Priam's Lens

TEN Enter the Dutchman

The one problem with interstellar travel was that time was always the enemy of truth. Not only did time go at a very different rate for those within the genholes than for those outside, it was next to impossible to send accurate and up-to-the-minute data on ship positioning and tracking. Up to whose minute, and when?

That was one reason why the Navy wanted a Gene Harker along, rather than a robot, however brilliant and clever, that was not prepared to improvise and understand what was possible and what was practical. Yes, human-kind had made machines in their own psychic image who were smarter than any of their makers, and more versatile, but they still depended on being given specific instructions and goals in advance by people who could not know all the questions that might need answering. The most flexible and practical one to send on any such mission was a combination of the best of both: a human in a combat-hardened e-suit.

It was almost always the humans in their suits being dropped on hostile worlds or from ship to ship in normal space. Riding the keel was not considered a proven method of infiltration and travel. Harker wanted to prove it.

While the ship went through the genhole and those inside prepared for their own duties, watched additional briefings, or ran new simulations of their updated problems, Gene Harker slept, blissfully unaware of anything at all. There was nothing at the moment he could do, so, for now, the suit itself was awake and in charge.

The first switchover was monitored, noted, the data from the genhole gates read out and identified, and compared with known navigational charts. The suit determined that this was almost certainly nothing more than a switchover, and thus it did not awaken the man inside.

The Odysseus turned, and as soon as the automated systems on the ship and the gate meshed, it accelerated once more and went into yet another genhole, and all was quiet once more.

This happened three more times before the suit decided that there was an anomaly. The readout from the selected gate showed that it was inactive—that, in fact, it had been deactivated as leading to occupied territory. The Odysseus should have been unable to traverse the final distance to the gate, let alone go through it; collision alarms should have been ringing all over. Instead, the gate, shorn of the identifiable light system and internal glow that showed active gates to be properly functioning, swallowed the ship.

From that point on, the next two switchovers showed a variety of genhole gates that were in fact not encoded with any headers known in The Confederacy. The codes were totally different and, at this point anyway, totally unreadable. Nonetheless, the ship appeared to know the codes and the complementary mathematics and had no more trouble using them than it had any of the official ones.

The suit made a note of this. Genholes could not be reprogrammed by humans, even geniuses; it took the kind of artificial intelligence systems that required whole planets just to store the knowledge and compute the variables. The genholes had been placed by creating essentially random wormholes and then forcing the genhole gate through them. Only when this was done thousands, even millions, of times, and star charts made and compared, had it been possible to build and map a transportation network safe enough to send through real ships with living beings inside.

Going from a naturally occurring phenomenon to generating it themselves to being able to stabilize and harness what some called tunnels through space-time had opened up the universe to humanity. Its network created The Confederacy. A few other races had been encountered out there, some of which had interplanetary travel and at least one of which had been playing with generation ships, but none had discovered how to harness the wormhole principle and use it consistently.

It still wasn’t easy to do or maintain. The math involved in programming each genhole gate was so complex it was done at factories and maintenance areas; genholes were replaced every few years, or they should have been. When the Titans came, it was feared that this same network could be used as a shortcut road map to lead them to all the choicest inhabited worlds of The Confederacy. Some were simply turned off, some deactivated, but most were replaced with special gates that used a far different and totally military cipher. This allowed Naval vessels to get into enemy territory if they had to, but nobody else, and each emergence through a genhole rekeyed the codes so that only the ship emerging could reenter from that point.

Nobody was supposed to have those codes except the highest defense intelligence computers. Even ships were supplied with them only on a need basis, and with rapid expiration. The suit knew this, and knew that, too, the Odysseus was applying those codes it should not, could not know, and doing so easily enough that they might as well not have been there at all. It made a note for future debriefing, if it ever occurred: the damned superintelligence code system for occupied areas didn’t work. It probably never had. It was just too complicated.

It actually would have been a difficult thing for the Navy to discover on its own. When it used these genhole gates, they worked as they were supposed to. Nobody else even tried them because they gave off an “inactive” or “inert” signal.

It was lucky that the Titans appeared to use a totally different and still unknown means of accomplishing the same thing. Otherwise, the road map was wide open. It was in many ways a lucky break; just as they ignored all resistance, they ignored this as well.

