Galactic Empires (12 page)

"Be that as it may," continued Astanger, "you knew that wearing anything other than graywear is… ideologically incorrect." Astanger turned to Shrad. "As synthesist, I suggest, Doctrinaire Shrad, that for the good of this mission, Citizen Rand be made to work 120 percent shifts on 75 percent rations."

"That will not be necessary," said Shrad. He turned to the two onetime Markovians, the two of the Guard-the only ones who wore a slightly different style of graywear in that theirs was armored. The two men were as stony-faced as ever, each of them bearing a stroud spread like a two-fingered steel hand up the side of one cheek and dividing at the temple to spread two fingers halfway along their foreheads. "Stroud him."

Citizen Rand bellowed and began to struggle but, being experienced at this sort of thing, in fact having experienced it themselves, the Guard held him, and one of them quickly slapped the stroud he had been holding into place. Rand shrieked, and now the Guard released him. For a moment, Shrad thought he saw something in the expression of the particular guard who had used the stroud-was he Evan Markovian, or one of the others? Shrad tended to get them confused now. After a moment, he dismissed the suspicion-there was hardly anything left inside their skulls of the people they had been.

Writhing like a maggot, Rand tumbled through the air, his face clenched in a rictus of agony and blood running from underneath the stroud. Then, abruptly, his face went slack, moronic. The probes, about two thousand of them in all, had found their required locations in his brain, in some of those locations killing brain matter and in others injecting certain combinations of neurochemicals. Now the recordings would be playing. The indoctrination process would take about three hours and Rand would be a good citizen afterward, if he survived-only one in three did. Satisfied, Shrad turned to gaze at Astanger.

"It was foolish of him to flout the law," said Astanger, still watching Rand and seemingly unaffected by what had happened. He now turned to Shard. "As synthesist, I will now have to factor in that though we may have gained one good citizen, we have certainly lost one good engineer."

"Be careful what you say, Citizen Astanger."

"I am always careful, Citizen Shrad… now, perhaps you would like to come to the bridge. It would seem that the
Breznev
has now dropped into U-space and is taking a most unexpected route."

"Unexpected?"

"Well, let me say 'disconcerting'-their choices were limited."

*

The ovoid, eight miles long, looked like a furry egg from a distance, but closer it revealed itself to be a loose tangle of yard-wide pipes of a white coralline substance. Yig worms dwelt in the pipes and were currently extending the perimeter of the nest since it had encompassed another asteroid for them to grind up and digest after the nest's departure from the rookery. The Mother crouched in the center of the tangle, with sensory tendrils spread half a mile all around her and engaged into yig channels, which in turn led to exterior long-range sensors. Like a giant metallized crayfish with an extended body, she crouched, protected from hard vacuum by yig-worm opalized shields, tending her domain, cataloging her additions to the yig work, and raging.

Five million of her children were dead, and the Mother's rage was a terrible thing that she knew might last her for the rest of her millennia. After the Misunderstanding, this slaughter had been the worst thing that had ever happened to her. No other Grazen had lost so much, and she felt justified in breaking away from the rest of her kind and fleeing to this outpost. But she knew, deep in her fifth heart, that in Grazen terms she was not entirely sane.

When she saw the distortion of the undersphere that signified the presence of humans, she lashed out, the yig weaving a ripple into the undersphere and directing it along the course she set, and she relished the coming opportunity for vengeance. Human neurology was a simplistic and easily manipulated thing, and it was possible to exact punishment lasting even beyond the death of the neural network that formed the being. She still had some of the murderers with her now-forever shrieking in yig channels. Only when the ripple was away did she experience a sudden dread. The distortion was so close to
his
realm that this might lead to another Misunderstanding. She waited, observed the human vessel slam up into the oversphere, then observed it continuing on under conventional drive. She felt a moment of chagrin at her impulsive reaction. The ship would be crippled and flung back out, so there was no rush—it would soon be hers.

Then the other human vessel rose into the oversphere.

