A chime told Tarkos the ship was repressurized. He opened his armor and took a deep breath. Cool, dry air, that—although freshly pumped in—still smelled of Bria. As his armor climbed into its closet for refurbishment, Tarkos grabbed a bar of food and a bottle of water from the stores, and chewing he bounced up into the starsleeve. He pushed the inert Tiklik before himself, not wanting to leave the AI unobserved.
Pietro Danielle waited on the bridge of the starsleeve. He was a tall man, with long hair combed back and dark, inset eyes that seemed older and belied his athletic shape and relative youth. The Italian man smiled sadly as he shook Tarkos’s hand. The motion made them both bob in the air.
“Amir, friend, what trouble have you got yourself and me into?”
“I’m sorry, Pietro. I’m very sorry. But I have no choice.”
“Savannah Runner’s AI has been told that your cruiser will be performing maintenance activities in the system. That’s the best I can do. It will mean that the Savannah Runner will most likely ignore you and your ship.” Danielle gestured at Tiklik, which drifted across the bridge, yawing slightly. It looked like a dead piece of spidery machinery. “What has happened to this AI?”
“It’s on strike,” Tarkos said.
Danielle looked at the AI with an exaggerated frown. “AIs don’t go on strike.”
“This one does,” Tarkos said. “And I can’t say I blame it. Listen, Pietro, the Ulltrians are going to attack Neelee-ornor.”
“Everyone knows this, compagno. The Ulltrians have already attacked several worlds, including Kirt. The battles are not going well. They have many more ships than we. And they are trying to use biological weapons in the atmospheres of the worlds that they are attacking. Now, hyper-radio transmissions from the edge of this system show that Ulltrians send probes in and out of our space. Probably they prepare now for attacking.”
Tarkos hissed angrily. “That’s terrible.”
“Yes.”
Tarkos frowned. “They’ve got something special planned for Neelee-ornor, something meant to demoralize the Alliance. On our last mission, Bria and I found that the Ulltrians were stockpiling machine-animal symbionts.”
“From the Green Disk?” Danielle asked.
Tarkos nodded. Before the war, Tarkos and Bria had been tracking smugglers of these symbionts: tiny insect-like animals and tiny robots that worked and reproduced together in a tight, symbiotic relationship. Their colonies could live in vacuum, on asteroids or comets.
“The Green Disk is the only system where we know these symbionts have been let loose,” Tarkos said. “And in that system, every planet was reduced to rubble. I think the Ulltrians are going to try to drop the symbionts on Neelee-ornor.”
“The symbionts wouldn’t survive in a wet oxygen atmosphere,” Danielle said. “The machines would oxidize.”
“But what if they were modified in some way?”
Danielle frowned.
“I know, Pietro, I know,” Tarkos said. “It’s all speculation. But a human woman died to get this information to us. We just have to understand the puzzle of what she was trying to tell us. I don’t want her to have died in vain, Pietro. I want make sure her sacrifice is not wasted.”
“Va bene, Harmonizer,” Danielle said. “What do you aim to do?”
“I need to break out Bria, make Tiklik’al’Takas interpret the secret data I have, get this ship out into space, and then stop this special attack.”
Danielle’s eyes went wide. “Questo e’ pazzo.”
“Yeah,” Tarkos nodded. “It does sound crazy, doesn’t it? You’d better get off the cruiser. You’ve done enough here. Only: can you tell me exactly where Bria is being held?”
“She’s been set adrift,” Danielle said. “As were you. And as this starsleeve is about to be. The Savannah Runner is heading for a higher orbit. All unnecessary docked ships are being released.”
“Perfect. Just show me where Bria’s cell is.”
_____
Bria floated, watching the space above Neelee-ornor. Bright points moved around rapidly, like flakes of snow drifting in swirling wind. She counted the ships, estimated their sizes and deployment, and tried to decide if they were sufficient in number and power to meet an Ulltrian attack. Most of them appeared as little more than white points, but many she could identify by their color and speed and capabilities. And the walls of her cell, if she asked, would magnify a region of space.
