The Sirens of Space

by Caminsky, Jeffrey

  Outside the repair room hatch and past the closed bay door, Cyrus hung weightless in the air. Their ship rested lifelessly behind him, held in place by mooring cables; the heat-shield tiles of her outer hull were discolored by long use and the rigors of space. He could hear Mason clanging away in the distance, repairing the Bradbury Converter—the small device that regulated the exchange of energy from the ship’s engines into artificial gravity. On a small ship they needed only one, and if his mind had been on business, Cyrus would have thanked the stars that Mason had talked him out of buying a bigger ship. A bigger ship meant more cargo, but it also meant more things to go wrong, and it would hardly profit them to haul twice as much, only to have the ship starworthy for half as long.

  But Cyrus’ mind was wandering far beyond the asteroid he shared with his brother and their woman. He looked out the hangar bay porthole, toward the stars of the East. He and Mason knew every parsec of space in these parts. Most of it had already been picked over by prospectors long before they arrived on the scene. It took longer and longer to find a good strike that wasn’t already claimed by somebody. There were still bounders aplenty who would as soon kill a man as steal from him—and he should know, Cyrus chuckled to himself. After all, he’d done it himself in his younger days. He didn’t have the energy anymore; besides, it would mean arguing with Macey, who was acting more and more like a woman every day.

  But he and Macey had found a strike; it fairly swam with nickel and copper and titanium, with lode upon lode of gold besides. The asteroid belt with all these riches spun around a yellow star. Ten parsecs from this star—just a few day’s journey, if their ship was in proper trim—was another one. Around that star spun a world with flowing water and air so sweet you could taste it.

  Cyrus’ jaw hardened as he looked through the milky cloud that filled the distant heavens. Anticenter from Deneb, which hung brightly to port, and barely a month away, it was all he’d ever wanted: a warm place on a planet as peaceful as sleep, with riches to be plucked at leisure whenever he felt like working. But their second night there, they were torn from their beds by a bunch of devil-eyed monsters with slimy hands and screeching laughs, to be shipped home like naughty children caught stealing candy. The lizards let them keep the ore stored in the ship’s hold, but the forty tons of gold they left in the other system went begging. It was the fortune of a lifetime, and Cyrus had no doubt that the lizards meant to keep it all themselves.

  Hatred turned his soul as black as space. He stared into the distance, his eyes fast on a starless point that never varied in the distant cloud, a point he could pick out of the sky from anywhere in Terra. It was the same point that held his endless fascination, whenever he found himself with nothing to do.

  * * *

  The security officer walked slowly down the corridor leading to the bridge. The d’Artagnan was his first assignment on a starship and he was eager to learn all he could, as quickly as possible. He had to know every inch of his ship, and there was no place better than the bridge to get started. Though they were made of standard cloth, he could almost feel his new lieutenant’s bars shining on his epaulets. He’d been so proud when his promotion came through; his parents even called by subspace relay all the way from Earth to congratulate him. And now, he could finally put his training to use—and on a starship! In his wildest fantasies, he never imagined drawing such a plum assignment his first time out. After leaving the Academy, most CosGuard Security Office trainees found themselves on some obscure rock guarding a science station, or banished to an outpost along the frontier where the only excitement was counting the days until the next duty rotation. Starships usually fell to those who had been around a lot longer. And though his first assignment—security on a subspace radar station out of New Calais—won him a citation for anticipating and repelling a pirate raid on the base, he had no illusions that this was the reason for his rapid advance.

  No, he told himself, the reason he pulled this assignment was dumb luck. His reassignment to IshCom, for reasons lost to a computer glitch that left him with nothing to do on the grandest starbase this side of Demeter, had made him the only security officer available. And since d’Artagnan needed a security officer, the same CSO computer that pulled him away from New Calais for no reason assigned him to the starship—also for no apparent reason. He could only smile at the irony, but he was hardly one to sneeze at fate.

