Emile and the Dutchman

by Joel Rosenberg

  Hardesty finished slicing, and stacked enough beef on my plate to feed two Akiva Bar-Els.

  I wielded my silverware deftly enough to make Mother proud, and nibbled at a forkful. "I say, Hardesty, that's most generous of you. Allow me to return the favor." I picked up the platter of lyonnaise potatoes that Hardesty had been glancing at—apparently he liked lyonnaise potatoes, but was exercising admirable restraint. I stopped myself. "No, no, I'm dreadfully sorry. My apologies," I said, helping myself to a heap.

  Sitting next to me, Ensign Rodriguez' plate contained only a politeness helping, which he'd barely touched. "Oh, I see you've finished yours. Ensign. Please," I said, plopping some onto his plate.

  I took a mouthful and washed it down with a long drink of water. "When one leads such a . . . sedentary life, it must be difficult to keep in shape." I eyed Rodriguez' waistline, which, to be fair, sported only a tiny potbelly. "Very difficult."

  Physical fitness is another bone of contention between Service and Navy personnel, as though we need one. Now, the Navy folks do try to stay in reasonable physical condition—TLGA, transient low-gee aesthenia, is a chronic danger—but they don't have to stay in top shape the way Service people do. Nor are they encouraged to display the kind of arrogant cockiness that comes with CS khakis.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Captain Arnheim repressing a grin, and then giving out the tiniest of sighs. I've always found Navy ship commanders to be a different sort than regular officers and files. I guess it's that they have to exercise a bit of independent judgment, be able to think for themselves. That's the way ship command had worked for millennia; by the time you can send home for orders, you'd better have made the right decision anyway.

  Although I do have to wonder how four stripes can turn a humorless automaton like Lieutenant Commander Bender into someone like Captain Arnheim. What do they do to them? Drugs? Electric shock? Tell them they don't have to play drop-the-soap anymore? I guess that makes ship commanders sort of kindred spirits to CS men, although I'm sure they'd deny it and I'd definitely rather not be quoted as admitting that.

  But I think it's true. "Precedent is no excuse for failure" is something I would have expected Captain Arnheim to understand.

  In any case, it was easy to figure why none of the officers at my table was choosing to take overt offense at my occasional veiled insults: they were under orders to avoid incidents, and you don't take offense at what a dead man says. The assumption they were making was that the Dutchman and I, once we hit the new system, were going to button ourselves into our scout and go out and get blown away by the locals, which would allow Magellan to Gate back and pick up the rest of the Fleet—in effect, using the Dutchman and me as a tripwire.

  I sipped more of the water, wondering if Janine had known that that was the plan, or if Vitelli had kept her in the dark. Perhaps even the light bit of flirting was intended to distract me from thinking things through; you don't want the Judas goat chewing through the rope.

  No complaints, mind; the universe is a nasty place.

  My head said there wasn't anything to worry about, not more than usual. The Dutchman wasn't worried; his consumption of booze was up—which, by the way, is the difference between a heavy drinker like Norfeldt and an alcoholic like my Aunt Gertel.

  There had to be some sort of fix in, but what? There was always one possibility: there wasn't any trick to it at all, and this was going to be both Norfeldt's and my last assignment.

  One of the reasons they teach you martial arts at the Academy is for the mental discipline. Now, I was no expert, but I could reach in and find the quiet center, just abaft of my solar plexus.

  Unfortunately, my quiet center was just as fucking scared as the rest of me.

  But damned if I'd let the Navy know that. "Allow me to pour you some more water, Lieutenant Chang," I said, picking up the water pitcher and pouring slowly, careful of the Coriolis effect. My hand was steady as a rock.

  Not my gut; just my hand.

  Enough of this, I decided. It was about time that Norfeldt and I had a face-to-face. Right after supper.

  But first, a bit of diversion. "Hardesty, Hardesty . . . damn me, but that name does sound familiar. We used to have a gardener named Hardesty, but he was arrested for molesting little girls. I'm sure you're not related. . . ."

