Timeweb Trilogy Omnibus (60 page)

“Podships have already died,” Noah said, “one in each planetary explosion.”

“Then we should capture the disguised merchant ships,” Lorenzo said. “The moment each podship docks at a pod station, we move in and … “

“We don’t know how much time elapses between the arrival of a podship and the destruction of a planet,” Noah said. “Maybe the Mutatis don’t wait for each podship to dock.”

Without warning, Noah felt a change of air pressure, and heard a firm click. A podship floated into one of the docking bays and connected to a berth.

Hanging over the walkway, a glyphreader panel flashed, calling for all Timian One passengers to board.

“Your ship, Sire,” one of the officers said.

Lorenzo did not move.

Noah was agitated at the podship’s arrival, and hoped that he had not given his warning too late. Were there any Mutatis aboard?

The passengers began to offload through an airlock, while vessels in the cargo hold slipped into the docking bay. There were no schooners, and no signs of Mutatis. But the shapeshifters were tricky, and might have disguised the vessels he had seen earlier.

Just then, a Red Beret lieutenant ran from the Doge’s grid-copter, which had remained in a protective position, with its weapons activated. Reaching the Doge, the officer said, breathlessly, “Timian One has been destroyed, Sire! No one knows how.” He held a mobile transceiver in one hand. “The planet and its pod station have been wiped out, leaving only space debris. We have eyewitness reports of people who barely escaped with their lives. The crew of a conventional spacecraft saw a huge explosion from outside the star system, then went to our nearest base to make a report.”

“Sire, issue your commands to all planets!” Noah said. “Set up defensive perimeters at the pod stations!
Now
!”

Reluctantly, the Doge nodded. “Fire off a nehrcom message to General Poitier,” he said to his Royal Attaché. “Tell him I need sensor-gun specifications, exactly as Mr. Watanabe described.”

The dispatch was sent, and a short while later the reply came, with the needed information.

Suddenly animated, Doge Lorenzo barked orders to the Red Berets. All over the pod station, uniformed soldiers jumped into action. Urgent messages were relayed to the Canopa nehrcom station and dispatched all over the Merchant Prince Alliance. The podship floated out on its regular schedule, and Noah watched it disappear in a glimmer of green, into another dimension of Timeweb. Without the Doge or his entourage.

Noah hardly noticed his sister slinking away.

A short while later, the Doge’s troop transports arrived, eerily silent in the vacuum of space. Hundreds of soldiers disembarked.

Soon the Royal Attaché was operating a hibbamatic to create the necessary sensor-guns, and furry little Hibbil technicians hurried to install them around the perimeter of the pod station, set to pick off any podships automatically as they came in. Merchant prince warships moved into positions in orbital space, near the station.

Noah felt a terrible emptiness in the pit of his stomach. Timian One! Billions of people had been killed.

* * * * *

Only moments after the defensive mechanisms were set up, a podship emerged from deep space in a burst of green light. The defensive units opened fire and the sentient spacecraft broke apart, scattering thick pieces of the fleshy hull in orbit, along with passengers and fragments from on-board vessels.

From the pod station, Noah gazed out on scattered particles and broken bodies floating in the airless vacuum of space. What looked like a merchant prince schooner floated by, with its hull split open to reveal gleaming alloy tubes and a dead Mutati pilot. Soon, two more podships appeared, and were blasted away. Then they stopped coming.

Almost oblivious to Red Beret guards beside him, Noah felt immense pain and sadness for the loss of life, but knew he could not have taken any other course of action. As a galactic ecologist, he hated having to interfere with the podships in this way, but he was convinced that the measures he recommended would save more of the beautiful creatures than they would harm. The same held true with regard to the members of other races who had to be sacrificed. Many more of them would die if he did nothing.

Noah’s corporeal future was as uncertain as that of the rest of the galaxy. He expected to be taken into custody and blamed for the huge economic fallout that would result from the cessation of podship travel. Through their political wiles, Doge Lorenzo and Francella would spin the facts to make it look as if the entire crisis was Noah’s fault. He didn’t know exactly how they would fabricate the story, but knew they would.

Deep in his psyche, a part of Noah no longer concerned itself with such details, for he was evolving into something unique in the annals of history, changing moment by moment.

The End

Dedication

For my loving wife and incredible soul-mate, Jan. Thank you for believing in me wholeheartedly, and for never doubting me when I told you truthfully that I had dedicated
Timeweb
to you, and the printer forgot to include that page. With Book Two in the series,
The Web and the Stars,
I am including that original dedication:

Of all the books I have written, I owe the most to Jan for this one. You are the love of my life and my daily inspiration. Thank you for being so understanding while I spend much of my life in my study, taking fantastic journeys through space and time. You are a blessing beyond words.

Chapter One

A thought can be immortal, even if its creator is not.

—Noah Watanabe

They floated in orbital space, torn fragments of thick, lifeless flesh, drifting apart slowly in bright sunlight. Nearby, the powerful sensor-guns of a pod station waited for the emergence of another podship, in a flash of green light. But it did not happen. Now, following three explosions in a matter of hours … obliterating as many podships and all of their passengers … an eerie silence prevailed.

Looking through the porthole of a shuttle as it made its way through the carnage, Noah Watanabe felt the deepest sadness in his entire life. To his knowledge, nothing like this had ever before happened in history. He had been responsible for it and felt considerable guilt, but reminded himself that the violence had been necessary to prevent further Mutati attacks, and that podships and their passengers had been dying anyway, each time the shapeshifters used their super-weapon against a merchant prince planet. Entire worlds had been annihilated!

