Strider's Galaxy

by John Grant

  "I represent the non-SSIA personnel aboard this craft," he began pompously.

  "I know," she said wearily. "You've told me often enough before." He told her every time they met, which was as infrequently as she could manage it. Why is it that groups of apparently sane, intelligent human beings always elect dorks as their representatives? she thought for the hundredth time. And, likewise for the hundredth time, she answered her own question. It's because the dorks elect themselves, that's why. Sane, intelligent human beings have better things to do. Out loud she said: "Dr Holmberg, how may I help you?"

  "There was an emergency three hours ago, and all of our people had to stop their work—important work, I might add—in order to suit up." Holmberg had put on a lot of weight since they had left Phobos; Strider wasn't certain quite how he'd managed it, because the rations aboard the Santa Maria were reasonable but not over-generous.

  "It was certainly an emergency," she said. She explained roughly what had happened.

  "Our lives were endangered, is what you're trying to tell me," said Holmberg.

  "They were indeed. But First Officer O'Sondheim and I were able, with the assistance of the Main Computer, to avert the danger."

  "But only at the very last moment. That's not good en—"

  "It's good enough for me." She raised a palm towards him. "I'm very tired, Dr Holmberg."

  He ignored her. "Why was the emergency allowed to arise in the first place?"

  "Because the puter on one of the fuel-ferry drones crashed. It shouldn't have happened. There'll doubtless be an inquiry in due course—with luck, sometime after we've left Jupiter far behind." She was finding it intensely difficult to keep her patience. It would be bad for personnel morale to land a punch smack in the middle of that pompous, technology-enhanced face, but . . .

  "Was there any way in which the SSIA crew of this vessel could have stopped this emergency before it began?"

  "No. It was totally unpredictable."

  "Isn't that shameful?"

  Strider shrugged. "Puters sometimes crash," she said.

  "There should be back-ups."

  "Yes, there probably should be, even on drones. But the tasks drones normally have to do are pretty simple, and normally there are big puters overseeing them and ready to take over. This time it didn't work. Look, I need some sleep."

  "So the SSIA, for reasons of economy—because they didn't put back-up puters in the drones—risked every human life aboard this ship? Is that what you're trying to tell me?" He mopped sweat away from his brow with the back of his sleeve.

  "I'm trying to tell you that there might—just might—have been a disaster, but we stopped it from happening. Can't you accept that?"

  His perspiration was making her perspire as well.

  "The personnel whom I have been elected to represent are very concerned about the fact that their lives have been wilfully put in danger," said Holmberg.

  Infuriated beyond control at last, Strider stabbed her finger into the center of his chest. "First, I don't believe it: I'll call a meeting if you like. Second, I think your people will tell you, if you'd listen to them, that they're damn' glad their skins were saved. Third, it probably wasn't too bad an idea that we had this crisis while still in the Solar System, because now we know what to do: if something like it had happened for the first time a year from now, in interstellar space, we could have been wiped out completely. Fourth . . . aw, shit, there are a whole lot of things lining up for 'fourth'. Now can you let me go? I need to crash out a while."

  "That's not good enough, Captain Strider."

  "Get it into your teensy head that me and First Officer O'Sondheim have just saved your life!" she shouted, shoving him away from her.

  He raised a fist.

  "Hit me and you're dead meat," she said.

  He lowered it again.

  "I could have you thrown off the Santa Maria as an undesirable," she added. "If I were feeling charitable I wouldn't just flush you out through the nearest airlock but arrange for you to be shuttled down to Ganymede. Is that what you really want? To miss out on seeing Tau Ceti II?"

  There was a pause during which she became aware of the sound of barley-heads rustling in the fields on either side of the path.

  "Well . . . no," said Holmberg.

  "Then get things straight, buster." She wiped her lips with the back of her hand. The exhaustion seemed to be moving through her in low pulses. "Your job is to look after the interests of the non-SSIA personnel. I respect that: it's an important job. My job is to make sure this vessel gets to Tau Ceti II, and to safeguard the lives of everybody aboard her if I possibly can. When it comes to it, because I'm better at my job than you can possibly be at yours, you will do what I say."

