They all considered that.
“So he’s got hostages, then,” Olag said at last.
“Maybe,” I told them. “Maybe not. He’s smart enough not to count on anybody holding fire just because some of our own are there. No, he’s got something potentially more valuable to him.”
“What do you mean?” almost everyone, including those below on my ship, asked.
“He still has the primal samples of that virus, remember,” I said softly. “He’s got a nice little chemical bank for making a lot of it fast. Right now I’ll bet the Deputy’s covered with it. They’re analyzing the
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metallic structure, the composition all the way down to the atomic. They’re feeding all this information to Moses, and Moses is figuring how to eat his way in-side, to the men and women on that ship. How big’s the crew?”
“Thirty,” she replied.
I nodded. “Thirty trained and knowledgeable peo-ple and Moseshell, he’ll have a field day. Don’t forget the Communards.”
There was silence this time, as they considered the implications and didn’t like what they were thinking.
Suddenly there was an override. “Admiral Seiglein here to all crew on all units,” came a voice that sounded slightly weird and stupid to me but probably did to them, too. Jerry Seiglein suffered from permanent ado-lescence in some things.
“Look, the longer we let this thing sit, the better off that computer will be,” he noted with a logic that surprised me. Maybe he did have something on the ball after’all. “Holliday? Could he figure out how to operate the Depaty once inside?”
I considered it. “Doubtful,” I told him. “Even if he could reason out the controls, there’s the mind-key, you know. He can’t get into your thoughts, only into your emotions and muscle reactions.”
Seiglein didn’t hesitate. “Holliday, fear’s an emotion. So is claustrophobia, at least it can be physically induced. Besides, military ships can’t be on mind-lock somebody else must always be able to command in an emergency!”
And he was right, I realized suddenly. They were open mechanicals. If Moses could figure out the controls, he could lock into the control computer and use
it.
“Admiral, is Deputy’s construction on the molecular level similar to my ship?” I asked.
“Identical,” came the reply.
“Then you’d better get him now,” I warned. “He had almost three months to study this ship. He al-
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ready knows most of what he needs to know, and he’s inside now. Admiral. All he’s trying to do is neutralize the crew and figure out the controls.”
“Close group!” Seiglein ordered, and I knew this meant that both ships were now under the bridge command of the Courrant. I was glad I wasn’t on the MacAlester.
The destroyer moved out ahead of the bigger ship but not too far, and they both moved slowly across the face of the gas giant in tight formation. I started adjusting my own ship to keep them in view. Then, suddenly, so quickly that I couldn’t follow it until it was over, I saw the quarry.
But which was the quarry?
The smaller Deputy, its blip slightly irregular from norm, shot out and collided with the MacAlester, while the huge bulk of the Peace Victory plowed through the energy screens of the Courrant stem-first, crashing into the larger ship. The bulk was not equal; the Courrant, large as it was, was barely a quarter the size of the PV.
The radio was bedlam.
The Courrant had a gash in her side; not fatal, but they would take a few precious minutes to get everything straightened out.
“Infidels!” roared Moses on Channel 161 via the smashed Deputy.
“Children of Satan you are punished now!”
And, with that, I watched as the Peace Victory maneuvered more tightly than I would have believed possible for such bulk, the front bay open now, swallowing both the crumpled remains of Deputy and the still in-tact but out of control MacAlester. Then, suddenly, there was full boost and he was off my screen.
“Courrant! Courrant!” I called. “Olag! What’s your situation?” I had never felt so helpless: tiny, unarmed, and threatened. I opened screens wide, not wanting a huge shape to add me to its collection.
George and the kids clamored to know just what was
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going on, but I had more important things to find out.
Finally there was a crackling and I heard Seiglein’s voice. It sounded even more strained, crackedand furious. “Holliday! We’ll be fully operational in about one more minute. We’ve got a lock on the Peace Victory but our drives are damaged. He knew just where to hit us!”
“Can you L-jump?” I asked him.
