Conquerors' Pride

18

The warbling cut off. "It's all right, sir," Hill said, his silhouette moving across the tiny colored lights as he shifted in his seat. "Just a proximity warning, Mrach style. We're coming up on Phormbi."

Cavanagh squinted at his watch. Seven hours, approximately, since that mad scramble out of Mig-Ka City. "Do we know where we're going?"

"Yes, sir, the Northern Wooded Steppes. There's a map and a little bit about the place on the computer here. With your permission I'm going to key the auto-entry to bring us in on the night side. Try to avoid whatever they've got in the way of a traffic pattern."

"Fine," Cavanagh said, rubbing his eyes. Between the interrupted sleep on Mra-mig and all the adrenaline surges since then, he was feeling desperately tired.

"Kolchin? You awake?"

"Yes, sir," the other's voice came softly. "I think Fibbit's still in that cold-sleep of hers. You want me to try to wake her?"

"Don't bother," Cavanagh said, his ears still ringing from that proximity alarm. Either that cold-sleep was incredibly hard to break, or else Duulian hearing was on a par with Duulian night vision. "Hill, do you have any idea what the landing procedure's going to be like?"

"None at all, sir," Hill said. "I've never been to a Yycroman world before. But I'm sure one of the interdiction ships will be able to tell us."

"Let's hope it's short and quick," Kolchin said. "Could be awkward if word of our departure from Mra-mig arrives while we're still up here chatting."

"At least we know the news couldn't have beaten us here," Hill pointed out. "That's something."

"Yes," Kolchin said. "Lord Cavanagh, I've been thinking about what happened back there at the hotel. Your suggestion that what we saw was a power struggle between Mrach factions?"

"Yes. And?"

"Another possibility's occurred to me. That red card Bronski showed you—could it have been a forgery?"

Cavanagh frowned into the darkness. "Interesting thought," he agreed. "I've never seen one up close before, and I didn't take the time to examine this one."

"Same here," Kolchin said. "But that might explain why the Mrachanis didn't send a representative up with him. And why he didn't haul us away when he had the numbers on his side."

"And perhaps explain the incident at the elevators," Cavanagh added slowly. "If Faction A issues official red cards, but Bronski was actually working for Faction B, Faction A might have sent the Bhurtala to bring him in."

"But why would a NorCoord diplomat be working for the Mrachanis?" Hill objected.

"We only have Bronski's word that he's a NorCoord diplomat," Kolchin reminded him. "If he can forge a red card, a diplomatic ID isn't going to be a problem."

"All of which brings us back to the man in Fibbit's threading," Cavanagh said. An odd and not entirely pleasant thought had suddenly occurred to him. "New line of thought, Kolchin. What are the chances that the whole Bhurtala thing at the hotel was a setup? That the Mrachanis fed us this tip about Phormbi and then deliberately let us escape?"

For a moment the only noise in the cabin was the twittering drone of the drive beneath them. "If they wanted us to escape, why didn't they let Bronski pass?" Kolchin asked.

"All they were guarding was the elevators," Cavanagh pointed out. "I didn't see anyone at the stairway down the hall, and there was certainly no one by the emergency drop shaft. Maybe if Bronski had turned around and taken the stairs instead of arguing, they'd have let him go."

"I suppose that's possible," Kolchin said thoughtfully. "Bronski sure wasn't the type to back down. All right, let's assume they wanted us to leave there and go to Phormbi. Why?"

"All I can think of is that we're on a wild-snipe chase," Cavanagh said. "Maybe they know who the man in Fibbit's threading is and don't want us talking to him. Or maybe there's something more to those Conqueror legends they don't want us to find out."

Kolchin seemed to ponder that. "Sounds pretty complicated for Mrachanis," he said. "They're not supposed to be that good at chicanery."

Cavanagh shrugged. "Most people I've met have been perfectly capable of becoming chicanerous when important interests were at stake. What differs is their abilities to do a good job at it."

"Maybe that's why the Mrachanis pointed us to Phormbi instead of someplace a lot farther away," Hill suggested dryly. "It would be days before we'd know Fibbit's friend isn't on Nadezhda."

"If you want, sir, we could turn around and head back," Kolchin said. "We've got plenty of fuel."

Cavanagh shook his head. "No point to that now. As long as we're already here, we might as well stay long enough to ask a few questions."

There was another brief warble from the control board. "We're here," Hill announced. "Stand by...."

