The Sirens of Space

by Caminsky, Jeffrey

  Cook heard about men he already knew—Drexler from CentCom, Addison from Ceres, McIntyre from Looking Glass—and even shopworn stories about the old days, when Captain Porter Clay, with “Fighting Joe” Ferrigan and Little Dickie Blodgett, finally drove the pirates out of the Demeter sector. In the end, he quickly conceded that he’d fallen in with a hopeless cast of scoundrels , and led Monty on a last inspection of the ship’s powerful engines. The nine large cylinders, each three stories high, had seemed so huge when he first took command; it was hard to believe that they would be dwarfed by the fifteen monstrous engine blocks of a starship. All too soon, time came to bid his friend farewell.

  “Next stop,” Cook called over his shoulder as he leaped toward second-story catwalk leading to the main corridor, “la maison de l’Escargot—and then, you’ll have a new skipper.”

  “Still trying to talk some sense into François?” Monty shouted in return. In the low gravity Monty kept in the engine room, Cook sailed through the air like a diver, deftly coming to rest between the handholds on either side of the gangway atop the ’tweendecks companionway.

  “Nice shot, Captain!”

  “So long, Monty,” Cook laughed. “Maybe you’ll find someone who can beat your next skipper at no-grav bandyball.”

  * * *

  The voice on the public address speaker boomed monotonously, announcing the routine departures and arrivals to those assembled at IshCom Central, the mammoth starbase’s civilian terminal, filling the gaps with items of interest to the starbase.

  “Shuttle to Ceres, departing from Dock C-7. All passengers please report to Departure Gate A. Last call for New Babylon Express, departing from C-6 enroute to Ishtar Main in 10 minutes; Departure Gate B closes in seventy-five ticks—repeat Gate B closing in seventy-five seconds—mark!

  “The following announcement is posted on all Eastern Fleet bulletin boards by order of Admiral Clay: ‘All CosGuard personnel wishing to place their names on the rotation list are reminded that the deadline for submitting transfer applications is Zero Hour on cc:142-9000. Officers and enlisted personnel currently on off-base assignments are reminded that applications must be received by their home base before the deadline in order to be considered for the next rotation in duty, unless written permission is secured from Eastern Fleet Headquarters in advance. There will be no exceptions.’

  “Local Trunk Daily Three Fifty-five has arrived from Ishtar and environs, disembarking at Gate E. Base Security, report to Dock C-12, Code Seven. Commodore Turner, please call Eight-Three-Four....”

  The arching ceiling of the terminal lobby loomed like a cathedral dome. On either side of what locals called Little Chicago, snack shops and boutiques lined the corridor and the lobby itself teemed with an endless crowd. Every day, all kinds of people flocked to the bustling stalls and shops. It was, after all, one of the few ports of call along the frontier offering the amenities of twenty-sixth-century life. Because IshCom was the only starbase this side of Demeter accepting civilian traffic, IshCom Central was port of choice for half the spacers in the Ishtari outlands—namely, the half that had nothing to fear from being recognized. This meant that the terminal saw its share of riff-raff, and the command staff forever complained to Central Command about the drain on base security that the open port policy caused. It came as a shock to new arrivals whenever a temporary space dock shortage caused diversion of a CosGuard ship to the civilian facilities, to see that their new base played host to half the flotsam of the frontier. But the square’s carnival atmosphere made up for any inconvenience they felt, for nowhere else on the frontier did two such diverse cultures—the military and the free-wheeling pioneers—co-exist in such proximity, with so little friction.

  Duffle bag slung over her shoulder, Ensign Connie McKenzie hurried down the middle of the square, marveling at the energy of the merchants lining the terminal hallway. After the week-long trip from Demeter, the bright colors of the shops and tantalizing aromas of the food stands teased her senses. On all sides, the merchants hawked their wares. Seen through the porthole of their ship, IshCom seemed immense and sterile, hanging in the blackness like a hollow shell. From the inside it buzzed with life, like the market street of any city.

