Island Worlds (26 page)

"A quality I share with fine wine. This operation is going to be tricky, but we have—"

Mike leaned close. "Thor, that little blonde, I saw her with Chih' Chin Fu back on Luna a couple of years ago. She's spooky, even if she has a nice body."

"Nothing wrong with my ears, either," Linde said.

"It's all right if she's spooky," Thor said. "We have spooky work for her to do." It never failed to amaze him how people allowed personalities to intrude where only professionalism and the mission counted. That was the true advantage Eos had over Shaw's forces. Eos had institutional discipline which didn't require a charismatic cult-figure to keep the troops in line. In Shaw's brief absence, his organization was already beginning to disintegrate.

The newcomers climbed out of their pressure suits, causing the Eos personnel to wrinkle their noses. Conditions in Shaw's ships were even more Spartan than in the Eos vessels. How was he going to get them to cooperate with Eos when they couldn't even get along with one another?

The conference chamber was merely an emptied hold. Furniture was irrelevant in zero-gee so the chamber contained only some holographic and communications equipment. The participants oriented themselves so that all could communicate without craning their necks to face one another. It was a skill they exercised without conscious thought.

"First," Thor said, "I need to know how many people you represent."

"Forget it," Mike informed him. "That's classified information."

It confirmed a suspicion Thor had long held. Defiance had been losing personnel from the start of hostilities. Battle casualties accounted for a lot of it, but many more had deserted to Eos. They were down to a hard core of no more than a few thousand. Perhaps they only numbered in the hundreds. If they had been more numerous, they would have bragged of it. "Let it pass," Thor said, as if making a concession. "Still, I need to know if you represent all of Defiance. For instance, where's Thierry Ruiz?"

"That bastard," Mike said disgustedly. "I tried to warn the boss about him. He tried to take over as soon as Martin was gone and we—"

"You talk too much, Mike," Natalie said. "Forget about Ruiz. He's no longer a factor in Defiance. And stop trying to pump us for information. We're here to discuss this rescue you claim you can pull off."

"The operation is two-stage," Thor said. "First, we infiltrate Elba with our own people."

"Hold it," Mike protested. "You just float in there and infiltrate? Elba's a max-security lockup."

"As such," Thor continued, "it doesn't produce anything except corpses. It has no agricultural capability and only the most rudimentary air-producing facilities. It has to be continuously resupplied from outside. We've captured one of their supply ships and replaced its crew with our own. They'll go in on a regular supply run and be there during turnaround time when our phase-two team arrives."

"How are you going to get your supply-ship team in undetected?" Natalie asked. "They'll undergo a complete bodyscan on arrival. Imposters can't escape detection. We know. We've tried."

"Meet our secret weapon," Thor said, nodding toward Linde. "She can do anything she wants with electronic instrumentation. The people we send in will give their instruments the same readouts as the crew we captured. None of the personnel in Elba were there the last time the supply ship made that run, so there shouldn't be any embarrassing encounters with old acquaintances. All of our people have been given appropriate cosmetic treatment."

"What's phase two?" Mike asked.

"That's when we go in and get Martin. A frigate has been sent out from Luna orbit to pick him up. None of the local admirals would detach a major war vessel to send him back and the Earth authorities are too nervous to transport him in anything less powerful. We're going to destroy their frigate and replace it with one of our own. They're going to hand Martin to us. By the time we get there, the phase one team will have thoroughly undermined their defenses and their morale."

"So that's why you want us in on it," Natalie said. "We have the frigate."

"Exactly," said Thor. "You captured
Mars Ultor
last year. You're keeping her near here, which is why we chose this site for our meeting. We need that ship."

"Why should we just hand her over to you?" said Mike.

"Do you want Martin back or don't you?"

"Of course we do," Natalie said. "But we want in on the operation. You want the ship, fine. We'll take a chance on your plan. But you have to take some of us along."

"I expected such a request," Thor said.

"Not request," she corrected, "demand."

"Don't be offended, Thor," Mike said, "but we don't really figure you people can pull off an operation like this on your own."

