"Border post," said Olsen.
"A what?" asked Elizabeth.
Why was she here? Someone more senior should have been here.
"Something I read about. They were also called death posts, though since we're sailing on past it without getting killed, I suppose the description is inapt."
"Or they have been deactivated by whoever sent us that invitation," said Slome.
It certainly looked a bit like a post, though one with streamlined ovoids attached at each end. It was huge-as Kelly recollected, the high magnification scan readout put these objects at two miles high, and there were thousands of them. The Doctrinaires aboard Mao told everyone they were the product of the ancient Collective from Earth that had been betrayed by the humans who took control before the Markovians. No one believed that; too many of the crew had heard the rumors about the entity called the Owner, though, of course, no one said so.
"That could have been what hit us," said Elizabeth.
Kelly shook her head. "I don't think so-that felt like something the Grazen did. Usually, after a strike like that, the wormships would be all over us. Maybe they're not attacking because of our location." She didn't feel as sure as she sounded, but felt the need not to let any of Elizabeth's statements go unchallenged.
Slome was listening to his headset again, nodding to himself. After a moment, he said, "Seems the same thing just happened to the Lenin, and now it's heading directly toward us."
Kelly rested her head against the port. It was quite simple-they'd gambled and lost.
Slome continued. "We're on the edge of a solar system here-one with a habitable world. Under conventional drive, we could be there in eight months."
"Do we have the supplies for that?" asked Kelly.
"Water and air recycling will last that long; the food will just have to."
"Then what?"
"We land."
"I don't see what good that will do us."
"Would you rather the Lenin caught up with us out here? At least down on a planet there's some chance of evading the Guard."
"Yeah, right."
*
The Grazen U-space weapon had knocked out the U-space drives of both the Breznev and the Lenin, and Astanger had thought they were all about to die. Owner Space would fling them out if they headed that way, and, anyway, they would never be able to flee the aliens using conventional drive through realspace. Whether they continued on their course after the Breznev had seemed irrelevant, but, in the end, that was what saved them from the Grazen. Owner Space flung out human ships, yet it destroyed the Grazen ones. This time it did not do the first, and fear of the second was, Astanger suspected, what was keeping the Grazen away.
However, their situation was now dire, and Shrad's insistence on pursuing those assets and punishing them seemed quite insane. With a Grazen dreadnought sitting in vacuum behind them, reversing their course would have been stupid. Taking some other course out of Owner Space would have taken years under conventional drive, and they just did not have the supplies for that. Heading straight for the same planet to which the other ship was heading seemed the best course available, but still, Shrad was as mad as a box of frogs.
Citizen Shrad—the one everyone knew was responsible for the war against the Grazen, even if Collective society doctrine had it that individual responsibility was an outmoded concept, and that there were no such things as leaders.
Shrad had ordered all of the strouded, except for the Guard, to stop eating, and, good little robots that they were, that is precisely what they had done. Now, a month into their slog insystem, some of those people were dying. Astanger felt much regret for their straits, since though the strouding process made good little robots of them, it did not relieve them of suffering-that would have been too much to ask of the Collective. However, all those who were dying were not crew but nonessential personnel, because those who were strouded did not have sufficient independence of thought to be essential. They were also, in Astanger's opinion, better off dead. At least Engineer Rand had not suffered death by slow starvation-his stroud had not taken, and he had died before they could get him to the medbay.
Everyone else was on half rations, except of course for Shrad himself, he being the most essential person aboard. Astanger could think of numerous people aboard who were more essential… the entire crew, for example. And as it was now seeming likely that there might be no return to the Collective-it struck him as improbable that a rescue ship would be sent, what with Shrad having been blackballed from the Committee-Astanger was attracted to the idea of depriving Shrad of his ability to eat. This was a position he'd never imagined himself to be in when he'd received his military call-up. As a misty-eyed youth, he had known himself to be a member of an advanced and rational political system.
