Tuf Voyaging Page 11

  Rica Dawnstar shook her head in disbelief. “You’re priceless, Tuffy,” she said. She stepped forward, spinning her needler around her finger. “So you think you ought to get the ship because you can use it, and I can’t?”

  “You have outlined the very heart of it,” Tuf said approvingly.

  Rica laughed again. “Here, I don’t need this,” she said lightly. She tossed her needler at him.

  Tuf reached up and snatched it out of the air. “It would seem that my claim has been unexpectedly and decisively strengthened. Now I may threaten to shoot you.”

  “But you won’t,” Rica said. “Rules, Tuf. You play the game by the rules. I’m the kid who likes to kick over the board.” She slung the tangled straps she had been dragging over her shoulder. “You know what I’ve been up to while you’ve been cloning yourself a kitten?”

  “Obviously I do not,” said Haviland Tuf.

  “Obviously,” Rica echoed sardonically. “I’ve been up on the bridge, Tuf, playing the computer and learning just about everything I need to know about the EEC and its Ark.”

  Tuf blinked. “Indeed.”

  “There’s a swell telescreen up there,” she said. “Think of it like a big gaming board, Tuf. I’ve been watching every move. The red pieces, that was you and the rest of them. Me, too. And the black pieces. The bio-weapons, as the system likes to call them. I like the sound of monsters better myself. Shorter. Less formal.”

  “Fraught with strong connotations, however,” Tuf put in.

  “Oh, certainly. But to the point. We got through the defense sphere, we even handled the plague defense, but Anittas got himself killed and decided to get a little revenge, so he kicked loose the monster defense. And I sat up on top and watched the red and the black chase each other. But something was missing, Tuf. Know what?”

  “I suspect this to be a rhetorical question,” Tuf said.

  “Indeed,” mocked Rica Dawnstar, with laughter. “The greens were missing, Tuf! The system was programmed to show intruders in red, its own bio-weapons in black, and authorized Ark personnel in green. There were no greens, of course. Only that got me thinking, Tuf. The monster defense was obviously a last resort fallback position, sure. But was it intended for use only when the ship was derelict, abandoned?”

  Tuf folded his hands. “I think not. The existence of the telescreen display capacity implies the existence of someone to watch said display. Moreover, if the system was coded to display ship’s personnel, intruders, and monstrous defenders simultaneously and in variant colors, then the possibility of all three groupings being aboard and active at the same time must have been considered.”

  “Yes,” said Rica Dawnstar. “Now, the key question.”

  In the corridor behind her, Haviland Tuf glimpsed motion. “Excuse me,” he began.

  Rica waved him quiet. “If they were prepared to turn loose these caged horrors of theirs to repel boarders in an emergency, how did they prevent their own people from getting killed?”

  “An interesting quandary,” Tuf admitted. “I eagerly anticipate learning the answer to this puzzle. I fear I will have to defer that pleasure, however.” He cleared his throat. “Far be it from me to interrupt such a fascinating discourse. I feel obliged to point out, however . . . ” The deck shook.

  “Yes,” Rica said, grinning.

  “I feel obliged to point out,” Tuf repeated, “that a rather large carnivorous dinosaur has appeared in the corridor behind you, and is presently attempting to sneak up on us. He is not doing a very good job of it.”

  The tyrannosaur roared.

  Rica Dawnstar was undisturbed. “Really?” she said laughing. “Surely you don’t expect me to fall for the old there’s-a-dinosaur-behind-you gambit. I expected better of you, Tuf.”

  “I protest! I am completely sincere.” Tuf turned on the motor of his cart. “Witness the speed with which I have activated my vehicle, in order to flee the creature’s approach. How can you doubt me, Rica Dawnstar? Surely you hear the beast’s thunderous approach, the sound of its roaring?”

  “What roaring is that?” Rica asked. “No, seriously, Tuf, I was telling you something. The answer. We forgot one little piece of the puzzle.”

  “Indeed,” said Tuf. The tyrannosaur was moving toward them at an alarming velocity. It was in a foul temper, and its roaring made it difficult to hear Rica Dawnstar.

  “The Ecological Engineering Corps were more than cloners, Tuf. They were military scientists. They were genetic engineers of the first order. They could recreate the lifeforms of hundreds of worlds and bring them alive in their vats, but that was not all they could do. They could also tinker with the DNA itself, change those lifeforms, redesign them to suit their own purposes!”

