The Eleventh Gate

by Nancy Kress

  Caitlin listened numbly. So this was why Jane had tested her K-beam so far from Galt. She’d wanted Prometheus for her bioweapon development. What had she done with the Peregoy scientists there?

  Jenna finished blubbering. Veatch sent her to her stateroom. Caitlin faced him. “How do you know she’s telling the truth now?”

  Veatch threw her a look of contempt. “You think I can’t tell? This is what I do. Why your grammy hires me.”

  “Why didn’t you just use a truth drug on her?”

  “This is better. Now she knows to tell no one, ever. And she won’t.” He returned to his computer.

  Caitlin heard the bridge door unlock from the other side.

  She said, with as much authority as she could muster, “You’re going to let her go, Veatch.”

  “Yeah, sure. As soon as we land.”

  “And then what?”

  “You and I are going to load cargo and supplies and go on to Prometheus.”

  “What? No. I’m going home.”

  “Not my orders.”

  “Damn your orders! I’m not going to Prometheus!”

  Veatch didn’t even answer.

  Caitlin thought of a dozen things to yell at him. This is kidnapping: But on her grandmother’s order, and did she want to indict Gran on that? I’ll scream: But it was clear the crew would not aid her. I’ll escape: But that was clearly impossible, in space or on the ground. She raised her wrister to call Security on Rand. Her wrister had been disabled.

  She wanted to believe that her grandmother wouldn’t have allowed Jenna to be more than bruised. She wanted to believe that Gran had instructed Veatch to take Caitlin with him, if that proved necessary, only because Caitlin was so vital to stopping Jane. She wanted to believe that Veatch knew what he was doing, that it wouldn’t be hard to destroy the facility, that she would be home in a few weeks. But could she really trust those beliefs? Or anything else?

  I’m learning, Rachel.

  • • •

  Rachel worked through the evening, reviewing with Annelise everything that had happened on Galt while Rachel had been recuperating at the beach compound. Rachel also received scout-delivered administrative reports from newly accessible Rand and New Hell. The one report they both waited for, from Caitlin, did not come. But at nearly midnight, she received an encrypted link from Eric Veatch, conveyed by a scout pilot as soon as the scout had passed the Rand-Galt gate.

  Annelise waited, completely still, as Rachel decrypted and read it.

  “The lab isn’t on Rand, after all,” Rachel said. “My people and Caitlin are going to Prometheus. Veatch says he has strong reason to believe it’s there.”

  Annelise said, “I’m going home now. I haven’t seen David or my kids in two days.”

  “Annelise—”

  “I’m going home now.”

  Rachel saw that Annelise had reached the bottom of her well. It would fill again overnight, but for now she was dry. “Yes, dear heart, go home.” And then, belatedly—and why hadn’t she thought to ask before? These were her great-grandchildren—“How are the kids? And David?”

  “All fine. Come with me, stay the night, visit with the children.”

  “I will soon,” Rachel said, knowing she wouldn’t, knowing she had no time, knowing that she wasn’t great-grandmotherly enough. Well, she hadn’t really been maternal enough, either. Not really.

  After Annelise left, Rachel stared for a long time at the twin holos on her desk. Her husband and son, both named Paul. Paul Senior, not she, had been the nurturer. She had been too busy running the corporation bequeathed by her own father. Paul Junior had inherited his father’s gentle character, plus something else, closer to depression. Or maybe his wife, Maria, had depressed him; unlike Rachel’s, theirs hadn’t been a happy marriage. So maybe Rachel’s five granddaughters’ aberrations came from their genes, or their difficult childhoods, or—who knew?—from curses by ancient and neglected gods. It didn’t matter. They were what they were. You had to go on from there.

  Midnight. Rachel wasn’t sleepy. She had been thinking a lot about what Caitlin had told her, and now Rachel was working on her own plan to send the remaining Rand refugees back home. But it wouldn’t do any good to just send them back. Rand’s economy had been devastated by this last, most virulent plague, and now that it was over, Rand would need financial help in rebuilding. Caity was right—the days of pure Libertarian self-reliance were finished. But whereas Caitlin’s motives were what she considered humanitarian, Rachel’s were practical. In order for the Landry Libertarian Alliance to survive at all in changed times, it was going to have to become less libertarian. Freedom Enterprises would have to subsidize both refugees and their businesses.

