Adiamante

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  None bore visible weapons, but each carried a large and long kit bag that could and probably did conceal complete ground combat kits. I had few doubts that additional equipment would arrive with each Vereal Union lander.

  Studying each marcyb as he or she emerged was Majer Henslom, cold green eyes flicking from one figure to the next, occasionally nodding. The entire process was silent, and I could sense that a portable netlink had already been established in the housing bloc to supplement the personal short-range net capability of the belt units the marcybs wore.

  They formed up in rows, by squads or whatever their organizational units were called, each with the nearest corner of a kit bag precisely fifteen millimeters from the toe of each marcyb’s right boot. In front of the group, silent, stood Majer Henslom, waiting.

  The other majer—Ysslop—waited by the doors to the residential bloc. Her eyes—I realized Ysslop was female—were colder than the intermittent swirls of snow. That I hadn’t sensed her sex the first time I had encountered her indicated to me exactly how alien the cybs really were, or at least some of them were.

  On the short side avenue—Frensic—a couple with a single child between them watched as the first group of marcybs walked briskly into the building. The woman shook her head, and the man looked at the cybs. All the cybs were short-haired, whether men or women, all with eyes that saw and did not see.

  The draff couple shivered, and I understood why. Cold were the cybs, colder by far than the supercooled mechcybs that ran our own Old Earth, colder than the heart of an antique supercon line or deep space beyond the Oort. And hot was their hatred—hot as the gaze of a kaliram—and their scarcely concealed desire to wreak vengeance upon Old Earth.

  Yet what could I do, under the power paradigms? We had retained the ability to apply force, but applying it in anticipation against the cyb-ships would be costly. More important, it would invalidate the Construct.

  Then, I reflected with a twisted smile, allowing our destruction would also invalidate the Construct.

  Another group of marcybs stiffened, then peeled off, and began to file into the residence bloc, their measured steps automatically transforming the building into a staging barrack.

  I glanced back at the couple who had crossed Frensic and were walking slowly across the park toward the Statue of the Unknown, their breath trailing them like white fog. The dark-haired boy between them turned his head and glanced back toward the uniformed cybs, but his mother tugged on his hand, and he finally looked away.

  The figure on the red stone pedestal could have been anyone. The sculptor had caught the agony of a soul caught in mindblaze and fire. I always had thought of the statue as the “unknown draff,” and most demis did, but a good percentage of demis had died in the mindblazes, as well as cybs and draffs.

  As another file of marcybs straightened, I swirled the niellen cloak back enough to reveal the red lining and walked through the irregular snow flurries to Majer Henslom.

  He nodded, brusquely, as I stopped a good meter from him.

  I waited, faintly amused smile in place, listening in on his tactical net.

  “ … the local headhonch … scanning me …”

  “ … be nice to him, Henslom …”

  “ … silly in that black cloak, like a melldram hero … vacuous grin … what do I say …”

  “ … less the better …” snapped a nearer transmission, probably from Majer Ysslop. “He can’t be as vacuous as he seems, and that means he’s dangerous.”

  “Him? I could take him apart in moments, even without weapons,” Henslom net-answered.

  “You might be surprised, one way or the other.”

  “Stuff it, Ysslop.”

  “Your farm, Senior Majer Henslom.”

  I wanted to sigh, even as I was willing to acknowledge Majer Ysslop’s pragmatic insights. The more I heard, the more likely it seemed that nothing had changed over a millennium. Then again, despite all the growth in abilities, basic human emotions never changed. The bottom line was always force. The problem facing me was that the cybs didn’t seem to recognize the difference between force and violence.

  That was the basis of the SoshWars, back before The Flight. The Mascs relied on violence, and the Fems didn’t understand that social controls represented force as surely as the violence of the Mascs. Even millennia after The Flight, the cybs seemed to carry some of the Masc heritage.

  “Greetings, Majer,” I offered verbally. “Is there anything else in which I might provide assistance?”

