Lieutenant (6 page)

  I thought a lot about the professor’s book after reading it, especially in light of my own experiences to date. I’d been unconscious when
The Sword of the People
struck her colors, but of course I’d read the official histories. Three hundred and nineteen mostly unwounded Imperials had surrendered to a hundred and sixteen Royal officers and men, most of whom like me were no longer in any condition to fight. We’d wanted to win and wanted it badly; Captain Blaine might've been good for little else, but he’d filled us with fire and set us a goal worth dying for. While the wargaming tournament hadn’t been actual combat, it was the next best thing. There wasn’t the slightest doubt in my mind, in retrospect, that we’d wanted to win more than our opponents. And by golly we
had
!

Maybe I’d even wanted to be a cadet more than Commandant Drecher had wanted me to quit the Academy? And that was why I’d been able to stand Mast all night, while he later killed himself? It was food for thought, certainly.

One night, just after reading the professor’s book for the second time, I was pondering how lucky a Rabbit I was, being able to read and learn and at least partially set my own course through life. Then a brainwave struck me, one that should’ve occurred to me much sooner. I checked the ship’s library computer…

…and sure enough, there were basic primers on file there. Though who the navy imagined might make use of them was beyond me. I smiled, then printed out three copies of “See Spot Run”. The next morning I called in Devin and Fremont and Snow, who I suspected were the most literate of the slaves. “These are your new training materials,” I explained. “First we’ll go through them together, just us four. Then you can teach some of the others, who in turn will instruct the rest. Once you can read you can learn anything about anything—everything you’ll ever want to know.” I smiled. “Books are the best things in the world!”

Devin gulped. “Sir… I mean, Masters don’t usually…”

I let my grin widen. “Masters don’t usually do a lot of things they really ought to. Even things that'd be good for them in the long run. Besides, I’m a Marcus. On the worlds we control,
most
Rabbits read. Someday, we hope, all Rabbits will be free.”

There was a long, long silence. “I’ve heard of the House of Marcus,” Fremont whispered. “We made custom suits for them, back in the day.”

“And I’ve met Rabbits who’ve been to Marcus worlds,” Devin added. He looked up at me. “They freed
you
, sir.”

“Yes,” I replied, letting my smile fade. “They did.”

Another long silence passed. Then Devin looked down at the primer. “S-s-see,” he began. “See Sp-p-p…”

“See Spot run,” Snow said, with only the slightest hesitation. And just like that, I knew who’d written my welcome note. “It’s easy. You sound it out, one letter at a time. All we need are more of these books, and…”

I never did know just exactly when or how it happened, but quite suddenly I found myself being squeezed from all sides by a solid wall of warm, soft Rabbit fur. “Thank you, sir,” Devin whispered as the snuggle-hug finally broke up. “For everything.”

9

We held a staff meeting the last night before Jumping into the Zombie Cluster. For the most part, everything was going according to plan. Lieutenant Jeffries reported that the Sweeper had tested out properly during the last dry run, which was a bit of a relief since one of the primary coils had been giving the engineering department fits. This was excellent news. Without the big magnets of the Sweeper to clear local space of all the ferrous debris of battle, maneuvering would be a lot more dangerous. Long experience had shown that four out of five bits of orbital debris created by modern weapons tended to be at least partly magnetic. Dodging the rest looked plenty exciting enough in my book. I was able to report that my own department was one-hundred percent ready, no ifs, ands or buts. The captain raised his eyebrows at this and Lieutenant Jeffries scowled, but in order to prove me wrong they’d have had to physically come down to the ‘smelly’ work-decks and look things over themselves. Which they were welcome to do anytime they liked, of course, as I really
was
a hundred-percent ready. But they and I both knew that it’d never happen. “When you get into trouble,” the first officer declared with a smirk, “come bawling to me and I’ll bail you out. Just like all the other cocky middies that’ve come and gone.” With
that
kind of support behind me, how could I fail?

