Double Spiral War Trilogy

by Warren Norwood

  “Up yours…sir,” Hilldill said flatly, his stare steady and cold on Stonefield.

  No one except Stonefield moved. He leaned back in his chair, returned Hilldill’s stare, then spoke in a voice that was almost a whisper. “Avitor Hilldill, while I am chairman of the Joint Chiefs you will show respect…or….you and your precious pipe jockies will find yourselves on the short end of every compromise this body has to make. Do I make myself clear?”

  Hilldill neither flinched nor hesitated. “Perfectly, Admiral. But since Flight Service is always on the short end anyway, I doubt that we’ll suffer much.”

  After only the briefest pause, Stonefiled gave him a tightlipped smile. “How would you like to have to collect your own methane?” he asked. “Or how would you like to find your precious, archaic Flight Service dismantled wing by wing and put under direct fleet orders? Would you like that, sir? Because if you would, I believe that under the War Control Act I have quite enough power to do just that.”

  Hilldill turned red and sputtered.

  “Oh, I know,” Stonefield continued with his eyes growing narrower. “I know it would cause turmoil for a while – might even cost us the Matthews system if we weren’t careful, but you know what, Hilldill, I might do it anyway, just to eliminate your continual complaints once and for all.”

  No one present believed Stonefield would do what he said, but none of them, especially Avitor Hilldill, was willing to risk testing him, or even, it seemed, to violate the uncomfortable silence that held them all in their place.

  “Perhaps, sir,” Mari finally said to break the tension, “perhaps we should return to the question of the politicians and the Tellers, and if I may, I’d like to make a suggestion.” Despite the put-down of Hilldill, whom Mari considered a trustworthy friend, he admired the way Stonefield’s whole expression changed when he turned to respond.

  “Thank you, General. That is an excellent idea. Please, give us your suggestion.”

  The tension was still thick in the room, but Mari decided to talk through it. “Well, sir, it seems to me that we might solve both problems at once if we used the Efcorps as the official source of all information.”

  “But they’re controlled by the politicians,” Lindshaw objected.

  “Exactly. Which means that the politicians control the news as we give it to them. And they’ll only give the Tellers what makes them look good. But so long as the Efcorps was the one and only official source, the Services would be out from under pressure.”

  “That will raise a lot of constitutional and confederational questions,” Lindshaw said.

  “But maybe by the time they’re settled, we will have won the war,” Stonefield added. “and those questions won’t matter.”

  “The Tellers will scream about freedom of information,” Admiral Eresser said.

  “Let them scream. We’ll tell them to read the War Control Act.” Mari didn’t mean to salt Hilldill’s fresh wound, but Stonefield had inadvertently given them a possible answer. He glanced quickly at Hilldill, but his friend was bent over the contents of a folder and didn’t seem to react.

  “It seems to me that only solves half of our problem, General,” Lindshaw said. “If we control the news to the politicians and the politicians control it to the Tellers, we’ll still have the politicians on our backs.”

  “Not if we tell them everything.”

  Heads snapped when he said that.

  “Well, not exactly everything,” he continued, “but enough so that both the Tri-Cameral and the Combined Committees were thoroughly briefed and had more information than they could safely release.”

  “What would keep them from releasing the information too early?” Stonefield asked.

  “If we dump a lot on them now, sir, almost without warning, and keep dumping it on them, we control its timeliness.”

  “You’re saying give them considerable old information now and new information only after it becomes old. Is that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I still say the Tellers won’t stand for it.”

  “Oh, I think General Mari had the right answer for the Tellers, Admiral, and that gets you and your people off the block. I’m not saying that they won’t be happy, but once it becomes obvious that the system has changed and the Efcorps – which will no doubt love its new power – is the place to go their stories, I think it just might work.”

  The room buzzed with private comments.

  “May I add to this discussion, sir?”

  All eyes turned to Hilldill.

  “Certainly, Avitor.”

