“Yes?” she asked.
Oscar recognized Tandra from the employment file Liatris had extracted out of Nik’s management net.
“We’d like to ask you some questions,” Tomansio said.
Tandra rolled her eyes. “Not another lot. What do you want to ask?”
“May we come in, please?” Oscar asked.
“I thought you Living Dream sods didn’t bother asking.”
“Nonetheless, ma’am, we’d like to come in.”
“Fine!” Tandra grunted and pushed the door fully open. She stomped off down the small hall inside. “Come and join the party. One of your lot’s already here.”
Oscar exchanged a nervous glance with the others and followed Tandra inside. He reached the small lounge and stopped dead, emitting a potent burst of shock into the gaiafield. The woman with active biononics was sitting on the couch with a happy twin on either side of her. She wore an immaculately cut major’s uniform and wore it well, the epitome of a career officer. Martyn was bending down to offer her a cup of coffee.
“Hello, Oscar.” The Cat smiled. “Long time, no see. So what have you been up to for the last thousand years?”
He let out a rueful sigh. Come on, you knew this would happen at some point. “I was in suspension, where you should be.”
“Bored with it,” the Cat said. She glanced at Tomansio and Beckia. Oscar had never seen the Knights Guardian so taken aback; they were even more startled than he was. “My people,” the Cat said mockingly. “Welcome.”
“I’m afraid not,” Tomansio said. “We are working for Oscar.”
“Surely I override that. I created you.”
“They have conviction in their principles,” Oscar said mildly. “Something to do with strength …”
The Cat gave a delighted laugh. “I always did like you.”
“What is this?” Martyn asked, looking from the Cat to Oscar. “I thought you people were all the same.”
“Oh, we are,” the Cat said.
“We are not,” Oscar countered forcefully.
“Mixal, Freddy,” Tandra called. “Come here.”
The Cat’s smile was joyous as her hold around both children tightened. “I like the twins,” she said mildly.
Martyn started forward as Mixal and Freddy began to twist about in her unyielding grip. Tomansio intercepted him fast, restraining him. “Don’t move,” he growled.
Beckia gripped Tandra. “No,” she warned as the woman tried to lunge at her children.
“Let go of me,” Tandra shouted.
“If you move again, I will shoot you,” Oscar told her flatly, hating himself for doing it, but he had no choice. Besides, it might just shock her into obedience. She’d never understand that the twins’ only chance of surviving the next five minutes was to let him and his team take charge.
“Big words,” the Cat said.
“I don’t have many options,” Oscar said.
“How’s Paula?”
“I thought you’d seen her.”
“Not quite. Not yet.”
“There’s always a next time, huh?”
“You should know that better even than I.”
“You know, last time I saw you on the plane to Far Away, you weren’t so bad.”
“I assure you I was,” the Cat said.
“Strange, because that was you now. The you that founded the Knights Guardian is in your personal memory’s future.”
“That sounds horribly convoluted and confusing, darling.”
“Thinking about it, you you never actually met me on the plane to Far Away. Your memories come from the day before you were sent to Randtown.”
“And your point is?”
“Interesting that you’ve researched yourself.”
“Know your enemies.”
“Ah, now that actually does make sense. Especially with the number you have by now.”
“Whereas you live in a happy universe.”
Oscar gave her a lopsided grin. “It has you in it.”
“Ouch. That was personal, darling.”
“Of course it was personal. After what happened on the plane between us, how could it be anything else? Oh, wait, you don’t have that memory.”
The Cat actually looked quite startled. “You have to be kidding, darling. You don’t even like girls.”
“No. But as you said, you like me, and racing toward almost certain death triggers some reflexes no matter what. I just had to work with what was available.”
“Now you’re being insulting.”
Oscar kept his face perfectly blank. “No, I’m still being personal. After all, whose kid did you go and have after the Starflyer crash?”
“Kid?” the Cat spluttered. “Me? With you?”
“What is wrong with you people!” Tandra screamed. “Just go, all of you. Go and leave us alone.”
