The Web and the Stars (32 page)

A week ago, he had supervised robots as they repaired the locks on the cells, so he knew the codes. Now, after the Guardians left him alone, he uttered the eight digits aloud to voice-activate the lock. The metalloy door slid open with a soft squeal.

Gio ran out into the corridor, and made his way to a secondary entrance to the headquarters. Again, he knew the codes to get out, since he had been one of the most trusted Guardians, and had been sent on several reconnaissance missions into the nearby towns.

But as he worked the codes, he heard something behind him and whirled.

Thinker stood there, with orange lights glowing and blinking around his face plate. “My probability program brought me here,” the robot said.

“You predicted I would be here?” Gio asked.

“Probabilities are not the same as prescient-based predictions. Machine programs are not the same as organic brains. Nonetheless, my system works rather efficiently.”

Expecting Thinker to detain him, Gio hesitated and considered his options. The door was not responding.

He repeated the codes. This time the door to the secondary entrance opened, sliding into the wall.

Gio stepped through the doorway, not feeling the electronic signal that the robot fired into his brain, erasing all knowledge of the headquarters location. For Thinker, the safety of Noah and the Guardians was paramount, and he had decided it was time for Gio and the organization to part. This man who had worn armor and had served in Thinker’s own army could not cause trouble any longer.…

As Gio ran through the moonlit woods, he felt confused and lost. Why couldn’t he tell which direction to go? His brain whirled, making him dizzy. Sitting on the ground to gather his thoughts, he saw the trees whirling around him. Every direction looked the same to Gio, and he had no idea where he was, though part of him knew that he had been here many times before.

Back in the headquarters, Thinker had been behaving strangely. But where had that been, and what had the facility looked like? He had no images of the place, only of the people and robots he had been with there.

Thinker did something to me,
Gio realized.

Feeling a wave of sadness, he knew he had not betrayed Noah at all. Though Gio’s motives had been complex and he had a penchant for promoting his own interests, he had genuinely liked and respected Noah, and had hoped to advance his own career in the Guardian organization. Admittedly Gio had taken shortcuts to get ahead, but he wasn’t the only one who’d ever done that.

Now all of his hopes were dashed. The Guardians thought he was a bad person, but that wasn’t the case at all. He had always been loyal to Noah, and had done a good job for him.

He just couldn’t get along with those meddlesome teenagers.

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Such an odd pairing, Princess Meghina and Lorenzo del Velli. She is known to show compassion, and has a love for exotic animals, while he has revealed himself to be the opposite, a cruel and scheming man. It suggests that our perceptions of both of them may not be entirely accurate.

—Subi Danvar, security briefing at Guardian headquarters

The young Doge was not sure how to respond to the conciliatory messages from Noah Watanabe, which he had been receiving in the form of personal letters delivered by an intermediary. To Anton, it seemed as if he himself had lived two lives. In the first one, Noah had been his beloved uncle and much-admired Master of the Guardians. But in Anton’s second incarnation, Noah had been the most wanted criminal in the Merchant Prince Alliance, accused of murdering his own father and of guerrilla attacks against corporate and governmental interests.

Dressed in a golden cloak over a jerkin and leggings, Anton paced the perimeter of a rooftop garden connected to his private office suite. Across the square he saw the Hall of Princes, with its red-and-gold banners fluttering in the breeze, each emblazoned with the golden tigerhorse crest of the del-Velli royal house.

My house, and my father’s,
he thought.

Even with the change in his own position, and the resultant metamorphosis in his relationship with the Guardians, Anton didn’t think he could ever hate Noah. Now, in his official capacity as the most powerful of all merchant princes, Anton might be forced to put him to death, but he could never hate him.

Anton held the latest letter now, written in Noah’s own hand. The paper crackled in a gust of wind. He had delayed answering the earlier communications, which must have made Noah think he was ignoring him. But that was not his intent.

It occurred to the Doge that Noah might very well guess what was going through his mind at that very moment, that Anton had never intended any disrespect by not answering. Noah must know that his own sister would interfere and prevent answers, but in this case that had not occurred. The letters had been delivered to him directly, and Francella did not know about them. Somehow, Noah had used his contacts to arrange that.

The young leader found himself in a difficult political position, feeling conflicting pressures and loyalties. The letter in his hands mentioned setting priorities, and placed the Mutati threat near the top. Noah wanted a cease-fire, so that the Guardians and merchant prince forces might work together for a common good.

Anton re-read the letter’s provocative last sentence:
“I have recently obtained access to a podship, with a pilot for it. “

This intrigued Anton immensely, but he was politically aligned with his own mother Francella, who hated her brother. In addition, Anton was now married to the daughter of General Jacopo Nehr, a man who was still on friendly terms with Lorenzo del Velli—who had recently instituted a program to find Noah’s elusive Guardians and annihilate them. The former Doge was doing that with his own private forces, in alliance with various corporations who opposed Noah’s guerrilla environmental activities.

