Timeweb Trilogy Omnibus (71 page)

In response, Noah gazed at her with calculated, loveless disdain.

Under different circumstances he might have been the owner of his father’s corporation and all of its operations, including this one. In an odd image, he tried to imagine what it might be like to be himself, strolling into the laboratory, looking at himself on this examination table. But the hardness of the table against his backside, along with the people looking at him like a bug under a microscope, reminded Noah only too harshly that he had no degree of control over the situation. Not in a physical sense, anyway.

But he still had his mind.

In this facility and in the prison before that, Noah had been forced to undergo rigorous medical examinations, with the doctors paying close attention to the healed gun wound in the center of his chest and his regenerated left foot—wounds that showed no easily visible scars or signs of internal injury. He wondered what was on the agenda for today, and did not have long to wait for his answer.

Without warning, he saw Francella shoved Bichette out of the way. “This is going too slowly for me,” she snapped. “Give me a tray of surgical tools!” She held her hand out, but the machinery did not respond.

“If you will just return to your seat, we can proceed,” Bichette said. “You must have faith in my abilities. I know this patient well, and the Doge has entrusted him to my care.”

“Like hell! Lorenzo has placed him in my care, not yours. You work for me, you dolt, and you will do as I say.” The fingers of her extended hand twitched, as if giving hand signals to the servomachines, telling them to do her bidding.

“I have authorization from the Doge to perform complete medical examinations,” the doctor insisted. “You must let me proceed.”

She arched her shaved eyebrows in displeasure. “How dare you act as if I am interfering?”

Narrowing his eyes, he said, “That is not my intent. I’m sure we can work this out.”

“I’m your boss, you fool. I own this facility, and Lorenzo put me in charge of the investigation. Don’t you understand that?”

“But the Doge sent me a telebeam message yesterday afternoon, telling me how important my work with Noah is. He thought I might be on the verge of a momentous medical breakthrough, and that. .

“He should not have communicated with you directly! I have an agreement with Lorenzo that all decisions concerning the fate of this”—she nudged Noah roughly in the side—”are up to me.”

“With all due respect, Ms. Watanabe, you don’t know what you’re saying. You’re too close to the situation, since it involves your brother, and you need to take a step back. Granted, you
own
this medical facility, but you don’t know how to run every aspect of it. Prince Saito understood that, and he delegated important tasks.” He glanced at Noah. “This is an important task.”

“You think I don’t know that? You say my judgment is impaired because
I’m
too close to the situation? What about you? I think you like my brother, and you’re going easy on him, showing favoritism toward him.”

“You could not be more wrong,” Bichette insisted.

In a rage, Francella smashed a hand against a case and broke the plax. Reaching through the jagged opening, she brought out a sharp, gleaming knife.

Noah braced himself, but tried to show no fear.

She waved the instrument wildly in the air. Bichette backed out of her way, and she swished the blade close to Noah’s face. In response, the captive did not close his eyes or flinch, and stared at her emotionlessly. He felt a spinning sensation, and a hum of energy all around him. Where was it coming from? Noah couldn’t tell.

“This is not the way!” Bichette said.

Francella hurled the weapon in another direction, and it skidded and clattered across the floor. “Get me some results,” she snapped, “or, by God, I’ll do it myself!”

As she stormed out of the laboratory, Noah breathed a sigh of relief, but only a little one. Somehow he had an odd, unsettling sensation that his apparent immortality might be penetrated by that insane woman.

Chapter Twenty

Some disguises run deeper than any form of perception.

—Noah Watanabe

At the Inn of the White Sun, cleverly constructed inside the orbital ring over a jewel-like planet, only a few machines remained after Jimu and Thinker took sentient units to join the opposing forces of Doge Lorenzo del Velli and Noah Watanabe.

The orbiting way station was not as exciting as it had been in past years. However, since it lay beyond the war zone, podships still came and went, though with a different mix of races, and far fewer Humans or Mutatis. The sentient machines often said they missed those two races, for their abundance of exotic personalities, capable of interesting and unpredictable behavior.

