3. FOUR PARROTS AND ONE COOKED GOOSE, WITH
FIREWORKS
THE TEMPLE COMPLEX THAT WAS ALSO WA CHI Center
had a far different look to it on the surface; a series of large
domes, some atop thick cylindrical bases, stretched out starting
about fifty meters from shore. Most were polished, waterproofed
wood, ornately carved and trimmed in silver and gold, although
there was some polished stone and slate and atop the domes, an
assortment of stained glass skylights showing religious or ethical
themes. Only a few lights showed through; it was essential that the
primitive mass of the population should not suspect the existence
of the technological wonders that the elite running their world
took for granted, even by accident. Water approach was secure, but
Chanchukians often were both curious and creative and were not
above occasional land forays to see what they could see, and while
Wa Chi was sacred ground, forbidden to the masses, it was so eerily
impressive above the water that many made pilgrimages just to look
upon it.
The coast itself was a black sand beach cut into a wide cleft in
the rock; around it the coastal range rose fifteen hundred meters,
the first five hundred or so in a craggy basalt rock wall.
The beach was used primarily for recreation and sunning oneself
on hot days. Although it was often convenient to bring boats in
there, supplies were landed elsewhere. Flat coastal barges were
fairly common over the world and so wouldn’t attract any
attention. They were powered by oar and sail and often by crews
pushing from beneath, guided by a helmsman above who could stomp
out commands to the “pushers.”
Every night a thick fog rolled in, covering the domes of the
lodges and the beach area, making things miserable for anyone
foolish enough to be out in it. Security used a sophisticated radar
to sweep the area at those times, and special infrared goggles to
see through even the densest fog.
Without the SPF present, this would have been a piece of cake,
but now the raiders had to resort to a mixture of the crude and the
creative to achieve their end. The crude was first; the SPF had set
up a low, horizon-sweep air radar on top of the mountain
overlooking the Center to supplement the surface patrols that were
normally run from Wa Chi’s security central. It gave some
protection against low-flying aircraft should any potential enemy
use them, but it was a weak point spotted early by the team.
The small radar station was automated and transmitted directly
to security central and also to the SPF command ship via satellite.
Monitoring there, too, was totally automated, designed to ring an
alarm if anything unusual was spotted. Colonel Chi, however,
mindful that the pirates in the past had shown a remarkable talent
for beating electronic locks, also had two enlisted personnel fully
armed stationed at the radar unit at all times, in six-hour
shifts.
Min Xao Po watched the guard change at two hundred hours through
her own special night goggles, then waited until the old guards
wearily put on their flight packs and jumped off the cliff to float
down to the beach below. She allowed them fifteen minutes to be on
the beach and in the water, well away from any trouble and unable
to return quickly, then took aim on the two new guards and shot
them down before they knew what hit them. The weapon fired a high
stun, rather than a killing beam, since the guards wore automatic
life sensors that would have brought a fast investigation if either
had died.
Hurrying to the fallen guards, she removed from a pouch a small
medical injector, already loaded with serum, and gave each guard a
shot in the arm. It would guarantee that they would sleep until
relieved, by which time this would be long over.
The Chows, born wizards with all sorts of locks, had looked at
the analytical photos of the lock on the radar unit and solved it
in a flash. It was pretty crude, but it did have a few nasty little
booby traps for the unwary or ignorant. The combination
wasn’t much of a problem; Vulture had tapped that line long
ago.
Carefully Min placed a device measuring about half a meter
square over the locking mechanism, securing it with clamps to the
small cubicle, then activated it with the press of a button. There
was a lot of loud clicking and a whine and then a light began
blinking on the device signaling that the door was unlocked. She
removed the device but did not immediately unlock the door. Instead
she climbed up on the top of the cubicle to the antenna complex,
found the set she wanted, removed another small box, and attached
it between two smaller antennas and then lifted up a second set of
antennas almost the same size as those on the cubicle. Two cables
were attached to terminals on the box, and then, stretching, she
fastened the huge alligator clips on the other end of the cables
simultaneously to the two fixed antennas. She then scurried back
down to the ground and waited nearly five minutes to make certain
that no activity could be heard from below.
Satisfied, she nodded to herself and opened the door. A bell
alarm sounded, but it was muffled beyond the immediate area by the
sound of the surf and wasn’t intended to do more than alert
the guards. The same alarm was now being transmitted to security
central and should have brought a horde of troopers armed to the
teeth, but the signal was now not being broadcast by the twin
original antennas to the receivers below, but rather being fed
directly into her little box, which filtered out all the nasty,
unpleasant things like alarms and then sent the rest of the signal
unaltered. With the simple press of a button on a remote control on
her belt, she could stop even that and send whatever signal she
wanted.
Her entry would be recorded and what she was doing would later
be plain to investigators, but she didn’t have the time to
dig into complex built-in monitor circuits nor did she want to risk
tripping secondary alarms. Let them find out—as long as it
was later. By now all three of them were almost certainly on
Colonel Chi’s wanted list simply by being absent from home
for four days, and she had no intention of being anywhere near
Chanchuk by the time the recordings were viewed.
She was relieved to find the unit a stock SPF issue as expected.
She had nightmares of having to face a totally different design
from what she’d been mindprinted to handle. Bless the
military mind! Within minutes she had done her work, and from this
point you could have brought Thunder in hovering over Wa
Chi Center and the screens and monitors both at the Center and on
the command ship would show empty, peaceful space. Of course, the
orbital and deep-space monitors were still operable, but those were
not a concern at the moment.
It went perfectly. The only thing they hadn’t anticipated
was the headache that damned alarm gave her, bouncing around in
that confined space.
She emerged, closed the door, and got some blessed silence.
Since there were no alarms sounding near or far now and no armed
squads and since she was still conscious and free, she took the
liberty of assuming that their estimate of Min Xao Po as a
brilliant communications technician had not been misplaced. She
picked up a small waterproof transceiver from her pack and lifted
it to her mouth.
“Secure One. Proceeding to level two.” She secured
her own floater device, picked up the bulky pack, and jumped off
the cliff.
Allowing themselves the time not merely to scout out but to
analyze the entire problem with the Thunder’s
computer and personnel and then taking the additional time and
patience to slowly infiltrate in the exact equipment needed was
paying off.
Now, aboard a coastal raft, Chung Mung Wo was getting her own
equipment in shape. The raft was a regular; it was expected in
these waters between midnight and dawn out on the fringes of the
security zone, just out of the fog area. Being subject to all sorts
of delays, it wasn’t unusual to have it show up on the
surface sweeps at any hour of the early morning—and often
later—and, because it wasn’t a Center craft but a
native one running between two native villages sixty or so
kilometers south of the Center and ninety kilometers north of it,
there was really no way security personnel could determine if it
was truly the correct raft or not. There would be no way of knowing
that the old helmsman had somehow gotten herself dead drunk down in
Waning and hadn’t even sobered up enough to leave town as
yet.
Chung checked her console, deployed the aerial and underwater
transmitters, and began to crank up the juice a bit. “Nice
static electricity tonight,” she mumbled to herself.
“Couldn’t be better. That fog is energizing almost too
well.” She looked at her watch. “Have to bring it up
slowly. We want the fireworks on schedule.”
Forward, Butar Killomen, the leader of this meager but
well-armed attack force, checked her own control console. This was
the one area she was most nervous about, since there had been no
way to test this equipment except with computer simulations. She
had some faith in simulations, but she was an old spacer. Computers
could answer only the questions you asked them in the first place,
and there was no substitute for actual experience. The very air was
starting to crackle all around them.
Around the Sacred Lodge, the surface guards, in pairs on small
platforms and within sight of one another even through the fog,
began to get disturbed.
“Must be a storm coming up,” one remarked to her
companion. “I don’t remember there being one on the
weather plots, but the electricity in the air tonight’s so
high I’m blind with these damned goggles on. It’s
shorting out everything.”
Her companion nodded. “I’m worried. If it gets much
worse than this we’ll get shocks every time we touch
anything. You get too high a charge, I heard that these damned
rifles’ll discharge all at once. I sure don’t want to
be holdin’ one that does.”
“That’s for sure.” The other nodded.
“Look, I’m gonna call this in. Anybody tries anything
in this shit is gonna be in the same shape we’re in. Besides,
this whole watch is screwy anyway. What are they gonna do? Bomb
us?”
She undipped her communicator. The static on it was almost
unendurable in and of itself. “This is Corporal Gwi, Post
Three. We have prestorm conditions up here and high static.
Visibility is zero even with the goggles, and we are starting to
get equipment malfunction.”
In about two minutes there was a loud splash and the sergeant of
the guard popped up and looked around in the water below. She
shouted the password, then did a survey. “You’re right.
It’s lousy tonight. I’ll call the OD.”
The officer of the day appreciated the conditions, but also
reflected that it was just the sort of night that she’d
choose to try something. It was certain that the guards were in
more danger from their own equipment than any help in fending off
an attack. Still, she didn’t like to make any major decisions
that might haunt her. She called Colonel Chi in her quarters.
Chi, awakened from a sound sleep, was in a foul mood, but
listened intently. “Check with the command ship for weather
data, then check space, air, surface, and subsurface scanners. If
nothing shows up, have them come below until conditions
clear—but they go back up the moment conditions clear,
understand?”
“Yes, Colonel.” The OD called the command ship.
“Anything unusual on your scopes?”
“Nothing at all, Captain. We’re measuring a local
disturbance in your area, though.”
“Anything unusual about it?”
“Well, meteorology can’t give a good reason for it,
but we’ve seen this sort of thing a couple of times before.
It’s rare, but it happens. Space monitors are clear, and the
aerial scan shows only your disturbance. I wouldn’t worry
about it.”
“Thank you.” The OD turned to her sergeant.
“Check all surface and subsurface monitors.”
“Already did, Captain. Nothing subsurface, but we’ve
got enough stuff there that anyone’d be crazy to try
anything. Air is a mess. With all that static and the discharge
from the storm, it looks like we’re being invaded, but the
monitoring computers don’t seem to be worried. You know they
could pick a bird out of that mess anyway, ’cause the echoes
from the storm are constantly changing in random patterns. Anything
solid would be regular. I’d say it’s clear.”
She nodded. “Very well. Send the sergeant of the guard a
stand-down for surface personnel until, in the assessment of this
or higher authority or the sergeant of the guard on the scene,
conditions should improve to a safe level. Got it?”
“Got it. Sending now.”
Butar Killomen looked at her watch. It was time. She turned and
shouted back to Chung. “Let’s do it!”
Chung nodded and brought up the charge to near storm levels. Her
console was getting hot, but it didn’t have to last all that
long anyway and, besides, enough energy had been dumped into that
fog bank now that it had a life of its own. Already there was a
good deal of lightning, and even from their distance the boom of
thunder reached them with increasing frequency. It was quite a nice
fireworks show, if Chung did say so herself.