"Don't give me that crap," Thor said affably. "I know damn well you don't want your boss to get rescued by EOS while the rest of you fight over what's left of your organization." It was a relief not to have to mince words for a change. "Now give me your decision. We don't have much time. Now that I've outlined our plan, you'll understand that I can't turn you loose until the operation's over, should you opt out."

Mike grinned. "Wouldn't miss it for the world."

"I'm in," Natalie said. She looked at an intense, blond young man who looked familiar to Thor. With a shock, he realized that it was Heimdal Roalstad, Sean's youngest son. He hadn't seen the boy since the beginning of the war and this hard-bitten skipper little resembled the shy youth he had known. But then, he thought, he didn't much resemble the Thor Taggart of a few years back, either.

"Heimdal, you're skipper of the
Tell
," Natalie said. "What do you say?" She turned back to Thor. "We renamed
Mars Ultor
as
Wilhelm Tell
when she became a Defiance ship."

"
Tell
's a fighting ship," said Roalstad. "I don't like the idea of using her as a decoy."

"The war's not over yet," Thor told him. "You may still get your chance to cover yourself with glory in a ship-to-ship shootout. Right now, we need a frigate to get Martin out. The plan won't work without it."

Roalstad let out a long breath. "Hell. Martin always said a war's no place for sentimentality. I'm in. Since this could be a suicide mission I'll have to let my crew opt on an individual basis. They've never turned down anything so far, though."

"That's fair," Thor said. "But if any want out after they've heard the plan, they're to be held in isolation until the operation is over."

Natalie looked around at her cohorts. There were minute nods or other gestures of assent. "We're all in," she reported. "Let's do it."

"I noticed that you managed to avoid telling them that the plan was mine," Linde said.

"They wouldn't trust you," Thor said. "They think you're spooky. Hell, they only trust me because Martin told them to. Don't worry, I'll see to it that you get all the credit in the history books." He felt like needling her. There was a real woman down beneath the paranoid armoring she had built around herself and he wanted to see what she was like.

They were in her quarters, a sparsely furnished cubicle in the crew section of the Sálamid vessel. Almost everything in the cubicle that was not obviously scientific apparatus was really scientific apparatus disguised as something else.

"You know what you can do with your historical credit, don't you? Do you think I've made myself into an unperson for the sake of undying fame?"

Thor congratulated himself. He actually seemed to have gotten under her skin. She was beginning to show flashes of emotion.

"Tell me something," she went on. "Why are you so determined to spring Shaw? I mean really, not just the reasons you gave the
Althing
. You're political enemies. He's everything you think is loathsome in his paramilitary tactics. What's more, any idiot can see you've been in love with Caterina for years and she's utterly under Shaw's spell. She can't even think of another man. So why don't you want to leave him where he is?"

His ears burned at her easy analysis of his relationship, or rather non-relationship, with Cat. But it was encouraging that Linde was showing curiosity about him.

"When I first left Earth," Thor said, "I had to cut ties with my entire past. My family, my career, my standing in the society in which I'd been raised. I found myself wandering around on Luna with my past amputated and my future, which had once been so carefully planned, a complete unknown. Martin was my first real friend, and I still think of him that way." He thought in silence for a moment. "Also, I know that if it was me in that prison, he'd come get me out."

"That clarifies a few things. You're a withdrawn and calculating man, Thor. I suppose that's what makes you so successful as a diplomat and as a planner, but it makes you a little difficult to read. Your forlorn passion for Caterina has been the only fully human quality I've found in you. Now I know about your friendship and loyalty to Shaw. Who knows what storehouses of humanity are down inside you?"

"I'm withdrawn? I'm calculating?" Thor demanded, truly shocked. "You're a goddamned human data crystal. The only enthusiasm you've ever shown is a passion for secrecy. You don't even seem to exist except when you're right in front of somebody."

