Among the Powers (14 page)

“No, I believe you. I just forgot.” Geste
shook his head in pleased bemusement at his own accidental
foresight.

“All in all,” Gamesmaster said, “I think
we’re all right on reconnaisance, boss, but we haven’t got much of
anything for defense or attack.”

“We can sabotage any system we can read,
can’t we?”

“Well, probably—it’s not quite that easy. A
lot of them will be tamper-protected, and we may lose the snooper
every time. And Thaddeus is bound to have a lot of redundancy in
his systems, as well as a lot of systems; he’s fought wars
before.”

“That’s true,” Geste said thoughtfully. “I
guess he has. He and Shadowdark.”

“Oh, some of the others have, too.”

“I suppose they must have.” It occurred to
Geste that he knew surprisingly little about some of his comrades.
He dismissed that as unimportant, and returned to the subject at
hand. “We must be able to mount
some
sort of an attack. I
want you to devote whatever capacity you can spare easily to
adapting equipment for use as weaponry, or maybe just building
weapons from scratch. We may need an arsenal.”

“You got it, boss. You want anything
special?”

“No, I don’t know any more about what he’s
got than you do.”

“Okay, I got it; I’ll do a mixed bag,
whatever I think of. You let me know if you come up with any
brilliant ideas for me to work on. Anything else?”

“On defense—Thaddeus can’t get into a
bent-space shelter, can he?”

“Not if you close it off before he can send
anything through. But, boss, you wouldn’t like being stuck in a
closed-off bubble. Once you close it off from normal space, you
don’t just have a bend any more, you’ve got a pocket universe.
Breaking back out into normal space could be tricky. I wouldn’t
want to try it. And so long as you have a connection to normal
space, Thaddeus can attack you through it, one way or another.”

“What if we got off-planet? Just packed up
and left?”

The intelligence hesitated. “Well, boss,” it
said at last, “you could try that. You could pack up and go back to
Mother and take off for Terra or anywhere else you fancy. But that
wouldn’t stop Thaddeus. He got off Alpha Imperium centuries after
the collapse of the local civilization, remember; he used salvaged
materials and slave labor and built himself a starship in a mud-hut
technology. He could do the same here. And meanwhile, if you just
took off, you’d have to leave behind a lot of stuff. All the
mortals, for example. And me. I wouldn’t like that. I mean, I know
that you won’t hang around Denner’s Wreck forever, but I always
figured that when you left you’d see that I came along, or else
you’d leave me a secure situation here. If you run off now, you
can’t take me along—there isn’t room on Mother, and you couldn’t
make the modifications quickly enough to get away before Thaddeus
shot you down. And if you left me behind, I figure Thaddeus would
get to me sooner or later.”

“I didn’t know you cared,” Geste said,
genuinely startled. “I thought silicon life didn’t have any ego or
instinct for self-preservation.”

“Well, I can’t speak for anybody
else
, boss. I know you guys built me and evolved me from
machinery instead of flatworms or whatever you humans are descended
from, so that I don’t need to have any instinct for
self-preservation, and I know that a lot of machines are about as
much alive and self-aware as a rock, and I know that even some
smart ones would just as soon be scrapped as not, but
I
sure
think
I have an ego. Blame it on your programming—or
Aulden’s, I guess, since he did the basic design for me. Whatever
you want to call it, I know damn well that I don’t like the idea of
Thaddeus messing around with me.”

“He doesn’t even know you exist!”

“Yeah, but he’d find out eventually.”

“And why couldn’t we make
modifications?”

“You aren’t worried about the mortals around
here?”

“Let’s leave them out of it for the moment.
Why couldn’t we make modifications and bring you along?”

“You wouldn’t have time. If Thaddeus sees
you packing up, he’ll try and stop you. He won’t want you alerting
whatever military authorities there might be out there. The only
way you could get off-planet safely would be to just pick up and
go, right now, and take off in Mother. Even then, he might try to
shoot you down.”

Geste leaned back, thinking, and his seat
reshaped itself to better fit his new contour. The goblet in his
hand also reshaped itself, to avoid spilling, and the feelie vine
at his ankle threw a massaging tendril up toward the back of his
neck. The music shifted subtly.

