“Mr. Whitehall would be more at peace if that promise bore any specifics,” the facilitator said gravely as Whitehall began to rise from his chair.
Though she did not seem to hurry, somehow Sujata was standing first. “Perhaps Mr. Whitehall would see the whole matter in a better light if he reminded himself that instead of being chosen to receive a unique asset like the Museum, Cheia might instead have been blessed with the Sentinel Support Node and all the interference from Defense that goes with it.”
“Fècuma,” Whitehall muttered as he moved past her. An impolitic smile tugged at one corner of Sujata’s mouth, but she politely hid it behind one hand as she showed the men to the door.
Coming from Ba’ar Tell, it was inevitable that Wyrena Ten Ga’ar would find Unity Center overwhelming. The communal cabin on the packet Moraji had been a new enough experience in itself, but at least she had had the company of others from her own world on the first leg, to Microscopium Center.
M-Center was a greater shock, and one for which she had no cushion. The great space station, which had begun life as an Advance Base in the era of expansion, gave her her first taste of what her father disparagingly called Terran hive-living. Inevitably, Wyrena got lost repeatedly in M-Center’s eighteen levels during the three-day layover, confused to the point of tears by the quad-level-sector address system and the maze of look-alike corridors.
From M-Center inbound to Unity, Moraji carried a more ethnically diverse group. Fully half the twenty beds were filled by Service staffers near Wyrena’s own age. She found them loud, mannerless, and intimidating. Two Ba’ar men were aboard, one a minor official of the Centrality and the other a student. But neither was from her home city of Farnax, and though she would have been willing to forgo clan rules for conversation and companionship, they made clear that they were not.
Also aboard was a stiff-necked delegation from Daehne, whose attitude toward the rest of the passengers fluctuated between paranoia and condescension. Two of the Daehni made open sexual demands on Wyrena, which she escaped granting less because of her own will than because of the intervention of a member of the USS tutelary commission traveling with the Daehni.
“Nothing personal,” the commissioner told her. “They just resent the fact that Ba’ar Tell has a Committee Observer and Daehne is still on the outside looking in. To get the best of a Ba’ar—especially a female—well, you understand.”
After that Wyrena kept to herself, with little to do but think about the decision she had made, already afraid she had made the wrong choice. She smoothed over her fears by painting her trip as an adventure and turning her hoped-for reunion with Janell into a girlish fantasy. Someone who met the ship would know Janell, or know someone who did. Or perhaps Janell would even be there waiting, having found out somehow that she was coming—
But Unity was no outer world to which ships came calling only four or five times in a year, and where traditions of hospitality dictated each be received with high ceremony. Morajiwas just another inbound packet, and the bewildered Ba’ar woman aboard her just another visitor. The harried-looking guest liaison who herded all the non-USS passengers through the terminal seemed far more interested in rushing them through processing than in welcoming them individually. After passing her identity and solvency checks, Wyrena was set free to fend for herself.
Despite having spent most of the last three days inbound planning what she would do, the next hours were better forgotten: it was the bustle and confusion of M-Center again, only worse. Her first act was to commandeer the first free comnode she saw. Facing an unfamiliar technology, she gratefully and hopefully accepted the unit’s patient prompts.
Then came the first surprise. On Ba’ar Tell no one who owned a talkwire ever left it unattended; etiquette demanded that someone answer every call. But Janell was “Page Offline—Message Only.”
“Where is she?” Wyrena asked plaintively. “When will she be back?” But however humanlike the voice, she was talking with a machine, not a sympathetic house retainer. “The address is UC-R-S100. No other data is available,” the com node advised her. “Would you like to leave a message?”
Wyrena did not want Janell to hear the news that way, from a frozen voice caught in an electronic trap. She would wait until she could witness the reaction she could not predict.
“No message,” she said.
“Thank you,” the voice said sweetly.
