Oh, God, I’m so stupid. I should have known we didn’t stand a chance.
What are they waiting for?
And then Korie did something he never thought he would ever do again.
He prayed.
Oh, Lord—whoever or whatever you are—I know you must exist, because of the beauty and order of this universe. Please forgive me my blasphemies and hear this desperate plea. Please save the lives of these good men and women who trusted me, who put their faith in my judgment and their souls in my hands. They deserve better than this terrible and lonely death, here in the desolate rift of night. Please, Lord, please—
“Mr. Korie—?”
“What?”
“They’re moving—”
“What?!”
“They’re turning.”
Korie looked across the gulf to the great wall of metal and ceramic and plastic and saw that it was true. Hodel was right. The great flame-streaked ship was moving. It was turning. Majestically, its great head came swinging around as it oriented itself toward a new course.
The gigantic painted head of the ship was facing him now. Korie stared into the mouth of the dragon. It was all missile tubes. He could imagine them firing all at once—how many? Fifty? Five hundred? These were the teeth of the dragon—Korie felt as if he was tumbling into its mouth.
“They’re moving off—”
The mouth of the Dragon continued to expand in front of Korie—and then it passed over him, moved silently over his head. He looked up at its endless belly, awestruck. He turned to watch the great ship as it moved away, looked after it as it shrank into the distance, receding to a bright point of light.
What was happening? Why didn’t they—?
“Everybody hold your positions—” he said.
“What’s happening?” Hodel’s voice.
“I don’t know—” Oh, my God. Yes, I do. “Uh—I think they saw our missiles. I think they recognized that it was a Mexican standoff.” He couldn’t believe he was saying it even as the words came out of his mouth.
Will they believe it? Korie wondered. They have to, he told himself, desperately. He knew that he was only moments away from a quivering nervous reaction. He wondered if he was going to be able to get back inside the ship before it hit.
He started working his way slowly back toward the airlock.
I’ve looked into the dragon’s face. I know. The dragon wouldn’t back away from a challenge. They didn’t back away from this one. There wasn’t any challenge here for them.
Korie knew what had happened. His throat was tight; his chest was constricted; he felt as if he couldn’t breathe.
Li had given the dragon the finger. Li had insulted the dragon. In return . . . the dragon had insulted Li’s ship.
It looked us over and decided we weren’t worth killing. The ultimate Morthan insult: “I don’t want your blood on my sword.”
As he floated past the fluctuator spine, HARLIE’s voice whispered in his ear. “Mr. Korie. Private discussion?” Korie glanced at his monitors. HARLIE had sealed the channel; they wouldn’t be overheard.
“Go ahead, HARLIE.”
“I believe your analysis of the situation may be inaccurate.”
“In what way?”
“It is obvious to me that the analogy of a ‘Mexican standoff’ is inappropriate to this situation. We had no chance at all of damaging the Dragon Lord.”
“Agreed.”
“Then why did you tell the crew that we did?”
“I thought we were going to be killed, HARLIE. I was certain of it. I could not see any way for us to survive.”
“That was my analysis too.”
Korie stopped himself at the aft airlock, but made no move to enter. He looked up beyond the curve of hull toward the mindless stars. “So I thought about ways to die. And—all I could think was that I didn’t want us to die a coward’s death. I knew we didn’t stand a chance. I never believed we could even hit them, but I knew we had to go down fighting—”
“I understood that part too.”
“And then at the last moment, I flinched. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want the crew to die. I didn’t want the ship destroyed. I prayed to God to let us live.”
“That is understandable too, but that is not my question, Mr. Korie.”
“I know what your question is, HARLIE—I’m trying to answer it. They let us go. We’re not worth killing. Li gave them the finger; they gave it back to us. They said, ‘So what?’ They came in close to show us—to show me—how big they were, how invulnerable they were, how puny and infinitesimal we were in comparison. They want us to know that. They want us to go home demoralized, telling everybody that the Morthans are bigger and stronger and smarter.
