She eyed him with respect. “How d’you know?”

He shrugged. “I lived by hunting, remember? On Ireta, the things you didn’t notice would hunt you. I heard something wrong.”

“Great.”

No weapons. No armor. And all her tricks were back in childhood, the tricks that worked on screen, and not

JJr in real life.   Real life worked a lot better with real

Bf weapons.

“I can take them,” Aygar went on.

_” - She looked at him: all the eagerness appropriate to a young male in the prime of his pride and no military training whatever. And he wasn’t hers, the way young £3inran would have been. He was a civilian, under her

·        oath of protection. She started to shake her head, but he hadn’t waited.

 

, ^ Even knowing about the great strength his genes and his upbringing had developed, she was still surprised. Aygar picked up the entire trash bin with all its clink-teg, rattling, dripping, smelly contents, and hurled it

F s«bwn the alley to crash into the next. Someone yelped.

“, Sassinak heard the flat crack of smallarms fire, then

·        nothing.

 

, ^ Aygar was moving, rushing the barrier of the two

(.”%ash bins crunched together  With a quick shrug, she

followed, vaulting neatly into the mash of rotten vegeta-

>( Wes and fruit peels on the far side. Aygar had neatly

s.ffcoken the neck of the ambusher Sassinak picked herself

v?put of the disgusting mess carefully and smiled at Aygar.

;k    “Try not to kill them unless you have to,” she heard

fcerself say,

 

“I did,” he said seriously. “Look!”

 

r*J- And sure enough, the Insystem guard had managed ,-„ 4» hang onto his weapon even with a trash bin pinning

r   v*t* .      I .1          -i                                                                                                                                 r                    °

 

,*JpBa by the legs.

 

>ii “Right. There are times .    . good job.” At least she J Wouldn’t have to worry about this one having post-^pQBibat hysterics. “Let’s get out of this.” ;i (   Aygar hesitated. “Should I take his weapon?” ^5 “No, it’s illegal. We’ll be in enough trouble.” We’re in enough trouble, she thought. “On second it, yes. Take it. Why should the bad guys have all advantages?”

 

jfcygar pried it out of the man’s hand and courteously m it to her. Surprised, Sassinak let her eyebrows as she took it and tucked it into a side pocket. swiping futilely at the stains on her coverall, she ‘• them down the alley to the street.

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By this time, sirens wailed nearby. With any luck, they would be on the other street. Sassinak motioned Aygar back. With that blood dripping down his face, he’d be better in hiding. Cautiously, she put her head around the corner. As if he’d been waiting for her, a stocky man in bright orange uniform bellowed and then blew a piercing whistle. Sassinak muttered a curse, and yanked Aygar into a run. No good going back into the alley. They’d have someone at the other end.

TTiey pelted down the street, dodging oncoming pedestrians. Sassinak expected at least one of diem to try stopping them, but none did. Behind them, the whistle-blower fell steadily behind. Sassinak led them right at the first corner, slowing to an almost-polite jog as she stepped on the first slideway. Aygar, beside her, wasn’t even breathing hard.

Then he gripped her wrist. Across the street they were on, ahead, was a cordon of orange-uniforms on the pedestrian overpass above the slideways. They carried something that looked uncomfortably like riot-control weapons. Sassinak and Aygar edged back off the slide-way. This street, like the other, had a miscellany of small shops and bars.

No time to choose. Sassinak ducked into the first she saw, hoping it had a useful back entrance.

“You look terrible, dearie,” said someone out of the

dimness.

Sassinak started to answer when she realized the young woman was looking at Aygar. Who was looking at

her.

“We don’t have time for this,” she said, tugging at

Aygar’s suddenly immobile bulk.

“Men always have time for this,” said the young woman, setting her various fringes in motion. “As for you, hon, why don’t you take a look in the other room “ Someone from there had already come to the archway. Sassinak ignored him and tried the only thing she could think of.

“We need to find Fleur. Now. It’s an emergency.”

“Fleurl What do you know about her?”

An older woman stormed through the draperies of

 

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ier archway. Somewhat to Sassinak’s surprise, she the trim, brisk appearance of a successful profes-which,  in a sense,  she was.  “Who are you, yway?”

“I need to find her. That’s all I can say.” “Security after you?” When Sassinak didn’t answer icdiately, the woman moved past them to peer nigh the outer window. “They’re after somebody you’ve got bloodstains and gods know what stinking your clothes. Tell me now! You?” “Yes. I’m ...” “Don’t tell me.” Sassinak obeyed. Here, in this place, someone else

manded.

¥”Come.” When Aygar cast a last look after the young who had greeted him, their guide snorted. “Lis-laddy-o, you’re looking at a week’s salary, unless ‘re ranked higher than I think, and you’d be dead you enjoyed it if we don’t get you under cover.” Then, as she led them down a passage, she shouted to her household, “Lee, get yourself in three with I don’t think the locals know you yet. Pearl, you Lee come in. The woman with him, if they think saw one, was our street tout.” She muttered over shoulder to Sassinak.  “Not that that’ll hold five ites if they really saw you, but they might not It’s getting to our busy time of day, so there’s a

In here.”

here was a tiny square office, crowded with desk two chairs. The woman pulled open a drawer and

an aid kit down on the surface. !e won’t pass anywhere, with all that blood. Clean up. Ill be back with another coverall for you.” ygar sat in one of the chairs while Sassinak cleaned Shallow gash and put a sticker over it. He did look conspicuous with the blood off his face. She used more stickers to hold the rents in his coverall >r. The scratches under them had long stopped g-

woman came back with a cheap working coverall tan fabric and tossed it to Sassinak.

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“Get that smelly thing off so I can run it through the shredder in the kitchen. What’d you do, camp out in a grocer’s trash bin?”

“Not exactly “ Sassmak didn’t want to explain. She handed Aygar the gun out of her pocket before peeling off her coverall and slipping into the other one. Aygar, she noticed, was trying not to watch while the woman stared at her.

“You must be Fleet,” she said, more quietly. “You’ve got muscles, for a woman your age. Over forty, aren’t you?”

“A little, yes.”

The tan coverall was a bit short in the arms and legs, but ample in the body Sassmak transferred her ID and the handcom into its pockets and then took the gun back from Aygar.

“Ever heard of Samizdat?” The woman’s voice was even lower, barely above a murmur.

Sassmak stared, remembering that bleak afternoon when Abe had told her a tiny bit about that organization “A little/’ she said cautiously. “Hmm. Fleet. Samizdat. Fleur. Tell you what, honey, you’d better be honest, or I swear 111 hunt you to the last corner of the galaxy, my own self, and stake your gizzard in the light of some alien sun, so I will. That Fleur’s a lady, saved my life more’n once, and never thinks the worse of a girl for doing what she has to.” “She’s a Fleet captain,” said Aygar. Both women glared at him.

“I didn’t want to know that,” said the woman. “A Fleet captain with undisciplined crew ...”

Before Aygar could say anything, Sassmak said, “He’s not crew; he’s civilian, an important witness against planet pirates, and they’re trying to silence him. Wt were supposed to have a quiet meeting but it didn’t stay quiet.”

“Ah. Then you do know about Samizdat. Well, we’ll have to get you out of here later, and 111 send word to Fleur ...” She stopped, as voices erupted down the passage. “Rats. Up out of that chair, laddy-o, and quick about it.”

 

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Aygar stood, and the woman shoved until he flat-tened against the wall. Sassinak, guessing what she wanted, lifted the chairs onto the desk. Beneath the worn carpet was the outline of a trap door. The woman didn’t have to urge quickness, not with the words “search” and “illegal aliens” and “renegade posing as Fleet” booming down the hall.

First came a straight drop down five feet to a landing

above a short stair. Aygar had scarcely bent to get his

head below floor level when the trap banged down,

‘    leaving them in complete darkness. Sassinak could hear

·        muffled thumps and scrapes as the rug and chairs went back atop it. She had made it almost to the next level, but stopped where she was, afraid to move in the darkness lest she trip and make a noise. Aygar crept down three steps and touched her shoulder. “What now?” he asked.

 

i      “Shhh. We hope the searchers don’t know about the trapdoor.”

·        For the first time since trouble started, Sassinak had leisure to think about it and about her ship. She had

 

(.   been fooled by the original communication because it

«   was in Fleet slang. That implied, but did not prove,

* ^tfaat someone in Fleet was trying to get her killed. Whoever it was knew enough about Coromell to suspect that his name would lure her and that she would

·        Jtnow only his general appearance. He was famous J/eoongh. It wouldn’t be hard for anyone to know his ^’height, his age, and find someone reasonably close to ^impersonate him.

 

‘i. But why all the complexity? Why not simply have ^4omeone assassinate her, or Aygar, or both, as they f <were on their way out of the shuttleport, or any place

·        between? And, assuming those orange uniforms were i*r;Ae pohce, why were the authorities on the side of the V attackers?

 

She tried to think what someone might have said to ce the local police that she and Aygar were dan-criminals causing trouble. Fleeing a bar fight tooiy common sense. She’d originally thought to call (-to CoromelTs office as soon as she found a telecom

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booth. And what was happening to her ship, topside? She wanted to pull out the comunit and find out, but dared not with searchers after them.

Time waiting in the darkness had strange dimensions. Endless, seamless, compressed by fear and stretched by anticipation, she had no idea how long it was before she dared extend a cautious foot to the next lower step. She edged down, drawing Aygar after her. Just in case they found the trapdoor, she’d rather be around a corner, behind something, under something. Another step, and another.

When the lights went on, her vision blanked for a moment. Aygar gasped Now she could see the long narrow room. She ran down the last few steps, Aygar behind her, and looked for a place to hide. There? An angle of wall, perhaps a support for something overhead? She ducked around it, out of sight of the stairs. Then a voice crackled from some hidden speaker.

“. . . know you have a basement, Sera Vanlis, and you’d better cooperate. This is nothing to play games about.”

“I still don’t see a warrant.” Not quite defiance, but not quite calm confidence, either. “I’ve nothing to hide, but I’m not setting precedent by letting you search without one.” “I’ll call for one.”

tA pause, then the sound of speech Sassinak could not distinguish. Did the sound go both ways? She had to trust not, had to hope the woman had hit some hidden switch to give them both warning and a way out. But nothing looked like a way out. No doors, in the long opposite wall, or the far end. No door at either end. A fat column of cables and pipes came out of the ceiling, entered and exited a massive meter box covered with dials, and disappeared into a grated opening in the floor.

Aygar nodded toward it. Sassinak looked closer. Not big enough for Aygar and she wasn’t sure she could slither alongside the bundled utilities, but it gave her an idea. If this were a ship, there’d be some kind of repair access to the utility conduits She couldn’t find

 

217

ft, and the conversation overhead could have only one ending.

Then Aygar picked up a filing cabinet, one of a row along the far wall, but in line with the path of the cables, and there it was. A flat circle of metal, with a pop-up handle, and under it a vertical shaft with a hdder fixed to one side. She would have had trouble getting the cover free, and up, but Aygar’s powerful fingers lifted it as easily as a piece of toast on a tray.

Sassinak eeled into the hole, slipped easily down tile * hdder to give Aygar room, and murmured “How’re you going to cover it after us?” 1   “Don’t worry.”

Nonetheless, she did worry as he slipped the access

cover behind the next file cabinet over, and backed

down into the hole, dragging the file cabinet with him.

Sorely he couldn’t possibly move it all the way into

; Jlbce, just with his hands? He could.

They were in the dark again, the top of the shaft waled with the file cabinet, but she could hear the proud grin in his voice when he said, “Unless they beard mat, they won’t know. And I think it’s been used Aat way before. That cabinet’s not as heavy as a full OttB would be.”

•^l” % ,*

_ _ _ - j ~ —.

She patted his leg and backed on down the ladder. y ought to come to a cross-shaft . . . and her foot nothing below, then something uneven. She ran foot over it in the dark, momentarily wondering ..__, she’d been stupid enough not to bring along a Jttndlight. Lumpy, long, slick . . . probably the bun-<Hed utilities. She couldn’t quite reach them with her * while clinging to the ladder. She’d have to drop. r’s foot tapped her head, and she touched his i, a slight sideways shove that she hoped he would understand as “Wait!”

Chapter Fourteen

“What about a light?” asked Aygar softly.

Sassinak counted to ten, reminding herself that he was not, despite his talents, a trained soldier. He would not have thought to tell her before that he had a light.

“Fine.”

Above her, a dim light came on, bright enough to dark-adapted eyes. Shadows danced crazily as he passed it down. Below, the cross tunnel was twice the diameter of theirs, its center full of pipes, with a narrow catwalk along one side Sassinak eased down, swung her legs onto the catwalk, and guided Aygar’s feet. She had to crouch a little; he was bent uncomfortably. She touched his arm and jerked her head to one side. They would move some distance before they dared talk much.

Twenty meters down the tunnel, Sassinak paused and doused the handlight. No sound or sight of pursuit. She closed her eyes, letting them adapt to darkness again, and wishing she had even the helmet to her armor. Even without the link to the cruiser’s big computers, the helmet onboard with sensors could have told her exactly what lay ahead, line-of-sight.

