Rogue Powers (49 page)

"Your crew must be pretty good, I admit that," Gustav said. "But not great. They missed the first lander launching toward the barycenter a week or two ago. And they missed the covert glider/lander that went in a few days ago. And they never had wit enough to do a frequency sweep-check and spot the Refiner's beacon. Of course, the Outposters have radio. Maybe they thought that was just one of the Refiner's normal signals, so I can't really fault them there. But my CIs didn't miss anything, not even the covert. Schiller nailed that, just barely. A very tough target. I can't blame you for missing that one either."

"Gustav, you bloody traitor—" Sprunt rose half out of his chair at Gustav, and froze. A laser pistol had appeared in Gustav's hand, pointed right at Sprunt's chest.

"Sit down again, Commander. Let me tell you a version of the truth. You know I'm ex-Intelligence. Suppose I told you that I was working desperately, taking enormous risks, playing the most daring games with the enemy, to prevent what I believe is a possible attack on Capital that could wipe out our nation?"

"I'd say that you were a bloody traitor with paranoid delusions of grandeur," Sprunt said.

Gustav realized his visitor was angry, not scared. Give Sprunt that much credit. "In a few days' time, Commander, I doubt it will matter very much what you think. But right now it might matter, and in blindly doing what I grant is your duty, you could doom millions. So I will put you under extremely quiet arrest. I think I might lie to the computer and put you on a flight down to the Contact Camp, a tourist going to see the aliens. There are already cases of men wandering off into the woodlands and vanishing. Sometimes the searchers find the torn-up remains of pressure suits. The native life is vicious. I grant you that would be a dangerous game, too. But know that I am prepared to kill you and cover it up as best I can if you force me to it.

"But I'll make you a promise. If I fail in what I'm trying to do, I'll hand you this gun and surrender to you. Let you take me to justice, arrange a court-martial.

"But if I fail, I doubt you or I or any other human in this star system will survive long enough for a court-martial to convene in the first place."

Captain Lewis Romero was scared to death. With the distinct and uncomfortable feeling of entering a trap, Romero walked up the broad gangplank to board
Starsight,
the intersystem ship the Guards had given to the Nihilists.

D'etallis clumped solidly up the ramp behind him, followed by the Outposter pilot and co-pilot, L'anijmeb and L'etmlich.

Starsight
had been up and down into orbit a few times, shakedown cruises. The last two flights had been made solo by the Outposter pilots. But this was the first trip that would actually take the ship anywhere. D'etallis had requested a chance to visit Capital, and the response had been a warm and eager invitation from Jules Jacquet himself. For the sake of wartime security, the flight itself would be a closely held secret, but once on Capital, the Outposters were sure to be a grand center of attention. The Central Guardians were understandably curious to get a look at their new allies—and Romero had been ordered to accompany them. Career-wise, it was a splendid moment for Romero, but this was one honor he would have been willing to forego.
  
He had no faith in the Outposter pilots, no faith that the
Starsight
could stay out of trouble in the midst of interstellar war.

Romero had wit enough about him to read the reports and figure out what was up. Odds were a major battle would shape up while the Nihilists were away from home. Supposedly, the
Starsight
and those aboard would never know. The ship's course was laid in by Guard astrogators under orders to keep their guests the hell away from the war zone.
Starsight's
detection and communications equipment were deliberately not very powerful, and the odds against accidentally blundering into some patrol ship in the vastness of space were nil. Especially since the course laid in for
Starsight
arced far out of the plane of mutual orbit for the two stars. She would never get within five hundred million kilometers of the barycenter. There was enough natural debris and sky junk in the vicinity of the baryworld that such precautions would have been prudent even if the enemy fleet hadn't been anywhere near the place.

But flying through a war wasn't smart. Lewis Romero could understand putting the best face on things for the Nihilists, but he knew there was trouble in the future.

What he didn't know was that the
Starsight
was carrying it.

D'etallis genuinely enjoyed the bustle and fuss of getting strapped in and ready for a voyage into space. And she was genuinely looking forward to the great adventure of travel on the longest Road any Z'ensam had ever travelled. It would be a leisurely journey of some days, and there would be great delight in seeing the stars, in seeing Outpost from space. But this was no pleasure trip.

Romero would have fainted dead away if he had realized just how much the Nihilists knew about the military situation. The Nihilist's radio gear was good, as was their skill at opening burn bags, examining the contents, and resealing the bags before anyone noticed. D'etallis knew what was going on in space, and knew that a time of turmoil, with the Guards occupied elsewhere, was the time to strike.

Starsight
might have been headed for Capital at the Guards' bidding, but the Nihilists had their own plans upon arrival. Once she was there, once she had landed, D'etallis would take a Guardian-provided mortar from the hold, set it up on the landing field, and fire the specially modified rounds. The rounds were set to fire straight up and explode in midair, releasing an air-borne plague. Within days, every human on Capital would be dead. The Nihilists' plague was deadly to humans, and not to Z'ensam— several of the Guards thought to have wandered off from Contact Base had actually been kidnapped by the Nihilists and exposed to the plague virus. They had died quickly and nastily—and the corpses proved to be highly contagious. With the humans of Capital dead,
Starsight
would begin shuttling back and forth between Capital and Outpost, bringing in more Nihilists, the heirs of the Guardians' industrial base. There would be much to learn there.

In a stroke, the Nihilists would have shipyards, the plans for the human stardrive, star charts that could lead them to the other human worlds.

Within the year there would many other emptied worlds, full of gleaming machines and vast stores of knowledge, waiting for their Nihilist inheritors.

