He fed the report on “Laundry, X-Ray Platoon, Officers” into the busy slipstream of message traffic that flowed through the ship, followed by “Laundry, X-Ray Platoon, Non-Commissioned Officers” and “Laundry, X-Ray Platoon, Enlisted.” He checked his schedule every time he went out of the word-processing mode, determined that another land mine like the one Bruno had planted under him the other night would not explode again.
Among other duties a visiting officer might be assigned were those small jobs that the ship’s officers were too busy to take care of, such as acting as ombudsman to settle a dispute between crew members (and often a stranger was the best person to handle a situation like that: never seen before, and never seen again), acting as a witness at certain traditional marriage rites, refereeing a sports match or appearing at, as Daivid’s day list now showed, a “bris.” That required a live call to Commander Iry’s office.
“What do they need me for?” he asked.
Gruen, Iry’s clerk grinned. “It’s an ancient Judaic rite,” he explained. “The mother gave birth eight days ago to a boy. The father’s not on board. Apparently the ceremony’s got to be done today. We’ve got a rabbi among the chaplain staff, and the mother has found a female sponsor, but the child needs a male sponsor, too, and all the rest of the officers are busy doing something … useful. This is a warship. Sorry, sir. I don’t mean to make it sound unimportant, or like you’re unimportant.”
“No apology needed,” Wolfe replied.
“Well,” Gruen said. “If you need more information, you can look up the extract in the ship’s library.”
“I don’t have to look it up, sir,” Daivid said, pleased to be in the know. “I’m already a godfather.”
Gruen looked uneasy. “Is that supposed to be … funny, sir?”
Daivid mentally cudgeled himself. Of course Iry knew all about him, so of course her clerk did, too. “Er … no, ensign. I mean, I was the kvatter for a friend’s baby three years ago. I know the drill.”
“Good. Uh, the commander will be pleased to hear that.”
O O O
It did make a change from umpiring soccer matches, Wolfe reflected, holding the baby, a fine four-kilo boy with caramel skin, black hair and muddy blue eyes, as the kvatterin fed it sacramental wine on the end of a folded napkin. It contained, the rabbi pointed out, a mild sedative. The fringed eyelids drooped slowly shut, and the chanting rabbi moved in on the baby’s genitals with a contraption that looked like a combination thimble and pencil sharpener.
“Waaaaaaahhhhh!”
Wolfe winced, and clenched his own thighs together in sympathy. The other males did the same or looked away. Or both.
“I thought you’d done this before,” the kvatterin whispered to him, as the rabbi bandaged the infant and tucked him tightly into fresh swaddling clothes.
“The last time it was a girl,” Wolfe whispered back. “I only had to hold her while she was given her name.”
O O O
“Congratulations,” he said, shaking hands with the beaming mother. The baby, now named Edward Pierre Jacom Sen-Yu Goldstein Akiya, was fast asleep over her shoulder. “Here.” He took an envelope out of his belt pouch. “It’s a certificate for baby clothes at the Stellar Stores. They ship. Shipping’s included.”
“That’s very nice of you,” Lt. jg Goldstein said, astonished. “But you didn’t have to.”
“He did, sort of,” the kvatterin, Goldstein’s best friend, Lt. Penny Buchanan. “After all, now you’re his … godfather.”
Daivid purposely kept his face fixed in a bland expression. “I guess I am.” So they did know who he was, or were guessing. He wasn’t going to give them a clue. Buchanan shrugged.
“Maybe we were wrong,” she commented to the mother. “Maybe it was some other Wolfe.”
***
Chapter 8
The rackety Insurgency shuttle landed just outside the confines of the Gibson factory dome. The crackling blue curve just barely visible through a haze of cold nitrogen gas liberally mixed with chlorine stretched away from the shuttle over a space of almost a thousand acres.
“Not a good place for hatchlings,” Itterim Oostern complained, reading the telemetry on atmosphere content and gravity. “Too heavy by half.”
