"But I'll make you a promise. If I fail in what I'm trying to do, I'll hand you this gun and surrender to you. Let you take me to justice, arrange a court-martial.
"But if I fail, I doubt you or I or any other human in this star system will survive long enough for a court-martial to convene in the first place."
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Guardian Contact Base
Captain Lewis Romero was scared to death. With the distinct and uncomfortable feeling of entering a trap, Romero walked up the broad gangplank to board Starsight, the intersystem ship the Guards had given to the Nihilists.
D'etallis clumped solidly up the ramp behind him, followed by the Outposter pilot and co-pilot, L'anijmeb and L'etmlich.
Starsight had been up and down into orbit a few times, shakedown cruises. The last two flights had been made solo by the Outposter pilots. But this was the first trip that would actually take the ship anywhere. D'etallis had requested a chance to visit Capital, and the response had been a warm and eager invitation from Jules Jacquet himself. For the sake of wartime security, the flight itself would be a closely held secret, but once on Capital, the Outposters were sure to be a grand center of attention. The Central Guardians were understandably curious to get a look at their new allies—and Romero had been ordered to accompany them. Career-wise, it was a splendid moment for Romero, but this was one honor he would have been willing to forego. He had no faith in the Outposter pilots, no faith that the Starsight could stay out of trouble in the midst of interstellar war.
Romero had wit enough about him to read the reports and figure out what was up. Odds were a major battle would shape up while the Nihilists were away from home. Supposedly, the Starsight and those aboard would never know. The ship's course was laid in by Guard astrogators under orders to keep their guests the hell away from the war zone. Starsight's detection and communications equipment were deliberately not very powerful, and the odds against accidentally blundering into some patrol ship in the vastness of space were nil. Especially since the course laid in for Starsight arced far out of the plane of mutual orbit for the two stars. She would never get within five hundred million kilometers of the barycenter. There was enough natural debris and sky junk in the vicinity of the baryworld that such precautions would have been prudent even if the enemy fleet hadn't been anywhere near the place.
But flying through a war wasn't smart. Lewis Romero could understand putting the best face on things for the Nihilists, but he knew there was trouble in the future.
What he didn't know was that the Starsight was carrying it.
D'etallis genuinely enjoyed the bustle and fuss of getting strapped in and ready for a voyage into space. And she was genuinely looking forward to the great adventure of travel on the longest Road any Z'ensam had ever travelled. It would be a leisurely journey of some days, and there would be great delight in seeing the stars, in seeing Outpost from space. But this was no pleasure trip.
Romero would have fainted dead away if he had realized just how much the Nihilists knew about the military situation. The Nihilist's radio gear was good, as was their skill at opening burn bags, examining the contents, and resealing the bags before anyone noticed. D'etallis knew what was going on in space, and knew that a time of turmoil, with the Guards occupied elsewhere, was the time to strike.
Starsight might have been headed for Capital at the Guards' bidding, but the Nihilists had their own plans upon arrival. Once she was there, once she had landed, D'etallis would take a Guardian-provided mortar from the hold, set it up on the landing field, and fire the specially modified rounds. The rounds were set to fire straight up and explode in midair, releasing an air-borne plague. Within days, every human on Capital would be dead. The Nihilists' plague was deadly to humans, and not to Z'ensam— several of the Guards thought to have wandered off from Contact Base had actually been kidnapped by the Nihilists and exposed to the plague virus. They had died quickly and nastily—and the corpses proved to be highly contagious. With the humans of Capital dead, Starsight would begin shuttling back and forth between Capital and Outpost, bringing in more Nihilists, the heirs of the Guardians' industrial base. There would be much to learn there.
In a stroke, the Nihilists would have shipyards, the plans for the human stardrive, star charts that could lead them to the other human worlds.
Within the year there would many other emptied worlds, full of gleaming machines and vast stores of knowledge, waiting for their Nihilist inheritors.