From somewhere behind them came the dull multiple thud of relays snapping open. The blackness through the canopy turned to the brief illusion of a tunnel, and then the stars flowed back into their proper positions around the large green-blue crescent hanging in space before them. "Right on target," Hill said approvingly. "Good autoentry on this thing."

"Mrach efficiency," Cavanagh told him, peering out at the specks of light moving in the planet's vicinity. "Which ones are the Peacekeeper ships?"

Hill leaned over his displays. "Actually... none of them."

Cavanagh frowned. "None of them?"

"No, sir. I'm picking up about thirty merchant-class, but they're all Yycroman design and registry. No Commonwealth ships of any kind."

Cavanagh rubbed at the stubble on his cheek. No Peacekeepers... and here they were flying a Mrach courier ship in Yycroman space. Not a smart move, by anyone's standards. "How soon before we're in laser range?"

"Searching for a satellite or ground station now," Hill said. "Couple more minutes."

Cavanagh nodded, looked out at the dark planetary surface ahead. If the sporadic clusters of lights scattered across it were anything to go by, Phormbi was not exactly a heavily populated world. "Maybe we should go ahead and contact one of those ships first. At least that would let someone know who we are."

"I don't think it'll be a problem," Kolchin soothed him. "They haven't got any ground- or orbit-based weapons anymore."

"I wouldn't bet money on that if I were you," Hill said, his voice suddenly odd. "Lord Cavanagh, you'd better have a look." The canopy shimmered, altering from viewport to display mode—

And there, looming out of the darkness behind them, was a dark shape. A shape splashed with lights and strangely curved luminescent edges. A shape out of the history records; a shape that no longer existed.

A shape that was rapidly overtaking them.

"That's a Yycroman warship," Cavanagh breathed, his voice seeming to come from a long distance away.

"Yes," Hill said. "And I'm not sure... but I think they want to talk with us."

After the sparsely furnished style of their Mrach hotel suite, the Yycroman room they were taken into was something of a shock. Large and ornate, packed almost too full of furniture and artwork to be comfortable, it felt to Cavanagh more like a museum with seats than an office or waiting room. Fibbit, in fact, seemed to treat it in exactly that way, flitting around the room from painting to sculpture to clothwork to scroll, studying everything in sight, apparently oblivious to the pair of Yycroman guards at each of the room's three doors.

The guards, of course, were not oblivious to her. Cavanagh could see their eyes moving beneath the glitter of their helmets as they watched every twitch of her long limbs. Or any twitch from the rest of them, for that matter.

Finally, after nearly two hours of waiting, they had a visitor.

A high-level visitor, too, judging from the elaborate ceremonial helmet and tooled cloak. [Which is Lord Stewart Cavanagh?] the Yycroma demanded, striding toward the ornately carved chair facing the prisoners.

"I'm Lord Cavanagh," Cavanagh said, standing up. "May I ask whom I have the honor of addressing?"

[I am Klyveress ci Yyatoor,] the Yycroma said, brushing the cloak to one side and sitting down. [Twelfth Counsel to the Hierarch.]

A female name, plus a title and position that traditionally went to a female. "Honored to meet you, ci Yyatoor," Cavanagh said, bowing low, a little of the tension leaving his throat. There was nothing good about this situation, but at least he wouldn't have to worry about sparking the hair-trigger male Yycroman temper. "I'd like to apologize for any problems our sudden appearance here may have caused," he continued. "I hope we can quickly resolve any misunderstandings that might still remain."

[Three of you carry passports of the Northern Coordinate Union,] Klyveress said, her eyes raking each of the three humans and then flicking to where Fibbit was now standing stock-still among the artifacts. [The Duulian has no passport at all. Yet you arrived here aboard a sensor-stealthed Mrach courier ship. Explain.]

"I admit it's an unusual situation," Cavanagh conceded. "As I explained to the ship's captain, we were forced by circumstances to borrow a Mrach courier when we left Mra-mig."

[Would a human fleeing the Mrach not seek out other humans?] Klyveress countered. [Yet you came to Phormbi instead of to a world of humans or the human ambassadorhold on Kammis. Explain.]

"We were looking for someone," Cavanagh said. "A human who we were told was somewhere in the Northern Wooded Steppes region of Phormbi."

Klyveress's gaze seemed to sharpen. [Who told you this?]

"A Mrachani who came to our hotel room a few minutes before we had to leave."

[His name? Position? Title?]

"I'm sorry," Cavanagh shook his head. "I don't know anything at all about him."

[Yet you believed this Mrach whom you knew nothing at all about?]