Butar Killomen put on the command helmet and sat back in her
makeshift recliner. The drone was already powered up; now she was
in complete command of it, and it was a mess. There was certainly a
lot of noise in the interface connection, more as the small drone
lifted off like some great bird of prey and slid into the night,
even though the special frequencies they were using were supposed
to insulate the electronics, and the intense lightning and the
sudden updrafts and downdrafts caused by the storm were hard to
handle. These were not the kind of conditions for an amateur pilot,
and the tiny computer brain in the drone was hardly adequate by
itself to handle these conditions. The problem was, any radar-type
scan to maintain distance and pick out targets that would be useful
to them would also be useful to the SPF; by knocking out the SPF,
they knew they’d be flying by the seat-of-the-pants method,
and that required great skill. Butar only hoped she wasn’t
too out of practice.
The visuals were awful; there was so much energy around that the
sensors were filled with garbage, and she concentrated hard to
separate the real from the unreal and keep everything just so.
There! Ease over, careful, careful, you did this in your
mind a thousand times blind . . .
The drone, barely three meters long by two across, settled onto
one of the guard perches and then locked itself onto the polished
wooden dome of the Sacred Lodge itself. A small drill extended from
beneath and bored a tiny hole through the more than twenty
centimeters of wood wall with nearly silent efficiency. There was a
problem when the required depth was reached; there was no
indication that the tip of the drill was through. Worried, she
continued on, but it was another ten centimeters, almost the length
of the drill, before she broke free. She guessed she’d
drilled through a case or an ornamental work, but it didn’t
matter what.
Next the drill was retracted and a small hose inserted. She had
a tense moment when she realized that the hose was only thirty
centimeters—perhaps a fraction short—and cursed herself
for not thinking of this eventuality, but it was close enough. A
centimeter was a very tiny distance and the ejection would be under
pressure.
Almost immediately the tanks switched on and began pumping a
high volume of the colorless, odorless neurotoxin into the Sacred
Lodge. She guessed it was going in in the vicinity of the entry
hall, but it didn’t really matter. The way the interior
climate control worked, the stuff would be all over the place
inside of six anxious minutes, and it only took about two parts per
billion to paralyze anyone breathing it in.
Now, if no busybody popped up at that point and spotted the
probe, and if Vulture was ready for the gas, could neutralize it,
switch the rings, and then find where the opening was, all within a
very short period of time, they just might make it.
This was certainly the toughest one yet, from a technical point
of view. Part of the problem had been access to the inside of the
Sacred Lodge, which was difficult even with Vulture, and
part had been circumventing the security system. There was,
however, one security system they could not circumvent because they
didn’t really know it or its capabilities. Nobody really did.
That was the internal one inside the Sacred Lodge, beyond even
Center’s security control. You could tamper with the monitors
and records, those things that had been designed for human
interfacing, but not the mechanical guard devices. Those operated
automatically whenever the Holy Lama was awake, and the only thing
the raiders could guess about the devices was that they were
formidable. Clayben had been insistent that their plans take the
worst-case approach toward the security system even though it might
be less efficient than they feared, and that was as it had to
be.
There was no way to get Vulture out of there without blowing a
fairly large and hardly unobtrusive hole in the dome and almost
certainly triggering all sorts of alarms. The windows and tempting
skylight in the Holy Lama’s office were connected to the
internal system as well as audible external alarms. They might
still have gotten Vulture out, but the odds of a successful getaway
after were practically nil. No, success depended on stealing the
ring separately and letting Vulture rely on his unique talents to
escape at a later time. Nor could they count on Vulture simply
becoming the Holy Lama. Not only would the best security system be
keyed on both her and the ring, but she could not exit without
always being in a crowd. Vulture was hard to kill, but mortal all
the same.
Vulture, of course, had already practiced with the specific
neurotoxin used, neutralizing it in no time with his absolute
cellular control. Awake and waiting, his body and mind sensed the
danger at once and moved to combat it. The process was simple but
not automatic. He’d been caught unawares by such substances
before, but this was different, it was expected and almost on
schedule.
The other Seed slept on like corpses. Even if they’d
suddenly awakened, they could not have so much as opened their
eyes, although their autonomic systems continued to function in a
reduced but not harmful manner. Vulture got up, went out into the
meditation chamber, and retrieved the duplicate ring from behind a
statue of the sacred Buddha. Then he headed for the Holy
Lama’s bedchambers.
He stopped and stifled a grin as he saw her in bed, and had to
suppress an urge to take advantage of the situation. That was the
Chanchukian male part of him, something he could control as easily
as the neurotoxin but which took more constant vigilance.
She’d actually taken off the ring and put it on her
nightstand! He wasted a precious second to lift and look at her
finger. The hair had been virtually worn away by the ring and there
was some scabbing where it had been. She must have had one
hell of a time getting the damned thing off!
Peeling away the disguise layer on the ring he’d brought,
he turned it from a high priestess’s signet into a near
duplicate of the ring on the nightstand. It wasn’t perfect,
but they’d been able to work from blown-up pictures of the
Holy Lama’s rare public appearances taken from the computer
files at security. However, when not side by side they sure as hell
looked identical.
For a moment he had a sudden fear as he momentarily forgot which
was the real one and which the fake. After all this it sure as hell
wouldn’t do to steal and send the counterfeit back! With some
relief, he saw a tiny bit of the foil from the outer wrapping of
the disguise still clinging to the back of the fake ring. He
scraped it away, inspected it, then put it down on the
nightstand.
Time was precious. He had timed this operation at no more than
twenty minutes. The storm outside sounded pretty bad, but the SPF
was certain to keep popping up to check on it firsthand. Every
minute that drone was atop the dome was one minute more it could be
spotted and an alarm sounded that would queer the whole deal.
Now the problem was to find the damned opening, not much bigger
around than the ring itself, and do it as quickly as possible.
By now the pumps on the drone would have reversed, and the
suction would create a strong airflow outward rather than in. With
that in mind, he found some papers and a match and lit them,
watching the smoke, then tried to follow it before he burned his
hand. Since he knew that it would be at one of the six guard
positions, if all went as planned, that narrowed down his search
some, and he found the proper location with little trouble. Finding
and then getting to the probe was more difficult. It had come into
the library, and it appeared to have drilled its way right through
a bookcase wall about three meters up—or about three times
his height. A chair might have helped, but Chanchukians
didn’t use chairs—they were built for a different sort
of furniture and tended in any event to have seating areas rather
low to the floor.
Feeling the seconds tick away, he thought frantically about how
to reach the probe, cursing that the whole elaborate scheme might
now fall apart because he was too short or the hole was too high.
He finally started stacking the largest books he could find one
atop the other, some so heavy he had problems with them, then
climbing on top. It was just out of reach, and he stretched his arm
to the limit on the high, hastily built stack, the ring held in his
outstretched fingers, and didn’t quite make it several times.
Finally, though, he felt it suddenly taken from his grasp, but he
looked in horror as he saw the ring jam up just inside the hole.
The probe hadn’t quite reached through, and the wood was
chewed up!
Summoning all his strength and concentration, he leaped up and
smacked the ring hard with his hand, then fell crashing to the
floor, his tower of books in shambles. He was bruised and battered,
and nearly broke his neck in the fall. Only the fact that, being
the creature that he was, that sort of damage wouldn’t really
harm him saved him from a rather obvious hospital call.
He looked up at the opening. He couldn’t see the ring, but
he wasn’t certain if it had fallen down or been sucked in or,
if sucked in, if it had made it to the tube and been hauled into
the probe. He looked around the floor, saw no sign of it, and
decided that there was simply nothing more he could do. He would
require a few minutes of concentration to repair his bruises and
sprains, and then he could only attempt to pick up and reshelve the
books and get back to his quarters.
At least the suction, which had been audible in the library, now
seemed to be gone. Whether that was because the ring was lodged in
the hole or safely inside the probe he wouldn’t know, perhaps
for some time, but even if it was lodged it was not a total loss.
He alone would know it was there, and it would be easier at some
point to retrieve it from that spot than to steal it all over
again.
Outside, the sergeant of the guard broke the surface and looked
around. The weather was still awful, and the wind was picking up,
but she frowned, not quite certain why it didn’t seem right.
Something, some sound—no, it was gone now, but its very
absence made her more suspicious.
Suddenly conscious of the fact that, if there were intruders out
there, she was in a pretty weak and exposed position, she ducked
back under. Now was the time to retrieve the guards, lousy
conditions or not, and do a thorough check of the exterior!
The probe switched from vacuum tube back to the borer, only now
a different mechanism was activated. The effect was to plug the
hole with the same material taken from it. It wouldn’t be
perfect, but it would be far less noticeable. That done, Killomen
attempted a sweep of the immediate area but found the weather
conditions impossible. The false echoes were everywhere, blanketing
the screen. She decided that enough was enough, detached the
clamps, and slowly eased the probe up to a height perhaps twenty
meters over the roofs of the lodges, then began bringing it bumpily
back to the barge.
The sensors in the extension mechanism of the drone
weren’t all that much; she knew she had grasped something,
but she wasn’t certain what or where or if it had gotten
inside the drone. That would have to wait for its return and
inspection.
It had been audacious, risky, and complicated as all
hell—that last being the best guarantee of something going
wrong. The fact that they’d gotten away with it even this far
was, to Killomen, nothing short of miraculous.
She brought the drone back down to the deck of the barge, drew
the tarp over it so that no SPF spy satellite might see anything
unusual if it should happen to look, then crawled under. The drone
was still warm from its long flight, but she wanted no suspense
that wasn’t necessary. The lock to the storage compartment
was easily accessible, and she opened it and reached inside.
There was nothing in the compartment. Damn! All this for
nothing . . .
She calmed down a moment and thought. The lone sensor had
indicated that the vacuum tube had picked up something. If it
wasn’t in the compartment, it might well have fallen out when
withdrawn, in which case it was either on the platform or on the
bottom at the foundation of the Sacred Lodge. There was only one
other place to look before assuming the
worst . . .
She went back to the command console and extended the suction
tube, then killed the power and crawled back under. With all the
strength she could muster she pulled and tugged at the tube, then
finally got a knife, reached in, and cut the damned thing off at
its base plate. After bringing out the tube, she felt along it and
found, not very far from the opening, a lump.
“Chung! I need very small pliers or a screwdriver or
something that’ll cut this material down the side!” she
shouted. “We’ve picked up something—but I’m
not sure just what. It’s stuck!”
Chung came over and examined the tube, then stuck her longest
finger in and felt it—it was close to the opening but wedged
in tight.
Taking the knife, and with Killomen holding, Chung cut through
the tube on both sides of the object, then sawed the very small
piece laterally. After some time and effort, she was able to peel
away the thick, tough hose and see just what was inside. It had
been nicked a bit by the knife, but was otherwise in pretty good
shape.
“So that’s one of the rings.” Chung Mung Wo
sighed. “It is impressive, even in the darkness.” She
brought up a small service light and they both stared at it.
“Four more ugly birds,” Chung said.
