The Stalk

by Janet Morris

  Sling cleared his throat in the awkward silence.

  Reice turned on him. "Don't you say a word, Mr. Aftermarketeer. Not one word about this to anybody. Ever." It burned Reice's butt that Sling had been witness to Remson’s tantrum. "This whole damned enterprise is classified, so far as you're concerned. You talk to anybody about the events surrounding this trip to the Ball site, I'm going to make policing you my personal business for the next twenty or thirty years. From now until I say different, you're on strip alert to support ConSec activities—you don't eat, sleep, or go to the can without reporting your movements first to my office. Got me?"

  "Yah, boss." Sling was toying with the tip of his long braid. "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil—that's me. I just hope you're talking billable hours, here. I got a life to live, too. Or maybe you forgot, in all this camaraderie, that I'm not part of your governmental infrastructure. You issue me a gag order and a heads-up, it better be in relation to some sort of contract." Sling's single earring twinkled at Reice provocatively, punctuating the incipient smirk on the aftermarketeer's stubbled face.

  "I'll keep your damned pilot's license in my hip pocket— as long as you're good. How's that for a contract?"

  Sling looked away, at his copilotry sensor suite. Then he said, "Here comes the shuttle, right on time. I don't know why that fool thinks he can dock with STARBIRD. I'm a good retrofitted but I ain't God. Nothing contemporary's going to dock with that antique without a whole lot of onboard help. You want I should tell him to park it here?"

  "You bet your ass I do," Reice growled, and got busy trying to implement Remson's orders for South's psych evaluation before the pilot was breathing down his neck.

  He shouldn't have worried. While Reice was still arranging for priority internal slippage to accommodate his personal convoy, plus vectors to cut through the ConSpaceCom traffic that was jammed up from here to Threshold, Sling let out a long, slow whistle and kicked back in his couch, arms dangling at his sides, eyes closed.

  "So? Cut the theatrics, okay, Sling? We haven't got squat for time to waste." Reice brushed his comset off his head to encircle his neck. "What's the damned problem?"

  "Don't know it's a problem. They say they're sending the shuttle back to the Ball and don't worry about docking procedures; they've already mated the locks. So we're invited aboard STARBIRD, soon as we're ready."

  "Can they do that? Mate those locks?"

  "Nope. Not in this universe, anyway. But there goes the shuttlecraft now." Sling swept a spread hand over the copilotry pad and the TICK'S monitors blossomed with four views of the Unity shuttlecraft headed back toward the Ball.

  Reice said, "Nothing special looking about that shuttle. Nothin' special about remote controls, either."

  "Yeah?" came Sling's voice. "From where? STARBIRD? The Ball? Internally controlled precision vectoring? Into the Ball? Past all that Spacedock Seven traffic? Without a comlink to Spacedock Traffic Control? For my part, I want to watch that shuttle make the Ball open up for it—shit!"

  Reice didn't have to ask what Sling meant this time. The shuttlecraft was disintegrating before their eyes. The bits and pieces didn't come apart normally, either: they stayed together in a pattern or an orbit around an invisible gravity source, so that the view in Reice's monitor resembled a deep-water jellyfish or magnetic field lines on a subatomic particle. Then that too disappeared, and nothing Reice or Sling could do in any scanning mode, not even infrared, could track the erstwhile shuttle's mass any farther.

  "Shit," Sling said again, almost prayerfully. "That can't be." But it was.

  Reice got up fast. "Let's get over there, before we record any more phenomena we don't like."

  The spacedock connecting Reice's BLUE TICK to STARBIRD was a flexible, pressurized tube about twenty meters long and lined with zero-gee webbing. Nevertheless, for safety's sake, they wore their helmets and gloves that made their suit life-support systems self-sufficient. Pulling himself along, toward STARBIRD s antique front door, Reice found the going harder and harder. Probably the stomach-churning encounter with Remson had thrown his chemistries too far out of line for abrupt zero-gee to be tolerable. Bile kept coming up in his throat. His head was aching by the time he and Sling reached the lock and slapped the exterior cycle plate that Sling had installed there.

