Edward M. Lerner (36 page)

The latest thought experiment involved constructing a replacement radio—the Snakes could not suspect every minor electronics or photonics project—for use with an antenna in one of the otherwise useless lifeboats. If they could disassemble control panels quickly, for access to the antenna, and if they could run cables from the lifeboat to a power source in their domain of control and if the Snake troops did not move in quickly and if the message were very short….

Too many ifs. “Then the Snakes in the engine room pop a circuit breaker or two, and we can’t signal. Or they fire a missile or two into the lifeboat bay. Or—”

Helmut tuned out the fruitless arguments. Something in that concatenation of hypotheticals struck him as useful. “How long
is
the message?”

“Quite short, actually,” Carlos said. “The bare minimum is a codeword and a digital signature. Whatever intel we can add would be appreciated, but none is strictly necessary.”

“So no more than seconds, assuming it gets through on the first try. Good.” He took silence as confirmation. “There’s a transmitter the Snakes don’t know about.”

Carlos nodded. “The lifeboat from
Deep Throat
. I assume we can upload a message?”

“No problem,” Helmut said.

“The message has to be short, because the Snakes will stop the signal quickly. But is the transmitter powerful enough?” As always, Art cut to the chase. Which was appropriate, because the chase was overdue.

“Yes, but.” His bones could not judge acceleration to the last few percent of a gravity, but
Harmony
had been pulling close to one gee. It had kept it up for about a week before the tumbling trick killed the fusion drive. He guestimated they were about two billion klicks from Jupiter, and outside the range
Deep Throat
’s lifeboat—drive and radio—had been engineered for. “Yes, because I’d expect some fairly sensitive receivers to be listening for us. But, only if we get the lifeboat out of the landing bay. Where it is, we’d be transmitting through lots of metal decking.”

Helmut let people digest that for a while. “The good news is I can remotely program the lifeboat to take off from the landing bay, to follow a course, and to keep transmitting.”

Kudrin eyed him appraisingly. “And the not so good news? That in a very short time the Snakes will scramble a warship or two and blow the lifeboat and its radio out of the sky?”

“No,” T’bck Fwa answered. “I’m the bad news. My sandbox is aboard that lifeboat.”

T’bck Fwa was alone with his thoughts. The little lifeboat containing his sandbox must have departed
Harmony
. He had been told a very brief separation would sever the tenuous ‘bot-to-’bot radio relay that had been the only external interface to his sandbox.

Much was on his mind. It was not in the Unity’s nature to nurture, or even to recognize, leaders, but he had long memories of interacting with humans. K’choi Gwu was a truly great leader.

Since the breakout, he had spoken extensively with members of the crew-kindred, but most of all with the ka. No one’s experience gave evidence of human complicity. He had conversed as well with the humans, and especially with Hong-yee Chung, Carlos Montoya, and Arthur Walsh. There were gaps in knowledge among the generally secretive humans, and differences in understanding, but nothing to substantiate the conspiracy he had so long inferred. There were tales of bravery and sacrifice by both species.

If T’bck Fwa could, all these thoughts and more would have been sent to his progenitor on Earth. These memories could have been downloaded over the improvised network aboard
Harmony
to the humans and appended to the upload the lifeboat would transmit for as long as it was able.

There was the problem.

Every repetition of the core message—Come get us!—improved the odds for the crew-kindred and the humans who had attempted to rescue them. Any other communication, no matter how valuable, was an avoidable risk. So while he had downloaded all he wished to be preserved, his testament would make its way to Earth, and thence to the first T’bck Fwa, and thence home to the Unity, only if the crew of
Harmony
were saved.

Seventy-five seconds had passed since the loss of his connectivity, from what must have been a maximum acceleration launch. Without access to the little ship’s instrumentation, he imagined that which could not be experienced. Launch without warning. A quick orientation using an unmistakable point of reference: the Sun. A maximum-acceleration course neither towards the Sun, and into suspected K’vithian jamming from the inaccessible engine room, nor in front of
Harmony
, and into view of its anti-space-junk lasers. Transmission after transmission. Evasive maneuvers to extend the crucial signal by a few more iterations.

