She bent to look into the faceplate. Bey's face was a mottled nightmare of fresh red blood and cyanotic blue skin. As she watched, the oxygen-starved look faded. The chest of the suit gave a series of shuddering heaves. Alive. Sylvia grabbed Bey's suited arm and began to drag him. She had come at once, as soon as her suit was on, and she did not know the cause of the problem. Another crash or explosion might happen at any moment. Like any Cloudlander, she fled for the safety of open space.
The exit wound of the colliding chunk provided the widest and easiest way out. Sylvia and Bey accompanied a mass of flotsam, flying out into space with the last puff of internal air from the bubble.
Bey was unconscious. Sylvia, shaking with exhaustion, held him tightly and looked around them. The collection layer of the farm had been left far behind. The surviving farmers had moved their lifeboat close to the shattered bubble, and half a dozen of them were preparing to reenter through an air lock. They had a clear duty toward their missing fellows: rescue or space burial.
Sylvia could see the ship that she and Bey had arrived on. It floated a few kilometers clear of the bubble, apparently undamaged, its warning beacons a red glow against the stars. She was not sure that she had the strength to get there. She set out, dragging Bey along with her. When she was nearly there she saw a suited figure jetting across to help her. It was Aybee.
"Leo?" she asked.
"Inside. Banged up, but not too bad." Aybee took over and hauled Bey along behind him. "How's with the Wolfman here?"
"Hurt some." She was shivering. "He should be all right. Where's our other ship?"
Aybee waved his arm through a wide circle. "You tell me. The beacon's not working. I don't know how we'll ever find it."
As he passed Bey through the lock, Sylvia took a last look around. There was no sign of the ship Aybee had arrived in. It was lost somewhere in the darkness, indistinguishable from a million other pieces of stellar flotsam.
She collapsed as she stepped out of the air lock. In the past twenty minutes she had forced her body all the way to its physical limits. Any more help for Bey Wolf would have to come from someone else.
* * *
Bey woke up three times.
Pain was the first stimulus. Someone was hurting his face, stabbing again and again at his cheek and forehead. "A bit crude," a voice said. "But it'll do. Couple more stitches, I'll be all done. You're a mess. You hearing me, Wolfman? No beauty prizes for you." The sharp pain came again, followed by a wash of icy fluid across his face. Bey grunted in protest and drifted back to unconsciousness.
The second time was more alarming. And more painful. He woke and tried to touch his throbbing left cheek. He could not do it. Something had him firmly held, unable to move. He began to struggle, to pull randomly against his restraints. He was too confused and dizzy to analyze what was happening or why, but he fought like an animal, straining as hard as he could. It was futile. He was working against straps designed to hold a human body secure under a ten-g acceleration. Exhausted after just a few seconds, he lapsed again into unquiet sleep.
Pain and consciousness came faster the third time, and with them—at last—vision. He was lying with his eyes open, staring at a woman's face. It was only inches away from him, pale and still. There was a tracery of blue veins on the temples and the violet-black smudge of deadly fatigue below the closed eyes. He studied it, puzzled by its familiarity. Who was she? That rounded brow was well known to him. He tried to lift his arm to touch the delicate skull and the fine red hair. He could not do it. They were strapped side by side, lying on a single narrow bunk and securely held in position.
As he placed his fingers on the release mechanism of his harness, awareness returned. And with it, fear. He remembered. Violent impact. The panicky hunt for a suit. The fight for air. Sylvia's appearance at his side just as that fight was lost.
He had a vague, surrealistic memory then of the nightmare ride through space, stars blurred points through a bloodstained visor.
"Sylvia!" She did not move.
Bey struggled free and sat up. He was again on the transit ship, and the McAndrew drive was on. They were moving with an indicated acceleration of a couple of hundred g's. He was lying in the same bunk with Sylvia Fernald. On the other bunk, strapped in and wrapped like a cocoon from neck to ankles, lay Leo Manx. As Bey straightened up, Leo's eyes rolled toward him.