Butar Killomen shrugged. “Makes sense, if we count
’em. Matriyeh’s ring has one bird and a tree.
Janipur’s had two but no tree, this is four, and from the
pictures, the one on Earth has three. I suppose the fifth one is
either five birds of some kind or maybe none. It would make over a
hundred possible combinations, all but one of which could kill you.
Makes a crazy kind of sense, I guess.”
“Yes,” Chung agreed. “Who knows how strange
those ancients were, or how they thought?” She sighed, and
they both just stood there for a moment, staring at the ring.
Finally Butar Killomen gave a grin and looked up at Chung.
“We did it. This insane, idiotic plan actually worked! We
have the ring!”
Chung nodded, always the pragmatist. “Yes, but we had
better signal Min to meet us at the rendezvous point. Now all we
all have to do is get off this world.”
Butar Killomen sighed, got up, and put the ring in her pouch,
then looked up at the dark, cloudy sky. “At least I will not
die here,” she muttered to herself. “At least I shall
return to where I belong.”
“We have much to do and something of a swim yet
tonight,” she reminded Chung. “Let’s get on with
it. I want to be well away before that fleet arrives. This plan is
not complete unless we get away with the prize, and we don’t
stand a chance with Vals and fighters and an SPF task force
about.”
Chung nodded but couldn’t help looking back into the fog.
“I think we will make it. They were not prepared for this, no
matter how elaborate their precautions and their trap. They will
not be prepared for our leaving, either. But
Vulture . . . ”
“Sometimes I think Vulture is too self-confident,”
she acknowledged. “With that much power and knowledge perhaps
we would be the same. But there is such a thing as being
overconfident. This Colonel Chi is a different breed than we have
seen before. I wish her or him or it luck. We have three now, and
know of a fourth. But the fifth—without the fifth, it is the
same as having none at all. And each time security is tougher: one
mistake and we must begin again—and this is taking long
enough as it is. Vulture will have to be extracautious with this
Colonel Chi . . . ”
Chung shrugged. “Well, our part from now on will be in
space, where we belong. I never believed that this plan
could be pulled off. Now, deep down, I feel our victory may be
difficult but is inevitable. Come! If the current carries us out
far enough I might even risk the motor!”
The storm activity continued fiercely for a while but died away
with the sunrise. The guards came back up and took their positions,
but nothing seemed amiss—and why should they think
differently? Clearly no one had broken into the Sacred Lodge from
above no matter what, or all hell would have broken loose within
and without.
Up on top of the cliffs, all hell was breaking loose anyway. The
relief guards showed up and discovered the ones on duty still
unconscious; an alarm was sounded and a specialty squad was
dispatched on the double. When they found the antenna jumpers and
the added little box, Colonel Chi, still sleepy, was not far behind
and already had issued a general alert.
Within an hour, a team from the science labs aboard the command
ship were down, examining the boxes and analyzing the work done
inside the station as well. They were cautious, just in case of
booby traps, but there were none.
The chief technical officer was quite certain of her results.
“Essentially, last night we had no surface-level sweep. We
were blind to about, oh, three thousand meters when the orbital
probes took over. You could have flown anything in here last
night.”
Now, suddenly, there was a careful examination of almost
everything. Colonel Chi was livid. If anything really serious had
happened, the blame never fell on the foot soldier, it all fell on
the commander. Nobody was more aware of this than Chi.
“All right, between two and six hundred this morning
somebody knocked out our sensors with a very clever set of
devices,” she said to her staff. “Now we must know why.
Such devices are beyond the capacity of anyone here to make, so we
must assume a tie-in with our missing priestess and her
housekeeping staff. The only external threat capable of this is the
pirates, and they are after one thing and one thing only. I want
the entire Sacred Lodge covered, every centimeter of the exterior
and all of the working plant below. I want all guards not just
questioned but mindprinted and computer scanned for the slightest
details.” She stopped and looked at the officer of the day.
“Didn’t you say you sighted a barge far out on the
scopes?”
The OD nodded. “Yes, but it was expected. Of course, if
they interfered with our scopes, I can’t be certain it was
there at all . . . ”
“It was there. The scope sighting came a few minutes
before the guards were put away on the hill,” said the charge
of quarters. “I checked on that.”
“I want that barge. Give me air probes and to hell with
regulations! I don’t care what the masses see or
what they believe!” She sighed. “And get me the Holy
Lama! I don’t care if we wake her up out of her precious
beauty sleep!”
But before she could put in the call, another came from the
surface guards reporting odd scratches and markings above guard
post three. Chi called the tech people and went to investigate. The
Holy Lama wasn’t going anywhere.
“Suction clamps,” the technical officer said after a
cursory study. “Some high-quality ones specially made for
bonding to a wet wooden surface, most likely. The marks
aren’t that pronounced—whatever it was was almost
certainly designed to do this very job and not much else. We
measured the marks and got an estimate as best we could. I’d
say it was small—too small to even fit one of us, considering
the type of motor it had to have to be that unobtrusive in
idle.”
Chi thought furiously. “Too small for us. Might a male
have fit in it?”
“Huh? Yes, I suppose—but how would a male get
into it? The only hole we found is a circular cut perhaps
two, two and a half centimeters across.”
Chi wasn’t certain what her hypothetical creature
might be capable of, but even she doubted it could turn itself into
a rope or snake and slither through such an opening, particularly
while carrying a ring.
It hit her suddenly, and she cursed herself for not seeing the
obvious. “It’s big enough to feed that damned ring
through! I want that barge and that drone! I want every available
trooper and all available technology on this—now! They might
have blinded us here, but they certainly did not blind the command
ship and the permanent system monitors! They are still on the
surface of this planet and I want them!”
She stood there a moment, on the platform, thinking hard. Not
only were they still on the planet, but no matter what their mole,
their inside operative—whoever or whatever it was—most
certainly was still inside the Sacred Lodge.
“Get me a team up here in full security gear and a
construction unit with heavy drills and saws,” she ordered.
“If they can get in by drilling a hole without
triggering the internal security system, we can get in by
drilling a bigger hole. I want to be in there as quickly
as possible—and no one, absolutely no one, gets
out!”
By zero nine-thirty they had a hole drilled sufficient to make a
total wreck of the library wall and large enough to get in both
fully armed troopers and equipment. The squad looked eerie in their
full battle gear and special suits that were both armor and life
support systems. Chi wanted no unpleasant surprises for her
people.
By ten-fifteen they had found the Holy Lama still out cold, as
well as all nine Seed and the children, all also apparently out
cold. Medical took scans and samples and discovered a simple
biochemical neurotoxin in the bloodstream. There were traces in the
air, but most if not all of it had been flushed out or broken down
by now.
“Simple but effective,” the medical officer told
Chi. “There is no permanent harm and it will break down in a
few hours at most. They should all have serious headaches but
little else.”
A sergeant came forward with an object in her gloved hand.
“This what they were looking for, Colonel?”
The colonel took it and examined it with some fleeting hope.
That little hole had been pretty high. Might it be that they made
the attempt but didn’t get what they were after?
“Is it safe to go in just like this?” she asked the
medical officer.
“No problem now. Go ahead.”
“Where is the Holy Lama? They could make a duplicate of
the ring to fool us, knowing we don’t know enough to tell a
valid ring from a phony one, but there is one thing they might have
overlooked.”
She was brought to the unconscious figure of the Holy Lama. It
was a bit startling to see the great figure of Chanchuk in person;
Chi realized that she had never seen her in the flesh until
now.
The SPF officer knelt down and immediately saw the finger where
the ring had been. She took the ring she had and placed it on the
supine figure’s ring finger. It went on easily—too
easily. Chi lifted the hand so the fingers bent limply down and the
ring fell right off and hit the floor with a clatter. A soldier
reached down to pick it up.
“File it as evidence, or a souvenir,” Chi told the
soldier. “It’s phony. Look at the ring finger. Clearly
our Holy Lama has gained some weight since she put on the ring at
her investiture. That ring she had was wedged on tight. See the
scabbing? This ring, on the other hand, is at least two
sizes too large. It was a nice try, though; I’ll give them
that.”
“They’ve got the ring, then?” the tech officer
asked.
Chi nodded. “They have—may it poison them!
They’ll never get it off this world, I swear.” She
turned and looked around. “Medical—you took blood
samples from all life forms here?”
“All the ones not our own people, yes,” came the
reply.
“I want you to run every test possible on all nine, for
the presence of the gas—whoever switched that ring and got
the real one out sure wasn’t knocked out. I want every test
run that you or your medical computers can think of or remotely
imagine. Understand?”
“Yes, certainly. But—what are we looking
for?”
“Anything. Any sign that the blood of one of them is not
one hundred percent normal. And, of course, any sign that one might
have no toxin, or have a greater or lesser degree of it than the
others. Don’t neglect the Holy One or the children, either.
And pull the internal security recordings and anything else useful
and then go over this place with a microscope.
And—Doc?”
“Colonel?”
“I want every living thing in here, from the Holy One to
any stray microbes, to be packed and sealed and taken to separate
isolation cells aboard the command ship as soon as possible. At no
time are any of them to be left alone. I want at least two armed
troopers with them every moment until they are safely in isolation.
Do it now!”
The medical officer shrugged. “All right, but I
don’t see what you’re getting at doing it to the
children, too. They’re mostly babies.”
“Everyone. No exceptions. Now.” Chi scratched her
chin, thinking furiously. “All the rest I can see. A bold
plan. But how do they expect to escape?” Suddenly she saw it.
“They’ll have to either move before the fleet arrives
later today or they’ll have to stay here underground for
years! Notify the command ship—I don’t care what sort
of ship might punch in in the outer system, I want no challenge
unless it moves within range of planetary defenses. I want
everything we have concentrated on Chanchuk. I want anything that
flies from the surface or from any position within transporter
range blown up, no questions asked. Everything. The one
who lets anything escape from the surface dies very
slowly!”
“Very well, Commander.” The way it was said, though,
indicated that the medical officer was wondering if Chi was very
long for that position. To her, the precautions seemed cold and
callously officious, not the work of a brilliant commander. The
colonel was well aware of this.
“And, Doctor—as soon as possible, when things are
established, I shall want a mindprint taken of myself. The print is
to be filed and also dispatched to the Val commanding the task
force.”
The medic was surprised. “Not to headquarters?”
“One to headquarters, too. All right. But I wish it on
record for the direct evaluation by Master System.”
“Very well. As you command.”
Later on the command ship, the Holy Lama and her family were
just coming around and not feeling any too good about it, while
Colonel Chi was in nearly as much discomfort after the thorough
scanning and recording of her mind and memories, when the
colonel’s recovery was interrupted.
“We have a punch,” the duty officer reported.
“All hands on full battle alert.” Alarms sounded
throughout the command ship.
Chi jumped from her cot, the headache pushed away as something
she could not afford, and made her way immediately to the command
center in the center of the ship.
