The Disinherited (20 page)

The station, of course, had similar weapons—relatively inefficient, clumsily massive as was typical of Korvaash engineering, but a lot of them and a hellacious powerplant for them to draw on. And the Korvaasha were veterans in their use.

But the deflector operators, overseeing computers with reaction times no human could match, artfully interposed their nonmaterial shields between the ships and the stabbing energy swords while the cruisers' weapons ripped and tore at every area of the station's surface where a weapon revealed itself by firing.

After a time, DiFalco was satisfied that the enemy's volume of fire had dropped to the level deemed acceptable for the next phase of the attack. He contacted Major Thompson on the assault carrier
Guadalcanal
and spoke a brief order. Then he watched as the assault shuttles dropped away from
Guadalcanal
and her two sisters. (No, damn it;
Sevastapol
was, he supposed, a brother. Why couldn't the Russians ever get it through their thick heads that ships were female?) Under covering fire from the cruisers, the stubby little craft accelerated toward the station, then began burning their forward-facing retrorockets to reduce their velocity and allow ramming without self-immolation.

DiFalco couldn't imagine what that impact was going to be like for Thompson and his men. It would, he imagined, be a foretaste of hell. And he could only watch and wait.

With a grinding, screaming roar of tearing metal, the specially reinforced snub nose of the still-retrofiring assault shuttle penetrated the outer skin of the station. The small craft's rudimentary artificial gravity could not begin to cope; Thompson and his men were thrown about in the webbing which, with their powered combat armor's shock absorbers, would hopefully limit their injuries to bruises.

The shuttle, like a slow-motion bullet, ground its way as far into the station as it was going. Thompson slapped the switch that disengaged the webbing, and the shuttle's blunt clamshell nose opened to reveal a vista of wreckage.

"Alright people, move it or lose it!" The armor suits were sealed against vacuum lest the Korvaasha, deciding they had nothing to lose, played cute tricks like letting the air out of the station. But the helmet communicators carried Thompson's voice to the entire squad as he leaped out into the ruined, dimly-lit passageway. Scanning for hostiles and finding none, he consulted the heads-up display that seemed to float a couple of inches from his left eye. Yeah . . . according to what Varien's people knew of the layout of this kind of installation, the command center should be
that
way.

"To the right," he called out. "Follow me." He had just turned into the branching passageway when an electronic scream awoke in his ear to inform him that a laser target designator had touched his armor. His reflexes were very nearly as instantaneous as the sensing system; he twisted aside just as a burst of hypervelocity, hyperdense slugs crashed into the bulkhead. Only one connected, and it caromed off his armor. Swinging in the direction of the hostile fire, he brought his plasma gun up into the socket that allowed it to tap into the armor's own powerpack. By the time he had completed the movement, he was facing his first Korvaasha. Without pausing to let weirdness register, he blasted the alien into flaming, nondescript ruin.

His squad, most of them armed with heavy-duty mass-driver weapons not unlike the one the Korvaasha had tried to use on him (although a human needed a strength-enhancing powered exoskeleton to carry one) came around the corner and proceeded to mow down the Korvaasha that had followed the first one out of the twisted ruins. The remains, he noted with relief, were more flesh than machinery. These were ordinary security guards. They weren't the fully-cyborgian warrior elite he had studied—those might well give even power-armored troops trouble.

Plenty of time for that later.

Motioning to the squad to follow him, he proceeded along the passageway.

The second wave had arrived, and the scientific and intelligence specialists were combing over what was left of the station. It was, on the whole, a disappointment. In particular, Kuropatkin and Tartakova would have liked prisoners to interrogate. But there were only corpses . . . not all of them Korvaash.

DiFalco stood with Varien in the chamber near the scanner controls, gazing at the abattoir that Thompson's men had found. Not even the butchery that had occured here could conceal the species of the victims.

I will
not
be sick
, DiFalco commanded himself. He looked at Varien, who
had
been sick at his first sight of this room. But now he was gazing at the remains of his fellow Raehaniv with an expression neither of nausea nor of shock but rather of infinite sadness.

