Spinneret (40 page)

Carmen, Loretta, and Hafner were waiting, in the control room, their expressions tight. “We heard you come in,” Carmen said quietly. “Everthing's ready, as far as I can tell.”

“Ready for what?” Perez asked suspiciously, his eyes flicking over the room.

“We're taking a short trip,” Meredith said, gesturing to a row of seats well away from any of the control boards. “If you three will strap yourselves—”

“A trip where?” Perez interrupted.

“To the Spinners' home world.”

Even Carmen's eyes widened at that. “You're not serious,” Perez growled. “I, for one, am far too busy to take any trips—certainly in an untested alien craft.”

“I'm sure Major Barner and Dr. Nichols can handle cavern duties until we get back,” Meredith told him, drawing a stunner from his pocket. “Let's avoid the need for force, shall we? I'd like everyone to be on speaking terms during the voyage.”

Perez sent a hard, accusatory look at Hafner and Carmen. “What about the election?” he asked, turning back to Meredith. “Or is this simply an elaborate way of eliminating my influence on Astra?”

“You'll note Dr. Hafner is also going with us,” Meredith pointed out. “If you don't consider that being evenhanded, I'll simply mention that Major Barner has instructions to postpone the elections until we return.”

“So what are you trying to prove? That you're still the man with all the power on Astra?”

“I've got no more power than anyone in this room,” Meredith said flatly. Turning the stunner around, he tossed it to Perez. “What I've got is curiosity and a hell of a lot of unanswered questions. We've got the chance now to go see what the Spinners did with all the cable they took from Astra; maybe even find out what ultimately happened to them. It seems to me that anyone who's really interested in Astra's future should be interested in knowing whether the simple fact of owning the cable contributed in some way to their destruction. Doesn't it seem that way to you?”

For a long moment Perez stared at him. Then, without a word, he walked over to the seats Meredith had indicated and sat down, dropping the stunner almost contemptuously on the seat beside him, Meredith stepped past him, retrieving the weapon and putting it away as he joined Carmen by the forward viewport and wraparound control board. “Let's go,” he told her.

Turning back to the board, she pressed a handful of buttons. Beneath them, the deck vibrated momentarily; and then they were moving along the tracks toward the double doors. Carmen consulted a screenful of Spinner characters and a translator display that had been set up beside it and adjusted another set of controls. “It appears to be automatic now until we're off the planet,” she told Meredith, her voice tight. “After that I just need to indicate where we're going on the map I told you about.”

“Right.” They were into the next room now and approaching the second set of double doors. Sliding into the seat next to Carmen, Meredith took a minute to puzzle out the alien restraining straps. By the time he looked up again, they were slowing down in a machinery-packed room that seemed to have no ceiling. “Under the volcano cone,” he grunted, eyes probing the jungle of oddly shaped devices and cables surrounding them. “Um—up ahead, by the wall: isn't that a duplicate of the transport cradle we're riding on?”

“Looks like it,” Carmen agreed. “Maybe the empty room we passed through originally held a second lifeboat.”

“That might explain why this one was never used,” Hafner put in quietly behind him. “By the time they left, there weren't enough of them still here to need two ships.”

Meredith craned his neck to look at the other. Seated next to Loretta, his injured leg sticking awkwardly out from the ill-fitting Spinner seat, the scientist had the look of someone trying hard not to pass judgment prematurely; and it occurred to Meredith that whether or not he succeeded in holding Astra together he stood a fair chance of losing whatever respect and trust he'd built up with these people. But it was far too late to regret his decision. “You think there may have been a plague or something?” he asked Hafner.

“Or else they were running with a skeleton crew at the end. I suppose that's one of the things we're hoping to find out, isn't it?”

Meredith nodded and turned back. The lifeboat had stopped now, and a slight movement among the thinner cables outside caught his eye. “Evacuating the air,” he muttered. “Must be going to launch us with the gravity nullifier.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when the room seemed to tilt away in front of him and, simultaneously, the viewports blackened. “What—?”