The Collective had taken power before he was born, and he'd grown up in a still relatively free society, for it took quite some time for the dictates applied to actually take effect. That effect was first felt on the Capital World and took some years to reach his borderland homeworld. He grew up with the changes, the indoctrination and propaganda, and the kowtowing to the Doctrinaires. He crewed on Fleet ships that were still run the old Markovian way and because of his indoctrination thought the system bankrupt. As a ship's security officer, he applied the dictates of the new Doctrinaires to each ship now acquired. This was probably what accelerated his ascent up the promotion ladder to the position of captain. Then came the war with the Grazen.
As captain, he then had a greater overview of everything that was happening, and though Shrad's propaganda talked of Grazen assaults on Collective worlds, Astanger knew otherwise. It started to nag him, the way a straightforward assault on the Grazen was by Shrad and his lackies called a "defensive maneuver." Plain aggression was couched in terms of Collective-speak, thus the bombardment of a Grazen nest was a "tactical clearance" and the incineration of a planet-based alien nursery-one of Shrad's "special projects"—was "groundwork procedure." This elicited his dislike of Shrad, the Committee, the Collective, and himself. Being older, and wiser, he began to reassess his life. But what could he do? He was but a small cog in the Collective machine. The introduction of graywear and the gradual dismantling of the Markovian command structure elicited his disgust and contempt, and the use of the strouds finally aroused in him a cold hatred. But, again, what could he do?
Five years before the end of the war, a wormship attack deprived Lenin of its Doctrinaire. He'd spent the rest of the war ensuring that the ship didn't get another one. The Grazen withdrew from numerous worlds, then consolidated their nests around the core of their empire-if "empire" was the correct description of their system of governance, which he frankly doubted. Supplies to fleet ships were low, resources scant. The Committee called it a "victory of political rationality over animalistic imperialism" and recalled the fleet. Seeing through to the reality, Astanger counted the cost: on the Grazen side, twenty out of tens of thousands of their nests destroyed and a nursery world burned; on the Collective side, fifteen hundred and six capital ships destroyed, numerous support vessels gone, ground assault troops exterminated in great numbers (some of them burned on the nursery world in the common kind of screwup occurring when military tactics became subject to political control). The total human cost was somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, though it was impossible to get an accurate count.
Victory indeed.
But now, here aboard the Lenin, he wanted to do something. Many of the crew agreed with him-the exceptions being new personnel who had not been aboard during those five years-but there simply weren't enough of them. The crew complement consisted of fifty-eight people, all, by Committee ruling, unarmed. Shrad had one hundred of the utterly loyal Guard with him, all of them armed with handguns and carbines, and with access to even more powerful weapons than those. It seemed hopeless, and would become more so in the months to come as his crew steadily starved.
*
The Mother retreated to the nest, but could not bring
herself to finally return her vessel to its structure. Only partially reconnecting her tendrils into the yig channels and thus to the nest's long-range sensors, she gazed at the two human ships as they moved beyond the barrier. No reaction, nothing. She could not believe this: every wormship sent through there had been destroyed, the posts had fried all the drive systems of every human ship that strayed that way and then flung them back out. Why not now?
She seethed as the two human ships made for the nearest world within his domain. She gazed at them throughout the months of their journey, her frustration growing at letting two such easy targets—now they had lost the ability to travel in U-space-escape. But she was also frightened: there was the Misunderstanding to consider.
Then it started again.
Through long-unused yig channels, she received the news that the humans were preparing for another attack on the Grazen. Watch stations peppered throughout the Collective reported uncontrolled industrialization and the effective rapine of worlds. They reported massive movements of supplies, ships, and human warriors. Apparently, these last were different somehow, and this, too, was a worrying development. Such an effort had been predicted as a remote possibility when the Grazen, taking a long view of things, had withdrawn to wait for the inevitable collapse of a societal experiment that seemed doomed to failure. Analysis of this new effort showed that it would bankrupt the Collective and bring about its predicted collapse early, but that would be no consolation if another nursery world was burned.
