The worms. The damned, horrible, nightmare worms. Thomas shivered, felt a twinge in the pit of his stomach. The worms would visit his dreams for the rest of his life. Even now, in the order of the situation room, the very thought of them raised his hackles. Worse than the worst delirium tremens he had ever had.
Wide dispersal in space was vital in protecting against the vermin. They were not immune to vacuum and neither, as it turned out, were the eggs. The eggs could survive maybe thirty seconds in zero pressure. A raider, a saboteur, might get a few ships with the damn things, but the Combined Fleet itself would be safe. Even so simple a thing as rigging Eagle for flag ops had been a challenge. No one really liked the idea of using a carrier for a flag, not after Britannica, but the plain fact was that there was no other combatant ship that could carry all the specialized gear and equipment, to say nothing of billeting the specialists who would use that gear. No one really discussed the fact that the USS Yorktown had stayed behind in Earth orbit.
Combined League Fleet. In a more romantic age, it would have been called the Grand Fleet, perhaps—named by a sailor awestruck by its mighty size, and not by a bureaucratic technician who saw the numbers and not the ships.
Never had so many spacecraft, under so many flags, been joined together in one task. A procedure for coordinating their movements should have taken years to invent, but this was wartime, and those same soulless technicians had come up with the computer programming and the comm system in weeks. Practice at simply talking ship-to-ship, working through the Babylon of languages and the dozen standard radio frequencies, was the most important thing for these craft at the moment, and would be until the Search teams finally located the enemy.
You could hear the capital S in Search when people talked about it. Nothing was more important; and yet it had to be done by the tiny number of ships that could be equipped with the proper sensing devices. After over a month of round-the-clock effort by the Brazilians, their detection stations were just arriving at Columbia and would be heading out in a day or so. So far, only about fifteen target systems had been checked. Nothing so far.
Far Shore was still out there, and so were Vasco da Gama and Jodrell Bank. One of them might have succeeded. But for Sir George, it was time to do little more than wait.
Except for one project, and Sir George was following it closely. It was based on what some of the scientific johnnies had said about what was to be found at the barycenter of a binary star system.
It was a frightening idea, and a daring one. But try as he might, Admiral Thomas could think of no reason why it would not work. The research team had already come up with operational recommendations.
They gave it the code name Bannister. It seemed to Thomas that the deadliest schemes always had innocuous code names.
Joslyn tried to let herself fall into the blissful mood of a happy, romantic reunion, and even succeeded to a certain extent. But there were too many things on her mind for her to manage it completely. Mac didn't seem to notice her worries, though, and she was very glad of that.
What about their new admiral, dear old Sir George? Their lives were in his hands now. She loved her great-uncle, but she worried. She knew him better than anyone else in the fleet, knew his strengths and weaknesses, and even she had no answer to the central question: Was he the man for such a command? If not for the foam worms, he would have had a major victory in his pocket at Britannica. Was that just luck, chance, or had old Sir George simply been given his first decent chance after a lifetime of being shunted aside?
And she worried about the drinking. She managed to keep his boozing under some control, but she couldn't be there all the time. How much worse would it make things?
But more than anything else, the death of the Impervious preyed on her mind. She resolved never to talk about it with her husband. Mac was already prepared to believe his words had cost them the Imp. It would be hard enough to convince him that wasn't so, that the Guards' plans must have been laid before he said anything. Joslyn was glad he hadn't seen that nightmare with his own eyes, glad that he couldn't know it was even worse than he imagined it being, or there would have been no convincing him.
And she herself had no desire to remember—though the disaster came into her thoughts, unbidden, time and time again. The nightmare trip from aux control to the emergency airlock, after the worms had done their worst and the Imp was dead, that was burned into her mind for all time. She could still hear the horrible shriek of the air roaring out the lock when they blew the outer door while the lock was full of air, because the pumps were dead. She could still see Ensign McCrae dying, strangling, screaming in silence before their eyes because the worms had eaten a hole in his suit somewhere. She could see the waiting cutter, framed by the worms that had gotten into the lock's vent system and so been sucked out with the air. The worms' ghastly, flaccid bodies bursting in the vacuum, and the cutter's lasers burning anything that even looked the size of a worm before it would allow them aboard.
And, the worst of it, somehow, the look on Sir George's race when they had half-dragged him out of the Imp's lock and into the cutter. The Imp had been more than his ship for ten long years—she had been his life, his hope, his plan for salvaging something out of his life's work. Now she was scrap metal, the grisly grave for hundreds.
Had she, Joslyn, done the right thing then? Aboard the cutter, she had handed him the bottle of gin, and let him drink as much as he would. What the worms had done to Sir George's world was more than any man should be expected to race, and Joslyn could not begrudge him his means of escape. But should she have given him one more lesson in hiding from failure?
Was he the man?
