Kaspar's Box tk-3

by Jack L. Chalker

“I see him, Leader. He’s lying back behind the asteroid, six o’clock.”

  “Very well. I see him. Going to instrumentation mode. Balance of flight, on me.”

  The fugitive ship had been hovering just inside a deep rift valley on the dark side of the barren planet with all systems powered down to minimum. It was in fact an impressive feat of flying. The ship was half the size of a destroyer but not engineered for those kind of maneuvers; to set it into a planet so that it hovered only meters above the surface and merged in most sensors with the surrounding rough landscape was not only skillful but also far beyond what such a ship should have been able to do. Whoever modified and maintained the old hulk knew what they were doing, and that in itself made them of great interest to the naval commanders supervising this operation. To take a ship designed essentially for commercial exploration and turn it into a formidable clipper was a skill worth pursuing.

  “Agrippa to leader first squadron. Shall we come in and take her with a nullifier?” came a query from their parent destroyer lying well away from these close quarters and asteroid-filled neighborhoods for now as the smaller one-person craft ferreted out the quarry.

  “Uh, negative, Agrippa. We’ll flush him out and send him to you if that’s your desire.”

  There was a sigh from the larger vessel’s operations commander. “Well, we’re made, so he’s not gonna run for home until and unless he’s positive we missed him, so we might as well take him and get the information the hard way. Go for flush.”

  The leader nodded reflexively. “Flight, spread out, and be careful. You remember the last one. We don’t want this thing flipping out and gunning itself full throttle into the star. First squadron, pull around and put yourselves between quarry and inbound. Keep position and do not vary unless quarry moves clearly away. At all times keep between quarry and star. Got that, Alpha leader?”

  “Got it. You’ll never let me live that one down, will you? He comes my way, he gets concentrated full forward fire. His shields can’t be that great after this. You flush him, we’ll roadblock and you climb up his ass.”

  “Don’t be vulgar, Alpha. Beta, on me. Let’s flush the bastard.”

  The squadron’s ships peeled off in precise order and dived on the hapless ship below as if they were somehow connected together or at least piloted by master machines with split-second timing.

  The old tramp didn’t wait for them to bracket him with strafing fire; he powered up and gunned it, barely missing tearing his bottom out on the tops of the mountains.

  For an old commercial vessel he was surprisingly fast and agile, but no match for the military fighters. They caught up with the fleeing tramp ship before it could even fully clear the planetary gravity well and took up a formation at speeds matching their quarry so that they essentially surrounded it.

  “All right, up to you,” the squadron leader called on a wide frequency spread. “Either you cut your engines and follow us or we’ll shoot some holes in you. We’ll try not to kill you but in space you never really know, do you? Your choice.”

  “I’m thinking it over,” responded a man’s sour voice on one of the standard emergency frequencies. The voice was raw and raspy, an old man’s voice with a lot of experience in its tone.

  The squadron leader shifted to the same frequency and the tactical sounds faded into a more standard open radio back and forth. It was more like they were next to each other and speaking normally. “What’s to decide? Is refusing to pay your just taxes worth dying for?”

  “Taxes be damned! You’re blackmailers and extortionists. I’d pay to be protected from the likes of you! Ah, you’re just a bunch of brainwashed drones. Why the hell am I explaining it? Bottom line is I got nothin’ here worth stealin’ ’cept my ship, and that ain’t worth all that much, even in spare parts and fuel rods. Cargo’s empty. I was on my way out, not in. You take my ship I’m no better off than if I was dead, and you don’t get much by takin’ it. So just who or what are you protectin’ me from ’cept maybe starvation?”

  “We’ve heard all this before,” the leader told him. “Just cut power and our mother ship will take you aboard. You can make your arguments there. I have nothing to do with the case, I just bring in who I’m told to bring in. Now, we know that there’s more than just you aboard. Even if you wanted to commit suicide, is it fair to take others with you?”

  The old man thought for a moment. “Maybe. If their choice is dyin’ or joinin’ the likes of you.”

  “We don’t conscript. Don’t need to.”

  “Then you don’t know much about your own operations,” the old captain responded, sounding weary and resigned. “You live in a hive like some ancient insects, but you got to renew the gene pool now and then.” He paused a moment, then sighed. “Okay, pull me in. I don’t like doin’ it to the others, but at least I’ll have the satisfaction of knowin’ that at least I’m gonna be your problem for a while.”

  The destroyer monitoring the engagement now moved in as the old tramp ship cut power and just drifted, defenseless against all the naval might arrayed against it. Tractor beams fixed on the old ship like a spider spinning a web to ensure that the fly did not escape, and, when secure, the prey was reeled in by the tractor lines until it could be mechanically grappled by arms extending beneath the destroyer.

  The old freighter held together well; whoever had fixed it up had known what they were doing, and it had clearly been expertly maintained as well. The fleet, of course, had its entire maintenance and dry-dock sections fully automated, but these people out here in the old colonies were lucky to keep anything running at all, let alone maintaining equipment to service the fruits of their scavenging.

