Priam's Lens

EIGHT Riding the Keel

The daily briefing for all who had been stuck for so long aboard the Odysseus was getting to be a real yawner, but as long as they were in the project and somebody else was paying the bill, attendance was mandatory.

This particular briefing, however, had some excitement attached to it, and they sat there, waiting, with slight but palpable anticipation that, perhaps, at last they were going to move.

A packet boat had come through during the previous watch, and among the things it carried were sealed and encoded courier pouches for the Odysseus. It was known that the old captain of the ship, along with the Orthodox priest and the old diva, had been huddled for a couple of hours looking over whatever had come in, and that the robotic systems were testing and preparing visuals.

The group was pretty well divided over the length of the wait. A number, led by the scientists Takamura and van der Voort, thought that this was as far as they were going to get, and that it was something of a wild goose chase. The mercenaries were content either to go or to continue to train both themselves and the civilians in what was to come. It was pretty well known that Colonel N’Gana believed that it would be far better for most of the others if this did turn out to be a wild goose chase, since he didn’t give them much hope of surviving any conditions that they would probably face were they to get a “go!”

And then there were Krill and Socolov, both of whom were bored to tears and just wanted something to happen before they died of old age. Krill felt certain that she’d swept the ship as thoroughly as technology made possible, and that nothing important was getting back to Commander Park. She was well aware of the tiny robotic bugs that kept crawling all over, but there were ways to limit them, or jam them completely if need be. Others had not been so kind about their discovery, but amateurs always believed that if you paid enough money and demanded that you juggle three planets and breathe pure carbon monoxide, then you should be able to do it all while singing your old college fight song.

One of the first things they taught would-be officers in OCS, though, was the ancient story of King Canute, who believed that he was king by God’s grace and will and thus had God’s powers. Irritated by the crashing of the surf on the incoming tide that disturbed his sleep, he marched out into the sea and commanded it to stand still and be quiet. The sea, of course, ignored him and he drowned.

The ones giving the orders and paying the bills were always the descendants of King Canute, whether private or government. That was why Krill, at least, had gone private. If you were going to have to work for idiots, then you might as well work for the ones that paid the best.

Madame Sotoropolis ambled in in her inimitable fashion and took a supporting seat in her usual spot. Krill and a few others knew what she looked like under there—although not how much was still human and how much was replacement but most were more or less content not to know.

Father Chicanis emerged from behind the stage and stood at the podium.

“I have good news and distressing news both this morning,” he told them without preamble. “The distressing news is that a new wave of Titan ships has deployed and is beginning to take over the Sigma Neighborhood. That’s eight systems, eight planets. The Confederacy knew they were coming and got off what it could, but the wholesale evacuation of eight worlds is simply impossible, as you know. Unlike the first wave, when we challenged them and were destroyed, or the second, in which we were far too cautious and didn’t yet know what sort of things they did, this time, at least, we managed to be set up to get detailed analytical measurements, including pictures. Their method of operation has not varied, but there do seem to be more of them this time.” He looked to the back of the room. “Run sequence number one, please.”

The screen suddenly leaped to life, showing a remarkably lifelike three-dimensional solar system against a star-field, a kind of shadowbox view of the inner planets with the sun blocked from direct view to keep the scene visible.

The military people had seen such footage before, but it was relatively new to the rest. It was public knowledge what the Titans did, but The Confederacy had thought it prudent not to allow the kind of graphic pictures that were possible. The resulting panic from what they now knew was bad enough; this sort of thing would simply serve no purpose.

There was a slight pan, and then, in the upper left, the formation of Titan ships appeared. They were, as always, apparently out of focus: flattened eggs with a horizontal demarcation line, but fuzzy and muted. No details were visible and even the yellowish color was a pastel.

They were large ships, but not that large, even by Confederacy standards. Although unitary rather than modular, like the Odysseus, the Titan craft looked to be a bit over a kilometer long and perhaps slightly narrower across, the orientation mostly taken from the direction of flight rather than from any feature that would indicate a pilot area, or, indeed, an engine module.

