Chapter 4
“Sit down, please,” Wolfe invited the three veterans. On the table he set a carafe of white lightning that he had abstracted from the still while he and Borden were cleaning up. “Drink?”
“No, thanks, sir,” Borden said. Lin shook her head silently.
“Too early,” Thielind agreed. “Lunch is in an hour. What’s up, looey?”
Daivid settled himself down in the chair behind the desk. “You’ve already figured out I’m as green as they come, but I got one good piece of advice when I shipped out from my last posting. My commander told me to trust the experienced officers and the top noncom in my unit, so that’s what I am doing. Let me put myself in your hands. I’m a newbie. Hell, I haven’t been here a day yet. You’ve been around here for years. What can I do to help keep this unit running, or get it running better? I’ve noticed the morale around here sucks. How can I help raise it? What does X-Ray really need? What do you need?”
“Need?” Thielind’s open face showed astonishment, then pleasure. “Really?”
Borden tented her hands together and leaned forward. “Sir, we need everything.”
Wolfe blinked. “Everything?”
“Everything,” Lin affirmed.
Borden nodded. “Yup. You wanted to know why we weren’t wearing dress whites today. Ours are falling apart. I haven’t had new ones in five years. Some of the others have gone longer. Supply always puts us off when we ask, saying that the request is going up the chain of command. Same goes for everything else. We need new field uniforms, updated weapons, updated software for the weapons, better communication gear … I guess we’re okay on the condition of our body armor, but the CBS,Ps are bad, and Supply refuses to replace them. We’ve had the same units for almost eight months, now. They’re supposed to be rotated every three months of use.” Borden pushed her infopad towards the lieutenant, who frowned at the list.
Compression Body Stocking, Personal, was a neck-to-heels weblike garment that went on bare skin underneath the padded lining of combat armor. Its sensors read environmental data coming from outside and kept blood flowing out to the extremities, especially in deep-space conflicts, by means of gentle peristaltic pressure. His CBS,P had been worn on only three missions of a few days each. From the litany of missions the others had given him, theirs had seen service for more than ten times that long. By comparison, his was brand, spanking new.
“That’s outrageous,” Wolfe sputtered. “CBS,Ps are vital! They might be all that keeps you alive if your armor malfunctions.”
Lin shook her head in pity. “Sir, they don’t care if we come back alive, remember? We’re an ancillary scout platoon, officially. Unofficially, well, this is where old troublemakers go to die.”
Borden’s bleak voice interrupted the master chief’s. “We’ve made the request about once a week since we got back from our last mission, three months ago. If we only have five days until we ship out again, then those are our top priority. The others won’t matter if we don’t have fresh webs.”
Resolutely, Wolfe shoved his infopad so the transfer eye faced Borden’s. “Give me the whole list. I’ll get new units for the company, and then we’ll see about the rest.”
“That,” Thielind said, with his ready smile, “will do a lot to help morale.”
O O O
“New CO of the Cockroaches?” the supply master chief asked, as he scrolled down the list on Daivid’s infopad. He had thick, red-tinted hair that contrasted violently with his ruddy-pink complexion and red irised eyes. His round belly strained against his gray-blue uniform tunic. “Welcome, I guess.”
“Thanks,” Daivid said, leaning over to read along with him. They were in the supply office, a square stub attached to the front of the vast warehouse that held everything from paperclips to armor-plated personnel carriers. “Will you be able to lend me a loader to get all these supplies to the transport, or do you deliver everything but the clothes directly to our transport?”
“Not so fast, not so fast!” Master Chief Sargus said, holding up a thick-fingered hand. “It’s restday, admiral. You asking to see me, I thought this was urgent.”
Daivid frowned. “Some of it is urgent. We’re shipping in a few days.”
“Uh-huh, so I hear.” Sargus scrolled through the list again. “Well, I’ve got some of this, but some, maybe not. There’s a hold against some of my stock for the other units here, see?”
