by Chris Bunch
‘All hatchlings imagine things to be different than they are.’
‘Did I ever say that reminiscing with you is just about as much fun as watching rocks become sand?’
‘This is the starship Normandie to unknown paired ships. Please respond.’
Wolfe, looking worried, swung the mike down. ‘Normandie, this is the tug Foss Enterprise. Go ahead.’
‘This is the Normandie, First Officer Wu. Is that a Hamilton-class corvette you’re pulling?’
‘Normandie, this is the Foss Enterprise. That’s affirmative. It’s the mothballed Hailsworth.’
‘I thought I recognized my screen projection, Foss Enterprise,’ the woman’s voice said. ‘I was just curious. I commanded the Hetty Green during the war. I don’t think I want to ask, but where’re you taking her to?’
‘You’re right. You didn’t want to know. She’s headed for the knackers’ yard.’
A sound very much like a sigh came from the speaker. ‘Thanks, Foss Enterprise. What’s the line . . . “but at my back/I always hear/Time’s winged chariot,” something or other?’
‘That’s “hurrying near,” Normandie.’
‘Yeah. That’s it. This is the Normandie, out.’
Wolfe turned away the speaker. ‘Nice to see there’s at least one other sentimental slob out here.’
‘I do not like this,’ Taen replied. ‘That was the fourth ship onscreen within the past few ship-hours. There are too many starships in this sector. There is too much chance of our being detected and challenged by either a Chitet ship or Federation Navy.’
‘Now you’re the one who’s not thinking right,’ Wolfe said. ‘Here, inside the Federation, there’s no reason for any naval vessel to challenge a ship proceeding on lawful business, and sure as hell no Chitet would dream of doing that. Hide in plain sight, and all that.’
‘You are correct. I was thinking like an Al’ar, like an enemy.’
‘This will be the last jump. Estimated distance from target world of Batan three ship-days’ journey if all navaids correct,’ the ship said.
The world twisted, changed, and the Grayle entered normal space.
Half filling the screen in front of them was the capital world of the Chitet.
By his conservative dress, the man onscreen might have been a preacher. He was not.
With further good news for our people, Master Speaker Athelstan announced a two percent reduction in the approved luxury tax. This, he said, was due to the excellent and mature response from us all when he announced last ten-month that we were consuming all too many nonessential goods and services. He promised that if this reasoned pattern continues, it might be possible . . .
Joshua turned away from the measured movements of the newscaster’s face.
‘Nice to hear that,’ he said. ‘It’d be a real pain if the bastard wasn’t home to give us a nice, logical response to events.’
‘It has been too long since I’ve done stupid things like this,’ Joshua said.
He wore a bulky deepspace suit and stood next to a stack of metal rafts nearly as tall as he was, Cormac’s High Altitude, High Opening rig. Short lengths of chain ran to rigid metal bars connected to the four corners of the bottom raft. The small hold of the Grayle was crowded.
‘Twelve beat until the correct time,’ Taen said. He sealed his own suit.
Joshua snapped his faceplate shut. ‘Any time.’
‘Atmosphere being removed.’
The slight ambient noise coming through the suit’s insulation died.
The air rushing out into space tugged at the Al’ar, and he steadied himself against a stanchion.
The lock opened all the way, and Joshua stared out at the green-and-white bulk of Batan. They were only a few hundred miles above the planet, barely outside range of the Landing Authority.
Taen and Joshua slid the metal stack to the edge of the hold, and Joshua floated out into space.
The chains grew taut and pulled him gently away from the Grayle. The lock door closed.
He spoke into the bonemike. ‘Execute orbital change as directed. You now are required to take commands from either this station or from the one who remains aboard.’
‘Understood.’
Joshua saw brief wisps from the ship’s secondary drive, and slowly the two starships moved away from him.
‘Orient suit. On zero,’ the ship said, ‘fire suit drive . . . five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . fire.’
Wolfe had turned as the Grayle instructed him and, on count, twisted the red handle on the canister attached to his stomach. Gas hissed for a time, then the cylinder was empty. He pulled two D-rings and let the container float away to find its own orbit as he began his descent into gravity.
He hung in a world of black and light, the small dots of stars moving around him while the great mass of Batan drew closer.
Wolfe ate twice, slept once while he closed on Batan. He woke, stretched within the confines of the suit, and sucked refreshment from the nipple beside the faceplate.
He blanked the faceplate and ran through the suit’s entertainment suite, found nothing suitable and reopened the window on his womb.
He stared at the cold dead stars beyond, couldn’t spot the Grayle, let the suit turn slowly until Batan was all that could be seen.
He watched the world turn, saw clouds spin, unwind, crawl over the planet’s curve, and realized, dimly, that he was quite happy.
The programmed proximity detector brought him back from a dream he could not quite remember.
‘In-exosphere,’ the voice buzzed. ‘Distance to ground, eight hundred miles.’
Time passed. Again he ate, drank, voided into the suit’s disposal compartments, dumped them, looked at his waste distastefully, then tucked into a vee and moved away from the debris.
‘External temperature rising,’ the suit sensor told him. ‘Suggest deployment first generator within five minutes.’
