The Sea is Full of Stars

“Then—why?”

“If we go right on by, we may be met at the next destination by more tugs with thugs. Wallinchky walks away and either the Rithians will get their cargo back before Customs, to try it again on another trip, or it’ll all blow up as soon as they’re off. Either way we gain nothing. We change the names and faces of those who will die, and we delay them a couple of weeks.”

“If they blow it, whatever it is, up, that’ll delay them longer than that.”

“Not much. They have the prototype, yes, so it would be inconvenient to lose it, but they have the entire plans and specifications and even the operator’s manual, as it were, and that is far more valuable. It simply means that the customer will have to arrange to have one built on the black market out on the frontier where it won’t be noticed until it’s too late. Either way, the first solid lead pointing directly to Josich Hadun’s hiding place in more than a dozen years will have been squandered. How many more will he kill before that chance comes again?”

She didn’t like this at all. “I see no moral choice but to save the innocents here and try again. And what of the innocents in the water-breathing modules? I cannot get to them.”

“I don’t think there are many innocents there, but if they are, they’re dead no matter what we do. We might as well make their deaths mean something.”

That was not a proper answer, she thought, but she was beginning to see how useless reason was with him now. Still, she had to give it one last try.

“You have no guarantee that this will lead you to your enemy, but there is a great probability that some will die,” she argued.

“You can’t stop it. Tomorrow we will stop, just where that Ghoma ship expects us to be. The distress signal will be sent. Of course, we won’t really be out of fuel or in distress, but it will be pretty convincing. They will come. During that fallow time, you and others you trust must get all those not involved in this to lifeboats and get the boats away. They are preprogrammed. The Ghomas likely won’t detect you, but if you use the cryogenic settings, you’ll reach a Junction or Starbase or a known hospitable Realm world in due time. Do it as quickly and quietly as you can. The computers will help you.”

“And you?”

“They need a tug to get the module out. I’ve found it and I now control it. Where that ship and that module goes, I will go as well. Unless they have their own freighter, they won’t be going all that far with a module that size. In fact, I already suspect where he is. I just have to get there.”

“And not be killed.”

He smiled grimly. “I can’t be killed. I’m already dead.”

It didn’t seem there was any way to talk him out of it. The only choice she could see, morally and otherwise, was to count on him for cover and get out those who had to go. If she understood any of this complicated mess or could argue well with the computer, she would have chosen to disable Kincaid and just arrange not to stop. Being unable to do any of that, she knew she would have to do it his way.

And she would have to do it fast. The ever-present countdown clocks said there were only hours left to go.

Angel didn’t use those hours idly, nor waste them in sleep or recrimination. She had a Situation, as her trainers would have called it, and it demanded that choices be made and stuck to.

One by one she contacted the cabins of those she’d determined were just ordinary passengers. As crisply and professionally as possible she explained the basics of the situation, and that their only chance was the lifeboats, which Kincaid could protect and launch remotely. Some refused to believe her. Some simply were too scared or convinced that this somehow didn’t apply to them and would blow over if they ignored it. She didn’t have much of a choice with the latter. They were told they would get one chance, and if they did not take it, they were on their own.

In each case, once told, the life module’s computer isolated them from the lounge and public areas. They could get deliveries to their rooms, but that was all. They would have to watch their cabin clocks; when instructed, they were to proceed, following the lifeboat signs, and board.

She was particularly gratified by the few who offered to stay and fight it out with Kincaid, but she rejected that course. This wasn’t their battle, and the opposition was far too powerful. In this case, dying just wasn’t a particularly productive strategy, and even if you could take some of the nasty ones with you, well, what was the long-term point that was worth lives?

Ari Martinez and Ming Dawn Palavri were two she felt confident she could place in charge of individual lifeboats. She planned on taking the third out herself. Tann Nakitt was still something of a question mark, but she allowed him to make his own decision, although he was, of course, monitored to ensure that he tipped off none of the bad guys.

Not that they needed to be tipped off. Jules Wallinchky sent the Rithians and Mallegestors on an all-out search to find out where the hell everybody had gone. When they determined that almost everybody had remained in their cabins for the last day and night, Wallinchky knew something was up. When he determined that the lifeboats would not respond to the general emergency access panels, he had the plot pretty well figured out.

“What do you want to do?” Teynal asked him. “If we can’t get off, we will have to go with them. Inconvenient, and they are water breathers.”

Wallinchky seemed singularly unworried. “We’ll take care of it. You know I never go into a place unless I have good protection and multiple exits. They can shut off corridor access to us when they need to, so I say let ’em go. If they can’t be picked off, so be it.” He did, however, palm and pass several pieces of paper between his people and himself, actions that could be observed by the monitors but not read by them. In all cases, they ate the messages, so there would be no reconstruction. Clearly he wasn’t going to give away his game plan to Jeremiah Kincaid.

Sealed off on the bridge with his monitors, Kincaid was frustrated by this most primitive of devices, nor could he be certain from that vantage point what conversations of theirs were for real and which ones were for his benefit.

It was simply a matter of waiting that eternity until the clock ticked down and they were ejected from null- space back into the normal universe. In the meanwhile he could only try to anticipate everything and wonder what he’d missed.

When the clocks read seven days, twenty hours, fifty-one minutes, no seconds, there was a shudder that shook the entire ship, and everyone once more had that feeling of falling into a deep, bottomless pit. Alarms went off then, and the ship’s “voice” said, “Attention! Attention! We have experienced an emergency, and to avoid loss of life and minimize discomfort we have been forced to reenter normal space short of our destination. Please remain calm. For your safety, all passengers are directed toward the lifeboats designated for their immediate sections. Do not be alarmed. It is a routine procedure. In the event of a life-threatening situation, the lifeboats can take you without harm to safety. This will probably not be necessary, but to ensure that everyone is where they should be, please follow the flashing lines in the direction they indicate to your lifeboats now.”

In the lounge, Wallinchky nodded to the Rithians and whispered something in the ears of each of his beautiful companions. All of them immediately set off into the corridors, while the Mallegestors took up protective station with Wallinchky in the lounge.

Kincaid couldn’t quite figure out what was going on, but he spoke into the two-way in his environment suit on a channel only he knew was operational. “Execute final option, priority code Ahab. Good luck, City of Modar. You are on your own.”

“We will do our best, Captain,” came the response from the control panel. “Good luck.”

Jeremiah Kincaid had to stifle a chuckle at that, even at this most tense of moments. A computer had just wished him good luck. He wasn’t sure he liked discovering that computers believed in luck.

The area they were in represented a huge amount of space, and he had only an approximation of where the other ship would emerge. Even a few seconds here or there could mean tens of thousands of kilometers; minutes might turn into millions.

He’d turned off the ship’s local distress calls, but the other ship would have something, probably from the water sections.

Almost as if on cue with the thought, his sensors picked it up, the scanners locking in on the frequencies. There was no way to break their code at this point, of course, but he noted with some approval that the ship