Deadman Switch

Chapter 27

It wasn't quite that easy, of course. The thunderheads had no way of distinguishing legitimate ships and settlements from smuggler ships and bases, for one thing, and it was quite a job explaining to them how to use human maps and skytracks. But with patience and computer wizardry on Freitag's part and stamina on Zagorin's, the job was eventually done.

A week later, Freitag had his clean sweep.

—

I learned later that no fewer than five smuggler ships were caught in the Pravilo's grand net, as well as four rather cushy bases buried in the wilds of Spall. Unraveling all the entanglements—some of which were rumored to stretch as far afield as Janus and Elegy—and bringing all those involved before the appropriate judiciaries would take months or even years. But for the leaders of one crew, caught red-handed with a kidnap victim still aboard, the Solitaran judiciary authorized the use of pravdrugs. From those five men, two were chosen whose clear and willing guilt was matched only by their complete ignorance of the group's business contacts.

Guilty, but at the same time useless to the Pravilo investigation... or in other words, perfect candidates for filling Eisenstadt's request for a zombi.

I expected the judiciary to take at least a week to make it official. It took, in fact, barely five days.

—

I'd expected the second time would be easier. Or perhaps merely hoped it would.

It wasn't, of course.

The Pravilo doctor stepped back from the Kharg's helm chair, returning the hypo to its place in his small case. My stomach a hard knot, I forced myself to watch as the dead hands lifted delicately and reached for the helm board. I shuddered—those hands could have been Calandra's. They settled there; and abruptly the stars vanished from the bridge displays.

"Deadman Switch in control, Commodore," the man at the ditto helm announced. "Taking us out on bearing twenty-two mark four zero, fifty-six mark three three."

Freitag nodded. "Navigation?"

The navigator's hands were already playing over his board. "There's nothing in particular listed for that direction, sir," he reported. "No large planetoids or cometary bodies. Though that may not mean much—except for Solitaire system itself, data for this part of space is pretty sketchy."

"Which should encourage all of you to keep sharp," Freitag reminded the bridge in general. "Wherever the Cloud generator is stashed, it's likely to be either well hidden or well defended. Or both." He swiveled another quarter turn. "Dr. Eisenstadt?"

Standing beside the ditto nav chair, Eisenstadt leaned over to peer into Shepherd Zagorin's glazed eyes. "Thunderhead? You still with us?"

"I am," Zagorin whispered.

"Are we on the right path?"

"Yes," she assured him.

I watched her closely, trying with all my skill to read past the words to what might lie beneath them. As usual, the attempt failed. There were subtle differences in the sense between one encounter and another, I could tell now, differences that might be related to thunderhead emotional coloring the same way it was to that of human beings. But it could equally well be a result of Zagorin becoming acclimated to the contact, or to different thunderheads handling their end of the communication each time, or to any of a dozen other factors.

Beside me, Calandra shivered. "You were right, Gilead," she murmured. Her eyes, I saw, were on the body at the Deadman Switch. "It is the same. The same motions, the same sense, the same... everything."

She trailed off. I turned to Eisenstadt, to find him looking in turn at Calandra. His eyes flicked to mine, then shifted to the helm and Commodore Freitag sitting stiffly in his command chair. His sense... "Something wrong?" I asked quietly.

Eisenstadt hesitated, shook his head. "Just... thinking. Wondering about... well, the logic involved here."

The logic of the Cloud. With all his attention focused on getting a zombi for this trip, Eisenstadt had apparently lost sight of all the questions and contradictions that had sparked this trip out in the first place. "I presume you and Commodore Freitag intend to move carefully," I said.

"Give us a little credit for brains," he grunted. "I just wish the thunderheads would loosen up and tell us exactly what they expect us to do for them out here."

His eyes dropped to Zagorin's impassive face, but if the thunderhead listening through her ears recognized the cue he ignored it. Zagorin remained silent, and after a minute Eisenstadt grunted again and gave up. "Anyway," he said to me, "we should know within ten hours. Wherever it is they're taking us, it has to be inside the Cloud itself."

