by Sharon Lee
Spin was slowing. The security ships were being respectful; scans showed nothing that might’ve been discharged armament. Tarigan’s shields were on high; weapons live. A couple defense cubes were close to her, armed, but not, according to the spectrum, ready to blow…
Yet.
On far scans, dots began to appear…arrays of dots. There was Lyre Institute’s work on display, arrogant and mind-numbingly attentive to detail. There was no ship he knew of that could invade this space and survive.
And they—more fools them—were gambling that they could extract two, intact and without repercussions.
“Your screen shows the electromagnetics and equipment I can see; the image is simulated to remove the artifacts of a slow tumble I have introduced. Tarigan’s high gain broadcast is aimed at a single ship closing in on her. We see it in reflection, as well as three companions, and these other…objects, which appear focused on Tarigan.”
Tolly saw the expanding bubbles showing the detection space Tarigan witnessed, and the same for the oncoming ships. The colors would have been entrancing if he didn’t know what they meant.
“They’re going to see us soon,” he said.
“Yes,” the Admiral said. “I am charting an intercept. If you will be so good, Pilot, as to make some noise?”
“My pleasure,” said Tolly and reached to the board.
Admiral Bunter made a twinkling kind of a sound. Not a laugh, really. Maybe more like a chuckle.
Tolly flipped the comm switch.
II
Jump glare.
Tarigan reported a ship in, very close.
Hazenthull read the arrival coordinates with a chill of recognition. She had refined the coords provided by the navcomp, adjusting for Tarigan’s specific power curves, and had arrived in-system very well placed for a ship intent on laying low.
The ship just in had arrived at very nearly the same coordinates, though with a great deal more fuss and glare, even while it failed to broadcast warn-aways, IDs, or affiliations.
For a moment, she allowed herself to entertain the thought that this new ship was Admiral Bunter, with Tolly aboard—but of course it could not be. Tolly and the Admiral were safe; she had their message displayed still, in the corner of her screen.
“Tarigan out of Waymart,” said her more immediate concern, the security ship that continued to approach her position. “Tarigan out of Waymart. Remain in current orbit, do not deviate, prepare to allow drone connection of additional sensing units.”
The message repeated, in Terran this time. Hazenthull shook her head.
How could they suppose that she would allow them to attach anything to the hull of her ship? Even the greenest of green student pilots knew better than to allow such.
Her next question being—how to avoid it?
Warning bells sounded. Hazenthull looked to the newly arrived ship, which was moving, on an apparent intercept course—and Tarigan threw a tagged match up on the aux screen replacing the text of Tolly’s pinbeam.
Admiral Bunter.
* * *
“Tarigan out of Waymart. Lower your shielding, or we will act to neutralize it.”
Fools. Yet, Nostrilia Safety and Escort had apparently not noticed the Admiral on his mad course to destruction. So was her own course decided.
Hazenthull reached for the weapons board.
“Wicklow’s Tugit.”
A fuzzy broadcast, overloud, hit the all-band like a rock.
“Report anomalous Jump. We was supposed to be going to Waymart. Damn drunk copilot…what the hell was he thinking? Where are we?”
All-band stuttered as another broadcast arose, fuzzier, the voice less loud.
“Chernubia, out of Solcintra, Liad. We are a private vessel suffering a failed Jump to Lytaxin. Where are we, please?”
“I am Priestess Freme, outbound from”—static, then a strong signal on a side band—“…ship is Hestique. I demand to speak to the local temple!”
“Clear channel, clear channel. Trinket Five, this is Trinket One. Clear channel; my emergency takes precedence! There was no Jump order!”
“Somebody drug me outta place, I got no Jump in this thing! RAH Barge P, with a loada rocks for station!”
“Trinket One, I got you listed, but I don’t got your signal. Trinket Five here…”
“Delan arriving from Lufkit. Delan arriving from Lufkit, make sense or tell me the frequencies for control!”
