It wasn’t, he decided, worth making an issue out of, not in view of everything else that was happening. “That’s why I left you in charge,” he said. “I had confidence in you, Sarha.”
She frowned suspiciously. He sounded sincere. “So you got Mzu, then. I hope it was worth it.”
“For the Confederation I suppose it is. For individuals . . . you’d have to ask them. But then individuals have been dying because of her for some time now.”
“Captain, please access our sensor suite,” Beaulieu said.
“Right.” He rolled in midair, and landed on his acceleration couch. The images from the external sensor clusters expanded into his mind. Wrong. They had to be wrong. “Jesus wept!” His brain was already acting in conjunction with the flight computer’s astrogration program to plot a vector before he’d fully admitted the reality of the tide of rock descending on the planet. “Prepare for acceleration, thirty seconds—mark. We have to leave.” A fast internal sensor check showed him his new passengers hurrying towards couches; images superimposed with purple and yellow trajectory plots that wriggled frantically as he refined their projected trajectory.
“Who did that?” he asked.
“No idea,” Sarha said. “It happened during the battle, we didn’t even know until afterwards. But it sure as hell wasn’t random combat wasp strikes.”
“I’ll monitor the drive tubes,” Joshua said. “Sarha, take systems coverage, please. Liol, you’ve got fire control.”
“Aye, Captain,” Liol said.
It was a strictly neutral tone. Joshua was satisfied with that. He triggered Lady Mac’s fusion drives, bringing them up to a three-gee acceleration.
“Where are we going?” Liol asked.
“Bloody good question,” Joshua said. “For now I just want us out of here. After that, it rather depends on what Ione and the agents decide, I expect.”
* * *
There must be someone who knows. One of you.
We know it is real. We know it is hidden.
Two bodies await. A male and a female. Youthful, splendid. Do you hear them? Do you taste them? Pleading for one of you to enter them. You can. All the riches and pleasures of reality can be yours again. If you have the admission price, one tiny piece of information. That’s all.
She didn’t hide it by herself. She had help from somebody. Probably many. Were you one?
Ah. Yes. You. You are being truthful. You know.
Come then. Come forwards, come through. We reward you with—
He cried out in wonder and misery as he struggled his way into the victim’s agonized nervous system. There was pain, and shame, and humiliation to cope with; tragic, terrible pleas from the body’s true soul. One by one, he faced them down, mending the broken flesh, suppressing and ignoring the protest, until there was only his own shame left. Not so easily abandoned.
“Welcome to the Organization,” said Oscar Kearn. “So, you were part of Mzu’s mission?”
“Yes. I was with her.”
“Good. She’s a clever woman, that Mzu. I’m afraid she’s eluded us once again, thanks to that traitor bitch Barnes. Even so, only the amazingly resourceful can duck an ironberg when it’s falling on their heads. I didn’t realize what I was dealing with before. I don’t suppose she would have helped us even if we had caught her. She’s like that, tough and determined. But now her luck’s run out. You can tell me, can’t you? You know where the Alchemist is.”
“Yes,” Ikela said. “I know where it is.”
* * *
Alkad Mzu floated into the bridge, accompanied by Monica and Samuel. She acknowledged Joshua with a small twitch of her lips, then blinked when she saw Liol. “I didn’t know there were two of you.”
Liol grinned broadly.
“Before we all start arguing over what to do with you, Doctor,” a serjeant said. “I’d like you to confirm the Alchemist does or did exist.”
Alkad tapped her toe on a stikpad beside the captain’s couch, preventing herself from drifting about. “Yes, it exists. And I built it. I wish to Mary I hadn’t, now, but the past is past. My only concern now is that it doesn’t fall into anybody’s hands, not yours, and certainly not the possessed.”
“Very noble,” Sarha said, “from someone who was going to use it to kill an entire planet.”
“They wouldn’t have been killed,” Alkad said wearily. “It was intended to extinguish Omuta’s star, not turn it nova. I’m not an Omutan barbarian; they’re the ones who kill entire worlds.”
