A Talent for War

by Jack McDevitt

  The station looks a trifle haphazard: the original structure was little more than a platform. But that’s been long since encased within environmental pods, manufacturing shells, power extraction nets, loading and docking facilities and automated factories.

  A substantial dust cloud—held in place by artificial gravity—orbits the complex, providing a shield against the harsh light of the Veiled Lady. Once inside the perimeter of the cloud, an observer is struck by the relatively soft illumination of the cylinder world, which spills out of a hundred thousand windows and ports and transparent panels and receiving bays. If Saraglia is on the edge of man’s universe, it is also the warmest of his habitats.

  We rode our shuttle into one of the bays, disembarked, and checked into a hotel. Chase immediately began preparations for the second phase of the journey.

  I needed some recovery time though. So I went sightseeing among the forests and glades, and even spent a couple of afternoons enjoying one of its seacoast lodges.

  Several days after our arrival, we were on our way again, in a leased Centaur. It wasn’t as large as the vehicle that Gabe had authorized, and the accommodations were (as Chase pointed out with some asperity) rather Spartan for a long trip. But I hadn’t got accustomed yet to controlling large amounts of money, and the price for the Centaur was sufficiently exorbitant.

  As soon as the engines had built up a sufficient charge, we made the jump back into Armstrong.

  “We’ll make our re-entry in fifty-seven days,” she said. “Shipboard days. Also, we have a decision to make.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “This is a long flight. Confederate regulations don’t really apply out where we’re going, but we’re supposed to abide by them anyhow. If we follow the guidelines, we will allow three hundred A.U.s for re-insertion back into linear. Factoring in our inability to be precise, we might find ourselves very easily five or six hundred A.U.s off the target. Now, a Centaur’s a lot slower in conventional space than a big commercial liner. If we aren’t lucky, we could find ourselves with a long trip to get where we’re going. Best bet would be to just go ahead and jump back in as close to the target as we can.”

  “Hell, no,” I exploded. “We’ve waited all this time. I don’t mind a little patience now.”

  “How about a lot of patience?”

  “Oh,” I said. “How much time are we talking?”

  “Possibly the better part of a year.”

  “I don’t think,” I said, “you mentioned this before.”

  “I was making assumptions about how you’d want to handle it. Alex,” she smiled and assumed her most soothing manner. “The chances of our actually materializing inside something are virtually nil. There’s an enormous amount of empty space within the entry area we’d be using. You’d be safer than flying a skimmer at home.”

  Her smile widened.

  “That’s not exactly reassuring,” I said.

  “Trust me,” she beamed.

  I’ve always been careful to ration my exposure to electronic fantasy. But that long ride out into the Veiled Lady provided the perfect excuse to dispense with old inhibitions. I retired to my cabin rather early in the voyage.

  I traveled extensively through the ship’s library, vacationing in a dozen different luxury spots. Some of them actually existed, some did not, some never could. There was always. at least one lovely woman on my arm. And their characters, of course, were amenable to my programing.

  Chase knew. She stayed up front in the cockpit most of the time, reading and staring out into the gray tunnel which opened endlessly before us. She said little when I wandered up periodically to crash into a seat beside her. It was always mildly embarrassing, and I didn’t know why. So I grew irritated with her.

  Eventually I tired of the standard travelogues. I’d brought along some archeological puzzle scenarios from Gabe’s collection. These were elaborate adventures, set in mythical ruins against exotic locales: find and identify a curious artifact in a submerged temple peopled with grotesque, animated statuary; translate a set of three-dimensional symbols afloat within a cluster of translucent pyramids on a frozen tundra; piece together the meaning of an ancient sacrificial ritual which seems to hold the key to explaining how the original inhabitants produced, within a few generations, a savage race.

  There was in all this a surprise.

  When I got in trouble trying to get through a water-filled passageway in the temple, I was rescued and dragged into a stone basin by an exquisite, half-naked woman whom I remembered but was slow to pinpoint.

  Ria.

  The woman in the photo in Gabe’s bedroom.

  She showed up again as a lovely savage in the ruined city, and among the pyramids as a magnificent wind-born creature with wings. Always she was there to rescue the adventurer and inform him he had lost the game; and on the one occasion that I got through to the end, she was waiting.

  Her name was always Ria.

  I became increasingly absorbed until, on one occasion while I was being stalked by an invisible thing through a mountain fortress that seemed to have no exits, the sequence dissolved, and I was on my back in a bunk in a dark space.

  For a long time, my heart pounded while realization gradually set in that I had returned to my cabin. And then I felt movement, detected a silhouette.

  “Chase?”

  “Hello, Alex,” she said. Her voice sounded different, and I could hear her breathe. “How about some reality?”

  On the seventeenth day, we saw a shadow on the Armstrong scanners. Only momentarily, and then it was gone.

  “It was nothing,” Chase said.

  But afterward, she was frowning.

  XXII.

  Man is fed with fables through life, and leaves it in the belief he knows something of what has been passing, when in truth he has known nothing but what has passed under his own eye.