“Affirmative,” he replied. “But we’ve lost too much fuel for a sublight pursuit and he’s headed out-system.”
So Moses was making tracks with his prize, I thought. Abandoning us, abandoning Patmos.
Ironically, the Courrant couldn’t go slow enough to give chase. They had enough power for in-system work, and probably enough reserve for an L-jump, although they probably wouldn’t make the second beacon be-fore they would have to call for help, being unable to match proper velocity for a full jump.
I felt the Courranfs extraordinarily powerful scan beams lock on me, even at this distance. I realized that in the excitement of battle I’d moved inside the seven-hundred-thousand K mark. And the Courrant was now movingmoving slowly toward me.
I started moving back, using my greater speed.
“Bar!” a shaken Olag called. “Don’t move away! We have to link up now!”
Even receding, I felt the aiming pulse from Courrant as the weapons systems locked onto me.
“Please, Bar!” Olag called. “I want to see you again. Talk over old times. We want to help you. Bar. Don’t
move away.”
Four robomissiles fired, and I tracked them at a lit-tle over a half-million K and closing fast. I made the emergency L-jump.
The screens blanked.
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Thirteen
George and the kids grumped a little about the bouncing I had given them, but they calmed down when I told them the reason. I wasn’t feeling too great myself, but I had managed a brace of sorts.
“But why would they want to kill us?” Ham asked, genuinely confused and distressed.
I considered my answer a moment.
“Because we’re different, Ham, that’s why. People fear anything that is different. They don’t know us, and anything they don’t know is a threat to them.”
“Patmos,” George put in, voice cracking. “What will they do to poor Patmos?”
“I don’t know,” I replied honestly. “We’ll have to find out, of course. Remember, the one thing the planet’s people don’t have is mobility. They’re stuck there.” That Seiglein would not harm Patmos because of the Choz’ lack of spaceflight was a ray of hope that I wanted to believe, but couldn’t, quite. Maybe if Moses had been destroyed, yes, butnow? And with the Seiglein temper?
I had jumped only an hour, so we were still fairly close when we emerged, although too far to receive real-time radio signals. I could still make out the sys-tem, but just barely.
George came up behind me, and I glanced around at him.
“So what do we do now?” the older man asked.
“Wait,” I replied. “The only thing we can do. Give
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Seiglein a while, then go back and check. We can’t make any plans until then.”
“You don’t think they’ll wait to blast us?” he responded nervously.
I shook my head. “Doubtful. Baby Seiglein’s had a nasty taste of Moses and he can’t count a hundred percent on the old boy staying away, although I think he will. He’s exposed now, and slowhe’ll run, the better the distance, the less likelihood of being found. As for the Courrant, the shields helped a little but the ship is damaged, and leaking a little fuel. They’ll jump for the beacon as soon as they can to save themselves and perhaps come back later if they want.”
“Can you tell when they leave?” Eve asked, curious. My routine link with the ship was mysterious to all of them; it gave me some power they could not share.
“I’ve set the energy detection screen, so when they jump I’ll know if it’s anywhere within half a light-year. There’s a lot of energy used when you jump,” I told her.
A few cycles later, the ship signaled for me to come to the bridge. I was surprised; although my time sense was shot, it was certainly a lot sooner than I’d expected them to jump.
They hadn’t. The energy bursts were too small for an L-jump, and too regular. These signals were com-ing from within the system, and I’d never in my life experienced anything quite like them. This made me more nervous, and edgy too.
The pulses stopped after a while, but the energy burst was still there, though lessened a bit. It puzzled me all the more, since the nature of the signal was more like those I’d gotten from suns at great distances.
A little later, well out-system, I perceived the L-jump. It was a big one; Baby Seiglein was taking no chances on Moses, on me, or on not reaching the bea-con before his conventional-space fuel ran out.
“They’re gone,” I sighed, but didn’t move to jump
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us back right away. Something nagged at me, something told me not to go, not to return, to stay, to do anything but return to the Christmas system.