“Extinguish a star?” Samuel mused in puzzlement.
“Please don’t ask for details.”
“I propose Dr Mzu is taken back to Tranquillity,” the serjeant said. “We can formalize the observation to insure she doesn’t pass the information on. I don’t think you will anyway, Doctor, but intelligence agencies are highly suspicious entities.”
Monica consulted Samuel. “I can live with that,” she said. “Tranquillity is neutral territory. It isn’t all that different to our original agreement.”
“It isn’t,” Samuel agreed. “But, Doctor, you do realize you cannot be allowed to die. Certainly not until the problem of possession has been resolved.”
“Fine by me,” Alkad said.
“What I mean, Doctor, is that when you are very old, you must be placed in zero-tau to prevent your soul from entering the beyond.”
“I will not give anyone the Alchemist technology, no matter what the circumstances.”
“I’m sure that is your intention at the moment. But how will you feel after a hundred years trapped in the beyond? A thousand? And to be indelicate, the choice is not yours to make. It is ours. You lost the right to self-determination when you built the Alchemist. If you give yourself enough power to make a galaxy fear you and what you can achieve, you abrogate that right to those whom your actions affect.”
“I agree,” the serjeant said. “You will be placed in zero-tau before you die.”
“Why not just put me in now?” Alkad said crustily.
“Don’t tempt me,” Monica said. “I know the kind of contempt you moron intellectuals hold the government services in. Well listen good, Doctor, we exist to protect the majority so they can run around living their lives as decently and as best they can. We protect them from shits like you, who never fucking stop to think what you’re doing.”
“You didn’t protect my bloody planet, did you!” Alkad yelled back. “And don’t you dare lecture me on responsibility. I’m prepared to die to stop the Alchemist being used by anybody else, especially your imperialist Kingdom. I know my responsibilities.”
“You do now. Now you realize what a mistake you made, now people are dying just to keep your precious arse safe.”
“Okay, that’s it,” Joshua said loudly. “We’re all agreed where the doc is going, end of discussion. Nobody is going to start shouting about moral philosophy on my bridge. We’re all tired, we’re all emotional. Pack it in, the pair of you. I’m going to plot a course to Tranquillity, you go to your cabins and cool off. We’ll be home inside of two days.”
“Understood,” Monica said through clenched teeth. “And . . . thank you for getting us off. It was—”
“Professional?”
She almost snapped back at him, but that grin . . . “Professional.”
Alkad cleared her throat. “I’m sorry,” she said apologetically. “But there is a problem. We can’t go straight back to Tranquillity.”
Joshua massaged his temple and asked: “Why not?” if only to stop Monica from flying at Mzu’s throat.
“The Alchemist itself.”
“What about it?” Samuel asked.
“We have to collect it.”
“All right,” Joshua said in a far-from-reasonable tone. “Why?”
“Because it isn’t secure where it is.”
“It’s managed to stay secure for thirty years. Jesus, just take the secret of its location to zero-tau with you. If the agencies haven’t found it by now, they never will.”
&
nbsp; “They won’t have to look anymore, nor will the possessed, especially if our current situation continues for more than a few years.”
“Go on, we may as well hear it all.”
“There were three ships on our strike mission against Omuta,” Alkad said. “The Beezling, the Chengho, and the Gombari. Beezling was the Alchemist’s deployment vessel, I was on board; the other two were our escort frigates. We were intercepted by blackhawks before we could deploy the Alchemist. They destroyed the Gombari, and hit us and the Chengho pretty badly. We were left for dead in interstellar space. Neither of us could jump, and the nearest inhabited star was seven light-years away.
