by Glen Cook
Why was the Admiral here, now, instead of in Luna Command? Stars' End would be a damned good reason.
It came down to Mouse. Had Mouse simply yielded to his hatreds and passed on the information about the Sangaree? Or was he still reporting?
Kindervoort asked, "If you're spread so thin, how could you mount a raid on Homeworld?"
"It wasn't a raid. It was a wipeout. Let's say the nova bomb disaster wasn't as complete as the news people have been led to believe. Let's suppose a couple of the weapons were taken out before the blowup. Let's take it a little further and speculate that a certain Jupp von Drachau tumbled one into Homeworld's sun."
BenRabi snapped up out of his chair, breaking Amy's sudden iron grip on his arm. He stared over Beckhart's head, into cruel vistas of self-condemnation.
A whole solar system destroyed!
"You're insane. You're all insane."
"I wish you could know how much soul-searching went into the decision, Thomas. I honestly do. And, despite the Four slash Six memo, I don't think the decision would have been made had it not been for the centerward race. Thomas? Come and see those tapes before you judge us. All right?"
BenRabi ignored him. He was back to that failsafer day again. How did Mouse get the manuscript out to Beckhart? Kindervoort had watched them every second. Beckhart's Seiner agents must have handled it while Mouse was holding everyone's attention.
He remembered a Seiner known as Grumpy George. Old George was a coin collector. He and Moyshe had done business several times. George had had a superb collection. He had claimed to have made an outstandingly lucky "blind" purchase during an auction held on The Big Rock Candy Mountain, years ago.
Any truly devoted collector was vulnerable. And George was an obsessive.
This same George had come to Angel City with the first group of tourists. He had stopped by the office to ask about hobby shops. Moyshe had passed him on to Storm. Mouse had given him a list.
"How many hobby shops does the Bureau run, Admiral?"
Beckhart's eyebrows leapt upward. "Damn, ‘Thomas. But you always were intuitive. Just one these days. Oddly enough, it's right here in Angel City."
"In other words, the place has served its purpose."
Beckhart leaned toward Kindervoort. "You see why he made Captain so young?"
Kindervoort simply looked baffled.
An ulcer that had not bothered Moyshe for a year took a sudden bite from his gut.
Someone pounded on the door. "Mr. benRabi, are you there?"
"Come in. What's up?"
"Someone just tried to kill Mister Storm."
"What? How?"
"It was a woman, sir. She just came up and started shooting."
"Is he all right?"
"Yes sir. He took off after her. She headed into Old Town."
Old Town was that part of Angel City which had lain under the first settlers' dome. Today it was largely a warehouse district. It was the base of the city's small underworld.
"You think it's the Sangaree woman?" Kindervoort asked.
"Marya? A grudge like that is the only thing that would set Mouse off," benRabi replied.
"How could she be here?" Amy demanded.
"I'd better go dig him out," Moyshe said. "If it's all right with you, Jarl?"
"It's your shift. Do what you want."
"Amy, stay with Jarl." Moyshe told the messenger, "Find me six off-duty volunteers. Tell them to meet me outside my office. Armed."
"Yes sir."
Moyshe bent, kissed Amy. "In a little while, hon." He wished he could have been a more loving husband lately. Events had permitted them only the most brusque of relationships.
He caught Beckhart giving him an odd look. A baffled, questioning look.
What did that mean? Puzzled, he went to the door.
He paused there, glanced back. Kindervoort and Amy were sipping their drinks, lost within themselves. Poor Jarl. The pressures here were too much for him. He was becoming less and less active, more and more a figurehead. Was it cultural shock?
He would survive. He would make a comeback in his own milieu. He did not worry Moyshe.
His concern was the almost magical disappearance of the Admiral while his back was turned.
He hated to admit it. He loved that old man like a father. Their relationship had that attraction-repulsion of father-son tension. But he could not trust the man. They were of different tribes now.
He had to hurry if he meant to stay ahead of Beckhart.
He was a block from the restaurant when he encountered the first poster. It clung crookedly to the flank of a Marine personnel carrier. He trotted past before it registered. He stopped, spun around. His eyes widened.
Yes. The face of a woman, a meter high, smiled at him.
"Alyce... " he croaked.
Wham! Darkness slammed home. He no longer knew where or who he was. He staggered past the carrier, went down on one knee.
His head cleared. He was in Angel City... He looked behind him. There was a man following him... No. That was last time. Or was it?
For a moment he was not sure if he was Gundaker Niven or Moyshe benRabi. Somebody was trying to kill Gundaker Niven...
He shook his head violently. The mists cleared. Which name he wore did not matter. Niven. McClennon. Perchevski. BenRabi. Any of the others. The enemy remained the same.
He returned to the personnel carrier. The poster was gone. He circled the quiet machine. He could find no evidence one had existed.
"What the hell is happening to me?" he muttered. He resumed trotting toward his headquarters.
He encountered the second poster fewer than fifty meters from his office trailer. It clung to the side of one of the tents his people used for quarters. He reacted just as he had before. He came out of it clinging to a tree, gasping like a man who had almost drowned. The poster was gone.
