The Eternal Enemy (33 page)

The Hydran stood on its own, exuding a different scent, radiating a quiet composure that was unsettling.

“Don't worry,” Markos said. “It's curious, but not afraid anymore.”

“That makes one of us,” Straka mumbled.

Markos approached it with the vial.

The scent changed as Markos approached. He immediately took a step back. The scent shifted slightly.

“Just throw the vial on him,” Straka said. “Unstop it and let it fly.”

“Yes,” the Old One said. “There is no reason to approach it and risk yourself. We still need you.”

Markos looked at the Old One, and Straka caught his expression. It was similar to the one she'd seen a few moments before, just as inscrutable, just as distressing.

Markos took a step forward. The smell returned.

“Markos?” Straka said.

“What?” Markos said, his eyes on the Hydran.

“Don't bother. If you want to commit suicide, there are cleaner ways to do it. Besides, I won't let that creature take one step toward you. I'll lase it down before it gets close. Now, just throw the vial.”

“I hear you, Straka.” He removed the top of the vial, aimed it for the creature's torso, and then flung it at him. Markos retreated quickly. The Hydran's body immediately defended itself by closing its breathing holes and all the other controllable pores.

Straka knew the Hydran's actions were in vain. It might take the virus a second longer to work its way into the Hydran's system, but it would find its way nonetheless. The smell of fear returned, the one she'd grown to recognize on the planet when she'd towered over the supine Hydran lying beside its dead companion.

Its eyes were dull like pieces of black coal. The Hydran swept its head from side to side, waiting for the Habers to engage in a life-or-death struggle. Straka was sure it felt it could beat them all, one by one. It was waiting for them to make the first move.

After a few silent moments the airholes opened on its body and Straka knew the virus would soon be doing its work.

“Be careful now,” she said to the others. “It might do anything at this point. There's no telling if there'll be violent reactions.”

They waited.

Straka was on edge, knowing from firsthand experience how quickly they could move. Markos stood by her side, taking a ragged breath every few minutes. No one in the circle seemed to be bored or to let his attention fade. They all understood the importance of what they were doing, and Straka was glad for that. She knew the crew members of her watch were being extra careful after their runins on the planet. They knew what tenacious fighters the Hydrans were. At least their children.

“How much time has passed?” Straka asked.

“Enough,” Markos said. “The virus should be in its system, doing its damage.”

“It works that quickly?” Wilhelm asked.

“Yes,” Markos said. “We made the virus. It's the way we planned it.”

Straka sat in the command chair watching the Hydran-occupied planet suspended in the viewscreens. She wished Markos were here in the chair instead of her. But Markos had insisted on being allowed to return the young Hydran to the planet's surface.

They had eased themselves out of the lab, leaving two crew members behind to guard the Hydran. After an hour they had flushed the lab's air, pumped fresh air in, and waited a few minutes before testing the new air. Once they'd run a quick analysis on the air, they found it had been adequately contaminated with the virus. The virus would thrive on any organism, one of a million such viruses in every organism, invisible, benign to its host—as long as its host wasn't Hydran.

“Ready to disengage,” Markos's voice came over the intercom.

Straka touched the communication button. “Fine. Have a safe trip, and keep communications open.”

“Right.”

Straka's watch sat in their chairs. “Do you think we should follow in H-three? Just in case?” Wilhelm asked.

“There's no need,” Straka said. “They're not going to fight. Just to deliver a little present.”

“The Hydran,” Wilhelm said.

“The very contaminated Hydran,” Straka said.

H-1, the ship Markos was piloting, appeared in the screens as it hurtled toward the planet. It should only take a few hours, Straka thought, to change every living Hydran on the face of the planet. It sure beats the hell out of dosing their sun with heavy radiation or dosing their atmosphere. Or even blowing up the ball of rock they're existing and breeding on.

H-l came back on schedule, with the crew safe. They had deposited the Hydran on the planet in the same general area where it had been captured. Even if the Hydrans killed the infected one, they would all be infected. Even if the infected one never found its way back to its settlement, the Hydrans would be infected.

The Habers had found a path to peace.

25

Markos had docked H-l and immediately called a meeting in the rec room. He knew their best shot was to dose the atmosphere of the oldest Hydran outposts and colonies with the virus. But he'd be damned if he'd make that decision on his own.

He remembered all too well what had happened when he'd tried it the last time a big decision needed to be made.

They needed to stop the second wave of expansion. And yet he knew that sooner or later they would also have to travel directly to Pi Hydra and meet the Hydrans on their own ground, to stop the root of the expansionist waves. If they didn't, they'd be fighting a losing battle. For every outpost Markos and the crew nullified, the Hydrans would start up two more.

Markos explained this to the crew, waited while they talked among themselves, and listened to all the positive and negative points. Making a decision like this might take longer, but points would be brought up that he never would have seen on his own. He figured that for once he had done the right thing by not shouldering the entire responsibility himself. And the crew seemed to appreciate the chance to decide their own fate.

They talked and argued, discussed and gestured wildly, and at last came to an agreement. The plan was unanimous. They would travel directly to the home base in the Pi Hydra system and stop them at their point of origin. At maximum speed, attainable only in tau, the trip would take a little more than two months.

Markos's watch, under his leadership, started the
Paladin
into motion once again, heading deeper into the Hydrans' territory. Straka was in the command chair when the relative-motion detector went off.

“What's that?” Straka asked.

There was a flurry of activity as the watch came to life. The crew turned their full attention on the instruments. As systems officer, Markatens was the first to speak.

“It's one of your detection systems,” Markatens said. “There's an object traveling at near light, small enough to be a ship, too small to be a planetary body.”

“Oh God,” Straka sighed.

“Orders?” Markatens asked.

