The Guards had indeed left Earth a hundred years before, but only after attempting a hopeless and pointless double coup against the American and British governments. In both nations, local police had mopped up the Guards without so much as bothering to call up the military. The schoolbooks' hundreds of thousands of heroic Guardians of the Atlantic Front turned out to be a few hundred rowdies scraped up from the LaRouchists, the Birchists, the Afrikaaners in Exile, the National Front, something called the Ku Klux Klan, and a few other groups. The near-victory over the forces of plutocracy turned out to be little more than a busy afternoon for the police in Washington and London. And the Oswald Mosley hadn't narrowly escaped destruction by the space fleets of Earth's criminal nations. Earth's nations didn't even have space fleets at that time. The Mosley would have been permitted to leave peacefully, and good riddance, except Thurston Woolridge and some of the other Guardian leaders had been sprung from jail in raids that had killed some people and freed a number of dangerous criminals. As it was, the Mosley got away only because the British and the Americans didn't have ships available to chase her. Once she had left the solar system, no trace of the Mosley was ever found—but then, no one had ever looked very hard. She was missing and thankfully presumed lost with all hands. The Guardians weren't a heroic page in history; they were a grubby little footnote. No one remembered or cared about a nut group from a century past.
To discover one's hated enemies to be civilized, decent people was disquieting. To discover them to be completely unaware of one's existence was galling. To discover the legends of one's people to be the glorification of a seedy little bunch of political thugs was humiliating. But to discover those hated enemies had a combined military potential a thousand times, ten thousand times, greater
than one's own planet was bone-chilling. Earth certainly had space fleets now. So did Britannica, and Europa, and Kennedy and Bandwidth. The League was big.
And Supreme General Officer Jules Jacquet, Tenth Leader of the Combined Will of the Guardians of the Planetary Commonwealth of Capital, and head of a rather shaky government, needed some sort of external crisis to divert attention from other problems. And it couldn't hurt to grab some technology and skilled laborers at the same time. Jules Jacquet was planning to attack the League.
When Johnson Gustav heard that through the back channel gossip at Headquarters Intelligence, he had decided then and there he was a Settler, not a Guardian.
Then-Commander Gustav had done what he had seen as his duty and filed that damned report, and had ended up busted in rank and posted to a pesthole named Ariadne.
Now he had other duties, the day-to-day jobs of running a space station. Among those was watching the CIs. The Survey students were smart enough to assume their cabins and work stations were bugged—and they got better and better at finding the mikes. They "accidentally" sabotaged a tap now and then, and Gustav usually let it go, simply repairing the damage after a day or two. The CIs were prisoners in feet, whatever they were in name. They could never escape, they could never contact the outside universe. Gustav allowed them their secret meetings; their conspiracies to collect information. After all, another of his duties was keeping them sane enough to work, and they needed the chance to grouse and complain and talk their situation out with each other. Everyone needed a way to let off steam.
Gustav never forgot that his CIs were soldiers. If he had ruthlessly crushed every attempt to circumvent the authority of the Guardians with an iron discipline, his CIs would probably have rebelled violently—and died pointlessly, wrecking Ariadne and thereby hurting the war effort in the process. Gustav stopped the train of thought
right there, before he could ask himself if hurting the war effort was such a bad idea.
So he didn't erase the CI's many "secret" databanks. If he had, it would simply cause them to start over, hiding things better the next time, perhaps in some memory section he couldn't find. Gustav didn't stop Schiller from using the station telescope and spectrograph to try and identify the brighter stars. Even if Schiller succeeded (which was most unlikely) the twin star system of Nova Sol was 150 light years from the nearest League world. What was Schiller going to do? Walk home? Use a message laser to send an SOS that would arrive in the middle of the next century?
Gustav sighed and glared at the desk he was stuck behind. Paperwork and playing footsie with the slave labor.
The damn fools around Jacquet! They put a joke like Romero in command of a station and used kidnapped spaceship pilots to run the place. Why the devil couldn't the Central Guardians see that meant they were in trouble?
