Between the Stars (19 page)

"It's simple enough," Sieglinde said. "Development and testing took up all the time. Once you understand the wave-nature of matter, the rest is easy."

"Wave-matter?" Bass said. They all prepared themselves with stoicism, knowing they were in for one of Sieglinde's explanations. Luckily, she usually kept it short.

"It was theorized as far back as the early twentieth century, by Schroedinger and de Broglie. We have a matter sensor and a protective field generator in each ship. The field itself is a by-product of Ugo Ciano's original research on his well-known GUFT, which I uncovered from his lab notes and developed further."

"GUFT?" Bass asked, resigned.

"Great Unified Field Theory," Ulric elucidated.

"Ugo had a unique approach to the unified field theory," Sieglinde said. "This particular force field is somewhat analogous to the nuclear force that binds protons within atomic nuclei and works only over a short range relative to the size of an atomic nucleus. My field works the same way, but it's repulsive rather than attractive and its effective range is immensely greater.

"The way it works is: The wave-front of matter approaching the ship or asteroid colony is detected by the matter sensor, which operates at virtual light speed. The approaching matter will encounter a repulsive force that is proportional to the square of the velocity of approach and inversely proportional to the fourth power of the distance from the protective field generator. Simple."

Bass cleared his throat. "Let's just pretend I understood that and go on about our business, shall we?"

"Hear, hear," somebody said.

"Luckily," Sieglinde went on, ignoring all comments, "the shield units don't require the precise placement that the drive units must have. They're already going into the star vessels and work will speed up now that I've confirmed that the technique and equipment have been perfected. How long do we have?"

"Shevket's new fleet is approaching battle readiness. All efforts at sabotage have failed. Cruise testing begins in three months. They'll be ready to come for us in four." Ulric looked across the table to the man in Salamid uniform. "Is that correct, General?"

"Exactly, and we'll need every bit of that time to get ready. The instant hostilities open, we will attack, but we may not be able to buy much time."

"For that reason," Isherwood said, "it has been decided that everyone leaves at once, no matter what destination they've picked."

"What about the Avengers?" she asked. There were several seconds of infuriating silence. Obviously, she had struck a sore spot.

"They're well-organized, they have ships, they're moving rock bombs into position, and we can't catch them at it," said the general.

"They're going to try something crazy," she said.

"What can they accomplish?" Ulric demanded. "Thirty years ago, such an attack would have been devastating. Today, it will provide the Earthies with a pretty fireworks display. Probably be the event of the season. Those idiots might as well be shooting cast iron cannon-balls."

Sieglinde held her own counsel until the meeting broke up. "Derek, I want to talk to you."

"Naturally. I'm still in the old Ciano quarters. Antigone's never in these days; she's working on getting the Avalonian drive unit installed."

"Where is Valentina?"

"I don't know," he said, miserably. "She's become obsessed with catching Vladyka." They ducked into the tube-train tunnel and boarded a car headed toward the Kuroda complex. The trains were full of workers headed to or coming off their jobs. Nearly everybody was now involved in the star drive project. "She has some crazy idea about finding him and she won't tell me what it is."

"Maybe she knows more about this business than you do. Trust her instincts."

In the Ciano quarters they drifted into the smokelike furniture. "Derek," she began, "you still have a lot to learn about intelligence work. I didn't want to say anything in that council meeting because I'm not sure whom I can trust. This war won't be like the last one. They were clumsy then. You can bet they've spent the last three decades planting moles in our governments and operations."

"Who do you suspect?" he asked.

"Anybody I haven't known practically all their lives. That's not the point here. The point is, who are the Avengers?"

"Them? Mostly they're a bunch of dumb kids—"

"About your age, in other words."

"We can't all be smart. The ones we know about are mostly losers with no prospects—the kind you might expect to flock to an outfit made up of misfits. Plus, there are some of Shaw's old bunch. Hey, you don't think Shaw's behind this, do you? He disappeared after the war and nobody's ever proved he died."

