Koban (5 page)

He looked at the taller man before he spoke again, assessing
his demeanor.

“Forgive me for saying this so bluntly Doctor, but how much ransom
do you think a pirate would expect to get for a group of bio-scientists? Tossing
all of you out an air lock for fun might prove to be their only pay back.”

There was no need to answer that. It would be hard to overcome
the “Good riddance” attitude of many that were asked to pay a ransom for the Midwife
scientists.

The lift doors opened and the two men entered the central common
area. There were people around, but none within earshot.

Mirikami paused a moment, recalling a sense of
déjà vu
he had experienced on the bridge earlier. He tried to put it into words.
“I suppose the real reason for my caution is an itchy feeling in my instinct. I
developed a keen sensitivity for that feeling, serving in the Navy during the Qaddafi
Jihad I spoke of earlier. The Faithful Few in the Sultan’s service would dive suicide
ships eagerly into any infidel vessel they could seduce into coming too close. My
cruiser was nearly taken out twice while patrolling mining bases in the Robe. A
favorite trick of the Few was to standoff behind a planet or moon until a Navy ship
came so close that there was no time to trap a Jump energy tachyon before at least
one attacker made it through the defenses and rammed.”

Dillon felt
a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. “I take it you see a similarity here.”

“Slightly,” he admitted. “Once, the tip off of a possible ambush
was a moon miner’s camp that didn’t answer our calls. In this case, though, there
was a real possibility of radio failure in such a small operation. I was the communications
officer but I felt uneasy about the situation. We had to go in close and visually
check out the camp’s condition. I passed along my hunch to the Captain. She was
a wary Old Lady.

“She set up a ballistic approach toward the moon, about a one-hour
coast, and then tuned both our primary and secondary Traps to the minimum Jump energy.
We had both fields charged when we were still twenty minutes out. That tactic saved
us from a swarm of two man Martyr ships. Skimming the airless surface of the moon
just meters above the crater rims, they arched around from behind the moon fast
enough and in enough numbers that our point defenses would have been overwhelmed.

“We did a preprogrammed minimum Jump using our primary field,
then a few minutes later, using the secondary field’s energy, we reversed the computation
and Jumped back. The Martyr ships had passed our position of course, and were exposed
and confused. We picked off nine before the rest scattered out of range. On the
moon the camp had been hit, but there were survivors holed up in the mines, staying
quite to avoid detection by the Few, who were out to kill the
infidels
.”

Shrugging his shoulders, he summed it up. “In a nut shell Doctor,
the radio silence similarity of the two situations stirred my sense of caution.
There is no reason to assume an actual parallel.”

Dillon shook his head. “I don’t agree. In fact I believe you
are pretty close to the mark.”
Why couldn’t the Captain make the final connection?

“Captain the most virulent opposition to Midwife came from the
organized religions. All of them, so far as I know. Several acts of violence were
committed against some of our universities by religious fanatics. They must see
this as a Holy Crusade to prevent another genetic war.”

Mirikami gave him an appraising look. “I suppose you might tend
to see events in that light, given your particular science background. Moreover,
I share a background that tends to make me sensitive to the motives of others as
regards myself. However, believe me when I tell you that no private group could
have organized a secret attack on Midwife, not on the scale implied to silence every
radio in the system.

“Only a planetary government has the resources, but it would
be far cheaper for them to scuttle your program through propaganda. Even if a small
private mercenary fleet was assembled by some organization, it couldn’t be kept
secret from the Planetary Union. No civilized person wants war or the Purges to
return. I think your perspective is distorted by your closeness.”

As a scientist, Dillon normally considered himself objective.
In retrospect, he saw he had perhaps allowed emotional and irrational feelings to
distort his thinking. He was highly annoyed with himself. “I’m forced to concede
to your argument Captain. But..., damn it! That leaves us without any viable theory.”

