What was it about so many alien races that compelled them to make fun of how humans were descended from primates? Every sentient species evolved from some wild creature. The Krag developed from scurrying rodents, the Vaaach from some sort of carnivorous tree sloth, the Pfelung from bottom-feeding, pond-dwelling lungfish. What made having apes as ancestors so worthy of ridicule? No one started off interrogating a Pfelung by asking if he knew his grandmother would taste good fried in cornmeal with hush puppies on the side.
“Make all the monkey jokes you want, Mickey, but I’m the zookeeper and you’re the one in the cage. And don’t you forget that I can do whatever I want with you. You give me information I can use, I might just keep you around and turn you over to the Prisoner of War Authority. They can put you in reasonably comfortable confinement until we kick your skinny little rat tails back to where you came from, and then send you back to your rat buddies to live out the rest of your miserable little rat life.
“If you don’t, I’ll just put you in an airlock, vent it slowly, and watch as your eyeballs pop while you roll around on the floor twitching, bleeding from your ears and rectum, and vomiting your entrails all over the deck.” It wasn’t pretty. But it was, to Max at any rate, intensely gratifying.
“Then we shove your carcass out into space and you get to spend eternity dancing with the stars.”
The Krag moved its head to its left and slightly down, a tiny, almost imperceptible shift of which it was almost certainly not aware. The interrogation reports Max had read said that this was an unconscious sign of submission or resignation. More rodent noises. “I have answered all your questions. I have told you everything that I know.”
“Bullshit. You were on board a freighter bound for Krag space carrying tons of gold, but you say you don’t know about any other shipments, the recognition protocols, rendezvous points, payment arrangements, and who else you are dealing with. You insult my intelligence.”
It made little barking noises, the Krag equivalent of laughter. “Any accurate reference to your mental capacity would be an insult to your intelligence, I am afraid. Perhaps with your chattering primate sociability, your species is in the habit of spreading important tactical information beyond those who have a need to know it, but that is not our practice. With us, information of this kind is rigidly compartmentalized. I was given only the information strictly necessary to complete my mission. I have given that to you, as I could not help doing with the interrogation drug you gave me.
“Kill me, if that is what you prefer to do. Or not. I no longer care. I have told you all that I know. I can tell you no more. If I am to die, that is my lot as a member of the Warrior Swarm. If I am to live, that is my lot as well, and I will carry on with the shame of failure, of giving information to monkey-blasphemer-deceivers and not striking back at you for cloaking your evil souls in misshapen, crude mimicry of the Creator-God’s True Handiwork.”
“Don’t push your luck, Jerry. I could have you in that airlock in two minutes.”
“Gloat in your power over me while you can. The Creator-God will erase you and your kind from His holy creation. The galaxy shall be cleansed.”
“Maybe so. But not today. Rat.” He turned to Futrell.
“Lance Corporal, opacify. I don’t want to see that thing any more.”
The wall went black and the Marine deactivated the translator. Max took a few steps toward the exit, then stopped.
“Lance Corporal?”
“Yes, Skipper.”
“I’ve heard that some Marines on some ships can ‘forget’ to provide food and water to Krag prisoners. Make sure the detachment understands that I won’t tolerate any memory lapses like that on my ship. Whiskers gets as much water as it wants and the standard Krag ration at the prescribed times. Understood?”
“Understood, sir. I’ll take care of it. No memory problems on this ship, sir.”
“Thank you. Carry on.”
Leaving the brig, Max was not in the best of moods. He hated every time he had to come face to face with a Krag. Seeing their beady little eyes, watching the twitchy way they moved their arms and their noses, hearing their squeaking and chittering speech, all triggered too many truly horrific memories for him to be able to experience such an encounter with equanimity.
He was lost in his own thoughts, trying to bury even more deeply the sights and sounds that kept on trying to surface in his mind, and was not paying attention to his surroundings. So, it was not with perfect amiability that he responded to an ordinary spacer third who, when Max was passing in front of the ship’s store on the way back to his quarters, bawled a little too loudly, “Hey, Skipper. You gotta see this.”
