Time Past (46 page)

I’ll coordinate with Lee. Gamet out.

“If I could talk to them, I know what I’d say.” Murdoch’s words were too precisely pronounced.

“Go and let the medics check you out,” I said. “We’ll handle this.”

He shook his head and dragged an unsteady hand down his face. “I’m fine. I reckon we need to talk to those K’Cher. What the fuck did they think they were doing?”

I’d never seen Murdoch pale and shaking before, and I hated it. It made me feel uncertain and solicitous and I wanted to physically attack the cause of his distress or anything else handy.

“Go and see the medics,” I said, more sharply than I’d intended. “I’ll talk to the K’Cher.”

His jaw set stubbornly. I put my hand on his arm and squeezed, then pushed gently. “Go on.” I smiled. “I need to know you’re all right.”

He stared at me as though he’d never looked at me properly before, half smiled back mechanically, and turned away. Streaks of blood stood out against the black armor across his shoulders.

“Uplift’s at the top,” said Sasaki from where she stood at the control panel.

I joined her and tapped instructions, not caring that she saw my hand shake.

“We’ll keep that uplift car at the center for the moment. If they try to take it down here or send for any of the other cars, we’ll be warned.”

We both knew the Q’Chn could use an uplift in one of the other spokes and the warning might not reach us in time. But there was little we could do.

“Do you think they’ll come down again?” she said quietly.

“I don’t know. Let’s talk to the K’Cher while we can. They’ve got to stay in shelter for their own and everybody else’s protection. And I want to know what they know about the Q’Chn.”

The crowd were willing to disperse, after Sasaki and I pointed out to them that if the Q’Chn figured out how to override the alternative exit function they could enter this section too. News of the Q’Chn attack would spread quickly and create further bad feeling against the Four. And against the New Council. Let Venner attempt to woo the residents. If she couldn’t keep the Q’Chn under control, who would believe her other promises as well?

When we entered Section Two some minutes later, halfway up the throughway the medics were lifting a covered form onto a maglev trolley.

Blood pooled in one spot on the deck near the uplift, streaks running off the pool. Near the medics, more blood had splashed in a wide arc. I couldn’t look at it without seeing the Q’Chn attack before my eyes, so I kept my attention on the walls.

The walls of the buildings showed a variety of singe weals, black burn clouds, blisters, and cracks, depending on their construction. Some of it looked bad enough to have damaged the circuitry inside.

The Trade Hall was unscathed. It rose in neat, rosy-colored blocks to regulation height.

“You did say Veatch was in there?” I said.

Sasaki brought herself back from frowning contemplation of the mess on the deck. “Yes. When we talked to them before, he said he went up there to persuade the K’Cher not to try to leave in their freighters.”

“I need to talk to him.” “We sent a message saying we want to talk. There he is.” Veatch hesitated in the main doorway and peered out. He saw us and hurried over, more quickly than his usual measured walk, then he clasped his hands behind his back as he reached us.

His antennae lifted a little. “My condolences on the deaths.”

Sasaki mumbled something that was either “thank you” or “fuck you.”

“I want to talk to Trillith,” I said. “Now.”

Veatch’s antennae stiffened in surprise. “Trillith? Why?”

“I need to know more about the Q’Chn,” I said. “The K’Cher must know more than they let on.”

“It will not come.” Veatch’s antennae curled apologetically. “It fears the Q’Chn will return.”

“It’s not that safe in the Hall,” said Sasaki scornfully. “The Q’Chn only left the K’Cher alone because the New Council was calling them back. The Q’Chn can break through the building if they want to.”

“Encouraging the K’Cher to panic will not help the situation,” Veatch said.

“They might as well stay there,” I said. “It’s as safe— or unsafe—as anywhere at the moment. I’ll talk to them. You go back to the Bubble,” I added to Veatch. “Make sure you’ve got reports from all departments and divisions on their current status. Send runners to get the information if the comm links are down.”

He started to protest but I glared at him and went into the Trade Hall.

Trillith waited on the second floor, in a white-walled room made tiny by its bulk. It sat still, waiting for us, a huge greeny-gray statue.

“Commander Halley.” Its voicebox tone seemed subdued, its actual voice no more than a faint rustle. “You must protect us. They are here.”