If she had known about Bannister, she would have worried even more.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Aboard Far Shore, En Route to Columbia
Girogi Koenig could think of nothing but a proper bath, a door thick enough to shut out noise and give some fellow some privacy, the sound of new voices, the sight of new faces. It was over, all over, and they were headed home, after hanging in space, lying doggo, careful not to betray their position, picking up every detail they could of the Guard solar system for far too long a time. And this damn crew would never be cooped up with each other again.
"C2 drive in thirty seconds. Please stand by," Captain Toshiro announced. Even Lieutenant Pak was excited.
The Far Shore would be in Kennedy's star system in less than a minute. Girogi had the comm laser set for secure transmission already. It would take Far Shore long hours to get from her entry point to Columbia, but her news would reach there in a few minutes.
Survey Service Base Comm Center
The comm center had standing orders, but they were the sort of orders an ensign stuck with the lobster trick was hesitant to obey. But 0330 hours local or not, the admiral had said he wanted to be notified. Ensign Timility swallowed hard and picked up the phone. It rang twice, and then he heard the noise of curses as the admiral slapped at the answer button.
"What?"
"Ah, Admiral Thomas?"
"No, laddie, it's the Queen of Sheba. Who is this, and why the hell are you calling at this time of night?"
' Well, ah, sir, this is Timility in comm. We're—we're picking up something from a returning Search ship. Far Shore.'
"And?"
"It looks like they found it! We're getting a long text message now. I'll have a hard copy in five minutes."
"The devil you say. Jolly good! You did right to wake me, Timility. Let me jump into my pants and I'll be there straight away."
Sir George showed up in his pants, but not much else. He had thrown on a disreputable dressing gown, a long, threadbare thing of indeterminate color that might have looked smart twenty years ago. Sir George was bare-chested, and a sparse thatch of gray peeped through when the gown slipped a bit. Ensign Timility could smell the port on the admiral's breath, but Sir George seemed nothing if not sober and in control.
The admiral grabbed at the hard copy as
it plopped out of the printer and riffled through the pages, growling to himself "By damn, they've got it. Dimity, I want everyone in tactics and planning roused out of bed and to work on this now. I want enough copies of this report to paper every wall in the base. My God, they actually found it. This calls for a bit of celebrating." Sir George stuck the report under one arm, dug an enormous black cigar out of his dressing gown pocket, and bit the end off it. "I've been saving this for the right moment. Imported it straight from old Cuba." He fussed about, trying to light it for a minute before it began drawing properly, and then stood, puffing smoke like a dragon, reading the Far Shores report. He looked up and noticed that Timility hadn't moved a muscle. "Well, get on it, Dimity. Rouse em! We've finally got some work to do."
Timility started working the intercom system, bringing the experts in. It was going to be a long night.
Second Lieutenant George Prigot, Royal Britannic Navy (Naval Intelligence) got one of the first calls. George had never been much good after a sudden awakening, and it took him a while to get his bearings. The call, a rather peremptory call to the comm center without explanation, didn't help. For that matter, his bearing had been a little off ever since Admiral Thomas had breezed into the Survey base.
As usual, no one had figured out what to do with George at Survey base, and he was apologetically packed into some broom closet they called guest quarters. Then Admiral Thomas had noticed George Prigot's card going past, somehow—and that was that. The admiral didn't like anomalies, and Mr. Prigot was one. Lieutenant Prigot would not be one. The Royal Navy permitted non-British persons to enlist, and Naval Intelligence was an odd barrel offish that wouldn't mind one more. Therefore . . . George had gone along with it. It would be nice to belong to something.
Intelligence. Why was it that every bureaucrat and brass hat in the League thought George Prigot belonged in Intelligence? He was an engineer, not a spy. Okay, so he was a native of Capital, and he knew which end of a Guardian screwdriver to hold. What good did that do them in Intelligence? George had used his brand-new clearance to peek at his own file, and the words there explained a lot about the cold shoulder he got from the rest of the Britannic Intelligence staff. All of them, right up and down, had urged that he was a bad security risk and should not be allowed to take up a commission. But Thomas had overruled them all. "There are times," the admiral's comment read, "when you have to have a little faith in people. Clearance approved."
George pulled on his brand-new uniform and staggered his way down the corridor to the head. He automatically went through the motions of trying to make himself look presentable and made his way to the comm center. Comm was crowded and confused, and getting more so by the minute. There must have been a couple of dozen people jammed into the tiny room and more coming all the time. A harried rating handed George a copy of the printout from Far Shore, and he found a quiet corner to sit down and start reading it.
Before he could get a fair start, the section chief of the comm center ordered everyone to get the hell out of her radio room and move into the auditorium on the next level down. The section chief then grabbed Timility's arm and gave him a royal chewing out for taking the admiral's order too literally and mobbing her command with a lot of unauthorized personnel.
George followed the rest of the herd down to the auditorium and took a seat in the back row. There were about fifty pages to get through. Like any good engineer, he wanted to read all the specs and have all the data before he reached any conclusions.
Others around him were of a different opinion. By now, there were thirty or forty standing around in the aisle or perched in chairs, yammering on, arguing over what it all meant and what should be done about it.
