Let someone attack the Redoubt. Whatever happened, she would be ready with the material she had stored here.

At the worst possible moment, Morgan Lon Oakes! You may be able to appreciate my timing, although you never have before.

Would it happen in front of Thomas? Was it possible that Thomas had survived and would lead an attack? She thought it distinctly possible. Thomas—another Ceepee. The unfailing Thomas who had seen her run the P, who had helped her in that desperate hour, then said nothing of it to anyone.

Discreet. Kind and discreet. Almost a lost breed.

Doubts began to fill her mind then. Perhaps the survival of humans groundside really did depend on Oakes and Lewis. But Colony was gone and the Redoubt was clearly under siege from the planet, if not from some nebulous force headed by Thomas. She thought of the Scream Room then. Where did the Scream Room figure in any scheme of survival? The Scream Room was unjustifiable by any standards. It betrayed negative, anti-survival impulses. Everything about it, that proceeded from it, brought death or hunger or a terrifying subservience. No-—not survival.

Oakes put me through the Scream Room.

Nothing would ever change that. But Thomas had guarded the perimeter hatch for her. His were survival instincts. She determined then that she would see what she could do to keep the Thomas breed from dying out.

At what cost? she wondered then, her doubts returning. At what cost?

Chapter 61

Chapter 61

A horrible feeling came over me—a terrible amusement, for I believed that humankind, through the filtering of Ship’s manipulations and the great passage of time, had lost the very ability to engage in war. I thought war had been bred and conditioned out of them at the very moment when they needed this ability the most.

—The Thomas Diatribes, Shiprecords

WHILE HALI was making another examination of Waela’s condition and well before the freighter reached atmosphere, Bitten’s metallic voice barked at them from the overhead ‘coder.

“Do you know a Kerro Panille?”

Waela stirred and mumbled at the sound, then rubbed both hands over her mounded abdomen.

“Yes, we know Panille,” Hali said. She closed and sealed her pribox. “Why?”

“You wish to land at some place other than Colony,” Bitten intoned. “That now may be possible.”

Ferry glared up toward the ‘coder. “You said we had to land at Colony!”

“I have been in contact with Kerro Panille,” Bitten said. “He asserts that Colony has been destroyed.”

“Destroyed?” Hali sat stiffly in her couch, dumb with shock.

Ferry gripped the arms of his command couch, knuckles white. “But we’re programmed for landing at Colony.”

“I remind you that I am the emergency program,” Bitten said. “Present conditions fit the definition of emergency.”

“Then where can we land?” Hali asked. And she felt the stirrings of hope. Contact with Kerro!