A World of Hurt

by David Sherman

  There wasn't anything all that unusual about the report; colonists did occasionally meet death in unexpected and sometimes spectacular manner. But something about that one niggled at her. She read through it again, wracking her brain in search of what it was. Oh, yes! It was the second Unexplained Expiration report from Maugham's Station that had crossed her desk in recent weeks. But, no, three unexplained deaths on a colony world over a period of several weeks was hardly far enough out of routine to catch her attention, so what was it about this one?

  She went into the files to retrieve the earlier report. The first report gave details of the demise of one Samar Volga, a botanist on a solo study of the flora of an unexplored area of Maugham's Station. She paused at that, wondering if it was routine for biologists to venture alone into unexplored areas, decided it didn't matter, then compared the two reports.

  This time she noted a detail that had seemed insignificant when she'd seen it in isolation. The remains of the young couple and the earlier biologist showed signs of having been eaten by acid. The type of acid wasn't noted.

  Odd, she thought. What was it that seemed significant about that? She read through the two reports again. Another mental synapse clicked and she remembered something else that, at the time, had seemed to have no bearing whatsoever on her job.

  A year or so earlier she had been engaged in a passionate affair with an army colonel who worked in the Heptagon. One night, after a particularly enthusiastic bout of lovemaking, he'd said something about a mysterious danger that had struck a couple of frontier worlds--human worlds, but on the fringes of Human Space. Invaders who used acid weapons.

  At least that's what it sounded like he said; he was rather vague about it, and she wasn't listening all that closely. When she'd asked for clarification, he quickly backed off and told her to forget he'd said anything, it was classified Ultra Secret, Need to Know, and he wasn't supposed to know anything about it himself. She was so filled with an excess of afterglow from the sex, she'd readily forgotten about it.

  Until now.

  What had he been talking about? A rebellion? No, he said a couple of worlds. A war between human worlds? No, she would have heard about a war between human worlds if there'd been one, no matter how obscure were the worlds involved. An alien invasion?

  She snorted a laugh. Everybody knew there was no other sentience anywhere humanity was likely to make contact, maybe not even in the entire galaxy. Well, maybe somewhere in the other spiral arm, but humanity wouldn't encounter them for many millennia to come. If they even existed. In reality, alien invasions only happened in some of the more lurid trids and books.

  Still, the colonel had said the business of acid weapons was classified Ultra Secret, Need to Know, so it must be somehow significant. He had said something about acid weapons, hadn't he?

  Tarah Shiskanova decided that her reports were, possibly, something the military should know about.

  So instead of uploading the new file into the Open Directory of Unexplained Expirations, where reports of odd fatalities normally went, she annotated it as of possible military interest, attached a copy of the earlier report to it, and queued it up the line for review.

  It was a slow month, and Fourth Assistant Director for Control Himan Birkenstock was seriously bored. It was three more weeks until his scheduled holiday--he was taking his wife and children to the dizzney on the moon's far side--and he wasn't sure he could last three more weeks without going completely vacuum-crazy. He desperately needed something to do, something to get him out of the office for an hour or three. Thus it happened that, without reading beyond her annotation recommending referral to the Heptagon for disposition, he jumped on the report Tarah Shiskanova had forwarded.

  A distant cousin of Birkenstock's was a lieutenant commander in the Confederation Navy who had been posted to the Heptagon six months earlier. Ever since, the two had been promising each other they'd get together for lunch some day "soon." Some day soon hadn't come yet.

  Birkenstock immediately punched up the Heptagon directory and did a search for Lieutenant Commander Stewart "Soupy" Gullkarl, CN. In less than a second a listing appeared in the Directorate for Orbital Weaponry Assessment and Evaluation. He touched the comm link in the listing, and in only a few more seconds got a response.

  "Lieutenant Commander Gullkarl. How can I help you, sir?" The gray in the neatly trimmed beard shown in the projection belied the youthful features of the barely remembered oval face.

  Birkenstock blinked in surprise; he hadn't realized his cousin was old-fashioned enough to wear spectacles instead of having his eyes corrected.

