Starhammer

by Christopher Rowley

  "Tell me one thing," Jon interrupted.

  "What?" Dahn said.

  "Why do you need to go to William?"

  "Because..." She trailed off.

  "But the aliens are out in the distant starfields. How can we get to them if we go to William, where the laowon are waiting?"

  Hawkstone intervened. "We have to go to William first, in order to go on to the stars. The Orn doesn't have the fuel to reach our ultimate destination. We'd have to refuel at laowon systems several times. They'd be waiting for us eventually."

  "Then how will we reach the aliens, to get help?"

  Eblis Bey laughed. "I fear you have been laboring under a misunderstanding. We shall have to explain things more fully."

  He paused. Something was happening on the astronav holo. A group of red blips had sprung into existence in the watermoon system around William.

  Officer Bergen on the bridge reported, "Captain, we have an arrival trace in William system—ten, no, eleven battlejumpers. More coming in all the time. Looks like the whole sector fleet is on its way to Nocanicus."

  "I have arrivals in the belt," another voice said. "They must be on combat footing; they're just popping out in midbelt and damn the consequences. Hyperion Grandee is center of activity but smaller ships are turning up in other sectors."

  The Bey noticed the proliferating red dots scattered about William and the main belt. "Admiral Booeej is on the move then. The game is set, Captain. I would imagine that Booeej has been given some inkling of the true nature of our mission."

  Captain Hawkstone struggled with it. Finally he gave in. "All right, we'll continue the mission."

  Jon read the shiver on Eblis Bey's face. He'd feared that Hawkstone might crack.

  "We will continue as planned," Hawkstone said quite calmly. "However, I would like it logged, which record I shall request be ejected before connection, that I protest the wanton misuse of this Luft Lines' vessel. I think we are all going to our deaths."

  "The Orn is your ship, Captain. I thank you for your most heroic offer," the Bey replied with a gracious smile.

  "This is a mad business..."

  "We have no choice, Captain, despite the cost of the ship. We must go to William." Administrator Dahn tried vainly to bolster the captain.

  "Besides, the ship will be controlled by the software developed by the Elchite brethren. They have worked on it for a long time, haven't you, M'Nee?"

  "The software will do the job. If the connection can be made, we will make it."

  Jon's forehead furrowed. "I don't understand. Why are we still in Nocanicus system? Why is the fleet concentrating around the watermoons of William?"

  "Because we must go to the very heart of the William system, and this name is one that the laowon have managed to pry from the musings of a traitor far behind us, on Earth. We have been keeping a few jumps ahead of them until now, but they have caught up again."

  "The laowon told me that they captured you but you escaped."

  The Elchite turned angry eyes on him. "As always, the laowon exaggerate in these matters. They came close, but we knew of their approach." He sighed.

  Officer Wauk on the bridge cut in on the PA.

  "We have a laowon vessel, cruiser-class jumper, in vicinity of El Zanzahab." A winking red dot had sprung into existence on the outer fringe of the belt, in the same quadrant that hid the Orn.

  Eblis Bey eyed the dot with obvious distaste. "They're getting closer, but since we're sitting still at low energy levels and they're arriving at high ones we can see them and they can't see us. Yet. Of course, eventually a probe will find us, so we will move soon, on the Orn's final journey."

  "On our own final journey, more likely," Hawkstone muttered.

  "Where are we going?" Jon said.

  "Mr. Iehard, have you ever heard a little piece of doggerel called the 'Testamenter Lament'?"

  "You mean, 'In the depths of the ocean where all hope sank...'?"

  "Yes, 'We laid him down, Where the gravity's no feather and the light will never reach.'"

  "Well, I've heard it all right."

  "But have you heard the third verse, the hidden verse?"

  Jon looked up with a puzzled frown.

  "It's the verse that begins, 'In the depths of the ocean where our hope sank, we laid him down,' just like the popular verse, but it goes thus:

  In stormy midlatitudes we secured him, and laid him down,

  Tucked close to Nemo's Piston a million fathoms round, where we laid him down,

  So don't look for us in sun's light lest the laowon hunt us down,

  To Hope and Nemo's Piston, a million fathoms round.

