Event Horizon (Hellgate) (130 page)

“That’s enough,” he snarled at last. “You appear to have learned a new brand of impudence, working with these humans, and the hybrids.”

It was Midani’s turn to change color with rage. “Who was it,” he demanded, fluent in his own tongue, almost sneering, “who flew Elarne? Who was it who found the
Ebrezjim
, walked its decks, paid tribute to the crew who stole it out of Zunshu space and were almost home before ill fortune overcame them?
Who
,” he hissed, “walked the streets of the Zunshu city, salvaged the computer core, confronted the old enemy face to face, and made the acquaintance of the Veldn, who walked those streets long before us?” He gave his sibling glare for glare. “Was it you,
Captain
Kulich? I think not. You were here, sitting on your ass in the sun, drinking wine and making sure the next generation is more
pure
, less
mongrel
, than the heroes who had the courage and vision to tread in the steps of our forefathers! And I –” he slapped his own chest, hard “– I walked with them, where the stars of the Orion Gate and the Blood Gate burn with the light of suns you never saw, Emil, and likely never will!”

Emil’s expression had shifted from anger to scorn to disbelief. “You walked the Zunshu streets?” His eyes flickered to Sherratt and Vaurien. “You fought Zunshu?”

“We fought,” Mark told him. “Not Zunshu. We walked those streets … if you can call them streets …and we were not the first. The Deep Sky is about to have visitors, Captain. The Veldn Peoples of the Worlds of the Second Star. And I’d advise you to be less arrogant, less pompous, in the face of a species that developed an engine similar to Weimann technology many thousands of years before we did. Now, do you want this data transfer, or not? In fact, I ought to be talking to the head of your science team – who is it?
Jun’ba
-tis?” He looked sidelong at Vaurien and Jazinsky. “Jean
Baptiste
Cleary, when he’s among humans.”

“He has gone,” Kulich said dismissively.

“What do you mean, gone?” Mark demanded.

“I mean, he stood down,” Kulich began.

Midani’s fists clenched. “You mean, you found a reason to
dismiss
Jun’ba
-tis from the position of head of the science team! He is – a mongrel, like the Doctors Sherratt and Sereccio. Not good enough for you.”

“Oh, for the love of …” Vaurien turned his back on the threedee and scrubbed his face with both hands. He pulled the combug out of his ear while Midani and Emil began to squabble in earnest. “Etienne, dump the data into however many cubes –”

“The transfer will take over 300 cubes, Captain,” the AI warned.

“And are you short of cubes?” Vaurien growled with exaggerated patience.

“No, Captain.”

“Then proceed,” Richard told it crisply. “Tully!”

“Yo!” Ingersol was on the engine deck with Fujioka, but he had been listening in, and was still chuckling. “Lemme guess. You want the tractor loaded,
muy pronto
.”

“I do,” Richard agreed. “There’s a moon just rising over the horizon right now. The third moon – smallest, lightest, no atmosphere, no
nothing
, according to the scans. Jim, is the installation ready to ship?”

The five Zunshu stasis chambers would be stored in a science camp not unlike the one on Kjorin, though this camp would need no long-term habitation facilities. Three basic labs, life support, a crew lounge, two simple apartments, a generator and backup, a rudimentary AI. Anything else would be specified by the Resalq scientists from the city of Raishenne, and shipped from the planet or from the
Freyana
.

“It was ready to ship yesterday, boss,” Fujioka assured him. “All we needed to know was when and where.”

“Small moon, any flat, rocky space, right
now
,” Vaurien said sharply. “Etienne, how long to transfer the data?”

“Five minutes remaining,” the AI said calmly, unaffected by Richard’s abrasive mood. “Please collect datacubes from Tech 3.”

“Got ’em,” Jazinsky volunteered. “Neil, do me a favor. Stick your head into my lab, bring me one of the big equipment cases. The
big
ones with the black and red tape and the blue smartfoam inside.”

“Will do.” Travers gave Marin a lopsided grin and stepped out.

Curtis was a pace behind him, and as they left Ops he clicked out of the loop. “Damn, Emil hasn’t improved by one iota. I thought he’d sweeten up once he got out here – nothing to prove, nobody to impress.”

“No sibling to fight with,” Travers added. “You don’t know how lucky you were, being an only child.”

“You?” Marin hazarded.

“I’d say I still had the scars,” Travers admitted, “but they were all psychological. The kids were
kids
when I didn’t have much growing left to do. We didn’t fight physically, but you can believe me, it was bloody.”

The lab was half lit, with machines running, cooling fans droning. A stack of equipment cases stood under the air vents, and the only challenge was finding an empty one. Travers unpacked old tools and dead power cells onto the end of one of the benches, and closed up the likeliest case. He almost expected the connection with Raishenne to have closed as they stepped back into Ops, but Emil Kulich continued to glare out of the threedee, flanked now by two other Resalq, one older, one younger than himself, and both of them much closer to the ancestral form than any of the Sherratts or Sereccio.

“I
do
understand that,
Mad’ue
,” Mark was saying to the elder, “and I’ll say again, there’s no time constraint. If you want to undertake the project, it’s yours. At this point I have no time for it … and the Zunshu hardware is much too delicate, too unpredictable, for it to be stored on this ship, or any ship. It must be placed somewhere safe, stable, where an
accident
will cause no great hardship, such as happened at El Khouri on Ulrand. Your third moon is ideal, and an engineer’s tractor is transferring the stasis chambers at this time.”

