You know, you old buzzard! And you've found an excuse to send her out of harm's way, light-years from the primitive savage! Wouldn't do to let her get sacrificed to a volcano or something, would it? And she could never face the relatives with a bone through her nose!
No, let's be reasonable. He's just thought of all the same arguments against it that I have. And he's probably thinking more clearly than I am.
Still, Varien, may you roast in hell!
His eyes slid away from Varien's and met Aelanni's across the room. She knew.
The docking area that was the largest open space with life support in Phoenix Prime was full to capacity for the change of command. The honor guard dressed its ranks repeatedly under the eyes of Sergeant Thompson and his Russian opposite number, as the technicians counted down to the playing of the two national anthems. And beyond the spectators rested the shuttle that would take Kurganov to
Aleksandr Kerensky
for the voyage to Earth. They'd had some bad moments when the Earthside brass had wanted to change plans and have him take
Yeltsin
, which was in the process of refitting. A little creativity in accident reports had turned the trick, and the general confusion had enabled them to transfer several unreliable people to
Kerensky
.
Behind the sliding access doors, Kurganov and DiFalco awaited the signal to make their entry and mount the podium, unconsciously checking each other over. DiFalco's mood had not been improved by the older man's ribbing: surely, if he
really
tried, he could get his new full colonel's eagles even shinier!
Now, though, Kurganov had turned serious.
"No, Eric," he said quietly, "it is impractical. There would be no conceivable excuse for me to come back here just for the ignition of the Phoenix engine. And you will have no way to approach Earth; if one of Varien's ships came into detection range it would defeat our entire purpose of secrecy. And what about the pickup itself? Are you going to land a fusion-drive shuttle in Red Square? No, I must remain on Earth."
"To hell with that! I'll think of a way to take you with us."
"Ah, Eric, never stop being an optimist! I wouldn't recognize you." The general glanced at his wrist chrono. "It's almost time. I think this must be our real farewell. Remember me, however far you travel—you, and Varien, and Aelanni."
DiFalco blinked a few times—some damned crud in the air system! "Farewell . . . Seryozha."
Kurganov turned mock-pompous. "I've told you a thousand times: the familiar form is
not
used by a junior to a senior! And for another minute or so I'm still in command of this great ugly rock!" He shook his head sorrowfully, eyes twinkling. "You Americans have no respect—no sense of the proprieties."
"Just maybe," DiFalco heard himself say, "that's what will save us yet."
Kurganov looked at him for a long moment. "It always has in the past, Eric, but . . . I think not this time." His smile seemed to hold all the world's sadness. "In my grandfather's time, I could have watched with equaminity what your country is doing to itself. I might even have been tempted to indulge in what I believe Americans call the 'horse laugh.' But now my country has become a cultural dependency of yours, and if you go down into the dark you'll take us with you." He gripped his friend's shoulders, hard. "Come back, Eric! You must come back, carrying the stars in your hand! That's all that can save us now."
On his last word, the intercom crashed into the Russian anthem—first, for the outgoing CO—and there was no time for a final embrace. The doors slid open and they strode, shoulders aligned, to the podium.
It was off-watch, and no one disturbed the solitude of the wide-curving corridor outside the engineering spaces, bathed in starlight from the viewport where DiFalco and Aelanni stood, gazing alternately at each other and at the ship that she would, in a few watches, take to Altair.
The journey to the type A giant star was almost eight months' round trip under continuous-displacement drive. (The survey ship was not one of those that was built for speed and little else; she could only manage the equivalent of slightly better than fifty times lightspeed.) That, plus God knew how long surveying that star's vicinity for displacement points.
Yeah, Varien, I can tell you put some thought into this.
And it was more than just the time factor. Varien had found the perfect rival for him: new frontiers. She hadn't admitted it, but while she contemplated the separation with genuine bleakness, it was clear that her excitement at journeying to yet another new star was equally genuine. The very qualities that had caused him to recognize in her a kindred spirit made it impossible for her to feel otherwise. Any nascent rebellion she might have felt had been a casualty of this war of emotions.
"I wonder how your father knew?" he wondered aloud.
She gave one of the expressive Raehaniv shrugs that Sergei had always said made him homesick. Which, in turn, reminded him of the Russian and deepened his melancholy. Soon Aelanni would be gone too, and he would be alone with the enterprise he had conceived and must now carry to completion.