For millions of years the gentle Aopoddae had traversed the galaxy to its farthest reaches and back, making their way through perilous meteor storms, asteroid belts, exploding stars, black holes, and a myriad of other space hazards. The sentient spacecraft had survived all of those dangers, and might have continued to do so for the rest of eternity.

If not for the unfortunate intervention of galactic warfare.…

* * * * *

They’re shooting podships out of space!

In the millennium that he had been the Eye of the Swarm, the leader of the Parvii race, Woldn had never faced a crisis of this dimension. Now he had to make a quick decision and knew it would be the defining moment of his life, the event that would be remembered for eternity.

He flew from star system to star system and then back again in a matter of moments, accompanied by an entourage of only a few million Parviis, moving with him almost as if they were part of his body. Usually he had many more of his kind with him, linked telepathically, but now he needed solitude and room to think. This small group constituted his royal guard, and now he was performing the Parvii equivalent of pacing, flying back and forth across great distances.

His worries caused him to fly faster. He reached such a speed that he very nearly left the others behind. Just before flying into the heart of a red giant sun, he spun around and returned, speeding past his entourage again, in the other direction.

He knew what had led up to the podship crisis, the Mutati torpedoes that destroyed four merchant prince planets, attacks that stemmed from the long-standing enmity between the Humans and their shapeshifting enemies.

When his guards had finally caught up with him, Woldn had made his difficult, monumental decision. The slender Parvii had slowed in the spiral arm of the galaxy, and come to a dead stop in space. His defenders gathered around.

From there, where no outsider could see him, the powerful Eye of the Swarm communicated his decision to his Parvii minions, sending mental signals so powerful that they reached completely across the galaxy, to every sector.

Effective immediately, without regard to who was at fault for the destruction of the three podships at Canopa, the Parviis would cut off all podship travel to and from Human and Mutati worlds. No notices would be sent; podships would simply no longer go to those places. Throughout the rest of the galaxy, service would continue. Furthermore, all podships presently operating in Human and Mutati sectors were to jettison their passengers and cargoes, and report to a remote region of the galaxy.

He transmitted the telepathic commands, ranging far and wide. In those targeted sectors, the bellies of hundreds of podships opened in-flight and everything tumbled out, sending the unfortunate, unwitting passengers to their instantaneous deaths.

* * * * *

In a matter of hours, Woldn received a troubling report that his messages had not reached every Parvii pilot. He had feared this might happen, since the number of telepathic dead zones in the galaxy had been increasing at an alarming rate, running parallel with the disintegration of Timeweb.

Boarding a podship, the Eye of the Swarm prepared to broadcast from a sectoid chamber directly to pilots in other sectoid chambers, a method that boosted his signal strength. In Woldn’s lifetime this had never been necessary, but it was one of the methods his predecessors had employed successfully in times of need. On the downside, it might injure the podship he transmitted from, due to the painful amplification of signal strength. But that was a risk he had to take.

Too much was at stake.

Chapter Two

In the vast universe, there are always hunters and their prey, either overt or latent. As a corollary, all relationships are only temporary, depending upon circumstances, mutual needs, and the availability of alternate sources of energy to satisfy the basic requirements of the living organisms. Symbiosis is only an illusion, and a potentially dangerous trap for the unwary.

—Master Noah Watanabe

As Tesh clung to the wall of the sectoid chamber at the nucleus of her podship, she guided the vessel along the gently curving strands of a deep-space web. Thinking back to a very special wild pod hunt centuries ago, she recalled her initiation into the ancient process. It had been in one of the darkest and most mysterious sectors of the galaxy, where hardly anything could be seen by the naked eye or instrumentation. But from an intense racial need, or survival-based instinct, Parviis on the hunt were able to see with a powerful inner eye—one that illuminated the fleeing podships as glowing green objects, like luminescent whales in a stygian sea.

She had been with other Parviis flying freely in space, millions and millions of them swarming to capture the feral pods, using neurotoxin stingers on the big, dumb creatures to subdue and train them. Gradually, as the podships were controlled and began to respond to the commands of their handlers, the Parviis cut back on the drugs, and drastically reduced their own numbers … until finally one tiny Parvii could control each Aopoddae vessel.

Employing that procedure, Tesh was given command of her first sentient ship. It had been an extraordinary, exhilarating experience, and she came to feel that the captured podship was her very own, like a Human teenager with a pony. At the time she knew the ownership sensation was preposterous, because her people rotated piloting duties, but she couldn’t help feeling it. Afterward, in due course, she passed the pod on to one of her comrades and went on to other duties.

Reminiscing now, she sighed and felt a profound, deeply satisfying connection with her people and their collective past. For hundreds of years Tesh had piloted countless other podships, but none had been as special as that first capture; like a first love, none had ever occupied the same place in her heart.

Within a narrow range, each Aopoddae ship had a subtly distinct personality, a slightly different way of responding to her commands. While all podships were similar in appearance, her trained eye could make out slightly different vein patterns on the skins, and with a touch she was able to distinguish varying textures. Inside the green, glowing core of this one, she inhaled deeply and identified barely perceptible musk odors, some of which reminded her of that first pod.

She was thinking how relaxing it was out here, speeding along the faint green web strands, hearing only the faint background hum of the sectoid chamber. Then the podship vibrated and slowed.

Using her linkage to peer through the eyes of the sentient vessel, Tesh saw that the web strand—ahead and behind—was slightly frayed, with tiny filaments fluttering in space, as if dancing on a cosmic breeze. Still vibrating, the vessel proceeded slowly over a rough section, making Tesh uneasy. She’d known the web was deteriorating but had never discovered the reason, and as a pilot she had never experienced anything like this before.