She opened her eyes to darkness. Complete . . . no. Not complete. Ahead, so dim she could hardly make it

218

 

219

out, a distant red-orange point. She squinted, then remembered to shift her gaze off-center and back across. Two red-orange points. She leaned out to peer back past Aygar. Another, and another beyond that.

Marker lights for maintenance workers. That would be the most harmless. Alternatives included automatic cameras that could send their images straight to some police station without ever giving them enough light to see. Or automatic lasers, linked to heat and motion sensors, designed to rid the tunnels of vermin.

She hated planets. There might even be vermin in these tunnels. But when there were no choices, only fools refused chances ... so Abe had said. She edged sideways along the catwalk, moving with ship-trained neatness in that unhandy space. Aygar had more trouble. She could hear him thumping and stumbling, and had to hope that there were no sound sensors down here. She used the handlight as seldom as she could.

Moving past the first dim light in the tunnel’s roof set off no alarms she could sense, but then a good system wouldn’t tell her. She was sweating now in the tunnel’s unmoving air, and wondering just how good that air was. Between the first and second lights, she felt a sodden draft along her side, and turned the light on die tunnel wall. Waist high, another grill, this one rectangular. A silent, slightly cooler breath came from it. She could hear no fan, not even the hiss of air movement. Then for an instant it changed, sucking against die back of her hand, then stilled, then returned as before.

Nothing but a pressure-equalizing connector, probably from die subway system, she thought. Nice to know they were connected to something else with air, though shed rather have found a route to the surface. She tapped Aygar’s arm, and they crouched beneath the vent to rest briefly.

“I’m not sure who’s after us,” she said. “That wasn’t die man I was supposed to meet, back there, just someone the right age and size, but not the same.”

Aygar ignored this. “Do you know where we are? Can we get back?”

“Not die right questions. To get back, we have to

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figure out who’s trying to kill us. At this point we don’t know if they’re after you, me, or both. And why.”

She could think of reasons both ways. All three ways, and even a few more. Why send her to meet a fake CoromeU and then kill him? It could hardly have been a mistake; the difference between a white-haired old man and a dark-haired woman was clear to the stupidest assassin. It couldn’t have been bad marksmanship, not with the cluster that had destroyed the man’s face. Had there been two different sets of conspirators whose plots intersected in wild confusion?

“You said that wasn’t Coromell.” Aygar’s voice was quiet, his tone alert but not anxious. “Did the one who killed him know that?”

“I’m not sure.” She was not sure of a lot, except that she wished she’d stayed on her ship. So much for confronting old fears. “If that had been Coromell, and if I’d also been killed, perhaps the next round of fire, you’d have been the ranking witness for Tanegli’s trial. And, as you’ve said often enough, you don’t know anything about the dealings Tanegli had with the other conspirators. All you could do is testify that he lied to you, led you to believe that Ireta was yours. If there were some way Coromell’s death could be blamed on me . . .”

“And why were all those other people waiting for us outside?” Aygar asked.

Clearly his mind ran on a different track. Natural, with his background. But it was still a good question.

“Hmm. Suppose they plan to kill Coromell in the bar. They expect me to run, with you, just as I did. The only smart thing to do in something like that is get out. So they’ve got others outside, to kill us. Or me. Then they could pin Coromell’s death on me, discredit Fleet, and any testimony I bring to the trial.”

“What would happen to the Zaid-Dayan? Who is your heir?”

“Heir? Ships aren’t personal property! Fleet would assign another ...” She stopped short, struck by another possibility. “Aygar, you re a genius, and you don’t even know it. Testimony is one thing: a ship of the line

 

221

is another. My Zaid is possibly the most dangerous ship of its class. If it’s the ship they fear and want to render helpless, then by taking me out or even keeping me onplanet while Coromell’s death is investigated, that would do it. It would be Standard weeks before another captain arrived. They might even seal the ship in dock.”

And why would someone be that upset about a cruiser at the orbital station, a cruiser whose weapons were locked down? What did someone fear that cruiser could do? Cruisers weren’t precision instruments, Despite her actions on Ireta, cruisers were designed as strategic platforms, capable of dealing with, say, a planetary rebellion, or an invasion from space. Or both.

Sassinak was up again before she realized she was going to move. “Come on,” she said. “We’ve got to get back to the ship.”

As if that were going to be easy She started looking for another access port. Soon enough this tunnel would come to someone’s attention, even if they didn’t find the escape hatch from that . place Her mind was working now, full-speed, running the possibilities of several sets of plotters It could reduce to one set, if they had some way to interfere with Coromell’s return and thought the singed corpse could pass as his for long enough to get her in legal trouble. Or suppose they’d captured the real Coromell and could produce his body.

Not her problem. Not now Now all she had to do was find a way out, to the surface, call Arly and get a shuttle to pick them up. She longer cared about the legal aspects of action.

The next access port led them down, deeper into the city’s underground warren of service tunnels. This one was lighted and the single rail down the middle of the Boor indicated regular maintenance monorail service. Plastic housings covered the bundled cables along one wall, the pipes running along the other Sassinak noted that the symbols seemed to be the same as those used in Fleet vessels, the colored stripes and logos she knew so well, but she didn’t try to tap a water pipe to make sure. Not yet. They could walk along the catwalk beside

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the monorail without stooping. With the light, they could move far more quickly.

That didn’t help if they didn’t know where they were going, Sassinak thought grimly. The port they’d come out of had a number on the reverse: useless information without the map reference.

“We’re still going the same way,” Aygar said.

She stared at him, surprised again. He was taking all this much better than she would have predicted.

“It’s easy to lose one’s way without references,” she began, but he was holding up a little button. “What’s that?”

“It’s a mapper,” Aygar said. “One of the students I met at the Library said I should have one or I’d get lost.”

“A locator transmitter?” Her heart sank. If he was carrying that, their unknown enemies could simply wait, watching the trace on a computer, until they came up again.

“No. He said there were two lands, the land that told people where you were so they could find you and help you, and the kind that told you where you were for yourself. Tourists carry the first kind, he said, and rich people who expect their servants to come pick them up, but students like the second. So that’s what I bought.”

She had not realized he’d been on his own long enough to do anything like that. Thinking back . . . there were hours and hours in which he’d been left at the Library entrance. She’d taken him there, or the FSP prosecutors had, between depositions or conferences. She hadn’t even known he’d met anyone else.

“How does it work?”

“Like this.” He flicked it with a thumbnail and a city map, distorted by the casing of the cables, appeared on the wall of the tunnel. A pulsing red dot must be their position. The map seemed to zoom closer, and letters and numbers replaced part of the criss-cross of lines. “E-84, RR-72.” Aygar flicked the thing again and a network of yellow lines appeared. There they were, in

 

223

what was labelled Maintenance access tunnel 66-43-V. “Where do we want to go?”

“I’m . . . not sure.” Until she knew who their enemies were, she didn’t know where it might be safe to surface and call Arly. Or if even that would be a good idea. “Where’s the nearest surface access?”

The red dot distorted into a line that crept along the yellow of their tunnel, then turned orange.

“That means go up,” Aygar said. “If we have to go down to get somewhere, our line will turn purple.” It made sense, in a way.

“Let’s go, then.”

She let him lead the way. He seemed to know how the mapper worked. She certainly did not. She wanted to ask about scale, but they’d been in one place too long already. Her neck itched with the certainty that pursuit was close behind.

“If you have any more little goodies, like the light, or die mapper, why not tell me now?” It came out a bit more waspish than she intended.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He actually sounded abashed. “I didn’t know . . . There hasn’t been time.”

“Never mind. I’m just very glad you opted for this kind of mapper and not the other.”

“I didn’t think I’d need it, really,” he said. “I don’t get lost easily. But Gerstan was being so friendly.” He shrugged.

Sassinak felt another bubble of worry swell up beside die cluster that already filled her head. A friendly student who just happened to take an interest in the well-being of a foreigner?

“Tell me more about Gerstan,” she said as calmly as she could.

Gerstan, it seemed, was “a lot like Tim.” Sassinak managed not to say what she thought and hoped Aygar had made a mistake. Gerstan had been friendly, open, helpful. He had sympathized with Aygar’s position. Because, of course, Aygar had explained all about Ireta. Sassinak swallowed hard and let Aygar go on talking as they walked. Gerstan had helped him use the Library

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computers to access the databases, and he had even said that it was possible to bypass the restriction codes.

“Really?” said Sassinak, hoping her ears weren’t standing right straight out. “That’s pretty hard, I’d always heard.”

Aygar’s explanation did not reassure her. Gerstan, it seemed, had friends. He had never explained just who they were: just friends whose specialty was intercepting data transmissions and diverting them.

“What land of transmissions?”

“He didn’t say, exactly.” Aygar sounded slightly grumpy about that, as if in retrospect Gerstan didn’t seem quite as helpful. “He just said that if I ever needed to get into the databases, or ... or slip a loop, whatever that is, he could help. Said it was easy, if you had the knack. All the way up to the Parchandri, he said.”

An icy spike went straight down Sassinak’s back at that. “Are you sure?” she said, before she could stop it.

“Sure of what?” Aygar was lolloping ahead, apparently quite relaxed.

“That he said ‘all the way up to Parchandri?’ “

“The Parchandri. Yes, that’s what he said. Why?”

He glanced back over his shoulder and Sassinak hoped her face revealed nothing but calm interest. Parchandri. Inspector General Parchandri? Who should not be here anyway, but at Fleet Headquarters. As if they were printed in the fiery letters in the air before her, she could see that initiation code, supposedly coming from the Inspector General’s office. . .

“I’m just trying to figure things out,” she said to Aygar who had glanced back again.

Should she explain any of this to Aygar? His own problems were complicated enough, and besides he had no real right to Fleet’s darker secrets. But if something happened . . . She shook her head fiercely. What was going to happen was that she would be laughing at The Parchandri’s funeral. If, in fact, The Parchandri was guilty of Abe’s murder.

At intervals they passed access ports on either side, above, below. Each had a number stenciled on it. Each

 

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looked much the same as the others. Had it not been for Aygar’s mapper, Sassinak would have had no idea which way to go.

She had been hearing the faint whine for some moments before it registered, and then she jumped forward and tapped Aygar’s shoulder. “Listen.”

He shrugged. “This whole planet makes noise,” he said. “No one can hear anything in a city. Nothing that means anything, that is.”

“How far to where we go up?” asked Sassinak. The whine was marginally louder.

“Haifa kilometer, perhaps, if I’m reading this right.”

“Too far.” She looked around and saw an access hatch less than twenty meters ahead, on their side of the monorail, below the cable housing. “Well take that one.”

“But why?”

The whine had sharpened and a soft brush of air touched his face. He whirled at once and raced for the batch. Sassinak caught up with him, helped wrestle it open. At once, an alarm rang out, and a flashing orange light, Sassinak bit back a curse. If she ever got off this planet, she would never, under any circumstances, go downside again! Aygar was dropping his legs through the hatch, but Sassinak spotted another, only five meters farther on.

“Ill open that one, too. Then they won’t know which.”

She could not hear the whine of the approaching monorail car over the clamoring alarm, but the air pressure shifts were clear enough. She ran as she had not had to run for years, scrabbled at the hatch cover, threw it back, and winced as another alarm siren and light came on. Then back to the first, and in. Aygar had wisely retreated down the ladder, giving her room. A quick yank and the hatch closed over them. They were in darkness again. She could still hear the siren whooping. From this one? From the other? Both?

All the way down that ladder, much longer than any they’d taken before, she scolded herself. She didn’t even know the monorail car was manned. It might have no windows, no sensors. They might have been able to

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stand quietly, watch it go by, and then walk out following Aygar’s mapper. Then again maybe not. Second-guessing didn’t help deal with consequences. She took a long, calming breath, and reminded herself not to tighten up. Although one thing after another had gone wrong, they were alive, unwounded, and uncaught That had to be worth something. Her foot touched Aygar’s head. He had reached the bottom of the ladder.

“I can’t find a hatch,” he said. His voice rang softly in the echoing dark chamber. “I’ll try light.”

Sassinak closed her eyes, and opened them when she saw pink against her lids. They were at the bottom of a slightly curving, near-vertical shaft, and nothing marked the sides at the bottom. Not so much as a roughly welded seam. Aygar’s breath was loud and ragged.

“We . . . have to find a way out. There has to be a way outl”

“We will.”

She felt almost comfortable in shafts and tunnels, but Aygar had had a wilderness to run in until he boarded the Zaid-Dayan. He’d done remarkably well for someone with no ship training, but this dead end in a narrow shaft was too much. She could smell his sudden nervous sweat; his hand on her leg trembled.

“It’s all right,” she said, the voice she might have used on a nervous youngster on his first cruise. “We passed it, that’s all. Follow me up but quietly.”

It was not that far up, a circular hatch in the shaft across from the ladder, easily reached. Sassinak just had her hand firmly on the locking ring, ready to turn it, when it was yanked away from her, and she found herself pinned in a beam of brilliant light.

