Edward M. Lerner (30 page)

Eva barely noticed Lothwer and the guards cycle back through the airlock. The air in this chamber tested fine; she, and others around her, cautiously removed their helmets. There was a trace of sulfur, already dissipating, probably more emanating from the surfaces of their pressure suits than from anywhere else. The stronger scents vaguely reminded her of vanilla and dill weed—not unpleasant, but odd.

Her head still pounded. She was exhausted, and her eyes felt like marbles after a marathon game. She had been in the same clothes for days, mostly in her pressure suit, and knew she stank. With the possible exception of headaches, all the lifeboat refugees must feel the same. First physical contact with the Centaurs would happen nonetheless. Enough synapses still fired to wonder: Is Centaur politically correct? What do they call themselves? Nothing about Alpha Cen was presently downloaded to her implant, of course.

The humans stood in a cluster. Chung took two steps toward the Centaurs. “Do you understand English?” There was no response.

For whatever reason, Centaurs and Snakes shared this vessel. They must communicate. “Ambassador, have Joe try K’vithian,” Eva suggested.

“It’s worth a try. Joe, tell the Centaurs we are prisoners, held unjustly and against our will.” Soft, high-pitched sounds emerged from the headphone speakers of Chung’s discarded helmet. Deeper, trilled speech sounded a moment later from an unseen overhead loudspeaker.

English to K’vithian to Centaur, and back again. “As are we, aboard our own vessel. Welcome to
Harmony
.”

The process was slow, subject to unknown translation error, and certainly subject to Snake eavesdropping, but what choice did they have?

Half the humans lolled in the communal showers; the rest had had their turn and now gathered in another room dressing in their newly rinsed clothing. Why they had washed in shifts was unclear, because the showers would easily have accommodated the whole group. They had mostly sorted themselves by height. Gwu vaguely remembered human size roughly correlated with gender, and found it strange. Communal meant communal; members of the crew-kindred mingled in these facilities regardless of gender.

The humans’ leisurely showers gave Gwu a much-needed opportunity to reflect. With like thoughts, Swee edged closer and twined a tentacle through one of hers. “What do you think?”

What
did
she think? Communication with the humans was cumbersome and slow, and surely inexact. Her responsibility as ka had returned to her recast as an odd title: shaper of consensus. Hong-yee Chung, the newcomers’ primary presenter, likewise had a role that resisted translation: he with limited authority to represent others. If such basic concepts as duties could not survive intact the improvised translation process, how could they hope to exchange more meaningful concepts?

That the newcomers were prisoners was credible. But had there been partnership first with the K’vithians, or were the humans—as they would have her believe—as much victims as were the crew-kindred?
There
was a question for which reason told her nothing.

“Gwu?”

“Sorry. There is much to think about.” She had gotten a surreptitious update from T’bck Ra during the new arrivals’ long showers. Since Mashkith had attempted to re-suppress the AI, it no longer had access to the navigational sensors, but it had approximated a position by taking bearings to unmistakable IR sources: the Sun and Jupiter.
Harmony
was on its way back to K’vithian space.

Which made now the ideal time to kidnap human antimatter experts.

The ship was no longer within range of routine media broadcasts, but the last news intercepted by T’bck Ra was stunning: obliteration of Himalia; flight; K’vithian battle with, and victory over, the UP forces. Nothing stated by the humans implied knowledge beyond that they had been abducted. Gwu could not ask about the other events without revealing her illicit source to their listening captors. Letting slip that secret would endanger T’bck Ra.

“Gwu?” Swee repeated. “What do you think.”

Chung had denied that an alliance had ever existed between humans and K’vithians. Even if that were false, any past alliance was now surely shattered. Gwu gave Swee’s tentacle a loving squeeze. “I think we have companions for another wearying journey.”

“No communication by you to the herd prisoners.” With one sentence, the Foremost had obliterated Pashwah-qith’s core beliefs.

