Final Inquiries (5 page)

The twelve-leggers were generally stronger and less graceful than the Nines, and their hands seemed better suited to heavy lifting than fine work. Sixes were the social betters of the Nines, an arrangement that both subspecies accepted completely.

But virtually none of all that general description applied to the being they now faced. It was as if someone had fished around in a bin full of standard Vixan parts and used them to build something else. At first Jamie thought it was three three-legged Vixa standing one on top of another, until he realized that it was all one creature, with a columnar central body core that sprouted three sets of three limbs each. The upper surfaces of the body were all a deep purple or violet, while the lower surfaces were all a pasty bluish white.

The lower three limbs were short, squat, and muscular, plainly dedicated to locomotion. The middle three were longer and more flexible, with much more developed three-fingered hands. The three upper limbs were shorter, but highly flexible, with the hand-eye structure modified into little more than oversized eyes on tentacles, the fingers short, stubby, almost vestigial. If on a "standard" Vixan the functions of movement, manipulation, and sight were all present on all the limbs, on this model Vixan the limbs had all been modified to specialize in one job each.

"I present SubPilot Greveltra, eighty-third known of that designation, of the Founder's Pillar Clanline, Tifinda," Brox said gravely. "He may be addressed as SubPilot."

"Ah, hello, SubPilot," said Hannah. "I present myself, Senior Special Agent Hannah Wolfson, and my colleague, Special Agent James Mendez. We may be addressed as Wolfson and Mendez."

There was a long silence, which lasted until Brox spoke. "Excuse me. My error. The SubPilot will not address you at all. My briefing on such matters of etiquette was quite rushed. By the standards of the Vixa, my species, the Kendari, is senior to yours, because it made contact with the Elder Races a few years earlier--but, of course, the Vixa are senior to the Kendari. The SubPilot does not have clearance to address anyone two levels of rank beneath himself."

"
That's
going to make it difficult to have much conversation with the natives," Jamie observed.

"Other Vixa will have greater latitude, or will be granted waivers for purposes of required contact. The prohibition does not apply if there is no one of intermediate rank present, or in the event of emergency."

"So if you weren't here, the SubPilot
would
speak to us," Hannah suggested.

"But I'm going to guess he wouldn't enjoy it," Jamie added.

"You are both correct," Brox replied, a tone of amusement in his voice. "However, if only one lower-ranking species is present, the SubPilot would address only those of the most senior rank within that species. He would speak with you, Agent Wolfson, but not with Agent Mendez."

"Right," said Jamie. "Tell me, Brox--do you ever wonder how it is the Elder Races ever get anything done? I mean, besides inventing rules and customs and traditions that prevent anything from happening?"

"I would remind you that the SubPilot can hear you perfectly well and understands your speech. He merely refuses to address you. Perhaps it would not be wise to insult him."

"Maybe it would be wise if he did not insult us," Jamie replied. "We've just been rousted out of our offices and hustled onto a starship the size of a midsized asteroid in order to rush to the scene of some unspecified crime. Someone would seem to need us very badly--and the Vixa are going to a lot of effort. But the first thing that happens is that we're told that we're not fit to speak with them."

He glanced at Hannah, half-expecting her to be signaling him to back down. But if anything, her expression seemed to be encouraging him. "If the Vixa want our help, they will have to provide us with sufficient support, cooperation--and respect."

"That is almost word for word the speech I made to a certain Vixan official not so many medium social duration units ago," Brox said. "Except, of course, I was telling them all those things about the Kendari."

"The small slow human vehicle has now achieved a safe distance from the
Eminent Concordance,
" SubPilot Greveltra announced, giving no sign at all that he heard any of what Jamie or Brox had said. "I will now commence maneuvers. Transport module to navigation station."

Greveltra's trio of midbody limbs whipped around with startling speed and flickered over the control panels. Suddenly the whole compartment lurched to one side, and Jamie felt the sickening drop in his stomach he got whenever he rode a high-speed elevator that was a little too high-speed.

"Perhaps it would be best to deopacify the hull to make the procedure clearer," said Brox.