“Well.” The voice was gruff, and only slightly surprised. “And what have we here? Not the Pollys, this time,”

Squinting against the brilliance, Sassinak could just see a dark form outlined by more light beyond, and the gleam of light down a narrow tube, a weapon, no doubt.

“How many?” demanded the voice.

Sassinak wondered if Aygar could hide below, but realized he couldn’t, not in the grip of claustrophobia.

 

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“Two,” she said crisply.

“Y’all come on outa there, then,” said the voice.

The light withdrew just enough to give them room. Sassinak slid through feet-first, and found herself coming out of a waist-high hatch in a horizontal tunnel. Aygar followed her, his tanned face pale around mouth and eyes, and dripping with sweat. Carefully, as if she were doing this on her own ship, Sassinak closed the hatch and pushed the locking mechanism.

Facing them were five rough-looking figures in much-patched jumpsuits. Two held obvious weapons that looked like infantry assault rifles: one had a long knife spliced to a section of metal conduit and one held the light that still blinded them. The last lounged against the tunnel wall, eyeing them with something between greed and disgust.

“Y’all rang the doorbell, up there?” that one asked. The same husky voice, from a stocky frame that might be man or woman—impossible to tell, with layers of ragged clothes concealing its real shape.

“Didn’t mean to,” said Sassinak. “Got a little lost.”

“More’n a little. Douse the light, Jemi.”

The spotlight blinked off, and Sassinak closed her eyes a moment to let them adjust. When she opened them again, the woman who had held the spotlight was stuffing it in a backpack. The two rifles had not moved. Neither had Sassinak. Aygar made an indeterminate sound behind her, not quite a growl. She suspected that he liked the look of the homemade spear. The person who had spoken pushed off the wall and stood watching them.

“Can you give me one good reason why we shouldn’t slit and strip you right now?”

Sassinak grinned; that had been bravado, not decision.

“It’d make a big mess next to the shaft we came out of,” she said. “If someone does follow down here ...”

“They will,” growled one of the rifle-bearers. The muzzle shifted a hair to one side. “Should be goin’, Cor . . .”

“Wait. You’re not the usual trash we get down here, and there’s plenty of trouble up top. Who are you?”

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“Who are the Pollys?” Sassinak countered.

“You got the Insystem Federation Security Police after you, and you don’t know who they are?”

A twin of the jolt she’d felt hearing Parchandri’s name went down her spine. Insystem Security’s active arm was supposed to confine itself to ensuring the safety of governmental functions. She’d assumed their pursuers were planet pirate hired guns, or (at worst) a section of city police.

“I didn’t know that’s who we had after us. Orange uniforms?”

“Riot squads. Special action teams. Sheee! All right. You tell us who you are or you’re dead right here, mess and all.”

The rifles were steady again, and Sassinak thought the one with the spear probably knew how to use it.

“Commander Sassinak,” she said. “Fleet, captain of the heavy cruiser Zaid-Dayan, docked in orbit...”

“And I’m Luisa Paraden’s hairdresser! You’ll do better than that or . . .”

“She really is,” Aygar broke in. The other’s eyes narrowed as she heard his unfamiliar accent. “She brought me . . .”

Sassinak had a hand on the hatch rim; a distant vibration thrummed in her fingers.

“Silence,” she said, not loudly but with command.

All movement ceased. The silence seemed to quiver.

“They’re coming. I can feel a vibration.” The one who’d spoken growled out a low curse, then said, “Come on, then! Hurry! We’ll straighten you later.”

They followed along the tunriel, a bare chill tube of gray-green metal floored with something resilient. Under that, Sassinak thought, must be whatever the tunnel was actually for. She was aware of the man behind her with a rifle, of Aygar’s growing confusion and panic, of the ache in her own legs.

She quickly lost track of their backtrail. They moved too fast, through too many shafts and tunnels, with no time to stop and fix references. She wondered if Aygar was doing any better. His hunting experience might help. Her ears popped once, then again, by which she

 

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judged they were now deep beneath the planet’s sur-fece. Not where she wanted to be, at all. But alive. She reminded herself of that; they might easily have been dead.

Finally their captors halted. They had come to a JLwell-lit barnlike space opening off one of the smaller i’ tunnels. Crates and metal drums filled one end to the p, low ceiling. In the open space, ragged blankets and I; piles of rags marked sleeping places on the floor; battered plastic carriers held water and food. Several huddled forms were asleep, others hunched in small groups, a few paced restlessly. The murmur of voices stopped and Sassinak saw pale faces turn toward them, stiff with fear and anger.

‘    “Brought us in some uptowners,” said the leader of their group. “One of ‘em claims to be a Fleet captain.” Raucous laughter at that, more strained than humorous. “That big hunk?” asked someone. “Nah. The . . . lady.” Sassinak had never heard the word used as an insult before, but the meaning was dear. “Got the Pollys after her, and didn’t even know what an orange uniform meant.”

A big-framed man carrying too little flesh for his > bones shrugged and stepped forward. “An oflworlder | wouldn’t. Maybe she is . .

“Oflworlder? Could be. But Fleet? Fleet don’t rum-i mage in the basement. They don’t come off their fancy f ships and get their feet dirty. Sit up in space, clean and ifree, and let us rot in slavery, that’s Fleet!” The leader spat juicily past Sassinak’s foot, then smirked at her.

“I suspect I know as much about slavery as most of |s you,” Sassinak said quietly.

“From claiming to chase slavers while taking Par-chandri bribes?” This was someone else, a skinny hunched little man whose face was seamed with old ‘scars.

“From being one,” said Sassinak.  Silence,  amazement on those tense faces. Now they were all listening; she had one chance, she reckoned. She met each pair of |*yes in turn, nodding slowly, holding their attention. “Yes, it’s true. When I was a child, the colony I lived in

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was raided. I saw my parents die. I held my sister’s body, I never saw my little brother again. They left him behind. He was too young ...” Her voice trembled, even now, even here. She forced steadiness into it “And so I was a slave.” She paused, scanning those faces again. No hostility now, less certainty. “For some years, I’m not sure how many. Then the ship I’d been sold to was captured by Fleet and I had a chance to finish school, go to the Academy, and chase pirates myself. That’s why.”

“//that’s true, that’s why the Pollys are after you,” said the group’s leader.

“But how can we know?”

“Because she’s telling the truth,” said Aygar. Everyone looked at him, and Sassinak was surprised to see him blush. “She came to my world, Ireta. She brought me here on cruiser for the trial.”

“And you were born incapable of lying?” asked the leader.

Aygar seemed to swell with rage at such sarcasm Sassinak held up her hand and hoped he’d obey the signal.

“This is my Academy ring,” she said, stripping it from her finger and holding it out. “My name’s engraved inside, and the graduation date’s on the outside.”

“Sas-sin-ak,” the leader said, reading it slowly. “Well, it’s evidence, though I’m not sure of what.”

Sassinak took the ring back, and the leader might have said more, but a newcomer jogged into the room from the tunnel, carrying a flat black case that looked like a wide-band communications tap. Without preamble, he came up to the leader and started talking.

“The Pollys have an all-stations out for a renegade Fleet captain, name of Sassinak, and a big guy, civilian. They’ve murdered an Admiral Coromell ...”

The leader turned to Sassinak. The messenger seemed to notice them for the first time, and his eyes widened.

“Is that true?”

“No.”

“No which? You didn’t murder anyone, or you didn’t murder Coromell?”

 

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“We didn’t murder anyone and the dead man isn’t Admiral Coromell.”

“How do you—oh.”

Sassinak smiled. “We were there, supposedly meeting Admiral Coromell, when someone of his age and general appearance sat down with us and promptly got fades in the head. We left in a hurry, and trouble followed us. Whoever killed him may think that was Coromell. It’ll take a careful autopsy to prove it’s not Or the real Coromell showing up. I don’t know who lent us a fake Coromell, or why, or who killed the fake CoromeU, or why. Unless they just wanted to get us into trouble. Aygar’s testimony, and mine, could be crucial in the trial coming up.”

Blank looks indicated that no one had heard of, or cared about, any trial coming up.

“His name Aygar?” asked the messenger. “ ‘Cause that’s who they’re after, besides Sassinak.”

·        Now a buzz of conversation rose from the others, no one would meet Sassinak’s eyes. She could feel their fear prickling the air.

 

“You mentioned Parchandri,” she said, regaining their attention. “Who is this Parchandri?”

To her surprise, the leader relaxed with a bark of laughter. “Good questionl Who is this Parchandri? Who Is which Parchandri would do as well. If you’re Fleet, and have never been touched ...”

“Well, she wouldn’t, if she’d been a slave,” said the r big man. “They’d know better.” He turned to Sassinak. “Parchandri’s a family,  got rich in civil service and ‘Fleet just like the Paradens did in commerce. Just like talon’ bribes and giving ‘em, blackmailing, kidnapping,

·        hem’ the law as thin as they could, and pilin’ the profits on thick.”

 

know there was a Parchandri Inspector General,” ^Sassinak said slowly.

Oh, that one. Yeah, but that’s not all. Not even in You got three Parchandris in the IG’s staff alone, two in Procurement, and five in Personnel. That’s family: using the surname openly. Doesn’t count cousins and all who use other names. There’s a nest

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of Parchandri in the EEC, controls all the colony applications, that sort of thing. There’s a Parchandri in Insystem Security, for that matter. And the head of the family is right here on FedCentral, making sure that what goes on in Council doesn’t cause the family any trouble.”

His casual delivery made it more real. Sassinak asked the first question that popped into her head.

“Are they connected to the Paradens?”

“Sure thing. But not by blood. They’re right careful not to intermarry or anything that would show up on the computers. Even though they’ve got people in Central Data. Say a Paraden family company wants to open a colony somewhere but they’re down the list. Somehow those other applications get lost, or something’s found wrong with ‘em. Complaints against a Paraden subsidiary get lost real easy, too.”

“Are other families involved?” Sassinak noticed the sudden shifting of eyes. She waited. Finally the leader nodded.

“There have been. Not all the big families. The Chinese stay out of it; they don’t need it. But a few smaller ones, mostly in transport. Any that gets in a little ways has to stay in for the whole trip. They don’t like whistleblowers, the Parchandri. Things happen.” The leader took a deep breath. “You’re getting into stuff I can’t answer unless I know . . . something more. You say you were a slave, and Fleet got you out so you joined Fleet...”

“That’s right.”

“Well, did you ever hear, while you were a slave, of a ... a kind of group? People that. . . knew things?”

Sassinak nodded. “Samizdat,” she said very softly.

The leader’s tense face relaxed slightly.

“I’ll chance it.” A broad, strong hand reached out to shake hers in a firm grip. “I’m Cons. That was my wife who speared you with the spotlight.” He grinned, a suddenly mischievous grin. “Did I fool you?”

“Fool me?”

“With all this padding. We find it useful to disguise our body outlines. I’ve been listed in official reports as

 

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a ‘slightly obese middle-aged woman of medium stature.’ “ He had reached under his outer coverall to remove layers of rag stuffing, suddenly looking many pounds lighter and much more masculine. Off came a wig that Sassinak realized looked just like those in the costume shop, revealing a balding pate. “They don’t worry as much about stray women in the tunnels. Although you, a Fleet commander, may give them a heart attack.”

“I hope to,” said Sassinak. She wasn’t sure what to make of someone who cheerfully pretended to be the opposite sex. “But I’m a little . . . confused.”

Coris chuckled. “Why wouldn’t you be? Sit over here and have some of our delicious native cuisine and exquisite wine, and we’ll talk about it.”

He led her to an empty pile of blankets and gestured. lt She and Aygar sat. She was glad to let her aching legs relax.

“Delicious native cuisine” turned out to be a nearly tasteless cream-colored mush. “Straight from the food proceessors,” someone explained. “Much easier to lib-[. erate before they put the flavorings or texture in ... nasty stuff, but nutritious.” The wine was water, tapped from a water main and tepid, but drinkable.

“Let’s hear your side of it,” suggested Coris.

Sassinak swallowed the last of the mush she’d been ^ given and took a swallow of water to clear her throat. Around her, the ragged band had settled down, relaxed but alert.

“What if they are seaching for us?” she asked. “Shouldn’t we ... ?”

He waved his hand, dismissing the problem.

They are looking, of course, but they haven’t passed any of our sensors. And we do have scouts out. Go on.”

Sassinak gave a concise report on what had happened .from the arrival of Coromell’s message. Highly irregular, but she judged it necessary. If she died down here, not that she intended to, someone had to know the »$ruth. They listened attentively, not interrupting, until told about entering the pleasure-house.

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“You went to Vanlis?” That sounded both surprised and angry.

“I didn’t know what it was,” said Sassinak, hoping that didn’t sound critical. “It was the nearest door, and she helped us.”

She told about that, about the woman’s reaction to Fleur’s name. She felt the prickling tension of this group’s reaction. But no one said anything so she went on with the story until the group had “caught” them.

“Trouble, trouble, trouble,” muttered Coris, now feu-less cocky.

“Sorry.”

