by Timothy Zahn
I grimaced. But it was not, I reflected, all that different from the reception I was likely to get when I got back to Earth. “I still want some answers,” I said. “And the harvesting complex is still the place to get them.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “You said there were two reasons you thought it would be worth the risk?”
I nodded. “You seemed concerned earlier about the idea of flying into a place guarded by antiair defenses. Right?”
“Correct.”
“But assuming you’re right about this whole setup being designed by the Modhri for his own benefit, where are those defenses likely to be centered? On the administration center, which holds the records we’re looking for? Or on the access to the harvesting areas, where the coral is?”
“Mmm,” he murmured. “Interesting.”
“Of course, once we’re down you’ll still have to get to the admin areas on foot,” I went on. “You’ll also have to neutralize enough of the weaponry around the access areas to get your people out once they’ve brought in the sub. But as you’ve already pointed out, the Halkas have lost most or all of their air power, which is usually the trickiest part.”
For a long minute Fayr gazed at me, his striped face expressionless. “You humans are without a doubt the most hunch-driven species in the galaxy.”
“Probably,” I agreed. “But for us, it works.”
“It does indeed,” he said, his whiskers stiffening in a tight smile. “Very well. Let us do it.”
SEVENTEEN
We finished blasting our hole and lowered the sub in. It took off with a will, diving deep toward the coral beds and the Halkan subs no doubt already arrayed in its path.
But those defenders would be mostly civilians, whether they had some bizarre group mind helping them or not. The attackers were warriors, and I had no doubt that the Bellidos would make it through.
Especially with us throwing in a double helping of chaos at the other end of the rabbit hole. With the lifter again hugging our flank we took off, flew past the mass of ground vehicles still uselessly trying to get to us, and made for the harvesting complex.
My first thought as we approached was that someone must have seriously overestimated the importance of the place as well as the amount of profit coming out of it. All that was visible was a modest trio of single-story buildings set around a docking and under-ice access area.
It wasn’t until we were nearly on top of it that I realized the truth. The three buildings were merely the front of the operation, a deliberately deceptive façade designed to throw off inquisitive eyes and minds. The rest of the complex had been built almost invisibly into the ice, probably constructed on the surface with ice then layered over it.
The true access to the coral beds was camouflaged even better. The only way we knew where it was, in fact, was by backtracking the antiair fire that erupted in our direction as we approached.
But my hunch paid off. The defenses were geared toward protecting the coral beds, with the workers’ safety running a distant second. As a probably unintended consequence, several of the larger ice-sheathed buildings lay squarely in one line of fire or another, creating a whole set of kill-zone shadows in the outer parts of the complex. Fayr landed us in the most convenient of them, and with weapons at the ready he and the rest of his team headed off into battle.
Bayta and I stayed behind in the torchferry. Our vac suits didn’t have the protective armor and heavy-duty puncture-sealant systems their chameleon suits did, and I doubted either of us had the training and stamina to keep up with a commando squad, anyway.
Besides which, it was time she and I had a little talk.
“So,” I commented, swiveling around in my seat to face her. We had taken off our helmets so that Fayr and his squad couldn’t listen in, keeping them handy in case of trouble. “Interesting theory, isn’t it?”
“What is?” she asked cautiously.
“Fayr’s fever dream about malevolent coral that wants to rule the universe,” I said, watching her closely. “Malevolent telepathic coral, yet. Crazy, huh?”
Her eyes slipped away from my gaze. “Very interesting,” she agreed, her voice studiously neutral.
“Never heard anything like it, myself,” I continued conversationally. “How about you?”
She didn’t answer. “There never was any vision of an attack on the Fillies, was there?” I asked, letting my voice harden. “In fact, this whole thing has been a scam from square one, hasn’t it?”
“No,” she protested, her eyes coming up to meet mine. Her lips compressed, and she again dropped her gaze to the floor. “No, there is a threat to the galaxy. A terrible threat.”
“From power-crazed coral?”
She glared at me. “You shouldn’t make jokes about things you don’t understand.”
“So enlighten me,” I countered. “Starting with what exactly my role was in all this.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, her voice gone cautious again. “You were hired to help us in the war against the Modhri.”
“No, I was hired to be your diversion,” I said bluntly. “Your Spider friends knew all about Fayr and his private little battle plan. You wanted to give him the best shot you could; and since you knew the enemy was watching, you brought me in to give them someone handy to watch.”
Her lip twitched. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Wasn’t it?” I bit out. “You have a drudge accost me and walk off with my carrybags in front of God and everyone at Terra Station. Then you throw everyone else off my car midway to New Tigris with the flimsiest excuse possible and hustle me off to a meeting on a secret Quadrail siding. And then you march both of us up from third-class steerage to a first-class compartment. You might as well have pinned a sign on my back that said Spider Agent—Kill Me in three languages.”
Her face looked like she was getting ready to cry. “We didn’t expect him to try to kill you,” she said earnestly. “You have to believe me. We thought he would think you were our latest attempt to find him and just watch you. That’s all. Just watch.”
