Spinneret

Chapter 4

With her fifteen years of Army experience, Carmen had left Meredith's office with the depressing certainty that it would take days for the colonel to take any action on the problems she had discussed with him—and that it would be weeks before she saw any of the results. It was therefore a pleasant shock when she arrived at her desk the next morning and found the shifting of extra farm machinery to Ceres already underway. A fast scan of the priority listing showed none of her coworkers had yet taken the job of organizing the assembly of spare farm equipment; keying that job onto her terminal, she set to work.

It was routine data manipulation—a simple matter of locating the equipment and necessary tools from the computer's listings and men shuffling work schedules for the right number of qualified mechanics—and as she tapped keys, her mind drifted back to the previous day and her conversations with Perez and Meredith.

She hadn't worked under Meredith for long, and aside from a brief interview when she'd been accepted for the colony, her personal knowledge of him was limited to the Ceres trip. Still, military bases had their fair share of gossip, and the stories she'd heard about the colonel had invariably painted him as honest and fair, which made his quick dismissal of Perez's allegations seem out of character. True, he was under a lot of pressure—and, admittedly, she wasn't convinced Perez had a case either—but it still seemed like an investigation was in order. As for Dunlop's dismissal, she couldn't make up her mind which way she hoped Meredith would decide.

In one corner of the terminal screen a yellow light blinked on. Startled, Carmen looked at what she'd just typed, realized with mild annoyance that in her reverie she'd tried to shift a worker who was already on a higher priority job. She blanked the command, the yellow light disappearing as she did so. Keying for the next page, she resumed scanning the job assignments.

One thing she was sure of, though, was that part of her responsibility to Astra was to do her bit to lower tensions and friction … and to that end she was determined to push her town council idea as hard as she could. Meredith's scorn notwithstanding, it seemed to her the simplest way to make the civilians feel more at home. Besides which, if the colony survived it would eventually shift to civilian government anyway, and having such a setup already in place would undoubtedly ease the transition.

Without warning, a red-bordered rectangle appeared in the middle of her screen, the words TOP PRIORITY MESSAGE flashing above it. Frowning, Carmen watched as words began filling the box … and felt her eyebrows climbing her forehead as she read them.

ATTENTION: ALL PERSONNEL: SATELLITE ARRAY HAS

DETECTED ROOSHRIKE SPACECRAFT APPROACHING ASTRA. NO

HOSTILITIES—REPEAT, NO HOSTILITIES—ARE EXPECTED, BUT

ALL MILITARY PERSONNEL ARE TO REMAIN ALERT.

LEGAL/ORGANIZATIONAL STAFF WILL IMMEDIATELY PREPARE

LISTING OF KNOWN ROOSHRIKE CUSTOMS AND RITUALS FOR

TRANSMISSION TO COLONEL MEREDITH'S OFFICE.

Carmen read the message twice before blanking it from her screen. "Hell in a Stealth," someone behind her muttered. The astonished chatter was just starting when Carmen's superior cut it off.

"All right, all right; delete the noise," she growled from her own terminal. "Smith, Hanson—start a Legal File search; Barratino, you check military records; Eldridge, start a general search for anything that's gotten buried in odd corners.

Olivero, you organize and format everything as it comes in."

The room fell silent, except for the steady sleet-on-a-window sound of computer keys. What rotten luck. Carmen thought as she waited for the data flow to begin.

Stuck in a little room twenty kilometers from the landing field when I could be out there catching my first glimpse of a real live alien.

Though come to think of it, perhaps it wasn't such bad luck, after all. The Rooshrike had contacted humans once before … and that time they'd opened fire.

The Rooshrike attack on the Celeritas was also on Meredith's mind as he watched the shiny dot driving over the ocean toward Martello Base, the feeling of being a massive sitting duck adding stiffness to his back as he sat in the lead vehicle of the five-car welcoming committee. The chances that this was a sneak attack were small—after all, over half of Astra's rental fee had yet to be paid—but business logic had only minimal effect on Meredith's combat reflexes. Trying to pretend that the sweat collecting on his forehead was due solely to the warm day, he squinted into the bright blue of the sky and waited.

