Unity had been called something else—Nueviberia, a worn-down form of the name its original colonists had bestowed on it long ago—when it had been the capital planet of the Empire's Psi Capricorni Sector. Basil could already see that the name wasn't all that had changed.
Certain of his fellow officers had always regarded his interest in the New Humans as an eccentricity, as well as a waste of time that might otherwise be devoted to more fruitful and potentially career-enhancing fields of study like the power politics of the contending regional admirals. But he'd persevered, mindful of the incredibly ancient adage, "Know your enemy." And now he had an opportunity to compare what he'd learned with reality, as he rode a slider with Felix and two guards from the spacefield toward Montrose City, as to whose former name he had no idea.
"Quite an honor for this planet, isn't it?" he asked Felix. "Having its chief city named after the originator of the New Human ideology. How is he, by the way?"
"Quite well," Felix said shortly. Fleet Intelligence had deduced that Montrose was now certifiably insane and addicted to a remarkable variety of drugs, and that his public persona was a computer simulation, aided by a very sophisticated robotic double whenever a physical appearance was required. But Felix ignored Basil's mischievousness and changed the subject. "Unity is, after all, an important planet of the People's Democratic Union, second only to Equality, the capital world. The naming of this city merely reflects that importance."
"No doubt. Still . . . I thought you'd done away with surnames."
Felix refused to be baited. "There are always exceptions—or, at least, there will be until all vestiges of the past's irrational clutter have been obliterated from the very memory of a New Humanity which has become universal. Delmore Montrose had his great revelation while still a former person, and therefore the surname is still associated with his work. The inescapable fact is," he added parenthetically, "we all used to be former people. Except, of course, those born in the last fourteen years."
"How very fortunate for them." Basil was all blandness.
"Actually," Felix went on, "it is hoped that eventually the use of all individual names can be discontinued, and that humans, as well as planets, cities, geographical features, and so forth can be identified purely by alphanumeric designators. Personal names of all kinds, with their more or less blatant historical associations, carry underlying assumptions of exceptionalism. Indeed, language in general is permeated with the stench of the past. Ultimately, for true equality to prevail, the existing tongues must be replaced by a rational language created as a phonetic analogue of binary logic. A language in which it will be impossible to express ideologically unacceptable thoughts."
"What a magnificent vision."
"Yes," Felix said softly, either oblivious to sarcasm or deliberately ignoring it. More and more, Basil was coming to suspect the former; Felix was armored in the absolute humorlessness of the ideologue. And he was even more given to lecturing than Basil himself. "Unfortunately, not everyone can perceive its magnificence. Most require . . . guidance. And there are always recalcitrants."
Basil began to see the implications of Felix's words as they swooped along the highway from the spacefield. To their left was the Naiad Ocean, beyond sand dunes with patches of mutated sea oats. Ahead, the towers of Montrose City—or whatever—still sought the sky, for the new regime still needed this system's economic infrastructure in place. But as they neared what had once been the suburbs, those towers were lost to sight in the press of shoddy residential blocks, newly run up by nanoconstructors working from the most elementary programs. Everywhere, the residue of unprocessed raw materials lay about in heaps that the inhabitants, sulking about in dispirited crowds, showed no inclination to remove. Sewage disposal clearly hadn't been part of the plan for these warrens, for streams of foul runoff flowed in the gutters, where skinny half-naked children played in a desultory way. The stench that penetrated the slider's enclosed cabin made Basil wonder what it was like outside.
Felix gestured at the masses of human misery beyond the cabin's armorplast bubble. "Former rural inhabitants of this continent," he explained in an offhand way. "They have been relocated to central locations like this so their labor can be more rationally organized for the war effort. Also, removal from their accustomed environs makes them more socially malleable. In the past, they have displayed a certain stubbornness in clinging to obsolete societal patterns, notably those associated with the family."
"I see they're still being brought in," Basil remarked as they passed a large open area in the midst of the high-density squalor. A bulky contra-grav transport had grounded there, and crowds of people were shambling out under the gaze of uniformed guards with nerve lashes.
