by Julian May
5
FLEET SECTOR BASE, HUMAN POLITY
SECTOR 12: STAR 12-340-001 [NESPELEM]
PLANET 2 [OKANAGON]
16 CHEWELAH [9 JUNE] 2078
Yes. I took over one of the unmanned maintenance craft from Chopaka Moonbase. I’m now in position docked against one of the meteorsweeper satellites. When the Orb courier exits the hype into c-space I’ll be well within metacoercive range.
Give me credit … I’ve been working on the operation night&day for nearly a week.
I’m sorry. I’ve experienced a certain amount of emotional tension.
My coercive power will be more than adequate to control the cerebroenergized pilot. But if the target herself should discover the source of the malfunction before the point of no return and abort the maneuver she may not only survive but also be able to identify me. I wish to hell Parni were here! If we could do the job in metaconcert I’d feel more confident.
Right. Well this plan of mine is the most effective one I could come up with but it’s not a total lockup. Even if she can’t prevent the sneetch&splat there’s still a remote possibility that she’ll pull some creative stunt [image] and stave off death.
!!!You didn’t tell us that!!!
But … you are the invincible one.
If the deaths are truly imperative you should think again about letting Parni act alone. He’s strong but he’s dangerously overconfident and too fond of bizarre stunts.
I’m not so sure about that. Remember how—
Yes … Forgive me. But I worry. Single units utilized in vital tasks such as these leave no margin for safety. Even the Hydraentire would be inadequate to deal with a metaconcert of three or more Grand Masters or an alerted paramount mind.
But this brings up an important point: You promised that I/we would soon have help. New Ones. Subordinate minds to amplify Hydra’s energy.
And I will control them! You promised.
Will you be able to continue your surveillance and assistance?
Yes. Well the time is getting short. I must withdraw.
Goodbye Fury.
The Commander-in-Chief of the Twelfth Fleet and his fellow Rebel, the Dirigent of Okanagon, stood side by side in companionable silence on the observation deck of the Space Needle, awaiting the arrival of their mutual nemesis, the head of the Panpolity Directorate for Unity.
Under different circumstances, Owen Blanchard would have enjoyed looking out over his bailiwick on a cloudless winter afternoon. The Pasayten high plains region where the Sector Base was situated enjoyed a light breeze, and the air temperature was mild enough to make extra clothing unnecessary. Most of the facilities were underground, but the physical plant of the starbase extended farther than the eye could see, a vast conglomeration of circular landing pads, landscaped artificial lakes, docking facilities, service buildings, and ground transport and supply stations.
The peaceful Galactic Milieu had no warships, but a myriad of other superluminal craft belonging to five races were parked at the pad perimeters or trundling to or from the massive elevators that gave access to the infrastructure. Occasionally a starship took off or landed with majestic slowness. Among the Human Polity vessels were small, high-df government couriers, research and survey ships of every description, cruisers equipped with modest photon weaponry that policed the human star systems within Sector Twelve and succored vessels in distress, and even enormous colonization transports serving pioneer planets.
Owen Blanchard’s idiosyncratic variant of the starfleet uniform reflected his nonmilitary mindset and was so simple as to be virtually indistinguishable from civilian garb. He wore a blouson of classic midnight-blue worsted with six pencil-thin golden stripes circling the lower sleeves. A small badge with the Twelfth’s insignia was fastened above his breast pocket. His shirt was white and his cravat an old-fashioned dark four-in-hand. Although he had reluctantly accepted rejuvenation, the Fleet Commander had chosen to retain the snowy hair and weathered countenance he felt he had earned.
In his youth, prior to the Great Intervention, Owen Blanchard had been an outstanding concert violinist. But the nonhuman Simbiari Proctors who supervised humanity throughout its long probation took note of his formidable intellect and higher mindpowers and denied him an artistic career. Instead he was forced to become a dynamic-field physicist. As the Proctors revised the course of Owen’s life for what they believed was the greater good of the Galactic Milieu, they unwittingly created one of the principal architects of the Metapsychic Rebellion.
The frustrated musician became a brilliant designer of hyperspatial drive mechanisms. In time, Owen Blanchard was chosen to head the Human Polity’s first Academy of Commercial Astrogation on the planet Assawompsett. Later, after humanity was fully enfranchised in the Milieu, he became Commander-in-Chief of the Polity’s first Sector Fleet, the Twelfth, based on Okanagon. He had now held that position for twenty-four years, during which time the Thirteenth Fleet was established on the planet Elysium and the Fourteenth on Assawompsett; but the Twelfth remained the Human Polity’s largest and most important interstellar flotilla.
In his leisure time, Owen Blanchard still played the violin … when he was not secretly working on ways and means of extricating his race from a galactic confederation dominated by exotic beings.
