“So, who . . . ?”
“I was in the tube, on my way to see Millet when I heard the news,” he said. “There was an item about galactic companies that weren’t doing too well. One of them was the Kuralti Brothers.”
“The big stores?”
“Yep. And I found out from Rawlins’s records that he had worked for them for several years. They have half a dozen outlets here on the station.”
He waited to see if she would put it together. After a moment she did. “My God. Rawlins was going to help destroy the station and kill ten thousand people and friendly aliens for the insurance?”
He nodded. “War insurance is very, very expensive. And it pays off very, very big—but only if the loss is in actual combat. If this station went boom! under the guns of an enemy alien, there would be sufficient documented records of it transmitted to require that the insurance company pay off policy holders. I would bet that the Kuralti Bothers have unusually large policies for the six stores on Hawking. And that they found some way to let the Ickies know just where to shoot.”
She shook her head. “My God.”
“I expect Rawlins bribed somebody to allow him access to some kind of escape ship. When the shooting started, he would have slipped away. Risky, but he was being well paid.”
“Hask died so somebody could make a profit,” she said.
“Yes. People have been killed for a few coins in their pocket. We are talking about billions. Big money blinds some people to everything else.”
“You took a big risk facing Rawlins alone.”
“Not really. He worked with electronics. I figured he must have used some kind of cardiac stunner on Hask; a neural tangler would have shown up on the autopsy, but the fibrillation damage was covered by the drone. That’s why Hask was facing the thing, so his heart would be crushed. He was probably almost dead when it hit him. I wore a faraday vest I borrowed from Millet, so I wasn’t in any real danger.”
“He could have used a needler or a zester,” she said.
“Nah. Too risky. No chance of calling that an accident.”
He stood. “I need to be be getting along. Officer Millet wants to buy me lunch. To celebrate his recent promotion to subcommander.”
She walked him to the door. “Listen,” she said, “I’m still grieving over Hask. I expect I will be for a long time.”
He looked at her and nodded, not speaking.
“Maybe,” she said, “maybe you might feel like calling me in a month or six weeks?”
“I would very much like to do that,” he said.
She raised herself up on her toes and kissed him lightly on the lips, the softest of touches, then pulled back. “Thank you for all you did,” she said. “And what you probably could have done—but didn’t. Call me.”
When the door closed quietly behind him, Gil let out a long sigh. Well. Maybe ethics were useful things after all. Lunch with Millet would be good, but a month from now, things could be a whole lot better, couldn’t they?
Oh, yes, indeed.
THE EDGE
Outnumbered by a factor of thousands to one, the crew of the Hawking had a few advantages that they had to make full use of. One of these was their more efficient warp drive. The warp drives used by the Ichtons, and most of the races inhabiting Star Central, were incredibly inefficient by Alliance standards. It took any Ichton ship almost a week to cover the same distance as could be traveled by the slowest Indie tradeship in a day. The most modern Fleet scouts were as much as ten times faster when under warp than their equivalent Ichton vessel.
The Ichtons did not use scoutships as such. Perhaps their communal instincts mitigated against the smaller vessels and isolated duties. More likely their greater numbers simply allowed them the luxury of making every reconnaissance one made in force. As the swarm of hundreds of mother ships and their escorts moved from system to system, the Ichtons would invariably send ahead smaller fleets comprised of several cruisers.
Counterbalancing the Alliance edge in technology to the dismay of the Fleet representatives, was the almost complete unwillingness of most races to even acknowledge the Ichton threat. Even when a race did recognize the danger, which might not directly affect them for generations, they often chose to fortify their own worlds and send only token forces to support the Hawking. The Hawking was, after all, crewed by outsiders. Their explicit intention to organize all the planets of Star Central under their coordination often appeared a greater threat to the local leaders than the distant Ichtons.
THE STAND ON LUMINOS
by Robert Sheckley
Frank Livermore was on his way to the blue briefing room, where the assignments for his section were being given out. Frank was more than ready, too. He was tired of waiting around while the high brass sat in their plush conference rooms on the Hawking’s upper levels and decided the fate of middle-level officers like Frank. He might be assigned to outpost duty on some lonely, deserted little world where he’d be expected to watch for the arrival of the Ichton fleet, and then try to get out at the last minute. Or he could be assigned to one of the task forces that civilization had set up in various locales as part of their great effort to contain the Ichtons before they reached the home worlds.
“Hey, Frank, wait up!”
Frank turned, recognizing the voice of Owen Staging, the trader, who had made his acquaintance early in the trip. Staging was a big, barrel-chested man with a boxer’s pug nose and the forward-thrust shoulders of a belligerent bull. He was a tough man, cynical and profane, who managed to stay popular with everyone aboard the Hawking. Frank liked him, too, though he neither entirely trusted Owen nor subscribed to his ethics.
“Where you off to in such a hurry?” Owen asked.
“They’ve called a briefing session,” Frank said.
“About time,” Owen said.
“These things take time,” Frank said.
Owen shrugged. “Where do you think they’ll send you?” the trader asked.
“You know as much about it as I do,” Livermore said.
