Bohannon whistled. “That is one big fucking ship, sir.”
Yes, it was, and probably big enough to hold one of those meson accelerators. Sam activated his commlink and pinged Ka’Deem Brook.
“Yes, sir?”
“XO, we have a little situation, nothing too serious yet, but I’m going to Readiness Condition Two, and I’d like you to relieve me on the bridge. I’m going to have another chat with our prisoner.”
“Do you find me attractive, Captain Bitka?” Te’Anna turned in her chair and looked at him with her enormous unblinking gray eyes.
It wasn’t how Sam expected the conversation to start, but then he never got exactly what he expected from their alien prisoner. He sat down himself before answering.
“Some species come closer to matching our aesthetic standards than do others. Yours has many attractive characteristics: you are tall, graceful, well-proportioned by our standards, and large-eyed. Your feathers remind us of human hair, at least your head feathers do.”
She ran her fingers through her neck and head feathers, fluffing them out, and Sam realized that was a preening gesture.
“But do you find me sexually attractive?” she said. “Do you find me alluring?”
Sam shifted in his chair. Alluring? Was she hitting on him?
“Um . . . you may remember from a previous conversation that I try not to think of people in my chain of command in those terms.”
“But I am not in your chain of command.”
“You are a prisoner, and that’s even more problematic.”
Te’Anna cocked her head to the side and looked at him in what might have been exasperation. “Eh. You have so many rules! How do you remember them all? I may not always be your prisoner, so consider the question hypothetically.”
Why was he suddenly so uncomfortable in her presence? Was it because there was a certain sensuality in her shape and the grace of her movements? Or was it the combination of that realization with the memory of her eating the still-warm flesh carved from Mikko Running-Deer’s body?
“Look, I really don’t have time for—”
“Make time,” she said, her suddenly sharp voice cutting him off, and she sat up straighter. “These are not idle questions. It is a subject of much interest and importance to me. Did your little biologist-thing tell you about me? About my sexuality?”
“She said you had no actual reproductive organs, but that you had those sexual organs associated with pleasure, what she called the fun ones.”
“The fun ones, yes, that is a good description. What else?”
“That’s all,” Sam said, and he felt thankful that was the truth. At the moment, it was more than he wanted to know.
“Oh,” Te’Anna said with a tone in her voice he was beginning to associate with disappointment. “She left out the most interesting part. I wonder if she noticed. Proportional to our size, we have over twice as much erectile tissue as any species we have ever encountered. So you see, when I do think about sex, my thoughts can be quite intense.” As if to emphasize the point she shifted in her chair, moving her weight from one hip to the other and then back again.
“Naturally,” Sam said. “Must be tough, stuck here all alone.”
“Not in the sense you mean. I am an excellent lover, and I love myself more than any other.”
“Well . . . that’s swell, then. Is there a point here?”
“Think of it as my natural curiosity as a student of intelligent life. You come from a culture which includes six intelligent species coexisting with the pretense of equality. Is there no interspecies sex?”
“Yes, there is,” Sam said, suddenly aware his face was turning a shade of pink. After all he had gone through in the uBakai War, and now this involuntary odyssey across a thousand unexplored light-years of interstellar void, he thought he could take pretty much anything in stride. Of course, that was before he had begun having regular chats with a cannibalistic alien overlord preoccupied with sex, possibly with him. “Look, I’m not interested in talking about this anymore, okay? Something important has happened, something which will actually interest you.”
Te’Anna leaned back and looked away with what might have been a shrug of satisfaction. How much of this was just to put him off balance, he wondered. “Very well,” she said, “I perceive your patience wears thin. But we will come back to this later. Now ask your burning question.”
Sam picked up his data pad, brought up the image of the Guardian who had been doing most of the broadcasting, and held it up for Te’Anna to see.
“Know this guy?”
