Rogue Powers

by Roger MacBride Allen

  "The one witness I would call, if I could, would be a naval commander—a Guardian naval commander. We must assume they have their spies here on Kennedy, watching us. The Guardians, on their hidden planet, Capital, perhaps have already viewed the recording we have just seen. If I could put a Guardian naval officer on the stand, under oath, I would ask him: Did Commander Larson's statements reveal weaknesses of which the Guardians were unaware? Did he make their forces more confident? Was what he said good for their morale?

  "We have heard a great deal about duty today. We have been told that Commander Larson felt it his duty to speak, a higher duty than that he had to Navy regulations. Was it not a higher duty still to keep silent? He has hurt our perception of our strength, our morale—and aided that of the enemy? He has told us of a danger that it seems only he can see. Assuming the danger exists at all, has he not made that danger greater by pointing it out to the enemy? But speaking out on this 'danger,' has he not increased all our other dangers?

  "This man has displayed courage, enormous courage, both in battle and in coming forward to say what he has said. But has he displayed good judgment? I think not. Your honors, I ask you to demonstrate your own judgment and find for the prosecution. In the old days, the wet navy days, they said that 'loose lips sink ships.' In our present day, loose lips might serve to vaporize ships. Do not encourage the practice of loose talk by letting this man go free. Yes, he is a hero. But heroism is no excuse for making a terrible mistake of judgment.

  "Your honors, the prosecution rests."

  Leventhal banged down his gavel. "Very well. This court-martial is adjourned. The court will withdraw to reach a verdict. This court-martial will reconvene at 0900 hours tomorrow morning."

  Mac might have been confined to quarters in the Navy Castle, but at least he was confined to comfortable, if not downright imposing quarters on a high floor of the Tower. The rough-hewn walls of the semi-circular room were hung with paintings of great ships and admirals, the furniture was from the captain's cabin of an old U.S. wet Navy battle cruiser, the floor was covered in a rich, solemn burgundy carpet. Pete was pleased by the room. They only put high-class prisoners here.

  The Navy Castle had not been built by some romantic architect to look like a fortress—it was a fortress, with stone walls three meters thick at the base, internally reinforced with steel and modern graphite composites. The walls would defend against mobs and most conventional attacks, and the bomb shelters drilled into bedrock a kilometer below could hold out long after the Castle proper had been vaporized. The Castle was designed to do more than just survive an attack, of course. It could fight back, with an armory full of rifles and side arms and supplies for a siege. There were other weapons tucked away inside the great building, which no one talked about much.

  The Navy Castle had been built seventy-five years before, in quiet and peaceful days—at least they had been peaceful days on Kennedy. The ROK Navy was busy back then, as it was now, frequently being dispatched in answer to League requests: police actions, rescue missions, and even the transportation of riot police from one star system to another. The League had been formed largely in reaction to the economic and political disarray on far too many

  of the settled worlds, and it fell to the navies of the strongest powers to effect and enforce the League's decisions. The ROK Navy had been there in the evacuation of New Antarctica, literally on day one of the League's existence. The Navy had flown relief supplies, bombed one side or another in the midst of revolts, arrested arms runners and drug smugglers, done too many dangerous things to trust much to days of peace. Only now, in the fight against the Guardians, did the ROK Navy find itself in its first war, but it had experience enough of fighting.

  So headquarters was built inconveniently far from town— near but not at the spaceport, in sight of but not on the coast, on the brow of a hill in the middle of a large and carefully tended clearing. It wasn't due to chance that the view from the Tower was superb, nor due to the prestige of the unit that the First Marine Battalion was stationed there.

  There had been scoffers who laughed at the egos that needed such a huge building, and a few Army types pointed out that the Castle cost more to build than most of the Navy's ships. Then the Fast Plague fell and madness literally became a contagious disease. When the cure was found, and the riots were over, the Castle was still there, with only a nick or two and a few scorch marks to mar the outer stone facing. The Army's gleaming, modern, downtown HQ Center had to be torn down and rebuilt altogether.

