Battlestations

by S. M. Stirling

  The only thing that Neilson shot was a puzzled glance back toward the party he was escorting, and most particularly at the tweedy lady, who was now giving the impression that she wanted to be standing on a chair with her skirt pulled tight around her legs. Since the regulation coveralls were—for good or, in her bony, long-shanked case, ill—fairly form-fitting, and most certainly didn’t come equipped with any sort of skirt, this took some doing, but she managed all the same.

  “Shoot it, ma’am? Why would I want to do that?”

  “It’s some sort of nasty alien!” Quite apart from the wording of the Alliance charter, simply being alien had long ceased to be any good reason to shoot something. There was a very satisfying embarrassed pause as the woman straightened herself up, brushed herself down, and generally tried to pretend that nothing untoward had ever happened. It didn’t really work, but Neilson suppressed his grin and gave her the benefit of the doubt.

  “No, ma’am. That’s a Rover-SAC.”

  “A what?”

  “A Rover. A Semi-Autonomous Cleaner.”

  “Dear God, I thought it was alive.”

  Lieutenant Neilson breathed out gently through his nose, so that the breath could not be used for all the comments that came simmering up inside him. Finally, he allowed himself just one. “Ma’am, Fleet sentiologists have identified more than three hundred life-forms since the Hawking moved coreward. They’ve had wings, legs, fins, tentacles, gastropodal traction, and even gaseous substructures. But so far, no wheels.”

  “What does it do, Lieutenant?” Neilson shifted his gaze and shrouded everything behind it with a slow blink. That sort of question could only come from a career civil servant who hadn’t been listening to anything that anyone had said.

  “Sir, it cleans, sir.”

  “Are you telling us that this facility has spent fiscal revenue on self-propelled cleaning devices?”

  I just did. “Yes, sir.”

  “Lieutenant, have you any idea of how much such things cost?”

  I’m flight crew. Why should I? “No, sir. But probably much less than the expenditure of putting FODed equipment to rights. Foreign-object damage is something you just don’t want to know about, sir. Also I would guess that the Rovers cost less than maintaining a janitorial staff big enough to deal with a station of this size. Sir.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. Carry on.”

  Neilson knew the tone of that thank you, just as he knew the tone of the muttering that followed him down the corridor, and he was heartily glad that he was nothing more than a guide. Before this bunch left the battlestation, somebody somewhere on Hawking was going to be justifying the bars on their cuffs and the salary that went with it.

  “Why ‘semi-autonomous’?” said a dubious voice behind him.

  Because autonomous units won’t let their union members wash the windows, thought Neilson with a grin. “Sir, I think I could show you better than try to describe the difference. This way, please.”

  The control room wasn’t too far from their intended route, and it was as busy with humming readouts and glowing monitors as any other on the battlestation. Even though he knew what it was all about, Neilson found the place appropriately impressive, and from the noises at his back, so did the members of the commission.

  “What is this, Lieutenant? Internal security?”

  “No, sir.”

  “That man at the control board, with the joystick, is he some sort of pilot?”

  “No, ma’am. He’s a janitor.”

  “A what?”

  “A janitor, ma’am. He monitors the Rovers—on an intermittent basis—and makes sure that they’re only doing what they’ve been programmed for. Hence semi-autonomous.”

  “All of this”—the disbelief was palpable—“just to keep an eye on a lot of self-propelled vacuum cleaners? I’m very glad you brought us here, Lieutenant Neilson. This is exactly the sort of gross overspending that our commission was—”

  “Overspending, sir? Hardly. If anything, this facility’s undermanned. And the Rover-SAC isn’t a vacuum cleaner. At least, not just a vacuum cleaner.”

  “I think you’d better explain yourself, Lieutenant.” The voice had one of those deceptively gentle tones, like a razor blade concealed in soap. “This, this blatant display has done very little to favorably influence the commission so far as allocations of funds from the next fiscal year are concerned.”

  Meaning, give us good reason to pay, or we won’t.

  “Ma’am, the commission was supplied with all necessary documentation—” Neilson began.

