In many ways he identified almost completely with Marek Kreegan, who must have had similar thoughts upon coming to the Diamond, and, most likely, even before. That priestly role was more than mere disguise, it was a subtle and humorous tweaking of the man’s nose at Man’s odd and distorted attempt at building institutions that served him. How many thousands, or tens of thousands, of years had Mankind been trying to build the right institutions? How many had slaved in faith at that building, and how many, even now, deluded themselves as they always had that, this time, they’d gotten it right?
Once upon a time sixty percent of the people didn’t believe in their system. Only twelve percent thought there might be something better than the system they hated, something worth bothering to fight about. Loss of faith equaled loss of hope, then, in that large a segment of the population, and it didn’t, in historical retrospect, seem out of line. People tended to extremes, and hope was a very mild extreme when faith became impossible, while despair was easy and all the way down the other end of the scale.
He pounded his fist on the console hard enough to hurt his hand. “Tarin Bul” had given in to despair, yet had died with slight hope. Qwin Zhang had risked everything on hope, and won. Park Lacoch had refused to be seduced by a good and happy life when he knew that others he did not even know depended on his actions. Cal Tremon had been used and abused by practically everyone for their own purposes,, yet he had never surrendered.
Pour people, four distinct individuals, who were, in every sense of the word, sides of himself. He hoped, he thought, he had learned something valuable, something the Confederacy had never meant to teach him. Now it was his turn.
The great orb that was Momrath filled the screens early on in the trip, and he watched it grow closer with eerie fascination. Ringed gas giants were always the most beautiful of places, and, in more than once sense, the most forbidding as well. At last two moons of the great planet were large or larger than any of the Diamond worlds, yet he went not to them but to small and frozen Boojum. Well, Momrath had been the one place he hadn’t visited, in a sense, as yet, and it seemed appropriate that it be his world.
He settled back to await the landing, still deep in reflection.
Task Force Delta was composed of four “war stations,” each surrounded and protected by a formidable battle group. Clustered around the barbell-shaped station that was the nerve center and computer control for its awesome firepower were hundreds of “modules,” each complete in and of itself. Most were unmanned; war these days was very much a remote-controlled affair, with battle group leaders merely choosing from a list of tactics, giving their battle group computers the objectives, and letting everything else run itself. Not a single one of the modules was intended for defense; the battle group provided that. Yet among all the clusters, there were weapons that could take out selected cities on remote worlds, could level a mountain range or even disintegrate all carbon-based life forms within a proscribed radius while doing no other damage. Other modules could ignite atmospheres with sufficient combustible gasses in them, while still others could literally split planets in two.
One such station could wipe out an entire solar system, leaving nothing but debris, gasses, and assorted space junk to orbit the sun, or could, in fact, even explode that sun. There were only six such stations in operation throughout the vast Confederacy, and four of them were concentrated here in the task force, the largest ever assembled.
The protective battle group was composed of fifty defensive ships, called cruisers after ancient seagoing vessels none could remember at this stage, built along the same lines as the war stations. But their modules consisted of hundreds of scouts, probes, and fighters, again almost all needing no human hand or brain, capable of taking continuous streams of orders from their base cruisers or, in the event the cruiser was destroyed, from any cruiser or the war station itself. Nothing else was needed; the combined firepower and mobility of a cruiser was equal to an entire planetary attack force, complete with human and robot troops that could land on and occupy a cleared stretch of land and hold it until relieved provided the cruiser’s modules continued their air and space cover. As well, the human marines inside their battle machines could be so effective that a squad might be able to take and destroy a medium-sized city, even if the city were defended with laser weapons, immune to the lethal energy rain their supporting fighters could unleash.
In theory the task force was as close to invulnerable as could be imagined, combined with the punch of an irresistible force. The only trouble was, its powers, weapons, programming, and tactics had never been tested under real battle conditions. For several centuries the Confederacy military had been amost exclusively devoted to policing itself.
A forward cruiser, still more than a light-year off the Diamond, launched four probe modules, one to each of the four Warden worlds. They sped off, skipping in and out of subspacial modes, in a near-random approach to the system, their next direction determined only after they came out for that brief moment and saw where they were. With no humans or other living organisms aboard to worry about, they made the trip in less than an hour.
Stern-faced men and women born and bred to the art of war sat in the center of the battle group, watching the four probes track on a great battle screen showing the entire probable sector of engagement, while subsidiary screens scrolled data slow enough for the human observers to see, although the data was far behind the reality being fed back to the master battle computer.
In precision drill, the four small steely blue-black modules arrived off each of their four target worlds simultaneously and quickly closed on their targets. Their armament consisted entirely of defensive screens and scramblers for potential adversaries; they were the forerunners, the testers of defenses and the data-bearers to the command and control center far off but closing.
“Measuring abnormal large energy flow between the four worlds,” a comtech reported to the battle room. “Our probes also report scanning on an unusual band, origin each of the four targets.”
