by Timothy Zahn
"I'm not sure it really matters," Holloway admitted, gazing out the canopy at the brilliantly lit field of debris drifting through space in front of them. "Given Dorcas's location and all, I thought it might be instructive to see what we were up against. I guess I could have saved myself the trip."
"There's not much left to see," Williams agreed. "We've already picked up most of the big pieces and sent them off to the analysis center on Edo. Mostly what we're doing now is picking bodies out of the rubble."
Holloway nodded, his stomach tightening in anger. That part had shown up in exquisitely painful detail in the watchship records. Twenty-eight hundred men and women, most of them slaughtered for no reason. "We're going to have to make them pay for that."
"No argument from me on that one," Williams said grimly. "Odds among my crew are running five to one that we finally bring CIRCE out of retirement."
"Let's just hope they're damn careful when they start putting it back together," Holloway said, looking around at the floating debris. "All we need is for these butchers to get hold of a working CIRCE."
"These, or any other batch," Williams said. "The Pawoles still haven't forgiven us for using it on them. I'll bet the Yycromae wouldn't mind getting their hands on it, either."
"That's certainly a cheery thought." Holloway looked out the viewport at the dim sun of the system, so far away it was hardly distinguishable from the background stars around it. "What were they doing out here, anyway?"
"Probably poking around the cometary halo looking for stuff to mine," Williams said. "Wasting their time - our teams looked the place over about five years ago. Nothing here worth the effort of digging out. Look, Colonel, we've still got a lot of work to do out there. If you want, I can drop you off - wait a minute." He cocked his head slightly, listening intently to his earphone. "Williams here. You sure? Okay, stay with it - I'm on my way."
He keyed the drive, and the drudgeship swung around toward one of the banks of lights. "What is it?" Holloway asked.
"The jackpot, maybe," Williams said. "Someone's spotted what looks like a piece of alien ship outside the scavenger area."
Two other drudgeships were already there when they arrived, their remote analyzers drifting across the fragment's surface. "What have you got, Scotts?" Williams asked, touching a switch and pulling off his headset.
"Looks like a hull plate, Lieutenant," the other's voice came over the cockpit speaker. "A piece of one, anyway. Got some electronic fragments or something on the underside, too."
"What got it, a shrapnel line?"
"Looks more like expansion shock to me," Scotts said. "Probably flash-heated by a close-in warhead explosion and popped at the seams. I'm picking up some odd dust here, too - could be the same stuff. We'll scoop some of it up."
Holloway peered out at the milky-white plate, only slightly scarred except near the edges where it had broken. "One plate and some dust," he commented. "Must be one very sturdy hull material."
"All that, and more," Scotts said. "I want a copy of the stress-test report when it comes in."
A third remote had drifted in to join the other two now at the hull plate's surface. "What haven't you done yet?" Williams asked.
"Bakst is looking at the edge structure; I'm trying to get an angle on those electronics," Scotts said. "We haven't tried composition yet."
"Okay, I'll run that," Williams said, keying in the program. "The Jutland ships took a shot at this before the shooting started," he added to Holloway, leaning over in his seat to peer into the remote's display. "Didn't get 'em anywhere; but then, they were eight klicks away and trying to read through a heat-dump spectrum. Let's see if we can do a little better now... well, well. Bingo."
"What?" Holloway asked.
"It's not a metal alloy at all," Williams said, straightening up again. "It's a ceramic."
"A ceramic?" Holloway echoed. "I've never heard of a ceramic this tough."
"Me, neither," Williams said. "I guess we're hearing about it now."
"I guess we are," Holloway agreed. "And that explains why the radar-triggered missiles the force kept throwing never went off. There weren't any large masses of metal for them to lock on to."
"I don't think there were even any small ones," Scotts's voice came from the speaker. "You're going to love this, Lieutenant. These electronics things on the underside? No metal in 'em."
"Not even power lines?"
"If they're here, I can't find them," Scotts said. "All the filaments they've got running in and out are just optical control fibers. No idea how the power's getting in."
