There was a loud whip crack, and smoke jetted from the sides of the door. Then there was an unbelievably loud bang, and Sauer’s ears popped. The doorway was gone. Behind it, a rolling darkness dragged at him with icy claws, howling and sucking the others out into the void. Not a pinhole? He tried to grab at the nearest emergency locker door, but it was already slamming shut, and he was dragged down the corridor. Something thumped him hard between the shoulders, so hard that he couldn’t breathe. Everything was dark, and the pain was unbelievable. A dark cylinder spun before his eyes, and there was a ringing whistling in his ears. Plastic flapped against his face. Must have ripped my suit, he thought vaguely. I wonder what happened to… Thinking was hard work; he gave up and fell into a doze, which spiraled rapidly down into dreamless silence.
Vassily Muller, however, was luckier.
BOUNCERS
The Admiral sat at his desk and squinted.
Commodore Bauer cleared his throat. “If I may have your attention, sir.”
“Huh? Speak up-up, young man!”
“We enter terminal engagement range with the enemy tonight,” Bauer said patiently. “We have to hold the final pre-approach session, sir, to articulate our immediate tactical situation. I need you to sign off on my orders if we are to conduct the battle.”
“Very well.” Admiral Kurtz tried to sit up in his chair; Robard’s helping hands behind his frail shoulders steadied him. “You have them?”
“Sir.” Bauer slid a slim folder across the polished oak. “If you would care to see—”
“No, no.” The Admiral waved a frail hand. “You’re a sound man. You give-ive those natives jolly what for, won’t you?”
Bauer stared at his commander in mixed desperation and relief. “Yes, sir, I will,” he promised. “We will be in lidar range of the planetary surface in another hour, then we should be able to establish their order of battle fairly accurately. Task Group Four will illuminate and take the first blood, while the heavies stay under emission control and punch out anything we can identify after we get within close broadside range. I have the destroyer squadrons ready to go after any fixed emplacements we find in GEO, and the torpedo boats are tasked with high-delta-vee intercepts on anything fleeing—”
“Give the natives what-ho,” Kurtz said dreamily. “Make a hill of skulls in the town square. Volley fire by platoons. Bomb the bastards!”
“Yes, sir. If you’d be so good as to sign here—”
Robard put the pen between the Admiral’s fingers, but they shook so much that his crimson signature on the orders was almost completely obscured by a huge blot, like fresh blood.
Bauer saluted. “Sir! With your permission I will implement these orders forthwith.”
Kurtz looked up at the Commodore, his sunken eyes glowing for a split second with an echo of his former will. “Make it so! Victory is on-on our side, for our Lord will not permit his followers to come to—” A look of vast puzzlement crossed his wrinkled face, and he slumped forward.
“Sir! Are you—” The Commodore leaned forward, but Robard had already pulled the Admiral’s chair back from the table.
“He’s been overwrought for days,” Robard commented, reclining his charge’s chair. “I shall take him back to his bedchamber. As we approach the enemy—” He tensed. “Would sir please accept my apologies and call the ship’s surgeon?”
Half an hour later, ten minutes late for his own staff meeting, Commodore Bauer surged into the staff conference room. “Gentlemen. Please be seated.”
Two rows sat before him, before the podium from which the Admiral commanding could address his staff and line officers. “I have a very grave announcement to make,” he began. The folio under his right arm bent under the tension with which he gripped it. “The Admiral—” A sea of faces upturned before him, trusting, waiting. “The Admiral is indisposed,” he said. Indisposed indeed, if you could call it that, with the ship’s surgeon in attendance and giving him a ten percent chance of recovery from the cerebral hemorrhage that had struck him down as he signed the final order. “Ahem. He has instructed me to proceed with our prearranged deployment, acting as his proxy while he retains overall control of the situation. I should like to add that he asked me to say, he knows every man will do his duty, and our cause will triumph because God is on our side.”
