The Web and the Stars

by Brian Herbert

  With a gentle smile, he withdrew his hand.

  While Tesh considered his proposal, Eshaz said that Noah should expand his ecological recovery operations, to encompass more planets. In order to accomplish that, a fleet of Guardian-operated podships would be necessary, and Noah—if he ever escaped from imprisonment—could eventually merge operations with the entire race of Tulyans, the original caretakers of the galaxy.

  “We Tulyans are working on methods of concealing podships from Parviis, and we think it might be possible to maintain control of every wild pod we capture.” Pausing, he added, “Actually, it’s something I’ve been wanting to discuss with Noah, but circumstances were never right—emergencies kept intruding.”

  “How do your people capture wild Aopoddae?” Tesh asked. “It is something I have always wondered about.”

  “I have already revealed a Tulyan confidence to you about our plans,” Eshaz said. “Just as Woldn is not pleased with you, the Tulyan Council thinks I may be a bit too much on the eccentric side. Still, they have given me permission to go on a special mission—if you consent, of course. We know that you have sealed the sectoid chamber, preventing intrusion. On wild podship hunts, we always stop at a certain planet first in the Tarbu Gap, and I will need to pilot us there, since you cannot know the location.”

  “We are not enemies anymore,” she said. “That much I will accept, but it must be reciprocal.”

  “Ah yes, to a degree. You concealed the location of the Parvii Fold from my truthing touch, hiding the galactic coordinates of your sacred place. Your people were the same to my touch; they told me nothing.”

  “And you Tulyans have your own sacred secrets as well.” She shook her head. “It’s too bad you and I can’t fully trust one another.”

  He smiled in a serene, perhaps ancient way. “Tell me where the Parvii Fold is, then, and I will tell you where the Tarbu Gap is. A quid pro quo.”

  “Just like that? But what if I give you the wrong information?”

  “Then I will do the same for you. Don’t forget. I have been traveling this galaxy for almost a million years, and I will know the truth … or the lie … of the coordinates you give me.”

  “It is at the far end of Nebula 9907,” she said.

  He narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “I have been to that region many times, and saw no galactic fold.”

  “There is an asteroid funnel that is veiled by a Parvii swarm that guards it constantly, a swarm that has changed its appearance to make it look like there is no opening at all.”

  “One of your nasty Parvii tricks,” Eshaz said. He nodded his head. “Yes, that location rings true.”

  “And you Tulyans have no tricks of your own?” she said, with a smile. “Now it’s your turn.”

  “Very well. The Tarbu Gap is in the Isuki Star System.”

  “Where?”

  He grinned, revealing large reptilian teeth. “In the five hundred seventy-seventh quadrant, past the Tlewa Roid Belt.”

  She thought for a moment. “I’m drawing a blank.”

  “It is a region of burned-out stars, and of dwarf stars, both white and brown. It is one of the Aopoddae breeding grounds.”

  “I don’t know how we missed it.”

  Eshaz shrugged. “It’s a big galaxy. If you are ready, I shall give you coordinates to take us there.”

  “Have you used Tulyan mindlink to veil the region in some manner?”

  “I have told you enough,” he said curtly.

  “Be nice to me or I’ll inform Woldn, and he will have the swarms cut you off from that area. He will end your podship hunts forever.”

  “But your true allegiance is not to Woldn, is it?” Eshaz said. “It is to the well-being of this galaxy. I see it in your eyes, and … I felt it … in your touch.”

  Tesh did not look surprised. She looked down at her hand, where Eshaz had made physical contact with her, and smiled.

  “Will you take us to Tarbu Gap?” Acey asked her.

  “Just let anyone try and stop me,” Tesh said.

  The four of them reached across the table, and clasped hands.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  From any point in time or space, the possibilities are endless.