"Could they be using a Djadaran electron-tunneling effect?" Holloway asked.
"Not unless they've come up with a way to make it a lot more efficient than the Djadar ever did," Williams said. "How about it, Scotts?"
"I don't think so," Scotts said slowly. "Scan's still running, but so far I'm not reading any semiconductors, either."
"No metals or semiconductors?" Williams frowned. "All right, I give: what is there?"
"Throw your guess in with mine," Scotts said. "All I'm getting is the optical fibers plus some complex geometric shapes of unknown composition."
"Crystalline?"
"Or amorphous," Scotts said. "The analyzer can't seem to make up its mind on that one, either. We could try taking an interference reading."
"Not worth the effort," Williams said reluctantly. "We're just supposed to find this stuff, anyway - it's up to the geniuses on Edo to figure out what the hell it is. Pull your remotes back and I'll take this piece in. You and Bakst start a search of the area, see if you can find any more pieces. I'll swing a couple more ships over to give you a hand."
"Yes, sir."
Williams keyed the board speaker switch off again and put his headset back on. "Where are we going?" Holloway asked.
"Back to the Ganymede to drop this off," Williams said, looking at the display as he maneuvered the grabber arms out toward the alien plate. "And unless there's something else you want to see, Colonel, I'm going to drop you there with it. We've still got work to do out here. And there's no guarantee the aliens won't come back."
"I understand," Holloway nodded. "I'd better be getting back to Dorcas, anyway."
"I can't say I envy you your post," Williams said candidly. "Playing sitting duck on a rock like Dorcas isn't my idea of a fun tactical stance."
"I could think of better positions myself," Holloway agreed. "Somewhere in Orion Sector springs to mind. You think you'll be able to find all the bodies?"
"Probably," Williams said, the bulk of his attention clearly on the task at hand. "The battle was pretty well localized - it was over too fast for much drift. Why?"
Holloway looked out at the field of junk floating off to their right. "Just wondering if maybe they weren't all killed."
Williams shook his head. "The watchships didn't leave until all the locator beacons had been silenced. And those things don't break down by themselves."
"Yes, I know," Holloway said. "I was just thinking that if I'd just had a run-in with an unknown race, I'd make sure I got at least one live prisoner to take back for study."
Williams shrugged. "You can't count on them thinking like humans."
"It still wouldn't hurt to mention the possibility in your report."
"Frankly, Colonel, I've got better things to do right now than add stuff to my file work," Williams said. "If you want it put in, write it up yourself."
"Maybe I will," Holloway said, looking out at the lights of the drudgeships moving around against the stars. "Yes. I think I will."
5
The rumors had begun even before they'd left Mees, and for the entire ten-hour trip they seemed to be the sole topic of conversation aboard the liner. There were whispered stories of sudden activity at the Peacekeepers' orbital Bridgehead base; second- and third-hand reports that the governments of the three human enclaves on Mees had been called into emergency session; dark hints that postbattle assessment teams had been activated and been
whisked off God only knew where. Through it all Aric had kept to himself, working through the shock and grief of his father's unexpected message as best he could. Wondering how his younger brother had died, and whether the still unknown circumstances surrounding it were to blame for the flurry of nervous hearsay.
It wasn't until he reached the NorCoord Parliament chambers that he had his first inkling that the rumors might for once have been understated. The smiling young pages who normally stood by the doors to the observation balcony had been replaced by a pair of armed and decidedly unsmiling Peacekeeper Marines. They checked Aric's ID carefully, double-checked it against their list, and finally let him in.
He walked down the short entrance corridor to the rear of the balcony proper. Kolchin was waiting there, leaning against the wall with his usual deceptive air of carelessness. A dozen other men and women loitered nearby, all exuding the same aura of alert competence as they gave Aric a thoughtful once-over. Apparently, CavTronics Industries wasn't the only big gun of Commonwealth industry and business represented here today.
"Mr. Cavanagh," Kolchin nodded as Aric came up to him. "Good to see you, sir."