The American election of 2060 drew closer, and with it Moving Day for Phoenix.
It had been, DiFalco reflected, over a year and a half since Kurganov had departed—a year and a half marked by unprecedented poor planning in the Project. Design change after wasteful design change, bungled components requiring replacements, flawed supplies and equipment . . . astonishing amounts of money pissed away to a rising chorus of protest Earthside. The protests would have been even louder if anyone had known that the "rejected" materials had been taken to a nearby region of the asteroid belt and used to jury-rig devices whose like no one on Earth had ever seen and whose very functions few could have recognized.
The administration had backed them to the hilt through it all, as it continued to hope for a political miracle. It had no choice anyway; it had been identified with the Project from its inception, and couldn't admit a mistake of such magnitude. So the supplies had continued to arrive while the political situation Earthside had continued to crumble. And they were all too aware that their own machinations had hastened the crumbling by discrediting the Project—a realization that posed a morale problem no one had anticipated. (Liz Hadley in particular had come close to an emotional collapse.)
But their morale had merely suffered erosion; that of the Raehaniv had received a hammer blow when one of the picket ships had arrived from Tareil after setting a new speed record for traversing the Lirauva Chain, bringing the news that the home system had fallen even sooner than expected. Raehan had surrendered when the Korvaash fleets had filled her skies and further resistance could only lead to planetary devastation. Certain local authorities had doubted the seriousness of the aliens' threats, on the grounds that dead populations and atomized industrial plant would be no economic asset to the conqueror; they had not lived to regret their miscalculation, and neither had some millions of people under their charge. (The Korvaasha clearly subscribed to the half-a-loaf philosophy.) And the effect of a falling orbital tower on the planetary surface was something no one had wished to contemplate. So Raehan's surviving cities now lived in the threadbare, hungry twilight world of occupation, a bleakness varied only by the occasional mind-numbing horrors inflicted with machinelike emotionlessness by the silent cyborgian giants who stalked their now-shabby streets.
It wasn't unexpected, of course; its very inevitability had originally driven Varien and his followers here on their desperate quest. And it didn't invalidate their plans, which had been predicated from the first on the assumption that no help could be looked for in the Tareil system save from whatever tatters of the Raehaniv space fleet continued to wage a guerrilla resistance in the system's asteroids (and, indeed, some had escaped there, under Arduin's leadership). But none of that helped. For a space of days the Raehaniv had withdrawn into themselves, as was their way in the face of the grief for which they had no acceptable outlet, and the Terrans had spent an embarrassed time—what can you say? Even Varien, knowing nothing of the fate of his son and grandchildren, had seemed inadequate, almost broken.
He had gotten over it eventually, of course, and become his old self. (DiFalco had surprised himself by being relieved.) But then the realization had grown that their estimates of their ability to raise the American and Russian warships to the technological level at which the Raehaniv and the Korvaasha waged war had been too optimistic; if the initial breakthrough into the Tareil system was followed by a long-drawn-out campaign, it was well that they would have access to the resources Varien had secreted in Tareil's asteroid belt, and the help of the free Raehaniv fleet there. So Varien's enthusiasm had been dampened, but never extinguished . . . until now, when he looked across the desk at DiFalco with eyes as empty of life and hope as they had been the day he had learned of the fall of Raehan.
"I fear, Colonel, that I bear heavy tidings," he sighed after lowering himself into the chair. He was acting every day of his age—almost ninety Earth years, DiFalco now knew—and the vitality that Raehaniv medical science could partly but not entirely account for was in abeyance. Under some circumstances, DiFalco would have felt sympathy. Today, he leaned forward and spoke with a self-conscious cruelty normally foreign to his nature.
"Oh? I suppose you mean that there's still no word of any ship returning from Altair."
Varien visibly flinched, as if from a sudden jag of pain. Nuraeniel had returned from Sirius when expected, reporting that binary star's lack of displacement points. But from Aelanni there had been no word. Ample time had passed for her to locate any displacement points Altair possessed, or to satisfy herself that there were none to be found, and return to Sol. Then still more time had passed. And now, with Moving Day less than three months away, there was no question of sending a rescue mission to Altair. Aelanni and her crew were presumed lost.
