Battlestations

by S. M. Stirling

  Which was why Schlein’s—servant? batman? bearman? aide-de-drunk?—Iorn had waded into a battle that was none of his instigation or concern and rescued him. Schlein had an abstruse sense of what was funny to say to a half-seas-over Khalian, the Khalian had a knife—surprising that was all it had—and Iorn had an unasked-for field day wiping up the floor of The Emerald with the weasely creature.

  “It doesn’t go with the job description, you know,” Schlein called at Iorn’s back as the Gerson popped a pan into the oven. An exotic, somewhat disturbing smell permeated the air until the recyclers kicked on and sucked it out. “Saving my neck. How’s the—uh—arm?”

  “It’s nothing.” Again Iorn attempted a shrug. He returned from the kitchen area and extended his hairy paw, the better to show off the expert job the medics had done. The shaved patch was almost unnoticeable, the stitches hidden by the same thick pelt that had thwarted or deflected much of the Khalian’s wild, drunken slashings.

  An uneasy silence fell between master and “man.”

  Then: “Will there be anything else you require of me, sir Schlein?” It was Iorn’s way of quitting for the day, as if this day had been no different from any other.

  “Hm? What?” Peter Schlein shook his head a little clearer. Iorn’s tonic prevented hangovers but didn’t do a damned thing toward diluting the immediate effects of strong waters. “You’re going?”

  “If there is nothing further required of me. Tomorrow is my day parted from you.” The Gerson phrased it so that his day off sounded like the saddest cycle of his life. Which was impossible, if you knew what the Ichtons had done to his home world. “May I be forgiven tomorrow’s service?”

  “But wait. Not so fast. How ’bout a re—re—reward, yes?”

  “It was my ghruhn,” Iorn repeated, and shambled for the door.

  In vino veritas, but Truth sometimes boots Common Sense clean out of the picture. Peter Schlein flung himself after the hulking Gerson and latched on to the creature’s left paw. “Hold on a seccie, friend. I mean—family honor, you know. My life—much or little as they care for it back home—it’s still—I’m Schlein, dammit! I’ve got to give you something!”

  “Kitchen privileges,” said the Gerson levelly, “such as I presently enjoy are quite sufficient, sir Schlein.” Iorn gave his nominal master a hard stare, a gaze with enough ice water in it to shock the family man into near sobriety. Schlein released his grip on the huge teddy bear’s paw, both of them behaving as if the recent outburst had been purely accidental, the participants innocent bystanders.

  “Yes, but—but you’ve already got those. At least let me have some of my Household escort you home,” Schlein muttered. “All that to-do out there”—he nodded toward the door that gave on the Green deck corridor—“I think I remember what a rough time you had getting me back from The Emerald, checkpoints and all, never would’ve happened if I’d had the foresight to take Household along. Ex-Fleetledeets to a man, they are. To a woman. Thing. That’s their whole job, after all, dealing with other military hoseheads. Why there’s all this botheration going on in the halls and no hard info . . . hmph! Some silliness about searching for—I don’t rightly know what.” He shook his head. Gently.

  “Ichtons, sir,” said the Gerson with as much emotion as a human butler might say socks. “They’re loose, you know.”

  “WHAT!” Too late, too late the netherbrained reminder that shrieking your head off in front of a Gerson is sure to be construed as Making a Scene. Peter Schlein’s face went chalky enough to blend with the no-color of his platinum-blond hair. Had he owned a chin, it would have been trembling madly. “D’you mean to say the Ich—the Ich—the bloodthirsty fiends have escaped?” He cast his infantile blue eyes upward toward either Heaven or the Fleet installations on the Hawking’s upper decks.

  “Only two of them, sir,” Iorn replied. “If rumor is correct. There have been no official statements issued.”

  Schlein pressed a hand to his brow. It came away clammy. “And they—the Fleetledeets—they’re searching this level for them?”

  “All levels. Thoroughly. It will take much time.” From the oven, a bell went tling! “Ah, good, it’s done. I almost forgot.” The Gerson showed his fangs in an Earth-approximate smile and headed for the kitchen as if Ichtons escaped strictest Fleet custody every day.