There were seven of them flying in a close-quarter V formation, and they moved as one and banked and headed for the second planet from the sun, the one that was blue and white and was clearly the sort of place to support a large human population.

Suddenly there was an enormous flare-up in space as they passed a point between planets two and three.

“That’s the primary genhole blowing,” the priest told them. “Essentially the power required to sustain it is simply bled out as they pass—note that there were no signs of anything shooting from the ships, nor coming to them. When they are near and there is power, they simply absorb it. The gate loses its stability and essentially vanishes within itself, the hole that swallows a hole and becomes nothing. Anything in there at the time also is destroyed, or, more accurately, ceases to exist, but I’m informed that they cleared everything that they could and that no ships got caught, unlike the last encounters.”

“Thank God for that,” Madame Sotoropolis muttered.

“As they close in on the second planet, which is called Naughton, you see that there comes a fair amount of exchange. Magnify, please!”

The view suddenly filled partway with a no less diffuse and unfocused Titan ship and also showed some rather substantial warships bearing in and firing full. The energy pulses, torpedoes, and fusion warheads all were permitted to come in and apparently hit the Titan ship, but when they did, nothing happened. Nothing. No explosions, no nothing. It was as if they were all snowballs and had simply hit a mass of molten rock.

Now, though, the three large warships lost their own shields even as they banked to attempt to get away. They did not explode, they did not flare, they simply went cold and dark and continued aimlessly in the trajectory they’d been taking when it hit.

“All power goes instantly,” the priest told them. “It sucks it up so fast and so completely it barely registers on the instruments. Since there’s also no life support, no lifeboat support, no environmental suits and space suits that will work, not even oxygen-carbon dioxide exchangers, normal ventilation, you name it, everything is instantly gone. Some of the poor souls may have hung on for a while, but the lucky ones died instantly. One will head forever out into deepest space; a second will fall into Naughton’s gravity well and burn up; and the third will angle in and eventually fall right into the star. Other ships based on the planet and stuck there will try to rescue them somehow, but none will succeed. Now—see them begin to deploy. There is more ocean on Naughton than normal, and the continental land mass is huge but singular at the moment. They are deploying along the outer edges of the continent as you see now from this angle, and essentially encircling it. Once the Titans have established position, they will begin a broad coordinated sweep that will eventually take them over every single part of the land mass. As they pass, slowly and methodically as always, the power will simply go below. This takes some time, and is probably not completed now down there. However, take a look at the night shot here. Next sequence, please!”

The planet was now in night, and there were still signs of vast lighted areas. Cities were down there still, and a huge amount of humanity had not been able to get off. The Titan ships weren’t even visible in a long shot, but you could see their effect on the coastal areas. There, quite discernibly, whole sequences of lights representing major places where people lived were simply winking out.

Father Chicanis continued, “The next step after this will be to establish a base system. With only one Pangean land mass, they will probably establish it equidistant from the edges of the continent. The seventh ship, probably the lead ship, will then detach a smaller vessel identical to the big ones and establish a center point in a flat area in the middle of the land mass. They will then set up an energy grid of a nature we have not ever been able to crack or understand, and, using that, they will begin the reshaping of the land.”

“What about the islands? There are lots of islands in that humongous ocean,” Katarina Socolov noted. “What about on the sea and underwater colonies?”

“They really don’t care,” Chicanis reminded her. “They simply ignore us. What will happen is that they will use the nexus they created to reshape the planet as they choose. Once they establish their ground stations, smaller ships, which kind of ooze out of the main ones like bubbles of oil out of a great slick, can extend the active force fields as desired. In Naughton’s case, it may be that some of the people on the smaller islands and perhaps even some underwater stations will continue to exist, as the Titans have shown little interest in the seas and there are no islands large enough for their plantings. What they might do is anything from tilt the axis of the planet to nudge it into a slightly different orbit that would produce their preferred temperature range. That usually destroys any settlements such as you describe, but in this case they probably will not do that. Naughton is already very close to their norms on its own. They need only adjust the rainfall patterns, accelerate drift to create or eliminate some needed landforms and river systems, and so on. They will almost certainly also do a cleansing, as we call it, once they have set up their various nexus.”

