by Tony Daniel
Transel would have to issue the order to destroy it.
Captain Malako would be duty-bound to obey.
But it could become unpleasant. Malako might simply scare the vessel away with a shot across the bow, or with a torpedo that went in unarmed, and then attempt to chase the craft back to its base and attack the base.
That wouldn’t do.
The more Transel thought about it, the more he was sure he must take this matter into his own hands. Which meant taking the Powers of Heaven into his own hands. He’d order the fail-safes off the weaponry, first thing. There would be no “dud” torpedoes, no scare tactics from the overly clever Malako.
“No one ever said the Regulation of justice was easy, did they, Companion Transel?” his old teacher, the Master Interrogator, had told him. “If you are to assume command, you must make your body and soul open to Regulation. A willing, supple instrument. Broken to the hand like a well-worn glove. And then, you must be willing to regulate. To compel obedience.”
Yes, Transel thought. The answer always lay in the teachings. First, he would order Captain Malako to destroy the human craft. Then, once that was done, he would confirm within himself the power of Regulation once again.
He would need to.
He even, he had to admit, wanted it.
Sweet surfaction.
He would retire to his quarters and give himself the appropriate punishment, the appropriate stimulus to continue with his duty.
Transel warmed to the thought.
He’d use the bladed mace on himself. Yes. It had been his Master Interrogator’s favorite shriving device, and it had become Transel’s favorite, as well.
After all, this very mace had been a gift from Transel’s Master Interrogator herself. And a gift from her own master before. One day perhaps he’d pass it on to his own favorite protégé.
But for now it was his instrument of personal balance.
The steel tang of justice.
Transel shivered with delight and anticipation.
Anticipation would see him through whatever unpleasantness lay in store when he confronted the captain, made his orders known.
Ah, yes. Even now, Transel could feel the bite of steel and pleasure that awaited him.
USX Chief Seattle
As the lifepod sped from the Chief Seattle, Japps had the odd sensation that the larger vessel was actually moving away from her and not the other way around. Both were practically motionless in comparison to the speed at which they had been traveling moments before—900 times c.
Now they had dropped into the N with momentum dissipated by a trick of navigation XO Martinez had once tried to explain to her, but that Japps had not been in the mood to attempt to comprehend. Somehow or another, you could “shudder” your way into Newtonian or normal space, and emerge dead still.
She was moving as if in the deepest deep ocean. Inky nothing. Distant, pinprick stars. No sun nearby, no planets, no nothing except the Chief Seattle behind her, out of her field of vision.
“What are you seeing out there, Japps? Anything?” It was the voice of the Chief Seattle communication officer, a thin, pasty-faced CPO named Bara.
“Negative, Chief,” Japps replied. “But the homing beacon is pinging him or it or whatever it is pretty well. Like the XO said, I’m getting beta reply off something he’s wearing or carrying. As long as that keeps up—”
Then her forward lights picked up something in the black distance. The faintest speck.
“Okay, I’ve got visual contact,” she reported. “Moving in.”
“Roger that, Pod Alpha,” said Bara.
Japps couldn’t believe it. The beta homing circuitry had worked. The forward lights of the little rescue pod picked up something floating against the vast canvas of black that she’d been staring into for the past—what? Twenty, closing in on thirty minutes.
The something was pale white. Exactly the color of a sceeve.
She’d found him. She’d found the Poet.
Now the question was: Alive or dead? She maneuvered nearer to the body—she couldn’t help thinking of it as a body—as it slowly spun in an endless head-over-heels flip. What she needed to do was position herself with the top of the lifepod beneath the body and then activate the “coffin,” the man-sized rescue unit built into the roof’s structure. Man-sized, but not quite sceeve sized, she thought. Most sceeve were a little under two meters tall—and eight feet plus was too large to scoop into the open coffin without bending a bit.
