Roj had been watching the tactical-visual repeater screens and had seen Minerva’s counterstrike detonate no closer to the cruisers than their perimeter shields. The blinding blue-white glare of multiple detonations might well have been no more than a very emphatic form of protective coloration ... but he wondered just a bit. He looked over the encounter once or twice on the recorder to be sure of his grounds.
“Annoyed?” he said at last.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. There was a pause. “Wretched trigger-happy blue jackets anyway. I hope I singed their trousers, or wherever else they keep their brains.”
“You made me throw up, Minerva.”
“You’ve been putting on weight anyway. You won’t miss that breakfast.”
“Then again, maybe it was your cooking ...”
“Brawns are replaceable,” Minerva muttered.
“Minerva.” Perhaps she caught the tone of his voice. At any rate, she held silent. “Too much method acting can trip you up after a while. Don’t come all over Khalian with me.”
“It may save your rear end,” she said, but her voice was a touch more subdued and thoughtful, and for quite a while she didn’t speak, as close as a shell could come to “going away” to think. Roj, none too sure of his own feelings, decided to refrain from saying anything further until well into the next day ... but by then there was no point in criticizing the playing of roles any more.
That was when the Khalians found them.
The incoming ship was a sunray-class rapid-response corvette, all weapons and power plant with a three-seat crew compartment stuck on top as an afterthought, looking like a crystal pimple on an oversized torpedo. The fencer-class of Minerva’s pretense was considerably bigger, and in common with the rest of the Khalian navy, big-ship captains were correspondingly more pugnacious than those of smaller vessels. That was why the sunray’s challenge, when it came, was couched in terms that were both diplomatic and (for a Khalian) almost polite. In other words, crude, rude, and pushy, but never quite insulting enough to justify an armed response.
Minerva chuckled to herself. “All right. So that’s etiquette, is it? Then try this ...”
Roj listened as she gave him an advance hearing of what her reply was going to be—before it went through the translation suite—and was appalled. Her normal vox-synth was indicative of her self-image—a dignified lady of mature years—and it had given him a mental image of the “person” behind the brain core: silver haired, staid, and mannerly. What that silver-haired lady planned to tell the Khalians ... “Oh, God, Minerva,” Roj said when he heard it, “isn’t there some other way to say that? Any normal male—”
“They’re not normal. Put a sock in it.”
She sent it, and after a twitchy second’s silence the sunray acknowledged with a rather more cautious choice of phrase. Then it sheered off hurriedly, shortly accelerating away about its patrol duties at a speed that suggested Minerva had touched a certain chord of self-preservation in the corvette’s commander.
Roj watched them go until not even the augmented scanners showed any trace, then turned to face Minerva’s primary lens and looked her in the “eye.” He was trying to look disapproving, and at the same time, trying not to smile.
“Who taught you to swear like that?!”
The speakers cleared their multiquadrophonic throat at him, sounding just the merest touch like an embarrassed maiden aunt. “A-hem. Well, one here, one there ... when I was much younger I wanted to learn everything I could about the people I met, and, er, once I learn something I don’t forget it. Ever.”
“I bet they won’t,” Roj said, his eyes flickering more or less in the direction the Khalian had taken. “What else did you tell them, besides what their pants—never mind ...”
He could feel Minerva smiling at him. It made him itch. “So far as they’re concerned, we’re a raider that crossed the frontier ten days ago, coming back with a hold full of booty—which is why I warned them off so, er, emphatically. Khalians are like that about plunder. Possessive. But their records will show that they counted ‘us’ out and then counted us back, so we’re in the clear.”
“And the original raider?”
“Blown to plasma by the same patrol that took a potshot at us. Fencer frigates slip in and out on such a regular basis that all I had to do was monitor the close-patrol bands, and sooner or later I’d pick up a genuine Khalian IFF/ID, rather than the fake one that I’ve been using. No wonder they were confused, poor boys. Fancy having to blow up the same ship twice in a week ...” Minerva chuckled again.
