The Web and the Stars (35 page)

Chapter Seventy-Four

Some people should never have been born, while others should never die.

—Ancient Saying

Acey knew his cousin was uncomfortable in the bright, variegated cape, leggings, and liripipe hat, as Acey was himself, dressed in his own gold-and-white outfit. But the two of them looked perfect for the reconnaissance mission, like typical young lords out squandering their inherited wealth. And their companion Subi, even though he was actually a rough-and-tumble type, looked suitably magnificent himself, like a no-nonsense corporate head, or a front-line military officer with many Mutati kills to his credit.

Disembarking from the shuttle, they stepped through an airlock onto the space station. Following a throng of gamblers, they bypassed inattentive security officers and swept into the large central chamber of the casino. Acey heard the tinkling of coins, the voices of card dealers, and the squeals of anticipation and delight as nobles and their ladies played the games. Robotic waiters passed between the patrons, plying them with gratis exotic drinks and reducing their inhibitions.

The three Guardians split up and explored side chambers and corridors, transmitting images of their surroundings back to headquarters with the cameras concealed in the buttons of their clothing. By prearrangement, they would meet again in an hour.

Acey was surprised by the lax security. Perhaps it was due to the gaiety of this section of the space station, or some of the guards had quaffed those exotic drinks themselves, but any red-uniformed men and women he saw seemed unconcerned and chatted casually with passersby. Waving cheerfully to one of the guards, as Acey had seen others do, he continued on his way into a corridor.

There were restrooms down there, along with a gourmet restaurant, and numerous other rooms, many of which were unlocked. He saw gambling patrons peeking into rooms curiously and either entering, or closing the doors and leaving. He did the same. Poking his head into a small private dining room he was surprised to see Giovanni Nehr in a black waiter’s uniform, serving a well-dressed Hibbil. They had not seen him yet. The center of the red-and-gold dining table had been inlaid with the golden tigerhorse crest of Lorenzo’s House del Velli, as had all of the chair backs.

Inside Acey’s pocket, he carried an unusual weapon that looked like a billfold full of money. Silently, slowly, he pulled it out and activated an internal pressure pad, causing the device to metamorphose into a powerful little laser pistol, with a silencer attachment.

Feeling uncontrollable anger, Acey burst into the dining room with his weapon drawn, not noticing Subi and Dux come up from behind and try to stop him.

In a blur of movement the Hibbil drew his own projectile weapon and fired, sending darts through the air with little pinging sounds. The diminutive, bearlike man was surprisingly fast, but not very accurate in his aim.

Ducking and running, the Guardians took cover behind the ornate chairs and fired laser bursts, an eerily silent battle that filled the room with blue light. Acey expected an alarm to go off at any moment, but it didn’t happen. Then he noticed signs of ongoing construction activities in the room—a couple of open junction boxes and a wire on the floor at the base of a wall. The alarm system might be inoperable in here.

Hurling chairs along one side of the table, Gio used their cover to leap into a hatch by the window, and slammed the door shut behind him.

“Emergency-escape route,” Acey said to Dux, firing in that direction.

The laser bursts had no effect on the hatch. Through thick clearplax, Acey saw Gio don a spacesuit with a manned maneuvering pack attached. In only a few seconds, he leaped out into space. Firing red flames from the thruster on the MMP, he propelled himself around the outside of the space station.

The Hibbil tried to sound an alarm, but Subi fired a laser beam into his shoulder, causing him to fall on the deck, moaning in pain. Acey ran for another escape hatch but the Hibbil started firing again, forcing Acey to duck for cover behind the overturned chairs. Subi, bleeding from a wound on one arm, crept around the other side of the table, making his way quietly toward the Hibbil.

Seeing another escape hatch nearer to him than to Acey, Dux considered running for it. But he didn’t have Acey’s skills with mechanical objects or weapons. Acey should be the one to go.

“Acey, look!” Dux shouted. He pointed at the hatch.

“Go!” Acey shouted to Dux. “If you can get him, do it!”

Coming around behind the Hibbil, Subi made a rude noise. The Hibbil whirled, but before he could fire, Acey leaped on him and hit him with a fist, causing the alien to drop his weapon. The furry little man fell back with a curse, but came straight at Acey and pummeled him with surprisingly hard blows.

“We’re trying not to kill you,” Acey grunted, “but you’re not making it easy.”

Subi joined in trying to subdue the Hibbil, who fought back with ferocity.

Dux wanted to help them, but decided he’d better go after Gio, to keep him from further compromising their security. He wished Acey hadn’t been so impulsive, but now they were committed and their choices were limited.

