The Fortress in Orion Read online

  Ortega and Circe knew each other, as did Snake and Pandora, and it took them only a few minutes to all feel comfortable with each other. The same could not be said for the Michkag clone and his instructor.

  Djibmet.

  “Goddamnit, Nathan!” said Snake, backing away from the two Kaboris. “He looks exactly like every holo I’ve ever seen of Michkag.”

  “He is Michkag,” answered Pretorius. “Or a version of him.”

  “Give us a little time to get used to him,” added Pandora.

  “We haven’t got much time,” said Pretorius.

  “It’s like putting a prisoner in a room with Genghis Khan or Hitler or Conrad Bland and saying ‘He’s actually a friend,’” said Snake. “How soon do you think they’d have adjusted?”

  “I assure you that I sympathize with your reactions,” said the clone in heavily accented Terran. “But I have been created and trained for the sole purpose of replacing the original Michkag and bringing this war to a peaceful conclusion.”

  “He even sounds like Michkag!” complained Snake.

  “He has to,” interjected Djibmet. “He will be under constant guard as well as constant scrutiny. He has been taught to think of himself only as Michkag, to speak Kabori with Michkag’s inflections and other languages with Michkag’s accents. His gestures mirror Michkag’s.”

  Pretorius nodded his agreement. “The thing to remember is that we’re not substituting an actor or a double, at least in the usual sense. This is really and truly Michkag, just a sane and rational version who wants to make a peaceful accommodation with the Democracy.”

  “I know, I know,” muttered Snake. “But it’s going to take some getting used to.”

  “Circe?” said Pretorius. “Do you detect any hidden hostility in Michkag, any indication at all that he’s not telling the entire truth?”

  “None,” she answered.

  Pretorius shrugged. “There you have it.”

  “So you got us all here,” said Ortega, “we’re all fed, we’ve met the reason for our mission, so how do we get from here to there?”

  “A direct approach is out of the question,” answered Pretorius. “We couldn’t get ten light-years into the Coalition’s territory without being challenged, any more than they could get anywhere near Deluros, and I’m not prepared to fight off half the Kabori fleet.”

  “Then what’s our plan?”

  “Cube,” commanded Pretorius, and instantly a holographic cube, some four feet on a side, popped into existence in the middle of the room. “Show the Democracy in blue, the Coalition in yellow.” The cube responded instantly with a three-dimensional holograph. “There’s some neutral space over here,” he continued, pointing to the left side of the cube. “I’ll call it a No Man’s Land, or No Man’s Space, if you prefer. Maybe two hundred systems, sixty-two of them inhabited or at least colonized. I don’t think more than a dozen have sentient native populations.”

  He paused while Ortega’s artificial eyes extended on stalks, microscopically examining the worlds in the neutral area.

  “Anyway, we have friends on five of these worlds, and on at least one of them we should be able to swap our ship for a Kabori vessel.”

  “Swap?” said Circe, arching an elegant eyebrow.

  Pretorius smiled. “A euphemism for ‘appropriate.’”

  “Which in turn is a euphemism for ‘steal,’” she said, returning his smile.

  “In essence,” he agreed. “Except that it’ll be more than a simple theft.”

  “Oh?” said Pandora.

  He nodded. “We’ll have to kill every member of the crew, any witnesses, anyone who might be able to signal to the Coalition that we’re approaching them in a stolen ship.” He paused. “The trick is to decide whether to steal a military ship, if one’s available, or a private ship. There are advantages and disadvantage to both.”

  “I can see the advantage of a military ship,” said Ortega. “We probably won’t be stopped and boarded or that carefully scrutinized. But what’s the disadvantage?”

  “Simple,” answered Pretorius. “Wherever we land—and if we’re in a military ship, it almost has to be a military base—they’re going to instantly recognize our Kabori passenger. And since it won’t have been announced that he’s in that ship or that sector of the Coalition, it’ll take them about ten seconds to see if the real—or let’s call him the original—Michkag is where he’s supposed to be, and it’ll probably take them another ten seconds to kill or incarcerate the lot of us.”

