Timeweb Trilogy Omnibus (62 page)

“Like royalty,” Dux said. “I’ve been using every facility. They make you feel like a prince here.”

“That is our custom,” Eshaz said. “We are a simple people, but we understand the needs of other races, such as your own.”

“When can we leave?” Acey asked. “I know. Soon, soon.”

“You are anxious to continue your adventures, I see,” Eshaz said. “I can understand that, and I apologize for not being able to spend more time with you. But that will change one day.” He hesitated, as if avoiding the annoying word “soon,” then said to Acey, “It seems odd for a Human not to enjoy the comforts we offer. Are you ascetic for religious reasons? You follow the Way of Jainuddah, perhaps?”

In a sharp tone, Acey responded, “I’m not sure what you mean, but I don’t have any religion. I just do what feels best to me.”

“Ah yes, Human viscerality,” the Tulyan said, nodding. He paused. Then: “I am saddened to inform you that four merchant prince planets, including the capital world of Timian One, have been destroyed by the Mutatis. As a result, Doge Lorenzo has set up a new base of operations on Canopa, where he is presently engaged in warfare against Noah’s Guardians.” For security reasons, Eshaz did not tell them exactly how he and the Council of Elders had learned all of this, using their Timeweb connections.

“Timian One is gone?” Dux said. “I can’t believe it.”

“Along with Plevin Four, Earth, and Mars.”

“Mars!” Acey said, leaning forward and accidentally knocking his tea over. “Dux and I saw what was left of it!” Acey sopped up tea with a napkin while relating how they had been aboard a podship that passed by the debris field, and the horrors that the passengers saw.

“We thought a huge meteor must have struck the planet,” Dux said.

“No meteor,” Eshaz said. “The Mutatis have a terrible weapon.” He went on to tell the boys what he knew about Noah’s involvement and the pod-killer sensor-guns he caused to be set up on pod stations orbiting all merchant prince planets, weapons that were designed to blast podships the minute they arrived from space, since they might contain Mutati weapons. Then he added, “Unfortunately, Noah is now a prisoner of the Doge.”

“He sacrificed himself for the merchant princes, and that’s how they reward him?” Acey said. “What kind of gratitude is that?”

“The ways of your race are most peculiar,” Eshaz said. “Despite Noah’s bravery, Doge Lorenzo and Francella Watanabe are speaking against him, blaming the cutoff of podship travel on him. They don’t provide details or reasons, only the false assertion that it is the fault of Noah and his Guardians, and they will be punished for their misdeeds.”

“They’re lying!” Acey exclaimed.

“Of course they are,” Eshaz said. “It is one of the things Humans do best. The truth is, Noah Watanabe is a most remarkable man, rare among the galactic races.”

“We need to get back and help him,” Dux said.

“But we cannot get to Canopa anymore,” Eshaz said, “or to any other merchant prince planet.”

“That puts a crimp in our travel plans,” Dux said.

Looking out the window of the private dining room, watching the cosmic mists swirling around the Tulyan Starcloud, Eshaz said, “Podships aren’t going to Human or Mutati worlds anymore. After they were attacked at Canopa, the creatures started avoiding potential war zones.”

“The podships made that decision?” Dux asked, his eyes open wide. “A boycott?”

Eshaz hesitated, for he knew Parviis controlled the vast majority of podships and must have made the decision themselves. He just nodded, then pointed to the nearby pod station, in synchronous orbit over the starcloud. “For what it’s worth to you, we can still travel throughout the rest of the galaxy.”

“I’ve always suspected that podships are smarter than people say,” Dux said, “that they’re not really big dumb animals.”

“I am not permitted to say much about them outside the Council Chamber. I will tell you this, however, my young friends. The Tulyan people have had a relationship with the Aopoddae going back for more years than you can imagine. In modern times our connection with that race has been much more limited than in the past, but I hope to change that one day.”

Deep in thought, trying to imagine what the Tulyan was not telling him, Dux nodded, and gazed out the window of the Visitor’s Center. The young man watched a podship leave the pod station. As the spacecraft accelerated, it became a flash of light that shifted from pale to brilliant green, like an emerald comet. Then it was gone, vanishing into the black void of the cosmos.

