“Tired, Sarge?”
“Yeah, sir. Sorry. This is the end of a second shift for me.”
“Well, sorry about that. Everything’s hit the fan at once, huh? It always does.”
Suddenly they hear a blare of sound, something like a trumpet but far louder, from the Alliance Embassy.
“What the hell?” Bates shades his eyes and stares over.
At the black-smoked front doors he can just barely make out a swirl of activity: beings moving, some large awkward parcel being carried forward. In a burst of paranoia he wonders if the Hoppers are moving up an artillery piece, but the thing turns out to be an enormous green and purple sunshade on poles, a rectangle some ten meters long, carried by a whole squad of guards. As it snakes out the door and toward the front gates, Bates can see some twenty Hoppers bouncing along under it. With a nervous sort of grin Akeli hurries over to stand next to him.
“A negotiating party,” the PBI boss whispers. “The president was most circumspect to ensure my availability at this juncture of events.”
“Looks like it, yeah. Think this is going to take a while?”
“It generally does. A very long while. In this instance they’ll most likely prolong matters beyond the usual, to allow any ship they may have in orbit time to interfere with our planned rescue of the sleeper-ship.”
“Crap! Well, nada I can do about that, damn it all to hell. I better get out of here pronto and do what I can do. With the town likely to explode, I can’t hang around and watch the diplomats.”
But Bates does, out of simple curiosity, linger just long enough to get a look at the head widow and the chief neuter, who are following the procession under heavy guard. Since he’s seen female Hoppers before, he’s prepared for the sight of her enormous hair-do, held up with hidden frames and padding, dyed bright green, and studded with all sorts of ornaments and signs of rank. What surprises him is the neuter, who looks just like a Hopper male, and strides along like one, too—but he’s wearing female clothing. Somehow he’d expected something more exotic and epicene.
“No accounting for taste,” he remarks to no one in particular. Then he hurries back inside the Pension Fund Building; the sooner he gets back to Police HQ, the better.
oOo
“There it is!” Lacey hisses. “On screen, captain.”
The viewer fills with the star-flecked dark of deep space, striped across the lower left corner with a glowing blue streak of nebulaic cloud. Right in screen center gleams a vast chunk of comet ice and nearby, a small, irregular ovoid, all gray and pitted from its long drift. Behind her Lacey hears Mrs. Bug make a high-pitched, metallic sort of sound.
“Can you pick up life on board?” Sam says to Lacey—but Mrs. Bug answers.
“I can. Someone is left, captain. Thank you, thank your gods—someone is left!”
“The Hoppers—how far behind us?”
“Five minutes now,” Lacey says. “Sorry, captain, but they got more speed than this rust-bucket’s ever going to make.”
“Shit!”
While the Montana might be slow by warship standards, at the speed it’s travelling, five minutes covers a lot of distance. On the screen the gray ovoid slowly swells, grows distinguishable as a ship, marked down the sides with symbols that seem all of a piece with those on the mysterious box that Little Joe retrieved from the Rat Yard. Behind it the comet ice looms larger, a glittering hugeness superimposed over the nebula far, far beyond. At his console Sam is trying to ready the donkeybots and a cargo grapple against the by now very long shot indeed that the Montana can reach the sleeper-ship before the pursuing Hoppers do. All at once, a hiss and whine floods over the ship-to-ship comm. On her mental screen she can see a long energy surge as Delta Four tries—unsuccessfully—to jam her own ship’s channel against the incoming burst of electromagnetism. Rather than disturb the AI, Lacey begins relaying messages to Rick mechanically. She can see him wave a hand in answer down in his transparent turret. On her board lights go on: the Montana is arming.
“RSS Montana, come in please.”
“Comm problems.” Sam lies, a little too cheerfully. “Identify yourself.”
On her board Lacey sees the signal light for the laser cannon come on and start flashing: fully armed. The Hopper ship sends another blast of energy and forces through the comm block.
“RSS Montana? I’ll bet you can hear us now.” The voice is a sniggering lilt, a giggle of perfectly formed human words, but only a Hopper would be making them. “Montana, we’ve got a prior claim on that ship as salvage.”
“Oh yeah?” Sam’s voice is dangerously level. “That’s too damn bad. That ship’s in Republic territory, and no way you can claim it.”