Wyrena spent two hours wandering the lower levels of Unity in search for R-S100 before the forlorn expression etched into her face prompted another woman in the same lift to take pity on her. It was then she learned that she was looking in the wrong place. UC-R-S100 was an address not at Unity but at a satellite station trailing Unity in orbit by a few thousand klicks. USS-Central, Resource Wing, Suite 100.
Wyrena’s benefactor helped her find the commuter node and get a seat on the twice-hourly UC shuttle. But then she was alone again. The canisterlike shuttle was claustrophobic, the view of the Earth from its window-simulating displays vertiginous, and the forty-minute flight almost unendurable.
When the shuttle finally docked, she followed the other passengers onto a spiral escalator. Three upward rotations later it delivered her into the middle of a towering atrium large enough to enclose the eight-story Councilary Hall in Famax. Dazzled by the architectural wonder surrounding her, several minutes passed before she noted the five great corridors corresponding to the Center’s five spokes and the USS’s five branches: Transport, Survey, Resource, Defense, and Operations. With tentative steps she crossed the atrium to the Resource wing and started down the central corridor.
Inside was a lift node, with its ranks of doors and electronic Directory. Beyond, a security station barred the way down the corridor. Beyond that, Wyrena saw a glass-walled waiting room where a woman sat working, a man sat waiting, and three office doors stood closed. The glass wall bore a perplexing legend:
SUITE 100
OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR
USS-RESOURCE
Janell had been head of the USS office on Ba’ar Tell, but the circumstances under which she had left—could she be working for a Comité now?
Confused, Wyrena summoned up her courage and stepped up to the security station. “I need to see Janell Sujata—”
“Show your card.”
Wyrena did, hopefully.
The officer barely glanced at it. “Not cleared. Have an appointment?”
“No—”
“Would you like to request an appointment?“At that moment one of the doors inside Suite 100 opened, and three figures emerged from the room beyond. The first two Wyrena did not know, but the one trailing behind—
“Janell!” Wyrena called out impulsively.
Sujata peered out through the glass, her face flashing annoyance at being addressed in public by her private name. Then she saw the woman standing by the Security desk, and the annoyance evaporated.
“Wyrena?” she exclaimed, disbelieving, and crossed the space between them with swift strides. “Wyrena!”
They hugged fiercely for a moment, wordlessly absorbing the sensory reality of each other, relearning familiar scents and softnesses. Then the men who had come out of the office with Sujata brushed by them in leaving, and the reminder of their presence brought on a spontaneous rush of self-consciousness. She pushed Sujata away, only to have her guilty impulse confirmed when she saw the frankly curious way the man seated in the waiting area was studying them.
Sujata caught the shamed look in her eyes and laughed.“This is Unity, not Ba’ar Tell,” she said gaily. “You don’t have to worry about offending people.”
Pulling Wyrena close again, Sujata kissed her gently but knowingly, an unhurried, full mouthed kiss of lovers separated and reunited. Eyes closed, Wyrena forgot her guilt, and this time it was Sujata who finally broke the embrace.
“Come on,” Sujata said, taking the younger woman’s hands. “My quarters are upstairs.”
As they turned to go, the man who had been
waiting stood.
“Comité Sujata, I really must see you,” he said in a clear, commanding voice. “Director Wells is very eager for your reaction to the materials I left with you last month.”
At the man’s tone Wyrena hesitated. But Sujata did not even look back. “Another time, Mr. Farlad,” she called over her shoulder. “Another time.”
There were a half dozen items queued up on the com register for Wells’s attention: a progress report on construction of the new headquarters; a quarterly budget statement; the latest recon survey from the Sentinels; and other less urgent minutiae.
Relegating the rest to a holding file, Wells took a few minutes to review the recon survey. It was both the most important and the most predictable item on the list. He knew before starting that there would be no real news in it; were anything unusual to happen on the Perimeter he would be notified immediately and directly by means of the tiny transceiver implanted below his right ear.
