The millefleurs sang a melody of ending. Clouds of twilight dimmed their thousand colors; rainbows faded into grayness, peace and longing mingled and black was there. Singing into silence:
Hallucination, she thought. Desperate battle to think. Oxygen loss.
She struggled for breath and lost the thought in Tirane’s screams.
But he was dead—the strength of that ego, to survive in memory still!
Dorista leaned close and said aloud, “Not lack of air.”
Shock made Hanna stupid. “But—?”
“The flowers. They’re Gabriel dying.”
Dorista wept. Hanna felt hot wetness, tasted salt. Tears of the living: Dorista, Martin, Antonia, Roly, Hanna herself. She knew these few were alive because she saw them here in Auxiliary Control.
There were also the tears of the dead.
She thought of getting up and decided against it, remembering dimly how a few minutes ago she had struggled to pick herself up off the floor and regain her seat. With clearing eyes she saw that Auxiliary Control was untouched, even though something like the heart of a star had smashed into the corvette Clara Mendoza and rammed it through space without effort. Pretty Clara with her rainbow passages, garlanded for battle: she had never had a chance against the Nestorian cruisers, nor had any of her mates.
(I want to go home oh please I’m lost lost alone and it’s dark—)
Dark-eyed Pamir. Dying too, his final thoughts echoing in her mind.
Hanna lifted her right hand and brought it down hard on the edge of the console before her. The surface was curved but she hit it with all her strength and the sharp personal pain filled her and blotted out the ghosts. In the reprieve she began calling Main Control. No voice answered. Gabriel of the millefleurs faded. Had anyone survived?
“Smashed. It was smashed.” Dorista still wept. “There can’t even be any bodies.”
“Gabriel’s, anyway.” The personal essence disappearing from the cooling flesh…the strongest took hours to go.
Voices rose round Hanna. Instinctively they were reverting to speech, the old way, the true-human way. To enter each other’s thoughts was to lose their way in the mental chaos of the injured, the dead, and the dying. Not many left injured, not now. The second assault had finished the patients from the first, along with sickbay and the medics and the drugs for pain and the drugs for dying. The third had finished everything.
“Report,” Hanna said over her shoulder, but nobody did. She turned and screamed at them, “Report!”
(Agony staggered them and stopped. They put a name to it. Don trying to keep pain to himself so it would not defeat them. Half the ship was crushed between them and he said: Don’t even try—)
“I am—”
(Ash, dead or dying, mourned the son he would not have—)
Hanna said through the wave of darkness, “I’m the senior officer. If Main Control is gone, I must be. Report! Concentrate!”
Ghosts moved among them, nearly visible: scraps of childhood, loving faces, the detritus of ebbing consciousness. She gave them something to concentrate on: white hatred of Nestor. Nestor, Nestor! she cried to them, and shaped the images, fanning hate. The crazed old general, the bleak warrens of an ill-managed colony world. The Polity worlds had closed ranks and done nothing for Nestor, and it was the ancient story: find an outside enemy to hate. D’neerans were easy to hate, telepaths; true-humans considered them only quasi-human. And D’neera was a peaceful world. With more love for flowers than for defenses.
Hanna kept her mind—
(Oh God, I’m so afraid, his blood, oh God, oh God—)
“Who’s—?” someone said.
She said over the swelling panic, “Alia. Not even hurt. Roly, find her and calm her down. It’s clear to Engineering.”
—kept her mind on the reports.
Main Control gone. She knew that. The few secure modules of Clara were on local life support. The reactor heat wasted into space, irretrievable; soon the cold of space would creep in. Of the twelve ships D’neera had been able to muster, only two answered now, and they were fighting, falling back. They could not come to Clara’s aid. The guns were out. Such as they were. And the shields. And Hanna’s head was spinning and her stomach lurched; gravity was erratic, it would be free fall soon.
“They want surrender,” Martin said. He snatched the link from his ear as if it had caught fire.
“Give me the link.”
But it fell to the floor as a mental howl from somewhere stopped them, and somewhere a failing heart stopped.
“Willi!”—that was Martin—“Willi!”
Hanna was stuck in a nightmare where nothing could be done. Through dimming eyes she saw Martin crawling, his frantic fear for Willi (but too late for fear; time for grief) heavy as her head.
I told them. The slow thought ticked over. I told them no lovers on the same—
The mental weight suddenly lifted. Martin sobbed and collapsed. The arm Hanna had stretched out to him hurt. She snatched up the link, fumbling it, put it to her ear and picked out the words that meant disaster.
Surrender. Immediate. Destroy.
Enough. It was too much effort to sort out the Standard words from the uncouth Nestorian accent.
