She was having trouble breathing, gobbling air in gulps. Her suit cautioned her against hyperventilation.
She exploded in one of those goofy laughs that had become her father’s trademark. She understood that now, too. It bled the tension.
She glanced at her Others. Buttoned up the way they were, she could read nothing.
Eyes to the screen. Still nothing from the Guardship. It was not showing lights. Wait. To the left there, just above her line of approach. A bay door had opened.
That was message enough.
She laughed again before forcing trembling hands to make course adjustments and switch on forward lights. A fighter nest. She made out a dozen pursuit ships. Like the Guardship, they looked neglected.
Nothing but ominous shadows moved in there.
She eased the shuttle in, rotated it to face outward. Like she really expected she could make a quick getaway. The bay door closed. Fifteen centimeters of armor, proof against any weapon the shuttle carried.
No Tregesser had come this close. In this she had outshone Simon already. “Just the beginning,” she promised herself. “Grab it by the horns and ride it.”
Shuttle said no atmosphere was being released into the bay. She swallowed a big dry egg.
No turning back.
One of the Others cycled the personnel hatch.
“Better take hand torches,” someone suggested. Not only was there no air, there was no light.
“Right.” Take charge. Do something. “Full kit. In case the whole dammed thing is this way.”
She had asked Lupo to brief her. He had given her a big nothing.
He divided Guardships into four kinds: Normal (thirteen units), Strange (four units, including I Primagenia and XII Fulminata), Weird and Deadly (three units, II Victrix, IX Furia, IV Trajana), and Insufficient Data (all the rest, including VI Adjutrix). Based on its current behavior, he suspected VI Adjutrix was Weird and Deadly.
And she had jumped right down the dragon’s gullet. Like some silly sacrificial virgin.
Personnel egress from the bay was sealed but not locked. The corridor beyond was empty of air and light too. Surface paint was cracked, chipped, peeling. There was dust everywhere.
“Is it deserted?”
“Somebody shot at our drones.”
“Somebody opened that bay.”
And closed it again, too.
Valerena took the lead.
Hours passed. Nothing changed. Was it all for show? A test to nervous destruction?
Maybe. She was riding the edge of getting spooked. They came to a huge hall. It was dark but there was a trace of atmosphere. “We’ll break here. Feed ourselves.”
Valerena swallowed a mouthful of liquified slop. Four hours already.
“Hey!”
“What?”
“I saw something. Over by that display.”
Six lights beamed that way. Valerena examined the instrument pack she carried.
“There!”
“I didn’t see anything.”
“I saw it, but I don’t believe it. He was naked.”
“Put the weapons away,” Valerena cautioned. “Sit tight. See what happens.” The pack said there was somebody out there.
The watcher hung around the edge of the light, shy as a fairy. Valerena glimpsed him once. A young him. He wore no protection against cold and vacuum.
Fed, rested, less rattled despite the improbable observer, Valerena said, “Let’s catch him.”
Ten minutes later, she knew they were being watched more closely than was possible for one pair of eyes. She could not surround him. She was being led. That imp stayed right there at the edge of the light.... She let the chase continue because he was the only contact they had made. Impossible as he was.
He left bare footprints in the dust.
Valerena saw the boy slip through a hatchway a hundred meters ahead. “I’m ready for another break.”
Someone said, “I feel like I’m caught in a fairy tale.”
The adventure became more unreal by the minute.
Valerena stepped through the hatchway — into intense light, acceptable warmth, decent atmosphere. The place appeared to be a battle command center. “Spread out and squat. This is the place.” A minute later, “This is getting too weird. Did I have some damn fool reason for coming here?”
Time passed. Some of the Others cracked their suits. The boy flitted, watching. He grew more bold. But not much.
“The hell with this shit. I’m crapping out. Long as we’re all right don’t wake me up.”
— 70 —
Turtle glanced up as Midnight bustled in. “What is it?”
“We’re going to Tregesser Prime. A Voyager just came for Blessed. He’s taking us with him.”
He just looked at her.
“Aren’t you excited?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
He had explained his moral quandry. She understood but was not worried. He was Turtle, and Turtle did not hurt people.
He wished he had faith in himself. Temptation and rationalization had him back-against-the-wall. “Have you seen Amber Soul?”
“Yes. She wasn’t excited, either.”
“I’d better pack if I’m going traveling.”
It worked. Midnight said, “Oh! Me too!” and fluttered out.
Turtle did no packing. He had none to do. He settled back to ponder an odd question Blessed had asked recently. Had he ever heard of a stardrive, overdrive, hyperdrive, whatever, that ignored the Web?
He had. But in no context suggesting such a thing was possible. It was the intellectual toy of fantacists who carped against the restraints imposed by the Web.
Turtle had asked why.
“Curiosity. My hobby is trying to figure out where the human race came from. It didn’t evolve on any of the worlds it occupies today. It didn’t migrate into Canon space on the Web. Its first contact with the Web came a thousand years before Canon’s founding, when the Go visited M. Vilbrantia in the Octohedron. All eight systems there had been occupied for several thousand years before that.
“Pity about the Go,” Blessed had said.