  "Nemo's Piston?" Jon repeated.

  "What would you say if I told you we're taking the Orn directly to the resting place of the Testamenter Battleship Winston Churchill?"

  Jon was rocked. Then he exploded. "Meg was right, she was right again, damn it!"

  —|—

  Admiral Booeej was coming. The Nocanicus System Governing Authority had assembled hurriedly to greet him. Members from the outer systems had been ferried, without warning, to Hyperion Grandee aboard swift jumpships.

  Laowon were everywhere. Petrie's section, the entire Military Intelligence building, was swarming with Superior Buro laowon in black tunics. For convenience, the meeting was to be held there, in Commander Petrie's very own office.

  Among them were still a few of the other things, the cyborgs, with human faces and power-graphite bones. Petrie had never felt such a chill in his heart as when the three shock troopers had burst into the section. They moved impossibly quickly, like the flickering of insects. Things that married human genetic material, like cloth, to machines. The eyes were so obviously artificial. The plate armor so convincing. It was hard to even see them unless they stood still or moved unusually slowly.

  Now Admiral Booeej himself was coming. His huge jumper, the Conqueror, had docked. Security teams lined the route.

  The admiral was tall, threatening, his purple face filled with fury. The door closed behind him with a cyborg guard on either side of it. The admiral moved across the room and sat at Petrie's desk, almost pushing the commander out of his way.

  "There is a new rule here. Imperial military conditions have been imposed." His voice was harsh, his accent that of the distant Orion arm.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Half a million kloms out, the Illustrious ran down the Dove model B and took it on board via suction tube. In minutes Melissa Baltitude was marched into the presence of Captain Ilefeit.

  "We have traced a departure trail. You have visited the habitat Sooner."

  Melissa tried to bluff her way out. "My name is Melissa Baltitude. I don't know the meaning of this outrage but I can tell you that my father, who happens to own one of the largest gas supply corporations in this system, will be just as angry as I am as soon as I can tell him about it."

  Captain Ilefeit regarded the human girl with amusement. She was not unattractive, if rather too thin for laowon tastes in human girls. Ilefeit himself preferred laowon females, something that he admitted was slightly old fashioned for the space service these days. Perhaps he would let the junior officers play with her first.

  "I think I should inform you that you aren't the only member of your family under arrest. Your father was taken by the Superior Buro about three hours ago. I believe he is in the Brutality Room."

  He enjoyed the look that came over her face.

  "We know that you visited Sooner; I conclude that you carried the fugitives Jon Iehard and Meg Vance. Any court of laowon justice would give us the blood rights to you on that basis alone."

  Melissa was lost. She stared helplessly at the laowon officer, so cold and blue and cruel. It was impossible to read his alien gold eyes; his face was inhuman. Yet she could tell he was enjoying himself.

  Her life seemed to have disintegrated violently. She began to think that it would have been better if that bullet from Arnei Oh hadn't missed her outside the Clocktower a
couple of nights before.

  —|—

  Aboard the Orn last minute checks remained to be made. The crew went about the list with grim faces, convinced they were going to their deaths. The young Elchites sat in the bridge, openly armed to prevent any thought of mutiny. Eblis Bey sat with Jon Iehard in the main cabin, and they drank a dilution of a fiery distillate the Elchite carried in a sleek little flask inside his robes.

  The Bey seemed in good spirits; he toasted their mission.

  The mote lay on the Bey's thigh, inactive, its tiny eyes retracted. It looked exactly like a glossy green billiard ball.

  The Bey caught Jon's expression. "A fascinating little monster, no? Strangely enough, from what I can deduce from my little friend, motes were a kind of pet. They had to be grown, but they remain, in a fundamental way, machines."

  Jon recounted his experience with Fabulous Fara and searched in his pockets for a moment before finding the little silvery cube. He brought it out.

  The Bey's eyes lit up.