  —Noah Watanabe

  While Giovanni Nehr was considering a plan to rescue Noah, he remembered seeing the underwater door of the Max One prison. The stone structure had once been a nobleman’s castle, so he thought that was probably a secret escape route, with an airlock on the other side. But there might not be an airlock on the other side, or it might not be functional anymore.

  To deal with that unknown, Gio now envisioned a scuba-commando team of Humans and fighting machines, attaching a mobile airlock to a wall underwater. They could then find a way to open the door and go through.

  Finding Thinker in one of the robot construction chambers, Gio outlined his plan to him.

  Blinking his metal-lidded eyes, Thinker said, “Your concept of a mobile airlock is intriguing, but it has never been done before. Granted, the underwater door on the prison may not have an airlock of its own, so your idea has some merit. But it presents difficulties, not the least of which is the method of sealing such a device against a wet surface, especially with the rock that the prison is made of. It’s Canopan sangran, a material that cannot be climbed with adhesive shoes, since malleable foreign substances do not stick to it. In my data banks, I have information about the difficulties they had in formulating mortars.”

  “But they came up with a mortar, obviously.”

  “Yes, and I know the formula. But it requires materials that are not readily available to us on Canopa.”

  “There must be a way,” Gio said.

  “If we had the right materials, yes, but the lack of podship travel.…” Thinker hesitated. “Ah,” he said.

  “What did you come up with?”

  “Come with me,” Thinker said. He led Gio down a long tunnel into a side cavern. At a barracks building, he asked to see one of the new recruits, a young woman named Kindsah. “Tell her to bring her friend, too,” he added.

  After a few minutes, she came over. A stocky woman in her early twenties with curly black hair, she smiled readily. Gio had never met her before, but had seen her with an unusual little alien—one she had with her now, visible from the top of an open carrying bag in her hand.

  Thinker explained the problem to her, and he said, “I’ve seen you demonstrating Lumey’s flexibility, and the way he can change shape and stick to surfaces with the most powerful adhesive quality I’ve ever seen. Could he stretch himself thin and do what we need, forming a gasket?”

  Reaching into the bag, Kindsah brought out the dark-brown amorphous creature that Noah Watanabe had originally rescued from an industrially polluted planet. “To save Noah, this fellow would do anything. Of course, he could do that.” She touched the creature soothingly as she murmured to it, and in a few seconds it became long and thin.

  “See if he can stick to this,” Thinker said. He brought a large gray chunk of sangran out of a bucket of water, and extended it.

  Like a snake, Lumey darted forward and adhered himself to the wet stone, so that no one could pull it free. Then, holding him by the tail, Kindsah swung Lumey and the heavy stone over her head like a lasso. Only when she stopped and spoke soothingly to the creature, telling it to let go, did it do so.

  Next, Kindsah caused the creature to spread all over the floor of the cavern like the thinnest of crepes on the surface, face-up.

  “This is going to work,” Thinker said. He knelt down and touched Lumey gently with the metal tip of a probe, then looked at Gio. “Now let’s solve the other problems presented by your plan.”

  * * * * *

  Giovanni Nehr had not anticipated such a woeful possibility, but as he developed the rescue plan with Thinker and Subi Danvar, he feared that he may have painted himself into a corner. Too late, a range of unwelcome possibilities occurred to him. The bottom line: If his plan did not result in Noah
’s safe return, he could very well be demoted to a mere fighter again, no more significant than the dead-brain robots who followed Thinker. Or worse, Gio envisioned the end of his career path in the Guardians.

  But he had to proceed anyway. He had no alternative. So he recommended the key details of a dangerous, risky plan. At every opportunity, he tried to spread the potential blame as widely as possible, even to the young female recruit who cared for Lumey. With such an uncertain result, he preferred to cushion his own fall. But everyone kept complimenting him on the boldness and cleverness of his ideas, and looking to him to spearhead the effort.

  It soon became apparent to Gio that the blame—or credit—would all go to him.

