Galactic Empires (13 page)

Five years before the end of the war, a wormship attack deprived
Lenin
of its Doctrinaire. He'd spent the rest of the war ensuring that the ship didn't get another one. The Grazen withdrew from numerous worlds, then consolidated their nests around the core of their empire-if "empire" was the correct description of their system of governance, which he frankly doubted. Supplies to fleet ships were low, resources scant. The Committee called it a "victory of political rationality over animalistic imperialism" and recalled the fleet. Seeing through to the reality, Astanger counted the cost: on the Grazen side, twenty out of tens of thousands of their nests destroyed and a nursery world burned; on the Collective side, fifteen hundred and six capital ships destroyed, numerous support vessels gone, ground assault troops exterminated in great numbers (some of them burned on the nursery world in the common kind of screwup occurring when military tactics became subject to political control). The total human cost was somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, though it was impossible to get an accurate count.

Victory indeed.

But now, here aboard the
Lenin,
he wanted to
do
something. Many of the crew agreed with him-the exceptions being new personnel who had not been aboard during those five years-but there simply weren't enough of them. The crew complement consisted of fifty-eight people, all, by Committee ruling, unarmed. Shrad had one hundred of the utterly loyal Guard with him, all of them armed with handguns and carbines, and with access to even more powerful weapons than those. It seemed hopeless, and would become more so in the months to come as his crew steadily starved.

*

The Mother retreated to the nest, but could not bring herself to finally return her vessel to its structure. Only partially reconnecting her tendrils into the yig channels and thus to the nest's long-range sensors, she gazed at the two human ships as they moved beyond the barrier. No reaction, nothing. She could not believe this: every wormship sent through there had been destroyed, the posts had fried
all
the drive systems of every human ship that strayed that way and then flung them back out. Why not now?

She seethed as the two human ships made for the nearest world within
his
domain. She gazed at them throughout the months of their journey, her frustration growing at letting two such easy targets—now they had lost the ability to travel in U-space-escape. But she was also frightened: there was the Misunderstanding to consider.

Then it started again.

Through long-unused yig channels, she received the news that the humans were preparing for another attack on the Grazen. Watch stations peppered throughout the Collective reported uncontrolled industrialization and the effective rapine of worlds. They reported massive movements of supplies, ships, and human warriors. Apparently, these last were different somehow, and this, too, was a worrying development. Such an effort had been predicted as a remote possibility when the Grazen, taking a long view of things, had withdrawn to wait for the inevitable collapse of a societal experiment that seemed doomed to failure. Analysis of this new effort showed that it would bankrupt the Collective and bring about its predicted collapse early, but that would be no consolation if another nursery world was burned.

Though she had physically separated her nest from the rest of the Grazen, she could not separate herself from her kind's racial will, the purpose, the gestalt that was the Grazen. While others of her kind prepared with cold efficiency to hold the Collective at bay until it collapsed, the Mother raged. She wanted to strike out, to damage, to hurt, and the nearest humans to her were but a few weeks away through the undersphere, then the oversphere.

The posts had not touched them, so perhaps they would not touch her? Maybe
he
was looking away, maybe
he
was gone? It was said by some that he took the form of a human, so maybe he was as short-lived as that kind and had died? While one part of her mind was so foolishly wishful, another part reasoned that something like
him
would not die and would not be caught with his guard down.

Then came the communication.

Though couched perfectly in the language of the yig channels, the Mother knew its source to be alien. Tracing back through the undersphere to its source, she felt a moment of pure dread.
Him?

But the Misunderstanding? was
the essence of her reply.

He
explained, and she felt a sudden overwhelming joy.

She once again detached her consolidated kernel for oversphere travel and fell away from her main nest. Clawing through vacuum between asteroidal debris until she found clear space, she dropped into the undersphere. Yes, she had always felt that humans must pay for the deaths of her children and the other deaths sure to come, and pay, and pay. However, this was different, this was
personal.