“Oh! How insulting! He would not come back to me, but he has returned to deal with you, Bitka? The New People must be beside themselves with joy. P’Daan, their creator, has returned.”
Sam felt the vibration at the base of his neck from an incoming comm. He squinted and saw Ka’Deem Brook’s ID tag.
“Yes, XO,” Sam said.
Sir, we have more jump emergence.
“Another ship?”
Seven more, sir. All of them big ones.
Sam felt lightheaded, a sensation almost immediately replaced with a certainty that he would not see Cassandra again, that whatever unanswered questions he had about their relationship would remain unanswered. The fact he would die not knowing seemed as bad as the prospect of death itself.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Six days later, aboard USS Cam Ranh Bay, running dark,
outbound to Destie-Seven
2 May 2134 (twenty-five days into hostilities,
seventy-five days after Incident Seventeen)
Lieutenant Homer Alexander, officer of the deck of Red Watch, sat in the command chair on the bridge of Cam Ranh Bay and thought about how drawing closer to people was different than drawing closer to things. As you got closer to a thing—a building, a mountain, a sign—it grew larger in your view. But the closer you got to a person, the smaller they seemed, at least the ones you had first noticed from a distance, the ones who seemed larger than life: politicians, holovid stars . . . war heroes.
When he first learned Bitka was to be their new captain, Homer could hardly believe it. Sam Bitka, a reservist just like him, a tactical officer just like him, and the man who, due to casualties and the emergencies of war, had risen to command his own destroyer and become the acknowledged tactical genius behind the victories of Destroyer Squadron Two in its desperate defense of K’tok in the uBakai War. That Sam Bitka was going to be their skipper! But whatever Homer had expected, the reality had been very different.
As if summoned by Homer’s thoughts, the captain floated through the bridge hatch and Homer hid a scowl. What the hell did he want? He made Homer nervous—all that prowling around the ship and always with that calm smile, as if he hadn’t a care in the world, as if . . . as if things were like they had been before.
“Any developments, TAC?”
“No change, sir. They’re still deployed in four two-ship elements: one element in Destie-Four orbit, the other three headed for different parts of the system. One of them is outbound toward us.”
“Methodical search,” the captain said, and the way he said it, as if it were some gem of wisdom worth passing on, made all the fear and despair and resentment in Homer bubble to the surface, and he suddenly didn’t care what he said, what the captain thought, what the goddamned Navy thought, or what came next, because he knew, knew, that he and all the rest of them were going to die here.
“That’s right, sir, methodical search, just like you said yesterday and the day before, and the day before that.”
Homer heard the sarcasm and ridicule in his voice. Had he meant that to bubble out into the open? Well, there it was. Bob DaSilva at Ops One looked at the captain, eyes wide, as if he expected an explosion. Chief Bermudez sitting beside him in Tac One just shook her head and studied her instruments. The captain floated near the hatch looking at Homer but his smile never wavered. After a moment, he looked at Ensign DaSilva in the Ops One chair.
“
Mister DaSilva, you are qualified to stand as officer of the deck, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir. I completed the training routine when we were still a week out from Destination.”
“Had a chance at OOD yet?”
“No, sir.”
“Shame to have all that training go to waste. Lieutenant Alexander, would you please surrender the bridge to Ensign DaSilva?”
Homer rattled off the ritual ship status report—which of course DaSilva already knew since he’d been sitting in Ops One the whole watch—and he turned over the command chair. The captain gestured for Homer to follow him.
Bitka led the way to his day cabin four frames aft of the bridge. After he clipped his tether to his desk he gestured to Homer to clip his to the other side. Somewhere on the brief trip back, the captain’s smile had disappeared.
“Now spill it, Lieutenant. What’s eating you?”