  —Thomas Jefferson,

  Letter to Thomas Cooper

  THE TARGET STAR was a dull red type-M dwarf. It floated benignly in one of the dustier regions of the nebula, about one thousand three hundred light years from Saraglia. We had no idea how many worlds circled it, nor have I ever learned..

  Chase brought us out into linear space at a sharp angle to the plane of the planetary system, within about ten days travel time. It was a piece of extraordinarily good fortune (or good navigating) to get so close.

  We held a party in the cockpit that night, toasting the red star and congratulating one another. For the first time since I’d known her, Chase drank too much. And for several hours, the Centaur lacked a pilot. She was passionate and sleepy by turns, and several times I looked away from her at the myriad stars, wondering which was the general direction from which we’d come. Odd that the vast political entity of several hundred worlds and a thousand billion human beings could disappear so utterly.

  Two planets floated within the biozone. One seemed to be in a primitive stage of development: its nitrogen atmosphere was filled with dust thrown up by global rings of volcanoes. Its surface was ripped by continual quakes and convulsions. But the other: it was a blue and white globe of unsurpassing loveliness, like Rimway and Toxicon and Earth, like all the terrestrial worlds on which life is able to take hold. It was a place of vast oceans and bright sunlight and countless island chains. A single continent sprawled atop the north pole. “I suspect it’s cold down there,” said Chase, peering through the scopes at the land mass. “Most of it’s covered with glaciers. No lights on the dark side, so I don’t think anyone lives here.”

  “I’d be surprised,” I said, “if anyone did.”

  “It looks comfortable in the temperate zones. In fact, downright balmy. What say we get out the capsule, and go down for a swim? Get away from walls for a while?” She stretched, enticingly, and I was about to reply when her expression changed.

  “What’s the matter?”

  She passed her hand across the search control, and a blip sounded. “There’s what we came for,” she said.

>   It rose out of the dark, above the terminator, indistinguishable from the blazing stars.

  “It’s in orbit,” whispered Chase.

  “Maybe it’s a natural satellite.”

  “Maybe.” She keyed analyses onto the screens. “Its reflection index is pretty high for a rock.”

  “How big is it?”

  “Can’t tell yet.”

  “Or it could be something the Tenandrome left behind,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. A monitor of some kind.”

  She shielded her eyes and peered into the scope. “We’re getting some resolution,” she said. “Hold on.” She put the starfield on the pilot’s monitor, filtered out most of the glare, and reduced the contrast. A single point of white light remained.

  Over the next hour we watched it take shape, expanding gradually into a cylinder, thick through the middle, rounded at one end, flared at the other. There was no mistaking the forward battle bridge, or the snouts of weapons, or the classic lines of Resistance Era design. “We were right,” I breathed. “Son of a bitch, we were right!” And I clapped her on the shoulder. It was a good feeling. I wished Gabe could have been with us.

  By the standards of modern warships, it was minuscule. (I could imagine it dwarfed beside the enormous girth of the Tenandrome.)

  But it had a hell of a history. It was the kind of ship that had leaped the stars during the early days of the Armstrong drive, that had carried Desiret and Taniyama and Bible Bill to the worlds that would eventually become the Confederacy. It had waged the endless internecine wars. And it had fought off the Ashiyyur.

  “I have its orbit,” said Chase, with satisfaction. “I’m going to lay us in right alongside her. Right under her port bow.”

  “Good,” I said. “How long will it take?”

  Her fingers danced across the instruments. “Twenty-two hours, eleven minutes. We’ll have a close pass in about an hour and a half, maybe a hundred kilometers. But it’ll take a few orbits before we can match course and speed.”

  “Okay.” I watched the image in the monitor. They were lovely ships. We’ve had nothing like them, before or since. We were in sunlight, and this one was a rich silver and blue. Her lines curved gently: there was about her a sense of the ornate that one does not see in the cold gray vessels of the modern age. The parabolic prow with its sunburst, the flared tubes, the swept-back bridge, the cradled pods—all would have been of practical use only to an atmospheric flyer. But she possessed an aura that was gently moving: whether it might have been the sheer familiarity of a type of vessel that symbolized the last great heroic age; or whether it was some sense of innocence and defiance designed into her geometry; or the menacing thrust of her weapons, I could not say. It reminded me of a time when I’d been very young.

  “There’s the harridan,” said Chase, centering our long-range telescope on the bow. I could almost make it out, the dark avian form caught in furious flight against the burnished metal, as though it would draw the ship itself hurtling down its track. She tried to increase magnification, but the image grew indistinct; so we waited, while the range between the two ships shortened.

  Chase’s attention was diverted by a blinking light on one of the panels. She listened to an earphone, looked puzzled, and threw a switch. “We’re getting a signal!” she said. Her eyes had widened.

  It got very quiet in the cabin. “From the derelict?” I whispered.

  She was holding the phone against her ear, but shaking her head. “No. I don’t think so.” She hit a switch, and an electronic whine fluttered through the sound system.

  “What is it?”

  “It seems to be coming from the surface. There are a couple of them, in fact. But no visual.”

