Downtime (25 page)

“Don’t
mock me,” she said angrily. “Don’t treat me as if I didn’t know anything at
all. I know about being psi and I know what is right for me. If you won’t help,
well, then, you won’t.” She let go of his hand and pushed back the cerecloth.
She climbed over him to get to her clothes, started pulling them on. “You’re
selfish,” she said, pulling her hair out from under the shirt she had just
slipped over her head. “You’re stupid, too. You want me to watch and listen to
jelly bean stories on the flatscan so I will learn and grow up, and maybe that’s
not a bad way for regular people. But for me it’s like trying to taste a new
food while holding my nose. I get more out of watching you dig holes out of the
ground because then I can see and hear and
feel
.”

It
was true. He had not considered that for a psi-sensitive girl the very best
holographic study aids might seem flat and uninteresting. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“But this isn’t the way either,” he said, gesturing to the rumpled bed. “Even a
psi sensitive shouldn’t go to bed with someone just so she can
feel
a story. It’s best to be in love
with the person. Someday that will happen to you.”

“It
already has,” Arria said over her shoulder as she walked out of the room. She
knew how to operate the door now, so that didn’t slow her down a second. The
door closed and she was gone.

Jason
lay down and clasped his fingers behind his neck.

Arria
in love with him? Why not, he thought. She was old enough to have had many
adolescent affairs. She just hadn’t had the opportunity. Now that she was
around people, it was only natural. Indeed, he had known even back in Daniel
Jinn’s cave that Arria felt sexual stirrings when she was around him, so maybe
he shouldn’t have been so surprised to find her in bed with him this morning.
And maybe if Calla’s leaving were not so fresh in his mind, he would have
reacted differently. But as it was, he had been right to exercise restraint.

He
couldn’t pretend to love a psi sensitive, even though Arria would be a very
nice love partner. The more she learned to use her psi abilities, the better
she would be at pleasing him in bed, and he couldn’t help thinking that she
would probably become the very best lover he had ever known. But she would also
know, or learn if she didn’t know at the beginning, that he did not love her,
not like he should. And it wasn’t healthy for her to pretend that she was
Calla, just to be close to him. But she had insisted that she was not
pretending. He thought back to the moment he realized he was not dreaming of
Calla but holding someone very real in his arms. He hadn’t let go, nor opened
his eyes, not the first moment. He had felt her breasts and kissed her, probing
her mouth with his tongue, enjoying complete abandonment until the moment he
knew she would open herself to him. Only then had he opened his eyes. No wonder
she was angry. He certainly wasn’t very consistent, pretending it was all right
one minute and wrong the next. Could she really feel his love for Calla so
vividly that it did not matter to her that it was not hers? Or had she just
been drawn to warmth and coziness and perhaps by sexual curiosity? And what if
she were eavesdropping now? Wouldn’t she be wondering why he was still half
hard?

Knowing
there was no possibility of more sleep this morning, Jason got up and went to
shower.

Mahdi was in the
Night
Messenger’s
combat communications center, garbed in a shiny leather shirt,
sturdy landboots, and a scarlet sash knotted around his torso. He looked from
the flatscreen to the holoscan for perhaps the thousandth time, both still
blank and empty after nearly two days in Dvalerth far-orbit. There was no sign
of the Cassells fleet in their own surveillance system, and no message from
reconnaissance. The lack of activity made him wonder if the Cassells fleet had
gone home, and the thought made him angry. The Dvalerth elixir garden would not
be easy to take without the unwitting help of the Cassells fleet.

“Where
are they, Larz?” Mahdi said.

Larz
Frennz Marechal shook his head. “I can tell you nothing more until I have more
information.”

