Gammalaw: Smoke on the Water

by Brian Daley

  Another Manipulant went stumbling by, the undersides of its wrists cut nearly through, as if it had attempted suicide with a power tool. The remaining muscles had contracted, pulling its meaty hands back as far as they could go, fingertips angled back and down, almost touching its own upper forearms.

  A sudden realization gave Dextra the willpower to tear her eyes away from the butchery. Where was Tonii? The gynander had been only a few steps away when the Manipulants had burst forth, but Tonii hadn't tried to shield her or pull her from harm's way.

  Then Dextra saw what had diverted 'erm. The gynander had engaged one of the Manipulants, probably because it had been coming Dextra's way. The thing had failed to gut or get by Tonii, who had managed to get the stun baton out of the creature's belt loop.

  Dextra had the presence of mind not to yell out. Compared with the eerily composed and unerring Skillsfighting of the Exts, Tonii's moves appeared plagued with split-second false starts, hesitations, and flinches.

  The Manipulant put its oxlike shoulder and arm into a downward stroke that suddenly doglegged to the right. Tonii evaded it and darted in to jam the charged tip of the baton over the top of the vest, a hard tonfa strike into the hollow of the throat. Even without an electrical discharge the impact would have put any normal human out of the fight, but the Special Trooper was only staggered. Tonii gave it more of the same to nose, teeth, and temple, leaving it rocked but still on its feet, then turned to look for Dextra.

  By then, however, Dextra was being carried toward the shuttle's boarding well by Emmett Qrman—Burning, as she'd heard him called. She clung to his arm and called for the gynander to follow.

  The blood on Burning's ka-bar was witness to the fact that he had fought alongside his Exts, though he'd given most of his attention to rallying defense and organizing the withdrawal. Exts were moving in to run interference, Lod and the almost anorectically slender Ghost among them.

  The soldier named Zone was part no-motion-wasted war machine, part silent hollow-eyed berserker. His implement of choice was an entrenching tool modified for grip and with what looked to be an enhanced edge on its bush knife feature.

  The jam-up at the boarding well had kept the Exts who already were in the shuttle from returning to render help. But the confined space and limited number of doors connecting the engineering areas to the passageway had similarly made it impossible for the Manipulants to bring their numbers to bear on a wide front.

  With Burning bellowing orders over the bedlam and combatants fighting furiously, the rear body of the Exts closed on the boarding well meter by meter. The decks were treacherous with spilled blood, and screams and roars filled the passageway.

  Ghost, in the thick of it, was rammed into a bulkhead and momentarily stunned. Dextra shrieked warnings no one heard. The human officer of Manipulants who had importuned Dextra raised his own chopper, plainly meaning to take Ghost's head.

  But a group of gnomish-looking Exts intervened. When one of them lost a helmet, Dextra realized that the Ext was nothing more than a kid. As fearless as the Manipulants, they swarmed over the colonel, hamstringing and half disemboweling him. One was slicing the colonel's jugular when Ghost hissed an order, and in a moment they were all falling back in good order.

  Zone cleared the blockage in the boarding well by clambering over people and laying about him with the flat of his e-tool. Burning got into the well, followed closely by Ghost. Somewhere behind them the two sides were breaking off contact, the din abating as the Exts yielded the field but won their freedom.

  In the middle of being trundled down the ladder well, Dextra gritted her teeth and threw everything she had into regaining her composure. What happened in the next few minutes would decide the fate of hundreds of people and make or break her chance to influence the outcome of the Roke Conflict.

  She shut her mind to the slaughter and shouted for Burning to put her down.

  He ignored her as he continued to pick his way through the forward boarding lock and into the shuttle. The Exts' training and discipline had kept the featureless deck space from becoming complete chaos, but the cavernous cargo bay was filled with uncertain milling, queries, and overlapping calls for assistance.

  Dextra pried at Burning's fingers. "Quit mauling me, for God's sake!"

  The stridency of her tone got his attention, but it was something else that gave him pause. Tonii seized the crook of Burning's free elbow and without making any show of strength halted him in his tracks.

  "Allgrave, I'll take her now," Tonii proclaimed.