“There’s one way.” The voice seems amused. “As restitution for damages. One of ambassadorial launches got in some trouble with a piece of the floating junk in this system, pal. As far as we know, the chunk broke off that derelict out there. We get first claim on the damn thing, going to see just how the damage to our embassy property occurred. You know all about ambassadorial privilege. Dunt try to tell me you dunt.”
“Okay, so I won’t.”
Now they can see the Hopper ship on screen, an unnecessarily streamlined cutter, as sleek and nasty-looking as a knife blade, heading full power on a trajectory that will take it between them and Mrs. Bug’s sleepership. In her head Lacey hears Delta Four:
Programmer, sensors indicate that they’ve armed torpedoes. They seem to be aiming at the other ship.
“Rick.” Lacey breathes a bare whisper into her comm link. “Now.”
With the shudder of recoil, the Montana belches light, a long streak of red light that arcs harmlessly into space between the Hoppers and the comet ice.
“Stand off,” Sam snarls into the comm. “I bet you can hear us now. We are armed and ready, mister. Stand off.”
Over comm, no answer, but on screen the Hopper ship fires a thruster, turns end over end, then settles into a new trajectory, heading straight for the Montana.
Programmer, what’s that!?!
Delta Four doesn’t mean the Hopper ship. On her mental graphs Lacey sees a blur, a displacement of space-time by some large mass, and it too is heading for them. When she looks up to the viewer, she sees a strange hole appearing in the nebula, a moving hole—then realizes that something solid is blocking the cloud-light. Sam has had no time to notice.
“Alliance cutter, stand off! To protect ourselves from collision, we will fire. Do you understand me? If your intent is to ram, we will fire.”
“Sam, jeezus! They’re arming! It’s coming over the sensors now.” So much data is pouring into Lacey’s inner graphs that she feels sick to her stomach as her eyes desperately try to track stimuli behind them.
“Well, if we hold them off long enough...” Sam lets his voice trail away into futility. “Hell, I never wanted to be a martyr.”
“Delta Four. Evasive manoeuvres.”
Braced against the roll of the ship, Lacey is thinking of Mulligan. As the sensor data piles up, showing torpedoes sliding into tubes, lasers being activated on the enemy ship, she is wishing that she told him she loved him, wishing that she believed in something transcendent or divine that might save their lives long enough for her to tell him now. In near-hysteria she realizes that on the other hand, she’s never particularly disbelieved in the transcendent, either. If you exist, Goddess, tell you what: you get us out of this, and I’ll tell Mulligan the truth. Promise.
With a buck and a roll the Montana soars up in relation to the comet, twists, and comes back down, behind and a little “above” the Hopper cutter now. Sam’s lost none of his battle navigator’s touch over the years. With a flip the Hopper ship turns again, spinning into an unhittable target for a brief moment, then straightening out on a course straight toward them. The sensors in Lacey’s head are going wild.
Programmer, look!
On screen that dark hole in the cloud is wavering, swelling, turning solid into the vast bulk of a battleship, a familiar bat
tleship looming unbelievably close above them. For a moment, Lacey cannot breathe. Signal pours into comm beyond her power to stop it, bringing the familiar growling voice of Admiral Wazerzis, known to his men as old Iron Snout.
“Alliance cutter, stand off! Any move toward the RSS Montana will be taken as an act of piracy and dealt with accordingly. I repeat: stand off, sir. This is the RSS Constitution, and I warn you, sir, we are armed and prepared to fire by order of our government.”
Swinging on its trajectory the Hopper ship seems to hang, exposed, dead in space if the Constitution chooses, for a long long minute. Then suddenly thrusters fire; it turns to sweep off majestically and head out-system. Over comm Lacey can hear cheering on the Constitution’s bridge, but she cannot speak to answer. Only then does she realize that tears are running down her face. She looks up to see Sam wiping his eyes on his sleeve.
“Yeah, takes you that way, dunt it?” he says, then goes back to comm. “Admiral, this is the RSS Montana. I guess just saying thank you is no going to be enough, huh?”
“Stand by to be boarded, Mr. Bailey.” Iron Snout sounds grimmer than Lacey’s ever heard him, and she’s heard him in some very tight places indeed. “The list of charges against you is as long as my tail.”
