Gretchen heard a stone certainty in the man's words and felt a chill wash over her. What does he know? Something about Russovsky's spooked him — and why not? Something duplicated a human being, down to memories and language. Did the same something send the eater cylinder aboard? Is the other cylinder a trap?
In all the busy confusion since her return from the surface, she hadn't had a chance to resume her translation work on the embedded slab. Thinking of it now, of the secrets which must lie concealed within, she felt a painful hunger wake. Those translation runs must have finished days ago! I'm so stupid — they could be waiting for me right now.
"More than this," Hummingbird said coldly, interrupting Gretchen's train of thought. "I will not explain. You will obey without question or dispute. In this way, you may yet live. Now Parker-tzin — during the next day, while Isoroku completes his preparations for the flyby, you will move the Palenque, very quietly, out of orbit. Minimal burn on the main engines, and you will do so by orienting us away from the planet. Anything we do must be unremarked from the surface. We are going to take care to leave no trace of our visit here."
Gretchen stirred, drawing the Mйxica's attention. "Hummingbird-tzin, your pardon, but if Palenque leaves the system, and Cornuelle has already departed, how will you leave the planet? And what about the base camp at the observatory? There are hundreds of tons of equipment, supplies, vehicles there. What about the observation satellites?"
"Those things," Hummingbird said with a steely lightness in his voice, "will be taken care of. And in the meantime — no scans, no active sensors on the ship, no experiments, no communications traffic. Nothing."
Gretchen started to speak again, but the nauallis gave her a fierce look, dark eyes glittering.
"We are mice," he said sharply, "creeping in a field of maize. We must step gently, or the stalks will rustle."
The Cornuelle, Outbound from Ephesus III Orbit
The pitch of the vibration humming through the deck and walls shifted and Susan Kosho looked up from her v-panel, head cocked to one side. "We've reached safe distance," she said, turning her attention back to the schematics on her display. With their gravity signature pared down to the absolute minimum by shutting off the g-decking, the Cornuelle creaked and groaned with odd noises. The main hull had picked up little tics and squeaks over time. In the depths of ship's night, you could hear her speaking, if you were quiet.
Hayes nodded absently, chewing on a stylus, pale blue eyes sunken in dark hollows. Susan pushed a cup of tea toward him, letting the sealed container slide across the worktable in the senior officer's mess. "You should drink that — you need to eat."
"Yes, mother," he replied, still paging slowly through the schematic. He set the cup aside. "This thing is a monster. Look at the shielding…and these mining beam rigs look like a Mark Ninety-Six proton cannon refitted for a civilian power plant."
Susan nodded, then took a long sip from her own cup. The tea was very strong and thick with honey. She was certain the steward had added stimulants and some kind of vitamin supplement. There's an undertaste, she thought, stealing a glance at her medband. The thin, flesh-colored circlet around her wrist was quiescent, indicating a lack of toxins. Of cinnamon.
"Don't fool yourself," Susan said aloud, tapping a section of the Tyr blueprints on her panel. "The power plant for one of these has more in common with our drive than any civilian liner. See? This report from the Mirror says a Tyr has three reactors, each capable of output matching or exceeding our own. She has to, to move so much mass."
"Wonderful," Hayes grumbled, finally putting down the pad. He retrieved his tea, which had slid back along the table toward the rear bulkhead. Grimacing at the bitter/honey taste, he downed the whole thing in one gulp. "So let's consider — she's surrounded by ore carrels which — if they're full, and loaded properly — give her the equivalent of a hundred meters of low-grade armor plating. Not a reactive shield, no, but enough to shrug off most of our lighter penetrators and beam weapons. Then her core section is clad in enough radiation shielding for a battle cruiser and she mounts the most godawful huge cutting beam assemblies I've ever seen. These are nearly dreadnaught-strength mounts!"
