Conquerors' Pride (30 page)

[And if you could not?]
"We'd probably have just gone on to Avon," Cavanagh said. "Left the courier ship with the Mrach embassy there and taken Fibbit back to Ulu once theCavatina caught up with us."
Klyveress hissed again; a long, thoughtful sound. [I have read your record, Lord Cavanagh,] she said. [You were not an ally of the Yycromae during your service to the hierarchy of NorCoord. But neither were you an ally of the Mrach.]
"My goal was to be an ally only of justice and truth."
[A noble ambition,] Klyveress said. [One which the Yycromae understand and honor. But when truth is hidden, such intentions can quickly be twisted into injustice. In this event I have no doubt that is what has happened.]
Cavanagh frowned. "What do you mean? What truth was hidden?"
[Many truths were hidden,] Klyveress said, standing up. [Perhaps later will be time for me to detail the full twistings of Mrach deceit. But for now I must leave you.]
Cavanagh looked at the guards at the doors. "What about us?"
[You wished to see the Northern Wooded Steppes,] she said, twitching her cloak back into position around her. [You shall see them now. You shall be our guests there for the following few days.]
"Your guests?" Cavanagh asked pointedly. "Or your prisoners."
[We do not wish to do this to you, Lord Cavanagh,] Klyveress said evenly. [I have little doubt that you are here at the manipulation of the Mrach. But for a few days you cannot be permitted to speak of what you have seen. The Peacekeeper ships are gone, and the path is open. The Yycromae must act now, before the time has passed.]
"And what exactly are you proposing to do?"
Klyveress gestured. The six guards at the doors left their posts and came forward, one of them bringing Fibbit with him. [We will make the wrongs right,] she said.
The guards came to a halt in a semicircle around them. "And do you include the Commonwealth in these corrections?" Cavanagh asked quietly.
She studied him. [You do not understand, Lord Cavanagh,] she said. [Someday, perhaps, you will. Come; your transport is waiting.]
The Northern Wooded Steppes were a series of flat plains in the northern section of Phormbi's second-largest continent. Despite the arid climate, the steppes were nevertheless covered with forests of huge fan trees, forests that had apparently been there since before the centuries-past climate changes that had killed off all the smaller and less deeply rooted vegetation. Tall and smooth-barked, with a single wide spread of leafy branches at the top, the fan trees had been thought in the ancient legends of the region to be the pillars that held up the sky. With the contrast of the shadowy-green canopy above and the totally barren ground below, the silent sentinels standing aloof from one other in the permanent twilight made for an impressive sight.
A sight that was even more impressive at the moment. In all directions, almost as far as they could see from their third-floor window, the ground between the tree trunks was covered with spaceships, cables, support equipment, and a city's worth of Yycromae working furiously among it all.
After twenty-five years of forced peace, the Yycromae were once again preparing for war.
"It's insane," Cavanagh murmured, staring out at all the activity. "Don't we all have enough trouble with the Conquerors sitting out there ready to attack?"
"Maybe that's why they're doing it now," Hill said from across the room. He'd been pacing restlessly around the suite since they'd arrived here. Why, Cavanagh didn't know; he surely wasn't going to locate any surveillance devices with his bare hands. "Maybe they figure the Peacekeepers will have their hands too full to have time to come after them."
"Then they're fools," Cavanagh bit out. "There's no way in hell that the Commonwealth can just sit back and ignore an attempt at genocide."
On the other side of the room, Fibbit looked up from her morose contemplation of the floor. "What?" she said, sounding startled. "Genocide? What?"
Cavanagh looked at her, a surge of irritation rising into his throat. Didn't Fibbit have any idea at all as to what was going on here?
With an effort he forced the annoyance away. No, probably she didn't. For all their artistic genius, the Sanduuli were about as politically sophisticated as an average four-year-old human. "It's all right," Cavanagh soothed her. Under the circumstances she was probably feeling even more helpless than the rest of them. "It's all right. Don't worry, we'll handle things."
"Yes," Fibbit said, not looking particularly convinced. "I believe you."
Cavanagh sighed. Great. Nothing like having a little extra burden of trust to pile on top of the rest of the guilt he was lugging around for having gotten them into this mess in the first place. Why on Earth hadn't he just gone on to Avon instead of dragging everyone out here? "Look, why don't you go do a threading or something?" he suggested to her. "There's no sense in just sitting around worrying."
