Starhunt: A Star Wolf Novel

by David Gerrold

A massive framework turns on its gimbals in three directions at once. Two sets of cables slide smoothly along their silicone-greased channels to follow the motion of the generators; the third set—

  —fouls on a mounting, hanging up another cable, a lesser one. The thing on the end of it screams as it is jerked from the webbing; a yellow-suited doll—

  Instantly, the generators stop their motion. The yellow thing swings—slams into a stanchion. Red lights start flashing on all the boards—

  The sound of the scream is enough. Korie hits the red button on his chair arm: all the lights, all the panels, all the boards go red. All the information is stopped. The drill is interrupted.

  —But when one flow of data is diverted, another begins; requests for reasons why, followed by hasty answers.

  “Status report—what’s the emergency?”

  “Something in the engine room—”

  “—the ‘monkey crew’. Someone got tangled in the—”

  “Sir, this is auxiliary control. Do you want us to shut down?”

  “Wait a minute,” snaps Korie. “Bridge, to go normal operation; reengage control network. Report status of ship. Auxiliary control, stand by to be relieved.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Engine room, what’s going on—?”

  “We’ve got a man caught in the generator cage—”

  “Is he hurt—?”

  “Don’t know yet—”

  “Are the generators maintaining warp?”

  “Yes, sir. Not a flicker.”

  “Good. Stand by.”

  Korie glances quickly around the bridge; the red lights are vanishing off the boards. Only the engine room is still paralyzed—

  “Goldberg, take the helm.” Korie is out of the seat.

  “Yes, sir. Do you want me to wake the captain? Call him to the bridge?”

  “No, not yet. Let me see what it is first.” And he’s out the door.

  Korie races toward the rear of the ship, once crashing into another man who hasn’t moved out of the way in time. His head-long rush is punctuated by the PA systems: “Medical Officer Panyovsky, come to the engine room, please. Medical Officer Panyovsky, come to the engine room.”

  Korie thrusts himself down the no-grav tube, disregarding all safety regulations. He hits the bottom with a thump, stumbles, and keeps going.

  The engine room is a scene of controlled confusion. Most of the men are still at their boards, but Leen and several others are in and around the webbing. Two of the men in the “monkey crew” are just lowering a third to the deck. A fourth suited man, his helmet removed, his ground cable dangling, stands by to receive the unconscious figure. He and Leen grab the body and keep it from slumping to the floor. Two other men move up with a stretcher.

  Korie waits until the figure is laid out on it, then moves in. “Who is it?”

  “MacHeath.” Leen is removing the man’s helmet; Korie kneels down and begins to help him. The chief looks at him coldly. “If you don’t mind, sir—”

  Korie returns the stare. “This is no time for that, Leen. He’s my man too.” He unsnaps the last seam and pulls the hood off. He unzips the front of the suit and puts his ear to MacHeath’s T-shirted chest.

  “All right,” Leen pulls his hands back. “You do it.” He stands. “You men get back to your posts. Clear those boards. I still see red lights. You too, Beagle. Get back up in the webs. Fowles—” He strides around angrily, snapping orders. “—and where’s the doc, dammit?!!”

  Korie snaps at him. “Leen! Shut up! I can’t hear anything!” He lowers his head again to MacHeath’s chest. He still doesn’t hear anything—Korie reacts without thinking; he thrusts his face up against MacHeath’s and begins mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. His hand on the other’s chest feels the gentle rise of the lungs as Korie breathes warm air into his throat—blow gently, lungs rise; suck gently, lungs fall; blow gently—

  “That’s it, keep it up—” The speaker is Panyovsky. He drops to his knees, pushes Korie’s hand out of the way. He listens first with his ear, then with a stethoscope.

  Korie pauses to look at him—

  “Don’t stop!” Panyovsky is rummaging in his bag; he begins laying things out—a hypodermic spray, an electrode unit, an oxygen bottle—

  “Move a second. Let me get this suit off him” Panyovsky jerks it free, exposing a section of bare arm. He presses the hypodermic to it; there is a hiss—

  “Adrenalin,” he explains. He picks up the oxygen bottle, snaps the plastic cover off the mask, and turns a valve. “Here—give him this.”