Had it ever existed? he wondered.
The fragile stability he had constructed with Chub's help was fraying. Was he in for a bad fall?
He clambered into his trailer like a man carrying an extra fifty kilos, dropped into his swivel chair. His heart hammered. His ears pounded. He was scared. He closed his eyes and searched his mind for a clue to what was happening. He found nothing.
It had to be this contact with his past. The benRabi personality was not really him. It could not withstand the strain of the milieu of Thomas McClennon.
Then he noticed the envelope lying on his desk. The envelope that had been attached to the magazine Literati.
He stared as if it were poisonous. He tried to back away. One hand stole forward.
It was from Greta Helsung, the girl he had sponsored in Academy. His pseudo-daughter. It was a grateful, anxious, friendly missive, seven pages of tight script reviewing her progress in Academy, and her continual fears for his safety. She knew that he had been captured by enemies of Confederation. His friends had promised they would rescue him. They would get her letter to him. And this, and that, and she loved him, and all his friends in Luna Command were well and happy and pulling for him, and she hoped she would see him soon. There were several photographs of an attractive young blond in Navy blacks. She looked happy.
There was also a note from an old girlfriend. Max expressed the same sentiments with more reserve.
What were they trying to do? Why couldn't yesterday let him be?
Greta had such a cute, winsome smile...
He sealed his eyes and fought to escape the conflicting emotions.
He began to feel very cold, then to shake. Then to be terribly afraid.
Fifteen: 3050 AD
The Contemporary Scene
There were fifty ships in the exploratory fleet. They had not seen a friend in two years. It was a big galaxy. They were 10,000 light-years from home, moving toward the galactic core, backtracking old destruction.
There had been eighty-one ships at the beginning. A few had been lost. Others had been left at regular intervals, to catch and relay instelled
reports from the probe. Most of the ships were small and fast, equipped for survey and intelligence scanning.
The fleet was near its operational limit. Three months more, and the ships would have to swing around, the great questions still unanswered.
The advance coreward had been slow and methodical. Still, space was vast and only a fragmentary vision of enemy territory had been assembled.
The stars were densely packed here. The night around the fleet was jeweled far more heavily than farther out The Arm. The skies were alien and strange. The worlds were silent and barren.
Where were the centerward people building all their ships? Where did the killing hordes spring from?
The Ulantonid explorers had detected convoys heading rimward. They had seen a parade of dead worlds. But they had located nothing resembling a base, occupied world, or industrial operation. They had learned only that the enemy came from still farther toward the galaxy's heart.
Then, too, there had been the tagged asteroids in the dead solar systems. Huge metallic bodies three to five hundred kilometers long, all similar in composition. Eleven such rocks, marked with transponders, had been located. The Ulantonid specialists had been unable to conjecture the meaning of the tagging.
The probe fleet had established five tracks along which enemy ships advanced out The Arm. Each was a river of charged particles, ions, and free radicals.
Contact was carefully avoided. The mission was one of observation.
Remote surveillance of the charged paths showed not only the occasional outward passage of a fleet but the regular back and forth of courier vessels. That suggested the enemy had no instel capability. Which was an important deduction. The allies would obtain a tactical advantage by being able to coordinate their forces over far vaster distances.
The centerpiece of the Ulantonid fleet was its only true ship of war, a vessel which beggared the human Empire Class. It bore the name Dance in Ruby Dawn.
Humans named their warships for warriors, battles, cities, old provinces, lost empires, and fighting ships of the past. Ulant used the titles of poems and novels, symphonies and works of art. Each race found the other's naming system quaint.
Ruby Dawn carried the liaison team provided by Confederation's Bureau of Naval Intelligence. Those people had been away from home even longer than their Ulantonid shipmates.
Theirs was a grueling task. They had to survey all incoming data and isolate those bits which justified transmission to Luna Command. They had to be diplomatic with their hosts. It was too much for twelve people eleven thousand light-years from the nearest of their own kind.
An Ulantonid officer stepped into their working compartment. "Commander Russell? We're getting something that might interest you."
Russell was a short black man built like a tombstone. He almost responded, "We'll get it in a while, won't we? Where's the damned hurry?" He did not. The Blues were so courteous it made him ashamed to think of giving them a hard time.
"Important?" he asked. The Blues were showing strain too, though they were more accustomed to extended missions.
"Song of Myrion reported a strong neutrino source. It didn't look natural. On the other hand, it was two-thirds of a parsec from the nearest star. Control is moving probe ships in from several directions. It was felt that you would want to see the scans we're getting."
"Of course. Of course. Doris, you can get in touch through Group Voice Nomahradine. Lead on, Group Voice."
Russell did not expect anything. The Blues came up with something new twice a week. There was always a natural explanation. But someone always went along. It was part of the get-along policy. Never give the Blues offense. The squabbling and snarling had to be confined to liaison team quarters.
A communications officer greeted them with, "We might have something this time, Group Voice." He gestured. Russell surveyed the elaborate and only slightly alien equipment. One huge display pinpointed the probeships involved in the current exercise. They had taken positions on an arc one Ulantonid light-year from the neutrino source. Lines and arrows of colored light flickered in and out of existence.
