Battlestations

by S. M. Stirling

  For a moment Ber Togren blanched at the thought of trying to fight a ground action on this planet when there were fifty billion Ickies and a functioning civilization.

  “Yeah, so, they’re not fools. They know Abanjul’s going down the shithole—couple of generations, you won’t be able to breathe.”

  Pordiik made the Wea—she corrected herself again—Khalian equivalent of a shrug. “Couppple of gen-gen-genrations, ev’rone dead.”

  “Ickies don’t think that way. One of the few good things that bastard Stensini figured out from the records. So . . . what have we got that the Ickies here want really, really bad?”

  “Urrk.” Pordiik raised his nose skyward, in symbolic surrender. “Bud tey tey haff te transponder.”

  “And Stensini knew the codes. He’s probably dead.” She sighed. “You know, for a while I thought Anton Brand was an idiot for sending us to find a few thousand Ickies on a whole planet. How could we find them if they hid? Now I know I’m the idiot. He knew the Ickies would come looking for us—he just didn’t figure I’d fuck it up so bad.” She grimaced. “Live and learn.”

  “Learn otter ting ting,” Pordiik said, pushing himself up with the extended stock of his machine pistol. It was time to police up and move out. “Learn not to look at my tail tail with knife and trophee in mind,” he concluded.

  Ber Togren stood thinking for a moment. True enough, she conceded. Brotherhood of the about-to-die, that’s us.

  Stensini’s face looked hollow and gaunt and mad-eyed on the screen. Better than mine, Ber Togren thought bleakly. Much better than Yertiik’s, which was naked and eyeless. Not much was left of the rest of him, although he wasn’t quite dying, since the wounds had been inflicted carefully under antiseptic conditions. Saliva worked around the thin sagging carnivore lips, and a trickle of sound.

  “—so tell them, you stupid bitch, tell them I’m telling them the truth!”

  Stensini was screaming, and she cut the gain down on him. It was understandable, of course. From what he said they didn’t bother with lights, much. The Marine officer swallowed slightly: complete darkness, and the Ickies moving in it. . . .

  “Why don’t you believe Stensini’s code?” she said to the Ickie that had called itself Fighter Izader; his image held center screen. The interior of the transport was dark otherwise, the air blessedly clear. She needed to be able to think, and they had to spare the fuel to filter and compress.

  “Because the subordinate species has also given us a code, and several crucial symbols are different,” it said. There was a high whistling background; it was using a modulator to bring the vibrations of its tympani down to the level humans could hear. “This code was supplied only after extreme coercion,” Fighter was saying.

  They learn fast. This one speaks better Standard’n I do. But then, it had learned from Stensini and his techs. Ber Togren was a promoted ranker from a long line of grunts. Dad had had better things to teach her than upper-class diction. For a moment Yertiik’s face reminded her of the picture of Mom. Mom’s gnawed bones, at least. Quite possibly chewed on by Yertiik’s grandparent . . .

  “ . . . since the specimen put up such resistance, there are grounds to believe that it is speaking correct information. It is also evident that the human Stensini is a status rival of Ber Togren. We know status rivalry. Perhaps this status-conferring information is not shared within the genotype, but only with a noncompetitor subordinate species?”

  “The Weasel is just trying to save itself,” Stensini barked.

  “This is possible,” Fighter agreed.

  “Why should I confirm or deny?” Ber Togten said softly.

  “You and your genesharers will die soon, without reproduction,” the Ichton said seriously. “We have that which you need for survival. If you can survive for some time, your Fleet will send rescuers. If we have your ship, we will depart. The people have no use for us, but we will go elsewhere to expand the realm of the people; we have proven our fitness. Thus all benefit from a temporary truce.” The Ichton was leaning forward; Ber Togren had an eerie feeling it was desperately trying to convey sincerity.

  She sighed, looking at Yertiik. Beyond help. “Yes, there’s only one sensible answer,” she said.

