Spinneret (38 page)

His ears were still ringing from the burst when a hand grabbed his collar and roughly yanked him to his knees. Peripherally, he saw Dunlop's men stretched out on their bellies, rifles pointed toward the tower … but his main attention was focused on the pistol Dunlop held against his temple. A pistol gripped by a white-knuckled hand.

“Meredith!” the major yelled toward the tower and directly in Hafner's ear. “I've got Hafner here—you hear me? Surrender or I'll kill him. I mean it!”

He paused for breath or an answer … and in the silence Hafner heard, dimly, the sound of distant gunfire. Dunlop's hand twitched; but before he could do or say anything, Meredith's voice drifted faintly from the tower. “Give it up, Dunlop. You haven't got a chance.”

“I've got Hafner!” the major shouted again. “You want to see him die?”

“Don't be a fool,” Meredith called. “You can't get into the tower, your rear guard at the tunnel's been taken—you've got no supplies and nowhere to run. What the hell is a hostage going to buy you? You
or
your men?”

“Just shut up!” Dunlop yelled.

“Major,” a sergeant spoke up tentatively, “maybe we
ought
to surrender—”

“Talk of surrender will be treated as desertion,” Dunlop cut him off harshly. “Meredith! I'll make you a deal. You call the UN ship and have them send down a shuttle for us. Then have your people pull back and let us leave here.”

“What about Dr. Hafner?”

“I'll ask Msuya to send him back down once we're aboard. “

“Forget it,” Meredith called. “However, I'll make you a counterproposal. If you turn Hafner loose right now, I'll guarantee you all safe passage to the UN ship.”

“You think I'm stupid enough to trust you? We're leaving, Meredith—you'd better call your people off.” Cautiously, Dunlop stood up, hauling Hafner to his feet. “All right; everybody get up and fall back to the cars.”

Slowly, even reluctantly, the soldiers complied—and because he was watching them, Hafner saw the shocked expressions as they began turning to leave. “Oh, bloody hell,” someone muttered.

Preoccupied with the gunfire and shouted negotiations,

Hafner had completely forgotten about the Gorgon's Heads. But the machines had obviously not forgotten them … and as he gazed at the six Gorgon's Heads standing motionlessly between them and the Great Wall, Hafner had the eerie feeling he was seeing a new level of programming being brought into play. With their tentacles poised like angry rattlesnakes, they seemed unnaturally alert, almost as if they sensed the tension and danger and were preparing to do something about it. Even Hafner, who was used to the things, felt uneasy; the effect on Dunlop's soldiers was an order of magnitude higher. The shocked expletives were punctuated by the clicks of rifles being put on full automatic.

“Take it easy,” Dunlop snapped, pushing Hafner a step closer to the wall. “As long as we've got the doc here they won't touch us.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Hafner put in, thinking quickly. “They're armed, you know, and I doubt they like having a supervisor as a prisoner.” If he could get just a few steps ahead of the soldiers, on the pretext of calming the machines, and then duck behind one of them …

“They're not armed, and they wouldn't understand what ‘prisoner' means if you drew them a picture,” Dunlop countered. “Come on, men.”

“Hell with
that,”
someone behind Dunlop muttered. “Meredith! I'm accepting your deal!”

Dunlop swung around, releasing Hafner's shirt as he brought his pistol to bear. “Back in ranks, you!” the major snarled—and Hafner leaped for the Gorgon's Heads.

He'd covered less than half the distance when something that felt and sounded like a small bomb blasted into his thigh, slamming him hard into the ground. A scream of pain welled up in his throat … but even as his clenched teeth blocked the escape he was deafened by a second thunderclap. He tensed for a new wave of agony, but it never came; and as the smell of ozone finally penetrated his pain-fogged consciousness he realized something else entirely had just happened. Raising his head with an effort, he looked back over his shoulder.

Where Dunlop had been standing a charred figure now lay sprawled on the ground. Around it the rebel soldiers stood frozen, their weapons sagging in their hands. From the tower a new group of soldiers was running toward them. “Well, what do you know?” Hafner heard his own voice say, as if from a great distance. “I guess they
are
still armed.”

