Part 40 (1/2)
”Tupelov?” she asked in wonder.
”He's out here with the task force. Stand by one, El, let me get this into the pipe.” Frank began spouting detailed galactic co-ordinates, which in their very remoteness from any she had been expecting to hear were somehow all the more convincing. ” . . . and I'm bringing her straight back to the Big K. Towing the lifeboat on a cable beam, about fifty klicks behind me, just in case the bad machines tried any funny business with it.” He interrupted his transmission to turn part of his attention back to her. ”What do you know for sure about what's happened to the kid?”
She went into more detail about her last minutes aboard the goodlife s.h.i.+p; Frank sent off a little more information.
”So there's a task force,” Elly said, when he seemed to have completed his transmission.
”Yeah. Well. I don't know how much of the story you know. If you were on that s.h.i.+p when we hit it, you must have been on it at the proving grounds. Don't tell me you've turned goodlife, though; I'm not going to believe that.”
”No. No, I was taken along by force.” She stumbled through an attempted explanation of her abduction from the Temple.
”Okay, if you say so. Good enough for me.”
Quite possibly, Elly realized, not good enough for some others. But even to be accused of being goodlife seemed like a very minor problem at the moment. ”There were goodlife on the s.h.i.+p, of course. Three of them still alive, at my last count. I don't know what happened to them when you people hit us. You've been chasing us, all the way from Sol?”
”More than a standard year now. More trying to intercept than chasing, and we finally did it. Tupelov's gathered a regular b.l.o.o.d.y armada as we've come along. Every system we've put in at, people have been ready to contribute a s.h.i.+p or two.
”Then we found a berserker base near here-I guess the bra.s.s on several worlds have known about it for some time, at least that it was in this general region, but n.o.body could get up the nerve to hit it.
Marvelous what a crisis can do sometimes. After we hit the base we left the hulk of it in place, with some fake devices to respond to signals. Parts of our force went home again after that, but the Sol System people stayed; we've been on ambush station for the better part of a standard month. And then you-the goodlife s.h.i.+p and escort-finally showed.
”Tupelov's good at his job, you've got to give him that. He even brought the kid's mother along, just in case we might be able to get Michel back without wasting him. I admit I never thought there was a chance of that.”
”Frank. I'm his mother.”
There was a silent pause. Then: ”You're wandering, El. They've done things inside your head.”
”No. Why do you suppose they kidnapped me? He represents my terminated pregnancy-it must be thirteen years ago now, or thereabouts. It has to be that long.”
”Terminated pregnancy-I never knew you had one. Lady, I still think the bad machines must have stuffed all that into your head.”
Elly shook her head, which felt quite clear. ”Of course Michel must have had an adoptive mother somewhere, too. It might be her that you've brought along with your task force. But I don't know her name.”
”Name's Carmen Geulincx. ButInever heard anything about her being adoptive. That doesn't prove she's not, of course.” Frank's voice became slow and doubtful. ”But . . .”
”She comes from Alpine, doesn't she?”
A few seconds pa.s.sed, in which Frank's boxes gave no sign of being any more than inert machinery.
Then his speakers commented, ”I guess you had some time aboard that s.h.i.+p to talk to him.”
”A lot. But I wouldn't have had, unless I were his mother. The berserkers knew it. And Tupelov knows it, too.”
”Well, when I get you back to the Big K you can talk all this over with him. . . . Hey, wait. Alpine, almost thirteen years ago? That's when you and I put in there. That was just shortly after-”
Again the boxes apparently went dead, this time so abruptly that some main power switch might have been thrown on them. Elly waited. At last Frank asked, ”A very early pregnancy?”
”Very early. That's right, Frank. Michel is your son.”
”You were ready and willing to kill him. You ordered him to be killed. Didn't you?” Carmen's voice hadn't quite broken yet, but any moment now. Her face was transformed into a stage mask of rage and hate.
Tupelov was watching her warily from across the big cabin, almost a luxury stateroom, that made up part of flag quarters aboard theJohann Karlsen.He was thinking that Carmen was certainly ent.i.tled to some kind of a blowup, after all she had been through. But at the same time he felt he had to correct the exaggeration.