  The fighters waited until the target was safely secured and then went in for their own predetermined berths, landing automatically. The pilots sat and waited for pressurization, then their canopies slid back and they got out and jumped down to the deck below. The artificial gravity in the berths was kept low to facilitate their ingress and egress, as their trainers called it.

  Each of the military figures wore what appeared to be a skintight blue-black body suit that showed them to be generally squat and muscular people, their muscles bulging as if they were about to burst through the suits. They kept the suits on, and would so long as they were officially on duty; the egg-shaped gold and black helmets were removed and placed on special holders near each fighter. On their mounts they would be recharged, benchmarked, tested and, if necessary, repaired, without ever leaving their perches. They could also be programmed with the specifics of any task the fighters might be asked to do, so that the information would be there right in front of each of them as needed. In an emergency, the crews could be at their fighters in less than a minute from anywhere they were likely to be, and in their ships and ready for takeoff with all that they required in no more than three minutes. They drilled on that constantly.

  Only some of the pilots, however, were in that position or needed to drill. More than half the squadron never removed their helmets or suits at all, ever. They were machines.

  A mixture of humans and machines had been found to be ideal from the earliest deep-space naval combat vessels. Nobody trusted machines alone to do the job; they could outwit and outfight everybody except a totally illogical human being who might do things they would never expect. The pilots were, however, both genetically and cybernetically enhanced. All were female, though that term had little real meaning for them except that they averaged perhaps twenty percent less mass than the men and had voices that were, on average, quite low but still a half octave removed from the men. Hairless, their breasts rock hard and their sexual organs removed and replaced with semiorganic hormonal regulators, they had no sense of sexuality at all, either to themselves or as regarded anyone else.

  It was not any of the pilots who would approach and enter the captured vessel, though. That was a job for a marine squad, mostly huge muscle-bound males, also hairless, and with nothing evident in the groin to suggest sexuality, either
. The naval nurseries harvested the eggs and all the sperm it needed, processed them, altered their DNA and designed what was required, far away from those who had been the donors. Like the pilots, adult marines and the other crewmen were basically asexual, and neither knew nor wondered what they were missing.

  Not that they were without emotion; that was a requirement of being human. But it was the emotion of camaraderie, of friends and brothers and sisters, nothing beyond. Not that they were ignorant of sex; they simply could not imagine why it was so important or why others did such disgusting things. The marines and the pilots saw themselves not as men and women, but as specialists designed to best do their jobs. And none of them wanted to be or do anything more than what they were; only to advance in rank, authority, power, and respect.

  The old captain had called them “drones,” and in effect that was just what they were.

  Now the marine squad went down the umbilical cylinder to the entry hatch on the old freighter.

  “This is Sergeant Maslovic,” their leader said using a transceiver essentially built into his thick rocklike jaw, although it was invisible to the naked eye and controlled by his own thoughts. “Open your hatch and prepare to be boarded.”

  There was a loud hiss and the hatch turned and then opened like the iris of a camera, allowing entry.

  Although the marines were armed, they were not expecting a fight. What, after all, could these people do? The worst they could try was to blow up their ship in order to take the larger one with it, and there were energy shields all around to insure that that was not somthing that would be very profitable to do. It would kill the marines, certainly, as well as those aboard the captured vessel, but little else. The marines did worry about this, but their officers above had plenty more marines if they lost these.

  The two lead men in the squad entered on either side, stun-type sidearms drawn, and flanked the sergeant as he walked confidently in, his own weapon holstered and not even unstrapped.

  The marines wore suits quite like those of the fighters, but the color of dark mud, and while the squad had on light protective helmets the sergeant hadn’t even bothered to put his on. Since he couldn’t stop anyone from killing him nor would that thing protect him from a shot, he saw no purpose to it here, and once they’d secured the ship and prisoners and were marching their captives to Legal, the proper uniform would be no helmet anyway.

  The captain of the tramp met him just inside the entranceway. He was not only old, he was perhaps the oldest man Maslovic had ever seen. Gray-haired, with a stringy, dirty gray beard, his skin had the look of ancient parchment and he stood slightly stooped in spite of a clear effort to look military himself. He wore a simple black flight jump suit that looked older and more wrinkled than he was, and some boots that had last been shined before the Great Silence.

  “I’m Captain Murphy,” the old man introduced himself.

  “Sergeant Maslovic,” the marine responded, looking around. “Sir, by authority of Combine Naval Code seventy-seven stroke six two I take command of your vessel. Where are your crew?”

  The old man chuckled. “Crew? No crew. Don’t need much of a crew for this scow, Sergeant. I have some passengers, though.”

  “We monitored three. Please have them come forward and then we can all go up to the Legal Officer.”

  “Well, now, we might need some help in transporting two of them, I think, although I’m not at all sure you’ll understand why without diagrams.”

  “Sir?”

  “This way, Sergeant.”

  Maslovic gestured for the guard to be posted at the airlock and the rest of the squad to fan out through the captive ship and begin to search and inventory it, then followed the old captain.

  The ship stank. Body odor, oils and lubricants—it was hard to isolate the sources of the stenches, but it was not exactly a ship that would pass inspection in naval life.