So far Anton had used his own influence to keep his forces and other government resources out of such operations, asserting that they were needed elsewhere. In reality he still admired his uncle, and could never envision taking overt action against him. Anton had also resisted making any contact with him, thinking it was best to remain essentially neutral and let the warring factions fight it out among themselves.

I
must not allow personal feelings to interfere,
Anton thought as he went back into his office.
I must make the right decision for the Alliance.

From youthful inexperience, he was not certain whom to consult about this situation. As time passed, he had come to the realization that he would need to make the decision on his own. He added the letter to the others, locked away in a cabinet.

Chapter Sixty-Nine

It is one thing to know you are going to die someday, at an indeterminate moment. It is quite another to see the process accelerate in front of your eyes.

—Francella Watanabe

With money, all things are possible, she thought. What a lie that is, what a cruel lie.

Money could not buy love or happiness, or the salvation of Francella’s life, which continued to dwindle away while she suffered helplessly. For weeks, the wealthiest woman in the Merchant Prince Alliance had been holed up on the lower floors of her cliffside villa, avoiding all Human contact. She took her food through slots in the door like a prisoner, and she wasn’t much different from that, because she was trapped inside her ever-weakening body. She looked like an old lady now, like her own grandmother. The elixir that had been prepared from Noah’s blood was not working on her at all, though she had been trying it in all conceivable doses, taking care to space them out (as Bichette had recommended) so that she did not overdose.

Enraged, she hobbled through the villa, even going to the top floor that was still leased to Lorenzo, though he had not been there in months. She smashed every mirror in the elegant home, even breaking anything that showed the slightest reflection of her aging face. Hardly any piece of glax survived, and she had every window covered on the inside (and many on the outside) with shutters. She even ordered that every serving robot be painted in dull colors, and that their synthetic eyes and other forms of visual sensors have no sheens whatsoever. Everything in the villa had to be either modified or replaced, to meet her demands. Even the smallest item that could cast a reflection.

Throughout Francella’s increasing madness, money rolled in. Much of it amounted to paper profits, since she received regular nehrcom-transmitted statements on how her holdings continued to mount around the galaxy. But a lot of it was real and tangible, profits that she could get her hands on from her extensive Canopan operations, and from her generous share of her son’s tax collection revenues, much of which came in from the many companies that had their galactic headquarters on Canopa. This planet, home to Prince Saito Watanabe, had been second in its wealth only to Timian One. And now, with the obliteration of the capital world, Canopa was preeminent.

She had enough money to keep CorpOne’s expensive medical laboratories and other industries going strong for a long time, facilities that were now heavily guarded by her own corporate military forces, along with contingents of Red Berets that Anton had assigned to her. With money, it should be possible to find a cure for her malady. But how long would it take? She was running out of time.

In her rising despair, she had considered hurling herself off the cliff by her villa, shooting herself in the head (or having someone do it), taking poison or having it injected, and even getting into a vacuum rocket and flying far away into space, bound for unknown regions. How romantic that last option sounded, and how utterly foolish. If she did that, or decided on any of the other options, it would amount to giving up. And she wasn’t about to do that. As long as she could manage one breath from her lungs, she would struggle to have a second, and a third.

Each mouthful of air and each moment had become precious to her, but the effort to sustain herself was hellish. She wished she could just rest and stop thinking about her problems, but knew she had to keep trying. Something would turn up, a medical procedure or even a miracle that had seemed impossible before. If her brother could have his miracle, she deserved her own, too.

Her thoughts ranged from philosophy to the pits of gloom, from hope and light to dark, homicidal rage. Her medical researchers lived in terror of her, and well they should, for their inexcusable failures. Periodically she had been getting rid of the people she felt were incompetent, or getting in the way of progress. All of her medical laboratories had been fitted with video-recording devices, enabling her to watch the progress of each experiment closely, listen in on the conversations, and send out her killers. All while never leaving her villa. Thus far she had spared Dr. Bichette, but with her own increasing medical knowledge—from observing and from her studies of technical holobooks—she had been selecting the doctors to work with him.

Bichette had been recommending that she broaden the scientific study of the elixir by bringing in more test subjects than just herself and the handful of others they had been using. She was coming around to agreeing with him. By seeing how the elixir worked on different people, it would surely reveal more information, and might open up new, critical avenues of research.

So it was that one day Francella transmitted her orders directly to Dr. Bichette, who had been ordered to never go out of range. “I want you to immediately distribute elixir to a broad spectrum of Canopa’s population,” she said. “Charge a price for it, but not too high, so that we pick up a variety of social strata and genetic types. Don’t put any limitations on it. I want all galactic races—at least those on the planet now—to have access to the elixir. Include a sampling from Lorenzo’s space station, too.”

Francella could not see Bichette on any screen at the moment, but she heard him muttering angrily, followed by the suction sound of a toilet. She smiled to herself.

Presently, she saw him in the hallway outside the restroom, staring up into an electronic eye. “Did I hear you right?” he asked.

She saw two robots with dull silver patinas pass by him and continue on their way.

