Ashes of Freedom
Page 21
“Of course. Not very entertaining. Bad comedy, really.”
Cole looked at Vorsh. The Shmali stood in the doorway, leaning against his left shoulder. His right hand twirled the dagger, long, narrow fingers guiding steel in intricate, flashing patterns. Beautiful hands, Cole noticed for the first time, an artist’s hands. Something terrifying about that.
“I didn’t tell them anything,” Cole said.
“I know you didn’t.”
“You know who they are, don’t you?”
The dagger’s patterns sped up, metal blurring. “I have a pretty good idea.”
“You’re going to kill them.” Cole wasn’t asking a question.
“Mm-hmm.” Vorsh may as well have been discussing an interesting cloud in the sky from his tone. “But not here, not now. There’ll be a better time.”
Cole sniffled, felt cold and dry inside. “I don’t want to know.”
Vorsh stopped his dagger’s twirling, his eyes fixing on Cole for the first time. He stepped over to him, flipping the blade into its sheath as an afterthought, knelt beside him.
“You understand now, don’t you, Cole?” he said. The expression on his face might have been a smile. “We’re friends. Have been a long time. All these others, this Movement, these ‘comrades’, that dead fool, Atchraq...none of them matter. The war will go on, and maybe someone will win. It doesn’t matter, though. Only we matter. Only surviving matters. And living. You understand, right?”
Cole managed to nod.
“Good. You just keep doing what you’re doing. No need to talk about this. Leave those others to me.”
The light bulb gave a piercing flash and died, casting part of the room into darkness. Vorsh’s face shadowed, folds in pale skin becoming crevasses, liquid flickers where the light caught his left eye and his smiling teeth.
“Remember. Friends.”
Vorsh turned and swept into the dark. Cole could hear the Shmali cackling as he went.
Cole didn’t move. He sat in the half-shadow and tried to start up a fresh cry. But it wasn’t in him. He was cold and dry inside.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“My trackers left her about here,” Ozer said, pointing at a section of holographic map plastered across the table in Outpost 9’s conference room. “I saw no reason to follow further. Our people are stealthy, but the holdout scouts have gotten to be quite adept. No sense advertising that we were tracking her.”
“And she had no idea your team followed her as far as it did?” Zarven asked. He didn’t really want an answer, but he was in the sort of mood that made hashing over details comforting.
“She gave no indication of it.”
“A pity we couldn’t implant her with tags,” Tedeschi said, standing beside Ozer. “Or better yet, harvest her.”
“We know that the worms have ways of detecting nanite infestation down to the cellular level,” Zarven said with a touch of exasperation. “Our meddling would certainly not escape notice.”
“And harvesting would wipe the mind clean, leave nothing of the individual,” Ozer said with a snap in his tone. He didn’t care for Tedeschi and made little secret of it. “The individual, the girl, is what the worms are expecting. An automaton, no matter how subtly programmed, would be recognized for what it is.”
“Has anyone ever tried?”
“Enough.” Zarven flicked a tone of warning at both officers. “Our instructions to her were clear?”
“Yes,” Tedeschi replied, returning to crisp formality. “She is to conceal the communications node we sent with her somewhere outside regular worm surveillance. When she can break away, she is to retrieve it and report to us. She is to do this as often as is practical.”
“And so, we begin to peel them apart,” Zarven said, mostly to himself.
“What about the names she provided?” Ozer asked. “Shall we have reaction squads standing by to seize them?”
“Not yet,” Zarven answered. “I want to see that she reports in, the first time, before we start acting on her information. I’m not certain any of the subjects she volunteered will prove to be worthwhile, anyway. If they were truly pivotal to their Movement, she wouldn’t have traded them to us so early.”
“Do you think she’s playing with us?” Ozer’s question had a snarl to it.
“No. But neither is she totally willing. She appears to be as afraid of her comrades as she is of us. All she really seems to desire is out. But she doesn’t want to betray everything. Remember the sister.”
“Yes.” Tedeschi’s harmonic crackled with a hint of predatory longing.
Zarven ignored him. “Her return route gives us some information by itself. We can be fairly certain the trails she took are ones the guerrillas utilize often to reach the settlements. We should plant surveillance drones in the area to monitor traffic. I want our regular sweeps of the area suspended to encourage the worms to—”
An electric ripple passed through the Awareness, a crimson pulse questing for Zarven’s attention. For a moment, he frowned in confusion, not recognizing the signal.
Realization came with a second pulse. Zarven had left a pirate tap on Awareness traffic between Mondanberg and Fort Ranzac when he first arrived on Lurinari—a piece of eavesdropping certain to be frowned upon, were it noticed. Any sign of a sudden spike in communication—likely in the event of an attack, or a political purge—and his AI had instructions to alert him.
A stream of communications noise cascaded down through the Awareness, not just the terse, anxious messages fired back and forth between Tan-Ezatz and the commands across the planet, but the chatter of excited Korvans as Hausts let slide things they would normally shut in and Fanrohausts caught wind. Orders to silence the talk snarled out but were lost. Too late. The word was in the Awareness, whispering through the communal intellect.
The guesses, the stories blurred, got more vague, more bizarre as they emanated out from the source. But the reason for the sudden furor remained very clear.
“A ship has been picked up on short range sensors,” Zarven said, though it was clear from their harmonics, his officers were already quite aware. “A capital ship, one of ours. Must have been rigged for a silent running, must have drifted in system to avoid detection.”