“Very well,” the admiral responded. “Close to minimum safety zone on each world. All photo recorders on. Commence evasive action on scans.”
As soon as the order was given it was done. The admiral wanted to know how well his hardware could be tracked after it was first discovered.
It could track very well indeed, it seemed, and the odd sensors kept pace effortlessly with the variations in course and speed; even shields and jamming techniques had no effect.
They approached within twelve hundred kilometers of the respective planetary surfaces, not too far above the orbits of the space stations of the Four Lords.
All data ceased on all boards simultaneously. Startled comtechs and observers leaped to then: consoles and ran every kind of data check they could, to no avail. There seemed no question that, on all four worlds simultaneously, something had fired and totally destroyed the probes.
They ran back the last few seconds frame by frame, looking for what happened, but could see nothing and had to call upon the computers for help. Ultimately the computers could simulate what could not be seen. It had been an electrical beam, a jagged pencil line of force looking more like natural lightning than something fired from any kind of known weapon, reaching up and out from an unknown point below the upper atmospheric layers of each world and striking each probe, destroying it instantly. Only a single burst had been used in each case, the burst lasting mere milliseconds yet packing enough punch to destroy the heavily armored probes completely.
Commander, Special Task Force, sighed and shook his head. “Well, we know that we’ll have a fight when we go in,” he said with professional objectivity.
Five seconds after the probes were destroyed, all Confederacy satellites around the Warden Diamond were taken out, leaving only one channel of outside communication unjammed.
He had to admit that while the rock wasn’t much it offered a really fine view. The great multicolored orb of Momrath filled the sky of Boojum, an
d the small probe boat settled into a cradle dock on the bumpy and drab surface. The setting made it seem as if the moon and ship were about to be swallowed by a sea of yellows, blues, and magentas.
He donned a spacesuit and depressurized the cabin, waiting for the lights to tell him he could open the hatch. The cradle dock was built for the blocky, rectangular freighters rather than for the small passenger craft he had used, so there was really no way to mate boat to airlock. He noted two of the Warden shuttlecraft parked in the rear of the bay, but was surprised not to see any ship of unfamiliar design. Either the Altavar hadn’t arrived as yet, or it utilized a different and less obvious mode of transportation.
As soon as he was at the hangar-level airlock, a small tug emerged from a recess in the far wall and eased up to his ship, grabbing hold with a dual tractor beam and then easing it into an out-of-the-way parking space. He hoped he’d remembered to tell them that the thing would automatically take back off on command of the picket ship in an hour or two, then shrugged off the thought. What good was taking over an enemy ship like the picket ship if your spies were incompetents? He shouldn’t be expected to do everything.
The light turned green and he opened the hatch, stepped inside the chamber, closed and hit reseal behind him, and waited for the light on the inner door to ogen. He was reminded a bit of that dual airlock in Ypsir’s space palace. Sure enough, there was even a camera here, and some of those odd projections.
He barely had time to reflect on the implications when he was bathed in an energy field from those same projections, just as his counterpart had been back on Medusa. It was over quickly and caused him no unpleasantness; in fact, he felt no sensation out of the ordinary at all. He couldn’t help wondering what all that was about, then. An automatic precaution? If it were some kind of decontamination, it would have been better served if they’d waited until he took off the spacesuit.
The inner lock’s guide light turned green, and he opened it and walked into a fairly large locker room. He quickly removed his suit, then opened his small travel bag and donned rubber-soled boots, work pants, and a casual shirt. He checked the small transceiver’s power, then left it in the case along with a change of clothes and his toiletries, then picked up the bag and walked out of the locker room and down a small utilitarian hall to an elevator. He felt a bit light but not uncomfortably so; they were using a gravity field inside the place.
The elevator was of the sealed type, so he had only the indicator lights to show how far he was being taken. Not too far, as it turned out. While there appeared to be at least eight levels to the place, he went down only to the third one before a door rolled back.
Yatek Morah, wearing a shining black outfit complete with a rather effective crimson-lined cape, stood there to greet him.
He had been used to thinking of Morah as a large man, but, he found, they were both about the same size. The eyes hadn’t changed much, though, and were still hard to look at.
He stepped out of the elevator and did not offer his hand. Instead he stood there, looking at Morah. “So.”
“Welcome to Boojum, sir,” Morah responded, sounding fairly friendly. “Odd name, isn’t it? The outer planets and moons were named for some follow-up scout’s favorite fairy stories, I think. Rather obscure.” He paused a moment. “Speaking of obscure—just what do we call you?”
He shrugged. “Call me Mr. Carroll. That’ll do, and it’s certainly appropriate both to history and to our current situation.”
“Good enough,” the Security Chief responded, apparently not aware of the irony in name or tone. “Follow me and I’ll give you the grand tour. It’s not much, I’m afraid—this is a mining colony, after all, not a luxury spa. Oh, you might be relieved to know that that shower bath we gave you has an interesting effect. The Warden organisms, which are thicker than dirt on this rockpile, will totally ignore you. That should relieve your mind.”
