Cat and Company (12 page)

Bedivere groaned as even more ideas connected up and made a terrifying whole. He looked up. Everyone was staring at him.

“The
gates
,” he said. “They steal technology. Why wouldn’t they borrow it, too?”

Cat got to her feet, moving as though she couldn’t keep still on the chair. “Oh, hell in a handcart…someone in the Silent Sector must have destroyed the Last Gate to stop them.”

Yennifer had her hands held tightly together. “The Last Gate was destroyed ninety years ago exactly. Griswold, the closest planet beyond the gate, lies a light year beyond it. Travelling at optimum sub-light speed, without the use of gate technology, a ship or a fleet could take ninety years to reach Kashya, which just happens to be the nearest planet with a suitable gravity and sun.”

“Kashya also has a viable set of gates,” Devlin said. He raised his hands to his mouth, as if he was trying to hold in an exclamation, then rubbed his cheeks hard. “They’re using the gates.” His tone was bleak.

“Some would have stayed on Kashya,” Bedivere said. “That’s why there were ships just sitting there, empty. How many more went through the gates?”

“And where are they going to emerge?” Catherine added.

Abruptly, everyone began to speak at once, trying to shout each other down. The fear in the room leapt with the volume.

* * * * *

“Enough!” Devlin roared.

Silence descended. Devlin looked around the room. “Screaming at each other doesn’t do anything constructive. It doesn’t even make
you
feel better. So for the third time in the last hour, will you please keep your comments civil and take turns?”

Bedivere pulled the brandy decanter across the table toward himself. Brant was sitting on the other side, his tumbler in his hand. He looked exhausted and he looked ill. There were lines around his eyes and his mouth.

“We have to warn
everyone
,” he said again. “We
have
to. We don’t know when or where they’re going to emerge, if they will at all. We might be lucky and they screwed up the jump and destroyed themselves by jumping into a wormhole that doesn’t go anywhere and that’s the last we’ll ever see of them.”

“Except there are more of them on Kashya, settling into their new home,” one of the Varkan pilots pointed out. “They could use any of the ships floating around Kashya, dive into the gates and pop out somewhere else.”

“They seem to be adept at using borrowed technology efficiently,” Devlin said gently. “Enough to make it this far into the galaxy.”

“Then blow up the gates at Kashya,” Connell said. “Stop a second bunch from coming through.”

Devlin pointed at him. “That
is
a good idea,” he said. “It’s not like those gates will be needed in the near future.”

“Why not blow them all up?” Bedivere said.

Everyone rounded on him instantly.

“You can’t!” Lilly cried.

“Humans need the gate technology if Varkans are not at hand,” Devlin said, his voice still gentle and full of diplomatic smoothness. “Too many legacy systems still depend upon the gates that the Varkan have not yet managed to replace with their own services. Food, supplies, resource ships still use them. If you destroyed them, you’d cripple the known worlds and drive us back into the dark ages.”

“Bedivere has a point,” Catherine said. “If they’re using the gates, then we might
have
to destroy them.”

“If we destroy the gates, we also destroy our major strength—our ability to cross the galaxy quickly is what binds the known worlds together and makes them strong,” Devlin countered.

“May I interrupt?” Yennifer said, her sweet voice lifting a little higher. Like many of the people in the room, she was still on her feet, her fingers twined tightly together. Zoey, her AI, stood next to her, waiting patiently with a serene expression on her face. Most of this discussion meant less than nothing to the AI and for a moment Bedivere envied it the absence of harsh emotions. His own hands were shaking, a sign of impending cravings. The brandy was a permissible bolt hole. Later, he would have to shore up his defenses.

Tension was running high in the room and he wasn’t the only one suffering.

Yennifer glanced around as everyone shuffled on their feet, rubbing at necks and combing back hair with fingers. Drawing breath.

“You’re all assuming that these aliens represent some sort of monstrous threat. That as soon as they come through the gates, they’re going to inhale entire worlds.”

“They are going to do exactly that,” Connell said flatly.

“You don’t
know
that,” Yennifer pointed out. “Maybe what happened on Kaysha was a mistake. Maybe they didn’t know that humans were there. If we establish communications with them, talk to them, maybe we’ll find out that they’re as afraid as we are.”

Connell moved closer to her. His face worked. “Of course they’re fucking hostile!” he cried, throwing out his hand for emphasis. “They’re using
our
gate technology! They know we’re here! They just don’t give a damn!”

