Temporary Duty

by Ric Locke

  “I would suppose it’s your relatives, come to object to my making free with their possessions,” Peters said drily. “I should have been taking precautions, but I was distracted.”

  A crackling voice emanated from somewhere on the control panel, saying something demanding. Peters jumped. “It seems you are correct,” Ander Korwits remarked.

  “What did he say?”

  “Shorn of the imprecations, he demands that you return to the ship,” said Ander.

  Peters eyed the panel. “I wasn’t aware this craft had a communicator. Do you know how to operate it?”

  Ander shrugged. “Only in theory. If the books have it right, the mechanism should be on the panel in front of Alper.”

  “Yes. Here.” The blonde girl handed him an object that trailed a long cord. “Speak into the grille, there. You have to push or activate something, all the stories are clear on that, but I don’t know what.”

  His fingers found a smooth lever on the side of the object. He pressed it, felt a click, and said, “Do you hear me? This is John Peters.”

  “I hear you,” said the voice. “Return to the ship. You cannot escape.”

  Peters couldn’t help himself. “Don’t be trite.”

  “I fail to understand.”

  “Never mind,” he said to the front transparency, and pressed the key. “I propose that you let me go. I have nothing but my own property and two individuals who seem to be of little or no value to you. The smallcraft is valuable, but you may have it back once I reach Llapaaloapalla if you will refrain from damaging your own property.”

  “Return to the ship. We require your information, and we cannot accept your exposing us. Return to the ship.”

  “I won’t return voluntarily,” Peters told the microphone. “You will have to destroy me, so the information is lost in any case. Why should I expose you? What profit would I gain?”

  “Traders,” the voice said, sounding disgusted. “Return to the ship, Peters. Otherwise we will destroy you.”

  “You have no imagination,” Peters responded, and lowered the mike. “Ander, if Alper’s panel has the communicator, yours very likely controls the weapons. What do we have? I can’t read the legends on the controls.”

  “Here are activators and level controls for four breakbeams,” she said, pointing.

  “I have no confidence in my ability to hit anything with a breakbeam,” Peters said. “Where are the controls for the—” Shit. He didn’t know the word. “There are weapons which are self-directing. Fredik Fers told me about them. Are the controls there?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Wham! and another lurch. “Here are a row of activator switches, but the legends are covered with a sign that says ‘do not use’.”

  “Can you remove the cover?” Wham! “Quickly. Your relatives are becoming insistent.”

  “Not while the ship is jerking about.”

  “I’ll try to buy some time.” He spoke into the mike. “Stop shooting, stop shooting. What treatment will I receive if I return?”

  “That hasn’t been decided. Return to the ship; we will discuss it. There is no alternative.”

  “I cannot return directly,” he pointed out. “The energy cost is prohibitive. I propose to loop the planet in order to redirect my velocity.”

  “That is acceptable. We will follow. If you deviate from the proper course we will destroy you.”

  Peters looked up and rolled his eyes. This guy had obviously not been reading the stories Ander and Alper had told him about; nobody would talk like that afterward. “I understand,” he told the microphone. “Be tolerant. I am not experienced, and my course may not be exact.”

  “Just get it right,” the voice growled.

  Peters grinned; here was something off script. “I’ll do my best,” he told the mike.

  “You had better. End of transmission.” The other ship was now visible, a spark off to starboard and “high” from their current orientation.

  Peters looked at it, then back at Ander. “What have you discovered, if anything?”

  “I was able to remove most of the covering, but I broke a fingernail in doing so.” Peters growled; she grinned up at him, then looked back at the panel. Alper Gor was leaning over him, trying to see what they were doing, and pressing her anatomy against his shoulder in the process. “The legend says ‘seekers’,” Ander explained. “There are six activators; I take that to mean we have six ‘seekers’, whatever they are.”

