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  When Oxindole came to Brother Andre, his manner cooled. He established that the friar was a papal legate and what that meant.

  “And what is your church’s attitude to this world of heretics, priest?”

  It was never possible to rattle Andre. “If you mean to ask how we feel about your present troubles, the answer is that we are appalled. All human beings are God’s children, and we will do anything in our power to help you in your time of need.”

  “And if Pock’s World is harboring an abomination?”

  “Then that abomination must be cauterized. Do you plan to defend it?”

  “Cauterized? At any cost, you mean? Leaving the Mother with no worshipers? Leaving one less church in the sector to contend with yours?”

  The friar kept his voice gentle. “The current problem is not the state of your souls, Gownsman, but of your lives. If you want a character reference for me, ask Emeritus Wisdom for one.”

  “Your mockery is unseemly!”

  “I do not mock. I knew her when I was here many years ago. My name then was Jame Mangold.”

  Oxindole stared glassily at him for a long minute and then nodded. “Your pardon, Brother. Her Highness sends her greetings.” He turned to his companion. “Skerry, please explain the situation to the honored emissaries and tell them what we will show them at Hederal. Answer all their questions fully and volunteer all relevant information.”

  The thin man nodded several times, like a bird. “As you know, honored friends, any planet tends to vacuum up passing space debris, and the resulting impacts can be deadly. Pock’s is especially at risk because we live deep within Javel’s enormous gravity well. The energy released in an impact varies as the square of the missile’s velocity, so even a tiny asteroid becomes a planet-killer when accelerated by the Mother of Worlds.”

  The giant planet almost filled the sky behind him, and Athena had to fight hard not to gape at that marvel instead of listening to him. It might officially subtend an angle of thirty degrees, but it looked much bigger, and it was all striped with bands and whorls of red and white cloud. Only at the base was a sliver of it left in shadow, but even that was visible as a faint blue ghost in the sky.

  Below that surreal vision, Pock’s landscape seemed so conventional as to be almost banal. There were no cities or great rivers, just soft green fields, wooded hummocks, and a scattering of hamlets and whitewashed cottages, each conveniently provided with a little stream or pond. Animals drawing wagons along unpaved lanes! As art it would make her gorge rise; as reality it had an appealing ancestral innocence. Only when she looked for them could she signs of Pock’s strangeness: dead lava fields or metallic blue pools that steamed in the sunshine.

  “One of STARS’s duties,” Skerry said, speaking as if he had rehearsed his speech or given it several times before, “in any inhabited system, is to inventory all bodies representing potential impact threats, and to change their orbits if necessary. Seventeen days ago, STARS informed me that its monitoring equipment on Pock’s Station had detected a previously unrecorded body in an unstable retrograde orbit around Javel. Detailed observations confirmed that it was of iron-nickel composition, approximately five kilometers in maximum dimension, and had a relatively high temperature, very unevenly distributed. That was proof that it had been used as an interstellar probe. Later that day, high resolution imagery detected artifacts on its surface.”

  “A probe from where?” Linn barked.

  “That was not an easy question to answer. Its present orbit is an elongated ellipse, extending from far outside Pock’s orbit, down almost into Javel’s atmosphere. We believe that it had been using cloud-skimming as a brake, a dangerous but not impossible tactic. Alternatively, it had been set on a suicide orbit where close encounters with Javel would break it up and eventually absorb it. A third, less likely, possibility is that a slight course deflection will cause it to be hurled out of the system by Javel’s gravity, in the direction of New Winish.

  “Without knowing when it entered the system or what maneuvers were used to brake it, we could not tell where the pirate came from, or when. Not only did STARS have no record of such a vessel, but the implication was that this one had deliberately come in at high speed, without using the power braking that would have revealed it to STARS monitoring. In other words, it arrived in the Pock’s system clandestinely. We cannot be certain, but most likely it came from the neighboring Canaster sector, and almost certainly from the nearest inhabited world, Malacostraca. All others are much farther away, beyond safe entanglement limit.”

