A Talent for War

by Jack McDevitt

  The sun was blocked off now.

  Chase’s voice exploded into the tableau: “Come on, Alex. Run!”

  I plunged desperately across the last few meters. The depth of water underfoot was increasing, and my lower clothes were wet and beginning to burn, and they slid clammily over my flesh. Another strand, fibrous and green and alive, arced around one foot, and pulled tight. I tumbled against the ladder, held on, and kicked free of the boot. I scrambled up, hit the release, waited in sheer panic while the canopy opened, fell into the cockpit, started the magnetics, and stabbed at the computer panel to activate the rest of the systems. Then I yanked back on the yoke and the capsule jerked into the air. The wave hit the struts and skids, the vehicle rolled sharply on its side, and nearly dumped me out. I dangled over the boiling water, and for a terrible moment, I thought the capsule was going to flip completely over. More filaments whispered toward me. The tip of one brushed my foot. Another wrapped around the undercarriage.

  I scrambled into the cockpit and pulled the canopy shut. In the same moment, the vehicle lurched and dropped. I looked around for a knife, thinking wildly about climbing back outside. I was lucky: there was none. It forced me to take a moment to think.

  I pushed the yoke quickly forward. The capsule fell a few more meters, and then I kicked in full thrust and jammed it back. We leaped up and ahead; shuddered to a quick, bone-ripping halt, and then lurched free.

  I didn’t know it then, but the undercarriage was gone.

  I threw most of my clothes out after it.

  Below, the thick, gummy water had rolled over much of the island.

  And I shuddered for Christopher Sim and his men.

  After that, I no longer considered tropical islands as likely candidates for my search. Surely, I thought, the conspirators would have been aware of the dangers. They would have looked for something else.

  Mid-morning of the next day, while I cruised somberly through a gray rainy sky, the monitors drew a jagged line across the long curve of the horizon. The ocean grew loud, and a granite peak emerged from the mist off to my right. It was almost a needle, worn smooth by wind and water.

  There were others, a thousand towers rising from the dark water, marching from northeast to southwest on a course almost directly parallel to the orbit of the Corsarius. The storm beat against them, and buffeted the small craft in which I flew. Chase urged me to go higher, get above them.

  “No,” I said. “This is it.”

  The winds drove me among the peaks. I navigated with as much caution as I could muster. But I quickly got confused, and lost track of where I’d been, where I wanted to go. Chase refused to help from the Centaur. Eventually I was forced to take it up a few thousand meters and wait for the storm to end. In the meantime it got dark.

  The red-tinged sun was well into the sky when I woke. The air was cold and clear.

  Chase said good morning.

  I was stiff and uncomfortable and I needed a shower. I settled for coffee, and drifted back down among the towers. “It’s here, somewhere,” I told her.

  I said it over and over, as the day wore on.

  The spires glittered blue and white and gray. And the ocean broke against them. Occasionally, on the sheer walls, a tree or a bush had taken root. Birds screamed at the heights, and patroled the boiling sea. Floaters, perhaps fearing the combination of sudden air currents and sharp rock, were not to be seen. Smarter than I was, maybe.

  In all that wilderness, there seemed hardly a place where a human could set foot.

  “Straight ahead,” said Chase, galvanized. “What’s that?”

  I put down the binoculars to look at the screens she was using. She blanked all but one: a peak of moderate size, utterly without any unusual characteristic. I should note that I was expecting to find something with its top lopped off. A place that had been thoroughly flattened and made habitable.

  That was not the case here. Rather, what I saw was a wide ledge, about a third of the way down the precipice.

  Dejà vu.

  Sim’s Perch.

  It was far too level, and too symmetrical, to be natural. “I see it. ”

  I eased up the magnification. A round object stood on the widest part of the shelf. A dome!

  I stared through the scopes: there had been no way on or off, up or down. Not that it mattered.

  Odd that a man who had owned the light years should eventually play out his life confined to a few hundred square meters.

  Other than the shelf and the dome, there was no sign of the hand of man. The scene possessed almost a domestic aspect. I imagined how it must have looked at night, with lights in the windows, and its illustrious tenants possibly seated out front idly discussing their role in the war. Awaiting rescue.

  “I don’t understand.” Her voice trembled.

  “Chase, at the end, Sim lost heart. He decided to save what he could, to make terms.”

  It was very quiet on the other end. Then: “And they couldn’t allow that.”

  “He was the central figure of the war. In a way, he was the Confederacy. They could not allow surrender, not while there was still a chance. So they stopped him. In the only way they could, short of killing him.”

  “Tarien,” she said.

  “Yes. He would have had to be part of it. And some of his senior staff officers. Maybe even Tanner.”

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t think they’d have done that. I don’t think they could have.”

  “Well. Whatever, They faked the destruction of the Corsarius. Brought it out here. And marooned Sim and the crew. They must have intended to come back. But most of the conspirators died within a few weeks. They were probably all on board the Kudasai when it was destroyed. If there were any survivors, they might have had no stomach for facing their victims. Except Tanner, maybe. However it happened, she knew what they had done, and she knew about the Wheel. She saw it; or someone else did and described it to her.”

