Rogue Powers

by Roger MacBride Allen

Outside, C'astille wondered what was taking so long in there. In the excitement of being back on her own Road (she realized she was beginning to think a bit like a Z'ensam) Lucy forgot about her escort for quite a while. It wasn't until she had sat down in a real chair (well, a crash couch, but it was designed by and for a human), and had a cup of properly hot, fresh coffee that she remembered her escort. It took her a minute to find the external mikes and speakers on the unfamiliar comm control panel. She switched on the mike and spoke in English. "Can you hear me?"

  "Very well, for too well," C'astille's voice replied a bit testily. "We all just bolted and ran half across the field out of reflex."

  "Sorry. Let me turn it down. Is that quiet enough?"

  "Much better. Now perhaps we won't attract every Hungry for a day's gallop around. What have you been doing? Night is coming on."

  "Sorry, C'astille. I was just cleaning myself and getting some human food and drink. Things I even forgot I missed.

  I lost track of the time. But if it's night, perhaps I'd better just sit tight here for the night. It would take a while to get into a suit and get out to the wagons."

  "Very well, though you could have mentioned it sooner. We were getting nervous, and I had no way of contacting you. I thought the air might have gone bad in there and killed you."

  "Thank you for worrying, C'astille, and I apologize for worrying you."

  "No more will be said. Is your lander well?"

  "She seems to be in very good shape, though it will take some hours more of work to get her powered up and operational. Tomorrow will be time enough. Rest well, and I'll see you in the morning. I'll leave the hearing and speaking devices on so you can call me."

  C'astille, still a bit miffed, summed up the English exchange to her companions, and the Z'ensam retreated to the protection of the wagons.

  If the truth be known, it wasn't the difficulty and delay of suiting up that kept Lucy inside the lander, but the comfort of being in human air, human light, with human food in her gut—and the thought of sleeping in a proper bed, even a collapsible mattress, was an overwhelming temptation.

  She left the comm station on standby and beside the external pickups, she set the radio on scanner/receive without even thinking, unfamiliar board or not. That was standard operating procedure, one of a thousand things they bashed into a pilot s skull.

  It was one of the thousand things that kept pilots alive.

  Left to itself, the cabin air was lovely in its scentlessness. With the air-conditioning on, bringing the temperature down from the usual high thirties of Outpost to a sinfully cool eighteen degrees centigrade, it was paradise. Lucy dragged the fold-up mattress out into the center of the cabin deck and flopped it down. Sheets, top and bottom! A pillow! She felt that she truly appreciated civilization for the first time.

  She dropped off to sleep the moment she had cuddled herself into a comfy position, the now-familiar growls and screams of an Outpost night coming through the external mikes to serve for a lullaby.

  Half an hour after Lucy dozed off, the emergency alarm blared into life, and she was in front of the comm board before she was fully awake. Where was the bloody alarm cut-off? There. The yowling of the siren cut off in mid scream.

  What the bloody hell was going on—a text message on channel 30? She shunted the message over to the computer screen:

  URGENT YOU DEPART FOR BARYCENTER DURING TIME PERIOD STARTING IN ONE HOUR TWO MINUTES AND ENDING IN ONE HOUR NINETEEN MINUTES. MANY SHIPS IN ORBIT AND THIS WILL BE ONLY CLEAR WINDOW FOR SOME DAYS DEPENDING ON SHIP MOVEMENTS. GOOD LUCK FRIEND WU MAINTAIN RADIO SILENCE DO NOT REPLY WE'LL KNOW IF YOU GO. MESSAGE REPEATS: URGENT YOU—

  Jesus! Lucy cleared the screen and rubbed her eyes. How the hell did Cynthia—of course, the beacon. Thank God for that.

  A loud thumping noise came from the external pickups. Lucy kicked in the cameras. It was C'astille, pounding on the hull. Damn! That reminded Lucy that she had wanted to record some images of the Z'ensam, get some sort of proof they existed. She had planned to do it in the morning, but it was too late now. She twisted a few knobs and set the external cameras to record. "Yes, C'astille. What is it?

