The Web and the Stars

by Brian Herbert

  Subi joined in trying to subdue the Hibbil, who fought back with ferocity.

  Dux wanted to help them, but decided he’d better go after Gio, to keep him from further compromising their security. He wished Acey hadn’t been so impulsive, but now they were committed and their choices were limited.

  Climbing inside the escape hatch, Dux slammed the door shut behind him. Dux was not the fighter that Acey was, and didn’t think he was anywhere near as brave, but Gio was trying to get away, and Dux did not want to waste any time. Putting on his own suit and maneuvering pack, the teenager shot out into space, steering with controls on his belt. He held his laser pistol in a gloved hand.

  Ahead he saw Gio trying to connect to the space station, on a windowless section where there was another hatch. He was having some trouble making the connection, and looked back nervously at his pursuer. Dux fired a warning shot that flashed blue against the hatch, causing Gio to recoil.

  Logic told Dux that he should try to kill Gio, since it would not be possible to take him back to Noah alive. But he hesitated. Gio did not appear to be armed, and he couldn’t just murder him in cold blood. Looking back at the modules of the space station, Dux did not see many windows on this side, except for those on the private dining room he had just left. So far, he and Gio didn’t seem to have attracted any attention.

  But Dux—with limited mechanical abilities—had not noticed the weapons on his own maneuvering pack, and on Gio’s. The man activated a high-powered projectile gun and fired a dart that grazed Dux on one side, not hitting his skin but penetrating the life-support system of the suit, causing oxygen to leak out.

  Gasping for air, the young man propelled himself directly toward Gio and spun away from two more shots, which sent him several hundred meters away from the station. He put the jet on full thruster, trying to get back in time.

  Now Gio had time to make the connection to the space station. As he pulled open the hatch, however, Dux hit him in the helmet with a laser blast, blowing his head off. Blood gushed into the vacuum of space, and the body floated away.

  The hatch was open, and Dux—nearly passing out from low oxygen—tumbled inside, then closed the hatch behind him. Finding himself in what looked like a food storage room, he caught his breath. Then a door opened, and Dux expected to be captured, or worse.

  Instead, it was Acey and Subi. “We followed your emergency locator,” Subi said. “You got him?”

  Dux nodded. He felt relieved to be alive, but not particularly proud of killing his first man. But if anyone deserved to be his first, it had been Giovanni Nehr.

  Regaining their composure and smoothing their clothes as much as possible, the trio walked calmly down a corridor and out into the gambling casino. They passed a Mutati game where patrons were thronging around, and continued on to the shuttle station, in another module.

  Through the windows they saw that a shuttle was just unloading, and other patrons were lined up to board it. Hurrying through an airlock, the three Guardians joined the line.

  Noticing a little blood on Subi’s arm, a female guard asked him what had happened.

  “It’s nothing,” Subi assured her, faking a slur to make it look like he had been drinking. “Just a little too much fun.”

  With a smile, she waved him and the teenagers onto the shuttle.

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Understanding the weak points of your enemy—and of yourself—can be the difference between victory and defeat.

  —Teaching of the HibAdu War College

  On the space station, Pimyt lay on a medical bed, receiving treatment from a nurse for the injury he received when three strangers attacked him and killed the waiter, Giovanni Nehr. His injured shoulder ached, but something else concerned him much more, and he was impatient to get back to his office.

  All of the violence had occurred in a new section that did not yet have security cameras, but he did have images of the three men from the moment they arrived at the orbiter, and afterward when they wandered through public rooms, and later when they boarded a shuttle to leave. The way they split up on arrival troubled him. It suggested that they were doing reconnaissance work, perhaps in advance of a military attack.

  “This will hurt a little,” the nurse said, as she cleaned bloody fur out of the wound.

  In his mind, the Hibbil ran through a list of suspects who might have perpetrated this intrusion. It could be Doge Anton or Francella Watanabe who sent them, or the noble-born princes who still hated Lorenzo for his policies when he was Doge. It might even be Noah’s troublesome Guardians, who had fought back so tenaciously against Lorenzo’s forces. The attackers could have been Mutatis, though he didn’t think so, since they were Pimyt’s secret allies and would not want to do him harm.

