BOOK II
A wonderful thing about the Universe: it offers so many novel ways to die.
—KessRith proverb
The compartment was twenty meters long and five wide, lined with dirty straw, and lit by overhead fluoropanels that were never dialed down or extinguished. It had been partitioned out of a star freighter's hold, and the decks and bulkheads were duralloy steel. Fresh air entered through grill slits high in the wall, and there was a sliding door at one end of the room to admit the new prisoners who occasionally arrived. When Kendric had been unchained and shoved into the compartment, thirty-two other men and women were already there. Now, at least twenty meals later, there were fifty-one.
Meals were the commonly accepted means of marking time, for they were the only convenient cycles by which to measure its passage. Periodically, the lights would flicker slightly, and all the prisoners in the room would slump to the deck in a paralytic stupor that left each one conscious but immobilized. Then the door would open, and a pair of slaves would bring in buckets of food. Feeling and strength would slowly return minutes after the slaves' departure, and then the prisoners would gather silently to eat. The fare was usually soup or gruel, and occasionally a nameless stew with a little meat in it. Once the buckets were empty, they were set aside as receptacles for human wastes, to be carried out later by the same slaves who had brought the food.
Life—or, at any rate, existence—continued in complete order and almost always in silence. There could be no demands, protests, arguments over food or a sleeping spot on the floor, for any talk or noise beyond some undefined minimum brought the flickering lights and the paralysis once again. It was clear that their captors would have order.
Unable to speak with his fellow prisoners, Kendric could only study them as they sat practically shoulder-to-shoulder in the straw. Some returned his interest while others showed only barely concealed contempt or hate. Though stripped of his rank emblems and decorations, he still wore his black Imperial Navy uniform. Apparently, even Kendric's fall from Caesar's grace could not make him any less a hated representative of TOG.
Most of the other prisoners ignored him and one another, however. Perhaps repeated exposure to the flickering overhead light and the body-numbing exhaustion it brought had left them totally withdrawn, or perhaps they had sunk so deeply into apathy that they were no longer conscious of those around them.
How long would it be, Kendric wondered, before he became as numbly indifferent?
There was no cruelty or deliberate brutality against the prisoners. In fact, once Kendric had been escorted here, he had never seen another guard. There were only the other prisoners and the slaves who delivered the food buckets. When he had first come aboard the cargo ship from the lmperatrix, one of the junior officers recording his name and former rank had verbally toyed with him. "Hey, another one for Haetai-Aleph!" the man had said with insufferable cheerfulness. "Say...he's pegged for Mount Grod! The beautiful crystal mines of Grod! Some guys have all the luck, eh, Larrick?"
Another officer grinned and remarked, "Boy, did you know that the average life expectancy of slaves on Haetai-Aleph is two days? Maybe you'd better enjoy the good life while you can!"
Yet, of all the hardships Kendric had endured during the past weeks, none was more terrifying than the stark knowledge that his captors simply did not care what happened to any of them. This had become obvious after the most recent batch of prisoners had arrived. From the telltale innertwistings and fluctuations of shipboard gravity Kendric realized that their ship was making a number of short T-space hops. Sometimes, after one of these hops, new prisoners would arrive, as though the cargo vessel had met another ship somewhere and taken the prisoners aboard.
One of the new prisoners ushered into the compartment carried with him the unmistakable pseudo-radiance of shimmerheat. He was young, another former Navy man, judging from the dirty remnants of his black uniform. The guards had hurled him into the compartment as though the man had been fighting his captors every step of the way. An instant later, he was on his feet again, hammering at the door screaming that his tau was short and that "they" couldn't do this to him.
The lights flickered immediately, and the man slumped to the deck with the rest of the prisoners, unable to move. No sooner had the effects worn off than he was at the door again, shrieking to be released. His screams and yells brought on three more sessions of the paralytic field.
