The Middle of Nowhere

by David Gerrold

  “The boat is back in hyperstate! It’s chasing!”

  The main display came back on then, so did the astrogation table. Two blips racing across hyperstate. One was large, the other was larger; its signature was spiked and blurry. Korie pulled himself over the railing and down onto the Ops deck. “Watch,” he said. “They’re going to drop out of hyperstate for ten seconds, just long enough to launch a torpedo of their own—there they go.” One of the blips on the screen disappeared. Korie counted out loud. “Ten . . . nine... eight... seven . . . six . . .” The blip reappeared.

  “They launch fast,” said Brik.

  “They’re very good,” Tor agreed. “I wish we could match that.”

  “I promise you, one day we will,” Korie said.

  “We can’t see the torpedoes,” said Tor. “We don’t have the resolution.”

  “Wait . . . there you go. The starboat’s evading and . . .” The larger blip, the weird one, disappeared from the screen. “They got it. Yes!” They watched for a moment as the Morthan bogey retreated across the hyperstate horizon. Its signature slowly faded and became more and more indistinct, until at last it vanished in the distance of light years.

  “They’re running home with a confirmed kill on a nonexistent Stardock and a juggernaut-class vessel that we don’t know how to build yet. And we’re home free!” Korie exulted.

  “Except for the imp,” Tor reminded him.

  “No,” said Brik. He was listening to something on his headset. “We found it.”

  The Imp

  “Gravity?” asked Tor. “Power?”

  “Not yet,” said Korie. “Who knows what was armed when power went off. Everybody hold present position.”

  “This way,” said Brik, already pushing himself out of his chair. Korie followed. The two swam aftward, down the upper corridor, out through the engine room, down to the machine shop below the containment, and then out through the access to the inner hull—the farm was devastated. He’d expected it. He’d mourn the loss later. There were pieces of dead greenery floating everywhere; it was like swimming through a glimmery yellow snowstorm.

  Their helmet lamps made everything flash and sparkle. They could barely see their way. They swam slowly aft, finding their way around the curve of the inner bottle until they came to a place behind the signal scrubbers, behind the place where Chief Leen had stashed his illicit kegs of moonshine, where six crew members floated in a silent circle. They parted as the chief of security and strategic operations and the acting captain swam up.

  There it was. Illuminated by a single work light. Attached to a strut. In a transparent plastic sac. The imp. Huddled in a fetal position. Dead. Its skin had already gone blue. It looked like a baby. A baby in a tank. Waiting to be born. Korie remembered... his own son. It looked so fragile, so delicate.

  He started to approach for a closer look, but Brik pulled him back. “No. Don’t get near it.” Brik touched helmets to the nearest crewmember and ordered them all away. Reluctantly, they began to move back. They disappeared into the gloom of the inner hull.

  Brik pulled himself around to look at the thing from as many different sides as he could see it.

  “It looks so innocent,” said Korie.

  Brik snorted.

  “Well, it’s dead now.”

  Brik hesitated.

  Korie caught it. “What?” he asked sharply.

  Brik didn’t answer.

  “You’re too suspicious,” Korie said. “Did it ever occur to you there’s such a thing as being too paranoid?”

  “No,” said Brik, innocently. “Should it?”

  Before Korie could answer, his communicator beeped. “Yes?”

  It was Cappy. “We found the imp, sir. Forward.”

  “Excuse me? Say again?”

  “We found the imp. Starboard bow. Section 2, fifteen degrees. In an Okuda tube. It’s dead. It was caught without protection.”

  “I’ll be there shortly. Korie out.” Korie looked to Brik sharply. “There were two?”

  “At least.”

  “At least?”

  The big Morthan floated back down to Korie and faced him directly. “When I went out on the hull—I didn’t tell you this—part of the reason was to see how much I could carry inside my harness. I could have carried one live imp, or two eggs in an incubator. I needed to know everything that Cinnabar was capable of. We now know that he had two eggs with him when he started. At least two. They were for the Burke. But he didn’t need to use them, so he never warmed them up. When he came across to the Star Wolf, he brought the eggs with him. I don’t think he intended to warm them up here either. I said before, these things are supposed to be pretty good eating. I think he stashed them somewhere, intending to come back later. He didn’t come back. The eggs warmed up by themselves. A fail-deadly.”

