by Ben Bova
“It’s Eric,” he answered, apparently unaware of any unintended slight on her part. “They’re putting him through now.”
“What’s your setting?” She scrambled for the pack that had served as a makeshift pillow the previous night and hastily found her own handlink where it had settled near the bottom. Flicking the power switch, she snapped it open, deftly touching in the setting as Billy read off the sequence of numbers, and put it to her ear just as the connection went through.
“Billy?” There was an urgency to Eric’s voice she had never heard before.
“Yes, I’m here,” Billy said, nearly all traces of his informal, outback speaking patterns gone. Clearly, he had not been expecting a call from the Emperor—or anyone else, for that matter—and took this turn of events seriously. “Adela’s here, too.”
“Good, you’re still together. When they told me her handlink was off-line, I thought … Anyway, I need to see you both. Immediately.”
“Eric, what’s wrong?” she demanded.
Even in the tiny speaker of the handlink, she heard him exhale heavily. “It’ll be better if I wait until I see you.”
“All right,” Billy cut in. Even as he spoke he gathered odds and ends of their belongings and started tossing them into the open packs. “As soon as we break the connection I’ll call Ellenbrae and arrange to get a hopper out here to pick us up.”
“Don’t bother. I’ll be waiting for you at the opening of the gorge, in the flat area to your left as you come out. Leave your things. I’ve already got someone coming in to collect them for you; you’ll probably pass them on your way out.”
“You’re here?” Adela asked. “Eric, can’t you at least give us a hint of what’s going on?”
“Not on a handlink, Mother. I’m sorry, but it may not be safe. See you both soon. Good-bye.” The connection immediately went dead.
“Crimey,” Billy said under his breath as he folded his handlink, slipping the thin unit into a back pocket of his shorts. “Now, why would he worry about sayin’ something over an Imperial communications link? With the security scramblin’ built into the Imperial nets, no bloody way anyone could possibly listen in.”
Adela pulled on her hiking boots and hastily yanked the laces tight. “I don’t know,” she said, on her feet and already heading for the gorge leading away from the now-forgotten bit of paradise. “Let’s go find out.”
They heard the approaching team Eric had sent before they saw them. There were ten of them, all jogging double-time in precise military formation in their direction. All were armed. When they reached them, the group stopped only long enough for their team leader, a tall woman with a heavy offworld accent, to send a pair of her fastest runners ahead to the camp to retrieve their things. She and the other seven escorted the two of them through the remaining section of the gorge. Aside from a polite greeting and her orders to the two guards she’d sent to their campsite at the notch, she spoke little and neither Adela nor Billy bothered to ask what was happening.
As they neared the end of the gorge, the walls became lower and spread farther apart, and the air grew warmer out of the sheltering depth of the fissure, but the early sunshine had not yet heated the outback to what they had become accustomed to. In a few hours, it would be stifling.
Adela wasn’t sure what she had expected to find once they got there, but it certainly wasn’t the fully outfitted landing shuttle they now saw glinting in the morning brightness. Several people, all of them in uniform of one variety or another, milled about at the base of the thing. It was easy to see, even at this distance, that most of them were armed.
The shuttle itself was large, of a type that could easily transport a hundred or more passengers. This craft was of no design she had ever seen before, but the markings clearly showed it to be a commercial vessel, not one belonging to the Imperial fleet. She felt a moment’s anxiety that something was dreadfully wrong, that somehow they had been lured out under false pretenses, but she quickly discarded the notion. If anyone flying a ship this size had wanted to do them harm, they could have easily done so already from the air while they were still in the notch.
Her fears were further calmed when, as they drew near enough to see clearly the faces of those at the base of the shuttle, she saw Eric himself anxiously pacing. The others, she now saw, were armed military personnel, their uniform markings identifying them as the Emperor’s personal guard. Eric waved to them as they approached.
“I’m glad that you’re together,” he said. “It saves a great deal of precious time.” He embraced his mother in greeting, exhaling in a sigh of relief that told her that finding her here was more than something he considered a mere convenience. There was something behind his words that almost sounded like he hadn’t really expected to find her at all. As they parted and he vigorously shook Billy’s hand, she also noted that he was in full uniform, and even wore the Imperial sash. “Come inside, both of you. We need to talk.”
The three of them were escorted inside, where the shuttle’s similarity to a commercial vehicle came to a jarring halt. While the vessel’s design might originally have been for commercial use, this ship proved to be no less than a movable Imperial Court, the commercial markings on the hull obviously intended as disguise. Adela once more felt her nerves twitch. Something serious was happening here. Why else would her son fly halfway around the planet in a disguised ship to discuss something that couldn’t even be mentioned over normal, secure Imperial communications links?
Eric took them to a room that appeared part briefing room, part office. As such, the room looked similar to many others Adela had seen aboard Imperial craft that were alternately used for informal meetings or simply to get necessary work done. There was a study area with a desk, complete with a manual data terminal, set off to one side of the room; a long table with comfortable padded chairs was arranged on the other. On one wall, the one nearest the table, was a large mural that must surely be a holoframe. There were amenities here as well: a plush leather sofa and a pair of matching high-backed chairs surrounding a low table with two silver trays. One of the trays held various bottles and glasses, but it was the other tray that demanded her attention; it held, judging from the rich aroma she’d noticed upon entering the room, a steaming pot of coffee and several cups.
