finally came down through the atmosphere, they left trails that glowed in a dozen colors. Even in the tests, they’d been horrible things, the stabbing hands of a spirit tarant, pouncing from the sky. A dozen traces, more coming. Thousands of missiles had been stopped, but what remained could destroy cities.
“Don’t worry.” Underhill’s voice came softly from Thract’s blind side. “My alien friends have taken care of those. Those warheads are dead carcasses now, a few tonnes of radioactive junk. Not much fun if one drops directly on your head, but otherwise no threat.”
Rachner turned, followed the tracks anxiously across the sky.My alienfriends have taken care of those. “What are the monsters really like, Sherkaner? Can we trust them?”
“Heh. Trust them? What a thing for an Intelligence officer to ask. My General never trusted them, any of them. I’ve studied thehumans for almost twenty years, Rachner. They’ve been traveling in space for hundreds of generations. They’ve seen so much, they’ve done so much…. The poor crappers think they know what is impossible. They’re free to fly between the stars, and their imagination is trapped in a cage they can’t even see.”
The glowing streaks had passed across the sky. Most had faded to far-red or invisibility. Two converged toward a point on the horizon, probably the High Equatoria launch site. Thract held his breath, waiting.
Behind him, Underhill said something like, “Ah, dear victory,” and then was very quiet.
Thract strained to watch the north. If the warheads were still live, the detonations would be visible even from over the horizon. Ten seconds. Thirty. There was silence and cold. And to the north, there was only the light of the stars. “You’re right, sir. What’s left is just falling junk. I—” Rachner turned, suddenly conscious of just how cold the heli’s cabin had become.
Underhill was gone.
Thract lunged across the cabin to the half-open door. “Sir!Sherkaner! “ He started down the outside steps, turning his head this way and that, trying to catch a glimpse of the other. The air was still, but so cold that it cut. Without a heated breather, he’d have burned lungs in a matter of minutes.
There! A dozen yards from the heli, in the shade of both stars and sky glow, two far-red blotches. Underhill limped slowly behind Mobiy. The guide-bug tugged him gently along, at every step probing the hillside with its long arms. It was the instinctive behavior of an animal in hopeless cold, trying to the last to find an effective deepness. Here, in a random nowhere, the critter didn’t stand a chance. In less than an hour he and his master would be dead, their tissues desiccated.
Thract scrambled down the steps, shouting at Underhill. And above him, the heli’s blades began to spin up. Thract cringed beneath the frigid wash. As the turbines ramped up and the blades began to provide real lift, he turned and pulled himself back into the cabin. He pounded on the autopilot, poking at every disconnect.
It didn’t matter. The turbines hit takeoff power and the heli lifted. He had one last glimpse of the shadows hiding Sherkaner Underhill. Then the craft tilted eastward and the scene was lost behind him.
SIXTY-ONE
Blowouts in small volumes were normally fatal. Quickly fatal. It was one of his guards who unintentionally saved Tomas Nau. Just as the hull melted through, Tung released his harness and dived up toward the hatch. The blowout clawed at all of them, but Tung was loose and closest to the hole. He rammed headfirst into the wall melt, sucked through to his hips.
Somehow Qiwi had kept her place by the jammed taxi hatch. Now she had the L1-A hatch open, too. She turned back, grabbed her father, and boosted him into the lock beyond. The action was a single smooth motion, almost a dance. Nau had scarcely begun to react when she turned a second time, hooked a foot into a wall loop, and reached out to snag his sleeve with the tips of her fingers. She pulled gently, and as he came closer, grabbed him by main force and shoved him through to safety.
Safe. And I was as good as dead just five seconds ago.The hiss of escaping air was loud. The damaged docking collar could blow in a second.
Qiwi dropped back from hatchway. “I’ll get Marli and Ciret.”
“Yes!” Nau came back to the opening, and cursed himself for losing his wire gun in the chaos. He looked into the taxi. One guard was clearly dead: Tung’s legs weren’t even twitching. Marli was probably dead too, certainly out of it, though Qiwi was struggling to get both him and Ciret free. In a second she would have them out, as quick and effectively as she had saved himself and Ali Lin. Qiwi was just too dangerous, and this was his last sure opportunity to get her out of the picture.