Wolfe sighed. He had dealt with supply officers before. The game they always played bored him silly, but it seemed as though every one of them had gone through a training class in the same technique and insisted on using it. ‘Obstruct, deny, refuse’ was the unspoken motto of Supply Corps. “Right, and if you give it to me, then you’ll be out of it, and you’ll have to reorder. Is that it?”
“Right you are, admiral,” Sargus agreed, with a grin that showed big square teeth. Daivid was surprised they weren’t tinted red, too, but, no, they were gleaming yellow. The guy looked like a tropical island shirt. “No can do. And then what would I tell my other customers?”
“You’ll tell them you gave them to me, because I asked,” Daivid said, dropping his voice slightly.
“Yeah? And why would I do that?”
“Because I did ask. And while you’re looking for the general list, why don’t you see if you can find me some extra rounds for my Dockery 5002?” Suddenly moving closer to the counter, Daivid eased a sidearm out of his holster just so the big man could get a look at the maker’s name, then briefly, just for shock value, the end of the barrel. He let his eyes flash dangerously, a glint of the gold showing. Sargus took an involuntary step backward as Daivid put the barrel practically up the other man’s nose. “Isn’t she a beauty? Eleven-millimeter select-fire machine pistol with a 20 round magazine? Caseless ammunition. With a suppressor like that no one would ever hear you die.”
“Well!” Sargus exclaimed, with fresh heartiness, his color paled to light peach. “I heard you were one of those Wolfes. Wasn’t sure. But you had to be a crazy bastard or canny as a fox to pull a gun on me in the middle of one of the most heavily secured buildings on the base, didn’t you? Nice to be connected, huh, admiral? I’m an organized man, you know. I like to have my facts in order. Now, those rounds I’d have to send away for. No way I’ll have them before you ship out, sir. No lie.” Daivid nodded slowly, backing away and putting the gun back into its holster. He deplored having to invoke the Family reputation, but it cut out at least forty minutes of the “I don’t have it” dance and negotiations. Lin had told him everyone already knew who he was; he might as well use other people’s imaginations to get what the company needed. It wasn’t as if he was threatening to have his father’s minions come down and wreck the chief’s storehouse. Not that Benjamin wouldn’t do it if Daivid had been stupid and rash enough to ask. “But within, say, six weeks, sure. I’m expecting at least three major shipments in that interval. By the time you get back I’ll have ’em.”
“Good,” Wolfe said, letting his hand drop away from the holster. “I’ve still got two hundred-round magazines in my kit. What about the rest of it?”
“Your group isn’t due for rotation into new dress gear for two more months,” the master chief said, shaking his head. This time Daivid believed him. “Fatigues—I’m only authorized to replace worn items, not ones that were willfully damaged. Otherwise, it comes out of your people’s pay. You know that. Ammo, yeah, Commander Mason sent me a message that you needed supplies. But fifty cases of P-130 shells, admiral! I can’t give you fifty.”
“We need fifty,” Daivid insisted patiently, though he had inflated the numbers just because he expected to have to negotiate. “That’s what my master chief said, and I want backups. I can’t just walk into a trading post or a department store and ask for heavy artillery rounds.”
“Thirty-five,” Sargus countered. “And I’ll make sure you get all ten rapid-charges for the dragons.” Daivid nodded slightly, satisfied. Dragons, the space service’s light, one-or two-man hovertank, were the workhorse of small field units. X-Ray had two. Lin had insisted that they couldn’t do without at least five backup power sources per dragon, especially since they were working under blind orders. Like the ammunition, it would be too late to hunt for more once they were at their task site. He wondered what assignment was so important that it had to be kept secret even on the base, but was being handed to a unit that everyone knew was considered expendable.
Sargus ran through the list. The two of them bantered back and forth over one item after another. Daivid noticed that the chief was purposely ignoring the item on the top.