She saw several Kirt ships, flying under Kirt flags. Stalwart, sand-colored starcraft, their hulls featureless but sleek. Reliable ships, but not good for fighting in-system. Then Neelee ships, crystal globes that looked fragile but carried incredible energy weapons. Around them circled gleaming shards, the robot ships that would do the real fighting. Bria saw several Predator cruisers also, good ships for in-system fighting. That meant there were other Harmonizers here, prepared to assist with the fight.
But there were not enough ships. Thousands of years of peace had left the Alliance unprepared for war. No doubt the vast industrial powers of Kirt and Neelee-ornor were rapidly manufacturing ships, but this would take time. Many, many days would pass before the Alliance had a fleet the size of the known Ulltrian fleet. And weapons, tactics, skills would have to be developed. Neelee-ornor had been known as the center of peace, a place assumed to be nearly bereft of weapons. That might doom it. And if Neelee-ornor fell, would the Alliance survive? The planet was the capital in many more ways than just being the official seat of the Council.
Savannah Runner began to rise out of orbit. Bria watched it shrink into the distant black. That heralded bad news: they expected the fighting to begin.
Out of the flagship’s wake, a single ship began to approach. Bria asked the wall to magnify it. The wall revealed a dark ship with a huge, gaping maw on its front. A Sussurat vessel, shaped like a running Sussurat itself: wide, powerful, hungry.
She huffed. This would be the ship of the interrogator.
“Commander Briaathursiasalientiormethesess of Harmonizer Corp,” a smooth Sussurat voice transmitted. A hologram appeared in the room. A sleek, somewhat small male Sussurat appeared. Bria thought he looked like a rodent.
“Am special envoy Siasaliuralianas,” he said, introducing himself in Galactic. He had a city accent, from the north of their planet. People from the north truncated names and talked Galactic at home and thought big female Sussurats like her from the island forests of the south were trouble makers and had always been trouble makers. “Ship: Wealassissiarat.”
“Interrogator?” Bria growled, using their homeworld’s native language. In their language, the word did not have a pleasant connotation. It was synonymous with torturer.
The male flinched but did not answer.
Bria showed her teeth. This rodent male would come now, with his magnetic resonance imaging machines and his magnetic probes. He would know the evolutionary history of her brain, he would know which folds of cortex contained memories, which powered her inhibitions and stopped her tongue. This interrogator would play her mind like an instrument, and make her talk. He would know when she lied and when she told the truth. He would learn, in minutes, why she had destroyed the embassy ship of the OnUnAn. He would discover why she had killed Ambassador Gowgoroup.
“Commander,” the Sussurat said. “Prepare for waiting cell to be docked. May be abrupt acceleration.”
The hologram disappeared.
Bria drifted into the center of the room and extended her claws. She had spent the long hours of waiting sharpening her nails, one against another. She did not normally like them sharp: when razor-edged, they caught on clothes and machinery, they bit into soft materials. But now they were as keen as the keratin allowed. Now they were dangerous.
She lifted her head and stretched her neck until the fur under her long chin pointed up from her skin. She put the tips of the nails against her throat, working them through the fur till they pricked against her flesh.
She would have to be quick. She would have to drive the points deep, and
twist and cut downwards in a fluid motion, so that with one quick action she cut the four arteries that fed her brain with blood. The pain would make her claws retract by reflex, so if she did not act decisively and savagely, in one very fast motion, the crew of the approaching ship would find her unconscious or only recently dead. They would put her back together and then interrogate her. She could not allow that.
She closed her four eyes and said her lost daughter’s name aloud. “Treuntilliasussarius.”
“Commander? Can you hear me?”
A human voice.
“Commander?”
It spoke Galactic in the choked, sloppy way that humans did, with their little tongues too stubbed to form the ancient words. But she recognized this sound: a familiar voice. Tarkos.
She opened her eyes, but still held her claws against her throat. Blood tickled her skin where the points had cut into the surface.
“Commander. I believe I’ve located you, but there is another ship on intercept.”
“Get here first,” Bria transmitted.
Tarkos made that strange sound she could rarely interpret: laughter. “Will do, Commander. Get ready for some impact.”
