Then she was inside the melding chamber, one among many. Ten. Twelve. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. The guards, waiting outside, sealed the chamber. The doors would only open from the inside.
Sr’o, trembling, extended the first tubacle. Lr’o took up the limb, and the eye and heat receptor within went dark. The ear within went all but deaf, sensing only the beating of two hearts.
The tubacle probing within Sr’ o’s own found its mark.
A jolt like the shock from an electric hunter-worm coursed through her mind. There was a flash, indescribable, and from the recesses of her mind unimaginable insights beckoned.
More! She must have more! Switching to ventral respiration, drifting, she extended her remaining tubacles. She groped all around her and felt probing in return. Limb found limb, aligned, conjoined . . .
Ganglia meshing!
Feedback building!
Heart pounding!
Electricity surging!
We will take over. The command echoed and reechoed in Sr’ o’s mind. Her own feeble thoughts, ephemeral and trivial, faded. . . .
Ol’t’ro, the group mind, had emerged.
Ol’t’ro considered:
The cargo ship, transmitting all the appropriate call signs, with its proper escort. It carried urgently needed supplies from the home world, Jm’ho.
The hegemony of Tn’ho over the nations of Jm’ho.
The origin of that dominance: Ol’t’ro’s collective intelligence—and the flow of new technology it had engendered—harnessed to the ruthlessness of Tn’ho’s rulers. In every generation, the Tn’Tn’ho was more cruel, more controlling, more ambitious, than his predecessor.
The awe, fear, jealousy, and disgust with which most Gw’oth viewed group minds like Ol’t’ro.
The rage when Ol’t’ro demanded release from their gilded cage.
Breaking free. Escaping Jm’ho in ships that Ol’t’ro’s own genius—and their daring among Puppeteers and humans—had made possible. Fleeing with a few trusted allies, free thinkers, from the certain and terrible enmity of cast-off masters.
A new home established far from Jm’ho. A home past the Fleet of Worlds, beyond New Terra, to complicate any attack should the refugees be discovered.
The colony’s increasingly inadequate food supply. (A hint of protest, our people are loyal, surfaced from the unit Sr’o.)
And so, circling around to where Ol’t’ro had begun: the timely arrival of aid.
The swiftness with which Tn’ho’s rivals—not necessarily Ol’t’ro’s allies—had sent that aid. A welcome outcome, and yet . . .
Another interruption bubbled up from the depths of the gestalt. It was less than thought, more than memory. An insinuation: I suspect.
Er’o was four generations departed, his many-times-transcribed engrams grown faint. Only the most profound influences, the most deeply inscribed lessons, persisted so long after bodily death. Influences like the human, Sigmund Ausfaller. The lesson that paranoia was a survival trait.
But what did Er’o suspect?
Any direct assault on Kl’mo risked retaliation by the survivors, and it took only one ship and one survivor to forge a fearsome kinetic weapon. Impact by a ship moving at relativistic speed could kill everyone on a planet.
Yet any overt attack also risked provoking the humans and Puppeteers whom a war fleet would pass en route. And a physical assault risked killing Ol’t’ro, the very source of Tn’ho’s preeminence, when the goal was to reenslave them.
If the Tn’Tn’ho would have his revenge on his rebellious subjects, what might he attempt?
A second insinuation: A reward?
What reward might the Tn’Tn’ho lavish upon vassals willing to betray Ol’t’ro and their colonists?
Think like Sigmund Ausfaller, Er’ o’s remnant urged.
A direct assault was imprudent and the people were loyal. But the colonists must eat. . . .
“Divert the approaching ship,” Ol’t’ro ordered themselves, preparing to dissolve the meld. “Impound it. Let nothing and no one disembark.”
20
Stars shone diamond bright in Aegis’ bridge display.
From heads held low over the pilot’s console, the better, if need be, to escape into hyperspace, Nessus watched the slowly approaching starship. It was a big vessel, longer and far broader than Aegis. A General Products #3 hull.