Radar had already shown that the ship was considerably larger than the shuttles Martello's landing strip had been designed for, but the Rooshrike pilot had assured Meredith that that wouldn't be a problem, and as the arrowhead-shaped craft made its final descent, the colonel saw why. Unlike the largely horizontal approach used by American shuttles, the Rooshrike's was predominantly vertical, reminding Meredith momentarily of the old single-use space capsules. He winced, recalling the helplessness of those ancient craft; but at nearly the same instant the image vanished as white spears of repulser fire erupted from beneath the ship. Even at their supposedly safe distance Meredith distinctly felt the heat wave of that ignition, and with a silent prayer for the runway's permcrete, he watched the alien touch down. A minute later, he ordered the motorcade forward.

The Rooshrike ship had deployed a debarkation ramp by the time the humans reached the area. The ramp, designed to bypass the hottest sections of permcrete, was considerably shorter than the ones the Ctencri who'd landed on Earth had used, and Meredith decided the description of the Rooshrike as hot-planet aliens hadn't been overstating the case.

The Rooshrike itself, when it appeared, wasn't particularly impressive; but then, as Lieutenant Andrews would comment later, there wasn't a lot even aliens could do with basic spacesuit design. Apart from the oddly shaped face just barely visible through the dark visor, the creature descending the ramp might almost have been a slightly misproportioned human.

It came alone. Taking the cue, Meredith left the cars and went forward, moving as close to the ramp as he could stand. The alien reached the end of the ramp and stopped expectantly.

Meredith cleared his throat. "I greet you," he called to the alien, "and welcome you to Astra. I am Colonel Lloyd Meredith; I speak for my people."

There was a barely discernible pause as the Rooshrike's translator caught up, and then the alien stepped off the ramp and started forward. Meredith started breathing again; apparently he'd gotten the formal greeting right.

Or else the Rooshrike was being tolerant with the new race.

The alien stopped a couple of meters in front of Meredith. "I greet you in turn," it said, its voice hitting the same slight mispronunciations Meredith had heard from the Ctencri translator computers on Earth. "I am Beaeki; I speak for my people."

"We're pleased to have you here," Meredith told him, easing back a few centimeters. The alien's spacesuit was noticeably hot; Meredith wondered what the internal temperature was. "I regret we cannot offer proper accommodations for your stay, but our information concerning your environmental needs is incomplete."

"I will not require accommodations; my visit will be brief. And your lack of complete information is per our instructions to the Ctencri."

Not much for the odd polite lie, Meredith thought. That'll be a welcome change. "I see. Would you care to explain why? After all, we're neighbors now, and either of us might someday crash a ship in the other's territory."

"Your argument is unidirectional. Should a Rooshrike ship be distressed in this system a rescue team from the inner planet would provide aid."

"You have a colony in this system?" Meredith asked carefully. The Ctencri hadn't mentioned that.

"A mining base only; the surface is too dry for practical colonization. The base is adequately defended against attack, however."

Meredith let the implication pass without comment; a stiff denial that Astra had any militaristic intentions might be misconstrued. "I see. May I ask how long you intend to stay here? I would like to give you a tour of our colony and the facilities we are setting up to mine the mineral deposits near here." A sudden thought struck him. "I take it you referred to liquid sulfur when you spoke of your mining base being too dry. Our analysis indicates that sulfur is the third most common element in our soil. Perhaps when we get our mining and separating equipment going you'd be interested in purchasing some of the sulfur from us."

There was a long pause—so long, in fact, that Meredith wondered if the translator had hit a snag somewhere. He was trying to come up with a complete rephrasing when Beaeki spoke. "Forgive our breach of understanding," he said, slipping his hands momentarily behind his back. "I am named Beaeki nul Dies na. We did not realize you were of equal status with your home planet. We assumed you were a vassal world, or possibly a detention center. We apologize."

"It's all right," Meredith assured him. Now what brought that on? he wondered.

The business about selling them our sulfur! He wished desperately the Ctencri had given them a little more data on Rooshrike psychology. "Human political and organizational structures can be pretty hard even for humans to understand, let alone outsiders. I take it the Ctencri didn't tell you very much about us?"

"The Ctencri do not give information away free. We ascertained you would be no military threat to us, even if you were outcasts, but could afford no more."

"Mm. The Ctencri charge too much, you think?"

