“Maybe I’ve had bad luck, but I’ve spent days waiting for podships that were supposed to show up and didn’t.” Acey’s chin jutted out stubbornly, as it often did when he debated a point.
“You mean on that cross-space trip you and Grandmamá took?”
“Uh huh, the contest she won.”
“I hear there was a big shakeup in the podcaster ranks a couple of years afterward, so hopefully it’s better now.”
For a long moment, Dux stared at another electronic sign hanging from the ceiling, a display panel that reported information transmitted by “glyphreader” robots from the zero-G docking bays. This one was blank, since there were no podships present at the moment. Had one been docked, the glyphreader would have translated the hieroglyphic destination board on the fuselage and transmitted the results to the various electronic signs around the station. (The alien hieroglyphs were one of the few things that anyone had figured out about the spaceships—a revelation that enabled travelers to know where they were going before boarding one of the vessels.)
When the right opportunity presented itself, Acey and Dux sneaked aboard a podship … without paying any attention to the destination.…
Back on Timian One, in the broad plaza mayore of the capital city, the citizens went into shock as rumors began to circulate about a catastrophic military loss suffered by the merchant princes at far-away Paradij. It seemed impossible for the Mutatis—who had lost most of the battles fought against the Humans—to have scored such a huge victory. People couldn’t believe it. Stunned and fearful, the crowds fell into murmurs. Were Mutati forces on the way here now?
In the throne room of the Palazzo Magnifico, Doge Lorenzo railed at General Sajak, who stood humbly before him in a wrinkled red-and-gold uniform, cap in hand. The furious ruler shouted so loudly that he could be heard all the way out in the corridors and public rooms. It was an embarrassment of epic proportions, the worst military defeat in the history of humanity.
Chapter Twenty-One
Nothing is entirely secure. No matter how many precautions are taken, no matter how much money and manpower are expended, a narrow crack of exposure always remains. Our mortal safety, then, depends upon the inability of an enemy to identify, or capitalize upon, each of his opportunities.
—Admiral Monmouth del Velli, ancestor of Lorenzo the Magnificent
A slideway took Master Noah from the docked shuttle into EcoStation, an orbital structure that looked like something a child had fitted together with toy parts, but on a very large scale. A round doorway dilated open and Noah stepped through into a vaulted entrance chamber that featured exotic climbing plants visible through glax-plate walls.
He waited while a security officer in a hooded black suit checked him with a scanner beam. The wash of white light felt cool on his skin. Even though Noah suffered this inconvenience every time he came here, it was the result of his own orders, to prevent anyone from pretending to be him. If a saboteur ever got aboard, the entire facility could be destroyed.
Guardian headquarters and this orbiter had state-of-the-art security systems and a private military force, which Noah had ordered on full alert. He’d had nothing to do with the assault on CorpOne, but feared that someone had impersonated his activists in order to make him look bad—thus paving the way for attacks against his operations.
For a while, he thought his father had laid a trap for him, but he was coming to believe that such a malicious deception was something altogether different from their earlier quarrels, and almost beyond comprehension. The more Noah thought about it, the more he suspected that Francella had masterminded the plan to ruin his reputation at the very least, and quite possibly to kill him. He wondered if his father had participated in such a scheme, perhaps after having been duped and manipulated by his wily daughter. And—plots within plots—had Francella planned to kill both her brother and father in the same incident?
A chill ran down Noah’s spine as possibilities curled around him like the tails of demons.
On the other side of a thick glax window, he saw the Adjutant of the Guardians, Subi Danvar, watching the security procedure. Loyal and efficient, he ran the entire Guardian organization whenever Noah was away on business.
Presently the hooded officer nodded stiffly, and on Noah’s right the door to a glax-walled booth opened, sliding upward. Stepping inside, Noah waited while an ion mist bathed him and his clothing in a waterless decontamination shower. It only lasted a few seconds, during which he felt a slight warmth, and a tingling sensation. Then an interior door opened.
