Timeweb Trilogy Omnibus (40 page)

By the time Dux returned, the crew was excited and smiling. They had the engine running, and were patting Acey on the back.

Coming over to Dux, Mac Golden said, “Your cousin asked just the right questions to get the mechanics thinking along the proper lines.”

“I was afraid he’d ruin something,” Dux said, glancing at the tough-looking little Hibbil.

“Welcome to the
Avelo
,” Mac said, reaching up and shaking Dux’s hand energetically.

When they were underway in space, Dux and Acey met the whole crew, an eclectic group of androids, Humans, and aliens who followed treasure maps, tips, and hunches all over the galaxy. They looked like a rough-and-tumble bunch, but took a liking to the young men.

Captain Yuell said to them, “You each get half shares to start, with the opportunity of working your way up.”

“That’s great, sir,” Acey said. “You can count on us. We can do men’s work, you’ll see.”

“We specialize in searching for merchant shipwrecks,” the captain said. “But it takes more than maps.”

“Well if you’re looking for luck,” Acey said, “I can provide that.”

“Luck has a way of changing around here,” Mac Golden said. “Don’t get too full of yourself. Not yet.”

Acey’s face reddened, and he said, “Yes, sir. Sorry.…”

The young men found themselves on a voyage unlike anything they had ever imagined, bound for unknown parts, with undiscovered adventures and treasures awaiting them.

Chapter Fifty-Seven

If not for the magic of perception,

Nothing would exist.

It is the spark of the universe.

-—Parvii Inspiration

Like a visitor to a municipal aquarium, the woman stood in front of a large clearglax plate, gazing out at the marine shapes swimming in the water, but it was murky out there and she was having some difficulty discerning what she was seeing.

Nothing was as it seemed here. This was not an aquarium, and she was not a full-sized human. Tesh Kori felt dampness in the air, and pulled her coat tighter around her shivering body. Back at the grid-plane, Noah still had not returned to consciousness after almost two days. She’d been worrying about him when she went to the window wall, and had tried to calm herself by looking out into the flowing river. But it was having the opposite, disturbing effect on her. She tried to peer deeper into the water.

On her right, she heard her companions working to open a stone door that none of them had noticed before, in what had appeared to be a solid rock wall. That morning, Anton had discovered the almost unnoticeable door, and now they were using cutting tools on it.

Standing at what looked like a wall of water, she’d been thinking about perception, and the old Parvii saying about it being the spark of the universe. She wondered, as she had before, what the architect of that aphorism had in mind when he or she came up with it. Didn’t perception extend to all of the senses, and not just to what you could see? Yes, of course, and at the moment she considered her various known senses and one that was not so easy to identify, lying just beneath the surface of her consciousness. Humans and their tiny Parvii cousins called it the sixth sense, but other races had a different number for it, since they had more or less senses. But the various sentient races were in universal agreement: this level of awareness existed.

Through the clear plates, Tesh saw frothing out in the river, and large, blurry shapes swimming toward her and then veering off to one side or the other, getting enticingly close to the glax without allowing her to see what they were. She touched the thick window wall, the coolness of it, and frowned.

There is danger here
, she thought. And she was about to call for her companions when she heard Anton shout.

“Tesh! Get over here!” He stood in an open doorway, where there had been none before. The others were behind him, moving around inside another chamber. Their voices were murmurous, agitated.

Hurrying over there, she saw an additional chamber fronting the river. While smaller than the main chamber, it had a window wall as high as the other one. She went inside, and her nostrils wrinkled as she picked up a revolting stench.

Death.

In one corner, she saw the blackened, charred bodies of Humans jammed up against the rock wall—men and women who seemed to have been trying to escape but had no way out. She noted burned, bloody Guardian uniforms on some of them, while the clothing of others, and most of their skin, had been burned off. The victims had pitted eye sockets, seared-off hair, and scorch marks on their melted, horribly burned faces.

“This explains where thirty of the missing Guardians are,” Dr. Bichette said.