  “Of course,” Tuf said. “Pardon me, but now I fear I must run away from the dinosaur.” The tyrannosaur was ten meters behind Rica. It paused. Its lashing tail struck the wall, and Tuf’s cart shook to the impact. Slaver was dripping from its fangs, and its stunted forelegs clawed the air with unseemly eagerness.

  “That would be very rude,” Rica said. “You see, Tuf, that’s the answer. These bio-weapons, these monsters—they were held in stasis for a thousand years, likely for longer than that. But they weren’t ordinary monsters. They were cloned for a special purpose, to defend the ship against intruders, and they had been genetically manipulated to just that end.” The tyrannosaur took one step, two, three, and now it was directly behind her, its shadow casting her in darkness.

  “How manipulated?” asked Haviland Tuf.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” said Rica Dawnstar. The tyrannosaur leaned forward, roared, opened its massive jaws, engulfed her head. “Psionics,” she said from between its teeth.

  “Indeed,” said Haviland Tuf.

  “A simple psionic capacity,” Rica announced from inside the tyrannosaur’s jaws. She reached up and picked something from between its teeth, with a tsking sound. “Some of the monsters were close to mindless, all instinct. They got a basic instinctual aversion. The more complex monsters were made psionically submissive. The instruments of control were psi-boosters. Pretty little things, like crowns. I’m wearing one now. It doesn’t confer psi powers or anything dramatic like that. It just makes some of the monsters avoid me, and other ones obey me.” She ducked out of the dinosaur’s mouth, and slapped the side of his jaw soundly. “Down, boy,” she said.

  The tyrannosaur roared, and lowered its head. Rica Dawnstar untangled her harness and saddle and began to strap it into place. “I’ve been controlling him all the time we’ve been talking,” she said conversationally. “I called him here. He’s hungry. He ate Lion, but Lion was small, and dead, too, and he hasn’t had anything else for a thousand years.”

  Haviland Tuf looked at the needler in his hand. It seemed worse than useless. He was a poor shot in any case. “I would be most glad to clone him a stegosaurus.”

  “No thanks,” Rica said as she tightened the harness, “you can’t get out of the game now. You wanted to play, Tuffy, and I’m afraid you lose all around. You should have gone away when I offered you the chance. Let’s review your claim, shall we? Lion and Nevis and the others offered you a full share, yes, but of what? I’m afraid now you get a full share, whether you want one or not—a share of everything they got. So much for your legal argument. As for your moral claim on the basis of superior utility,” she slapped the dinosaur again, and grinned, “I think I’ve demonstrated that I can put the Ark to more effective use than you can. Down a little more.” The beast leaned over still further, and Rica Dawnstar vaulted into the saddle on its neck. “Up!” she barked. It stood.

  “Therefore we put legality and morality aside, and again return to violence,” Tuf said.

  “I’m afraid so,” Rica said from on top of her tyrant lizard. It came forward slowly, as if she were feeling her way. “Don’t say I didn’t play fair, Tuf. I’ve got the dinosaur, but you’ve got my needler. Maybe you’ll get a lucky hit. So we’re both armed.” She laughed.
“Only I’m armed to the teeth.”

  Haviland Tuf stood and tossed back her needler, overhand. It was a good throw. Rica leaned out to one side, caught it. “What’s this?” she said. “Giving up?”

  “Your scruples about fairness have impressed me,” said Tuf. “I would take no advantage. You have a claim, I have a claim. You have an animal.” He stroked his kitten. “I have an animal, too. Now you have a gun.” He activated his cart and backed away from the intersection, rolling quickly down the corridor behind him, or at least as quickly as he could go in reverse.

  “Have it your way,” Rica Dawnstar said. She was done playing. She felt a little sad. Tuf was turning his cart about to flee headlong instead of backwards. The tyrannosaur opened its mouth wide, and slaver ran from half-meter-long teeth. It screamed a scream that was pure red primal hunger a million years old, and came roaring down on him.

  It roared down the corridor and into the intersection.

  Twenty meters away along the cross-corridor, the minimind of the plasma cannon took cognizance of the fact that something exceeding the programmed target dimensions had entered the fire zone. There was the faintest of clicks.