The Z'ensam radio did not offer anything like a news service; the closest thing to reporting of events was what amounted to the neighbors gossiping over the back fence— one radio operator chatting with unseen friends in other Groups. But that sufficed; word travelled.

The launch of
Starsight
was a secret among humans but to the Z'ensam it was a most public event, and the Nihilists made no secret of it—though they made no mention of the real purpose of the mission, either. They announced it and described it as an embassy mission.

That didn't fool C'astille. She heard the news as she came out of the Guidance's house. The Guidance and all the leadership had, of course, been appalled by the news that humans had committed so grave an insult as to send implanters, 'males,' to negotiate. The adult, 'female' humans were the ones to blame, of course. That was too repellent to think about. No one was to have any further contact with the humans. Shun them, ignore them, allow them to leave, be done with them.

But
Starsight.
C'astille knew the Nihilists well, knew their plans and schemes, and how what they did compared to what they said. She
knew,
instantly, that the
Starsight
was intent on a bio-attack. And she knew how hopelessly unprepared the humans, Guards or League, would be to defend against that.

The humans. Lucy had seemed a
friend,
and C'astille felt dirtied by the thoughtless, unmeant betrayal. Medicine. Supposedly "intelligent" implanters. Treating implanters as equals, and tricking all the Z'ensam into doing the same.

Disgusting, half formed creatures, with their shameless ways, their perversities unpunished. C'astille knew, somehow, that it took no trick of hormones, no sublimation of conscious will, that forced the human females to mate with the males. They would go to it willingly, perhaps even eagerly, rutting like filthy, mindless beasts.

To hear the humans say it, their kind was never dragged down to the level of animals. But C'astille knew better. The humans never, once in their life-cycle, rose
above
the animals.

She wished the Nihilists and
Starsight
well.

Let the humans die. All of them.

The first thing Chief Petty Officer Nyguen Chi Prihn noticed was the slight wear on the status panel's hold-down screws; the Phillips-heads were slightly chewed up. Someone had over-tightened the screws, or perhaps used the wrong-sized screwdriver. In any event, the screws were damaged, and
that
was something to bear down on the maintenance techs about. It was just the sort of minor sloppiness that could lead to disaster. If those screw-heads got much more chewed up, it might suddenly get very difficult to unscrew the screws to lift that panel and repair the innards in a hurry, in the midst of battle. And that panel reported on flight status of some very important birds. If the status panel went out, it could incapacitate the whole port side launch ops bay.

Who had done the last work on this panel? He or she needed a good bawling out. Prihn signed on to a computer terminal and pulled up the maintenance log for the status panel. He studied it for a moment, then let out a string of curses that could be traced right back to old Saigon. He, Prihn, was listed as the last person to work on that panel, over one thousand hours ago. And Prihn would bet his life that those screws hadn't been damaged two day ago.

Someone was going to be lucky to be alive after Prihn got through with him. Doing repairs without logging them! But wait a second. Prihn knew his spacers well. All of them knew, and believed, that lives, the fortunes of battle, the tide of history itself, could easily depend on how well they did their work. Overtightening a screw was one thing, that might happen accidentally, but none of his kids would screw around with logging procedure. Writing up a careful description of what they had done was second nature to all of them. They knew that not doing so was one of the quickest shortcuts to catastrophic failure. Prihn chewed on his finger for a moment, then ran a beefy hand over his perfectly combed, well brillantined head of hair. Something was seriously wrong here.

He pulled a tool kit out of the cabinet, grabbed a screwdriver, and opened up the panel. And there was no string of curses suitable for what he saw. Someone had rewired the panel lights to give phony readings. Sabotage. Clear cut, unmistakable sabotage. It took him a moment to trace the reworked wiring. The telltale lights on the number three Rapid-Deployment Docking Port had been shorted out so as to show green on all counts no matter what the real situation was.
Covert Lander Two
was supposed to be hanging there.

The external cameras. One after another, he punched up the cams that should have shown RDDP-3. All of them were dead. He switched in the intercom. "Comm room, this is CPO Prihn at port side launch control. Emergency Priority. Request any ships at close station-keeping distance with
Eagle
to feed us a visual of our hull in the area of the port side Rapid Deployment Docking Ports. Pipe the feed to me."

"Stand by, Port Side Launch. One moment. We have a feed from
Bismarck."

The video screen came to life, showing nothing but space. Then the camera panned over and locked in on the huge cylinder that was
Eagle,
dimly lit by the distant suns. Then
Bismarck
powered up her searchlights, and the big ship seemed to shine against the darkness of space, proud and stately in her rotation about her long axis.
Bismarck's
camera zoomed in toward the RDDP ports, but they slipped out of view with
Eagle's
spin before Prihn could get a good look. The camera pitched up slightly to catch the docking ports as they came about again. There should have been four covert landers docked to the external hull.

There were only three.

Prihn swore again, and felt a cold knot of fear and anxiety twisting together in his stomach. "Comm. Prihn again. Emergency Priority. Get me the captain. We've got trouble."

The radio signal came out of nowhere. Long-range in-terferometry placed the source very close, only thirty thousand kilometers away, but radar hadn't detected anything and still couldn't. The radio source, whatever it was, was requesting permission to rendezvous and dock with
Zeus
Station, but the commodore would have none of that. He didn't want any ship that radar couldn't see getting too near his command. It could be a sneak attack, a trick bomb. He deployed a squad of fighters and ordered them to home in on the radio signal, pick up any crew or passengers, and then leave the ship, or whatever it was, in a stable orbit far from any Guardian installation.