Hunted lop-4

by James Alan Gardner

  Three days later, Willow reached the Celestia system. I’d spent most of that time wandering around the ship, hoping I’d find something useful to do. It wasn’t much fun walking through the lounge and the hold, or the bridge either, where there were three more corpses: people who’d stayed on duty instead of going to the party. But I went through every room anyway, because I was the captain. I even asked the ship-soul if there were logs I should be keeping, or paperwork or something. But the computers handled stuff like that automatically, so they didn’t need me getting in the way. A few times I checked over computer files, just to see if there was stuff I ought to be taking care of. Mission stuff… you know. But every database I tried to look at, records and logs and all, turned out to be passworded or encrypted or just plain inaccessible to lowly Explorers Second Class, even if they’d become acting captain. Maybe that was normal; keeping everything locked away just on general principles. Then again, maybe Willow had been doing something extra-specially secret, and outsiders like me were supposed to mind our own business.

  I found out there was only one thing I absolutely had to do as captain of Willow. Apparently, captains are supposed to get at least half an hour of exercise every day, to keep themselves fit for command. So my only mandatory duty was going down to the gym when the ship-soul told me, and working up a sweat.

  Weights. Jogging. Bagwork. It made me laugh, that my one compulsory chore was the only thing I’d ever been good at. I went to the gym twice a day and stayed a lot longer than just half an hour — thinking maybe I’d turn out to be captain material after all.

  I made a point of being on the bridge as we drew near Celestia. Not that I actually sat in the captain’s command chair — there was a sweet-looking red-haired woman slumped dead in it, and I didn’t want to disturb her. (She seemed too young to be officer of the watch. Nineteen or twenty, tops. All the senior officers must have wanted to go to the party, so they’d given the bridge to the most junior lieutenant-cadet on board. Poor kid: I wondered what she could have done that was so bad the League needed to kill her.)

  "Starbase Iris is hailing us," the ship-soul announced.

  "Okay," I said. My breath came out steamy — I’d asked for the bridge to be cooled like the lounge so the bodies didn’t go bad. "Do I just talk or what?"

  "Connecting now."

  The vidscreen on the command chair lit up with a young man who started to say, "Greetings, Willow, this is—" Then he broke off and gawped at his own screen, staring at the face of the dead woman in the chair.

  I should have thought of that. Now I’d gone and scared the poor boy on the other end of the line.

  "Sorry," I said, as I nudged the woman aside and pushed my own head in front of the vidscrfeen. "I didn’t mean to startle you," I told the boy, "but we’ve got a problem up here."

  "Is she…" The boy stopped himself, gave his head a shake, and went all professional. "State your problem, Willow."

  I told him about everybody being dead. Then I told the same thing to his commanding officer. Then I told the base’s Commander of Security. After that I spoke to a doctor who kept talking like the people on Willow had died of a disease. To me that was just plain foolish — if several dozen humans and a hive-queen die in the same second while crossing the line, you don’t need to be a genius to figure out why. But next thing I knew, everyone at the base had latched onto the disease idea, and they told me I’d have to stay quarantined where I was till the Admiralty could fly in an Outbreak Team. Whenever I tried to point out what really happened, the base personnel cut me off, saying maybe I was delirious with the plague myself.

  "No," I told a Security captain, "I was delirious for a while but now I’m better."

  "What do you mean you were delirious?" she snapped in surprise. Then suddenly, she said, "Oh. Right. You were delirious. Thank you, Explorer York, that confirms our disease hypothesis. Thank you." She gave me a relieved smile before she cut the connection.

  After chewing my knuckle a bit, I figured out why she’d acted that way. People at the base wanted to pretend there’d been an outbreak, because otherwise they’d have to admit the truth: a whole navy ship had done something so horribly bad, the League decided to execute everybody. And when I’d talked about getting delirious myself, the Security captain thought I was helpfully playing along.

  It was so strange. Something important had happened, and the whole starbase staff just wanted to hide their heads in the sand.

