by B. V. Larson
“Yeah?”
“And I—I saw something, sir.”
“Roll back the stream and play it for me.”
I’d been bored for hours, as had most of my crew. The shift was about to end. They were yawning now, looking forward to grabbing something to eat and hitting their bunks.
But that could wait. Dalton, in particular, seemed put out. He slumped in his harness and let his chin rest on his chest.
“Play it,” I ordered Chang again. “Let’s see what you’ve found.”
Nothing was quite as dull as watch-standing in a peaceful system while docked. I appreciated everyone’s desire to change shifts, but I didn’t feel like taking any fresh chances today.
We watched a slow scan of the skies. To make things less interesting, the scan wasn’t even in the visible spectrum. It was reading X-rays and gamma rays. Splines and flashing, meaningless arcs of color shot across the stars. The stars themselves were black, the void of space white. It was hard to make out what, if anything, was going on.
Then, I thought I saw whatever it was that Chang had noted. A spot on the visual data went dark, with a brilliant center—then it went dark again.
“What the hell was that?” Dalton asked. His hooded eyes snapped wide open. He was suddenly alert.
“What does it look like?” I asked.
“I don’t know… A rift, maybe? A fast one, opening and closing like a blinking eye.”
“Yeah…”
“The stream is moving forward at ten times normal speed,” Chang explained. “Let me slow that down and replay it.”
We all watched, and we were amazed.
“That’s a breach,” Samson said. “A small, fast breach. No way around it.”
“Yes…” I agreed. “Someone has just entered our system. Why didn’t the computer flag it?”
“I did,” said the AI. “That’s why, out of sixty trillion gigapixels, Lt. Chang was able to spot this anomaly.”
“You didn’t report it as a rift. No one said anything about an invasion when I started this shift!”
“It fell below the profile thresholds,” the AI explained. “I shall adjust them.”
“Do that. When was this scan taken?”
The AI caused the time and date stamp to loom up in green numerals.
“Last night…” I said, thinking hard. “I don’t believe it. We’ve been sitting on our thumbs while they arrive and assemble.”
“Who?” Hagen demanded. “Who do you think it is, sir?”
“Probably Fex. But it could be someone else. We’ve been like Grand Central Station around here lately. Whoever they are, they’re hostile. Why else would they arrive so far out? Isn’t that past Saturn?”
“Yes sir. In Saturn’s shadow, in fact, from the point of view of Earth.”
I nodded. “That’s why they chose that spot. From here, we’ve got a better angle. Someday we’ve got to get defensive probes built and placed all around the Solar System.”
“All our space-based construction is tied up in building new starships, sir.”
“Right…”
Even as I spoke, an alarm went off. It was a proximity warning.
“AI? Is that you? What triggered that warning?”
“After being scolded,” it said, “I’ve lowered my threshold for significant events.”
“Well? What is it?”
“It’s Captain Verr’s ship, sir,” Chang answered. “The Terrapinians have disconnected from our docks. They’re drifting away slowly now, falling behind us in the Mars orbit.”
I glanced over at Hagen. Our eyes met.
“That’s an amazing bit of timing, don’t you think, XO?”
“It is indeed, sir,” he said. He checked his chrono. “We’re supposed to have gone off-duty just ten minutes ago. Do you think Verr knows that?”
“I would bet on it, Captain.”
Staring after the retreating ship, I made a fateful choice.
“Plot a parallel course,” I ordered. “When he’s slipped around to the far side of Mars, undock and pursue.”
=28=
I’d really started to believe I’d lost Godwin. He hadn’t showed up and talked to me since I’d left Earth suddenly. In a way, it’d been a welcome relief. He was like the ghost of some ancient relative that just wouldn’t stop haunting me.
But he finally found me again—if I’d ever really managed to shake him—the day we left Mars.
“Captain Blake?” a voice asked in my cabin. “Do you have a moment?”
