Lucy's wagon started up again with a slight jerk. She glared at its interior, tired of trading one prison for another. The Guards might have locked her up on the Venera, on Ariadne, kept her confined to base on Outpost, but at least they had never locked her in an small, utterly blank room on wheels with nothing to read, nothing to do, no one to talk to. After some wheedling, and a lot of drawing and explaining, she had managed to get a table and chair built. Neither quite fit her proportions, but it was a big improvement over squatting in a corner to eat, and made keeping her journal easier, too.
If only something worth reporting would happen. C'astille came sometimes, but not often enough to ease her boredom. The rest of the Z'ensam kept their distance. The higher-ups, the Guidance and the First Advice of this crowd didn't entirely trust her, didn't quite believe she had told C'astille the truth. Why believe there was to be a terrible war among humans, and the Nihilists were in an unholy alliance with M'Calder's enemies? There was no proof of that, yet. Until there was, the Refiners would harbor her, but they would keep their distance, and keep her existence a secret from outsiders. Potentially, she was of great value to the Refiners. But that potential had yet to be proved, and no one really liked looking at the weird little two-legged monster.
It seemed strange to be bored to tears while in the midst of a wholly alien culture travelling in an alien land— but Lucy was a prisoner again, able to do little more than stare out the window, and that got old mighty fast. There was nothing to do.
Her few possessions—a rather worn and dirty looking pressure suit, a sleeping bag, a toilet kit, a few pair of work overalls that served as changes of clothes, her laser pistols, some emergency rations, a first-aid kit—were neatly stacked up by the rear wall. There hadn't been much else in the lander worth the carrying—and lugging even that lot around while wearing a pressure suit hadn't been a picnic.
She worried about keeping sane. That was what the journal was about. Every day she carefully noted down everything that had happened, forcing her mind to focus on present reality, to keep track of the passage of time. She knew she'd be in real trouble if she ever lost track of how many days and hours it had been. So far it had been just over 3000 hours. About four months, Earthside.
It seemed like a lot longer than that. And she was just about out of pages in her journal.
Worst of all was the open-endedness of the situation. She had to wait it out here until the League arrived. The League would need her, because she could speak to the Z'ensam and supposedly knew their ways. But what she came to realize was that she needed the League. There was no return to the relative comfort of Ariadne for her, not if she wanted to live. There were less elaborate ways to suicide than flying back to the executioners. The League ought to come, logically. But Lucy could dream up a half dozen reasons why they never would. In which case she would live here, among the Z'ensam, and die among them. Perhaps she could survive a week longer, or a year, or a decade, or fifty years. She didn't know.
There was one bright spot—the Refiners were planning to move into a small crossroads village tonight. They expected to arrive at it toward evening, and settle in to five there for perhaps ten or twenty days while they repaired the wagons and waited for another Group that was headed toward the town from the opposite direction. The two Groups had struck a trade deal over the radio, and planned to carry out its provisions in the village.
For Lucy, it meant she would get a break from the endless days cooped up in her rolling cage. And perhaps these new Z'ensam would take more of an interest in her.
The kilometers rolled past, and Lucy returned to her window to watch the scenery. A huge bird zipped across her field of view. At least Lucy called them birds, because they flew. She had noted dozens of flying species. Like most of the life on this world, they were six-limbed, but with the middle pair of legs modified into wings. The flyers of Outpost didn't look quite as graceful as Earth's birds, but they were strong and agile on the wing. Air pressure here was about twenty percent higher than Earth sea level, which must have been a help.
There was one particular breed of flyer that Lucy especially liked. Things about the size of a big house cat, with gaudy, brightly colored wings that reminded her of giant butterflies. They were not the most graceful of flyers, and Lucy named them stumblebugs.
The Z'ensam seemed to keep them as pets, or at least the Z'ensam tolerated the stumblebugs and let them follow the Group from camp to camp.
The stumblebugs' front paws could serve for hands about as well as a squirrel's could, and Lucy enjoyed feeding them bits of food, getting them to swoop down and grab a morsel from her hand, or even land and waddle up to get a treat. They seemed to have the vocal skills of the comical parrots Lucy had kept when she was a kid, and she even managed to teach one or two of them to say a few words in English in exchange for a bite of food.
She named them and played with them, and, like many other lonely people, found pleasure and solace in the company of her pets. None of the Z'ensam seemed to approve of her spending time with the stumblebugs, but Lucy didn't let that bother her; she needed some pleasure to keep from going mad.
The line of wagons and lorries turned off the road into a small village. Good. They had arrived on schedule. Lucy was eager to get out and stretch her legs.
Suddenly, she heard a triple thump three times on the outer wall of the wagon. That was C'astille's signal that the hungries had been shooed off and it was safe to come out. Eagerly, Lucy climbed into her pressure suit and cycled through the lock. It was good to be out of that rolling prison, if only for a few hours, and if only in a shabby pressure suit.
