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She must have weighed three hundred pounds, and she put it all behind the next
effort, kicking then grabbing the pipe, planting her feet on the ceiling and
arching with all her strength. The pipe split along the scratches. She fell
with it to the floor, and hot air began to hiss out. She held her hands, her
face to it, nearly wrapped herself around it, sat on her knees and let it blow
across her. Miles crouched down and stripped off his socks and flopped them
over the warm pipe to dry. Now would be a good opportunity to run, if only
there was anywhere to run to. But he was reluctant to let his prey out of his
sight. His prey? He considered the incalculable value of her left calf muscle,
as she sat on the rock and buried her face in her knees.
They didn't tell me she wept.
He pulled out his regulation handkerchief, an archaic square of cloth. He'd
never understood the rationale for the idiotic handkerchief, except, perhaps,
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that where soldiers went there would be weeping. He handed it to her. "Here.
Mop your eyes with this."
She took it, and blew her big flat nose in it, and made to hand it back.
"Keep it," Miles said. "Uh . . . what do they call you, I wonder."
"Nine," she growled. Not hostile; it was just the way her strained voice came
out of that big throat. ". . . What do they call you?"
Good God, a complete sentence. Miles blinked. "Admiral Miles Naismith." He
arranged himself cross-legged.
She looked up, transfixed. "A soldier? A real officer?" And then more
doubtfully, as if seeing him in detail for the first time, "You?"
Miles cleared his throat firmly. "Quite real. A bit down on my luck just at
the moment," he admitted.
"Me, too," she said glumly, and sniffed. "I don't know how long I've been here
in this basement, but that was my first drink."
"Three days, I think," said Miles. "Have they not, ah, given you any food,
either?"
"No." She frowned; the effect, with the fangs, was quite overpowering. "This
is worse than anything they did to me in the lab, and I thought that was bad."
It's not what you don't know that'll hurt you, the old saying went. It's what
you do know that isn't so. Miles thought of his map cube; Miles looked at
Nine. Miles pictured himself taking this entire mission's carefully-worked-out
strategy plan delicately between thumb and forefinger and flushing it down a
waste-disposal unit. The ductwork in the ceiling niggled at his imagination.
Nine would never fit through it. . . .
She clawed her wild hair away from her face and stared at him with renewed
fierceness. Her eyes were a strange light hazel, adding to the wolfish effect.
"What are you really doing here? Is this another test?"
"No, this is real life." Miles's lips twitched. "I, ah, made a mistake."
"Guess I did too," she said, lowering her head.
Miles pulled at his lip and studied her through narrowed eyes. "What sort of
life have you had, I wonder?" he mused, half to himself.
She answered literally. "I lived with hired fosterers till I was eight. Like
the clones do. Then I started to get big and clumsy and break things they
brought me to live at the lab after that. It was all right, I was warm and had
plenty to eat."
"They can't have simplified you too much if they seriously intended you to be
a soldier. I wonder what your IQ is?"
"A hundred and thirty-five."
Miles fought off stunned paralysis. "I . . . see. Did you ever get . . . any
training?"
She shrugged. "I took a lot of tests. They were . . . OK. Except for the
aggression experiments. I don't like electric shocks." She brooded a moment.
"I don't like experimental psychologists, either. They lie a lot." Her
shoulders slumped. "Anyway, I failed. We all failed."
"How can they know if you failed if you never had any proper training?" Miles
said scornfully. "Soldiering entails some of the most complex, cooperative
learned behavior ever invented I've been studying strategy and tactics for
years, and I don't know half yet. It's all up here." He pressed his hands
urgently to his head.
She looked across at him sharply. "If that's so," she turned her huge hands
over, staring at them, "then why did they do this to me?"
Miles stopped short. His throat was strangely dry. So, admirals lie too.
Sometimes, even to themselves. After an unsettled pause he asked, "Did you
never think of breaking open a water pipe?"
"You're punished, for breaking things. Or I was. Maybe not you, you're human."
"Did you ever think of escaping, breaking out? It's a soldier's duty, when
captured by the enemy, to escape. Survive, escape, sabotage, in that order."
"Enemy?" She looked upward at the whole weight of House Ryoval pressing
overhead. "Who are my friends?"
"Ah. Yes. There is that . . . point." And where would an eight-foot-tall
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genetic cocktail with fangs run to? He took a deep breath. No question what
his next move must be. Duty, expediency, survival, all compelled it. "Your
friends are closer than you think. Why do you think I came here?" Why,
indeed?
She shot him a silent, puzzled frown.
"I came for you. I'd heard of you. I'm . . . recruiting. Or I was. Things went
wrong, and now I'm escaping. But if you came with me, you could join the
Dendarii Mercenaries. A top outfit always looking for a few good men, or
whatever. I have this master-sergeant who . . . who needs a recruit like you."
Too true. Sergeant Dyeb was infamous for his sour attitude about women
soldiers, insisting that they were too soft. Any female recruit who survived
his course came out with her aggression highly developed. Miles pictured Dyeb
being dangled by his toes from a height of about eight feet. . . . He
controlled his runaway imagination in favor of concentration on the present
crisis. Nine was looking . . . unimpressed.
"Very funny," she said coldly, making Miles wonder for a wild moment if she'd
been equipped with the telepathy complex no, she pre-dated that "but I'm not
even human. Or hadn't you heard?" [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]