Climbing inside the escape hatch, Dux slammed the door shut behind him. Dux was not the fighter that Acey was, and didn’t think he was anywhere near as brave, but Gio was trying to get away, and Dux did not want to waste any time. Putting on his own suit and maneuvering pack, the teenager shot out into space, steering with controls on his belt. He held his laser pistol in a gloved hand.

Ahead he saw Gio trying to connect to the space station, on a windowless section where there was another hatch. He was having some trouble making the connection, and looked back nervously at his pursuer. Dux fired a warning shot that flashed blue against the hatch, causing Gio to recoil.

Logic told Dux that he should try to kill Gio, since it would not be possible to take him back to Noah alive. But he hesitated. Gio did not appear to be armed, and he couldn’t just murder him in cold blood. Looking back at the modules of the space station, Dux did not see many windows on this side, except for those on the private dining room he had just left. So far, he and Gio didn’t seem to have attracted any attention.

But Dux—with limited mechanical abilities—had not noticed the weapons on his own maneuvering pack, and on Gio’s. The man activated a high-powered projectile gun and fired a dart that grazed Dux on one side, not hitting his skin but penetrating the life-support system of the suit, causing oxygen to leak out.

Gasping for air, the young man propelled himself directly toward Gio and spun away from two more shots, which sent him several hundred meters away from the station. He put the jet on full thruster, trying to get back in time.

Now Gio had time to make the connection to the space station. As he pulled open the hatch, however, Dux hit him in the helmet with a laser blast, blowing his head off. Blood gushed into the vacuum of space, and the body floated away.

The hatch was open, and Dux—nearly passing out from low oxygen—tumbled inside, then closed the hatch behind him. Finding himself in what looked like a food storage room, he caught his breath. Then a door opened, and Dux expected to be captured, or worse.

Instead, it was Acey and Subi. “We followed your emergency locator,” Subi said. “You got him?”

Dux nodded. He felt relieved to be alive, but not particularly proud of killing his first man. But if anyone deserved to be his first, it had been Giovanni Nehr.

Regaining their composure and smoothing their clothes as much as possible, the trio walked calmly down a corridor and out into the gambling casino. They passed a Mutati game where patrons were thronging around, and continued on to the shuttle station, in another module.

Through the windows they saw that a shuttle was just unloading, and other patrons were lined up to board it. Hurrying through an airlock, the three Guardians joined the line.

Noticing a little blood on Subi’s arm, a female guard asked him what had happened.

“It’s nothing,” Subi assured her, faking a slur to make it look like he had been drinking. “Just a little too much fun.”

With a smile, she waved him and the teenagers onto the shuttle.

Chapter Seventy-Five

Understanding the weak points of your enemy—and of yourself—can be the difference between victory and defeat.

—Teaching of the HibAdu War College

On the space station, Pimyt lay on a medical bed, receiving treatment from a nurse for the injury he received when three strangers attacked him and killed the waiter, Giovanni Nehr. His injured shoulder ached, but something else concerned him much more, and he was impatient to get back to his office.

All of the violence had occurred in a new section that did not yet have security cameras, but he did have images of the three men from the moment they arrived at the orbiter, and afterward when they wandered through public rooms, and later when they boarded a shuttle to leave. The way they split up on arrival troubled him. It suggested that they were doing reconnaissance work, perhaps in advance of a military attack.

“This will hurt a little,” the nurse said, as she cleaned bloody fur out of the wound.

In his mind, the Hibbil ran through a list of suspects who might have perpetrated this intrusion. It could be Doge Anton or Francella Watanabe who sent them, or the noble-born princes who still hated Lorenzo for his policies when he was Doge. It might even be Noah’s troublesome Guardians, who had fought back so tenaciously against Lorenzo’s forces. The attackers could have been Mutatis, though he didn’t think so, since they were Pimyt’s secret allies and would not want to do him harm.

But paranoid thoughts darted through his mind. In his own long career, he had developed enemies, too, perhaps even more than Lorenzo.

“Hurry it up,” Pimyt said, in an agitated, squeaky voice. “I have work to do, and this is costing me valuable time.”

“If an infection sets in,” she snapped, “it will cost you a lot more than that.”

“Okay, okay. But pick it up, pick it up! You’re as slow as a nursing student.”

“What an unkind thing to say.” Her hands shook with anger, but she did speed up, and slapped a healing patch over the wound, a little too hard.

Pimyt didn’t say anything about the bolt of pain her mishandling caused. He just sat up and hurried off, glad to get out of there.