  “Sir, colleagues, I do not doubt the immensity of the powers we were granted under the War Control Act, both to us as a body, and to our chairman in particular…”

  Everyone waited. Don’t push, Mari thought. For the sake of Sondak, don’t push this.

  “However,” Hilldill continued, “I think it would serve us well to use those powers as judiciously as possible, lest we set dangerous precedents. I fully respect General Mari’s intentions, and furthermore, I appreciate the practicality of his idea. But as Admiral Lindshaw indicated, we would arouse serious constitutional and confederational questions by such actions – not to mention the freedom of information problem – and if we can avoid those difficulties, I believe we should attempt by all means to do so.”

  “Is that all, Avitor?” Stonefield asked after a long pause.

  “Yes, sir. That is all. For me, it is quite a lot.”

  Mari winced and held his breath as he waited tensely for Stonefield to react.

  “Very well, then. I think you’ve made your position quite clear – as has Admiral Lindshaw. We will consider both before making our final decision.”

  With a low sigh Mari relaxed in his chair. He had hoped his complaint would bring some action, and now it looked like it would. There would be some interesting controversies stirred if the elitist Efcorps with its high-hand news reporters was given this job and brought under the intense scrutiny of its far more successful and plebian competitor, the Official Tellers.

  Once the Joint Chiefs settled this question, he planned to reintroduce the idea of Abandoning Matthews system.

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  “But I thought you said –“

  “I did, Caugust. I did. Don’t let these equations fool you. What Ayne Wallen formulated for us is the basis for a reciprocal weapon.” Sjean sighed. “I have to keep reminding myself of that. Too many years of looking at things from the wrong direction, I think. Anyway, if you ignore the negative exponents for a moment and concentrate on the balance…”

  She let her voice trail off as she recognized the look on Caugust’s face. He was formulating something himself, and until he finished it, there would be no getting through to him. It was one of his most frustrating traits, one which made him look slow, even dim-witted at times, but Sjean had learned to adjust to it and patiently waited him out.

  Finally he drew a large circle around one set of the equations, then looked up at her with an odd sparkle in his eyes.

  “Wallen did more than that.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Look, Sjean,” he said, rapidly tapping the equations with a kind of nervous excitement, “if I understand what you’ve told me, and what these equations mean, not only did Wallen formulate the basis for the weapon itself, he also indicated a way to aim it.”

  “Now I don’t understand, sir.”

  “All right, look. In Guntteray’s prolegomenon to the basics of his theory, he stated…”

  Six hours later Sjean returned to her rooms, tired to the bones, but understanding all too well what Caugust had seen in Ayne’s equations. He was right, of course. There was a suggestion in the equations of how such a weapon might be aimed. But the path from the equations to an actual weapon looked longer and more arduous than ever.

  In a week she would not only have to be able to explain all this in far less than six hours, she would also have to welcome the new additions to Drautzlab’s staff. The
seven expatriate physicists, four nonhuman and three human, and their families had fled from the U.C.S. along with thousands of other intellectuals to what they considered to be the morally right side of the war.

  At least they all spoke gentongue, so she wouldn’t have translators cluttering up the lab as well as seven lost scientists wandering around outside their normal space.

  Sjean didn’t know whether their coming would be a blessing or a curse, but she did know that her main project would suffer, and that made her slightly angry. Sondak needed the ultimate weapon as quickly as it could be developed. According to the Teller reports, the Ukes were doing just about whatever they damned well pleased in the galaxy, and there were all kinds of dire predictions about the possible outcomes of the war.

  She did not want to hear any of that, but she couldn’t ignore it. With two sisters in Flight Service and a dozen other relatives just joined one or another of the services, family and duty demanded that she do her part. Yet however much she accomplished each day, she never felt a sense of meeting the urgency of the war. Others at Drautzlab were producing real weapons systems for use in the very near future. She was struggling with a project that might never bring results.

