* * *
The docking hangar was very dark. After the brightly lighted access corridors, Jensen found it difficult to adjust. Strange, he thought, that the overhead floods should be switched off. On the heels of a major crisis, he would assume a conscientious staff would take extra precautions.
But when Jensen queried the guard on duty, negligence proved not to be at issue.
“Damned skip-runner blasted the communications turret.” The security man gestured in resignation. “Lights in here run off the same solar banks, and we’ll need more than one shift on deep-space maintenance for repairs.”
Though the explanation seemed reasonable, Jensen’s nervousness increased. He crossed the echoing expanse of hangar with swift steps and hurried up the Shearborn’s ramp.
Instinct caused him to hesitate just inside the entry. He sensed something amiss, perhaps from the conspicuous fact that Harris was not at his usual post in the galley with a row of empty beers for company. Jensen paused midstride, almost in the corridor to the bridge. That moment, a shadow moved just at the edge of vision.
Jensen ducked. The blow that should have felled him glanced instead off his ribs.
It knocked the breath from his lungs nonetheless. The bottle spun from his hand and smashed in a spray of glass and spirits. Jensen bent double, whooping for air that tasted sickly of whiskey. He snatched by reflex for his side arm. But the shadow moved ahead of him.
It proved to be a man, a large man who already dodged the shot he knew would follow. A Fleet officer accomplished enough to earn marksman elite could be expected to handle his gun as if it were an extension of his living flesh.
Jensen’s shot crashed into the bridge-side bulkhead. Padding exploded into fluff where the intruder’s head had been but a fraction of an instant before. Cursing, the lieutenant shoved another round into the breech. He hastened forward, skidding over the puddle of alcohol and glass. The cold portion of his mind wondered why the intruder had fled. A second blow, better placed, might have killed him in that instant before surprise kicked into adrenaline surge.
Jensen whipped around the innerlock, slammed shoulder first into a stowage locker. He trained his pistol squarely upon his quarry, only to flinch the shot wide. His curse of white hot anger blended with the clang as the pellet hammered harmlessly into high impact plastic.
Over the heated end of his gun barrel, Jensen beheld the limp form of Harris, gripped like a shield in a pair of coil-scarred hands.
The name left his lips, unbidden. “Mac James!”
“Godfrey,” came the muffled reply. “Tired of the party early, did you?”
The face, with its icy gray eyes, stayed hidden. Jensen was given no target for his murderous marksmanship, which was a feat. Mac James outweighed his unconscious hostage by a good sixty pounds. As to how the skip-runner had stowed away, Jensen recalled with sinking recrimination that the Marity had passed close enough to plant a boarder on the Shearborn’s hull. The stowaway’s life support of necessity would have been limited to the capacity of his suit pack, which meant that Mac James had gambled his life on the lieutenant’s subsequent behavior. Had the Shearborn’s crew backed down, returned through FTL to Dead Star, the skip-runner would have been fried in the coil field. Instead, the heroics which had preserved the station’s integrity and the lives of two children had earned the Shearborn a warm invitation, without security screening, into a classified research installation. With a dawning stab of outrage, Jensen understood. He had been nothing more than a pawn. His triumph over the terrorists had provided the linchpin of a plot for MacKenzie James.
“I could kill Harris to see you dead,” Jensen said thickly. Certainly he was ruthless enough, MacKenzie James should recall.
But with insight that bordered the uncanny, the skip-runner sensed why the lieutenant dared not fire to kill. “First you’ll want to know just what mischief I’ve set loose while you were celebrating, boy.”
Jensen’s fingers whitened on the grip of his pellet gun. His thoughts darted like a rat in a maze but found no opening to exploit. He had visited the control bridge on the Marity. Her captain’s ability to manipulate hardware was real enough to frighten, and if Harris had slugged down drugs with his beer, the Shearborn’s systems had been open to sabotage for something close to three hours. Any havoc was possible.