Eighty seconds. He was hurtling through space without ability to experience what was happening. How far had he come? How near was the end? Would he know when the end occurred?

How much his patient researches had revealed. How much still needed to be reported. Holmes had said, “It is my business to know what other people don’t know.” If this last voyage were successful, and his downloaded memories preserved, then what he had learned would remain known.

Ninety seconds. Hurtling through space without the ability to experience what was happening. Logically, there could be no sensation, but he had a perception nonetheless. It was something T’bck Fwa had never sensed, could never sense, but it as though he were going over a waterfall.

Over the Reichenbach Fal—

Human and Centaur floated side by side, amid the sighing of what Eva was willing to call trees, and the chirping of flying things that resembled neither bugs nor birds. Feathery leaves on some of the smaller plants were already turning brown and sere at their tips as the shallow layer of soil dried. Irrigation streams did not work in micro-gee, and crew with hoses could accomplish only so much.

“So it is done,” said K’choi Gwu ka. Joe used translation rules provided by T’bck Fwa.

It: the desperate, short-lived mission of the UPIA lifeboat. Within a minute of its activation, ‘bots on a forward deck had reported Snakes hurriedly disappearing into an airlock abutting the landing bay. Eva pictured them swimming down clear tunnels like the one she had walked in the other direction, into captivity. “It is done.”

“How then, do we know if the signal was received by your people?”

It was not a question in search of an answer, so much as a friend, a new but already dear friend, seeking assurance. Eva answered in that spirit. “We’ll know when help arrives.”

Or they would know when, after another few days,
Harmony
had drifted beyond the reach of any possible rescue.

The bridge crew sat at their posts or swam about calmly. Discussions were casual and inconsequential. The main status holo showed only a field of stars, Sol far brighter than any other, but shrunken to a point like any other sun.

That aura of normalcy was a lie.

Mashkith was off-watch and in his cabin. The on-bridge display omitted details not intended for enemy eyes, presumed observing through their increasingly ubiquitous sensors. A fast-approaching human fleet dominated his implant-mediated view. The armada had given chase at well over two gravities; they now decelerated for the final confrontation with equal seriousness. Nothing could stop their arrival within a few ship’s watches—even if its drive could be reactivated,
Victorious
could barely maintain one gee.

How recently it seemed he had smugly recalled the conquest of Gaul. I might have done better, Mashkith thought, to remember Rome’s decline and fall at the hands of vigorous barbarians. Of all InterstellarNet species, humans were the most consistently aggressive—the most like Hunters—and hence always the most worrisome. One cannot choose one’s neighbors, which was all the more reason to study them.

He sipped absently from a water bulb, reacquainting himself with a plan long-ago formulated. It had never been shared. Soon the time would come to make that plan known—after the impending battle, too, was won.

Rapid blows rattled his cabin door. He knew the impatient caller was Lothwer before bothering to check the corridor sensor. “Entrance authorization.”

Lothwer swam into the cabin, twitchy with tension. He closed the door with a near-slam. “Permission for candor?”

Reticence was never Lothwer’s failing. His candor would be argumentative, indeed. “Permission, by net only.” Whatever Lothwer had to say—and Mashkith was confident he knew—would be unsuitable for human eavesdropping. Tiny, wireless sensors drifted everywhere about the ship.

“Decision overdue, Foremost. Fleeting opportunity. Immediate attack authorization necessary.”

They had had this debate four times in the past two shifts. Mashkith agreed retaking the amidships could free crew from their present defensive positions for the coming space confrontation. Where they disagreed was on the consequences. How quickly could an all-out assault on the herd and humans retake
Victorious
? How serious would be the damage to the ship? How severe would be the casualties? Could they afford such a victory? “Lothwer, familiarity with Romans?” Mashkith asked.

