"Captain to the bridge! Captain to the bridge!"
Captain Mateus Fofão rolled out of bed as the urgent voice of the officer of the watch blared over the intercom, counterpointed by the high-pitched wail of the emergency General Quarters signal. The captain's bare feet were on the decksole and he was already reaching for the bedside com before his eyes were fully open, and he jabbed the red priority key purely by feel.
"Bridge." The response came almost instantly, in a voice flat with the panic-resisting armor of training.
"It's the Captain, Chief Kuznetzov," Fofão said crisply. "Give me Lieutenant Henderson."
"Aye, Sir."
There was a brief instant of silence, then another voice.
"Officer of the deck," it said.
"Talk to me, Gabby," Fofão said crisply.
"Skipper," Lieutenant Gabriela Henderson, the heavy cruiser's tactical officer, had the watch, and her normally calm contralto was strained and harsh, "we've got bogies. Lots of bogies. They just dropped out of hyper twelve light-minutes out, and they're headed in-system at over four hundred gravities."
Fofão's jaw clenched. Four hundred gravities was twenty percent higher than the best Federation compensators could manage. Which pretty conclusively demonstrated that whoever these people were, they weren't Federation units.
"Strength estimate?" he asked.
"Still coming in, Sir," Henderson replied flatly. "So far, we've confirmed over seventy."
Fofão winced.
"All right." He was astounded by how calm his own voice sounded. "Implement first-contact protocols, and also Spyglass and Watchman. Then take us to Condition Four. Make sure the Governor's fully informed, and tell her I'm declaring a Code Alpha."
"Aye, aye, Sir."
"I'll be on the bridge in five minutes," Fofão continued as his sleeping cabin's door opened and his steward loped through it with his uniform. "Let's get some additional recon drones launched and headed for these people."
"Aye, aye, Sir."
"I'll see you in five," Fofão said. He keyed the com off and turned to accept his uniform from the white-faced steward.
In actual fact, Mateus Fofão reached the command deck of TFNS Swiftsure in just under five minutes.
He managed to restrain himself to a quick, brisk stride as he stepped out of the bridge elevator, but his eyes were already on the master plot, and his mouth tightened. The unknown vessels were a scatter of ominous ruby chips bearing down on the binary system's GO primary component and the blue-and-white marble of its fourth planet.
"Captain on the bridge!" Chief Kuznetzov announced, but Fofão waved everyone back into his or her bridge chair.
"As you were," he said, and almost everyone settled back into place. Lieutenant Henderson did not. She rose from the captain's chair at the center of the bridge, her relief as Fofão's arrival relieved her of command obvious.
He nodded to her, stepped past her, and settled himself in the same chair.
"The Captain has the ship," he announced formally, then looked back up at Henderson, still standing beside him. "Any incoming transmissions from them?"
"No, Sir. If they'd begun transmitting the instant they dropped out of hyper, we'd have heard something from them about"—the lieutenant glanced at the digital time display—"two minutes ago. We haven't."
Fofão nodded. Somehow, looking at the spreading cloud of red icons on the display, he wasn't surprised.
"Strength update?" he asked.
"Tracking estimates a minimum of eighty-five starships," Henderson said. "We don't have any indications of fighter launches yet."
Fofão nodded again, and a strange, singing sort of tension that was almost its own form of calm seemed to fill him. The calm of a man face-to-face with a disaster for which he has planned and trained for years but never really expected to confront.
"Watchman?" he asked.
"Implemented, Sir," Henderson replied. "Antelope got under way for the hyper limit two minutes ago."
"Spyglass?"
"Activated, Sir."
That's something, a detached corner of Fofão's brain said.
TFNS Antelope was a tiny, completely unarmed, and very fast courier vessel. Crestwell's World was the Federation's most advanced colonial outpost, fifty light-years from Sol, too new, too sparsely settled, to have its own hypercom yet. That left only courier ships, and at this moment Antelope's sole function was to flee Solward at her maximum possible velocity with the word that Code Alpha had come to pass.
Spyglass was the net of surveillance satellites stretched around the periphery of the star system's hyper limit. They were completely passive, hopefully all but impossible to detect, and they weren't there for Swiftsure's benefit. Their take—all of it—was being beamed after Antelope, to make certain she had full and complete tactical records as of the moment she hypered out. And that same information was being transmitted to Antelope's sister ship, TFNS Gazelle, as she lay totally covert in orbit around the system's outermost gas giant.
Her task was to remain hidden until the end, if she could, and then to report back to Old Earth.
And it's a good thing she's out there, Fofão thought grimly, because we certainly aren't going to be making any reports.
"Ship's status?" he asked.
"All combat systems are closed up at Condition Four, Sir. Engineering reports all stations manned and ready, and both normal-space and hyper drives are online prepared to answer maneuvering commands."
"Very good." Fofão pointed at her normally assigned command station and watched her head for it. Then he inhaled deeply and pressed a stud on the arm of his command chair.
"This is the Captain," he said, without the usual formalities of an all-hands announcement. "By now, you all know what's going on. At the moment, you know just as much about these people as I do. I don't know if they're the Gbaba or not. If they are, it doesn't look very good. But I want all of you to know that I'm proud of you. Whatever happens, no captain could have a better ship or a better crew."
He released the com stud and swiveled his chair to face the heavy cruiser's helmsman.
"Bring us to zero-one-five, one-one-niner, at fifty gravities," he said quietly, and TFNS Swiftsure moved to position herself between the planet whose human colonists had named it Crestwell's World and the mammoth armada bearing down upon it.
Mateus Fofão had always been proud of his ship. Proud of her crew, of her speed, of the massive firepower packed into her three-quarters-of-a-million-tonne hull. At the moment, what he was most aware of was her frailty.
Until ten years earlier, there'd been no Terran Federation Navy, not really. There'd been something the Federation called a navy, but it had actually been little more than a fleet of survey vessels, backed up by a handful of light armed units whose main concerns had been search and rescue operations and the suppression of occasional, purely human predators.
But then, ten years ago, a Federation survey ship had found evidence of the first confirmed advanced nonhuman civilization. No one knew what that civilization's citizens had called themselves, because none of them were still alive to tell anyone.
Humanity had been shocked by the discovery that an entire species had been deliberately destroyed. That a race capable of fully developing and exploiting the resources of its home star system had been ruthlessly wiped out. The first assumption had been that the species in question had done it to itself in some sort of mad spasm of suicidal fury. Indeed, some of the scientists who'd studied the evidence continued to maintain that that was the most likely explanation.
Those holdouts, however, were a distinct minority. Most of the human race had finally accepted the second, and far more horrifying, hypothesis. They hadn't done it to themselves; someone else had done it to them.
Fofão didn't know who'd labeled the hypothetical killers the Gbaba, and he didn't much care. But the realization that they might exist was the reason there was a genuine and steadily growing Federation Navy these days. And the reason contingency plans like Spyglass and Watchman had been put into place.
And the reason TFNS Swiftsure found herself between Crestwell's World and the incoming, still totally silent fleet of red icons.
There was no way in the universe a single heavy cruiser could hope to stop, or slow down, or even inconvenience a fleet the size of the one headed for Fofão's ship. Nor was it likely he could have stayed away from hostile warships capable of the acceleration rate the unknowns had already demonstrated, but even if he could have, that wasn't Swiftsure's job.
Even at their massive acceleration rate, it would take the bogies almost four hours to reach Crestwell's World, assuming they wanted to rendezvous with it. If all they wanted to do was overfly the planet, they could do it in less than three. But whatever their intention, it was Swiftsure's job to stand her ground. To do her damnedest, up to the very last instant, to open some sort of peaceful communication with the unknowns. To serve as a fragile shield and tripwire which might just possibly, however remote the possibility might be, deter an attack on the newly settled planet behind her.
And, almost certainly, to become the first casualty in the war the Federation had dreaded for almost a decade.
"Sir, we're picking up additional drive signatures," Lieutenant Henderson announced. "They look like fighters." Her voice was crisp, professionally clipped. "Tracking makes it roughly four hundred."
"Acknowledged. Still no response to our transmissions, Communications?"
"None, Sir," the com officer replied tautly.
"Tactical, begin deploying missiles."
"Aye, aye, Sir," Henderson said. "Deploying missiles now."
Big, long-ranged missiles detached from the external ordnance rings, while others went gliding out of the cruiser's midships missile hatches. They spread out in a cloud about Swiftsure on their secondary stationkeeping drives, far enough out to put the ship and their fellow missiles safely outside the threat perimeter of their preposterously powerful primary drives.
Looks like they want to englobe the planet, he thought, watching the bogies' formation continue to spread while his ship's unceasing communication attempts beamed towards them. That doesn't look especially peaceful-minded of them.
He glanced at the master plot's range numbers. The intruders had been inbound for almost a hundred and sixteen minutes now. Their velocity relative to Crestwell's World was up to just over thirty-one thousand kilometers per second, and unless they reversed acceleration in the next few seconds they were going to overfly the planet after all.
I wonder—
"Missile launch!" Gabriela Henderson announced suddenly. "Repeat, missile launch! Many missiles inbound!"
Mateus Fofão's heart seemed to stop.
They can't possibly expect to actually hit an evading starship at that range. That was his first thought as the thousands of incoming missile icons suddenly speckled his plot. But they can sure as hell hit a planet, can't they? his brain told him an instant later.
He stared at that hurricane of missiles, and knew what was going to happen. Swiftsure's defenses could never have stopped more than a tithe of that torrent of destruction, and a frozen corner of his mind wondered what they were armed with. Fusion warheads? Antimatter? Chemical or biological agents? Or perhaps they were simply kinetic weapons. With the prodigious acceleration they were showing, they'd have more than enough velocity to do the job with no warheads at all.
"Communications," he heard his voice say flatly as he watched the executioners of Crestwell's World's half-million inhabitants accelerating towards him, "secure communication attempts. Maneuvering, bring us to maximum power, heading zero-zero-zero, zero-zero-five. Tactical"—he turned his head and met Lieutenant Henderson's eyes levelly—"prepare to engage the enemy."
The scout ship was too small to be a threat to anyone.
The tiny starship was less than three percent the size of TFNS Excalibur, the task force's dreadnought flagship. True, it was faster than Excalibur, and its weapons systems and electronics were somewhat more advanced, but it could not have come within a light-minute of the task force and lived.