“Admiral Bunter, out of Waymart. Ignore these, they’re loopy. I’m here to retrieve my tow—Tarigan! These are out of order emanations of prior existences. They have no reality. You should not hear them. You cannot hear them! They are no longer permitted to speak!”
“I am Delan and I am not in your control, Admiral. I am my own ship, how dare you!”
“Trinket Five, where are you, I don’t see your beacon, give me a beacon!”
“Port Control, Delan here, give me clearance to establish orbit. We await your reply! Time is short!”
The voices became cacophony, overwhelming the all-band; IDs flooded channels. There was movement on the audio subscreen. Hazenthull brought it up and saw ships, outlined by the noise, as clearly as by a spotlight.
“Meetcha for dinner, Haz.” It was a whisper in her ear, below and among the bellowing chaos.
“Haz, Haz. Meetcha for dinner.”
She took a breath, looked to the comm board. Tarigan was sorting the threads, seeking the source of each transmission. She might achieve it, eventually, except the transmissions changed source with a nearly gleeful malice, and the noise made it hard to—
“Meetcha for dinner, Haz. Whiskey and rye.”
The source for that—she watched Tarigan follow the thread first to Wicklow’s Tugit, then to Delan, and at last to Admiral Bunter.
Tolly, using the code they had used when they had walked Surebleak Port together, so that they would understand each other in a confused situation. So that they would know where to rendezvous, if they separated themselves or were separated by action.
Meetcha—that meant attend.
Dinner—that meant stay where you are.
And whiskey and rye?
Trust me.
Hazenthull leaned back in the pilot’s chair and folded her hands, watching the screens, listening to the escalating verbal confusion, watching one, then another of the secondary safety ships change course to follow the interloper, while her primary opponent continued to move in.
* * * * *
“Getting tight,” Tolly murmured, watching the screens. “We don’t wanna take anybody but ourselves with us.”
“Understood,” the Admiral said. “By my calculations, we will reach Hazenthull within the margin of error.”
Tolly didn’t ask whose error, and anyway it wouldn’t matter, if they caught more mass into the hysteresis field than the Admiral had calculated for. They’d all be dead, or lost ’tween normal space and Jump, fodder for some scary stories like old pilots told young ones.
He figured the two that were moving to match the Admiral’s course weren’t gonna make it—not at their current rate, and they were being conservative, for which Tolly couldn’t blame them.
The safety ship that’d been on point with Haz, though—that could throw a spanner in the works, and no mistake. Worse, they might spook Haz into working an avoid, and while the Admiral could do math real quick, he wasn’t sure—
One of the watchpods was closing on Tarigan’s position.
Tolly bit his lip as he looked over the scans.
“Admiral, we got a problem.”
“The pod is not a problem,” the Admiral assured him, sounding as happy as a boy on his first flower day. “We will achieve optimum range in thirty seconds.”
A lot can happen in thirty seconds, which Tolly knew from experience.
What happened in this particular thirty seconds was that the safety ship stalking Tarigan slowed its approach, while the watchpod practically leapt forward, apparently intending to explod
e against her shields.
Tolly opened his mouth, and closed it again. The pod wasn’t a problem, so said the ship, and every good pilot knew that, in a tight spot, you had to trust your ship.
He extended a hand and upped the magnification on his primary screen until he had Tarigan centered, her coords showing bold along the bottom edge.
If Haz panicked—well, he wouldn’t blame her if she did. Nobody’s nerves were up to this. And now that it was way too late, he wondered if he’d been too forward, choosing for Haz what was better than life.
“Now,” the Admiral said.
* * * * *
Voices filled Tarigan’s bridge, making it difficult to think. Hazenthull dared not turn the comm off or even decrease volume, in case there should be another message from Tolly.