At that an image finally comes on the comm screen: Wazerzis turning away and relinquishing command to a human fleet captain.
“Sorry we were a little late, Montana. We were on field manoeuvres when HQ commed in with the rescue order.”
“Holy Madre de Dios!” Sam snarls. “You mean it’s been you guys that we’ve been seeing on our screen all along?”
“Seeing us? You weren’t supposed to be able to see us, Montana!” The officer turns from the view-screen and yells over his shoulder. “Hey, Admiral, the bastards picked us up on screen!”
“Well shut up about it, you blithering ding-bat!” Iron Snout’s bellow carries all the way across the control room. “We still got the comm on an open line.”
Lacey turns to Sam and whispers.
“Am I right, captain, in assuming that this means they were trying out some kind of secret masking field or something?”
“And that it didn’t work worth shit? I think, Mr. Lacey, we can make that assumption.” He raises his voice into the comm link. “Very well, sir. We’re sending out our transfer tube right now. Want to wait till we pressurize?”
“Nah.” Iron Snout’s gray-green face, all toothy snarl, fills the screen again. “I got an officer suited up, and he’ll come over right away. The sooner we get you mutinous little bastards under control, the better.”
Programmer! Why aren’t they treating you as you deserve, as heroes?
“Because this is the Navy, pal. I never expected anything different.”
Delta Four is speechless. Although Lacey considers trying to explain, at that moment the extruding tube bumps against the Constitution’s hatch, and it takes both of their concentration to seal up the various links so that the officer in question can make his slow trip over, pulling his way from one artificial gravity field to another.
At last the final hatch opens, and the officer swings himself inside, his weighted boots hitting the floor with a slap that makes the control room tremble. From the insignia on his powerpack, Lacey can tell that he’s a commander, but she thinks little else about him, since she’s busy pressurizing the secondary airlock into the control room. Sam, however, is watching the viewer in a slack-mouth fascination as the officer makes his way through. At last the pressure’s equalized, and she opens the lock to let him step inside.
“Oh jeezuz,” Sam mutters. “Should’ve known he’d end up on the damn flagship. He always was that kind.”
Lacey turns around just as the officer pulls off his helmet and shakes his head in relief, that familiar gesture, so like a wild horse, that familiar smile, a flash of humor in a face as harsh and handsome as a perfect steel blade. Thanks to rejuv Jaime is indeed every bit as good-looking as she remembers him, the liquid dark eyes smouldering under heavy brows, the coppery skin stretched tight over the high cheekbones and strongly modeled jaw, but now she sees things that somehow she never saw before, the slight laxity of the sensual mouth, the emptiness lying just behind the eyes. My God, he’s stupid, isn’t he? That’s why he’s the perfect soldier. The shock of this sudden insight turns her speechless, and predictably, Jaime misunderstands, preening a little as he turns toward her.
“Surprised to see me, Bobbie? You sure haven’t changed, always getting yourself in trouble.” Before she can swear at him, he turns to Mrs. Bug. “Ma’am, I’m authorized to tell you that rescue operations will start immediately on your ship. Our sensors have picked up life-signs from hundreds of sentients.”
Mrs. Bug howls out a long whine and jigs a few steps in what Lacey can only interpret as joy.
“Immediately, officer?” she says at last, in her fluting voice.
“Immediately. As soon as you give us permission to board.”
“Permission granted. And we all thank you.”
Only then does Lacey realize that the improbable has happened. They’ve won.
In a few minutes the command module fills up with Navy beings, striding around yelling orders, elbowing Sam and his jury-rigged crew away from the control panel, some stopping to shake their hands or slap them on the back, others snarling at them to stand to one side and wait for the admiral. Only Mrs. Bug gets treated with honest respect. When Delta Four picks up the confusion, it flatly refuses to operate until one of the Navy men lets Lacey get on the comm to reassure the AI unit. Finally Iron Snout himself, flushed a bright green with excitement, waddles aboard, followed by a clutch of ensigns, and makes his way through the crowd.
