Emile and the Dutchman (12 page)

II

A scout sleeps four.

Da Gama
's aft hold was at the boundary between the quarantined section and the Navy's clean part of the ship. Through the plexi window, I could watch the Navy files swarming over the scout. They reminded me of a bunch of roaches on a dead rat.

Although that wasn't a fair comparison. The scout was a trifle cleaner when they were done, and clearly I'd rather have it tested and fueled than not.

But a scout sleeps four.

Bar-El glided into the compartment, moving carefully, precisely, as he anchored himself to a stanchion before throwing me a precise salute. "You wanted to see me, Lieutenant?"

I returned the salute. "At ease, dammit. This isn't a zero-gee parade ground."

He nodded, reaching out to turn up the outflow as he pulled a slender tabstick from his shirt pocket and puffed it to life, savoring each puff individually. "Thank you, sir."

The tradition in the Contact Service is that second lieutenants don't call first lieutenants "sir," unless the first john is his commanding officer—a CO is always sirred. But Akiva Bar-El tended to ignore the tradition, and often sirred me, either unconsciously or insolently. I guess I should have straightened him out, but it really didn't bother me; besides, this wasn't the time to go into that.

"We go in two hours, Akiva." The air currents pushed us around just a little; we waved like two fronds of seaweed. It made him look as though he had been drinking. "Three is not a Team."

He looked uncomfortable, and then angry. "We're supposed to have the option to Drop."

"A Contact, or the Service? You dropping out of the Service?"

"No, sir. I don't think I have to. I don't think Norfeldt can give me the choice of either going along with his rule-breaking or dropping out of the Service."

"So you're dropping Norfeldt?"

He grinned a little, but it was only a facial expression. There was no feeling behind it. "It's a question of who drops who first. Lieutenant."

"We don't have time for a lot of discussion, Akiva. You can't drop it now. Seven weeks ago, sure. Or even a month ago, when we could have switched off with a team on Nueva. But now, now's a damn fool time—"

"Now?" For a moment, anger flared behind his bushy eyebrows. "Now's a damn fool time for Norfeldt to throw this at us. At me. Turning a Contact into a Drop is about as important a weapon as we've got, sir. The Dutchman is trying to take that away, sir, and asking us to stick our necks out."

"He's sticking his neck out, too, Akiva. Any one of the three of us could send in a report—"

"I understand that, sir. Don't think I haven't thought about it. But that is not the point. The point is that if there's trouble out there, it would be suicide to go, under Norfeldt's conditions. Maybe he should just think about scrubbing—three isn't a team, after all."

"He trusts us." Little beads of sweat bobbed in the air in front of my face. One of them touched my eye and became a tear.

"And Metzada trusts me. As I have reminded you, sir, I am in the Contact Service, First Lieutenant von du Mark, for the good of Metzada. For the offworld credits that my salary brings if I live—"

"Noble."

"—or for the insurance policy that the Thousand Worlds will pay off on if I die in the line of duty. Not for Norfeldt's glory." He took a last puff from his tabstick, then flicked the ash toward the outflow before wetting his thumb and forefinger and crushing the butt out.

"And not for your glory, either,
Deutscher
," he said quietly. "Do you understand me, Emile von du Mark?"

In that moment he could have killed me without hesitation or regret. It wouldn't have mattered in the slightest that I was an Austrian national, and that my family had been Austrians for two centuries. It wouldn't have bothered him that what he called the Holocaust had ended more than two and a half centuries before I was ever born.

None of it would have made a difference; in that moment, his people's history was a very personal matter between Akiva Bar-El and me.

But the moment passed.

"This isn't a noble mission," he said. "Its purpose is to get Norfeldt some light colonel's leaves. And perhaps to get some captain's bars for First Lieutenant Emile von du Mark?" He said that last without any rancor, as though it wasn't an insult. Bar-El was just idly considering what my motives really were.

He shrugged as he remembered that he didn't give a damn what my motives really were.

"Stay in the scout," I said.

He looked at me.

"We'll all four go down, but you just stay in the scout. I'll . . . explain it to the Dutchman. You just sit tight, and hit the panic button if things go to hell." I shrugged. "If there's anything. Second could have blown it; it could be a walk-through."