“Let me see them. Tonia, what can you get?”
Her head was empty and quiet now. She supposed the living were unconscious or calming themselves. Roly had not gone after Alia; she assumed Alia had fainted. She risked a thought to Tonia that took in every sensor the Clara possessed, and an order to Dorista to evaluate their chances of escape through the unspace of Inspace. And an order to Roly to count, if he could, the living. For hand-to-hand fighting, if it came to that.
You know we’re all there is you’re good at this too good as true-human, Roly said, and it was hateful, a signal for a purely D’neeran catfight. There was no time for one. She stared him down and he bowed his head and started the hopeless job, dropping into himself and reaching out.
Tonia said unsteadily, “No visual. Nothing.”
“What about the rest?”
“I think—wait.”
Smoke began to drift through the ventilators with, oh God, the smell of burning meat.
Hanna clipped off her own horror and made them do it too.
“This is bad,” Dorista muttered.
Hanna looked at the computer’s relentless judgment. Not just bad. Fatal. Inspace systems were working, in a manner of speaking. They could Jump out of here. But incoming space-time data was getting garbled somewhere in the system, and if they Jumped—
Dorista’s vision was almost soothing. Particles fanning at random through infinity like fine gray dust…
“We’ll have to surrender,” Tonia said.
“You don’t want to surrender,” Hanna said, and Roly came out of the silence where silence should not be and stabbed her with a picture of herself as the quintessential soldier, fighting mindlessly to the end.
“Giving up is better than dying,” Tonia said.
“Come on! They want to question us. They want to find out what can hit them from the surface. And it’s an all-male army, Tonia.”
Roly looked at her blankly, the two women with growing unease. Innocent, innocent, Hanna thought in despair, how innocent we are! We feel one another’s pain and cannot harm each other. And are helpless before our brothers who are our enemies.
Tonia had forgotten the sensors. She was examining things caught from Hanna’s mind, shocking lessons in events that had happened in places that were not D’neera. Third-hand memories, fourth-hand; they had not happened to Hanna. She had only brushed against them, and imagined how it would be. But they made Tonia tremble. Giving up did not look so good.
Hanna got up and went to her and pushed her aside. There were faults in the pictures the sensors drew, colors changing for no reason, lines flickering and re-forming. But Hanna said, “What’s that?”
Her hands worked at Tonia’s controls. She knew two of the shapes—Nestorian cruisers, not as fast as Clara in realspace but bigger, better shielded, better armed, and scarcely damaged. Clara was their prey. But something new was there, and when the mass readout came she looked at it with disbelief.
“Data error,” Roly whispered.
“No.” She coaxed the library for a guess.
“Cit—” its vocal circuit said, and expired.
Citybuster, said the legend on the screen.
Gravity rocked and they fell against each other.
“It’s not after us,” Hanna said, single-minded. The others did not speak but watched the lumpy thing grow as sensors built up a pseudo-visual pattern.
“Havock,” the library said suddenly. “N.S Havock commissioned ST 2808 drydocked…ST 2809…under…terms…” It sighed and died again.
“You could stuff a hundred Claras into that,” Dorista said.
“Uh-huh. More than that. And look at those shields.”
Hanna sank into Tonia’s seat. Weight flux or defeat tore at her stomach, and she might have been watching herself go through the motions of command from a distance. She had never taken Defense as lightly as most of her comrades, who thought danger meant pirates and knew the existence of their elegant little fleet was deterrent enough. The news that Nestor would attack had not surprised her—nor should defeat; yet defeat did not seem real.
And we are all so young, she thought. Parents cannot serve…I should have had Max’s baby when he asked me.
Roly mumbled, “I don’t believe it. Mass sensors would’ve warned us.”
Hanna presented him with her memory of the third and last assault. Every alarm on Clara had been screaming, and even those sounds were dim; the voices in their minds, the soundless terror, had drowned them out.
The cruisers were beginning to move toward them. They did not have much time.
“We took them on,” Dorista said suddenly. “We did that, anyway.”
Her palpable pride annoyed Hanna. “Too little and too late,” she said.
She got up and turned away and paced the tiny chamber, leaving them to stare at Havock. She felt resentment spreading through them at the unfairness of this giant’s coming when they could do nothing to it. It felt better than Alia’s panic, anyway. It did not occur to her that her own control strengthened them.
The lights in the room seemed dimmer. She did not bother to check the power.
Dorista said, “What are they going to do?”
