“Sir,” he said, but I wasn’t listening to what he said, only to the metal in his voice. “You don’t understand what I said. (Click) But don’t let that bother you. (Click) I do my job. (Whirr-click)”
I didn’t reply. The hatch on the entrance tube was open and I left. Up in the control room, Quail brought up the subject of Willis again, but I couldn’t argue about it anymore. After this mission, Willis had to go.
Forty hours out from Ceres, we had to change the beam. We had been pulling ourselves along smoothly toward Jupiter with the Monarch’s tractor beam, but we needed a few hours of pull toward the sun to shift our vector. Quail spoke his directions down the intercom in as emotionless a voice as he could manage, but the contempt was still there. He had no use for anyone who would not help him fight. I had gotten him to take sleeping tablets, but he never stopped worrying about Marine. Willis kept his replies to a minimum. He did his job like a machine. The final piloting change was switching the propulsion beam from tractor to pressor and realigning it on Jupiter for another forty hours of deceleration.
When we finally cut that beam, the eta navigation beacon was strong in the nav receiver. Quail and I were at our duty stations. He wanted a short course to get us a little closer to the beacon, and I was hunting rocks. Willis walked into the room. We both looked up in surprise.
Quail growled, “What are you doing up here?”
He shrugged. “I thought it might be a good idea to find out what you were doing.”
“Well, you can just crawl back into your hole and–”
“No, Quail,” I interrupted. It looked as if I was to be the one to keep personal friction to the minimum until our job was done, in spite of how I felt. “Let him stay. He’ll find out soon enough. I don’t think we can destroy the beacon without his help.”
A ripple of concern passed over Willis’s face. “Destroy the beacon?”
I nodded. “Yes. We live in the rocks. Quail could navigate the Great Circle by instinct alone. But if we can break up the nav-beacon system, the Terran ships won’t be able to use their fancy automated nav systems. They will have to shoot the stars, and it’s a safe bet that not many will know how to do that. At worst, this operation will slow them down.”
Willis thought a moment, then: “That beacon is Terran property. Destroying it would be a felony, with possible civil suits caused by the lack of its services. Have you thought about that?”
Quail exploded. “Of all the ridiculous… This is war, man!”
“Has there been a declaration of hostilities?” Willis displayed a machinelike calm. His face was undecipherable.
I tried to explain, before his manner drove Quail to blows. “Look, Willis, the Belt has never had a formal government, other than an occasional commission the Terran Assembly has tried to palm off on us. The closest we have are city governments such as Ceres Port. This is more a civil uprising than a formal war, but it is no less real. The Monarch isn’t the only ship out taking action. Almost every ship in the Belt is doing something. When the Terran fleet arrives, the real fighting will start. Nobody will ever consider this a criminal action. Quail is right: This is war.”
Willis said nothing, but he frowned as he turned and left. I threw a questioning look at Quail, but he shrugged in puzzlement. Neither of us could make him out. Right then, neither of us cared.
Our problem was to destroy the beacon. Thirty years before, the Terran engineers who had set them up built well. In all, there were better than a score of the monsters scattered through the Belt and in orbits around the nearer planets. Each was four times as massive as our ship and equipped with an impressive automated pressor-beam system to deflect the rocks that happened to wander too close. Inside their computers were supposedly a hundred strategies to handle everything from pebbles to Ceres itself. I had never heard of any of them being damaged in any way. It would have been easier if we had packed a laser with us, but we were a mining/survey ship, not a battlewagon.
Quail griped about that. “Jake Coro should’ve sent an armed ship, or at least a couple more like us, so we’d have a chance to overload the beacon’s defenses. As it is, even if we throw a bunch of rocks at it, our power will run out before its will.”
“You know he would have if he could’ve spared the ships. Face it, Quail—our job is important, but it is merely an afterthought compared to his job of drumming up enough ships to put together a defense around Ceres that isn’t a joke. He wouldn’t have sent an armed ship out here for anything.”
