Scotty had argued that an admiral ranked higher than a commodore, who was only a regular captain, after all, in charge of more than one vessel.
Asked for his opinion, Mikey—who had once been in the Navy—had only deigned to transmit snoring noises to the rest of the “fleet”.
Shorty’s three companions hadn’t had much to say, so far, although they’d helped with Shorty’s repairs enthusiastically enough. They’d accepted Wilson’s leadership immediately, without question, and he was trying to get to know each of them better now. This not a particularly easy task (he finally understood) by means of the electronic media. He wished he’d anticipated that when he’d first met Amorie Samson on the SolarNet.
Shorty, it turned out, was one Manuel Echeverria Gavilando, born and bred in “Lost Angeles”, a portion of West America’s largest city that remained in overgrown ruins today, more than a century after the devastating earthquake that everybody still called “The Big One” had killed twenty million Californians and paralyzed the American economy for more than a generation, precipitating the East-West political divide.
Shorty had scrimped and saved, he’d told Wilson (much likelier burgled and mugged, Wilson suspected) to earn passage to the Moon, and had been hired afterward by an asteroid hunting corporation that had supplied him with a ship, taking nine tenths of whatever he found with her.
In the Moon, lacking certain customary legal powers and immunities traditionally granted to it by nation states like East America. the corporation Shorty worked for had soon gone bankrupt. Manuel—who appeared to like being called Shorty—had whisked his little ship off to the faraway Asteroid Belt before anybody came looking for her, renaming her La Diabla, and claiming to anyone who would listen that he’d long since paid for her by using her for what she’d been built for.
Wilson wondered where Shorty had sent the checks. He had decided that he could work with him—but it would be necessary to keep an eye on him, as well. As someone famous had once put it, “Trust—but verify.”
“Beanpole” had turned out to be a musician, of all things, and kept an acoustic guitar aboard his little ship, Lady of Spain, the same way Wilson did. He was a more experienced player, however, and had a sweet, clear tenor voice. His real name was Casey McCarthy, he’d told Wilson and his friends, from Joe Batt’s Arm on Pallas. By the time they’d reattached Shorty’s engine, he’d begun teaching Wilson elementary harmony—it was an eerie thing to sing chords, Wilson thought—and started singing traditional Pallatian Newfy songs with him.
The real surprise was “Boils”, a self-confessed former seminary student from the mysterious Shadow Monastery atop Mars’ Olympus Mons, and, as he called himself, an avid philosophy buff. His real name, he told them with a verifying hand over his heart, was Merton Kwembly, and he delighted in arguing about absolutely anything, interminably, taking whatever side pleased him at the moment. However he refused to say a word about what went on in the Shadow Monastery. Wilson would dearly like to have known where the brothers got their oxygen at that altitude.
“Fatty”, on the other hand, or Pimble S. Pharch, as he called himself, would need close watching. Originally a native of West America, he was unkempt, slovenly, and so grotesquely obese that he’d had to have a pair of envirosuits cut and remade into a single suit that fit him. He also had the most evil eyes Wilson had ever seen. He talked slowly, deliberately, provocatively, slitting those evil eyes to watch for the other person’s reactions to what he said, probing for any sign of weakness.
In the end, Wilson had called a conference with his three original friends aboard Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend, before they’d begun their rescue mission. Despite the urgency of what lay before them, they had to make plans and preparations. The repairs had only taken them eight hours, in all. As the work had progressed, he’d tried hard not to think about his little sister and what might be happening to her in the cold, cruel depths of interplanetary space. He tried not the think about Jasmeen, as well, for many of the same reasons and perhaps one or two more.
Most of the talk now involved what to do if any of the pirates—Fatty being the likeliest in everyone’s opinion—tried to betray them.
“Even his buddies are afraid of him,” Marko had advised Wilson. “Just keep that big particle beamer pointed at him. He’ll be a good boy.”
And that was exactly what Wilson had done, arranging his little fleet—or task force—so that the gesture didn’t look quite as threatening as it was, but in a way that Fatty would still get the message. As Marko had predicted, he’d been a good boy, at least so far.
It was a good thing. Following the big black whatever-it-was, their heading and velocity had been almost perfectly wrong for the task of intercepting the hijacked spaceliner, ninety degrees away in the inappropriate direction, headed sharply south of the plane of the ecliptic.
They’d begun by cutting material from the asteroid they were chasing to use as reaction mass, grinding it up, filling their tanks to capacity, then stowing more raw material in steel baskets on the outsides of their ships. They had not run into any diamonds—which would have jammed or damaged their grinders—and had started calling their bizarre high-velocity discovery the “unusually carbonaceous chondrite”.
Nonetheless, they marked its location and course before abandoning it and accelerating in a corrective direction, at one third of a gee, something they were all accustomed to and could tolerate. Each of them went over his ship carefully, making certain nothing was amiss, and then they added a tenth of a gee and checked their ships all over again.
They repeated this routine until they were at ten percent higher than one full gee, and the colonials among them began to have trouble breathing, let alone moving about their ships. Wilson suspected that the former Earthers were having problems, too, but wouldn’t admit it. In any case, it was also very dangerous, since a fall from the pilot’s chair to the deck, forty feet below, would almost certainly prove fatal.
