by Janet Morris
He made a sour face at the sound of his falsetto bouncing off the monitor glass in Blue Tick's cockpit. Nobody could hear him out here, except his ship's black box. And he could take care of anything unfortunate left on his flight recorder, if he needed to—when he needed to.
"Reice," he continued, in a high-pitched imitation of Riva Lowe, "make sure Commander South doesn't do anything stupid."
He broke off and shook his head, as if she were still giving him orders from her nice cushy berth back on the habitat.
"How the hell am I supposed to do that?" he asked aloud.
The Blue Tick didn't answer.
Reice didn't like AI chatter. His ship's voice-response was encoded to deliver only emergency information, not chatter.
Normally he didn't need anybody to talk to out here. But it wasn't going to be easy keeping everybody parked out here from doing anything stupid, especially when the alien craft looked so . . . threatening ... so alien . . . that you couldn't tell whether they might be readying for some aggressive act.
If somebody out here did do something stupid enough to start a war or cause an incident, then it was going to be Reice's fault, thanks to Riva Lowe.
Of course to believe that, you had to not believe that the appearance of the Ball hadn't been such an incident, or that the arrival of the ships was the start of a war.
Reice wasn't sure what he believed. About the only thing he was sure of was his unwillingness to add to his list of current duties the job of babysitting Joe South, the Pilot From Before Time Began. And Keebler, the grungy fool who still claimed the Ball as his personal property. And Sling, who thought he was an operator and had finally maneuvered himself into a position where an operator's presence was a clear liability.
You'd think, if Creation was giving mankind a heads-up that its time as Master of the Universe was about over, then the folks in charge of humanity's fate would make sure that the people on the sharp end of destiny were the best and brightest to be found.
Not South.
Not Keebler.
Not Sling.
And most especially, not Reice and his happy band of soldiers and cops. Space marines and naval brass, customs bureaucrats and two-bit science officers: Was this the best contact team that the Trust Territory could put together when the Four Horsemen rode into town?
Reice shook his head, and little Reice-reflections moued back at him from his monitors. There must be something he could do to make a difference out here.
Hold the fort. Keep the peace. Ferret out the truth.
He was free to do anything but arrest the perpetrators, unless those perpetrators happened to be humans with itchy trigger fingers.
The real perpetrators, to Reice's way of thinking, were now piloting teardropshaped craft majestically in the Washington's wake, on their way to the Stalk.
"Realtime, forward view only," Reice told the Blue Tick.
With a sigh of quantumly stored resignation, the ship obeyed.
There in his monitors, the Ball floated. He didn't like looking at it. But it beat looking at his flight path and worrying about sinkholes popping up to suck him up.
And it beat looking at the teardrops headed toward Threshold. The habitat was unguarded, because of orders from their Commander in Chief.
If anything untoward happened, Mickey Croft was going to become the ex-SecGen before you could say "Micah Keebler." That is, if there was a civilization left out here to declare anybody an ex-anything.
What Reice wanted, most of all, was to avoid becoming an ex-Reice. Secondly, if given the option, he'd like to keep the security force under his command from winking out of existence the way the Cummings kid and his girlfriend, Dini Forat, had when the Ball changed colors and the universe puckered up around their ship. . . .
Reice tried once again to push inexplicable memories away. He'd plotted a course right over the spot where those kids had disappeared. He'd been in hot pursuit and, back then, he'd been willing to follow them into Hell itself to bring them back.
When he'd flown over the spot where they'd disappeared, the spacetime had been as normal as a club sandwich in the Blue Mid officers' lounge.
So what was he worried about now?
But then there hadn't been three teardropshaped ships popping in and out of Threshold's continuum at will.
He'd seen that much. He'd been locked on UFO-1 when it disappeared. And he was sure it had disappeared, physically. Not used some sort of stealth device. Not moved a centimeter to the left or to the right.
UFO-1, with its unique multispectral signatures and its discrete mass, had simply removed itself from this spacetime.
You could do that without violating the laws of physics around here, in the natural world to which Reice was loyal physically and mentally, only by attaining sufficient acceleration to let relativistic effects multiply your mass and alter your relationship to your native spacetime. Then you punched your way into spongespace; not before.
How the hell could anything just remove its mass from the local spacetime without leaving so much as a perturbation behind?
But there hadn't been a waveshift or so much as a gravitational ripple. There'd been no ghost-signature in infrared, even. So maybe the teardrops aren't really physical, he had thought.
But UFO-2 and UFO-3 were each reading as solid as a proverbial house. Or an asteroid. Or a space habitat.
What was solid when it wanted to be, and nonexistent when it didn't want to be? What came and went at will without traversing linear distance? Bohm-Aharanov transforms hinted that the universe as man knew it was merely a result of a unique set of boundary conditions—everything humans could perceive as real was no more than bits of stuff caught in a narrow band of special-case conditions bound together and maintained on and by the surface tension of an energy sea.
All the three hundred civilizations man had seeded across the stars were living on that surface like so much flotsam, floating on a narrow band of "reality" that couldn't even perceive the rest of the natural world.
