The Voyage of the Star Wolf

by David Gerrold

  “Mmm, maybe—” The chief engineer was not enthusiastic about the idea. “What’s to keep them from jumping into hyperstate, leaping ahead and brushing us with their ripple?”

  “If we live long enough to get to that situation, we’ll activate our own hyperstate kernel. If they brush us they’ll disintegrate with us. Not even a Morthan would consider that an honorable death.”

  There was silence from the other end of the line.

  “Chief?”

  The Engineer’s voice had a sour tone. “Can’t say I like it. And it’s going to be hell to burn it off at the other end. We’ll have to spend as much time decelerating as we do accelerating. And we’ll have to do it before we can inject into hyperstate for the way home.”

  “Well, let’s think about that . . .” suggested Korie.

  “Uh-uh,” said Leen with finality. “I can’t compensate for that high a velocity inside the envelope. We’ll be too unstable to hold a modulation.”

  “All right,” said Korie. “You win. We’ll do it your way.”

  “You listen to me. I’ll bring you home. Leen out.”

  Korie allowed himself a smile. Three weeks of steady subluminal acceleration, plus another three of deceleration, would also give them enough time to effect major repairs. If they could do it at one gee, it would put them twenty-five light hours away before they had to inject into hyperstate. Not a great head start, but workable.

  Korie remembered the problem from Officers Candidate School; he hadn’t ever expected to apply it in a real situation. If it worked here though, they would earn themselves a place in future texts. But it would be difficult. Unless they could find a way to disassemble and rotate the main mass-drivers, it would be like standing the ship on its tail . . .

  No. They didn’t have the time. They’d have to jury-rig ladders. They didn’t dare risk powering up the gravitors. That would be almost as visible to a tracker as the pinpoint black hole in the engine room.

  Korie hadn’t let himself ask the hard question yet. How much of a crew did he have left? That would be the worst—not having enough skillage to pilot the ship home. What was the minimum practical number?

  Hodel returned then, pulling himself into the Bridge with a practiced motion.

  Korie looked at him questioningly, as if to ask how bad?

  Hodel shrugged. Who knows?

  “You have the conn,” Korie said. He pulled himself down toward the floor, and out through the Operations bay, the tiny cubbyhole beneath the high platform of the Bridge. There was one man on duty in the operations bay. He looked pale and shaken, but he had the power panel of his work station open and he was testing fuel cells. Korie patted him on the shoulder and pulled himself past, down into the keel.

  The lights here were dimmer, making all the cables, conduits, and pipes into oppressive shapes in the gloom. Slowly, Korie made his way toward the A.I. bay and pulled himself up into it. HARLIE was totally dark.

  “Shit.” Korie popped open a compartment and pulled out the red-backed manual. “First. Make sure the power is on,” he said to himself.

  He stuck the manual to the top of the console and pulled open the emergency panels. He had the nightmarish sensation that he was going to spend the next three weeks doing nothing but powering up fuel cells by hand. There had to be an easier way to do this; but nobody ever expected a ship to have to start from zero.

  The fuel cells kicked in immediately, which was a pleasant surprise. The bad news was that the automatic restart process would take several hours. Each of HARLIE’s various sentience modules had to be individually powered up and tested, and not until system confidence was acceptable could they be reassembled into a functioning personality.

  The alternative—to reawaken HARLIE without the complex system analysis—was to run the risk of post-shock trauma, disassociation, confusion, increased statistical unreliability, and possible long-term psychosis.

  On the other hand, they couldn’t get home without him. They couldn’t even run the ship.

  Theoretically, it was possible to run a starship without a sentient consciousness, but nobody had ever done it. Theory was one thing. Starships were something else.

  “All right, HARLIE,” whispered Korie. “You get to sleep a while longer.” He punched in the command, then locked the console.

  He levered himself sadly out of the computer bay and pushed himself along the keel until he got to the engine room. Work lights were hung all over the chamber, and crewmembers were already maneuvering around the great singularity cage in the center.

