He suspected the Guardship fleet had gotten bogged down. The Ku agreed. Big doings near Starbase suggested the deadlock would be broken soon.
Then three Outsider humans walked into Lupo's office.
He had expected that since VII Gemina issued its fleet directive.
He gathered the usual group. Blessed brought a recovered Cable Shike and had his new Other listen in.
Two of the Outsiders were lean, slight, with narrow skulls. Their features were sharp. They were dusky. Their hair was a glossy black. They wore it identically. Their eyes were a startling blue. They wore black. They seemed emotionless. Lupo guessed them to be in their thirties.
The third man, twenty years older, shared their height, hair color, and eyes, but weighed more. His clothing was stark but would have drawn second glances nowhere in Canon.
Two announced him as "Gif the Hand, Voice Appointive to the Godspeakers of the Shadowed Way, Master of A Hundred Torches." When Lupo lifted an eyebrow, she added, "Don't ask me. The clown said to introduce him that way."
Gif the Et Cetera snapped, "You're an arrogant and obstreperous breed." His speech had an odd cadence. "The Godspeakers directed that you be disabused of false notions of who is master."
Those two men were fast.
Two shot one through the arm. The Ku caught the other by the back of the neck, lifted him overhead. Cable Shike placed the snout of a hairsplitter under Gif's chin. Two's man looked more astonished than hurt. She gestured for him to get down on his face. He refused.
She blew his brains out.
Lupo said, "Mind telling me what other lessons you have, Gif?"
Gif looked at the corpse. "That's impossible."
"If you say so. So. The Guardships are kicking butt and they're getting desperate out yon. They sneaked you in to twist our arms."
"Grace of the Godspeakers, the Guardships have been stopped. The counterattack will begin soon."
"The Godspeakers those things that look like a puddle of raw guts?"
"Soon you will speak of them in pure terror."
"I doubt it. Your bosses smell the fleet getting ready for the killing push, which is why you're here. But House Tregesser won't go down with you."
"You have no choice. There's your role in the ambush of three Guardships."
"Right. And if we help we'll harvest wonderful rewards."
"Yes."
"Liar. Gif, your side won't win. Unless I let it."
Gif gave him a bug-eyed look.
"The Guardships are going to squish those gut piles till there aren't any left. Then they'll stomp whoever worked for them. You ought to be trying to cut a deal with the fleet."
"You are an enemy of the Guardships."
"Sure. And before that I'm an agent of House Tregesser. You're only offering a chance to trade an unpleasant status for something worse. Why do you think we'd be willing? Two, take friend Gif to Research. Send somebody to clean up."
Two left. The Valerena said, "You're sure about this?"
"It was a high risk mission for them. So on the record they didn't get through. Right? It'll be months before they're sure the mission failed."
Events Outside prevented the appearance of another mission for a year and a month. The second followed the routine of the first. Tregesser security invaded the Hauler that brought the envoys. A methane breather was found in what should have been a refrigerated hold. They killed it. There were witnesses. The incident had to be reported.
The raids started a month later. Every Tregesser system suffered at least one. A new level of pressure. None of the raids did serious damage. The Ku had had two years to prepare.
— 101 —
VII Gemina took no part in the operation that broke the deadlock. That was the greatest strike ever launched. Ten Guardships assailed the world where the methane breathers had evolved.
They thought highly of it. They shielded it with an unimaginable array of war machines. It took the Guardships six months to clear those and sterilize the planet.
Till then no Guardship had been lost. In that struggle seven perished.
In the end, Guardship soldiers stormed and captured a huge orbital fortress. They degraded its orbit. Four Guardships hammered it with Hellspinners till a self-sustaining reaction started. They let it go down to start a world afire.
There were no offers of surrender, no pleas for an armistice. Plainly, the struggle would go on for years.
— 102 —
Jo and AnyKaat made themselves Immunes, of sorts, by virtue of their weapons and willingness to use them. But even after two years they dared not let one another out of sight.
Jo felt tired, beaten down. In the beginning they had wanted to acquire wealth enough to get off and buy passage to P. Jaksonica, where AnyKaat could lever them back into the real universe. That had cracked up on the realities of Merod Schene. They had lowered their aim again and again. Now when the rare shuttle landed, they went out to see if they could get a message to AnyKaat's mother.
Jo's spirits were at low ebb. And for months she had been having nightmares about Seeker—or something alien—invading her mind whenever she slept.
She was afraid she was cracking.
— 103 —
It took Seeker a long time with Amber Soul to grasp the meaning of his experiences among the humans. And even she, who had been so long among them that she could not now fit among her own, did not comprehend them well.
They rewrote the faces of worlds.
They were an abomination in the eye of the universe, yet they had brought to this sand grain something unknown before their advent, the unyielding rule of law.
Their law did not always make sense. It was skewed to the advantage of the few. But it was as inflexible and predictable as any natural law and could no more be bent or twisted.
In their way, the humans were into the afternoon of their time, waiting for the twilight, but they had created this one great thing, this bubble of order and peace that hung like a jewel upon the tumultuous Web. With Chaos's own sword they chastised it, striking off its heads one by one, each time wresting from Chaos another shadow-thin slice of its dreadful empire.
There was a darkness upon the Web. It was a shadow of horror that left the strands thrumming with pain. It was an evil risen from the heart of Chaos to challenge the march of law. There was grave concern among the elders. They petitioned Seeker to burden himself with separation again.
Strange, strange Amber Soul begged to share his quest.
The Lieutenant Klass had become like one of the Lost Children, abandoned somewhere on the vastness of the Web, without lightmarks to sign the way to her. Could he find her while it mattered? The thread they had spun between them had been slender.
His people activated the signal that would alert a visitor to the system that there were passengers to collect.
— 104 —
Turtle came and went as he pleased. He was a trusted agent of the House creating a planetary defense.
Like it or not, he was a public figure and object of debate. He headed a band of aliens and artifacts numbering a hundred. Their presence in positions of trust caused grumbling.
The Directors had a grudge. The Chair no longer consulted them in any but the most mundane business. They knew nothing of its secret agendas. But they did know snakes were stirring. The Ku's gang and Provik's security forces were everywhere. Provik's monetary demands gnawed the belly out of the House's profitability.
Turtle was more content than he had been since leading the Dire Radiant. His moral cavils bent easily in the wind of a need to do what he had been fashioned to do.
The legacies of Valerena Tregesser included the Isle of Ise, for which Blessed had no time or love. That had become Turtle's place. There he heard a thousand echoes of childhood. He went there with Midnight, his frequent companion lately. Blessed was trying to fulfill an obligation by providing himself with an heir.