The Dragon Never Sleeps

— 115 —

The convoy left the Web twice before crossing the Rim, each time so its commanders could pass information, each time far from any anchor point. Turtle was impressed. The Outsiders were more daring than Canon operators, who dreaded leaving the Web away from carefully calculated optimum insystem points. Few Canon-based ships were prepared for extended stays in starspace.

A Godspeaker ship waited at the second pausing place. It relayed the news that Tregesser commandos had uncrossed the planned doublecross in the Hemebuk Neutrality.

They could not make an issue of it. But Turtle was sure they would try to even scores later. He would have to keep them thinking they had not reached his useful limit.

The convoy made a long passage to the nether reaches of the Outsider empire, broke away into the wildest waste space Turtle had ever seen.

Interstellar gas and dust were so dense the galaxy outside could not be seen. Parts of the cloud were in such rapid motion that its electromagnetic voices formed an endless chorus of screams. Gasses and dust and clouds of cold matter ranging from sand to planetoids were torn this way and that by mad gravitational tides. At the waste's heart was a trinary consisting of a black hole, a neutron star, and a living giant star that was being gutted by each in turn as the three whirled in a rapid orbital dance that distorted the very fabric of space. The cloud was no more than five light years across, yet Turtle could discern another dozen stars or protostars with his naked eye. Their fires lighted the dust, making sprawls of angel hair that braided into a firestorm spanning the entire sky.

Fourteen strands led into the maelstrom. Not a one was anchored.

Provik was intrigued. He thought a study of local conditions would reveal something about the Web, the study of which, for him, was something more than a hobby yet not quite an obsession.

"I tell you, Kez Maefele, if we survive this, I may just retire. The older I get, the less it seems worth the trouble. Shike would love to take over. I could give it to him. Take me a Voyager and go kiting off, trying to figure out what the Web is, why, where it came from, all that." There was real excitement in his eyes.

"An honorable pursuit," Turtle said. And not an original one. The Web intrigued everyone who came to it, of whatever species.

So far as anyone knew, the Web had always been. Yet it could not be explained by any physics or cosmology, scientific or religious. The Web had no physical right to exist. It should not do what it did. Yet it was there.

One of the mysteries of the Web was that no one ever found it independently. Every species that gained access learned how from a race already using the Web to beat the iron tyranny of the photon.

Dammit, that was like the universe itself. No matter how deep you dug, you could not come up with a First Cause.

"An honorable pursuit," Turtle said again. "But I've never heard of anyone making real progress on it. Even Valerena's Guardship, which spent centuries at it, did not do much but chart reaches not yet known."

Provik grunted. He did not want to hear that his dreams were impractical.

The convoy moved into the waste space slowly, following beacons, traveling with screens up. The clutter was so dense and unpredictable no chart remained reliable. Two days after leaving the tag end, it reached a spinning canister of a station in a pocket kept swept of dangerous cold matter.

Soon after breakaway Turtle knew the Outsiders believed they had him in complete control. They began feeding him data of a sort a WarAvocat would kill for. Its delivery guaranteed his best chance for success. And that the Outsiders had no intention of releasing him, ever.

At one point Provik observed, "Now we know how they came up with such outrageous quantities of rare metals. Must be stars blowing up here all the time."

Several score ships budded the station. They betrayed the varied concepts of shipbuilding of at least ten races. The lean, swift killer ships of Outsider humans predominated. Standing off, too massive to snuggle up, were three of the vessels operated by the Godspeakers themselves.

Industrial-type construction was under way nearby. "They are preparing their last redoubt," Turtle guessed. "They do not have a falsely optimistic view of their military chances. A pity we Ku could not have had access to a region like this."

"Why?" Midnight asked, awed by the fury of the waste space.

"We would be fighting still. The Guardships could not have rooted us out. They could have done nothing but contain us, and that would have required the efforts of half the fleet forever."

The Outsiders knew they could not win. They had acquired him to buy time to develop the waste space as a hiding place of the mysteries of a dark faith.

The Godspeakers would not be too concerned about the loss of an empire. The pain of that would torment their human pets-slaves-allies.

The waste would be no boon to those. Those who retreated here would have to hide far deeper than this station lay. They would have to stay on the move amidst chaotic matter. Operations outside would require long voyages to the tag ends, starspace voyages measured in decades.

Did the Outsider humans understand that their masters were going to abandon them?

The existence of this place, and the planning behind it, said many things. One was that Turtle was caught in the jaws of another moral quandary.

To engineer the destruction of Starbase in a manner that insured that Canon had to change radically to survive was not the same as destroying it to guarantee the survival of a repugnant and predatory creed.

He glanced at the Valerena, at Blessed, at the Proviks, as though for inspiration—and found it. In what they were. In what they represented. One of Canon's great pestilences could become a blessing, through their greed.

There was unimaginable wealth in this waste space. Let the Houses battle the darkness for it.

"This may be our home for a long time," he said. "Let's hope it's not our last."

The Outsiders had an agenda more brisk than Turtle's. They barely gave him a chance to find his quarters before they put him to work.

The heart of the station was a major military headquarters. They presented it to him in its entirety. All its resources and personnel were assigned to his project. He was shown how things worked, given a team of translators, and was told to get busy.

They gave him access to everything worth knowing about their military and industrial capacity. They gave him technicians who could communicate with any Godspeaker anywhere on the Web, through Godspeakers here. He could check every fighting unit and what it faced. He could take charge if the whim hit.

His employers were determined to let him do his job.

It was a general's dream.

He had been created an all-powerful warlord, but even he could not believe this.

Turtle spent most of his time in that command center, learning, putting together what needed putting together, running models, reaching across the light years to experiment, even interfering where interference would save lives and forces or would avoid stupidities that offended him professionally. And all the while his employers studied him, feeling for the truths within.

The methane breathers watched every breath he took, humping and slithering through transparent pressurized tubes that meandered throughout the station.

Sometimes he could not resist temptation, used his power to twist Guardship noses. It was a trying year for the fleet.

Turtle found fewer and fewer occasions to consult his conscience. He had become too caught up doing what he had been designed to do.

The Outsiders even presented him with a command ship, of a type as yet uncommitted to combat, unsubtly named Delicate Harmony. It came complete with quarters for six Godspeakers, his long-range communicators. And keepers.