As always, the first item in the report was the deployment update. Only eight of the ten Sentinels were on station; Muschynka and Gnivi were still in the yards at Lynx Center for general overhaul.
I’d love to replace all five of those old survey ships, Wells thought as he read on. They were a poor bargain right from the start.
Next came the rotation schedule for the Sentinels’ twelve-person crews. The tender Edmund Hillary was en route with relief crews for Maranit and Feghr. All the other crews were well within the stringent fatigue criteria employed on the Perimeter.
The penultimate section dealt with the condition of the eight hundred listening buoys oriented toward the Ursa Major cluster and popularly known as the Shield. As might be expected with two Sentinels in port, the inspection schedule had slipped a bit, and an unusually high fifty-three buoys were abnominal in one parameter or another. But there was no pattern to the failures, nor any real gap in the coverage. The situation bore watching but did not justify heightened concern.
Lastly there was a summary of the data collected by the buoys. The buoys’ receptors were capable of simultaneously and continuously monitoring everything from low-frequency radio on one end of the spectrum to microwaves at the other. The raw data was sieved in real-time against a long list of alarm triggers, then relayed via dedicated Kleine links to the Strategic Data Center, which occupied two levels of the Defense wing.
What finally reached Wells was a list of anomalies, tagged by time and buoy, along with the explanation for each and a rating of the degree of confidence with which that explanation was proffered. In this instance, as was generally the case, it was a short list. By now the only real secrets of the quarantined zone were those that lay beyond the capacities of the receptors.
Foremost among them the Mizari themselves.
Somewhere in the Ursa Major moving cluster, the Sterilizers waited. Almost certainly the suns of the Mizar-Alcor system—the Horse and the Rider of Arabian astronomy, the traditional test for acuity of vision—shone bright in their sky, but they might call other worlds home, as well, worlds orbiting Alioth or Merak or Megrez or Phad. Even the most far-flung members of the cluster, in Draco and Leo Minor and Ursa Minor, could by now be host to the murderous Mizari. On the star map in the Committee Chamber, all sixteen members of the cluster were black-flagged.
Wells could not think of the Mizari without surrendering at least part of his conscious energies to a well-considered and deeply rooted antipathy. It had been sixty thousand years since humans and Mizari had last had contact, but for Wells that dusty history was as vivid and immediate as if .he had witnessed it. The vast span of time only heightened his outrage at a crime so long left unavenged.
With no more provocation than the appearance of a single Weichsel iceship near their triple binary system, the black star of the Mizari had struck back across the light-years and destroyed the human civilization now known as the Founders. The punishment was so out of proportion to the offense that Wells could find no way to rationalize it. It had been deliberate, cold-blooded, unblinking genocide, an attempt to erase from existence an entire sentient species. Had the Mizari known of the colonies started by the Weichsel explorers, the attempt would doubtless have been successful.
And had it not been for Merritt Thackery’s pursuit of, and contact with, the ethereal D’shanna and the revelations that resulted, the foraging survey ships would inevitably have blundered into Mizari space once more and given the bastards a second chance.
Which we will never give you, Wells vowed. Never again will we allow ourselves to be victimized.
But it was a vow that was still mostly bluster. No one knew better than Wells how precarious the strategic situation was. No one knew better than he what a woeful misnomer it was to call the elliptical array of buoys a Shield. It was psychologically appealing, and the geometry of their deployment even suggested such a shape. But the elements of the Shield were unarmed and completely passive, mere receptors for the energies that reached them and the information that might thereby be gleaned. Even active radar was considered too risky, too intrusive.
The Sentinels, which looked after the buoys as shepherds might look after sheep, were warships only in name. Carrying only a single-barreled railgun and a single terawatt lance turret each, they might hold their own in a duel against ships of their own kind, but in cold truth were little more imposing than a shepherd waving his wooden staff.