  Korie does so; he fumbles the mask into place over MacHeath’s nose and mouth. Panyovsky puts his stethoscope to the man’s chest again, frowns—

  —reaches for his electrodes. With scissors, he cuts open MacHeath’s T-shirt, then smears a light salve on the man’s chest. “Watch out,” he cautions. He presses the electrodes to the spots of salve, then thumbs the control on one of them. MacHeath jerks—

  “Again!” says Korie. MacHeath jerks—

  —jerks and gasps—

  Panyovsky drops the electrodes, listens with the stethoscope again. He relaxes slightly. “Hold that oxygen bottle steady. He’s going to need it.”

  “He’s alive—?”

  “He’s in shock.” Panyovsky begins pulling at the seals of the yellow protective suit. “He’s got other injuries too. Leen, come here. Help me get this off him.”

  The chief is there almost immediately, pulling and tugging with Panyovsky. “There. Got it.” MacHeath’s burly form lies naked between them. Leen stares across the body at Korie. “I thought this was supposed to be a full simulation, sir—why don’t you continue the drill? Pretend this is a real causality—”

  “Shut up, Leen.” Panyovsky, pulling a blanket up.

  Korie says, “You’re right, you know. I shouldn’t have stopped the drill. If this had been a real battle, we might all be dead now—”

  Leen’s face is incredulous. “You’re serious, aren’t you—?”

  “Shut up, both you!” Panyovsky tucks the edges of the foil blanket under MacHeath’s form. He plugs it in at the end of the stretcher and sets a temperature control. “Give me two men to take him to sick bay.” He moves up, straps the oxygen mask to MacHeath’s pallid face. “I won’t need you anymore, sir. Thanks.”

  Leen taps O’Mara and Fowles for stretcher duty. With Panyovsky staying close to the side of the stretcher, they move out of the engine room. Korie and Leen are left behind.

  Leen looks over at the tall first officer, bitterness and anger etched across his features. He opens his mouth to speak, then thinks better of it. He bites back his words instead, and turns away—

  “Leen.”

  “Yes, Mr. Korie?”

  “What was MacHeath doing on the ‘monkey crew’? He’s a console man.”

  “Yes, sir. I asked him to.”

  “Why?”

  Leen straightens. “I wanted him to help me run some checks on the generators—”

  “During a drill?”

  “Yes, sir. Because that’s the only time we’d be turning the generators, and that’s what I wanted to check.”

  “You were checking the way the generators turn?”

  “No, sir—I was monitoring the phase adapters.” He spits the words, “I don’t want to burn out any more.”

  “I see,” says Korie. He surveys the other carefully.

  “Is that all, sir? May I go?”

  “No. I’m not through.”

  Leen stiffens, his jaw jutting forward. His whole attitude says, All right, you bastard. I can take whatever you want to dish out.

  “Chief,” Korie says slowly. “If you’re expecting me to chew you out, you’re mistaken. You haven’t done anything wrong. You’ve done exactly what you should have done.”

  Leen’s jaw drops—

  Korie adds, “I might fault you for snapping at me, but considering the circumstances, it’s forgivable. Everything else you’ve done down here has
been exemplary. You and your crew have been handling your jobs to the best of your abilities, and if you felt you needed to check the phase adapters—I can’t fault you for that. Just keep it up, please. Thank you.” He turns on his heel and exits, leaving an astonished chief engineer staring after him—

  Outside the door, Korie pauses; slams his hand against a panel. (Christ, I’d like to take him apart—but I can’t. I still need him too much. First, I’ve got to get that bogie. Then, I’ll see about Leen—)

  TWENTY-TWO

  The design of the machine, the nature of its use, the principles by which it operates, all have an effect on the men who come in contact with it. Our ships exist in isolated bubbles, temporary prisons moving alone through a resistant stress field: our warps are generated by pitting energy against energy—and we superimpose a secondary conflict on them to give them motion.

  Then we put human beings inside those ultrastressed pressure chambers.

  Doesn’t the nature of the tools they are working with affect the way they use them, indeed, even the very way they think and live?