  “Rations?”

  “Food? We can provide supplies to the central kitchens, and cooks, if you like. Would that be agreeable?”

  “The supplies would be fine.” Then he added, in a transmission to the locial field—and probably from the lander to the orbiting ships, given the delay in responses, “No way I’d trust their cooks.”

  “They might make the food edible,” snapped Ysslop.

  “Enough!” growled a voice after a short delay.

  “I will make the arrangements,” I promised and offered a very slight bow before turning.

  Behind me, the marcybs continued to march into the residence bloc. I waved down a shuttle. I didn’t know the dark-haired driver, but she knew me. “Where to, Coordinator?”

  “The landing field.”

  “The field it is, and we’ll be picking up more of their greencoats.”

  “Greencoats?” I hadn’t heard the term before.

  “That’s what Ser Dvorrak called them, and it stuck. He has a way with words.”

  I sat down, glad to be out of the wind. Even with the cloak, it took energy to stay warm in the cold. The shuttle was empty except for the two of us.

  “Cold out there, and getting colder.” The draff driver wore a heavy leather jacket with the golden kaliram fleece out. The jacket represented a very brave soul, a great obligation, or both.

  “I think so.”

  She glanced at me, both in the mirror and the screen, several times as the shuttle whined back toward the landing field before finally asking, “Are they going to make trouble?”

  “I think that’s what’s on their minds,” I said frankly. Anything else would have been untrue, and even a draff would have known that. That she was a shuttle driver trusted with carrying marcybs indicated intelligence, and that meant she was a draffs by choice, not from lack of ability.

  “Why don’t they just have a nice visit and go back where they came from?”

  “We’re working on that.” I shifted my weight on the seat.

  “Good. Where do you want off?”

  I looked for the shuttle, and finally located it about fifty meters east of the base of the tower. “By the tower is fine.”

  The driver nodded to me as I slipped off. I watched the ground shuttle whine northward along the landing strip toward the remaining marcybs that waited amid the scattered light flurries of white that blurred the sharp black edges of the landers that had brought the greencoats to Old Earth.

  The craft that waited for me on the permacrete was as dissimilar to a cyb lander as a demi to a cyb. Less than thirty meters long, white, the top of the forward cockpit no more than five meters off the permacrete, the magdrive shuttle looked like a toy compared to a cyb lander. The side door slid open, and I stepped into the small cabin behind the cockpit.

  “Coordinator.” The short-haired redhead in the plain gray jumpsuit nodded. “I’m Lieza.”

  “Ecktor, Lieza,” I corrected. “I’m only Coordinator for now.”

  The shuttle pilot smiled briefly as if to dispute me, but only said, “Do you want to sit back there or up here?”

  “Up there, if you don’t mind.”

  She nodded again, and her eyes blanked as she went fullnet. I took off the cloak and folded it into a square that I put into a locker before I strapped in to the other cockpit couch. As I settled in, I studied the display screens, far simpler than those on board the cyb landers, I was certain.

  Appropriate technology is onl
y one key. The cybs couldn’t use magfield drivers, not even on their landers. Even if Gates had a magnetic field as powerful as that of Old Earth, and the cyb’s home planet probably didn’t, other planetary and solar magnetic fields vary, and there usually isn’t enough power concentration in the outer fringes of most systems. Fusactors always work, but they’re heavy and require a comparatively high amount of fuel. You can’t take a ship underspace in high dust densities, and that means traveling outsystem before underspacing, and that requires concentrated energy generation systems—fusactors or the equivalent.

  Magfield drivers tap existing energy flows, above and below the normspace web, whereas fusactors create an energy flow to be used.

  After checking the door and seals, Lieza returned to the pilot’s couch, and brought the taps on line, using the electric drivers in the wheels to propel us out to the end of the buried guideway.