Susan nodded, finding a page she recalled from the Seeking Eye — Fleet Intelligence — report. "Pursuant to the Treaty of Rostov," she read, "the macehualli pochteca — or industrial combines — have been required to turn all armaments and munitions factories, orbital yards, workshops and other means of naval production to nonmilitary use. This they have done." A brief, fierce smile flickered across Susan's face. "In the case of the Tyr-class mobile ore refinery, the core of the civilian ship is a stripped down Kaiserschlacht-class heavy cruiser. Some of the early refinery models, in fact, are physically built around decommissioned K-schlacht hulls."
"Sister bless!" Hayes tabbed to the same page. "They didn't leave the original sensor net and ECM intact, did they?"
Susan pursed her lips and pointed with her stylus at another section of the report. "Navigating in an asteroid belt, or an Oort cloud, is a tricky business. This requires the refinery to carry advanced avionics and sensor equipment. The targeting systems and main comp aren't supposed to be military grade, of course. Just civilian models."
Hayes leaned back against the bulkhead, his broad face looking tired and pudgy. "Easy enough to replace from the black market — if the originals were ever actually removed in the first place."
"Or to upgrade," Susan said quietly. "K-schlacht hulls are over a hundred years old. Even a modern civilian rig would be superior in head-to-head with the old Royal Navy gear. And these ships are straight out of the Norsktrad yard at Kiruna — which means they have the very latest comp and scan on board."
Hayes rubbed his face and made a groaning sound. Kosho wanted to laugh derisively, but she felt a certain sisterly affection for the senior lieutenant. He was quick on his board, and quite adept at handling dozens of incoming threats and targets in the thick of the action — but he hadn't quite the taste for the hunt a commanding officer really needed.
"So," she said, in a brisk voice, "how do we kill this thing?"
Hayes stared at her, then leaned his chin on clasped hands. "Right. Kill it…well, the firing aperture of those mining beams is restricted — they can't have full traverse with the ore carrels in the way — so there are blind spots if we can get a target lock and proper orientation."
"Good." Susan laid down her comp pad and fixed him with her full attention. "And?"
"And…they probably don't have any missile capacity, unless they're hiding some kind of pods in the carrels — which they could be! But that wouldn't pass muster anywhere they docked — and they did come here to mine, didn't they?" He seemed to perk up at the thought.
"Yes, they did." Susan rolled her stylus between middle finger and thumb. "The ship's power-to-mass ratio is also against them — they will have a hard time outmaneuvering us, and a harder time hiding from us if they do move."
"Yeah." Hayes made a face. "So we have to maneuver for position, get into one of their blinds and just hammer them, knock out engines, break through the armor… Could be messy."
"No, we can't be messy," Susan said, flipping the stylus deftly in her hand so the sharp point pointed down at the table. "We must be exact — " she made a sharp stabbing motion with the writing tool "- and swift. One blow, thrust past all that armor will — "
"— not be necessary." Hadeishi's voice was soft from the hatchway. Susan stiffened, aware her hair was unbound, her uniform jacket untabbed at the neck, and she sat up straight. Hayes had also come to attention. The chu-sa stepped into the room, nodded to them both, and drew a tea from the automat. "You two should get some sleep. We will be busy later."
"What about the Tyr?" Hayes said, betraying a little confusion. "We have to be ready to deal with this brute when we — "
Hadeishi waved him to silence, settling into a chair at the end of the table, hands curling around the warm cup. "If we engage the refinery in any
kind of shooting match, we've failed. I am under strict orders to secure the miner without the use of any kind of missile, beam weapon or weapon producing an electromagnetic signature."
He smiled gently at both of them — particularly at Hayes, who was staring gape-mouthed.
"What is the pinnacle of a warrior's skill?" Hadeishi turned to Susan, his mellow brown eyes capturing hers. She felt a chill shock, as if he'd splashed ice water on her face. But her mind was quick, and she remembered both the question and the traditional answer.
"To subdue the enemy without fighting." She frowned in distaste. "You're quoting from — "
Hadeishi raised an eyebrow and finished his tea. "That does not mean," he said quietly as he stood up, "it is not true. Good night."
