“I want you to understand something else, too,” the captain said. “I picked Wainwright for our new Boats because he’s your pick. I trust your judgment, but it’s more than that. I’ve got you to back me up, but if something happens to me, you’ll be in charge. Ka’Deem Brook is senior department head so he’ll step into the XO slot, but we both know his weaknesses. He may rise to the situation, but you can’t count on that. You’ll need a senior chief you can rely on.”
“Something happen to you, sir?” She realized that after all the captain had already lived through, the thought that she might survive and he not had never even occurred to her.
“You never know, XO,” he said. “Take it from me, command can come to you when you least expect it and through some genuinely screwy ways. You just never know.”
He leaned back and looked at her thoughtfully.
“I have this feeling you have some . . . interesting notions about the war and the people who fought it, including me and, apparently, that useless sack of noise Larry Goldjune. What did you call him? My wartime XO?”
“Yes, sir,” she said and again felt her neck and ears flush with embarrassment. The captain grinned.
“It makes you uncomfortable to hear me talk about heroes that way, doesn’t it? I don’t mean it to, but you should know that the reason I’m commanding the Bay is I filed probably the most negative fitness report in the recent history of the United States Navy, filed it on my wartime XO Larry Goldjune, and then I refused to walk it back when I got leaned on by admirals all the way up to his Uncle Cedric, the chief of naval operations. It’s the sort of fitness report that would end any career, but I have the feeling Larry’s will survive.”
He took a swallow of bourbon and grimaced. Mikko felt as if a door was opening and she was allowed into a private room where public figures removed their disguises and appeared as they actually were. But it also meant the Navy she had dedicated her life to might not actually be what she had been taught it was, believed it was, and wanted it to be. If anyone else had said these things she would have put them down as some disgruntled failure making excuses for his own lack of recognition and progress, but this was Sam Bitka.
“Admiral Goldjune talked to you directly, sir? About Lieutenant Goldjune’s fitness report?” Mikko had never heard of any pressure being put on an officer to alter a fitness report. It violated everything she had ever been taught about the prerogatives of a commanding officer.
“No, he had Vice Admiral Stevens do the dirty work,” the captain said. “It came from him, though. Stevens told me so, for one thing, and you could tell it was true from how scared he was.”
“You don’t think much of Vice Admiral Stevens, do you, sir? You don’t think much of Admiral Goldjune either.”
Bitka shook his head.
“Of course, I’ve never met Admiral Goldjune,” Mikko said. “I’ve heard the stories—we all have—that you disapprove of some of his wartime decisions on ethical grounds. I can’t disagree with that, sir. But from what I’ve read he is a first-rate strategic thinker.”
“Strategic thinker my ass!” The captain laughed without humor and then took another sip of bourbon. “I could run circles around him and I’m just some half-baked reservist. I’ll tell you the bill of goods we’ve been sold, XO, and I mean all of us, the whole damned society we live in. It’s that if someone is heartless and cynical, that must mean they’re smart. The colder they are, the crueler, the greedier, the more ambitious and dishonest, well, the smarter they must be, right?
“You don’t lose your soul all at once. It starts when a superior tells you their stupid idea and you say, ‘Yes, sir,’ instead of, ‘Are you loco?’ You say it because it won’t do any good to question their sanity, will it? It won’t change anything. It will just make trouble, and for what? Nothing. So you say, ‘Yes, sir,’ and you start discarding your soul in those little, harmless fawning lies told to incompetents and mental defectives, and you keep going up the ladder, and one day you’re Vice Admiral Stevens sitting in an office on K’tok wondering how you got there.”
Mikko sat motionless listening, frightened, unwilling to say anything. She certainly was not about to say, “Yes, sir.”
Bitka had delivered this last speech almost to himself but now he turned and looked her in the eyes. He poured another two fingers of bourbon in his glass and took a sip.
