The Web and the Stars Read Online Free PDF

had gone AWOL. Before that he’d asked the boys and Gio for more information, without receiving any satisfactory answers. Acey and Dux had probably gone off to join another treasure ship, or they were on some other space adventure. They were known to have talked about such things on the night before disappearing.
    Gradually the calming effects of alcohol sank in, and Noah’s loyal adjutant drifted off to sleep.

Chapter Seven
    By their very nature, secrets are invariably contained in imperfect vessels that crack and leak, given the right set of circumstances.
    —Lorenzo del Velli
    On the strangest morning of General Jacopo Nehr’s life, he awoke to hear alien voices jabbering inside his bedroom, as if people had seeped through the walls from somewhere outside. But as he sat up and yawned the voices drifted away, and finally fell silent.
    Swinging out of bed, he shambled to a bay window, thinking it must have been a dream. Still, the voices had seemed to come from somewhere around here. At a window seat, he pushed a mobile nehrcom transceiver out of the way and sat down to gaze out toward the front walkway of his forested estate.
    Rubbing sleep from his eyes, Nehr saw two of his blue-uniformed security men working with a large black dog, doing training exercises. The men did not appear to be concerned about anything, and Jacopo had observed this sort of activity many times before. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
    A fuzzy, staticky noise near his leg caused him to jerk, before he realized it was the shiny black transceiver he always carried, which he had forgotten to turn off. But it never made that sort of noise, because nehrcom transmissions were always crystal clear, even when made across great distances of space.
    Perplexed, he lifted the unit and fiddled with the digiscroll settings. He heard a static pop, followed by voices again, this time unmistakably alien. Jacopo did not understand the rapid-fire words, but felt a sinking sensation. The way he had set up the nehrcom installations around the Merchant Prince Alliance, all under Human control, he should not be hearing anything but Galeng—the common galactic language—and clear signals.
    Something was terribly, terribly wrong.
    Perspiration formed on his brow as his mind whirled. If aliens had taken over a nehrcom station and figured out how to transmit and receive, the signals should still be clear. It didn’t make sense. The system was unproblematic the way he had set it up; it couldn’t possibly go out of adjustment. It was either completely on or completely off, and trouble-free either way. Jacopo knew the technology well.
    He also knew the security system. As the nehrcom inventor and the appointed Supreme General of the MPA Forces, this information was etched indelibly into his mind.
    The secret workings of nehrcom transceivers were protected by internal explosive devices that would go off if anyone scanned or tried to open them. The booby traps were common knowledge, and there had been widely publicized explosions and deaths. They were not ordinary blasts either, because they left absolutely no evidence behind about the original composition of the transceivers. Every piece was left unrecognizable, with even the cellular structures changed. He had devised an extraordinarily clever method of protecting his priceless secret.
    Nonetheless, something had gone dreadfully wrong.
    Jacopo locked on to the mysterious signal and sent a tracer, bouncing the nehrcom transmission back to its source. A holo-image of one of the galactic sectors popped up from the transceiver, and floated in front of the astonished inventor’s eyes.
    The signal was coming from one of the Mutati strongholds, the planet of Uhadeen!
    Utterly impossible. He rechecked, and rechecked. No doubt of the source, and he found additional transmissions going back and forth between Uhadeen and Paradij, the capital world of the Mutati Kingdom.
    But how could that be?
    A nehrcom unit could not be moved