As the Guardian leader marched into the adjacent room, Subi bowed slightly and said, “I trust you are doing well, Master Noah?”
“Passably, thank you.”
After the sound of a musical tone the adjutant said, “Excuse me for a moment, please.” From a pocket of his surcoat he removed a headset, and put it on. Telebeam images danced in front of his face, a live connection. He tuned the device so that the color projections grew larger, and filled the air between him and Noah. Two people were shown.
“An urgent transmission from a friend of yours,” Subi said. “He is at the entrance gate of the compound.” The adjutant was referring to the Ecological Demonstration Project, down on Canopa.
Noah recognized one of the pair, a blond, mustachioed young man standing just outside the guard station. It was Anton Glavine, accompanied by an attractive woman. She had long black hair and a good figure. “You’re looking fit, Anton,” Noah said, looking away from her.
“I must speak with you.”
“This is a busy time, but I can grant you three minutes. Proceed.”
“In person. Please.”
“I’ll return the day after tomorrow. You may await me in one of the guest houses. Make yourself comfortable.”
“I must see you now. Please, Noah. Allow me to come up there with you. I’d like to bring my girlfriend along, too. This is Tesh Kori.”
The woman bowed and smiled. She had emerald green eyes that Noah found striking. But he tried not to look at her, and focused instead on Anton. There were many reasons why Noah would do anything for this young man, reasons that had never been revealed to Anton.
“Very well,” Noah said after a long pause, “but I’m about to conduct a class. I will see you afterward.”
“All right. Thank you.”
Assuming that Anton wanted to express his sympathy over the life-threatening injury to Saito Watanabe, Noah told Subi to telebeam approval to the security people down at the compound, so that the young man and his companion could board a tram car and shuttle.
After Subi took care of this, he put away the headset and said, “Your class awaits you, Master.”
The two men walked through a dimly-illuminated corridor. This was a section that had been added to the complex recently. EcoStation, always in geostationary orbit directly above Noah’s wildlife preserve and farm, had originally been designed with modular elements. Hence it was easily enlarged with the addition of more units, an ongoing process as the need for more laboratory and classroom space constantly increased. Aside from the benefit of an uncontaminated, off-planet facility for genetic studies on exotic plants and animals, he liked the isolation that the orbiter provided for students, so that they could maximize the learning process. The students lived in dormitories on board.
Soon Noah heard the chattering and giggling of young voices, just ahead. Moments later he and his companion entered the classroom. The students, all new to the school, grew silent.
While the adjutant introduced Noah to thirty men and women dressed in unisex green smocks and trousers, Noah found himself impressed by their erect posture and bright, attentive expressions. They seemed eager to learn and become full-fledged Guardians, and he was just as eager to teach them.
The classroom was surrounded by dwarf oak and blue-bark canopa pines, simulating a forest environment. Birds and small woodland creatures flitted from branch to branch, kept separate from the classroom by an invisibl
e electronic barrier. It was an entirely self-sufficient, small scale environment. Noah had designed it himself, and others that were similar. They doubled as air cleaning facilities for surrounding rooms.
“All of you are volunteers,” Noah began, from the lectern, “and you are to be commended for not going to work in a polluting industry, and for instead committing yourselves to the preservation of the galactic environment. The term I have just used—‘galactic environment’—is not easily defined, so I will take several moments to explain certain basic concepts to you.… “
He gestured with his hands as he spoke, and for almost an hour he went on uninterrupted, while the students listened in fascination, hardly stirring from their seats.
Then he rolled forth a large clearplax box on a cart, and explained that it contained a living organism he had saved from the planet Jaggem while performing ecological recovery operations there. The box held what looked like an amorphous hunk of dark brown flesh, writhing slowly, throbbing and pulsing. But Noah knew it was a lot more than that.
“Meet my friend Lumey,” he said. “I named him that because he glows luminescent white when digesting his food.”