Fibbit looked around helplessly. "But I have no threading material. Also no frame."
"Hill will improvise something for you," Cavanagh said, looking over at the other. "Hill?"
"Yes, sir," Hill said, not quite suppressing a grimace. "Come on, Fibbit, let's see what we can find."
Fibbit unfolded herself from her seat, and together she and Hill went into one of the suite's other rooms. Sighing again, Cavanagh turned back to the window. "We're all going to go crazy if we have to stay here very long," he told Kolchin. "You'd better start finding us a way out of here."
Kolchin held up a finger. "Just a minute, sir."
Cavanagh frowned, leaning forward for a closer look. Kolchin's eyes were tracking methodically across the scene outside, his lips moving silently as he did so.
Whatever he was doing, a minute later he was done. "Well?" Cavanagh prompted.
"I'm not sure," Kolchin said slowly. "Looks to me like what they're doing is just fitting external weapons pods onto those ships down there. Newer merchant types, most of them, probably designed with this kind of quick military conversion in mind."
"They haven't been at this very long, then?"
"Not more than a week," Kolchin said. "Probably not even that long-the interdiction ships couldn't have been pulled out more than a couple of days ago."
"And when they did, the Hierarch decided this was their chance to pick up the war where they'd left off," Cavanagh growled.
"Well, that's just it, sir," Kolchin said. "They haven't been at this very long; and from the way Klyveress talked, it sounded like they weren't going to be at it much longer. And I doubt they'd risk trying to run an operation this size on any of their other worlds-they're much more populated, too close to major trade routes, with far too many non-Yycroman ships coming in and out. Best guess is that this is it."
"Isn't it enough?"
"No, sir," Kolchin shook his head. "That's just the point. It's not."
Cavanagh frowned at him. This wasn't just some intellectual game Kolchin was playing, he realized suddenly. "What do you mean?"
"Well, look at them," Kolchin said, gesturing. "There's a lot of stuff out there, but most of what you see is actually support and operations equipment. There aren't more than thirty or forty actual ships that we can see. Even if the whole steppe region is crammed this full, we're only talking maybe a thousand ships. And these are converted freighters, not real warships."
Cavanagh pursed his lips, thinking back to what Quinn had said about converting freighters to combat ships. "Perhaps this is only the support fleet," he suggested. "The actual battle force could be made up of ships like the one out there that caught us."
"No, I don't think so," Kolchin said. "We took their war fleet down pretty thoroughly after the Pacification. They couldn't have hidden more than a couple of ships that size from the inspectors. And there's no way they could have built another shipyard since then. Not with the interdiction zone and the limitations on what goes in and comes out of their worlds."
Cavanagh nodded. Kolchin was right on that point, anyway. He'd seen the inside of the interdiction-zone operation when he was in the NorCoord Parliament. "So where does that leave us?"
Kolchin shrugged. "It leaves us with a thousand ships' worth of strap-on weaponry setting out to take or destroy three major and two minor planets. It can't be done, and the Yycromae have to know that. Not in a single strike, anyway, which is all they're going to get before the Peacekeepers come down on them."
Cavanagh looked out at the ships below, his chest suddenly feeling tight. "Unless they're not planning to rely on just missiles and particle beams," he said quietly.
He could feel Kolchin's eyes on him. "You're not serious."
"No?" Cavanagh countered. "Tell me it's impossible. Especially now, when NorCoord is presumably digging the components out of wherever they've been stored all these years and bringing them together for reassembly."
"I hadn't thought about that part," Kolchin murmured. "God in heaven. If the Yycromae have got it, we're in big trouble."
Cavanagh took a deep breath, trying to ease the tightness in his chest. CIRCE in the hands of vengeful Yycromae... "Well, let's not jump to conclusions," he said. "There could be some perfectly legitimate tactical scheme where a thousand ships are all they need."
Kolchin shook his head. "I wish Quinn were here. They didn't teach us much about line-ship warfare in the commandos." He turned his back on the window. "By the way-for what it's worth-this shows you were right about the Mrachanis letting us escape. Ten to one they knew all about this place and wanted us to come blow the whistle on it."
Cavanagh had forgotten all about that conversation. "Certainly looks that way," he said. "What did the ci Yyatoor call it? A sensor-stealthed courier ship?"
