The Holocaust Piano
by Phaedra7veils
Chapter 10: Tumbling Back to Amoi
Hilarion thought quickly. Nothing could be done to spare Merc from imminent arrest and whoever had the power to carve a path through this crowd was almost upon them now. Many of the onlookers who had poured out of the many luxury Elite craft docked in the Von Colony Imperial Spaceport firstly to gape at the fire, had drawn around them in a circle after the Federation envoy was shot. It was a stupid thing to gather around a man holding a live weapon, a man who had just shot another person, but when the Sapphire looked around, he could see that they simply had no other place to go; it was that crowded. He supposed it was because most of them were Jupiter's Elite, altered and trained not to react emotionally, that they hadn't panicked and caused a stampede. The Sapphire's breath felt laboured and tight in the thick of them, although it could just be the smoke and dry heat which sucked all the vitality out of the air. So while every eye was focused on the smuggler, he abandoned him. He elbowed his way through, slipped back down the ladder and drew Hahna out of the other spotlight of Hazall's corpse.
The Admiral's protests were cut off with a wave of slender fingers and, as he briskly marched her away, he muttered. "Hazall's dead and Merc will soon be arrested and brought in for interrogation, if he makes it to interrogation."
The odds of a suspicious accident happening while Merc was in custody were higher than most. The unfairness of it choked him. One of the worst-kept secrets in the senior tiers of Elite was that the neatly stitched murder of Hazall and disposal of his assassin, subject to no further questioning or investigation, would benefit his many enemies, vast quantities of whom numbered amongst the Elite and lesser citizens, Amoian and Federal alike. Hilarion suddenly noticed sharp pains in his palms and discovered that his fingernails had bitten through skin.
"We cannot just leave him," Hahna vibrated with distress.
Her reaction baffled the Sapphire. She scarcely knew them. How was it possible for that obnoxious, leathery smuggler to have won so much of her concern in so short a time? He was just a Mongrel, a business acquaintance; nobody in Tanagura would twitch so much as an eyelid if he died, whereas the Kressellians were infamous for ruthlessness. Their raids featured lightning-quick surprise strikes and bloody battles with no survivors; this presumed a certain sangfroid laissez-allez toward death on the part of its marshals. How could such an emotional person be a leader of men? — Especially such men?
It was just as well that Amoi and its colonies were so removed from the rest of the Glan system. Offworlders simply did not understand how things worked on their planet.
"I realize that this is difficult, but the one thing I cannot fail is to deliver you and the Pianoforte interface to the Leader of the Tanaguran Syndicate. Only after that is accomplished can I provide Merc with assistance. Do you understand?"
As he led her toward the glow of the burning Imperial Syndicate Ship, Hilarion could sense the strength and flexibility rippling beneath her supple arm, the martial skills revealed in the carriage of weight distributed through her body. Combat wasn't his specialty, but he'd had some experience during his training at the Elite Academy where it was, both, a required study and skill to maintain his position in the student ranks, one in which he fared poorly. Plus he'd seen her in action. Had he been a Mongrel, she could probably overcome him with ease and, even as an Elite, he would be hard-pressed. The key to keeping that notorious Kressellian brutality at bay lay in winning her sympathy and cooperation.
"Our world depends upon it."
He should've kept his mouth shut.
"He's your friend!"
"No. He merely offered the use of his spaceship for this mission. I accepted. Apart from that, we share nothing."
Hilarion suddenly remembered their room at Kalga 19, and Raoul's command that they work together. He decided it was too late, too futile to explain. He hadn't really wanted to leave the smuggler's side. He just didn't dare risk being separated from the Admiral. He didn't dare risk that the local constabulary would detain them, or keep them from fulfilling their mission. Too much depended upon her and her tiny black cube.
He pursed his lips in stubborn resolve as they clattered past berth after berth of luxury spacecraft. The port seemed unusually full. Packed. Overflowing with ships, in fact.
Hahna was unimpressed. "You haven't met my terms yet, Sapphire."
"I was just about to get to those. As I mentioned before, I cannot comply because I have no training as a biotechnician. I can't even tell you if Tanagura Kalga has the ability or technology to manage it."
She came to a dead-stop, yanking her elbow out of his fingers, fixing him with a glare.
