Cat and Company (26 page)

Bedivere brought the
Aliza
down just on the edges of the old Soward City outskirts and threw open the doors. So did dozens of other Varkan craft. The citymind, Arrigo, had spent the few minutes between blasting out his warning and their arrival gathering everyone who could not find a shuttle up to the station on the edges of the common where they had landed.

Arrigo was the first aboard the
Aliza
, and he made his way forward to the flight deck and shook Bedivere’s hand. “Everyone is accounted for. We’ll need three surface runs to take everyone off.” His face was drawn and his chin dark with growth. He had been working hard lately, too.

“What about you?” Bedivere said sharply. “Have you replicated yourself somewhere safe?”

“I’ve already switched over to the bunker,” Arrigo assured him. His expression darkened. “I liked Soward,” he said softly. “Are these bastards going to run us out of every nice system we have?”

“Not if I can help it,” Bedivere growled. “We’re full. Doors closed. Let’s go. Strap in, Arrigo.” He turned back to the dashboard.

* * * * *

The
Hana Stareach
, Mid-Jump. FY 10.187

On the second run from Soward to Gry, Toby didn’t quite pull Catherine aside, as his hologram wasn’t solid. He had a way of shepherding her with gestures and waves of his hands and a look in his eye that told her she needed to pay attention.

“Bedivere,” he said. Then his hologram flickered out and was replaced by Bedivere, standing on the flight deck in front of her.

“Toby says you’re captain at the moment?” Bedivere said without preamble.

“Devlin stayed back on Charlton,” she said. “He’s more useful screaming at the planetary governors about taking in refugees. Where to take everyone is really becoming an issue.”

“I know. As long as they have soil to stand upon, or a station deck, it’ll do. We’ll have to worry about overcrowding later,” Bedivere said shortly. “I need your help with something, Cat. I can’t coordinate these jumps and the gates, too.”

“The gates? Oh, you mean blowing the Soward gates? I can arrange that.” She would take great delight in it.

“Not just the Soward gates,” he said gently.

She gasped. “All of them? Bedivere, no! Humans still need them and Varkan can’t keep up with all the demands that losing the gates would put on them—”

“We’re just going to have to,” he said flatly. “I’m asking you, Cat, because you’ll see the need for this, while anyone who has a vested interested in the gates and the revenue they bring in will baulk at the very idea. That’s just about everyone else except the Varkan and we’re all a bit busy right now.”

She swallowed. “It’s such a big step…there’s no going back.”

“And there
can’t
be any going back on this,” he said quickly. “The Periglus are using the gate technology and we can’t predict where they’ll emerge. There’s no way to communicate with them at the moment, so we can’t stop them from terraforming any planet they take a fancy to. All we can do is run and that’s not something we can keep doing forever. This has to stop. We have to destroy the gates. All of them.”

She pressed her lips together. “I can’t blow them all by myself. I’ll need help.”

“Coordinate with the other Varkan ships that can’t land,” he said. “Get Yennifer and the Varkan who haven’t found Interspace yet to help with the coordination. They can talk to all the ships faster than you can. There’s a Varkan on Charlton right now, Arrigo, the former Soward citymind. He can help, too. Tell him I sent you.” He gave her a rough smile. “I have to go jump again. Thanks, Cat.”

“How do you know I’m going to do it?” she demanded. “I haven’t said yes, yet.”

“You were about to.” He winked and his image dissolved.

Toby replaced him and raised his brow. “Back to Charlton to get Arrigo?” he asked.

“And the weapon hardware we off-loaded weeks ago when Varnham was wiped out. We’re going to need it again. I’ll talk to Mael and the others.”

“They’re already aware,” Toby assured her. “All Varkan are.”

She sat back down on the sofa. “That’s going to make this easier,” she muttered, not sure if she was annoyed or pleased that Bedivere had anticipated this and had already dealt with it. “Are the passengers off-loaded yet?”

“About fifteen minutes longer,” Toby said.

“Any issues?”

“Strangely, no. Some of the passengers are refugees from Varnham and Sunita, so they’re just glad to have a ship take them anywhere else. I think humans are getting used to rapid exodus.”