  Korie thought about that. “An imp is born knowing how to sabotage a starship?”

  “When we find the eggshells, we’ll also find an incubation frame; which programs the imp while it’s still in its shell. And we have to find that frame; it’s probably booby-trapped too, but it’ll tell us how many there were. I was hoping we’d find it with one or the other of the imps, but . . . we didn’t.”

  Korie took a breath. “How many imps are we looking for, Brik? One? Two? A dozen?”

  “Not that many,” Brik said calmly. “Not a dozen. I estimate that Cinnabar could have carried as many as six eggs, if he’d had the packing; but I don’t think he would have wanted to take the risk. Imps are monosexual. And they mate ferociously. I expect that if we scan the two dead imps we’ll find they’re both carrying eggs. I doubt that any eggs have been laid yet, though. If there are other imps still alive, however, we have only a few more days before they start hiding their eggs all over the ship. And the offspring won’t be programmed, they’ll be feral. You don’t want to know what trouble feral imps can be. That’s why even Morthans handle imps carefully.”

  A new thought clawed its way to the surface of his consciousness, and it wasn’t one he liked thinking about. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  Brik shook his head. “You still believe it is possible to be too paranoid. Besides, I thought we had a chance against one imp. Against more than one... I wasn’t sure.”

  “You lied to me!”

  “No I didn’t. You never asked.”

  “You misled me then.”

  “All right. Yes.”

  “I don’t like that, Mr. Brik.” Korie felt the anger rushing to his face. At the same time, he couldn’t help but feel a certain sense of irony at the situation.

  “I didn’t think you would.”

  “But you’d do it again if you thought it would make a difference, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And even if I order you not to do it again . . .”

  “I would prefer that you not give that order.”

  “So you wouldn’t have to disobey it, right?”

  Brik didn’t answer.

  “I see,” Korie said. “You realize we’re on very dangerous ground here.”

  “Yes, Mr. Korie. It is the same ground you are standing on with the vice admiral.”

  Korie opened his mouth to speak. Then shut it again. He took a breath. Then another. Then a third. Brik was right.

  “We’ll have to stay depressurized for a few days more,” Brik said. “I’ll use nanos to search for eggs and imps. If it will reassure you any, I believe that our various detox procedures kept the imps seriously off balance. I expect that the only imps we find are going to be dead, and that we are unlikely to find any egg clusters. This imp still looks immature and the others are probably equally so. But we will need a robot to remove the bodies.”

  “We haven’t got one.”

  “Homer-Nine,” said Brik.

  “We traded it.”

  Brik grunted. “No, we didn’t. It went into failure mode. The Houston wouldn’t take it.”

  “Oh, yes. Now I remember.” Korie though
t for a bit. “Would you know anything about that failure, Mr. Brik?”

  “I can only put it to human error.”

  “I see. You thought we might need a robot, did you?”

  “There is a certain ironic convenience to the situation,” Brik admitted.

  Korie exhaled in exasperation. “You deceived me again, didn’t you?”

  Brik didn’t answer.

  “Right. I didn’t ask. Okay, okay. Let’s do it. Let’s take a look at the other one, and then I want you to get these things out of here.” He headed forward.

  The Stars

  Three days later, Brik came to Korie on the Bridge. “Homer-Nine is at the forward airlock.”

  “Display forward,” Korie ordered.

  Brik touched a control on the work station in front of him. The image came up showing a six-armed robot, holding onto handholds with two of its arms. The other four were carrying containments with imps inside.

  Korie looked to Brik. “You sure about this? I really hate to lose the robot.”

  Brik said, “I’m sure.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Brik gave an order. Still carrying its deadly cargo, the robot pushed itself away from the starship. They watched as it tumbled slowly in the glare of the ship’s spotlights. It dwindled into the distance.