  While Lieza would handle the piloting, much as I would have enjoyed it, I did follow the linkcomm, the pulsed bursts so quick that even the best of the cybs’ equipment couldn’t have detected the communications, even had they known the method and the standing wave modulations.

  “Deseret Control, this is MagPrime, ready to lift for Ell Control this time.”

  “Cleared to lift, maintain one eight zero until clear of the zone.”

  “Stet.”

  The modified mag-induction system that was far smoother than any of the alternatives had the shuttle’s lifting body airborne within a few hundred meters, but Lieza held the shuttle down as the speed built, until we reached the end of the guideway. Then we angled up so fast that I couldn’t have seen Kohl Creek even if I’d had one of the exterior scanners focused there.

  The hint of ozone inevitably rose with the continued operation of the magfield shuttle, one of the few drawbacks for some, though I didn’t find the odor objectionable.

  “Clearing zone this time. Turning to ell intercept radial.”

  “Stet, MagPrime.”

  The magfield shuttle swept eastward, pressing me back into the copilot’s couch. The hull insulation didn’t totally damp the roaring whistle that continued to build, and static crackled through the net as we climbed, not with the sudden acceleration of an old-style rocket but with a continuous two-plus gee force that lasted far longer than the chemical rocket jolt.

  “MagPrime, on Ell Prime radial. Ell Prime, do you copy?”

  “We have you, MagPrime,” answered Elanstan, sounding husky and full-voiced even on direct netlink despite the link static, a shield to accompany Rhetoral the ancient longblade.

  “Stet.”

  “Take care of your passenger,” linked Elanstan, thinking protection even to others, the dark-shield always, the shield to come.

  “I’ll take as good a care of this one as the last.”

  I had to grin, since Lieza’s last passenger to Ell Prime had to have been Rhetoral.

  “You can take better care of this one.”

  I grinned at that. Elanstan was somewhat possessive, near the end of the permissible range, since possessive tends to slide into control.

  The net interference faded, and once we cleared the upper atmosphere, Lieza dropped the acceleration and switched the screens.

  The main screen showed a dark blob that would have been hard to pick out had the shape not been enhanced by a soft yellow screen-highlighting. As the image grew, I had to admit, again, that Ell Prime didn’t look impressive—just a three-klick chunk of nickel-iron filled with linked fusactors, shielded enough that the Vereal fleet’s EDIs wouldn’t show more than a satellite power system in operation.

  “Just a chunk of iron. Right, Coordinator?”

  “Absolutely. An observational station of no interest whatsoever.” I tried to keep my tone light, since we certainly hoped the power of those shielded fusactors wouldn’t be needed.

  The far left screen, a representational screen, showed Ell Prime and the rest of the orbital asteroid stations in luminous blue, and the twelve orbiting adiamante hulls of the Vereal fleet in brighter green.

  “There they are, our friends the cybs.” Lieza’s hands flicked, although she could have used the net, and the Vereal EDI readings appeared on the far right screen—each ship generating and using more power in hours than a locial used in weeks.

  “Do they track you?”

  “Every time.”

  That figured. The cybs were doubtless paranoid and then some, but they’d find little threat in one apparently low-powered asteroid station, or in the apparent navigation beacons on the other asteroid stations. When one sees limited technology in use by a rising power, one assumes greater technology is either reserved for warfare or still being developed, but when one beholds such limited technology in use by a once-great empire, one assumes that greater technology has been lost or abandoned. And that’s usually the case. Usually, but not always.

  The ell station image grew until it filled the screen.

  “Ell Prime, MagPrime beginning decel and approach.”

  “We’re standing by. Commence approach when ready.”

  Then I was pressed into the couch for what seemed a short eternity, followed by near weightlessness as the magshuttle slid into the locking tube without even a shiver—another advantage of the system—and we eased to a stop smoothly, but all the metal of the asteroid severed my netlinks. The small shuttle shivered with the hiss of forced warm air entering the landing-lock tube.