  "Soupy? It's Himan," he said.

  "Himan?" Birkenstock distinctly heard an unspoken Who? after his name before Gullkarl's face lit up in recognition. "Himan Birkenstock! Good to hear from you, cousin. You know, we really do need to get together for lunch sometime."

  "Well, cousin, that's why I'm calling. How about today?"

  "Don't know." Light reflected off the lenses of Gullkarl's spectacles as he shook his head. "I've got quite a bit of work here." That was their usual excuse for not meeting; one or the other always seemed to have a lot of work to do, though that was hardly Birkenstock's problem just now.

  "And I want to add to it."

  "You do?" Gullkarl looked at him with a mix of interest and curiosity. He wasn't really busy with work, he had a tentative "discreet" luncheon meeting planned with a lieutenant commander--female--in the Directorate of Pregnancy and Sexually Transmitted Disease Prevention and Control. He was hoping that the "meeting" would actually happen and turn into a very long and intimate luncheon.

  "Yes. One of my analysts flagged a"--he looked at the report to see what it was and where it was from--"an Unexplained Expiration report from Maugham's Station as being of possible military interest. I don't know who to route it to, and I was hoping you could give me some direction."

  "All right. Queue it over to me and I'll take a look when I get a moment."

  Birkenstock leaned toward the projection and lowered his voice. "Soupy, I need to get out of the office; I'd rather walk it over."

  Gullkarl surreptitiously glanced at a clock and saw he had enough time. "Can you come over now? I can't promise lunch, though."

  "I'll let you know when I'm five minutes out."

  "Make it six minutes. Come to the southwest entrance." That was how long it would take him to check with the lovely lieutenant commander and get from his office to the southwest entrance to the Heptagon to verify his visitor.

  Hiram Birkenstock and Lieutenant Commander Soupy Gullkarl reached the guard station at the Heptagon's southwest entrance almost simultaneously. Rather than begin the verifications and other formalities involved in securing a visitor's pass for Birkenstock and admitting him through the guard station, Gullkarl came out.

  "My meeting got canceled," he said sourly. "Let's go to lunch."

  Sixty thousand people worked in the Heptagon and its immediate annexes, and a small city of shops and eateries had sprouted up around it to service them. Gullkarl steered them to a medium-size place that advertised a traditional Eastern European menu. Birkenstock let Gullkarl order for both of them, since he was unfamiliar with Eastern European cuisine, preferring traditional British himself.

  They made small talk about seldom seen relatives while they waited for their meal, and even smaller talk while they ate. Only after the dishes were cleared away and they were enjoying a cup of real coffee did they get to their ostensible reason for meeting. Birkenstock popped a crystal into his reader and handed it to Gullkarl.

  The navy officer read through the report and looked up at his cousin. "What's supposed to be of military interest in this?" he asked.

  "Tarah, Tarah Shiskanova--she's the analyst who flagged it--thought she saw something." He took the reader back and scanned the report beyond its what and where for the first time. "Here it is," he handed it back, "the bit about acid."

  Gullkarl studied the minor note for a long moment, wonder
ing why on earth anyone would think the military would be interested. Then he blinked. Right. He'd heard something, a vague, whispered rumor. There was somebody out there using acid guns. He nodded and almost snorted. Right. An alien invasion. Absurd. Absolutely absurd. And that was being kind. Everybody knew there was no such thing as sentient aliens. Still, there was that whispered rumor.

  "Can I have the crystal?" he asked, returning the reader. "I'll check it out."

  Birkenstock nodded. "It's a copy." He popped the crystal and handed it over.

  They chatted over a second cup of coffee, wrangled over who would pick up the check--Birkenstock won, he was certain he could charge it to his division as a military liaison expense--and went their separate ways, vowing to get together soon for another lunch. Maybe Gullkarl could come to dinner sometime and, yes, he could bring a lady friend.

  Lieutenant Commander Stewart "Soupy" Gullkarl, fully aware of the pun, stewed over the report and what to do about it for two days before deciding to go upstairs with it. He didn't literally go upstairs--"upstairs" was the glass-walled office at the end of the row of desks of which his was one. Captain Wilma Arden occupied the glass-walled office. She sometimes mused over the irony that an office with walls she could see through in all directions was a career dead end.

