AnyKaat fiddled for several minutes. It had been a long time and she was not sure what to look for.
Jo heard something in the passage outside. She did not have her back to the hatchway. "Company, AnyKaat. Cover."
"Right."
Jo spun to cover the passageway.
Lieutenant Jo. I have found you at last.
"Seeker? You old sonofabitch! AnyKaat. It's Seeker. I think. What the hell is this? Was that really you in my nightmares?"
It was a thin thread and a weak one, Jo Klass. It has been a long, hard search.
"You found us. I could kiss you. Couldn't you kiss him, AnyKaat?"
"Yeah. Station's on with a bitch, Jo."
"Screw station." She had a thousand questions.
Now we must find your commander.
"Haget? He's dead. Long gone. You know that. You were there."
The one called WarAvocat Hanaver Strate Dictat. There is much to tell him.
"You bet your ass we're going to find him. We're going to let him know what the hell has been going on, then we're going to kick some ass."
"Jo."
She looked at AnyKaat. She saw a lot of pain that would not have awakened had they never broken free of Merod Schene. AnyKaat had a kid she hadn't seen in more years than they had figured out. Just one anchor point away. A lot closer than this station had seemed from Merod Schene till a few years hours ago. "Yeah. Right. Seeker, we got to go on down the strand to P. Jaksonica. Got to."
There, AnyKaat. That do it?
She fought the panic that boiled up from the pit of her stomach. All those days of peril, all those nights of fear, all those years, with nothing constant, nothing trustworthy, but AnyKaat. Gone on so long it was programmed into her cells, it seemed. And now maybe about to be lost.
Jo suffered an almost paralyzing dread of being alone. It had been bad down below, but now it was worse. Now it was not something she could hold back by being the fastest and deadliest gun around.
"Station is all excited," AnyKaat said. "Somebody is going to have to deal with them before STASIS gets righteous."
Seeker faced the senior Pioyugov. The man's half of their exchange made it sound like Seeker's people had all but bought the Traveler. The Traveler's operators seemed inclined to do anything he asked. If they could understand what he wanted done.
The crew went to work. AnyKaat drifted out of their way. Joe told the purser, "Guess you'd better show us where to bed down."
He glanced at her hairsplitter, said, "Yes, ma'am."
— 115 —
The convoy left the Web twice before crossing the Rim, each time so its commanders could pass information, each time far from any anchor point. Turtle was impressed. The Outsiders were more daring than Canon operators, who dreaded leaving the Web away from carefully calculated optimum insystem points. Few Canon-based ships were prepared for extended stays in starspace.
A Godspeaker ship waited at the second pausing place. It relayed the news that Tregesser commandos had uncrossed the planned doublecross in the Hemebuk Neutrality.
They could not make an issue of it. But Turtle was sure they would try to even scores later. He would have to keep them thinking they had not reached his useful limit.
The convoy made a long passage to the nether reaches of the Outsider empire, broke away into the wildest waste space Turtle had ever seen.
Interstellar gas and dust were so dense the galaxy outside could not be seen. Parts of the cloud were in such rapid motion that its electromagnetic voices formed an endless chorus of screams. Gasses and dust and clouds of cold matter ranging from sand to planetoids were torn this way and that by mad gravitational tides. At the waste's heart was a trinary consisting of a black hole, a neutron star, and a living giant star that was being gutted by each in turn as the three whirled in a rapid orbital dance that distorted the very fabric of space. The cloud was no more than five light years across, yet Turtle could discern another dozen stars or protostars with his naked eye. Their fires lighted the dust, making sprawls of angel hair that braided into a firestorm spanning the entire sky.
Fourteen strands led into the maelstrom. Not a one was anchored.
Provik was intrigued. He thought a study of local conditions would reveal something about the Web, the study of which, for him, was something more than a hobby yet not quite an obsession.
"I tell you, Kez Maefele, if we survive this, I may just retire. The older I get, the less it seems worth the trouble. Shike would love to take over. I could give it to him. Take me a Voyager and go kiting off, trying to figure out what the Web is, why, where it came from, all that." There was real excitement in his eyes.
"An honorable pursuit," Turtle said. And not an original one. The Web intrigued everyone who came to it, of whatever species.
So far as anyone knew, the Web had always been. Yet it could not be explained by any physics or cosmology, scientific or religious. The Web had no physical right to exist. It should not do what it did. Yet it was there.
One of the mysteries of the Web was that no one ever found it independently. Every species that gained access learned how from a race already using the Web to beat the iron tyranny of the photon.
Dammit, that was like the universe itself. No matter how deep you dug, you could not come up with a First Cause.
"An honorable pursuit," Turtle said again. "But I've never heard of anyone making real progress on it. Even Valerena's Guardship, which spent centuries at it, did not do much but chart reaches not yet known."
Provik grunted. He did not want to hear that his dreams were impractical.
The convoy moved into the waste space slowly, following beacons, traveling with screens up. The clutter was so dense and unpredictable no chart remained reliable. Two days after leaving the tag end, it reached a spinning canister of a station in a pocket kept swept of dangerous cold matter.
Soon after breakaway Turtle knew the Outsiders believed they had him in complete control. They began feeding him data of a sort a WarAvocat would kill for. Its delivery guaranteed his best chance for success. And that the Outsiders had no intention of releasing him, ever.
At one point Provik observed, "Now we know how they came up with such outrageous quantities of rare metals. Must be stars blowing up here all the time."
Several score ships budded the station. They betrayed the varied concepts of shipbuilding of at least ten races. The lean, swift killer ships of Outsider humans predominated. Standing off, too massive to snuggle up, were three of the vessels operated by the Godspeakers themselves.
Industrial-type construction was under way nearby. "They are preparing their last redoubt," Turtle guessed. "They do not have a falsely optimistic view of their military chances. A pity we Ku could not have had access to a region like this."
"Why?" Midnight asked, awed by the fury of the waste space.
"We would be fighting still. The Guardships could not have rooted us out. They could have done nothing but contain us, and that would have required the efforts of half the fleet forever."
The Outsiders knew they could not win. They had acquired him to buy time to develop the waste space as a hiding place of the mysteries of a dark faith.
The Godspeakers would not be too concerned about the loss of an empire. The pain of that would torment their human pets-slaves-allies.
The waste would be no boon to those. Those who retreated here would have to hide far deeper than this station lay. They would have to stay on the move amidst chaotic matter. Operations outside would require long voyages to the tag ends, starspace voyages measured in decades.
Did the Outsider humans understand that their masters were going to abandon them?
The existence of this place, and the planning behind it, said many things. One was that Turtle was caught in the jaws of another moral quandary.