  Haviland Tuf was turned away from the glare; he put his body between Chaos and the heat and awful noise. It lasted only an instant, fortunately, although the smell of burnt reptile would linger in that spot for years, and sections of the deck and walls would need to be replaced.

  “I had a gun, too,” said Haviland Tuf to his kitten.

  Later, much later, when the Ark was clean and he and Havoc and Chaos were settled comfortably into the captain’s suite, and he had moved all his personal effects and taken care of all the bodies and done what repairs he could and figured out how to placate the incredibly noisy creature that lived down on deck six, Haviland Tuf began to search the ship methodically. On the second day, he found a store of clothing, but the men and women of the EEC had been shorter than he, and more slender, so none of the uniforms fit.

  He did, however, find a hat he took rather a liking to. It was a green duckbilled cap, and it fit snugly atop his bald, milk-white head. On the front of it, in gold, was the theta that had been the sigil of the corps.

  “Haviland Tuf,” he said to himself in the mirror, “ecological engineer.”

  It had a certain ring to it, he thought.

  2: LOAVES AND FISHES

  Her name was Tolly Mune, but they called her all sorts of things.

  Those entering her domain for the first time used her title with a certain amount of deference. She had been Portmaster for more than forty standard years, and Deputy Portmaster before that, a colorful fixture in the great orbital community that was officially known as the Port of S’uthlam. Downstairs, planetside, the office was only another box on the bureaucratic flowcharts, but up in orbit the Portmaster was foreman, chief executive, judge, mayor, arbiter, legislator, mastermech, and head cop all in one. So they called her the P.M.

  The Port had started small and grown over the centuries, as S’uthlam’s swelling population made the world an increasingly important market and a key link in the network of interstellar trade for the sector. At port center was the station itself, a hollow asteroid some sixteen kilometers in diameter, with its parks and shops and dormitories and warehouses and labs. Six predecessor stations, each larger than the last and each now outdated, the oldest built three centuries back and no bigger than a good-sized starship, clung to the Spiderhome like fat metal buds on a stone potato.

  Spiderhome was what they called it now, because it sat at the center of the web, an intricate silver-metal net cast across the dark of space. Radiating from the station in all directions were sixteen great spurs. The newest was four kilometers long, and building; seven of the originals (the eighth had been destroyed in an explosion) stabbed twelve kays out into space. Inside the great tubes were the port’s industrial zones—warehouses, factories, shipyards, customs gates, and embarkation centers, plus docking facilities and repair bays for every class of starship known in the sector. Long pneumatic tubetrains ran through the center of the spurs, moving cargo and passengers from gate to gate and to the crowded, noisy, bustling nexus in Spiderhome, and the elevator downstairs.

  Other, lesser tubes branched from the spurs, and still lesser passages from them, crossing and recrossing the void, binding everything together in a pattern that grew in intricacy each year, as more and more additions were made.

  And between the web strands were the flies—shuttles going up and down from the surface of S’uthlam with consignments too big or too volatile for the elevator, mining ships coming in with ore and ice from the Frags, food freighters from the terraformed farming asteroids inward they called the Larder, and all manner of interstellar traffic: luxurious Transcorp liners, traders from worlds as close as Vandeen or as distant as Caissa and Newholme, merchant fleets from Kimdiss, warships from Bastion and Citadel, even alien starcraft, Free Hruun and Raheemai and gethsoids and other, stranger species. They all came to the Port of S’uthlam and were welcome.

  The ones who lived in Spiderhome, who worked in the bars and mess halls, moved the cargos, bought and sold, repaired and fueled the ships, they called themselves spinnerets as a badge of honor. To them, and to the flies who came calling often enough to be regulars, Tolly Mune was Ma Spider—irascible, foul-mouthed, rough-humored, frighteningly competent, omnipresent, indestructible, as big as a force of nature and twice as mean. Some of them, those who had crossed her or earned her displeasure, had no love for the Portmaster; to them she was the Steel Widow.

  She was a big-boned, well-muscled, homely woman, as gaunt as any honest S’uthlamese but so tall (almost two meters) and so broad (those shoulders) that she had been considered something of a freak downstairs. Her face was as creased and comfortable as old leather. Her age was forty-three local, nearing ninety standard, but she didn’t look an hour over sixty; she attributed that to a life in orbit. “Gravity’s the thing that ages you,” she would say. Except for a few starclass spas and hospitals and tourist hotels in the Spiderhome, and the big liners with their gravity grids, the Port turned in endless weightlessness, and free fall was Tolly Mune’s natural element.

