One salvo stilled the drives. But too late. The Outsider was in a groove that would take it into atmosphere in thirty-eight hours.
WarAvocat XXVIII Fretensis ordered the attackers to concentrate on shield generators. When permanent gaps appeared, he began recovering his secondaries.
XXVIII Fretensis began laying in all the fire it could, including 100cm axial clusters at 12,000mps capable of penetrating to the Outsider’s Core — if it had one.
On the Outsider’s far side, which had suffered little damage, attackers began opening a path for boarding parties already on the move.
The invaders found nothing alive. In the few hours they had they learned very little. They collected biological and technical samples and got out in time for XXVIII Fretensis to pound the hulk into fragments unlikely to be large enough to do damage when they reached the planet’s surface.
As the Guardship turned toward the Web, M. Meddinia station broke communications silence with a laconic, “Thank you, Guardship.”
The only Guardship casualties were two bruised and embarrassed pilots whose interceptors had collided during a race to be first through a gap in the Outsider’s screen.
— 40 —
Jo slammed into the suite. She was in a grim mood. Vadja had the monitor. Degas and AnyKaat watched over his shoulders. Jo demanded, “Any sign of the krekelen?”
“Not a whiff,” AnyKaat replied.
“What’s going on?”
Vadja said, “We’ve maybe got a breakthrough, Sergeant. Course, I only hear the Commander’s end. But it sounds like they’re talking.”
“Good. About damned time.”
“Something eating you, Sergeant?”
“I just spent a watch poking around on the bridge. Making a pain of myself. It wasn’t Timmerbach’s turn to be on but he showed up ten minutes after I did. Looked like he dragged out of his rack in a panic. Worked his butt off trying to keep me from poking in the wrong places. But I still saw enough to know he stuck it to us when he skipped that strand. Him and Cholot are up to something. They think they’re going to hand us the dirty end. Wish he’d hurry up.”
“Want me to buzz him?”
“Don’t bother. Time won’t matter. I just want to break some bones.”
Degas asked, “Did you get into the system deep enough to cull those biomass figures?” He was convinced that the krekelen had killed somebody and assumed his identity. Haget rejected the notion. Jo was drifting toward Degas’s viewpoint.
Degas headed for the door. “I’m going to the galley. That thing has to eat.”
Jo looked at AnyKaat, who said, “Instead of looking for the man, he looks for his footprints. Like checking with cooks and stewards on what meals went out when and where.”
Vadja leaned back. “The Commander has had enough. He’s working on his graceful exit.”
Jo leaned past him. Haget was by-the-booking it out the door.
“Way to go, Commander!” Vadja enthused. “Look at there. He broke away clean.”
Jo rested a hand on Vadja’s shoulder. “How’s your arm, Era?”
“Hurts bad enough. I don’t think it’s going to fall off.”
Macho bastards were all alike, male or female. She had talked the same damned way. Was it just soldiers’ territory? A defense mechanism that kicked in when you were vulnerable?
Haget shoved into the suite, flopped into a chair. “Jo. Can I impose on you?”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
“Ask a steward for an analgesic, some soda water, and whatever that liquor was you were swilling the other night.”
“Headache?”
“Low grade. Nerves. It would have become a killer if I’d stayed down there.”
“You got through?”
“Sort of. It’s decided to cooperate. Sort of. Its thinking right into your head isn’t as convenient as it sounds. It hurts.”
AnyKaat called the stewards while Jo listened.
Haget said, “It’s ground gained. Maybe we’ll manage some back-and-forth now.”
“Did you get anything?”
“Only that it’s real anxious to get back to V. Rothica 4. It claims one of its own is marooned there, a child, that it overlooked when the Traveler was there.”
“If it missed this kid when it was there, how come it knows now?”
“There’s where communications break down. Maybe it couldn’t explain. Maybe I just didn’t understand. But it’s positive and it can’t figure out why we won’t jigger the clockwork of the universe to help. Hell with it. I don’t want to think about it. Answer the door.”