Chapter Five

As Human beings, we are often not proficient at considering the consequences of our actions. Rather, we plunge forward carelessly, taking the path of least resistance. Short-term pleasure. But for the sake of our children and grandchildren, we need to look farther ahead than the stubby tips of our noses.

—Noah Watanabe,
Eco-Didactics

With his ears attuned to every noise, Noah heard footsteps. Boots, but he could not recognize the stride, the one foot scuffing. Maybe it was another doctor coming to examine his condition. He hated them for probing him every few hours, taking cell and blood samples, hooking him up to machines.

For three days Noah Watanabe and Anton Glavine had been incarcerated at Max One, believed to be the highest-security prison on Canopa. They were in individual cells on separate floors, preventing the men from communicating with one another. The facility, like the notorious Gaol of Brimrock that had been destroyed with Timian One, fronted a broad canal, and had been built around the same time, during the reign of Lorenzo’s father.

To Noah it seemed ancient, with green-and-black grime and mold on the stones, and lingering, unpleasant odors. Max One had an ugly reputation during the decades it had been operating, with stories of tortured and murdered prisoners. His father, Prince Saito, had always said they were only unsubstantiated rumors, but looking around his own cell and walking the rock-lined corridors whenever he was escorted by guards, Noah sensed that bad things had taken place here, and might be occurring at that very moment.

On the third night he heard voices down the corridor, the authoritative tones of guards and the whimpering pleas of a prisoner, followed by an ugly sounding thump. Then footsteps again, and the dragging of a heavy object, probably a body. The noises receded, leaving Noah with his own troubled thoughts.

The fortresslike building echoed with emptiness. The muscular, red-haired man climbed on top of a chair and looked out a high window at the canal. Through the soft orange glow of electronic containment bars, he saw the lights of the Doge’s military encampment on the opposite shore, casting reflections across the water. Even at this late hour, soldiers moved around over there, tending to their various tasks.

Any fears Noah had were diminished by the fact that he now seemed impervious to physical harm. In one of his most optimistic projections, he only had to wait, and eventually he would discover a way to gain his freedom. His enemies could not kill him. Or, he didn’t
think
they could. Certainly, every method had not yet been attempted. Not even close. He shuddered at the thought of what the Doge’s torturers might do to him, the unspeakable suffering they might inflict on him as they performed cruel tests to see how much he could endure. He might be immortal, but apparently that did not come with invulnerability to physical suffering. He remembered only too well the intense, searing pain of the puissant blast to his chest when his own sister shot him.

Through it all, Noah at least had an avenue of escape into the paranormal realm, and he hoped to perfect that ability enough to endure even the most terrible atrocities that his torturers might visit upon him. Noah was able to break away mentally for a few moments at a time, and sometimes longer, to take what he called “timetrance” excursions into the web. But the ability was erratic and unpredictable.

On an earlier excursion into Timeweb, Noah had been able to remote-pilot podships, one at a time. But when he attempted to do the same thing from the prison cell, his power proved unreliable. Like the tendrils of a plant, his mind would reach out into the cosmos, questing, trying to secure itself to a podship. Sometimes he could do it, though for only a few moments before the living vessel jerked away and fled into space. On other occasions he could not even touch one of the vessels. Such attempts disappointed him, because he thought he’d been making progress at unraveling the mysteries of the alternate dimension. But like a playful lover, Timeweb seemed to withdraw and elude him whenever it felt like it, dancing away and then returning, always enticing him, while remaining out of reach.

If only he could remotely control the podships on a regular basis, even one of them at a time, he might find a way of going after the Mutati torpedo weapons. But previous visions had shown him that there were hundreds of the super-bombs in space, surrounding the Merchant Prince Alliance. Noah would need to make a concerted, methodical effort, and he didn’t have anywhere near the capability necessary to accomplish that yet. He also realized that even if he found a way of destroying the super-weapons, that wouldn’t solve the underlying problem—the ability of the Mutatis to create more of the devices. He couldn’t just treat the symptom of the disease. It went much deeper than that.

