“A message torpedo to the fleet?” Serig asked.
“You echo my thoughts, Serig,” Belazir said. “Ready for instant transmission once we close our fist on our prey.”
The message sent back with the captured merchantman would have the Clan fleet on alert. But the transports could not yet have arrived at Bethel, much less landed there. Rigged for deep-space running, sufficient ships could be diverted to assist him without hindering the effort at Bethel. Say, ten days’ transit from the Saffron system, to be conservative; two or three days loading, depending on how many Father Chalku decided to send. Then set demolition charges, nice large ones to leave nothing larger than gravel. There might well be prisoners worth taking for skilled labor. The huge rectangular frame of a shipyard was now visible on one side of the station, and that meant that there would be rare and valuable slaves to sell.
With an effort, he restrained himself from rubbing his hands together. “Oh, what a surprise they have in store,” he said.
“Indeed,” Serig said. His eyes and teeth shone in the dim blue lights of the bridge and his voice was husky, like a man in the grip of lust. Which, Belazir reflected, was exactly what it was. Metaphorically and literally.
“Keep your eagerness in chains, my friend,” he said genially. “It is a good slave but a poor master.” He turned to Baila. “What traffic inbound?”
“None, Great Lord.”
“None?” Belazir raised a brow.
Curious, he thought, a space station built in an area nearly devoid of traffic. Is it old and due to be abandoned? Or is it new and as yet rarely used? A small chill diluted the perfection of his pleasure. There were alternatives here; he might be the hero who brought unimaginable wealth, or the immortal villain who revealed the existence of the Clan to an enemy more powerful than they.
He shook his head with a small, tssk of disgust. Impossible. The merchantman had been rich with treasure and it had just left the station. “Indications?”
“Great Lord, the background radiation is consistent with large-scale departures over the past five days.” Baila paused, hesitant. “Lord, it is difficult to be certain, with the density of the interstellar medium here. Subspace distortion damps out very quickly . . .”
The small chill became fingers of ice stroking the base of his spine. His testicles drew up in reflex.
“I want information, not excuses!” he said in a harsh voice. “Ready the seeker missiles.” If the accursed Bethelite cowards had warned the station—prompting the normal traffic to flee—they would destroy it and run immediately. He was nearly certain he had crippled the prey’s communications apparatus in the pursuit, but “nearly” grilled no meat. But, if it had escaped, where was it? Or had the station done his work for him? A rich station would have cause to be wary of unexpected visitors. “Continue stealthed approach.”
That meant running with the powerplants down, off accumulator energy, on a ballistic sublight approach. Slow, they would take years to come near at this speed, but quite safe at a respectable distance. At any moment they could power up and close in swiftly at superluminal speeds. This was a modification of a tactic the Clan sometimes used against merchantmen on the outskirts of a solar system. And they were close enough that lightspeed was not much of a problem for detection purposes. Briefly, he considered running back on FTL for a few parsecs, to see if he could pick up traces of in- or outbound traffic over the past week. Then he shook his head, rejecting that plan. Signal degraded too much over distance, and his own trail would advertise his presence. While the station retained subspace communicator capacity, it presented the Clan with a deadly risk.
Taking time to consider a problem from all angles was no excuse for inaction. Strike the hardest blow you could, then see if another was needed; that was the Kolnari way.
“See if you can pick anything up from their perimeter relay beacons,” he said. In dust this thick even local realspace beacons needed amplification.
“Message, Great Lord,” said Baila.
“I would hear it.”
Immediately a woman’s crisp voice filled the control center, “Warning all ships, warning all ships. SSS-900-C is under Class Two quarantine: I repeat, Class Two quarantine. The following species are advised not to make port at these facilities under any circumstances.”
A list of alien species followed, most of them unknown to’t‘Marid.
“Human visitors are restricted to the dock facilities and the entertainment areas immediately adjacent to them. You are advised to continue on to your next port of call. Warning . . .”