  I found the Dutchman in the armory. He had kicked the Marine armorer out, and was busy checking the action on a Korriphila 10mm pistol, of all things. I could have understood it if it was the forty-four Magnum—that was part security blanket for the fat man—but the Dutchman's often gone on about how if you put decent loads in an automatic, it's more likely to jam than fire right.

  I disagree—for my taste, the Korriphila Ten Thousand is the best conventional pistol made, a hair better than the Ruger Ultra Blackhawk II, which is a revolver, not an automatic—but my preference is just a lay opinion; I don't have the Dutchman's knowledge of or interest in single-shot slugthrowers. I prefer automatic weapons—wireguns, miniguns, whatever—anything where you hose instead of aim. Aiming means you can miss; hosing is a lot more accurate, in the long run.

  Norfeldt opened a box of 10mm Glaser Safety Slugs and began to thumb them into a clip.

  "Why the Glasers?"

  He pretended not to hear the question.

  Again: I'm no armorer. One thing I do know, though, is that loading an automatic with the old-fashioned Glaser Safety Slugs that the Dutchman prefers for revolvers isn't a good idea—while Glasers have great stopping power and create enough Sturm and Drang to scare to death whoever they don't hit, the oversized charges can jam up the action after only three, maybe four rounds.

  If your preference is for semiexotic ammunition, much better to use Geco-BATs or Expandos—or Penetrators, if you're either planning on shooting through walls or more concerned with the size of the hole you blast through the target than with stopping power.

  "Major . . ." I didn't bother trying to keep the reproach out of my voice. "What are you doing? If I'm not being nosy, sir."

  "You're being nosy." He set the clip down on the table in front of him, then picked up the empty pistol, working the slide. "But pull up a chair, kid. I'm checking out some weaponry—what does it look like?" He followed his own advice, lowering his bulk into a too-small chair.

  "Weaponry? You think we're going to get in close enough so that a pistol is going to do any good ?" A pistol isn't a silly weapon for intership warfare—it's not that good.

  I shook my head. "Now, if you want to talk about jury-rigging something on the scout so we can get some decent free-space use out of the weapons turret—"

  He snorted. "There are three very large marines on watch on either side of the launching-bay lock. The orders are that everyone except the guards—particularly CS personnel—stays on this side."

  He slammed the clip into the pistol's butt with a solid chunk. One of the Korriphila's flaws is that the cartridges are held slantwise in the clip—it can only hold seven of the oversize rounds, giving you a maximum of eight if you carry one chambered.

  "You seem to be forgetting that this isn't a regular contact, Major. We're not supposed to decide whether or not it's safe to open contact with the Xenos—we open contact with them, period."

  Norfeldt shook his head, several of his chins waggling in syncopation. "You'll grow up someday, Emmy—if you're lucky. There's lots of ways to communicate. Think about it for a moment. Way back when the original UNEG team tried to open contact with the Xenos, what did they do?"

  "Any reason to believe that they got creative?"

  "No."

  "Then it'd be like our own First Team operations; doctrine hasn't changed." I shrugged. "Standard doctrine is to take up an orbit and signal. Radio, message laser, blinking lights."

  "Right. And what happened next?"

  * * *

  I tried to visualize it. Back then, there had been only one level of Gate, all deep in their gravity wells like Old SolGate. That was before we destroyed Old
SolGate and put the present SolGate high in the gravity well, leaving the only path from Outside to Earth via the high-and-low AlphaCeeGates.

  Well, that isn't strictly true. It is, at least theoretically, possible to travel from any Gradient One Gate to where new SolGate swings in orbit, somewhere—never mind exactly where—about halfway between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. You'd have to hit the alien Gate just at the right angle, at just the right speed, of course.

  But, even so, you can't repeal the law of conservation of energy—it's not safe to travel through shortspace from a Gradient One Gate to a Gradient Two gate. Moving suddenly from deep in a gravity well to high up in another gravity well would cause you to lose energy; the Gradient Two Gates—new SolGate and Inbound AlphaCeeGate—are both high in their respective star's gravity wells. There's no effective direct route from any star to Sol except via Alpha.