  Annelise, that bastion of tradition and rules, wasn’t going to like it. But this was not a democracy, and Rachel was CEO. Still, there must be a way of presenting it to Annelise so that charity didn’t look too much like…well, charity. Rachel would need to find that persuasion, need to build it into her plan. Which might also assuage Ian Glazer’s protest movement. Glazer—she would have to try for a meeting with him.

  She got down to work.

  36

  * * *

  DEEP SPACE

  Martinez was puzzled. At first, the data that his dead crew, Gonzalez and Wilson, had sent from the two Landry ships made sense. And then, as more of the data was unencrypted, it didn’t.

  The Dagny Taggart and the Galaxy had indeed been carrying a deadly bioweapon, which killed everyone on board both vessels.

  They had been headed toward New Utah.

  Martinez’s original assumption had been that the Landry ships had been caught on the Prometheus side of the closed Prometheus-Polyglot gate. The tiny research station could not indefinitely furnish food for two warships without resupply from Polyglot. The station could not, in fact, have fed itself for more than a few months, assuming that the Landry takeover of Prometheus nine months ago had left any of the original Peregoy scientists alive. So the Dagny Taggart and the Galaxy had first plundered the station for what it could scavenge, and then waited for the Prometheus-Polyglot gate to open, as the eleventh gate had opened to allow Martinez’s ships through. But might that have been a special opening, to remove humans from access to the alien planet? That idea seemed confirmed by the alien gate’s closing as soon as the Skyhawk and the Green Hills of Earth had cleared it, but Martinez didn’t really know.

  Either way, the two Landry ships had been marooned around Prometheus for at least three months. So they’d started the long trek to New Utah to surrender, their best option for survival.

  Or so Martinez had assumed.

  However, ships’ records had been sent to the Skyhawk by data specialist Jordan Wilson before he died. (Before you vaporized him, Martinez. Call it what it was.) The records revealed an entirely different scenario. Both Landry ships carried much more food than usual, and a much lighter crew list. They could have reached New Utah, turned around, and gone back before they ran short of provisions. However, as far as they knew, the Prometheus-Polyglot gate still would have been closed. The ships had not been deweaponized. That suggested that they had left Prometheus before its gate reopened—if it had—and didn’t realize they were able to return to Polyglot. Or that they did know the gates were open, planned to attack New Utah, and would return to Prometheus afterward, stripping their radiation weapons only just before they passed through to Polyglot.

  But an attack on New Utah would have been fatal to the Landry ships. Although sparsely settled, New Utah did have a military station and planetary-defense weapons. Sloan believed in securing his own. The Dagny Taggart and the Galaxy would have been shot down—unless they’d been equipped with long-range meta-beams. That’s what Martinez had expected to find in the ships’ installation records, and he did. Both Landry ships carried the new weapons, which the Landrys called “K-beams.” How many more did the enemy have? There was no intel on this critical question.

  “Sir,” said DiCaria,
waking Martinez from a nap in his quarters, the first he’d taken in thirty hours, “the data team found something else.”

  “What?” Martinez sat up, instantly alert. Or as alert as possible, anyway. DiCaria’s expression brought him the rest of the way.

  “I think you should see the unencrypted data for yourself.”

  Martinez did. The specialists, looking exhausted and tense, were jammed into a small cabin off the wardroom. It smelled of stale food and bodies that had not showered in too long. The lead specialist, Tiana Stevenson, was a very young woman with such dazzling encryption skills that Martinez had had to fight to get her for the Skyhawk. Stevenson neither stood nor saluted. Nor did the others. Martinez had long ago decided that these specialists’ lack of military polish was irrelevant.

  “Sir, they had missiles,” Stevenson blurted. “Adapted. They could be fired from pretty far out and aimed at the planet.”

