The City Who Fought (27 page)

"Mornin', honeybunch," Patsy's voice said.

Channa started so violently at the presence of two other people on the lift that she almost slopped the hot coffee over her hand. Gus put a steadying grip under her elbow.

"Why meetings?" Gus repeated, "because they're civilians. They're not used to facing a military emergency. They need to be told the information again and again before it'll seem
real
to them."

The lift hissed to a stop. "Fortunately, I don't need to be told so often, so I can get right on with my work," he said. "See you later, ladies."

Channa looked across at Patsy. The older woman was leaning into the padded corner of the lift, eyes closed and a dreamy smile on her lips. "Patsy?"

One eye opened reluctantly and a sweet smile lightened her expression as she stretched languorously.

"Yeah?"

"You look almost as exhausted as I am. Aren't you getting enough sleep?"

Patsy's eyes widened, and she worked her eyebrows melodramatically. "Not much," she said with some enthusiasm. "Unless you use 'sleep' in the euphemistic sense."

"Anh hanh. Gus?"

"Con mucho Gusto!" Patsy giggled. "Ah've read about this. People in crisis, they jest get together, y'know? You ask Simeon about it. He'll tell ya."

"I wouldn't presume to ask Simeon about private matters. I suspect he's morbidly fascinated by the subject. Besides, I know what you mean."

"Ohho! Ah heard about yoah pretty li'l roommate," Patsy said with a wink. "Hubba hubba." She nudged Channa with her elbow.

Channa cleared her throat, stuck the light-pencil over one ear and took a sip of her coffee.
Ghastly,
she thought. "Simeon told me that 'hubba hubba' meant 'sexy lady.' "

"Did he? Well, when he says it, it probably does. No, really, it jest means somethin' sexy, anythin' sexy.

What, is up to the beholder." Patsy rose onto her toes and clicked her heels together a couple of times.

"Ah think Simeon-Amos is sexy," she said teasingly.

"Right now you'd think taffy was sexy," Channa said repressively.

"Oooh, yeah, ya can puulll it . . ."

"Patsy!"

"Loosen
up,
girl! If ya get too tense, all yore hair falls out. Doncha know that?" She grinned and waved as she got off on her floor.

"Damn," Channa said, leaning against the wall. The padding held a faint trace of Patsy's body heat. "It's been entirely too long since I went to work with a smile like that."

* * *

Belazir tapped a meditative thumb against his lower lip. "Why not?" he said mildly.

The technical officer swallowed. "There is too much traffic here, lord. Individual trails fade in the background clutter."

Belazir raised his brows, the only outward sign of an icy stab of concern. According to their best calculations, the way the fugitive ship had been pushing its engines, it should have blown itself to a ball of plasma and fragments long before now. Granted that, in the old days, ships had been built to last, still . . . If, by unforeseeable fortune, they reached a well-traveled zone first, the unthinkable could happen. The Clan would be in danger.
He
would be in even more danger—from the rest of the Clan.

"Computer," he said, the command-voice that slaved its attention to him. "Extrapolation: the vector of the prey, matched against last definite location and possible destinations, as updated from the chartlogs of that captured merchantman."

A spray of possibilities flicked out in the 3-D tank. "Now, eliminate all those that would require more than four days' transit from last known location."

All faded but one. "Ah, that station," he said. It was the most probable search vector in any case. "We must continue the pursuit. Comments?" he asked the other captains' faces. They were present by holo, a ghostly ring of faces on the shadowed command-couches of their respective bridges, similar to the
Bride's.

Aragiz t'Varak, of the
Age of Darkness;
Zhengir t'Marid, of the
Rumal—Strangler,
in the old tongue—Pol t'Veng, of the
Shark,
old and scarred and the only woman among them, the only one with an independent command in the Clan fleet. Enemies and rivals; his ability to make them move in concert was another test the Clanfathers imposed.
That which does not kill us, makes us stronger,
he reminded himself.

"Captains and kin," Belazir said. "You have the data. We must decide whether to continue the pursuit, or break off. My recommendation is that we continue."