Mac James’s laconic observation interrupted the lieutenant’s thoughts. “Now, I see you have two choices. Murder your pilot to get me, and you’ve got a Fleet investigation on your case. You can bet they won’t send a lightweight to chew your ass. Not if you kill without witnesses and a suspect like me turns up dead on your chaser, smack in the middle of a classified installation.”
“That won’t save you,” Jensen said quickly.
“Maybe not.” Harris’s head lolled to one side as Mac James shifted his grip. “But a review of Shearborn’s flight log will uncover a coded file, accessed through stolen passkeys. The data list includes plans for every project Cassix Station personnel have going on the drawing boards. Fleet court martial will nail you on theft of military secrets without appeal. You need me alive, boy. Unless you know enough to go into that system and monkey that file out of existence without leaving tracks.”
Jensen felt shaky down to his shoes. He lacked the expertise to clear the encoded locks on the Shearborn’s software, much less to alter records on the other side. His helplessness galled doubly. In the event of a trial, the very ignorance that ensured his innocence would be impossible to prove.
“You’re much too quiet, boy.” Mac James shifted, his weight with sharpening impatience. “Why do you think I’ve been so busy?”
Rocked by a stab of hatred, Jensen perceived more. “You sent that other skip-runner in, pitted me against him specifically to gain entrance to Cassix Station without leaving traces. The Indie contract on the kidnappers was only a cover.”
A strained silence followed, broken gruffly by Mac James’s reply. “A man lives according to his nature, you for pride and advancement, and Captain Gorlaff for his bets. That one buried his future permanently because he neglected to watch his odds. You can, too, boy. Or you can lift off Cassix and rendezvous with the Marity, where I can transfer that incriminating file without leaving traces in the system. I’ll return Harris in a cargo crate. When he recovers from his hangover, he can fly you back to Commodore Abraham Meier for the commendation and promotion you both so richly deserve.”
Jensen steadied his grip on the gun. His hand trembled, and his face twitched. A single shot would restore his inner pride but shatter his public career forever. Swept by rage, and by a desire like pain to see the skip-runner captain who had manipulated him end up cold and bloody and dead, Jensen shut his eyes. Cornered without recourse, he made his choice.
* * *
Commodore Meier stepped forward on the dais, and stiffly cleared his throat. “Each man lives according to his nature,” he said in official summary. The medals in his hand flashed brightly in the lights of the vid cameras. “May others draw inspiration from the bravery and initiative cited here.”
Jensen held very still as the precious medallion was affixed to the sash on his chest. Like MacKenzie James, he never gambled; there had been no allowance for doubt. A Fleet officer with a future might pursue a skip-runner to the death. The duel of wits would continue. Reveling in his promotion and his honors, the newest Lieutenant Commander in the Fleet promised himself victory at the next pass.
THE RICH BLUE world shrunk in the background as Hawk Talon blasted away. Martial music played faintly in the background.
“Another lost world found for the Alliance,” he intoned, satisfied. For the last hour Hawk had outwitted grasping politicians and outfought two Khalian cruisers. Finally he led a revolt by the general populace that had forced the corrupt planetary government to apply for membership in the Alliance, demonstrating once more how every right-thinking planet would rush
to join.
Music swells and fade to crowd of cheering new citizens.
I.
WHEN BRODSKY ENLISTED in the levy from Perdido, he was sent to the planet Target, the Khalian staging ground which the special forces from Perdido, with a little help from the rest of the Fleet, had conquered some two years previously.
By the time Brodsky got there, the fighting was over and there was nothing much to do. So Brodsky had proceeded to do nothing.
Then one day, his platoon sergeant came to him and said, “The company commander wants to see you.”
At the time, Brodsky was off-duty, sitting under a tree watching two crickets watching each other. He’d learned a lot from watching insects and small animals while on Target. It was funny, but when you really watched them closely, you saw that they did stuff the textbooks never mentioned. Individual variation. Despite their lack of personality, their behavior was never quite predictable.