"Do you think I can live any other way?" she demanded. "I wasn't yet ten years old when I realized I was a freak. Worse than that, I was probably the most valuable freak in history! Picture yourself at the age of eight, taking advanced mathematics and n-dimensional physics in a university on Mars. Being a child prodigy isn't so bad, as long as people are tolerant and condescending. After all, I knew that I had absolutely nothing in common with my own age group. My teachers seemed dumb and slow, but there were always the computers to make up for their deficiencies.

"As a child, even a brilliant child, you have very little knowledge of the world and what a nasty place it can be. My mother insisted that I take some time from the sciences and study history, languages, social sciences, things like that. I resented the time it took, but I plunged into the subjects and came out with a knowledge of how damned valuable I was. A child prodigy is treated with amused condescension—there's that cute little girl again, talking just like a grownup. But a full-fledged, adult genius is a high-priced commodity.

"It didn't take me long to figure out what I was in for. Sooner or later, after I'd started publishing my independent research papers, some college administrator was going to realize that he had the next Newton or Einstein or Ugo Ciano on his hands. Do you know what that's worth in the modern world. It meant I'd be working for the government, for one thing. I'd spend my life on Mars or Luna, but most likely on Earth. I'd have a beautiful lab, I'd probably live in a lavish mansion, and I'd be under guard every minute of my life. Every bit of my research would become government property and most of it would be put in secret banks because not one scientist in hundreds could understand it and it would only have value if it meant immediate commercial or military advantage."

She stuck her hands into the front pockets of her coveralls. "From the moment I made that discovery, I began to make it my policy to hide how good I really was. I learned everything I could about security and information systems and I devised ways to get around them. When my parents died in the Barsoom City riots, I began obliterating my records wherever they were kept. I continued my studies but turned in the work of a mid-level prodigy, one of those early bloomers who mature into scientists of no extraordinary capability. I designed my own crystals to hold my real research. When the war broke out, I contacted Fu on the clandestine computer network. I faked my ticket and travel permits and joined his organization on Luna. I've lived like a hunted animal ever since but I'm free."

Thor had not dreamed that she was capable of such a lengthy speech. She usually pared sentences down to the bare bones and a paragraph of three sentences was a major effort for her. She smiled. My god! he thought, she actually smiles!

"Besides," she added, "Mike says I have a nice body."

"A little on the hefty side by spaceborn standards," he said, "but you'll do."

"I'm glad we've had this little heart-to-heart," she said. "Now, are you ready for some bad news?"

"Not the jailbreak plan!" he said. "Is there something wrong with it?"

"No, it's what I was trying to tell you earlier. It's the Ciano material, the stuff you've had Aeaea working on. It's not going to work."

A great, hollow space opened up somewhere beneath his stomach. "That last report said they'd succeeded!" The Aeaean report had said that the original Ciano drive had failed because the Ciano field generator had been far too bulky to install in a ship. Massive strides in miniaturization had been made since Ciano's day, however. The Aeaeans were ready to begin production on the new drive units.

Linde slapped the stack of readouts against the padded wall. "Whatever you paid for these calculations, it was too much. I'd have done it for a keg of good Franconian, and taken one-tenth the time."

"We didn't have access to you at the time," he muttered.

"These figures are correct as far as they go, but it still won't work. Not the way you want it to."

"Why not?" he demanded. "The anti-matter drive would give us a virtually unlimited source of condensed energy. We can use it to move entire asteroids. I'm no great physicist, but I've done some figuring myself. For interstellar travel, you could use the anti-matter drive to accelerate an asteroid to a velocity where a Bussard-type ramjet can cut in. The supply of interstellar hydrogen is unlimited and with the relativistic time-dilation effect, we could reach a number of planetary systems in the vicinity within one generation." A devastating thought came to him. "You're not going to tell me that we've been wrong about the frequency of planetary systems in the solar neighborhood, are you?"

"Uh-uh. If anything, we've been underestimating the likely number of systems within a few tens of light years from here. It was about the only really practical spinoff from the old SETI program. Whole bunches of Jupiter-sized planets have been found by spaceborne apodized telescopes. All current cosmogony says that, where you find a giant planet, you'll probably find smaller planets as well. I agree with that theory, which is a pretty good indication that it's correct."