“You did, and I want it instituted immediately. My lawyers will form a new subsidiary of CorpOne to handle the sales. Mmm, we’ll call it LifeCorp, and its product will be the Elixir of Life. How does that sound?”

“Excellent, ma’am, but I must tell you something we have discovered. We can produce millions of capsules, but we must be careful not to use up all of Noah’s blood plasma in the manufacturing process. Until we locate him, the blood supplies we have are irreplaceable.”

“Of course, of course.”

“Very well then, ma’am. I’ll take care of it right away.”

“I know you will.”

Everything in Francella Watanabe’s life was on the fast track, including her bodily decay and the commands she issued in a desperate attempt to stave off the end.

In a matter of days, LifeCorp salesmen spread out to the major cities of Canopa, using old-fashioned hucksterism and showmanship to draw crowds and sell the product. In this manner, they sold more than two hundred thousand capsules of elixir, as many as they had been allotted, while leaving plenty of Noah’s plasma for Francella herself and for other studies.

Even in the face of mounting military and political tensions, her new profits were substantial. But she didn’t care a whit about the money. Concurrent with the marketing program, she dispatched an army of medical researchers to study the path of each capsule of elixir after it was sold, analyzing how it affected those who took it. Each purchaser had to sign a holodocument, agreeing to cooperate with the research program. Offered the prospect of eternal life, no one argued with that.

Out of all the elixir capsules that were sold, the product did enhance the DNA of a small number of people … but only six. This was in line with a computer projection that Francella discovered Dr. Bichette had withheld from her. Against what have been expected, she actually forgave him for that, as she came to realize he had not wanted to discourage her, and she would not have wanted him to. Even if the odds were pitiful, and they were close to that, she wanted every chance she could get. Every straw of hope.

The sales and research program became like a lottery, with the prize going to only a few. But what a prize it was! The winners emerged under widespread publicity and then tried to continue their lives and vocations, envied by all who knew them.

One of the lucky winners was Princess Meghina, the infamous Mutati who wanted to be Human, and who had remained in that shape for so long that she could not change back. She lived in her own private apartments on Lorenzo’s orbital Pleasure Palace.

Far across the galaxy, at the Tulyan Starcloud, Eshaz was summoned to the private office of the First Elder. As Eshaz entered, he saw Kre’n standing at her central work table, with Dabiggio sitting in a sling chair on one side. Uncharacteristically, the big Tulyan Elder had a smile on his bronze-scaled face, which surprised Eshaz.

“And where is your Parvii friend and her vast fleet of podships?” Dabiggio asked.

“She’ll be back,” Eshaz said.

“With the ships?” Dabiggio’s large body caused the sling chair to sag low, just above the floor.

“If anyone can do it, she can.”

“So, she’s a super Parvii, just as Noah Watanabe is a super-Human. Is that it? My, you certainly have influential friends. But has she even sent a message? Any word at all?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Eshaz admitted.

“We should never have let her go,” Dabiggio said. He hefted himself out of the chair and stood by Eshaz, at least a head taller than him. “She admitted having information beyond the reach of our truthing touch … all that stuff about breedmasters, war priests, and unstoppable telepathic weapons. She was probably a spy, and has given military intelligence about us to the Parviis.”

“After millions of years, the Parviis have a lot of dirty tricks,” another Elder said, a thin male who was one of the followers of Dabiggio. “The way they magnify themselves should tell us something. They never are what they appear to be. How do we know they even resemble Humans in their appearance? Maybe they’re something else entirely, something they don’t want us to know about. Think about the way their swarms move, too, defying physics and even the imagination. They breathe without air? What are we to believe about such a race?”

“Even if Tesh Kori brings the ships,” Dabiggio said, “we shouldn’t let her back into the starcloud. I say we keep the mindlink barrier up and strike the fleet the way we hit the swarms.”

“If she brings the ships, we’re going to let her in,” Kre’n said, interrupting the exchange between the Elders. “Bringing them here would be a feat never seen in the annals of history.”

“And you would sacrifice our race just to see it?” Dabiggio asked. “There is no limit to the tricks they could pull on us if we let them in. These are
Parviis
we’re dealing with, remember, not innocent children.”

“We’re all in trouble anyway,” Kre’n said. “Even if she brings us half that many, or a hundredth, we have to take the chance.”

“OK,” Dabiggio said, grudgingly. “But if she doesn’t get back soon we need to embark on repair missions with what we have, making a last-ditch effort to save what’s left of the galaxy.”

“Agreed,” Kre’n said.

“She’ll be back,” Eshaz repeated. “I know she will.”

At that moment, thousands and thousands of Tulyan repair teams were being assembled on the three worlds of the starcloud, along with the potions and other supplies they needed for their work. As it looked now, there would be many more teams than ships, a reality that would restrict the efforts considerably.

To deal with this serious limitation, the Elders were assembling reports from all of their web
caretakers. The trouble spots were being prioritized on a triage basis, like injuries on an immense galactic battlefield.