The
Ship Avenged The
Ship Avenged
Prologue Belazir t'Marid, War Lord
of the Kolnar, Clan Father after Chalku, gazed at the row of crystal vials in their rack,
admiring the amber liquid within them. With a lover's tenderness he stroked one jet-black
finger across them, reveling in their cool, smooth surfaces.
"Perfect," he murmured, holding
the rack up to the light.
His face was no longer an ancient Greek's
vision of masculine beauty colored the depthless onyx of a starless night. The quick aging
of Kolnar had seamed and scored it, until the starved hunger of the soul within showed
through the flesh. The brass-yellow eyes looked down on the vials with a benevolent
affection he showed no human being.
Then he smiled, teeth even and white and
hard, and laughed. His fist squeezed shut, as if it held a throat.
His son fought not to shiver at the sound
of that laugh. There was hatred in it, and an overtone of madness. It made the narrow
confines of the bio-storage chamber seem constricting--an odd sensation to one born and
raised in the strait confines of spaceships and vacuum habitats. Life-support kept the air
pure and varied only enough to simulate Kolnar's usual range of temperatures, from
freezing to just below the boiling point of water. Yet now it felt clammy and oppressive .
. .
"Not perfect," Karak's voice
rasped across his father's reverie. "This disease does not kill. I call that far from
perfect. Clan Father," he added, when Belazir turned to glare at his oldest living
son.
The elder Kolnar allowed himself an
exasperated hiss; it was entirely natural for a boy to plot his father's death, but also
for his father to strike first if it became too obvious. And the boy's resentment and
dislike were, if anything, obvious.
At times, he wondered about Karak's
paternity, for the boy had no subtlety. But the face that looked defiantly back at him
might have been his own, some years ago. Once, he too had that youthful swagger, the
crackling vitality that sparkled though the lean, panther- muscled body and the vanity
that showed in silver ornaments woven into waist-length silver-white hair.
"Child," he said with deceptive
gentleness. Karak stiffened. Belazir enjoyed the reaction, and the reaction to reaction.
Let the heir realize the old eagle still had claws.
"It pleases me to enlighten you as to
why this is a punishment that most admirably fits the crime. Central Worlds, and the
damnable Bethelite scum, created The Great Plague to eradicate the Divine Seed of
Kolnar." He paused and raised one eyebrow, as if to inquire, Is this not so?
Karak nodded once, resentfully. "And we shall repay that evil by inflicting upon them
a disease that will not simply destroy, but will terrify and humiliate them."
Reluctantly he placed the rack of vials
back on its shelf and closed the cooler door. Then he turned to his son:
"Is it enough for you that they
should merely die?" he asked in mild astonishment. Karak frowned, but did not answer.
"True, it does not kill. What it does is far worse, and the Bethelites shall
appreciate that, where you cannot." Belazir laughed, a low chuckle full of gloating
pleasure. "It will be a living nightmare to those few not afflicted.
"As you lack imagination, Karak, let
me tell you what will happen." Belazir made a sweeping motion with his arm, as though
activating a holo-display. "Once the scumvermin realize the magnitude of the threat
they face, first, they will call upon their god, as they did when we took Bethel in our
fist. And when he does not answer them, some will say that they deserve their fate; a view
that we, of course, share. But not all of them will lie down and wait to rot. No."
Belazir ground his teeth, remembering one
Bethelite in particular who had refused to lie down.
"So. They will next call upon their
allies, the mighty Central Worlds, for aid." He spread his hands. "But there is
no cure! Oh, a few paltry doses of one," he jerked his head dismissively, "but
they are in our possession. Their champions will have no choice but to quarantine their
miserable little planet. The all-powerful Fleet of would-be saviors from Central Worlds
will watch helplessly from orbit while the pleas for help from below slowly fade away, as
thousands starve and the so-moral Bethelites turn to preying upon each other to survive.
They will watch until Bethel's civilization falls and the last of them dies--and no human
foot will ever walk upon that accursed planet again!"
Belazir wiped the spittle from his lips
and studied his son's impassive face with growing impatience.
"Think, my son! Our revenge shall
have symmetry." Belazir made a fluid gesture with his hand, "subtlety."
"Your love of subtlety,"
Karak said bitterly, "has already cost the clan dear."
True. After their disastrous rout from the
Space Station Simeon-900-C, what the Central Worlds Navy hadn't destroyed, the Great
Plague did. From the Navy they could run or hide, but they brought The Plague with them to
every gathering of Kolnar-in-space, to all of the exiles from homeworld.
Also, as was their custom, for the
strengthening of their seed, they had exposed the children to it. Virtually an entire
generation, with their caretakers, died. The adult population had been reduced by three
quarters. Only now was their natural fecundity increasing their numbers once more.
The Plague had been created by minions of
the beauteous Channa Hap, station master of the SSS-900-C and by the "brain", Simeon,
the station's true ruler, whom she served.
And by the Bethelites. The damnable
should-have-been-crushed Bethelites who had lured them to the Central Worlds station and
their doom.
Belazir's hubris had allowed him to
believe he held their hearts in his fist. He was so sure he'd terrorized them into
believing their safety was guaranteed--if they followed every Kolnari order to the
letter.
He should have broken Channa Hap's spirit,
broken all of their spirits, he knew. But he'd so enjoyed the cat and mouse game they were
playing.
Belazir sighed. This was hindsight. He
couldn't have known about The Plague. Even his Sire, Chalku, would not have anticipated a
sickness that could afflict the mighty Kolnar. Had not the Divine Seed shrugged off
diseases that annihilated whole populations of scumvermin? All that does not kill us,
makes us stronger, Belazir told himself. But this had come close to killing them all,
very close. Almost as close as homeworld had come to killing all the exiled Terrans who
were the first ancestors of the Divine Seed.
Yet some survived to breed, he
reminded himself. Survived, to become the superior race and made a home of a planet their
persecutors had thought would kill them all. The Clan had escaped Kolnar too; escaped into
space for endless revenge and conquest.
He glanced at his scowling son. Belazir
understood the boy's bitterness. Do I not feel it myself, ten-fold?
"My mistake was not in being
subtle," he said to Karak. "It was in not being subtle enough."