“I know you want to know about the war, XO, so I’m going to tell you about it. You think it was against the uBakai? Hell, they didn’t want a fight. They’d just had a civil war. They were broken, licking their wounds. So the great strategic thinker behind our Outworld Coalition, Admiral Cedric Goldjune, decided that was the time to lean on the uBakai at K’tok. What could possibly go wrong with that, huh?
“Well, he didn’t count on a bunch of anti-human Varoki fanatics who wanted to rid the Cottohazz of the scourge of . . . well, of us, XO, of you and me and everyone we’ve ever known. They couldn’t do it by themselves, though, being just a cabal of crackpots, although pretty highly placed crackpots. All they could do was get the war started. To go all the way, though, they needed all the Varoki to sign on, and for the rest of the Cottohazz to at least look the other way. To accomplish that they needed to sucker us into an attack on Hazzakatu, the Varoki homeworld, to ‘pay back’ the uBakai. That’s what it would take to turn all the Varoki against us; cross that one line nobody had ever crossed, an attack against the surface of the homeworld of one of the six sentient species. And your brilliant strategic thinker, Cedric Goldjune, walked right into it. He fell for it like a rube at his first carnival.”
“But there wasn’t an attack on Hazzakatu,” Mikko said.
“That’s right, there wasn’t. There wasn’t because a group of officers disobeyed orders, deceived their chain of command, violated the Articles of War, broke their sacred oaths, and committed what amounted to treason so stark and heinous it would have had them dancing at the end of a rope if anyone had figured it out.”
He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Most of them ended up dead anyway. Now people call them heroes, and they were, but just not for the reasons everyone thinks.”
Mikko had never meant to, but she hadn’t been able to avoid occasionally thinking that someday Sam Bitka might open his heart and unburden himself to her—not as a lover, necessarily, but as a friend. On those occasions when she had allowed herself to think about that possibility, she had never imagined it like this. She didn’t want to believe this, but she did. She had to believe it coming from Sam Bitka, even though it changed what she thought she had known about him and challenged everything she believed about her service. She also understood that Bitka could not know any of this unless he had been part of it. Most of them ended up dead, he had said. Not all.
She thought through the names of the heroic, famous dead of that war, the people whose actions were now held up as exemplars of duty, bravery, and sacrifice, and she wondered how many of them had been part of Bitka’s treason. Were they still exemplars of duty, bravery, and sacrifice? Bitka clearly thought so. She had no way to judge.
“Why are you telling me all this?” she said, and it came out sounding angrier than she had meant it to, but not, she was surprised to realize, angrier than she felt. “Why are you putting all this on me?”
“Because you’re a good officer, Running-Deer, but before you can be a great officer you’ve got to stop glorifying all these people above you. You think they’re smarter than you, braver than you, better than you. They aren’t. I’m not. Trust yourself, not these phony military geniuses and made-up heroes. You know the only difference between you and most of the people above you in the chain of command? They’re older, and let me tell you, wisdom does not invariably come with age.
“Navies need heroes, I guess. Wars absolutely need heroes. How else would you get the next guy to sign on? How else do you get people excited about the next war? But you don’t need them, Running-Deer. Sure, some officers are pretty good at what they do, but none of them
are perfect. Respect them, but don’t worship them. Pay attention to what everyone else is doing, take every good idea they have and use it yourself, but learn from their mistakes, too. If you think they walk on water, you’ll miss the mistakes.”
He drained his glass.
“Long speeches make me thirsty,” he said.
Did he really see that much potential in her? Or was this just a pep talk to keep her morale up? Did he think her morale needed keeping up? Had she done something to—
No. No more second-guessing herself, not if she could help it. She owed him that much. She owed him the effort to be the officer he thought she could be. Not because he was a hero, not because he was a tactical genius, but because he was her captain.