Hanna looked around, remembering the others had not heard the ultimatum. She told them, but she added, “I think it’s bluff. I still think they want prisoners. They won’t put that buster in place till they’re sure we’re finished. That—” She pointed at a signal for an incoming message; it had been flashing since she threw the link down. “That’s probably an order to stand by for boarding.”
“We can’t,” said Tonia. “I won’t. I’ll kill myself first. I’ll kill them.”
There was an overtone of wonder in what she said, as if she could not believe it of herself. Hanna looked at her thoughtfully.
“Me too,” she said. “Dorry?”
Dorista hesitated. Faint voices, visions, the traces of death, but in their minds. Dorista and Don had been friends. Don was still conscious and paralyzed with his back broken and the fire coming close. The reeking smoke had begun to choke him.
Dorista said, “I want to fight. I want to kill one for him.”
“Roly?”
He opened his mouth and shut it. He had liked Defense exercises; he had liked free fall and riding the clouds and the little band’s camaraderie. He had never expected to fight. He did not want to fight anymore and he was ashamed of not wanting to. He let them see it and Tonia touched him sympathetically, accepting it.
“Doesn’t matter,” Martin said. He pulled himself up and set his back against the wall. His grief for Willi filled the room, the world, the universe, and then he shut it in again.
“Oh, Martin,” Dorista said, and went to him and took him in her arms.
“I guess we don’t give up,” said Roly, looking sick. “But what’s the use?”
“No use,” Hanna admitted. She wandered back to her place, veering here and there as gravity wavered. It was safer sitting down. She got into her seat and stared at the outline of the city buster. D’neera had nothing dangerous on the surface. Nestor would find that out soon enough. And then this thing would move into orbit, ungainly, unbalanced, but efficient enough in space. It could blanket fifty square kilometers with fast or slow death. Its presence would guarantee there would be no resistance.
She said softly, “The Polity’s got good intelligence. They must have known Nestor refitted that thing.”
“Why didn’t they tell us?” Roly said. He was cross. He could not get used to what had happened or what was coming, and with the end nearly here he could only be querulous.
“I don’t know. Yes, I do. They only told us to prepare for an attack. They thought we’d ask for help and then, you see, when they had us where they wanted us, they’d tell us all the rest. I don’t think they were even going to tell us where the strike force was coming into realspace without an agreement. But they did. Somebody must have thought the ambush was our only chance. It was, too.”
Don’s control broke in a wave of death-fear that stopped breath and thought. Hanna clung to her seat and her sanity, riding it out. It lasted only an instant before the smoke knocked him out, and when it ended the others were choking. Alia was awake and screaming in their heads.
“Roly! Will you go shut that bitch up!”
“Yes. Yes.” He stumbled into a wall and righted himself and made it out the door on the second try.
“She’s too dumb to get out of Engineering,” Dorista muttered.
“Why’d we put her there anyway? Never mind. At least there’s air there,” Hanna said, and rubbed her face with weary hands. After the first two attacks they had been spread too thin to be selective.
They waited in silence. Alia modulated to shock and pain and was still. It was like having a siren turned off, something that squawked just at the end when you touched the switch.
“Sharp right to the jaw,” Hanna said.
I think I’ll stay here, Roly said to her, half-present. To be here when Alia wakes up. For the end.
He felt acquiescence and let the mind link go, and Hanna forgot him. She ought to be thinking of sidearms, some form of futile deployment, but she could not stop staring at the citybuster. There was something at the back of her mind and she could not dig it out, and it was getting harder to think, to go on trying. Roly and Martin were passive dead weight, the future another weight of apprehension. Clara had set out with a crew of thirty-six and the survivors had died, in effect, thirty times in these last hours. The dead spoke to them still with ghostly voices their ears would not hear again. Perhaps the voices were even real. To let herself and the others believe so would reduce them to shadows for Nestor to take with ease.
And she could not keep from thinking of how she would die. Small-arms fire if they boarded, perhaps. A single blast of heat and radiation if they didn’t. If she were taken alive there would be the half-world of stripdope, irresistible. And other indignities; but perhaps she would be drugged and would not care; and perhaps she would live and someday get revenge.
The patterns before her eyes grew and shrank and burgeoned again as the computers adjusted for real motion. They had settled on red and yellow, and the lines that showed the cruisers coming in on Clara’s flanks were lengthening. When they met the uncertainty would end. The thought had a kind of seductiveness.
“H’ana,” said Dorista from the floor. She still held Martin’s hand. He looked indifferently at nothing; with Willi gone he waited patiently to die.
“H’ana?”
Wildfire, whispered her thought, the intimate image that meant Hanna in happier times, laughing and ready and reckless. It woke Hanna, a little.
“What?”
“They tried this once with Lancaster, didn’t they?”