  “Okay,” said Snake. “Then we eliminate the crew of a private ship and appropriate it. It sounds less dangerous start to finish.”

  “Well, it’s certainly less dangerous at the start,” agreed Pretorius. “Not much less at the finish. Just about any member of the Coalition, in or out of the military, is going to know that Michkag doesn’t fly in a private ship with no bodyguards, no subordinate officers, just a bunch of the enemy.”

  “You don’t like easy assignments, do you?” said Snake.

  “If it was easy, I wouldn’t need all of you,” replied Pretorius.

  “So what the hell is our plan?”

  “We’ve got two months to get our Michkag safely and secretly to Petrus IV. We plan to leave this world in another day, head through No Man’s Land, stop at a few friendly, or at least nonhostile worlds, land on Petrus IV, kill or kidnap their Michkag and replace him with our Michkag, and escape unseen and safely.” He paused. “Everything else will be improvised on the fly, and you represent the best talents I can assemble for any eventuality.”

  “I’m flattered,” said Pandora, “but I also think I just heard you pronounce my death sentence. Surely you have thought this through more thoroughly than that. After all, you’re Nathan Pretorius, the man the military goes to when everyone says it can’t be done.”

  Pretorius nodded. “Yeah, I’ve got a number of ideas, but probably half of them, maybe more, will have to be scrapped along the way.”

  “Let’s hear them anyway,” persisted Pandora. “Maybe we can scrap some right now and replace them with better ones.”

  Pretorius shrugged. “Why not?” He paused, ordering his thoughts. “If we’re spotted after we change ships, especially if we’re spotted as we approach the Petrus system, one ruse that might work is for a Kabori to claim to have captured us. We’d have to hide Michkag, of course; they’d know he’s an imposter. It might get us on the ground and even into Michkag’s presence, especially if we claim to have information to sell him, but . . .”

  “But?” said Ortega.

  “But Djibmet is undersized, probably too old, and would never pass for a military officer or even the kind of private citizen who could have captured all of us.”

  “This is true,” put in Djibmet. “They would see through such a ruse in seconds.”

  “Then why even mention it?” asked Pandora.

  “Because we may need to try it.”

  “But—”

  “Does anyone know a shape-changer?”

  There was a general shaking of heads and murmuring of negatives. Pandora pulled one of her tiny computers off her belt and spoke softly into it, then looked at its answer.

  “There are only three shape-changing races in the galaxy,” she replied, “and none of them are politically aligned.”

  “To which I repeat: does anyone know one?”

  No one did.

  “All right,” said Pretorius. “Hopefully we won’t need one, but we’ll see if we can find one on one of the No Man’s Land worlds.”

  “What else?” asked Snake.

  “We’ll see if any races we can impersonate have aligned themselves with the Kabori.”

  “The answer is no,” said Pandora.

  “The answer is no as far as Deluros VIII and the military know,” replied Pretorius. “But every alliance is in a constant state of flux. I mean, hell, it’s not as if the Democracy and the Transkei Coalition are the only major players. As we get closer, we’ll see if tha
t option is open to us.”

  “You’re not giving me a lot of confidence,” said Snake. “What else?”

  “The closer we get, the more likely we’ll run into some Kabori. And the more Kabori we run into, the more likely we are to be able to appropriate their ship or computer and let Pandora get to work finding the fortress and maybe even the essential rooms of the fortress. She may be able to totally mislead the planetary defense, have them all looking the wrong way as we approach and sneak in.”

  He turned to Ortega. “We’ve got the strongest being in the galaxy, short of those dinosaurs on that little world out on the Rim—Skyblue, I think it’s called. If we need to disassemble anything from a ship to a small building to an enemy, he’s the guy to do it. And if we’re incarcerated or something vital to our mission is well beyond everyone’s reach, or behind an impenetrable lock, that’s why we have Snake.”

  “And why do we have her?” asked Snake, indicating Circe.