The message began to repeat and Baila cut it off. “Further scan, lord: there are two debris fields. Both of them between us and the station. The one nearest the station is largely of natural ferrous compounds, probability ninety-seven percent-plus semi-processed asteroidal material. The other, nearest the Bride, is of . . . metal and ship-hull compounds, finely divided. Computer assessment is that the mass represented by the metal debris is equivalent to the mass represented by the prey ship.”
She touched several controls, and the multiple screens displayed a scene of tumbling scraps of half-melted metal, no single piece larger than a meter wide or long. Most were a fog of metallic particles.
His eyes narrowed. The quarantine could explain the absence of shipping. Baila’s analysis suggested that, either the prey ship, which he knew had been ancient, had disintegrated under the stress of redlining or the station had destroyed it. The former was more likely since no weaponry had been detected on the station. No doubt the truth of the end to the Bethelite refugee ship would be found in the station’s records.
“Your appraisal?” Belazir asked his weapons officer.
“Great Lord,” the man said, collating a probability run, “the bulk of the fragments are definitely the result of ultra-high temperature breakdown. The profile is completely compatible with sudden energy discharge from the main internal drive coil of a very large ship. Some of the other debris—” he called up relevant views “—show blast fragmentation. That could either have been the result of direct hits with chemical-energy warheads, or secondary propagation effects when the engine blew. The Shockwave through the hull . . .”
“I’m aware of the phenomenon,” Belazir said dryly. The weapons officer shrank back. Belazir’t‘Marid had fought his first space engagement before the younger noble was born. “Continue scan and analysis. Inform me of any anomalies.”
“They blew up,” Serig said.
“Just as they arrived? How convenient,” Belazir said. He gnawed a thumb. “Possibly too convenient?”
“Possibly. However, we were expecting their engines to fail catastrophically at any moment. They were sublimating bits of their cooling vanes for the last thirty light-years.”
“True. It is still a coincidence.”
“Once is coincidence,” Serig said in ritual tone, “twice is happenstance—”
“—and the third time is enemy action, yes,” Belazir finished irritably. “But for the station to be plague-ridden at the same time?”
“The scumvermin races are weak of body, lord,” he noted.
Belazir signed confirmation. The seed of Kolnar was strong. It had to be, to have survived so long on a planet not suitable for human beings, and further devastated by so many centuries of reckless development and continual war with every nuclear, chemical and biological weapon ingenuity could produce. When the Clan fled a losing struggle, they had kept the tradition of culling any child who showed signs of vulnerability to infection. In fact, it was a stroke of fortune to have the enemy immobilized by a menace that was no menace to the Kolnari.
“Hold position. Call in the consorts.”
“Yes, Great Lord.”
Belazir glanced at his communications officer. Her face was bright with excitement, too. He smiled. She was young; this was her first term of duty. He remembered well that sharp, eager feeling. He grinned. Ah, but he was feeling now, at the ripe age of thirty, that his life was half over.
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“All captains confirming receipt of your orders, Great Lord. Moving into position.”
“Excellent,” he said, glancing back at the schematic. You have already given a cry of distress, oh rich and beauteous station, he thought vindictively. The entire universe was in conspiracy against the Clan—against all of Kolnar and its children. Soon you will scream.
Channa turned at her desk. “Hi Joat, welcome home.”
A relieved, shy smile greeted her. “Um . . . gonna take a shower.”
“You can use it,” Channa said, sniffing. “When you’re through, I want to introduce you to someone.”
“Ah,” Simeon said lightly. “We’re a family again.”
“Shut up, you hunk of tin,” Channa said good-naturedly, throwing a wad of scrunched-up tissue in the general direction of the pillar. “How does this look?”
She punched a key to feed in the distribution of supply caches.
“Hmmm. Not bad. Okay, how about we seal off the following passageways?” A schematic of several decks sprang up. “If you didn’t know about modern fabrication methods, that would look right for structural members.”