  "We heard a loud scream come from the talking device that comes from your ship. Are you all right?"

  "Yes, thank you. It was an emergency message, from, from one of my Group who guessed I would be here. She tells me I must leave this place very soon, or not at all, because later the enemy will be where it can find me as I launch."

  "You must leave now?"

  "Yes." Lucy hesitated and shifted to Z'ensam. "You will sense me again. I will be here again, and we shall journey more. But there is a thing you must do. The device I called a beacon—the radio-direction finder. It is in the wagon. Keep it with you. It will show me the Road that leads to you, no matter where you are."

  "It will be with me. Good luck." The last C'astille spoke in English. There was no way to say it in her own speech.

  "Thank you. Now, bright lights will come on for a few minutes. My camera will get pictures of you for my Group to see, so they will have knowledge that you truly exist. My people still have never sensed you. The lights will stop before too many large night animals are attracted."

  'very well. There is no time for your descent from the machine for a true goodbye?"

  "No." There wasn't much else she could say. "I wish there were time," she said, switching back to English. "But let me get your picture, and then you must all get quite far away, for the lander is dangerous to those outside."

  "I have seen many landers fly. We will get well out of the way. When will you launch?"

  "In about an hour. I'm sorry, I can't think well enough to convert that to your measures."

  "I know what an hour is. We will be out of the way in time."

  The floodlight blossomed on, blanketing the area around the lander in a harsh white light. C'astille shielded her eyes with her hand and waited for her eyes to adjust. She told herself to act intelligent, to convince this mysterious halfwalker Group of Lucy's that she wasn't just an animal. She wondered what, exactly, would constitute intelligent behavior.

  Unsure of what to do, she did what billions in the same

  situation had done before. She waved at the camera.

  * * *

  Lucy would have smiled at that if she had been watching the monitors, but she was already over her head in calculations. How the hell to get off the planet without being converted into radioactive gases? If the Guards were in line-of-sight of her, they would spot the plume of her lander's fusion engines instantly. It would be impossible to miss. Having spotted her, they would know who it had to be, and where she had to be going. They would blow her out of the sky, and probably bomb her launch point just to be on the safe side.

  She had to stay out of line of sight while firing her engine. Okay, fine. That meant a short boost at high thrust so she could get up to escape velocity and shut down the engine fast. She had to dive for southern skies, toward the barycenter, and that would help. She knew from running the radar on Ariadne that there was very little surveillance of that direction—and what there was run from Ariadne—and if the Guards didn't breathe down their necks too hard, there were fair odds that the CIs could manage to look the other way. Cynthia Wu would make sure of that.

  Then, a long run powered-down, to get far, far away before she relit her fusion engines for an extended burn that would get her to the barycenter, 7.65 billion kilometers away. The further from Outpost she was, the better a head start she would have on any pursuit. And if they couldn't backtrack her launch point, they couldn't identify her—and that meant that, with their hands full with an invading fleet, they wouldn't be likely to bother with her.

  But she had to get this tub ticking along, bring her to life carefully after her months-long slumber. God only knew what systems had gummed themselves up without maintenance. Lucy had hoped to take at least a day or two to check things out, but it looked like it was time to have faith in the backups.
Engine test cycle go. Fuel system at go. Fuel tanks at ninety percent—and she was going to need every drop of it. Food, water—there should be enough aboard for this trip, and if not she could stay alive on not much for a few days. No time to take an inventory now. Guidance. The computer seemed sane, and seemed to know where the sky was. She would have to trust it. No benchmark to test it against, and with forty-five minutes until her launch window opened, no time to calibrate against the sextant.

  Damn! No time to toss the dead-weight mass out of the lander. Well, she'd have to deadhead it to escape velocity, then toss it through the airlock when she was running doggo, all engines powered down.

  What about the hull? Did it still have integrity, or had some damned Outpost plant secreted some weird acid that had weakened it so it'd split a seam and start losing air under the stress of acceleration and vacuum? No time and no way to check. But she could take precautions. The second pressure suit. Lucy dug it out of the storage locker, and didn't realize she was buck naked until she started to put the suit on over bare skin. It had felt good to sleep in the nude, but time to get back into a damned monkey suit again. At least it was a clean one.