Homer looked at him and suddenly didn’t know where to start. That every order the captain gave seemed to diminish Homer somehow? Give further proof that he was less a man than the captain, less than the man he wanted to be? They were within a year or two of the same age, both had successful civilian careers, both had been called back to service, but Bitka had fought through the war and Homer had spent it on training exercises in the Solar System. The Bay had even been on the wrong side of the Solar System, in far Saturn orbit, when the uBakai fleet made its punishing hit-and-run raid on Earth’s orbital facilities.
But what ate at him most was that if their places had been swapped, he didn’t think he would have risen to the challenge the way Bitka had. He couldn’t know for certain, sometimes he thought he would have, but when he was alone and he closed his eyes and looked inside, he didn’t think so. He just couldn’t see himself doing those things. Or he could, but the images seemed like daydreams, scenes from an adventure holovid, not reality.
Was that what Mikko had thought as well?
“Look, Lieutenant,” the captain said, finally breaking the silence, “I know you took the XO’s death very hard. All of us did, but your feelings for her went beyond . . . what most of us felt for her as a shipmate. I didn’t understand that until afterwards. I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“She never understood either,” Homer said. “She never noticed how I felt, and you know why? Because of you. She was in love with you, and you never even saw it.”
“You’re letting your own disappointment run away with you,” the captain said. “Running-Deer and I had a professional relationship, and the start of a real friendship, but nothing more. Don’t be a fool, Alexander.”
Homer felt his face flush with anger and he leaned forward in the chair.
“I’m the fool? You think I’m imagining it? Hell, everyone on the ship knew she was crazy about you, except you. Ask any officer if you don’t believe me.”
Homer saw a look of surprise come over the captain’s face and he knew this last shot had struck home.
“Come on . . . she hardly spoke to me at first,” Bitka said.
“Tongue-tied,” Homer answered. “That’s why she never noticed how I felt: she only had eyes for you. Maybe it wouldn’t have worked out between us, but we should have had the chance to find out. Just the chance, that’s all I wanted. Now I’ll never know.”
Something changed in the captain’s expression when Homer said those last words.
“What you just said, say that again.”
He said it not with anger, but more curiosity or wonder in his voice. Homer looked at him a moment before answering.
“What hurts most is never knowing what might have been, never finding out whether or not it would have worked.”
“And that’s what you can’t get past,” the captain said, nodding.
“That’s right.”
The captain looked away, his forehead creased in concentration, and he sat there, silent and lost in thought for what seemed a long time but probably wasn’t much more than a minute. A minute of silence between two people who have been trading heated words can seem like a very long time. Finally, the captain turned back and appeared almost surprised to find him still there.
“Mister Alexander, you are being foolish. If it’s any consolation, you’re not the only one on this ship in that condition.”
“Captain, I—”
“Shut up and listen for a minute, Homer. I’m sorry I never noticed Mikko’s feelings for me. I can be fairly oblivious at times and I’ve been preoccupied with a broken love affair of my own . . . too preoccupied. I see that now. I think it’s gotten in the way of doing my job. Well, that stops right now.
“As to Mikko, I’ll tell you this: whatever infatuation she may have felt for me before we got to know each other, I think it was maturing into a genuine friendship. It was for me, anyway. I miss her a lot.
“I lost someone in the uBakai War—not a lover but someone I was coming to love. I can’t tell you how to deal with loss like this, but I can tell you others have gone through it and come out the other side. I believe you can, too.”
Homer floated in zero gee with his eyes closed, trying to regain a sense of physical and emotional equilibrium. He knew the captain was right. He didn’t hate him any less, but he knew he was right. Well, hate was too strong a word. What did he feel? Hurt. Just hurt, and he wanted the hurt to stop. He closed his eyes even tighter.
“When something won’t let go of you, sir, when it fills your head and won’t leave room for anything else, keeps getting bigger and bigger, like it’s going to overwhelm you . . . what do you do?”
“Well, for me what made the difference was my responsibility to the people relying on me to get them home alive. That’s what keeps me going here as well, TAC. You need something to think about and work on, something really important, and I’ve got just the thing. When you get off watch, get together with Lieutenant Ma. He’s got the best handle on how that meson gun of theirs works. Lash up some best estimates of its range and lethality, and a guess at what it will take to kill one of those Guardian long ships.”
