Starhunt: A Star Wolf Novel

by David Gerrold

  TEN

  War is hell!

  —GENERAL WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN

  Channel B, the all-talk channel on the intercom:

  “He’s late.”

  “So? Who’s complaining?”

  “Maybe we’re lucky and he’s dead.”

  “You dreamer—”

  “Korie’s the dreamer. He thinks this tub is a battleship.”

  “Maybe he knows something we don’t.”

  “Maybe he’s on something we’re not.”

  “I wish he were on another ship.”

  “You know, if we ever get close to that bogie, we won’t need any missiles. Korie’ll put on a space suit and go after it with his bare hands.”

  “If he does, let’s not wait for him to come back—let’s just leave.”

  “Hear, hear! The man has finally come up with a worthwhile suggestion.”

  “Let’s not even leave him the space suit.”

  “Aw, now—do I detect a note of hostility in these speculations?”

  “Damn right you do!”

  “Okay. I just wanted to make sure your hearts were in the right place.”

  “Hey, listen—you want to know what that asshole has done now?”

  “Which asshole?”

  “There’s only one asshole on this ship.”

  “Oh—that asshole. What’s he done now?”

  “You know why we keep ‘missing’ on those drills?”

  “Sure—because we’re more than 15 per cent off optimum.”

  “Yeah, but do you know what Korie used as optimum when he wrote those programs?”

  “Five million units of Hallucin-N?”

  “Not quite, but you’re close. The ‘optimum’ we’re trying to hit is the battle efficiency of a K-class cruiser.”

  “Huh—?”

  “You heard me. He’s got us competing against K-class specifications.”

  “He’s out of his tree—”

  “He should have stuck with the Hallucin-N.”

  “Maybe he did and this is the result.”

  “You think we should tell him this is an F-class ship?”

  “Naw, let him find out for himself.”

  “Yeah, but we’re on it with him—”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “Congratulations. You’ve just realized Korie’s secret.”

  “What is?”

  “That we weren’t signing up for the space force, we were joining a suicide pact.”

  “Now, he tells us—”

  “You should have read the fine print on your papers.”

  “Who can read? When I joined, all they wanted was someone who could stand up for five minutes without falling over!”

  “Well, that explains the efficiency of this ship.”

  “Yeah, but what explains its inefficiency?”

  “Hey, when we get back to base, what’re we going to say when they ask up why we couldn’t catch the bogie?”

  “Our butterfly net had a hole in it?”

  “That’s very funny—hey, aren’t you the guy who, when they start insulting your ship in the bars, you start nodding your head and agreeing?”

  “Yeah, well—I don’t like to argue with my own shipmates.”

  “Has anyone ever noticed there’s something weird about Korie?—Like he’s always calculating?”

  “There’s something weird about everybody on this ship. That’s why we’re here.”

  “Hey, does anybody know what the penalty for mutiny is?”

  “Last I heard, it was death by spacing.”

  “Hmm—that’s getting more attractive every day.”

  “Forget it. The last one to try taking over the ship was Captain Brandt.”

  “And what happened to him?”

  “Korie sent him to his room.”

  “That bastard—that’s pretty harsh treatment for an old man.”

  “Yeah? Well, that’ nothing compared to what he’s got in store for us.”

  “Oh? What’s he going to do to us?”

  “He’s going to make us stay at our posts.”

  “Aw, shit!”

  ELEVEN

  I have little hope that if the human race were more intelligent that it would be an improvement. It would only enable us to make a higher class of mistake.

  —SOLOMON SHORT

  A low whistle of surprise is the only signal—an officer has entered the crew’s quarters. Someone turns the lights up, revealing the sagging griminess of the bunks, the chipped plastic panels of the walls. In the center of the room, First Officer Korie stands with a face like grim death. “Wolfe, stand up.”

  “Huh?”

  “I said, stand up.”

  Surprised, startled, the shorter man levers himself upright—realizes abruptly that it is Korie and jerks to his feet. “Yes, sir.”

  “Wolfe, I’m only going to say this once, so you’d better listen—and if you miss any of it, I’m sure your big-eared bunkmates will clue you in.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Wolfe; I know what you did to Rogers. I know it as surely as if I’d been here watching.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir.”

  “Of course, you don’t—but just in case you do, you’d better listen.”

  “I repeat, I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir.”

  “Wolfe, you’re interrupting me—”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir. Rogers hit his head against a bulkhead.”

  “Wolfe—”

  “I don’t know anything about it—”

  “Wolfe! Shut up!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Korie is breathing heavily. His usually pale face is flushed with anger. Wolfe stands stiffly at his bunk—at attention, but somehow still defiant.

  “All right,” Korie says, a little too quickly. “You don’t know anything about it—but let me give you a warning—”

  “Sir—”

  “—a warning that you can give to the bulkhead that Rogers walked into.” Korie is seething. “If I have any more trouble out of that particular bulkhead, I am going to personally rip it out. I am going to take it apart piece by piece and shove it out an air lock. And I am going to fully enjoy myself doing it—do I make myself clear?”

  “I guess so, sir.”