It was a lovely evening, clear and still. As she hopped down from the airlock, Lucy was almost glad to be behind the glass of her suit's helmet—it kept out the overwhelming smell of mold and rotting plant life. Shielded from the stench, she could almost imagine it as a perfect night for a stroll back in Sydney—the air cool and clean, the stars shining brightly down, God up in heaven and everything in its place. A huge shape, hard to see in the twilight, shifted its stance and turned toward her.
"Hello, Lucy."
"Hello, C'astille. English tonight?"
"It is that you need less of the practice than I have need of."
"I don't know about that—but I certainly have more need of your language than you have of mine."
C'astille paused for a moment before answering, trying to sort out the difficult statements about knowledge and relative needs that Lucy had crammed into one sentence. C'astille could make herself understood in Human—no she must remember it was English, one of many Human tongues—but she could not yet manage the compression, the conciseness, with which Lucy spoke.
"I have less need now. There will be a time when my skills in Human talk will be of great value. So let me practice it tonight."
"Of course, my friend. I was only teasing you."
C'astille only grunted at that. Teasing wasn't a part of Z'ensam humor, or even a Z'ensam concept. What worried C'astille was that she had come to understand teasing. Was she beginning to think like a Human? How could she do that, when she couldn't even make sense of Humans?
Lucile Calder stepped away from her wagon and walked toward the center of the clearing. Around her, the bustle of unpacking and setting the village to rights went on. Light began to glow in the low one-story structures, and there were snatches of conversation—and of song.
A pack of Z'ensam children rushed past, chasing each other around the clearing in a game of tag that any human child would have recognized at once. The kids here had long ago gotten used to the halfwalker monster in the Group, and some would even gather round once in a while to hear stories about Earth and space. For the most part, though, they paid her as much mind as the adults did. Lucy barely realized how little she knew about Z'ensam family life.
All she really knew was that a child's name began with the prefix O'. C'astille was very proud of the fact that she had stopped being O'astille at a very early age.
Lucy looked through the scuffed plastic of her bubble helmet at the sky, the stars—Nova Sol A outshining all the rest, beaming down far more brightly than a full moon, casting crisp shadows. The night sky was lovely and clean, dark, studded with the glory of the stars.
She knew she belonged up there, and was but gradually coming to accept that she might be trapped where she was for all time. Strange to think that all humans, less than two centuries ago, were so trapped, and never realized that there were any other worlds, that they were in any sort of trap at all.
And strange to think that this was the first generation of Z'ensam which knew for certain that there was more than one world. But the Z'ensam didn't seem to have invented flying machines. Perhaps they weren't interested in getting off the ground.
"Would you travel there, C'astille? Would you be willing to go through the sky?"
Her friend moved closer to her, bumped her long, rough flank against the pressure suit, and placed a long, four-fingered arm on Lucy's shoulder. C'astille looked up at the darkness. "Willing? That is a weak word. The mightiest traveler of the Z'ensam, the heroes who have crossed every overland route, the seafarers who have spanned the globe—none of them has ever found a Road, a way, as long as your shortest journeys. I yearn to go that way, and see everything, everywhere, all the worlds the Humans have found and all the ones they have not."
"You'll get there."
"Yes. As passengers on your ships. But one day we will have our own ships, and grow our own star roads. But come. I must eat, and see to it that our chemists have grown enough of that dull stuff we force you to live on."
The two of them headed toward the mess wagons, the stars in their hearts.
Of all the Refiners, only L'awdasi, the lifemaker, was a stargazer. L'awdasi was in charge of caring for all the workbeasts of the Group, and she had campaigned hard before the Guidance allowed her to care for M'Calder as well. It gave her access to the halfwalker, and gave her the chance to talk with Lucy for hours about the sky. L'awdasi had a fine telescope, a rugged reflector of about thirty centimeters apeture, built by the craftworkers of a distant city. It had been well worth the journey there, and even worth enduring the company of the eccentric city dwellers, to obtain such a fine instrument. Recently, L'awdasi had a new goal to seek for among the stars. This halfwalker had spoken of a "barycenter," a place between the twin suns where matter would accrete. It was even possible that there was a small planet at the bary center. The idea fired her imagination. A new world! L'awdasi searched each night, joyously engaged in the hopeless task of detecting a hypothetical dim and tiny dot of light, as distant from her as Neptune is from Earth.
And so only L'awdasi saw the faint, flickering lights, all but lost in the glare from Nova Sol A, that sparked and shone for a time about the bary center. A strange phenomena. Tomorrow she would ask the halfwalker about it. After all, the halfwalker knew about barycenters.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Nova Sol System Barycenter
The skies flamed and flickered in the viewscreen, and the Republic of Kennedy Starship Eagle's external radiation meters quivered, crawled a bit closer to the high end of the scale. All hell was breaking loose out there, exactly on schedule.
The Eagle and the rest of the League fleet stood well off from the barycenter of the Guardian/Outpost star system, and let the Snipe do their work.
All that wooing of the Bandwidthers had paid off. Admiral Thomas had sent them little more than a sketch on the back of a envelope, and they had responded a month later with five thousand custom-designed decoy drones. No other planet could have responded that quickly or effectively. Sir George was just glad the Bandwidthers were on the same side he was on.