The command center was a different world from the surface
expedition and troop ships. Here SPF officers and enlisted
personnel of a number of races worked side by side, each there
because he or she was the best at what they did. Commodore
Marquette, in overall command of the SPF task force now in place
and the only superior on hand that Chi had, was in his command
chair studying screens full of data that scrolled so fast only the
experienced, trained naval eye could make sense of them.
Marquette was a thick, burly apelike creature who looked as if
he could bend steel bars without thinking, his face a hairy mass
with two huge yellow eyes peering out from the brush and a mouth
that had the teeth and muscles to crush bone. Every race that
Master System had carved from the human base forcibly expelled from
Earth many centuries before had its counterpart in the SPF, so that
they could move unobtrusively in and out of any and all of the
colonial worlds as need be, and so that there would be a certain
level of understanding between the human fighting forces and the
colonials. Chi was of the race of Chanchuk; Marquette’s own
people were from a far harsher and more violent world.
“What is happening, Commodore?” the colonel
asked.
“Lone ship, relatively small but fast. Punched in just
beyond the orbit of Makyiuk. Distance is about sixty million
kilometers. It’s kept its shields on and its engines at full
power, but it’s keeping just out of range of the fighter
screen.”
“It’s a feint,” Chi told him flatly.
“They are trying to draw us out so that they can get their
people off Chanchuk. They know that we have sufficient force to
either cover this immediate area or to make a creditable challenge
but not both. I should not be surprised if others show up in mock
attack formation.”
The commodore was not totally convinced. “You’re
certain? They fought last time, remember.”
“And took tremendous losses. They can replace ships but
not people so easily.”
“I could take three such ships, maybe more, with what I
have,” Marquette noted. “If you’re right, though,
and we get more company, we could wind up as sitting ducks for hit
and runs unless we challenge them.”
“It is true you could take them if they stood and
fought,” Chi agreed, “but this time they will not. I
beg you to hold firm. If we can hold their people on the ground for
just another few hours, the main task force will be here and we
will be impregnable.”
“Two more punches, evenly spaced, twenty-million-kilometer
separation!” the scanning computer reported.
Marquette’s eyes narrowed. “Freighters. Scows. The
one in the middle is the only worthy fighting ship.” He
punched a command button. “Identification?”
“Likely that the freighter to port is Bahakatan,
freebooter vessel commanded by Ali Mohammed ben Suda,” the
computer reported. “Starboard is Kaotan, commanded
by Ikira Sukotae. Commanders are last known registry, may not apply
at this date. Fighter is unknown origin, no registry, but was
involved in the Battle of Janipur. Communications monitors referred
to it as Lightning. All three ships have additional armor
and have changed configurations since last encounter.
Bahakatan is most vulnerable since inherent design makes
it intrinsically slower and less maneuverable, but for that reason
it is probably the best armed and shielded.”
Chi nodded. “What do we have?”
“Nine fighters dedicated to command ship fighter screen,
two other groups of six each on random surface sweeps, two
transports and the supply and factory ship each with one group
screen of nine,” Marquette responded.
Alarms suddenly went off. “Minipunch detected! Attack
imminent!” warned the speakers, and as Chi watched, the
center ship vanished from its position on the master screen while
the two fighters went into normal space motion, peeling off and
creating large arcs as their probable attack plan was analyzed.
“Don’t like this,” Marquette grumbled.
“Sitting ducks, waiting for them to shoot before we know
where to shoot back.” Lightning emerged from its punch within barely a
kilometer of the supply and factory ship and let loose a barrage of
torpedoes, punching back in within moments.
“Bastard! Nervy bastard! He’s actually punched
inside our damned fighter screen!” the commodore exclaimed.
The torpedoes, all intelligent and all preprogrammed for weak spots
in shielding, curved and dodged close to the transport whose guns
blazed trying to pick them off before one of the torpedoes found a
way in. In the meantime the fighters were nearly useless; any
attempt on the torpedoes would be just as likely to hit the ship
they were supposed to protect.
“Transport struck! One—two—no, three hits!
Damage serious!” the battle group commander called, although
Marquette could see what was happening. Lightning punched
out a good fifty million kilometers out from the Chanchuk task
force, looped, then came back straight in and punched as,
simultaneously, the two freighters punched as well.
With these speeds and distances, punching was nearly
instantaneous. An attacker would simply vanish in one spot and
appear in another. No human could defend against such an attack,
but the battle computers could shift—if Marquette freed them
to counter the threat.
Suddenly all three ships were inside the command ship’s
perimeter, firing off salvos of a dozen torpedoes and vanishing.
Punching in with their full forward shields on and punching out
without turning, the massed fire from the command ship itself had
no more effect than to perhaps shake up the people on the attacking
vessels. The command ship attack was equally futile; the kind of
screens employed by the command ship would take far more than these
kinds of forays to damage. Still, there was a faint shudder within
the bowels of the ship as the torpedoes struck where they
could.
“These aren’t random attacks,” Marquette told
Chi. “They’re well planned, well scouted, and well
flown. Thanks to the initial response, the damage to the factory
ship isn’t bad and is under control, but they can do this all
day if they have the power, and I’d guess they do. Sooner or
later they are going to take some of us out. I’ve
got to free the defensive computers to work as a whole!
Otherwise we will begin to suffer serious damage!”
“No!” Chi was adamant. “They are trying to
pull us away, don’t you see?”
“Colonel, we have twelve fighters covering the Chanchuk
grid from pole to pole. Nobody can punch from the surface;
it’d take a good ten minutes for anything taking off to reach
orbit, let alone beyond. In ten minutes I can have three fighters
taking out anything that comes up from anywhere.”
Chi swallowed hard, unable to make a case against that. The navy
knew what it and a potential enemy could do, and physical laws were
physical laws. “All right. I will defer to you on this. Keep
the planetary screen intact but feel free to employ your other
forces as you desire.”
“Now you’re talking!” The commodore could have
overridden Chi from the start, of course, on the basis of sheer
rank and position, but had no desire to do so. Their mission was to
prevent an escape; that was Chi’s department.
The defense computers took over task force command. The three
vulnerable ships were brought close and tightened up with the
command ship, and the new task force fighter screen, now numbering
eighteen, divided into two groups, one shielding the ships and the
other ready to analyze speed, trajectory, and movements of the
enemy and go after them. None of the fighters was manned; all had
limited punch capability.
The three enemy ships and the SPF played cat and mouse for
almost forty minutes, neither striking any real blow against the
other that caused any damage, until the defense computers under
Marquette determined what was known as a “release
pattern” to the enemy attacks. They came in, attacked
alternately, and regrouped at various angles from the task
force—but the regrouping positions were now showing a
distinct mathematical pattern. The defense computers took a guess
at just where they could come out next, and when the next attack
came, and the attackers punched through, the fighters punched
through at the same time.
Colonel Chi watched the battle on the screens, noting
particularly the rolling and gyrations of the enemy vessels as they
were engaged by the fighters. Thinking about there being
people on those attacking ships, she was very glad she was
a ground trooper.
“Stung ’em a bit that time,” Marquette noted
with satisfaction.
“Sir! Surface launches!”
Marquette whirled in his chair. “Where? How
many?”
“All over. Oh, my—hundreds. From all over
the place!”
A full three-dimensional model of Chanchuk hovered over the
command plate in the planetary defense section, and on it could be
seen just what the monitor was reporting. Hundreds of angry, red
blips, all over the globe . . .
Suddenly Chi realized the one thing she’d forgotten in all
the excitement over the Sacred Lodge, the raid, the creature, all
the rest. That damned small motor assembly.
Somehow, somewhere, over a very long period of time, they had
been planting those things all over Chanchuk! What use was just a
motor and a small logic module? On defensive screens the damned
things all looked alike. Somewhere among them was one, two, perhaps
three with pirates aboard—and the ring.
“Break off!” Chi shouted. “Concentrate all
fighters on those things! Shoot ’em down! All of them! Forget
about anything else!”
“I’ll be damned if I’m going to take my screen
off this ship!” the commodore responded. “Recall and
reform battle group,” he commanded. “When done, commit
three fighters from battle group two to each enemy vessel. Have
planetary defense battle group break off and split into thirds and
join covering fighters. Target anything attempting to reach said
vessels. Shadow!” He turned and looked up at Chi.
“Can’t possibly get more than a fraction of ’em,
but we can shoot anything they try to pick up!”
Chi’s estimation of Marquette went up a notch or two.
The tiny SPF fighters were much too small and fast to use
torpedoes against, and as long as they themselves could throw a
random missile or two at the enemy to make it keep its
distance—which meant keeping out of range of the ship’s
guns—they were relatively safe. On the other hand, guns could
pick off an object of any size or significance that was on any sort
of clear trajectory for pickup by the freighters, who were bearing
down so that they would both skim opposite sides of Chanchuk well
away from the task force’s position. If either freighter
stopped long enough to allow matter transmission from the surface,
enough fighters would converge on it that it would never
escape. Lightning continued its attack against the task force,
keeping the rest of the fighter screen occupied. Now facing only
nine fighters having to cover four ships, the enemy was able to
inflict some real damage on the previously weakened supply and
factory ship and on the two transports. It ignored the command ship
for now—except for an occasional salvo of torpedoes to keep
the fighter screen busy—since those shields were just too
strong for any one ship.
“Two Val ships and twice the fighters and all three of
them would be history,” Marquette noted. “I just
can’t figure out what they’re trying to accomplish by
this.”
The two freighters continued to close as the fighters screening
them remained ahead and began picking off anything in their path
before those freighters could get close. There were now effectively
two fighter groups, one on each freighter, while a lone group of
five or six ships randomly picked off the small dots just attaining
orbit.
Marquette pointed at the globe of Chanchuk. “We’ve
got a few of those mystery blips heading straight for us. Good.
It’ll give our gunnery computers some work!” Lightning looped at forty-six million kilometers out,
turned, and bore back in on them head on, punching as predicted.
Suddenly an alarm went off in the command center and they turned to
look. The projected exit of Lightning was not within their
protective ring but below and beyond it! As they watched,
Lightning reappeared perhaps a hundred kilometers below
them, extended some sort of scoop, and sucked up a half dozen of
the mystery blips.
It was so close in that the defense computers committed the
fighters to go after Lightning, loosing a horde of
torpedoes at the same time. Even ships’ guns opened up; at
that range they had a clear shot at the enemy.
There were several hits but clearly not enough.
Lightning lurched and then began accelerating to where it
would miss the planet and attain sufficient speed for a punch. The
fighters were on its tail, but they could not prevent the punch or
stop the enemy ship. Lightning was damaged but by no means
helpless, and it had a pretty good chance of complete escape.
“All fighters break off, break off!” Marquette
ordered. “Target the escaping vessel. Repeat, target the
escaping vessel.”
Almost immediately Kaotan and Bahakatan were
alone. Only when they were certain that there was no more fighter
cover did they alter course and close in together. Kaotan
opened its pickup bays and activated its transport beams as
Bahakatan covered.
As Chung had predicted, the pickup was made with comparative
ease and safety.