Anton shone a flashbeam on the walls, went around and rubbed his hands over the surfaces, checking them. “But what could have killed these people?” he asked. “We came through the only door, and it was sealed from the inside.”

“A locked-door mystery,” Eshaz said. His bronze-scaled face, usually taciturn, showed concern now, in the downturn of the reptilian snout and the nervous gaze of the slitted eyes. “I don’t like it in here.”

“This was supposed to be a safe room,” Anton said, “where they could get away from attackers. I suspect the other Guardians are around here somewhere, too, in additional safe rooms, or maybe up on the surface. They were trying to get away from something.”

“And it got them anyway,” Bichette said. “I think Eshaz is right. This place gives me the creeps. Let’s go.”

“I was just about to call for all of you,” Tesh said, as the group moved toward the door. She pointed at the window wall and the blurry, swimming shapes out in the current. They had moved over to this chamber now and were continuing their strange water dance, getting closer and closer without revealing details of their features. They were large, the size of canopan sharks or dolphins.

Something flashed in the water, but for only a second, a glint of color. Red.

“Hurry,” Eshaz said, pushing his Human companions toward the door. “Those are hydromutatis, swimming shapeshifters. They’re still here from the time when this planet was controlled by the Mutati Kingdom.”

As they reached the grid plane and boarded, Eshaz added, “I have heard of worlds with large bodies of water, where all of the hydromutatis could not be killed off by the Humans who took over.”

“I’ve heard the same,” Tesh said. “Hydromutatis are much more elusive than terramutatis or aeromutatis, and are very difficult to hunt down.”

Eshaz nodded his scaly bronze head. The grid-plane shook as he boarded, from his great weight.

“But the hydromutatis are sealed off from the chambers,” Anton said. “They couldn’t have killed the Guardians.”

“The creatures are rumored to have telepathic powers,” Eshaz said. “They are also called Seatels.”

As Tesh took a seat and watched Subi Danvar work the controls, she felt a tingle in her mind, and heard what sounded like pounding against the walls of the bunker, like a heavy surf slamming into a bulkhead. Or like Diggers burrowing their way through rock and dirt.

She heard a mechanical whine as Subi tried to start the engines. But they didn’t catch. At the window wall, she saw scores of Seatels, their features clearly visible now, with smoldering red eyes and undersized heads.

Suddenly, a lance of light from one of the Seatels hit the grid-plane and fried the engines, so that they would not start.…

Chapter Fifty-Eight

From birth to death, life is a game of chance.

—Old Sirikan Saying

Even Doge Lorenzo del Velli, the richest and most powerful Human in the galaxy, liked to keep a little extra spending money around. He was not certain exactly why he felt the need to carry liras around with him in the pockets of his royal robe, but he did anyway. Perhaps just to reassure himself that the assets were available if he ever needed them, an eventuality that would require catastrophic changes in his life. He would have to lose his magnificent palazzo, all of his corporate holdings, and find himself tossed out in the street. All utterly impossible, but he felt helpless to avoid the feelings, the chronic fear.

This theory carried through the rest of his life. In secret places all over the galaxy, he had stashed his treasures, culled from the legitimate and illegitimate profits of his business and governmental enterprises. This went far beyond liras, although he had plenty of those in various places. Of critical importance, he didn’t want to depend on the solvency of the merchant prince economy. To protect against that, he owned, among other things, some of the largest and most valuable gemstones in all of creation. This included the famous Veldic Saphostone, which disappeared from the Intergalactic Museum one day and found its way—through a circuitous path—to him.

The men who had taken it for him had been put to death. Now no one knew his little secret.

Each morning, as he was doing now, Lorenzo strolled through his ornamental Galeng gardens, passed a guard station, and entered a scaled-down version of his Palazzo Magnifico that had the same number of rooms and the same configuration, but with much smaller dimensions. He rather liked his “Palazzito” for its coziness, but it was not a suitable place for contemplation, or a place to be alone. It was, instead, where he practiced what he most enjoyed doing.