“Or they’re all shell-shocked,” Catherine said shortly.

“What is shell-shocked?…Oh, I see. Yes, that is a possibility,” Toby agreed. “It is a passive trauma for now. Later, treatment will be possible.”

“There is a lot of ‘later’ happening. We’re going to be feeling the effects of this for decades,” Catherine observed.

“Quite likely,” Toby agreed. “Do you need fresh coffee, Catherine? Should I ask the galley to prepare some? The pot on the table is very old and will have lost its medicinal virtue by now.”

Catherine’s next few days were spent right there on the sofa. The trip to Charlton to pick up the armaments and the Varkan, Arrigo, was just the start of the headaches. Bedivere may have had confidence in her ability to empathize with the Varkan point of view and agree that the gates must be destroyed, yet he had overlooked that she wasn’t Varkan herself. Coordinating hundreds of Varkan ships when she couldn’t speak to them all directly the way they could talk to each other was limiting.

She was grateful that the lean and weary Arrigo was sitting on the opposite sofa to her, acting as her conduit to the Varkan ships, for while she planned her phase of the exodus, all the Varkan continued to shuttle refugees to new homes. She couldn’t demand they drop everything and meet in a central location. It would take them away from vital work.

So they met and spoke in the digital universe, where she could not go. She used Arrigo to speak to them, instead. It was a very mechanical exercise. Pick a gate, assign a Varkan ship to destroy it and move on to the next gate. It was the scale of the project that made it unwieldy. There were over two thousand gates in the known galaxy.

It took three days to dole out the assignments and in those three days, all of the Varkan completed their assignments and returned for the next one, dozens of times each. The
Hana
also jumped around the galaxy, using the particle beams Catherine had re-stowed aboard to destroy their fair share of the gates.

The human outcry at the destruction of the legacy transport system would have been deafening if Catherine had listened to it. She asked Toby to filter any messaging she received to remove the threats and vitriol. “I need to focus,” she said shortly.

The one person she allowed through the iron-clad filter was Bedivere. She reported to him every eight hours, with numbers of gates destroyed. It was her version of the array the AI had been distributing, reporting on numbers of refugees removed from Sunita.

Even though Bedivere was shuttling refugees from Soward and once Soward was clear, he returned to Sunita to continue the evacuation there, he still managed to sound relaxed whenever she spoke to him, which was a far cry from the tension that was giving her a headache and the churning in her stomach from too much coffee and not enough sleep. She had not returned to her room to sleep properly since he had given her this assignment. Instead, she had curled up on the sofa and napped whenever she could no longer function with her eyes open.

Bedivere must have sensed that because once she had given him the numbers, he spoke of everyday things. Gossip from Charlton. The joys of piloting the
Aliza
after so many years away from space. The enhancements he was planning for the ship. Trivia. Glorious, inconsequential, superficial and above all, happy chatter.

The few minutes she spent thinking about wall colors and ship speed enhancers, inertial dampers and clothes…clothes, for Glave’s sake…those were the most peaceful and relaxing moments in her day.

The very last gate to be destroyed Catherine reserved for herself and for the talented Mael. “We get to blow the gates at Soward,” she told Arrigo and Mael together. “Not because they’re the last, but because they’ll be the most dangerous. They’re very close to the planet and the Periglus have started terraforming. If we get too close to them at this critical stage, we have no idea what they will do. They could react and if their weapons are of the same scale and effectiveness as the terraforming device, then we’ll be completely outgunned. The only advantage we seem to have over them is speed and Interspace, so we need to go in lightly, ready to jump away with no notice. Mael, that’s going to be your primary role. You sit with your finger on the Interspace button, every sense up and wide open,
looking
for an excuse to jump away. Arrigo, I hope you don’t mind. I want you to operate the particle beam.”

Arrigo smiled. “I was going to ask if I could.”

“As soon as we’re in firing distance, you destroy the gates, then you slap Mael on the shoulder and he jumps us away. There are no more Varkan ships in the system and no more humans. The system is empty except for one skivver that is monitoring to make sure no Periglus use the gates. It’ll just be us there, so in and out as fast as we can.”