"Norfeldt would let me?"

I snickered. "No. He'll ride you unmercifully. But he couldn't report you, not under the circumstances. And how would he make you go out? Do you think there's a chance he'd pull a gun on you?"

Bar-El smiled vaguely. "Not twice." He looked out through the plexi window for a moment.

And then he said, "Interesting."

They let us into the hold a short while later. Donny looked surprised when he climbed into the scout and saw Bar-El strapping himself in his couch. It took him a lot of effort not to say anything.

Bar-El just lay quietly, endlessly stropping his Fairbairn knife. Which may explain why the Dutchman didn't say anything.

Then again, it may not.

Da Gama
split her gut and pushed us free.

I let the scout tumble for a few minutes before I hit the gyros, and then impatiently canceled most of the rotation with the attitude jets.

We waited while the battlecruiser slid away, an antennaed, blistered expanse of steel and aluminum hundreds of meters wide and long.

The Dutchman nodded to me. "The auto checks. Engage."

I hit the autopilot—"Engaged"—and then sat back to enjoy the view.

Alpha burned distantly in the aft monitor as AlphaCeeGate grew in the forward screens, filling the forward view.

Appearances were deceiving.

I wasn't looking at AlphaCeeGate through a curved transparent port on the scout's command deck, but through a monitor that could show me the starscape in hues of radio, gamma, or IR, or, as now, just relay the visual spectrum, brightening reference stars.

And the Gate wasn't an immense solid cup, though it was both immense and cup-shaped. The aluminum power-screens surrounding it for a thousand klicks were so thin that the entire silvery disk could easily have been folded up and packed into the back of my old Hummingbird. Unfolding it would be another matter.

Somewhere, at the center of the disk, was a naked singularity, a true hole in space, carefully maintained by a field generator. The scout slipped unerringly into the approach that would put us through the hole, and out through the right Gate—

I hoped. Fervently.

The Dutchman sat alongside me, N'Damo behind us, and Bar-El in the pit alongside N'Damo, still honing his sticker. Norfeldt turned to N'Damo. "You going to need a sickbag, N'Damo?"

"Yessir."

Norfeldt passed him one; Donny taped it into place.

"You, Emmy?"

"That was just the first time, Major." It's ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. I can eat a meal of squid salad, snap a trainer through an Immelmann on instruments alone, and then land it and hang upside down while munching on caramelized sweetbreads—but I can't go through a goddam Gate without getting nauseous.

Unless I'm loaded to the gills with Paradram. "I'm just fine, Major," I said, palming another pill and swallowing it.

"Here it comes," he said. He folded his hands across his belly and cracked his knuckles, rubbing his Team Leader's ring against his class ring.

As he spread his hands to grip the arms of his couch, the light flashed off something I'd never noticed before, a bezel on the palm side of his Team Leader's ring.

A bezel. If he held his hands right, he could read the faces of the cards that he dealt, using it as a shiner.

An expensive bezel. Any disreputable jeweler would have ground the bezel into the ring for less than a quid. It had already cost me six months' pay.

To hell with Major Alonzo Norfeldt's lieutenant colonel's leaves.

The Gate rushed up toward us, until all we could see was a gleaming expanse of metal. I had to keep reminding myself that it was mostly just thinly aluminized nothing.

"Here it comes, children," he said. "Standby for im—"

"—pact." The main screen was full of stars. I keyed in the aft monitor. As the new Gate shrank in the distance, we could see the new sun behind us, huge and red.

"I thought you said it was a small star," Donny said.

The Dutchman growled at him. "Shut up."

"It is, Donny, but we're close up." But he wasn't listening anymore.

I hadn't heard a sound from Bar-El, and when I turned to look at him, he eyed me neutrally. Kind of strange, really; if I'd been raised under Metzada's high gravity, I would have found low-gee hard to get used to.

My own stomach was churning, a condition that didn't improve as the scout quivered, spun slowly on its gyro, and started to accelerate at about a tenth of a gee.

The Dutchman turned to me. "Mister von du Mark." He leaned back, his thumbs hooked over the only fastened button on his uniform shirt, just above his belly.

