The D’neeran Factor (2 page)

She said over the swelling panic, “Alia. Not even hurt. Roly, find her and calm her down. It's clear to Engineering.”

—kept her mind on the reports.

Main Control gone. She knew that. The few secure modules of
Clara
were on local life support. The reactor heat wasted into space, irretrievable; soon the cold of space would creep in. Of the twelve ships D'neera had been able to muster, only two answered now, and they were fighting, falling back. They could not come to
Clara's
aid. The guns were out. Such as they were. And the shields. And Hanna's head was spinning and her stomach lurched; gravity was erratic, it would be free fall soon.

“They want surrender,” Martin said. He snatched the link from his ear as if it had caught fire.

“Give me the link.”

But it fell to the floor as a mental howl from somewhere stopped them, and somewhere a failing heart stopped.

“Willi!”—that was Martin—“Willi!”

Hanna was stuck in a nightmare where nothing could be done. Through dimming eyes she saw Martin crawling, his frantic fear for Willi (but too late for fear; time for grief) heavy as her head.

I told them. The slow thought ticked over. I told them no lovers on the same—

The mental weight suddenly lifted. Martin sobbed and collapsed. The arm Hanna had stretched out to him hurt. She snatched up the link, fumbling it, put it to her ear and picked out the words that meant disaster.

Surrender. Immediate. Destroy.

Enough. It was too much effort to sort out the Standard words from the uncouth Nestorian accent.

“Let me see them. Tonia, what can you get?”

Her head was empty and quiet now. She supposed the living were unconscious or calming themselves. Roly had not gone after Alia; she assumed Alia had fainted. She risked a thought to Tonia that took in every sensor the
Clara
possessed, and an order to Dorista to evaluate their
chances of escape through the unspace of Inspace. And an order to Roly to count, if he could, the living. For hand-to-hand fighting, if it came to that.

You know we're all there is you're good at this too good as true-human,
Roly said, and it was hateful, a signal for a purely D'neeran catfight. There was no time for one. She stared him down and he bowed his head and started the hopeless job, dropping into himself and reaching out.

Tonia said unsteadily, “No visual. Nothing.”

“What about the rest?”

“I think—wait.”

Smoke began to drift through the ventilators with, oh God, the smell of burning meat.

Hanna clipped off her own horror and made them do it too.

“This is bad,” Dorista muttered.

Hanna looked at the computer's relentless judgment. Not just bad. Fatal. Inspace systems were working, in a manner of speaking. They could Jump out of here. But incoming space-time data was getting garbled somewhere in the system, and if they Jumped—

Dorista's vision was almost soothing. Particles fanning at random through infinity like fine gray dust…

“We'll have to surrender,” Tonia said.

“You don't want to surrender,” Hanna said, and Roly came out of the silence where silence should not be and stabbed her with a picture of herself as the quintessential soldier, fighting mindlessly to the end.

“Giving up is better than dying,” Tonia said.

“Come on! They want to question us. They want to find out what can hit them from the surface. And it's an all-male army, Tonia.”

Roly looked at her blankly, the two women with growing unease. Innocent, innocent, Hanna thought in despair, how innocent we are! We feel one another's pain and cannot harm each other. And are helpless before our brothers who are our enemies.

Tonia had forgotten the sensors. She was examining things caught from Hanna's mind, shocking lessons in events that had happened in places that were not D'neera. Third-hand memories, fourth-hand; they had not happened to Hanna. She had only brushed against them, and imagined
how it would be. But they made Tonia tremble. Giving up did not look so good.

Hanna got up and went to her and pushed her aside. There were faults in the pictures the sensors drew, colors changing for no reason, lines flickering and re-forming. But Hanna said,
“What's that?”

Her hands worked at Tonia's controls. She knew two of the shapes—Nestorian cruisers, not as fast as
Clara
in realspace but bigger, better shielded, better armed, and scarcely damaged.
Clara
was their prey. But something new was there, and when the mass readout came she looked at it with disbelief.