Put bluntly, if the Sterilizers came out now, USS-Defense would be helpless to stop them. That fact had become the unifying focus of Wells’s life, gnawing at him and driving him on. He was ashamed of the timidity forced on him by the weakness of the Unified Worlds, furious at those who refused to see the threat. The specter of the Sterilizers cast a shadow over everything that humankind was and did, and nothing was more important than beating back the darkness.
“Busy?” a cheery voice asked, intruding on Wells’s brooding. Even without looking, Wells knew who his visitor was—the distinctive tenor voice and presumptuous entrance were sufficient identification. Wells reflexively purged the screen of his terminal, then settled back in his chair with his hands folded in his lap.
“Observer Berberon,” Wells said. “What a surprise. What brings you over from Unity?”
Felithe Berberon beamed, as though merely being recognized was the highest form of flattery. “Oh, this, that, the little details that so fill up one’s calendar. But when I heard, I had to come up and congratulate you.”
Wells’s gaze narrowed. “Congratulate me on what?”
“Why, on your successful test of the Defenders, of course. I’m sure the Committee is going to be delighted with the news—you’re ahead of schedule and I’ll wager you’re under budget as well. Excellent, simply excellent.”
Working to keep a scowl off his face, Wells replied. “I’m glad you’re pleased. We’re ready to declare the Defenders operational, in fact.” It was bad enough to be reminded that he had thus far been unable to ferret out Berberon’s sources inside Defense, but Wells had no patience for Berberon’s endless ingratiatory chatter.
“Of course, I understand perfectly,” Berberon was saying,“though I understand the attack drones didn’t put up much of a fight, did they? Still, I assume you’ll have some spectacular video of the war for Thursday’s Committee meeting?”
What nerve, Wells thought, and almost said. I don’t care how many years you’ve been here, you’re only an Observer. You can’t even vote on appropriations.
But the liquid-voiced senior member of the Terran Observer Delegation had some influence on the Committee—there was no doubt about that. Even if you never knew exactly where he really stood, there was no point in going out of your way to offend him. No matter how smarmy he was—
“If we can put it together by then, and the agenda allows,“Wells said.
“Oh, I’ll see that there’s time for you. Count on it,” Berberon promised breezily. “Well, I won’t keep you, Harmack. See you Thursday.”
Swallowing his spittle, Wells nodded acknowl
edgment as the door closed on Berberon. He allowed enough time for Berberon to clear the outer office, then touched a contact on his terminal. “Lieutenant Holloway? Have someone find out who Berberon talked to before he came here. Get on it right now.”
“Another leak, Director?”
“Yes, another leak, goddamnit,” Wells said, scowling.“And I want it plugged fast, before something important gets compromised.”
Chapter 2
* * *
In the Private Heart
After the spontaneous moment of reunion, there was awkwardness. Though she hated herself for it and strove not to show it, Sujata found that Wyrena’s reappearance in her life felt like an intrusion. However warmly remembered, the Ba’ar woman was part of a life episode already put away as complete. She belonged there, on Ba’ar Tell, in the past. Not here.
There was no mistaking that Wyrena was uncomfortable, too. All the way to Sujata’s quarters, Wyrena was on the verge of blurting out either an apology or an explanation. The same insecurity that prompted the urge quelled it.
But alone, naked in each other’s arms, they rediscovered the wordless communion which they had known on Ba’ar Tell. The erotic glow enfolded them and carried them off to a private place. And after, with the distance between them erased, talk came more easily.
“I shouldn’t have come.” The words were said in a small voice muffled by the pillow into which Wyrena’s face was pressed, as if they were not really meant to be heard.
Sujata smiled to herself and shifted so that she could reach out and stroke the bare skin of Wyrena’s back. “Why not?”
“I couldn’t know you’d become this important—”
“Nor could I,” she said, remembering. The whole structure of the Service had changed while she was in the high craze to Unity, and, with it, the selection procedures for the high staff positions. “But what does that have to do with us?”
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