The Best of Bova

by Ben Bova

  He had to yank open four airtight hatches along the short way. Each clanged shut automatically behind him.

  At last Hazard floated into the dimly lit combat center. It was a tiny, womblike circular chamber, its walls studded with display screens that glowed a sickly green in the otherwise darkened compartment. No desks or chairs in zero gravity; the CIC’s work surfaces were chest-high consoles, most of them covered with keyboards.

  Varshni and the Norwegian woman, Stromsen, were on duty. The little Indian, slim and dark, was wide-eyed with anxiety. His face shone with perspiration and his fatigues were dark at the armpits and between his shoulders. In the greenish glow from the display screens he looked positively ill. Stromsen looked tense, her strong jaw clenched, her ice-blue eyes fastened on Hazard, waiting for him to tell her what to do.

  “What happened?” Hazard demanded.

  “It simply blew out,” said Varshni. “I had just spoken with Michaels and D’Argencour when . . . when . . .” His voice choked off.

  “The screens went blank.” Stromsen pointed to the status displays. “Everything suddenly zeroed out.”

  She was controlling herself carefully, Hazard saw, every nerve taut to the point of snapping.

  “The rest of the station?” Hazard asked.

  She gestured again toward the displays. “No other damage.”

  “Everybody on full alert?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Lieutenant Feeney ducked through the hatch, his eyes immediately drawn to the row of burning red malfunction lights where the bridge displays should have been.

  “Mother of Mercy, what’s happened?”

  Before anyone could reply, Susan Yang, the chief communications officer, pushed through the hatch and almost bumped into Feeney. She saw the displays and immediately concluded, “We’re under attack!”

  “That is impossible!” Varshni blurted.

  Hazard studied their faces for a swift moment. They all knew what had happened; only Yang had the guts to say it aloud. She seemed cool and in control of herself. Oriental inscrutability? Hazard wondered. He knew she was third-generation Californian. Feeney’s pinched, narrow-eyed face failed to hide the fear that they all felt, but the Irishman held himself well and returned Hazard’s gaze without a tremor.

  The only sound in the CIC was the hum of the electrical equipment and the soft sighing of the air fans. Hazard felt uncomfortably warm with the five of them crowding the cramped little chamber. Perspiration trickled down his ribs. They were all staring at him, waiting for him to tell them what must be done, to bring order out of the numbing fear and uncertainty that swirled around them. Four youngsters from four different nations, wearing the blue-gray fatigues of the IPF, with colored patches denoting their technical specialties on their left shoulders and the flag of their national origin on their right shoulders.

  Hazard said, “We’ll have to control the station from here. Mr. Feeney, you are now my Number One; Michaels was on duty in the bridge. Mr. Varshni, get a damage-control party to the bridge. Full suits.”

  “No one’s left alive in there,” Varshni whispered.

  “Yes, but their bodies must be recovered. We owe them that. And their families.” He glanced toward Yang. “And we’ve got to determine what caused the blowout.”

  Varshni’s face twisted unhappily at the thought of the mangled bodies.

  “I want a status report from each section of the station,” Hazard went on, knowing that activity was the key to maintaining discipline. “Start with . . .”

  A beeping sound made all five of them turn toward the communications console. Its orange demand light blinked for attention in time with the angry beeps. Hazard reached for a handgrip to steady himself as he swung toward the comm console. He noted how easily the youngsters handled themselves in zero gee. For him it still took a conscious, gut-wrenching effort.

  Stromsen touched the keyboard with a slender finger. A man’s unsmiling face appeared on the screen: light brown hair clipped as close as Hazard’s gray, lips pressed together in an uncompromising line. He wore the blue-gray of the IPF with a commander’s silver star on his collar.

  “This is Buckbee, commander of station Graham. I want to speak to Commander Hazard.”

  Sliding in front of the screen, Hazard grasped the console’s edge with both white-knuckled hands. He knew Buckbee only by reputation, a former U.S. Air Force colonel, from the Space Command until it had been disbanded, but before that he had put in a dozen years with SAC.

