by Chris Bunch
“We’ll never learn, will we?”
• • •
Garvin got out of his lifter, started up the long steps to the Mellusin mansion, Hillcrest. He was at the door when he heard a loud crash. He opened the door, heard an obscenity, then another crash.
“Assholes!” Jasith shouted.
There was another smash.
Garvin went carefully toward the sound of the destruction. It was in the remnants of the kitchen.
Jasith Mellusin was glaring at a smashed communicator. Then she went back to the serving cabinet, selected a platter, and threw it the length of the dining room.
“Shitheads!”
She picked up a plate in each hand.
“Uh … I’m home, dear,” Garvin said.
She looked at him angrily, threw both plates at the wall.
“Sons of bitches!”
“Since you’re talking plural,” Garvin said, “I can hope you’re not sonsabitchin’ me.”
“Not you!”
“Then can I kiss you?”
Jasith pursed lips. Garvin strode through the ruins of most of their dinner service, kissed her. After a bit, they broke apart.
“That’s a little better,” Jasith admitted. “Not that it makes me want to stop cursing.”
Garvin lifted an eyebrow.
“My goddamned Board of Directors, my twice-goddamned stockholders, my three-times-screwed executives!”
“Pretty comprehensive list.”
“Don’t stay so calm, Garvin! They just told me I can’t go with you!”
“But … you’re Mellusin Mining, I mean, the only one,” he said bewilderedly. “You can do what you want, can’t you?”
“No,” she said, starting to steam once again. “Not if it affects the price of the stock, or the confidence of the stockholders if their chief executive happens to be out-system, maybe even in danger and God forbid I go and get killed. The entire goddamned board went and voted they’d resign if I go out with you. Said I didn’t have any regard for my own company if I’d go do something dangerous that I didn’t have to, that was the job of proper soldiers, not immature little girls like they seem to think I still am!
“Fughpigs!”
A very large crystal dessert tray Garvin had rather liked skimmed across the room and disintegrated in rainbow shards.
“Oh,” Garvin said.
“You want to throw something?”
“Uh … no.”
She gave him a suspicious look.
“Aren’t you sorry I’m not going?”
“Of course, sure I am,” Garvin said hastily. “So don’t go and lob anything my way. Honest, Jasith.”
“Dammit, dammit, dammit,” she said, and started crying.
Garvin, cautiously, put his arms around her again.
“Why don’t they ever let me have any fun?” Jasith said into the hollow of his shoulder.
“I always thought,” Garvin said, “the really rich were free.”
“Nobody’s free, dammit,” Jasith said. “Except maybe the dead.”
• • •
“What do you think?” Maev said, raising her voice to a singsong, “Candy, lifts, chewies, balloons, candy, lifts, chewies, balloons, a prize in every box.”
“I think,” Njangu said, eyeing her very scanty costume, “nobody’s gonna be looking at your goodies. At least not the ones in that tray.”
“Sure they will,” Maev said. “Little children love me.”
“Then what’s this about selling lifts?”
“Nothing addictive,” Maev said. “A mild mood-enhancer. With about an eight hundred percent profit.
“And if they are ogling m’ boobs, that’s fine, too. They’ll never notice …”
And her hand moved under the tray slung around her neck, came out with a smallish, large-barreled projectile weapon.
“… this. Guaranteed I can put two of these slugs between somebody’s eyes at fifteen meters. For less lethal response …”
Again, her hand went under the tray, came out with a squat cylinder.
“… blindspray. Give you convulsions for half an hour, vomiting for an hour, can’t see squat for two hours.”
“That’s if somebody tries to get friendly?”
“Other than you,” Maev said. “Or somebody really, really rich.” She took off her tray.
“Now, I need a drink. This security operation is sweaty work.”
“Already made for you, m’love,” Njangu said. “Over on the sideboard.”
It wasn’t financially convenient, but Njangu had kept the lease on the apartment across the bay from Camp Mahan, on the outskirts of D-Cumbre’s capital of Leggett, as a convenient way of getting away from uniforms when the military made him want to howl at the moons.
