Dr. Däng sat up a little straighter and smiled. “Well, when I got up this morning I never thought I’d end up considering the lascivious nature of frogs. We could spend the better part of a week arguing about some definitional issues, and probably never settle them to everyone’s satisfaction, but basically, yes Koichi, you are correct.”
“That’s the boundary line,” Ma said, “desire. Animals lower than a frog mate because they are programmed to, like machines, but a frog does because it loves to fuck! That’s the beginning of self-awareness, and it isn’t a result of binary addition. It’s a result of sensual pleasure.
“You want to make a self-aware machine? Figure out a way to give it an orgasm and then we’ll talk.” He leaned back in his chair.
Choice glared at him for a dozen or more heartbeats and then shook her head, “You’ll see when we get there.” She sat down and turned away from him.
For a few seconds no one said anything. Sam wasn’t sure what the others thought of all this, but he really enjoyed the idea of an engineer arguing against machine-based intelligence and an artist arguing for it.
“But Ms. Choice,” Sam said, “your argument, intriguing as it is, addresses much older civilizations which supposedly died off a long time ago and left their intelligent machines behind. We seem to be approaching a civilization which developed electronic communication within the last thousand years, not million.”
She turned back and looked at him for a moment before answering.
“Captain, you assume the beings generating those radio transmissions are native to that star system and developed the technology eight or nine hundred years ago. What if that’s just when they got there?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sixteen days later, aboard USS Cam Ranh Bay
24 March 2134 (thirty-six days after Incident Seventeen,
74 light-years from Destination)
Sam looked around at his cabin—the dark-red composite chairs and sofa, the imitation wood-grain coffee table and desk—and compared it to the compact austerity of the captain’s cabin on USS Puebla. He’d thought that was luxurious, and it was by a destroyer’s standards. He’d actually had his own private zero-gee shower, the only one on the boat. Here his bathroom was nearly as big as his first cabin on Puebla, when he’d just been its tactical officer. He’d considered that luxurious as well, because as a department head he hadn’t had to share it with another officer.
He shook his head. Not for the first time he felt out of place here, and that was no way for a captain to feel on his own ship, He activated his desk holovid recorder and settled back in his padded swivel chair.
“Hey, Cass. I doubt you’ll ever see this so I feel a little stupid even making it. It’s sort of a personal log addressed to you, mostly because I need someone to talk to about all this, someone whose morale won’t crumble if they find out their captain has doubts and fears, and even regrets. Talking to myself seems more like a symptom than therapy, so I’m talking to you instead. There’s no way to transmit it from here, but if I get back—or if Cam Ranh Bay gets back without me—it’ll be there for you.
“Well, we’re almost six weeks out and we’re farther from Cottohazz space than anyone has ever been: almost three thousand light-years. One jump a day for the first three weeks and one jump every other day for the last two. Whatever is steering us has us headed roughly toward the galactic core and we’ve just crossed the great rift between the Orion Spur and the Sagittarius Arm. No one’s explored in this direction because you have to go through so much empty space to get anywhere interesting.”
He smiled.
“Interesting. What’s that old curse? Well, wherever it’s taking us, it’s on the outer edge of the Sagittarius Arm. We’re only about seventy light years from the end of the road. How’s that for a change in perspective? Only seventy light-years. How long did people look across distances like that and think of them as uncrossable voids? Tomorrow we’ll take the plunge, jump right into the Destination system, come out about twenty-five million kilometers above the plane of the ecliptic. We’ll start broadcasting to the locals and monitoring every data stream our sensors can capture—try to find some common basis for communication.
“This wasn’t my original intention. At first, we worked out a plan where we’d jump to a range of one light-month and spend a couple weeks there gathering data before we made the final jump. Everyone, including me, wanted that extra time to study them up close before committing, but I ended up scrapping it. If we jump in from that close they’d pick up the signature of the jump, and they’d already know where we came out, so they’d be able to connect those two points and draw a line right back to the Cottohazz. They may already know where we’re from, but if they don’t I won’t give it to them on a platter.
