He stepped back into the hatch and it closed. It drained of air in a matter of thirty seconds, then the outer door slid open and he gave a slight kick and sailed out and almost immediately on to the hull of the Odysseus’s main cabin.
At this moment, the tiny receptors in his head were directly connected to and communicating at the speed of thought with the suit. He could, essentially, fly in space using tiny nozzles, by just thinking about it, and he floated away from the tender and just half a meter above the smooth, dull hull of the bigger ship.
There was no safe place to do this, but the design of the bigger ship put a series of large spokes emanating equally from around the midsection of the cabin. These were used for precise genhole injection, and where they were joined to the ship, there was quite a large indentation at the base of each. He picked the nearest one and settled down into it. Once there, the suit secreted one of the most powerful bonding substances known that could later be dissolved. In fact, ships were often repaired with it. It wasn’t intended to take the place of true molding on a permanent basis, but many a warship had lasted many days in running pursuits and fights and it had held until they made it to dry-dock. It would cement him to the hull of the Odysseus so thoroughly that he would effectively become part of it.
So far the drill was going according to form. Now, and for many weeks if need be, the suit would generate or convert all that he required. He would not eat, or drink, or directly breathe, but those elements would be supplied or created as the monitors of every single square millimeter of his body told the suit he required. He would be, in effect, a disembodied spirit, and, before injection, even that spirit would be placed into a tranquilized sleep, not to awaken until there was a reason for it to do so.
If this group was going out to meet the real Dutchman, then he was ready to board and, if necessary, do battle and set tracking devices. If somewhere else, well, he hoped that this group believed that an extra experienced hand was more convenient than killing off a nosy hitchhiker.
He wished he could plug into that gathering once they’d injected, but to do that he’d have to be inside. He could communicate with them in real space, but inside a wormhole, whether natural or created, you were strictly incommunicado.
Commander Park elected not to hold them up anymore. In the little time he could finagle, there didn’t seem to be anything more he could do that he hadn’t already done anyway. At twenty hundred hours, the Odysseus gave a shudder and came to life like some great prehistoric star beast suddenly waking up and needing to prowl. Automated pilot programs handled all the undocking and everything up to and including injection. The ship’s onboard computers and even her live captain were basically redundancies, just as Eugene Harker, in his much smaller environment, was.
The great ship quickly picked up speed. First the space dock and then the entire planet began to rapidly recede with little or no sensation inside or out. Harker was still conscious and still thinking about whether or not he was committing the stupidest act of suicide in recent memory. It took the form of a dialogue, only he was the only one speaking.
Okay, so why wasn’t this a job for a good bioengineered robot? he asked, trying to convince himself that he was in fact useful.
Because, if there are Titans involved, not even the old lady’s lower parts would work, let alone any form of robot, no matter how much of it was quasi-organic. If it was a machine, they’d eat it.
So what are you right now but a lump of biological material lying inside a big machine? Some help you’ll be if the Titans show up!
Maybe. Just maybe. We’ll see...
The ship continued to accelerate and steered itself for a large structure floating in space, one of three in the area. These looked like giant squares, kilometers high and wide but only a hundred meters thick, and within them was a void that could not be described. Even a vacuum was something. How does one describe nothing? Many had tried, none had succeeded, but even those who saw it regularly tended to feel as if there was a total wrongness there, that even “empty” had to have some meaning.
The genhole was connected, through a kind of warp in space, a folding of space-time, with another at a predetermined point. You couldn’t just go faster than light in a practical sense—even if you weren’t quite doing it in a literal sense—and come out where you pleased. Each “hole” was still a sort of tube that needed another end. That was how Harker and Park and the rest knew where the ship was going, at least initially. They had to file plans so that ships were not crashing as they emerged from one or another, and, of course, it was a good way for the Navy to know just where everybody was heading. Of course, that assumed that all of them were charted, that all of them were legal, and that those which had been in areas no longer on the service lanes had been deactivated. In no case were these assumptions valid, of course, particularly not in this day and age.
