Island Worlds (21 page)

The tech station with the unlikely name was not, for a change, a hollowed-out asteroid. It was a glittering construction of metal, ultraglass and glaring-white mooncrete. Built in Lunar orbit thirty years before and moved to its present location later on, it had been at that time the largest man-made object in space, and larger than all but a few Earthly structures. It could not compare for sheer mass with the Great Wall of China, but it easily surpassed all the pyramids, with the Pentagon thrown in for good measure.

Aeaea had been built by a consortium of high-tech companies wanting a number of things available only in space: Pristine, zero-gee conditions, secrecy and security from the competition, tax advantages and freedom from government interference. Huge as it was, Aeaea manufactured few products. Almost all of its output was pure, abstract technology. The founders had given the ship-colony-scientific station the name of Circe's island both because of their intent to work sorcerous miracles in their labs and as a subtle reminder to the competition and interfering governments of what happened to people who messed with Circe. Just in case anyone missed the point, their corporate logo was a pig wearing a Greek helmet.

Aeaea had not been one of Thor's stops on his whirlwind diplomatic tour. Someone else had been there, and had reported on the Aeaeans' reluctance to take sides in a conflict when they viewed all parties as customers. They also proclaimed to have no fear of Earth aggression. Thor was pretty sure that they were bluffing, but he was equally sure that it would be a long time before anyone felt confident enough to call the bluff. In the meantime, if there was such a thing as a safe, neutral spot in all of human-occupied space, it would have to be Aeaea.

The woman across from Thor wore a white sari modified for zero-gee. Her left eye was some kind of weird instrument that showed only a curved surface of faceted glass and it gave her a daunting stare. She looked about fifty but could be easily twice that. A lot of medical research was done in Aeaea. She was in some kind of contact with other scientists within the facility, through a communication system Thor had never heard of. He suspected that it had something to do with the eye and with the slight bulge implanted in her skull behind the left ear. Most of the people he'd seen here had ungodly-looking biomechanical implants. They looked creepy and caused him to question the wisdom of what he was doing.

Too late to do anything about it, though. The woman had stuffed his sheets and crystals into a console and was now going through them at incredible speed. She appeared to be in a deep trance-state. He turned to Roseberry, who floated beside him. The Aeaeans favored zero-gee. "Have you ever seen anything like this?"

"People gets peculiar when they been isolated for a long time," Roseberry said. "I been to rocks where you'd swear the people wasn't human any more at all. This ain't bad."

Thor was sure that everything they were saying was being recorded, but he had better things to worry about than sparing the Aeaean's feelings. If they wanted to be complimented for their looks, they could damn well hide their electronic excrescences. The room they were in was the main office. At least, it seemed to be the location from which business was transacted. The walls were of some translucent material that shaded from transparency to white at an indefinite depth. They had entered through a door but it was invisible now. It was like being inside a cloud.

Abruptly, the room was full of people. They were holographic projections, but might as well have been real. They jabbered away at one another in some kind of scientific shorthand language from which Thor could snatch only scattered words. A man in bug-eye goggles turned to Thor with a maniacal grin. "This is it! With this, there's no limit to what we can do!" Thor wasn't sure he liked the sound of that.

An enormously fat, Buddha-like man dressed in a loincloth smiled serenely. "I had thought that Ciano died with more secrets locked in his skull than Nikola Tesla. This is like a gift from the gods." Except for his obesity, the man seemed normal. Then Thor noticed that there was an electronic gizmo in his belly button.

"God help us," he whispered to Roseberry, "they're all nuttier than Ciano."

"That'd be going some," Roseberry said cautiously.

The jabber died down and the woman in the sari spoke. "You have our attention, Mr. Taggart. What is the nature of your proposal?"

"In return for the rest of Ciano's research, I want you to develop something exclusively for the Confederacy."

The woman held up a hand. "Before you go any further, I must tell you that, until the present unpleasantness is settled, we will not develop anything that can be used as war materiel."