The Mother observed it for a little while. She surmised that once it saw what was about to happen to the one ahead of it, it might flee into the undersphere, so she sent another ripple to render its undersphere engines inert. Then she began to consolidate a kernel nest for travel. She withdrew her tendrils to the kernel, shifted supplies and the required devices inside, selected specific yig worms, and opalized the kernel. The nest yig opened a path through the outer opalized shields to the oversphere, and, clawing space, she shot out, wrapped in her kernel. The second human vessel, now limited to oversphere drive, was heading directly
there
too. She traveled slowly, waiting for both vessels to be expelled, and relished the prospect of revenge. Then, in horrified disbelief, she observed the two human ships enter
his
realm, unharmed!

*

Wearing a spacesuit, which gave her a lot more shielding than she had ever been allowed aboard the
Mao,
Kelly clung to a handhold in the drive penny and gazed at one drive unit-a teardrop of polished alloy ten feet long. There were three of them evenly spaced around the circumference of the penny, where they had been braced on bubblemetal beams at a distance apart precise to one ten-thousandth of an inch. The penny was temperature-controlled simply to maintain this accuracy, since variation in temperature would have resulted in disastrous metal expansion. It was all irrelevant now. The drive unit she was studying obviously lay out of true with the rest, and if that wasn't enough, the smoke coiling from a blown-away inspection hatch certainly was.

"What's the problem, Kelly?" asked Slome over the suit radio.

Kelly pushed herself away from her handhold over to the central cleanlock and went through; once out the other side, she began undogging her helmet. There were three of them awaiting her in the drive annex-no room for any more: Slome, his daughter, and Olsen.

"The problem is," she replied at length, "no more U-space drive."

"What?" said Elizabeth. "You're saying you can't repair it?"

The girl was really starting to irritate Kelly now. "A U-space drive is fitted and tuned in the Gavarn station complex. It takes about eight months just to balance it, and all the processing power of the complex itself. If I took back what we've got in there"-Kelly stabbed a thumb over her shoulder-"they'd likely scrap it and start again."

"Well," said Slome, listening to his headset, "it may all be irrelevant now." He gestured to the ports over to one side, and Kelly pushed herself over, dreading that she was about to see one of those shimmering tangles of pipes that the Collective called a Grazen dreadnought, although probably that wasn't an apt description at all. The things had only appeared occasionally during the war, and not one had ever been destroyed. If the Grazen had used them properly, she reckoned, there would be no Collective by now, but that was something you weren't ever allowed to say out loud aboard the
Mao.
But the Grazen had
not
used them, just their wormships, which, though dangerous, the human ships were able to destroy. However, the sight that greeted her eyes wasn't a Grazen dreadnought, but something she had only ever seen in very hazy high-magnification pictures.

"Border post," said Olsen.

"A what?" asked Elizabeth.

Why was she here?
Someone more senior should have been here.

"Something I read about. They were also called death posts, though since we're sailing on past it without getting killed, I suppose the description is inapt."

"Or they have been deactivated by whoever sent us that invitation," said Slome.

It certainly looked a bit like a post, though one with streamlined ovoids attached at each end. It was huge-as Kelly recollected, the high magnification scan readout put these objects at two miles high, and there were thousands of them. The Doctrinaires aboard
Mao
told everyone they were the product of the ancient Collective from Earth that had been betrayed by the humans who took control before the Markovians. No one believed that; too many of the crew had heard the rumors about the entity called the Owner, though, of course, no one said so.

"That could have been what hit us," said Elizabeth.

Kelly shook her head. "I don't think so-that felt like something the Grazen did. Usually, after a strike like that, the wormships would be all over us. Maybe they're not attacking because of our location." She didn't feel as sure as she sounded, but felt the need not to let any of Elizabeth's statements go unchallenged.

Slome was listening to his headset again, nodding to himself. After a moment, he said, "Seems the same thing just happened to the
Lenin,
and now it's heading directly toward us."

Kelly rested her head against the port. It was quite simple-they'd gambled and lost.

Slome continued. "We're on the edge of a solar system here-one with a habitable world. Under conventional drive, we could be there in eight months."

