“I’ll leave right away.”
Babuyan Atoll was undergoing an approximation of night. The dome’s internal illumination was off, but the crystal remained perfectly transparent. Icalanise’s jaundiced crescent was rising above the lip of the parkland to shine a jaded light across the forests and towers. Admiral Kazimir saw it through his office window as he made some niggling final adjustments to his dress uniform. Over on Aldaho, the Senate Executive Security Commission was convening for an emergency session where he was due to present the really bad news about the Ocisen Empire’s new allies. It was looking like the deterrent fleet would have to be used, a prospect that both thrilled and horrified him in equal amounts. For nearly seven hundred years the mere threat of its existence had been enough to deter the more belligerent species in the galaxy from any aggression against the Commonwealth. Now the bluff was going to be called, and those who thought it was a bluff were about to get a very nasty surprise.
The silver collar on his tunic was lopsided. Kazimir grimaced at it in the mirror and tried to fiddle the awkward fabric back into shape. In seven hundred years he’d never used semiorganic fabrics for his uniform, and he wasn’t about to start now.
His u-shadow told him Paula Myo was calling from Ganthia. “Good news?” he asked.
“Not even close,” she said. “I’ve uncovered evidence that suggests the navy has been manipulated.”
Kazimir listened with growing anger as she explained her suspicions about Chatfield and his secondary persona, Evanston. When she’d finished, he called ANA: Governance.
“This cannot stand,” he said. “The Accelerators have committed treason.”
“Circumstantial evidence,” ANA: Governance replied. “We don’t know for sure.”
“They have worked up this whole Pilgrimage situation right from the start.”
“Pilgrimage was inevitable from the moment Inigo dreamed his first dream,” Paula said. “If they are behind the Prime-Ocisen alliance, then it is an arrangement that goes back decades. Evanston was assigned to the Elan system thirty years ago.”
“And whatever Troblum worked on was twenty years before that,” Kazimir acknowledged.
“I’d suggest this idea of fusion was concocted when Inigo abandoned Living Dream,” Paula said. “They saw a method of fast-forwarding to postphysical status and immediately set about enacting it.”
“Very likely,” Kazimir said. “They don’t call themselves Accelerators for nothing. The question is, What do we do about it? Can’t you simply suspend them?”
“Any intervention would have to be universal,” ANA: Governance said. “At present I do not have sufficient grounds.”
“But you know.”
“I very strongly suspect. To act on suspicion alone is persecution. I believe the human race is past such barbarism now, isn’t it?”
“Let’s try this tack,” Paula said. “What can they possibly hope to achieve by the Prime-Ocisen alliance?”
“It’s a distraction,” Kazimir said.
“No,” Paula said. “It has to be more than that. They know it will divert a degree of attention to the invasion fleet, but they also know that ANA and people like myself will continue to monitor the Pilgrimage preparations and investigate Troblum and Marius. No matter how many distractions, how many crises and alien invasions we face, we will not drop the ball when it comes to the Accelerator manifesto. Therefore, it has to be connected.”
“How?” Kazimir asked. “For all that the alliance is shocking, in military terms it is trivial. It doesn’t physically threaten the Commonwealth, nor will it prevent Ethan’s Pilgrimage from launching.”
“Are you so sure Chatfield is an Accelerator?” ANA: Governance asked. “Your conclusion was drawn from a single answer. It would be more credible if he was a Custodian or even an Isolationist.”
“He’s an Accelerator,” Paula said. “It fits. So why would they want to engineer a threat to the Commonwealth, one that would be triggered by the Pilgrimage? One that isn’t a simple diversion tactic?”
“The deterrence fleet,” Kazimir said bitterly. “Without the Primes as part of the empire’s fleet, a squadron of Capital-class ships would be enough to take them out. But with the Primes we have to send the deterrence fleet.”
“They want to know what it is,” ANA: Governance said.
“Why?” Paula asked. “What does knowing that get them? Is it a bluff?”
“No,” Kazimir said. “It is not a bluff.”