He couldn’t help smiling at that. “As easy as that. Well, I’ll be damned.” He followed the man in black down the corridor.
Morah first showed him his room, a small cubicle less than a third the size of his module on the picket ship, but it would do. He thought about retaining his bag, then decided not to and tossed it on the bed. “Better let your people know not to touch that bag without me around,” he warned Morah. “A few things in there can be very unpleasant if you don’t know exactly how to talk to them.”
“Although this is nominally Ypsir’s territory, I am in complete command here,” the security chief assured him. “You are currently under what might best be expressed as diplomatic immunity. None of your things, or your person, will be touched; whoever touches them will answer to me.”
He accepted that, and they proceeded. “The Lords are staying along here, in rooms similar to yours,” Morah told him. “The others are sharing a dorm normally used by mine security personnel. I’m afraid there’s been a lot of grumbling as to the accommodations, but only Ypsir has a livable place here.”
“It’ll do,” he assured the other man. “IVe been in worse.”
A small central area between the single rooms and the dorm had been set up with a large conference table and comfortable chairs. “This is our meeting hall,” Morah told him, “and, I’m afraid, also our dining hall, although the food comes from Ypsir’s personal kitchen and is quite, good.”
The three people assembled in the room when they entered all turned to look at the newcomers. One of them looked so shocked he appeared to be having a heart attack. “You!” he gasped.
He smiled. “Hello, Zhang. I see nobody warned you.” He turned to the other two. “Doctor, I am most happy to see you here, and I’d like to thank you for all your help.” Dumonia bowed and shrugged. The third man he didn’t recognize at all. He was a tall, thin, white-haired man of indeterminate age. About the only thing that could be told about him was that he was certainly a Medusan. “And you are?”
“Haval Kunser, Chief Administrator of Medusa,” the man responded smoothly, putting out his hand.
He took it and shook it warmly, replying, “It’s very good to meet you. I know you only by reputation.”
He turned back to Zhang, who looked only slightly less stricken. “Are you going to drop dead or shoot me or relax and have a drink?” he asked his Cerberan counterpart.
“Well, what do you expect?” Qwin Zhang responded tartly. “I’m still not over the other two yet.”
His eyebrows went up. “They’re here, then?”
“Everyone is here,” Morah told him. “We can proceed after dinner if you like.”
“The Altavar.”
“Two levels down. Not only do they prefer it down there, but I’m afraid they stink like a three-day-old corpse. Our body odor is similarly offensive to them, so you can understand the separation considering the cramped quarters. I’ll certainly take you down and Introduce you if you want to verify that they’re here, but I think otherwise we should let them sit in by remote, for, ah, mutual comfort. Don’t answer until you’ve smelled them.”
He chuckled. “All right, I have no objection to the remote, although I am going to have to verify their physical presence. I’m afraid that some in the Council simply don’t believe in them.”
“Understandable. Through that door there, and we’ll meet the others.” They walked into a large room that looked more like a barracks than anything else, in which several people were sitting and talking or reading or writing. All heads turned as they entered, followed by Zhang and Dumonia, and he saw immediately that Zhang’s reaction was not going to be unique. Tremon, for one, was so startled he stood up and banged his head on an upper bunk.
“Tremon and Lacoch you know,” Morah said pleasantly, “and the others are either associates of theirs or aides of the Four Lords like Kunser. Communications, coordination, and a subsidiary meeting room with visual facilities have been set up on the level below us. It’s all ready, Mr. Carroll.”
Tremon and Lacoch both shook their heads at that. “Mr. Who?
” Lacoch muttered, but did not press the matter. He looked over at two others near them and smiled and bowed slightly. “Darva and Dylan. Charmed.” The two women stared back at him in puzzlement. He looked over at Tremon. “No Ti?”
Tremon looked a little stunned. “So it did work!”
“Better than you could ever know,” he responded softly, then turned to Morah. “I’ll give your techs the codes to open everything to the Council so they can make the proper checks and set up a time. I’m not sure how many on the Council we managed to get together but it’ll be a working majority. Then I’d like to meet privately with my three former operatives, if that’s possible, and separately with you, Doctor. Then 111 go down with you to meet the Altavar, Morah, and we can get started.”
Morah looked a little uncomfortable. “Um, I believe all that can be arranged, but I would recommend eating before going down to meet the Altavar. Lord Ypsir has invited you to dine with him in his private suite above us.” He paused a moment. “Nothing says you have to accept, you know.”
He thought about it “Does he know the full extent of who and what I am?”
“No. I thought it would be … judicious not to tell him. And although he has this whole place wired up, my own people are controlling everything there.”
“I thank you for that. In that case, I’ll accept his invitation. Oh, don’t worry. I’ll be a good boy.”
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