by Diane Duane
"I don't believe they wouldn't be pretty well informed of the comings and goings of Concord ships," Gabriel said. Still Enda might have a point. Or there might be some other reason entirely. He sighed and sat down. "I just don't know," he said. "If I could only-"
Both their handheld comm receivers, tucked in their pockets, beeped softly. Gabriel looked at Enda, who shook her head and reached into her pocket to turn hers off.
The air whispered in Gabriel's ear that this was a mistake. He swallowed, then shook his head and took his comm out, thumbing it open for reception.
"You two still awake down there?" said Helm's voice from both their handhelds.
Enda gave Gabriel a rather dire look, for all around them the cavern had suddenly gone very quiet.
Gabriel swallowed again, very certain that this was not because everyone had suddenly gone to bed.
"Helm," Enda said, "I fear dawn will have no secrets from either of us. Why are you still awake?"
"Not my night yet. I was talking to Delde Sola."
"Statement: still is," came the doctor's voice down the comms.
"Delde Sola," Gabriel said immediately, "you are an angel with a wire hairdo. I will change your batteries any time, but what are you doing in this system?"
Delde Sola snickered. "Conjecture: thought gallantry was dead. Objective statement: Helm called me earlier, suggested presence here might be useful. Made excuse to Iphus authorities, called in favor, found outgoing transport. Location: Ino at moment, completing 'supply run.' Needed to do some shopping anyway."
"An angel," Gabriel repeated, "but the analysis-can you do that from this distance?"
"Affirm," Delde Sota said. "I am on the Grid. Helm is on the Grid. Longshot's computer is on the Grid and connects to my sensor extension-my braid-in his weapons bay. Object is in his weapons bay. Preparing now."
"The braid has one of those atomic-level microporous tendril attachments," Helm said. "All she has to do is touch it to something and it goes right through-" "I've seen it," Gabriel said. "Slick."
"Request: quiet for a moment please," Delde Sota said. "Interfacing."
Gabriel and Enda looked at each other. The silence in the cavern was even greater than it had been. Kaiste was standing in the opening between their private space and the main hall, looking at them grimly with a sabot pistol in his claw.
Gabriel looked up at him, wondering whether this was something that would have happened whether he and Enda had suddenly started to communicate with someone on the outside or not. Did they ever intend to let us leave, really? Have we been under a death sentence since we got here, no matter how good our intentions were? Not that it mattered now.
"Kaiste, it's Ondway's friends we're talking to," Gabriel explained and surprised himself somewhat with his own anger. "They know you're here, and they haven't betrayed you any more than we intend to. If you're going to shoot us, at least wait until the doctor finds out what you need to know. Then do what you like." He turned his back on Kaiste, rude though it was. His back itched at the feeling of the pistol leveled at it.
And itched, and itched, but he would not turn around again.
"Initial result," Delde Sola said then. "It is a chemical/enzymatic device. Catalytic compounds .. ." She trailed off.
There was something peculiar about her silence, and apparently Enda heard it too. "Doctor, are you all right?"
"Analyzing." A long silence.
"Conjecture:" Delde Sola said then, "device is intended to promote a catalytic reaction in atmosphere. Catalyzation starts high up, near space altitudes. All free or atmospheric oxygen is catalyzed into 'locked' forms, clathrates and other similar structures, using nitrogen and other gaseous atoms to construct the clathrates. Such structures bind the atoms into 'cages' in which they are inaccessible and from which they cannot escape. Over only very long periods the clathrate 'cages' would disintegrate." "What would happen if you dropped this into a planet's atmosphere?" Gabriel asked. "All oxygen in it would become sequestered in clathrate form." Delde Sola's voice was getting angry. Gabriel could just see those dark eyes and the anger in them. "Such oxygen is not respirable. It enters the lungs, but oxygen is not able to bond with hemoglobin in human blood cells, cyanoglobin in sesheyan blood, and so forth. It passes out of the lungs again unused and unusable. Breathing does no good. You breathe freely yet die of suffocation within minutes." "And then the clathrates disintegrate," Enda said softly.