  Burning gave the gynander a reappraising stare. Dextra could see that he still hadn't figured Tonii out, but he understood that Tonii was a presence to be reckoned with. He glanced to make sure the lock was well guarded, then complied.

  The last of the casualties were being carried aboard, as well as the Ext dead. Led by Zone, the rear guard reported that the Manipulants were withdrawing. While Dextra combed her hair back out of her face with her fingers and took a few yogic breaths, Burning blew a signal whistle for quiet.

  "Company commanders or their execs report to me. Get all casualties moved to the aft bulkhead. Everybody else stand fast."

  General Delecado emerged from the cockpit. "We're in control for now," he told Burning. "All locks secure and guarded. No unfriendlies encountered."

  Burning nodded approval. Dextra decided that the Exts had to have run endless tactical simulations and training problems during the months-long voyage from Concordance, including familiarization sessions and enter-and-clear drills in assorted LAW craft.

  Zone appeared, wiping scarlet off his e-tool with his sleeve. Someone from his outfit laughed. "Your eeter got some good eatin' today, huh, Colonel?" Zone didn't lower himself to acknowledge it.

  "What's down, Allgrave?" General Delecado wanted to know.

  "The whistle blew, and the shit flew—" Burning began.

  "You two, get everybody strapped in," Dextra said, cutting him off. "And get someone to the boarding lock who knows how to operate the manual releases. Prep your people for free fall, maneuver forces, and possible micro-g nausea."

  The sighs and sounds of the bloodbath were still with her, but anyone who had been raised in an orbital habitat knew how to thrust aside all distractions and turn to what needed to be done in a life and death emergency. "If we stay up here, we're finished. But if we can make planetfall, I can get us out of this."

  Burning and his sister exchanged dubious looks.

  "I say we trust her," Ghost said at last. "All that's certain is that there's no way back."

  * * * *

  Half into a bottle of vodka he had discovered in one of the station's storage rooms, Mason watched through the window wall as a helipod touched down on the pad outside. The fair Ms. Deitz with more questions, he decided. Instead, however, it was Farley Swope who climbed out of the 'pod.

  Where LAW's injustices had drained the fight out of most of the survey crew, they had only made Farley more stubborn. If leaving Sunbeard had bereaved her, she refused to let it show. She was still the stocky, dynamic, frizzy-locked woman Mason had met in LAW mission fundamentals training, maybe because she'd had more practice than most at forging her way through life's embitterments.

  She walked briskly to the station, peeling off her flight gloves as she came through the door. Mason didn't even try to rise from the chair the vodka had glued him to. She took one look at him and shook her head in a gesture that managed to mix disapproval and sympathy.

  "Claude," she said, approaching him, "the time's come to bring you in on something important. From the sorry look of you, you won't last much longer without hearing me out."

  "Have a drink with me," he slurred, blinking in her general direction.

  Farley squatted down in front of him. "Claude, listen to me. There might be a way for us to go back."

  Mason's sluggish confusion must have shown on his face: thoughts of his parents' estate, now sold off; of his ex-several now light-years away; of former family frien
ds who had distanced themselves from him because he had blundered his way onto the political gallows.

  Farley clicked her tongue in exasperation. "Not back to Abraxas. I mean back to Aquamarine. Where you and I both know we belong."

  He stared at her, not trusting his ears.

  "We can put our lives back on track, Claude. But you've got to want it badly enough, because we're only going to get one crack at it."

  Mason gazed at the torturous, windblown Blades and tried to make sense of what she was telling him. "Farley, it's impossible. LAW will never allow us to go back."

  Farley, who'd seemed about to chew him out, softened unexpectedly, coming closer to touch his face. "So fabulous-looking and dutiful to boot. Your family made damn sure of both, didn't they?" She glanced briefly at the vodka bottle beside him. "Claude, there's something getting into motion onboard the Sword of Damocles, something involving the con-scriptees from Concordance."

  "The Exts," Mason said.

  Farley nodded. "This incident, Claude; it's going to grab a lot of media attention, and we can make use of it."

  "To do what?"