“That is not my idea of a fair fight!” Sergeant Mogutu complained, emerging dripping wet and aching, not to mention stark naked, from the sim chamber aboard.

“I’m sorry, Sergeant,” Katarina Socolov told him. “It’s hard on me, too, but its the best I can come up with to simulate what you might face on the surface of a Titan-occupied world. Nothing—no machinery of any kind—works. Food would be present but not easily obtained. I postulated no large animals because of the cleansing they do before they allow a regrowth, but there would still be” person-to-person combat of some kind. You are back to the most basic ancestral state, Sergeant.”

He glared and quickly put on a towel, then stomped off to the showers.

Colonel N’Gana, who was about to enter, stood there wearing only a towel and a headband. “You will have to excuse my sergeant for grumbling,” he said to her in that very low melodious voice of his. “However, he will be a good man down there in those conditions. There is little call now, nor has there been for ages, for hand-to-hand combat and basic resourcefulness in the military. That is why we are able to command the fees that we do.”

She looked down at the control board. “Well, Colonel, I can certainly accept that you will be at least capable down there if my guesses are anything close to correct. You appear to have beaten the sim most of the time. Your sergeant beat it three times, and nobody else has quite beaten it yet. To what do you owe your remarkable record?”

The colonel flashed an evil grin. “It is because I dispatch any potential threat before it can be a threat to me. It is because I am devoted entirely to winning every such contest or dying myself. And then, perhaps, it is because I truly enjoy snapping the losers’ necks.”

She said nothing in response to that. There wasn’t anything to say, only to think that it was good that, at least for now, the good colonel was on her side. She knew for a fact that he was by no means kidding her; the readouts as he’d dispatched sim attackers hand to hand showed that he got a tremendous rush when he did so.

Still, she had to wonder about both the soldiers and the others, including herself. The colonel, after all, knew it was a sim, always knew it was a sim, always knew that he was, no matter what, going to wake up and come out of there whole. All of them were dependent to some degree on the devices of the culture in which all of them had been raised. She wasn’t sure that she, or anyone, could really imagine what it was like down there.

She heard a rustling noise to her right and turned to see the Pooka entering the sim control chamber. The Quadulan was a secretive and enigmatic type. She’d often wondered what it must be like on his home world. What kind of an evolution would produce a creature that was partly like a snake, about three meters long but thicker than a grown man’s thigh, covered in insulating fat and then thick waterproof hair that was so stiff it served as quill-like defense against being eaten as well as the cosmetic and perhaps protective roles such body hair usually denoted.

Its “arms” were several tentaclelike appendages that could be withdrawn entirely into the body cavity, leaving only the closed and flattened three fingers at the end of each to suggest that anything was there. When needed, these arms could extend out two to three meters, and with six of them placed around its midsection it could accomplish feats of close manual dexterity as easily or more so than many humans.

The face was somewhat owl-like, although it was all flesh, no beak or bony cartilage. The eyes were deep set, round, and changed like a cat’s in reaction to the light. They were not color-blind, but they did see into the infra-red; perhaps they did not see all the gradations of color the human eye did in exchange for seeing as comfortably at night as they did in broad daylight. The mouth was beak-like with overlapping lips that, when opened, revealed rows and rows of mostly tiny pointed teeth that seemed to go all the way down the esophagus.

It was said that they had originally been named Pookas by an Irish scout named O’Meara who landed on their world and found it difficult to find the natives, who lived below ground in vast complexes, though they easily found him. They would ooze out and take parts of his packs, his instruments, all sorts of things, and bring them below to be examined and analyzed. The Pookas were invisible spirits of Irish folklore; it’s not known if O’Meara ever finally found them, but those who followed did.

It was a curious mixture, humans and Quadulans. They had very little in common save a quest for understanding the universe. The thing that had brought the two peoples together was an understanding that both were intelligent and cultured.

The Quadulans, it seemed, unlike Terrestrial snakes, could hear quite well. And they absolutely loved fast-paced music with a heavy beat. Their own native music was tonally quite different but oddly pleasing to human ears as well. In that case, music had truly been the universal language music professors always dreamed it might be.