  Chief Engineer Leen was supervising the stringing of an auxiliary power conduit. He looked up as Korie floated over. “I sent a man to the forward lookout to take a sighting, but we’re tumbling ass over tea-kettle. Until we get HARLIE online, we can’t do anything about that. I think we can get the autonomic network online sooner than that. I need to see if it’s traumatized. And I’m rigging an auxiliary electrical harness, so we can charge up the mass-drivers as soon as we’re oriented. What else do you want to know?”

  “That’s plenty. HARLIE’s down for at least six hours, maybe longer. I want you to pull the manuals on running a ship without a brain, if we have to—and cross your fingers that we don’t have to. In the meantime, I’m taking the tour. I need to see what shape the crew is in.”

  “They’re rocky, but they’re working.”

  Korie looked at Leen. “Have we got the skillage to get home?”

  Leen shrugged. “We don’t know. I’ve got Randle taking roll. Some of the boys are a little mindwiped. I don’t know if we can bring ’em back.” His expression was very unhappy.

  “All right,” said Korie, accepting the report. “Have the galley make sandwiches—uh, did the galley crew make it?”

  Leen shook his head.

  “Sorry. Okay, appoint two men to kitchen detail. Let’s keep the lights on and the air circulating. If we can’t make this work, we’ll plug in the hole and try to run for it. But I’m assuming the worst.” He looked to Leen, “Did I leave anything out?”

  “We could pray. . .”

  “I stopped praying a long time ago, Chief.”

  “Didn’t get your prayers answered?”

  “I got an answer. It was no.” Korie pushed himself out of the engine room into the aftward keel. It was darker than the keel forward. Korie paused at each of the manually operated safety panels and double-checked atmospheric pressure, CO2 content, temperature, and humidity. All were stable. Good. That meant hull integrity hadn’t been breached. The biggest danger right now was that there might be a pinhole leak somewhere in the ship; but with no power and no network, there was no way to detect a pressure loss or locate the hole.

  There was too much to worry about and not enough worriers.

  Korie floated up into the shuttle bay and let himself drift while he considered. Maybe the shuttles could be useful. They were designed to be powered up quickly; maybe they could plug into a shuttle brain and run the ship from there. The shuttles weren’t sentient on the same scale HARLIE was, but they were smart enough to avoid bumping into planets, moons, and asteroids. He’d have to talk it over with Chief Leen. It was another option.

  As he headed forward again, he nearly bumped into Reynolds and MacHeath. They were maneuvering an unconscious crewmember toward sick bay. Korie nodded to them, then pushed himself quickly ahead.

  The ship’s mess was full of men and women; the overflow from sick bay. Some were conscious, most were not. Several were moaning. As Korie watched, two more crew members pulled themselves into the room. Fontana, the ship’s pharmacist, floated in, carrying a hypo-spray injector and began administering sedatives to the worst injured. She glanced over to Korie. “You okay?”

  “I will be. As soon as I get a chance to clean myself up. How about you?”

  She shook her head. “This is a mess.”

  Korie followed her forward, catching her in the hall outside the sick bay. He lowered his voice. “How bad?”

  “T
welve dead. At least six more we don’t expect to make it. Two of the Quillas, the rest are in shock. I’ve sedated all of them. They’re in bad shape; they’re going to need extensive rehabilitation. Probably we all will. I’ve never seen injuries like this before. I thought we were better shielded—”

  “It wasn’t a beam. It was a ripple effect.”

  “Better if it was a beam. We can treat disruptor wounds.”

  “I’ll remember that for next time.” Korie lowered his voice. “How’s the doctor?”

  Fontana shrugged. “Indestructible.”

  “Have you got enough help?”

  “No . . . but we’ll manage. To tell the truth, there’s not a lot we can do. Either you get better . . . or you don’t.”

  Korie allowed himself to ask the question he’d been avoiding. “Captain Lowell?”