“Data error,” Roly whispered.

“No.” She coaxed the library for a guess.

“Cit—” its vocal circuit said, and expired.

Citybuster, said the legend on the screen.

Gravity rocked and they fell against each other.

“It's not after us,” Hanna said, single-minded. The others did not speak but watched the lumpy thing grow as sensors built up a pseudo-visual pattern.

“Havock,”
the library said suddenly. “
N.S Havock
commissioned ST 2808 drydocked…ST 2809…under…terms…” It sighed and died again.

“You could stuff a hundred
Claras
into that,” Dorista said.

“Uh-huh. More than that. And look at those shields.”

Hanna sank into Tonia's seat. Weight flux or defeat tore at her stomach, and she might have been watching herself go through the motions of command from a distance. She had never taken Defense as lightly as most of her comrades, who thought danger meant pirates and knew the existence of their elegant little fleet was deterrent enough. The news that Nestor would attack had not surprised her—nor should defeat; yet defeat did not seem real.

And we are all so young, she thought. Parents cannot serve…I should have had Max's baby when he asked me.

Roly mumbled, “I don't believe it. Mass sensors would've warned us.”

Hanna presented him with her memory of the third and last assault. Every alarm on
Clara
had been screaming, and even those sounds were dim; the voices in their minds, the soundless terror, had drowned them out.

The cruisers were beginning to move toward them. They did not have much time.

“We took them on,” Dorista said suddenly. “We did that, anyway.”

Her palpable pride annoyed Hanna. “Too little and too late,” she said.

She got up and turned away and paced the tiny chamber, leaving them to stare at
Havock.
She felt resentment spreading through them at the unfairness of this giant's coming when they could do nothing to it. It felt better than Alia's panic, anyway. It did not occur to her that her own control strengthened them.

The lights in the room seemed dimmer. She did not bother to check the power.

Dorista said, “What are they going to do?”

Hanna looked around, remembering the others had not heard the ultimatum. She told them, but she added, “I think it's bluff. I still think they want prisoners. They won't put that buster in place till they're sure we're finished. That—” She pointed at a signal for an incoming message; it had been flashing since she threw the link down. “That's probably an order to stand by for boarding.”

“We can't,” said Tonia. “I won't. I'll kill myself first. I'll kill them.”

There was an overtone of wonder in what she said, as if she could not believe it of herself. Hanna looked at her thoughtfully.

“Me too,” she said. “Dorry?”

Dorista hesitated. Faint voices, visions, the traces of death, but in their minds. Dorista and Don had been friends. Don was still conscious and paralyzed with his back broken and the fire coming close. The reeking smoke had begun to choke him.

Dorista said, “I want to fight. I want to kill one for him.”

“Roly?”

He opened his mouth and shut it. He had liked Defense exercises; he had liked free fall and riding the clouds and the little band's camaraderie. He had never expected to fight. He did not want to fight anymore and he was ashamed of not wanting to. He let them see it and Tonia touched him sympathetically, accepting it.

“Doesn't matter,” Martin said. He pulled himself up and
set his back against the wall. His grief for Willi filled the room, the world, the universe, and then he shut it in again.

“Oh, Martin,” Dorista said, and went to him and took him in her arms.

“I guess we don't give up,” said Roly, looking sick. “But what's the use?”

“No use,” Hanna admitted. She wandered back to her place, veering here and there as gravity wavered. It was safer sitting down. She got into her seat and stared at the outline of the city buster. D'neera had nothing dangerous on the surface. Nestor would find that out soon enough. And then this thing would move into orbit, ungainly, unbalanced, but efficient enough in space. It could blanket fifty square kilometers with fast or slow death. Its presence would guarantee there would be no resistance.

She said softly, “The Polity's got good intelligence. They must have known Nestor refitted that thing.”

“Why didn't they tell us?” Roly said. He was cross. He could not get used to what had happened or what was coming, and with the end nearly here he could only be querulous.