  “Documentation is one thing, Lieutenant. Personal observation is another matter altogether. I know which I prefer.”

  Neilson took the insult—to himself, to the Fleet, to the veracity of the Service—without turning a hair. As one of the two Khalian commissioners wandered past, nosing and poking at things in a way that he would never have dreamed possible on an Alliance ship, hair was, however, much on his mind. If the commission wanted personal observation, they could have it. “Then, ma’am,” he said, “it might be worth your while to question Mr. Leary.”

  “Mister who?”

  Just the man sitting at the console. The one with Leary on his name tag. “The janitor, ma’am.”

  “Then bring him here.”

  “It would be better if the commission went to him, ma’am. He’s quite busy just at the—”

  “I said here, Lieutenant. And now.”

  “Ma’am, I really don’t think—”

  “Lieutenant Neilson, all this pretense of industry isn’t fooling anybody. Janitor Leary, come here please. . . .”

  Neilson backed hurriedly out of the cross fire as Leary, never impressed by Suits at the best of times, made it plain that he wasn’t going anywhere for anybody right in the middle of his shift. For just a second Neilson thought the old man was going to say why, but he needn’t have worried. In the tradition of janitors from long before man took his first faltering steps into space and left little trails of moondust that somebody had to sweep up, Leary subsided back over his controls, muttering as if they were somehow to blame.

  A Rover-SAC whirred by, paused ever so briefly, then meeped to itself as Leary hit the override and trundled on. Neilson winked at it, and grinned.

  “Janitor Leary,” said the tweedy woman, her thin veneer of patience wearing out after several fruitless attempts at being polite, “if you value your position on this battlestation, you’ll do as this commission requires, and do it now.”

  “Do it,” said Neilson, leaning over the console and tapping it with one finger. “Just make sure you’ve logged a record that you left your post subject to unnecessary duress, and McCaul can’t say a thing. No matter what happens.” Another Rover-SAC purred into the room, and, like the first one, hesitated as if trying to make sense of conflicting signals. Halfway out of his seat, the janitor reached out to his control board, but Neilson slapped it away. “Leave be,” he said briskly. “The Suits are waiting.”

  They weren’t the only ones. The Rover-SAC ambled along a bulkhead and scooped up a few minuscule scraps of garbage, but the little machine’s heart—or processor, anyway—didn’t seem to be in its work. Neilson watched it thoughtfully, wondering how something that was little more than a knee-high six-wheeled box of tubes and brushes could convey such an impression of nonchalant whistling. Every few seconds it stopped while its small sensor suite ran a check on its surroundings, almost as if it was expecting something to happen.

  Like, for instance, the duty janitor to explain what was and what was not genuine trash—except that the duty janitor was also trying to explain his existence to a group of unsympathetic civil servants. That meant the Rover-SAC had to make up its own tin brain, and in common with all such dim-witted machines, it reverted to default programming. Part of that default required the collection of loose fibers and particulate matter . . .

  . . . And it was unfortunate that one of the Weasels was halfway through a molt.

&n
bsp; As the Rover-SAC lunged at the Khalian’s left leg and started giving the limb a vacuum-and-rotary-brush grooming the like of which the Weasel had never experienced before in all its life, the Khalian jumped half its own height off the deck and shrilled something that its translator flatly refused to handle. It didn’t help matters that the Rover’s suction system was strong enough to keep it firmly attached and brushing away even when the Khalian left the ground, and within only a few seconds the leg had no further problems about shedding fur.

  At least, not until some grew back.

  As the rest of the commission stood dumbfounded and as Neilson and Leary came close to bursting in their attempts not to laugh, three more Rovers appeared in the doorway. The attentions of the first—still attached, still brushing, but working on the fleeing Weasel’s tail by now—had left enough particulate matter of one form or another that none of the cleaning machines hesitated even for an instant. With the merest hint of tire squeal, they made straight for the Khalian commissioners, chased both of them three times around the console, followed them through the door in a whirl of rotating brushes, then down the corridor and out of sight.