“What does the company commander want with me?” Brodsky asked.
“No doubt he would prefer to enlighten you as to that himself,” the sergeant said. “Are you coming?”
“I suppose so,” Brodsky said.
“Can’t you just say, ‘Yes, Sergeant,’ like everyone else?”
“I suppose I could,” Brodsky said. “But I’m not like everybody else. Nobody is.”
II.
Brodsky was tall, gangling, awkward, and poorly coordinated. He had an IQ that registered around 185, genius level, but he didn’t seem to have any aptitude to do anything with it. This provided a challenge for his company commander, James P. Kelly from Carthaginia II in the Eastern Ridge Star Sector CJ.
Captain Kelly was perfectly charming in a sarcastic way. “So here is Brodsky, the company philosopher!”
“You do me too great an honor, Captain,” Brodsky said. “I am a mere seeker after truth.”
“Is that why you invariably screw up our close-order drills?”
“I don’t do it on purpose,” Brodsky said. “I’m not rebellious.”
“Except unconsciously?”
“Perhaps. But I submit, Captain, that a man is not to be held accountable for the actions of his subconscious, which is, by definition, unknown and unknowable to him.”
“If you’d just pay attention,” the captain said.
“I beg your pardon?” asked Brodsky. He had been staring out the window, wishing he were somewhere else.
“Brodsky, sometimes I wish we were in one of the old-fashioned armies of the bad old days. Back then, when soldiers screwed up, do you know what their commanding officers did?”
“Scolded them?” Brodsky guessed.
“A lot more than that. They punished them.”
“I don’t understand,” Brodsky said. “What has punishment got to do with screwing up?”
“Nothing. We know that now. But in the ancient time, they thought they could correct behavior by punishing it.”
“What a peculiar notion,” Brodsky said.
“Quite unscientific. But can you imagine, Brodsky, what gratification it would be to me to be able to punish you after all the anguish you have caused me?”
“Sir, if it will help your state of mind,” Brodsky said, “then by all means punish me. I won’t hold it against you, and I’ll never tell anyone.”
“I may have emotions,” the company commander said, “but I’m not an old-fashioned thinker. No, Brodsky, I’m not going to punish you, though my heart would delight in giving you pain. On the contrary, I am going to reward you. Is that modern enough for you?”
“I don’t know if rewarding behavior you despise is really a good idea,” Brodsky said. “And I also have the feeling—call it a presentiment—that I am not going to like this reward.”
“You can call it a presentiment,” the company commander said, “or you can call it grape jelly. No power on Earth, and certainly no plea on your part, is going to prevent me from rewarding you for your miserable and vile performance ever since you joined my detachment.”
“Detachment is something you have too little of,” Brodsky said. “But if you’re determined to reward me, let’s get it over with. What’s it to be? A three-day leave so that I can get disgustingly drunk in the horrible little town filled with sarcastic six-foot birds outside of our post?”
“No, it’s better than that,” the company commander said.
“Sir, I can’t imagine what it is.”
“Then I will tell you, Private Brodsky, you are hereby promoted to the rank of first lieutenant.”
“That’s it?” Brodsky asked. “That’s my reward?”
“Only part of it. Aren’t you curious why I’ve promoted you?”
Brodsky shrugged. “Maybe you have a daughter who has seen me and found me desirable and insisted that you give me enough rank so that she can be seen with me socially.”
In a low, deadly voice the captain said, “Brodsky, have you been seeing my daughter?”
“I didn’t even know that you had one. My supposition was purely hypothetical.”
“I have promoted you,” the company commander said, “because, according to the new directives, lieutenant is the lowest rank permitted to operate a scoutship.”
“A scoutship? Me fly a scoutship? Sir, I can’t even drive a car!”
“They are simple enough to learn. Intelligence is the magic key that unlocks all techniques. You told me that yourself.”
