Cat and Company (11 page)

“Let me see, please,” Bedivere said.

“Me, too,” Connell said.

Bedivere grabbed the data stream as it was pushed toward him and immersed himself in it. Information…inference…implication…the meanings built in his mind. “Somewhere out in the Scutum-Centaurus Arm,” he said.

“The Silent Sector?” Lilly asked sharply.

“No,” Connell said flatly in his digital-processing voice. “Close. On this side of where the Last Gate used to be.”

“The Canum system,” Bedivere concluded. “Three light years beyond the Last Gate.”

“Canum?” Brant repeated. “There’s nothing out there but ore balls and meteors.”

“There is a single registered planet,” Yennifer said. “Kashya. N
on-Terran and classified as high risk. High in mineable ores and there are mineral rights claims lodged.”

“If it’s a high risk ball, then it’s a good bet that’s where the pilot got the long-term doses that caused the cancers,” Brant said. “Did you dig up a name amongst the data?”

“I’ve matched his DNA with datacore records,” Yennifer said. “
Yuudai Grigorov. He was a shipmind, from the
Grigorov
, one of the last Federation cruisers commissioned. Achieved sentience fifty-three years ago, relocated to a secure datacore base thirty-three years ago. He brought a tether from you, Bedivere.”

“I don’t remember him,” Bedivere said. “There are so many Varkan now. I only retain those I meet personally.”

“Does he at least have a mule farm somewhere?” Connell asked. “I can’t see anything.”

“Nothing in the data indicates if he does or not,” Yennifer said.

Bedivere shook his head. “It’s not something his bios or his pod would record. We’ll just have to assume he does. I hope he emerges and doesn’t remember a thing, not even us here on Charlton or arriving here. If he doesn’t, he won’t come back here after the regeneration, so we’ll never know.”

“That’s a mystery I’ll be happy to live with,” Brant said.

“Who’s up for a trip to Canum?” Connell said, standing up. “I’ve got room for one or three, depending on which pod I use.”

“You’re not going there,” Bedivere said flatly and got to his feet, too.

“How else are we going to see the dragons with spines and red eyes?” Connell asked patiently. “I just checked the feeds. There was only ever one feed from that system and it’s dead and black. The only way we find out what happened is to go there.”

“If we do, you’re not going in a pod,” Brant said. “We use Bedivere’s ship, which can limp home via the gates if anything happens to you guys.”

Connell rolled his eyes. “So take Yennifer and Bedivere and me, and you’ll have two back-ups and a pilot with you.”

“I can’t leave the city vulnerable, not when there is a potential threat out there,” Yennifer said quickly.

“You’ll be attached through the core,” Connell said dismissively.

“Wait,” Lilly said firmly, raising her voice. “Before anyone gets into an argument about this. Bedivere, I agree with Connell that we have to go and look. Yuudai
died
getting the warning to us. Charlton is on the far side of the galaxy from Canum, so he didn’t pick the nearest habitat to jump to. He chose Charlton for a reason. We must go and look. Your ship
is
the best protected one out there. Pods have absolutely no defenses—”

“Except for the ability to jump away instantly,” Connell inserted.

Lilly glared at him. “Indulge my human paranoia,” she said. “Brant, would you mind going with Bedivere and Connell? I will stay here to mind the store.” She smiled. “Voluntarily, this time.”

Bedivere nodded. “I was going anyway,” he said truthfully. He checked the dock status. “The
Aliza
is on ready status.” He paid a lot of money for the ship to be maintained and ready to go at a moment’s notice. While he had been away, the dock master had assiduously kept the
Aliza
in top notch condition. He inserted himself into the systems, just enough to start up pre-flight procedures, then alerted the dock crew. “By the time we get to the dock, I’ll be ready.”

Brant got to his feet and rubbed at the back of his neck. “I feel like loading up with weapons…how do you prepare for the unknown?”

“You don’t,” Bedivere said flatly. “We’ll just have to stay alert.”

Brant kissed Lilly soundly. “Thank you for volunteering me.”

She patted his cheek. “Stop complaining. You wanted to go.”

“Come
on
,” Connell urged, heading for the door.