“Well, that’s it, admiral,” Sargus said, slapping the infopad down on the counter. “Success to your mission. I’ll have your special order ready when you get back. Forgot to ask—is it official, or will you be, er, making some other arrangement for reimbursement?” He leered, showing the big yellow teeth. “A … favor, maybe?”
“The Dockery ammunition is personal,” Daivid said, cringing at the use of the word. The man really did understand who he was. “We can talk about what you’d like in exchange when you know what it’s going to cost … but we’re not done yet. You still have not signed off on one of my requests, and it’s the most important of all.”
“No can do, Lieutenant Wolfe,” Sargus said, clapping his big hand down on the screen. His jovial manner evaporated and he was back to all business. “Sorry. No CBS,Ps.”
“Sorry? What do you mean, sorry?” Wolfe asked, drawing his brows down over his eyes. He knew he was losing his temper, and fought to control it. What had gone wrong? It had looked like he’d been establishing a good working rapport with Sargus. “You know that those CBS,Ps are the one vital item on that list. We might as well not have shells or power packs if the human beings in my company carrying them can’t function in their armor.”
“Your company,” Sargus said, leaning close and showing the red-veined whites of his eyes, “should have thought of that before. I’m tired of getting all sorts of crap from the reconditioning facility when I send the used units from your company back to them to be refurbished. The unauthorized modifications make it almost impossible to tune them up so they can go to another, decent unit who don’t screw with the programming of your so-called most vital item! And I don’t even want to talk about the extra mess. Now, if you don’t mind, Lieutenant, I’d like to get back to what I was doing on my restday before you decided to waste my time.” With a shove, he propelled the infopad back toward Daivid, who caught it just before it fell off his side of the counter. Sargus backed up and stabbed a button with his thumb. The security wall crashed down out of the ceiling, sealing the supply hatch before Daivid could reach over the counter and grab him by the neck. Fuming, Daivid stormed out of the building and marched back toward the transportal.
O O O
“What unauthorized modifications?” Daivid demanded.
After forty minutes bottled up on the transport where he couldn’t even vent his temper because security eyes were all over the tube-train, he had stormed all over the barracks looking for someone, anyone, to explain the last humiliation to him. Having dismissed everyone to enjoy the remainder of their restday meant hunting out the various hiding places in which the Cockroaches could find a little peace and quiet without the brass coming upon them casually with a scut assignment. He had managed to find Thielind practicing tai chi in his swim fins in the mess hall.
“It’s not for me to explain, lieutenant,” Thielind explained, leading Daivid back to his quarters. “I’m just the ensign. But I have got about a dozen locations where Lieutenant Borden or Chief Lin might be.” He held up a small personal tracking device. “They’re in the memory.” Daivid reached for it, but Thielind held it just out of reach. “Looey, don’t let this finder get into range of an infopad. It took us ages to get those spaces the way we like them. If the data hits the base source computer everyone will know they exist. I mean, they could use our implant tracers to find us in ’em if they really wanted, but … just don’t, sir. These are our vacation spots.”
Daivid gestured impatiently. “Agreed, ensign,” he said. He activated the little device, noticing that its ‘eye’ had been covered by a strip of duct tape. Thielind was right: that wouldn’t stop a handshake transmitter from picking the unit’s memory. But Daivid wasn’t out to destroy yet another Cockroach tradition. All he wanted was either Lin or Borden, in front of him, immediately.
The screen showed the first nook no more than fifty feet from where he was standing. His feet driven by the memory of the smug look on Chief Sargus’s face, he strode toward it, readying a diatribe on not giving him sufficient briefing to handle a situation, and how he felt, personally, about being humiliated.
He missed the entrance three times before he found a gap between two ancient and battered metal tanks feeding the water-purification plant. He squeezed through it and discovered a circular area about four meters across and lined with discarded ship’s carpeting. He hastily backed out again.