“I think so…” She was not good at history, recent or not. “Years ago. About the time they built Havock, I guess.”
“And the Polity stopped them.”
“Must have. Lancaster’s got fewer defenses than we have. Than we had.”
“Why didn’t they stop it now?”
Hanna said wearily, “They thought we’d ask for help. We didn’t ask.”
“Why?” Dorista sounded merely curious, but behind Hanna’s eyes she floated the shadow of D’neera encased in implacable stupidity.
“The magistrates couldn’t agree. Stiff-necked as usual. That’s all.”
Hanna saw that her hands were unsteady. It made her angry. She knew, distantly, that Alia was conscious and huddled in Roly’s arms. Tonia sat unspeaking near the door; she had caught Martin’s mood of relinquishment. Only Hanna and Dorista on this dying ship were thinking, and Hanna did not know how much longer her own endurance would hold. She was a D’neeran, after all, though she knew D’neera’s faults better than most. D’neerans gave and took comfort freely, and readily believed against all evidence that wrongs could be cured with love. They were stubborn and joyous anarchists who could not make a common move without arguing the direction for years, and they did not like emergencies, did not know how to meet them. There were men and women still alive and vigorous who remembered the time when D’neera had nothing to do with the rest of the human species. Many wished it were still that way. They had argued too long about asking for help.
The cruisers were closing in, in no hurry. Perhaps they thought everyone on Clara was dead. The Havock was closer too; Clara could not hold herself steady, and she would drift near but not into the monster’s path. Hanna put her chin on her hand and watched the course and mass displays, resisting an impulse to let herself sink into the pretty colors. The idea was coming by itself. Think of something else and let it be born.
Dorista said in a desultory way, “They wanted to help, didn’t they.”
“Umm-hmm. One of the commissioners talked to the magistrates personally. Jameson of Heartworld, in fact. Isn’t that funny?” The ghost of a smile twitched at her mouth. “Of all people.”
“What did he say? Did Lady Koroth tell you?”
“There wasn’t time for much. She thought he was angry because she was the only one who’d listen.”
“They’d listen now.”
“It’s too late.”
“To call for help now? Why? Even if we’re finished, the Interworld Fleet would just come in and kick Nestor out of the system.”
“It would take too long for the Fleet to get here. By that time the buster would be in place. Over Koroth, probably. It’s got the biggest city and its House has the best ties with the Polity. Then—well. City Koroth alone gives Nestor two hundred thousand hostages.”
Dorista sighed and did not speak again. Hanna watched the citybuster coming closer. She thought of City Koroth with its fountains and its ever-blowing wind and the slow clean river rolling toward the sea, and its white splendid House gleaming in the sun, and how in winter the scarlet stoneveins grew up its walls from the snow. She thought of the sky as she had seen it last, so crisp a blue she could almost touch it, and how this abomination would dirty it with threat.
The idea was there, born whole.
Suicide.
What wasn’t?
Dorry! Hanna said, showing it to her all at once. They were almost close enough to Havock to make it work. Closer would be better.
Fear and approval wrestled in Dorista. This was different from deciding to fight; no human being believes in his death, and there is always a chance of winning if he fights.
But look, Hanna said, concentrating on Havock’s end, displaying it: yes, only dust left of Clara and, yes, her people dust too, but also much of Havock, the rest crumpling and folding like soft plastic and a fireball at the end—
Hanna looked at her friend. “Well?” she said.
Dorista hung back. But the logic was irresistible. With Havock gone Nestor would find it hard to press the Polity for terms of occupation.
“Yes,” Dorista said.
Martin focused on Hanna and smiled.
Tonia sighed and got up. “Where do we start?” she said. She added, “Don’t ask the others.”
“I have to,” Hanna said. “Start figuring it out, Dorry.”
The ghosts sang to her more loudly: Come to us. I am not doing this, she thought, it is against nature; but her hands moved, her voice was clear, even Roly somehow did not hear the ghosts. Roly was relieved. He did not mind dying so much, only fighting. The picture Hanna showed him comforted him: Clara drifting helpless, harmless, near Havock. A last burst of conventional power to throw them straight at Havock, crashing with luck right through its shields. And a last Jump to anywhere shredding Clara and Havock together through all of space-time. Roly would not have to fight. He would just be here, and then not here; and he settled on what his death would buy with a fixity of purpose that shamed Dorista’s hesitation. And Alia took courage at last, took it from him.
“Are you smiling?” Tonia asked. She looked at Hanna strangely.
“It’s everything they warn us about,” Hanna said. “Random terminus, undescribed mass, we’re not clearing dimensional topography for any point—we’re doing it all wrong. Every last thing.”
