Starhammer (9 page)

"All right, I'm sorry." He raised his hands. "You're a Testamenter, Meg, but all the proofs concerning Testament were destroyed fourteen centuries ago."

"There were survivors. They came to the watermoons of William after a long NAFAL voyage. That's one reason why the Williams don't fuel laowon ships."

"In the depths of the ocean where all hope sank..." he began half mockingly.

"We laid him down." She finished with a face full of determination. She went on in a hard tight voice.

Where the gravity's no feather and the light will never reach,
We laid him down,
On the breast of the ocean that has no farther beach,
We laid him down.

She finished the verse and caught his eye.

"Of course it's better when Tier Merier sings it, but you better realize that we Testamenters never give up. I'll convert you yet, once we can break down all that laowon conditioning they gave you."

He smiled, though once that crack about his conditioning would have raised his hackles. Iehard had come a long way in the nine years he'd lived aboard Hyperion Grandee. A long way up, and a long way down.

"All right, Meg, I give in. There is a lost Testamenter ship and we may even find it someday. I bet the laowon find it first though."

"The
Winston Churchill
is out there somewhere, Jon. Perhaps in one of the nearby red-dwarf systems."

"After Testament fell, the laowon scoured all those systems."

"Well, perhaps they went farther away."

"Perhaps they did."

A chime from the DAex Ram 44000 intruded.

"At last, the MI dump." But Jon's eager eyes found only disappointment on the screen.

"Requested files are classified. No access allowed," read Meg.

"Incredible, they won't give us any information."

"Except a photo and the basic ID."

"How are we expected to find anyone without a little background?"

"I'll talk to Petrie."

Jon headed for Petrie's office, not wanting to risk a phone call with the Superior Buro interested in the case.

This time they made him wait. Almost an hour had gone by before he was let out of the anteroom into Petrie's office. The commander had hurriedly donned the psi deflector, it hadn't settled quite evenly around his head.

"Jon, hellishly busy day. Must say I didn't expect to see you again quite so soon. You have news?"

"We've been told we can't get access to information about the suspect and the crime he's committed. How are we supposed to trace him if we don't have any information about him?"

Petrie sighed. This case was becoming more difficult by the hour. He'd just decoded a message on the Deep Access from the Hyades Exploitation Corporation Military Intelligence. The message was already incinerated but the words of warning still burned in his thoughts.

"Jon, there are certain military and political aspects of this case that I'm afraid must remain a secret. Superior Buro is involved. I've been told that if you need any further data you're to submit questions to my office and we'll check them with the Superior Buro and get back to you."

Jon couldn't keep the shock out of his voice. "You mean we can't even access our own databanks here on Grandee? The Superior Buro has control over our own files?"

Petrie pressed his palms together. This could be difficult. He would have to try and explain just a little. "You can't imagine how seriously the laowon are taking this case, Jon." Petrie thought of that message again. His voice took on a conspiratorial tone.

"There has even been a call from the leadership of the cult on Lao for the immediate investiture of Nocanicus by the sector fleet. The whole system to be turned over until they find this man." Petrie shrugged, smiled. "Of course, that is the normal tone that we hear from the cult. They are just as fanatical as our Panhumanists and are allied to some very odd groups on the fringes of the court. Fortunately the Imperial Family favors the Mathematica over the cult and is allied with the Military High Command on this. For which all humans can give grateful thanks, eh?" He gave Jon a bleak smile.

"However, there's a dangerous edge to this situation. The murders have opened Blue Seygfan to possible civil war. As you know, Blue Seygfan is responsible for the entire exploratory thrust by the Imperiom into the Local Star Drift, which of course is considerably larger than the human sphere of exploration. Our sphere lies entirely within the Drift and so our fate is intimately bound up with the success or failure of Blue Seygfan. If Blue Seygfan was to weaken, Red Seygfan would be sure to attack its enemies within Blue. We could have a full-blown interstellar war, all over the Local Drift and right through human space."