The Z'ensam radio did not offer anything like a news service; the closest thing to reporting of events was what amounted to the neighbors gossiping over the back fence— one radio operator chatting with unseen friends in other Groups. But that sufficed; word travelled.
The launch of Starsight was a secret among humans but to the Z'ensam it was a most public event, and the Nihilists made no secret of it—though they made no mention of the real purpose of the mission, either. They announced it and described it as an embassy mission.
That didn't fool C'astille. She heard the news as she came out of the Guidance's house. The Guidance and all the leadership had, of course, been appalled by the news that humans had committed so grave an insult as to send implanters, 'males,' to negotiate. The adult, 'female' humans were the ones to blame, of course. That was too repellent to think about. No one was to have any further contact with the humans. Shun them, ignore them, allow them to leave, be done with them.
But Starsight. C'astille knew the Nihilists well, knew their plans and schemes, and how what they did compared to what they said. She knew, instantly, that the Starsight was intent on a bio-attack. And she knew how hopelessly unprepared the humans, Guards or League, would be to defend against that.
The humans. Lucy had seemed a friend, and C'astille felt dirtied by the thoughtless, unmeant betrayal. Medicine. Supposedly "intelligent" implanters. Treating implanters as equals, and tricking all the Z'ensam into doing the same.
Disgusting, half formed creatures, with their shameless ways, their perversities unpunished. C'astille knew, somehow, that it took no trick of hormones, no sublimation of conscious will, that forced the human females to mate with the males. They would go to it willingly, perhaps even eagerly, rutting like filthy, mindless beasts.
To hear the humans say it, their kind was never dragged down to the level of animals. But C'astille knew better. The humans never, once in their life-cycle, rose above the animals.
She wished the Nihilists and Starsight well.
Let the humans die. All of them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
RKS Eagle
The first thing Chief Petty Officer Nyguen Chi Prihn noticed was the slight wear on the status panel's hold-down screws; the Phillips-heads were slightly chewed up. Someone had over-tightened the screws, or perhaps used the wrong-sized screwdriver. In any event, the screws were damaged, and that was something to bear down on the maintenance techs about. It was just the sort of minor sloppiness that could lead to disaster. If those screw-heads got much more chewed up, it might suddenly get very difficult to unscrew the screws to lift that panel and repair the innards in a hurry, in the midst of battle. And that panel reported on flight status of some very important birds. If the status panel went out, it could incapacitate the whole port side launch ops bay.
Who had done the last work on this panel? He or she needed a good bawling out. Prihn signed on to a computer terminal and pulled up the maintenance log for the status panel. He studied it for a moment, then let out a string of curses that could be traced right back to old Saigon. He, Prihn, was listed as the last person to work on that panel, over one thousand hours ago. And Prihn would bet his life that those screws hadn't been damaged two day ago.
Someone was going to be lucky to be alive after Prihn got through with him. Doing repairs without logging them! But wait a second. Prihn knew his spacers well. All of them knew, and believed, that lives, the fortunes of battle, the tide of history itself, could easily depend on how well they did their work. Overtightening
a screw was one thing, that might happen accidentally, but none of his kids would screw around with logging procedure. Writing up a careful description of what they had done was second nature to all of them. They knew that not doing so was one of the quickest shortcuts to catastrophic failure. Prihn chewed on his finger for a moment, then ran a beefy hand over his perfectly combed, well brillantined head of hair. Something was seriously wrong here.
He pulled a tool kit out of the cabinet, grabbed a screwdriver, and opened up the panel. And there was no string of curses suitable for what he saw. Someone had rewired the panel lights to give phony readings. Sabotage. Clear cut, unmistakable sabotage. It took him a moment to trace the reworked wiring. The telltale lights on the number three Rapid-Deployment Docking Port had been shorted out so as to show green on all counts no matter what the real situation was. Covert Lander Two was supposed to be hanging there.