  “To tell us who’s lying and who isn’t, who’s about to take some kind of action and who isn’t, who trusts us and who doesn’t,” answered Pretorius. “As I said, you were chosen to improvise in any situation, but thanks to Circe, we’ll know up front if the situation requires a change in our plans.” He paused. “Now, before we’re done here, I’ll have our initial itinerary—the trip through No Man’s Land—available to each of you. If you have any contacts among the inhabited or colonized worlds there, I’d like to know about it. If any true telepaths have joined the Coalition, we definitely need to know about that. I’ve checked you all out pretty thoroughly, but if any of you have any restrictions—gravity, abnormal oxygen content, endurance, anything that I might not be aware of, this is the time to tell me so we can make adjustments in our plans or eliminate you from the team.” He turned to Djibmet. “I know the Kabori are oxygen-breathers, but if you’ll have any difficulty with our oxygen-nitrogen ratio, let me know.”

  “We’re fine,” responded Djibmet. “But your gravity is about ten percent lighter than that of Rigel XV or Petrus IV, so—”

  “It is?” interrupted Pretorius.

  “Yes,” answered Djibmet. “So we’ll have no difficulty at all on the ship.”

  Pretorius shook his head. “You’re not trying to fool anyone on the ship. I want our Michkag to take strength exercises twice a day, for an hour each time. We can’t have him staggering from the gravity on Petrus after all of his subordinates have seen him walking and reacting comfortably.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Djibmet.

  “All right,” said Pretorius. “This meeting is over. You can go to your quarters. Make sure you study the itinerary, and at dinner tonight we’ll discuss any further suggestions or observations. But as I said at the outset, I expect this to require more improvisation than planning.”

  “I don’t think of myself as an improviser,” remarked Ortega.

  “Haven’t you figured it out yet?” asked Circe with an amused smile.

  “Figured what out? asked Ortega.

  “He’s the improviser,” she replied. “We’re the tools.”

  5

  They took off the next evening and left the Democracy two days later. As much time as he’d spent in space, Pretorius never ceased to be awed by its vastness. Once Man had thought that finding ways around Einstein’s equations and reaching, then exceeding, light speeds would turn the rest of the galaxy into his backyard. But a galaxy that was one hundred thousand light-years across still took one hundred millennia to cross, even at light speeds. Wormholes, which seemed to exist outside of normal space, certainly helped, allowing ships to travel parsecs in mere minutes, but one took one’s wormholes where one found them, and no one entered one until it had been charted, because it was just as likely to dump you halfway across the galaxy as in that system six light-years away.

  Literally thousands of technicians had been charting wormholes for centuries, but the job was nowhere near completion. For one thing, about a quarter of the technicians—Pretorius preferred to think of them as galactic explorers—never came back, and it was impossible to know the reason. Did they emerge in hostile territory? Were some wormholes only one-way? Did some damage or destroy ships? Until a second, or a third, or a tenth exploration of the wormhole produced tangible results, commercial and even military traffic avoided it.

  The ship emerged from the Boise wormhole, so-named for the birthplace of its explorer’s great-great-great grandmother), and since Bortai III, the first planet on its itinerary, was only one day away through normal space, Pretorius didn’t even have the ship’s navigational computer search for wormholes.

  The crew kept busy, each in their own way. The most obvious was Snake, who underwent a rigorous exercise regime every few hours, twisting and contouring her body in ways that no human body had never been designed for.

  Ortega sat and watched her. Finally she turned to him and said, “Are you just gonna sit there all day? There’s room for both of us to work up a sweat.”

  “No, thanks,” he said. “I don’t exercise.”

  “Ever?” she asked, surprised.

  “Ever,” he replied. “When I get up, from sleeping or even from just sitting down to eat—or to watch you, for that matter—if my arms and legs are working, they’re working. They never tire, they don’t get any stronger with exercise, they’re powered by tiny batteries embedded just below my right ear in one of the few original parts of me, so stamina never enters into it. Once a day I test my various visions—telescopic, microscopic, infrared, ultraviolet—but that only takes maybe a minute.”