  She didn't realize it when Gullkarl rapped his knuckles on the frame of her open door, but her career was about to take a very dramatic change in direction and progression.

  "Enter!" she called.

  "Excuse me, ma'am," Gullkarl said as he took the seat she waved him toward. "Someone at Colonial Development passed a report to me and I can't figure out what to do with it." He gave her the crystal when she extended her hand.

  Arden morphed the console out of her desktop and popped the crystal into it. "I don't see anything about orbital weaponry. Why would anyone give it to us?"

  Gullkarl lifted his hands in embarrassment. "He didn't know who to queue it to. We're distant cousins, so he asked if I could direct him to the appropriate office."

  "Hmm." She read through the reports again and this time noticed the bit about acid. She'd heard the rumor too. She looked up and swiveled her chair to look out the window toward...toward...She knew all the constellations and could name every major star she saw in the night sky, but she was no astrogator and had no idea what stars or constellations lurked invisibly in the daytime sky where she looked.

  Wilma Arden was a navy captain. She wasn't supposed to wonder what to do, she was supposed to act like she knew exactly what to do--even if she hadn't the foggiest notion. She spun back to Gullkarl and slapped the palms of her hands on her desktop. "Thank you, Lieutenant Commander," she said firmly. "Your 'distant cousin' was right in referring this to the military, and you were right in bringing it to my attention. I'll take care of it from here."

  "Yes ma'am." He stood, understanding that he was dismissed, and came to attention. "By your leave, ma'am?"

  She nodded curtly, and he marched out of his commander's office, glad to have that crystal off his hands. A few minutes after he sat back at his desk, it occurred to him to wonder whether he'd promised cousin Himan he'd get back to him on the final disposition of the report. Then he shook his head. No, Birkenstock hadn't seemed to have any notion what the report was really about and had probably forgotten all about it.

  He was right.

  Commander Moon Happiness liked to think he had the best job in the We're Here! navy--commander of the heavy cruiser Goin'on, We're Here!'s most advanced starship. Just then, though, he wasn't as happy about his command as he had been. Admiral of the Starry Heavens Sativa Orange, Chief of Naval Operations for We're Here!, had taken personal command of the mission to locate the current home port of the Broken Missouri, the pirate freighter that was hauling rare ores from the planet designated 43q15x17-32--at least Admiral Orange and Commander Moon had independently concluded that's what the unmarked-but-nonetheless-identified Broken Missouri was doing, though Moon kept to himself his opinion that she wasn't a pirate ship--and made the Goin'on his flagship for the mission.

  Happiness was unhappy because Orange was unhappy. Not because he commiserated with Admiral Orange, but because the admiral was unhappy with him. Admiral Orange believed that the Goin'on should have already located the Broken Missouri's home port, and had made known his suspicion that her failure to do so was due to either dereliction or incompetence on the part of her commander. So Commander Happiness was justifiably concerned that instead of being promoted to captain, as he should be as commander of We're Here!'s most advanced warship, he might be relieved of his command, which would effectively terminate his career.

  Admiral Orange, in expressing his displeasure with Happiness, said more than once that he had forgotten more about being a ship's commander than the Goin'on's current commander had learned. Which was true as far as it went. Unfortunately for the sake of accuracy, what Admiral Orange remembered was less than what Commander Happiness knew. One detail that Admiral Orange had forgotten was, once a starship jumped into Beamspace, it was impossible to follow.

  When the Goin'on reported back to We're Here!, the admiral had come aboard with his primary staff and ordered the starship back to the Rock, which he called by its official designation. They'd only waited for nine days standard before the Broken Missouri, still cloaked, reappeared and headed for the planet. Admiral Orange wasn't impressed by the freighter's stealth capability or by the skill demonstrated by the Goin'on's crew in spotting it.

  "Why didn't you pick her up earlier?" he growled when he realized the starship must have been in Space-3 for three or four days before she was detected.