  The command hatch opened and the young lieutenant stepped onto the bridge. Instantly, he could see that something was not quite right. The lights should have been dimmed, but they were as bright as day. Star charts flashed haphazardly on the small screen beneath the main viewer at the head of the bridge. As he stopped to listen, he heard annoyed murmuring coming from somewhere nearby, punctuated by grunts of exasperation.

  Quietly, he moved ahead to investigate.

  “Aw, crap!” muttered an angry voice. The lieutenant ‘s head snapped toward the direction of the sound. He saw a pair of legs sticking out from beneath a console station in the middle of the room—Navigation, if he remembered correctly, though ships could be awfully confusing. The legs were clad in dirty fatigues and sporting a well-worn sneaker on each foot. The left sneaker was held together with duct tape.

  “Excuse me,” the young officer said, his voice firm and commanding. “But the bridge is still restricted to— ”

  “Who’s that?” demanded the voice at the other end of the feet. “Never mind—go get me the toolbox. It’s over by the Auxnav.”

  “The what?”

  “The toolbox.”

  “No, I mean—the ‘onyx valve?’”

  “No, no—the interface, the auxnav interface.”

  “The ‘inner phase’ of—of what?”

  “No, no, no. The auxiliary—who is that, anyway?”

  Seeing the captain scuttering out from beneath the navigation console, the CSO lieutenant felt like a hopeless imbecile. Here he was, charged with protecting the most advanced machine in human history, and he hadn’t the slightest idea what anyone was saying when they talked about the simplest bits of equipment. Worse yet, he’d demonstrated his incompetence to his new commander. Cook rose and dusted himself off, fixing the junior officer in a glare of such severity that the young lieutenant felt his face flushing like a ripe tomato, and his bladder preparing to empty. But Cook’s mien soon softened into one of mild curiosity.

  “You’re the new security officer, aren’t you—Burdick, isn’t it? Yes, Burdick.”

  Burdick’s throat was dry as dust, and he found it impossible to swallow. “Yes, sir,” he managed at last, in the scratchiest of voices.

  “Doesn’t CSO teach you people anything about ships?” Cook sighed, more to himself than to the tortured young man who imagined himself standing in judgment. “I swear—how can they put you into space if you don’t know the first thing about— ”

  Cook looked to see his young security officer near tears.

  “Well, never mind about that,” Cook said, scratching his nose. “I guess you’ll learn soon enough.”

  “Yes, sir,” nodded Burdick, his voice barely audible. “I am a rather quick study.”

  “I imagine so. And by now I guess you’ve probably adjusted to the different uniforms. CSO tan doesn’t go with the decorum, you know. Too bland. Blends right into the walls.”

  “Yes, sir,” Burdick laughed weakly.

  “All right, then,” Cook smiled. He pointed to a small box behind the second tier railing on the starboard side of the bridge. “The toolbox is up there, by the auxiliary navigation console.”

  “I’ll get it right away, Captain.”

  As his security officer scurried toward the toolbox, Cook leaned back to sit on the main navigation console and wiped the perspiration from his brow. Reprogramming the navigation computer was a big job, and he wished he could trust his new navigator to do it—Talbot, he thought; or was it Talley? Whatever—he’d be arriving the day after tomorrow. Cook glanced over his shoulder at the hopeless mess on t
he navigation screen. He might not know everything in this Universe, but he did know that there was just one Deneb. Not sixteen. If those idiot engineers would use their heads in the first place—use Rigel and Deneb as fixed points of reference instead of Demeter and New Babylon, whose stars were too dim to be much use in the depths of space—he wouldn’t have to go through this every time he got a new ship.

  He breathed deeply as the young man returned with the toolbox. Once he’d stopped, thought Cook, it was hard to get started again. But he had to do this sooner or later. And since he refused to argue the point with his navigator, it was better to do it sooner. The file on this Tally-something pegged him as a chronic complainer. The last thing Cook needed now was the added grief of a temperamental navigator.

  “Here you are, Captain.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Burdick,” Cook said, lifting himself off the main console. It was time to get started, he thought; and he would keep at this until he was done. Or until he was sick of it, whichever came first.

