Beholder's Eye (50 page)

It was also supposedly eavesdropper-proof. I composed and sent my first message, the contents of which I definitely didn’t want shared. Confirmation was impossible. I had to hope the lure of revenge would be sufficient motivation.

I checked that Ragem was safely asleep before sending my second message. He wouldn’t approve. I wasn’t sure I did. But I owed him a future.

Then I set up the relay to Ultari Prime. Part of the cost of this device had been the services of what was euphemistically called an information collector. From the price tag, I hoped she was the best in the business; she’d soon be the richest. I was relieved to see the data feed start immediately, dumping directly into the ship’s library for sorting.

I stroked my hoobit, letting the machines work, finding an odd satisfaction in using the same ephemeral technology that threatened my secrecy to track down my Enemy. It would have to feed somewhere, sometime. And those deaths, while I couldn’t prevent them, would help me find it.

Meanwhile, I had one final task to perform. I’d left this until I was alone, feeling a need for privacy; a sign of respect for Ersh that I shared this last time without an alien observer, no matter how dear to me.

Putting aside the hoobit and skirt, I opened the box that had never left my side and pulled aside the covering cryosac. There were a total of three blue gems inside; the other two having been tucked beneath the first I’d seen on Picco’s Moon. I cycled ever-so-slowly, intent on making the moment last as long as I could.

Ersh taste filled my mouth.

 

Ragem tugged the lowermost sheet from the pile covering most of the control room deck. “Where did you say the last sighting was?” he asked, spreading his prize out on his lap.

I keyed in the request. “An empty freighter was salvaged off the Commonwealth lanes near Inhaven.”

“Inhaven!” Ragem tossed aside the map he’d just found and ruffled through the others on the floor until he grunted with success. “Here it is.” He frowned. “What’s it doing over there?”

The maps were poor representations of the volumes we dealt with; nonetheless I thought I could see a pattern emerging. “It’s avoiding the Kraal. See? There’s a loop of Confederacy-patrolled space here, and over there. It’s learned to be wary of their weapons.”

“Why? They didn’t work.”

“Caution. You wouldn’t pick up something hot with your bare hands, would you, Paul-Human?”

“If it avoids warships, shouldn’t it avoid the Tly blockade?”

The investment in information had paid off. “The Tly have pulled back their ships, according to this,” I patted the constantly humming com. We’d had to dump the incoming feed into a second storage system, but it was worth it. “And it had good—luck—in the Fringe. I think it plans to hide there, where there is intelligent life, but away from more settled, more protected areas.”

“If it hides, Es . . .” Ragem’s voice trailed off. I saw him look over the maps at his feet, his tongue darting over his lips as though his mouth had suddenly dried. “Where would we start to look? We can’t stop it killing if we can’t get ahead of it.”

“We do have one advantage,” I reminded him. “We know what it prefers.”

“Skalet used herself as bait,” he protested. “You know how well that worked. And she had a fleet of ships to defend her. We’ve got—” he flung his hands out wildly. “A taxi!”

“I don’t have a death wish, Paul,” I assured him firmly. “And I have no intention of sitting around waiting to be eaten.”
Not quite, anyway.
“I’ve thought of something a little less high-tech than Skalet’s drones and warships.”

 

My something came from Lesy. My web-kin had been the one to add the Modoren form to our shared memory. Included in her sharing was a year’s experience as a fisher in one of the many Modoren ports on their homeworld. The Modoren were very good at capturing their prey.

“Chum?”

“That’s the Human term for it,” I said, trying not to sound annoyed as Ragem interrupted my mental calculations for the second time. “The boats go out and spread a mixture of organics on the surface of the water. Organics that would be tasty to the type of fish they want. The fish sense the mixture and follow the concentration gradient to where it originates.”

“The boats.”

“Exactly.”

“And you want to do this over how many parsecs of space?” Ragem shook his head. “You might live long enough to see a result. I certainly won’t.”

I nudged the map closest to me with my long toes, enjoying its feathery texture if not Ragem’s sensible objections.

“We—I,” I corrected, “can detect even a single atom and know its likely origin. In web-form, I feel the energy flickers of electrons as they dance about their cores. If we place the chum in the right locations, our Enemy will find it soon enough.”

“And then what happens?”

I kept my fingers from the hoobit; the Human was too good at interpreting the physical markers of my mental state in several forms now. “Let’s get its attention first.”

 

The
Ahab
needed five more days translight to reach Inhaven. Ragem and I could have shaved a day from the total if we’d dared cut through Tly space, but neither of us felt like taking the extra risk. The Tly were smarting under Commonwealth sanctions; however, nothing in the news reports or other information we received from Ultari suggested those sanctions were doing more than temporarily subduing the territorial pangs of the Tly.

