Strider's Galaxy (38 page)
Authors: John Grant
Just as an experiment, he tried using the Pocket to look into the
Santa Maria
's future.
It didn't work.
#
Strider didn't see the alien at first. It came hopping across the blue-green vegetation, winged itself into the air for a few meters, and then started hopping towards her again. She saw it out of the corner of her eye, but assumed that the local bird-analogue life had chosen a singularly inappropriate moment to display itself. She kept the downslope covered with her lazgun, moving it steadily one way and the other. The lazgun wasn't going to be a lot of use if those things out there were just remotes, but neither was anything else.
The little creature almost jumped on to her hand before she gave it proper attention. It had bird-like wings, but its body was more like that of a tailless mouse. Its head was vaguely reminiscent of that of a mouse as well, except that there were no visible ears.
THIS PERSON WISHES TO SPEAK WITH YOU, CAPTAIN LEONIE STRIDER,
said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.
"Which person?"
THE ONE STANDING ALMOST DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF YOU. HIS NAME IS COMMANDER EBERRY SEGRILL. HE IS THE HEAD OF SECURITY ON THIS PLANET.
Strider focused on the small winged animal. She had been just about to bat it out of the way with the back of her hand.
"You mean he wants to kill us?"
I THINK YOU HAD BETTER SPEAK WITH HIM.
She looked more closely at the little creature, and then held out her hand. Without hesitation Segrill hopped on to her palm.
"We must talk to each other," he said. Strider could hear both the piping noise he made and the words interpreted by Ten Per Cent Extra Free. The proposition seemed ludicrous on the face of it. If she clenched her hand tightly she could crush this tiny animal to a pulp. Yet Segrill was chief of what was presumably an efficient strike force and she was the leader of a band of primitives . . .
"Please explain," she said.
"Not everyone who is in the thrall of the Autarchy wishes to see it persist," said Segrill.
"How do I know I can trust a single word you say?"
"I will permit you to read my mind in its entirety," said Segrill.
Strider didn't understand for a moment. Then realization struck her. The little alien assumed that the Images were an integral part of this particular small band of human beings. Why should he think anything different? Ten Per Cent Extra Free was currently operating out of Pinocchio, but of course Segrill couldn't see that. He must assume humans were telepathic. It might be wise to let him continue thinking that for a while.
"I've already done so," she said. Because the alien was so close to her she couldn't even subvocalize.
Have you done a sweep of his mind?
she thought at Ten Per Cent Extra Free.
HE IS SINCERE,
said the Image.
I SHALL LET YOU KNOW IF HE STARTS TO LIE.
"And how can
I
know that I can trust
you
?" said Segrill.
"Because you're standing in the palm of my hand. More to the point, I'm metaphorically in the palm of yours. Each of us could destroy the other very easily."
"That is true," said Segrill. "My people have lazcannon trained on you right at this minute."
Strider hesitated. That was something more than she had anticipated. She had better get her mind together. If she continued to find it difficult to take this alien seriously she might find herself and all the rest of her personnel dead very much more quickly than she expected.
"What can you offer us?" she said.
Segrill explained how the techs working on F-14 were, in effect, a legion of revolutionaries just waiting for the right moment to rise up. He had seen the huge fleet of Human warcruisers—it took Strider a further moment of thought to understand that what he had seen was the Helgiolath armada—and believed that he could add several hundred warcruisers to it, each crewed by dedicated warriors. The techs knew more about the Autarchy's weaponry—its strengths and weaknesses—than even the Autarch's military themselves, so that in effect he would be almost doubling the size of the "Human" fleet. Although the Autarch, with warning, could set up a force much larger than the combined fleets, they would have the advantage of surprise—they might even be able to strike at Qitanefermeartha itself before they were faced by any greater firepower.
Strider decided to put her cards on the table.
"Tell him what the true situation is," she said to Ten Per Cent Extra Free.
"Are your friends the Helgiolath likely to accept us?" said Segrill after a short pause.