  Transfer from, say, Ophiucus A's tightly orbiting Gradient One Gate to New SolGate and it'll loose energy, freezing the vessel and all its occupants solid. Make the mistake of transferring from OphiGate to one of the even more tightly orbiting trapGates inside the orbit of Mercury, and the reappearing energy will fry you in microseconds, long before Sol does.

  It had been simpler back then. The UNEG team had just cruised through Old SolGate to the new Gate, not needing to transfer via the fraternal-twin AlphaCeeGates.

  They had looked at the new system, and listened and sniffed . . . and found something.

  And then they had signaled. Peaceably—it would be impossible for a culture sufficiently advanced to be a danger to see a small scout as a threat. Stripped of its deetee tanks, the scout wasn't much larger than the first space shuttle—which wasn't the Columbia, by the way: it was the Enterprise; look it up—and couldn't have been mistaken for a warship.

  So why had the Xenos attacked?

  I looked over at the Dutchman. "I don't know, dammit."

  "You're right."

  "Huh?"

  "You don't know," Norfeldt said. "And neither do I. But my guess is that they did something a lot like what that Vitelli is going to order the two or three of us to do."

  "I think—"

  "Shut up." I'd seen the Dutchman hostile before, but it was always . . . casual. Until now: now, his nostrils flared and his face grew beet-red.

  "I'll do the thinking around here, shithead. You just obey orders like the good little boche you are, and keep your fucking mouth shut. We've got another two weeks until we hit the Xeno system—homeworld or not—and I want you in shape by then. You've been on vacation for too long. From now on, it's one full shift of workouts with Bar-El, every day—half in the low-gee gym, half in the skin gym. I've given him your training schedule. Just do it, don't think about it—that's an order, Lieutenant."

  He looked at me. "I can't hear you, Mister."

  "Aye, aye, sir. One question, though?"

  "Yes?"

  "How about Bar-El? If you're expecting some hand-to-hand, well—"

  The Dutchman shook his head. "The Hebe is not trustworthy—you heard him: he serves Metzada, not the Thousand Worlds. So you keep your mouth shut around him—if he asks you what time it is, you don't know and you don't want to know. Understood?"

  I quelled the vague glimmering. I didn't want to know what was going on. The Dutchman had just told me that, in so many words. "Aye aye, sir."

  IV

  Low-to-no-gee hand-to-hand combat is a little like something out of a classic comic book, like Sharkman, Captain America, or American Flagg! or whatever. In all those comics—still one of my secret vices—the heroes leap around, jumping their own height in the air or higher, somersaulting into a fight.

  Low-to-no-gee combat is something like that. Unless you're as good as Akiva Bar-El.

  I kicked hard off the padding—think of it as a wall, ceiling, or floor; it's all a matter of taste—and spun half over, lunging feet first at where he hung in midair, floating just about a meter from the curved wall.

  He seemed to shift microscopically to one side, then, as I went by, he tapped me lightly on the calf, groin, solar plexus, throat, wrist, and forehead. There was no doubt in my mind that any of the blows could have hurt me badly, if this had been for real.

  I let my knees give as I hit the opposite wall.

  "Even allowing for skill differences, you still have to consider the mass, Lieutenant," he said. "You have to strike a vulnerable point as you pass by me, or my greater mass will tell."

  He untied the towel from around his waist and mopped at his forehead. In low to no gravity like that in the tubular gym at the center of rotation of the Magellan, surface tension tends to keep sweat on and around the body, unless you turn up the longitudinal fans high enough to blow you against the outflow, which would defeat the purpose of a free fall gym.

  So, you sweat, and if you don't mop down frequently, you suffer.

  Stripped to the waist, Akiva Bar-El was even uglier than he had been clothed; the coiled muscles under his mottled skin were powerful, certainly, but hadn't been developed with looks in mind. His hairy chest was dotted with a greater variety of scars than I'd ever seen on a human being. He didn't talk about it, but it couldn't have been from Metzada Mercenary corps work—he had arrived at Alton at eighteen.

  He beckoned me over. "Alternately, think about this," he said, taking up a zero-gee parody of a karate stance. His back was straight, and his knobby left fist extended at the end of an arm, his right fist at his side—but his feet were curled up underneath him, like a perching bird.