“In all my time I have never met a navy officer who served in the deterrence fleet,” Paula said. “I’ve met hundreds serving on every other class of ship, but never that. And given the levels of government I interact with, I find that extremely odd.”
“You have met someone from the deterrence fleet,” Kazimir told her calmly. “Me.”
“I was birthed to provide protection to the physical segment of the human race,” ANA: Governance said. “I assure you the deterrence fleet is real and is quite capable of achieving that level of physical defense. I should know. I built it.”
“In which case the Accelerators must want to know what it’s armed with,” Paula said. “I assume it’s something pretty potent.”
“Yes. Very.”
“All right, so they’re expecting to analyze it and use it—after all, you wouldn’t go to this much trouble if you didn’t have a need for it. But the time scale’s not good here. Even if they did analyze it perfectly, they still have to build it. That will take time, and the Pilgrimage fleet is due to launch in a couple of months. Can they duplicate it in that time?”
“Extremely unlikely,” ANA: Governance said. “It required my full abilities for several years to fabricate. Admittedly, my faculties have increased dramatically since then, but still it is not something which can be accomplished quickly.”
“Let’s examine the extremes,” Paula said. “Can the deterrence fleet weapons knock out the Void?”
“No.”
“But you’re confident it can ward off just about everything else in the galaxy?”
“Yes.”
“In which case my guess would be that they intend to use it against the Raiel ships guarding the Void boundary. Justine barely managed to get through, and she had a head start on them, plus some help from the Void itself. As it stands, Ethan’s ships wouldn’t even make it to the Wall, let alone through the Gulf.”
“Damn,” Kazimir grunted. “That has to be it. The idiots. Not enough to try and wreck the galaxy; they’ve got to start a war with the most powerful race in existence.”
“There is one factor which might work to our advantage,” Paula said.
“What?”
“The Primes.”
Centuries of experience had taught Kazimir never to be surprised at Paula’s ideas. “Go on.”
“They’re not stupid. At least not the ones still living in the Commonwealth, which is the group the Accelerators have manipulated. A standard Prime immotile knows that if there is any possibility of them threatening us again, we will simply exterminate them.”
“Yes. Actually, given the new nature and developing psychology of the five surviving Prime civilizations, the navy has downgraded their threat potential twice in the last thousand years.”
“So they’re not going to risk triggering human retaliation. They are extremely unlikely to agree to cooperate with the Accelerator plan. However, we know that human personalities can operate within a Prime neural structure. I once met the Bose motile. The integration was flawless; he functioned without any problem. That gives us our potential evidence.”
“What does?” Kazimir asked.
“They might be Prime bodies inside those warships, but I’ll give you very good odds that they’re animated by human thought routines. It would be a simple matter to snatch some motiles that have just come out of the birthing pond. At that stage their brains are completely empty; it’s their immotiles which instill them with baseline thoughts and memories. So if you did snatch one at that
stage, it would be a simple procedure to load in a human mind and memories instead—it’s our basic re-life procedure but with an alien body. And there you have it, the core of a completely independent Prime hierarchy. The Ocisen Empire thinks they’ve found a genuine enemy of humanity to give their cause some particularly sharp teeth, while in fact they’re being manipulated by the Accelerators just like everyone else.”
“So all we have to do is catch one and download its thoughts,” Kazimir said.
“Exactly. When you go to the Senate Commission, explain that you’re going to give the Ocisen Empire fleet one last chance to turn around now that you and they know Capital-class ships can defeat the Prime. Use the Capital class to disable a Prime ship and board it.”
“If they are human-driven Prime, they’ll suicide,” ANA: Governance said.
“Will that be sufficient evidence for you?” Paula asked.
“Not conclusively, no. I would have to be inserted into the inter-Prime communication network and analyze the thought stream.”
“Attempt the Capital-class interception,” Paula said. “It acts completely in our favor. If it works and we prove the Primes are just biological shells for the Accelerators, then you can suspend all Accelerator activities. If not, then Kazimir still has plenty of time to use the deterrent fleet before the Ocisens reach the Commonwealth, and as a bonus you delay Accelerator acquisition of the fleet weapons.”
