Starhunt: A Star Wolf Novel

by David Gerrold

  Leen’s eyes are moist. There is a hint of redness around the edges. His face looks haggard. When Barak finally runs down, he says quietly, “But it’s your life too, Al; your ship too. Don’t you care anymore?”

  Barak hesitates a half-beat before answering. “I don’t know. I’m tired. I don’t think so. I just want to be left alone.”

  He turns and goes up the corridor toward the bridge. He will sit down in the Command and Control chair and will pretend to be in charge. But he will only be waiting, just like the rest of them.

  Leen watches his departing back sadly.

  He doesn’t fully understand it. He knows that Brandt and Korie and Barak adjourned to the captain’s cabin immediately after the unwarp fiasco. They stayed in there a long time. Their voices were raised, the shouts could be heard in the corridor, only dimly muffled by the insulating walls. When Korie and Barak finally emerged again, they weren’t speaking. Korie’s face was grim. Barak’s countenance was ashen, haggard. Exactly what had occurred in there was unknown, and neither Korie nor Barak would comment.

  Periodically, the captain’s bell would ring and an aide would bring him a covered tray from the galley. That was the only evidence there was still a captain aboard this ship. Otherwise, Korie was still in charge.

  Except Korie had not been back to the bridge since unwarp. Nor had he issued any order more significant than “Clean up that mess, Crewman.”

  The crew remains on alert.

  Because the order to stand down has not been given.

  And will not be given.

  The shifts change. But the men stay at their stations.

  And the Burlingame drifts.

  THIRTY

  A little ignorance can go a long way.

  —SOLOMON SHORT

  Korie is sitting in the galley, alone. There is no one else in the room.

  On the table in front of him is a chessboard, sixteen squares to a side. There are two pieces of board, a white flag-ship and a black one. Korie is studying them with a slight frown on his face. He looks tired. His eyes are hollow circles. His skin seems drawn and tight. He doesn’t look up when the chief engineer enters.

  “It’s the problem of the two flagships,” he says to no one in particular.

  “Eh?” says Leen. “Are you talking to me?”

  “Huh?” Korie looks up, confused, blinking. “Oh, Chief, I didn’t see you come in. Get some coffee, sit down. I want to go over something with you. Do you know the problem of the two flagships?”

  Leen shakes his head. “I—uh, I don’t play chess that much.”

  “Never mind. Sit down. I want to show you something. You see here? The flagship is the most powerful piece in the game. It can move horizontally, vertically, diagonally, and hyper. What makes it so powerful is that you can’t move into position to attack it without being vulnerable yourself. If you and your enemy each have a flagship only, then neither can attack the other, right?”

  “If you say so, sir.” Leen is puzzled, not really following what Korie is trying to tell him.

  “No, no—look here. There’s no other ship on the board to provide support. If I move onto the enemy’s diagonal to attack him, I lose. If he moves into position to attack me, he loses for the same reason. The target gets one move in which to strike first. So it’s a draw, with neither side able to move except to avoid the other.” Korie adds quietly, “He’s out there, Chief. He’s playing a very calculated game with us.”

  “Sir—? You still believe there’s something there?”

  Korie looks up at him. “Believe? I’m more convinced than ever. We’re each hiding from each other, waiting for that one moment of vulnerability. The question, Chief, is why didn’t he attack us when we were unwarping, because that’s when we were most vulnerable.

  “I have to game it out from the beginning. I can’t figure out the appropriate countermove until I understand his strategy. The question is this: Why did he run from us in the first place?”

  “Sir—” Leen tries again to interrupt, but Korie won’t stop.

  “No, no, hear me out. Please.”

  The word startles the chief engineer. Please? From Korie?!! He looks at the man’s face. There is desperation there. Korie needs someone to believe with him. And for a moment, Leen feels pity.

  “Thank you, Chief. Thank you. Now, think—”

  “Mr. Korie—” Leen blurts suddenly. “—there’s nothing out there. Let’s go home.”

  “What—?” Korie is momentarily startled alertness. “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘There’s nothing out there. Let’s go home.’”

  “We can’t go home. That would be . . . it would be quitting. It would be defeat. It’s what he wants us to do.”

  “But there’s nothing there, sir!” Leen says it a little too loudly and a little too quickly.

  “No, that’s what he wants us to believe. He’s clever, that one. You see it, Chief, don’t you? He’s pretending that he’s not there in the hope that we’ll believe it too.”

  Leen is staring now. The scuttlebutt was true. Korie had tossed a field.

