The Lion and the Lizard

by Brindle, Nathan C.

  "LaForrest out. XO, send them the coords. Communications, stand by for a frantic call."

  "Coordinates sent, sir."

  "Aye, aye, sir."

  "Turret's firing, sir," reported Weapons. "About half a percent power. And right on the money, too."

  "Sir," called Communications, "I have someone on the line for you. They're screaming they're unarmed, stop, please don't kill us, et cetera."

  "And turret's cut power, sir."

  LaForrest stood. "Communications, tell that ship to stand down all operations, disarm themselves of all personal weapons, and prepare to surrender to a boarding party of Marines. If we see them start to move, Turret One will take out their drive. They should be aware that we know where it is, at this point. Weapons, take note, Turret One is weapons-free and is to fire at will for this purpose only."

  "Aye, aye, sir," came from Communications and Weapons.

  "Then call Drop Three and Drop Four, and tell them to get over there and take that ship's surrender. Drop Three will dock, Drop Four will stand overwatch and look menacing with all guns run out and hot. Tell them to stay above the centerline in case Turret One is required to fire."

  "Aye, sir."

  "Weapons, when you call Spacer Green – make that Spacer First Class Green – in Turret One with his orders, give him and his crew my compliments, and tell him job well done."

  "Aye, sir, I'll take care of it," said Weapons, grinning ear to ear.

  "You have the authority to do that?" asked Wolff, privately.

  "This isn't the wet Navy," replied LaForrest. "As you know, the turretmen are generally set up in teams of three – an able Spacer with two Spacer Apprentices or Recruits. I'm authorized to promote any Spacer up to and including Spacer First Class, which is a rate the wet Navy doesn't have. It sits between E-3 and E-4; still paid as an E-3, but an SFC gets preferential consideration for promotion to Petty Officer Third." He grinned. "For the purpose of award points, it's like getting the Bronze Star Medal."

  Wolff shook his head. "Nothing like the Marines, sir, but I suppose the Space Force looks at it the same way the British Admiralty did in the Age of Sail – you're out of contact and far away and sometimes you just have to promote someone."

  "Yes and no – of course, I can brevet someone if necessary, but this isn't a brevet, and really is prestigious and sticks no matter what. A brevet promotion, on the other hand, is typically made due to the exigencies of the service, and can be rescinded after the mission."

  "Ah." Wolff nodded. "More like a medal, but without the medal, then. Nice pat on the back, well-done-young-Spacer." LaForrest grunted. "Which reminds me," Wolff continued, "I was going to ask if you thought Space Force would ever bring back ship's boys. For when Jack turns about 10 or so." He smiled, guilelessly.

  LaForrest snorted. "Not on your life, Major. I don't want to face the wrath of your lady wife."

  "But sir, you haven't even met her."

  "No. But I've met her friend, my new Chief Nurse. So that will be all, Major."

  "Aye, aye, sir."

  "Her friend, by the way, is a significant improvement over the previous holder of that position. As is her boss, Dr. del Toro."

  "Yes, sir. You may be aware that he and I have history. Good history."

  "I am. And since we're just sitting here waiting for things to happen, why don't you wander down to Medical and say hello?"

  "Is this in the way of a 'get the hell off my bridge and let me work,' Captain?"

  LaForrest was anything but noncommittal. "Yes."

  Wolff saluted, followed by von Barronov. "Aye, aye, sir; we're Casper." The two majors turned and headed for the hatch. LaForrest watched their retreating backs, barely holding back the mirth he didn't dare let out.

  "Coffee, sir?"

  He looked around, and there was his steward, holding out a fresh mug, which he took. "Thanks, Charlie. Any problem with the samples?"

  "No, sir. All taken care of. You'll have results shortly."

  "Good."

  *~*~*

  Personal Diary of Ariela Rivers Wolff, Volume 60

  30 May 2047

  Aboard the USSF Constellation in the HIP 98813 system

  Well, I'm the most junior person here in the medical section, it appears, at least by rank; just a measly 2nd Lieutenant surrounded by couple of full Commanders, and a bunch of SF Lieutenants who are the equivalent of Marine Captains . . . but I'm also a doctor with MD and PhD after my name, and thirty-three years plus of hands-on experience, so military rank is sort of off the table, here.

