The Eternal Enemy (9 page)

To his right a ramp was lit. It glowed with light generated below its surface, making the upward-curving ramp seem like a path studded with glistening gems. Beyond the ramp was a tall, unbroken bulkhead—probably ending at the aft section of the hull.

The bay itself was empty. Markos saw little that indicated the ship was capable of flight, much less fight. But he was learning not to draw conclusions too quickly. After he'd toured the entire ship, he'd have a much clearer idea as to its capabilities.

The Old One was walking up the sloping ramp. When he reached the top, a door slid back and the Old One passed through it.

“Come on,” Markos told the children. “Absorb all the information you can about this ship. If anything should happen to him, we may need it. Do you all understand?”

They showed red.

Markos led them up the ramp.

At the top was a passageway, the rectangular section he'd seen from outside that connected the two hull sections. A bridge of any kind would most probably be somewhere off this passageway, he figured. The hallway seemed smaller than it should have been—it was less than two meters high and only a little more than a meter wide. It would have been uncomfortable for a large, muscular Terran.

The old Haber appeared suddenly as he walked from a cabin into the passageway. “Come in here,” he said. “This is the area we must stay in for now.”

Markos walked into the bridge. The first thing that caught his eye was the startank. What else could he call it? It was a huge cube, three meters on a side. Within the cube was blackness. Thousands of points of light were suspended within.

One point was larger than the others and in the center. It was reddish-orange and distinguished by a tiny, barely visible emerald-green wedge right beside it. He realized the star had to be Tau Ceti, with the green wedge representing the ship. A quick glance at the rest of the cube showed that several stars had green wedges beside them. The stars with the green wedges could be Haber-owned, he thought, and that would make one of them the Habers' home star.

Markos noticed that all the stars with green wedges near them were reddish-orange K-type stars.

If he could locate some more familiar stars, he could get a good idea as to the scale being used and then figure out how far the home-world was from Tau Ceti. He knew there was a binary system nearby, and with that he could sight down an imaginary line to where Sol should be. He moved around the cube until he had the proper angle and had sighted Sol, a yellow dwarf, a little above the level of Tau Ceti.

Yes, he thought, and there's Proxima Centauri, Alpha Centauri A & B, and Barnard's Star.

He knew the distance Sol was from each of the recognized stars, so approximating a scale was possible. He gave himself a rough distance from Tau Ceti to the other K-type stars with green wedges near them and realized they were at least twenty-five to thirty parsecs away. The distance was beyond Markos's imagination.

He took a breath. My God, he thought. One hundred light-years. Even if it's eighty, if I misjudged the distances, we'll never get there in time to be of any help. The
Paladin
would have taken over two years of f-t-l travel to make that journey, and no one knows if the
Paladin
could remain intact while in tau-space for that period of time. Plus the time needed to accelerate to the jump point, then the time needed to decelerate—the trip would have taken the
Paladin
an
absolute minimum
of four and a half years.

A lot could happen in four and a half years. The crew of the
Paladin
would have taken over Gandji and any other habitable planets in the Tau Ceti System, claiming them for Terra.

But if the distance was so immense, and the time it took the Habers to travel it was anywhere close to what Markos felt it had to be, then why did they come all the way across to Tau Ceti? There had to be a closer habitable planet where they could have tried to mutate.

“Why did you pick Gandji?” Markos asked absently.

“It is far enough from our, our home, and from …”

He turned to face him. “Your enemies.”

“Yes. Our, our enemies.”

Well, Markos thought, the Old One is learning new words, even if he doesn't really understand their meanings. Enemies is a good first step. Once they understand that their problems lie with an alien race and not with some “change,” there's a chance they can be taught to fight.

They had sought safety in distance, he realized, and that showed a minimal understanding of their plight. But if they understood that, then why didn't they just all get on board their ships and settle in a different sector of space, away from the threat of war?

He walked around the front of the startank and studied the area of space he figured the Habers owned. It was below the galactic ecliptic, further out toward the edge of the spiral arm than Tau Ceti or Sol. Judging by the grouping of green wedges, their home star could have been Alpha Indi, a K-2 star about 25 parsecs from Sol. Add to that the 3.5 parsecs to Tau Ceti from Sol, and that put their home star at about 28.5 parsecs away.

But then where did the Habers' enemies come from? If they had f-t-l drive and their ships were as advanced as the Habers' ships, they could be coming from anywhere.

He shook his head, a throwback to his Terran past, and turned to check out the rest of the machinery on the bridge. None of the controls were labeled or were obvious in function by design, so he touched nothing. What he couldn't surmise through observation he would ask about. He was already learning caution and patience, a quality he would have been thankful for before his flight in the screamer.

The bulkhead behind the startank, directly opposite the entry, seemed to house most of the piloting equipment. There were two chairs that looked anything but comfortable. They appeared to be made of clear, hard plastic or crystalline rock. Knowing what he did about the Habers, he figured it
was
rock. The chairs sat side by side, separated by a console.

Directly before each of the chairs was a thin, clear screen inlaid with a hairline grid. The screens were mounted on thin support pedestals.

The console between the chairs had a tube mounted on it, parallel to the deck, aiming into the startank directly before it. On either side of the chairs were single consoles with what looked like duplicate controls—levers, a few switches, and some touch plates. None of the equipment looked like it could have come from a Terran ship.

The other two bulkheads had storage lockers, each one with a tiny outlined door. Markos had no idea what they might contain. He glanced around the rest of the cabin and felt satisfied—he'd seen enough for now.

“When do we leave?” Markos asked.

“Soon. I, I must finish preparations.”

“Anything I can do to help you?”

“There is no need. Most of what I, I will do is routine.”