  In the plan, he set the time and means of infiltrating Max One prison, in a daring attempt to liberate the beloved founder of the Guardians. The penal facility had been constructed on a manmade canal to resemble its notorious, blood-stained predecessor on Timian One, the Gaol of Brimrock.

  Finally, Gio and his team were ready to go, not knowing that Noah wasn’t even there anymore.…

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “The noble-born princes call themselves aristocracy and cavort about in fine trimmings, but they are empty shells, for they have earned nothing and only came into their wealth through the deaths of their ancestors. But each chain of inheritance actually began with someone earning the wealth. Hence, it is beyond comprehension how the noble-born princes can consider themselves superior to those of us who have amassed great assets through ingenuity and hard work. Alas, this has been a dynamic of history, the eternal clash of old and new money.”

  —Prince Saito Watanabe, public address on “The Nouveau Riche”

  Seated in a front-row seat of the operating theater, Francella Watanabe leaned forward in anticipation. Having been unavoidably detained by a meeting, she had come in late. It was late morning now, and every window shade in the facility had been drawn so that bright yellow sunlight only came in through slits.

  Dr. Bichette, standing over Noah at the central table, was injecting him with something. Four burly security guards stood nearby, ready to spring into action if her brother tried to escape again. Electronic straps no longer held him, and guards reported that he had shown interest in the electronic containment field of his cell, apparently trying to think of ways to disable it, too. But this was a different, far more powerful system, and thus far it seemed capable of holding Noah. No one was taking any chances, though. Additional guards had been assigned to him around the clock.

  Francella glared down at the doctor, who had also been a source of irritation. Bichette had displayed a maddening degree of independence to her, but she couldn’t get rid of him. Like her father before her, Prince Saito, she relied on Bichette’s expertise, and to his credit, the man did not seem to like Noah much himself. In a heated discussion the day before, Bichette had assured Francella that their goals were “not dissimilar,” and that he would take care of the situation in his own way, but to their mutual satisfaction.

  The pledge had been somewhat less than she would have preferred, but Francella wanted to maintain her own composure in this situation, and was trying to pull herself back emotionally from the experiments being performed on her brother. That was much easier said than done, she realized.

  Besides, she had other important matters on her mind. Shortly before coming in today, she had conducted a virtual-reality nehrcom session with noble-born princes on other planets. Blocked from meeting them in person by the podship crisis, this was their only viable means of getting together. At her insistence security had been tight, and because of the high status of the participants, all of them had been able to obtain private rooms at the various nehrcom transmitting stations.

  The video quality of the meeting had been fuzzy, nowhere near as good as the clarity of the audio. Jacopo Nehr, inventor of the cross-space transmission system, had never been happy with the video feature, even on direct hookups such as this that did not go through relay stations. Apparently he considered it something of a professional embarrassment, so often he acted as if the feature didn’t exist at all. All Francella could do was to make the best use of the technology, such as it was. She liked to watch the body language of people with whom she was conversing, as that often told her more than their words. It told her something about their sincerity and loyalty, of paramount importance to her because of the nature of their meetings.

  For years Doge Lorenzo del Velli had favored men who excelled in business, and he had been appointing them to important governmental positions … at the expense of the noble-born princes. Her late father and Jacopo Nehr were among the most conspicuous examples of commoners honored at the expense of nobles, as both had been appointed “Princes of the Realm.” But there were many others at various levels of government, undermining the entire infrastructure of the Merchant Prince Alliance. In a sense it was ironic that she—not of noble birth herself—should find herself aligned with those who were, but it was how she felt about the matter nonetheless. The old traditions were important, and should not be discarded easily. Men like her own brother, if permitted to excel and advance, were part of the problem.

  At the VR nehrcom session the noble-born princes had clamored for her attention, asking her to be more active in their cause. She assured them that she was doing everything she could, but for security reasons she could not reveal all of the details. That was true to an extent, because she was helping their cause by destroying her own brother. But she had to admit to herself that she had something else in mind that was far more important than anything she would ever reveal to them.