  But paranoid thoughts darted through his mind. In his own long career, he had developed enemies, too, perhaps even more than Lorenzo.

  “Hurry it up,” Pimyt said, in an agitated, squeaky voice. “I have work to do, and this is costing me valuable time.”

  “If an infection sets in,” she snapped, “it will cost you a lot more than that.”

  “Okay, okay. But pick it up, pick it up! You’re as slow as a nursing student.”

  “What an unkind thing to say.” Her hands shook with anger, but she did speed up, and slapped a healing patch over the wound, a little too hard.

  Pimyt didn’t say anything about the bolt of pain her mishandling caused. He just sat up and hurried off, glad to get out of there.

  Alone in his office, the Hibbil considered the grand plan that he and his people had set up, in cooperation with their Adurian allies. Doge Lorenzo del Velli was no longer in control of the Merchant Prince Alliance, but during his time in that position, Pimyt—as his Royal Attache—had been in a key position to set things up on behalf of the secret HibAdu Coalition, designed to overthrow both the Humans and the Mutatis.

  More work needed to be done, and Jacopo Nehr’s foolish loss of his position as Supreme General was presenting new obstacles. But Pimyt prided himself on his own craftiness, and thought he might come up with some clever way to replace the loss. Perhaps he could get to Nirella Nehr and influence her in the same way he had her father. After all, the business interests of father and daughter ran parallel. But it was not so easy for him to get to her in his present position. Even with this obstacle, and others, the die was cast. Victory would just take a little longer to achieve.

  At least that mad shapeshifter, Zultan Abal Meshdi, had been prevented from foolishly destroying any more merchant prince planets. The intervention of Noah Watanabe had been most helpful, when he recommended to Lorenzo that they establish sensor-guns on all pod stations, to keep podships from arriving and potentially bringing in more Mutati planet-buster bombs. Following Noah Watanabe’s fortuitous suggestion, the Hibbils had been only too happy to set up defensive perimeters on all pod stations that orbited Human-controlled worlds, thus preventing wayward Mutati outriders from coming in and torpedoing another valuable planet.

  But not before key worlds were destroyed by the hell-bent shapeshifters, including the merchant prince capital of Timian One. Valuable resources that might have been spoils of war had been destroyed.

  For decades, the Hibbils and Adurians had been fostering disorder in their intended victims, enabling the imminent conquerors to divide the spoils between themselves. As a result of this wide-scale sabotage, it would be a diminished war between Humans and Mutatis if it ever resumed—which it most certainly would if podship travel ever started again. Such an unexpected problem for the HibAdu Coalition, and a mystery as to how or why the galactic transportation system had been cut off—another unexplained occurrence to add to the litany of them concerning the sentient spaceships that had wandered the cosmos since time immemorial.

  But the inventive HibAdus had come up with a solution. After undermining the Mutati lab-pod production program, they had used Hibbil machine expertise to develop an excellent navigation system for the vessels, a secret
that had been kept from the Mutatis. Now, on Adurian and Hibbil worlds, the HibAdu Coalition was mounting a military offensive of massive proportions.

  While Pimyt’s people had known about an alternate galactic dimension for some time, they had never previously been able to capitalize on it. Centuries ago, using the viewing skills of captured, drugged Tulyans and projecting images from their minds, the Hibbils had been able to see the galaxy’s weblike connective tissue on screens. Now the HibAdu Coalition had their own burgeoning lab-pod fleet. Using Hibbil manufacturing expertise combined with Adurian biotechnology, their factories were working around the clock.

  The Coalition had a Hibbil method of guiding lab-pods, a nav-unit that caused the vessels to travel along selected podways. Initially the lab-pods had been considerably slower than traditional podship travel, taking more than three days to get across the galaxy, along the longest routes. This had been more time-consuming than traditional podship travel, but had still been remarkably fast in comparison with Mutati solar sailers and the hydion-powered vacuum rockets of the merchant princes. Gradually, the Hibbils had discovered ways of improving the speed of lab-pods, but they had not been able to attain the optimal speeds that should have been reached, according to hull-speed engineering calculations. One of the long-lived, captive Tulyans had revealed the reason for this: increasingly frayed podways that caused all podships traveling over them to slow down.

