Silhouette targets of various sizes appeared on the screen and Terson placed his shots center of mass in tight groups without any difficulty. Even a fully charged beam pistol generated no recoil, so firing the impotent weapon in his hands made the exercise little more than a cheap video game.
“Can’t we liven this up a little?” he complained. “I could do just as well with a flashlight.”
“Sure, I can make it more interesting,” Druski said agreeably. “What do you say we move them around a little?”
Terson shrugged. It wouldn’t be much more difficult.
Half an hour later he wasn’t so sure.
“You’re supposed to hit them, Joey, not scare them to death,” she commented after Terson, cursing under his breath in frustration, watched another set of targets escape untouched. He’d shot birds out of the air with a rifle, but Druski’s targets were beyond him and he didn’t understand why.
“There must be something wrong with the sights,” Terson insisted.
Druski took it from him and plugged five targets in a row. “Works fine for me,” she grinned.
“I don’t get it!”
“Think about it,” Druski pressed. “Are you leading the targets?”
That went beyond insult; it attacked his competence. “Of course I am!”
“Bear with me,” she soothed. “How far should you lead?”
“Depends,” Terson said. “You have to account for distance, target speed, and muzzle velocity.”
Druski nodded. “So what’s the muzzle velocity of light?”
Terson groaned—at that range radiant energy like a beamer pulse was instantaneous. “I’m an idiot!”
“I wanted to make a point, and you’ll remember it better this way,” Druski said. “Another problem with bullets is that they’re susceptible to the influence of gravity—or the lack thereof. If you sight in a rifle at one hundred meters in one gravity then fire it in one-quarter gravity the round goes high; vice versa if you take it into a high gravity environment. If you expect to fire it in freefall you have to bore sight the weapon.
“Unfortunately we don’t usually get the chance to do that, hence the shotguns. I’m sure you’ll do better with these.”
Terson had to admit that shotguns were better all-around weapons in the varied environments the Embustero’s crew was likely to find itself in than a pistol or rifle. Altered gravity merely changed the effective range, and the available ammunition could be substituted quickly to meet any situation.
Druski spent the rest of the day acquainting him with the specialized ammunition she had in stock: non-lethal stun rounds and plastic shot for station-side security as well as the rifled slugs and lead shot he was familiar with for dirtside. She even had several hundred rounds of the infamous “mutiny pills,” shells containing sub-munitions the size of double-ought buckshot, pre-scored to facilitate fragmentation on impact, and filled in turn with dozens of tiny ball bearings. The sub-munitions splattered against solid objects, but wrecked havoc in soft tissue.
Afterward he disassembled, cleaned, and reassembled the shotgun, performed a functional check and turned it over to Druski for inspection—then she handed him a broom. The range floor had been clean enough to eat off of, so it didn’t take long to round up the scattered remains of targets and shotgun pellets that had escaped the bullet trap. Terson dumped the remains in the trap’s hopper and returned the broom to Druski.
“You look almost happy,” she noted with a smile. “Been a while since you did target practice?”
Terson was mid-shrug before it dawned on him that she was right—he did feel better, and it had been a long time. The last time he’d engaged in any casual shooting had been on Boss Hanstead’s ranch on Algran Asta. The difficulty of obtaining ammunition on Nivia, combined with Virene’s aversion to firearms, had restricted him to occasional sighting-in and until now he’d never realized how much he missed it.
“I get the hankering to pop a cap or two myself, now and then,” the medic admitted. “Nothing else relieves stress like setting off an explosion in your hand to plant a chunk of metal where you want it to go. I tried to organize a competition between first and second watch a couple of times but Colvard’s got a hang-up with guns and Markland’s got a hang-up with letting guns get in the hands of enlisted crew.”
“Then I’m surprised they let me in here,” Terson said.
“Markland was less than thrilled with the idea, but it came straight from Shadrack,” Druski replied.