Bauer shuffled his papers, trying to dismiss his parting image of the Admiral from his awareness; lying prone and shriveled on his bed, the surgeon and a loblolly boy conferring over him in low voices as they awaited the arrival of the ship’s chaplain. “First, to review the situation. Commander Kurrel. What word on navigation?”
Commander Kurrel stood. A small, fussy man who watched the world with sharp-eyed intelligence from behind horn-rimmed glasses, he was the staff navigation specialist. “The discrepancy is serious, but not fatal,” he said, shuffling the papers in front of him. “Evidently Their Lordships’ projected closed timelike path was more difficult to navigate than we anticipated. Despite improvements to the drive timebase monitors, a discrepancy of no less than sixteen million seconds crept in during our traversal—which, I might add, is not entirely inexplicable, considering that we have made a grand total of sixty-eight jumps spaced over some 139 days, covering a distance of just over 8053 light-years; a new and significant record in the history of the Navy.”
He paused to adjust his spectacles. “Unfortunately, those sixteen mega-seconds lay in precisely the worst possible direction—timewise, into the domain within which the enemy occupied our territory. Indeed, we would have done little worse had we simply made the normal five-jump crossing, a distance of some forty-four light-years. A full pulsar map correlated for spin-down indicates that our temporal displacement is some three million seconds into the future of our origin point, when it is extrapolated to the destination’s world line. This is confirmed by classical planetary ephemeris measurements; according to local history, the enemy—the Festival—has been entrenched for thirty days.”
A single intake of breath rattled around the table, disbelief and muted anger mingling. Commodore Bauer watched it sharply. “Gentlemen.” Silence resumed. “We may have lost the anticipated tactical benefits of this hitherto untried maneuver, but we have not entirely failed; we are still only ten days in the future of our own departure light cone, and using a conventional path we wouldn’t be arriving for another ten days or so. As we have not heard anything from signals intelligence, we may assume that the enemy, although entrenched, are not expecting us.” He smiled tightly. “An inquiry into the navigation error will be held after the victory celebrations.” That statement brought a brief round of “ayes” from the assembly. “Lieutenant Kossov. General status report, if you please.”
“Ah, yes, sir.” Kossov stood. “All ships report ready for battle. The main issues are engineering failures with the Kamchatka—they report that pressure has been restored to nearly all decks, now—and the explosion in the waste-disposal circuits of this ship. I understand that, with the exception of some cabins on Green deck, and localized water damage near the brig, we are back to normal; however, several persons are missing, including Security Lieutenant Sauer, who was investigating some sort of incident at the time of the explosion.”
“Indeed.” Bauer nodded at Captain Mirsky. “Captain. Anything to report?”
“Not at this time, sir. Rescue parties are currently busy trying to recover those who were expelled from the ship during the decompression incident. I don’t believe this will affect our ability to fight. However, I will have a full and detailed report for you at your earliest convenience.” Mirsky looked grim; and well he might, for the Flag Captain’s ship was not expected to disgrace the fleet, much less to lose officers and crew to some sort of plumbing accident—if indeed it was an accident. “I must report, sir, that the Terran diplomat is among those listed as missing following this incident. Normally, I would conduct a search for survivors, but in the current situation—” His shrug was eloquent.
“Let me ex
tend my sympathies, Captain; Lieutenant Sauer was a fine officer. Now, as to our forthcoming engagement, I have decided that we will deploy in accordance with attack plan F. You’ve gamed it twice in exercises; now you get a chance to play it for real, this time against a live but indeterminate foe—”
A bumping on the hull brought Martin to his senses. He blinked, hair floating in front of his eyes, and stared at the wall in front of him. It had slid past his eyes as the cold-gas thrusters tried to yank him into the ceiling, turning from solid gray into a sheet of blackness stippled with the glaring diamond dust of stars. The tides of the Lord Vanek had tried to yank his arms and legs off; he ached with a memory of gravity. Rachel lay next to him, her lips twitching as she communed with the lifeboat’s primitive brainstem. Huge gray clouds blocked the view directly overhead, waste water from the scuppers. As he looked, yellow beacons flashed in it, rescue workers searching for something.