  “They’re beacons,” I said. “Left by the Tenandrome.”

  “Why are they still running? Does it mean they cleared out in a hurry?”

  “Not really. They could be any number of things. Most likely geological sites. Survey uses transmitters to send different types of pulses through the planet over extended periods of time. The devices make a record, which gives you a pretty good picture of its internal dynamics. Anytime a ship enters the area, the record is automatically broadcast. There are probably other signals too if you can find them.” She smiled, embarrassed by her tendency to jump to nervous conclusions.

  “How do you know so much about these missions?” she asked.

  “I’ve done a lot of reading about them over the past couple of months.” I was about to say more when Chase’s complexion went bone white.

  The antique ship had been drawing closer, growing larger in the overhead monitor. I followed her gaze toward its image, but saw nothing. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Look at the sigil,” she whispered. “The harridan.”

  I looked, and I saw nothing unusual, just the prow, with its feathered symbol—

  —Enclosed by a curving slice of light—

  —A silver crescent.

  —So the enemy can find me.

  “My God,” I said. “It’s the Corsarius.”

  “Impossible.” Chase was scrolling through old accounts of the final battle, stopping periodically to point out specifics: . . . Destroyed while Tarien looked on helplessly . . . Sim’s operational staff and his brother watched from the Kudasai while the Corsarius made its desperate run, and vanished in nuclear flame . . . Et cetera.

  “Maybe,” I said, “the Ashiyyur were right: there was more than one.”

  She surveyed her instruments. “Axial tilt’s about eleven degrees. And it’s rolling. I think the orbit is showing signs of decay.” She shook her head. “You’d think they would have corrected that, at least. The Tenandrome, I mean.”

  “Maybe they couldn’t,” I said. “Maybe there’s no power after all this time.”

  “Maybe.”

  Images flickered across the command screen, tail sections and communication assemblies and lines of stress factors. The ship itself was beginning to pull away again. “If it can’t move on its own, they’d have no way to get it home. I mean, even if they could get it into a cargo bay, which I doubt, how the hell could they secure it? And the goddam thing could blow up at any time. Remember the Regal?

  “Chase,” I said, “that’s why Gabe wanted the extra pilot. And had Khyber along. To try to take it back!”

  She looked doubtful. “Even if the drive’s okay, you’d be taking a hell of a risk. If something came loose somewhere, say during the jump—” She shook her head.

  The quality of light was changing: we were moving into the early evening, the Corsarius dwindling quickly, falling through the dusk, plunging toward the terminator. It glowed against the encroaching dark. I watched it during those last moments before it lost the sunlight, waiting, wondering perhaps whether it wasn’t some phantasm of the night which, with the morning, would leave no trace of its passing.

  The object dropped into the planetary shadow. It grew dimmer, but—

  “I can still see it,” said Chase, tensely. “It’s glowing.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Where the hell is the reflection coming from? There aren’t any moons.”

  It shone with a steady, pale luminescence. A cool damp hand groped its way up my spine. “Running lights,” I said. “Its running lights are on.”

  Chase nodded. “The Tenandrome people must have done it. I wonder why?”

  I couldn’t believe that. I knew enough about the way professionals operate with technological artifacts: if possible, until studies are complete, they get left the way they’re found. I wondered briefly whether the people from Tenandrome had boarded the ship at all.

  An hour or so later, we followed the Corsarius down the nightside. By then it was only a dull star.

  “That’s enough for me,” Chase said, getting up. “Maybe we should take Scott’s advice and go home. Barring that, I think it would be a good idea if one of us remains in the cockpit at all times. I know that’s a little paranoid, but I’ll fee
l a lot better. You agree?”

  “Okay.” I tried to look amused, but I favored the proposal.

  “Since this is your expedition, Alex, you draw the first watch. I’m going back and try to get some sleep. If you decide to drop this whole business, you’ll get no argument from me. And while you’re thinking about it, keep an eye on the goddam thing.” She let herself out through the cockpit hatch. I listened to her moving around back there, running the dispenser, closing doors, and finally turning on the shower. I was glad she was there. Had she not been, I doubt I’d have gone any further.

  I depressed the back of my seat, adjusted my cushions, and closed my eyes. But I kept thinking about the derelict, and periodically I raised myself on an elbow to look out at the night sky, to make sure something wasn’t sneaking up on us.

  After an hour or so of that, I gave up trying to sleep, and switched on a comic monologue from the library. I didn’t much care about the humor, which was weak and obvious. But the delivery was casual, energetic, studded with one-liners and awash with audience laughter. It was a good sound, reassuring, soothing, encouraging. There is this about comedy: even when it’s bad, it provides a sense of a secure existence, in which things are under control.

  Eventually the cockpit drifted away from me. I was vaguely aware of the absolute stillness in the after living quarters—which meant Chase was asleep, and that I was, in a sense, alone—of the smooth liquid rhythm of a cinco band, and of the occasional flicker of instrument lights against my eyelids. When I came out of it, it was still dark. Chase was back in the pilot’s chair, not moving, but I knew she was awake.