Glory's People (8 page)

Though there was no human eye nearby to see it happen, the wreckage of MD-23 spun into a tight orbit around a darkness that was blacker than black, a tiny Gateway into the Near Away.

It was never so near, nor so far away.

On the island of Kai, in a planetary observatory atop a mountain called Suribachi, a Junior Astronomer stared in disbelief at a monitor as Planet Yamato’s largest telescope recorded the destruction of MD-23 and the death of its crew.

Aboard
Glory
the destruction of the MD-23 was captured by a surveillance camera atop the port mizzenmast. This camera, ordinarily used to monitor the condition of the upper five kilometers of the spar, was activated by the FTL flash of tachyon power released across the Tau Ceti Star System by the forcible opening of the Gateway from the Near Away.

When inertial-mass-depletion-powered Yamatan craft transited between the Near Away and normal space, their size and low power created openings that were small, less than a thousand meters in diameter, and the Gateways were not held open for any measurable time. But the disturbance caused by the Gateway that devoured MD-23 was emotionally familiar to
Glory
’s crew members, who’d encountered it before in the Ross Stars.

Glory
’s monkeys, confined for refurbishment and safety while in orbit around Planet Yamato, were frantically disturbed by the power of the distant Gateway’s forcible distortion of normal space.

In the battle
Glory
had fought in the Ross System, a monkey had been slaughtered by a soldier of the boarding party from Ross 248 Beta. Now, months of shiptime later, the monkeys were still deeply disturbed by what had happened. Since
Glory
’s commissioning in orbit around Earth’s Moon, no cyberbeast had ever died, and any who met with an accident had been swiftly repaired. Death is a human concept. The chimp-descended monkeys had been shocked by the demise of one of their number. The cats knew this. Their closeness to the human syndics had given them a grasp of what it meant to cease living. But neither Mira nor any of the other members of the pride had yet conveyed to the Starmen the import of what had happened to the monkeys at Ross 248.

Glory
’s mainframe had detected both the anxiety and fear the monkeys were feeling. Yet sophisticated as it was,
Glory
's computer was still only a machine. It had taken no action about the monkeys so long as they performed their duties safely and correctly. Now the impulse that swept through Near Space from the Gateway that had opened across the system agitated the monkeys.
Glory
tranquilized the small cyberbeasts and saved the information in memory, but she did not alert the syndics, being fully occupied with more serious possible danger to the ship.

Dietr Krieg, even though the least empathic of the Starmen, nevertheless was able to recognize the emotional signature of the wave of rage that swept across the inner Tau Ceti System. The Cybersurgeon felt the others’ emotional surge.

Warned by the attack on Duncan and Anya on the surface,
Glory
’s people had been preparing the ship for a precipitous departure. Attempts to contact Duncan and Anya by radio had failed. Almost immediately after the ninja’s attempt--witnessed by all aboard
Glory
on the Yamato Planetary Television Net--there had been an immediate Loss of Signal from Duncan’s and Anya’s communicators. The phenomenon of LOS was as old as orbital flight. Only on planets ringed by relay satellites could it be avoided when the sending transmitter vanished over the horizon. On Yamato the problem was not a lack of relay satellites; Planet Yamato had them to excess. But the satellites did not transmit or receive in the radio bands used by the personal com devices of the Goldenwing’s crewmen.

Demands sent by the syndics downworld had not immediately produced the geographical coordinates of the Master and Sailing Master’s location. The
gaijin’s
exact whereabouts was classified because it was also the location of Minamoto no Kami, the planetary daimyo. By ancient tradition the Shogun’s location was a state secret. Shoguns were prime targets for assassins. Except when public duties made it impossible, the Shogun’s whereabouts was kept secret from the ninjas who operated freely on Planet Yamato. Often the attempt at secrecy failed. In the last five hundred years only one hundred Shoguns had died of natural causes.

After a dozen increasingly concerned demands for information,
Glory
's syndics were coldly informed that a certain dignified patience was the approved demeanor for visitors to Planet Yamato. “We will soon make contact with your officers,” the Planetary Security Net told the anxious syndics. “They are safe and well protected.”

