by Ric Locke
They were, without exception, frightened out of their minds. It wasn’t possible to communicate with the human girls at all; they spoke no Grallt, and even considering English was ludicrous. The Grallt girls spoke their own language, but in halting baby-talk with little or no vocabulary and less grammar. Se’en, Dee, and a short squad of others were back there, trying to let the girls know they were safe and could come out. Sending men, human or Grallt, to try to talk to them was worse than useless. If a male of either species entered their section they scrambled for their bunks and lay there, cowering and uncommunicative.
That wouldn’t do at all. Llapaaloapalla was still “dead in space”, drifting between stars far from its ports of departure or destination. They were, in a few words, in bad trouble.
“You say this has never happened before that you know of?” Peters asked.
Heelinig shook her head. “No, I’ve never heard of anything like this happening.” She looked up at the ferassi ship. “Ships have been attacked by the ferassi; I’ve never had the experience, but I’ve been told about it. It would start out just as this did, but the ship would heave to, and the Grallt men would come aboard and start picking out what they wanted. They would ransack the ship, but mostly they would take food, valuable things, and—”
“And girls,” Peters finished when the pause extended itself.
“Yes. Nobody ever found out what happened to them. I suppose we know now.”
“Slaves.” Peters had learned the word from reading historical romances. He’d never expected to need to use it.
“So it would seem.” Heelinig was grim. “But for the moment that’s secondary. If it were up to Preligotis, or me, we’d dump that hulk right here, bodies, survivors, girls, and all, and get our butts to Jivver, and never never never breathe a word about this to anybody anywhere.”
“You really think it’s that bad? There’s lots of interesting stuff on board.”
“Peteris, you simply have no idea.” Most of the Grallt did that now, added a schwa between the “r” and the “s” of his name. “We have to trade with these people, or at least with their Grallt flunkies.” She pursed her mouth and blew in exasperation. “Ssth. They are the only source of zifthkakik, and until we found you people they were the only source of breakbeams. I still can’t quite believe they couldn’t disable your breakbeams.”
“Apparently what they can disable is the control system. They didn’t disable your zifthkakik, or the ones on the planes.”
Heelinig nodded. “That would kill everybody. It would make robbing us easier, but if they want slaves it isn’t practical. They brought us down from High Phase, but that would be a function of the control system, as you say.”
“And you anticipate—”
“Ssth. Picture the scene,” she suggested, gesturing forward. “We breeze in to Jivver system, take up orbit, and send you people down for your holidays. There are almost four squares of you, and how many can keep secrets? You start bragging and showing off souvenirs… Jivver is a nexus, there’s almost always two or three other ships there, and one of them is almost bound to be ferassi, a ferassi trade ship I mean.”
“Yes, I think I see what you’re getting at.”
“Ssth. They ask to come aboard, and how can we refuse them? We have to trade, after all; we need zifthkakik for the rest of our round. They see this.” She thumped the side of the ship. “They discover that we have killed two and eight of them, and taken two captive. This has never happened before, even in the stories. Which means—”
“Which means either it really never has happened before, or the ones who did it got rather thoroughly suppressed.” Peters stretched his mouth in a rictus that wasn’t in any way reflective of amusement. “I lean toward the second possibility, myself. I have heard some hints, on Zenth—” he remembered Keezer’s sneer “—and elsewhere, that the ferassi aren’t completely unknown.”
“Yes, I’ve heard similar hints.” She looked around. “We simply cannot do this, Peteris.”
“Oh, yes, we can.” Peters “smiled” again. “We just have to be careful. Trust us, Heelinig. This sort of deception is common in our society.”
“Oh, I trust you.” She looked him in the eye. “I have to, don’t I? And really I don’t have a problem with you, but him—” indicating Warnocki “—and the rest of you—”
“Don’t worry.”