Cynthia Wu had rigged her "bug-sniffer" out of parts stolen from an old pressure suit radio and from some other odds and ends. She moved carefully around the storage compartment, checking the deck, the bulkheads, the storage racks.
Finally she shoved the device back in her pocket. "Clean, as best I can tell. Unless Gustav is playing the game a new way. But none of the standard-issue bugs are in here."
Lucy and a half dozen other CIs relaxed slightly. Lucy pointed at Dmitiri and nodded toward the door. Dmitiri nodded back and headed out into the corridor to watch for Guards. "So maybe it's safe to talk," Lucy said. "So we talk. Schiller, any luck?"
"Yes and no." Sam Schiller was a tall, dark, clear-eyed farm boy from Iowa, USA, with a thick mop of deep brown hair and a quiet, serious manner. As a lad in the corn fields, he had loved to look at the stars, and had joined the Navy and signed up for the Survey just for the
chance to see them up close. He had been in the Navy Astrocartography Command, and was the obvious choice to look for home amid the points of light. "No really solid idea of where we are yet,' he went on, "but I've got a program running right now: Every time the high-gain antenna is out of use, I've got it checking a different piece of sky for radio sources. I'm not just after artificial sources of course, most of the signals that transmitters and radars and so on put out are too weak at interstellar range. But there are pulsars, hot gas clouds, that sort of thing. I've got eight mapped now. None of them are strong enough for me to get a really good signature with our gear, but sooner or later we'll nail the galactic center. That'll give us a lot."
"What about visual?" someone asked.
"Not so great. I'm working with gear that's supposed to spot incoming ships, not read spectra of stars. Without spectra you can't really tell one star from another reliably— especially when you have no idea of the distances to the stars in question. All I can say for sure is that we're a long way from home: at least 100 light years from Earth. I need a star catalog. Has anyone found anything like that in the computers?'
"Not a thing," Wu said. "They've got what looks like a bootleg copy of a standard databank reference encyclopedia, but it s been edited or, I guess, censored. I cracked into it. Almost no history left, something on a few of the sciences, but everything on stars and astronomy and astrogation is gone. Nothing left but the titles of the articles."
"That makes sense," Lucy said. "If you were trying to keep your home world hidden, you'd make astronomy a state secret."
"But how could you keep it secret? All you have to do is look up at the sky!" Amoto objected.
"That's just it,' Schiller said. "If all you've got is eyes, you'll never get anywhere. To tell one dot of light in the sky from another, you need to measure spectra and radial
velocity and Doppler shifts—and if you're doing what I'm trying to do, trying to find some signposts in the sky to point you home, you've got to plot the apparent positions of stars in the sky against their true positions in space, in three dimensions. That takes either a properly programmed computer or years of counting on your fingers. And I don't have a computer programmed for astrogation.
"But I can tell you a bit more about the star system we're in. I think it's a binary star system, but with a weird geometry I haven't worked out completely yet."
"How come you're not even sure about being in a binary system?" Cynthia asked. "No offense, but that seems so obvi
ous."
"If it is a binary system, the other component—the other star—is pretty distant, and to the naked eye it doesn't show a disk. It just looks like a very bright star. I'd be more sure about things, except the geometry is so crazy. The planet we're in orbit of is called Outpost, we all know that. Well, the usual thing would be for all the stars and planets of a binary system to be moving in the same plane. Okay, there's one very bright star with an extremely high proper motion against the background of the sky— measurable over a period of days even with the equipment I've got. But it's way the hell out of the plane of Outpost's orbit. On the other hand, it's moving so fast across the starfield that it's got to be in a mutual orbit with our star. The evidence says a rare type of binary system. But everything I've ever learned about binaries says there shouldn't be planets in such a system. Which I guess means the theories are wrong. Wouldn't be the first time.
"One other thing: There's a very strong radio source associated with that star, all sorts of noise on all sorts of frequencies. I haven't checked with any of you in Signals, but I'll bet that radio source is Capital, circling the other star of whatever the hell this two-star system is called."