Down on the glassy surface of the planet Ignem, the machines were still constructing their army, robots building robots, but they no longer had the same enthusiasm for the project, no longer had the same altruistic goal that had originally been instilled in them by Thinker. Previously, their cerebral leader had motivated them through reminders that they had been abandoned by their Human creators, discarded on junk heaps. He convinced the robots to build a machine army to serve Humans, with the goal of proving to them that the robots had worth after all, that they still had dignity. It was revenge in a sense, but with a loving touch, a desire to excel despite tremendous obstacles, despite being overlooked and tossed away. It was also ironic, considering how poorly they had been treated by Humans.

Now, far across the galaxy the machines serving the Doge and Watanabe were proving themselves, showing their value by performing work once limited to Human beings. On each side, Thinker and Jimu were adding to their numbers as they had previously on Ignem, building more and more sentient fighting machines.

Word of their successes got around the galaxy, even this far from the Canopan battle zone, and despite the podship problem. Travelers who had heard nehrcom news reports on fringe worlds brought bits and pieces of information back to the Inn of the White Sun. The two opposing machine leaders on Canopa were developing stellar reputations, or “interstellar” reputations, as one of the travelers quipped. .

According to the reports, the two machine forces had clashed in brief skirmishes when Watanabe’s Guardians made guerrilla attacks against their enemies. To Ipsy, one of the left-behind units still at the Inn of the White Sun, it seemed unfortunate that robots had to fight their own kind, or that Human creators had to fight robots, either, for that matter. Ipsy was extremely proud of his machine brethren, but felt deep sadness as well.

A small robot, Ipsy had reconstructed himself with advanced computer circuitry. His real love was for combat, and if podship travel was ever restored to the Human-ruled worlds he wanted to join Jimu’s forces, since he had always admired the ferocious fighting methods that robot had espoused.

The feisty Ipsy frequently picked fights with much larger opponents, so that he could test his personal combat skills. He won a few of the frays, but lost many more by wide margins, and was frequently forced to repair himself.

* * * * *

From Canopa, the Doge broadcasted orders to every planet in his Alliance, requiring all inhabitants—without exception—to submit to medical testing and thereafter to wear a micro-ID embedded in their earlobes, certifying that they were Human. Previously there had been testing, but it had been sporadic, with too many opportunities for shapeshifters to elude discovery. This time the Doge had his military and police leaders set up stringent systems to ensure that there would be no opportunities for anyone to escape the nets of detection.

On Lorenzo’s newly christened capital world, a surprisingly small number of Mutatis were rounded up in this manner and thrown in his dreaded prisons—and it was the same elsewhere. But there were many suspects. It was reminiscent of the Salem witch hunts of the seventeenth century on Earth, as people constantly turned in their neighbors and personal enemies as suspects.

All across the merchant prince empire, anti-Mutati hysteria ran rampant, with widespread fear that shapeshifters could be hiding inside the bodies of anyone, impersonating people.

Chapter Twenty-One

Even in a corner with predators at your throat, there is always a way out, if you can only discover it.

—Mutati Saying

On the shapeshifter homeworld of Paradij, the Zultan spun inside his clearplax gyrodome, high atop his magnificent, glittering Citadel. During this procedure, his mind was like an advanced computer with all data in it available to him instantaneously. In addition, he had altered his body, and now looked like a cross between a saber-toothed wyoo boar and a Gwert, one of the intelligent alien races employed in scientific positions by the Mutatis.

At the moment, he was considering a very big problem, and needed all the inspiration he could muster.

With podship space travel cut off—the only practical means of transport across the galaxy—Mutati outriders had not been able to continue their Demolio attacks against Human-controlled worlds. Conventional spacecraft, such as Mutati solar sailers and the hydion-powered vacuum rockets used by Humans, were far too slow to be effective, except for intra-sector voyages. The Humans had learned this lesson the hard way when they sent an attack fleet against the Mutatis by conventional means, and it took more than eleven years to arrive, by which time the military technology was obsolete and easily defeated.