“Pity about poor Jasith,” Maev said.
“What? I haven’t heard squat.”
Maev told him about the near revolt by the officers of Mellusin Mining.
“So she’s out, sulking like a fiend.”
“Uh-oh,” Njangu said inadvertently, thinking of Darod Montagna.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Njangu said hastily.
“You’re holding back.”
“I surely am.”
• • •
“How terribly interesting,” Darod Montagna said. “Poor Miss Mellusin, forced to stay home and count all her money and not go play with us.”
“Dammit,” Monique Lir told her XO, “I hope you’re going to be a good girl.”
“I’m going to be a very good girl,” Darod said in her most sultry voice. “I’m going to be the best girl that man’s ever seen.”
“Uh-oh,” Lir said.
• • •
Finally Stage One — planning; Stage Two — logistics and personnel; and Stage Three, operations, were finished. There were almost 150 men and women picked, all volunteers, including a few civilians who’d managed to penetrate the fairly tight security screen Dant Angara had imposed after all.
They filed into Big Bertha and found their assigned compartments. The old soldiers made old jokes that hadn’t been that funny the first time around, the new women and men wondered why they had tight lumps in their guts instead of pride.
Garvin Jaansma kissed Jasith Mellusin.
“You better come back,” she said fiercely, then looked away.
“I’ll go with what she said,” Angara said. “But with an addition. Bring me back something, Garvin.” There was a flash of desperation in his eyes. “Dammit, we can’t keep on as we have, not knowing anything!”
“I’ll come back,” Garvin promised. “With the hot skinny, boss.”
He saluted Angara, kissed Jasith again, and went up Big Bertha’s ramp. It slid shut, and a speaker blatted: “All personnel. All personnel on ramps. Clear ramps for takeoff. Clear ramps for takeoff. Three minute warning. Clear ramps.”
“Come on,” Angara said, taking Jasith’s arm.
She followed him back into the terminal, went to a window.
The ground trembled, and Big Bertha’s antigravs lifted her clear of the ground. Her secondary drive cut in, and the behemoth crawled upward, became graceful, and vanished into the stratosphere and space.
Jasith stood there, watching emptiness for a long time.
CHAPTER
4
N-space
Njangu and Garvin had given themselves more tactical options than just hiding in plain sight if — or, more realistically, when — problems developed.
“I am getting very damned tired of being ambushed every time we come out of hyperspace,” Yoshitaro had said, looking pointedly at the three aksai pilots. “Which is why I’m going to use your young asses as bait … or anyway, some kind of warning system. I just hope you won’t slow down and get dead bringing us the word.”
The aksai was the prime fighting ship of the Musth during the war with Cumbre. Now, with peace looming on all sides and trade flourishing with Man, the aksai were being built for the Force, somewhat modified for
human pilotage. It was a flying wing, C-shaped, about twenty-five meters from horn to horn, with one, two, or three fighting compartments, capsules, mounted on the concave forward edge of the wing, weapons either encapsulated or just hung below the wing. It was impossibly fast and, as Ben Dill said, “harder to fly than a whore on roller skates.”
Jacqueline Boursier, the self-described “shit-hot pilot,” tried to put together a fund to hire an athletic prostitute, buy some old-fashioned roller skates, and lock Ben Dill in a gymnasium with her to see what happened. She had no takers.
In-atmosphere, the aksai would stall handily and snaproll into the ground if flying speed wasn’t kept up, and transitioning between the standard antigravity lift system to secondary and then stardrives took a most delicate touch.
Out-atmosphere, its instant acceleration and speed were as likely to stuff its pilot into something unpleasantly solid as punt her to the fringes of the system before reaction time could take over.
But those who could fly the ships invariably fell in love with them. They were possibly the most acrobatic craft ever built, with the possible exception of Dawn-age propeller ships.