“Mister Lacey, Mister Bailey!” He stretches his beak in a grin. “What the hell? Every time I see you two guys, you’re in hot shit up to your necks, huh? You damn lucky you’re civilians, this time around. All right, you’re going dirtside with Ensign Chang, here. Is your launch still operational after that cowboy take-off you made?”
“Sure is, sir.” Sam, out of old habit, is standing at stiff attention. “By some kind of dumb luck.”
“It’s a little more than luck, amigo.” Admiral Wazerzis turns his attention to Lacey. “Okay, pal, you’re going have some real explaining to do. Do you know why to our lousy frigate never caught up with the Montana?”
“Because Bailey jettisoned the cargo modules?”
“Hell no. Its AI unit refused to operate. Said it was having a break-down in one of its circuits, but since the damn thing had just been checked out three hours earlier, it sounds like mutiny to me—well, if an AI is capable of mutiny, which I doubt, and which is why I want to know what you did.”
“I dint do nada, sir, and that’s the honest truth.”
“Yeah? Then why did the AI say it no was going to fire on Bobbie Lacey?”
Lacey is speechless, so honestly and so long that the admiral finally shakes his head in surprise.
“You really no savvy, do you?”
“No sir. I’ll swear it on anything you want, but I got no idea at all.”
Sam suddenly laughs in a long hysterical giggle.
“It’s because they love you,” he says, gasping for breath. “What do you bet? Every God-damn AI in this system knows you think they’re people, and they love you for it.” He giggles again, even higher. “Bobbie Lacey’s God—what do you bet that’s how they see it?”
Wazerzis reaches out with a heavy paw and slaps him across the face.
“You might be right, Mr. Bailey,” the admiral says. “But there’s no call to be getting hysterical over it. Chang, Wilson, Ksiskeris—get the humans and this two-headed guy in the launch. The sooner you all get dirtside, the better.”
Nunks growls under his breath.
“He’s only got one head,” Lacey says. “It’s just bifurcate.”
“Dunt give a damn. Get in the launch. You got quite a party waiting for you down on Hagar.”
And for the second
time in her life Lacey knows the bitter numbness of being under arrest.
Since they are surrendering to Hagar’s gravity rather than trying to escape it, the trip down in the launch takes considerably less time than their trip out to the sleeper-ship. Even so, the four of them spend a morose couple of hours strapped into their seats and speaking to no one as Hagar’s red ball grows larger and larger in the main view-screen and the Navy crew scrupulously ignores them. At moments Lacey hears her mother’s voice echoing in her memory, snarling “You’re just like your father.” Finally, when the ensign in charge makes radio contact with Space Dock and begins asking for clearance, she can stand it no longer.
“Jeez, Sam, I’m sorry I got you into this.”
“You dint. I was stupid enough to volunteer, remember?” He flashes her a smile. “I suppose they’re going to impound the Montana, huh?”
“We no going to need her when we’re in the rehab colony.” Rick can barely squeeze out the words. “Jeez, I hope to God they dunt turn me over the Lies. I’d rather die than go back. I mean, shit, I’d die there, too, but real slow. Y’know?”
“Yeah. Fraid so.” She feels her stomach knot. About the only thing she can think of to do for the poor kid is to ask Richie to arrange his murder for mercy’s sake—not a very pleasant idea, but no doubt better than what the Alliance will do to him. Then something else occurs to her. “Damn! The Bentley!”
“It’s gone, yeah,” Sam says. “We left it right under the launch when we lifted off. I dunt know why, but that gripes the hell out of me, thinking of that beautiful skimmer being melted all to hell.”
“Well, Richie will understand. Stuff like cars dunt mean a lot to him, anyway. He just likes the feeling of being able to buy whatever he wants.”
When Nunks allows himself a long wordless sigh, Ensign Chang turns from the control panel.
“Will you guys shut up? I’m trying to land this damn launch.”
“Ah cojones de tu madre,” Sam mutters, then falls silent when Chang pats the laser at his hip in a significant manner.
At last, in a roar of reverse acceleration the launch settles on the pad, and ground techs swarm over her to attach the assorted gantry cables. When Chang motions with his pistol, the four of them unstrap and get up, marching in a neat military formation down to the outer hatch. As the iris starts opening, Lacey gets her first hint that something’s going on when she catches Chang suppressing a grin.
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