The old man finally turned to him and spoke with a strange gentleness. "Your weapons didn't do this, you know. They were obviously slaughtered by the Korvaasha—slaughtered with a ferocity I cannot understand. But
you
didn't kill them."

"No," the American said harshly. "But we both know that we
are
going to have to kill humans—probably a lot of them—when we reach Raehan. Unless the Korvaasha magically go away in a puff of smoke, there's no way we're going to be able to avoid it." His eyes met the Raehaniv's, and there was almost a challenge in them. Varien looked away.

"I know," he finally said, almost inaudibly. "I suppose I've known it all along. I've simply avoided thinking about it. Like all Raehaniv, I've found that easy to do where the realities of war are concerned—it's all seemed so abstract, so . . . historical." He straightened, and his voice firmed. "No more. Do what you have to do at Raehan, Colonel. You cannot let yourself be deterred by blood, any more than any other surgeon."

They departed, leaving the room to the dead.

"Quiet, everyone! Order!" Arduin's bellow finally silenced them. He ran a threatening look around the table, then spoke in a normal tone of voice. "We may be pirates by Korvaash definition, but that's no excuse for
behaving
like pirates. Now, Daeliuv, please continue."

The intelligence chief gave a professorial harrumph, and his eyes focused on his neural display. "To repeat," he began frostily, "our routine monitoring of the Seivra displacement point detected realtime gravitational emanations that indicated the arrival of what appeared to be a Korvaash picket ship, or other vessel of comparable mass and power. Afterwards we, like everyone else in the system with the proper receiver, picked up a signal which, while naturally in Korvaash code, gave every indication of being a system-wide emergency alert.

"The result," he continued in the same pedantic tones, "was dramatic. Korvaash operations against us here in the asteroids have come to a standstill—they have assumed a defensive posture as their mobile forces have departed for the Seivra displacement point. Likewise, their combatant ships at Raehan itself have been dispatched to the same destination. To it . . . but not
through
it. We have detected no departures for Seivra. Courier vessels have, however, transitted this system's other displacement points.

"Information from our sources on Raehan is, of course, still too sparse to allow meaningful evaluation . . . ."

"Come on, Daeliuv," Yarvann broke in, risking Arduin's wrath. "You must have
some
feedback from your dirtside sources by now! Give us your first-sense impression."

Daeliuv's voice dropped a few more degrees in temperature. "Subject to later verification," he said heavily, "the early indications we have received suggest that the Korvaasha on Raehan are in an uproar, as if they are responding to some emergency. Security has been tightened still further, and the Implementers"—a kind of subliminal growl ran around the table—"are behaving with a nervous bluster that suggests that they are feeling pressure from above.

"Any conclusions must, at this time, be tentative . . . ."

" 'Tentative' nothing!" Yarvann swung around to face the head of the table, eyes glowing with a fire that had not been seen among the Raehaniv for a long, long time. "Arduin, there's only one possibility, only one thing that could account for all this. Somebody, from somewhere, has taken Seivra! And," he continued, grinning savagely, "whoever that is has got the Korvaasha here in the Tareil system by whatever they use for balls!" He spoke a command that awakened a holo display above the center of the table. "The only displacement chain that connects this system with the Korvaash empire runs through Seivra! Of course, those departing couriers have warned the Korvaasha in the other chains that converge here at Tareil—but those are just light forces, mopping up our research stations and such. The Korvaasha in this system are on their own, cut off from their own higher echelons!"

"And just where could these mysterious Unknowns have come from?" Daeliuv's sarcastic tone didn't quite make it to the end of the sentence.

Yarvann shrugged. "Who's to say? Seivra has only the two displacement points, and the Unknowns obviously didn't come from this system, so they must have come through the other one, from somewhere beyond Seivra."

"But," Daeliuv argued, "that leads to Korvaash space."

