Fool's War

by Sarah Zettel

  His voice ran strong through her mind, even as she heard Yerusha’s voice from the intercom. “Four minutes to jump.”

  “Four minutes,” Al Shei answered. Yerusha and Lipinski had managed to fix the timing fault without killing each other. Al Shei decided to take that as a good sign for the rest of the jump.

  The clock on the board turned over the seconds. She checked the pressure monitors on the pipes carrying the reaction mass from the tanks to the accumulators.

  The Pasadena ran on magnetically confined fusion. Her mind’s eye stripped away the shell of metal and ceramic between her and the tanks and she saw the stream of boron 11 pellets rattling down the pipes into the midline injector where the electric arc fired, vaporizing the pellets and letting the electrostatic fields shoot the ionized gas through the gleaming gasdynamic mirror chamber. An upstream injector fired a thin stream of precious, and expensive, anti-protons down the long axis of the mirror chambers, providing energy and muons to spark the fusion reaction. The plasma ignited into a bright fury.

  Resit once asked her what it was like to think in equations. Al Shei had looked at her blankly. Equations weren’t what you thought in. Equations were what you spouted off for the professors and the inspectors. She thought in pictures, in video sequences. If you did this and this and this, then that would happen.

  The heated gas, already supersonic, speeded up as it expanded into the traveling-wavencoils that compressed the plasma in an annular magnetic field which was passed from coil to coil down the length of the traveling-wave tube.

  Ancient physical principles applied over and again. Energy built and built until it had to be used up or thrown off.

  “Plasma flow redirected,” reported Javerri, just as Al Shei’s board traced a new route for the burning river.

  Now the plasma would not be vented out the Pasadena’s aft nozzle to push the ship forward. It would run upstream into the homopolar accumulators. It took a massive push to kick the ship into fast-time space, and another to bring it back into real-time. The accumulators stored up the power to make that jump.

  “Jump threshold in five… four… three… ”

  “Torch out,” called Ianiai.

  “Bismillahir,” murmured Al Shei. In the name of Allah. In her imagination, she saw the bright blue flame beneath her feet wink out.

  “… Two… One. Now.”

  Al Shei’s hand came down on her station’s central key. A barely perceptible vibration

  filtered through the deckplates. Her imagination supplied an accompanying rumble.

  The accumulators fired. A small weight pressed against the center of her chest like a balled-up fist, and it was over. Now light was straining to catch up with them. Now the view screens showed nothing but the curving silver refraction wall that would stay in place until they got where they were going.

  Despite an unfamiliar impatience scratching at her insides, Al Shei checked her boards carefully. “Station One reports all normal and in synch,” she called out. Once she had satisfactory replies from her crew, she undid her straps and stood up.

  “Relief!” Ianiai gave her his mocking salute. In no mood to banter, Al Shei just gave him a warning glare as he took her seat. Her silence brought him up short like no verbal warning would have and he immediately turned his attention to the boards.

  Al Shei started up the stairs toward the data hold. Footsteps sounded above her. Schyler was descending from the bridge. He gave her a small wave, but he was too far away for her to see his face. She could not, however, picture a smile on it.

  He waited for her one step above the hatchway.

  “The moment of truth?” he inquired, attempting to sound light-hearted. His tone fell very flat.

  “I doubt it.” She stepped through the hatchway into the corridor. “Not the way Lipinski works.”

  “He’s glacial, I’ll admit it. Slow but nothing can get out of his way.”

  “We hope.” Al Shei palmed the hatch reader for the comm center.

  Lipinski was on his own in the center. If Al Shei had set her relief shaking with a quiet glance, Lipinski had probably set his running with a thunderous shout.

  Whatever had happened, there was only Lipinski bent over the work table with a needle-thin tracer in his hand, talking to whatever didn’t move away, as usual.

  “Could’ve managed to burn just a little more off and made it really hard for me, couldn’t you? Why do half…”

  “Is there anything there at all?” Al Shei came to stand by the table.

  Lipinski lifted the tracer away from the ruined surface of the wafer stack. “Not a lot.”