Quail nodded at my words, but he was right about the problem we faced. No matter what we threw at it, the eta beacon could repel it with ease. And with Jupiter so close, it could recharge its power accumulator as easily as we could. There was no doubt that its capacity was greater. But, somehow, we had to find a way…
The intercom clicked on. Quail’s head swung around as quickly as mine. Willis? He never calls us first.
“Mr. Ster? Are there any rocks in the close vicinity?”
I had my screen covered with the geotyping files of every rock that was likely to be near, looking for a good one to throw. “No. Nothing over a kilogram in a hundred kilometers. Why?”
“Well, my mass readings down here show a ship-sized mass hanging just off the beacon. You may have your war sooner than you thought.”
I glanced instinctively at the gaping hole in the console where the mass detector had been mounted before we moved it down to the engine room. I wished I had it back. I swiveled back to my screen and punched up radar and visual. Nothing. If there is a ship there, I thought, it is very well hidden. I didn’t want it to be there.
Quail said something vile across the room. I looked at him bending over the radar. He looked at me. “He’s right! There’s a double doppler. Terrans, just waiting there, watching us.”
“They have to be painted black, then; there’s nothing on the visual.”
“That clinches it.” He hit his fist on the console. “It’s a warship.”
I put the visual on the big center screen. The image showed the bright sunlight reflecting off the beacon, with the tiny disk of Jupiter behind it. Other than a scattering of stars, nothing else showed in the dark. “What do we do now?” The Terrans had planned better than I had given them credit. Anything we could try now had even less chance of success. They could even attack us.
“We’ve got to do something!” Quail paced, glaring up at the screen. He wasn’t scared. The sight made me feel better, although I could see no hope.
“But what can we do, Quail? They’ve got lasers and sucker bombs as sure as anything. They can blast us to vapor in seconds. And you can be sure they’ll act if we try anything. They aren’t dead out there!”
“I don’t know, but we have to do something! If this beacon is protected, then so are the others. This shows the Terrans need the beacons, so that makes it all the more important that we take this one out. The rest of the Belt is counting on us to do our job. We have to do it. I’m not going to have my wife and kids sent back to Earth as prisoners.”
Not if I can help it, either, I said to myself. Quail and I had always backed each other up. I was not going to stop then. Breathing in his determination was like pure oxygen.
The intercom clicked. “Mr. Gren, plot a course back the way we came. Hurry, before they come at us.”
What! I thought. No!
Quail’s face darkened. “I will do no such thing, you coward! We’ve got a job to do and we’ll do it if it kills us!”
“Mr. Gren,” he said in his naggingly calm voice, “you will do as I say, or I will try to plot the course myself from down here with the mass detector.”
I could have strangled him! It was a critical time. It could be disastrous to give up.
Quail yelled, “Over my dead body! We’ve got to stay and fight!”
“I must remind you I have control down here. Your controls of the engine and the accumulator all route through me. I have secured the latches on my hatch down here. You’d be wasting your
time to fight about it. I repeat, plot a reverse course, immediately. That is the only thing that will save us.”
I was thinking dark thoughts of the welding rig stowed in the hallway storage bin and what I would do to him. It would be difficult to sneak it down the engine-room connecting tube, but it could be done. I would not have a mutineer on the Monarch. No way. She was mine, mine and Quail’s.
Quail was yelling abuse at the intercom, but he was weakening. Willis, for a little while, did have control of the ship. I fingered the silent keys on my console, spelling out a message to Quail on the screen:
LET WILLIS MOVE US OUT OF RANGE OF THE TERRAN SHIP, FOR NOW. COOPERATE. WE WON’T BE GOING FAR!