In her screens, Admiral Bunter was dead-on for Tarigan. If they collided…all three of them would be out of the grasp of the Lyre Institute. It might be that this was the plan, and while she appreciated their gentle courtesy in insuring that she died honorably at the hands of comrades rather than being taken prisoner, she wished that Tolly and the Admiral had instead taken their moment and fled.
As it was…
The safety ship was no longer approaching.
However, the armed pod was approaching rapidly. Tarigan, in fact, was in some doubt about which might reach them first: the pod or the Admiral.
On the all-band, Hestique screamed for succor, while Trinket Five declared itself unstable.
And beneath the cacophony came the soft voice meant for her ears alone.
“Hey, Haz. Game of cards?”
Holster your weapon, that was. Hazenthull frowned and flicked her gaze to the screen where Admiral Bunter approached—too near, too fast—with the Jump engine everything but engaged, according to Tarigan’s readouts.
She knew, then, what he intended to do.
Quickly, she slapped the weapons board closed, cleared the lock on Tarigan’s Struven, and flushed the coord stack.
Then, she pulled the crash webbing snug around her, checked the Admiral’s process in her screens.
And lowered Tarigan’s shields.
* * * * *
Spin, then a moment of floating nothingness before the screens re-formed, showing Jump grey. Tolly didn’t speak; there was no reason to speak; no way to know…
“Mentor, Tarigan came with us into Jump,” the Admiral said, wild elation replaced with a certain level of seriousness.
“That’s good, then, right?” he answered, not thinking about what would have happened to Tarigan—to Haz—if the Admiral’s calculations were off by even one decimal point…
“Yes, that we brought Tarigan with us is good. What may not be good is that we also brought the bomb pod.”
Vivulonj Prosperu
They hit normal space at Morinsap. It was to be a skim only: to catch whatever messages there might be and to send one via fast bounce.
Yuri was anxious for any further news from Andreth, Dulsey knew, but his anxiety for Seignur Veeoni had grown during this last phase of Jump. He was not normally possessive—or tender—of his siblings. He ensured that each was thoroughly trained in their assigned specialty before they were loosed into the universe to pursue their results, and considered his duty done. Most had never met their elder brother. What would be the need?
Seignur Veeoni, however…
Seignur Veeoni was valuable as none of the others of Yuri’s siblings had been valuable. Without Seignur Veeoni and her particular expertise, the Catalinc Project would—fail.
In the proper ordering of the universe, Yuri’s projects did not fail. They might not wholly prosper; they might fall short of expectations, but they did not—fail. There was always, in Yuri’s undertakings, a secondary plan should the first prove unachievable. It had been so from the very beginning.
The Catalinc Project…
Should the Catalinc Project fail…whole star systems would vanish, galaxies would unravel, the universe…
Perhaps the universe would not be…wholly…unmade.
But it would be vastly altered.
They were competent…all of them who made common cause in this, their second universe, not merely Yuri and herself, or only Andreth and his team or, indeed, all the web of operatives stretched from system to system…
Competent as they were, skilled in strange sciences and stranger arts, they were no fit curators for a project of this scope. They were merely the most fit, and Seignur Veeoni had been born and honed as their sword and shield.
Seignur Veeoni was…unique.
They had discussed that, at length, weighing the danger of there being only one in all the universe who might solve the riddle they had found—against there being two who held the old universe at their core.
In the end, they had judged that the danger of uniqueness was the lesser, which might be mitigated by appropriate security measures.
So had Seignur Veeoni been surrounded by security from the moment of her birth. She had been tutored by Yuri himself, which was very nearly unprecedented. She was given smartstrands; she became an expert—perhaps the only such in this, the new universe—on the systems, philosophies, and works of the Great Enemy. She spent uninterrupted days in study; she wore the strands even when she wore nothing else, and she fulfilled…part of the purpose for which she had been born.
She engineered fractins—a new and stable kind, that partook of the nature of this universe and worked within its natural rules.
Once she had a stable and operating fractin, she constructed association frames, and for the first time in this new universe, there existed machines motivated entirely by fractins.