  Brother Andre said, “I thought Malacostraca was sterilized centuries ago.”

  Skerry glanced around his listeners, almost as if worried he might be boring them. “We do not know that. The link was broken and contact was lost. Even STARS says it does not know why. So it says now.”

  “Interesting. Please continue, and excuse my interruption.”

  “We had a lucky break when we reexamined old records and discovered images of a dim, blue-shifted star that appeared more than a hundred years ago, several degrees off the direct Malacostracan line of sight, against a background of a globular cluster containing millions of stars. It had been overlooked, as had its subsequent disappearance, which of course would have been when powered braking was discontinued. By analyses of Doppler shifts in the earlier radiation, we established the most probable trajectory, and then examined recent records that should have caught sight of it. By elimination, we concluded that the pirate could have left the Malacostracan system about three centuries ago and arrived in the Pock’s system within the last two or three fortnights. This is our best guess.”

  Athena said, “And STARS insists that it does not know whether Malacostraca is still inhabited? Or by whom?”

  Skerry smiled mirthlessly. “STARS has put out several stories about Malacostraca. This year’s version is that it does not know what happened. It is popular belief that the Canaster Sector STARS took out the world to destroy a synthetic hominin strain known as the Zombies, but that has never been confirmed.”

  “I don’t see why it should be a mystery,” Millie complained. “Can’t you detect radio signals from Malacostraca?”

  “Not really, Director,” Skerry kept his smile courteous, although his son was pulling faces as if even he knew the answer.

  Even Athena did. Technically a radio message could be beamed to another inhabited world. In practice the senders would have to wait several lifetimes for a reply and nobody at the other end would be listening, so they would never get one. Mere eavesdropping was not practical at stellar distances. For secrecy and economy and several technical reasons, modern electromagnetic signals were transmitted in short bursts on varying frequencies and the lowest possible power. If they could even be detected, they could not be separated or read without the appropriate protocol, and the chatter of an entire planet would appear as white noise.

  “Malacostraca might be inhabited, but we can’t tell,” Skerry said. “If there were ever Zombies there, they may have won. We don’t know.”

  “And now they want to kill us!” said the boy.

  He had tears in his eyes. Solan was about the age Chyle had been when he drowned. If a child like him must be aboard this ship at all, he ought to be forward with the crew, pretending to fly it, not listening to horror stories.

  His father’s nod was both agreement and a gentle indication that he should not interrupt. “STARS has limited space-faring capability within this system, and the pirate’s retrograde, eccentric orbit made it difficult to intercept. At apoapsis it is out of range, at periapsis it is hurtling over Javel’s cloud tops a third of a million kilometers per hour. But a vessel was found and a mission sent to investigate. Logistics limited it to a crew of five and restricted their stay to a few hours.”

  “You mean a STARS expedition, of course?” Linn said skeptically.

  Skerry started to shake his head and was taken with a sudden coughing fit. Gownsman Oxindole had been watching his sick frie
nd with obvious concern and now intervened.

  “No, a joint expedition. STARS has been extremely cooperative in this venture. It is definitely as worried as we are. It provided two men to run the ship. The other three were experts provided by three of the larger planetary governments, at Monody’s request.”

  “And what did this joint expedition discover?”

  “They forced an entry and found living quarters that had been recently used. We had thought to include a police forensic expert, and she recovered fingerprints of at least twelve persons; fresh prints, not years old. Also, I regret to report, traces of DNA, which has been identified as hominin but not human.”

  So there it was—the case against Pock’s. Athena felt ill. STARS had not been bluffing. She glanced at the faces: Millie horrified, Brother Andre black as thunder, Linn perhaps still skeptical.

  “They analyzed bits of the asteroid,” young Solan said hesitantly. Receiving a smile and a nod from Oxindole, he went on. “And the isotopes were right for the Malacostraca system. The stuff on the outside was mostly burned away, but they found a Wong-Hui projector and an entangler inside.”