If the teardrops could be here, how could they be not here without leaving so much as a plume or a trace behind?
Riddles like those could make your head ache. Reice had enough headaches right now.
He had to decide how you could tell if the alien craft was readying for an aggressive act. Or if the Ball was.
The Ball was his job, he reminded himself savagely. That's why he'd dumped his scans of the teardrops on their way to Threshold. If the teardrops made a move, there was nothing much Reice could do about it from here.
In fact he'd been ordered not to do anything about the teardrops, no matter what they did.
Even if they ate Threshold whole. If they positioned themselves around the habitat and somehow created the same set of conditions that had swallowed up Cummings III, his girlfriend, and their ship before Reice's eyes, there was nothing Reice could do about it anyhow. Not even if Mickey Croft had ordered him to try.
So the best thing was to be sure he and his security force were ready to blast the Ball to component atoms with Kinetic Kill Devices if it made a false move.
But you had to know what a false move by the Ball would look like. And he had to admit he didn't.
He also had specific orders not to open fire on the Ball, even in self-defense. Even if it started opening up suck-holes and picking off the security complement's ships one by one.
"This sucks," he said aloud. Nobody could order you to commit suicide, not even Mickey Croft. "Head count," he told Blue Tick, then listened as, one by one, the ships under his command reported readiness.
Of course that meant, eventually, he was going to hear from Joe South.
South and his antiquated STARBIRD were like a thorn in Reice's side that Riva Lowe kept jabbing him with.
When South reported in, Reice bypassed the automated reporting circuit and said, "Hey, South, how about you come on over here and we talk about what's going on?"
There was a pause on the com circuit which l
asted altogether too long to be a function of South's ancient electronics and the hijinks that Blue Tick had to go through to facilitate coms with STARBIRD.
Then South said, "I was . . . just about to go outside and have a hands-on look around." The pilot's voice was more than usually tinny.
The bastard was in a damned space suit. Ready to EVA, Reice was willing to bet.
"The hell you will, without my direct order," Reice nearly snarled. "You get your butt over here, if you need to stretch your legs. I have a burning need to avail myself of your unique perspective and expertise."
South never knew when Reice was insulting him.
Or maybe he did. The pilot said, "Hold it a minute, Reice, okay?"
Reice said, "No way. I'm ordering you to come directly here, right now. Door's open. Coffee's on."
Instead of breaking the circuit South said, "Then I'll have to bring Keebler and Sling with me—or let them go off on their own."
"What?"
Reice told himself that he'd misheard owing to the pilot's infuriatingly low tone. South couldn't have meant what he'd just said.
But then, Riva had told Reice to keep South from doing anything stupid. "If you're telling me that Keebler and that box-jockey of his are up to some stunt involving the Ball, and that you know about it and aren't actively trying to end-run it, you're in for more trouble than you've ever seen, Relic." There was a long pause, with heavy breathing in it.
Then South said, "You know I'm just getting used to the rules around here, Reice. Let me see if I can't rephrase what you thought you heard: Keebler, Sling, and I were just about to go check the hull of Sling's ship. We're reading a violated seal and we can't find it from inside."
"Tell you what I'm going to do, South," said Reice, trying very hard not to let his voice betray the fury that was making his throat prickle. "I'm going to remember you don't know what the fuck you're doing. And you remember who's giving the orders out here. Got that?"
"Yep. I got that. Once we get this seal patched, we'll be right along—if you've got room over there for three?"
Reice rubbed his face with his hands. The pressure of his fingers on his eyeballs felt good. He tried telling himself that South was trying.
Trying not to be an infuriating son of a bitch.
Trying not to be a classic test pilot sort of asshole.
Trying not to flout authority.
But Reice just couldn't believe it.
He said, "Now, South, or you're going to have more to worry about over there than a possible leak or two. I have orders to prevent any untoward action in the vicinity of the Ball. At all costs. Got that?"
"It'll cost Sling and Keebler their lives if life-support—"
"It'll cost you your ship, buddy, if I don't see it and you on your way over here by the time I count ten. That's T-E-N. Now . . . One . . ."
Reice felt as much as heard the com circuit to South go dead.
"Two," he said into the circuit, not caring.
"Three," he said, reaching up to set target-lock-on for South's STARBIRD. A KKD up STARBIRD's ass long ago would have solved a number of Reice's problems.
"Four."
Blue Tick shivered a little as she made attitude corrections to facilitate a clean shot up STARBIRD's tail pipe.
"Five," Reice said softly, nearly purring.
His targeting screen blossomed to life, cross hairs centered on the antique ship from the early twenty-first century.
"Six." Reice's voice, despite his best efforts to control it, was almost jocular. He'd have to break off his verbal countdown to let the rest of the security force know that he was firing one disciplinary salvo, and that nobody was to take this single incident as a reason or a pretext to start plinking away out here, but—
"Hold it, Reice, okay? Just hold it. We're on our way."
"Not just you, South. Keebler and Sling in that prefab jalopy of Sling's, too. Or I just keep counting."
