In the Empire of Shadow. Lawrence Watt-Evans

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      Prossie hesitated. “Maybe,” she said.

      “Perhaps you can tell me, Mistress Thorpe,” Raven said, “why these men should have chosen to saddle me with a blockhead such as Colonel Carson.”

      Prossie’s mouth opened, and then closed again. Someone snickered.

      Had the time come to admit what she had done, and tell them all the truth?

      “I didn’t snoop…” Prossie began uncertainly. Then she stopped. Her expression wavered for a moment; Raven, who had started to turn away from her to argue further with Carson, saw the colonel’s expression and turned back.

      She had been nervous as Raven and Carson questioned her, but Carrie, who was listening in, had thought the whole affair was thoroughly amusing. Prossie could sense her mental giggling. Carrie could afford to giggle; she was safe at home, not out here in an alien forest.

      But then Raven asked why he had been saddled with Colonel Carson, and Carrie, at first amused by the question, had read what Prossie knew.

      And suddenly she wasn’t giggling, mentally or otherwise. Her amusement had vanished. She sent a feeler out to General Hart, and then to others…

      By now everyone, from all three universes, was staring at the telepath, though several of them were not sure why. Pel, watching, felt a growing tension; for his own part, he had a sense of impending doom.

      But then, he had felt a sense of impending doom for much of the time since Nancy’s death.

      Prossie’s face went oddly blank as Carrie, panicking, pulled her briefly into a full linkage; then her expression returned more or less to normal.

      “What troubles you, lady?” Raven asked.

      Prossie hesitated, trying to think over what she had read herself, and what Carrie had relayed. Trying to decide what to say, when she couldn’t read her listeners’ reactions, was very difficult.

      “It’s a mistake,” she said at last. “General Hart…there’s been a lot of factional fighting about Shadow…there were several plans, and they got confused, what with Major Copley being ill. It should have been Captain Haggerty in command, not Colonel Carson…”

      It was actually worse than that, but Prossie had had a lifetime of not telling everything she knew. She didn’t relay what Carrie had just told her.

      General Hart’s choice of personnel, and entire attitude toward the mission, had been subtly affected by undeservingly trusted subordinates. Prossie had known that Hart had intended to send an officer he wanted to get rid of, but it had actually gone beyond that.

      Colonel Carson had been selected by agents of Shadow as absolutely the worst possible officer for the job.

      “Bull!” Carson shouted.

      For a moment, Prossie thought Carson was replying to her unspoken thought, but then she realized he was simply denying that his appointment was a mistake.

      Prossie felt lost without her mind reading. She knew what everyone wanted; the Earthpeople wanted Elani to send them home, Elani wanted to send them. Raven wanted to take command of the rest and take them to join the underground. Elani and Valadrakul and Stoddard trusted Raven and would support him in whatever he had planned against Shadow.

      Most of the fifteen troopers just wanted to finish whatever the job was and go home; they had no idea of what they had gotten into.

      And Carson wanted to prove that he was a great leader and a true man among men, but since he was not, in fact, either one, he had no idea at all how to accomplish that.

      She knew what they all had wanted, up to the moment they hit the space-warp—but what they intended to do about it, she had no idea. Why hadn’t the Earthpeople taken Elani aside? Amy had been talking to her, but nothing had come of it, so far as Prossie could see.

      Why wasn’t Raven playing along with Carson, as he had with Hart? Didn’t he see that the man was an arrogant fool who could be coaxed into doing anything, so long as he thought it was his own idea? If Raven didn’t see it, what about Valadrakul or Elani?

      Prossie wished she could take Raven aside for a few moments, or Elani, or almost any of them, but instead here she was, trapped between Raven and Carson in the most public manner possible. She regretted, now, that she had taken time to look around and admire the trees.

      “It’s bull, I said,” Carson repeated, and Prossie realized that everyone was looking at her. She stared back at Carson. Even without her telepathy, Prossie could almost feel the hate Carson felt for her.

      “Maybe I misunderstood something,” she said.

      “Nay, lady,” Raven protested, “’twould explain much, if this man was sent in error. ’Tis plain he’s no master of subtlety, and ill-fitted for our task here. What, then, shall I, as a rightful lord, take the charge? What say you all?”

      “I say it’s bloody treason, you barbaric fop!” Carson bellowed. He reached for his sidearm.

      Raven stepped back and reached for his sword-hilt—but he had no sword. The weapon was lost long since, somewhere back in the Galactic Empire. “Valadrakul!” he called.

      Carson’s blaster was out and pointed, and Prossie stared at it in horror.

      Didn’t they know it wouldn’t work here?

      Carson pulled the trigger as Valadrakul raised his hands; the wizard’s fingers twisted strangely as he spoke a word.

      For a moment, Prossie thought the blaster had worked after all, as something flashed, pale and quick as heat lightning, between Carson and Valadrakul. Then she realized that the weapon was pointed at Raven, that the shimmering flare had traveled from the wizard’s upraised hands to Carson’s body.

      For an instant the colonel stood motionless, an expression of astonishment spreading slowly across his features; then it turned to a rictus of pain, and he crumpled to the ground, still holding tight to the useless blaster.

      The sound of his fall into the dead leaves seemed impossibly loud and prolonged. Accustomed to a constant telepathic echo behind every voice, the eternal hum of other minds drowning out the ordinary noises of the inanimate universe, Prossie rarely heard mere sound so clearly, but here, in this telepathically dead environment, there were no distractions. She thought she could almost hear each individual leaf crumbling, each separate impact as first one knee, then the other, then a hand and the blaster and the other hand struck, his belly and finally his face landing in the rustling detritus.

      And when the sound of the impact had faded, she heard a strange arrhythmic chorus of faint clickings. At first she took it for leaves settling, but then she realized it came from the wrong direction.

      She turned, and saw a dozen blasters, drawn and aimed, triggers clicking uselessly against copper contacts. Carson’s men were avenging their fallen commander—or trying to.

      “Men of the Empire!” Raven called, his hands upraised in an orator’s gesture. “Yon usurping fool is dead; drop your arms, an you’d not taste the same!”

      “The hell you say,” someone called.

      “Raven,” СКАЧАТЬ