Nonetheless, there might still be a way for the Zultan to continue his Demolio torpedo attacks, busting enemy planets apart. Years ago, a Mutati scientist cut a piece of material off a podship—a thick slab of the soft, interior skin. He did it at a pod station while the ship was loading, and caused the sentient creature to react violently. It contracted, crushing the scientist and the Parvii pilot before they could send an emergency signal, but the piece of flesh was thrown clear and recovered by another Mutati.

After that, laboratory experiments were conducted on the tissue, and detailed analyses were made of the cellular structure. In the last couple of years, after many wrong turns, Mutati scientists had been able to clone the complex tissue, and had grown several podships … an unprecedented event.

However, while the lab-bred creatures appeared to possess many of the same attributes as authentic Aopoddae, they did not have all of them, and fell short in significant particulars. The scientists suspected this might have something to do with the power of the sentient creatures to control their own appearances, and—except for the influence exerted over them by Parviis—their own actions.

What the Mutatis possessed now were generic pods that did not display any individuality or variety. They all looked virtually the same, including their interiors and amenities, which often differed in authentic, natural podships. The clones had primitive access hatches and rough, archaic interiors, more like the insides of caves than the interiors of spacecraft capable of faster-than-light speeds. Not that any of the natural podships were luxurious; far from it; they did, however, offer some basic amenities that were lacking in the clones—such as benches, tables, and stowage areas for luggage.

So far, the Mutatis had met with no success testing the lab-pods. Several attempts to guide them and ride in them as passengers had been disastrous, resulting in crashes that killed everyone aboard, or in vessels that drifted aimlessly and had to be rescued by chase ships.

In addition, using rocket boosters, the laboratory-bred pods had been shot into space. From instinct, perhaps, the pods always accelerated beyond what the Mutatis wanted and reached such high speeds that they left their boosters behind and disappeared into space. Out of twenty-four such attempts, none of the lab-pods had arrived at the intended destinations on Mutati fringe worlds. They had a serious guidance problem, and all efforts to steer them precisely had met with failure. The artificial podships were like wild rockets shot by children in backyards.…

Emerging from the gyrodome, the Zultan was disappointed. Inside, God-on-High had appeared before him in a vision, telling him the guidance problem could never be solved. He’d experienced visions before, and had no idea that many of them were psychic influences from the Adurian gyrodome, altering his decision-making processes. He also didn’t know that his research scientists were similarly influenced by minigyros they used, keeping them from ever figuring out how to control the lab-pods. The clandestine HibAdu Coalition didn’t want any more important merchant prince planets destroyed, because they were slated to be prizes of war for the secretly allied Hibbils and Adurians.

Unaware of the layered plots enfolding him, Abal Meshdi went to the lab-pod development facility, and commanded them to make a ship ready to carry an outrider in a schooner, fitted with the torpedo doomsday weapon.

“The ship will be guided by God-on-High,” the intensely devout Mutati leader announced. “If our Demolio is meant to hit the target, it will.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

All things in life have a mathematical property to them: Everything you perceive by any of your senses, and everything that occurs to you in the apparent privacy of your own mind. No one can escape the numbers, not even in death.

—Master Noah Watanabe

From an observation ledge, Giovanni Nehr watched a machine manufacturing and repair facility inside one of the largest caverns in the underground hideout. He knew that Thinker had perfected some of these methods on the planet Ignem, but mostly the machines had engaged in repair operations on discarded robots there. Gio had served there himself, dressed in the very armor he wore now. Thinker was beside him now, a dull-gray metal box that only moments before had clattered shut… one of the cerebral robot’s many turtle-like retreats into his inner self.

Directly in front of the shuttered robot a mist in the shape of a Human being formed in the air. But it was so faint as to be indiscernible to the eyes of any sentient race. Certainly Gio had no chance of seeing it at all. But the entity that drove the image saw him and Thinker, and absorbed information about them. The mist drew closer to Thinker, and swirled around him, like a spirit from another realm.…