  “This is Hazard.”

  Buckbee’s lips moved slightly in what might have been a smile, but his eyes remained cold. “Hazard, you’ve just lost your bridge.”

  “And six lives.”

  Unmoved, Buckbee continued as if reading from a prepared script, “We offer you a chance to save the lives of the rest of your crew. Surrender the Hunter to us.”

  “Us?”

  Buckbee nodded, a small economical movement. “We will bring order and greatness out of this farce called the IPF.”

  A wave of loathing so intense that it almost made him vomit swept through Hazard. He realized that he had known all along, with a certainty that had not needed conscious verification, that his bridge had been destroyed by deliberate attack, not by accident.

  “You killed six kids,” he said, his voice so low that he barely heard it himself. It was not a whisper but a growl.

  “We had to prove that we mean business, Hazard. Now surrender your station or we’ll blow you all to hell. Any further deaths will be on your head, not ours.”

  Jonathan Wilson Hazard, captain, U.S. Navy (ret.). Marital status: divorced. Two children: Jonathan, Jr., twenty-six; Virginia Elizabeth, twenty. Served twentyeight years in U.S. Navy, mostly in submarines. Commanded fleet ballistic-missile submarines Ohio, Corpus Christi, and Utah. Later served as technical advisor to Joint Chiefs of Staff and as naval liaison to NATO headquarters in Brussels. Retired from Navy after hostage crisis in Brussels. Joined International Peacekeeping Force and appointed commander of orbital battle station Hunter.

  “I can’t just hand this station over to a face on a screen,” Hazard replied, stalling, desperately trying to think his way through the situation. “I don’t know what you’re up to, what your intentions are, who you really are.”

  “You’re in no position to bargain, Hazard,” said Buckbee, his voice flat and hard. “We want control of your station. Either you give it to us or we’ll eliminate you completely.”

  “Who the hell is ‘we’?”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “The hell it doesn’t! I want to know who you are and what you’re up to.”

  Buckbee frowned. His eyes shifted away slightly, as if looking to someone standing out of range of the video camera.

  “We don’t have time to go into that now,” he said at last.

  Hazard recognized the crack in Buckbee’s armor. It was not much, but he pressed it. “Well, you goddamned well better make time, mister. I’m not handing this station over to you or anybody else until I know what in hell is going on.”

  Turning to Feeney, he ordered, “Sound general quarters. ABM satellites on full automatic. Miss Yang, contact IPF headquarters and give them a full report of our situation.”

  “We’ll destroy your station before those idiots in Geneva can decide what to do!” Buckbee snapped.

  “Maybe,” said Hazard. “But that’ll take time, won’t it? And we won’t go down easy, I guarantee you. Maybe we’ll take you down with us.”

  Buckbee’s face went white with fury. His eyes glared angrily.

  “Listen,” Hazard said more reasonably, “you can’t expect me to just turn this station over to a face on a screen. Six of my people have been killed. I want to know why, and who’s behind all this. I won’t deal until I know who I’m dealing with and what your intentions are.”

  Buckbee growled, “You’ve just signed the death warrant for yourself and your entire crew.”

  The comm screen went b
lank.

  For a moment Hazard hung weightlessly before the dead screen, struggling to keep the fear inside him from showing. Putting a hand out to the edge of the console to steady himself, he turned slowly to his young officers. Their eyes were riveted on him, waiting for him to tell them what to do, waiting for him to decide between life and death.

  Quietly, but with steel in his voice, Hazard commanded, “I said general quarters, Mr. Feeney. Now!”

  Feeney flinched as if suddenly awakened from a dream. He pushed himself to the command console, unlatched the red cover over the “general quarters” button, and banged it eagerly with his fist. The action sent him recoiling upward and he had to put up a hand against the overhead to push himself back down to the deck. The alarm light began blinking red and they could hear its hooting even through the airtight hatches outside the CIC.