“I don't know. Yes, I do. They only told us to prepare for an attack. They thought we'd ask for help and then, you see, when they had us where they wanted us, they'd tell us all the rest. I don't think they were even going to tell us where the strike force was coming into realspace without an agreement. But they did. Somebody must have thought the ambush was our only chance. It was, too.”

Don's control broke in a wave of death-fear that stopped breath and thought. Hanna clung to her seat and her sanity, riding it out. It lasted only an instant before the smoke knocked him out, and when it ended the others were choking. Alia was awake and screaming in their heads.

“Roly! Will you go shut that bitch up!”

“Yes. Yes.” He stumbled into a wall and righted himself and made it out the door on the second try.

“She's too dumb to get out of Engineering,” Dorista muttered.

“Why'd we put her there anyway? Never mind. At least there's air there,” Hanna said, and rubbed her face with weary hands. After the first two attacks they had been spread too thin to be selective.

They waited in silence. Alia modulated to shock and pain and was still. It was like having a siren turned off, something that squawked just at the end when you touched the switch.

“Sharp right to the jaw,” Hanna said.

I think I'll stay here,
Roly said to her, half-present.
To be here when Alia wakes up. For the end.

He felt acquiescence and let the mind link go, and Hanna forgot him. She ought to be thinking of sidearms, some form of futile deployment, but she could not stop staring at the citybuster. There was something at the back of her mind and she could not dig it out, and it was getting harder to think, to go on trying. Roly and Martin were passive dead weight, the future another weight of apprehension.
Clara
had set out with a crew of thirty-six and the survivors had died, in effect, thirty times in these last hours. The dead spoke to them still with ghostly voices their ears would not hear again. Perhaps the voices were even real. To let herself and the others believe so would reduce them to shadows for Nestor to take with ease.

And she could not keep from thinking of how she would die. Small-arms fire if they boarded, perhaps. A single blast of heat and radiation if they didn't. If she were taken alive there would be the half-world of stripdope, irresistible. And other indignities; but perhaps she would be drugged and would not care; and perhaps she would live and someday get revenge.

The patterns before her eyes grew and shrank and burgeoned again as the computers adjusted for real motion. They had settled on red and yellow, and the lines that showed the cruisers coming in on
Clara's
flanks were lengthening. When they met the uncertainty would end. The thought had a kind of seductiveness.

“H'ana,” said Dorista from the floor. She still held Martin's hand. He looked indifferently at nothing; with Willi gone he waited patiently to die.

“H'ana?”

Wildfire,
whispered her thought, the intimate image that meant Hanna in happier times, laughing and ready and reckless. It woke Hanna, a little.

“What?”

“They tried this once with Lancaster, didn't they?”

“I think so…” She was not good at history, recent or not. “Years ago. About the time they built
Havock,
I guess.”

“And the Polity stopped them.”

“Must have. Lancaster's got fewer defenses than we have. Than we had.”

“Why didn't they stop it now?”

Hanna said wearily, “They thought we'd ask for help. We didn't ask.”

“Why?” Dorista sounded merely curious, but behind Hanna's eyes she floated the shadow of D'neera encased in implacable stupidity.

“The magistrates couldn't agree. Stiff-necked as usual. That's all.”

Hanna saw that her hands were unsteady. It made her angry. She knew, distantly, that Alia was conscious and huddled in Roly's arms. Tonia sat unspeaking near the door; she had caught Martin's mood of relinquishment. Only Hanna and Dorista on this dying ship were thinking, and Hanna did not know how much longer her own endurance would hold. She was a D'neeran, after all, though she knew D'neera's faults better than most. D'neerans gave and took comfort freely, and readily believed against all evidence that wrongs could be cured with love. They were stubborn and joyous anarchists who could not make a common move without arguing the direction for years, and they did not like emergencies, did not know how to meet them. There were men and women still alive and vigorous who remembered the time when D'neera had nothing to do with the rest of the human species. Many wished it were still that way. They had argued too long about asking for help.