“I just might know more about it than you do,” Staging said.
“I don’t get you,” said Frank.
Owen smiled and laid a forefinger alongside his nose. “I got a kind of idea about where they’ll send you.”
“Where?”
“Hell, no sense talking about it yet, it’s only a hunch,” Owen said lazily. “Tell you what, though. Come have a drink with me after you get your assignment, Frank. In the Rotifer Room, okay? I’ve something to tell you I think you’ll like to hear.”
Frank looked at Owen with mild exasperation. He knew how the trader loved to pretend to have inside information. And perhaps the man did have such knowledge. Some people always seemed to know what was going on behind the closed doors in the upper-level boardrooms where senior officers conducted the day-to-day business of fighting the war against the Ichtons.
“All right, I’ll see you there,” Frank said, then hurried off onto the express walkway that led to Blue Briefing B.
The small auditorium had seating for about five hundred people. Frank noted that it was about half full. It was a circular functional room with no pretense to grace. There was mellow indirect lighting, as in many places on the Stephen Hawking. The place looked somber, shadowy, and official. Frank found a seat in one of the front rows between a bearded gunnery officer and a uniformed woman from Ship’s Stores. Frank couldn’t remember seeing either of them before. It was strange, how long you could live on the Hawking without meeting any appreciable number of its ten thousand mixed personnel. At the end of a five-year tour of duty you rarely knew anyone beyond the core group of ten or twenty people with whom you had immediate business. Although most of the Hawking’s great expanse of space and its array of stores, shops, buildings, and structures of all sorts were pretty much open to everyone, people tended to live pretty much in their own section and to limit their friendships to people with similar job descriptions.
The gunnery officer sitt
ing beside him unexpectedly said, “You’re Frank Rushmore, aren’t you?”
Frank looked at the man. The gunnery officer was in his late sixties, like Frank. He had that tired, somewhat cynical look that some officers got when they stuck too closely to their specialty for too long. Officers are not encouraged to sound off about matters outside their own competence, of course. Phlegmatic and incurious, that was the desideratum; but some measure of the simian quality was needed if a man was to stay mentally alive.
“Hello,” the gunnery officer said. “I’m Sweyn Dorrin.” He was broad-faced and clean-cut except for the tufts of hair on the points of his jaw that proclaimed him a follower of Daghout, a mystery cult that had made some inroads into the loyalties of Fleet personnel in recent years. Dorrin did not look the religious type, however. He had a dull and incurious look about him, as if hardly anything was worth his while to consider, or even to wonder at.
Yet he was wondering something now, perhaps just for the sake of the conversation, for he asked Frank, “Do you know where they’re posting you?”
“My superior hasn’t discussed it with me,” Frank said, not particularly wanting to talk with the man but unsure how to extricate himself without seeming rude. “Do you know?”
“Of course,” the gunnery officer said. “My CO said to me, Dorrin, you’re the best man we’ve got on Class C Projectile Spotting Systems. No combat zone assignment for you. We need you to train new troops. They’ll be moving you back to the secondary services depot at Star Green Charley.”
“Good for you,” Frank said.
“Thanks,” the gunnery officer said, ignoring Frank’s irony. “What about you, Frank?”
“How do you know my name?” Frank asked.
“I used to see you at the Academy outpost at Deneb XI. They said you were a square shooter.”
Frank knew he had been a good officer, conscientious, thorough, but never flashy, never seriously considered for higher ranks. They’d never put his name forward for promotions above and beyond what fell to him through seniority. He was twenty-nine years in the service, and what had it gotten him? A lot of traveling, a lot of staring at the insides of spaceships, a lot of leave in strange places, a lot of women he didn’t remember the next day, and who didn’t remember him the next minute. That was about all the years in the Fleet had brought him, and he wondered now why it had all gone by so fast. Retirement time was coming up and he wasn’t sure what he was going to do, retire with thirty years or take another hitch. There was a war on, of course, and some would say that now was not a time to be leaving the Fleet. But there was always a war on somewhere and a man had to think of himself sometime didn’t he? It seemed to him that a man owed something to himself, though Frank wasn’t sure what that something was.
The gunnery officer wanted to talk about old times, but the assignments officer had entered the auditorium and obviously wanted to get on with it. This officer’s name was James Gilroy and he had been doing this for a long time, leading out the assignments as they came down to him from the Fleet Planning Offices.
Frank’s speculations were stopped when he heard the assignments officer call his name.
James Gilroy’s dry voice said, “Mr. Rushmore? You have been given a special assignment in sector forty-three. Lieutenant Membrino will meet you in Room IK and give you the requisite information and documentation.”
Frank groaned inwardly. He had just come back from a three-month mission in his single-man scoutship. He could have used some time off, a chance to have a little fun in the honky-tonk bars on the Green-Green level of the Hawking. But he made no protest, saluted, and left the conference hall.
Lieutenant Membrino was quite young, no more than his early twenties. He had a small mustache and a serious case of acne.