  Fontana’s expression said it all. She looked Korie straight in the eye and said, “I’m sorry, sir. You’re going to have to bring us home.”

  Inside himself, Korie marveled that he didn’t feel anything at all. He felt guilty. I should be feeling something right now, shouldn’t I? “I, uh . . . I was afraid of that.”

  “Want some free advice? It’s worth exactly what you paid for it.”

  Korie met her eyes. “Say it.”

  “Go to your room. Clean yourself up. Put on your sharpest uniform. And then make another inspection of the ship. Be seen by as many crewmembers as you can. And let them know that everything is under control—even if it isn’t.”

  “That’s good advice,” said Korie. “And as soon as I have time—”

  “No. Do it now,” said Fontana. “This ship isn’t going anywhere. There’s nothing happening that needs your immediate attention. There is nothing happening that is as important as the morale of this crew. They know the captain’s hurt. They don’t know what state you’re in. You need to show them that you’re ready to bring them home.”

  Korie stopped himself. He looked at Fontana and realized what she was saying. It was straight out of the Academy. First year. The first machine that has to be fixed is not the ship, but the crew. Fix the crew and everything else takes care of itself. And remember what Captain Lowell said. “You have to be straight with them . . . It’s all about trust.”

  “You’re right,” Korie said to Fontana. “Thanks.” He patted her affectionately on the shoulder and pushed himself forward. Her remarks echoed in his consciousness.

  He remembered the seminars at the Academy. The real crisis is not the crisis. The real crisis is what you do before it and after it.

  Right.

  What did you do or what did you fail to do beforehand that turned the situation into a crisis?

  What did you do or what did you fail to do afterward that prolonged the crisis-ness of the situation?

  All the classes, all the simulations, all the seminars and discussions, all the endless analyses and recaps and debriefings—this was all of that all over again. He could hear the voices of his instructors, as if they were standing right behind him, judging his every move, his every decision.

  Ask yourself three questions: What do you want to do? What are you capable of doing? What are you actually going to do? Be clear that these may be three different things.

  “What I want to do,” Korie said to no one in particular, “is take this ship home, fill it up with missiles, and then come back out here and kick some Morthan ass.”

  “What am I capable of doing—?” He considered the question. He could get the ship home. That wasn’t in doubt any longer. It might take four months, limping all the way, but it was doable. Could he fight back? Now? No. With a refit? Definitely.

  What was he going to do?

  Korie grinned.

  “What I’m capable of doing, what I want to do, and what I’m going to do . . .are all the same thing.”

  He touched the button on his headset. “Now hear this—” His voice was amplified throughout the ship. “This is First Officer Korie speaking. We’ve been hit, we’ve taken damage, but we’re still afloat. We don’t know how badly the fleet’s been hit. We don’t know how badly the convoy’s been hurt.

  “I am going to assume that a state of war exists now between the Terran Alliance and the Morthan Solidarity and I am going to act accordingly.

  “It’s going to take some time to bring all ship systems back online. It’s going to take even more time to get home. But we will get home, I promise you that. We’re going to rebuild this ship, and then we’re going to come back out here and put a missile into every Morthan ship we can find.

  “Korie out.”

  He thought he could hear the cheers of the crew echoing throughout the ship, but it could just as easily have been his imagination.

  The hard part would be keeping them believing that . . .

  A Situation of Some Gravity

  Light had been restored to the corridors of the LS-1187, but not much else. Most of the desperately wounded were in sick bay or the mess room. The lesser wounded were spread across the forward half of the shuttle bay. A makeshift morgue had been established at aft starboard corner; a partition hid the bagged bodies from view; they were tethered like cargo.

  A decision was going to have to be made about that soon, Korie knew. Do we space them here or do we take them home? He didn’t know how he felt about it yet, and he didn’t know who he should ask. Fontana probably. He knew the thought was irrational, but didn’t like leaving any of his crew floating alone in the dark so far from home. There was also a military consideration. As unlikely an occurrence as it might be, what if one of the spaced bodies were discovered by a Morthan cruiser? It would be evidence that the LS-1187 had not been destroyed.