“By the Imperative,” Ozer said, “she would have had to fight her way through the worms.”
“They’re here to reinforce us,” Tedeschi hazarded.
“One ship? Don’t be ridiculous. She may be a...”
Zarven shook his head to clear the others from his mind. He strained, focused his attentions on the orbital sensor nets to get a clearer picture. Harmonics rang off one another in discordance. His head ached with the upheaval of the Awareness. He had to sift through them, the emotions and the excitement, had to concentrate.
Suddenly, noise fell away like a dropped curtain and a blast of icy clarity howled through Zarven. His harmonic shuddered like bones struck a blow. Twin points of searing light speared through his temples and danced behind his eyes. The brilliance increased, brushing aside the others, his own thoughts, his own will. He was nothing, standing in a cold room he could not see or touch. Alone.
But not alone. Something else was there, at his shoulder, whispering in his ear. Were it not so long since he last felt the Presence, he would have recognized it right away.
There was an Ubermind on the ship.
And it wished to have a word with Zarven.
THE BATTLESHIP, Sovorahz, had arrived at the edge of the Lurinari system with two destroyer escorts and a light attack cruiser, expecting a brief stopover and replenishment at the Lurinari orbital docks. Three months from their rendezvous in Generis Sector, where they were to reinforce the Ninth Deep Space Fleet and their Honorable passenger was to assume command.
There had been no word from the Lurinari command in nearly a Terran standard year. Not unusual by itself in an empire that spanned hundreds of light years. The disappearance of two corvettes dispatched with the 18th Special Commandos had raise
d some alarm, but considering the vast distance and the liquid nature of a three-dimensional battlefront, most on Homeworld did not yet see a reason for concern.
A quarter of the way in system, a wave of worm starfighters slashed into the small flotilla. The Sovorahz took moderate damage in the ensuing melee and a flurry of tracking missiles turned one of her escorts into a thermonuclear fireball. After several minutes of brutal punishment from Korvan point-defenses, the worm survivors broke off. By this time, the rest of the worm fleet massing at the edge of sensor range became obvious and the battlewagon and her consorts made a break for it.
Over the next week, the Sovorahz played a cat-and-mouse game across the edge of the system in an attempt to get clear of the trap. Twice she nearly escaped the gravity well only to be corralled back in system by hounding pursuers. The second attempt cost her the light attack cruiser and turned her hide-and-seek into a deadly race back toward the heart of the star system.
Relentless sorties by worm starfighters and fast attack cruisers crippled the last of her escorts, leaving it to be picked apart. In desperation, she overloaded her propulsion systems and disengaged the pursuit by high acceleration. Once clear of long-range sensors, she shut down all major systems and allowed herself to coast down the gravity well toward Lurinari and the succor she hoped to find there.
All these things poured into Tan-Ezatz’s mind as she stood in her office in the midst of upheaval. She had assembled most of her local commanders in Mondanberg for a review of their parts in the coming Winter Offensive—in front of her, where she could physically gauge their suitability.
The arrival of the battlewagon in orbit had set the group of Korvans, already skittish, into near hysterics.
Not that their gibberings reached her through the icy Presence filling her mind. She sat at her desk while bickering and boasting and back thumping echoed through the Awareness around her. Her arms wrapped around her instinctively and a shiver could not be resisted. She looked at her subordinates. Could they not feel this? Could they not sense the Presence and quake like she did? Of course not. An Ubermind would only make Itself known to those that interested It. Tan-Ezatz suddenly hated her subordinates, hated all of Korvan-kind because they were not feeling this crushing, freezing weight now.
Kavelton, at least, took noticing of her cooling harmonic. “HaustMarshal? Are you unwell?”
Tan-Ezatz shook herself. The Ubermind was not yet in direct commune with her, was only letting her feel Its presence and catching her up to speed with Its situation, Its dissatisfaction.
To Kavelton Tan-Ezatz rasped, “Get them out of here, HaustMajor.”
“Right away,” he replied, allowing only a brief pause of concern. He began herding the officers out.
Questions and protests erupted, hot pinpricks lingering in her skull even after the others were gone from the room. She forced them away, focusing on the Presence, giving herself to It. They were inconsequential, the fools and their little problems, the problems that added friction to a machine that should run smoothly.
They were inconsequential when one found oneself facing a God.
“I am here,” she said.
Before an intellect capable of cutting through her thoughts and emotions and self-deceptions like a razor, Tan-Ezatz could only grovel. “I await your command.”
“You have my apologies.” If falling to the floor on hands and knees appropriate, Tan-Ezatz would have done so gleefully. “My command is yours, if you so desire.”
The Ubermind paused and all Tan-Ezatz could feel was Its rage, Its frustration and Its despair. She wanted to shudder. She wanted to cry. She couldn’t bring herself to believe she was feeling this from one of Them. She saw herself as a small child, locked terrified in a darkened chamber, alone in the days before her implants, before she felt the caress of the Awareness.
“What can we do?” she asked.
“We are preparing an offensive for the winter—”
Tan-Ezatz winced inwardly, felt an acidic churn in her gut as she imagined the groans of protest from certain senior officers.
Calculating presence again.
Unaccustomed to being a subordinate mind by years on Lurinari, a careless part of Tan-Ezatz thought, isn’t that what we’re doing?
“It will be as you say,” Tan-Ezatz replied with solemnity she hoped the Ubermind believed more than she did.