Glory's People (32 page)

Broni, a Voertrekker aristocrat unaccustomed to being disciplined, responded furiously. “He called you Master and Commander. “

“He did, and I am,” Anya said in a voice steely with command. “You heard Duncan’s instructions to
Glory
. Unless there is a miracle, there is no more to say
. Is that clear, Astroprogrammer?
“ For a syndic to use a Starman’s shipboard title was a clear warning given that discipline was being enforced. Life aboard a Goldenwing was seldom strict and not often formal. But on any vessel crewed by so few individuals, a direct appeal to ship’s discipline was not to be challenged. That had been true on the clipper ships of old Earth, and it was true now, near the limits of Near Space.

Broni bit her lip and held back the tears. Buele reverted to type and said gently, “We all miss them, Sister Broni. But there is the ship to care for.”

Broni clung to Clavius, holding him against her breast. He remonstrated with her as gently as one of the Folk may do.
“I am not a pet, “
the cat sent. The Folk were never pets.

Everyone on the bridge read the sending. Tragedy had sharpened and enhanced their empathic Talents. The more sensitive among them, Buele and Broni, could “hear” the reassurances being offered them from all the unknown number of cats throughout the ship.

Buele said, “See, Sister Broni? We are not alone.”

A strong pulse came from
Glory
herself. It was a nurturing touch from a machine that had nurtured the men and women who had served her for a thousand years. Broni caught the swift thought from Buele:
“What is being alive compared to that?’’
Cybersurgeon Dietr Krieg, who had been silent throughout the interview with the Yamatans, said, “Paracelsus is young. He grieves for Mira.” Despite the situation, he could not restrain himself from announcing, in this anonymous way, that he, the cold and cerebral man of old Earth, was no longer alone.

“So do they all, Brother Physician,” Buele said. “Can’t you hear them?” He glanced at Anya, a woman newly decorated with a new kitten on her shoulder. Anya was comforting her small familiar, cupping the small head in a hand and touching an ear with her lips.

Broni regarded Buele with a regard she had never known she felt for him. She noted that he had reverted to the “Brother This” and “Sister That” form of address. He had not done that for weeks, but it seemed just right now.

One day Buele will command us, Broni thought. Duncan as much as told us that many times.

“All right, then,” Amaya spoke with authority. “Let’s get the ship into a slingshot around Hideyoshi and back to Yamato as quickly as we can. Buele, can you replace Damon with the monkeys?”

“Aye, Captain.”

“See to it the Yamatans stay on the hangar deck. We can’t afford to have the monkeys frightened.” They were all only too aware of how the small cyborgs had gone into fugue when soldiers of the Collective had blundered among them and murdered a few.

Amaya looked at Broni steadily. Her amber eyes held steady on Broni Ehrengraf Voerster’s blue ones.

“Is there anything more you want to ask?” Amaya said.

“No, Captain,” Broni said in a low voice. “Nothing more.”

Within six uptime hours,
Glory
's delta had dropped sufficiently for the computer to align the ship with the pass, awkward for a vessel of the Goldenwing’s size, needed to make for a slingshot maneuver around Moon Hideyoshi.

Seven hours of backing sails to the solar wind of Amaterasu had also reduced
Glory
's speed enough to allow a launch of the remaining mass-depletion-engined ships still aboard. With their mass neutralized, the MD craft would begin their fall back to their homeworld from a point of neutral gravity. Their voyage back to Yamato would be swift and undemanding.

Yoshi Eiji, the second-wave daimyo of Kai who was now the senior retainer present in the retinue of the Shogun Minamoto no Kami, was finishing the business of getting all the Shogun’s people who had come in the barge
Dragonfly
into the more crowded accommodations aboard the MD ships. He had already been heard to complain about the lack of amenities aboard the Shogun’s experimentals. His own, he made it known, were superior in every way.

Minamoto no Kami, dressed now in a contemporary manner for space, stood with Anya Amaya in the shadow of
Dragonfly's
stubby atmospheric foils. His distaste for the Lord of Kai was evident in his manner, but it would have been out of character for the old man to discuss Yamatan politics with a
gaijin
.