Gambling at the most sophisticated gaming tables in the galaxy.

The first to arrive in his private casino, the Doge went from machine to machine in the Blue Chamber, activating the programs, seeing how well he could do at the mechanical games of chance. His favorite, where he stood the longest this morning, was a simulated suicide machine, called Spheres. He didn’t have to put money or chips in it, because he owned the establishment. After a scanner identified him, he could play it to his heart’s content.

By voice command, he selected the means of “death” that he preferred, and instantly the ominous hologram of a Mutati with a huge handgun appeared on one side of him, with the weapon pointed at his head.

Next, he specified the amount of his wager, which in reality wasn’t anything at all. But he provided a number anyway, and the screen in front of him filled with hundreds of tiny spheres, each with a different color and number on them. He had only two minutes. With a foot pedal, he directed the motion of the balls, trying to balance them on a narrow bar.

In only a minute, he had seven spheres lined up, and his score appeared on the screen: 17,252. It had to be higher than the last time he played the game, or the holo shapeshifter would fire, and a holo of blood would be all over his head and clothing.

The last time he played, his score was 17,251, and he liked to play it close, only increasing by one point at a time. This was the most risky way to play, dancing on the edge of the proverbial sword, but it energized him.

Game after game, he increased by one point, without fail. He became aware of a crowd of men and women streaming into the chamber around him, the royal court. They cheered him on and chanted his name. He liked that, playing the hero. One day, he might even use the threat of a real Mutati with a weapon, instead of a hologram.

Presently, Francella came in and sat by him. She wore a low-cut black lace dress, with a long red fall of hair cascading over her shoulders.

Only she and Lorenzo knew that he could not lose here, not in his own casino. If he didn’t measure up at any game that involved skill or if a game of chance did not go his way, the machine compensated, and he won anyway. It did not work that way for the other players, and they lost a lot of money on a regular basis. But as members of the Doge’s royal court, they had no choice. If they wanted to remain in his favor, they needed to participate in what Lorenzo called “friendly exchanges.”

Actually, this meant transferring their funds to the casino, and ultimately into one of the Doge’s secret stashes. It was an additional source of income for him, one of many.

And he needed all he could get, he thought, as he looked into Francella’s dark brown eyes. She was an expensive mistress.

Chapter Fifty-Nine

For as long as there has been warfare, there has been subterfuge. It can be the key to victory.

—Mutati military handbook

Just above the hazy atmospheric envelope of Plevin Four, a podship emerged from space in a burst of translucent green light, having traveled the faster-than-light podways known to the sentient space travelers. It settled into a docking station at the little-used pod station.

A cargo hold opened like a mouth in the side of the podship, and a long black transport ship slipped out into the docking bay, followed by what looked like a red-and-gold merchant schooner.

But this vessel was not that at all.

The Mutati outrider at the controls taxied out into space, and went through the detailed checklist he had learned at the training camp on Dij, just prior to its destruction. He had prepared carefully for this moment, and would only get one opportunity to make good.

Today my life and death meet
, he thought, feeling supreme joy at the prospect of his final journey to heaven.

This Demolio suicide mission had been dispatched prior to the attack against the factory by a pair of Human escapees from a Mutati prison moon. The vessel had no long-range communication device aboard, so the pilot didn’t know what had happened. He also could not be called back by the Zultan and diverted to a more significant planet. The timing of the attack had been predetermined, and he had waited in deep space for the moment to arrive.

The pilot looked forward to his own glorious death, and to his ascension into heaven. It would be wonderful, but in a way he wished he might have gone on the Demolio mission later. In recent weeks he’d been hearing intriguing rumors of an instantaneous cross-galactic communication system under development by the Mutati Kingdom. Everyone was curious about how it worked, and how it would enhance the war effort.

But it all seemed like another universe to him, another life. The fate of the galactic communication system was just one of many loose ends he had left behind, along with family, friends, and his career as a construction superintendent.