"The Ctencri are usurers," the Rooshrike said flatly. "They perhaps appear generous to you at this time because you are newly contacted and they do not yet know what they want from you. But you will learn, as we did, that their only interests are building their own power and influence."

"Well, we have a long history of that ourselves. Once we find our feet the Ctencri may find us harder to fleece than they expect." Meredith suddenly remembered his duties as host, and gestured back toward the cars. "May I offer you that look around now? I'm sure the Ctencri didn't tell you what we had planned for Astra—and we don't charge for the tour."

"I will accept." If Beaeki had caught the attempt at humor he gave DO sign of it.

"I would prefer we use my vehicle, though. If you have no objection."

Meredith shrugged, trying hard not to read anything sinister into the suggestion.

"No objections at all. Whenever you're ready."

It took only a few minutes to offload the vehicle, a sort of cross between a hovercraft and a powerboat with stubby outriggers; but once he and Beaeki were inside, Meredith understood the alien's reluctance to rough it in Astra's more primitive cars. The passenger compartment was large, comfortable, and whisperquiet, with a climate control Beaeki had thoughtfully set to match the outside air temperature. The ground effect cushion, which seemed both more powerful and less dust-making than those of the military ground-effect vehicles Meredith was used to, handled even boulder-sized obstacles with ease. Meredith's escort, confined as they were to cars and the water-only hovercraft, had a hard time keeping up, but Meredith wasn't overly concerned. Beaeki didn't seem bothered by the possible breach of protocol, and as their conversation was being monitored via Meredith's phone, the colonel didn't feel nervous when out of sight of his men.

What he did feel was surprise. Beaeki, he'd judged, was only mildly interested in what the humans were building on Astra, and he'd accordingly been thinking along the lines of a half-hour trip to Unie and back. But the Rooshrike, with no trace of his earlier official coolness, asked question after question, and before he knew it Meredith had launched them on a grand tour.

They began at the continental shelf due east of Martello Island, where the mysterious mineral deposits lay clearly visible a few meters beneath the water.

Crossing the narrow strip of land that separated the ocean from the northernmost finger of Splayfoot Bay, they came to the village of Wright, where the mined minerals would eventually be separated and purified. The road from there to Unie bordered both the bay and the Wright-Unie fanning area, and Meredith spent several minutes talking about the special fertilization being used. He broke off the monologue when Beaeki explained that his race had little interest in plant cultivation; on Rooshrike worlds, with solar energy up to thirty times more abundant than on Earth, keeping the flora cut back was more of a problem than persuading it to grow. The fish nurseries near Unie were far more to his interest, inducing him even to stop the vehicle and get out. Squatting by the offshore mesh pens, whose tops barely cleared the surface of the water, he peered into the depths as Meredith described how the metal-rich runoff from the Crosse fields would be carried by the river to the bay, where it would presumably allow the growth of algae and more complex plants to which the penned fish would have access.

"You go to great lengths for such a useless world," Beaeki commented as they headed toward Ceres.

"It may be the only other one we ever have," Meredith said sourly, "if the Ctencri are to be believed. Besides, we humans are very big on challenges."

They made a fast circuit of Ceres—where, thankfully, the workers were sticking to business today—looked at Teardrop Lake, and then headed south to Crosse, at the junction of whose rivers a second fish nursery was located.

And through it all, Meredith learned a great deal about the Rooshrike.

They were a young race, relatively speaking, technologically anywhere from eighty to three hundred years behind the other starfaring races of the region. As junior members of the six-nation trading association, they had chafed somewhat under the perceived condescension of the older races, particularly that of the Ctencri, and while they had rapidly built an empire of twenty colonies and bases, they had always had the feeling none of the others really took them seriously.

Though Beaeki never actually said so, Meredith got the distinct impression the Rooshrike were relieved that the beings from Earth were taking their former place at the bottom of the pecking order.

"Nice that at least no one's all that much more advanced technologically than all the others," Meredith noted at one point. "Still seems sort of odd, though, considering all the time that's been available for life to develop in."

"An accident of nature," Beaeki said, gazing out the side window as he drove.