Bedivere followed him at a more sedate pace, waiting for Brant to catch up with him, although really, he wanted to race to the ship just like Connell was doing, except that Connell was skipping ahead with excitement over a potential adventure, while Bedivere’s chief emotion was worry…with a dose of fear for good measure.

* * * * *

Kashya (Canum III), Canum System, Scutum-Centaurus Arm. FY 10.187

When the Canum star field coalesced on the screens, Connell leaned forward in the co-pilot chair, his eyes widening. “Holy heavens…!”

Bedivere scanned local space both digitally and with his human eyes on the screens and dash readouts, braced and right on the verge of jumping away again. The skin on the back of his neck was crawling with unnamed terror.

The sky was full of ships…at least, he presumed they were ships. He had never seen anything like such craft before.

“They’re not human or Varkan,” Brant breathed.

“They’re not attacking,” Connell whispered. “They’re just sitting there. They must have noticed us by now.”

The ships were all sizes. Big and small, personal craft and behemoths that could carry an entire city. The styling of some of them was almost organic in the graceful curves and sinuous lines. Others were clunky, angled designs bristling with appendages, at least some of which would be weapons, even though nothing attached to the sides of those craft looked like any weapons that Bedivere recognized.

“It’s a junk fleet,” Brant said. “Nothing looks like anything else. It’s as though they’ve collected every craft that could move through space in a straight line.”

“No, there’s different classes,” Connell said in his flat processing voice. “The spiky ones outnumber the others. The smooth ones are the second most common design, even though each ship looks different.” He looked at Brant who stood between the two chairs, holding the backs of them. “They were purpose built. What they
did
collect was the design.”

Bedivere focused on one of the ships that Connell had described as “spiky”. They did look spiky. The front of the ship, where presumably the flight deck was located, if there was one at all, formed a head, attached to the body of the ship by an articulated and elongated structure that had panels or baffles mounted along the center line. Spikes.

The front of the flight deck had observation windows that glinted crimson in the light of Canum’s red sun.

“Dragons with red eyes,” Brant murmured. “Where’s Kashya?”

“Behind us,” Connell murmured.

“Hang on,” Bedivere said and switched the rear screens into active mode.

The view swapped over and Bedivere caught his breath. “Glave save us…” he muttered, using Brant’s favorite oath. “That isn’t the Kashya we looked at before we jumped.”

“That was an image in the datacore,” Connell said. “This is the real Kashya.”

Kashya, as registered in the datacore star catalogue, was the third planet of Canum. It had a highly inhospitable and thin nitrogen and ammonia atmosphere with a swirling permanent cloud cover. The original generation ship that had built the gates had lost all but a handful of their landing party on the surface. The three survivors had only lived a handful of years after that before needing regeneration, because the atmosphere was corrosive, eating at most metals and humans, too. The ores on the planet were resistant, which made them particularly valuable and explained why someone had registered the mineral rights. If a cheap way of extracting the metals could be found that didn’t kill off their labor too quickly, a profit could be made down below the cloud cover.

What they were staring at now was bare rock face, with patches of green. There was no cloud cover, yet there was a shimmer where the planet curved away from the naked eye.

“Atmosphere,” Bedivere said. “Only…not the atmosphere that used to be there.”

“They changed it?” Brant breathed. “Terraformed it…so quickly?”

“Who
are
they?” Connell demanded. “No one can terraform a whole planet in a few days or less. We’re still perfecting the technology and even then it takes decades.”

“Wasn’t there a mining colony under a dome, here, Bedivere?” Brant asked. “Where is it?”

“It should be on the dawn line right now,” Bedivere said. He looked at the emerging edge of the slowly turning globe. There was more green, more bare earth and rock. He magnified the view so that something as small as a large house would show.

For long minutes they scanned the section of the globe, quartering it with the long range viewer.

“It’s gone,” Brant said bleakly. “Everything…and everyone.”

“Whatever they use to terraform…it must wipe out everything already in place,” Connell said slowly, staring at the view. “Like a big meteor hitting a planet and destroying the atmosphere.”

Bedivere looked at the armada of ships floating around them, silent and still. “They hit it with something from up here. Something big that destroyed the atmosphere and all life, then replaced it with something they wanted in its place. An atmosphere favorable to them.”