  “Of course,” said Neilson unsteadily, “we could do away with the janitor and refit the Rovers with artificial intelligence. You know, the stuff the military use. But Leary’s cheaper in the long run. . . .” He broke down in helpless sniggering for a few minutes, then hauled himself back to something like composure. “Either way, you’d better make your minds up soon. There’s three hundred Emry due on Hawking day after tomorrow, and the Rovers’ll want to brush down every one of them. . . .”

  IMPERATIVES

  by Judith R. Conly

  The twin siren calls of duty and desire

  have launched our legions of need-driven soldiers

  to conquer another hatchling-fragile foe.

  Their concern-rooted hold on bountiful homeland

  as precarious as their biped balance

  cannot muster sufficient strength to withstand

  our avalanche of dominating drive to victory.

  Performing devout service to instinct’s compulsion

  to protect and provide for potential mates

  and nourish the unborn heirs to our future,

  we cleanse our new nest of its erstwhile occupants

  and assemble the skeleton of our civilization

  to shield the female flesh that will fill it.

  Then, content with a world secured,

  we follow our obsession onward through the dark.

  Yet, even as we strive to pour further lengths

  of rainbow-blood road across the spectrum of stars,

  I cannot always succeed in suppressing

  vain idle speculation about the imperatives

  of those children of such alien swarms.

  COUNTERINTELLIGENCE

  When they conquered the Syndicate of Families at the end of the Khalian War (see The Fleet, Volumes One through Six) they had absorbed the Family-controlled worlds there into the Alliance. Now, two generations later, most former family members considered themselves patriotic Alliance citizens. Perhaps only the Schlein family had retained their antipathy for the Alliance and the Fleet. As the youngest of the major families, the Schlein had run the intelligence branch of their space navy. When the Alliance prevailed, Fleet Intelligence determined that they no longer needed the services of any part of the Schlein organization. But the Schlein refused to disband.

  After so many decades the Schlein family no longer engaged in active sabotage or outright attack on Alliance officials, but even seventy years later they still maintained a shadow organization based upon their old intelligence stations. It is hardly surprising that several Schlein descendants were ordered to join the civilian ranks on board the largest fighting station the Fleet had ever constructed. There to continue their tradition of passive resistance and dislike for the “Khalian traitors and oppressive Fleet.”

  Except for a distinctive success in planting a few agents among the Ichtons themselves, the Fleet intelligence branch had little success for the first two years of the defense. Driven by instinct to preserve and expand their race, captured Ichtons proved stubborn even in the face of death or mutilation. It fell to a renegade Schlein agent and embittered Gerson survivors to realize that the best way to counter instinct was with instinct.

  YOU CAN’T MAKE AN OMELET

  by Esther M. Friesner

  “Sundry alarums,” the drunken man muttered, “and diversions.” Peter Schlein tried to get off his bed and only succeeded in rolling himself onto the floor. Outside, the chaos that was officially, emphatically not anything for anyone on Green Eleven to concern themselves about thundered on.

  “Which is why they’ve got every last set of blunderfoot Fleetledeets in this whole godforsaken metal marble ram—ram—rampaging, that’s what, through the halls so an honest man can’t even have him a drink in peace without getting sort of killed. Four—four—four, I think, or was it five? Ah, fuck it, four cycles they been at it now, and still no one knows what all the whizmadoo’s about. A man’s got a right to know!”

  He staggered to his feet and leaned against the dear, familiar wall of his cabin. “Don’t you agree, O my muzzy brother?” he asked, apparently of the bulkhead. Had he been alone, he would have kissed it, glad to be safely home again, and to hell with looking like a candidate for the psychs.

  But he was not alone, nor was he actually having a nice chat with the wall.

  “It is not my place to say, sir,” came the rumbly reply. Big, solemn, brown eyes regarded Peter Schlein with such completely nonjudgmental acceptance for the man as he was—warts and all, constructive criticism be damned—that for an instant Peter wished at least three out of his seven ex-wives had been Gersons.