"I picked up some in-the-clear traffic that called Outpost's star Nova Sol B," Lucy put in.
"So presumably the other star is Nova Sol A. At least we've got a name," Schiller said.
"But Sam, will you ever find Earth?"
"I've had six weeks, and I've had to dodge the Guards and run the space traffic center at the same time. Give me six months, or a year, and I’11 find it, well enough to navigate in the right direction and refine our course between C2 jumps."
"Okay," Lucy said. "What about a ship?"
"No chance," Wu said, "at least in the short run. Nothing larger than a tug ever calls here, besides the atmosphere landers. Nothing with a C2 unit aboard, you can bet that."
"What about the Venera?"
"They undocked her the day after we got here," Stana said. "My guess is she's already got a new name and that flame-and-delta Guardian flag painted over the Survey Service symbol."
"Any chance of building a C2 unit ourselves?" Schiller asked.
"Out of what? With what tools? Anyone memorize the plans of one?" Wu said.
Somebody in this crowd must at least know the principles," Stana objected. "And there are parts and tools."
"With Guardians sitting on them," Danvers said. "And those are warships in orbit around us. With guns. Cynthia's right. And even if we did make a C2 unit and plugged it into a ship, remember we're talking light years. The thing's got to move a ship with a minimum accuracy of one part in a million. What do we calibrate it with? And what about a power source?"
No one spoke for a long time.
"At least we know where we stand," Lucy said. "Sooner or later Sam will come barrelling down the corridor with the news that he knows where home is—and just as important, where we are. And then, somehow, we've got to grab a ship and launch it. Only one person has to be on it,
or it could even be a drone. Just so long as it carries the message that we're here—"
"—And that we're not alone. Luce, I bet whatever you want that we're not the only CIs," Stana said.
"She's right," Amoto said. "They've got a bureaucracy set up for it. I saw a form that said 'Office of Conscripted Immigration' on it. And one of the troopers posted on duty in my section told me it wasn't so bad—one of his grandparents was a CI."
Everyone spoke at once. "My God. How long have they been grabbing ships?" "Why hasn't anyone ever caught them?' "Why do they want all these people?" "C'mon, Dwight, if that was true, why didn't the League find 'em years ago?"
Amoto ignored everyone but the last speaker. "When a ship is lost in interstellar space, you never expect to see it again. And given the choice between believing ships blow up now and again, and saying pirates from beyond the stars have been kidnapping people—"
"Yeah, I suppose," Schiller said.
"You realize what that means," Wu said. "When we were back on the League worlds, we never heard a hint about hijacked ships. The League doesn't know such things happen, or that these people, these Guards, exist. The League thinks we're dead, and that Venera was lost with all hands. They won't come looking for us. We're on our own."
"Not for long. Something's up," Lucy said. "That's why we're here. The immediate reason we were put on Ariadne was to allow them to transfer its crew elsewhere. And I've picked up a lot of traffic from the big ship, Leviathan, the one that arrived in orbit about twenty-five days ago. They're still having trouble filling billets even after 'recent transfers of comm personnel.' Which I figure means the men from here. And what does it suggest to you when a big ship rushes around to fill all billets? Plus, there's more-general radio traffic everyday. They call the ships orbiting
Outpost the Main Strike Fleet. The Guards are going out on some sort of military mission."
"You're saying they're going to attack someone," Schiller said.
"And who is there to attack but the League worlds?" Lucy replied. "Unless there's another mystery planet, which I doubt. And if the Guards attack the League, the League will find out there are such things as Guards, and the League will come looking for 'em. Our job is to do our work, gather as much information as we can, be good little boys and girls, and watch for the chance to get the hell off this station and back to the League carrying a road map with Capital on it."
Two weeks later, there was a sudden increase in radio traffic. Ship orbits were changed more and more. The CIs were kept busier than they had ever been, patching calls and tracking ships. Then, one after another, the ships left orbit altogether, heading away from Outpost to deep space, to a point far enough distant from Nova Sol B to allow a safe C2 jump. As Lucy watched her board, the realization sunk in: Main Strike was leaving. Lucy wanted to jam the calls, send bad messages, whatever she could to stop them, but it was too late. Clear of the planet, whose bulk had served to block signals most effectively, the ships had perfect line-of-sight on each other: Their messages bypassed the relay station altogether.