Turnover, Wilson thought, was going to be interesting.
***
“Mr. Luegner?”
He stirred uncomfortably, opened his eyes, and looked up at the young man standing over him, realizing there wasn’t any way to tell if it was the same young man that he’d been dealing with, or one of the others.
Maybe they were clones. Of course Null Delta Em and organizations allied with it were opposed to cloning, or any other form of genetic manipulation. It was another of science’s excesses that threatened to artificially prolong human life, and was therefore a threat to the natural balance. But, he supposed, using technology like that to wage war against technology in general was probably a morally acceptable hypocrisy.
Probably.
“Why aren’t we accelerating?” he asked. “Are we preparing for Turnover already?” One of the reasons he’d decided to sleep most of the way was that the seats on this spacecraft faced forward, which meant that when it was underway, it was like lying on one’s back on a shelf.
In his experience, only prison transports and military troop carriers were built that way. Thank somebody there had been a urinal “relief tube” built into the left arm of his chair. The aisle between the rows of seats was built like a ladder, but he didn’t want to risk killing himself climbing up and down on the thing, even to go to the bathroom.
Another reason he’d slept was that there seemed to be something wrong with the 3DTV system. The screen on the back of the seat ahead of him worked well enough, but all it would show were reruns of the immensely popular situation comedy Happy Dog, about a politically correct family owned by its pet, rather than the other—evil—way around.
It made Luegner bilious.
He simply adored the exciting shoot-em-ups of his youth, and kept a secret collection of them carefully hidden in his home. It was just thrilling to watch legendary heroes like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and Geronimo and Osceola driving European intruders from their native land. Sadly, even that kind of violence had fallen out of style on 3DTV.
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In East America, anyway.
“We aren’t accelerating any more, sir, because we’ve arrived at our destination. We never underwent Turnover, because for the entire transit, we were catching up with the E.A.S. City of Newark, which has continued to accelerate since the moment it was taken by your operatives.”
Luegner nodded, unlatched his seatbelt, and started to get up. The young man took his arm firmly, before he could crack his head on the ceiling.
“Zero gravity, Sir,” said the young man. “Now if you’ll allow me to assist you, aft of this section, we have a change of clothing for you, more appropriate weaponry, and you’ll have ample time to look over the script that’s been provided for you while we dock with the liner.”
“Script?” Luegner shook his head, feeling a little dizzy. He’d never cared for zero gravity, although most people he knew thought it was lark—until they began throwing up. There was a cover over the aisle ladder now, and handholds on the top of every seatback. He relied on them, as much as on the young man, to keep his feet in place.
“Yes, sir. It’s the feeling of your sponsors that this operation has to conclude perfectly. The script was written by an associate of yours, using the latest Packard-Dell hypercomputer, with the aid of several dozen opinion polls and focus panels. The good ladies and gentlemen of the Solar System will hear only what they want to hear, nothing that will tend to upset them. It’s a masterpiece, if you ask me.”
They passed through the bulkhead into the boarding area where he’d seen all the media traveling gear. The containers had been rearranged now, and the equipment distributed among the gray-clad young men. Across one of the big black boxes, someone had laid out his new clothing.
Maybe they were personal valet clones. The idea was horribly attractive.
What they had chosen for him to wear was classic. It began with a pair of soft black high-top running shoes like the ones he’d worn taking firearms instruction in Mexico. He’d always liked those shoes, which looked surprisingly dressy. Maybe he could take these with him afterward. The black stockings were knee-length and woven to aid circulation.
He guessed he’d keep his underwear. None had been provided. He was always very careful to cut the tags out in case he got hit by a bus or something.
The trousers were black bush-wear, with a bewildering number and variety of pockets. For some reason, each of them had been fitted with a block of foam rubber to make it look full. Maybe some focus panel had decided that would make him appear more dangerous and sinister. The belt he recognized. It was what his firearms instructors in Mexico had worn, black nylon with a peculiar V-ring buckle. This one had a number of different pouches on it, also stuffed with blocks of foam rubber.
A black cable-knit turtleneck completed the ensemble, along with black skin-tight leather gloves, and a black Balaclava that could be worn as a watchcap, or rolled down as a traditional terrorist’s ski-mask.
Luegner changed in the head, emerging to find the gray clad young man waiting for him, an exotic and intimidating weapon in his outstretched hands. It was of black plastic and metal, with a front handgrip.
“You look good, Mr. Luegner. I especially like your shoes. Take this. It’s the latest, a cartridge arm, but a .14 caliber ultrahyper- velocity piece that does just a little over five thousand feet per second and generates just a little over a ton of kinetic energy at the muzzle.”