“I’m sorry for all of this,” Eric said at last, once the escort had been dismissed and the three of them were alone. He pulled the sash over his head and tossed it casually across the meeting table as he headed for the sofa, unbuttoning the tight collar of his jacket as he did. He poured coffee for all of them, passing the delicate china cups around as he filled them. Replacing the decorative silver coffeepot on the tray, he approached the table and pulled three chairs out for them.
Adela could barely stand it. “Eric, what’s—”
“Please, watch this before you ask anything else.”
Eric took the centermost of the three chairs and faced the mural, which immediately faded from view at his silent integrator command, to be replaced with a soft blue field. The Imperial crest, with a sequence of numbers below it, occupied the image’s center. The numbers were meaningless to Adela, except to indicate that what they were about to see was a recording as opposed to a live transmission.
For some reason, Adela was not the least surprised when Jephthah’s image faded into view.
“This isn’t pleasant for me.” Jephthah’s voice was still as deep and commanding as she remembered, but somehow he sounded almost repentant as he spoke. He looked tired, troubled, and seemed almost nervous as he gazed from the holoframe. She also noted that the reactionary was not as well dressed as he usually was, and gave the appearance, with his open-collared shirt and slightly disheveled hair, that this transmission had been done in a hurry with little preparation. There was even a sense of desperate urgency about it. From what she had learned about Jephthah, Adela was convinced that any tone or underlying message put forth in one of his transmissions was not only intended, but most certainly
rehearsed.
“My friends, we have reached a crisis point in our existence. I have warned the Human Worlds for so long about the threat presented by the Outsiders that you might think I would take pleasure in what I am about to show you.” He lowered his head, shaking it slowly, and took a deep breath before continuing. “Please believe me when I tell you that nothing that has happened, although it justifies even the very worst of my fears, gives me even the slightest amount of satisfaction. Let me warn you, too, that what you will see in the next few minutes is not pleasant to behold.
“You may recall that several months ago I spoke to you of an alien, a Sarpan scientist who had somehow coerced our own scientists to allow it to be placed into cryonic suspension. This alien, along with its human companion, had been taken to a research station on Mercury, in Sol system, to await the day when the grand project to save Earth’s Sun neared completion.”
Jephthah turned away briefly, then continued, a self-conscious look on his face. “I admit, this particular alien had been instrumental—working alongside humans—in not only helping to perfect the scientific procedures developed by Dr. Adela de Montgarde, but in the discovery of the very nature of wormholes. It is to this alien we owe a debt of gratitude, for without its help we might never have developed wormhole spaceflight.
“Its name was Oidar, and because of its contribution to human science we gratefully—if naively—assented to its request to be present for the conclusion of the greatest human endeavor of all time. But that was our fatal mistake. You see, we allowed our own gratitude to blind us. We allowed ourselves to consider this Oidar’s contribution a gift, rather than the self-serving ploy it was: a device intended solely to gain our trust.”
Jephthah’s image faded in the recording and was replaced with a picture of a small, cratered planet that looked like nothing so much as some forlorn moon.
“This is Mercury,” Jephthah continued as the image rotated and centered on the desolate planet’s south polar region. As the image zoomed in, Adela recognized the research facility located at Chao Meng-fu. “It is the innermost of Sol system’s nine planets, and location of four ‘sunstations’ critical to monitoring the finishing stages of Dr. Montgarde’s glorious project. What you’re going to see was recorded at the station you’re looking at now. I apologize if the recording is blurred or difficult to follow; the high angle of the surveillance cameras used to document these events did not offer an optimum viewing perspective.”
The overhead shot of the sunstation was replaced immediately with a stationary view of a modest, sparsely furnished room. As Jephthah had warned, the recording-within-a-recording had been made from a wide-angle lens placed near the ceiling, which gave the entire picture an ethereal feel. Objects nearest the lens, like the simple chair almost immediately below it, appeared grotesquely out of shape. The upper portion of the chair’s backrest was seemingly three times the width of the seat and legs beneath it. Even the room itself twisted into a trapezoidal shape that seemed to fan out from the viewpoint of the surveillance lens.
There were two cryosleep tanks at the far side of the room, although in the fish-eye image they seemed to curve upward over a sloping floor. One of the tanks was dark, sealed and obviously unused. The plastiglass lid of the other had been removed, and now rested against the wall. There was a man in a lab coat near the open tank who was busily engaged in what Adela recognized at once as a reawakening procedure. She had certainly experienced cryosleep enough to know what it was like. There was something unusual about the man’s actions, however, in that he had a pressure bottle tucked under one arm and appeared to be spraying the contents into the cryotank. Littering the floor were several smaller bottles, plainly empty, that Adela recognized as juice packages. If the occupant of the tank had already consumed that much rehydrant, then the cryosleep wake-up procedure they were watching must be fairly well complete. He abruptly dropped the sprayer apparatus and set the bottle aside, then leaned into the tank, helping someone inside to sit up. The image suddenly froze.