Quail got my meaning. He reluctantly got down to the business of plotting the line toward Jupiter that the pressor beam would follow. It was too risky a maneuver to let Willis plot his own; the mass detector didn’t have enough resolution to bull’s-eye a planet at that distance. For a change, Willis was on top of everything we did. The course was a simple one, but he questioned everything, down to the exact location of the beacon and the Terran ship. The suspicion was overpowering that he was some kind of Terran spy. I don’t know what Quail was thinking. I saw him hesitate. He looked at me and I shook my head. We could easily feed him inaccurate data, but that wouldn’t help us. Quail frowned deeply and gave him the last of the data. I waved his attention to my screen again.
HE MAY HAVE ENGINE CONTROL, BUT WE…
Willis’s voice on the intercom interrupted, “Are you ready to activate?”
Quail’s answer was short and profane. I stepped into the following silence. I had to give him one last chance. “Willis? Why don’t you help us? We can do more than run away. I’m sure that I can talk Quail into taking you on as a partner after the war.” I frantically had to wave down Quail’s anger before he said something to alienate Willis even more. “Come on, Willis. You are a Belt man like us. Help us fight for our rights…”
Willis replied in a voice as flat as any machine’s: “Mr. Ster, we don’t have time for that now. Just tell me if the board is clear, so I can activate the beam.”
Quail spat out, “Yes, the board’s clear, you traitor!”
“Thank you.” His voice clicked off.
I swiveled back to my screen. Quail watched.
BUT WE HAVE CONTROL OF HIS AIR. FADE DOWN HIS OXYGEN AND THEN USE THE WELDER ON HIS HATCH.
Quail nodded. Doing so would be dangerous for Willis, but I was ready for him to take his chances. He was a mutineer in wartime.
A flicker of the indicators caught my eye. Willis had triggered the beam, sending its influence toward Jupiter at the speed of light. In twice the time it took the beam to get there, we would be moving. I glanced at the visual on the screen and noticed the beacon partially eclipsing Jupiter. Our beam had to be passing through it as well, although we were showing no acceleration yet. More of Willis’s machinelike control over the beam. I had heard that there were beam controllers who could make their projectors play such tricks.
I got up and watched over Quail’s shoulder as he carefully reset the air flow so that Willis would not notice the change until too late. It would take a while for it to act. I nodded my approval, and we sat down to await the beginning of the acceleration. My head was full of thoughts about Willis and the Terran ship and the beacon. I had an inspiration about how to attack the beacon and turned to my files to see how difficult doing so would be. I wanted to arrange a compressed bombardment, taking several days and many recharges to set dozens of rocks into high-speed collision courses, timed to arrive almost together, overloading the beacon’s defenses. Not even the Terran ship could help in such a hailstorm.
I glanced up at the beam indicators. Then I looked again, because what I saw the first time didn’t make any sense. I needed a second to get my mental bearings—suddenly everything looked wrong. Then everything focused. Three indicators were entirely off scale! As I watched, a fourth climbed to its danger point, and then past. I heard blood rushing in my ears. What is happening?
“Quail! Look!”
I knew nothing of the workings of the beam projector, but I could read Quail’s face. It went from puzzled to dead white!
He spun around and yelled at the intercom: “Willis! What are you doing? That’s a high-tension beam! Are you trying to blow us up? Stop it!”
There was no reply. Quail was out of his seat, heading for the welder’s storage bin. In seconds, the scorching tide of power Willis had evoked from Jupiter’s orbital motion was due to arrive. We would be nothing but vapor. I could only think stupidly that the oxygen shortage couldn’t have worked so quickly!
I was too confused to do anything but follow after Quail, although time had run out.
There was a flash of light. I saw my shadow on the wall before me. I turned.
On the big screen was a new sun. The image was saturated white with a growing ball of superheated gas where the beacon had been. I glanced at the radiation meter, just a tiny bit above normal. The explosion hadn’t been nuclear. Quail walked to his station and touched a control.
“That was the beacon,” he said. “And our beam is gone.”
I looked, startled, and the indicators that had scared me senseless were sitting calmly at their neutral positions. Willis! What did he do? I turned to the hatchway. There he was, watching the screen with that same undecipherable expression on his face.