The new prisoner glowed even in the bright lighting of the cell, his expression nearly masked by the eerie, shifting radiance that seemed to suffuse his being. The glow was a form of Cherenkov radiation, visible light liberated by particles travelling faster than light as they crowded the barriers that held the man in his proper relationship to the hyperdimensions.
He had remained silent until the unmistakable wrenching of the ship's transition back into T-space brought him to his feet again. In T-space, the glow was gone, but it had been so bright before transition that it was obvious he was very near the edge of his tau limit. Again he hammered at the door, shrieking in panic, and again the entire compartment was blanketed with the enervating field, and silence enforced. After that, the man had lapsed into the same dull-eyed, apathetic silence of most of the other prisoners.
Meals came and went, and the young man maintained his isolation, neither eating or drinking. Kendric noted that the others in the compartment stayed clear of him, too, at least as much as the crowding would allow. Had they seen this happen before? Kendric wondered.
He knew as well as anyone the threat the prisoner faced. He had studied T-space drive theory at Grelfhaven. Though he had never seen a tau-limit version, the cadets had listened to descriptions of the horror again and again, as their instructors drilled into them the importance of logging one's tau in the perscomp and of keeping track of one's time under tachyon drive.
Just as Kendric was thinking that he must do something, the paralysis field came on, the door slid open, and two slaves appeared, carrying their usual burden of food. Struggling against the exhaustion that seemed to drain the life from his veins, Kendric managed to croak a warning to them. "That...man! Before...transition...he was glowing. ..shimmerheat! Do...do...something...!"
One slave had ignored him, and the other glanced with a shrug in his direction. After they had collected the waste-filled buckets and left without a word, Kendric knew that their captors cared not whether any
one of their charges was about to die horribly.
Faster-than-light travel depended on the fact that the four normal dimensions of space and time were intimately bound up with at least eight dimensions more, that ships and the people aboard them could be rotated into these higher dimensions where the lower limit to velocity was the speed of light. T-space translations were themselves a function of the mathematical relationship between time and the hyperdi-mensions. Objects that rotated into T-space could not remain there longer than 700 hours without facing disastrous consequences. A man who spent 30 days in T-space had to return to the sane universe of three dimensions-plus-time, or die. For every day he remained in normal space, he gained another day that he could spend in T-space, but the 700-hour limit of accumulated time in the tachyon universe remained a final barrier that no great leap nor any number of small, accumulated steps could bridge.
From the glow that emanated from the new prisoner's body while in normal space, it looked as though he had been in T-space long enough to be crowding his tau-limit now. They had taken his perscomp away from him, of course, but he must know that his time was running out.
Kendric mustered his strength and managed to roll over. His arms trembled with the effort, but he was able to get them under him and push himself off the straw, then move his legs under his body and lever himself into a crouch. The other prisoners watched him listlessly from their sprawled positions about the compartment. Kendric stopped, panting hard, until he felt a measure of strength return. Then, his shoulder braced against the wall, he edged himself upright and lurched ac
ross the deck to the door.
"Hey, out there! I know you hear me!" he yelled. He knew he was inviting the paralysis field again, but he could not sit by and watch the prisoner murdered. "There is a man in here who is about to hit his tau limit..."
The lights flickered, and waves of exhaustion dragged at Kendric. This time, he braced his arms against the door, forcing himself to remain upright. The door, centimeters in front of his nose, wavered and swam through his blurring vision. "Listen...to...me! It...won't... do ... any one... any... good... to let... him... die!"
The door looked very strange now, as though it were illuminated. It took Kendric a moment to realize that he was flat on his back staring at the overhead lighting, and that he must have passed out.
He sat up slowly, aware that several of the other prisoners were watching him. No doubt they blamed him for bringing on the repeated
flicker paralysis. None of them would meet his eyes.
Then a shriek from near the door wrenched his attention around to the new prisoner. He was kneeling, clawing the uniform shirt from his chest as though it were on fire. Kendric was dimly aware that the paralysis field was on again, but he remained sitting, slumped against the wall, his eyes on the tortured prisoner who seemed completely unaware of the paralysis field's effects. The man's head jerked back, his eyes starting from their sockets, and a tortured, barely human shriek came from his throat. His chest and stomach seemed to bulge, then writhe with unnatural inner twistings.