  The lock opened and Sling, floating by the plate with one hand on the safety webbing, motioned Reice ahead of him, doing a weightless caricature of a courtier's bow.

  Reice's feet hit the metal floor of the bulkhead, hard, as he entered the fifth-force field. Sling was right behind him, working the jury-rig manually to start the safety cycle. Red light flooded the tiny, closed compartment. Green light followed. Then the inner door opened before Sling could enable the controls.

  And there was South, helmetless, with the lady ambassador right behind him, smiling brightly in the narrow corridor. Without helmets and integral comlinks, you couldn't even say hello or ask permission to come aboard.

  Crazy fools, not to wear helmets during a lock cycle, especially between this ancient crate and a modern spacecraft.

  Reice stepped smartly through and waited for Sling to follow before unsealing his gloves from his suit. "Here we go," Reice breathed.

  Sling's voice in his com said, "So far, so good. At least the lock seals are tight. I can't figure out how they got over here from the shuttlecraft without disengaging my rig, but—"

  "Do me a favor, Sling." Reice's breathing was too sharp. He ignored it. "Don't ask them, okay?" South was watching him, staring into his helmet as if following the conversation, as if the Relic pilot could hear every word being said.

  "Okay, boss. No sweat."

  You couldn't stand two abreast in STARBIRD's narrow passageway. For the two newcomers to have room to take off their helmets, South and Ambassador Lowe had to move out of the way.

  Piece of crap ship. Reice couldn't see what South thought was worth keeping. Any sane person would have off-loaded whatever special AI he wanted to keep onto new media and consigned the rest to the scraphead domain. But not South.

  Reice had to crabwalk up the passageway, helmet in hand, once he'd gotten the damned thing off his head.

  Sticky seal. He'd work on it later. Sling had moved forward, along the narrow passage. Reice's stomach was still feeding him fountains of hot, sour bile that hit the roof of his mouth disconcertingly.

  Up ahead, he saw South hugging Sling like a long-lost friend and Riva Lowe pumping the aftermarketeer's hand as if they were of equal rank. He got goose bumps from the sight of the contact.

  All of a sudden, he saw 7 those black alien eyes inches from his, and he admitted that he was at least as jacked up about this mission as Remson. Maybe even agreed with Remson, that you didn't know what kind of hazard the Relic pilot and his ladyfriend ambassador might represent. Not after they'd been intimate with Unity aliens for so long.

  So you were real careful. You took your time. You didn't make any false moves. When Reice straggled onto the cramped flight deck, South was sitting at his pilot's station, and Ambassador Lowe's pert butt was perched on the navigation console. There was barely room for Reice to crowd into the single-place cockpit with the other three. So he didn't. He leaned against the hatchway and stuck his head inside.

  You had to be on your toes in here to avoid touching the two wanderers by accident. Contamination was a real consideration when you were dealing with the unknown.

  Reice was determined to be as careful as possible. He finally admitted that he didn't want to be any closer than necessary to South or Lowe, and his stomach calmed down immediately.

  Sling was saying, "—shuttlecraft broke up. far as I could see, without losing relative cohesion, and the bits stayed on vector. I can't figure it."

  "Don't try," Joe South advised from his station. "We're just glad to be back, safe and sound. Aren't we, Riva?"

  Riva Lowe was a beautiful woman, to Reice's way of thinking: compact, smart, sexy. But today he didn't want to go anywhe
re near her.

  From less than four feet away, she said, "Absolutely. How have you been keeping, Reice? Ready for the big move out beyond Pluto?"

  Reice had spent lots of energy, in the old days, trying to get into this woman's pants. He'd sensed something different about her and South over the ship-to-ship link, but that could have been his nerves. Now he was sure. He knew different when he saw it. He just couldn't put his finger on what that difference was. Well, that was what Remson's orders were meant to find out.