"You too," Aric nodded back, noting peripherally that with Kolchin's identification of him the other bodyguards seemed to lose interest. "Where is he?"
"Down there," Kolchin said, pointing toward one of the lower tiers of seats.
Aric looked. The balcony was barely a quarter full, his father's white hair instantly recognizable in the subdued lighting. He was sitting alone, and even at this distance Aric thought he could see a slump in the older man's shoulders. "Melinda hasn't arrived yet?"
Kolchin shook his head. "No, but she should be here soon. She was doing an operation on Celadon that couldn't be rescheduled and had to catch a ride with one of our transports. They got in to Cheredovat about half an hour ago. Parian's bringing her in."
Aric nodded. "Okay. Send her down when she gets here, all right?"
"Sure thing."
Parlimin Hurley Maxwell was on the podium down on the floor below, speaking passionately about Peacekeeper preparation and funding as Aric walked down the aisle. "Hi, Dad," he said as he reached his father's row and sat down beside him.
"Aric," the elder Cavanagh said, giving him a poor attempt at a smile as he gripped his son's hand. "Thanks for coming."
"Sure," Aric assured him, studying the other's face in the subdued light. There were new lines there, lines of fatigue and grief that he hadn't seen three weeks ago. The old man was taking this hard. "How are you doing?"
"No worse than you'd expect," his father said, trying the smile again with the same lack of success. "Of course it's hard; but it's not like we never knew that this day might someday come. Pheylan knew there were risks that came with the uniform, and he accepted them."
"It was more than just acceptance, Dad," Aric reminded him. "He'd wanted to be in the Peacekeepers since before he was seven." He smiled as a stray memory clicked. "Wanted it about as badly as he didn't want an office job."
His father threw him a sideways look. "Told you about that fight, did he?"
"We told each other most things," Aric said, swallowing through a suddenly aching throat. He was going to miss Pheylan, too. More than he was willing to admit even to himself. "I remember him storming into my office right after that particular argument and announcing that he'd rather join a pirate gang than disappear like me behind a desk somewhere in CavTronics. It took me half an hour to calm him down."
"That sounds like him," the elder Cavanagh said, shaking his head. "Strange, isn't it. He hated the idea of a desk job; but even in the Peacekeepers that's where he would eventually have wound up. Maybe it's just as well he didn't get that far."
"Maybe," Aric said, looking down at the chamber floor and searching for a way to change the subject. His father was putting up a good front, but beneath the calm words Aric could see an all-too-familiar pattern beginning to form. The downward emotional spirals that followed Aric's mother's sudden death had plagued his father for months afterward, taking a harsh toll on his health and threatening to turn him into a recluse. Now, five years later, Aric suspected he would be even less capable of handling that kind of stress. "What's the big debate down there today?" he asked. "Some fallout from all of this?"
"More than you know," his father said. "I couldn't put it into my message, but your brother didn't just die in an accident or minor skirmish. The Kinshasa was destroyed in a full-blown battle. Along with the rest of the Jutland task force."
Aric swiveled in his seat. "The entire task force?"
The other nodded. "All eight ships. No survivors."
An unpleasant tingle ran through Aric's body. The shipboard rumors had indeed been understated. No wonder the Marines were on guard duty out there. "Where did it happen?"
"Dorcas. A few light-years outside the system, actually."
"Do we know who hit them?"
"All we know is that it's someone new," his father said. "That much was clear from the watchship data. Who they were, or where they come from, we still don't know."
Slowly, Aric turned back and settled again into his seat. A brand-new self-starfaring race... and already blood had been drawn. "What's Peacekeeper Command doing about it?"
"Preparing for war." His father gestured toward the chamber floor below. "And I can't say that everyone is upset at the prospect."