“Good, good—what does that give us?”
“About a thousand people we can stick away in corners—the ‘b’ list.” Those were the ones that they hadn’t had space available to evacuate.
“Nobody essential, I’m afraid,” Channa said. They had agreed that they had to let essential staff take the risks, as their absence would elicit questions.
“No, but it’ll cut down the number of potential victims quite nicely. Also, it’ll give us a chance to scatter around some stuff that’ll come in useful later. Ah, Simeon-Amos.”
The Bethelite leader’s eyes were red-rimmed, but his smile brought a warm lurch to Channa’s diaphragm. “I think I have mastered the basic administrative structure,” he said. “It is not too strange.”
Channa raised a brow. A 900-series station isn’t too strange to a backworlder? she thought.
The thought must have been obvious, but Amos only spread his hands and tossed his head, setting aswirl the coal-black curls of his shoulder-length mane. The blue eyes twinkled beneath the broad clear brow.
Oooooo, Channa thought, and fought to bring her attention back to his words.
“In any large organization, there will be certain constants,” he said. “The central authority; officers in charge of various departments; a structure for meetings to coordinate activities; procedures for routine decision-making, and so forth. This is not too dissimilar to my family’s holdings on Bethel. We, too, were essentially coordinators of the activities of many independent entrepreneurs. There are no ranchers or farmers here, of course, but both communities have mining, manufacturing, education, cultural facilities . . .”
“Culture?” Joat ducked back into the lobby, toweling her wet hair. For a wonder, she had on something more formal than the shapeless, patchwork-colorful overalls that were current fashion among SSS-900-C’s youth. “Like holos and virtie games and stuff?”
“Ahhh . . .” Amos hesitated. He had been thinking more of choral song and traditional dancing. “The general principle is the same.”
The servos had been setting out the evening meal. Simeon had programmed them to meet the basic dietary superstitions of the Bethelite religion, although Amos had turned out to be flexible. Channa shuddered mentally at some of the things she’d screened in that Bethel text. How in God’s name, for example, were they supposed to check that none of the materials had ever been touched by a menstruating woman?
They sat down, Amos murmured a prayer, and for another wonder Joat waited a second before grabbing the nearest bowl. She had turned out to be a monumentally unfussy eater, but in sheer capacity she belied the scrawny underdeveloped frame. Between—or sometimes during—mouthfuls, she grilled Amos about Bethel.
“Sounds dull,” she said at last.
“I thought so, too,” Amos said, pushing a bowl of steamed millet closer to her. She shoveled several helpings onto her plate and heaped them with sour cream and chives.
“Joat,” Channa said gently. “That really doesn’t go with pineapple slices, you know.”
“Why not?” Joat asked, turning to her with a milk mustache on her upper lip. The girl licked it away with satisfaction as Channa searched for a reply, gave up, and turned her attention back to Amos.
“Hiding away all that stuff was smart of Channa,” she said thoughtfully. “Always gotta have supplies in your bolt-hole unless you’re fardlin‘ stupid.”
“Sound strategy,” Amos said seriously.
He certainly seems to be good with children, Channa thought, stirring her food around with her fork. Girls don’t bother him. Not pre-pubescent ones, at least.
In her inner ear, Simeon began to croon an ancient song: “Across a croooowded room . . .”
“Shut up,” she subvocalized.
“This place has got more back-alleys than you’d believe,” Joat was saying. “Not like a ship at all, really. You can get anywhere from anywhere and ain’t nobody can stop you, if you know where you’re goin‘. Some of the places pinch grudly, but they’re in-able if you’re sveltsome.”
“I would have thought it much like a ship of space,” Amos replied courteously. Channa could see his lips move silently for an instant as he puzzled out Joat’s slang. That was no wonder. Half of it was her own invention.