The external cameras. One after another, he punched up the cams that should have shown RDDP-3. All of them were dead. He switched in the intercom. "Comm room, this is CPO Prihn at port side launch control. Emergency Priority. Request any ships at close station-keeping distance with Eagle to feed us a visual of our hull in the area of the port side Rapid Deployment Docking Ports. Pipe the feed to me."
"Stand by, Port Side Launch. One moment. We have a feed from Bismarck."
The video screen came to life, showing nothing but space. Then the camera panned over and locked in on the huge cylinder that was Eagle, dimly lit by the distant suns. Then Bismarck powered up her searchlights, and the big ship seemed to shine against the darkness of space, proud and stately in her rotation about her long axis. Bismarck's camera zoomed in toward the RDDP ports, but they slipped out of view with Eagle's spin before Prihn could get a good look. The camera pitched up slightly to catch the docking ports as they came about again. There should have been four covert landers docked to the external hull.
There were only three.
Prihn swore again, and felt a cold knot of fear and anxiety twisting together in his stomach. "Comm. Prihn again. Emergency Priority. Get me the captain. We've got trouble."
Zeus Orbital Command Station, Circling the Planet Capital
The radio signal came out of nowhere. Long-range in-terferometry placed the source very close, only thirty thousand kilometers away, but radar hadn't detected anything and still couldn't. The radio source, whatever it was, was requesting permission to rendezvous and dock with Zeus Station, but the commodore would have none of that. He didn't want any ship that radar couldn't see getting too near his command. It could be a sneak attack, a trick bomb. He deployed a squad of fighters and ordered them to home in on the radio signal, pick up any crew or passengers, and then leave the ship, or whatever it was, in a stable orbit far from any Guardian installation.
Not only Zeus, but the entire ring of bases and ships around Capital went on alert. There might be more of these invisible ships out there.
The fighters made the personnel pick-up without incident, reporting that there was only one person aboard the strange ship. The fighters hurried home, and their passenger was taken aboard Zeus and hustled straight into the Intelligence section. Captain Phillips himself decided to interrogate this one. There was only one place that ship could have come from. And to get a voluntary defection, flying such an advanced ship—it could be the sort of Intelligence bonanza that changed the course of a war. Captain Phillips took a look at his visitor—tired, frightened, worried. He decided this one required gentle handling.
"All right, son. You gave us a quite a start there for a moment, but now here you are. Who are you, and why did you come here?"
"I came to warn you of the Nihilists' plans," the visitor said. "They'll betray you. They're going to launch a plague attack that could wipe out every person on Capital. My name is George Prigot, and I'm a native of Capital."
After a four-hour interrogation, Phillips was forced to conclude that he had a credible witness. A check with Central Military Records matched this fellow's fingerprints and retinal patterns with one George Prigot, listed as Missing and Presumed Dead on New Finland. And this Prigot knew too many things, his story fit together too well.
"You realize, Mr. Prigot, that by coming here, you place yourself in grave danger. Whatever your reasons for coming here, by your own admission you are a deserter from the Guardian Army, and by your own admission, you have repeatedly committed acts of high treason against Capital. When your case is brought before the proper authorities, the only question left open to debate would be whether to shoot you as a spy or hang you as a traitor."
"I realize all that, sir," George said, his voice steady, only his eyes betraying his agitation. "But whatever my feelings about the government of Capital, I couldn't just sit back and allow the Nihilists to wipe out every human being on the planet. I decided I couldn't live with myself if I didn't try to stop them."
"And you are convinced that the Nihilists mean to turn on us?"
"Yes sir."
"But your only reason for so thinking is the report of this Calder woman, who in turn based her conclusions on what one single Outposter, a member of a Group that opposes the Nihilists, had to say."
“Sir. I don't have to tell you that the truth isn't determined by majority rule. The truth is just as true if no one believes it. And that's not my only reason for distrusting the Nihilists. I saw the tapes of what their foam worms did to the Impervious. Whoever invented those had no love for humanity. And why should they care about us? Their philosophy says intelligent life is an abomination. Alien intelligent life must be a double abomination. They kill their own kind. Why not us, too? And if they wipe us out, they get Capital. A whole world, and all our technology. Think of all the power that would represent, and tell me that wouldn't tempt them.”