  Lipinski hadn’t been exaggerating. The stack’s delicate etchings were marred by wide, black patches that made Al Shei think she should be smelling charcoal.

  “So, what can you tell us?” She leaned both forearms on the bench and folded her hands.

  “It’s not a regular stack.” Lipinski laid the tracer back in its pocket in the workbench drawer. “It’s for storing binary data.”

  “Binary?” Al Shei felt her eyebrows arch.

  Lipinski nodded. “Straight ones and zeros. Yes and no. On and off. Very blunt. If you know what you’re doing, you can work some pretty fancy programs and data storage with it, but if you try to let any binary programming loose into a regular fuzzy logic stack, you’ve got the proverbial bull in a china shop. Fuzzy boards work with gradations and percentages. Binary data is all or nothing.”

  “Can you tell what happened here?” asked Schyler quietly. He had his hands jammed in his pockets. From the bulges in the fabric, Al Shei guess he also had them balled into fists.

  Lipinski looked at the wall as if taking its measure and then looked back at Schyler. “Tully stored some binary data, transferred it somewhere, blanked the stack and then burned it with a pin laser.” He pushed the bench drawer shut. “Then, my guess is, he expected me to take them to recycling. When I didn’t, he apparently came looking for them.” He jerked his chin toward Schyler. “Thanks to Watch’s sticking to the rules like he’s been vacuum welded, Tully did not get them.”

  Al Shei’s jaw began to work itself slowly back and forth. When she spoke, her voice was much harsher than she’d intended.

  “Why didn’t he just trash them?”

  “Ah.” Lipinski raised one finger. “I expect that’s because they were still important. I expect that he was storing the binary data in those reconfigured boards I had to deal with back in port. Then, he transferred the data into one or more of the chips on these three stacks, probably where it’s most covered in carbon, and I expect he’s annoyed because I’ve got it and he doesn’t.”

  “And I expect,” Al Shei straightened up, “that my oh-so-clever-and-honored Houston can find that data for me.”

  Lipinski gave her the ghost of a smile. “If you give him enough time, ‘Dama Engine, I expect he can.”

  “Then I expect he should get a torch burning under it.” She touched her fingers to her forehead in salute. Lipinski nodded and hunched over the board, completely absorbed in the problem before Schyler even had the hatch cycled open.

  “This just keeps getting more and more interesting, doesn’t it?” he remarked at the hatch closed.

  Al Shei didn’t say anything. She walked up about ten steps. She heard his footsteps following her, dull thuds bouncing off the near-by wall.

  She turned to face him. “Have you made any progress at all in finding out where whatever is on those boards came from?”

  Schyler shook his head tiredly. “I’ve been glued to the system logs and analyzing every comma and semi-colon for double meanings. Tully may have left stolen goods on board, but he didn’t leave any records to go with them.” He cycled the stair hatch open. “I’ll need some credit so I can made some fast-time calls as soon as we reach The Farther Kingdom. I’ve got some friends who might know something.”

  Al Shei nodded. “I’ll dig it out for you.” Inwardly, she sighed. Guess what, Uncle Ahmet? I’m doing something for
the family this trip after all.

  Schyler met her eyes again. “There’s an additional possibility we need to consider.”

  “Oh?” Al Shei laid her hand on the railing.

  “We’ve been having an unholy lot of comm system trouble already this run,” he said. “Maybe what Lipinski is tracking isn’t entirely stored on those stacks.”

  Al Shei sighed and rubbed her forehead. “I thought of that.” Confidential data, particularly military data, often had viruses built into its structure that were meant to get out and wreak whatever system had tried to steal it. “If he’s left a virus in here, I’m not just going to denounce him in front of my sister, I’m going to string him up by his thumbs.”

  Schyler shrugged heavily. “Well, maybe Lipinski was right. Maybe it’s just that our new pilot is a saboteur.”

  “I’m not sure which would be worse.”

  A hatchway cycled closed beneath them. They both stiffened automatically. Light, quick footsteps raced up the stairs.

  Al Shei and Schyler both pressed themselves against the wall as the Fool breezed past them. She stopped on the galley landing just above them and crouched on it. Al Shei looked up and down the stairway, trying to work out what she was running from.

