Investments (14 page)

“I’m ordering complete secrecy on this matter,” Martinez said. “You will censor all communication off
Surveyor
and order censorship on
Titan
as well. Absolutely nothing must get out. I’m going to explain
Titan’s
movements as a maneuver ordered by the Exploration Service high command.”

Severin could only stare at the inverted image.

Martinez’ eyes took on a more confiding glance. “Let’s hope you’re right about all this. I’ll check the math, and enjoy talking with you when it’s all over.”

The orange End Transmission symbol flashed into place on Severin’s sleeve. Thoughtfully he felt his way across the cabin and turned on the lights manually.

Total secrecy, he thought. Now
that
was interesting.

Clearly he wasn’t the only one here with a scheme up his sleeve.

*

“Total secrecy,” Martinez told Shon-dan. “I want this to be strictly between the two of us.”

“Yes, my lord.” The astronomer clacked her peg teeth in thought, then spoke hesitantly. “May I ask your lordship the reason for the secrecy?”

“People might be less than committed to the evacuations and the shelter-building program if they thought the shelters weren’t going to be needed. Even if the math checks there’s still too much that can go wrong with this scheme, and if the plan blows up, those shelters will be necessary.”

Shon-dan hesitated again. “Very good, my lord.”

“I want you to check these figures,” Martinez said, “and I’ll check them as well. And
no one else is to know.
Understand?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Because if anyone else finds out, I’ll know who blabbed, and I’ll throw you into that x-ray beam with my own hands.”

After hearing a series of heartfelt assurances from Shon-dan, Martinez ended the conversation. His dinner lay cold on the table before him. Terza lowered the cup of coffee from her lips and said, “I hope this means I’m not going to have to take that refugee ship.”

Martinez considered this. “No,” he decided, “you’re going aboard.”

Her mouth tightened. “Why?” she asked.

“Because you’re the Chen heir and mother of the
next
Chen heir,” Martinez said. “And so you will go on board the refugee ship and be gracious and accepting and thoughtful and considerate of the other passengers, because that’s what people expect of the next Lady Chen.”

Terza looked cross. “Damn,” she said.

“Just as I’ll be last off this station,” Martinez said, “and first on, because it’s what people expect of a war hero.”

Reluctant amusement tugged at Terza’s lips. “I haven’t noticed that you find being a hero much of a hardship.”

Martinez sipped his cold coffee. “Well,” he said, “not
yet.
But when I’m old and mumbling in my rocking chair by the fire, and multitudes of citizens come to me begging to be rescued from some cosmic menace or other, I’m probably going to find it all very inconvenient
.
”

“No doubt,” Terza said.

Martinez signaled to Alikhan to fill his coffee cup.

“You’ll have to excuse me for the next few hours,” he told Terza. “I have to confirm all of Severin’s calculations.”

Terza rose from her chair. “I’ll start the job of being gracious and accepting, then, and leave you to your work.”

*

Martinez’ calculations supported those of Severin, and more importantly Shon-dan’s supported them both. Martinez called Ring Command to tell them that
Titan
and
Surveyor
would be engaged in a series of maneuvers, and that the sensor operators should be told to disregard them. “Put a memo on the sensor display,” Martinez said. “I don’t want to get a call from Command whenever a new sensor operator goes on watch.”

Then it was back to the endless series of planning meetings. Shelters were being dug with furious efficiency, roofed, and then covered with dirt. The accommodations were primitive, but few conveniences were required by a population that would be in the shelters for less than an hour.

The first of the two refugee ships was sent off, with four thousand aboard, mostly children. The ship would boost far enough away to be safe from the pulsar, and could then return to Chee or continue on to Laredo, depending on whether Chee Station survived or not.

The second ship left two days later. Martinez kissed Terza goodbye at the airlock door, and watched her drift aboard in an elegant swirl of grace and gallantry. Martinez paused for a moment of admiration, and then turned to drift past long lines of refugees patiently waiting to board, each tethered to a safety line as they floated weightless in the great docking space.

Some unused to weightlessness looked green and ill. Martinez sped past them before the inevitable consequences began to manifest themselves.

He made his way to Command, and encountered Lord Ehl leaving. Ehl braced in salute as he drifted past, then recovered in time to snag a handhold on the wall. He made a nervous gesture with his free hand, then stuffed a sheet of paper in a pocket.

“Is something wrong?” Martinez said.

“No,” Ehl began. “Well, yes. There have been some arrests, people who got onto the refugee ship that weren’t supposed to be there. Officials of the shipping company, apparently.” He lifted the paper from his pocket, then returned it. “I have their names, but they’ll have to be checked.”

“Do you need my help?”

“No, my lord, I thank you.”

“Very well. Once you find out for certain who they are, ship them down the skyhook and put them in the deepest dungeon on Chee.”

There were no dungeons on Chee, so far as Martinez knew, but perhaps they’d build one.

From Command Martinez followed the saga of the stowaways, who were marched off the ship by the military constabulary. The refugee ship was given permission to depart, and the enormous vessel gently backed from the station until it reached a safe enough distance to light its torch.

Martinez said another silent farewell to Terza as the displays showed her ship building speed, then took a covert look at
Titan.
Titan
itself was boosting at nearly twenty gravities toward its rendezvous with the pulsar, a speed that would have killed any crew on board. The icon representing
Titan
on the sensor displays had a large text box attached to it, saying the ship was engaged in maneuvers. The two lifeboats containing its crew were on their way to their rendezvous with
Surveyor,
and had been given the cover of a mission to resupply the crippled craft.

