“We have,” Globin acknowledged. “But we will still extend every courtesy to our guests. Indeed, the Distressed Spacefarer’s Law allows no less.”
“It does not require ‘every courtesy,’ ” Selena said with irony, “but we are grateful for all that you have given us thus far.” She had rallied; pirates might be dangerous, but businessmen would strike a deal, and Selena, scientist or not, had been raised to business. “We are, then, aboard one of your Baratarian ships?”
“I fear not, madam. You are aboard the Stephen Hawking, an Alliance battlestation operated by the Fleet.”
Instant consternation spread throughout the recovery room—consternation verging on panic. “So that is why those doctors were so cold, so hostile!” the auburn woman cried, and Selena snapped, “You cannot surrender us to them, sir! You must not!”
“Peace, peace, Aunt,” Lusanne said. “The war has been over for years!”
The women stilled, staring at her, huge-eyed.
“What war?” Selena whispered. “The Khalians were defeated three years before we left!”
“The war between the Fleet and our Families.” To Lusanne, a whisper was as good as a shout. “The war is history, and the wounds have healed.”
“But how can so much have happened in so short a time! You were not even born when we left! Only twenty-six years ago! Could our home world have fallen so quickly?”
“Madam,” said the Globin, “how old am I?”
Selena turned and stared, suddenly registering the lines, the wrinkles. “I had thought it was only space tan,” she whispered.
“I fear it is more,” the Globin said. “In fact, I have been told that I am uncommonly well preserved for my years, especially in view of the strains of my life in administration.”
Selena’s lips parted, but her voice was a bare whisper. “How . . . how long?”
“You have been in cold sleep for several decades,” Globin said gently.
“Several?” Selena licked dry lips, swallowed, and asked, “How long?”
“Many years,” Globin answered, and Lusanne said, “We have been on our journey for a hundred fifty years, Aunt.”
Selena reeled, squeezing her eyes shut. Lusanne was at her side in a second.
“No, no, child, I am not going to faint,” Selena muttered. She recovered her poise, pushed Lusanne away, and said, “So the battle is lost, and the rancor has cooled—but not completely, as we have seen from our doctors.” She glanced nervously at the medical team who hovered behind Globin. “All in all, I think we might be safer here.”
“You are my guests for as long as you wish to remain.” Globin inclined his head graciously. “Or at least for as long as I can stall off Commander Brand.”
“And how long will that be?”
“At the least, until you are completely restored to fitness and peak physical condition. How did you say you felt, madam?”
The Klaxon sounded.
Throughout the Baratarian Quarter, Khalians scrambled for battle stations. The Klaxon’s braying modulated into words: “Enemy approaching! Enemy penetrating screens! Enemy attack on south pole!”
The quarter rocked at a sudden blast that rang through the hull into every cubicle. The Khalian crewmen stumbled, throwing themselves against walls for support; a few fell to the floor. Then they were up again and running as the Klaxon yammered, “Hull penetrated at cargo hold South 24!”
South 24! Globin had a momentary vision of trade goods spilling out into space by the gross, trade goods fired by energy weapons within the hull, trade goods trampled under . . . Then he shook it off—if they didn’t manage to repel the Ichtons, all the trade goods in the galaxy wouldn’t do them a bit of good. He yanked open the cabinet on the wall and pulled out his rifle, then hauled the door open and went into the corridor. At his age, he knew better than to run, and his crew knew better than to let him near danger—but Plasma had dashed off after the attackers, gray muzzle or no, and no one would see the Globin coming out to the fight. . . .
He was amazed at himself; his self-image was still fixed at twenty, when he would have shied away from any combat in sheer terror. But a lifetime with Khalian pirates, and Goodheart’s careful instruction in unarmed combat, had given him back the courage the boyhood bullies had stolen, and he went toward the sound of battle, not away from it.
Then the deck lifted against his feet, and the walls shuddered. He lurched against a bulkhead, but kept his feet while a chorus of screams broke out ahead. Globin stared, then ran. It was only a few steps to the sickbay. . . .