Every warship has a ship’s store. This is where personnel obtain items such as stationery, toiletries other than the basics issued to them, gum, candy bars, sundries, book and periodical download codes, and trid vid cubes.
But most of the business in ship’s stores was in ship’s souvenirs: T-shirts, caps, jackets, coffee mugs, and patches that said “Navy” or that displayed the name of the ship or the ship’s emblem. The men bought these items not just for themselves but also to give to family members and sweethearts. Most ships did a particularly brisk business in children’s items such as child-sized T-shirts and baby pajamas, all with the ship’s emblem so that everyone could see where their fathers or grandfathers or uncles served and that they were “children of the ship.”
The Cumberland’s store had done very little of that sort of business, as there was little demand for these items and no one had ever taken the trouble to design an emblem for the vessel.
Max was probably not wearing the most receptive-looking face when he looked around to see who had called for him, but his expression rapidly turned to surprise. The spacer who had yelled at his skipper was pointing to the line in front of the ship’s store. The line that had twenty men standing in it. Max had never seen so many as two people in line before. Careful to stand slightly to the side to make it clear that he was not cutting in front of twenty men who were waiting patiently for something, he stepped up to the store’s window, a roughly one-by-two-meter opening set chest high in the wall of the corridor, opening into a small shop behind that was manned by a clerk who sold the items and handed them over the counter to his customers.
The clerk visibly brightened when he saw Max, and he began to talk breathlessly. “Captain, sir, we just got these out of the FabriFax half an hour ago, and we done more business in them thirty minutes than in the last ninety days put together.
“We got the T-shirts, the ball caps, the pins, the coffee mugs, and the pillow cases right now, and by tomorrow we gonna have the pendants, charms for the wives’ and sweethearts’ charm bracelets, polo shirts, shot glasses, T-shirts in kids sizes, and workout shorts, all with the new emblem thing. It’s gonna be a few days on the throw pillows and Christmas tree ornaments, but there’s no rush on them ornaments, it being only February and all—”
“Petrone,” Max broke in, clueless, “what ‘emblem thing’?”
“This.” Wearing the biggest grin that Max had ever seen on this ship, Ordinary Spacer Third Class Walter Petrone held up a T-shirt with an enormous emblem on it that Max had never seen before. But after looking at it for a few seconds, Max found himself grinning even more widely than Petrone.
The emblem covered the entire front of the T-shirt and was almost twice as large as such things were customarily printed. The whole thing was encircled by a gold ring, two or three fingers wide, into which was inscribed along the top in Navy blue, “USS Cumberland DPA-0004.” Below that, inside the circle, was depicted a deep cleft in a range of green-forested mountains, presumably the Cumberland Gap on Earth. Beyond the Gap, one could discern a tiny image of the destroyer herself, leaving a stylized “swoosh” in her wake from having flown level through the Gap, her bow now pointed almost straight up at a cluster of stars in the sky high above her.
Perhaps the best part, and Max’s rudimentary grasp of Latin let him inst
antly understand what the men must have just made the ship’s new motto, was inscribed in the bottom of the gold ring: “Per laboram ad victoriam.” Through hardship to victory.
Right on.
A few minutes later, having been rebuffed in an effort to buy a T-shirt and a ball cap by Petrone, who informed him (quite correctly) that, under immemorial naval custom, the captain never pays for anything with his ship’s name on it, so long as it is for his personal use, Max had stowed his new shirt and cap and was in his day cabin, sitting at the coffee table, sipping some truly outstanding coffee with the doctor and Jones.
“Have you decided what to do with the Krag?” Sahin asked. “I ask purely out of academic interest, because if you intend to kill him, I was hoping you would do so in such a way that would preserve as many of his tissues as possible in undamaged condition and cause minimum biochemical change. An air embolism perhaps? I have never gotten to dissect a Krag, and after having repaired this one’s arm, I am very curious about many of the details of his finer anatomy.”