The steward had come. He looked at them warily, the way Jo had come to expect. The STASIS people said law enforcement people faced that daily. Jo did not like it.
Haget asked, “Something bothering you?”
She told him about her visit to the bridge.
“Give me fifteen minutes. Then I’ll choke Timmerbach till he tells us what’s happening.”
“Might do better with Cholot. Little sweater like the Chief, he isn’t going to spit without orders.”
“Uhm. Check the infocomm. See if you can access any Web data. See about this strand Timmerbach wants to pick up.”
Jo did that. Timmerbach and Cholot, the twits, were slapstick comics at conspiracy. They had not locked inferential data out of the system.
“Commander, the second system down that strand is L. Caelovica 3, known locally as Karihn. Main city is Cholot Mogadore. Three stations. Only one handles Web traffic. Not much, but the only settled system on the strand. I’d guess only Cholot ships go there.”
“That’s enough. It ties the knot tight. We’ll give them some slack and see how they hang themselves.”
— 41 —
There were few occasions when the crews of Guardships came in contact. WarAvocat had come face to face with XII Fulminata crew only twice. He had not been impressed. They suffered from an excess of arrogance and presumption of superiority.
Still, there was a trap in that end space and there was no reason to suspect that it had not been put together with care. This might be the time the villains had what it would take. Wouldn’t hurt to go in with more than one Guardship.
“You think too much, Strate,” he muttered. “Don’t think, act.”
The tramp of many feet echoed through the corridors of Starbase. VII Gemina was warming every body and turning everyone loose, to have most of their expectations disappointed.
This was not the Starbase of old. This Starbase was a ghost artifact, empty corridors echoing only to phantom memories of the bustle that had been.
Today it was all automation, machines pursuing ancient programmes, overseen by the ghosts of ghosts, carrying on without human clutter.
There were six completed replacement Guardships in the construction channel and a dozen more being completed at a leisurely pace. They amounted to a macro-exemplar of the process by which slain soldiers were replaced. If a Guardship was lost, a replacement would be impressed with data left during its last visit to Starbase.
VII Gemina began updating its file when it broke off the Web. That would continue throughout its stay. All crew would register a current personal file.
VII Gemina might be destroyed, but there would always be a VII Gemina.
Those who created the fleet had faced a problem as old as idealism: how to keep the fire burning. Children reject the dreams of their parents, and grandchildren hold them in contempt.
Their answer was to preserve the founding generation.
A whisper from behind told Strate his time was no longer his own.
He did not hurry. They could not start without him. And they would be irked with him anyway, having to deal with a Dictat-WarAvocat who was one of the living.
He was less than a minute late. The stir had hardly settled.
Was there any real point to this formalization? A face-to-face only highlighted the ways in which Guardships had evolved independently.
VII Gemin
a had turned out a parade: soldiers, gunners, Twist Masters, pilots, ridership crews, OpsCrew and ServCrew. XII Fulminata had sent a minimum of live crew, a few passionless senior officers to attend the six Immortals who ruled the Guardship.
The formalities were to be conducted over a circular table at the center of a parade hall. That table was surrounded by equipment that would allow XII Fulminata’s Immortals and VII Gemina’s Deified to participate. XII Fulminata’s delegation had not activated their images.
They waited till WarAvocat seated himself because in their universe the living snapped to attention in the presence of Immortals.
Hanaver Strate did not. “Ready? To remain in character you’ll have a list of trivial complaints to demonstrate your superiority. Let’s get them out of the way so we can get on with the job.”
Thalygos Mundt winced. But Kole Marmigus looked at his opposite number and chuckled. WarAvocat XII Fulminata Delka Stareicha fixed Strate with his best cold stare. “You want us to break off into this end space first.” He had turned up the chill on his voice box.
“You claimed the right by seniority. I happily yield the honors to so illustrious...”