  Looking her straight in the eye, he said, "We're gettin' there. Right now, you two better be ready for a command performance at the Secretariat. I got orders to escort you straight into a Blue-Mid slip, then up to the Secretariat for a couple meetings that Assistant Secretary Remson's got scheduled for you. Debrief, you know. Chop chop." He wasn't about to tell South right off the bat that South was getting an AI psych evaluation. "And we're on a tight time line. So we better get started. We're due at the Secretariat at thirteen hundred hours, sharp."

  That was what Remson had said: sharp.

  South said, "Sling, you want to ride with us? Go over these new retrofits with me?"

  "If Sling goes with you, Joe," Riva Lowe said like they'd planned it between them, "then perhaps I'll ride in with Mr. Reice. Otherwise, it'll be too crowded."

  How many times had Reice schemed to get Customs Director Riva Lowe alone on his cruiser? But Ambassador to the Unity Riva Lowe was a whole different piece of work. And yet there was nothing he could say against the plan that would make sense.

  So he told Sling, "You remember, Sling, you're on my payroll and you better make all the hours you're billing for this worthwhile. South, you got any problems with Sling's work on this crate, you come to me and we'll fix it." Hearty. Friendly. And with a message for Sling that the aftermarketeer had better not forget.

  "Some things never change." Sling sighed. There was no way that the four of them could pretend much longer that the awkwardness on the flight deck wasn't a real problem. So you got the hell off the flight deck. You prayed that Sling would play his part, keep his mouth shut. And you escorted the UNE ambassador to Unity space aboard your cruiser with as much aplomb as you could manage.

  And without any physical contact whatsoever.

  Maybe some things did change. Irreparably.

  CHAPTER 21

  One More Time

  Commander Joe South was back in the UNE and feeling like an outsider all ow again And the UNE wasn't helping. Here he was in the damned inhuman clutches of an artificially intelligent shop vacuum cleaner with a voice module that thought it was going to map his psychological state and display u to Mickey Croft, Vince Reimnn. and other high-and-mighties with Need To Know.

  The digital therapist said metallically. "Commander South, please describe your impressions of the Unity aliens' intentions toward the United Nations of Earth." Its goosenecked videocam arched back and stared at him with cyctopean patience.

  This was the third time it had asked him nearly the same question in slightly different ways. Interrogation techniques didn't seem lo have changed much over time. Maybe some of the delivery systems got more sophisticated, but this one was still as dumb as a post.

  In the sterile evaluation chamber, he kept having the feeling mat he was being watched from behind, as well as by the digital therapist. Fine Let them watch. He resented the hell out of being chucked right into a psych evaluation, straight off the ship. He understood the reasoning, but the people doing that reasoning weren't having to endure the process.

  So what if his psych profile of today did or did not match the one they'd taken from turn when he'd first arrived in this century, dared and fresh from an experimental spongespace jump that had taken him to X-3, a Unity world, and back to his own spacetime with a little wobble that had lost him five hundred years of UNE clock time, his own century, his friends and family, and everything he cared about.

  If he'd known then what he knew now—including the fact that his experimental flyby of X-3 would have killed him if the Unity aliens hadn't leant him a helping hand— maybe he wouldn't have been so resentful when he'd ended up in twenty-fifth-century UNE space.

  But maybe he would have acted just the same. The UNE had a way of ignoring your rights, your welfare, and your wishes when it suited UNE purposes. He couldn't help wanting to trash the crude, implacable robot torturing him, just like last time.

  This time, he wasn't going to let it get his goat. This time, the UNE wasn't getting any information from him that he didn't want to give. And when he was ready to talk to them, they were going to meet his terms. Riva and he were agreed on a strategy. He just had to keep his head and not get flapped.

  The machine asked again, "Commander South, what are your impressions of the motives of the Unity aliens toward the United Nations of Earth."

  "Good. Positive. Curious. Cautious. They'd like a working relationship but on mutually acceptable terms." Same thing he'd said the last time he was asked. Same thing he'd say the thousandth time he was asked.

  The AI therapist burbled to itself. Its videocam head arched back on its gooseneck and then curled in on itself. "This session is ended. Please await further instructions."