  “Nuclear?” Those could be tracked and shot down long before they reached a planetary surface. It was what he’d expected the Dagny Taggart or Galaxy to do to his torpedoes.

  “No, sir, that’s just it. What we were trying to figure out. These are basically big rocks. They have no guidance machinery, no warheads. They’re big enough to survive atmospheric entry, but small enough to escape probe detection or to do much impact damage. They’d either explode over random areas or just blow a smallish hole in the ground and break apart.”

  “Go on,” Martinez said, but he already knew.

  “The design allows for a hollow center. To be stocked with pathogens, sir. And the continent on New Utah is a windy place.”

  “Yes,” Martinez said. And then, a beat too late, “Good work, Stevenson, all of you. Is there more?”

  “No, sir. I mean yes, there’s evidence that the pathogens were indeed brought up to the Dagny Taggart from Prometheus. The rest seems routine ship data, but we’re still digging.”

  “All right. Get some sleep, all of you.”

  On the bridge, he briefed Vondenberg and Murphy. Elizabeth Vondenberg, her face thin from half rations, frowned.

  “Did the data contain any information about what planetary defenses the Landrys installed on Prometheus? In addition to what we had there before?”

  “No information. But there wasn’t much there when it was a Peregoy research station. Virtually nothing.” Nobody had wanted the barren, cold little world until the discovery of the eleventh gate.

  From the Zeus, a few days ahead on the voyage toward New Utah, Murphy said, “They had time to install K-beams before the gates closed.”

  “Yes, if they had more of them. And there might be more Landry ships on the way to Prometheus now, if the Polyglot-Prometheus gate is open. Either way, the primary objective is now to destroy that bioweapons facility.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Murphy, the Zeus will continue on to New Utah. Vondenberg, the Skyhawk and Green Hills of Earth will set course for Prometheus, maximum speed.”

  With the gates supposedly closed for good, the Landrys might have assumed they would never be able to contact their bioweapons facility again. If the gates had all reopened, they might still assume that since they controlled—or had controlled—the Polyglot-Prometheus gate, and since the Peregoys did not know about the bioweapons, there was no need to rush warships to Prometheus.

  Or right now they might be sending K-beam-equipped ships to defend the dwarf planet and its lethal facility.

  Martinez did not have enough information. He would have to proceed without it. The bioweapon and its diabolical delivery system posed the single greatest threat to the Peregoy worlds that he could imagine. Old Earth had a long, rich history of wars in which disease killed more people, combatants and civilians alike, than died in battle. Including, of course, the final biowars that had ended up killing Earth itself.

  As the Skyhawk and Green Hills of Earth changed course and strained their engines, one additional thing continued to puzzle Martinez. He’d scoured the intel data on Rachel Landry. She seemed intelligent. Under her long leadership of the Landry Libertarian Alliance, its crazy brand of libertarianism had allowed much suffering on Galt and Rand, unrelieved by government regulation or aid. Everyone for themselves, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, self-reliance as king, all that essentially heartless non-governing. However, she’d seemed, in his opinion, callous but not murderous. And as far as he could discover, she hadn’t welcomed this war. Even if she read as little Earth history as Sloan Peregoy, she of course knew about the disease-heightened death throes of Terran civilization. Scorched-earth biowarfare didn’t seem her style.

  So why was it happening?

  • • •

  Six days later, the Skyhawk and the Green Hills of Earth reached Prometheus.

  Martinez had been fortunate in one respect. Prometheus and New Utah shared a star, with New Utah in the Goldilocks zone and Prometheus orbiting very far out. Their current orbits brought Prometheus much closer to Martinez’s position than might have been the case. The tiny planet would one day slip the star’s gravity and wander off into the black depths of space, but right now it was here in all its frozen bleakness, requiring only a slight detour off his course for New Utah.

  Prometheus suddenly looked to Martinez very like the planet behind the eleventh gate. Was its only reason for having a gate to enable humanity to eventually find the new gate beyond it?

  Fanciful speculation.