  "Marvelous, this is another of their eternity substances. Some of their machines are built of similar materials. High albedo, thin, even transparent, but indestructible! Yet other machines have completely rusted away. We infer their presence in the long-ago from concentrations of iron oxides in the surrounding rocks."

  He turned the cube over in his hands, "The saddest thing, perhaps, is that most likely we will never find out what this is or what it is made of. From Rhap Dimple's descriptions of the ancient sciences, the flowering of the arts employed biological principles and techniques to crystals and even machines. Things were constantly being grown. How, or why, or even what was grown we have much less conception of."

  He was about to hand the cube back when Rhap Dimple became active with a squawk.

  "Trace! Yes! Unit to report!"

  "What is the matter?" the Bey asked. The mote hovered over the cube and a blue spark passed between them.

  "Hey, that's my cube!" Jon said, reaching for it. But when he took it, it was hot and, it seemed, slightly smaller than before. "What happened?"

  In response, he felt something strange impinge slightly on his consciousness, a shiver, a wind, a premonition.

  "Traced! It is you!" The mote hovered in front of him.

  "Me?"

  "Where were you traced?" squawked the mote.

  "I'm afraid I don't understand. What do you mean, Rhap Dimple?"

  "You carry tracer! Made recently, strong signal! Where were you traced? Where is the ancient master! Yes! Only they can trace!"

  Jon looked to Eblis Bey. "Do you know what it's talking about?"

  "I would hazard a guess. The so-called template must produce a solidified mental trace of living organisms. Your cube is such a trace. The mote can sense it somehow."

  "It was warm when I took it back from you. Fara said that all the bubbles were inert."

  "But yours was the first cube. Perhaps the others all lacked something in their creation."

  As Jon tried to explain how he'd come to receive the cube, the mote hovered.

  "I'm sorry, Rhap Dimple," Eblis Bey said. "There are no ancient masters left."

  The tiny sphere emitted a curious little groan, then it suddenly brayed, "Lack energy! Emergency!" and it sped off to the galley microwave ovens.

  They stared after it.

  "An amazing device, if that is what it is. You must tell me how you came to possess it."

  Eblis Bey sighed. "One day I will. It's a long story, that one, but one day I will give you an account of my adventure as a young man. It has a bearing on our mission."

  Jon returned to the question that loomed uppermost in his thoughts as the ship prepared for the next and last jump.

  "What if the Churchill isn't there?"

  "It will be," the Bey said imperturbably.

  "What if it isn't in working order?"

  "Then we will have an hour or so to fix it. If we cannot, then we are doomed and so is our mission. I am assured, however, by the head of our Testamenter Research Division, that the ship is most likely in perfect condition. The drives will be operating, idling, keeping it floating in William's hydrosphere. The technical people tell me that the Testamenter Drives use a variant on the technology of the deep link, which gives us instant communications access across the deeps. Such drives are easier to leave running than to turn on and off, apparently."

  "What is Nemo's Piston?"

  The Bey chuckled. "Questions, questions! Can I never satisfy you? Nemo was the nickname of Captain William Shrad, of the Hyades exploration vessel Jules Verne. It was the first ship here, the big planets are named after the crew."

  Jon shook his head in surprise. He'd never heard that scrap of history before.

  "The Piston is a storm vortex in William's northern hemisphere. It rises above a volcanic outbreak in the deep mantle. The Churchill is moored in the lee of the Piston, a relatively peaceful region. At that point, the hydrosphere flows east to west past the Piston at about one hundred kilometers an hour, but in the eddies directly behind the storm vortex is a dead zone with hardly any current flow."

  The Bey's eyes twinkled. "The Orn has been specifically reinforced for the mission. It will be flown by the software developed for us by young M'Nee and our technical group. Everything has been calculated quite finely. Orn will enter the upper atmosphere some distance from the Piston but will angle toward it through the gas clouds and then we will descend inside the vortex to the level of the hydrosphere. The real moment of danger will be in moving from one ship to the other. We replaced one of Orn's airlocks with a special elevator. A pressure-proof car will ferry us across. Then Orn will be sent aloft on its last journey. And the Orners will have paid their debts to Elchis."