The trills and arpeggios of the newcomer’s name were lyrical, evoking bucolic companionship and gentle breezes, fetlock-high meadowplant tickling one’s legs, and a cloudless sky overhead. It did not translate well to Interworld. Contentment must suffice for Louis.
But things more fundamental than a label were at issue. Achilles had nearly killed Nessus and Louis! The sooner they got Achilles off Aegis, the better.
“Twenty kilometers, Louis,” Nessus called over the intercom. “Closing speed is ten kilometers per hour.”
“I’m ready,” Louis answered.
“This is the Concordance starship Aegis,” Nessus radioed.
A holo opened to reveal a familiar figure. His eyes were a deep, clear blue. He was slender, with a neatly coiffed mane. Vesta, longtime aide to Nike.
“Hello, Nessus,” Vesta sang, his voices a forceful contralto. “We are ready to receive your . . . package.”
“Greetings, Vesta. I did not expect to see you here.” What did the appearance of Nike’s protégé mean?
“The Hindmost has his prerogatives.”
Nessus muted the ship-to-ship connection. “Louis?”
Louis was monitoring from a terminal in Achilles’ cabin, where Voice would be translating. “Of course, I don’t know Vesta. Do you trust him?”
“I know him. He has long served the Concordance.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
How did one explain the nuances of Experimentalist politics to a human, even one as perceptive as Louis? Or the shadow of doubt cast over everyone who had passed through Scouting Academy while Achilles was hindmost of its faculty, secretly nurturing a cult of personality. Planting the seeds of future rebellion.
Was Vesta among Achilles’ acolytes?
“Nessus?”
“The Hindmost trusts Vesta.” Nessus had no other answer to offer, and it ignored that Baedeker had had to accept even Achilles into his cabinet. To be Hindmost bestowed neither infallibility nor unlimited power.
“I guess that will have to do,” Louis said.
Nessus unmuted the ship-to-ship connection. “Vesta, we are ready, too.”
“Transmit when you are ready.” Vesta appended a fifteen-digit stepping-disc address.
“Proceed,” Nessus directed Louis. And in a moment Achilles, still in stasis, was teleported to the waiting ship for trial on Hearth.
Nessus set course for New Terra, and Louis could not help noticing: the Library remained aboard Aegis.
Whatever the Hindmost believed, it seemed that Nessus had doubts about Vesta.
Achilles lay stunned, crumpled onto the deck in ignominious defeat. The next moment the corridor vanished and he was in an unfamiliar room . . . he did not know where. Not anyplace he knew aboard Aegis.
The stunner blast still held him voiceless and immobile. Only his thoughts were free to roil, his rage to mount. After far too long, his limbs began to tingle. Breathing became less labored. “Where am I?” he wheezed.
“Safe for now, Excellency,” familiar voices sang from behind. Vesta!
Achilles stood and turned, his legs trembling. Surveying the room, he saw many overstuffed cushions, a deluxe synthesizer, a desk and computer. Mouth holds in the walls and ceiling. Another ship, then. Not a hindmost’s suite but a comfortable cabin.
Vesta stood with heads bowed respectfully, unable to meet Achilles’ gaze. A medical-emergency stasis generator peeked from a pocket of Vesta’s sash.
“Where am I?” Achilles asked again, this time with stern grace notes.
Vesta wilted further. “At Nessus’ report, Baedeker ordered that a ship be s
ent to bring you . . . to justice, he called it.”
Achilles piled cushions and settled himself. “And instead, where do we go?”
“We must return to Hearth, Excellency, as I was ordered.” Vesta plucked at his mane. “We share this ship with two squads of Clandestine Directorate security personnel.”
Achilles stared. “You have failed me.”
“Softer, Excellency,” Vesta pleaded. “Guards wait in the corridor.”
Guards who must not know Vesta’s true allegiance. “Does Baedeker suspect you?”
“I do not believe so. When Baedeker indicated that a senior official must . . . accompany this mission, I endeavored to complain more vociferously than other candidates.” Vesta looked himself in the eyes. “He thought to spite me for resisting.”