"But I know someone who does, although I suspect it was his transport that was targeted in the explosion we just witnessed."
"Is he even alive then?"
"That remains to be seen."
"Fyss, you shady bastard, if this is a trap, so help me–!"
Hilarion sighed as he gestured for her to follow him. So help her? He and Merc were the ones who could use some help, not to mention their planet, little as it deserved salvation. He wondered if it wouldn't be better just to remain on the Von Colony and let Amoi whimper off to its sorry end. A lot of other Elite seemed to have had the same idea, he considered, understanding for the first time why the spaceport was packed to the scalp.
The sight that met him when they arrived at the burning ship left him hopeless. The First Blondie's Car, Paviter, held a wildly struggling Katze pinned to the dock. It appeared that the ex-Furniture would've leapt straight into the flames. He shouted Raoul's name over and over with so much emotion that Hilarion found himself shivering with disgust bred from the Elite Academy where such unrestrained devotion was held to be appropriate only in Pets. Small wonder the people to whom Katze belonged were called Mongrels. Yet he was also gripped by the sight. The illicit nature of all that untethered emotion made it seductive. Had there been a time when he enjoyed that sort of energy release? It seemed as though his body held the memory of it.
Yet Katze seemed to have gone mad with grief. To Hilarion, it appeared he had collapsed this explosion with the one that happened several years before at the abandoned Dana Bahn mining complex. He babbled about Hilarion's friend, Iason Mink, as though the assassination of the late Leader of the Tanaguran Syndicate was somehow connected to Raoul's death, or possibly even to the Dana Bahn explosion itself. He kept crying out about someone named Riki and how Iason's death would be in vain. Iason! Didn't he mean Raoul? Or had he collapsed the two Blondies together as well? Even though it seemed natural to the Sapphire that someone from Ceres should worship Elite at the level of the Blondies, it was a shameful and embarrassing display nonetheless, not to mention bewildering. What purpose would it serve Raoul or anyone else if Katze died? Hilarion had no further time to dwell on it though; once he listened past Katze's outburst, he caught the Car's attempts to bring him back to reason.
"You're not listening, Katze... There's no proof Raoul was in that ship when it exploded... We can't assume he's dead... Even if he is, there wouldn't be a thing you could do for him now... You must pull yourself together."
Hilarion stepped forward, with Hahna in tow. Paviter and Katze stopped emoting, stopped fighting, and watched the newcomers in silence.
"Are you saying that Lord Am was not on the ship when it exploded?" Hilarion asked Paviter.
Paviter's face twisted with uncertainty. He gave a helpless shrug. "I said we don't know. He wasn't when we left it."
"If he's still alive, then why hasn't he let us know?" Katze's voice was hoarse. Apart from the scar, his face was streaked with carbon from the smoke, tears, and what appeared to be traces of makeup. His body was limp with fatigue, Hilarion assumed, from the struggle with Paviter and the recent days of stress alike, enough to take its toll on the most hardened man. "Why hasn't he responded to our calls?"
"He may not be able to, Katze," the Car replied gently. "He might be in the company of people he doesn't want to eavesdrop... He might be in the midst of something critical..."
"You're talking about the Leader of the Tanaguran Syndicate?" Hahna abruptly broke into the conversation. The stubborn set to her jaw warned them into silence.
"The biotechnician whom I mentioned," Hilarion finally replied with a small bow. Sparks erupted from the craft behind him, like a cloud of red-gold fireflies sailing into the heavens. Against his blue hair, they reflected a neon shade of violet, unearthly and primeval, like clouds in a sunset. When his face was cloaked in shadow, none of his scars could be seen, only the sculptural planes, handsome and symmetrical.
Her eyes narrowed, "Lord Am is a biotechnician?"
"The best in Amoi," Paviter said.
"And the only one with the authority to grant or deny your terms," Hilarion added.
"What does Novaterra want with Amoi?" Katze asked belligerently.
The Admiral ignored him. Her blue eyes were hard upon the Sapphire, "This would've been quite an advantage to you, delivering me straight into his hands."
"He is the man you sought anyway."
"So why you couldn't tell me this before?"
Hilarion's face was as inscrutable as only the Elite could be, "You might've refused–"
She tensed.