  “Carry on, then. And Burdick?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Could you tell Chief Connors to come to the bridge? We have some things to discuss, and he could give me a hand here while we do it.”

  “Aye aye, sir. Right away!” Burdick said, and hurried off the bridge.

  Cook lowered himself onto the floor. They should put padding under the consoles, he thought. That way, people could work on computer innards without rubbing their backs raw. But such concerns faded quickly, for he had other things on his mind. Things like turning the navigation computers into something useful rather than accepting Standard CosGuard Issue. Or finding a way to tell Yeoman Chief Connors that there would be no hazing the tyros on his ship.

  Chapter 12

  “THIS IS RIDICULOUS.”

  Cook exhaled loudly. He was leaning back in his chair, feet propped up on his desk and holding a folded sheet of paper. Untouched on a tray on a side table was a breakfast of reconstituted eggs and toast, and a cup of lukewarm coffee. A digital scanner was on the work table next to the wall, and display disks were evenly divided between the floor and the half-open binder box on the floor. He woke up in a foul mood. Insomnia kept him up reading half the night, and that usually meant a rough day for anyone he was around the next morning. The mail that greeted him had not helped his disposition.

  “Problems?” asked Jeremy, entering the room, wondering what new problems faced them today. The captain seemed a font of boundless energy, but as nearly as Jeremy could tell, most of that energy was focused on sending the ship’s executive officer chasing in a dozen different directions.

  “I haven’t been on Isis in fifteen years,” Cook complained. “Aside from an occasional reference to my Uncle Cornelius in letters from my parents, nobody tells me anything that’s going on there. What do I know about local politics? They don’t even tell me which district I vote in these days, for crying out loud.”

  Baffled, Jeremy walked to the captain’s desk and took the paper from Cook’s hands. His eyes widened in surprise when it dropped to the floor and unfolded into a sheet nearly eight feet long. It was a ballot, sent him by the Northland Province Elections Commission. By law, everyone in the Cosmic Guard received an absentee ballot whenever his home planet held elections. Isis had the minimum number of senators—one fixed-termer, one special-termer elected whenever the president called for elections—and this was the year Isis selected her fixed-term senator. The Isitian ballot also presented a confusing array of candidates and ballot proposals and was taller than he was. The tiny printing on the ballot’s twelve columns did not seem designed to help anyone to make sense of it all, and apparently nobody thought to distribute the ballot by district. By the looks of it, every office on the planet was listed. Fortunately there only seemed to be two parties, and a brief scan of the top of the ticket revealed a name that even Jeremy recognized.

  “There’s Irene McGinnis,” he said. “I remember her from the hearings on that big scandal a few years ago. She has quite a reputation, as I recall. I was quite impressed with her.”

  “No, no, no,” Cook said, trying not to sound impatient. “That’s not the way we do things on Isis. She’s already had her turn. Besides, she’s the wrong party. She’s a Nuthatcher.”

  Jeremy looked again. The only parties on the ballot were the Liberals and the Conservatives.

  “Well, you see,” Cook tried to explain, “we don’t like to give anyone more than one turn in Covington. Politicians are like naughty children. They’re easily spoiled and must be constantly watched. Give them too much and it goes right to their heads. Makes them think they’re big shots. So tradition is quite specific. Nobody goes to the Senate more than once. Anything beyond that is simply not very Isitian.”

  “But hasn’t she already served two terms? And what in God’s name is a nuthatcher?”

  “On Isis, tradition is not carved in stone,” Cook said testily. “And the Cooks vote for Mugwumps, not Nuthatchers. Nuthatchers are a subspecies of unenlightened visigoths. Corneilius Cook would never let me hear the end of it.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “There is no problem.”