“You think we’ll go in there, take a beating, and look bad.”
“Whoever goes in first stands a chance of hitting a firestorm. Whoever put out the bait believed he could take a Guardship. If you don’t think XII Fulminata can handle it, you can run backup.”
Stareicha was caught.
“You invited yourself, WarAvocat. If you want to play games meant to validate XII Fulminata’s superiority, I’d as soon VII Gemina undertook the operation alone. Since neither first in nor second pleases you, why don’t you return to routine patrol?”
Kole Marmigus chuckled again.
Prune-mouthed, Stareicha observed, “It must be getting near time to elect Dictats. Very well. XII Fulminata claims first honors.”
History in the making. Formalities held for no better reason than so they could be recorded for posterity.
The shimmer behind Strate’s shoulder murmured. Stareicha got a thoughful look.
Another Guardship was coming in. XXVIII Fretensis. It brought news of an Outsider attack upon the Closed System M. Meddinia. The creatures responsible sounded like the methane breather aboard Glorious Spent. Curious.
Had VII Gemina stumbled into one grand skein of schemes, or two? There had been nothing to connect the krekelen to the aliens aboard that Traveler, but now there was a connection between those two.
Their races appeared to be at war.
That was not permitted in Canon space.
The brass of that attack outraged Hanaver Strate’s sense of the natural order.
— 42 —
Lupo could not shake a ballooning pessimism. He tried to study intelligence abstracts but his mind refused to focus.
Simon Tregesser cruised up. He was subdued, too. “I heard you had something.” He had not recovered from finding his refuge destroyed by a berserk Outsider.
“We’ve had sightings of two more Guardships headed in to Starbase. VII Gemina and XXVIII Fretensis.”
“That’s three pretty fast. Any statistical significance?”
“No.”
“Why so glum, then?”
“The unpredictable variables aren’t coming our way often enough to please me.”
“You want to put the Web locaters back, don’t you?”
“If it sours, we lose our investment.”
“And I say that strategy, run to fight another day, is hopeless.”
“But...”
“But you have some right to your argument, Lupo. Put the damned things back.”
“They won’t know they can run. I’ll give them sealed orders to be opened only on receipt of an unlocking code.”
“Good. Have you made plans to get us out, too? With your usual devotion to detail?”
“Yes.”
“It’s the waiting. Relax. Go play with a woman.”
“Yes.”
“Can you say anything else?”
“Yes. But it’d be on a subject you don’t want to talk about. You have to consider bypassing Valerena.”
“It isn’t done, Lupo.”
“The House will suffer.”
Tregesser made burbling, grumbling, contrary noises.
“She is a Tregesser. But she comes up short on perspective, Simon. She has no sense of timing. She’s lacking in the intangibles. She can’t hang on to loyalties.”
“If she’s feeble, she won’t last. That’s the way it’s done.”
“Blessed will take it away from her. But at what cost? Suppose we catch a Guardship. You want to imagine Valerena having her own Guardship?”
“We grab a Guardship, Valerena won’t get her hands on it. Get me one. You’ll have no worries.”
“You’ll give it to Blessed?”
“The hell I will. I’ll give it to me. I’ll succeed myself. You can make me a new damned Other, a healthy one, and I’ll move into it when you do the personality impression.”
“That’s an interesting idea. If you can get away with it.”
“Why shouldn’t I?” Tregesser did not notice Provik saying “you” instead of “we,” though he replied with “I” instead of “we.”
“No clone has ever been anything but an artifact, except Valerena. But officially only you and I know about Valerena.”
“Be the same thing, Lupo.”
“Hardly. How the hell would you hide Simon Tregesser suddenly turning up with a healthy body? The Directors would claim it wasn’t you. They’d say it was some scheme of mine to take over the House. Hell, it’s been tried before. Somebody works a deal with Banat-Marath and Troqwai and gives it a shot, and everybody cheers him for giving Death the slip, then they show him the door to the nearest DownTown. There’s too much wealth and power at stake.”