  Skerry had recovered. He chuckled and patted his son’s knee. “You have big ears! As my assistant says, honored friends, the isotope ratios were compatible with an origin in the Malacostracan system, as defined by ancient records. The exterior equipment had been damaged by one or more passages through the Javel’s exosphere but did include identifiable remains of two shuttle cradles, both empty. The entanglement equipment had been reset so we could not establish what the linkage parameters had been.”

  “Very neat,” Linn murmured. “The dreaded cuckoos launched the probe centuries ago, sending it by a devious route. When it neared this system, the remote descendants of the original cuckoos dispatched a force of at least twelve through the entangler—”

  Skerry said, “We estimate from the layout of the quarters and the size of the shuttle cradles that the force probably comprised about fifty persons. We have not finished analyzing DNA residue, but it represents at least a score of individuals, and we suspect both men and women, as you would expect in a colonizing mission.”

  “Really?” Athena said. “I was imagining a cuckoo invading force as an army of identical clones.” Why did she think that? Had she been cognizing too many space operas?

  “Would that they were, Senator! Then it would be child’s play for us to tailor a virus that killed them all dead and merely made us sneeze. Cloning is a sort of parthenogenesis, asexual reproduction. Many plants and some animal species reproduce asexually. It works well in the short term, but the result is a monoculture that is highly susceptible to disease. In asexual species, whenever a new bug comes along that can kill a mother and her daughters, then their whole line is likely to get wiped out. One of the main benefits of sex is that the father may introduce genes to provide some immunity to some of the offspring. I dearly wish that the cuckoos were clones.”

  Linn said, “So this suicide squad rode the hellfire around Javel a time or two until the mother ship had dropped enough velocity to let the shuttles make safe landings on Pock’s World. That’s it? Mission accomplished?”

  Oxindole broke in angrily. “Do you disbelieve us, Lazuline? You imagine we are making all this up just to give STARS an excuse to burn our world to cinders and destroy us all?”

  Undeterred, Linn stared back coldly. “No. I just suspect that STARS could have faked it all to deceive us by deceiving you. You may not be aware of this, but STARS is politically threatened elsewhere in the sector and may be preparing to cut your throats and then shout that there are killers loose. Have you found the shuttles yet?”

  Skerry was leaning back, exhausted by his long lecture, clasping his son’s hand. Oxindole answered.

  “We found one. Thirteen volcanoes are currently active. It would be easy to put a shuttle on remote and run it into a lava lake, so we looked there first. We saw what we believe to be the remains of a shuttle, half melted and completely out of reach. STARS hoped to be able to show it to you, but you were delayed by the solar flare. The last of the wreckage disappeared yesterday.”

  “Very convenient! Everything is always just out of reach.”

  “Not quite all!” Oxindole frowned and closed his eyes. Then his frown became a scowl, and after a moment he opened them again and glared across at Brother Andre.

  “Are you familiar with a man named Braata?”

  “I have met him, yes.”

  “He is extraordinarily anxious to speak with you. He has bullied his way up through the hierarchy of your church to Cardinal Phare, and now Phare has talked his way through my defenses also, although I threatened to behead people if I was interrupted.”

  The friar smiled faintly. “Braata is impressive! A STARS trainee, he met us on Pock’s Station. He is a member of my church.”

  “You spoke with him privately when we landed,” Linn said. “You were the last to come into the blockhouse. He never did.”

  “He asked my blessing. We shared a moment of prayer in the rain. But I do not know why he should be so anxious to speak with me now.”

  The airship was already turning.

  “It seems we have to find out,” the gownsman said crossly. “However urgent our business, it has to wait for Friend Braata. We are well out over Draff Water now, and so is he, chasing us on a flyer. He claims he is about to run out of fuel.”