  “Activate one of them… no, wait.” He rotated the ship, Alper hanging on his seat back as he did so, until the spark of the other ship was nearly centered in the front transparency. There was a circle there, engraved in the material, with four short lines forming a centerless cross at a forty-five degree angle, and he adjusted the sidestick until the other ship was as nearly centered as possible. “Now. Activate a ‘seeker’.”

  Ander threw the switch with a click. “Nothing happened,” she remarked after a moment.

  “This may take time… no, we are missing part of the procedure. What else do you find in that area of the panel?”

  “A lot of things. It’s confusing.”

  “Is there anything labeled ‘door’ or ‘opening’ or anything cognate?”

  She looked up in surprise. “Why, yes, there is, but it isn’t next to the ‘seeker’ controls.”

  Peters rolled his eyes again. “What do the labels say in that area?”

  “There are only glyphs. Here is a kh—”

  “Are there four of them?”

  “Yes, numbered one through four.”

  “For the breakbeams, I would imagine. How many ‘seeker’ activators did you say there were?”

  “Six.”

  “Is there a set of six switches in the ‘door’ group?”

  “No. Here is a group of switches, labeled ‘Z1’ through ‘Z3’.”

  “Move those three switches to the ‘open’ position, please.”

  “The positions aren’t labeled.”

  Peters rolled his eyes again. “Then we will assume that the doors are currently closed,” he said patiently. “Move the switches to the opposite position.”

  She did so. “Don’t be cross,” she said with a touch of petulance.

  “I’m not cross. I am nervous. You have my apology if I seemed cross.” Alper Gor giggled in his ear. A group of indicators illuminated, two rows of three at the bottom of the front transparency. “Ah. We have achieved something.”

  “Those lamps are yellow,” Alper pointed out.

  “So?”

  “Foolish person.” That was a single word; a better rendering might be ‘silly’. “Yellow is the color for something that is working, but has some deficiency.”

  “By coincidence we use it the same way.”

  “You are straying farther from course than permissible, even for an inexperienced operator,” the radio said. “Correct your vector.”

  The planet nearly filled their field of view. Peters operated the stick, adding velocity at right angles to their course, and picked up the microphone. “Is that better?”

  “You are still far from the correct course.”

  “I told you I was inexperienced. Which way should I add or subtract velocity?”

  “If you roll ship so that the limb of the planet is horizontal,” the voice said, “and the present vector is ahead, you should add velocity in a direction two points to the right and one up.” The tone was remarkably similar to that he’d used to Ander Korwits a moment ago, and both girls giggled this time.

  Peters complied with the instructions. “Is that better?”

  “Much better. Keep your course. End of transmission.”

  Peters flexed his shoulders to relieve the tension, and again rotated the ship to center the other one in the reticle. “Ander, activate a ‘seeker’, please.”

  “Just one?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Here is number three.” One of the lamps, at top center, went out, and a red-orange
one beside it came on.

  “What does that color mean?” he asked.

  Alper frowned. “In normal circumstances it means ‘danger’ or ‘something is wrong’. But these are weapons. Possibly it means that the other party is in danger.”

  “Hmm… I don’t care to—” he was about to say “experiment” when the red lamp went out and a blue one came on. “That looks promising,” he noted.

  “Yes. Blue is the color of readiness or proper operation.”

  “We can hope.” They waited for several moments, but nothing happened. “We are still missing part of the procedure,” Peters said with a frustrated grimace.

  “I was thinking,” Ander began.

  “Yes?”

  She gestured at the panel. “These are called ‘seekers’. In order to seek something, one must be told what it is, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, that’s inherent in the concept.”

  “Precisely. I activated the seeker, and the lamp changed from yellow to red. A few moments later the blue light illuminated. It seems logical to me that ‘seeker number three’ has notified us that it now knows what to seek.”

  “Ander, you are a brilliantly intelligent person,” Peters said gravely. “I believe you are precisely correct. So what is missing is the command or permission to the ‘seeker’ to perform its function.”

  “So I would suppose.”