The drones had gotten christened Snipe somewhere along the line (someone claimed the name stood for Special Nonexplosive Intrusive Probe Experiment, but obviously they had backed that acronym into the name). By any name, they were out there doing their job right now.
A Snipe was the size and shape of a standard torpedo, the smallest thing ever to get a C2 generator crammed inside—and the Bandwidthers managed that mainly because the generators didn't have to be very precise, and because there was very little else that needed to go inside a Snipe. The big advantage to torpedo-size was that Snipe could be fired by practically any ship in the League fleet. At the moment, practically every ship in the fleet was firing them.
The League fleet stood off from the barycenter by about a twentieth of a light year, surrounding it in a vast ring, facing the center from every point of the compass. The ships themselves stayed well out of range of the defensive missiles, and the Snipe went in. Once fired from a torpedo tube, a Snipe would burst in and out of C2 space in a millisecond or so, jumping from the fleet's encircling position to the vicinity of the barycenter, making as much radio noise and calling as much attention to itself as possible.
The Guards' automatic anti-ship missiles, designed to sense and home in on ships arriving from C, were drawn to the Snipe like lambs to the slaughter. A Guard missile would home on a Snipe and blow itself up—taking out the cheap, mass-produced drone instead of a warship, and there was suddenly one less Guard anti-ship missile to worry about. The real warships, the fleet, would wait until the anti-ship missiles stopped coming, until the skies about the barycenter were no longer lit by the fire of nuclear explosions.
Salvo after salvo of Snipe blipped into the barycenter and died, saturating the Guardian defenses before the main attack ever began. The Snipe were a rich man's weapon, a brute force solution to the problem of getting through the Guards' missiles.
But Admiral Sir George Thomas, watching from the battle information center of his flagship, the Eagle, had never much cared about subtlety for subtlety's sake. He would settle for the irony of bombing the hell out of the enemy's defenses with their own bombs.
Computer-controlled sensors, quite unconcerned by such things, counted and mapped the explosions, and monitored the "I'm-still-here" telemetry from the thousands of Snipe.
After long hours, the number of flashes in the darkness began to decline, and more and more Snipe survived longer and longer. Admiral Thomas, a guest on Eagle's bridge, turned to Eagle's master, Captain Josiah Robinson. "Well, Captain, either our friends have run out of missiles or they're shutting down the missile system until we run out of drones."
"Either way, Sir George, that leaves a nice hole in their defenses."
"My thoughts, exactly. What's say we keep sending in the Snipe and start slipping in some fighters among them? It's time that trigger-happy younger generation of ours had a chance."
Captain Robinson nodded to the comm officer, and the order was relayed to the appropriate units. This moment was planned for. Robinson, a short, middle-aged, dark-skinned black man with a peppery temper, rubbed his bald spot with the palm of his hand, noticed what he was doing, and stopped. Occasionally he wondered what he had done for a nervous gesture when he still had a full head of hair.
And there was plenty to be nervous about. Eagle was half the size of the Imp, but she still made a nice juicy target, not just for the worms and/or whatever other horrors the Guards had cooked up, but for a plain old-fashioned nuke. One of those pretty flashes of light would be enough to knock Eagle out of the game for good.
But that didn't happen. The fighters went in, and some of them died. The Guardian ships that deployed the anti-ship missiles were blown. Sir George sent in frigates and corvettes and resupply ships, gradually establishing coherent force around the tiny worldlet that sat right where the astrophysicists said it would, exactly at the barycenter. A few minor Guard warships fought hard, killed and were killed. Slowly, methodically, Sir George peeled back the barycenter's defenses. Finally the League fleet moved in, and found itself astride the centerpoint of the whole star system. No Guard ship could move between Outpost and Capital in normal space without battling its way through the League fleet. The League forces could also intercept and/or jam most radio and laser communications between
the two worlds. Most important, they were in under the range of the anti-ship missile systems around Capital and Outpost. The missiles spotted ships coming out of C2. As long as the League ships stayed in normal space, they could move against the two worlds without tear of the robot missiles. Of course, the Guards would see them coming, and the anti-ship missiles could probably be fired by remote control to go for ships in normal space. The fight wasn't over.
The planning for this attack had been hideously complex— the timing and communications problems mind-boggling. But it all paid off, with a clean, careful, methodical, smoothly run—and almost dull—operation. Captain Robinson liked it that way. So for, Eagle hadn't even had her paint job scratched.
Sir George was equally pleased, at the end of it. He had been in the task force control center seemingly every minute, always fresh and calm looking. It was time to put Bannister into operation. The specialists went down to the baryworld, and Thomas kept himself carefully appraised of their progress. Now it was time for him to wait again. Thomas didn't want to hack through the defenses of the two worlds. He wanted the Guards to come to him, force them to fight on his turf.
He intended to keep building up his power at the barycenter, bringing in an endless stream of supplies and ships. Sooner or later, the Guards would have to try and put a stop to it, or face the prospect of a huge and impregnable enemy fleet in their own back yard. He had to wait. But waiting was slow torture to Sir George—and he had spent a lifetime in that torture already.
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