The Empire of Glass - Andy Lane [87]
"What is your name?" Albrellian said. "About this will hear Braxiatel."
"My name is Szaratak," the alien replied, and spat on the ground between Albrellian's front pair of claws. "Do what you will -
Braxiatel is nothing to us. He has served his purpose. We don't need him any more."
Vicki felt a pang of sadness. She had liked Irving Braxiatel. He had believed that what he was doing might actually help, and now it was going to come crashing down in flames around his ears. Poor man.
"Purpose?" Albrellian reeled backwards. "What purpose?"
Vicki reached out and patted his shell. "Mr Braxiatel brought all the envoys together, didn't he?" she asked, directing her comments more at the Jamarians than at the Greld envoy. "And he persuaded them to leave all their ships unguarded on the moon as a gesture of good faith. Their heavily armed ships, ready to be taken apart for their secrets." Something suddenly occurred to her, and she turned to the Jamarian. "It was you that tried to kill Galileo, wasn't it? He was the only person capable of seeing that you were going to and from the moon. Braxiatel just tried to stop him from seeing anything, but you tried to kill him."
Albrellian was silent for a moment. "Very clever have been they,"
he said finally in a very quiet, very flat voice. "Badly underestimated them did we, and that is not something often do the Greld. Too paranoid they were, thought we, too psychotic ever to amount to anything in the universe. Scrabbling around in their play-pit of a planet, them watched we, no two of them ever agreeing with each other for long enough to form an alliance, and at them laughed did we. It was not even worth selling them weapons, knew we, because nothing to offer us apart from their obsessive fascination with detail and their amusingly vicious natures had they. When using them to arrange this Convention Braxiatel was heard we, that he'd stopped them squabbling for long enough to get them to do anything amazed were we."
" Psychotic? " Szaratak screamed, its little red eyes glinting with madness. "I'll show you psychotic!" Dipping its head until its rapier-like horn was pointed directly at Albrellian's palps, it lunged straight at the arthropod envoy.
As Vicki stepped back out of the way and into the lee of the huge zeus plug, the, other Jamarians started cheering and clapping.
Szaratak's thin legs propelled it at Albrellian so fast that the sound of its feet hitting the deck was a continuous rattle and the air whistled past the sharp point of its horn.
And when Szaratak was about to plunge its horn deep into Albrellian's mouth, the Greld reached out with his second set of claws and calmly snipped the Jamarian's knob-like head off. The Jamarian dropped to the floor, spouting blood from the stump of its neck.
"Quick!" Albrellian yelled to Vicki as the shell of his back folded open and two massive fans of leathery skin burst forth. "To the skiff run!" The last thing she saw as she turned away and ran for the flattened disc behind them was Albrellian buffeting the Jamarians with mighty strokes of his wings. Light streamed from the open doorway of the skiff, its welcome glow pulling her on like a magnet. Her feet echoed like gunshots against the metal deck.
From behind her she could hear what sounded like a pavement being thrashed with a lot of sticks but which must have been the Jamarians jabbing at Albrellian's hard shell with their horns as he ran. Time seemed to break into fragments which whirled confusingly around her in no particular order, and she couldn't tell whether she was running, safe or dead.
And then a nightmarishly thin figure reached out of the shadows of a fighter ship and wrapped its bony fingers around her head. She screamed, and the sound seemed to go on for ever, echoing throughout eternity. Nothing was real but the insane glint in the Jamarian's eye, and the way its muscles moved like eels beneath its warty skin, and the gut-wrenching stench of its breath emerging