Noah invited the students to gather around.
“As far as we can tell,” he said, “Lumey belongs to a nearly extinct galactic race, and may be the last of his kind. We keep him in a sealed environment, and he might live there for a long time. Or, sadly, he might die before your very eyes. One thing is certain: We could not leave the little fellow on Jaggem, since industrial polluters there destroyed his entire food chain.”
“How does he see?” one of the female students asked. “Where are his eyes?”
“According to my biologists, he doesn’t have eyes, ears, or a sense of smell. Nonetheless, he uses other senses to get around, and has an innate ability to sense danger, and to survive.”
“Is that a face?” one of the young men asked. “He keeps turning a portion of his body toward us.” He pointed at a light brown area of flesh. “See. Just a small section that is different in color, and more smoothly textured than the rest of his body.”
“Good observation,” Noah said. “That seems to be a sensor pad, although we’re still not sure what he detects with it. When we found the poor creature in a pile of industrial slag, he was living off his own residual body cells, withering away. We have created a mini environment here where he lives quite well on his own recycled air, and reprocessed waste as well, which exits his body in a mineral-rich condensation and is then scooped up by one of our inventions from eco-recovery. In this case it’s a small-scale skyminer, which salvages important elements from the mini-atmosphere and converts them to food for Lumey.”
As Noah spoke, he pointed to a miniature skyminer hovering inside the container, and a food processor on one wall. He was about to explain more, when suddenly he stopped in mid-sentence. Startling him, a nehrcom screen on the back wall—which previously had been as black as space—came to life, showing the fuzzy image of a large terramutati. Turning their heads to look back, several students cried out or screamed in horror.
The Mutati was, in its natural state, an almost incomprehensible amalgam of fatty tissue, with bony extrusions for its numerous arms and legs. A tiny head with oversized eyes was barely visible atop folds of fat, like the head of a turtle poking out of its shell. The creature had no mouth, but words came forth in synchronization, as its body quivered and pulsed like gelatin.
“Your security is rather feeble and easy to penetrate,” the Mutati said in a crackling, eerie voice. The image on the screen and accompanying sounds, while weak, were the normal quality of a nehrcom transmission that had been relayed from the Canopa ground station. He saw what looked like nehrcom equipment in the background.
“Find out where this is coming from!” Noah barked to Subi. “And evacuate the classroom!” The adjutant ran out into the corridor and shouted for guards. A number of students followed him, but others tarried, staring with transfixed expressions at the screen.
“Get out of here!” Noah shouted at them. “All of you!” He gripped the lectern, and it rocked.
“Out there orbiting Canopa,” the electronic intruder said in an irritating, calm tone, “you are not exactly at the center of the galaxy, are you? So I will tell you what has occurred today. A merchant prince assault fleet, sent to Paradij by devious design, has been demolished.”
As if to emphasize what the Mutati had just said, a loud static pop sounded, and the last word echoed in the room: “ … demolished … demolished … demolished.… “
Stunned by the assertion, Noah was not certain if he should believe it. He had heard nothing of a military venture against Paradij. But could this possibly be true?
* * * * *
On the wall screen the Mutati sneezed, coughed, and twitched. The shapeshifter had sneaked onto Timian One, having assumed the identity of a Human and gained access to a nehrcom station while its electronic surveillance system was under repair.
As one of the Mutatis who did not normally show allergic reactions in the proximity of Humans, he had, for a time, experienced no adverse reactions. But eventually the allergies had surfaced and now they were now hitting him full force. Even the implanted allergy protector he had as a backup did not work.
* * * * *
As Noah watched the screen, he heard a static hiss, and then saw a gray fog surround the Mutati. Previously Noah had seen captive shapeshifters do this when under stress.
Out of the fog came words. “Abal Meshdi, his Eminence the Zultan of the Mutati Kingdom, has instructed me to present a generous offer to you. We would like to join forces with your Guardians against the evil industrial polluters of the Merchant Prince Alliance. We can provide you with technical advice, even highly portable military hardware to use against the corporations. We have a common enemy.”