  “Just listen, Chief. Just listen for a little bit. As long as we drift here like this, we’re safe. The minute we start to move, he’ll see us. By our course, he’ll know what we’re thinking. If we turn around and go home, it’ll be obvious we’re breaking off. If we do anything else, then he knows we’re still searching, and he’ll know he has to continue to pretend not to be there. But as long as we drift, he can’t know what we’re doing or what we’re thinking. Now we’re the enigma to him. Because we’re not doing anything. And as long as we’re powered-down like this, he can’t know for sure where we are. Or even if we’re here at all, because our stress-field ripple is practically nonexistent when we’re adrift. This is what he must have been doing. Floating just like this. It’s eerie, isn’t it? How the roles are reversed. He saw us come in, he couldn’t have missed us. Now he can’t start up his engines either without giving himself away. If he really wants us to believe that he’s not there, then he doesn’t dare move while we’re here. So we have him trapped, Leen. He can’t move either. We’ve got him in a siege of logic. And we have the advantage, I think. Because we’re not trying to pretend that we’re not chasing him. Our problem is to figure out how we can make the most of that advantage before he realizes that there’s no further point to the game, that we’re trying to outwait him. I figure we have two weeks at least. In a powered-down state, a ship can drift for months on station. I’ve ordered half rations, you know. And have you noticed how dim the lights are, and how dark and still the ship is—oh, yes, that’s right. I gave those orders to you, didn’t I? I’m sorry, Chief. I already—I mean—uh, what was I talking about? Uh, the other ship. The bogie. We uh, we don’t really know for sure how much cruising range he has left, but we can reasonably assume that we have more than him. After all, he was heading for home when we picked up his trace, and that implies the end of a run and the exhaustion of his resources. We, on the other hand, had just been resupplied from a tender, so I figure we can outwait him, and I—I uh, also figure that it’ll take at least two weeks because that’s how long we had to chase him before we lost him—well, not quite. It was, uh, twelve days, wasn’t it? Anyway, if he has the perseverance to hide for that long too. It’s worth a try—”

  Leen says softly, “This is what you told the captain and Barak, isn’t it? And they bought it, didn’t they? The captain anyway.” Leen isn’t trying to hide his bitterness. “Damn you! Damn all of you!”

  Korie’s gaze is calm. He betrays not the slightest hint of emotion. His voice is flat. “The strain is getting to all of us, Chief. Don’t crack now. I need your strength.” For a moment, it was the old Korie speaking and for a moment, Leen was startled—uncertain.

  The chief engineer rubs at his nose and looks down at the table top and then looks back up to Korie and rubs his nose again and blinks and when he finishes all of that, he says, “Sir, I’m sorry for—getti
ng loud like that—but you have to give yourself a different perspective on all of this and—”

  Korie takes a sip from is mug, then makes a face. “Ugh. The stuff went cold.” He exhales loudly, and the old Korie is gone again. This one is tired—and vulnerable. “Yes, I know what it looks like, Chief. I’ve tossed a bloody field. Strobed out. Tight-focused. I know the terms. I know more than that, I know what they mean and how to use them accurately. You didn’t know I studied psychonomy, did you? That’s what I wanted to do before the war. Psychonometrics. I guess I’m not very good at it. I thought I was. I thought I was a mover of men, that I could structure a dynamic for a desired result. I knew how to use a brutal tactic where soft ones wouldn’t work. Brutal tactics are good for a lot of things. They’re fast, they stamp the lesson in hard, they work because they overpower the system’s ability to assimilate change. But the lessons don’t take unless the system eventually perceives the love behind the brutality, the will for mutual gain that motivates it. Do you follow this? It doesn’t matter, but it would be nice if you did. I thought I was pretty good at manipulating people.” He looks up, straight at Leen, eyes clear and wet and hurting. “I like solving problems. That’s why psychonomy fascinated me—it was a way to understand the most interesting problems of all, human beings. Or maybe I learned my part too well. I shouldn’t have struck Rogers, he’s just a kid, but suddenly it seemed like it was in character. Except that by then I didn’t have to be in character any more. I’d already accomplished the task of turning this into a fighting vessel. So I didn’t need the character. And now I may have lost the trust of my crew just when I need it the most. Oh, that bogie’s out there, the captain knows it, Barak knows it. But that’s not the issue any more. The issue is what’s happening on the Burlingame. I guess I owe them an apology, Chief. The crew, I mean. I—I didn’t have time to try to whip them into shape with . . . love.”

  Leen looks a little panicked around the edges. “Sir—why are you telling me? I don’t know how to deal with this. I don’t even know if I can believe you or not.”