  It turned itself off, apparently, and sat there inert. The white room around him was sterile and completely silent. South wasn't going to let them spook him. He was back. He had valuable data. He didn't blame Mickey Croft for wanting a definitive read on South's physical and mental condition and an evaluation from the AI shrink on whether his judgment could be trusted. But he minded like hell being ordered around as if he were just another piece of hardware they could turn on and off at will.

  South had come back here to get Birdy. The AI therapist couldn't understand that. He wanted STARBIRD because the ship, and Birdy, its AI, had shared a mission with him that had nearly killed him, precipitated them forward in time into a world he didn't halfway like and wasn't truly fit to operate in, and every time somebody talked about junking STARBIRD, so far as he was concerned, they were talking about junking Joe South. He'd put all his UNE wages into acquiring and upgrading his ship because he couldn't really tell where he left off and STARBIRD began anymore.

  These fools couldn't understand that when you were displaced, you anthropomorphized familiar things. And Birdy was a real intelligence, now—especially since Sling had been working on her. He'd have been content to stay in Unity space and never come back here, except that he wanted his ship back. He wanted to fly a normal spacecraft the hard way, using his hands and his heart and his reflexes and his brain.

  In the Unity continuum, he'd flown other craft, other ways. He was now a more qualified test pilot than any hotdog ConSpaceCom pilot who'd lord rank and rating over him if he ventured into a pilot's bar. They didn't know that yet, and that was fine with him.

  He was making a new life for himself, for him and Birdy and STARBIRD's venerable hull. Despite, or maybe because of, what he'd learned in the Unity, he was more comfortable with the space time he'd grown up in than in the UNE. And since he couldn't get back there, even with Unity help, he had to make some choices. He wasn't a career diplomat with his own success all tied up with choices for the future of the human race. He was just a guy trying to adapt to a real bad run of luck, followed by a real abrupt change in circumstance.

  You couldn't ask people to be more than they were. He'd been the top-rated test pilot of his generation, once. If he could just fly spacecraft again, in a spacetime topology that made sense to him, then he didn't care if he did it in nowtime or alltime.

  He kept telling himself that. He had to keep telling himself that. Otherwise, the mission was going to suffer because South had never, really, made his peace with the UNE.

  He was more comfortable in this spacetime, now that he was readjusted to it, than he'd expected to be when he transited back. If Mickey Croft would quit having surrogates poke and prod him, he could even enjoy it.

  But Croft, or Remson, or whoever was in charge of the debrie
f, couldn't leave him be. He kept trying to understand it, excuse it, because even in his day and age, they pulled you right in after a mission and did their best to wring out your brain, impression by impression. They did it because memories, especially memories imprinted in stressful situations, fade and because serial memory in a crisis fades fastest of all. Every security type and intel jock knew the drill.

  But UNE methods were too intrusive for South's tastes. When two human technicians came to get him for the "physical" part of his exam, he tried not to take out his exasperation on them. He just wanted to go back to his ship. That's what he'd come here for.

  But they marched him down another white hall and into a virtual reality bay to do a bunch of reflex tests and physio tests. He cooperated the best he could by putting his hands in the gloves and his head in the helmet and reacting to the stimuli they presented.

  The helmet started hissing in his ears, though, and the stimuli presented in the virtual reality helmet became pictures of people he knew—Riva Lowe, Mickey Croft, Remson, Reice, Sling. And then there were pictures of Unity aliens he knew: bad representations, poorly defined, of the Interstitial Interpreter and other representatives. Every time he saw a picture, he was supposed to choose a word defining it and pick from other columns of words the ones that he liked. The Ball came flying up to his face and spun there. He nearly laughed. The UNE didn't understand the Ball, yet. They had no idea what it was, or what it was for, or why it was still sitting out there at Spacedock Seven.

  When he got his word list for the Ball, he picked out rocket ship and home plate and vacation spot. Those choices ought to give the UNE shrinks something to think about. He knew that the gloves on his hands were measuring his galvanic skin response, blood pressure, and muscle tension, so he was careful to tell the truth at all times.

  Maybe the UNE could use this device to find out whether you were telling the truth, not just whether you were lying. There was a world of difference, South knew.