A careful one second later the two backups leapt past him, facing either way. They waited in silence, eyes flickering in trained patterns.
“Nothing,” Serig said, coming to his feet and walking into the axial corridor. He glanced down at the readouts on his gauntlet.
“Air is Terran-standard basis.” Thinner than Kolnar, but with more oxygen and less sulfuric acid and ozone. Homeworld had much ozone at the surface, little in the stratosphere. “Slightly depleted oxygen levels, high level of necrotic decay products. Wouldn’t like to have to breathe it.”
“Proceed,” Belazir’s voice said.
“As you command, lord,” Serig replied. In the language of Kolnar, that phrase was one word. “Proceeding up axial corridor now.”
Almost all human-made ships still had a notional “bow” at the north pole, and that was the most common location for a bridge. Serig directed his subordinates forward with hand signals. They moved from one compartment to another, opening each, checking inside with a vision thread and then going on to the next.
“Sensors detect no live presence,” Serig reported. They moved forward again, two covering the one exposed, up to the small ship’s control center. “These chambers appear to be staterooms, lord, presently disused.”
“Better and better,” Belazir’s voice said. That implied extensive life-support facilities.
The north-end hatch yielded to the same simple random-number code as the exterior entranceway. The control chamber was a domed hemisphere with three couches, only one occupied. It had half-closed around the pilot’s body in a coldsleep cocoon, not fully deployed.
Serig moved to look down at the body.
“You were right; a woman,” Belazir said dryly.
“Not one that appeals to me,” his second-in-command replied. “Tshakiz, get a tissue sample.” He was glad for the filtered, neutral air that flowed through his helmet.
The rotting flesh slid greasily away from the probe. Serig looked elsewhere, touching the controls with slow caution. The shrill accented voice of the Medical Officer broke in. That was a low-status occupation, and the man was the gelded son of a slave mother.
“Subject has been dead approximately four days,” he announced. “Scan, please, my great lords.”
One of the ground fighters detached a sensor wand from her belt and ran it slowly from head to toe of the corpse. A minute’s silence followed.
“Preliminary analysis: death from overdose of coldsleep drugs, combined with oxygen starvation and dehydration when cocoon failed to properly deploy.”
Serig nodded. On single-crewed vessels the pilot would often use coldsleep, relying on the AI systems to handle the simple and tedious work of long interstellar transits. Slightly risky, but it saved lifespan.
“Ship systems are live,” Serig said. “Cryptography, please.” He punched a jack into the receptor and waited while the powerful machines on the Bride worked on the guardian programs of the enemy ship. “Worm is through. I have control of the computer.” That was simple, he thought. Not much computer security at all, and . . .
“Ah! Lord? The coldsleep system was sabotaged.”
“How wicked,” Belazir said, and they shared a chuckle. “Why?”
“A moment, lord. Yes, by the dugs of the Dreadful Mother! This is a commercial courier. The female was an agent for some merchant house, traveling with samples. She boasts of making the ‘sale of a lifetime’ at her most recent stop, a nexus-station designated SSS-900-C. Some rival did it.”
“It was the sale of her lifetime,” Belazir said.
This time Serig could hear more laughter in the background. He turned sharply to his assistants. “Nobody told you to stop working,” he barked. “Divine Seed of Kolnar! Lord, I have accessed the cargo manifest!”
He could hear Belazir grunt like a man belly-punched as the figures and data scrolled across to the Kolnari warships. Computers and computer parts; engineering software; fabrication systems; drugs; luxury consumer items, wines, silks . . .
“And lord! The cargo compartments have full climatic control!”
Rigged for the carrying of delicate cargo? That made the vessel beyond price to the Clan. With climate-controlled holds, she could be easily and cheaply rerigged to hold families or troops in coldsleep.
Belazir’s voice grew sardonic. “Captain’t‘Varak, I hope you are satisfied.” Nothing came over the circuit but the sound of teeth grinding. One of the other captains did venture a comment.