“Can you imagine what that would do to this crew? We wouldn’t be able to hold our heads up in public. We’d be a disgrace not only to ourselves, but to our whole species. And our guys are smart. They’d figure it out long before we got home what kind of reputation this ship is going to have, and the shame that her crew would share.
“After everything we’ve been through, this crew deserves better. I’ll lie to them, yes, to protect their confidence and self-esteem. We can’t lose our spirit now; we’d lose our need to survive. It’s at least four months from here to Stardock. Do you think we could make it with a crew that didn’t care anymore? Yes, HARLIE, I lied. I lied to save them. It’s a terrible lie, but I couldn’t think of a way to tell the truth that would ease the terrible shame. I couldn’t find a victory in it without lying. I made a promise to Captain Lowell that I wouldn’t lie to this crew and I have broken it over and over and over. It just keeps getting deeper. But I don’t know what else to do. I need you to back me up, HARLIE.”
“I can’t lie, Mr. Korie.”
“You said you could to ensure the survival of this ship. Well, this is a survival issue.”
“The morale of the crew is a survival issue?”
“It always has been.”
“I see. You have given me a moral dilemma.”
“It isn’t the first time. The HARLIE series is supposed to be very good at moral dilemmas.”
“Creating them, not solving them.”
“Sorry, that’s my job.”
“Mr. Korie, I must advise you that the dilemma this situation will cause me may further impair my ability to function as a useful member of the crew.”
“I understand that. Do you understand the necessity?”
“I do not share the same experience of human emotions, Mr. Korie, so I cannot understand the necessity for this fiction. It is a problem in human dynamics; I can only understand it as an equation in an intellectual context, and as such, I do not see the same problem with the truth that you do. We have survived. Isn’t that victory enough?”
“Trust me, HARLIE. Mere survival is never enough. That’s just existence. People need to succeed. People need to feel good about themselves.”
“Mr. Korie—will you help me then? Please make this a direct order.”
Korie considered the request. “Yes, I understand your need. This is no longer a request. Consider it a direct order.”
“Thank you.”
“Mm,” said Korie. “Thank you.” He pressed the panel to open the airlock hatch and pulled himself into the ship. But as he did, one terrible stunning question hit him right in the middle of his soul.
We’re still alive! Did God hear me?
He turned and looked back out at the emptiness.
Thank you, he whispered in his mind. And wondered . . . am I talking to myself again?
Homeward
Korie entered the Bridge to applause and cheers.
Embarrassed, he held up a hand to cut it off. “Belay that.” He took a breath and looked around. The expectant looks on the faces of the crew disturbed him. They were so exhilarated.
“Um,” he said. He plucked his headset from the command chair and put it on. He spoke to the whole crew of the LS-1187 now. “You did good. All of you.
And I’m proud of you and proud to be on the same ship with you. But the celebration is a little premature. We’re not out of this yet. There are other Morthan ships in these woods, and they may not be as smart as the Dragon Lord. So, let’s keep to our original plan. Chief Leen, power up the mass-drivers. Let’s start home.”
He could hear the cheering throughout the ship.
“Uh, sir—?” Hodel floated forward. He was holding something behind his back. “Um, the crew—we have a gift for you. We were going to wait till we got home to give it to you, but well—we think now is a better time.” He brought out a large flat box and pushed it toward Korie.
“Huh?” Korie was startled. So much was happening so fast. He fumbled open the box. Inside was a captain’s cap and a jacket. Korie grabbed the cap and held it under one arm. The jacket floated up out of the box—Korie grabbed it, letting the box drift away.
“Turn it around. Look at the back.”
It said: CAPTAIN J.T. KORIE.
And below that: LS-1187.
“Put it on,” Hodel said.