“Cleansing?”

“Yes. They will create an energy firestorm that will sweep the area in between their bases and meet in the center. This will eliminate all standing vegetation and probably whatever humanity is trying to survive above-ground. That’s what we believe. A great deal of effort went into putting up shelters in underground units, even in old transport tubes and the like. It won’t be very pleasant there, and there will be no fresh air flow, no lights, no nothing, but some people will survive and live off preserved foods and such for years. By the time the very few survivors emerge, they will probably be nocturnal, and very primitive, but they will emerge into a world which is hot, wet, and has a reestablished ecosystem. The Titans tend to foster fruit and vegetable growth, including both imported and native species, if they’re in balance. A very small human population can probably survive on them. Our energy scans indicate that they range in tribal groups. But there will not be many, and they will be essentially ignored.”

“Just what sort of population were we looking at there, Father?” van der Voort asked him, fearing the answer from the knowledge of past conquests but wanting to know anyway.

“Last census was a bit over a billion people,” Chicanis responded gravely. “They managed to evacuate, oh, perhaps a hundred and thirty thousand.”

That cast a sudden chill and noticeable pall across the whole gathering. Still, N’Gana shifted a bit impatiently. “This is old stuff, Father. Why do we need the gory details again?”

“Sorry, Colonel, but it’s not completely old stuff to some, and it was necessary that everyone, I think, not only know the facts but see them in graphic detail. The reason why Naughton is a particularly important object lesson is that it is, in many ways, quite similar to Helena.”

That caused a major stir.

“Helena has two continental land masses,” Madame Sotoropolis put in from her perch in the center. “However, they are not all that far apart and, even with a gulf of perhaps five hundred kilometers between them, they are in many ways similar to what you have seen. The rest is sea.

There are active volcanic islands in the ocean which the Titans have so far not seen fit to shut down or alter. There is also volcanism scattered in among the high mountains that ring the two continents. Helena was designed to our specifications, although, of course, over a far longer period and using our more primitive tools, so there is a certain regularity. Two island continents, rather playfully called Eden and Atlantis. The Titan bases are set up much the same as you saw them there, only there are fewer of them. Eden, the more tropical of the two throughout and the planet’s breadbasket, has only one primary base and then uses a half dozen small bases using the spinoff ships. Atlantis, which was where the major population centers were, has three large ships doing a kind of triangle system the way those seven did there with the larger single continent on Naughton.”

Katarina Socolov took several deep breaths. Chicanis noticed and asked, “Are you all right, my dear?”

She nodded. “I—I think so. How old were those pictures, Father?”

He looked at a small screen in the podium. “Even allowing for temporal distortion, we are talking no more than two years here. Yesterday by the packet boat’s clock.”

“Two years… So, right now, that continent is a blasted plain with nothing growing, and out of a billion people a few—what? hundred? thousand?—survivors are huddled like animals in caves in near darkness eating jars of food and—it’s horrible!”

“Tell me how to stop it and I’ll blow those things to hell without a second thought,” Colonal N’Gana put in, showing some uncharacteristic compassion.

“What’s the real time clock on Helena now?” Doctor Takamura asked.

“If we left tomorrow and managed somehow to establish a genhole terminus in system without attracting the bad guys, it would be seventy-eight years standard,” Chicanis told them.

“We left them and marched to the rescue a mere six years ago,” the old diva sighed. “But in that time we have lived, they have been remade. That is the worst of all tragedies. Not just that we cannot help, but that no matter when one rides to help, it’s always too late. Much, much too late.”

There was silence for a minute or so there, then the priest continued.