Mad’ue
was the Resalq with the long, somber face and too-wide eyes. He regarded Sherratt thoughtfully and at length shook his head, which Travers remembered was an affirmative gesture among the ancestrals. “A good choice,
M’hak
. You’re quite right, of course. Oh, how I envy you the expedition! I imagine your mission logs will read like a novel!” He licked his lips in anticipation. “You have the Zunshu data
and
the Veldn…?”

“It’s all copying at this moment.” Mark glanced over at Jazinsky, who had taken the case from Travers and was loading it. “We’ll bring it down immediately … if we have permission to land.” He gave Emil Kulich a glance like a dagger.

“Oh, copious aromatic defecations upon ancestral superciliousness,” Etienne translated, struggling with the colloquialism, the casual crudity, as
Mad’ue
overrode Kulich. “You’re most welcome in my house,
M’hak
. How long since you and your offspring ate real Resalq food?”

“A long time,” Mark admitted, studiously ignoring Kulich now.

“Then you’re invited,”
Mad’ue
said firmly, and when Kulich opened his mouth to protest, the senior scientist silenced him with a hand gesture Travers had never seen before. “Come at once, bring your offspring. Bring the human partner of Leon. Dine with us, spend an evening listening to the old language, the old music … being Resalq for the joy of being Resalq before the work takes you away again, as it will. I know you too well,
M’hak
. I recall who you were when you were so young, stars still shone in your eyes.”

Mark made a soft sound of amused exasperation. “Was I ever so young? An hour,
Mad’ue
.”

“An hour, my old friend.”
Mad’ue
made another unfamiliar hand gesture and stepped out of the vid pickup angle.

“We’ll see you shortly,” Mark said stiffly to Kulich. “If you’d rather not be present at the evening’s festivities, I’ll overlook your absence in the interests of mental health.” He paused. “Midani
will
be with us, so it’s probably wise if you find some pressing duty to occupy you elsewhere. And have an inventory of what the
Freyana
needs for the highband to be back online
at once
. We can fabricate it, and test the transmitters before we leave. You understand, it is entirely unacceptable for the colony ship to be offline at any time.”

The speech was deliberately provoking but Kulich was visibly restrained by the presence of the younger Resalq, who had a hauteur, a bearing, which belied his apparent youth.
Kulich’s
mouth compressed, his eyes glittered with fury, but the other took a step forward and held up a hand to stop the fight before it could escalate.

His face was smooth with youth, his eyes unlined, but he was old enough, close enough to the ancestrals to have no hair, and to have kept the double thumbs which made the Resalq hands so different. He set the left on
Kulich’s
shoulder and said in a light, pleasant voice,

“Enough of this
rancor
– surely we’ve heard more than was necessary. You’re right of course,
M’hak
, about the
Freyana
; many council members, myself included, have been eager to attend to the work in a much more timely fashion … forgive us the unfortunate oversight.” He was in the business of making peace, and he seemed to have a knack for it. Kulich heard him out as he went on, “As to the issue of cultural and perhaps even genetic integrity, in fact both sides of this old, old argument are correct.

“Many of our young people
did
trade their racial heritage for survival; but they did indeed survive, and their achievements in the human worlds made it possible for a few of us to preserve our ancestral racial type. Without those who sacrificed,
none
of us would have survived, and most of us –” he glanced sidelong at Kulich “– are fully aware of this. The hybrids have always been our benefactors … however, it’s equally true that the ancestrals hold the keys to the future of a race that can, and should, return to its own identity.”

Travers dropped his voice. “So shake hands and play nice, guys.”

Even Emil Kulich could not argue, though he had probably been compelled to cede authority to the younger Resalq. Marin whispered to Midani, “Who is this?”

“Is being
Kel-juns’yn
, is being very good representing person, voted for by all citizen, city peoples.”

“The mayor of Raishenne?” Travers brows rose. “An ancestral type with a grasp on fair play and tolerance of the
hybrids
. There’s hope for us yet.”

“Mongrels,” Midani growled. “Not being liking disgust-words, me.”

“Me neither,” Travers agreed, “but what can you do about it? This is Carahne. They can be as superior as they like at home.”

“Not all Resalq being
bastardish
,” Midani said darkly. “Not
all
.”

Perhaps not even most, Travers thought as he took charge of the loaded case and followed Marin back to the service elevators. Minutes later they were in Hangar 4, killing time with music and the techs’ loop, listening as the tractor launched. Ingersol and Fujioka took it out on a wide arc, rising away from the ship and heading fast for the small rocky moon, not much larger than an asteroid, which orbited Carahne in captured rotation.

They would drop the installation, wait while twenty drones raised the storage bay, and then gently, gently pilot the three Arago sleds in, on remote. Ingersol estimated four hours, and the tractor would be back in its own hangar, just forward of the engine deck.

The dinner group was late enough for Marin to be restless before they began to arrive. The Sherratts, Tor and even Roy had dressed in the colourful, exotic style of the Resalq. Jazinsky, Rusch and Shapiro, Rabelais and Queneau were elegant in subdued fashion which would have taken them into any hotel in uptown Sark; Vaurien and Vidal were in black silk and platinum jewelry, deliberately understated. Travers was surprised to see the humans, but Jazinsky said brashly,

“We’re invited. The news raced through Raishenne that we’re back from transspace. From Zunshu space. Nobody thought we’d make it – apparently they were laying bets. But here we are. We were
there
, and people want to know what happened, and how. Where the future lies,” she added thoughtfully. “Emil Kulich is only one voice.”