Part 11 (2/2)

”Thank you.”

ELEVEN.

Still Harry had never heard the inventor refer to Cheng's prospective purchase by any name other than ”my s.h.i.+p” or ”my invention.” Harry found this vaguely disturbing, and in his own mind had christened the vessel with his own private choice,Secret Weapon . Not imaginative, but practical. He had yet to try the name on anyone else.

Crew quarters on theWeapon were fairly small, even for a small s.h.i.+p, but still the cabin s.p.a.ce was more than adequate for two people. Any Templars or other visitors who might have been hinting that they could use a ride somewhere had been blandly ignored, and Harry was misleading about the direction he was going next.

Gianopolous expressed his relief that there were going to be no additional pa.s.sengers. He said he didn't want any more Templars poking their noses aboard, trying to copy this s.h.i.+p's secrets without paying for them.

”You think they want to do that?” Harry asked.

”A lot of people would.” For a moment the inventor looked gloomy. ”Too many people have seen it already.”

Harry paused in his inspection of an empty locker. ”I thought you said only a couple of Templars had been aboard-was there anybody else?”

”No-oh no. In my work I use robot a.s.sistants exclusively. The memories of all but Perdix were wiped clean afterward.”

Harry glanced across the cabin at Perdix, who was waiting with a robot's usual perfect imperturbability, and had no comment.

Gianopolous was going on about the Templars and their inadequacies. At the Templar base only the abbot and two of his advisers, one technical and one financial, had ever come on board. And only Abbot Darchan himself, and one other Templar pilot, had been at the controls. ”No one else has ever tested it.”

It seemed a reluctant admission.

Harry tried to make his questions casual. ”Were Darchan and his people a long time about their testing?

It seems to have taken them a while to make up their minds.”

”They ran some tests in their proving ground, to begin with. Then Darchan actually did one solo flight of five days.”

”That seems a long time.”

”He had some kind of urgent meeting to attend, halfway across the sector-I got the impression he needed to report in person to the Superior General-and making the journey in my s.h.i.+p allowed him to accomplish two tasks at the same time.”

”If he had the s.h.i.+p for as long as five days I a.s.sume that you went with him.”

The inventor hesitated briefly. ”Actually I didn't. He went alone.”

”Oh?”

Gianopolous seemed vaguely embarra.s.sed. ”He was rather eager about it, I thought. Seemed to welcome the chance to get off by himself for a while. And the truth is that I have a certain difficulty with some of the maneuvers involved in what they consider necessary testing.”

”By difficulty you mean like the s.p.a.ce sickness you mentioned.” Flights.p.a.ce could do things to susceptible people even with all the viewports turned opaque.

The other bristled slightly. ”There can be more than simple nausea involved-as you know.”

”Oh, I know.”

Gianopolous was going on, as if he had suddenly thought of an explanation that sounded better than mere weakness on his part: ”Also I'd been granted the freedom of the Templar library, their magnificent collections, and opportunities like that don't come along too often. So I preferred to make use of my time in a different way.”

”I see. And could you pin that five-day period down exactly? I have a reason for asking.”

Gianopolous could, and did. The continual sickness in the pit of Harry's stomach, that had been starting to go away, came back. Right in the middle of that short stretch of time was centered the terrible hour in which Harry's life had been destroyed. On that day theSecret Weapon , that could imitate a Type B well enough to fool an expert witness, had not after all been docked on a Templar base, where hundreds of people would have known if it had moved. Instead it had been off in deep s.p.a.ce somewhere, maybe as far as two days gone, the G.o.ds of s.p.a.ce knew exactly where, with Abbot Darchan the only human being on board.

Emil Darchan, sworn enemy of berserkers and their dedicated hunter. Harry's old friend, with no possible reason in the world to want to do him any harm.

And at the same time, Del Satranji had also been alone somewhere in s.p.a.ce. No telling, really, exactly where, but out of sight of everyone-and, according to the logs, alone in a very different s.h.i.+p.

”Anything wrong, Harry?”

”Only everything . . . no, there's nothing the matter with your s.h.i.+p here. It looks fine.” He thumped his palm on a control console.

Coincidence again? Or something going on behind the scenes.

Again Harry thought, or tried to think. Then he shook his head. He asked: ”You never even tried to sell your invention to the s.p.a.ce Force? They would seem to be your most likely customers.”

”I did have some preliminary discussions with one of their generals.” The inventor mentioned a woman's name that Harry vaguely recognized, without knowing anything particularly good or bad about her. ”Or I should say I tried to. That was standard months ago, almost a year. The s.p.a.ce Force bureaucracy is beyond belief, far surpa.s.sing even the Templars'.”

Looking back with the benefit of a fair amount of experience with both organizations, Harry was inclined to agree. Of course a lot depended on how and where and by whom the far-flung Force was approached; but he wasn't going to debate the point.

He had to ask once more: ”But only the Templars have ever done any actual testing?”

”Yes, and on the dates that I've just told you.” That answer was a trifle sharp.

With Harry nodding in acknowledgment, Gianopolous went on railing against the blindness and general fatuity of large organizations. He spoke with some pride of how he had built his vessel, remodeling a fairly standard hull and engines into the precise shape he wanted, with no human helpers on the scene at all. He had tried hard for secrecy, and Harry was thinking that perhaps he had succeeded all too well.

Once Harry had fitted on the pilot's helmet and began to get himself attuned to the subtle idiosyncrasies of its optelectronic circuits, and was thinking purely as a pilot, he soon revised upward his first estimate of the s.h.i.+p. He could sense the presence of extra capabilities, most of them probably having to do with refinements of disguise, but it was not time yet to begin to check out such peripherals. It was essential to make sure of all the basics first. The extras, including the maneuvers in flights.p.a.ce that Gianopolous was so anxious to avoid, could wait for a more formal test flight-if the upcoming confrontation with metallic death allowed time for such things.

Ordinarily Harry would have wanted any piece of hardware to undergo very thorough testing before he took it into combat-but this mission was indeed a special case. If this s.h.i.+p served well enough to get an a.s.sault force to the enemy base, then doubtless that was all they'd need from it.

Harry spent a lot of the trip back to 207GST in the pilot's chair, often sitting with his eyes closed, hands clasped, fingers interlaced, over his flat abdomen. There was nothing particularly exotic about the mechanics of flying this s.h.i.+p, or its internal communications between computer pilot and human brain.

Nothing to suggest the image of a killing machine. It was hard to remember that from the outside, the perception of human or robotic observers was very different.

. . . stretched out in one of the small crew cabins, he had a difficult dream of Becky, in which she was angrily trying to tell him something. But there was so much background noise, coming from some mysterious machine, that he could never manage to hear what she was saying . . .

Up and out of the pilot's combat couch again. Every compartment that Harry entered in Gianopolous's s.h.i.+p, he kept looking for some mark, some oddity, that could suggest, or lightly hinted, that this craft might somehow have been connected with one or both of the kidnappings. But the possibilities were slim, and soon exhausted.

There was a fair amount of vacant cargo s.p.a.ce-the waiting a.s.sault team would have good use for that.

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