And then, thankfully, the darkness took him.

B
USY WITH THE TASK
of straightening things out in the Spinner cavern, Meredith wasn't able to get to the Unie hospital until nearly an hour after Hafner had been flown there. He arrived to find Andrews and Carmen sitting together in the tiny waiting room. “Any news?” he asked, sinking into a chair across from them.

“It doesn't look like he's going to die,” Andrews said. “They're not sure yet whether they'll be able to save his leg—the thighbone was pretty badly damaged.”

Meredith nodded tiredly. “Yeah. Carmen … I'm sorry.”

“Wasn't your fault, Colonel.” Her voice was under control, despite the strain lines in her face. “Dunlop had to be stopped. “

“Stopped and a half.” He shifted his eyes to Andrews again. “You tell her?”

The other nodded. “Any idea yet what that flash was?”

“Simple old-fashioned high voltage, apparently. Probably grounded through a cable-material base or grid underlying the cavern soil.”

“So now the supervisors have been raised to demigod status,” Carmen murmured. “Able to call lightning down on their attackers.” She sighed. “I don't think I like the idea of Gorgon's Heads equipped with offensive weaponry.”

Andrews shrugged. “It'll sure slow down any more would-be rebels.”

“Oh, it's fine
now.
But what about twenty years from now?”

“We'll have the whole system figured out by then,” Meredith assured her. “I've already made the supervisor/security programming a high-priority project. We'll be able to make new supervisors long before we need them.”

“That wasn't what I meant,” Carmen shook her head. “I mean it's just one more way the Spinneret's resources can be applied directly to warfare. Is that what the Spinners originally planned for this place, or is it just our human viciousness that's turning everything in sight to weapons?”

“There aren't a lot of things in this universe that can't be used for both good and evil,” Andrews said. “If the Spinners were so morally pure that they couldn't see the negative uses of their stuff, they would've been wiped out pretty quickly by the first group that did.”

“Or enslaved.” An idea was beginning to brush the back of Meredith's mind. “Maybe the Spinneret was built by slave labor.”

Carmen shuddered. “That's a horrible thought. To be living on a slave planet. …”

“You make it sound like living in Auschwitz,” Andrews said. “Remember, whatever happened here it was all over a hundred thousand years ago.”

“Besides which,” Meredith said, “I doubt that the overseers they would need to run this place would have needed a lifeboat as big as the one we found.”

Carmen blinked at him. “A
what?
Where is it?”

“It's stashed away in a room just off of the volcano cone,” Meredith told her. “For the moment its existence is classified information—which is why Andrews is giving me such an odd look right now.”

Andrews reddened slightly. “Sorry, Colonel, but I thought you weren't going to tell anyone else about the ship.”

“I wasn't. I've decided, though, that we might want to try flying it … and for that we'll need a pilot.”

Carmen's jaw dropped. “You don't mean … you mean
me?”

“That's right. I want you to start figuring out the controls first thing tomorrow. You'll need the list of tentative translations that linguist—Dr. Williams—has worked out; I'll see she makes you a copy.”

“But why me?” Carmen protested. “You've got lots of pilots who're better than I am.”

“True,” Meredith said frankly. “But after Dunlop's move, there aren't hell of a lot of people on Astra I can implicitly trust. You're the only one besides me with any flight experience; ergo, it's your baby.”

Carmen shook her head in disbelief. “Lieutenant, will you kindly explain to Colonel Meredith that the chances of my figuring out an alien ship from scratch are about the same as swimming the Dead Sea underwater?”

“Actually, it shouldn't be as bad as you think,” Andrews said. “If it
is
a lifeboat, it'll be designed to be as easy as possible to fly, with a lot being done automatically. Though”—he added with a glance toward Meredith—“I don't know what exactly we'd want to use it for.”

“We'll figure something out once we know more about it,” Meredith said, deliberately vague. “Incidentally, did the Whissst make their cable pickup okay?”

“Yes,” Carmen nodded. “And I didn't get a chance to tell you: the whole cable came out nonsticky.”