“How do you feel about it?” Terson asked pointedly.
“I was a Marine,” she grinned. “What do you think?” She turned to one of the gun lockers without waiting for a reply and brought out a cloth-wrapped bundle. “This thing’s been knocking around in here since I came aboard,” she said as she set it on the workbench. Terson stepped closer as she unwrapped it, hissed through his teeth when it lay fully exposed. It was, he decided without hesitation, the largest handgun he’d ever seen in his life. “It’s seized up all to hell, but I put a scope down the barrel—chamber’s empty.”
“I’ll bet this thing could tell some stories,” Terson marveled when he picked it up. It was heavy—machined from solid steel rather than an aggregate of carbon composite and ceramic like modern firearms. The surface, where he could see it past the hardened mix of rust, dirt and gun oil, was marred by hard use or mishandling. The crosshatch pattern on the stained wooden handgrip was worn smooth, and he couldn’t find a manufacturer’s mark. The slide was frozen solid just as Druski said and not even Terson’s strength was enough to break it free.
The stainless steel barrel, he noted, looked big enough to stick his thumb in. He sighted down-range, and found it superbly balanced despite the missing magazine, a solid, reassuring weight in his hand. “Any ammunition for it?” he asked.
“A few round, but they’re pretty old and I wouldn’t recommend trying to fire them. It’s a moot issue anyway, unless you’re really interested in getting the thing to work—assuming that’s even possible.”
“I’ll do my best,” Terson smiled.
Shadrack’s gesture deserved some reward, so Terson decided to head for Engineering where he spent the first three hours of his off-shift time helping Neuchterlien finish cleaning the fouled burn-tube. It was well into first watch by the time he washed up. The delay caused him to miss both evening chow and the chance to apologize to Lytle, so he dug out one of the cold space-rations he’d squirreled away in his quarters, intending to turn in early.
He’d hardly finished unwrapping it when someone rapped on his doorframe. Michelle Lytle stepped back timidly when he pushed aside the flap. “Hi, Joey—um, sorry to bother you.”
“It’s fine,” Terson, assured her. “I owe you an apology for this morning.”
“No, I understand,” she said quickly. “Mackey told me what happened, but I gave you the coffee and I feel…I don’t know…weird about it.”
“I’m willing to call it even, if it helps,” Terson offered.
“A little,” she said with a tentative smile. “I’d feel a lot better if I could buy you a drink.”
It wasn’t beneath Shadrack to orchestrate an emotional enticement, if what Druski said about the man was even remotely accurate. Terson considered declining the offer, but the hopeful anxiety flitting across the young woman’s face convinced him that she didn’t have a deceptive bone in her body. Even if she were unknowingly part of some manipulation of Shadrack’s it wasn’t fair to treat her unkindly because of it—and being aware of the possibility meant Terson wouldn’t fall for the bait.
A drink, then, to ease her conscience, followed by careful neutrality in the event she thought it more than it was.
A slightly inebriated Jerrell Mackey yelled a greeting from across the commons where he and O’Brien had ensconced themselves in the theater seating opposite the large view screen. “They’re showing one of the new vids we picked up at Caliban,” Lytle informed him. “You want to watch it?” They collected the
ir bottles at the bar and joined the others.
Lytle chattered about something that had happened during her shift while they waited. Terson chuckled when he was supposed to and nodded every few moments. Lytle, a nice, needy girl, talking about the things everyone else talked about: what happened on-shift today, who was sleeping with who, anecdotes of past station calls—like kids bragging about a fist-fight in the schoolyard to a man who’d killed with his bare hands. Their whole universe encompassed barely more than the ship—no one talked about before; nobody even asked.
The lights dimmed; the rest of the seating began to fill as the opening credits rolled.
Grogan stuck his head between Terson and Lytle from behind. “Have you no respect for the dead?” he demanded of Lytle in a disapproving stage whisper. “His old lady’s not even cold yet!”