I nodded down at Zagorin. "Are you going to have her maintain contact the whole way?"

Eisenstadt pursed his lips, shook his head. "No, I suppose not. They're not," he added dryly, "exactly being fountains of information, after all. Ms. Zagorin?—you can go ahead and break contact. Thunderhead, we'll be talking to you later. If there's anything we need to know, you'd better tell us now."

Zagorin straightened slightly. "Farewell," she said... and with a loud sigh slumped in her seat.

Eisenstadt looked at me, a sour expression on his face. "Or in other words," he growled, "they're still playing it coy."

"Don't worry about it," Freitag advised him coolly. "Whoever or whatever is out there running the Cloud generator, we'll be ready for them."

Woe to those going down to Egypt for help, who put their trust in horses, who rely on the quantity of chariots, and on great strength of cavalrymen...

Quietly, I slipped out of the bridge, leaving Freitag and the others to their watch. And their confidence.

—

It didn't take the ten hours Eisenstadt had been prepared for. It was, in fact, just under an hour later when the Kharg's pseudogravity abruptly vanished.

We had arrived.

There were no warning sirens, no terse announcements of red alert or whatever as I left the command ready room and floated hurriedly across the small lounge to the bridge proper. Not that that was really surprising; Freitag would hardly have left matters to a last-second scramble for battle stations, any more than he had permitted me to stray farther from the bridge than the nearby ready room. Still, somehow, the silence was more unnerving than the sounds of even a pitched battle would have been. As if the bridge crew—perhaps even the entire ship—had been suddenly killed or disabled... Heart thudding in my ears, senses fully alert, I slid open the bridge door and pulled myself in.

And, naturally, instantly felt like a fool. Everyone was still alive and well, working quietly at their posts. The overall sense of the room was concentration, underpinned with tension and controlled nervousness, but there was nothing that seemed to indicate imminent danger.

I took a deep breath, privately embarrassed by my sudden wild imagination... and preoccupied with that, it took me another second to realize that that very lack of danger sense was in itself a signal that something here wasn't right.

Calandra was sitting quietly to one side, strapped into a ditto station chair where she could observe without being in the way. Giving the wall a push, I floated over to her. "What's wrong?" I murmured.

She shrugged fractionally, her sense uneasy. "There doesn't seem to be anything out there," she said.

I frowned, giving all the displays within eyeshot a quick scan. They meant little to my untrained eye. "Error?" I asked.

She flicked a glance at Eisenstadt and Zagorin, the latter working on getting into a meditative state—

I was looking at Zagorin, not any of the displays; but even so my peripheral vision was dazzled by the brilliant flicker of light that flashed across the room. "What—?"

I was drowned out by the warble of warning sirens. "Radiation attack," one of the crewers snapped. "Bow-starboard hull registering particle fluxes of—it's off the scale, sir." His voice sounded awed and more than a little shaken. "Heavy magnetic flux residue—focused particle beam weapon, almost certainly."

"Backtrack it, Kernyov," Freitag ordered another man. "Pinpoint the source. Costelic, how much got through?"

The first crewer opened his mouth to speak... paused. "Uh... virtually none, sir," he said slowly, frowning at his displays in disbelief. "The inner hull sensors are recording just barely above background."

"The hull is designed to block radiation, isn't it?" Eisenstadt asked.

"Not from particle weapons that go off the scale," Freitag said tartly. "You got a spectrum profile yet, Costelic?"

"It's coming in now, sir." Costelic paused, his puzzlement growing even deeper. "It... doesn't appear to have been a beam, sir. The distribution suggests an extremely hot thermal spectrum, almost like residue from a point source."

"Some kind of nova or star-collapse remnant, maybe?" Eisenstadt suggested doubtfully. "A wall of radiation sweeping past might give readings like that."

