Downtime

by Cynthia Felice

  “I don’t care. When you kissed me, it felt wonderful. Kiss me again, Jason. Kiss Calla.” She held up the covers for him to slide back down underneath them, just as he had done for Calla. She was young and firm and slim, but he shook his head again sadly.

  “It would not be good for you,” he said.

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “You said yourself that you knew nothing of psi people. You’re judging me — us, as if I were not psi at all. You know that I can touch and taste and smell and hear and see, because you can do those things, too. But you don’t know how I can feel your love and how good it is.”

  “If I loved you . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter who you love, not to me. I can feel it anyhow, and I like it. I can help you remember everything, every detail.”

  “You can’t read minds,” Jason said, brushing hair off her forehead.

  “I can’t hear words, but sometimes I can see pictures and I can almost always feel. You feel worried, right now, like my father used to feel when he looked at me when he thought I was sleeping.”

  Jason smiled. “It’s wondering what the right thing is for you. He must have had his doubts from time to time about isolating you here on Mutare. I sure wish I knew what to do for you.”

  “Kiss me,” she said.

  “I don’t believe that’s it.” He laughed at her and started to tousle her hair, but she grabbed his hand and held it fiercely.

  “Don’t mock me,” she said angrily. “Don’t treat me as if I didn’t know anything at all. I know about being psi and I know what is right for me. If you won’t help, well, then, you won’t.” She let go of his hand and pushed back the cerecloth. She climbed over him to get to her clothes, started pulling them on. “You’re selfish,” she said, pulling her hair out from under the shirt she had just slipped over her head. “You’re stupid, too. You want me to watch and listen to jelly bean stories on the flatscan so I will learn and grow up, and maybe that’s not a bad way for regular people. But for me it’s like trying to taste a new food while holding my nose. I get more out of watching you dig holes out of the ground because then I can see and hear and feel.”

  It was true. He had not considered that for a psi-sensitive girl the very best holographic study aids might seem flat and uninteresting. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But this isn’t the way either,” he said, gesturing to the rumpled bed. “Even a psi sensitive shouldn’t go to bed with someone just so she can feel a story. It’s best to be in love with the person. Someday that will happen to you.”

  “It already has,” Arria said over her shoulder as she walked out of the room. She knew how to operate the door now, so that didn’t slow her down a second. The door closed and she was gone.

  Jason lay down and clasped his fingers behind his neck.

  Arria in love with him? Why not, he thought. She was old enough to have had many adolescent affairs. She just hadn’t had the opportunity. Now that she was around people, it was only natural. Indeed, he had known even back in Daniel Jinn’s cave that Arria felt sexual stirrings when she was around him, so maybe he shouldn’t have been so surprised to find her in bed with him this morning. And maybe if Calla’s leaving were not so fresh in his mind, he would have reacted differently. But as it was, he had been right to exercise restraint.

  He couldn’t pretend to love a psi sensitive, even though Arria would be a very nice love partner. The more she learned to use her psi abilities, the better she would be at pleasing him in bed, and he couldn’t help thinking that she would probably become the very best lover he had ever known. But she would also know, or learn if she didn’t know at the beginning, that he did not love her, not like he should. And it wasn’t healthy for her to pretend that she was Calla, just to be close to him. But she had insisted that she was not pretending. He thought back to the moment he realized he was not dreaming of Calla but holding someone very real in his arms. He hadn’t let go, nor opened his eyes, not the first moment. He had felt her breasts and kissed her, probing her mouth with his tongue, enjoying complete abandonment until the moment he knew she would open herself to him. Only then had he opened his eyes. No wonder she was angry. He certainly wasn’t very consistent, pretending it was all right one minute and wrong the next. Could she really feel his love for Calla so vividly that it did not matter to her that it was not hers? Or had she just been drawn to warmth and coziness and perhaps by sexual curiosity? And what if she were eavesdropping now? Wouldn’t she be wondering why he was still half hard?

  Knowing there was no possibility of more sleep this morning, Jason got up and went to shower.