Unfortunately, it didn't have to.
"It's confirmed, Sir." Captain Somerset's mahogany-skinned face was grim on Admiral Pei Kau-zhi's flag bridge com screen. Excalibur's commander had aged since the task force set out, Admiral Pei thought. Of course, he was hardly alone in that.
"How far out, Martin?" the admiral asked flatly.
"Just over two-point-six light-minutes," Somerset replied, his expression grimmer than ever. "It's too close, Admiral."
"Maybe not," Pei said, then smiled thinly at his flag captain. "And whatever the range, we're stuck with it, aren't we?"
"Sir, I could send the screen out, try and push him further back. I could even detach a destroyer squadron to sit on him, drive him completely out of sensor range of the fleet."
"We don't know how close behind him something heavier may be." Pei shook his head. "Besides, we need them to see us sooner or later, don't we?"
"Admiral," Somerset began, "I don't think we can afford to take the chance that—"
"We can't afford not to take the chance," Pei said firmly. "Go ahead and push the screen out in his direction. See if you can get him to move at least a little further out. But either way, we execute Breakaway in the next half-hour."
Somerset looked at him out of the com screen for another moment, then nodded heavily.
"Very well, Sir. I'll pass the orders."
"Thank you, Martin," Pei said in a much softer voice, and cut the circuit.
"The Captain may have a point, Sir," a quiet contralto said from behind him, and he turned his bridge chair to face the speaker.
Lieutenant Commander Nimue Alban was a very junior officer indeed, especially for an antigerone society, to be suggesting to a four-star admiral, however respectfully, that his judgment might be less than infallible. Pei Kau-zhi felt absolutely no temptation to point that out to her, however. First, because despite her youth she was one of the more brilliant tactical officers the Terran Federation Navy had ever produced. Second, because if anyone had earned the right to second-guess Admiral Pei, it was Lieutenant Commander Alban.
"He does have a point," Pei conceded. "A very good one, in fact. But I've got a feeling the bad news isn't very far behind this particular raven."
"A feeling, Sir?"
Alban's combination of dark hair and blue eyes were the gift of her Welsh father, but her height and fair complexion had come from her Swedish mother. Admiral Pei, on the other hand, was a small, wiry man, over three times her age, and she seemed to tower over him as she raised one eyebrow. Still, he was pleased to note, in a bittersweet sort of way, it wasn't an incredulous expression.
After all, he told himself, my penchant for "playing a hunch" has a lot to do with the fact that I'm the last full admiral the Terran Federation will ever have.
"It's not some arcane form of ESP in this case, Nimue," he said. "But where's the other scout? You know Gbaba scout ships always operate in pairs, and Captain Somerset's reported only one of them. The other fellow has to be somewhere."
"Like calling up the rest of the pack," Alban said, her blue eyes dark, and he nodded.
"That's exactly what he's doing. They must have gotten at least a sniff of us before we picked them up, and one of them turned and headed back for help immediately. This one's going to hang on our heels, keep track of us and home the rest in, but the one thing he isn't going to do is come in close enough to risk letting us get a good shot at him. He can't afford to let us pick him off and then drop out of hyper. They might never find us again."
"I see where you're going, Sir." Alban looked thoughtful for a moment, her blue eyes intent on something only she could see, then returned her attention to the admiral.
"Sir," she asked quietly, "would I be out of line if I used one of the priority com circuits to contact Gulliver? I'd . . . like to tell the Commodore goodbye."
"Of course you wouldn't be," Pei replied, equally quietly. "And when you do, tell him I'll be thinking about him."
"Sir, you could tell him yourself."
"No." Pei shook his head. "Kau-yung and I have already said our goodbyes, Nimue."
"Yes, Sir."
The word spread quickly from Excalibur as the Tenth Destroyer Squadron headed for the Gbaba scout, and a cold, ugly wave of fear came with the news. Not panic, perhaps, because every single member of the murdered Federation's final fleet had known in his heart of hearts that this moment would come. Indeed, they'd planned for it. But that made no one immune from fear when it actually came.
More than one of the officers and ratings watching the destroyers' icons sweep across the tactical displays towards the scout ship prayed silently that they would overtake the fleet little ship, destroy it. They knew how unlikely that was to happen, and even if it did, it would probably buy them no more than a few more weeks, possibly a few months. But that didn't keep them from praying.
Aboard the heavy cruiser TFNS Gulliver, a small, wiry commodore said a prayer of his own. Not for the destruction of the scout ship. Not even for his older brother, who was about to die. But for a young lieutenant commander who had become almost a daughter to him . . . and who had volunteered to transfer to Excalibur knowing the ship could not survive.
"Commodore Pei, you have a com request from the Flag," his communications officer said quietly. "It's Nimue, Sir."
"Thank you, Oscar," Pei Kau-yung said. "Put her through to my display here."
"Yes, Sir."
"Nimue," Pei said as the familiar oval face with the sapphire blue eyes appeared on his display.
"Commodore," she replied. "I'm sure you've heard by now."
"Indeed. We're preparing to execute Breakaway even now."
"I knew you would be. Your brother—the admiral—asked me to tell you he'll be thinking about you. So will I. And I know you'll be thinking about us, too, Sir. That's why I wanted to take this chance to tell you." She looked directly into his eyes. "It's been an honor and a privilege to serve under you, Sir. I regret nothing which has ever happened since you selected me for your staff."
"That . . . means a great deal to me, Nimue," Pei said very softly. Like his brother, he was a traditionalist, and it was not the way of his culture to be emotionally demonstrative, but he knew she saw the pain in his eyes. "And may I also say," he added, "that I am deeply grateful for all the many services you have performed."
It sounded horribly stilted to his own ear, but it was the closest either of them dared come over a public com circuit, especially since all message traffic was automatically recorded. And, stilted or no, she understood what he meant, just as completely as he'd understood her.
"I'm glad, Sir," she said. "And please, tell Shan-wei goodbye for me. Give her my love."
"Of course. And you already know you have hers," Pei said. And then, whatever his culture might have demanded, he cleared his throat hard, harshly. "And mine," he said huskily.
"That means a lot, Sir." Alban smiled almost gently at him. "Goodbye, Commodore. God bless."
The destroyers did succeed in pushing the scout ship back. Not as far as they would have liked, but far enough to give Admiral Pei a distinct feeling of relief.
"General signal to all units," he said, never looking away from the master tactical display. "Pass the order to execute Breakaway."
"Aye, aye, Sir!" the senior flag bridge com rating replied, and a moment later, the light codes on Pei's display flickered suddenly.
Only for an instant, and only because his sensors were watching them so closely.
Or, he thought wryly, that's the theory, anyway.
Forty-six huge starships killed their hyper drives and disappeared as they dropped instantly sublight. But in the very same instant that they did, forty-six other starships, which had been carefully hidden away in stealth, appeared just as quickly. It was a precisely coordinated maneuver which Pei's command had practiced over and over again in the simulators, and more than a dozen times in actual space, and they performed it this one last time flawlessly. The forty-six newcomers slid quickly and smoothly into the holes which had abruptly appeared in the formation, and their drives' emissions signatures were almost perfect matches for those of the ships which had disappeared.
That's going to be a nasty surprise for the Gbaba, Pei told himself coldly. And one of these days, it's going to lead to an even bigger and nastier surprise for them.
"You know," he said, turning away from the display to face Lieutenant Commander Alban and Captain Joseph Thiessen, his chief of staff, "we came so close to kicking these people's asses. Another fifty years—seventy-five at the outside—and we could have taken them, 'star-spanning empire' or no."
"I think that's probably a little over-optimistic, Sir," Thiessen replied after a moment. "We never did find out how big their empire actually is, you know."
"It wouldn't have mattered." Pei shook his head sharply. "We're in a virtual dead heat with them technologically right now, Joe. Right now. And how old are their ships?"
"Some of them are brand new, Sir," Nimue Alban replied for the chief of staff. "But I take your point," she continued, and even Thiessen nodded almost unwillingly.
Pei didn't press the argument. There was no reason to, not now. Although, in some ways, it would have been an enormous relief to tell someone besides Nimue what was really about to happen. But he couldn't do that to Thiessen. The chief of staff was a good man, one who believed absolutely in the underlying premises of Operation Ark. Like every other man and woman under Pei's command, he was about to give his life to ensure that Operation Ark succeeded, and the admiral couldn't tell him that his own commanding officer was part of a plot against the people charged with making that success happen.
"Do you think we gave them enough of a shock that they may start actively innovating, Sir?" Thiessen asked after a moment. Pei looked at him and raised one eyebrow, and the chief of staff shrugged with a crooked smile. "I'd like to think we at least made the bastards sweat, Sir!"
"Oh, I think you can safely assume we did that," Pei replied with a humorless smile of his own. "As to whether or not it will change them, I really don't know. The xenologists' best guess is that it won't. They've got a system and culture which have worked for them for at least eight or nine thousand years. We may have been a bigger bump in the road than they're accustomed to, but the formula worked in our case, too, in the end. They'll probably be a little nervous for a century or three, if only because they'll wonder if we got another colony away somewhere without their noticing, but then they'll settle back down."
"Until the next poor dumb suckers come stumbling into them," Thiessen said bitterly.
"Until then," Pei agreed quietly, and turned back to the display.
Eight or nine thousand years, he thought. That's the xenologists' best guess, but I'll bet it's actually been longer than that. God, I wonder how long ago the first Gbaba discovered fire!
It was a question he'd pondered more than once over the four decades it had taken the Gbaba Empire to destroy the human race, for two things the Gbaba definitely were not were innovative or flexible.
At first, the Gbaba had clearly underestimated the challenge mankind posed. Their first few fleets had only outnumbered their intended victims three- or four-to-one, and it had become quickly and painfully obvious that they couldn't match humanity's tactical flexibility. The first genocidal attack had punched inward past Crestwell to take out three of the Federation's fourteen major extra-Solar star systems, with one hundred percent civilian casualties. But then the Federation Navy had rallied and stopped them cold. The fleet had even counterattacked, and captured no less than six Gbaba star systems.
Which was when the full Gbaba fleet mobilized.