“Because of the likelihood of this conference being monitored, we can’t go into much more detail right now,” he told them. “I think they are going crazy trying to figure out what this is all about, and, frankly, I was beginning to have my doubts as well. However, now we can both bid farewell to the prying little crawling monitors of Commander Park and this rather depressing little place and head off. The packet also brought the codes we have been waiting for. It appears that the Titan movement caused the delay in ways I suppose we will need to have explained. At any rate, from this moment on, all shore leave is canceled for any and all personnel, as little as we’ve done to begin with, and the captain, even now, is putting in his charts and requests to break port and head out. It will doubtless take a few hours for traffic control to clear us, and, of course, as much added time as Commander Park and his people want to delay us, but it is a good bet that we will be under way by twenty hundred ship’s time this day.”

“At last,” several breathed, although there was also among the small group a sudden rise in tension as well. It was finally on!

“Once we are through the genhole, we will meet again here and in security discuss for the first time some of the more specific parts of what we aim to do. All of this, of course, still depends on a third party who might or might not come through, but we will see.”

“In the meantime, parties should continue with their simulation exercises,” N’Gana said firmly. “It looks like you may well need them after all.”

Below, in the Officer’s Quarters on the Naval base, a communicator went off like a fire siren.

Commander Park and Admiral Storer were aboard the tender Margaite now with Gene Harker and the chief. Harker’s combat e-suit stood like a streamlined robot just behind them.

“This is still volunteer, Harker,” Storer reminded him. “You don’t have to do this.”

The warrant officer swallowed hard. “Yes, sir, I think I do. Something tells me that if we’re not, somehow, along on this then there is no hope. I would rather take risks and maybe go down than sit and wait for the damned Titans to come knocking. I just hope all the theory people back in the labs are right that this is possible for a human being to do.”

“Oh, it’s possible. We’ve had people do it, at least for one jump, in testing this sort of thing,” Park assured him. “Of course, that was under controlled conditions with us knowing somebody was there, but it should work.”

“Thanks a lot for the qualifiers, sir,” Harker responded glumly.

The admiral looked at him. “Scared, son?”

“Yes, sir. Scared shitless, beg the admiral’s pardon. This may be the stupidest thing I’ve ever thought up, but I’m not going to back out.”

“Well, you’re as checked out as we can make you,” Commander Park said. “The suit’s the top of the line, even has some protection features and capabilities that are still not available in contract models. We’ve done this drill many times in this old heap.”

“Beggin’ the commander’s pardon, the Margaite’s no heap,” the chief piloting it snapped.

“Fair enough. This is no time to argue aesthetics.”

“Comin’ up on the hull, sir,” the chief reported. “Hold on, we’re about to mate with the high energy power intake.” There was a shudder, and the old chief nodded. “Now comin’ up on the ship. You got ten minutes, sonny. Get in the damned suit now. Ten minutes from now I got to disengage or they’ll know we’re up to somethin’.”

“They already know we’re up to something,” Harker noted. “They’d have to be nuts not to. I just hope they don’t think about this.”

He shook hands with the two superior officers and even the chief, and went back and turned his back on his suit. The suit walked slightly forward and enveloped him, and he felt himself drifting into the center. All of the life support plug-ins, instrumentation, direct links to the cortex were established, and he began to see better than ever, hear better than ever, and feel a little like superman.

“God be with you, Mister Harker,” the chief said simply but seriously.

He stepped back into the hatch and it closed. It drained of air in a matter of thirty seconds, then the outer door slid open and he gave a slight kick and sailed out and almost immediately on to the hull of the Odysseus’s main cabin.

At this moment, the tiny receptors in his head were directly connected to and communicating at the speed of thought with the suit. He could, essentially, fly in space using tiny nozzles, by just thinking about it, and he floated away from the tender and just half a meter above the smooth, dull hull of the bigger ship.