Not
bothering to hide his disgust, Mahdi touched the holoscan controls and brought
up the probabilistic assessment of Cassells fleet deployment that the decemviri
had made when they were enroute to the Dvalerth-Macowan solar system. The model
showing the Cassells fleet withdrawing was less than one percent, but it was
not zero. The decemviri, whom the Decemvirate had conveniently loaned to him
when he rested in Mercury Novus near-orbit while waiting for the public
announcement of their decision on elixir distribution, had not been able to
eliminate the remote possibility that all the worlds would accept council’s
decision without protest. Such an outbreak of peace was the only situation that
could possibly spell failure for his plan to become emperor of all the known worlds,
for then everyone would be allied against him and their sheer numbers would
defeat him. The odds were that the Cassells fleet would move in on Dvalerth as
soon as they heard council’s decision, engaging the enemy before Mahdi’s legion
of ships could arrive to stop them. There was a fleet of drones far behind
Mahdi’s actual strike force, electronically mimicking large destroyers, acting
as decoys to fool Cassells fleet reconnaissance. The Cassells fleet should be
under the mistaken belief that Mahdi was still days away from popping in to
Dvalerth-Macowan interplanetary space, and they should be using the time to
take Dvalerth. Two days were gone. Why had they not moved?

Roma
came in from the bridge, not even glancing at the flatscreen or holoscan. As
always, she appeared to be in total control, but the quickening tapping of her
heels betrayed her gathering anxiety. She sat in the chair next to Mahdi’s,
scarcely seated before the signal officer broke the silence by saying, “Messenger
drone incoming.”

Mahdi
glanced from Roma to the signal officer, trying to decide if the man had
touched his board in the last minute, for it seemed too coincidental to Mahdi
that Roma should come from the bridge just as the first intelligence arrived,
too. He was certain the man’s hands had moved, and was therefore sure that he
had signaled Roma. That kind of loyalty would all be transferred to Mahdi just
as soon as he had the Dvalerth elixir garden in his control, for then there
would be enough for junior officers, too.

“Is
it one of our scouts?” Larz said, “or Dvalerth’s?” The signal officer pondered
his little flatscreen for a moment, then looked up and said, “It’s ours, sir.
Message incoming.”

The
flatscan colored and painted the message as they stared: “Two nuclear bursts in
Dvalerth near-orbit. More . . .”

Mahdi
smiled. He didn’t know how a Cassells strike force had sneaked past his
reconnaissance and Dvalerth’s defense systems, but they had, and the two bombs
were their first move. Now Dvalerth could not use their gravity wells to raise
troops and weapons to near-orbit battle stations, for the magnetosphere through
which they had to pass now was filled with high-energy protons from the nuclear
blasts. Not even heavy shielding could protect against that much radiation.
Dvalerth was reduced to entering space through the polar openings of the
magnetosphere which would greatly hamper their maneuverability during the
pending invasion.

Mahdi
flicked the holoscan controls, instructing the jelly beans to erase all but the
model that had predicted that the first offensive action would be to make
Dvalerth near-space impassible. Now there was another tree of probabilities to
examine, and it was an immense tree. But Mahdi didn’t care. At the tip of every
branch was Mahdi’s crown. He had only to wait and see which one he should
seize.

The planet Dvalerth was an island fortress, its outer
reaches bounded by a wild river of trapped radiation and steeply rising
gravitational potential. Dvalerth, like every other inhabited planet in the
known worlds, maintained control over its near-orbit regions with a net of
surface-based interceptors that could rise through the gravitational waves like
cork bobbers. That is, they could when the wild river was in its natural state.
With the trapped radiation augmented by Cassells fleet sneak nuclear attack,
radiation intensities made the equatorial regions of the magnetosphere an
impassible torrent of heavy protons and excited electrons, impassible for even
heavily shielded vehicles. As a result of the attack, Dvalerth’s gravity wells
were useless for achieving the outer reaches of near-orbit, for passage through
the gravity wells to orbiting space stations took longer than thirty minutes.
The fastest bucket took fifty minutes, the heavily shielded buckets took
longer. Still, Dvalerth was using buckets to deploy armory in very near-orbit,
under the now deadly magnetosphere, especially at the polar regions where the only
safe access through the trapped radiation could be achieved. While such
vehicles had little capacity to deviate from their predicted path because their
high velocities made maneuvering difficult, in sufficient numbers they could be
a very discouraging factor to an invasion force trying to use the polar gates
to enter Dvalerth atmosphere. These polar orbiters would also offer armed
escort to the Dvalerth fleet when it used the polar gates to achieve far-orbit
where the Cassells fleet was certain to be falling in orbit, waiting.