  “Okay,” said Korie.

  Brik gave another order.

  In the middle of the screen, something flashed soundlessly.

  “Tell me that’s the last of it,” Korie said.

  “That’s the last of it,” Brik replied.

  Korie glanced over at him. “An actual declarative sentence. My goodness.”

  “Sarcasm is wasted on me,” said Brik.

  “At least you recognize sarcasm,” Korie started to say, then stopped himself. “Sorry. I’m in a very bad mood. All right—to the cargo deck. Everybody.”

  This ceremony was much more somber.

  A single draped body lay on a gurney. Lambda. Crewman Armstrong and all of the surviving Quillas stood by dispassionately. Korie wondered what the Quillas were feeling. How did a massmind feel when it lost part of itself? He wondered what kind of recovery therapy would be needed for the cluster. He made a mental note to talk it over with Williger.

  Korie had never presided at a funeral before. He’d been to enough of them. He’d never been the ranking officer. He didn’t look forward to this. He opened the book and began reading. There were words here about God. He didn’t trust God. Not anymore. Not since God had taken his family away.

  He read the words and he felt like a hypocrite as he read. What he really wanted to say was, God doesn’t keep her word. God gives with one hand and takes with the other. God doesn’t deserve our faith. But he didn’t.

  Because he knew that the others still believed. Some of them, anyway. And he wasn’t going to take that away from them. They’d find out soon enough. Or not at all. It didn’t matter.

  They worked hard, they fought hard, they survived, that was victory enough.

  But acknowledgment? Reward?

  Not in this lifetime. Not the way things were headed.

  Korie finished reading. He knew his performance had been mechanical. He felt regret about that. The crew deserved the best he could give them. Maybe God wouldn’t give them her best, but he would. The hell with God. He closed the book and looked up at the others. They were grim-faced, stony. He had no idea what they were feeling. Perhaps they were expecting him to say more...?

  He took a breath.

  “We’ve lost too many friends since this war started,” he said. “And we’re going to lose too many more before it’s over. It’s very likely that... most of us here will end up as names on a wall somewhere. I know that I should offer you all some solace, some hope, some words of healing. I’m sorry, but I can’t do that. Not today. The best I can offer you today is my anger.

  “But the good news is that our anger has brought us this far. We’ve survived to fight another day. So let’s see how much farther our anger will take us. Let’s see how much we can hurt them for every death they’ve given us. It isn’t enough to make up for our losses, but it’s something useful we can do with the pain they’ve given us. We can give it back.”

  He nodded to Chief Leen.

  Lambda’s body rolled into the airlock. The airlock hatch popped shut behind it. A moment later, the music began. A fanfare, something Hodel had picked out. He’d have to ask him later what the name of it was.

  Good Friends

  Brik found Bach in the gym, an area of the inner hull just forward of the orchards. Bach was running vigorously on the treadmill when Brik came in. She saw him and nodded. Brik waited patiently. After a moment, Bach slowed her pace, first to a trot, then to a walk; a moment later, she stepped off the treadmill, grabbed a towel and wiped the sweat from her forehead. She looked up—and up—at Brik. Her eyes shone, her face was flushed, but Brik couldn’t tell if it was the exercise or anything else.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Better,” she said.

  Brik considered his next words for a long moment. “I regret that you were hurt.”

  “I wasn’t hurt,” she said. “Well, that’s not quite true. I was . . .” She shrugged and smiled, both at the same time, a wistful gesture. “I was exhausted.”

  “Yes,” Brik agreed.

  “It was a good exhaustion,” she acknowledged.

  “Dr. Williger said there was considerable strain on your heart.”

  “She also said there was no permanent damage. I just need a few days rest and exercise to work out the stiffness, that’s all.” She began toweling her hair. She added, “I’m not sorry we did it.”

  “Nor am I,” said Brik.

  “Did you, um . . . find out what you wanted to find out?”

  “I think so,” the big Morthan admitted.

  “And?”