  Plus, I brought these two patients in, after keeping them alive after a 5-Sv radiation pulse. Nobody survives those. At least, they didn't in the past. Two Sieverts was considered near-fatal. Four was about the most anyone could take and possibly come back from. Eight was absolutely fatal.

  Luckily, we had nanos . . . and I was able to upgrade them to v4, which do a better job recognizing, prioritizing, and mopping up radiation damage. So I'm pretty much a celebrity among these nurses and doctors and orderlies and suchlike, since I'm the inventor and main developer of nanos in my timeline. Thanks to Dad. Sigh.

  They're still at v3. So I offered to upgrade everyone. Dr. del Toro allowed as how he would like to see my documentation first, but as long as everything was all in order, he wouldn't have a problem with that. Apparently the guy they had here the last time we were aboard would flatly have said no (and I believe it after dealing with his nurses, especially that bitch Karen), and the folks who were here three years ago were practically doing the happy dance after del Toro said that. It's no biggie, I was going to give the upgrade to Dad anyway and he was going to post it on the main nano site on the hypernet.

  So anyway . . . I'm writing this up hours later, of course, after we've finally had dinner and chatted with the Captain, and found our quarters. For me, it's been thirty years in personal time since I was last aboard, but it's like it was yesterday because nothing, well, very little, has changed. Lots of the same people still here. I remember everyone being so nice, well, other than that bitch Karen, and they still are. Some of them have been promoted, which is great. It makes me wonder how we're going to handle that when long-life really sinks in. Who wants to be a lieutenant for fifty years? There will be a lot of changes, I think, because long life hasn't changed the human need to succeed and advance.

  Prisha and Naira.

  They were in awful shape when we got them into medical. I was literally watching them both sinking toward death. But Tina – Chief Nurse Commander Dr. Tina Murphy Patterson – started barking orders like a drill sergeant and people flew around the room like they had wings, grabbing this and that and the other thing and bringing them over to the two gurneys in something that looked like a choreographed ballet.

  These people are good.

  The upshot is, Prisha and Naira are not out of the woods, but they are certainly in better shape than they were aboard the Bandersnatch. And getting better support than I could give them with the limited resources we had at hand. They're getting intravenous fluids designed to help flush radiation, both have feeding tubes and are being supported with some sort of mush for calories (important both for them and for their nanos), and the docs here have ventilators and such available if they become necessary. They are both going to be in for a long recovery. But it was clear the v4 nanos were doing their job. I could see that. Said something to one of the nurses to that effect, but she looked at me like I was crazy or something. Oh well. They do that back home, too, when I say that. Weird. Maybe nearly falling off the edge of the universe gave me some special sensitivity to nanos or something. Who knows.

  We've looked at the chip Prisha gave me. Lots of info. From what we could reconstruct of how the portal must have worked, it looks like it was open on one side. Three singularities arranged in a "C" shape, with the fourth above the transport stage. The open side was apparently where they loaded the cargo. And we think Naira may have been standing on that side when the thing transported
them to the station. Prisha took the brunt of the pulse from the three side singularities (X, Y, and Zed) and partially shielded Naira with her body, which is why Prisha was in so much worse shape. Naira still got what went through Prisha, plus the radiation from the Tau singularity above them.

  And before you ask, yeah, well, that's apparently the problem with the portal when used in a one-way transport with no matching portal on the other end. If there's a matching portal, the radiation travels safely outside the "hypertube" made by the singularities. And it's not the same as my "time hopper," which is a much smaller implementation (obviously, it fits in my hand and nearly squeezed me out as toothpaste at the other end the first time I used it). So why was there no matching portal on the other end? Well, because the RIFs were transporting valuables in radiation-proof cases to the station for that Chinese ship to pick up. An American ship coming by with its occasional shipment would certainly have noticed a portal installation in the station!