  Korie holds up a hand. “Easy, Chief. I’m telling you this because this is what I told the captain and Al. You have a right to know too. Why do you think the captain has stayed in his cabin for so long? He can’t run the ship—he knows it. The crew—well, you were here before. The morale was nonexistent. The captain and I, we used to sit and talk for long hours about the ship’s problems. He would drink and ramble and drink, and I would drink and listen and drink. He was unhappy because he didn’t want this assignment, and I was unhappy because I did—and we both recognized it, and accepted it. I know you find this hard to believe, Chief, but officers are very human, really. Sometimes. But maybe only with other officers. They’re the only ones we can trust. So there we were, stuck on this boat together, wishing we could trade places—I guess I shouldn’t tell this in the clear like this but—what the hell—I suddenly realized that all that psychonometric charting of group dynamics I had learned was meant to be practiced. The captain and I structured a desperation plan—he would retire to his . . . ah, Olympus—and be Zeus, a God, enigmatic, distant, mostly benevolent, but occasionally dangerous. That was the perception of him we built up in the crew’s minds. The more he kept away from them the more benevolent he became, because the less direct action on their lives he exerted. I, on the other hand, would become a martinet, an unpopular, swaggering, manipulating—well, you know. I wasn’t a very nice person, right? That was the character. The dynamic is a dangerous one to set up and even more difficult to control, but the situation required drastic steps. We’re losing the war, I think. I don’t know—but you know what happens when one side gets desperate. They do desperate things in the hope of a miracle. We—this ship—we’re one of those desperate actions. If we’re to survive, we have to be desperate ourselves. I’m terrified of being on this ship, Leen. I don’t want to die. But there’s not an enemy ship we can destroy in actual combat. We’re old and slow and clumsy, and the enemy certainly isn’t going to send ships weaker than us on missions into territory as well patrolled—or so they’re supposed to believe—as the one we’re patrolling. I’ve lost track of the separate ploys. But the enemy is supposed to think that area is heavily protected, too well defended to be vulnerable. But there’s a flaw in that reasoning, Chief. If the enemy decides to test those defenses, even in a feint, they’re not going to send a weak ship. They’re going to test that area with something . . . unusual. Something powerful. Something certainly strong enough to destroy us.” He takes a breath, then continues in a strangely darker tone of voice, “And I wanted—still want—to survive this war. And the only way to do it was brutalize the crew into unifying, then focusing that unity into a pride of accomplishment. I told Barak this and he understood. That’s what we told Barak in the captain’s cabin, the captain and I. He did something very dangerous. He almost destroyed a major psychonomic matrix—that’s our real problem. The fragility of the gamma-unity matrix.”

  “But—the captain was arguing with you, sir—”

  “He has doubts, of course. Everybody has doubts, Chief. I have doubts. But I was right. And I could have won, Chief, I could have. If Barak hadn’t interfered, we would have—we would have—” Korie stops, confused. He blinks uncertainly. His eyes remain unfocused. “But we did unwarp, didn’t we—and the enemy wasn’t there, was he? But then, the enemy couldn’t know about the psychonomy of this ship, could he? I’ve got to—wait—let me figure a moment—anyway, yes the captain does have his doubts about the—the, ah, wisdom of psychonometric manipulations applied—but, uh—”

  “Sir, does the captain know about this—this psychonomy?”

  “Yes, of course he—”

  “I mean, does he know that you’re applying it. Have you discussed this with him, in language like you’re using now?”

  “Why, uh—yes, of course—I mean, not in exactly these terms—we’ve, yes, we’ve discussed the ah, problems and the possible ah, solutions—but you have to remember, Chief, that there’s another psychonomic level of operation—uh, I’m sorry, Chief—” Korie is momentarily flustered. “I—I guess I should explain what’s happening here. You need to understand it all, don’t you? I’m dumping. The contents of my brain. I need time to assimilate the mix of problems I have to solve. I’m dumping it out like a computer, the better to—and I need someone to dump it all out on. I’m sorry it’s you, you probably can’t deal with it, I know, but you’ve got to try—I guess I should explain it all to you—I’m an alpha-matrix personality. I think I can trust you with that information, Chief. It’s supposed to be classified information, but sometimes it’s necessary to release that knowledge—with, uh, discretion, of course. I’m relying on your confidentiality here, of course. You know, you understand, don’t you? Anyway, I’m an alpha-matrix, and alphas have large faults, but we’re forgiven our large faults because we have large virtues, and one of the—one of the faults is we dump, but that’s the penalty we pay for having an overprocessing mind. If you want to operate like a meta-processor, you have to operate like a meta-processor. I’m sure that doesn’t make sense to you, Chief, but what it means to be an alpha-matrix is that all of your twenty-seven separate and distinct ego states are functioning harmoniously, all in tune with one another, all of them liking each other and communicating with each other, constantly, and all of them operating like a meta-processor simulator—you know how that works, don’t you?—with a single processing unit switching from one state to the next so rapidly that it appears that all of the states are functioning simultaneously. Do you know what this means, Leen? Do you know people who you can’t seem to figure out? People who confuse you because their repertoire of response has contradictions in it. It’s because you’re seeing different ego states operative in the same body, except you don’t know to identify them; but it wouldn’t be a mystery to a psychonomist. Most psychonomists are alphas anyway, they have to be. Anyone who seems to be confusing, who’s switching from state to state rapidly,
is obviously a functioning high-level matrix, whether they know it or not. The human mind can’t function as a meta-processor, Leen, but it can function as a meta-processor simulator, and that’s me. I’ve been trained to have this ability, I should use it—I see I’m losing you, Leen, perhaps already lost you, I’m sorry, look, maybe I shouldn’t have told you all of this, but you need to understand. And I know how this looks—that I’m mad. And there’s probably no way to convince you I’m not. Lord, God, how do you prove to someone you’re sane? Don’t you think I’ve pondered that question too? The more you try to prove your sanity the more you have reason to suspect it. Sometimes I find myself talking to myself, and I start listening to see what I’m saying. I monitor my own mind, Leen—is that scary to you? Sometimes it’s scary to me. Will I recognize it if I go mad, or, if I go mad, will the ability to recognize it be the first thing to go? It terrifies me. If I were mad, I’d truly be dangerous, wouldn’t I?”