Though she had physically separated her nest from the rest of the Grazen, she could not separate herself from her kind's racial will, the purpose, the gestalt that was the Grazen. While others of her kind prepared with cold efficiency to hold the Collective at bay until it collapsed, the Mother raged. She wanted to strike out, to damage, to hurt, and the nearest humans to her were but a few weeks away through the undersphere, then the oversphere.
The posts had not touched them, so perhaps they would not touch her? Maybe he was looking away, maybe he was gone? It was said by some that he took the form of a human, so maybe he was as short-lived as that kind and had died? While one part of her mind was so foolishly wishful, another part reasoned that something like him would not die and would not be caught with his guard down.
Then came the communication.
Though couched perfectly in the language of the yig channels, the Mother knew its source to be alien. Tracing back through the undersphere to its source, she felt a moment of pure dread. Him?
But the Misunderstanding? was the essence of her reply.
He explained, and she felt a sudden overwhelming joy.
She once again detached her consolidated kernel for oversphere travel and fell away from her main nest. Clawing through vacuum between asteroidal debris until she found clear space, she dropped into the undersphere. Yes, she had always felt that humans must pay for the deaths of her children and the other deaths sure to come, and pay, and pay. However, this was different, this was personal.
*
Kelly gazed at the images displayed in the viewing cylinder. The two probes showed the world ahead to be beautiful, warm and burgeoning with life. Bands of forest rimmed the continents, enclosing prairies and mountain ranges. Vast herds of grazing beasts, sometimes tens of miles across, were visible in flowing patterns across the prairies, cutting swathes of brown through the green. One close view showed a predator—some kind of massive reptile standing up on its hind legs-bringing down one of these grazing beasts. It was just a microcosm of the huge ebb and flow of life spread across the landmasses.
The oceans seemed equally as bountiful. Shoals of fish spumed the sea across areas as large as those landward herds. Giant cetaceans hunted and played, enormous sharks the color of polished copper cruised shorelines swamped by either basking amphibians or swimming mammals come ashore to mate and lay eggs.
Birds and flying reptiles swirled across the sky. Tropical seas gleamed sapphire. Snowcapped peaks glistened pure white. Salmon leaped in a million miles of clean rivers. It all looked so wonderfully natural, an untouched paradise.
"Do you even begin to comprehend the kind of engineering involved in creating something like that?" enquired Olsen. "If it is engineered," said Elizabeth dismissively. "Tell me about the engineering," said Slome. "Think of the migratory pattens-it all has to be programmed in. Not only has life been created down there from base genetic imprints, it's been programmed to integrate into the entire artificial environment. And you know, there's things down there that went extinct back on Terra and others that simply never existed."
"Then perhaps they were here before any engineering commenced," suggested Elizabeth, playing her preferred devil's advocate role.
"No, you see, they're suited to their environment." "Precisely." Elizabeth was triumphant. Olsen shook his head at her and turned to Slome. "Everything down there is suited to that environment. Yet, unless a lot of Markovian records are wrong, that environment was a lot colder about three hundred years ago."
"Go on," said Slome, his eyes narrowing.
"This world is not where it's supposed to be—it's much closer to the sun."
Elizabeth barked a laugh. "So, this immortal superbeing is also capable of moving worlds? I think it more likely that initial Markovian studies were inaccurate and that inaccuracy was simply copied."
Olsen shrugged. "That's always possible."
Kelly continued gazing at the images and compared what she was seeing to the incompleteness of many Collective worlds, where near-Terran environments were maintained by gas extraction and fixing plants, the importation of essential minerals from elsewhere, the resowing of certain biologicals, the endless war against alien biologicals—whole industries working to prevent, in human terms, planetary ecological collapse. This world, though, seemed to function perfectly. There was no sign of atmosphere plants or any other support technology-no sign, in fact, of any technology at all… until Traviss spoke.
"I've found something," he said.
