The Faded Sun Trilogy (73 page)

In the same way the regul turned up on the human side during the cleanup—had turned on their own mercenaries, slaughtering them and the mri’s civilian population without warning. That was the mri’s final payoff for serving regul. A simple change of policy: regul knew the right moment to move. And, truth be told, everything human breathed a sigh of relief to know the mri were gone, and that someone else had pulled the trigger.

Regul came now, having tracked the last two survivors of the mri who had served them, to their homeworld, to Kutath, the far, far origin of their kind. Regul had rushed ahead to destroy a peace message from Kutath before humans could hear it, had fired on a quiet world and elicited answering fire before humans understood the situation. More mri were dead down there. The last remnants of dying cities were shot to ruin; the last of a dying species were made fugitives on their own world . . . the last place, the very last, that mri existed.

Something tight and unpleasant welled up in Galey’s throat when he thought of that. Somehow it was Haven again, and civs getting killed. He had come very far to feel something finally. It was ironic that he felt it for the enemy, that deep-down sickness at the belly that came of seeing an unequal contest.

It would have been that kind of blind, helpless death for his own kin. It gave him nightmares now, after so many years. No fighting back; a city under fire from orbit; no ships; no hope: folk armed with handguns and knives
against orbital strike.

Everything dead, and no way out.

There was a little drift in his position. It had been minor, but the shuttles were still in his path and he had to maintain a while longer. He corrected a fraction. Sweat was running down his sides. He tried to stop thinking, tried to concentrate on his instruments for a time. There was no reason for uneasiness. The feeling simply grew. And in time the thoughts crept back again. His eyes traveled inexorably and unwillingly toward the outward view. Kutath’s dying surface was barely in his visual field. The rest was stars, fewer than he ever liked to see. He sweated. He had never been in a place where the goblins got to him so thoroughly, those ancient human ghosts that tagged after a man in the deep. They dogged him, kept, as proper ghosts should, just behind him . . . gone when he would look.

Look back,
they whispered against his nape, stirring the hairs,
Look again.

The stars hung infinite in his drifting view, as deep down as up, as far on left as on right; and a near star, Na’i’in, the mri called it, which would make even
Saber
a mote of dust beside it. All, all those little lights which were suns, and some cloudy aggregates of suns, themselves reduced to dust motes by distance which reached out from himself, who was the center of the universe, and then not—an insignificance, less than the mote of a world, far less than a sun, infinitely less than the vast galaxies, and the distance, the cold, deep distance that never stopped, forever.

Move it,
he thought at the ships which held him off. He wanted in, wanted
in,
like a boy running for his front door and warmth and light, with the goblins at his back. It had never gotten to him, not like this.

The mri had a word for it: the Dark. Scientists said so. Anyone who had traveled the wild places in little ships had to have a word for it. Except maybe regul, who could not imagine, only remember.

Mri felt it. He understood beings who could feel it.

He worked his hands on the controls, heard the chatter in his ear, the thin lifeline of a voice from
Saber,
proving constantly his species was real, however far they sat now from friendly, trafficked space.

Real. Alive. Men existed somewhere. Somewhere there were human worlds, less than dust motes in the deep,
but living. And that somehow affirmed his own reality.

Was it this, he wondered, for the two mri, last of all their company . . . who had run this long, desperate course home?
Their
little mote was dying, an old world under an old sun, and what fragile life of their kind survived here, regul refused to leave alive. Was it such a feeling, that had made
home
more urgent for them than survival—to come in out of the Dark, even to die?

He began to shiver, catching a moving dot of light among all the others.
Shirug.
The regul shuttles were too far and too small to see now. It had to be regul
Shirug,
catching the sun.

“NAS-12, come on in,”
Saber
-com said. “Shuttle NAS-12, come on in.”

He kicked the vessel into slow life and eased onward, resisting the temptation to close the interval with a wasteful burst of power. There was time. The bay was all his.

“Priority, NAS-12.”