  The builders of the Castle were more farsighted than they were optimistic.

  The view from Mac's cabin (which Pete insisted on calling a room) was spectacular. Brown and Gesseti joined Mac for breakfast there the next morning. Mac couldn't eat much. He was too drawn by the view, the things to see. The coastline, the skyline of Hyannisport, the broad plain of the spaceport, were laid out in a magnificent panorama. It was the spaceport that Mac stared at. As he watched, a ship, a small winged job, made a horizontal launch into the perfect blue morning sky and rushed for orbit, the dull yellow of its air-breathing engines suddenly

  flaring into sun-bright specks as it shifted to fusion power. Mac watched it climb to orbit, to space, to the dark between the suns, and thought of Joslyn, his wife, once again so far away.

  "I should be out there, Pete," Mac said at last. "There's work to be done and I'm one of the best qualified to do it, and I'm cooped up here."

  "You'll be out there soon, Mac. The judges will pass their verdict, this whole farce will be over, and you'll be back at it. Besides, you're only locked up here because you had a job of talking to do that you thought was pretty damn important. And you were right."

  "Maybe," Captain Brown said, carefully refilling his coffee cup, "you even did some good, though I doubt it. And Pete, we gave it our best shot and did pretty well, but I've never had much hope of getting Mac off. The regulations are pretty clear, and I can't see Leventhal and company being thrown by a lot of verbal flourishes."

  "Why do you doubt I did any good?" Mac said.

  "Because you're a lousy politician and you didn't know the right people. Oh, I don't think you had much choice, and you did get your case heard, but all that accomplishes is getting the brass with their backs to the wall. They can't lose face by admitting you're right. They want to prove they're right—"

  "And the only way to do that is to deploy the damned carriers. But I had to try, Captain Brown. For all the reasons you talked about in court."

  "Yeah." Brown was angry, though he couldn't quite explain at what. But Terrance MacKenzie Larson was not the sort of man who should be hung out to dry. It was only the higher ranks, the admirals who loved their big ships too much, who felt the need to punish him. They left the dirty work to the Tsungs and the Leventhals, honorable officers honorably and reluctantly doing their duty. And Brown felt he never wanted to hear the word duty again.

  There was a polite knock at the door and the very respectful white-gloved marine informed them that the court-martial was ready to reconvene.

  They descended in the sleek, silent-running elevator, and were led the familiar way to the courtroom by the marine guard.

  There was shuffling of papers, and rising for the court, and finally it came, unwilling, from Leventhal's lips.

  One word.

  "Guilty."

  CHAPTER FIVE March, 2116 Guardian Contact Base on Surface of Outpost

  The day dawned as most of them did in this clearing, with a mist-shrouded sun easing its way through the knotted, roiling clouds and the tangled limbs of the surrounding forest. Two camps, one human, one Outposter, stirred and began their morning routines as the sun burned off the mist and the clouds and the dew dripped off the plant life.

  C'astille opened her eyes, uncurled her legs from beneath her long body, flexed her tail, and stepped out of her field shelter into the clearing. She sucked in the fresh morning air through her blowhole. The morning air smelled good, invigorating. She stretched h
er arms and flexed her long fingers. It would be another good day. She went to the camp kitchen in search of breakfast.

  On the far side of the clearing, inside one of the humans' pressurized huts, Lucy Calder slapped at the alarm clock with somewhat less enthusiasm for the day. With the dim thought of a shower and coffee, she stumbled out of bed. She had been up late again the night before, working on her notes. And Outpost's day was only nineteen hours long. It took getting used to. And C'astille would beat her to the Crystal Palace, as usual. She had given up trying to be early for their meetings—C'astille would simply be earlier still the next day. Calder liked her counterpart, and even felt in some strange way that she had something in common with her, but a little less enthusiasm for early morning work wouldn't be amiss. Coffee. That was the main thing.

