Enda gave Gabriel a rather dire look, for all around them the cavern had suddenly gone very quiet.
Gabriel swallowed again, very certain that this was not because everyone had suddenly gone to bed.
'Helm,' Enda said, 'I fear dawn will have no secrets from either of us. Why are you still awake?'
'Not my night yet. I was talking to Delde Sola.'
'Statement: still is,' came the doctor's voice down the comms.
'Delde Sola,' Gabriel said immediately, 'you are an angel with a wire hairdo. I will change your batteries any time, but what are you doing in this system?'
Delde Sola snickered. 'Conjecture: thought gallantry was dead. Objective statement: Helm called me earlier, suggested presence here might be useful. Made excuse to Iphus authorities, called in favor, found outgoing transport. Location: Ino at moment, completing 'supply run.' Needed to do some shopping anyway.'
'An angel,' Gabriel repeated, 'but the analysis-can you do that from this distance?'
'Affirm,' Delde Sota said. 'I am on the Grid. Helm is on the Grid. Longshot's computer is on the Grid and connects to my sensor extension-my braid-in his weapons bay. Object is in his weapons bay. Preparing now.'
'The braid has one of those atomic-level microporous tendril attachments,' Helm said. 'All she has to do is touch it to something and it goes right through-' 'I've seen it,' Gabriel said. 'Slick.'
'Request: quiet for a moment please,' Delde Sota said. 'Interfacing.'
Gabriel and Enda looked at each other. The silence in the cavern was even greater than it had been. Kaiste was standing in the opening between their private space and the main hall, looking at them grimly with a sabot pistol in his claw.
Gabriel looked up at him, wondering whether this was something that would have happened whether he and Enda had suddenly started to communicate with someone on the outside or not. Did they ever intend to let us leave, really? Have we been under a death sentence since we got here, no matter how good our intentions were? Not that it mattered now.
'Kaiste, it's Ondway's friends we're talking to,' Gabriel explained and surprised himself somewhat with his own anger. 'They know you're here, and they haven't betrayed you any more than we intend to. If you're going to shoot us, at least wait until the doctor finds out what you need to know. Then do what you like.' He turned his back on Kaiste, rude though it was. His back itched at the feeling of the pistol leveled at it.
And itched, and itched, but he would not turn around again.
'Initial result,' Delde Sola said then. 'It is a chemical/enzymatic device. Catalytic compounds .. .' She trailed off.
There was something peculiar about her silence, and apparently Enda heard it too. 'Doctor, are you all right?'
'Analyzing.' A long silence.
'Conjecture:' Delde Sola said then, 'device is intended to promote a catalytic reaction in atmosphere. Catalyzation starts high up, near space altitudes. All free or atmospheric oxygen is catalyzed into 'locked' forms, clathrates and other similar structures, using nitrogen and other gaseous atoms to construct the clathrates. Such structures bind the atoms into 'cages' in which they are inaccessible and from which they cannot escape. Over only very long periods the clathrate 'cages' would disintegrate.' 'What would happen if you dropped this into a planet's atmosphere?' Gabriel asked. 'All oxygen in it would become sequestered in clathrate form.' Delde Sola's voice was getting angry. Gabriel could just see those dark eyes and the anger in them. 'Such oxygen is not respirable. It enters the lungs, but oxygen is not able to bond with hemoglobin in human blood cells, cyanoglobin in sesheyan blood, and so forth. It passes out of the lungs again unused and unusable. Breathing does no good. You breathe freely yet die of suffocation within minutes.' 'And then the clathrates disintegrate,' Enda said softly.
'Leaving the oxygen slowly freeing itself for use again. Months, perhaps. Weeks, more likely.' 'So that after everything that breathed oxygen on a given planet was dead,' Gabriel said softly, 'the planet itself would be usable again after a while.'
'Why waste perfectly good infrastructure investment?' said Doctor Delde Sola, almost in a growl. 'Plants remain unhurt since plants use nitrogen, and plenty of free nitrogen is left. Planet surface is cleansed of undesirable organisms- non-Employee sesheyans, for example.'