"Yes . . . and there appears to be a disturbance. Stop here." The slider came to a halt in obedience to Felix's command. The bubble raised, and Basil forced his rising gorge down as the outside air flowed in. This was a fairly cool day; he wondered what the hot ones were like.
Felix, showing no reaction to the miasma, got out and walked toward a knot of struggling figures. Two guards were restraining a wild-eyed woman from touching two children being pulled away by other guards. A junior officer was running up, but came to a sudden, exaggerated position of attention at the sight of Felix. There was a brief exchange that Basil couldn't make out, then Felix said something to one of the guards.
With a sudden movement, the guard touched his nerve lash to the base of the woman's neck. Her back arched convulsively, and she rent the air with a scream fit for the ultimate torments of hell. The guard withdrew the lash, and the woman collapsed, convulsing—but Felix gestured, and the guard, after what might have been a fraction of a second's hesitation, thrust the lash back into contact with her, and kept it there. The screams rose to a level that must have lacerated her throat, drowning out the children's wails, but they didn't last long.
Felix, without troubling to determine if she was dead or merely unconscious, turned to the children. He glanced only momentarily at the girl, five or so, who was standing in unblinking shock, sucking her fingers. But his gaze lingered longer on her nine- or ten-year-old brother, a slender olive-complexioned boy with regular features. Then Felix spoke a few words to the junior officer, who saluted and spoke to the guards. The two children were taken off in separate directions, screaming anew and reaching for each other. Felix, without a backward glance, returned to the slider.
"What about . . . ?" Basil gestured at the crumpled heap of the children's mother, carefully keeping his voice level.
"Unimportant. Even if she's alive, the neural damage she's sustained would render her useless for any form of labor. The detritus will be cleaned up by morning." As the slider proceeded in response to his command, Felix gestured at the instant slum around them. "What happens to these people is of no concern. As I indicated, they are just rural trash, inherently incapable of appreciating the truth of New Human doctrines."
"Such as that of human equality?"
"Precisely. I'm gratified—and surprised—that you understand the situation so well."
"Still," Basil ventured, "some of them evidently are less useless than others. The boy and girl, for instance?"
"Ah, yes." Felix's eyes took on a faraway look, and he unconsciously licked his lips. "The girl is fit only for labor—and later, perhaps, as recreation for the male laborers. But the boy will be attached to my household staff, in which capacity he will be able to render more important service to the State."
They rode in silence as the shoddy forced-labor housing gave way to the old city. Here, the crowds were marginally better dressed and better nourished, and basic services seemed more or less functional despite an overall air of run-down shabbiness. And there was one altogether new municipal utility: on every major street corner, a holoprojector ran a twice-lifesize image of Delmore Montrose, declaiming his precepts for the edification of small crowds that collected at each such corner. The members of those crowds alternated between vociferous exclamations of admiration for the sage's words and surreptitious glances over their shoulders to see if any uniformed personnel were watching. The answer was almost invariably yes, for every fourth individual seemed to be wearing a uniform. Those uniforms weren't all that different from the standardized gray garb that everyone wore. But the sight of the rank and branch insignia on cuff and shoulder was enough to reduce civilian gait to a kind of shuffling cringe.
They proceeded through the city to what was obviously a long-established residential district. Soon, with the abruptness of a giant's axe stroke, the old tree-shaded homes and the landscape produced by centuries of careful tending ceased, for the slider had entered an area that had been recently cleared with brutal thoroughness and surrounded with a security fence. After a while they came to a gate in the fence and turned down a long driveway between rows of recently planted saplings that hadn't had time to grow into shade trees. Beyond, a vast manorial residence rose at the far end of a reflecting pool. Basil, whose knowledge of classical schools of architecture was sketchy at best, recognized only a few of the elements that had entered into the grandiose eclecticism.
"Most impressive," he remarked neutrally.
"It is the residence of this sector's Coordinator. He found the old Imperial governor's palace inadequate to his needs. Naturally, the local populace was overjoyed to contribute to the expense of construction, for they realized—after suitable instruction in correct doctrine—the gratitude they should feel toward those of us who are leading them out of the Empire's archaic class structure into a new age of democratic equality."