Still, their lifestyle, their biology, their whole existence was quite alien to humans. They got along, they traded, as junior—very junior—partners, except when human interests got in the way, in which case the Quadulans discovered how junior they were. Still, humans had given them the keys to the stars, and the Titans were coming for them as well. Quadulans, it seemed, thrived on the same sort of worlds humans and Titans both liked so well.

“You have the sim set up for me?” the Pooka asked her, its voice resonating from somewhere deep inside it, sounding in some ways like a very artificial monotone. It was, however, natural, and formed by inner muscles and internal gases. Their own language was formed in the same way, but involved such bizarre sounds that, while humans eventually learned it and programmed it into their machines, no human could ever speak it or follow it without aid. The Pookas, however, had no trouble with human speech, if you didn’t mind the eerie bass harp monotone.

“Yes, I did what I could,” she told it. “However, there is only so much I can do with this lack of information.”

“That is soon to be remedied, I believe? In the meantime, this will have to do. If my kind was specified as necessary for this expedition, then it is because of our physiology. That is logical. Someone thinks that I can get something that you could not. Comparing your abilities to mine, I surmise that it is someplace dark, perhaps well underground; that it is someplace that may only have a small access hole or tunnel; and that, most likely, it is in itself either some kind of data, data module, or unknown device that is no larger than my circumference. That is the problem I will work on.”

“Colonel N’Gana just went in on the surface sim,” she told it. “Since no com is allowed, there is no way for me to notify him that you will also be starting in on your sim. He is a very dangerous man and is likely to kill any surprises.

Don’t you think it’s prudent to wait until the Colonel comes out?”

“That will not be necessary,” the Pooka responded. “I am the only Quadulan on the expedition. I am not on the sim world. I also know the Colonel’s name. We will allow him to get in a bit so that he is away from the entrance and then I will go in. If he strikes, I am not so easily taken, and this will be a good test. If he does not, then he is irrelevant to me.”

She sighed. “Suit yourself. Ur—you weren’t in your own people’s military, were you?”

“The concept of military and civilian among your people is very quaint,” the Pooka responded, going to the entry hatch. “It shows just how long most of you have been without a war. Your people must have opposites of everything, even sexes.” And with no further elaboration, it triggered the opening sequence on the hatch, which released its air and swung open, filling the area temporarily with very hot, humid, somewhat fetid air. The Pooka slithered in, and then vanished as the hatch closed and resealed itself behind it.

Socolov’s corn link buzzed. “Yes?”

“Is anyone in the sims?” Father Chicanis asked her. “Yes, Father. Two. N’Gana and the Pooka.”

“They can be trusted on computer automatics,” the priest told her. “Please come up. I would like to speak to you.”

She was surprised, but replied, “Yes, of course. I’ll be right up.”

Father Chicanis sat in the small meeting room, relaxing comfortably on a chair. Although he had elaborate vestments as befitted an Orthodox priest, and both a black cassock and one in reversed color, aboard ship he used the formal garb only when serving as priest and confessor. The rest of the time, like now, he wore comfortable slacks, well-worn black boots, and a pullover shirt in one or more colors and patterns. Today’s was plain white.

“Please—sit down, be comfortable,” he invited.

She sat and relaxed, curious. “What is this all about, Father?”

“You, mostly. We’re actually speaking one last time to just about everybody individually. You’re not like the military types. You are in extremely good physical shape and you keep it that way, but you are no professional athlete. You are also somewhat shy around others. I’ve noticed that in mixed company, even in the sim area, you seem self-conscious or a bit nervous.”

“I—well, it’s not something I normally do, you know.”

“Indeed. But it is you who suggests that that is the normal dress down on Helena. We are following your scenarios. Why do you think there won’t even be the proverbial fig leaves down there?”

She shrugged. “We have lived for centuries in a disposable society. Even what we are both wearing now will be simply discarded. It’s easier to simply have our machines create new and fresh ones than to go through all the problems making them heavy-duty and cleanable. Clothes, then, would go early in a post-takeover society and they would be irreplaceable in a culture like ours where everyone can have everything made to order in their own bed-rooms. I suspect that when they first came back onto the surface, they used the fig leaf approach, but that quickly became pointless, as they are that exposed, it’s that consistently warm, and natural biology from sex to taking a crap would be so, well, public. They may have ornamental things, or things denoting rank, but in general nothing we’d think of as clothes beyond some kind of makeshift carrier for weapons or perhaps to carry babies. I don’t think they would understand the concept of modesty, but I was born and raised with it.”

