“You’re in good company with that question. Again, no one has said it officially, but the truth is that we need an answer to that question more than anything else in this war. Get some rest, Steve. Get something to eat, and then be on top of your game.”
He was fresher the next morning and felt a hundred percent better than the night before. Emily looked more fit as well.
“Well I get in trouble if I change in the bathroom?” Steve asked.
“No, but Steve, think on this. When I need to change, I’m going to do what has to be done and I’m not going to pay the least attention to your sensibilities. Captains have changed on the bridge as the situation warranted -- and they didn’t care who watched. Of course, no one watched -- they had their duties to attend to.”
She took pity on him. “It is common when showering to take your fresh shipsuit along and change. The reason is efficiency, though, not modesty. You are my supervisor. Both of us would get fatal dings in our records if we do anything stupid, like trying to hook up. I have every intention of never getting even a small ding in my records.”
“Some Rim Runner I am.”
“You are the opposite of the usual dirty-foot. You were born a Rim Runner, spent a few years there, and then were raised by dirty-feet. I like to think it’s more common the other way around.”
The morning staff meeting was bizarre. It was just Commander Booth, Steve and Emily. Commander Booth was forthright. “I received no questions from the others. I received no addtional volunteers for duty at the meet point.
“I had no idea who they were going to appoint as captain of the Thebes. I’m stunned that they picked John Hargrove. You will want to be sharp around him. He went through fighter transition’s first class. He was the captain of Third Rome. He commanded Rome for all of Second Rome; there had been two captains on the first deployment.
“Our XO is another old Rome hand -- Tommy Mikklejon. They left Captain Shapiro back on Grissom -- she has taken one hundred and seventy-five percent of her maximum lifetime dose of radiation. That’s LD 95 -- ninety-five percent of the people who get hit like that die at once. She has a cancer screening once a week.”
“And us, Commander?”
“The Koopianers will meet with us. You, Mister Yardley, have read their reply to our questions. Your evaluation?”
“Commander Booth, either they are lying about everything or they are telling the truth about almost everything. I’m of the opinion they are telling the truth.”
“Ensign Rosen?”
“I agree.”
“As do I. However, we can’t take the chance that we are wrong. So we are going to have to jump through a lot of hoops. Return to the duty space, work on more questions. Tomorrow afternoon, it will be very, very real. We will be joined this afternoon by a fighter pilot who has been assigned to us. I didn’t request a specific individual -- I requested the oddest pilot on assignment in Earth orbit. I think his name says it all: Gilhoolie.”
“And that’s his real name?” Steve asked.
“That’s right. Not only that, he’s from an Ozark family that predates the Federation. The Fleet has the word of the Koopianers that they never tried to infiltrate the Fleet. Fleet is taking that with a grain of salt.”
After lunch they met Pilot Officer Gilhoolie. He was a tall, rangy man in his mid-twenties with the three pips of a senior lieutenant. “Commander, I have no problems with the duty assignment, but my squadron CO let me see the original request, because he thought it was funny.
“I’m a fighter pilot and a good one. I’ve been on three deployments and survived all of them, obviously. I’m told my next deployment is my last -- after that I’ll be an instructor. I am, sir, okay with that. It’s dangerous out there!
“As for being the oddest pilot, that’s because my wing commander has an atrophied sense of humor. He thinks my name is bizarre, and no matter how normal I behave, I’m a cowboy. Commander, cowboy fighter pilots die first -- no one will willingly fly with them. I come back, each and every time, and I have a waiting list of candidates for my wingmen as long as your arm -- I always bring them back, too. They are BSing you on the bizarre.”
“Actually, I was hoping to get someone just like you, Lieutenant. Someone who’s been around the block, someone who knows how to get around the block, and the bizarre thing was something my father used to ask about prospective habitat managers.”
“I’m not bizarre -- I’m just good at what I do.”
“You know what we’re worried about?”
“Plague; yes, sir.”