  "We're supposed to discuss—"

  "Yeah, and we will discuss things when it's appropriate. Right now it's not." She jabbed her finger at him again. "Right now it's important for everyone's lives that I get some sleep. You're stopping me from doing that. Ask all of your people what they actually think about what happened today, and then you can come and see me tomorrow. We can 'discuss'"—she covered the word in sarcasm—"as much as you like at that point. But not now. OK?"

  "This is not democratic," said Holmberg stiffly.

  "Who ever said," remarked Strider, walking away from him towards her cabin, "this was supposed to be a democracy?"

  #

  Leander and Nelson had watched the entire scene via their secondary retinal screens.

  "There's trouble a-brewing," said Nelson. He was a blocky man, his face craggy, his skin even blacker than Strider's. Like O'Sondheim, he had retinal screens over both eyes. He wore a bushy grey-white beard with pride. He smiled at Maloron Leander. "It's gonna be a real fun mission if this keeps up."

  "I think Leonie's just taken the trouble off the boil," said Leander quietly. Although as tall as Nelson, she was extremely slight, her figure seeming barely able to support her height.

  "Holmberg hates her," said Nelson.

  "Right now he does." Her voice had a clipped quality that Nelson relished. The two of them had been regular lovers since about three months out towards Jupiter. They hadn't committed themselves yet—Leander slept with whom she liked, and Nelson generally slept with whoever liked him—but it seemed probable that sometime during the trip they would settle down with each other. They enjoyed each other's company. Sex between them wasn't all that great, in strict technical terms, but they had the same sense of humor, which made up for a lot. They enjoyed the stupid jokes they shared when they woke up together.

  "In a couple of days' time," Leander continued, "he'll come round. The man isn't an imbecile."

  "Coulda fooled me."

  "He has degrees in astrophysics, astrometry, mathematics, chemistry, economics, ergonomics . . ."

  "And he's a damn' troublemaker."

  She touched a few buttons on her keyboard, making a small adjustment to the course of an incoming drone.

  "He's not all bad," she said. "He's playing a game, that's all. He wants Leonie to know that she's not a god."

  "Shit, darling, you just fucked up," said Nelson, suddenly concentrating very hard on his keyboard. His fingers moved rapidly. "We coulda lost some fuel there."

  "I was only testing your concentration. It was a deliberate mistake, OK?"

  After he had tapped in a few more instructions they both began to laugh.

  The drone docked successfully, locking to the rear of the Santa Maria like a fly against a wall. Another drone was already beginning to come on-screen.

  "Holmberg's an asshole," said Nelson after a few minutes. "There's no idiot like an idiot who's gathered himself a passel of degrees."

  "I would remind you, Mr Nelson," said Leander primly, "that I too have several degrees to my credit."

  "Yeah, but you're not an asshole. That's a big difference."

  "I AM OVERRIDING THE PUTER ON THE INCOMING DRONE," said the Main Computer. It was a fairly standard message, so neither of them pai
d it more than cursory attention.

  "Pinocchio," said Leander, looking back over her shoulder, "could you do me some coffee?"

  "Of course, Maloron Leander," said the bot, who had parked himself unobtrusively near the rear of the command deck.

  "Chocolate for me," said Nelson.

  It was going to be a long shift. Both Leander and Nelson privately wished that something would go wrong, just as it had for Strider and O'Sondheim, so that the boredom would be alleviated a bit.

  Nothing went wrong except that Pinocchio forgot her preferences and put milk in Leander's coffee. She drank it anyway.

