“Not a chance. Sorry.”
“Bugger.”
“You two did a good job up here,” Joshua said. “Well done, that was some fine piloting to stay above the space-plane.”
“Thanks, Josh.”
Joshua looked from Liol, who was anchored to a stikpad by the captain’s acceleration couch, to Sarha, whose expression was
utterly unrepentant.
“Oh, Jesus, you gave him the access codes.”
“Yes, I did. My command decision. There was a war up here, Joshua.”
It wasn’t, he decided, worth making an issue out of, not in view of everything else that was happening. “That’s why I left
you in charge,” he said. “I had confidence in you, Sarha.”
She frowned suspiciously. He
sounded
sincere. “So you got Mzu, then. I hope it was worth it.”
“For the Confederation I suppose it is. For individuals… you’d have to ask them. But then individuals have been dying because
of her for some time now.”
“Captain, please access our sensor suite,” Beaulieu said.
“Right.” He rolled in midair, and landed on his acceleration couch. The images from the external sensor clusters expanded
into his mind. Wrong. They had to be wrong. “Jesus wept!” His brain was already acting in conjunction with the flight computer’s
astrogration program to plot a vector before he’d fully admitted the reality of the tide of rock descending on the planet.
“Prepare for acceleration, thirty seconds—mark. We have to leave.” A fast internal sensor check showed him his new passengers
hurrying towards couches; images superimposed with purple and yellow trajectory plots that wriggled frantically as he refined
their projected trajectory.
“Who did that?” he asked.
“No idea,” Sarha said. “It happened during the battle, we didn’t even know until afterwards. But it sure as hell wasn’t random
combat wasp strikes.”
“I’ll monitor the drive tubes,” Joshua said. “Sarha, take systems coverage, please. Liol, you’ve got fire control.”
“Aye, Captain,” Liol said.
It was a strictly neutral tone. Joshua was satisfied with that. He triggered
Lady Mac’s
fusion drives, bringing them up to a three-gee acceleration.
“Where are we going?” Liol asked.
“Bloody good question,” Joshua said. “For now I just
want us out of here. After that, it rather depends on what
Ione and the agents decide, I expect.”
• • •
There must be someone who knows. One of you.
We know it is real. We know it is hidden.
Two bodies await. A male and a female. Youthful, splendid. Do you hear them? Do you taste them? Pleading for one of you to
enter them. You can. All the riches and pleasures of reality can be yours again. If you have the admission price, one tiny
piece of information. That’s all.
She didn’t hide it by herself. She had help from somebody. Probably many. Were you one?
Ah. Yes. You. You are being truthful. You know.
Come then. Come forwards, come through. We reward you with—
He cried out in wonder and misery as he struggled his way into the victim’s agonized nervous system. There was pain, and shame,
and humiliation to cope with; tragic, terrible pleas from the body’s true soul. One by one, he faced them down, mending the
broken flesh, suppressing and ignoring the protest, until there was only his own shame left. Not so easily abandoned.
“Welcome to the Organization,” said Oscar Kearn. “So, you were part of Mzu’s mission?”
“Yes. I was with her.”
“Good. She’s a clever woman, that Mzu. I’m afraid she’s eluded us once again, thanks to that traitor bitch Barnes. Even so,
only the amazingly resourceful can duck an iron-berg when it’s falling on their heads. I didn’t realize what I was dealing
with before. I don’t suppose she would have helped us even if we had caught her. She’s like that, tough and determined. But
now her luck’s run out. You can tell me, can’t you? You know where the Alchemist is.”
“Yes,” Ikela said. “I know where it is.”
• • •
Alkad Mzu floated into the bridge, accompanied by Monica and Samuel. She acknowledged Joshua with a small twitch of her lips,
then blinked when she saw Liol. “I didn’t know there were two of you.”
Liol grinned broadly.
“Before we all start arguing over what to do with you, Doctor,” a serjeant said. “I’d like you to confirm the Alchemist does
or did exist.”
Alkad tapped her toe on a stikpad beside the captain’s couch, preventing herself from drifting about. “Yes, it exists.And
I built it. I wish to Mary I hadn’t, now, but the past is past. My only concern now is that it doesn’t fall into anybody’s
hands, not yours, and certainly not the possessed.”