  The captain punched a panel and an interior hatch slid back, and Murphy gestured for the sergeant to enter.

  “Sergeant, meet my passengers,” the old man said with a trace of amusement in his tone.

  Maslovic entered what was clearly ordinarily the captain’s cabin and stopped. For a moment, he really did feel confused. Three women were inside, one in a reclining chair, one in the bed, and a third in a straight-backed utility chair bolted to the floor.

  Maslovic had seen many colonial women before, but there was something odd about these. They were disproportionately fat, but not all over. Just in the…

  He suddenly realized their condition and why Captain Murphy had been so apprehensive about them and yet amused to introduce them to him.

  All three were hugely pregnant.

  He suspected that these people would be going up to the cruiser. There was nobody here who could deal with them like this.

  * * *

  It was two kilometers long and looked like it had been assembled by a horde of drunken babies. Nonetheless, the Thermopylae was actually as functional as a socket wrench; in its time, its design fought wars, conquered rebellions, ran down smugglers and brought would-be dictators to heel. Its birth name was the CNC Thermopylae, the initials standing for “Combine Naval Cruiser.” Its armament was and continued to be more than formidable; it could incinerate the average solid rock planet, vaporize a path ahead of it through the densest of asteroid belts, and its defensive shields could withstand blasts from a ship of equal or lesser capabilities.

  It did not, however, have many light armaments; instead, it carried a series of externally docked fighter squadrons in what were known as “pods” and, in four equally spaced “hangars” around its midsection, it carried and could quickly launch a like number of destroyers, each with formidable weapons of their own, each with their own single abbreviated pod of defensive fighters. The destroyers could use a wormgate on their own, as could the cruiser; the fighters had no such equipment aboard and were dependent for interstellar travel on the bigger ships even as they were dependent on the smallest for the first line of defense.

  For all that, they’d had relatively small human crews when the Great Silence came down and all the wormgates leading to the old Combine and Mother Earth suddenly became inactive. Most of the systems were fully automated; the only ones aboard the large vessels were those who had to make the command decisions that it was felt no machine should be permitted to make and those who represented the human race in its projection wherever that force was required. Ultimately, it was the lowest and least of them that proved essential to remain essentially human. It was discovered, by long and rueful experience, that you could make the perfect soldiers out of robotic arts but so could the other guys. Stalemate was not the objective of a military projection; so long as machines of equal capabilities faced off, though, that’s what happened most of the time.

  And that was why the pilots and the grunts, supported, of course, by the best in robotics, but not governed by them, remained.

  The Thermopylae had exactly one hundred and sixty pilots in four squadrons with three hundred base personnel supporting them when she found herself orphaned from higher command; beyond those few was one division of marines divided into four regiments of eight forty-person companies each. Six hundred and forty men and women, with twice that in support, all of whom were also rated to replace anyone in the combat division if needed. The command staff included the small complements on each destroyer, the naval commanding officer, the cruiser’s captain and small support staff, and a fleet admiral. In all, far fewer than two thousand souls.

  That had changed, but not as much as might be expected. More were needed in a fairly steady stream because of the time it took to evaluate and train competent personnel to replace what might be lost or what might be needed as a reserve, but wholesale expansion would have meant the end of the division as it drowned in a sea of consumers of limited resources.

  Cut off from home, adrift in a sea of stars with no way home and no longer a clear mission nor view of its place in the universe, such ships
as this either disintegrated or found a new purpose, new mission, and new identity. Military always had their own separate culture, their own feeling of “us” and “them” even in the best of times, and that had been reinforced after the Silence.

  The Thermopylae, part deliberately, part without even realizing it as events and culture swept it along, became its own small world, its own society, its own unique nation and culture. Its power and isolation from higher command assured that it would be able to do so and make it stick; the rest came from the ancient human ability to justify to itself almost anything it wanted to do.

  It saw itself as the law, the only law left in its more limited cosmos. It continued to safeguard what commerce was left, and to enforce order on the forces of chaos, anarchy and greed that always rode in to capitalize on any misfortune. Most of the other ships did the same, almost as a sense of duty, a matter of honor.

  There were, of course, a few that went over to the other side and became the enemy, and those, too, ships like the Thermopylae sought out to battle and possibly destroy.

  Nothing, particularly such a valuable commodity as security, was ever free, though, and with no taxing authority to finance it and no controlling government to set its worth and limit its reach, the ship quite naturally took a percentage of whatever was produced by those whom it protected. This was its just share for keeping the defenseless in business, and it was necessary for all the luxuries, necessities, repairs and consumables that such a military unit required. It did not make them universally loved in most places when they priced their own value and service at a rate much higher than their “clients” considered reasonable, proper, or possible, but the ships projected power that no one else could equal. There were no debates; the ships either were paid what they wanted or they took it.

  To many if not most of the people on the planets throughout the old colonial sector, and the struggling commercial vessels that tried to keep them supplied and viable as working societies, it was increasingly difficult to tell the protector from the folks they were being protected from.