“You alright?” he croaked.
“Just a minute.” Rachel closed her eyes again and let her arms float upward until they almost touched the glassy overhead screen—which was much, much closer than Martin had originally thought. The capsule was a truncated cylinder, perhaps four meters in diameter at the base and three at the top, but it was less than two meters high; about the same volume as the passenger compartment of a hackney carriage. (The fuel tanks and motor beneath it were significantly larger.) It hummed and gurgled quietly with the rhythm of the life-support pipework, spinning very slowly around its long axis. “We’re making twelve meters per second. That’s good. Puts us a kilometer or so from the ship… damn, what’s going on back there?”
“Somebody on EVA? Looking for us.”
“Seems like more than one of ‘em. Almost like a debris cloud.” Her eyes widened in horror as Martin watched her.
“Whatever happened, it happened after we left. If you’d triggered a blowout, we’d be surrounded by debris, wouldn’t we?”
She shook her head. “We should go back and help. We’ve got a—”
“Bullshit. They’ve got EVA teams suited up all the time they’re at battle stations, you know that as well as I do. It’s not your problem. Let me guess. Someone tried to get into your cabin after we left. Tried a bit too hard, by the look of it.”
She stared at the distant specks floating around the rear of the warship, a stubby cylinder in the middle distance. “But if I hadn’t—”
“I’d be on my way to the airlock with my hands taped behind my back, and you’d be under arrest,” he pointed out.
Tired, cold, rational. His head ached; this capsule must be at a lower pressure than the ship. His hands were shaking and cold in reaction to the events of the past five minutes. Ten minutes. However long it had been. “You saved my life, Rachel. If you’d stop kicking yourself over it for a minute, I’d like to thank you.”
“If there’s anyone out there and we leave them—”
“The EVA crew will get them. Trust me on this, I figure they tried to blow their way into your cabin. Didn’t check that it wasn’t open to space first, and got blown a bit farther than they expected. That’s what warships have away teams and jolly boats for. What we should be worrying about now is hoping nobody notices us before the final event.”
“Um.” Rachel shook her head: her expression relaxed slightly, tension draining. A certain darkness seemed to lift. “We’re still going to be entirely too close for my liking. We’ve got another cold-gas tank, that’ll give us an extra ten meters per second; if I use it now that means we’ll have drifted about 250 kilometers from the ship before perigee, but before then, they should begin maneuvering and widen the gap considerably. We’ve got enough water and air for a week. I was figuring on a couple of full-on burns to take us downside while they’re busy paying attention to the enemy defenses, whatever they turn out to be. If there are any.”
“I’m betting on eaters, shapers.” Martin nodded briefly, then held his head still as the world seemed to spin around him. Not spacesickness, surely? The thought of being cooped up in this cubbyhole for a week with a bad case of the squirts was too revolting to contemplate. “Maybe antibodies. Nothing the New Republic understands, anyway. Probably easy enough for us to avoid, but if you go in shooting—”
“Yeah.” Rachel yawned.
“You look exhausted.” Concern filled him. “How the hell did you do that? I mean, back on the ship? It must take it out on you later—”
“It does.” She bent forward and fumbled with a blue fishnet, down around what would have beien the floor of the cabin. Surprisingly homely containers of juice floated out, tumbling in free fall. She grabbed one and began to suck on the nozzle greedily. “Help yourself.”
“Not that I’m ungrateful or anything,” Martin added, batting a wandering mango and durian fruit cordial out of his face, “but—why?” She stared at him for a long moment. “Oh,” he said.
She let the empty carton float free and turned to face him. “I’d prefer to give you some kind of bullshit about trust and duty and so on. But.” She shrugged uncomfortably in her seat harness. “Doesn’t matter.” She held out a hand. Martin took it and squeezed, wordlessly.
“You didn’t blow your mission,” he pointed out. “You never had a mission out here. Not realistically, anyway, not what your boss, what was his name?”
“George. George Cho.”