  Much as she wanted to, she could not stop to answer the merchants’ call. In rigid formation, she and the other new arrivals from Demeter moved through the square, ushered through the chaos by a squad of guards from the CosGuard Security Office, led by a handsome young lieutenant. His assignment was to take the newcomers to Orientation as quickly as possible. With practiced ease, his steely voice parted the river of people, hurrying the newcomers to the tube station en route to Central Processing. The guards he led, all clad in CSO tan and sporting black garrison caps, flanked the arrivals to form the small phalanx that moved briskly through the crowd. Occasionally they brushed past a civilian a little too closely and knocked him to the floor. But the guards moved too quickly for tempers to get out of hand; and in any event, they were too big and strong to challenge.

  They neared the end of the corridor, approaching the mammoth arch of the Little Chicago Concourse. Connie felt anticipation surge through her body and felt the giddiness of starting a great adventure. She had already given four years of her life to the Cosmic Guard, studying engineering and astrophysics, principles of navigation and elements of modern weaponry. She’d had fun along the way, and some of her friends, like Paul Jackson, would always be more than just a mysterious smile on her lips. But Paul was long gone, to the Western Fleet and Zarathustra. She was on her own now, to make a name for herself along the eastern frontier.

  “Hello, Connie,” said a familiar voice, belonging to a too-familiar figure coming to hover close beside her as they rushed along. She cringed at the very sound of his voice, and the lovesick look on his face every time he talked to her made Connie want to retch.

  “Hello, Dexter,” she said dryly, wishing she were really on her own. Completely on her own.

  “Isn’t this something? I mean, it’s so big. Like DemCom multiplied by two. I bet you could fit the grounds of CosGuard Tech inside a single concourse here. And the people—look at them all. Why, this place is almost a city all by itself.”

  “It is a city, Dexter. All starbases are cities. This one is bigger than most, that’s all.”

  “But the engineering that went into building this thing! They built it from scratch, you know, from asteroids and rock, smelting the metal in temporary stations built specifically to process the raw materials. And it’s a half light-year from Ishtar itself, so for the five years it took to build this place they had no real landfall to speak of. And Ishtar isn’t much to begin with in the first place, you know?”

  “Who cares, Dexter?” she replied. Quickly, she cut in front of the yeoman on her left and pushed toward the outer reaches of the formation, where she hoped to be left alone. With all the friends she had at the college, and all the people she knew who could have drawn the same first duty, she got stuck with Dexter—a myopic non-entity with tangled hair and a crush on her a mile wide. Life could be so cruel, sometimes.

  * * *

  Striding into the command center, Admiral Clay cast a stern glance from the monitor screens on the left to the radio controls on the right. He was pleased to see the room well-disciplined and tightly controlled. Every technician was seated and focused on the instruments, and there was none of the mindless chatter that often made the Command Deck seem so chaotic. Every voice was either asking or answering a question; a crewman sat at every screen. Everyone in the Cosmic Guard knew just how deadly a pirate raid could be, and the coded security announcement calling him to the bridge had made clear that another attack was underway. The admiral didn’t like the turn things were taking the last few weeks; he didn’t like it one bit.

  “Admiral on the deck!” announced the officer of the day, a dark, pretty lieutenant commander whose name Clay couldn’t remember.

  “Situation?”

  “Brigantines moved to attack a lone f
reighter along the Ishtar Spike, Admiral. Fortunately, the freighter was sticking right to the middle of the shipping lanes. We had a squadron of escorts patrolling the affected sector. They scrambled and put the bandits to flight.”

  “The freighter?”

  “It was hauling a train of six cargo trailers. The pilot decoupled almost at once and took flight. But the pirates didn’t seem interested in the cargo—they started after the freighter. The escorts arrived before they could close. Now they’re helping the freighter recouple with its cargo.”

