Power Play - Anne McCaffrey [44]
Dinah O’Neill clicked her fingers at Marmion, who still held the hypospray and the codeine vial. Marmion handed them over.
“So?” Marmion asked the privateer in a deeply significant tone. “Now what?”
“Can you walk, Colonel?” Dinah asked, peering down at Yana.
“If a walk means we can settle this nonsense sooner, I’ll make it.”
“Ever the valiant colonel,” Dinah replied, dimpling at her. “I do admire your resolution and intrepidity.”
“Thanks,” Yana said, exhaling wearily. That coughing had taken a lot out of her, but she mustn’t indicate just how much.
“Good. Then Megenda, the first mate, will escort you to the captain’s cabin. I have other duties to attend.”
“Macci?” Marmion asked, hopeful of an answer.
“Now, that would be telling, wouldn’t it?” Dinah said, mildly reproving, and went off. The doctor of astronomy followed her, and then a larger figure loomed in the hatch opening.
First Mate Megenda was a tall, muscular black man who probably had ended up a pirate-privateer because he looked the part so completely. One eye was a cyber-implant that was only slightly less grotesque than an eyepatch. He had cut the sleeves out of his orange coverall and wore a striped jersey beneath it and a flowered red bandanna around his shaven skull. Really, Yana thought, grasping at any diversion, the man had been watching far too many swashbuckling holovids.
He gestured peremptorily for them to follow him, and an equally large and threatening-looking fellow, olive-green rather than black, fell in behind Diego, who was last to leave their prison. Yana managed another swig of the linctus—just the act of getting up made the tickle return to her throat—and then they were led through corridor after endless corridor, past supply locks and repair bays and what looked like weapons rooms and cybersleep facilities, storage bay after storage bay. Some of them, Yana could have sworn, they passed by more than once. They walked until her feet hurt and her cough was ceaseless, but still their captors led them on through more corridors. The captain evidently controlled business on the ship via remote most of the time, because the captain’s quarters certainly appeared to be hard to reach. Most of the commands that didn’t come via computer were probably relayed by the O’Neill woman and the first mate.
But the captain made the first mate look normal. The chamber into which Megenda led them was theatrical in the extreme, resembling an opulent captain’s chamber from an ancient sailing vessel, with swags of rich material, hard-copy navigational charts, antique compasses and sextants and things that would be of very little use in space, plus a computer console and a few other contemporary touches disguised in what appeared to be real wooden settings.
Behind a large carved desk, the top of which was an immense star chart, sat the infamous Onidi Louchard. Yana had wondered what this pirate chieftain would be like. She’d heard that Louchard was a woman. Hard to tell. To the world, the captain appeared as an Aurelian—a six-armed, vaguely humanoid creature with a craw full of fangs that would have stretched from ear to ear had the creature had ears, and an optical slit that circled its entire cranial prominence. This was a holocover. Even if the wavy aura weren’t discernible, which it was, though only slightly, an Aurelian, even an Aurelian pirate—an unlikely occupation for a peaceful sea-dweller with a language similar to that of Earth’s aquatic mammals—even an Aurelian who could live outside its normal environment would have no conceivable use for the gadgetry displayed in that room.
Also, this particular Aurelian dry-environment-dwelling pirate spoke pretty good English, through some sort of distorting device.
“I had no idea you had a sense of humor, Louchard,” Yana stopped coughing long enough to say.
“Enough. You will record