Accompany this mission. Achilles translated without difficulty: bring the criminal home in disgrace. He pictured Baedeker, the fool, the incompetent, gloating.
“You have failed me,” Achilles repeated coldly.
“But the actions you have commanded are all well under way! Our progress is excellent.”
How would that matter if he were to be banished? “Failure has its price.”
Vesta cringed. “I will do better, Excellency. On Hearth, with the resources of your many followers, I will find—I will make—an opportunity.”
21
A sterile, storm-battered continental interior was the last place Sr’o wanted to be. Far from the ocean, it was the best place to do what so urgently needed to be done.
“Suit check,” she ordered, although her status-lamp array showed yellows across the board. Buoyant within her hard-shell suit, she nonetheless felt claustrophobic and clumsy. The heavy enclosure held her to the cabin deck. The water she respired carried the taint of lubricant.
She, two technicians, and two guards sidled around one another, checking fittings and external readouts. Someone’s tubacle brushed her dorsal region, arching to examine her equipment from above. At every stride, craning and twisting as they performed their inspections, the water droned with the soft whines of exoskeleton motors.
Pk’o: “All yellow.”
Kt’o: “All yellow.”
Her bodyguards: “Yellow.” “Yellow.”
And finally, Sr’o herself: “All yellow. We will proceed.”
The five of them clanked into the water lock. The inner hatch closed behind them. Exoskeletons held them erect as the water drained. Even afloat within her hard-shell water gear, simply to imagine the onslaught of gravity made Sr’o sag.
Before the migration she had often worked above the ice of Jm’ho. She understood gravity. She had experienced gravity. The crushing, unbearable weight here was nothing like that. Not even humans or Puppeteers would choose to live here. That was among the reasons Ol’t’ro had selected this planet.
The last of the water vanished into its holding tank and the egress lamp flashed yellow. The outer hatch irised open. With Pk’o leading the way, they crept from their aircraft down a shallow ramp to the barren ground. A motorized cart with all their gear waited on the rain-slippery packed clay. With exoskeleton motors shrieking in protest, they clambered aboard the cart to ride to the waiting starship.
As lightning flashed overhead and thunder roared, Sr’o wondered what they would find.
With every clumsy step of her metal-shod limbs, Sr’o kicked rich silt into the water. A lush profusion of sponges and sessile worms carpeted the cargo-hold deck. Motile worms and scuttlebugs, creepers and little clawed hunters of every imaginable kind, swam and scurried and peered out of the luxuriant growth. Everything glowed with health, so fertile and vigorous that Sr’o yearned to rip off her pressure suit, and pull the delicious water through her gills, and feast.
Instead she and her technicians did a full battery of tests with every instrument they had brought. Everything checked out perfectly.
“Are you satisfied?” the captain asked, still irate at the unexplained diversion so far from the ocean. Or perhaps what offended him was the armed escort ship circling above the landing site. Or the armored guards ceaselessly scanning the hold. Or Sr’ o’s own skeptical behavior.
Sr’o waggled a tubacle apologetically, but her suit made a mockery of the gesture. Ol’t’ro had ordered that everyone remained suited for the inspection.
“We came to help,” the captain snapped. “When can we make our delivery to your colony?”
Ol’t’ro had been so certain of tampering. Had they ever been wrong about something so important? Sr’o could not remember such an event.
Or did she merely delude herself? Perhaps settling so far from Jm’ho was a mistake.
A trace of memory from the last meld, and an even fainter Er’o remnant chided, I suspect.
What more could she test or question? “Where did you obtain your cargo, Captain?”
“The deep vents at the north end of Gk’ho trench.”
“Excellent.” The northern trench was a remote wildlife preserve, deep within Gk’ho Nation. Sr’o could not have named a better place from which to take samples and fresh stock. And the Gk’Gk’ho was no friend of the Tn’Tn’ho.
Subvocalizing into a microphone planted deep within a tubacle, Sr’o radioed a private question across the crowded hold. “Pk’o. Can you determine the origin of the cargo?”