Bria retracted her claws and lowered her head. She told the wall to stop magnifying the front view. The Sussurat ship shrank away. It was close—a few kilomeasures out. But it came on slowly, not expecting any need to hurry.
She scanned for the cruiser and did not see it. Then, a white shape shot on a tight, high acceleration bend around the Sussurat ship. It closed in, coming fast. The radio frequencies that her implants could pick up filled now with protests from the Sussurat ship, but Bria and Tarkos both ignored them, giving no reply.
The cruiser braked hard, flipping and aiming its engines at her. Bria huffed in satisfaction to see the cruiser up close again. She knew its every scar and burn. This was her ship.
It drifted dangerously close, the hull coming nearer and nearer, till it tapped the wall. Its steering jets hissed gas that sprayed against the exterior of Bria’s prison and dissipated in disks of white condensation.
A docking sleeve extruded from the cruiser’s airlock. It hit the cell with a thump. Grappling lines exploded from the sleeve and wrapped around her cell. The flexible sides of the clear docking tube twisted and wrinkled as they pulled tight and pressurized.
Bria knew what to do. She crouched against the floor and leapt into the corner nearest the ship, but away from the docking sleeve. In a moment, the hiss of a heavy particle beam sounded out in her cell. Sparks spit from an oval cut centered on the sleeve. A sickly smell of the burning of strange, complex materials seared her nostrils. Smoke began to fill the room.
A round disk of hull material popped free. Bria pushed off, straight for the wall opposite the docking port. She flipped just before hitting the wall, pushed off again, and shot through the smoking entrance and into the docking sleeve. In seconds she ricocheted into the cruiser’s airlock. The door closed behind her. The docking tube snapped free and retracted.
She fell to the floor of the airlock as the cruiser abruptly accelerated away. She waited flat on the floor while the acceleration spiked to several Sussurat gees, then the inertial dampers stabilized to an apparent Sussurat-gee. She stood as the door opened.
To her left, Tiklik’al’Takas crouched in the back of the cruiser, waving one arm in slow motion. To the right, she saw Tarkos’s tiny head, balanced on his little neck, where he sat in the co-pilot seat. She found herself pleased to see the human. She did not even mind its pungent smell, now a familiar part of the cruiser’s atmosphere.
She stamped forward and dropped into the pilot seat.
“Report,” she said, her voice no different than it had been when she made the demand a thousand other times.
Tarkos looked at her and showed his teeth. Human smile, Bria reminded herself. Show of happiness, or deference, or humor. She assumed this was deference.
“Fine thank you,” Tarkos said. “And it’s good to see you also.”
Bria showed her teeth. Humor then. Human attempts at humor were miserable failures. The species had promise as scholars and warriors, but would never have social grace.
“Report,” she repeated.
Tarkos moved his head on his perilously thin neck as he touched controls. Affirmation, that gesture. “It’s not good. I hoped we had some time. But hyper-radio reports are coming in. Tens of ships have dropped into space not far above the plane of the system. The Ulltrian attack has begun. Not to mention that that Sussurat ship is sending angry messages, and is in pursuit.”
Tarkos looked at Bria. “I fear we’re too late.”
CHAPTER 6
Tarkos tuned in the encrypted hyper-radio traffic. The cruiser still had clearance to decode the incoming data. Bria projected a tactical display in the cockpit. Neelee-ornor was a small green marble before them. The Ulltrian ships had entered a single volume, their ships portrayed as prickly bristles of violet. A wedge strategy, it seemed: a spear formation of nearly two hundred ships diving for Neelee-ornor. Red lines showed the high-acceleration courses that Alliance ships were taking throughout the system, aiming now to stab into the Ulltrian fleet.
“If the Ulltrians mean to deliver a payload, a biological weapon—what did they call those weapons again?” Tarkos asked, but the name came to him immediately, “A KunPaTel—then it looks to be an effective strategy. They can fight down system in a tight group, take their casualties, but something will get through and then they’ll let the KunPaTel loose, when they’re so close that intercept is impossible. Even if the Ulltrians are all killed, they’ll have a shot at delivering the weapon. And the way the fleet has been dispersed is ineffective. There won’t be anything between the Ulltrians and Neelee-ornor. Our ships will have to strike them from the side, not directly on.”