  I drifted in over the shelf.

  “I wonder,” said Chase, “if Maurina knew?”

  “We know Tanner went to see her. It would be interesting to have a copy of that conversation.”

  Chase murmured something I couldn’t make out, and then: “Something’s wrong here. Look at the size of the dome.” It was small, far smaller than I’d realized. “That thing would never support eight people.”

  No. And I understood with sudden, knife-cold certainty how terribly wrong I had been, and why the Seven had no names.

  My God! They’d left him here alone!

  Two centuries late, I floated down through the salt air.

  The wind blew clean and cold across the escarpment. No green thing grew there, and no creature made its home on that grim pile. A few boulders were strewn about, and some loose rubble. Near the edge of the promontory, several slabs stood like broken teeth. The flat-sided peak towered overhead, its walls not quite sheer. The ocean was a long way down. Like at Ilyanda.

  I landed directly in front of the dome.

  Damage sustained in the fight with the sea animate—a bent undercarriage and a missing skid—gave the capsule a distinct lean to the pilot’s side. I set the cameras, one on the dome, the other to track me, and I climbed out.

  “It’s a lot like the two-man survival unit we have on board the Centaur,” said Chase. “If it were properly stocked, he could have survived a long time. If he wanted to.”

  A makeshift antenna was mounted on the roof, and curtains were drawn across the windows. The sea boomed relentlessly against the base of the mountain. Even at this altitude, I imagined I could feel spray.

  “Alex.” Her tone had changed. “You’d better get back up here. We’re getting visitors.”

  I looked up, as though it might be possible to see something. “Who?”

  “Looks like a mute warship. But I’m damned if I can understand what’s going on.”

  “Why?”

  “I
t’s on a rendezvous course. But the damned thing’s coming in at relativistic speed. No way it can stop here.”

  XXIV.

  For me, sex is second. I’d rather catch an enemy in the cross hairs anytime

  —Alois of Toxicon

  (Address at the Dedication of the Strategic Studies Center)

  “I NEED A few minutes here. How much time do we have?”

  “About a half hour. You can’t make it back by then anyway. But I don’t see what difference it makes. Only thing he can do is wave as he goes by. It’s going to take him several days to get turned around and come back.”

  “Okay.” I was more interested in the shelf just then. “Keep him on the scopes.”

  I had no extra boots, and the sun was heating up the rock. I pulled on a pair of socks, and advanced on the dome.

  It was discolored by weather, streaked in some places, faded in others. Falling rock had creased it, and earth movements had pulled it askew.

  Christopher Sim’s tomb.

  The shelf was so very like the one on Ilyanda, where he had suffered a death of another kind. It was not a very elegant end, on this granite slab, under the white star of the ship that had carried him safely through so much.

  The door was designed to function, if need be, as an airlock. It was closed, but not sealed, and I was able to lift the latch, and pull it open. Inside, the sun filtered through four windows and a skylight to illuminate living quarters that appeared surprisingly comfortable, in contrast to the sterility of the dome’s exterior. There were two padded chairs of starship design anchored to the floor, several tables, a desk, a computer, a stand-up lamp. One of the tables was inlaid for chess. But there was no sign of the pieces.

  I wondered whether Tarien had come on this long flight out from Abonai, whether there had been a last desperate clash, perhaps in this room, between the brothers! Had Tarien pleaded with him to continue the struggle? It would have been a terrible dilemma: men had so few symbols, and the hour was so desperate.

  They could not permit him to sit out the battle (as Achilles had done). In the end, just before Rigel, Tarien must have felt he had no choice but to seize his brother and dismiss the crew with some contrived story. (Or perhaps an angry Christopher Sim had done that himself, before confronting Tarien.) Then the conspirators had invented the legend of the Seven, concocted the destruction of Corsarius, and, when the engagement was over, they’d brought him and his ship here.

  I stood in the doorway and wondered how many years that tiny space had been his home.

  He would have understood, I thought. And if, in some way, he could have learned that he’d been wrong, that Rimway had come, and Toxicon, and even Earth, he might have been consoled.

  There was nothing on the computer. I thought that strange; I’d expected a final message, perhaps to his wife, perhaps to the people he had defended. But the memory banks were empty. And in time I felt the walls begin to close, and I fled the place, out onto the shelf that had defined the limits of his existence.

  Chilled, I walked the perimeter, skirting the slabs at the north end, striding in the shadow of the wall, and returning along the edge of the precipice. I tried to imagine myself (as I had on the island a couple of nights before) marooned in that place, alone on that world, a thousand light years from anyone with whom I could speak. The ocean must have seemed very tempting.

  Overhead, Corsarius flew. He could have seen it moving among the stars, hurtling across the skies like an errant moon every few hours.

  And then I saw the inscription. He had cut a single line of letters into the rock wall, just above eye level, at one end of the shelf. They were driven deep into the limestone, hard-edged characters whose fury was clear enough (I thought), though I could not understand the language in which they’d been written:

  “Chase?”

  She was slow to answer. “I’m watching.”

  “Can we get a translation?”

  “Trying. I’m not sure how to enter a visual into the computer. Give me a minute.”

