Judgment at Proteus (53 page)

“Wait,” Bayta said.

I waited as her eyes became unfocused, and I counted out ten heartbeats before she finished her silent communication. “The Elder will see you,” she said with a sigh. “The defender will take you to him.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the defenders detach himself from the Melding and head toward us. “I’d prefer you take me,” I said.

Bayta shook her head, a short, choppy movement. “He won’t let me,” she said. “Only you and the defender.”

The dark loneliness of an empty Tube
 … “Okay,” I said. “Whatever.”

Morse came up to us. “What’s the trouble?” he asked.

“No trouble,” I said. “The Chahwyn want to talk to me. Probably just a glitch or two that need ironing out.”

His eyes flicked to Bayta, back to me. “Sounds good,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”

“I don’t think you’re invited,” I said.

“I don’t think I care,” he countered. “If we’re going to be allies, we have to trust each other.”

“You can trust me,” I said.

“
You
, yes,” he said pointedly. “But so far, only you.” He looked back at Bayta. “Make sure they know that,” he said gruffly. “The Modhri and I trust Frank Compton. No one else.”

“They know,” Bayta said quietly.

“He’s also the best excuse for a strategist that we’ve got.” Morse’s eyes flicked to the approaching defender, then back to me. “And whatever strategy you’re working now, good luck with it.”

“Thanks.” I gave Bayta the most encouraging smile I could, then turned to the defender. “Let’s get to it,” I said, gesturing him to the tender.

The typical cruising speed for a Quadrail was roughly a hundred kilometers per hour relative to the Tube, which translated to a light-year per minute relative to the universe at large. Usually tenders could pull a slightly better speed even than that.

On this trip, though, the defender telepathically operating the controls didn’t seem in any hurry to build up speed. We rolled along the track toward the end of the station at an almost leisurely pace, no faster than the average Olympic distance runner would do. We angled up the slope and through the atmosphere barrier into the main Tube, at which point we slowed to little more than a fast walk.

It was quickly clear why we weren’t bothering to pick up speed. Less than thirty seconds after leaving the station, we rolled to a stop. “They are waiting,” the defender said, lifting one of his metallic legs and gesturing toward the door.

“Do I at least get an oxygen mask?” I asked, eyeing the door dubiously. Centuries of Quadrail travel and the slow but constant leakage through the atmosphere barriers of a thousand stations had left enough pressure throughout the entire Tube system to protect me against the more serious physiological effects of decompression. But there wasn’t nearly enough air out there for actual breathing.

I was still contemplating the unpleasant possibilities when the door opened, bringing with it a gust of slightly stale air. I stepped outside and found myself in a siding, one of the small service areas the Spiders had stashed at various places off the main Tube. Behind my tender—or in front of it, depending on how you looked at it—was another tender, this one with two defenders flanking the door. I walked over to it, veering a little ways outward so that I could see behind it, mostly out of idle curiosity as to whether there might be more defenders hanging around back there.

There weren’t any defenders, at least none that I could see. What
was
there was an entire train’s worth of tender cars, at least fifty of them plus a pair of engines at each end, nearly filling the rest of the siding track. Either the Chahwyn had indeed brought the modified Modhran coral that I’d asked for, or else we had one hell of a mass migration going on here.

I was still staring at the train when the Chahwyn tender’s door irised open. “They are waiting,” one of the defenders said.

“Right,” I muttered. Squaring my shoulders, I stepped inside.

A single Chahwyn was seated in a chair at the far end of the car, his typically pale skin looking even paler today. The cat-like whiskers above his eyes were undulating in a way that I would have attributed to a restless breeze had there been any restless breezes around. Two more defenders flanked his seat, and I had the itchy sensation of a pair of attack dogs sizing me up. “Be seated, Frank Compton,” the Chahwyn said, gesturing toward a chair half a dozen meters in front of him.

“Thank you,” I said, crossing to the chair and sitting down. “Do I have the honor of addressing an Elder of the Chahwyn?”

“You do,” he said. Like the other handful of Chahwyn I’d met over the past two years, this one had a fluid, melodious voice.

But I could also hear an edge of tension beneath the music. Something was definitely wrong.