Broni Voerster, though excited and upset by what she had seen on the planetary telecast, was nevertheless determined that when Duncan returned aboard he would have nothing whatever to complain of regarding her performance of duty. At this moment she lay in her pod, Wired to
Glory
, composing the basic astroprogram for
Glory
's retreat from the Tau Ceti Star System, maneuver by maneuver.

When the MD-23 was destroyed within the gravimetric confines of Tau Ceti’s gravity well, Broni had received a jolt of malevolent psycho-empathic energy that made her cry out and pull the drogue from her head. She lay nude in the gel, bathed in a surge of stinging inertia-stripped tachyons. From her shoulders to her knees she felt the pulses from across the system. By this time she was syndic enough to reconnect to
Glory
swiftly and ask that the ship compute the exact location of the Gateway that had caused the surge. That was the first thing Duncan would want to know.

Mira’s image of the open Gateway was part rathole and part dragon’s lair. She had never seen either a rat or a dragon, but she recognized the vast, searching, hungry malevolence. Not only was the knowledge imprinted in her DNA and present in the lessons learned in purrs from her surrogate mother, the great-queen-who-was-not-alive, but Mira herself had sensed it before. Many times. And she had stalked it time and again, through that night without space or time.

All this she had passed on to her offspring, so that when the young cats indulged in their savage play, it was not dead or wounded animals they brought as offerings to Mira and to the syndics, but images of creatures from Glory
’s
vast database: reptiles, chimerae, phantasms. Recently these images had been reinforced by the memories of the fight at Ross 248 Beta, amplified by kittenish nightmares of teeth and claws and empty eyes burning with a loathing of life.

The cat floated in free-fall on the ob-deck. Above her the pelagic image of Yamato rolled swiftly by, a gleaming copper-tinged panorama of sea and cloud. Beyond it, far beyond, on the far side of Tau Ceti, the Gateway burned an instant and then was gone, closed, leaving only the star-shot sky of Near Space.

Mira uttered a trilling call for her brood to assemble. She, knew, beyond any doubt, that there would soon be a hunt and a battle, and that there was work for her and hers to do. But where was the dominant tom? She raised her small head to see more clearly the planet Glory orbited.
There
, she thought,
the dominant tom is there and we are here to face the dragon without him
. And though she could not possibly reach him with her call, she began to yowl.

Buele, working in one of the vast holds where the landing sleds and shuttles were stored, sensed Mira’s furious cries. Immediately he abandoned his task of preparing a shuttle for descent to the planet and settled into the lotus position (a move taught him by the skeptical but open-minded Cybersurgeon). It took the boy no more than four seconds to establish contact with
Glory
's mainframe. Through the computer, Buele reached out to make mental contact with Mira.

“Angry rejection. You are not what I want. “

He made a mental effort to push into the rapport between cat and computer.

“Stay away! You are not the dominant tom. “ Threat. Image of teeth and claws.

“Mira! You know me. Hear me. Tell the pride to prepare for hunting. It is what the dominant tom would say to you if he were here. “

“Sullen disbelief. “ Feline skepticism. Of which there is no greater.

“Hear me, Mira. Hear me. I am one of you. “

“You are not. “

Buele sensed a wish to disengage. He was in danger of losing his contact with the small queen. He cast about for help and found

Damon Ng. The Rigger had detected the cyberorganisms’ distress and he had hurried to the Monkey House, where he was now fully engaged. Buele cast his search farther afield, found Broni.

“Help me, Sister Broni! “

“Buele? Is that you? You aren’t Wired. How have you reached me?”

“Never mind, Sister Broni. Help me with Mira. “

Mira snarled her exasperation. Cats did not respond well to being forced to pay attention when they chose not to do so. Both Buele and Broni felt the small queen’s anger. It was far greater than her size.