“Does this not seem too much like the answer to a prayer?” he murmured. “I sacrifice much to my joss and the ancestors, vessels of the Divine Seed, but . . .” The joss help the strongest first, the saying went.
“Under other circumstances, Zhengir’t‘Marid,” Belazir answered him coolly, “I might agree. But cousin, who could know we forayed in this direction? Only those we pursue, and they press forward in a disintegrating hulk with no communications capability since we blew it away.” Command snapped in his voice. “Serig. Secure the ship. Discard the corpse and flush the environmental systems. Are fungibles adequate?”
“More than adequate, Great Lord,” Serig said, hammering the glee out of his voice. My gods! My greed! he thought. A full percentage point would be his as noble-in-command of the boarding party. My lord is well pleased with me, he decided. He must, to give his bastard half-brother such an opportunity. Petit-nobles had been translated to full status for less.
“There is plenty of air,” he went on. “Surplus water. The pilot never awoke to renew.”
“Good. Await the prize crew—Alyze b’Marid will command it—and then return. Expedite! We will resume superluminal in less than an hour, or skin will be stripped.”
Alyze was the commander’s new third wife. Serig suspected she might be pregnant, and Belazir anxious to have her out of harm’s way before even the slight danger at the end of their chase. He nodded to himself. Such was good noble thinking, for a man’s honor was in the diffusion of his portion of the Divine Seed.
“Hearkening and obedience, lord,” he said. And this SSS-900-C will also be in the path of our pursuit, Serig thought. I will light ten sticks to my personal joss in apology.
He had kicked the little idol across his cabin in anger when he learned they were to be sent on a lootless, honorless pursuit mission while their comrades and clanfolk plundered Bethel. It seemed he had been premature.
Chapter Eleven
“Told ya,” Joat said.
“Yes,” Seld Chaundra said, turning his head aside.
The transit levels of SSS-900-C were still chaotic and barely-suppressed panic was rampant. Squads of weeping children pressed by, herded by an adult with a child in her arms. A caterpillar of toddlers held on to a cord which was tethered to a few protesting sub-adolescents.
Joat and Seld were off to one side in the shadows of an access bay. There were many at the upper globe’s north pole, what with the pumping and docking facilities and the multiple feeds needed. The housekeeping programs were laboring overtime, pumping odors of pine, sea-salt and wildflowers into the air. It still smelled of vomit and unchanged diapers and fear, and the baffles only muted the roar of voices. The two teenagers stepped backward as a man wearing the armband of a part-time policeman went by.
“I hate running out on my dad like this,” Seld said in a choked voice. “He’s gonna kill me, Joat.”
“No, the pirates may kill you, but all he can do is slap you around.”
Shocked, the boy looked up. “Dad never hits me!”
“Well, then you’ve got a pretty good dad, and you’re not running out on him—you’re staying with him. ‘S what you wanna do, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” He turned his face to the wall. “I can’t go . . . my mom. . . .” he said in a fierce tone. “I never saw her again . . . I woke up and she was just . . . gone.”
Surprised at herself—she generally hated to touch people—Joat put an awkward arm around his shoulders. He clutched at her for a moment, sobbing.
&
nbsp; “Sorry about blubbering,” he said after a moment. Then he grew conscious of the bearhug grip he was exerting, and broke away.
“‘Salright,” Joat said. Somehow it is, she thought, then flogged her mind back to practical matters. “Need a snot-rag?”
“Thanks.” He blew noisily on the one which she offered and then gave it back to her. “What do we do now?”
“We get out of sight. Channa’s going to go ballistic, and she’s nearly as hard to hide from as Simeon. Worse, ‘cause I can’t screw up her sensors.”
“There she is,” he said.
Joat’s head whipped around. The noise was reaching tidal proportions around the tall lean figure of Channa Hap. Only the escort of Vicker’s security personnel kept her from being bowled over in the crowd. She had a canvas carrier bag in one hand. Joat recognized the foot of the stuffed bear sticking out one side.