The time was welcome. What I’d planned to do required a certain sacrifice on my part, one much easier to bear if taken slowly, although less pleasant from Ragem’s viewpoint.

I was molting.

To be exact, I was in web-form and shedding excess mass as a fine blue dust, carefully freed of any memory. Ragem’s task was to suck up the dust using a portable cleaner and store each bagful in the ship’s cryo unit.

Every so often, I’d cycle to Ket to take a rest, Ragem would put away the cleaner, and we’d go over the latest information feeds to see if anything had changed.

Then I’d cycle back, assimilate more mass from our dwindling supply of plants, and start molting again.
It wasn’t dignified,
I admitted to the Ersh part of me whenever I grew queasy or protective of my mass, but it was a vast improvement over the other ways of losing mass I’d experienced in my short life.

It also gave me time to think, or rather not to think. I needed to assimilate Ersh’s last memories, her gift to me, before I tried any of the new things she’d finally decided to teach me.
If I ever did,
I thought ruefully.

She’d taught me how to fly. I dreamed about it, reliving the sensation through Ersh-memory. It was simple, once you knew how.

The only problem was the cost.

I could exit the
Ahab
right now. I could soar beside her in the glory of vacuum, diving through waves of radiation, basking in streams of light. All I’d need would be every molecule of Ragem’s flesh, as well as all of the remaining plant life on board.

At least I now understood why my Enemy had been so voracious, yet had never—as far as I’d tasted—succumbed to the need to divide or die. Almost all of its victims’ mass must have disappeared into the energy demands of translight travel.

I was very glad Ersh had hidden this ability from us all.

“READY?”

“As she’ll ever be,” Ragem responded, one finger pressing on the control we’d jury-rigged on the panel. Neither of us were techs. I sincerely hoped Mixs-memory and Ragem’s childhood model building wouldn’t let us down now.

“Well?”

He gave me a harried look, then examined the panel display. “It looks as though the first bag is emptying. How much did you want to send out?”

I thought wistfully of the tiny flecks of blue me, abandoned into space like so much lint.
No way to retrieve them now.
“Just the one bag,” I decided, not eager to spend another five days filling up the
Ahab
’s storage locker.

He lifted his hand from the control a short time later. “Done.”

“I’ll reset our course, then.” The automatics on the
Ahab
let me simply punch in the new coordinates.

“Are you sure we should have done that translight? Those particles are going to have quite a kick to them when they decelerate to sublight.”

“Ships pull debris with them all the time, Paul-Human,” I said, standing up and stretching my long Ket arms behind my back. If I’d raised them over my head, I’d have hit the ceiling. “That’s what hull shielding is for.”

Ragem straightened up, too. “With luck, maybe some will hit our friend out there.”

I shuddered and drew my arms back around to hug myself.

“Sorry, Es.”

“No. This was my idea. I’m all right.”

We had a routine of sorts. It was Ragem’s turn to cook, so he walked over to the servo kitchen at the back wall: our yacht’s dining room. I set an alarm to let us know when the
Ahab
reached its next chumming point and went over the latest data feed. The information was still coming in, but the lag was increasing. How much of this was due to our distance from the nearest relay and how much to my informant approaching the last of her payment, I wasn’t sure.

I was sure the information was worth every credit.

“There’s been another attack,” I announced, numbed as much by the implication that we were closing in as by the consistent violence of my Enemy. “A freighter—within a day of Inhaven’s Vineland colony.”

“How many on board?” Ragem said in a carefully even voice.

“Eight.”

He went on working, his back to me. Maybe it was time to broach a topic I’d left safely alone up to now. “Paul-Human,” I began, watching him for any reaction, “What do you want?”

“Want?” He glanced over one shoulder at me, eyes puzzled. “I’m not sure what you mean, Es.”

I padded over to sit at the pull-down table near to where he was adding vegetables to one of our two pots. The other he’d labeled with a skull and crossbones for my personal use.
Human humor.
“I mean, what do you want after all this is done? One way or another.”

“Oh.”

This monosyllable was all he uttered for a few minutes. I crouched and fondled a board he’d made me on one of those days when I’d been less company than the furnishings in his cabin. The board had four areas, each with a different surface texture. It was a close copy of a common Ket art-form. I trailed one finger over the tips of tiny pins, valuing this latest symbol of our friendship.

Ragem passed me a plate and I put away my treasure. “What do I want?” The question was troubling him, I noticed with regret.
But it had to be asked.
“If it were a perfect universe—which it isn’t—” he said with abrupt, typical honesty, “I’d like to be back on the
Rigus,
exploring new worlds and species. With you and Tomas around to liven up the place.” A short pause, then he winked at me. “And Kearn reassigned somewhere—Lawrenk’s got a place in mind that’s waaay out there.”

He wants his web restored,
I thought.
I’d been right.