"If you're with us. If I'm able to talk to Kortland through a Pocket and persuade him that you're not snakes in the grass."
This last metaphor clearly didn't translate too clearly. Strider had to explain it in two or three different versions before finally Ten Per Cent Extra Free hit on one that Segrill could understand.
"We must get you back to your spaceship," said Segrill at length.
"How are you going to do that? I mean"—she waved with her free hand in the general direction of the hillside where the fighter craft lay squatly and small—"you couldn't fit even half of one of us into your ships. By the way, just how
big
are these warcruisers you're offering?"
"Some of them are forty times the size of your own."
"Um."
"The techs vary in size between species very much smaller than I am myself up to others that are nearly fifty meters tall. We all work together."
"Are any of the cruisers as small as those fighters?" she said.
"Those fighters could very simply be converted into warcruisers, but you must understand that their firepower would not be great."
"I think I just have the first glimmerings of an idea," said Strider. "I also think we have a partnership. I'd like to shake on it, except that probably you have some completely different method of signalling agreement and anyway I'm not sure I could do it without breaking your hand."
SEGRILL'S SPECIES NORMALLY CONFIRM AN AGREEMENT BY HAVING SEXUAL INTERCOURSE,
said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.
WE THINK THAT IN THIS INSTANCE . . .
She stroked the top of Segrill's head, making sure that her touch was as gentle as possible.
"We're an alliance," she said.
He leapt off her hand.
"Agreed."
Then he was flying away across the hillside. He wheeled up into the sky for a moment, performing a complicated wing-movement that undoubtedly meant something to his troops—something like "Don't shoot yet"—before she lost him from sight.
#
It was good to be back on board the
Santa Maria
again, and to be able to take a bath: that was just about the first thing most of the personnel had done.
Not Strider or her main officers, however: furtively hoping that they didn't smell as bad to other people as they did to themselves, they were trying to power the ship up, aided by the Images and by various of Segrill's techs. The difficulty was that, while the
Santa Maria
had been redesigned so that it could be operated in an atmosphere, it hadn't been adapted for landing or takeoff. It had jets that, with a little bit of cunning, could be used to lift it a few tens of meters off the ground, but thereafter its rocketry would be useful only for turning several thousand square kilometers of desert, and whoever happened to be there, into glass.
Segrill had transported them from their leafy hideaway back to the desert by calling up one of the fighters under his command: this ship, crewed by the Bredai, who were rather larger than the average nightmare and required a methane atmosphere, had been almost of the same size as the
Santa Maria
itself. A human behavioral therapist, interested in the way these aliens interacted, had gone too close to one of them and been rendered, on the floor, as something quite disturbingly like a Preeae except for the bits and pieces of spacesuit scattered around the splotch. Strider didn't allow herself to spend too much time thinking about what had happened to the guy: someone had shovelled him up and they'd all given him a burial—a ceremony that had clearly baffled the aliens.
It had been a quick way to go. One moment you're conducting a piece of scientific observation, the next moment
splat
. One had to assume that, far in the past of every sentient species, there had been individuals who had made similar scientific discoveries. Let's try this nice new brightly shining fruit we haven't come across before.
Omnes:
Aargh.
Segrill had gone back to Hallaroi in hopes that the techs there would be able to solve the problem of getting the
Santa Maria
off the ground. Strider was in constant touch with him through the Images.
"This hasn't been the easiest of missions," she said off-handedly to Nelson.
"I set off to Tau Ceti
II
and all I got was this lousy T-shirt," he replied.
There was a beep from one of the communications Pockets. Strider moved to it and saw a semblance of Segrill: reproduced in the Pocket he seemed to be the same size as she was herself. The Images had clearly decided that she should speak to him face to face.
"There is a way," he said, not concerned with any preliminaries.
"How?"
"We can
lift
you into space. A Bredai transport vessel is big enough and powerful enough to haul you up into orbit. We're going to have to tamper with the size of the bay doors of the one that is just being completed in order to accommodate you, but this is not beyond our means."
