by Zach Hughes
Genocide.
The far-ranging ships of the Department of Exploration and Alien Search went armed. Man knew his own nature. Long ago he had loosed the nuclear thunderbolts on Old Earth; and in the Zede War he had shattered worlds. When he ventured into the nothingness of unexplored space he looked over his shoulder, for there was always, embedded in his mind, the dread of meeting something like himself, or something like the beings who had not only eradicated biological life from the Dead Worlds but had cooled the inner fires of the planets.
"Well, Josh," she said, finally, "was it an alien probe?"
Josh shrugged. "Makes you think, doesn't it, sir?"
"I don't think we'll be able to say definitely what it was, not with the data we have."
"I'm afraid not," Josh said.
She turned to him, smiled. "But it's not your job to investigate unexplained flying objects, Captain."
"Still, if there's anything I can do—"
"There is," she said, standing, reaching for a Service blue envelope that measured eight by ten inches. She walked around the desk and handed it to Josh, who had risen with her.
"Your new command, Captain," she said.
Josh grinned boyishly. He lifted the flap of the envelope and pulled the contents partially out, exposing the thick, blue silk paper of a ship's commission. His fingers trembled as he read the name, Erin Kenner.
"Admiral," he said, "I'm speechless." The Erin Kenner was X&A's newest, a cruiser-explorer of the new Discoverer class. She was only the fourth of her type to come out of the yards on Eban's Forge. Named, as were her predecessors, for independent space explorers, she had the muscle and the reserves to go anywhere in the galaxy. She, and others in her class, were miniature Rimfires, equipped with state of the art detectors, armed with enough firepower to meet any known or imagined threat.
"A crew has been assigned," Julie said. "You may choose your ownofficers."
"Admiral, thank you," he said, extending his hand.
"Thanks are unnecessary," Julie said stiffly. "Your selection was based on merit." She smiled. "I envy you, Josh. There are times, sitting here at this damned desk, when I wish I were your age with twin suns on my shoulders, a good ship around me, and all of space before me."
"I'd gladly sail under your command, Admiral," Josh said.
"Go on," she said, "get the hell out of here."
"Yes, sir."
She walked with him to the door. "When you read your orders, you'll see that they leave you quite a bit of latitude."
He looked at her, waiting.
"Yes, I do envy you. You can choose to blink in any direction, into any one of millions of unexamined systems, but if you choose to take the Erin Kenner to a certain point on Rimfire's route and strike off into the interior, you'll be serving two purposes."
She was giving him not only permission to search for the two ships that had carried four members of his family into the unknown, she was indicating that she thought it was desirable.
"I'm grateful, Admiral," he said.
"Well, Josh, I can accept the unexplained disappearance of a gentleman amateur at space navigation, but when a man like your brother David goes unreported after blinking off into the same area I think it's time to try to find out why."
"Yes, sir, I feel the same way."
"To warn you to be careful would be insulting to your standing," she said.
"I don't mind at all," he said with a grin, "and you can be assured, Admiral, that I'll be very damned careful."
* * *
Josh did a little dance around his office, brandishing the ship's commission paper. Angela stood, arms crossed, her face serious, watching him.
"Why the sad face?" he asked.
"When will you leave?"
"That's not the right question."
"What do you mean?"
"The question is, when do we leave?"
Her face relaxed into a beaming smile. "We?"
"If you think you can hack a couple of years in space, Lieutenant."
"I can."
He winked. "Well, then, why aren't you packed?"
"Give me five minutes."
"There's one thing, Angela."
She was immediately apprehensive.
"The Erin Kenner is a small, tight ship. We'll be a part of a rather closely confined and varied group of people. You are familiar, I assume, with the rule of service decorum regarding male-female relationships aboard ship. On a big craft, where the crew numbers in the dozens or into three figures, there's a certain latitude. On a small ship one's personal life impacts more intimately on others. To avoid complications one sleeps in one's own bed."
She smiled. "Surely there will be times when—"
"You will not try to seduce the captain into improper behavior, wench."
"Well, I can stand it if you can," she said.
He took her into his arms, looked down at her face. "There is a solution to what would become, I fear, a matter of some frustration."
"Yes?"
"If a ship's captain and one of his officers are man and wife, their bed can be the same."
"That's a proposal?"
"Yes."
"And what if, in the future, our orders put us on different ships?"
"We'll face that when it comes," he said. "Will you marry me?"
"Oh, hell, I guess so," she said teasingly. "I hate sleeping alone."
As he was kissing her, a vivid image of his younger sister was so real in his mind that he opened his eyes, startled, wanting to reassure himself that it was Angela and not Sheba in his arms.
