Court of a Thousand Suns by Allan Cole & Chris Bunch

Author:Allan Cole & Chris Bunch [Cole, Allan & Bunch, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, General
ISBN: 9781434439024
Google: FRD0AAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2011-12-15T21:45:26+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The gurion rushed straight for him, its blood-red stomach brushing across his face, leaving a trail of digestive saliva that burned through the first layer of skin. Dynsman screamed in horror and hurled himself backward. From the corner of his eye he saw the Dru guard plunge a pole into the creature's maw, and then the boat flipped over against the combined weight of the gurion and Dynsman's panicked attempt to escape. He clawed his way to the bottom. He was in total hysteria, breath bursting out of his lungs, yet too frightened to surface. Blindly, he grabbed hold of a razor-sharp outcrop and felt the edges bite deeply into his hands. Despite the pain, he held on as long as he could. He could feel the awful roil of the water and taste the rusty sweetness of blood. Something hard touched him and Dynsman screamed again, losing the little hold he had over his sanity. Water rushed into his lungs and he battled his way to the surface. A huge whoosh of air knifed in, and Dynsman saw the guardsman closing on him, gore dripping from a slim flash of silver in his hand. Dynsman struck out at the man in a panic. In slow motion the knife hand reached toward him. Dynsman was helpless, and watched in awful fascination as the knife slid into a mouth beneath the arm, and then the hand shadowed past his head. There was a sudden heavy pressure between his shoulder blades and neck, and Dynsman felt himself... dying... dying... dying... His body flopped against its restraints on the table. A huge flipper appeared and just barely touched the slide-pot, and soothing sedative trickled into his veins. Dynsman's body went very still again. Rykor's face was a portrait of odobenus-contemplation. She woofed at her dripping whiskers and then daintily brushed them aside with a front flipper. Rykor sighed and leaned back into her gravchair. The bot mechanism shrilled in complaint as it tried to adjust itself to her enormous bulk. "It's difficult, young Sten," she said. "The man keeps replaying the same memory patterns." Rykor was one of the Empire's chief psychologists, specializing in the Imperial military. Her subspecialty, never publicly mentioned, was screening people for the Guard's Mercury Corps--intelligence--and for the secret Mantis teams. She also handled the occasional special project, such as Dynsman's in-progress brainscan. But Dynsman's brain was locked in trauma and insisted on rerunning the moments of his near-death. Sten glanced at the helpless bomber, almost obscene in his nakedness, dripping with a myriad of probes and intersyn connects. He had seen Dynsman relive the moments a dozen times, and so far nothing went past the gurion attack. Even the moment when he came awake on the flit was a ghostly instant that flashed back again and again to the terrible moment of the gurion. Sten rose and walked to Rykor's side. She reached out an affectionate flipper and gently caressed him. "You were always one of my... special people," she said softly.

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