  “And . . . I think I understand why this is such a difficult subject for humans. It is hard even for me to discuss it.”

  “Yes. Me too.”

  “Yes, you’re a human.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  Brik took a breath. “I don’t think we should try this again.”

  Bach did not react. Or perhaps she had been expecting him to say something like this. She continued to meet his steely gaze. “Why not?” There was only curiosity in her question, no anger.

  “I don’t think it would be a good idea, that’s all. I don’t want to cause you any further hurt.”

  “I wasn’t hurt.”

  “I don’t want to cause you any further embarrassment.”

  “I wasn’t embarrassed,” she said.

  “And . . .” added Brik, “I am concerned that my integrity as a Morthan officer could be compromised.”

  “Ah,” said Bach. “Yes. There is that. Your integrity. As a Morthan officer. Yes.” She nodded to herself. “Yes, of course.”

  “It’s not that I didn’t like the feeling,” Brik admitted quietly, “but it has had an unpleasant effect on the rest of my mental processes.”

  “Yes,” said Bach. “I understand. I understand completely.”

  “Good,” said Brik, still not getting it. “Then we can continue on as . . . just good friends.”

  “No,” said Bach. “No, we cannot. We cannot just be good friends!” She whirled on him, poking him ferociously in the chest. “And I’ll tell you why, you flaming Morthan idiot—because you just said to me that I’m second best. That I’m not good enough. That your stupid Morthan stability is more important to you. That sex with me makes you so uncomfortable that you’d rather pretend it didn’t happen. And that’s not what I felt at all. What I felt was exhilarating and wonderful and joyous and passionate and exquisite. And what you’re doing now is telling me it can be dismissed, discarded, put away like an exercise box. And if you don’t understand what a devastating insult that is, then fuck you and the horse you rode in on. I’m applying for a transfer. And maybe sexual rechanneling as well. Stolchak
was right. I should have been a lesbian! Men! Morthans! You’re all alike! Assholes!” She flung the towel at him and headed for the showers. “Good friends! I don’t want any more friends! I want a lover! You can kiss my big black ass goodbye, because that’s all the kissing you’re ever going to get!”

  Brik thought about going after her. He even took two steps in her direction.

  But then he stopped himself.

  He’d thought this decision out very carefully. Very very carefully. He’d been very logical about the whole thing. This was the only way.

  Bach was the one who was acting illogically. Later when she calmed down, when she thought about it logically too, she’d see the logic of it. She’d see that he was right. He was only being logical.

  He tossed the towel in a bin and left the gymnasium.

  Vice Admiral O’Hara

  “All right, Jon,” said Admiral O’Hara. “Sit down.” She pointed. Korie sat.

  She leaned back in her chair, regarding him with a renewed respect. She nodded, grudgingly. “You made your point.”

  She opened her desk drawer, hesitated for a moment, then withdrew Korie’s bars. She slid them across the dark gray surface of her desk. “Here,” she said.

  Korie made no move to pick them up. They still weren’t the stars he’d earned. He looked to the admiral questioningly.

  She returned his gaze dispassionately. “Go ahead, Jon. Put them on.”

  “They aren’t the stars I’ve earned.”

  “No, they aren’t.”

  “May I ask why I’m not being promoted? I think I’m entitled to an explanation.”

  Vice Admiral O’Hara nodded. “Actually, no. The decision-making process of the Admiralty is confidential.”

  “I see,” said Korie. He began to rise—

  “But I will tell you, it’s not for the reasons you think. Sit down, Jon.”

  He lowered himself back into the chair. And waited.

  “You proved your point,” the admiral repeated. “It was a proud thing to do. Admirable. Heroic.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “But . . . to do that, you had to disobey the orders of this office. And that,” the admiral said, “is intolerable. I can’t have captains in the Fleet who don’t follow instructions. Fleet command needs to know that it can depend upon its captains. We cannot depend on you the same way we can depend on our other shipmasters. We can depend on you only to have a strong stubborn will of your own. So far, you’ve been lucky.”