“Too late.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Warnocki had come up while he and Heelinig were talking, obviously to ask a question, but something had changed in Peters. Maybe it was the fact that he was only Navy on a technicality now, maybe it was the sight of Todd with a spear through his heart; he’d felt the change between two heartbeats, looking at his reflection in a spaceship windshield, and while he still used the proper forms of address it was perfunctory, habit. He’d been talking business with the XO, not on equal terms but professionally; Chiefs could wait.
“Did you find out whether the Grallt have any welders we can use?” Warnocki asked when he had the chance.
“Yes, I did, and no, they ain’t, Chief. The only welders on Llapaaloapalla are the ones we brought with us.”
Warnocki grimaced. “It’s gonna be tough.”
What they proposed to do was cut the ferassi ship up into sections and haul it into the dark unoccupied section above the berthing compartments. Given the size and mass of it, that was about like deciding to keep a destroyer for a souvenir, but Bolton was adamant, Warnocki enthusiastic, and Joshua dubious and cupidous by turns, and Peters was going along. He’d pointed out that there was no access to that area from the ops bay; Tollison had grinned, glanced at the overhead, and said in a good imitation of Peters’s accent, “Reckon where do they want one?” He was up there now, in the bucket lift, dribbling sparks on the deck along a piece of overhead as wide as the space between the beams and thirty meters long.
“Can we get oxygen and some kind of gas?” Warnocki persisted. “All we’ve got to cut with are the LIGs, and we’ll be out of wire before we’re done here.”
“Nope.” Warnocki obviously found that hard to believe, as did Peters. Incredibly, the Grallt had no, repeat no, stores of compressed gases. They did have sizeable stores of water—most of the section below the engine rooms was water tanks—and if they needed atmosphere they simply electrolyzed it, using the never-ending energy from the zifthkakik. Filler gases like nitrogen they’d never paid attention to, although Lindalu the supply supervisor had had an aha! experience. “Maybe that’s why people get silly and crazy when the air is lost and has to be replaced,” he’d suggested, and Peters could only nod and turn away.
“This is gonna take a while with hacksaws and chisels,” Warnocki warned. “Do we have that much time?”
“Probably not. It’s gotta be done before we go Down to Jivver.” Peters glanced up at the side of the ship, all eighteen meters of it. “Could we use the lasers to whack off big pieces, and use welders to cut those up? We know the lasers’ll cut it.”
“Probably.” Warnocki followed Peters’s gaze, then looked down. “Trouble is, they don’t collimate down fine enough. There’s lots of interesting stuff on board. Hate to chop any of it up because we’re in too big a hurry.”
All that was true enough. The ship’s zifthkakik—it had two, side by side near midships—were almost straight-sided like a pressure tank, and instead of being bright plated were the shiny dark of black chrome. They weren’t exactly transparent, but a strong light behind them revealed shadowy shapes. The breakbeam generators were similar, but what had the pilots and some of the enlisted sailors intrigued, to say the least, was that they would most likely be immune to whatever force the ferassi had used to disable the Grallt equipment.
The ferassi had detected and run them down in High Phase, where all logic dictated that they should be the next best thing to invisible. Mannix, Schott, and the other electronic types had identified the subsystem they thought had possibilities in that direction, a set of vanes ten ce
ntimeters across and thirty long set in the top and bottom surfaces near the bow; each had a lump like a miniature zifthkakik embedded in the bottom. They were nowhere close to figuring out how they worked, even to the point of turning them on, if they weren’t already.
The nav instruments were different and more complex. The control panel featured switches and indicators that had no parallel on any of the other ships Peters had seen, including the bridge of Llapaaloapalla. The heads flushed automatically, no big trick, but the sensors weren’t IR; they responded to humans and Grallt, but not to any nonliving substitute. The weapons bay under the “chin” held two dozen long thin objects with what looked like reaction nozzles; if they were missiles, why hadn’t they launched them?
All the written materials aboard were in the ferassi language, blocky characters that looked a little like Cyrillic, as different from Grallt as a written language could be; if there were operating manuals and circuit diagrams aboard they were useless. The ferassi ship was a prize, all right. Now to hold on to it.