“I agree that’s a logical course of action,” Kazimir said.
“But?” Paula inquired.
“We didn’t really know how powerful the warrior Raiel were until my mother flew past them in the Gulf. From what we can determine, this plan of the Accelerators has been in motion for at least fifty years.”
“We’ve known the Raiel had defense systems around the Wall stars since the day Wilson Kime discovered them back in 2560. It was inevitable that those Raiel would have adequate firepower to back up their mission. After all, they’re the ones who once tried to invade the Void. That’s not something you attempt with anything as pitiful as a novabomb. The Accelerators have always known they’ll need serious firepower to reach the Void boundary.”
“Maybe,” Kazimir said reluctantly. “There’s just something about this that bothers me, and I can’t define it.”
“If they don’t want to see the deterrence fleet weapons in action, what else could they be using the Ocisen Empire fleet for?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “ANA?”
“Paula’s scenario is the obvious one. An exceptionally large effort is being made to draw the deterrence fleet out to the Ocisen invasion forces. Primes are the one species which will still unite every political and cultural bloc within the Commonwealth. And I would point out that even if you’re right and the Primes are exposed as Accelerator agents, the Ocisens themselves will still keep coming.”
“Very well.” Kazimir finally got his collar straight. “I’ll ask the Senate Commission for permission to deploy the deterrent fleet, but only after we make one final attempt to warn them off.”
“Do let me know how Ilanthe responds to that,” Paula told him.
It was as humiliating as Honious, but Corrie-Lyn had to rely on Aaron as well as Inigo to make it across the hundred-meter gap between the remains of the ground crawler and the navy starship. As well as her broken arm, her ankle was badly twisted and sprained, as she discovered when she tried to put any weight on it.
Aaron had simply knelt down on the rim of the ground crawler’s bodywork that he’d sheared off with his disrupter pulse and extended his arm. She’d reluctantly grasped it with her good hand and allowed him to haul her up with no more effort than if he’d been lifting a bag of gromal puffs. It was only when he’d put her down that she had gasped with pain and nearly collapsed back onto the ice. Aaron, of course, had caught her easily.
So she had to sling an arm around each of them and let them take the weight as she hopped all the way over to the starship. Her body was shivering violently from the terrible cold. Huge flashes of lightning ripped overhead, their muted thunder rolling around the little bubble of calm the starship’s force field had cast over them. Even without any enriched sensors she could see that the craft had taken a terrible beating. The fuselage actually had splits in it, and fluids were seeping out of various valves and exposed pipes.
The ground shook violently, and all three of them went tumbling down.
“Move,” Aaron snapped. His integral force field strengthened, surrounding him in a mild blue haze.
Corrie-Lyn was slightly disconcerted to see that Inigo had protected himself the same way. Then the pair of them picked her up and started jogging over the last twenty meters with her hanging ignominiously between them. While they were doing that, she started to pay attention to the red symbols appearing in her exovision. She was receiving a very unhealthy dose of radiation from the atmosphere trapped under the force field.
It was a navy ship; she could see the name CNE Lindau on the fuselage. But the crew wasn’t responding to her desperate pings. She wondered what kind of cover story Aaron could possibly have spun them. Somehow she never thought to ask herself how he could have survived the glacier. It was sort of inevitable.
They hurried up the ramp and into the airlock. The outer hull was already flowing closed as they crossed the threshold. Another quake made the starship tremble. Then there was the unmistakable whine of power feeding into the drive, and they lifted from the surface. The floor immediately shuddered badly, and the decking shifted out of horizontal alignment. It juddered its way back level as the unnerving sounds of equipment straining at its safety margins set her teeth on edge.
The airlock’s inner door unfurled as her weight began to build up.
“Hold her,” Aaron instructed curtly as he let go of Corrie-Lyn’s arm and lurched his way into the ship against the rapidly increasing acceleration.