Suddenly Gabriel thought of that VoidCorp cruiser he had seen heading nonchalantly toward Grith in a maneuver that looked like it was simply using Hydrocus's gravity to slingshot around the two worlds. But something else was going on. Such a maneuver might look like an energy saving move at first. For a cruiser like that, though, it had to cost more energy to set up than it would or could possibly save. What was it practicing for? Gabriel thought. Insertion of something into the high atmosphere . . . Now, only now, he turned to look at Kaiste again. The sesheyan was standing there, the pistol lowered, looking stricken. 'Yes,' Gabriel said. 'Non-Employee sesheyans, and not just these, either.' Enda was staring at him 'What?' Helm said. 'Who?' 'The ones on Grith' Gabriel said.
Enda's mouth fell open. 'But there are thousands of humans there as well, and fraal, and other species. All the Hatire settlers at Diamond Point, and the people scattered through the jungles, and ...' She trailed off.
'Not VoidCorp employees, though,' said Gabriel. 'Not real people.' He was thinking again about Delvecchio's rueful remarks about how long it took to turn other beings into people, or at least the kind of people worthy of being treated like Us.
'They would destabilize the whole system,' Enda said slowly. 'They would start a war here, and it would spread. They might have wiped out a Hatire colony once, but they would not get away with it twice.'
'Wouldn't they? Since when have they cared about a war or two?' Gabriel said. 'This is VoidCorp we're discussing. Their business, long term and short term, is to win, and they can't win as long as there's a colony of renegade sesheyans sitting right out under their noses on Grith, flaunting 'their' contract with the Company! So they'll kill them, but they'll make sure their little gadget works here and kill these sesheyans first, because two colonies of free sesheyans are even worse than just one.' 'The Concord,' said Enda slowly, 'cannot allow them to get away with this.'
Gabriel did not share his immediate thought. Perhaps the Concord did not intend to let them get away with this, and he- and to a lesser extent Enda-were the tools that the Concord were employing to this purpose. The issue had come up for consideration before. Isn't a willing tool still a tool? Gabriel was now finding aspects of the question that he had not considered before. He had occasionally spent some time wondering what good he might be doing Lorand Kharls. Now he found himself wondering what good Lorand Kharls might do him, and whether the tool might not turn in the hand of its user in ways that even the user might find surprising.
More-and in a more shadowy manner-the idea was beginning to creep up on Gabriel that there were other kinds of service to the Concord than the strictly military ones and that willing service might change the nature of everything that had gone before it.
Enda's getting to me, he thought, putting that thought aside for the moment. 'So that's why that thing was signaling,' Gabriel said. 'It was waiting for the sesheyans in the attack force to lock onto it and give it the signal to go active. Their bosses didn't want to leave it on automatic. There might have been some reason to abort the attack suddenly.'
'Like if a Concord ship turned up suddenly,' said Enda.
'Yes.'
'And when we turned up, some of them went to go ahead with the delivery, thinking there would be no witnesses, until we started to get a little the better of the situation,' Enda said, 'at which point the insertion must have been called off. The ships detailed to it came back to finish us off.'
'With the results we saw.' Gabriel sighed. 'Did they make that decision themselves, though? Or did someone order them to? Did they have a chance to report to whoever was in charge of the attack?'
'For all we know, the whole thing was being watched remotely by their masters elsewhere,' Enda said.
'In fact it seems all too likely. I think we must expect them to return, and in short order.'
'On top of everything else, they were using Employee sesheyans to deliver this thing.' Gabriel grimaced.
'Probably from VoidCorp's point of view, that just made it even more fun,' Helm said.
Gabriel put his head down in his hands-then looked up again, looked over at Kaiste. 'Kaiste, you've got to leave,' he said. 'You've got to get out of here. There's no way VoidCorp can have intended to try something like this and fail to carry it through eventually. You have to come with us.'
'In two ships?' Enda said, very softly. 'There are at least three thousand sesheyans here.'