And she was, though she felt much better now that the tasteless food, the water and the short rest had done their work. She glanced at Aygar, who was picking moodily at the bandage on his face. He seemed to be over his fright.

“You’re like a thread sewing together things we hoped they’d never connect,” Jemi said softly. Coris’s wife was a thin blonde. She looked older than either Sassinak or Coris, but it might be only worry. “Eklarik’s shop . . . Varis’s place . . . Fleur . . . Samizdat . . , they aren’t stupid, you know. They’ll put it together fast enough when they have time to think. I hope Vans has warned Fleur. Otherwise ...”

She didn’t need to finish that. Sassinak shivered. She could feel their initial interest fading now into a haze of fear and hostility. She had endangered their precarious existence. It was all so stupid. She had suspected trouble, hadn’t she? She had known better than to go haring off into the unknown to meet some Admiral whose staff insisted he was off hunting. And because she’d been a fool, she and Aygar would die, and these people, who had already suffered enough, would die. And her ship? A vision of the Zaid-Dayan as it hung in orbit, clean and powerful, filled her eyes with tears for a moment. NO.

She was not going to die down here, not going to let the Paradens and Parchandris of the universe get away with their vicious schemes. She was supposed to be a Fleet commander, by Kipling’s corns, and it was about

 

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time she started acting like it. The old familiar routines seemed to waken her mind as she referred to them, tike tights coming on in a dark ship, compartment by compartment. Status report: resources: personnel: equipment: enemy situation . . .

She was not aware of her spine straightening until she saw the effect in their faces. They were staring at her as if she had suddenly appeared in her white battle armor instead of the stained civilian coverall. Their response heightened her excitement.

“Well, then,” she said, the confidence in her voice ringing through the chamber. “We’d better sew up their shrouds first.”

Chapter Fifteen

Dupaynil stared at the bulkhead across from his bunk, and thought that luck was highly overrated. Human space aboard the Grand Luck meant this tiny stateroom, adjoining plumbing that made the Claw’s spartan head look and feel like a spa, and one small bare chamber he could use for eating, exercise, and what recreation his own mind provided. Most people thought the Seti had no sense of humor; he disagreed. The Commissioner’s comments about the humbleness with which he would travel argued for a keen sense of irony, at the least.

He had had a brief and unhelpful interview with the Ambassador. The Fleet attache lurking in the background of that interview had looked unbearably smug. The Ambassador saw no reason why he should undertake to have Fleet messages transmitted to FedCentral when Dupaynil was headed there himself. He saw no reason why redundancy might be advisable. Was Dupaynil suggesting that the Seti, allies within the Federation, might interfere with Dupaynil’s own delivery of those messages? That would be a grave accusation, one which he would not advise Dupaynil to put in writing. And of course Dupaynil could not have a final

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interview with Panis. Quite against the Ambassador’s advice, that precipitous young man had already departed, destination unknown.

It occurred to Dupaynil that this Ambassador, of all the human diplomats, surely had to be in the pay of the conspirators. He could not be that stupid. Looking again, at the florid Bice and blurred eyes, he was not sure. He glanced at the Fleet attache and intercepted a knowing look to the Ambassador’s private secretary. So. The Seti probably supplied the drugs, which his own staff fed him, to keep him so safely docile.

And I thought my troubles were over, Dupaynil thought, making his final very correct bow and withdrawing to pack his kit for the long trip. Not surprisingly, the Fleet attache insisted that anything Dupaynil asked for was unavailable.

And now he had the leisure to reflect on the Ambassador’s possible slow poisoning while the Seti ship bore him to an unknown destination; he did not believe for a moment they were really headed for FedCentral. He forced himself to get up and move into the little exercise space. Whatever was coming, he might as well be fit for it. He stripped off the dress uniform that courtesy demanded and went through the exercises recommended for all Fleet officers. Designed, as he recalled, by a Fleet marine sergeant-major who had retired and become a consultant for adventure films. There were only so many ways you could twist, bend, and stretch. He had worked up a sweat when the intercom burped at him.

“Du-paay-nil. Prepare for inspection by Safety Officer.”

Of course they’d chosen this time. Dupaynil smiled sweetly into the shiny lens of the surveillance video, and finished with a double-tuck-roll that took him back into the minute sanitation cabinet. No shower, of course. A blast of hot air, then fine grit, then hot air again. Had he been covered with scales, like a proper Hz ... Seti, they’d have been polished. As a human, he felt sticky and gritty and altogether unclean. He would come off this ship smelling like a derelict from the gutter of an unimproved frontier world ... no doubt their intent.

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He had his uniform almost fastened when the hatch to his compartment swung back, and a large Seti snout intruded. They timed it so well. No matter when he took exercise or was using the sanitary faculties, they announced an inspection. No matter how quickly he tried to dress, they always arrived before he was finished. He found it curious that they didn’t interrupt meals or sleep, but he appreciated even that minimal courtesy.

“Aaahh . . . Commaanderrr ...” The Safety Officer had a slightly off-center gap between front teeth. Dupaynil could now recognize it as an individual. “Iss necesssary that airrr tesst be con-duc-ted.”

They did this every few inspections, supposedly to be sure that his pressure suit would work. It meant a miserable struggle into the thing, and a hot sweaty interval while they sucked the air out of his quarters and the suit ballooned around him. Dupaynil reached into the narrow recess and pulled out the suit. Not his choice of suits but, the Fleet attache had assured him with a smile, the only one in his size at the embassy. At least it had held up, so far, with only one minor leak, easily patched.

He pushed and wriggled his way into it, aware of the Seti’s amusement. Seti faced the uncertainties of space travel without pressure suits. While they had such suits for those who might need to work on the outer surface of a ship, they did not stock suits for the whole crew. It made sense. Most of the time when a Fleet vessel lost hull integrity, the crew never made it into their suits anyway. And of course a Seti would have been disgraced for insisting on a way of cheating chance. Still, Dupaynil was glad to have a suit, even though the Seti considered it another example of human inferiority.

He dogged the helmet down snugly and checked the seals of the seam that ran from throat to crotch. The suit had an internal com unit which allowed him to speak, or more often listen, to the Seti. This time, he heard the Safety Officer’s instructions with amazement.

“Come to the bridge?”

Humans were never invited to the bridge of Seti

 

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ships. No human had ever seen the navigational devices by which the gamblers of the universe convinced themselves they were being obedient to chance while keeping shipping schedules.

“At once.”

Dupaynil followed, sweating and grunting. He had not had to put on his suit for this. Seti kept breathable, if smelly, atmosphere in their ships. No doubt they intended to make him look even more ridiculous. He had heard, repeatedly, what the Seti thought of human upright posture. It occurred to him that they might have insisted on his suit simply to spare themselves the indignity of a human’s smell

When he reached the bridge, it bore no resemblance whatever to that of a Fleet ship of the same mass. It was a triangular chamber—room for the tails, he realized—with cushioned walls and thickly carpeted floor, not at all shiplike. Two Seti, one with the glittering neck-ring and tail ornament that he had been told signified ship’s captain, were crouched over a small, circular, polished table, tossing many-sided dice, while one standing in the remaining corner recited what seemed to be a list of unrelated numbers. He felt cramped between the table and the hatch that had admitted him and then slammed behind him. The Seti ignored Dupaynil and he ignored that, finally trying to figure out what kind of game they were playing.

The dice landed with one face fiat up, horizontal. Three dice at a time, usually, but occasionally only two. He didn’t recognize the markings From where he stood, he could see three or four faces of each die and he amused himself trying to figure out what the squiggles meant. Green here, with a kind of tail going down. All three dice had this on the top face for a moment. Purple blotch, red square-in-square, a yellow blotch, two blue dots. The dice rose and fell, bouncing slightly, then coming to stillness. Green squiggles again, and on the other faces purple, blue dots, more red squares-in-squares.

The Seti calling out numbers paused through two throws. Dupaynil’s attention slid from the dice to the

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Seti, wondering what the purple blotch on the napkinlike cloth around his neck meant. When he looked back at the board, the green squiggles were on top again.

Surely that couldn’t be right, and surely they didn’t just want an observer for the captain’s nightly gambling spree. He watched the dice closely. In another two throws, he was sure of it. They were loaded, as surely as any set of dice that ever cheated some poor innocent in a dockside bar. Time after time the green squiggles came up on top. So why throw them? His mind wandered. Probably this wasn’t the bridge at all. Some bored Seti officers had just wanted to bait their captive human. Then a fourth die joined the group in the air and down came three green squiggles and one purple blotch.

Three Seti heads swung his way, toothy jaws slightly open. He shivered, in his suit. If that was bad luck, and they thought he had brought it ...

“Ahhh! Humann!” The captain’s voice, through his comunit, had only the usual Seti accent. “It wass explained to me that you were ssent here by very sspecial luck. Ssso your luck continuess. As the luck fallss, you sshall be told, though it makess danger to usss.”

Dupaynil could not bow. The suit gave him no room for it.

“Illustrious bringer of luck,” he began, for that was part of the captain’s title. “If chance favors your wish to share precious knowledge, my luck is great indeed.”

“Indeed!” The captain reared back on massive hind legs, and snapped its jaws. A sign of amusement, Dupaynil remembered from handbooks. Sometimes species-specific. “Well, o lucky one, we ssshall sssee how you call your chance when you know all. We ssshall arrive even sssooner than you thought. And we shall arrive in forccce.”

The Seti could not mean that the way a human would, Dupaynil thought. Surely not . . .

“Do you grasssp the flying ring of truth from tossssed baubles?” the Seti asked. Dupaynil tried to remember what that meant, but the Seti captain went on. “You ssshall sssee the ruin of your unlucky admiral, he who

 

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tossed your life against the wissdom of our Sek, in the person of the Commissioner of Commerce, and you shall see the ruin of your Fleet. . . and of the Federation itself, and all the verminous races who prize certainty over Holy Luck. Sssee it from the flagship, as you would say, of our fleet, invincible unless chance changes. And then, o human, we ssshall enjoy your flesh, flavored with the smoke of defeat.” The captain’s massive snout bumped the screen of Dupaynil’s helmet.

From the frying pan of Sassinak’s displeasure, to the fire of the conspirators on Claw, he had come to the Seti furnace. If this was luck, he would take absolute determinism from now on. It couldn’t be worse. He hoped the Seti could not detect the trickles of sweat down his back. He could smell his own fear, a depressing stench. He tried for a tone of unconcern.

“How can you be certain of this destination by throwing dice?” Not real thought, but the first words that came into his mouth, idle curiosity.

“Ahhh ...” The captain’s tail slapped the floor gently, and its tail ornament jingled. “Not pleass or argumentss, but ssense. As chance favors, I sshall answer.”

His explanation of the proceedings made the land of oblique sense Dupaynil expected from aliens. Chance was holy, and only those who dared fate deserved respect, but the amount of risk inherent in each endeavor determined the degree of additional risk which the Seti felt compelled to add by throwing dice or using random number generators. “The Glorious Chaos,” as they named that indeterminate state in which ships traveled or seemed to travel fester than light, had sufficient uncertainty to require no assistance. So they tossed loaded dice, as a token of respect, and to allow the gods of chance to interfere if they were determined.

“War, as well,” the captain continued, “has its own uncertainties, so that within the field of battle, a worthy commander may be guided by its own great wisdom and intuition. Occasionally one will resort to the dice or the throwing sticks, a gesture of courage all respect, but the more parts to the battle, the less likely. But you ...” A toothy grin did not reassure Dupaynil at all. “You

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were another matter and judged sufficiently certain of unsuccess without our chance to place you in the toss. As your luck held, in the unmatched dice, so now I offer to chaos this chance for you to thwart us. 1 told you our plan, and you may ask what you will. You will not return to your quarters.”

Dupaynil fought down a vision of himself as Seti snack-food. If he could ask questions, he would ask many questions.

“Is this venture a chance occurrence, or has some change in Federation policy prompted it?”

The captain uttered a wordless roar, then went into a long disjointed tirade about the Federation allies. Heavy-worlder humans, as victims of forced genetic manipulation, roused some sympathy in the Seti. Besides, a few heavyworlders had shown die proper attitude by daring feats of chance: entering a Hall of Dispute through the Door of Honor, for instance. Some humans were gamblers: entrepreneurs, willing to risk whole fortunes on the chance of a mining claim, or colonial venture. That the Seti could respect. The Paradens, for instance, deserved to lay eggs. (Dupaynil could imagine what the elegant Paraden ladies would think of that.) But the mass of humans craved security. Born slaves, they deserved the outward condition of it.

As for the allied aliens . . . The captain spat something that Dupaynil was glad he could not smell. Cowardly Wefts, the shifters who would not dare the limits of any shape . . . Bronthin, with their insistence on mathematical limits to chaos and chance, their preference for statistical analyses. Ryxi, who were unworthy to be egglayers since they not only sexed their un-hatched chicks, but performed surgical procedures through the shell. The Seti had the decency, the captain snarled, to let their eggs hatch as they would and take the consequences. The Ssli, who insisted on giving up their mobile larval form to become sessile, bound to one location throughout life: a refusal to dare change.