He cleared his throat and nodded. “I see. My problem, Kati, is that we’ll have to put some folks down on the ground. The odds are they will have to travel some distance. Not everyone, of course, but the Colonel and the Sergeant, certainly, as well as our Pooka, and, frankly, me, since I know the land even if I no longer know the world. Takamura and van der Voort will remain aboard; their task will be in developing what we hope to extract. What I am trying to say is that, while we could really use you along, we will be three men and a giant hairy snake, all naked and using only the most primitive of tools and weaponry, and you. You’re not a fighter; I sincerely doubt if you could kill anyone or anything, at least not without such provocation as you do not wish to imagine. Under these conditions, with that kind of party, these kind of men—are you sure you wish to come with us?”

She thought about it. “You’re trying to scare me. They tried to scare me before, remember, when they came and recruited me. Okay, put me down stark naked with a couple of throwbacks to Neanderthal and a world where it’s likely women aren’t held up much as leader material, not if they went, as I believe they did, the way other primitive survivalist societies go—then, yes, I am scared. But I’ve spent my whole life studying these things in the abstract, with no real way to test out my theories, and here is an opportunity to be the first qualified observer to get in and see what happens to humanity after the power goes off. Don’t you see, Father? I can’t not go.”

“That is all I wanted to hear. But I want you doing many more simulations in the next few days, not only alone, as before, but with the rest of the ground party. That means under true sim conditions. We are also going to increase the load, particularly in basic supplies. The survivors down there have discovered what fills you up and what blows you up by now. We don’t know that, so the more we control our own food, the better. At least we don’t have to worry about wild animals. Unless, of course, that is what the survivors have become.”

“I don’t think that’s the right word for it,” she told him. “Consider our species. We’re soft, we damage easily, we’re laughably easy to kill. On our ancestral world and many others we settled afterward, there were creatures with better eyesight, better hearing, better sense of smell and taste and touch—you name it. We’re not even collectively any smarter than the other races we took over, like the Quadulan. But, other than a taste for the same music and the love of a good beat, what do we and the Pookas have in common? We adapt. Long before we ever left ancient Earth, in fact, before the age of machines, you found people living in the most frozen tundra, in the hottest and densest jungles, and just about everywhere in between. And when we moved out, we were able in many cases to do terraforming at a very fast clip because we didn’t need things to be exactly like they were back home. We’re adaptable. All the sentient races that survived and evolved to a high point are incredibly adaptable. No matter what the conditions, humans have always adapted.”

“And that’s why you believe that there are still people as we know them down there? After what will be, oh, close to a century by the time we get there?”

“I do. Your own sensors said that there were some. Not many, but some. I’ve worked out what I believe that society might have readapted to. I may be totally wrong. That’s why I have to go. I have to know.”

“I see. No matter what the price?”

She looked at him. “I don’t know if any of us could really accept living down there under those conditions for the rest of our lives. I’m not sure how long our lives would last under those conditions. But, yes, it’s worth a risk. Everything worthwhile seems to require risk, doesn’t it?”

“And what about—defense?”

“I can do all right in self-defense. Beyond that—I don’t know. Father, you are a Christian priest. Could you kill another human being? Do you really know if you could or not?”

Father Chicanis licked his lips and stared off into space for a moment. Then, without bringing his gaze back to her, he responded, very softly, “I have. It fills me with eternal remorse, but I know God forgives me. But, yes, I know I can kill if I must.”

His response shocked her, but didn’t completely throw her off. She decided, though, that if he was going to say who he’d killed, when, and why, then it would have to be because he wanted to say it, and at a time and place of his own choosing.

“Then you have said it,” she told him instead. “I do not know it, because, as I am sure you can agree, none of us truly knows what we will do until we are forced into actually doing it. It’s easy to say what we would do, or would not do, but until the choice is forced, there is no way to know, is there?”