“There is a thing I should say to you, Captain-san,” he said quietly. “My most skilled MD engineer was watching our vessel penetrate the Gateway into the Near Away--” He hesitated, as though unsure of how, precisely, to say this to the new Master and Commander of the Goldenwing
Gloria Coelis
. This venture had not gone well, and he did not now wish to make it worse. “He watched carefully. The Gateway was not what one customarily sees when an MD coil is activated. It was very different, Anya-san.”

“Tell me, Lord Shogun.”

“It did not resemble a Gateway at all. What it appeared to be was a black hole. That, of course, is impossible. But nevertheless, Akaga-san is seldom in error.”

Anya felt a stab of further grief. If what the Yamatan said was true, then those aboard the missing mass-depletion ship were truly and forever gone, tom apart by the powerful gravitic interplay of the hole. “I have read papers on the possibility of miniature black holes, Minamoto-sama, but everywhere
Glory
has sailed such things are intellectual constructs, not actual things.”

The old man regarded her sadly. “I devoutly hope that you are right and my engineer is wrong.” He essayed a melancholy smile. “But whatever you must face, you will face it well. As will I, Master and Commander. We are born and trained to our respective tasks. It is,” he finished gently, “our karma.” He bowed. “I bid you good journey back to Yamato.”

For Duncan it was a plunge into emptiness. He sat in the unfamiliar chair of the MD pilot, his hands on controls he understood imperfectly. But Kantaro, with Hana on his shoulder, had moved to Duncan’s side and stood ready to intervene if assistance was required. Damon, closely attended by Pronker, was engaged in whispered, intense conversation with the young Yamaguchi Kendo, who seemed dazed by all that had happened to the vessel entrusted to his care by the Shogun.

That left the odd-man-out character of Ishida, whose presence aboard the MD ship was unexplained. The man sat on the deck, motionless, as though lost in some deep meditation. His heavy-lidded eyes were veiled. From Mira came the warning that the man was dangerous. Duncan was certain that it had been Ishida who had thrown the star in the carapace deck aboard
Glory
. Minamoto no Kami had done Duncan no favor by assigning the silent man to the mission into the Near Away.

But there was no time to unravel all the twisted strings of feudal plotting, political maneuvering, and Yamatan motivations. Kantaro had warned Duncan that politics was a dark tangle in the colony and that because of it Duncan and the syndics might find themselves at risk. The time was now, Duncan thought. If he had been able to develop his original plan of isolating Yamato’s ruling daimyos aboard
Glory
and well out into space where in isolation and utilizing the obligation with which Wired Starmen were regarded, a true alliance might have taken form.

But the Terror had preempted any hope of that, and Duncan was forced now to pass political concerns on to another, to Kantaro, who knew his people and why they behaved as they did--but whose motives were as obscure as any of Planet Yamato’s ruling class.

Thank God, Duncan thought, for Mira and Pronker and small Hana, without whom the humans aboard the MD craft were deaf, dumb and blind in this limbo of the Near Away.

Mira sent Duncan visions:

She was in pursuit of a shadowy enemy. It was dark night, a night without moon or stars, the footing was damp and had the smell of rank growing things--

Yes, yes, Duncan thought. That is how it was in deep space. Mira always knew where the threats were; time and distance meant nothing to her when she hunted.

In a response to a command from Mira, Pronker left Damon and attached himself to Duncan’s other shoulder, gripping hard enough to drive the tips of his claws through the monomolecular fabric of the skinsuit.

Duncan felt the small, hard head press against his own. He could feel, too, the wispy touch of the drogue wire Dietr had planted in Mira’s skull, unwittingly beginning all that had happened to
Glory
's cats. Duncan abandoned himself to the powerful empathic sendings.

Two cats now stalked the dark grassland, searching, testing the scent of the air, tasting the feast of wild odors on the wind. A third cat appeared. A young female, still weeks from her first estrus. These were one with the saber-tooth and the smilodon who prowled this vast savannah. A hunting pride was forming, purposeful, dangerous.