“A moment.” Pk’o scuttled, his suit clanking, its exoskeleton motors droning, to the equipment cart. Their scans and readings flowed wirelessly into its onboard computer, and it took the technician a while to survey the data. “Almost certainly the Gk’ho wildlife preserve,” he radioed back.
“Good,” Sr’o responded. “You can start packing up our gear.”
“I would like to get the cargo delivered,” the captain said, “and the crew needs some time off the ship before we go home.”
Sr’o could not bring herself to give the authorization. She raised a tubacle, motors whining, to look once again around the cargo hold. Angry reds and far reds rippled across the captain’s calloused hide; she ignored them. What did she see and hear? Her two guards, watchful. Pk’o, stowing instruments on their motorized cart. Kt’o, among a cluster of crew, asking for news about home. More crew, floating freely, jetting about as Sr’o so yearned to do.
Something in the vista was wrong. What?
“Soon, Captain. Please bear with me.” She set off, clanking, new flurries of disturbed mud and silt marking her wake. The captain jetted away, growling.
“What is it?” Pk’o asked as she reached him. “We have checked and rechecked everything.”
An intuition Sr’o did not want to articulate. “A multiscanner, please.”
He recoiled—as much as the suit would let him—from something in her voice. “Yes, Your Wisdom,” Pk’o said formally.
She coiled a tubacle around the instrument. From another tubacle she looked once more around the hold. The cargo. The cluster of conversation. Crew swimming about.
The swimming was wrong.
“Captain,” she called, the exterior speaker on her suit turned up high.
He jetted to a halt and angled two tubacles back toward her. “What now?”
“Some of your crew seem . . . energetic.”
But energetic did not quite define the oddity. The supply ship’s crew was . . . what? Ebullient. Enthusiastic. All that, and more.
Euphoric.
The captain, for that matter, was much less irate than she had expected. Than he had every right to be.
He swam down toward her. “As I told you, a long trip. The crew is excited about getting off the ship, about seeing new people and a new world.”
By the end of her long trek through hyperspace to this world, she had been exhausted and twitchy. Certainly not euphoric.
Something about euphoria, then. “A moment, Captain,” she said.
It was, she decided, as though the crew were high on magnesium salts or hydrogen sulfide, but her suit’s instruments insisted all solutes in the water were within acceptable
ranges.
She raised the tubacle that clasped the multiscanner. “May I take your readings?” He gave no answer, so she proceeded. He was the picture of health.
And yet, a few readouts were off: enzyme levels higher than she had ever seen. Those could account for the unexpected energy levels. A few repeating genes repeated many more times than she had ever encountered. Those genes coded for the anomalous enzymes. And, most puzzling to Sr’o, unexpected sequences between the genes—
Where retroviruses could lurk.
“My team and I must return to our transport,” she told the captain.
“Why?” he demanded. “Is something wrong with us?”
“Something is . . . unexpected. I do not have the resources here to make a full analysis.” Nor the mental capacity.
Ol’t’ro did.
Ol’t’ro considered:
The cargo ship’s crew: they were doomed. Had they been allowed to off-load their cargo and leave, none could have survived to return their ship to Jm’ho. Equally doomed was the navigator who had boarded the cargo ship at the rendezvous deep in the interstellar void, to safeguard the secret location of the colony.
The death that awaited them. Cells died, and cells reproduced. With each generation of cells, the anomalous enzyme concentrations would increase. Until, at sufficiently high concentrations, the enzymes would cleave the cell’s DNA, kill their unsuspecting hosts, and release the retroviruses that lay dormant within.
The retrovirus. Had it been set free near the ocean vents, it would have invaded the entire transplanted food chain—and yet it would not have affected the Gw’oth colonists themselves.
Biological warfare. This contagion was no accident. It was meant to force surrender. To force the colonists, to force Ol’t’ro themselves, back to Jm’ho. Back into servitude.
They could not have engineered such a plague, or such a subtle way to deliver it. The task far exceeded any Gw’otesht’s capacity for handling data. The work could only be done on a large nonbiological computer, such as humans and Puppeteers used. A computer such as the Tn’Tn’ho might have purchased.