Commander Pei Kau-zhi had been a fire control officer aboard one of the Federation's ships-of-the-line in the Starfall System when the real Gbaba Navy appeared. He could still remember the displays, see the endless waves of scarlet icons, each representing a Gbaba capital ship, as they materialized out of hyper like curses. It had been like driving a ground car into crimson snowflakes, except that no snow had ever sent such an ice-cold shudder through the marrow of his bones.
He still didn't know how Admiral Thomas had gotten any of her fleet out. Most of Thomas' ships had died with her, covering the flight of a handful of survivors whose duty had been not to stand and share her death, but to live with the dreadful news. To flee frantically homeward, arriving on the very wings of the storm to warn mankind Apocalypse was coming.
Not that humanity had been taken totally unawares.
The severity of the opening Gbaba attack, even if it had been thrown back, had been a brutal wakeup call. Every Federation world had begun arming and fortifying when the first evidence of the Gbaba's existence had appeared, ten years before Crestwell. After Crestwell, those preparations had been pressed at a frenetic pace, and a star system made an awesome fortress. The surviving fleet elements had fallen back on the fixed defenses, standing and fighting to the death in defense of humanity's worlds, and they'd made the Gbaba pay a hideous price in dead and broken starships.
But the Gbaba had chosen to pay it. Not even the xenologists had been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation for why the Gbaba flatly refused to even consider negotiations. They—or their translating computers, at any rate—obviously comprehended Standard English, since they'd clearly used captured data and documents, and the handful of broken, scarred human prisoners who'd been recovered from them had been "interrogated" with a casual, dispassionate brutality that was horrifying. So humanity had known communication with them was at least possible, yet they'd never responded to a single official communication attempt, except to press their attacks harder.
Personally, Pei wondered if they were actually still capable of a reasoned response at all. Some of the ships the Federation had captured or knocked out and been able to examine had been ancient almost beyond belief. At least one, according to the scientists who'd analyzed it, had been built at least two millennia before its capture, yet there was no indication of any significant technological advance between the time of its construction and its final battle. Ships which, as Alban had suggested, were brand-new construction had mounted identical weapons, computers, hyper drives, and sensor suites.
That suggested a degree of cultural stagnation which even Pei's ancestral China, at its most conservative rejection of the outside world, had never approached. One which made even ancient Egypt seem like a hotbed of innovation. It was impossible for Pei to conceive of any sentient beings who could go that long without any major advances. So perhaps the Gbaba no longer were sentient in the human sense of the term. Perhaps everything—all of this—was simply the result of a set of cultural imperatives so deeply ingrained they'd become literally instinctual.
None of which had saved the human race from destruction.
It had taken time, of course. The Gbaba had been forced to reduce humanity's redoubts one by one, in massive sieges which had taken literally years to conclude. The Federation Navy had been rebuilt behind the protection of the system fortifications, manned by new officers and ratings—many of whom, like Nimue Alban, had never known a life in which humanity's back was not against the wall. That navy had struck back in desperate sallies and sorties which had cost the Gbaba dearly, but the final outcome had been inevitable.
The Federation Assembly had tried sending out colony fleets, seeking to build hidden refuges where some remnants of humanity might ride out the tempest. But however inflexible or unimaginative the Gbaba might be, they'd obviously encountered that particular trick before, for they'd englobed each of the Federation's remaining star systems with scout ships. Escorting Navy task forces might attain a crushing local superiority, fight a way through the scouts and the thinner shell of capital ships backing them up, but the scouts always seemed able to maintain contact, or regain it quickly, and every effort to run the blockade had been hunted down.
One colony fleet had slipped through the scouts . . . but only to transmit a last, despairing hypercom message less than ten years later. It might have eluded the immediate shell of scout ships, but others had been sent out after it. It must have taken literally thousands of them to scour all of the possible destinations that colony fleet might have chosen, but eventually one of them had stumbled across it, and the killer fleets had followed. The colony administrator's best guess was that the colony's own emissions had led the Gbaba to them, despite all of the colonists' efforts to limit those emissions.
Pei suspected that long-dead administrator had been right. That, at any rate, was an underlying assumption of Operation Ark's planners.
"At least we managed to push their damned scout ship far enough back to give Breakaway a fighting chance of working," Thiessen observed.
Pei nodded. The comment came under the heading of "blindingly obvious," but he wasn't about to fault anyone for that at a moment like this.
Besides, Joe probably meant it as a compliment, he thought with something very like a mental chuckle. After all, Breakaway had been Pei's personal brainchild, the sleight-of-hand intended to convince the Gbaba they'd successfully tracked down and totally destroyed mankind's last desperate colonization attempt. That was why the forty-six dreadnoughts and carriers which had accompanied the rest of his task force in stealth had not fired a missile or launched a fighter during the fight to break through the shell of capital ships covering the Gbaba scout globe around the Sol System.
It had been a stiff engagement, although its outcome had never been in doubt. But by hiding under stealth, aided by the background emissions of heavy weapons fire and the dueling electronic warfare systems of the opposing forces, they had hopefully remained undetected and unsuspected by the Gbaba.
The sacrifice of two full destroyer squadrons who'd dropped behind to pick off the only scout ships close enough to actually hold the escaping colony fleet on sensors had allowed Pei to break free and run, and deep inside, he'd hoped they'd manage to stay away from the Gbaba scouts. That despite all odds, all of his fleet might yet survive. But whatever he'd hoped, he'd never really expected it, and that was why those ships had stayed in stealth until this moment.
When the Gbaba navy arrived—and it would; for all of their age, Gbaba ships were still faster than human vessels—it would find exactly the same number of ships its scouts had reported fleeing Sol. Exactly the same number of ships its scouts had reported when they finally made contact with the fugitives once again.
And when every one of those ships was destroyed, when every one of the humans crewing them had been killed, the Gbaba would assume they'd destroyed all of those fugitives.
But they'll be wrong, Pei Kau-zhi told himself softly, coldly. And one of these days, despite everything people like Langhorne and Bédard can do to stop it, we'll be back. And then, you bastards, you'll—
"Admiral," Nimue Alban said quietly, "long-range sensors have picked up incoming hostiles."
He turned and looked at her, and she met his eyes levelly.
"We have two positive contacts, Sir," she told him. "CIC makes the first one approximately one thousand point sources. The second one is larger."
"Well," he observed almost whimsically. "At least they cared enough to send the very best, didn't they?"
He looked at Thiessen.
"Send the Fleet to Action Stations, if you please," he said. "Launch fighters and began prepositioning missiles for launch."
"Grandfather! Grandfather, come quickly! It's an angel!"
Timothy Harrison looked up as his great-grandson thundered unceremoniously through the open door of his town hall office. The boy's behavior was atrocious, of course, but it was never easy to be angry with Matthew, and no one Timothy knew could stay angry with him. Which meant, boys being boys, that young Matthew routinely got away with things which ought to have earned a beating, at the very least.
In this case, however, he might be excused for his excitement, Timothy supposed. Not that he was prepared to admit it.
"Matthew Paul Harrison," he said sternly, "this is my office, not the shower house down at the baseball field! At least a modicum of proper behavior is expected out of anyone here—even, or especially, out of a young hooligan like you!"
"I'm sorry," the boy replied, hanging his head. But he simultaneously peeped up through his eyelashes, and the dimples of the devastating smile which was going to get him into all sorts of trouble in another few years danced at the corners of his mouth.
"Well," Timothy harumpfed, "I suppose we can let it go without harping upon it . . . this time."
He had the satisfaction of noting what was probably a genuine quiver of trepidation at the qualifier, but then he leaned back in his chair.
"Now, what's this you were saying about an angel?"
"The signal light," Matthew said eagerly, eyes lighting with bright excitement as he recalled his original reason for intruding upon his grandfather. "The signal light just began shining! Father Michael said I should run and tell you about it immediately. There's an angel coming, Grandfather!"
"And what color was the signal light?" Timothy asked. His voice was so completely calm that, without his realizing it, it raised him tremendously in his great-grandson's already high esteem.
"Yellow," Matthew replied, and Timothy nodded. One of the lesser angels, then. He felt a quick little stab of regret, for which he scolded himself instantly. It might be more exciting to hope to entertain a visit from one of the Archangels themselves, but mortal men did well not to place commands upon God, even indirectly.
Besides, even a "lesser" angel will be more than enough excitement for you, old man! he told himself scoldingly.
"Well," he said, nodding to his great-grandson, "if an angel's coming to Lakeview, then we must make our preparations to receive him. Go down to the docks, Matthew. Find Jason, and tell him to raise the signal for all the fishing boats to return to harbor. As soon as you've done that, go home and tell your mother and grandmother. I'm sure Father Michael will be ringing the bell shortly, but you might as well go ahead and warn them."
"Yes, Grandfather!" Matthew nodded eagerly, then turned and sped back the way he'd come. Timothy watched him go, smiling for a moment, then squared his shoulders and walked out of his office.
Most of the town hall staff had paused in whatever they were doing. They were looking in his direction, and he smiled again, whimsically.
"I see you all heard Matthew's announcement," he said dryly. "That being the case, I see no need to expand upon it further at this time. Finish whatever you were doing, file your work, and then hurry home to prepare yourselves."
People nodded. Here and there, chairs scraped across the plank floor as clerks who'd already anticipated his instructions hurried to tuck files into the appropriate cabinets. Others bent over their desks, quill pens flying as they worked towards a reasonable stopping point. Timothy watched them for a few seconds, then continued out the town hall's front door.
The town hall stood upon a hill at the center of the town of Lakeview. Lakeview was growing steadily, and Timothy was aware that it wouldn't be long before it slipped over that elusive line dividing "town" from "small city." He wasn't certain how he felt about that, for a lot of reasons. But however he might feel about it, there was no doubt how God and the angels felt, and that made any purely personal reservations on his part meaningless.
Word was spreading, he saw. People were hurrying along the cobblestone streets and sidewalks, heads bent in excited conversation with companions, or simply smiling hugely. The signal light on the steeple of Father Michael's church was deliberately placed to be visible by as much of the town as possible, and Timothy could see its bright amber glow from where he stood, despite the brightness of the summer sun.
The bell in the church's high bell tower began to ring. Its deep, rolling voice sang through the summer air, crying out the joyous news for any who had not seen the signal light, and Timothy nodded around a bright, lilting bubble of happiness. Then he began walking towards the church himself, nodding calmly to the people he passed. He was, after all, Lakeview's mayor, which gave him a certain responsibility. More to the point, he was one of Lakeview's slowly but steadily declining number of Adams, just as his wife Sarah was one of the town's Eves. That left both of them with a special duty to maintain the proper air of dignified respect, adoration, and awe due one of the immortal servants of the God who had breathed the very breath of life into their nostrils.