  Fighter looked up. The humans and their subordinates were grouped nearby, and the thundercrack across the sky bespoke a hypersonic transit. He signaled to the technician, and mentally inventoried the huge piles of supplies; they must take all that was practicable, for a primitive world. The hatchlings whistled through the lattice of their traveling cages, already becoming torpid with traveling-aestivation.

  “You shall awake to a boundless feast,” he murmured, and watched the tech’s manipulators touch the keyboard.

  “Kali damn you, Yertiik,” Ber Togren said, looking down at the limbless body, still barely breathing. Khalia were tough. She was glad he was unconscious, though; they felt pain, too. “You didn’t leave me any fucking choice at all.”

  Across the shallow valley from her, the Ichton was ordering the code transmitted. Yertiik’s, and quite genuine.

  Fighter looked up. It had been worth the effort, worth resisting the temptation to curl up and dream away the effort and grief and pain. He had won, for his people—his own people.

  For a moment there was sunlight.

  GUNG HO

  by Judith R. Conly

  Grandmother’s children cut their teeth on Fleet medals,

  on glory tales of conquest and heroic sacrifice,

  of battle companionship grown to life bond

  and heart’s partner exploding in tragic loss

  along the mine-studded course to stable alliance.

  Father’s comrades gleamed with the reflected glow of legend,

  and smugly accepted inherited tranquility

  with eyes averted from parents’ unsightly scars.

  Their patrols wore tracks in the space between the stars,

  and their shift-end dinners appeared on schedule.

  We, the restless heirs of memory and routine,

  trained to revere past generations’ rites of valor,

  retrace history-blessed patterns of combat

  with no adversaries but our ancestors’ shades

  and the boredom-born hazards of careless assumptions.

  With erstwhile enemies who have echoed our yawns,

  now we congregate in decades-suppressed anticipation.

  Through the battered lens of new neighbors’ desolation

  we gain grief-focused perception beyond united borders

  and rediscover our uniforms’ peace-deferred promise.

  Together we gather, admiral-shriven of guilt in our joy,

  excitement-fueled, to transport our sphere of protection

  in defense of disparate strangers’ kindred cause.

  To repel the ravenous avalanche of devastation,

  we launch our laser-bright ranks toward victory.

  CIVILIANS

  One of the greatest assets of the Hawking was also the source of the greatest complications to its performance. This was the large number of civilian specialists and merchants that comprised nearly half of the battlestation’s inhabitants. While technically under martial law when in a war zone such as Star Central, these were still civilians who were unused and unwilling to become very military.

  Among the most difficult types of civilians for the Fleet to deal with were the dozens of top scientists who had joined the mission for a wide range of reasons. Often eccentric and aware that they were terribly vital, some of these civilian experts often had to act as the sole resource for their specialty for the entire station. With the round-trip from Star Central to the nearest Alliance world taking nearly a full year, the analysis of vital information often had to depend on the insights of a single individual.

  BLIND SPOT

  by Steve Perry

  Gil was inserting a smokestack on the model of the Toya Maru when the woman walked into his shop. The model was of a Japanese ferry that
had sunk in the Tsugaru Strait on Earth in 1954, killing over eleven hundred people. He held the tiny stack in place long enough for the bond to set before he put the miniature vessel down on his bench and ordered the work light to dim. The voxlume obediently dialed itself down by half and the pix he was using for reference faded from the tabletop.

  The woman was tall, wearing green skintights that showcased a sthenic and most attractive figure, and he guessed she was about his age, thirty. Her jet hair was chopped short, worn very curly, and her features were not quite balanced enough to be called classically beautiful. Her nose was a tad too long, her lips a bit too full, her green eyes large and on the edge of sanpaku, the tiniest bit of white showing under the irises. No, not classically beautiful, but the combination of features was synergistic and quite striking. Amazing that the Hawking was large enough so that he had never seen her before. And surely he would remember if he had.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m looking for M. Gil Sivart.”

  “You’ve found him.”