“Hull holed in Khalian sickbay!” the Klaxon blatted. “Infantry to sickbay!”
Globin swerved into the doorway, remembering to leap aside so other defenders could come in—and they did, in a stream; but a fireball blossomed in the doorway. Khalian screams shrilled; Globin shrank back, turning his face to the wall while the light faded. Then he turned and saw dead Khalians on the floor. His heart wrenched at the sight, but more of his young Weasels were leaping in and dodging to the sides, and there was no time for grief. Globin turned ahead and saw the huge insectoid shapes grabbing at the Family women. They shrank back shrieking, looking about them wildly, clawing at the walls. The oldest one had found a plasma holder and was beating at a carapace; the Ichton tore it out of her hands and turned its rifle toward her, but younger women jammed chairs between them, and their screaming was beginning to be as much in anger as in fear. Lusanne had a bit more presence of mind than he would have expected—she had found a pole lamp and was stabbing the glowing tube at the Ichton’s eyes.
It was valiant, but would do no good. Globin steadied himself, resting his barrel on a bedstead. He aimed for the insect’s eyes and waited for a split second when there would be no human head in the way. Auburn hair swung aside; Globin pressed the trigger. The energy bolt flashed. Women screamed as they leaped aside, giving Globin a clear field of fire. He shot again and again.
The Ichton’s shrilling was at the upper edge of his hearing, tearing through his head, and the monster swung its firearm about, blasting blindly. The women hit the deck. Globin realized, with satisfaction, that he had burned its eyes out. He lowered his aim to the thorax and fired. His bolt smashed in; three more of the Khalian crew joined in, focusing on the thorax. The monster bucked, then fell dead.
Globin looked up and saw that his crew had seen what he had done, and were imitating. Bolts flared at Ichton eyes; bug rifles spewed in every direction, but hit only the walls. Khalian fire focused on thoraxes and burned through.
Then Plasma leaped in front of him, chittering in rage. “Globin! If you die, we are all lost! Get back, get away!”
A dozen young Khalians leaped in, a living wall between them and the Ichtons—but the living bugs were retreating, firing as they went back out through the hole they had blasted in.
“That is a long tunnel,” Globin said to Plasma. “We are nowhere near the hull.”
“But there is vacuum somewhere at the other end,” Plasma snapped. “They are fainting from loss of air!”
And indeed, the women who had thrown themselves down were not rising. Here and there, a few Khalians were falling, clawing at their throats. The air being sucked in from the rest of the quarter had sustained them thus far, but it was almost exhausted.
“Lusanne!” Globin cried. “Quickly, Plasma! The oxygen!”
Plasma moved more quickly than his chief, and a few of the youngsters saw what he was up to as he cracked the valve on the oxygen cylinder in the clinic. Some leaped to help him, finding other green cylinders; others caught up blankets and sheets and slapped up a quick barrier over the hole.
Moving more slowly, Globin brought an oxygen mask to Lusanne—but she was already working her way to her feet, and pushed the mask away. “Selena—my other aunts—they need it more than I.”
Globin sighed and turned to help the Schleins who knew from personal memory what had caused the animosity between them.
“All told, we got off very lightly
,” Brand told the hastily assembled conference. “It was just a raid by a couple of destroyers, backed up by a battlewagon. The big ship sat back and helped pour fire into one point on our shield until it overloaded, causing a sector to collapse. Then they sat back and provided covering fire while the destroyers broke in and started shooting their way toward the sickbay. When they found out they were dying faster than we were, they pulled out. All told, we lost four of the Schlein women and six of our own crew, plus thirty wounded. All things considered, it could have been much worse.”
“Let’s hope they don’t think to try it with a larger force,” someone said grimly.
“We know they will, now,” Brand said, his face heavy. “We’ll just have to start shooting if they come anywhere near. That’s pretty obvious, though. The real question is, why?”
Everyone was silent, avoiding one another’s eyes. It was the question they’d been hoping not to have to think about.