*

Kelly gazed at the images displayed in the viewing cylinder. The two probes showed the world ahead to be beautiful, warm and burgeoning with life. Bands of forest rimmed the continents, enclosing prairies and mountain ranges. Vast herds of grazing beasts, sometimes tens of miles across, were visible in flowing patterns across the prairies, cutting swathes of brown through the green. One close view showed a predator—some kind of massive reptile standing up on its hind legs-bringing down one of these grazing beasts. It was just a microcosm of the huge ebb and flow of life spread across the landmasses.

The oceans seemed equally as bountiful. Shoals of fish spumed the sea across areas as large as those landward herds. Giant cetaceans hunted and played, enormous sharks the color of polished copper cruised shorelines swamped by either basking amphibians or swimming mammals come ashore to mate and lay eggs.

Birds and flying reptiles swirled across the sky. Tropical seas gleamed sapphire. Snowcapped peaks glistened pure white. Salmon leaped in a million miles of clean rivers. It all looked so wonderfully natural, an untouched paradise.

"Do you even begin to comprehend the kind of engineering involved in creating something like that?" enquired Olsen. "If it
is
engineered," said Elizabeth dismissively. "Tell me about the engineering," said Slome. "Think of the migratory pattens-it all has to be programmed in. Not only has life been created down there from base genetic imprints, it's been programmed to integrate into the entire artificial environment. And you know, there's things down there that went extinct back on Terra and others that simply never existed."

"Then perhaps they were here before any engineering commenced," suggested Elizabeth, playing her preferred devil's advocate role.

"No, you see, they're suited to their environment." "Precisely." Elizabeth was triumphant. Olsen shook his head at her and turned to Slome. "Everything down there is suited to that environment. Yet, unless a lot of Markovian records are wrong, that environment was a lot colder about three hundred years ago."

"Go on," said Slome, his eyes narrowing.

"This world is not where it's supposed to be—it's much closer to the sun."

Elizabeth barked a laugh. "So, this immortal superbeing is also capable of moving worlds? I think it more likely that initial Markovian studies were inaccurate and that inaccuracy was simply copied."

Olsen shrugged. "That's always possible."

Kelly continued gazing at the images and compared what she was seeing to the incompleteness of many Collective worlds, where near-Terran environments were maintained by gas extraction and fixing plants, the importation of essential minerals from elsewhere, the resowing of certain biologicals, the endless war against alien biologicals—whole industries working to prevent, in human terms, planetary ecological collapse. This world, though, seemed to function perfectly. There was no sign of atmosphere plants or any other support technology-no sign, in fact, of any technology at all… until Traviss spoke.

"I've found something," he said.

The images in the cylinder blurred for a moment, then settled on a high view of a coastline. Traviss focused in by stages, each time allowing the ship's computers to clean up the image presented. The final image was of an estuary where a river cut down into a wide blue bay. On one side of the estuary, on a blunt peninsula, it seemed evident that there was a large building of some kind. Squinting, Kelly was also sure she could make out a jetty with what appeared to be a large twin-hulled boat moored beside it, projecting from a rocky shore just beside a white sand beach.

"Someone living down there?" wondered Slome.

Kelly shivered. The
Owner
!

"I'm getting stuff in infrared and some other EMR," said Traviss. "Nothing substantial, but it does seem likely there's someone down there."

"Can you give us a closer view?" Slome asked.

"If I do, we'll lose this probe-it won't have enough fuel to pull up again."

"Do so."

They all stood watching as the probe obviously headed in a course out to sea and down, the view flicking back to the building and clarifying intermittently. The image shuddered for a little while as the probe's stabilizers failed to compensate for its decelerating burn as it curved around and headed back in. Kelly felt both a growing excitement and trepidation, but really did not know what she expected to see. The final views in the probe's life were clear, and puzzling; something so prosaic in so unusual a location. Nestled in rocky slopes scattered with gnarled trees was a large building, a house, something like the kind of place the Markovians might have used as a country retreat. It was sprawling, fashioned of the surrounding stone, with turrets and towers rising here and there, red tiles on the roofs and many baroquely shaped windows. Tracks led down from it to the shore, to some wooden buildings from which a jetty projected out into the sea. Moored next to the jetty was a large catamaran. As the probe sank down toward the sea, she was sure she could discern a figure sitting on the jetty.