He reached the church, and Father Michael was waiting for him. The priest was actually younger than Timothy, but he looked much older. Michael had been one of the very first of the children brought forth here upon Safehold in response to God's command to be fruitful and multiply. Timothy himself had not been "born" at all, of course. God had created his immortal soul with His Own hand, and the Archangel Langhorne and his assistant, the Archangel Shan-wei, had created Timothy's physical body according to God's plan.
Timothy had Awakened right here, in Lakeview, standing with the other Adams and Eves in the town square, and the mere memory of that first glorious morning—that first sight of Safehold's magnificent blue heavens and the brilliant light of Kau-zhi as it broke the eastern horizon like a dripping orb of molten copper, of the towering green trees, the fields already tilled and rich with the waiting harvest, the dark blue waters of Lake Pei, and the fishing boats tied up and waiting at the docks—still filled his soul with reverential awe. It was the first time he'd ever laid eyes upon his Sarah, for that matter, and that had been a miracle all its own.
But that had been almost sixty-five years ago. Had he been as other men, men born of the union of man and woman, his body would have begun failing long since. Indeed, although he was four years older than Father Michael, the priest was stoop-shouldered and silver-haired, his fingers beginning to gnarl with age, while Timothy's hair remained dark and thick, untouched by white, although there were a few strands of silver threading their way into his beard here and there.
Timothy remembered when Father Michael had been a red-faced, wailing babe in his mother's arms. Timothy himself had already been a man full grown—a man in the prime of early manhood, as all Adams had been at the Awakening. And being what he was, the direct work of divine hands, it was to be expected that his life would be longer than the lives of those further removed from the direct touch of the godhead. But if Michael resented that in any way, Timothy had never seen a single sign of it. The priest was a humble man, ever mindful that to be permitted his priestly office was a direct and tangible sign of God's grace, that grace of which no man could ever truly be worthy. Which did not absolve him from attempting to be.
"Rejoice, Timothy!" the priest said now, eyes glowing under his thick white eyebrows.
"Rejoice, Father," Timothy responded, and went down on one knee briefly for Michael to lay a hand upon his head in blessing.
"May Langhorne bless and keep you always in God's ways and laws until the Day Awaited comes to us all," Michael murmured rapidly, then tapped Timothy lightly on the shoulder.
"Now get up!" he commanded. "You're the Adam here, Timothy. Tell me I shouldn't feel this nervous!"
"You shouldn't feel this nervous," Timothy said obediently, rising to put one arm around his old friend's shoulders. "Truly," he added in a more serious tone, "you've done well, Michael. Your flock's been well tended since the last Visitation, and it's increased steadily."
"Our flock, you mean," Father Michael replied.
Timothy started to shake his head, then suppressed the gesture. It was kind of Michael to put it that way, but both of them knew that however conscientiously Timothy had sought to discharge his responsibilities as the administrator of Lakeview and the surrounding farms, all of his authority ultimately stemmed from the Archangels, and through them, from God Himself. Which meant that here in Lakeview, the ultimate authority in any matter, spiritual or worldly, lay with Father Michael, as the representative of Mother Church.
But it's like him to put it that way, isn't it? Timothy thought with a smile.
"Come," he said aloud. "From the pattern of the signal light, it won't be long now. We have preparations to make."
By the time the glowing nimbus of the kyousei hi appeared far out over the blue waters of Lake Pei, all was ready.
The entire population of Lakeview, aside from a few fishermen who'd been too far out on the enormous lake to see the signal to return, was assembled in and around the town square. The families from several of the nearer farms had arrived, as well, and Lakeview's square was no longer remotely large enough to contain them all. They overflowed its bounds, filling the approach streets solidly, and Timothy Harrison felt a deep, satisfying surge of joy at the evidence that he and his fellow Adams and Eves had, indeed, been fruitful and multiplied.
The kyousei hi sped nearer, faster than the fastest horse could gallop, faster than the fastest slash lizard could charge. The globe of light grew brighter and brighter as it swept closer to the town. At first it was only a brilliant speck, far out over the lake. Then it grew larger, brighter. It became a star, fallen from the vault of God's own heaven. Then brighter still, a second sun, smaller than Kau-zhi, but brilliant enough to challenge even its blinding brightness. And then, as it flashed across the last few miles, swift as any stooping wyvern, its brilliance totally surpassed that of any mere sun. It blazed above the town, without heat and yet far too bright for any eye to bear, etching shadows with knife-edged sharpness, despite the noonday sun.
Timothy, like every other man and woman, bent his head, shielding his eyes against that blinding glory. And then the brilliance decreased, as rapidly as it had come, and he raised his head slowly.
The kyousei hi was still above Lakeview, but it had risen so high into the heavens that it was once more little brighter than Kau-zhi. Still far too brilliant to look upon, yet far enough removed that merely mortal flesh could endure its presence. But if the kyousei hi had withdrawn, the being whose chariot it was had not.
All across the town square, people went to their knees in reverence and awe, and Timothy did the same. His heart sang with joy as he beheld the angel standing on the raised platform at the very center of the square. That platform was reserved solely and only for moments like this. No mortal human foot could be permitted to profane its surface, other than those of the consecrated priesthood responsible for ritually cleansing it and maintaining it in permanent readiness for moments like this.
Timothy recognized the angel. It had been almost two years since the last Visitation, and the angel hadn't changed since his last appearance in Lakeview. He did have the appearance of having aged—slightly, at least—since the first time Timothy had ever seen him, immediately after the Awakening. But then, the Writ said that although the angels and Archangels were immortal, the bodies they had been given to teach and guide God's people were made of the same stuff as the mortal world. Animated by the surgoi kasai, the "great fire" of God's Own touch, those bodies would endure longer than any mortal body, just as the bodies of Adams and Eves would endure longer than those of their descendants, but they would age. Indeed, the day would ultimately come when all of the angels—even the Archangels themselves—would be recalled to God's presence. Timothy knew God Himself had ordained that, yet he was deeply grateful that he himself would have closed his eyes in death before that day arrived. A world no longer inhabited by angels would seem dark, shadowed and drab, to one who'd seen God's Own messengers face-to-face in the glory of that world's very first days.
In many ways, the angel looked little different from a mortal. He was no taller than Timothy himself, his shoulders no broader. Yet he was garbed from head to foot in brilliant, light-shimmering raiment, a marvelous garment of perpetually shifting and flowing colors, and his head was crowned by a crackling blue fire. At his waist, he bore his staff, the rod of imperishable crystal half as long as a man's forearm. Timothy had seen that rod used. Only once, but its lightning bolt had smitten the charging slash lizard to the earth in a single cataclysmic thunderclap of sound. Half the slash lizard's body had been literally burned away, and Timothy's ears had rung for hours afterwards.
The angel looked out across the reverently kneeling crowd for several seconds in silence. Then he raised his right hand.
"Peace be with you, My Children," he said, his voice impossibly clear and loud, yet not shouting, not raised. "I bring you God's blessings, and the blessing of the Archangel Langhorne, who is His servant. Glory be to God!"
"And to His servants," the response rumbled back, and the angel smiled.
"God is pleased with you, My Children," he told them. "And now, go about your business, all of you, rejoicing in the Lord. I bring tidings to Father Michael and Mayor Timothy. After I have spoken with them, they will tell you what God desires of you."
Timothy and Michael stood side by side, watching as the crowded square and surrounding streets emptied, quickly and yet without hurrying or pushing. Some of the farmers from outside town had ridden hard—or, in some cases, literally run for miles—to be here for the moment of the angel's arrival. Yet there was no resentment, no disappointment, in being sent about their business once again so quickly. It had been their joyous duty to welcome God's messenger, and they knew they had been blessed beyond the deserts of any fallible, sinful mortal to have beheld the angel with their own eyes.
The angel descended from the consecrated platform and crossed to Timothy and Michael. They went to one knee again before him, and he shook his head.
"No, My Sons," he said gently. "There will be time enough for that. For now, we must speak. God and the Archangel Langhorne are pleased with you, pleased with the way in which Lakeview has grown and prospered. But you may be called to face new challenges, and the Archangel Langhorne has charged me to strengthen your spirits for the tasks to which you may be summoned. Come, let us go into the church, that we may speak in the proper setting."
Pei Kau-yung sat in the comfortable chair, his face an expressionless mask, as he listened to the debate.
The G6 sun they had named Kau-zhi in honor of his brother shone down outside. It was just past local noon, and the northern summer was hot, but a cool breeze off Lake Pei blew in through the open windows, and he grimaced mentally as it breathed gently across him.
The bastards couldn't heap enough "honors" on us, could they? Named the local sun after Kau-zhi. The lake after him, too, I suppose—or maybe they meant to name it after both of us. Maybe even Shan-wei, at the time. But that's as far as they're going to go. I wonder if Mission Control picked Langhorne and Bédard because the planners knew they were megalomaniacs?
He tried to tell himself that that was only because of the weariness almost sixty standard years—almost sixty-five local years—of watching the two of them in operation had made inevitable. Unfortunately, he couldn't quite shake the thought that the people who'd selected Eric Langhorne as the colony's chief administrator and Dr. Adorée Bédard as its chief psychologist had known exactly what they were doing. After all, the survival of the human race—at any cost—was far more important than any minor abridgments of basic human rights.
"—and we implore you, once again," the slender, silver-haired woman standing in the center of the breezy hearing room said, "to consider how vital it is that as the human culture on this planet grows and matures, it remembers the Gbaba. That it understands why we came here, why we renounced advanced technology."
Kau-yung regarded her with stony brown eyes. She didn't even look in his direction, and he felt one or two of the Councillors glancing at him with what they fondly imagined was hidden sympathy. Or, in some cases, concealed amusement.
"We've heard all of these arguments before, Dr. Pei," Eric Langhorne said. "We understand the point you're raising. But I'm afraid that nothing you've said is likely to change our established policy."
"Administrator," Pei Shan-wei said, "your 'established policy' overlooks the fact that mankind has always been a toolmaker and a problem solver. Eventually, those qualities are going to surface here on Safehold. When they do, without an institutional memory of what happened to the Federation, our descendants aren't going to know about the dangers waiting for them out there."