“We must be starting up the shaft,” Carmen said. “The windows opaque when the boat turns nose up, probably to protect them.”

“Nose up?” The deck felt perfectly normal beneath him. “—Ah. So the Spinners could create gravity as well as eliminate it.”

“In a craft this size?” Amazement momentarily pulled Perez out of his tight-lipped silence. “Incredible.”

“Yeah.” Just one more item, Meredith thought grimly, to add to Astra's list of militarily useful hardware.

He hoped to hell the Spinners, whatever had happened to them, had left behind some answers when they went.

“It was pure luck we spotted them,” the
Trygve Lie's
captain told Msuya, his tone indicating he still wasn't sure he should have awakened his superior. “As per instructions we had a telescope trained on Olympus—”

“Yes, yes,” Msuya interrupted him, struggling into a robe as his feet searched the floor for his slippers. “Have they shifted yet?”

“No, sir,” the other said. “Actually, they seem more like they're heading somewhere in Astra's outer system.”

“Or else are trying to get far enough out that we won't be able to get their direction vector when they go,” Msuya snarled. It was the sort of precaution he'd expect Meredith to take. “After them, Captain—I want to be right next to them when they shift.”

“Yes, sir. We'll leave orbit in five minutes.”

Nice try, Colonel,
Msuya thought, smiling with grim satisfaction as the alarms sounded their warning of the upcoming activity.
But you can't get that ship away from me. It'll be mine … or it'll be no one's.

Lurching a bit as the
Trygve Lie's
rotation slowed, he headed for the bridge.

“S
O WHY HAVEN'T WE
shifted?” Perez demanded.

“Keep your RAM cool,” Meredith shot back over his shoulder, trying to hold his own fears in check. “Well?” he added as Carmen blanked the screen and leaned back in her chair.

She waved her hands helplessly. “Every diagnostic I can find says nothing's wrong,” she said. “The course we're on seems deliberate, as opposed to being random, so I can only conclude the boat knows what it's doing. Or at least thinks it does.”

“Great.” Meredith pondered. “You said the computer indicated four days to Spinnerhome?”

“Spinner days, yes. About a hundred twenty hours total.”

“Does our course indicate anything that far ahead that could be our destination? A larger preprogrammed ship, say, that has the necessary star drive?”

Carmen shook her head. “There's no way to tell at this range.”

“This is ridiculous,” Perez snorted. “Something's obviously gone wrong. Let's give up and go back to Astra.”

“I don't think that would be a good idea,” Meredith said. “There's a repulser flare moving on what looks like an interception course off our starboard side.”

“What?” Perez moved to the side viewport to look. “Who is it?”

“Does it matter? Whoever it is would probably be willing to risk even a Spinneret cable embargo in exchange for this one ship.”

“But how did they spot us? Carmen—you said we were using a gravity drive of some sort, right? So
we're
not putting out a flare of our own—”

“Msuya will have been watching from the UN ship,” Loretta put in quietly. “He knew about the lifeboat.”

Carmen twisted around. “He
what?
How could he?”

“Because she told him,” Meredith said calmly. “Don't look so surprised; it's been obvious ever since Dunlop's coup attempt that Dr. Williams and her friends were spies planted on us.”

“But the Ctencri …” Perez trailed off as cold anger replaced the shock on his face. “
Damn
them. They probably went straight to Saleh with my letters.” He turned to Loretta. “So they hired you to come here and learn the Spinner language for them.”

“They pressured me into doing it,” she corrected tiredly. “And now they have my two children. That's the pressure Msuya's been using on me lately.”

Perez snorted, looking back at Meredith.
“You
seem remarkably phlegmatic about all this. If you knew she was a spy, why did you let her aboard?”

“What choice was there?” Meredith countered. There were other reasons, but if the UN ship had a chance of overtaking them, he'd best keep his hole card private. “We needed her to decipher the controls, and we'll probably need her at Spinnerhome even more.”