The spokes along each segment of the Odysseus now hummed to life, and blanketed the entire outer hull with an energy shield. Fortunately, as it was supposed to, that energy shield considered Gene Harker a part of the hull and blanketed him as well.
The tip of the forward spokes now activated, throwing energy beams that struck the surface of the genhole. At this point the ship pitched slowly, until the twelve radiated lines on the ends of the spokes hit the precise spots of a similar grid just inside the genhole itself. At that point, ship and hole were locked on. There was a sudden heavy burst of power and the ship aimed right for the nothing in the middle. Perfectly aligned and oriented, it struck the outer surface.
Watching this from a side angle was something technicians always loved, no matter how many times they’d seen it. A huge, elongated modular ship crashed headlong into a block only a hundred meters thick and kept going until it was apparently consumed: it was always an awesome sight.
Just before injection, Gene Harker’s suit decided it was time to put him to sleep.
Even so, he was awake and aware when injection actually arrived, and he felt it: a weird, bizarre feeling that combined a crackling heat and the deepest cold all at once, and sent a roar with the sound of a cyclone’s winds through his unhearing ears. It was probably the drug and the fears and imagination of his mind, but he could never be sure.
• • •
Father Chicanis felt a bit more free than he had in some time. Admiral Krill noted that there were still some of Park’s bugs crawling around, but they could hardly transmit and they didn’t have much data storage abilities. And, since they weren’t coming home for some time, it didn’t matter if there were all sorts of recording devices on the hull. Let them be there, for all the information they could transmit back in the same year it might do anybody any good.
“You all know that Madame Sotoropolis and I are from Helena,” he began, “and that this is about returning to our world. But it is not precisely about that, because merely returning, this late, would do little good. It is almost certain that everyone we remember and love down there is dead, and perhaps their children as well. We can only pray that some survive. You cannot believe the tragedy of this.”
Colonel N’Gana thought that it was nice that the really rich folks got out to mourn the rest, but he said nothing. The mere fact that the very rich and powerful thought they were moral and proper human beings was why they always acted so insufferably that they inevitably caused themselves to be hated and occasionally overthrown. He was not, however, one of those particularly moved by all this Greek tragedy.
“We have been aware for some time that certain elements, apparently criminal, mostly from the services of previously conquered worlds and thus now off the registries, have been eking out a clandestine existence in conquered areas of space,” the priest went on. “They live on their ships, they stay out of die way of the Titans, and they establish nothing near them that would attract attention. What they need to survive and cannot get from whatever they can mine or process, they have been known to steal. It pains me to have to deal with these sorts of people, but there
is a greater moral good at work here, I feel certain, and they are at least understandable.”
“How do they get around out there?” Takamura asked him. “I mean, we saw the gate for that world implode as the power was drained.”
“True, that happens, but not all gates from the conquered areas are deactivated, nor those in the path of the invaders,” Chicanis told them. “And, frankly, they have been able to deploy or make some of their own for smaller vessels. We will be into that network in a few days as we switch back and forth until we reach an outer point where there is, well, an extra genhole in a place too close to the Titans to be still used. At that point we will switch to their control, and the pirates or freebooters or whatever you wish to call them will control the navigation. The one we will be meeting, as you know, calls himself the Flying Dutchman. Most of them use quaint, sometimes antique names to disguise themselves or perhaps even characterize themselves. We have been waiting for the Dutchman’s signal, and now we are going to meet him inside the territory he controls.”
“Goodness! Do you mean inside conquered territory?”
Katarina Socolov found that news unsettling.
“Yes, and no. Space is very big, and the one advantage we have, the same advantage they have, is that the Titans simply don’t care about us. We are irrelevant to them unless we make ourselves intrusive. They will not go hunting for us. They want our worlds, for whatever purpose.”
