“And that’s why you believe that there are still people as we know them down there? After what will be, oh, close to a century by the time we get there?”
“I do. Your own sensors said that there were some. Not many, but some. I’ve worked out what I believe that society might have readapted to. I may be totally wrong. That’s why I have to go. I have to know.”
“I see. No matter what the price?”
She looked at him. “I don’t know if any of us could really accept living down there under those conditions for the rest of our lives. I’m not sure how long our lives would last under those conditions. But, yes, it’s worth a risk. Everything worthwhile seems to require risk, doesn’t it?”
“And what about—defense?”
“I can do all right in self-defense. Beyond that—I don’t know. Father, you are a Christian priest. Could you kill another human being? Do you really know if you could or not?”
Father Chicanis licked his lips and stared off into space for a moment. Then, without bringing his gaze back to her, he responded, very softly, “I have. It fills me with eternal remorse, but I know God forgives me. But, yes, I know I can kill if I must.”
His response shocked her, but didn’t completely throw her off. She decided, though, that if he was going to say who he’d killed, when, and why, then it would have to be because he wanted to say it, and at a time and place of his own choosing.
“Then you have said it,” she told him instead. “I do not know it, because, as I am sure you can agree, none of us truly knows what we will do until we are forced into actually doing it. It’s easy to say what we would do, or would not do, but until the choice is forced, there is no way to know, is there?”
“No,” he replied, still staring off into space.
“Then that is my only possible answer.”
He nodded, and finally looked at her again. “Very well, Kati. Go ahead and return to your duties now.”
She got up, started to leave, then stopped and turned to face him once more. “Why was this interview necessary, Father?” she asked him. “We spoke of nothing we haven’t spoken of many times since I was brought into this.”
He sighed. “Because we will rendezvous with the Dutchman in under eight ship hours,” he told her. “And from that point on, God knows where this is going to lead.”
“Warning! We are being scanned by diagnostic and targeting sensors!” The ship’s computer did not mince words.
They had been sitting in the designated area off a remote and totally desolate genhole gate switching area for three hours. Suddenly everything had erupted into warnings and actions.
“Place origin of scans on the main screen,” Captain Stavros ordered. When it came up, though, it wasn’t a whole lot of help. “I wonder how the hell he does that? It’s damned weird,” Stavros muttered.
“Clever, though,” Colonel N’Gana commented.
On the screen, in three dimensions, color, and with full and authentic depth, sitting in the middle of empty space but somehow internally and fully illuminated, was a gigantic sailing ship out of Earth’s past.
“What is actually there. Captain?” Takamura asked, fascinated. “I assume this is inherent in the scanning operation, so that the effect is a broadcast that overwhelms the screen. It is a clever invention, but it shouldn’t fool your own instruments.”
“Computer?” the captain prompted.
“Orion class frigate, well armed, showing its age but well maintained and upgraded. Minimum life signs aboard,” the computer reported.
“Orion class! That is an antique!” Admiral Krill commented. “It has to be salvaged from one or more vessels that went down in the initial Titan attacks. Nothing else makes sense.”
“Nonetheless, it makes a formidable pirate ship for freighters like us, does it not?” the captain responded. “Computer—you say minimal life signs aboard. How many biological life-forms do you scan?”
“There is some jamming of this. My sensors indicate very few, though. Perhaps as few as one.”
“One!” Takamura gasped. “Could one person even fly a ship like that?”
“Easily,” Admiral Krill told her. “That is, if they knew what they were doing in the first place, and they obviously do. Just like this ship, it’s all computerized, much of it artificial intelligence piloting and navigational gear. The crew of a modern frigate is small, and much of it is assigned to the sim training facilities and interpretive intelligence sections. The majority of live people aboard today’s frigates are Marines in combat gear.”
“Well, dear, don’t let’s keep guessing,” the old diva prodded the captain. “Hail them and let’s get going!”
“Odysseus to Flying Dutchman. Here we are. Please inform us as to what this is about.”
For a short period there was no response. Then back came a voice that was full, firm, and almost kindly, with just a trace of accent that could not be placed. “This is Hendrik van Staaten, captain of the Hollander. Your ship has transmitted the correct coding, and I have acknowledged it. We are both who we say we are and we are out here in the middle of nowhere. Shall we begin our negotiation?”
Madame Sotoropolis whispered to her captain, “Any chance of visuals?”
The captain shook his head. “No, ma’am. He’s got that blocked.”
“Hell of a trip and lots of trouble for a phone call,” Stavros retorted. “We’re all gathered here. Would you like a rundown of the assemblage?”
“Unnecessary,” van Staaten replied. “I probably know more about your passengers right now than you do. Overall, the choices run from good to adequate, but even the question marks will have to do. Let us begin by doing a bit of background work. Colonel N’Gana, have you ever heard of Priam’s Lens?”
The colonel snorted. “It was a pipe dream from a century or more back,” he responded. “Some sort of gizmo attached to a natural phenomenon nobody understood that was supposed to actually be capable of drilling a hole right through a Titan. Quite the adventure thriller concept, but there was no basis for it. Only in fiction do people just conjure up superweapons. In any event, it didn’t work.”
“The Lens, which is a natural phenomenon, does exist. The theory behind using its curious by-products as a weapon was sound, and a prototype was built that worked in limited tests,” van Staaten told them. “Madame Sotoropolis, I suspect, knows of the project. It was financed partly by Karas family money when the government took your own position, Colonel.”
Eyes turned to the old lady in the veil and sacklike dress.
“It was a last chance to save our world,” she said softly, remembering over the years. “Nobody else had any kind of answer at all. The Confederacy’s research and development people, its military, all the rest, had gone off on their own secret weapons projects that produced a lot of busy-work and lots of pet theories, but none of them worked. Eventually, they stopped funding them. We—the family, that is—did our own searching and researching when it became clear that we were in the way of this new threat. Almost everything we found had been tried by one or another of the government projects. So, we looked at the ones they rejected as too silly, too impractical, or simply fantasy. We found several, almost all very odd ideas from highly eccentric university types who were considered crackpots. All were highly eccentric—that is, crazy as loons—and most were crackpots, but some were not. The one involving the curious effects produced by Priam’s Lens, which was close to our system and in fact was the reason Helena had been discovered, showed definite promise, but before a full working prototype could be built and deployed, Helena was overrun. We never knew what happened to that or several other projects. We assumed that they either ran when the funding ran out or the world was overrun, or they were down there at the time.”