At this time the search was on for the missing planets of the old empire. Two thousand years previously, the First Empire had come to an end. Its original nucleus had been thirteen planets, one of which was Earth. In the days of the last emperor the empire grew to encompass one hundred thousand planets. Power was in the hands of the Fleet, which headquartered at Tau Ceti, the Port.
When the Empire broke up, many records were lost, and many planets went entirely out of communication. It was a time of dark ages. Part of the present day work of the Alliance was to find these planets, reestablish contact, bring them back into the Alliance.
Brodsky hadn’t thought the exploration program would affect him. He was not an explorer type. He was not even a military type. In fact, he had good reason to suspect that he wasn’t even a type at all.
“I don’t know anything about piloting,” Brodsky said.
“There is an instruction manual on board the ship. You will have several hours to study it. Also, you will have a partner, no doubt more technologically competent than you.”
“Why me?” Brodsky asked. “And why a scoutship?”
“Scoutships,” the company commander said, “are the ships of choice in the locating and contacting of civilizations.”
“You want to send me out exploring?”
“It’s important work, Brodsky. Two thousand years ago we were part of an empire of a hundred thousand planets. Think of it!”
“Unwieldy,” Brodsky commented.
“Lofty. Noble. A grand conception.”
“To each his own. I personally think there’s entirely too much nostalgia for the Old Empire. The dark ages sound like much more fun.”
“We need to find those planets,” Captain Kelly said. “We need them back in the Alliance. We’re at war, in case you forgot. The Khalians, remember? And the sinister intelligences behind them. Enormous forces are moving against us, Brodsky. We need everyone and everything on our side. And if self interest doesn’t move you, think of someone else’s problems for a change. Do you know what the enemy does to unprotected civilizations?”
“I don’t want to hear about it,” Brodsky said.
“These planets are defenseless. Most of the planets have not been able to sustain an interplanetary civilization on their own. After a few generations of isolation, space flight is forgotten, or remembered only as a possession of some godlike race that once came and went. When the Khalians and ot
hers come across such people, it’s easy enough to enslave them, or to kill them off, or have them quick-frozen for meat supplies.”
“Please,” Brodsky said, “I’ve got a sensitive stomach.”
“I’ve said enough,” the company commander said. He rummaged in his desk drawer and found a shiny ornament.
“Here is your lieutenant’s medallion. Put it around your neck. That’s it. Welcome aboard, Lieutenant Brodsky.”
Brodsky fingered the ornament. “Honestly now, sir, all humor aside. Is this really such a good idea? Sending me out in a scouter to explore alien worlds? I mean, that’s work for an expert, isn’t it?”
“Indeed it is,” the company commander said. “We have considered carefully the ideal requirements for the job. You should be a trained linguist, of course, and quick at learning new languages and understanding dialects. A knowledge of chemistry will help you stay unpoisoned when you try to eat on your new planetary home. You should have some training in various disciplines—economics, politics, technology of all sorts—so that you can determine how important this planet might or might not be to the Alliance. It would help if you were a geologist, because there are still rare earths and metals to be found ... a botanist and biologist, because some of our best cultures for a variety of things come from alien platforms. If the place has an ocean, as most oxygen-rich worlds do, it would help if you were an oceanographer. We’d like you to be a zoologist so that you could tell us something about the animals you encounter. If you were a sociologist and an ethnologist you could make some guesses about the various cultures, because the cultures we have come across so far have been anything but homogeneous, and they tend to have as much variation or more as races, groups, clans, religions, on Earth. It takes a trained man to deal with all this without giving offense. Maybe we’d better add psychologist to your list of credits. It stands to reason that you should be a doctor, if for no other reason than to heal yourself when you fall ill far from home and don’t care to rely on the local methods, steeped as they are in alien physiology and alien nutrition. As a matter of fact, it wouldn’t be bad if you were also a nutritionist.”
The Fleet Book Three: Break Through Page 16