“If it helps, I don't really want Msuya to win out here,” Loretta said. She looked at Hafner. “Especially after … what he tried to do through Major Dunlop. If I'd known he was going to use violence …”

“Well, he hasn't won anything yet,” Meredith told her. “Why don't you come up here and double-check Carmen's translations, make sure we're not missing some warning light or something.”

Loretta nodded and moved to the control board. Meredith took one last look at the distant repulser flare and walked over to Hafner. “You're very quiet, Doctor,” he said, sitting down next to him. “Still mad at me for shanghaiing you like this?”

Hafner smiled. “All you had to do was ask, you know—I wouldn't have missed seeing Spinnerhome for the world. No, actually, I was just sitting here trying to figure out what kind of star drive can take us anywhere from a dozen light-years to several hundred in the same few days.”

Meredith frowned. “Is
that
the scale Carmen's nav map shows?”

“I don't see it making sense any other way. What we've got here, it seems to me, is that old standby of science fiction, the instantaneous-jump drive.”

“Um.” Meredith chewed on his lower lip. “Then the five or six days between planets is just the insystem travel time between port and … what?”

“A safe distance from large masses, perhaps, or a low dust density,” Hafner suggested. “Hard to tell what they came up with. The immediate question, then, is whether Msuya will see anything we don't want him to see when we go.”

“Before that comes the question of his capturing us,” Meredith said dryly.

“Won't he run out of fuel first? A couple-three days of constant acceleration—”

“Won't bother him. The Rooshrike gave me the specs to Ctencri courier ships a few months back; it turns out they're designed for long-range insystem work as well as interstellar.”

“Oh.” Hafner pursed his lips. “I don't suppose we're armed or anything.”

“I doubt it. Maybe Carmen can program a little more speed for us.” He stood up, paused as Hafner touched his arm.

“Did you know Msuya could follow us?” the scientist asked quietly. “In other words, do you have a plan?”

“Afraid not,” Meredith shook his head. “I thought he'd see us emerge from Olympus, but I expected to be long gone into hyperspace before he could do anything about it. We'll just have to hope it takes him long enough to figure out how to perform deep-space piracy for us to reach our jump point.”

“If not, we break out the cutlasses?”

Meredith gave him a reassuring smile and moved off.

“You're just making this harder on yourselves,” Msuya growled, the distortions caused by the Spinner speaker not quite masking the other's rage. “You obviously can't control your ship well enough to escape, and it's clear your star drive's broken. I assure you I'm quite willing to disable you if I have to.”

“If you really wanted to shoot us down, you could have done so anytime in the past eight hours,” Meredith reminded him. Their talk had been going on sporadically for nearly that long now, and he, for one, was getting sick of hashing over the same territory. But as long as Msuya was reluctant to damage his prize—and as long as the odd gravitational effects from the lifeboat's drive continued to make a boarding dangerous for both ships—the impasse was a remarkably stable entity. “As I've said before, if you can't offer suitable guarantees for our safety, we'd just as soon go down with the ship.”

“You talk very casually of throwing your lives away,” the UN official spat out. He, apparently, was getting impatient as well. “Let me tell you a secret: sacrificing yourselves will no longer protect the Spinneret's secrets. We—
I
—know everything you do about the operation of your precious machine.”

“Yes, Dr. Williams has been telling us about your little spy network. Not a particularly clever setup, you know—I'm sure the CIA or KGB could have designed something better for you.”

There was a moment of silence, and in the gap Carmen snapped her fingers twice. Meredith looked at her; she pointed urgently to his seat belts and then to the screen. Against the navigation grid had appeared two spots that flickered back and forth from red to orange; directly between them sat the Lorraine-cross course indicator. Meredith raised his eyebrows questioningly, got an uneasy shrug in return, and began strapping in.

“So you know about that, do you?” Msuya said at last. “Well, it'll do you no good. Arrest them—execute them if it makes you feel any better—but understand that all I need to control the Spinneret is already in my hands.”