"Sounds good to me," said Strider, although the prospect sounded terrifying. The immensities of what could go wrong filled her mind. Segrill assumed that the Bredai were his allies, but if they were in fact loyal to the Autarchy they could simply hoist the
Santa Maria
a few thousand meters in the air and
drop
it. Or, even with the best of intentions, they could allow an accident to occur which caused methane to flood into the
Santa Maria
.
"Go ahead," she said.
5
My Fleet is Bigger than Yours
Kaantalech looked at her aide with what she knew was the precisely proper expression of disdain. Not that the aide would be able to pick it up, of course: any aide who grew clever enough to be able to read her body language was dangerous, and swiftly met the same fate as those who were too stupid. It was a fine line you had to tread, being one of Kaantalech's aides.
"You've found the Humans again, but they're in the middle of an eight-thousand-strong fleet of warcruisers? That's worse than it was before," she repeated disbelievingly.
"That is what's happened," said the aide tremulously. "The fleet has grown. Most of the ships are of the Helgiolath; the rest we cannot as yet identify. And then there are the Humans."
Kaantalech swore with elegant fluency. A fleet this size was sufficient to inflict considerable damage on the Autarchy, at least in the short term. She hadn't expected that other species might start to add themselves to it.
Add a few hundred warcruisers and the fleet could . . .
Now
there
was an idea.
Add a few hundred warcruisers and you had a fleet big enough to cause
permanent
damage to the current Autarchy. Then there would be a hiatus while The Wondervale sorted itself out, and
then
there would be the dawn of a new empire. The future suddenly looked golden.
"I have spoken with the leader of the Human contingent before," she said. "Establish contact again."
"I'll do my best," said the aide nervously.
Kaantalech hit him so hard that the sound of his bones fracturing as his body shattered against the bulkhead remained in the aural memories of her other aides for the rest of their lives.
"I want to speak with the Human-thing again," she said. "I need a volunteer to make the contact."
#
Kortland made his decision. The raid he had mounted on F-14 had been, in the most unexpected of ways, a triumph. His fleet was now twice as strong—in effect if not numerically—as it had been before, and the Autarchy's main source of weaponry was hardly functioning at all. It wouldn't be long, though, before the Autarchy shipped out more techs to repair what farewell sabotage had done to the manufactories on F-14. He credited the Humans with their bravery and the ability they had shown to survive; had they not been so ugly he might have been prepared to award them the status of honorary Helgiolath. As it was, he was content enough to have their vessel as part of his armada.
The decision he made was simply enough expressed in a single word. He had thought this was an order that he himself would never be able to give—that it would be issued only by his successor, or by his successor's successor.
"Qitanefermeartha," he said.
#
Polyaggle was attempting to establish contact with Kortland when a quite different face popped into existence in the communications Pocket. She recognized the species immediately: this was one of the Alhubra who had visited and attempted, from time to time over the years, to take over Spindrift and turn the planet to profit, and who had eventually destroyed her kind.
"You're not a Human," said Kaantalech at once.
"I'm a Spindrifter."
"There are no Spindrifters left alive."
"I am."
"I very much regretted the operational exercise which the Autarch forced me to perform. Please let me commiserate about the demise of your species."
"Please let me commiserate about the demise of yours," said Polyaggle. She had never felt an emotion like this before—she guessed she must have picked it up from the Humans. It was vengefulness.
"My species is still alive and proliferating," said Kaantalech.
"Not for long." She didn't mean it. There were doubtless good Alhubra and bad Alhubra, just as there had been good Spindrifters and bad Spindrifters.
"I want to speak with your Human commander," said Kaantalech.
"She may not want to speak with you."
"Please ask her," said Kaantalech. "I am prepared to wait." Drool was spilling out of the creature's mouth. Polyaggle, who did not salivate, was revolted.
She lifted her head from the Pocket and addressed Strider. "There is a person here who believes it can do a deal of some kind with you."
"Who is it?" said Strider, who was in the midst of trying to persuade the Images that perhaps they could resuscitate even more of the Main Computer than Polyaggle had been able to do, now that she had carried out the groundwork.
