The Forlorn(39)

Even Shael quailed before this onslaught, but she came up fighting. "That's simply not true. She only just escaped the command center with her life, when she blew up the transmitter core. Her sub-captain betrayed them. She was little more than a vagabond until she reached Arlinn, and the people recognized her as queen."

The tall man shrugged. "She could hardly tell the truth, could she? As for being a vagabond . . . well, let's rather say she was a promiscuous little tramp. She didn't much care where she got or where she dumped her offspring. You, boy, have the look of her command-center lover. The same Sub-Captain Fisher she blamed it on, poor sod. Anyway, what I'm hunting are sections of the supposedly blown-up transmitter core from the starship's control center. Fortunately, it was made to be virtually indestructible. The sections were just scattered across half the continent. This is one of them." He held up Keilin's pendant again. "If I can gather enough of them, then we can take them to the backup Compcontrol in the second landing command center, and reactivate the project."

Despite being tied up, and told that the plan had been to kill him, Keilin was fascinated. He'd seen pictures, and been hypnotized by several stories of starships, back in the library. "You mean . . . my jewel is part of a starship? If you had enough pieces you could fly away from our world to the stars?"

Cap sighed. "It's been a long three hundred years. The ordinary people haven't a clue about reality any more." He pointed upwards. "There is the starship Morningstar. Your `moon.' It's a lot smaller than the moon that used to orbit the world we humans came from. Less than a seventeenth of the size, but still the biggest ship the human race ever made. It's far too big to ever land. And this isn't `our world' either. We humans came from Earth, fleeing the Morkth. The terraforming of this place had been started by robot drones nearly fifty years before we even left Sol. Fortunately, there was an atmosphere with oxygen, but no other life except a lot of primitive mosslike stuff before that. I came here with the shipload of construction crews and equipment a year before the Morningstar was ready. They built your cities or Evie would have dumped millions of people without any shelter onto an alien world."

"So how did people get down here, sir? I mean . . . that's high, there couldn't have been a ladder. Did they . . . um, have flying ships, or did they lower platforms with ropes or something?"

Cap snorted. "You don't even know what you're talking about, but you've put your finger on the basic problem. We had to get nearly one hundred million evacuees onto that ship, and off again. They had to choose between carrying people or enough fuel to ferry the people down. Trotting up and down into a gravity well is a fuel-expensive process, and the sort of loads we could carry on a shuttle would have meant a couple of lifetimes worth of trips.

"Your `jewel' as you call it, was the answer. It is part of the matter-transmitter system. We could move passengers up from Earth, frozen, conditioned and ready to be good little settlers, zip-zap. We brought them down here the same way. Easy, although signal attenuation limits the use of the matter transmitter to a couple of thousand miles.

"The only trouble was that we needed a psionic to make the damn thing work. A transmitter system has miles of bloody electronic amplifiers, but triggering the whole thing still needs something else. This `jewel' of yours. As well as some nanocircuitry, there is an unstable crystal lattice inside it. When you have perfect alignment in that lattice, right down to the atomic level . . . it works. That alignment is right, by chance, about once in every fifteen thousand attempts. Yet a stupid psi can make the thing work every time, without even knowing how they're damned well doing it! So, one decent psionic, and we had no need to carry loads of fuel and landing craft. We could pack in a lot more corpsicles instead. We just had a couple of shuttles for the crew."

He sighed. "We lost those when the Morkth atmospheric craft hit Morningstar's principal control center. Now, the only way back up to the ship is to get the matter transmitter working again. Even the Morkth can't get there. The battleship that deployed their landing craft got taken out kamikaze-style by our one and only screening cruiser. Anyway, the defenses up on Morningstar should be able to trash the sort of piddly little ships the Morkth managed to drop. At least, I hope that's what they think. I presume they must, as they haven't tried a direct frontal assault on her. They obviously don't know that the crew are very dead, and that the ship is in shut-down mode, thanks to one of Evie's last little tricks."

He ground his fist into his palm. The pendant swayed wildly. "One live human up there would be all it takes to get the ship up and running. One human being . . . and we can't even do that."