Terson dropped his bottle, seized Grogan by the front collar of his shipsuit, and dragged him across the seat onto his shoulder while Lytle and the other onlookers stared in shock. He hoisted the big spacer into the air, carried him clear of the others, and flipped him forward to land with a crash, flat on his back.
Grogan’s mouth opened and closed as he tried to suck in his wind, started to rise, but Terson planted a foot on his throat and forced him down again. The spacer’s hands went to Terson’s ankle, trying to force it away, but had neither the strength nor the leverage, and he only succeeded in choking himself in the struggle.
“Easy, Joey, easy!” Mackey hissed in the background.
“If you ever so much as mention my wife again,” Terson coughed out, “I swear to God Almighty I will end your miserable fucking existence!”
Grogan sucked air into his lungs with a great wheeze when the foot left his throat. Terson glared around at the Embustero crew, expecting any number of them to come at him, but they stood mute, letting the silence drown in the vid’s soundtrack. He turned and walked away.
The only voice to rise up with his departure was Lytle’s: “Goddamn you, Grogan!”
Terson didn’t go back to his cabin, the first place the ship’s officers would search for him. He headed down, instead, into the maze of dim service-ways on the cargo decks. The low, narrow corridors exacerbated his mood, seemed to press in on him with the weight of a mountain, but there was no other choice when the instinct to escape to the open met the hard, cold reality of vacuum.
There were no officers waiting for him when he finally returned to his quarters, surprisingly, nor anyone lurking inside to exact revenge for his tussle with Grogan.
NINE
Nivia: 2710:02:25 Standard
Hal stood at an observation window overlooking the labs with Erin Nowatchik while one of her technicians harvested parasites. The grazer had been isolated a few days before and infected from the biochemist’s collection of viruses. The animal was already in failing condition from the massive infestation of parasites it carried. With the onset of the disease it began to rub itself against any object available to ease the excruciating itch from which the condition drew its name. Blood oozed from raw flesh, and still it scratched.
“It’s a neurologic condition, not dermal,” Nowatchik said when she saw where his attention lay. “It will keep scratching even after the nerve endings are gone.”
“And people do the same thing?”
“Yes, but humans have fingernails.”
The technician, encased in a protective suit, ran a lice comb through the grazer’s remaining fur and vacuumed the parasites off the teeth. After he’d brushed out the entire animal he carried the small vacuum collector into an adjoining lab and emptied the catch basin onto a large sheet. He placed the empty basin on the floor a meter away and turned on a heat lamp above it.
“It’s about five degrees centigrade in that room,” Nowatchik said. “The adults will congregate under the lamp in a couple of hours. The nits can’t move fast enough and go into hibernation on the sheet. We’ll freeze the adults and put the nits back on the host to mature.”
The technician inside took a container of nits from a refrigerator and returned to the collection room where he sprinkled the immature parasites over the grazer’s back. When he finished he entered a decon chamber which sprayed him down with insecticide and scalding water to kill any diminutive disease carriers clinging to the suit.
The grazer moaned weakly and shifted to scratch the other side of its body against its enclosure. “How much longer will it last?” Hal asked.
“Two or three days; long enough to get what we need.” They headed back to Nowatchik’s office. “We’ll have to time the release carefully,” she told Hal. “If it gets much colder they’ll freeze before they reach the ground. On the up side, they’re attracted to heat so they should make a beeline for the inside of Minzoku homes.”
“You’ve got enough serum to protect us?”
“Plenty,” Nowatchik said. “If this weather holds we won’t have to vaccinate everyone; just those that come into contact with the locals. Everyone who leaves the Fort should decontaminate before reentering until the disease runs its course in Sin City. Say two weeks.”
Two weeks. That wouldn’t leave him much time if he procrastinated. “Keep me informed.” He walked back to the command post with his hands stuffed deep in his pockets. Over the last few days the wind had swung south, bringing chilly temperatures and high clouds that changed the sky from deep cobalt to a lighter slate blue. The daytime temperatures dipped closer and closer to freezing and the mountains to the east had maintained their white caps for almost a week.
