A Kodiak, painted in purple and yellow stripes, with a sawed off stub protruding from the turret’s cannon housing, fishtailed across the plain at fifty miles per hour. It roared toward the stampeding herd, trailing a dust plume behind its skirting. Waist deep in the commander’s hatch atop the turret, his hands gripping the bare gun mount ring, swayed Casus. He wore tanker’s goggles under his plumed helmet, and his beard and cape snapped in the slipstream. The Kodiak roared in among the duckbills, spun doughnuts, and they scattered, honking. Casus threw his head back, and yodeled.
Ord stood with his arms crossed, shaking his ûd, us head.
I smiled at him. “Not a regulation paint job, is it, Sergeant Major?”
“Hardly, sir. But I know many dead men who would love to see it.” Ord clapped the Duck on the shoulder. “Peace well made, Mr. Muscovy.”
The Duck and I walked to the brick wall that rimmed the Consulate roof, rested our forearms on its cool, tile rail, and looked out across the city. The Summer Palace, granite pink and spired, loomed to our left, the onion towers of the Great Library rose to our right. The four-story Consulate nestled among stuccoed villas of the wealthy, amid tree-lined streets.
We peered down into the gardened courtyards of two villas, side by side. The Duck pointed at an orange pennant, hung alongside the servant’s entrance of the left-hand villa. “Well, at least one slaveholder agrees with Bassin.”
Marin’s new monarch had embraced peace with the Casuni and Tassini for its own sake, but also to free his nation to remake itself. However, change is hard, especially change for the better.
Marini, Casuni, and even Tassini, custom had always allowed an owner to emancipate a slave. Longevity in service, acts of heroism, even the declining ability of the owner to support his household, were common reasons. And there was a small class of freemen and freewomen who filled similar jobs to those slaves held, mostly doing laundry.
Bassin the First had the absolute power to simply abolish slavery. But the vile thread of man owned by man had been woven into the Clans’ fabric for millennia. By comparison, the United States’ Emancipation Proclamation after “only” a few hundred years of slavery had been overdue, but its aftermath hadn’t exactly been smooth sailing. Bassin the First was wise enough to take it slow, because Bassin the Assassinated couldn’t accomplish much.
The first token of Bassin’s administration was to encourage slave holders to replace their slaves by hiring freemen and freewomen. An orange pennant by the door meant the household was hiring. We could see a hundred villas. We saw one pennant.
In each courtyard below us a robed gardener bent, tending flowers. The man on the right wore the yellow bracelet of indenture. The man on the left didn’t. He was a freeman. Both lived with their families in modest quarters behind the big house. Both sweated dawn to dark. Both were paid less in a month than their master or boss paid for wine in a week.
The Duck said, “You could argue there’s no practical difference.”
“You wouldn’t. I wouldn’t. Bassin wouldn’t.”
“Then tomorrow should go great.”
THIRTY-THREE
THE NEXT DAY, Bassin became the first Clansman to see his planet from space, unless you counted his ancestors, who the Slugs had brought to Bren from Earth as slaves thirty thousand years before.
Marini were more worldly than a plains nomad like Casus, but getting an average Marini citizen to climb into a claustrophobic tin box that fell straight up wþ">Mould have resembled kidnapping. Bassin wasn’t average.
He rapped his knuckles against the four-inch thick quartz window beside his seat, then traced the joining between it and the hull’s plating. “The pressure differential is that great?”
The Loadmaster nodded, then leaned across Bassin, and pointed to the planet four hundred miles below. “You can make out Marinus, below. Where the cloud breaks, and the river joins the coast, sir. Your Highness.”
The transport slid cleanly into the empty bay it had left on Ike. The swabbies fitted Bassin with complimentary blue coveralls, with “H.M. Bassin I” sewn above the breast pocket, and a red baseball cap with an MCC-3 D.D. Eisenhower patch on the peak. Baseball was hardly the only thing new to Bassin here, but he sponged up every detail. Ike’s skipper, himself, gave Bassin a tour, then the new king sat together with Howard, the Duck, and me in Ike’s wardroom.
Duck pitched the general idea, which was that Marin should want to move toward the more advanced reality that the Eisenhower represented. Then the Duck pitched the specific idea that, with Bassin’s nation unexpectedly at peace thanks to us, Bren could and should commit its considerable non-slave civil engineering capacity to Mousetrap. Of course, our Spooks bungled Bren into the war in the first place, but the Duck skipped over that.
Bassin gazed at the bulkheads. “The Stones move this mass?”
Howard splayed his fingers, and waggled his hand, palm down. “More or less. They allow gravity to move it.”
Bassin made a screwing motion, turning his hand. “As an opened valve allows gravity to empty a canal lock’s water.”
Bassin saw the universe as a civil engineering project, which was what we were counting on. He said, “This Mousetrap. We would have the opportunity to sculpt an entire world.”
When Bassin said “we,” the Duck beamed.
All I had to do was, as Nat Cobb would say, keep my pie hole shut. Instead, I cleared my throat. “Bassin, building the Locks on the Marin may have been difficult. You need to understand, this may be impossible.”