Despite Noah’s frustrations, his ephemeral sojourns into the mysterious realm gave him something he could look forward to. Curiously, some of the paranormal occurrences, even if they lasted for only a few seconds, seemed to take much longer, like complex dreams that were experienced in an instant. But it was not always that way, judging by his own wristchron, which his jailers had allowed him to keep. Sometimes it was exactly the opposite, as longer trips seemed to pass in an instant, and an hour became five seconds. It was as if Timeweb, the teasing lover, was not allowing him to figure out patterns, not permitting him to exploit it.

Noah steeled himself as he heard the footsteps getting closer, and he vowed to outlive this prison, all of its wardens, and all of its doges. He would find a way to survive and live a full, rewarding life, a contributing life.
Life.
Such an unpredictable force, even in his own case, with his cellular system enhanced.

What did his tormenters want of him this time? Had they thought of some new experiment to conduct, yet another painful intrusion? He took a deep, shuddering breath. They weren’t giving him enough time to sleep, but he had already noticed a diminishing need for rest, beginning right after Eshaz connected him to Timeweb and gave him the miraculous cure.

Now a new guard appeared on the other side of the containment field, with his features fogged slightly by a glitch in the electronic barrier. He fiddled with the black field-control box on his waist, cursing the trouble he was having with it.

Finally the energy field fizzled and popped, then went down entirely in a crackle and flash of orange.

Noah sprang into the corridor and tackled the guard before he could grab a weapon, slamming him to the floor. Noah was powerfully built, and had been doing daily exercises in his cell, trying to stay as active and strong as possible. The guard was no match for him. With one punch to the jaw, Noah knocked him unconscious.

Just as he was removing the guard’s uniform, however, he heard a noise and reached for the man’s gun. Before he could unholster it, a bolt of yellow light knocked the weapon away.

Doge Lorenzo emerged from a side passageway, with half a dozen Red Beret soldiers. One of them fired a stun dart at Noah, hitting him in the shoulder and dropping him hard to the stone floor.

“We’ve been observing you,” Lorenzo said. “Taking bets on what you would do. I won, of course.”

Chapter Six

Truly great acts are never transitory. They last into eternity.

—Master Noah Watanabe

It had been a hard day of supervising digging operations in the deep tunnels of the subterranean Guardian base, and Giovanni Nehr felt the leaden weight of fatigue. He still wore the armored, machinelike shell that had been custom-fitted to his body by his robot companions, but it now had green-and-brown colors, like the uniforms of Noah’s Guardians. All of the fighters under Thinker’s command sported such colors on their bodies now. Gio remained the only Human directly under the command of the robot leader, although he was beginning to work more closely with other Humans all the time.

Subi Danvar greeted Gio in the main cavern, near one of the makeshift barracks. “You want to grab a beer?” the portly adjutant asked. He grinned. “You’re the only ‘machine’ who will drink with me.”

“I was going to take a shower, but what the hell. That can wait, eh?” Gio patted Subi on the back, and they trudged off toward the drinking chamber that the Guardians had named the Brew Room.

The bar inside the dimly lit space was a conversation piece in and of itself. The elongated, silvery shell of a decommissioned Digger machine sat on huge treads that were now bar seats on two sides, fitted with dirty pillows and mattresses to ease the discomforts that even heavy drinking could not mask. Thinker had devised a mechanized method of serving drinks, with glasses of beer popping out of openings all along the hull of the machine onto little platforms that formed tables in front of each seat.

As the two men climbed on a tread and sat down, Gio felt he was making good progress toward getting close to Danvar, who had taken charge of the Guardians in Noah’s absence. Already Gio’s strong personality had gained him an important position in charge of ongoing construction activities at the base, and he expected further personal gains. That goal was much easier to achieve now that he had gotten rid of those two troublesome boys, Acey and Dux, by drugging them and dispatching them into space. He smiled, thinking about the confusion they must have felt upon waking up inside a cargo box in some distant star system, and not knowing who did it to them … although they must have had some suspicion. No matter, they were far away now and couldn’t get back anyway, because podship travel had been shut down.