Chapter 35

The Pravilo commodore read the page through twice before finally raising his eyes to look at us. "You put me in a rather awkward position, Lord Kelsey-Ramos," he said. I listened carefully, but though there was considerable annoyance beneath the courtesy in his voice, I could hear nothing that sounded like suspicion. "I respect your position here; at the same time, I'm sure you're aware of how close to the wire Project Avalanche is running. Handling guided tours is pretty far down the worklist."

"I understand that, Commodore," Lord Kelsey-Ramos said, his tone managing to combine understanding sympathy and firm resolve. "I'm sure you understand in turn that when I put my name on a recommendation, I like to know how well the orders are being carried out."

He had not, in fact, signed the commission's official recommendation, but the commodore probably didn't know that. "Yes, sir," he nodded, "and I'd really like to accommodate you. But as I said, we simply don't have the people to spare."

"Not even a clerk or desk worker?" Lord Kelsey-Ramos persisted. "Come, now, Commodore, I'm not asking for a full Pravilo honor guard or anything like that. I have my own launch and my own pilot—all I'm asking is for you to give me a security clearance and someone to point out the high points as we go along."

The commodore grimaced and reached for his control stick. "Lord Kelsey-Ramos, I really don't have time for this. You want a clearance?—fine; I'll have one made out for you. But you and your launch had better stay out of our way. We've got thirty tugs buzzing around out there, and you so much as near-miss one of them and you're out."

"I understand," Lord Kelsey-Ramos nodded. "Don't worry; we don't intend to spend much time in the current work areas. My primary interest is with the rocheoids that have already been fitted with Mjollnir drives."

The officer's forehead creased slightly at that, but there were too many other matters clamoring for his attention for him to bother with an odd comment from a civilian. "Fine," he grunted, tapping a few keys and pulling a red-stripped cyl from its slot. "Replace your launch's ID beacon with this," he instructed, handing it across the desk, "and don't pull it out until you're ready to leave the area—if you do, it'll erase."

"Thank you," Lord Kelsey-Ramos said, taking the cyl. "What about a guide, now?"

I held my breath. We didn't really want a guide—didn't want any witnesses around when I hijacked the rocheoid—but Lord Kelsey-Ramos had persuaded me that it would be strongly out of character for someone in his position not to demand some kind of official escort. He'd toned down the request as far as he reasonably could, and I could tell the Pravilo commodore had noted that. Now if the latter would just push the protocol a little from his direction...

He did. "Again, sir, I'm sorry," he said, "but the best I can do is offer you my aide for a couple of hours."

Lord Kelsey-Ramos nodded. "That'll be quite satisfactory, Commodore," he told the other. "Is he available right now?"

"If you want him to be," the other shrugged, waving his control stick at the intercom. "Grashchik? Finish up whatever listing you're on and pull the overview file. Got some visitors here for you to give a brief tour to." He got an acknowledgment and waved the intercom off. "It'll be just a couple of minutes."

"Thank you." Lord Kelsey-Ramos glanced behind the commodore, to a real-time schematic of the entire Project Avalanche area. "Tell me, how close to schedule are you running?"

"Dead on, sir," the other said, an obvious note of pride in his voice. "The original plan was for the rocheoids to be able to fly six days from now; we figure we'll be ready in a little over five."

I felt my stomach tighten. Five days—just five days. Deep down, I'd hoped that the project would be behind schedule, that there would be a little more time for us to prepare ourselves before we had to do this. But that hadn't happened. Today—right now—was the time.

I glanced over to find Lord Kelsey-Ramos's eyes on me. I nodded fractionally, got an acknowledging nod in return, and he turned back to the Pravilo officer. "Since time is of the essence, Commodore," he suggested, "why don't we go on back to the Bellwether and get the launch ready to go? Your man can meet us there."

The other nodded, almost absently, his mind already on more important matters. "Whatever you want to do, sir," he said. "Grashchik will be there in a few minutes."

Lord Kelsey-Ramos nodded. "Thank you, sir," he said... and I could hear the grim determination lurking beneath the words. "We'll be ready for him."