Russell was astounded. The neutrino source was not a point. The lines indicated that it subtended a half second of arc, vertically and horizontally, from the point of view of each observer. He did some quick mental arithmetic. "Jesus," he murmured. "That's a globe... almost six times ten to the twelfth kilometers in diameter. That's five hundred tunes the diameter of the old Solar System."
The Group Voice was equally impressed. "Commander, that's one hell of an artifact."
Russell scanned the displays. There was enough mass in the region to slightly distort space! The stars behind did not show through.
"Could it be a dark nebula?"
"Too dense."
"You'll take a closer look?"
"When it's cleared up top."
"Whatever it is, it's moving. At a damned good clip."
"That's what makes us so interested, Commander."
Russell looked for a spare seat. There were none. The word was out. The place was filled with curious Blues. The Heart Of The Shield, or Fleet Admiral, made her entry. She spoke with her science officers, and included Russell as a courtesy. Russell simply listened. It was not his place to offer his thoughts.
It took three days to design a probe mission. A swarm of instrument packages would be placed in the great globe's path, well ahead, passive, hidden on old spatial debris. Care would be exercised so the ships placing the instruments would remain undetected.
It took three weeks to do the seeding. Another month passed before the globe reached the instruments. During that period scores of couriers were recorded moving to and from the neutrino source. Two convoys swarmed out toward the remote frontier.
Intense examination of space behind the globular revealed it to be the focus of tremendous activity. Enemy ships swarmed through that trailing space. The globular had a cometary tail of vessels falling away and catching up.
"It looks like the warfleets are clearing the way for this outfit," Russell told his compatriots.
"Aren't they working a little far ahead? I mean, it'll be thirty or forty thousand years before they reach Confederation."
"Maybe it's lag time in case the war fleets run into somebody stubborn."
"Stubborn? They could roll over anything. There're so many of them the numbers become meaningless."
"Still, there seems to be a gap in weapons and communications technology between them and us. I'd guess around two centuries. That means we'll kill a lot more of them than they'll kill of us. The Blues think they're frozen into a technological stasis. Their real weapon is their numbers. If they ran into somebody very far ahead of us, they'd suffer. They'd win, but it might take them generations. I'd guess they've been through it before, which would be why the Globular is so far behind the front."
Probes into star systems behind the Globular had shown, for the first time, the enemy actually living on planets. Billions of the little kangaroo people seemed to have been dumped, apparently to rework the worlds to certain specifications. The Ulantonid experts thought they would be taken off after the terraforming was complete.
Yet another puzzle.
More of the little creatures were occupied mining the asteroidal and cometary belts of numerous systems. Operating in hordes, they stripped whole systems of spatial debris.
The significance of the marked bodies had become apparent. The little folk were using that type asteroid as a portable world. The big bodies were mined hollow, given drives, and turned into immense spaceships. Given spin, they achieved centrifugal gravity. Built up in tiers inside, they could provide more living space than any planet. They could grow with their populations.
"They must breed like flies," someone suggested. "If they have to devour everything for living space."
"Question," Russell said. "The Blues say they leave the planets after terraforming them. Why?"
"Nothing about these things makes any sense," a woman replied.
"I think we're wasting our time trying to figure them out. Let's concentrate on finding weaknesses."
Russell suggested, "Knowing why they're doing what they're doing might clue us how to stop them. Anybody think we can do that now?"
Ruby Dawn was a ship of despair. Hope had vanished. Its crew no longer believed their peoples would survive the coming onslaught.
"We need deeper probes," Russell said. "We have to get this far again past the Globular if we really want to know what they're doing. From here it looks like a million-year project to remodel the galaxy."
"But we can't probe that deep."
"No, we can't. Unfortunately. So we'll never know."
When the first remote instruments were activated by the Globular, everyone in the fleet made sure he or she could examine the incoming data.
Within hours the sight of lines of huge asteroid-ships, stacked tens of thousands high, wide, and deep, killed all interest.
What point to staring into the eyes of doom? Let the watching be done by machines that could not be intimidated.
The probe fleet turned toward home, pursuing the sorry knowledge it had sped ahead.
Sixteen: 3050 AD
The Main Sequence
Six of Moyshe's best men gathered outside his trailer. They had donned nighttime black. They were buttoning buttons and making sure their equipment was in order. Each bore weapons, carried a hand comm, gas mask, and any odd or end the individual thought might come in handy. To a man they were still trying to rub sleep from their eyes.
BenRabi leaned against the frame of the door to his office. He was still shaky. "You guys willing to get into a fight to save my friend Mouse?"
"You're on, Chief," someone muttered.
"He's just an immigrant, you know."
"We wouldn't be here if we weren't ready, Jack."
Another said, "We're ready, sir. He's one of us now. I never liked him much myself. He stole my girl. But we got to protect our own."
A third said, "Klaus, you're just spoiling for a fight,"
"So now I got an excuse, maybe."
"Okay, okay," benRabi said. "Keep it down. Here's the frosting for the cake. I think the Sangaree woman is involved."