"–even if it was not in your advantage to do so."
"Says a man who, mere minutes ago, walked away from a comrade in danger of capture–"
So this was about mistrust. Hilarion had lost her confidence the moment he turned from Merc.
Katze and Paviter's heads, which had swiveled between Hilarion and Hahna during this exchange, now turned to face the Sapphire, their disturbance and disbelief over this news clearly marked.
"–or worse."
Paviter lifted off of Katze and helped the calmed man rise to his feet. He brushed the dirt and debris off the old uniform Katze wore and pulled his sunglasses down with the whispered suggestion, "You might want to wear these in case someone who shouldn't recognizes you."
Hilarion wondered briefly who the Car could possibly mean since there couldn't be a more positive form of identification than the huge scar running down the ex-Furniture's cheek.
"Where's Merc?" Katze immediately demanded of him.
Hilarion surveyed him coolly. Had he forgotten to whom he spoke?
"What have you done to my friend?"
"Nothing," a familiar voice broke through their squabble. They started, surprised, then looked over. The smuggler peered at them from behind another Blondie who Katze and Paviter immediately recognized as Florien Von.
"I'm perfectly fine," he shot a poisonous glare at Hilarion, "no thanks to you!"
No one was paying attention. Everyone's eyes were on the Blondie who stood at the front of this group.
"Raoul!" Katze murmured, his face white with relief.
This public affront earned him a blow from Paviter. Although the Car had the decency to look ashamed and apologetic while striking Katze, he also felt compelled to add, "Watch your tongue, Mongrel!"
Again, Raoul dreamt. Again, he was lucid, aware of his subconscious mind as it unfolded before him, although not so much of all its symbolic meanings and permutations.
In his dream, he floated far above Amoi turning slow, lazy circles in space, with just the faintest tug of gravity to propel his motion, without the walls of a space ship to surround and protect him.
Like the planet's gravity, the song, the silvery female chorale which had always led him to every place of purpose in his past dreams, was also so faint that it was almost undetectable.
The susurration of ocean breakers was not. This was quite a mystery for Raoul who couldn't understand how he could hear them so clearly in space when the oceans were confined to the planet's surface, well below even their thin atmosphere.
Then he remembered the phenomenon of the twin moons spinning around each other as they circumnavigated the planet, how that sound appeared in the atmosphere of the Von moon at certain peak intervals during their conjunction.
Haven't you noticed that the tidal patterns are changing? Iason had told him during his last dream. One moon is receding. It's pulling the old waters with it back into space. The other is coming into its ephemeris and, under its gravity, the shape of the world is changing forever. We ride on its first wave.
There was also a message about his formal clothing, the costumes he wore like uniforms to proclaim his status, how he had to discard them in order to ride those waves himself. This obviously meant more than mere physical clothing. Raoul had taken it to mean all the ritualized behaviour, patterns of thought, belief, and conduct, the habitual reactions he had amassed during his privileged life. He had felt fairly confident that his recent decisions reflected his success.
Clearly it wasn't enough if the warning had crept back in the form of omens.
Was Iason's message a warning to clear off Amoi altogether? To remain on the Von Moon with the other Elite as the world spun to its destruction?
Somehow, Raoul doubted it. It didn't seem to be, although this was only a hunch. If that was dream-Iason's intended meaning, then he was fully prepared to dismiss it, even if the consequences resulted in his own demise. The costs were too great.
He also wondered when it was that the sight of those Elite flying to their ultimate gated community on Von far above the dolor of Amoi had started to disgust him. For what had Eos Tower been but another gated community from which all the unwashed humanity was carefully scoured?
It was in that moment, while all the stars and planets reeled and roiled within his mind along its night journey, the Von colony moon orbited into view on the distant horizon of Amoi, a white ghost, insubstantial and wan. Someone stood upon it.
Admiral Hahna.
In his eyes, she appeared her normal size which, although substantially smaller than him in real life, would've rendered her a colossus within this cosmic scale, to use an entire asteroid as a footstool. There was something oddly sanctified and mythic about her, her white skin, her eyes raised away from Amoi toward the deep black of space, the way she stood so straight and still, in utter tranquility, her hands clasped in front of her as though in prayer, like ancient icons of the Madonna. As he drew closer, Raoul saw that her hands, in fact, were bound and a white cloth covered her mouth, effectively silencing her. The expression in her upraised eyes wasn't piety, but exasperation. She appeared to plead for release.
