Rogue Powers

by Roger MacBride Allen

  They had pretty much shot their bolt, coming in with all guns blazing. (That matter-transmitter they had used on New Finland would have come in handy right about now, but apparently the damn thing was hideously expensive to run, and no one knew exactly why the one existing transmitter had spontaneously melted down a month after it was used to transmit the troops to New Finland.)

  So supply ships shuttled in and out of the barycenter, bearing fuel and ammunition and food. The League fleet built up its strength, and waited. And with every day of waiting, Robinson noticed, Sir George was just a trifle later getting out of bed, and his cheeks were just a trifle rosier when he turned in.

  Under the League's careful watch, the Guards likewise made no dramatic moves, but carefully reordered their forces. There were two large flotillas, each about a third the size of the League fleet, one orbiting Capital and the other about Outpost. Every day a ship or two launched away from Outpost and disappeared into C2, only to reappear some time later on approach to Capital. Slowly, carefully, the Guards were shifting their strength to a direct defense of the home world. Presumably, in some computer simulator on Capital, they were planning the best way to dislodge the League. But an attack by hundreds of ships was not something to organize in an hour or two. It took time.

  It could be weeks before either side was prepared for a major fleet movement.

  In the meantime, there was that one tiny mystery ship, growing closer all the time. Robinson didn't like mysteries, especially this one. The Eagle stood ready to vaporize the visitor at a moment's notice. The comm crews tried to reach her over a hundred different frequencies, in a dozen languages. Since the Guards spoke English, it was hard to see the point of broadcasting to the visitor in Russian, but it kept the comm crews busy and happy, and that counted for something.

  That was its only benefit; the visitor did not transmit a syllable in response. Obviously, things would start happening after she had arrived and taken up her station a hundred thousand klicks out.

  Robinson deployed a half dozen unmanned probes into the vicinity of space toward which the visitor seemed to be headed. One of these was the first to get a good visual on her when her engines finally cut off and the ship itself was no longer hidden in their glare. Robinson and Thomas were both on the bridge for the arrival, watching everything comm could pipe up to them. It was a lander, a rather weathered one, with Guard markings all right. No real shocker there, Robinson thought. Who else's ship would it be?

  It was the first transmission from the lander that surprised him. It was a general broadcast in a woman's voice. 'I have no directional radio gear. It is a wide broadcast transmission. Please jam this frequency for reception at Outpost and Capital. Do not respond until this is done."

  Robinson hesitated a moment, then shrugged. He could play that sort of game. What harm could come from jamming the enemy s radio? He punched the intercom key and talked to the comm chief. "Comply with that, and use a good overlap. Jam well above and below that frequency. Reply to our new friend when you've done it. keep us patched in up here."

  There was a few moments' pause as the comm station set up directionalized antennae and aimed them at the two planets. There was a increase in the background hiss as some of the signal leaked over, and then Eagle's radio operator spoke again.

  "Eagle to unidentified ship. Jamming commenced. Please identify yourself now."

  There was another short pause. "This is Lieutenant Lucille Calder, Royal Australian Navy, on detached duty with the League of Planets Survey Service. I was last known by you to be aboard the Venera, and I suppose I'm listed as missing and presumed dead. I have a lot to tell you. I don't want the Guards to know I'm still alive. That's why the jamming. But I don't think I should broadcast my report, even so. Request permission to come aboard."

  That started a hubbub. The Venera! She was more than a lost ship to spacers, she was a quick-born legend, a Mary Celeste or a Flying Dutchman, a mysterious story that had never had a proper end. The usual murmur of voices around the bridge rose to a dull roar until Robinson called out. "Put a lid on it! Admiral, your opinion?"

  "Well, if it's some kind of trick, it's a damn clever one, and I can't quite see the point of it. If this Calder truly was with the Survey, Captain Larson and my niece can both identify her. I say let her aboard—with extreme precautions.'

  "I agree."