“Five thousand … ” Luegner accepted the weapon. “Er, thank you—I think.” As he had been trained to do, he looked for the right button and ejected the long, curved magazine from underneath the gun. “But there aren’t any bullets in this thing! What am I supposed to do with—”
“Say ‘cartridge’, Mr. Luegner, not ‘bullet’. Otherwise you sound like an idiot. You’re supposed to smile, sir, and look pretty for the camera. Just deliver your little speech. And don’t worry, you’ve got plenty of well-armed personnel around you for protection. You might as well give me that little pistol of yours. We’ll keep safe it for you until—”
“Absolutely not!” Instead, he handed the young man a block of foam rubber. “I’m supposed to be in charge of this operation. I’ve decided that I’m keeping it in one of the many pockets you have thoughtfully provided. While we’re’ at it, you can hand me one of those big knives over there.”
“Anything you say, sir,” the young man nodded, surprising Luegner with his sudden mildness. Luegner had no idea what he’d do with an edged combat weapon if he were called upon to use it, but it looked splendidly menacing, went with his outfit, and the concept of having his demand fulfilled and putting an underling back in his place was important. “I think we’d better go now, sir, if we want to stay on schedule.”
Luegner put the sling over his neck, to carry the weapon across his chest. At the young man’s suggestion, he rolled the Balaclava down to make the right impression when he took it off in front of the camera.
He attached the knife scabbard to his belt and took a breath. “I’m ready.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT: LIFEBOAT ETHICS
Edmund Burke once said. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” I would only differ with Mr. Burke by adding that those who do nothing in the face of evil cannot be good men.
Or women, for that matter. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu
“Good heavens!”
As Luegner passed from the airlock of the smaller ship he’d arrived in, to the airlock of the City of Newark, the first thing he saw, through the black balaclava bag over his head, was the body of a middle-aged man, all but decapitated by the blast of some powerful weapon.
The body had obviously been dragged here from somewhere else. It wore a suit and necktie. An empty leather shoulder holster lay between the torso and the left arm. A bloody streak on the airlock floor led from what was left of the man’s head toward the inner door of the airlock.
Luegner stumbled, and felt an urge to throw up. He was not a violent man, himself, but was employed to direct others to perform violent acts in a righteous cause. Although he knew that making history is an often messy process, he had never seen a dead body before, except on 3DTV. Why hadn’t anybody ever warned him about the smell?
Two of the young men took his elbows and helped him get past the horrific sight, and into the bowels of the hijacked spaceliner. There they summoned an elevator in the service core and escorted Luegner to the second level where he would unmask himself and read his statement. Leaving the service core, they passed one of Krystal’s heavily-armed cohorts into the elegant dining room, not quite as elegant as it had been.
Two other young men in gray had set up in that room, swiftly and violently clearing tables away from the curved outer wall and piling them in a heap, with their dirty dishes, leftover food, and soiled linen, near the double swinging doors to the kitchen. Every chair in the room had quickly followed. The men had then made everybody sit, huddled on the floor under the huge windows with their starry view. They had directed their camera so the 3DTV audience would look past Luegner, their main focus, to three hundred terrified and cowering passengers whimpering every time one of their captors made a sudden move.
That, of course, was the substance of the message.
One of the young men in gray directed Luegner to a place in the middle of the floor marked with an X made of blue gaffer’s tape. He was turned about, pulled this way and that, and generally treated like a window-dummy in a storefront until they were satisfied with the camera angle, placement, and lighting. One clipped a microphone to his jacket lapel, another made hand signals and counted backward silently from five.
Two … one … now.
“People of the Earth,” Luegner began. One of his assets was a partially eidetic memory. He’d only had to read the speech they’d written for him once to know it by heart. “My name is P.E. Luegner. I am the executive commander of Null Delta Em.” He used one hand to pull the black mask off his head, wondering what it had done to his hair. “I am s
peaking to you now from the East American Spacelines passenger vessel City of Newark, on course for Mars from the Earth/Moon system.”
The young man acting as director signaled to him to throw the bag away, not twist it between his hands. He nodded encouragingly. Luegner was glad he’d taken plenty of public speaking courses in college and no longer feared to address an audience, either in person or by media. He’d begun as one of the many who would rather have faced death. Thank heavens his fraternity at Yale had helped him overcome his fear of speaking.
Resting his gloved hands on the weapon slung across his chest, he said, “We ask for nothing. We make no demands. We have taken control of this ship to get our point across that space is too dangerous for human beings to live and work in, and that, as long as they continue to try, we of Null Delta Em will continue to make it even more dangerous.”
On cue, two of Krystal’s assistants had stepped forward abruptly and begun sweeping the muzzles of their weapons across the huddled passengers, causing many of them to cry out or try to bury their tear-stained faces among their fellow captives. Luegner gave them a few moments to quiet down before he continued.
“From now on, whenever you contemplate that cruel illusion they call progress, whenever you think of that foolishness they call space exploration and settlement, consider the fate of those you see behind me now, for they are victims of that illusion, of that foolishness. They, like so many others, thought they could defile space and other worlds as their ancestors did the Earth. Here is our message to you: there will be no more progress, there will be no more exploration or settlement. We of Null Delta Em stand in the way, and we are in control.”
Suddenly, from beside the pile of tables and chairs near the kitchen door, there came a brief flurry of motion. Luegner opened his mouth to continue speaking and stopped. He put a hand to his face. A common table knife stood quivering in his right eye socket. He pitched forward onto the floor, driving the knife the rest of the way into his brain.
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