Timeweb Trilogy Omnibus (117 page)

Hari had Hibbil and Adurian prisoners in the cargo hold, all of them soldiers. For a reason they refused to divulge, they had landed a small military force on his own planet of Dij. The Emir’s fighters had overcome them, killing most and taking the rest into custody, along with their two unusual ships. His own demented father had authorized the breeding of what were known as “lab-pods,” but these two spacecraft were of a higher order. They actually had Hibbil nav-systems that worked quite well, in sharp contrast with those of the Zultan.

The prisoners were members of the “HibAdu Coalition.” One of them had carried a document fragment bearing the name of that military force, inscribed on a remnant of papers the soldiers had tried to destroy, along with all electronic records. But the salvaged document and other articles found with the soldiers had only succeeded in generating more questions, which none of the captives would answer.

Historically, Hibbils were allies of Humans, while Adurians had a similar relationship with Mutatis. And, since Humans and Mutatis had been the archenemies of one another since time immemorial, everyone had assumed that Hibbils and Adurians should be the same. Perhaps it was only a splinter group that had landed on Hari’s planet, but he sensed it might be something much more significant, and dangerous. The well-armed soldiers had carried the sophisticated weaponry and communications equipment of a much larger, well-financed force. They appeared to have been on a reconnaissance mission.

They call themselves HibAdus
, Hari thought as he watched the Mutati pilot seated ahead of him, operating the touch-panel controls of the ship.
Very strange.

Perhaps the Tulyans—with their ability to determine truth or falsehood through physical contact—could determine who his prisoners really were. And Hari had an additional motive for approaching the reptilians in their legendary starcloud. They were rumored to be close to Noah Watanabe and other Human leaders of the Merchant Prince Alliance. Perhaps the Tulyan Council of Elders could broker a peace agreement between the warring MPA and the Mutati Kingdom, ending the insane, ages-old hostilities between the two races. No one could even recall why they had been battling for so long, and Hari had always believed that there should be some way of bringing it all to a peaceful end. This had put him in direct conflict with his stubborn father, but now—after the unthinkable act Hari had committed—perhaps the Humans would believe him. If necessary, he would even submit himself to the truthing touch of the Tulyans.

At the sound of the cockpit door sliding open behind him, Hari turned to exchange smiles with his girlfriend, Parais d’Olor. While Hari and the pilot (like most other shapeshifters) were terramutatis who walked, she was an aeromutati, able to spread her wings and soar into the air, should she ever desire to do so. Just before departing on the trip with him, she had metamorphosed into the guise of a colorful Alty peacock, a very large bird with a red-and-gold body and black, silver-tipped wings that were now tucked tightly against her body. In the confinement of the lab-pod, she got around by walking, and from her own morphology she had developed a way of walking smoothly on her two bird legs, instead of hopping around in the customary avian fashion.

Behind her stood Yerto Bhaleen, a career military officer who held the rank of Kajor in the Mutati High Command. A small, muscular terramutati with the standard complement of three slender arms and six stout legs, he was a four-star Kajor, just beneath the highest of ranks. Like Hari, he had refused any higher designation, since his own commanders had died in the tragic loss of Paradij, the horrific collateral damage involved in the assassination of the Zultan.

“We should be there soon, My Emir,” Bhaleen said. “All is in readiness.”

“Very good,” Hari said.

The officer moved back a couple of paces and stood rigidly, awaiting any further commands.

Glancing at Parais, the Mutati leader said, “You can’t wait to fly on your own, can you? Perhaps after we arrive the Tulyans will permit you to fly around their starcloud.”

“Only if we gain their trust,” she suggested.

Rubbing up against his side, she smiled gently at him. Her lovely facial features were fleshy, with a small beak and oversized brown eyes that were totally without guile. “But I don’t need to fly,” she said. “Wherever you are is where I want to be.”

Hari adored her. Without Parais’ guidance and inspiration, he would not be able to go on with his life, and with the new, very ambitious purpose he had undertaken. If anyone deserved to lead the Mutati people, it was her, and not him. But the shapeshifter race was very traditional, and Hari had the right of ascendancy by birthright, no matter the terrible thing he had done to accelerate the process.

