The Disinherited (19 page)

And now they neared journey's end and the first of their tests.

"Two minutes to Seivra mass limit, Colonel." Farrell's crisp voice broke into DiFalco's reverie.

He looked at the Raehaniv-installed holo tank, in which the positions of his ships were displayed in accordance with their instantaneously propagated gravitic signatures. Most of the first wave were in what passed for a tight formation in space, flanked at a great distance by the cruisers
Therdore Roosevelt
and
Aleksandr Nevsky
.

"Mr. Farrell," he spoke levelly, "signal the rest of the main body to secure from continuous-displacement drive at . . ." He glanced at the chronometer and gave a time less than a minute away. No need to push the mass limit.

"Aye aye, sir." Farrell spoke into the communicator. Ships in continuous-displacement drive could see and communicate with each other normally as long as they were popping in an out of normal space at exactly the same rate, a synchronicity into which they could only be tied by Raehaniv computers; they were, as DiFalco found helpful to think of it, existing at the same frequency. Should one such ship "switch frequencies," it would simply vanish from the ken of the others. It was just one of the effects that placed continuous-displacement travel outside the range of possibilities defined by normal human experience, and DiFalco had long ago stopped worrying about it. On a more practical level, it made ship-to-ship combat under the drive so easily avoidable that such combat almost certainly could never take place, except possibly by mutual consent in accordance with some fantastic code of high-tech
bushido
.

Farrell received acknowledgments, the moment arrived, and the ruddy light of Seivra suddenly stopped growing in the viewport. The holographic blips wavered in the tank before steadying as the display began reflecting input from more conventional sensors—all but
Roosevelt
and
Nevsky
, which remained under the drive and proceeded to veer off in opposite directions toward Seivra's two displacement points.

DiFalco released a pent-up breath. So far, so good. Levinson and Golovko had responded as planned to the realtime signal provided by the cessation of the others' gravitic pulses and departed to fulfill their roles—a tricky role in the case of Levinson and
Roosevelt
. DiFalco's part was, by comparison, simplicity itself: the brute simplicity of combat with the Korvaash station toward which the main body now proceeded in free fall.

"Seventh Level Embodiment!" The Korvaash scanner officer's exclamation was meant for Uftscha alone but his translator/voder made it audible and comprehensible to the humans . . . at least to the extent that it could be heard over Aelador's screams. "The gravitational anamoly—or, rather, cluster of anamolies—has suddenly ceased to register on the scanners."

Uftscha gestured, and the Korvaash guard withdrew his neurolash from contact with Aelador's flesh. The human's spine relaxed from its convulsive curve and he collapsed, shuddering, to the deck. With a soft hum the neurolash retracted into the guard's artificial forearm. Uftscha ignored the scene as he considered the scanner readouts.

"Perhaps the malfunction was a temporary one, in which case it could recur," he mused. "Clearly, it
was
a malfunction; the readings made no sense, being of an unprecedented nature and coming from a region of space remote from either of the two displacement points. Disengage the new gravitic scanners." He turned ponderously and directed his eye to where Aelador lay gasping on the deck in front of a clump of other humans. "You will form a work crew and track down the source of the problem." He turned to go, then paused and addressed the scanner officer. "Order two frigates to proceed outward on that bearing and locate any possible external source of these readings. And place the pickets on low-level alert."

He departed, and Aelador led the humans to the antechamber that gave access to the scanner system's power leads and connections with the actual hardware on the station's outer skin. As the tide of molten pain ebbed from his nervous system, he wondered what the scanner readings portended. Uftscha had been right: there was no reasonable possibility other than a malfunction. But Aelador knew these systems, and he could imagine no malfunction that could have produced these particular readings.

He was thinking about it as they removed the detachable panels along the base of the chamber's walls and gazed down into the system's glowing guts.

Aleksander Nevsky
disengaged its continuous-displacement drive and resumed the intrinsic vector it had possessed back in the outer system of Terranova. (Strictly speaking, it had never lost it, but this was a minor problem of interstellar navigation.) Golovko noted with satisfaction that the Korvaash picket lay almost dead ahead, so only minor course corrections would be needed.