"The farthest thing from my mind," Thor said. "Quite the contrary, in fact. I want you to develop fully the engine Ciano was at work on when he died. I want big engines, lots of them. I want engines that will take a whole asteroid, whatever its size, on an interstellar voyage."

There was a span of silence, then another woman spoke. Her entire head was encased in a delicate lattice of crystal and metal. Such features as were visible were Asiatic. "This would be a worthy commission. We've not had such a challenge in too long. We are all tired of petty, profit-oriented commissions. It would be good to stretch ourselves."

"We are not set up for heavy industry," said the voice of a man who had chosen to remain invisible. "Such engines would be massive and thousands of them would be necessary."

"We can build the facilities and have automated labor robots manufactured to our design," said the sari-clad woman.

"Testing could be a problem," said the fat man. "We know from Ciano's mishap that the process could produce a spectacular display."

"During the testing phase we'll stay on the move and conduct the tests at widely-separated locations. Nobody will know what the displays signify in any case," said the sari-clad woman. There was more of the incomprehensible jabber, then she said: "Are we agreed, then?" She turned to Thor. "You have a deal. The contract will be recorded and registered under strictest seal."

"You'll have the rest of the data as soon as I have confirmation of the contract from Dula, Wong and Metuschaskayasky." D, W&M was Avalon's most reputable legal firm. "And now, I must be off. I have a convention to attend and I've already missed the first day."

Two days later, when he got back to Avalon, he found that not only was the convention under way, but the opening moves of the war had begun.

ELEVEN

Hjalmar spotted Thor from clear across the floor of HMK. Thor stood on the balcony outside the train station overlooking the cavernous chamber. Red-faced, Hjalmar stormed across the packed floor, his ploughing bulk sending shock waves through the crowd. He leaped thirty feet to grab the guardrail of the balcony and hauled himself over it. "Where the hell have you been, Thor?" he shouted. "We've been trying to find you for days! Figured some Earthie spies had snatched you or set you out to breathe vacuum."

"I had business to take care of and I don't care to talk about it here," Thor said. "Fine security chief you are, anyway. Didn't you figure out that I took that little prospector ship out for a short voyage?" The agitation below was unbelievable. There were big holo screens set up and some of them played the expected political speeches but others displayed scenes of devastation. Thor began to have a bad feeling about this.

"Of course I found out about the prospector," Hjalmar fumed. "And about you and Roseberry taking it out, but it wasn't anything that couldn't have been faked. I happen to know that snatch teams are out looking for you and Shaw. Shaw can take care of himself, but the family doesn't want me to lose you."

"Disinformation," Thor said, shrugging. "I've told you before, there are no snatch teams and no assassins. I'm too valuable as a symbol. If they killed me, they'd have to create another villain. Hjalmar, what the hell's going on?" He pointed at one of the screens. It displayed an asteroid and the rock was spraying sparks and molten rock from numerous fissures.

"You mean you haven't heard? The war's under way. Yesterday about this time, the Earthies landed a nuke on M-255. It was in a rock driller. Just bored its way to the center and triggered. An ore freighter waiting to load got these pictures."

There was a sinking feeling in Thor's chest. So it had begun. He had hoped that, somehow, it might be averted. "How many?"

"There were four hundred miners there at the time. There can't be any survivors. We don't know how many ships were docked there yet."

"Why a remote mining rock?" Thor asked. "Why not Avalon or one of the other key settlements?"

"Because it was easy," Hjalmar said, bitterly. "They got a quick 'victory,' " his mouth twisted wryly at the word, "an impressive body count, at least it'll be impressive when they announce it for the folks back home. They had a spy satellite sitting a few hundred kilometers from the rock to get pictures of the destruction. It's a damned impressive sight, to see a nuke go off in an asteroid, in case you've never seen it."