They gave him leave to move. His heart started thudding with a heavier and heavier weight of premonition. His hands moved, throwing the little ship over into rightwise alignment and hurtling it at
Saber
with furious haste.

*   *   *

“Sir,” the intercom announced, “Lt. Comdr. James Galey.”

Adm. Koch scribbled a note on the screen, hit FILE and disposed of one piece of business, touched the intercom key in silent affirmative. A second screen showed the busy command center: Capt. Zahadi was taking care of matters there at least; and Comdr. Silverman in
Santiago
was currently linked to Zahadi, keeping a wary eye over the world’s horizon. Details were all Zahadi’s, until they touched policy. Policy began here, in this office.

Galey arrived, a sandy-haired, freckled man who had begun to have lines in his face. Galey looked distressed—ought to be, summoned directly to this office for debriefing. The eyes flicked to the corner, where a high-ranking regul had lately died; Koch did not miss it, returning the offered courtesies.

“Sir,” Galey said.

“You set SurTac Duncan downworld in good order?”

“Yes, sir. No trouble.”

“You volunteered for that flight.”

Galey was masked in courtesies. The face failed to react to that probe, only the eyes, and that but slightly, betraying nothing.

“Want you to sit down,” Koch said. “Relax. Do it.”

The man looked about him, found the only chair available, drew it over and sat on the edge of it. Koch waited. Galey dutifully eased himself back and positioned his arms. Sweet was standing on Galey’s face, which might be from change of temperature and might not. Careers rose and fell in this office.

“Why?” Koch pursued him. “The man walks into this office wearing mri robes, asks for a cease-fire, then guns down a ranking regul ally. Security says he’s gone entirely mri, inside and out. Science department agrees. You imagined some long-ago acquaintance, is that it? You volunteered to ferry him back—why? To talk with him? To satisfy yourself of something? What?”

“I—worked with him once. And I’d flown guide for
Flower’s
landing, sir; I happened to know the route.”

“So do others.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You worked with him—on Kesrith.”

“One mission, sir.”

“Know him well?”

“No, sir. No one did. He’s SurTac.”

The specials, the Surface Tactical operatives, were remote from the regul military, in all ways remote: peculiar rank, peculiar authorities, the habit of independence and irreverence for protocol. Koch shook his head, frowned, wondering if that was, even years ago, sufficient explanation for Sten Duncan. Governor Stavros, back in Kesrith Zone, had trusted this wildness, enough to hand Duncan two mri prisoners and their captured navigational records. It had paid the dividend Stavros had reckoned: they were here, at the mri home world; and Duncan, with the mri contacts no one had ever been able to establish, came suing for peace . . . .

Then shot a regul in the same interview, bai Sharn, commander of
Shirug,
lieutenant to humanity’s highest placed ally among regul, and all plans were off.

I have done an execution,
Duncan had said.
The regul know what I am. They will not be surprised. You know this. I can give you peace with Kutath now.

Mri arrogance. Duncan had been acutely uncomfortable, asked for a moment to drop the veil with which he covered his face.

“You worked with the man,” Koch said, regarding Galey steadily. “You had time to exchange a few words with him in getting him back to Kutath. Impressions? Do you know him at all now?”

“Yes,” Galey said. “It’s what he was, back on Kesrith. Only it wasn’t—wasn’t all the same. Now and again it’s there, the way he was; and then . . . not. But—”

“But you think you know him. —You . . . were in the desert together back at Kesrith, recovered the records out of that shrine . . . had a little regul trouble then on the way back, all true?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hate the regul?”

“No love for them, sir.”

“Hate the mri?”

“No love there either, sir.”

“And SurTac Duncan?”

“Friend, sir.”

Koch nodded slowly. “You know the pack he was given has a tracer.”

“I don’t think that will last long.”

“You warned him?”

“No, sir, didn’t know. But he’s not anxious to have us find the mri at all; I don’t think he’ll let it happen.”

“Maybe he won’t. But then maybe his mri don’t want him speaking for them. Maybe he told the truth and maybe he didn’t. There are weapons on that world worth reckoning with.”

