B00BFVOGUI EBOK (6 page)

“Something’s wrong with the security system,” Trovatelli said, closing the panel. “We’re locked out.”

Bridget’s eyes narrowed. “Falcone said the Regulans gave us
all the codes in the sale.”

“Well, they’ve changed,” the
technician said. “I think there’s an access point one level up.”

The chief nodded. Pulse weapon
drawn, Bridget led the way. It didn’t seem necessary, but their destination was
a room she hadn’t checked yet. Yellow rungs jutted from the wall ahead, the
nearest route leading up.

“Mind if I ask a question,
Chief?” Trovatelli asked the older woman.

Bridget looked back down the
ladder. For the first time since Bridget had met her, the Q/A seemed less than
self-assured. “Shoot.”

“You were at Overland, weren’t
you?” Trovatelli followed her through the hatchway.
“How — I mean, how—”

“How did I start Earth’s first
interstellar war?” Bridget didn’t even flinch. Every new recruit to the team
asked once they realized she was
that
Bridget Yang. Unless they were so clueless about the universe they lived in
that they didn’t know to ask…in which case she didn’t want them on her team
anyway. “A lot of things went wrong in a row.”

“I know. I
did a research assignment on it in school.”

Great
, Bridget thought.
I’m core curriculum now.

“So I know
what
happened,” the Q/A said. “I just don’t know how you
didn’t…well, see it sooner. I mean, you seem to try to get to know all your
recruits.”

“Cause and effect,” she said,
knowing exactly what Trovatelli was referring to. “You’re
an engineer. You should understand that.” She looked in a side door and pointed
Trovatelli toward it. “That should be your spot, if
the schematics are right. I’ll check in later.”

Bridget walked ahead in silence,
alone.
Cause and effect, my ass,
she
thought.
One big cause
and all the rest, effect.

That had been her life since Overland.
The location in Nebraska was little more than a crossroads on the Platte River:
a maintenance stop for the maglev line heading east. But everyone had heard
about it after the events of 2130. Eight years ago — but yesterday, as far as
Bridget was concerned. She lived through it all again every time someone
brought it up. . .

In deep space the hot-tempered Gebrans had at last agreed to an exchange of trade
representatives. However, being Gebran, the aliens
had insisted on making their own way to Earth and landing in a remote area. But
no place on Earth was truly remote anymore, and Bridget’s special marine
detachment had been just as capable of meeting the shuttle in the wheat fields
as in the capital.

Hers had been an honor guard. But
it was still a guard, and it had failed in that duty. Or rather, she had failed
to spot until too late that two of her junior escorts had belonged to the
radical Walled Garden movement, the last holdouts against Earth joining the
interstellar community. Most of the members of the Gebran
delegation had died in the assassination attempt, and while Bridget’s quick thinking
had saved the ambassador, news of the event had touched off the war that
threatened to undo the Signatory Pact.

Once humans began dying in
battle, many people began grasping for someone to blame. Some faulted Bridget,
who had initially been decorated for her role, for not having recognized
Gardeners in her midst. This despite the fact that there wasn’t anything she
could
have done — the investigators had
concluded early on that the turncoats had covered their pasts well.
Reflexively, she had taken responsibility anyway — although doing so before the
media had, in retrospect, been a mistake. The flak that followed had cost her
rank and commission, and ultimately she left the service after the muddle of a war ended.

She’d come to Quaestor
for a job rather than redemption. Praetor, Lazarius, Osman, and the other trading firms had turned her down
outright. Only a farseeing Quaestor expedition
leader, realizing how much experience a small amount of money bought, had
offered her a contract. Bridget had stayed ever since, running a crack surge
team even as the fortunes of the expedition it was protecting faltered. Her
past had convinced her that part of soldiering was making time to get to know
all her new recruits and seeing what made them tick. There’d be no more
Gardeners on her details.

And loyalty had demanded that she
stick with the expedition now, even after bad years and Spore attacks. She’d
even coped with the deteriorating quality of her new recruits, welcoming help
by veterans like O’Herlihy and Dinner. This latest
mission, however, had tested her loyalty to the limits.

