In utter darkness, flesh met flesh, sharply and without compromise.
“This is for our Facilities Director! This is for our Assistant Facilities Director!”
His Imperial worship, whom Nubry had expected to bellow and roar and give orders, just stayed bent over the arm of his chair, whimpering and crying for someone he called “Mimavax”.
“Whatever that is,” she informed him, “It’s not here and you can’t have it. And this…is for the Director of the Mail Room!”
“Your Worship!” called a voice muffled by the closed door. “Can you hear us? Are you all right?”
Nubry dealt the imperial bottom another swat. “And this is for anyone I left out!” She turned away from the whimpering emperor and stared in the direction she thought the door might be.
“Mimavax! Mimavax!” sobbed her prisoer.
Nubty felt a little sorry for him, pining for his Mimavax, whatever that might be. She shook herself. For all she knew, a Mimavax could be an especially nasty torture device that would be here right now if the power hadn’t shut down. She stepped back, still testing her legs: at times they still didn’t feel as if they were completely hers. Joints, toes, and ankles tingled in an unpleasant manner. No way pf knowing whether this energy boost was temporary or not, but there was no way that everything which had been done to her knees and hips could have healed.
“The override pass is not opening the door Your Worship,” said the voice from the other side of the door. “We’ll have to cut through. If Your Worship can hear us and pleases to do so, it would be better to move away from the door.”
Nubry’s mouth twisted to one side. Then she dropped to her knees, hoping the knees would withstand this, and started to grope along the floor. Her clothes had been cut apart by vicious little blades, but she was sure there were shreds big enough to cover her. She would NOT wear anything of His Imperial Majesty’s. Bad enough she’d had to touch his pants to pull them down.
She heard a hiss on her left, and a shuffle and whimper on her right. “You stay right where you are or you know what you’ll get,” she ordered. She had a good mind to push his chair right over next to the door. But she wasn’t positive where the door was, and positive the chair would not move for anyone until the power was restored.
She heard a tiny whisper, mechanical and not organic. Sucking in a breath, she pushed up and out. Her hands found the thick puffy buttocks, and shoved hard. The owner fell on his Imperial head. At the same moment, the forecefield on the chair sizzled back to full power, bathing the control room in a flickering blue light.
“Deputy! The saw’s losing power, sir! The Imperial Chair must be sapping it!”
“Your Worship! If some of the functions of Your Worship’s chair could be shut down, we could cut though more quickly!”
No one could do anything with the Imperial Chair. The forcefield sealed it off from Nubry and its usual occupant alike. Nubry sat back and sucked a finger she hadn’t jerked away from the forecfield quite soon enough. She looked over to the sobbing heap of Emperor.
“Oh, shut up,” she informed it. “I just saved your life. Don’t tell anybody, okay?”
Her main fear had been that he would sit back down in the chair and start pressing buttons on the console when the power came to it, but being in here with two halves of burnt Imperial Worship would not have been pleasant, either. His auxiliary control panel was not far from her, the Imperial bulk having knocked it to the floor when he went over the arm. He showed no signs of claiming this, so she grabbed it up.
“No no!” cried the Emperor, throwing his hands over his head and pulling his knees farther under him.
Nubry looked from the quivering rump before her to the giant egg-shaped prisoner she had occupied while His Imperial Worship sat in the Imperial Chair. “How do you work this thing?” she demanded. Dassie has said to take it along, and she could see His Imperial Worship couldn’t be allowed to play with it any more.
“They’ll cut through the door. Then you’ll be sorry!”
She let her eyes drift across the controls. She should remember some of them. These on the bottom row altered the copies: these had not lit up. And she knew this big bright one very well. She kept her hands away from it.
This left only a double row of blue levers, a yellow lever, and a shining silver switch. She tried the switch.
Blue cuffs, scattered around her on the floor, leapt into the air. Nubry nearly dropped the console, sure these would come after her. Instead, they lined up in perfect order to form a solid blue column. The two halves of the big egg came upright, and then wrapped themselves around this column, closing afterward to form a large unmarked egg.
She nodded. That must be the power button. The blue levers likely maneuvered the matching cuffs. So this yellow lever must move the egg.