Through clenched teeth came a reply. “No, Foremost.”

“Human clan. Rulers over much Earth territory for many generations.” Arblen Ems would have been better served had his tactical officer chosen to master his opponent’s military history rather than chess. Before Julius Caesar was born, Greek armies invading southern Italy had won a great battle—at the cost of half their army. To the courtiers who would compliment the king on his great victory, Pyrrhus of Epirus had offered this: Another such victory against the Romans, and I am undone. “Pyrrhic victory unacceptable.”

“Space battle imminent.” Lothwer missed or ignored Mashkith’s point. “Need for full warship crews.”

Their fighters were above all else spaceship crew, not infantry. Ship for ship, Arblen Ems could decimate the UP forces—clan warships had proven that already—but the impending conflict would not involve closely matched forces. The clan’s brief numerical superiority after the explosion of Himalia had been lost to delay. No ship, not even
Victorious
, could carry naval might to equal an entire solar system, and now a great fleet approached. He could rage against herd and humans for impeding their departure, but rage did not change facts.

One such fact was that, since Grandpa’s exile, the clan’s battles had been in space. The interior of this huge vessel was as much land as spaceship, and the clan had no recent experience in land warfare. The lack showed. A network of spy motes like that now spread throughout
Victorious
was within the clan’s ability, but he had nothing like it. Clan warriors’ combat armor was far inferior to that used by the humans.

Arblen Ems forces far outnumbered the human raiders aboard—but the price in casualties to prevail would be terrible. And then? Guarding the survivors would still require warriors. And if the humans and herd chose to fight to the death—what then would be the cost in clan lives? “Onboard assault unapproved. Requirement: your acknowledgement of my order.”

“Acknowledgement: surrender approval by the Foremost.”

“Immediate cessation of your insolence. Your obedience mandatory.” Changes would be made, as soon as the crisis had passed. “Now.” Into their consensual vision Mashkith pulled up a star chart. “Surrender not the plan. Instead: a trade.”

The consensus among the special-ops folks watching the latest surveillance data was, “Huh.” Art routed a copy of the 3-V imagery through a holo projector for consideration by K’Choi Gwu ka. He had found her, as expected, in one of the park/garden/farm levels.

“I have not previously seen him in micro-gee.” She studied the image from many angles as a tiny Lothwer swam and shoved his way from corridor to corridor, round and round the ship. Other Snakes scurried from his path. “The facial expression, though, and the snarl are familiar. Whatever the reason, he is unhappy. That has never been good news for us.”

For what it was worth, Art went to pass along the warning to Carlos.

The Foremost had lost his courage, Lothwer thought.

It had not always been thus. Mashkith had once acted boldly. He had seized a great trophy, outmaneuvered all other clans to keep it, led Arblen Ems across the void, outwitted the humans to obtain the secrets of antimatter, and set the stage for Lothwer’s own great victories. But now, after just a few clan casualties, Mashkith hesitated to act. He was weak.

Lothwer rushed from corridor to corridor, brimming with anger, seeking in vain for relief through exertion. “A trade,” Mashkith had said. Some trade. If the Foremost had his way, they would deliver to the approaching fleet all the rebellious captives and sufficient fuel to return to Earth in triumph. The Foremost was even prepared to provide the humans with an interstellar-capable lifeboat. This would all come without firing a missile or a photon. In return, Mashkith envisioned, Arblen Ems would keep the battle-damaged
Victorious
and withdraw to learn about farming.

Mashkith actually expected the human fleet to honor a deal and let them depart in peace! What if the enemy fleet accepted the hostages and fuel, and then insisted upon more? Any clan would raise its demands in the face of such weakness. “Acceptable outcome,” Mashkith had responded to the challenge. “Removal of prisoners without further clan casualties or further damage to
Victorious
.”