Jo Clayton - Shadow of the Warmaster

Pels named the tug Chicklet; behind those fangs he’s a sentimental little fuzzy, Kumari tells him the cute has seeped into his brain. I put Chicklet into the slot behind a pair of cargo creepers and pooted along just beyond their detection range. If I could’ve taken her up to full speed, the trip would have ended in a few hours, but Kinok said not and I didn’t want to push my luck, so I was stuck with a four-day crawl.

That was not a pleasant four days. I got a good look at why Adelaar’s daughter took off; Del had a tongue like a Tongan bladewhip. Pels showed the good sense to hide down in the engine room when he wasn’t asleep or on duty at the com; that way he didn’t have to deal with her. Kumari kept cool; if she was pushed too far, she gave back better than she got. Never, never, ever get in a word-slinging match with our Mom. Trouble was, more often than not I ended up in the middle, getting beaten up by both of them.

We reached Tairanna when the Warmaster was at noon; I had my fingers crossed, hoping Kinok was right and the observers on board were not looking for trouble from space.

The black whale ignored us, not even a twitch to acknowledge our existence; I laid an egg (a shielded satellite) and drifted on. Nothing. I laid another, then I scooted past South Continent into the Polar seas and dipped into the atmosphere through a hell-spawned storm where winds tore the caps off massive towering waves that swept along with nothing to break them up but a few rocky islets. Battered by those winds and by electrical discharges powerful enough to shock Chicklet’s powersystems into fits, we crawled along the coast until we reached the fringes of the storm and settled to a careful drift along the duskline, circling out to sea whenever we spotted the lights of a settlement. Up near the northern bulge of the western coast the land turned hostile, rocks along the shore like shark teeth, white foam pounding high against the stone, precipitous cliffs and equally precipitous fjords. I turned inland there.

The land passing below us was rugged, mountainous; Chicklet said no locals lived there and I could see why. It was the kind of place I was looking for, a deserted locale where we could get up a landbase and a holding area for the vanished until we’d collected them all and could shift them up to Slancy .

About twenty minutes after we left the coast, I set Chicklet down in a pleasant wooded valley between two mountain spurs. There were streams filled with fish and freshwater crustaceans; the forest, the mountain slopes, the grassy meadowflats were thick with deerish browsers and other game that had no fear of fangless bipeds since they’d never been hunted. Chick-let’s probes told us there were nuts and tubers, wild greens, trees and vine fruits; though it was early spring here south of the equator, some of those fruits and berries were ripe enough to eat. Plenty to help feed the vanished when we brought them here; hunting and fishing to pass the time, an untouched wild place to explore, a lake on a small plateau at one end of the valley where they could swim or do some boating if they had the ingenuity to build their own watercraft. Pretty place if you liked that kind of thing.

We kept our heads down for the next four days, sent out EYEs to map the capital and see what was where, using the satellites to bounce the data to us.

The first day I was cautious, sent in one EYE to poke about, ready to pull the deadman if its field started trouble.

Nothing happened so I saturated the place. Except for one area the city, Gilisim Gillin it was called, was completely unshielded. Helpful of them, wasn’t it. They showed us precisely where to look.

By the middle of the second day it was clear the EYEs weren’t going to get past the shield without blowing every alarm in the place, so I pulled in most of them and let Adelaar fiddle with them. She stopped fratcheting and settled to work. By midmorning on the fourth day, those altered EYEs gave us a detailed schema of the shielded area.

There was a monster mainBrain parked in a subterranean honeycomb that stretched under a complex of buildings and gardens enclosed behind a wall at least thirty meters high and proportionately thick; there was a mess of traps and alarms on the ground, nothing we couldn’t handle. A score or more of guards patrolling the place, others at watchpoints inside the structures. The ones that stayed out of the buildings, they worked with leashed pairs of large cats, something like the spotted panthers on Flayzhao. Cats and men were alert. More than alert, they were nervous. I didn’t like that. Something was making them jumpy and that meant trouble for us. I’d rather have them relaxed and lazy like the gatewatch back on Weersyll.

Pels tracked the guards on their rounds, built up a schedule. Night and day it was much the same. Half of them followed set rounds that took some of them through the public rooms of all the buildings, others into the twists and turns of the arcades and the gardens and still others into that mess of wormholes underground. They clocked in roughly every twenty minutes, pressing their thumbs on sensor plates attached to the walls inside and on columns outside, decorative spikes set inconspicuously throughout the gardens. The rest were rovers. They checked in at forty-five minute intervals, using the same sensors but in no particular order. They were good, they kept the patterns random enough to frustrate most observers but still managed to cover the ground.

Whoever it was ran things depended on scanners to warn him of air attacks and to direct the melters installed on the walls; Pels snorted when he saw them, he could hocus them without half trying. No bloodoons to point out warm bodies, or sniffoons to track them, no ’droid shootems. It looked almost too easy. We’d be using miniskips when we went in and they were hard to spot on a clear night, let, alone a foggy or a rainy one; it was autumn up north, storms blowing in every third night, we could afford to wait for optimum conditions so we wouldn’t have to worry about the outside patrols until we were on the ground. Once we broke through into the wormholes, all we had to do was get to the computer before it noticed it had mice in the walls. If we played things right and kept moving fast, we should get in and out clean; with a little Luck they’d blame any traces we left on whoever was keeping them up nights.

I meant to leave Adelaar behind, let her be the one to hold fort while Kumari, Pels and I went after the list, but she wouldn’t stand for that. Stumping up and down the grass, scaring the bitty amphibs off the rocks where they were sunning, she argued at the top of her voice that we had to take her along. She said she’d back her physical capacity against me and a dozen like me, hadn’t she already proved that? and as for mental capacity, she knew more about computers and security, especially anything provided by Bolodo, than me or Kumari or anyone else I could dig up, that she had the core of her equipment in the gear we’d collected on Aggerdorn and why’d we have her bring it if she wasn’t going to use it?

Kumari took me aside and told me not to be a fool, the woman was liable to explode and do something stupid; she’d been under pressure too long, she needed action. Security is something she’s good at, Kumari said, take advantage of that. You know me, Swar, I’ll be happier here with the remotes, setting up the shelters and getting things ready for the vanished. That’s more my sort of job.

Kumari is fragile, her homeworld’s around.7 g; she went into the Tank Farm a while back and had some genwork done on muscle and bone so she wouldn’t get exhausted or injured in heavier pulls, but she prefers to leave running about to us hardier types. Even so, there’s not many I’d rather have at my back; she fights with her head more than hands and feet and that’s one fine weapon.