Cavanagh grimaced. Put that way, it did sound pretty ridiculous. "We didn't have any other leads," he said. "I thought it would be worth a try."

[Who is this man you seek?]

"I'm afraid I don't know that, either."

The Yycroma cocked her crocodilian head. [Yet you follow him. Have you no better uses for your time?]

Cavanagh felt his lip twitch. This was starting to get sticky. Klyveress clearly suspected them of being agents of the Mrachanis; and given the highly illegal existence of that Yycroman warship they'd run into out there, she had good reason to be hostile toward potential spies. "We went to Mra-mig looking for information about the Mrachanis' supposed contact with the Conquerors," he told Klyveress.

Klyveress hissed gently through her long snout. [It is not supposed. It is real.]

"Are you sure?" Cavanagh asked, frowning.

[We are quite certain. Continue your story.]

"There's not much more to tell," Cavanagh shrugged, wondering how on Earth the Yycromae would know anything about two-hundred-year-old Mrach legends. Had they already been in space by then? "We saw Fibbit—the Duulian—threading on the street and observed what seemed to be several Mrachanis watching her from concealment. That caught our interest, and so we went over and talked to her. Among other things she told us about a human who'd passed her a couple of times, and offered to show us the threading she'd made of him. Shortly after that the Mrachanis suddenly seemed to be trying to get her away from us and off the planet. That aroused my curiosity even further, and when the Mrachani I mentioned came to our suite and told us the man was on Phormbi, we decided to come here and see if we could find him."

[And if you could not?]

"We'd probably have just gone on to Avon," Cavanagh said. "Left the courier ship with the Mrach embassy there and taken Fibbit back to Ulu once the Cavatina caught up with us."

Klyveress hissed again; a long, thoughtful sound. [I have read your record, Lord Cavanagh,] she said. [You were not an ally of the Yycromae during your service to the hierarchy of NorCoord. But neither were you an ally of the Mrach.]

"My goal was to be an ally only of justice and truth."

[A noble ambition,] Klyveress said. [One which the Yycromae understand and honor. But when truth is hidden, such intentions can quickly be twisted into injustice. In this event I have no doubt that is what has happened.]

Cavanagh frowned. "What do you mean? What truth was hidden?"

[Many truths were hidden,] Klyveress said, standing up. [Perhaps later will be time for me to detail the full twistings of Mrach deceit. But for now I must leave you.]

Cavanagh looked at the guards at the doors. "What about us?"

[You wished to see the Northern Wooded Steppes,] she said, twitching her cloak back into position around her. [You shall see them now. You shall be our guests there for the following few days.]

"Your guests?" Cavanagh asked pointedly. "Or your prisoners."

[We do not wish to do this to you, Lord Cavanagh,] Klyveress said evenly. [I have little doubt that you are here at the manipulation of the Mrach. But for a few days you cannot be permitted to speak of what you have seen. The Peacekeeper ships are gone, and the path is open. The Yycromae must act now, before the time has passed.]

"And what exactly are you proposing to do?"

Klyveress gestured. The six guards at the doors left their posts and came forward, one of them bringing Fibbit with him. [We will make the wrongs right,] she said.

The guards came to a halt in a semicircle around them. "And do you include the Commonwealth in these corrections?" Cavanagh asked quietly.

She studied him. [You do not understand, Lord Cavanagh,] she said. [Someday, perhaps, you will. Come; your transport is waiting.]

The Northern Wooded Steppes were a series of flat plains in the northern section of Phormbi's second-largest continent. Despite the arid climate, the steppes were nevertheless covered with forests of huge fan trees, forests that had apparently been there since before the centuries-past climate changes that had killed off all the smaller and less deeply rooted vegetation. Tall and smooth-barked, with a single wide spread of leafy branches at the top, the fan trees had been thought in the ancient legends of the region to be the pillars that held up the sky. With the contrast of the shadowy-green canopy above and the totally barren ground below, the silent sentinels standing aloof from one other in the permanent twilight made for an impressive sight.

A sight that was even more impressive at the moment. In all directions, almost as far as they could see from their third-floor window, the ground between the tree trunks was covered with spaceships, cables, support equipment, and a city's worth of Yycromae working furiously among it all.

After twenty-five years of forced peace, the Yycromae were once again preparing for war.

"It's insane," Cavanagh murmured, staring out at all the activity. "Don't we all have enough trouble with the Conquerors sitting out there ready to attack?"