  #

  Holmberg, too, was drinking coffee. He was sitting in his cabin, looking downwards between his knees through the window. Every now and then part of Jupiter would come into view. In between times he was offered a vista of stars or, rarely, a crescent of Ganymede. It was better than a holo, though that wasn't saying much. Jupiter had lost a lot of its glamour when the Great Red Spot had dissolved during the twenty-second century and the early part of the twenty-third: the Solar System's longest volcanic eruption—except possibly Neptune's Stigma Formation—had finally come to an end. But it was still a very exciting planet to see this close up, with its curvilinear formations of clouds. From here, too, you could appreciate the fact—in a way you never could from Mars or through holographs—that Jupiter's atmospheric structures were not just hugely wide: they were also hugely deep, and they operated on a completely different timescale from anything in the inner Solar System. A volcanic eruption on Earth might affect the atmosphere for a few months. The Great Red Spot had taken hundreds of years to die away.

  Strider had been right. He'd recognized that even at the time. She'd saved everyone's lives.

  If she hadn't been right, he might be feeling a little less resentful.

  The truly annoying thing was that he liked her.

  #

  There was plenty of water aboard the Santa Maria. It was a luxury that Strider hadn't known since she'd left Earth for Mars. On Mars you could create the illusion of water any time you wanted to, but as soon as you switched the illusion off it was over. On the Santa Maria you could enjoy a long lukewarm shower at the start of the day and still feel refreshed by it when you fell on to your bed sixteen hours later. You could turn on a tap and fill up a liter cup with cold water and drink it all down, and then have some more, if you wanted to.

  The recycling aboard the Santa Maria was very efficient.

  Strider was having a shower at the moment, while at the same time briefing Dulac on what had happened with the berserker drone. She hadn't known the man was on Ganymede; it had probably been kept from her deliberately, so that he could covertly supervise her decisions in the final few months before blast-off from Jovian orbit. It was never too late to fire a starship captain until the starship was going faster than conventional ships could easily manage. She hadn't expected, either, that she would be speaking to him right now. She'd assumed he would have the common sense—the knowledge of personnel-management—to leave her and O'Sondheim alone for a while, so they could wind themselves down.

  Her argument with Holmberg had stirred up her adrenalin again, so that when she got back to her cabin she looked at her bed and realized that sleep was a strange and distant country. So she'd started to run a shower, hoping the warm water would ease the tension out of her.

  That was when the screen on the ceiling above her shower had clicked into life.

  "Instigate face-to-face communication," she told the screen in answer to its question. Dulac had of necessity seen her naked hundreds of times before during the past few years—he probably knew her body better than she did, because there were bits of it she couldn't examine except in a mirror. She wasn't much worried in general by nudity, although she knew there were still some psychos on Earth who might get over-excited and jump you. Dulac wasn't like that.

  Well, he probably wasn't. He was a hard man to read.

  It didn't matter. He was down on Ganymede, the screen had said, and she was thousands of kilometers away on the Santa Maria. Let him slobber at the mouth if he wanted to. It was a long jump from Ganymede to here.

  She smoothed the skin of her stomach with a digit of soap and looked directly up at three-quarters of Dulac's face. The remaining quarter, at the top right, was taken up with the Main Computer's constant updating of the operations Leander and Nelson were carrying out on the command deck. It was unnecessary for Strider to know any of this—she trusted them implicitly—but the Main Computer insisted on feeding her the data every time she activated one of her screens.

  The effect at the moment was odd. It was as if Dulac were permanently winking at her.

  Maybe he was. But the rest of his face seemed completely disinterested.

  As he started speaking she had a sudden awful suspicion.

  ." . . and we'll need a full report in due course, Captain Strider."

  "You can get that just as well from the Main Computer." She bent down and raised her leg cautiously, and began to soap her calf. The g in the Santa Maria's living quarters was currently a little under Mars-standard: if you splashed around too much there'd be water everywhere.

  "But I want it from you, Strider. And a separate report from First Officer O'Sondheim, of course."

  "No."

  She slowly lowered her leg and began on the other one.

  "I think I may have misheard you."

  She twisted her head upwards again. Both the visual image and the sound were patchy this close to the cocktail of electromagnetic radiation that the active surface of Jupiter constantly ejected.

  "No," she repeated. "My first imperative is to manage this ship as efficiently as I possibly can. Making unnecessary reports gets in the way of that imperative. There was a crisis, and O'Sondheim and I dealt with it. Anything else you can get from the Main Computer, as I said. Or you could ask Pinocchio—he was there at least part of the time."

