The Gripping Hand

"Why?"

Joyce thought it over. Bury's attitude toward Moties was no secret, but the cause of MacArthur's death was a Navy secret; secret from the Moties, by order of the Privy Council. It was a good question, though. What was changing Horace Bury? Greed, probably. "There are still vast fortunes to be made. Power and influence, for Bury and his relatives."

Three dissimilar spacecraft nursed from red cables that dipped into the ice. Each ship was built as solidly as a safe. A transparent tube ringed the ships; canisters and Moties of several sizes flew along inside it.

Eudoxus didn't try to stop Joyce from circling the ships with her pickup camera ru

Eudoxus said, "We don't have to move this slowly, Joyce. The tube is faster and you would still have a view."

No accent, but an irritating richness, an overemphasis on consonants- My voice! Eudoxus spoke with Joyce Trujillo's voice, exactly as she sounded on video. "No, this is fine," she said. "I'm getting great pictures."

The Mediator led off. Aft, the glow of jets had faded to black sky.

Eudoxus stopped. Joyce and the Warrior caught up; Eudoxus spoke briefly to the Warrior. Then her upper right arm pointed ahead and up. "There, Joyce, what do you see in the sky?"

Joyce followed the creature's long upper-right arm. "Just stars."

"The Warrior says he's spotted it, the locus of your friends."

"Do Warriors have good eyes?"

"Yes."

Joyce tapped at the pickup, instructing it to find and fix on the brightest spot in its field, narrow the field, zoom in. She raised it by its sleeve, aligned along Eudoxus's arm, and set it going.

The camera wriggled in its sleeve, gyros whirring. A wide field of stars showed on the monitor screen. There: crumpled tinsel reflecting dim sunlight, just bigger than a point. Joyce set the camera zooming. Structure began to show, crumpled mirrors, a beehive torn open, violet points that might be fusion torches or spacecraft.

"Do you have it? It's a nest of war rats and Watchmakers. It's being harvested by the Crimean Tartars."

"Now follow my finger down to the horizon. A scattering of blue points?"

Joyce shook her head. Again she worked with the pickup.

"I don't see it either, but Warriors can. That's a war fleet bearing down on the nest."

"Got it." It was as Eudoxus had said, a scattering of blue points and no more.

"Mostly Khanate ships. In four hours they will arrive at the rat nest, but in twenty minutes the Tartars will be ru

"Great! I should tell the Captain."

"We will do that," Eudoxus said.

"Good." Chris should have been here, she thought with satisfaction. A sudden thought. "Have the Tartars become your allies?"

And thus ours.

"Perhaps. For the moment they are in mortal danger, and we offer them refuge. For the future-what is the future, Joyce? The question is not what place the Tartars have with Medina and East India, it is what place have Moties in the universe."

"I can't answer that."

"No, but you must have thought about it."

"Sure. A lot of people have." Interest in Moties flared and died and flared again through the Empire, and the latest news would cause the biggest flare of all. What to do about Moties would be the topic of discussion everywhere. The Humanity League. The Imperial Senate. The Navy League. The Imperial Traders Association. The editorial board of her own news syndicate. Little old ladies at tea parties.

She was begi

Eudoxus bounced alongside her, talking, with the Warrior at the lead. "We've taken a great gamble, you know."

"Yes."

‘If we could only understand one thing, we would feel far less at risk. Your superiors seem to expect... what shall we call our gathering of alliances?... expect the Medina Consortium to remain stable, ultimately to speak for all of Mote system. How can they expect that?"

"I don't know." The Motie was too distant: Joyce couldn't see her face. She wouldn't be able to see Joyce's either. But all discussions of Moties came down to the same thing: there was no central Motie government, and it didn't look as if there ever could be. How could there be stable relations with a caldron of Motie families? Even the real Genghis Khan hadn't been able to form a stable empire of Mongols...

They'd reached a ring of domes wreathed in cables of all sizes and colors, with a great ship rising out of the center. In the minuscule gravity Joyce bounded to the crest of a dome and caught up a handhold line. Joyce considered herself to be hard and fit, but this was hard work... and the Warrior was alongside her in an instant, and here was Eudoxus, too. Didn't Moties get tired faster than humans?

Eudoxus spoke to the Warrior, who said little, and then switched to Anglic. "A Master's ship is bigger, to house an entourage, and is built for intelligence and communications and defense, and never for stealth. In battle a Master may be left alive for later negotiations."

"Uh-huh." Joyce was filming the huge ship, retractable ante

"I have heard that your Empire prefers not to interfere with its member cultures, but sometimes it must. Is that our fate?"

"I don't know that, either, but it's got to be better than what you've been doing." Joyce was surprised at her own vehemence. I sounded just like my father, and I never thought of myself as an Imperialist.

"Joyce, we have a great deal more to see. Shall we take a tube?"

Fatigue made her irritable. "Eudoxus, they're too small. Anyway, why would that be easier? We'd still have to move!"

"No. Difference in air pressure moves us. To fit inside we must deflate our oversuits. Let the Messengers follow with them."

"Done."

Victoria came into the humans' area of Cerberus. "Representatives of houses allied with your Empire await you," she said. "Gather your possessions. Particularly your trade goods. You will not be returning here, and we may not be able to save this ship."

The humans stared in astonishment. "What's happening?" Glenda Ruth demanded.

"The Khanate comes. We have formed an alliance with Medina Trading. Their representatives await you. They call themselves Mentor and Lord Byron and you must assure them that you have been well treated. I trust there will be no difficulty with that."

"That's not a problem," Freddy said. "And I can afford to lose Hecate, but just what's about to happen to us?"

For answer Victoria pointed to an image on the telescope screen. Vermin City continued to change, to dwindle... was rapidly melting away, Glenda Ruth saw, leaving long bulges... slender spacecraft emerging from the wreckage.

"Looks familiar," she said.

Freddy laughed. "They're oversize copies of Hecate!"

"You'll board the fastest of those. We're ru

"How fast will we be going?" Je

Victoria frowned. "As swiftly as possible. Three gravities-Mote Prime gravities."

Mote Prime was a lighter world. Freddy said, "Call it two and a half standard gee. Terry-"

"Terry can't take that," Je