Branegate (27 page)

To end the colloquium there was a lavish dinner with a speech by Khalil to flatter the priests for their attendance and hard work, and then a prayer for The Council of Bishops that moved all of them. This was truly a great man who led them, and he was one of The Faithful.

When the limousine returned him to the president’s residence wing in the palace it was near midnight, later than he’d anticipated. He hurried upstairs and sent the servants back to bed when they arrived to see to his needs. He ran his own bath scalding hot, disrobed and added a lavender-scented oil to the water before slipping into it. Instantly he was sweating, and the tension of the day was melting away. It had been a good day, and he was most gratified by it.

The call he was expecting came soon. It had come twice earlier, but he’d ignored it.

Finally.

Yes. I’m taking a nice bath, now. You know not to call me in the daytime.

Sorry. I felt it was urgent.

Your last news was good. I hope you don’t spoil it now with something bad. Did the last of our associates survive, perhaps?

No, he died. I’ve been able to find out what he told them. They’re looking for The Bishop, now. They suspect he’s on Gan or Galena, think it could be industrial sabotage.

Ah, we can send them in a thousand directions with that one.

That’s what I’m worried about. I tried to send you an update to the previous data, and it wouldn’t go through. I tried four times, and the server said the address didn’t exist, so I sent it to your office at Thisken.

Azar Khalil sat bolt upright in the tub. His face was red, and not just from the heat of the water.

I told you never to do that. Never!

I know. I’m sorry. The update showed some of the previous data was wrong. I panicked when I couldn’t get it to you. Then today I tried to send it again to the usual address, and it went through. It could be a transient anomaly with the server, but it’s never happened before.

That, or someone’s playing a watching game with you, brother. Send nothing else electronically. Put it on cube and sent it by commercial mail. Updates can come slowly. I have an entire facility to build before we can test what you’ve sent us.

Okay. There’s other news. We’re being told the boy’s body has been taken away by Zylak’s people on an outbound vessel to follow his father to the core. Could this be?

Possible, even likely. The invasion could be underway. Zylak could be regrouping, if they haven’t caught him yet. His son could be cloned and retrained in transit. The family empires of Zylak and his wife are all that can stand up to the power of The Bishops if they choose to do it. That’s all out of our hands, brother. Things are going well here. Gan will greet the invasion with open arms when it comes.

That could be many years.

All the more time to prepare. Be careful, and call on the power of The Source within you.

Azar broke his connection with the field that bound them together, a connection they’d shared since one was playing with toy blocks while the other was still in the womb. He was angry with his brother, but understood. They were dealing with intelligent people. His brother might be found out. For one moment, Azar wondered if he should be eliminated. He was surprised by the pain the thought caused him. The decision could wait, anyway, since everything else was going so well.

Everything except communication. No signals could get through the brane, and ship-travel to the portal was nearly a lifetime. The invasion could be happening right now, and he wouldn’t know about it for years. The new Zylak technology for smaller ships and longer jumps could shorten that time considerably, and give him the ability for blitzkrieg strategies with nearby planetary systems. This
was
in his hands. Let the invasion come when it could. When it arrived, he would hand over a dozen new worlds to them in the name of The Source, and the Council of Bishops at home would be most pleased they’d put their faith in him as the one true missionary of The Church of The Faithful.

The water in the tub had cooled. He dried himself off, dressed in silk, and slipped into bed in darkness. A silent prayer to The Source of his strength, and his mind drifted away to the sound, comforting sleep of the righteous, for that was what he truly thought himself to be.

CHAPTER 28

S
o now we know who the enemy is,” said Wallace.

“Thanks to you, yes. We just don’t know why. It makes no sense to me. We’re not competitors of his. His power and wealth aren’t threatened, and he’s an advocate of The Church. Why would he regard the Zylak family as a threat?”