"That last image," said Slome. "Can you repeat it and clean it up?"

Traviss complied, and they all gazed at a human figure-difficult to tell if it was male or female-sitting on the jetty, fishing-and waving, too. No one seemed able to say anything about that-it all just seemed too incongruous. They had arrived at a world that had been under interdict for longer than any of them had been alive because it was owned by some dangerous being… then this.

"Give us that first orbital view again," said Slome.

Once again they gazed down from upon high.

Slome pointed. "On the other side of the estuary, the forest comes nearly down to the shore. On the side where the house lies, it's hilly for a few miles back before leveling into prairie-that's one of the few areas where forest doesn't cover the land to the rear of the shore."

"No coincidence, I would suggest," said Elizabeth, now somehow subdued.

"No," said Slome. He turned and checked each face in turn. "I suggest we land on that prairie—as close to the house as we can get. Then I suggest we go and see who is living there."

"Is that a good idea?" wondered Kelly.

"I don't know. However, what I
do
know is that once this ship is down, we'll not be able to take it back up again, and I do know that the
Lenin
is not far behind us and will almost certainly land near to us. A Doctrinaire and the Guard will come looking for us. If we were to land anywhere else, our only choice would be to run, and keep on running. There"—he stabbed a finger at the projection—"some alternative might lie open to us."

"The Owner might save us," said Elizabeth flatly.

"Or we might be bringing the Guard down on an innocent lone settler," said Kelly.

Slome shook his head. "No one is innocent. Haven't you been reading your Committee dictates?"

*

The
Breznev
headed toward the world tail first, poised on the bright flare of its main drive. Behind the half hemisphere of the thrust plate and the conglomeration of fuel tanks, reactor, lithium pellet injectors, and ignition lasers lay the drive penny for the U-space engines. Beyond this stretched a long reinforced framework holding an access tunnel from the now stationary spin section-a cylinder eighty feet wide and a hundred feet long-inside which the escapees were being crushed into acceleration chairs. Next along from the spin section was the giant brick of the storage section and holds, capped off by the heavy reentry shield and underslung reentry plate. The ship left an ionized trail past the world's single cratered moon, the four big reaction thrusters positioned at the four corners of the frame holding the spin section belching chemical flame to force the ship into an inward curve.

Further brighter ionization in the world's disperse exosphere sketched the vessel's course around the world and deeper toward the thermosphere. When its speed reached a predetermined level, the main drive cut out and the thrusters flared again, turning the ship nose to tail to present its reentry shield to the steadily thickening air. The flip-over had its usual effect internally, and clamping down on her churning guts, Kelly knew the vomit vacuums would again be required. Explosive bolts blew, clamps detached, especially weakened structural members broke where they were supposed to, and the entire drive section detached, small steering thrusters slightly altering its course to throw it into orbit around the world. Landing with a U-space engine and fusion reactor had never been an option.

The reentry shield smoked as its layer of soft ceramic began baking hard. It soon began to emit a dull red glow. Then fire flared out and back from it, enclosing the ship, podlike. It hurtled down, planing on fire. Then the thrusters adjusted its course to bring it down on the underslung reentry plate and steadily began firing to slow the ship even further. As the ship penetrated cloud, sealed containers positioned all around the spin section opened like buds to spew parachutes. Using a combination of these and the big thrusters, the ship descended on prairie, scattering herds of buffalo, and one herd of unicorns. Grass fires ignited underneath as it finally began to settle, but they were short-lived, for this vegetation was spring green. With a final whump and a settling of parachutes all around, the
Breznev
was down.