Fuzzy gray—that was the only way to describe it— replaced the blackness. It swirled over and around me for ages.
I woke up in a medcrib. It wasn’t a CIS crib, either, and I was restrained. I was surprised that I was awake and could still think. I felt feverish and weak.
“He’s coming around.” I didn’t recognize the voice.
“Good afternoon, Tech Bond, or Goodman, or whatever your real name is.” The man who spoke wore a commander’s uniform. His hair was iron gray, and his eyes were bloodshot. He didn’t sound happy.
The other figure, barely visible behind his shoulder, was a major.
“When is it?” I figured that was a safe question. Better to ask questions than have them ask the ones that would trigger the nanites in my system. It was a fool’s game, because I was playing for time I didn’t have. Sooner or later they would get to the questions, and I’d be dead in all the ways that counted. But I had to try.
“Not quite a week after we caught you.”
“What happened?”
The commander laughed. I didn’t like the sound of it. “By the way, I’m Commander Morgan.”
I should have recognized him. Why hadn’t I?
“You’re damned lucky that Chief Stuval was so careful. At least, I think you’re fortunate,” Morgan said. “You don’t fit the profile of a suicider.”
Suicider?
“That device you were assembling was a very small— but very powerful—AG capped-drive vortex bomb.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. I’d been building an AG signaler. Hadn’t I? That was what I’d been trained to do.
“I’m sure that your controller didn’t tell you that. If there had even been the slightest grav shift after you connected the power source, there wouldn’t have been more than a few coupled molecules within several thousand kays—and that would have included you. You should have wondered why you were placed in an armory, and why it was so easy to get the equipment you need…”
What could I say? If I revealed what my assignment had theoretically been, I was dead, and if the commander asked any leading questions along those lines, I was dead.
“Oh… those SAD nanites they dumped in your system are gone—at least most of them. That’s why you’ve been under so long. Major DeLisle figured that most of them had to be in the brain and bloodstream, and he’s been flushing your system for days. You’re feverish because formulated blood isn’t a perfect match, and we don’t have the equipment for that. We do have enough to read whether you’re telling the truth and understand a great deal of what you won’t say.” He laughed again, harshly. “And you’ve probably lost sections of your memory, and you’ll lose a bit more, but not enough that you won’t remain you. I wouldn’t want you to get the benefit of a quick death or a personality death through nanite amnesia. After what you planned, you don’t deserve quick oblivion.”
I had a feeling that, bad as matters had been, they were about to get worse, and I couldn’t even move.
“What was the device you were building? Or what were you told it was?”
There wasn’t much point in answering. If Morgan was lying, I was dead. If he was telling the truth, I was also dead—just a little later. Still… “Where are we? What was the thing the scientists brought back up from Danann?” Better to ask questions than to answer them, one way or another.
“We’re on our way back to Hamilton system, and neither the captain nor I is very happy that we ran into a Covenanter fleet or that you were planted to blow us into cosmic dust. If I were a sadist and didn’t have to account for equipment, I’d put you in a needle with all your little pieces and let you either suffocate or assemble your device and turn yourself into dust and energy.”
“But what happened?”
“We stunned you before you could put the pieces together. Both the Covenanter fleet and the CW flotilla are scattered debris, and Danann is probably off-limits to human exploration for a millennium or so.”
I had to keep the interview away from more questions. I had to. “You said I was putting together some sort of bomb. That wasn’t my assignment at all.” I had to risk one sentence. “I was supposed to build a signaler.”
Morgan’s gray face froze. “That may have been what they told you, whatever your real name is, but the device you almost assembled was effectively an old-style vortex torp warhead. They were abandoned centuries ago because they were so unstable.”
A coldness settled over me. I’d been set up. Because I was pragmatic, because I was practical, I didn’t fit the suicider profile—and the colonel had been counting on that. What else could I say?
“You know what really tripped you up, Goodman, or whatever your name is?”
I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t any point in saying anything. If I did, the nanetics would turn my memory to mush. Or they might. Even if they didn’t, the Comity would execute me if I admitted anything.
Morgan shook his head, looked down at me. “You tried to be an armorer. You were too damned good. According to Chief Stuval, when you came aboard, you were a typical borderline tech second. You learned more in two months than most techs learn in three tours. When he found out you fixed that power converter…”
I’d hidden it. How had Stuval known?
“You don’t think a chief knows every hiding place in his spaces? He checked it out and put it back. That was when he let me know.”
One way or another, I was dead.
“You’ll be under restraint for a few more days yet, until we decide. I wouldn’t want you to escape seeing what happened as a result of your actions—and those of Colonel Truesdale.”
I tried not to swallow. The commander had known of Truesdale, and his connections?
“You’re going to have to pay, especially for this assignment,” Morgan added, “since I doubt we know of all the others for which you won’t pay.”
He turned to the major standing behind him. “Put him back under.”
As the grayness rose around me, so did the questions. Why had I been set up? What had really happened? What had the artifact been? Had there ever been a Morning Star or Spear of Iblis… ?
79
Fitzhugh
We’d made two successful Gate translations of the three necessary to return us to Hamilton system, and the wall screen in my work space now showed stars—those scattered at the edge of the Galaxy, but individual stars discernible to the unaided eye—and not just distant clouds of light or points of light that represented entire galaxies.
More than a day at high-sublight travel remained before we reached the final Gate on our return. With attacks by three different polities in slightly less than four objective months, I retained certain doubts that the remainder of our return would be as uneventful as intimated by either the captain or by Commander Morgan, although we had encountered no additional obstacles after the first two return translations.
Jiendra and I had eaten together when she had not been occupied with the various duties that devolved upon junior officers, particularly when casualties had abbreviated the duty rolls, and those few stans we had spent together had been the most enjoyable in years, so much so that, for that reason alone, I was not anticipating with relief the conclusion of the expedition and mission. After what I had heard from Command Morgan and from what Jiendra had appended in private, accurate postulation of any return to Danann within the temporal limbi of current human civilizations appeared improbable, and that was the most generous assessment foremost in my personal analyses of the situation.
I’d also been considering Chendor’s artifact, and the limited information surrounding it. My foremost thesis was that it was a model, perhaps even one designed to replicate on a smaller scale, a massive stellar engineering project. The two silver-gray spheres had to represent Chronos and Danann—