Emile and the Dutchman

by Joel Rosenberg

  I poured a cup for myself, too. Black, of course.

  I brought the coffee to the table, set the cups down, then sat down. The Dutchman took a swig of coffee and combined it with a mouthful of black cigar smoke. I guess he liked the taste; the smell had me wishing for a Paradram.

  "Well, we've got another tough one coming," Norfeldt said.

  Both men looked up, McCaw obviously irritated at being brought back to the real world, Bucholtz smiling evenly.

  "I'll make it short," the Dutchman went on. "You can go over the reports later—I'll square it with the scout's computer—but leave the Pers records alone, Kurt; I'm tired of covering for you.

  "In any case, scoop Theta Twelve, about a year ago, dropped a nucleus around an F9." Nerfeldt didn't tell us what F9 star it was; none of us needed to know. Maybe he didn't know, either. The acceleration algorithms for both our trip out and our return would be programmed into our scout's NAV computer; we didn't need to know them, either. There are lots more demanding tasks than going point-to-point in space. It's even easier than walking and chewing gum—it's like having someone else walk and chew gum.

  "First Team went through via AlphaCee, built the Gate around the singularity on the other side, started the look, listen, and sniff.

  "They found a live one, out at about two AUs—surface will be brighter than home; the dirtball's hotter, but tolerable. Atmosphere's decent—shirtsleeve temperatures over the northern continent."

  "Damn." Buchholtz pursed his thin lips. "No armor?"

  Norfeldt bit down hard on the end of his cigar, then spat a hunk of tobacco at the nearest bulkhead. It stuck.

  "Am I telling this, or are you?" He didn't wait for an answer. "First did the pole-to-pole orbital sweep, got some good pictures. A lot of indigenous animal species; apparently one intelligent one. Erect, bipedal, vaguely amphibian. No abnormal neutrino emissions; no unusual synchrotron."

  "Radio?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "Not apparently. The star puts out a lot of RF and the dirtball's got a hot ionosphere; unlikely even the local equivalent of Marconi would think of RF as a good way to communicate. In any case, First didn't pick up on any radio. No promises, but the tech doesn't look too bad; maybe about middle, late Iron Age."

  The Dutchman shrugged. Analogies between human history and any alien history were likely to be useless. "They've got small cities, but no evidence of warfare—any kind."

  Buchholtz didn't look disappointed, which surprised me for just a moment. Then it occurred to me that he must have had faith in the Dutchman's description of the mission as a tough one.

  Norfeldt puffed at his cigar. "So, Second Team went in. We know they made contact. There was no apparent trouble, no fatalities dirtside. The scout returned to AlphaCee intact, complete with crew—who were relatively intact."

  "Relatively?" If I were an esper, I know that I would have heard Buchholtz inventorying the team's weapons.

  The Dutchman shook his head. "That's the word. Don't know much more. Under psych testing on the AlphaCee side, three of the four Second Teamers turned up . . . changed."

  "How?" I'm sure that McCaw didn't care; he was just asking out of a vague sense of obligation to participate.

  "Don't know. As soon as their escort's computer latched onto the fact that the changes were beyond normal bounds—except for the Team Leader's—the skipper of the escort opened fire. A bit too quick on the trigger; I would have liked to know more. One hell of a lot more."

  I started to speak, then changed my mind.

  "Well, Emmy? What is it?"

  "I . . . don't understand. Wouldn't the records of the psych test still be in the escort's computer?"

  "Good question." The Dutchman nodded as he rose and stretched. "Got another one?"

  "Sure." Buchholtz snorted. "How about this: Where the fuck are the records?"

  "I don't know. I wasn't given them, and I wasn't given an explanation, either. It could be that somebody's bullshitting around with classification games—they are classified high—or there's some sort of snafu. Central loses more records than they like to admit." He shrugged. "So we get to play it by ear. Fun, eh?"

  Buchholtz spread his hands. "I don't see the problem. All we have to do is blow the Gate on the other side, no? Looks like a clear Drop."

  Norfeldt pulled his chair out, swung it around, then sat down assbackward, resting his forearms on the back of the chair. "No, Kurt. We don't Drop this one, unless we absolutely have to. You don't have to know why."