—

Visually, Project Avalanche was a disappointment.

Not surprisingly, I suppose. The image I'd started with—two hundred mountain-sized rocheoids floating in formation with a hundred workships darting around between them—that picture had pretty well disappeared from my mind as soon as it occurred to me that it would be far more efficient to leave the rocheoids wherever they originally were in orbit and to simply move the Mjollnir-lacing equipment back and forth through the rings as needed. Still, traces of the image had lingered, reinforced perhaps by the fact that the last fifteen rocheoids were being fitted simultaneously from this one orbital station.

But even those fifteen rocheoids turned out to be scattered over a thousand cubic kilometers of space; and the tugs and workships attending them flew for the most part on cold nitrogen maneuvering jets. Even in the middle of it, it was hard to imagine anything at all unusual was happening out here.

Which was, I suspected, exactly the way the Pravilo wanted it to look.

"That's the one, over there," Lieutenant Grashchik pointed through the launch's viewplate toward our target rocheoid. "If you look carefully, you can see the attached tug just below center, on the dark side of the terminator line."

Beside him, Lord Kelsey-Ramos nodded. "Yes, I think I see it. Will we be able to go aboard?"

"I suppose so, sir, if you really want to," Grashchik said, an expected lack of enthusiasm in his voice. "Let me see if it's been left pressurized..." He reached past the pilot and tapped in a telemetry code. "Yes, sir, it has," he nodded. "I can tell you right now, though, that there's really nothing there to see. Just an old, stripped-down tug fitted with a Deadman Switch and not much else."

"Has it got pseudograv capabilities?" I put in.

The lieutenant twisted around to throw me a surprised look. "I don't really know. I doubt it'll matter one way or the other to the zombi."

"I'd like to know for sure," I told him, my heart thudding in my ears. The lieutenant's boredom had subtly altered; not yet a real suspicion, but definitely a recognition that something here was just a shade off-key. The sense seemed to be universal: beside me, I felt the shifting of Kutzko's muscles as his hand drifted a few centimeters closer to his needler; behind me, I heard the rhythm of Shepherd Adams's breathing change slightly.

Grashchik studied me. "Why?" he countered.

"Because it could be important," Lord Kelsey-Ramos came to my rescue. "I'm sure you know that flights in and out of Solitaire system routinely leave their pseudogravs on, on the bridge as well as elsewhere. The thunderheads who guide the zombis are used to it by now; it's even possible they wouldn't be able to manage the pinpoint accuracy we'll need without it."

The thought, I saw, had never even occurred to Grashchik. "Ah... yes, sir, I see your point," he said, his doubts evaporating. "Well, let me check the specs."

"I'd prefer seeing directly if the pseugograv generator is operational," I said as he slid one of his cyls into the slot.

Lord Kelsey-Ramos threw me a puzzled glance. "It's just something that occurred to me," I told him, unable to explain further with Grashchik sitting there.

The puzzled look remained, but he nodded his recognition that I wasn't just making conversation. "Well, Lieutenant?" he asked. "We're going in there anyway—surely we can flip on the current for a second and see if it's functioning."

The other hesitated, and I could see the muscles of his jaw tighten. Uncertainty, this time, not suspicion. "I don't know, sir. I'd have to open-code the board to do that, and these ships are supposed to stay dead until they're all ready to fly."

I felt my heart pick up its pace. An unexpected bonus—I'd wondered how in the world we were going to persuade him to open-code the tug's control systems. Unwittingly, I'd given Lord Kelsey-Ramos an ideal lever to use.

And he knew it. "Then you'd better call the commodore and get permission," he said firmly. "Mr. Benedar is right—now is not the time to start experimenting with techniques and parameters."

"Yes, sir," the lieutenant sighed. Another type of officer would probably have simply given in; but this one knew his job better than that. Reaching for the microphone, he flipped on the comm board.

The commodore was thoroughly annoyed—even from the single carefully guarded side of the conversation we could hear that much was evident. The entire discussion took most of the rest of our trip to the rocheoid, and it was only as we locked tubes with the dormant tug that the commodore finally relented.

