Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 09_ Edge of Victory 02_ Rebirth - J. Gregory Keyes [29]
She noted the results in her portable memory-qahsa, then moved on to the next batch of trials. Before she could get a good start, however, her door burred softly, indicating a request for admittance to the shaping quarters. She moved to the villip on the wall and stroked it to life.
The face that appeared was the prefect Ona Shai, commander of the worldship. Her eyebrows had been cut into a series of vertical ridges, and one of her ears had been sacrificed to the gods.
“Prefect Shai,” Nen Yim said. “What can I do for you?”
“I desire admittance, Adept.”
Nen Yim dithered, inwardly. There was no time to hide her work, but then, no one else on the Baanu Miir was likely to comprehend what she was doing, much less recognize it as heresy.
“Please enter, Prefect.”
A moment later the door burred a different tone, and Nen Yim opened it by exposing her wrist to its chemical sensor.
In person, the prefect was not particularly intimidating. Younger even than Nen Yim, she had been born with a slight stoop to her spine. Another degree of angle, and she would have been sent back to the gods at birth. She was habitually excitable and ill controlled, as was evident now.
“Adept,” Ona said.
“Prefect.”
For a moment the prefect stood there blankly, as if she had forgotten why she came. She passed a hand across her face, and her eyes wandered. She seemed almost in shock.
“Something has happened,” she said at last. “It requires your attention.”
“What, Prefect? What has occurred?”
“One-fourth of the population of the Baanu Miir is dead,” the prefect said.
As Nen Yim stepped through the emergency membrane, she felt the vacuum-hardened ooglith cloaker tighten against her body, maintaining the pressure that kept her blood from boiling away into the airless chamber beyond.
The frozen bodies piled three and four deep on the floor hadn’t been wearing cloakers. Nen Yim felt a tightness in her throat that had nothing to do with the hard-shelled variety of gnullith she had inserted there to pass the air from the lungworm coiled on her back.
They had time, she thought. The air went out slowly, at first. They had time to reach this place, where the ship finally thought to seal itself off. Here they died, beating against a membrane they did not have the authority to permeate.
“This is no way to die,” she heard the prefect murmur over the tiny villips that pressed at their throats and ears.
“Death is always to be embraced,” Sakanga, the warrior who completed their triad, reminded her. He was an ancient, almost mummylike man. Like the prefect, he was of the disgraced Domain Shai.
“Of course that is true,” Ona said. “Of course.”
“What happened here, Shaper?” the warrior asked, turning his attention to Nen Yim. “Meteor impact? Infidel attack?” He paused. “Sabotage?”
“It was not possible to tell,” Nen Yim answered. “The rikyam’s understanding was hazy. It is why I wished to come here, to seek evidence. The breach is at the end of this arm, that is all I know. Perhaps when I see it, I can say more.”
“We should have a master on this ship,” the prefect grumbled. “I do not demean you, Adept, but a worldship should have a master shaper on board.”
“I quite agree,” Nen Yim said. “A master is needed.” A master like my own, Mezhan Kwaad, not one of the mumbling dodderers who pass for them, she finished silently.
They moved soundlessly through the carnage. Most of the bodies were slaves and Shamed Ones; in death, vacuum had mutilated them as they could not have been in life. Perhaps the gods would accept their final sacrifice, perhaps not. They were, at least, beyond caring.
The capillary platforms that would normally have taken them down the arm were as dead and frozen as the people who had once used them. The three were forced to descend by the bony spine with its intentionally runglike vertebrae.