"That particular concern is based on a faulty understanding of the societal matrix we're creating here, Dr. Pei," Adorée Bédard said. "I assure you, with the safeguards we've put in place, the inhabitants of Safehold will be safely insulated against the sort of technological advancement which might attract the Gbaba's attention. Unless, of course"—the psychiatrist's eyes narrowed—"there's some outside stimulus to violate the parameters of our matrix."
"I don't doubt that you can—that you have already—created an anti-technology mind-set on an individual and a societal level," Shan-wei replied. Her own voice was level, but it didn't take someone with Bédard's psychological training to hear the distaste and personal antipathy under its surface. "I simply believe that whatever you can accomplish right now, whatever curbs and safeguards you can impose at this moment, five hundred years from now, or a thousand, there's going to come a moment when those safeguards fail."
"They won't," Bédard said flatly. Then she made herself sit back a bit from the table and smile. "I realize psychology isn't your field, Doctor. And I also realize one of your doctorates is in history. Because it is, you're quite rightly aware of the frenetic pace at which technology has advanced in the modern era. Certainly, on the basis of humanity's history on Old Earth, especially during the last five or six centuries, it would appear the 'innovation bug' is hardwired into the human psyche. It isn't, however. There are examples from our own history of lengthy, very static periods. In particular, I draw your attention to the thousands of years of the Egyptian empire, during which significant innovation basically didn't happen. What we've done here, on Safehold, is to re-create that same basic mind-set, and we've also installed certain . . . institutional and physical checks to maintain that mind-set."
"The degree to which the Egyptians—and the rest of the Mediterranean cultures—were anti-innovation has been considerably overstated," Shan-wei said coolly. "Moreover, Egypt was only a tiny segment of the total world population of its day, and other parts of that total population most definitely were innovative. And despite the effort to impose a permanent theocratic curb on—"
"Dr. Pei," Langhorne interrupted, "I'm afraid this entire discussion is pointless. The colony's policy has been thoroughly debated and approved by the Administrative Council. It represents the consensus of that Council, and also that of myself, as Chief Administrator, and Dr. Bédard, as Chief Psychologist. It will be adhered to . . . by everyone. Is that clear?"
It must have been hard for Shan-wei not to even look in his direction, Kau-yung thought. But she didn't. For fifty-seven years the two of them had lived apart, divided by their bitter public disagreement over the colony's future. Kau-yung was one of the Moderates—the group that might not agree with everything Langhorne and Bédard had done, but which fervently supported the ban on anything which might lead to the reemergence of advanced technology. Kau-yung himself had occasionally voiced concern over the degree to which Bédard had adjusted the originally proposed psych templates for the colonists, but he'd always supported Langhorne's basic reasons for modifying them. Which was why he remained the colony's senior military officer despite his estranged wife's position as the leader of the faction whose opponents had labeled them "Techies."
"With all due respect, Administrator Langhorne," Shan-wei said, "I don't believe your policy does represent a true consensus. I was a member of the Council myself, if you will recall, as were six of my colleagues on the present Alexandria Board. All of us opposed your policy when you first proposed it."
Which, Kau-yung thought, split the vote eight-to-seven, two short of the supermajority you needed under the colonial charter to modify the templates, didn't it, Eric? Of course, you'd already gone ahead and done it, which left you with a teeny-tiny problem. That's why Shan-wei and the others found themselves arbitrarily removed from the Council, wasn't it?
"That's true," Langhorne said coldly. "However, none of you are current members of the Council, and the present Council membership unanimously endorses this policy. And whatever other ancient history you might wish to bring up, I repeat that the policy will stand, and it will be enforced throughout the entire colony. Which includes your so-called Alexandria Enclave."
"And if we choose not to abide by it?" Shan-wei's voice was soft, but spines stiffened throughout the hearing room. Despite the decades of increasingly acrimonious debate, it was the first time any of the Techies had publicly suggested the possibility of active resistance.
"That would be . . . unwise of you," Langhorne said after a moment, glancing sidelong at Kau-yung. "To date, this has been simply a matter of public debate of policy issues. Now that the policy has been set, however, active noncompliance becomes treason. And I warn you, Dr. Pei, that when the stakes are the survival or extinction of the human race, we're prepared to take whatever measures seem necessary to suppress treason."
"I see."
Pei Shan-wei's head turned as she slowly swept all of the seated Councillors with icy brown eyes so dark they were almost black. They looked even darker today, Kau-yung thought, and her expression was bleak.
"I'll report the outcome of this meeting to the rest of the Board, Administrator," she said finally, her voice an icicle. "I'll also inform them that we are required to comply with your 'official policy' under threat of physical coercion. I'm sure the Board will have a response for you as soon as possible."
She turned and walked out of the hearing room without a single backward glance.
Pei Kau-yung sat in another chair, this one on a dock extending into the enormous, dark blue waters of Lake Pei. A fishing pole had been set into the holding bracket beside his chair, but there was no bait on the hook. It was simply a convenient prop to help keep people away.
We knew it could come to this, or something like it, he told himself. Kau-zhi, Shan-wei, Nimue, me, Proctor—we all knew, from the moment Langhorne was chosen instead of Halversen. And now it has.
There were times when, antigerone treatments or not, he felt every single day of his hundred and ninety standard years.
He tipped farther back in his chair, looking up through the darkening blue of approaching evening, and saw the slowly moving silver star of the orbiting starship—TFNS Hamilcar, the final surviving unit of the forty-six mammoth ships which had delivered the colony to Kau-zhi.
The gargantuan task of transporting millions of colonists to a new home world would have been impossible without the massive employment of advanced technologies. That had been a given, and yet it had almost certainly been the betraying emissions of that same technology which had led to the discovery and destruction of the only other colony fleet to break through the Gbaba blockade. So Operation Ark's planners had done two things differently.
First, Operation Ark's mission plan had required the colony fleet to remain in hyper for a minimum of ten years before even beginning to search for a new home world. That had carried it literally thousands of light-years from the Federation, far enough that it should take even the Gbaba scouting fleet centuries to sweep the thicket of stars in which it had lost itself.
Second, the colony had been provided with not one, but two complete terraforming fleets. One had been detached and assigned to the preparation of Safehold, while the other remained in close company with the transports, hiding far from Kau-zhi, as a backup. If the Gbaba had detected the ships actually laboring upon Safehold, they would undoubtedly have been destroyed, but their destruction would not have led the Gbaba to the rest of the fleet, which would then have voyaged onward for another ten years, on a totally random vector, before once more searching for a new home.
Hamilcar had been with that hidden fleet, the flagship of Operation Ark's civilian administration, and she'd been retained this long because the basic plan for Operation Ark had always envisioned a requirement for at least some technological presence until the colony was fully established. The enormous transport, half again the size of the Federation's largest dreadnought, was at minimal power levels, with every one of her multiply redundant stealth systems operating at all times. A Gbaba scout ship could have been in orbit with her without detecting her unless it closed to within two or three hundred kilometers.
Even so, and despite her enormous value as administrative center, orbiting observatory, and emergency industrial module, her time was running out. That was what had prompted the confrontation between Shan-wei and Langhorne and Bédard this afternoon. The Safehold colonial enclaves had been up and running for almost sixty standard years, and Langhorne and his Council had decided it was finally time to dispose of all the expedition's remaining technology. Or almost all of it, at any rate.
Hamilcar's sister ships were already long gone. They'd been discarded as quickly as possible, by the simple expedient of dropping them into the star system's central fusion furnace once their cargoes had been landed. Not that those cargoes had been used exactly as Mission Control had originally envisioned . . . thanks to Bédard's modifications to the psych templates.
A deep, fundamental part of Pei Kau-yung had felt a shudder of dismay when Mission Control first briefed him and his brother on everything involved in Operation Ark. Not even the fact that every one of the cryogenically suspended colonists had been a fully informed volunteer had been enough to overcome his historical memory of his own ancestors' efforts at "thought control." And yet he'd been forced to concede that there was an element of logic behind the decision to implant every colonist with what amounted to the detailed memory of a completely false life.
It almost certainly would have proved impossible to convince eight million citizens of a highly developed technological civilization to renounce all advanced technology when it came down to it. No matter how willing they all were before they set out for their new home, no matter how fit, young, and physically vigorous they might be, the reality of a muscle-powered culture's harsh demands would have convinced at least some of them to change their minds. So Mission Control had decided to preclude that possibility by providing them with memories which no longer included advanced technology.
It hadn't been an easy task, even for the Federation's tech base, but however much Kau-yung might despise Adorée Bédard, he had to admit the woman's technical brilliance. The colonists had been stacked like cordwood in their cryo capsules—as many as half a million of them aboard a single ship, in the case of really large transports, like Hamilcar—and they'd spent the entire ten-year voyage with their minds being steadily reprogrammed.
Then they'd stayed in cryo for another eight standard years, safely tucked away in hiding, while the far less numerous active mission team personnel located their new home world and the alpha terraforming crew prepared it for them.
The world they'd named Safehold was a bit smaller than Old Earth. Kau-zhi was considerably cooler than Sol, and although Safehold orbited closer to it, the planet had a noticeably lower average temperature than Old Earth. Its axial tilt was a bit more pronounced, as well, which gave it somewhat greater seasonal shifts as a result. It also had a higher proportion of land area, but that land was broken up into numerous smallish, mountainous continents and large islands, and that helped to moderate the planetary climate at least a little.
Despite its marginally smaller size, Safehold was also a bit more dense than mankind's original home world. As a result, its gravity was very nearly the same as the one in which the human race had initially evolved. Its days were longer, but its years were shorter—only a bit more than three hundred and one local days each—and the colonists had divided it into only ten months, each of six five-day weeks. The local calendar still felt odd to Kau-yung (he supposed it made sense, but he missed January and December, damn it!), and he'd had more trouble than he expected adjusting to the long days, but overall, it was one of the more pleasant planets mankind had settled upon.
Despite all of its positive points, there'd been a few drawbacks, of course. There always were. In this case, the native predators—especially the aquatic ones—presented exceptional challenges, and the ecosystem in general had proved rather less accommodating than usual to the necessary terrestrial plant and animal strains required to fit the planet for human habitation. Fortunately, among the units assigned to each terraforming task group, Mission Control had included a highly capable bio-support ship whose geneticists were able to make the necessary alterations to adapt terrestrial life to Safehold.