“My official position is that it’s extremely unlikely.”
“I know who you are, sir. My family lives a mile from the Zodiacs. Everyone knows you around there.”
“Whatever for?”
“Missy ops officer, sir. You worked with her.”
“I nearly killed her.”
“You only tried. Ozarks, Commander, want to win. We live to win. Anything that moves the ball forward is okay by us. Missy ops officer moved the ball a long, long ways forward. You haven’t done badly yourself.”
“Flattery and ass-kissing aren’t something I expected from an Ozark.”
“Ah, Commander... You must mean those dumb-as-shit Marines! I’m a Fleet brat. My family has supplied Fleet officers -- Aloft officers -- since the dawn of the Federation.”
After that, Lieutenant Gilhoolie behaved pretty much as Steve expected a senior lieutenant to behave. He was correct, polite, and didn’t rub Steve’s nose in his rank; he didn’t rub Emily’s nose in hers, either.
The next day they stopped a light hour short of the Koopianer ship. “Pretty standard design,” Lieutenant Gilhoolie said, looking at the initial photometry.
“Indeed. We will be aboard a pinnace. There’s room for about a hundred people. We’ll put up forty, and so will they. Admiral Merriweather is in command; I’m her number two as well as her senior advisor. It’s a Federation pinnace; we believe we can scramble the electronic emissions from the human brain to obscure our thoughts from their telepaths. We have an additional scrambler that individuals wear. A high priority is any positive indication that they can read thoughts anyway. Only Admiral Merriweather and I have leave to speak to them, at least initially. If they address a question to you in a meeting, look to the admiral or me if you should respond. If you are alone in a compartment with one or more of them, you are a total screw-up. Don’t say anything, and start preparing your court-martial defense.”
It was a bizarre meeting. There were only two people to greet them. Admiral Merriweather shrugged. “We expected rather more of you.”
“And we are outnumbered tens of millions to one. What you see is what you get, Admiral.” The speaker was man in a Federation Marine shipsuit, with eagles on his collar... but the rings on his shipsuit sleeve had a most unmarine-like wavy stripe.
He spoke in clear, modulated tones. “I am Fleet Marine Colonel Trevor Grimes, retired. I recalled myself to active duty when notification of the war arrived. I prepared to take on passengers aboard my habitat. I told the Port Admiral that I had space and supplies for five thousand. He sent eleven thousand children and young people up from the planet; I didn’t have the consumables for that many. A habitat sent some more kids, and some slop buckets. I got some additional from the planet. That was enough.
“When I went to High Fan to escape the attack, my fans began to quickly fail. I have promised the Union people that I won’t say how far we traveled before the last fan failed. Suffice to say we traveled hundreds of light years in a handful of seconds.
“With me is Senior Pilot Officer Makaa, a Union fighter pilot.”
Makaa stepped forward. “Your mechanical scrambling of thoughts works. I realize you probably don’t believe me, but believe me, my government is as terrified about telepaths as you are.”
Admiral Merriweather sniffed. “We thought being able to see other people’s thoughts was benign, at first. Now we have experience with the failure of ‘benign.’”
“I don’t object that your thoughts are scrambled. Trust me, if our government could do it mechanically as you do, they’d prefer that to their aluminum foil hats.”
“Surely that doesn’t work.”
“Well, the hats are a bit more complex than that, but they are hats they have to wear. They look like dorks.”
“That’s not a word I know,” Admiral Merriweather explained. “Was this word used on Earth before you left or newly invented?”
“Yes, it was from before we left. It was not a complementary term.”
Steve swallowed, remembering an arm over his throat. He touched Commander Booth’s sleeve. “May I speak, sir?”
Commander Booth turned a gimlet eye on Steve, and then glanced at Admiral Merriweather.
Admiral Merriweather looked at Steve. “Pirate’s request?”
“Yes, sir.”
“By all means, I’m interested in the answer to that myself.”