“I noticed,” I said. “And if you want protection, you pay for it. We just paid in three lives. Now it’s your turn.”

Ordinarily I wouldn’t use that tone to a K’Cher. They are so accomplished at rudeness, that politeness is our only weapon. Today, Trillith didn’t even notice. The ridge of exoskeleton down the front of its thorax was pale and dull, as though it was in shock.

“I will contribute your required value,” it said.

If I hadn’t been so angry, my jaw might have dropped. Trillith, agreeing to pay me an amount I specified?

“I don’t mean in goods. I mean information.”

Its color deepened a little. “What are your questions?”

“Why are they chasing you?”

“They hate us. They hate the aristos most of all. The aristos created them.”

The barons, of whom Trillith was a minor member, did not wield power in K’Cher society—that was left to the Few, as the aristos liked to call themselves. Even more xenophobic and paranoid than the barons, the aristos saw themselves as the brains of K’Cher pre-Change society. Below the barons, Lowers like Keveth, the first victim of the Q’Chn on Jocasta, were forced to deal directly with other “inferior” species as a result of their own inferiority. And by doing so, confirmed that they were tainted and inferior.

“The aristos emerged before the Q’Chn existed,” said Trillith. “Half a human millennium ago,” it added with pride. “The K’Cher at that time were genetically similar all over our colony planet network. Much greater than anything your species ever knew. Unfortunately, we could not win the war against the ancestors of Leowin. We began genetic manipulation to create the perfect warrior. The first mutations carried through the Change to breed true, and the present aristos are their descendants.”

Trillith’s eyes, so uncomfortably like multifaceted Q’Chn eyes, clouded briefly, then cleared again. “Then ambition overreached ability and the resulting strand could not Change. They could not enter the next life stage. They could not breed. But the aristos chose to continue to create these creatures because they were fearsome fighters. Free of the need to allow their creations to propagate, the aristos modified further and further. When contact with the Invidi brought them the technological ability to expand their empire they did so, not hesitating to use the Q’Chn. Until the Invidi finally stopped them.”

“So the Q’Chn want revenge on the aristos because they agreed to let them die off after you joined the Confederacy?” I said. “But why do they attack you? It’s the aristos they should hate.”

Trillith’s forearm twitched and it wedged the arm under its torso, as though embarrassed. “You do not understand. The aristos commanded the Q’Chn’s extinction, but the Q’Chn hate all of us because we can Change and they cannot. They cannot become more than they are now. They will never know the heights of our culture, our philosophy.”

“Why are they obeying the New Council’s orders?”

“I do not know. They are different to the old Q’Chn. But they kill just as efficiently.”

I set my jaw in annoyance. It wasn’t enough, but I didn’t think Trillith knew much more. I turned to go.

“Commander?” It pushed itself to its feet with creaks and small whistles of air exhaled from carapace holes. “You will protect us?”

I thought of the blood on the deck below and felt too tired to say more than “Yes, Trillith.”

Thirty-four

L
ieutenant Gamet was coordinating opsys repairs in the Bubble. I stopped off there on my way to see Veatch. It had been a long time since I’d been in that round, cramped space, but my feet knew exactly how many steps to take from doorway to the edge of the upper level, and I found myself checking the readouts on each monitor, comparing them with the ideal levels in my mind. The sounds felt right—subdued voices, the hum and occasional ping of the opsys. Except for a slow, regular boop. Wonder what that is.

Three people in EarthFleet blue sat at the main consoles, and Ensign Lee was on call at the central station. She looked up as I came in, blinked in surprise, and straightened from where she’d been bent over a panel.

“Comm...” she began, then stopped. She must have heard I’d resigned from ConFleet, but here I was, wearing a ConFleet uniform and walking unguarded into the Bubble.

“I’m here to see the lieutenant about the core,” I said, nodding at Gamet’s back, which was bent over the Ops console on the lower level.

Gamet turned at the sound of my voice and raised her hand a little. “Be my guest,” said Lee.

Someone cleared their throat behind me and Lee looked over at them, then back at me.

“Er, welcome back, ma’am,” she added.

She looked different, and I ran through a mental list— short dark cap of hair, same; slim figure, same; determinedly calm expression. Ah, she now wore light EarthFleet blue instead of ConFleet navy. And she wasn’t an ensign anymore.