  And yet . . . he also knew that it unnerved the crew to have those dead bodies tethered there. It was damning evidence of their failure in battle. It was as if the dead were pointing an accusing finger at the living. “If you had not failed, we might still be alive.”

  Korie shook his head sadly. This was not a problem that he could solve immediately. This decision could be postponed a while longer. It went against his grain to postpone a decision; the unfinished business seemed to lurk in the back of his skull gnawing at his consciousness, but—

  He pulled himself forward, into the starboard corridor, then left into the shallow chamber directly above the starship’s engine room. This was Chief Leen’s office and auxiliary control station. At the moment, it was also functioning as the starship’s Bridge.

  The chief was strapped into a chair before a work station. He was running diagnostic programs, frowning and muttering to himself. “Nope. Nope. That won’t work. That won’t work. Nope. Shit.” Then he’d lean forward intensely and order a new set of routines to be run.

  Korie hated to interrupt him, but—“I’ve thought of something else,” he said. Leen pushed back from the screen and swiveled to face Korie.

  “What now?”

  “We’re on minimum life support. How long can we maintain?”

  Leen thought for a moment. Korie could almost see him running the subroutines in his head. “Six days,” he said, finally. “If we use the LOX for the fuel cells, we can buy ourselves another three weeks, but then we’re out of power unless we recharge. And that doesn’t allow any margin for the mass-drivers. I don’t see any way around it, we’re going to have to use the singularity sooner or later.”

  “I know,” said Korie. “But I want to hold off as long as possible, and I want to minimize any use of it. We give off G-waves, they’ll find us. Right now, if they’re tracking us, all they see is a derelict.” He hooked one leg around a stanchion to keep from floating away. “We can survive without gravity. We have three months of food. We can ration our water. Our big problem is air.”

  “Can’t use the osmotics,” said Leen. “Not without the gravitors. And that’s more G-waves. Y’know, if we could take a look-see, find out if there’s anything hostile in range, we could control our radiations, keep them below the noise level . . .”
<
br />   Korie shook his head. “Not yet. I don’t want to risk opening up a scanning lens yet. Maybe in a week. Even a lens might give us away to the Dragon Lord. We just don’t know how accurate her vision is. I have to assume the worst.”

  Leen grunted. “You’re not making this very easy for me.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Korie. “We could go to aeroponics. String lights and webs in the shuttle bay, in the inner hull, maybe even in the corridors and the keel. We could use irrigation stems. Start out with Luna moss, take cuttings every two days. In fourteen days, we should be able to increase the volume 64-fold.”

  Leen didn’t answer. He just swiveled back to his screen and called up a set of extrapolations. “It’ll be at least a month before you’re getting significant oxygen production, even if you could double volume every two days. Which I don’t think you can.”

  “A month might work,” said Korie. “Just barely. It lets us keep our head down.”

  “It’s going to be messy.”

  “We don’t have a lot of choice in the matter. We’re going to have to go to aeroponics sooner or later anyway. We have food for three months. We might make it on half-rations, but that’s only a stay of execution, not a reprieve. What if it takes longer than four and a half months to get home? Let’s start laying in our crops for the winter.”

  Leen made a noise deep in his throat; it sounded like a growl of disapproval. “Sounds like a lot of busy work to me. We’ve got more important things to do.”

  “No, we don’t.” Korie cut him off. “As long as we drift, we’re safe. We look like a derelict. The longer we can drift, the more convincing we are. This isn’t busy work—this is work that will guarantee our survival.”

  Leen didn’t look convinced.

  Korie shrugged and admitted, “Yes, all right. It’ll give the crew a challenge they can accomplish. But they need that right now.”

  “I think we’d all much rather put a missile up the tail of the Dragon Lord.”

  “You tell me a way we can get close enough to do that and I will. Otherwise, my job is to bring this ship and her crew safely home.”