Yennifer blinked, backing up a half step. She had grown pale, too. “Until you talk to them, you don’t know that for sure.”

Nichol August put down his glass and moved a little closer, too.

“I saw the ships,” Connell told her. “I saw the
hundreds
of ships just sitting there like so much used junk. There are so fucking many of them, they can afford to discard them right there in space, like a graveyard. They don’t give a damn who finds them, or discovers them there. Who the hell knows how many more are going to come pouring out of whatever gate they chose? Are you suggesting we set up a welcoming committee for them?”

“Hey, take it easy, Connell,” Nichol said quietly, reaching for his elbow.

Connell shook him off. “You’re so fucking optimistic it’s offensive,” he told Yennifer. “When are you going to grow up and get a clue?”

Yennifer pressed her hand to her throat. A vein was throbbing in her temple and her hand was shaking. “I don’t think it’s optimistic to expect the best outcome.”

“Just naïve,” he shot back.

“Connell, that’s enough,” Lilly said loudly.

Brant slid passed Nichol and inserted himself between Connell and Yennifer. “Enough,” he said, his voice low. “Take a deep breath and calm down. Yennifer is not the enemy here.”

“Look at Zoey!” Cat called, surging toward the tight little group. The AI was flickering in and out of view, sparking like a live wire too close to water. “Quick, Lilly!” Cat added.

Lilly grabbed the smaller woman’s arm and turned her to face Lilly. “Yennifer, breathe. Slow and easy. You’re blowing circuits. Come on, now, look at me.”

The two Varkan pilots from Devlin’s ship stepped up one on either side of him, responding to the possible threat.

Yennifer was breathing rapidly. Hyperventilating. Her chest hitched and she began to gasp in tight, hard breaths. Her shoulders bent forward as oxygen depleted in her system.

Bedivere found himself unable to move or look away. He’d experienced that frightening hysteria when strong emotions he’d never felt before registered for the first time. The physical sensations were overwhelming, delivering their own fear. The first time it had happened he really had thought he was dying.

Yennifer was young enough and sheltered enough here in Charlton, surrounded by reasonable Varkan, that she had never experienced such conflict before. She had not yet found Interspace. Every Varkan had to go through this, sooner or later.

The terror in her eyes was hard to watch, all the same.

There was a sparkling, sizzling sound from near the front door, as the relays gave out. Lights flickered overhead and the heads-up displays that had been floating around the room for everyone to examine disappeared.

Then blackness tore through his mind, stealing every thought and all his consciousness.

* * * * *

Hearing returned first. Then awareness, stirred by the panicky voices he could hear.

He was bent over the table and the smell of brandy was sharp in his nose, scratching at the back of his throat. He blinked, getting his eyes to work.

“Lilly, don’t move him. I think his leg is broken.”

Cat’s voice.

“Devlin’s okay.” That was Brant. “He’s underneath the other two.”

“Some bodyguards,” Cat said from very close by.

Hands on his shoulders. Lifting him. “Bedivere.” Cat again.

He let her lift him up into a sitting position. His forehead ached. “What happened?”

“You’re bleeding. You must have hit the glass when you passed out.” Cat moved into his line of vision, studying his head. “You also stink of brandy,” she added. “It’s all over you.”

“I’d just filled the glass,” Bedivere said. “Wasted the lot of it, I think.”

Cat muffled a laugh. “Yennifer blew a circuit that supports the datacore in this section of the city. Varkan everywhere just dropped dead for a moment. There’ll be panic out there.”

“And in here. Who broke what?” He tried to look around. Catherine was blocking his view.

“Connell. He was standing. He fell heavily against the chair there. Think of a stick breaking over a knee.”

Bedivere winced. “No, I won’t, thanks.”

She shifted. “There. It’s not a bad cut and it’s already clotting. I think the brandy may actually have helped.”

“It’s stinging like crazy,” he said, confirming her guess. Now he could see the rest of the room. Yennifer was stirring. Someone had already put a cushion under her head. Nichol was sitting next to her.

Connell was lying on top of the destroyed chair, groaning, his hand reaching for his leg, which was bent at an impossible angle, halfway between his hip and his knee. Lilly was in front of her desk, talking to the nearest therapy center. Calling for medical help, Bedivere assumed.