  The woman glanced around, and if she was impressed with what she saw, it didn’t show. Gil’s model shop was deep in the Dark Blue small-biz section, halfway to the hull. The place was not much bigger than the main room of a personal residence cube, jammed between the much larger cloned spidersilk shop and the kung fu school, but it suited Gil’s needs. It didn’t require a lot of room to build ZZZ-scale models—a couple of magnifying cams, a few microsurgery tools, and a moldmaker table would just about do it. Of course, there were some exhibits set up, but a two-centimeter-long version of the Titanic or the Hsin Yu under a magnifier hardly needed a landing bay for display.

  “Were you looking for a model?” he prompted.

  She sighed. The words tumbled out, all in a rush: “No. I need your help. Somebody murdered my lover and I want you to find out who.”

  Gil opaqued the front window, the plastic going indigo to match the level color, and had his security computer lock the door. “Have a seat,” he said.

  The woman sat.

  “You are . . . ?”

  “Linju Vemeer. I work in sensor construction on Bright Green, that’s J1.”

  “Well, M. Vemeer, I watch newsproj. I don’t recall hearing anything about a murder.”

  “It was a week ago,” she said. “A robot on Orange 5 pinned Hask to a hatch and . . . crushed him.” Her emotions welled, but did not spill into tears. Gil could feel her pain almost as a tangible thing in the air.

  “I do remember something about that,” he said quietly. “A terrible accident. Near the hull.”

  “It wasn’t an accident, M. Sivart. Hask was too careful a man to let a drone just roll up and kill him!”

  “Have you said so to ISU?”

  “Yes, loud and repeatedly. Internal Security thinks I’m a grieving mate whose brains have been short-circuited by my loss, though they didn’t put it quite like that.”

  “Why should I think otherwise?”

  She looked at him. “You’re a pretty large man and you work out, right?”

  “I have an arrangement with the kung fu school next door, yes.”

  “You would go maybe a hundred eighty-five centimeters tall and, about ninety, ninety-one kilos?”

  “Pretty close to that.”

  “Could you stop a C-class drone, a sweeper, say, from pushing you off a walkway?”

  “I expect so.”

  “Well, Hask is—was—ten centimeters taller and fifteen kilograms heavier than you, M. Sivart. He was a weight lifter, he could benchpress almost three hundred and twenty kilos. He could have torn that drone apart if he had seen it coming, certainly he could have pushed it away or flipped it over.”

  “If he had seen it coming,” Gil said.

  “His back was pinned against the hatch,” she said. “He was looking right at the thing that killed him. He couldn’t have missed it.”

  Gil thought about that for a second. Yes, that seemed on the face of it odd. Still, this was out of his area of expertise. “I’m afraid I couldn’t be of much help to you. I sometimes do favors for people, to facilitate the, ah, return of certain things that have . . . gone missing, when nobody wants ISU to get involved, but I don’t have any official standing. Station authorities might take a dim view of somebody meddling in an ISU investigation.”

  “There is no investigation,” she said. Her voice was bitter. “How could you interfere with something that isn’t happening?”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “I can pay you whatever you ask,” she said. “Hask left me his insurance. DOJ—death on the job—pays a quarter of a million stads. I’m rich—but he’s gone.”

  “It’s not the money—” he began.

  “Look, I don’t have anybody else! Please!”

  Gil looked at her. She was in pain. She was going to start crying in a second and this was obviously something she needed to do to get past this tragedy. A vital man, her lover, had been cut down unexpectedly. She had to deal with that and make some sense of it, only she couldn’t accept the explanation. So here she was, asking him for his help. That was usually his problem, he couldn’t turn away from somebody who really needed him. Especially women who were not-quite-classically-beautiful. A character flaw, no doubt, but one he had learned to live with, being that he didn’t have any choice. So what would it hurt if he asked a few questions? He could talk to the cools and the medics, likely confirm what they thought, and make Linju Vemeer feel as if she had done all she could to put her dead lover to rest. It was little enough. Besides, he was a puzzle addict, and there was a little piece here that didn’t seem to fit. He would worry about that until he found out where it went.

