The Dragon Never Sleeps

— 52 —

Turtle established them in an empty office overlooking that cavernous birth canal where new Guardships came to life. For him the location was no better than any other. But it pleased Midnight. She could launch herself on fanciful acrobatic flights in the inconsequential gravity of the construction channel. Her wings had gained color and luster.

For six days Turtle worked himself to exhaustion. If Starbase had secrets it wanted kept, he could not detect the blocks locking him out. If there were living beings anywhere, he could not track them down. He could locate none of the Deified supposed to haunt the system. There seemed to be no omniscient observer as there was aboard VII Gemina.

He could find no evidence Starbase was anything but what it appeared, a half-forgotten fortress where no one had remembered to shut the gate and the garrison were dozing at their posts. The neglect of absolute assurance.

No defenses were active.

Turtle could not focus on the monitor. He went to watch Midnight's ballet. "Castle Dreaming," he murmured, recalling a myth as Midnight looped. A fortress dire and invincible, defended by unkillable demons with claws of steel and fangs of diamond. But Tae Kyodo had entered unchallenged and had walked out with the Bowl of Truth because the demons were taking a siesta, confident their reputation would keep the bad guys away.

Up the cavern the automated factory went to work. Sparks flew. Midnight glided down. "That was beautiful," he said.

"It's easy where there's so little gravity. Did you find a way?"

"It's so easy it's pathetic. We just get on one of the shuttle ships. The Deified operating them aren't interested in what happens inside them. But once we reach the Barbican, we'll have problems. We'll have to change ships. And they will be alert for people who do not belong."

"I'm going to check on Amber Soul."

"All right." Turtle stared at nothing. Somewhere along his life path he had lost the fervor that had driven him in the days of the Dire Radiant.

All those years slinking through the shadows, peeking through the cracks, educating and arming himself against his next bout with the necromancers, and now his inclination was to lay his sword aside and declare peace on the Guardships. Revolutionary change would deliver Canon into the jaws of predators.

There was an evolutionary thing happening, and he'd just begun to recognize it—though he had listed symptoms for WarAvocat.

Canon grew as inexorably as a black hole. Growth would not stop while there were Guardships and Outsiders to offend them.

Give them that. The conquerers never struck first.

Within the ever-advancing Rims a vacuum was developing, consequent to human depopulation. The race was old and, maybe, beginning to fade from the stage of the Web.

The vacuum was pulling nonhumans off the worlds where they sulked, to fill empty shoes. Almost by capillary action, some were oozing upward into the hierarchies. This great empire, Canon, might be theirs to inherit. Ten thousand years hence, Canon law and the Guardships might be the only evidence of the human race's passing.

Circumstances argued that the greatest good for the greatest number sprang from the status quo.

How to get out? Just the one way. Stealth. Going without being seen, without leaving a spoor. But the Barbican stood athwart his path like a wall a thousand kilometers long and five hundred high.

"Turtle!" Midnight squealed. "Come here! She's waking up! For real this time."

He hurried into the office.