“Very noble,” Sarha said, “from someone who was going to use it to kill an entire planet.”
“They wouldn’t have been killed,” Alkad said wearily. “It was intended to extinguish Omuta’s star, not turn it nova. I’m not
an Omutan barbarian; they’re the ones who kill entire worlds.”
“Extinguish a star?” Samuel mused in puzzlement.
“Please don’t ask for details.”
“I propose Dr Mzu is taken back to Tranquillity,” the serjeant said. “We can formalize the observation to insure she doesn’t
pass the information on. I don’t think you will anyway, Doctor, but intelligence agencies are highly suspicious entities.”
Monica consulted Samuel. “I can live with that,” she said. “Tranquillity is neutral territory. It isn’t all that different
to our original agreement.”
“It isn’t,” Samuel agreed. “But, Doctor, you do realize you cannot be allowed to die. Certainly not until the problem of possession
has been resolved.”
“Fine by me,” Alkad said.
“What I mean, Doctor, is that when you are very old, you must be placed in zero-tau to prevent your soul from entering the
beyond.”
“I will not give anyone the Alchemist technology, no matter what the circumstances.”
“I’m sure that is your intention at the moment. But how will you feel after a hundred years trapped in the beyond? A thousand?
And to be indelicate, the choice is not yours to make. It is ours. You lost the right to self-determination when you built
the Alchemist. If you give yourself enough power to make a galaxy fear you and what you can achieve, you abrogate that right
to those whom your actions affect.”
“I agree,” the serjeant said. “You will be placed in zero-tau before you die.”
“Why not just put me in now?” Alkad said crustily.
“Don’t tempt me,” Monica said. “I know the kind of contempt you moron intellectuals hold the government services in. Well
listen good, Doctor, we exist to protect the majority so they can run around living their lives as decently and as best they
can. We protect them from
shits
like you, who never fucking stop to think what you’re doing.”
“You didn’t protect my bloody planet, did you!” Alkad yelled back. “And don’t you dare lecture me on responsibility. I’m prepared
to die to stop the Alchemist being used by anybody else, especially your imperialist Kingdom. I know my responsibilities.”
“You do now.
Now
you realize what a mistake you made, now people are dying just to keep your precious arse safe.”
“Okay, that’s it,” Joshua said loudly. “We’re all agreed where the doc is going, end of discussion. Nobody is going to start
shouting about moral philosophy on my bridge. We’re all tired, we’re all emotional. Pack it in, the pair of you. I’m going
to plot a course to Tranquillity, you go to your cabins and cool off. We’ll be home inside of two days.”
“Understood,” Monica said through clenched teeth. “And .. . thank you for getting us off. It was—”
“Professional?”
She almost snapped back at him, but that grin… “Professional.”
Alkad cleared her throat. “I’m sorry,” she said apologetically. “But there is a problem. We can’t go straight back to Tranquillity.”
Joshua massaged his temple and asked: “Why not?” if only to stop Monica from flying at Mzu’s throat.
“The Alchemist itself.”
“What about it?” Samuel asked.
“We have to collect it.”
“All right,” Joshua said in a far-from-reasonable tone. “Why?”
“Because it isn’t secure where it is.”
“It’s managed to stay secure for thirty years. Jesus, just take the secret of its location to zero-tau with you. If the agencies
haven’t found it by now, they never will.”“They won’t have to look anymore, nor will the possessed, especially if our current
situation continues for more than a few years.”
“Go on, we may as well hear it all.”
“There were three ships on our strike mission against Omuta,” Alkad said. “The
Beezling
, the
Chengho
, and the
Gombari. Beezling
was the Alchemist’s deployment vessel, I was on board; the other two were our escort frigates. We were intercepted by blackhawks
before we could deploy the Alchemist. They destroyed the
Gombari
, and hit us and the
Chengho
pretty badly. We were left for dead in interstellar space. Neither of us could jump, and the nearest inhabited star was seven
light-years away.
“After the attack, we spent a couple of days repairing our internal systems, then we rendezvoused. It was Ikela and Captain
Prager who came up with the eventual solution.