  In her hands, Dobbs held what looked like a fat spring. It must have been fairly loosely coiled, because she had no problem laying one end on the landing and one end on the next stair so that the spring made an arch from one to the other. Then, while Al Shei was still trying to sort out what was going on, Dobbs flipped the end on the landing up and over the end on the stair. The spring’s own momentum repeated the motion. With a soft “ching, ching,” noise, the spring began walking down the stairs.

  All Al Shei could do was stare as the thing ching-chinged past her with the Fool practically on its heels.

  Dobbs grinned at them. “Linear, isn’t it? Northern American toy from before the Fast Burn. I’ve got a bet on with Javerri that I can get it to walk all the way from the bridge to engineering.” She skipped down the next couple of stairs. “This is the dry run,” she explained, before turning her attention to the walking spring. “Come on! You can do it! Mary Mother of God, I don’t believe what I’m seeing! Come on! You’ve got to be able to do better than that!” She sounded amazingly like Lipinski, but hopping sideways down the stairs she looked like some manic circus clown.

  Schyler tried to stifle his laughter but it came out as a snuffling wheeze. Al Shei allowed herself to smile.

  “She’s got that thing rigged,” she remarked softly. “She must, or it’d be walking into the walls. Javerri’s taking a sucker bet.”

  “And she’ll chase Dobbs twice around the berthing deck when she catches on, and I do believe, Mother, that our Fool will be sure she catches on.” He shook his head. He was still smiling. Al Shei realized he had no idea of what had just struck her.

  “All right,” she said to him. “You’ve got an hour left on your shift. If you don’t get back on station, I’m going to have the Watch Commander review your record.”

  He took a deep breath. “Right.” He ran his hand through his hair, which, Al Shei noticed with a start, was beginning to thin on top. “I’ll see you at dinner.”

  “Right behind you.”

  They climbed up the stairs, all the while hearing the Fool’s shouts of encouragement to her walking spring. When they reached the berthing deck, Al Shei left Schyler and opened the hatchway. In the corridor, she passed Javerri and Brand, the third-shift bridge watch, probably on their way to breakfast. She waved to them but passed them without another comment.

  In her cabin, Al Shei sat in the desk chair. She’d left the day book recorder on the desktop.

  She picked the palm-sized rectangle up and turned it over in her fingers. On its own, her mind drifted back to their last night together before she’d left on this run. They’d spent the day with the children on the monorail, looking out at the regrown wilderness beneath the last set of blast mountains. Then, with Muhammed and Vashti finally tucked into bed, and all of Bala house still and quiet around them, they’d gone into the tiled courtyard to sit beside the fountain and let the moon shine on them through the plexiglass ceiling.

  “Has it lost its charm for you?” Asil asked, wrapping his arm around her shoulders.

  “What? Marriage?” She unwrapped her hijab and bared her face to him. “Only when Vashti pitched a fit over not being allowed a second ice cream.”

  “I meant the Moon.” He nodded up at the silver crescent. “You’ve been up there so many times, seen how dead and dusty it is. Doesn’t that spoil nighttime for you?”

  She followed his gaze and smiled. “No, actually, it makes the wonder greater. All that dead dust is silver light for us. All those suns,” she swept her hand out, “are life for their worlds, and beauty for us. It’s all alive and complex and beautiful beyond description.” She glanced at him and saw the grin that spread all across his face. “And you are laughing at an engineer’s attempt to wax eloquent.”

  “I am not.” He dropped a serious expression into place that lasted all of two seconds before the smile crept back. “All right, maybe I am.” He brushed her bare cheek with his finger. “But I am also basking in the glow of my wife, who is so beautiful, she is like a second moon in the sky.”

  He’d bent to kiss her then, and everything else faded away.

  Name of God, Beloved, Al Shei thought toward Asil’s memory. I hope this has all worked out by the time you hear about it. She shut the recorder into the drawer.

  “Intercom to Dobbs,” she said to the wall.

  After a moment, the Fool’s voice came through. “Dobbs here, Boss.” Al Shei could still hear a faint “ching-ching” in the background.