  “Oh, don’t bother, don’t, I’ll take care of my own dinner tonight,” Schlein said hastily. His skinny form was far more agile than the Gerson’s fearsome bulk and he nimbly darted past Iorn to reach the oven first. “It’s the least I can do for you.” He opened the hatch and reached in.

  Later he couldn’t recall whether his shriek of pain had been louder than Iorn’s bulkhead-rattling roar. He remembered thinking that he did not recognize the cooking vessel he pulled from the oven, that ordinary pans were not supposed to retain heat that way, and that a sensible man would certainly let the offending dish drop, even if it did mean that it shattered and splattered all over the floor. There were people to clean up the mess after. When you were Schlein there was always someone else to clean up after you.

  He really didn’t think Iorn was justified in batting him so hard across an already weakened skull that every light in the Peter Schlein private universe flickered out.

  He woke up with Iorn’s face looming over him, the Gerson’s breath smelling like a bizarre combination of old meat and violets. Another memory came tippytoeing into his battered brain, one of an All Decks Alert stench wafting up from the cook pan he had so unceremoniously dropped.

  He tried to sit up and found it remarkably easy. His head was clear, all vestiges of the djroo purged from his system by Iorn’s magical blend. That was to the good: he would have hated to confront his present situation drunk, because it was hardly bearable cold sober.

  “Where the—?” He turned his head this way and that, but it was too dark to make out any object farther than arm’s length from his eyes. He could feel that the bed he rested on wasn’t your standard Hawking-issue bideawee. It rustled too much, was loosely covered with a coarsely woven throw, and again, the smell—!

  “Sir Schlein honors us,” said Iorn to the dark.

  “Us?” the family man could only repeat, at a loss.

  “Honor is done,” came the response, and the sound of large bodies with the tip-off Gerson gait of shamble-rock approaching. Two more of the huge ursinoids emerged from the blackness to stand beside Iorn, though one was considerably smaller than the other.

  For the first time in a short life ill spent, Peter Schlein felt like the goldy-haired girlie in the nursery tale his madonnamech had played for him at bedtime in the fargones. The bears in the story had wound up tearing the juvie trespasser limb from limb, in the righteous vindication of the private property laws, but that was only a cautionary fabula.

  Wasn’t it?

  “Welcome to my home, sir,” said Iorn in a voice so neutral Peter was hard-pressed to divine whether his once-harmless servant had mayhem in mind. “Our thanks for your presence.” He spoke his native tongue here.

  “Think nothing of it,” Schlein replied in kind, with only the slightest hesitation. In truth he was very good at what he did, linguistically, when he was functional enough to do it. If he sounded a bit dubious, it was more from wondering what Iorn had in store for him now.

  We’re all the way in down-below Violet, where these eetees have their home-from-homes, he thought. Which explains this away-in-a-manger excuse for a bed. Violet Nineteen deck, maybe even Twenty, for all I know. Half the world away from home for me, and all the way to hell and gone from those top-crawling Fleetledeets for sure. Never did think I’d want to see one, but autres temps, autres temptations. Too easy to ask how he got me here. The sight of Peter Schlein being hauled unconscious around the Hawking’s so damn common the kiddies set their chronos by it. Anyway, once we hit Indigo levels, the quartermasters don’t look twice at anything they can’t check in or ship out, and here in Violet where there’s just eetees and cold, co
ld storage, who’s going to interfere with a full-grown Gerson on business bent? Mutation! Whatever the fuck I did to twist Iorn’s tailypo, he’s got me at his mercy for it now, in spite of all this finicky show of ceremonial hospitality. If things could get any worse than this for me, I’d bleeding like to know how!

  And somewhere the God that family Schlein had written off so long ago as a poor business partner laughed and complied.

  “Sir Schlein will forgive us if the lighting of our humble home is less bright than what he is used to,” Iorn went on. “It is an unfortunate necessity. Among the Gerson, guest-right is divine, and first-come guests must be accommodated in all things, even at the expense of later-come guests’ preferences.”

  “Then . . . I’m not the only one you’ve—” Careful, Peter, careful! A Gerson can rip your arm off single-pawed and absentminded. “—invited?”

