<Jimmy! A section just broke away and it’s clear!>
Jimmy sat up and stared at the screens. There was a clear space opening up. You could see a distant star right through it.
<We’re going to take it! Wish us luck!>
<Have caution! They will detect and close on you! Make certain you have enough room! A parsec at least!>
Jimmy took over manual control and brought the ship around. The opening was still there and appeared, if anything, to be widening a bit. He snapped down the command helmet and the computer estimated the top speed at which the blackness could move and the distance between. It was just a bit better than even odds that they could make it clear, but there wasn’t a question in either of their minds.
Not, at least, until they were committed beyond the point of no return. Suddenly the stuff did seem to gather and started to rapidly close, as if forming two sides of a fog-like wall that were rapidly coming together.
<We’re not going to make it!> Modra thought, bracing herself, as they passed through. The wall closed behind them, and Jimmy had to steer around some odd puffs that appeared in the backfield, but they were through!
“Where to?” he asked her, feeling suddenly higher than a kite.
“Home!” she told him. “The capital, if it’s not bathed in blackness. Back to settle our affairs and to see if there are any replies to our little bombshell message.”
“We’ll have some explainin’ to do.”
“Jimmy! This won’t be the frontier or the navy! That’s the Exchange!. We’ll be returning”—she took on a mock-serious tone—”back from the clutches of the evil Mycohl in a stolen spaceship! We’re even bringing in salvage!.”
“You may be right,” he told her, “but I’m not so sure we won’t have a welcome party of cymols and security.”
“If they’re there for the right reasons, all the better,” she told him. “If they’re there for the wrong reasons, we know how to handle them.”
“Perhaps,” he replied, “but don’t get too cocky or too power drunk. There’s a reason they held on to power over all those worlds for so long, you know. And now the devil is everywhere.”
It took several more days to reach the world that was the heart of the Exchange, the world everyone just called the capital. During the trip they dodged a few stray puffs of random material and had to do some fancy talking to explain to mostly commercial shipping why they had Mycohl registry, but nobody called out the military on them. Either they were complacent here, far from the frontier, or they were surprisingly vulnerable.
There were some units of the blackness in and around the capital, but isolated and easy to avoid. Jimmy guessed that they were monitoring things rather than trying anything nasty.
“Courier of Mycohl registry, identify,” came the ground call.
“Salvage under license 34B787KL-6-12-1,” Modra responded. “Licensed exploiter Stryke, Modra, Widowmaker Corporation, along with licensed exploiters McCray, James Francis, and McCray, Molly, same affiliation, sole occupants. No weapons or other contraband aboard. Request permission land at spaceport salvage.”
Their hearts both skipped a beat during the pause, but then the response came, “Scan confirms, licenses check. Turn your com over to landing control.”
“Hey! What’s that about Molly McCray?” Grysta snapped from the back.
Jimmy half turned to look at her. In one sense, although he knew it was sinful to think that way, it gave him some satisfaction that his, er, operation had given her a shattering of her own dreams as she had shattered his all those years.
“If you are Grysta, you are dead meat,” he told her. “If you are Molly, you are a citizen, wife of a citizen, and joint claimant on the bank account. And don’t you ever forget that—Molly. If you do, the best you can hope for is to be broke and expelled, a one-of-a-kind of your race.”
“Shit,” she pouted. “It ain’t fair!”
“You sound like me with a Morgh on my back. You can have a divorce any old time, and half of all the assets. My Church doesn’t believe in divorce, but an annulment would send you back to the entertainment district, the property of some promoters.”
“Jeez, Jimmy! I wouldn’t know where to go or what to do on my own down there!”
“Well, the one time you were on your own you certainly screwed things up,” he agreed.
He turned and looked at the status screens and viewplate. “Well,” he said, “they’re bringin’ us in at the right spot. Let’s just hope we don’t have a nasty welcoming committee down there composed of dead folks with crystal brains.”
EDEN’S FORGE
MODRA STORMED INTO THE SUITE RADIATING such a mixture of strong emotions it almost knocked Jimmy down.
“I can’t believe it! The son of a bitch got the marriage annulled!” she exclaimed angrily.
Jimmy turned from the personal viewscreen in the hotel suite wall console and frowned. “But weren’t you gonna divorce him!”
“Of course I was! But that’s different.”
Jimmy sighed and thought that maybe it wasn’t such a curse to be an Old Order Priest after all. He turned the conversation to avoid either an argument or getting tangled up in knots.
“Modra, do you know the word ‘pogrom’?”
She stopped and frowned. “An organized massacre of a particular group. At least that’s how your mind defines it.”
“They’re massacring Terrans.”
“What!” She immediately shifted to the mind-link.
Images . . . Scene after scene, world after world of the Terran sectors being attacked and pillaged by large mercenary forces of a dozen races. Men, women, children, massacred by the thousands, maybe millions. . . .
She unlinked in sheer horror, her face ashen. “Where?
When? There’s been nothing about it here, and I’ve certainly felt nothing.”
“Right now the newer, post-assimilation worlds,” he told her. “But they’re getting very good at it and show no inclination to stop. Don’t worry—both your birth world and mine are still alive and well away from it, but it’s coming. They sent some forces to clamp down on it but they either did nothing or, some say, actively participated. There’s been a systematic expulsion of Terrans from the services; some of the lads serving, upon getting the reports, tried to take over some ships.”
“But—aren’t we doing something? There’s a hell of a lot of us!”
“Not in positions of power outside our own worlds, there aren’t. The demagogues are popping up all over here fanning anti-Terran sentiment, telling foul lies that we’re all defecting to the Mycohl or allying with some new and powerful force to take over the Exchange—all the rot you hear in non-Terran bars and low places. They’ve always resented us in the mass, precisely because we are a mass and getting more of one quickly.”