The two Varkan pilots were moving slowly, rolling onto their knees and looking around with confused expressions. Bedivere had been through this once before and it had scared the crap out of him. If this was the first time the pilots had been disconnected from the datacore, then they would be feeling some of the same panic. It wasn’t comfortable facing the fact that they were vulnerable and could be taken out simply by disrupting the dataflow.

Devlin pushed himself up into a sitting position. He looked around, blinking. He wore the same bewildered expression as his pilots and the same fear was in his eyes.

Bedivere recognized it with a shock that jolted him to the core.

Devlin was Varkan.

Charlton Space City, New Cathay (Ji Xiu Prime), Ji Xiu System, Perseus Arm. FY 10.187

“Bedivere.”

He looked up.

Brant grinned. “That’s the third time I’ve said your name. Where were you?”

Bedivere stirred himself. Two aides were putting Connell on an air bed, to take him to the clinic to knit his femur together. Another was checking Yennifer, who was still sitting on the floor, her back against Nichol’s shoulder. She was wan and silent.

Devlin was sitting on the sofa, a cloth to the back of his head, waiting his turn.

“Three aides?” Bedivere asked. “They couldn’t send us medics?”

“The entire quadrant went out for a second or two,” Brant pointed out. “Simple math says that’s over two thousand Varkan who just got scared into next week. We’re not the only ones to suffer broken bones and split heads. When you guys go down you don’t do it halfway, do you?”

Bedivere tried to suppress his grin. “Nothing short of spectacular, that’s our motto.” He glanced at Devlin again. Catherine was sitting next to him now, talking to someone on the
Hana
, organizing things, tamping down the panic that would have broken out there, too. E Dock was part of the old city as well.

“Got a moment?” Bedivere said to Brant.

“I’m a supernumery at the moment. Sure.” He shrugged.

Bedivere got to his feet. Slowly. Everything stayed still and he remained upright. It was reassuring. He moved out around the table and headed for the double doors to his room, waited until Brant had followed him, then shut them behind him and sealed them against noise.

Brant turned, taking in the austere room once more, then faced Bedivere and raised a brow.

“Devlin went down, too,” Bedivere said, speaking quietly despite the noiseproof on the door.

“He said his pilots fell on him. Something busted the back of his head open and they were on top of him. I didn’t see them fall. I was busy watching Connell topple like a tree.”

“No,
Devlin
fell, too,” Bedivere said patiently.

Brant frowned. “Pretend I don’t think as fast as you for a moment and explain it to me.”

“He
fell
, Brant. His consciousness was wiped for a split second, just like mine and Connell’s and Yennifer’s.”

Brant’s jaw sagged. “You’re saying he’s a
Varkan
?”

“I don’t know for certain,” Bedivere replied. “I was out cold at the time. The room feeds will confirm it, though. He didn’t fall because the pilots landed on him. He was wearing the same confused look they were and that Yennifer was wearing and probably me, too.”

“The room feeds went out for the same period you did,” Brant said. He walking in a tight little circle, then leaned against the wall with one stiff arm. “He’s
Varkan?
Glave above….”

“Think about it,” Bedivere pressed. “That explains so much about him, not least this evangelical drive of his to push for Varkan rights and keep working for the Varkan once he got ’em.”

Brant let out a heavy breath. “It makes sense,” he agreed, with a tone that said he didn’t like that conclusion much.

“Someone must have seen him fall,” Bedivere added. “Lilly or Catherine. Maybe even Nichol.”

“I don’t think it matters,” Brant said.

“What, you’re going to take my word for it?” Bedivere was startled.

“No, I mean it doesn’t matter if he’s Varkan or not.”

Bedivere stared at him. “Of course it matters! If he is, then he’s been lying to us…to everyone, all along.”

“So?”

“So, he’s not the pure, golden hearted leader everyone thinks he is. If he’s hiding that he’s Varkan, what else is he hiding?”

“Nothing that matters a damn,” Brant shot back. He straightened up from his lean. “Think it through, Bedivere. Devlin started his campaign for Varkan rights when things were the hardest for you guys. You were the natural leader, but half the known worlds thought you were a murderer and the other half thought you were crazy. There was
no one
to speak up on behalf of the Varkan…except Devlin did. If he really is Varkan, then maybe he was smart to hide it. It looked far more convincing having a human fighting on behalf of the Varkan, than just another Varkan trying to speak up.”