Homer thought about putting together some simulations of Guardian long ships, estimating damage, range of engagement, but after a moment he shook his head.
“Okay, I’m with you on this, sir, but we don’t know enough about those ships to do anything but guess. We can work out something on the armament, but if you want me to show how to kill those ships, we need more than a guess. What about our prisoner? From what Ma said, she has a pretty good head for technical detail, but he didn’t know what to ask beyond the big science things. You’re a Tac-head, sir. You know what information we need. Can you talk to her? Maybe you can get something we can use to dummy up a simulation.”
The captain unhooked his tether, which Homer took as his cue to do the same.
“I haven’t had a chat with Te’Anna yet today, and I’d planned on trying to ask her what makes this guy P’Daan tick. I’ll see what she can tell us about technical performance of those ships, too. You’re close enough to the end of your watch you may as well get some lunch. Let Ensign DaSilva finish his first watch and turn the ship over to his relief. Do him good.
“Thank you for speaking so honestly with me, Homer. I guess I needed to talk this through myself. But just so we understand each other, Lieutenant, if you ever again pull a stunt like you just did on the bridge, you will spend the rest of this cruise under arrest for insubordination and conduct injurious to good order. Are we clear on that?”
“Yes, sir. I’m very sorry, sir.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
One hour later, aboard USS Cam Ranh Bay, running dark, outbound to Destie-Seven
2 May 2134 (twenty-five days into hostilities,
seventy-five days after Incident Seventeen)
Sam thought about his conversation with Homer Alexander on the short walk from the lift to Te’Anna’s confinement cabin. It was a good walk, if stripping away your self-illusions is good, and Sam thought that it was, uncomfortable and embarrassing as the process might be.
Here he was, trying to counsel the officer he considered the least mature and emotionally developed of his senior officers, and what did he find himself looking at? A goddamned mirror! Well, maybe not exactly, but close enough. He managed not to laugh at himself as he walked, but he couldn’t keep the grin from his face.
“Unusual odor in there today, Captain,” the Marine corporal in charge of the guard detail said. “We checked it out and Dr. Däng says it’s harmless. Some herbs the alien’s burning, like incense. You suppose she’s smoking dope and trying to cover it up, sir?”
“Every Marine’s a comedian,” Sam said.
“Yes, sir,” he answered with a grin.
Sam smelled the unusual aroma in Te’Anna’s stateroom as soon as they cracked the hatch. It was musky, not unpleasant, but you couldn’t help but notice it. A variety of different strains drifted through the main odor, some alien, some vaguely familiar, one . . . pungent, so sharp he could almost taste it on his tongue, and he knew it at once, how Cassandra had smelled and tasted after sex. And he remembered her tasting him, kissing and licking his shoulders and neck, saying he must have sailed because she could taste the sea brine on him—
The Marine guards closed the door behind him with a click, and his mind was suddenly back in the Guardian’s stateroom. It took him a moment to get his bearings, but only a moment, and he realized that had he experienced this vivid odor an hour ago, before his talk with Homer Alexander, the recollection might have overpowered him. He wasn’t sure why it was different now, but it was.
He took a seat opposite the Guardian and examined her carefully. She sat turned slightly to the side in her chair so she had to turn her head to look at him. She leaned casually against the chair’s back, a study in confident grace and elegance.
“What does P’Daan want?” Sam said.
“The same as I and every other Guardian wants,” Te’Anna answered, “a reason to go on living. It was a long time ago now, but I remember that so long as I knew them, M’Eetos was P’Daan’s reason for living. M’Eetos’ imagination, creativity, flair with which he undertook everything he did, entranced P’Daan. M’Eetos was special. He seemed to . . . glow with possibility.
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