Inigo quickly lowered her onto the floor of the short corridor. “Don’t move your neck,” he said urgently. “Keep your spine level. I don’t know how bad this is going to get.” The decking seemed to be made of gray plyplastic. It wasn’t comfortable, but with the gee force approaching five, she was grateful to be lying prone. Medical symbols warned her what the acceleration was doing to her broken arm, which might have accounted for her mounting nausea.
“What’s happening?” she grunted to Inigo. “Where’s the crew?” Her body was still shivering from the icy air outside.
He kept his head steady as he replied. “We’re going straight up to get out of the atmosphere as fast as possible. I don’t know about the crew.” His gaiafield emission was tinged with worry.
“I can’t access the ship’s net.”
“Me neither.”
After a couple of minutes the acceleration suddenly sank back to a stable one gee. Inigo lifted himself to a sitting position. Worry was still leaking out of his gaiamotes.
Corrie-Lyn winced as she slowly sat up. Her ankle was throbbing, and the medication she’d taken for her arm was doing strange things to her vision. Or maybe it was just her balance that made her feel weirdly light. Or perhaps the ship’s drives were acting oddly. Something in the air smelled funny. She hiccupped, hoping it wasn’t a precursor to being sick. For some reason the situation didn’t bother her as much as she knew it should. The crew, though; that was bad. She knew it at a deep instinctive level but didn’t want to examine the obvious consciously. Too much. Way too much all at once.
“We’re still alive, then,” she said with a sigh.
Inigo gave her a troubled glance. “Yes.” He clambered to his feet. One of the light strips on the ceiling was flickering. Its case had cracks. He frowned at that. “My field scan is revealing a lot of damage in the structure around us. Uh, I can’t find the crew on board.”
“What do you mean?”
A thick plyplastic door curtained open, and Aaron stepped out into the corridor. His gaiamotes were closed, but even in her medicated state Corrie-Lyn didn’t need them to tell ho
w angry he was. He glared at Inigo. “Don’t you ever pull a stunt like that glacier again.”
Inigo gave him a disdainful glance. “Almost got you, though, didn’t it? And me a simple amateur.”
Aaron produced a tight smile, and took a step forward.
Corrie-Lyn screamed at the pain as his foot came down on her ankle.
Inigo lunged forward, hitting Aaron with a rugby-style tackle. It barely moved him. For emphasis, Aaron held the position for another few seconds before slowly and deliberately taking his foot off and stepping back.
Corrie-Lyn whimpered and gripped her ankle where the hot pain was still firing into her flesh. There were tears in her eyes. “Don’t,” she whispered fearfully.
“The medical chamber is in the main cabin,” Aaron said, and held his hand out.
“Where’s the crew?” she asked.
“They stepped out for a moment.” Aaron paused, thinking. “They might be some time.”
Corrie-Lyn ignored his hand. Inigo helped her up. They hobbled after Aaron through the door into the main cabin.
“Oh, Lady!” Corrie-Lyn’s free hand came up to cup her mouth. She felt the bile rising in her gullet at the sight that greeted her.
The starship’s main cabin was a circular room about seven meters across. Several items of furniture had been extruded from the plyplastic walls and floor. Some had twisted and locked into strange shapes. A lot of the equipment modules sunk flush with the walls were damaged. Most had suffered some kind of physical impact, leaving their casings buckled and broken. Others were melted along with the wall around them, leaving soot marks scarring the ceiling. That wasn’t what drew her eye. There was blood on the floor. Big puddles of the grisly fluid had been sloshing around in the starship’s erratic acceleration. Now it was congealing. There was blood on the walls, broad splash patterns radiating out from the burn scars. There was blood on the ceiling in long splatter trails.
“Monster!” she groaned through clenched teeth.
“Let’s get one thing quite clear,” Aaron said as he ordered the smartcore to activate the one surviving medical cabinet. “I am not a good man. I am not a bad man. I am simply a man with a job to do. I will complete that job. Nothing must prevent that. Nothing.”
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