In its first millennium on the Web, humanity fought eighteen wars with its benefactors. There was no need for a nineteenth. The Guardships came onto the stage of the Web in triumph complete and absolute.
Blessed scowled at Nyo. “Let the bastards grumble. I don’t move till everything is set. I want nothing left for Provik’s scavengers or the Guardships. Cable.”
“Yes?”
“What’s the data situation? They haven’t come back, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t get something. Did they?”
“I don’t think so. I can’t find a hole that would’ve caught their attention.”
“What’re you doing now?”
“Trying to figure out how to get our guests into Tregesser Horata.”
“Anybody going to get suspicious if I turn up with an artifact for a playmate?”
“No.”
“There’s one covered.”
“Artifacts come and go. Ku warriors don’t.”
“It’s your competence. Where’s Tina, Nyo?”
“Fussing around trying to get everything on the lighter.”
“And I’ve got everything loaded but live baggage,” a voice said from Nyo’s wrist. “Will you come on?”
Blessed glanced around. “I always feel like I’m forgetting something.”
Nyo grunted. Cable did not say anything till they were on the launch platform. And that was something Blessed did not want to hear. “We’ll have to bring Provik in on this eventually. There’s no way around it.”
“That means handing the whole damned thing over.”
“He’ll have somebody on the Voyager. He’ll have somebody around us every minute. There won’t be any way to hide the Ku.”
The first person Blessed saw aboard the Voyager was that woman who had been Provik’s companion that last day in the Pylon.
&nb
sp; She smiled her enigmatic smile.
— 71 —
N. Etoartsia 3. Tregesser Hyxalag High City. Myth Worgemuth sneered. He had seen DownTowns that pleased him more.
The High City was bedecked with special effects. It was some damned holiday he did not understand and had no intention of understanding, though he was hosting a gala for Tregesser Hyxalag’s cream.
Be barely better than scum in Tregesser Horata, he told himself, and kept smiling.
He looked out at the High City, sneered again, glanced at his guests. The locals ignored him. He could slide out for a dip without anyone noticing.
He slipped.
He was dipping from a jar of Jane — the finest True Blue — when he realized he was not alone. A figure in black moved toward him. “Who the hell are you?” The figure unnerved him. He backed toward the doorway.
“Go ahead and snort, Myth.”
“Valerena? What’re you doing here?”
“Take it, Myth.”
He looked down the half-meter barrel of a hairsplitter. Its compressed sodium bullet could cook his brain beyond hope of reclamation.
He snorted a dip. The euphoria started immediately.
“Do one on the other side.”
Voice frightened but growing languorous, he protested, “That would put me out of it.”
“Do it, Myth.”
He did it. He had no choice, did he?
Two minutes later he needed help standing. The woman in black helped. She led him to the rail of the balcony, where he could support himself. She dropped his jar of Jane. A fortune spilled across the balcony. He did not notice.
“Goodbye, Myth.” She squatted, lifted his ankles, flipped him over the rail.
He giggled for a while, having fun flying. Then he stopped doing anything at all forever.
— 72 —
The Trajana ghost bustled around WarAvocat, babbling, straining his patience. But he was learning more than he wanted to know about phantom phantoms.
The ghost never did catch on.
He found no breech in the closure of IV Trajana’s Core. Trajana, having subsumed its crew into a single character, had become neurotic and lonely but not diseased. The Core tissue remained safely sterile.
— 73 —
Valerena wakened certain something was wrong. She rolled over. The boy jumped up and tore away.
The Others were sleeping. Some had shed their suits. The boy had been squatting over one with an impressive erection.
Valerena laughed through a dry throat. She had a handle on him.
She needed a drink.
As she took a long draught off her canteen tube, she noticed the time.
Two days gone? A night in Elf Hill for sure. No wonder she felt awful.
But they had not been harmed. She supposed they had been studied, but how and why was not evident.
She ate. She drank. She did not waken the Others. She watched the boy, who had gotten a console between them but had not continued his retreat. “You have a name?”
No reply.
“Are you alone?” A bored kid with a battle center as a toy would explain the sniping incidents. She closed her mind to the larger questions that made the whole surreal.
Concentrate on the narrowest possible focus. Get her hands on the boy and work from there.
She rose slowly. He was poised for flight but did not go. He watched, fascinated, as she shed her suit.
It was a matter of time till the moth dipped a wing in the flame.
There was something weirdly exciting, even erotic, going on here. That surprised her. Her couplings had become little more than desperation transactions, brief and usually unsuccessful attempts to escape.
Four Others were awake when Valerena brought the boy to the group. He was hers. Or any woman’s who wanted to manipulate him.
She settled on the deck, pulled him down beside her. “This is Tawn. He’s amazing.” She trailed her fingers up his inner thigh. He responded instantly. “He’ll do whatever we want as long as we do what he wants.”
“Artifact?” one asked.
“Sort of. He’s an organic hologram projected by the Guardship’s subconscious. We’ve got a very horny Guardship here.”
“You say if you screw the kid you’re screwing the whole damned machine?”
“Near as I can tell.”