Kosho watched the chu-sa leave and wondered how he'd gained access to a copy of the Ping Fa. She was a little disturbed. I'm very sure all those books were destroyed.
In Geosync Over Ephesus
Pacing was almost impossible with the bridge of the Palenque in z-g, so Gretchen resorted to staring moodily at an image of the planet filling the main display. Parker and Magdalena were working under the main control board — grunting and cursing by turns as they rewove the power and data fibers snaking up from under the floor and into the control surfaces.
Anderssen had rarely felt such distaste for another human being. Even the thoughtless racism of her instructors at university had not inspired such a bleak mood. I will find some way, she thought, letting fantasies of outlandish torture devices blossom in her mind's eye, to make him suffer. What an arrogant bastard!
Gretchen had been annoyed when Hummingbird took the remains of Russovsky away into "Imperial Custody," though her reaction had been mild compared to Sinclair's. The xenobiologist had begged to examine the strange dust, but the Imperial judge had flatly refused. The rest of the scientists were confined to quarters, which greatly reduced the possible range of disputes. Gretchen had been a little smug — she could go where she wished — but all of her good humor had evaporated when she finally made her way down to airlock number three.
Which was empty. The steel cradle remained, but her good field comp, the jury-rigged sensor panel, the cylinder and its attendant limestone block were gone. For once, when she turned around snarling, Fitzsimmons was nowhere to be found. But Gretchen still knew who'd stolen her artifact.
"What does he think is down there?" Gretchen rattled her feet noisily — now in stiff-bottomed shipshoes — against the railing separating the captain's station from the rest of the crew positions. "Leave no trace of our visit? It's just not possible."
Magdalena peered over the top of the navigation panel. Her yellow eyes were bare slits. "What a whiny kitten you are," she declared with a sharp yrroowl in her voice. "Either ask him yourself or be a good packmate and help pull cable."
Gretchen ignored her to stare sullenly at the planet. Most of her hair was twisted into a thick corn-tassel plait. She started to bite at the braid, head cocked to one side. "He must believe something's down there, something that can see us…" She paused, thinking. "No — it can't see us now, but it might see us in the future? Something which will notice satellites, spacecraft…but why wouldn't his precious something find the observatory camp?"
Magdalena's tufted ears disappeared with a disapproving growl. Parker managed a subdued laugh, but his hands were filled with bundles of conduit. The power leads to the navigator's station were proving difficult to restore. The substandard cables had ended in metallic connectors, which were still embedded in the panel sockets. Sitting flush, without the usual cable run to grasp hold of, Parker was forced to remove them one at a time with a hand tool. He'd already wrecked one panel by shorting the connector with too much pressure.
"Maggie? How did Russovsky communicate with the Palenque when her ultralight was on farside?" Gretchen poked some of the buttons on the captain's panel and a variety of plotted routes, icons and little winking glyphs appeared across the live image of the planet. The routes of the geologist's flights vanished over the curve of the world, then looped back again. "Does she have some kind of a relay station?"
A low, ominous growl trailing away into a hissing snarl answered Gretchen's question. Magdalena crawled out of the utility space under the floor, her fur slick with sweat and snarled with bits of wire and the particular brand of sealant grease used by the Imperial Navy. The Hesht shot Anderssen a fierce, quelling look — an effort entirely lost on Gretchen, who was staring fixedly at the main v-pane.
"If I tell you, witless kit, will you be quiet?"
"Sure." Gretchen nodded, though even Magdalena could tell the human woman hadn't heard her. "Do you have a log of her transmissions? Could we find the relays that way? Does he have a copy? I mean — what if she dropped a three-square bar somewhere, would he have to clean that up?"
Magdalena swung herself over the comm station — her toolbags and tail drifting behind her — and dug a claw into the back of the captain's chair to anchor herself. Gretchen finally looked at her with something like full attention.
"I think the dust would take care of litter," Maggie said, voice rumbling deep in her throat. "The base at the observatory — that's a problem — or our mystery shuttle — there's another difficulty."
