Rogue Powers (4 page)

The CIs were expected to run the station's communications center, operate the space traffic control system, manage the station computer system, and generally do routine technical work. Failure to cooperate got them nothing but another beating. The Guards made that simple to understand.

The League of Planets Survey Service had chosen the brightest young people from the military services of every League member and trained them to be skilled pilots, ready to adapt to new situations. The CIs—they were already calling themselves that—mastered their new jobs quickly. It helped that the equipment was more or less familiar, as if the Guardians had begged, borrowed, and stolen whatever old and new designs they could get their hands on, and copied them.

The CIs tried to protest, to sabotage, to avoid work.

Until Wilkie was shot. Wilkie hadn't done anything. They shot him because Leventhal had refused work, wouldn't t cooperate. Romero had strutted out to talk with them all the next day and announced that Wilkie's death was not an accident—it was policy. "Shirk your responsibilities, and it isn't your life you risk—it is your friend's, your cabinmate's, your comrade-in-arm's. I was reluctant to take extreme measures, but you have left me no choice. Each of you is hostage to the behavior of the others."

Leventhal tried to kill himself by slashing his wrists the next day. They got him to sick bay in time.

But that settled it. They did the work. They cooperated. "Bide our time, wait and see," Wu had said, and they did.

Lucy drew a regular shift in front of a communications console. It took her only a day or two to confirm her vague impressions of what was going on. Most of the signals were encrypted, but enough was in clear for her to find things out. She compared notes with the other CIs, and they quickly came to some conclusions.
Ariadne
wasn't in orbit of Capital, but circling another planet, called Outpost.

Much of Lucy's job was in relaying data and voice communications between at least two dozen ships in different orbits.
Ariadne
relayed any traffic for ships that didn't have line-of-sight on each other.

Lucy's console, and nine others, were in a large compartment on B Deck. As she and the other CIs worked, two well-armed Guardians watched them, sullen-faced and bored. Slave labor, Cynthia had called it, and that was close enough. And Lucy told herself that no half-abo Aussie from the Outback was going to be a slave. Not for long, and not without revenge.

Another signal was coming in from the big ship in high orbit.
Leviathan.
The
Lev
was using the same code as the planetside stations, and Lucy wanted to know that code for her own reasons. She hit a few keys on her console and a copy of
Leviathans
signal went into a very private computer file she had set up. Lucy was learning.

First Lieutenant Johnson Gustav, Guardian Navy, knew he was lucky not to be dead already, shot for treason. Being transferred out of Headquarters Intelligence to be the executive officer of some unimportant orbital station wasn't much, but being alive was something. And Gustav had all his off-duty hours to reflect on the concept of the truth being treason.

His report had been erased, shredded, burned, purged, eliminated in whatever form it had existed but one. It was still in his mind. Gustav had the feeling that Captain Phillips had arranged to keep Gustav alive so that one last copy of the report, up there in his brain cells, wouldn't be "erased" as well. Which meant the Phillips knew Gustav was right, and Phillips was a good man—so why didn't Phillips forward the report instead of wiping it out of existence and shipping its author to some tin can orbiting Outpost?

Because Captain Phillips knows that doing that would get us both shot without accomplishing anything,
Gustav thought. Phillips was like that. All the good officers in Intelligence were. They had to balance the necessary against the possible. Odd phrases like that cropped up in Intelligence a lot. Phillips had sent Gustav off with another one:

"Pay more attention to politics and less to reality. Until the times change."

Well, the times were, about to change all right, but not to anyone's benefit. It was all there in the report.

The trouble was that Intelligence trained its men to be objective in analysis, and it was the only branch of the Navy that sent its men out of the Nova Sol star system to other settled worlds.

It had been easier before he had been trained to go out. He had heard what every kid heard growing up, from the school books and the Political Orientation lecturers: that the Guards had threatened the established order on Earth and had been driven off the mother planet by the plutocrats, cleverly leaving misleading clues as to that part of the sky for which they were bound. That the League of Planets had been formed with the sole purpose of tracking the Guardians down and smashing them, that the League would never stop searching for Capital, the one world that threatened the League's utter domination of human space, and that Capital must be prepared, well armed, disciplined, ready to fight.

Then Gustav had been approved for Navy Intelligence, started his training, and learned a whole new story, one he hadn't really believed until he had shipped out in a tiny one-man ship with a phony Liberian High Free Port registration to wander the League worlds gathering information for Capital.

He had gone out and come back in a score of times. He had stolen designs and collected technical journals that would end up in Guardian labs. He had fingered likely ships for the CI "recruiters." He had read news services and passed back political reports. He had travelled. He had seen.

Gustav had been to Kennedy, to New Asia, to New Finland, even to Earth. He had seen Capital's "enemies" and discovered that the plutocrats and hedonists and demagogues and bloodsuckers of grade school P.O. were just— people. Worse, they were people who had never even
heard
of the Guardians, and it took a day of digging in the New York Public Library data files to find more than a passing mention—and the truth—about the Guardians.