  The bad thing is, we think there is another portal, and we think it's somewhere in South China. Otherwise we can't figure out how the technology to build the installation on Sanddoom could have gotten there that fast, and without Space Force having some sort of inkling that someone was landing ships on Sanddoom. Though it's entirely possible they landed once, offloaded a ready-to-assemble, barebones portal, and sent the rest of the installation through the South China portal once they had the Sanddoom barebones portal assembled and operating.

  Oh, and? There's a huge mine underneath the installation that blew out. Diamonds, gold, silver, other precious metals and gems. The RIFs were paying the Chinese in gems and precious metals. The report came back from Science and the chips Dad and I found in the Bandersnatch were, in fact, shards of sapphire (not diamond, and not aliglass, either – real sapphire, mined out of the ground). What were they paying for? Well, the portal tech, plus mining equipment, plus high-speed underground trains and tunneling equipment (not the same as the mining equipment), frankly, you name it. The Chinese came to them first, thinking to do an end run around the Americans and establish a base on Sanddoom they could access through the portal tech, but the RIFs realized the tech went both ways, and they had a chance to get "freedom fighters" (yeah, terrorists) back to Earth. Apparently there are a few there already, and more were supposed to follow, but ha ha, boom boom boom, so sorry, no portal now, RIF-san. Shit, that's Japanese, I must be tired. Anyway, that's been reported up the chain to the Captain, and as soon as Constellation can rotate home, he'll pass it along to General Buford and the President.

  According to the chip, Prisha's husband was (as we surmised) a Chinese national who was involved in the project at a relatively-high level, but who nevertheless managed to displease the mullahs somehow, and ended up being executed and his wife and child sold into slavery. Nice place, Sanddoom.

  Finally (because I am in fact yawning all over the place), it turns out there was an actual scratch-built, Nagasaki-type atomic bomb underneath the installation. And that's what went off fifteen seconds after the portal activated and sent Prisha and Naira to the station. Prisha's Muslim owner, Bahadur al-Hashimi, is the Big Man In Charge of the portal project on the RIF side, and he never agreed with it; wanted nothing to do with it, felt they needed to be content with their lot and accept their exile. But apparently when the Mad Mullahs tell you you're going to be the Chief Engineer of their joint pet project with the Chinese, you smile, suck it up, and do the job . . . your way. And he figured out how to get Prisha (with whom he apparently is madly in love) and her daughter off the planet, but they were too rushed to get into one of the big cargo containers . . . or it was supposed to be in place on the transport stage and wasn't, or something like that. We'll work that out when they're strong enough to talk coherently for more than two or three sentences at a time. Bahadur himself was not in the blast area at the time; he'd gone back to the city for some mad mullah meet or other, and he'd also managed to get his trusted crew out of the area as well. Question is, do the MMs suspect him of having set the whole thing up to fail, or are they all blaming the Great Satan or the Big Dragon at this point?

  I hope it's the latter, and we can get him out. I love happy endings and I want Prisha's story to have one.

  Good night.

  *~*~*

  "So there we were, and this is no shit, driving like a bunch of stunned mullets down this bombed-out street in Mogadishu. And I was getting more nervous by the second. The hair was literally raising on the back of my neck, because I could tell there was something going on just past the rubble pile on our left. Then I saw this, I dunno, disturbance in the ground and my mind was going, now, that's not right. I hadn't heard anything from Top, and he'd been past that very spot only half a minute before in the lead Humvee. But my hackles were way, way, way the fuck up, and I started to turn to the Ell-Tee – now Tina's husband, Roger – and had opened my mouth to say we needed to stop and recon and maybe go the other way around – when that fucking IED blew the fuck up."

  Wolff was sitting in the Medical Director's office, telling the story to del Toro, who'd never actually heard the whole thing because of Wolff's PTSD issues. Von Barronov and Tina were sitting in, too, and some of the other nurses were standing around outside the door, trying not to be noticed.

  "Made a lot of work for me," grunted del Toro. "Those fuckers." He reached out, medicinal whiskey bottle in hand, and topped up Wolff's glass, then looked at his own, shrugged, and topped it off, too. "Damn good work you did, killing six of them, even if it did make it even harder to fix."