She hoped rigor mortis hadn’t set in. But then she chided herself for being ridiculous. This was space. Rigor mortis was from bacteria, right? So you wouldn’t get it in a vacuum, she supposed. But who the hell knew what kind of organisms might inhabit the sceeve? Nobody had ever seen a sceeve burial, if they even had such customs. Maybe they just bloomed into roses or sea anemones or something like that when they died.
She arrived at the body, parked herself “under” it. She used the attitude jets to thrust upward, using the open coffin as a scoop. The sceeve body settled awkwardly in. But there was no possibility she was going to be able to close the lid. There had to be a way. The designers surely would’ve come up with a method to manipulate a victim’s body in the coffin, wouldn’t they?
Or maybe they figured the lifepods would never be used, were more for show and morale, so why bother with actual, functional niceties. Wouldn’t be the first time appearance won out over reality in the Extry, that was for sure.
But in this case, after pulling open a covering box, she discovered a small hole in the roof. That hold led to a glove—arm length—that protruded across the bulkhead, across the lifepod hull. She thrust her arm up into it and carefully pulled the sceeve into the coffin. She folded his legs at the knees, pulling both legs in. Then she signaled the coffin lid to close.
Suddenly, the body wasn’t a body anymore. The Poet squirmed. He evidently saw what was coming down at him and attempted to escape it, get out.
Too late.
The coffin lid shut, self-sealed. Air began flooding into the coffin. The wrong kind of air for a sceeve, she knew. She had something like the right kind—not perfect but workable—in a tank near her pilot’s seat. The Poet, if that’s who this was, would just have to suffer the indignities of Earth atmosphere for a moment.
But now the Poet had gone from shaking to thumping. He wanted out of that coffin, that was for sure.
Japps considered what she had wrought. What she was about to do.
I’m about to save a fucking sceeve’s ass, she thought, and I don’t like it one bit.
Too much brooding. You’ve brooded enough for a dozen lifetimes. Why wasn’t I there with them? Why did I survive and my family did not?
Useless speculation. You never got any answers.
Japps pulled the opening lever, and the bottom of the coffin fell away—and the sceeve fell down into the lifepod. She closed the lid, cycled the air out. When she turned back, the sceeve was sitting up. It regarded her with its big, black lidless eyes. And she regarded its smashed-apart excuse for a nose in turn.
What the hell. If this was the Poet, she didn’t want to kill him. He’d offered her too much amusement. Given her a puzzle to solve. The D.J. of the night sky. The sourpuss voice she’d spent hours listening to. Trying to image the smell analogs. Trying to understand the underlying import of his crazy samizdat broadcast.
As the XO had ordered, Japps had brought along a tank of hastily mixed heliox, and she shoved a breathing tube into the Poet’s muzzle, worked it down into his body—Lord knew to where—as if she were putting a feeding tube into somebody’s stomach. The Poet resisted. Not a chance, she thought. You’re too weak to stop me. The scraping gills of his hands felt like dried paper as he pawed at her arms.
He must be pretty far gone, Japps thought.
“I’m trying to help you,” she said. Like he could understand those puffs of air shooting out of her mouth. What did her breath smell like, anyway?
She sniffed
in her own exhalation.
Pancake-scented burps from her short-stack breakfast. Coffee.
What the Poet really needed—must have eventually if he were to survive—was a pressure suit or pressure chamber. He was not used to the lower atmospheric pressure in human spaces, and he was going to get the helium equivalent of the bends as soon as his rescue bottle ran out of charge—if it hadn’t already. If the helium bends was anything like the bends humans got from diving too deep and surfacing too rapidly in the ocean, the Poet was about to be in a world of agony.
“It sucks to be you,” she told him. He seemed to understand at least the predicament he was in, for after a moment’s more struggle, he lay back and sucked at the heliox hose.
A flash from outside through the small lifepod porthole.
It was no brighter than a flashing camera might be if you were in the middle of a football field in a stadium and someone in the far upper decks was making a picture.
But there weren’t supposed to be any flashes out here. The nearest star. 82 Eridani, was over fifteen light-hours away. They were truly in the waste between stars.