As they waited, the rugged old man and the handsome younger woman idly exerted their farsight, watching a huge cosmic exploration vessel slowly descend for a rare landside docking. Ordinarily such starships were serviced from one of the three orbital stations encircling Okanagon rather than on the planetary surface. Owen told the Dirigent that this particular explorer was scheduled to undergo a complete refit before heading out on an extended tour of potential human colonial worlds located in the Perseus Spur of the Milky Way, ten thousand lightyears distant Following the scandal involving inadequate Krondak surveys of certain Twelfth Sector worlds, the Human Polity had insisted upon doing its own inspections before new colonies were established.
The enormous starship was over two kilometers long, composed of dozens of disparate modules connected by a crazy network of struts. To Dirigent Patricia Castellane, who had been educated as a chemist, the craft looked more like a gigantic model of a polysaccharide molecule than an astrocarrier. Because of thei
r size and peculiar shape, cosmic explorers lacked sigma shielding of their antigravity rho-field envelope, a modification that was now mandatory on other fleet starships, and had to land “hot.” For safety’s sake (and to spare the landing-pad surface) the explorer descended into one of the large artificial lakes at the northern perimeter of the base. A great cloud of steam ballooned skyward as the burning purple rho-field touched the water. Then the ship’s generators shut down and a minnow-school of tugs popped out of lakeside bunkers and prepared to haul the explorer to its subterranean refitting bay.
“I should be blasé by now,” Patricia Castellane remarked, “but the sight of one of those monstrous things hovering in the air still gives me the shivers. Look at it—a good-sized city full of scientists and their equipment, weighing millions of tons—but it floated down as lightly and silently as an autumn leaf. A hundred years ago we would have called that a miracle. Now it’s just another working example of dynamic-field engineering, courtesy of the generous exotic races of the Galactic Milieu. On our own, we might not have developed dy-field technology for another century—if at all.”
“The point is moot,” Owen said, a surprising bitterness in his voice. “We took off and ran with Milieu science and we left the nonhumans in the dust. We’re made of superior stuff and we know it, and so do the exotics. But the human race is also flawed and immature, and therein lies the crux of our Rebel dilemma: Are we better off inside the Milieu or out of it?”
“You know my answer, Owen, and I don’t mind telling you that I’m getting damned sick and tired of the question.” Patricia gave her long chestnut hair an emphatic flip. She was tall, dressed in a trouser suit of forest-green faux leather ornamented with trapunto work. Her blouse of ecru lace was pinned at the throat with an antique Spanish sardonyx cameo.
“I think we’re wasting time on philosophical debates and shillyshallying,” she said, “and so do most of the other younger Rebel magnates. The exotic races are holding us back, stifling us! The way the Concilium is currently structured, the Human Polity is continually being reined in by exotic restrictions. The Krondaku are stodgy archconservatives, the Simbiari are jealous of us, and the Gi are a gang of sex-crazed loony-tunes. But their combined voting bloc adds up to forty-four hundred, while ours is only a tenth of that. Even if all the friendly Poltroyan magnates vote with us, we still have no chance to win any important floor fight. This Unity controversy is the last straw! Secession is our only option.”
He smiled at her vehemence and his reply was mild. “Are we really ready to abandon the Milieu for the sake of human sovereignty? I can tell you this for certain, Pat—if we tried to secede tomorrow, we’d fail. The exotic minds in metaconcert could overpower us, force us to retreat back to our own solar system, and keep us there in quarantine forever.”
“I wonder if they’d really be able to do that?” the Dirigent said softly, turning away from him to look down at the crowded plaza below the Space Needle. “Even if they took away our starships and other high technology, we’d still have our brains. We could build it all again. They’d never slaughter us outright—it’s contrary to their damned Unity ethic. Whatever means of mental or physical interdiction they used, we could eventually overcome.”
“Perhaps,” the Fleet Commander admitted. “But it might take generations.”
“We can’t compromise on the Unity question,” she said urgently. “We can’t let the exotics force us into this—this pad-fistic mental intercourse of theirs. We have a right to evolve in our own way, flaws and all.”
“I agree. But they’ve said they won’t coerce us into Unity …”
“No. They’re more insidious than that, with their talk of mutual love and perfect civilization! They’re setting a trap, reminding us how morally deficient we still are, promising cosmic harmony, an end to aggression, paradise in the here and now.” She turned back to him, her expression stony. “But the exotics are deceivers, Owen. They’d make us docile slaves of the Milieu, destroy human individuality, and subordinate our superior minds to their own stunted view of reality.”
The Fleet Commander pretended to wince. “I hope you won’t make the point too emphatically with Director Anne Remillard and her people when they haul me on the carpet for neglecting to suppress disloyalty.”
The Dirigent of Okanagon smiled contritely. “Well, maybe not this time around. I came here today hoping to make things easier for you and the Fleet in Remillard’s inquiry, not to stir up a fresh hornet’s nest. I promise to be ever so mealymouthed and smarmy.”
“That’ll be the day.” Owen consulted his wrist chronograph. “The Directorate courier ship is due to break through the superficies into c-space just about now. It’ll do a VIP docking right here at the Space Needle in less than five minutes. I really would appreciate your support, Pat. But remember: De la diplomatic, et encore la diplomatic, et toujours la diplomatic!”