  Through her own sources, she had learned that some of the princes felt uneasy working with a woman (and a commoner by birth), but because of her political power and influence, she was their best hope to overthrow Lorenzo and replace him with their own man. The new leader had to be a man; she had no delusions about that, or ulterior motives of her own. She wouldn’t want the job anyway, since it would only invite competitors to plot against her, especially in view of her gender. Francella felt more comfortable as a power behind the scenes. She could be a puppeteer, and make the next doge dance on the end of her strings.

  She had concluded the VR meeting as quickly as possible while assuring her allies of her devotion to them, and her ongoing, behind-the-scenes efforts to undermine Doge Lorenzo’s authority and eventually overthrow him. It was all a political cesspool as far as she was concerned, but she didn’t particularly want to take more severe action, such as assassination. After all, she and Lorenzo had been bedmates for years now, and she didn’t want to completely do away with him. She just wanted him out of office.

  Now, in the laboratory, she focused on her most pressing interest. The square-jawed Dr. Bichette, in a white medical smock, was flanked by a pair of female technicians, similarly attired. The trio wore belts containing a variety of medical instruments and even stunners, should the patient become unruly and somehow break free of the electronic restraints that were holding him down.

  At the moment, they seemed to be sedating Noah.

  Her brother’s purported immortality condition had not yet been verified, and there were certain things she needed to know. At the thought, she felt a slight trembling. In her discussion with Bichette she had emphasized their importance. He’d said he understood, and would perform the research properly, to fully exploit the information they obtained.

  In previous laboratory sessions, Bichette had taken blood and tissue samples from Noah, and had performed a variety of experiments on him. Today, the doctor looked back at Francella and said, “I’m glad you are here. You will want to see this. The patient’s ability to regenerate body parts seems to be linked with his reported ‘immortality’ condition, and if so, it is important to understand how it all works.” Without further comment, he turned to his work, watching as the technicians took vital signs, including checking the dilation of the pupils. Unconscious, Noah heaved deep breaths, with his chest rising and falling percepti
bly. Bichette opened one of Noah’s hands and then swung the arm and hand onto a metal side table.

  At a nod from one of the technicians, Dr. Bichette called for a C76 surgical scalpel, holding his hand out as the servo machinery in the room whirred to life, and a mechanical arm reached down to him from the ceiling.

  Grabbing the scalpel, he made a quick motion with it, cutting off her brother’s right forefinger. Noah jerked, but did not awaken. His breathing became less regular, and more agitated. Tossing the finger on a tray, the doctor moved to the bottom end of the table. This time he called for a surgical saw, and cut off the big toe on Noah’s left foot, the same foot that had regenerated after being amputated earlier.

  Again Noah jerked, and this time his eyes fluttered open before he drifted off once more, probably experiencing a nightmare. Francella felt no sympathy for him, never had. If he ever injured himself when they were children, she always enjoyed it, and now she felt a comfortable, pleasant sensation, a wash of memories from those times.

  While Francella watched, fascinated, one of the attendants recorded everything with a holocam. In less than a minute, the finger and toe regrew, forming red appendages that changed in hue moment by moment, returning to the natural, light pigmentation of Noah’s skin.

  The technicians wrapped up Noah’s severed finger and toe, and marked them for laboratory analysis. Dr. Bichette tossed the scalpel on a table, and looked thoughtfully at Noah. Francella wondered if his thoughts paralleled her own. Surely, he must have considered the possibilities. As for her, convinced that her brother really had eternal life, she was anxious to obtain it for herself, too.

  Francella left her seat, and moved to the doctor’s side. He glanced in her direction.

  “I’ve been thinking about injecting his blood into my own bloodstream,” she said.

  Overhearing this, one of the laboratory technicians looked alarmed.

  “I would not recommend that,” Bichette said. “There are many analyses to complete before anything like that can be considered. Even then we would not want to try it on a Human being first.” He shook his head. “There are many steps to follow.”