  "But I want—"

  "More to the point," she said, cutting through him, "is what you have to report to me. That drone's puter crashed, and there wasn't any back-up. I know that the SSIA always tries to run things as cheaply as it can, but that was a false economy. You could have lost the Santa Maria and everybody aboard her."

  She remembered the way, when she'd been on the command deck, that the thought of those three kids had kept coming back into her mind.

  "Are you deliberately committing an act of insubordination, Captain Strider?" said Dulac formally.

  "Yes, but it's so that I can do my job better. More efficiently."

  "I could have you out of there in three hours. O'Sondheim could do your job just as well."

  "No he couldn't." Oho, she thought, so you haven't been through the Main Computer's records yet.

  Dulac pursed his lips and glanced down at something front of him. "How is O'Sondheim shaping up?" he said after a few moments.

  Strider began to straighten up.

  "If I thought there were any deficiency on the part of First Officer O'Sondheim," she said coldly, "I would report it to you. He seems to have been undertrained for his task, but he and I can make a good team together."

  "But you're not very fond of each other, are you?"

  "We have . . . an interesting relationship. It works out OK, though." She began to wash the lower part of her face.

  Dulac glanced down again at what was presumably a checklist of things to ask her.

  "And Leander and Nelson?"

  "They're first-rate," said Strider emphatically. "Leander has tremendous powers of intuition, while Nelson's got a quick computational brain and"—she waved a hand lazily and a spray of shower-water shot towards the wall. Oh shit.—"and a lot of common sense. They're a great partnership."

  "A better partnership than yourself and First Officer O'Sondheim, would you say?"

  She hadn't really thought about it before. "Yeah," she said eventually. "They probably are."

  "Would you say that O'Sondheim is a weak link,
in that case?"

  "Not at all." I don't have to like Danny, but I bloody well do have to be loyal to him.

  "We can remove him from the chain of command, if you would prefer."

  "No. I won't have that. I've spent three years establishing a rapport with the guy." She reached out behind her for the shampoo cylinder, not wanting to take her eyes off Dulac's three-quarter face. The cylinder proved elusive, so she pretended she had simply been stretching her arm. "I told you: we make a good team. If you drafted in someone else, I might have to spend another three years and discover we made a lousy team. By then we'd be well on our way to Tau Ceti—a bad moment to sack someone."

  "I will want," said Dulac mildly, "a complete report on the situation aboard the Santa Maria before I will permit you to ignite the nuclear-pulse drive." He rubbed his chin with a palm, and Strider suddenly realized that he was as tired as she was—maybe even tireder. "In the meantime, are there any of your personnel who you feel should be . . . er . . . taken off the staff?"

  Holmberg, thought Strider immediately, but almost at once realized she didn't want to abandon anyone. It was a tight little community aboard the Santa Maria, and at the moment it was working fairly well. Holmberg was a small and seemingly counterproductive component of the machine, but who knew? If the machine was working fine, it'd be crazy to mess around with it. For all she knew, Holmberg was holding some part of the machine together.

  But there was another.

  "Strauss-Giolitto," she said.

  Dulac looked down again.

  "The teacher," he said.

  "One of the teachers. Andersen's fine. There's no problem with him. But Strauss-Giolitto . . . yeah, we might have a difficulty."

  "Why's that?" said Dulac, still looking downwards. "Her credentials are excellent."

  "She's prejudiced."

  Dulac looked back up at the screen, visibly surprised.

  "Against whom?"

  "Bots in particular," said Strider. "I mean, I know Pinocchio's supposed to present himself to everyone except me as a bit dimwitted, but Strauss-Giolitto keeps trying to score points off him as if to prove publicly that he's inferior." At last she'd found the shampoo cylinder, but right now she wasn't sure she wanted to use it. "Just above bots on her spectrum of contempt come people who can't trace their roots back to Europe, in particular Greater Yugoslavia." She put the cylinder down on the shower-bath's rim and began soaping her armpits for the second time.