  “There’d better not be a next time.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll tell the bulkhead that.”

  “You do that.” Korie stares at the man for a moment, wondering if he should say any more. Wolfe is a pasty-faced slug; a sallow-colored muscle, layered with fat. His eyes are watery blue and hint of veiled meanness.

  Korie decides he has said enough. Wolfe obviously isn’t listening anyway. He turns on his heel and strides quickly out.

  Wolfe waits until he is out of earshot, then exhales loudly and sinks to his bunk. “Wow! He is sure after my ass!”

  “Yeah, well, that’s a hard target to miss,” calls MacHeath.

  “Screw you.”

  “Face it, man,” says Erlich. “You keep getting in his way. Pretty soon, the man’s bound to trip over you. And then he’s going to get mad. Just don’t give him any reason to. That’s all.”

  “You make it sound so simple,” snaps Wolfe. He throws himself back into his bunk.

  “Well, he sure didn’t waste any time getting down here.”

  “Hey!” says MacHeath suddenly. “You think Rogers squealed?”

  “No. I think that bastard’s guessing—else he would have killed me for sure.”

  “You hope that’s the case.”

  “It is. It is.”

  TWELVE

  Half the men don’t know why we’re fighting, the other half doesn’t care—they just like to fight.

  —MAJOR GENERAL JACOB ENDERLY,

  Second American Civil War

  “All right, let’s go.” Korie strides into the engine room and directly to his monitor console. “Leen, get your men in the webs.” He drops into the
chair and clears the board. “Bridge, we’ll skip the first two problems and start with number three. Auxiliary control, you’ve got the red button. If you have any trouble compensating for any of these maneuvers, push it—I’d rather stop the drill than lose that bogie again.” He swivels back then and looks at Leen. “All set?”

  “Yes, sir. We’ve been ready for twenty minutes.”

  “My fault. I should have given orders for you to start even if I wasn’t here. Oh well, no matter.” He unclips his hand mike from his belt. “Now hear this,” his voice is amplified throughout the engine room. “We’re going to skip the two warm-up problems and go directly to the important ones. This first drill will be a series of hit-and-run missile firings to see if we can lay down a wide-spectrum barrage. We stand a better chance of getting that bas—that bogie, if we can drop a school of fish on him instead of just one. As soon as we master that, we’re going to add a few extra touches—some evasive maneuvers and some programmed missile firings by our simulated enemy, so while we’re ‘shooting’ at him, he’s going to be ‘shooting’ back at us. And I promise you men—it’s not enough to just kill the bear, we have to take his skin home and nail it to the wall. Uh—Chief Leen tells me I should compliment you men because you’ve trimmed your efficiency down to 22 per cent of optimum. I disagree. I don’t think so. Not yet—let’s get it down to that, we may be able to make the kill. And, of course, that’ll mean bonus money for us all, right?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Okay, let’s go.”

  He swings back to his board as the klaxon squawks across the room. The massive framework of the generator mounting fills the engine room like the bones of some Brobdingnagian beast. The conical black giants within the framework hum with a life of their own. Even from his position at the console, Korie can feel the tingling on his cheeks and hair that indicates the field pressure. “Chief?”

  “Sir?”

  “Static—I can feel it. Is everything all right?”

  “Uh—” Leen steps to Korie’s console, leans over him, and flicks a switch. He watches the monitor screen as it flashes a series of diagrams. “It’s okay, sir. It’s just routine discharge through the injective compensators. Auxiliary control must be doing it to prepare for the drill.”

  “All right. Thanks.”

  Leen straightens and moves away. Korie glances at his screen. The Burlingame’s warp is now moving at 28.5 lights. They have covered thirty-six light days, they have twenty to go.

  He clears his board again, sets it up to monitor the drill. As an afterthought, he switches off the intercom, decides not to listen to the intersystem chatter this time. He will watch only the changing pattern of lights and diagrams.

  Originally, he had thought his presence here in the engine room would allow him to pinpoint a specific cause for the crew’s inefficiency—a man who was not doing his job properly or a procedure that was wasteful of time—but after running a few drills. Korie has realized that there is no one specific reason for the engine room’s looseness; rather, it is a general sloppiness of the whole crew. The only way to tighten them up is to drill them—and drill them and drill them.

  Korie narrows his thin lips in thought; they are almost bloodless normally and this slight pressure is enough to make them go white and disappear against the paleness of his skin. His eyes are veiled pinpoints of concentration.

  Under ordinary circumstances, on their normal patrols, Korie would not have objected to a certain laxity in the crew’s performances of their duties. This is an old ship and a tired one; if there is a noticeable lack of pride in her operation, it is not without justification.

  But this is not a normal patrol—abruptly, they have been thrown into battle, and Korie is faced with the task of converting the lackadaisical crew of a middle-aged ship ordinarily assigned to backwater duties into a crack crew of precision military men able to compete with the best of them: they are equipped with inefficient equipment and they are underarmed, yet somehow he must make them meet—and exceed—the standards set by the finest ships in the force.