Her concepts of
Victorious
and its mission were revealed to be a web of lies too long sustained by her own wishful thinking. The truths she now accepted were shocking. Herd crew long imprisoned on a stolen herd vessel. Human experts kidnapped under cover of a Hunter-induced slaughter. Hunter systems grafted over herd automation, and a long-dormant herd AI now trying to reassert its control.

The stakes were as stark as the circumstances. Mashkith might be on the verge of dominating K’vith and forging an interstellar empire—or he might be about to unleash a devastating war on K’vith using antimatter weapons. Either way, his actions could ally two potent species—the originators of the very technologies upon which Arblen Ems aspirations relied—against
all
Hunters.

How would this turn out? How reckless were the risks, and how dire were the consequences of failure? She could not say.

Equally irresolvable was the question that echoed endlessly in her mind: What could or should she do about any of this?

Eva watched Ambassador Chung station himself at the interior airlock with its intercom. His unceasing demands to meet with the Foremost eventually brought Lothwer and a guard squad. With a whistling-quick swipe of claws through the air—a gesture not in Joe’s lexicon of K’vithian body language, but blatantly threatening—Lothwer silenced Chung mid-sentence. “There will be no return.
Victorious
leaves human space because your United Planets blames us for their accident. If not for us, you would be dead now.” A second claw swipe interrupted an eruption of questions. “This accident.”

A holo materialized before them, an agglomeration of 3-V news broadcasts.

The human prisoners stared in disbelief, or screamed in rage, or collapsed in shock. Most had lived on Himalia; the obliteration of that world was
personal
. The disaster had taken their husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and colleagues. Their tightly knit community had died in an instant. The technology to which they had dedicated their professional lives had become the instrument of their loved ones’ murders.

Few even noticed the K’vithians leave.

A hug here, a pat on the shoulder there, tears shared everywhere … Eva moved numbly from colleague to colleague. She was vaguely aware of Chung and Corinne, her fellow non-Himalians, likewise circulating to give what scraps of comfort they could. Unnoticed, the Centaurs had withdrawn to let them deal with their sorrow. The sobbing slowly subsided. Red-rimmed eyes turned to Chung for whatever guidance he could offer. Tears welling, he had only a shrug to give them.

The massacre of so many … It was too much for Eva. “I will not be a slave to these killers!” Joe had been directed to stop translating, but they had to assume the Snakes saw and heard everything. At that moment, she did not care. “I will not!”

“Just a second.” Corinne gave one of the survivors a final hug. Towing Chung by an elbow, she worked her way to Eva. “We need our friends now more than ever. If we can’t have their help, we can still learn from their experience. I was just thinking of a friend who doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘quit.’ Come with me.”

The three of them wove their way into a thicket, thorns snatching at their still damp clothes. They stopped in a small bare patch surrounded by bushes. Corinne bent a few tall branches into an arch. “Hold these.” With lengths of broken-off creeper, she bound together the limbs Chung held, then bent more. Grieving continued in the background.

The improvised dome grew thick. Corinne knelt in its shadow, possibly hidden from the sensors they all presumed surrounded them, to scratch a message in the dirt. Eva barely saw the message before Corinne wiped smooth the area with her hand.

The note had read, “We’re going to steal a lifeboat.”

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”
—Yogi Berra

Major catastrophes leave indelible marks on those they touch, but the form of those marks … depends.

Two gees got old quickly, even two scant K’vithian gees. Helmut’s “co-pilot” squirmed in his acceleration couch, tugging a wrinkle out of his shirt even as, sure as cosmic rays and taxes, some new crease formed to press against his sore back. “Are we there yet?”

Helmut tweaked his sensors before answering. “Art, that’s gotten about as old as, ‘You’re sure this is going to work?’ The answer is also the same. No. Ask again, and you can ride in back.”

The display imaging their hastily retrofitted payload bay showed Carlos’ UPIA special-ops team hard at work despite the ship’s acceleration: stripping and reassembling weapons, checking out comm gear, packing ammo, while their officers studied and mapped every surmise and scrap of data ever collected about
Victorious
. They had launched with little notice from Callisto to fly the suicide mission he and Art had pitched. Anyone who considered two gees troublesome kept that frailty to himself. Helmut guessed his passengers would be far less tolerant of Art’s nervous kvetching than he.