Kendric suddenly remembered what he'd heard so often at the Academy. Take acutout of a triangle with unequal sides, the instructors would say. Draw its outline to show its shape. Pick it up, turn it over, and place it back on its outline, which will no longer match the triangle's shape. This, with two dimensions rotated through a third, was a crude analogy of what happened to a three-dimensional object rotated through T-space when it had crossed the tau-limit.
The man turned inside out.
Or at least partly so. A detached portion of Kendric's mind noted that many of the organs were still recognizable. The inversion had not been on a cellular scale, for the heart was intact and pumping, and there were sounds escaping from the red gash where the mouth had been, which suggested that the lungs still worked. But there was a great deal of blood, and the overpowering odor of feces stung the air.
The horror was that the. ..thing still lived, if only for the moment. Whatever it now was, this Human-shaped mass, Kendric knew that he must find a way to kill it to end the suffering it must be enduring...
And then the pent-up energy of the dimensional rotation burst through from somewhere within the raw flesh as a flash of actinic brilliance. The fireball grew, roaring, consuming the once-Human mass in white flame and dense, oily smoke. In seconds, the body was transformed into a blackened cinder.
The straw where the body had been caught fire almost immediately. If they paralyze us now, Kendric thought wildly, we'll all burn... and they won't care!
He leaped across the room and took up one of the metal buckets half-full of urine and drenched the burning straw in carefully measured splashes. Steam and a foul stench filled the compartment, but the fire was out. Then he realized that the paralysis field was on. Adrenaline and the terror of burning alive had kept him moving despite the unnatural tiredness that dragged at his limbs and mind.
The other prisoners ignored him. Some hours later, the lights flickered yet again, and a pair of slaves entered. Using tools that resembled broad, flat spatulas, they scraped up the charred remnants of the dead prisoner and stuffed them into a plastic bag. When they had gone, the stench of burnt meat and human waste remained, defeating the feeble efforts of the air vents near the overhead.
Afterward, Kendric was violently sick in a series of wrenching upheavals that left him as weak as any doses of the paralysis field.
The recovery and processing of gennarium ore—source of gennium-arsenide crystals, or laser crystals—is a case in point. The raw ore is mined and collected at mining facilities leased to private developers, loaded aboard ore freighters, and transported to deep-space, zero-G processing plants. There the ore is crushed, heated, and put into an electrically charged liquid solution, from which laser crystals of great size and purity can he grown. These crystals are used as exciter cores for lasers, as thermic flash triggers for thermonuclear warheads, and as code-pulse laser modulators in VLCAs.
Gennium-arsenide is a relatively unstable mineral ore formed under considerable temperature and pressure—generally within the crust of satellite worlds kept in a constant state of tidal stress by nearby primaries. Examples include tide-locked planets within a fraction of an AU of red dwarf suns, and rare, marginally habitable worlds circling superjovian gas giants as moons.
Extracting ore from such worlds requires dedication and high technology.
—From Social and Economic Structures: A Survey of Ways and Means, Imperial Naval Academy Textbooks, Grelfhaven, 6809 A.I.
Lenard Morganen stepped off the gangway leading from the Gael Warrior's quarterdeck to the receiving concourse aboard Alba Port. The return to Alba from Trothas V had been uneventful, if melancholy. Every officer and crewman in the squadron seemed to take the loss of Kendric Fraser personally. The extra complement of Imperial TOG
Marines stationed aboard each ship only accentuated the alienation they all felt, as though now they were the ones on trial.
The entire squadron was docked at Alba Port now. Looking around the concourse, Morganen had a peculiar awareness of some subtle difference in the place, and it took several moments for him to realize what it was.