“It seems to me,” he said, “that Mother is
the big threat to his plans here; why hasn’t he
already
shot
her down? If I were trying to take over the planet without letting
anyone outside the system know about it, I’d destroy Mother first
thing, before anyone else knew I was up to something, in order to
keep anyone from escaping. Thaddeus hasn’t done that. Why not?”

“I’d guess he probably plans to use Mother
himself. Seems obvious. After all, he surely doesn’t want just
Denner’s Wreck. He must want a dozen or more suns, the same as
before, and Mother’s the only thing in the system with a stardrive.
Building a new one would take a lot more time and a lot more
resources than he wants, I’d guess. He could
do
it, he’s
done it before, but it’s a lot easier to take the ship
ready-made.”

“But it’s too big a risk, just waiting until
he’s ready. He must have something in mind, some way to make sure
none of us are going to take the ship and leave him here while we
go get help.”

“If he does, boss, it’s nothing
I
know about. Maybe we should ask Mother.”

Geste waved a command. “Ask her, then.” He
sipped his drink through a straw the goblet extruded for him.

“Bad news, boss,” Gamesmaster replied
immediately. “Mother says that Thaddeus came up for a visit a
couple of days ago and left off a few things, with orders not to
touch them. They’re hooked into the main controls and the
stardrive. Mother’s not happy about it, but she didn’t have
self-defense programs strong enough to override his orders, so
they’re all there now. He gave her orders so she couldn’t even tell
anyone until she was asked. It’s a safe bet they’re booby-traps of
some kind, something to make sure that nobody can use the ship
except him.”

“We’re in real trouble, then. I mean, I’m
sure that anything Thaddeus can rig up Aulden could get
around—probably in about five minutes—but Thaddeus has Aulden
stashed away somewhere, and none of the rest of us are fit to
program a lunchbox. If those
are
booby-traps, and I’m pretty
damn sure they are, then unless we get Aulden out we’re stuck here
on Denner’s Wreck. Is there any way we can call for help?”

“Who would we call? How? We’ve been cut off
here for centuries on this little vacation you people put together.
I don’t have any idea what’s been happening back in civilization,
and neither do any of the other machines that will talk to me. And
we don’t have an open channel to anywhere, either—nothing outside
the system but normal-space communications. We could broadcast a
message, anywhere you like up and down the electromagnetic
spectrum, but it would go out at light speed, and it’s eight
light-years to the next inhabited system. That means it would be
eight years before anyone could respond. Even if they took your
word for everything and launched ships immediately, Thaddeus would
have had eight years to do whatever he’s going to do.”

“Do it anyway. Send the message, before that
monster finds some way to jam outgoing traffic for the whole
planet. At least then Thaddeus will have a time limit. Eight years
isn’t much.”

“Boss, I don’t think that’s a good idea, at
least not yet.”

Annoyed at being questioned by his own
machine, Geste snapped, “Why the hell not?”

“Well, first off, it will tell Thaddeus that
we know what he’s doing, and we haven’t got any defenses set up
yet. Do you really want to issue an invitation to come and kill us?
Besides, it won’t set a definite time limit anyway. We don’t know
that anyone will answer. The nearest known inhabited planet is New
Schenectady, but why would anyone on New Sken care about Denner’s
Wreck? I’ve picked up crosstalk from there every so often, and it’s
not a hotbed of wild-eyed idealism. If the message ever reaches
Alpha Imperium we can expect an answer—they remember Thaddeus
there, and last I heard they still had a death warrant out on
him—but that’s almost a century away in normal space. We might have
help in eight years—or in ninety-six. I suspect we’d all be dead in
ninety-six, if we antagonized Thaddeus like that.”

Geste saw the truth in Gamesmaster’s
argument. “Then we’ve got to stop him ourselves, here on Denner’s
Wreck,” he said.

“I’d say so, boss. Looks to me like you’re
up to your neck in trouble.”

“
We’re
up to
our
necks,” Geste
corrected.

“Boss, I hate to tell you this, after all
these years, especially after what I just said about my being one
of the guys, but my secret’s out—I don’t
have
a neck.”