  That was the djroo speaking, of course. Only a drink as insinuating and deadly sly as djroo could convince Peter Schlein that he should have married a giant teddy bear. Djroo had an awfully strong voice. By cycle’s end it would be screaming inside his skull. Schlein already owed his life to the towering, fur-covered ursinoid presently staring at him. It was this same Gerson—Iorn by name—who had, on numerous occasions previous to this, figuratively saved Peter Schlein’s skin, soul, and sanity from the horde of miniature Mongols who wreaked hangover havoc every time the man crawled back under the djroo samovar and turned the tap open all the way.

  “Urrrh . . . Iorn, when you’ve got a spare seccie, would you mind mixing me up a little of that dee-lightful little spring tonic of yours?” Schlein sounded pitiful when he wheedled, but he had found it the tone of voice most likely to obtain promptest reactions from the Gerson. Orders, however politely couched, smacked of shouting, and shouting bespoke scenes. When Iorn was—assigned? bonded? given into Schlein’s service? Schlein couldn’t say which—he was briefed that it would be the politic thing to respect the Gersons’ cultural preference for not making scenes, even in private. Good advice, this, given the size of the average Gerson.

  The once-bright leading light of the Schlein family might have lost much, but political savvy was bred so deeply into his DNA that it would only abandon him five minutes after he was declared clinically dead.

  Which, he reflected, had almost happened.

  The Gerson turned from his contemplation of homo inebriensis and busied himself briefly in the very compact, very efficient, very frivolous, and most certainly very discreet kitchen-cum-bar at the far end of Schlein’s living quarters. A private kitchen—complete with the requisite accompanying pantry-supply channels of dubious legality—was the stuff of legend aboard the Hawking. It was an indulgence whose clandestine construction had required sizable “understandings” with the slickest of the Indie traders, but every time Schlein tasted Iorn’s latest culinary or potable concoction, a small, djrooless voice inside told him it had all been worth it.

  Even when the drink was going to taste as close to Khalia tailfur as this one.

  The work of moments produced a thick uberglas
beaker filled with a frothy, somewhat viscous solution the color of old cheese that was presented to Schlein on a silver tray. “Your tonic, sir.”

  “Uh . . . thank you, Iorn,” Schlein said. He downed the concoction in three gulps and shuddered as each swallow walloped the relative circadian daylights out of his stomach. He set the beaker down with much the same sense of relief at Duty Done as Socrates must have showed the hemlock.

  Freed now from the threat of alcoholic retribution, Schlein managed to add, “I mean . . . thanks for it all. Everything you did. Not just the tonic.” The words sounded inadequate, even to a man who was accustomed to giving short weight in all his personal dealings. “If you hadn’t come into the lounge just then, I think that nest-fouling Khalian would’ve done for me.” He addressed the bearlike Gerson in its own tongue—linguistic ability was what had landed Peter Schlein aboard the Hawking instead of in a richly deserved prison cell somewhere halfway back across the galaxy—but he dealt out the insult to his absent whilom opponent in its native language. Profanity for the Gerson, Schlein had learned, went paw in paw under the selfsame shunned aegis of making a scene.

  Iorn attempted to shrug his sloping, shaggy shoulders. It was not a gesture suited to Gerson anatomy, but the alien’s excruciatingly precise code of behavior encouraged him to make any effort necessary to treat with others in ways familiar to them. “It was my ghruhn, sir Schlein,” he replied. “My . . . pleasure.” He retired to the kitchen.

  The translation was even more inadequate than Schlein’s watery thanks, and the family man knew it. Ghruhn was more duty than pleasure, backed by the Gerson convention of doing what you had to do amiably, like it or not; but if you were Gerson you had damn well better make yourself like it. Ghruhn was how obligations—however unpleasant, distasteful, or downright revolting—were forcibly given both the mask and the substance of something the bounden party had wanted to do all along. As Schlein watched Iorn potter around with some mysterious new cookery project he reflected that next to the ghruhn-burdened Gerson, Old Earth samurai came off looking like a pack of whiny, self-indulgent shirkers.