3. FOUR PARROTS AND ONE COOKED GOOSE, WITH
FIREWORKS
THE TEMPLE COMPLEX THAT WAS ALSO WA CHI Center
had a far different look to it on the surface; a series of large
domes, some atop thick cylindrical bases, stretched out starting
about fifty meters from shore. Most were polished, waterproofed
wood, ornately carved and trimmed in silver and gold, although
there was some polished stone and slate and atop the domes, an
assortment of stained glass skylights showing religious or ethical
themes. Only a few lights showed through; it was essential that the
primitive mass of the population should not suspect the existence
of the technological wonders that the elite running their world
took for granted, even by accident. Water approach was secure, but
Chanchukians often were both curious and creative and were not
above occasional land forays to see what they could see, and while
Wa Chi was sacred ground, forbidden to the masses, it was so eerily
impressive above the water that many made pilgrimages just to look
upon it.
The coast itself was a black sand beach cut into a wide cleft in
the rock; around it the coastal range rose fifteen hundred meters,
the first five hundred or so in a craggy basalt rock wall.
The beach was used primarily for recreation and sunning oneself
on hot days. Although it was often convenient to bring boats in
there, supplies were landed elsewhere. Flat coastal barges were
fairly common over the world and so wouldn’t attract any
attention. They were powered by oar and sail and often by crews
pushing from beneath, guided by a helmsman above who could stomp
out commands to the “pushers.”
Every night a thick fog rolled in, covering the domes of the
lodges and the beach area, making things miserable for anyone
foolish enough to be out in it. Security used a sophisticated radar
to sweep the area at those times, and special infrared goggles to
see through even the densest fog.
Without the SPF present, this would have been a piece of cake,
but now the raiders had to resort to a mixture of the crude and the
creative to achieve their end. The crude was first; the SPF had set
up a low, horizon-sweep air radar on top of the mountain
overlooking the Center to supplement the surface patrols that were
normally run from Wa Chi’s security central. It gave some
protection against low-flying aircraft should any potential enemy
use them, but it was a weak point spotted early by the team.
The small radar station was automated and transmitted directly
to security central and also to the SPF command ship via satellite.
Monitoring there, too, was totally automated, designed to ring an
alarm if anything unusual was spotted. Colonel Chi, however,
mindful that the pirates in the past had shown a remarkable talent
for beating electronic locks, also had two enlisted personnel fully
armed stationed at the radar unit at all times, in six-hour
shifts.
Min Xao Po watched the guard change at two hundred hours through
her own special night goggles, then waited until the old guards
wearily put on their flight packs and jumped off the cliff to float
down to the beach below. She allowed them fifteen minutes to be on
the beach and in the water, well away from any trouble and unable
to return quickly, then took aim on the two new guards and shot
them down before they knew what hit them. The weapon fired a high
stun, rather than a killing beam, since the guards wore automatic
life sensors that would have brought a fast investigation if either
had died.
Hurrying to the fallen guards, she removed from a pouch a small
medical injector, already loaded with serum, and gave each guard a
shot in the arm. It would guarantee that they would sleep until
relieved, by which time this would be long over.
The Chows, born wizards with all sorts of locks, had looked at
the analytical photos of the lock on the radar unit and solved it
in a flash. It was pretty crude, but it did have a few nasty little
booby traps for the unwary or ignorant. The combination
wasn’t much of a problem; Vulture had tapped that line long
ago.
Carefully Min placed a device measuring about half a meter
square over the locking mechanism, securing it with clamps to the
small cubicle, then activated it with the press of a button. There
was a lot of loud clicking and a whine and then a light began
blinking on the device signaling that the door was unlocked. She
removed the device but did not immediately unlock the door. Instead
she climbed up on the top of the cubicle to the antenna complex,
found the set she wanted, removed another small box, and attached
it between two smaller antennas and then lifted up a second set of
antennas almost the same size as those on the cubicle. Two cables
were attached to terminals on the box, and then, stretching, she
fastened the huge alligator clips on the other end of the cables
simultaneously to the two fixed antennas. She then scurried back
down to the ground and waited nearly five minutes to make certain
that no activity could be heard from below.
Satisfied, she nodded to herself and opened the door. A bell
alarm sounded, but it was muffled beyond the immediate area by the
sound of the surf and wasn’t intended to do more than alert
the guards. The same alarm was now being transmitted to security
central and should have brought a horde of troopers armed to the
teeth, but the signal was now not being broadcast by the twin
original antennas to the receivers below, but rather being fed
directly into her little box, which filtered out all the nasty,
unpleasant things like alarms and then sent the rest of the signal
unaltered. With the simple press of a button on a remote control on
her belt, she could stop even that and send whatever signal she
wanted.
Her entry would be recorded and what she was doing would later
be plain to investigators, but she didn’t have the time to
dig into complex built-in monitor circuits nor did she want to risk
tripping secondary alarms. Let them find out—as long as it
was later. By now all three of them were almost certainly on
Colonel Chi’s wanted list simply by being absent from home
for four days, and she had no intention of being anywhere near
Chanchuk by the time the recordings were viewed.
She was relieved to find the unit a stock SPF issue as expected.
She had nightmares of having to face a totally different design
from what she’d been mindprinted to handle. Bless the
military mind! Within minutes she had done her work, and from this
point you could have brought Thunder in hovering over Wa
Chi Center and the screens and monitors both at the Center and on
the command ship would show empty, peaceful space. Of course, the
orbital and deep-space monitors were still operable, but those were
not a concern at the moment.
It went perfectly. The only thing they hadn’t anticipated
was the headache that damned alarm gave her, bouncing around in
that confined space.
She emerged, closed the door, and got some blessed silence.
Since there were no alarms sounding near or far now and no armed
squads and since she was still conscious and free, she took the
liberty of assuming that their estimate of Min Xao Po as a
brilliant communications technician had not been misplaced. She
picked up a small waterproof transceiver from her pack and lifted
it to her mouth.
“Secure One. Proceeding to level two.” She secured
her own floater device, picked up the bulky pack, and jumped off
the cliff.
Allowing themselves the time not merely to scout out but to
analyze the entire problem with the Thunder’s
computer and personnel and then taking the additional time and
patience to slowly infiltrate in the exact equipment needed was
paying off.
Now, aboard a coastal raft, Chung Mung Wo was getting her own
equipment in shape. The raft was a regular; it was expected in
these waters between midnight and dawn out on the fringes of the
security zone, just out of the fog area. Being subject to all sorts
of delays, it wasn’t unusual to have it show up on the
surface sweeps at any hour of the early morning—and often
later—and, because it wasn’t a Center craft but a
native one running between two native villages sixty or so
kilometers south of the Center and ninety kilometers north of it,
there was really no way security personnel could determine if it
was truly the correct raft or not. There would be no way of knowing
that the old helmsman had somehow gotten herself dead drunk down in
Waning and hadn’t even sobered up enough to leave town as
yet.
Chung checked her console, deployed the aerial and underwater
transmitters, and began to crank up the juice a bit. “Nice
static electricity tonight,” she mumbled to herself.
“Couldn’t be better. That fog is energizing almost too
well.” She looked at her watch. “Have to bring it up
slowly. We want the fireworks on schedule.”
Forward, Butar Killomen, the leader of this meager but
well-armed attack force, checked her own control console. This was
the one area she was most nervous about, since there had been no
way to test this equipment except with computer simulations. She
had some faith in simulations, but she was an old spacer. Computers
could answer only the questions you asked them in the first place,
and there was no substitute for actual experience. The very air was
starting to crackle all around them.
Around the Sacred Lodge, the surface guards, in pairs on small
platforms and within sight of one another even through the fog,
began to get disturbed.
“Must be a storm coming up,” one remarked to her
companion. “I don’t remember there being one on the
weather plots, but the electricity in the air tonight’s so
high I’m blind with these damned goggles on. It’s
shorting out everything.”
Her companion nodded. “I’m worried. If it gets much
worse than this we’ll get shocks every time we touch
anything. You get too high a charge, I heard that these damned
rifles’ll discharge all at once. I sure don’t want to
be holdin’ one that does.”
“That’s for sure.” The other nodded.
“Look, I’m gonna call this in. Anybody tries anything
in this shit is gonna be in the same shape we’re in. Besides,
this whole watch is screwy anyway. What are they gonna do? Bomb
us?”
She undipped her communicator. The static on it was almost
unendurable in and of itself. “This is Corporal Gwi, Post
Three. We have prestorm conditions up here and high static.
Visibility is zero even with the goggles, and we are starting to
get equipment malfunction.”
In about two minutes there was a loud splash and the sergeant of
the guard popped up and looked around in the water below. She
shouted the password, then did a survey. “You’re right.
It’s lousy tonight. I’ll call the OD.”
The officer of the day appreciated the conditions, but also
reflected that it was just the sort of night that she’d
choose to try something. It was certain that the guards were in
more danger from their own equipment than any help in fending off
an attack. Still, she didn’t like to make any major decisions
that might haunt her. She called Colonel Chi in her quarters.
Chi, awakened from a sound sleep, was in a foul mood, but
listened intently. “Check with the command ship for weather
data, then check space, air, surface, and subsurface scanners. If
nothing shows up, have them come below until conditions
clear—but they go back up the moment conditions clear,
understand?”
“Yes, Colonel.” The OD called the command ship.
“Anything unusual on your scopes?”
“Nothing at all, Captain. We’re measuring a local
disturbance in your area, though.”
“Anything unusual about it?”
“Well, meteorology can’t give a good reason for it,
but we’ve seen this sort of thing a couple of times before.
It’s rare, but it happens. Space monitors are clear, and the
aerial scan shows only your disturbance. I wouldn’t worry
about it.”
“Thank you.” The OD turned to her sergeant.
“Check all surface and subsurface monitors.”
“Already did, Captain. Nothing subsurface, but we’ve
got enough stuff there that anyone’d be crazy to try
anything. Air is a mess. With all that static and the discharge
from the storm, it looks like we’re being invaded, but the
monitoring computers don’t seem to be worried. You know they
could pick a bird out of that mess anyway, ’cause the echoes
from the storm are constantly changing in random patterns. Anything
solid would be regular. I’d say it’s clear.”
She nodded. “Very well. Send the sergeant of the guard a
stand-down for surface personnel until, in the assessment of this
or higher authority or the sergeant of the guard on the scene,
conditions should improve to a safe level. Got it?”
“Got it. Sending now.”
Butar Killomen looked at her watch. It was time. She turned and
shouted back to Chung. “Let’s do it!”
Chung nodded and brought up the charge to near storm levels. Her
console was getting hot, but it didn’t have to last all that
long anyway and, besides, enough energy had been dumped into that
fog bank now that it had a life of its own. Already there was a
good deal of lightning, and even from their distance the boom of
thunder reached them with increasing frequency. It was quite a nice
fireworks show, if Chung did say so herself.