  "Conservation of angular momentum." Slowly, he mimed a punch, pulling his left arm back as he thrust his right arm forward.

  That was the only movement. "Now, if you don't compensate with the other side," he said, demonstrating, "you spin opposite to the direction of force. Try again."

  I measured the distance by eye and tried again, kicking off the padded walls, trying to time my spin so that I could catch him off-guard with a backfist.

  "Very nice," he said, easily catching my wrist with a monkey-block. "Again, sir. If you please."

  V

  I was in the middle of a nice dream. I didn't know it was a dream, and later it turned out that Janine really did enjoy—

  "Three hours to AlphaCeeGate," the speaker blared metallically, then shut off. Some idiot had apparently put my cabin speaker on the distribution list for the ETA announcements.

  "Wonderful," I said, and then rolled over and tried to get back to sleep. We wouldn't be on for days after Magellan went through to the new Gate, and maybe if I could sleep through transfer I could avoid the nausea.

  Just as I was dozing off again, the speaker chimed again. And again. And again.

  I slammed the heel of my hand against the stop button. "Shut the—"

  "What?" The Dutchman sounded more amused than angry.

  "Hmm, nothing, sir."

  "Lieutenant," the Dutchman's voice rasped, "you're on. I want to see you on the bridge one half hour before transfer. Full uniform. Repeat: full uniform. Understood?"

  "Yes, sir. Bar-El?"

  "Negative. I've ordered him to check out our scout—got both the ambassador's and Captain Arnheims permission. Repeat: full uniform."

  That was ridiculous. A weapons officer doesn't check out the scout—the pilot does.

  "Major, what's up?"

  Strangely enough, the Dutchman didn't bite my head off for asking. Unusual for him.

  "Vitelli has been assuming that there's not going to be a bunch of Xeno ships around the new Gate. I'm willing to bet that the skipper won't count on it. I'm not."

  "Why should there be?" It was possible that the Xenos had a system-wide skywatch that could spot a distant Gate being built, but I doubted it.

  And, if so, what could we do? Either the Xenos would give us a chance to make contact very quickly, or it would be up to the Navy crew to use the Magellan's armaments well enough to give us a chance to escape back through the Gate.

  I didn't like it at all. If the Xe
nos knew where the Gate was, they could blow it. Granted, the destroyer on watch around Outbound AlphaCeeGate had been sending robot probes through, and none of them had failed to return, but it was still possible that the Xenos would blow the Gate in the time between when the last probe went through and when Magellan would go through.

  If that happened, we wouldn't come out in the system we were supposed to. We'd come out of another singularity, most likely one inside a stellar-mass hole.

  I shrugged. No need to worry about that. It would be over before we'd feel it.

  "Why should there be?" I repeated.

  "Honestly, I don't know," the Dutchman said. "But I'm hoping that there are. I'll see you on the bridge."

  "But—"

  "Shut up and get dressed. Norfeldt out."

  There wasn't much sense in talking when nobody was even pretending to listen. I shut up and got dressed. In full uniform. Which, in my case, meant both Fairbairn and wiregun.

  VI

  During my short period in New Haven, I'd gotten in a few hours on the TWS Immovable, the constantly upgraded mockup of a Thousand Worlds battlecruiser's bridge that, together with its supporting facilities, occupies a good portion of Rickover Hall.

  But most of that time was spent as the bridge talker, which is probably the least skilled job in the Navy and certainly was the lowest-status job aboard the Immovable; perfectly suitable for a shitlisted plebe. My real experience in out-atmosphere flying was in a Contact Service scout, a vessel a four-hundredth the mass.

  Add to that the curious stares and the frankly hostile ones that I was getting from the bridge crew, and you'll understand why I was about as comfortable on the bridge of the Magellan as the Dutchman would have been at a meeting of the Thin Man Society.

  Well, actually there was a difference. The Dutchman wouldn't have cared.

  There was another difference, actually. I had no doubt I could handle the helm of the Magellan—if it flies, I fly it. Period.