The Lieutenant stepped out from behind the table and slapped her, hard. She took it calmly, then just raised her head and stared at him. She knew she could easily take him down, and perhaps one or two of the others, but would probably end up badly beaten or dead. She also knew that if this went any further she would have to do something drastic, because many prisoners had died in such situations, foolishly waiting for them to improve.
"Orbital Combine!" he spat. "We fought and died for Sudoria while you nestled around the planet growing fat and wealthy. Now you think you're better than us. Worse even than the groundsiders, you lie about the War and you smear Fleet. Now the Brumallian is painted as the poor victim, with Fleet's boot on his neck." He stabbed a finger. "You forget what we did!"
Yishna could feel herself flushing with anger. "Hardly you; I should think you were still pissing your bed when Fleet destroyed Brumal."
He swung at her again, but this time Yishna raised both her forearms, scissoring them with his wrist between. Bones broke with a satisfactory crunch. She grabbed and pulled him into her and, turning, spun him over her hip into two of the guards behind her. Still turning she raised her foot off the ground and cannoned it into the temple of another guard. To her left: a weapon being raised. Leaping in close, she drove the heel of her hand into that guard's nose, and he flew backwards over the table. Behind her, the others were recovering. Probably she would be gunned down as she went for them, but—
The door slammed open. "Enough!" bellowed Pilot Officer Clanot. "Lower your weapons!" Struggling to his feet the Lieutenant did not seem to be listening, as he tried to draw his side arm left-handed. Clanot drew his own weapon, stepped in close and brought it down hard against the side of the man's head. Now Duras entered, followed by two more crew and a third figure Yishna recognised at once.
"You four, return to your berths right now!" Clanot ordered. He reholstered his gun, his hand shaking. As the four guards exited, he turned to Yishna, keeping his gaze fixed firmly upon her face. "Please clothe yourself, Yishna Strone."
"I didn't know you had joined the Exhibitionists," said Dalepan. The Ozark containment technician, clad in a spacesuit, leant back against the door jamb with his arms folded.
Yishna shot him a wry look and began to pick up her clothing.
"It is precisely this kind of behaviour," observed Duras, "that causes people to fall out of sympathy with Fleet."
"They will be punished," said Clanot, gazing down at the unconscious Lieutenant.
"Will they? After we have left this ship?"
Clanot looked up. "There are those in Fleet who do not like what is happening now."
"Not nearly enough of them."
"Yes." Clanot looked down again.
Now once again dressed, Yishna tossed her belongings into her bag and shouldered it. "It's time for us to depart, I think," she said.
"Yes, I'm very much afraid it is," Duras replied.
Orduval
He gazed out at the setting sun, its light hazed above the desert like angel dust, and a weary sadness infected his mood as he reviewed recent events. His book had very much changed public—and thus parliamentary—opinion about the Brumallians and about Fleet. He understood how the effect of its publication had killed Fleet's political manoeuvring to have the U-space link closed down, and that, without that same effect, Fleet would have had the power to prevent the Consul Assessor coming here. But in the end it had been too late, for he calculated that if he had published it five years earlier, things would have been very different now.
"Oh, Harald, what are you doing?" he asked the desert, but the question was rhetoric into the abyss, for he knew the answer.
Had public opinion been swayed only a little more against Fleet and in favour of the Brumallians, Parliament would not have returned to Fleet its wartime prerogatives, and Fleet would not then have been able, without consultation and a vote, to bomb a Brumallian city. On such little things turn catastrophic events.
Orduval wished Tigger would return, but supposed the Polity drone was wrapped up in business more important than keeping Orduval informed. He did not himself believe the Brumallians had launched the attack that resulted in the Consul Assessor's death. He understood that many on Sudoria did not believe it either, and like him could not decide which of the two, Fleet or Combine, was the guilty party. Tigger could tell him, and had already told him so very much.
"I have finally ascertained the cause of your debility, and I am amazed," Tigger informed him during their last meeting, just before the drone's departure for Brumal.
"If you could explain?" Orduval suggested.
"You knew I was coming today, even though I did not tell you I would be coming."
Orduval felt a moment's bewilderment. Yes, Tigger was right. He had turned off his console, put it to one side and walked out here fully expecting Tigger to be waiting—and never questioned that impulse.
"Some structures in your brain are sensitive to U-space," the drone explained. "Interestingly, the first fit you ever experienced happened precisely on one of the occasions when I arrived back here from Brumal."
Orduval knew that Tigger contained in his sphere part a U-space drive which he used in order to zip back and forth between the two worlds.
"So it's all your fault," he wryly suggested.
"Not entirely. My arrival on that occasion may have triggered the first feedback loop that resulted in your fit, but the weakness was already there, and such a loop inevitable."
"I feel a bit more explanation is required."
"So do I. Far in the past, on Earth, there used to be a long-running debate, often quite heated, concerning so-called psychic powers. Those being the ability to see into the future, to move objects by thought power, to read minds or communicate from mind to mind. It was only some years after the advent of U-space technology that the debate was partially resolved. Most psychic phenomena were then found to be related to a brain configuration that made them sensitive to U-space, and theoretically able to cause localised phenomena related to it."
"Theoretically?"
"Cases of the strictly mental phenomena have been documented, but none has been documented regarding the physical phenomena."
"So I am in some way sensitised to U-space, and this causes my fits—a phenomenon you say is already known about in the Polity. Why then are you amazed?"
"Because the structures in your brain grew from your DNA blueprint, as do most basal structures in most human brains—meaning nature not nurture. Everything that forms afterwards is nowhere near so dramatic."
"Biology is not my main interest, but I do know enough to understand that."
"Without her knowledge, I visited your grandmother Utrain, and sampled her DNA. What I found there led me to a rather risky penetration of Corisanthe Main, where I managed to obtain a stored blood sample taken from your mother. I discovered that the difference in your DNA, resulting in those unusual brain structures, cannot be accounted for by your ancestry."
Orduval nodded slowly to himself, realising that at some level he already knew that someone had tampered with his DNA.
"This is something I must investigate further," Tigger told him, "but now I must prepare for the arrival of the Consul Assessor."
Their conversation continued for a while, as it always did, while they discussed current events and Orduval's eventual return to Sudorian society. But he felt himself to have shuddered to a bit of a halt, contributing only little to the conversation as on some other level his mind chewed over the latest information. After Tigger departed he returned to his cave and sat and thought for a while, then opened up his console and began to use programs provided by Tigger for research, in order to penetrate Corisanthe Main. He began looking at the time when his mother had first arrived there, and speed-read files feverishly, looking for some clue to what dangerous genetic experiments Orbital Combine had been conducting then. For two days and two nights he found nothing, and began to realise that his conjecture about experiments might be wrong. Then he found something significant—right near the end.