"So I can see," Basil muttered, gazing around at the extensive grounds. Here and there, humans—presumably cheaper than robots—labored at gardening chores and tried to make themselves inconspicuous whenever the armed guards strolled by.
The slider curved off to the right of the reflecting pool and bypassed the main façade, coming to a halt at a side entrance. "When I based my intelligence-gathering operation here," Felix explained, "the Coordinator was good enough to place a wing of his residence at my disposal." Then one of the guards nudged Basil out of his seat, and they passed through the doorway into a long high-ceilinged entrance hall from which hallways extended in three directions. Here and there, a number of fine-featured young boys were in evidence, and Basil decided he had been correct in certain assumptions about his captor.
Felix turned to face him. "You will be housed in comfortable quarters to await the procedure we discussed previously. Unless . . ." He stretched the pause to the snapping point. "Unless you decide you would rather cooperate with us voluntarily."
"I gather you'd prefer that." Basil spoke in a voice whose steadiness surprised him.
"It's possible that you will be more useful to us in your organic form. So, to that extent, the answer is yes. But, more to the point, I would think you'd prefer it. You'll have a while to consider the matter, as preparations have to be made in any case. Besides which, I have plenty to occupy me at the moment." With what passed for a theatrical flourish, Felix indicated the briefcase he was carrying. "I must supervise the harvesting of the rich crop of information your probing yielded."
Once again despair engulfed Basil—or, rather, his dulled awareness of its presence flared up anew. Yes, the datachip that held all the images that had impressed themselves on his eyes, right up through his capture to the point where he had been taken into that little chamber after seeing the rebel fleet . . .
All at once, he knew what the cliché "blinding realization" meant.
After seeing the rebel fleet . . . with the stars spread out behind it . . .
He struggled to keep his face blank, without total success. But Felix never saw his expression, for he turned on his heel and departed. Basil was hustled off down a side corridor. He scarcely noticed the guards' frequent shoves, for his thought processes had suddenly acquired a new intensity.
"Comfortable" was a generous description of the austere semi-subterranean bed-and-bath with its shallow, barred windows near the ceiling. But at least the sanitary arrangements were civilized, and the rations were measurably better than the synthetic shipboard paste. And they didn't keep him there long.
He was lying on his narrow bed, propped up into reading position, when the door slid aside—this was a traditional residence—to admit Felix and a pair of guards. "Ah, Admiral, I see you're using your time wisely," Felix remarked approvingly, with a glance at the book he was reading.
Basil put the condensed anthology of the works of Delmore Montrose down without commenting that it was the only reading matter that had been made available to him—which Felix already knew anyway. "Yes. Most illuminating. But I've also been using the opportunity to do some thinking."
"Ah." Felix seated himself on a chair, leaving the guard standing in a watchful attitude. "Thinking about what I said when we arrived, I presume."
"Yes. I've come to the conclusion . . . well, I can see no real alternative to cooperating with you."
"Ah," Felix repeated, and gave his quick near-smile. "Am I to understand that you have become a convert to New Humanity?"
Basil laughed harshly. "If I claimed that, you'd probably have me downloaded without further delay, and then kill me."
"Quite true, Admiral; I don't respond well to having my intelligence insulted. So what are you saying?"
"It's simple enough. If I don't cooperate, I'll be killed—but only after you have my download under your control, so my death would accomplish nothing."
"Very rational, Admiral. Only . . . I can't rid myself of the suspicion that this particular manifestation of rationality is slightly out of character." The pale-gray eyes grew even colder. "As you've probably gathered, I've made something of a study of you. In addition to your stubborn loyalty to the outworn trappings of Imperialism, it is my impression that you value the good opinion of your peers highly. Too highly to be able to endure the thought that they might learn of your treason."
Basil met the almost colorless eyes with a glare that was as tightly controlled as the bitterness in his voice . "Oh, you're right . . . more right than you can know. The thought is unendurable. But the fact is, I'm going to have to endure it, aren't I?" He gestured at the spy cell high on a wall. "The visuals you have of me should provide the raw material for a very sophisticated holo simulation, which you'd be able to trot out in conjunction with my recorded personality. So my side is going to think I'm a traitor regardless of what I do. Once again, my death would mean nothing."