Dupaynil opened his mouth to say that Ssli anchored to warships in space could hardly be considered “bound to one location,” remembered that not everyone knew

 

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about the Ssli in Fleet ships and instead asked, “And the Thek?”

This time the captain’s tail hit the floor so hard its ornament shattered.

“Thek!” it roared. “Disgusting lumps of geometrical regularity. Undifferentiated. Choiceless, chanceless, obscene ...” The ranting went on in a Seti dialect Dupaynil could not begin to follow. Finally it ran down and gave Dupaynil a sour glance. “It is my good fortune that you will flavor my stew, miserable one, for you irritate me extremely. Leave at once.”

He had no chance to leave under his own power. At some point, the captain must have called for Seti guards because they grabbed the arms of his suit and towed him along strange corridors much faster than he could have gone by himself.

When they finally stopped and released his arms, he was crammed in a smallish chamber with an assortment of aliens. The Bronthin took up the most cubage, its chunky horselike body and heavy head impossible to compress. A couple of Lethi were stuck together like the large yellow burrs which they greatly resembled. A Ryxi huddled in one corner, fluffing and flattening its feathers, and in a translucent tank, two Ssli larvae flutter-kicked from end to end. On one wall, a viewscreen displayed sickening swirls of violent color: the best an exterior monitor could do in FTL space. Beside it, a fairly obvious dial gave the pressure of various atmospheric components. Breathable, but not pleasant.

So the Seti had collected an array of alien observers to gloat over, had they? Dupaynil wondered who the human would have been, if he and Panis had not shown up. Certainly not the Fleet attache. Probably the Ambassador. Had they all been told what was going on? He cracked the seal of his helmet cautiously and sniffed. A tang of sulfur, a bit too humid and warm and clearly no shower in sight. With an internal sigh, he took off his helmet and attempted a greeting to his new companions.

No one answered. The Ryxi offered a gaping beak, which Dupaynil remembered from a training manual

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meant something like “Forget it, I don’t want to talk to you unless you’ve got the money.” He had never learned Bronthin (no human ever had) and the tubby blue mathematicians preferred equations to any other form of discourse anyway. Lethi had no audible communications mode: they talked to each other in chemical packages and could not interface with a biolink until they formed a clump of at least eight. That left the Ssli larvae, who, without a biolink., also had no way of communicating. In feet, no one was sure how intelligent the larvae actually were. They were in the Fleet Academy to learn navigational theory but Dupaynil had never heard of one communicating with an instructor.

He could try writing them a message, except that he had nothing to write with, or on. The Seti had not brought any of his kit from his compartment; he had only the clothes and pressure suit he stood up in.

It really wasn’t so bad, he told himself, forcing cheerfulness. The Seti hadn’t killed them yet. Didn’t seem to be starving them, though he wondered if that slab of elementary sulfur was really enough for the Lethi clinging to it. He found a water dispenser, and even a recessed cabinet with oddly shaped bowls to put the water in. He poured himself a bowl and drank it down. Something nudged his arm and he found the Bronthin looking sorrowfully at the bowl. It gave a low, grunting moo.

Ah. Bronthin had never been good with small tools. He poured water for the Bronthin and held the bowl for it to drink. It swiped his face with a rough, corrugated lavendar tongue when it was done, leaving behind a faintly sweet odor. A nervous chitter across the compartment was the Ryxi, standing now with feathers afluff and stubby wings outspread. Dupaynil interpreted this as a request and filled another bowl. The Ryxi snatched it away from him with its wing-claws and drank thirstily.

“They for us water pour but one time daily,” the Ryxi twittered, dropping the empty bowl. Dupaynil picked it up with less graciousness than he’d filled it. He had never been the nurturing type. Still, it was communica-

 

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tion. The Ryxi went on. “Food at that time, only enough for life. Waste removal.”

“Did they tell you where we’re headed?” ‘ An ear-spitting screech made him wince. The Ryxi began bouncing off the walls, crashing into one after another of them, shrieking something in Ryxi. The Bronthin huddled down in a large lump, leaving Dupaynil the Ryxi’s path. He tried to tackle it but a knobbed ‘ foot got him in the ribs. The Ryxi flipped its crest up and down, keening, and drew back for another kick,

Dupaynil rolled behind the Ssli tank. “Take it easy,” he said, knowing it would do no good. never took it easy. This one calmed slightly, sides “lieaving, crest only halfway up.

“They told,” came the sorrowful low groan of the Bronthin. Dupaynil had never heard one speak Stan-<Jard before. “Wickedly dangerous meat-eaters. We told what would come of it. Those who sweep tails *across the sand of reason,  where proofs of wisdom abound.” The Bronthin had accomplished advanced math-^ematics without paper or computers,  using smooth pbtretches of sand or clay to scribe their equations. Al-|though their three stubby fingers could not manipulate fltae tools, they had developed an elegant mathematical ^calligraphy. And a very formal courtesy involving the f%se of the “sands of reason.” A colt (the human term) ; who used its whisk of a tail on someone else’s calcula-|?tkms would be severely punished. Bronthin were also vegetarians — browsers on their world which had |«nall and witless carnivores. They were pacifists.

Dupaynil eyed the calming Ryxi warily. His ribs hurt. didn’t need another kick. “Do you have any plan?” asked the Bronthin.

“The probability of escape from this ship, in a nonvia-e state, is less than 0.1 percent. The probability of |«scape from this ship in a viable state is less than 0.0001 percent.  The factors used to arrive at this include

“Never mind,” said Dupaynil, softening it with an >logy. “My mathematical skill is insufficient to appre-te the beauty of your calculations.”

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“How land to save me the trouble of converting to Standard that which can only be properly expressed in the language of eternal law.” The Bronthin Heaved a sigh, which Dupaynil took to mean the conversation was over.

The Ryxi, however, was eager to talk, once it had calmed enough to remember its Standard.

“Unspeakable reptiles,” it twittered. “Unworthy to be egg-layers!” Not again, thought Dupaynil, not anticipating the Ryxi side of that argument. “Thick-shelled, they are. You can’t even see a Seti in its shell. Not that it makes any difference, because even if something’s wrong, they won’t do anything. Just let the hatchlings die if they can’t make it on their own. Some of them don’t even tend their nests. Not even to warn away predators. They say that’s giving Holy Luck the choice. I’d call it criminal negligence.”

“Despiccable,” said Dupaynil, edging farther away from the dance of those powerful feet. Then a bell-like voice rang out, its source unidentifiable.

«Sassinak friend?»

Dupaynil tried to control his start of surprise, and glanced around. The Bronthin looked half-asleep which is the way Bronthins usually looked and the Ryxi had begun grooming its feathers with jerky strokes of its beak. The two Lethi were still stuck to each other and the slab of sulfur.

«Do not look ... in the tank.» He managed to stare at the blank space above the Bronthin, while the voice continued and his own mind shivered away from it. He had never liked descriptions of telepathy and he liked the reality less. «Sassinak friend you are. We greet you. We are more and less than we seem.»

Of course. Ssli. So Ssli larvae could communicate! He could not “feel” anything in his mind when the voice fell silent, but that didn’t mean it, or they, were not reading him.

«No time to investigate your dark secrets. We must plan.»

They were reading his surface thoughts, at least, to have picked up that distaste for internal snooping. He

recognized the irony of that, someone whose profession was snooping on others, now being turned inside out by f: aliens. He tried to organize his thoughts, make a clear message.

“You stare at wall for a reason?” the Ryxi asked, its ,-Jeathers now sleeked down.

Dupaynil could have strangled the Ryxi for breaking ‘his concentration, and then he did feel a featherlight I touch, soothing, and a bubble of amusement.

“I’m very tired,” he said honestly. “I need to rest.”

With that, he found a clear space of floor, between wall and the Ssli tank, and curled up, helmet era-fdied in his arms. The Ryxi sniffed, then tucked its head j-back over its shoulders into the back feathers. Dupaynil Ijdosed his eyes and projected against the screen of his ^eyelids.

«What can you do?»

«Nothing alone.  We hoped they would bring a

-,   «What did you mean, ‘more and less’?»

Again the mental gurgle of amusement. «We are loot both Ssli.»

The voice said nothing more and Dupaynil thought >ut it. If they were reading his thoughts, they were ^welcome. Not both Ssli? Another alien marine race? iddenly he realized what it had to be and almost

·        laughed aloud.

 

«A Weft?»

«Seemed safer this way. Seti hate Wefts enough to them before the coup.  But with this form come Poertain . . . limitations.»

«Which humans don’t have?»

«Precisely.»

«Sorry, but I don’t think they’ll let me push that Etank to wherever they keep the escape pods. Assuming ‘they have any.»

\<  «Not the plan. May we share?» I*   It seemed an odd question from beings who could >rce mental intimacy, and already had, but Dupaynil in the mood to accept any courtesy offered.

«Go ahead.»

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He tensed, bracing himself for some unimaginable sensation, and felt nothing. Only information began to knit itself into his existing cognitive matrix, as if he were learning it so fast that it was safely in long-term memory before it passed his eyes. The Bronthin, he learned, had been hired by the Seti to provide them with mathematical expertise. On the basis of its calculations and models, they had defined the best time to attempt the coup.

And the Bronthin had had no way to warn the Federation. Bronthins could not manipulate Seti communications equipment, were not telepathic, and suffered severe depression when kept isolated from their social herds. As for the Ssli, it had been delivered, in its tank, after it had been stolen from a Fleet recruit depot. The Weft, a Fleet guard at the depot, had been shot in the burglary and survived only by shapechanging into the Ssli tank in a larval form. The thieves had not known the difference between Weft and Ssli larvae and had apparently supposed that two or more larvae were in each tank, in case one died.

«But what can we do?» Dupaynil asked.

«You can talk to the Bronthin, and find out more of what it knows about this fleet. It had the information to make models with. It must know. It’s depressed. That’s why it won’t talk. Later, when we drop out of FTL, you can see the viewscreen. We have no such eyes. But the Ssli can link with other Ssli on a Fleet vessel, and that Ssli has a biolink to the captain.»

Cheering up the Bronthin took all of DupaymTs considerable charm. It turned away at first, muttering number series, but the offer of another bowl of water helped. He watered the Ryxi, too, automatically, and this time the feathered alien handed the bowl back rather than dropping it. But it took many bowls of water, and a couple of sessions of picking the burrs from the dry grass the Seti tossed in for its feed, before the alien showed much response.

Finally it scrubbed its heavy head up and down his arm, took his hands in its muscular lips, and said,

“I ... will try to speak Standard ... in thanks for your kindness ...”

“Inaccurate as Standard is, and unsuited to your genius, would it be possible to recall how many ships this size the Seti have with them?”

The Bronthin flopped a long upper lip, and sighed.

“The ratio of such ships to those next smaller to those next smaller to the smallest is 1.2:3.4:5.6:5:4. An interesting ratio, chosen by the Seti for its ragged harmony, tf I understood them.” It shook its long head. “Alas . . . never again to roll in the green sweet fields of home or be granted the tail’s whisk across the sands in the company of my peers.”

“Such courage in loneliness,” Dupaynil murmured. f( In his experience, praising the timid for courage sometimes produced a momentary flare of it. “And the total to which such a ratio applies?”

With something akin to a snort, the Bronthin’s lovely periwinkle eyes opened completely. ,  “Ah! You understand that the ratio is theoretical. The fleet itself made up of actual ships, of which at any time some fraction is out of service for maintenance and the

·        like. Of those actually here, in the sense that here has any meaning . . . are you at all femiliar with Sere-kleth-vladin’s transformational series and its application to hyperspace flux variations?”

 

“Alas, no,” said Dupaynil, who didn’t know such things existed—whatever they were.

“Unhhh . . . one hundred four. Eight similar to this, i which would of course make you expect 22.6,37.3, 35.9 ships of the other classes, but fractional ships are non-|; functional. Twenty-three of the next class, then thirty-

·        seven, then thirty-six. And since it would be the logical I’next question,” the Bronthin went on, its eyes beginning to sparkle, “I will explain that the passive defenses of the Federation Central System, if not tampered with, could be expected to destroy at least 82% of the total. | Those remaining would be unlikely to succeed at reduc-the planets or disrupting the Grand Council. But le Seti count on tampering, which will reduce the iciency of the distant passive scans by 41%, and on

 

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specific aid whose nature I do not know, to disable additional defenses. This incursion is timed to coincide with the meeting of the Grand Council and the Winter Assizes, at which the presence of many ships could well cause confusion.”

“They expect no resistance from Fleet?” The Bronthin opened its mouth wide, revealing the square grinding teeth of a herbivore, and gave a long sound somewhat between a moo and a bray. “My apologies,” it said then. “Our long misunderstanding of the nature of humans; our votes have long gone to reducing appropriations for what we saw as a means of territorial aggrandizement. These Seti expect that any Fleet vessels in Federation Central Systems space will be neutralized. And once again, we aided this, voting to require that all Fleet vessels disarm lest they overpower the Grand Council.”

“A most natural error for any lover of peace,” Dupaynil murmured soothingly.