“After the attack, we spent a couple of days repairing our internal systems, then we rendezvoused. It was Ikela and Captain Prager who came up with the eventual solution. Chengho was smaller than Beezling, it didn’t need as many energy patterning nodes to perform a ZTT jump. So the crew removed some of the Beezling’s intact nodes and installed them in the Chengho. We didn’t have the proper tools for that kind of job; and then the nodes had different power ratings and performance factors, they had to be completely reprogrammed. It took us three and a half weeks, but we did it. We rebuilt ourselves a ship that could make a ZTT jump—not very well, and not very far, but it was functional. That was when things started to get difficult. The Chengho was too small to take both crews, even for just a small jump. There was only one life-support capsule, and it could hold eight of us at a push. We knew we couldn’t risk a flight back to Garissa, the nodes would never last that long, and we guessed that Omuta would have launched some kind of big attack by then. After all, that’s why we’d been dispatched in the first place, to stop them. So we jumped to the nearest inhabited star system, Crotone. The idea was that we’d charter a ship and get back to Garissa that way. Of course, when we arrived at Crotone, we heard about the genocide.
“Ikela and Prager had even formulated a worst case option. Just in case, they said. We’d brought some antimatter with us on the Chengho; if we sold that together with the frigate it would fetch millions. Assuming the Garissan government no longer existed, we would have all the money we needed to operate independently for decades.”
“The Stromboli Separatist Council,” Samuel said suddenly.
“Right,” Alkad acknowledged. “That’s who we sold it to.”
“Ah, we never did find out how they got their antimatter. They blew up two of Crotone’s low-orbit port stations with the stuff.”
“After we left, yes,” Alkad said.
“So Ikela took the money and founded T’Opingtu.”
“Correct; once we found out that the Confederation Assembly granted the Dorados to the survivors of the genocide, all seven navy officers were given an equal share. The plan was for them to invest the money in various companies, the profits from which would be used to help fund the partizans. We needed committed nationalists to crew the ship that they were supposed to prepare for me. After that, they would buy or charter a combat-capable starship to complete the Alchemist mission. As you know, Ikela didn’t fulfill the last part of the plan. I don’t know about the others.”
“Why wait thirty years?” Joshua asked. “Why didn’t you just hire a combat-capable starship as soon as you had the money from the sale of the frigate, and go straight back to the Beezling?”
“Because we couldn’t be sure exactly where it was. You see, we didn’t just repair the Chengho. There were thirty people and the Alchemist left behind on the Beezling. Suppose the Chengho didn’t make it, or suppose we were caught and interrogated by the CNIS or some other agency? There was even the possibility the blackhawks might return. We had to plan for all those factors as well, the remaining crew had to be given their chance, too.”
“They went into zero-tau,” Joshua said. “How does that prevent you from knowing the exact coordinate?”
“Yes, obviously they went into zero-tau, but that’s not all. We also repaired their reaction drive. They flew a vector to an uninhabited star which was only two and a half light-years away.”
“Jesus, a sub-lightspeed journey through interstellar space? You’ve got to be kidding. That’s impossible, it would take—”
“Twenty-eight years, we estimated.”
“Ah!” Realization came to Joshua like the silent detonation of Norfolk Tears after it hit the stomach. He felt a surge of admiration for those lost desperate crews of thirty years ago. Not caring what the odds were, just going for it. “They used antimatter propulsion.”
“Yes. We transferred every gram from our remaining combat wasps into the Beezling’s confinement chambers. It was enough to accelerate them up to about nine per cent lightspeed. So now tell me, Captain, how difficult would it be to locate a ship that is moving away from its last known coordinate at eight or nine per cent lightspeed? And if you did find it, how would you rendezvous?”
“Not possible. Okay, you have to wait until the Beezling decelerated and arrived at that uninhabited star. How come you didn’t make a dash for them two years ago?”
“Because we weren’t sure just how efficient the drive would be over such a long period of use. Two years gave us an adequate safety margin; and of course as it turned out, the sanctions would be over. There was always a remote chance the Confederation Navy blockade squadron would detect us, after all it’s their job to be looking for sanction-buster starships emerging in odd places around Omuta. So after we sold the Chengho we decided on thirty years.”
“You mean the Beezling is just orbiting that star waiting for you to make contact?” Liol asked.