Aragiz's face pushed forward, tensing like an eagle held by jesses to a hostile wrist. "If you had not stopped to loot, we would be closer on the prey's trail," he said sharply.

Pol cut through his words with a snort. "Irrelevant. We must continue the mission."

Belazir nodded at her.

"I do not like it," Pol said in her guttural rumble. She was known to be a canny and prudent commander.

"Something is just slightly out of kilter." She made a rocking gesture with the claw-scarred hand.

Belazir considered her remark. What had that contractor—one of the ones the Clan fenced loot to occasionally—said? "There are bold pirates, and old pirates, but there are no old, bold pirates."

"Still," she went on, "the balance of risk is clear. We must know if the prey reached this station. To do that, we must take it in our fist."

"And if it did?" Aragiz said.

"We kill, send a message torpedo to the fleet, and we run," Pol said. "With as little as one week's lead, we can lose the Navy among the stars and dust. Nothing is lost save time."

"And the effort we put into subduing Bethel!" Aragiz snapped. "Stopping for that merchantman—"

"Was irrelevant and consumed no significant expense of time!" Belazir said. "In any case, there is a substantial chance nothing was left alive on the prey-ship by the time it reached this station. If it did reach them. In which case, there is the station itself."

"Ah," Zhengir said. He was a close relative, and a man of few words. "A target of great opportunity."

"Risky," Pol said, rubbing her chin.

"We come in fast at the limits of their sensor capacity and launch hyper-velocity anti-rad missiles to knock out their communications," Belazir said. "We pulse our engines to jam subspace for the time required. It will look natural to those who come to investigate later. A black hole evaporating, or some such."

"Hmmm."

Pol rasped a hand over the horrible keloid scars that furrowed one half of her face. Since cosmetic repair would be easy enough, Belazir suspected she kept them as an affectation. But with those scars, even the most arrogant seldom remembered that Pol was a woman. Those grooves had been made by the claws of an animal which Pol had subsequently strangled with her bare hands. She wore its tanned hide around her shoulders.

"Hmmm," she said again. "That would be minimum-risk strategy. However, we cannot find out if the prey reached the station if we obliterate the station. We must be sure that no warning of us has gone out.

On the other hand, a swift raid, catching them unawares, would discover the truth and we can act accordingly."

"Taking with us whatever the station holds," Belazir said, grinning avariciously. Greed was quickly kindled, since everyone knew what the merchant ship had yielded: the merest trifle in comparison to what a full station would render up. "Depending on what we find, we might even have time to call for the Clan's transports to come and haul the loot. Even what we could load on our frigates makes a raid more than worth our while."

Agreement rolled around the circle with the exception of Aragiz. Belazir quirked a brow at him. After criticizing his commander for sloth, he could not be behindhand now.

"Attack, then," Belazir concluded. The others nodded. "Tactical instructions follow. Confirm on receipt."

* * *

Woof,
Simeon thought. Thin, plain and severely ascetic in middle-age, Flimma Torkin blossomed visibly as Simeon-Amos bowed over her hand.

Her smile died a few minutes later. He appeared to be hovering attentively, but . . .

"Mr. Sierra Nueva—"

"Simeon-Amos," he said.

"Will you please
listen
to what I'm saying? As station head, you should have
some
knowledge of how our communications system functions."

"I am sorry," he said meekly.

This should be interesting,
Simeon mused. The rest of the session went much more smoothly, although several times Amos absently called the communications chief
nama.

Nonstandard.
Simeon thought the computer into action; a few nanos later it came up with a probable derivation, from the languages other than Standard spoken among the first settlers of Bethel, plus observation of the refugees.

nama: aunt, auntie. Probable meanings: female authority figure from childhood, nurse, teacher [primary].

"That didn't go too badly," Amos commented as Flimma left.

"You learn quickly," Simeon said: sufficiently true as well as polite encouragement.

Meanwhile, Simeon had been busily switching assignments. The assistant power chief was really the logical person to brief Amos. The fact that Holene Jagarth was stacked and less than thirty was irrelevant; at least to Simeon and anyone else dealing with her as an expert on plasma containment.