Wolfe thought he could feel atmosphere rush and turned on an outside microphone, heard noise as he hurtled down toward green and blue.
Four minutes later, he touched another sensor, and the first of the antigrav generators rafted above him released its catches, deployed to the length of its twenty-foot chain, and turned itself on slowly.
Wolfe felt gravity drag, and he was pulled upright by the chains linked to the shoulders of his suit.
He rode the generator for fifty miles while Batan stabilized under him, turning until it was still night below, then cut the generator away and free-fell until he saw the suit’s metal turning a flecked heat-gray.
Three more times, as he fell deeper into the planet’s atmosphere, he activated, then cut away the antigravity ‘rafts’ above.
He rode the last-but-one generator to ten miles above the surface, then cut loose from that.
Wolfe touched a key, and the tiny screens above his faceplate dropped down and showed him where he was in relation to his target. He decided he was a little long and to the east, but his position was acceptable. He retracted the screens and looked down.
It was about two hours before dawn in the city below, well within his desired arrival time.
He saw the mountain the city had been built against and deployed the last generator.
He grunted when it went on, feeling the jerk. ‘Waited a little long,’ he murmured, and dialed the power up until he hung motionless in the sky.
The dawn wind carried him behind the mountain, gave it to him for a shield. The wind eddied around the peak, back toward the city. Wolfe reduced power and bled off altitude.
Now he was in the first swell of daylight.
He looked below and saw the sun’s rays touch a great palace’s dark-gray stones. The spires were squared, tapering slightly to blunt tips, imagination constrained, dreams allowed but within limits.
The lake that was his target was just below. He thought the breeze was carrying him too close to the shore, chopped his power, and free-fell the last thirty feet to splash into the
water.
He grimaced, muttered something about getting sloppy and out of practice, and let himself sink to the lake’s bottom, some seventy feet down. He sunk to about midthigh in muck. The generator thudded against his helmet and slipped off into the mire beside him.
Wolfe unfastened the chains that held him to the generator, turned on the suit’s integral antigrav generator until he nearly lifted clear of the mud, then began wading toward shore, following the compass direction illuminated above his faceplate.
It was slow, laborious going, but he was in no hurry.
After two hours, he turned on an exterior camera, swiveled it to look up, and saw the silver plate of the surface about fifteen feet above. He turned the antigrav off, settled down to wait.
Several times curious fish floated around, one an orange extravagance with long, white fins and an expression of incredible stupidity. Once the camera blipped alert, and he saw the oval of a boat move above him. At last the suit clock told him it was night again, and he turned the suit’s antigrav on and went toward the land.
The boy and the girl sitting on the grass verge of the lake did not appear to be behaving in a calm, logical, Chitet manner.
She broke away from his embrace, slid the fastener of her soberly green tunic open, tossed it away.
The boy embraced her, and they lay back on the grass. A few minutes later, she lifted her hips, wriggled out of her slacks. Her legs came up, curled around the back of his thighs as he moved over her.
Neither of them could have seen the metallic dome that broke the surface, rose, then submerged again.
Joshua surfaced once more around the curve of a small point, saw no one on the land, and waded ashore, a dark alloy gorilla in the night.
He went as quickly as he could into the trees, found one with a considerable overhang, ducked underneath the branches, and sat.
He unsealed his faceplate, drank in air that smelled like something other than sterility and Joshua Wolfe.
There were two moons overhead, one, slightly pinkish, racing past like an aircraft, the other, mottled orange, hanging motionless, half full, above and to one side of the residence of the Master Speaker.
There were many lights in the palace, and Wolfe supposed the Chitet leader was entertaining. He wondered briefly what their idea of entertainment would be, then decided that a rousing debate on whether Srinivasi Ramanujan would have been greater than Einstein if he’d lived was about the height of their decadence.
He unclipped the magclips of his pack, opened it, and took out a transceiver with an archaic key instead of a microphone.
The other device in the pack looked like a rather bulky small telescope, with a tripod. He extended and opened the legs, and set it in front of him. He peered through the eyepiece, focused it on the palace’s central tower, locked the elevating wheels down.
Then he turned the transceiver on, swung the key out, and tapped K, K, K, K, waited.
The old dot/dash code came back from the Grayle in orbit off Batan: R . . . R . . . R . . .
When he heard the first letter, he turned a timer in his suit on.
He touched a stud on the scope, looked again through the eyepiece. Now the tower appeared to be lit by a strange, reddish glow.
Joshua moved back from the apparatus, careful not to disturb anything, and sent X . . . X . . . X . . . X . . . The timer showed forty-seven seconds when he thought he saw something high above the palace, then heard the whine of the Occam’s secondary drive.
There might have been raving madness in the Landing Authority’s control rooms and in Batan’s aerial defense network. Wolfe heard, saw nothing except the ship plunging down, homing on the laser beam painting the tower.
It struck, and the palace exploded in a red-and-gray ruin, flames gouting high into the sky. Wolfe thought he saw the ruins of the Occam pinwheeling away to smash down in a courtyard but wasn’t sure.