“You are Mr. Rushmore? I have all the data right here for you.” He handed Frank a small black plastic satchel and motioned for him to open it. Within were star charts, a stack of printouts, and an assignment list. In a separate envelope were his orders.
Frank read that he was to go to the planet Luminos, and there present his credentials as a messenger from the Stephen Hawking. Once he had established his bona fides, he was to inform the inhabitants of the planet of their situation apropos of the Ichtons. A position paper on Luminos followed. The gist of it was that Luminos was in the path of the oncoming Ichton space fleet.
“I don’t understand,” Frank said. “Why does someone have to go there and tell them? Why not just send a voice torpedo?”
“They might not pay attention,” Membrino said. “Luminos is a new world, and the Saurians are not very sophisticated in the ways of interstellar politics. Their electrical technology is scarcely a generation old. They’re still pre-atomic. They have only recently encountered the idea that other intelligent races exist in the galaxy other than themselves. If we sent a message, it would simply confuse them. They have had so little experience of other races that a lot of them still believe some of their own people might be trying to pull off a hoax. Whereas if you appear in a scoutship that employs a technology a thousand years beyond anything they’ve got, and deliver your message . . .”
“I get the idea,” Frank said. “In how much danger are they?”
“That’s the sad part. According to our best calculations, Luminos is directly in the Ichton invasion path.”
“How much time do I have before they show up?”
“It looks like three weeks, maybe a month. Enough time. But you’ll have to move lively, Mr. Rushmore, to get in and out of there without getting into trouble.”
The Rotifer Room was an expensive eating spot and nightside hangout much frequented by the better-heeled members of the Hawking’s personnel. This tended to limit it to upper ratings and wealthy or at least affluent traders. Frank had often passed by its discreet entrance on Green-Green with the plastic palm tree copied from the logo of the ancient Stork Club of Earth. He had never gone in, not because he couldn’t afford it—anybody could buy a drink at the Rotifer—but because his tastes tended toward the egalitarian and he was more than a little uncomfortable in close proximity to wealth and position of a sort he had never attained.
Owen Staging was waiting for him inside, seated at a table near the small, highly polished dance floor. This was not an hour when people were dancing, however. Not even the orchestra was present. The place was empty except for Staging and Frank and one or two couples in dark corners, and a discreet waiter in black tuxedo who moved around noiselessly, making sure everyone had drinks.
“Take a seat, Frank,” Owen Staging said. His voice was vibrant, with strong chest tones. The big trader was wearing a shirt of some iridescent material decorated with many bits of cloth and metal sewn on to it. The fashion was a little too young for him to carry off successfully. His wristwatch was a genuine Abbott; aside from keeping time it also regulated his body’s autonomic systems, checking and smoothing out any disparities when they deviated from Owen’s previously established norm. The Abbott also had an automatic yearly adjustment for aging, and in most ways took the place of a personal physician, with advantage, some would say. The big trader looked the picture of health. He was in his late fifties, the prime of life, a big man, on the corpulent side, with large fleshy features and lank blond hair cut in a short brushcut. The smile on his face came easily and seemed genuine. This is a pleasant man, you would have said to yourself. Then, a moment or two later, you would have thought, But there is something about him . . . You’d mean something unpleasant, but you wouldn’t know just what it was. Perhaps it was the flat, appraising way Staging looked at you, sizing you up and deciding what use you could be to him. That might have been it. At the present moment, however, the trader was all affability as he pushed a chair out for Frank and clicked his fingers for the waiter.
When the waiter came with the wine list, Owen pushed it aside. “Try some of the Vivot Clique ’94, Frank. The sommelier didn’t even know he had it until he was looking for something else in his Violet dec
k storage bay and found this. Pricey, but worth every credit of it.”
“Just a beer,” Frank said to the waiter.
He was uncomfortable around the trader, but had come to think of him as his friend. They had done a lot of drinking and talking together on the long trip out to Star Central. The trader had been affable and had shown interest in Frank.
“So what assignment did you get?”
“I’m dispatched to a planet called Luminos,” Frank said.
“Luminos?” The trader’s yellow eyes closed as he thought for a moment. Then they snapped open. “Luminos! Right on the edge of the war zone, isn’t it?”
“I’m not supposed to talk about my assignment,” Frank said.
“Come on, Frank! What am I, an Ichton spy?”
“Of course not,” Frank said. “It’s just that some things are best kept private.”
“I already know,” Staging said. “So they’re sending you to Luminos? It’s a useless assignment.”
“Well, someone’s got to warn them,” Frank said.
“But why you? It’s a rotten assignment, Frank. You just got back from a long one-man run. You’ll be weeks getting to Luminos in a scouter, and once you get there there’ll be nothing for you to do. The Saurians of Luminos won’t want to talk to you; not after the news you bring them. And there’ll be no traders there to talk to because the whole thing’s in a war zone. And while you’re being bored to death on this provincial little planet, there’s a good chance you’ll be rather messily killed if the Ichtons come through earlier than expected.”
“Somebody has to do this sort of work,” Frank said. “That’s what the Fleet’s out here for. We have to warn all intelligent races who are in the path of the Ichtons.”
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