Aric focused his attention on the podium. " - and will furthermore cement our position once and for all within the Commonwealth and among the nonhuman worlds," Maxwell was intoning. "For the past decade the policies of the Northern Coordinate Union have been treated with thinly veiled contempt by more and more member states of the Commonwealth. Particularly those policies involving the organization and philosophy of the Peacekeeper forces that protect them. It's high time we demonstrated to the critics that their taxes and young people have not been simply disappearing into some soft, bloated military bureaucracy. The Peacekeepers are hard and lean and ready to fight. It's time they proved it."
He picked up his plate and stepped down from the podium to a ripple of applause from the rest of the chamber. "He's sure ready to go," Aric murmured.
"He's not the worst, either," his father said. "There's a small but vocal faction that's convinced on philosophical grounds that a strong common enemy is exactly what the Commonwealth has been missing lately. Something to pull humanity together, get us all going in the same direction again."
"Under NorCoord leadership, of course."
The elder Cavanagh shrugged. "Some of them genuinely believe that would be better for all of humanity. I'm not sure all of them do."
"Has anyone brought up CIRCE yet?"
"Not yet," the other said grimly. "But it can only be a matter of time."
Aric studied his father's profile. The taut cheeks, the haunted eyes. The memories. "You don't want it reassembled, do you?"
The other sighed. "You see CIRCE as history," he said, gesturing toward the Parliament floor. "Most of the people down there do, too. Even those my age who lived through the events saw CIRCE more as facts and numbers in a news report than anything else. But I was there. I saw what it did."
Aric frowned. "I didn't know you were at Celadon."
"I wasn't at the battle, no," his father shook his head. "But I was with the cleanup crew that went aboard one of the Pawolian warships afterward."
Wandering around a ghost ship... "Pretty bad, huh?"
"In its own quiet way it was the most terrifying thing I've ever witnessed," the elder Cavanagh said. "You had to see those ships, Aric, to really appreciate what CIRCE had done to them. The Pawoles knew we were experimenting with ion-beam weapons, and they'd built some awesome ion protection into those five ships. They had multiple layers of superdense metal shielding, high-power dipole field generators, even a liquid-envelope radiation reflector. None of it did a bit of good. Twenty-five thousand Pawoles died in that one shot, radiation-burned right where they stood. A shot, remember, that went
straight through the cloud of fighters arrayed between the two lines without even singeing them. That was the eeriest part of all."
Aric shrugged slightly. It was hard to get too worked up over nonhumans who'd died before he'd even been born. Especially when it was the Pawoles who'd picked the fight in the first place. "It ended the war," he pointed out.
"Oh, it ended the war, all right," his father said heavily. "And we were all terrified out of our minds that it would end everything. You know as well as I do that no technology ever remains exclusive property for very long - not nuclear weapons, not the Chabrier stardrive, not anything. If CIRCE's secret had leaked out..." He shook his head. "We've been lucky, Aric. Weapons like CIRCE almost always lead in one of two directions: a balance of power where everyone has it, or abuses of power by the exclusive owner. In this case we've had neither."
"Perhaps," Aric murmured noncommittally. It was true enough that CIRCE hadn't been used since the Pawolian war, but not everyone would agree that just because a weapon wasn't fired meant it wasn't being abused. The NorCoord Union had slowly been becoming a secondary voice in Commonwealth politics when the Pawolian war and CIRCE came along. It was hardly a secondary voice now.
A historical fact that was surely not lost on those Parlimins down there. "So how long do you think it'll be before someone finally suggests that NorCoord reassemble the thing and get it ready to use?"
His father nodded toward the floor below. "I'd say right about now."
A Yycroma had taken Maxwell's place at the podium, its furry-scaled crocodilian face almost hidden by the glints of light rippling across the crest and faceted sides of its ceremonial helmet.
Aric frowned. It was hard to tell size and proportion beneath the cloak and helmet, but - "Is that a male?"
"It is indeed," the elder Cavanagh said darkly. "A special envoy from the Hierarch, here on some matter concerning the interdiction zone. He took over from the ambassador as soon as they were informed about the Dorcas attack."
"Terrific," Aric growled. A male Yycroma, the heady smell of conflict in his nostrils. Just what they needed.