"All right," Grashchik said as we unbuckled from our seats, not even trying to hide his own irritation at having been put in the middle of this. "The commodore's authorized me to run the pseudograv once, just long enough to make sure it's working. I hope that'll be satisfactory because, frankly, that's all you're going to get."

"Quite satisfactory," Lord Kelsey-Ramos nodded. "Lead on...?"

The lieutenant eased past us, far more graceful in zero-gee than the rest of us would ever hope to be. A quick but thorough check of the seal indicators, and he popped the lock door. A wave of cold air swept into the launch as he opened the tug and floated in. Shivering, from nervous anticipation as much as from the cold, I followed him.

The tug was dark, the only light coming from the small viewports and from a set of firefly indicator lights. A darker shadow—Grashchik—floated at the main panel. A faint glint of light from the edge of his cyl as he inserted it—

There was an audible click of relays, and abruptly the main lights came dimly on. Grashchik turned them up a bit, then moved to the other side of the helm chair. "You ready, Lord Kelsey-Ramos?" he asked over his shoulder. "Listen for the hum..."

He flipped a switch, and in the silence the faint drone of high-frequency oscillating current filled the tug. In Mjollnir space that current—or, rather, the flickering electric field it was generating—would take on the character of a gravitational field; right now, in normal space, about all it was doing was radiating a highly distinctive electromagnetic signal all over this part of the ring system.

The lieutenant was thinking about that, too. "That's all I can do," he said, switching it off after perhaps two seconds. "We'd just as soon not broadcast the fact that there are ships out here that aren't registering on the traffic displays. Well. This is it, Lord Kelsey-Ramos. If you have any questions, I'll try and answer them."

Lord Kelsey-Ramos sent me a questioning glance, and I floated over to the board for a quick look. The controls seemed simple enough, certainly compared with the simulated helm Captain Bartholomy had set up aboard the Bellwether for my two-day piloting crashcourse. Set in place over the center of the helm board was the by-now familiar black Deadman Switch keyboard. "Looks all right, sir," I told Lord Kelsey-Ramos, the words coming out with difficulty in my nervousness. This was it; time for Lord Kelsey-Ramos and Kutzko to ease Grashchik back into the launch.

Lord Kelsey-Ramos nodded his understanding. "Good. Now, Lieutenant, if you'll come back into the launch for a moment—"

"All of you just stay where you are," Kutzko's voice came quietly from the lock. Quietly enough that the click of his needler's safety was clearly audible...

I turned slowly, peripherally noting Lord Kelsey-Ramos's stunned expression as I did so. So this was now Kutzko's play entirely. "Kutzko—"

"Quiet, Benedar," Kutzko cut me off. "Leave the cyl where it is, Lieutenant, and move this way. Slowly."

"Whatever you think you're doing," Grashchik growled, "you're not going to get away with it. Security could walk over here faster than you can fly this monstrosity."

"I appreciate your concern," Kutzko said calmly. "Now do like I told you—I don't really want to have to shoot you. You, too, Lord Kelsey-Ramos, if you please."

I looked behind Lord Kelsey-Ramos to where Adams was quietly floating... and in his face I saw that he, alone of all of us, hadn't been caught unawares by Kutzko's move. Something they'd cooked up together, probably while I was occupied with my flying lessons, in an obvious attempt to push Lord Kelsey-Ramos as far as possible out of direct implication in this. A scheme I'd been too wrapped up in my own worries to even notice...

"Not you," Kutzko said into my thoughts. I focused on his face, saw the calm determination there as he looked at me. "You stay aboard with me. You too," he added, glancing briefly at Adams.

Grashchik, halfway to the lock, suddenly stiffened, and I saw the impotent anger in his sense turn to horror as he abruptly realized that Kutzko wasn't planning to fly the tug away through normal space... and recognized what the implications of that were to Adams and me. "Wait a minute—wait a minute," he said, his voice beginning to shake. "You can't—look, blaze it, that's premeditated murder. This tug can't possibly be worth that much to you—"

"You let me decide that, all right?" Kutzko cut him off coldly. "You just be a good boy and get into the launch."

