Tides of Light (7 page)

He had to rouse the crew for an assault that promised little success. They were going in against unknown opponents, across
a mechtech terrain they had never seen the likes of
before. Hard-learned Family tactics would mean nothing here—perhaps worse than nothing, for they might well be exactly the
wrong thing to do.

The swelling disk below revealed its silvery intricacies as he watched. At their present speed, blunted somehow by the station
as they approached, it would take over an hour to reach the central tower. If that was their destination, he had time to carry
out the ruse he had planned. If not, there was a surprise squad set at a spot mechs would probably not anticipate.

Killeen wore his full ceremonial tunic of blue and gold over his gray coverall, and a full belt of tools and weapons beneath
that. He would waste no time changing if events interrupted the ceremony. Battle squads were poised at every small lock of
the ship, ready to pour forth on signal. The remaining crew, gathered here, were for effect. Killeen had no way of knowing
if whatever ran the station had already planted bugs on the hull, listeners powerful enough to pick up conversation. But he
had to allow that this might be true, and use it against the enemy if he could.

Ahead, the scintillant, perfectly circular disk filled half the sky. Phosphorescent waves spiraled inward on the disk, their
troughs brimming silver, their peaks moving rims of gold. The luminescence hovered like a fog over the actual metal-work of
the disk. Arcs formed at the disk’s rim, where they washed and fretted in random rivulets.

Somehow this chaos resolved itself into distinct waves which grew and glowed with each undulation, oozing inward to join a
whirlpool that twisted with majestic deliberation toward the towering spike at the disk center. That bristly central axis
harvested the inward-racing waves in a spray of rainbow glory as they hammered against its ribbed base.

Jutting above and below the disk, the light-encrusted central tower tapered away, many kilometers long. Web antennae
bristled along it. One end of the tower poked into a vapor of forking flux that burned steadily, silent and ivory against
the backdrop of a passing dustcloud. The other ended in a burnished stub.

The waves seemed to be drawing
Argo
down in a long, scalloping glide across the circular plain. Bulkheads crackled and the deck rippled in sluggish, muscular
grace, like something roused from sleep. Killeen fretted about how much of such flexing the ship could take.

Shibo said to him quietly, so the gathering Family behind them could not hear, “Lie doggo?”

“A little longer. Looks like whatever’s bringing us in is taking no other precautions.”

“Maybe it thinks we’re a mech ship?”

“Hope so.” Killeen watched luminous discharges warp and merge in the plain beyond. He had the sensation of skating over a
huge sea, and remembered the time he had spent in a place like this—the interior digital world of the Mantis, a great gray
ocean of the mind.

“What now?” she prompted.

“We zag against their zig.”

He turned when he sensed the room become still. Lieutenants Cermo and Jocelyn had ranked and ordered the Family into lines
precise and attentive.

This was the atmosphere he wanted, had carefully programmed. Here, he reflected, was all of humanity he would probably ever
know again. The nearest brothers were back at Snowglade, an unfathomable distance behind. For all he knew, this small band
might well be the only shred of their race that yet lived.

“Dad? Uh, Cap’n?”

He turned, startled, to find Toby at his elbow. “You’re out of ranks, midshipman,” he said severely.

“Yeah, but I gotta carry this damn thing, and it’s ’cause a
you
.” Toby twisted his neck uncomfortably at the cowling that wrapped around his shoulders, snug against his helmet ring.

“You’ll carry your designated ’quipment into battle,” Killeen said stiffly.

“This’ll just slow me down!”

“It will give us a good view of all the action around and in front of you. Someone has to carry the area-survey eye.” Killeen
used the connective words
of
and
to
, which were absent in ordinary Family speech, to lend distance and Cap’nly reserve.

It failed to work with Toby. “
You
got me saddled with this, right?”

“Lieutenant Cermo chooses gear.”

Toby sneered. “He knew just what you wanted.”

“Cermo assigns jobs, picks the most able,” Killeen said tightly. “I’m proud that he deemed my son capable of such an important
job.”