  The research station, located near the equator, lay mostly underground. The Skyhawk’s database held the station blueprints. The Landrys might have dug additional tunnels after they wrested Prometheus away from Peregoy Corporation, but a nuclear bomb could devastate the entire area. First, however, Martinez had to get a scout close enough to fire it.

  As they approached the dwarf planet, both the Skyhawk and the Green Hills of Earth searched for Landry ships. They found none. Apparently the Dagny Taggart and Galaxy had been the only vessels caught on the Prometheus side of the Prometheus-Polyglot gate, and the Landrys had not yet sent new warships. Was that because it took time to retrofit them with K-beams?

  That left planetary and orbital defenses. The Skyhawk’s sensors had picked up automatic signals from orbital probes. The station knew he was there.

  He sent Vondenberg’s ship to the far side of the planet. With both ships out of even K-beam range, Martinez signaled. “This is the PCSS ship Skyhawk, Captain Luis Martinez commanding. Research station, identify yourself.”

  Silence.

  And what would he have done if station personnel had claimed to be the original Peregoy scientists, who had somehow overpowered and disposed of both the Landry conquerors and the bioweapon facility? Even if Martinez verified their identities, he still would have no choice of action. The biological pathogen came from here, and no potential carriers could be allowed to survive. But his mission would feel easier if the men and women downstairs were wartime enemies who had already murdered the Peregoy scientists. Then there were no innocents on Prometheus.

  Are you sure? No one has their families with them? Their children?

  He pushed the thought away. “This is the PCSS ship Skyhawk, Captain Luis Martinez commanding. Research station, identify yourself. Repeat, research station, identify yourself.”

  Silence.

  “One more iteration and only one: Captain Luis Martinez of the Skyhawk, Peregoy Corporation Space Service. Research station, identify yourself.”

  Nothing. Was everybody down there already dead? Or completely defenseless? Not likely. The facility was just playing dead, waiting for him to get within firing range. That’s what he would have done in their place. There was no way to fire a nuclear weapon accurately without getting within radiation-weapon range.

  Martinez waited. The planet’s six-hour rotation had to bring the station into exactly the right position.

  Seventy-two minutes later, as the gate disappeared behind the curve of the planet, still no response from Prometheus. Martinez closed the hailing frequency
and switched to an encrypted link. “Scout bay, are you prepared to launch?”

  “Yes, sir. Prepared.”

  “Launch scout one. Lieutenant Adebayo, good luck. Green Hills of Earth, commencing operation.”

  “Yes, sir,” Vondenberg said, simultaneously with Lieutenant Tad Adebayo’s affirmative.

  Scout one streaked out of the Skyhawk toward Prometheus. Its trajectory had been carefully calculated; it would reach firing range at the same time that scout one from the Green Hills of Earth would break above the horizon 180 degrees away. But before either of those things could happen, Vondenberg said from her ship, “Abort! Abort!”

  A beam shot up from the research station, but too late. Adebayo had already banked sharply to return to the Skyhawk. He escaped: young reflexes, plus radiation beams that could not bend. Martinez said sharply, “Vondenberg?” She would never have aborted without good cause.

  “Sir, a ship coming through the Polyglot gate!”

  It couldn’t have radiation weapons, but Vondenberg was wisely taking no chances. A moment later, she said, “Not a warship. Looks like a class 6A…a personal vessel. Move to block its return through the gate?”

  “Yes. And recommence operation. Adebayo?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Launch.”

  Vondenberg would be giving the same order on her side. Scout one from the Skyhawk flew at maximum speed toward Prometheus. Adebayo ejected. The ship continued on automatic pilot. A brilliant flash, and the beam from the planet vaporized the scout.

  But before the beam artillery could swing around to take out the scout from the Green Hills of Earth, the small craft was within range and fired its missile. The beam vaporized the second scout; its pilot had not ejected in time. But the missile hit and the station went up in a mushroom cloud of methane, nitrogen, rock, and death. If anyone or anything survived in tunnels deeper than the blueprints showed, they were never coming up.