  "Damn good work you did, too," replied Wolff, "or I wouldn't have walked, even with Kat's help, until the nanos came on the scene."

  "Well." Del Toro looked modest. "It was cutting-edge shit for that day and time. But I can't take all the credit. That lattice cloth we used to wrap the bone to hold everything together was absolutely brand new, I'd never even seen it or heard of it until some fat, old, white-haired salesman showed up with it, about a month before you appeared on the scene, and left me a big sample of it to play with." He raised his glass and drank. "I wasn't even going to use it, thought it was nothing but a novelty, until I got the word from Ramstein that I had a compound fracture of the femur coming my way. Funny thing was, I checked with the FDA the next time I had a minute, which was some time after you'd gone home, and they'd never heard of it, or of the company the salesman claimed to represent." He shook his head. "I nearly shit myself, because I thought I must have used some completely-untested product and the salesman was a fraud. So I just wrote a note into your case file about it, held my breath, closed the file, and forgot about it. And then, about fifteen years later, bam, the company existed and the product, a 3D-printed bone tissue micro-lattice, was on the market. I got hold of a sample of it, compared it to a small piece of the original I'd had left over and had stapled into your file along with the note, and they were identical. Even under the electron microscope at NIH."

  "Yeah." Wolff looked around. "Nobody here is cleared for the truth on that. But I'll tell you. Tina, swing the door shut, and sorry to your folks who are pretending not to listen." He got up, walked around the desk, and when Tina had shut the office door, he lowered his mouth to del Toro's ear, and whispered: "That salesman was me, time-traveling back from 2044. I fixed a bunch of shit that night. Well, that night in my calendar."

  He walked back around the desk, del Toro staring at him the whole time, and sat back down. The doctor finally looked down, reached for his glass, and downed the whole thing.

  "You did not," he gasped, "just tell me that. I heard nothing. I know nothing about it. It was a fluke."

  Wolff shrugged. "It's what got Tina and Roger together, too."

  Tina nodded. "We've wondered about that. The more we thought about it, especially as we watched you get older before the nanos came along, the more we thought your 'Great-Uncle John' sure looked and sounded a lot like you."

  "Heh. Simpler. I already knew you got married, I just gave you a little push."
/>
  "What about Kat? Did you give her a push?" Tina grinned.

  "Never." Wolff shook his head. "I never did anything directly with either myself or with Kat. As far as I went was what I told you that night in the bar – that she'd be good for me and I'd be good for her. I was deathly afraid of creating a paradox. The rest of what I did was bad enough. And I'm amazed I was able to do it at all, knowing what we now know about the timeline and how it works."

  "So after the IED blew up," said von Barronov, trying to steer the conversation back to "safe" topics, "what happened then?"

  "Oh. Well, the blast caved in the left passenger door of the Humvee, and flipped us over on the roof. Roger banged his head on the roll bar and went to nighty-night land. The driver just got shook up pretty good, and I, of course, took the brunt of the blast on my left femur. So we all sort of hung there upside down for a couple of minutes while I heard the shooting start, and the next thing I knew, some of the riflemen from the other Humvees were all over us, getting Roger and the driver out, and then trying to figure out how to get me out . . . " Wolff sat quietly for a moment, nursing his whiskey. "It's really amazing," he went on, a bit huskily, "how many smart, inventive, and capable young men we had in the Marine Corps in those days. And how many of them only cared about getting their Gunny out of the shit while bullets were flying around them. I didn't deserve to lead any of them. But there I was. And there we were, no shit." He looked around, eyes a bit moist, really reliving the day for the first time in years. "Stuck in a firefight in the middle of fucking Mogadishu, Somalia, with – as usual – nothing to eat but crayons."

  The other three roared with laughter, as Wolff smiled, and chuckled himself.

  Chapter 8

  Stop Lollygagging And Get To Work

  All told, they spent several days aboard Constellation. Ariela continued to monitor Prisha's and Naira's recovery, at the request of Commander del Toro, and also was set up in Medical to upgrade all ship's personnel to the v4 nanos – again at the request of del Toro, after he'd gone over her documentation and pronounced it sound and within the Space Force standards for such.