The images in the cylinder blurred for a moment, then settled on a high view of a coastline. Traviss focused in by stages, each time allowing the ship's computers to clean up the image presented. The final image was of an estuary where a river cut down into a wide blue bay. On one side of the estuary, on a blunt peninsula, it seemed evident that there was a large building of some kind. Squinting, Kelly was also sure she could make out a jetty with what appeared to be a large twin-hulled boat moored beside it, projecting from a rocky shore just beside a white sand beach.
"Someone living down there?" wondered Slome.
Kelly shivered. The Owner!
"I'm getting stuff in infrared and some other EMR," said Traviss. "Nothing substantial, but it does seem likely there's someone down there."
"Can you give us a closer view?" Slome asked.
"If I do, we'll lose this probe-it won't have enough fuel to pull up again."
"Do so."
They all stood watching as the probe obviously headed in a course out to sea and down, the view flicking back to the building and clarifying intermittently. The image shuddered for a little while as the probe's stabilizers failed to compensate for its decelerating burn as it curved around and headed back in. Kelly felt both a growing excitement and trepidation, but really did not know what she expected to see. The final views in the probe's life were clear, and puzzling; something so prosaic in so unusual a location. Nestled in rocky slopes scattered with gnarled trees was a large building, a house, something like the kind of place the Markovians might have used as a country retreat. It was sprawling, fashioned of the surrounding stone, with turrets and towers rising here and there, red tiles on the roofs and many baroquely shaped windows. Tracks led down from it to the shore, to some wooden buildings from which a jetty projected out into the sea. Moored next to the jetty was a large catamaran. As the probe sank down toward the sea, she was sure she could discern a figure sitting on the jetty.
"That last image," said Slome. "Can you repeat it an
d clean it up?"
Traviss complied, and they all gazed at a human figure-difficult to tell if it was male or female-sitting on the jetty, fishing-and waving, too. No one seemed able to say anything about that-it all just seemed too incongruous. They had arrived at a world that had been under interdict for longer than any of them had been alive because it was owned by some dangerous being… then this.
"Give us that first orbital view again," said Slome.
Once again they gazed down from upon high.
Slome pointed. "On the other side of the estuary, the forest comes nearly down to the shore. On the side where the house lies, it's hilly for a few miles back before leveling into prairie-that's one of the few areas where forest doesn't cover the land to the rear of the shore."
"No coincidence, I would suggest," said Elizabeth, now somehow subdued.
"No," said Slome. He turned and checked each face in turn. "I suggest we land on that prairie—as close to the house as we can get. Then I suggest we go and see who is living there."
"Is that a good idea?" wondered Kelly.
"I don't know. However, what I do know is that once this ship is down, we'll not be able to take it back up again, and I do know that the Lenin is not far behind us and will almost certainly land near to us. A Doctrinaire and the Guard will come looking for us. If we were to land anywhere else, our only choice would be to run, and keep on running. There"—he stabbed a finger at the projection—"some alternative might lie open to us."
"The Owner might save us," said Elizabeth flatly.
"Or we might be bringing the Guard down on an innocent lone settler," said Kelly.
Slome shook his head. "No one is innocent. Haven't you been reading your Committee dictates?"
*
The Breznev headed toward the world tail first, poised on the bright flare of its main drive. Behind the half hemisphere of the thrust plate and the conglomeration of fuel tanks, reactor, lithium pellet injectors, and ignition lasers lay the drive penny for the U-space engines. Beyond this stretched a long reinforced framework holding an access tunnel from the now stationary spin section-a cylinder eighty feet wide and a hundred feet long-inside which the escapees were being crushed into acceleration chairs. Next along from the spin section was the giant brick of the storage section and holds, capped off by the heavy reentry shield and underslung reentry plate. The ship left an ionized trail past the world's single cratered moon, the four big reaction thrusters positioned at the four corners of the frame holding the spin section belching chemical flame to force the ship into an inward curve.
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