“Wouldn’t know, sir.”

“Your first run down there, you took damage.”

“Some. Shaken about. What I hear, it’s old stuff. I didn’t see anything to say different; no fields, no life, no ships. Nothing, either time. Only ruins. That’s what I hear it was.”

“Less than that down there now.”

“Yes, sir.”

A dying world, cities decayed and empty, machines drawing solar power to live: armaments returning fire with mechanical lack of passion; and the mri themselves . . . .

Rock and sand,
Duncan had said,
dune and flats. The mri will not be easy to find.

If it’s true,
Koch thought.
If—there are no ships in their control, and if all the cities are machine life only.

“You think they pose no threat to us,” Koch said.

“Wouldn’t know that either, sir.”

There was a feeling of cold at Koch’s gut. It lived there, sometimes small, sometimes—when he thought of the voyage behind them—larger. It grew when he thought of the hundred twenty-odd worlds at their backs, a swath which marked the trail mri had followed out from Kutath to Kesrith, a trail eons old at the beginning and recent at the farther end, in human space, where the mri had been massacred. Before that, along that strip—all worlds were scoured of life . . . more than desert: dead.

Mri hired themselves for mercenaries. Presumably they had done so more than once, until the regul turned on them and ended them.

Ended a progress across the galaxy which left no life in its wake, a hundred twenty-odd systems which by all statistical process should have held life, which might have supported intelligent species.

Void, if they had ever been there . . . gone, without memory, even to know what they had been, why the mri had passed there, or what they had sought in passing.

Only Kesrith survived, trail’s end.

I have done an execution,
Duncan had said, black-robed, mri to the heart of him. And:
The regul know what I
am.

“Bai Sharn,” Koch said, “is being transported back to her ship. There
is
no regul authority with us now; the rest are only younglings. They can probably handle
Shirug
competently enough, but nothing more, without some adult to direct them. That puts things wholly into our laps.
We
deal with the mri, if Duncan can get their holy she’pan to come in and talk peace.
We
run operations up here. And if we misread signals, we don’t get any second chance. If we get ourselves ambushed, if we die here—then the next thing human space
and
regul may know is more mri arriving, to take up the track the others left at Kesrith, and this time, this time with a grudge. The thing we’ve seen . . . 
continued.
Is that understood, out among the crew?”

“Yes, sir,” Galey said hoarsely. “Don’t know whether they know about the regul, but the other, yes, it’s something I think everybody reckons.”

“You don’t want to make a mistake in judgment, do you? You don’t want to make a mistake on the side of friendship and botch a report. You wouldn’t hold back information you could get out of SurTac Duncan. You understand how high the stakes are . . . and what an error could do down there.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m sending
Flower
and the science staff back down. Dr. Luiz and Boaz are friends of his. He’ll talk with them, trust them, as far as he likely trusts any human now. I have need of someone else, potentially. What we want is a substitute for a SurTac, someone who can operate in that kind of terrain.” He watched the apprehension grow, and a twinge of pity came on him. “Our options are limited. We have pilots we could better risk. You’re rated for
Santiago,
and you know your value . . . don’t have to tell you that. But it’s not a matter of skill in that department. It’s the land, and a sense of things—you understand what I’m saying.”

“Sir—”

“I want you first of all
reserved.
Just prep. We keep our options open. Maybe things will work out with mri contact. If not . . . you have a good rapport with the civs, don’t you?”

“I’ve been in and out of the ship more than most, maybe.”

“They know you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“In some things down there, that could be valuable; and you’ve been in the desert.”

“Yes, sir,” the answer came faintly.

“I want you available, whenever and wherever SurTac Duncan comes into contact with us; I want you available—if he doesn’t. Willing?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ll have some semblance of an office, whatever scan materials we come up with, original and interpreted. Whatever you think you need.” Koch delayed a moment more, pursed his lips in thought. “It took Duncan some few days to get from the mri to groundbase; allow—ten, eleven days. That’s the margin. Understood?”