"What's it doing?" Keff asked, watching the ship veer deeper into the clouds of debris. Within seconds it was out of visual contact. "Is it coming around to sneak up on us?"
"Not unless it's going all the way around the orbit and coming at us from the front," Carialle said. "It's running away." She slowed down, and made her way cautiously out of the asteroid belt. A further check showed Ship Three really was fleeing. It had put the full width of the belt between itself and Carialle. "It's gone. The field's all ours. Congratulations, TE. It was your marksmanship that saved the day for us."
The Ozranian tipped a hand self-deprecatingly.
"Stop being so modest. You're a genuine hero, and I'm going to tell the world when we get back to Cridi. I'm turning around to see if we can pick up traces of the DSC-902." She swung off sunward from the belt, and turned a huge circle. "Call this your victory roll." The frog image repeated the concept with difficulty. Tall Eyebrow ducked his head.
"Cari, we've done it!" Keff said, dusting his hands together. "That'll neutralize the pirates in this system—killing two and scaring off the third. They'll never shoot at a ship in this place again. If they ever troubled you, you've evened it out now. Probably saved the future of the Cridi space program, too."
"I'm not satisfied," Carialle said, firmly. "I want to be certain that they are the ones. Were the ones. I want to see them face-to-face. I have to know." She paused, waiting until the adrenaline in her system evened out. "And then I want to haul them back to CenCom and prove to that insufferable bureaucrat and his flunkies that I was not hallucinating. Then, I'll be satisfied."
They returned to the asteroid clump where they first saw the raider ships. Carialle searched for the ion traces, now slightly disturbed by their passage and battle.
Behind the cluster of rocks was a confused knot of trails. Carialle and Keff flew back and forth, trying not to destroy the delicate veins, as they read the order of the events that had gone before they arrived.
"Looks like they were here before," Keff said, thoughtfully, sitting at the console with his chin in his hand. "Then they went away and came back again. Where did they go?"
"I think this is where they waited to ambush the DSC-902," Carialle said. "Look at that mass of exhaust particles. Those three ships accelerated to get there, then sat a long time before kicking out. They did it twice, the second time when they came after us. They did grab the ship with a Core—look at the hard thruster emissions from two ships."
"But what happened to the DSC-902's emissions?" Keff asked, studying the starchart.
Tall Eyebrow let out a little gasp and planted both hands firmly over his mouth and nostrils.
"That's it," Carialle said. "Suffocation. They sealed it up in a forcefield like TE's shield, and carried it away."
"But where did it go?"
Carialle bracketed the traces that led away from the cluster. "If I follow the tangle correctly, they went galactic clockwise."
Not far from the original point of contact, the celestial fragments grew larger, until the belt alongside which they were traveling looked like a gigantic string of brown-red pearls. The spider webbing of ions led from every direction to the largest one. Even from a distance, the artificial structures there were apparent.
"A base!" Keff exclaimed. "Give us a closeup, Cari."
The facility looked like a travesty of the spaceport on Cridi. What must have been a small fuel depot huddled beside a prefabricated dome of extreme age. Both were riddled with pockmarks from meteor strikes. Around them lay debris Carialle recognized with a sinking heart as sections from destroyed or dismembered spaceships. The most recent wreck was frosted white. The residual moisture from the life support system of the DSC-902 had not yet had time to leach away in vacuum. Its hatch and all the cargo bay doors stood open, unspeakably lonely and vulnerable. Lights were on inside.
"Oh, no," Keff whispered. Tall Eyebrow murmured a tiny, sympathetic creak.
"The hull shows half a dozen breaches," Carialle said, pulling a closeup of the imploded hull plates, showing black holes partially opaqued by the film of ice. "You can see what happened. They held it in place, and they peppered it with laser fire. See how rough the holes are. They were using a mining laser, not weapons grade. I'm getting no trace of radiation from the engines. It looks like our three friends stripped out the drives. No signs of life."
"Bodies?" Keff asked.
Without a word, Carialle magnified a small section of the asteroid's surface. What Keff had taken for a heap of short lengths of tubing in the faint light from the distant sun were half a dozen human bodies. The expression on the staring faces was that of surprise. Keff swallowed hard.