Throwing a puzzled look at Mirikami, he amended his last remark.
“Correction, I’m the one without any theories. You apparently fear a surprise attack
or you wouldn’t be diverting energy into the primary Trap for a Jump. An attack
by whom?”

Spreading arms wide, palms up, Mirikami shrugged again. “No one
that I can think of, and that’s my point about not alarming the other passengers
with speculative theories.

“Incidentally, I’m
not
prepared for an emergency Jump.
The low-level tachyons we have will only give us reserve power if we need it for
a boost in propulsion, and for the plasma beams; the tachyons we have fall far short
of even minimal Jump energy. The dual fields provide redundancy, and I didn’t want
all our tachyons in one basket, so to speak. I did have Noreen heat up both beam
plasmas for a possible defense from debris, but I see no obvious threat. I don’t
think this situation requires further precaution until we learn more.”

“Then you
really have drawn a blank?”

Mirikami pulled at his lower lip. “I’d have to say yes. The situation
defies an easy explanation, and I feel slightly uncomfortable due to an unrelated
previous experience. Those aren’t substantive enough reasons to justify the concern
that revealing all this would provoke. I use your own reaction as a case in point.

“As long as we stay alert and remain in open space, well out
from any large bodies that could conceal an ambush, there’s no way anyone can reach
us before Jake detects them. The primary tachyon Trap can be retuned for Jump energy
in a matter of minutes, and probability gives us twenty-five minutes average time
before we trap a tunneling tachyon energetic enough to make a tenth light year Jump.
Jake can detect the fastest and smallest missiles I’ve heard of at about forty to
forty five minutes out. I intend to give a wide berth to any moon, comet, or asteroid
that is large enough to shield a particle beam, laser cannon, or small ship. I’m
not about to blunder blindly into orbit around Newborn until we learn what has gone
wrong.”

Dillon looked down the half meter to meet Mirikami’s eyes. “You
have me convinced Captain. Whatever has happened at Midwife, we have to go in and
find out.”

In retrospect, everyone aboard would look back and agree
that the Gene War would become the
second worst
calamity the human race
had ever faced.

Doctor Margaret Fisher was a wiry diminutive bundle of
energy. At age ninety-one, her seemingly frail grandmotherly appearance and
quaint colonial mannerism frequently fooled opponents into underestimating her.
They often found themselves skewered by rapier sharp logic, her words twisting
the blade as she smiled sweetly.

Fisher's enemies called her “Tiger Lady”; her small circle
of friends preferred “Tiger Lily.” Even her friends carefully avoided using the
pet name anywhere within range of her legendary sharp hearing. This dainty
looking “flower” had teeth, and she often enjoyed a playful nip at someone
else's expense. Dillon considered himself one of her friends, and she nipped him
often in their playful give and take.

She had been the first scientist to recognize the importance
of Newborn's discovery, and that its remoteness promised a means to circumvent
the chokehold on biological research. Unfortunately, her home, Ramah, was a
relatively new colony in the Human Sphere, established shortly before the first
Clone Wars started.

The old Hub world schools dominated the Joint Academic
Council that controlled the most lucrative research grants, so Fisher arranged
for her research proposal to be “stolen” by the Biology Department of Earth’s
Harvard, one of the oldest and most prestigious schools on the home world. Then
she had to make certain that the project took the direction she intended.

When Fisher was named Chairfem of the fledgling project's
Board of Directors, it was a highly controversial appointment. It was rumored
to be a political compromise, forced on the Joint Academic Council by an
unusually bitter struggle between several influential Hub Universities over
project control. Having fomented the dispute in the first place, Fisher had
seen to it that she was the highest placed, and most neutral, non-Hub
university candidate available. As the only New Colonist on the project's
Board, and a presumptive rube, she deftly played the Hub representatives
against one another. She frequently got the votes she was after, and some of
her defeats were actually calculated token concessions.

The meeting with the nine Board members began politely
enough. Mirikami gave them a concise description of their situation, including
the precautions he had already taken, and those he would employ if they
continued to Newborn. When he finished, he stood waiting for questions.

