by Chris Walley
“Thank you, Captain,” responded Louis with a little bow of the head.
“And, Erika, what about you?”
She gave him a pained look. “I’m not from Farholme; I’m from Bannermene.”
“Our next-door neighbor. We say here that it’s the next best thing.”
“And we say the same about you. Well, I work on Assembly government protocols for our sector. I was caught here by the Gate’s loss—destruction. Call it what you will.”
“Ah, I see.”
“Yes, all my family are—” she glanced skyward—“over there. I too know Anwar Corradon, of course. He asked if I would volunteer for something difficult. If these intruders do have the technology to go through Below-Space, then I would certainly like us to get it.”
“So you can go home?”
“Of course. But equally, if they are evil, which I gather we suspect, then I don’t want them going on to the next system and wiping out their Gate. I don’t want what happened here to happen there.”
“A fair point.”
Merral was thinking what to say next when the drinks arrived.
As Erika drank her coffee and Louis cautiously sipped his water, Merral outlined the plan for them to approach openly. He watched them carefully for their response.
Louis just shrugged in a polite way. “What you’ve said is about what we were told. How many people are there with us on this hoverer?”
“Fred Huang—your lieutenant—suggested four. The only arms I can offer are bush knives, which are now slightly modified and probably more effective.”
“Do they work?” asked Erika.
“Oh yes,” Merral replied, rather reluctantly. “They work. At close range.” He tried not to think about his own experiences. “And we are also giving you smoke canisters. If there is trouble, Fred will tip them overboard. They float, and they may give you a screen to escape behind.” The smoke canisters had been Vero’s idea.
Erika bent over to whisper something in Louis’s ear. Whatever it was, Merral decided it was well received, because he nodded agreement.
“Captain,” Louis said, leaning forward, “Erika is suggesting that we reduce the crew going with us. To the minimum. Two, I would think. A pilot and this Lieutenant Huang. As you gather, we are not particularly concerned about our own lives. But I am—no, we are—about those of others.”
Merral evaluated the request for a moment before answering. “Very well, I accept that suggestion. I will talk to Lieutenant Huang about that. So you are not very optimistic about a negotiated settlement?”
“No,” Louis said firmly, and he put down his glass with a look of slight distaste. “I’ve talked with Anwar, and I can make my own deductions. If they wanted to talk they would have done so earlier.”
He peered into the empty glass and then looked up with sad eyes. “If I were you, Captain, I would prepare for the worst.”
After Erika and Louis had gone to the tents assigned to them, Merral sat down to check the manifest from the Henrietta Pollard and was encouraged to see that it had brought the dozen men needed and the outstanding equipment. As he put the manifest down on the table, he heard the sound of the freighter taking off on its way back to Isterrane. The next time engines like that roar over this island, it will be us on our way north.
A few minutes later, his guard admitted Perena, accompanied by a pale-faced young man in civilian clothes whom he did not recognize.
“Sorry to interrupt you, Captain,” she said as she saluted, her face stiff.
“You are always welcome, Per—Captain Lewitz,” Merral said, rising and saluting back. He was wondering at her formality when he noticed the worried look of her companion.
“Have we met before?” he asked, extending his hand.
There was a look of hesitation in the man’s face as he shook hands. “No . . . sir. Not so as you’d remember. I was loading the Emilia Kay the other day when you came through. I’m Leonas Vorranet.”
“Loading, eh, Leonas?” There was something about both his and Perena’s manner that allowed Merral to guess at what was to come. “Take a seat, both of you.”
The young man sat down and stared at the floor as Perena began to speak. “After our problems with the barrel I made inquiries. Leonas very kindly volunteered to come over from Isterrane in the Henrietta Pollard and tell us what happened. Exactly.”
Leonas tilted his head up enough that Merral could see his eyes, deep blue and tinged by guilt.
“Sir, I’ve come to apologize,” he said, his voice faint and strained. “It’s my fault. Somehow, I used old strapping. Stuff that was already on the ship. Not the new stuff.”
