Rogue Powers (40 page)

So be it. Lucy hit one last button, and
Halfwalker
grabbed for sky.

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*

C'astille watched with a full heart as the pillar of flame clawed its way toward the stars, and the roar of the engines made the very ground shake. She had tried to describe this thing,
launch
the humans called it, to her companions. But words failed. To ride that pillar of flame, to race through a skyful of enemies to some sparkles of light in the night sky that you hoped was a mighty fleet— C'astille marveled at her friend's courage and wondered if she herself had the nerve, the spirit, to do such a thing, to ride flame toward the risk of death.

But the stars. The stars lay at the end of that Road of fire.

C'astille watched the lander climb out of sight, leaving a ropy vapor trail behind that quickly dispersed into the wind. And she realized that she might be the first of all her kind to dream of flying without revulsion, for none of her kind had ever flown and kept a whole name.

D'etallis was a veteran of endless political infighting; she knew the value of good Intelligence. From a half dozen sources—Z'ensam who had befriended Guardians, from taps and listens-ins on radio traffic that the halfwalkers thought the Z'ensam didn't know about, through any number of little tricks—D'etallis knew the League had arrived at the barycenter.

She didn't know exactly what the League was, besides the fact that they were human and the enemies of the Guards. That was all she really needed to know. And the timing was just about perfect for her purposes.

D'etallis had made grand progress in her projects, but she discovered that her motives, her plans, her desires changed, even as she went from victory to victory.

She had seen Eltipa Divide. That was the turning point. Even after all the scheming, all the lies, all the manipulations, D'etallis had discovered that she still loved her old Guidance at that last, horrible moment. Too late to deny her the indignity of madness, idiocy, the loss of her name, D'etallis had killed her Guidance, and sworn that this would be the last generation that would suffer Division.

Her Guardian friends had helped bring that dream closer. With their weapons and tactics, D'etallis's followers, still half herd-mob and half army, would soon conquer or absorb every Group for an eight-day gallop in every direction. The Refiners still stayed ahead of her, stayed out of it, and a few others, but the day was not far off when she would have taken the entire heart of the continent.

And, under her direction, there were no Divisions. That was the main thing, or at least it should have been. D'etallis had found herself up against a paradox. An end to Division was merely a first step. The only absolutely certain way to ensure an end to Division was to ensure the end of the race. Which meant having a large enough base of power to support an army that could do the actual killing. Which, clearly enough, meant having a lot of live Z'ensam around. If there
weren't
enough Nihilist Z'ensam around, Nihilism would collapse. If it had gotten big enough first, it might manage to take some or all of the rest of Z'ensam civilization with it. But inevitably, some small number would have to survive, and divide, and the species would continue, and repopulate the world.

Worse, there were some sub-Groups of Nihilists not at all interested in the great work of genocide. They had found the power in a rifle barrel, were living well, and weren't too keen to wipe out the Z'ensam that served them at gunpoint. They had lost the purity of their ideals to luxury. D'etallis was forced by her successes to realize that she was doomed to failure, if she went on the way she was.

But a good politician knows how to twist failure into victory, how to exploit advantages and chance opportunities while sidestepping problems.

D'etallis had worked it all out very clearly. First was the principle that
all
intelligent life was an abomination. There was equal merit in killing halfwalkers as in killing Z'ensam. More importantly, it should be easier to talk Z'ensam into killing ugly aliens—especially when the aliens had such interesting toys to serve as booty. The Guardians obviously had weapons for more powerful than what they gave to the Nihilists. Get her hands on those, and the job of wiping out the Z'ensam could be done.
Starsight
was another piece of the puzzle. The Guardians had made the formal presentation of the spacecraft a few days ago. D'etallis herself had christened the craft. The name was calculated to please and reassure the humans, and apparently it had.

Best of all was the news from the Nihilists' biological labs. They had carefully collected bits of human skin scraped from inside pressure suits; saliva from used drinking containers, even blood drawn from Captain Romero himself. The good captain had been strolling the grounds of the camp without a pressure suit, wearing a neck-sealed bubble helmet instead. C'ishcin had "accidentally" bumped into him and driven a tiny collection syringe into him and pulled it out before the fool halfwalker even had time to feel pain. It was perilously close to medicine, of course, but crimes had been committed in the service of a greater good before this. The biologists had burrowed in the human garbage dumps and latrines for samples. Discarded toenail clippings, mucus on a tissue, bacteria from human feces—all of it went into the labs for examination.

And now the biologists knew enough to build their plagues.

The Guards would be distracted by their war with the League. Presumably, they would try to keep it secret from the Nihilists. Detains knew how to take advantage of that, too.

The Guards had taught her a lot about strategy. It was time to strike.

The whole fleet was on alert, thanks to one tiny ship.
Eagles
tracking had spotted her two days ago, coming toward the center from Outpost. It was the only response the Guards had made so far to the League's invasion.

It was easy to imagine a superweapon aboard, a bomb that could vaporize the entire barycenter, or a bioweapon that would make the foam worms seem benign by comparison.

But there were some strange things about that ship. She had started her boost from millions of kilometers this side of Outpost. And if she kept to the course and thrust she was using, about forty hours from now she would come to a halt, a hundred thousand kilometers away from the center. It was tempting to think that she wanted to stand off so as to not get too close and appear threatening. Or was she just trying to stay out of range of whatever she was going to lob at the fleet? Captain Robinson wanted to blast her out of space, but Admiral Thomas had some faint hope that she was a peace ship, negotiators aboard. If there was the slightest chance to limit the killing, he would take it. Besides, the League needed time to build up its supply and expand its beachhead in the barycenter.