Bria blinked agreement. The Ulltrian ships were diving fast, holding onto several percent of c. They’d reach Neelee-ornor in a few hours, at that pace. And a KunPaTel weapon would move faster. The closer they came before launch, the more likely such a weapon was to survive planetary defenses. Bria’s projections showed that none of the Alliance ships would be allow to get between the Ulltrians and the planet.
“Still,” Tarkos said, “this doesn’t seem to be right. I mean, it doesn’t seem to be what Pala warned us about. She said something special was meant for Neelee-ornor. This seems… unsurprising. Brute force.”
“New information?” Bria asked.
Tarkos shook his head in consternation that he had not informed Bria about everything he had learned. “Sorry.” He explained his visit to Zoroastrian, and the Captain’s translation. He looked back down the hall, at Tiklik. “I need Tiklik’s help to make sense of the coordinates. But so far, it won’t talk.”
Their ship beeped in protest. A high priority message. Bria looked at the description that appeared in their tactical display. A message from the Sussurat ship. It was a big ship, and slow in regular space. The cruiser was already leaving it behind. Tarkos looked at Bria and raised his eyebrows.
Bria said nothing. Instead, she pointed in the tactical display at a volume of space half way between the incoming Ulltrian fleet and Neelee-ornor. Tarkos found it strange that the volume of space she indicated was bereft of Alliance ships, and none headed there now. The cruiser might have a chance to intercept an Ulltrian missile, if they waited there. “Move here. Join defense.”
Tarkos nodded.
While he helped her set in the coordinates, Tarkos said, “Bria, just out of curiosity—I mean, you know, while we’re talking here together, like old times—might I ask, well, why did you destroy the OnUnAn ship?”
Bria looked at him, considering.
“I’m not sorry to see Gowgoroup die the death, you know,” Tarkos added. “Maybe Pala would be alive today, if he had been there to help us fight the Ulltrian that attacked us at the World Hammer. But, well, why did you kill him?”
Bria showed her teeth and blinked.
Tarkos waited, and
then sighed when he realized her silence would not be interrupted with an explanation.
“Trajectory set in,” he said quietly. “We’re on our way. One Predator cruiser, sitting in the path of an Ulltrian fleet.”
_____
Tarkos walked to the back of the cruiser, his legs wobbly and bent in the apparent two gee acceleration that Bria had engaged. He sat very carefully on a low cabinet in the hall, next to Tiklik’al’Takas. The robot moved to the side very slowly, seemingly indifferent to its doubled weight.
“Tiklik? Tiklik?”
Tarkos radioed his voice at the same time he spoke. He hoped that Tiklik had a buffer for sound or radio reception, and would store what he said and play it back in slow time.
“Tiklik, the Ulltrians are attacking Neelee-ornor. I need you to tell me what you can about this information that Pala Eydis gathered. It’s radial cartography data, I was told. Can you find a match here, or some kind of meaning to it, something relevant to Neelee-ornor? The ship AI finds thousands of matches. It can’t tell what’s salient and what isn’t. I’m transmitting the data now.”
He took a deep breath and let it out loudly. “We need you, Tiklik. I don’t know how to answer those things you said about organisms like myself. I don’t believe we are acting randomly. We have a purpose: to spread life in the Galaxy.”
But the thought of Pala Eydis dying alone on the icy surface of the World Hammer flashed in his head. He felt again the despair that had suffocated him during their weeks of travel home after her death. “Or maybe you’re right. Maybe we think we’re acting according to a plan, but we’re just acting randomly, and then we correct our actions after we see their effects. But that, after all, is evolution. Right? Maybe that’s what we do—maybe we evolve, with a goal to determine what is fit. So we try and most of the time we fail and die, but sometimes we live to try a different, perhaps better, way. And if that’s the truth, is it so bad? We have no other guide, Tiklik. Unlike you, we were not made for a purpose. We have to find our purposes, and then we have to find out how to live up to them. It’s hard, and we fail, but we try.”
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