Japps went to the controls, rotated the pod. Toggled in on the Chief Seattle beta beacon. Focused, refocused.
The signal wouldn’t resolve.
What the heck.
She overrode the automatic frequency lock, paged through the beta signatures available. Or that should have been available. There weren’t any.
She fired the puny reaction rockets on the lifepod and headed toward the Seattle’s last-known position.
A blip. Another blip.
Japps breathed a sigh of relief.
Okay, baby, show yourself. Come on—
Blip, blip, blip, blip, blip.
And then Japps was among the blips, and she saw what it was.
A debris field.
Blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, endless, endless . . .
The remains of the Chief Seattle.
“Oh, God,” Japps said.
The crew. Martinez. Her drinking buddy. Her friend.
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit—it was all happening again. She was losing everything.
Everything.
Even yourself, Melinda. Where do you think you are? This isn’t good.
Hold. Get a hold.
She swiped away her own nascent tears. Squeezed her ducts dry.
No more.
What could she do? What—
Messenger drone. All lifepods had an FTL-capable MDR. Pigeon-sized. Like the Chief Seattle was—had been—the drone was capable of the current Q-drive speed limit, 900 c.
Send it. Send it where?
Japps laughed when she realized that she really only had one choice. She had no telemetry on any other vessels in this region. In fact, there was only one target she had even the slightest chance of hitting, and that by activating the drone’s automatic default trajectory. It was a destination that was ten days away.
Could she survive the month that a rescue might take?
Could the Poet?
Did they have some semblance of food?
Just taking care of a few contingencies, Martinez had said. Throw in some of that glucose goo.
Martinez, now dust between the stars. Gone. Oh, God.
Thank you, XO.
They had food for a time, if she could figure out how to feed the sceeve. Hell, if she could figure out how to survive on lifepod hardtack herself. Yes, a month. Maybe more on starvation rations.
Until.
Until the cold equations asserted themselves. The fires inside died.
Until they died.
But not yet.
“Guess I’m going to find out what I can take without losing it permanently,” Japps mumbled to herself. She quietly promised herself to find a way to kill herself, maybe kill them both, before that happened. She turned to the Poet. He gazed up at her with big black eyes. Impossible to read an expression in them. At least impossible for her, who had never had any practice.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “This isn’t much of a rescue.”
The Poet laid his head back, his breathing growing more rapid.
The atmosphere was going to be the problem. Sceeve lived in a pressurized environment equivalent to the water pressure at three hundred feet under the ocean on Earth. That same pressure would kill a human with oxygen narcosis who didn’t slowly adapt to it by punctuated periods in higher and higher pressure.
She had a pressure suit on, but, of course, in the haste to depart—of course, of course, she’d forgotten her helmet.
Goddamn it, she couldn’t be blamed; this wasn’t her billet.
Of course she could be blamed. It was an idiot move.
No space helmet.
Here they were.
Could she even up the air pressure in this pod? Japps doubted she could get it that high. She’d have to break into the monitor board, figure out the circuitry, see what she could do. At least that was part of her skill set. Maybe she could at least get the pressure up to some degree. Enough? She’d do what she could.
Shit.
Her good friend, dust out the viewport.
Herself stuck in a lifepod.
No Q bottle.
No FTL.
Adrift on the outer reaches of the Fomalhaut Limit.
Nearly twenty light-years from Earth.
Deep space.
Alone.
Well, not quite alone. For what that was worth.
“It sucks to be you,” she said to the Poet, knowing he couldn’t understand a word she said but figuring he just might get the intent. “It sucks to be you. And it really, really sucks to be us.”
NINE
31 December 2075
Richardson, Texas
New Pentagon E-Level
Coalbridge turned a corner on E-Level of the New Pentagon and came to the end of a corridor. There he found an open door that led to the office of Huntley Camaroon, the Secretary of the United States Extry. Coalbridge paused, took a breath, then entered the SECEX’s office with trepidation.