He looked at me and asked, “Have you checked on our friend?”
It took me a second to think of what he meant, then I reached for the radar. I found it after a minute, red hot and tumbling sunward. The Terran ship must have been sitting right on top of the beacon when it exploded.
“But how?” I asked.
“It was the beam,” Quail answered.
Willis nodded. “I set the inflection voltage as high as the projector would go and kept the beam thin for maximum backlash. When the beam hit Jupiter, the energy of a head-on collision started back at us. At the last minute, I opened the beam and cut our accumulator out of the circuit. The only convenient place for the energy to go was into the beacon’s accumulator.”
“And it couldn’t take it,” I finished.
“It took quite a bit, before it blew.” Quail smiled. “That ship won’t bother us again.” He faced Willis and held out his hand. “I see I was wrong about you. Will you accept my apology?”
Willis backed off, suddenly sullen. “None of you will ever understand.” And he walked out the door.
Quail looked hurt and confused. I had to do something. I dashed after him.
“Willis, I want to talk to you!” I stopped him at the head of the tube.
“Can you?” he asked. “At times I thought we talked, but it turned out we were just making noises at each other.”
“Willis, we both want to apologize for not understanding you. It was inexcusable for us to think that you would be any less loyal to the Belt than–”
“Oh, stop all this mishmash! Don’t bother to apologize. I haven’t changed and neither have you. You’ll think I’m a traitor again as soon as I say something you don’t understand.”
“No.” I didn’t want to lose him now. Not since he had shown what he could do. And what he would do. “We’ve seen what you did. We understand, now, that just because you talk differently about things, it doesn’t mean you are any different in what is inside you.”
“No! I’m not the same as you!” he screamed at me. I stepped back instinctively; Willis never screamed. But he suddenly blazed: “I can’t believe the lies you live by!” His voice abruptly dropped to a fatigued whisper. “Oh, how I wish I could.” He straightened and looked back at me with demon eyes. “Listen to me, Clement Ster. I’ll say this only once. I said before that you had no right to fight the Terrans. You condemned me for it. I say it again! You have no right.”
“But the beacon—the Terran ship?”
He grabbed my shoulder tight in his huge hand and shook me. “Listen, Ster! I had no right to
destroy them. Neither do the Terrans have the right to take over the Belt. Rights don’t exist! There is only power and action. Your imaginary rights are only good for keeping people like you and Gren happy and righteous while slaughtering your enemies, if you can call that good.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but he shook me silent like a misbehaving child. “Understand me, Ster. I murdered the crew of that Terran ship, and I destroyed someone else’s beacon worth more than I could make all of my life. I did it because I had the power, and a fair chance of getting away with it. I did it purely for the selfish reason that I don’t want the Terrans controlling the Belt and running my life! Just the same as you would have—if you had been the one with the power.
“Don’t tell me about defending our sacred rights, and wars against the oppressor. As long as there are people, there will be men killing each other for property, for power, whatever. The winner will always have been just defending his rights. The losers are the criminals. It’s all fiction, Ster! If you have to kill somebody, then kill him. But don’t talk nonsense about rights!”
He stopped and I twisted out of his iron grip. He didn’t look as if he noticed, away in some place inside his head. I didn’t know what to do or say. I wished Quail were with me. I glanced back toward the control room, but there was no sign of him. I was alone.
“Clement,” Willis said, in an easy conversational tone, so unlike him, “those men in that ship. They lived all their lives under a government that promised them the right to life. And that government lied, ‘cause I just killed them! I wonder how big a slice of their souls their government charged for that politicians’ promise. Rights! Moral excuses and politicians’ lies.” He shook his head in amusement, then abruptly looked me directly in the eyes, pinning me in place. “Clement Ster, if you have to lie, steal, destroy, and murder, then do it! But then have the strength to take responsibility for what you do. Do you understand?”
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t talk. He was like an elemental force. His words flared out at me. His eyes searched my face.
There Will Be War Volume VII Page 8