  Norfeldt gave me a meaningful sideways glance. It takes tonnes of germanium, squeezed by a grabfield into a quantum black hole, to make the nucleus of a Gate, and the germanium is not recoverable; it comes out of the evaporating nucleus as random quanta, some locally, some through other singularities. "You got that, too, Emmy?"

  I didn't have any objection. I didn't want my First Assignment to end in a Drop. "Yes, sir. But, if we have to . . ."

  "Then we have to. Don't bother me with the obvious." The Dutchman paused. "One more thing. The escort ship, the one that blew up Second Team's scout?"

  Buchholtz nodded. "Magellan?"

  "Right."

  III

  Even if I live to be a hundred—unlikely, given my line of work—I'll never get used to Gate travel. Back at the Academy, they used to explain that the nausea most people feel when they fly through a Gate is purely psychosomatic. They'll point to studies showing that blindfolded psi-negs can't even tell that they have gone through a Gate.

  Which may be true, but it is nonsense. You can feed me chock-full, blindfold me and then put me in an absolute-direction trainer, then spin it like a top, and I won't even get queasy. But Gates are different. Humans weren't meant to be squeezed through to the other side of the singularity left behind when a quantum black hole evaporates.

  It's just not natural.

  Now, it's not that I'm afraid of collision. While it's theoretically possible that one ship entering the Gate could bump into another leaving it—the three-space projection of the singularity may be infinitely thin, but the ship isn't infinitely short and it is always traveling at finite speed—a simple protocol prevents that from actually happening. Outbound vessels—relative to either of the AlphaCeeGates—use the Gates only during the first three-quarters of even-numbered hours; inbound vessels travel via Gate only during the first three-quarters of odd-numbered hours That leaves fifteen minutes cushion, which is more than enough, by a factor of about a million to one.

  So it isn't fear. Maybe there is something to the psychosomatic argument, though. Knowing that an error of less than a thousandth of a degree in angle of insertion or a couple of centimeters per second too much or too little speed means that you'll end up coming out of some other singularity than the one you aimed for—probably one inside a stellar-mass black hole, almost certainly one at an energy level that'll fry you or freeze you—Well, that isn't good for the digestion. To make a long story short, I never looked at the screen as we approached AlphaCeeGate and Magellan released us, our scout's computer putting us into precisely the right insertion flight. It's just as well that the ship flies itself through the Gate: the Dutchman's the worst pilot I've ever seen wearing wings, and I was occupied.

  "Occupied" is the nice way of putting it. The truth is that I had my eyes closed, vomiting up food that I must have swallowed in my childhood. My early childhood.

  "You about done puking your guts out?" The Dutchman's hands were confident and sure as he ripped the sickbag's tapes from my cheeks, sealed the bag and pitched it into the open oubliette, then replaced the bag with a fresh one. "C'mon, Emmy—we're through already. Take a look at a new sky."

  Cautiously, I pried an eye open, then looked at the screen in front of my couch. Stars, that was all.

  I couldn't immediately make out any familiar constellations, but that wasn't unexpected. For one thing, the stars are a lot brighter when you're looking out of a scout's monitor than they are when you're looking out of a thick atmosphere; it sort
of confuses the issue.

  For another, in the two and a half centuries we've been sending point-five-one-cee ramscoops out to seed alien suns with the makings of Gates, some of the ships have gotten far from home. A lot of the familiar stars in our sky, the ones Papa used to point out to me at home in Graz or visiting cousins in Sao Paolo—Alpha Centauri B, Beta Hydri, Delta Pavonis, Epsilon Eridani—are just about as dinky as old Sol; they only look bright close up.

  Hell, two of the three brightest, Sirius, and Arcturus, aren't all that far off. And in less than a hundred years, we'll have probes out past Canopus.

  But the sky isn't just distorted; once you leave the filter of Earth's atmosphere, better than ten times as many stars become visible.

  Which is why it's easy to feel lost when you're looking out at an alien sky. A globe with a radius of just 125 or so light-years may only be an amazingly small speck of the galaxy, but that's the wrong way to look at it. Imagine a cube one light-year on each edge; you could fit more than eight million of them inside the rough globe of our ramscoop exploration, without one cube even coming close to touching another.