“… The contemplation of the newfallen snow is less lonely with you beside me, and the stars look down upon us and laugh for joy …” Mose read off an infopad. He lay with his head on Streb’s chest at the far end of the enclosure. The muscular petty officer plucked grapes from a bunch in a bowl beside them and fed one to the poet, who continued with his reading, letting his warm baritone voice echo magnificently in the metal tube. “… Cold the future, and cold the past, but warm the present held in your hand fast.…” Daivid backed hastily out; hoping Streb and Mose hadn’t noticed him. Activating the tracker again, he headed for the next ‘vacation spot.’
It amazed him how many dead areas there were on a spaceport where every square centimeter was supposedly in use and under tight surveillance. Adri’Leta was lolling in the sun reading a book out behind a spent-fuel storage block. She glanced up in surprise when he appeared almost beside her, and he threw her a salute. If not for the silhouettes of the fighter craft behind her, she might have been in a luxury resort, up to and including holoposters adhered to the side of the storage shed.
Daivid didn’t really need to use the finder to locate Jones. He found the Cymraeg standing knee deep in waders, fishing in the rocky brook that flowed parallel to the landing pad about a kilometer out and singing light opera in his big voice. Ewanowski and Aaooorru sat slung in a pair of insulation rings sipping out of cocktail glasses festooned with paper umbrellas which they lifted in toast to Daivid as he frowned at them. Funny, corlists and semicats were not species that usually got along well. But he still hadn’t found the right person. He strode on, stalking his prey with all the intense concentration of his namesake animal.
Meyers looked up with concern and gathered up the arrangement of Tarot cards she had spread out on a cloth across the bottom of an unused shipping container and snuffed out the candles burning at the corners.
“Sorry, sorry,” Daivid kept saying, getting more and more angry in his embarrassment.
Finally, he located one of his two quarries, at the bottom of a gully bounded on three sides by an ox-bow of the ancient river that bounded the spaceport.
“There you are!”
A naked Chief Boland scrambled up and out of the double-recliner chair at the sound of Daivid’s furious voice. The big man reached for his discarded breeches and started to tug them on. Lin, similarly unclad, merely shrugged and shifted her eyeshades up onto the top of her head. Her slight but taut body was a criss-crossed network of healing scars and decorated here and there with tattoos. On her knee was a raised area resembling Ambering’s do-it-yourself Cockroach.
“So, you went to Supply,” she said, her eyes crinkling up at Daivid with amusement. “How far’d you get?”
“What unauthorized modifications?” Daivid exploded. “You set me up.”
“Nah,” Lin waved a protest. She found a bottle of sunprotectant on the ground and handed it to Boland. Obediently, he opened it and began to rub it on her back and shoulders. “It was worth a try. I thought your background might get the request past him. You’re going to have to go through Mason to get replacements after all. Sorry. I was hoping you wouldn’t have to.”
“You knew he was going to refuse?” Daivid asked, feeling his blood pressure rising.
“Well … maybe 80%.” She took the bottle and began to anoint her small breasts with the white lotion.
Daivid lost his patience. He threw his hands in the air. “What unauthorized modifications? What did you do to the CBS,Ps that I am going to have to take the request to the commander instead of just requisitioning them like any other unit?”
“Everybody does it,” Boland interjected. Daivid just glared at him. The big chief looked momentarily sheepish. Daivid transferred the glare to Lin.
She looked a little embarrassed, too. “All right, maybe they don’t. But they could.”
“Do what?” Daivid pressed.
“Well, you know what the CBS,P does,” Lin began. “It monitors circulation, and responds to drops or increases in ambient pressure. It keeps up a wave of compression going all over the body.”
“Yes, so where does.…?”
“Let me explain,” Lin pleaded. “So … you know, sometimes transport to the arenas takes so long, and people were getting bored … we adapted it so that maybe it compresses a little harder in some places.…”
“… And a little faster,” Boland added. “Okay, a lot faster. Not all the time, just after a while. Then it stops.”
Daivid eyed them. “And where does it start this faster, har—oh, tell me you’re kidding!”
