The burn lasted for about twenty seconds. The gs that had piled on so fast dropped off little by little. The Fleet Ops woman looked over to him from her seat next to his and smiled. “Sorry, we’re in a rush,” she yelled.
“DiJeRiCo?” Asher yelled back.
“Yeah, some kind of atmo-capable scout or runner off of a destroyer in orbit up there. You guys picked a hell of a time to set off that beacon!” She smiled again. “Hey, what the hell’s that thing I just buckled in? That a Cythran?”
“Yeah,” said Asher. “A—well, a captive I guess.” He looked over at Miraneeria. She was immobile, crushed back against the back of the seat. He hoped she was just unconscious or incapacitated, rather than dead. He had no idea what kind of g-forces a Cythran body could withstand.
He turned back to the crewmember. “Why are we on Slider? What happened to Komaru?”
The smile left her face. “We don’t know. We lost contact with her not long after she dropped your pod. We think she may have been blasted by a DiJeRiCo cruiser on her way back to orbit. As soon as she dropped off-com, they sent us down this way to keep an eye out for you. Were not as quiet as a scout, though. At least two DiJeRiCo pickets saw us coming in to extract you.”
Asher pictured Lieutenant Deal and Ensign Curcic. He had barely known either. Now they were presumably gone, the first Hokozana casualties in Bright-Dim. He glanced over at Jaydrupar, who looked like he might well be the next. That was, of course, assuming that they didn’t all get hit by a DiJeRiCo missile in the next few minutes. He looked back at the Fleet Ops woman. “Field Op Asher,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”
“Bo’sun Ruthgate,” she yelled back. “Nice to meet you too.”
“And thanks,” yelled Asher, “for getting us out of there. That was one hell of an extraction.”
Bo’sun Ruthgate smiled. “Not over yet,” she said. “Here comes another hard burn.”
Asher closed his eyes as the g-forces once again tried to push him through his seat and out the back of the shuttle.
Chapter Eleven
As a mere passenger, Asher had no idea how close they really came to getting fried by the DiJeRiCo ships that were hunting them. All he had to go on was the changing tension on Ruthgate’s face as she got new information over her neural net, which would be linked directly to the rest of the crew and to Slider’s on board systems. Just based on what he read there, he knew that he never wanted to hear how close a thing it had really been. He was just glad when they were drifting free in system-space. Once they had escaped the planet, he knew the hunters had missed their quarry. There were just too many places to hide in open space. The chances of anyone finding them now were slim to none.
“Are we going back to Bernabeu?” Asher asked the pilot, a Lieutenant Anna Dar, who came back to meet her passengers once the ship was safe.
“That’s the plan, last I heard,” said the tall woman. “Cormorant was still on station at the jumpgate as of five hours ago, along with most of the fleet. We haven’t heard anything since.”
That was normal in a high-security situation. The one sure way to alert an enemy to your whereabouts was with unguarded com chatter. Even the subspace links were generally kept free of all but the most necessary messages, ever since an operative in Hokozana’s Research Division had figured out how to get at least a vague bearing on a subspace signal. If Hokozana had that technology, they had to assume that others did too.
The flight was uneventful after the excitement of the extraction. Asher and Kaz checked on Jaydrupar, but he was still unconscious. He was hooked up to the shuttle’s medical services connection, so there really wasn’t anything else they could do. Another connection was wired to Miraneeria, who seemed to have suffered some internal injury from the acceleration. The shuttle was doing what it could for her, but it was somewhat lost in Cythran physiology. Out of curiosity, Asher looked over some of the scans to see if he could spot a Ferether in her, but he gave up when it became clear he had no idea what to look for. He might have been able to tell if something was really off with the scan of a human, but for a Cythran he had no baseline for comparison. Not knowing what was normal, he couldn’t tell if anything was abnormal.
The flight took about five hours, and Asher was growing bored by the time they felt safe contacting the Cormorant. Just minutes after they reestablished contact and confirmed the ship’s location, Asher received an encrypted subspace link request.