  Chapter 4

  Ratty’s first sight of the Mother nearly caused him to fall a thousand meters into the scenery. He had twisted around to see how Scrob was doing, because the solitary flier chasing after them had to be Scrob. Having stolen, rented, or otherwise acquired another machine in Elaterin, he had been gaining slowly all morning, while Ratty and Joy cruised on relentlessly over the phantasmagorical landscape of Pock’s World. Unable to talk to his kidnapper, Ratty had been packing his portable recorder with incredible visual memories of geysers, old lava beds, ripening fields, jungle, and rugged terrain like nothing he had ever seen before. Cliffs were steeper in low gravity, waterfalls slower, the trees higher and more widely crowned. If all else failed, the show would have to be Last Views of a Lost World by Ratty Turnsole.

  Since dawn he had assumed that the oddly flat light was just sunlight through a haze. He should have guessed the truth when the flyers crossed a wide expanse of water, apparently a channel between two large lakes or seas—large enough that both of them stretched away over the curvature of the world. A stupendous wave, a wall of foam about a hundred meters high, was sweeping through this gap. He had even guessed that it must be a tidal bore, but he had not looked around to see what might be raising such a tide. Then he turned to check on Scrob and almost fell off his flyer. There was no sun. It was Javel that lit up the world. The Mother was a vast brightness in the sky, a disk of curlicue red and white cloud bands, a world terrifyingly huge. It was a substitute sun, its light bright enough to feel warm on his face. After Ratty recovered his balance, he was able to reconcile what he was seeing with what Brother Andre had said. The sun was still below the horizon and might not rise for days. Then, presumably, the weather would get even hotter.

  Scrob caught up at last, greeting Ratty with a gesture that he had not met before but whose meaning he could guess. He responded with the Ayne equivalent, wondering if it would cost him teeth when the opportunity arose.

  The opportunity came quite soon after that. Joy put her flyer into a shallow dive, taking Ratty’s with it. Scrob followed. Her objective was a village on the shore of an irregular lake, one that looked small enough not to come raging ashore at high tide. As she had at Elaterin, she avoided the settlement itself, and landed instead on a grassy knoll a short distance away.

  She dismounted, hauled off her goggles, and turned to grin at her prisoner.

  “Sorry. I couldn’t resist it! I mean no harm.”

  Ratty smiled back. “No offense. I’ll follow you anywhere, lady. Where are you taking me?”

  “To meet Monody.”
r />   “That’s the big peach? She who must be obeyed?”

  Scrob’s flyer landed beside them. “Idiot!” he yelled, but he was speaking to Joy. “What would you have done if a mirbane had attacked when I wasn’t there?”

  “Given it Ratty of course.”

  Scrob leered. “Hey! Good idea!”

  “Fine by me,” Ratty said. “But my knights-errant’s union insists I charge at least one kiss a day for being standby human sacrifice.” (Had Brother Andre’s accusations of human sacrifice been based on fact or just prejudice?)

  Scrob bristled. “You shut your filthy mouth, off-worlder! Do you know who you’re speaking to?”

  “Somebody-important’s daughter, but she’s so lovely I don’t care who she is. I know her mother has terrible taste in gorillas.”

  “Scum! You want me to beat some manners into this tourist, my lady?”

  “That will do, both of two!” Joy said, obviously enjoying the rivalry. “Scrob, go and refuel. And requisition something to eat. No! Better still, leave our two flyers here and tell them I’m on my way and want lunch.”

  Her guard looked doubtful. “Is that wise?”

  She stamped her foot on the grass. “Do as you’re told!”

  Scrob shrugged his beefy shoulders and sent his flyer howling into the air, leaving Ratty alone on the hillside with Joy. She attempted a haughty expression.

  “It was very improper of you to propose kissing!”

  Ratty never refused such blatant offers. A good kiss required a tight hug and two tongues. Chest-to-chest contact made a kiss even better. This was a very good kiss indeed. The taste of her mouth was sheer paradise. It was not an easy kiss to end.

  Joy had flushed almost as red as a normal Pocosin, staring at him in disbelief. “You dare!”

  Had she not realized she was issuing a challenge, or had she truly not believed he would accept it?