"Why?" Gretchen gave the Hesht a puzzled look, then she grinned. "Oh, do you think the miners will come back? That would spoil our crow's plan to leave no trace!"
Magdalena twitched her ears. "They don't have to come back. I've been running nonstop image searches on Smalls's weather archive." One long arm reached out and tapped a command on the panel. "The mining shuttle didn't leave like everyone expected."
The big view of Ephesus shimmered away and the v-pane displayed a high altitude shot of the planetary surface. Gretchen could recognize the edge of the northern permafrost, as well as the tapering wing of the Escarpment running down to smaller mountains and then — almost at the pole — to nothing but barren, rocky plains. "I don't see — "
"Hsst!" Maggie cuffed Gretchen's head, catching one ear with the back of her paw.
"Ow!"
"Watch. Quietly. Learn." Maggie moved a control and the image narrowed, the point of view zooming down from orbit. Mountains, valleys, vast plains of glittering sand flashed past. Suddenly, Gretchen caught sight of a triangular shape flitting across a queer-looking stone plateau. The ground was chopped up into smaller triangles of shadow, making the speeding shuttle almost invisible.
The shuttle was gone from the next picture — a half hour had elapsed — but the pattern of the ground had subtly changed. Gretchen stiffened in her chair. "What was that? What are those lines?"
"Interesting, isn't it?" Maggie's tongue was showing. Gretchen frowned at her. "Look at this," the Hesht said, moving the control again.
Another high-angle shot, but later in the planetary day. The image had been enhanced, but a long blackened gouge was clear, cutting across a rippling line of dunes to an abrupt end. Gretchen squinted as Magdalena zoomed again. The track ended in a welter of shining metal, a mostly recognizable wing canted at a queer angle, the twisted body of a shuttle scored with carbon and the signs of a fierce conflagration.
"The Valkyrie didn't get home," Maggie said. "So our nosy crow has a bigger mess to clean up than he thinks."
"Jesu…" Gretchen zoomed again, though now the image was very grainy and large sections showed the gray rippling tone of comp interpolation. "They suck up too much dust?"
"Looks like they got hit." Parker had come up on the other side of the captain's chair. He made a sign against ill luck, face screwed up in a grimace. "That fire damage didn't happen on the crash, not in such a thin atmosphere. Something swatted them down. Maybe some kind of beam weapon."
Maggie's ears twitched again. "I found the crash site last night, after everyone had gone to sleep. Old crow has been searching too. But he's not as good with the comp as this paaha, for all his shining-coat equipment. Now, you want to see what happened?"
Parker and Gre
tchen gave the Hesht a disbelieving look. "How? Smalls's satellites only take pictures every half hour!"
"True enough," Magdalena said, a deep purr beginning in the back of her throat. "But they don't take their pictures all at the same time, and near the poles the fields of view overlap." A claw tapped on the panel and the view of the planet returned, this time with white rectangular grids superimposed. Near the poles, the rectangles overlaid each other in a flurry of lines. "All this lets us see sideways into the area of the crash. So I cobbled together video from the adjacent satellites and from those further around the curve that had a horizontal vantage of the crash site. Which lets us see…"
The claw went tik-tik on the panel and a jerky, crude, massively interpolated vid unspooled on the display.
The shuttle arrowed down out of the eastern sky, sweeping across the crisscrossed plateau. The flare of the twin engines was very clear in the vid. The Valkyrie began to bank, turning south and Gretchen felt her breath seize — the entire plateau seemed to ripple with motion, the crisscross lines shifting noticeably — and there was a sudden, shockingly bright flash. The entire plateau was blotted out by a burst of white light. When the light faded — after only a fraction of a second — the shuttle was wreathed in smoke. Flames jetted from a smashed engine in a bright, blossoming cloud. They wicked out only seconds later, but the shuttle was already spinning out of control.
The vid skipped and they caught only a glimpse of the aircraft as it slammed into the desert floor and skidded wildly across the dunes, spewing debris, chunks of airframe, and engine parts. Then the vid ended, and the vast red disc of Ephesus replaced the grainy images.
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