  “They took after the naked freighter?” Clay squinted.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But the situation is under control?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right, Commander—carry on.”

  Clay left the Command Deck and walked down the wide corridor toward his office. Guards from the Security Office snapped to attention as he passed, but he was too preoccupied to nod an acknowledgment, as he usually did when young Cozzies tried to impress him. This was the seventh pirate attack they’d seen in the last three months, he thought. All against lone freighters.

  He decided to issue another advisory, this time strongly advising against solitary travel, and urging all commercial shipping to form into convoys before entering interstellar skies. He knew he’d get resistence: the shippers always resisted advisories, and usually ignored them. It delayed their delivery schedules and added to their costs. But he knew he’d never be able to make a mandatory directive stick: the threat was still too amorphous, too random, too unfocused. He’d be overruled by Central Command by the end of the day, if he tried to impose another Convoy Directive. Just like he was at the outset of this latest round of attacks.

  Arriving at his office, he strode into his private chambers and locked the door behind him. Gazing at a picture of himself as a young skipper, he smiled sadly before taking a seat and beginning to write out his notes for the report he’d file later in the day. He’d spent his youth battling pirates, he reflected. He’d chased them away from Demeter and cleared the shipping lanes all the way to Central Terra, but they never really disappeared. The past few months it seemed that they’d returned as bold as ever, raiding ships closer and closer to base, harassing the lanes from Ishtar all the way to the frontier.

  Briefly, he thought about scheduling a command conference for the next day, to discuss their options. Maybe a simple redeployment would give them more assets to use along the commercial corridors. With the aliens behaving themselves, they certainly could spare some ships from the frontier. But he dismissed the idea as soon as it formed in his head.

  They’ll just think I’m an old granny, the admiral chuckled. Attacks had always tended to come in streaks, and whenever pirates got bored, they’d take to buzzing convoys, just to amuse themselves. Still, he thought, it had been nearly a year since they’d seen Chadbourne Wilkes and his band of cutthroats. Wilkes was not often given to lying low, and he was hardly the type to retire quietly. Clay couldn’t avoid thinking that while the raids were doing no real harm, they seemed a lot like an enemy probing for weakness.

  Finally giving it up, he decided that everyone else was probably right, and he really was just an old granny. He quickly sent along his advisory, and turned his attention to resolving the logistics snafu that kept routing half of their food from Looking Glass back to the Hodges Binary, and most of their replacement parts back to Central Command.

  * * *

  The gentle tapping at the open door caught her attention, and Janet looked up from the dark blue duffel bag and disorganized piles of clothing on her bed. Instantly, Cook knew he was in trouble. Janet’s eyes blazed with cold fury, making the hair on his neck prickle with embarrassment. But he had rehearsed his speech and there was nowhere else to turn. Tentatively, since admittance had not really been given, he stepped into the anteroom of her cabin.

  “Lieutenant,” he began. He was not prepared for what awaited him.

  Like a coiled spring freed of its constraints, Janet stepped to the table beside her bed and retrieved a cream-colored piece of crumpled paper in her left hand. Before Cook realized what was happening, she charged toward him, tossed the paper in his face, and returned to her bed to continue packing her bag.

  “I suppose this is your doing,” she said archly, not even looking up from her task. “Not that I’m surprised. It seems I never have had much of a choice in the matter, whenever you’re concerned.”

  Cook looked at the paper. They were orders, transferring her to his new command. What remained of his stomach left him, but he had the presence of mind to close the door behind him.

  “Mendelson,” he began, already on the defensive and looking quite uncomfortable.

  “Save it, Captain,” she said sharply, looking him squarely in the eye.

  “I’m afraid I’ve bungled this thing quite badly, Lieutenant. I told headquarters I needed to get your approval first, but I can see they paid no attention to me. I’ll have your orders changed at once.”