Most of the Onjin wore coats and gloves as a matter of course, but the teenagers stubbornly refused to acknowledge the onset of winter and shivered in shorts and summer shirts as they dashed between buildings.
A harried-looking Tamara Cirilo arrived at the command post entrance at the same time Hal did. “Rough day?” he asked conversationally. The look she cast him as she took off her coat inside let him know his quip was noted and unappreciated.
“Our last shipment out never arrived,” she explained. “The Old Lady’s got me tracking it down with the information we got from Sorenson’s system. I’m pretty well convinced it made it as far as Caliban but they can’t find the containers.”
“Maybe it was misdirected,” Hal offered. “That’s happened before.”
“I’m looking into that,” Tamara said. “I’ve already got a pretty good idea of the traffic flow out-system from trying to identify those poachers.”
“Hopefully that saved us some time,” Hal commented. “I’d better get up to my office.”
“I’ll see you later,” she said as she headed off on her own task. “Good luck!”
As he feared, there was a message from the Old Lady waiting for him and he knew what to expect before he even opened it. The Family’s production of indium gallium arsenide semiconductors, and the income derived from it, had fallen behind due to the shuttle incident that precipitated his arrival eight and a half months—has it been that long?—earlier.
He’d pushed production to its limit, delaying downtime for maintenance and shortening recovery between cycles to catch up. Output was already dropping, though slowly, from what it had been without Derner’s skill at calibrating the system. One more lost shipment would be devastating.
His mother’s message covered that and contained the instructions he expected to see with two notable exceptions: she authorized him to meet any and all of Den Tun’s demands for technology with wide latitude in order to increase delivery of raw materials, and directed that half of said materials be shipped to the facility she’d set up to experiment with monoisotopic IGA. They could recover from this latest setback more quickly if they could establish two production lines. Development of mono-IGA would necessarily move to the back burner until the Family’s primary source of income was back on solid ground.
Hal was disturbed to find that the quantity of ore supplied by the Minzoku had been dropping slowly for the last several weeks. The Onjin stockpile hadn’t grown any smaller due to t
he lower production he’d already noted, but it hadn’t increased, either.
Granting Den Tun’s requests in the face of such a shortage wasn’t something Hal was happy to do, but there was no help for it. Hopefully, Den Tun would take advantage of what the Onjin offered rather than gamble on greater advantage by refusing.
Hal spent the rest of his shift filtering the backlog of Minzoku requests, rubber-stamping the routine demands without a second thought and granting more of the excessive ones than he denied. There was enough work to keep him busy until late in the evening, but he remained aware of the time and what else he had to accomplish before the night was over.
He stopped at the op desk on his way out. “I’m going out to my shuttle,” he told the watch officer. “I’ll use the west sally port.”
“Yes, sir. Do you want an escort?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Hal said, “but have someone stand by to let me back in. I’ll radio in when I’m ready.” He put on his coat and gloves when he left and headed for the wall. The night was clear and bitter cold. The stars overhead looked like ice glittering in the sky.
The sally port groaned open and he imagined the alarms sounding at the command post. The watch officer would reset them immediately after confirming Hal had used the egress he said he would. The ground sloping away from the base of the wall on the other side was lit bright as day by floodlights. Hal’s shadow leaped ahead of him, grown huge by the angle and intensity of the light. He trotted down the path leading past the fences and mine fields into the unbroken expanse of killing field beyond. The wedge-shaped breaks in the perimeter fence would look inviting to an attacking force, a flaw in the Fort’s defensive layout allowing the enemy to reach the wall without the trouble of breaching the minefields. The shape of the breaks, however, would funnel the attackers into a path no more than three abreast and line them up for the machine guns recessed in the wall just above the door.
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