  The bogie shimmering on his screen now is only a simulation—but somewhere out there, only twenty light days away, is a real bogie. An enemy ship, squat and deadly; its stress-field disturbance indicates it is a destroyer of much the same size as the Burlingame. Beyond that, its capabilities and armaments are unknown.

  They’d picked up the bogie a little more than thirteen days ago in a supposedly “clean” area of space. There’d been a few scares in DV sector, though, and they had been warned to be on their guard. At first, Korie had dismissed the warnings. Threebase issues them with monotonous regularity—but when the first sensor flashes were picked up, he had been forced to change his mind.

  They’d spotted the ship almost by accident—and at first, the radec crew couldn’t believe there was actually something out there; after all, it was so unlikely. They kept checking and rechecking their instruments, but the bogie only became more and more substantial.

  It was almost directly ahead of them and it was heading for their base on the same course they were—presumably, the other ship was on a hit-and-run bombing mission. At first, Korie had thought it might be one of their own ships, but a check of the records and the bogie’s behavior quickly negated that possibility. Its stress-field shimmer—as individual as a fingerprint—was totally unknown; therefore, it had to be an enemy.

  As they increased their speed, so did the bogie. Apparently it had become aware of them at the same time they had become aware of it. The captain of the other ship must have decided to forsake his mission, for he bypassed their base. In hot pursuit, they did the same. The Burlingame increased its speed to maximum. The bogie did likewise; according to the computers, its warp had been boosted to 171 lights. But that speed was uneven, it kept slipping downward. Perhaps the other’s cells were at their limit, perhaps his engines were unstable—whatever the reason, pursuit was feasible.

  It was more than feasible—it was inevitable. Korie had been on the Burlingame for twenty-one months without seeing any action. The frustration had been building in him, gnawing at him like some deadly internal parasite. He’d been trained for battle, he’d been promised it, every part of his career had been oriented toward this one goal. His hands ached for the feel of the war, his eyes burned with it, his whole body had gone rigid with anticipation. He had given the order for pursuit without even thinking. In his mind, he had no choice. (And then, struck by what he had done, he had looked to Brandt; but the old man had only nodded and said, “This one is yours, Mr. Korie. Go get it.” Then he left the bridge.)

  For ten days, Korie had watched that bogie on the screen—and all during that pursuit, one thought had stayed uppermost in his mind. When we catch it, will we be able to kill it?

  They had one advantage. The other captain obviously didn’t know how badly equipped they were and how weakly they were armed—else he wouldn’t be running. As far as that other captain knew, he was being chased by a K-class cruiser.

  (Fine. Good. Let him think that. Let him go on thinking that at least long enough for me to fire my missiles and climb back into warp. Just that long, that’s all I’ll need.)

  Korie had brooded on that, long and hard. (This is not a fighting ship; this is not a fighting crew.)

  Drills?—he had scheduled a few during the strung-out agony of the chase, but his concern then had been to determine what his men were capable of so he could plan a battle strategy around that. Now that his strategy had been changed by circumstance, he had no choice. He had to try and whip them into shape. It was no longer a question of making the kill—it had become a matter of their own survival; they had lost their advantage. (That captain’s going to know we’re not a K-class cruiser by now; we’ve got to prove otherwise.)

  Korie watches as the massive generators slide downward in their mountings, an important part of the drill, a bright-suited crewman scrambles to keep a cable from hanging up. The ship is changed her orientation within the warp, altering the direction o
f her inherent velocity. For a moment, the man teeters precariously in the webs; then the cable slides into its proper channel and Korie lets his breath out. The men know what they are doing, but still—

  The man hangs there easily now, glittering in his yellow protective suit, dark goggles, and helmet. A cable runs from his left leg to a station on the engine room floor; should any of the generators throw off a massive spark of static electricity—as has been known to happen—the cable will ground it out. Dispersal of static electricity has always been a bothersome problem in spacecraft.

  The warp generators are impressive units in their spherical framework. Each of the giant cones is eighteen feet long. The six big engines impress their fields one on top of the other in the narrow area at the center of the mounting sphere—creating a miniature warp there; that warp in turn is resonated through the three sprawling grids which surround the ship. In a sense, the warp is both within and without the starcruiser.

  The grids expand the warp to enclose the ship and move it through the stress field. Every time the ship rotates, the orientation of the generators—and the warp within them—is changed in relation to the grids; but the shape of the resonance must be maintained in relation to the stress field—thus, as the ship and its grids swing into a new position, the phase reflex system adapts and adjusts the resonance throughout the grids, allowing the warp to maintain its orientation and stability.

  The larger warp without keeps its relation to the smaller warp within; the ship turns between them. All the while, the injective compensators work to control any sudden energies thrown off by the phase adaptors. If the system didn’t work this way, if the warp grids didn’t change the shape of their resonance as the warp generators turned within the ship, the result would be a feedback, an overload, and a possible burnout—the latter would mean the destruction of the ship.

  If a ship were to try turning without adjusting the resonance of its warp, it would—in effect—be trying to turn a piece of the stress field. The task is not necessarily impossible because that piece of the stress field is removed from the greater field surrounding it; but to do it would require more power than any one ship could muster.