“Instead we’ll jump from here. I doubt anyone can detect a jump signature from this far out, but even if they can it will take seventy years for the light to get to them. Seventy years. That’s as much breathing space as I can give you and still have a half charge on our power ring in case of trouble.”
Sam paused to take a sip of coffee and stare at the walls of his cabin. He had the smart walls set to show the exterior view. He found himself doing that more and more, even though with no nearby star the vastness and loneliness of the view was nearly overpowering.
“I find myself staring at the stars a lot, Cass, wondering. As long as there have been people, I guess we’ve looked at the stars and wondered if something alive, something intelligent was out there. Then we found the Cottohazz—or they found us—and the if was answered. But just those other five species, and we’ve gone a long time, looked a long way, without finding anyone else. Now we found one more—or they found us—and they must be pretty intent on meeting us.
“I’ll tell you what I can’t tell anyone else here, Cass. I have a terrible feeling about what we’re likely to find. If they could communicate with our jump drive, why not just communicate with us? Why snatch a ship full of people and drag it across the rift to another spiral arm of the galaxy if all they wanted to do was chat?”
His schedule reminder vibrated softly inside his head, at the base of his skull.
“Well, Cass, I’ve got to go. I’m due at captain’s mast. We’ve been having discipline problems, more and more the farther out we get, and we’ve got a really bad one on the docket today. People are frightened and they’re losing hope. It’s my job to give them that hope. I’m trying, Cass, but I’ll tell you, I’m kinda running on empty.”
CHAPTER NINE
One hour later, aboard USS Cam Ranh Bay
24 March 2134 (thirty-six days after Incident Seventeen,
74 light-years from Destination)
Captain’s mast was the name the Navy gave to nonjudicial punishment. Judicial punishment required a court martial, which could be convened as necessary, but for most infractions the miscreants were offered the option of allowing the vessel’s captain to decide their punishments in a less formal setting.
For almost an hour Mikko had watched Captain Bitka dispense judgment in a strikingly nonjudgmental manner. He reprimanded, lectured, and disbursed punishments somehow without displaying disdain for the men and women brought before him. She had first seen him conduct captain’s mast three weeks ago and she had asked him about it afterwards.
“Well, we don’t punish them for being bad people, XO. We punish them for doing bad things. There’s a difference. That’s my theory, anyway.”
As she called the last case of the day, she saw the lines of his face harden. This would test his theory.
“Senior Chief Bosun’s Mate Duransky, Francis X, front and center,” she ordered.
Duransky walked in. Captain’s mast was held in the captain’s day cabin in the spin habitat, so there was normal gravity. The chief bosun’s mate normally had the slightly bouncing stride of someone who spent a lot of time working in zero gee but his gait today was flat and lifeless. He entered the office in company with the Marine lance corpor
al guard and came to attention. Mikko noticed a fresh bruise on his left cheek and the start of a black eye. That hadn’t been there two hours ago.
“What are the charges, XO?” Captain Bitka asked for the record, although he knew the answer.
“Sir, Senior Chief Petty Officer Duransky stands accused of misuse of Navy equipment, theft of government property, conduct injurious to good order, abuse of authority, dereliction of duty, and incapacitation while on duty,” she answered.
The captain looked at Duransky. The chief bosun’s mate’s gaze remained on the wall above the captain’s head but his face slowly went from flushed to pale.
“So, Duransky, you figured out how to modify a medbay drug processor to produce Oblivion.”
“Yes, sir,” Duransky answered after licking his lips.
“You got Medtech Patel to help you. Ruined her career too, by the way. And you used up some of our irreplaceable pharma stocks to do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And then you traded some of it to crew members for sexual favors?”
Duransky closed his eyes and nodded.
“You’re the chief bosun’s mate, the senior noncommissioned officer on this ship, the figure every enlisted person and most junior officers look to as an example of correct behavior in the face of adversity. And this is the example you chose to set.”