  I wasn’t too happy being part of the lie, but Samantha used to tell me, "If everyone else is denying an obvious truth, you go along with them, Edward, okay? Because the Admiralty sometimes plays games, and if you spoil the game, they’ll be mad at you."

  I didn’t want anyone mad at me. Even if this particular game seemed stupid. And dishonest. And cowardly.

  Maybe it all made sense if you had the big picture.

  While I waited for the Outbreak Team to arrive from some other starbase, I used the captain’s vidscreen to watch outside the ship. I didn’t see much — nothing came or went at Starbase Iris, not even in-system shuttles. Once I noticed a merchant vessel passing within range of Willow’s hull cameras, but it didn’t come very close; it was aiming for the planet Celestia, a light-minute nearer the local sun.

  After two more days of waiting, another navy ship popped into view with that gorgeous FTL effect: the ship appears without warning and then you see a streak trail out behind it. That’s light from where the ship used to be, catching up with where the ship is.

  Through a nearby speaker, my ship-soul announced, "Heavy cruiser Jacaranda of the Outward Fleet."

  "Is it hailing us?" I asked.

  "No. It’s communicating privately with the starbase."

  Jacaranda chatted with Starbase Iris for half an hour… and according to my ship-soul, they were using higher-than-normal levels of encryption to keep anyone from eavesdropping. I wondered if they were worried about being overheard by civilians on Celestia, or if they were just keeping secrets from me. Maybe both.

  So I sat and stewed, staring at the Jacaranda as it floated in the blackness. The ship was shaped like a long baton, with a big round knob on the front end; that was where they kept the Sperm-tail generator. The tail itself rippled all milky around the ship’s hull and far back into space until it dwindled away to nothing. Mostly the free end of the tail just drifted… but every now and then it gave a flick, the way a fish in a quiet river sometimes comes awake for a second to dart at something too small to see.

  My sister once told me the Sperm-field created a separate little universe around the ship, and the little universe could slide through the big outside universe faster than light, without worrying about inertial effects of acceleration. I got lost when she tried to explain how it worked. Samantha was usually pretty good at avoiding subjects that confused me, but sometimes she got extra fired-up like she was absolutely certain she could make everything clear, no matter how slow I was. "I’m a communicator, Edward," she would say. "It’s my gift. If I can communicate with alien races, I can damned well communicate with you."

  Well… sometimes it didn’t work with me; and I thought to myself, There at the end, it didn’t work with the aliens either.

  At last I got a call from Jacaranda’s captain, a woman named Prope. In all the days to come, she never let on whether that was her first or last name. Maybe she came from one of those colonies where people only have one name, because they think it sounds more dramatic.

  Prope certainly was the dramatic type. Whenever you talked to her, she always made you think she was half listening for something that was really worth her attention — like assassins sneaking up behind her back, or a Mayday from a luxury liner struck by a meteorite. Now and then she’d suddenly pause, as if she’d thought of some important point that went over the head of everybody else in the room… except she never told us what these great insights were, and after a while, I wondered if maybe she was just playacting.

  As my sister’s bodyguard, I
’d met a lot of diplomats. I’d seen tons of playacting.

  So Prope’s face appeared on my vidscreen. She was lit from only one side, which meant the left part of her face was swallowed up in deep dark shadow — the captain’s attempt at dazzling me with a dramatic first impression. As far as I knew, the only way she could get that effect was turning off the lights on one whole side of her ship’s bridge.

  "Captain Prope of the Jacaranda, calling for Acting Captain Edward York of Willow. Are you Explorer York?"

  "Yes, Captain." I couldn’t help noticing how fast I got switched from acting captain to Explorer. Maybe Prope didn’t like treating me anywhere close to an equal.

  "How are you feeling, Explorer?" the captain asked. "No ill effects from the disease?"

  "I’m okay," I said. "Are you going to send someone to help dock this ship?"

  "Sorry, not yet. Because of the risk of contagion, standard operating procedure says we start by sending an Explorer team to assess the situation."

  "There’s not much risk of contagion," I answered. "Really."

  "Even so, you can never go wrong following the proper protocols. Don’t you agree?"