Butar Killomen put on the command helmet and sat back in her
makeshift recliner. The drone was already powered up; now she was
in complete command of it, and it was a mess. There was certainly a
lot of noise in the interface connection, more as the small drone
lifted off like some great bird of prey and slid into the night,
even though the special frequencies they were using were supposed
to insulate the electronics, and the intense lightning and the
sudden updrafts and downdrafts caused by the storm were hard to
handle. These were not the kind of conditions for an amateur pilot,
and the tiny computer brain in the drone was hardly adequate by
itself to handle these conditions. The problem was, any radar-type
scan to maintain distance and pick out targets that would be useful
to them would also be useful to the SPF; by knocking out the SPF,
they knew they’d be flying by the seat-of-the-pants method,
and that required great skill. Butar only hoped she wasn’t
too out of practice.
The visuals were awful; there was so much energy around that the
sensors were filled with garbage, and she concentrated hard to
separate the real from the unreal and keep everything just so.
There! Ease over, careful, careful, you did this in your
mind a thousand times blind . . .
The drone, barely three meters long by two across, settled onto
one of the guard perches and then locked itself onto the polished
wooden dome of the Sacred Lodge itself. A small drill extended from
beneath and bored a tiny hole through the more than twenty
centimeters of wood wall with nearly silent efficiency. There was a
problem when the required depth was reached; there was no
indication that the tip of the drill was through. Worried, she
continued on, but it was another ten centimeters, almost the length
of the drill, before she broke free. She guessed she’d
drilled through a case or an ornamental work, but it didn’t
matter what.
Next the drill was retracted and a small hose inserted. She had
a tense moment when she realized that the hose was only thirty
centimeters—perhaps a fraction short—and cursed herself
for not thinking of this eventuality, but it was close enough. A
centimeter was a very tiny distance and the ejection would be under
pressure.
Almost immediately the tanks switched on and began pumping a
high volume of the colorless, odorless neurotoxin into the Sacred
Lodge. She guessed it was going in in the vicinity of the entry
hall, but it didn’t really matter. The way the interior
climate control worked, the stuff would be all over the place
inside of six anxious minutes, and it only took about two parts per
billion to paralyze anyone breathing it in.
Now, if no busybody popped up at that point and spotted the
probe, and if Vulture was ready for the gas, could neutralize it,
switch the rings, and then find where the opening was, all within a
very short period of time, they just might make it.
This was certainly the toughest one yet, from a technical point
of view. Part of the problem had been access to the inside of the
Sacred Lodge, which was difficult even with Vulture, and
part had been circumventing the security system. There was,
however, one security system they could not circumvent because they
didn’t really know it or its capabilities. Nobody really did.
That was the internal one inside the Sacred Lodge, beyond even
Center’s security control. You could tamper with the monitors
and records, those things that had been designed for human
interfacing, but not the mechanical guard devices. Those operated
automatically whenever the Holy Lama was awake, and the only thing
the raiders could guess about the devices was that they were
formidable. Clayben had been insistent that their plans take the
worst-case approach toward the security system even though it might
be less efficient than they feared, and that was as it had to
be.
There was no way to get Vulture out of there without blowing a
fairly large and hardly unobtrusive hole in the dome and almost
certainly triggering all sorts of alarms. The windows and tempting
skylight in the Holy Lama’s office were connected to the
internal system as well as audible external alarms. They might
still have gotten Vulture out, but the odds of a successful getaway
after were practically nil. No, success depended on stealing the
ring separately and letting Vulture rely on his unique talents to
escape at a later time. Nor could they count on Vulture simply
becoming the Holy Lama. Not only would the best security system be
keyed on both her and the ring, but she could not exit without
always being in a crowd. Vulture was hard to kill, but mortal all
the same.
Vulture, of course, had already practiced with the specific
neurotoxin used, neutralizing it in no time with his absolute
cellular control. Awake and waiting, his body and mind sensed the
danger at once and moved to combat it. The process was simple but
not automatic. He’d been caught unawares by such substances
before, but this was different, it was expected and almost on
schedule.
The other Seed slept on like corpses. Even if they’d
suddenly awakened, they could not have so much as opened their
eyes, although their autonomic systems continued to function in a
reduced but not harmful manner. Vulture got up, went out into the
meditation chamber, and retrieved the duplicate ring from behind a
statue of the sacred Buddha. Then he headed for the Holy
Lama’s bedchambers.
He stopped and stifled a grin as he saw her in bed, and had to
suppress an urge to take advantage of the situation. That was the
Chanchukian male part of him, something he could control as easily
as the neurotoxin but which took more constant vigilance.
She’d actually taken off the ring and put it on her
nightstand! He wasted a precious second to lift and look at her
finger. The hair had been virtually worn away by the ring and there
was some scabbing where it had been. She must have had one
hell of a time getting the damned thing off!
Peeling away the disguise layer on the ring he’d brought,
he turned it from a high priestess’s signet into a near
duplicate of the ring on the nightstand. It wasn’t perfect,
but they’d been able to work from blown-up pictures of the
Holy Lama’s rare public appearances taken from the computer
files at security. However, when not side by side they sure as hell
looked identical.
For a moment he had a sudden fear as he momentarily forgot which
was the real one and which the fake. After all this it sure as hell
wouldn’t do to steal and send the counterfeit back! With some
relief, he saw a tiny bit of the foil from the outer wrapping of
the disguise still clinging to the back of the fake ring. He
scraped it away, inspected it, then put it down on the
nightstand.
Time was precious. He had timed this operation at no more than
twenty minutes. The storm outside sounded pretty bad, but the SPF
was certain to keep popping up to check on it firsthand. Every
minute that drone was atop the dome was one minute more it could be
spotted and an alarm sounded that would queer the whole deal.
Now the problem was to find the damned opening, not much bigger
around than the ring itself, and do it as quickly as possible.
By now the pumps on the drone would have reversed, and the
suction would create a strong airflow outward rather than in. With
that in mind, he found some papers and a match and lit them,
watching the smoke, then tried to follow it before he burned his
hand. Since he knew that it would be at one of the six guard
positions, if all went as planned, that narrowed down his search
some, and he found the proper location with little trouble. Finding
and then getting to the probe was more difficult. It had come into
the library, and it appeared to have drilled its way right through
a bookcase wall about three meters up—or about three times
his height. A chair might have helped, but Chanchukians
didn’t use chairs—they were built for a different sort
of furniture and tended in any event to have seating areas rather
low to the floor.
Feeling the seconds tick away, he thought frantically about how
to reach the probe, cursing that the whole elaborate scheme might
now fall apart because he was too short or the hole was too high.
He finally started stacking the largest books he could find one
atop the other, some so heavy he had problems with them, then
climbing on top. It was just out of reach, and he stretched his arm
to the limit on the high, hastily built stack, the ring held in his
outstretched fingers, and didn’t quite make it several times.
Finally, though, he felt it suddenly taken from his grasp, but he
looked in horror as he saw the ring jam up just inside the hole.
The probe hadn’t quite reached through, and the wood was
chewed up!
Summoning all his strength and concentration, he leaped up and
smacked the ring hard with his hand, then fell crashing to the
floor, his tower of books in shambles. He was bruised and battered,
and nearly broke his neck in the fall. Only the fact that, being
the creature that he was, that sort of damage wouldn’t really
harm him saved him from a rather obvious hospital call.
He looked up at the opening. He couldn’t see the ring, but
he wasn’t certain if it had fallen down or been sucked in or,
if sucked in, if it had made it to the tube and been hauled into
the probe. He looked around the floor, saw no sign of it, and
decided that there was simply nothing more he could do. He would
require a few minutes of concentration to repair his bruises and
sprains, and then he could only attempt to pick up and reshelve the
books and get back to his quarters.
At least the suction, which had been audible in the library, now
seemed to be gone. Whether that was because the ring was lodged in
the hole or safely inside the probe he wouldn’t know, perhaps
for some time, but even if it was lodged it was not a total loss.
He alone would know it was there, and it would be easier at some
point to retrieve it from that spot than to steal it all over
again.
Outside, the sergeant of the guard broke the surface and looked
around. The weather was still awful, and the wind was picking up,
but she frowned, not quite certain why it didn’t seem right.
Something, some sound—no, it was gone now, but its very
absence made her more suspicious.
Suddenly conscious of the fact that, if there were intruders out
there, she was in a pretty weak and exposed position, she ducked
back under. Now was the time to retrieve the guards, lousy
conditions or not, and do a thorough check of the exterior!
The probe switched from vacuum tube back to the borer, only now
a different mechanism was activated. The effect was to plug the
hole with the same material taken from it. It wouldn’t be
perfect, but it would be far less noticeable. That done, Killomen
attempted a sweep of the immediate area but found the weather
conditions impossible. The false echoes were everywhere, blanketing
the screen. She decided that enough was enough, detached the
clamps, and slowly eased the probe up to a height perhaps twenty
meters over the roofs of the lodges, then began bringing it bumpily
back to the barge.
The sensors in the extension mechanism of the drone
weren’t all that much; she knew she had grasped something,
but she wasn’t certain what or where or if it had gotten
inside the drone. That would have to wait for its return and
inspection.
It had been audacious, risky, and complicated as all
hell—that last being the best guarantee of something going
wrong. The fact that they’d gotten away with it even this far
was, to Killomen, nothing short of miraculous.
She brought the drone back down to the deck of the barge, drew
the tarp over it so that no SPF spy satellite might see anything
unusual if it should happen to look, then crawled under. The drone
was still warm from its long flight, but she wanted no suspense
that wasn’t necessary. The lock to the storage compartment
was easily accessible, and she opened it and reached inside.
There was nothing in the compartment. Damn! All this for
nothing . . .
She calmed down a moment and thought. The lone sensor had
indicated that the vacuum tube had picked up something. If it
wasn’t in the compartment, it might well have fallen out when
withdrawn, in which case it was either on the platform or on the
bottom at the foundation of the Sacred Lodge. There was only one
other place to look before assuming the
worst . . .
She went back to the command console and extended the suction
tube, then killed the power and crawled back under. With all the
strength she could muster she pulled and tugged at the tube, then
finally got a knife, reached in, and cut the damned thing off at
its base plate. After bringing out the tube, she felt along it and
found, not very far from the opening, a lump.
“Chung! I need very small pliers or a screwdriver or
something that’ll cut this material down the side!” she
shouted. “We’ve picked up something—but I’m
not sure just what. It’s stuck!”
Chung came over and examined the tube, then stuck her longest
finger in and felt it—it was close to the opening but wedged
in tight.
Taking the knife, and with Killomen holding, Chung cut through
the tube on both sides of the object, then sawed the very small
piece laterally. After some time and effort, she was able to peel
away the thick, tough hose and see just what was inside. It had
been nicked a bit by the knife, but was otherwise in pretty good
shape.
“So that’s one of the rings.” Chung Mung Wo
sighed. “It is impressive, even in the darkness.” She
brought up a small service light and they both stared at it.
“Four more ugly birds,” Chung said.