It had been an act of violence that went terribly wrong in the trajectory calculation of a planet-busting Demolio torpedo. Aimed at a moon his father was visiting, the missile went off course and destroyed the Mutati homeworld of Paradij instead, wiping out billions of Hari’s own people. The orbiting moon and the mad Zultan Abal Meshdi had been annihilated in the cataclysms as well, but that had been little solace. Hari could hardly bear to think of the scale of the tragedy.

Not yet having admitted to the Mutati people what he did, or the reason, Hari carried a terrible burden of guilt on his shoulders. At Parais’s encouragement, he continued to lead the shapeshifter race, but he insisted on doing it as Emir, a princely governor’s designation, rather than the customary Zultan title his father and most predecessors had held. It was Hari’s way of saying privately that he did not yet deserve the higher title, that he had not earned it, and perhaps he never would.

Chapter Three

After we defeated the Parviis, the Eye of the Swarm withdrew his survivors, taking more than 100,000 podships they control to the remote Parvii Fold. Earlier, he had already cut off regularly scheduled podship travel to Human and Mutati worlds, and now he’s done the same for the rest of the galaxy. A few Parvii pilots who are out of contact with their leader are continuing routes in non-Human or Mutati sectors, but that won’t last long. In addition, there are disturbing reports of laboratory-bred pods out in the galaxy.

—Excerpts from confidential report to the Tulyan Council of Elders

From the window of a small office suspended inside the immense building, Jacopo Nehr looked down on his manufacturing and assembly lines as they produced new machine components and robots for export. He heard the steady drone of machinery, and felt the vibrations of manufacturing beneath his feet. This plant, located on one of the Hibbil Cluster Worlds, was one of many industrial facilities that Nehr owned around the galaxy.

But to his dismay, he was not there voluntarily. He cursed and smashed the side of his fist against the plax window. It flexed, but did not break.

Down on the factory floor he saw a scruffy, silver little robot engaged in oddly animated conversations with subordinate workbots of varying sizes and designs. The little one’s name was Ipsy, an odd mechanical runt who had an officious, irritating personality. He certainly grated on Jacopo, and other sentient robots took offense to him at times as well, as they seemed to be doing at the moment. Jacopo had tried to teach him personal interaction and management skills, but Ipsy had been resistant to learning them.

Now, Ipsy pushed another robot in the chest, knocking him backward against others. Three more of them tumbled over like dominoes. Jacopo had seen this mechanical emotionalism and physicality before, and always Ipsy won out. Someone had programmed him to be quite aggressive.

Despite his gruff methods, the little guy had taken charge of the facility, causing it to hum at high efficiency, producing more robots and machine parts than ever before. Jacopo knew where some of the products were being shipped around the galaxy, but not all of them. He only knew for certain that business was booming. Ipsy didn’t seem to know all of the end-user details either, or he was keeping the information to himself. As a large part of this factory’s business, it produced electronic instruments and control panels—components that could be used for a variety of purposes.

Unfortunately, the facility was making money Jacopo could not spend. The Hibbils allowed him access to heavily edited financial reports, but he couldn’t get his hands on his share of the funds themselves, and he was not allowed access to any form of transportation. The factory complex was ringed with an electronic containment field that penned him in. The furry little bastards even forced him to live in a rudimentary apartment on the grounds, a stunted, boxlike abode that had been designed for one of
them
, not for a Human being.

Each day Nehr woke up in a foul mood, then spent much of his time dithering around the factory, hoping something would change, that the Hibbils who had essentially imprisoned him there more than a week ago would set him free and allow him to return to Canopa. But he saw no sign of that happening.

He hadn’t seen any fellow Humans at all since being forced to fly across the galaxy on a strange podship, one that was unlike any other he’d ever seen. From Ipsy he’d learned it was a craft that had been bred in a laboratory, and guided by a Hibbil navigation system. The thought of an artificial podship boggled his mind, not easily done to an inventor and businessman of his stature. One of the leading merchant princes in the Alliance, Jacopo Nehr had discovered the nehrcom cross-space communication system, and had built an impressive multi-planet business empire around that connective tissue. Before falling out of favor with the princes, he had even been appointed Supreme General of the Merchant Prince Armed Forces—the primary Human military force.