“That’s very comforting,” I growled. “Unfortunately, good intentions don’t feed the bulldog. They knew about Fayr, too, or at least suspected something was in the works.” I paused, studying the shame and self-reproach in her face and feeling a small twinge of conscience. “And for whatever it’s worth, I don’t think those two Halkas back at Kerfsis were really trying to kill me,” I added reluctantly. “That incident was mainly designed to give Rastra and JhanKla an excuse to get us aboard the Peerage car.”
She shivered. “To try and make friends with us, so that they could bring us here.”
There it was, that whole friend thing again. “You keep talking about friends,” I said. “What do friends have to do with it?”
“There are natural emotional barriers between people that tend to block thought viruses,” she said. “Only between friends or trusted associates are there the emotional connections that allow the thought virus to pass.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, a few more pieces falling into place. “Which is why Mahf tried to pretend we’d met before that afternoon in the casino. And why you kept asking if Rastra or Applegate were friends of mine.”
She nodded. “I didn’t know if either of them was a walker. But if they were, I was afraid you’d trust them enough for a thought virus to get through.”
“Is that why you picked me for this job in the first place?” I asked. “Because you figured I’d become something of a loner?”
“Partly,” she admitted. “Mostly it was because you’d been ostracized by all your former official Terran government contacts. That was the pattern the Modhri followed with all the other species: An officially sanctioned team would go in to investigate, be infected by the Modhri, then go home to infect and conquer the rest of the upper military and government levels. With thought viruses passing freely between close friends and associates, it can happen very quickly.”
She gave me a wan smile. �
�Humans are almost the last ones left unconquered. We didn’t want to risk your people by getting someone who was still involved with important government officials.”
“And so you picked me,” I said, a small part of me appreciating the potentially lethal irony of the situation. If only they knew who I was involved with. “Why didn’t you tell me all this last night when I asked?”
She looked away from me. “I wasn’t sure I could trust you.” “And now?”
She shrugged noncommittally.
Which was pretty damn ungrateful, I thought, especially after all I’d done for her and her Spider friends. A surge of annoyance threatened to wash over me; ruthlessly, I forced it back. A combat situation was no place for stray emotional reactions. “What makes you think humanity hasn’t been conquered yet?”
“The Spiders have been watching the top levels of Human government very closely,” she said, clearly relieved to be back on less personal ground. “So far, they’ve seen no sign of Modhran influence.”
“Only you said the people themselves don’t even know when they’re carrying a colony,” I pointed out. “You have some kind of Rorschach test?”
“I wish we did,” she said ruefully. “But since the colony usually stays in the background of the walker’s mind, there usually isn’t anything that would show up on psychological tests.”
“Or emotional or skin/eye reaction tests, either, I suppose,” I said. “That just leaves straight-out physical tests.”
“Which also aren’t usually very helpful,” she said. “The polyps tend to gather in hidden areas, especially around and beneath the brain. It would take a very careful microscopic examination to spot them.”
“Is that why JhanKla insisted those two dead Halkas be cremated?”
“Yes, though of course he himself wouldn’t have known the true reason,” she said. “He would have had his own set of perfectly good excuses. And we’ve never found a scanning technique that can pick the polyps out from the organism they’ve attached themselves to.”
“So again, what makes you think Earth hasn’t been infiltrated?”
“There are patterns of behavior and decision that can be seen, especially on a group level,” she explained. “Neither the UN nor any of your nation-state governments have shown signs of such behavior.”
“We just too small for the Modhri to bother with?”
“The reasons are probably more practical,” she said. “For one thing, you have no coral outposts on your worlds, which by itself would make conquest difficult. There’s also your political structure, with its many nation-states and lack of a truly central governing body. That holds challenges they won’t have found elsewhere among the Twelve Empires.”
I’d never before thought of Earth’s political chaos as being a possible military asset. Usually just the opposite, in fact. “What would have happened if I’d touched the coral last night? I’d be a walker now, too?”
“Not yet,” she said. “It takes days or weeks for an implanted hook to grow into a polyp and then to reproduce enough to form a complete colony.”
“Okay, so back to current events,” I said, picking up the logic trail again. “We had Fayr and his commandos on one hand, and us on the other. The Modhri knew about both of us; but he didn’t know what the connection was. So he maneuvered us here, hoping we would trip over Fayr’s scheme and expose it for him.” I lifted my eyebrows. “Damn near worked, too, didn’t it?”
She grimaced. “I know,” she murmured.
“So if this is their homeland, why don’t the Spiders just lock them in? They have to travel by Quadrail like everybody else, don’t they?”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “But all we knew at first was that various leaders were being controlled and governments were being corrupted. It was a long time before we learned the mechanism and, later, where it was coming from.”
“But you know now,” I said. “So why not just keep the coral off the Quadrails?”
