The D’neeran Factor (71 page)

She finished, “All that would be necessary, would be a command for the system to fail upon completion of the first Jump after Omega. I think that was done. Our position is exactly what they would wish. No signal from us can reach Omega for one Standard month. We cannot Jump to get away. These humans can be sure that we will transmit a distress signal that includes our exact location, which is all that they need. Perhaps they even believe it will be directional toward Omega, and will confine their search accordingly. I think we had better not do that, Rubee. I think we had better not send a signal at all, and begin the long journey to Omega as soon as the old-style engines are at power—and not in a direct line, either.”

Rubee said, “I will activate the engines and set course at once. But I wish one of us had thought of this more quickly. The signal was initiated some time ago. I saw no reason not to do that.”

“Directional?” She watched the margin of safety shrink.

“Yes. How long will it take a human spacecraft to find us if all that you say is correct?”

“Hours.”

“Hours have gone by already.”

“Then we had better think of evasion instead of escape,” she said. “They may be nearly here.”

He went quickly to the bridge and she followed him. He did not speak again, but manipulated a work station without explanation. She understood that he ordered the
Bird
to extend its scanning range. The display at this station was blank and black at first. Then it showed one thing: the arrowhead-shape of an atmosphere-efficient spacecraft. Rubee's fingers stretched to pointed threads and touched tiny keypads in a blur of speed. Numbers appeared beside the image.

“What does that mean?” Hanna said.

He said, “They are moving in from the direction of Oneba, and they come with great speed. They have scanned the
Bird
as we slept. This vessel could not match the speed of that one even at full power; not in a hunt; it was not made for chase or pursuit. There is no hope of escape.”

He turned away from the terminal and started out. Hanna called after him, “Where do you go?”

He answered without stopping, “I go to wake Awnlee.
They will arrive in one of our hours; less than one of yours. We are caught completely.”

*   *   *

Awnlee, so calm until now, lost his composure and his courage all at once. “This was not supposed to happen!” he said over and over, and all efforts to soothe him were ineffectual. Hanna wished to learn what she could of the distant presence that was perceptible in this waste of isolation, but she felt only Awnlee's agitation. Rubee took him away again so that she would not see his pitiful terror. It made no difference. To close him out she had to shut down telepathy altogether, as a true-human might close his eyes, and then she was insensible also to the presences she wanted to touch.

Shutting consciousness to all of them had one advantage: she was able to think of their situation coldly and without distraction. It came more easily than she expected, as easily as even Jameson might have wished. Alone on the
Bird
's bridge, she thought about that. She felt no fear or uncertainty. That was new. In D'neera's brief war with Nestor, and even more in her first agonizing contacts with the People of Zeig-Daru, she had lived on the edge of madness. This was different. It was as if the years of order and protocol had not passed; as if, in her official life of courtesy, she had grown more callous to danger. Yet she had not faced danger for a long time, so that what she felt could not have come from habituation. She traced it, and saw that its source was anger. This event was too much. She had gone obediently where she was sent, produced what was wanted, done as she was told by D'neera, by the Polity, by all the human voices, for a long time, all her life. Now she must stop and surrender to—well, to the Master of Chaos, if it came to that; Rubee surely discerned that unpredictable hand. After all she had done it was going too far, after all she had done for Polity; could they get nothing right? But she knew she was unfair, that at least Jameson had tried to ward off what was coming, and that it was her own skepticism, conspiring with the aliens' stubbornness, that had brought her to this position of helplessness.

Then she thought with more logic of other things. And the first thing logic told her was that they could not escape or get help.

The next thing was a question. How far should they go in defending the cargo of the
Bird
?

She did not have to think about that much to come to a decision. The robbers could have it.
Here, take it, is there anything else you would like?
Precious it might be, irreplaceable even, but it was dust next to the lives of Rubee and Awnlee. And Hanna did not want to die either, not defending a crateful of baubles.

The last thing was whether their lives were in jeopardy in any case, and whether anything could be done about it. She was no longer critical of Jameson's urgency in educating her about Michael Kristofik. She wished she had paid more attention. Twenty years ago on the
Pavonis Queen
no one had been harmed. With luck it would be sleepygas again. But men change in twenty years. Probably Kristofik did not know that he was already suspected, in advance, of something he had not yet done. He might think that eradicating the
Bird
and her passengers would be the safest measure; that the
Bird
would be presumed lost in space on a course that was nearly untried. It seemed to Hanna that murder was the logical step for a man capable of taking it.

Was he, then, capable of taking it?

She sat on the bench that girdled the
Bird
's bridge with her chin on one hand, and retrieved certain statements from memory. Honoria Hood, twenty years ago: “At no time were lethal weapons used…” Jameson, drawing on sources that went back that far and farther: “There were incidents on Alta and Valentine and later everywhere. He was dangerous. He is still dangerous.” Her own voice, casual, dismissing the threat: “I suppose if you assume your subject is a monster, and then he doesn't act like one…” But here was Jameson again: “He must have known every worst thing there was to know about men…don't forget the man he's believed to have killed…”

It was so sparse, there ought to have been more, but she had not wanted to listen. And now she must estimate the extent of her danger, and she did not know enough to do it.

A communications module that ought to have stayed silent for weeks made a sound. Hanna scrambled for it. “Acknowledged,” she said tightly.

A man's voice said, “This is the trader
Avalon
out of
Lancaster. We've picked up a mayday from your location. You in trouble?”

You could say that.

Hanna said, “We're the
Far-Flying Bird
out of Terra on special mission for the Polity. What's a Lancaster trader doing out here?”

“Just looking around.”

The voice was thin and toneless. It disturbed her. She said, “Nobody comes out here. You're well out of Omega's range. I don't know if coincidence goes that far.”

“You want help or don't you?” said the voice.