“Glad to hear it,” I said. “I see you’ve brought the coral I asked for. When can I arrange delivery down to Yandro?”

“There will be no delivery,” he said. “Your plan has been rejected.”

“Really,” I said, keeping my voice neutral. “Why?”

“Your assumptions and calculations have been reexamined by the assessors,” he said. “It has been concluded that there is insufficient coral to carry out your plan.”

“With all due respect, your assessors are wrong,” I said. “They’re assuming we need enough modified coral to overwhelm a Modhri who’s actively resisting the change. But as I made clear in my message, that’s no longer the situation. Not only is the Modhri desperately eager to cooperate with us, but if Morse’s colony is any indication the segment-prime will quickly realize the change is to his benefit and accept it with open arms.”

“You assume in turn that Morse is telling the truth,” the Elder countered. “You assume that the Modhri will indeed see the Melding change as a gain to him and not as a loss.”

“First of all, anything that keeps the Modhri from becoming a Shonkla-raa slave counts as a gain,” I said. “Second, I know Morse, and I know how Humans behave when they’re lying, and he wasn’t.”

“Perhaps his Modhran colony was lying to him.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “In fact, if Morse’s current arrangement is anything like the one Bayta has with her Chahwyn symbiont, I doubt he and the Modhri
can
lie to each other. And third, since when is this just
my
plan? This has been
your
plan, too, dating back to at least when you started working on the Melding coral.”

“Our involvement in that project is a secret,” the Chahwyn said stiffly. “You’re not to speak of it with anyone.”

“Oh, please,” I scoffed. “You really think the Modhri isn’t going to put two and two together now that he’s actually in communication with the Melding? There’s no way he’s not going to figure out that you’re the ones who created them. Or that your ancestors were the ones who created
him
, back when the original Shonkla-raa were running the galaxy.”

There was just the briefest of hesitations. “We believe the Modhri already knows of our role in his origin,” the Chahwyn said reluctantly.

“So there should be no problem,” I said. “In fact, I daresay that makes it even more likely that he’ll gladly accept this new direction. Who else but your creators would know how to make you better than you already are?”

“Perhaps,” the Chahwyn said. “But the point is moot. As I have said, the plan is changed. And with that change, your services are no longer needed.”

I stared at him. The Chahwyn were firing me?
Again?
“Just like that?”

“Just like that,” he said. “Instead of you and the Modhri, we shall send the defenders to fight against the Shonkla-raa.”

“They can’t,” I said as patiently as I could. “Don’t you read our reports? The Shonkla-raa command tone freezes them like statues.”

“That problem will soon be solved,” he said. “We have a variant in development that will be immune to that tone.”

“And exactly how soon do you expect to have this miracle defender up and running?” I countered. “How soon after that will you have built up the numbers you need? How soon after
that
will you get those numbers deployed?”

“We believe we have sufficient time.”

“No, you don’t,” I said bluntly. “The Shonkla-raa are on the move, Elder of the Chahwyn. This is no time to go back to square one for a whole new battle plan.”

“Nevertheless, that is our plan,” the Chahwyn said. “And with you no longer under our guidance and protection, we must ensure that you will not leak its substance to the enemy. You will therefore be taken to Viccai—”

“Wait a minute,” I cut him off. The insanity here was coming way too thick and fast. “What’s this nonsense about me leaking the plan? Since when have I leaked
anything
?”

“You were seen speaking with the enemy on the Quadrail from Sibbrava,” the Chahwyn said, his melodious voice gone flat and stern. “We fear you may speak with them again. We cannot risk that.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I protested. “Talking with the Shonkla-raa doesn’t mean a thing. Hey, I talked with the Modhri all the time back when we were still enemies. That’s part of warfare, one of the ways you gather intelligence and work out trades.”

The Chahwyn’s whiskers twitched. “The decision has been made. You will be taken to Viccai, where you will remain for the duration of the war.”

A chill ran up my back.
Frank, this is suicide,
Bayta had said. Had she known this was what the Chahwyn had planned for me?

No, of course she hadn’t. If she had, she would surely have said something more concrete, something to warn me off. All she’d had was a feeling, some sense of this grim new insanity that had apparently overtaken the Chahwyn.