“Could be our new technology, if it works. We could reach Gan with a fighting force in the blink of an eye. And now he has what we have, though somewhat modified and confusing, I hope.” Wallace’s fingers moved over his keyboard, and a new page came up on his screen.

“I’ve also been trying to understand why Marcellus Rosling is involved with assassinations and interplanetary political intrigue. He’s not married, and regarded as a loner. No social life at all. He must be third lifetime; his records in business go back to the first century after settlement. The Rosling family tree to that point lists two generations. Marcellus had a sister and two brothers, two of them chemists like him, but one brother was a Bishop in The Church.”

“A Bishop?”

“Yeah, I picked up on that, too, but it looks like Marcellus was the only Rosling to come through the brane. Maybe he and Khalil knew each other in a previous life on the other side. Still doesn’t explain why they’d want to kill Zylak, unless they saw him as vital to the development of our new jump technology.”

“Whatever. Keep a watch on him, and continue feeding him bad data.”

“I will, but he’s been quiet as a mouse for weeks. My game with the server scared him, I’m afraid. He’s not a stupid man.”

“Neither is Azar Khalil. I’m debating whether or not to go to our Intelligence Agency with what we have, but right now I don’t even want our own government to know about the new tech we’re working on until we’re sure it works. Khalil is way behind us in manufacturing capability; let’s get it done quickly, and fly it. You still have Myra, and Trae will be back in months. The rest is manufacturing.”

“I saw her upstairs with him,” said Wallace softly.

“What?” Thinking along another line, Meza was confused.

“Myra. She was upstairs in cloning when I went to check in the archives for any data on Rosling. She was there with the new Trae. He already looks ready to be born as an infant. Nice features. Myra had her hand on the window. She was talking to him. Boy, she was embarrassed when she saw me there. I told her it was all right, that I understood. Seemed to make her feel better.”

“Sweet girl,” said Meza, and put a hand on Wallace’s shoulder. “Far too young for either of us. I just hope she isn’t disappointed when Trae comes back as Anton. I encourage her, but I really don’t know what to expect.”

“Yeah,” said Wallace.

CHAPTER 29

T
hey came out of another forced sleep, and the ship droned on.

At the rate they were going it would be thirty years to the known populated frontier. They’d only been traveling a year, and boredom had set in with a vengeance. Here they were again, backtracking a course to the portal after a break of only months for arrest and imprisonment to conclude a lifetime of travel. “There has to be a faster way to do this,” said Leonid, and Tatjana agreed. Both hoped their only son had made progress in this direction, but as yet they’d been unable to contact him.

For Grandma Nat it was all a grand adventure. She’d read everything in Leonid’s histories of Elderon, Galena and Gan, and was reading them again. She spent hours in the observation bubble, looking at the stars, and more time talking to the medical archivists who were on board another ship in the fleet. Already she was planning her new body, her new life. She wanted it completed and tested before they reached the frontier. She’d had minor medical problems in her current life: asthma, and a touch of arthritis. That would be corrected at the molecular level. There was also a lengthening of her face she desired, and a somewhat enhanced musculature. The doctors explained the difficulties in identifying and changing the combinations of base pairs and sequences responsible for these traits, but she assured them of her faith in their abilities, and ordered them to do what she wanted.

One did not say no to Grandma Nat. Strangely, one did not mind doing what she wanted, even when she was aggressively demanding about it, for the next moment she was totally charming and caring, and you were in love with her again.

Such were the ways of the family matriarch.

Much of their planning depended on contact with Trae, and indirectly the people he was working with. If the Bishops really intended to launch their invasion fleet the first line of defense was the Grand Portal, and that meant a minimum of ten thousand jumps from Elderon. Fifty total years of travel time, and that was pushing the limits of a modern ship. With the new technology potential, only forty jumps were needed, a mission of months to the portal. And if the ships themselves could produce minor branegates they would not just be defenders, but formidable aggressors in a fight with anyone.

They had to contact Trae, and he wasn’t answering, and they worried, first because they needed to know what was going on, and second because he seemed to have disappeared.

