Two hours later, they shared an embryonic idea of what had been going on around Sol, Phoebus, and Centrum.
Rueda could no longer sit. He paced the room, back and forth, making gestures like karate chops. Blood had withdrawn from his features, turning the olive skin gray, and he stared at the narrowness enclosing him as his ancestors had stared across sword points on a dueling ground.
“It must not be borne,” he declared. “It will not be. They subvert the Covenant, they would close the star gates, ay, kidnapping and murder are small among their crimes. Daniel, Joelle Fidelio. . . . Never fear we may do wrong fighting them. We cannot.”
Cross-legged in an armchair, pipe bowl hot in his clasp and smoke mordant on a scorched tongue, Brodersen said, “I guess that’s axiomatic, Carlos.
The question before this assembly is where we go from here. And how. And whether.”
belle had chosen a straightbacked seat opposite him and had scarcely stirred except to talk, for the most part giving a dispassionate account of Beta. Her hands lay quiet on her lap. Fidello sat beside her on a tripod of feet and flukes and likewise moved little, save that his whiskers trembled. “You must have an idea or two, Dan,” she said.
“Yes!” Rueda jerked to a halt and stared at the captain. “You were always bold, but never heedless.”
Brodersen scowled. “Maybe I have been, this time around. Or maybe there’ve been too goddamn many jokers in the deck. I was, well, kind of childishly hoping you from Emissary would have brought back a wild card we could play.”
Joelle’s lips quirked upward, barely enough to be seen. “If we had that, we wouldn’t have languished in the Wheel.”
“No, but-” Brodersen shrugged, drew on his pipe, laid it on an ashtaker, and met their gazes head on. “Okay,” he told them, “naturally my shipmates and I have discussed several schemes. None of them appeal much, but see what you Side 84
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The
think.”
He ticked them off on his fingers. “We can defy the bastards immediately, veer off, scoot around the Solar System. We can’t prowl forever, but we do have a lot of delta V before our tanks go dry. Food stores are ample for years, and air and water recycling can go on as long as fuel for the migma cells holds out, which is years more. . . . Oh, of course Fidelio’s limited to what? Several months? -but we wouldn’t be out in space that long anyway.
“You see, the watchships can hunt us down. An accelerating craft is a difficult target, and we can doubtless shoot out some of their missiles, but they’d swamp our defenses in the end. Meanwhile they’ll’ve kept us far from Earth or any settlement. That whole effort might turn out to be impractically large and visible for the opposition-they can’t afford publicity which they haven’t doctored-but I wouldn’t count on it. Bear in mind, they’ve got a grip on enough of the levers of power to have already done things like jailing you.”
“Ah, but wait,” Rueda said. “We can beam our word, can’t we? I suppose your radio transmitter is like ours, not designed to get a message across an astronomical distance. Probably no one would be tuned in anyhow. But the radios are limited precisely because the lasers can reach far.”
“Two problems there,” Brodersen replied. “First, a message like that to Earth or Luna or the satellites gets picked up by a comsat, you know, and passed on from there to its destination. What you may not know, because it hardly ever makes any difference, is that the program includes censorship. Only certain classes of official communications may go in cipher. Everything else, a computer scans, and if it spots a reference to àflagged’ subject, the message goes to a human, who decides whether or not it’s harmless. The system dates back to the Troubles, and even I have to admit it’s not all bad. For instance, it was what trapped the Finalists before they were quite ready to set off their atomic bombs. But you can bet your bottom sol that when Quick’s bunch started planning what to do in case Emissary returned, a very early order of business for them was to quietly get control of it-put in the right programs and personnel so they can intercept whatever may threaten disclosure.