"Approximately one hundred forty million years ago a supernova saturated this part of space with enhanced cosmic radiation, resulting in rapid mutation of disease organisms, destruction of high-atmosphere protective regions, and direct large-creature destruction via tissue damage. Those peoples capable of survival lost nearly all technology; the few who survived are more primitive now than even your people."

"I would have thought some of their knowledge would have survived with them."

"But the material base did not. Too much of their metal was already in forms too difficult for a primitive technology to extract."

Meredith swallowed. Metal again; metal, and lack of same. Just what his lowflying morale needed to hear about.

"Other more advanced races are reputed to exist," Beaeki continued. "But they are far away and few have seen them. They show as little interest in us as we do in the non-space-going peoples within this region."

"Um." Probably, Meredith thought, just as well.

He probed for information about the other nearby races, too, but here he had somewhat less success. Whether Beaeki simply wasn't interested in talking about their trading partners or whether the Rooshrike had learned the folly of giving away useful information for free Meredith didn't know. Still, he managed to get the races' names and general locations and, in a couple of instances, a brief physical description. Of those, the most interesting was that of the Poms, seagoing creatures that sounded something like dolphins equipped with manipulative tentacles. Meredith had often heard that a mechanical culture was impossible without fire, but Beaeki wouldn't say what the Poms had discovered as a substitute.

"That's something else that seems odd about this whole setup," Meredith commented. The tour over, Beaeki had brought his vehicle back to the ship and set it down expertly beneath its davits. "You said the edge of the Poms' territory is only a couple of light-years away. Since you're only interested in hot, Mercurytype worlds and the Poms live in liquid water, why haven't your two empires interpenetrated? Surely each of you has planets the other could use; it seems a perfectly reasonable deal for both sides."

"You will learn that there are only two things of value in an interstellar community: information and resources," Beaeki said as they left the vehicle and walked around to the ship's entry ramp. "All the solid bodies in a nation's territory, whether useful for colonization or not, can be exploited for mineral wealth and are thus guarded carefully."

"I would think asteroid mining would be cheaper than hauling cargo out of a planet's gravity well, though," Meredith suggested.

"Certainly. But asteroid belts are rare."

"Oh." A stray fact clicked in Meredith's mind: the Ctencri mission to Earth had rather offhandedly brought up the subject of mining rights. He would have to send back a warning with the next ship to watch out for a possible swindle. "As I recall, our lease includes the rights to this system's asteroids."

"Correct. But you may be disappointed. The belt is curiously deficient in the highdensity, heavy-metal asteroids which are most profitable for mining."

Meredith grimaced. How much of the eighty million dollars, he wondered, had gone for those mining rights? "You people seem to have learned the principles of cutthroat business without much trouble."

"The Ctencri are good teachers; but their lessons have been expensive."

"Thanks for the warning. We humans are supposed to be pretty good businessmen ourselves."

"Perhaps." Beaeki paused at the edge of the ramp and made a sweeping gesture across the torso of his spacesuit. "If you would be interested in buying metal from us, our refinery here may be able to supply small amounts."

"We would certainly be interested in discussing the matter," Meredith nodded.

"And you should consider buying the sulphur and other minerals we will soon be producing."

"I will pass your offer to the proper reviewers. Farewell."

Turning, the Rooshrike walked up the ramp and disappeared back into his ship.

Meredith's escort, which had parked a respectful fifty meters back, drove forward to pick him up, and within half a minute they were speeding toward the control tower and the safety of distance. They needn't have worried; Beaeki waited until they were well clear before withdrawing the ramp and starting the plasma compression cycle.

The launch, a few minutes later, was more spectacular than even the landing had been. The ship drifted almost leisurely upward at first, its repulsers muted in obvious consideration for the permcrete; but at a hundred meters the white spears abruptly became a pillar of fire, and the ship shot up like a fly off a table. Five seconds later the drive repulsers added forward motion; a minute after that it was lost to sight past the hazy cone of Mt. Olympus to the east.

Seated next to Meredith in the car, Lieutenant Andrews let out a low whistle.

"Either the Rooshrike have one hell of a technology," he commented, "or else the repulsers the Ctencri sold us are about five generations behind state of the art."

"Probably both." Meredith felt drained, as if he'd just spent the morning before a hostile congressional committee. "Well, I guess that's our taste of diplomacy for the week. Let's get back to work, shall we?"