She shook her head. "No, I'd feel much better about it if I thought he was running this lunacy. I was close to Martin in those last weeks of the war. He was Thor's friend, remember? No, Martin was physically destroyed by the Earthies' torture. Only his will kept him alive. In the end, he went off to die alone somewhere, like an old lion. He didn't want to expire ignobly in a hospital with people watching. Besides, he had a flair for the dramatic and he knew there'd be legends that he was out here alive someplace. Believe me, that very prospect has been haunting the Earthies ever since."

She seemed to shake off the odd mood. "That was then. This is now. So what we have is a handful of old vets, a bunch of thrill-hungry kids, and a leader rumored to be called Colonel Sparta. This pack of nobodies has ships, they're traveling among the Island Worlds undetected by the Sálamids, and they're shifting big rocks and icebergs all over, also undetected. Those are expensive operations, Derek. Hasn't it occurred to you to wonder who's financing all this?"

"Well, when Shaw started out—"

"Martin Shaw had a merchant fleet before the war started. He was joined by other merchant and smuggling skippers who brought their own vessels and pooled their resources. These raggedy fools have nothing like that."

"Some tycoon with a fleet, then?"

"Maybe, but I doubt it. Everybody with enough brains to get rich is heading out."

"Who, then?" Derek demanded.

"How about Shevket?"

After a stunned moment his mind began to whir and click. "You think maybe Sparta's an agent provocateur?"

"Either that, or a puppet for one. I don't know what Shevket would really plan, but one of the oldest warmongering tricks is to provoke, or better, create an incident that gets everybody to believe that right is on their side."

"My God. I wonder if that's what Val—"

"Bet on it," Sieglinde said.

The mass meeting was held in the
Althing
chamber. Representatives of all the departing Island Worlds were there, although the great majority were there only in holographic projection. In the frantic effort to get the drive units and shields installed, few had the leisure to travel between worlds.

"Destinations," Sieglinde said. "That's what we're here to discuss. Of course, everybody gets to choose their own destination, but let's have a little coordination here."

"What business is it of yours where we go?" yelled someone belligerently.

"If you don't have a destination picked out," someone called back, "I can make a suggestion."

"Order! Order!" shouted Isherwood. "For all anybody cares you can change destinations in mid-course and you'll just disappear from human history, but for now let's have some sort of consensus. We have to leave at the same time and future generations will want to know where to look to find their relatives."

"Why all at the same time?" asked a representative from Delos.

Sieglinde answered. "Since we have plenty of energy to burn for boosting, there's no real need to use an optimal orbital location for the departure. By the time we leave, the Earth fleet will probably be after us. If we're already on our way, they can't catch us. While we sit, we're vulnerable. Some of the asteroid colonies will have to take a circuitous route around the sun before they can get aimed in the right direction to reach the stars they've chosen. If everybody goes at once there's far less chance of anybody being caught alone.

"The nearest solar systems have been pretty thoroughly studied by interferometric telescopes, so we have a fairly certain selection of stars with clement conditions, possibly including Earth-like worlds."

"Who needs 'em?" someone yelled.

"There are those among us," she said patiently, "who still want to settle other planets, as you well know, so pipe down. Any single system should be more than adequate for all the Island Worlds, but we all know that this bunch is too cantankerous to stand being in the same solar system with one another if there's a chance to get away.

"We recommend that a minimum of three asteroids make up each caravan. That guards against systems failures, insures an adequate gene pool in case you should be cut out of contact with other humans for several generations and, let's not forget, there is or has been at least one other starfaring species in this galaxy, and I suspect there are far, far more."

She cut into the subsequent murmur. "The odds-on favorite is Tau Ceti. Who's going there?" More than thirty hands went up.

"Sigma Pavonis? That's where Avalon is going.
Nova
will be there ahead of us, and that'll help when we get there." Another large contingent raised their hands.