"True, but between Seivra and the old Korvaash frontier lie all these displacement connections"—he indicated the holo display—"that we explored before we blundered onto the Korvaasha, and all these displacement chains that branch off from them. We never explored very far along the branching chains; maybe, since occupying Raehan, the Korvaasha have ventured farther along them than we did, and stirred up a
zorat
's nest! Or maybe the Unknowns have been expanding along one of those chains and encountered the Korvaasha and decided something had to be done about them. Either way, we can't say how much they've conquered beyond Seivra. All we know for sure is that any enemy of the Korvaasha is a potential ally of ours!"

Arduin held himself aloof from the desperately-hopeful excitement that visibly awoke among the others. "Let's consider all the possibilities, Yarvann. For one thing we don't know that these hypothetical conquerors of Seivra reached it via displacement points. They might have the continuous-displacement drive."

That brought them all up short. He had told them about Varien's invention, of course, but it still wasn't altogether real for them—they hadn't grown up with it. They had discussed the possibility of equipping some of their ships with the drive and leaving the Tareil system to search for a new home among the stars. But nothing had come of it. Too much of the vital technical information had departed with Varien, and the task of recreating the drive from theoretical generalities was beyond their capabilities, or at least beyond any capabilities they could spare from the day-to-day desperation of their struggle against the Korvaasha. Arduin suspected there was a deeper reason: such a project would have represented an admission of their cause's long-term hopelessness, and this was precisely the admission they could not afford to make to themselves.

"Well," Yarvann began after a moment's hesitation, "I hadn't thought of that. But if the Unknowns have the continuous-displacement drive and can go where they please without regard to displacement points, why should they have gone to a miserable little red dwarf like Seivra?"

Miranni zho'Traellann spoke up hesitantly. "Unless . . . could it be Varien? Or somone somehow connected with Varien?" She spoke the questions with an eagerness that reminded Arduin of her prewar friendship—and, some said, more than that—with the long-time widower Varien. When he spoke, it was with a careful gentleness.

"I don't see how it can be, Miranni. In straight-line distance, Seivra is even further from Lirauva or Landaen than this system is. At the top pseudo-velocity most of Varien's ships can manage, a nonstop continuous-displacement flight from either of those stars to Seivra—as if such a thing were possible—would take more than three times as long as he's been gone! No," he continued, meeting one pair of eyes after another around the circuit of the table, "I want to believe in Varien's return as much as any of you. But we can't let our hopes run away with us.

"Yarvann, you may be right:
something
has caused the Korvaasha to take the pressure off us. So perhaps it's time to put some pressure on them! I want a detailed operational plan for an attack on the mining station at Raesau. In the meantime, we'll continue our surveillance of the Seivra displacement point and stand ready to respond to whatever happens in that direction."

Yarvann slapped the edge of the table and sank back into his chair with an exclamation that a Terran of the American persuasion, had any such been present, would have instantly recognized as Raehaniv for "Hot damn!" Then he leaned forward as if energized by a new thought. "Something else, Arduin. If we're going to put pressure on them, we should do it
everywhere
. Maybe it's time to signal our people on Raehan to commence some serious guerrilla action."

Daeliuv looked on the verge of a stroke as he tried to form words. "Are you insane?" he finally blurted out. He turned to Arduin beseechingly. "We can't commit our planetside organization to overt action now! Even if they succeeded, the result would be massive, bloody reprisals—we learned that early in the occupation. And the consequences of failure would be catastrophic: the destruction of our hidden munitions caches and the severing of our contacts. We can't jeopardize our intelligence sources!"

Arduin nodded. "You're right, Daeliuv. Yarvann, an armed uprising on Raehan would be premature at this time. Rmember, we've discussed this before." They did remember—none of them could forget the sickening butchery of the massacres that had followed the first attempts at resistance. "We decided then that our groundside combat capability can only be used once, so we have to hold it in reserve for a final, all-out effort to liberate Raehan. The logic of that decision still holds." Even Yarvann's mutter of disappointment was pro forma, as if he knew it was expected of him. "No, for now we'll continue to keep the full extent of our organization on Raehan secret. That . . . and the Turanau find."