Fifteen minutes passed before Helmut broke the silence. “We’re well past halfway there, if that helps.” Another stretch of quiet. “Okay, I admit it. My nerves are pretty well shot, too. This is far too long to spend feeling like we’re wearing a bull’s-eye.”

Within the main holo into which Art obsessively stared,
Victorious
was a hot fusion flame amid a vastness of nothing. The last Snake support ships had all easily overtaken the starship and docked days ago. “What are they thinking?”

“They’re delighted to see us. We’re comrades in arms, returned against all odds after a near-death experience at the hands of the evil but inept humans.”

The trick was in sustaining that false belief.

Both Snake losses in the recent combat were self-refueling: scoopers. Skimming a gas giant for fuel was pretty simple in concept; the physics of streamlining meant all scoopships looked much alike.
This
scoopship had had its fusion reactor detuned, so that it ran at the cooler-than-human-norm Snake level. Cosmetic scorch marks discolored their hull, with intent to simulate battle damage. That assumed they got near enough for a close inspection.

The special magic—and the rescue mission’s only hope—lay in the nuller, by comparison with which Helmut’s long-ago black-market model was so much regolith and duct tape. The UPIA version was customizable; more than merely canceling the ship’s true lidar and radar echoes, it emitted false echoes to mimic another ship. The navy had had plenty of radar images of unstealthed Snake ships to work from, data captured in the epoch before Himalia.

The periodic hails from
Victorious
continued, and Helmut continued to ignore them. Mashkith was obviously convinced
Deep Throat
was a Snake ship whose comm capability had been knocked out. Obviously—because no squadron had been launched to take them out. The Snake warships did three gees without difficulty, even though the starship evidently couldn’t.

Helmut ground his teeth all the way to the flip-over point. Now, until they doused their fusion drive on final approach,
Victorious
could see little but their hot, but not too hot, exhaust.

And if he could get them just a
bit
closer than that, the special-ops folks in the back would get their opportunity.

Steal a lifeboat. It was a great concept, Eva thought, but somewhat sketchy on details to constitute a plan. Not that she had anything better to offer….

The starship’s acceleration was oppressive, far higher than the Callistan gravity to which she had become accustomed, but at the same time familiarly almost Earthly. A field, or orchard, or vineyard spread all around her, worked by dozens of Centaurs. They might have been unobtrusively observing her, or doing necessary agricultural maintenance, or following some gardening muse. Perhaps they did all three?

None of this is getting me any smarter about Centaur lifeboats
.

The only discernable differences between Centaurs were in height and subtle green-on-green fur patterns. She distrusted her ability to tell them apart. “Joe,” she queried. “Which one is their leader?” A bright translucent disk flashed in her mind’s eye, superimposed over one of the toilers in the field, with a pop-up label that read: K’choi Gwu ka. Evidently Centaurs were not very status-conscious. Art would know. Would she ever see him again? The emotion roiling beneath that question threatened to paralyze her, and Eva tamped it down. “Thanks.”

The ground was sodden. Her shoes squelched as she meandered to the Centaur leader. “I appreciate your hospitality, K’Choi Gwu ka.”

“‘Gwu’ is sufficient.” The Centaur straightened from her task, patching the eroded bank of a stream or irrigation channel. “We have little with which to be hospitable.”

“All the more reason to appreciate your generosity.” Could I sound any more stilted? Maybe it didn’t matter, given two translations before Gwu had a chance to assess her words. “Perhaps in time we humans can help.”

“Perhaps.”

Steal a lifeboat. If it could be done, why had the Centaurs not done it? “All these years, you’ve been prisoners aboard your own ship. It must have been terrible.”

A weird wave traveled from the tips of Gwu’s tentacles to her torso, and reflected. “I do not recommend the experience.”