Steve drew himself up. “Colonel Grimes, a crewmate was from Grayhome. Her daughter, Melissa Rawlins, was a reserve academy student. She would very much like to know if her daughter survived the attack or any other of her family members.”
“A Melissa Rawlins is among my officers. I can offer nothing beyond that. It is not a common name -- but not uncommon either.”
Admiral Merriweather cleared her throat. “I would hope that we could get a list of the survivors, Colonel Grimes.”
He produced an HDD disk from a folder in his hands. “No matter what you think of me, this has always been a high priority. Actually repatriating the survivors is my highest.”
Donna Merriweather took the disk and turned to one of her own people. “Get this transmitted at once.”
The commander who accepted the disk saluted formally, before hurrying off.
“Admiral Merriweather,” the woman said, “on behalf of the Union I place our limited military forces under your command.”
“You think the aliens have found you?”
The woman shook her head. “We don’t. As we sent in response to your questions, we have gone to a great deal of trouble to prevent detection since we learned of the war. That said, at some point the feeling is that we would be discovered. This way we have a friend in the universe.
“Our peoples did not separate on the best of terms. We are more than willing to admit to our mistakes. We ask you to examine your own actions and admit to your errors.”
“And if we think we didn’t make any?” Admiral Merriweather asked.
“Then you are not the person we should be talking to. We did; you did. Kinsella herself believed that she missed it somewhere -- our manifesto of why we did what we did. To the people of the Union it was self-evident, so our ancestors didn’t bother to leave an explanation behind. They thought you would think it just self-serving propaganda. That was a mistake on our part. Worse, our ancestors were stunned to learn that you never moved beyond the obvious about our research. You never learned the main focus of what our ancestors were doing and their goals.”
“Do you think we didn’t notice? The human genome.”
“Don’t be silly. That was the simplest problem my ancestors faced, not the most complex.”
“DNA in general.”
“Again, you are not even close to what you missed. Once you learn the code, everything follows from that. Not even your precious Kinsella had a clue. Her daughter told her once, but Kinsella didn’t understand what she was hearing -- because of her preconceptions.”
“And what did we miss?”
“Dr. Koop’s research focused on the nature of the soul. At first he added the word ‘human’ to the definition, but later he moved on. Yes, we left behind some of animals we had experimented on. None of them had souls, except the six infants. Not even your people were dim enough not to accept the infants as human. But it was because they had the right shape -- not because they had souls. It is a trivial thing to create a being with the right shape, but without a soul. We won’t do it -- but it still occasionally happens by accident.
“Our ancestors were shocked beyond words when they learned you hadn’t figured out what the research was about. In fairness, they destroyed all the clues. Still, they assumed you’d quickly duplicate the research. You banned it instead. Don’t tell me that you didn’t make mistakes.
“Admiral, we are here as friends. Yes, we’ve modified the human genome, but that doesn’t mean we’ve created cat-women or Tinkerbell men or anything like that. We’ve had a lot of time to research the question. Some tweaks, yes indeed. We beat cancer not long after we left. We live a lot longer than you because we fixed some glitches in the aging process.
“We can repair most any injury to the human body -- we can even re-grow lost limbs, hair, eyes, hearing... you name it. We can offer you a wealth of medicine that will improve the lives of billions of your citizens. All of them, in fact.
“Look at me. Do you see any tweaks?”
“No, I can’t say as I do. I’m not sure I’d recognize whatever was done to you to generate telepathy.”
“It’s increased sensitivity of certain parts of the brain. As for the other modifications, you can ask Colonel Grimes. I’m more adapted than most to space. I don’t suffer from transition nausea. I can exist in vacuum for about fifteen minutes. Again, it’s not magic. I can’t deal with the cold of space any better than you can. The extra time is a function of my hemoglobin. Yours is a one-stage reaction; the hemoglobin absorbs oxygen and later trades it for carbon dioxide.