Ayala read the gauge himself: 1.53g. Not pleasant, but the added gravity added to the density which was all to the good. Parker Gibson as a settlement existed solely to provide a home for Parker Gibson Electronic Servants Dot Com, a venerable and respected manufacturer of domestic and industrial robots. The planet had a wealth of mineral ores that needed only to be supplemented by a few rare metals and synthetic materials to have everything needed on hand to make its sturdy little cleaner-bots and repair-bots. For the purpose the Insurgency had in mind for it, its function and its isolation were ideal.
“We will take this and make it the breeding ground for our future warriors,” Ayala said, taking a deep breath. “Pilot brains, tank brains, submarine brains! All capable of following orders with as much intuition as though they were human beings—no offense, my friend.”
“Is it not too early to count on success?” Oostern asked, clicking his mandibles together. He did not take Ayala’s comment as an insult. He thought of everything in terms of itterim superiority, and assumed that any creature with sufficient pride in its species would do the same. “You do not have the device yet, nor the means to copy it.”
“I will have it,” Ayala said positively, “and copying it will be the work of this factory. It is the perfect employee in and of itself. Give it an order, and it will follow it blindly and obediently until you change the parameters. We can have a thousand, a million warriors! We will not need to train nor risk living beings—they can’t really be trusted anyhow. And they are just too fragile.”
He signed to the helm officer to deploy the landing bridge.
“How many are in there?” Oostern asked the telemetry officer.
“Only one,” the itterim at the scope replied. “A human.”
“So we were told the truth,” Ayala said, pleased.
Clapping the helmet onto his head he listened to the hiss of the seals securing it to the neck of the environment suit and entered the tube-shaped airlock which had been extended to within centimeters of the dome. At the end of the corridor two itterim held the edges of the flexible framework between them. Swiftly, they tossed it toward the heaving blue electrical fire. The edges adhered to the transparent material underneath. Within the door-shaped rectangle the sparks died away.
“That is the door,” Van Yarrow confirmed, eying the black oblong bisected by the airlock. “A little to the left, though.”
“Fix it!” Ayala boomed. The itterim leaped to obey, tugging the accordion-pleated material until the ring was framed entirely. “Open it! We must make this place our own.”
O O O
“It is so clean here,” Oostern said. The Insurgency force, all five of them, treaded lightly along the plascrete corridor. He heard a hissing sound, and spun, weapon out. Behind them two cleaner bots were busy sweeping up the dust they had tracked in on their walk from the dome’s edge to the factory complex.
Ayala laughed aloud. “That is why there is only one person here. Once the robots are made, they maintain the factory and keep it clean. Very intelligent. I wish we could conscript the designer for our cause.”
“That you, Linewire?” a man’s voice came echoing down the long corridor from the open door at the end. Except for emergency indicators, the only light on in the place was that yellow rectangle. Ayala strode towards it. “Look, I told you you could be a few days late, but a week is really pushing it. I deserve my leave, too … oh.”
A scruffy man in coveralls, his puffy hair tied into a dozen buff-colored pigtails and tied in one knot behind his head, emerged from the room.
“Who are you?” he asked, shifting a pow from one side of his mouth to the other. As an afterthought he took it out of his mouth and held it behind him.
“I
am Colonel Inigo Ayala, Insurgent and rebel,” Ayala announced proudly.
“So Linewire didn’t send you?” The man scratched his long beard, unimpressed. “Well, if you’re not here to take over so I can get out of here for a while, then you and your buggy friends had better hop your butts back out of here. This is private property.”
“Oh, we are here to take over, my friend,” Ayala said. He tilted his head towards Van Yarrow, who drew a weapon. The man raised his hands and backed away.
“Hey, you don’t have to do that!” he exclaimed. “All I want to do is go on my vacation. Look, I shouldn’t be here. My co-worker was supposed to take my place.”