”Not exactly, Carmen. That's not fair. I just ordered that his s.h.i.+p and its escort be stopped at all costs.”
”Not exactly,” she echoed in a weak shout, and with that her voice gave way. Suddenly Carmen was looking about her as if for something to throw at him. There was of course nothing worth the throwing, since furniture, decorations and objects in general on wars.h.i.+ps had to be secured in place against sudden s.h.i.+fts of gravity or acceleration.
As she turned away from him and back again he had to listen hard to understand the rest of what she said: ”For a year you've been trying to kill my son, chasing after him to kill him, ever since they took him away. And even now when that woman reports he's still alive, you give more orders that we're going to chase him on all the way across the galaxy if necessary, to shoot . . .” She broke down momentarily.
”To shoot if necessary, I said. If there's no other way to keep the berserkers from having him. Carmen, he's been with them more than a year now. How do you know he wouldn't be better off dead?”
Carmen got herself together and stood up straight. There was something new in her eyes. ”Tell that to his father. Tell that to Colonel Marcus. After a year in s.p.a.ce I've come to know the Colonel, a little bit. He'll killyouif you tell him that.”
”He cares nothing about kids, even his own.”
”Is that what you think? You never talk to him.”
”Well. Regardless. Let him get Michel out of the berserkers' hands, one way or another, and Lancelot too. Then he can kill me if he wants.” Not, he thought to himself while speaking, that there was really going to be much likelihood of that.
Carmen was at least listening to him again, and now he added, with concrete patience, ”I really do want Michel back alive. Of course. Dammit, why do you think I brought you along-just to keep my bed warm? It was because you might possibly be of use to him and to us, keeping him functional, if and when we ever do get him back alive. Now it looks as if there is a real chance we might. Why do you suppose I've got the whole task force spread out right now in search formation? And if the search fails here, you're right, we're going to go on looking for him across the whole d.a.m.n galaxy if necessary. Until we find him or we die of old age, or the berserkers learn to use him and they win.”
”Why do you do that? Why? Because you want your weapons system back.”
”We're fighting a war.” Then Tupelov thought to himself that there must have been something better for him to say than that.
THIRTEEN.
I'm going even faster than before.
That was his first clear thought, coming as soon as he had begun to be aware of himself again and of the world around him, and for a good long while it was his only thought. The next one, after some interminable time, was a question: Should he open his eyes, or not?
Michel was somewhat afraid of what he might see if he did so. But certain physical discomforts had arisen, and Lancelot for some reason was not coping with them perfectly. They came in the form of unpleasantly constricting sensations on each of his arms and legs, also circling his neck and the middle of his body. Still they did not prevent his moving freely. Grimacing, eyes still closed, Michel turned and stretched in s.p.a.ce, almost as though he lay under snug quilted covers upon a carven bed. But he knew that he was still in s.p.a.ce, and he sensed something about his speed, something he was not anxious to confirm with eyesight.
The sense of speed was quite internalized. And a similar inward feeling a.s.sured him that his flight was straight, in the sense that it was proceeding along the most economical course that Lancelot could find, toward his goal. What their pa.s.sage might look like in terms of an objective pathway drawn across the sky was of course quite another matter.
It was necessary that he open his eyes soon, but he was really afraid to do so. With lids more tightly closed than ever, he willed first that his flight should slow. And with the willing he felt, as he might have felt aboard a slowing stars.h.i.+p, the delicate inward jolt that meant a c-plus jump was ending.
Brought fully awake only now, by that fine jolt, Michel blinked about him at the scenery of the galaxy.
With no atmosphere around him to impede vision, he had perhaps half a million stars in view as clearly focused points; only a spoonful out of the galaxy, most of whose suns were as usual obscured behind ma.s.ses of nebular material, light and dark. And with his first glance he felt sure that the nearer stars were not the same ones that had been closest to him during his last clear look at undistorted s.p.a.ce, before his building speed had blurred the universe around him.
The dark nebula that he had seen so clearly as Blackwool, and had yearned toward so desperately, had now disappeared, as completely as a sunset cloud searched for in the sky of dawn.