They had had the same solemn instructors, and Dorista smiled too.
For a while they worked very hard, sabotaging failsafes and destroying Clara’s automatic inhibitions against what they were going to do. They worked with an air of astonishment at themselves and also, because they were D’neerans, some of the pleasure of clever children getting away with the forbidden. Hanna fixed on the pleasure to keep her thoughts from other things. She would key the Jump herself. There was no time to program the computers for every contingency, and they might be unreliable in any case. She thought about the final key, the last thing she would touch. She pushed the dead away so the others would not hear, and went machinelike through her tasks. Past a crystal wall the shadows waited, urging her to farewells. Farewell to sun and sea of youth, the lure of stars and strangeness, to the bright future, to so much, so much wasted—
(You are our future, Lady Koroth said. The white faces of a non-human emerged from the past. The F’thalian Hierarchus had chuckled at humanity’s useless squabbles. You were right, Progenitor, she said. But did you see my only own end?)
“Ready,” Dorista said, but something in her wavered. Hanna put aside her memories and the alien Hierarchus diminished into the past. She had strength for Dorista and steadied her. Where did the strength come from? The ghosts, perhaps. In a kind of exultation she saw the wills of her friends as separate threads and took them in her hand. H’ana ril-Koroth faded with the ghosts. She had become an instrument.
She drew a lever through its course, and Clara shuddered and began to move.
And the cruisers moved fast; but not toward Clara.
“What the hell? What have they got up their sleeves?”
Hanna stood up suddenly. She felt very light; gravity had stabilized, but not at norm. She pushed at her hair and rubbed her hands, too nervous to keep still.
“They’re heading out,” Tonia said.
“Where? What to? There’s nothing out that way. Why aren’t they defending Havock?”
Clara picked up speed. Dorista said, “Maybe Havock’s going to finish us off and they’re getting out of the way.”
“Busters don’t track moving targets. They depend on warships for defense. Clara masses enough to get through its shields. Get us more speed, Roly.”
One of the cruisers started back in a wide turn.
“That’s for us,” Hanna said. “That was a command error before. Why? What happened?”
“Now,” Tonia said suddenly.
“What?”
“I can’t get the evasion program going. They’re going to fire and it’ll catch us before we do it.”
“I want to be closer.”
“There isn’t time!”
Hanna’s hand crept toward the key. She said, “A second. A few seconds. Marty, can you hear what they’re saying? Let us hear.”
The loop was still going, mindless. On another band someone shouted at them to halt. The same on still another.
They were close enough to Havock and the cruiser would fire. Now. Now.
A new voice boomed out in clear strong Standard, not at them.
“This is Commander Andre Tirel of the Interworld Fleet Warship Willowmeade. You are ordered to lay down your arms and vacate the stellar system of D’neera at once. Do not attack. We will return fire—”
Dorista caught at Hanna’s moving hand. She looked at Hanna’s face, slipped in front of her, and set about changing course. Clara responded slowly, pulling up, up, on a course that would clear Havock. The calm voice went on.
“Any hostile act directed toward a D’neeran vessel will be considered an act of war against the Interworld Polity and we will take appropriate action—”
Martin shut off Willowmeade. “We could get them on sensors,” he said.
Tonia’s fingers flew. “There they are.” Her voice shook. “We weren’t looking there. What’s the other one?”
After a minute Martin said, “St. Petersburg.”
“There’s more. What happened?”
“They must have been waiting. They must have been close. For days maybe. Waiting for the magistrates to yell.”
Dorista said, “H’ana? H’ana. Are you all right?”
Hanna slowly took her eyes from the shifting forms. The cruiser was not coming after them. Sweet ballistic curves of life. She said thickly, “All right.”
All right but wounded. All right; but there was no joy. Shock held them silent and guilt gnawed at them already. Others who deserved to live were dead. The world was changed and they were changed forever. They could not yet know how. Hanna felt them touch her, seeking comfort and offering it. She did not want comfort. She did not know what had happened to her. It seemed she had pressed the button after all; that the decision had been the reality and all of them were ghosts, chattering in the dust, and the fireball which she saw vividly, sharp-edged and real, in the lesser reality of this crippled chamber.
She moved at last, slowly. Dorista had canceled the Jump order; but she looked once at Hanna, and checked it again.
Hanna said, her voice dragging, “Get Willowmeade, Marty.”
The choice came unconsciously from memories of Willow. She had been met courteously there.
She did not bother to identify herself. “Polity force,” she said, “we need help.”
She put her head down and thought about darkness. Dorista took over.