  Still, the lab-pods functioned as well as could be expected, under the circumstances. On both Hibbil and Adurian worlds, the cloned spacecraft were being put into military service. Some of the fully-functional lab-pods had already been used to land clandestine Coalition military operatives directly on Human and Mutati worlds, after bypassing pod stations and defeating planetary security systems, so that no one knew they had gotten past.

  Now, thousands of lab-pods fitted with nav-units had been built, and more were on the way.

  They were aided in their efforts by another Hibbil innovation. Some time ago the Adurian Ambassador VV Uncel had passed interesting technology on to them, information that the Mutatis had obtained on the workings of the famous nehrcom cross-space communication system. While the Mutatis struggled to perfect it, with their research efforts inhibited by gyros provided to them by the Adurians, the HibAdu Coalition had no such impediments. They had perfected a working nehrcom system that linked their growing military enterprise … and through a system of complex, secure relays they were in contact with conspirators such as Pimyt on merchant prince worlds.

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Pitfalls are always around you … sometimes visible, but more often not. Survival frequently depends upon seeing them with your inner eye.

  —Noah Watanabe, Drifting in the Ether (unpublished notes)

  The large, unmarked grid-plane circled a remote canyon, with Noah and fifty robots in the passenger compartment. At the controls of the vessel, Subi Danvar used infrared and other electronics to survey the conditions below. With his naked eye, Noah saw a transport vessel on the ground, bearing the red-and-gold colors of Doge Anton. It was midday, with fast-moving clouds overhead that cast scattered shadows on the landscape.

  The house colors demonstrated that Noah’s nephew was a del Velli now, and confirmed what he had heard, that Anton was no longer using his foster name of Glavine. This gave Noah pause, since this was the son of the man who had just launched a sneak attack against Guardian headquarters. Were the two of them working closely together now, and were soldiers hiding in the surrounding terrain, ready to pounce and capture Noah again?

  Noah wanted to think the best of Anton, for he had known the young man for years, and hoped he had not changed for the worst since becoming Doge. In his high position, Anton might have inherited certain political necessities, but Noah had always trusted him … and Anton had never let him down before. He could not have lost his sense of honor so quickly.

  But Noah recalled only too well his own wounds from having trusted Giovanni Nehr, of thinking he had seen goodness and loyalty in Gio’s heart, and how wrong he had been. Still, he had a feeling about Anton, that this was an important, even essential, relationship to be developed even further. Noah did not see any benefit in fleeing on Tesh’s podship to another world, because what would he do there? He didn’t want to raise an army to attack the merchant princes; instead, he wanted to work with them against the Mutatis and the Parviis, who were causing so much damage to everything they touched.

  Today was a necessary step. He had to risk it.

  The grid-plane went into its vertical landing mode and dropped slowly toward the shore of a river at the bottom of the gorge, passing billions of years of sedimentation and rock formations on the sheer canyon walls, in all the shades of brown he could imagine. Gusts of wind buffeted the craft, but Subi kept it under control.

  Around Noah the robots were entirely silent, because they had been packed compactly and programmed to sleep. All of them were boxy in shape, which made them easier to pack in tight quarters.

  Robots had certain advantages, Noah realized, and this was only one of them. The primary reason he had brought them was another—he didn’t want to risk losing Guardians in case he was wrong about Anton. As for Subi, he was Noah’s equal in many ways, and when the big man wanted to go someplace, it was hard to stop him. Subi, intensely loyal, wanted to make certain that every possible safety precaution was taken. He had even formulated a plan to take Anton hostage in a quick strike, if necessary. Assuming Anton was even there.

  As the grid-plane settled onto a sandy beach, Noah got his answer. Doge Anton del Velli, looking elegant and rested, strode toward him across the glittering, silvery sand, leaving his own entourage behind. He wore a thick coat, to protect against the unseasonably cold weather. His blond mustache looked freshly trimmed.