A sort of enraged panic flooded Grashchik's sense—a panic built of duty, pride, and anger—and for that single moment I thought he would decide to fight back, after all. I clenched my hands into fists... but as he hesitated, the panic subsided, and with returning sanity he saw that resistance would accomplish nothing but the useless sacrifice of his own life. Clenching his teeth, muscles tight with bitter fury, he silently continued on into the lock.

Some of the tension went out of Kutzko's face; he, too, had sensed Grashchik teetering on the brink. "Now you, sir," he said.

Lord Kelsey-Ramos pursed his lips, followed Grashchik off the tug without comment. "Now—you, Benedar," Kutzko gestured to me. "There's a satchel just inside the lock. Get it—and don't forget that I'll be covering you."

He winked reassuringly as I moved toward the lock. An unnecessary gesture; I already knew the threat had been solely for Grashchik's benefit.

Another unnecessary gesture, as it turned out. Grashchik was nowhere in sight as I collected the massive satchel and carefully maneuvered it through the zero-gee onto the tug. "He's gone forward," I told Kutzko as I pushed the satchel over into a corner and eased it toward the deck. "Probably calling in the alert. Get going—we'll seal the lock from here."

"Don't bother," he said calmly, swinging the lock closed.

I stared at him, feeling a horrible tingle run through me. How had I failed to notice—? "Kutzko, get out of here," I snapped.

"Get the engines fired up," he said, ignoring the order. "I trust you remember how?"

"Mikha—"

"And you'd better get busy—like you said, Grashchik's up there calling for help. Be a waste of a good hijacking if they get us while we're sitting here arguing."

I glared at him; but it was a useless gesture. If he was determined to come along, there was nothing I could do to stop him. And we both knew it.

Tight-lipped, I went over to the board, where Adams had already seated himself in the helm chair. By the time I had the power indicators reading operational, he was ready.

"Thunderhead?" I called. "Are you there?"

For what seemed like a small eternity there was no reply. Heart pounding in my ears, I watched Adams's slack face, thoughts of treachery and betrayal spinning through my mind—

"I am here," Adams whispered.

I swallowed, the worst of the tension draining from my muscles. "We're ready to go. Do you know exactly where the Invaders are at the moment?"

"I do. But where is the zombi... for me to use?"

There was a totally uncaring attitude toward human life hidden beneath the words. "There will be no zombi," I gritted. "Shepherd Adams—the man you're speaking through—will act as your hands."

For a long moment Adams just stared at me, an alien yet unmistakably surprised look on his face. Apparently that implication of their Seeker contacts hadn't yet occurred to the thunderheads, either. "I don't know if it will... be possible to—"

"So try it," Kutzko broke in brusquely, nodding toward the displays. "We've got company coming."

Adams's face twisted, his hands reaching tentatively for the black Deadman Switch. I held my breath... and abruptly fell a few centimeters to the deck below me as the Mjollnir drive came on and the pseudograv began to function.

I exhaled raggedly, swaying a bit as my circulatory system adjusted to weight again. A moment, and my vision cleared... and I turned to find Kutzko looking at me. "Well," I said to him. "It worked."

He nodded, a quiet grimness to his sense. "So far, anyway," he agreed. "Now what?"

"We see how long he can handle it," I said evenly. "If he can get us all the way to the alien fleet in one jump, fine. If not... we see how long he needs to rest between contacts."

"And once we're there?" Kutzko persisted. "You can't have him fading in and out on you while you're trying to hold a conversation with the Invaders."

"Let's just see what happens, all right?" I snapped, my mouth dry. Beneath his casual words I knew what it was he was offering.

For a moment Kutzko studied me. Then he nodded, once, and turned back to the satchel in the corner. "Sure," he said over his shoulder. "There's no rush. Come on—give me a hand and we'll get this comm gear of yours set up."

I stared at his back, my muscles trembling with anger and dread. No, there was no rush; and if we were lucky, there might be no need to go through with it at all.

But I could tell Kutzko didn't believe that. And down deep, neither did I.