"Do we have the supplies for that?" asked Kelly.

"Water and air recycling will last that long; the food will just have to."

"Then what?"

"We land."

"I don't see what good that will do us."

"Would you rather the
Lenin
caught up with us out here? At least down on a planet there's some chance of evading the Guard."

"Yeah, right."

*

The Grazen U-space weapon had knocked out the U-space drives of both the
Breznev
and the
Lenin,
and Astanger had thought they were all about to die. Owner Space would fling them out if they headed that way, and, anyway, they would never be able to flee the aliens using conventional drive through realspace. Whether they continued on their course after the
Breznev
had seemed irrelevant, but, in the end, that was what saved them from the Grazen. Owner Space flung out human ships, yet it destroyed the Grazen ones. This time it did not do the first, and fear of the second was, Astanger suspected, what was keeping the Grazen away.

However, their situation was now dire, and Shrad's insistence on pursuing those assets and punishing them seemed quite insane. With a Grazen dreadnought sitting in vacuum behind them, reversing their course would have been stupid. Taking some other course out of Owner Space would have taken years under conventional drive, and they just did not have the supplies for that. Heading straight for the same planet to which the other ship was heading seemed the best course available, but still, Shrad was as mad as a box of frogs.

Citizen Shrad—the one everyone knew was responsible for the war against the Grazen, even if Collective society doctrine had it that individual responsibility was an outmoded concept, and that there were no such things as leaders.

Shrad had ordered all of the strouded, except for the Guard, to stop eating, and, good little robots that they were, that is precisely what they had done. Now, a month into their slog insystem, some of those people were dying. Astanger felt much regret for their straits, since though the strouding process made good little robots of them, it did not relieve them of suffering-that would have been too much to ask of the Collective. However, all those who were dying were not crew but nonessential personnel, because those who were strouded did not have sufficient independence of thought to be essential. They were also, in Astanger's opinion, better off dead. At least Engineer Rand had not suffered death by slow starvation-his stroud had not taken, and he had died before they could get him to the medbay.

Everyone else was on half rations, except of course for Shrad himself, he being the most
essential
person aboard. Astanger could think of numerous people aboard who were more essential… the entire crew, for example. And as it was now seeming likely that there might be no return to the Collective-it struck him as improbable that a rescue ship would be sent, what with Shrad having been blackballed from the Committee-Astanger was attracted to the idea of depriving Shrad of his ability to eat. This was a position he'd never imagined himself to be in when he'd received his military call-up. As a misty-eyed youth, he had known himself to be a member of an advanced and rational political system.

The Collective had taken power before he was born, and he'd grown up in a still relatively free society, for it took quite some time for the dictates applied to actually take effect. That effect was first felt on the Capital World and took some years to reach his borderland homeworld. He grew up with the changes, the indoctrination and propaganda, and the kowtowing to the Doctrinaires. He crewed on Fleet ships that were still run the old Markovian way and because of his indoctrination thought the system bankrupt. As a ship's security officer, he applied the dictates of the new Doctrinaires to each ship now acquired. This was probably what accelerated his ascent up the promotion ladder to the position of captain. Then came the war with the Grazen.

As captain, he then had a greater overview of everything that was happening, and though Shrad's propaganda talked of Grazen assaults on Collective worlds, Astanger knew otherwise. It started to nag him, the way a straightforward assault on the Grazen was by Shrad and his lackies called a "defensive maneuver." Plain aggression was couched in terms of Collective-speak, thus the bombardment of a Grazen nest was a "tactical clearance" and the incineration of a planet-based alien nursery-one of Shrad's "special projects"—was "groundwork procedure." This elicited his dislike of Shrad, the Committee, the Collective, and himself. Being older, and wiser, he began to reassess his life. But what could he do? He was but a small cog in the Collective machine. The introduction of graywear and the gradual dismantling of the Markovian command structure elicited his disgust and contempt, and the use of the strouds finally aroused in him a cold hatred. But, again, what could he do?