  The decontamination boat launched from Eagle forty-five minutes later, Mac and Joslyn aboard. Mac could still not believe it. Calder, alive! Pete had been right all along— the Venera had been hijacked. Oh, it had all but been taken for granted after a while as a great theory, but here was proof. Joslyn and he had never known Calder all that well—she had been a smile in the mess hall, not a close friend. But if she lived. . . .

  The decom boat was little more than a control panel, vacuum, engines, and fuel, cobbled together out of spare parts months ago in case the task force had to rescue anyone from a worm-ridden ship. Mac and Joslyn rode in crash couches welded to the midsection of the I-beam that made up the fuselage. At one end of the thirty-meter long beam were the engines, and at the other was a specially built personnel decom station. Midway between the bow and the pilot's station was a lethal-looking weapons pod, plus a disinfectant sprayer and other things to kill worms. Mac and Joslyn wore armored pressure suits. No exposed part of the ship or their suits was edible to the worms, so far as anyone knew. They had learned how to kill worms, and hoped they knew how to kill whatever else the Guards had dreamed up.

  But how the hell did Calder get here?

  Joslyn moved the decom boat at a stately one-gee toward Calder's lander, a careful, deliberate pace. It was easy to remember that any weapon not trained on Calder's ship was now trained on theirs. It was just over a four-hour run, accelerating for two hours, then turning the decom ship bow-to-stern and decelerating for another two hours.

  "Mac, what can this mean?" Joslyn asked. "How the hell did she manage to steal a Guard lander? What's been going on out here?"

  "Hey, kid, your imagination is as good as mine. Make up your own answers."

  "Foo to you, oh captain mine. But the Venera alive! It makes a chill run down my spine."

  "You're not alone. Just think of how Pete must feel. He was the only one who ever really dreamed that they weren't just a shipwreck."

  "I'll bet he's glad he came along with the fleet."

  "Watch your radar. We're coming up on her."

  "Who's the pilot in this marriage?"

  "Okay, so watch where we're goin—"

  The engines stopped suddenly, and the decom ship was dead in space to Calder, not ten kilometers away from her. Calder had switched on the lander's navigation lights, and they could see them blinking across the darkness of the brilliant starfield.

  Mac grinned and reached across to squeeze Joslyn's armored shoulder. "Very sweet, pilot. Very sweet."

  "Shut up and open the secure channel, Cap'n."

  "Aye, aye, ma'am." Mac told the computer to train a laser link back on the Eagle. "Eagle, this is Captain Larson speaking over a secure line. We are in position." Mac switched on the radio, and took a deep breath as he prepared to talk with a woman who had been a ghost to him. "Lucille, this is Mac Larson. Do you know me?"

  The answer came back instantly, and there was delight and pleasure in the voice. "Mac! Dear Lord, what are you doing here?"

  "I could ask you the same question. But, look, Lucille, the big shots want proof that you're you ..."

  "As well they should."

  Joslyn plugged her suit into the radio. "Lucille! Who am I and who married me to Mac?"

  "Joslyn! Hello! That dreadful Reverend Farnsworth Buxley. He put half the congregation to sleep."

  Joslyn turned and grinned at Mac. "If you're not you, you do a great imitation. Now, we've got a whole decontamination rigmarole to get through. Did Eagle explain to you?"

  "Yes they did. I'm in my suit and the ship is in vacuum. I have my personal stuff in a vacuum-sealed carrybag. Swi
tching to suit radio. You might have to boost your gain, it's not a very powerful set.'

  "Yes, your signal just got a lot weaker."

  "Okay, coming out the lock. Jumping free, toward you, and lordy it's a big first step."

  "Don't worry, we'll get you."

  "Oh, I'm glad to be here. I've been cooped up so long. The stars look so lovely and I don't care if I'm babbling—I'm free!"

  The telephoto cameras showed a tiny human figure sliding away from the shabby-looking lander.

  "Okay, Luce. Now listen. We're going to move in on you. If I come in too fast, let me know."

  "Oh, don't treat me like a groundhog, Joslyn! This is more fun than I've had in ages!"