Four members quickly reached similar conclusions as had
Dillon, blaming militant religious zealots as having a hand in sabotage,
invasion, or whatever had silenced Midwife. Vicechairfem Cahill, joined by her
usual three-member bloc of votes, was the most strident advocate of this
viewpoint, demanding an immediate Jump back to the Hub. Two of her group
speculated that the Planetary Union itself, or one of the individual world
governments, might have intervened to shut them down.

Dillon felt his face flush with embarrassment, recalling
moments earlier his own paranoid suspicions. Finding that he had aligned,
however briefly, on the same side of an argument as that arrogant gasbag and
her faction was acutely uncomfortable.

Fisher listened quietly, letting the diatribe and panic
increase. When she decided Cahill's pit was deep enough, she pushed her over
the edge.

The Chairfem's words cut through the caterwauling like a
knife. “This is unacceptable Ladies! How can as distinguished a group of
scientists as you, ignore logic and facts?”

Dillon cringed inwardly as he listened to Fisher rip into
the theories Cahill and her toadies had offered. She skewered their arguments,
making similar points as had Mirikami, but without any of his tact. Dillon
decided then that males were truly the gentler sex, despite past wars to the
contrary.

In a matter of moments, none of the other four neutral Board
members would have admitted that they had ever seriously considered Vicechairfem
Cahill's fears to have any rational basis what so ever. The inevitable and only
possible conclusion, they agreed, was that it was impossible for a private
militia to have mounted a system-wide attack on Midwife. They agreed with the
Chairfem that the notion of secret government intervention was implausible and
ridiculous.

Two of Cahill's weaker willed supporters changed sides and
joined with those four neutral members. Neither of them considered themselves
to have switched to Fisher's side at all, but rather they were helping build a
united Hub university coalition, and the rustic Chairfem just happened to be on
the same bandwagon.

Cahill, bitterly resentful of Fisher's appointment as
Chairfem over her own candidacy, stung smartly from the seemingly irrefutable
rebuttal. Unwilling to concede to someone she thought of as an uncultured and
undereducated New Colony backwoods bitch, she played her vindictive trump card
without hesitation.

“Well,” she sneered, “if our duplicitous Madam President and
her Security Council wanted to keep a covert operation a secret, I doubt that
the media or even Doctor Fisher's provincial Senator friends would have learned
of a plan to terminate Midwife militarily.”

With a gentle smile, Fisher prepared to twist the blade. She
began softly. “So, now we are to place our suspicions on Madam President?” She
shook her head in wonderment. “Dear Lady, just where do you think the Academic
Council found all the grant money to pay for our expensive little project?
Perhaps out of the entire pitiful Bioscience budgets of all our collective
universities?” she added with sweet sarcasm.

Not waiting for a reply, her smile became predatory. “The
Joint Academic Council moved to support this project only after I personally
and privately requested President Stanford to intercede, and she agreed to
provide covert government funding. Politically, she can't openly back us, but
the Lady is highly intelligent. She recognizes that regaining our lost
biological knowledge is vital to the long-term survival of the New Colonies.”

Fisher was just warming up. “The President understands that
alien worlds are inhospitable to our crops and animals” she went on, now
tapping into an old speech she had once made. “Only genetic alteration of our
crops and livestock can help them flourish in an alien ecology, and to modify
them to produce safe food for local consumption and export. This is how
every
single one
of the Old Colony worlds were settled hundreds of years ago. It
was unregulated alteration of the human genome that hurt society. That made the
Clone and Gene wars not only possible, but probably inevitable. If the New
Colonies don't become self-sufficient food producers, and even food exporters,
then they cannot help support our expanding populations and economy. The risk
of hunger and eventual abandonment of these worlds would be an economic
disaster for the Hub worlds and Old Colonies.”

She
paused, looking at each member in turn.