There was no safe place to do this, but the design of the bigger ship put a series of large spokes emanating equally from around the midsection of the cabin. These were used for precise genhole injection, and where they were joined to the ship, there was quite a large indentation at the base of each. He picked the nearest one and settled down into it. Once there, the suit secreted one of the most powerful bonding substances known that could later be dissolved. In fact, ships were often repaired with it. It wasn’t intended to take the place of true molding on a permanent basis, but many a warship had lasted many days in running pursuits and fights and it had held until they made it to dry-dock. It would cement him to the hull of the Odysseus so thoroughly that he would effectively become part of it.

So far the drill was going according to form. Now, and for many weeks if need be, the suit would generate or convert all that he required. He would not eat, or drink, or directly breathe, but those elements would be supplied or created as the monitors of every single square millimeter of his body told the suit he required. He would be, in effect, a disembodied spirit, and, before injection, even that spirit would be placed into a tranquilized sleep, not to awaken until there was a reason for it to do so.

If this group was going out to meet the real Dutchman, then he was ready to board and, if necessary, do battle and set tracking devices. If somewhere else, well, he hoped that this group believed that an extra experienced hand was more convenient than killing off a nosy hitchhiker.

He wished he could plug into that gathering once they’d injected, but to do that he’d have to be inside. He could communicate with them in real space, but inside a wormhole, whether natural or created, you were strictly incommunicado.

Commander Park elected not to hold them up anymore. In the little time he could finagle, there didn’t seem to be anything more he could do that he hadn’t already done anyway. At twenty hundred hours, the Odysseus gave a shudder and came to life like some great prehistoric star beast suddenly waking up and needing to prowl. Automated pilot programs handled all the undocking and everything up to and including injection. The ship’s on-board computers and even her live captain were basically redundancies, just as Eugene Harker, in his much smaller environment, was.

The great ship quickly picked up speed. First the space dock and then the entire planet began to rapidly recede with little or no sensation inside or out. Harker was still conscious and still thinking about whether or not he was committing the stupidest act of suicide in recent memory. It took the form of a dialogue, only he was the only one speaking…

Okay, so why wasn’t this a job for a good bioengineered robot? he asked, trying to convince himself that he was in fact useful.

Because, if there are Titans involved, not even the old lady’s lower parts would work, let alone any form of robot, no matter how much of it was quasi-organic. If it was a machine, they’d eat it.

So what are you right now but a lump of biological material lying inside a big machine? Some help you’ll be if the Titans show up!

Maybe. Just maybe. We’ll see…

The ship continued to accelerate and steered itself for a large structure floating in space, one of three in the area. These looked like giant squares, kilometers high and wide but only a hundred meters thick, and within them was a void that could not be described. Even a vacuum was something. How does one describe nothing? Many had tried, none had succeeded, but even those who saw it regularly tended to feel as if there was a total wrongness there, that even “empty” had to have some meaning.

The genhole was connected, through a kind of warp in space, a folding of space-time, with another at a predetermined point. You couldn’t just go faster than light in a practical sense—even if you weren’t quite doing it in a literal sense—and come out where you pleased. Each “hole” was still a sort of tube that needed another end. That was how Harker and Park and the rest knew where the ship was going, at least initially. They had to file plans so that ships were not crashing as they emerged from one or another, and, of course, it was a good way for the Navy to know just where everybody was heading. Of course, that assumed that all of them were charted, that all of them were legal, and that those which had been in areas no longer on the service lanes had been deactivated. In no case were these assumptions valid, of course, particularly not in this day and age.

The spokes along each segment of the Odysseus now hummed to life, and blanketed the entire outer hull with an energy shield. Fortunately, as it was supposed to, that energy shield considered Gene Harker a part of the hull and blanketed him as well.

The tip of the forward spokes now activated, throwing energy beams that struck the surface of the genhole. At this point the ship pitched slowly, until the twelve radiated lines on the ends of the spokes hit the precise spots of a similar grid just inside the genhole itself. At that point, ship and hole were locked on. There was a sudden heavy burst of power and the ship aimed right for the nothing in the middle. Perfectly aligned and oriented, it struck the outer surface.