  There was a rather awkward series of mechanisms on the suit that would take care of wastes, a sipping straw that would stave off death by dehydration, and even a little airlock gizmo that would let her pass food in toward the general direction of her mouth. If the hull leaked, she could stay alive in the suit long enough to get to the barycenter. But it wouldn't be fun.

  She was on the clock and the minutes were dying. Back to the pilot's station. Fusion chamber pressure okay. Atmosphere engines cranked up and ready. She was tempted to skip them and boost on fusion, but C'astille and company might be too close. If the plume of fusion rocket exhaust brushed past them as she was on the way up, they'd never feel it before they died. Even if they were out of range, the actinic light of fusion could blind them.

  No, she d have to go up on the old liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen engines. Half a tick. Why not ride the lox/l.h. as far as she could? It'd be the most efficient way to dump the mass of the liquid oxygen, and burning conventional propellant produced a much less noticeable flame—oh, they would spot it if they knew to look—but more than likely they wouldn't be rigged to spot such an inefficient fuel combination.

  Lucy knew that she might begrudge every gram of hydrogen wasted in the lox/l.h. burn later on, but she knew damn well there might not be a later on if she didn't take the gamble.

  She wasn't the sort to look back once she made a decision. She'd use the lox/l.h. system. Eighteen minutes until the window—and when it opened she'd jump through it, with any sort of luck.

  Luck. And there she was on a nameless lander. It wouldn't do. She did nothing but think of the name. That was enough to ward off bad luck. Halfwalker. C'astille was possibly the only person of any species who would appreciate the humor in that. Lucy resolved to stay alive long enough to tell her about it.

  Working quickly and carefully, Lucy brought Halfwalker to life. The minutes died, all too fast. Too many systems were taken on faith, too much she just had to cross her fingers on.

  Three minutes. She had a course, of sorts, laid in, a brute-force run into the south, and then she'd see what happened.

  Two minutes; one; none. Show time. Power to take-off engines—

  And a red light came on. Lucy's fingers rattled over the keyboard, demanding details on the malfunction, and her heart hammered in her chest. She had only seventeen minutes to solve it, fix it, or else—oh bloody hell, it was only the damn manual crank on the outer airlock. She had forgotten to fold the thing and close and cover on it. More than likely it would be sheared off by air resistance as she headed out of the atmosphere.

  So be it. Lucy hit one last button, and Halfwalker grabbed for sky.

  * * *

  C'astille watched with a full heart as the pillar of flame clawed its way toward the stars, and the roar of the engines made the very ground shake. She had tried to describe this thing, launch the humans called it, to her companions. But words failed. To ride that pillar of flame, to race through a skyful of enemies to some sparkles of light in the night sky that you hoped was a mighty fleet— C'astille marveled at her friend's courage and wondered if she herself had the nerve, the spirit, to do such a thing, to ride flame toward the risk of death.

  But the stars. The stars lay at the end of that Road of fire.

  C'astille watched the lander climb out of sight, leaving a ropy vapor trail behind that quickly dispersed into the wind. And she realized that she might be the first of all her kind to dream of flying without revulsion, for none of her kind had ever flown and kept a whole name.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Outpost, Nihilist Encampment

  D'etallis was a veteran of endless political infighting; she knew the value of good Intelligence. From a half dozen sources—Z'ensam who had befriended Guardians, from taps and listens-ins on radio traffic that the halfwalkers thought the Z'ensam didn't know about, through any number of little tricks—D'etallis knew the League had arrived at the barycenter.

  She didn't know exactly what the League was, besides the fact that they were human and the enemies of the Guards. That was all she really needed to know. And the timing was just about perfect for her purposes.

  D'etallis had made grand progress in her projects, but she discovered that her motives, her plans, her desires changed, even as she went from victory to victory.