Damn
him. Here he was, looking more like a vagrant than a CS officer, and he wanted to get formal.

"What is it?"

He eyed me slowly, deciding whether or not to straighten me out. On the negative side, I already had enough on him to get him cashiered.

But on the positive side, it was his Team. "What did you say, Mister?"

"Sorry,
sir.
What is it, sir?"

"Better. Now . . ." He punched a few keys on his panel, then raised an eyebrow. "I have it as just about four days until we're in orbit around the dirtball. Does that square with your calculations?"

"Yes, sir." I could read
eta to orbit 97:32:15 as easily as he could.

"You think you can handle things for a watch?"

Piloting in an atmosphere can be tough; sitting around watching a computer match velocities with a planet isn't. A dog can handle a vacuum-side watch. "Yes, sir."

"Then I will retire to my quarters," he said, unbuckling himself from his couch. "You have the conn. Wake me in eight hours."

"Aye, sir."

He nodded to N'Damo on his way out, who threw him a startled salute.

Bar-El eyed him levelly, but neither of them said anything.

III

"Where you want to put her down, Emmy?"

"Emile, sir. And I don't know. Two obvious possibilities: near Second's scout, or as far away as we can get."

It seemed mostly green down there. While the ratio of land to water was about the same as Earth's, all of this land was concentrated in only three landmasses, all on the same side of the planet.

And a lot of it forested. That's what First Team's report had said. It hadn't seemed so significant when I'd read figures off a screen. Looking down on a forest as large as Asia, wreathed in cloud, lapped by a turquoise sea. the planet looked choked, like a diseased fruit.

"N'Damo?"

Donny tapped three times at his panel; a point on the screen pulsed red once, twice, three times, and then went green again. "Just the echo transponder. Nothing else."

The Dutchman tapped his temple. "Anything up here?"

"Sorry, s-sir." N'Damo shook his head helplessly; "I'm just an esper, Major, not a psychic. If there's anybody down there, they're a good thousandth of a light-second away, and we're not in a close enough frame to communicate by psi. Unless you believe in simultaneity."

Norfeldt snorted. "I'll believe in any damn thing if believing'll let me communicate—never mind, never mind." He turned back to me. "What do you think about aiming for the transponder?"

I thought about it. Again.

"Well," I said, "plus side: we know Second's shuttle got down there. Add a bit for the transponder still being active, add a bit more for the desirability of seeing if any of Second are still alive, and then subtract a
hell
of a lot for the fact that they almost certainly aren't."

"How about an LZ?"

I didn't like the fact that I couldn't find any decent-sized clearings groundside. When I run for God, one of my campaign promises will be that every world gets a lot of plains. "We may have to burn our way down the last few meters. And that's tricky."

A shuttle has to make an almost totally unpowered landing; you kick in the belly jets not much more than a klick out. Use too much juice in landing and you won't have enough to rendezvous skyside.

"Or deadly." The Dutchman decided. "Okay, we'll try for their neighborhood. Gimme some mag and show me where you were thinking about doing it."

I zoomed in and tapped the ,surface of the monitor. "Right about there. Visual shows solid forest, but I'm getting some anomalous IR reads—well, actually it's IR absence—like there's a swath of cool air nearly a klick wide and a few hundred klicks long." I punched up the IR overlay and let him see for himself.

"Like a river. Except that we'd be able to see a river."

"Right. And here," I said, pointing, "we've got some kind of heat concentration."

"A fire?" Donny asked. "Or a volcanic vent?"

"Again, nothing on visual. Be a damn funny volcanic vent—too diffuse. Reads about forty-five degrees."

"Could be an inversion layer or something. Any other ideas?"

I shrugged. "I've seen villages that look that way from orbit. Not alien, but a Hmong one, back in Siam."

Norfeldt chewed on his cigar for a long moment. "You're assuming the danger is natives."

I spotted that trap. "I'm assuming nothing. But you're the one who taught me that it's almost always the sapients we've got to watch for."

"I did, at that. Any other concentrations like that one?"

"Yes, but that's the most distinctive."

He grunted. "All right. Do it."