It wasn’t just that she didn’t
like Jamison Sturm — she hadn’t been friends with most traders she’d protected.
The job simply attracted a type of person she wasn’t at ease with: show-offs.
It made sense, of course, that sellers would have to talk themselves up, as
well as their goods. It was part of making a sale. And yet show-offs in her
line of work got killed. But that wasn’t the issue.

No, her real problem was that she
had no faith whatsoever that Jamie could do the job
at all
. There was an ocean of difference between issuing sell
orders at a desk on Ops and trading with other civilizations. An ocean of
plasma and void separated cultures that had few, if any, common understandings.
Language wouldn’t necessarily be the problem: they had the knowglobes
for that, and they contained the facts learned by explorers who had gone
before. It was the opposite that concerned her: that understanding Jamie might
actually make anyone they met
more
hostile. And then the trouble would really begin.

People didn’t understand that
about surge teams — or about her. Her forces didn’t cross light years for a
chance to shoot at bug-eyed uglies. Mindless
organisms were one thing, sentient beings something else. Her job wasn’t to
start wars. It was to prevent them by keeping hostilities from breaking out in
the first place.

Bridget had helped to start the Arcturo-Solar War. Now, she lived in terror of what trouble
Jamie might start in the next few weeks.

Her earpiece buzzed again. This
time she ignored it.

From where he had been thrown to
the deck, Jamie looked up in panic at the silver-clad figures looming over him.
He’d never seen armor like theirs. Bulky and spiked, with two
large shoulder fins rising on either side of a bulbous helmet. The
faceplates were as dark as ink, but he didn’t need to see faces to know their
attitude. Each of his attackers held a frightening-looking weapon crackling
with electricity or glowing with unreal fire.

For a moment Jamie thought Bridget
had sent her goons to play a prank on him. There weren’t any bipedal species in
the Signatory Systems, nor any outside that he was aware of — and this crowd
certainly had two arms and two legs. Except for the skinnier one he now saw
through the crowd: he had only one arm attached and was cradling the other like
he was carrying a loaf of bread. That one alone wore a golden collar.

“Welligan?”
Jamie asked in a small voice. “O’Herlihy? Dinner?”

His assailants parted to allow
the approach of another figure from the shadows. Powerfully built, this one
wore black armor instead of silver. His faceplate was as opaque as the others’.
Through his armor’s public address system, the figure said something alien and
unintelligible.

“Oh,” Jamie said, reaching his
knees. He pointed to the decoration, still clicking and tinkling idiotically on
his chest. “Um…peace? See? I have a badge…”

The Black Priest of the Xylanx looked down on the simpering creature. “So this is a
human,” Kolvax said in his language. He glanced back
at one-armed Tellmer. “Are you sure the surveillance
imagers are off-line?”

“Yes, Great Kolvax.
Old Liandro locked the intruders out of the system.”

“Fine.” It wouldn’t do for the humans to
find them here — not until he knew how many were coming. He’d seen a weapon in
the hand of the dark-haired female that entered. He didn’t expect the humans
could defeat the Xylanx, but he wasn’t ready to test
that belief yet.

Instead, the Xylanx
exiles spent the precious minutes after the humans arrived sweeping the station
to hide evidence of their presence. If the dark-hair was bringing an army, Kolvax didn’t want them to find any trace that would reveal
the Xylanx’s characteristics. Here, his followers’
fastidiousness had come in handy: there wasn’t as much as a dead cell to be
found in areas they’d frequented. His chapel was the messiest of all the areas,
owing to his own habits, but the mess, and the spatters from Tellmer’s wound, had been hastily cleaned.

It was a lesson from Kolvax’s training with the Stalkers, the Xylanx’s ruthless paramilitary: “The longer your prey
stands in ignorance of you, the mightier you become in their fears.”

And then they had hidden using
the warren of vents and service corridors to move about the station. When the
humans left one of their number behind, Kolvax saw
the chance to act — and to learn what they were up against.