"I see." Felix looked pensive. "Perhaps my estimate of you requires modification, Admiral. I'm not in a position to verify this change of heart, as I have only one telepath and she almost certainly isn't strong enough to penetrate beneath your active surface thoughts, given your powers of telepathic resistance—oh, yes, we know about that, too. Still, much can be done with drugs—"
"Wait! You haven't heard my conditions."
Felix's head snapped up in annoyance at the interruption, and the guards tensed. "'Conditions'? I don't think you're in any position to be talking of 'conditions,' Admiral."
"You'll have to be the judge of that. It's all a matter of how badly you want the added benefits and lesser expense that will come with my voluntary cooperation. But you'll have to hear them before you can decide, won't you?"
"Very well. Proceed."
"First of all, no drugs. And no poking about in my mind by some powerful telepath or group of telepaths working in concert until after you've met my second condition."
"Which is?"
"I want to talk to higher authority than you. Higher, in fact, than anyone this side of your capital world."
Felix raised one sandy eyebrow. "You do think a lot of yourself, don't you? What makes you think anything you have to tell us would be of sufficient interest to earn you immediate access to anyone higher than me? Especially in light of the fact that we already have the most important information you can provide. Thanks to the probe, we know in detail the plan for the coming offensive."
"Do you?" Basil asked, very softly.
Felix's mocking expression suddenly froze into the worried frown of a man wondering if he's missed something obvious. After a second or so, his face cleared and he gave his head an annoyed shake.
"Of course we do! It's all there: everything you heard yourself and others say, transcribed by the probe operator; and everything you saw, recorded from the screen in conventional video media."
"But not what I know about what I was hearing and seeing. The probe doesn't read thoughts and memories, just sensory impressions."
"But those sensory impressions are real ones. . . ." Suddenly, Felix's pale-gray eyes ignited with anger. "Are you actually trying to convince me that you and other highly placed people, up to and including Medina, have spent the last three months play-acting, to feed us false information?"
"Oh, no. But what you don't seem to understand is that while Imperial security has its leaks—in fact, the court is one vast sieve—it is very tight where Grand Admiral Medina is in direct charge. And the possible capture and probing of someone with access to highly sensitive information has been taken into account."
Felix's frown was back, along with a slight sheen of sweat on his brow. "Meaning . . . ?"
"Of course the staff can't communicate in code at all times. But for quite a while—considerably longer than the last three months—certain protocols have been in effect, designed not just to obscure information but to actively mislead the uninitiated. You know what I heard and saw . . . but you don't necessarily know what everything meant. You just think you do."
"Tell me about these 'protocols.'"
Basil shook his head. "No. This is too important, and from what I've seen of this place I don't trust its security a bit." Felix's eyes flashed again, but Basil pressed on. "Besides, if I'm going to turn my coat, I may as well do it right. I want to oblige the most powerful people I can."
"So," Felix said in a voice whose quietness was, Basil somehow suspected, deceptive, "I'm not a prominent enough patron for you?"
"Oh, don't take it personally. In fact, there's no reason why we can't share the credit."
"What do you mean?"
"Your capital system—'Equality' I think you called it; I can't remember what it used to be called—is only a short hop from here for a speedster like my Courier. You could take me there; and en route, with no security worries, I could go over the visuals and transcriptions with you and explain in detail the discrepancies between apparent and actual meanings. You could present your superiors with the information, as a fruit of your success in recruiting me. We'd both benefit: kudos for you, unassailable credibility for me."
As he'd spoken, Basil had noticed Felix's tongue making its little unconscious lip-licking motion. In any other circumstances, he would have been amused at his captor's efforts to keep up an emotionless façade. "On reflection, Admiral, I believe that your conditions are acceptable, and that the course of action you suggest has much to recommend it. In fact, I suggest we leave for the spaceport at once."
They retraced their route through the city to the spaceport, but this time Basil noticed nothing, for he was deep in thought.