  Jon's brows furrowed. "What do you mean?"

  "Since we took in the crew of the Churchill, nine hundred years ago, the children of Testament have been indebted to us. They had left the ship via a gas-company booster to escape William's gravity and they went to the Ginger Moon where they took fast NAFAL to the Hyades. Of course by the time they reached their destination, the Superior Buro had its spies everywhere. They came to us for help; we hid them well. You see some of their descendants around you today."

  "The Orners?"

  "Of course, the cult of Elchis is very old, young man. Even then there were Elchites spread across the clusters. The temples were beautiful, if perhaps a little sleepy at that time. But in taking this action against the laowon we were revitalized. We conceived our great project. Gradually, our heroic energies were increased until at last we were ready, whenever the call came."

  The PA crackled into life. Captain Hawkstone announced that they were preparing to jump. Jon quickly made sure Meg was strapped into her bunk, then returned to strap in himself. A heavy vibration began, lasted for a few seconds, and ceased as the ship jumped.

  The Orn pitched itself into the William system like a big fly fallen into a pool of starving trout. Before the ripples had passed the outer moons, lumpy battlejumpers were rocketing inward on intercepts.

  But the Orn had emerged only a few thousand kilometers above the cloud tops of vast blue William. One aspect of such a risky maneuver was the tendency for a jumper to acquire enormous spin momentum, from the conflict between the gravitomagnetic drive fields and the big planetary gravity node. The acceleration effects would convert everyone aboard to gruel if not compensated.

  For the first half second or so the ship wobbled, violently unstable, but the computer programs assumed control, the crew took correctives as prescribed by the software, and the chemfuel rockets blazed into life, holding the ship stable, fighting the spin tendency.

  Held fast against the spin, the Orn pitched forward, sliding straight down into the outer layers of the atmosphere. A fireball enveloped the hull as William's gravity sucked the ship down, shuddering vibrations rocking the crew members in their acceleration couches.

  On the screen, William bulked enormous. The horizon was flat, and huge storm system
s coiled one after another, endlessly, through the gas belts.

  The Orn rattled on, heavy thuds coming from somewhere up front as the ship blazed downward through the clouds of methane ice crystals and into the deeper atmosphere.

  Although the exterior view screens had lost almost all light, the computer enhanced what it could get. The Orn was angling through clouds toward a vast gray rampart of darker clouds that swirled up and across the flat horizon.

  The first big chutes opened, slowing the ship and jerking everyone up against the seat belts. The chutes vanished, crisped in seconds. The secondary and tertiary chutes opened and again, everyone was hurled hard against the crash straps.

  —|—

  High above them, the first laowon battlejumpers were swinging around William in tight orbits, powerless to interfere.

  The laowon commanders flinched before the outraged countenance of Admiral Booeej which stared out at them from their command screen.

  One finally broke the embarrassing silence. "They have realized their failure. They commit suicide like honorable soldiers facing overwhelming odds."

  Booeej shook his head violently. "Dispatch probes. Monitor the vessel. They did not come here to die unnecessarily."

  With furrowed brows, the ship commanders fired probes into the dark atmospheric depths below. There they picked up the Orn's smoke trail, even though it was blurring rapidly in the five-hundred-kilometer-an-hour winds of the upper helium layers.

  —|—

  Aboard the Orn the tension was broken by Captain Hawkstone's matter of fact announcement. "We have first definite radar trace. We are locking on now. I have initial arrival calculation of fifteen minutes."

  Explosive cheers sounded all over the ship. They had contact! A window opened on screen to show the radar trace: a fat blip, it hardly wavered. The Churchill was still there!

  Then there was a hard white flash from above and a hundred kilometers behind. A nuclear explosion roiled William's atmosphere. Eblis Bey spoke before anyone could panic.

  "No cause for concern, just a little surprise for the laowon. We have to keep them off balance at this vital juncture. So I have arranged for several salvoes of mines to be left in our trail."