"Where's Aybee?" Bey asked.
"I don't know. But the last time I saw him he was all right." Leo turned his head slowly and gingerly. "It is Sylvia I have been worrying about. I cannot move, and I cannot see her monitors. How is she?"
Bey scanned the condition sensors, supplementing that with his own touch to her cheek and forehead. "Out cold, but everything shows normal. What happened to her? And to you, too? And where's Aybee? And where are we heading?"
"Mr. Wolf, I am sure you can ask more questions than I can answer." Leo Manx's silky voice was gruff. He was either in much pain or terribly ill at ease. "I'll do my best. Sylvia Fernald made a supreme physical effort when she saved you, but it was too much for her. She collapsed as she reached the ship. At my suggestion and with the medical system's concurrence, Aybee extended her natural period of unconsciousness. She should sleep until we are close to the Marsden Harvester—our planned destination, where we should now find Cinnabar Baker. What was not my suggestion—" Leo Manx grimaced with displeasure and then with pain. "—was the idea that I would be bound here like an Egyptian mummy, unable to release myself. If you would be kind enough to free the harness . . ."
"What happened to you?"
"Broken ribs and broken legs. Aybee exceeded his duties and his authority when he anesthetized me and then did this."
Bey moved to examine the telesensors for Leo Manx, spent a few seconds with the displays, and shook his head. "Sorry. The monitors agree with Aybee. You stay like that until it tells me something different. You should not move."
"Mr. Wolf, I assure you that I am quite able to—"
"Don't take my word for it. Try a deep breath." Bey watched as Manx tentatively inhaled and gasped with pain. "Case closed. What about Aybee?"
Manx rolled his eyes toward the tiny console crowded against the cabin wall. Everything on the transit ships was a third the usual size. "It was my expectation that he would be with us on this ship. Clearly, he is not. But according to the signal there, a message is waiting for us. I have been looking at the indicator for some time, but unfortunately I cannot reach it."
Bey went across to turn on the unit. As he did so he saw his own reflection in the display screen. Whatever Aybee's talents, plastic surgery was not one of them. Bey's face and forehead were crisscrossed with crude, ugly stitches, and the skin on his left cheek had been pulled down so far that the red socket of his eye was exposed. There was no chance that such a mess would heal cleanly. He would have to use one of the Cloudland form-change tanks. He switched on the set.
Aybee's image showed no sign of either excitement or injury. He scowled out of the display like a bad-tempered baby. "I don't know which of you will be watching this, but hi. If it's you, Leo, I didn't lie to you. I intended to come along as well. But the ship was awful crowded once I had you in your bunks, and with those ribs I knew you wouldn't enjoy anybody cuddling up close to you, the way Sylv and the Wolfman were doing last time I saw 'em. So." He shrugged. "I had to change my mind. And I haven't found any trace of the other ship. I'll look again, but if I'm delayed getting back there, don't be surprised. Here's a few things for you to chew on. First, the female farmer we talked to. She's dead. We'll never get any more about that woman she saw walking on the collection layer. Second, the farm can be saved, but the data banks are shot. So you should drop the idea that we can correlate the form-change problems with events on the farm and the collection layer. I was doing that when the bubble was hit, and I'll tell you the only thing I'd noticed. The form-changes starting to go wrong coincided with a doubling of energy use on the farm. That fact's for Wolf—you there, Wolfma
n?—and I hope you can make more out of it than I can. Bet you can't, though. Here's my last thought, and it's for anybody who wants it. From all I can tell, the bubble was hit by a Cloud fragment, one that was traveling unusually fast and from an unusual direction. Bad luck, you say? Except that the farm had sky-scanning sensors, and the bubble had a standard response system. That fragment ought to have been given a little laser nudge when it was millions of kilometers away, and missed us by a nice margin."
He smiled from the screen, a humorless grin. "Now, I know what you're thinking, Leo. It's old paranoid Aybee, at it again. But try it on the Wolfman—he thinks more the way I do. And while he worries that, here's one more thing for you. The equipment that protected the farm from space junk is the same type as we use on all the harvesters. Foolproof, triple-tested, infallible. If the farm can get hit, so can anything else. Nice thought, eh? Sweet dreams, you three. Think entropy."