Once he spotted the difference, it was not reassuring. There were far fewer civilians walking along the station concourse this time, fewer people gathered at the bars, restaurants, and shops along the moving ways, than when he had last stood at this spot. Yet there were more Imperials by far—mostly soldiers, legionnaires and auxiliaries, but plenty of civil administrators and bureaucrats as well. Black Imperial Navy uniforms and the colorful garments of civilian Imperials mingled with the grays of the Gael Cluster starmen crowding off the ten ships into the concourse. Morganen saw at least three civilians dressed in richly ornamented togas, garments that marked the wearers as high-level government administrators. Most of the Imperials bore the same shimmerheat signature as the Cluster starmen, indicating that they had only recently arrived from a long way off.
Morganen stepped out of the flow of traffic for a moment. Frowning slightly, he brought up the message that had been routed to the Captain's console almost from the moment the Gael Warrior had berthed at Alba Port. The message had been brief to the point of enigma, and he had downloaded it to the perscomp on his wrist so that he might later puzzle out whatever hidden meaning it must carry.
The letters glowed up at him from his perscomp's tiny display. "IMPERATIVE REPEAT IMPERATIVE I MEET YOU CONCERNING KRF. CONCOURSE NINE. 0950 L. PLEASE BE THERE. CE."
Morganen supposed that "KRF" had to be Kendric Fraser's initials, while "0950 L" was local time, as denoted for Alba Port. He assumed "CE" were the sender's initials, though they meant nothing to Morganen. He blanked the display and let his gaze travel around the crowded concourse. No doubt the message carried only enough information to accomplish its primary objective—to pique his curiosity enough to get him off ship and here, to Concourse Nine. Though he wracked his brains, Morganen could not come up with one good idea about who would want to talk to him about Fraser.
He glanced at the time function on his perscomp and cursed silently. His orders had been to bring the Gael Warrior to port and await further orders. Technically, he was violating those orders by leaving the ship, though Lieutenant MacAllister would be able to reach him quickly enough if he were needed on the bridge. Nevertheless, he couldn't spend much time waiting around a spaceport concourse for the mysterious "CE." If nothing else, he was anxious about what his next personal orders would be. Not command of the Gael Warrior, certainly. No one had made any bones about the fact that it had bee
n only a temporary command.
Damn Fraser, he thought. Damn this tangle, whatever it was, with the Imperials! Damn the Imperials!
"Pluiarchos Morganen?"
Morganen turned at the voice and found himself facing an older man, shorter than himself, with silver hair, and eyes that seemed to miss nothing. He was wearing nondescript civilian dress, and only the man's use of the word Pluiarchos suggested that he might be an Imperial.
An Imperial! Morganen felt a stab of suspicion. What would an Imperial want with him?
"Yes?"
"You don't know me. My name is Elliot. Caius Elliot. I sent the message. I am a friend of Kendric Fraser."
"Indeed?" Morganen was instantly on guard. "I had no idea Captain Fraser had any Imperial friends."
"I was close to his father.. .and to him. He was something of a son to me, after Ramsay Fraser died."
Morganen said nothing. How did he know whether this man spoke the truth or not?
Elliot glanced left and right. "Can we go somewhere and talk, you and I?"
"To what purpose?" Despite his suspicions, Morganen found himself curious about the man. Elliot was clearly nervous and uncomfortable about being seen in public.
"To help your Captain."
Morganen shook his head. "From what I've heard, he's beyond help now. And I certainly see no reason to trust you."
"Look, Pluiarchos... it's not safe for me to be seen like this. And it's probably not safe for you to be seen talking to me. You' ve done nothing wrong, but if I were a police informer or an External Affairs agent who wanted to make trouble for you, there are plenty of ways I could have done so. Like having you arrested when you stepped off the ship.. .or held for questioning...or anything else I damn well felt like. I need to talk to you, and quickly!"
Morganen crossed his arms. He was of more than half a mind to follow the man, but his natural stubbornness refused to give in without some clear proof that Elliot was legitimate. "And if you're the bad news you claim to be, I'd better not be found talking with you in some secluded meeting spot. How do I know you are Fraser's friend?"
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