Straka hit the control panel on the command chair. “Markos, report to the bridge immediately. And bring the Old One.” She turned back to Markatens. “Just shut off the warning system, please. Kominski, get a fix on this ship. Katawba, power up the weapons, and Wilhelm, get ready to decelerate at maximum speed and translate.”

Now all she had to do was wait for Markos. She tried to find a little moving blip on the screens that surrounded them, in the vastness of space into which she stared, but there were far too many points of light in motion. At the speed they were traveling there was no way of distinguishing the relative motion of the stars from the constant motion of the ship.

“What is it?” Markos demanded from the top of the ramp. He was followed by the Old One.

Straka got out of the command chair and pointed to it. “It's all yours. One of NASA 2's systems went off, and Markatens tells me we've spotted a ship.”

Markos's eyes flashed canary yellow with surprise and questions. He sat in the command chair.

“You want my watch here?”

“How long till they're relieved?” Markos asked.

“A few hours.”

“Sure. Kominski, have you got its course yet?”

“Yes,” Kominski said. “But if it's a Hydran ship, it makes no sense. The ship is heading in the general direction of the Epsilon Scorpio System, but with a distinct downward angle relative to the galactic ecliptic.”

“What's down there?”

“I don't know,” Kominski said, “and the navigational computer doesn't know either. There's nothing within the first-wave radius—no K-type stars—they could possibly be heading for.”

Markos slapped the command chair's console, opening shipwide communications. “Prepare for maximum deceleration,” he said. “Immediately. Get ready, Wilhelm.”

“Ready.”

“Are there
any
K-type stars in its path, Kominski?”

“Yes, but none that aren't already colonized.”

“It doesn't make any sense. You're right, Kominski.” He turned to Straka. “We have to intercept it.”

“I figured,” Straka said. “That's fine.”

“Deceleration in ten seconds,” Markos said into the communications network. “Attach yourselves.”

Straka needed no further reminder. She sat on the decking beside the Old One and altered her outer covering to merge with the deck, then made her whole body hard. The others on the bridge were doing the same thing in their seats. Wilhelm provided a calm countdown, then hit the engine controls, starting the engines on the four Haber ships that pointed backward. The tremendous force blocked out everything else in Straka's mind as she felt every molecule in her body shift forward to try to keep up with the speed they'd been traveling, try to escape through her skin. The deceleration surge lasted almost half a minute and then was gone.

“Translate,” Markos said.

Wilhelm switched in the translation equipment, transferring them from tau to real.

“Have you projected an interception course?” Markos asked Kominski.

“Working on it. Should have it in a moment.”

“When you've got it, lay it in.”

“Okay.”

Kominski entered the course a few seconds later.

“Entered,” Kominski said.

“Time to interception?”

“One hour,” Kominski said.

“We should try to establish radio contact,” Straka said.

“What for?” Markos asked.

“Well, what are you going to do, blow it out of space?”

“No. But we can't let it continue on its present course without at least contaminating it with the virus.”

“I agree. Let's try to establish contact,” Straka said. “We might be able to intimidate the crew of their ship. The
Paladin
does look pretty imposing.”

Markos shrugged. “I suppose it's worth a try.”

Markos had Markatens channel a radio beacon into one of Katawba's aimed lasers. Katawba took three minutes to reprogram one of the tight beams, then aimed it at the distant ship.

“Are you hitting it?” Markos asked.

“Yes,” Katawba said.

“We'll wait a few minutes to let them respond by radio. Then we'll dump the signal and try that light-intensity laser. Use single pulses and see what happens.”

“Right,” Katawba said.

Straka had never expected the Hydran ship to respond to either the radio waves or the light beacon. There was something about the Hydrans, perhaps their single-mindedness, that precluded interruption on their flights. Why else would you have two-way radio communication on board? No one on their home planet was going to send a message for them to turn around and come back. She figured that even if something went wrong, the Hydrans would let their colonizing ship drift endlessly—the bodies on board could be happily replaced by the home population.

“Try the light beam,” Markos said.

“Right,” Katawba said.

Even if there were some other reason for communication between the ship and its home, the Hydrans didn't seem to be the type of creatures who would use it. They were far too driven, far too obsessed with expansion to bother with ship-to-ship communication. Their colonizing ships were little more than projectiles hurled into other star systems, exploding the Hydran seed on whatever planet they happened to land. Still, they had to make the effort.

“Nothing,” Markos said to Straka.

Straka flashed red.

“Do we know it's a Hydran vessel?” Wilhelm asked.

“No,” Markos said. “Though we will soon enough. Markatens, put the screen in the unknown ship's sector on maximum magnification.”

Markatens did as ordered.

“Kominski, plot in a nearly parallel course. I want to stay about this distance, closing in on them slowly, heading in the same direction as they are.”

“That will take a few,” Kominski said.

“Take your time.”

“What are you planning?” Straka asked.

“I'm not going to risk everything, especially now that we have a solution. I can't bring the
Paladin
in too close. But we could send out H-one. It's fully armed. We could send a crew of two, carrying the virus. They could move in a lot closer than we could.”

“You want them to dock?”

Markos flashed a strong red. “What a great opportunity this is, Straka. We've never known how the Hydrans travel through space, how they pilot their ships, how many Hydrans are actually on board their first-wave ships. There's so much we don't know about them. We don't even have a clear idea as to where they are technologically.”

“Sounds like a suicide mission to me,” Straka said. And it did. If the Hydrans had any weapons on board, which they had to, they would use them as soon as H-l got within their range. And it was highly doubtful the Hydran vessel itself was unarmed. Just because they didn't have ship-to-ship radio or light-beacon communications didn't mean they weren't armed. And they still didn't
know
that the Hydrans were without communication—they just knew that the Hydrans hadn't responded to the hailing.