Unsurprisingly, Felix had appropriated the admiral's stateroom on the Courier for himself. Basil found himself housed in the secondary cabin in which he'd been kept unconscious after his capture. The other secondary cabin held the one guard Felix had brought along. The two-man crew had its own quarters.
They had barely passed Unity's Chen Limit and engaged the drive when the guard came and escorted Basil to the admiral's stateroom, gesturing with a nerve lash for emphasis. Felix was waiting there, amid the stateroom's relative spaciousness. The compartment was largely unchanged; its new occupant hadn't removed any of Basil's personal objects . . . including an odd sculpture of some crystalline material, on a side table to the right of the data terminal. Basil sternly ordered his body and features not to sag with relief.
"And now, Admiral Castellan, let us proceed." Felix seated himself before the data terminal and inserted a datachip. Then he turned to Basil and motioned him to stand beside the chair.
"So that's a visual recording of my probe?" Basil gave the guard at his elbow a sideways glance. The fellow, who hadn't spoken to him except in monosyllables, had a holstered sidearm besides the nerve lash; Basil recognized a standard Fleet issue bead gun.
"It is. And don't concern yourself; this man is absolutely trustworthy."
"What about the crew?"
Felix shrugged, and fingered certain controls. "This stateroom is now locked, and surrounded with a privacy shield against the highly unlikely eventuality of eavesdropping by the crew members."
"But . . . is this necessary?" Basil indicated the nerve lash that the guard was holding unsettlingly close to his side.
"It is," Felix stated in a flat, cold voice. "You see, Admiral, I still don't trust you. This room has been checked for any conventional booby traps you might have had installed here. And you're not a telepath, so you can't trip any hidden psionic switches. So I feel secure allowing you here in your old stateroom. But not unguarded. And any attempts at prevarication will be instantly punished by nerve lash. If I come to the conclusion that you've been deceiving me from the beginning, the punishment will be prolonged to the edge of permanent neural damage—this guard has much experience in judging when that point has been reached. And now that your position has been made clear to you, let us proceed." He activated the screen.
Basil stepped forward. "Let's begin at the beginning. I assume your probe operator edited out everything that was obviously of no interest."
"Of course. And the operator's recitation of your relevant auditory input accompanies it." Felix pressed keys, and a corridor of Fleet Headquarters on Prometheus appeared on the screen, as viewed by a tall man walking along it.
"Speed it up some. A significant sequence should be coming up soon." Basil leaned forward as though to look over Felix's shoulder. The latter, secure in his knowledge of the guard's presence and absorbed in the sights unfolding on the screen, was oblivious to his captive's movements. And not even the guard found any cause for suspicion when Basil rested his right hand on the curious crystalline sculpture.
It portrayed a tiger lizard of Selagore, a world of the Serpens/Bootes region where life had arisen independently and the higher land animals were hexapods. "And damned ugly hexapods," he'd remarked when Torval, who'd served on Selagore, had presented the grotesque thing to him as a birthday gift.
The big Marine's ruddy face had formed a grin in the beard he had taken to cultivating—it was chestnut rather than dark brown like his hair—and his hazel-green eyes had twinkled. "Has its uses, though. How much do you know about Selagore?"
"Not much. Ex-Beyonders, incorporated when the Draconis Empire expanded in that direction but never completely assimilated."
"Right. And like a lot of Beyonder societies, they'd become backward in most ways but advanced in odd directions in a few others. In particular, they're real craftsmen with psionically active materials. Some of their artworks have more to them than meets the eye."
"I'm relieved," Basil had said drily, continuing to eye the sculpture with scant favor.
Torval had chuckled in his seismic way. "Listen. The thing about these Selagore psi-crystals is, you don't need to be a telepath; they're sensitive to the right thought from anybody who makes physical contact and concentrates. Here, touch it and—"
It had made quite a party trick, and Basil had kept the thing with him. Now, with his hand resting on the head of the sculpted beast, he thought of the actual tiger lizard—neither a tiger nor a lizard, of course, but with attributes worthy of both in its scale-armored, razor-fanged, massive-jawed presence . . . which suddenly appeared in the middle of the stateroom, a quarter-ton of ill-natured carnivore rearing up on its two hind pairs of legs and using the front pair to slash the air with cutlasslike claws. It opened its cavernous, slavering mouth to emit a roar which the holoprojection couldn't reproduce but whose volume Basil did his best to approximate with a full-throated scream.