“Because the sensors can’t detect it,” she said. “I mean, they can, but the chemical composition is so close to a hundred other things that it would require hand searches.” She shrugged uncomfortably. “Besides, by now the coral’s been distributed so widely that locking down Sistarrko system wouldn’t gain us anything.”
And with that, the final, ugly piece dropped into place. Modhran outposts all over the galaxy, accessible only via the Spiders’ own Quadrail system… “You didn’t hire me to find out how to stop a war,” I said quietly. “You hired me to figure out how to start one.”
She turned her face away from me. “You have to understand,” she said, her voice suddenly very tired. “We’d finally learned where the enemy was located, but we knew the same limitations that keep one empire from attacking another would also keep us from taking any action against them. We suspected Fayr was up to something, but we assumed he was still just investigating. And here especially the Modhri would make sure that the warships guarding the Tube transfer station were exclusively manned by walkers. We needed a way to break the stalemate.”
Involuntarily, I glanced back out the canopy. I’d forgotten all about those warships, and the fact that they might be burning space on their way here at this very moment. I hoped Fayr wasn’t taking time to smell the flowers. “You could have saved all of us a lot of time if you’d been up front with me in the first place,” I told her. “I could have told you that you do exactly what Fayr did: Bring in stuff to sell and then buy or create your weapons there in the target system.”
She sighed. “I understand that now,” she said. “But the Spiders thought the story of an attack on the Filiaelians would be the only way to get your attention.”
“Especially since Fayr’s technique wouldn’t work on the Fillies,” I conceded. “No weapons black market, and too many genetically loyal soldiers wandering around watching everything.”
“Yes.” Bayta ran a hand through her hair. “But at least now it’s almost over.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”
She frowned at me. But before she could ask, there was a ping from my helmet. “Compton?” a voice called faintly.
I picked up the helmet and slipped it over my head. “Here,” I said.
“We have the records and are moving to support the half squad at the dock,” Fayr reported. “Estimate arrival and retrieval in one and two-thirds hours, return one-third later. Hostiles?”
“No sign,” I said, looking out the canopy and giving the displays a quick check. “I think all the unfriendlies must be on your side of the fence.”
“Acknowledged,” he said. “Be watchful.”
“You, too.”
He clicked off, and I took my helmet off again. “He says they’ll be back in about two hours,” I told Bayta. “Then maybe we’ll find out whether it’s over or not.”
They were back exactly two hours and five minutes later. Rather to my surprise, all of them made it, including the two commandos from the sub. They had apparently succeeded in destroying all the coral they could find, while Fayr had located and pulled all the records stored in that part of the complex. He ordered a few quick preparations, and we were ready to go.
Unfortunately, the unwanted company was already coming up the walk.
“There,” Fayr said, pointing at the long-range display as we ran up the torchferry’s thrusters and eased cautiously away from the now out-of-business harvesting complex. “You see it?”
“It would be hard to miss,” I said. In actual fact, of course, most people would miss it: A small sensor dot nearly hidden behind the glow of its decelerating ion drive, hardly big enough to identify as an ore tug. But to someone with the right training, the sensor footprint of a stealthed warship was unmistakable. “Coming in fast, too,” I added. “I hope you have a plan for getting past him.”
“It won’t be possible to get past him,” Fayr said calmly as we reached a safe distance from the complex’s remaining defenses and lifted away from the surface.
�
��We’re sure not going to talk our way out of it,” I warned, frowning as he punched in our course. He was turning us toward the edge of Cassp’s disk, sitting directly ahead like a huge black hole in space with only its edge lit as the outer atmosphere refracted the light from the distant sun.
The Tube, though, was in exactly the opposite direction. The only thing in that direction was—”Sistarrko?”
“Why not?” he replied calmly. “It has a population of over three billion, including at least a hundred thousand resident Bellidos and three thousand Humans. There are also several smaller mining centers, colonies, and homesteads in the inner system. What better place for a small group of fugitives to hide until they can arrange passage back to the Quadrail?”
“Except that all those colonies and homesteads have bright shiny police and military units standing around with nothing to do,” I countered. “We’d never even get close before we got cut into bite-sized chunks.”
“Unless we have a plan to avoid that,” Fayr said, examining the power readings and adding a little more juice to the drive.
“Do we?”
“No.” His whiskers twitched. “But the Halkas don’t know that, do they?”
I frowned at him… and then, finally, I understood. “Cute,” I said. “You think they’ll fall for it?”
Hunching his shoulders once, he settled himself down into his flying. “We shall find out together.”
We pulled away from Modhra I, picking up speed as we drove inward through Cassp’s massive gravitational field, still heading for the gas giant’s edge. I alternated my attention between our projected course and the aft displays, and less than ten minutes after our departure I saw the warship’s drive wink out. “He’s turning over,” I reported. “Apparently decided we’re serious about heading inward and doesn’t want to get left behind.”
“A reasonable concern,” Fayr said. “Even without leaving Cassp there are four ring and far-moon mining operations we could be making for.”