“You transferred?” I said, surprised. Lee had always been a staunch ConFleet supporter in the inevitable ConFleet-EarthFleet squabbles.

She smiled shyly. “I got comfortable here.”

Someone said something about “making a love nest” and she swung around menacingly.

“Our gain is ConFleet’s loss, then,” I said. “And congratulations on the promotion.”

“Thank you, Commander.”

I stepped down to Ops, where Gamet waved her hand at the bank of readouts.

“It’s not too bad. We’ve settled the environmentals, although Delta recycling is having problems.”

If environmentals had stayed up, An Serat must have left that part of the opsys alone. “Delta recycling always has problems,” I said. “What’s that noise?”

Gamet listened for a moment, her head on one side. The lights from the readouts stained her nose and cheeks a sickly green. Then she grinned, understanding. “That’s the subsystem monitor network. We set up access here after you left.”

I became aware that the Bubble was a lot quieter than when I’d stepped inside. Everyone was carefully not listening to Gamet and myself.

“Uplifts are a bit unreliable,” continued Gamet, tapping up information on each system as she spoke, spidery blue figures weaving their way down the screen. “We’re monitoring them closely, especially after what happened in Alpha.”

“Good. I want to... the administration needs to know if there’s any unauthorized usage.”

“There’s one worrying development.” On the screen to her right rotated a 3-D schematic of the core. “These energy fluctuations.” She traced a series of orange patterns that passed in waves through a certain part of the core. On the periphery of the opsys, but connected to it.

“That’s one of the dock systems...” my voice trailed away.
Farseer
’s dock. An Serat must be trying to gain information from the Tor elements of the core. Or activate them, or subvert them, or whatever he meant to do. While we’d been chasing Q’Chn, he was connecting a live Tor device to my station’s core. We had to get rid of him,
Farseer,
and the Q’Chn. I wanted the lot of them off my station.

“Set up a block against Tor interference,” I said to Gamet. “As close as you can to these connections with the ship. You can find examples of blocks in the database, look in the construction records for 2116, about the middle of the year.”

Gamet’s eyes widened and she dropped her voice, “
Tor
interference? But how can... I thought it was the Invidi ship.”

“I could be mistaken,” I said. “But those blocks are the most thorough, anyway. Set it up and see how it goes.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Procedures we’d used six years ago wouldn’t stop An Serat from reaching further into our opsys for long, but with any luck we wouldn’t need long. If ConFleet hurried up through that jump point... I cursed mentally. Here we go again. Waiting for ConFleet to come and rescue us. What happens if we get neutrality? ConFleet won’t come then. It’s about time we learned to stand by ourselves.

“I’ll need you in a meeting soon,” I said to Gamet, “to coordinate with the other departments.”

“I’ll stand by.” She didn’t lift her gaze from the screen. Her fingers tapped busily, sending signals to each ring.

I left her to it and walked over to Lee. “Is Mr. Stone in there?” I nodded at the connecting door to the head of station’s office. Another door beside it led to the rest of the administrative complex. Veatch’s territory, a hive of corridors and offices.

Lee shook her head. “I don’t think so. He hasn’t checked in here, at any rate.”

“What, not since the Q’Chn attack?” I said, shocked. “I saw him earlier, about ten, up in the center with the New Council captain.”

“He hasn’t come in here.” Lee seemed half reluctant to disclose this breach of custom, but at the same time needing to tell someone. I could see a station timer on beside her monitor. It read 16:20.

“I took him the night shift’s report, he signed it,” she said.

“That’s it?”

“He leaves tactical affairs to Lieutenant-Commander Parno and myself.”

Which was, strictly speaking, the correct procedure. Head of station was supposed to be an administrative position. My ConFleet rank had been incidental.

“Where’s Parno?” I said.

“He went on short leave the day before you and Mr. Murdoch got back.”

“He missed the fun, then.”

She smiled properly at that. “I think Mr. Stone went to see the magistrate after he finished in the center.”

“Thanks.”

I tried Veatch’s office, next door to Stone’s. The door opened to reveal an immaculate interior. Matte beige and cream, no EarthFleet blue for Veatch. Flat, abstract creations on two walls. A water sculpture bubbling in the corner.