  Peters looked over the controls available at his chair. Navigation instruments, zifthkakik activator and level controls, compensator…

  “Perhaps the control is on Alper’s panel,” Ander suggested.

  “That wouldn’t make sense,” Alper protested. “The ship operator controls the direction. The control should be available to him.”

  There were a pair of pedals or treadles in the floor. Grallt ships didn’t use rudder pedals, and he hadn’t needed any in operating this one… he pressed the right pedal. Nothing. Then the left one. A thump from below their feet, and a small object left the front of the ship at high speed. Simultaneously the blue lamp went out, leaving five yellows glowing.

  There was a short pause; then the spark of the other ship expanded enough to see it as a sphere, even at that distance, then faded away to nothing. “That seems to have done it,” he said with satisfaction. “I’ll change our course to head for Llapaaloapalla.”

  “Yes,” said Alper Gor in a musing tone. “I wonder who that was.”

  Peters looked up in startlement. They—he—had just killed somebody, or several somebodies, the women had known all their lives.

  “It sounded like Brendik Jons,” Ander Korwits remarked, her voice devoid of color.

  “Yes,” Alper agreed. “I served him a few times while I was in the tuwe… I didn’t like him very much.”

  Ander nodded. “So did I… I don’t think he bathed regularly.”

  “No… I wonder who else was on board.”

  “I don’t see that we had any real choice in the matter,” Peters said gently.

  “No,” Ander agreed. She looked up at him, face sober, sidelit by reflected light from the planet.

  He stood and took Alper Gor’s hand, then took the single step down from the pilot’s station to the main deck. “Come here,” he said gently. Ander rose, and he took both of them in the best hug he could manage. They came without resistance, molding their bodies to his, and he said softly, “It’s never good to see relatives die, even if you didn’t like them very much. I would have avoided that if possible, but there didn’t seem to be a way. You should mourn them. Even if you didn’t like them, they were still family.” Neither responded verbally, but Ander burrowed under his arm, and Alper pressed her face against his right shoulder. They stood that way for a long moment, and Peters felt a drop of warm moisture touch his right ear.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Peters sat in the control chair, mind in the condition he privately thought of as ‘neutral mode’. The spark ahead was almost big enough to resolve into the bulk of Llapaaloapalla. Ander Korwits and Alper Gor were aft, in one of the two cabins the smallship offered, crying, sleeping, waiting apprehensively, or some combination.

  An object crossed his field of view, right to left, at a tremendous rate, leaving a subliminal impression of something dart-shaped. That generated a line of thought, his first in several utle, and he dug out the earbug and inserted it. “Green Three Seven,” he said, the only call sign he’d ever been assigned. “Is anybody on th’ frequency?”

  “Green Three Seven, Hornet Two Oh Two.” There was a pause. “Petty Officer Peters, is that you?” The woman sounded as if she were speaking conversationally from a few feet away, which meant the earbug’s batteries were still good. She must have been close by, because the earbugs had very limited range. That agreed with what he knew of fighter pilot training: get on the tail and close. If he could look back he could probably read the numbers on the bird.

  “Yes, ma’am, it’s me. Uh, Two Oh Two, Green Three Seven, that’s affirmative, ma’am.”

  “Ha,” she said, a short bark of amusement. “Green Three Seven, I take it that you’re aboard the brick I just intercepted.”

  “That’s affirmative, Two Oh Two. Request permission to come aboard.”

  “Wait one, Green Three Seven.”

  “Roger, Two Oh Two, Green Three Seven is standin’ by.”

  There was a pause while the pilot—Travers, it was, if the first-line crews were flying CAP; Roper otherwise—checked over the UHF. At length she said, “Permission not granted, Green Three Seven, repeat, permission not granted until you answer a few questions.”

  “Understood, Two Oh Two. Ask away.”

  “Is there anybody in earshot of you who speaks English?”

  “No, ma’am, there ain’t. There ain’t nobody but me and two others aboard, and neither one of them speaks English. They ain’t here with me right now anyway.”