The guard would have been more than human if he hadn't used the weapon in his hand to fend off that nightmare apparition whose sheer impossibility hadn't had time to register. With a strangled cry he swung the nerve lash away from Basil and thrust it at the gaping fang-lined jaws, a movement made clumsy by panic.
But Basil, who had known exactly what to expect, moved swiftly and surely, chopping at the guard's wrist in a manner summoned up from academy vintage memories of karate training. The impact sent the nerve lash falling and sliding across the floor. Simultaneously, Basil used his left arm to catch the guard's head in a choke hold, followed by a vicious neck-breaking sideways twist. Then, dropping the still-twitching guard, he flung himself in the direction the nerve lash had gone . . . only to collide with Felix, who had come out of his paralysis and dived toward the same goal.
They fell to the floor in a struggling heap, rolling into the side table and sending the sculpture toppling onto the floor where it shattered into a thousand crystalline shards. The phantom tiger lizard abruptly vanished, but the two men didn't notice as they strained to reach the nerve lash while grappling with each other. Basil brought a knee up into an impact which caused Felix to gasp and loosen his grip. Taking quick advantage, Basil gave a forward heave which brought his fingers curling around the nerve lash's hilt. With another heave, he got on top of his opponent and jabbed the nerve lash into contact with Felix's cheek. He didn't activate it, but Felix's struggles ceased abruptly, and sweat broke out over the long narrow face.
Basil gasped for breath and then spoke levelly to his motionless opponent. "And now, Felix, you will order the crewmen to leave the ship under computer control and go to their quarters. Any tricks and I'll use this."
Felix gave the smallest possible nod. Basil pulled Felix's left wrist up behind him, raising him slowly to his feet while keeping the nerve lash in position, and walked him over to the intraship communicator. Felix gave the command in as steady a voice as could have been expected. Basil toyed with the thought of indulging himself in a brief application of the nerve lash anyway, but only momentarily. Instead, he reversed the device in his hand and, with the base of its handle, struck Felix a precise blow behind the ear, then lowered the limp form to the deck. Next he turned to the guard's body and drew the bead gun, a heavy pistol-shaped weapon with a magnetic accelerator coil around its barrel. He made sure the weapon had a full magazine of the little glass spheres that gave it its name. Then he went to the door and studied the spy cell. No activity in the short passageway; the pilot-captain and helmsman must already be in their bunkroom. He touched a key, and the door slid open with the faintest of hums.
As he stepped out into the passageway, it occurred to him that he hadn't really thought things through. The Courier wasn't designed to transport prisoners; these hatches couldn't be locked from the outside, for no one had ever visualized a situation in which it would be desirable to keep their occupants from getting out. Felix was such a valuable prisoner that he'd be worth keeping physically restrained for the whole trip, even if it required nursemaiding him. But two others, when there was only one of himself . . . ?
Then the question became academic, as the two crewmen appeared in the bridge hatch at the far end of the passageway, firing paralysis pistols.
Basil didn't waste time wondering why the rebels equipped space crew with the electronics-disrupting weapons. He just flung himself back through the hatchway. It wouldn't have been enough, save for the paralysis guns' narrow-beam effect. He wasn't quite fast enough to keep his right foot out of the fringes of a beam, and all at once it felt as though he'd spent motionless hours with that leg curled up under him. Luckily, rising to his feet was neither necessary nor desirable just now.
I'm not a trained combat soldier, he told himself. I haven't fought with anything except my brain for years. He did, however, have the knack of letting immaterial thoughts run their course while his body carried out the necessary action. (Torval had once told him he would have made a pretty good Marine corporal. He'd decided to take it as a compliment.) Ignoring his tingling foot, he rolled to the hatch, thrust the bead gun out into the passageway at floor level, where his opponents didn't expect it—they weren't trained combat men either—and pressed the firing stud at full automatic setting.
