Transvergence (6 page)

Atvar H'sial was crouched close to the floor, her head nodding as the listing of internal and external dimensions and performance ratings went on. After ten minutes the Cecropian began to sit up straight, towering over the humans.

"Weapons?" The single word to Nenda carried an overtone of speculation.

"We're just getting to 'em. You'll love this, At, it's the cream on the cake. Fifteen weapons centers in the main control room. Forty-four turrets, all around the ship and all fully independent. Each one has as much kick as a Lascelles complex—any one would beat what I had on the
Have-It-All
. Plus you can make a Dalton synthesis combining all turrets—"

"A question, Louis Nenda, for you to ask Julian Graves. How much did J'merlia and Kallik pay for the
Erebus
?"

"I don't need to ask—it's shown right here. One hundred and thirty-two thousand. Damnation, I see what you mean. That's
way
too cheap."

"Perhaps not, Louis. I would like the answer to one further question. How
old
is this ship?"

"That's not shown on the listing." Nenda turned to Julian Graves. "Can you interrupt the display for a query? Atvar H'sial is asking about the age of the
Erebus
."

"No problem." Graves had been leaning back in his chair, watching with huge satisfaction as the statistics rolled past. He entered Nenda's query, then turned to face the Karelian. "I hope that this gives you increased faith in my methods, Mr. Nenda. I sent J'merlia and Kallik to negotiate for purchase of a ship. They have bought a ship—and what a ship! And at a most reasonable price. I ask you, do you believe that you, or Atvar H'sial, or anyone, could have found a better bargain? The moral of this is—"

He paused and goggled at the screen. "Is that the date it was put into service? It can't be. Let me check again."

"Three thousand nine hundred years, At," Nenda said softly. "That's the listed age of the
Erebus
." He continued silently, using only pheromonal communication. "What's going on? You must know, or you'd never have asked the question."

"I will tell you, though you may prefer to allow Councilor Graves to learn what I have to say for himself, rather than from you. The information is not likely to bring joy to his heart. Your description of the
Erebus
—especially of its weapons system—sounded familiar. It reminded me of the Larmeer ships used in the long-ago battles between the Fourth Alliance and the Zardalu Communion. Those ships were commissioned by the Alliance, but they were manufactured by my people, in the Cecropia Federation, in the free-space weapons shop of H'larmeer. J'merlia and Kallik have purchased something with the carrying capacity of a freighter, the firepower of a battleship, and the internal life-support systems and personnel accommodations of a colony ship. But it is none of these. It is a Tantalus orbital fort."

"And it's four thousand years old. Will it still work?"

"Assuredly. The orbital forts were created for multi-millennial working lifetimes, with negligible maintenance. There will be a problem recognizing the
purpose
of some of the onboard devices, since the common day-to-day knowledge of one generation lies unused and forgotten in a later one, to the point of incomprehensibility. To quote an old Cecropian proverb.
Any sufficiently antique technology is indistinguishable from magic.
However, I would expect little or no degradation in ship performance."

"So Graves got a really good deal. He's going to be crowing over us for months."

"I regard that as unlikely. Councilor Graves has already told us that it may be necessary to visit dozens of different worlds before he finds the Zardalu."

"He can do it. The
Erebus
has ample power. And if the Zardalu get pesky, the ship has plenty of weapons."

"It does indeed. But still I suspect that Councilor Graves will shortly become less satisfied with his purchase."

"Huh?"

"Less satisfied, indeed." Atvar H'sial paused for dramatic effect. "
Much
less satisfied, as soon as he realizes that what he has purchased is an
orbital
fort—a device which can never make a landing, ever, on any planet."

Darya Lang sat in the main control room of the
Erebus
, staring at the list of locations that she had generated and swiveling her chair impatiently from side to side.

Stalemate.

The way that Hans Rebka had described the plan, it sounded almost too easy: acquire the use of a ship and recruit a crew; seek out the refuge of the escaped Zardalu, with adequate firepower to assure their own safety; and return to Miranda with unarguable proof of Zardalu existence.

