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worthy…
     
    S URE. HOW EASY it had seemed then!
    Civilians still believed all that crap. Many spacers believed it still. That gawky Ensign Blade with his squeaky-pressed uniform and iced-over eyes would certainly believe it. Even that underwitted, overmuscled, overboosted lieutenant likely believed it, with his glib talk of the Empire.
    Panting hard, Vaun came to a crossing. The path went on, but a narrower, steeper track transected it. That was obviously meant for service vehicles, and it must lead up to the parking lot. Even without glow lamps, it would be a faster road. He accepted the challenge and took off up the service track.
    As soon as he reached his torch, he would be long gone away from Maeve and her crimple-stinking Arkady. He wondered who hosted for her. She certainly would not lack for volunteers to share an estate so grand and a bed so generous.
    There had never been an Empire.
    Only the Patrol itself.
    Thirty thousand years of tyranny disguised as service. Rape in the name of love.
    Now the simple people of Ult would expect the Patrol to defend them from the runaway Q ship. Even Maeve, a minister in one of the larger governments, had not questioned the Patrol’s intent, nor its ability.
    Except that there wasn’t any way to stop a Q ship. Not in these circumstances. Coming in on the ecliptic was blatant aiming. Even to lay a simple trajectory for a target planet was a breach of space law. The accepted procedure was a flight path that needed end-course correction, just so that there couldn’t be unfortunate accidents if things went wrong on the long voyage. There was no question that this brute was hostile.
    And there was damned little the Patrol or anyone else could do about it now. If they threw up a missile or diverted an asteroid, it would just impact with the fireball. An asteroid vanishing to nothing in a singularity would emit enough hard radiation to cook the whole system, and the ship would be left unscathed. The intruder was only a third of an elwy away, and the time for throwing asteroids had passed. If death was their purpose, the bastards had won already…
    Dark as a sewer…He raised his arms before him and slowed his pace to a trot.
    They could have been stopped a year ago, maybe, but a year ago there had been insufficient evidence. Q ships still came to Ult from worlds farther in—rarely, of course, far fewer than in ancient times, when Ult itself had been part of the frontier—but there were still adventurers, exiles, and jittery refugees fleeing the Silence. After a journey of years, most voyagers had had enough, and even if they hadn’t, the local Patrol might evict them and replace them with its own people. There was no way to avoid planetfall, because the ships themselves needed attention. Heated by their own radiation almost to melting point, stressed between their singularities, Q ships, tended to stretch with time.
    So some or all of the passengers would become settlers, buying entry rights with whatever scraps of unfamiliar technology they might have brought, and with their ship itself. The Patrol would refurbish it, rotate it to a new axis, and send it on again, outward to the frontier worlds. The new crew would be Ultian spacers, of course—keep it in the family. This steady Outward drift was what mankind had been doing since it fell out of a tree in some tropical corner of a minor world called Earth. It was the human way. Probably this one vessel had seemed no different from any of the others, except that it had come from Scyth.
    That was significant! The Patrol should have been more vigilant. What had gone wrong? Tham was not only the most likely boy to know the answer to that question, Tham vyas almost the only high-ranking officer in the Patrol who might be willing to share the information with Vaun. Even if Roker had specifically ordered him not to, Tham would probably confide in Vaun if Vaun asked him to. Normally Vaun would not have forced him. Now Tham had withdrawn.