The procedure Garvin and Njangu had come up with to keep from being mousetrapped was complicatedly simple: Big Bertha would set a hyperspace jump to the desired navigational point. However, the navigational instruments were set with a pause feature, rather than the usual, automatic reemergence into N-space.
Hanging in something beyond nothingness, the mother ship would launch an aksai. The aksai would enter real space and make a preliminary recon for bad guys, surprises, or flower-tossing maidens. It would pass the word back to Big Bertha, which could take appropriate measures.
If the system was hostile, the ship would wait as long as she could for the aksai to rejoin her. If the mother ship had to flee, the aksai was to make a hyperspace jump, to a predetermined nav point, and Mayday in all directions, hoping for rescue before the air ran out.
But this was an option none of the three aksai pilots believed would ever happen.
After all, they were all shit-hot, not just Boursier …
• • •
The inship annunciator burped sedately. The synth-voice Garvin hadn’t gotten around to replacing, which, unfortunately, ‘cast into all compartments, announced “Aksai section … aksai section … ready pilot, report to the bridge.”
The man, woman, and alien cut for high card, and Alikhan obeyed the summons, round ears cocked in excitement.
The bridge of Big Bertha was as unusual as the rest of the bulbous starship: a self-contained pod at the “top” of the cargo/passenger spaces, with the forward edge, monitors looking like ports, protruding from the hull a bit. Flanking the large bridge area were communication and navigation compartments and, at the rear of the pod, a secondary command center with observation ports looking “down” into the hull’s huge cargo spaces.
It would make, Garvin thought, a dandy place for a circus master to crack the whip from. Or possibly, if they kicked out a few of the windows, some sort of high-wire or other flier act.
Alikhan got his briefing, and went along a sealed catwalk through an airlock to the “top” of the ship, where three of the state-of-the-ten-year-old-art Nana boats and the four aksai hung, like so many bats in a huge barn.
He wedged himself rear legs first into the aksai’s pod on his belly, then closed the clear canopy. He turned power on, checked controls, touched sensors, read the displays on his canopy as the main and secondary drives came alive, then announced he was ready to launch.
“This is Command,” Garvin told him. “Your coordinates and flight pattern have been fed into your computer. Launch at will.”
A hatch above him slid back, and a steel arm lifted the aksai clear of Big Bertha. Alikhan watched readouts blink on his canopy, trying to convince himself that the blur of N-space around him wasn’t vaguely nauseating, certainly not for a combat-experienced Musth.
Gravity spun, vanished, and he was beyond the ship’s grav field. Alikhan considered what Garvin had told him about the system he was to enter — three worlds, settled over two hundred E-years ago, no data on government, military, peacefulness. It’d been chosen for the first system to enter because it was distant from the nav points “close” to Larix and Kura, and hence, Garvin assumed, hadn’t been slandered by Redruth, and, hopefully, wouldn’t be that hostile to an intruder.
Alikhan touched a sensor, and the aksai dropped out of hyperspace, the swirl around him becoming stars and not-too-distant planets. He went at full drive toward the second planet, reportedly the first colonized, searching all common bands for ‘casts.
Within an E-hour, he sent a com back into hyperspace to Big Bertha: no hostiles. Safe to enter. Request assistance, nonemergency.
The big ship obeyed, and the two patrol craft, Chaka in command of the flight, were launched, shot toward the homing signal on Alikhan’s aksai. Behind them came Big Bertha.
Dill was riding shotgun on one of the patrol ships.
“What’s the problem, little friend?” he asked on a standard voice channel as the two ships closed.
“Your data, to use a phrase of yours, sucketh goats, whatever a goat is.”
A louder signal boomed from Big Bertha: “Scout One, this is Command. Give details. Over.” Garvin didn’t sound thrilled at the relaxed com procedure.
“Command, Scout One,” Alikhan ‘cast. “Details are: There is nothing here, and it appears there never was. No cities, no buildings, no humans. Over.”
And so it was. None of the three planets that were supposedly colonized, all within the habitability range, showed any sign of settlement or abandonment.