  —JARLES “FREE FALL” FERRIS,

  Electric Philosophies

  Korie starts for the bridge—but his communicator bleeps insistently.

  He thumbs it to life. “Korie here.”

  “Mr. Korie, this is sick bay. Panyovsky would appreciate it if you could come down.”

  “Right, I’m on my way.” He goes at a half-run, the excitement still coursing through his veins. By the time he reaches the medical compartment, he’s walking slower and panting slightly.

  He enters without knocking. “How’s MacHeath?”

  The orderly looks up. He starts to shake his head that he doesn’t know, when Panyovsky comes out of the other room. “He just died.”

  The sensation is like being kicked in the stomach. Korie gasps for air. “He—he—can’t be. He was alive when you left the engine room—”

  Panyovsky pushes him into a chair; he closes and locks the door. “Sorry, Jon—” Korie starts at the sound of his little-used first name. “But you can only revive a body so many times. His heart stopped again while we were putting him on the table. I couldn’t restart it—” Abruptly, the doctor crumples, sinks down onto the bench opposite Korie. “Oh, Christ!” He buries his face angrily into his hands. “Goddammit all anyway! Son of a bitch! Shit, shit, shit—hell, hell, hell! Aw, shit!” For a moment there is silence, then he looks suddenly up at the first officer; his eyes are red. “Dammit. There aren’t enough words. Dammit, Mike, bring me my bottle.” To Korie, “Want a drink?”

  “Strictly medicinal?”

  “No—strictly alcohol.”

  Mike, the orderly, produces a flask of whiskey. He puts it on the desk by Panyovsky. “Get some cups—get one for yourself,” the doctor says, opening the bottle. He looks at Korie. “Mackie was dead before they got him on the stretcher. I—couldn’t have saved him.”

  “But his heart—”

  Panyovsky waves that aside. “Reflex reaction; I don’t know—I don’t think he died all at once. He, uh, was pretty well broken up inside. He wouldn’t have survived. Cracked sternum, ruptured lungs, ribs shattered in three places that I know of, burst spleen, and kidneys, too, massive hemorrhaging—he was lucky that the electric shock knocked him out first; he didn’t feel a thing—” He takes a plastic cup from Mike and pours himself a drink. “Uh, the shock alone would have been enough to kill him anyway. I mean, we restarted his heart once, but uh—” Panyovsky shakes his head, “—but we shouldn’t have been able to. He’s pretty well scorched up inside. Sorry.” He sips at his cup morosely. “I think what happened was that his heart didn’t realize the rest of him was dead.”

  Korie takes a cup from the orderly. “Do you know how it happened?”

  “Fowles said he got his ground cable caught in the generator cage. When it moved, he was pulled from the webbing and into the mountings. He fell onto a stanchion.”

  The liquor burns Korie’s throat; he makes a face. “That must have been quite a drop.”

  “According to Fowles, ten meters.”

  Neither man says anything for a bit. They stare at the floor and listen to the sound of each other’s breathing. Occasionally one takes a pull at his cup.

  Panyovsky mutters, “Hell of a way to go . . .”

  Korie nods. “At least it was painless—it was, wasn’t it?”

  The doctor shrugs. “I don’t know. He had time to scream, didn’t he?”

  Korie exhales loudly. “Yeah, I guess so—” He rises and steps to the wall communicator. “Bridge.”

  Goldberg’s voice, “Yes, sir?”

  “Everything all right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Keeping tight on those search patterns?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good—listen, I want you to wake the captain. Ask him to meet me down in sick bay. Tell him it’s—serious.”

  “Sir—can I ask? How bad is it?”

  “Very.”

  Goldberg hesitates. Korie can almost see him phrasing the next question. “Uh—”

  “You’ll hear about it later,” he interrupts. “Listen, that drill we were on—set it up on the boards again. We’ll start over in two hours. It’s important; it’s the missile evasion exercise.”

  “Yes, sir—anything else?”

  “No, just keep her steady and wake the captain for me.”

  “Aye, aye.”

  Korie switches off, turns around, and looks at the doctor; he slumps one should against the wall—he leans, his posture is wry, skeptical, tired.