“Dad, I’ll be a slow target with this rig on, crawlin’ ’round down there. I’ll get pushed back to the second skirmish line.”

“Damn right. I’ll want views from the second line, not the first.”

“That’s not fair! I want—”

“You’ll get back in rank or else you won’t set boot outside,” Killeen said sharply.

Toby opened his mouth to protest and the Cap’n spat back, “
Now!
”

Toby shrugged elaborately and marched stiffly back to his position in the third left-flank squad. He stood beside Besen, the
dark-eyed young woman; Killeen often saw them together these days. True, they served in the same squad, but that probably
concealed more than it explained.

Killeen hoped the Family had not overheard them and
thought they were just bantering casually. Somehow, given his inability to conceal his emotions where his son was concerned,
he doubted that. As if to confirm this, Besen cocked an eyebrow at Toby. Killeen realized that he and Toby must have been
quite obvious to everyone in the large room.

He suppressed an irritated grimace and nodded curtly to Cermo. The inspection began. Killeen walked down the ranks, Lieutenants
Cermo, Jocelyn, and Shibo at one pace behind. He scanned each crewmember closely. Faces well remembered, faces which had grown
healthier with rest and better food. But also faces that had time to see that the old ways of Family fidelity and organization
did not suit well the running of a true starship. Faces that doubtless hatched half-thought-through plans to better themselves
by bending Family and crew discipline.

With the press of deadly necessity gone, the sprouts of individual ambition grew in fertile soil. Would they fare well in
battle after such indolence? A host of tiny impressions collected in Killeen’s mind. He would digest them later, during his
solitary walks on the hull, to form the raw and instinctive material for furthering the efficiency of the ship—if they ever
again flew the
Argo
. Yet the ritual was worthy in and of itself.

The Family had added thirty-two newborn on the voyage. Mothers tended the young at the rear of the domed assembly room. Killeen
wondered if those children would ever stride the soil of the world far below, proud and free. Or, indeed, of any world at
all.

It was time. Before the action to come, it would be best to remind them of who they were. He began to read the ancient Family
Rites.

His Ling Aspect had provided the text from ancient times. The planet-bound Citadels of Snowglade had neglected the spacefaring
rites. But here they fitted perfectly.

It was a code black and stern, full of duty and tradition and larded throughout with dire warnings of the punishment which
would befall any Family member who transgressed it.

Many of the arcane passages made no sense to Killeen at all. He read one such without letting the slightest suggestion of
a frown of incomprehension cross his brow. “No Family shall countertack or polyintegrate more than two separable genetic indices
in any one birthing, using artificial means. Penalty for this is expulsion of both parents and child for the lifetime of the
engendered child.”

Now what did
polyintegrate
mean? And how could anyone tinker with the traits of his or her children-to-be? True, Killeen had heard whispered tales of
ancient crafts like that. They were buried in the mists of mankind’s origins in the Great Times. This passage indirectly vouched
for the ancient origin of the Families, which was, he supposed, reassuring. The human vector had been set long ago, and its
opposition to the mechs was a truth which emerged from time immemorial.

Something about the droning passages, saddled with legalisms and prickly with techtenns, caught and held their attention.
The Family stood stiffly with solemn, set faces. As Killeen launched into the long, rolling sentences detailing the depredations
of the mechs, and the valiant efforts every Family member was expected to take to oppose them, they stirred. A boy in the
front row, Loren, had eyes that seemed to fill his face. Tears welled in those eyes and trickled down, unnoticed by the boy.
He had a faraway look, perhaps dreaming of classic battles and brave victories that were to be his.

In a sudden bitter gust Killeen wondered if these old, lofty sentiments would armor Loren against mech shots. He had seen
more than one boy blown to red jelly—or worse,
his mind sucked of self, the once-vivid eyes blank and empty.

This sudden lurch of emotion did not make him miss a syllable of the reciting. He went on to the finish, projecting the stern
moral tones that were right and effective, even though within him doubts fought and sputtered.

Now for the added touch:

“In furtherance of these high aims I have a new name to bestow. Tradition grants Cap’ns the right to name a fresh-found star
system. I have already seized this right. The blazing opportunity before us is Abraham’s Star.”