"Those bastards."
"There's more," Carialle said. She shifted focus to another one of her cameras. They were above the base now, able to see the ruins on the other side of the structures. Carialle showed them pieces of tiny ships, strewn like discarded toys.
"Even their Cores couldn't protect them," Carialle said.
"Cridi? They did not crash?" TE asked, smashing one of his long hands down on the other.
"They did not crash," Carialle replied grimly. She showed them the parts of the ships. On extreme magnification the pair in the main cabin could see that the pieces showed little damage, except where the laser holes were evident.
"And the crews?" Keff asked, subvocally.
"Dead," Carialle said, without elaborating, but she made a comprehensive recording of the pathetic scatter of small bodies in protective suits near the landing pad. Carialle wished she could not see them. At least she could spare Keff and TE that, and showed them the bodies from a distance. Keff and TE fell silent.
"I hope we blew up the ones carrying the Cores," Carialle said. "This is what the CenCom should see: what happens when that extraordinary power falls into the wrong hands."
"Four ships," Keff said sadly. "All destroyed."
"More," TE signalled suddenly, pulling handfuls of air towards his chest.
"What do you mean?" Carialle asked.
The Ozranian leader tapped the side of his head. "Observation. Please put the pieces in the air for me. Like the puzzle."
"Ah, I get you." Carialle blew up the parts of the ships and placed them in holograph form before him. With lightning speed the Frog Prince reconstructed three small ships from which pieces were missing, but there were parts left over that could not possibly belong to any Cridi ship. Among the leftovers Carialle recognized a nose cone and landing fins of an obsolete model of a human-made ship. She constructed a hologram of the completed ship around the screen image. Keff gawked at Tall Eyebrow.
"How did you do that?" he asked.
The Ozran shrugged modestly. "Observation," he repeated.
"That spatial talent of his," Carialle said. "Extraordinary. I'd like to see his people engaged in engineering design work with ours."
"But, see what is left," TE continued. "It is like yours, but not like."
"It's old," Carialle said. "Do you recognize the model, Keff? It dates from fifty or seventy years back. About the time that Cridi got bottled up."
"So a Central Worlds explorer might have found the Cridi before now," Keff said thoughtfully. "These pirates destroyed them before they could get back to report on their findings."
"Maybe they didn't find Cridi," Carialle said.
"What do you mean?"
"These thieves don't live on this rock," she said. "They can't. There's no facilities, no supplies, barely any air. They didn't simply intend to destroy the ship, or they would have left the hulk floating where it died. These unknowns are ambushing and robbing starships. This is a chop shop, a staging area. They come from somewhere else. They go somewhere else, with the stolen booty. Doesn't it make sense that it's right here, in the system?"
Keff's teeth showed in a feral grin. "It does. We'll find them. We can't let these brutes get away with mass murder." He poked a finger at the shining strands in the holotank. "Shall we see if those ley lines from the e
ngines lead anywhere?"
Chapter Nine
"Planet Five," Carialle said, turning all her video screens to the view of the dark hulk silhouetted by the distant sun. "The traitors live right here in the Cridi system."
"Let's take them," Keff said, leaning forward and slamming his fists together. In the navigation tank, strands of ion emission joined hundreds more in a skein around the black sphere, like webs tying up a fly. That was the center. So close, and yet no one knew it was here.
"Have you brushed your teeth and said your prayers?" Carialle asked, interrupting his concentration. "We can't destroy a base by ourselves, let alone a planet."
"No," Keff sighed, sitting back. Reason had been restored. "But we can get data to instruct a CW fleet. Let's see what's down there."
Keeping in the widest possible orbit, the ship circled around to sunside. It looked an inhospitable place, but there were sure signs of habitation, and the three moons, each the size of Old Earth, could have concealed fleets of pirates. Carialle listened on the frequencies she had observed the three assassins using. She picked up a familiar drone.
"Landing beacon," she said, putting the sound on audio for the others. "So far, nothing else. If there are detection devices out there I'm risking having another force come boiling after me, so I'm keeping thrusters ready to run back toward Cridi if necessary."