“I’ve heard of this Dutchman. He’s a killer and a pirate,” N’Gana commented gruffly. “What the hell do you want that requires him?”
“You misunderstand, Colonel,” Madame Sotoropolis put in. “We have no interest in the Dutchman. It is the Dutchman who has an interest in us. In other words, neither I nor any of my people contacted him—I don’t think any of us would have known exactly how to do that in any event. We were sitting around casting about for some way to get back at those fuzzy creatures or whatever they are that stole our world when we got a call from the Dutchman.
“It was simple and to the point. ‘If you wish to take a chance and devote the personnel and resources, I believe I have a way that can not only hurt the Titans but can drive them off our worlds. If you wish to take the risk, the coded addresses that follow will reach me. If you do not, do not bother to reply. In ten standard days, I will make this offer to someone else.’”
“That’s all you got? That’s it?” Admiral Krill responded. “Why, that could have been anybody claiming to be the Dutchman! It could be a hoax, or some Confederacy security plot, or simply an attempt to draw you into the clutches of freebooters so they can hold you for ransom or worse.”
“There was, quite naturally, a lot of follow-up,” Father Chicanis put in. “We replied, of course, and in due course we were sent just a small part of a thick data stream. The source was definitely a defensive computer system, and it contained some very interesting but incomplete data. The point was, we knew from the header ID that it had come from only one place.”
“It came from Eden,” Madame Sotoropolis sighed. “It came from the surface, or beneath the surface, of Helena.”
“Now, hold on! That’s impossible!” Juanita Krill responded. “There’s no power down there for a computer system. There is no power at all once these—these—things take over! Never have we seen or measured one bit of anything we know of as a power source that was not the Titans’ unique physics.”
“No physics is unique,” Takamura interjected with initation. “Like ‘magic,’ unique physics is simply physics we don’t understand yet.”
“Fair enough. But there’s nothing down there, right? It’s dead.”
“It is,” Colonel N’Gana agreed. “I was a part of a high-risk scan once in the early days of the second wave. We took tiny ships so small they would be hard to track even if you were looking for them, loaded only with deep scanning equipment, and we overflew two different Titan worlds. Almost got their attention on one, but they didn’t pursue and we got away before they could put an energy hook into us. But there was nothing down there. We could have picked up a battery for a single electric torch, I think. Nothing.”
“Nonetheless, this was from Helena, and from beneath the surface,” the old diva insisted. “We had the header and a lot else confirmed.”
“All right, we think we know how it’s done,” the priest added. “You yourself noted that there were a few pockets, islands or undersea stuff, where the Titans didn’t seem to bother. That’s not generally true—they usually drain it all—but on Pangean worlds like Naughton and Helena, even if they do a complete sweep and drain, they don’t maintain monitoring over the entire surface of the world. It’s wasteful. Once you’ve deactivated everything, why bother? In the case of primary land planets and planets that have a number of irregular and distant continents, they establish their permanent energy grid over the whole surface, it is true. But on these planets, they often just put anchors at the poles and allow normal rotation to keep the sweep and drain on. That means, first of all, that even a Titan’s power has limits. That’s comforting to know. Secondly, it means that, while they are continuously sweeping, they only have a round-the-clock energy cloak over the continents. The rest they sweep in two pole-to-pole lines. For example, if the complete day was twenty-two hours standard, as it is on Helena, the area outside the continents would be swept and monitored for power and activity only once every eleven hours.”
“My God!” van der Voort breathed. “If you knew when the sweep passed, you could actually get down, if you avoided their probes and used a region over the horizon for the continents, and have eleven hours before you would be detected and whatever you had turned off!”