As expected, it was from Drienner Marcolis. He accepted and soon the old man was talking in Asher’s head. “What are you two doing back so soon?” Apparently Kaz was in on the link as well. “I mean, what the hell happened in that forest?”
“I’ll have my net make you a download,” said Asher. “In the meantime, we have an incoming Cythran. She’s a prisoner, but I don’t think she realizes that. She thinks we saved her from captivity among a band of natives in the woods. I thought we’d have a hard time explaining why we were taking her to Cormorant, but she got knocked out by the acceleration. We can tell her we had to take her somewhere to get her patched up.”
“And what are we supposed to do with her?”
“Jaydrupar seemed to think that we could figure out once and for all whether she’s a Ferether, or genetically modified, or what.”
There was a pause. Marcolis was either thinking or conferring with someone—either in person or on a second link. Finally, he said. “Well, there’s no point crying about it. What’s done is done. I suppose this is the best we could expect, under the circumstances. Marcolis out.”
Asher looked over at Kaz. “Well, isn’t that great? We follow Jaydrupar around, climb up and down the largest trees in Ordered Space, get captured by savages, nearly get ourselves killed, run from a DiJeRiCo destroyer and it’s the best we could expect, under the circumstances.”
“Well,” said Kaz, “I guess we did kind of screw up the mission. I bet he’s pretty pissed off that DiJeRiCo knows we were there. Now they’re going to be taking a long, hard look at the native Cythrans, too, not just the plains-dwellers.”
“The New-Other People,” Asher corrected.
Kaz groaned. “Don’t start talking like them. I might have to shoot you.”
Asher laughed.
They docked with Cormorant about an hour later. By that time, Asher’s and Kaz’s neural nets had compiled and uploaded all the data on what had happened on Cierren Cythra. When they stepped out of the docking collar, they were almost immediately surrounded by an escort of people of all stripes. Biologists from research Division were prominent among them, as were Lang and Cult people and others from Intel. Asher looked around, but he didn’t spot Lori anywhere. Ravkar was also nowhere to be seen, but he wasn’t as surprised about that. He would have thought that Lori would be there to hear news of Cierren Cythra. He had also vaguely hoped that she might be there to make sure he was all right.
Jaydrupar and Miraneeria were whisked off by medical personnel. Asher knew that now they had reached a major Hokozana ship with state-of-the-art medical equipment, the chances of either of them dying from their injuries were very small, so he stopped worrying about them. He had seen a man practically reassembled from constituent pieces in a top-of-the-line medical bay. As long as consciousness continued, almost anyone could be patched back together. The only people who didn’t make it these days were those with catastrophic brain injuries and those who died in the field before they could be brought aboard.
Asher and Kaz were led to large meeting room, not Conference Room A, but a similar place. Asher figured it was probably Conference Room B. Sure enough, his neural net soon confirmed that that was exactly where they were. Also in the room were Marcolis, Captain Echo Hawk, and—Asher was surprisingly happy to see—Lori. There were a few others as well, mostly scientist-types.
Marcolis was the first to speak. “We’ve all seen the short versions of the reports uploaded by Two-Bars Asher and Kazmalewski. I have to say for the record that I think that things could have been handled better,
but I think that is mainly down to Three-Bar Jaydrupar. Besides, the native Cythrans were a contingency none of us had really planned for. On the whole, I think the mission was adequately carried out. We have a Cythran female in our medical facilities. I am told her injuries are moderate and that she will recover. So, in sum, we have our chance to find out exactly what is going on down there.”
“I have to say, Sir,” said Asher, “that I don’t think Jaydrupar is to blame in anything that happened. In fact, I was surprised at how well he did in negotiations with the Cythrans, under the circumstances. I agree, if we had had extensive downloads and possibly a subspace uplink to Cormorant, we might have seen a different outcome, but well—stuff happens in the field.”