  Korie drinks from his mug, neglects to make a face this time. He needs liquid to continue talking more than he needs to feign a gesture of camaraderie.

  “But the point is this, Chief. That bogie is out there. And he did not attack us when we were vulnerable, when we were unwarping. So what does that suggest? It says to me that he can’t attack us. I don’t believe any more that he stopped because he had engine trouble. No, he stopped because it was part of a larger plan. Because he didn’t think he could destroy us. And that’s because my plan worked. If I made this ship look and act aggressive enough, the enemy would assume we really were a K-class vessel, and stay away from us. And the tactic worked, the enemy ship believed it, and he ran. And he had to convince us that he really wasn’t there because he couldn’t confront a K-class ship head on. He believed us when we acted like a K-class ship. Now, the question is, are we going to believe him when he acts like he isn’t a ship at all? Crazy, isn’t it? We’re both a couple of goddamned liars, aren’t we? But that’s how war is fought. With lies, with pretense. With calculations and manipulations, and that’s why captains don’t have to be captains, but good psychonomists—not to work their skills on their crew, but the enemy—only, if you have such a tool at your disposal, why shouldn’t you use it on your own crew too? After all, that’s part of making them battle-ready, isn’t it?—and if the alternative is killing them—hell, the navy isn’t in the business of teaching men how to make nice anyway. That’s the secret of a fighting force. You have to give them energy to power their emotions. You have to have someone to hate, and if you can’t hate an unseen enemy, you hate your old man, and you hate him with a passion, and if he’s a sharp old man, then at the right moment, there’ll be a—a relationship of grudging respect for each other, and then all that angry energy will be channeled into destroying the enemy. It’s a beautiful relationship, a commander and his crew, Leen—like riding a stallion, naked in the wind, it’s almost an act of love—yes, I know what that sounds like too, that’s another part of the price of being an alpha-matrix. You know where all of your pieces are, and you recognize them. So what? I got the job done, didn’t I? The other ship ran from us, didn’t he? The question—the question is this: Why is he pretending to be our wobbly? Oh, yes, I suspected that from the very beginning, I know this ship’s patterns, Chief. I know your engine room as well as you do, and I know about flux-wobblies and all the other kinds. I suspected that it was our wobbly, except that I know what our wobbly looks like—and his was too goddamned good. His simulation was too perfect. It didn’t have the jagged beta-flux edge-ripple that occurs once every thirty-three megacycles, and that was the giveaway. Chief, I looked at that wobbly long and hard, I stared at that screen. You saw me. Something was wrong with that wobbly, I sensed it somehow, but I didn’t know how I knew, or what it was I was sensing, but there was something about it that just didn’t look right. I had to trust my hunch, so I kept looking for the thing that my subconscious mind had recognized, but my conscious mind hadn’t yet focused on and identified; I didn’t even know it was a simulated echo, Chief. I just knew there was something very peculiar about a wobbly that clean, that perfect, that familiar . . . so I started examining each separate function of it. Privately, because I didn’t want anyone else to know what I was doing or what I suspected. But it was when I looked for the beta-flux edge-ripple that I knew. Because the ninth-order harmonics produced by that ripple are very distinctive second-level modifiers. And when I looked, Chief, I couldn’t find the ripple. It wasn’t there.”