Empery (28 page)

“At first we had no idea. But after we made clear we knew who was on board, he filed a formal flight plan giving his destination as the Corona Borealis Cluster.”

“I’m afraid I’m not familiar with that astrographical feature.”

“No reason why you should be, sir. It’s a galaxy cluster, one of the richest—more than five hundred of them, mostly ellipticals. Sir, that cluster lies more than a billion cees beyond the edge of our Galaxy. But he’s in no hurry, considering how far he thinks he’s going.
Munin
hasn’t crazed since he made his getaway.”

“
Munin
may not be crazed, but there seems ample evidence her pilot is,” Yamakawa said. “Why was the ship not intercepted?”

“No Sentinel was in a position to do so,” Hogue said.

. “If Triad One had been on-station, would it have been able to intercept?” Wells asked.

“I don’t think anyone has worked it out,” Hogue said. “My suspicion is yes, it would have.”

“What is the point of entry into the Mizari Zone?” Yamakawa inquired.

“Indeterminate.
Munin
will not enter the Cluster proper. In fact, her general heading is carrying her away from the more sensitive areas. She’ll cross the Perimeter somewhere in the Boötes-Corona Borealis area. Here’s an odd note: He’s been changing course to pass through or near systems which haven’t yet been surveyed. He relays back the data collected by the ship’s scientific instrumentation—or tries to.”

“Tries to?”

“
Munin
’s communications gear was not updated for advanced error-checking. We lose a portion of his transmissions to interference.”

“Then we
are
in contact with the ship?” Yamakawa asked.

“After a fashion. He’s never answered any dispatch directed at him,” Hogue said.

“Interference again?” Wells asked.

“Possibly,” Shields said. “Possibly intransigence. I agree with Mr. Yamakawa—whoever he is, this man is not stable. And he is about to compound what is already a very serious list of offenses.”

“Seems to me as though he has little to fear in the way of retribution,” Wells said lightly. “Was there anything else, Governor?”

“No. Nothing of comparable urgency.”

“Fine,” Wells said. “I’ll sleep on both these matters and take them up with you again tomorrow. I also want to tour the yards tomorrow and take a look at Triad Three.”

“I’ll arrange it,” Hogue promised.

“Not too early,” Wells added as he stood up. “Onhki? What do you say we go try to see what Lynx
does
have to offer in the way of civilized fare?”

“The effort should be made,” Yamakawa said. “But I hold out little hope for fresh seafood.”

Over a Daehne-style platter of sectioned fruits, seared meat cubes, and seasoned raw dough, Yamakawa and Wells continued the discussion.

“Are you truly concerned about the
Munin
matter?” Yamakawa asked.

“Why do you ask?”

Yamakawa twirled a meat cube in a cup of mustard sauce.“The ship is two hours west and twenty degrees south of Alcor. Colonel Shield’s alarm seems excessive.”

“There’s a lesson in what happened,” Wells said. “The fact that we couldn’t prevent
Munin
from leaving means that in that same time frame we couldn’t have prevented a Mizari ship from entering. It underlines the importance of getting the Triads on station.

“Still, to answer your question, no. I’m more concerned about Sujata. Why did you say what you did about her losing confidence in us—in me?”

Yamakawa chewed thoughtfully before answering. “As you well know, there are certain sensitive matters on which she was not fully informed. If she were to have been appraised of them, she would be forced to consider the Mizari threat more seriously than she was previously inclined to. At the same time she could well conclude that in order to have full and honest knowledge of the situation, she would have to be more directly involved. Either or both would account for her coming here.”

“How do you imagine she came to be ‘appraised’ of those sensitive matters?”

Yamakawa shrugged. “This decision was clearly made in haste, after we sailed. The window of opportunity was small, the number of candidates limited.”

Wells ticked them off on his fingers. “Captain Hirschfield. Mr. Rice and Mr. Scurlock of the Strategy Committee.”

“And Farlad.”

“Yes.”

“Three of whom had access to that information for several months before we sailed,” Yamakawa observed. “Surely if it were one of them, they would have acted sooner.”

“So you think it was Teo?”

“I do.”