"Maybe that's why they're doing it now," Hill said from across the room. He'd been pacing restlessly around the suite since they'd arrived here. Why, Cavanagh didn't know; he surely wasn't going to locate any surveillance devices with his bare hands. "Maybe they figure the Peacekeepers will have their hands too full to have time to come after them."

"Then they're fools," Cavanagh bit out. "There's no way in hell that the Commonwealth can just sit back and ignore an attempt at genocide."

On the other side of the room, Fibbit looked up from her morose contemplation of the floor. "What?" she said, sounding startled. "Genocide? What?"

Cavanagh looked at her, a surge of irritation rising into his throat. Didn't Fibbit have any idea at all as to what was going on here?

With an effort he forced the annoyance away. No, probably she didn't. For all their artistic genius, the Sanduuli were about as politically sophisticated as an average four-year-old human. "It's all right," Cavanagh soothed her. Under the circumstances she was probably feeling even more helpless than the rest of them. "It's all right. Don't worry, we'll handle things."

"Yes," Fibbit said, not looking particularly convinced. "I believe you."

Cavanagh sighed. Great. Nothing like having a little extra burden of trust to pile on top of the rest of the guilt he was lugging around for having gotten them into this mess in the first place. Why on Earth hadn't he just gone on to Avon instead of dragging everyone out here? "Look, why don't you go do a threading or something?" he suggested to her. "There's no sense in just sitting around worrying."

Fibbit looked around helplessly. "But I have no threading material. Also no frame."

"Hill will improvise something for you," Cavanagh said, looking over at the other. "Hill?"

"Yes, sir," Hill said, not quite suppressing a grimace. "Come on, Fibbit, let's see what we can find."

Fibbit unfolded herself from her seat, and together she and Hill went into one of the suite's other rooms. Sighing again, Cavanagh turned back to the window. "We're all going to go crazy if we have to stay here very long," he told Kolchin. "You'd better start finding us a way out of here."

Kolchin held up a finger. "Just a minute, sir."

Cavanagh frowned, leaning forward for a closer look. Kolchin's eyes were tracking methodically across the scene outside, his lips moving silently as he did so.

Whatever he was doing, a minute later he was done. "Well?" Cavanagh prompted.

"I'm not sure," Kolchin said slowly. "Looks to me like what they're doing is just fitting external weapons pods onto those ships down there. Newer merchant types, most of them, probably designed with this kind of quick military conversion in mind."

"They haven't been at this very long, then?"

"Not more than a week," Kolchin said. "Probably not even that long—the interdiction ships couldn't have been pulled out more than a couple of days ago."

"And when they did, the Hierarch decided this was their chance to pick up the war where they'd left off," Cavanagh growled.

"Well, that's just it, sir," Kolchin said. "They haven't been at this very long; and from the way Klyveress talked, it sounded like they weren't going to be at it much longer. And I doubt they'd risk trying to run an operation this size on any of their other worlds—they're much more populated, too close to major trade routes, with far too many non-Yycroman ships coming in and out. Best guess is that this is it."

"Isn't it enough?"

"No, sir," Kolchin shook his head. "That's just the point. It's not."

Cavanagh frowned at him. This wasn't just some intellectual game Kolchin was playing, he realized suddenly. "What do you mean?"

"Well, look at them," Kolchin said, gesturing. "There's a lot of stuff out there, but most of what you see is actually support and operations equipment. There aren't more than thirty or forty actual ships that we can see. Even if the whole steppe region is crammed this full, we're only talking maybe a thousand ships. And these are converted freighters, not real warships."

Cavanagh pursed his lips, thinking back to what Quinn had said about converting freighters to combat ships. "Perhaps this is only the support fleet," he suggested. "The actual battle force could be made up of ships like the one out there that caught us."

"No, I don't think so," Kolchin said. "We took their war fleet down pretty thoroughly after the Pacification. They couldn't have hidden more than a couple of ships that size from the inspectors. And there's no way they could have built another shipyard since then. Not with the interdiction zone and the limitations on what goes in and comes out of their worlds."

Cavanagh nodded. Kolchin was right on that point, anyway. He'd seen the inside of the interdiction-zone operation when he was in the NorCoord Parliament. "So where does that leave us?"

Kolchin shrugged. "It leaves us with a thousand ships' worth of strap-on weaponry setting out to take or destroy three major and two minor planets. It can't be done, and the Yycromae have to know that. Not in a single strike, anyway, which is all they're going to get before the Peacekeepers come down on them."