  “Be just a moment, Coordinator,” said Lieza warmly.

  I unfastened my straps and stretched before standing in the enhanced point two gees of the asteroid station and reclaiming my cloak. I just draped it over my arm. Who needed a cloak inside an asteroid station? Getting rid of heat was usually a bigger problem than staying warm.

  “All right,” said Lieza, as she cracked the shuttle’s lock.

  The station air was warm, not unpleasantly so, but warmer than the winter air of Parwon, with the hints of ancient ozone and oil and metal heated and reheated for probably all too long. With the air came a resumption of the netlink, repeated by the ell station.

  “How long will you be?” asked Lieza as she followed me out of the shuttle.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Hours. Not more than a day, I’d guess, but that just depends.”

  “Then I’ll seal up the shuttle.”

  She linked with the ship’s system, and the hatch slid shut.

  As we turned, Elanstan stepped forward out of the main corridor into the light of the high-arched docking/ unloading area. “Welcome, Ecktor.” Her hair was as dark as the nielle of my new cloak. Her smile was warm, and she looked like a frail elf of ancient times, a frailness that concealed the power behind the appearance, the solidity of a shield. I almost laughed at my antique metaphors, but I preferred them to more modern ones.

  “Thank you. I hope I won’t disrupt your efforts.”

  “I’m glad you came.” A wry half-smile crossed her face. “Not all Coordinators have taken their duties personally enough to inspect an ell station.”

  “Call it my intuit background. I can’t factor in what I haven’t seen and felt.”

  “You haven’t been here before?” asked Elanstan as we took the main corridor toward the center of the station’s mid-level.

  “Not under these circumstances. I’ve done stand-down maintenance, but it’s not the same thing. Power makes a difference, and that’s something people don’t understand.” As we passed the first set of side corridors, dark and unused, I slowed, sensing the energy that flowed in and thought the solidity of the nickel-iron above and around us, tied into the underspace in minute filaments. “Where’s Rhetoral?”

  “He’s in the center. I feel better if one of us is there.” She shrugged her thin shoulders. “We’ve had the basic system fully up for only three days. The remotes still aren’t operating on Delta and Kappa. Rhetoral just got back from putting Gamma on line.” She turned to Lieza, then refocused her black eyes on me.

  I grinned at the pilo
t. “You can tag along, or do whatever else you want to do. I’m just poking and prodding.”

  “Sleep sounds good to me,” Lieza admitted. “In this line, you take it when you can get it.”

  “You know where everything is,” said Elanstan, “better than I do.”

  “Let me have a few minutes’ notice, Coordinator. That’s all.” Lieza gestured down the glowstrip-lit passage. “We’re going the same direction.”

  According to the schematics, Ell Control had been laid out on three levels—upper, mid, and lower—that sliced through the middle of the asteroid. The locks were on mid-level, on what corresponded roughly to the “equator,” although the asteroid was shaped more like a loaf of bread, and the locks were where the heels would have been.

  Every twenty meters, or so it seemed, we passed a door—occasionally sealed hatches, but usually just doors. I couldn’t sense net-based operations behind the doors, but if the records were correct, Ell Control had once been the central operations focus for the starfleets of the Rebuilt Hegemony, and had hummed with activity. Those years were long, long past.

  We slipped down the corridor in gentle and near-effortless movements, our lightened steps whisper-echoing on the hard permaplast that coated the smoothed metallic ore beneath. The walls were similarly coated, and our words echoed as well as our steps, almost like ghosts of a far-distant past.

  I tried not to move too quickly. Weight might be twenty percent of normal, but mass and inertia remained, and trying to stop in low gee had broken all too many limbs throughout the history of satellite installations. Plastic-coated nickel-iron remained hard in low gee.

  “Are they still cybs?” asked Elanstan. Her voice sounded preternaturally loud in the silence, and she lowered it as she added, “The way the legends say?”