Rubee came in. His comprehension of Standard was limited. He said, “What have they said?”

“They play a game.”

“Do you play?”

“I will. To discover what we may expect.”

The light voice outside said, “Talk Standard.”

Hanna said, “We don't want help. We'll handle it.”

“Not good enough,” said the voice.

Only three words. The hair stood up on Hanna's arms, she had heard nothing like them before, nothing like the irony and finality in the slow light voice. If this was Michael Kristofik, Jameson's assessment had fallen short of the dreadful truth. Her hand shaped itself for a weapon, though she had not held one in years.

She said coldly, “Let's work with the truth. I know what you want.”

It must have startled him. There was a pause before the voice said, “Yes?” so softly it was nearly a whisper. There was a suggestion of hollowness, of echoes in empty spaces, a trick of acoustics.

“Is it whom we feared?” Rubee said.

“Who else could it be?”

“Tell this person to take the cargo and leave.”

Hanna thought of her own estimate of the reasonable thing to do. She had qualified it before: murder was the logical step for a man capable of taking it. The reservation no longer counted. The man who owned this voice was capable of it.

The voice said, “I don't want to hear any more of that alien noise. I said: Standard.”

“All right. I'll talk Standard.” Some of her fury might
have gotten into her voice. She hoped it had. “Listen to this. The Interworld Fleet and Intelligence and Security expected trouble. You got by them, I don't know how. But this isn't going as smooth as you think. They've got an idea who to look for. The Uskosian envoys don't want trouble. They want you to take what you came for and get out. So do I. You come right aboard and get it. We'll stay out of the way. But believe me, you don't know what trouble is. Trouble is what you get from Fleet and I&S if you touch an alien envoy. I'm not talking smuggling, Earthside Enforcement, port patrols, that kind of garbage. I'm talking top-level Polity Admin. If you're smart, you'll make sure nobody gets hurt. How does that sound?”

The voice said, “That's fine. Glad you take it like that. Just remember what you said about wanting trouble. The kind you get if you ask for it, is a battery of Fleet surplus wide aperture laser cannon. Give us an airlock and stay where you are. We're coming in.”

*   *   *

The approach took an hour. The
Bird
waited dead and silent. Awnlee appeared on the bridge, apologetic and calmer. He said he did not know what had happened to him. He sat between his sire and Hanna and held Hanna's hand.

“I thought I was brave as Bistee!” he lamented.

“I don't think it was an unnatural reaction,” Hanna said.

“But you and my sire did not act so!”

“We are older,” said Rubee.

“Yes,” Hanna said, “and I don't know about Rubee, but the last time I was in such a position, I was jelly. And I may yet forget myself before we are done.”

“I wish I were like Sirsa of Sa,” Awnlee said with a return of his natural enthusiasm.

Hanna opened her mouth to ask what had happened to Sirsa of Sa, or who Bistee had been, for that matter, and shut it again. This was no time for legend.

She said to Rubee, “We must think of defending ourselves.”

“Do you think we will have need?”

“I think it is very possible.”

“We came with weapons; a small number only; meant for defense against beasts if we met such danger. You saw the weapons destroyed, all of them.” Rubee hesitated. “Did you know then why I did it?” he asked.

“I did. I gave you then my gratitude, even before I gave you my love.”

Awnlee said, “It was a token of good will when 'An-arilporot joined us.”

“It was another thing also,” she said, watching Rubee over Awnlee's head.

“You had great fear,” Rubee said. “I then knew nothing of your kind of speech, thought to thought. There was no other common language and when words came to you I did not know what they meant. But there were pictures. You stood here, where we are now, and remembered another meeting. I could not endure your memories. And so I put our weapons into space. I knew, because of you, that we would not need them.”

“It was a token of good will indeed, and has been so ever since. But now we may need weapons, Rubee.”

“Is there not an accommodation?” said Awnlee.

“I would not give my trust to these men,” she said. “I do not wish you to have alarm, Awnlee, but I think we had better think of the worst case. We have tools. Perhaps we could use them. Even something to throw would be better than nothing; better still would be tools that could harm from a distance.”

“There is nothing,” Rubee said. “There are objects we might modify, given time. But there is no time.”

The air lock was open. The
Bird
would announce at any moment that it had been entered. Hanna's mind was busy with possibilities that she rejected as quickly as they came—close the lock, seal the inner one, trap them inside it—but the cannon that could punch holes in the
Bird
as easily as a fist smashing through paper rendered all her ideas useless.

Awnlee's grip on Hanna's hand felt strange. She looked down and saw his fingers change. He said, “Tell me of this accommodation.”

Hanna could not answer. She had not laid out all her conclusions even for Rubee. But Rubee said, “I think 'Anarilporot and I are of one mind. I think our danger is great.” He touched his selling gently. “We are in a tale, Awnlee. We thought it another telling of the Tale of Erell. That was what we wished and planned. But the Master has come to us. The danger was there always. It is present always, and especially
in a great undertaking such as ours. And now we are in a new tale, a dark one.”

“They have entered,” Awnlee said. He moved closer to Rubee, looking at a schematic that showed new points of light where none had been. “There are four. I wonder if that is all?”

Hanna watched the blips of light. When the lock finished its cycle, they moved out and turned for the bridge. She said, “There are probably others on the
Avalon,
if that is its name. But now that these are aboard, they are not likely to use the cannon. As long as they are here, our only danger is from whatever weapons they carry with them.”

“Perhaps we should attack at once,” Rubee said. “Yet there are four of them and three of us, and we have no weapons.”

He was icy: a good being to have by you in a fight. Hanna said, “Yes. We must wait and find out their intent. It would be foolish to provoke them if there is a chance they will not harm us. If there is no chance—then an attack may give us only a small one, but it will be the only chance.”