"So what will we do now?" Thor said wearily. "We'll have to retaliate." They began to walk toward the cave that had been set aside as Eos party headquarters.

"We already have by now," Hjalmar said. He smiled grimly at Thor's look of surprise. "The Sálamids sent out an expeditionary force months ago. They've been in position for a long time, waiting for the Earthies to make the first move. They plan to strike as soon as the attack on us is announced. There's nothing like immediate reprisal for an object lesson."

"What's the target?"

"Something military, I'm told, either in Earth orbit or on Luna. They've picked a facility where most of the personnel are from the First-World countries."

Thor stopped in his tracks. "Why be so selective?" He knew it was illogical, but it hurt to know that the victims would be his former countrymen.

"Because the families of the servicemen will likely be notified. That way, there's no way they can hide the casualty count. Plus, their media will be flooded with our pictures of the raid."

"But they've been jamming all our transmissions for months," Thor said.

"Some genius on Luna has set up a station that can bull through any jamming the Earthies can set up. If he keeps it moving and keeps the broadcasts short, there's no way they can keep his transmissions out."

Thor thought of Chih' Chin Fu. That boy was playing a dangerous game.

Party headquarters was full of people shouting at each other or into communicators. It was also full of people talking in very low voices. It looked to Thor as if there were a lot of deals being made. A good many of those present were members of other parties. He saw none of Shaw's people. He decided that this kind of political collusion was the inevitable accompaniment of a parliamentary democracy.

"Thor!" someone said. "When did you get back?" Heads swiveled his way.

"If spacers smoked," Thor said, "this would be the proverbial smoke-filled room.''

"Huh?" Nobody understood the reference.

"Never mind," he said. "What's been happening at the convention? I've already heard the war news."

Sean Roalstad pushed through the crowd and took Thor's hand. "We're winning by a landslide," he said, and Thor was struck by the inappropriateness of the image in space. "Eos has pulled in a big majority of seats. That's why all the other parties are here. They want to talk coalition. The new parliament's to be called the
Althing
, after the ancient Icelandic assembly. That was my suggestion," he added, proudly. "The constitution is based on the old Confederate States of America's, with additions from the Iroquois League and a half-dozen other systems. Tomás Sousa's to be President, as head of the majority party. Saburo and some of the others have stepped down so's it won't look so much like a family operation. He calls it the House of Saud syndrome."

"I don't see any of Martin's people here," Thor said. "I take it they aren't interested in making deals."

"We haven't heard anything from them since yesterday," Hjalmar said. "I suspect we'll be hearing about them pretty soon, though."

"Your attention, please," said someone. "The holos of our counterattack against Earth have just come through." Silence descended as all eyes turned to the display covering one wall.

A million tiny, colored specks converged to form a robed man. It was Chih' Chin Fu in his Confucian scholar persona. "Greetings, brothers of Earth and space. This is the voice and image of the Free Holographic Network, bringing you the true story of the terrible war which is about to engulf us all. Yesterday we showed you the authentic pictures of the unprovoked attack on the peaceful mining asteroid M-255, in the first deliberate use of atomic weaponry against human beings since 1945. Today, you shall see how the Confederacy of Island Worlds has retaliated."

The scholar's image disappeared and a massive, orbiting fortress of metal and mooncrete took its place. A broad arc of Earth could be seen in the background. "This is Orbital Base Thunderbird. It is a staging area for proposed offensives against the Confederacy." Abruptly, blue-white flares erupted all over the base. "What you have just witnessed was the destruction of all the station's defensive and sensory apparatus by precision laser fire. The Confederate warships approached without difficulty, since Earth forces really don't believe in those powerful outerworld battle fleets they have been frightening you with for several years. The next stage of the operation was a commando raid into the base. The following sequence was holographed by a camera mounted on a raiders armored spacesuit. The action has been smoothed out, but it is still somewhat jerky."

