by Robert Culp
Damn!
“Line up!” Kreq yells, clapping his hands. “Attack line! Sonia, you are the defender.” Normally, we’d line up in order of seniority with the senior student repelling our attacks and when we got to the end, he would fall into the end of the line and the next student would be the defender. I don’t think we’ll be rotating this time. They take turns coming at me. The only good news is that I’m allowed to blend, block, kick, strike, and throw. Whatever it takes; whatever I know how to do. I’m sure we’re only at it for ten minutes, but it feels like hours. “Stop!” Master Kreq finally says. I’m preparing to relax when he says something that drops my heart to my stomach. “Circle!” They form a ring around me. This is new to me. “Sonia, this is an attack ring. There is no particular order in which you will be attacked. They will observe you and each other. The only guarantee I will give you is that more than one person will not attack you at a time. Yet. Begin!”
He’s honest enough about that, and usually they’re polite enough to not attack from behind me. Usually. And if I’m not careful about where I wind up when I blend, I get reminded to keep my eyes open. There are no strikes to the face, but the ones to the ribs and kidneys hurt too. I lose all track of time. “Stop!” Kreq says. “Sonia, stay. The rest of you are dismissed after you help her from her gear. Thank you for your time.” I try to help them unstrap the booties and gloves, but I’m gently rebuffed. And honestly, I lack the energy to assert myself.
Before they leave, one of them hands me another bottle of water and a tube of applesauce. “You did fine,” he says with a wink. “Anyone would feel weak as a kitten after a workout like that.”
Kreq approaches with a short-legged stool and places it on the mat behind me. “Sit,” he says and taking me by the hands, helps me onto it. If I keep my feet flat, my knees are higher than my hips. Kreq gently arranges my legs so I’m sitting in an elevated cross-legged posture. “Keep your spine erect,” he chides me. I’m on the ugly side of the meat grinder, and he’s insisting on good posture? He sits in front of me. “How do you feel?”
“Exhausted,” I answer around a mouthful of applesauce. “What is the purpose?” I ask after swallowing.
“Actually, you have said it. Exhaustion. Your body would ordinarily fuel your mind’s resistance to your coming psionic exercises. Now it's too busy for that. The good news is that you will not be required to do another drill like that, unless you ask for it. But my question of you is, where would you most like to be right now?”
“Right now?” I ask. “Right now I think I’d like to be in my bed.”
“Describe it to me, its ideal condition.”
“My sheets are fresh, crisp, cool and comforting…” I look at Kreq, and I see him shimmer. I’ve felt like this before.
I’m falling.
I fall right onto my bunk. I look around. I’m in my stateroom. I’m not in the dojo. I’m alone. My perCom chirps, it’s Master Kreq.
“What just happened,” I ask as way of greeting.
“Where are you?” he asks.
“My stateroom.”
“Are you well?” he asks. “Intact?”
“Yes, to both questions.”
“Excellent, you were too tired to resist your teleportation. That was the purpose of the examination. Sleep well. Athena will bring your belongings to your cabin. I haven’t authority to relieve you from your job, but don’t feel the need to come to the dojo until you desire. You need time to rejuvenate.”
“So I’ve just been trying too hard?”
“Indeed,” he says. “You need to unlearn, but I’ve no doubt that you will persevere…” If he says more, I don’t hear it. Too tired to shower or care, I fall into a deep sleep. When I wake the next morning—and for many mornings after that one—I’m quite sore.
Four weeks later, Freddie drops by my table at chow. “Hey Squats,” he says. “The deployment commander is looking for qualified volunteers to form investigation teams on the next planet. Me and Shawna have already signed up, and there's engineer positions if you want to get in on it. It pays big bonuses."
“Sounds good to me,” I tell him, “but should we come across any orphans, if anybody looks at me to care for them, I’ll start shooting.” We both laugh. I don’t know about Freddie, but the thought of coming across another Gwendolyn terrifies me. My laughter is just a cover. Two hours later my perCom chirps.