Wells stared at Yamakawa for a long moment, then shook his head. “Why would he do it? Why would he betray me that way?”

“The motives of traitors and cowards are not particularly subtle. Money. Self-aggrandizement. Misplaced loyalties. Fear. Does it really matter?”

Wells laid down his fork, the food suddenly tasteless in his mouth. “I suppose not.”.“He will have to be disciplined, of course.“Wells did not answer.
How many years must you wait
? he was thinking.
How well must you know someone before you can be sure of him!

“If there is doubt in your mind, all four can be presumed guilty—” Yamakawa began.“I want him out,” Wells said harshly. “I want him gone.” Nodding, Yamakawa went on. “It is a court-martial offense. Even a capital offense. But difficult to prove. And atrial would be awkward, due to the Chancellor’s involvement, s We may wish to find other means to settle the account.” Wells was not listening. An old adversary, thought vanquished, had returned to the board, and he was busy assessing her position.
She can only be coming to stand in my way—if she believed in the cause, she would have stayed on Earth. She seeks to harry me, to distract me, to place her collar and leash around my neck. But to do that she will have to catch me—

Despite a night of restless sleep and what he had told Hogue, Wells was up early the next morning, impatient to see at last the fruits of his labors. Wells had defined the mission, but he had been obliged to entrust the engineers with designing the ships themselves. He knew only the generalities; he was eager to learn the specifics.

The final contract had awarded Triad One to Boötes Center, Triad Two to Perimeter Base, and Triad Three to Lynx. The decision had turned not on politics or economics but on time. Any one of the Service’s Earth-orbital shipyards could have built a Triad twenty percent faster for thirty percent less. But the price of those savings was an extra seventeen years journeying to the patrol circles located from eight to fifteen cees beyond the Perimeter.

Lynx Center’s shipyard was an integral part of the station, occupying the equivalent of its nine lowest levels. Most of that volume was devoted to an enormous enclosed work bay with a one-tenth strength gravity held that was upside down in relation to the rest of the station. The inverted field, which turned what should have been the ceiling into the floor, was an innovation peculiar to the Lynx Center. It was necessary because the real floor was a multisectioned door several hectares in total area and quite complicated enough without gravity ducting.

Nearly one third of that door was at that moment retracted, and from the foreman’s lookout where Wells was first taken he could see why: One of the Triad’s two lineships was being towed away from the yard by a small tug. Wells knew at a glance that the ship under tow was part of the Triad. Its peculiar profile said it could be nothing else.

Each Triad ship had not one AVLO drive, but two—an axial drive with forward and aft field radiators, just as any deepship, and a translational drive, with a second set of radiators amidships oriented at right angles to the primary hull. The transverse hull gave the lineship the appearance of a flying Iron Cross.

Turning his attention inside the work bay, Wells saw that the effect was even more pronounced with the carrier. Its transverse hull was nearly as large as the primary in order to accommodate the cradles for the massive DDs, one on each side.

“I don’t see how you shoehorned them all in here,” Wells said to his guide. “The bay looks crowded even with one of them out.”

“There hasn’t been much room to spare since the hulls were completed,” the guide agreed. “Ready to go aboard?”

“You bet I am.”

Though the physical elements that made up the interior were familiar to anyone who had ever spent time on a Service deepship, the Triad as a whole had an alien feel to it. Most notably there was no bridge to speak of. Where Wells would have expected to find it, he found instead a ring of second-generation battle couches burrowed in among the hardware of the drives, each at the end of its own cavelike ejection chute.

The arrangement afforded the crew the maximum physical protection, but it also meant that they would go into battle fragmented, psychologically alone. They would never look across an open bridge and see dying and injured mates, but they also could never look out and catch a thumbs-up or a reassuring grin.

Absent a bridge, the largest “open” spaces aboard were the immersion tanks forward and aft. The tanks were there to protect the off-shift crew against the neck-snapping lateral accelerations that would come as the ship evaded incoming fire. The translational drive was nearly as powerful as the main. Test crews had opined that even with the couches and I-tanks, the brutal translational maneuvers—combining snap rolls and abrupt sideslips—were more punishing than taking fire would be.