But it didn’t make any sense. All I’d done was talk to Riijkhan. I hadn’t made any deals with him, or told him any of my plans, or given him intel on our allies. More importantly, I’d just repulsed two separate Shonkla-raa attacks. If that didn’t show I was on the Chahwyn side, nothing would.

Unless it wasn’t my talking to Riijkhan that the Chahwyn were concerned about. Maybe it was my listening to him.

What had Riijkhan said to me? More importantly, what had he said that might have thrown the Chahwyn into this insane mental tailspin?

Whatever it was, whatever the Chahwyn thought they’d heard, there couldn’t be very much of it. Sitting in the Quadrail bar, Riijkhan and I had been encased in the usual acoustical bubble that prevented outsiders from eavesdropping.

But there
had
been a moment when that bubble had been breached, I remembered now. The point where the server Spider came by to ask for our orders.

And as I thought back, that breach had occurred right as Riijkhan was offering to tell me something terrible about my employers.

A dramatic buildup that had been followed by a big fat lot of nothing. As the Spider left, Riijkhan had merely trotted out the traditional vague threat that my allies would eventually turn on me. It was such a tired old ploy that I hadn’t given it a second thought.

But the Spiders had apparently reported Riijkhan’s question to the Chahwyn, who were obviously taking it very seriously. Which implied in turn that there was one hell of a secret lurking somewhere in the Chahwyn’s collective closet.

And if I didn’t do something fast, that secret was about to get me exiled from the entire war. Which was no doubt exactly what Riijkhan had been angling for in the first place.

“If you take me off the field, you will lose,” I said as calmly as I could. “The Shonkla-raa will take over the galaxy, they’ll track you down, and they’ll destroy you.”

The Chahwyn lowered his eyes. “There are worse things than death.”

“Sure there are,” I said acidly. “Slavery is one of them. Watching your friends being murdered is one of them. Having some deep dark secret become common knowledge isn’t.”

His eyes snapped up, his whiskers flattening. “So we were right,” he said. “The Shonkla-raa
did
tell you.”

If I’d been smart, I would have just said no: straightforwardly, honestly, passionately, with a little righteous bewilderment thrown in.

But I’m never that smart. My brain is that of a truth-seeker, my training that of a professional investigator, my personality that of a damn the torpedoes, full speed aheader. Even as I opened my mouth, my mind was sifting the problem, sorting like heat lightning through everything I knew about the Chahwyn, the Shonkla-raa, and the universe at large.

What could a Shonkla-raa tell me that the Chahwyn wouldn’t want me to know?

I’d heard a little of the story during my one visit to Viccai. Four thousand years ago, the Shonkla-raa had discovered the quantum filament the Chahwyn called the Thread and figured out how to use it for interstellar travel. Over the centuries they’d learned how to ravel off pieces that could be used to link all the inhabited and inhabitable systems together. Once widespread interstellar travel was possible, the Shonkla-raa had built huge warships and sent them out on a systematic subjugation of all the other peoples of the galaxy. Along the way they’d used their skills at genetic manipulation to create the Chahwyn and various other servant races. When the inevitable revolt finally came, the Shonkla-raa had forced the Chahwyn to create the Modhri as a last-ditch, fifth-column-type weapon that they’d hoped to use against their enemies.

Only the end came before the Modhri could be deployed. The Shonkla-raa were destroyed, the surviving races were crushed back to pre-spaceflight levels, and the Modhri was lost and effectively gone dormant. Three centuries after the dust had settled, the Chahwyn had stumbled on caches of Shonkla-raa tech and had used the genetic equipment to create the Spiders and, through them, the Quadrail, wrapping their Tubes around the sections of Thread. When Modhran coral was found and began to spread across the galaxy, the Chahwyn had countered by again using the old Shonkla-raa equipment, this time to create the Melding in hopes of turning the Modhri from a single-minded conqueror weapon into something calmer, more civilized, and less threatening to the galaxy at large.

And as the history lesson flashed across my mind, so did something more recent: the image of the defenders aboard the Sibbrava Quadrail, carefully carrying the injured Belldic commandos to their compartments but merely lugging the dead Shonkla-raa back to the tender like sides of beef.