He sent Z . . . Z . . . Z . . . Z on the transceiver, then stowed it and the illuminator in the pack and set the melt-down timer to thirty seconds. He pushed his way out of the overhang and hurled the pack out into the lake. It sank rapidly. He barely saw the white flare as the detonator went off underwater.
‘Federation pirates taking Chitet ships . . . an Al’ar on board . . . a suicide attack on Athelstan with one of his own craft,’ he murmured. ‘Yeah, Taen. I guess we have distracted them a little bit. Now we can go for the main chance.’
He looked again at the palace as explosions rocked the ground, almost knocking him down, then waddled away, waiting for the Grayle to home on his suit’s signal.
NINE
DEATH STRIKES AT CHITET MASTER
Suicide Ship Smashes Palace, Athelstan Safe
Press for More
BATAN - Unknown attackers sent a starship crashing into the Residence of Chitet Master Speaker Matteos Athelstan.
Athelstan was slightly burned and concussed in the attack, but otherwise uninjured. At least 50 high-ranking Chitet officials and a greater number of his Residency staff were killed and more than four times that number injured when the starship slammed into the historic palace shortly after midnight, local time, this date.
A Residency spokesperson said that an important conference, the subject of which is secret, was being held, which accounted for the great number of government officials present at that late an hour.
The Residency, completed less than a year ago and first occupied by Speaker Athelstan, was regarded as a physical embodiment of the group, which now claims several billion adherents on over 100 worlds.
The Chitet’s highest-ranking Authority Coordinator, Dina Kur, said no conceivable motive for the murderous attack is known, nor has any terrorist group claimed responsibility. The ownership of the starship and the type of ship are under investigation.
‘Obviously,’ Coordinator Kur said, ‘the disturbed ones responsible for this outrage shall be brought to the bar, either by our own representatives of order or by others.
‘The full force of our deductive processes and the weight of our entire culture will be brought to bear on solving this atrocity.’
‘Outrage . . . atrocity . . . best get yourself a thesaurus, Dina, old son,’ Wolfe murmured, then returned to the com.
‘We call on all Federation officials and worlds to assist us in discovering the villains responsible for . . .’
‘What in the name of several hells are you trying to pull off?’ Cisco said. ‘Are you and your goddamned Al’ar buddy on some kind of vendetta?’
‘Now, Cisco,’ Wolfe said mildly, ‘use some of that Chitet logic that FI’s so permeated with these days, and don’t get your bowels in an uproar.’
‘All right.’ Cisco took a deep breath. ‘What were - are you trying to accomplish trying to kill the head of the Chitet? I assume you know you missed him.’
‘I wasn’t trying to kill him,’ Wolfe said. ‘If I was, he’d be in his meat crate. Think, man.’
Cisco shook his head. ‘I don’t get it. Or you.’
‘I’ll just give you one thing you might get out of what happened. Look around. See who’s frothing at the mouth in your organization. That might help you pick out a couple more moles. Looks like you’ve got more of them than a fruitcake’s got fruit.’
Cisco smiled tightly. ‘Thanks for helping me clean up my organization. I’m sure you’re doing it strictly out of altruism.’
‘That’s me,’ Wolfe agreed. ‘Aren’t you glad you looked me up last year when I was in a quiet sort of retirement?’ His forced smile vanished. ‘Goddammit Cisco, you built this monster. You’re going to have to live with him, until it’s over.’
‘And when is that? What are you looking for? What are you after?’
Wolfe brought himself under control. ‘I’ll tell you when I figure it out. Right now, I’m still on the trail. The only reason I bothered to contact you was to tell you to keep your gunsels off my ass. I’m on to something, and it’s very big.’
‘With the Al’ar. How does he fig
ure into it?’
‘I won’t answer that, either way. Maybe because I don’t know.’
‘So what am I supposed to do? Just sit here, listening to all the frigging whines from Earth Central, and nothing more?’ Cisco demanded.
‘No. I want you to keep watching the Chitet. If you hear of them getting close to me, let me know. You can use this same conduit. I’m monitoring it, through cutouts, about every E-week. But don’t try to put a tracer on it.
‘Cisco, you sent me down this rathole like a good little terrier, so you can goddamned well sit there with your net and see what comes out.’
‘And not do anything, no matter what you decide to do? What comes next, Wolfe? Are you going to nuke Federation Control?’
The tight smile came back to Wolfe’s face. ‘Extreme times call for extreme measures, Cisco. I heard you say that, three or four times.’
‘That was during the war!’
‘Like you told me a year ago: Maybe mine’s gone on longer than yours.’
Wolfe blanked the com without signing off. ‘He’s really going to hammer his arteries when those guys come out of the jungle with the rest of the story.’
‘We are now,’ Taen said, ‘three jumps from entering what were Al’ar sectors. An interesting note, one that I think should be disquieting to us both: I experienced that strange buzzing sound once more when I was waiting for your signal to send the ship down against the Chitets. But it felt very faint, very distant.
‘This last sleep period I felt it once more. It was much stronger. This suggests that whatever is causing this is either in the Al’ar sectors or is just beyond them.’
‘I wonder why I didn’t feel it when you did,’ Wolfe said. ‘And I wonder if we’re the only two people in the galaxy who have.