“That satisfies the letter of it,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Channa stalked into the lounge, opened the door to Joat’s room and flung the canvas bag she carried as hard as she could against the room’s far wall. It made a solitary spot of disorder in the servo-neat room. Then she shut the door and walked stiffly to her desk, sat down and began keying through her messages, back hunched in rejection.
“It’s not my fault,” Simeon finally ventured to say.
She turned slowly to glare at his column.
Oooh, I’m glad this is titanium crystal, Simeon thought. Now, if only there was something similar available for the psyche.
Just as slowly, just as silently, Channa turned back to her console.
Simeon sent her a message that read. “I’m sorry you had to go through that scene at Disembarkation.”
Channa let out an exasperated little hiss and slapped the screen. Simeon’s image appeared on it, wincing realistically.
Unwillingly, a smile quirked at her mouth. “Simeon, I would have been there anyway, to speak words of encouragement, to wish well, to shake hands, to show solidarity.” She swung a fist in a go-get-‘em gesture. “But I would have had a lot more credibility if I hadn’t been standing there with an overnight bag in my hand. Did you see the suspicious looks I got? Half of the evacuees probably think I’m on one of the other ships. You could have said something, a quiet word of warning in my ear, as it were. Then I could have dumped that damned incriminating bag!” She turned to look at his column again. “Why wasn’t she there?”
“She wouldn’t go,” Simeon said weakly. “She said she’d see you. I thought she meant there at the Boat Dock.”
“You did?”
“Well, I hoped,” Simeon said. “I tried my best to get her there. Pushed every emotional button I could. Manipulated shamelessly, you know the way I can.”
“Ol‘ silver-tongued Simeon slips up again, huh?”
“I can’t exactly get out of my shell and chase her down and hog-tie her, Channa. She wouldn’t go. She told me that we could never find her in fifteen minutes and she was right. Even you’d have to agree with that. Trying to manipulate Joat is like trying to suck liquid hydrogen through a straw.”
Channa sighed. “Indeed! But standing there with that bag was hideously embarrassing for me. Besides, I really wanted to get her to safety.”
“I know how you feel,” he soothed her. “This surrogate parent stuff is pretty intense.” And it was your idea, he reminded himself. Oddly, he felt no impulse to remind her. I guess I like it, he decided.
She ground the heels of her hands into red-rimmed eyes. “I apologize.”
Well, that’s a first. “I accept.”
“Announce me,” Amos ben Sierra Nueva said to the door.
It hinged softly, and he knew it would be turning to a screen on the interior, showing his image in real-time. Such things still made him a little nervous. Bethel had never used much in the way of sophisticated electronics. Doors there were usually plain honest wood. He smiled slightly in spite of himself. Here, wood was an unthinkably expensive luxury, and the most advanced technology, the stuff of common life. At least he had been able to dress properly, from the baggage somebody threw into the shuttle at the last minute. It was demoralizing to look like some cottonchopper goatherd from the backlands. Loose black trousers tucked into his boots, silver-link belt emphasizing the narrow hips, open robe throwing his broad shoulders into relief. He bowed ceremoniously as he entered, sweeping off his beret to Channa.
“Come in.” Channa’s voice was flat and tired as the door opened, but her face lit in an inadvertent smile of welcome.
Good, he thought, smiling back. Even in this desperate hour, it was pleasant to have so exotic and attractive a woman smile at him. Then he bowed again, to the column. To Simeon, he forced himself to think. And tried not to think of the pale deformed thing in there, among the tubes and neural circuits. Whenever the image came to him, a slight tinge of nausea accompanied it. He was afraid that Simeon could detect his reaction. He could imagine several sensors that would make it difficult or impossible to lie to a shellperson. Guiyon he had never thought of so. Guiyon had always been there in the background, a sympathetic voice from his earliest days. Guiyon was my friend.
“I am sorry to disturb you,” he began. “Now that the most urgent tasks are done, I wish to reiterate my desire to assist in the coming battle.”
“When our plans are more solid, I assure you there will be a place for you in them,” Simeon said.
Amos’s mouth quirked. You mean, when you’ve figured out something we can do, he thought.