I froze. It had been weeks. Somehow, down on Earth, Godwin’s appearances were easier to take. Your mind could convince itself that it was all a matter of quick feet. That no one could slide into existence and out of it again—not in reality. That it was all some kind of trick.
But not here. Not aboard my own starship. I knew every bolt aboard by this time. There was nowhere to stow away. The AI would never have permitted it, even if there had been such a spot. It tracked every micron of oxygen consumed, counted the heartbeat of every crewmen aboard, and generally mothered us every moment we were aboard Devilfish.
Even more convincing, perhaps, was the fact I’d been in my cabin alone for an hour. The voice piping up from behind me hadn’t come from the bathroom, or the doorway. Both hatches were firmly shut.
I turned slowly.
Godwin smiled at me. He was stretched out on my bunk, with his hands laced behind his head.
“Get up!” I ordered. “Have some class, man!”
Looking surprised and amused, he swept his papery boots off my bed and stood. As he did so, he gave the mattress a thump.
“Such hard butts you humans seem to have. Nomads live in luxury by comparison.”
He was remarking upon the austerity of the cabin—which was entirely due to Dr. Abrams and his miserly designs. But I didn’t feel like talking about that.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him. “What do you want, really?”
“I thought that was abundantly clear by now. I’m trying to help you—to help Earth.”
“As long as our goals align, I’ll believe that.”
He chuckled. “Who’s been abusing your trust? I know it can’t be me.”
“The list is long and distinguished,” I assured him. “Now, what do you want?”
“To help! I understand you’re in pursuit of an enemy vessel.”
“It’s not an enemy ship, she’s crewed by another type of Rebel Kher—Terrapinians, they’re called.”
“Ah…” he said, and he walked around my cramped cabin. He toyed with a picture I had on the wall that depicted sailing warships from centuries past. One finger righted it slightly. “Are you sure they’re really your friends?”
“The Terrapinians? They might be difficult and stern, but they have honor.”
“There, we’ll have to agree to disagree. I have a very different view of those people.”
“You know them?”
He shrugged. “No more than I know your people.”
“Look, Godwin, I’m getting sick of these visits. Why don’t you appear before the Council? Earth will surely recognize you as a foreign dignitary. You can play Ambassador down at Geneva whenever you feel the urge to visit our star system.”
He turned at last and looked at me. “I’m hurt,” he said. “Don’t you value our visits? Don’t you get something out of them?”
“I guess…” I said. “But I’m busy running one of Earth’s finest warships now. I need to focus on that. I’m not a diplomat.”
“I’m not either. I would hate such a task. Imagine, spending all your time trying to talk people into giving up their sovereignty—that’s the point of the whole thing, you know. Alliances, deals, treaties—all ways for planets to restrict one another.”
I figured he was probably right, but I didn’t care.
“Isn’t there anyone else you can haunt?” I asked.
“Haunt? An odd choice of words… but it is apt. I told you last time how I travel from
star to star, didn’t I? Of course I did…”
Grunting impatiently, I put my hand on the door panel. It lit up, but the hatch didn’t open. Not yet.
“Is there anything else you’d like to say?” I asked. “Because I’m late to my watch. I’ve got to go.”
Godwin met my eye. “Just this: blow the Terrapinians out of the sky. Don’t hesitate. Don’t let them talk you out of it.”
That surprised me. He wasn’t beating around the bush—not this time.
“Why?” I asked him. “We just armed them and repaired their ship, you know.”
“I do know that. I’ve been busy—but I came back to warn you. Now, you’ve heard the warning. I’ll be going again. Perhaps we’ll meet again, Captain. Bon Voyage.”
What happened next was the strangest thing. He sank down toward the floor. He melted, sort of. It was very weird.
I stepped close to watch, and I thought to turn on my sym’s recording systems. Body-cams caught the end of it, even though the process was quick.
“So strange…” I said, watching. “He just committed suicide, of a sort. I can still smell a faint tickling odor.”