Finally, Driscoll jumped up on the small stage, grabbed a mike and shouted into it. "PIPE DOWN OUT THERE."
The hubbub slowly died out.
"All right," Driscoll went on in a quieter voice. "Everyone take a seat and we'll go over this together."
The murmur of voices rose up again for a moment as people sat down. George spotted Mac and Joslyn sitting near the front of the house. He waved, and Joslyn waved back. Mac was too busy reading to notice anything else.
"TEN-SHUN!" Everybody got to their feet as Admiral Thomas came in a side door and took the three steps up to the stage. He had gone back to his quarters and taken his time to get into his uniform and shave, but he was still smoking that big Cuban cigar, and looked more cheerful and alert than anyone had a right to be at this hour.
"At ease, all of you. Take your seats and let's get on with it. As you have all seen, Far Shore has found the little spot our Guardian friends call home. The big surprise is that planets of both star systems seem to be inhabited. At least Far Shore picked up radio traffic from both sources. One of the two planets was definitely identified as Capital, and the other planet seemed to be called Outpost. Far Shore picked up numerous radio calls in clear referring to the planet names. Captain Toshiro and his crew did an excellent job—not only did they find our quarry, but they also managed to sift through the radio traffic and come up with some rough figures on numbers of ships and how and where they are based. Most of their Navy seems to be stationed in omit about Outpost.
"Another bit of information. The anti-ship missile systems the Guards are so good at. There are no less than three of them in the system. One deployed around Nova Sol A, and so protecting Capital. A second deployed about Nova Sol B, shielding Outpost.
"And a third is being built around the barycenter. Toshiro's crew listened in on the chatter of the construction tugs, and Toshiro's best estimate is that the barycenter system is less than a third complete. Which sounds like an engraved invitation—though we haven't much time to exploit it.
"All this begs the question—what are we going to do? What is our plan? What are our war aims? Now we're all military here, and war aims are more properly a question for the politicians.
"So we drop the question of what to do in their laps. And when they come back with the answer we will be ready, because you lot here are going to break off into separate planning groups, each to plan for a different contingency. You will have your specific assignments within the hour, and some of you will stick with the jobs you have now and simply be expected to keep informed and assist.
"But we are going to plan for:
"A peaceful and open arrival—a show of strength that will scare the pants off the Central Guards and convince them to give up. Then I suppose we go around and hand out flowers to the people who attacked us without the barest hint of a provocation and then murdered our allies and friends using the most barbaric weapons imaginable, invaded our star systems and came bloody close to wiping out my fleet, and who have probably been kidnapping our kith and kin and enslaving them since before any of us were born. As you might have gathered, I rate the sweetness-and-light approach as not likely to work, and not bloody likely to be tried.
"Second, choosing among the various military options to find the one most likely to gain us a military victory with the greatest cost to the Guards and the least hurt to ourselves. In parallel with this, we will want to look at ways and means of rescuing any and all League-member citizens kidnapped by the Guards. I am certain that we can defeat the Guards, even in their home system, even against their loathsome bioweapons."
Admiral Thomas paused for a moment, and something in his ice-cold tone of voice horrified George Prigot before the new Intelligence officer understood what the admiral was saying. "The third option is simple. And since the Battle of Britannica, I must admit that it is more likely than it once was. Personally, I would oppose it strenuously. However: That third option is extermination. We wipe them out, down to the last. Bomb every city, every satellite, every ship, sterilize the planets of Nova Sol, and ensure that the damned worms are wiped out along with their masters.
"This, too, I am certain we could do."
CHAPTER TWENTY Ariadne
Have they forgotten us?
No one asked that question anymore,
at least not out loud. But all the CIs asked it of themselves, every time they saw the stars or thought of home. "Home" was gradually becoming a mythic place for each of them, an ideal that would never be seen again.
It had been a year and a half and more that they had been here, cooped up on Ariadne. The former members of the Survey Service's first class didn't think of themselves as being with the Survey or the League, or as citizens of their own nations anymore. It was a feat of selective memory, defense against pain. To forget what they had been helped resign them to what they were. But that made it easier for them to think of themselves as CIs—and Conscripted Immigrant was a polite term for slave. Yet that defense of forgetfulness, acceptance, surrender to the situation, was only skin deep. Every now and again, a certain look would pass across someone's face. The look of sorrow, the look of loss—the look of being lost. The outside universe thought they were dead, had given up on them. The CIs had lost hope.
Other things had been lost as well; the main strike fleet had never been seen again. Leviathan had launched long months before. None of the ships had ever come back, and rumors swept the station that the Guards had suffered a grave defeat. That had helped morale for a while, and the CIs watched the screens and monitors, waiting for the great League fleet that would come to chase the Guards back to their home system.
But Sam Schiller, the CIs' best astronomer, had been pessimistic then, and he had been right. The League had to find the Guards first, and whatever else had happened with the main strike fleet, the Guardians at least had kept their home system hidden. No great League fleet ever appeared, and morale slumped lower than ever.
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