  Subi disembarked first, followed by Noah, both wearing green-and-brown Guardian uniforms. Then the robots came to life, and began clattering down the ramp to the ground. As they did so, Anton showed no alarm, and left his own guards a considerable distance away, by his own plane.

  As if in answer to Noah’s unspoken question, Anton said, “I have nothing to fear from you, and you have nothing to fear from me.”

  Standing in sunlight, the two men clasped hands firmly, then embraced. For a moment, it seemed to Noah as if nothing had ever separated them.

  “It seems like a long time since we saw each other at your wedding, doesn’t it?” Noah said, as they separated. “It’s only been a few months, but so much has happened.”

  “And not all for the best,” the Doge said, scowling. Wind whipped his long hair. He gestured, “Come, Uncle, and accompany me on a walk.”

  Noah nodded, and followed Anton’s lead as they strolled away from both aircraft onto a rocky section of beach.

  “Speaking of uncles,” Anton said with a sidelong glance, “my wife is grieving over what happened to Gio.”

  Noah nodded, and said, “An unfortunate incident.”

  “Yes, most unfortunate. But Gio was not like his brother, was he?”

  “No, sadly he was not like Jacopo at all.”

  “Tragic situation. He’d fallen on hard times, was working as a waiter on the orbital casino.”

  Noah expected Anton to press for more information, voicing suspicions that Guardians might have killed Gio, but instead the young Doge dropped the subject and said, “You may have noticed that I made no real effort to find you, or mount my own attack. I, too, have had odd mental experiences. While I should know where your headquarters is, because I have been there, I cannot remember anything about the location. It is as if a portion of my memory has been erased.” He stared hard at Noah, and added, “Did you do that to me?”

  “Not consciously, but perhaps it is linked to the powers I received. The Supreme Being who gave me those powers may have wanted to protect me, so he did a little tap dance inside your brain.”

  “As good an explanation as any, I suppose.” He smiled. “I never wanted to take action ag
ainst you anyway, no matter how hard my mother pressed me. Now, why did you request this meeting?”

  The Master of the Guardians closed his coat, to protect against the cool wind that was whipping through the canyon. “Undoubtedly you have heard things about me, how my cellular structure has taken on certain unusual propensities.”

  “Not only have I heard that, I was on the pod station when Mother fired a puissant blast through your chest. You’re like a reptile that can grow back its lost body parts.”

  “On a much more advanced level than any reptile,” Noah said, as they stepped over a log. “You heard what she did to me in the laboratory?”

  “Yes.” He smiled ruefully. “That wasn’t very nice of her, was it?”

  “She has certain—personality defects. Doge Anton, forgive me for insulting your mother, but I may be the only person who has the right.”

  “I don’t dispute your right to say anything you please about your sister, but there are other sides to her as well, sides that have surprised me. I’ve seen compassion in her eyes when she looks at me, and she has done things for me that can only be interpreted as love. Of course, she always has her own personal ambitions and motivations, but she really has shown me love, in the only way she knows.” He paused. “It’s a distant sort of emotion with her, but it is still there, as if it’s been suppressed for her entire life and is finally breaking free.”

  “It’s not enough,” Noah said, in a bitter voice. “I know her bad side only too well. Did you take the Elixir of Life?”

  “No, for a couple of reasons. One, I don’t know if I want to live forever. And two, look what it’s done to her. It could do the same to me.”

  Noah nodded. He thought for a moment, and said, “Even when it works, it’s no blessing.”

  They sat on a flat stone in a patch of sunlight, watching the clean mountain water flow swiftly by them. Noah related some of his incredible stories so that Anton could better understand the immensity of the challenges facing humankind and the entire galaxy. He told of his travels through a web of time and space, of signs of decay around the galaxy, of wild podships captured by the Tulyans, and of injured Parviis taking their entire podship fleet out of service in order to recuperate in a galactic fold. He also described the ancient caretaking duties of the Tulyan race, and how that had been diminished severely when they lost their podships to the Parviis.