  Joslyn played with the low-powered trim jets, and nudged the decom ship toward the suited figure. In spite of Lucille's urging, she moved the ship slowly, carefully, closing the distance from kilometers to meters to centimeters, until the suited figure reached out a hand and gently pulled herself onto the I-beam fuselage.

  "Welcome aboard. And welcome to League territory." Mac watched with anxious eyes as Lucille swung herself around and waved.

  "Thank you, thank you, thank you! Which way to the showers?"

  "Straight toward the bow. Strip to skin in the airlock there. Once you're in the decom tank use the inside controls to open the outer lock and jettison the suit and everything else."

  Lucy felt herself bubbling with delight. She had escaped! It didn't matter what happened next, didn't matter that the League would have to come down on her like a ton of bricks to get every bit of information on the Guards and the Outposters and Ariadne—well, that was the way it had to be. She owed that to Wu and Schiller and everyone else back on the station. And she owed Johnson Gustav.

  She pulled herself along the I-beam toward the decom chamber. The outer hatch was open. She clambered into it, and shut the hatch behind her. The lock itself was a standard-issue aluminum and plastic box, little bigger than a closet. It didn't take long to pressurize. She wriggled out of the suit and her clothes and shoved them into a corner. She opened the inner hatch and tossed her carrybag into the decontamination tank. She followed the bag in and, working in the dark, dogged the inner hatch shut. She found a light switch and turned it on. Then she used the remotes to open the outer hatch with the lock still pressurized. There was a shower there, and several bottles of very strong, nasty-smelling soap. The paranoia about decontamination told her they had met with bioweapons already.

  She didn't have to ask what the outcome had been.

  Mac saw the outer lock open and the pressure suit and other clothes zip out into space, pulled along by the escaping air. He powered up the infrared laser in the weapons pod, aimed and fired as Joslyn played with the attitude jets to match velocity with the debris. The suit melted and then vaporized in the intense heat. Mac zapped the rest of the clothes, and then Joslyn moved the boat alonside the lander. Mac pulled a pair of heatflash grenades out of a satchel and tossed them through the open airlock into the lander's cabin.

  "Pull her back, Joz."

  The control jets flared, the boat pulled back, Mac hit the radio trigger, and the lander's interior flared with a sullen, killing heat. They headed for home.

  Decontamination. Bioweapons. First Contact. The League still had no idea that they were mixed up in a First Contact. Sobering thoughts. There was so much to tell them, but how to start? Scrubbing herself, carefully drying herself and getting into fresh coveralls, Lucy pondered the question. In all her time of waiting, she had never considered how to tell them. Now she did, and resolved to say nothing until she was sure of her words, until the right people were there to listen. Lucy kept her silence on the journey back to Eagle, except to reassure Mac and Joslyn she was all right. She smiled and waved and said nothing of consequence to the small crowd that cheered her arrival in the hangar deck, smiled her way up into the conference room where the Intelligence staff was waiting.

  She looked out across the feces, and thought of the Nihilists and lost her smile. And she knew how to begin. "You're fighting the wrong war," she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Aboard RKS Eagle

  Lieutenant George Prigot sat there, silent and glad to be forgotten in the hubbub. The command staff and the Intelligence units had been in joint session for endless hours now, and the voices of argument swirled around him.

  "We can't make First Contact in the middle of a war!"

  "The bloody Guards made First Contact. We'll have to settle for second—and we don't have much choice about making Contact. How can we avoid it?"

  "But in the middle of a war? How? Who? How can we get through the Guard ships around Outpost?"

  Captain Robinson listened to it all for a while before banging his gavel and attempting to bring the talk back to the point. "Lieutenant Calder, I have seen the results of the attack on Impervious, and I am willing to grant that bioweapons are dangerous. I can't quite credit your claim that these Nihilists could or would wipe out the human race. For starters, how could they get to us? They have no starships, no spacecraft of any kind—

  "But they will get them, Captain," Lucy said, with the weary voice of someone who has said the same thing many times before. "By trade or theft or by building their own, sooner or later they will have ships, now that they know such things exist. The Nihilists regard intelligent life as an abomination. Before anyone can ask me why, I'm not quite sure. The Nihilists want to keep growing in power— and they lose lots of friends if they start genocide against their own kind. Mostly, as I understand it, the Nihilists limit themselves to killing Outposters as they enter old age, which doesn't really seem to bother anyone. Again, don't ask me why, I don t know.