“Doctor, I’m afraid that you will have to do without the dissection. I am planning to let it live.”
“Really?” Jones smiled enigmatically, like someone who has heard something he wants to hear but is very surprised nonetheless. “Why is that?”
“I generally kill only when I have good reason, and I don’t have any good reason to kill it. This particular Krag has committed no crime for which I am required to execute it. Since there are no other Krag on board, I can’t use the death of this one to threaten the others. There’s just no benefit in killing the thing, and letting it live doesn’t do any harm that I can see. Maybe someone at an interrogation center can get more out of it than we have. This one has basically had its incisors pulled. It’s got no bite left.”
“For what it’s worth, I concur,” said Jones. “It was a low-level operative possessing a tiny sliver of compartmentalized knowledge, which we have successfully extracted. It may prove useful in the future if we can break it to voluntary cooperation and we capture another Krag that it knows. Then it might help us break the second Krag, who might possess some knowledge that is more valuable. Not a likely scenario, but in total war you don’t throw away any tool, no matter how small or apparently limited its usefulness.”
The doctor shook his head. “You two offer the most cold-blooded reasons for an act of generosity, mercy, and humanitarianism that I have ever heard.”
“Doctor,” said Max, “for all you know, all I told you was a tiny portion of my true reasoning on the issue. Perhaps I am sparing the Krag primarily because the Sermon on the Mount says, ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.’”
“I would feel better if that were your true reason, but if you do not open your mind to me, I will never know.”
“Then you will never know. Besides, we have bigger fish to fry now. The first transponder shows that one of your art dealer friend’s freighters carrying Krag cargo left Rashid IV several hours ago. According to the schedule, it will be jumping into the S’regor system at 00:14 tomorrow and rendezvousing with another freighter to transfer its cargo at 05:52. There’s only one jump point in that system that leads to anywhere near Krag space. It goes to Keldof. It will take the freighter at least fifteen hours to get from the rendezvous point to the jump point. We’re already on our way to Keldof following a different route. We’ll get there a few hours ahead of him and lie in wait, then either take or destroy the freighter, depending on what kind of ship it is and what kind of escort it has, if any.”
“If that’s all you have for me, Captain, I have a report to write,” said Jones, thoroughly uninterested in the business of attacking and taking freighters. He left.
“I heard that the crew has finally come up with a coat of arms, as it were, for the ship,” said the doctor.
“Indeed, they have. Take a look.” Max retrieved the T-shirt and unfolded it on the table in front of the doctor.
“Very, very interesting,” he remarked. “This is good news, indeed.”
“How so?”
“Max, whatever your drills and efficiency ratings are telling you, this emblem that you hold in your hands right now says that you have already won the most important battle—the one for the hearts of the crew. You have turned these men around. You have given them back their pride, their honor, and their self-respect. Experience shows that once you have done that for a group of men, they will follow you to the very gates of Hell.”
* * *
CHAPTER 22
* * *
00:12Z Hours, 8 February 2315
The freighter turned out not to have any escort at all. When the ship carrying the Krag-purchased cargo arrived in the Keldof system, the Cumberland was already doing its now well-rehearsed imitation of a Romanovan Revenue and Inspection cutter. Because it had documentation showing its cargo to be entirely legitimate, the Igandii freighter Frenkung-Tan had no reluctance whatsoever about heaving to for inspection by the representatives of the Romanovan Imperium.
When the appropriately costumed doctor and Marine boarding party went aboard her, they were not surprised to see the vessel crewed by humans, as the Igandii rarely ventured into space themselves and usually crewed their ships with humans from one of the neutral systems. “May I see your ID cube please,” the doctor asked the freighter captain, who identified himself as Brigham Johnson.