Chengho
was smaller than
Beezling
, it didn’t need as many energy patterning nodes to perform a ZTT jump. So the crew removed some of the
Beezling’s
intact nodes and installed them in the
Chengho
. We didn’t have the proper tools for that kind of job; and then the nodes had different power ratings and performance factors,
they had to be completely re-programmed. It took us three and a half weeks, but we did it. We rebuilt ourselves a ship that
could make a ZTT jump—not very well, and not very far, but it was functional. That was when things started to get difficult.
The
Chengho
was too small to take both crews, even for just a small jump. There was only one life-support capsule, and it could hold
eight of us at a push. We knew we couldn’t risk a flight back to Garissa, the nodes would never last that long, and we guessed
that Omuta would have launched some kind of big attack by then. After all, that’s why we’d been dispatched in the first place,
to stop them. So we jumped to the nearest inhabited star system, Crotone. The idea was that we’d charter a ship and get back
to Garissa that way. Of course, when we arrived at Crotone, we heard about the genocide.
“Ikela and Prager had even formulated a worst case option. Just in case, they said. We’d brought some antimatter with us on
the
Chengho;
if we sold that together with the frigate it would fetch millions. Assuming the Garissan government no longer existed, we
would have all the money we needed to operate independently for decades.”
“The Stromboli Separatist Council,” Samuel said suddenly.
“Right,” Alkad acknowledged. “That’s who we sold it to.”
“Ah, we never did find out how they got their antimatter. They blew up two of Crotone’s low-orbit port stations with the stuff.”
“After we left, yes,” Alkad said.
“So Ikela took the money and founded T’Opingtu.”
“Correct; once we found out that the Confederation Assembly granted the Dorados to the survivors of the genocide, all seven
navy officers were given an equal share. The plan was for them to invest the money in various companies, the profits from
which would be used to help fund the partizans. We needed committed nationalists to crew the ship that they were supposed
to prepare for me. After that, they would buy or charter a combat-capable starship to complete the Alchemist mission. As you
know, Ikela didn’t fulfill the last part of the plan. I don’t know about the others.”
“Why wait thirty years?” Joshua asked. “Why didn’t you just hire a combat-capable starship as soon as you had the money from
the sale of the frigate, and go straight back to the
Beezling
?”
“Because we couldn’t be sure exactly where it was. You see, we didn’t just repair the
Chengho
. There were thirty people and the Alchemist left behind on the
Beezling
. Suppose the
Chengho
didn’t make it, or suppose we were caught and interrogated by the CNIS or some other agency? There was even the possibility
the blackhawks might return. We had to plan for all those factors as well, the remaining crew had to be given their chance,
too.”
“They went into zero-tau,” Joshua said. “How does that prevent you from knowing the exact coordinate?”
“Yes, obviously they went into zero-tau, but that’s not all. We also repaired their reaction drive. They flew a vector to
an uninhabited star which was only two and a half light-years away.”
“Jesus, a sub-lightspeed journey through interstellar space? You’ve got to be kidding. That’s impossible, it would take—”
“Twenty-eight years, we estimated.”
“Ah!” Realization came to Joshua like the silent detonation of Norfolk Tears after it hit the stomach. He felt a surge of
admiration for those lost desperate crews of thirty years ago. Not caring what the odds were, just going for it. “They used
antimatter propulsion.”
“Yes. We transferred every gram from our remaining combat wasps into the
Beezling’s
confinement chambers. It was enough to accelerate them up to about nine per cent lightspeed. So now tell me, Captain, how
difficult would it be to locate a ship that is moving away from its last known coordinate at eight or nine per cent lightspeed?
And if you did find it, how would you rendezvous?”
“Not possible. Okay, you have to wait until the
Beezling
decelerated and arrived at that uninhabited star. How come you didn’t make a dash for them two years ago?”
“Because we weren’t sure just how efficient the drive would be over such a long period of use. Two years gave us an adequate
safety margin; and of course as it turned out, the sanctions would be over. There was always a remote chance the Confederation
Navy blockade squadron would detect us, after all it’s their job to be looking for sanction-buster starships emerging in odd
places around Omuta. So after we sold the
Chengho
we decided on thirty years.”