"It is a person from the Autarchy. It claims to have led the expedition that exterminated my species."
"Tell it to fuck off, then."
"It is most insistent. I believe it may have something to offer." Polyaggle hated the words even as she spoke them. Were it not for the brood of new Spindrifters that was already forming within her she would have snapped off communications with the Alhubra-thing. But the Humans had befriended her, and one of them might form the nest for her brood. It was possible that the Alhubra could benefit the Humans, help them survive.
"OK, I'll speak with it," said Strider.
Polyaggle stood aside to let Strider face the communications Pocket. In doing so she inadvertently brushed against Lan Yi, ripping his jumpsuit in several places with her bristles. He made the movement of his mouth which Polyaggle had come to realize was among the Humans a gesture of friendliness. She touched a claw to his hand by way of apology, and he made that same gesture with his mouth again. She found it very difficult to like individual Humans, but this one seemed more amenable than most.
When her brood came to full ripeness, perhaps he would be the one.
#
"I have five hundred and twenty-two ships under my command, and I am prepared to join them to the Helgiolath fleet," said Kaantalech to Strider as soon as she put her face into the communications Pocket.
"I don't think the Helgiolath will want you. You're the shit who destroyed the Spindrifters, aren't you? I thought I'd made my feelings plain enough before."
"I was under orders."
"Whose?"
"The Autarch Nalla's. He made me do it."
"You could have refused."
"If I had I would have been summarily executed."
"So you thought it was worth annihilating an entire species just to save your own life?"
"This is irrelevant," said Kaantalech. "I can add considerable might to your fleet. I can also give much by way of information: I and my puters know more about the Autarchy's military secrets than you will ever learn."
By your friends you are known,
thought Strider. "What you're trying to tell me," she said, "is that this could be a mutually profitable relationship?"
"It could indeed. I am as eager to see the end of the Autarchy as you are." Kaantalech made a curious movement of her forelimbs which Strider couldn't interpret. "I wish to see peace and harmony throughout The Wondervale."
SHE'S LYING,
said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.
"I knew that already," Strider subvocalized.
"We have a common cause," said Kaantalech.
"No, we don't. If I knew where you were right now I'd hit you with every beam and missile aboard this ship, and after I'd done that I'd get the entire Helgiolath fleet to do the same, and if that weren't enough I would chase you so far and so fast that you fell out of the side of the Universe. Is this clear?"
"We will talk about this again later," Kaantalech said as her face vanished from the communications Pocket.
"Another nuisance commline call," Strider explained sarcastically to O'Sondheim as she backed away from the Pocket. "If only a few of them would start talking obscenely . . ."
#
Strauss-Giolitto woke to find there was a warm body beside her on the bed, and she snuggled affectionately against it. Then she woke again to discover that there wasn't anyone there.
Of all the recurring dreams she had, this was the cruellest.
Loneliness stretched out like a lake of unlit, unruffled water behind her. Ahead of her was the same black, still surface. She could speak openly to Pinocchio and with a certain modified frankness to Lan Yi, but otherwise there was no one on board the
Santa Maria
whom she could count as a friend. Yes, of course she missed sex, but what she missed far more than that was intimacy—the intimacy of whispering together in the moments before falling asleep, the intimacy of being in someone else's arms and holding them in her own, the intimacy of very slowly and softly licking a kneecap or a navel, the intimacy of waking together and both wanting a pee at the same time but neither of you willing to be the first to get up and go and have it. Masturbation could—and did—regularly relieve the sexual tension, but at the same time it made her all the more lonely.
She reached an arm across her forcefield bed, in the sleepy hope that for once her dream had not deceived her.
No. Still there was no one.
#
Strider and O'Sondheim were planning to pass over control to Leander and Nelson when the instruction from Kortland came through.
"Start with the big ones, eh?" said Strider to no one in particular. Flitting into the base of her Pocket were co-ordinates that she rapidly copied on her keyboard.
