THEIR MASTER

"It's a navigator, boy. I doubt even the medians saw a navigator before. Nobody ever sees the navigators. Nobody. They live in the heart of the ship in their own sealed environment."

"What exactly do they do?"

"What their name says. They navigate. Don't ask me to explain it in detail. They navigate the cluster through jumpspace. They know instinctively where we are, and they sculpt the jumps accordingly."

"Weird."

"You said it."

Including Rance's troopers, there were some thirty humans in the room. Most were rank and file, other troopers, spacecrew, riggers, sluicers, a motley bunch who had managed simply to survive both the attack and the jump. The medians stood apart from the others of their kind. Rance noted that there wasn't a single officer present.

The interpreter's voice came again.

"We are in a unique position. The Therem on this ship are all dead." The alien's voice echoed strangely; somehow it was speaking in a number of languages at once. "We have also lost the other ships in the cluster."

Everything with eyes looked up through the dome. It was true-they were alone in space. Beyond the dome, there were no other ships, just the stars. The closest object was a glowing cloud of gas that hung in space like a furled silver flag. The emptiness seemed very close.

"What of the Yal?"

"It's unlikely that they are able to track or follow us. They probably believe that this ship was destroyed along with the others."

One of the medians had a question.

"How badly is the ship damaged?"

"A number of levels are out of commission. We have no weapons capacity, but the ship has spatial mobility, and it's capable of short jumps."

"Do we know where we are?"

A dim green light glowed in the navigator's tank. The interpreter's equipment translated.

"We know where we are. We are away from the normal avenues of combat. Do you require the coordinates?"

The median shook his head. "It would appear that our duty is clear. We should proceed, in short stages, to the nearest Alliance base and await orders."

The lantere made a noise that was a cross between a grunt and a bellow.

"That might be open to a certain amount of discussion," came the translation.

The median's voice was cold and particular. "Surely any such discussion might be construed as treason when our duty is so obvious."

This time the interpreter spoke for itself. "There are those of us who don't see it as quite so obvious. Some might say that fate has freed us from the Therem and our duty might, in fact, be to pursue that fate."

"We still belong to the Therem Alliance," the median argued.

There was a rumble from the dauquoi. "You mean we still belong to the Therem." "We still belong to the war."

The navigator blinked and bubbled. "Ah, yes, the war. It was never a war of our choosing."

"There is no escaping the war."

"Do the other humans share their median's devotion to our master's war?" the interpreter asked.

Rance looked around, wondering who was being addressed. Then he realized that everyone had turned in his direction.

"I… don't think we're crazy about going back to the war. Is there any alternative?"

The median cut him off. "There is no alternative."

"Let the humans speak for themselves."

The median took a step forward. His tone was now coolly threatening. "My men don't need to speak. They do what they're told."

Rance started receiving a telepathic image. It showed him and his men burning down the medians. He realized that the men were seeing it, too. They were looking to him for direction. The median must have also received the image. He started to draw a sidearm.

"You men will stay exactly where you are!"

Rance fired without thinking. The other men did the same. The three medians were cut down by a withering hail of MEW lire. The troopers kept on firing until the medians' bodies were nothing more than shapeless blackened stumps. The interpreter was making a high-pitched keening. Rance slowly lowered his weapon.

"What now?"

The interpreter got its voice back under control. "You must pardon me. I find it very distressing to be in close proximity to death."

"We've just committed grand mutiny. What are we supposed to do now?"

"You have killed all your remaining superiors. What you do now is your decision."

"There are no more medians and no officers?"

"The human officers' level was destroyed in one of the first explosions. No one survived. The other medians died later."

"What do you intend to do?"

"We have a plan that we will outline."

The aliens' plan was a relatively simple one. They would take the Anah 5 and get as far away from both the Yal and the Therem as possible. Their offer to the troopers and the other humans still on board was a free ride to the planet of their choice. The best choice, as the aliens saw it, was a planet in a system three jumps away. It had recently been terraformed by a party from the Anah cluster.

"The existence of the planet would only have been recorded in the cluster's brain net. Now that has been destroyed; only we know that it's there. It's a bleak, bare place where it rains a lot of the time, but over the years," conditions will improve. The important thing is that the odds against being discovered are astronomical."

Rance shook his head. "I don't know if the surviving men can stand up to three jumps in quick succession."

"Di-trexane."

"What?"

"Di-trexane. It was issued to the medians and officers to ease them through the jump. It wasn't issued to you."

The anger among the men was like a physical presence.

"I fucking knew they had something."

There was real disappointment that nobody was left to kill. The jumps had been bad enough when they'd seemed unavoidable. Not it was like some hideous conspiracy of pain.

"But why?"

"The Therem move according to strange logic." "Don't they just."

There was one other major flaw in the aliens' plan. It was Renchett who voiced it. "We don't have no women." "I beg your pardon?"

"Women. We don't have none. It going to be a pretty sad little colony with just a bunch of old soldiers getting older."

"I'm sorry, I don't understand you." "Seems simple to me."

Rance stepped in. "Without females, our species ca

"We didn't know that."

Renchett was getting angry. "Everybody knows that."

"We are all specialists. None of us have a grounding in comparative biology."

"That's as may be. The question still remains. What are we going to do about it?"

The interpreter moved an unhappy tentacle. "There seems to be nothing we can do about it."

Renchett bristled. "There damn well is."

"There is?"

"We could head back to the last recstar and liberate the women there."

There was a murmur of agreement from the humans. Then the lantere boomed.

"That's impossible. Even if this ship had operational weapons and shields, it couldn't take 6n an asteroid base."

The other aliens signified agreement.

"We can't go back into combat space."

"And we ain't sitting around on some mudball waiting to be the last one to die."

Rance held up a hand. "Wait a minute. There could be a way to do this. How many fighting men could the ship muster if it really came to it?"

"Perhaps two hundred if we armed the technical perso

"We could take a recstar with two hundred motivated troops."

Renchett gri

The navigator emitted bubbles. "It's impossible."

"No, it's not. Listen, we could approach the recstar pretending to be exactly what we are, the lone crippled survivor of a destroyed cluster. They must know by now that the Anah was wiped out in the JD4 system, and they won't suspect anything. We limp in, and we dock. While we're docking, the ground troops drop to the surface of the asteroid. We hit 'em hard before they know what's happening. The women will join with us. We'll have the ship ready-powered so we can jump immediately everyone's back on board."