  "To bring Aquamarine into the light. I'd do it myself if I could, but like it or not, you're the Scepter's public face."

  Mason sniggered drunkenly. "Claude Mason, momentary hero—preinquest, of course."

  "This involves Dextra Haven, Claude."

  "The Hierarch?" he asked, showing a hint of interest.

  "No, Dextra Haven the plumbing supply spokesmodel." Farley let go of her frown. "She's pushing for an Alpha-LAW mission to Aquamarine, but she's being hemmed in by Lightner and a lot of other Preservationists. The thing is, we can change that. Or you can, anyway."

  Mason's pretended scorn was lost on Farley, who had always been able to see through the handsome facade the bio-cosmeds and subdermal sculptors had given him. Even so, he said, "You're staking our lives on a bunch of old-guard progressives?"

  "'The enemy of our enemy,' " Farley told him.

  Mason reached for the bottle but didn't drink from it.

  "Who've you been talking to, Farley? I mean, just how reliable's your information?"

  She hesitated, then said, "I have contacts in the Quantum College."

  Mason blinked once, then laughed long and hard.

  The Quantum College. He associated the phrase with everything from stale party jokes to ominous questions and warnings in security oath documents. It was invoked by would-be mystics trying to get laid, paranoids in locked wards, blood-chilling modern myths that said the QC was the mask and mantle worn by certain surviving Cyberviruses.

  There were abundant ways to enroll. An applicant often wound up supplying complaint data to consumer fraud investigators or experiencing a much less auspicious interface with internal security investigators.

  At its low end the Quantum College was lumped in with cybergeist trickster fables such as Obetron, fAIries, and Hackey Puck. At the high end Mason knew of at least two independent studies—LAW and Lyceum—that had investigated allegations that the QC was a vehicle for Roke incursion into the Periapt computational and communications TechPlex.

  Farley clamped a hand on his upper arm. "After the things we witnessed on Aquamarine, you're going to doubt me?"

  She had his attention now and began to fill him in while she walked him through sobering circles in the station's communal room. She explained how Dextra Haven fit into the plan, how the Exts did, and how Mason would. As she ran it down for him, one part of his mind veered off onto the tormenting need to know whether his wife and child were alive on Aquamarine.

  But Mason was yanked back when she got to the part about the Exts' landing on Periapt—and about the ocean.

  "Farley, I can't," he interrupted. "You weren't at Styx Strait when the Oceanic got Marlon and the rest. You didn't see it kill Boon. You don't know what you're asking of me!"

  She nodded once more, all sympathy and understanding. "You're right; I didn't see it get Boon. But I do know that the Oceanic's six light-years from here, Claude. And here's another calculation for you: Let's say Haven manages to get an A-LAW mission launched in a year. Using the second-generation zero-point-energy drive, that's still seven years objective in transit."

  Mason ran the figures automatically; by that point he could do it in his sleep. "Almost nineteen years old, baseline." Merely saying the words hurt him.

  "By the time you get there," Farley agreed. "You can't raise your child—if he or she survived—but you could be there for a marriage or maybe even the birth of a grandchild. Make what you can of your fatherhood that way. As for what we're asking of you regarding Periapt's ocean and all—"

  "Don't say it," Mason cut her off. "I'll cross that when I come to it."

  Chapter

  Twenty

  The proverb etched into a white and blue marble wall of the Periapt Naval Museum read grande nao, gran cuidado. Chaz Quant, executive officer of the SWATHship Matsya, did not know much Spanish, but he knew this one by heart and could vouch for it personally: "Great ship, great anxiety."

  Even so, a certain measure of anxiety aboard the Matsya would have been preferable to the decline and moribundity that had taken hold of her. It was a terrible thing when a vessel came to an ignominious finish, especially a vessel of distinction.

  Now the mighty Mats, from flight deck to trimaran keels, was a caretaker operation, a glorified test barge with a skeleton crew and dozens of embarked second-rate science types. He found himself increasingly inclined to hold guilty just about anything or anybody else who presented a target. Better, then, to pay his respects to the naval museum, an institution whose days were also numbered.