  “Geneva, Miss Yang,” Hazard said sternly, over the howl of the alarm. “Feeney, see that the crew is at their battle stations. I want the satellites under our control on full automatic, prepared to shoot down anything that moves if it isn’t in our precleared data bank. And Mr. Varshni, has that damage-control party gotten under way yet?”

  The two young men rushed toward the hatch, bumping each other in their eagerness to follow their commander’s orders. Hazard almost smiled at the Laurel-and-Hardy aspect of it. Lieutenant Yang pushed herself to the comm console and anchored her softboots on the Velcro strip fastened to the deck there.

  “Miss Stromsen, you are the duty officer. I am depending on you to keep me informed of the status of all systems.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Keep them busy, Hazard told himself. Make them concentrate on doing their jobs and they won’t have time to be frightened.

  “Encountering interference, sir,” reported Yang, her eyes on the comm displays. “Switching to emergency frequency.”

  Jamming, thought Hazard.

  “Main comm antenna overheating,” Stromsen said. She glanced down at her console keyboard, then up at the displays again. “I think they’re attacking the antennas with lasers, sir. Main antenna out. Secondaries . . .” She shrugged and gestured toward the baleful red lights strung across her keyboard. “They’re all out, sir.”

  “Set up a laser link,” Hazard commanded. “They can’t jam that. We’ve got to let Geneva know what’s happening.”

  “Sir,” said Yang, “Geneva will not be within our horizon for another forty-three minutes.”

  “Try signaling the commsats. Topmost priority.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Got to let Geneva know, Hazard repeated to himself. If anybody can help us, they can. If Buckbee’s pals haven’t put one of their own people into the comm center down there. Or staged a coup. Or already knocked out the commsats. They’ve been planning this for a long time. They’ve got it all timed down to the microsecond.

  He remembered the dinner, a month earlier, the night before he left to take command of the Hunter. I’ve known about it since then, Hazard said to himself. Known about it but didn’t want to believe it. Known about it and done nothing. Buckbee was right. I killed those six kids. I should have seen that the bastards would strike without warning.

  It had been in the equatorial city of Belém, where the Brazilians had set up their space launching facility. The IPF was obligated to spread its launches among all its space-capable member nations, so Hazard had been ordered to assemble his crew at Belém for their lift into orbit.

  The night before they left, Hazard had been invited to dinner by an old Navy acquaintance who had already put in three months of orbital duty with the Peacekeepers and was on Earthside leave.

  His name was Cardillo. Hazard had known him, somewhat distantly, as a fellow submariner, commander of attack boats rather than the missile carriers Hazard himself had captained. Vincent Cardillo had a reputation for being a hard nose who ran an efficient boat, if not a particularly happy one. He had never been really close to Hazard: their chemistries were too different. But this specific sweltering evening in a poorly air-conditioned restaurant in downtown Belém, Cardillo acted as if they shared some old fraternal secret between them.

  Hazard had worn his IPF summerweight uniform: pale blue with gold insignia bordered by space black. Cardillo came in casual civilian slacks and a beautifully tailored Italian silk jacket. Through drinks and the first part of the dinner their conversation was light, inconsequential. Mostly reminiscences by two gray-haired submariners about men they had known, women they had chased, sea tales that grew with each retelling. But then:

  “Damn shame,” Cardillo muttered, halfway through his entree of grilled eel.

  The restaurant, one of the hundreds that had sprung up in Belém since the Brazilians had made the city their major spaceport, was on the waterfront. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the muddy Para River widened into the huge bay that eventually fed into the Atlantic. Hazard had spent his last day on Earth touring around the tropical jungle on a riverboat. The makeshift shanties that stood on stilts along the twisting mud-brown creeks were giving way to industrial parks and cinderblock housing developments. Air-conditioning was transforming the region from rubber plantations to computerized information services. The smell of cement dust blotted out the fragrance of tropical flowers. Bulldozers clattered in raw clearings slashed from the forest where stark steel frameworks of new buildings rose above the jungle growth. Children who had splashed naked in the brown jungle streams were being rounded up and sent to air-conditioned schools.