  Chapter 17

  Mahdi was in the Night Messenger’s combat communications center, garbed in a shiny leather shirt, sturdy landboots, and a scarlet sash knotted around his torso. He looked from the flatscreen to the holoscan for perhaps the thousandth time, both still blank and empty after nearly two days in Dvalerth far-orbit. There was no sign of the Cassells fleet in their own surveillance system, and no message from reconnaissance. The lack of activity made him wonder if the Cassells fleet had gone home, and the thought made him angry. The Dvalerth elixir garden would not be easy to take without the unwitting help of the Cassells fleet.

  “Where are they, Larz?” Mahdi said.

  Larz Frennz Marechal shook his head. “I can tell you nothing more until I have more information.”

  Not bothering to hide his disgust, Mahdi touched the holoscan controls and brought up the probabilistic assessment of Cassells fleet deployment that the decemviri had made when they were enroute to the Dvalerth-Macowan solar system. The model showing the Cassells fleet withdrawing was less than one percent, but it was not zero. The decemviri, whom the Decemvirate had conveniently loaned to him when he rested in Mercury Novus near-orbit while waiting for the public announcement of their decision on elixir distribution, had not been able to eliminate the remote possibility that all the worlds would accept council’s decision without protest. Such an outbreak of peace was the only situation that could possibly spell failure for his plan to become emperor of all the known worlds, for then everyone would be allied against him and their sheer numbers would defeat him. The odds were that the Cassells fleet would move in on Dvalerth as soon as they heard council’s decision, engaging the enemy before Mahdi’s legion of ships could arrive to stop them. There was a fleet of drones far behind Mahdi’s actual strike force, electronically mimicking large destroyers, acting as decoys to fool Cassells fleet reconnaissance. The Cassells fleet should be under the mistaken belief that Mahdi was still days away from popping in to Dvalerth-Macowan interplanetary space, and they should be using the time to take Dvalerth. Two days were gone. Why had they not moved?

  Roma came in from the bridge, not even glancing at the flatscreen or holoscan. As always, she appeared to be in total control, but the quickening tapping of her heels betrayed her gathering anxiety. She sat in the chair next to Mahdi’s, scarcely seated before the signal officer broke the silence by saying, “Messenger drone incoming.”

  Mahdi glanced from Roma to the signal officer, trying to decide if the man had touched his board in the last minute, for it seemed too coincidental to Mahdi that Roma should come from the bridge just as the first intelligence arrived, too. He was certain the man’s hands had moved, and was therefore sure that he had signaled Roma. That kind of loyalty would all be transferred to Mahdi just as soon as he had the Dvalerth elixir garden in his control, for then there would be enough for junior officers, too.

  “Is it one of our scouts?” Larz said, “or Dvalerth’s?” The signal officer pondered his little flatscreen for a moment, then looked up and said, “It’s ours, sir. Message incoming.”

  The flatscan colored and painted the message as they stared: “Two nuclear bursts in Dvalerth near-orbit. More . . .”

  Mahdi smiled. He didn’t know how a Cassells strike force had sneaked past his reconnaissance and Dvalerth’s defense systems, but they had, and the two bombs were their first move. Now Dvalerth could not use th
eir gravity wells to raise troops and weapons to near-orbit battle stations, for the magnetosphere through which they had to pass now was filled with high-energy protons from the nuclear blasts. Not even heavy shielding could protect against that much radiation. Dvalerth was reduced to entering space through the polar openings of the magnetosphere which would greatly hamper their maneuverability during the pending invasion.

  Mahdi flicked the holoscan controls, instructing the jelly beans to erase all but the model that had predicted that the first offensive action would be to make Dvalerth near-space impassible. Now there was another tree of probabilities to examine, and it was an immense tree. But Mahdi didn’t care. At the tip of every branch was Mahdi’s crown. He had only to wait and see which one he should seize.