"Leaving the oxygen slowly freeing itself for use again. Months, perhaps. Weeks, more likely." "So that after everything that breathed oxygen on a given planet was dead," Gabriel said softly, "the planet itself would be usable again after a while."
"Why waste perfectly good infrastructure investment?" said Doctor Delde Sola, almost in a growl. "Plants remain unhurt since plants use nitrogen, and plenty of free nitrogen is left. Planet surface is cleansed of undesirable organisms- non-Employee sesheyans, for example."
Suddenly Gabriel thought of that VoidCorp cruiser he had seen heading nonchalantly toward Grith in a maneuver that looked like it was simply using Hydrocus's gravity to slingshot around the two worlds. But something else was going on. Such a maneuver might look like an energy saving move at first. For a cruiser like that, though, it had to cost more energy to set up than it would or could possibly save. What was it practicing for? Gabriel thought. Insertion of something into the high atmosphere . . . Now, only now, he turned to look at Kaiste again. The sesheyan was standing there, the pistol lowered, looking stricken. "Yes," Gabriel said. "Non-Employee sesheyans, and not just these, either." Enda was staring at him "What?" Helm said. "Who?" "The ones on Grith" Gabriel said.
Enda's mouth fell open. "But there are thousands of humans there as well, and fraal, and other species. All the Hatire settlers at Diamond Point, and the people scattered through the jungles, and ..." She trailed off.
"Not VoidCorp employees, though," said Gabriel. "Not real people." He was thinking again about Delvecchio's rueful remarks about how long it took to turn other beings into people, or at least the kind of people worthy of being treated like Us.
"They would destabilize the whole system," Enda said slowly. "They would start a war here, and it would spread. They might have wiped out a Hatire colony once, but they would not get away with it twice."
"Wouldn't they? Since when have they cared about a war or two?" Gabriel said. "This is VoidCorp we're discussing. Their business, long term and short term, is to win, and they can't win as long as there's a colony of renegade sesheyans sitting right out under their noses on Grith, flaunting 'their' contract with the Company! So they'll kill them, but they'll make sure their little gadget works here and kill these sesheyans first, because two colonies of free sesheyans are even worse than just one." "The Concord," said Enda slowly, "cannot allow them to get away with this."
Gabriel did not share his immediate thought. Perhaps the Concord did not intend to let them get away with this, and he- and to a lesser extent Enda-were the tools that the Concord were employing to this purpose. The issue had come up for consideration before. Isn't a willing tool still a tool? Gabriel was now finding aspects of the question that he had not considered before. He had occasionally spent some time wondering what good he might be doing Lorand Kharls. Now he found himself wondering what good Lorand Kharls might do him, and whether the tool might not turn in the hand of its user in ways that even the user might find surprising.
More-and in a more shadowy manner-the idea was beginning to creep up on Gabriel that there were other kinds of service to the Concord than the strictly military ones and that willing service might change the nature of everything that had gone before it.
Enda's getting to me, he thought, putting that thought aside for the moment. "So that's why that thing was signaling," Gabriel said. "It was waiting for the sesheyans in the attack force to lock onto it and give it the signal to go active. Their bosses didn't want to leave it on automatic. There might have been some reason to abort the attack suddenly."
&
nbsp; "Like if a Concord ship turned up suddenly," said Enda.
"Yes."
"And when we turned up, some of them went to go ahead with the delivery, thinking there would be no witnesses, until we started to get a little the better of the situation," Enda said, "at which point the insertion must have been called off. The ships detailed to it came back to finish us off."
"With the results we saw." Gabriel sighed. "Did they make that decision themselves, though? Or did someone order them to? Did they have a chance to report to whoever was in charge of the attack?"
"For all we know, the whole thing was being watched remotely by their masters elsewhere," Enda said.
"In fact it seems all too likely. I think we must expect them to return, and in short order."
"On top of everything else, they were using Employee sesheyans to deliver this thing." Gabriel grimaced.
"Probably from VoidCorp's point of view, that just made it even more fun," Helm said.