The strange field binding them together was not understood. It was just there. It was as if all space were filled with a matrix of threads to be plucked by a thought, a vision, a contemplation within the mind, producing a musical note everywhere in space simultaneously and heard only by a select few connected by birth or life histories. The resonances were always there within close family members, but the rest seemed random, and were unexplained. Leonid and Tatjana had always had immediate contact with their son in both of his lives, and they agonized for many months when he didn’t answer them. They went individually and together to that special place constructed from memories of their first days on Gan and along the coasts with the crashing seas, the cliffs, the rolling fields covered with wild flowers and gnarled, wind-beaten trees. The place where they’d made love and produced a child, and preached a doctrine of freedom to people who’d never known it.

Over a year out from the branegate guarding the other side, both of them began to despair. “He just isn’t there. Something has happened to him. Our son no longer exists in this universe,” said Tatjana.

“We’ll keep trying. He has to be here,” said Leonid, but he doubted it. Masking himself from his wife, he thought that Trae had somehow been found and destroyed forever by the Emperor of Gan.

And then suddenly, at the end of a ship’s cycle, while they drowsed in each other’s arms—they found him.

They’d gone to their cabin early, after a long session taking Grandma Nat through the details of their holdings on Elderon. Nat had already decided Elderon was the best place for her to settle, for it was the stronghold of her own kind and isolated from the political and religious squabbles of ordinary humans. She was determined to consolidate power on arrival. After her experience with The Council of Bishops, she would never again trust another government, even one appearing to be a democracy.

They were exhausted from the long discussions, and it was the tenth time they’d been over the same material and answered the same questions. By the time they were finished, the mess hall buffet had closed down and they ate sandwiches with the maintenance crew just going on red shift. The shift was named for red lights that went on in the ship during what passed for night in interstellar space.

Two jumps were scheduled for that night, and they wanted to be asleep for both of them. They undressed and zipped themselves into their bed. The bed fit them like the gentle squeeze of a gloved hand, but allowed them wiggle room. Indeed they wiggled playfully against each other before falling into a doze in each other’s arms.

In the twilight of sleep, Leonid went to their flowery place on Gan, and Tatjana with him. Conditions varied with their moods. The sun was shining, and there was no breeze. The perfume of the flowers filled them. They lay next to each other, propped up on their elbows. They looked up the hill over the carpet of purple and red flowers towards a beautiful, old tree at the summit.

“If you’re there, Trae, we’d sure like to have you with us,” said Leonid. He knew it was all just a wonderful hope in their minds, but he wanted it to be real.

“He’ll always be Anton to me. I want to hold him in my arms just one more time,” said Tatjana. She had said it many times, but Leonid never reminded her of that. He would not allow himself to disturb the feeling behind it.

As she said it, there was movement at the top of the hill. A figure appeared, as if it had just stepped out from behind the tree. A man. He looked around, then right at them and began walking down the hill in their direction. Leonid’s heart leapt; at first look he’d thought it was Trae, but Trae had dark hair and this man was blond. As he drew closer, they could see a strong resemblance, but he seemed a stranger.

The man was young, about the same age Trae would be now. He was beautiful: familiar, delicate features but deepest, blue eyes, and waves of golden hair draped across his forehead. His clothes were gray; pants and long-sleeved shirt, tailored to fit like a uniform. Something about the focus of the eyes struck Leonid as familiar, and Tatjana was giving the lad a huge smile.

He stopped a few feet away from them and shoved his hands deep into his pants’ pockets. He looked embarrassed, seemed unwilling or afraid to meet their gaze. Finally his forehead wrinkled, and he asked rather forcefully, “Can you tell me how I got here?”

“We were calling for our son,” said Tatjana.

“This isn’t a real place, it’s a memory,” said Leonid. “Where do you come from?”

“I was asleep,” said the young man. “I’m sure of it. I’m supposed to be released tomorrow.”