For Love and Glory

The eeriness below neared the edge of sight as Hulda swung on toward the night ahead.

“We’d better send these data straight home,” said Lissa. While we still can, said her mind.

“Uh-huh. You’re smart, too. And beautiful, I might add.”

She drew a breath to order the ship back to hyperwaving distance.

Dzesi yowled. Hulda sang an alert. “What the hell!” roared Hebo.

A gleam lifted from darkside into sunlight. It arrowed at them. In seconds it had waxed to a complex of coils and strands, half the size of their vessel, shimmering like the constructs down on the planet. At the center pulsed an iridescent sphere: a heart, a brain? With no trace of jets, of any propulsive force, maneuvering as deftly as a barracuda in the sea, and with no sign of deceleration stress, it glided to a relative halt and poised three hundred meters away.

Dzesi crouched a-bristle, right hand gripping the arm of her chair, left hand on her knife. Both humans kept still, staring, shocked into that coolness and clarity, that weird detachment, which sudden extremity can throw upon their kind. The compartment, the control board, the huge day-crescent of the planet were blade-sharp in their eyes; they heard each murmur of the air; they smelled its fragrance of summery meadows and the observers in their heads noted how inappropriate that was—but meaningless, meaningless; they waited for whatever would befall.

Set for broad-band reception—though how did the thing know which band?—the radio said forth in a calm human contralto and unaccented Anglay: “Outsiders are forbidden access. You shall depart immediately. There is no wish to harm you. However, in token of what can be brought to bear against intruders, your hyperwave communicator is now disabled. Bring the warning home, and broadcast it to all your societies. Make known that further attempts will suffer penalties more severe, up to and including destruction. But make known, also, that otherwise no one has anything to fear from this quarter. The prohibition is in large part for their own sake. Think about this.”

After a moment the voice changed to flutings and rumbles that shaded off into the humanly subsonic. Lissa recognized the principal Gargantuan language. She had acquired few words of it, but grasped that the message was the same.

“How about that hypercom?” Hebo demanded.

“Ruined,” Hulda replied. “Circuit elements burnt out, quantum superpositions decohered, programs wiped. My systems registered nothing while it occurred.”

No, Lissa thought, the Forerunners would have means more subtle than an energy blast. But I’ll bet they— their robots, or whatever these are—can call up as much energy as they want, any time they want.

The voice became Rikhan. Dzesi snarled.

“Yep, everybody,” Hebo said.

“We haven’t much choice but to obey, do we?” Lissa asked needlessly.

“Reckon not. Still, I expect we’ve got a grace period, at least till it’s run through its repertoire. Plain to see, it doesn’t know just who or what we are. And since it wants us to take the news back, if we’re still here when it’s done talking, logically it ought to say, ‘Scram, I mean it,’ maybe with some extra token that doesn’t really hurt us either, like turning our food stock to charcoal. Then of course we’ll say, ‘Sorry, honorable sir,’ and skedaddle. Meanwhile, though, we’re up against heap big medicine, but not God Almighty. How about we collect any more information we can?”

Recklessness? No, Lissa thought, boldness. Taking a risk, yes, but you can’t cross a street without taking a risk. He’s my kind of man. “Keep scanning,” she ordered the ship.

Susaian turned into clicks, while an Arzethian image appeared on the visiscreen and went through the body language that was most of its converse.

Hulda and the alien were not precisely co-orbital. They drifted slowly apart. The alien kept sending. The sun slipped behind the planet, which became a circle of blackness, very faintly edged with light, and stars sprang into heaven.

“Another site,” Hulda reported, displaying and amplifying— not quite the same as the first, though it was hard to distinguish between such foreignnesses.

Having run through every known spacefaring race, and three or four that Lissa couldn’t identify, the radio returned to human. Han, this time. How many important languages would the sentry try before it—lost patience— and struck again? Already it had dwindled to a small, exquisite piece of jewelry.

Something high caught sunlight and flashed.

“Hoy!” Hebo exclaimed. “Give us that!”

The optics locked on and magnified. The thing hurtled inward. Plasma jets made ambient atoms fluoresce, ghostly sparkles. Velocity already closely matched, the vessel needed little adjustment to lay her nearby, in adjacent orbit. She must have emerged from hyperspace about as far down the gravitational well as possible.

“Jesus Christ, what a piece of navigation!” blurted Hebo.

Lissa knew that lean body, those flat turrets from which projectors reached out like snakes. A Susaian—no, a Confederacy warship.

Hulda’s receiver continued dispassionately. But the Forerunner machine must have observed too. Was it transmitting the same command, backed by the same disablement?

A streak leaped from the newcomer. The viewscreen muffled a fireball to a flare. Then incandescent gases dissipated into space, and the sentry was gone.

XLVII

“A tactical nuke,” Hebo mumbled into the abrupt void. “No, we’re not confronting God. It’s worse than that.”

The warship still looked small at her remove, toylike athwart the stars. Another missile could cross the distance between in a second or less. Lissa seized his hand.

“Receive any communication,” Dzesi coolly ordered Hulda.

The visiscreen flashed to life with the blunt head and snaky neck of a Susaian. Lissa caught a gasp. She knew that countenance, that rufous, cloudily spotted skin. “Naval unit Authority of the Great Confederacy, Dominator Ironbright commanding, calling Asborgan vessel,” rendered a trans. “You are under arrest. Make no attempt to escape or otherwise resist. If you do, we shall fire upon you. Acknowledge.”

“Do you wish to transmit?” asked Hulda.

“Yes, and challenge this outrage,” Dzesi rasped.

Hebo made a shushing motion. “Better let Lissa speak for us,” he said. “You seem to’ve met yon bugger before.”

She nodded, again abruptly cool, totally alert. “He was second in command of their expedition to the black hole.”

“And you saved his slippery ass. Some gratitude.”

The pickup focused on her. Recognition became mutual. “Greeting, Milady Windholm,” said Ironbright. The nonhuman voice sounded as imperturbable as what came out of the trans. “We thought very possibly you would be here. We trust you will understand that necessities of state force us to take stern measures. Cooperate, and you will live.”

A part of Lissa noted a change in the underlying timbre and, yes, barely perceptible to a human who knew what to look for, the posture and manner. During the years since their last encounter, Ironbright’s life cycle had changed gender. She was no less grim now for that—if anything, was more so. That could well be part of the reason for giving her this mission, that and past experience and—

We’re caught, knew the detached observer and calculator. No weapons except for what we brought along ourselves. We can’t reach hyperjump distance if they don’t let us. Oh, we can out-accelerate that craft by more than enough to make pulp of us. However, we can’t a target-seeking missile.

She had a far-away sense of feeling cold, but her body did not tremble or sweat or even uselessly tense very much. “Why are you doing this?” she heard herself ask.