  Panyovsky makes a toasting gesture to him with his cup, as if saluting his courage in continuing, but he shakes his head sadly. “That isn’t going to make you very popular with the men.”

  “You mean the drill?”

  “Yes,” he sighs. “I think you’ve pushed them about as far as they’ll go.”

  Korie sits down. “Possibly—but they still need it.”

  “I don’t know, Jon, I don’t know.” Panyovsky stares down into his cup. “I’m just a little—worried, I guess. You know they don’t like you.”

  “I know—but when has a crew ever liked their officers?”

  “Oh, I’ve seen a few.” He takes a drink. “But there must be something about this ship—it’s as if the brass purposely assembled a group of people that would hate each other.” He puffs his cheeks thoughtfully, blows out the air. “Oh, I know it isn’t really like that; all crews get a little sticky every so often; but his one—” He shakes his head again. “—I don’t know; it just seems like this one is always angry.”

  “I’ve noticed that myself,” Korie says. “I think it’s the ship. None of us wants to be on this particular tub—the bridge is too cold, the bunkrooms are too warm, the engine room is too loud, the food is bad, the lavatories smell—”

  “She’s an old ship, Jon. There’s not much we can do about that.”

  Korie shrugs, finishes his liquor in one gulp.

  “You could ease up a little.”

  Korie meets his gaze. “Pan, you’re a good doctor, maybe even a good psychonomic analyst—”

  Panyovsky holds up his hand. “Jon, listen to me for a minute. I know you want a tight ship, but a good crew is like a violin string. You can only tighten it so much and then it breaks. You reach a point where there’s nothing more you can do—except leave them alone.”

  “You think we’re at that point?”

  “Close to it.”

  “Well—I don’t know.” Korie puts his cup on the desk; Panyovsky refills it. “I keep looking at our efficiency ratings—they’re way down; we should be able to do better. We’ll have to do better if we’re going to meet that bogie—”

  “Perhaps—but I don’t think you’re going to get any more out of this crew now.”

  “I’ve got to try.”

  “You could always give up the bogie instead—”

  Korie just looks at him. Coldly.

  Panyovsky d
rops his gaze. Embarrassed, he refills his own cup. “Anyway,” he says, “they don’t like you, Jon. They’re going to like you less after today, just because you’re you.”

  “There’s little I can do about that.”

  “Funny thing,” muses the doctor. “I got my training during the uprisings on Shaleen. That was a civil war, and we knew who the enemy was—you always knew who you had to hate, who you had to kill. Here—” He shrugs. “—it’s different. We never see the enemy; we never even get close to him. It’s all done by buttons; all we see is the shimmer on the screen. He might as well be a simulation.”

  “So—?”

  Panyovsky shakes his head. “This kind of fighting isn’t right, Jon—there’s nobody to hate. If we’re going to be at war, we should be able to come face to face with the enemy; we should be able to experience the actual act of killing, of taking a stun pistol and pointing it at a man and pulling the trigger—feeling the awful hum of it; watching him as his eyes roll back in his head; all his blood vessels rupture, and his limbs start quivering in paralysis. All his nerve cells discharge at once and at random—it’s like an epileptic fit. He gasps, he groans, he froths at the mouth, he falls down and shakes. If you keep firing, he’ll start hemorrhaging inside, pretty soon blood starts coming out of his nose and mouth, sometimes the ears too. It takes a long time for a man to die that way. I don’t think it’d be a pleasant experience. I know it isn’t very pretty to watch—” He looks at Korie, “But if you hate someone enough—”

  “Is that what you used on Shaleen?”

  Panyovsky nods. “There were times when it was pretty bad.” His manner changes, he straightens and gestures at the ship around them. “This is wrong, Jon—we’ve denatured the war. We’ve taken all the horror out of it. All we have left is the killing, sterile and clean and quick. And supposedly painless.” A pause. “It’s no wonder they hate you, Jon—they’ve nobody else left to.”

  Korie is staring off at a corner; the doctor’s words hurt—but he won’t let it show. “There’s only one thing I can do, Pan. I can try to be the best possible officer I know how. That means I have to do what I think is right, same as you have to do what you think is right when you get a man on the table.”