  He rose from the bench to drift among displays he'd first seen in his boyhood, decades earlier. The weather being hot and clear, the place was almost empty. Quant followed a route he knew well to look upon what he regarded as sacred objects.

  He passed the mangled and bashed-open submersible, once superstrong, from the epic PN Solaris submarine rescue, and lingered at a plaque that had come from Old Earth itself:

  Sea captain: Upon his first popping up, the lieutenants sheer off to the other side, as if he were a ghost indeed; for 'tis impudence for any to approach him within the length of a boathook.

  The quote dated back to 1707 baseline and Plain Ned Ward's The Wooden World; it brought a smile to Quant's lips, his first in days.

  The smile faded as he gazed at the flat photo taken on the boatwell deck of the marifortress McMurdo Sound, a group shot of the young, hard-bitten skippers from her amphib assault force. Six men and two women in salt-silvered fabric body armor, all staring directly into the camera, leaning against one another or with an arm propped on a comrade's shoulder. In the thirty-odd hours after the taking of the still, they had carried out a series of riverine raids and amphibious attacks that had stunned the world and virtually ended the Turnback War, in effect eliminating any need for the use of strategic weapons. The squadron commander was a man with a teak-dark somber face and wiry, short-cropped, graying black hair. He stood 180 centimeters tall and looked as if he could bench-press a capital ship's anchor.

  Quant confronted his younger self. He had been nine kilos lighter in those days, twenty years younger, and he would go on to a kind of heroic infamy commanding the frigate Hornet. But nobody could take the McMurdo Sound away from him.

  A sea captain, by God.

  He gazed at the face and the nonreflective captain's insignia on the body armor collar for as long as he could bear to, then strode off quickly for the museum's huge main doors.

  "Commander Quant."

  Quant looked back the way he'd come, recognizing the gravelly voice and wondering why Valentin Maksheyeva was being so formal. Quant had precious few friends, but the curator was one of long standing. Then he saw that a stranger was slouching along lackadaisically in the wake of the old man. The stranger wore a uniform Quant couldn't place, an ill-fitting one that would have looked a good deal worse if it had not been wrinkle- and stain-res
istant Then he recognized it as some kind of Hierarchate civil service flunky getup.

  Maksheyeva's ugly old puss composed itself into a grin. Quant approved of the curator's unaugmented looks, having nothing but scorn for cosmetic treatments and enhancements.

  Changes that counted couldn't be bought. "This young man has been sent with an air diligence to return you ASAP to the Matsya, Commander," Maksheyeva said.

  Quant beetled his eyebrows. "A limo?" He had figured to hitch a lift back aboard a harbor patrol craft if the Matsya's captain's gig and surface-effect whaleboat were unavailable.

  "Central Liaison has been trying to reach you without success," the young driver explained.

  Quant grunted and showed him the plugphone he had removed from his ear.

  "So some kind soul at Central Liaison has sent this fine young fellow to fetch you aboard." Maksheyeva touched the driver's arm. "I trust there's nothing amiss," he added.

  Quant squared away his white-visored cap and smoothed his beard. "As do I. We'll have that drink another time, Admiral."

  Maksheyeva nodded, beaming a bit at the driver's surprised, reassessing look. Valentin claimed to prefer not to be addressed by his retired rank, but he liked hearing it from Quant. "I'll be here. But you'd better make your good-byes to my two doormen there."

  He meant the exhibits flanking the entrance: two naval gun turrets, monolithic and sharply sloped. To the left was the turret Musashi, rescued when the heavy cruiser Yamamoto went to salvage; to the right was Lord Nelson, off the McMurdo Sound. Special circumstances had brought back the day of the naval big gun during the Turnback War, but only fleetingly. Musashi, with its two 240-mm rifles, and Lord Nelson, with three monster 635s, were the last of their breed.

  "The reclamation yard so soon?" Quant said.

  Maksheyeva's shrug said volumes. "Cost-reduction requirements from the War Board. The museum is obliged to yield three-quarters of its physical space and most of its budget to other operations. Musashi and Lord Nelson are headed for the recycling yard, where they'll earn back something on the order of one three-thousandth of what it cost to build them."