  Janet’s eyes narrowed hatefully. “Starship assignments rarely come more than once. I’d be a fool to turn this one down—as you probably already realized. So once again you have me at a disadvantage, sir,” she smiled bitterly, almost hissing the last word. “But we both know it’s easier to transfer to a starship from another starship. Don’t count on having me stay on your new ship for very long. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of packing to do. I don’t want to be late for my new assignment. I hear the commanding officer there is rather full of himself.”

  Impassively, but with grim satisfaction, she watched Cook squirm in discomfort as he searched for a response to break the tension. Finally conceding defeat, he lowered his eyes and withdrew in silence, leaving Janet all alone. Her face, smooth and pretty even in anger, softened as the rage left her. She felt darkly triumphant, but victory brought her no joy.

  Slowly, she looked around the room. Piles of clothing were everywhere. Everything she owned in the Universe was scattered on tables and chairs in the small chamber that had been her home for the past cosmic half-year. Her breathing became shallow and rapid and she felt her throat tighten. She’d sacrificed everything she knew to be part of the Cosmic Guard—her friends, her home, her family. Now that her career was rocketing toward the heavens, she felt cheated and misused. It had once been her fondest dream to draw duty on a starship; why, she wondered, when it was finally coming true, did she feel that her life was falling apart?

  Her eyes caught sight of a pale green lump, sticking out of one of the boxes on the floor, the one she had designated for trash. She reached inside and drew out a small stuffed animal, a gift from a friend in better times. It was a grubnush in caricature, a small, bear-like creature that lived in the forests of her native New Babylon. Blinking back tears, she looked at its comical face and thought of moonlit walks through endless gardens, and carnival vendors and ferris wheels. Slowly the realization fell upon her that the soft mass of cloth and matting still held too many memories for her to abandon, no matter how bitter she felt today. Frustrated and furious, she flung the toy animal against the wall. It thudded softly and fell to the floor, and silence filled the room again.

  Janet fell forward onto the bed, her head buried amid the piles of clothes, and closed her eyes. Her body ached with loneliness. A tear left her eyelid and trickled down the side of her face, and she began to cry.

  * * *

  His goodbyes almost finished, Cook headed down Corridor A, past the elevators and down the walkway. He gave the security door his clearance code, and the door opened with a rush of air. He stepped through the gate and onto the deserted bridge.

  Unnoticed when the bridge was in use, a buzz cracked the stillness, as power coursed through the powerful electric brain that controlled the ship even in dry dock. The viewing screens were blank now, black rectangles in the shadows of the ship’s darkened command center. Over the last cosmic year they had shown him much, as the ship explored unknown star systems, chased pirate r
aiders across the heavens, and slipped through the cold beauty of space like a dream on wings. Casting a glance from one side to the other, Cook smiled sadly, for the bridge had been his home for what seemed to be a lifetime. He hated to get mawkish over material goods, but the Constantine was hardly a trinket he could discard without a second thought. The ship had sustained him, nurtured him; he had mastered his craft on this bridge, and leaving for good was harder than he would have predicted in the giddy rush of promotion. For all the trappings of command, he concluded, at heart he was just a sentimentalist. It was yet another drawback to being an Isitian.

  “Everyone’s asking for you at the party, son. Uncle Neil’s making his usual fool of himself, practicing his Roscoe imitations, and your mother is waiting to serve dessert.”

  Roscoe smiled, but said nothing. The brook trickled over the shallow rocks, and a small squirrelline chattered noisily in the trees overhead.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No, Dad. Everything’s fine.”

  The father stepped onto a sturdy-looking rock overlooking the water, and sat down. “You know how proud of you I am, Roscoe. I’ve probably never told you, but you have been a constant amazement since before you could talk. There is no hope I’ve ever had for you that you haven’t fulfilled. I wanted you to know that, before you leave.”

  “Dad,” said the young man, after a long silence. “Mom has barely spoken to me for the last two weeks, and Grandpa Tom is getting old. I’m afraid that— ”

  “That he’ll be dead before you return?”