“We are not trained as soldiers,” he said with a self-deprecating smile and a shrug. “And we are from a backward world. But,” he raised a finger, “I have thought of something which you both, being so close to the matter, may have overlooked.” He glanced from Simeon to Channa and back again. “It is something that Guiyon said that makes me think of this.
“He said to me, I am one of Central Worlds’ most valuable resources. The Kolnari do not have any brainships in their fleet and I do not intend to be the first.”
“Oh,” Channa murmured.
“Hell,” Simeon said. “I knew it but I didn’t think of it. Brains are so rare, out in the backlands.”
“Yes.” Amos nodded vigorously. “We must hide the fact that Simeon exists. Or the first thing that the Kolnari do will be to cut out Simeon’s shell and send it back to their fleet. This must not happen.”
“Indeed it must not,” Simeon said, his voice slow and flat. All three of them knew what followed from that. If the Kolnari did get their hands on a brain—one trained in strategy, at that—it would immediately change them from a wandering pack of scavengers to a first-rate menace.
“Simeon would never—” Channa began body, then trailed off.
“Yes.” Simeon’s voice was now as expressionless as a subroutine robotic. There were dozens of unpleasant ways of forcing a captive brain to capitulate. The most effective was also the worst: simply cut off the exterior sensor feeds which would mean sensory deprivation fugue in days or less. “I tend to forget how . . . helpless I am, most of the time,” he went on. “Forget I’m a cripple, so to speak.”
“You are not!” Channa blazed.
Amos blinked at the sight. She seemed to bristle, the widow’s peak of her rusty-brown hair rising. I would not like to have this lady wrathful with me, the Bethelite thought respectfully.
She forced herself to be calm. “Compared to you, we are cripples, Simeon,” she said. “You have a hundred abilities we lack.”
“Thank you,” he said in more normal tones. “Still, what Amos says is true. At all costs, we can’t let the Kolnari get their hands on me.”
The self-destruct sequence surfaced in the minds of both brawn and brain, like some monster rising from the depths of the ocean, with a wave of cold black water sweeping before it.
Amos coughed. “There is a way, I think. We may fool them. Convince them that there is no brain controller on this station. If indeed,” and his lips peeled back over his teeth in a
nasty grin, “barbarians such as the Kolnari even know of such persons.”
Seeing Channa about to speak, he held up his hand to forestall her. “Do I assume that Simeon’s name appears on far too many documents or news holos or whatever, for us to hide his very existence? Also, someone is sure to lapse and mention the name, thus giving rise to questions. So,” and he gave his cloak a little flourish, “I have come to offer myself as a false Simeon. To deceive them.” He looked from one to the other eagerly. “Is this not a good idea?”
“It’s . . .” Channa began, and looked at him with shining eyes. “It’s damn brilliant!” She sprang up and hugged him for a moment, then began to pace. “If we can get the substitution to work.”
“Well, it sure beats suicide,” Simeon said, for he had had to consider that as his only option. “One small point pops up, Amos. I’ve been here for forty years, and you’re what, twenty-eight?”
“Ah, a valid point to consider,” he said, “but as you have already pointed out, during their stay in this station, they are unlikely to spend time reviewing its history. They would have no reason not to accept me as Channa’s assistant. If you feel it is an important concern, we could always tell them that Simeon is a title, I could then be the Simeon-Amos.”
“Yes,” Channa said enthusiastically, “we could pretend it’s a traditional title. A position named after the first person who held it, an honorific! Why would they check if we say it is so and has always been? And that ploy would involve jimmying fewer personnel records—that’s a major plus. Especially with people who’ve been here a while. Faking that is like trying to pull one card out of a tower. Every change means more changes and pretty soon it cascades out of control.”
“There are the transients,” Simeon said meditatively. “Most of them don’t bother about who manages what so long as they’re not inconvenienced. We’ve pretty near dispatched so many who do know that the ruse might just work.” Simon began to enlarge the concept of deception. “Mmm, you know, we could use that old secondary control center that was on-line when the station was being built. Before I was installed here. These quarters don’t look much like an office. We could say this is a living accommodation.”