They had the ship, they had the weapons, and they had the crew. But there was one gigantic snag. The Zardalu had not left a forwarding address. They could be anywhere in the spiral arm, on thousands of habitable planets scattered through thousands of light-years. Neither Hans Rebka nor Julian Graves had offered a persuasive method of narrowing that search, and no one else on board had been able to do any better. To examine all the possibilities, the
Erebus
would have to fly in a thousand directions at once.

As soon as Darya and Hans Rebka arrived on board the whole group had met; and argued; and dispersed. And now the ship sat in lumbering orbit around Sentinel Gate, while the Zardalu—somewhere—were relentlessly breeding.

Everything in the
Erebus
had been built in a multiply redundant and durable style. The control room was no exception. Fifteen separate consoles, each with its own weapons center, ran floor-to-ceiling around the circular room. General information centers were fitted into niches between them. Darya sat in one of those, and across from her on the other side of the chamber Atvar H'sial was crouched over another, manipulating controls with a delicate combination of four clawed limbs.

The flat screens could not provide images "visible" to the Cecropian's sonic sight—so how could she be obtaining useful feedback of information? Darya wished that Louis Nenda or J'merlia were there to act as interpreter, but they had headed off with Hans Rebka to the auxiliary engine room of the ship, where Graves claimed to have found "a fascinating device."

Kallik was sitting in the niche next to Atvar H'sial, deeply immersed in her own analysis of data. Without examining the outputs, Darya had a good idea what the Hymenopt was doing—she would be sifting the data banks for rumors, speculation, and old legends concerning the Zardalu, and pondering their most likely present location. Darya had been doing the same thing herself. She had reached definite conclusions that she wanted to share with the others—if only the rest would come back from their excursion to the engine room. What was keeping them so long?

It occurred to her that there was something deeply significant in what was happening. She, Atvar H'sial, and Kallik—the females in the party—were working on the urgent problem of Zardalu location, analyzing and reanalyzing available data. Meanwhile all the males had gone off to play with a dumb gadget, a toy that had sat on the
Erebus
for millennia and could easily wait another few years before anyone played with it.

Darya's peevish thoughts were interrupted by a startling sound from the middle of the control chamber. She turned, and the skin on her arms and the back of her neck tightened into goose bumps.

A dozen hulking figures stood no more than a dozen paces from her. Towering four meters tall on splayed tentacles of pale aquamarine, the thick cylindrical bodies were topped by bulbous heads of midnight blue, a meter wide. At the base of the head, below the long slit of a mouth, the breeding pouches formed a ring of round-mouthed openings. While Darya looked on in horror, lidded eyes, each as big across as her stretched hand, surveyed the chamber then turned to look down on her. Cruel hooked beaks below the broad-spaced eyes opened wide, and a series of high-pitched chittering sounds emerged.

Once seen, never forgotten.
Zardalu.

Darya jumped to her feet and backed up to the wall of the chamber. Then she realized that Kallik, across from her, had left her seat and was moving
toward
the looming figures. The little alien could understand Zardalu speech.

"Kallik! What are they—" But at that moment the Hymenopt walked right
through
one of the standing Zardalu, then stood calmly inspecting it with her rear-facing eyes.

"Remarkable," Kallik said. She moved to Darya's side. "More accurate than I would have believed possible. My sincere congratulations."

She was talking not to Darya, but to someone who had been sitting tucked out of sight in a niche on the side of the control room. As that figure came into view, Darya saw that it was E.C. Tally. A neural connect cable ran from the base of the skull of the embodied computer, back into the booth.

"Thank you," E.C. Tally said. "I must say, I like it myself. But it is not
quite
right." He inspected the Zardalu critically, and as Darya watched the aquamarine tentacles of the land-cephalopods darkened a shade and the ring of breeding pouches moved a fraction lower on the torso.

"Though congratulations are due more to this ship's image restoration and display facilities," the embodied computer went on. He circled the group of Zardalu, trailing shiny neural cable along the floor behind him. "All I did was feed it my memories. If something as good as this had been available on Miranda, perhaps I would have had more success in persuading the Council. Do you think that it is a plausible reconstruction, Professor Lang? Or is more work needed before it can mimic reality?"

Darya was saved from answering by the sound of voices from the control-room entrance. Louis Nenda and Hans Rebka appeared between two of the massive support columns, talking animatedly. They glanced at the Zardalu standing in the middle of the room, then marched across to Darya and Kallik.