Perena looked hard at Merral. “That’s what tests confirm,” she said. “The strapping was decades old and decaying inside. We thought we had removed it all, but there must have been bits lying around.”
“I see, Leonas,” Merral said, already wondering whether he was supposed to discipline this man and, if so, how. “But wasn’t it obvious that it was outdated? It’s color coded.”
There was a long pause and the blue eyes looked down at the floor. “Well, it was really, sir. But I was . . . careless, I suppose. I didn’t think it mattered. There was the hurry. I suppose I thought that Assembly standards are always overcautious.” There was a pitiable tone in his voice. “I’m sorry.”
Merral walked round to the front of his desk and sat on it. What do I do with this fellow? He saw that Perena was frowning.
“And, Leonas,” Merral asked, “I take it Captain Lewitz has told you how she nearly had to eject the cargo module because of your stupidity?”
“Sir,” interrupted Perena, her diffident tone suggesting how unhappy she was about intruding, “if I may make a distinction; I have had a longer time to think about this. It was not stupidity. Leonas is not stupid. It was negligence. In some ways that is more worrying.”
“I see. . . . Negligence, eh?” Merral wished he’d had a chance to look that term up in the dictionary and also in the section on military discipline in the handbook. “As in carelessness? Perena, I suggest we send this fellow off to Luke while we have a talk together.”
“I think that would be very wise,” she said. “Very wise indeed.”
Merral turned to Leonas. “I accept your apologies; I will decide what to do with you later. In the meantime go and find the chaplain and tell him why you are here.”
Leonas bowed his head in a way that Merral thought was possibly indicative of gratitude. “Thank you, sir,” he said and rose to his feet.
As he went to the tent door, Perena called out, “Oh, Mr. Vorranet. One last thing. Would you just tell Captain D’Avanos where you are from?”
“I don’t see as—,” Leonas began, but Merral saw Perena’s thin eyebrows rise in irritation and he seemed to change his manner. “Yes, sir. Larrenport . . . sir.”
“Larrenport?” Merral said loudly as the significance sank in. It had to be coincidence. “I don’t suppose you know the crew of the vessel Miriama?”
Leonas gave a weary grunt. “That again. Yes, one of the crew stays with us. Lawrence Trest. But I fail to see . . .”
Lawrence Trest, Merral remembered: one of the men who, with Daniel Sterknem, had met the cockroach-beast on the floating tree trunk.
“You fail to see, do you?” Merral replied, rather more sharply than he had intended. “There’s a lot we fail to see too. But I suggest you go to the chaplain.”
When Leonas had gone out of earshot, Merral stared at Perena. “So what do you make of it?”
Perena ran slender fingers through her cropped hair and shook her head sadly. “Merral, I’ll be honest; as a pilot it scares me rigid. Of everything that has happened here, including those holes burned in my ship, this is the worst.”
“I think I see why, but go on. Explain.”
“Certainly. Negligence of the type perpetuated by Leonas is almost unknown. There have been odd instances in Assembly history of accidents caused by the coming together of minor ac
ts of forgetfulness. You know, X forgets to put in the right computer code, Y is away, and Z forgets to check it, that sort of thing. But that is basically it. Nothing like this. Ever. And we are very vulnerable to negligence. If it breaks out on a large scale, we could be in a lot of trouble. We may have accepted the Technology Protocols, but an awful lot of our technology—diaries, ships, Gates and so on—are very complex machines. And we have very few defenses against negligence.”
“Forgive my stupidity, Perena, but how can you defend against it?”
“Oh, ask Vero. The ancients did in the old days. Before the Intervention and the Assembly. They double-checked things for a start. They trusted nobody—least of all themselves. So in this case there would have been a loading supervisor in the module who checked Leonas’s work, and there would have been a specific list to check it off against. There would have been rules and instructions and discipline for any breaches.”
“I see.” Merral felt his mind reeling. “So is this another manifestation of evil?”