Meredith's heart skipped a beat. “
Non
sticky? Uh-oh.”

“Oh, there's nothing wrong,” she hastened to add. “It's just that the cable's coated with about a millimeter's thickness of a rubbery material that seems to absorb or redirect the surface attraction. They tried peeling some from one end; it comes off quite easily and the cable underneath is like every other the Spinneret's turned out.”

Meredith felt his tense muscles go limp with relief. “You had me worried for a minute. How are the Whissst taking it?”

“Oh, you know the Whissst outlook on life—they think the whole thing's a priceless joke. Do you suppose Dunlop's people changed some tower settings?”

“According to them, no one ever got up there,” Meredith shook his head. “We can confirm that with Dr. Hafner later, but I suspect we're just seeing the result of getting that digging machine back on the job.”

“Oh, right—I'd forgotten that.” Carmen shook her head tiredly. “Brain's shut down for the night, I guess.”

“Then you ought to take your body home and let it do likewise,” Meredith said.

“I want to wait here until they know for sure about Peter's leg.” She hesitated, as if casting around for a less painful topic of conversation.

Andrews saved her the trouble. “Colonel, what are we going to do about Msuya? Even if we can't prove it, it's pretty obvious the UN was backing Dunlop's power play. Can we get the Rooshrike to throw him out of the system?”

“Probably, but I don't know if it'd be worth it. Whatever we decide about immigration or direct aid to poor countries, we'll need at least halfway peaceful relations with the UN to make it work. Besides, Saleh's suspicious enough of what we're doing out here.”

“But what if they try to stir up more trouble?” Carmen asked.

“How? With Dunlop gone, who's left for Msuya to work through?”

“How about the five scientists Cris brought in? Surely they've been missed by now. What if Saleh threatens their families if they don't cooperate?”

“Again, how? Even a threat needs to be delivered, and our friends upstairs have no way of contacting them. “

“They got to Dunlop,” Andrews reminded him. “Remember those high-band transmissions? Msuya got that radio to him
somehow.”

Meredith grunted. “I'd forgotten that,” he admitted. “We'll have to figure out how that was done and shut down the pipeline.” An obvious possibility occurred to him, but he decided not to mention it. “We can ask the Orspham to monitor, that band, too, see if anything else shows up on it.”

A motion through the swinging door's window caught Meredith's eye, and he turned as Astra's chief surgeon came quietly into the room, his pastel green coveralls stained with dried blood. “Well?” the colonel asked, tensing up again.

“I'd say he's got an eighty percent chance of keeping the leg,” the doctor said with tired satisfaction. “A bad blood-flow interruption down there, but I think we got it restored in time. If so, the bone itself shouldn't be a problem; we can build a porous ceramic implant the remaining pieces can grow into.” His eyes had drifted to Carmen. “He'll be under sedation for at least another ten hours—longer if we decide he's stable enough for an implant operation—so you might as well go home.”

“Thank you, Doctor; good job,” Meredith said, getting to his feet. “Andrews, you may escort Carmen home and then hit the sack yourself. Good night, all.”

Five minutes later, he was in his office. From the corner, his spare cot beckoned temptingly; turning his mind away from it, he sat down at his desk and punched for the Martello duty officer. “I want to talk to the Orspham officer-in-charge,” he told the other. “Get him for me on the secure radio channel. After that, see if you can locate a Rooshrike ship; I have a special equipment order that I need right away.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

Leaning back in his chair, Meredith checked his watch. The first contact would take several minutes to establish and perhaps triple that to get sufficiently deep into the Orspham hierarchy for what he wanted. And as long as he was waiting anyway … “Get me the UN ship, too,” he instructed the officer.

There were several very salty things he wanted to say to Msuya.

I
T TOOK THREE WEEKS
for Hafner's leg to recover sufficiently for him to begin taking short trips without a wheelchair—and, coincidentally, it was after the same three weeks that Carmen finally threw in the towel on her own project. “I'm just not getting anywhere,” she told Meredith, slapping her notebook in frustration. “Loretta's translations make sense enough when I read them, but I just can't apply it all to the squiggles on the control boards.”