"Alpha Centauri? You people get to catch up with the old antimatter starships and fit them with the new drives. Naturally, you'll have to decelerate first to match velocity with them. Maybe you'll meet some old friends you thought you'd never see again." More hands went up.

"Eighty-two Eridani?" More hands. She read out a long list of nearby stars that were almost certain to have promising planetary systems. Some had many takers, some had few. There were even a very few solitaries who chose against all advice to go it alone. These few were mostly religious communities that wanted to get away from the contamination of unbelievers.

After the holographic representatives blinked off, Sieglinde looked over her list. A small group of Avalonians crowded around her. "Thirty-three destination stars," she said. "Of course, some are probably lying and will end up going someplace else, but this is roughly accurate. If we can just get out of here before the Earthies nuke us all, we can pretty well ensure that the human race will last as long as the universe does, unless something comes along soon that can wipe out a whole arm of the galaxy."

"Hell," said Magnus Roalstad, "there's even one crazy bunch that hasn't settled on a star. They're just heading for the center of the galaxy. Think they'll find God there."

"It'll be their remote descendants if they ever make it," Sieglinde said. "My drive is fast, but that kind of distance will still require centuries. Oh, well, it's their choice."

"That's why I was urging that we refrain from scattering too much," Isherwood said. "If we stay relatively close, we'll all be able to benefit from new developments, be able to swap new discoveries. Those tiny expeditions won't have large enough scientific establishments, and some of them will be out of touch with the rest of humanity for a long, long time."

"At least that should encourage the greatest possible human diversity," Sieglinde said. "That might be the best idea after all. For better or worse, the die is cast now. We can't go back."

"Where are Katrina and Taeko being quartered?" Sieglinde asked.

"They wouldn't take anything in the Kuroda stronghold," Nadia said with a snort. "They're your daughters, you talk to them. Their husbands must be saints to put up with them."

At least the girls were going in Avalon. Like her son, her daughters were stubborn, independent and headstrong. Just like their parents, she thought ruefully. They would go whole years without contacting her, but for the duration of the voyage, they might grow closer. They would be reunited with Dieter when they arrived, but it still broke her heart to think about Martin.
Well
, she told herself,
he's said that if he lives through the war, or if the cause collapses completely, he'll follow after us.
It was all she had to console herself with.

Derek came in, looking gray and drawn. He looked much, much older than the puppyish boy who had brought her the little green egg that had changed history. "What is it?" she said, knowing it would be bad.

"It's started. Mauritius and Easter Island had been nuked. No survivors, at least eight thousand dead."

The emergency meeting was held in the Security Council chamber. The near-euphoria of recent days had been replaced by near-gloom. They had been jerked violently from their dreams of the stars to present reality.

"They were destroyed simultaneously," Ulric reported. "To the second." The holo over the table showed a scene familiar from the last war—shattered rocks still oozing lava, barren of life.

"How were the nukes delivered?" asked Isherwood.

General Davidson, the Salamid liaison, answered. "We were able to detect nothing at all. Either the Earthies have a new delivery system we know nothing about—"

"Crap," Sieglinde said. "If they had something like that, they'd've hit all of us at once and timed it to happen simultaneously. Those nukes were planted, probably been in place for months."

"That," Davidson said stiffly, "was what I was about to say. We also consider that the likeliest possibility."

"Then there may be more of them," said Isherwood.

"Unlikely," Davidson said. "Everyone is looking for them now. Any more will be easy to find and dismantle. I suspect that this is a political incident."

"I agree," Sieglinde said. "Shevket's precipitating this war. He's doing it for both sides. He's just given us an excuse to start shooting. I suspect Earth's excuse is already in motion. He can always screw around with the chronology later to balance the history books. After all, if he wins, he'll be writing them."

"This is all a little Byzantine," Isherwood said.

"What else did you expect?" Sieglinde asked.

They all looked up as an apparition took the place of the smoldering rocks. It was Chih' Chin Fu, dressed in his usual newscasting robes and looking like a Confucian scholar.