The Gripping Hand (46 page)

"What was that about?"

She shook her head. "Anyway, you made the point."

One of the Warriors scuttled forward and anchored itself next to the safe, gun pointed back toward the humans.

The safe door slid open. A Watchmaker scuttled in. It handed out a laboratory sealed-environment jar as large as itself, then a plastic jar of dark powder, a stack of documents, a roll of gold coins.

The Engineer examined the gold and said something to the Master. The Master answered.

The Engineer put the papers back, and the cocoa. It examined the jar.

"Don't touch that!" Glenda Ruth shouted. No Motie would understand, but the Mediator would remember.

The Engineer opened the seals.

There was a
pop
. The Warrior's head snapped around to catch the same puff of gas that caught the Engineer. Glenda Ruth wondered if they would be shot.

The Warriors didn't shoot. The Engineer took a scraping from the sludge in the jar, then resealed it and put it back. It left the door open. It spoke a word and tossed the gold at one of the Watchmakers, who caught it and jumped through the new airlock.

The other Engineers had reattached the sewage recyling system where six lines of graffiti-green met in a sunburst. They continued to work on it, add a pipe here, bend, constrict. The Warriors maintained their stations. When Glenda Ruth kicked herself forward to the safe, she could feel phantom bullets. The Warriors came alert; the Master gave no signal that she could recognize; but no Motie stopped her.

Thanks to the Moties' parsimonious lowering of cabin pressure, the canister's pressure had sprayed perhaps 10 percent of the encysted eggs of the Crazy Eddie Worm into the cabin as an aerosol. Most of the contents were intact. There was a mild odor of petroleum and other pollutants, the natural state of water on Mote Prime, fading rapidly as the air filters did their work. The Moties clearly didn't like the smell any more than the humans did. It wouldn't have bothered planet-dwelling Moties.

They've evolved in space,
Glenda Ruth thought.
Space-dwelling Moties who don't detest pollution will die of it.

Glenda Ruth carefully wiped the rim and resealed the canister, and glared at the Engineer. It might be vital to be able to claim that the Moties had been infected by accident.

Then she suppressed a shudder: a hundred wormlets would hatch and die in her lungs.

Thirty years before, Whitbread's asteroid-mining Engineer had been infected with the parasitic worm.
MacArthur
's biologists determined that it couldn't infect humans and labeled it Form Zeta, the sixth living thing they'd found during autopsy on the Engineer. Present, not in large numbers, but present.

Jock and Charlie and Ivan carried it in greater numbers, and they didn't care any more than humans care about E. coli. Parasite Zeta did no harm beyond consuming a few calories; which was why the Blaine Institute biologists had used it as the base for their genetic engineering experiments.

It would be interesting to know if the parasite was normal among these space-evolved Moties. Not that it mattered: surely it would live, and this worm was different. And it would not survive in human lungs, but just the
thought
—

The Mediator spoke at her shoulder, and she jumped. It said, "Mediators talk. No Horace Bury Fyunch(click), but we talk."

"Good," said Glenda Ruth. "Let's talk. Please leave our trade goods alone. This is all we have to bargain with. It should not be ruined."

And now the Crazy Eddie Worm was growing in an Engineer, a female. Had the Warrior been female, too? Would it affect these Watchmakers?

How many Masters were aboard? Too many, of course, more
than their captors would actually want, but . . . three? Four? And
the clock was counting down.

"Your Lordship's presence is requested," the voice said. "My Lord. My Lord, I must insist. Rod Blaine, wake up, dammit!"

Rod sat bolt upright. "All right, already."

"What is it?" Sally asked. She sat up with a look of concern. "The children . . ."

Rod spoke to the ceiling. "Who?"

"Lord Orkovsky. He says the situation is urgent," the telephone said.

Rod Blaine swung his feet over the edge of the bed and found his slippers. "I'll talk to him in the study. Send coffee." He turned to Sally. "Not the kids. The Foreign Secretary wouldn't call us in the middle of the night about that." He went across the hall to his study and sat at his desk. "I'm here. No visuals. All right, Roger, what's up?"

"The Moties are loose."

"How?"

"Actually, it's not
quite
that bad." Lord Roger Orkovsky, Secretary of State for External Affairs, sounded like a diplomat under stress. "You'll recall there was some question of when Dr. Buck-man's protostar would collapse."

"Yes, yes, of course."

"Well, it's happened, and the Moties were ready for it. Due to some clever thinking—Chris is mentioned in the dispatches—Mercer had sent everything he could scrape up out to where the new Alderson point would form, so we were ready, too. Almost ready.

"Details later. We got a whole bunch of reports at once, about stellar geometry and such. You'll have to read them all. What's important is that there are some Motie ships with an ambassador on board cooling their heels under Navy detention while we decide what to do about them. And Mercer wants a battle fleet."

Rod was aware that Sally had come up behind him. "Roger," she said.

"Good morning, Sally. Sorry to yank you up like this—"

"Are the children all right?"

"I was just getting to that," Orkovsky said. "We don't know. Chris volunteered to be Navy liaison aboard Bury's ship—
Sinbad
. Commodore Kevin Renner commanding."