It left Catherine with nothing to do except worry. She couldn’t sit still and ended up prowling around the navigation table in slow circles as the
Hana
prepared to jump. Then she stood between Mael’s and Wayna’s chairs as the now-familiar star field around Soward assembled beyond the windows. The gates were right in front of them. It was a technically perfect jump.

She looked at Arrigo. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“Bringing up the beam.” They couldn’t jump with the beam ready to fire, for no one knew what the shift through Interspace might do to the unstable and volatile weapon. There was a reason particle beams weren’t in common use. Too many ships had destroyed themselves instead of their targets because the beams had slipped out of their control.

These few moments would be their most vulnerable ones. Catherine looked at Cleon, who was manning the defensive terminal. He was looking down at the dashboard, frowning.

“Periglus. Thirty ships, heading in our direction.” He looked up at Catherine. “I don’t know what range their weapons have.”

“We may yet find out,” Catherine told him. She gripped the edge of the navigation table, watching Arrigo.

The seconds ticked on.

Mael was not watching Arrigo. Nor was he looking through the viewports for a first glimpse of the pursuing Periglus. He was staring straight ahead, mentally poised to throw the ship back to Charlton at the first indication of trouble. Once Arrigo fired, he would reach through digital space and tell Mael to jump and the message would be faster than any human form of communication.

“Ten seconds,” Arrigo murmured.

“Closing,” Cleon said. “And slowing, which means they’re coming into range.”

Catherine gripped the two chairs, bracing herself. The flight deck was utterly silent, except for the far distant murmur of the engines at the back of the ship, that vibrated through the superstructure like a background hum.

“Firing,” Arrigo said with chilling calm.

“Confirm destruction,” Catherine said. She looked at Cleon. He had all the long range scanner and monitors feeding into his terminal.

Cleon nodded. “Destroyed. All functions disabled. They’re dead metal.”

“Go!” Catherine cried, but Mael had already made the jump. The ship shivered and the star field reformed in front of them.

Charlton was dead ahead, a collection of mismatched structures and the girders and beams and docking collars that held it all together. It had never looked so damn wonderful.

Charlton Space City, New Cathay (Ji Xiu Prime), Ji Xiu System, Perseus Arm. FY 10.187

No one liked the high-handed way Bedivere had gone about destroying the jump gates. No authority figure was crazy enough to try to argue that the gates should have remained functioning, not with the loss of three star systems and the current refugee crisis pressuring every single remaining system’s resources. Instead, they focused upon the lack of consultation and agreement.

“It’s just shock,” Brant said. “They’ve got to vent it somewhere, the collective angst of their constituents will make them implode if they don’t. You’re just a handy excuse, Bedivere, but damned if they’re not stretching it a bit much.”

Bedivere shrugged. He’d known before he’d asked Cat to do it that no one would like not being consulted. “I didn’t have time for committee meetings. Destroying the gates is the
only
way we have to slow the Periglus down. Now, if they want another system, they’re going to have to travel to it in sub-light space and that will take them hundreds of years. In that time, we should have our own defenses in place.”

“So, sooner or later, we’re going to be facing war with an alien species,” Connell concluded, sounding unhappy.

“Unless we figure out how to talk to them in the meantime,” Brant reminded him. “Thanks to Bedivere, we’ve now got time to do that. That seems to have been overlooked, if you listen to the governors shouting each other down.”

The only influential person who wasn’t screaming for Bedivere’s blood was Devlin. Bedivere wasn’t sure if he appreciated the man’s championship, yet Devlin spoke eloquently, over and over again, on how destroying the gates benefited humans and after a while, the angst and hysteria began to calm and common sense reasserted itself.

“I’d like to think it was just time passing that makes the difference,” Bedivere told Brant over brandy. “Everyone finally realized that it was a done deal, there’s no going back. So they’re picking up and moving on. Except that Devlin is good. Very, very good.” He sipped his brandy, struggling to decide if he should be angry about that or not.

Devlin and the secrets he held were a tabled subject. Bedivere simply didn’t have time these days to follow up on the mysteries around Devlin. It was at the top of his list of things to do once the panic over the Periglus had subsided and things got back to a new normal.