And one breath later, a sudden and fierce rain began to fall…
Forty-seven
Because they saw a Wayward car—a little machine patterned after a copperwing—Washen and the others climbed up into the epiphyte forest, into a camouflaged blind, watching from above as the car set down on the graveled shoreline. Because he could have been anyone, they kept hiding when a man with Pamir’s face and build jumped out, big boots kicking the gravel and a hard, tired voice calling, “Washen,” over the constant rush of the river. Because he was Pamir, and tired, he said to the forest, “I guess you thought again and changed your mind.” He shook his head, saying, “Good. I can’t blame you. I never liked this leg of our plan.” Then he lifted his gaze, somehow knowing exactly where to stare.
Washen stood, shouldering her laser as she asked, “Could you see me?”
“Long ago,” he replied with a crisp sense of mystery. Then he motioned at the car, telling her, “It’s stolen. Scrubbed and reregistered, if we did everything right.”
Quee Lee and Perri stood. Then finally, Locke.
A sudden dull shiver passed through the canyon. One of her newly implanted nexuses told Washen what she’d already guessed: a comet had impacted on the hull, instantly obliterating a thousand cubic kilometers of armor.
“If you’re going,” said Pamir, “you’ve got to go now. Everything’s late as it is.”
Quee Lee touched Washen on the arm, and with a motherly concern, she said, “Maybe he’s right. You shouldn’t do this.”
They were filing down onto the gravel bar. To her son, Washen said,’Make sure you’re happy with things. Quickly”
Locke nodded grimly, leaping into the hovering car.
She reminded everyone, including herself,’We need bait, and we need it convincing. Delicious and substantial. What else can we offer but me?”
No one spoke.
“What about Miocene?” she asked.
“She got your invitation twenty-three minutes ago,” Pamir reported. “We still haven’t seen any traffic that might be her. But it’s a long trip, and unplanned, and since she’s got to suspect an ambush, I don’t expect her to come too fast or follow the easy routes.”
A massive shudder rumbled through the ship’s body.
“The biggest yet,” was Perri’s assessment.
The shields had been down for five minutes. “What’s the official explanation?’Washen asked.
“Remoras are bastards,” said Pamir. “Officially, they’re proving themselves to be enemies of the ship, and in another ten or twenty or fifty minutes, repairs will be made, the shields will be restored, and within the day, every last bastard will be dead.”
Boom, and then a sudden second boom.
From inside the car, Locke shouted, “Everything’s ready”
Washen jumped inside, paused and took a ragged breath. She was anxious, and it took a moment for her to realize why. No, not because she was the bait. Her thundering heart had nothing to do with any danger. In a perfect peace, she would feel the same way. She was returning to Marrow after more than a century’s absence. She was returning home, and that was enormous in its own right.
Washen waved to Quee Lee and her husband.
Then the steel door was yanking itself shut, and with a hurried, inadequate voice, she called to Pamir, “Thanks for these days.”
Wayward security was thorough. Was seamless.
And it was totally unprepared for an invasion of exactly two people: a famous dead captain and her even more famous son.
“You’ve been missing,” a uniformed man declared, staring at Locke with a mixture of awe and confusion. “We’ve been looking for your body, sir. We thought you were killed that first day”
“People make mistakes,” was Locke’s advice.
The security man nodded, then stumbled over the first obvious question.
Locke answered it before it was asked. “I was on a mission. At the insistence of Till himself He spoke with authority, and impatience. He sounded as if nothing could be more true. “I was supposed to recover my mother. By any means, at any cost.”
The man looked small inside his dark uniform.
Glancing at their prisoner, he said, “I should beg for instructions—”
“Beg to Till,” was Locke’s sound advice.
“Now,” the man sputtered.
“I’ll wait inside my car,” promised one of the greatest, most honored Waywards. “If that’s all right with you.”
He had no choice but to say, “Yes, sir.”
The waystation was perched on the throat of the access tunnel. Traffic flowed rapidly up and down. Washen saw giant steel vehicles patterned after the familiar hammer-wings. The empty ones dove into the kilometer-wide maw, while others appeared beneath them, rushing fresh units into the gaps in the Wayward lines.
The war’s carnage was relentless. And perhaps worse for the ship was the swelling, unstable panic among passengers and crew.
Washen closed her eyes, letting her nexuses sip updates. Coded squirts. Images from security eyes and ears. Avenues and public plazas were filled with terrified, furious passengers. Angry voices blamed the new Master, and the old Master, too. Plus Waywards. Remoras. And that largest, most terrifying foe: simple stupidity. Then she watched dust and pebbles falling at one-third lightspeed, smashing Wayward vehicles as their terrific momentum was transformed into a brilliant light and withering heat. An army had charged into the Remora’s desperate trap, and it would be dead in another few moments. But a new army was coming to replace what was lost. Washen opened her eyes and watched the steel hammerwings rising up to the fight. And in that mayhem of coded messages and orders and desperate pleas, one small question was misplaced. Then a fictional but utterly believable answer was delivered, wrapped snug inside bogus encryption seals.
The waystation’s AI examined the seals, and because of a subtle and recent failure in its cognitive skills, it proclaimed:
“From Till, it is. And it is authentic”
With a palpable, almost giddy relief, the Wayward told Locke, “You need to take the prisoner home. Great sir.”
“Thank you,” Locke replied.
Then he unberthed their car and dove after one of the empty hammerwings, accelerating until the rising hammer-wings blurred into a single dull line—all of Marrow seemingly rising up now, eager to behold a vast and exceptionally dangerous universe.
“Changes,” Locke had promised.
He had thoroughly described the new Marrow, displaying a good poet’s taste for sadness and Irony. Washen came with expectations. She knew that the compliant Loyalists had finished Miocene’s bridge, then with Wayward resources, the bridge had been improved, making it possible for whole armies to be transported through the fading buttresses. The old captains’ base camp housed the engineers who quickly rebuilt the access tunnel. Energy and every raw material had been brought from the world below. Lasers with a fantastic punch had widened the old tunnel, and the chamber’s own hyperfiber was salvaged and re-purified, then slathered thick and fast on the raw iron walls above. Then the same lasers were moved, digging a second, parallel tunnel barely wide enough for power and communication conduits. That was dubbed the Spine. It linked Marrow to the ship, making them one and the same.
With a soft pride, Locke mentioned, “From here, everything is our work.”
The tunnel suddenly became narrower, hammerwings missing them by nothing in the silent vacuum.
“How strong is it?” Washen inquired.
“Better than you would think,” he replied, his voice almost defensive.
Again, Washen closed her eyes and watched the war. But the Waywards had retreated, or died, and most of the Remoras’ links were dead. There was nothing to see except the battered hull glowing red, radiating the heat of impacts and battles as well as the bloody glow of the passing sun.