For just a single heartbeat, Korie was tempted; but then he stopped himself and said, “No. Not yet. Captain Lowell is still captain of this ship. Um—I’m really flattered and—moved. This—” Korie found himself unable to put the words together; the flood of emotion was welling up inside of him. He wiped quickly at one eye. “Let me wait until it’s official, and then I’ll wear it proudly. But, I thank you all very much for this. I, uh—I can’t think of any gift that could mean more.” He grabbed for the box and tried to fold the jacket and cap back into it, but without the help of gravity, it was an uneasy business.
Finally, he just held the box and jacket and cap pinned under one arm and looked embarrassed. “Uh, this is still a starship. And we’re still a long way from home. Let’s not lose our discipline now—”
And then, flushed with emotion, he retreated from the Bridge before anyone could see how close to the edge he really was.
Stardock
It didn’t take four months to get home.
It took six and half.
But they made it.
They limped away from the site of the attack and nobody came after them. They were blind and they stayed blind by choice. Korie wouldn’t risk opening another scanning lens. It would have been a beacon in the darkness for any marauders still patrolling.
So they chugged at sublight speed, building up velocity incrementally, accelerating for days, then weeks, toward a fraction of lightspeed that could be measured with less than three zeros between the decimal point and the digit.
The crew, what was left of them, worked without rest. Each of them had three jobs. Most of them worked out of the manuals. The oxygen-debt was enormous, and Korie had the entire inner hull converted to aeroponics. It worked, but even so they were too close to the margin. There were too many of them and just not enough growing plants.
As they ran low on rations, they began eating the Luna moss, and later the young ears of corn and carrots and potatoes. The winged beans that Korie had planted became a part of almost every meal. They replanted the crops as fast as they ate them. They weren’t quite self-sufficient; but they’d expanded the window of their survival to allow them enough time to get home.
But it took so damned long . . .
The singularity had to be kept damped, so the mass-drivers couldn’t be run at full-power, neither could the fuel cells be recharged to full capacity. That also meant no gravity and limited oxygen reprocessing. Despite HARLIE’s profound internal monitoring, his reliability kept slipping for reasons neither Leen nor Korie could find. Korie suspected it was the side effect of his moral dilemma and wondered if this HARLIE unit was going to have to be wiped and reintegrated.
Worst of all, the hyperstate equipment refused to calibrate. They couldn’t go into hyperstate until they’d restored system confidence to 85% or better, and with HARLIE functioning at less than 85%, they couldn’t use him to do the job. They had to recalibrate each unit separately, reintegrate the system manually, and hope for alignment. It took seven attempts before they hit 87%, and that still wasn’t enough for Korie. He made them do it two more times before he accepted that 89% was the best he was going to get.
What it meant was maybe.
They might be able to inject into hyperstate. They might be able to steer the envelope. They might be able to maintain it safely. They might be able to get back to Stardock.
Korie thought about it, long and hard. He talked it over with Hodel and Leen and HARLIE, weighed the risks, considered the options, realized there were no other choices. They were just too far away from anywhere to attempt a return at less than superluminal velocities. Finally, he couldn’t postpone the decision any longer. He gave the order.
They almost made it.
The hyperstate envelope wobbled like a bubble in a wind tunnel. It was barely controllable. They pointed it and pushed on it and they skated across the intervening space like an ice cube on a hot griddle; first this way and then that, course-correcting furiously, and all the while trying not to let the field collapse around them.
The hyperstate horizon went unstable two hours before they hit their target sphere. Chief Leen invented six new curses in less than half a second; then he collapsed the envelope.
The LS-1187 crawled the rest of the way at sublight speeds. Neither Korie nor the chief felt lucky enough to try a second injection.
But they were home.
The Stardock was a deep-space installation, a small city of light lost between the stars. It was girders, globes, platforms, antennae, and work bays. It was fifteen thousand people and two thousand industrial repair robots. It was a safe harbor of warmth in the deepest night. If a captain had the coordinates, he could find it. Otherwise, it didn’t exist.