The screen blanked. As it did so, the system alert inside the ship's cabin sounded its warning beep. They were close to crossover, the place where the ship rotated through 180 degrees, and they changed from acceleration to deceleration. For that thirty-second period, they needed to be strapped in.
Bey headed for the bunk, lying down again alongside Sylvia. As he did so, Leo Manx gave a gasp of irritation. "Mr. Wolf! Don't let it do that."
A spray syringe was creeping out of its holder above Manx and quietly positioning itself close to his neck.
Bey paused from his strapping in and checked the monitors. "Don't worry. It's only an anesthetic. Apparently the robodoc thinks you're being too active."
"But I have no wish to go to sleep, Mr. Wolf. Stop it!"
"Sorry. Can't disobey doctor's orders." Bey lay back on the narrow bunk, squashed up next to Sylvia Fernald. He watched as the spray mist passed painlessly through Leo Manx's skin and the other man fell asleep in mid-protest.
Bey liked Leo and enjoyed talking to him. But at the moment he needed time to chew on what Aybee had said. If he had been allowed one guess as to something that might correlate with the deaths in the form-change tanks, he would have picked sabotage—something in the software on the farm's central computer complex. That fit the idea that feedback information was being tampered with or supplied incorrectly. What he would never have picked in a hundred guesses was the farm's total energy load. In fact, he could see no way that it could be involved.
He felt fully awake. His aches and pains were unpleasant, and there was a disturbing buzzing in his ears. But he could stand that. He lay back in the bunk, ready for a long, intense session of thought. By the time he saw the anesthetic syringe at his neck it was too late.
"Hey! No. I don't need—" Like Leo Manx, Bey fell asleep in mid-protest.
Bey had checked Sylvia's condition and Leo Manx's, but not his own. He believed he was doing fine. The transit ship's computer disagreed. It knew that Wolf should have been safely asleep and resting, but it also understood that he was unlikely to obey a computer command. The machine had waited for crossover, knowing that Wolf would then have to return to his bunk. Then, satisfied once more with the physical condition of all three passengers, the computer turned to other matters. At its direction the speeding ship passed through crossover point and raced on for the second half of its journey to the Marsden Harvester.
The computer was justly proud of its performance. It encountered hardware problems so seldom that the automatic error-correcting codes were called on only a couple of times a year. Error checking and correction were completely automatic. No human realized it, but the ship's rate of signal-error generation was less than a thousandth of that of the computers on the Marsden Harvester—and less than a millionth of the rate for the now-destroyed computer on the Sagdeyev space farm.
CHAPTER 14
"War is nothing more than the continuation of state policy by other means."
—Karl von Clausewitz
"A thermonuclear war cannot be considered a continuation of politics by other means. It would be a means to universal suicide."
—Andrei Sakharov
Conflict between the Inner and Outer Systems was a battle between a cat and a kestrel, between a lion and an eagle. Each could hurt the other—perhaps fatally. But neither could possess the other's territory, or rationally want to do so. Fifty million people might annihilate twenty billion, but they could never subjugate them. No sane Cloudlander desired to live crowded into the Sun and the inner planets. And despite their enormous superiority in numbers, twenty billion could never control the sparse and infinitely dispersed inhabitants of the Cloud, constantly drifting outward, always farther from the Sun. No member of the United Space Federation could stand the cold, open space of the Cloud.
War was senseless. And yet war came creeping steadily closer. Its presence could be seen and felt—in the angry faces of people on the harvesters, in the hoarding of food supplies and metals, in the false confidence and self-righteousness of the government speeches, and in the tense warning notes that flew between the Inner and Outer Systems.
Cinnabar Baker felt it better than anyone. She was officially responsible for the operation and maintenance of the harvesters, but that position carried an additional duty as head of system security. It made Baker, the Most junior of the three people who ruled the Cloud, also the most powerful.