As the man fished the cube out of his pocket, the doctor noticed that the front zipper of the uniform, a utilitarian jumpsuit that had one zipper running from the crotch to the neck, was pulled down to roughly the middle of the man’s sternum, revealing a bare and distinctly hairy chest. The man was not wearing any kind of undershirt, which was nothing unusual for a freighter rat. A quick scan of the bridge showed two other crew members at their stations, one of whom was drinking hot coffee from a mug. A glance at the mug sitting at the Captain’s Station showed that he was drinking coffee as well. One of the crew, a hard-looking sixtyish woman at the Maneuvering Station, appeared to have just noticed that a pack of cigarettes was protruding from a stack of personal items in a rack near her seat and was trying to cover it up without drawing notice to herself.
The reader showed that the ID cube was a forgery that Romanovan equipment would read as the genuine article. The captain’s entirely false biography appeared on the screen, including his date and place of birth, residence history, piloting certificates, and so on.
“So,” the doctor said, in a conversational tone, “you are from New Zarahemla.”
“Yes, I am. We all are.”
That too was nothing out of the ordinary. A lot of people from New Zarahemla became freighter rats. The local economy had been struggling for the past several years; the planet had a strong space-faring tradition; and transit companies liked to hire from there because the people of that world had a reputation for being honest, hard working, reliable, and family oriented, and for being less prone than most to abusing alcohol and drugs on long, lonely freighter runs.
“Raised there?”
“Yes. We all grew up there together. We’re old friends and we like to ship out on the same crew.”
“Yes, many freighter crew do that. I envy you, coming from such a world. I’ve always wanted to visit New Zarahemla. Especially the beaches. I hear they are beautiful.”
“Yes,” the captain responded, with the rest of his crew nodding their support. “Absolutely beautiful. I love them. In fact, I was born and raised close to the water, right there on a bay. Practically lived on the beach. Went fishing every day. I love fishing. Are you a fisherman, Captain?”
The doctor shook his head.
“Anyways, I remember my father telling me over and over again about how he had this little cypress skiff that he would row out to his favorite fishing spot, an oyster shell reef in a shallow, muddy bay that he would find by lining up a wind turbine with a gap between some trees. He’d catch redfish and speckled trout and a really tasty but hard-fighting little fish that we called a �
��croaker’ because of the noise it made. He’d bring the fish back and his mother would fry them up in this little cottage we had right on the water—beautiful place with a screen porch where we used to sit in rocking chairs and enjoy the breeze off the water. I’ve got a holocube of it right here. You’ll see that it was really quite quaint the way they built them back then.”
As the captain was droning on, he opened a small locker near the Commander’s Station as if to pull out a holocube. What came out of the locker, though, was decidedly not an image of a beach cottage. Just as he accelerated his motion to bring the object to bear, two sharp reports rang out, accompanied by the sudden appearance of two roughly eleven-and-a-half-millimeter circles in the center of the captain’s forehead and an explosion of bone and brain matter from the back of his skull. As the man fell to the floor, all eyes turned in the direction of the two shots.
There, in his garish faux uniform, stood Dr. Ibrahim Sahin, holding a smoking M-1911 in a two-handed combat grip, with a look on his face that could almost be characterized as embarrassment. By this time the Marines had the other crew members covered with shotguns, and Major Kraft was taking a small black pistol from the dead man’s hand.
“CZ 535, nine millimeter, made on Bravo. Good little pistol, actually. Good thing you had the drop on him, Doctor.” He peered at the dead man’s forehead. “Nice grouping, by the way. You could cover both entry wounds with a one-credit coin.”
“Without meaning any insult to you, Major, I decline to accept the compliment, I’m afraid. I take pride in saving lives, not taking them.”
“No insult taken. Merely admiring a thing done well.” He turned to two of his men.
“Bind these two, and take them across to the Cumberland.”
To two others: “Zamora and Ulmer, you two search the rest of the ship. Be careful.” He turned back to the dead man.
To Honor You Call Us (Man of War) Page 32