“Crap.”
“Human nature, Simon. It don’t work. It’s the iron law. They’ll let you cheat death once if you’re at the top but the price is you have to start over at the bottom. As an artifact.”
“Bah! Crap, I say! Watch me! You’re my man, aren’t you? If we can flout the law and human nature and historical inertia to put together that mass of firepower out there, we can get around the Directors. Can’t we?”
“No doubt.” Lupo Provik maintained the neutrality of billet steel. He was Simon Tregesser’s man, worthy of the trust he had been given, but his loyalty had been subscribed in the certainty that Simon Tregesser was not immortal.
“Hey! The more I think about it, the more I like it.” Big mad peal of the old Simon Tregesser hilarity. “I’m going to get on it. Something to while away the hours. Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Immortality. Wouldn’t that be a bitch!”
A screaming bitch, Lupo thought as Simon zipped away, roaring and treating his aides and allies with complete disregard. A bitch so big he would have to reexamine his commitments and undertakings if Simon pursued it.
Not that he objected to immortality per se. It was good enough for Lupo Provik.
— 43 —
Midnight told Turtle, “You’d better come. She might be coming out of it.”
Turtle secured the infocomm. “That’s good news.” Gemina had not been letting him at much. For instance, he could access nothing about Kez Maefele.
He followed Midnight to Amber Soul’s stateroom. “You haven’t been spending much time with WarAvocat.”
“He’s busy figuring out how to kill people.” Her tone was peevish.
Turtle suspected some of those people needed killing. They had loosed the beast of blood when they had sent that krekelen on its mission.
Amber Soul did seem changed. The air around her had lost that charge of pain it had carried so long. She no longer looked human, only humanoid, in the shape she had worn most often in Merod Schene DownTown.
He began with a gentle examination, aware that Gemina monitored his every twitch and breath. He did not try misdirection.
“This might be a good t
ime to get some nourishment down her.”
The door snapped open. Four humorless ConCom security types tramped in. A junior officer looked around with the cold eye of the jackboot breed. Turtle accepted it with bland indifference.
They needed the fear, his type. They fed upon it. “You’re to come with us.”
“Fine.”
“Get that onto the stretcher and let’s move out.”
Turtle glanced over his shoulder. Nobody there. “You talking to me?”
“Who the hell else would I be talking to?”
Turtle shrugged. “I’m not crew. I don’t do crew’s work. Gemina wants her moved, Gemina can move her.” Something was wrong here.
“You’ll do what I tell you,”
“Or you’ll put a bug down my shirt? I know you wouldn’t be dumb enough to get physical with a Ku warrior.”
The color left the officer’s face. Odd response. Humans got red and puffy when they were angry.
One of the others whispered to the officer, who barked, “I know that, dammit! You and Blaylo get the thing on the stretcher.”
The security men designated activated the stretcher’s grav unit, moved Amber Soul aboard, set her floating into the corridor. They bothered guiding her only when the stretcher drifted near a bulkhead. Turtle remained close behind, keeping Midnight near. One security man ranged ahead, scouting. Another fell back to rearguard. The officer was nervous.
Midnight kept tossing Turtle questioning glances he ignored. But finally he asked, “Up to something sneaky, subaltern? Slipping through all these deserted passages. Who are you trying to put one over on?”
“Just keep moving.”
“You can sneak but you can’t hide. Gemina is watching.”
The bearer’s shoulder flinched. That had stung.
The officer snapped, “Close the mouth, Ku. Or we will give the obsolete warrior a field test.”
Turtle turned, took the man’s cap before he could blink, shifted hands, put it back. “You’re right. I’m slowing down.”
The act was satisfying but not worth the scorn he got from Midnight.
They mostly went down, past the armored bulk of the Core, always through the kinds of passageways Turtle haunted when he wandered. The final passageway led to an exit lock.