Butar Killomen shrugged. “Makes sense, if we count
’em. Matriyeh’s ring has one bird and a tree.
Janipur’s had two but no tree, this is four, and from the
pictures, the one on Earth has three. I suppose the fifth one is
either five birds of some kind or maybe none. It would make over a
hundred possible combinations, all but one of which could kill you.
Makes a crazy kind of sense, I guess.”
“Yes,” Chung agreed. “Who knows how strange
those ancients were, or how they thought?” She sighed, and
they both just stood there for a moment, staring at the ring.
Finally Butar Killomen gave a grin and looked up at Chung.
“We did it. This insane, idiotic plan actually worked! We
have the ring!”
Chung nodded, always the pragmatist. “Yes, but we had
better signal Min to meet us at the rendezvous point. Now all we
all have to do is get off this world.”
Butar Killomen sighed, got up, and put the ring in her pouch,
then looked up at the dark, cloudy sky. “At least I will not
die here,” she muttered to herself. “At least I shall
return to where I belong.”
“We have much to do and something of a swim yet
tonight,” she reminded Chung. “Let’s get on with
it. I want to be well away before that fleet arrives. This plan is
not complete unless we get away with the prize, and we don’t
stand a chance with Vals and fighters and an SPF task force
about.”
Chung nodded but couldn’t help looking back into the fog.
“I think we will make it. They were not prepared for this, no
matter how elaborate their precautions and their trap. They will
not be prepared for our leaving, either. But
Vulture . . . ”
“Sometimes I think Vulture is too self-confident,”
she acknowledged. “With that much power and knowledge perhaps
we would be the same. But there is such a thing as being
overconfident. This Colonel Chi is a different breed than we have
seen before. I wish her or him or it luck. We have three now, and
know of a fourth. But the fifth—without the fifth, it is the
same as having none at all. And each time security is tougher: one
mistake and we must begin again—and this is taking long
enough as it is. Vulture will have to be extracautious with this
Colonel Chi . . . ”
Chung shrugged. “Well, our part from now on will be in
space, where we belong. I never believed that this plan
could be pulled off. Now, deep down, I feel our victory may be
difficult but is inevitable. Come! If the current carries us out
far enough I might even risk the motor!”
The storm activity continued fiercely for a while but died away
with the sunrise. The guards came back up and took their positions,
but nothing seemed amiss—and why should they think
differently? Clearly no one had broken into the Sacred Lodge from
above no matter what, or all hell would have broken loose within
and without.
Up on top of the cliffs, all hell was breaking loose anyway. The
relief guards showed up and discovered the ones on duty still
unconscious; an alarm was sounded and a specialty squad was
dispatched on the double. When they found the antenna jumpers and
the added little box, Colonel Chi, still sleepy, was not far behind
and already had issued a general alert.
Within an hour, a team from the science labs aboard the command
ship were down, examining the boxes and analyzing the work done
inside the station as well. They were cautious, just in case of
booby traps, but there were none.
The chief technical officer was quite certain of her results.
“Essentially, last night we had no surface-level sweep. We
were blind to about, oh, three thousand meters when the orbital
probes took over. You could have flown anything in here last
night.”
Now, suddenly, there was a careful examination of almost
everything. Colonel Chi was livid. If anything really serious had
happened, the blame never fell on the foot soldier, it all fell on
the commander. Nobody was more aware of this than Chi.
“All right, between two and six hundred this morning
somebody knocked out our sensors with a very clever set of
devices,” she said to her staff. “Now we must know why.
Such devices are beyond the capacity of anyone here to make, so we
must assume a tie-in with our missing priestess and her
housekeeping staff. The only external threat capable of this is the
pirates, and they are after one thing and one thing only. I want
the entire Sacred Lodge covered, every centimeter of the exterior
and all of the working plant below. I want all guards not just
questioned but mindprinted and computer scanned for the slightest
details.” She stopped and looked at the officer of the day.
“Didn’t you say you sighted a barge far out on the
scopes?”
The OD nodded. “Yes, but it was expected. Of course, if
they interfered with our scopes, I can’t be certain it was
there at all . . . ”
“It was there. The scope sighting came a few minutes
before the guards were put away on the hill,” said the charge
of quarters. “I checked on that.”
“I want that barge. Give me air probes and to hell with
regulations! I don’t care what the masses see or
what they believe!” She sighed. “And get me the Holy
Lama! I don’t care if we wake her up out of her precious
beauty sleep!”
But before she could put in the call, another came from the
surface guards reporting odd scratches and markings above guard
post three. Chi called the tech people and went to investigate. The
Holy Lama wasn’t going anywhere.
“Suction clamps,” the technical officer said after a
cursory study. “Some high-quality ones specially made for
bonding to a wet wooden surface, most likely. The marks
aren’t that pronounced—whatever it was was almost
certainly designed to do this very job and not much else. We
measured the marks and got an estimate as best we could. I’d
say it was small—too small to even fit one of us, considering
the type of motor it had to have to be that unobtrusive in
idle.”
Chi thought furiously. “Too small for us. Might a male
have fit in it?”
“Huh? Yes, I suppose—but how would a male get
into it? The only hole we found is a circular cut perhaps
two, two and a half centimeters across.”
Chi wasn’t certain what her hypothetical creature
might be capable of, but even she doubted it could turn itself into
a rope or snake and slither through such an opening, particularly
while carrying a ring.
It hit her suddenly, and she cursed herself for not seeing the
obvious. “It’s big enough to feed that damned ring
through! I want that barge and that drone! I want every available
trooper and all available technology on this—now! They might
have blinded us here, but they certainly did not blind the command
ship and the permanent system monitors! They are still on the
surface of this planet and I want them!”
She stood there a moment, on the platform, thinking hard. Not
only were they still on the planet, but no matter what their mole,
their inside operative—whoever or whatever it was—most
certainly was still inside the Sacred Lodge.
“Get me a team up here in full security gear and a
construction unit with heavy drills and saws,” she ordered.
“If they can get in by drilling a hole without
triggering the internal security system, we can get in by
drilling a bigger hole. I want to be in there as quickly
as possible—and no one, absolutely no one, gets
out!”
By zero nine-thirty they had a hole drilled sufficient to make a
total wreck of the library wall and large enough to get in both
fully armed troopers and equipment. The squad looked eerie in their
full battle gear and special suits that were both armor and life
support systems. Chi wanted no unpleasant surprises for her
people.
By ten-fifteen they had found the Holy Lama still out cold, as
well as all nine Seed and the children, all also apparently out
cold. Medical took scans and samples and discovered a simple
biochemical neurotoxin in the bloodstream. There were traces in the
air, but most if not all of it had been flushed out or broken down
by now.
“Simple but effective,” the medical officer told
Chi. “There is no permanent harm and it will break down in a
few hours at most. They should all have serious headaches but
little else.”
A sergeant came forward with an object in her gloved hand.
“This what they were looking for, Colonel?”
The colonel took it and examined it with some fleeting hope.
That little hole had been pretty high. Might it be that they made
the attempt but didn’t get what they were after?
“Is it safe to go in just like this?” she asked the
medical officer.
“No problem now. Go ahead.”
“Where is the Holy Lama? They could make a duplicate of
the ring to fool us, knowing we don’t know enough to tell a
valid ring from a phony one, but there is one thing they might have
overlooked.”
She was brought to the unconscious figure of the Holy Lama. It
was a bit startling to see the great figure of Chanchuk in person;
Chi realized that she had never seen her in the flesh until
now.
The SPF officer knelt down and immediately saw the finger where
the ring had been. She took the ring she had and placed it on the
supine figure’s ring finger. It went on easily—too
easily. Chi lifted the hand so the fingers bent limply down and the
ring fell right off and hit the floor with a clatter. A soldier
reached down to pick it up.
“File it as evidence, or a souvenir,” Chi told the
soldier. “It’s phony. Look at the ring finger. Clearly
our Holy Lama has gained some weight since she put on the ring at
her investiture. That ring she had was wedged on tight. See the
scabbing? This ring, on the other hand, is at least two
sizes too large. It was a nice try, though; I’ll give them
that.”
“They’ve got the ring, then?” the tech officer
asked.
Chi nodded. “They have—may it poison them!
They’ll never get it off this world, I swear.” She
turned and looked around. “Medical—you took blood
samples from all life forms here?”
“All the ones not our own people, yes,” came the
reply.
“I want you to run every test possible on all nine, for
the presence of the gas—whoever switched that ring and got
the real one out sure wasn’t knocked out. I want every test
run that you or your medical computers can think of or remotely
imagine. Understand?”
“Yes, certainly. But—what are we looking
for?”
“Anything. Any sign that the blood of one of them is not
one hundred percent normal. And, of course, any sign that one might
have no toxin, or have a greater or lesser degree of it than the
others. Don’t neglect the Holy One or the children, either.
And pull the internal security recordings and anything else useful
and then go over this place with a microscope.
And—Doc?”
“Colonel?”
“I want every living thing in here, from the Holy One to
any stray microbes, to be packed and sealed and taken to separate
isolation cells aboard the command ship as soon as possible. At no
time are any of them to be left alone. I want at least two armed
troopers with them every moment until they are safely in isolation.
Do it now!”
The medical officer shrugged. “All right, but I
don’t see what you’re getting at doing it to the
children, too. They’re mostly babies.”
“Everyone. No exceptions. Now.” Chi scratched her
chin, thinking furiously. “All the rest I can see. A bold
plan. But how do they expect to escape?” Suddenly she saw it.
“They’ll have to either move before the fleet arrives
later today or they’ll have to stay here underground for
years! Notify the command ship—I don’t care what sort
of ship might punch in in the outer system, I want no challenge
unless it moves within range of planetary defenses. I want
everything we have concentrated on Chanchuk. I want anything that
flies from the surface or from any position within transporter
range blown up, no questions asked. Everything. The one
who lets anything escape from the surface dies very
slowly!”
“Very well, Commander.” The way it was said, though,
indicated that the medical officer was wondering if Chi was very
long for that position. To her, the precautions seemed cold and
callously officious, not the work of a brilliant commander. The
colonel was well aware of this.
“And, Doctor—as soon as possible, when things are
established, I shall want a mindprint taken of myself. The print is
to be filed and also dispatched to the Val commanding the task
force.”
The medic was surprised. “Not to headquarters?”
“One to headquarters, too. All right. But I wish it on
record for the direct evaluation by Master System.”
“Very well. As you command.”
Later on the command ship, the Holy Lama and her family were
just coming around and not feeling any too good about it, while
Colonel Chi was in nearly as much discomfort after the thorough
scanning and recording of her mind and memories, when the
colonel’s recovery was interrupted.
“We have a punch,” the duty officer reported.
“All hands on full battle alert.” Alarms sounded
throughout the command ship.
Chi jumped from her cot, the headache pushed away as something
she could not afford, and made her way immediately to the command
center in the center of the ship.