  But in spite of everything, she lay back on the bed and went to sleep with a slight smile on her face, a smile born of years of scientific patience. Not everyone can be in the battlespace, she reminded herself. Some of us have to build the ammunition. With that thought she fell asleep.

  14

  LUCKY STARED IN DISBELIEF at the picture that appeared on his viewscreen when Graycloud popped out of subspace. He immediately braked as hard as the shuddering dampers would allow, all the while keeping one grim eye on the space battle which raged between him and Oina.

  “The Oinaise are neutral,” he reminded himself aloud, as though by saying that the picture would change. It didn’t.

  Pinpoints of light grew to dazzling flashes against the background of stars, then traced bright lines that left afterimages on his retinas.

  Brief spectroscopic explosions flowered brilliantly with startling hues of color. Then they dissolved into transparent pastel lenses through which shadows and light shifted at odd angles of optical illusion that made depth perception almost impossible.

  In the midst of it all, Oina hung like a fragile, blue-green gem, caught in a conflict that all logic said should not have been taking place. But it was taking place. Neutral Oina was being attacked by someone, for some reason, and Lucky wanted to know who, and why.

  With a reflex reaction, he started scanning the standard lightspeed communications channels as Graycloud vibrated violently against the full braking action of its engines.

  The few channels that were active spurted equally violent messages into the cockpit. Lucky did not have to be able to understand the languages he heard to know what was going on. Battle communications in any language have harsh, staccato patterns of their own, all too easy for the experienced ear to recognize. It was Roberg all over again, but this time he had arrived in the middle of it.

  Lucky eased the engines as Graycloud slowed, and the dampers responded by settling down to a deep hum that reached through the deck to the marrow of his bones. Who in the galaxy would be attacking Oina? And why? he wondered again. Then a voice spoke in clear gentongue from the communicator as though in answer to his questions.

  “Withdraw! All timinos withdraw!”

  Lucky thought he recognized the word. Timinos was a Uke military term for small fighting groups. But the timinos didn’t look like they were withdrawing.

  Graycloud was still much too far away from Oina even with the screen on full magnification for Lucky to see individual ships, but the flashes between them and random explosions of light told him that no one was paying much attention to the instructions. Now the question was, why were the Ukes attacking Oina?

  “This is Commander Fugisho. All timinos withdraw!”

  It would take Graycloud another thousand kilometers to stop at this rate, so Lucky again applied full braking power and watched with growing fascination as fewer and fewer flashes appeared on the screen. Then he gradually realized the battle flashes had stopped altogether and the lights he saw were the firing of warp engines.

  Suddenly, a ship loomed on the viewscreen, then just as suddenly it disappeared into subspace less than fifty kilometers from him. Lucky shuddered and resumed scanning the lightspeed communications channels until he found a voice speaking in steady Vardequerqueglot. At least he thought it was, because it sounded like Delightful Childe’s language.

  When the voice paused for a few seconds, he spoke quickly in gentongue. “This is Captain Teeman, lightspeed freighter Graycloud. May I be of assistance?”

  The voice resumed speaking in Vardequerqueglot as though its owner hadn’t heard an interruption. But when the voice paused again. Lucky repeated his message.

  “Be still, human,” a different, heavily accented voice answered in gentongue. “We will attend to you shortly.”

  Given the circumstances, Lucky the Oinaise were not being at all rude, so he diverted his attention to bringing Graycloud to a full stop while waiting for a response.

  After an hour Lucky grabbed some flight rations and ate them cold. After two hours he started doing little shipkeeping chores to keep himself occupied. After three hours he had fidgeted himself closer and closer toward anger, but the response finally came.

  “We have located your ship, Captain Teeman. By what authority have you entered our system?”

  “I am a freespace lightspeed freighter. I’ve come looking for Captain Delightful Childe of the Nazzarone.”

  “We did not ask your purpose,” a new, less accented voice said. “We asked by what authority you have entered.”