The Guards had indeed left Earth a hundred years before, but only after attempting a hopeless and pointless double coup against the American and British governments. In both nations, local police had mopped up the Guards without so much as bothering to call up the military. The schoolbooks' hundreds of thousands of heroic Guardians of the Atlantic Front turned out to be a few hundred rowdies scraped up from the LaRouchists, the Birchists, the Afrikaaners in Exile, the National Front, something called the Ku Klux Klan, and a few other groups. The near-victory over the forces of plutocracy turned out to be little more than a busy afternoon for the police in Washington and London. And the
Oswald Mosley
hadn't narrowly escaped destruction by the space fleets of Earth's criminal nations. Earth's nations didn't even
have
space fleets at that time. The
Mosley
would have been permitted to leave peacefully, and good riddance, except Thurston Woolridge and some of the other Guardian leaders had been sprung from jail in raids that had killed some people and freed a number of dangerous criminals. As it was, the
Mosley
got away only because the British and the Americans didn't have ships available to chase her. Once she had left the solar system, no trace of the
Mosley
was ever found—but then, no one had ever looked very hard. She was missing and thankfully presumed lost with all hands. The Guardians weren't a heroic page in history; they were a grubby little footnote. No one remembered or cared about a nut group from a century past.

To discover one's hated enemies to be civilized, decent people was disquieting. To discover them to be completely unaware of one's existence was galling. To discover the legends of one's people to be the glorification of a seedy little bunch of political thugs was humiliating. But to discover those hated enemies had a combined military potential a thousand times, ten thousand times, greater

than one's own planet was bone-chilling. Earth certainly had space fleets now. So did Britannica, and Europa, and Kennedy and Bandwidth. The League was big.

And Supreme General Officer Jules Jacquet, Tenth Leader of the Combined Will of the Guardians of the Planetary Commonwealth of Capital, and head of a rather shaky government, needed some sort of external crisis to divert attention from other problems. And it couldn't hurt to grab some technology and skilled laborers at the same time. Jules Jacquet was planning to attack the League.

When Johnson Gustav heard that through the back channel gossip at Headquarters Intelligence, he had decided then and there he was a Settler, not a Guardian.

Then-Commander Gustav had done what he had seen as his duty and filed that damned report, and had ended up busted in rank and posted to a pesthole named
Ariadne.

Now he had other duties, the day-to-day jobs of running a space station. Among those was watching the CIs. The Survey students were smart enough to assume their cabins and work stations were bugged—and they got better and better at finding the mikes. They "accidentally" sabotaged a tap now and then, and Gustav usually let it go, simply repairing the damage after a day or two. The CIs were prisoners in feet, whatever they were in name. They could never escape, they could never contact the outside universe. Gustav allowed them their secret meetings; their conspiracies to collect information. After all, another of his duties was keeping them sane enough to work, and they needed the chance to grouse and complain and talk their situation out with each other. Everyone needed a way to let off steam.

Gustav never forgot that his CIs were soldiers. If he had ruthlessly crushed every attempt to circumvent the authority of the Guardians with an iron discipline, his CIs would probably have rebelled violently—and died pointlessly, wrecking
Ariadne
and thereby hurting the war effort in the process. Gustav stopped the train of thought

right there, before he could ask himself if hurting the war effort was such a bad idea.

So he didn't erase the CI's many "secret" databanks. If he had, it would simply cause them to start over, hiding things better the next time, perhaps in some memory section he couldn't find. Gustav didn't stop Schiller from using the station telescope and spectrograph to try and identify the brighter stars. Even if Schiller succeeded (which was most unlikely) the twin star system of Nova Sol was 150 light years from the nearest League world. What was Schiller going to do? Walk home? Use a message laser to send an SOS that would arrive in the middle of the next century?

Gustav sighed and glared at the desk he was stuck behind. Paperwork and playing footsie with the slave labor.

The damn fools around Jacquet! They put a joke like Romero in command of a station and used kidnapped spaceship pilots to run the place. Why the devil couldn't the Central Guardians
see
that meant they were in trouble?

Cynthia Wu had rigged her "bug-sniffer" out of parts stolen from an old pressure suit radio and from some other odds and ends. She moved carefully around the storage compartment, checking the deck, the bulkheads, the storage racks.

Finally she shoved the device back in her pocket. "Clean, as best I can tell. Unless Gustav is playing the game a new way. But none of the standard-issue bugs are in here."

Lucy and a half dozen other CIs relaxed slightly. Lucy pointed at Dmitiri and nodded toward the door. Dmitiri nodded back and headed out into the corridor to watch for Guards. "So maybe it's safe to talk," Lucy said. "So we talk. Schiller, any luck?"

"Yes and no." Sam Schiller was a tall, dark, clear-eyed farm boy from Iowa, USA, with a thick mop of deep brown hair and a quiet, serious manner. As a lad in the corn fields, he had loved to look at the stars, and had joined the Navy and signed up for the Survey just for the

chance to see them up close. He had been in the Navy Astrocartography Command, and was the obvious choice to look for home amid the points of light. "No really solid idea of where we are yet,' he went on, "but I've got a program running right now: Every time the high-gain antenna is out of use, I've got it checking a different piece of sky for radio sources. I'm not just after artificial sources of course, most of the signals that transmitters and radars and so on put out are too weak at interstellar range. But there are pulsars, hot gas clouds, that sort of thing. I've got eight mapped now. None of them are strong enough for me to get a really good signature with our gear, but sooner or later we'll nail the galactic center. That'll give us a lot."

"What about visual?" someone asked.

"Not so great. I'm working with gear that's supposed to spot incoming ships, not read spectra of stars. Without spectra you can't really tell one star from another reliably— especially when you have no idea of the distances to the stars in question. All I can say for sure is that we're a long way from home: at least 100 light years from Earth. I need a star catalog. Has anyone found anything like that in the computers?'