Nau pushed on the L1-A hatch. It turned smoothly, pressed by the air currents, and slammed shut with an ear-numbing crash. His fingers danced across the access control, tapping out the code for an emergency jettison. From the other side of the wall there was the explosivewhump of exhausting gas, the banging of metal on metal. Nau imagined the airless taxi, floating out from the lock.Let Pham Nuwen take his target practice on the dead.
The lock’s pressure rose quickly to normal. Nau popped the inner hatch and took Ali Lin through, into the corridor beyond. The old man mumbled, semiconscious. At least his bleeding had stopped.Don’t die on me, damnit. Ali was worthless meat right now, but in the long run he was a treasure. Things would be expensive enough without losing him.
He coasted Ali gently up the long corridor. The walls around him were green plastic. This had been the security vault aboardCommon Good. Its irregular shape had made sense there; nowadays its value lay in its monolithic construction and its shielding, several meters of composites with the melting point of tungsten. All the firepower Pham Nuwen possessed couldn’t get him in here.
Till a few days ago, the vault had held most of the surviving heavy weapons in the OnOff system. Now it was almost empty, stripped to support the mission of theInvisible Hand. No matter. Nau had been very careful that enough nukes remained. If necessary, he could play the old, old game of total disaster management.
So what can be salvaged?He had only the vaguest idea how much Pham Nuwen controlled. For an instant, Nau quailed. All his life he had studied such men, and now he was pitted against one.But in winning, Iwill be all the more. There were a dozen things to be done, and only seconds to do them. Nau let Ali loose, free to slowly fall in the rockpile’s microgravity. A comm set and local huds were tacked to grabfelt by the door. He snatched them up and spoke brief commands. The automation here was primitive, but it would do. Now he could see out from the vault. The Peddlers’ temp was above his horizon, and there was no taxi traffic, there were no suited figures approaching around the rockpile’s surface.
He dove across the open space, unshipped a small torpedo. The flag at the corner of his view told him that his call to Hammerfest had made it through. The ring pattern disappeared, and Pham’s voice came in his ear.
“Nau?”
“Right the first time, sir.” Nau floated the nuke across to the launch tube that Kal Omo had installed just thirty-five days ago. It had seemed a maniac precaution then. Now it was his last chance.
“It’s time that you surrendered, Podmaster. My forces control all of L1 space. We—”
Pham’s voice held quiet certainty, with none of the bluster of Old Pham Trinli. Nau could imagine ordinary people gripped by that voice, led. But Tomas Nau was a pro himself. He had no trouble interrupting: “On the contrary, sir. I hold the only power that is worth noting.” He touched the panel by the launch tube. There was a thump as compressed air blew out the top end and cleared the snow. “I’ve programmed and loaded a tactical nuclear weapon. The target is the Peddlers’ temp. The weapon is ad hoc, but I’m sure it’s sufficient.”
“You can’t do that, Podmaster. Three hundred of your own people are over there.”
Nau laughed gently. “Oh, Ican do it. I lose a lot, but I still have some people in coldsleep. I—are you really Pham Nuwen?” The question slipped out, almost uncalculated.
There was a pause, and when Nuwen spoke, he sounded distracted, “Yes.” And you’re handling everything yourself, aren’t you? It made sense. An ordinary conspiracy would have been detected years ago. It had been just Pham Nuwen and Ezr Vinh, right from the beginning. Like a single man pulling his wagon across a continent, Nuwen had persevered, had almost conquered. “It’s an honor to meet you, sir. I’ve studied you for many years.” As he spoke, Nau popped up a view of the torpedo’s diagnostics. He was looking straight down the launch rail; the tube was clear. “Perhaps your only mistake is that you have not fully understood the Podmaster ethos. You see, we Podmasters grew out of disaster. That is our inner strength, our edge. If I destroy the temp, it will be an enormous setback for the L1 operation. But my personal situation willimprove. I will still have the rockpile. I will still have