The two chiefs had the grace to look ashamed of themselves. “Uh, no.”
“So you’ve turned the space service’s main survival garment into an all-over masturbation machine? No wonder Supply is furious with you!”
“He’s quick on the uptake,” Lin told Boland. “Most of ’em don’t get it right away.”
“Would you like us to adjust yours?” Boland offered. “If you’re not interested in the sex thing, it also gives a hell of a good backrub.”
“And a footrub,” put in Lin. “Totally sensual.”
“No!” Daivid exclaimed, horrified. “So … you say you turned in the used garments for new ones, and they refurbished the material, and then some poor unsuspecting bastard in another unit puts it on and activates the mechanism, and …” The image in his mind of a body stocking putting intimate moves on its wearer started to form in his mind. The guy had to be squirming in his armor, unable to explain what was happening to him. Daivid tried to remain upset about it, but the more he thought about it, the harder it was not to laugh. The situation struck him as irresistibly funny. “And he’s got to explain to his commanding officer that he can’t … because he’s got … and then he …” He gestured feebly as words failed him. He started laughing. His knees folded under him and he slid down until he was sitting on Lin’s deck chair. Tears leaked out of his eyes. He wiped them away with the edge of his hand. In a while he gasped for breath. “Oh, my God! I love it.”
“After a while you get used to the effect,” Boland explained. “I mean, once I had to do an insertion dive before I … er … finished. It was kind of cool, getting turned on in mid-air. It doesn’t interfere with your effectiveness, I swear. We don’t run it during the missions themselves. It just keeps us from being bored during the long stretches in the suits.”
“So what are the limericks and the other time-fillers for, then?”
“Hey, you can’t jerk off all the time!”
“Are you sure you don’t want to have the programming installed yourself?” Lin asked.
“Hell, no,” Daivid said, passionately, getting himself under control. “And if anyone does that to my suit without my permission I’ll space them.”
Boland made a face. “You gonna make us undo ours?”
“It would help if you deprogrammed the old ones before we turn them in for replacements,” Daivid pointed out, reasonably. He stood up. “If I can get that tightass in Supply to give us replacements.”
Lin waved a hand. “They’ve got to give them to us anyhow. Just get Mason to sign off on it. She’ll do it, no problem. She’s done it a bunch of times.”
“Fine,” Daivid said. He’d had enough, and he had his answer. “I’ll leave you alone now. Enjoy the rest of your day. See you at 0600 for PT tomorrow.” He boosted himself up the bank.
“Hey, lieutenant?” Lin called. “You passed the test. You were a good sport. Captain Cohen, the CO we had before Scoley, went into a complete snit the first time he found out about the CBS,Ps, and we ended up doing survival evolutions every day for a month. But then he asked Boland to reprogram his, and he never again gave us shit about it.”
Daivid smiled down at them, the sun behind him casting his long shadow over their faces. “How do you know I won’t?”
Lin gave him a half-smile, soldier to soldier, Family to Family, woman to man. “I just know.”
“Don’t think you’ve pegged me as a softy, chief,” Wolfe warned her. He waved and walked away.
O O O
The soft blue glow of the chronometer on the front of the mess hall read 0200. Two of Treadmill’s three moons, tiny gleaming white bubbles, sailed high overhead through a clear, black, star-spangled night. That night, Daivid moved on soft-footed tiptoe to the door of the enlisted barracks. In the red glow of the emergency lighting, he could see humped shapes on each of the bunks and floating in the corlist’s tank. He knew they had been over the big room with electronic detectors and other means of investigating whether he had planted some form of discipline upon them. Sometimes, he mused, low-tech was best. Standing at attention in the doorway, he removed a finger-long silver cylinder from his breast pocket, raised it to his lips, and blew.