As the tour proceeded, Wells tried to build in his head a picture of what life would be like aboard Triad, a picture that would keep the ships and their crews real to him when they were far removed from his sight in the Mizari Zone. But the picture refused to coalesce. Only the mechanical elements were in focus: he strained unsuccessfully to bring the human element to the forefront.

Presently Wells realized that he was responding to a design philosophy completely antithetical to that of all other deep-ships. The packets and surveyors, even the flagships, had been built as living places for human beings, tiny worlds cased in synthmesh and alumichrome. Triad was more akin to an intrasystem tug or mining ship, where every other consideration was subordinate to its function.

But even beyond that, Wells sensed that Triad had been designed and built as an integrated organism, a cyborg with interchangeable brains. The bridge stations were merely places to plug in key components, the tanks and berths merely places to store the spares.

Following his voluble guide from stern to bow, Wells had less a sense of being inside a hull than of crawling through the guts of a machine awaiting the installation of its animating force. Everything he saw said that the prospect for human pleasures was small, the possibility of death very real.

Wondering if he was asking too much of the men and women who wore the golden trigon, Wells continued his inspection. He sat in the captain’s battle couch, peered into the heart of the drive, tasted the output of the food synthesizers. He tested the knowledge of the riggers aboard with his questions, and their workmanship with his eyes and hands.

After more than ninety minutes Wells and his guide left the carrier by the forward access hatch. On the bulkhead between the hatch’s inner and outer doors, directly below the anodized plaque bearing the carrier’s official designation “T 301,” Wells discovered an unauthorized plastic sign that bore the legend AVENGER. The lettering was rendered in a bold freehand style, the oversized
A
drawn as a pair of pincers, poised to crush a planet already in flames. “Where did this come from?” Wells asked, pointing.

“One of the riggers, probably. The Triads weren’t given names by the Flight Office, so I’m afraid the crews come up with their own. I’ll see that it’s removed, sir,” the guide said apologetically.

It was the first purely human touch Wells had seen that morning. But more than that, it was a welcome sign that the human spirit of
Avenger
’s crew would survive the privations their duty aboard her would enforce on them. “You’ll do nothing of the kind,” Wells said. “It’s a good name. It stays.”

“Certainly, sir. Would you like to see
Falcon
, sir?” the guide asked. “I understand that Mr. Yamakawa isn’t expecting us for another forty minutes.”

The armed and armored reconnaissance ship was moored in the adjacent refit bay; originally Wells had planned to include it in his tour.

“No,” Wells said with a small, contented smile. “I’ve seen enough.”

Wells spent the rest of the morning huddled with Yamakawa. That afternoon he called Hogue, Shields, and all the Lynx Annex department heads together for a war conference. He did not waste words.

“In three days the survey ship
Munin
will cross the Perimeter,” Wells told them. “We can’t prevent this violation. We can’t predict whether the Mizari will detect the incursion or what reaction they might have if they do. So we have to ready ourselves for the worst. As of this moment I am officially placing the Defense Branch on a full war footing.”

There was a stirring among those gathered, but Wells ignored it and went on. “I have already this morning ordered the Triads deployed to their patrol circles beyond the Perimeter as soon as they are operationally certified. Within six hours Triad One will sail from Boötes Center. I am assured that within four weeks Triad Three will be ready to sail from here. All Status-A mission rules are in effect—the ships will be armed and authorized to defend their sectors.

“I am also ordering the reconnaissance ships
Eagle
and
Kite
, now at Perimeter Base, to begin their intrusive survey of the members of the Ursa Major Cluster.
Kite
’s initial destination is Megrez.
Eagle
will attempt to make contact with Feghr, the isolate colony believed to be on 82 Lynx. As soon as its crew is complete,
Falcon
will leave here to join the mission—

“Commander?” interrupted one of the department heads.“It seems to me that all this does is multiply the risk—”

“By the time the first survey is made, all three Triads will be positioned to respond swiftly to any threatened hostilities,“Wells said firmly, shaking his head. “Believe me, we’ve analyzed the risks very carefully.”