I coughed and felt disgust overwhelm me. He’d done something to disintegrate his corpse, but it wasn’t complete. There was a stain—a wet spot that was already drying up. I was reminded of a spill of cleaning fluid.
A freaky way to go, I thought. Would instant interstellar travel be worth such a sacrifice? I didn’t think so. Not for me.
Taking the evidence to the one person I knew who might be able to comprehend it, I marched down to Abrams’ lab. I knew he was in there, even though he seemed reluctant to open the hatch at my knock.
As the captain, I had the key codes to every hatch on this ship. I used them now to open Abrams’ lab.
There, I found him. He was alive, but only barely.
“A Terrapinian,” he croaked when I gently turned him over. His face was bruised and clawed. Blood ran over his clothing in a slow oozing stream. “One got in here somehow and struck me.”
“What? How?” without waiting for an answer, I broadcast the alarm over the ship. “Security! Get to lab, and bring a medical team.”
Turning back, I knelt to check his vitals.
“How did a Terrapinian get in here, Doc?” I asked him. “Where did he go?”
“I can’t answer that—the beast was here, then it was gone. It asked me no questions. It merely struck me repeatedly until I fell. Then it continued beating me. Perhaps it sought status points.”
“You’re not worth much in the way of status, I’m sure of that.”
Abrams gave me a flash of annoyance, but I ignored him. I stood up as the security people and a medical team arrived.
“He’ll live,” said a nurse with curly hair. “But barely. This had to have just happened. He’s got open wounds that are still bleeding freshly.”
Abrams had lost consciousness, so we couldn’t ask him about it. The whole thing seemed odd. Very odd…
As a lifelong scammer, I didn’t believe in timely coincidences. I’d created my own too many times to be anything other than highly skeptical. I recalled that Godwin had just appeared and vanished again in my own cabin. He’d given me the hard sell on attacking the Terrapinian ship—then this happened.
Could all this be a series of freak occurrences? Or was it a setup?
I asked myself how I might have proceeded, if I’d been tasked with pushing the captain of one starship into attacking another.
Nodding to myself, I became convinced of several things all in a rush. One, Godwin was trying to pull a fast move. Two, he had to be desperate to try it on me. Three, and most importantly, he’d managed to convince Captain Verr to buy the bullshit he was selling.
Why else was Verr pulling out and running right now, without a word?
=29=
Feeling sure that Godwin had been playing with Verr’s head just as surely as he’d tried to mess with mine, I contacted the Terrapinian Captain in a new way. Instead of opening a dialog, I transmitted a vid file. It was a simple document—sort of an exposé.
“Here, we see the stain a Nomad leaves behind when he dematerializes. Apparently, some of the liquid in his form is too resilient to be dissolved away into the air. We’ve noted that the humidity level is considerably higher after such a vanishing trick is performed.”
I used the recording I had, and chemical analysis of the stains—both the one in my cabin and the one I’d found in Abrams’ lab.
As a nice touch, if I do say so myself, was the demeanor with which I narrated this hit-piece. I made sure to sound bored. I wanted it to seem as if I was delivering information I believed Verr already knew—as if these details were so obvious that any moron with a nickel’s worth of brainpower already understood it to be true.
“Yeah, these Nomads think they’re so smart,” I said. “They think of us Kher as fools. Dupes, to be manipulated like children. One day I plan to find their base and exterminate a few of them in retribution. Can you imagine the dumbass fools who must have fallen for this kind of trickery in the past?”
I played it up to the camera, working hard on the “dumbass dupes” angle. The more incredulous I was at the gullibility of unnamed others, the angrier any Terrapinian would become at having been fooled.
When I was finished, I transmitted the file and slouched in my captain’s chair. A few crewmen eyed me strangely. It wasn’t my shift, but I wasn’t budging.
“Sir?” asked the off-hours pilot. She was young, bright-eyed and nervous about everything except steering a starship. “Aren’t we supposed to be catching up to the Terrapinian ship?”