“A whole other order of magnitude,” Simeon said. “No mass limits on a station—the SSS-900-C wasn’t expected to go anywhere. The outer shell was fixed, as well as some of the major facilities, but the rest was intended to allow organic growth up to a couple of hundred thousand people, max. We’ve found natural expansion is the best way to stabilize a real community, as opposed to a transient community, like a passenger vessel.”
“That is good sense,” Amos said meditatively. “On my family’s estate, planning towns was similar. If you set down every detail, the place has no life. When Uncle Habib decides to put his tobacco store next to Aunti Scala’s pastry shop or Brother Falken’s saddlery, and that brings an ice-cream parlor, it then follows that the town becomes a living and efficient entity.”
“Why do you talk so funny?” Joat asked.
“Why do you talk so funny?” Amos parried, and they both laughed. “Because Bethel was cut off for so long. We did not even screen or broadcast data from other worlds, so our people’s way of speech changed little, and those changes differed from those in the Central Worlds, which had dealings with many other worlds and cultures.”
“Central Worlds?” Joat asked. “Oh, you’re fardlin‘—’cuse me—way off there. This is the hikstik, frontier, you know.”
“To you, not me.” He paused. “I think, Joat, that someone besides yourself should know of these hidden ways of yours.”
“You should see it,” she said enthusiastically. “You wouldn’t believe what’s back there!”
“I would very much like to see it,” he told her gravely. “But, I have not much time left for my studies.” Her face fell. “Still,” he said, “I think that it is important that trusted people, other than just you and Simeon, should know these back ways of yours. Would you be willing to show my friend, Joseph?”
“He’s your head honcho, hey?”
“My brother and my right hand,” Amos said seriously.
“Okay, if he’s nanna grudly.”
Amos gave up trying to interpret that remark and glanced over at Simeon’s image in the screen.
“Grudly,” the brain said in his most professorial. “An all purpose negative. In this context—‘not too grudly’—straight-laced, conventional, boring, unimaginative.”
“No, no. To tell the truth and shame the devil, Joseph was, in fact, a dockside desperado when I met him,” Amos said.
Joat lit up, her urchin smile taking a year or two off the extra time life had dealt her, so that she looked twelve. “Sure! I’ll be glad to show Joseph around. Whenever you like.”
“Thank y
ou. And now I must return to my studies.” He sighed theatrically and rose.
“I know how you feel,” Joat said, shaking her head in resignation.
“He’s made a conquest there,” Channa subvocalized. “Wonder how he did it?”
“Joat is no longer a feral child,” Simeon pointed out. “We broke the ground for him. Being glamorous doesn’t hurt. And he listens to her. He’s naturally interested in people, I think, under the weird socio-religious stuff they rammed down his throat.”
“You’re right,” Channa said aloud, looking dreamily at the now closed door of Amos’ quarters.
Well, Simeon-Amos, Simeon thought, you’re a hit with both my girls. A petty observation, but couldn’t he indulge in pettiness in the privacy of his own mind?
“‘Course I’m right,” Joat said. She was having more of the pineapple slices, fresh from the vats, lavishly dolloped with ice cream. “You flipping the sheets with him yet?”
“Joat!” Channa said warningly, reaching over to flick her on the ear with thumb and forefinger.
“Watch it!” Joat said, rubbing the offended lobe. “I’ll report you to Gorgan the Organ.” She grinned unrepentantly. “I know all about it, y’know.”
“You may have observed—and I wouldn’t put that past you for a nanosecond, but you don’t understand what you’ve seen. You also have no manners.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” Joat said complacently.
“You needn’t act so smug about the lack,” Simeon cut in.
“Why not?” Joat asked. “Lots of way-neat stuff you can’t do if you’ve got manners.”
My God, Channa thought, looking up from her notescreen.
All of them were looking terrible, but Doctor Chaundra looked old. And haunted as well. Channa was a little surprised. She would have thought him one of the ones who could handle the fear.