Jack Chalker - Priam's Lens

“Wrong, Father. The prototype is rather large, in fact. It is built right into the smaller moon, Hector. I’ve been there myself, although that in itself is no mean feat, and I’ve examined the ruins. It’s still there, all right. It’ll take some work to get it up and running, but it is there. It does not, however, have any power. Whatever power there was seems to have been drained by the Titan attack force as it came down to the surface of the mother planet.”

“Then the records—even any instructions, commands, procedures. They are gone!” Takamura groaned. “Whatever computers they would be using would have died themselves for lack of any power, even a trickle charge!”

“You, too, are wrong, Doctor. That is a bad habit of your group. I hope you guess better once you are in action. There is a minimal trickle charge there, or so my information states. Not enough to be read by almost any instruments we have, and probably not by the Titans, either, but it’s there. Just barely enough. The trouble is, as I said, it’s incomplete. Much of the targeting and serious program debugging was going on on the surface in an underground research facility on the Eden continent just outside a city named—hmm, let’s see—Ephesus. How—Biblical. I sent a team in there to see what they could find. Nobody made it back out, but one of them managed to get out quite a bit of data.”

“Yes? How?”

“Remember what I said about indetectable trickle charges? Seems a few standby combat facilities, mostly fed by geothermal rather than fusion or antimatter, which would have been detected and sucked up, survive and are sort of turned on. Their residual hum is below the noise threshold of the Titans’ monitoring grid, or so my computers aboard my ship theorize. Of course, if they are ever used, then the Titans will be on them in a moment and that’s the end of that. One of my men was able to get to one. He knew by that point he couldn’t get out, that they were on his trail, and he made the decision to broadcast and hope that I’d pick it up, at least through the rescue ship waiting for him to make it to an area between sweeps. We got it, and, since then, nothing else. I’m pretty sure they got him, too. But that’s what I have here, ladies and gents. Real live data out of an interface with a dead man who was down there. It contains a great deal of data, but he didn’t get everything because he didn’t know what it was he was supposed to get. You, Madame Sotoropolis, have the family Karas databases. You know. I can trade you the where and the how, and a way in and out if you are good enough.”

“And what is it you wish, Captain van Staaten?” Captain Stavros asked suspiciously.

“I want control of the weapon. I want control, not the Navy, not the incompetent Confederacy, not the cowardly and defeatist types who now run things.”

“A weapon that can destroy Titans?”

“I have no idea if it will destroy them. I would like it to, but it may just hurt them. It may even merely annoy them, cause them pain. Whatever it does, I want it. I alone will decide where it shoots and what it shoots. I alone will give the commands. That is my price and it is not negotiable.”

Colonel N’Gana, along with several of the others, wasn’t overly concerned with this demand. After all, once the weapon was activated, once it was used, what could the Dutchman do anyway? Still, he had to ask: “Why do you think that we can get in and get the data from the surface when your people couldn’t? Why do you think we can make it out when you can’t?”

“I have no idea if you can do it, Colonel. If I thought it was easy, I would have done it myself and not needed any of you. When you do the cybernetic link and see what all was sent, you will understand what the purpose of each member of your team is. Some of it should be obvious.”

“So, let me get this straight,” Admiral Krill put in. “You expect us to go down and retrieve whatever your people couldn’t and then sit there and make this thing in the moon work. And then you expect us to just give you the trigger?”

“I do, and you will. You see, whether it does the job or not, the moment you shoot whatever this thing shoots and strike a Titan ship or base, well, you are really going to get their attention. There are seven primary bases down there. The moment I fire and hit one, the other six are going to know just exactly where it came from. Now, just who do you propose to fire that weapon?”

N’Gana sighed. “I, for one, agree with him, but it shows why this is stupid. He is certainly right that as soon as one of them is wounded, killed, blown up, whatever it does, the others are going to come after the source, and they won’t have far to go; a moon isn’t something you can move out of range easily. So, assume we go down. Assume we get everything we need to make it work. Assume we get back up with it. All big assumptions. One shot, then it’s over. So what? What will we have accomplished? All that for just one target? It might as well not work at all!”

“Not exactly,” van Staaten’s voice came back to them. “You will have the data. You will have the principles. And you will have a demonstration. If you can’t take that back and build and deploy more, then you do not deserve to live.”

“He’s got you there, Colonel,” Chicanis commented, sounding a bit too pleased.

“Yes or no? I can get you in, and I can get you out. Say yes, and I will transfer the cyberrecord and then we can go from there. Say no and it stops here. Once you say yes, though, you agree to my terms and commands. There will be no going back.”

“Might as well,” N’Gana grumbled. “If we say no, he’s just going to blow us to hell anyway.”

“Very well,” the old diva told the Dutchman. She still wished, as they all did, that she knew more about this strange rogue, and she certainly had no more trust in him than N’Gana did, but she had come too far to retreat now.

“I’m transferring an exact copy to your library computer now,” the Dutchman told them. “I would suggest that only people who are familiar with the technique and can interpret the information, either scientifically or geographically, should look at it. There’s a lot of extraneous stuff there that will be difficult to filter out completely. Oh—and one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“You might get Mister Harker off your goddamned hull and inside where he might do some good. I don’t think he’s going to be any help at all out there by himself.”

Littlefeet had seen women give birth a number of times while growing up; there wasn’t much concealment in the Family, nor much attempt at it. Even so, to see it happen with Spotty, and with his child coming out—that was something very different.

There was no way to stop the wail of a newborn child, so sentries were just doubled and vigilance was increased when such a thing happened.

Spotty was attended by Greenie and Bigcheeks, two girls of her own age who were well along with child themselves. That was how the women trained from the start, with each assisting and younger ones usually watching. A priest, almost always Father Alex, was also there not only to ensure that all went well but to bless and cleanse the child in water as soon as its umbilical cord was tied off. Within two days the mother would give the child a nick-name that would generally last a lifetime; a more formal name was given at puberty from the Old Names. Young girls, often called scribes, would memorize the genealogies and maintain them so that future generations could track lineage, which was always via the mother. The father was normally considered irrelevant, and unless there was a marked resemblance it was generally impossible to even know who the father was.