"What power emissions are you reading?" Keff asked, studying the astrogation tank.
"Not much. If they have any industrial complexes, they must all be underground. Residual decay in a lot of places on the surface, probably power plants from purloined spaceships. Another refueling depot, in the midst of one enormous junkheap. Radioactive dumping ground, ten degrees north of the equator, far from any of the heat vents. Read this spectroanalysis," she said, putting up a chart on one of her screens. "The atmosphere has a hefty ammonia content."
"Our archives say this burns us," Tall Eyebrow signed, looking at the molecular diagram. "Also smells bad."
"Then I'll need a full breather suit," Keff said, perusing the screen with a critical eye. "Oxygen. Grav assist. Maybe take one or both of the servo drones with me in case the gravity is too much."
"What are you talking about?" Carialle asked.
"I want to have a close-up look at the people who were just shooting at us," Keff said, but Carialle recognized the gleam in his eye. He'd looked the same way whenever they were sent on assignment to a planet suspected of sustaining life. He pointed at a spot on the planetary map, a field of craters near the refueling depot. "If you set us down there, I can get in and gather data, and be out before they know it."
"Wait a minute, Sir Knight. Yes, we may have encountered a brand new, sentient species, but that doesn't mean you should fling yourself into their midst."
"Cari, think of it—it's unprecedented. Two intelligent life forms evolving in the same solar system—and never meeting. Think of the furor at Alien Outreach. Think of being the only brainship team ever to bring home a prize like that." Keff began to see glory before his eyes, to hear the congratulations in his ears. Carialle interrupted his reverie.
"It's too dangerous! May I point out you just mentioned that these are the same people who were just shooting at us? Who murdered the crews of at least four starships? And who may have tried to kill me twenty years ago? Surely the ships sent messages with our description and video bits to home control on one of these obscure frequencies I've been trying to monitor. We'd be too easy a target landing near their spaceport, and I don't think they'll buy 'I come in peace' from the ship that just destroyed two or three of their craft. If you get caught, they'll kill you. I won't land."
"I haven't forgotten any of that, Cari, but we can accomplish a great deal if I can infiltrate them successfully. We do need data to support a Central Worlds deployment. I'm good at camouflage. All you have to do is land us very quietly in a nice, deep syncline, and give me sufficient data on the terrain. I'll find a bivouac. It'll take time for the CW ships to reach us . . . ." Keff's eye was distracted from the intractable face of Carialle's Lady Fair image. He turned to stare fully at the navigation tank.
"Cari, jump! There's a ship coming up astern. We can hide behind one of those moons, maybe loop around to the nightside. Hurry! Why aren't your proximity alarms going off? Damn it," he said, hammering a fist down on the console. "I thought we scared that third ship into next Tuesday." He scanned the scopes looking for convenient asteroid belts, planetoids, or ion storms in which they could lose themselves. "There's nothing! We'll have to run. Can you read any armament . . . ?"
"Keff!" Carialle shouted, blinking the displays on and off to get his attention. "It isn't the pirates. It's the Cridi. You'll recognize their configuration by the time it gets into range. Tad Pole persuaded the Cridi to launch their new ship in our defense."
"What?" Keff felt his jaw drop open with shock. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"You've been raving so much I didn't have an edgewise to fit in a word. Long Hand is transmitting to me from the other ship. IT is translating her sign language to me, but it's slow going, with their rotten screens. Narrow Leg and the others scrambled as soon as we accomplished a successful takeoff. They want to back us up. Small Spot and Long Hand persuaded them to launch in our defense. They came along, and they brought Big Eyes, among others. I'll play you the audio. It's very amusing. I can hear Big Voice chirruping madly in the background behind everyone else."
"Big Eyes comes?" Tall Eyebrow signed, pleased. Keff looked appalled.
"No! Send them home. This is too dangerous."
"They have better defenses than we do, Sir Knight," Carialle said, patiently. "Besides, they want to help us. I think they recognize the risk they're taking."
"We can't let them, Cari," Keff said. Suddenly the small ship came fully into focus. It looked very small and vulnerable. He dashed a hand through his hair and stared desperately at the screen. "The pirates are armed to their masticatory appendages."