The whistle’s blast tore the air like a descending tornado. Snatched from sleep, the Cockroaches sprang out of bed. Or tried to. As each of the occupants of the bunk attempted to draw his or her feet out of the covers, the Vortex, a complicated but nearly undetectable folding together of top and bottom bedsheets, twisted together around their lower limbs, immobilizing or significantly hobbling them. As Daivid punched on the overhead lights, he was treated to the morally satisfying sight of nineteen of his twenty enlisted personnel flailing about as they thrashed, fell out of bed, or staggered upright with their sheets clinging to their legs. The corlist swam to the side of his tank and hung there by his upper limbs, watching with bemusement. With a final grin at his troopers, Wolfe pocketed his whistle, spun on his heel, and marched out of the barracks into the night, leaving the confusion behind him.
A touch on the arm nearly made him jump out of his shoes.
“It’s me, sir,” Borden’s voice whispered. She drew forward into the light. Thielind stood at her elbow, his large eyes gleaming. Both of them wore grins that nearly reached their ears. “Very nice, sir. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. The Vortex is … very effective.”
Daivid couldn’t help sharing their grin. “A shock for a shock,” he said succinctly. “Let the punishment fit the crime. Good night, lieutenant, ensign.”
“Good night, sir,” they chorused. Daivid marched off to his own quarters, cognizant of a job well done. This might be the start of a battle of practical jokes, but he was ready for it. On the way back from the main base he had had plenty of time to review all those long-dormant tricks he had learned at camp. What with modern technology and the experience of the intervening years, he was pretty sure he could hold his own. If he woke up the next morning with his clothes soaked and tied into knots, he would cope.
O O O
The geese woke him two hours later, at false dawn. Wolfe stared at the ceiling for a moment, then rolled over, carefully feeling the bedclothes with his feet. No strings had been tied to his toes, no return Vortex played on him while he was sleeping, but he still had the feeling that someone had been in his quarters. He had no specific reason, no clue to which he could easily point, except for a faint, foreign scent in the air that couldn’t be put down to his perambulation of the base nor his personal toiletries. He stretched out a hand to palm the control for the overhead lights. He could see nothing unusual. He eased himself out of bed.
Very gingerly, he stood to one side and activated the doors to the closet and the bathroom. Nothing. No bucket of water tumbled to the floor, no tripwires sprang up from the smooth, synthetic flooring to grab his ankles, no sudden blast of marching band music shocked him into jumping backwards. The contents of his bureau and desk had been left alone. None of the drawers were booby-trapped. His infopad seemed to function correctly, and all his uniforms were dry and properly pressed.
With a sudden attack of panic he felt for the card on his chest. It was intact, with no sign that any attempt had been made to tamper with it. The miniature screen sprang into life when he held the retinal scanner up to his eye. None of the access alarms showed.
A half-hour’s search turned up no signs of intrusion. Still feeling a little uneasy, he stepped into the shower and turned on the tap.
The outrushing torrent from the showerhead knocked him against the back wall. Wolfe flailed for the grab bars and hauled himself upright. He slammed the lever downward and stood panting, water streaming down his body.
A cursory flick of the lever produced another waterfall-power cataract. Wolfe turned it on and off a few times just to make certain that it was ordinary water coming out of the rose, not perfume, paint or a few other less savory liquids that he knew could be loaded into a tank. He laughed until the enamel-walled room rang with the sound. Either the faulty plumbing had healed itself overnight, or the Cockroaches were responsible for the puppy-piddle stream he had bathed with for the first few days of his tenure. They were waiting for a sign that he was worthy of their respect. How many commanding officers had come and gone through here, never knowing that the shower could work properly?
“I wonder which one it was,” he said, aloud, as he adjusted the spray to a comfortable spray, halfway between drowning standing up and a fine mist, before stepping in, “facing the supply chief, or the Vortex?”
An hour later he jogged in place on the exercise yard as the chronometer turned over from 0459 to 0500. The door of the barracks zipped open, and every member of the Cockroaches swarmed out, attired in workout gear.