If anyone in Command ever bothered to check the ship’s heading and acceleration, they would have had a surprise. But the staff had an emergency on its hands, and much to occupy them; the sensor displays were tuned to the awesome might of the x-ray beam spinning ever closer, and a distant ship that did not call attention to itself was something that floated only on the margins of their attention, like a lily floating in the distant reaches of a pond.

No queries regarding
Titan
came to Martinez’ attention. One shelter after another was certified, and the population put to rehearsing their evacuation schemes. At the last moment the Lady Mayor of Port Gareth came up with another plan: she wanted to put much of the population of her town into several of the large containers that had brought goods from orbit, and sink them below the surface of the bay for the duration of the emergency. Martinez, torn between irritation and hilarity, told her that it was too late to change the plans, and she should complete all conventional shelters in her town.

Lord Pa and Allodorm were on the ground, coordinating last-minute emergency and evacuation work. Personnel on Chee Station were sent to the surface, leaving a skeleton crew behind. The two huge rotating wheels were braked to a stop, and the antimatter reactor powered down. Even the emergency lighting was turned off in most of the station to keep surges from following the power cables.
Kayenta
was readied at the airlock, with Marcella and select Meridian Company personnel aboard, a team that would return to the station with Martinez for a survey before anyone else was allowed to return to the station. One by one the displays and work spaces at Ring Command were shut down, leaving live only the boards that would be needed to begin the restart.

Martinez, Lord Ehl, and the other crew left the darkened, eerily silent Command room and floated along guide cables to the entrance to the great elevator car. Martinez accepted their salute, wished Ehl luck, and watched them file aboard. The car began its descent, diving smoothly along the cable to its vanishing point in the green land mass below, and then Martinez headed for
Kayenta
’s berth
.

When
Kayenta
departed the station, it would go into a polar orbit calculated to place the mass of the planet between itself and the pulsar for the critical few seconds, just as the shuttles were doing. Martinez would be able return to the station after less than an hour’s absence.

With all the ventilators shut down the air was perfumed by the scent of decaying polymers. Empty and without lights the docks were a monumental, indistinct darkness, vast as space itself. The beam of Martinez’ hand flash vanished in the blackness. At a great distance Martinez saw the glow that marked
Kayenta
’s docking port, lit not by station power but by the yacht’s own power supply. Martinez placed his feet carefully against a wall and kicked off, and was pleased to find that he was straight on course for the airlock.

Two figures bulked large by the door, their feet tucked into handles on the wall, their arms reaching for Martinez. As he drifted closer, he saw they were both Torminel. They wore only shorts and vests over their thick grey and black fur, and their huge eyes, adapted for hunting at night, glittered as they tracked Martinez.

Two of Marcella’s survey team, apparently.

Martinez flew into their arms, and they caught him and absorbed his momentum with ease. A furry hand closed on each of his, and placed his hands on handholds by the airlock.

“Thank you,” Martinez said. He tried to shift his left hand, but the Torminel on his left kept it pinned.

The other Torminel, he saw, had a med injector in his free hand.

He barely had time to register alarm before he felt the cool touch of the injector against his neck.

And then he had all the time in the world.

*

There was silence in the control room, broken only by the sound of his breath, by the pulse that beat a quick march in his chest.

Severin watched from his acceleration cage as
Titan
flew toward its objective, its engines firing a last series of powerful burns that would inject it into the pulsar’s accretion disk at exactly the right angle.

The colossal gravity of the pulsar would tear the ship to atoms, hurling its cargo of antihydrogen into the spinning disk. A great swath of the disk’s hydrogen would be annihilated in a ferocious burst of gamma rays, energetic neutrons, and pi-mesons. A percentage of these particles would fall into the neutron star and pump up its x-ray emissions. Another percentage would fly outward into the accretion disk, heating the hydrogen there to blazing temperatures so that when it fell into the pulsar another fierce megaburst of x-rays would blaze forth.

But in between the two ferocious blasts would come eighteen minutes of silence. The mechanism that produced the life-destroying double lance of the pulsar would be shut down.

Or at least it would if Severin’s calculations were correct.

“Fifteen seconds,” Chamcha reported unnecessarily. The seconds were ticking down in a corner of Severin’s display.

Titan
was standing on a vast, blazing tail of annihilated matter. Severin was using the cargo ship as a giant torpedo, aimed straight for a deadly enemy.

“Ten seconds,” Chamcha said.

“Oh shut up,” Severin murmured. Chamcha must have more acute ears that Severin thought, because the sensor tech maintained a resolute silence right up till
Titan
vanished into the larger blip that was the pulsar and its brown companion.

Severin’s attention immediately turned to the pulsar’s rotating x-ray beam, which his display had colored a lurid green. The reaction was immediate: the beam, rotating twelve times per second, blazed into an emerald fury. If the beam hit Chee now, it would strip the planet down to its mantle.

Severin could only hope that the pulsar would switch off when it was supposed to.

And suddenly he thought:
the statue!

That’s how he’d work it. Frenella, the gamine, would send Eggfont the little statue of Lord Mince, and that would tip Eggfont to Mince’s relationship with Lady Belledrawers.