"I worked it out after the next game. What happened was, you already had your flush, but you had a shot at low hand, too. I was betting like I had a full house. You believed me. You threw your flush away and got it back with your low hand ruined. ‘Rape my lizard,' you said to yourself-"
"And beat you for the very last time."
"Fyunch(click)."
"Enough," another voice said. "Is it Blaine?"
"Definitely, Admiral."
"Sinbad and Atropos. Converge on the Flag. We're sending escorts. All squadrons, engage enemy closely."
Epilogue Endgame
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Inner Base Six had lost 80 percent of its mass. Its skin was wrinkled and folded. Despite the Engineers' busy maintenance, pipes and lines were bent in curves and loops, and domes edged against each other. The sky was clotted with spacecraft waiting to be refueled.
From the stretched-taffy look of the ice around the Mosque, it must have been twisted almost horizontal, then later pulled back to true. No damage showed. If anything, it had been improved.
The tremendous space of the Great Hall now sprouted semicircular balconies at every level. Men and Moties clustered on the balconies in groups of three or ten, sometimes shouting or even jump/flying from balcony to balcony. Diplomacy moved at a breakneck pace here, slowing down at times to accommodate human minds.
What Joyce was doing wouldn't have worked in the older Mosque; wouldn't have worked without the gyrostabilized camera either.
In the diminished gravity Joyce Mei-Ling Trujillo was leaping from balcony to balcony stopping to swing the camera at Nabil and a handful of Moties, again with Glenda Ruth and her brother to do a short interview, then leaping on. She looked like some lovely goddess moving from cloud to cloud, gradually approaching earth.
She reached the floor flushed with the exercise, started to say something to Kevin, then swung toward the great monitor screen.
The great blue-and-white sphere filled most of the view. Cloud patterns streamed sluggishly across continents whose borders were marked all in circles. "That's Mote Prime! Isn't it, Kevin? I can see the craters. I came to see Mote Prime, and we've been here seven bloody months without coming anywhere near it!"
He put a hand out to steady her in the minuscule gravity. "You won't get any closer this trip. The good news is, they still don't seem to have any kind of access to space. That footage was taken from a Medina ship skimming just above the clouds, pole to pole, and nobody tried to shoot back."
"I would have loved to see the Zoo."
"Probably gone by now. Things don't last among Moties."
Joyce and camera faced him. "So it's a blockade again, but with Moties in charge."
"Subject to approval from home."
"Of course." Joyce switched off the camera. "Off the record? You don't have any doubts, do you, Kevin?"
"Plenty. How do we use the worm here? We could pick a faction on Mote Prime-maybe King Peter's family survived-and distribute it. Or not. Or not yet. The Crazy Eddie Worm is still experimental. Say..."
"What?"
"Bear with me a second, Joyce. Victor! Dammit, that worm's done it. Mediators really do all look alike now. Victor? All just out of adolescence."
The Mediator who had been the Tartars' Victoria bounded toward them in a low arc. "Kevin?"
"Yeah. Victor, sooner or later you'll be in contact with Mote Prime. We want certain bodies returned to us for proper burial. Three human males, Midshipmen Potter, Staley, Whitbread. They may have been dissected, God knows what, but please retrieve them at your earliest convenience."
"It will be done. If there is any successor to the group that held them. Things change rapidly there."
"Some don't. Try."
"Yes. Anything else?"
"Yeah. Joyce, guess what the Bandit Group was guarding?"
"Some weapons cache that was too far away to use," Joyce said promptly.
"No. It was the Khanate's main base, including all their wealth. They offered it all as bribes to their allies, and the allies have turned it all over to Medina. Victor, did your people find any surprises?"
"Not to us. We'll make holos, Kevin. Their Engineers are ingenious; you'll see some interesting innovations in the hardware."
Joyce considered the nuances. She turned the camera on Victor.
"Then it's over? The Khanate didn't just surrender, they meant it."
Kevin caught Glenda Ruth Blaine's semaphore wave, halfway up the Great Hall's curved roof, and her all-too-knowing smile. Kevin grinned and waved back. No hiding anything. Dammit, Joyce had caught it, too.
"We control all of what was Khanate wealth," Victor answered. "The families have returned from hiding at Bury's Star, and all of them now carry the worm. I see no way in which they could harm us or you, ever again. Their line is at an end, unless we choose differently; would not that satisfy Horace Bury's anger?"
Joyce answered carefully. "As much as I came to know Bury, I think he had no anger left for Moties. This was his last corporate war. I believe he enjoyed it very much."
The Motie smiled and moved on. Kevin felt his eyes begin to sting. He said, "That was wonderfully well said."
"Thank you. I actually miss him, Kevin. Not like you, I expect. Almost thirty years."
"Yeah. But he did go out a winner, and .... can't seem to decide how to feel about finally being free of the old man's power games, Life is about to turn simpler."
"What was the smirk about?"
"Smirk?" Joyce's black eyebrows came together and he said, "It's a secret. There are still secrets. Dammit, Joyce, is every woman going to go around reading my mind for the rest of my life?"
"This isn't any diplomatic secret, Kevin. And it isn't a scandal because you'd never be stupid enough ... you wouldn't."
"Joyce, there is a secret you should not hear. Just like last time, when Eudoxus read your feet."
She swallowed her first answer. "Maybe, but I have to have it."
"Okay." Kevin Renner began to talk.
Inner Base Six had been following the Empire ships. Renner took his own sweet time returning thence, sending the Blockade Fleet ships on ahead, thrusting at half a gee while he and his people healed. It still took him only eight days.
On the afternoon of the sixth day he found Glenda Ruth perched on the arm of his chair with a tray in her hand. He settled in with his lunch and said, "Talk."
She didn't seem able to.
"Freddy," he said. "Aristocrat. Just a touch lazy by my admittedly rigorous standards. Didn't want to join the Navy. He'll have precious little choice now. They'll hit him with major medals and a Reserve commission."
"Good motivation," Glenda Ruth said. "Put him in charge of avoiding a war so he won't have to work."
"He tenses up when you're around. What's he afraid of? You're too sensitive?"
"Squeamish," she said. "Whoever gets hurt around me, child or adult or cat or Motie, I feel it. But I had as much to do with saving us as he did. More. Kevin-"
"Glenda Ruth."
"Oh. Sorry." She shifted to the navigator's empty chair and slumped a little and smiled at him.
"I was going to say... oh." That wide, her smile looked a little vacuous. "You got it."
Glenda Ruth said, "Please turn down the sex appeal because it makes me uncomfortable."
"Yeah. And I don't doubt you could turn it up again if I need to remember what gender I am."
"Maybe not. Kevin, you've stopped thinking of me as not quite human."
"Don't test that out, okay?" Unless you mean it ....o, dammit, seducing Lord Blaine's daughter is one of the many things I'm going to skip in this life. "Sure you're human. You may be a great many humans. Every child does a lot of role-playing. You and Chris would do it better than most. What kind of role have you been playing with Freddy?"