Freitag shook his head, studying Costelic's readings. "Too sharply defined for that. Kernyov!—where's that backtrack report?"

I looked at Kernyov in time to see him wave his hands helplessly. "It doesn't backtrack, sir," he said, voice rich with frustration. "I can pull a vector from the particle velocities—it's vague, but it's there—but there just isn't anything in that direction."

"What do you mean, isn't anything?" Freitag demanded. "That radiation came from somewhere."

"I know, sir, but there's nothing larger than a few microns in the indicated direction."

Freitag rubbed his fingertips together thoughtfully. "We're well within Solitaire system's cometary halo. Anything nearby large enough for a ship to be hiding behind?"

"I've already checked, sir," was the prompt answer. "There are eight good-sized comets visible on scope, but none of them is even remotely near the radiation vector. Also checked for neutrino emissions that might indicate fission or fusion going on; again, negative."

Freitag snorted and turned to Eisenstadt and Zagorin. "I want some answers, Doctor. When'll she be ready?"

"Thunderhead?" Eisenstadt asked, peering at Zagorin's impassive face. There was no response. "Thunderhead?" he repeated, throwing a questioning glance at Calandra and me.

"Doctor—" Freitag began.

"It's not Zagorin, Commodore," Calandra spoke up. "She's in the proper meditative state."

Freitag's eyes flicked to her, as if he was going to argue with her diagnosis. "Then why isn't it working?" he demanded instead.

I could see her brace herself. "I'd guess, sir, that the trouble is on the thunderhead side."

Freitag transferred his glare to Zagorin. "Is it, now. Sort of as if they led us out here and then deliberately pulled back?" He shifted the glare once more, this time to Eisenstadt. "I don't suppose, Doctor, that you'd care to speculate on why these friends of humanity would do something like that?"

It was the first time I'd heard the thunderheads referred to in that way; and from the way Eisenstadt winced, I gathered the phrase had been his own coinage. For the first time I realized just how hard he'd pushed to get this trip approved, and how much of his reputation and prestige he'd put on the line for it.

And now, with it threatening to crumble right in front of him, I saw his mind frost over in the face of Freitag's question. He glanced at me, an unspoken plea behind his eyes— "Perhaps," I spoke up, "they're simply unable to make contact."

"They can run a zombi over nine light-years farther from Spall than this," Freitag countered.

"But we've never had a ship come in from this direction," I pointed out, feeling sweat breaking out on my forehead. Now it was me on the hot spot, and I wasn't at all sure where I was even headed with this. "None of the colonies is anywhere near this path."

"And?" he challenged.

"Well..." I floundered a bit. "Perhaps the radiation here is a clue. Coming from seemingly nowhere, and all—"

"I hope you're not going to suggest the radiation is scaring them off."

I clenched my teeth. "I don't think the radiation per se is bothering them, no. But perhaps there's something else associated with the Cloud generator that is."

Freitag cocked an eyebrow. "Oh? What Cloud generator is that?" he asked, hand waving across the empty displays.

"There's nothing that says the Cloud generator has to be in normal space, is there?" I asked doggedly. Spur-of-the-moment idea or not, I had no intention of letting myself be bullied into just abandoning it. "The Cloud itself certainly doesn't seem to be. And if the Cloud was created to keep the thunderheads inside Solitaire system, maybe the generator itself was designed to keep them out."

Freitag's mouth opened... closed again. "Uh-huh," he said at last, thoughtfully. "Interesting, indeed. It's supposed to be impossible for something to be at rest in Mjollnir space, but let that pass for the moment. Costelic, have we got a solid fix on our position here?"

The navigator was opening his mouth to reply when, without warning, the Kharg lurched and gravity abruptly returned.

"Hold it—!" Freitag snapped, his flash of anger turning to equally sharp embarrassment as he suddenly remembered he was yelling an order to a dead man. "Kernyov!—get his hands away from that thing."

