The Disinherited (16 page)

"Silence." Gromorgh's pendant emitted the flat, tinny "speech" that made him seem even more machinelike than his enhanced soldiers. His eye contemplated Tarlann. "Your contacts with the feral inferior beings of the asteroid belt have long been known to us. But your death would result in more disruption and loss of productivity than we wish. Instead, you will remain in your present position, heading the enterprises you inherited when your father died."

Again Tarlann almost fainted, this time from relief. The Korvaasha still believed Varien was dead; all this had nothing to do with the Lirauva Chain, and suicide would not be necessary.

"But," Gromorgh continued, "in the future you will report to us on the plans of the feral inferior beings. Thus you will buy your life . . . and theirs." He gestured with a hand whose four fingers were all mutually opposable, and two more Korvaasha entered the chamber, shoving Tarlann's wife and children in front of them.

Nissali's eyes were glazed with terror, but she clutched her son and daughter convulsively. Iael's fear warred with his early-adolescent boy's pride. But Tiraena, for whom puberty still lay a couple of years in the future, was too young to understand what was happening to her; her uncomprehending fear was still tempered by wide-eyed wonder at the novel surroundings.

"Daddy!" she cried out, great dark eyes widening even more, and tried to run to Tarlann. Nissali, darting a terrified glance at the nearest Korvaash guard, restrained the child with desperate strength and locked eyes with her husband.

"Director," Tarlann stammered, thinking furiously, "the Free Rae . . . the feral inferior beings may not trust me after seeing me emerge from this building. They will assume I am working for you . . . ."

"It will be your task to make them trust you," the mechanical voice cut in. "I see that you need more incentive. You have not yet learned that we are to be taken seriously." He looked down at the woman and the two children. Irresistably, their gazes were drawn to that enormous eye. Tiraena looked upward and actually gave Gromorgh a tremulous little smile.

The Director made an abrupt gesture and one of the guards, moving with the speed of the bionically enhanced, grasped Tiraena's small head in his massive hands. Her scream died aborning as he wrenched her head around almost almost a full circle and her neck snapped. He dropped the small, weakly twitching corpse to the floor and, too quickly to fully register, it was over.

Tarlann, existing in a universe of horror in which time did not exist, heard Nissali's gasping sobs as she tried to form a scream that would not come, and saw Iael's eyes glaze over with shock. But mostly he heard the empty expressionlessness of Gromorgh's voder, addressing the assault leader. "Laerav, you may have the remains. I believe your perversions include a preference for immature females of your species . . . and that you are not averse to the recently deceased."

The assault leader stepped forward, anticipation momentarily overcoming cravenness on his face. Little flecks of spittle appeared at the corners of his mouth.

Tarlann, moving like an automaton, tried to break away and reach toward Laerav. One of the Implementers, grinning, smashed the butt of his weapon into Tarlann's fractured knee. Tarlann crumpled to the floor and vomited, over and over.

When he was finally aware of his surroundings again, that which had been Tiraena was gone, as was Laerav. A part of what Tarlann had been was gone too. He tried to make eye contact with his wife, but there was nothing there to make contact with. Nissali was no longer there; she had taken refuge in a place where her baby was with her and the Korvaasha could not follow.

"I have illustrated," came the voice from Gromorgh's pendant, "what should already be obvious: since the lives of individual members of our own species mean nothing to us, the lives of individual inferior beings mean less than nothing. If you do not cooperate to the full, or if you attempt any treachery, the female and the immature male will be made available to the Implementers before being butchered, and you will watch both processes."

Tarlann looked up into the face that held no more expression than the uninflected mechanical voice. When he spoke, it was with a strange calmness that came of having passed beyond all feeling except a certain curiosity.

"You don't even enjoy it, do you?"

"Your question is without meaning. I simply do whatever is necessary to further the expansion of the Unity. It must incorporate the entire accessible physical universe into itself. This is the only imperative. Nothing else matters."