Despite that, those terrestrial life-forms remained interlopers. The genetic modifications had helped, but they couldn't completely cure the problem, and for the first few years, the success of Safehold's terraforming had hung in the balance.
That had been when Langhorne and Bédard needed Shan-wei, Kau-yung thought bitterly. She'd headed the terraforming teams, and it was her leadership which had carried the task through to success. She and her people, watched over by Kau-yung's flagship, TFNS Gulliver, had battled the planet into submission while most of the colony fleet had waited, motionless, holding station in the depths of interstellar space, light-years from the nearest star.
Those had been heady days, Kau-yung admitted to himself. Days when he'd felt he and Shan-wei and their crews were genuinely forging ahead, although that confidence had been shadowed by the constant fear that a Gbaba scout ship might happen by while they hung in orbit around the planet. They'd known the odds were overwhelmingly in their favor, yet they'd been too agonizingly aware of the stakes for which they played to take any comfort from odds, despite all the precautions Mission Planning had built in. But they'd still had that sense of purpose, of wresting survival from the jaws of destruction, and he remembered their huge sense of triumph on the day they realized they'd finally turned the corner and sent word to Hamilcar that Safehold was ready for its new inhabitants.
And that was the point at which they'd discovered how Bédard had "modified" the sleeping colonists' psychological templates. No doubt she'd thought it was a vast improvement when Langhorne initially suggested it, but Kau-yung and Shan-wei had been horrified.
The sleeping colonists had volunteered to have false memories of a false life implanted. They hadn't volunteered to be programmed to believe Operation Ark's command staff were gods.
It wasn't the only change Langhorne had made, of course. He and Bédard had done their systematic best to preclude the possibility of any reemergence of advanced technology on Safehold. They'd deliberately abandoned the metric system, which Kau-yung suspected had represented a personal prejudice on Langhorne's part. But they'd also eliminated any memory of Arabic numerals, or algebra, in a move calculated to emasculate any development of advanced mathematics, just as they had eliminated any reference to the scientific method and reinstituted a Ptolemaic theory of the universe. They'd systematically destroyed the tools of scientific inquiry, then concocted their religion as a means of ensuring that it never reemerged once more, and nothing could have been better calculated to outrage someone with Shan-wei's passionate belief in freedom of the individual and of thought.
Unfortunately, it had been too late to do anything about it. Shan-wei and her allies on the Administrative Council had tried, but they'd quickly discovered that Langhorne was prepared for their resistance. He'd organized his own clique, with judicious transfers and replacements among the main fleet's command personnel, while Shan-Wei and Kau-yung were safely out of the way, and those changes had been enough to defeat Shan-wei's best efforts.
Which was why Kau-yung and Shan-wei had had their very public falling out. It had been the only way they could think of to organize some sort of open resistance to Langhorne's policies while simultaneously retaining a presence in the heart of the colony's official command structure. Shan-wei's reputation, her leadership of the minority bloc on the Administrative Council, would have made it impossible for anyone to believe she supported the Administrator. And so their roles had been established for them, and they'd drifted further and further apart, settled into deeper and deeper estrangement.
And all for nothing, in the end. He'd given up the woman he loved, both of them had given up the children they might yet have reared, sacrificed fifty-seven years of their lives to a public pretense of anger and violent disagreement, for nothing.
Shan-wei and the other "Techies"—just under thirty percent of the original Operation Ark command crew—had retired to Safehold's southernmost continent. They'd built their own enclave, their "Alexandria Enclave," taking the name deliberately from the famous library at Alexandria, and rigorously adhered to the original mission orders where technology was concerned.
And, even more unforgivably from the perspective of Langhorne and Bédard's new plans, they'd refused to destroy their libraries. They'd insisted on preserving the true history of the human race, and especially of the war against the Gbaba.
That's what really sticks in your craw, isn't it, Eric? Kau-yung thought. You know there's no risk of the Gbaba detecting the sort of preelectric "technology" Shan-wei still has up and running at Alexandria. Hell, any one of the air cars you're still willing to allow your command staff personnel to use as their "angelic chariots" radiates a bigger, stronger signal than everything at Alexandria combined! You may say that any indigenous technology—even the memory of that sort of tech—represents the threat of touching off more advanced, more readily detectable development, but that's not what really bothers you. You've decided you like being a god, so you can't tolerate any heretical scripture, can you?
Kau-yung didn't know how Langhorne would respond to Shan-wei's threat of open defiance. Despite his own position as Safehold's military commander, he knew he wasn't completely trusted by the Administrator and the sycophants on Langhorne's Administrative Council. He wasn't one of them, despite his long-standing estrangement from Shan-wei, and too many of them seemed to have come to believe they truly were the deities Bédard had programmed the colonists to think they were.
And people who think they're gods aren't likely to exercise a lot of restraint when someone defies them, he thought.
Pei Kau-yung watched Hamilcar's distant, gleaming dot sweep towards the horizon and tried not to shiver as the evening breeze grew cooler.
"Father. Father!"
Timothy Harrison muttered something from the borderland of sleep, and the hand on his shoulder shook him again, harder.
"Wake up, Father!"
Timothy's eyes opened, and he blinked. His third-born son, Robert, Matthew's grandfather, stood leaning over the bed with a candle burning in one hand. For a moment, Timothy was only bewildered, but then Robert's shadowed expression registered, despite the strange lighting falling across it from below as the candle quivered in his hand.
"What is it?" Timothy asked, sitting up in bed. Beside him, Sarah stirred, then opened her own eyes and sat up. He felt her welcome, beloved presence warm against his shoulder, and his right hand reached out, finding and clasping hers as if by instinct.
"I don't know, Father," Robert said worriedly, and in that moment Timothy was once again reminded that his son looked far older than he himself did. "All I know," Robert continued, "is that a messenger's arrived from Father Michael. He says you're needed at the church. Immediately."
Timothy's eyes narrowed. He turned and looked at Sarah for a moment, and she gazed back. Then she shook her head and reached out with her free hand to touch his cheek gently. He smiled at her, as calmly as he could, though she was undoubtedly the last person in the world he could really hope to fool, then looked back at Robert.
"Is the messenger still here?"
"Yes, Father."
"Does he know why Michael needs me?"
"He says he doesn't, Father, and I don't think it was just a way to tell me to mind my own business."
"In that case, ask him to return immediately. Ask him to tell Father Michael I'll be there just as quickly as I can get dressed."
"At once, Father," Robert said, not even attempting to hide his relief as his father took charge.
* * *
"Michael?"
Timothy paused just inside the church doors.
The church, as always, was softly illuminated by the red glow of the presence lights. The magnificent mosaic of ceramic tiles and semiprecious stones which formed the wall behind the high altar was more brightly illuminated by the cut-crystal lamps, which were kept filled with only the purest oil from freshwater kraken. The huge, lordly faces of the Archangel Langhorne and the Archangel Bédard gazed out from the mosaic, their noble eyes watching Timothy as he stood inside the doors. The weight of those eyes always made Timothy aware of his own mortality, his own fallibility before the divinity of God's chosen servants. Usually, it also filled him with reassurance, the renewed faith that God's purpose in creating Safehold as a refuge and a home for mankind must succeed in the end.
But tonight, for some reason, he felt a chill instead. No doubt it was simply the unprecedented nature of Michael's summons, but it almost seemed as if shadows moved across the Archangels' faces, despite the unwavering flames of the lights.
"Timothy!"
Father Michael's voice pulled Timothy away from that disturbing thought, and he looked up as Michael appeared in a side door, just off the sanctuary.
"What's this all about, Michael?" Timothy asked. He paused to genuflect before the mosaic, then rose, touching the fingers of his right hand to his heart, and then to his lips, and strode down the central aisle. He knew he'd sounded sharp, abrupt, and he tried to smooth his own voice. But the irregularity, especially so soon after the Visitation, had him on edge and anxious.
"I'm sorry to have summoned you this way," Father Michael said, "but I had no choice. I have terrible news, terrible news." He shook his head. "The worst news I could possibly imagine."
Timothy's heart seemed to stop for just an instant as the horror in Michael's voice registered. He froze in midstride, then made himself continue towards the priest.
"What sort of news, Michael?" he asked much more gently.
"Come."
It was all the priest said, and he stepped back through the door. It led to the sacristy, Timothy realized as he followed, but Michael continued through another door on the sacristy's far side. A narrow flight of stairs led upward, and the priest didn't even pause for a candle or a taper as he led Timothy up them.
The stairs wound upward, and Timothy quickly recognized them, although it was over forty years since he'd last climbed them himself. They led up the tall, rectangular bell tower to the huge bronze bells perched under the pointed steeple at the very top.
Timothy was panting by the time they reached the top, and Michael was literally stumbling with exhaustion from the pace he'd set. But he still didn't speak, nor did he pause. He only put his shoulder under the trapdoor, heaved it up, and clambered through it.
A strange, dim radiance spilled down through the opened trapdoor, and Timothy hesitated for just a moment. Then he steeled his nerve, reached for his faith. He followed his friend and priest through the trapdoor, and the radiance strengthened as the one who had awaited them turned towards him and the power of his presence reached out.
"Peace be with you, My Son," the angel said.
Fifteen minutes later, Timothy Harrison found himself staring at an angel with the one expression he had never expected to show one of God's servants: one of horror.
"—and so, My Children," the angel said, his own expression grave, "although I warned you only days before that new challenges might await you, not even I expected this."
He shook his head sorrowfully, and yet if it would not have been impious, Timothy would have called the angel's expression as much worried as "grave."
Perhaps it is, the Mayor thought. And why shouldn't it be? Not even angels—not even Archangels—are God themselves. And to have something like this happen . . .
"It is a sad and a terrible duty to bring you this word, these commands," the angel said sadly. "When God created Safehold for your home, the place for you to learn to know Him and to serve His will, it was our duty to keep it safe from evil. And now, we've failed. It is not your fault, but ours, and we shall do all in our power to amend it. Yet it is possible the struggle will be severe. In the end, we must triumph, for it is we who remain loyal to God's will, and He will not suffer His champions to fail. But a price may yet be demanded of us for our failure."
"But that's not—" Timothy began, then closed his mouth firmly as the angel looked at him with a small smile.