“Look out below!” came to their ears via both atmosphere and earbug, and the section of overhead Tollison had been cutting fell to the deck with a clang louder than anything Peters had heard before, bar the breakbeam that had killed Todd. The big blond sailor began lowering the bucket lift, grinning like the Cheshire Cat, and Peters and Warnocki shared looks.
After a bit of that Warnocki shrugged. “What we’ve got is what we’ve got,” he said. “What we have to do is be smart using it.”
“We should go,” Heelinig commented. “Veedal is expecting us.”
“Chief, you’re gonna have to excuse me. Me’n Heelinig’ve got an appointment.”
“I see.” Warnocki regarded him steadily. “You got a minute? Something I need to chat about.”
Pause. “Let me tell her.” When Warnocki nodded he told the Grallt, “We have a little business to conduct. Go ahead, if you don’t mind, and I’ll see you in a few tle.”
“Not a problem.” Heelinig nodded, but didn’t take herself off, just stepped aside and waited.
Warnocki gave her a look. “You know, I’m just now starting to realize that that’s a good-looking woman.”
Peters grimaced. “Yeah. What’cha need, Chief?”
Warnocki took a deep breath. “Peters, you’re a Second Class with ten years of service, and I shouldn’t have to say this, but you do not, you simply do not, tell a Senior Chief you’ve got business and just walk off. It doesn’t matter much to me, but your attitude the last couple of days is about to send the Master Chief into orbit.”
Peters didn’t even flinch. “Chief, you got any idea what the date is?”
“Not exactly. I figure it’s end of June, first of July, somewhere in there.”
“Good estimatin’, Chief. ‘Cordin’ to my handheld it’s the eighth of July, 2055.”
“Fine. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Well, Chief, I joined up in April of 2045, walked down out of the hills and hitched a ride to Huntington. When I shipped over in 2047 I took the option to do the whole eight years active so I’d get the double bonus. I liked the life, and besides Granpap was sick and needed the cash for doctorin’.”
“So your ETS date is—”
“Was, Chief. Seventeenth of April.”
“Three months ago. I think I see where this is going.”
Peters nodded. “That good-lookin’ woman you was just complimentin’ is the Executive Officer, as we’d count it. She come to my new quarters for dinner, call it ‘last night’. You heard about my new quarters?”
“Yeah. It was part of what I wanted to talk to you about. I’m not sure it’s appropriate for a member of the detachment to take separate quarters.”
“Am I a member of the detachment, Chief? That ain’t what my orders say, it’s one of th’ things that got me crosswise with Chief Joshua in the first place.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“I thought not. Me’n Todd got orders to Llapaaloapalla, not to the detachment. Dreelig detailed us to work with the rest of you, but Prethuvenigis could cancel that any time you like.”
“Might not be a bad idea. Get it on paper.”
“Hunh. Anyway, Heelinig’s around forty an’ got two kids, she ain’t interested in romance, this was more in the way of a housewarmin’. Dhuvenig was there, and the Captain stopped by for a minute. So did Prethuvenigis and a couple of his people, and some folks from the Engineerin’ Department I get on with. We had ourselves a right nice party.”
“I’m sure you did. So?”
“So I was late gettin’ there. I reckon you know why.” Warnocki looked at him, and Peters nodded, and grinned with more than a bit of irony. “Yep. I spent a quarter of an hour standin’ at parade rest with my hat on, listenin’ to Master Chief Joshua chew me out for assumin’ above my ratin’ and outside my rate, by talkin’ on the radio to the airplane drivers.”
“I knew the Master Chief was put out—”
“Yeah. Well, Chief, you can pass the word, that shit has just come to an end.” Warnocki regarded him steadily, and Peters grimaced again and went on, “The situation ain’t real clear. If we was aboard a Navy ship and out of contact with the World, ain’t no question, I’d still be in the Navy and subject to orders ‘til we got back to port and somebody cut separation papers, right?”
“Right, but—”
“Yeah, but… if we was in port, or somewhere within reach of a civilian facility, I could just ask for separation there. The Navy’d owe me time and a half on my base pay and transportation home, right?”
