The Dragon Never Sleeps

— 127 —

WarAvocat had not mistaken Jo for Haget. He had promoted her. Hardly had she been cleared by Medical than she was chin deep in planning a chastisement operation against House Tregesser. Her assignment was WarAvocat's idea of a reward.

She was to lead the regimental combat team assigned to capture Tregesser Horata and the villains.

He made no mistake calling her Colonel. His mistake was failing to wonder what mischief Kez Maefele had been up to during his stay on Tregesser Prime.

VII Gemina broke off the Web and swooped in the grand Guardship style, attacking without warning, without explanation to a system that went into a whining panic, wanting to know what they had done. They always did.

The change came when Jo's assault craft reached four thousand meters altitude, while riderships filled with invaders began forcing dockage all around station 3B.

Some unsuspected, undetected, automated system wakened.

A shaped blast gutted every docked rider. Soldiers already disembarked hurtled out of the ring, carried by the winds of decompression.

VII Gemina fighter patrols came under fire from a thousand small killer satellites.

Jo's assault craft encountered a barrage so accurate and intense forty percent did not reach the ground intact.

The survivors arrived scattered, disorganized, and without communications because a heavy jam blanket had spread over the whole region. Automatic strongpoints, indistinguishable from workaday structures, responded to the presence of unknown weapons. They were proof against all but the regiment's heaviest weapons.

It got worse when the city's shields went up. And worse still when Tregesser security forces counterattacked.

They were no untrained, disorganized rabble.

Jo survived the landing. She wondered if she would be as lucky with the inquiry certain to follow the fighting. This would not be an auspicious entry in her record.

WarAvocat had gone a sickly gray. He stood nose to nose with the worst moment of his life. WarCentral's wall display screamed debacle. Casualties already between forty-five hundred and six thousand. Those for the landing team were uncertain. VII Gemina had no contact with the ground.

Every station in the system had raised Guardship quality screens. The 3A, an antique supposedly out of service, was spewing seeker mines that made fighter deployments suicidal.

Down below every significant population center had vanished behind a pearlescent screen.

WarAvocat had not encountered that before. He did not like it. He had the firepower to scorch Tregesser Prime several times over. If he tried, when he ran out of ammunition, those cities would be sitting there still. The atmosphere itself protected them from his most powerful arguments.

Aleas came. "Message just arrived via system traffic band. You'd better listen."

He accessed Communications. The shimmer behind his shoulder said, "Invader, your hostile behavior has triggered an automated doomsday defense which cannot be deactivated by anyone in this system. It will remain active till it is destroyed, you are destroyed, or its control is satisfied that you have withdrawn."

WarAvocat cursed. He accessed Gemina and discovered that he could not communicate with House authorities because of the jam blanket. He learned that those authorities had tried to warn VII Gemina before system defenses went active.

"Damn! We just shot ourself in the foot. I can hear the Ku laughing."

"You think he's responsible?"

"Yes. If we'd come in and said ‘Please' and had taken Traffic direction, we wouldn't have run into anything. Only he would design a system triggered by our bad manners."

He asked Gemina for tactical suggestions. The choices were not exciting. He did not want to destroy Tregesser Prime. He wanted to punish House Tregesser's scheming masters. If he limited himself to that, he had to invade Tregesser Horata and the Tregesser Pylon. Which meant accepting heavy losses.

"We could pronounce a Ban," Aleas suggested.

"And have all Canon mock us." Aching inside, he issued orders. It would be the hard way.

What else had the Ku left him?

Jo gained control gradually. She used messengers till she discovered that the public comm service remained undisturbed by the jam blanket. After six hours she had communications with all her battalion and company commanders. She told them to avoid fighting, to find ways around the strongpoints and under the screens.

Air support arrived. Reinforcements came. Armor and heavy artillery materialized. It still took another two days. And not once did she take one prisoner who had the slightest idea why a Guardship would attack Tregesser Prime. They thought VII Gemina had gone rogue.

The House security forces were embarrassingly good. They made the soldiers buy every meter with blood. Their only failing was inadequate numbers.

WarAvocat greeted Colonel Klass wearily. "Plant yourself. Relax." Pause. "This has been the most embarrassing incident of my life. Eighteen thousand casualties. Massive equipment losses. Their casualties were lighter than ours. And we did not catch one criminal."

"They had positional advantages." Klass sighed. "I'm confused. I was sure I killed Provik, Shike, and Provik's girlfriend on V. Rothica 4. Though AnyKaat didn't find their bodies when she got their stuff. You dealt with them here, later. Seeker says none of them went offworld while he was here."

"It is puzzling. It has been from the day we ran into a krekelen shapechanger centuries after the last one died. Aleas wonders if someone isn't framing House Tregesser."

"I don't believe that."

"Neither does she. She entered it as a hypothesis because it doesn't contradict the known facts. She's useful that way."

Klass nodded. He supposed she was too tired to care. "Colonel, we lack the critical witness. Lupo Provik. Everyone else seems to be dead."

"I really thought we'd get it from Cable Shike. But I and I only got the inside story on some nasty family politics. And the Ku. He admitted that. But the case is thin. He didn't know the Ku had been aboard a Guardship or to Starbase till you bombed them with the news. The Ku was a major public figure at the time—I confirmed that with a minute's research—and they couldn't believe you'd missed, but since you did and you'd increased his value a million times, they weren't going to help you overcome your ignorance."