“No,” he replied, still staring off into space.

“Then that is my only possible answer.”

He nodded, and finally looked at her again. “Very well, Kati. Go ahead and return to your duties now.”

She got up, started to leave, then stopped and turned to face him once more. “Why was this interview necessary, Father?” she asked him. “We spoke of nothing we haven’t spoken of many times since I was brought into this.”

He sighed. “Because we will rendezvous with the Dutchman in under eight ship hours,” he told her. “And from that point on, God knows where this is going to lead.”

“Warning! We are being scanned by diagnostic and targeting sensors!” The ship’s computer did not mince words.

They had been sitting in the designated area off a remote and totally desolate genhole gate switching area for three hours. Suddenly everything had erupted into warnings and actions.

“Place origin of scans on the main screen,” Captain Stavros ordered. When it came up, though, it wasn’t a whole lot of help. “I wonder how the hell he does that? It’s damned weird,” Stavros muttered.

“Clever, though,” Colonel N’Gana commented.

On the screen, in three dimensions, color, and with full and authentic depth, sitting in the middle of empty space but somehow internally and fully illuminated, was a gigantic sailing ship out of Earth’s past.

“What is actually there. Captain?” Takamura asked, fascinated. “I assume this is inherent in the scanning operation, so that the effect is a broadcast that overwhelms the screen. It is a clever invention, but it shouldn’t fool your own instruments.”

“Computer?” the captain prompted.

“Orion class frigate, well armed, showing its age but well maintained and upgraded. Minimum life signs aboard,” the computer reported.

“Orion class! That is an antique!” Admiral Krill commented. “It has to be salvaged from one or more vessels that went down in the initial Titan attacks. Nothing else makes sense.”

“Nonetheless, it makes a formidable pirate ship for freighters like us, does it not?” the captain responded. “Computer—you say minimal life signs aboard. How many biological life-forms do you scan?”

“There is some jamming of this. My sensors indicate very few, though. Perhaps as few as one.”

“One!” Takamura gasped. “Could one person even fly a ship like that?”

“Easily,” Admiral Krill told her. “That is, if they knew what they were doing in the first place, and they obviously do. Just like this ship, it’s all computerized, much of it artificial intelligence piloting and navigational gear. The crew of a modern frigate is small, and much of it is assigned to the sim training facilities and interpretive intelligence sections. The majority of live people aboard today’s frigates are Marines in combat gear.”

“Well, dear, don’t let’s keep guessing,” the old diva prodded the captain. “Hail them and let’s get going!”

“Odysseus to Flying Dutchman. Here we are. Please inform us as to what this is about.”

For a short period there was no response. Then back came a voice that was full, firm, and almost kindly, with just a trace of accent that could not be placed. “This is Hendrik van Staaten, captain of the Hollander. Your ship has transmitted the correct coding, and I have acknowledged it. We are both who we say we are and we are out here in the middle of nowhere. Shall we begin our negotiation?”

Madame Sotoropolis whispered to her captain, “Any chance of visuals?”

The captain shook his head. “No, ma’am. He’s got that blocked.”

“Hell of a trip and lots of trouble for a phone call,” Stavros retorted. “We’re all gathered here. Would you like a rundown of the assemblage?”

“Unnecessary,” van Staaten replied. “I probably know more about your passengers right now than you do. Overall, the choices run from good to adequate, but even the question marks will have to do. Let us begin by doing a bit of background work. Colonel N’Gana, have you ever heard of Priam’s Lens?”

The colonel snorted. “It was a pipe dream from a century or more back,” he responded. “Some sort of gizmo attached to a natural phenomenon nobody understood that was supposed to actually be capable of drilling a hole right through a Titan. Quite the adventure thriller concept, but there was no basis for it. Only in fiction do people just conjure up superweapons. In any event, it didn’t work.”

“The Lens, which is a natural phenomenon, does exist. The theory behind using its curious by-products as a weapon was sound, and a prototype was built that worked in limited tests,” van Staaten told them. “Madame Sotoropolis, I suspect, knows of the project. It was financed partly by Karas family money when the government took your own position, Colonel.”

Eyes turned to the old lady in the veil and sacklike dress.