  He looked at her and nodded. “All right. I’ll check into it.”

  Now she did start to cry. “Thank you,” she said. “Oh, thank you.”

  Accident reports were generally unclassified, and Gil had no trouble downloading the file and storing it in his personal flatscreen. He scanned the text, scrolling through it rapidly. It seemed straightforward enough. Burton Haskell, aged thirty-one T.S., had been found by a coworker in the induction space between the third and fourth hulls on Red 2 one week past. He was apparently dead upon discovery—here was the medical report, cause of death a crushing chest injury that ruptured the heart. M. Haskell had been an inspector/supervisor for two years, a sensor installer for a military hitch for four years before that, and had worked in other aspects of electronic construction since graduation from secondary ed, having been with the Hawking since construction began. No brothers or sisters, parents both deceased in a shuttle accident ten years back. Not officially married, but an SO of record, Linju Vemeer, listed as beneficiary on his insurance policy.

  Gil smiled, his mind working. The classic triangle of any crime was constructed of three sides: means, motive, and opportunity. A quarter of a million HS standards was certainly motive. But Gil didn’t think Linju had killed her lover, not if the cools had signed off on it as an accident. She would have to be incredibly stupid to stir up an investigation if she were the killer and already cleared of any crime. She didn’t seem that stupid.

  He went through the rest of the information. ISU had sent a man as a matter of form, there was the name of the officer. Here was the medic’s name and that of the worker who had found the body. He would start there. Assembling a puzzle was not all that difficult if you had a knack for it. Like constructing a tiny model, it was simply a matter of basic logic. First, you gathered pieces, then you put them together. If they didn’t fit, you went out and found some others that would.

  Gil glanced at his chronometer. A couple of hours before midshift change. He could take a lift up to Dark Green and enjoy a nice stroll to the medical center. Or he could go all the way up to Orange, to the ISU substation and locate the investigating cool and see what he had to say. Or walk to the hull and catch the slant tube to Bright Green and the coworker. In truth, he could visit all these people via the com; he could link and find out what he wanted wit
hout ever leaving his shop. But there was no substitute for personal contact, he had found. Pheromones didn’t traverse the com, neither did subtle body language, and sometimes these things told you more than words.

  All right. He would go and gather a few pieces of this puzzle and see what they looked like.

  The air in the induction hull felt stale, it smelled faintly metallic, something like the injection mold Gil used to form model parts did when it was cooking permaplast. The supervisor had cleared him to talk to the man who’d found Hask.

  “M. Rawlins?”

  The man’s head was depilated and he had a mandala tattoo in shades of true red and blue inscribed on his bare scalp, making it hard to focus upon. He was thin, medium height, and wore installer’s recycled gray-paper coveralls and biogel slippers. According to his public information file, Rawlins had been working here for six months; before that, he had been employed by Kuralti Brothers, one of the larger commercial merchants in the galaxy, at various of their six branch outlets on the station, transferred in from one of their planetoid-class stores in the Tado System. He was a sensor installer, one of the dozen who had worked under the late Haskins.

  Without making it obvious, Gil tapped at his right breast pocket, activating the tiny ball recorder he carried there. True, it was a violation of civil privacy, but he was gathering information, not legal evidence; he’d never present the little steel marble recording to any official scrutiny, it was only for his personal use.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m Gil Sivart. I wonder if I might ask you a couple of questions about M. Haskins? I cleared it with your supe.”

  “You a cool?”

  “A friend of M. Vemeer’s.”

  Rawlins shook his head. “I feel sorry for her, you know, but Linju’s got a bug up her twat about this. Talking about somebody killing Hask.”

  “I understand you found him?”

  “Yeah, I was the first one to see him dead. I was scheduled EVA, to the outer hull to do security scanners, you know, Dopplers. The drone had squashed him against the V-wall lock.”