  “What’s a shame?” Hazard asked. “Seems to me these people are starting to do all right for the first time in their lives. The space business is making a lot of jobs around here.”

  Cardillo took a forkful of eel from his plate. It never got to his mouth.

  “I don’t mean them, Johnny. I mean us. It’s a damn shame about us.”

  Hazard had never liked being called “Johnny.” His family had addressed him as “Jon.” His Navy associates knew him as “Hazard” and nothing else. A few very close friends used “J.W.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked. His own plate was already wiped clean. The fish and its dark spicy sauce had been marvelous. So had the crisp-crusted bread.

  “Don’t you feel nervous about this whole IPF thing?” Cardillo asked, trying to look earnest. “I mean, I can see Washington deciding to put boomers like your boats in mothballs, and the silo missiles, too. But the attack subs? Decommission our conventional weapons systems? Leave us disarmed?”

  Hazard had not been in command of a missile submarine in more than three years. He had been allowed, even encouraged, to resign his commission after the hostage mess in Brussels.

  “If you’re not in favor of what the American government is doing, then why did you agree to serve in the Peacekeepers?”

  Cardillo shrugged and smiled slightly. It was not a pleasant smile. He had a thin, almost triangular face with a low, creased brow tapering down to a pointed chin. His once-dark hair, now peppered with gray, was thick and wavy. He had allowed it to grow down to his collar. His deep-brown eyes were always narrowed, crafty, focused so intently he seemed to be trying to penetrate through you. There was no joy in his face, even though he was smiling; no pleasure. It was the smile of a gambler, a con artist, a used-car salesman.

  “Well,” he said slowly, putting his fork back down on the plate and leaning back in his chair, “you know the old saying, ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.’”

  Hazard nodded, although he felt puzzled. He groped for Cardillo’s meaning. “Yeah, I guess playing space cadet up there will be better than rusting away on the beach.”

  “Playing?” Cardillo’s dark brows rose slightly.

  “We’re not playing, Johnny. We’re in this for keeps.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply that I don’t take my duty to the IPF seriously,” Hazard answered.

  For an instant Cardillo seemed stunned with surprise. Then he threw his head back and burst into laughter. “Jesus Christ, Johnny
,” he gasped. “You’re so straight-arrow it’s hysterical.”

  Hazard frowned but said nothing. Cardillo guffawed and banged the table with one hand. Some of the diners glanced their way. They seemed to be mostly Americans or Europeans, a few Asians. Some Brazilians, too, Hazard noticed as he waited for Cardillo’s amusement to subside. Probably from the capital or Rio.

  “Let me in on the joke,” Hazard said at last.

  Cardillo wiped at his eyes. Then, leaning forward across the table, his grin fading into an intense, penetrating stare, he whispered harshly, “I already told you, Johnny. If we can’t avoid being members of the IFF—if Washington’s so fucking weak that we’ve got to disband practically all our defenses—then what we’ve got to do is take over the Peacekeepers ourselves.”

  “Take over the Peacekeepers?” Hazard felt stunned at the thought of it.

  “Damn right! Men like you and me, Johnny. It’s our duty to our country.”

  “Our country,” Hazard reminded him, “has decided to join the International Peacekeeping Force and has encouraged its military officers to obtain commissions in it.”

  Cardillo shook his head. “That’s our stupid goddamn government, Johnny. Not the country. Not the people who really want to defend America instead of selling her out to a bunch of fucking foreigners.”

  “That government,” Hazard reminded him, “won a big majority last November.”

  Cardillo made a sour face. “Ahh, the people. What the fuck do they know?”

  Hazard said nothing.

  “I’m telling you, Johnny, the only way to do it is to take over the IPF.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “You mean if and when the time comes, you won’t go along with us?”

  “I mean,” Hazard said, forcing his voice to remain calm, “that I took an oath to be loyal to the IPF. So did you.”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure. And what about the oath we took way back when—the one to preserve and protect the United States of America?”