“Morning, lieutenant,” Boland greeted him, with a snappy salute. “So, what do you want us to do first?”
O O O
“As you can see, we have already returned twenty-two units,” Wolfe said, as Commander Mason read through the supply request he had placed on her desk. “They’re ready for refurbishment.”
“They are?” Mason asked, glancing up from the infopad. On the tip of her tongue was an unasked question. Wolfe picked up the cue as neatly as he could. He put on a stern expression.
“Yes, ma’am. I think you’ll find them to be in as good a condition as CBS,Ps can be, when they’re so overdue for replacement. I believe they should have been swapped out over 150 days ago. Even standard programming can’t stabilize an elastic fabric that gets that much wear in the course of a military task. My troopers might have to rely upon those units to save their lives. Not that I am criticizing a senior officer, ma’am. Just quoting regulations.”
“Standard programming, eh?” Mason murmured to herself. “Miraculous. I mean, good.” As Lin had predicted, the senior officer read the notation on the infopad, and affixed her signature code. She pushed it toward him.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Wolfe said, saluting. “I’ll take this directly to Supply. We have only three days until we lift.”
“Lieutenant,” the commander began tentatively. Wolfe stopped. “I … I have to say how remarkably well you’re doing with your new unit. I was very impressed by the results of the inspection the other day. I wouldn’t say such strides are unprecedented, but admittedly, they are rare.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Daivid said, pleased. But Mason wasn’t finished.
“I, uh, you didn’t have to put any unusual pressure on your company in order to get those results? There’s nothing you need to discuss with me?”
Wolfe groaned inwardly. He knew exactly what she meant. Was he threatening the Cockroaches, Family style, to get them to shape up the way they had? He almost opened his mouth to admit to her he had made most of the beds himself.
“No, ma’am,” he assured her fervently. “My interaction with X-Ray company is pretty much all within normal parameters. Don’t worry, commander. I’m sure it won’t all be such smooth sailing in the future.”
Mason sagged visibly with relief. Wolfe guessed she felt torn between two reputations, the Cockroaches’ and the Wolfe Family. “Glad to hear it … I mean, please keep me apprised of your progress. And if you have any troubles over the next few days, come to me. That’s what I’m here for.”
Wolfe saluted briskly. “Thank you, ma’am.”
O O O
Colonel Inigo Ayala stood before his captain’s chair on the bridge of his flagship, the Dilestro, as the helm officer prepared to bring the ship out of nonspace transition. The starchart he saw on the three-dimensional viewscreen was a computer-generated projection. What was actually outside the ship in nonspace, that fourth-dimensional jump in between linear points, was nonsense to the human eye since they were traveling faster than light, but people, he mused, could not stand to have nothing to look at. Stars were pictured as streaks, relative to their proximity to the ship, the color dependent upon the Doppler effect of which direction they were moving in the great cosmic dance. Even if it was an illusion, Ayala rejoiced in it. It was pretty. And each streak out there represented either a star system that humanity had conquered, or had yet to conquer. In his opinion, Man was wasting his time not taking over more worlds and making use of their potential. That was why he followed General Sams. She had the same belief he did. Maybe it was a big dream, one that would never be realized in his lifetime, but he still enjoyed picturing the universe as the rightful playground of the hairless, clawless apes from Terra. Not bad for a race that spends its formative years helpless and frightened, eh?
Ever since humanity made the non-linear jump in between Sol’s star system and another, questions arose, not just “how can we do this again?” but “how far can we go, and what effect does it have on the people who make the jumps and the ones they leave behind?” With nonlinearity, the disruption of lives was minimalized. Transit, while not instantaneous, was greatly reduced in endurance, so that to cross the thousands of light years comprising the Thousand Worlds sector of the Milky Way galaxy along the longest axis took less than two hundred days. Why, travellers had to be fairly hyperactive even to get bored during that short a trip.