Oscar held a finger up to the distraught woman, then ignored her. “If you didn’t research that bit, ask the Knights Guardian here you created. Was there a gap in your history around then?”
The Cat glanced at Tomansio, who was still holding back Martyn. “Actually, there is a chunk of your time line missing following the crash,” he said slowly. “Nobody knows what you were doing then.”
“Fuck off,” the Cat snapped at him. “And you”—she glared at Oscar—“you don’t know, either. You were a memorycell dangling on Paula’s chain for a thousand years.”
“The kid visited me after I was re-lifed. Told me the whole story.”
“Stop it. Now.”
“Okay,” he said reasonably. “Did you have time to ask these good people anything?”
“You cannot screw with my mind.”
Oscar winked. “Already done the body.” He turned to Tandra. “Did she ask you about Araminta?”
Tandra stretched her arms out toward the couch, where the twins were still squirming ineffectually. “Please?”
Oscar extended his arm. A red laser shone through the skin on his forefinger, splashing a dot onto Freddy’s forehead. Everyone froze. Freddy started wailing, curling up tighter against the Cat, believing she would protect him. If only you knew how wrong that instinct is, Oscar thought miserably. “Did she?”
“You won’t,” the Cat said; she gave Tandra a brisk smile. “He’s the good guy; he’s not going to shoot children. That’s what I do. And I’m very good at it.”
“Well, I wouldn’t shoot ours,” Oscar said with a cheerful tone. He rather enjoyed the venomous expression on the Cat’s face. “What happened before I got here?”
“Nothing!” Martyn bellowed. “In Ozzie’s name, stop this, please. Please! They’re just children.”
Oscar looked straight at the Cat, unflinching. His target laser switched off. “We’re going to share the knowledge, and then we’re both going to leave.”
“How very weak of you,” the Cat said.
“How very tactical,” Oscar said. “If you resist, the three of us will turn on you. Some of us may suffer bodyloss, but ANA will have us re-lifed in half a day. You, on the other hand, will certainly die. The information will die with you, unused. The Accelerators will not recover Araminta, and you … Oh, yes, what was it now? Message from Paula. She paid a visit to the ice moon Accelerator station. There were several of you in suspension there. There aren’t anymore.”
The Cat gave the crying twins a pointed glance.
“Possible end of the galaxy against two lives,” Oscar said. “No contest. Remember, I was a serving navy officer. I’m used to this situation. Necessity always outweighs sentiment. I blew up Hanko’s sun, which killed an entire planet.”
“Actually, darling, I killed Hanko, but let’s not go into that right now.”
“You don’t get to go into anything. You have one choice—walk away or die. And think about this: If Living Dream or the Accelerators win, your real body will never come out of suspension. The Earth will have been converted to pure energy by the Void’s boundary to fuel some idiot’s daydream long befo
re that scheduled day comes.”
Oscar turned his back on the Cat. And how many have done that and lived? As she didn’t immediately open fire on him, he said to Tandra: “Tell me about Araminta.”
“She was here,” Martyn blurted. “That bitch. She’s the reason all this has happened, and she came here! Here in our home.”
“When?”
“The night before the fight in Bodant Park,” Tandra said wearily. “She said she was frightened of the crowd in Bodant Park and hadn’t got anywhere else to go. We let her sleep here. On the couch.”
“Did she tell you she was the Second Dreamer?”
“No. I still can’t believe it. She’s just a messed-up girl.”
“She’s a lot more than that. How did she get here?”
“She said she walked.”
“I never believed that,” Martyn grumbled.
“Did you see a trike or a taxi?” Oscar asked him.
“No, but it’s a long way to walk from Bodant Park. And she lied about everything else.”
“Okay, and when she left?”
“She walked,” Tandra said. “I saw her go. There was no trike or anything. She was all alone.”
“Where was she going?”
“She didn’t say.” Tandra hesitated. “I thought it might be a man. She used my makeup, took a long time. She looked great when she left.”