“When I took up the queen’s commission as a colonel of engineers, I learned a saying. ‘The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer.’ ”
Ord smiled at me. Combat engineers thought alike. Navy Seabees a starship flight away lived by the same slogan.
Bassin shook his head, smiling. “You really can show us how to cut rock with knives of light?”
Howard said, “The moonlet’s mostly iron and nickel, not precisely rock. But, yes, we can cut rock with light beams. Much of the tunneling will be labor intensive.”
Men still died digging sewers under Newark. Carving the Pearl Harbor of space in vacuum, light years from anybody’s home, before the scourge of the universe arrived on the doorstep, was going to be more than “labor intensive.” Yet Bassin was not just going our way, he was racing ahead of us, like a rich kid chasing new tinker toys.iv height="0%">
Bassin watched me frown. “Your concern touches me, my friend. But Jason, I’m a responsible adult. I understand the undertaking, and what it means for my nation. Don’t worry that you’ve cheated some bumpkin for the price of a baseboard cap.”
I said, “You don’t understand everything. And will the kids in the pits understand when outside their gloves the temperature is just above absolute zero? Will they understand when one of Howard’s light knives beheads a friend?”
The Duck’s eyes burned into me, and I clamped my jaw shut.
Bassin eyed the ribbons on my chest. “Will Sergeant Ord tell me you knew every single thing that those would cost when you enlisted? Jason, I find myself blessed with an unexpected peace, and cursed with an unalterable social contract. This project will provide work for freemen and freewomen who aspire to more than washing rich men’s clothing. Those who succeed in this adventure will return with self-respect and the gratitude of their society. They will create the core of what your books call a middle class. Owners who emancipate enlistees will be paid for it. Emancipations will rise. Your Mousetrap lets me begin to cut a cancer from Marin. If I’m doing you a service, you’re doing me one, too.”
I turned to the Duck, and raised my palms. “Fine. Howard’s rathole is now the Peace Corps. All I care about is we get it done before the Slugs come back.”
Whump. Whump. Whump. Ike shook enough that coffee in Bassin’s decaled souvenir cup sloshed.
He frowned. “What’s that?”
The Human Union couldn’t defend all the Outworlds. But it sure as hell could
shuffle the fleet so that one locked and loaded cruiser was at all times orbiting above the sole source of propulsion-grade Cavorite known to mankind.
Therefore, every moment that we talked, a Starfire simmered in each of the three launch bays designated as Ike’s Hot Bays. Each fighter was fueled, armed, locked on the launch rails, and crewed by a pilot and systems officer so strap-down ready that they had to pee into bags.
“Early bird special.” Ord frowned, too. “All three launched at once.”
There was a rap on the wardroom hatch, but before we said anything, it opened, and a pop-eyed ensign poked his head in. “Sirs? The Captain sends his compliments. He requests that I escort you all to join him on the bridge.”
I was already out of my chair, but Ord beat me to the open hatch, with Bassin, the Duck, and Howard following in our wake.
The ensign race-walked ahead of us, as speakers in the passage ceiling oogahed general quarters. Three ratings dashed toward us, slowed, scooted sideways around us, then dashed aft. One kid looked back over his shoulder at Bassin.
The captain wanted the strangers on his ship where he could see them, not wandering around distracting his crew, when things got hairy. Which evidently they had.
THIRTY-FOUR
ALONGSIDE THE HATCH that opened onto the bridge, a bosun fingered the little electronic whistle that hung around his neck. It squealed, then he announced, “Attention on deck! Visitors are on the Bridge!”
Fifty feet away, at the opposite end of the Eisenhower’s red-lit bridge, between two facing rows of swabbies bent over control consoles, the captain stood, his back to us, arms folded. He watched the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall forward display.
The red light was a hangover from the days when it was thought to preserve night vision, in case the crew had to step off the Bridge, into the salt night air, or at least the bathroom. The whistle was even older. Navies, wet or vacuum, clung to their traditions. Churchill understated when he said those traditions were limited to rum, sodomy, and the lash.
The captain turned a shoulder in response to the bosun’s pipe, saw us, then waved us to him, through the aisle between the consoles.
“What you got, Jimmy?” I asked.
A flashing red dot near the screen’s top crawled toward a solid green dot in the screen’s center. Three flashing green dots, labeled EB 1, 2, and 3 crawled away from the solid one, toward the red one, but so slowly by comparison that they scarcely seemed to move.
“Inbound bogey winked as we rounded. We popped the early birds. Sorry to disturb your meeting.”
Behind me, Ord whispered to Bassin, “As this ship circled Bren, an unknown approaching object appeared, no longer obscured from view by the planet’s mass. That’s the red dot. The three moving green dots are smaller ships we’ve launched—those launches were the lurches you felt—to investigate, and defend us if necessary.”
Bassin nodded.
I asked, “Trash?”
The captain shook his head. “Point six.”
Ord whispered, “The object is traveling too fast to be a shooting star or similar natural object. Almost two thirds as fast as the flash from a lightning bolt.”