“That’s too bad—means I can’t wring it.
Anyway, I meant all of the humans, mostly.”

“Well, I’d have to agree with that.”

“I have
got
to get help.”

“I’d have to agree with that, too. But you
didn’t do very well at enlisting troops before.”

“Then I’ll just have to do better. Who
haven’t I tried?”

The intelligence emitted a synthetic sigh,
and began listing names.

Geste listened to the recitation with little
enthusiasm. He had already covered every one of the immortals who
lived anywhere near Fortress Holding, and he knew that the further
away a person’s hold, the less likely that person would be to care
what Thaddeus was doing. They would prefer not to believe that
anything was going to disturb their quiet lives, and they would
find it particularly hard to believe coming from Geste the
Trickster.

There were the three residents of the
northern mountains, Isabelle, Dragon, and Arn of the Ice. The
ocean-based immortals included Geste’s closest neighbor, Lord
Hollingsworth, who was relatively promising, and one of the oldest
of the group; he might actually know something about military
strategy. The others in that group—Feura and Tagomi—Geste had
little hope for. The eastern forests, in addition to Shadowdark,
held Lord Carlov, Lady Haze, Starflower, and Anna, who called
herself the Lady of the Lake. Carlov liked to play the part of an
ancient warrior, but Geste had no idea whether he would be of any
use in actual conflict.

And somewhere in the skies there was the
Skyler. Geste decided that she was the best place to start, for a
variety of reasons.

Firstly, her home, the Skyland, could be
valuable. Being mobile, it would make an excellent base of
operations. Geste could also see several possible uses for a
million metric tons of airborne rock. If nothing else, it looked
impressive to have the thing come sailing over one’s head; in fact,
the Skyler generally kept it out at sea to avoid terrifying the
mortals.

Besides, if he came sailing overhead aboard
the Skyland, people would be less likely to think that the whole
thing was one of Geste’s stunts. They knew that the Skyler was not
the sort of person who would volunteer to help out in one of the
Trickster’s schemes. And the fact that people were gathering in one
place, in person, rather than just talking over long distances,
would help drive home the seriousness of the matter. As a rule,
face-to-face gatherings were reserved for pleasure, and problems
were dealt with through the communications systems. A problem that
got Geste aboard the Skyland would seem more real.

The Skyler was a skittish, suggestible
person. A threat of the sort Thaddeus posed would rouse her to
action far more readily than it would most of the others.

Furthermore, because of her elevated
location and his own preference for setting his plans upon solid
ground, she had been the subject of very few of Geste’s pranks, and
should therefore be more willing than most to trust him.

And finally, she was a good friend to Imp,
and Imp was genuinely worried about her lover, Aulden the
Technician—and with good reason. If Geste could not convince the
Skyler by himself, he would ask Imp to intervene on his behalf.

That reminded him that he had not heard
anything back from Imp. Well, he would call her back after he had
spoken to the others.

“Get me the Skyler,” he said.

“You got it, boss.”

An instant later the Skyler’s familiar face
appeared before him. She wore a worried expression, which was
nothing unusual.

“Oh, Geste, it’s you!” she said, her face
brightening. “Thank heavens! Imp told me what’s happening; what can
I do to help?”

Geste smiled, then suppressed it. Imp had
done the convincing for him.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to come aboard,
and we can talk about it there. Should I come find you, or will you
come find me, or shall we meet somewhere?”

“I’m headed for the Falls to pick up Imp;
could you join us there?”

“Of course. I’d be glad to. See you there.”
Geste signalled, and the Skyler’s image vanished.

Things were looking up; he had Imp and the
Skyler on his side now, at the very least. Thaddeus would not be
able to take them all by surprise.

But Geste still had no idea at all how they
could stop the would-be conqueror.

“
...fell to the sand and waited to die.

“
The next thing he knew strong hands were
grasping him and lifting him up, and he found himself being laid
across a wagon, a wagon that moved without any wheels or beasts to
draw it. And when he could gather the strength, he looked around
and saw that on either side of the wagon were three men, and they
were all clad in flowing robes of white and gold, and they all
marched on silently, not saying a word, and in perfect
step.