One ship was left behind. Leviathan. Lucy had never seen her, but the scuttlebutt from the Guards and the radio channels was that Leviathan was the biggest starship ever built, the first of her class.
Why the hell would they leave the big ship behind? Curious, Lucy glanced over her shoulder to see if the Guards on duty was watching carefully. No, thank God, they were talking with each other about last night's poker game. She tapped into the signal traffic from Leviathan command channel directly and listened on her earphones. With luck they'd be using one of the codes she had broken.
"—long, Carruthers. We'll see you in a few months."
Lucy's eyebrows shot up. They were talking in clear! No encryption. But it wasn't the first time. The signals crew on Leviathan seemed to be out to lunch half the time.
"I suppose, Johnny. You go and have your fun while I try and get those pinheads on Capital to send me some fighters. Or maybe even the rest of my crew. I'm still only half-manned."
Lucy got more interested. This sounds like two commanding officers talking, saying goodbye.
"Come on, now, they're only 6000 hours behind schedule."
" 'Only' he tells me. Listen, seriously, you guys be careful. Main Strike shouldn't be flying without Leviathan. We shouldn't divide our forces."
"Yeah, I know. Bollixed up the whole battle plan. But orders are orders. 'Main Fleet is to depart on schedule, and no debate on this point will be heard.'"
"'Any ship not yet prepared will join the fleet later,' " the other voice said, completing the quote. "But look on the bright side. They were going to send us with you as we were."
"But Leviathan's nowhere near ready!"
"I talked 'em out of it. Pounded my fist on the table at the admiralty and showed them what was what."
"Bloody fools."
"But it s going to be all ri—"
"Calder! Quit staring into space and get back to work!" One
of the Guards had finally noticed that Lucy had stopped pushing buttons.
She came to herself and cut off her tap on Leviathans radio.
Whatever it was the Guardians were up to, had begun.
CHAPTER THREE June, 2115
Ariadne
Two weeks after the fleet left, Gustav came out of his daily meeting with Romero covered in a cold sweat. Something new had come up. New information received, a big new job to do. The news was stunning. Incredible. And they had handed Ariadne the job of dealing with it. Romero in charge of it! That damn fool wasn't competent enough to tie his shoes without consulting the manual, and they handed this job to him because Ariadne was in charge of communications! Brilliant logic. Obviously no one had any idea how big this was. A check of the computer personnel files completed the chain of rotten luck. A CI, not a loyal Guardian, was the best qualified person to do the actual work. If anyone was qualified.
Lucy thought she was being arrested when the call came. Gustav had bugged the meetings, knew what was going on, knew that she was tapping the comm fines. But the Guard who came to her work station said nothing beyond ordering her to the executive officer's office. None of the CIs had dealt much with the XO yet, and Lucy had little idea of what to expect. She pushed the buzzer at the entrance to his office.
"Come in," a tinny voice said through a speaker. She opened the hatch—why couldn't they call it a door?—and entered. Gustav looked the way he always did: too young for his job, dark-haired, with deep, intelligent eyes and a face that would have been handsome smiling—if Gustav ever did smile. He was of medium height, or slightly above, in good shape, though his midriff seemed in the first stages of going to fat. A good field officer recently trapped behind a desk.
"Lieutenant Calder. Have a seat."
She took a chair and sat down. "Thank you."
"All right, let me clear the air of the easy part. I don't know and I don't care about any and all of your conspiracies and plots and plans and meetings, and that's not why you're here. Your people are prisoners—and I'll call you that even if it's against policy—and you can never ever escape. Period. You're too far from home and have too few resources. I don't care about your plots because they can never do you any good, or me any harm. You are here for the rest of your life. So as long as you do your work, we don't care. Or at least I don't, and as far as you're concerned, it's the same thing."
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