CHAPTER TEN
Two days later, aboard USS Cam Ranh Bay
26 March 2134 (thirty-eight days after Incident Seventeen,
at Destination)
They’d made the jump to Destination the previous day, come out safely above the plane of the ecliptic, and begun transmitting at once, as well as recording every bit of incoming radio they could capture. They had extended the large sensor array, the one the Bay had to help carry out its alternative mission of deep survey vessel. That was imaging everything in the star system on a broad spectrum, from X-ray down to infrared.
Sam had decided, and most of his advisory committee concurred, that the best course was to transmit as soon as they jumped in. The inhabitants of the system were bound to detect their arrival. A flood of broadcasts would do more to defuse suspicion and potential alarm than would an ominous silence. At least that was the theory.
Sam had given Brook and his Ops department twenty-four uninterrupted hours to collect data and analyze it, and he’d given strict orders for everyone to leave them alone, had even forbidden Ops to share any data with anyone, including Sam himself, to make sure they weren’t interrupted. That hadn’t been easy; this was one loop Sam wanted to stay in, but he’d kept his curiosity in check for one long day. The only piece of relevant information he had was from engineering, that as soon as they arrived in the system, their jump drive had gone cold and would no longer respond to any commands.
As he made his way to the lift that would take him to the main hull, knots of passengers and crew stopped talking as he passed and their eyes followed him. They had some hope, at long last. They had been in the system for a whole day, and so far, no one had made any hostile or aggressive move toward them. He supposed that was a good sign, but it felt odd. There should have been more reaction to their arrival, some alarm or at least some excitement, shouldn’t there?
“This is fascinating, sir!” Lieutenant Brook, the Ops boss, all but gushed five minutes later when Sam entered the auxiliary bridge. Sam took his excitement as encouraging—at least he didn’t look terrified or depressed.
“I wanted the briefing here,” Brook explained, “instead of the briefing room because we’ve got a better holosuite, and we can use the main display for the big-picture flat-vid stuff.”
Sam saw everyone else from the advisory group already present. Well, who wouldn’t be anxious for the first look at a new civilization? He strapped into the command chair between Bohannon and Alexander, already in the COMM and TAC One chairs. Brook and Running-Deer were at the Ops stations, and the civilians made their way to other workstations.
“Okay, Ops, show me what you’ve got.”
“Well, we have to start with this—imagery of the Desties.”
A stir went through the room. Desties is what they had begun calling the until-now hypothetical inhabitants of Destination. Brook smiled like a magician about to unveil his greatest trick. He touched his control panel and they were looking at a flat vid of an alien talking to them—or to the camera anyway.
Long narrow face, broad mouth under a prominent snout, eyes set very wide, longish ears, thin hair on the top and bits of the face but mostly bare brownish-grey skin.
“Looks like a goat,” Lieutenant Ma said, “not a robot.”
The remark was clearly meant for the musician Choice but Sam saw no reaction from her.
“Almost certainly herbivorous,” Dr. Däng added, leaning forward in her workstation. “Note the dentition. Also, the eyes placed on the side of the skull instead of the front—excellent field of vision but poor depth perception—better suited to prey than hunter. None of the six species of the Cottohazz evolved from herbivores, all from carnivores or omnivores, but in all cases hunters. I wonder how these creatures’ ancestors got enough concentrated protein for dramatic brain growth.”
“Here’s what they sound like,” Brook said and added audio. The language was gibberish for now, but the voice sounded soft, not unpleasant at all. The language had a lot of sibilant sounds and Sam noticed the alien’s jaw seemed to have less range of motion than did human jaws but its lips were longer, fleshier, more mobile, and with many more precise formations. Its lips rippled across its teeth like water over stones as it spoke.
“Who is it talking to?” Sam asked. “Do we know? Or is this to us?”
“We believe it’s traffic control directions to a spacecraft, but we’re not certain. It’s a broadcast radio transmission, and it was sent probably before they were aware of us. It originates from Destie-Four, which appears to be the center of population and space traffic in the star system, sir.”