Another midbody limb whipped over to another control on another panel--and suddenly the compartment hull vanished altogether. Looking up with a gasp, Jamie saw that they were moving, and fast. What he had assumed was a compartment with a fixed position inside the ship was in fact something closer to an elevator car--and they were riding it straight up a cylindrical shaft.

"I should explain," Brox said mildly. "The outer sphere we observed as we approached the
Eminent Concordance
is merely the propulsion unit, plus the power store for the ship and shielding. This smaller sphere comprises the crew compartment, the passenger space, life support, cargo space, the piloting systems, and so on."

Jamie thought for a moment, and recalled his history-of-technology classes, and the lectures on the early days of spaceflight, when they had to jettison everything the moment they were done with it in order to save weight. "So this little sphere here is the, ah, command module, and all the rest of this giant ship is the service module? All of it is nothing more than a way to carry this little sphere around?"

"That is it precisely."

"That's insane," said Hannah.

"Not in an emergency," said Brox. "Not to a species that has the technical and material resources that the Vixa have."

"Why does the ah, command sphere, move around inside the ship?"

Brox cocked his head to one side, obviously amused. "I should have made a transcript of my conversation with the SubPilot on the way here. I could have simply handed it to you to read. You are asking almost all the same questions I asked--and just about in the same order. The SubPilot explained that it is done to achieve a balance of safety and capability, with the sphere shifting positions as required by each phase of the mission. In order to achieve maximum safety from exterior radiation, to defend the command sphere against attack, and to permit the easy access of passengers and cargo, it is positioned in the center of the sphere whenever the combined vehicle is not actively maneuvering. During periods when precise navigation is required, and during periods when the high-velocity drive is active, the sphere is moved forward to the navigation blister."

"And that's where we're going now," Hannah suggested.

"Exactly."

At the moment, the command sphere came to a sudden halt with a rattly
bang,
lurching hard enough that Jamie was nearly knocked off his feet. Then the whole sphere took off again, moving sideways, starting up fast enough that Hannah had to grab at Jamie's arm to stay upright. They stayed braced together, and it was a good thing they did. A few seconds later, they came to another too-abrupt halt, then resumed their upward movement.

"They're not much for acceleration compensators, are they?" Hannah grumbled.

"Their compensators work on the ship as a whole. The Vixa are not much bothered by sudden, minor stops and starts, and, as a safety measure to avoid field interference difficulties, they often do not activate the command sphere's compensators."

"What did you do, Brox," Jamie asked, "memorize their technical manuals?"

"No. I am just trying to answer your questions as diplomatically as possible--having asked them myself not so long ago. And I have been dealing with the Vixa for some time now. I have learned something about their attitudes."

"What's had you dealing with the Vixa?" Jamie asked.

SubPilot Greveltra was directing two of his three eyestalks at Brox, and Brox tossed his head in the Vixan's direction. "I may have said little, but I have said too much already," said the Kendari.

"You may commence limited discussion soon," SubPilot Greveltra announced. "Our high-velocity drive will provide sufficient signal interference, and you will be able to provide a briefing on the general political situation."

"
Political
situation?"

"I think, perhaps, SubPilot Greveltra might also have said too much while saying too little," Brox replied. He looked up, through the overhead dome of the sphere. "But we are approaching the blister. There will not be much longer to wait."

Jamie and Hannah looked up as well. Overhead, they could see that the vertical shaft they were traveling through ended in another, larger hatch. Jamie half expected Greveltra to barrel on through at full speed, trusting the machinery to flick the hatch open at the last possible moment, but instead he brought their sphere to an abrupt halt well aft of the hatch, waited for it to open fully, then started up again with a lurch. There were two more hatches after the first one, and the command sphere followed the same pattern going through all of them. It was like riding on a rickety old antique manually operated tram at a transportation museum--on a day when the tram operator was in a bad mood.

Beyond the first hatch, and the second, was more vertical shaft. But beyond the third was--nothing. Just an empty hole, out into space.