Twenty minutes later she stood, ominously silent for a moment, then turned to the pillar.

"
Talk
to him, Simeon. Or send him around to my place for recreational duty, but in the meantime I have
work
to do!" Holene said in a terse voice, turned on her heel and stalked for the corridor.

Amos blinked in astonishment. "What was the matter with her?" he asked plaintively.

"Ahem," Simeon said, and watched Amos turn back toward the training display they'd been using. "I wonder if you could tell me, what role do women play in Bethel society?"

"Role?" The question seemed almost meaningless to him. "They are mothers, of course; daughters, sisters, wives. They keep the home, raise the children, follow gentle skills such as medicine and painting, the writing of novels and poetry." He looked puzzled. "What do you mean?"

"I was wondering if, perhaps, women played a more subservient role on Bethel."

"Subservient? No, of course not! Bethel has, as yet, a very small population. Therefore, to us, the bearing and raising of children is the highest calling a woman may attain. We revere our mothers, and we feel that women and children are to be protected and nurtured."

He frowned, mildly indignant. "There are exceptional cases, such as Channa. And I have never been one of those who think that women should keep to the inner rooms and stay silent in the presence of men.

That is old-fashioned and ridiculous. Why, some of my primary associates in the New Revelation were women! I feel as though you are telling me that respect is disrespectful."

"Not at all," Simeon said soothingly, "but I think you may be confusing respect with condescension."

Amos' face took on the set look it had worn through the last half of his dinner with Channa. "A little less patting on the hand, Simeon-Amos. You give them the impression that you claim authority because of your gender."

"No, no," Amos exclaimed, throwing up his hands in rejection. "If I have an aura of authority, it is because of my position on Bethel. Birth aside, I am a junior member of the ruling council. I rule the family estates, of course. I have been an administrator for several years now." He smiled in a confiding manner.

"Although, I have found that women react differently to my orders. I do not deny that I find it simpler to work with men." He gave a negligent shrug. "There is no problem of seduction between men."

Well, he's consistent, at least, Simeon thought. Maybe he needs to cling to whatever ego-confirmation he's got, since he's so displaced.

"Do you realize," the brain said coldly, "that you've just patronized
me?
Based on your belief that you're such a treat for anyone to deal with? I'm a part of this culture. You're not. I know these people, you don't. I run this station and have been running it since before you existed, and will be running it centuries after you're dead. And I'll be running this station throughout this emergency while you're only pretending to. So listen up! You're treating your women instructors as if they're only adequate until someone
real,
meaning male, arrives to take over. Well, the experts here just happen to be female! We're short of time, so I'm going to pay you the compliment of expecting you to be able to adjust to that alien concept. We need you to be one of us. We need you to forget about Bethel for the time being.

"I know how much we're asking of you, Simeon-Amos," he concluded, his voice less stern and more understanding, "but you're asking us to trust you with our lives."

Amos gasped, his eyes wide with a mixture of embarrassment, puzzlement and astonishment.

Oh, fugle,
Simeon thought.
Channa was right. I do have the sensitivity of a demolition charge.

Seventy-seven of Amos' followers had died fleeing Bethel. And, being the conscientious sort of leader Simeon had seen him be, he probably had them marching through his dreams at night, asking, "Why?"

"Sorry," Simeon said, "that was badly phrased. Look, I need to know if you can do this. I need to know
now.
You'll be dealing with Channa, under her authority, daily. I'm not going to waste time. If we have to replace you with someone who doesn't have the same hangups you have, then six hours is all we can afford to waste on a false start. Now, can you or can't you?"

Amos put a hand to his brow. They depended on me, and they died, ran through his mind like a prayer response. Followed by: No. I saved some, who would otherwise have died. And Bethel may yet live, what is left of it.

"Ihave never yet failed to accomplish a thing that I have set out to do," he said grimly. He touched head and heart with two fingers as he bowed to Simeon's column. "Would you be so good as to convey my apologies to the lady who has just left?"