Emile and the Dutchman (10 page)

"Yes?"

"How about Bar-El? If you're expecting some hand-to-hand, well—"

The Dutchman shook his head. "The Hebe is not trustworthy—you heard him: he serves Metzada, not the Thousand Worlds. So you keep your mouth shut around him—if he asks you what time it is, you don't know and you don't want to know. Understood?"

I quelled the vague glimmering. I didn't want to know what was going on. The Dutchman had just told me that, in so many words. "Aye aye, sir."

IV

Low-to-no-gee hand-to-hand combat is a little like something out of a classic comic book, like Sharkman, Captain America, or American Flagg! or whatever. In all those comics—still one of my secret vices—the heroes leap around, jumping their own height in the air or higher, somersaulting into a fight.

Low-to-no-gee combat is something like that. Unless you're as good as Akiva Bar-El.

I kicked hard off the padding—think of it as a wall, ceiling, or floor; it's all a matter of taste—and spun half over, lunging feet first at where he hung in midair, floating just about a meter from the curved wall.

He seemed to shift microscopically to one side, then, as I went by, he tapped me lightly on the calf, groin, solar plexus, throat, wrist, and forehead. There was no doubt in my mind that any of the blows could have hurt me badly, if this had been for real.

I let my knees give as I hit the opposite wall.

"Even allowing for skill differences, you still have to consider the mass, Lieutenant," he said. "You have to strike a vulnerable point as you pass by me, or my greater mass will tell."

He untied the towel from around his waist and mopped at his forehead. In low to no gravity like that in the tubular gym at the center of rotation of the
Magellan,
surface tension tends to keep sweat on and around the body, unless you turn up the longitudinal fans high enough to blow you against the outflow, which would defeat the purpose of a
free fall
gym.

So, you sweat, and if you don't mop down frequently, you suffer.

Stripped to the waist, Akiva Bar-El was even uglier than he had been clothed; the coiled muscles under his mottled skin were powerful, certainly, but hadn't been developed with looks in mind. His hairy chest was dotted with a greater variety of scars than I'd ever seen on a human being. He didn't talk about it, but it couldn't have been from Metzada Mercenary corps work—he had arrived at Alton at eighteen.

He beckoned me over. "Alternately, think about this," he said, taking up a zero-gee parody of a karate stance. His back was straight, and his knobby left fist extended at the end of an arm, his right fist at his side—but his feet were curled up underneath him, like a perching bird.

"Conservation of angular momentum." Slowly, he mimed a punch, pulling his left arm back as he thrust his right arm forward.

That was the only movement. "Now, if you don't compensate with the other side," he said, demonstrating, "you spin opposite to the direction of force. Try again."

I measured the distance by eye and tried again, kicking off the padded walls, trying to time my spin so that I could catch him off-guard with a backfist.

"Very nice," he said, easily catching my wrist with a monkey-block. "Again, sir. If you please."

V

I was in the middle of a nice dream. I didn't know it was a dream, and later it turned out that Janine really did enjoy—

"
Three hours to AlphaCeeGate
," the speaker blared metallically, then shut off. Some idiot had apparently put my cabin speaker on the distribution list for the ETA announcements.

"Wonderful," I said, and then rolled over and tried to get back to sleep. We wouldn't be on for days after
Magellan
went through to the new Gate, and maybe if I could sleep through transfer I could avoid the nausea.

Just as I was dozing off again, the speaker chimed again. And again. And again.

I slammed the heel of my hand against the stop button. "Shut the—"

"What?"
The Dutchman sounded more amused than angry.

"Hmm, nothing, sir."

"Lieutenant,"
the Dutchman's voice rasped,
"you're on. I want to see you on the bridge one half hour before transfer. Full uniform. Repeat: full uniform. Understood?"

"Yes, sir. Bar-El?"

"Negative. I've ordered him to check out our scout—got both the ambassador's and Captain Arnheims permission. Repeat: full uniform."

That was ridiculous. A weapons officer doesn't check out the scout—the pilot does.

"Major, what's up?"

Strangely enough, the Dutchman didn't bite my head off for asking. Unusual for him.

"Vitelli has been assuming that there's not going to be a bunch of Xeno ships around the new Gate. I'm willing to bet that the skipper won't count on it. I'm not."

"Why should there be?" It was possible that the Xenos had a system-wide skywatch that could spot a distant Gate being built, but I doubted it.