"Hang me as a traitor if you like, but listen to me first. Stop the Nihilists, before it's too late."
It was not until this George Prigot character had been led off to a fairly comfortable cell, not until Captain Phillips had befouled the station's air conditioning system with two pipefulls of the most hideously expensive and malodorous out-system tobacco, not until Phillips had sat there in thought for a solid hour, that the Intelligence chief came to the conclusion that he believed Prigot. Not only that, Prigot was telling a story and voicing a warning that he, Prigot, thought was honest. Phillips decided that the story and the warning themselves were legitimate. The Nihilists were going to attack Capital. He had never really trusted them in the first place. The bioweapons deal had been too rushed, too rashly and hurriedly considered.
But Mr. George Prigot, late of both the Britannic and the Guardian armed forces, had sent other messages by coming here, though such had not been his intention.
With Prigot flown the coop, the League forces would be forced to assume that all their plans had been exposed, all their schemes revealed, all their traps turned around. That meant they would be forced to change their plans.
And that meant the enemy would lose time, would be somewhat more vulnerable for a while.
Even though he had not brought a scrap of tactical planning material with him, Prigot, by his very presence, had wrecked all the League's schemes and forced them to start over. Captain Phillips could see the advantages in that great but fleeting advantages. He powered up his terminal, and rattled off a priority preliminary assessment to flag HQ.
But there was another point, a more private one. Prigot had never mentioned the name, never mentioned any Guardian Navy officer involved in the plans that had gotten Calder to the League fleet. But there had to have been one. Phillips knew that. Johnson Gustav, Phillip's former aide in Naval Intelligence, was assigned to Ariadne station. Gustav had dealt with Calder; Phillips had seen action summaries written by Gustav that mentioned her by name.
The connections were tenuous enough, but Phillips knew Gustav, knew what he would do in a given situation. And Phillips had read the report that Gustav had written so long ago. The one that had flatly stated that Capit
al would lose the war, suffering greater and greater loss of life and political freedom the longer the war was allowed to drag on. The report that had cost Gustav a step in rank, gotten him thrown out of the Intelligence Service, and nearly gotten him shot.
Yes, Gustav's fingerprints were all over the place. He was mixed up in this scheme.
There was only one last important fact that Phillips had kept secret from everyone until now. But now, at last, it was time to act on. For the fact was, Phillips had agreed with every word of that report.
It was time to contact Gustav, privately, over a secure channel. Phillips had a lot to talk about with him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Captain's Cabin, Aboard the Eagle
Captain Robinson poured himself another cup of coffee and shoved his untouched-and-now-cold breakfast away. Hot, black, strong coffee—his morning repast was down to that. He was losing weight, he knew that without getting on a scale. He always stopped eating properly when he was nervous, on edge. Tension made his appetite vanish. Robinson had never been more tense and on edge than he was now.
He thought of his wife, Mildred, back home on Kennedy, and knew how she would worry if she saw him now. She knew the danger signs, the tiny twitches and microscopically small nervous gestures that warned things were not good.
And they weren't. For the first time, Robinson was seriously entertaining the thought that he might not get home to Mildred. He raised the cup to his mouth, sipped at the coffee, and burned his tongue. Too hot.
Prigot. Prigot was the last damn straw. They had mustered the ship's complement the moment Covert Lander Two turned up missing, of course. Prigot was the only person unaccounted for. The bloody twice-told traitor. He was competent enough to crack into any data file aboard and make a copy. It had to be assumed the Guards knew exactly where every ship had been—and so all of them had to be moved, or else be sitting ducks. Every plan, every disposition of forces had to be thrown out and reworked, and that was a crippling blow; the League forced into its second-best plans. Time, energy, and fuel chewed up.
Rogue Powers Page 34