“Uh, Minerva ... How long do you think this cover’s going to work?”
She made an interrogative noise at him.
“I mean, the Khalians may be crazies as far as we’re concerned, what with all that ‘no dishonor, death and glory’ stuff, but then so were a lot of people in the past, like the samurai. Agato should have guessed that one at least. But it doesn’t mean that they aren’t intelligent. There are brains in those toothy little heads. I’ve fought against them and I know!”
“What makes you think that I don’t, then?” Minerva said, and her voice had that honey-with-the-bee-still-in-it-sweetness with the sting waiting. “Roj, dear lad, I was fired on by a Khalian ship before you had graduated from school, much less from the academy. Of course, that was in a different hull, but still ...” She broke off for the merest instant. “Ah. The long-range scanners have just cut in: they’re in search mode for traces of heavy traffic activity around any viable planet in this system. However, since I estimate some five thousand bodies of above seventy meter diameter in one form or other of stellar orbit, this will probably take rather longer than those optimists at Port projected. Sit back and make yourself comfortable. And Roj ... ?”
“Yeah?”
“Trust me.”
He never had; he was going to have to. It came down at last to that.
* * *
Even with on-board telemetry running as fast as Minerva could handle it, analyzing input from so many potential targets (Roj found his mind tended to spell that with a capital T, and didn’t much like the way his thoughts tended afterward) was taking a lot longer than anybody had anticipated. Not long in terms of time, since Minerva reckoned that she would complete the task in about two hours, but long in terms of what it might do to their cover. A skipping, uncertain transit of a supposedly familiar sector of space was likely to draw attention—the one thing they wanted most to avoid.
“Monitor any chatter, Roj,” Minerva said suddenly as they dropped back for the seventh time. “All frequencies. We’ll want advance warning if anyone starts to wonder.”
“Been doing that,” he muttered and returned to the multiple layer of jabbering from the dozen or so Khalian ships in their immediate area, a sphere maybe a quarter-million miles across. One set of speakers, gain turned well down, was giving him a mutter of Khalian intermingled with bursts of whispery garbage from the nearer stars, and other sets, his earpiece included, provided a verbal translation of the several squawks that marched in variously colored letters across his repeater screen. The translation suite, running on automatic, was keyed to give him both audible and visual indication if any Khalian used one of the several hundred keywords that might be the beginning of something nasty. It wasn’t exactly the way Roj might have chosen to spend his time, but his stint was—hopefully—almost over, and there had been no chimes, no buzzers, no flashing high-visibility transcriptions. Nothing but the stars and the Khalians and unimportant private conversations from them both.
And then the horn went off, and for all his nonchalance and boredom, never mind his locked seat harness, Roj Malin almost had to scrape himself off the flight-deck ceiling.
“Oops!” said Minerva just a second later. “Too loud. Sorry. But I think I’ve got something.”
“Me too.” Roj wasn’t amused. “Thunderclap cardiac arre
st, thanks to you.”
“I said I was sorry, didn’t I? Look here. Tactical overlay one ... and two ... and three. Well?” Roj looked and said nothing for a while. “Roj, you’re too old for sulks, and I’d like a second opinion sometime today if that’s all right by you.”
“I’m not sulking. Just looking hard, as requested. Run those three past me again.” The palms of his hands were beginning to sweat, and a set of the twitches the size of a battleship was coming to life in his stomach. “Yeah. There. Bull’s-eye! So IntelSec was right after all. Either that’s the place or it’s one hell of a big traffic junction. Nice going, me lady ...”
“Maybe. I hope so.” Minerva sounded uneasy for the first time since he had met her, and it was an experience so unusual—and consequently so unsettling—that Roj turned right around from his console and looked straight at her.
“You don’t like this any more than I do.” It wasn’t a gloat or an accusation, just a statement that he hoped she would answer truthfully rather than with the evasions she used so adeptly.