"But . . .
why?
"

"This question, too, is meaningless. When our race attained the Unity we reached the end of all such philosophical problems. The Unity settles the question of means and ends, for it is both means and end. It settles the question of good and evil, for it is neither good nor evil. It simply
is
. The Unity is the goal toward which all sentient life strives, however unknowingly, for through it sentience will eventually be transcended—in the absence of choice, thought itself will become unnecessary. But its guiding control can only be entrusted to our race, which brought it into existence. Your species, and all other inferior beings, can aspire to no higher destiny than to serve it in subordinate capacities.

"The fundamental fallacy of your values is revealed by the fact that you allow yourselves to be intimidated and dominated by the specimens of your race that are, by the terms of those very values, the lowest: these vermin that we employ." Gromorgh gestured at the Implementers, whose cringes intensified lest they inadvertently display any resentment. "This is why we use them. They will continue to keep your race terrified and submissive, so that it can better serve the Unity under our direction. Thus it will be . . . forever.

"Remove him."

Arduin stared at the tabletop as he listened to the report, oblivious to the occasional exclamations from the others. Tharuv dead. The entire operation centering on Dormael's establishment exploded. And Tarlann . . . ?

No one could be sure. He had been taken to Gromorgh's headquarters, as had his family. Later, he had emerged—alone. And there were no apparent obstacles to resuming contact with him, which was in itself suspicious.

"Of course," Daeliuv was arguing, "we can take advantage of the fact that we
know
they're using him. We can pretend we don't know it, and feed them false information through him." Since becoming the Free Raehaniv intelligence chief, the former professor had displayed a surprising aptitude for the more devious aspects of espionage. Maybe it wasn't all that different from academic politics.

"
Rhylieu
shit!" Yarvann's outburst was characteristic, and not nearly as startling as it would have been in the old days. They had all changed; Yarvann had merely changed a little more than most. He was one of the rare Raehaniv who had actually taken to military life. The wiry little man had been the space fleet's most aggressive combat officer before the fall, and one of the few officers in Arduin's experience who actually managed to look right in the uniforms that had been inflicted on them. In fact, alone among them all, he still wore them—or, at least, his own flamboyant versions, complete with a brace of custom-made laser pistols. In a historical drama, or a space-pirates fantasy, nobody would have believed him. But as a combat commander he was still in a class by himself.

"I know Tarlann," he was saying, "and he'll never betray us! What we need to be thinking about now is reprisals! If we don't keep the initiative, the
mneisafv
-fuckers will think they've shocked us into immobility. It's time to activate our plan for hitting one of the big mining stations here in the asteroids."

Daeliuv ignored all of Yarvann's speech except the first part. "He would not
willingly
betray us, granted. But . . ."

"You're all forgetting something." Arduin's flat voice came abruptly from the head of the table. "You're forgetting what Tarlann knows."

There was a shocked silence. All of these people knew the truth about Varien—Arduin had had to reveal it, to give them a gleam of hope. And they
had
forgotten it. It had become easier and easier to forget as the years had passed with no sign of the old man and the allies he had gone to seek. But now they remembered that Tarlann knew it too—which meant that the Korvaasha might now know it.

But their silence also said that it probably didn't matter very much. None of them really expected Varien to ever return, whatever had happened to him and the others at Landaen. They hadn't expected it since the day they had learned of the Korvaash discovery of the Lirauva Chain, for they knew full well what that meant for Varien's schemes. There would be no relieving fleet for them to aid. They fought on simply because, knowing what was happening to their homeworld, they could not do otherwise. They could continue the struggle for a long time, but not forever. Sooner or later, the Korvaasha would wear them down and starve them out. And eventually the Korvaasha would stumble onto the secret of the continuous-displacement drive, whether or not Tarlann had already revealed to them its basic principle.

Arduin was silent, his face like stone. But inwardly he wept—for Raehan, for the Landaeniv (or whatever they called themselves), for all humanity.

Liberator
floated in high Terranova orbit, the picture of lordly serenity—or so it seemed to DiFalco, viewing it from the safe remoteness of Kurganov Station. Any time now . . .