She embraced him lightly and kissed his cheek. “You betcha, mon cher commandant. Together we’ll bedazzle the inquisitors with our arsenal of good and worthy shit. We’ll prove that Rebellion equates with virtue—and that we don’t really mean it when we skulk and plot and mutter about seceding from the Galactic Milieu.”
Owen threw back his head and roared with laughter.
“Seriously,” Patricia said, “my image is just as smutchy as yours in the eyes of the Concilium. I welcome this chance to defend Okanagon against critics who view us as a cesspool of sedition.”
“I doubt that this inquiry will be that stringent. I have a feeling we’re all going to be terribly decorous and nice. The Unity Directorate has no official mandate to purge Rebel elements of the Fleet. At worst, they can require that the operant officers submit to attitude readjustment courses.”
Patricia rolled her eyes and began to chant in a mocking falsetto. “Thou shalt not mistrust nor despise thy inhuman neighbor! Thou shalt not impute that Teilhardian Unanimization is a crock of shit. Thou shalt not worry thy silly little head about getting into a permanent mind-meld with exotics when sweet Unity eventually prevails … And thou especially shalt not contemplate the inconvenient fact that humanity has greater mental potential than the coadunate races, and would be better off outside their damned confederation.”
“Time is on our side, Pat. The Concilium backed off on outlawing us Rebels for a very good reason: The action would have alienated most of nonoperant humanity and a fairish proportion of the metas. But the day will come when we can compel the Milieu to let us go our own way.”
“Maybe. But you’d still better pray that we manage to get the CE hats built without getting caught.” She turned away from him, took out a small compact, and touched up her lip gloss. “Well, I’m as lovely as I’ll ever be. Bring on the Inspector General, and we’ll—”
The external annunciator said: “Vessel emergency. Vessel emergency. Space Needle personnel prepare for sigma cover.”
“Oh, shit,” Owen muttered. His mind farspoke Ground Navigation Control: ThisisCommanderwhatemergency?
A laconic telepathic reply came from the chief controller: Incoming courier HU 0-652 ex NAVCON in uncontrolled full-power inertialess descent severe atmospheric ablation precludes RF com or mental hail NAVCON unable trigger emergency upsilon translation and tractor-beam retrieval of impacting craft unfeasible deploying ground-defense sigma.
Frozen with horror, Patricia asked Owen: Isit AnneRemillardship?
Yes.
Abruptly, the sky above the headquarters stratotower darkened to ultramarine blue and the structures and landing pads surrounding it faded into ghostly insubstantiality. The Space Needle and everything within a radius of three kilometers of it had been enclosed within the protective hemisphere of an enormous sigma-field. A moment later smaller sigmas, dimly visible to Owen and Patricia as mirrored half-bubbles, shielded every building and parked spacecraft within the estimated impact area.
“Can you farsee the ship, Pat? I’m damned if I can make it out through the sigma.”
She
nodded grimly, her face tilted toward the sky. “It’s vectoring in vertically. A flaming broad arrow.”
“No tumbling?”
“Straight down, like it’s on rails.”
“Then the situation must involve more than rho-field generator malfunction. It could be that the pilot is deliberately augering in, overriding the approach control backups. Come on!”
He seized her hand and pulled her into the observation platform’s lift. As they whisked down to ground level the car vibrated to a faint ground tremor.
“That’s it,” Patricia murmured. Her eyes were unfocused, her ultrasenses concentrated on the accident site. “Ground Control has cut the big sigma … The debris is right at the bubble tangent, almost due east. There’s no crater. The ship hit the shield and slid on down.”
The elevator door opened and the two of them ran across the broad main lobby. Appalled humans and exotics, most of them in uniform, had gathered into small groups, listening to audible and telepathic announcements of the disaster.
The Fleet Commander and the Dirigent clashed outside. Sirens of emergency ground vehicles wailed in the distance. Because of the danger of residual ionization or anomalous dy-fields shorting out their generators, rhocraft were prohibited from approaching the scene of a superluminal carrier crash until their safety could be assured.
At the edge of the Needle’s east plaza was a rank of staff eggs. Their drivers stood together gaping at the thin column of smoke in the distance. Owen’s coercion scattered the bystanders and he hauled open the door to one of the rhocraft. “Breaking regulations,” he said. “But to hell with it. The courier’s burnt and blasted to bits. There’s no danger of field-suppression or explosion.”
Moments later he and Patricia were in the air, hovering over the scene of the crash. They were the first ones to arrive.
“My sweet Lord,” the Dirigent whispered. “Is that a body?” Then she cried, “There! Do you see it?”
Cursing, Owen Blanchard maneuvered the egg to set down as close as possible to the thing Patricia’s farsight had indicated. They climbed out and stumbled through smoldering grass littered with shattered cerametal and half-melted fragments of nameless detritus. The courier wreckage had fallen into a landscaped area near the edge of a pad. Some of the ornamental trees were still on fire. Others were blackened skeletons.