Silence. Then, “No, I don’t,” she said. “When you’ve lived as long as I have, the prospect of the end starts getting familiar at least. Sometimes inviting. ‘A consummation devoutly to be wished,’ if I was devout, which I’m not. But now ... now I’m not in as much of a rush any more. I’d like to keep going a bit longer.”
“Then log that planet’s coordinates and let’s get out of here. Or”—and he stared at the armor sheathing of her brain core—“are you thinking we should take a closer look?”
“We’ve come this far. Everything’s working as it should. Shame on us if we turn back now.”
“You sound like a Khalian.”
“If you’re going to insult a lady, you can get out and walk home, Roj ... do we go in?”
“Er ... Yes. We do. But very, very carefully.”
“And quickly.”
“And quietly.”
“As a little mouse, believe me. Better run through the preapproach checks, Roj. Confirm for me, ECM—at standby condition; IFF/ID—holding constant; scanner suppression ... ?”
“At readiness; tubes charged—standard spread; cannons—preheat cycle; shields—powering up, set to maximum.” He paused to swallow what he could of the constriction in his throat, glanced down the remaining dozen or so very minor checks, then glanced at Minerva’s primary lens, the one that to him always approximated looking her in the eye. “I guess we can finish the rest as we go, so ... so you’d better take us in.”
Their approach vector, all hundred million miles of it, was flown in a weird combination of tippy-toe caution and swaggering arrogance. At least that was how it looked to Roj, watching from the inside. To the occasional Khalian warship—and that “occasional” was rising in frequency at an alarming rate—they were just one more fencer-class inbound for a postraid refit with the crew making whoopee aboard.
“This is damned strange. This close to Port we’d have Fleet ships all over us. Why won’t they come in for a closer look?”
“Simple.” At least it was simple for Minerva; she had instant access to the great sheaf of intelligence data about the Khalians, while Roj had to sift through what he remembered reading. “We’re coming home, we’re in high spirits, we’re cock-of-the-walk, and for all or any one of those reasons, we might fire on them. Or just to prove how tough we are ...”
“Crazy people ...” He subsided into a data-monitoring slouch while the pods of IntelSec packs along Minerva’s fake-fencer hull noted everything there was to be seen, heard, scanned, and speculated about the little blue-green world planet all those miles away.
“Passing through the outer perimeter globe.” It was a dry enough statement, but various tactical screens blinked with windows indicating the position and the number of what made up that perimeter: little amber dots on an outline display, like beads strung on wire, six thousand of them according to the readout. Defensive platforms, each packing the firepower in torps and cannon of a heavy cruiser. “The inner perimeter is yellow and the orbital stations are green,” Minerva continued blandly. The white circle representing the planet was becoming rapidly obscured by variously colored specks that interwove like fireflies dancing. “Do you want the ship traffic as well?”
“Oh, why not? Let’s have the lot. But break it up a bit, will you? Individual overlays.”
“All right. Here’s the system and the outer sphere. The planet, its moons, and the inner sphere. The planet, and its orbital platforms. The planet again, and local traffic. Now all of it together ...”
“Dear God.” Roj stared at the main screen, gone gaudy now with a polychrome spatter of unsettling schematics. The planetary disc was lost somewhere at the core of it all—and they were intending to infiltrate that?
“I don’t think there’s any further doubt about it. This is either the Khalian home world or their main spaceport.”
“And we’re right on their doorstep.”
“Not yet, but we will be quite soon. Stay on the recorders; I’m patching in for a long-range visual. You might want to look at this.” Blue oceans, green-brown land masses, swirls and streaks of cloud in the atmosphere envelope, everything peaceful, pastoral, not in the least menacing. Nothing like the base and HQ of a navy which had been a thorn in the Fleet’s side for far too long. “You see?”
