Conquerors' Pride

Cavanagh nodded. Kolchin was right on that point, anyway. He'd seen the inside of the interdiction-zone operation when he was in the NorCoord Parliament. "So where does that leave us?"

Kolchin shrugged. "It leaves us with a thousand ships' worth of strap-on weaponry setting out to take or destroy three major and two minor planets. It can't be done, and the Yycromae have to know that. Not in a single strike, anyway, which is all they're going to get before the Peacekeepers come down on them."

Cavanagh looked out at the ships below, his chest suddenly feeling tight. "Unless they're not pla

He could feel Kolchin's eyes on him. "You're not serious."

"No?" Cavanagh countered. "Tell me it's impossible. Especially now, when NorCoord is presumably digging the components out of wherever they've been stored all these years and bringing them together for reassembly."

"I hadn't thought about that part," Kolchin murmured. "God in heaven. If the Yycromae have got it, we're in big trouble."

Cavanagh took a deep breath, trying to ease the tightness in his chest. CIRCE in the hands of vengeful Yycromae... "Well, let's not jump to conclusions," he said. "There could be some perfectly legitimate tactical scheme where a thousand ships are all they need."

Kolchin shook his head. "I wish Qui

Cavanagh had forgotten all about that conversation. "Certainly looks that way," he said. "What did the ci Yyatoor call it? A sensor-stealthed courier ship?"

"Right," Kolchin said. "All that means is that it's harder to locate once it meshes in. Same sort of stuff we do with watchships. There's some field-baffling on the tachyon emissions, too, so that you can get a little closer before the wake-trail detectors pick you up. But even with a ship the size and speed of a courier, they're going to have half an hour's warning that you're on your way in."

"It's still something the Yycromae would assume was a spy ship."

"Can't say I blame them," Kolchin conceded. "What I don't get is why the Mrachanis would bother sending us here. Why not just call in the Peacekeepers directly?"

"I don't know," Cavanagh said. "Maybe they didn't want to answer any awkward questions about how they knew the buildup was going on. Or maybe they were trying for a two-for-one deal: we blow the whistle on the Yycromae, plus we get distracted from our hunt for the man in Fibbit's threading. Or we blow the whistle and forget about the Mrach Conqueror legends. Take your pick."

Kolchin shook his head. "This is starting to sound way too complicated for Mrachanis."

Cavanagh snorted. "I'm begi

"More or less," Hill nodded, looking slightly disgusted. "I improvised a threading frame from a plastic sorting box I found in one of the armoires and a towel from the cleansing room. She wasn't happy with the texture, but I told her to consider it a challenge. She said she was going to try to thread that man from Mig-Ka City for you again."

"How's the room look?" Kolchin asked him.

Hill shrugged. "Well, there's no sign of any recent installations. They could be ru

"Any idea what this place is?" Cavanagh asked. "It looks like a hotel."

"That's exactly what it is," Hill agreed. "Put up about twenty years ago by a joint Swiss-Yycroman consortium."

"Strange place to stick a hotel," Kolchin commented.

"It had a strange clientele, too," Hill said. "Most of them were bored rock climbers who wanted to tackle something different."

Kolchin stared at him. "You're kidding."

"No joke," Hill said. "The Joint Interstellar Climbing Club declared the trees here to be Class Sevens or Eights or something, and within days the climbers started to deluge the place. I guess the place was still humming until about six months ago, when the Yycroman government decided they were tired of burying the failures and declared the place closed."

Cavanagh frowned. "Six months ago?"

"That's what the skitter's records said," Hill said. "Why, is the number significant?"

"Probably not," Cavanagh said slowly. "It just struck me that that was almost exactly the same time that the Commerce Commissioner suddenly started restricting nonhuman access to Commonwealth military technology."

"You think there's a co

Cavanagh looked out the window at all the military activity outside. "Probably just a coincidence."

For a long minute no one spoke. Kolchin broke the silence first. "I suppose the next step is to find a way out of here."

"I think we should sleep on it," Cavanagh said, rubbing at his eyes. "I don't know about either of you, but I'm just about dead on my feet."

"I understand, sir," Kolchin said. "You and Hill go ahead and get some sleep."

"What about you?"

"I'm all right," Kolchin assured him. "I slept some on the skitter." He glanced out the window. "Besides, there's a little something I'd like to try."

"Fine," Cavanagh said, too tired to argue. "Whatever you do, just be quiet about it."

19

"I was starting to wonder if you weren't going to come back," he commented as the four of them walked out into the bright sunshine. "This would be better for me if I could go out every couple of days, you know."

"Pleased you go out at all," Thrr-gilag said. "You try take that stone."

Pheylan shrugged. Actually, under the circumstances, he was a little surprised that Thrr-gilag hadn't been summarily demoted from his spokesman duties the way Svv-selic had been earlier. Did that imply Thrr-gilag had more clout in the Zhirrzh hierarchy? Or was it because this latest incident hadn't involved that mysterious white pyramid? "I didn't mean anything by that," he told them.

"Perhaps," Thrr-gilag said. "Or not. But no purpose. We walk this way today." His tongue snaked out, pointing directly away from the pyramid toward a clump of turquoise-tinted bushes at the edge of the forest.

"Fine," Pheylan said, heading obediently in the indicated direction. He'd been wanting to take a look in this area, anyway.

"Explain to us about weapon called Copperhead."

Deliberately, Pheylan counted to two before turning to look at Thrr-gilag. "What?"

"Copperhead," the Zhirrzh repeated. "Explain to us."

Pheylan shrugged. "It's a snake from our homeworld. Venomous, lives mostly in the Confederate region of North America—"

"It is weapon of war," Thrr-gilag interrupted. "Explain about Copperhead. Or go inside."

Pheylan grimaced, but there really wasn't any way around it. "The Copperheads are humans like me," he said. "Specially equipped to handle a particular type of attack fighter."

"How equipped?"

"They have direct brain-to-computer linkages," Pheylan said, feeling his forehead wrinkling. As far as he knew, there hadn't been any Copperheads aboard the Jutland. Had the Zhirrzh found some reference to them in Commodore Dyami's computer? "That gives them faster response time and better control of their ships. Why the sudden interest?"

"Zhirrzh interested in all things human," Thrr-gilag said.

"You've run into some of them, haven't you?" Pheylan accused him. "Where? What happened?"