"Right," Kolchin said. "All that means is that it's harder to locate once it meshes in. Same sort of stuff we do with watchships. There's some field-baffling on the tachyon emissions, too, so that you can get a little closer before the wake-trail detectors pick you up. But even with a ship the size and speed of a courier, they're going to have half an hour's warning that you're on your way in."
"It's still something the Yycromae would assume was a spy ship."
"Can't say I blame them," Kolchin conceded. "What I don't get is why the Mrachanis would bother sending us here. Why not just call in the Peacekeepers directly?"
"I don't know," Cavanagh said. "Maybe they didn't want to answer any awkward questions about how they knew the buildup was going on. Or maybe they were trying for a two-for-one deal: we blow the whistle on the Yycromae, plus we get distracted from our hunt for the man in Fibbit's threading. Or we blow the whistle and forget about the Mrach Conqueror legends. Take your pick."
Kolchin shook his head. "This is starting to sound way too complicated for Mrachanis."
Cavanagh snorted. "I'm beginning to get the feeling Mrachanis aren't nearly as simple and ingenuous as they'd like us to believe." There was the sound of a movement behind them, and he turned to see Hill come up. "You get Fibbit settled down?"
"More or less," Hill nodded, looking slightly disgusted. "I improvised a threading frame from a plastic sorting box I found in one of the armoires and a towel from the cleansing room. She wasn't happy with the texture, but I told her to consider it a challenge. She said she was going to try to thread that man from Mig-Ka City for you again."
"How's the room look?" Kolchin asked him.
Hill shrugged. "Well, there's no sign of any recent installations. They could be running bouncers off the windows, of course, but with all the noise and vibration out there they're not going to get much that way."
"Any idea what this place is?" Cavanagh asked. "It looks like a hotel."
"That's exactly what it is," Hill agreed. "Put up about twenty years ago by a joint Swiss-Yycroman consortium."
"Strange place to stick a hotel," Kolchin commented.
"It had a strange clientele, too," Hill said. "Most of them were bored rock climbers who wanted to tackle something different."
Kolchin stared at him. "You're kidding."
"No joke," Hill said. "The Joint Interstellar Climbing Club declared the trees here to be Class Sevens or Eights or something, and within days the climbers started to deluge the place. I guess the place was still humming until about six months ago, when the Yycroman government decided they were tired of burying the failures and declared the place closed."
Cavanagh frowned. "Six months ago?"
"That's what the skitter's records said," Hill said. "Why, is the number significant?"
"Probably not," Cavanagh said slowly. "It just struck me that that was almost exactly the same time that the Commerce Commissioner suddenly started restricting nonhuman access to Commonwealth military technology."
"You think there's a connection?" Kolchin asked.
Cavanagh looked out the window at all the military activity outside. "Probably just a coincidence."
For a long minute no one spoke. Kolchin broke the silence first. "I suppose the next step is to find a way out of here."
"I think we should sleep on it," Cavanagh said, rubbing at his eyes. "I don't know about either of you, but I'm just about dead on my feet."
"I understand, sir," Kolchin said. "You and Hill go ahead and get some sleep."
"What about you?"
"I'm all right," Kolchin assured him. "I slept some on the skitter." He glanced out the window. "Besides, there's a little something I'd like to try."
"Fine," Cavanagh said, too tired to argue. "Whatever you do, just be quiet about it."
"Don't worry, sir," Kolchin assured him. "You won't hear a thing."
19
The three interrogators didn't come again for seven full days. But that was all right, because it took Pheylan that long to come up with another plan. By the time they arrived, he was ready to give it a try.
"I was starting to wonder if you weren't going to come back," he commented as the four of them walked out into the bright sunshine. "This would be better for me if I could go out every couple of days, you know."
"Pleased you go out at all," Thrr-gilag said. "You try take that stone."
Pheylan shrugged. Actually, under the circumstances, he was a little surprised that Thrr-gilag hadn't been summarily demoted from his spokesman duties the way Svv-selic had been earlier. Did that imply Thrr-gilag had more clout in the Zhirrzh hierarchy? Or was it because this latest incident hadn't involved that mysterious white pyramid? "I didn't mean anything by that," he told them.
"Perhaps," Thrr-gilag said. "Or not. But no purpose. We walk this way today." His tongue snaked out, pointing directly away from the pyramid toward a clump of turquoise-tinted bushes at the edge of the forest.