And, if so, what could we do? Either the Xenos would give us a chance to make contact
very
quickly, or it would be up to the Navy crew to use the
Magellan
's
armaments well enough to give us a chance to escape back through the Gate.

I didn't like it at all. If the Xenos knew where the Gate was, they could blow it. Granted, the destroyer on watch around Outbound AlphaCeeGate had been sending robot probes through, and none of them had failed to return, but it was still possible that the Xenos would blow the Gate in the time between when the last probe went through and when
Magellan
would go through.

If that happened, we wouldn't come out in the system we were supposed to. We'd come out of another singularity, most likely one inside a stellar-mass hole.

I shrugged. No need to worry about that. It would be over before we'd feel it.

"Why should there be?" I repeated.

"Honestly, I don't know,"
the Dutchman said.
"But
I'm
hoping that there are. I'll see you on the bridge."

"But—"

"Shut up and get dressed. Norfeldt out."

There wasn't much sense in talking when nobody was even pretending to listen. I shut up and got dressed. In full uniform. Which, in my case, meant both Fairbairn and wiregun.

VI

During my short period in New Haven, I'd gotten in a few hours on the TWS
Immovable
, the constantly upgraded mockup of a Thousand Worlds battlecruiser's bridge that, together with its supporting facilities, occupies a good portion of Rickover Hall.

But most of that time was spent as the bridge talker, which is probably the least skilled job in the Navy and certainly was the lowest-status job aboard the
Immovable;
perfectly suitable for a shitlisted plebe. My real experience in out-atmosphere flying was in a Contact Service scout, a vessel a four-hundredth the mass.

Add to that the curious stares and the frankly hostile ones that I was getting from the bridge crew, and you'll understand why I was about as comfortable on the bridge of the
Magellan
as the Dutchman would have been at a meeting of the Thin Man Society.

Well, actually there was a difference. The Dutchman wouldn't have cared.

There was another difference, actually. I had no doubt I could handle the helm of the
Magellan
—if it flies, I fly it. Period.

"Lieutenant von du Mark." Captain Arnheim's voice was brisk, deep, and businesslike as he spun around in his chair. I quickly swallowed my third Paradram.

"Sir." The skipper of the
Magellan
had no real authority over me, except for the fact that he was the skipper of the
Magellan.

He seemed to figure that that was enough. "Contact Service officers are not normally found on the bridge, and particularly not during transition," he said. Someday, I'm going to learn that tone; sort of a cross between a question and a bland but accusatory statement.

"Yes, sir. Major Norfeldt told me to meet him here during the second shift. Something about Ambassador Vitelli . . . but if you're ordering me off the bridge, I'm not going to put up a fuss, Captain. I try to get along, sir."

One thing I don't envy about regular Navy people is that they have to keep DP people happy; I was hoping that the half-lie—yes, half; I didn't finish it, after all—would keep him from pressing the matter.

"I've noticed that last, Lieutenant." Arnheim rubbed at his chin with a beefy hand. His nails were neatly trimmed, and his fingers scrubbed almost pink—one of the badges of upper-ranks Navy. He pursed his lips together for a moment, then let himself notice that I was wearing khaki and leather, not zero-gee fatigues. He didn't notice the Fairbairn or the wiregun; those were just part of the uniform.

I could almost hear him thinking that there was no point in giving a dead man a hard time.

"Well, just keep out of the way. Mister. I don't anticipate any serious course change, but when the horn blares, you strap yourself to that wall. I'm not having you bouncing around in freefall. Understood?"

"Yes, sir." Not aye-aye, just a simple yes.

"Very well." He turned back to his panel, which gave me a chance to look at the main screen. I'd seen Gates before, of course, but this was different. Normally, a Navy escort releases the scout a few tens of thousands of klicks away—and scouts are tiny little ships, with small view-screens, not like this one, that was easily eight meters by five.

On the screen, Outbound AlphaCeeGate grew slowly. It looked like a huge metal flower, aluminum foil cupping a node of black.

Superimposed on the bottom part of the screen were the numerical and flightpath displays. Momentarily, a red flash of a deflection vector appeared, then vanished. It must have been a tiny one; I couldn't feel any sudden boost change at all, just the slowly diminishing gravity as the ship's main-axis flywheels were spun up to take the spin off.

The direction of the pseudo-gravity, changed too; the boost wasn't being cut back.

It didn't make any difference to the bridge crew; their panels were swing-mounted to their couches.