Sassinak would be there with the Zaid-Dayan. Would she have disarmed completely, trusting in the disarmament of others to keep her ship safe? Somehow he doubted it. But with surveillance by the FSP local government, she wouldn’t be able to have all the ship’s scans on ... and without warning ... he realized he had no idea how fast the Zaid-Dayan could get into action.

«We do appreciate the difficulty.» If mental speech could have tones, that would be dry wit, Dupaynil thought. He sent a mental flick of the fingers to the Ssli and Weft, still swimming with apparent unconcern in the tank. Easy for them, he thought sourly, and then realized it wasn’t. He would be even more miserable if he’d been stuck in a tank like that.

Despite the rising tension, he had actually fallen asleep when a screech from the Ryxi brought him upright, blinking. The viewsc’reen snowed what he presumed to be the real outer view, although he had no way of knowing which of the ship’s outer sensors had produced the image. Darkness, points of light, some

 

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visibly moving. A Seti voice from the wallspeaker interrupted the Ryxi’s tantrum.

“Captives, observe,” it began, with typical Seti tact. “See your feeble hopes destroyed.”

The view shown shifted from one angle to another. The outside of the Grand Luckt with a long pointed snout oozing from a recess to slide past, aimed at some distant enemy. A zooming view of nearby ships, lifting them from points of light to toylike shapes against a dark background. Then another view, of the star around which the Federation Central Zone planets swung, a star which now looked scarcely bigger than any of the others.

«Share again!»

Dupaynil tried to relax. He had already passed on all lie’d learned from the Bronthin. Now he watched the screen, listened to the Seti boastful commentary and hoped the Ssli/Weft pair could contact another Ssli. Time passed. The view shifted every few minutes, from one sensor to another.

«Contact.»

Dupaynil wasn’t sure if the triumphant tone came from the Ssli or his own reaction. He expected to hear more, but the Ssli did not include him in whatever link ft and the Weft had formed with that distant Ssli. The Ryxi clattered its beak, shifted from one great knobby foot to another, fluffed and sleeked its feathers, staring wide-eyed at the viewscreen. The Bronthin refused to itook. Its closed eyes and monotonous hum could be either sleep or despair. And the Lethi, as before, simply stuck to each other and the sulfur.

Dupaynil had the feeling that he should do something more to prepare for the coming battle. Now that die Ssli had warned its fellow. Now surely that alarm was being passed on.  He felt free to consider more Immediate problems. Could they possibly break free of I* this compartment? Could they steal weapons? Find some | kind of escape vehicle? Or, failing escape, do something “disasterous to this ship and destroy it? He and the Ryxi

re the only two who might actually do something, for , BO one had ever heard of a Bronthin being violent. He

 

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edged over to the hatch, and prodded its complicated-looking lock.

A roar of Seti profanity from outside made it clear that wouldn’t work. He was looking around for something else to investigate, when the viewscreen blurred, cleared, blurred, and cleared again after a couple of short FTL skips. Then it grayed to a pearly haze and the ship trembled.

“Battle started!” came the announcement in Standard over the speaker. Then a long complicated gabble of Seti that must be orders.

«Sassmak is not aboard her ship.» That fell into his mind like a lump of ice. «She disappeared onplanet. Wefts can’t land to find her.»

«Other ships?»

He had assumed she would be aboard her ship. He had assumed she would be wary, as alert as he’d always known her. What was she doing, playing around onplanet with her ship helpless above, with its weapons locked down, with no captain? Without at least taking Wefts with her?

«No other ships larger than escort insystem.»

“Stupid woman!”

He didn’t realize he’d said it aloud until he saw the Bronthin’s eyes flick open, heard the Ryxi’s agitated chirp.

“Never miruf!” he said to them, glaring.

Here he had gone through one miserable hell after another, all to get her information she desperately needed, and she wasn’t where she was supposed to be.

«Zaid-Dayan moving.»

That stopped his mental ranting. Then the Grand Luck lurched sharply, as if it had run into a brick wall, and as his feet skidded on the floor he realized his head had nowhere to go but the corner of the Ssli transport tank.

Chapter Sixteen

FedCentral

“You’re joking.” Cons stared at her. “You don’t realize ...”

“I realize precisely what will happen to all of us if we don’t take the initiative.” Sassinak was on her feet now and the others were stirring restlessly, not committed to either side of this argument. “If you’d wanted death, or a mindwipe, and the rest of your life at hard labor, you’d have managed it before now. It’s easy enough, even yet. Just wait for them to come after me. Because Temi is quite right. They will. I’m too dangerous, even by myself.” She paused a careful measure, then added, “But with you, I could be dangerous enough to win.”

“But we don’t . . . We aren’t ...” Jemi’s nervous looks around got no support. Most were staring fascinated at Sassinak.

“Aren’t what? Strong enough? Brave enough? You’ve been strong and brave enough to survive and stay free. How long, Coris?”

“I been here eight years. Jemi, six. Fostin was here when I came ...”

“Years of your lives,” Sassinak said, almost purring it.

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254

 

“You survived capture, slavery, prison, all the disasters. And you survived this life below the city. Now you can end it. End the hiding, end the fear. End the suffering, your own and others.”

They stirred. She could feel their need for her to be right, their need for her to be strong for them. Give them time and they’d revert, but she had this instant.

“Come on,” she said. “Show me what you’ve got. Right now.”

Slowly, they stood, eyeing her and each other with hope that was clearly unfamiliar.

“Any weapons? We’ve got this.” She pulled out the snub-nosed weapon Aygar had taken from the first row. “How many are you, altogether?”

They had weapons, but not many and most, they explained, were carried by their roving scouts. Nor did they have an accurate count of their own numbers. Twenty here, a dozen there, stray couples and individuals, a large band whose territory they overlapped in one direction, and a scattering of bands in another. They had specialists, of a sort. Some were best at milking the mass-service food processors without detection and some had a knack for tapping into the datalinks.

“Good,” Sassinak said. “Where’s this godlike Par-chandri you say is running the backscenes on Fed-Centrair

“You’re not going after him\” Coris’s shock was mirrored on every face. “There’ll be guards—troops—we can’t do that! It’s like starting a war.”

“Coris, this became a war the second a warrior dropped into it. Me. I’m fighting a war. War means strategy, tactics, victory conditions.” She tapped these off on her fingers. “You people can squat here and get wiped out as the enemy chases me or you can be my troops and have a chance. I don’t promise more than that. But if we win, you won’t have to live down here, eating tasteless mush and drinking bilgewater. It’ll be your world again. Your lives! Your freedom!”

The big-framed man she’d noticed before shrugged and came up beside Coris. “Might’s well, Coris. They’ll

 

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be after her, after us. Using gas again, most likely. I’m with her.”

“And me!”

More than one of the others; Coris gave a quick side-to-side glance, shrugged, and grinned.

“I should’ve slit you back up there,” he said, jerking his chin in what Sassinak assumed was the right direction.

Aygar growled, but Sassinak waved him to silence. “You’re right, Coris. If you’re going to take out a threat, do it right away. Next time you’ll know.”

You cant wage war without a plan, one of the Command & Staff instructors had insisted. But you can lose with one. Sassinak found this no help at all as she chivvied her ragged troops through the tunnels to the boundary of their territory. She had no plan but survival, and she knew it was not enough. Find the Parchandri and . . . And what? Her fingers ached to fasten around his throat and force the truth testimony out of him. Would that do any good? They didn’t really need it, not for Tanegli’s trial. Even if she didn’t make it back, even if Aygar didn’t, there was evidence enough to convict the old heavyworlder. As for the status of Ireta, she doubted any non-Thek court would dare to question the Thek ruling she’d received which was already in official files.

Official files to which a powerful Parchandri might gain access. She almost stumbled, thinking that. Was nothing safe? She glanced around at her new fighting companions and mentally shook her head. Not these people, who were about as far from Fleet marines as she could imagine. Give them credit for having lived so long. But would they hold up in real combat?

Ahead, a quick exchange of whistled signals. The group slowed, flattened against the tunnel walls. Sassinak wondered if the battle would begin now, but it turned out to be the territorial boundary She went forward with Coris to meet this second group To her surprise, “her” people were now holding themselves more like soldiers. They seemed to have purpose, and the others were visibly impressed.

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“What goes?” asked the second gang’s leader. He was her age or older, his broad faced heavily scarred. His eyes focussed somewhere past her ear, and a lot of his teeth were missing. So was one finger.

“Samizdat.” The code answer.

“Whose friend?”

“Fleur’s. And Coris’s.”

“Heh. You’d better be Fleur’s friend. We’ll check that. You have a name, Fleur’s friend?”

“Sassinak.”

His eyes widened. “She’s got a call out for you. Fleur and the cops both. What you done, eh?”

“Not everything you’ve heard, and some things you haven’t. You have a name?”

He grinned at that, but quickly sobered. “I’m Kelgar. Ever*body knows me. Twice bitten, most shy. Twice lucky, to be free from slavers twice.” He paused, and she nodded. What could she say to someone like that, but acknowledge bad experience shared. “Come! We’ll see what she says.”

“She’s down here?”

“She goes slumming sometimes, though she doesn’t call it that. ‘Sides, where she is, is pretty near topside, over ‘cross a ways, through two more territories. We don’t fight, eh?” That was thrown back to Coris, who flung out his open hand.

“We good children,” he said.

“Like always,” said Kelgar. “For all the flamin’ good it does.”

He led the way this time and Sassinak followed with Coris’s group. She could tell that Kelgar had more snakes in his attic than were strictly healthy, but if paranoid he was smart paranoid. They saw no patrols while passing through his territory, and into the next. There she met another gangleader, this one a whip-thin woman who went dead-white at the sight of Sassinak’s face. A Fleet deserter? Her gang had the edge of almost military discipline, and after that first shocked reaction, the woman handled them with crisp efficiency. Definitely military, probably Fleet. Rare to lose one that

 

257

good. Sassinak couldn’t help wondering what had happened, but she knew she’d get no answers if she asked.

They passed another boundary and Sassinak found herself being introduced to yet another leader. Black hair, dark eyes, brownish skin, and the facial features she thought of as Chinese. Most of his followers looked much the same, and she caught some angry glances at Aygar. All she didn’t need was racial trouble; she hoped this leader had control of his people.

“Sassinak ...” the man said slowly. “You had an ancestress Lunzie?” This was something new. How would he know? Sassinak nodded. The man went on, “I believe we are distantly related.”

“I doubt it,” Sassinak said warily. What was this about?

“Let me explain,” he said, as if they had settled down in a club with all afternoon to chat. “Your grandfather Dougal was Fleet, as you are, and he married into a merchanter family . . . but Chinese. Quite against the custom of both his people and hers. He never told his family about the marriage, and she eventually left him to return to her family, with her daughters. His son they liked less, and when he married your mother and decided to join a new colony, it seemed the best solution for everyone. But your grandmother’s family kept track of your father, of course, and when I was a child I learned your name, and that of your siblings, in family prayers.”

“They . . . knew about us?”

“Yes, of course. When your colony was raided, your grandmother’s ship was hung with white flags. When they heard you had survived ...”

“But how could they?”

“You were honor graduate in the Academy. Surely you realized that an orphan rising to honor graduate would be featured in news programs.”

“I never thought.” She might have, if Abe’s death had not come on the heels of that triumph, and her grief filled every moment until her first posting.

“The name is unusual. It had made your grandmother very angry for her son to choose a name like that. So

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they searched the databases, found your original ID. They assumed you had done the same, and would make contact if and when you chose.” He shrugged, and smiled at her. “It has nothing to do with your purpose here, but I thought you might like to know, since circumstances brought us together.”

If she had a later. “I ... see.” She had no idea what etiquette applied; clearly he expected something more from her than he would of another stranded Fleet officer. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what obligations I would have under your customs ...”

“You? It is our family that did not protect you. Our family that did not make sure you knew of us. What I am trying to say is that you have a claim on us, if you are not ashamed of the connection.”

“I’m not ashamed.” That much she could say honestly, with utter conviction. To have another segment of her family accept her brought her close to tears, but not with shame. “I’m . . . amazed, surprised, stunned. But not ashamed.”

“Then, if it pleases you, we should go this way for you to meet Fleur again. She, too, was insistent that you must know about our family bond before you talked to her.”

She tried to reorganize her thoughts as they went on. A family, at least her father’s side. Now, why had she always thought her mother was the connection to Lunzie? Chinese didn’t bother her. Why would it? And what land of family had Dougal had, that he hadn’t told them about his wife? Lunzie had said something about Bud-ing Fiona’s children stuffy. She tried to remember, as she usually tried to forget, her parents. They had both been dark-haired, and she did remember that her father had once kidded her mother about her “Assyrian” nose, whatever that meant.

Her relative, in whatever degree, led her to into a huge room in which great cylinders hissed softly at one another. Pipes as thick as her waist connected them, code-striped for hot and cold water, steam, gas. Something thrummed in the distance. A narrow door marked “Storage” opened into a surprisingly large chamber that

 

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had evidently been used by the group for some time. Battered but comfortable chairs, stacks of pillows, strips of faded carpet. Sassinak wished she could collapse into the pillows and sleep for a day. But Fleur was waiting, as elegant as she had been in her own shop, in soft blues and lavendars, her silvery hair haloed around her head.