  Cook voted straight Mugwump, too proud to admit that McInnis—Old Ironpanties, as she was known on Isis—was the only name apart from his uncle’s that he recognized as well. All the while, he grumbled about the fact that he didn’t know enough about the issues or candidates to vote for “None of the Above.” Like most Isitians, he also voted to reject all the proposals and initiatives, since voting for them only encouraged similar nonsense in the future. It made no difference anyway, he muttered to himself. In interplanetary politics everyone on Isis was a Federalist: they stuffed the last Tory and put him in a museum long ago. And it hardly mattered that the Mugwumps made a hash of things whenever they came to power. The Nuthatchers were just as bad, but at least this way they’d face a Mugwump mess in the end. Those messes were usually more convoluted, of course, but at least their hearts were in the right place. As he finished, he noticed that Jeremy was trying not to laugh, and doing a very poor job of it.

  “All right, what’s so funny?” Cook snapped. Immediately, he felt a surge of guilt at his lack of good temper. He knew that Jeremy wouldn’t like his next assignment, but if there was one thing he’d learned on the Constantine, it was how to delegate assignments that he didn’t want to do himself.

  Of course, some jobs were easier to delegate to people he didn’t like. Jeremy was such an improvement over his last first officer that Cook hated pushing the advantages of rank too far. That reluctance wouldn’t stop him from doing so, he admitted to himself. But at least he had the decency to feel guilty about it.

  “It’s an outrage.”

  “That it is, Chief.”

  “It’s a bloody outrage.”

  Chief Connors put down his wrench and shook his head. Though progress had been steady, the emergency hatch was proving more difficult than he’d anticipated. He took his handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his brow and motioned to the redshirt beside him to keep working. Taking his lead from the Chief, Yeoman Sillers holstered his own wrench; it was time for another break.

  “It’s disrespectful, that’s what it is. Disrespectful of tradition and common sense.”

  “Aye on that, Chief.”

  “And ye know what really galls me?”

  Connors led Sillars away from the rest of the repair crew. There was no need to sow any more dissension on board. The captain had taken care of that with his sequestration order: no visitors or departures until the ship was starworthy, even if it meant working through the Cosmic New Year. The cream colored walls muffled the sound in the corridors, but the screams of the old time Cozzies still echoed through the ship. Connors stopped as soon as they were a proper distance away.

  “What galls me,” the Chief whispered conspiratorially, “is the way these tyro blueshirts go struttin ’round these hallways like they was desk jockeys out of Covington. Barely three weeks he
re, and they still don’t know their butts from a black hole—yet they have the temerity to tell me about pullin my weight. As if I’ve been loafin at the throttle while they be takin their own sweet time a-gettin here.

  “I tell ye, Sillars—if one more o’them snotnosed groundtoads tries to tell me how to do me own job, I’ll throttle’em myself.”

  “Calm down now, Chief. It ain’t as bad as all that.”

  “Chief Connors?” A cry came from down the hall. It was Crewman Recruit Larsen, the silk-shirt college boy from Demeter. He’d signed up on a lark, because he was tired of school and wanted to see the universe, but Connors liked him all the same. He sang a good song, and for a college boy he talked with an intelligible accent.

  “What is it this time, Larsen?”

  “We’re ready to test the hatch, again.”

  “Go ahead, Crewman; let’s see what we’ve done to her this time.”

  A buzzer rang in the hallway for an instant, only to die like a strangled goose.

  “Chief— ”

  “I heard, Larsen. See what ye can do. I’ll be along presently.” He turned a stern face toward Sillars.

  “Ain’t as bad?” Connors muttered, turning his fury to the matter at hand. “One of them tyros—a bluebird name o’McKinsey, I think it was—come up to me while I was mindin a whole field-full o’redshirt recruits on their way to help unglitch the engine coils, and wanted me to folly her to the Molly room. Seems she had a stackfull o’computer disks that needed cartin off somewheres— ”

  “To her cabin, no doubt, eh, Chief?”

  “—an’ she didn’t want to soil her wee dainty hands,” the Chief concluded acidly, not at all amused by Sillars’ inability to see past his own lust. “Why, if the Skipper hadn’t— ”

  “Ready again, Chief. Shall we have another go?”

  “All right, Larsen. See how she behaves this time.”