Duransky opened his eyes.
“God help me, sir, but I was that scared. It’s like I went crazy, like some other person did all them things.”
“We’re all scared, Duransky. Now I have a ship full of people even more scared because they think they can’t even trust their own chain of command. My inclination was just to go straight to a court martial, throw the whole goddamned book at you, make an example. The XO convinced me it makes more sense to get through this with as little fuss as possible. You owe her your neck, because regulations limit the extent of punishment I can dole out in a captain’s mast.”
“I understand, sir. I’m very sorry, sir.”
“Your sorrow means shit to me,” the captain spat back. “Here’s all that Navy regs allow me to do without a court martial: permanent reduction in rank of two pay grades to bosun’s mate first, confinement to quarters on plain rations for thirty days, all accumulated leave revoked, pay forfeiture for thirty days plus restitution for replacement of all stolen materials.
“In addition, so long as you are on my ship you are limited to menial duty and will have no supervisory authority over any crewperson. I will recommend your separation from the service without pension as soon as we return home. Now get out of my sight.”
Duransky turned and took a step toward the door.
“Wait,” the captain said, and Duransky turned back. “Leave your bosun’s whistle right here.” The captain pointed to the surface of his desk.
Mikko saw tears of humiliation in his eyes as Duransky pulled the curved brass whistle from a pocket of his khaki-colored shipsuit and laid it on the captain’s polished desk.
“Another thing,” the captain said. “Lance Corporal Gupta, you will escort the prisoner to the ship’s store and have him turn in his khaki shipsuit and replace it with penal orange. You will then escort him to his confinement compartment and, upon turning him over to the guard, you will go to the prisoner’s quarters, collect every khaki shipsuit and item of khaki uniform clothing, take it to the ship’s store, and replace all of it with enlisted mariner blue.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Only chief petty officers and Marines wore khaki.
Mikko and the captain sat in silence for several long seconds after the others left, both of them looking at the whistle.
“You know, sir, technically that’s his property.”
“I don’t give a damn. He doesn’t get to have a bosun’s whistle on my ship, not even stowed away in the bottom of his sea bag.”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
The captain huffed out a sigh. He suddenly sounded tired.
“Crew’s coming apart, XO. I can feel it. Medbay’s passing out sleep aids and antidepressants like they were candy. Three times as many fistfights this week as three weeks ago, and I think half of them don’t end up on report. We practically have to post guards on the beer dispensers in the galley, and then post guards to watch the guards. Now Oblivion? And from our senior chief? Jesus Christ, what a mess!”
“It’s the waiting and the uncertainty, sir,” Mikko said. “Once we make that last jump and get to Destination, the crew will at least know what they’re up against and what to do. The drills you have us doing help, maybe more than you know. This thing with Duransky . . . I know it’s bad sir, but we caught it. We dealt with it. Let’s replace him and move on, keep everyone focused on what’s out there ahead of us. The crew will get squared away, sir, and Ops is finding out new stuff all the time. That helps.”
“Shoving Duransky out an airlock might help, too,” Captain Bitka said, and then looked up at her. “Not that I would ever consider such a thing.”
“What he did was pretty bad, sir, no question. But he had a clear record up until now. Usually you don’t . . . well, you don’t react quite this strongly.” She said this last with some trepidation, but it was true and part of her job was to tell the captain the truth as she saw it.
“It wasn’t just pretty bad, XO. This was different. All those mariners that come before us, we’re responsible for leading them. That means discipline, but not humiliation, because if they stumble, often as not it’s as much our doing as theirs. But Duransky . . . he was our senior chief. Was one of us, one of the leaders the entire crew looked to. Maybe all the commissioned officers outrank him on paper, but in terms of who the crew looks to, the only people more important are you and me. Not even the department heads are as important. What he did to my crew . . . I’ll never forgive him.”