They had pretty much shot their bolt, coming in with all guns blazing. (That matter-transmitter they had used on New Finland would have come in handy right about now, but apparently the damn thing was hideously expensive to run, and no one knew exactly why the one existing transmitter had spontaneously melted down a month after it was used to transmit the troops to New Finland.)

So supply ships shuttled in and out of the barycenter, bearing fuel and ammunition and food. The League fleet built up its strength, and waited. And with every day of waiting, Robinson noticed, Sir George was just a trifle later getting out of bed, and his cheeks were just a trifle rosier when he turned in.

Under the League's careful watch, the Guards likewise made no dramatic moves, but carefully reordered their forces. There were two large flotillas, each about a third the size of the League fleet, one orbiting Capital and the other about Outpost. Every day a ship or two launched away from Outpost and disappeared into C
²
, only to reappear some time later on approach to Capital. Slowly, carefully, the Guards were shifting their strength to a direct defense of the home world. Presumably, in some computer simulator on Capital, they were planning the best way to dislodge the League. But an attack by hundreds of ships was not something to organize in an hour or two. It took time.

It could be weeks before either side was prepared for a major fleet movement.

In the meantime, there was that one tiny mystery ship, growing closer all the time. Robinson didn't like mysteries, especially this one. The
Eagle
stood ready to vaporize the visitor at a moment's notice. The comm crews tried to reach her over a hundred different frequencies, in a dozen languages. Since the Guards spoke English, it was hard to see the point of broadcasting to the visitor in Russian, but it kept the comm crews busy and happy, and that counted for something.

That was its only benefit; the visitor did not transmit a
syllable in response. Obviously, things would start happening after she had arrived and taken up her station a hundred thousand klicks out.

Robinson deployed a half dozen unmanned probes into the vicinity of space toward which the visitor seemed to be headed. One of these was the first to get a good visual on her when her engines finally cut off and the ship itself was no longer hidden in their glare. Robinson and Thomas were both on the bridge for the arrival, watching everything comm could pipe up to them. It was a lander, a rather weathered one, with Guard markings all right. No real shocker there, Robinson thought. Who else's ship would it be?

It was the first transmission from the lander that surprised him. It was a general broadcast in a woman's voice. 'I have no directional radio gear. It is a wide broadcast transmission. Please jam this frequency for reception at Outpost and Capital. Do not respond until this is done."

Robinson hesitated a moment, then shrugged. He could play that sort of game. What harm could come from jamming the enemy s radio? He punched the intercom key and talked to the comm chief. "Comply with that, and use a good overlap. Jam well above and below that frequency. Reply to our new friend when you've done it. keep us patched in up here."

There was a few moments' pause as the comm station set up directionalized antennae and aimed them at the two planets. There was a increase in the background hiss as some of the signal leaked over, and then
Eagle's
radio operator spoke again.

"Eagle
to unidentified ship. Jamming commenced. Please identify yourself now."

There was another short pause. "This is Lieutenant Lucille Calder, Royal Australian Navy, on detached duty with the League of Planets Survey Service. I was last known by you to be aboard the
Venera,
and I suppose I'm listed as missing and presumed dead. I have a lot to tell you. I don't want the Guards to know I'm still alive. That's why the jamming. But I don't think I should broadcast my report, even so. Request permission to come aboard."

That
started a hubbub. The
Venera!
She was more than a lost ship to spacers, she was a quick-born legend, a
Mary Celeste
or a Flying Dutchman, a mysterious story that had never had a proper end. The usual murmur of voices around the bridge rose to a dull roar until Robinson called out. "Put a lid on it! Admiral, your opinion?"

"Well, if it's some kind of trick, it's a damn clever one, and I can't quite see the point of it. If this Calder truly was with the Survey, Captain Larson and my niece can both identify her. I say let her aboard—with extreme precautions.'

"I agree."

The decontamination boat launched from
Eagle
forty-five minutes later, Mac and Joslyn aboard. Mac could still not believe it. Calder, alive! Pete had been right all along— the
Venera
had been hijacked. Oh, it had all but been taken for granted after a while as a great theory, but here was
proof.
Joslyn and he had never known Calder all that well—she had been a smile in the mess hall, not a close friend. But if
she
lived. . . .

The decom boat was little more than a control panel, vacuum, engines, and fuel, cobbled together out of spare parts months ago in case the task force had to rescue anyone from a worm-ridden ship. Mac and Joslyn rode in crash couches welded to the midsection of the I-beam that made up the fuselage. At one end of the thirty-meter long beam were the engines, and at the other was a specially built personnel decom station. Midway between the bow and the pilot's station was a lethal-looking weapons pod, plus a disinfectant sprayer and other things to kill worms. Mac and Joslyn wore armored pressure suits. No exposed part of the ship or their suits was edible to the worms, so far as anyone knew. They had learned how to kill worms, and hoped they knew how to kill whatever else the Guards had dreamed up.

But how the hell did Calder get here?

Joslyn moved the decom boat at a stately one-gee toward Calder's lander, a careful, deliberate pace. It was easy to remember that any weapon not trained on Calder's ship was now trained on theirs. It was just over a four-hour run, accelerating for two hours, then turning the decom ship bow-to-stern and decelerating for another two hours.