Cavanagh looked out at the ships below, his chest suddenly feeling tight. "Unless they're not planning to rely on just missiles and particle beams," he said quietly.

He could feel Kolchin's eyes on him. "You're not serious."

"No?" Cavanagh countered. "Tell me it's impossible. Especially now, when NorCoord is presumably digging the components out of wherever they've been stored all these years and bringing them together for reassembly."

"I hadn't thought about that part," Kolchin murmured. "God in heaven. If the Yycromae have got it, we're in big trouble."

Cavanagh took a deep breath, trying to ease the tightness in his chest. CIRCE in the hands of vengeful Yycromae... "Well, let's not jump to conclusions," he said. "There could be some perfectly legitimate tactical scheme where a thousand ships are all they need."

Kolchin shook his head. "I wish Quinn were here. They didn't teach us much about line-ship warfare in the commandos." He turned his back on the window. "By the way—for what it's worth—this shows you were right about the Mrachanis letting us escape. Ten to one they knew all about this place and wanted us to come blow the whistle on it."

Cavanagh had forgotten all about that conversation. "Certainly looks that way," he said. "What did the ci Yyatoor call it? A sensor-stealthed courier ship?"

"Right," Kolchin said. "All that means is that it's harder to locate once it meshes in. Same sort of stuff we do with watchships. There's some field-baffling on the tachyon emissions, too, so that you can get a little closer before the wake-trail detectors pick you up. But even with a ship the size and speed of a courier, they're going to have half an hour's warning that you're on your way in."

"It's still something the Yycromae would assume was a spy ship."

"Can't say I blame them," Kolchin conceded. "What I don't get is why the Mrachanis would bother sending us here. Why not just call in the Peacekeepers directly?"

"I don't know," Cavanagh said. "Maybe they didn't want to answer any awkward questions about how they knew the buildup was going on. Or maybe they were trying for a two-for-one deal: we blow the whistle on the Yycromae, plus we get distracted from our hunt for the man in Fibbit's threading. Or we blow the whistle and forget about the Mrach Conqueror legends. Take your pick."

Kolchin shook his head. "This is starting to sound way too complicated for Mrachanis."

Cavanagh snorted. "I'm beginning to get the feeling Mrachanis aren't nearly as simple and ingenuous as they'd like us to believe." There was the sound of a movement behind them, and he turned to see Hill come up. "You get Fibbit settled down?"

"More or less," Hill nodded, looking slightly disgusted. "I improvised a threading frame from a plastic sorting box I found in one of the armoires and a towel from the cleansing room. She wasn't happy with the texture, but I told her to consider it a challenge. She said she was going to try to thread that man from Mig-Ka City for you again."

"How's the room look?" Kolchin asked him.

Hill shrugged. "Well, there's no sign of any recent installations. They could be running bouncers off the windows, of course, but with all the noise and vibration out there they're not going to get much that way."

"Any idea what this place is?" Cavanagh asked. "It looks like a hotel."

"That's exactly what it is," Hill agreed. "Put up about twenty years ago by a joint Swiss-Yycroman consortium."

"Strange place to stick a hotel," Kolchin commented.

"It had a strange clientele, too," Hill said. "Most of them were bored rock climbers who wanted to tackle something different."

Kolchin stared at him. "You're kidding."

"No joke," Hill said. "The Joint Interstellar Climbing Club declared the trees here to be Class Sevens or Eights or something, and within days the climbers started to deluge the place. I guess the place was still humming until about six months ago, when the Yycroman government decided they were tired of burying the failures and declared the place closed."

Cavanagh frowned. "Six months ago?"

"That's what the skitter's records said," Hill said. "Why, is the number significant?"

"Probably not," Cavanagh said slowly. "It just struck me that that was almost exactly the same time that the Commerce Commissioner suddenly started restricting nonhuman access to Commonwealth military technology."

"You think there's a connection?" Kolchin asked.

Cavanagh looked out the window at all the military activity outside. "Probably just a coincidence."

For a long minute no one spoke. Kolchin broke the silence first. "I suppose the next step is to find a way out of here."

"I think we should sleep on it," Cavanagh said, rubbing at his eyes. "I don't know about either of you, but I'm just about dead on my feet."

"I understand, sir," Kolchin said. "You and Hill go ahead and get some sleep."

"What about you?"

"I'm all right," Kolchin assured him. "I slept some on the skitter." He glanced out the window. "Besides, there's a little something I'd like to try."

"Fine," Cavanagh said, too tired to argue. "Whatever you do, just be quiet about it."