He picked up the bosun’s whistle by its chain and watched the shining curved brass tube swing back and forth for a moment.
“We might need this,” he said. “Where’s Duransky’s replacement going to find a bosun’s whistle way the hell out here? Who do we have?”
“Two possibilities, sir: Chief Wainwright runs the small-craft subdivision and Chief Velazquez heads up the deck subdivision. And by the way, no senior bosun worth his or her salt doesn’t have a whistle tucked away just in case.”
“Fair enough,” the captain said with a smile. He watched the whistle swing back and forth for another second and then dropped it in a drawer of his desk. Then he looked directly at her. “If I wasn’t here and you were running the ship, who would you pick?”
“Ted Wainwright,” she said. “Gloria Velazquez is great but I’d rather she had a few more years before giving her this much responsibility. Also, we’d be bumping her over the heads of a couple of other chiefs with more seniority. The crew likes her but she might have trouble pulling the chiefs along.”
“Wainwright strikes me as pretty solid,” the captain said. “You work well with him?”
“Yes, sir, I do. I asked him to wait out in the passageway, just in case you wanted to talk with him.”
The captain smiled, and she felt herself color slightly.
“I didn’t mean to overstep, sir. I can have Velazquez here in five minutes.”
“You aren’t overstepping, XO. It’s your job to anticipate. No, I was just wondering if Wainwright gave Duransky that new shiner.”
Mikko hadn’t realized the captain noticed the bruise, but that was stupid of her. He noticed a lot.
“Maybe punching Duransky doesn’t show the sort of self-control you want in a Boats, sir.”
“Maybe not, but I think what we need right now is a chief bosun’s mate who is ferociously protective of this crew. Did anyone see it?”
Mikko shook her head.
“Okay then, Chief Wainwright’s our pick. We’ll talk to him and, unless he steps on his dick in here, he’s our new Boats.”
“Thank you for the confidence, sir. I appreciate it very much. I know I
can’t fill the shoes of your wartime XO, Lieutenant Goldjune, but I—”
The captain’s laughter cut her off and she felt her face flush with humiliation. He saw her look and shook his head.
“I’m not laughing at you, XO. I swear to God I’m not.” He sat back and looked at her, frowning in thought. He seemed to make up his mind about something.
“XO, I think we need to clear the air. We’ll meet in my cabin once we’ve talked to Wainwright.”
“Very well, sir,” Mikko said with a sinking feeling. The last time he “cleared the air” was when he told her what a failure she had been as XO. And he had been right. What new revelation was coming?
When she got to the captain’s cabin the hatch opened for her and she entered.
“You drink bourbon?” he said without preamble.
“On occasion, sir.”
“Not my drink of choice,” he said, “but it’s sort of a tradition I picked up from a former captain.”
Bitka poured two fingers of bourbon in a tumbler and handed it to her, poured another for himself, and then gestured to his small lounge area. She took an armchair and he settled on the leather couch, setting the bottle on the coffee table. He lifted his glass.
“USS Cam Ranh Bay,” he toasted, “and all who sail in her.”
She clinked his glass and then sipped. The bourbon was pretty good.
“XO, I know I caught you flatfooted with my critique of your leadership style a couple weeks ago. I apologize, not for that, but for not telling you how I feel about your performance since then. I guess I got caught up in all the things going wrong and ignored the things going right. You are doing an outstanding job under difficult and terrifying circumstances, and in a situation no one has ever had to face before. When I laughed back there in my office, it was because you seem to think you’ll never be as good as my last XO. Jesus Christ, set your sights higher than matching Larry Goldjune! You’re worth ten of him.”
Mikko felt her face color even more, and hated knowing it was obvious, even if now for a different reason. She found it hard to believe he rated her higher than Larry Goldjune, one of the most promising young officers in the Navy. Everyone knew he was on the fast track for admiral and he’d been Captain Bitka’s right hand through the worst part of the war. Why would the captain say something like that?
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