“I have to say I second that,” said Lori. “I may not be Hasim’s biggest fan, but the man has quite a brain on him. I’m not sure that I, with years of Lang and Cult training, could have done any better.”
Marcolis grunted. “Noted,” he said. “Perhaps I was too hasty to judge the mission outcome harshly. I think I had just gotten somewhat carried away by expectations. As Donnie said, stuff happens in the field. Now, we need to decide our next move. DiJeRiCo’s attention has been drawn to the forest. They are certainly wondering what our people were doing there, and we must assume they have at least one team of their own among the Bone Tree People as we speak. So the question is, what do we do about it?”
“Well, Sir,” said Kaz. “I figure I’m making a stupid assumption somewhere, as I usually do, but I don’t see why we have to do anything. So what if DiJeRiCo realizes something fishy is going on on Cierren Cythra? Won’t that just make them back off and call off the war?”
Asher saw that Lori was nodding at this. So were some others at the table. Echo Hawk, Marcolis, and a few others looked grim, though. There was some reason that Kaz was wrong, but Asher couldn’t see what it was. Only the higher ranks seemed to be in the know.
“Well, as to the war,” said Marcolis, “there’s no backing out now. Three contracted combatants have been involved, two on our side and one on theirs. We and DiJeRiCo have each lost control of a core system and some trigger happy idiot wasted the DiJeRiCo planet Iratha, which isn’t in the core systems but still had a population of about ten million. Our analysts project involvement by thirty-three percent of the class-one corps within the next three days, involvement will max out at about three hundred and fifty corps, including seventeen class ones, within the next two weeks.”
Asher sat back heavily in a chair. Getting seventeen major corporations involved meant that almost every system would have some participation in the fighting. There would be no containing it now. The only people who were going to do well out of this were the arms manufacturing corps in neutral Deventer.
“As to our own problems here in Bright-Dim. Since the war has expanded, the higher-ups have decided that this battlefleet has to do something. Either we take on the DiJeRiCo carrier groups orbiting Cierren Cythra or we bug out for the core systems where the ships can do some good. No decision has been made yet, so we still have time to provide in-system input. There is also the Cythran question. If they are Ferethers, then we have every reason to fear that this war is the outcome of a remarkable and carefully-laid Ferether trap. If that is the case, then we have to assume that we will soon see Ferether involvement, and we have almost no idea what their capabilities are.”
“I say we hit the carrier group hard and fast,” said Echo Hawk. “We have the strength to knock them out of the system now. Regardless of the Cythran question, we can’t let DiJeRiCo build a jumpgate of their own here. We hold every gate between here and the core systems. If they get a foothold here, they can force us to fight on a whole new front. On the other hand, if we can crush them here, we seal off a big chunk of Ordered Space and go a long way toward shortening the war. As we all know, the only way a war like this is going to end is when the two sides can no longer get at each other through the few remaining contested jumpgates. The faster we can seal this end of space, the faster we can get the fleet moving to help in another sector.”
The conference devolved into a number of smaller conversations after that. In general, Asher thought that the military folk agreed with Echo Hawk’s assessment of the strategic situation. In a war between corporations that relied on jumpgates to move between star systems, control of the gates was key. As Echo Hawk had said, past experience taught that wars like this would start with significant bloodshed and major battles. Once the initial race to control individual systems and their jumpgates was over, the fighting would settle into a stalemate. There might be attempts to run a blockade or force a contested jumpgate, but the truth was that such attempts normally failed utterly. If all the defending side had to do was mine and patrol their end of a gate, the chances of a breakthrough were low to nonexistent. It was at that point that negotiations toward a cease-fire contract would begin. In this case, since a lot of DiJeRiCo’s motivation in starting hostilities was to take control of Bright-Dim and the Cythrans, eliminating them from the system and preventing the construction of a second jumpgate would probably force negotiations even sooner.