  "What do you think, Emmy?" The Dutchman's wide face smiled knowingly. "Don't you feel somehow different, being under another sky, looking out at a view that no more than ten other humans have ever seen?"

  I looked him in the eye and answered honestly: "Not really."

  Norfeldt laughed, clapping a hand to my shoulder. "Like I said, krauthead, just maybe you got possibilities." He leaned over my panel and punched a strobing square button, then sat back in his couch, pulled a fresh cigar—well, a new one, anyway—out of his pocket, turned his ashtray up to a loud hiss, then lit the cigar.

  He clasped his hands over his ample belly. At least he was wearing clothes that once could have been called a uniform. "Kurt, Ari—break out the poker table. We got two weeks till we hit dirt."

  IV

  "How's it look, Emmy?" The Dutchman belted himself into his couch.

  I nodded. "Not bad, Major." I tapped at the screen. "That's the best landing zone, if you want to make contact at that village."

  "Does mean a bit of a hike if we have to go out and meet the locals."

  "Yes, sir, but it's flat enough to give me a bit of room to bring the shuttle down."

  "Oh? You need a lot of room for error?" He flicked a finger against his own wings. "Back when I was using these for a living, I didn't."

  I didn't answer that. For one thing, I didn't believe that the Dutchman had been all that hot a pilot in his youth; he didn't have the look. For another, anything I said to that effect was sure to get me gigged for insubordination.

  I pointed at the monitor. "Maybe you want to pick another village, sir? The nearest flat ground to the village you picked out has no margin for error, not unless we blast something clear."

  "Hmm." Norfeldt puffed on his cigar for a moment, then examined the stub and pitched it into the oubliette. "Shit. I guess I can use the exercise. We'll do it your way."

  Trying to ignore the way the white-and-blue bulk of the planet overfilled the screens, I ran the ballistics program again, just to be sure.

  "What are you doing, Emmy?"

  "Everything's fine, sir. The comp knows where we are, and there's nothing else in this sky; I should be able to rendezvous by radar, if necessary."

  He snorted. "Kid, if we have to depend on you to pantseat it back up here, we're in deep shit. Some problem with the computer?"

  "No, sir. It's just stan—"

  "Academy chickenshit, again. Emmy, if we ever lose the computer, we're dead. So don't waste your sweat taking precautions against it."

  "But—"

  "Shut up. How much margin do you figure to have? About a klick-second of delta-vee? At best?"

  "Almost."

  He pulled another cigar out of his pocket and stuck it in his mouth, unlit. Even the Dutchman wasn't fool enough to smoke during a reentry; a bit of ash accidentally hitting me in the eye could mean me dumping the shuttle.

  "Exactly," he said. "You're not good enough to pull a ground-to-orbit seat-of-the-pants rendezvous with just a klick-second margin. Nobody is. So don't worry about it, eh? That's why we have tell-me-a-hundred-times built into the astrogation module."

  He turned to look at McCaw and Buchholtz, who were belted in their couches. McCaw sat back, his eyes half closed, while Buchholtz stropped his Fairbairn knife intently.

  The Dutchman sighed. "Put the sticker away, Kurt; we're undocking."

  Regretfully, Buchholtz gave the blade a quick buffing, then slipped it into its sheath.

  "Quit stalling, Emmy," the Dutchman said. "According to the comp, we've got about three minutes to undock, or we have to wait an orbit." Norfeldt waved his cigar. "You're on. Let's see how hot a pilot you really are."

  You don't use a joystick for point-to-point in space; I unshipped it, locking it into its socket with a solid chick, then cracked my knuckles as I settled myself into my couch. I thumbed for some wing just for practice, and then gave each of the pedals a trial push.

  "Stand by," I said. I armed and pushed the undock button, and then pulled my harness just a bit tighter as the shuttle thunked itself loose from the orbiter.

  I used the attitude jets to kick us gently away, and waited, watching the orbiter move away. You don't want to fry your orbiter with the exhaust of the shuttle's main engines.