“Ah,” Beckia said. “Did she look like herself?”
“Not really; she changed a lot. Her hair was real dark. Her own color is better for her.”
“Clever.”
“Okay, then.” Oscar looked back at the Cat. “You got anything else to ask?”
“Who’s she screwing?” the Cat asked.
“I don’t know,” Tandra said. “I hadn’t seen her for ages. It was a surprise when she came here.”
“So you’re her best friend? The one she turns to in a crisis?”
Tandra shrugged. “I guess.”
“I’ve heard enough.” The Cat released the twins and stood in one swift motion. Oscar blinked. She really had moved fast.
Must be running accelerants, he thought.
Tandra and Martyn rushed for their children.
The Cat gave Oscar a wicked grin. “Be seeing you.”
“I’ll tell the grandkids you’re coming. There’s lots of them. It’s been a thousand years, after all.”
Her chuckle sounded genuine. “You know, maybe it is possible.”
Oscar braced himself. If she was going to do anything, it would be now. The moment passed, and the Cat left.
Beckia let out a low whistle as she relaxed.
Tomansio put his hand on Oscar’s shoulder. “You know, you’re almost as crazy as she is. Er, you and her on the plane. Did that really …”
“A gentleman never tells,” Oscar said solemnly.
“Fuck me.”
“When this is over, I’ll take you up on that. But I think we’d better leave now.” His field scan showed him the Cat’s stolen capsule rising from the pad. Once again he tensed up. Would she fly over the house and blast away at it?
Tandra and Martyn had huddled up protectively, hugging their children hard. The twins were sobbing in distress.
“Take my advice,” Oscar said to them. “Leave here right now. Go stay with friends or in a hotel, anywhere, just not here. There will be more like us coming.”
“Ozzie curse you straight to hell, you bastards,” Martyn hissed furiously. There were tears running down his face.
“I’ve met Ozzie,” Oscar said quietly. “He’s nothing like everyone today thinks he is.”
“Just go,” Tandra implored.
Oscar led Tomansio and Beckia back to their borrowed capsule. As soon as they left the little drycoral house behind, he called Paula.
“The Cat’s here.”
“Are you sure?”
Oscar shuddered. “Oh, yeah. We had quite a chat.”
“And you’re still alive. I’m impressed.”
“Yeah, well, I managed to throw in a cosmic-sized distraction. It put her off her game for a while.”
“Is she joining the hunt for Araminta?”
“Yes.”
“Figures. The Accelerators are desperate to acquire her.”
“I thought we are, too.”
“We are. It has become imperative.”
“I’m doing my best. I’m still hopeful she might just call me. She’s not quite the superwoman everyone thinks.”
“I never believed she was. What’s your next move?”
“We’re going to visit a Mr. Bovey, Liatris has uncovered some kind of connection between him and Araminta.”
“Okay, keep me informed.”
“What are you doing?”
“Don’t worry; I’m on my way to Viotia.”
“I thought I was doing this so you could keep a low profile.”
“That time is now officially over.”
As he approached the Ocisen fleet, Kazimir maintained a single hyperspace communication link back to ANA. He knew the ExoProtectorate Council was expecting him to provide it with a real-time progress review of the engagement, but that would have given Ilanthe too much information. The Prime ships traveling with the Ocisen Starslayers would have been warned of his approach. Not, he admitted, that it would have done them any good against his abilities. But then, they were never the true threat. Something else would be out there watching, sending precious information on the nature of the deterrence fleet back to the Accelerators. He was sure of it.