He spoke an order, the attitude jets performed their aligning function, and the fusion drive roared to life. After the few seconds it took lightspeed phenomena to cross the distance that still separated the two vessels, the picket's reaction appeared on
Nevsky
's sensors.

"Yes," Golovko muttered to his executive officer, "they picked us up as as soon as the burn commenced. And they're following their standard procedures as Varien described them." He indicated the readouts that told of the picket's broad-band shout of warning to all Korvaash units in the system, and of its simultaneous powering-up as it prepared for the emergency acceleration that would take it through the nearby displacement point to the star that lay on the far side of Seivra (in terms of the displacement connections) from Tareil.

But Golovko knew it would never make that transit, to alert the remainder of Korvaash space. They hadn't been able to drop out of continuous-displacement drive right on top of the picket, of course—Varien had explained that displacement points always occurred inside a star's mass limit. But they were never very far inside it, and
Nevsky
was already coming into range, approaching on a heading less than twenty degrees from the displacement point. The picket (already burning its fusion drive, by dint of who knew what frantic efforts) was heading almost directly into its doom.

He spoke another order, and a salvo of four missiles leaped forth. The picket exerted its limited defensive capabilities, and point-defense lasers actually stopped one of the missiles while ECM caused a second to detonate too soon. The other two sped home, and the picket died in glare whose magnified image left spots in Golovko's eyes.

The Russian settled back in his acceleration couch and released a long-held breath before ordering the ship turned around to commence the retrofiring that would bring him into position to cover the displacement point in case any chance Korvaash traffic should pass through. It had gone so smoothly as to almost worry him. But, then, the operation had been meticulously planned so as to assure that he would succeed . . . and that Levinson would not.

Similar thoughts were going through Levinson's mind at substantially the same instant, as he watched the Korvaash picket that was
Teddy R.
's ostensible target accelerate toward the Tareil displacement point.

He had disengaged his continuous-displacement drive sooner than necessary, outside Seivra's mass limit, and approached from almost dead astern of the picket. Now he ordered two missiles launched—no need to be too wasteful of expensive munitions, as long as realism wasn't compromised.

The missiles did their robotic best, but a stern chase is a long chase. The picket reached the displacement point and seemed to flicker out of existence. The missiles swept on through the volume of space where their target was no longer located, and receeded swiftly into the void.

"And so much for
that
,"
Teddy R.
's executive officer muttered. "Now the goddamned Russkies will be insufferable! We could have gotten that bastard if we'd intended to!"

"But we didn't, XO," Levinson reminded her. "Just remember that. Our job was to let him get away to Tareil while
seeming
to try our damnedest to stop him. And as far as I'm concerned, we succeeded in that. I don't care how stolid the Korvaasha are supposed to be; you can't tell me that wasn't one badly scared crew!

"And now," he continued, "let's take up station at that displacement point. Cheer up—if they send anything back through to take another look at what's going on here in Seivra, you can blast it to your heart's content! Otherwise, we wait."

He couldn't let the XO or anyone else know how hard that waiting would be for him, while DiFalco and the rest proceeded into a battle that was not a charade.

The two Korvaasha frigates that Uftscha had dispatched outward from the station had approached at a relative velocity that had allowed for nothing but an exchange of fire
en passant
that could have but one conclusion.
Andy J.
had rung with cheers as they had hit one of the bogies dead-on with the spinal-mounted particle accelerator, only to grow silent as a Korvaash missile had gotten through and inflicted more damage on
Ronnie R.
than DiFalco allowed himself to think about. But the storm of missiles from the Terran cruisers had saturated the Korvaash defenses, and they had flashed on past a thinning cloud of debris.

Now they had turned end-for-end and commenced retrofire, braking themselves with blinding violet-white plasma jets into an orbit that would intersect that of the station. (
Ronnie R.
was able to keep up, to DiFalco's relief.) The fusion drives themselves were formidable if clumsy weapons of destruction, but DiFalco didn't intend to turn them on the station. Nor would he use missiles. He wanted to leave as much of that station in existence as possible, to glean as much as they could of the intelligence information that was the rarest and most precious commodity in interstellar, interspecies war.