"No!" Eisenstadt barked as Kernyov reached for the Deadman Switch board. "We could lose our path!"

Freitag threw him a stabbing glare. "We may already have lost it—"

And, mid-sentence, the circuit breakers cracked and gravity again vanished. Freitag swore under his breath, and for a long second seemed to be trying to regain his mental balance; then the gears meshed and he was back in control again. "All right, let's sort this out. Costelic, where are we now?"

The navigator peered at his displays. "Not too far from where we started, Commodore. Looks like we basically did a short loop, back around to a point about five million kilometers closer in to Solitaire. I can give you an exact location in a minute."

Freitag eyed me. "You want to try and explain this one, Benedar?" he suggested. "You've got a choice: two separate Mjollnir-space generators or one extremely large one. Take your pick."

I took a deep breath, trying desperately to come up with an answer that wouldn't sound overly stupid—and as abruptly as the last time, the displays again flashed with light.

Eisenstadt yelped something, the words drowned out by the warbling of the radiation alarm. "What in chern-fire—?"

"Shut up," Freitag snapped. "Costelic?"

"Same as before, Commodore," the other reported. "Hot radiation, but without any of the penetrating power of a beam weapon."

For a moment longer the activity continued on the bridge, with crewers reporting generally the same findings as before. But I was watching Freitag... and because I was, I saw the moment when his irritated puzzlement turned suddenly to something cold. "Commodore?" I asked tentatively.

He ignored me. "Costelic... did we get anything on the aft-starboard instruments?"

"The flash came from the bow-starboard side again—"

"I know where it came from," Freitag said tightly. "I'm asking about aft-starboard. Specifically, ninety degrees from the flash."

"Ah—yes, sir." Costelic's fingers skittered across the keys. "There's not really much of anything there, sir. Solitaire system is that direction, of course; a couple of comets in the distance... just a moment."

"What is it?" Eisenstadt asked.

"We'll know in a minute," Freitag told him.

I watched as Costelic's sense took on a tinge of awe... and when he lifted his gaze from his displays his eyes were haunted. "Aft-starboard instruments show a tube-shaped region of high particle density, Commodore," he said, the words coming out with some difficulty. "Expanding rapidly into an even larger tube of... extremely hard vacuum. A large fraction of the high density material reads as superexcited helium."

The muscles in Freitag's back visibly tightened. "And the optical scanners?"

Costelic braced himself. "It's there, all right, sir. Computer's doing a cleanup and compensation now—be just a few more seconds."

"It who?" Eisenstadt asked. "What did you pick up, one of the thunderheads?"

"Hardly, Doctor," Freitag said darkly. "That splash of light and particle radiation... was the backwash of a spacecraft."

Eisenstadt blinked. "A space—?"

And all at once his sense turned to quiet horror. "You mean... traveling space-nomal?"

Freitag nodded grimly. "And over nine light-years in from the edge of the Cloud, too. Even at—looks like they're doing something over ten percent lightspeed—even at that rate they must have been doing this for one smert of a long time. Costelic?—where's that adjusted data?"

"Coming through now, Commodore... oh, bozhe moi."

The last word was an abrupt whisper. For a long moment Freitag gazed at his displays... and I watched his sense go from disbelief to something akin to horror.

Slowly, he looked up, turning to face Eisenstadt. "My error, Doctor," he said, his voice icy calm. "It's not, in fact, one spacecraft heading inwards toward Solitaire. It's something close to two hundred of them."

Eisenstadt stared at him. "A war party?"

"I don't see what else it could be," Freitag nodded.

I suddenly noticed my hands were clenched tightly at my sides. "Couldn't they simply be colony ships?" I asked, moved by something I only vaguely understood to give the strangers the benefit of the doubt.

Freitag looked at me. "Does it matter?" he asked bluntly. "Whether they want territory or a fight, the end result is still the same.

"Solitaire is under attack."