There! A series of flashes awoke against the blackness of space off to one side of the Raehaniv ship, without apparent cause. Squinting, DiFalco thought he could make out a certain wavering of the starlight behind the area where the lights were blossoming, as if something odd were being done to space there—as, indeed, it was.

He became aware of Aelanni stepping up beside him and gazing intently at the viewscreen. "Well," she breathed, "so far so good. Now for Phase Two." Very little of her Raehaniv accent remained.

DiFalco had barely nodded when a different sort of light show erupted off
Liberator
's other flank. Rippling flame like sheet lightning seemed to corruscate in space, the same distance from the ship's skin as the flashes had been. Then, abruptly, the fun was over.

Aelanni made inquiries of the station's main computer, then seemed to focus on a point in midair as she consulted her neural data display. Then she turned to DiFalco with the smile that still excited him after . . . how long? Nearly seven Earth-years since he had first set eyes on her while picking himself up from a deck equipped with the manmade gravity that had turned out to be only the first of many miracles.

"It's definite," she announced. "The deflectors performed almost up to theoretical predictions, against both railguns and particle accelerators. We can tell father and the others that they haven't been wasting their time after all."

It had started with the mysterious abandoned base that continued to haunt their thoughts from the darkness of the outer system. Varien hadn't been able to get those wide-open hangar spaces out of his mind—how could such a thing ever have been workable? Others had wondered as well, including Terrans who were too new to gravitics to be aware of all the things the Raehaniv
knew
were impossible. Their speculations had caused Varien to exceed even his usual capacity for condescension . . . and then to think even harder. He had brought the Terrans into contact with Raehaniv specialists, who had begun by ridiculing and ended by refining.

The end result was the series of generators aboard
Liberator
, which projected (to a very short range) a disc-shaped zone of force that deflected incoming objects with a force proportional to their own kinetic energy. Very fast-moving ones were generally incinerated by the heat of their own shedded energy. Lasers, made up of photons which lacked mass but possessed momentum and energy (the Raehaniv had confirmed the Terrans' current tendency to abandon the notion that they had "relativistic mass" though no "rest mass"; zero times infinity is still zero) were made to red-shift, becoming less destructive.

Varien believed the ancient builders had been able to fine-tune the effect to prevent the passage of air molecules while allowing large solid objects like vehicles and personnel to come and go as long as they did it slowly, and had used this capability to fashion the perfect airlock. This still eluded him—but even the admittedly crude applications that he had achieved held potential for fending off attacks that were only now being appreciated.

"Of course," Aelanni cautioned, "we have to bear in mind that this isn't a realistic test. The technicians aboard
Liberator
knew exactly when, and from what bearing, those attacks were coming, so they could put out their deflectors in advance."

"Yeah. It would be nice to be able to travel around inside a permanent bubble-shaped deflection field. But the effect doesn't work that way—and even if it did, the generators use too much power to just leave 'em switched on all the time. In actual combat, it'll be a guessing game. Still . . ."

Thoughtfully, they turned away from the screen and walked across the control center to the wide viewport. Kurganov Station had grown from the nucleus of one of Varien's factory ships, and now it sat like a spider at the center of a vast web of construction and refitting work that drifted in silent majesty in low Terranova orbit. The panorama beyond the curving wall of transparent plastic had never lost its power to raise DiFalco's spirits.

It might have seemed incredible that their small band could have wrought so much in so short a time. But Varien had brought with him the capacity to produce all the essentials of Raehaniv industry. Once established, that industry had grown by geometric progression, with machines making machines. Their only real limiting factor had been the shortage of raw materials outside planetary gravity wells, in this system that lacked a resource-laden asteroid belt like Sol's. But Terranova's active geology had left its many mountainous regions rich in accessible heavy elements. Those riches had to be lifted into orbit—but with Raehaniv shuttles whose atmospheric drives manipulated the planet's gravity into a force that pushed them to a significant altitude and speed before their fusion drives had to take over, this became workable.