"Not 'fair,' My Son?" he said gently. Timothy stared at him, unable to speak again, and the angel shook his head. "The Archangel Shan-wei has fallen, My Sons, and we did not keep the watch we ought to have kept. Her actions should not have taken us by surprise, but they have, for we trusted her as one of our own.
"She was one of our own, but now she has betrayed us as she has betrayed herself. She has turned to the Darkness, brought evil into God's world through her own vaunting ambition, blind in her madness to the sure and certain knowledge that no one, not even an Archangel, may set his will against God's and triumph. Maddened by her taste for power, no longer content to serve, she demanded the power to rule, to remake this world as she would have it, and not as God's plan decrees. And when the Archangel Langhorne refused her demands and rebuffed her mad ambition, she raised impious war against him. Many lesser angels, and even some other Archangels, seduced to her banner, gathered with her. And, not content to damn their own souls, they beguiled and misled many of their mortal flock to follow in their own sinful path."
"But—but what shall we do?" Father Michael asked, in a voice which scarcely even quavered, Timothy noted. But was that because the priest had found his courage once again, or because the enormity of the sin the angel had described was simply too vast for him to fully take in?
"You must be prepared to weather days of darkness, My Son," the angel said. "The sorrow that she who was one of the brightest among us should have fallen so low will be a hard thing for your flock to understand. There may be those among that flock who require reassurance, but you must also be vigilant. Some even among your own may have been secretly seduced by Shan-wei's minions, and they must be guarded against. It is even possible that other angels may come here, claiming Visitation in Langhorne's name, when in fact they serve Shan-wei."
"Forgive me," Timothy said humbly, "but we're only mortals. How shall we know who an angel truly serves?"
"That is a just question, My Son," the angel said, his expression troubled. "And, in honesty, I do not know if it will be possible for you to tell. I am charged by the Archangel Langhorne, however, to tell you that if you question the instructions you are given by any angel in his name, he will forgive you if you hesitate to obey them until you have requested their confirmation from me, who you know serves his will—and God's—still.
"And"—the angel's expression hardened into one of anger and determination, almost hatred, such as Timothy had never expected to see upon it—"there will not be many such angels. The Archangel Langhorne's wrath has already been loosed, with God's holy fire behind it, and no servant of Darkness can stand against the Light. There is war in Safehold, My Children, and until it is resolved, you must—"
The angel stopped speaking abruptly, and Timothy and Father Michael wheeled towards the open side of the belfry as a brilliant, blinding light flashed upon the northern horizon. It was far away, possibly all the way on the far shore of the enormous lake, but despite the vast distance, it was also incredibly bright. It split the darkness, reflecting across the lake's waters as if they were a mirror, and as it blazed, it rose, higher and higher, like some flaming mushroom rising against the night.
The angel stared at it, and it was probably just as well that neither Timothy nor the priest could tear his own eyes away from that glaring beacon to see the shock and horror in the angel's expression. But then, as the column of distant flame reached its maximum height and began slowly, slowly to dim, the angel found his voice once more.
"My Children," he said, and if the words weren't quite steady, neither of the two mortals with him was in any shape to notice it, "I must go. The war of which I spoke has come closer than I—than we—expected. The Archangel Langhorne needs all of us, and I go to join him in battle. Remember what I have told you, and be vigilant."
He looked at them one more time, then stepped through the belfry opening. Any mortal would have plunged to the ground, undoubtedly shattering his body in the process. But the angel did not. Instead, he rose quickly, silently into the blackness, and Timothy summoned the courage to lean out and look up after him. A brilliant dot blossomed far above as he looked, and he realized that the angel's kyousei hi had lifted him up.
"Timothy?"
Michael's voice was soft, almost tiny, and he looked imploringly at the mayor, then back to the distant glare, still fading on the horizon.
"I don't know, Michael," Timothy said quietly. He turned back to the priest and put his arm about him. "All we can do is place our faith in God and the Archangels. That much I understand. But after that?"
He shook his head slowly.
"After that, I just don't know."
She woke up. Which was odd, because she didn't remember going to sleep.
Sapphire eyes opened, then narrowed as she saw the curve of a glass-smooth stone ceiling above her. She lay on her back on a table of some sort, her hands folded across her chest, and she'd never seen this room before in her life.
She tried to sit up, and the narrowed eyes flared wide when she discovered she couldn't. Her body was totally nonresponsive, and something very like panic frothed up inside her. And then, abruptly, she noticed the tiny digital ten-day clock floating in one corner of her vision.
"Hello, Nimue," a familiar voice said, and she discovered she could at least move her head. She rolled it sideways, and recognized the holographic image standing beside her. Pei Kau-yung looked much older. He wore casual civilian clothing, not his uniform; his face was grooved with lines of age, labor, and grief; and his eyes were sad.
"I'm sorrier than I can ever say to be leaving this message for you," his image said. "And I know this is all coming at you cold. I'm sorry about that, too, but there was no way to avoid it. And, for whatever it's worth, you volunteered. In a manner of speaking, at least."
His lips quirked in an almost-smile, and his image sat down in a chair which suddenly materialized in the hologram's field.
"I'm getting a little old, even with antigerone, for standing around during lengthy explanations," he told her, "and I'm afraid this one's going to be lengthier than most. I'm also afraid you'll find you won't be able to move until I've finished it. I apologize for that, too, but it's imperative that you stay put until you've heard me completely out. You must fully understand the situation before you make any decisions or take any action."
She watched his expression, her thoughts whirling, and she wasn't surprised to discover she wasn't breathing. The digital display had already warned her about that.
"As I'm sure you've already deduced, you aren't really here," Commodore Pei's recorded message told her. "Or, rather, your biological body isn't. The fact that you were the only member of what I suppose you'd have to call our 'conspiracy' with a last-generation PICA was what made you the only practical choice for this particular . . . mission."
If she'd been breathing, she might have inhaled in surprise. But she wasn't, because, as Pei had just said, she wasn't actually alive. She was a PICA: a Personality-Integrated Cybernetic Avatar. And, a grimly amused little corner of her mind—if, of course, she could be said to actually have a mind—reflected, she was a top-of-the-line PICA, at that. A gift from Nimue Alban's unreasonably wealthy father.
"I know you won't recall any of what I'm about to tell you," the commodore continued. "You hadn't realized there'd be any reason to download a current personality record until just before we went aboard ship, and we didn't have time to record a new one before you transferred to Excalibur. For that matter, we couldn't risk having anyone wonder why you'd done it even if there'd been time."
Her eyes—the finest artificial eyes the Federation's technology could build, faithfully mimicking the autoresponses of the human "wetware" they'd been built to emulate—narrowed once again. For most people, PICAs had been simply enormously expensive toys since they were first developed, almost a century before Crestwell's World, which was precisely how Daffyd Alban had seen his gift to his daughter. For others, those with serious mobility problems not even modern medicine could correct, they'd been something like the ultimate in prosthetics.
For all intents and purposes, a PICA was a highly advanced robotic vehicle, specifically designed to allow human beings to do dangerous things, including extreme sports activities, without actually physically endangering themselves in the process. First-generation PICAs had been obvious machines, about as aesthetically advanced as one of the utilitarian, tentacle-limbed, floating-oil-drums-on-counter-grav, service 'bots used by sanitation departments throughout the Federation. But second- and third-generation versions had been progressively improved until they became fully articulated, full-sensory-interface, virtual doppelgangers of their original human models. Form followed function, after all, and their entire purpose was to allow those human models to actually experience exactly what they would have experienced doing the same things in the flesh.
To which end PICAs' "muscles" were constructed of advanced composites, enormously powerful but exactly duplicating the natural human musculature. Their skeletal structure duplicated the human skeleton, but, again, was many times stronger, and their hollow bones were used for molecular circuitry and power transmission. And a final-generation PICA's molycirc "brain" (located about where a flesh-and-blood human would have kept his liver) was almost half the size of the original protoplasmic model. It had to be that large, for although a PICA's "nerve" impulses moved literally at light speed—somewhere around a hundred times as fast as the chemically transmitted impulses of the human body—matching the interconnectivity of the human brain required the equivalent of a data bus literally trillions of bits wide.
A PICA could be directly neurally linked to the individual for whom it had been built, but the sheer bandwidth required limited the linkage to relatively short ranges. And any PICA was also hardwired to prevent any other individual from ever linking with it. That was a specific legal requirement, designed to guarantee that no one else could ever operate it, since the individual operating a PICA was legally responsible for any actions committed by that PICA.
Eventually, advances in cybernetics had finally reached the level of approximating the human brain's capabilities. They didn't do it exactly the same way, of course. Despite all the advances, no computer yet designed could fully match the brain's interconnections. Providing the memory storage of a human brain had been no great challenge for molecular circuitry; providing the necessary "thinking" ability had required the development of energy-state CPUs so that sheer computational and processing speed had finally been able to compensate. A PICA's "brain" might be designed around completely different constraints, but the end results were effectively indistinguishable from the original human model . . . even from the inside.
That capability had made the remote operation of a PICA possible at last. A last-generation PICA's owner could actually load a complete electronic analogue of his personality and memories (simple data storage had never been a problem, after all) into the PICA in order to take it into potentially dangerous environments outside the direct neural linkage's limited transmission range. The analogue could operate the PICA, without worrying about risk to the owner's physical body, and when the PICA returned, its memories and experiences could be uploaded to the owner as his own memories.
There'd been some concern, when that capability came along, about possible "rogue PICAs" running amok under personality analogues which declined to be erased. Personally, Nimue had always felt those concerns had been no more than the lingering paranoia of what an ancient writer had labeled the "Frankenstein complex," but public opinion had been adamant. Which was why the law required that any downloaded personality would be automatically erased within an absolute maximum of two hundred forty hours from the moment of the host PICA's activation under an analogue's control.
"The last personality recording you'd downloaded was made when you were still planning that hang-gliding expedition in the Andes," Commodore Pei's holograph reminded her. "But you never had time for the trip because, as part of my staff, you were tapped for something called 'Operation Ark.' For you to understand why we're having this conversation, I need to explain to you just what Operation Ark was . . . and why you, Kau-zhi, Shan-wei, and I set out to sabotage it."
Her eyes—and, despite everything, she couldn't help thinking of them as her eyes—widened, and he chuckled without any humor at all.