  She had seen Eltipa Divide. That was the turning point. Even after all the scheming, all the lies, all the manipulations, D'etallis had discovered that she still loved her old Guidance at that last, horrible moment. Too late to deny her the indignity of madness, idiocy, the loss of her name, D'etallis had killed her Guidance, and sworn that this would be the last generation that would suffer Division.

  Her Guardian friends had helped bring that dream closer. With their weapons and tactics, D'etallis's followers, still half herd-mob and half army, would soon conquer or absorb every Group for an eight-day gallop in every direction. The Refiners still stayed ahead of her, stayed out of it, and a few others, but the day was not far off when she would have taken the entire heart of the continent.

  And, under her direction, there were no Divisions. That was the main thing, or at least it should have been. D'etallis had found herself up against a paradox. An end to Division was merely a first step. The only absolutely certain way to ensure an end to Division was to ensure the end of the race. Which meant having a large enough base of power to support an army that could do the actual killing. Which, clearly enough, meant having a lot of live Z'ensam around. If there weren't enough Nihilist Z'ensam around, Nihilism would collapse. If it had gotten big enough first, it might manage to take some or all of the rest of Z'ensam civilization with it. But inevitably, some small number would have to survive, and divide, and the species would continue, and repopulate the world.

  Worse, there were some sub-Groups of Nihilists not at all interested in the great work of genocide. They had found the power in a rifle barrel, were living well, and weren't too keen to wipe out the Z'ensam that served them at gunpoint. They had lost the purity of their ideals to luxury. D'etallis was forced by her successes to realize that she was doomed to failure, if she went on the way she was.

  But a good politician knows how to twist failure into victory, how to exploit advantages and chance opportunities while sidestepping problems.

  D'etallis had worked it all out very clearly. First was the principle that all intelligent life was an abomination. There was equal merit in killing halfwalkers as in killing Z'ensam. More importantly, it should be easier to talk Z'ensam into killing ugly aliens—especially when the aliens had such interesting toys to serve as booty. The Guardians obviously had weapons for more powerful than what they gave to the Nihilists. Get her hands on those, and the job of wiping out the Z'ensam could be done. Starsight was another piece of the puzzle. The Guardians had made the formal presentation of the spacecraft a few days ago.
D'etallis herself had christened the craft. The name was calculated to please and reassure the humans, and apparently it had.

  Best of all was the news from the Nihilists' biological labs. They had carefully collected bits of human skin scraped from inside pressure suits; saliva from used drinking containers, even blood drawn from Captain Romero himself. The good captain had been strolling the grounds of the camp without a pressure suit, wearing a neck-sealed bubble helmet instead. C'ishcin had "accidentally" bumped into him and driven a tiny collection syringe into him and pulled it out before the fool halfwalker even had time to feel pain. It was perilously close to medicine, of course, but crimes had been committed in the service of a greater good before this. The biologists had burrowed in the human garbage dumps and latrines for samples. Discarded toenail clippings, mucus on a tissue, bacteria from human feces—all of it went into the labs for examination.

  And now the biologists knew enough to build their plagues.

  The Guards would be distracted by their war with the League. Presumably, they would try to keep it secret from the Nihilists. Detains knew how to take advantage of that, too.

  The Guards had taught her a lot about strategy. It was time to strike.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Bary center

  The whole fleet was on alert, thanks to one tiny ship. Eagles tracking had spotted her two days ago, coming toward the center from Outpost. It was the only response the Guards had made so far to the League's invasion.

  It was easy to imagine a superweapon aboard, a bomb that could vaporize the entire barycenter, or a bioweapon that would make the foam worms seem benign by comparison.

  But there were some strange things about that ship. She had started her boost from millions of kilometers this side of Outpost. And if she kept to the course and thrust she was using, about forty hours from now she would come to a halt, a hundred thousand kilometers away from the center. It was tempting to think that she wanted to stand off so as to not get too close and appear threatening. Or was she just trying to stay out of range of whatever she was going to lob at the fleet? Captain Robinson wanted to blast her out of space, but Admiral Thomas had some faint hope that she was a peace ship, negotiators aboard. If there was the slightest chance to limit the killing, he would take it. Besides, the League needed time to build up its supply and expand its beachhead in the barycenter.