“Good morning, Miss MacTaggert,” a man’s voice says. “I’m the deployment commander for Star Chaser, Don Hart. Fred Call tells me you’re interested in signing on the next expedition in an engineering capacity. Fred also tells me that you are quite the engineer. I have an opening for a chief and an associate, which would you prefer?” On its face, it’s a silly question. If I’m qualified as a chief engineer—and I am—the conventional wisdom is I should jump at the top position. But I’m assigned as a Lead Engineer and a person could want to take a break from leadership. So I could ask to be the associate engineer, doing the dirty work and passing wrenches to someone else and not having to deal with the headaches of management. But I won’t because I’m self-aware enough to realize that my personality won’t allow it.
“A pleasure to make your acquaintance, sir. The good stuff from Freddie is true, the questionable isn’t. Unless someone jumps up and down for it, I’d like to take the chief position. But, of course, I’ll do whatever you need of me.”
“I think you should take it too, from what Call tells me and what I read in your personnel file, you are way over qualified for the associate position. Call is your team leader, Landers is your pilot. It made sense as you all know each other and have worked together before. There’s a meet and greet in lounge four at 1900 for you to all get to know each other. I’ll pass on to Call that you are on his team. You should get a warning order from him in the near future with a rough outline.”
“Yes, sir, as you say, I’ve worked with him before. I trust him.”
“That’s good to know. I will talk to you later, possibly at the meet and greet, but if not I’ll address the group before your ship departs.”
An hour later, I get a message from Freddie. It’s not just to me; the message went to several other people, most of whom I don’t know. We’ll arrive at Drelious II in four weeks. Aside from other members of the team—the only other people I know well are Freddie, Shawna, and Athena—there is also a vague description of the mission and equipment we can expect to need. I also see that we’re drawing Extreme Hazard and Dangerous Assignment bonuses. That gets my attention, so I call Freddie to see what that means. After we get beyond our typical exchange of insults, I ask “Do you have any preliminary intel on the physical environment? This might be—with your permission, of course—a good field trial for the wraith armor.”
“Yes, it would,” he agrees. “I’ll run the idea up the Command chain, you send it up the Engineering side. As experimental armor, said request will almost certainly have to be approved by the Captain. To answer your question though, we’re expecting an environment classified as ‘toxic.’ There is supposed to be a science ship with some ‘valuable research materials’ inside that need to be recovered. And we’re already taking enough marauder suits for everyone.”
The meeting at the lounge is, for this sort of thing, pretty boilerplate. Aside from Freddie, Shawna, Athena and me, there are eight troopers, two computer technicians, a combat medic and six micro gravity qualified mechanics. I’ve seen them around at a few departmental meetings, but I can’t call them by name. Freddie pounds a table with his fist to get attention. The background chatter dies down. Freddie picks up a long wooden pointer. It’s about a meter in length with a red light mounted on one end. As there are no charts, maps or models to point at it must be something for him to hold while he talks. I guess that’s better than him sticking his hands in his pockets. “Okay all, quiet down. My name is Fred Call and I am the mission leader for this foray. The woman to my right is Sonia MacTaggert from Engineering. She is my second in command and our
Chief Engineer for this mission. If anyone has a problem with either me or her, there’s the door. Go now and nothing will be said. Anybody?” He indicates the door with the pointer as he turns to face the wall. No one moves. I take that as a good sign. “All right,” Freddie continues. “Sonia is going to show you some new armor over the next few days—schedule that presentation before you leave here, please Sonia. She will be showing us two suits. One is battle tested; the other is not. It will behoove you to get comfortable with both. At this time the big picture is this: We will be looking for a crashed ship and recovering some equipment from it. Naturally, we do not know the extent of the damage. Nor do we know if it was forced down or suffered a landing mishap. We do know that the last survey of the planet reported a toxic atmosphere. So for this whole trip unless you’ve deconned into a ship that came from Star Chaser, you will be on bottled air. As details become known, they will be published for this group with the understanding that the knowledge is to be considered NTKC. Are there any questions about that?” Need To Know – Compartmentalized. So we won’t necessarily be getting the whole picture, just the parts we need individually. Nor will we be able to share what we know with other departments tangentially involved in the mission. I have mixed emotions about that.