WarAvocat muttered to himself.

"Shike says the Ku and artifact convinced them they'd never been anywhere near Starbase, that you weren't interested in him at all, you were after her."

None of it held together. But Shike could not have lied. What they got from him was the truth he knew. But... His comm buzzed. "What?"

Aleas appeared. "Is Colonel Klass there?"

"Yes."

"The alien Seeker has gotten something off the Web. I can't make sense of what he's trying to tell me. He's excited. Upset-excited."

"Bring him." He broke the connection. "Your Meddinian friend is in a lather." He paused to think. She said nothing. "It all comes back to the Ku. Always. Each time we trace him, his reported behavior makes him look apolitical or even sympathetic. He saved you.... But nothing happened to you in the universe where the Tregessers live. I'm confused, too, Colonel. You sure as hell got stuck on Merod Schene somehow."

"The Ku, sir?"

"Where does he stand? What's he doing? He knows me. He knows the Deified. He knows VII Gemina. If he's taken up arms again, he may be the reason we can't extract a reliable version of the past. He may be causing us to collide with realities reshaped to the workings of the Ku mind. The Ku wizard could believe two or three conflicting truths."

Seeker was troubled. That was not good. It made communication more difficult. Jo did not always understand when he was calm.

She was not looking forward to her next assignment. She and AnyKaat were to record the secrets and history of the Godspeakers as they were known to Seeker's people. If Seeker's race was half as old as he claimed, they would be a long time getting a story.

Jo worked with him while WarAvocat and Notable argued softly about something she was too distracted to catch. Once she grasped what Seeker wanted to convey, she had trouble remaining calm herself.

"WarAvocat?"

"Have you got it?"

"He intercepted a message from the Outsider supreme commander to the commander of the ship shadowing us." That ship was sitting out there now, barely off the strand, watching. "Which goes by the name Hunger of the Destroyer."

"That's cheerful."

"Isn't it? The message was a heavyweight commendation for the way Hunger has hung on to us and made us waste time trying to shake or catch him. Also, for doing a good job, teamed with a ship called Edge of Night, of letting a Traveler deliver a partial message before destroying it."

WarAvocat frowned. He glanced at his woman friend. She shrugged. He asked, "Was that rigged?"

Jo shrugged, too. "They were trying to kill me. I wasn't watching to see if they were trying to time it."

"There were Godspeakers on both ships. They could have."

"In which case I'm luckier than I thought."

"What's the rest of it?"

"The end of the message ran, ‘The dragon took the poisoned bait. Now it is too late. Success is assured.' "

WarAvocat grunted as though he had been kicked in the groin.

Strate did not trust his voice not to crack. Aleas asked the question for him. "You're sure the word was dragon?"

"Yes. I triple-checked it."

How long had the Ku belonged to the Outsiders? He had run from Starbase to a station controlled by Godspeakers. An Outsider-operated Traveler, apparently with Godspeaker aboard, delivered him to the Tregesser system M. Shrilica. Maybe he had been using House Tregesser since. Maybe he had been the grand choreographer, not Lupo Provik.

Hell. Maybe it went back further. Maybe the krekelen, the Concord risings, the Outsider on the Cholot Traveler, had been pawns in a grand design to bring VII Gemina and the Ku together....

He shuddered like a wet dog. A man could go goofy worrying about the ever-widening possibilities. That was then and this was now, and the most dangerous mind alive was active again, directing the most powerful war machine ever. There was no time for might-have-beens.

"Colonel, does he know where the supreme commander is now?"

Klass and the Meddinian huddled. WarAvocat cued Gemina to review what it had overheard.

Klass said, "He says the supreme commander is now sending frequent countdowns. If he listens long enough and has access to good charts, he can position the transmission point. He thinks it's on the M. Bullica—M. Tennica strand now, moving toward M. Tennica."

Deep inside Canon, in the region where the Sixth, Second, and Fourth Presidencies converged. From M. Tennica one dramatically elongated strand arrowed to M. Lakica, into the heart of Canon, directly toward S. Alisonica. "It is Capitola Primagenia! Access, Gemina. Is Kez Maefele correct in thinking it's too late for us to take him at S. Alisonica?"

Tension mounted. Gemina took a long time getting the data up on screen.

The air shuddered, cracked. "Yes. Can catch."

Klass fainted.

Aleas screamed.

WarAvocat sat there chewing air like a fish out of water.

Seeker observed, bewildered.

VII Gemina was almost four thousand years old. Never before had that great mind down in the Core, Gemina, spoken to anyone directly. Speech did not come till a Core mind developed an identity and ego and concluded that it was a singular entity with the Guardship itself as flesh. From that leapoff, it was only centuries before it decided it was not a machine but a demigod.

Speech was the first climbing onto the Web of madness. The end of the strand was the hollow, lonely insanity of a IV Trajana or VI Adjutrix.

It was not too late to stop that. If the news did not leave this compartment, did not get discussed, and the Gemina ego did not become alert to its peril, Starbase could rectify the trouble. But would not try, should the ego become integral to the Guardship's functioning.

He would head in to Starbase as soon as they finished the Ku.

WarAvocat regained his composure. He accessed OpsAvocat and ordered a crash run straight through to S. Alisonica. The hell with Tregesser Prime.