  "Um." In my years with the Outward Fleet, I’d seen things go wrong all over the place, protocols or no. "So after your Explorers check things out," I said, "then can I go home?"

  "One thing at a time," Prope replied. "Please go to your transport bay and let my people in through the main airlock. They should be there in fifteen minutes."

  She nodded a vague good-bye and waved her hand in the general neighborhood of her forehead. Ship captains are supposed to exchange full salutes after talking to each other… even if one of you is only a lowly acting captain. I guess Prope couldn’t bring herself to give me a real salute, seeing as I was only an Explorer.

  Lots of regular navy people are embarrassed by Explorers. Or scared of them. Even fake Explorers like me. Everybody knows Explorers aren’t normal.

  Before I could show Prope what a real salute looked like, she cut her end of the connection. I saluted anyway, to the blank screen. As long as I was sort of a kind of a captain, I wanted to do the right thing.

  6

  MEETING THE EXPLORERS

  Fifteen minutes later I sat at the transport bay’s control console, watching two Explorers float weightless outside the ship. These were real Explorers, not just fakes like me. Their suits were as glinty white as washed stucco, with cords of black piping along the sleeves and pant legs. As they drew close to Willow, little jets puffed out from their hips and shoulders to slow their approach.

  From my point of view, the two people looked like they were completely upside down: flying along with their feet poking up in the air, because that was the angle they’d happened to come in on. But as soon as they touched the ship’s hull, they grabbed the handbar railings that surrounded the airlock entrance and pulled themselves right way up. I’d already told the ship-soul to open the outer hatch, so they slipped straight inside.

  It took a minute for the airlock to cycle — and that minute felt like forever, I was so eager to see people again. These two were both humans, I could tell that from the shape of their outfits… but looking at their tinted visors and their lumpy tightsuits (with pockets and pouches and electronic attachments front and back) I couldn’t tell if the Explorers were young or old, male or female, bulky or slim. They hadn’t talked to me by radio either; there’d been no need, and Explorers aren’t the sort to chat for the sake of chatting. Not to strangers, anyway.

  Finally, the inside airlock door opened and the two Explorers stepped out. A big thick observation window separated me from the transport bay, but I banged on the glass and waved. After a few seconds staring at me, both Explorers waved back. Pretty halfhearted waves, if you ask me.

  "York?" a growly man’s voice asked. The Explorers had patched their helmet radios into Willow’s speaker system. "The name’s Tobit — Phylar Tobit." One of the white-suited figures gave a slight bow. "And my know-nothing greenhorn partner is Benny Dade." "Benjamin!" the other snapped in a peevish high-pitched voice. "But everybody just calls me Dade."

  Tobit gave a loud snort. "Dade? Who the hell calls you Dade? Everyone I know calls you the Sissy-boy Whiner… but I thought I’d be polite in front of company."

  Dade (or Benny or Benjamin) gave a hissy sniff that may or may not have been good-natured. I tried to keep a straight face. Explorers make a point of never addressing each other by title — it’s tradition. But without titles to go by, the young cadets sometimes get hung up on what they should or shouldn’t be called. Carefully I said, "Hello, Tobit. And, um, Benjamin. Welcome aboard the Willow."

  "Yeah, yeah, swell," Tobit answered, waving his arm dismissively. I tried to lock down in my head which Explorer was which, but knew I’d get mixed up as soon as they started moving. The two tightsuits looked exactly like each other on the outside, no names or insignia or anything.

  "So what do you want to do first?" I called down. "Would you like a tour?"

  "We’re supposed to follow a specific search pattern," Benjamin replied, still a bit miffed and huffy. "You’re an Explorer, aren’t you, York? You should know there are procedures for this sort of thing."

  His voice sounded as young as wet paint. All full-fledged Explorers had to be at least twenty-two, but I didn’t think the boy could possibly be that old. It made me feel dry-dust ancient, the way I kept coming across recruits who were practically babies. "All right," I told him, "you do what you have to do. I’ll tag along and watch."