In the end, the Bright-Dim task force forwarded that recommendation to the higher-ups in the core systems. They argued that they should be allowed to attack and attempt to eliminate the DiJeRiCo presence in Bright-Dim as soon as possible, in the hopes that that would bring about a quicker end to the war. The question of possible Ferether involvement was shelved. DiJeRiCo was the enemy they could see and respond to, taking any concrete action based on the possible future involvement of an incomprehensible foe with unknown capabilities was a fool’s game.
After the conference, Asher and Kaz were summoned to Marcolis’ quarters. When they entered, Lori was already there, speaking quietly with the old man. Marcolis turned to them with a tight smile. “Lori and others have explained how I was a bit harsh with you two today. I want to apologize for that. I have reviewed the summary reports from your nets and I agree that the actions you took were reasonable, under the circumstances. Anyway, won’t you please have a seat?”
Asher thought that the apology was far from sincere, but he had come to expect exacting and occasionally incomprehensible standards from Marcolis. It seemed sometimes that he had read a book about a hard-ass security boss, realized that it didn’t fit his personality at all, and then decided to force himself into the role. The problem was, he only seemed to remember he was supposed to be a hard-ass once in a while, and normally only in front of witnesses. In private, he was generally his more mercurial self.
Asher found a small, armless chair and took it. As he had expected, Kaz was filling and overflowing the only remaining armchair—Marcolis having taken the other. Lori was sitting, looking surprisingly relaxed, on the only sofa. Her eyes met Asher’s and held them for a while. She smiled warmly at him. Clearly, she didn’t share Marcolis’ disappointment.
“So,” Marcolis said once they were all seated. “As we recommended after the conference, the higher-ups have decided that DiJeRiCo is the enemy here and that we are to strike against them as soon as possible. At the same time, some—particularly Goldman Jaynes in Intel—have not lost sight of the Cythran problem, and the potential Ferether problem. I felt—well, Lori convinced me, anyway—that the two of you should know what’s going to happen next, as you are so intimately connected with the case.”
Asher had always found that Marcolis could cut to the chase and be direct when he wanted to. On the other hand, the man had a profound sense of his own rank relative to everyone else’s and he hoarded information like a precious resource. If he felt an underling didn’t need to know something, then usually that thing was never relayed. Asher wondered what kind of sway Lori had over him to get him to make any concessions at all.
“The Cythran you brought back with you—,” he began.
“Miraneeria,” Asher said.
“Yes, Miraneeria. She is recovering well from the internal damage done by the g-forces she experienced on Slider
. The medical people and the computers have little experience with her physiognomy, but they tell me they believe she will be awake and alert within the next few hours.”
“Well, that’s good news, right?” said Kaz.
Marcolis glanced over at Lori, who returned the look, as if urging him to share something he wanted to keep secret. Finally, he said, “They also tell me that it is almost certain that she is a Ferether.”
Asher and Kaz shared a look. Asher judged that his big friend was no more surprised than he was. Their encounter with the native Cythrans had done more than anything else—even Jaydrupar’s arguments—to show that there was something profoundly different and unnatural about the plains dwellers.
“Honestly, Sir,” said Asher, “I can’t say that I’m surprised after what we saw and heard among the Bone Tree People. I guess my only question is, what do they mean by almost certain?”
Marcolis sat back in his chair. “Apparently, there are some important differences between her physiognomy and that of the Ferether captured and, well—dissected—by Intel and the Research exobio people. An expert will be arriving within the next few hours via a special packet that left the Minada system three days ago when we first started suspecting Ferether involvement. We hope he can clarify the issue.”
With a hard stone developing in the pit of his stomach, Asher was compelled to ask, “What expert, Sir?”
It was Lori who answered. “It’s your father, Asher.”
Chapter Twelve
The special packet was a long-range shuttle outfitted to transport VIPs. It came through the jumpgate about four hours after Asher returned to Cormorant. Asher thought about avoiding it, but his father would know he was on board, so there was no point starting things off on the wrong foot. When the ship docked, he was one of several people waiting to greet the famous Dr. Maxim Asher.
Participant Species: Asher in Ordered Space Volume I Page 11