“—George thought. Insufficient data, right? What would he have done if he’d known about the Festival?”
“Possibly nothing different.” She smiled bleakly at the empty juice carton, then plucked another from the air. “You’re dead wrong; I still have a job to do, if and when we arrive. The chances of which have just gone down by, oh, about fifty percent because of this escapade.”
“Huh. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help, alright?” Martin stretched, then flinched with a remembered pain. “You wouldn’t have seen my PA would you? After—”
“It’s bagged under your chair, along with a toothbrush and a change of underwear. I hit your cabin after they pulled you in.”
“You’re a star,” he exclaimed happily. He bent double and began fishing around in the cramped space under the control console. “Oh my—” Straightening up, he opened the battered gray book. Words and pictures swam across the pages in front of him. He tapped an imaginary keyboard; new images gelled. “You need any help running this boat?”
“If you want.” She drained the second container, thrust both the empties into the bag. “Yes, if you want. You’ve flown before?”
“Spent twelve years at L5. Basic navigation, no problem. If it’s got a standard life-support module, I can program the galley, too. Traditional Yorkshire habit, that, learning how to cook black pudding in free fall. The trick is to spin the ship around the galley, so that the sausage stays still while the grill rotates—”
She chuckled; a carton of cranberry juice bounced off his head. “Enough already!”
“Alright.” He leaned back, the PA floating before him. Its open pages showed a real-time instrument feed from the lifeboat’s brain. (A clock in one corner spiraled down the seconds to Rachel’s first programmed deceleration burn, two thousand seconds before perigee.) Frowning, he scribbled glyphs with a stylus. “We should make it. Assuming they don’t shoot at us.”
“We’ve got a Red Cross transponder. They’d have to manually override their IFF.”
“Which they won’t do unless they’re really pissed off. Good.” Martin tapped a final period on the page. “I’d be happier if I knew what we were flying into, though. I mean, if the Festival hasn’t left anything in orbit—” They both froze.
Something scraped across the top of the escape capsule, producing a sound like hollow metal bones rattling against a cage.
The rabbit snarled and hefted his submachine gun angrily. Ears back and teeth visible, he hissed at the cyborg.
Sister Seventh sat up and stared at the confrontation. Everyone else except Burya Rubenstein ducked; Burya stepped forward into t
he middle of the clearing. “Stop this! At once!”
For a long moment the rabbit stood, frozen. Then he relaxed his stiff-backed pose and lowered his gun muzzle. “He started it.”
“I don’t care what he started: we have a job to do, and it does not require shooting each other.” He turned to the cyborg whom the rabbit had confronted. “What did you say?”
The revolutionary looked bashful; her fully extended claws retracted slowly. “Is not good extropian. This creature—” her gesture at the rabbit brought another show of teeth—“believe cult of personality! Is counterrevolutionary dissident. Head-launch now! Headlaunch now!”
Burya squinted. Many of the former revolutionaries had gone overboard on the personal augmentations offered by the Festival, without realizing that it was necessary to modify their central nervous systems in order to run them. This led to a certain degree of confusion. “But, comrade, you have a personality, too. A sense of identity is a necessary precondition to consciousness, and that, as the great leaders and teachers point out, is the keystone upon which the potential for transcendence is built.”
The cyborg looked puzzled. Mirror-finished nictitating membranes flashed across her eyeballs, reflecting inner thoughts. “But within society of mind there is no personality. Personality arises from society; therefore, individual can have no—”
“I think you misunderstand the great philosophers,” Rubenstein said slowly. “This is not a criticism, comrade, for the philosophers are, of their essence, very brilliant and hard to follow; but by ‘society of mind’, they were referring to the arrival of consciousness within the individual, arising from lesser pre-conscious agents, not to society outside the person. Thus, it follows that being attached to one’s own consciousness is not to follow a cult of personality. Now, following another’s—” He broke off and looked sharply at the rabbit. “I don’t think we will pursue this question any further,” he said primly. “Time to move on.”
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