This was more fun than Reice had thought he could have out here. "Sev-en."
He was about to switch com channels when South, finally realizing that Reice was serious, began talking fast and promising complete obedience.
"That's better," Reice said, trying not to sound regretful. "Maybe together we can figure out what we're looking at out there."
South's com spouted precise ETAs.
Reice belayed the targeting lock-on and crossed his feet on his control suite's bumper.
Sometimes he liked his job. He hadn't liked it enough lately.
Once he got that hotdog pilot and the Scavenger over here, at least Reice could be sure that, if he wanted to, he could carry out his mission.
Funny how, when those mission parameters had been threatened by South and Keebler, doing the mission had seemed a lot more desirable than it had previously.
Maybe Remson and Lowe were right. Maybe the best thing was to sit here, on guard duty, and make sure nothing untoward occurred. From their side.
As for the other side . . . well, Reice wasn't a diplomat. But he was in charge of keeping anything from busting loose out here.
And he was going to do that.
Just to make sure, he was going to spend the remaining time before the arrival of South and friends talking personally, in his capacity as chief of the security contingent, to everybody on the flight deck of every single ship in this deployment.
Just in case any other fool had some bright idea.
Because somebody would. Every other ship out here had somebody aboard who was using all this standoff time to wonder whether the standing orders in effect were wrongheaded.
It was a natural reaction to inaction, and a natural function of sitting at the sharp end of any possible action.
So Reice wanted to make sure that the other ship commanders, many of them technically of higher rank than he, were "in the loop."
Everybody needed to know that he, Reice, had things under control.
And that he, Reice, intended to keep things under control.
No matter what.
CHAPTER 18
Prejudice's Ugly Head
"Cummings the Second has found out about the aliens, Vince. I'm sorry," Riva Lowe sighed into her office vidphone. Blue Mid seemed to have shrunken around her, now that there were aliens on Threshold. Her office with its curvilinear azure-and-cobalt walls now seemed to be some sort of prison. She was uneasy, but didn't know what would make her feel better. Remson was going to think she'd failed. "Vince, Cummings wants to gain whatever trade concessions are possible—make some sort of deal with the aliens to exploit the new business opportunities—the usual."
"And you think," came Remson's words, while his thin lips moved along with them on her desk's vidphone screen, "we ought to let him?"
"I don't know what else to do. I told you, he's determined to meet with them. He'll do it somehow."
"He'll have to meet with me first." The tiny image of Remson's head wasn't a bit less formidable because it was framed in a mini-monitor.
She'd never before felt the brunt of Remson's displeasure. And she didn't like it.
"Christ, Vince, it's not like I failed or anything. Cummings still wants to take that trip to Earth—and take me with the party." Remind him of that. Remind him you've got some clout of your own.
And don't let him scare you. How could anybody make you so nervous without saying a single thing that was overtly threatening?
Riva was afraid the next thing that came out of her mouth would manage to be just the wrong thing. As a matter of fact, she might have said the wrong thing already. Probably had said it. When someone like Remson decided you weren't up to the challenges, you simply stopped being a part of the challenging work....
Riva Lowe would rather be dead than sidelined. She'd put too much into this Earth gambit, and into cultivating Richard Cummings, Jr.
So why didn't Remson say something? Why was he staring at her that way?
She said in a small voice, "I think we ought to meet." Don't tell me you don't
have time to see me. Don't tell me you're too busy.
Remson said, "I think that's a good idea."
She nearly blithered thanks. Even if he tore her apart when she got to his office, she'd be in there. Face-to-face. Able to give the best account she could of herself and her actions. She'd have a chance. He was giving her a chance to redeem herself.
Then Remson added: "Bring Cummings with you. If he wants to meet the aliens, perhaps we'll oblige him."
"No problem," she said faintly. But it was one. No need to tell Remson that Cummings had been bitching about aliens in the habitat without those aliens first having undergone quarantine—about the germs and unknown dangers.
But there was a need. "He's . . . Cummings is somewhat xenophobic, so we'll have to expect him to threaten to lodge a formal complaint, as a major stockholder in Threshold."
"But he wants to meet them, right?"
"I think so. That's what I make of what he's been saying, anyhow. I think he feels left out of the decision-making process."
"Then we'll see him first, privately. And play it by ear. How's right after lunch? Call my office scheduler when you have a firm time."
The screen went blank before she could reply.
She got up, got her purse from her drawer, and then paused. She reached down and toggled her way through a morass of offices and schedulers until she'd firmed up the meeting that Remson had decreed.
She had to move things around on her own calendar to do it, so when Croft's office complained she wasn't polite about it.
Then she had a moment to breathe. In it, she decided that she was winning.
She went out, down through the tube station, and waited for her car to come. She was winning. She was back in the loop. If Cummings was going to meet the aliens, then that meant she'd get to meet them, too.
Every time she made a step forward like this she was too busy doing the job and protecting her backside to be impressed with herself, or to be honored, or to evaluate the challenge ahead as "progress" simply because she was facing it.