“Fine. I'm going to take the children and explore the rest of the ship.”

The Old One showed red, and Markos led his group through the doorway.

The right hull of the ship had two levels. The top one was even with the level of the bridge and was filled with living quarters. Each of the twelve cabins was large, capable of supporting between six and ten Habers in comfort. If comfort were not a concern, he figured the cabins could support fifteen.

The lower level was divided into two major sections. The forward compartment contained row after row of oddly shaped crystals, stacked, linked together by weblike filaments of metal or silicon. He touched one of the crystals, expecting to find a record of events stored inside. The crystal's lattice structure had definitely been altered—he could detect that easily enough—but no image or story appeared in his mind.

The aft section was a storage area, complete with replacement parts for most of the equipment he'd seen on the bridge.

The children followed his example. They touched everything he touched, absorbing what they learned as if the knowledge were food and they were starving. Markos could tell the differences between them—each child was an individual, with enough physical and personality differences to make it unique. If he hadn't been the one responsible for forming them, molding them, mentally creating the mutation in the genetic material, telling them apart might have been more difficult.

When the right hull had been explored, Markos instructed Alpha to lead the others back to the large bay area and wait for him.

When a Haber child was born, his autonomic system let a little color leak from his eyes. The parents who saw this called the child by those colors, naming him based on some genetic uniqueness. Each of the children Markos had created had done the same thing—the Habers around them at birth had been quick to pick up their Haber names and use them. Markos thought in sound-speech, though, and the names were not really translatable. He would have to name them before long.

He walked out of the aft compartment to the other hull and saw three of the children lying on the deck. They weren't moving. He spotted two children with their backs to him, hiding behind an indentation in the bulkhead.

He scanned the bay for Terrans, saw none, and quickly realized they couldn't have found them. And even if they had, they couldn't have infiltrated the ship.

One of the children rushed out of hiding, his eyes flashing a strong, coherent, narrow beam of light toward the two in hiding, temporarily blinding himself in the process. The larger of the two—it looked like Alpha—jumped out and focused his eye-beam on his running brother. The one struck by the eye-beam collapsed instantly to the deck.

“Stop this!” Markos shouted from the top of the ramp.

All the children rose to their feet, gathered around Alpha, who stood in the center of the bay. They were all fine, unhurt, and Markos immediately felt a little foolish and embarrassed, but the metal taste still lingered.

“We were making up a story, like the one you saw in the crystal,” Alpha said.

Playing, Markos thought. They were just playing.

He was glad they had been playing—if they'd been pure Habers, they would have been sitting there meditating while waiting for his return instead of playing like that. But there was still something upsetting him. Was it the aggression? No, he thought, it couldn't be that.

The scene continued to nag him, bother him, and he wasn't sure why.

8

Markos sat in the right seat, the Old One sat on the left. The children, with Alpha as their appointed leader, were safely secured in the cabins. The old Haber had taught them all the trick of hardening their bodies to survive the tremendous force of acceleration.

The ship moved up and out of the mountain through an escape tunnel with the grace and ease Markos had come to expect from anything Haber. They leaped into orbit in one smooth motion that lasted only a few short minutes. The acceleration was tremendous.

He didn't know if their flight had been detected by the crew of the
Paladin
, but detection didn't seem to matter, at least to the Old One. From what the Haber had explained about the wedge-shaped ship, pursuit on the part of the Terrans would have been futile.

The tube mounted on the console between Markos and the Old One was emitting a tight beam of light. It was focused right now on the back plane, piercing right through the tiny globe that represented Tau Ceti. Markos watched as the startank's interior rotated around Tau Ceti. The scene stopped shifting and rotating when the beam of light rested on their target star. Markos recognized it after regaining his orientation to the startank's orientation. The star was Alpha Indi. The Old One explained that as they approached the star, the view within the startank would shift, keeping the center of the startank their location. Alpha Indi would creep toward the center of the startank.

Markos noticed that the Haber touched certain plates and areas on the consoles to activate and deactivate different in-flight systems. The Old One explained that the switches worked by the “touch and change” principle, the switches being flipped by the electron flow between the Haber's hand and the receiving plate.

Markos experienced between two and three Gs, an increased gravity he wouldn't have been able to survive if he hadn't learned the hardening trick from the Old One. As a Terran, there would have been some discomfort, but nothing debilitating. He watched the startank, hoping to see some progress in the changing positions of the stars. Nothing seemed to move—they had yet to achieve light-speed.

When the acceleration increased, Markos was pinned to his seat, unable to move. But he could see directly before him into the startank, and the stars were moving. They must have been traveling well beyond light-speed. Tau Ceti was no longer in the exact center; it was creeping back toward the Old One and Markos.

Tau Ceti began to move, moving to the degree where motion in some surrounding stars could be detected too. Everything within Markos's line of sight on the bridge began to shift color. It was barely discernible at first—the reds seemed a little deeper, while everything else took on a slightly reddish cast. The oppressive acceleration stopped suddenly, then stabilized at one G.

Markos still stared at the startank, this time in disbelief. Within the few hours of takeoff and acceleration, and the hours they'd spent under heavy acceleration, their location had shifted significantly. Tau Ceti was far behind. They had traveled nearly a light-year.

They had been in space just a few days before Markos decided it was time to do something about Alpha and the other children. He saw the need for educating them, making them aware of the differences between play and real, between war games and war.

Markos regretted having left Gandji so early in their life cycle. If they'd had a few more months on the planet, he could have seen the children in action. He would have liked to have seen them kill something, even if it was only a mendil. With their aggressive play they had warrior potential. But that didn't mean they could fight under actual war conditions.