  They watched as the unmarked starship docked with the equally unmarked space station. They waited while the freighter took on its cargo. They followed discreetly when the Broken Missouri headed out-system for her jump into Beamspace. When she jumped, Admiral Orange waited with growing impatience for the Goin'on to follow. He finally demanded to know what the delay was.

  Commander Happiness did his best to control his expression, but wasn't able to keep some astonishment from showing. "But, sir, we can't follow a ship in Beamspace!"

  "Of course you can," Admiral Orange admonished Commander Happiness.

  "Sir?" Happiness asked, confused. Everybody knew starships couldn't be tracked in Beamspace.

  "It's simple. You enter Beamspace on the same trajectory your quarry enters it. That is how you find its destination."

  Commander Happiness blinked. That wouldn't work, but he wasn't about to tell the only admiral of the starry heavens in the entire history of his world that he was thinking from the wrong end of his spinal column. "Yessir," he unhappily replied. He ordered his astrogator, Lieutenant Sunshine Stems'n'seeds, to plot the course.

  "Aye aye, sir," replied Lieutenant Stems'n'seeds. "How far do you want us to jump?"

  Therein lay the rub. The Broken Missouri could jump back into Space-3 anywhere from one light-year distant to twenty or more lights, and nobody had any way of knowing without being informed by someone privy to the freighter's astrogation plan. Even then, the vagaries of Beamspace were such that where a starship returned to Space-3 would vary to some extent from a true straight line. If that wasn't enough, when she made her jump back into Beamspace following the brief course correction for which she reentered Space-3, the Broken Missouri could jump in any direction. Again, there was no way for anybody to know--or even make an educated guess--without, again, access to her astrogation plan.

  Commander Happiness was in a very bad position. No matter what he told his astrogator, he was going to be wrong. He swallowed, wondering if he'd be allowed to wear a spacesuit when he was keelhauled, and asked, "Sir, how far does the admiral want us to jump?"

  The look that Admiral of the Starry Heavens Orange gave him was one that had sent many a staff officer scurrying back to quarters for a quick shower and change of undergarments. The voice in which he replied was cold enough to fracture continent-size ice sheets. "This is your ship, Capta
in. How far do you normally jump?"

  How far the Goin'on jumped depended on how far she was going, how great the need for precision was, and whether she had any escort destroyers. Happiness glanced at the starchart to see where other gravity wells were relative to the evidently mineral-rich planet they had under observation and picked a destination midway between it and the next major gravity well that could have a negative impact on the starship's reentry into Space-3.

  "Make it four point one lights," he ordered.

  "Four point one lights. Aye aye, sir," Stems'n'seeds replied. "Jump in five minutes."

  Happiness turned to Orange. "If the admiral will return to his cabin, sir."

  "The admiral will remain on the bridge, Captain," Orange said in a barely less frigid voice. He proceeded to strap himself into the Skipper's jump couch.

  Commander Happiness unhappily looked about the bridge. The other jump couches were all occupied by officers and crew who actually had jobs to perform during the jump. He came to the sad conclusion that he was the only person present on the bridge whose presence wasn't vital during a jump, and headed for the executive officer's cabin, which he was sharing since Admiral Orange occupied his.

  Ten minutes later, no worse for the experience of a jump than usual, Happiness emerged from his cabin, wondering why the officer-of-the-deck hadn't restored ship's gravity. He found out--and almost lost it--when he entered the bridge.

  Essential crew were carefully selected for their ability to withstand the gut-wrenching effects of jumps. Admiral Orange hadn't made many jumps since he'd been assigned to planetside duty as deputy G1 of the previous CNO fifteen years earlier. The single jump the Goin'on had made between We're Here! and the vicinity of the Rock had, purely coincidentally, come as the admiral was taking a nap. This was the first jump he'd made while conscious in a decade and a half. That, combined with the null-g required during jumps, had a powerful effect on the admiral, and the entire contents of his upper digestive tract ejected themselves rather spectacularly into the close space of the bridge. That caused two of the bridge crew to eject theirs, and that in turn set off the regurgitative reflex in everybody else.