  "Yeah," Tobit muttered, "we love spectators." The tint on his visor had started to fade now that he was inside the ship; I could see his eyes, puffy and a little bloodshot. He stared at me a moment longer, then said, "Oh all right, you can come along. Professional courtesy to a fellow Explorer. Although if I were you, I’d just mix myself a drink and let other people do the work. You’ve been sick, haven’t you?"

  "I’m fine now," I told him. Then I whispered, "You know there isn’t really a disease, right? Everyone at the starbase is just pretending."

  He made a phlegmy noise in his throat, then said, "If everyone else is pretending, pal, I wouldn’t want to be the odd man out. The Admiralty High Council are rabid old bastards on the subject of solidarity."

  Benjamin looked at him in surprise. Before the boy could speak, Tobit went on quickly, "Okay, time to get our asses in gear. We got some damned important standard procedures to follow." He belched loudly, then headed for the door.

  It was too bad the Explorers couldn’t take off their tight-suits. As it was, I still felt kind of alone, even with them walking right beside me. They were all bundled up so I couldn’t see more than their eyes, and their voices came from the ship’s overhead speakers instead of from the people themselves.

  Not that they talked to me much; Explorers really focus on their jobs. From the moment they left the transport bay, Tobit and Benjamin were so busy giving their home ship a running commentary of what they saw, they scarcely tossed a word in my direction. I tagged behind like baggage, through machinery rooms with automatic systems doing automatic things… till we got to the hold.

  When Benjamin saw the queen he nearly jumped out of his suit. "Shit!" he squeaked. "I mean, shoot! Look at the size of that thing! I had no idea they were that big!"

  Tobit didn’t take his eyes off the queen’s corpse, but he gave a deep sigh. "Benny. Buddy. My dear bright spark. Didn’t you study the goddamned Mandasar castes in Explorer Academy?"

  "Yeah, sure," Benjamin answered, "but it’s one thing to watch them on chip and another to see one up close."

  "Christ on a crutch," Tobit muttered. "If you don’t have enough imagination to learn from normal pictures, run yourself a VR sim. The first time you meet a real alien in the flesh, I don’t want my partner gibbering, ‘Mercy me, look at the size of that thing!’ "

  Benjamin mumbled something I couldn’t make out. If Tobit had belonged to any other branch of the navy, he’d yell, "What was that, mister?
" then shout in the boy’s face for ten minutes about subordinates keeping their mouths to themselves. But Explorers hated acting authoritarian, especially if it meant browbeating their partners. Instead, Tobit turned to me. "What’s with the defense clouds around the venom sacs?"

  "Oh those. Um." I dropped my gaze. "The ship had uninvited nanites show up a few days ago…"

  "What?" Tobit snapped. "No one told us about nanites."

  "The folks at Starbase Iris never let me get that far," I answered. "As soon as I reported the whole crew dying, they just stopped talking to me. When I tried to tell them other stuff, they cut me off sharp."

  "Bloody hell. Those morons at Iris have their heads up their candy-coated asses." Tobit took a deep breath. "All right, York, we’re listening now. Tell us everything. The truth, not what you think we want to hear."

  So I went through the story, right from the start — which shocked young Benjamin, let me tell you. He couldn’t believe the kind of party Willow held for crossing the line. Tobit told him not to be naive. "Just goes to show," he said, "the crew knew they’d pissed off the League. They were all in on it, they were all guilty… and they were all whacked out with fear as they came up to crossing the line. In a way, you have to admire these bastards; most Vacheads would just sit around moaning if they knew they were going to die. At least this group had the good taste to hold an orgy." He sighed, then glanced at me. "I don’t suppose you know what gruesome deed they’d done?"

  I shook my head. "No one told me anything."

  "You were just a passenger. Getting rotated back to New Earth, right?"

  "Right. I was stationed on the moonbase near Troyen, but it was getting too dangerous to stay. You know Troyen’s having a big civil war? Most of the time they just fight among themselves, but a few weeks ago someone took a potshot at us — a missile came close to landing on top of our station. The blast disrupted our outer dome field and nearly knocked down the inner one… so our base commander decided we had to evacuate. The other personnel got away in a two-person scoutship, but I was assigned to stay behind till everything shut down properly."