Of course, that meant they just had to take it on the way in . . . .

DiFalco, like everyone else, was confined to his acceleration couch, even though the deceleration could not be felt—the G forces they were pulling were such that a momentary failure of the compensating artificial gravity fields could have been catastrophic for anyone caught standing around. So he couldn't even pace as the first of the Korvaash missiles began to arrive.

Aelador and the other humans knew nothing of the signals that had arrived from the frigates and—shortly thereafter, travelling at lightspeed from the outer system—from the pickets. All they knew was that something had unleashed pandemonium among the Korvaasha, and that Uftscha made an announcement whose disjointedness not even the voder/translator could entirely smooth over, ordering the new grav scanners to be reactivated.

But Aelador could draw inferences, and as they worked frantically under the eyes of unwontedly nervous-seeming Korvaash guards to reconnect all the circuitry they had disconnected in their search for a malfunction that evidently didn't exist after all, a suspicion grew in him. When they were finished, and the rumble of missile launches began to vibrate through the station, the suspicion became certainty.

Seivra was under attack. Someone had, impossibly, gotten into the system by some means unconnected with either of the displacement points. He couldn't imagine how, and he couldn't conceive of who the intruders might be. But he knew one thing, and as he was hauled up through the hatches by the other humans he was sure they all knew it, even though they didn't dare talk among themselves. Someone was attacking the Korvaasha. Someone was
hurting
the Korvaasha!

The astonishing thought immobilized him for an instant at the edge of the hatch, and one of the low-ranking Korvaash guards rounded on him. "Move, inferior being! We must close up the hatch!" Without waiting for a response, he jabbed Aelador with his implanted neurolash.

Aelador gasped as the jag of unendurable pain shot through his nervous system and fell forward into the arms of one of the other humans—it was Turiel—and suddenly something seemed to lift from him, leaving nothing except the certain knowledge of what he must do, a certitude marred only by what he knew would happen to Turiel and the others after he did it. Their eyes met and Turiel nodded his head very slightly. All the understanding and forgiveness that the universe could hold flowed between them, wordlessly.

Aelador stood up on the lip of the hatch—the guards were too startled to react—and met the eyes of the other humans for an instant, with an odd little smile. Then, slowly, he toppled over backwards and fell toward the glowing mass of wiring below.

With a crackling roar and a blinding, spark-showering flash, he vanished, and the chamber filled with the stench of burned meat. And electrical systems began to die.

"Colonel!" Farrell sounded puzzled. "Something's happened to the incoming missiles. There are just as many of them, but it's as if their fire control has suddenly become a lot less effective."

DiFalco could see it himself from the readouts. Their point-defense lasers no longer had precisely coordinated time-on-target salvos to deal with, just straggling individual missiles they could easily handle.

"Yes," he said slowly. "They must have had some kind of major systems failure on that station—a big short-out or something. God knows why; we're not even hitting them yet." He turned his attention to other matters. "Guess we'll never know."

Retrofiring steadily, the cruisers matched orbits with the station. The three remaining Korvaash frigates, after the tactical datanet they had shared with the station had become useless, had been sent outward on an intercept course which had ended in their deaths in a storm of fusion warheads.

And now the Terrans drew close enough to the station for energy weapons to come into play. First lasers—they were the longest-ranged, but their effectiveness was downgraded by ablative and reflective armor materials, as well as by various countermeasures. Then, as the range closed still further, the plasma guns opened up, bringing deuterium bullets to near-fusion heat with enfilading lasers and electromagnetically expelling the resulting bolts of plasma. The plasma's unavoidable dissipation limited the weapon to short ranges—but within those ranges it was devastating. And, DiFalco thought, it produced a properly-cinematic blinding flash, unlike the laser beams which were invisible in vacuum and only faintly visible in the clouds of vaporizing ablative armor that they themselves created.