“Oh,” Ayala said, snapping his fingers. Two more itterim came forward and dumped a body on the floor. “Do you mean him? We intercepted him at the edge of the system. In his defense I must tell you he was worried about you, too. I am glad to say that you are both going away from here together, but not as you think.”
The bearded man’s eyes went wide, and he turned to run. Oostern hesitated, so Ayala drew his own gun and blasted the man. The plasma bolt hit between the shoulder blades, searing a blackened hole through the torso. The body fell forward and kept sliding. Ayala holstered his weapon. The itterim went to pick up the body.
“Leave it,” Ayala ordered. “Let the bots take both of them. Now, this facility is ours. Roosen and Deelt, find the controller complex and learn the programming. When we return from our successful mission, we will need to start production at once. We need more intelligent minds working for our cause, and we needed them six months ago.”
“Yes, colonel!” the two itterim chimed, saluting.
Behind them, clusters of cleaner bots dragged the bodies away.
O O O
Daivid looked up from his infopad as the klaxons in his cabin erupted into deafening a-OOO-gahs.
“The ship is exiting trans-space. Repeat, the ship is exiting trans-space. Please assume braced positions until the all clear. Thank you.”
He saved his current material and stuffed the device into the padded drawer of the desk. His chair wasn’t rated for crash-worthiness, so he moved to his bunk and strapped himself down. The bed, responding to the tug on the belts, drew him downward into a recess now padded by the thin shockfoam. It was a lot like being in a coffin, he mused, but with better neck support.
He turned on the entertainment screen over his bunk with a verbal command, and clicked his way through the on-ship channels until he got the view from the bridge’s main screens. As usual, all he could see was the projected, dashlike images of the stars they would have been passing if they had been visible to the human eye in folded space. The calm voice of the on-duty helm officer carried on in a near monotone.
“Preparing to drop to sublight. Increasing energy envelope to protect hull. Engines prepared to drop.”
Harawe’s voice came in sharply. “Drop!”
Daivid braced himself, elbows and knees jammed against the padding of his bunk. The means of traveling faster than light meant going through the pipeline, or rather one of thousands, maybe millions, of pipelines available throughout the galaxy. The drive relied upon these ‘strings,’ or mini-wormholes to penetrate the fourth dimension that bridged the other three, enabling ships to go much faster than light. The speed varied, depending upon not only the width of the rift, but of its length. Scientists had hoped these strings might be infinite, enabling humanity to cross the great divide between galaxies, but they petered out unexpectedly, usually within range of the end of one or more others, leading the theoreticians to speculate on whether strings affected one another, or originated from common hubs.
Starships transited the strings one at a time. Star maps showed in which direction ‘traffic’ flowed in each of the known and commonly used lanes. A few reckless captains had ignored the rules and caused collisions that resulted in the destruction of their own ships and the unhappy travellers who met them head on. The accidents also tended to render the string involved unusable for a long time, so even pirates made a point of obeying the right of way. The strictures of physics also meant ships could not travel side by side.
Just throwing a physical object into one of these two-dimensional strings would result in its destruction. Astrophysics engineering had come up with a generator that balanced the forceful pull against itself, creating an egg-shaped envelope for the ship to travel in safety. The footprint did not rely upon mass. In fact, it was the same, whether the ship was a lone scout vessel or a full-throttle dreadnought.
To enter or exit a string, a ship only had to sidestep, which meant that all string-drive vessels had slipstream engines that pulled the ship into or pushed it out of the string. Some slipstream engines moved their vessels slightly, at just enough angle to break out of the singularity, but that meant that the exit point might not be very precise, but it was a gentler transition. The big ships, with heavy shielding and good shock absorption for the crew and cargo, could drop or shift a virtual 90°, exiting at precisely the point desired, coming out into real-space just in time for the men and women aboard her to throw up. Daivid had prided himself he had pretty good sea legs, but sharp-shift made him queasy. The elite squads chose their members partly on whether or not the applicant tossed his or her or its cookies on exiting wormholes at full speed.