  “I envy you,” said Snake.

  “Don’t,” he said unhappily. “There’s not a lot of the original me left to envy.”

  Pandora sat in a corner with her computers, oblivious to the others, and kept picking up distant signals, translating or deciphering them, very occasionally replying to them, saying nothing, letting the cup of coffee in the flat arm of her chair grow cold.

  Michkag, having completed his physical therapy, was in his quarters, where Djibmet would spent the rest of the day, like all the previous ones, schooling him in his country’s recent history; in military protocols; in the original Michkag’s personal likes and dislikes in literature, entertainment, food, and associates; as well as working on his speech inflections.

  Circe sat by herself, plugged in to an ancient classic, living the life of Elizabeth Bennet as she first met Mr. Darcy, oblivious to all else.

  And Pretorius continued to go over the checklist of possibilities and eventualities in his mind, wondering how many he was missing, wondering if he had recruited the right team. They were better than any crew Cooper would have provided, but that didn’t mean they could break into the enemy’s stronghold, kill or kidnap its best-guarded leader, replace him with a clone who as of this moment had only encountered a single member of his own race, and somehow escape intact. He almost wished there was a bookmaker aboard; he’d have loved to bet against being able to pull it off.

  After a few hours, Pandora began composing messages in Kabori and having Djibmet make any necessary corrections so that if she had to send a phony one within the Orion constellation its construction wouldn’t give it away. The evening was pretty much a repeat of the morning, and Pretorius decided the only reason he hadn’t gone mad from boredom preparing for so many missions was that, having experienced them, he’d have traded the excitement and especially the danger for some nice peaceful boredom every time.

  When they were within three hours of the Bortai system, Pretorius got his crew’s attention.

  “Okay,” he announced. “Bortai’s got about ninety-four percent of Standard gravity and an oxygen-nitrogen ratio within two percent of Deluros VIII. It was colonized by a race that calls itself the Bort—I have no idea if they took their name from the planet or vice versa. They have their own language, but most of them speak and understand Terran.” He turned to Djibmet. “They understand Kabori, too, though I gather their mouths have some difficulty forming the words
correctly. You’re welcome to come with us or stay on the ship.” He jerked a thumb in Michkag’s direction. “He stays.”

  “We can disguise him so that he doesn’t look like General Michkag,” said Djibmet. “And surely Pandora can create a passport for him under any name we choose.”

  “There’s no doubt that she can,” agreed Pretorius. “But he stays anyway.”

  “But why?” asked Djibmet.

  “I don’t want him answering to any other name, speaking in any other dialect or tone of voice, or carrying himself in any other way. There’s an old scam, dating back thousands of years, though it applied to livestock, not sentient beings. The term was ‘ringer,’ and it was a different, usually less valuable, look-alike animal that was substituted for a more valuable one. Well, we’re trying to pull off the biggest ringer scam in history, and the odds are already too stacked against us.” He turned to Michkag. “I’m sorry, but you are Michkag and no one and nothing else, not even for an hour in a non-Kabori town three thousand light-years from Orion. I hope you understand, but whether you do or not, you’re staying on the ship until the impersonation begins.”

  Michkag inclined his head slightly. “I understand.”

  “Now, at some point you’ve got to meet some Kabori,” continued Pretorius, “and convince them you’re Michkag. We need a trial run, but we’ll have to dope out the proper scenario. It’ll almost have to involve them coming aboard whatever vessel we’re on, where, if you do make a mistake, it won’t be fatal to the mission.”

  “When will that be?” asked Djibmet.

  “I’ll work it out and let you know,” replied Pretorius. He looked around. “Any other questions or comments?”

  There was no initial reply, but just as he was about to get up and return to his cabin Pandora spoke up.

  “Got a problem here,” she announced, looking at one of her tiny computers.

  “Oh?” said Pretorius.

  “Yeah,” she said. “We’d better not land on Bortai.”