“They’re down there, then?” Connell whispered.

Brant rolled his eyes.

“I think so, yes,” Bedivere told him, except that something was niggling, trying to sit up and talk to him. He left it alone. The idea would arrive when it was ready.

“We should leave,” Brant said. His voice was hoarse. “Someone with the ability to wipe out an entire planetary ecosystem…I don’t want to meet them.”

“We came for information,” Bedivere reminded him. “I’ve been scanning since we landed. I’m nearly done.”

“Who could do this?” Connell was still whispering.

“Hurry up,” Brant urged.

“Hurrying,” Bedivere assured him.

“
Who
?” Connell said more loudly.

Brant gripped his shoulder. “Not humans. Not Varkan. You said that yourself. We’re still a generation away from perfecting something like this.”

“That leaves….” Connell looked at them, his eyes wide.

“Yes,” Brant agreed.

“Aliens.” Bedivere breathed out the word. “There’s another species in our galaxy, one that can scrape off an entire world and remake it for themselves in the blink of an eye.”

“God above, get us out of here,” Brant begged.

Bedivere jumped.

Charlton Space City, New Cathay (Ji Xiu Prime), Ji Xiu System, Perseus Arm. FY 10.187

“We have to tell all the planetary governors, of course,” Devlin said, in a reasonable tone. “Their worlds are as vulnerable as Kashya was, if I understand you properly. Kashya has close to a standard G in gravity and is an ideal size for human habitation. The only thing that made it high risk was the ammonia atmosphere. Now that has been replaced by whatever these aliens consider to be suitable for them. Every inhabited world in the known galaxy has the same gravity specifications, doesn’t it?”

There was a profound silence in response. Bedivere looked around the room. No, not everyone had processed all the implications properly yet. The shock on their faces told him that much.

Catherine, though, merely looked thoughtful. She had already figured out that much, then. She looked at Bedivere directly. “You didn’t see them?”

“Only their ships.”

“And a mottled, rag-tag fleet that was, too,” Connell said. “Different design specifications and philosophies.”

“A remaindered fleet?” she asked him sharply.

Connell shook his head. “Too many of the same
type
. They built the ships themselves. They just used a smorgasbord of design approaches to do it.” He was still pale and his fingers were twining in and out of each other as he sat with his head down, his shoulders bowed.

Brant was sipping his way through his second brandy. The first had lasted only a few seconds.

“Stolen technology,” Catherine said softly.

That was when the memory clicked into place and began screaming at him. Bedivere dropped his feet off the arm of the sofa and sat up. “
That’s
where I’ve seen it before.” He pushed his fingers into his temples, trying to bring the memory into focus.

“Bedivere?” Lilly asked softly. “You’ve remembered something?”

“It’s not all there,” he muttered. “I can’t quite grab it. The spiky ships…I’ve seen them before. Something like them. Remnants.”

Catherine was staring at him, her eyes wide. So were the Varkan pilots who Devlin had brought with him to this hastily called meeting.

“You don’t
remember
something?” Catherine said. Dismay was etching her face in harsh lines. “How can you not remember?”

Connell lifted his head. “Is it from…?” he asked delicately, with a glance at Devlin and his crew. Even Nichol August was watching him with narrowed eyes.

“The Silent Sector,” Bedivere said flatly. He had to lay it out there for them. This was too important.

“You’ve been in the Silent Sector?” Catherine said. Shock made her voice hoarse.

“A while ago,” Bedivere said briskly, dismissing it. “I don’t remember much. The spikiness, though, I remember. What I saw out there was old. Very old. Ancient.”

“We’ve known for a long time about the alien artifacts out there,” Devlin said slowly, thinking it through. “None of it was whole or workable or told us anything except that there had been another sentient race in the galaxy, a long time ago. Are these the same race, then?”

“No.” Brant shook his head. “If they had been in the Silent Sector all along, we would have met them before now. These aliens
steal
technology.”

“They stole the spiky ship technology from the ones they found in the Silent Sector,” Catherine said softly. “That’s where they’ve come from. Kashya is only a few light years from where the Last Gate was.”