Kazimir matched velocity with the vast alien armada and began to examine the ships. With his sensor functions, detection was easy; over two thousand eight hundred Ocisen ships were racing through interstellar space at four and a half light-years an hour, including nine hundred Starslayers. His perception infiltrated the hulls, exposing the weapons they carried, enough quantumbuster types to wipe out most of the Greater Commonwealth worlds should they ever reach their destination. But nothing more, no postphysical systems they’d chanced upon and retro-engineered, which was a relief. He switched his attention to the thirty-seven Prime ships accompanying them; they used a sophisticated hyperdrive configured to keep their distortion to an absolute minimum. Their weapons were considerably more advanced than anything the Ocisens possessed, effectively equal to a Commonwealth Navy Capital-class ship. But that was it. They didn’t pose a danger to him. And there were no other ships, no clandestine ultradrive-powered observers keeping watch, no unaccounted hyperspace links within a light-year of the Ocisen fleet. Each of the Prime ships had a hyperspace link opened to some location back around Commonwealth space; he could sense them, slender threads stretched across the quantum fields, pulsing with information.
The Prime ships were the observers, he decided. Presumably they wouldn’t expect him to be able to eliminate all thirty-seven of them simultaneously. Well, that was their first mistake.
Kazimir manifested extra sensor functions into five of the Prime starships. In spacetime they were barely the size of a neutron, but they could receive all the inter-Prime communications with the hulls. Every Prime ship had a controlling immotile that took the job of a smartcore in human ships, governing the technology directly; it also instructed the immotiles. The ships represented a microcosm of Prime society. Pretechnology, the Primes had communicated by touching their upper-body stalks, allowing nerve impulses to flow between them. That had been superseded by simple electronic carriers, allowing immotiles to extend their immediate control over vast distances.
Kazimir began to read the digitized impulses. The Commonwealth had a lot of experience with inter-Prime communication. The navy had developed a whole range of disruption routines and electronic warfare techniques. If the Primes ever escaped the barriers at the Dyson Pair and posed a threat again, they would find their thoughts literally snuffed out.
The first thing that was apparent was that the Primes in the starships were simple biological hosts to human thoughts. So Paula was right, Kazimir thought
grimly.
“Do you concur with my assessment?” he asked ANA:Governance.
“Yes.”
“Very well.” Within the deluge of the neural directives he was aware of a datastream being encrypted and sent down the ultrasecure hyperspace link to the Commonwealth. There was a lot of sensor data, but again, nothing beyond Capital-class level. “The Accelerators will know I’ve intercepted the fleet when the signal is severed,” he said. “But I can ensure they don’t know the nature of the interception.”
“Proceed.”
Kazimir manifested a series of aggressive function inside each Prime starship and used them to attack the hyperspace communication systems. As the secure links failed, he switched to breaking the hyperdrives themselves. The ships fell back into real spacetime within fifty milliseconds of each other. With their flight ability neutralized, he set about eliminating the onboard weapon systems. It took a second and a half for his aggressor functions to break down the hardware. Then he turned his attention to the Ocisens.
The problem he had was eliminating the military threat the aliens posed without causing catastrophic loss of life. He couldn’t simply destroy the drives of so many ships, because the empire didn’t have the ability to rescue so many of its own kind from such a distance. Instead he manifested specific aggressor functions inside each of the starships and ruined the weapons beyond repair or recovery. Between them, they weren’t left with enough components to make a single laser, let alone the more advanced devices.
Total elapsed time to nullify all two thousand eight hundred starships was eleven seconds, enough for them to realize something was starting to go wrong but denying them any response time. Not that they could have done anything against him even if they had known.
Kazimir let them go. His energy signature flashed back to the area of space where the big Prime ships were floating helplessly. This time he manifested a communication function into one of the ships, its ability identical to the inter-Prime system. Like all human minds, the one occupying the Prime bodies utilized association as its main memory routine.
Kazimir injected: Origin.
Identity.
Purpose.
Each one triggered a deluge of thoughts. Kazimir identified that the animating personality was derived from Chatfield’s mind, his human persona stripped of most emotional traits. His sense of purpose was resolute, as was his devotion to the Accelerators. The Prime ships were to escort the Ocisens and protect them from the Commonwealth Navy’s attempts to intercept, but their most important mission was to report on the appearance of the deterrence fleet, its nature and capability. After that there was no requirement left.
The Void Trilogy 3-Book Bundle Page 150