“Yes. And one we had not expected. Evil is proving more complex and subtle than we had anticipated.” She stared into the distance, rubbing her face with her hands. “You see, Merral, think of evil and you think of murder, rape, and war. Yet there are lesser manifestations, and they may be just as dangerous. Fear, grumbling, pride, and yes, negligence. All could be our undoing.”
“A depressing but valuable thought. But the Larrenport link again? I wonder how many—”
“Three.” She gave him her severe introspective smile. “You have three men from Larrenport in the existing teams.”
“You guessed my question. What do I do? Pull them all out?”
Perena gave him an odd look. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“What?”
“There is another center of infection. If you pull out the Larrenport men, then you’d better be consistent and remove the Ynysmant men too. You’d lose a man from the reserve unit—”
“Jonas Trinder . . .” Merral snorted as the implication sank home. “And also the captain himself. I can hardly discriminate against them except by discriminating against myself.”
Perena looked at him in knowing sadness. “Just so. You must be fair. But the implications are, Merral, that we all need to be on our guard. To check and double-check.”
“So what do I do with Leonas, then?”
“Your decision. But seeing as he resulted in a tent being ruined, why not have him sleep out in the open?”
Just after lunch, as Merral was reviewing the plans for the following evening’s deployment of forces, one of the young men who worked with Vero came into the tent with an air of urgency and handed him a piece of paper. He unfolded it to see Vero’s fine neat handwriting.
Felicity is approaching the ship!!! We are getting images! Can you assemble the team leaders? I will bring the printouts over. Get a screen fixed.
It took twenty minutes for Merral to find and assemble the leaders in the humid meeting tent and get a wallscreen hung up at the end. No sooner had everybody sat down than a sweating Vero pushed his way in through the flap, clutching a datapak and a roll of large prints. The sentinel’s face bore such an intensity of consternation and unease on it that, for a moment, Merral thought he had failed. Vero nodded clumsily to everybody, pulled up a chair, and sat down.
“H-here it is,” he said, with a hint of a stammer, and let the sheets unroll on the table. “Th-there’s a copy each.”
Perena leaned forward and, in her enthusiasm, almost snatched a sheet. The others followed. Merral pulled off a copy and stared at the image, barely conscious of the hum of excited chatter developing around the table.
They were large, grainy color prints. At the limit of resolution for a micronic camera, thought Merral, trying to assimilate what he was seeing. At the bottom of the image lay the blue lake waters, and in the upper part, above a rugged slope, were the hazy gray hues of the sky. In between the two, not quite horizontal, lay the shoreline on the other side of the lake, and on that rocky shore was the ship.
Merral’s first impression was of a giant matte black slipper stretched out under some sort of extended awning.
“Brilliant!” cried someone in the room. “Just brilliant!”
“Marvelous, Vero! Well done!” called another.
Merral did not look up but stared at the image, trying to pull out as much information from it as he could. There was a sharp rear end and smoothly rounded front. The rear section was supported by two massive legs, apparently paired, while the front was held up off the ground by a high, single column. The only other features appeared to be long, lateral, finlike protrusions on the sides and top and, three-quarters of the way along, a ramp that sloped forward onto the ground. Below the ship, and dwarfed by it, were four small bipedal creatures and three taller creatures of a broadly anthropoid form. Neither was human, and the sight of them gave Merral a sick and fearful feeling in the pit of his stomach. He realized how much he had hoped not to see them again.
Merral looked up to see that Vero was leaning forward on the table, his head supported on his clasped hands, staring darkly into the distance. Funny. I would have expected him to be excited about these images. But perhaps he feels the same as I do on seeing these creatures again.
Merral saw that Perena was measuring off the size of the ship with her fingers.
“Perena, your initial thoughts?” he asked. “Please.”
She looked up, her face thoughtful and wary. He saw the others look at her.