  Greek. Sim had remained a classicist to the end.

  My heart hammered against my ribs, as I contemplated what his final days, or years, must have been. How long had he endured this shelf, beneath the ecliptic of the endlessly circling link with home?

  It would have been a reflexive choice, when the Tenandrome flashed its news to Fishbowl and Rimway, to keep it quiet. I could imagine the hurried meetings of high-ranking officials, already burdened with a disintegrating government. Why not? What good could come of such a revelation? And the men on the Tenandrome, themselves shaken by what they’d seen, had readily agreed.

  “Alex. The computer thinks it’s classical Greek.”

  “Good. What else?”

  “That’s it. It says there are only a few languages in its library, and all of those are modern.”

  “The last word,” I said, “looks like Demosthenes.”

  “The orator?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. But I can’t imagine why he’d go to the trouble to carve the name of a dead Greek on a wall. In these circumstances. ”

  “Makes no sense,” said Chase. “He had a computer available in the dome. Why didn’t he use that? He could have written whatever he wanted. Why go to all the trouble to carve it in rock?”

  “The medium’s the message, as someone once said. Maybe an electronic surface wouldn’t express his feelings appropriately.”

  “I have a link with the computer on Corsarius. There are only two references to ‘Demosthenes.’ One is the old Greek, and the other was a contemporary wrestler.”

  “What’s it say about him? The Greek, I mean.”

  “384-322 B.C. Old Style. Greatest of the Hellenic orators. Said to have been born with a speech impediment which he overcame by placing pebbles in his mouth and speaking against the sea. His orations persuaded the Athenians to make war against Macedonia. The best known were the three Philippics and three Olynthiacs. All dating from around 350 B.C., give or take a few years. The Macedonians won despite Demosthenes’ efforts, and he was driven into exile. Later, he died by his own hand.”

  “There’s a connection,” I said.

  “Yes. Tarien was an orator too. Maybe it’s a reference to him.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” I said. I’d noticed another inscription on the rock, at its base, in letters of a different sort: Hugh Scott, 3131. Cut with a smaller laser.

  “That’s Universal time,” said Chase. “It equates to either 1410 or 1411, Rimway.” She sighed. “At the end, Sim might have forgiven his brother. Maybe he even realized he was right.”

  “Considering the circumstances, that would take a lot of forgiving.” My feet hurt. The socks weren’t all that much protection, and I had to keep moving to prevent being burned. “Where’s our visitor?”

  “Still coming. Still accelerating. They’re really piling it on.” The air was still. “Alex?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you think she found him? In time, I mean?”

  “Leisha?” I’d been thinking about little else since I’d set down. Tanner had hunted for years. Candles’s lost pilot. And Sim,Who walks behind the stars,

  On far Belmincour.

  “She didn’t have the resources of the Machesney Institute. My God, she must have been out here all that time, taking pictures and running them through computers, trying to recreate that constellation.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. But I suspect that’s the question that haunts Hugh Scott.”

  I’d resisted the temptation to cut my name in the rock alongside Scott’s, and wandered back toward the capsule. I was climbing into the cockpit when Chase’s voice took on a note of urgency. “Alex,” she said, “I hate to break in with bad news, but there’s another one! And it’s big!”

  “Another what?”

  “A mute ship. Battle cruiser, I think. I should have seen it before, but I was watching the little one, and not paying much attention to the sca
n.”

  “Where?”

  “About ten hours out. Also on an approach vector. It’s coming fast, but braking hard. Must be raising hell with the crew. Anyhow, it should be able to slow down enough to get into orbit. I think you’d better get back here so we can clear out.”

  “No,” I said. I was sweating. “Chase, get out of the Centaur.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Please,” I said. “There’s no time to argue. How far away is the destroyer?”

  “About five minutes.”

  “That’s how much time you have to get aboard the Corsarius. If you don’t make it by then, you’re not going to make it at all.”

  “You’ve got the capsule.”

  “That’s why we shouldn’t be standing around talking. Move. Get over there any way you can, but get there!”

  I saw the flash high in the western sky: a brief needle of light.

  “Chase?”

  “I’m okay. But you were right. The bastards just blew the Centaur to hell.”

  I tried to pick the destroyer up with the capsule’s scopes, but it was already out of range. Chase, who had a picture of it on Corsarius’s monitor, hadn’t figured out yet how to relay it down to me. It didn’t matter anyway. “I’m on my way,” I said. “See you in a couple of hours. You might want to invest the time learning how to run Sim’s bridge. Can you get a message off to Saraglia?”

  “I’ve already done that. But if they ever receive it, I’ll be amazed. This thing isn’t equipped for that kind of long-range transmission. Alex, I think we’re stuck here.”

  “We’ll manage,” I said. “They’ve got to have a stardrive.” I lifted off the shelf, and locked onto the numbers that Chase transmitted.

  In the soft cool womb of the cockpit, over the late afternoon of the world, I thought about Sim and Scott. And it was Scott’s melancholy fate that caught at me.

  Maybe because Christopher Sim was too remote.

  Maybe because I knew Scott’s obsession would become my own.