Unnoticed by Noah, he had been joined in the classroom by two people who entered from a side door, and stood beside him.
“Interesting proposition,” one of them said.
Startled, Noah glanced to his left. “Anton!”
“You gave me some kind of high priority clearance to come aboard. Hey, I must be pretty important to you, huh?” He nodded toward his companion. “Meet Tesh Kori.”
Noah nodded toward her, but only briefly.
“You’re not going to accept that creep’s proposal, are you?” Anton asked.
“Of course not. I’d never sell out to the Mutatis.”
“I didn’t think so.” The blond young man looked up at the screen and shouted at it. “He says no! Do you understand?”
“Too bad,” the Mutati said. He produced a shiny, metallic device, which he held in front of his face. “I was prepared to offer this to you and your Guardians.” Tiny wings popped out of the side of the apparatus. “Stealth bomb. It’s undetectable, can fly past any security system and blow up an entire factory. Just think of how much that would help the environment.”
“You heard what my friend said,” Noah responded.
“Is that your final decision?”
“It is!”
“In that case,” the Mutati said, “we wouldn’t want this to go to waste.” The flying bomb glowed red, and exploded. The transmission flashed bright red and orange, then went dark abruptly, leaving the wall screen black again.
“Did you hear him talking about a Mutati military victory against merchant prince forces?” Noah asked.
“No,” Anton said.
Noah went on to relate what he had been told, then said, “Let’s hope it isn’t true.” He paused. “What do you want to see me about?”
“We came to help,” Anton replied. “And it looks like you can use it.” He put his arm around Tesh. “We want to become Guardians.”
“This is not a good time. I thought you were here because of my father’s injury.”
Anton’s face darkened. “I’m sorry that happened, and I hope he gets better. Look, I always told you I wanted to join the Guardians someday, but you
gave me a bunch of excuses. You’re not going to do that again, are you?”
Noah hesitated. He did not want Anton to do anything dangerous, and was considering how to respond. For years, Noah had concealed from Anton the true identity of the young man’s parents … that his mother was Noah’s sister Francella, making Noah his uncle. The identity of the father was even more shocking.
At that moment, two security men burst into the classroom, apologizing profusely. Seeing the screen dark, one of them said, “We don’t know how he got through, sir, but it won’t happen again. We’ll make sure of it.”
Noah didn’t see how they would accomplish that if they didn’t know what had happened in the first place. He told the men to have their commander submit a full report to Subi Danver within the hour. Nervously, the pair saluted and hurried away.
Refocusing, Noah saw his nephew standing with Tesh Kori, waiting for a response. He met their hopeful gazes, then looked away for a moment.
Francella had become pregnant after one of her trysts with the Doge Lorenzo himself and had kept the information from him—for reasons that she never revealed. After she gave birth, Noah learned about her indiscretion and insisted upon making certain that the child was cared for properly. Reluctantly, she had given Noah the responsibility of maintaining contact with her son, while she paid the bills for the child’s support. It was one of the few things on which she and Noah had ever agreed.
Knowing what he did about his sister’s nature, however—her cruelties and selfishness—Noah always wondered why she had not just aborted the fetus. It had given him some hope that she might have a modicum of humanity after all. But Francella always had a way of dashing such sentiments.
Out of concern for the safety of his nephew, Noah had discouraged him from joining the Guardians, and now it was more dangerous than ever. Still, the organization was in desperate need of good people, and Anton certainly qualified. He was a hard worker, honest, and resourceful.
During several moments when Tesh Kori was looking in another direction, Noah studied her exquisite profile, the way she stood tall and proud and beautiful. She glanced at him before he could look away, and he felt drawn into her hypnotic, emerald green eyes.
The Timeweb Chronicles: Timeweb Trilogy Omnibus Page 13