Watching this from a side angle was something technicians always loved, no matter how many times they’d seen it. A huge, elongated modular ship crashed headlong into a block only a hundred meters thick and kept going until it was apparently consumed: it was always an awesome sight.

Just before injection, Gene Harker’s suit decided it was time to put him to sleep.

Even so, he was awake and aware when injection actually arrived, and he felt it: a weird, bizarre feeling that combined a crackling heat and the deepest cold all at once, and sent a roar with the sound of a cyclone’s winds through his unhearing ears. It was probably the drug and the fears and imagination of his mind, but he could never be sure.

Father Chicanis felt a bit more free than he had in some time. Admiral Krill noted that there were still some of Park’s bugs crawling around, but they could hardly transmit and they didn’t have much data storage abilities. And, since they weren’t coming home for some time, it didn’t matter if there were all sorts of recording devices on the hull. Let them be there, for all the information they could transmit back in the same year it might do anybody any good.

“You all know that Madame Sotoropolis and I are from Helena,” he began, “and that this is about returning to our world. But it is not precisely about that, because merely returning, this late, would do little good. It is almost certain that everyone we remember and love down there is dead, and perhaps their children as well. We can only pray that some survive. You cannot believe the tragedy of this.”

Colonel N’Gana thought that it was nice that the really rich folks got out to mourn the rest, but he said nothing. The mere fact that the very rich and powerful thought they were moral and proper human beings was why they always acted so insufferably that they inevitably caused themselves to be hated and occasionally overthrown. He was not, however, one of those particularly moved by all this Greek tragedy.

“We have been aware for some time that certain elements, apparently criminal, mostly from the services of previously conquered worlds and thus now off the registries, have been eking out a clandestine existence in conquered areas of space,” the priest went on. “They live on their ships, they stay out of the way of the Titans, and they establish nothing near them that would attract attention. What they need to survive and cannot get from whatever they can mine or process, they have been known to steal. It pains me to have to deal with these sorts of people, but there is a greater moral good at work here, I feel certain, and they are at least understandable.”

“How do they get around out there?” Takamura asked him. “I mean, we saw the gate for that world implode as the power was drained.”

“True, that happens, but not all gates from the conquered areas are deactivated, nor those in the path of the invaders,” Chicanis told them. “And, frankly, they have been able to deploy or make some of their own for smaller vessels. We will be into that network in a few days as we switch back and forth until we reach an outer point where there is, well, an extra genhole in a place too close to the Titans to be still used. At that point we will switch to their control, and the pirates or freebooters or whatever you wish to call them will control the navigation. The one we will be meeting, as you know, calls himself the Flying Dutchman. Most of them use quaint, sometimes antique names to disguise themselves or perhaps even characterize themselves. We have been waiting for the Dutchman’s signal, and now we are going to meet him inside the territory he controls.”

“Goodness! Do you mean inside conquered territory?” Katarina Socolov found that news unsettling.

“Yes, and no. Space is very big, and the one advantage we have, the same advantage they have, is that the Titans simply don’t care about us. We are irrelevant to them unless we make ourselves intrusive. They will not go hunting for us. They want our worlds, for whatever purpose.”

“I’ve heard of this Dutchman. He’s a killer and a pirate,” N’Gana commented gruffly. “What the hell do you want that requires him?”

“You misunderstand, Colonel,” Madame Sotoropolis put in. “We have no interest in the Dutchman. It is the Dutchman who has an interest in us. In other words, neither I nor any of my people contacted him—I don’t think any of us would have known exactly how to do that in any event. We were sitting around casting about for some way to get back at those fuzzy creatures or whatever they are that stole our world when we got a call from the Dutchman.