George sensed my hesitation.
“We’ve got to go, you know,” he said softly. “You have to do it. Bar. Come on, let’s get it over with.”
Finally, that nagging fear still within me, I made the jump.
It took another hour to bring us in-system. I am very conservative in my jumps, always. I don’t want to risk even the astronomically small chance of winding up in a sun.
The ship’s radiation deflection shields snapped on, a procedure which is automatic but which startled me nonetheless. That shouldn’t have happened this far out, I thought, nerves getting worse.
We closed on Patmos, but not too close. I stopped almost fifty thousand kilometers out. But if the sensors weren’t broken, I had seen enough.
The radiation count was off the scale for the planet, the surface temperature averaged over 500°C, much hotter in spots. There were no ice caps, nothing. I couldn’t test the atmosphere without probing, but the instruments indicated it wouldn’t be anything familiar.
I think I screamed. The others rushed up to me, tried to calm me down, tried to control me. I was wild; I resisted, I kicked, I spit webbing, I smashed into things. It took all three and several minutes until I could control myself, and I lay exhausted on the deck.
I thought of them allGuz, the point, Maraall gone.
“What happened?” George asked calmly, slowly, soothingly. “Just relax and tell us.” I think he already knew the answer. I tried to get my breath; I was sobbing and my chest was heaving madly.
I couldn’t speak. George understood, saw my aura,
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and said the words for me. “He’s killed them all, hasn’t he?” he prodded, a sadness that was genuine yet somehow clinical in his tone.
I nodded. “That bastard!” I stopped a minute. “No, George, killed them. brought Seiglein here.”
George softened even more, the clinical tone gone.
“No, Bar. They were as good as dead with Moses anyway. You took the only way out. You did the only thing you could. Besides, that was a joint decision I was in on it, too, remember. We knew the risk, and we took it.”
I could only think of that world, of the greenness, the hills, the rushing riverand the billion or more
Choz.
“I must say I expected something like this,” George continued. “I resigned myself to it. You were blind not to realize what would happen. Bar. If it hadn’t been for Eve, here, I might have stopped you, but I couldn’t. Not really.”
I didn’t follow his reasoning. He knew? Knew and didn’t point it out to me?
“Oh, God! How I hate them!” I spat. “All of them. Any race that could do this, wipe out a whole planet! And they must have planned it ahead of time! They used dirty weapons not seen for centuries! They had to get them out of storage, along with the means of firing them! They must have dropped the whole nuclear bomb stockpile down there! Nothing will ever live on that planet again! We’re the last of our race, George! The last!”
“Snap out of it!” the older man bristled sharply. “I’ve lost far more than you! You have been one of us less than a year. Bar. One Breed, and always in control! I’ve been one so long I can hardly recall what it’s like not being one. Those people down there many were my own children, my associates! What have you lost except your pride? Except the egomania? Nobody ever beats Bar Holliday! Ha!”
His diatribe was cruel and acidic and was just what
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I needed. I struggled to my feet, furious, but, once up and facing him, the two kids staying discreetly back, I calmed down.
This was George, dammitalll George! And he was right.
I looked over at the children. Hell of an exhibition, I thought suddenly. Hell of an example, too. They couldn’t understand death, had never faced or experienced it. They had lost nothing but a promise; this ship was their world, and we were the only people they’d ever known.
I sighed and relaxed.
“Are you all right?” Eve tried, concerned.
I nodded. “I’m okay now. Don’t worry anymore. But don’t forget, either! Never forget the humans and what they did to our people! Never be too big, or too grown, or too civilized to show rage, emotion, care.” I stopped, feeling the rage building up in me again.
“We all love you. Bar,” Ham said softly. “We’re one together, all of us.”
Love, I thought. Hadn’t heard much about that in a long while. Not ever, really. One of George’s terms. Humans always equated it with sex. But not George, I thought suddenly. Never George. There was a kin-ship among us four, I realized, that went beyond the biological. We were a family, and we cared.