The gun accelerated the crystal beads instantaneously to six thousand meters per second with a faint plasma flash as their ferrous coating met the air at that velocity, but they didn't have enough mass to impart much recoil. So Basil was able to momentarily hold the weapon more or less on target. That was enough. One of the rebels fell backwards with a scream and a spray of blood, ruined arm flapping from the strands of red muscle that still connected it to his shoulder. The other stayed upright for a fraction of a second longer, as Basil started to lose control of the pistol. But the upward-swerving stream of glass beads crossed his forehead, and his skull exploded upward from overpressure as hydrostatic shock took its course.
Limping as he dragged his barely-functional right foot, Basil stepped onto the bridge, imposing mental discipline against the gore. Fortunately the armless man, whom he'd been prepared to put out of his misery, had at least lost consciousness. So he examined the controls. Bead gun projectiles were valued for shipboard use because they inflicted only limited damage on anything except unarmored flesh, shattering on impact with hard surfaces; but there was no telling what the out-of-control beams of falling paralysis guns might have shorted out as they swept across the bridge. He seated himself at the pilot-captain's station, ignoring the neurohelmet—he did not belong to that minority of humans with the specialized form of mental discipline needed for direct computer interfacing—and applied himself to the keyboard. Piloting a Courier wasn't his job, but he'd spent enough time aboard the little ships to acquire basic familiarization from pilots who'd been flattered by the high-ranking interest.
A few minutes' work convinced him that all was not well. The Courier was still proceeding under drive on its preset course toward the rebel capital system, but he was far from confident of his ability to persuade it to change that course. Then he remembered Felix, and decided there would be time enough later to worry about navigational problems.
He picked up one of the crewmen's paralysis guns and limped back to the stateroom. Felix was beginning to stir, and his eyes registered despairing surprise at the sight of Basil in the hatch.
"How did you give them the warning?" Basil asked conversationally. "I'm damned if I caught it."
"That," Felix said with a glimmer of returning animation, "would be telling."
"You didn't do them a favor," Basil continued. "I would have accepted their surrender, and figured out a way to keep them prisoners until we got back to Mu Arae. But you don't give a shit about your own people's lives, do you? Any more than you do about any others. And before you can read me a tract on the meaninglessness of individual human life . . ." He raised the paralysis pistol and Felix froze into immobility with his mouth half-opened. No insects here to fly into it, Basil thought regretfully as he dragged the motionless form into the cabin where he himself had been held captive and secured it on the bunk. Then he returned to the bridge.
It was difficult to pinpoint the problem, for there was little physical damage. And the computer, like those of most military ships, was not designed for voice communication, which might have led to confusion in the heat of battle. Basil had to sweat his way through on the keyboard, a job for a specialist. It was with a shaky sigh of relief that he sat back two hours later, watching the stars precess across the viewscreen until Mu Arae lay dead ahead.
He was punch-drunk with exhaustion, but sleep was out of the question until he had satisfied himself on one point. He returned to his stateroom and ordered coffee from the little autogalley. Then he seated himself at the data terminal, which still held the digital video recording of his mind probe.
He sped through ninety percent of what Felix and his technicians had deemed important, hoping frantically that they hadn't edited out what he needed. Then he was up to that last staff meeting on Hespera before his capture. . . . Yes! After that, they hadn't bothered with further editing. Conceivably, Felix had wanted the Basil's-eye view of the capture preserved as a testament to his own cleverness. Basil fast-forwarded through the confused fight at the spaceport, his awakening and initial conversation with Felix, the two guards manhandling him down the passageway to the bridge . . .
Weak with relief, he watched what his own eyes had seen: the stars in the viewscreen, just before Felix had ordered tactical display that had revealed the rebel fleet. He backed up, and recorded those few seconds' view of the firmament, then settled back with a long sigh.
Interpreting those star configurations to determine the observer's location in space was no job for the Courier's little nav computer, even had it been in the best of health. But back on Hespera, with the base's great molecutronic brains and encyclopedic astronomical databases available . . .
He was still thinking about it when sleep finally took him, still seated at the data terminal.