“Negative,” I said. “Maintain course and speed. Shadow her without appearing to do so. The cover story is that we’re both heading out to that anomaly which Chang discovered yesterday. I don’t want to get there before they do, but I don’t want them to feel pursued, either.”
The pilot and the navigator looked at each other and shrugged. I couldn’t help but notice they were both nice-looking women. Thinking about that, I began to frown. Could it be that Commander Hagen had a predilection toward selecting a certain kind of personnel?
I shook my head, erasing the thought. Just because the bridge was about half full of eye-candy didn’t mean Hagen’s judgment was at fault. Even thinking what I was thinking would have been offensive to some—but I couldn’t stop wondering, as I knew Hagen had hand-picked his own team…
“Captain?” bright-eyes asked me.
I forced myself to look at her nametag.
“What is it, Lt. Rousseau?”
“The Terrapinian ship is altering course—do I continue to follow her?”
“That’s what I said.”
“But… it’s shifting away from the anomaly.”
“I see… Navigation? Plot their most likely new course. Helm, stay with them.”
There was a pause as the woman at the navigational computer worked silently. At last, she conferred with the AI before giving me a verdict.
“They’re wandering, sir. They aren’t aiming anywhere special—no single point in space can be identified. They’re changing their course every thirty seconds or so, but only slightly. Each time, the new course is nonsense. It’s like their dodging in slow-motion—but they’re still headed in the general direction of the anomaly.”
I frowned at that, then I nodded to myself as I thought it over.
“It’s a test...” I said. “Helm, belay my last order. Lock onto the anomaly and head directly there. Keep our speed at a matching pace with the Terrapinian vessel.”
Lt. Rousseau made the adjustments and for a time, no one spoke. We were all feeling tense.
A moment like this was precisely why I was standing watch on the bridge in the middle of the “night” aboard our ship. The Terrapinians probably knew our schedules. Unless something big happened, they knew my crew was unlikely to awaken their captain to see if their orders should be changed.
Therefore, this simple t
est was an easy way to know if the bridge crew had been ordered to follow their ship, or to head out to the anomaly in space. With my adjustments, they couldn’t be certain.
As old Sun Tzu had said, warfare was mostly a matter of deception.
After an hour or so of drifting around and randomly altering their course a degree or two, the Terrapinians finally gave up. They proceeded directly toward the anomaly, allowing us to stop worrying about it. We coasted at a safe distance, and I went to bed after leaving orders that I was to be awakened if anything changed.
Just when I’d reached the state of REM sleep some two hours later, the contact came.
“Sorry sir,” Commander Hagen said, “but you left instructions to the effect that—”
“Is this an emergency?”
“No sir—I don’t think so. The Terrapinian ship is trying to open a channel, but they refuse to talk to anyone other than you. Arrogant bastards. If you want me to—”
“I’ll be right there. Leave them on hold.”
My sym switched over to the pending channel. My reality grayed and shifted, even though I kept walking along the passages. This was a dangerous trick, recently made illegal while driving or even walking near traffic. It was too easy to get lost in a conversation with a person you could see and hear right in front of you.
“Captain Blake,” Verr said. “You are awake. How was your hibernation?”
I knew the Terrapinians didn’t sleep much, and they thought of themselves as superior to monkey types who needed six to eight hours every day.
“Unlike most humans, I never sleep,” I said, giving him a blatant lie.
His black eyes blinked in surprise. “Interesting… perhaps that explains your rise to power. In any case, I’m contacting you in regards to your previous message. Our science crew was amused, and our xenopsychologists delighted. Neither could comprehend such an elaborate hoax.”
“It’s no hoax. You must have checked out my data and found similar chemical traces on your ship. You wouldn’t be contacting me otherwise.”
“You maintain that this Godwin person—a being unknown to us—is capable of transmitting himself aboard a moving starship?”