"What are we doing?" said Polyaggle.
"We're heading for Qitanefermeartha. The hub of the Autarchy." Strider looked anxiously into her Pocket. She wished she could somehow divert the course of the
Santa Maria
so that she could take out Kaantalech, but she had no notion where Kaantalech was. In an intellectual way she knew that the Autarchy was committing crimes up to and including genocide all across The Wondervale, but that didn't match the emotions she had felt as she'd seen Spindrift die. Kortland was correct. While the time was right it was best to strike straight for the heart.
From all she had been told by Polyaggle and Segrill, the Autarch's fortress on Qitanefermeartha was impregnable. Assuming one could fight through the battalions of warcruisers there were still the forcefields to deal with. After that came the deadmetal. The alternative was to wipe out bits and pieces of the Autarchy, elsewhere in The Wondervale. Strider suspected this would involve crimes as great as the extermination of the Spindrifters. No, after all, diverting to discover Kaantalech and her fleet was not a good option.
Kaantalech could wait until later.
Strider pressed a final button, and everything in both the view-window and the Pocket changed. The vessels of the fleet were far more tightly bunched together now, so that it was possible to discern a few of the nearer ones as spacecraft rather than as just scintillating, moving pinpoints. In the Pocket itself Strider could see the overall configuration of the armada as it surrounded a small, undistinguished planet of a small, undistinguished star. In both the visual and the graphic displays of the Pocket it looked as if the fleet were forming an unbroken shell around this world, though she realized immediately that this was merely an illusion created by the Pocket's necessity to render eight thousand spacecraft as something larger than motes.
She squinted up at the view-window once again and speculated about which of the dots of the starry sky might be the planet they were surrounding. Somehow she had expected that it would be bright and awesome, as befitted its importance in The Wondervale, but of course she knew that from this distance—they were half a light-hour out—it was possible that Qitanefermeartha was not even directly visible.
The first missile hit the
Santa Maria
's defensive shields exactly seven minutes and thirty-three seconds afterwards.
#
"I would like to be able to study you. Would this be permitted?" said Lan Yi. There it was. At last he had been able to muster the nerve to put it directly to Polyaggle.
They were seated opposite each other with Lan Yi's chessboard between them. They were playing a variant of the four-handed version, each of them taking two teams; the objective was to obtain a misère, whereby you aimed to force your opponent into taking your pieces until finally only your two kings were left. He and Polyaggle had been contesting the game in various lengthy sessions ever since the
Santa Maria
had been lifted off F-14. They talked occasionally over the board; more usually they maintained silence, communicating through the moves they made—chess seemed to be not just an international but an inter-species language. The Spindrifter had taken to chess the moment Lan Yi had introduced her to the game, his underlying motive having been to lead up to the question he had just asked. Her only difficulty was in handling the pieces with her talons.
She looked at him blankly. Clearly what he had just said to her had been nothing more than a meaningless string of noise. She said something back to him, giving a little flutter of her wings as she did so. It was his turn to stare at her in incomprehension.
The Images were too busy elsewhere to be able to devote any part of their minds to interpreting between the two chess-players. This hardly ever happened. There must be some emergency brewing.
As there was absolutely nothing he could do about it, Lan Yi forced himself to relax. He shrugged at Polyaggle, returning the flick of the wings she had made towards him.
As he looked into her empty-seeming eyes, Lan Yi was hit yet again by the hugeness of the gulf that existed between them. They were learning the basics of each other's gestures, but there was no question—possibly never
could
be a question—of their speaking directly to each other. The principles upon which the Spindrifter's language was constructed were entirely different from those that underpinned Argot. The two tongues had been born out of completely dissimilar species experiences and emotional states: although there were many areas of overlap—as evidenced by Polyaggle's seizing upon chess—Spindrifters and humans
thought
quite unlike each other. Lan Yi was amazed that the Images had been able to create communications between them at all.
That gulf—so vast. Presumably Polyaggle would feel closer to some of the ancient species, but otherwise she must be the loneliest being in all The Wondervale.