“It was a last chance to save our world,” she said softly, remembering over the years. “Nobody else had any kind of answer at all. The Confederacy’s research and development people, its military, all the rest, had gone off on their own secret weapons projects that produced a lot of busy-work and lots of pet theories, but none of them worked. Eventually, they stopped funding them. We—the family, that is—did our own searching and researching when it became clear that we were in the way of this new threat. Almost everything we found had been tried by one or another of the government projects. So, we looked at the ones they rejected as too silly, too impractical, or simply fantasy. We found several, almost all very odd ideas from highly eccentric university types who were considered crackpots. All were highly eccentric—that is, crazy as loons—and most were crackpots, but some were not. The one involving the curious effects produced by Priam’s Lens, which was close to our system and in fact was the reason Helena had been discovered, showed definite promise, but before a full working prototype could be built and deployed, Helena was overrun. We never knew what happened to that or several other projects. We assumed that they either ran when the funding ran out or the world was overrun, or they were down there at the time.”

“I am most curious,” Doctor Takamura put in. “What sort of thing was this Priam Lens? Some sort of death ray? It certainly sounds like one of those cheap thriller ideas.”

“Some sort of thing in space. I really don’t know,” the diva told her. “I sang. My great-great-grandson and my two great-great-great-granddaughters were into all that. They’re all gone now.”

“On Helena?”

“No, not all of them. A different story for a different time, perhaps. But I knew little of this save that the projects were going on.”

“You did, however, recognize Priam’s Lens by name when I mentioned it,” van Staaten noted. “And I am certain that you are not here with these people on a whim. You have checked out the partial data I sent you. You know it is true. You know that I may be able to give you the location of the prototype of the Priam’s Lens project codes.”

“You also claim to be able to get in and out of Titan-controlled worlds. I assume that is on the polar sweep worlds?” N’Gana put in.

“Yes, that is true. The sweep worlds are the ones. Fortunately, Helena is such a world. It does, however, present particular problems, since the gravitational effects of the two moons in opposition orbits keeps the ocean very churned up and very dangerous at many times during the year. It is not an easy body to navigate under the best of conditions.”

“That is true,” Father Chicanis acknowledged. “We found working underwater to be far preferable to surface work, although it is possible to sail them if you are good enough and have a good enough craft.”

“Ah, yes. Father Chicanis. Good of you to be along. Understand, though, that you cannot work submerged under today’s conditions. While the overall force fields that drain all power from anything we can build tend to lose some effect just below two meters, that does not mean they have no effect. And if power is applied, rather than simply idled, it sets off alarm bells and you’re dead. That’s why even the underground and underwater installations went. That leaves you with non-powered surface travel as the only way. You cannot land on the continents or within the continental shelf’s limits. Those are constantly under monitoring and observation by the Titan grid. Non-powered craft, however, generally escape detection if at sea. The wave action and tidal forces appear to foul up their precise locators. But my people can get in. They do get in, and out, and quite often, if there’s something there we really think is worth the risk. The price is pretty high if they fail, though.”

“Priam’s Lens, or at least the prototype, is, I gather, on Helena? Probably on Atlantis?” Chicanis guessed.

“Wrong, Father. The prototype is rather large, in fact. It is built right into the smaller moon, Hector. I’ve been there myself, although that in itself is no mean feat, and I’ve examined the ruins. It’s still there, all right. It’ll take some work to get it up and running, but it is there. It does not, however, have any power. Whatever power there was seems to have been drained by the Titan attack force as it came down to the surface of the mother planet.”

“Then the records—even any instructions, commands, procedures. They are gone!” Takamura groaned. “Whatever computers they would be using would have died themselves for lack of any power, even a trickle charge!”

“You, too, are wrong, Doctor. That is a bad habit of your group. I hope you guess better once you are in action. There is a minimal trickle charge there, or so my information states. Not enough to be read by almost any instruments we have, and probably not by the Titans, either, but it’s there. Just barely enough. The trouble is, as I said, it’s incomplete. Much of the targeting and serious program debugging was going on on the surface in an underground research facility on the Eden continent just outside a city named—hmm, let’s see—Ephesus. How—Biblical. I sent a team in there to see what they could find. Nobody made it back out, but one of them managed to get out quite a bit of data.”