Compliant, Raoul reached over and pulled off her gag.
In that instant, she lost all the humanity in her eyes. A fearsome cacophony poured from her open mouth, the sound of millions of voices speaking at the same time, all coherence lost in the towering Babel of sound. Her lips continued to part, the opening growing larger and wider until she was lost and all that remained was a gaping maw in which strange Hieronymous Bosch-like ruins stood in blackened silhouette against a backdrop of flames. He recoiled in shock and fear.
The Priestesses! She was one of them, had admitted her own suspicions of it freely while they prepared to leave the Von Colony, begged him to restore her memories so she could know for sure. More than just a priestess, Raoul realized, she was their Trojan horse. Their typhoid Mary. Unwitting or not, she poured out their nightmare creations upon Amoi, turning it into an inferno, a hellworld.
Fool! A million voices merged into one deafening, synchronized roar. This is your hellworld, your very own nightmare. It was created from your own will. Blind man! Machine man! Don't blame us for your imperfections.
Raoul looked down at his body to discover it had changed. Without his knowledge and against his will, he had been transformed into one of Jupiter's very own Apheliotrophs, a Deus ex Machina. He could feel the nanites advance upon his brain, feel them steadily consume all extraneous flesh, steadily remove the control of his body from his will. Yet they left his consciousness simultaneously aware, forever trapped and held by the machine, unable to change anything, but aware of constant excruciation where nerve endings and cells were spliced with cold, hard metal.
Was this a dream? Or was he actually waking up to an unspeakable reality he and Amoi shared with those who once populated the lost moon of Thallë? Had they been caught in the same fate-webs? These were the last thoughts he had before millions of random voices whispered, murmured, shouted, hissed, and howled, and intoned altogether all at once trillions upon trillions of disconnected thoughts, until he started to sink into madness under their weight, their density, their constriction.
With a shout of agony, he awoke.
It was the most amazing stroke of good fortune that the Blondie shouted when he did.
If he hadn't, Admiral Hahna wouldn't have started in shock. This meant she wouldn't have accidentally tugged so sharply on the steering column causing it to veer off their flight path. This meant they would've been in the trajectory for a direct hit when the Tenebrian Wasp fired its cannons at them, and that would've destroyed them instantly.
It took less than a second for the young woman to adjust to the adrenaline-induced blare of her heightened senses, past the thumping of her own heart and the increased flow of blood roaring through the arteries near her ears. She rolled the Corvette over to the side as the blasts from the enemy ship swept black space in striations of blinding yellow, then spun it stern to bow to return fire with lightning speed.
"What the fuck is going on?" She heard the Blondie's giant guard... chauffeur... gorilla shout from his seat at the co-pilot's controls.
"Didn't you hear the news? There are people out to kill us!" Hahna answered with a laugh. "Look sharp to starboard."
"Holy Jupiter! They must've sent an entire squadron after us," Paviter finally pulled himself together enough to squeeze off a few bolts from his own gun, before the ship's pilot skittered out of the path of another onslaught, flinging his head around as though they were riding the wildest roller-coaster in the galaxy.
"No, there's only five or six." She hit one with a penetrating charge, and punched the air as the Wasp's thorax section imploded, crumpling its frontal controls and abdominal weapons section into each other.
"Make that five. They underestimated me!"
For all her bravado, the Admiral had a difficult time dodging the other craft. She spun and somersaulted the craft to and fro, up and down with alacrity and skill, managing to avoid the worst fire, but there was no denying it was like a proverbial turkey-shoot. Energy percussed around them, emitted waves and flaring lights in a steady onslaught. They were badly shaken.
One advantage in their favour was that the enemy swarm formation was in its gravest danger from friendly fire as they attempted to hem in the Corvette, to trap it between their cannons. Still, she grit her teeth, kept the grin on her face — even if it was a decidedly sanguinary grin — and the eerie, scary light in her eyes.
By holding off by a breath on a sudden veer, Hahna managed to knock off two enemy ships that intended to broadside her and ended up catching each other in the crossfire. This brought the total count of enemy vessels down to three.