  Slowly, slowly, it receded.

  Enough. I turned the shuttle until the belly cameras and computer agreed with me that we were flying tail-first. You have to do that, in order for the engines to slow you enough so that you hit atmosphere. Of course, if you and the computer forget to flip it back over after the burn, you're dead.

  "Here we go." I punched program and ignite.

  It was magic time.

  There are trickier propositions than dropping the shuttle portion of a Contact Service scout down to a planet's surface, but not many. Part of it is numbers—skin alloys can only go to a classified but finite temperature; braking spars and variwings can only take so much pressure—but a lot of it is feel.

  Now, I'm not the greatest admirer of flight modules in copters and atmosphere-only fixed-wing craft—before the Academy, I spent a lot of time and money on bandit circuits—but for reentry variwings, they're an absolute necessity. At, say, Mach 25, just barely inside an atmosphere, an attitude change—usually adjustment of angle of attack—has to be done by attitude jet. The same change at Mach 2 is going to be a careful mixture of jet and elevon; at, say, four hundred klicks per hour it's going to be entirely elevon, and whatever it is will take much more elevon to do it.

  Even a flier as good as I am can't make a smooth transition between using attitude jets and elevons the way the computer does. With fly-by-wire, any adjustment—say, bringing the nose down a couple of degrees while rolling to port to go into a bank—takes exactly the same movement of stick and pedals, and, with appropriate feedback, feels the same.

  Which lets the pilot pay attention to flying. And there's plenty to do. The trick is to try to get both low enough and close enough to the landing zone so that on landing you don't have to burn the engines one second longer than necessary—the juice may come in handy for getting back up to the orbiter.

  If you miss the orbiter, no matter by how little, there's no recall, no matter how many tonnes of fuel are waiting for you up there.

  In any case, flying isn't something I have to think about. I just do it—and I'm damn good. In less than an hour, the shuttle was safely down.

  V

  The Dutchman had been lying back in his couch, deliberately irritating me by pretending to be asleep, his hands folded over his massive belly, the cigar clenched in his teeth.

  The shuttle settled down on its landing pods. I went into the powerdown sequence while Buchholtz deployed the weapons turret and manned the foamer—after a quick trip through an atmosphere, the heat shield tends to start any vegetation around the LZ burning, which can make one unpopular with the locals. Norf
eldt's eyes sagged slowly open, and he brought up his lighter and lit his cigar with one hand while he opened the biogel port with the other.

  "Anything, Kurt?"

  "Negative, Al." Buchholtz sounded disappointed as he eyed his screens, swinging the weapons turret radar and camera a full three-sixty before he set it on auto. "We've got a quiet plain. Want to go to Yellow, anyway?"

  "Shit, no."

  Planetside, we're always on alert, but doctrine allows for the Team Leader to take us to Condition Yellow—a state of high alert—pretty much at his own whim. The disadvantage of Yellow is that it gives the weapons officer more discretion to fire without consulting, and I can imagine that Norfeldt wasn't eager to take the safety off Buchholtz.

  By the way, going to Condition Blue, "Attack Expected," allows the WO to assume anything is hostile without further evidence, and as far as Buchholtz was concerned, I had the feeling that there wasn't much difference between Blue and Black; Condition Black is "Attack Initiated."

  "You getting anything, An?"

  McCaw's eyes were dreamy and distant. "Just . . . a vagueness on a vagueness, sir." He shrugged, then resumed his reverie.

  "Any feelings of hostility?"

  "No."

  I was waiting for McCaw to say more, but he didn't.

  The Dutchman spat. "Okay. We're about five klicks from the village, and if they didn't hear us come in, they're deaf. So we're going to play it conservative, and let them come to us while we wait for the biogel to spoil.

  "Buchholtz, you get the recoilless out of the skimmer and mount it topside.

  "Emmy, you and Ari launch a comm balloon; swing-mount the III-b radar on the all-purpose flange. I'll sit with the panic button.

  "Let's get to it, people."

  Deciding what to wear outdoors on a new world is easy; until developments in the biogel have had a chance to show us whether there are local airborne bugs or toxins that like human flesh, we always have to go through the full decontam protocol.