“This makes no goddamned sense,” Njangu snarled. “Howinhell could the Confederation punt some people out with their little shovels and picks and tents … I assume they did that, unless this whole goddamned scheme was some bureaucrat’s fiddle to steal something large … and then not check on them, not follow up, not send the occasional goddamned checkup team … for two hundred goddamned years?”
Garvin shook his head.
“It makes me goddamned wonder,” Njangu raved on, “just how much of our goddamned Empire was a goddamned phony. Maybe the whole goddamned thing was some kind of a shadow play.”
“That makes little sense,” Danfin Froude said mildly.
“Then give me some explanation that does. Goddamit!”
Froude held his palms up, helplessly.
“ ‘Kay,” Garvin decided. “Forget it. We’ll pull the recon elements back and try again.
“I don’t like this,” he finished. “I don’t like things that don’t have explanations.”
Froude looked at him.
“In another life, you could have been a scientist.”
“The hell,” Garvin said. “In another life, I’m going to be a frigging boulder on a beach somewhere, with nothing to do but watch pretty naked women and slowly turn into sand.
“Get ready for another jump.”
• • •
Garvin had made one major break with naval tradition. The Big Bertha had a club, but it was for all ranks, not just officers. Njangu had agreed with this, since both of them found a noncommissioned officers’ club far livelier than anything for upper ranks.
As to the old military policy that these restrictions gave rankers a place to relax and discuss their problems without being around the enlisted sorts, Garvin’s answer was short and sweet: “Let those who want to play footsie or whine do it in their own compartments.”
He’d found a corner with a beer, and was still wondering about that colony that evidently never had been, when he saw Darod Montagna, mug in hand.
“Greetings, boss,” she said. “Are you in deep thought, or can I join you?”
“Grab a chair,” Garvin said. “Njangu should be here in a mo, so obviously it’s not deep.”
She sat, sipped at her beer.
“Thanks for letting me go on this little detail.”
�
�So far, no thanks … or blame … needed,” he said.
They sat in comfortable silence for a few minutes. Garvin realized he didn’t feel any particular need to be entertaining or even companionable, somewhat like the peacefulness he felt around Njangu.
He saw his XO enter the rather crowded compartment, make his way toward them.
“I guess I better scoot,” Darod said. “Deep, dark secrets and all that.”
She got up, just as Big Bertha twitched a little, making another jump, and fell into his lap.
“Bastard!” she swore, picking herself up. “I’ll never get used to going out of N-space.”
Garvin just smiled, thinking how she felt rather nice against him.
“Who does?” Njangu said, taking her seat. “And I’m gonna rip a strip off our damned watch officer, who’s supposed to notify us before we hippety-hop in or out of the wild black yonder out yonder.”
“Oh … maybe I should have said something,” Montagna said. “The PA system’s down … one of the techs is trying to get rid of that old lady in the system.”
As she spoke, the overhead speaker crackled into life: “Time to next jump … three ship-hours.” It was still the weird synthesized voice they were all growing to hate.
“I love technology,” Njangu said. “Let’s take an ax to the system and put in voice tubes like the first starships had. Or uniformed messengers. Or signal flags.”
“Good night, sirs,” Darod said, and left. Njangu watched her leave.
“Not hard on the eyes at all,” he said.
“Not at all,” Garvin said, pretending casual notice.
“Did she have anything in particular to talk about … being nosy?”
“Other’n what a nosy sort you are,” Garvin said, “nothing much.”
“Careful, Garvin,” Njangu said.
“Careful about what?”
Njangu waited a moment. “Careful that you don’t spill your beer in your lap. Sir.”
• • •
“Mother Mary on a bender,” Garvin said softly, staring into the screen.
“Yeh,” Njangu said. “Evidently somebody didn’t have any qualms about going nuke.”
The planet below it, like the twin moons that were supposed to be fortified, was nothing but desolation. A counter roared radioactivity at them.