Not
much
, Kolvax concluded as he studied the pale face of the human. Hair on his head the color of sand, with a narrow nose and chin.
And thin. So thin! The Xylanx knew of humanity; from
childhood on, every Xylander learned of the great
existential threat that these creatures posed to their domain. But Kolvax wasn’t impressed in the least. “His home must be a
soft place for this thing to have lived,” he said.

“It’s repugnant,” Rumber said. “We should kill it before it infects us with
whatever makes them waste away like that.”

“Later,” Kolvax
said. He slapped a powerful hand on the human male’s shoulder and lifted him. The
man howled, and Kolvax kneed him in the stomach. That
stopped the howling but not the noise. The creature whimpered and mewled,
clutching his midsection.

Kolvax’s followers, clearly nauseated,
held their captive’s arms. Kolvax ripped the headset
from the bewildered human and crushed it in his gloved hand. Then the badge
caught his eye.

“I know this symbol,” Kolvax said. “It’s issued by the Signatory Systems. I
gutted a few of their other members before the Dominium withdrew us from the
wider galaxy. Evidently, they’ve let the humans in.” He stared at it. “They’ve
advanced faster than I would have thought.”

As Kolvax
started to pull off the trader’s badge, the eldest surviving member of his
party spoke up. “It grows warmer,” Liandro said,
looking worriedly at a gauge. “They have control of the environmental systems
again.”

“We take him,” Kolvax said. He looked to his followers. “The Xylanx have a destiny. We have all sought Forrah Glay, the great unknown.
This human’s coming is proof we were right — and a sign of the danger that awaits
us all if we fail to act.”

He grabbed the human by his slick
and disgusting hair. “
You’re
the
sign,” Kolvax snarled at the terrified being. “And
I’m taking you back to our people —
now!
”

Jamie was no xenobiologist.
He wasn’t even slightly interested in the subject. Documentarians had gone wild
in the days after first contact, recording millions of hours about what existed
out there; some people were really into it. Jamie thought it was all noise. The
beings that were out there weren’t anything he could relate to at all.

There were no humanoids with
bumpy faces and extra arms, buxom females with exotic skin colors and
odd-shaped ears. The old entertainment programs had lied to him. Sentient life
ranged from the amorphous to the ethereal, and you could never read expressions
or body language. How did the company’s traders even have anything to work
with? Jamie had no idea.

Jamie also had no idea what the
armored beings that carried him were, but he was sure they weren’t human. They
had the requisite limbs — well, all but the little guy — but nothing about the
powerful brutes or their odd barking language seemed familiar to him. If
humanity ever opened up trade with these people, they’d need to shop from the big
and tall section.

At the moment, that didn’t seem a
likely prospect. Following the black-clad warrior, who was evidently their
leader, Jamie’s captors dragged him through one darkened corridor after
another. He could feel his limbs growing lighter as they ascended from level to
level; even Jamie knew that meant they were heading toward the station’s spine,
where there was no gravity. Jamie hoped that might slow them down. But those
hopes ended when his captors activated the jets in their backpacks. Small
gimbaled engines fired, scooting the figures along higher and faster.

Jamie twisted to see where they
were taking him. Bright yellow light shone down through an opening far above.
He knew where it led. The security guys on the way in had called it the Shaft,
joking that Quaestor had just given it all to them. A
football field’s width across and a kilometer from end to end, the Shaft was a
vast cylindrical pressurized region within the station’s axis, a weightless
loading dock for materials shipped in from the whirlibangs
outside. Grids of metal scaffolds extended from the rounded walls, providing places
where ’boxes could be secured for unloading; hatchways back into the north habitation
area could be seen on all sides. In the middle of the open space, Jamie saw the
supply ’box the surge team had arrived with tethered to a metal scaffold.
Nobody was here unpacking.

The alien leader grunted
something as the entourage entered the Shaft, and Jamie now saw other
silver-clad aliens joining the group from other places of hiding. This wasn’t a
small party, he realized: there were thirty or forty of the creatures here.
Bridget’s Surge Sigma team only had thirty-two people. One by one, all of the
figures ignited their personal backpack rockets.