Broni and Buele together addressed the cat:
“Pay attention, Mira. Hear what we say. “

Buele once again took control. His thoughts were sharply defined, honed and as sharply delivered as the strokes of a weapon.
“Mira. Tell the others. Either we hunt It or It will hunt us. Tell them, little mother. “

Mira:
“Call the dominant tom. Do it now. He will know what to do. “

Broni:
“We cannot. “

Buele (interrupting):
“We can. We will. But we can't wait for his return to prepare. “
The boy and girl felt Mira’s reluctance. There was a moment when her decision rested on such intangibles as the scent of her offspring in
Glory
's internal atmosphere, the familiar sound of ancient machinery maintaining the life-supporting systems, the trust she had begun to develop in syndics other than the dominant tom. Buele and the girl on the bridge heard her calling her pride. It was a feral, emotional cry. Though they could not smell the air in Mira’s vicinity, somehow both human girl and boy knew it was filled with pheromones.

They heard echoes throughout the vast ship as all the cats replied to the summons.

“Buele,” Broni sent through the computer net. “What’s happening?”

Though un-Wired, the boy heard Broni clearly.

Then Mira said, with shocking clarity:
Call Duncan.

Duncan
, Buele thought.
She called him Duncan
.

The net among
Glory
's syndics--among all her syndics--was forming.

Buele looked around the dark, mainly empty, hold in bewildered wonderment.

Under his touch, in sight of his inner eyes,
Glory
was becoming a thing that had never existed before in all the universe. Powerful forces were gathering, using
Glory
as a matrix.

Buele felt himself bathed in icy sweat. It was a frightening thing to become part of an angry god.

Dietr Krieg, Wired to the com panel in the bridge, felt a shift in the forces around him. It was peculiarly comforting, as though he were being gently but firmly guided into a slot, a position he could--and must--fill until Duncan was once more aboard.

The Cybersurgeon was a man with little empathic Talent. He had served
Glory
for years by substituting intellect and curiosity for the empathic ability so prized among Goldenwing syndics. What he offered was accepted; he had always sensed that this was so, but now, at this moment, he felt an upwelling of love and gratitude for the whole into which he had, over the course of years and parsecs, been integrated.

Glory
spoke through the drogue:
“I have located Duncan and Anya. The coordinates are in the communications console. Use the Yamatan com-net and tell Duncan that a Yamatan spacecraft was just destroyed and that others will be unless he can bring them aboard. “

Dietr was shocked. Not by what the Goldenwing’s computer had just told him--he had expected that--but by the fact that
Glory
had spoken to
him directly
on a subject not related to his medical specialty. Shock gave way to pride and then to a strong desire to be worthy of
Glory
's trust.

He began the procedures that realigned the communications antennae.
Glory
was capable of performing the task more quickly and efficiently than any one of the syndics aboard, but Dietr remembered one of Duncan’s dicta: Never lose your humanity. Dietr also remembered the terrible encounter in the Ross System. An important part of one’s humanity was the ability to feel fear. It had kept early Man alive on the open savannahs of Africa. It might keep
Glory
's syndics alive here, under the Tau Ceti sun.

In the tube outside the bridge, Mira and three of her sons met and, despite their high anxiety, exchanged feline greetings, ritually sniffing one anothers’ pheromones. Mira’s brood did not yet think in abstract concepts. Their mentation was direct, without embellishments. But the concept of fear was a universal to all species originating on Earth, and among Mira’s kind fear was always accompanied by anger. Mira was angry now. The dominant tom called Duncan was somewhere in that light that could be seen through the transparent overheads, and he belonged with his pride, with the great-queen-who-is-not-alive, with the others of his kind, and most importantly with Mira and her offspring. He should be here, preparing to fight. But since he was not, Mira’s augmented mind sullenly accepted a substitute.

The surrogate was not the-tom-who-cuts or the young-queen or the tom-who-speaks-to-the-frightened-things-in-the-rigging (Mira’s view of her world was expanding at a rapid pace as she approached full maturity, but it remained ailurocentric). The surrogate had to be the annoying young tom who irritated Mira and her brood by addressing them in their “speech ’’--a speech he would always know imperfectly because he lacked a supple body, vibrissae, scent glands and a proper tail, the use of which assets were vital to total expression in the language of the Folk. (Mira had slipped easily into thinking of her kind as “the Folk, “ meaning the true people.)