Down on the floor, Ipsy was getting increasingly aggressive, and he pushed other workbots out of his way as they pressed in around him.

Jacopo hardly cared. Ipsy would get his way, as always. The merchant prince was more concerned about being held prisoner in his own factory complex, with no one to talk to except the robots that ran the facility. Why was he being treated this way? It seemed like a cruel joke, but he wasn’t laughing.

To make it even more perplexing, a Hibbil had done this to him, and not just any furball, either. It had been Pimyt, the Royal Attaché to Lorenzo del Velli, former Doge of the Alliance. Pimyt was so trusted that for a time he had even been appointed regent of the entire multi-planet empire, until the princes could agree on the selection of a new doge—the prince of all princes. Nehr had suspected for some time that Pimyt was involved in war profiteering, but he’d found no evidence of it, and had been unable to determine exactly what the attaché wanted with him.

He’d been able to come up with a pretty good guess, though, one that made sense the more he thought about it.
Leverage
. Holding him hostage on the Hibbil Cluster Worlds in order to force his powerful daughter, Nirella, to cooperate. She was not only married to Doge Anton del Velli; she was Supreme General of the Merchant Prince Armed Forces, having succeeded her own father in that position.

Nehr wondered if he would ever see her again, or his wife, Lady Amila. His mood sank even more, as he realized that the Hibbils could just keep him there for the rest of his life, and maintain the leverage they wanted. But Hibbils were supposed to be allies of Humans. Why would they do this? It went beyond war profiteering. Nehr didn’t want to imagine how far beyond.

Noticing that the altercation down on the production floor had escalated, he sighed. Robots were streaming toward Ipsy, leaving their work posts, slowing down the operation. It looked like Jacopo would have to intervene this time.

Taking a lift down to the main floor, he found hundreds of robotic workers surrounding Ipsy, glaring at him with orange visual sensors that were much brighter than usual and shouting at him in a din of mechanical voices. Jacopo pushed forward through their midst. Noticing him, the robots grew quieter, but he heard them whispering around him, a peculiar and disturbing mechanical hum.

“I want all of you to calm down and return to work!” Jacopo shouted, raising his arms in the air.

The robots grew completely quiet, each one just staring at him. But in the multicolored, blinking lights around their face plates and their bright orange, ember-like visual sensors, he saw that Ipsy’s supervision methods had triggered their anger programs to a much higher level than Jacopo had ever seen. They were operating in concert, too. Like a mob or a pack.

A wave of fear passed through him, as he saw the blinking-light patterns intensify, and the ember eyes burn even brighter. Under a strict code of honor programmed into all robots created by Humans (or stemming from those creations), robots were not supposed to harm Humans. But since his incarceration, Jacopo had grown increasingly concerned about the factory robots, since many of them were of unfamiliar designs and didn’t always behave according to known industrial parameters. Some of their personalities seemed oddly unpredictable, and he had decided that this must be because they had been manufactured by the Hibbils, under standards that were not known to Humans. The Hibbils had long manufactured their own robots, but until recently Jacopo thought he knew all of the basic designs, since he had often worked in concert with them on the development and manufacture of sentient machines. Now, something had changed.

“We demand that you get rid of Ipsy,” one of the robots howled in a tinny voice.

“Yes!” said another. “He goes, or we stop work!”

“Don’t be silly,” Jacopo said. “Robots can’t go on strike. Now stop this foolishness and get back to work immediately.”

The robots advanced on Jacopo, their face-plate lights blinking furiously, their eyes afire. He felt their hard bodies press around them, and it hurt. Then he heard Ipsy shout in his officious mechanical voice, telling them to clear away. The little mechanical man managed to reach Jacopo’s side, but now the other robots pressed hard around both of them.

Jacopo panicked as he felt them crushing him, and he couldn’t breathe. He cried out in pain and rage as they crushed his bones. Broken and smashed, the inventor slumped in the midst of the hard metalloy bodies around him.