Gabriel put his head down in his hands-then looked up again, looked over at Kaiste. "Kaiste, you've got to leave," he said. "You've got to get out of here. There's no way VoidCorp can have intended to try something like this and fail to carry it through eventually. You have to come with us."
"In two ships?" Enda said, very softly. 'There are at least three thousand sesheyans here."
Gabriel shook his head. "Delde Sola, thanks for the analysis. We may need some more help from you before this is over."
"Call when ready," she said, and the line clicked. "Helm," Gabriel said. "I'll be up a while yet."
"Stay ready. We may have to do something in a hurry." "Like what?" I have no idea!
"I'll let you know before morning," Gabriel said.
He turned again, but Kaiste had vanished from the doorway out into the silence and the dimness of the cavern.
Earlier, the time seemed to be dragging, but now it seemed to be fleeing by, unfairly swiftly, and Gabriel snatched at every moment of it, hoping that the next moment might give him the idea he needed. But every moment that went by without an answer said in his ear, You blew it.
Enda sat by the little hot pool with her eyes closed, listening to him. This was something Gabriel had seen her do on Sunshine. She often looked as if she were sleeping, but she never missed a word. Now he paced and talked as he might have done with Delvecchio in those far lost days on Falada. "The Concord ought to be here," he kept saying. "Why aren't they here?"
"Indeed," Enda said after a moment, her eyes still closed, "I would have thought that because of the treaty, the Concord's attention would have been turned much more intently toward this system." "I think that may be why things have heated up here." Gabriel said. For a moment it was as if it was not Enda sitting there but Delvecchio. Odd how he could almost feel that prickly, amused presence nearby. "Enda, think about the situation as it was. Phorcys and Ino hate each other, but neither is averse to doing a little trading on the side with a tiny colony of sesheyans well out in the middle of nowhere. No one else is interested in that colony. It remains the Thalaassan worlds' little secret, though they understand perfectly well what VoidCorp's response will be if it ever finds out about this place. The Company moves in and deals with this little colony, probably terminally. Then, understanding that Phorcys and Ino will have known about this place but never informed VoidCorp about it, the Company moves into the Thalaassa system with intent. Oh, outwardly it's all very much on the up and up. Development, progress, sell us a few of your outer planets-you don't need them. Sell us some of the bigger companies on your worlds, we'll make them work better. Economies of scale, all the usual excuses. So that would happen too. Soon enough VoidCorp would have a major hold on this system, and once it controlled most things, that's when the revenge would start. The Company has a long memory.
"Then all of a sudden the Concord shows up and starts insisting that Phorcys and Ino stop fighting one another, make peace, lay everything out on the table where it can all be seen. Well, on the one hand, the governments on Phorcys and Ino are absolutely delighted. Here's possibly the only force that can keep the Corpses from eating the whole Thalaassa system alive. At the same time, they don't really want to stop fighting, and they also know that if the Concord finds out about this little colony of sesheyans on Rhynchus, there'll be trouble.
"So it's never mentioned, at first. Then the treaty comes close to being ready to sign. Now, both governments know they can't make a treaty 'disposition' of their system without mentioning it. Yet if they do mention Rhynchus, one way or the other, they're straight down the hole. VoidCorp will never forgive them if the Concord makes an issue of this the way they did of Grith... and they will. There will be two Griths, one of them in the Thalaassa system, a much less well protected system than Corrivale is, and sooner or later the wrath of VoidCorp will fall on Rhynchus-and on Phorcys and Ino as well. Yet if they don't mention the colony on Rhynchus, there's trouble as well. The language of the treaty they signed requires both planets to help to 'protect and defend the sovereignty of all inhabited worlds in the system.' That will have to include Rhynchus, even though no one has mentioned it. When the Concord finds out what's going on there, and what's been going on, they'll be furious, and they'll probably withdraw their protection, leaving Phorcys and Ino in just as bad a spot."