We burned the air on our way down. The early part of a reentry is almost as simple as point-to-point in space, but by the time you brake down to about Mach 2, the artistry comes in. There's always something unexpected.

This time, it was some sort of jet stream at about fifteen klicks up that tried to carry us away from the area we'd decided on as an LZ. I had to light the engines to get us out.

"I don't see any clearing, Emmy," the Dutchman said.

I glanced at the monitor. "There isn't one." I reached my left hand over to the small joystick mounted between the Dutchman's panel and mine, brought a cross of light onto the screen, put it where I wanted it, then punched for a probe.

"But give me a minute," I said over the roar of the probe blasting away. I banked into a turn gentle enough that it wouldn't force the belly jets on.

"Emmy—"

"Shut
up,
sir." One of the few privileges of a pilot has is to get the damn shuttle down or up without having his elbow unnecessarily joggled.

I held the turn for a full one-eighty, then took a quick glance at the energy display on the monitor. The max range line fell short. I spread the wings fully open and the line lengthened, but it didn't quite touch the probe's destination. Damn. Not enough energy to make it to where the clearing was going to be in a moment.

"Hold on." I slammed my left fist down on the ignite button, gripping the stick tightly as the nose intakes wheezed open, then let the rams roar long enough to bring the line forward to where it was supposed to be. "We're right on target, Major."

I shut the engines down to a quiet murmur.

Despite the fact that the shuttle is a variwing and not a rotary-wing, landing a Service shuttle is more like a hot copter landing than anything else.

In a copter, you make a hot landing by skimming in just a few meters over the ground toward the LZ, the swing-locks off the stabilator so that you can bring the nose way up, and then, at the last second, you pull back hard on the yoke, while you kick in every last bit of throttle and pitch your rotors can take.

Do it just right, and—assuming that you don't have what's appropriately named a "catastrophic rotor failure," in which case you're dead—the nose of the bird will pitch up while the fast-milling rotor, now almost perpendicular to the ground, will quickly slow your forward speed to nothing.

After that, you have to push the nose forward and down, while you ease off the throttle just right.

Do everything perfectly, and in just a few meters you can go from skimming quickly over the ground to settling gently down on it.

Do anything wrong, and you
will
dump the bird.

That's with a copter. There are some big differences when you're landing a shuttle. A rotary-wing craft doesn't have a stall speed in the way that fixed-wings and variwings do; stalling happens when your rotors aren't spinning fast enough for their pitch, not when the craft isn't moving forward fast enough. You can learn by trying a wimp version of a hot copter landing; hell, a normal horizontal landing
is
a wimp version of a hot landing.

But a variwing shuttle can stall just as easily as a fixed-wing craft; you practice a hot shuttle landing the same way you execute one:

At better than four hundred klicks per hour.

We came in low over the forest, the shuttle's wings fully spread. Less than a klick ahead, the smoke from where the probe had detonated puffed its way upward into the sky.

At just under three hundred meters out, I hit the program button to shut down the mains and fire up the belly jets.

My right hand on the stick, I curled my left hand around the throttle as I pulled back hard on the stick, pushing the throttle almost to the wall.

The belly jets roared, better than three gees worth.

As forward speed dropped off to nothing, I pushed the nose down and pulled the throttle back, balancing her down on her belly jets. You hear how hard it is to pull off a hover in a copter; I
never
want to hear any of that bull from someone who hasn't tried it in a shuttle.

"Not too bad," the Dutchman said, as we dropped toward the smoking clearing. "Not too bad at all."

Vines and branches scraped across the hull. Leaves bloomed in a silent explosion. Something orange, with wings and two huge, startled eyes, flapped across the monitor's field of view.

Our rate of descent slowed, but I couldn't see anything on the monitors.

"Radar, Major."

"One hundred meters, Emmy."

But one hundred meters to what? I glanced at the radar display, but all it showed was flatness. "Okay, here we go." I eased up on the belly jets. "Give me landing pods, full extension."

The Dutchman snapped a toggle; the pods
ka-chunked
into place. "Got 'em. Fifty. Forty. Thirty. Twen—ten."

I pushed the throttle forward again, hard.

Steam geysered as the scout dropped lightly to the muddy riverbank and settled itself firmly into the mud.