And after that...

Petrie was nodding. "You see the point, don't you? The extremists in the cult would like nothing more than a civil war and dissolution of Blue Seygfan's control. With sufficient disorder in this sector, the cult could move to establish cult authority, force the Imperial Family's hand, and bring to an end human independence."

"They would do that?"

"If the extremists get their way, that would be but the beginning."

"How shall we find the Elchite without access to information about him and about Elchites in general? This is not a subject with extensive files here in Nocanicus."

"I will press the Superior Buro for some information. More than that I cannot promise you."

Iehard left Petrie's office with a degree of consternation in his heart.

Back at Meg's, he found both computers humming through complex search programs as Meg drove them to find whatever scraps of data the Superior Buro had overlooked.

The big Bioram had completed a full analysis of the photo of Eblis Bey, the Elchite. When Jon read the section on skin and retinal pigments he gave a whoop. "Terrestrial! What are we dealing with here?"

"An Earthman, Jon, just think of that."

"Never met one before, have you?"

"Of course not. This fellow
has
traveled far."

"A terrestrial Elchite, on this side of the Hyades. The skin tones show he has spent time under some pretty hot stars too planetside without much radiation shielding."

Daisy, the DAex Ram, chimed.

"Daisy's been checking the police department's main computer, the entry and exit files."

"If our man came in legally he must be well disguised, otherwise the Superior Buro would already have him."

"You never know what you might turn up. Let's look." Meg gave a little whoop of excitement.

Daisy was piggybacking on another computer search, which was riffling through the files, searching for that same Elchite and some other people.

"Quick, Daisy, dump those images for us." The DAex Ram copied the requested pictures from one screen window while others showed a search through Hyperion Grandee's hotels.

"It's a search from outside Grandee," said Meg suddenly. "In fact, I can tell by those communication codes. See the X designations throughout the openers? That means this is a coded ship-to-ship transmission."

"Which means the
Illustrious
."

"Of course."

Jon felt a twinge of unease. The laowon battlejumper was nearby, crammed with weaponry and Superior Buro shock troops.

Daisy exited the other computer's search program as she detected the first brush of a laowon security program seeking interlopers.

"Close," Iehard said.

"Not really, Daisy's too fast, especially with my alarm code."

Jon shook his head. Meg's confidence in her computers would get her in trouble one day.

"What did we get then?" The DAex Ram put the captured images on screen. They were fuzzy, a pair of pictures of Eblis Bey. Police mug shots from long ago, without earring and long hair. The others were even less well defined, a pair of very pale blond people, male and female, wearing spacer bodysuits with small survival packs on the chest.

Daisy was enhancing the images.

"Who might these people be?" Jon wondered as a very striking female face enlarged on the screen. She had eyes that were peculiarly black in a face that was very pale indeed.

"Deep spacers. Never been out of their ship by the look of that skin, whole lives spent under superior shielding."

The man had a long, straight nose and calm eyes with that same darkness in them. His cheekbones weren't quite as prominent as the female's, however.

"If the
Illustrious
is after these people, they must be connected to our Elchite."

"There's a ship involved!" Meg exclaimed with sudden conviction.

Iehard nodded slowly. "Let's put Daisy onto a search for ships."

"I doubt if we'll find them that easily."

"Nevertheless, it might turn up something. This case gives me bad feelings, Meg. It's like we're going into a dark room and someone's waiting for us in there. You can't touch the sides of the walls when you put your hands out, there's nothing visible in front."

Meg had a grim expression as she switched up some files from another search that Daisy had executed.

"This is from the Jumbo at Nocanicus University library. Look at this stuff and tell me we aren't ruled by the aliens."

The first file up on the screen was headed:

Elchites:
Human Religiopolitical group associated with the star traders of Aldebaran Sector (232 systems within 30 light-years of Aldebaran.)

Origin:
temporarily deleted.