“In my case there are two more reactions, both predicated on increased presence of carbon dioxide in my blood. There isn’t much more oxygen there, but enough for a few extra minutes. It can make the difference between life and death.”
“We do the same thing with shipsuits,” Commander Booth observed.
“Indeed you do, it is functionally identical, Commander.” The woman plucked at the sleeve of her clothes. “This is the same material, Commander. Again, we freely admit to enrolling some of our young people in technical programs in your universities, and skimming off the most useful bits of your technology. Please believe me that we never targeted the Fleet or the Federation government at any level. With one caveat to that, that I don’t expect will be a problem.”
“And what caveat is that?”
“We had an outpost inside the Federation that functioned as a research station. It has a habitat and was recognized by the Federation as sovereign. Everyone at the habitat was one of our people, so the habitat administration was, of course, all ours. There are a dozen other habitats that neither have a Federation representative present, nor have they submitted someone to the Federation in return.
“Because we appreciate a good joke just as much as everyone does, the government of the habitat was identical with the structures of the Union.”
“We have only a few AI-equipped ships left. But at some point at least you or your captain are going to have appear to be scanned without disruptive technology,” Admiral Merriweather told Makaa.
“It will be me,” Makaa told her. “Of course, Admiral, we want the same chance with you.”
“And like your captain, I’m exempt. Commander Booth. You will find her mind extraordinary -- but she has no access to war plans, whereas I do. She also is one of our most knowledgeable officers about the aliens attacking us and about our recent troubles with computer artificial intelligences.”
“That is agreeable.”
There was a lot more talk; hours of talk. They sat down and shared a meal, each eating their own rations, but that was the only evidence of the mutual paranoia.
Makaa laughed at the end of the meal. “We have a number of homegrown delicacies. We never could get potatoes to grow on our planet -- there was just too much wrong with the local soil ecology. It’s been a hundreds of years since any of us have had a French fry. All we know is that we should try them. We have our own delicacies. It is our hope we can exchange dinners.”
“I’m sure that we
can arrange that.” Admiral Merriweather cleared her throat. “As I’m sure you are aware, the Federation has concerns about plagues, or any sort of biowar critters. Samples of anything you feed us will be sent home for analysis.”
Makaa laughed bitterly. “Centuries of paranoia have left their mark on us as well. Two things to remember about us: the thought of developing weapons like that would be anathema to us. We changed governments when we learned from Colonel Grimes about this war... our government had earlier decided to -- terminate -- all of our stay-behind agents. One chore I’ve been tasked with is finding out if any of those executions have taken place.
“We have no direct evidence to show that such an order had actually been given, but it was curious that the two individuals who’d most likely have issued them died under suspicious circumstances. Again, we haven’t found any evidence that the deaths were deliberate acts, but it was certainly convenient for the former ruling party.
“They are a number of them currently being held on suspicion. It is important enough for us to something previously unthinkable. The Federation still has the death penalty and we do not. It is arrant cowardice, but if any of those sentences have been carried out those deaths would have occurred in Federation space. We’ll turn the individuals over to your justice.
“The last, and what I think is most determinative, is that we’d have to be out of our ever-loving minds to do anything that stupid.”
“Sixty percent of the human race is dead, Senior Pilot Officer Makaa; we owe it to the survivors to be as sure as we can be -- no matter how stupid and paranoid it makes us look.”
Makaa shivered. “If three-fifths of us were dead, we’d be paranoid, too. All we wish to do, Admiral, is prove our bona fides.”
“If you can read my mind you, have to know about diseases that have a years-long incubation period and are lethal. Like leprosy and AIDS and then there is Mad Cow disease, which took years to figure out and wasn’t really a disease, but a badly folded protein.”
“I can’t read your mind, Admiral. And while we expect continued tricks to show us up, one way or the other, it does get tedious.”
The Odyssey and the Iliad (Kinsella Universe Book 7) Page 15