The command center was a different world from the surface
expedition and troop ships. Here SPF officers and enlisted
personnel of a number of races worked side by side, each there
because he or she was the best at what they did. Commodore
Marquette, in overall command of the SPF task force now in place
and the only superior on hand that Chi had, was in his command
chair studying screens full of data that scrolled so fast only the
experienced, trained naval eye could make sense of them.
Marquette was a thick, burly apelike creature who looked as if
he could bend steel bars without thinking, his face a hairy mass
with two huge yellow eyes peering out from the brush and a mouth
that had the teeth and muscles to crush bone. Every race that
Master System had carved from the human base forcibly expelled from
Earth many centuries before had its counterpart in the SPF, so that
they could move unobtrusively in and out of any and all of the
colonial worlds as need be, and so that there would be a certain
level of understanding between the human fighting forces and the
colonials. Chi was of the race of Chanchuk; Marquette’s own
people were from a far harsher and more violent world.
“What is happening, Commodore?” the colonel
asked.
“Lone ship, relatively small but fast. Punched in just
beyond the orbit of Makyiuk. Distance is about sixty million
kilometers. It’s kept its shields on and its engines at full
power, but it’s keeping just out of range of the fighter
screen.”
“It’s a feint,” Chi told him flatly.
“They are trying to draw us out so that they can get their
people off Chanchuk. They know that we have sufficient force to
either cover this immediate area or to make a creditable challenge
but not both. I should not be surprised if others show up in mock
attack formation.”
The commodore was not totally convinced. “You’re
certain? They fought last time, remember.”
“And took tremendous losses. They can replace ships but
not people so easily.”
“I could take three such ships, maybe more, with what I
have,” Marquette noted. “If you’re right, though,
and we get more company, we could wind up as sitting ducks for hit
and runs unless we challenge them.”
“It is true you could take them if they stood and
fought,” Chi agreed, “but this time they will not. I
beg you to hold firm. If we can hold their people on the ground for
just another few hours, the main task force will be here and we
will be impregnable.”
“Two more punches, evenly spaced, twenty-million-kilometer
separation!” the scanning computer reported.
Marquette’s eyes narrowed. “Freighters. Scows. The
one in the middle is the only worthy fighting ship.” He
punched a command button. “Identification?”
“Likely that the freighter to port is Bahakatan,
freebooter vessel commanded by Ali Mohammed ben Suda,” the
computer reported. “Starboard is Kaotan, commanded
by Ikira Sukotae. Commanders are last known registry, may not apply
at this date. Fighter is unknown origin, no registry, but was
involved in the Battle of Janipur. Communications monitors referred
to it as Lightning. All three ships have additional armor
and have changed configurations since last encounter.
Bahakatan is most vulnerable since inherent design makes
it intrinsically slower and less maneuverable, but for that reason
it is probably the best armed and shielded.”
Chi nodded. “What do we have?”
“Nine fighters dedicated to command ship fighter screen,
two other groups of six each on random surface sweeps, two
transports and the supply and factory ship each with one group
screen of nine,” Marquette responded.
Alarms suddenly went off. “Minipunch detected! Attack
imminent!” warned the speakers, and as Chi watched, the
center ship vanished from its position on the master screen while
the two fighters went into normal space motion, peeling off and
creating large arcs as their probable attack plan was analyzed.
“Don’t like this,” Marquette grumbled.
“Sitting ducks, waiting for them to shoot before we know
where to shoot back.” Lightning emerged from its punch within barely a
kilometer of the supply and factory ship and let loose a barrage of
torpedoes, punching back in within moments.
“Bastard! Nervy bastard! He’s actually punched
inside our damned fighter screen!” the commodore exclaimed.
The torpedoes, all intelligent and all preprogrammed for weak spots
in shielding, curved and dodged close to the transport whose guns
blazed trying to pick them off before one of the torpedoes found a
way in. In the meantime the fighters were nearly useless; any
attempt on the torpedoes would be just as likely to hit the ship
they were supposed to protect.
“Transport struck! One—two—no, three hits!
Damage serious!” the battle group commander called, although
Marquette could see what was happening. Lightning punched
out a good fifty million kilometers out from the Chanchuk task
force, looped, then came back straight in and punched as,
simultaneously, the two freighters punched as well.
With these speeds and distances, punching was nearly
instantaneous. An attacker would simply vanish in one spot and
appear in another. No human could defend against such an attack,
but the battle computers could shift—if Marquette freed them
to counter the threat.
Suddenly all three ships were inside the command ship’s
perimeter, firing off salvos of a dozen torpedoes and vanishing.
Punching in with their full forward shields on and punching out
without turning, the massed fire from the command ship itself had
no more effect than to perhaps shake up the people on the attacking
vessels. The command ship attack was equally futile; the kind of
screens employed by the command ship would take far more than these
kinds of forays to damage. Still, there was a faint shudder within
the bowels of the ship as the torpedoes struck where they
could.
“These aren’t random attacks,” Marquette told
Chi. “They’re well planned, well scouted, and well
flown. Thanks to the initial response, the damage to the factory
ship isn’t bad and is under control, but they can do this all
day if they have the power, and I’d guess they do. Sooner or
later they are going to take some of us out. I’ve
got to free the defensive computers to work as a whole!
Otherwise we will begin to suffer serious damage!”
“No!” Chi was adamant. “They are trying to
pull us away, don’t you see?”
“Colonel, we have twelve fighters covering the Chanchuk
grid from pole to pole. Nobody can punch from the surface;
it’d take a good ten minutes for anything taking off to reach
orbit, let alone beyond. In ten minutes I can have three fighters
taking out anything that comes up from anywhere.”
Chi swallowed hard, unable to make a case against that. The navy
knew what it and a potential enemy could do, and physical laws were
physical laws. “All right. I will defer to you on this. Keep
the planetary screen intact but feel free to employ your other
forces as you desire.”
“Now you’re talking!” The commodore could have
overridden Chi from the start, of course, on the basis of sheer
rank and position, but had no desire to do so. Their mission was to
prevent an escape; that was Chi’s department.
The defense computers took over task force command. The three
vulnerable ships were brought close and tightened up with the
command ship, and the new task force fighter screen, now numbering
eighteen, divided into two groups, one shielding the ships and the
other ready to analyze speed, trajectory, and movements of the
enemy and go after them. None of the fighters was manned; all had
limited punch capability.
The three enemy ships and the SPF played cat and mouse for
almost forty minutes, neither striking any real blow against the
other that caused any damage, until the defense computers under
Marquette determined what was known as a “release
pattern” to the enemy attacks. They came in, attacked
alternately, and regrouped at various angles from the task
force—but the regrouping positions were now showing a
distinct mathematical pattern. The defense computers took a guess
at just where they could come out next, and when the next attack
came, and the attackers punched through, the fighters punched
through at the same time.
Colonel Chi watched the battle on the screens, noting
particularly the rolling and gyrations of the enemy vessels as they
were engaged by the fighters. Thinking about there being
people on those attacking ships, she was very glad she was
a ground trooper.
“Stung ’em a bit that time,” Marquette noted
with satisfaction.
“Sir! Surface launches!”
Marquette whirled in his chair. “Where? How
many?”
“All over. Oh, my—hundreds. From all over
the place!”
A full three-dimensional model of Chanchuk hovered over the
command plate in the planetary defense section, and on it could be
seen just what the monitor was reporting. Hundreds of angry, red
blips, all over the globe . . .
Suddenly Chi realized the one thing she’d forgotten in all
the excitement over the Sacred Lodge, the raid, the creature, all
the rest. That damned small motor assembly.
Somehow, somewhere, over a very long period of time, they had
been planting those things all over Chanchuk! What use was just a
motor and a small logic module? On defensive screens the damned
things all looked alike. Somewhere among them was one, two, perhaps
three with pirates aboard—and the ring.
“Break off!” Chi shouted. “Concentrate all
fighters on those things! Shoot ’em down! All of them! Forget
about anything else!”
“I’ll be damned if I’m going to take my screen
off this ship!” the commodore responded. “Recall and
reform battle group,” he commanded. “When done, commit
three fighters from battle group two to each enemy vessel. Have
planetary defense battle group break off and split into thirds and
join covering fighters. Target anything attempting to reach said
vessels. Shadow!” He turned and looked up at Chi.
“Can’t possibly get more than a fraction of ’em,
but we can shoot anything they try to pick up!”
Chi’s estimation of Marquette went up a notch or two.
The tiny SPF fighters were much too small and fast to use
torpedoes against, and as long as they themselves could throw a
random missile or two at the enemy to make it keep its
distance—which meant keeping out of range of the ship’s
guns—they were relatively safe. On the other hand, guns could
pick off an object of any size or significance that was on any sort
of clear trajectory for pickup by the freighters, who were bearing
down so that they would both skim opposite sides of Chanchuk well
away from the task force’s position. If either freighter
stopped long enough to allow matter transmission from the surface,
enough fighters would converge on it that it would never
escape. Lightning continued its attack against the task force,
keeping the rest of the fighter screen occupied. Now facing only
nine fighters having to cover four ships, the enemy was able to
inflict some real damage on the previously weakened supply and
factory ship and on the two transports. It ignored the command ship
for now—except for an occasional salvo of torpedoes to keep
the fighter screen busy—since those shields were just too
strong for any one ship.
“Two Val ships and twice the fighters and all three of
them would be history,” Marquette noted. “I just
can’t figure out what they’re trying to accomplish by
this.”
The two freighters continued to close as the fighters screening
them remained ahead and began picking off anything in their path
before those freighters could get close. There were now effectively
two fighter groups, one on each freighter, while a lone group of
five or six ships randomly picked off the small dots just attaining
orbit.
Marquette pointed at the globe of Chanchuk. “We’ve
got a few of those mystery blips heading straight for us. Good.
It’ll give our gunnery computers some work!” Lightning looped at forty-six million kilometers out,
turned, and bore back in on them head on, punching as predicted.
Suddenly an alarm went off in the command center and they turned to
look. The projected exit of Lightning was not within their
protective ring but below and beyond it! As they watched,
Lightning reappeared perhaps a hundred kilometers below
them, extended some sort of scoop, and sucked up a half dozen of
the mystery blips.
It was so close in that the defense computers committed the
fighters to go after Lightning, loosing a horde of
torpedoes at the same time. Even ships’ guns opened up; at
that range they had a clear shot at the enemy.
There were several hits but clearly not enough.
Lightning lurched and then began accelerating to where it
would miss the planet and attain sufficient speed for a punch. The
fighters were on its tail, but they could not prevent the punch or
stop the enemy ship. Lightning was damaged but by no means
helpless, and it had a pretty good chance of complete escape.
“All fighters break off, break off!” Marquette
ordered. “Target the escaping vessel. Repeat, target the
escaping vessel.”
Almost immediately Kaotan and Bahakatan were
alone. Only when they were certain that there was no more fighter
cover did they alter course and close in together. Kaotan
opened its pickup bays and activated its transport beams as
Bahakatan covered.
As Chung had predicted, the pickup was made with comparative
ease and safety.