Suddenly, reality lurched sideways. Daivid’s skull and heart felt as if though they had been jerked out of his body, then restored without so much as an apology. His heart raced; glad to be back where it belonged.
He glanced up at the screen. Twinkling stars dotted the infinite blackness on the screen, refreshing, live diamonds after the computer-generated streaks of fourth-dimensional space. He didn’t know how he knew what he was seeing was real; he just knew the difference when he saw it. The ship also had companions, silver and black boxes that dwarfed their drive tubes.
“All clear,” the helm officer announced. “Move to Level 2 alert, maintain until further notice. That is all.” Daivid hit the release on his restraints. The center of the bed rose up to its normal level, and he rolled off. Keeping one eye on the screen, he reached for the infopad in his desk and sent a message to Borden, Ti-Ya, Wilbury, Barikson, Corrundum and Al-Hadi.
Any idea what’s going on? he asked. There’s a line of ships out there, looks like a merchant fleet.
No one’s asked to come on board yet, replied Al-Hadi, whose assigned station was the signal room, so they’re not selling us anything. Must be an escort mission.
Don’t they usually announce it to the crew? Borden inquired. She had become part of the evening poker games at Daivid’s initial insistence, and stayed because she liked it. Her ability to count almost anything with no apparent effort meant that she stood a good chance of guessing what combination of cards everyone at the table was holding. Daivid started losing money to her, and demanded they switch over to five-card stud, when she couldn’t see their discards and work them into her calculations. It would be a routine mission, wouldn’t it?
Need to know, kid, Wilbury interjected. And we don’t. We’ll find out if we need to.
O O O
Rumor spread faster than the official word, but Al-Hadi’s guess turned out to be a good one. The ships had requested a silent escort, which meant a security crackdown until the point of interception. Officers and crew, seeing the vessels hanging in the viewtanks in every corridor, speculated on what they were carrying that required such heavy firepower as the Eastwood was carrying.
“Need to know,” Wilbury kept saying. “Trade ships are always at risk. They’re sitting ducks. When they jump out of a string, it could be seconds, minutes, or hours before the next ship follows. That leaves plenty of time for pirates to strike.”
Al-Hadi let her cronies in the wardroom know that the department head had ordered all communications from the ship be routed directly through him. “Kind of unusual,” she said, dealing cards. “I think something’s up, but I have no idea what.”
“Need to know,” Wilbury repeated
darkly. He gathered up his five cards and began to arrange them.
A calm voice, belonging to the helm officer on duty, came over the intercom system.
“Attention, please, prepare for sideslip. Repeat, prepare for sideslip. Fifteen minutes from … mark.”
Everyone in the wardroom looked at the screen in the rear wall. They noticed for the first time that the coterie of trade ships flying alongside the Eastwood had diminished in number to three. As they watched, another one bloomed with light until it was surrounded by a translucent egg glimmering with blue, yellow, and red. It seemed to jump violently to the left, and shrank out of sight before they could draw another breath. Within five minutes, the second departed.
“All personnel, strap in, please. Preparing to enter trans-space.” As the third and last trade ship began to glow, the officers cleared the wardroom, heading for the harnesses concealed in the panels behind the walls of the corridor. Wolfe was lucky enough to find one close to the nearest screen tank. The heavens around the dreadnought were empty. It was their turn. The stars took on brilliant color; it was the bubble of protective energy growing around the ship. He hung on as the Eastwood lurched sideways, its drives whining audibly. Daivid’s intestines twisted. Only the first few moments were rough. Once the ship was part of the slipstream, it was like traveling in a hot-air balloon, an experience Wolfe had had a few years ago. No matter how rough the wind, if you were travelling with it, you didn’t feel it. The stars strobed weirdly, the nearest ones elongating into glowing worms. By the time the order came to stand down, they were a colored bubble, floating through a tunnel of white-hot needles of light after a dozen more colored bubbles.
Strong Arm Tactics Page 16