I kept an eye on the helmsman, the closest thing to a pilot that a Navy ship has. Most of the time a ship is flown by numbers—nav data extracted from the computers, decisions fed back in by typing numbers into a keyboard. Sort of like making love wearing an overcoat; no real flying, no magic time.

But
Magellan
was a battlecruiser, and there are times when a battlecruiser really has to be flown. There was a sure-enough joystick clipped to the side of the helmsman's panel, and steering yokes over at the fire control panel.

"Okay, Stan," Arnheim said to the commander strapped in the couch off the internal panel, "I want the rest of the spin off, pronto, then get the shields up."

Commander Bender turned to the talker. "Sound ack stations; spin off minus two minutes; time to impact by the minute, now."

"Acceleration stations," the speaker near my ear blared as the talker mouthed the words into his microphone. "Spin off warning. Spin off warning. Two minutes to spin off . . . impact minus eleven minutes."

Bender punched some numbers on his panel as the elevator door hissed open, and the Dutchman stood there in his poorly cut khakis and leathers, his automatic in a shoulder holster, Vitelli at his elbow.

While Vitelli made his way over to Arnheim's command chair, Norfeldt blew a cloud of smoke onto the bridge ahead of him as he floated his way in and grabbed a handle next to me.

"How they hanging, Emmy?" Norfeldt muttered.

I looked over at him. As the steering jets came on, I went dizzy for a moment. Mind you, I can snap a bird into a barrel roll blindfolded, but I always have a bit of dizziness trouble when I'm not the one flying.

"Impact minus nine minutes. Shields up."

A battlecruiser's ablative outer skin is always brightly polished, then sprayed with some reflective compound—the highly reflective shields that are extended from the hull are just another attempt to give the ship a few more moments of life if it finds itself in a laser's path; the shields can't stop a fist, much less a projectile.

"Impact minus eight minutes."

"Where's Bar-El?" I whispered.

The Dutchman shook his head. "I still don't trust the big Hebe. He's not an obedient little kraut, not like some people I could name."

"Maj—"

"Shut up." The Dutchman quirked a smile. "Just curious—could you fly this thing?"

I didn't let myself think why he was asking that. "Yes, sir."
And a fine time to be asking, Major,
I added silently. What if my oft-repeated claim that I could fly anything had been nonsense?

The elevator hissed again, and two of
Magellan's
marines made their way out of the shaft. Standard procedure aboard a Navy vessel—I guess it gives them something to do during transition.

"We're on the money, Skipper," Bender called out. "Computer will be cutting drive in ten seconds . . . mark."

Ten seconds later,
Magellan's
drive cut out, and we floated rapidly toward the Gate that was growing ever larger in the forward screen. The silvery sheen was picked up and reflected on the sweaty faces of the bridge crew as we approached the singularity.

The last minutes are always the worst. Just a few scant thousandths of a degree off and . . .

I took my tube of Paradrams out of my pocket and brought it to my mouth, tonguing another one.

The Dutchman produced a gas hypo. "This is actually more useful," he said.

"I'm fine. Major. Just fine."

"Thirty seconds to impact."

"Not for
you.
" He jerked his head toward the two bored marines, who floated near the bridge elevator. "It might help them."

"Twenty seconds to impact.

"Ten seconds to impact . . . seven, six, five, four, three, two, im—"

"—pact."

We were through, and the main screen went wild.

Among the stars, three points of light blinked on and off like a dancer's strobe.

The captain must have ordered sensor ports opened and chemical sensors set for boron; ugly red letters flashed on the screen, superimposed over the field of stars:

BORON DETECTED

I swallowed. Three lights.

"Holy Mother of
Christ
—we got three bandits, Skipper." Numbers flashed so fast I couldn't follow them. "Two of them mass half a million tonnes each, the other's not much smaller than we are—"

"I don't want your goddam opinion, I want—"

"—eleven hundred thousand tonnes, sir."

I didn't know Norfeldt could move so quickly. One moment he was floating next to me, the next he had kicked off the wall and bounced off the two marines, flipping end over end toward the captain's couch as he left the marines and the two now-empty hypos floating in the air.

"Get the talker's microphone, Mark!"

I kicked myself toward the bridge talker and jerked his microphone rig off his neck as I hooked one leg around the back of his couch. He clawed at me, but I slapped him across the throat, hard, and he lolled back in his couch.

At the fire control panel, Hardesty had already unhooked himself from his seat and was floating toward me; I ducked under and slammed a bottom-fist into his groin as he passed overhead.