Humankind’s footprint in the galaxy had increased in size every year since the discovery of faster-than-light travel, and began to overlap those of other intelligent races. The first thing humans discovered was that they could do it—travel faster than light and survive—and the second was that they could do it again. The next thing they learned was that they were not alone in the galaxy, and some of the beings out there could do it, too. The other thing they learned was that people in their zeal to travel great distances kept their eyes on the distant prize, and less on their immediate surroundings. To a boy who had grown up picking pockets in the capital city of Great Fufford, Bailey’s Planet, he hoped that starfarers would never lose that idealistic, billion-light-year vision.
From the trio of worlds that was the Insurgency’s base of operations, forty days to the central trade routes. The latest gen from his spies gave him copies of the bills of lading informed him that the loads he was interested in, the Tachytalks and millions of credits’ worth of other supplies, had already set out from their worlds of manufacture on board a fleet of trade ships bound for distributorships in five different destinations. The trick was to catch the ships before they split up. His ships were built for chase and conquest. They lacked the comforts of most of TWC ships, such as entertainment centers and holosuites, sometimes even devoid of shock padding anywhere but the crash couches, but they had capacious cargo holds and better-than-average shielding. The people who shipped aboard them didn’t mind the discomfort. They were zealots. Each had come to the Insurgency with his, her or its own agenda and own particular grudge against the central government, but by and large they managed to operate under a grudging truce. The first thing was to overthrow the status quo and get rid of the unresponsive, overblown government. How things worked after that was a war for the future.
Not that Ayala had anything against non-humans. Most of the crew of Dilestro were bugs. With their hard carapaces they were more radiation resistant than humans, and cared less for the comforts most humans craved. Ayala, who slept on an unpadded plastic slab, never listened to gripes about soft beds. The one thing the bugs liked were fresh leaves, a fortunate coincidence, since the cheapest way to recycle carbon dioxide-heavy air was to let plants breathe it in. Every ship had all-shift grow lights beaming down on mosses and vines that clung to every non-essential interior surface. So the wild growth made it a little hard to read door signs and indicators once in a while, and every so often one tripped over a vine seeking a more room to grow. So what? Green refreshed the eyes. Once the Insurgency had succeeded in overthrowing the central government, he intended to lobby for certain resource-poor worlds to be transformed into nature conservancies. No sense in supporting an impoverished industrial complex when there were so many others making a profit in the universe. Specialization—that made for survival. Let predators be predators, and let herbivores be their prey.
The everpresent howl of the drives faded as they slowed. The bright streaks in the navigation tank shortened from dashes to dots. Ayala rode out the rough transition, bending his knees like a surfer at each bump and judder. He would not sit down. To have to hold on to something was a sign of weakness. He cursed his knees, which had forced him to suffer replacement surgery. They did not understand who was master here. Mere joints and cartilage! What were they against neural tissue and its potential for greatness?
Itterim Sol Oostern appeared at his side. “We’ve cleared nonspace,” he chittered.
“Good,” Ayala said. “Any fresh info?”
“Awaiting transmissions from shell-brothers. I sent a coded squirt letting them know our vector. It could be up to half a day. Do we want to wait?”
Ayala nodded. “No sense in throwing a surprise party if the guests of honor aren’t coming.”
He deplored the use of spies, but the other side employed them, so he had to. No sense in refusing to take up a weapon. He felt that the Insurgency had the right on their side. The Thousand Worlds Confederation was outdated, dying under its own weight. What was needed was a simpler outlook: everyone to their purpose, in cooperation with all others, for the greater glory of the galaxy. Others, deep inside the bloated bureaucracy, shared his vision. The identities of some of them would surprise the senators and representatives who purported to speak for the people. They would be amazed to know how many of their so-called constituents felt that government had gone off track and was sticking its nose into places it didn’t belong.
An itterim at the communications console signed to Oostern, who checked his battered infopad.
“They have received our coordinates and will arrive shortly, colonel.”
“Good,” Ayala said. “Tell them we await their news.”
***