Myths:
temporarily deleted.

Religious Practices:
temporarily deleted.

Political Import:
temporarily deleted.

The others were all the same; all had been deleted after the initial descriptive entry.

"They're not subtle," Meg said, "but they are thorough. The same story from both university libraries and seven corporate libraries to which I have current subscriptions. Everything about the Elchites is suddenly unavailable."

"To us but not to the
Illustrious
, I'll bet."

"Jon, what's going on? Why is this case in our laps? Why aren't they handling it themselves? Are we stalking horses for them? Or bait?"

He rubbed his chin. "I don't know, Meg, but we need more information than we've got so far."

A dangerous light had come on in Meg's green eyes. "Maybe we'll have to go after the information in their databanks."

"Laowon data?"

"Right."

"I don't know, Meg, this is weird enough already. Who wants to be caught poking around in classified files?"

"I am not going to let them cut me off from the information we need."

A few moments later Meg's big Bioram was running an unusual piece of software. In the pit, with the progress of the program constantly refreshed in visual images on the main screen, Meg explained it to Jon.

"We know that all laowon ships use the same X designations for opening ship-to-ship communications. I just let Sha3 work through all the laowon codes we've accumulated from years of snooping and then we try out the most likely combinations for this time period. Laowon security codes change about every two hours, throughout the system. We think they're beamed in on deep access from the sector fleet high system. Anyway, we've monitored a lot of them over the years and we've been able to predict some of the changes in code as they occurred. You know, laowon are good at complicated things but they're curiously blind to some simpler things. I guess they never thought a mere human would work that hard on their codes." She chuckled, then pointed to the screen.

"Anyway looks like Sha3 got through already."

On screen Sha3's emissary probe, represented as a pink worm, was knocking on Superior Buro menus that guarded the big laowon computer memory aboard
Illustrious
.

Sha3 emitted a burst of security code. The first menu wavered, they received an option, and with a keystroke Meg pushed the probe forward into the laowon databank.

"Don't want to stay in here too long, Sha," Meg muttered.

On screen the pink worm danced and split into a number of threads lacing together windows with files on search. Meg started to tap into them and transfer their contents to the Bioram's own storage devices.

A grid formed on the screen suddenly.

"Uh-oh, security program. Quick, Sha, hit the ten zero five evasion mode."

The pink worms writhed through a forest of gray tines that sought to pin them down.

"This is just low level, automatic house-cleaning by the laowon computer."

The first files were being dumped into the Bioram's storage system as Meg drummed her fingers on the keyboard. "Come on, Sha, we can't hang around in here. Auditor program will be moving in soon. Let's go."

Then a thick red line appeared on the screen. A flashing grid of numbers followed and beat Meg's fingers to the disconnect button.

The screen went crazy.

"Oh, no, disruptor program. They've got Sha!"

"What do you mean?"

But already Sha3 was doomed. Its peripheral devices flickered on- and off-line like strobe lights. On screen a mishmash of image junk flashed as the disruptor program reproduced itself inside Sha3's memory cells until they were completely occupied and the Bioram's complex programming collapsed. In thirty seconds Meg lost six years of careful programming.

She looked up from a quick search of the Bioram's support computers, which monitored its health. "Sha's gone. Whole personality, everything down the tubes."

Jon realized that Meg was ruined in more ways than one. Sha3 was an indispensable part of her Masque characters. With only the DAex Ram 44000 to work with Meg couldn't possibly keep seventy-three characters going night after night.

"Oh, shit! I'm sorry, Meg, I—"

"Damn that Superior Buro," she said ruefully. "They don't mess around now, do they?" Her eyes had a stare of iron to them, they seemed to strike sparks inside him.

He got up and made some instacaf while Meg called a Bioram hospital and booked Sha3 in for a complete restructuring.

Later they went out for a meal. Over dessert Meg had a brainstorm. "I have an idea. It might just turn up something. It's an angle I don't think they can have covered."