“It was simple and to the point. `If you wish to take a chance and devote the personnel and resources, I believe I have a way that can not only hurt the Titans but can drive them off our worlds. If you wish to take the risk, the coded addresses that follow will reach me. If you do not, do not bother to reply. In ten standard days, I will make this offer to someone else.’ ”

“That’s all you got? That’s it?” Admiral Krill responded. “Why, that could have been anybody claiming to be the Dutchman! It could be a hoax, or some Confederacy security plot, or simply an attempt to draw you into the clutches of freebooters so they can hold you for ransom or worse.”

“There was, quite naturally, a lot of follow-up,” Father Chicanis put in. “We replied, of course, and in due course we were sent just a small part of a thick data stream. The source was definitely a defensive computer system, and it contained some very interesting but incomplete data. The point was, we knew from the header ID that it had come from only one place.”

“It came from Eden,” Madame Sotoropolis sighed. “It came from the surface, or beneath the surface, of Helena.”

“Now, hold on! That’s impossible!” Juanita Krill responded. “There’s no power down there for a computer system. There is no power at all once these—these things take over! Never have we seen or measured one bit of anything we know of as a power source that was not the Titans’ unique physics.”

“No physics is unique,” Takamura interjected with irritation. “Like `magic,’ unique physics is simply physics we don’t understand yet.”

“Fair enough. But there’s nothing down there, right? It’s dead.”

“It is,” Colonel N’Gana agreed. “I was a part of a high-risk scan once in the early days of the second wave. We took tiny ships so small they would be hard to track even if you were looking for them, loaded only with deep scanning equipment, and we overflew two different Titan worlds. Almost got their attention on one, but they didn’t pursue and we got away before they could put an energy hook into us. But there was nothing down there. We could have picked up a battery for a single electric torch, I think. Nothing.”

“Nonetheless, this was from Helena, and from beneath the surface,” the old diva insisted. “We had the header and a lot else confirmed.”

“All right, we think we know how it’s done,” the priest added. “You yourself noted that there were a few pockets, islands or undersea stuff, where the Titans didn’t seem to bother. That’s not generally true—they usually drain it all—but on Pangean worlds like Naughton and Helena, even if they do a complete sweep and drain, they don’t maintain monitoring over the entire surface of the world. It’s wasteful. Once you’ve deactivated everything, why bother? In the case of primary land planets and planets that have a number of irregular and distant continents, they establish their permanent energy grid over the whole surface, it is true. But on these planets, they often just put anchors at the poles and allow normal rotation to keep the sweep and drain on. That means, first of all, that even a Titan’s power has limits. That’s comforting to know. Secondly, it means that, while they are continuously sweeping, they only have a round-the-clock energy cloak over the continents. The rest they sweep in two pole-to-pole lines. For example, if the complete day was twenty-two hours standard, as it is on Helena, the area outside the continents would be swept and monitored for power and activity only once every eleven hours.”

“My God!” van der Voort breathed. “If you knew when the sweep passed, you could actually get down, if you avoided their probes and used a region over the horizon for the continents, and have eleven hours before you would be detected and whatever you had turned off!”

“Or, if you had something that could move at a decent clip and you had that knowledge, you could follow along in the blind spot for quite some time,” Chicanis agreed. “That’s what some of these privateers have done. They get down in the holes on selected worlds, probably to island or underwater bases. Why they do it we’re not sure, but that’s what’s indicated by the readouts this Dutchman sent us. We think they’re scavenging. Below the surface there’s a lot left to scavenge, even after all these years. Mostly data. Information, on data cubes and blocks in the old computer cores. Imagine what somebody like the Dutchman could do with a full-blown planetary protection system of the Navy, even if it was out of date!”

“But what good does this do?” N’Gana wanted to know. “I mean, this must be known, at least in theory, to The Confederacy, but so what? They can’t assume that this scavenging is going on or do much to stop it, all things considered. And, beyond that, all it is is dropping in, running about, picking up something inert, trying to make it back to a window area somehow, and then getting picked up. It doesn’t hurt the Titans, doesn’t tell us anything more about them except that, like us, they will conserve their power and manage their installations efficiently where they can.”