A couple of thousand staff members on her payroll sent back official reports from locations in the Cloud. Twice that number, scattered through the Inner System and the Halo, provided Baker's unofficial information network. If someone sneezed on Ceres and that sneeze might mean bad news for the Cloud, Cinnabar Baker wanted to know about it.
Bey Wolf had watched the big woman in action and asked himself: What makes Cinnabar run? The easy answer was the official one. She worked enormously hard directing the harvesters, and that work gave her satisfaction. But the innermost depth of Cinnabar Baker, the invisible place where the ego is so delicate that a feather's touch will bruise it, lay elsewhere. She loved and cherished her secret security operation. The network was her eyes and ears. She would do anything to keep it in place. Yet even that was not her secret pride. When word drifted in through the grapevine of an impending disaster at the Sagdeyev space farm, she could not compromise her sources. There might be a chain of a dozen informants involved, each with his own unreliability quotient and each with his own cover. Everyone had to be protected. No details had been available, no statement of how or when an "accident" might be expected. Cinnabar Baker had a choice: she could ignore the rumblings of her own intelligence net, or she could recall Leo Manx and the others from important work.
She had chosen to send that urgent recall message, but the news of the farm's destruction had not yet reached her. The farmers were too reclusive a group to offer frequent messages. Silence was not significant. She had no way of knowing that they were struggling to devise a makeshift communications link from the remains of the old one.
Baker had the habit of returning to her office after the evening meal, clearing her desk, and starting in again to work as though it were the dawn of a new day. She had arrived at the Marsden Harvester only that morning, but now, at an hour when most humans were settling in for their three or four hours of sleep, she was beginning to sieve through the mass of printouts of the day's incoming messages.
She had three types of informant. There were the ones she had carefully planted over the years, reliable Cloudlanders who knew what she needed and who understood how to screen important information from rumors and rubbish. Baker took any inputs from them seriously.
The paid informants were another matter. Loyal to no one, they tended to send her any old garbage, hoping that it might somehow be worth money. Their input had to be looked at hard, and almost everything was discarded or given little weight.
Then there were the revolutionaries. Small groups within the Inner System were working for the overthrow of their own government, and they were willing to form alliances with the Outer System in order to do it. They provided i
nformation free, and would be outraged at any suggestion of payment. Cinnabar Baker worked with them and used their input. But she had no illusions about their value. Most of her informants on Earth or Mars preached the overthrow of the United Space Federation, but they would never live in the Cloud or the Halo. Worse than that, they saw every event through the distorting lens of their own paranoia.
Cinnabar Baker had inspected Bey Wolf very carefully during their first meeting. Wolf's reputation for intelligence and insight was extremely high. But Leo Manx had told of a self-destructive, hallucinating man, obsessed with a former lover. That fit the pattern of an Inner System paranoid, one who might someday be converted to form part of her recruited group of unpaid informants.
She had dropped that thought in the first fifteen minutes of their meeting. Wolf was too strong and too skeptical, too cold and analytical. He could not be manipulated in the usual ways.
But there were also unusual ways. At the end of that first meeting Cinnabar Baker had set a high-priority trace on the whereabouts of Mary Walton. So far, she had two things. The first was a recent poor-quality photograph of Mary Walton standing with her arm around the waist of a stern-faced man. Even in that faded image, his eyes were the commanding orbs of a fanatic, blazing out of the picture. Scribbled on the back of the photograph were the coordinates of a location in the Kernel Ring, accompanied by a question mark.
Those coordinate strings had been noted as a place for future investigation, but not as a high-priority item. Baker had no idea how she might use any information on Mary Walton, but patience and foresight were two of her main strengths. She would never admit she was willing to work with anyone and anything to achieve her goals, but she would have found it hard to name a group she would reject.
That night there were ninety messages for her review. Half of them had come from official news reports, the rest from her own network. With Turpin crooning on her shoulder, his black head bobbing or tucked away under one shabby wing, she set to work.
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