  Neither side was consciously aware of it, of course, but each had done the same thing, or had at least arrived at the same result: Young, open-minded, highly intelligent, and quite expendable individuals represented both species.

  The Guardians hadn't made any immediate, deliberate decisions to put Johnson Gustav or Lucy Calder on Ariadne at the moment of First Contact. However, human traditions of exploration and military service, formed by decisions made and lessons learned over thousands of years, favored the practice of using young, still-flexible personnel, people with few immediate dependents to lead expeditions to the unknown or the unpredictable. It seemed to be what worked best: More explorers and soldiers came back when the leaders were young and smart and had few attachments to the outside world. Given that tradition, persons like Gustav and Calder were the most likely to be thrown into situations where a First Contact might occur: for example, on board a station orbiting a largely unexplored world. If humans had found that older left-handers who lacked a sense of humor did better in hazardous situations, the Outposters would have faced some aged and stern-faced southpaws instead of Gustav and Calder.

  But fresh, sharp, and flexible minds did work best, and not just for humans. C'astille's mind fit that description just as well. C'astille's people had no concept corresponding to that of a military, though hers was not a particularly peaceful race. She knew what exploring was, though, and had dreamed of being the finder of a new thing. As a youth, she had at times worried that the world was too well known, that there would be no discoveries or explorations or new things to learn. All that had changed now, of course, and certainly there were now to be strange new things to fill more than a lifetime.

  She found the humans themselves the most interesting. Even now, long after she had first set eyes on them, the sight of humans, especially walking in their bizarre bipedal gait, fascinated her. The sight both mesmerized and repelled practically any Outposter not used to it. A human parallel to this reaction could be found in the unpleasant, creepy thrill some humans got out of touching a snake. A nastier, more accurate, and more compelling analogy might be the giddy, horrified, stomach-knotting reaction humans often have when they see a member of their own species, unfortunate enough to have both legs amputated, forced to walk on hands instead of feet.

  To the Outposters, the humans looked mutilated, a front half of a creature chopped from the whole. Given the cultural and biological background of the Outposters, the very sight of a human brought a whole constellation of unpleasant things to mind.

  It took a flexible, educated psyche like C'astille's to accept the fact that these were natural, whole, and healthy creatures—probably evolved in a process similar to that which produced C'astille herself—and not monsters.

  Calder and the other humans had an advantage without realizing it: They were used to the idea of seeing a creature that walked on four legs, and even had the comfortable, familiar, and not unpleasant legend of the centaur to help them get used to the shape and movements of the Outposters. The Outposters had no such comforting images. To C'astille and her fellow Low Assistances, the humans did not bring to mind a more-or-less friendly sort of mythical beast. A very mild analogy to what humans reminded them of would be the front half of Frankenstein's monster lurching off the laboratory slab.

  Humans took some getting used to, and the older Outposters happily left direct contact with the halfwalkers to the younger set.

  Her meal quickly finished, C'astille cantered across the clearing from the Outposter camp to the Talking House. The halfwalkers had built their part of it first, not long after C'astille had first met the human Calder. The human techniques of building had puzzled the Outposters. The methods seemed highly inefficient, but the human structures went up quickly enough.

  A Guardian Army engineer's platoon had poured a concrete slab foundation, assembled a rather large prefab hut and simply bolted it to the slab. The hut was meant to keep the rain off and nothing else, and the slab to keep the hut from sinking into the soggy ground. A quiet-running portable generator was installed and lights were hung. No effort was made to make the hut airtight, but inside it, a more sophisticated structure went up. The artificers assembled a room-sized box of very tough and transparent plastic. It took up about a third of the interior of the prefab hut and was airlocked. The artificers added a few conveniences outside on the slab: racks to hold equipment, a hose-down station to get the mud off a suit before entering the airlock. The whole interior of the box was always visible from the outside, except for a portable toilet which could be hidden behind a screen when in use. Calder quickly named the plastic box the Crystal Palace, and was delighted to have it. Learning and teaching a wholly novel language was rough enough without having to stand in the middle of a soggy field in a pressure suit to do it. Gestures, expressions, movement were essential to learning, and all were infinitely easier out of a suit.