  “Then who’s flying that thing, Three Seven?”

  “I am, ma’am. Uh, Two Oh Two, Green Three Seven is in control.”

  “He says he’s flying it.” The voice was incredulous, and Peters started to respond, then realized that the earbug had made an error. She’d been speaking into the UHF, and the processor hadn’t caught the redirection of her remarks. There was a pause, then, “Green Three Seven, the last information we had was that you were missing from groundside. Commander Bolton wants to know what the—what happened.”

  “Well, ma’am, I reckon you could say I got abducted by space pirates,” Peters said wryly. “I just now escaped and want to come home.”

  “Are the rest of the space pirates on your tail, Three Seven?” The question wasn’t as sardonic as it might have been if the events of the last couple of months hadn’t happened.

  “I reckon it’s possible, ma’am,” Peters conceded. “I done shot one of ‘em down in the process of makin’ my escape, and I reckon the rest ain’t likely to be too happy about it.”

  “Understood, Three Seven.” Pause. “They’re scrambling the ready CAP. Help is on the way.”

  “Yes, ma’am, and I’m grateful.” He thought for a moment. “Anybody been keepin’ an eye on the ferassi trade ship that’s on orbit a hundred and twenty, maybe a hundred and fifty degrees ahead of us?”

  “We’ve been watching, Three Seven. They had some activity a few hours ago, but nothing since.”

  “I reckon that ‘activity’ was me, then, Two Oh Two. If they ain’t done nothin’ since, probably there ain’t no reason to send out the birds ‘til they do.”

  “Never hurts to be sure, Three Seven.”

  “There is that, ma’am.”

  “Sure is… That ship appears to be of the same pattern as the one that shot us up, and its weapons bays seem to be open. Care to comment, Three Seven?”

  Oops. “Uh, Two Oh Two, that’s affirmative on the ship type.” He scrambled out of the chair and down to the weapons control station. “Sorry about the weapons bays, we was doin’ somethin’ else and just forgot.” He scanned the panel, t
rying to remember where the switches were, and spotted a set that looked right. “Two Oh Two, if I’ve done the right things the weapons bays ought to be closin’ up right now.”

  “That’s affirmative, Three Seven.” The yellow lights below the windshield went out, and Peters climbed back into the control chair. “Check your velocity,” the Hornet pilot said as he was doing so. “Don’t get too close to the ship until we’ve resolved this.”

  “Aye aye, ma’am.” He took the control and complied, thinking as he did so, Shit. Navy-ass rigamarole when all I wanted was to get aboard and get some shut-eye.

  The Hornet came into view from overhead, matching velocities and taking up station a few hundred meters ahead and a little to port and up. It rotated so that the canopy faced him and the figure inside raised its arm in greeting. Peters returned the gesture, realizing as he completed it that he had done so left-handed, like a Grallt, and the earbug said, “I only see one person on the control deck, Three Seven. Is that you?”

  “Two Oh Two, that’s affirmative.” He raised an arm again, being careful to do so right-handed.

  “Three Seven, you said there were two other persons aboard. I’d like to see them.”

  “Aye, ma’am, but I reckon they’re asleep right now,” he told her. “It’ll take a couple minutes.”

  “Understood, Three Seven. Hornet Two Oh Two is standing by.”

  Peters sighed, headed aft, and knocked on the cabin door. “May I enter?” he called.

  Ander Korwits had been crying; her face was still flushed, and her eyes were wet. “What do you need, John?” she asked. “We had a nap, but we were about to get up anyway.”

  “The people from my ship are suspicious,” he said. “They want to see you before we can come aboard. I need for you to come forward to the control cabin and show yourselves.”

  “Both of us?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I didn’t expect there to be formalities.”

  “That’s all right. Alper’s still asleep; I’ll get her.” She turned back into the cabin, returning in a few moments with Alper Gor, who had also been crying, the effects more prominent on her pale features.