"Cci works flawlessly," said Dad as another small asteroid shattered from a red fusion beam.
"Make for final jump point," L'Wrona ordered the computer. The asteroid belt was a well-known target practice area, just off the principal ship path from K'Ronar to U'Tria. Three jump points-those unseen but well-charted points from which a ship could jump most accurately to another specified point -lay behind them, one ahead. It was here the captain expected trouble-even looked forward to it. After ten years of battlecruisers, he was reveling in the immediate response his hands brought from the sleek little ship, the almost forgotten thrill of piloting a one-man scout. Only the lack of his father's voice would have made it more enjoyable. Why ever did he impress his persona on the computer? wondered L'Wrona, not for the first time. Did he really think he was doing me a favor, or did he do it for himself, assuaging some secret guilt about being away so much when I was young?
Just before the war, after an especially long and argumentative trip aboard Toy, L'Wrona had consulted a ship's cyberneticist about having his father's persona and voice removed from Toy's computer. The man had glanced at the system specs, then at the programming overlay specs. "Voice is no problem," he'd said. "The personality, though.. ." He'd shaken his head. "Might as well scrap the whole system and start with fresh gear."
"How much?"
The cyberneticist shook his head again. "Can't get a replacement-system specs are unique to this series-start substituting, you're asking for big trouble a long way from home. You'd have to find another O'Lan in private berth, buy it and switch hardware -seeing as how you've made certain modifications." His finger delicately traced the schematic of the CCI interface.
Then the war had started, U'Tria had fallen and L'Wrona had forgotten all about it-until now.
"A ship has just appeared at jump point," said Dad. "ID'd as a nova-class Fleet destroyer."
The projection appeared on the tacscan -the red of the destroyer moving toward the green of Toy as it approached the pulsing red circle of the jump point.
"Ship-to-ship," said the computer.
A man's face appeared in the commscreen, the silver starships of a captain on his collar. He was in his middle years, graying at the temples-and he looked most unhappy. He nodded at L'Wrona. "My Lord," he said with a faint nod. "Captain Z'Than, commanding A'Lan's Hope. We are ordered by FleetOps to take your ship aboard and return with you to K'Ronar."
L'Wrona's hand tapped the joystick, taking Toy off automatic, moving the ship forward at standard. "I invoke the immunity of the Covenant," he said. On the tacscan, the distance between the two ships was quickly shrinking.
"I'm sorry, but they said you'd do that," said Z'Than, "and that it was a procedural matter best decided by a tribunal. As a Line officer, I am merely to bring you in."
A line of text appeared beneath the captain's image, moving slowly across the screen. "H'Nar. He's armed his weapons batteries. Tacscan locking on. Touch your left earlobe if you want me to open fire now, while we still have a chance."
L'Wrona kept his left hand on the chairarm. "Z'Than," said the margrave. "You're from U'Tria, aren't you?"
The captain nodded.
"Do you have a signed order from Fleet ordering my arrest?"
"I have verbal authorization, My Lord." Even in the small pickup, L'Wrona could see the sweat on the other's brow. He and his family had been liegemen of the margrave since before the Fall.
"You can only bring me in with an order signed by the Grand Admiral, or an order signed by the full Council. Do you have either?"
Z'Than shook his head.
"Then get out of my way, sir. As first ship insystem, we have prior navigation rights. You are between us and our jump point." gods! h'nar, jump now! flashed the screen. deviation will be only. 00032. we can make it up in a few weeks.
"Cut your engines and prepare to be taken in on tractors," said Z'Than. On the tacscan, what little space there was between the two ships was vanishing. L'Wrona could see the destroyer through the armorglass now, a mile-long black hull bristling with weapons turrets and instrument pods. They were within seconds of colliding.
"Too easy," said L'Wrona. Pulling up on the stick, he sent the scout knifing up and over the destroyer's bridge, down along its hull and then off toward jump point, the big tri-tubed engines shrinking in the rearscan.
The destroyer commander's image vanished as the commlink broke. "He's switched off," said Dad as L'Wrona moved the scout up to flank speed. "And he's suspended weapons tracking. You won."
Reaching jump point, L'Wrona engaged the drive, feeling his stomach churn as space twisted in that crazy, familiar way, then it was over-they were in U'Tria system. Home.
Sighing, L'Wrona dropped Toy's speed down to standard.
"Mines!" shouted the computer. "All around!"
Cursing, L'Wrona cut speed, tried to nullify forward thrust, even as an alarm sounded. "Incoming missiles!" warned Dad. "Move and the mines get us, don't move and the missiles get us."