  "But out of all this come some key points: They can kill us, and kill us by the millions. You have seen the results of weapons that can breed more weapons. They are, I assure you, actively seeking to get ships so they can get to us. That's opinion on my part, but every Outpost Refiner I've talked to agrees with that assumption. And killing us has got to be politically healthier for them than killing other Z'ensam—other Outposters. We are very ugly to the Z'ensam. Worse than ugly—mortifying to look on. The Guards are the only humans any Outposter has met, and they aren't the best ambassadors of good will. A lot of Z'ensam would stand back and let the Nihilists go after us—and if the Nihilists, say, take Capital, wipe out the population there, the weapons and the ships and the technology there would let them take over all of Outpost. And if they got starships, and they came hunting the rest of us—imagine, just for starters, a breed of those worms that was designed to attack a planet."

  There was a long silence. Finally one of the New Finnish officers broke it. "Just once, right there at the end, did you mention Capital, the Guardians. They are our reason for being here. Your aliens are all very interesting, but we are here to fight the Guards! You know what those monsters did to my world. Why should we defend them against these Nihilists of yours? Let it happen. We would be well rid of the Guards. Let the Nihilists wipe them out. We of the League can handle the Nihilists afterwards. I would consent to that course of action, but even it would not satisfy me altogether. / say we must ignore these creatures who don't even have spacecraft. We must flatten Capital. We have waited in this dreary barycenter of yours long enough, admiral. Enough of caution. We New Finns, at least, came here to kill Guardians!"

  George's blood turned cold. This crazy Finn was talking genocide—and no one was disagreeing! They were concerned with the tactics of battle. No one raised the moral issues against allowing the Nihilists to exterminate the people of his planet. He wished Mac or Joslyn were in on this meeting. They would have spoken up. George knew damn well no one would listen to him on this subject. Anything he could say would only make things worse.

  Captain Robinson turned to Admiral Thomas, but the admiral didn't seem to want to say anything. Robinson looked to the Finnish contingent. "Gentlemen, we understand your feelings. But I don't think the situation is simple enough for a simple answer. We ar
e not properly prepared to do it, we do not have the experts in xeno-sociology and so on available, but nonetheless I think we must establish some sort of relations with at least this group of Outposters that Lieutenant Calder traveled with."

  The Finns did not reply, but a murmur of agreement came from the rest of the table. "So how do we do it?" Robinson asked.

  "Ah, Captain?" A nervous-looking young black woman, an Intelligence lieutenant, spoke up timidly. "We can get a team down there, with a minimum of risk. We just can't get them back—at least not for a while. We have those covert landers."

  "Right! I'd clean forgotten about them. Thank you, Lieutenant Krebs."

  "Wait a minute," came a voice from the rear. "What's a covert lander—and what was that about not getting back?"

  Krebs leaned in toward the center of the table so she could be heard. "The coverts are one-shot landers designed to be transparent to radar and so on. We have a number along so we could drop spies and saboteurs on Capital. Each can carry six and some cargo. You can't get back in one because they don't carry much fuel—and they land a little rough, too. A covert lander could follow that beacon down, we could get some people in there, and they'd have to sit tight until we could get them out. They'd have radios and so on, of course."

  "Lovely," said the same voice from the rear.

  Pete Gesseti sighed at that news, but such was life. He was along for this trip so the League could have some expendable diplomats on the scene to get negotiations started. The key word was expendable. You didn't send the dean of the diplomatic corps into a war zone. May as well get the volunteering over with. Pete rose. "Ah, Captain Robinson. I really hate to admit this, but it seems to me that I'm the logical one to send on this trip."