  Chapter 18

  The planet Dvalerth was an island fortress, its outer reaches bounded by a wild river of trapped radiation and steeply rising gravitational potential. Dvalerth, like every other inhabited planet in the known worlds, maintained control over its near-orbit regions with a net of surface-based interceptors that could rise through the gravitational waves like cork bobbers. That is, they could when the wild river was in its natural state. With the trapped radiation augmented by Cassells fleet sneak nuclear attack, radiation intensities made the equatorial regions of the magnetosphere an impassible torrent of heavy protons and excited electrons, impassible for even heavily shielded vehicles. As a result of the attack, Dvalerth’s gravity wells were useless for achieving the outer reaches of near-orbit, for passage through the gravity wells to orbiting space stations took longer than thirty minutes. The fastest bucket took fifty minutes, the heavily shielded buckets took longer. Still, Dvalerth was using buckets to deploy armory in very near-orbit, under the now deadly magnetosphere, especially at the polar regions where the only safe access through the trapped radiation could be achieved. While such vehicles had little capacity to deviate from their predicted path because their high velocities made maneuvering difficult, in sufficient numbers they could be a very discouraging factor to an invasion force trying to use the polar gates to enter Dvalerth atmosphere. These polar orbiters would also offer armed escort to the Dvalerth fleet when it used the polar gates to achieve far-orbit where the Cassells fleet was certain to be falling in orbit, waiting.

  The relatively low orbital velocities associated with far-orbit permitted the Cassells fleet almost complete maneuverability with very little consumption of energy, for which, while in enemy interplanetary space, it had no ability to replace. By changing orbit continually, they complicated Dvalerth’s problem of detecting and tracking what were relatively microscopic specks at such great distances and with such small visual angles. Cassells fleet would remain virtually invisible to Dvalerth until they chose to reveal themselves. And they enjoyed the advantage of wide-angle observation of Dvalerth’s scramble to deploy its weaponry.

  “Cassells fleet would appear to be giving up its advantage,” said Singh as he stared at the holoscan model of what was happening in Dvalerth near-orbit. “It has been almost twenty four hours since the nuclear bombs exploded.”

  On companion-class ships, the navigational bridge and combat communications were combined into a combat operations center at the forebridge, thus Calla’s officers had front row seats for watching the war arena. Tam Singh Amritsar was at the helm, overseeing the constant orbit changes, which kept the Compania invisible to both Dvalerth and Cassells fleet, and hopefully to Mahdi’s fleet, as well. The holoscan had been lit constantly since the nuclear bursts in Dvalerth magnetosphere, and still reconnaissance had not been able to sort out any sign of Cassells fleet or Mahdi’s fleet from the ever-present natural background radiation from the cosmos.

  “They’re just farther out than we expected them to be,” Calla said in a tranquil tone. “And they have days before Mahdi’s fleet of drones are due to arrive.”

  The drone fleet, moving ponderously slow through deep space, was a decoy that had fooled even Calla for a while during her pursuit of Mahdi. He had stopped in Mercury Novus interplanetary space only long enough to hear council’s decision to distribute elixir based on populations of thirty years ago, despite the Decemvirate’s recommendation that distribution be based on present population. While the Decemvirate had ordered its legions, Mahdi’s included, to uphold council’s decision, the Decemvirate had also recessed immediately thereafter.

  It was suspected that the decemviri had actually disbanded their organization and gone to head up their legions in person. Calla knew for a fact that a light-speeder-class ship had caught up with Mahdi’s flagship, and someone had transferred aboard. Such unheard-of tactics on the part of the decemviri gave rise to speculation that the legions would not uphold council’s decision, despite their orders. Neither Cassells fleet nor Dvalerth could be certain to whom the slow moving fleet in deep space would render assistance when it arrived, and the uncertainty could only encourage the continuation of war, not an outbreak of peace. Once Calla realized that the deep-space fleet was a sham of electronic decoy ships and low-mass weasels, she was certain Mahdi was already in Dvalerth interplanetary space, just waiting for the battle to begin. Then, with the advantage of the proverbial fisherman, Mahdi would strike.

  “Uh-oh,” said Singh. “Looks like Dvalerth’s reconnaissance is better than ours, and that they’re acting on something we don’t know.”