It looked like House Tregesser could take possession of a Guardship through simple sexual manipulation.
Maybe.
There was a lot she did not yet know. Where were the crew? Why was the Guardship sitting here like a derelict? Why was it in such bad shape?
She let her hand drift into the boy’s lap. He would tell her.
It was outrageous. Absurd. Unbelievable. It was a surreal and spooky universe.
— 74 —
It was the first time the Barbican and House Horigawa had seen Guardship soldiers. Everyone dockside stopped to stare. One of the soldiers feigned a charge.
Jo snapped, “Hoke!”
“Aw, Lieutenant, I was just...”
“Working on getting the shit details. As usual.” She spotted AnyKaat up the curve, with a small, brownish man who should be the purser of the chartered Horigawa Traveller. AnyKaat waved.
The purser spoke first. “Is this the lot, Lieutenant?”
Trying to be cool. Like having his Traveler rebuilt and taken over was nothing new. “All the personnel. There’s still cargo in the system. Where are the others?”
“The two Colonels are on the bridge, putting in black boxes. The other one is snooping.”
AnyKaat smiled. “Degas being Degas.”
“Where is the alien?”
“In his quarters.”
AnyKaat asked, “Want me to show your people where to go?”
“That’s my job,” the purser snapped. “Come along, you people.”
Jo dismissed the soldiers, asked AnyKaat, “Are they all like that?”
“All of them. Working real hard to show us they aren’t impressed. Wait till you meet the Chief. You’ll wax nostalgic for Timmerbach. Though Colonel Haget has his number.”
“That’s TDA brevet-Colonel Haget.” Jo grinned.
“Be like him to insist we use all that luggage, too. Wouldn’t it?”
“What the hell. You can’t have everything. He’s good in bed.”
“Wouldn’t he love to hear you tell me that.”
“He’d shrivel up and die. How’s Seeker?”
“Settled in and eager to go. Except he don’t know where. I gather his Lost Child has to have a seizure before he can sense her.”
AnyKaat guided Jo to her cabin. This time there would be separate quarters for whoever wanted them.
“He’s awfully evasive.”
“Wouldn’t you be?”
“Damned right. I don’t say I don’t understand, only that I don’t like it.” She began removing her combat suit. “I’ll drag this back to the armory later. This cabin is huge.”
“Want a ball of string?”
“Wise ass.” She had room but the appointments were not plush. The Horigawas were a spartan crowd. “Guess I better report.”
As they approached the bridge, Jo asked, “Why did you guys volunteer?”
AnyKaat grinned. “Great pay. Short hours. Nothing else to do but wait around till WarAvocat sent us home.”
“Really?”
“No. We weren’t ready to go home.”
“Uhm?”
“We were all born on P. Jaksonica 3B. Era is the only one who’s been off. A year for Staff College. My mother was STASIS, too, till she moved to Admin. She always wanted to travel. Fixing it so I could was the next best thing. Degas’s mother is a dock worker. She’d throttle him if he didn’t work this for all he could.”
Jo stopped. This was all news. After months in AnyKaat’s company. She’d never wondered about the woman’s background. Soldiers did not think about anyone having antecedents.
“What’s the matter?” AnyKaat asked.<
br />
“Just being awestruck. You probably see your mother sometimes.”
“Every day. Another good reason for going away.”
“Mine died while VII Gemina was being built. I was in storage.” She resumed walking, shaken. “What about children?”
“We have a son. Tobias. Be turning four soon. He’s staying with Degas’s mother. I miss him.” Just like that. And that was all. “What about you?”
Jo shivered. “We’re all sterile.” Without knowing why, she was sorry she had opened the subject. She increased her pace, arrived on the bridge briskly. “Combat team is aboard, Colonel.”
“Ah. Lieutenant.” Haget smiled. “I rehearsed. I’ll probably call you Sergeant the next ten times. We’re almost set. What about cargo?”
“Last of it shoud be loading now.”
“Vadja’s in Operations running test routines. When he’s ready, tap station data and see if you can get a line on our aliens.”
“You’re pretty calm. Considering.”
“Of course. The Deified will be along in an advisory capacity only.”
“And if you don’t follow his advice, there goes your career.”
“Only if he’s right and I’m not.”
“Are they ever wrong?” Jo did not want the Deified along. There were a lot of angles to this mission she did not like.
“Your soldiers good for anything besides kicking ass?”
“Tell them what you need, they’ll try to do it. I’ll see what Vadja’s got.”
Haget pretended to notice AnyKaat for the first time. He beckoned her over and asked how he might best utilize her and Degas. Another angle Jo did not like. The thing was being thrown together, without formal manning for the systems being jammed into the Traveler. She left the bridge, stepping between stonefaced Horigawas pretending they did not mind having their ship rebuilt around them.
What had been crew’s quarters and mess decks had had the partitions removed so the space could be made an operations center. The entrance lay only a few steps from the bridge hatch. Once the cargo bays were filled and passageways were cluttered with cables and everything was connected and integrated with the Traveler’s systems, the ship would have many of the espionage and data-processing capabilities of a Guardship. There would be nothing like it on the Web.