The
relatively low orbital velocities associated with far-orbit permitted the
Cassells fleet almost complete maneuverability with very little consumption of
energy, for which, while in enemy interplanetary space, it had no ability to
replace. By changing orbit continually, they complicated Dvalerth’s problem of
detecting and tracking what were relatively microscopic specks at such great
distances and with such small visual angles. Cassells fleet would remain
virtually invisible to Dvalerth until they chose to reveal themselves. And they
enjoyed the advantage of wide-angle observation of Dvalerth’s scramble to
deploy its weaponry.

“Cassells
fleet would appear to be giving up its advantage,” said Singh as he stared at
the holoscan model of what was happening in Dvalerth near-orbit. “It has been
almost twenty four hours since the nuclear bombs exploded.”

On
companion-class ships, the navigational bridge and combat communications were
combined into a combat operations center at the forebridge, thus Calla’s
officers had front row seats for watching the war arena. Tam Singh Amritsar was
at the helm, overseeing the constant orbit changes, which kept the
Compania
invisible to both Dvalerth and
Cassells fleet, and hopefully to Mahdi’s fleet, as well. The holoscan had been
lit constantly since the nuclear bursts in Dvalerth magnetosphere, and still
reconnaissance had not been able to sort out any sign of Cassells fleet or
Mahdi’s fleet from the ever-present natural background radiation from the cosmos.

“They’re
just farther out than we expected them to be,” Calla said in a tranquil tone. “And
they have days before Mahdi’s fleet of drones are due to arrive.”

The
drone fleet, moving ponderously slow through deep space, was a decoy that had
fooled even Calla for a while during her pursuit of Mahdi. He had stopped in
Mercury Novus interplanetary space only long enough to hear council’s decision
to distribute elixir based on populations of thirty years ago, despite the
Decemvirate’s recommendation that distribution be based on present population.
While the Decemvirate had ordered its legions, Mahdi’s included, to uphold
council’s decision, the Decemvirate had also recessed immediately thereafter.

It
was suspected that the decemviri had actually disbanded their organization and
gone to head up their legions in person. Calla knew for a fact that a
light-speeder-class ship had caught up with Mahdi’s flagship, and someone had
transferred aboard. Such unheard-of tactics on the part of the decemviri gave
rise to speculation that the legions would not uphold council’s decision,
despite their orders. Neither Cassells fleet nor Dvalerth could be certain to
whom the slow moving fleet in deep space would render assistance when it
arrived, and the uncertainty could only encourage the continuation of war, not
an outbreak of peace. Once Calla realized that the deep-space fleet was a sham
of electronic decoy ships and low-mass weasels, she was certain Mahdi was
already in Dvalerth interplanetary space, just waiting for the battle to begin.
Then, with the advantage of the proverbial fisherman, Mahdi would strike.

“Uh-oh,”
said Singh. “Looks like Dvalerth’s reconnaissance is better than ours, and that
they’re acting on something we don’t know.”

A
column of Dvalerth ships was coming up the northern polar funnel and paying a
heavy toll to change inclination to the equatorial orbital regions. Without
being told, Calla’s signal officers changed their surveillance to concentrate
on one small sector of space, and within twenty minutes they picked up optical
reflections of Cassells fleet dropping in to engage the Dvalerth fleet.

It
would be hours before the two fleets confronted each other, and no certainty
for the outcome, except for the certainty in Calla’s mind that Mahdi would make
his move while the fighting was fiercest. Meanwhile, Calla and her officers
would wait and watch.

“We
should take the advantage ourselves,” said Cinna, who would command the wing of
raiders when Calla was ready to strike. “We could go in at forty-nine degrees
north, bomb the garden, and leave forty-five degrees south.” He turned his head
slightly and gave Calla his starkest grin.

But
Calla shook her head. “Let Mahdi soften Dvalerth’s interceptors, or did you
think they would stand by while we destroy the elixir gardens? Besides, this is
the only opportunity we’ll have to reduce Mahdi’s fleet. He won’t be caught
this way twice.”