  “Didn’t I tell you he was wise, Mate?” In the dark, Iorn sounded cheery enough. “Perceptive. I always said how deeply I was indebted to the psychs for having granted me my employment as— What did they call it?”

  “Therapy,” came a second growly voice, a whit less throaty than Iorn’s. “So that you would refrain from future outbursts of slaughter.”

  Iorn chuckled, Peter cringed. “All wisdom to the psychs,” the Gerson said. The words unadorned were a simple, ritual statement of high regard for the brainpokers, but Peter Schlein picked up on the linguistic music of intonation that translated Iorn’s remark to mean, I took those fools to market and back and came home wearing their asses for a hat!

  Peter’s eyes made adjustments. The Gerson whom Iorn called “Mate” plopped herself down beside him so that he could see her a little better. Her muzzle was somewhat blunter than Iorn’s, though her fangs looked just as sharp. The smallest Gerson pressed itself close to her back. There was more glittering around its head than Schlein could put a reason to. In the warmth of Iorn’s quarters he felt cold.

  And then Iorn gave him cause to feel colder. “Sir Schlein is kind, as always, Mate. You will learn this as I have, the longer he honors us with his company. Certainly one who speaks our tongue so well—taking into account the Ten Degrees of Courtesy almost as well as a homeborn—will offer us his help in entertaining our first-come guests as they deserve.”

  Something chittered and whined in the dark. Something large rustled in a corner of the room that Schlein still couldn’t see.

  “Ah!” Iorn sounded pleased. “They are hungrier. They are almost always hungry.” He lumbered off and the shadows swallowed him.

  “They’re here,” Schlein said, half to himself. “Ichtons.” There was no denying it, once he got past the mental obstacle of a flatly pronounced It’s impossible! Peter Schlein had once been dragged along up-level to view some of the Hawking’s prized captives, in the empty Fleetledeet hopes that the Family man might be persuaded to enlist his considerable linguistic skills in the cause of in-depth decoding of Ichton communications. No one had to tell Schlein or the Fleetledeets that there’s more to translate in a language than merely what is said.

  He would never forget the skin-crawling sight of the captive Ichtons, and he would never forget their smell! Which was why he didn’t need his eyes to confirm what his nose had just told him. Impossible or not, they were here. Looking back, Schlein believed it was the horrific thought of spending so much time near that god-awful Ickie stink that made him refuse to cooperate with the Fleet. He had declined the honor by pricing his services in a way to make the family back home proud, and gave the despised popgunners to know that if they coerced him, he’d be only too happy to translate . . . wrong. There were other, lesser linguists aboard the Hawking, some even Fleet personnel. None as good as Schlein, but good enough to make do. They let him off.

  Who would do the same for him now? The chirring in the darkness grew louder, accompanied by a bone-shattering clashing sound. “How in the name of downtrade he managed to bring two full-grown Ickies—oh, God, they’re really fucking here!”

  “Yes, they really fucking are. And what we are to fucking do about it I do not fucking know,” said Mate. Schlein hadn’t expected a response at all, not from her, less so in his own tongue, least of all using that sort of language. What he could make out of her expression was proud and self-satisfied. “Iorn has been teaching me,” she explained, pleased with herself. “To learn to address all guests in their own speech is my ghruhn. Oh! Apologies. It is my fucking ghruhn.”

  Peter Schlein made a mental note to stand vigil over his own vocabulary around Iorn in future. If “future” was a word he could still use as more than a bad joke.

  “Do you—do you suppose your ghruhn might include explaining why your hubby has turned your happy home into an illegal Ichton shelter?” he asked. “Or why he decided to invite me to join this little exercise in getting us all deep-spaced when the Fleetledeets finally get their search parties all the way downball to this level?” Sotto voce he added: “If there’s any shred of my nerves left after finding out I’m in the same room with the fuzzybuggies.”

  “You have no ease, honored sir? You fear our first-come?” Her voice was richer and deeper than Iorn’s. Courtesy served, she had returned to speaking Gerson. The little one at her back—little only beside herself and Iom—slipped around to insinuate itself into her lap. It was pretty big for such babyish snuggling, but Schlein reflected that he really didn’t know enough about how fast Gersons matured to be a critic.