Roj could see indeed. Their approach was a long parabola, curving against the planet’s rotation, and as he watched and they moved and the world turned, what had been a preindustrial planet became a technological wasps’ nest. There was only one spaceport and repair facility on the world, but it covered the surface of an entire continent ...
“They didn’t build that,” said Roj. “Not with their cultural level. There isn’t a trace of any city, any heavy industry, anything at all on any of the other continents. They’re just forest, and plains, and—”
“And there’s more to this than meets the eye. I don’t like the feel of it, not one bit. But it’s not our business right now. Let’s finish what we came to do and get out of here.”
“I’d second tha— Look out! Break right! lncoming ...!”
Minerva didn’t quibble. She rammed all controls into the corner and racked around in a wrenching 90-right. A human pilot with human reflexes wouldn’t have reacted in time to sidestep the Khalian destroyer barging into the disorderly conga-line that passed for a traffic pattern. Even then, an extra coat of reflec-absorp paint might have made the difference between being scared and being scrapped.
The destroyer, being the biggest thing in the vicinity and carrying presumably the meanest, toughest, most senior officer, trundled haughtily on toward a rank-pulling priority orbit while in its wake the smaller ships began to jockey back into some sort of favorable position for their own approach, their crews turning all frequencies blue with loudly expressed but carefully modulated opinions.
“Too close! Too bloody close by half! They tried to ram us!” Roj stared at a proximity gauge that was telling him the two ships had passed within six hundred yards of each other. He thought of what would have happened had they made contact, and then decided not to think thoughts like that any more.
“No. They did what they wanted; made us get out of their way. My fault.” Minerva sounded genuinely apologetic for once. “It’s one thing pretending to fly like a Khalian, but this lot do it naturally. At least they probably just think we were playing chicken—” Something bleeped, and a green light on the board began to blink amber. “Damn, not again! Glitch in the transponder, thanks to that hammering from the border patrol. It doesn’t like violent maneuvers any more than I do. Look, Roj, warn that cretin off while I fix this, would you?”
“That cretin” was a Forger-class frigate trying to sneak into line ahead of them; standard Khalian base-leg behavior, just as not letting the Forger get away with it was standard response. Roj tabbed in manual override and moved closer, thre
atening, as the destroyer had done, to ram the smaller ship if it didn’t give way.
Although it held position with laudable stubbornness, the forger gave way at last, moving aside reluctantly with the sort of foul-mouthed insults that Khalians of apparently equal status exchanged in such circumstances. These observations screeched and chittered from the Language-One speakers like poorly unoiled machinery, and the translator converted to an entertaining mixture of comments about the fencer captain’s parentage and sexual proclivities, and invitations for him to copulate with various lower animals.
“Does all that refer to you?” Roj wanted to know.
“Huh?” Minerva left off her repairs for just the merest beat. “No, you. I never had the parts he just referred to ...”
Grinning, Roj patched an open channel through the translator. “Vulgar enough,” he told whoever on the Forger cared to listen, “but lacking the true creative spark. Better luck next—”
“No, Roj, not like tha—,” Minerva began to scream from all her speakers, She was cut off by the static-screech and gravity grid jolt of a close-range hit on her outer shields. “Oh, damn!” she wailed. “Why couldn’t you have been like any other sailor and sworn at the bastards rather than trying to be so bloody clever! They don’t talk like that! You heard them!” The deck under his boots began to rumble with main-drive subharmonics as Minerva accelerated. “If they insult you, you’re twice as rude right back, or you say nothing and accept inferiority. You don’t indulge in witty repartee or— Oh, Roj, listen ...”
“I hear it.” He glowered at the translator speakers, furious with himself, with IntelSec, with the mission, with the Khalians for not acting like sensible creatures ... The only thing or person in the entire Galactic arm that he didn’t hate right now was Minerva, and that was because he had gotten her into a no-hope situation through his own stupidity.
The Fleet Book Three: Break Through Page 9