  Her hair was silver and iron, bound up tightly when she worked, but off-duty it flowed behind her like a comet’s tail, following her every motion. And she did move. That big, gaunt, raw-boned body of hers was firm and graceful; she swam through the spokes of the web and the corridors, halls, and parks of Spiderhome as fluidly as a fish through water, her long arms and thin, muscular legs pushing, touching, propelling her along. She never wore shoes; her feet were almost as clever as her hands.

  Even out in naked space, where veteran spinnerets wore cumbersome suits and moved awkwardly along tether lines, Tolly Mune chose mobility and form-fitting skinthins. Skinthins gave only minimal protection against the hard radiation of S’ulstar, but Tolly took a perverse pride in the deep blue-black cast of her skin, and swallowed anti-carcinoma pills by the handful each morning rather than opt for slow, clumsy safety. Out in the bright hard black between the web strands, she was the master. She wore airjets at wrist and ankle, and no one was more expert in their use. She zipped freely from fly to fly, checking here, visiting there, attending all the meetings, supervising the work, welcoming important flies, hiring, firing, solving any problem that might arise.

  Up in her web, Portmaster Tolly Mune, Ma Spider, the Steel Widow, was everything she had ever wanted to be, equal to every task, and more than satisfied with the cards she’d drawn.

  Then came a night-cycle when she was buzzed from a sound sleep by her Deputy Portmaster. “It better be goddamned important,” she said when she stared at him over her vidscreen.

  “You better access Control,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Fly coming in,” he said. “Big fly.”

  Tolly Mune scowled. “You wouldn’t dare wake me up for nothing. Let’s have it.”

  “A real big fly,” he stressed. “You have to see this. It
’s the biggest damn fly I’ve ever laid eyes on. Ma, no fooling, this thing is thirty kays long.”

  “Puling hell,” she said, in the last uncomplicated moment of her life, before she made the acquaintance of Haviland Tuf.

  She swallowed a handful of bright blue anti-carcinogens, washed them down with a healthy squeeze from a bulb of beer, and studied the holo apparition that stood before her. “Large ship you’ve got there,” she said casually. “What the hell is it?”

  “The Ark is a biowar seedship of the Ecological Engineering Corps,” replied Haviland Tuf.

  “The EEC?” she said. “You don’t say.”

  “Must I repeat myself, Portmaster Mune?”

  “This is the Ecological Engineering Corps of the old Federal Empire, now?” she asked. “Based on Prometheus? Specialists in cloning, biowar—the ones who custom-tailored all kinds of ecological catastrophe?” She watched Tuf’s face as she spoke. He dominated the center of her small, cramped, disorderly, and too-seldom-visited office in Spiderhome, his holographic projection standing among the drifting, weightless clutter like some huge white ghost. From time to time a balled up sheet of paper floated through him.

  Tuf was big. Tolly Mune had met flies who liked to magnify themselves in holo, so they came across as bigger than they were. Maybe that was what this Haviland Tuf was doing. Somehow she thought not, though; he didn’t seem the sort. Which meant he really did stand some two-and-a-half meters tall, a good half-meter above the tallest spinneret she’d ever met. And that one had been as much a freak as Tolly herself; S’uthlamese were a small people—a matter of nutrition and genetics.

  Tuf’s face gave absolutely nothing away. He interlocked his long fingers calmly on top of the swollen bulge of his stomach. “The very same,” he replied. “Your historical erudition is to be commended.”

  “Why, thank you,” she said amiably. “Correct me if I’m wrong, though, but being historically erudite and all, I seem to recall that the Federal Empire collapsed, oh, a thousand years ago. And the EEC vanished too—disbanded, recalled to Prometheus or Old Earth, destroyed in combat, gone from human space, whatever. Of course, the Prometheans still have a lot of the old biotech, it’s said. We don’t get many Prometheans way out here, so I couldn’t say for sure. But they’re a bit jealous about sharing any of their knowledge, I’ve heard. So, let me see if I’ve got this straight. You’ve got a thousand-year-old EEC seedship there, still functional, which you just happened to find one day, and you’re the only person on board and the ship is yours?”