“Only very initial. Size—bigger than predicted. The shape is less ovoid—your computer smoothed it too much, Merral. From the tactical point of view, my guess would be for the teams to go for severing the nose leg and blocking closure of the gangway ramp. The rear legs look too solid.”
Frankie and Zak nodded agreement.
“Seen anything like it before?” asked Maria Dalphey.
“No.” Perena’s voice was sharp. “I’m fairly certain no production Assembly craft has been designed like that. If we had the time, I’d compare it against any of the prototypes. But it’s not like anything I recollect seeing. And it looks all wrong. It’s ugly.”
That’s right, thought Merral. No Assembly ship looks this unattractive.
“But you reckon as there’s any evidence of Below-Space technology?” It was Zak’s voice.
Perena looked at the image again, pursed her lips, and shook her head. “No . . . not that I can see. Looks like a chemical or ion engine at the rear. I think I can see evidence of where a hatch for a ferry craft hold may be. On the top. The closest thing would be, oh, one of our inter-system liners. Say the current 20D series.”
Anya caught Merral’s attention with a gesture of her hand. “The creatures we can see. Cockroach-beasts and ape-creatures?”
“Yes. I’m afraid so.”
There was a moment of silence as everybody looked at the images again.
“Funny thing there,” Luke said. “The dark object. On the water . . . Or above it? Just to the right of the ship. Debris?”
Merral looked at the image again, seeing, not far from the ship, a black object that eluded immediate identification. A bird, he thought, before he remembered that birds shunned the ship. He stared at it, wondering how big it actually was.
“It’s n-not debris,” Vero said with such a tone of numbed assertion that everybody turned to look at him. Seeing his strained face, Merral wondered whether he was ill.
“So what is it?” Merral asked, somehow unable to restrain a shiver of unease.
“I-I don’t know,” Vero said in a distracted tone. “It’s in other frames. . . . It is s-something new.”
Suddenly a thought came to Merral. “Vero, the horse—Felicity? Is she all right?”
The brown eyes blinked. “No,” Vero said eventually, and his expression told of some awful fate. Then he breathed in deeply and seemed to regain some measure of control.
“I’m sorry, Merral, ev-everyone. We’d better wat
ch the whole clip. I should warn you that it is not . . . not easy watching.”
People looked at each other, their faces openly expressing alarm and bewilderment.
Vero started speaking. “This morning Felicity reached the southern end of Fallambet Lake Five.” His voice was now controlled, but under its flat tone Merral was aware of a real anxiety. Vero tapped his diary and the wallscreen flashed on with a tilted and grainy image of the lakeside.
“Part of the problem was that increasingly we had been having problems motivating her. She seemed reluctant to go north. Anyway, this morning she did. F-frame rate here was once every ten seconds, so we can fast forward.”
A flickering and shuddering succession of images filled the screen. The pointed end of the lake got progressively nearer and nearer as the mare moved slowly and hesitantly northward. She seemed to stop every so often. Presumably, Merral thought, to eat. Now the images looked across the lake waters toward the other side.
“It was about at this point that the metabolic indexes of stress started to rise,” Vero said, his voice drenched with unhappiness. “Heart rate, adrenaline or its equivalents.”
The images jerked onward, and for the first time they caught a glimpse of the ship. Vero paused the display, freezing on a tilted image with the lake leaning strongly to the right.
“We haven’t printed these yet, but I don’t think they will show too much more than you have seen already.”
He unfroze the screen, and as the new images flickered past, Merral decided that the horse was no longer stopping to eat.
As the imagery became increasingly like the printout they had studied, Vero spoke again. “The idea,” he said, “was to get Felicity opposite the ship and then get her to veer away westward. Then she could make her own way back south. Or we could have picked her up in a couple of days’ time. That was the idea. . . .” He trailed off into silence and more images flashed up. “By the time we got to this point she was under severe stress. The control team was very worried.”
“Why?” asked the dry, worn voice of Dr. Azhadi. “Why was she scared?”
It was, Merral thought, a question a doctor would ask.