They cheered. Abraham’s legend endured still.

“To the crew of a ship falls the time-honored right to name a discovered world. Your council has picked one hallowed and vibrant—New
Bishop.”

He finished and, following tradition, the Family shouted “Yeasay! Yeasay! Yeasay!” and broke into a raucous symphony of howls
and calls. A few, thinking of the battle ahead, indulged in rude obscenities. Some were ingeniously impossible, describing
acts of unlikely sexual passion between mechs of astounding geometries.

Killeen stepped back, his mind coolly distant from the effect he had sought. Humans could not press the attack without heightened
adrenaline and hormone-driven zest. Mechs could simply switch on, but humans who would risk their lives needed a powerful
cocktail lacing their veins.

Killeen realized now that in these last years he had come to think of the Cap’ncy as a welter of endless detail. To be a good
shipman meant mastering the countless minute but important elements of lifezone regulation, of pressures and flows, servos
and engines. Only the memories of the Aspects had gotten him and his crew through the blizzard of petty mysteries that allowed
life to survive this harshest of all realms.

But now he felt returning his older, original sense of what a Cap’n needed. Bold initiative, laced with sober calculation.
Ingenuity and quickness. Moral and physical courage, both. Tactful handling of Family who were in ship’s terms underlings,
but in the full compass of life were the dearest people he would ever know.

Those were the crucial qualities. He only hoped he had some of them. So much depended on him, and he had only his memories
of Fanny and of Abraham—whose wind-worn face swam before him now, split by a fatherly grin—to guide him.

His personal sensory net resounded with pinpricks. Timing was essential now, and he wanted the mech acoustic bugs—if any—to
register human zest and celebration, and so be unprepared for what came next.

“Cap’n!” Cermo called.

As the Family dissolved into chattering knots, Killeen turned to Cermo and from the corner of his eye caught a hint of movement
upon the immense perspectives outside.

They were moving swift and sure toward the central axis. Fresh energies surged on the intricate disk floor below them. It
was as though the activity he glimpsed took place beneath a tossing ocean, and he could catch only a flickering of a vastly
larger plan beneath the waves. Oblong forms shot swiftly among bulky pods. Machines whirled on rails, angularities moved like
schools of darting fish—yet it all had the appearance of orderly iabor, carried out beneath the surging bands of luminescence.

Bass notes rolled through the deck. Metal rang.

Something felt for purchase on the
Argo’
s outer skin.

Killeen switched to his shielded comm frequency and whispered the code: “Hoyea! Hoyea!”

He patched a line in from Shibo’s control survey. It bloomed in his left eye, a view uphull from the lifezone bubbles.
Against the
Argo
’ burned and nicked hull, those moist, filmy swellings seemed like abnormal growths run wild. From small slits in the opalescent
bubbles came quick, darting figures. They shot downward, through the roiling waves of electro-luminescence, and into the protecting
grooves of the disk.

Killeen blinked twice and got a view looking forward. Long, tubular mechs had appeared from somewhere and were moving rapidly
toward the airlocks of the
Argo
. He nodded to himself, seeing only the flexing forms that flew to meet them.

Good timing. They would be at the locks in a few moments, undoubtedly sent by the mechmind to take advantage of the momentary
human rituals.

So the mechs in this station knew something of humans—enough, at least, to recognize them as enemies. That could be useful.
Killeen had learned certain patterns of thought from the Mantis, oblique ways of viewing humanity. Mech ways were now more
intelligible, though no less hateful.

These station mechs were probably following the orders of the Mantis, sent before the
Argo
lifted from Snowglade. Whatever the intention of the Mantis in sending
Argo
here, the Family was united on one point—they would destroy whatever agency tried to control them. They had smashed the small
mechs aboard
Argo
immediately after liftoff. At the slightest sign of interference they would attack the station. Some thought the Mantis’s
plans may have been benign, but they were a minority.

Killeen stood amid the fading revelry of the Family, seeing and hearing nothing except the silent drama beyond the hull.