"Nice job, E.C.," Nenda said casually. "Put it on video and audio when you're done." He turned from the embodied computer and the menacing Zardalu, and grinned at Darya. "Professor, we got it. We agree on everything. But me and Rebka gotta have your help persuading Graves and J'merlia."

"You've got what?" Darya was still feeling like a fool, but she could not help returning Nenda's grin. Villainous or not, his presence was always so
reassuring
. She had been unreasonably delighted to see him at their first meeting on the
Erebus
, and she found herself smiling now.

"We figured out how to track down the Zardalu." Hans Rebka flopped down into the chair where Darya had been sitting.

"Damn right." But Nenda was turning to face the crouched figure of Atvar H'sial. "Hold on a minute, At's sending to me. She's been working the computer. I'll be back."

If Nenda and Rebka agreed on anything, that was a first. It seemed to Darya that they had been snarling at each other since the moment when the
Erebus
picked up Darya and Hans Rebka and made its subluminal departure from Sentinel Gate. It did not help to be told by Julian Graves that Darya herself was the hidden reason for the argument.

She watched as Nenda moved to crouch below the carapace of the Cecropian, where pheromonal messages were most easily sent and received, and remained there in silence for half a minute.

"I don't see how Atvar H'sial can interface with the computer at all," Darya said. "The screen is blank, and even if it weren't, she couldn't get anything from it."

"She does not employ the screen." Kallik pointed one wiry limb to where Atvar H'sial was now rising to her full height. "She obtains information feedback aurally. She has reprogrammed the oscillators to give audible responses at high frequencies. I hear only the lower end of the range. J'merlia would catch the whole thing, but all of it is too high for human ears."

Nenda returned, followed by Atvar H'sial. He was frowning.

"So now we got
three
ideas," he said. He stared at Darya and Kallik. "I hope that neither of you two think you know where the Zardalu are."

"I do," Darya said.

"Then we got problems. So does At."

"And I also have suggestions." Kallik spoke softly and diffidently. Since they had been reunited, Darya had noticed a strange change in the relationship between Louis Nenda and Atvar H'sial, and their former—or was it current?—slaves. Kallik and J'merlia had greeted their sometime owners with huge and unconcealed joy, and those owners were clearly delighted to see them. But no one was sure how to behave. The Lo'tfian and the Hymenopt were ready and eager to take orders, but the Cecropian and the Karelian human were not giving them. Nenda in particular was on his absolute best behavior—which was not very good, in terms of social graces. If Darya had been forced to introduce
him
to the research staff of the Institute, Professor Merada would have had a fit. But Glenna Omar, with her appetite for anything rough and male, would more likely have been all over him.

She pushed away that last thought as unworthy as Nenda scratched thoughtfully at his backside, sniffed, and dropped into a chair next to Hans Rebka.

"We gotta sort all this out quick," he said. "We sit here jerking ourselves off, while new little Zardalu must be poppin' out of the pouches every five minutes."

"We must proceed," Rebka said. He and Nenda were having their usual silent tussle as to who was in charge, something they did whenever Julian Graves was not around. "We can't afford to wait for the other two to show up. It seems that we all have ideas, so who wants to go first?"

Darya realized that Kallik was glancing deferentially in their direction.

"I guess that I do," she said. "What I have to say won't take long. I'll start with two facts: First, when the Builder transportation system returned us from Serenity, it landed us in different parts of the spiral arm. But in every case, we came out on or next door to the location of a Builder artifact. Second, no one has reported the sighting of any live Zardalu—and you can bet that would make news everywhere. So I deduce two things. First, the Zardalu would almost certainly have arrived close to an artifact, too. And second, that artifact cannot be in Fourth Alliance territory, or in the Cecropia Federation, or even in the Phemus Circle. It has to be where you might expect Zardalu to be sent—to a location somewhere in the territories of the Zardalu Communion. That makes sense for two reasons: the Zardalu were originally picked up there; and the Communion still has a lot of unexplored territory. If you
wanted
to disappear, and remain hidden, that's the first place in the spiral arm that you'd pick."