“The woman on my left is Shawna Landers, she will be our system defense boat pilot.” His gaze and pointer traverse around the room introducing everyone and saying something glowing about him or her, by the time he finishes we all realize that we are each subject matter experts in our particular field. None of us are department heads.
“In closing, you are all hereby relieved of your departmental responsibilities until this mission is over, by order of Captain Pipper. There is or soon will be a memo from the Adjutant’s office with the Captain’s signature to that effect in your inbox. The same memo went or will go to your entire chain of command. We will meet daily at 0830 for no longer than fifteen minutes. What are your questions?”
I raise my hand, “Is there a place and way to replicate the atmosphere? I’d like to determine how long the armor could resist it. Which leads to my next question: How long can we expect to be there?”
“To the first, ‘can we replicate it,’ I’ve no idea. I kill people for a living, remember?” He’s grinning, not upset with me. But I notice a flicker of sadness in his eyes. “Check with the environmental sciences people. That science type you were yakking it up with at the Captain’s Banquet, Professor Jenkins, might be able to help you with recreating it. As to duration, there’s no way to determine that right here right now. There are too many variables to even begin considering. But I can tell you this much, a big factor will be the results of your experiment with the toxic atmosphere. So get on it. Anybody else?”
One of the troopers raises his hand. “I see a total of eight troopers and a field medic with combat skills. That tells me you anticipate determined resistance. Do we know the nature of the threat?”
“Not at this time, and for that reason we are going loaded to the gills. I’d say ‘prepared for’ rather than ‘anticipating.’ We are taking everything up to and including high-energy weapons and portable nukes. If we cannot salvage the ship we may have to destroy it in place.” We’re there for another thirty minutes, and the only thing we can really know for sure is that there’s still a whole lot we don’t know for sure.
Back in my stateroom, I activate my holoCom and start the ship’s directory application. Professor William Jenkins isn’t really hard to find and I call him up. He answers on the second ring, “Ah, Miss MacTaggert, what a delightful surprise. How can I help you?”
“Do we have a hostile environment chamber aboard?” I ask without pleasantry or preamble. “If so, I need to get in the testing rotation to determine the resistance a prototype armor configuration would have, please.”
“As it happens we do, and it is not currently being used. I’ve been directed to provide you and a handful of others any support I can, so the chamber is now available to you for as long as you need.” His grin borders on the maniacal. I’m not exactly unfamiliar with that, but it’s oddly disconcerting from him. “It’s in Planetary Sciences bay twelve, room thirteen. Of course, there will be a price.”
There usually is. “And that price is?” I ask warily.
“Why dinner and a digestif, of course,” he says. “To insist on anything else would be unseemly.”
“To say the very least,” I agree. “There’s no need to block out the chamber just yet, I don’t have the particulars for the atmosphere. I’ll let you know when I have them and I’ll book it then. Dinner and drinks I can do, how about tomorrow, around 1830?”
“That will be fine,” he says with a leer. “Banquet room four, 1830. I shall see you then.” Without another word, I close the communication channel. Something about that man is decidedly unpleasant, but I need resources right now and procedurally, he’s the man to see about them. I look up banquet room four hoping there are no clothing traditions to worry about. Damn it to the deepest level of the abyss! That particular hall is formal only, so I have to be in a gown; an evening gown. I’m preparing for an away mission involving prototype armor in a toxic environment and I have to take hours out because he wants to play dress up. I have a good mind to call him back and tell him to pick someplace besides BR4 until I open the new message in my inbox. It’s the preliminary evaluations of the target atmosphere. Oh my, that is some nasty stuff. To the degree that robots will be used and tested before humans are exposed. There’s too much on the line. Our first test will be for twelve hours, just to evaluate corrosion rates. I’ll have some balloons and melons in the suit to see how they survive. That will be phase one. If we get good results there, we’ll put an android in the suit for longer, maybe sixteen hours doing something like playing solitaire or stacking poker chips. If that goes well we go to phase three, with the captain’s permission, which will be human subjects for an hour, then through the same gates as the empty armor. But before all that, I have to find a gown for dinner. If only we’d had more time on Demris! I could have bought one then and been done with this foolishness!