Gabriel sat down and thought for a moment, reaching for a cup of chai the sesheyans had left him. "So. Here it starts to get iffy. But I would lay money that at this point, VoidCorp suddenly switched roles and offered to be the 'good cop.' Some soft-voiced, well-dressed type at level Q or better turns up in the offices of the lord president of Phorcys and the delegate of Ino and says, 'Don't get all concerned now. We can do you a little favor, solve your problems, solve our problems. Then everybody will be happy.' What they suggest is that they're going to get rid of the colony on Rhynchus. Sterilize it." The anger was building in him again, but he didn't care. "That way, there will be no dirty little secret for the Concord to discover when they come in after the treaty and start doing detailed scans and assessments on all the planets in the system to determine where the assistance programs and so forth will go. Naturally VoidCorp will be very grateful. Probably the gratitude would at first take the form of them not moving to take over the system wholesale." Gabriel grinned. "My guess is that they'd wait for the Concord to finish the assay sweeps, let them spend the money to find out whether there's any reason to stay in the place. Resources, whatever. Then move in. Or, if there's nothing worth the taking, leave the place alone. Otherwise . .. until there's enough other infrastructure in place in this part of the Verge to come back inexpensively and take over the system." "The Company," Enda said softly, "has a long memory." Gabriel nodded. "Revenge." He put his chai down. "There are other problems." "Yes," Enda said. "Silver Bell."
Oleg's dead face came up before Gabriel's eyes again. Who's doing this? he thought. These-people-well, they were people once. Now they move, they act, but are they alive?
Who takes a dead person and brings him "alive" again, then sends him out to fight and kill?
He shook his head.
"What will we do?" Enda asked.
Gabriel sighed. "I need more time."
"I think there is no more time," Enda said. "It is dawn."
He and Enda stepped out of the caves for a breath of fresh air and to see the new light. Dawn did not make that much difference here. At this distance Thalaassa was only a small disk, just a step up from a super bright star, its light at noon not much brighter than a misty morning or a very bright moonlit night on Bluefall in Gabriel's childhood. Still it was a change from the blackness of night or the closeness inside the caves.
Gabriel stood out at the edge of the landing field, looking up. The sky here was dark, partly because of the distance from Thalaassa, partly because there was still not that much oxygen or nitrogen to refract the sunlight. The early morning was cloudless-no surprise, the planet had shown little weather when they arrived yesterday. High up, though, there was one long streak of c
loud, catching the pale sun, burning surprisingly bright.
Gabriel looked at it. "Has Helm been dipping down into atmosphere?" he said to Enda. "Why would he do that?"
"Well, that almost looks like a contrail-" They both stared at it, pausing to nod at Kaiste as he came out behind them and looked up to see the contrail as well. Gabriel glanced at Kaiste and got out his handheld. "Helm?"
A pause. "What?"
"Have you been in atmosphere?"
"Me? Hardly."
"Then what's that contrail up there?"
A long silence. Then, slowly, eloquently, Helm began to swear. "What? What?" Gabriel asked frantically, but he already knew. "The sensors say," said Helm, "that it's clathrates. Clathrates of nitrogen."
Gabriel's heart seized up inside him. Something up there was changing the way the air reflected the little sunlight it got from Thalaassa, changing the atmosphere's constitution. "Aiai," Enda said softly. "They had another one."
"Of course they did," Gabriel said, groaning. "No one ever makes just one weapon. And they had to use it quickly because their attack force was seen or because their first bomb was found. Helm, how did they get past you ? "
He was swearing again, but he stopped long enough to answer. "Not impossible, if there's just one ship in orbit and you stay on the far side of the planet from it at all times. If the ship is small enough-" What fourteen didn't do, one did, Gabriel thought bitterly. "How fast will the change come?"
"From what Delde Sola said, pretty fast. It's a catalytic process. Maybe only a few hours to sweep around the planet. Another couple of hours to work right down into the lower atmosphere. After that-"
"After that we will start to die," said Kaiste softly. "We do not have machines to make air from stone the way the satellite colonies do. We take our air from outside, concentrate it, filter it, and process it. If within a few hours there will be no more-then a few hours after that, we will start to die."