* * *
The Erin Kenner lay in her cradle, long and sleek, one hundred fifty feet of gleaming, silvery metal. One had to look closely to see the seams of air locks, of weapons bays and sensor ports. At her bow, high, twin viewports were open, protective covers rolled back into their slots in the hull. Like opposed eyes, the viewports gave the ship a pixieish personality. In space the ports would seldom be opened. The Erin Kenner's eyes would be electronic and optic, for the fragile men and women who would be enclosed in her durametal hull needed the protection of her density against the cold and the radiations of open space.
The crew were lined up at attention along the length of the ship when Josh and Angela stepped down from an aircar to the brassy blare of a service band. Two junior officers, selected by Josh after a search of personnel records, had already joined the ship. One of them called the men to attention. Josh answered his salute and, with First Mate Angela Webster at his side, walked slowly past for a formal inspection. The second mate and the navigator were male. Of the ten-man crew five were female.
Josh had examined the service records of each member, and he was pleased. The admiral had assigned only top personnel to the new ship.
"No speeches," he said, when the second mate bellowed out an order to the crew to stand at rest.
"None of us here is on his first cruise. You can expect from me that the Erin Kenner will be run by the book. I expect from you that you'll do your duties as efficiently as your records show that you have performed them in the past."
He looked up and down the row of young faces. "I know that you're curious about where we'll be blinking. We'll be following Rimfire's extragalactic routes in a counter rotation direction to a point which the navigator will be happy to show you on the charts, and then we'll be laying new blink routes into the interior. Not incidentally, we will be trying to locate two private exploration vessels which have gone unreported in the area. First, however, while we get acquainted with Miss Erin Kenner and she with us, we'll have a little pleasure cruise a few parsecs toward the core. As you know, it's standard procedure to keep a ship's shakedown cruise on well traveled blink routes. Our destination will be one of the new wilderness planets in the Diomedes Sector. From there we will return to Eban's Forge for final provisioning and any needed repairs or alterations before going extragalactic."
For two days Josh directed his officers and crew in dry runs of ship's op
eration. Only when he was certain that each man knew his station and his duty did he activate the flux drive. The Erin Kenner lifted smoothly from her construction cradle. She wafted upward through atmosphere, accelerating, and then the black of space claimed her. There, in her element, with the latest model of blink generator humming smoothly, she lay poised while captain and crew ran dozens of final checks.
On an order from Josh the navigator engaged the drive. The ship blinked out of existence to materialize light-years away near a beacon marking the lanes toward the galactic core. For some time the routes were well traveled. As the mass of the core brightened on the optic viewers, as the big emptiness that was space became relatively more crowded, the blink beacons were closer together, the blink lanes less traveled. The last few jumps, before the Erin Kenner fluxed down to a newly constructed spaceport on the wilderness world where Sheba Webster's holofilm company was at work, were marked by temporary exploration beacons that had not yet been replaced by permanent fixtures.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sarah Webster de Conde was a small-boned, petite woman. She wore her shoulder length hair in a ponytail because there simply were not enough hours in the day for visits to the salons. For everyday matters she favored a conservative but elegant simplicity of dress. For the monthly meeting of the Parents' Panel of the Tigian City Educational Oversight Board she had selected a classic little business suit in pale mauve Selbelese silk. When she was recognized by the chairman she stood, ran her hands over her small but shapely rump to make her skirt hang properly, donned her black-rimmed reading glasses and confidently stepped to the speaker's stand with the notes for her speech in her hand.
Her voice was strong, and so were her opinions. Her subject was the lack of discipline in the Tigian City school system. "I am Sarah de Conde," she began modestly, although she knew that everyone there was aware of her identity, and not just because her husband, Pete, was a member of the T-Town Board of Governors and a man of substance in the business community.
"I'm afraid that I'm as guilty as the rest of you," she said, looking not at the members of the Board but at the parents and teachers in the audience.
"We went to sleep, you and I, during the last election. Things had been going so well that we were lulled into complacency."
Several members of the Board were glaring at Sarah.
"The price of good government, at any level," Sarah said, "is eternal vigilance, and we neglected our duty. As a result the forces of liberal permissiveness are, once again, in control of our school system."
"Mrs. de Conde," said the chairman.
"I think, Mr. Chairman, that I have the floor," Sarah said.
"Yes, you do," the chairman said, "but I see no reason, Mrs. de Conde, for you to be abusive and to try deliberately to create ill feelings between the members of your Board and the parents."
"Mr. Chairman," Sarah said, her brown eyes snapping, her delicatechin jutting, "ill feeling already exists between the Board and the parents of Tigian City, and it was not I who created it."
The parents in the audience applauded. Thus encouraged, Sarah stated her case. "The purpose of discipline," she explained, "is not punishment.
Discipline is an expression of love. Discipline tells our children that we care. Young people require and desire guidance."