I swallow my pride and open the catalog for the formal wear shop. I’m on the third page with my head approaching a super critical meltdown when there’s a knock at my door. I glance at the window for the doorCam; it’s Shawna. I press the button to open the door and she steps in.
“Hey, wild woman, sit down and take a load off.” I gesture at the other chair in the room, which she practically falls into. “Is there something specific I can help you with? I’m kind of busy right now.”
“I won’t be long,” she says. “That bitch boss of yours? She wants to marry me. Some weird tradition she follows. If she bites it, I get half of her possessions. And she’s richer than the terminal meter of a Rison’s Beast colon. I wanted to get your opinion before I answered her.”
The gown can wait. I turn to face her square on. “You and DuQuois?” I ask. She nods in the affirmative. “In the first place: eeww. You can do so much better. Secondly, you and DuQuois exclusively?”
“I don’t know, I wouldn’t think so.” She says shrugging, both hands palm up. “She’s already married to a man. Says she is, anyway. Which makes me wonder…well, I suppose he’ll get a half of what’s exclusively hers rather than theirs and I would get the other half.”
“First place, you’ll want that nailed down, the legalities and the exclusivity. I love you, but I can’t see you foreswearing all others for as long as you live. I don’t say that to hurt your feelings, but as your friend I’d be remiss not pointing that out. And if she’s willing to sign over half of her fortune, it’s a safe bet she’s presuming monogamy. You need to be careful about this: I’ve seen her angry and I don’t want that for you. Personally, I don’t really even like being on the same ship with her, but I don’t have the luxury of choosing right now. This is a big step, this is bigger than Avi and I ever went.” She remembers Dr. Avinoam Took on Night Searcher, the ship where we met. He gav
e me a ring, but a few months later when I tried to advance the relationship, he bolted. Heartbreaking, but it was best to find out then. “You have to decide this for yourself, Shawna. And the reasons need to be yours. Not because she wants it, not because she’s a lot easier for me to deal with when she’s happy, and believe me she is. But I’d still rather have her, whom I despise, treating me like shit every day than I would see your life always being a micron from being total shit. I mean I’ve been dealing with jerks like her most of my adult life. I’ve gotten pretty good at it.
“You mentioned her fortune, if it’s money you need talk to me. I have the proceeds from the marauder AKA SoniArmor. I’m going to have proceeds from wraith. I’m going to be pretty well off myself. Once I get back to Goliath and start production on the armor, I’ll count my money with a shovel. Bottom line, if it will make you happy and if you can devote yourself to one woman for the rest of your lives together, say yes. But don’t let yourself get bullied, guilt-tripped or pressured into it. Forever is a damn long time.”
She looks at me for a few seconds and then nods in agreement. “That’s kind of what I was thinking too. So, I’ll just ‘date’ her for now, that never lasts for long if one side wants a commitment and the other doesn’t. That’s been my experience anyway. And I don’t need the money right now—not that I would get it—but I hope when this gig is over you’ll consider me if you need a pilot. You know I’m a damn good one.”
“I’ve yet to meet one better. I don’t care near as much about her as I do you and I don’t want to see you get hurt or abused, and I can see either or both coming from her. Now, if that issue is settled I need you to either help me pick out a gown or get the hells out.” She laughs, hugs me and hits the door. Some help she is. My head is spinning looking at all of the different gowns. There is an application that—in theory—will help me narrow down the options. It does, and the gown will be ready at …1800. Damn, that’s cutting it close, but it satisfies my requirement. I press the order button.