"Basically," he began, "the concept was—"
"—so," Pei Kau-yung told her a good hour later, "from the moment we found out Langhorne had been chosen over Franz Halversen to command the expedition, we knew there was going to be a lot of pressure to dig the deepest possible hole, crawl into it, and fill it in behind us. Langhorne was one of the 'we brought this down on ourselves through our own technological arrogance' types, and, at the very least, he was going to apply the most stringent possible standard to the elimination of technology. In fact, it seemed likely to us that he'd try to build a primitive society that would be a total break with anything which had come before—that he might decide to wipe out all record that there'd ever been a technologically advanced human society. In which case, of course, all memory—or, at least, all accurate memory—of the Gbaba would have to be eliminated as well. He couldn't very well explain we'd encountered them once we attained interstellar fight without explaining how we'd done that, after all.
"None of us could question the necessity of 'going bush' to evade detection, at least in the short term, yet where Langhorne was determined to prevent any new confrontation with the Gbaba, we felt that one was effectively inevitable. Someday, despite any effort to preclude the development of a high-tech civilization, the descendants of our new colony's inhabitants would start over again on the same road which had taken us to the stars and our meeting with them."
He shook his head sadly.
"In light of that, we began considering, very quietly, ways to prevent those distant descendants of ours from walking straight back into the same situation we were in. The only solution we could see was to ensure that the memory of the Gbaba wasn't lost after all. That our descendants would know they had to stay home without attracting attention, in their single star system, until they'd reached a level of technology which would let them defeat the Gbaba. The fact that the Gbaba have been around for so long was what suggested they'd still be a threat when mankind ventured back into space, but the fact that they've been around so long without any significant advances also suggested that the level of threat probably wouldn't be much higher than it was today. So if there was some way for our descendants to know what level of technological capability they required to survive against the Gbaba, they would also know when it ought to be safe—or relatively safe—for them to move back into interstellar flight.
"One way to do that would be to maintain a preelectric level of technology on our new home for at least the next three or four centuries, avoiding any betraying emissions while preserving the records of our earlier history and the history of our war with the Gbaba. Assuming we could convince Langhorne, or at least a majority of the Administrative Council, to go along with us, we would also place two or three of the expedition's ships in completely powered-down orbits somewhere in our destination star system, where they'd be only a handful of additional asteroids without any active emissions, impossible to detect or differentiate from any other hunk of rock without direct physical examination, but available for recovery once indigenous spaceflight was redeveloped. They would serve as an enormous bootstrap for technological advancement, and they'd also provide a yardstick by which to evaluate the relative capabilities of later, further developments."
His holographic face grimaced, his eyes bitter.
"That was essentially what the original mission plan for Operation Ark called for, and if Halversen had been in command, it's what would have been done. But, frankly, with Langhorne in command, we never gave it more than a forty percent chance of happening, although it would obviously have been the best scenario. But because the odds of achieving it were so poor, we looked for a second option. We looked hard, but we couldn't find one. Not until we were all sitting around after dinner on the very evening before our departure, when you and Elias Proctor came up with the idea which led to this conversation.
"You were the one who pointed out that the same technology which had gone into building the PICAs could have been used to build an effectively immortal 'adviser' for the colony. An adviser who actually remembered everything which ought to have been in the records we were all afraid Langhorne wouldn't want preserved and who could have guided—or at least influenced—the new colony's development through its most dangerous stages. Unfortunately, there was no time to implement that idea, even if there'd been any way Operation Ark's planners would have signed off on any such notion. And even if the mission planners had agreed to it, someone like Langhorne would almost certainly order the 'adviser's' destruction once he was out on his own.
"But Elias was very struck by your observation, and he pointed out, in turn, that the only thing preventing an existing, off-the-shelf PICA from being used to fulfill the same role were the protocols limiting PICAs to no more than ten days of independent operation. But those protocols were all in the software. He was relatively certain he could hack around them and deactivate them. And a single PICA, especially one with its power completely down, would be relatively easy to conceal—not just from the Gbaba, but from Langhorne."
The PICA on the table, which had decided she might as well continue to think of herself as the young woman named Nimue Alban, whose memories she possessed, would have nodded if she could have moved her head. Doctor Elias Proctor had been the most brilliant cyberneticist Nimue had ever known. If anyone could hack a PICA's software, he could. Of course, trying to would have been a felony under Federation law, punishable by a minimum of fifteen years in prison.
"Unfortunately"—Pei Kau-yung's expression turned sad once again—"the only last-generation PICA belonging to anyone we knew we could trust was yours, and there wasn't time to acquire another. Certainly not without making Mission Control wonder what in the world we wanted it for. In fact, you were the one who pointed that out to us. So I signed off on a last-minute cargo adjustment that included your PICA in your personal baggage allotment, on the basis that it might prove useful for hostile environment work somewhere along the line. And then, after all our personnel and cargo had been embarked, you volunteered to transfer to Kau-zhi's staff aboard Excalibur."
Nimue's eyes went very still, and he nodded slowly, as if he could see them.
"That's right. You volunteered for service on the flagship, knowing it would be destroyed if Operation Breakaway worked. And when you were transferred to Excalibur, the official manifest on your gear included everything you'd brought aboard Gulliver, including your PICA. But you didn't actually take it with you, and I personally transferred it to a cargo hold where it could be permanently 'lost.' It was the only way to drop it completely off all of the detailed equipment lists in Langhorne's computers."
His image seemed to look straight into her eyes for several seconds. Then he drew a deep breath.
"It wasn't easy to let you go," he said softly. "You were so young, with so much still to contribute. But no one could come up with a counterscenario that offered us as good a chance of success. If you hadn't been . . . gone before we reached Safehold, the master manifests would have shown you still holding the PICA. You would have been forced to turn it over to Langhorne for destruction, and if you'd announced you'd 'lost' it somehow, instead, all sorts of alarms would have gone off, especially given how late in the process it was added to your allotment. So, in the end, we really had no choice. Yet to be perfectly honest, despite the fact that you'd chosen to deliberately sacrifice your life to give us this option, we all hoped we'd never actually need it.
"Unfortunately, I'm afraid we do."
He settled back in his chair, his face hard, set with an expression she'd seen before, as Gbaba warships appeared on his tactical display.
"Langhorne and Bédard have turned out to be not just fanatics, but megalomaniacs. I've left a complete file for you, with all the details. I don't have the heart to recite them all for you now. But the short version is that it turns out Langhorne and his inner clique never trusted me quite as completely as I thought they had. They deployed a complete orbital kinetic strike system without ever telling me, as their senior military officer, a thing about it. I never knew it was there, couldn't take any steps to neutralize it. And when Shan-wei and her supporters resisted their efforts to turn themselves into gods, they used it. They killed her, Nimue—her and all of the people trying to openly maintain any memory of our true history."
A PICA had no heart, not in any physical sense, but the heart Nimue Alban no longer possessed twisted in anguish, and he cleared his throat, then shook his head hard.
"To be honest, I thought about waking you up, having this conversation with you in person, but I was afraid to. I've lived a long time now, Nimue, but you're still young. I didn't want to tell you about Shan-wei. For a lot of reasons, really, including the fact that I know how much you loved her and I was . . . too cowardly to face your pain. But also because I know you. You wouldn't have been willing to 'go back to sleep' until you'd personally done something about her murder, and I can't afford to lose you. Not now. Not for a lot of reasons. Besides, you'd probably try to argue with me about my own plans. And when you come right down to it, no time will pass for you between now and when you actually see this message, will it?"
His bittersweet smile was crooked, but when he spoke again, his voice was brisker, almost normal-sounding.
"We did our best to give you at least some of the tools you'll need if you decide—if you decide, as the person you are now, not the Nimue Alban who originally volunteered for this—to continue with this mission. We didn't really think we'd be able to do that, since we hadn't known Langhorne would decide to keep Hasdrubal with the main fleet instead of personally overseeing Safehold's terraforming. We were delighted that he did, at the time, because it gave us a lot more freedom. Of course"—he smiled bitterly—"we didn't realize then why he was staying there. Even without him looking over our shoulder, though, we couldn't begin to give you everything I would have liked to. There were still limits to what we dared to 'disappear' from the equipment lists, but Shan-wei and I showed a little creativity during the terraforming operations. So you'll have some computer support, the most complete records we could provide, and at least some hardware.
"I've set the timer to activate this . . . depot, I suppose, seven hundred and fifty standard years after I complete this recording. I arrived at that particular timing because our best projections indicate that if the Gbaba didn't decide Kau-zhi's fleet was all of Operation Ark's units, and if their scout ships continued to sweep outward, it ought to take them a maximum of about five hundred years to pass within easy detection range of radio emissions or neutrinos from this system. So I've allowed a fifty percent cushion to carry you through the threat zone of immediate detection. That's how long you will have been 'asleep.'-"
He shook his head again.
"I can't begin to imagine what it's going to be like for you, Nimue. I wish there'd been some way, any way, I could have avoided dropping this burden on you. I couldn't find one. I tried, but I couldn't."
He sat silent once more for several seconds, his holographic eyes gazing at something no one else had ever been able to see, then blinked back into focus and straightened in his chair.
"This is the final message, the last file, which will be loaded to your depot computer. Besides myself, only one other person knows of your existence, and he and I have an appointment with Administrator Langhorne and the Administrative Council tomorrow evening. I don't know if it will do any good, but Langhorne, Bédard, and their toadies are about to discover that they aren't the only people with a little undisclosed military hardware in reserve. There won't be any survivors. It won't bring back Shan-wei, or any of the rest of my—our—friends, but at least I'll take a little personal satisfaction out of it."
He seemed to look at her one last time, and he smiled once more. This time, it was an oddly gentle smile.
"I suppose it could be argued that you don't really exist. You're only electronic patterns inside a machine, after all, not a real person. But you're the electronic pattern of a truly remarkable young woman I was deeply honored to have known, and I believe that in every way that counts, you are that young woman. Yet you're also someone else, and that someone else has the right to choose what you do with the time and the tools we've been able to give you. Whatever you choose, the decision must be yours. And whatever you decide, know this; Shan-wei and I loved Nimue Alban very much. We honored her memory for sixty years, and we're perfectly satisfied to leave the decision in your hands. Whatever you decide, whatever you choose, we still love you. And now, as you once said to me, God bless, Nimue. Goodbye."