“Yes. Providing everything worked as it was supposed to. They are supposed to wait for another five years; the time is irrelevant in zero-tau, but the support systems cannot last indefinitely. If they hadn’t been contacted by then, either by myself and the Chengho crew, or the Garissan government, they were to destroy the Alchemist and start signalling for help. Uninhabited star systems within the Confederation boundaries are inspected on a regular basis by navy patrol ships to make sure they aren’t being used by antimatter production stations. They would have been rescued eventually.”
Joshua glanced around to the serjeant, wishing the construct had some way of displaying emotion; he’d like to know what Ione made of the story. “Makes sense,” he said. “What do you want to do?”
“We have to see if the Beezling completed its journey,” the serjeant said.
“And if it has?” Samuel asked.
“Then the Alchemist must be destroyed. After that, any surviving crew will be taken back to Tranquillity.”
“Question, Doc,” Joshua said. “If anybody sees the Alchemist, will that give them a clue to its nature?”
“No. You have no worries on that score, Captain. There is however someone among the crew who could tell you how to build another. His name is Peter Adul, he will have to remain in Tranquillity with me. After that, you will be safe again.”
“Okay, what’s the star’s coordinate?”
It was a long time before Alkad said: “Mother Mary, this is not what was meant to be.”
“Nothing ever is, Doc. I learned that long ago.”
“Ha! You’re too young.”
“Depends how you fill the years, doesn’t it?”
Alkad Mzu datavised the coordinate over.
* * *
A wormhole terminus is opening, Tranquillity announced.
At the time, Ione was standing knee deep in the warm water of the cove, rubbing Haile’s flank with a big yellow bath sponge. She straightened her back and began wringing out the sponge. Her real attention was focused on a point in space a hundred and twenty thousand kilometres away from the habitat where the vacuum’s gravity density was building rapidly. Three SD platforms orbiting the emergence zone locked their X-ray lasers on to the terminus as it expanded. Five patrol blackhawks accelerated in at four gees.
A large voidhawk slipped out of the two-dimensional rent. Oenone, Confederation Navy ship SLV-66150, requesting approach and docking
permission, it said. Our official flight authentication code follows.
Granted, Tranquillity replied after it verified the code. The SD platforms were switched back to alert status. Three of the blackhawks resumed their patrol, while the remaining two curved around to form an escort as Oenone accelerated in towards the habitat.
“I’m going to have to leave you,” Ione said.
Jay Hilton’s vexed face peeped over the top of Haile’s gleaming white back. “What is it this time?” she asked petulantly.
“Affairs of state.” Ione started wading towards the shore. She scooped some water up and tried to flush the sand out of her bikini top.
“You always say that.”
Ione gave the disgruntled girl a forlorn smile. “Because it always is, these days.” Sorry, she added.
Haile formshifted the tip of an arm into a human hand and waved. Goodbye, Ione Saldana. I have much sorrow you are leaving, my endlegs itch like hell.
Haile!
I form a communication wrongness? I have shame.
Not wrong, exactly.
Gladness. That was a Joshua Calvert expression. Much favoured.
Ione snapped her teeth together. That bloody Calvert! Anger gave way to something more confusing, a sort of resentment . . . possibly. Hundreds of light-years away, and he still intrudes. It would be. Please don’t use it around Jay.
Understanding is me. I have a great many human emphasis phrases conveyed by Joshua Calvert.
I’ll bet you have.
I want properness in my communication. I ask your assistance in reviewing my word collection. You may edit me.
Yes, all right.
Much gladness!
Ione took another pace, then laughed. Reviewing everything Joshua had said to the young Kiint would take hours. Hours she hadn’t been spending on the beach of late. Haile was becoming very crafty.
Jay leaned against her friend, watching Ione put her sandals on and start back up the path to the tube station. There was a slightly distracted expression on the woman’s face, that Jay knew meant she was busy talking to the habitat personality. She didn’t like to dwell on the topic. More than likely, it would be the possessed again. That was all the adults talked about these days, and it was never reassuring talk.
The Night's Dawn Trilogy Page 238