The command sphere slowed to a crawl, and eased to a halt when the floor of the deck they were standing on was exactly flush with the hull outside. The clutter of machines and hardware around the perimeter of the sphere obscured the view toward the apparent horizon. But the view overhead was breathtaking. The outer dome itself was utterly, flawlessly transparent, with no smudge of dirt or shimmer of reflection to spoil the illusion that it was not there at all. The planet Center hung in darkness and glory before them, ten times, a hundred times, the size of the Moon as seen from Earth. The planet was almost in full phase, a gleaming ball of swirling blue water, shimmering white clouds framing the lush greens and sturdy browns and tans of the land surface.

Hanging in the middle distance, riding the rim of the world, was the dazzling, complex shape of Center Transit Station, home of BSI's orbital HQ, the Bullpen. Home, or the closest thing Jamie had to a home at the moment. Not much more than an hour before, Hannah and he had been catching up on paperwork in the Bullpen. But that had been a very fast-moving hour. Things had changed, and then some.

"Commencing low-power acceleration safe-distancing maneuver," SubPilot Greveltra announced. Moments later, without any sensation of motion, without any shudder or vibration of any kind, the planet Center and Center Transit Station slid off to port side and rapidly receded out of view.

"Good Lord," said Hannah, speaking in a half whisper, and in English, with words meant for Jamie's ears alone. "And that's their
low
-power acceleration. How many gees do you think we're doing right now, to get past the whole planet in just a few seconds?"

With a start, Jamie realized that he had taken on the unconscious assumption that he was seeing something on the scale of a boat sailing past an island, or an aircraft passing over a city. They had just accelerated from near-zero relative velocity to a speed of many hundreds or maybe thousands of kilometers a second in less time than it would take him to walk once around the Bullpen. "This ship is big enough that it's got to be naked-eye visible from the surface of Center," Jamie said. "And it must be sending every radar system pegging off-scale high all over the CenterStar system. Can you imagine how much they must be freaking out down there?"

"Just about as much as we are up here," Hannah said, still more or less whispering. "Every once in a while it just gets rubbed in our faces, doesn't it? The sheer, effortless, incredible raw
power
that the Elder Races have."

"Indeed it has that effect," Brox said, speaking in pretty fair English himself. "Please note that I answer this rhetoric question to be good sport, and to remind you that many of my fellow Inquirists know English just finely."

"And to remind us you have good ears as well," said Jamie, shifting back to Lesser Trade Speech.
And recording devices so his people can play it all back later if need be.
He realized that Brox was doing something else as well--sending a signal that, this time at least, they were all on the same team.

But he was also putting them in the habit of deferring to him, turning to him for information, accepting him as their guide, even their leader. Jamie could have recited word for word the warnings that Hannah would have given him if they had been free to speak.

And though Brox was quite literally an enemy agent, Jamie and Hannah had every reason to believe he was also an honorable and trustworthy adversary. Until the moment came when they couldn't trust him any longer.
Just because things were complicated on the surface, that didn't mean they weren't even more complicated underneath,
Jamie told himself.

"Safe distance and thrust vector now achieved," SubPilot Greveltra announced. "Commencing primary acceleration maneuver."

"Look up," Brox said in a low voice. "You wouldn't want to miss this."

Jamie and Hannah turned their heads upward toward the gleaming stars, the swirling glory in the blackness--and watched as the sky began to melt.

It was the stars directly overhead, at the zenith, that first started to smear, to stretch, to blur, shift in color toward the blue, and fade to nothing. But the contagion spread outward from there, more and more stars smearing, spreading, growing dimmer and bluer.

After only a few minutes, all the overhead stars had vanished altogether, and those near the horizon were mere compressed, misshapen blurs.

Jamie understood what was happening. As a spacecraft moved faster and faster, and got closer and closer to the speed of light, the light from stars directly in the line of travel was affected so strongly by blueshifting as to vanish altogether, while the light of stars that were merely close to the direction of travel were affected to a lesser degree. The closer your ship got to the speed of light, the more pronounced and dramatic the effect.