Brand turned to Globin, pointing at the cross-sectional map of the ship. “They attacked your quarter, Chairman. That might have been accident, but coming into the hold and blowing their way through wall after wall until they came to the sickbay—that was deliberate, very deliberate. Why?”
He turned back to the assembled officers. They all frowned, looking back; then one voiced the thought that all were thinking: “The women.”
Brand sighed. “Good. Then I’m not the only one who sees it. But . . . why?”
The officers exchanged puzzled glances. Then one said, with an apologetic half laugh, “Because they’re beautiful, of course.”
The reaction was out of all proportion to the joke—if it was a joke. Everyone took it as such, though, laughing till the tears came. Brand took it well, grinning as he looked about them, stifling a chuckle of his own. After all, it was hilarious—giant insectoids thinking human women attractive. It was almost as funny as the notion of one of the bug queens exciting desire in a human male—and every one of them must have thought of that, too, for when the laughter had begun to slacken, it suddenly redoubled in a new wave. When the noise had subsided, though, Brand frowned, serious again. “Okay. What possible interest could they be to the bugs? And how could the swarm have found out about them, anyway?”
There was only muttering for a while; then Globin had a sudden inspiration. “Commander! They could never have seen the women before, or the Schleins would not have lived for us to find them!”
The conversation stilled; everyone turned, amazed. “Why, that’s very true, Chairman,” Brand said slowly. “They could only have seen the Schlein vessel.”
“But they destroyed the ship,” someone else pointed out, “and all the male Schleins aboard.”
“Yes, Commander, that tallies with what the women have told us,” Globin corroborated. “The men ejected them in a life capsule and stayed to fight.”
Someone else said slowly, “Why did the men stay?”
It was a good question, and the apparent answer was so obvious that no one had ever thought of it. They looked at one another in surprise.
“Yes,” Brand said slowly. “Once the women were safe, why didn’t the men escape in the same fashion? Obviously, because they couldn’t.”
“Of course!” cried a captain. “If they all ejected in a life-pod, the bugs would have blasted them out of this space-time! The men had to keep the fight going long enough for the women to get lost in the depths!”
The room was very quiet for a few minutes, as each man contemplated the courage of those Schlein men, fighting to certain death, knowing they stood no chance of winning, but also knowing that each second they bought would give their loved ones a little longer to recede into the dark and cold of interstellar space. Even here near the Core, there was enough room between stars so that one tiny, hundred-foot-long life-pod would be indistinguishable by radar from a thousand other asteroids—if it were beyond the reach of telescopes.
“So the bugs knew someone had escaped,” Brand summarized, “but they couldn’t find them. Why would they be so fanatical about killing them, though, once they’d been found?”
“The Ichtons are fanatical about everything,” someone said.
“Sheer cussedness,” someone else suggested. “They hate not finishing something they’ve started.”
“No.” Brand shook his head. “They’ve always been very logical—we’ve seen the records, we know they’ve gone past hard targets to find easy ones, and not come back until they had so much strength massed that the hard targets had become pushovers. It’s not like them to take a risk of any kind, let alone what amounts to a commando action against overwhelming odds. They had something to gain from this, more than just a sixty-year-old grudge.”
“More to the point,” someone else said, “they must have had something to lose.”
“Of course!” Globin was on his feet, eyes wide with sudden understanding. “That’s been bothering me for a while—why would they have taken the trouble to eliminate a single ship, one that didn’t even bear enough armament to be a military vessel? Why bother swatting a fly?”
“Unless,” Brand said slowly, “the fly has come too close to your lunch.”
“Or your heart,” Globin said grimly.
Brand’s eyes glowed. “Yes! They saw something, Chairman. They saw something on their viewscreens that they shouldn’t have seen—and the bugs have to make sure they don’t tell anybody. When your men found the life-pod, the bugs must have picked up the radio transmissions—we know they have some kind of intelligence service. They wouldn’t have had to understand very much to know that your people had found something. A little thought, and a bit of record-checking, could have told them what.”
“Seems kind of farfetched,” an officer said slowly, “for them to find out that much just from some half-understood radio transmissions.”
