before he thought, and he immediately felt a
twinge, like a toothache, only this pain was in his conscience, not
his molars.

"It's all Tusk's
fault anyway," he muttered.

"Repeat the
command, sir. That is not in my files. Repeat the command, sir."

"Sorry, computer.
Just ignore it. It wasn't a command. I was talking to myself."

"Yes, sir. Will
you be doing that often, sir?"

"No, computer.
This was an accident. It slipped out. Now let's go through the
preflight check."

"I've already done
that, sir."

"Oh. And, uh, does
everything . . . check out?"

"Of course, sir.
What didn't, I fixed."

"What do you mean,
what didn't, you fixed? What didn't? What did you fix?"

"I assure you,
sir, the matter was trivial. You do not need to concern yourself. It
is my duty to take care of such routine emergencies and keep you free
from worry, sir."

Dion wondered just what
a "routine emergency" might be but decided not to ask. He
felt somewhat intimidated by this cold, impersonal, and authoritative
computer and decided he would ask the Warlord to have it
reprogrammed. He'd prefer something with more personality, like
XJ-27, which brought his mind back to Tusk again.

"What are we
waiting for?" Dion demanded irritably.

"The signal to
take off, sir. We're one of the last squadrons to leave, sir."

"Well ... is there
any way I can find out what's happening?" Dion had the feeling
the war was going to end without him ever having been in it.

"Yes, sir. Visual
on this monitor. Audio on this channel."

Dion looked and
listened, but all he saw was a confusing blob of blips converging,
dispersing, appearing, and disappearing. The audio was loud and
equally confusing to him, though he supposed it must be making sense
to somebody. He asked himself, suddenly, if he should really be going
out there. It had all been exciting, like a game, when Lord Sagan
took him to this shining new plane. Dion had seen the looks of envy
on the faces of the other pilots, the carefully expressionless faces
on the men of his squadron. He had exulted in his heady status, but
now—listening to the tense, cool voices of men fighting for
their very lives, fighting to keep a heinous enemy from their
doorstep—Dion felt ashamed, inexperienced, and frightened.

"I don't belong
here! This is crazy. Sure, I've flown before, but not as much as I
led Sagan to believe. Why didn't I tell him the truth? Or maybe he
knew the truth. He seems to know everything. Maybe this is a test.
Another one of his goddam tests!"

"Sir, your pulse
rate has climbed to an unacceptable level. Blood pressure and body
temperature are both rising, sir. If you will look at the EKG monitor
on your left—"

"I don't need to
look at it! I wouldn't know what it meant, anyway! Damn it, when are
we going to get out of here? Can't you cool it off in this cockpit?"

"My readings
indicate that the temperature is quite comfortable for those of your
species. And I must insist, sir, that you take steps to lower your
pulse rate immediately. Otherwise I shall have to declare you unfit
for duty."

"All right, all
right."

Dion remembered
Platus's training in meditation techniques. Leaning back, drawing in
a breath, he let it out slowly through pursed lips, drew in another,
and tried to send his fear out along with the impure air. That
worked, to a certain extent. But what worked even better was the
thought of what XJ would be saying right now to this fascist
computer. Dion grinned and felt better.

"Tusk understands.
It just caught him by surprise, me being a king and all. I guess he
never really believed in it. I wish I could have stayed and talked to
him back on Vangelis. We'd have worked everything out. But I had my
duty to the Warlord. Tusk's a soldier. He understands. I'm sure he
understands."

Was it your duty that
kept you from visiting Tusk and Link and General Dixter and the
others on
Defiant
? a part of him replied.

"I wanted to, I
really did."

That was more true than
he knew. Dion was lonely, desperately lonely on board
Phoenix
.
Seeing Tusk had made his loneliness worse. He remembered with longing
and regret the fun of being with Tusk and Link; of drinking stale
beer in that hot, smelly cafe; of listening to the two try to outdo
each other in tales of heroism; of watching them flirt—more or
less successfully—with the local women. He remembered warmth,
camaraderie, good-natured teasing about his flaming red hair.

"Are you doing it
again, sir?"

"Doing what,
computer?"

"Talking to
yourself, sir?"

"Yes, and if you
don't like it, you can short yourself out!"

"My internal
security systems prevent me from carrying out that order, sir."

Outlaws. Deserters. A
failed, broken-down general. Hardly suitable companions for the heir
to the galactic empire. Sagan had never said so in those words, but
by talking to Dion about how a prince should be "a fox to
discover the snares and a lion to terrify the wolves," the young
man understood that he was being raised a lion and the lion always
travels alone.

He recalled another
passage Sagan had quoted to him: "Because this is to be asserted
in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowards,
covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely. . .
."An ancient writer on statecraft named Machiavelli had said
that. Dion found it strange that Platus had never required the boy to
read him.

Of course, you couldn't
quite call Dixter fickle or false, or term Tusk a coward. Dion wasn't
certain, therefore, that he quite accepted such a cynical view.
Certainly Platus wouldn't have. But then, Platus had believed in man,
not in God. Sagan believed in God. And himself.

Dion sighed. "I
don't have faith in God, man, or myself!"

"We have received
the signal to take off, sir. Please sit back and relax. I am
programmed to handle everything. Is your seat belt properly fastened,
sir? We cannot lift off unless your seat belt—"

"It's fastened,
damn it! You're handling everything? Just what the hell do I get to
do?" Dion shouted.

"Hell? Repeat the
command, sir. That is not in my files. Repeat the command, sir."

A horrid front of
dreadful length and dazzling arms . . .

John Milton,
Paradise
Lost

"General Dixter!
You look terrible, sir, begging the general's pardon. Can I get you
something?"