"Missiles from where?" said L'Wrona.
"Two heavily armed commercial vessels." It all came up on the tacscan then: the red of the minefield surrounding the jump point, the incoming red streaks of the shipbusters, the yellow Xs of the two hostiles, and standing well outside the minefield, the small, fragile green of Toy.
"Origin of vessels?" said L'Wrona, seeing only one way out.
"ID'd as Combine T'Lan," said Dad.
The missiles penetrated the minefield and were destroyed-as planned. Noiseless, a spectacular wave of overlapping orange-red explosions licked toward the scout, a chain reaction racing from mine to mine.
"Short jump, backside," snapped L'Wrona.
Toy disappeared as the blast reached her.
"Yes or no?" said the face in the commscreen.
The man wearing the uniform of a Combine merchant captain shrugged. "Maybe yes, maybe no. We think we got him, but the tacscan shows no ship residue. There should be at least some traces of the drive isotopes."
"He may have blind jumped. If so, he's as good as dead," said the other. "Remain on station until you hear from me again, Captain."
"Yes, Goodman T'Lan."
As the Combine captain's image disappeared, T'Lan, neither good nor a man, turned to the other human-adapted AI, one who could and did pass for his son and heir. "That's L'Wrona's home system. He probably jumped, but I doubt it was blind. We'll just have to watch and wait, strike when it shows."
The two stood in the underground command center of one of the Federation's wealthiest industrial combines-a combine created several hundred years ago by beings from another reality, intent on infiltrating and ultimately destroying the Confederation. The big room bustled with activity, coordinating the far-flung merchant fleets and maintaining communications with distant points in this and one other universe.
"One of our units has the humans' only portal device," said the younger T'Lan.
"S'Yatan?" asked T'Lan senior, glancing at the status boards. Everything was on schedule -forward battle units of the Fleet of the One were approaching the Rift, about to penetrate into the K'Ronarins' Quadrant Blue Nine -the Ghost Quadrant.
The other AI nodded.
"He's had it since his ship was assigned to Terra," said T'Lan senior. "His crew's human and loyal. He can kill them but he can't run the ship by himself. And there's always an escort vessel. So…?"
"He's convinced the crew they're fleeing an unlawful order, heading back for K'Ronar. The instant he leaves the Terran system, he can kill his crew, and one of our ships will meet him."
T'Lan senior nodded. "Having that device, we'll use it to bring in a second force, augmenting the one coming through the Rift. Nothing can stop us." A sudden thought gave him pause. "What unlawful order was he fleeing?" he asked, frowning.
The other AI looked at his senior nervously. "You recall Binor's advance force? The one we thought the mindslavers wiped?" "Thought?"
"It seems that R'Gal, Guan-Sharick and some humans actually captured the flagship. It's at Terra now, and has been granted the device by the insystem commander."
The senior AI was absolutely still for a moment, absorbing the data. "No one," he said finally, "has ever taken a battleglobe. Not in all the long years of the Fleet of the One."
"Shall I alert home?" asked T'Lan junior, nodding toward a console manned by an AI wearing a terminal coupler plugged directly into his temples.
T'Lan senior held up a hand. "Not yet. Not until we've some success to report. That battleglobe can hurt us far worse back home than it can here-which is why R'Gal's trying to take it there."
Toy's jump drive was a creation of the High Imperial epoch. Unlike contemporary star-ships, the little scout was capable of low-risk, insystem jumps-and had just made one.
L'Wrona looked down on the rugged highlands of the S'Htil, one of the planet's three continents and its commercial hub.
In the old days, before the war, the tacscan would have picked up hundreds of space- and atmospheric craft, coming and going from U'Triaport or traversing the planet. Now the tacscan was empty.
"Set us down in the old s'hlar grove, across the lake from the Hall," said L'Wrona as the ship plunged into the atmosphere, taking a sharp evasive tack against hypothesized missiles.
"Acknowledged," said the computer.
Unchallenged, seemingly undetected, the little ship sat down at dusk in the wooded hills just outside L'Yan, ancestral home of the Margrave of U'Tria. The sere autumn foliage was just catching the last rays of sunset when L'Wrona clambered down Toy's boarding ladder and stepped onto his home soil for the first time in ten long years.
Breathing deeply of the crisp, fresh air, he bent and picked up some leaves and dirt. Rubbing them slowly between his hands, he let them fall back to the forest floor, brushed his hands gently, then made his way toward the faint ruts of the old vehicle trail and the distant village.