She looked around the room. Move it where?
There seemed to be only one door, which now showed a red stain in the middle. That made no sense. There had to be an emergency exit for any room where an Emperor would be spending time, especially THIS Emperor. None of the monitors around the room was turned on, so she could ask, and she had no cards like Bott’s.
Looking around the room showed the scraps of her uniform. “If you had to buy clothes,” she informed the wiggling bottom beyond the chair, “You’d be more careful with them.” The buttocks clenched, and quivered.
Nubry tried to reach for some fragments of clothing. “Ack!” As she slid in a pool of her own sweat, one leg twisted behind her and the other smacked the Imperial chair shin-first.
“Ohhhh.” The shock went through her entire body, bringing a memory to each muscle and joint of what it had been subjected to. This flash of pain was brief but told her the stamina she’d received when all those copies were reabsorbed into her was not going to last. If she was going to get out of this box by herself, it had to be soon.
Pulling herself up on her elbows, she saw it. Logical, really, that she hadn’t thought of that door. Even though she’d been through it dozens of times, she had not actually been through it yet.
She pressed a hand against the trap door. It gave way. So did one of her shoulders.
“Is Your Worship all right? We’re nearly through. I hope the air isn’t too hot.”
Nibry sat up and swung her legs over the edge, keeping her bottom firmly on solid floor. A black emptiness awaited her. Vague memories crowded in, saying this was a long tunnel with hundreds of trap doors to drop you into the maze. The pictures in her head were fuzzy, faint copy memories from the copies of herself. But none of them had gone through any of those before they were sucked back into the room and their original source.
There had to be something else. Escaping through the maze was not an inviting proposition. Bott was there, of course. But how would she find him?
She caught up some of the shreds of her clothes but just twisted them between her hands. And if she did find him, how could she convince hi she was the original?
“We can’t make it through at this level of power, sir. We should send for the Imperial….”
“Keep on with it, Burvitt.”
She knotted a couple of rags together and threw them around herself. And if she could convince him she was real, would he kill her anyhow? The transcription monitor had probably been lying, but those Klamathans might have better plans. And there were three of them, and only one of her.
This was as clothed as she was going to get, and likely it would all fall off the moment she moved anyhow. She took up the controls again. She needed to learn how to move that big horrible egg right now. She drew the yellow lever down.
The big copy machine did not move. Nubry licked her lips and pressed harder, but then shook her head. The egg was sitting on the floor: it couldn’t move down any farther. Ashe pushed the lever the other direction. With a hum, the egg rose about a foot into the air.
“Losing more power, sir!”
“It isn’t supposed to be easy, Burvitt.”
Nubry moved the lever up and down, left and right, confirming what the controls did and draining more power from whatever they were using. She was in no rush to drop into the unknown on infirm legs, and she had a feeling she was forgetting something.
She glanced at the trembling Emperor. Was that it? Yes, it was! She really ought to do something truly dreadful to him before she left. A brief flurry of swats was hardly full payment for the way he had turned her inside-out and eft her feeling squished like a weevil under an unabridged dictionary.
Rising, she stepped toward him. She stepped back.
She couldn’t think of anything.
Thin red lines were radiating away from the hot red stain on the door. She shifted the lever to position the egg close to the trap door. It was just about time to go.
She wished Bott was here. A pirate could think of something practical and dramatic, something painful and memorable. Very difficult to have to think up an atrocity all on your own, with no experience…on the giving side.
The library held numerous books with horrible pictures, pictures of what tyrants did to people and what people did to tyrants in return. Meanness, cruelty, and joy in destruction filled page after page in some histories. There ought to be something….
She crawled over to the Emperor. Reaching down, she put a hand on each side of the pudgy, clammy head and turned it toward her. Terrified eyes made her pause, but remembering those eyes and how they shone while she writhed and twisted in the blue cuffs made things easier. Her own eyes were cold. Her chin hardened.
“You,” she informed His Imperial Worship, “Are really, really, really very groteskew.”
Then, dropping his head, she snatched up the control module and jumped for the trap door. A red sliver of the other door fell hissing into the control room.
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