So it continued for another twenty minutes, as the Admiral maneuvered her ship like an acrobat. They cartwheeled, spiraled, and danced through space, around satellites and massive chunks of derelict space garbage, as the planet's gravitational pull tugged on them more powerfully or dissipated like cobwebs trying to cling to an eagle.
Paviter was awestruck by her reflexes and intuition, so quick, so sure. Yet he hadn't been able to line up a shot once and felt frustration and nervousness grow as their enemies' volleys continued to round on them, as they continually broke and re-set their formation. It was only a matter of time before she grew tired or miscalculated, before the intensity of her concentration was distracted, before they grew lucky, or the—PHOOMP!
Paviter blinked. He managed to hit one. That was unexpected.
The Car straightened his spine and started firing off some more random bolts. Even if the fight was still two to one, he was starting to like how these odds were shaping up. Maybe he would get lucky again.
"Don't get — smugging — fuck us — the blow up!" The Admiral shouted incoherently between grunts of effort and expelled gasps of air.
"What?" Paviter gaped at her, confused.
They twisted backwards, then dropped beneath one of the Tenebrian Wasps' bowsprit cannon just before it fired.
He caught a glimpse of Raoul seated at the commlink, then stared at him in surprise as Tanagura's leader calmly transmitted distress calls.
For an instant, he wondered at how Raoul managed to negotiate his way there from his own Soma chamber as the ship spun, heaved and dipped so unpredictably. He snapped back to his senses with the recollection that he had no time to wonder about such things.
That was when they were hit.
Those days are over.
Katze shook off his escort four miles from the Imperial Spaceport and followed the trail back.
"Berth 16NG2xx-3dxxx, got it?" Merc had muttered in his ear — his other ear, the one without the pet ring on it, thank some-deity-who-wasn't-Jupiter!
"What?" Katze's head bobbed back in surprise. He felt the smuggler press something into his palm, while pretending to slap his shoulder in a consolatory fashion with the other hand, just before the Onyx security contingent stepped forward and snapped restraints over his wrists and hauled him away.
Katze had looked down and saw the passkey to Merc's spaceship. Shit, no! He couldn't remembered all those different numbers and letters; he didn't have that fine-tuned a memory.
The day when I stand by quietly while someone drags a skewer across my face just because he's bigger and stronger have passed.
Raoul had ordered him to stay behind on the Von Colony with Hilarion Fyss.
He hadn't ordered Fyss to stay behind, Katze noticed, seething. No, the Sapphire had volunteered, claimed it was so he could help out with Merc's legal defense in some sort of atonement for having ditched him back at the murder scene. So he claimed.
Right! — As though Florien Von was going to let anything happen to the smuggler. Especially after Raoul had reminded him about "the great service" he had performed for them, and others that he might still perform if he continued to heal. Merc would probably end up in a house arrest situation, snugged up in one of the Elite suites at the Pinnacle Hotel, surrounded by opulence, every need fulfilled. Since releasing him would amount to an overt slap in the face to the Federation, one which might lead to war, Raoul hadn't dared let the smuggler go completely free, but by placing him in the custody of the Amoian attaché with special instructions, he managed to do the next best thing.
Raoul had tried fob Katze off with a reason why he didn't want him to accompany the Blondie back to Amoi.
"Civil unrest is escalating and the planet itself is in danger," he had said, as though he didn't want to risk the ex-Furniture's life, as though Katze's safety meant that much to him, as though the fact that Katze no longer looked like a Ruby Elite had nothing to do with it.
Forget that!
He had watched Raoul walk up the gangway with Paviter and that woman Fyss scrounged up, a woman who turned out to be the leader of the Kressellian Raider fleet, pirates with whom he had both tangled and bargained from time to time during his years directing the black market in Midas. It felt like his throat was caving in. His head swam, like being wracked by a high fever. The only way he could hold up was to concentrate on the next breath, and the next breath, and the next breath. He watched them disappear through the hatch of her vessel. He watched the Corvette seal, fire up and fly away. He watched it disappear over the horizon. Then he remembered to exhale.