“Dear girl,” she said, extending a hand with such elegance that Sassinak could not for a moment reply. “You look worn out. You know, you didn’t have to get in this amount of trouble just to talk to me again.”

“I didn’t intend to. “

Sassinak took the chair she was offered. Her new-found relative grinned at her and shut the door. She and Fleur were alone. She eyed the older woman, not quite sure what she was looking for.

“I suppose you could say that things . . . took off.” Sitting down, in a real chair, she could feel every tired muscle. She fought back a yawn.

“I’ll be as brief as I can.” Fleur shifted a little in her seat and then stared at a space on the floor between them. “In the hopes that we will have time later to fill in what I leave out now. “ Sassinak nodded. “When Abe first met me, I had been captured, held hostage for my family’s behavior and finally sold into prostitution.” As a start, that got Sassinak’s attention. She sat bolt upright.

“My family were wealthy merchanters, rivals of the Paradens. Or so the Paradens thought. I’d been brought up to wealthy, luxury, society, probably spoiled rotten, though I didn’t know it. The perfect hostage, if you look at it that way.” Another pause. Sassinak began to feel a growing horror, and the certainty that she knew what was coming. “We were taken,” Fleur said, biting off each word. “Me and my husband. Supposedly, it was independent pirates. That’s what our families were told. But we knew, from the moment we were locked in the Paraden House security wing. I never knew the exact details, but I do know they asked for a ransom that neither my family nor his could have survived independently. His family ... his family paid And the Paradens

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sent him back, whole and healthy of body, but mind-wiped. They made me watch.”

Sassinak drew in a shaky breath to speak, but Fleur shook her head.

“Let me finish, all at once. My family thought they had proof of the Paraden connection. They tried to bring them to justice in the courts. In the end, my family lost everything, in court costs and countersuit damages. My father died, of a stroke; my mother’s heart tailed; my brothers . . . well, one went to prison for a Vicious unprincipled assault* on the judge the Paradens had bribed so well. The other they had killed, just for insurance. And they sold me to a planet where none of my family had ever traded.”

Sassinak’s eyes burned with tears for the young woman Fleur had been. Before she realized it, she’d moved over to grip her hands.

“Abe saved me,” Fleur went on. “He came, like any other young man, but he saw . . . something. I don’t know. He used to kid me that whatever training my governness had given me couldn’t be hidden. So he asked questions, and I was wild enough to answer, for I’d just heard of my sister-in-law’s death. The Paradens took care to keep me informed. And he swore he would get me out, somehow. In less than a year, he had saved out my purchase price. How, on his salary, I’ll never know. He wanted to marry me but I knew Fleet was strict about identity checks. I was terrified that the Paradens would find me again. So he helped me set up my first dress shop, and from there ...”

She waved her arm, and Sassinak thought of the years of grinding work it must have taken, to go from that first tiny shop to the fashionable designer.

“Eventually I designed for the best families, including of course the Paradens. None of my friends recognized me. I had gray hair, I looked older, and of course I took care to look like a dressmaker, not a customer.

“Abe and I stayed in contact, when we could. He was sure there had to be a way to bring the crime home to the Paradens, and started digging. That was really the beginning of Samizdat. I knew a few people. I helped

 

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those I could. Passed him information, when it came to me, and he passed some back. We built up a network, on one planet after another. Then he was taken, and I thought ... I thought I’d never survive his loss. So I swore that if he came back alive, I’d marry him, if he still wanted me.”

She patted Sassinak’s hands gently.

“And that’s where you came in. When he came back, he had you: an orphan, in shock from all that had happened. I heard through our nets that he was back. I came to Regg to talk to him. And he explained that until you were on your way, he dared not risk your future with any more disruption.”

“But I wouldn’t have minded,” Sassinak said. “How could he think I would?”

“I’m not sure, but we decided to wait, on marriage, that is, until after your graduation. And that, dear Sassinak, is what he wanted to tell you that night. I don’t know whether you noticed anything ...”

“I did! So—so you were his big secret.”

“You sound almost disappointed.”

“I’m not . . . but it hadn’t occurred to me. I thought perhaps he’d found out more about the planet pirates.”

“He might have. But he’d decided to tell you about me on graduation night. If all had gone well, he’d have brought you to the hotel where I was staying. We’d have met, and you’d have been the witness at our wedding before you went off on your first cruise.”

Like light pouring into a darkened house as shutter after shutter came off the windows, she had wondered so long, so darkly, about the secret of that night.

“Did you come to his funeral? I don’t remember any civilians at all.”

Fleur’s head drooped; Sassinak could not see her face.

“I was frightened again. I thought it was the Paradens, that they’d found me, and killed Abe because of me. You didn’t need that and you didn’t know about me, you wouldn’t even have known why I was there. So I left. You can call it cowardice, if you like. I kept track of

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your career, but I never could find the right time to try telling you ...”

Sassinak threw her arms around the older woman and hugged her as she cried.

“It’s all right,” she vowed. “I’ll get the job done this time.”

She could hear the steely edge in her voice herself. Fleur pulled away.

“Sass! You must not let it fill you with bitterness.”

“But he deserved to get you!” Now she had tears in her eyes, too. “Abe deserved some pleasure. He worked so hard to save me ... and you, and others, and then they kitted him just when ...”

She had not cried for Abe since her few tears the night of his death. She had been the contained, controlled officer he would have wanted her to be. Now that old loss stabbed her again. Through her sobs she heard Fleur talking.

“If you turn bitter, you’ve let them win. Whether you kill them or not, that’s not the main thing. The main thing is to live as yourself; the self you can respect. Abe would not let me despair, the other kind of defeat, but he told me he worried that you might stay bitter.”

“But they killed him. And my parents, and your family, and all the others ...”

Fleur sighed. “Sassinak, I’m nearly forty years older than you, and I know that sort of comment makes prickles go up your spine.” Sassinak had to chuckle. Fleur was so right. “And I know you don’t want to hear that another forty years of experience means additional understanding. But!” Her beautifully manicured finger levelled at Sassinak’s eyes. “Did Abe know more than you in the slave depot?”

“Of course. I was just a child.”

“And if he were alive now, would you still respect his greater age and experience?”

“Well ...” She could see it coming, but she didn’t have to like it. Her expression must have shown that, because Fleur laughed aloud, a silvery bell-like peal that brought an answering laugh from Sassinak.

“So please trust me now,” Fleur said, once more serious. “You have become what Abe dreamed of. I have kept an eye on you in the media, I know. But the higher you go in Fleet, the more you will need unclouded judgment. If you allow the bitterness, the unfairness, of your childhood and Abe’s death, to overwhelm your natural warmth, you will become unfair in your own way. You must be more than a pirate chaser, more than vengeance personified. Fleet tends to shape its members toward narrow interests, rigid reactions, even in I die best. Haven’t you found that some of your difficul-I ties down here arise from that?”

Put that way, some of them certainly had. She had I developed the typical spacefarer’s distaste for planets. f She had not bothered to cultivate the skills needed to 1 enjoy them. The various gangs in the tunnels seemed | alien, even as she tried to mold them into a working unit.

“Abe used to say to me,” Fleur said, now patting at If her hair, “that growth and development can’t stop for stars, rank or travel. You keep growing and keep Abe’s I memory green. Don’t let the Paradens shape the rest of | your life, as they shaped the first of it.” “Yes, ma’am.”

“Now tell me, what do you plan to do with all this scruffy crowd?”

Sassinak grinned at her, half-rueful and half-deter-I mined.

“Chase pirates, ma’am, and then worry about whether I’ve gotten too rigid.”

But when it came down to it, none of them actually knew where The Parchandri was located in a physical sense. Sassinak frowned.

“We ought to be able to get that from the data systems, with the right codes,” she said. “You said you had people good at that.”

“But we don’t have any of the current codes. The only times we’ve tried to tap into the secure datahnes, anything but the public ones, they’ve sent police after us. They can tell where our tap is, an’ everything.”

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“Sassinak?” Aygar tapped her shoulder. She started to brush him aside, but remembered his previous good surprises. “Yes?”

“My friend, that student ...”

“The one who boasted to you he could slap through the data]inks without getting caught? Yes. But he’s not here and how would we find him?”

“I have his callcode. From any public comsite, he said.”

“But there aren’t any—are there? Down here?”

She glanced at the ragged group. Some of them nodded, and Coris answered her.

“Yes, up in the public tunnels. There’s a few we might get to, without being spotted. Not all of us, of course.”

“There’s that illegal one in the 248 vertical,” someone else said. “This maintenance worker put it in, patched it to the regular public lines so he could call in bets during his shift. We used to listen to him.”

“Where’s the 248 vertical?” Sassinak asked.

Not that far away, although it took several hours of careful zigging about to get to it. Twice they saw hunting patrols, one in the blue-gray of the city police, and one in the Pollys’ orange. Their careless-sweep of the tunnels did not impress Sassinak. They seemed to be content to walk through, without investigating all hatches and side tunnels. When she mentioned this to Coris, he hunched his shoulders.

“Bet they’re planning to gas the system. Now they’re looking for easy prey, girls down on their luck, kids . . . something to have fim with.”

“Gas! You mean poison gas? Or knockout gas?”

“They’ve used both, before. ‘Bout three years ago, they must’ve killed a thousand or more, over toward the shuttle station area. I was clear out here, and all it did to us was make us heave everything for a day or so. But I heard there’d been street crime, subways hijacked, that land of thing.”

Sassinak fingered the small kit in her pocket. She had brought along the detox membrane and primer that Fleet used against riot control gas, but would it work

 

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against everything? She didn’t want to find out by using it, and she had only the one She put that thought away and briefed Aygar on what to tell, and what not to tell, his student friend. If only she’d had a chance to evaluate that friend for herself. No telling whose agent he was, unless he was just a student playing pretend spy games. If so, he’d soon find out how exciting the real ones could be.

Two of the group went through the hatch into 248 vertical ahead of Aygar, and then called him through. This shaft, they’d explained, had enough regular traffic to keep the group out of it, except on special occasions.

Sassinak waited, wishing she could make the call. Aygar was only a boy, really, from a backwoods world: he knew nothing about intrigue. It would be like him to call up this “friend” and blurt out everything on an unsecured line. She kept herself from fidgeting with difficulty. She must not increase their nervousness. How many hours had slipped by? Would Arly be worried yet? Would anyone?

Aygar bounded back through the hatch, his youthful strength and health a vivid contrast to the underworlders’ air of desperation.

“He wants to meet me,” Aygar said. “He says the students would like to help.”

“Help? Help what?”

Sassinak knew nothing of civilian students, except what the media reported. It was clear they weren’t anything like cadets.

“Help with the coup,” Aygar said as if that should explain it. “End the tyranny of greed and power, he says.”

“We aren’t starting a coup,” Sassinak said, then thought about it.

While in one sense she didn’t think she was overthrowing a government, the government had certainly sent riot squads after her, as if she were. Did they think she was working with a bunch of renegade students? Did someone else have a coup planned . . . and had they stumbled into it, and was that , . . ?

Her brain seemed to explode, as intuition and logic

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both flared. Aygar was giving her a puzzled look, as she went on, more quietly.

“At least, not the one he’s thinking about. Exactly. Now, what kind of help can he give us? Can he find The Parchandri?”

“He just said to meet him. And where.” Aygar was looking stubborn again, he could not fail to realize that he was being used, and no one liked that.

“In public territory. Great. And you’re about as easy to disguise as a torn uniform at inspection.”

“Fleur’s the one who taught us all about disguises,” Coris said. “Although, it won’t be easy with that one.”

Sassinak felt almost too tired to think, but she had to. She pulled herself together and said, “We’ll go ask her. We certainly can’t stroll out looking like this. And we’ll get some rest before we go anywhere, because I notice that Aygar looks almost as exhausted as I feel. In the meantime, Coris, if you have any maps of the underground areas, I’d like to see them.”

She hoped that would give them all the idea that she had a specific plan in mind.

Chapter Seventeen

FSP heavy cruiser Zaid-Dayan

“I do not like this.” Arly tapped her fingers on the edge of the command console. One of its screens displayed the local news channel. “How could anyone think Sassinak would murder an admiral?”

The senior officers, including Major Currald, were ranged around her while the bridge crew pretended to pay strict attention to their monitors.

“Civilians.” Bures looked almost as disgusted as she felt. “You know, if they’re so scared of Fleet that they won’t let us use our own shuttles up and down, then they probably think we’re all born with blood in our mouths and fangs down to here.” He gestured at his chin. “Long pointed ones. We go around covered with weapons, just looking for a chance to kill someone.”

“News said the guy might not have been Coromell after all,” said Mayerd who had come up to the bridge to watch the news with them. “Not that that helps. Good thing we don’t have trouble in the neighborhood. It’d be worse if we had action coming.”