I said, “Too slow for a Viper. Trolls crawl, and there’d be a spread.”
“Yep.”
Ord said, “The object is moving too slowly to be a particularly destructive type of high-velocity Pseudocephalopod projectile. And if the object were a Pseudocephalopod invasion transport, it would be moving much slower than this ship, and it would have deployed protective escort vessels ahead of it.”
I asked, “Spoofing?”
The captain pointed at a large red set of numerals in the screen’s lower right, spinning down toward zero, then shrugged. “Closure in two.”
Ord again. “Two minutes from now, the distance between the first of our small investigating ships and the approaching object will have closed enough that the small ship can determine whether the object is a Pseudocephalopod vessel, imitating the speed and movement pattern of a cruiser like this one.”
Bassin asked, “What if it is an enemy warship?”
I faced Bassin. “Based on our historical performance versus the Slugs, your reign will be very short.”
THIRTY-FIVE
THE DUCK WHISPERED over my shoulder, “Can we get His Majesty into a downbound transport?”
I shook my head. “First thing I thought of. The three hot birds were Starfires. Fine in space, but bricks land better. All the other bays will have Starfires loaded, too, by now.”
Whether it was a flaw, or a deliberate pistol at the troops’ back, a cruiser’s design forced its captain to choose early whether to stand and fight, or to man the lifeboats. Not that it mattered. Jimmy Wethers was a gunfighter, not a lifeboat coxswain.
“That Scorpion thing I heard about would come in handy,” said the Duck.
Not so long ago I had been watching my godson fly rings around Paris. Now I was watching a gunfight that might kill me.
The countdown timer reached zero.
The Bridge fell so silent that I thought I could hear hearts beating. In addition to my own, which seemed to boom.
The captain asked a swabbie who sat at a console, shoulders scrunched, “Well?”
“Pings are away, sir. Waiting.”
The timer started counting up, now, in red numerals. It reached plus fifty seconds when the tight shouldered swabbie pressed his earpiece with his fingers, and held it.
The swabbie’s head tilted back, and he exhaled. Then he said, “It’s Emerald River, sir.”
“You’re sure?”
“It’s Mean Green alright, Captain. Early One pinged her twice.”
The captain sighed, then he looked up at the ceiling and spoke to nobody. “What the hell are they doing here? And wouldn’t it have been nice to let us know they were coming?”
The swabbie, who didn’t seem to know a rhetorical question when he heard one, said, “I guess you can ask Admiral Ozawa that yourself, sir, in a couple hours.”
I looked around at Howard. As usual in situations like this, he looked away.
THIRTY-SIX
WE REMAINED ABOARDIke so Bassin and the Duck could enjoy the show from the observation blister, as the three Early Bird Starfires returned, spun a few vacubatics to burn off fuel, then snuggled back into their launch bays. Howard waxed eloquent about the red moon, its uniqueness as a polar-orbiting intragalactic stranger, and any other irrelevant curiosity that might divert attention from what he knew about Emerald River’s unannounced appearŽ€…ance.
But Mean Green was enough of a distraction all by herself. Emerald River was the newest of the new Bastogne-class cruisers, and the only one named for a military victory that occurred off Earth. And on Bassin’s planet, to boot.
Nickname aside, she wasn’t green, but reflective white, which made her look as big as Monaco, with both Bren’s white moon and its red one inching, at right angles to one another, across the blackness behind her. Bren spun by, slow and blue beneath us, but Mean Green hung dead still, relative to Ike, and a safe two miles away. It normally took hours for cruisers to match orbits, but Mean Green had a woman driver who could parallel park.
We swam down from the blister, which was a bubble on Ike’s prow, at the zero gee centerline. Then we made our way back to rotational gravity, and then to a launch bay that was being cleared to receive a transport from Mean Green. Ord towed Bassin, and I towed the Duck. Some people puke their first time swimming in zero gee, but they both grinned like kids in the baby pool.
When we reached the wardroom again, I pulled Howard aside by the elbow, and pressed him against the bulkhead with my forearm across his chest. “What the hell is going on, Howard?”
“I don’t know. Honest.”
I rolled my eyes. Howard plus honest created an oxymoron. “But you suspect.”
“There was some talk before we left Washington.” He eyed the far hatch like a roach spotting a baseboard. “Shouldn’t we catch up with the othe
rs?”
I pressed my forearm harder against his chest. “Howard, I have ways of making you talk. Just tell me it isn’t Slugs.”
“Worse. It’s politicians.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
TWENTY MINUTES AFTER Howard and I rejoined our group in Ike’s cleared receiving bay, the inner bay doors slid open, and Emerald River’s transport hissed down the rails and locked. The transport had slid up in Ike’s shadow, so it was cold enough that frost had condensed on its hull, and cracked off when its hatch opened.
Twenty-one passengers wearing VIP coveralls wobble-kneed out of the hatch onto the receiving platform. Twenty of them started to mince one at a time down the thirty-foot left-hand ladder, toward the deck.
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