This was it, wasn’t it? The moment he’d always dreaded. He was going to be grounded, he just knew it. TACTIC was the traditional resting place for captains awaiting new commands to be readied. He hadn’t exactly enjoyed pushing data there, but he’d accepted it as necessary. And definitely temporary.
But today’s orders, out of the blue, sent him over to STRAT for the grand tour. STRAT was definitely not a way station for field officers. STRAT was a specialty.
After the tour, he was report to SECEX. Not the section of the New Pentagon that housed the office suites—but to the man himself.
They had to be priming him for some bogus promotion. Planning staff. Headquarters. Something along those lines.
And if so, he would lose his vessel.
Yes, assignment to STRAT was a big deal. It meant somebody had an eye on you for admiral, for one thing. He knew plenty of Extry officers who would give their eyeteeth for such a chance. He was not one of them.
Fuck. Double fuck.
It had started innocently enough, with his boss, Micky Wu, a two-star rear admiral, pulling him aside on the train ride back from the RAMP meeting that morning.
How about taking a stroll over to STRAT this afternoon, check out the current deployment grid? Bone up on the latest intel while you’re at it. Get an overview of current fleet deployment.
But Micky, I’ve got those torpedo reqs to finish—
Too busy?
Too bad.
Orders are orders.
So off he’d gone. Now it was 18:30, his stomach was grumbling, and Coalbridge dreaded what he was about to hear from the SECEX.
Camaroon sat at a huge oaken desk. Several files were scattered across its surface, and an old-fashioned pad of dazz paper served for written messages, although Coalbridge figured the SECEX was also wiied to the New Pentagon’s chroma matrix. Everyone was.
“How was your tour of STRAT, Jim?”
; “I’m pretty much up to speed on the fleet deployment at present now. At last report, the sceeve are at Wolf 359, sir. They’ve got ten thousand vessels.”
“Yes,” said the SECEX. “And vectoring for Sol at a nice steady pace of 100 c.”
“We’re in for it, sir.”
“Yes.”
“If I may ask,” said Coalbridge, “the Extry’s not planning to keep me here permanently, is it, sir? Am I being reassigned to STRAT? Because I would hate that, sir, I really would. Especially if the situation in space is as dire as it looks.”
Camaroon’s stern expression softened to a smile. “No, no. On the contrary, Jim.” The SECEX leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his neck. He regarded Coalbridge. “Hell, son. You fight.”
Coalbridge breathed a sigh of relief. “Good. Sir.”
The SECEX put a hand, his left, on his desk. His nails were manicured, but his fingers were wrinkled, wizened. Like an old man’s. He’s only fifty, Coalbridge thought. Could body parts age at different rates? He didn’t think so. The SECEX wore a silver wedding band that glinted against his dark skin.
“STRAT INTEL gave you the full details on the Chief Seattle?”
“Yes, sir. Some I already knew from Lieutenant Commander Leher’s analytical report.”
“So the Chief Seattle disappears from existence. Almost. No further word. She misses her next rendezvous point. Nothing.”
“Almost, sir?”
The SECEX smiled. “Caught that, did you?”
“Yes, sir.”
The SECEX nodded toward a file that lay on his desktop. It was red-taped TOP SECRET. “There’s one more piece of information.”
“Sir?”
“Messenger drone arrived at Walt Whitman today from 82 Eridani sector. It was sent by a lifepod belonging to the Chief Seattle.”
Coalbridge eyed the file. It was the MDR from the drone. Had to be.
“Before I reveal to you what’s in that file, let me tell you that the messenger drone’s black box recorded debris near its originating location. Debris characteristic of the Chief Seattle’s core material, I’m afraid.”
Coalbridge breathed out. So, she’d been destroyed. Too bad. He’d known and liked her captain, even though Hayden did seem to entirely lack most traces of a sense of humor. He’d been a good man. “I’m sorry to hear that, sir.”