Somewhere, not nearby, but within the globe of his awareness, Duncan sensed his own forebears. Not yet true men. What was happening to time? Duncan saw small, hungry creatures with heavy brow-ridges and fearful eyes. He remembered them. On summer nights, he huddled with them around a sparking, smoking fire while the cats watched from the shadows.

I will not crouch tonight,
he thought
. I am not
Homo habilis
. I am something else entirely.
Something that was never born, yet here it is. He felt the grasses brushing his belly as he crept forward toward the prey. He smelled its fear: His hunger burned like fire …

Duncan opened his eyes. The reality within the ship was indistinct, fading. He had to concentrate his effort to keep from drifting back to the empty savannah with Mira and Pronker and young Hana. His hands on the helm console seemed to be appendages of another being, too civilized to prowl the black night of interstellar space.

He was aware that he had recklessly fed mass into the grid within the MD coils girdling the ship. Without points of reference, it was not possible to know how fast the ship was moving--or if it was moving at all. But the outsider left a spoor of fear behind it.

Is it truly afraid of us?
Duncan wondered. All living beings could feel fear. Wasn’t it possible that the intruder had never before been threatened with extinction? In the Ross Stars we fought its aspects, Duncan thought.
We saw how it killed and we were terrified. We sought escape. We never considered retaliation.

Had Man finally become too civilized to survive in the savannahs of Deep Space?

Hana squeezed between Mira and Pronker, so that Duncan wore a living necklace of cats. All of them were uttering deep, soft growls. Their eyes were wide open, the pupils dilated. The lights of the control console reflected in the black mirrors of those far-seeing eyes.

What could they see? Was it the scene that became ever more real in Duncan’s mind? A world of their creation built of species memories reaching back a thousand centuries and a dozen light-years.

Duncan was struck by a thought that left him shaken. If there was no time in the Near Away, then there could be no true space. Were the cats getting sendings from the others still aboard
Glory
, as near or as far as one’s perceptions allowed? But was it what he truly wanted? Didn’t the empty savannah whisper a more powerful call? To hunt, to stalk the dark enemy, to find and to kill ...

He resisted the empathic coma
. I cannot live as they do
, he thought. He struggled to control his anima.
Mira
, he thought,
I honor you, but I cannot
become
you
. He reached blindly to touch his familiar.

I am a man
, he thought.
Only a man
. But was that really true?

That was only one reality.

There was another.

With a rush of desire, he reached for it, embraced it, and abandoned himself once again to the hunt.

Minamoto Kantaro, crouched beside the pilot’s chair, looked disbelievingly at the chronometers in the console. They were a blur that could not be read.

In normal space there was always a sense of time passing.

In the Near Away there was none.

There was a void where the human sense of temporal awareness should be. The ship could have passed through the singularity moments ago. Or years.

Damon Ng was receiving the empathic spillage of the sendings being exchanged among Duncan and the Folk. Damon had actually seen, heard, experienced, if only for an instant, the same incredible savannah that Duncan and the cats were experiencing. But Damon’s Talent was too small, too weak, to stabilize the visions.

To Kantaro he whispered, “I saw something for a moment. Did you?”

“Was it real?” Kantaro’s voice was even lower than the young syndic’s. His was a native Talent, too late to be recruited and schooled. But his vision had been powerful enough to make him, for a moment, slightly more than human.

He had glimpsed an endless plain he did not know, a night without stars he did not understand, and he sensed the deep anger of dire beasts resolved at last to turn and fight.
Four great cats. Not three ...

Damon said, “
Everything
is real here.”

The Near Away was not a place where time did not exist. It was a location where all time existed. Everything that ever was, ever had been, ever would be, was here, somewhere imbedded in the topology of the Near Away.

The thought was terrifying.

The fourth cat raised his head and tasted the night. The enemy--he thought of it as prey--lay just ahead. The chase had been long, very long. Yet the great cat and his companions felt no physical fatigue. On the contrary, the depth of the night and the emotion of the chase made them stronger, angrier.

He knew the three others relied on him to lead the attack when it must be led. There would be death. That was understood. The fear that accompanied the understanding was familiar. All of life was laced with fear. It made life precious.