“I don’t like to think of the alternative,” Brand said grimly.
Neither did anyone else—that there was a traitor aboard or some kind of listening device. The atmosphere grew strained; they knew that Brand couldn’t discount the possibility, now that he’d thought of it, and that Internal Intelligence would be very alert for any signs of treachery from now on.
“Still, it seems possible,” Globin said slowly. “A lone picket who picks up a sudden flurry of language-noise, then gets close enough for his long-range sensors to see something heavy being towed in. . . . Of course, he wouldn’t attack himself, not if there was a chance he’d be shot down instead of bringing back important information. No, I don’t think it requires a spy.”
“Maybe not,” Brand conceded, “but it does require the Schlein women being a lot more important than we thought they were. Chairman, I really must insist they be moved into the Fleet sickbay, where they can be guarded more securely.”
Globin bridled, but kept his tone soft. “I beg to differ, Commander. This incident has set back their convalescence by several weeks; it is very important that they not be moved.”
“But your sickbay’s shot to pieces, Globin! You can’t take care of them anymore!”
“Repairs on the sickbay are almost complete,” Globin demurred. “The survivors are comfortable in the recreation room in the meantime—and your counselors are helping them to cope with the shock of the invasion.”
“We must have them submit to hypnosis and memory scan, Chairman! It’s absolutely vital!”
“Agreed,” Globin said easily, “but they cannot be subjected to any such exertion until they are fully recovered. You know that, Commander. Ask your own physicians. What good is a dead source? How much water can you draw from a dry well?”
Brand was still a moment; his eyes narrowed. “There is one among them who is fully recovered, Chairman. I have seen her walking in your company.”
“What, Lusanne?” Globin shrugged impatiently. “She is scarcely more than a child, Commander. What could she know? What could she have understood from what she had seen?”
“Her information is vital, Chairman!”
“Then ask her, Chairman!”
Globin sighed. “Very well, Commander. I shall ask.”
Lusanne drew in upon herself, her eyes wide. “Must I, Globin?” Then she answered herself. “Yes, of course I must. If it might save lives . . .”
“But you are afraid,” Globin interpreted. “It will do no good if you are afraid, Lusanne. You would be too tense to achieve the trance. Even if you did, it could not be deep enough.”
“What could I have seen that the Ichtons would care about?”
“Nothing, probably,” Globin said, “unless everyone on your ship saw it, too. But in all probability, they did not—only those who were on duty on the bridge at the time would have had the chance.”
Lusanne nodded slowly, frowning. “That would make sense. . . .”
“Who was on the bridge?” Globin asked softly.
“Of my aunts? Only Selena, and Maude and Mirabile—they were the only ones of command rank. The rest of us couldn’t have cared less. There were only a few of the men, too—no one wanted to take time away from their experiments, to do it. Someone said it was like having to be chairman of a mathematics department.”
“Perfect irony,” Globin said, and reported it that way to Brand. “They may be trying to kill people who do not have the information they fear, Commander. The ones who did know, they have done in already.”
“It’s possible,” Brand admitted, “but we must be sure. Can’t you persuade her, Chairman?”
“I probably could,” Globin said slowly, “but she is afraid of the Fleet, Commander. Your doctors have not hidden their hostility very well.”
“And the scan would be unsuccessful, if she’s so fearful,” Brand sighed, sitting back. “Very well, Globin. We’ll work at creating an atmosphere of trust. Let’s just hope that the Ichtons don’t manage to rob us of all atmosphere of any kind, first.”
But Brand couldn’t be stalled forever. A good long time, true—his own doctors admitted that the women were thoroughly depleted by their long sleep; muscle tone was gone, digestion was delicate, and nervous systems were recovering rather slowly from thirty years of dormancy. Still, even Globin couldn’t delay physical therapy with any good conscience—the women’s lives depended as much on their physical fitness, as on their dwelling place. So the day came when Brand invited Globin to a conference again, and demanded, “They are restored to health. We want them.”
Battlestations Page 34