  “I’d like to see you in my cabin, ‘Dama Fool. Immediately.”

  The “ching-ching” silenced. “On my way, Boss.”

  “Intercom to close.” Al Shei pictured Dobbs setting her spring carefully into one of her multiple pockets, sealing it thoughtfully, and then taking the stairs two at a time.

  In less than three minutes, a knock sounded on the cabin hatch. Dobbs breezed in and bowed elaborately.

  “At your service, ‘Dama Al Shei,” she said as the door shut behind her. She folded herself up to sit cross-legged on the floor. “What may your Fool do for you?”

  “She may tell me how much she overheard,” said Al Shei.

  Dobbs laid her hand on her breast and screwed a wounded look onto her mobile face. “Eavesdropping? Me? I am hurt, I am outraged, I am…” Al Shei didn’t let her eyes flicker. Dobbs lowered her hand. “Potentially out of a job,” she finished.

  Al Shei tugged at her tunic sleeve. “I only heard the hatch cycle once. You must have been on the stairs when we started talking.”

  Dobbs looked up and for the first time, Al Shei saw her wearing an absolutely straight face. “Have to watch that,” she said. “As to what I heard, I heard all of it.” She spread her hands. “If you’re worried I’m going to use it as a matter for joking…”

  Al Shei shook her head abruptly. “That kind of fool, I know you are not.” Her English became awkward as old, uncomfortable memories tugged at her for attention and she wished she could drop into Arabic.

  Al Shei fiddled with her sleeve for a minute, then let her hand fall away.

  “For the life of me, I still don’t know why my sister fell in love with Marcus Tully, but she did. But because I understood what it was like to want something that most of the family disapproved of, I never tried to talk her out of the marriage.

  “It took awhile to patch things up, with our grandmothers and uncles, but Ruqaiyya’s always been good at that.” Al Shei paused, remembering her younger sister standing at the low supper table with her head bowed and her hands folded in a completely demure and humble attitude, yet, somehow, at the same time managing to deliver a lecture on family loyalty to Uncle Ahmet of all people. Name of God, how she’d admired Ruqaiyya’s nerve!

  “I was working a passe
nger shuttle at the time. Earth, the Moon, Mars and back again. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t what I wanted. Asil and I were already saving to build our own ship, but even on a Chief’s salary, it was going to be slow going. I was starting to think little Vashti would be at University before we had enough.

  “Then, about two years after her marriage to Tully, Ruqaiyya came to see me, at Port Armstrong, no less. She had a business proposal from Marcus, who, she said, was nervous about sounding me out.”

  Ruqaiyya had been so earnest as they’d talked over bulbs of thick, sweet, coffee. She’d told Al Shei at length how Marcus admired her skill, her practicality, the way Al Shei and Asil had arranged their disparate lives to make their marriage a warm, working, reality.

  Al Shei had looked at the reflection of the overhead lights in her coffee and felt ashamed at herself for wondering what all this was leading up to. She’d felt even worse when she asked.

  Al Shei cleared her throat. “Ruqaiyya told me that Marcus’ business partner had defaulted on his obligations at Phobos Point, leaving Marcus holding the bag, and the Pasadena, which he couldn’t afford to operate solo. He wanted to ask me to go in on a time-share arrangement with him, but he knew, she said, that I didn’t think much of his business sense…” Al Shei waved the rest of the sentence away.

  “Ruqaiyya knew I’d been looking for this kind of chance for years. She knew I couldn’t take the kind of ties that crewing a corporate ship lays on you, and she knew how un-holy expensive independent shipping is. Merciful Allah.” She gave a short, mirthless laugh. “One little mistake and you can keep a whole hundred-wafer stack at the Bank busy tallying your deficits.

  “Ruqaiyya also knew that, in spite of myself, I was already drooling of the idea of being my own Chief Engineer.

  “So, I promised I’d talk to Tully and I sent her home. Then, I got on the wire to Phobos Point security to find out what had really happened to Tully’s partner. Not,” she added quickly as Dobbs’ right eyebrow raised a single centimeter, “that I thought Ruqaiyya had lied, but I was very willing to believe that Tully hadn’t told her the whole truth.”