She spoke for half an hour, often interrupted by frenzied applause. She outlined a system of discipline that put the responsibility for disruptive behavior on the student perpetrator and that student's parents. She spoke heatedly but logically. At the end of her explanation of the system of control that she and the concerned parents present at the meeting were recommending, she made the announcement that she intended to register to run for the position on the Board occupied by the chairman. The applause followed her back to her seat.
* * *
Sarah didn't trust Central Control. Her big aircar carried, after all, precious cargo. She had the car's controls on manual. She sat at the wheel with her back straight, her head high. Petey and Cyd, her two youngest, were strapped securely into their seats behind her. Petey was teasing his sister about her ballet skirt. Sarah was thinking about the meeting of the Educational Oversight Board and wondering if she'd made the right decision in announcing her candidacy.
"Mom," Cyd said, "you'd better start slowing down."
She'd been about to pass the turn to the dance studio. She checked traffic, lowered the car to street level, hovered six inches off the ground while Cyd gathered her paraphernalia and ran into the studio.
Then it was twenty miles across town to Petey's Space Scout meeting.
Before returning to the dance studio to pick up Cyd, she had just enough time to stop by the sporting good shop to pick up the camping equipment she'd ordered for her oldest daughter's excursion to Terra II at the end of the school term. She had to go all the way down to ground level in the parking garage before finding a space and that made her late at the studio. Cyd was standing outside, her long, young legs exposed to a chill breeze by the ballet skirt.
Frenc, the oldest, was at the dentist's office. Sarah was late there, too.
"Mother," Frenc complained, "I'm going to be late for my Explorers'
meeting."
* * *
Everyone was at home but Pete when dinner was delivered by the airvan from Seven Worlds Cuisine. Sarah had a meeting of the Library Improvement Committee, so there'd been no time to cook. Neither she nor Pete wanted servants, although they could have afforded any number of them. Pete came in just as she was getting ready to leave.
"Dad," Frenc said, "Marcia wants me to spend the night, but—"
"Enough," Sarah said. "I have told you, Frenc, not on a school night."
"But—"
Pete de Conde patted his teenaged daughter on the shoulder. "You know the rules, love," he said.
Sarah pecked him on the cheek. "Gotta run."
"I hope this won't be a long meeting," he said.
"Shouldn't be."
But a couple of the old hardheads had their dander up because the more progressive members of the Improvement Committee wanted to increase the number of holofilm viewers in the library. The argument continued for over an hour. It was after ten when Sarah dropped the aircar swiftly from the local airlane to the entrance of her garage, entered on the fly, pushed the close and lock switch that buttoned car and garage up for the night while the flux engine was still revving down. The two younger children were asleep, Cyd with a stuffed Tigian tiger in her arms, Petey sprawled half-under, half-out of his coverings. She kissed them both on the forehead, adjusted Petey's cover, stuck her head in Frenc's door after knocking. Frenc was watching a music holo.
"Don't stay up too late," Sarah said.
"I won't."
"Goodnight."
"Night, Mom."
Pete was propped up on pillows, his briefcase at his side spreading its contents over the bed. "Hi," he said.
"You look so comfortable."
"How was the meeting?"
She shrugged tiredly. "Same old stuff."
"Coming to bed?"
She recognized the look in his eyes. Her first response was negative, but then she smiled. "I thought I'd have a quick bath."
"I like dirty girls," he said, grinning.
"I'll be quick."
He had cleared away his papers and his briefcase when she came out of the bath smelling of scents and powders. When he threw back the sheet to allow her to enter he was nude. She felt the good, solid surge of her libido.
They had been married for twenty years, and every move was familiar and comfortable. He was considerate of her needs. She accepted his attentions as her due, as something felicitous and pleasurable but not necessarily vital to her continued existence. She knew that he liked for her to make sounds of approval. Her little cry at the end was not faked, but had it not been for his need to know that she enjoyed it she would, by preference, have been silent. Then it was his turn and she did her duty with a glow of fondness and sati
sfaction. He was her husband, her man, the only man she'd ever known sexually. When, as he reached his completion and she felt his throbbings inside her she suddenly saw her brother David's face and felt, for one split second, a forbidden, sordid excitement, she made a face of total disgust, wiped the image from her mind, and held her husband close as he kissed her lightly on the neck and face.
As she freshened herself in the bathroom she wondered a bit about her mother and father. She didn't stay in touch with her siblings as closely as she should. When she'd last heard from Josh, there'd been no news of theelder Websters and Josh had said that David would be going out to look for them. Well, she thought, everything would turn out right in the end.
Bad things didn't happen to Sarah Webster de Conde. Sarah Webster de Conde had a wonderful husband, a splendid home, and fine children. Her life was so full of a number of things that she had no time for negative events. Mom and Pop would turn up with some amusing tale of being lost in the stars.
Pete was still awake when she got into bed beside him. He pulled her to his side and caressed her. "You're pretty sexy for an old married woman," he said.
"You're not bad for a staid old businessman," she told him.