  Lucky was puzzled. He had never needed authority before to enter a neutral system, and he didn’t remember anything in the Guidelines indicating a need for authority. But he had never been to Oina before, either, so perhaps their request was common practice. Or brought on by the war, stupid, he added to himself when the obvious smacked his brain.

  “I have no authority,” he said simply. “As I told you, this is a freespace freighter and I –“

  “Permission to move, denied. Permission to leave, denied. Permission to proceed, denied,” the voice said in a steady monotone. “Per Strictures Two-seventy-one and Three-three-four, your craft will be confiscated and impounded until a hearing can be held before the –“

  “Repeat, please,” he requested in disbelief.

  “Your craft will be confiscated and impounded until –“

  “Over my ship’s rubble!” Lucky said when he realized that they were serious. “It’ll be a clear day in subspace before you confiscate Graycloud.” Even as he spoke, he hit the turning jets and began preparing to fire the engines. “Tell Captain Childe I stopped in to say good-bye.”

  I should have known better than to come here, he thought as he verified the preliminary heading which would take Graycloud out of the system. Who in the universe did the Oinaise thing they were anyway?

  “A thousand pardons, Captain,” a third voice said in an accent so thick that Lucky could hardly understand it, “but are you the same Graycloud that assisted Delightful Childe’s benevolent mission on Alexvieux?”

  “No. I’m Delightful Childe’s grandmother,” Lucky said as Graycloud steadied on the proper heading.

  “Captain,” the thick voice said, “there is no need for you to leave. The despicable Ukas have disrupted our protocol, for which we heartily apologize. Please be assured that you are certainly welcomed to be here.”

  “No thanks,” Lucky said without hesitation. But he did not fire Graycloud’s warp engine. So it was the Ukes, or the Ukas as the accented voice called them. Seems like a stupid thing for them to do, he thought, about as stupid as me staying here. “I know where I’m welcome, and where I’m not. You want this ship, you’re going to have to catch us or blast us out of space.”

  “Do not be rude, Captain. I
t is not fair in the evidence of our apology. The forces of Oina have no intention of ‘blasting you from space’ as you so bluntly put it. You are welcomed here as a friend. Please accept this welcome.”

  Lucky hesitated. Was this some trick? Or did the Oinaise speaker really mean it?

  With a sudden shrug of his shoulders he began turning Graycloud back toward Oina with an odd sense of resignation.

  “Very well,” he said quietly. “I accept your welcome. Please send orbit and landing instructions.”

  “Yes, Captain Teeman. Yes we will. Channel nine-zero-point-five-five-three.”

  “Check,” he replied as he tapped in the numbers. What difference did it make to him where he set Graycloud down? He wanted someplace quiet. He had found a new corner of the war where there shouldn’t have been war.

  Maybe there is no quiet place, he thought as the instructions clicked into his computer. Maybe this war is going to consume the whole known galaxy. Then what difference does any of it make to us?

  He looked up and beyond Oina toward the Spider Nebula with an odd sense of reassurance. Maybe he had come to the right place after all. If it wasn’t safe here on the edge of explored space, at least they had a direction they could run in where groups of humans were not killing each other.

  There was the Spider Nebula, the Double Spiral’s closest neighbor, unexplored space with nothing stopping them except the black hole curtain and the knowledge that they would not have enough fuel to return.

  “Just you and me, Graycloud,” he said with a sudden, bitter laugh, “you and me popping through the black hole curtain and into the unknown. Bam! Just like that. We’ll get away from them all!” When a tear ran down his cheek, he angrily wiped it away. “Just you and me against the whole damned universe.”

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  “But Father,” Mica said quickly, “wouldn’t it be foolish – I mean, wouldn’t you be taking an unnecessary risk joining the battle group?”

  “Perhaps, Mica, but I think Hew would agree with me that there are times when a commander has to be with the fleet in order to ensure the greatest chance of victory.”