Where am I? he thought, looking around with crusted eyes. The drilling rig had suddenly disappeared, and then the alien had come floating up and—
“Hrrrg,” he said, staggering erect. “Hrrrgg.”
Blood leaked through scabs on his tongue and pain lanced through his mouth. Bite, he realized. I bit myself. Cold wetness in the seat and legs of his flightsuit; he realized that he must have lost bowel and bladder control. Somehow that was not shameful; it was a fact, just as the distant crystal clarity of the alien bridge was a fact, like things seen through the wrong end of Mutti’s antique optical telescope. He could taste the brass smell of it.
Nobody else was stirring. Some of the humans looked dead, very dead, slumped in their chairs with tongues lolling and blood leaking from their noses and ears. Some of the aliens, too.
“Master!” he cried blurrily, spitting out blood.
The squat greenish form was slumped in its chair, the helmet half-off the bullet dome of its head. He tried to walk forward, and fell himself. The skin of his face and thighs tingled as the blue pseudolife of the floor cleansed them. He waited while the kaleidoscope shards of reality fell into place around him again; the inside of his head felt more raw than his tongue. Once in a skirmish he had been trapped in a wrecked singleship, with his arm caught between two collapsed struts. When the rescuers cut him free, the pain of blood pouring into the dry flesh had been worse than the first shock of the wound itself. He could feel thought running through sections of his consciousness that had been shut down for weeks, and he wept tears of pain as he had never wept in action.
Certainty, he thought. Never have I known certainty before. “Mutti,” he whispered. Mother, in the tongue of truth and love. English was common, Belter. Father spoke English, and Mutti had married him when the kzin chased her away from the home he had never seen. Mother was certainty, but he, he could never be certain. Never do enough. Love might be withheld. Markham screamed with the terror of it, colder than space. Worse than death.
“I will be strong, Mutti,” he whispered, through blood and tears and mucus that the floor drank. “Stronger than Father.” Rage bit him, as he remembered tall slim beautiful Mutti stiffening at the touch of hated grubby commoner hands. You must be all mine, myn sohn, the voice whispered in a child’s ear. Prove yourself worthy of the blood. The tears flowed faster.
I am not worthy. My blood is corrupt, weak. I fear in battle. No matter how much I purge weakness, treason, their faces come back to me, I wake in the night and see them bleeding as we put them out the airlocks Mutti, hilfe me.
His eyes opened again, and he saw his hand. The shock broke reality apart again; it was a skeleton’s hand, a starved yellow claw-hand. He touched himself, feeling the hoop of ribs, and then hunger struck his belly, doubling him over.
“Master,” he whispered. Master would make it right. With Master there was no weakness, no doubt, no uncertainty. With Master he was strong. A keening escaped him as he remembered the crystalline absoluteness of the Power in his mind. “Don’t leave me, Master!”
Markham crawled, digging his fingers into the yielding surface until his hand touched the cable of the amplifier helmet. He jerked, and it tumbled down; he drew himself erect by the command chair, put a hand to the thrint’s face to check. The bunched tendrils by the mouth shot out and gripped his hand, like twenty wire worms, and he jerked it back before they could draw it into the round expanding maw and the wet needles of the teeth.
“Survival,” he muttered. The Master’s race was fit to survive and dominate. Overman . . . is demigod, he remembered. No more struggle; the Power proved whose Will must conquer.
Now he could stand. Some of the others were stirring. With slow care he walked back to his seat, watching the screens. Analysis flowed effortlessly through his head; the enemy vessels had made parking trajectories . . . and Catskinner was accelerating away . . . Brief rage flickered and died, there was nothing that could be done about that now. He sat, and called up the self-destruct sequences.
“Tightbeam to all Free Wunderland Space Navy units, task force Zarathustra,” he wheezed, his throat hurt, as if he had screamed it raw. “Maintain . . . present positions. Any . . . shift will be treated as mutiny. Admiral . . . Ulf Reichstein-Markham . . . out.”
He keyed it to repeat, then tapped the channel to the von Seekt, his fast courier. Adelman was a reliable type, and a good disciplinarian. The communicator screen blanked, then came alive with the holo image of the other man: a gaunt skull-like face, staring at him with dull-eyed lack of interest. A thread of saliva dangled from one lip.
“Hauptman Adelman!” Markham barked, swallowing blood from his tongue. I must get to an autodoc, he reminded himself. Then, with a trace of puzzlement: Why has none been transferred to the Ruling Mind? No matter, later. “Adelman!”
The dull blue eyes blinked, and expression returned to the muscles of his face. Jerkily, as if by fits and starts, like a ‘cast message with too much noise in the signal.
“Gottdamn,” Adelman whispered. “Ulf, what’s been . . .” he looked around, at the areas of the courier’s life-bubble beyond the pickup’s range. “Myn Gott, Ulf! Smythe is dead! Where—? What—?” He looked up at Markham, and blanched.
“Adelman,” Markham said firmly. “Listen to me.” A degree of alertness.
“Zum befehl, Admiral!”
“Good man,” Markham replied firmly. “Adelman, you will find sealed orders in your security file under code Ubermensch. You understand?”
“Jahwol.”
“Adelman, you have had a great shock. But everything is now under control. Remember that, under control. We now have access to technology which will make it an easy matter to sweep aside the kzinti, but we must have those parts listed in the file. You must make a minimum-time transit to Tiamat, and return here. Let nothing delay you. You . . . you will probably note symptoms of psychological disorientation, delusions, false memories. Ignore them. Concentrate on your mission.”
The other man wiped his chin with the back of his hand. “Understood, Admiral,” he said.
Markham blanked the screen, putting a hand to his head. Now he must decide what to do next. Pain lanced behind his eyes; decision was harder than analysis. Scrabbling, he pulled the portable input board from his waistbelt. He would have to program a deadman switch to the self-destruct circuits. Control must be maintained until the Master awoke; he could feel that the others would be difficult. Only I truly understand, he realized. It was a lonely and terrible burden, but he had the strength for it. The Master had filled him with strength. At all costs, the Master must be guarded until he recovered.
Freeing the Ruling Mind is taking too long, he decided. Why had the Master ordered a complete uncovering of the hull? Inefficient . . . We must free some of the weapons systems first, he thought. Transfer some others to the human-built ships. Establish a proper defensive perimeter.
He looked over at the Master where he lay leaking brown from his mouth in the chair. The single eye was still covered by the vertical slit of a closed lid. Suddenly Markham felt the weight of his sidearm in his hand, pointing at the thrint. With a scream of horror, he thrust it back into the holster and slammed the offending hand into the unyielding surface of the screen, again and again. The pain was sweet as justice.
My weakness, he told himself. My father’s weak subman blood. I must be on my guard.
Work. Work was the cure. He looked up to establish the trajectory of the renegade Catskinner, saw that it was heading in-system towards Wunderland.
Treachery, he mused. “But do not be concerned, Master,” he muttered. His own reflection looked back at him from the inactive sections of the board; the gleam of purpose in his eyes straightened his back with pride. “Ulf Reichstein-Markham will never betray you.”
Chapter 15
“Here’s looking at you, kid,” Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann said, raising the drinking-bulb.
Home free, he thought, taking a suck on the maivin; the wine filled his mouth with the scent of flowers, an odor of violets. Ingrid was across the little cubicle in the cleanser unit, half visible through the fogged glass as the sprays played over her body. Absurd luxury, this private stateroom on the liner to Tiamat, but Claude’s fake identities had included plenty of valuata. Not to mention the considerable fortune in low-mass goods in the hold, bought with the proceeds of selling Harold’s Terran Bar.