Alone in his office, the Hibbil considered the grand plan that he and his people had set up, in cooperation with their Adurian allies. Doge Lorenzo del Velli was no longer in control of the Merchant Prince Alliance, but during his time in that position, Pimyt—as his Royal Attache—had been in a key position to set things up on behalf of the secret HibAdu Coalition, designed to overthrow both the Humans and the Mutatis.

More work needed to be done, and Jacopo Nehr’s foolish loss of his position as Supreme General was presenting new obstacles. But Pimyt prided himself on his own craftiness, and thought he might come up with some clever way to replace the loss. Perhaps he could get to Nirella Nehr and influence her in the same way he had her father. After all, the business interests of father and daughter ran parallel. But it was not so easy for him to get to her in his present position. Even with this obstacle, and others, the die was cast. Victory would just take a little longer to achieve.

At least that mad shapeshifter, Zultan Abal Meshdi, had been prevented from foolishly destroying any more merchant prince planets. The intervention of Noah Watanabe had been most helpful, when he recommended to Lorenzo that they establish sensor-guns on all pod stations, to keep podships from arriving and potentially bringing in more Mutati planet-buster bombs. Following Noah Watanabe’s fortuitous suggestion, the Hibbils had been only too happy to set up defensive perimeters on all pod stations that orbited Human-controlled worlds, thus preventing wayward Mutati outriders from coming in and torpedoing another valuable planet.

But not before key worlds were destroyed by the hell-bent shapeshifters, including the merchant prince capital of Timian One. Valuable resources that might have been spoils of war had been destroyed.

For decades, the Hibbils and Adurians had been fostering disorder in their intended victims, enabling the imminent conquerors to divide the spoils between themselves. As a result of this wide-scale sabotage, it would be a diminished war between Humans and Mutatis if it ever resumed—which it most certainly would if podship travel ever started again. Such an unexpected problem for the HibAdu Coalition, and a mystery as to how or why the galactic transportation system had been cut off—another unexplained occurrence to add to the litany of them concerning the sentient spaceships that had wandered the cosmos since time immemorial.

But the inventive HibAdus had come up with a solution. After undermining the Mutati lab-pod production program, they had used Hibbil machine expertise to develop an excellent navigation system for the vessels, a secret that had been kept from the Mutatis. Now, on Adurian and Hibbil worlds, the HibAdu Coalition was mounting a military offensive of massive proportions.

While Pimyt’s people had known about an alternate galactic dimension for some time, they had never previously been able to capitalize on it. Centuries ago, using the viewing skills of captured, drugged Tulyans and projecting images from their minds, the Hibbils had been able to see the galaxy’s weblike connective tissue on screens. Now the HibAdu Coalition had their own burgeoning lab-pod fleet. Using Hibbil manufacturing expertise combined with Adurian biotechnology, their factories were working around the clock.

The Coalition had a Hibbil method of guiding lab-pods, a nav-unit that caused the vessels to travel along selected podways. Initially the lab-pods had been considerably slower than traditional podship travel, taking more than three days to get across the galaxy, along the longest routes. This had been more time-consuming than traditional podship travel, but had still been remarkably fast in comparison with Mutati solar sailers and the hydion-powered vacuum rockets of the merchant princes. Gradually, the Hibbils had discovered ways of improving the speed of lab-pods, but they had not been able to attain the optimal speeds that should have been reached, according to hull-speed engineering calculations. One of the long-lived, captive Tulyans had revealed the reason for this: increasingly frayed podways that caused all podships traveling over them to slow down.

Still, the lab-pods functioned as well as could be expected, under the circumstances. On both Hibbil and Adurian worlds, the cloned spacecraft were being put into military service. Some of the fully-functional lab-pods had already been used to land clandestine Coalition military operatives directly on Human and Mutati worlds, after bypassing pod stations and defeating planetary security systems, so that no one knew they had gotten past.

Now, thousands of lab-pods fitted with nav-units had been built, and more were on the way.

They were aided in their efforts by another Hibbil innovation. Some time ago the Adurian Ambassador VV Uncel had passed interesting technology on to them, information that the Mutatis had obtained on the workings of the famous nehrcom cross-space communication system. While the Mutatis struggled to perfect it, with their research efforts inhibited by gyros provided to them by the Adurians, the HibAdu Coalition had no such impediments. They had perfected a working nehrcom system that linked their growing military enterprise … and through a system of complex, secure relays they were in contact with conspirators such as Pimyt on merchant prince worlds.