The point of view was now the red-lit interior of a small craft. Hulking, armored forms could be seen bristling with enigmatic weapons. The forms were facing a round hatch broad enough for two or three raiders to pass through at the same time. There was a jerk as the vessel's motion ceased and the hatch slid aside, revealing the outside of an airlock hatch. Lasers flared and metal sparked as two of the raiders cut through the hatch with heavy-duty miner's shortbeam cutters. As the hatch was cut free, a raider slapped a charge in its center and detonated it, sending the hatch flying into the interior of the lock. At the blast, the raiders rocked back on their tethers.

Some kind of temporary emergency seal kept the air within the ship and the base. The raiders loosed their tethers and flew into the airlock on tiny, compressed-gas jets. Inside, the inner hatch was cycled open and the commandos flew into the base proper. The raider was recording sound as well as sight, and the base was a deafening pandemonium of alarms, bells, sirens and shouting personnel. Startled, unbelieving faces turned to stare at the armored commandos as beams, taking their energy from backpack power plants, began to sizzle out from forearm-mounted lasers, destroying every piece of equipment the raiders came upon, as well as personnel foolish enough to try to protect the facilities. A man in a sergeant's uniform came through a hatch with a beam rifle cradled in his arms. Before he could aim it, he was met by a stream of gas-driven ceramic pellets, no more than one millimeter in diameter, but traveling in great numbers at a velocity of four thousand meters per second. The effect was instantaneous and gruesome.

The raiding party worked its way through its assigned area of the base, remorselessly destroying anything of value but attacking only persons who showed resistance. After perhaps thirty minutes, they worked their way back to the airlock and reboarded their vessel. Near the hatch, one raider was carving something on the mooncrete wall near the lock. The raider carrying the camera paused and faced the inscription. In blackened letters carved deeply by an arc-torch, it read: "We could have dropped this station on Earth."

Fu reappeared. "Six such parties landed on Base Thunderbird. Later today, I shall broadcast all their holographs. Another part of the expeditionary force struck at a shipbuilding station near Thunderbird, destroying two cruisers and a frigate under construction. You shall see views of that as well. At this moment, an official U.N. broadcast is being shown depicting large numbers of casualties from a ruthlessly assaulted hospital ward. This is a holographic fabrication, as the most cursory analysis will demonstrate. The most rigorous analysis will prove the authenticity of the Free Holographic Network's holos. I will be back in two hours, with the next installment of our continuing report on the action at Base Thunderbird. This is FHN, where truth is the best propaganda." The holo faded to a starscape.

There was little cheering at the end of the broadcast. Faces were pale and voices were subdued. "It's good," Roalstad grunted, "that we have had a chance to see real fighting close up. Maybe now we won't have so many long-range fire-eaters anxious to send other people out to win glory for them."

"How long can Fu get away with it?" Thor wondered.

"If he can last more than a few days," Hjalmar said, "then he will have to be incredibly clever. He—" Hjalmar's head tilted slightly to one side, as if someone were whispering in his ear. "Your attention, please," he called out. "I have just received word that the ships
Spartacus
,
Simon Bolivar
,
Garibaldi
and
Jeanne D'Arc
have left simultaneously and without filing a spacing plan or personnel roster with port authority."

"All of Shaw's ships!" said someone. Thor looked around and saw that it was Reiko McNaughton. "We should declare him an outlaw at once!"

"He's done nothing treasonable yet," Thor said.

"He will, and soon," Hjalmar said. "I'll have the bastard put under death sentence when he does."

"Hold it," Thor said. "We've just become a nation and we're already splitting up. This is not a good start. Solidarity should be everything now."

"Thor," said Brunhilde, who had been operating one of the vote-counting computers, "we have to denounce him. He's going to take unilateral action and we can't recognize him or Earth will blame his atrocities on us. What's more, they'll be right to do so." He couldn't argue with her. It was true. The events of the last few days bore down upon him with crushing weight. They were a nation and they were at war.