“We’ve already confirmed the man as Dr. Templeton Rice,” Eric said, a silent integrator command causing the paused recording to zoom in to the center of the picture, highlighting the tank’s occupant. “Mother, you worked closely with Oidar. Is that him?”
Adela looked closely at the image. “I … can’t be certain. The angle makes it … Can you correct it?”
Eric concentrated as he requested the necessary adjustments from the playback computer. The image tilted suddenly, “unbending” itself into an almost normal still frame.
Adela gasped. The alien appeared near death, his face frozen in what looked like a desperate attempt to merely draw his next breath. His skin was an unhealthy-appearing gray-brown, not the vibrant green-brown normal for a Sarpan of his age. More disturbingly, his skin looked dry and brittle, and the gill slits on each side of his face drooped limply despite the wetting-down he had just received. The nictitating membranes on his eyes, halted midblink in the still image, appeared cloudy, gummy.
“My God,” she whispered, the tone of her voice confirming what Eric had asked. “What have they done to him?”
The recording switched to its original angle and resumed playback with Rice helping the alien up to a sitting position. “Easy! Not too fast!” he said desperately. “How do you feel?”
Oidar turned to face his friend, barely able to keep his bobbing head erect. He blinked several times and managed to grasp the man’s forearm with a shaking webbed hand. “Temple … ?” His voice was little more than a croaked whisper, barely audible.
“Yes, it’s me! I’m right here!”
“Temple … my friend. This one is … pleased … to see you.” Oidar gave a weak attempt to imitate a human smile, an unnatural expression for the Sarpan that Adela knew had been learned only through long hours of painstaking practice.
There was a sudden pounding, which drew Rice’s attention to a point directly below the camera lens. The pounding shifted to splintering, and he jumped to his feet just as the door burst open at the bottom of the image, seemingly “downhill” from where he stood. Thick smoke billowed through the room, while pieces of the doorframe itself were sent scattering about the floor. There were several loud discharges; with each, a small hole exploded in the wall behind Rice.
“No!” Dropping to one knee, Rice pulled a weapon of some sort from his belt and fired at whoever was attacking him, the gun making an exaggerated puffing sound that was almost lost in the commotion—a needle gun. He fired twice, his aim true in the close quarters, and two bodies came into range of the camera lens as they fell to the floor, unmoving. There was a good deal of scuffling and shouting from somewhere outside the pickup range, but no one else appeared. After a moment, Rice tucked the gun back into his belt and tended to the alien, who, although still shaky, was obviously recovering. His coloring was already improving, and his eyes were beginning to look slightly clearer than before.
“Come on, Oidar,” Rice barked, helping the alien out of the tank and up onto thin, wobbly legs. As Oidar steadied himself against the side of the tank, Rice yanked at the wires and tubing that stretched from the tight-fitting cryosuit and stockings back into the tank itself, ripping them loose. A few of the longer dangling wires he then tore from the suit, ignoring the others. “Listen, we’ve got to get to the evac pods. Can you walk?”
Oidar didn’t answer, but started moving almost immediately. His gait was slow—one foot, carefully but unsteadily placed before the other—but with Rice’s arm around his reed-thin waist, within a few steps he seemed to reacquire a fair sense of the balance he’d lost during his two-hundred-year sleep.
“Good; that’s good.” Without taking the supporting arm from around his friend’s waist, Rice swept at one of the soldier’s bodies and grabbed the man’s weapon with his free hand. “Here,” he said, handing it to Oidar. “Take this and hang on to it.” None of them got a good look at it before he moved under the camera, but it was clearly a projectile weapon
considerably more deadly than the needle gun that had put to sleep the two who had burst into the room. Just before disappearing under the surveillance camera, Rice grabbed the other man’s gun as well.
Abruptly and without warning, the image suddenly changed to one that was oriented from a handheld video pickup. The carnage it showed nearly turned Adela’s stomach as Jephthah’s voice-over continued.
“Unfortunately, there were no other surveillance cameras that could record the events that occurred next. However, it is all too easy to show you the results of what happened.”
The handheld camera showed the entrance to the cryosleep chamber from the corridor, the shattered fragments of the doorway still hanging around the edges of the image. There were the two uniformed bodies, lifeless and bleeding, a pool of dark blood beneath each.
A quick cut to another jerky handheld shot. This showed the results of a different exchange of weapons fire. Two bodies lay crumpled on the floor, one reaching up and hanging from a remote console as if she had been gunned down while calling for help. Both wore lab coats, although from the grotesque position of the bodies Adela couldn’t identify them as any of the scientists she had met during her visit to the sunstation. The woman had been shot—three times, judging from the triangular pattern of bloodstains on her white coat—in the back; the other in the face at close range.
Another quick cut to what appeared to be a vehicle hangar or storage facility of some type; there were a couple of small caterpillar transports here, as well as a dismantled short-range surface hopper that looked to be undergoing repair. There was another body; this one was neither a soldier nor scientist, as his greasy coveralls attested, but rather an engineering tech. He had also been shot in the face. A small plastic case and a scattering of tools spilled at his right hand indicated that the man had been taken by surprise.