  Of course, there was no practical limit to how long a pressure suit could be worn if survival was the only criterion. But the suits were heavy, tiring, restricting, they limited vision, and the speakers and mikes were only so good.

  In the Palace she could relax, pace, even take a nap or go to the head between language sessions, grab a snack from the compact refrigerator or make a cup of coffee. Far more important, she could see and be seen. Pantomime was often vital to making sure she understood what a word meant, and it was a hell of a lot easier to have the props of language-learning—a drawing board, objects you wanted the names of, notepads and recorders and so on—safely under weatherproof conditions, and it was a double pleasure not to have to handle a pencil through a pressure suit's gloves.

  C'astille understood the advantages of getting in out of the rain as well as anyone, and once she had gotten an accidental whiff of what the humans breathed for air she understand why they needed to stay in a suit or a glass box. Unlike humans, the Outposters could smell and taste carbon dioxide and nitrogen. Human air had too little for the former and too much of the latter. She too was glad to get her drawing and writing and recording things out of the rain, and even took the human lead in making the Outposter half of the Talking House as comfortable as possible. She and the other Low Assistances brought in work tables, lights, rest couches, and their own food stores and portable power sources.

  As the language lessons went on, it became clear to both sides it would be wise to concentrate on teaching the humans C'astille's language. Things simply weren't working going the other way.

  The Outposters had so much trouble learning English that at first Lucy Calder thought they were "hard-wired," as she put it. It seemed possible that Outposters inherited their language genetically, and were no more capable of learning an alternative to the sense of smell. Calder would have been pleased if that idea had been correct; it would have meant one language would be usable across Outpost.

  But the Outposters weren't the problem; English was. The Outposters just couldn't seem to get the hang of it. Calder concluded the problem lay in the structure of English, the parts that tone and sound played in meaning. She had a hunch that the 'Posters would do better learning Chinese, but there was little point in teaching them a language no one else in the star system besides
Cynthia

  Wu understood. Might as well teach them one of the Australians aborigine dialects. Come to think of it, Calder had a feeling C'astille would do pretty well at the abo languages. But not at English.

  So Lucy did the learning, slowly, gradually. More of it today, and she had some questions to ask. Dressed in a lightweight pressure suit, she walked the paved path from the human camp to the Crystal Palace. C'astille was there, her tail flicking with eagerness to begin. Calder grinned and waved. Every morning it was the same; the moment she saw the young Outposter, she was caught up in the other's unflagging enthusiasm for their work. She hurried through the lock cycle, stripped her suit off, and sat down at the field desk inside the Palace. She cleared her throat and forced her voice into the odd resonances of C'astille's tongue. "Your presence is sensed, C'astille." It made as much sense as hello," and meant as much.

  "And yours is sensed as well. Talk starts?"

  "Talk starts. But word-learning remains deferred," Calder said. It was the passivity of the language that was the most difficult and bewildering. It was hard for her, and hard for her human students of the language, to bear in mind that action must be placed away from the speaker, or better still, removed entirely and the verb used to describe a state of being rather than an action. "Absence of knowledge continues for my Guidances. And yet word-learning and word-puzzlement are at its center. A thing is pointed to—this structure, my clothes, our vehicles, our path to the Talking House—and the humans say they got there by being made, or built. Sometimes the Outposters have things pointed to and it is said they are grown. Your recorders, your structures, your couch are called 'grown.' Is it that verbs 'grow' and 'make' or 'build' are the same, or are so many of your things formed from live things?"

  " 'Grow' is not 'build.' My couch is grown, my house is built from walls and other parts of a material grown in sheets. But walls not precisely grown. Never living, but made by living things not of my species. Species are caused by my people, and these species are makers of much of our things.'