“Or, if you had something that could move at a decent clip and you had that knowledge, you could follow along in the blind spot for quite some time,” Chicanis agreed. “That’s what some of these privateers have done. They get down in the holes on selected worlds, probably to island or underwater bases. Why they do it we’re not sure, but that’s what’s indicated by the readouts this Dutchman sent us. We think they’re scavenging. Below the surface there’s a lot left to scavenge, even after all these years. Mostly data. Information, on data cubes and blocks in the old computer cores. Imagine what somebody like the Dutchman could do with a full-blown planetary protection system of the Navy, even if it was out of date!”
“But what good does this do?” N’Gana wanted to know. “I mean, this must be known, at least in theory, to The Confederacy, but so what? They can’t assume that this scavenging is going on or do much to stop it, all things considered. And, beyond that, all it is is dropping in, running about, picking up something inert, trying to make it back to a window area somehow, and then getting picked up. It doesn’t hurt the Titans, doesn’t tell us anything more about them except that, like us, they will conserve their power and manage their installations efficiently where they can.”
“That’s true, it wouldn’t do The Confederacy any good to know it, which is probably why it’s never brought up,” Chicanis agreed. “But it appears from what they sent us as a sample, as it were, that one of the scavengers actually went down to Helena and somehow made it to Eden, one of the two main continents. He appears to have found something there, somewhere, deep underground, that hadn’t been fully drained. If we went there, perhaps we could find out. If even one battery remains, then there is some way to shield things from them. That could be the break we’ve been praying for. So far we’ve found nothing. He did. He found it, but apparently when he turned it on, they instantly found him. In spite of that, he managed to actually send the first broadcast, from just beneath the surface, of an actual defense intelligence dispatch since the Titans took over. It was short and sweet, and the odds are he’s dead or whatever they do to humans down there. But in that brief period, an enormous amount of information got sent. Something so important he was willing to give himself away to send it. And that, my friends, is what we are going to get from the Dutchman.”
“But—this is wonderful
!” van der Voort exclaimed. “I mean, think of what you have just said! Energy shielded until used. We’ve never accomplished that! And a broadcast! An activation of an ancient defense unit! That’s astonishing! The leads that this suggests, the mere fact that it happened, open up countless new areas for research! This is not something we can morally or ethically keep to ourselves! Given sufficient resources and data like this, we might yet find a way to act against them!”
There was a short period of silence again, and then Father Chicanis put a bit of a damper on all the joy and enthusiasm. “Um, Doctor, just what would you tell anybody? What evidence would you use to back it up? Where is your data to get the personnel, funding, and labs? You see the point?”
“Why, I—uh...”
“Stories like this have been around for years,” Krill added. “I never believed any of them. Wish fulfillment.”
“Believe this one. The data sent checks out,” the old diva told her.
“But—if this is true, then it’s the possible salvation of the human race!” the mathematician pressed. “Nobody could or should keep this to themselves, or market it!” Colonel N’Gana snorted. “Um, yeah, Professor. You don’t get out much, do you?”
“Huh?”
“This Dutchman’s a pirate and a killer. I doubt if he cares if humanity is mostly stamped out, and the allied races with them, if he can be the survivor, maybe with a few like-minded freebooters. Besides, even if he did suddenly turn into this great altruist and savior of all The Confederacy, just how do you propose he go about it? Mail a copy of this report to the nearest Naval Intelligence district? Pop up in full view like several of you seemed to think he’d do back at that joint? No, I do think maybe he’s not so far gone that he doesn’t want it to get out, but he’s doing it his way, the safe, sure, and possibly profitable way as well. At least now I can see the sense of this expedition. The only thing I want to know is, if we’re just buying information, why do you need all of us? I can see the physicist and the mathematician. You want people who can test the data, and know how to interface with computers that can really test it. Even Krill, both for security, such as it was, here aboard ship, and to check out the inevitable codes if this is an old security device. But why two old fighting men like Sergeant Mogutu and myself? And, for that matter, why a cultural anthropologist? Unless you want to figure out what kind of culture these freebooters have built out there? And for God’s sake why the Pooka, who’s still asleep somewhere down below?”
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