Arly frowned at her. Doctors were the next thing to civilian, as far as she was concerned. “You know what she said. She thought there might be trouble ...”

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“Like what? An invasion of mysterious green-tentacled slime monsters? We’re at the center of as big a volume of peaceful space as anyone’s ever known. Barring a few planet pirates, and I’m not minimizing that. But the last big stuff was decades back. Even the Seti haven’t dared Fleet reprisals since the Tonagai Reef encounters. They may be gamblers, but they aren’t stupid. I suppose, if the Paraden got all their pirate buddies to come blowing into FedCentral at once, they might cause us trouble, but they’re not stupid either. They need a fat, peaceful culture to prey on. A shark has no advantages in a school of sharks.”

Arly and Bures had crossed glances above Mayerd. Arly had to admit she had never considered a whole pirate fleet. They just didn’t operate that way. Two or three raiders at once, more only in defense of an illegal installation. But now, with Sassinak lost somewhere below, the whole weight of the ship rested on her shoulders. She wished Ford would show up from wherever he’d been. She wished Sassinak would come back. Blast that admiral, she thought. Coromell, or whoever it had been, luring her away. And why? The trial? To have the Zaid-Dayan helpless?

The Fleet comline blinked at her, and she put the button in her ear. “Lieutenant Commander Arly, acting captain of Zaid-Dayan.”

“Arly, it’s Lunzie. Do you recognize my voice?”

Of course she did. She’d enjoyed meeting Sassinak’s astonishing young ancestor. But why was Lunzie calling on the Fleet line? “Yes. Why?”

“You need to know I’m who I say I am. I’m on FedCentral. I can’t tell you where.”

Arly’s heart skipped a beat. Could she be with the captain? Were they in hiding?

“Sass—Commander Sassinak?” She heard the rough edge to her own voice, and hoped it would not carry.

“We don’t know. Arly, the real Admiral Coromell wants to speak to you. I know he’s the real Coromell because I knew him years ago. Before my last session of coldsleep. Do you trust me?”

Something in the voice sounded different; something

 

269

had changed since Arly had said goodbye as Lunzie left the ship back at Sector HQ. Arly considered. Lunzie sounded more mature, more confident. Did that matter? Did it mean anything at all? And even if she didn’t trust Lunzie, she still wanted to hear what this mysterious Coromell had to say. She gestured to Bures, who bent close, and tapped out a message on her console: get Flag Officer Directory. Bures nodded. Arly spoke, hoping her voice sounded calm.

“I believe you’re Lunzie if that’s what you mean.”

“It’s not, but it’ll do. Here he is.”

A silence, then a deep voice that certainly had the expectation of command.

“This is Admiral Coromell. You’re Lieutenant Commander Arly?”

“Yes, sir.”

Bures handed her the Directory, and she flipped through it. Coromell: tall, silver-haired, bright blue eyes. A handsome man, even approaching old age. He had probably been very handsome when Lunzie knew him before. She wondered whether they’d had anything going, and forced herself to listen to him.

“As you no doubt realize, the situation is critical. Your captain has disappeared and the local law enforcement agencies were, until a few hours ago, convinced that she had killed me. I’ve been unable to find out what’s going on, and some of my own staff have vanished as well.”

“Sir, I thought the admiral was hunting over on Six. That’s what Commander Sassinak was told.”

“I was. I had an urgent message to return, and my return was complicated by Lunzie’s ...”

A flashing light on the console yanked Arly’s attention away from Coromell; the Ssli biolink alarm. Could she interrupt an admiral?

“Excuse me, sir,” she said, as firmly as she could. “Our Ssli has a critical message.”

He didn’t quite snort, but the sound he made conveyed irritation barely withheld. “Check it, then.”

Arly touched the controls and the Ssli’s message began scrolling across the console’s upper screen.

“Enemy approaching. Seti fleet entering system, down-

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warping from FTL, expecting assistance in evading detection and system defenses.”

Her hands trembled as she acknowledged that much. The message continued with details of the incoming menace. Number of ships, mass, weapons as known, probable crew and troop levels.

Bures, craning his neck to read this sideways, let out a long, low whistle. Mayerd, then Currald, joined him, their faces paling as they watched the long lists grow.

“Commander Arly?” That was the admiral, impatient of the long silence.

Ar!y answered, surprised that her voice was steadier than her hands.

“Sir, our Ssli reports an incoming Seti fleet, definitely hostile.” She heard a gasp, but did not stop. “Apparently they’ve got Insystem help that’s supposed to disable some of the system defenses. They’re timed to arrive here during the Grand Council session. There’s some kind of coup planned.” The display had stopped. She tapped in a question to the Ssli, asking for the source of all this.

“But how do they know?” Coromell asked. The answer came up on the screen even as he asked.

“Sir, our Ssli says there’s a Ssli larva, captive, on the Seti flagship, and a Fleet officer . . . Dupaynil.” Her own surprise carried to him.

“Who s that?”

“A Fleet Security officer assigned to us a few months ago. Then he was transferred, I think to go look up something in Seti space.”

“Which he quite evidently found. Well, Commander, you have my permission to leave orbit and make life difficult for those Seti ships.”

She opened her mouth to ask what about Sassinak and realized the futility. Even if the captain had been at the shuttle port, they couldn’t have waited for her. Not knowing where she was, they certainly couldn’t delay.

“Yes, sir,” she said. Then, “Request permission to drop a shuttle and pilot in case Commander Sassinak shows up. She may need it.”

“Granted,” he said.

 

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That was all. She was now more than acting captain: she had command of a warship about to fight an alien fleet. This is impossible, she thought, touching the button that set red lights flashing throughout the ship. She punched the ship’s intercom.

“Ensign Timran to the bridge.” And, off intercom, to Bures, “Get one of Sassinak’s spare uniforms from her quarters and whatever else she might need. Get it up to Flight Two, fast.”

More orders to give, evicting the Insystem Security monitor teams that had the weapons locked down, to Engineering to bring up the drives.

“Ensign Timran reporting, ma’am!”

He was very quick or he’d been lurking in the passage outside. She hoped he would be both quick and lucky with the shuttle.

“Report to Flight Deck Two. You’ll be taking a small unit to the surface.”

The admiral had said nothing about an escort, but whatever had happened to Sassinak, a few Wefts and marines couldn’t make things worse. When she looked at Currald he nodded.

“Ten should do it,” he said. “Leave room for her and that Aygar, coming back.” He picked up another comset and called his own adjutant.

“Yes, ma’am!” said Tim, eyes gleaming. “Do I have permission . . . ?”

“You have permission to do whatever is necessary to assist Commander Sassinak and get her safely ofiplanet at her command. Bures will have some things for you to take. Check with him.”

He saluted and was off at a run. She hoped she’d done the right thing. Whatever had happened to Sassinak, if she was still alive, she would think she had a cruiser waiting for her. And now we’re leaving—I’m leaving, taking her ship, leaving her nothing but a shuttle.

Arly couldn’t believe this was happening, not so fast, but it was. Through her disbelief, she heard her own voice giving orders in the same calm, steady tone she’d cultivated for years. Longscans on, undockmg procedures to begin immediately, two junior Weft officers to

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report to Flight Two. A loud squawk from the Station Dockmaster, demanding to know why the Zaid-Dayan was beginning undock without permission.

“Orders of Admiral Coromell,” said Arly. Should she tell them about the Seti fleet? “We’ll be releasing one planetary shuttle.”

“You can’t do that!”

“We’re releasing one planetary shuttle,” she went on, as if she had not heard, “and request navigational assistance to clear your Station without damage.” She punched the all-ship intercom and said, “Ensign Gori to the bridge.”

“But our scans are showing live weapons ...”

That voice abruptly stopped, and an Insystems Security Force uniform appeared on one of the viewscreens.

“You are in violation of regulations. You are requested to cease and desist, or measures will be taken ...”

“Ensign Gori reporting, ma’am.”

Not as quick as Tim, but eager in his own way.

“Ensign, the cap—Commander Sassinak said you knew regulations forwards and backwards.” He didn’t answer, but he didn’t look worried, either. “You will discuss regulations with Insystems Security. We are withdrawing under threat of enemy attack, at the orders of a higher officer not in our direct chain of command.” Gori’s lace brightened and his mouth opened. Arly pushed him toward one of the working boards, and said, “Don’t tell me, tell him.”

Yet another screen showed Flight Two, with the hatch closing on one of the shuttles. As the launch hatch opened, the elevator began raising the shuttle. Arly could just see some part of the Station through the open hatch.

“. . . no authorization for such deliberate violation,” the Insystem voice droned on. “Return to inactive status at once or regulations will require that force be used.”

Arly’s temper flared. “You have a hostile Seti fleet incoming,” she said slowly, biting off” each word. “You have traitors letting them past the defenses. Don’t threaten me. So far I haven’t hurt the Station.”

 

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Perhaps not all the Insystem Security were in the plot. This one looked as if he’d just been slugged.

“But. . . but there’s no evidence. None of the detector nets have gone off. .

“Maybe someone’s got his finger on the buzzer.”

The shuttle cleared the Zaid-Dayans hull, and disappeared. Arly sent a silent prayer after it.

“If I were you, I’d start looking at the systems with redundancies.”

By now, the Zaid-Dayan’s own powerful scans were unlocked. Nothing would show, yet. The enemy was too far out. Arly glanced around and saw that the regular bridge crew was now in place. It felt very strange to be in Sassinak’s place, while Tenant Yulyin sat at “Tier” board, and stranger to see that board mostly dark, after a’ship’s alert. She pointed to Gori, who transferred the Insystems Security channel to his board.

“Ensign Gori will stay in contact with you.”

“Fleet Regulations, Volume 21, article 14, grants authorization to commanding officers of vessels on temporary duty away from normal Sector assignment ...” Gori sounded confident, and as smooth as any diplomat.

Arly left him to it. The combination of a surprise Seti fleet and Gori’s zeal for regulations should keep trigger-happy fingers off the buttons until they could get away and raise shields.

“Docking bay secure, Captain!”

Arly nodded to Engineering. Critical as the situation was, she could not justify destroying the Station to jump-start the Zaid-Dayan and bringing the insystem drive up was a delicate operation. Centimeter by centimeter they eased away from the Station, adding just enough thrust at first to let rotational inertia begin their outward spiral.

“Weapons still locked down,” Yulyin reported, at the two-minute tick.

“Right. Sassinak and I did some fancy stuff” that should unkink by the time we can use them—“ She wondered if this Ssli and that distant one were still in contact. And what was Dupaynil doing there? No time for that, though: her weapons had to come first.

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She keyed in the code Sassinak had left with her, the captain’s access to the command computers, the master controls of all weaponry. Then she explained what they’d done, and as quickly crew and marines began scurrying around the ship to restore it to fall fighting capability. One hundred kilometers from the Station, Arly notched up the insystem drive.

So far, if the invaders were getting scan on her, she would look predictable. A rising spiral, the usual departure of a large ship from anything as massive as a planet. Then she engaged the stealth gear, and the Zaid-Dayan passed into darkness and silence, an owl hunting across the night.

FedCentral: Fleet Headquarters

Coromell swung to face Lunzie. “I never thought of that\ My mind must be slowing!”

“What?” Lunzie hadn’t heard what Arly said, had only seen its effect in the changes on Coromell’s face.

“A Seti fleet, inbound—“ He told her the rest, and began linking it to what they’d learned elsewhere. “This Iretan thing . . . you must have come very close to the bone somehow.”

“Unless they had it planned and we just showed up in the middle of it.”

“True. I keep forgetting you were sleeping away the past forty-three years. Like a time-bomb for them. Come to dunk of it, without the Iretan’s trial, the Winter Assizes were mostly commercial cases this time. And nothing coming up before Grand Council but a final vote on some financial rules affecting terraforming. Not my field: I don’t know a stock from a bond.”

“So if they wanted a quiet session, they could have arranged that . . . and we really are a time-bomb.”

“Which they set for themselves, I remind you. Very fitting, all this is.”

“If they don’t blow us away,” said Lunzie. “That’s not Sassinak up there.”

“She’d have left the ship to her most competent

 

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combat officer. The best we can do now is make sure whatever was planned down here doesn’t work.”

Lunzie was unconvinced. “But what can one cruiser do against a whole fleet?”

“Buy us time, if nothing else. Don’t worry about what you can’t change. What we’ll have to do is make sure Insystem has the alarm, and believes it, and get Sassinak out of whatever trap she’s in.”

The tiny clinic attached to Fleet Central Systems Command had but one corridor that opened directly into the back offices of the Command building. Lunzie followed Coromell, noticing that the enlisted personnel looked as stunned to see him as he had looked when he heard about the Seti fleet.

“Sir? When did the Admiral arrive?” asked one, almost but not quite barring the way to the lift marked “Admiral’s use only.”

“About thirty hours ago. Apparently our security confused at least a few people.” He punched the controls and the lift door sighed open.

“But, sir, that commander . . . the murder ...”

“Put a lock on it, Algin. Who’s been speaking for us?”

“Lt. Commander Danish, sir. He’s up . . .”