"No, there is not," Varien said slowly, "although that isn't what I meant." He drew a deep breath, seeming to gather his strength. "Aelanni understood the risks involved, Colonel. She was not . . .
is
not a soldier, in your sense—we have had none for a long, long time, as I have explained. But she has always had a comparable sense of duty." He paused. Was there the slightest hint of malice in his eyes? "And, if memory serves, she showed no great hesitation about leaving, Colonel!"
A cold anger flared in DiFalco, banishing everything he had started to feel for an old man who had reason to believe both his children were dead. "Yes, there is something soldierly about her, isn't there? She'll follow orders . . . no matter what she thinks of them! No matter how cynical and unworthy she knows their motivations are!"
For a long moment they glared at each other in dead silence. It was a subject they had both shied away from—this was the closest either had ever come to an open acusation. It was Varien who blinked first, and lowered his eyes with a sigh.
"Whatever I did was done for the good of everyone concerned. You can have no conception of the cultural gulf! And Aelanni has led a life that perhaps leaves her unprepared for some things . . . unable to see beyond the glamor of novelty." He stopped with an annoyed look. "But I have permitted myself to be distracted from my original purpose, Colonel! A ship has, in fact, arrived under continuous-displacement drive . . . but from Alpha Centauri!"
DiFalco at once forgot everything but the implications of Varien's news. It went without saying that the Raehaniv had known about the ship's arrival first; their gravitic technology included grav scanners, capable of realtime detection over interplanetary distances due to gravity's instantaneous propagation. They could detect a ship's emergence from a displacement point—although the scanner, being directional, had to be trained on the displacement point at precisely the right time. And the continuous-displacement drive, with its ongoing series of intense grav pulses, showed up like the proverbial sore thumb. Both were, of course, undetectable by any instrument known to Earth's science. (He recalled, with a flash of amusement, the we-are-alone types in the last century who had made much of the absence of visible Bussard ramjet exhausts in the skies between the stars.)
"Alpha Centauri," he repeated. "So it can only be . . ."
" . . . the remaining picket ship from Tareil," Varien finished for him. "Which was under orders to abandon its station and come here under one and only one set of circumstances. I fear, Colonel, that that ship brings news that transcends our personal concerns—even our concern for Aelanni."
Naeriy zho'Troilaen was young for a ship captain, but she had aged quickly of late. That was clear as she told her story in the briefing room of Varien's ship. (It still bothered DiFalco that the Raehaniv ships lacked names; the custom had never arisen among them. Wasn't it supposed to be bad luck?)
"The Korvaasha began routine surveying almost as soon as they had settled into their occupation of Raehan. It seems they didn't trust the official records, taking for granted that our government must have been keeping secrets. At any rate, it was sheer chance that one of their ships blundered onto the fourth displacement point. We stepped our power output down to miminal life-support levels and waited them out. After they departed, we powered up and transited—they had no reason to have a grav scanner trained on the displacement point by then. We then," she finished anticlimactically, "proceeded here."
Varien slowly rose and faced the Terrans—most of the original members of the cabal. The Raehaniv in the room already knew, and their expressions made clear their understanding of the implications.
"We are undone," he said in a voice of ash. "The Korvaasha now know of the Lirauva Chain—we must assume that they have already begun to explore it. Our base at Alpha Centauri has been obliterated"—Naeriy nodded in confirmation—"so even when they reach it they will have no certain knowledge that we have been there. But they will, at a minimum, mount a heavy guard on Tareil's fourth warp point, and garrison the systems between Tareil and Alpha Centauri as quickly as they can survey them, merely as a matter of routine procedure." His dark eyes held all of theirs as he spoke the doom of all their hopes. "We can no longer enter the Tareil system from an unsuspected displacement point, which has been the basis of our plans from the beginning. We would have to assault a defended displacement point—hopeless in itself without overwhelming numerical superiority—after fighting our way through several intervening systems." His concentration seemed to waver, and when he resumed it was with a vague bewilderment that, in him, was shocking. "I never dreamed that the Korvaasha would discover the fourth displacement point so soon . . . their instrumentation is so unsophisticated . . . well, they
have
had centuries of experience in surveying . . . ."