Clean fractins—not tools of the Enemy. Fractins that did not insert promises or threats into the minds of the unwary, nor misdirect the untrained into associating them into unfortunate configurations. Fractins that did not spontaneously fail, injuring an individual, a building, or a city as they did so.
Absolutely, Seignur Veeoni was unique in all of this universe, her knowledge unsurpassed in the fields her brother had chosen for her. Her intellect was considerable; her ability to synthesize information astounding; her instincts, within the boundaries of her expertise, infallible.
As might be expected in one whose training had stressed her own importance, her uniqueness, her brilliance—she was spoilt. She expected that her every whim would be met—and why should she not when her whole life and all of her accomplishments were in the service of the preservation of the universe and everything it contained?
Her character was not so much disagreeable as aloof. In Seignur Veeoni’s private universe, so Dulsey strongly suspected, there were only two people: herself and Yuri. Her security was merely a fact of her life; there was no necessity for her to engage with them. The residence in which she lived and worked was not sentient—not quite sentient. It did watch her, however, and enforced standards of sleep, nutrition, and exercise, denying her access to her work screens and references if she refused or ignored its suggestions.
It would protect her, if there should be an attack and other security measures had failed.
They had been very careful to obfuscate Seignur Veeoni’s actual whereabouts, leaking fake coordinates, and even setting up decoy establishments…
Only to have an operator from the Lyre Institute provide the true coords and news of a concerted attack.
Well and good to suppose that they would have heard, had there been an attempt upon the residence…but was that supposition sound? The Lyre Institute was capable of wonders, as they had found previously and to their sorrow. Would they have heard?
Jump end sounded. The grey screens bloomed with data, with stars.
The comm lit; a bell tolled deeply—security wrap, that was.
Yuri was on it. Dulsey minded her boards, noting the lack of nearby ships, and the distant bulk of Morinsap Prime.
“I have…” Yuri said, in that particular flat tone that meant they had just moved from trouble into bad troubl
e.
Dulsey turned her head to look at him. He met her eyes briefly before again looking to his screens.
“I have a priority pinbeam sent direct from the residence to Crystal Energy Systems’ public address. It informs us that there has been an attempt to breach defenses, which was rebuffed, though at cost. Assistance is requested.”
“Signed?” Dulsey asked quietly. She increased the shields slightly, for no reason save to soothe nerves suddenly stretched tight.
“The signatory is Ops,” Yuri said expressionlessly.
Dulsey shivered.
“Kalib?” she asked, after a moment.
“I had thought of Indira, but you make a valid point. If the residence is taken, there is no need for finesse.”
“Seignur Veeoni?”
“Shall we assume that security removed her in time?”
“Without knowing the nature of the attack…” Dulsey murmured.
“Precisely. Perhaps a two-pronged approach. Indira’s team, to analyze so that we may better understand what we face, and Kalib, as backup.”
Dulsey nodded, in her mind’s eye seeing warped light mixed eerily with bright dust and, taking shape out of the dust, something dire and stranger still…
The universe stood at stake. And while they had seen—and met—such stakes before, she and Yuri, and some others of their group—it was not a game lightly undertaken. If Seignur Veeoni were lost or subverted…
“Shall we remain here,” Yuri asked, “or will you take us to a more secure location?”
“We’re well enough here for a time, if you want to wait,” she said. “It’s a deviation from our usual sort of transit point. Even if someone has an algorithm, it will take time to locate us. And they’re handicapped by the need to wait and see if we fell for it.”
Yuri snorted lightly, in appreciation of the phrasing, his fingers inputting messages to Indira and Kalib.
“Yes,” he said, tapping the release key. “Let us wait, since we are not immediately exposed. We may not have another opportunity soon.”
Dulsey nodded and stood into a long stretch.
“Shall I tell our guests that progress is…delayed?” she asked.