"And a moment ago you wanted me to land in their midst," Carialle said sweetly. Keff had a sudden, heartfelt temptation to kick her pillar.
"I'm trained to take risks," he said. "The Cridi are not. Why did they come?"
"Why? Sir Keff, you spent over a month convincing the Cridi to sign on with Central Worlds as a member nation with full privileges. You did a good job. They've taken the concept of alliance seriously, and they mean to back up what they say. How can they prove they're our equals and allies unless we let them?
"But not like this!"
"Then, how?"
"I help," Tall Eyebrow put in, with a quick sign, before Keff could object. "They, too."
"See?" Carialle asked. "I'm proud of them."
Keff wasn't convinced, but suddenly the rust-colored planet off Cari's starboard side looked more menacing. It would be useful to have backup. CW Fleet ships were months away. If they scrambled tomorrow, it would still take weeks to close the distance. He glanced at Carialle's pillar.
"Was it unanimous?" he asked.
"By no means," Carialle said. "Snap Fingers and his brood think they should mind their own business. But look at the ones who are risking their lives, who weren't sure that ship would even break atmosphere safely. But, there they are."
Keff glanced up slyly through his eyelashes. "Big Voice came, too?"
"Believe it or not, he did."
Keff raised his hands in surrender. "All right. But Alien Outreach isn't going to like this."
"Then, they can lump it," Carialle said firmly. "Would they rather have the pirates running around loose? This is the Cridi's necks on the block, too. It's their system, and for the last fifty years, their menace. These pirates took their freedom, and killed who knows how many Cridi astronauts. The Cridi have a right to be here."
"You're correct, as always, Cari. Let me talk to them. I'm going to eat crow." He sat down in his padded seat before the console. The 1028-square grid appeared on the screen, and coalesced into a rough mosaic of the face of Narrow Leg.
>
"Captain, Carialle and I welcome you back to space."
"We are successful!" the elderly Cridi squeaked, and IT echoed his tone of triumph. "It flies, it is sound."
"I never doubted it," Keff signed, with a grin. "I've never seen such careful construction. I'm glad you're with us." He cleared his throat, then emitted a short series of chirps. "X equals Y. X plus Y is greater than X. X plus Y is greater than Y. We are equals, and the two of us together are greater than we are alone."
Narrow Leg nodded his head. "That is evident. You honor us. Circling this planet. What must we know about it?"
Carialle spoke up. "We have traced the path of the villains who attacked the diplomatic ship. We have no fleet, no heavy armament, so all we can do is gather information, and send for help from the Central Worlds. We plan to infiltrate the planet's surface."
Narrow Leg's cheeks hollowed, and the faces of the Cridi behind him paled to mint green. They looked terrified, but all of them squeaked up at once.
"Tell us how we may help."
"I didn't want them down here with me," Keff said, sublingually, hunkering himself down further into the crevasse beyond the outskirts of the building they had designated as the spaceport. "I wanted them up there, where they could use their Core to help protect us, and you."
"Nonsense," Carialle said. "There's a delay in response time, even from space. I want them where they can be on the spot if you need them."
Keff didn't protest, but the sound of the plastic globes rolling along the rocky surface of the planet sounded louder than thunder to him. Tall Eyebrow paddled at the head of a party of scouts, heading around toward the other side of the compound. Big Eyes kept up gamely behind him, beside Small Spot and her father, but most of the homeworld Cridi frankly cheated and used their amulet power to levitate their new globes. They bobbed along behind the toiling group, sitting at their ease in the bottom of the transparent spheres.
"Darn it, TE, tell them not to do that," he growled into his helmet's audio pickup. "I know the extra gravity's uncomfortable, but I'd rather take a chance on movement being spotted than extraneous power transmissions." It was bad enough that the Cridi had to use the Core technology to keep the water in the globes from freezing on this cold world. They risked detection of their ship with every deviation from strict survival. "They might at least put down a physical twitch as indigenous wildlife. If there is any. What a bleak place."
The Ship Who Saved the Worlds Page 45