"Commodore."

"Yeah, that's complicated, too."

"So they went into the Mote system," Rod said.

"Right.
Sinbad
, a light cruiser—
Atropos
, Commander Rawlins— and a Motie ship. The reports say the first person the Moties wanted to talk to was Horace Bury."

"Roger, that doesn't make sense," Sally said.

"Maybe not, but it's true. Look, I better give you the rest of this. There'll be a cabinet meeting in the Palace in two hours. We want you there. Both of you. Matter of fact, we want you back on the Motie Commission. You were going back to New Caledonia anyway, now the government will pay for getting you there. The Navy will have a ship ready by the time you get to the Palace."

"We can't leave so soon!" Rod said.

"Yes, we can," Sally said. "Roger, thanks. You mentioned Chris. What about Glenda Ruth?"

"That was the last message in the stack," Orkovsky said. "Sally, a hundred hours after
Sinbad
went into the Mote system, Freddy Townsend took his yacht through. Glenda Ruth was aboard."

"I want his name," Sally said.

"Huh?"

"Whoever let them through. There's got to be a Navy man in charge out there, and he let our daughter go into the Mote system in an unarmed yacht. I want his name."

"Sally . . ."

"Yes, I know, he thought he had a good reason."

"Maybe he did."

"It wouldn't matter, would it? When was the last time you won an argument with her? I still want his name. Fyunch(click)!"

"Yes, madame?"

"Is our car ready?"

"Yes, madame."

"Tell Wilson we'll be leaving in an hour. Get clearances for the west entrance to the Palace."

"Yes, madame."

"So what do we take?" Sally said. "Jock. Fyunch(click), we want to talk to Jock. Wake him up, but check with the doctors first."

"Good thinking," Rod said. "Sally, we can't take him with us."

"No, but we can get him to record something to prove he's still alive," Sally said.

"What?" Rod held a sheath of facsimile papers. "The last report says, and I quote: The Hon. Glenda Ruth Blaine, on the basis of brief conversations with the Motie representatives, has concluded that although these Moties know Anglic and have some familiarity with the Empire, they are not part of any Motie group previously encountered! I don't think they believe her."

"More fools they."

"Madame," the ceiling said. "Jock has been awakened. Do you want visuals?"

"Yes, thank you."

Brown and white fur streaked with gray. "Good morning, Sally. If you don't mind, I'll have chocolate while we talk."

"By all means. Good morning. Jock, the Moties are loose."

"Ah?"

"You knew about the protostar."

"I know what you have told me about the protostar. You said that it would collapse within the next hundred years. I take it that was wrong? That it has already happened?"

"You got it," Rod said. "Jock, we have a problem. Moties that Glenda Ruth believes aren't part of King Peter's group have got out of the Mote system. So far they appear to be stuck in a red dwarf backwater, but we all know the Empire can't keep up two blockades."

"And you and Sally have been given the problem of what to do about the Moties," Jock said. "Have they made you an admiral yet?"

"No."

"They will. And they'll give you a fleet." Jock's hand moved expressively. "At least it's not Kutuzov. Of course they want you to leave immediately. I am afraid I cannot accompany you."

"No, the Jump shock would kill you."

"Are the children well? They must have involved themselves by now."

Sally said, "They've gone to the Mote."

"I did not think you could surprise me," Jock said, "But you have. I see. Give me an hour. I will make what records I can."

"In what language?" Rod asked.

"In several. I will need recent pictures of Chris and Glenda Ruth, as well as of myself."

"We have a meeting."

"Of course. We will discuss this when you're done with that." The Motie paused, and somehow the Motie smile was a grin of triumph. "So the horse learned to sing after all."

"I hadn't expected
this
," Jennifer said. "We're infested with Mo-ties! Freddy . . . Freddy, I can't keep thinking of this ship as
Hecate
!"

Freddy Townsend looked around. "Yeah.
Hecate
's cabin mounted on a ship of unknown name.
Bandit-One
? And we'll just hang numbers on the rest of the fleet."

Glenda Ruth said, "We could ask—"

And she shied back before he snarled, "I won't ask Victoria. She'd give us the name of this Motie ship, like we're strap-on cargo."

Jennifer said, "A two-headed ship. Two captains. We've never seen the Master that gives the orders.
Cerberus
?"

Five Watchmakers, two Warriors, three Engineers nursing two Mediator pups, the old Mediator they now called Victoria, a Master, a Doctor, and a lean, spidery variant that scuttled back and forth through
Cerberus
's big new airlock, perhaps bearing messages, had all made their nests in the cabin.

The change had come gradually, while they slept. Glenda Ruth remembered waking from time to time in a shifting pattern of variously shaped Moties. Twelve hours of that, then she woke choking and weeping. The Doctor had examined them and then meeped at the young male Master they'd named Merlin, who warbled at the engineers, who readjusted the air and sewage recyclers until the air was back to standard . . . but it was still thick with Motie smells, and every human's eyes were still red.

The green strips painted along the walls had grown into vines, furry green tubes as thick Glenda Ruth's leg. The various Moties used the lines to mark off their territories.