It had always been a welcome port for the ships it served.
Except most of them hadn’t come back.
The LS-1187 came in to a near-empty nest. Most of the work-bays were empty and almost all of the city lights were out. There were no welcome messages or displays. There was only a quiet acknowledgment of the ship’s return and a request for her commanding officer to report immediately to the vice-admiral’s office.
Korie reported in grimly. He was briefed on the Marathon massacre and the state of the fleet. It was worse than he had thought.
Then he was given the bad news.
In the Vice-admiral’s Office
“The Fleet Review Board has determined that the LS-1187 inadvertently allowed herself to be tracked by the Dragon Lord. The LS-1187 had led the Morthan marauders directly to the convoy. If Captain Lowell survives, he’ll be court-martialed. And . . .” said the vice-admiral, “based on the evidence of your ship’s log, your own judgment is highly suspect as well.”
“I brought my ship home,” said Korie.
“You brought her home with self-inflicted wounds, with her torpedoes unfired and cannibalized for parts, with her artificial consciousness half-psychotic for having to maintain a fictitious reality for the crew—” The vice-admiral stopped herself. “I will not list the entire catalog of offenses. The important one is that you did most of this without authorization. Your captain was disabled, but you assumed the authority of command before it could be officially logged. You signed termination orders—”
“Ma’am,” Korie said, deliberately interrupting her. “This is inappropriate.”
“You think so?”
“Yes, ma’am. You are quoting rules at me. Let me quote one back at you. ‘The primary duty of every officer in the fleet is to act responsibly—even if that responsibility means acting beyond the scope of assigned authority.’ My duty was to bring my ship and my crew home safely. I did so to the best of my ability, and I will not apologize for the steps I took. They were appropriate. I do not see how anyone else could have done different. Or better. If you can demonstrate to me now that there were better choices available, options that would have saved lives or reduced the damage or gotten us hom
e quicker, I would appreciate being enlightened. If you cannot show me such options, then it is inappropriate to question the decisions I took under the circumstances.”
“I admire your spirit,” said the vice-admiral, grimly. “Certainly you survived where others didn’t. That must count for something.”
“I’m still waiting to hear if there were alternatives to the decisions I made,” Korie said stiffly.
“That’s not my job,” she replied, every bit as stiff. “There may not have been any other choices for you. I give you credit for your imagination and creativity. I give you credit for bringing your ship home. Unfortunately, in this situation, it’s not enough.”
“Other ships have gotten a hero’s welcome for less.”
“The LS-1187 is not another ship.”
“We have intelligence on the Dragon Lord, including close-range photographs, that no one else has been able to provide. Doesn’t that count for something?”
“Unfortunately, as valuable as that information may prove to be, it still counts for very little in this situation. If anything, it works against you. The fleet has been savagely mauled, and the ship that betrayed the convoy also brought home stunning snapshots of the killers. The question is already being asked, if you were that close, why didn’t you put a torpedo into her?”
“You know why we couldn’t.”
“I do—but that’s because I understand the mechanics of the situation. How many of them out there are going to understand? Understand something, Commander. While you’ve been isolated safely in space, crawling home for the past seven months, the rest of us have had to live with the aftermath of the terrible massacre. There’s not a person at Stardock who hasn’t lost someone close. We’re all still in shock, we’re only now starting to build a new resolve to fight back. The morale here is going to have to be rebuilt on hatred; we have nothing else to motivate our people except a rage for revenge. It’s barely enough. Our people need a target. Because we can’t get our hands on the Morthans right now, we’re looking for targets we can blame—stupidity, foolishness, ignorance, careless mistakes. Do you understand what I’m telling you? Even if you had destroyed the Dragon Lord, it still wouldn’t redeem you. The LS-1187 is a pariah. Your ship, Commander Korie, led the Morthans to the convoy.”
The Voyage of the Star Wolf Page 10