  A column of Dvalerth ships was coming up the northern polar funnel and paying a heavy toll to change inclination to the equatorial orbital regions. Without being told, Calla’s signal officers changed their surveillance to concentrate on one small sector of space, and within twenty minutes they picked up optical reflections of Cassells fleet dropping in to engage the Dvalerth fleet.

  It would be hours before the two fleets confronted each other, and no certainty for the outcome, except for the certainty in Calla’s mind that Mahdi would make his move while the fighting was fiercest. Meanwhile, Calla and her officers would wait and watch.

  “We should take the advantage ourselves,” said Cinna, who would command the wing of raiders when Calla was ready to strike. “We could go in at forty-nine degrees north, bomb the garden, and leave forty-five degrees south.” He turned his head slightly and gave Calla his starkest grin.

  But Calla shook her head. “Let Mahdi soften Dvalerth’s interceptors, or did you think they would stand by while we destroy the elixir gardens? Besides, this is the only opportunity we’ll have to reduce Mahdi’s fleet. He won’t be caught this way twice.”

  “You’re serious about destroying all the elixir gardens in the Arm, aren’t you?” It was Singh who spoke, and Calla glared at him. “No offense, ma’am,” Singh added hastily when he saw her face, “but I continue to be amazed at the extremity of the decision. Millions of people depend on those supplies, including the decemviri themselves. It’s just hard to accept knowing that the Decemvirate would order the destruction of its most precious resource.”

  “I’m not certain this is precisely what they had in mind when they told me to neutralize the traitor. On the other hand,” Calla said in her mildest voice as every officer in the center turned to stare at her, “I’m fairly predictable in terms of their probability studies. They have forty years of documentation to feed into their jelly bean-like brains, and it could be that they know exactly how I will interpret their orders.”

  Singh was first to break the stunned silence, his face flushed with color. “They gave you one companion-class ship with all forty bays filled with raiders. More than enough to defend an outback planet like Mutare against a traitor’s takeover. It’s nothing against a fleet . . . three fleets! Madam, you have overstepped.”

  “Nonsense,” said Cinna. “Calla’s right. The Decemvirate knew how Calla would interpret such broad orders. What they couldn’t know was who the traitor was, only that he had to be stopped to prevent even worse calamity than they had already foreseen. It won’t kill anyone to live a normal lifespan, including the decemviri. But billions could die trying t
o take the gardens back from Mahdi, or anyone else who has control of them. Compania with Calla in command was the perfect choice: Big enough to be self-sustaining for a few years, powerful enough to do considerable damage to selected targets, and if you’ll take the time and trouble to check, you’ll learn that it’s no skin off any of our nine hundred noses on board Compania if we do destroy every elixir garden in the Arm.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” asked Singh, not the least bit mollified.

  “Not one crew member is entitled to an allotment of elixir,” Calla said. “You and everyone else failed in the lotteries, except me, of course. And in my case, having succeeded doesn’t help at all.”

  “It is rather coincidental that you would have no one unwilling to strike garden targets,” Singh admitted grudgingly. “I wonder what kind of edge that gave us in the probability models?”

  “No edge,” Calla said. “Just evened the chances for success to fifty percent.”

  “If you know that, then you knew before we ever went to Mutare what our mission would be.”

  “No, not for certain. This was one twig on the probability model I was shown. I would give a lot to see what the same model would show with all this new information.”

  No one said anything, each being certain that if new modeling could have helped them, the Decemvirate would have found a way to get it to them.

  “Look at it this way,” Calla said. “No one is modeling us. We’re an unknown factor to everyone, including Mahdi.” And that was true, at least for a while. Mahdi would not be expecting anyone to destroy Dvalerth’s elixir garden, only to attack with the intention of claiming it for themselves. His defenses would be superb with an entire fleet at his command. He had only to pull in close to the garden, and it would be as if a threshold had been erected that no one was willing to cross . . . except Calla. One contact explosive — she didn’t expect Cinna to have the time or precision required for lasering — and Dvalerth gardens would be gone, some of Mahdi’s Fleet with it.