  “Well, my dear hostess, to tell you the truth—”

  It was then he saw it. Total dark would have been a blessing, even if it left Schlein blind, but there was light enough to let his eyes suck more and more sight from the blackness—the pattem if not the color of Mate’s tunic, the shimmer of moisture at the tip of her snout, the gentle curve of the paws cradling the smaller Gerson to her chest. Now through the pounding waves of sickness in his gut he could not keep himself from staring even while he prayed not to see.

  Half the child’s head was torn away, replaced by a silvery shell that glittered with a compact array of multicolored lenses and telltales. The bearish snout was gone, and the lower jaw; a simple, flexible tube ran from the convex metal muzzle cup-shaped like a surgeon’s mask down into the throat incision. Idle clasps and fasteners dangled from the gap where the small Gerson should in a rational universe still have a right upper limb.

  “He will not wear it,” Mate said softly. Eyes fully used to the dark, she had seen where Schlein’s gaze ultimately came to rest. “The medics have been very kind to us—our debt endures—but he refuses to wear the ’tronic arm that they have made him. It is too hard, he says. It reminds him too much of—”

  How can he say anything? Schlein wondered, staring at the nearly faceless creature in Mate’s arms. Aloud he said, “They did this to him? The Ichton?”

  Mate’s heavy head nodded. “Iorn fought with the rest of our city; no good. We were able to escape to the caverns, awaiting help, but it was so deep, so dark in there, so close and crowded—” Her paw tenderly stroked the metal face cup as if it were responsive flesh. “Nn’ror was always impetuous, like his father; a leader. He would not mind his elders. He stirred up the others of his year, brought them out of the caverns by a secret way—spying on the enemy, he said, to learn their weakness so that someday he and his followers could attack them, defeat them, drive them away.”

  “They caught him?” It really was a stupid question.

  “All of them, his year-friends, Nn’ror, all. It was yet in the time before they made our world ash. They reaved the surface, then. As nearly as we could have any news, we heard they meant to use all they could find for the maintenance of their hatchlings.” Her gaze fixed itself on the child’s mangled face. “Ours was always a good world for raising children.”

  Hesitantly, as if acting on its own, Schlein’s hand stretched out to touch the small Gerson’s ravaged face. Mate saw, and nodded ever so slightly, allowing it. The child flinched away when Schlein’s fingers came within b
rushing distance of its shell—sensors in place and functioning, top-of-the-line synthetic nerve replacement, nothing too good for these martyrs to the Ichton scourge. Every sentient on the Hawking knew what the Gersons had suffered; everyone was more than willing to make excuses and allowances for anything a Gerson survivor might do.

  Which explained, perhaps, why Iorn had managed to spirit off the captive Ichtons unhindered, undetected. Folks tended to look the other way when a Gerson passed, going about his business. If we give them what they need or want, maybe they’ll go away, Schlein thought. And if they go away, we won’t have to look at them, and remember what they went through, and live with the dead scary thought that such things can happen in this galaxy and maybe—not so big a maybe—maybe next time we’ll be the ones it happens to.

  “Almost all the others were fully . . . taken by the hatcheries when Iorn and the others were able to learn where they were and stage a raid. It was easier than they hoped. They did not yet know that word had come to the invaders to move out, that the resistance elsewhere had made our home not worth the effort to subdue, that it would be burnt in retribution and example. There were so many other worlds to be had, so easily. Nn’ror and perhaps two others of his year-friends still lived, left behind with those few eggs that had not hatched. Those two—” Mate shuddered. “Those two Iorn himself had to kill.”

  Speechless, Schlein tried to force an unwilling mind to form a picture of towering, shaggy, benevolent-looking Iorn killing children of his own kind. What could bring any sane, feeling being to that point? Part of him didn’t want to know, part would go mad if he stayed ignorant.

  “Why—why did he kill—?”

  “For kindness. They could not live long with what parts of them remained uneaten,” said Mate, and Peter Schlein vomited noisily into the bedding.

  Peter Schlein never dreamed he would turn out to be such an apt short-order cook.