"Everybody, freeze!" His plump thighs locked around the back of Arnheim's couch, the Dutchman had the captain's hands handcuffed in front of him and his Korriphila pressed against Arnheim's head, the safety off, the hammer back.

Arnheim smiled thinly. "I don't know what you're trying, but it won't work, Major. —Rush him!"

Bender dove through the air toward the Dutchman, but Norfeldt slugged him with the gun butt, then braced himself against Arnheim's couch and fired a round into the comm panel.

The explosion of the Glaser was incredibly bright, and incredibly loud in the tight confines of the bridge.

"I don't fire two warning shots," the Dutchman said.

Sparks danced behind my eyes. Nobody moved while the air conditioner swept the acrid smell of powder away.

"Emmy?"

"Yes, Major."

"Order battle stations, please—and take over the fire control panel."

Not the helm? Bizarre. I shrugged. In for a penny, in for a pound.

Vitelli started to speak up, but the Dutchman gestured him to silence. A 10mm automatic's good for that; while the Korriphila is reasonably compact, when it's pointing at you, it looks like it has a maw instead of a barrel.

I donned the talker's rig and thumbed the mike.
"Battle stations, battle stations,"
I said, hearing my voice echoed back as the klaxon started to bark.
"All hands to battle stations."

"Bring the ship about, Mister," the Dutchman ordered the helmsman.

* * *

The fire control officer was a young lieutenant I'd met only casually. He was just about my age, I guess, but Navy people look a lot younger than Contact Service folks do.

He drew himself up straight in his couch. "No,
sir
."
You're not moving me out of this chair while I'm alive,
he meant. The pride of the Navy.

I drew my wiregun and thumbed it to single fire. I probably wouldn't have to shoot him, but I wouldn't miss him by much.

"Belay that, Mark," Arnheim snapped. "Bolanger, get out of the couch."

"Everybody over by the racks," the Dutchman said as I strapped myself in. He floated over to where I had belted myself in the couch and quickly exchanged his Korrophila for my wiregun before it could occur to anyone else that he didn't dare fire his weapon while unanchored.

"Set the lasers for one one-ten-thousandth full," he said, "then get the fuck over to the helm and strap yourself in."

"Yessir." I did. One-ten-thousandth power wasn't enough to fry a healthy fly. If the Dutchman didn't want to sucker the Navy into fighting this battle for us, what the hell was he doing?

I unshipped the stick and clicked it into place, then closed my eyes for a brief prayer while the roll pedals rose out of their places in the couch. This was a battlecruiser, massy, not a light scout—I'd have to remember about all that inertia.

"Bring her about, Mister von du Mark. Vector in on the largest of those babies—evasive."

"Aye-aye, Major." I thumbed the mike—
"Boost warning, boost warning"
—punched for a variable acceleration centering on a half-gee, and heeled hard over on the stick.

The universe spun as
Magellan
waddled around.

Magic time. It doesn't matter how, when, or what. I fly.

"Gimme a hand, here," the Dutchman said, beckoning to Bolanger, the helmsman. "Center that fucker on the crosshairs for me, then—

"Captain?"

Later on, at the disciplinary hearing, they played the bridge tape. Frankly, I didn't believe a lot of what I heard. For one thing, my voice came out a lot smoother and calmer than I remember it.

For another, I
know
it took forever for Amheim to decide, not the scant two seconds the tape shows. It wasn't a difficult decision for him, although it was a hard one.

But the Dutchman had been counting on the captain's understanding something about command: that the only thing worse than a successful mutiny was a mutiny in progress. In one case, the wrong decisions are likely to be made; in the other case, there can only be stasis until the mutiny is settled one way or the other.

Condition Blue is not a situation where you want arguments over who is in command.

Better to have the wrong person in charge.

"Do it." Arnheim nodded slowly.

Vitelli finally spoke up. "Captain, this is—"

"Mutiny, and a successful one so far. Now shut your mouth and let the mutineers do their job, Ambassador." He gave me a thorough glance as though to say,
We'll discuss this later, Mister. At your court-martial.

At that moment, I sincerely hoped so.

"Fire!"

You never actually see the laser beam, not in a vacuum—there's not enough dust to reflect it. But sensors can pick up the ever-so-faint glow of the hydrogen ionized by the beam, and display it on the screen.

The phony blast caught the main battleship squarely, and played across its hull for a few seconds before it skittered out of the beam.

"Now, full power—and get those crosshairs as close to the ship as you can,
without
touching. I don't want you to singe the buggers, just let them know you could."