“That’s true, it wouldn’t do The Confederacy any good to know it, which is probably why it’s never brought up,” Chicanis agreed. “But it appears from what they sent us as a sample, as it were, that one of the scavengers actually went down to Helena and somehow made it to Eden, one of the two main continents. He appears to have found something there, somewhere, deep underground, that hadn’t been fully drained. If we went there, perhaps we could find out. If even one battery remains, then there is some way to shield things from them. That could be the break we’ve been praying for. So far we’ve found nothing. He did. He found it, but apparently when he turned it on, they instantly found him. In spite of that, he managed to actually send the first broadcast, from just beneath the surface, of an actual defense intelligence dispatch since the Titans took over. It was short and sweet, and the odds are he’s dead or whatever they do to humans down there. But in that brief period, an enormous amount of information got sent. Something so important he was willing to give himself away to send it. And that, my friends, is what we are going to get from the Dutchman.”

“But—this is wonderful!” van der Voort exclaimed. “I mean, think of what you have just said! Energy shielded until used. We’ve never accomplished that! And a broadcast! An activation of an ancient defense unit! That’s astonishing! The leads that this suggests, the mere fact that it happened, open up countless new areas for research! This is not something we can morally or ethically keep to ourselves! Given sufficient resources and data like this, we might yet find a way to act against them!”

There was a short period of silence again, and then Father Chicanis put a bit of a damper on all the joy and enthusiasm. “Urn, Doctor, just what would you tell anybody? What evidence would you use to back it up? Where is your data to get the personnel, funding, and labs? You see the point?”

“Why, I—uh…”

“Stories like this have been around for years,” Krill added. “I never believed any of them. Wish fulfillment.”

“Believe this one. The data sent checks out,” the old diva told her.

“But—if this is true, then it’s the possible salvation of the human race!” the mathematician pressed. “Nobody could or should keep this to themselves, or market it!”

Colonel N’Gana snorted. “Um, yeah, Professor. You don’t get out much, do you?”

“Huh?”

“This Dutchman’s a pirate and a killer. I doubt if he cares if humanity is mostly stamped out, and the allied races with them, if he can be the survivor, maybe with a few like-minded freebooters. Besides, even if he did suddenly turn into this great altruist and savior of all The Confederacy, just how do you propose he go about it? Mail a copy of this report to the nearest Naval Intelligence district? Pop up in full view like several of you seemed to think he’d do back at that joint? No, I do think maybe he’s not so far gone that he doesn’t want it to get out, but he’s doing it his way, the safe, sure, and possibly profitable way as well. At least now I can see the sense of this expedition. The only thing I want to know is, if we’re just buying information, why do you need all of us? I can see the physicist and the mathematician. You want people who can test the data, and know how to interface with computers that can really test it. Even Krill, both for security, such as it was, here aboard ship, and to check out the inevitable codes if this is an old security device. But why two old fighting men like Sergeant Mogutu and myself? And, for that matter, why a cultural anthropologist? Unless you want to figure out what kind of culture these freebooters have built out there? And for God’s sake why the Pooka, who’s still asleep somewhere down below?”

“We were asked to bring people with combat knowledge and experience, if you must know,” Father Chicanis answered. “You know the simulations we’ve been running, which were also at least partly suggested by our yet absent ally. He also suggested the Quadulan, or Pooka as you call him. There is also the matter of the cargo.”

“Eh?”

“Just judging from it and the evidence otherwise,” the priest responded, “I would say that the Dutchman intends that at least some of us go down there and retrieve or do something he wants or needs done. Something he doesn’t want to do himself, or have any of his other people do, if he has any.”

“Down there. On Helena.” N’Gana thought it over, but didn’t seem totally put off by the idea so long as he thought there was a way out.

“Yes, on Helena. And we’ve invited Doctor Socolov, an expert on primitive and tribal cultures, to come along and keep us from getting speared and maybe eaten by our own grandchildren.”