After it was gone, Hilarion Fyss touched his arm to let him know their limousine was ready to depart. The Sapphire knew which way the wind blew in Amoi. He knew the place was collapsing. He knew that an Elite suite on the Von moon was infinitely safer and quieter than any place in Midas, even though there wasn't a hope or prayer for Von if Amoi was no longer capable of supporting life, the colony depended too heavily on it. Still, if the spoilt Sapphire could spare a little time to help out Merc, or at least visit the old bastard, Katze could forgive him. No one had asked the smuggler to pull the trigger on Hazall.
Knowing that the Onyx would monitor his movements as long as he remained at the port, Katze slid into the limo behind Fyss, as he was told. He lingered as the hovercar pulled into the stream of traffic and made its way down the main urban arteries — no motorcade escort to speed things up this time. After about ten minutes in silence, stuck behind a stoplight, the Sapphire had dozed off. Katze bided his time a bit longer. They inched along for another ten minutes, and then, while the chauffeur was busy craning his head from side to side trying to look around a massive transport vehicle, Katze slipped off his seatbelt, quietly opened the window, and pulled himself out. If he was lucky, they wouldn't notice him missing until they got to the hotel. If he was even luckier, the traffic would slow them down so they wouldn't get to the hotel for another hour.
As he made his through the maze of craft harboured at the Von spaceport, unable to remember the number of Merc's pier, Katze figured his luck had run out. He didn't have a hope in hell of finding the ship in this sea of space-yachts. He passed Rejinan Schooners, Sharffai Cruisers with their biospheric garden domes, sleek little racing Ketches from Ka'an. Then he saw something which made him laugh.
In the midst of these luxury craft glittering with rare alloys, fancy gadgetry and high-tech enhancements, was the sorriest hunk of banged-up, pockmarked, scratched to hell piece of space-trash he had ever laid eyes on. That had to be Merc's ship.
It seemed that Katze's luck was still with him.
Serge Renaud had just received word from the Von Colony moon about the destruction of the Imperial Syndicate space vessel when Raoul's first distress transmission came through. Tanagura was closer to the embattled space ship than the taskforce on Von, yet the brigadiers of Amoi's fleet seemed to be caught in some sort of quandary as to the proper response, no doubt impeded by a completely illogical desire to move that one social rung closer to Jupiter.
Serge shook his head. No matter how many Blondies died, they were never going to be anything other than brigadiers. That was the sole purpose of their manifestation as determined by Jupiter.
He, on the other hand, had no trouble figuring it out. Since Raoul had signed over control of the Port Authority to him, he ignored them and quietly dispatched fighters under their bickering noses to sortie with the Tenebrians. This was why Raoul had promoted him up from traffic control.
By the time the fighters engaged, at the edge of Amoi's atmosphere, where the two remaining Wasps prepared to follow the Kressellian Corvette, the First Blondie's commandeered ship had been hit. The Wasps chose to veer off rather than pursue now that a defense taskforce was at hand.
From the images flashed to Serge over the viewscreen, the Corvette looked like it had sustained a serious blow to one of its wings. It entered the gravitational field too quickly and only the sharpest angle, almost perpendicular to the surface of the planet kept the craft from plunging nose-first in a free fall. Even so, the damaged stabilizer that the Tenebrians clipped on their right tailwing made the long spiral descent rough, wild and far too fast.
The brigadiers were still sorting out how to tell the Syndicate that they had failed to respond to the late First Blondie's distress call, and what excuses they should give, when Serge left the control tower and picked his way over the tarmac.
He didn't even wince when the Corvette bounced twice upon landing. With his genetically enhanced spatial perception, the Platina just knew it would hold together. He didn't bat so much as an eye as it skipped and skidded across the asphalt and the wheels ground to a stop mere inches from him. That same enhancement allowed him to calculate the exact place to stand for maximum safety and efficiency. Nor did he twitch when the tail section fell off with a hollow, echoing crash that seemed to issue from the mouth of a god. A quick perusal while back in the control tower of their intelligence with regards to the construction of Kressellian vessels sufficed to let him know there would be no explosion.
But when the hatch flew open, and the Admiral stepped out, you could've knocked him over with a puff of air.
The Holocaust Piano – chapter 9.2 << >> The Holocaust Piano – chapter 11