“They’ve made no reaction to our appearance?”
“Some. Per your orders, we’ve been broadcast transmitting from the time we emerged from jump space, letting them know we’re here and not trying to sneak up on them. We’ve gotten some tight-beam transmissions from Destie-Four in reply, although we haven’t been able to decipher them yet.”
“But no change in spacecraft routes? No ships vectored toward us? No spike in system-wide radio traffic?”
Brook shifted uncomfortably and then shook his head.
“No, sir. That’s a little weird, isn’t it?”
“Not if they were expecting us,” Running-Deer said.
“Well, at least no threatening moves,” Alexander added.
Sam turned back to the view screen. The alien speaker was in some sort of control room. Other similar aliens sat at other control stations behind it and occasionally Sam saw one walking. They were upright bipeds, short and squat, their gait shuffling but fast.
“What’s gravity like on Destie-Four?” Sam asked.
“About one point four Earth gravities, sir. We’ll get a workout just moving around down there unless we wear SA frames. Those control systems you see in the background of the video feed appear to be highly bio-interactive. There’s a lot of prolonged touch, slight motion, maybe pressure changes, and probably some tactile feedback.”
It was actually hard to tell where the Desties ended and the workstations began. The Desties wore sleeveless tunics and their arms fit into flexible, irregularly pulsing sleeves which looked moist and alive, and sported very organic-looking webbing around their connection points to the control consoles. The surfaces of the consoles were also irregular and highly flexible, and they continually rippled and changed shape, possibly to reconfigure for different functions. Occasionally whitish fluid bubbled and ran down sleeves and across the control surfaces, leaving them looking slimy.
“That looks really gross,” Homer Alexander the TAC boss said.
“Their hands seem awkward,” Dr. Däng said. “Three fingers and an opposed thumb, but very thick and apparently with less range of motion than ours. If those controls are biosensitive, they may also be genetic-specific, whatever means they have of holding genetic information. Any plans you may have had of pirating a ship and learning to fly it home just became problematic, Captain Bitka.”
“Never fancied myself in an eye patch, anyway,” Sam said, and most of the humans in the room laughed. “Go on, Mister Brook.”
“Well, their control panels have very sophisticated holodisplays. Better than ours, it looks like. Some of those things on the control panels, I can’t tell if they’re real or h
olograms, but if you watch for a while sometimes some of those manipulating tendrils on the sides of the control arms go right through them.”
“Hope it’s a hologram,” Lieutenant Ma the engineer said. “If they can move a finger through a solid object . . . ”
“Pretty sure it’s a hologram, Mister Ma,” Brook said with a touch of condescension. There must still be some friction there. Sam would have to keep an eye on that.
They watched for a while in silence, other than the continuing monologue from the alien. It was hard to look away from this view of an entirely new intelligent species, but Sam knew there had to be more than this one recording.
“What else do you have, Ops?”
Brook turned off the recording and activated the main holo-display to show a large three-dimensional schematic map of the star system.
“Well, we’ve got a K2 yellow-white star with at least six inhabited worlds: four rocks in the liquid water zone and two inhabited moons of the largest gas giant.”
“Inhabited moons out there?” Lieutenant Alexander said. “Doesn’t it get pretty cold?”
“By the gas giants? Yes. We don’t know if those are outposts or self-sufficient habitats, but there is definitely signal and spacecraft traffic to and from them.”
Brook began describing the volume of spacecraft traffic—much higher than in most star systems in the Cottohazz—identified high- and low-density routes, and while Sam listened with part of his brain, another part marveled at the latticework of glowing orange threads on the hologram hovering before them, each thread representing one ship and its projected course track. There were hundreds of them, maybe over a thousand. The intricacy of the astrogation and the volume of the traffic suggested millions—no, billions—of minds at work. He again felt fear, but different than earlier. Before he’d feared the unknown; Now he feared what he could see in front of them.
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