“Right… shipping over is not an option you’re considering, I take it.”
“Hunh… ain’t no way the Navy can buy me a ticket home, and I don’t think Bolton could sign my separation orders if he wanted to. So here’s the way it is, Chief.” Peters took a deep breath. “You post a watch bill with me on it, you’ll find me there, in proper uniform and walkin’ my post in a military manner. Comes a duty stint, you’ll find me at my station and executin’ my duties best I know how. You got somethin’ else for me, you tell me what it is and I’ll hop. But I have moved out of the enlisted quarters and I ain’t goin’ back. Stop by if you’ve a mind to. Your name’s Edward, ain’t it?”
“Yeah.” Warnocki looked up, the ghost of a grin quirking the left side of his mouth. “I generally go by ‘Ed’.”
“And I’m John.” Warnocki nodded, accepting that and the implications, and Peters continued, “But I do not care to speak to Master Chief Petty Officer Leon Joshua now or at any time in the foreseeable future, and the next time he wants to call me on the carpet he can use the mirror in the head instead.”
“He’s not going to like that.”
“Foamin’ at the mouth’s more like it, don’t you reckon?”
Warnocki’s mouth quirked again. “Probably.”
“All right… he’s likely to think of writin’ me up, and if he don’t, Commander Bolton might. If they do that, you tell ‘em I ain’t gonna stand a Summary, and there ain’t nobody on board impartial enough to sit a General Court. Write it up an’ I’ll sign it, and we’ll sort it out when we get back to Mayport or whatever.”
“Absent without leave?”
“Or insubordination, or any of half a dozen things.” Peters bit his lip. “I ain’t lawyer enough to know what they’re likely to think of.”
“They might try to make it treason.”
“‘Clingin’ to our enemies, givin’ ‘em aid and comfort’,” Peters quoted. “Aid and comfort’s about right, Chief, but you reckon the folks back home’re gonna be anxious to call people who can fly in space enemies? The spooks are another story, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.”
“You may have burned it already,” Warnocki mused. When Peters nodded at that, he took a deep breath and looked at him straight on before continuing, “All right, I’ll pass the word. I may soften it some. I don’t want to give Chief Joshua a heart attack.”
; “Nor me, but if it happens I can find him freezer space.”
“That’s cold.”
“There was room for Todd. I just don’t give a shit any more, Chief.” He thumbed his buckle, pulled the belt off, and fiddled with the controls. His suit began fading from Navy blue to its default light tan. “I’ll see you later, Chief. I’ve got zifthkakik watch third ande, but right now I got business with the XO, and I need to get as much of it done as I can before I go on watch.” By the time he was done speaking his suit had taken on the blue-and-white zerkre pattern.
Warnocki spread his hands and shrugged, but didn’t speak, and Peters turned. “Let’s go,” he suggested to Heelinig, who had stood by, watching, as he and the Chief conferred.
“Yes… what was that about?”
“There’s some question about my status. The situation can’t be fully clarified for some time; there are several others whose input is important. This was a preliminary discussion.”
“Your status with us is clear,” she told him, smiling a little.
“I’m grateful that something is… for now, something that was said earlier has suggested a concept to me. Can we speak to Dhuvenig? If there’s one thing we have a sufficiency of aboard Llapaaloapalla it’s labor, and if there are enough hacksaw blades on board…”
* * *
Peters chose the east-facing bedroom and carefully closed the door to the other. Not having Todd at his elbow felt strange—the blond sailor would’ve been remarking on the forested valley filled with light and shadow, or the luxury of the room, while checking how the light switches worked—but at the same time it was as if somebody had opened a door, or taken down a fence. Todd had enjoyed the sights and experiences, but the thought that he might not be able to go back had worried him badly. Without that pressure, Peters occasionally sweated a bit at the memory of chewing out a Senior Chief, but still felt… relieved. Standing on a precipice, wondering if he knew how to fly. He had begun to suspect that he’d do better than anyone had expected, including himself.