“Sure, sure, I know the score. I’m one, too, remember. But something must have triggered it. And if naval forces aren’t putting it down, it has to have some official approval. The cymols wouldn’t allow it unless they’d been told to overlook it and you know it!”
He nodded. “I fear it’s us may be partly to blame. Remember, except for Tobrush, it was a bunch of Terrans came out of that crystal, walked through their security as nice as you please, and took off in a Mycohl ship to boot. Now add the fact that there’s always been a strong tradition of Satanism and the occult in Terran culture and you see that they’ve capitalized on our very escape.”
“But—here— ”
He shrugged. “Here there’s a half-billion souls of which maybe eight, ten thousand tops, maybe Jess, are non-cymol Terrans. Everything’s electronic, preassigned, using little ‘ cards and such anyway for everything, so they know just where all ten thousand are at almost any given moment. We tend to be of two kinds here, too. Freebooters, mercenaries,
and exploiters like us, the kind of dangerous folk you don’t want to alarm until you make your move, let alone allow to flee to the troubles, and the few very rich and influential folk who could cause quite a few nasty ripples on the Exchange. They’ll let us go until we make trouble, and they’ll let prejudice come after us before lookin’ official, I’d guess. I wouldn’t be surprised, in fact, if there weren’t bugs all over this place and cymols on all our fannies. We got in and down too easy, and with our right names, too.”
“But why!” she asked him, bewildered. “Why are the Guardians allowing it? And why only our kind?”
“I’m not so sure, but I’ll make a Chin-type guess. The Quintara don’t want to come too close to the Exchange for fear they’ll trigger some sort of big defenses. Their main thrust is the Mycohl. For s6me reason, though, it’s us, Terrans, they’ve chosen as their main vehicle. Maybe we’re more easily susceptible to them. Maybe, somehow, we’ve inherited the role that all three Higher Races had last time, since we’re in and of all three. They’ve not got enough power to do this Mycohl business and something of the sort in the Exchange, so they stir up those closest to them while stirring up their old friends’ hatred, fear, and prejudice, to discredit us, keep us on the defensive, fragment the Exchange.”
She considered that. “Funny you should mention the captain in that context. When I was with the Mizlaplanians, back on that horrible world of endless rain, we had a talk about the Terrans outbreeding everyone. Something about his own ancient people having infinite patience and eventually breeding every conqueror out of existence. We couldn’t do that here.”
“No, but the old boy had a point, as usual. As a majority, we’d basically control the economy of any empire where that was the case. Control the economy and you don’t have to be the politicians, you buy them. The economy couldn’t ignore such a market, and you could then put anybody out of business just by boycott. Destroy much interstellar trade, which is interdependent, by everybody just sitting on their hands for a few months. In the Exchange, control the economy and you own the joint. In the Mizlaplan, you can’t have the majority of your people under mostly alien Church leaders, so more and more Tenons move in and move up. They don’t have a Pope; the clergy elects their bishops, the bishops select their archbishops or whatever they call them, and so on. And the worst that’s in us thrives on a system like the Mycohl’s. If the Higher Races were to go down we’d either be the victims of genocide or ruling all three within a hundred years or so.”
“But the Higher Races aren’t going to go down. They’d have to be taken down by somebody who could, and the only ones we know who have a shot at that …”
“Exactly,” he agreed. “The Quintara. Sure! That’s it! Fan the flames of genocide here and then the Quintara and their Terran followers pop up, do a few miracles, and make an offer. Join us and we’ll protect you and avenge your losses. We’ll give you power and help you remove the obstacles to running the whole show. A proper Faustian offer.”
She shook her head in wonder. “Jimmy—if the Guardians are already against us, how can we possibly get to them?”
The mind-link opened full, connecting them so that an entire conversation if need be could be done in a matter of seconds, yet could not be intercepted by telepathic agents.
< Were you so furious at your old ex that you forgot to do what you had to?>
<No, I did that first. >
<And you’re certain nobody saw you? And that it isn’t obvious to others?>
<I’m competent, damn it!> She sent him a mental picture of the scene. He got it, along with a series of scenes that were more on her mind right now, but he didn’t mention the other visit. Not yet.
<Well, then, I suppose it’s time for us to give our little signal. Then it’s try to relax and hope they don’t raid us before midnight.>
Nobody raided them, but relaxing was next to impossible and paranoia became increasingly rampant.
Grysta left about six. They didn’t know if she was followed or not, but it didn’t make any difference. Hopefully they didn’t know that they weren’t dealing with a simple syn any more, and Grysta was confident that she could act the part and appear to be following a memorized list while seeming sweet, innocent, and childlike. Her merger with Molly hadn’t left much of Molly, but they all counted on Grysta for once doing something right and letting the Molly pan run. She wasn’t essential, but she would be convenient.
They both grew more and more nervous as midnight approached. They did scans of the immediate vicinity and found several cymol presences, but in this area of town and in a hotel that was to be expected. There were also a vast assortment of telepaths, empaths, hypnos, and levitators about, but again, that wasn’t all that unusual in a hotel for thousands of space-faring guests and many, many races.
The room did have bugs, of course, but they decided to leave them in place, both because none of the ones they discovered looked like extras but rather built into things and thus possibly normal, and because if they were being specifically monitored the discovery of bugs might precipitate some action.
<I’ll go alone, > he told her.
<The hell you will! I’ve been in this from the start and I’m not quitting now!>
<Yes, but that was before you went to the clinician today and found that the reason you’ve been waking up so nauseous is because you’ve got morning sickness.>
<I’ll be fine. And what’s the use of bringing a child into this place anyway if we don’t succeed?>
</ was thinking of those mood swings and the fact that you now have something to lose. It makes you vulnerable. >