“Yes? How?”

“Remember what I said about indetectable trickle charges? Seems a few standby combat facilities, mostly fed by geothermal rather than fusion or antimatter, which would have been detected and sucked up, survive and are sort of turned on. Their residual hum is below the noise threshold of the Titans’ monitoring grid, or so my computers aboard my ship theorize. Of course, if they are ever used, then the Titans will be on them in a moment and that’s the end of that. One of my men was able to get to one. He knew by that point he couldn’t get out, that they were on his trail, and he made the decision to broadcast and hope that I’d pick it up, at least through the rescue ship waiting for him to make it to an area between sweeps. We got it, and, since then, nothing else. I’m pretty sure they got him, too. But that’s what I have here, ladies and gents. Real live data out of an interface with a dead man who was down there. It contains a great deal of data, but he didn’t get everything because he didn’t know what it was he was supposed to get. You, Madame Sotoropolis, have the family Karas databases. You know. I can trade you the where and the how, and a way in and out if you are good enough.”

“And what is it you wish, Captain van Staaten?” Captain Stavros asked suspiciously.

“I want control of the weapon. I want control, not the Navy, not the incompetent Confederacy, not the cowardly and defeatist types who now run things.”

“A weapon that can destroy Titans?”

“I have no idea if it will destroy them. I would like it to, but it may just hurt them. It may even merely annoy them, cause them pain. Whatever it does, I want it. I alone will decide where it shoots and what it shoots. I alone will give the commands. That is my price and it is not negotiable.”

Colonel N’Gana, along with several of the others, wasn’t overly concerned with this demand. After all, once the weapon was activated, once it was used, what could the Dutchman do anyway? Still, he had to ask: “Why do you think that we can get in and get the data from the surface when your people couldn’t? Why do you think we can make it out when you can’t?”

“I have no idea if you can do it, Colonel. If I thought it was easy, I would have done it myself and not needed any of you. When you do the cybernetic link and see what all was sent, you will understand what the purpose of each member of your team is. Some of it should be obvious.”

“So, let me get this straight,” Admiral Krill put in. “You expect us to go down and retrieve whatever your people couldn’t and then sit there and make this thing in the moon work. And then you expect us to just give you the trigger?”

“I do, and you will. You see, whether it does the job or not, the moment you shoot whatever this thing shoots and strike a Titan ship or base, well, you are really going to get their attention. There are seven primary bases down there. The moment I fire and hit one, the other six are going to know just exactly where it came from. Now, just who do you propose to fire that weapon?”

N’Gana sighed. “I, for one, agree with him, but it shows why this is stupid. He is certainly right that as soon as one of them is wounded, killed, blown up, whatever it does, the others are going to come after the source, and they won’t have far to go; a moon isn’t something you can move out of range easily. So, assume we go down. Assume we get everything we need to make it work. Assume we get back up with it. All big assumptions. One shot, then it’s over. So what? What will we have accomplished? All that for just one target? It might as well not work at all!”

“Not exactly,” van Staaten’s voice came back to them. “You will have the data. You will have the principles. And you will have a demonstration. If you can’t take that back and build and deploy more, then you do not deserve to live.”

“He’s got you there, Colonel,” Chicanis commented, sounding a bit too pleased.

“Yes or no? I can get you in, and I can get you out. Say yes, and I will transfer the cyberrecord and then we can go from there. Say no and it stops here. Once you say yes, though, you agree to my terms and commands. There will be no going back.”

“Might as well,” N’Gana grumbled. “If we say no, he’s just going to blow us to hell anyway.”

“Very well,” the old diva told the Dutchman. She still wished, as they all did, that she knew more about this strange rogue, and she certainly had no more trust in him than N’Gana did, but she had come too far to retreat now.

“I’m transferring an exact copy to your library computer now,” the Dutchman told them. “I would suggest that only people who are familiar with the technique and can interpret the information, either scientifically or geographically, should look at it. There’s a lot of extraneous stuff there that will be difficult to filter out completely. Oh—and one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“You might get Mister Harker off your goddamned hull and inside where he might do some good. I don’t think he’s going to be any help at all out there by himself.”