slowly sat down, as Jacoby did. He was frightened. Perhaps Jacoby himself was.
He lapsed into his long habit of silence, finding nothing to say to a traitor at
any event. There was no polite conversation possible.
The ship moved, a crash echoing through the hull and the corridors and
disturbing them from their calm. Soldiers reached for handholds as the moment of
queasy null came on them. Freed of station’s grav, they had a moment yet to
acquire their own, as ship’s systems took over. Clothes crawled unpleasantly,
stomachs churned; they were convinced of imminent falling, and the falling when
it came was a slow settling.
“We’ve left,” Jacoby muttered. “It’s come, then.”
Ayres said nothing, thinking in panic of Bela and Dias, left behind. Left.
A black-clad officer appeared in the doorway, and another behind him.
Azov.
“Dismissed,” Azov said to the mannequins, and they went out in silent order.
Ayres and Jacoby rose at once.
“What’s going on?” Ayres asked directly. “What is this?”
“Citizen Ayres,” said Azov, “we are on defensive maneuvers.”
“My companions—what about them?”
“They are in a most secure place, Mr. Ayres. You’ve provided us the message we
desired; it may prove of use, and therefore you’re with us. Your quarters are
adjoining, just down that corridor. Kindly confine yourself there.”
“What’s happening?” he demanded, but the aide took him by the arm and escorted
him to the door. He seized the frame and resisted, casting a look back at Azov.
“What’s happening?”
“We are preparing,” Azov said, “to deliver Mazian your message. And it seems fit
for you to be at hand… if further questions are raised. The attack is coming; I
make my guess where, and that it will be a major one. Mazian doesn’t give up
stations for nothing; and we’re going, Mr. Ayres, to put ourselves where he has
obliged us to stand… up the wager, as it were. He’s left us no choice, and he
knows it; but of course, it’s earnestly to be hoped that he will regard the
authority you have to recall him. Should you wish to prepare a second, even more
forceful message, facilities will be provided you.”
“To be edited by your experts.”
Azov smiled tautly. “Do you want the Fleet intact? Frankly I doubt you can
recover it. I don’t think Mazian will regard your message; but as he finds
himself deprived of bases, you may yet have a humanitarian role to fill.”
Ayres said nothing. He reckoned silence even now the wisest course. The aide
took him by the arm and drew him back down the corridor, showed him into a
barren compartment of plastic furniture, and locked the door.
He paced a time, what few paces the compartment allowed. In time he yielded to
the weariness in his knees and sat down. He had managed badly, he thought Dias
and Bela were… wherever they were—on a ship or still on the station, and what
station they had been on he still did not know. Anything might happen. He sat
shivering, suddenly realizing that they were lost, that soldiers and ships were
aimed at Pell and Mazian… for Jacoby was brought along too.
Another—humanitarian—function. In his own stupidity he had played to stay alive,
to get home. It looked less and less likely. They were about to lose it all.
“A peace has been concluded,” he had said in the simple statement he had
permitted to be recorded, lacking essential codes. “Security council
representative Segust Ayres by authority of the Earth Company and the security
council requests the Fleet make contact for negotiation.”
It was the worst of all times for major battle to be joined. Earth needed Mazian
where he was, with all his ships, striking at random at Union, a nuisance,
making it difficult for Union to extend its arm Earthward.
Mazian had gone mad… against Union’s vast extent, to launch the few ships he
had, and to engage on a massive scale and lose. If the Fleet was wiped out, then
Earth was suddenly out of the time he had come here to win. No Mazian, no Pell,
and everything fell apart
And might not a message of the sort he had framed provoke some rash action, or