The worst part of the meeting was seeing Nestor for the first time since I’d watched the captain fondling him in his cabin. He didn’t look at all good. Sure, he was well-fed and his fur was neatly brushed. Physically he was fine. But he moved slowly and listlessly, and often had to be told twice what to do. Strangest of all, he absolutely refused to meet my eyes. It was so blatantly obvious that I found it hard to believe that no one else noticed, and distracting enough that once the meeting was over there were large parts I couldn’t even remember. It wasn’t until we were almost ready to break up that I finally figured out what was going on. The captain might’ve been too drunk to realize that he’d paraded his little secret right out in the open in front of me, but Nestor had been as sober as I was. He knew that I knew, in other words. And that must’ve been just
awful
for him. While Rabbits understand better than anyone that they have no options about such matters, they also tend to look askance at those who lead the ‘easy’ lives of sex objects and see them as ‘brown-nosers’ of the worst kind. It makes no sense, of course—it’s not even logically consistent. Yet Nestor had every reason to fear that I’d already spread the word of his shame far and wide down on the work decks, so that his mob-mates—his entire social universe!—would never treat him as an equal again. And this was on
top
of the psychological damage that the captain’s repeated violations must surely have caused. No wonder he was so ashamed that he could barely function!

“Sir?” I asked the captain when the meeting was over. “Can I see Nestor for about an hour down below? I need him to help settle a dispute.”

Captain Holcomb’s eyebrows rose. “A dispute?”

I nodded. “It’s about bedding-down space, sir. Since Nestor’s never there anymore, the other Rabbits in his section have divvied up his straw allotment. So they have more than the others now. That’s not right, sir—straw’s important to a bunny. And they said Nestor was okay with it. So I thought that—“

“Fine, fine, fine!” my commander interrupted. “Don’t bore me with trivial details. But if it were me, David, I’d just lay down the law and take away
all
their straw for a while. You shouldn’t be so easy on them.”

“Exactly what I had in mind, sir!” I lied, knowing he’d never bother to double-check. “But they should have to confront Nestor, too. In the end, that’s who they’re stealing from.”

“Whatever,” the captain replied. He fozzled Nestor’s ears, then squeezed him up close to his side for a moment before releasing him to me. “But keep in mind, Middie, that Nestor is a
good
bunny. I don’t want to hear that you’ve let the others abuse him. And hurry, will you? He’s to serve me my dinner, and I don’t want to eat it cold and late.”

Nestor’s eyes were wide with terror as we boarded the main lift together, then went wider still when I hit the manual override and halted us between decks. “Sir!” he blurted. “I didn’t… I mean I don’t…”

“I know you don’t,” I answered. Then I sighed. “Nestor, of all the ship’s Rabbits I've had the least contact with you. And yet I’m going to have to ask you to trust me.”

He licked his nose. “How so, sir?”

I raised my eyes and met his. “First, I want you to know that none of the other Rabbits have found out about… What the captain expects of his personal servant. Nor will they ever, from me.”

Nestor blinked, but said nothing.

“Second, I’m going to make you a promise. At the moment there’s nothing I can do to help you. It’s just how thing are, for us both. But someday, just as soon as I can, I’m going to see to it that Captain Holcomb never hurts you again. Or any other Rabbit either, if I can manage it. You have my sacred word on that as an officer, and as a Marcus.” I smiled slightly. “As a fellow Rabbit, too.”

For a long, long time Nestor said nothing. Then a single large tear flowed down his cheek. “I want to kill him sometimes,” he whispered. “Rip his throat out, claw his… his…” Then he shook his head and met my eyes again. “I hear you’re teaching the others to read. And lately about how things like the government works, too. All the stuff the Masters never bother telling us. Because they think we don’t care.”

I nodded and smiled. “They seem to enjoy it. And I do too.”

Nestor looked back down at his feet. “Please, sir. Will you teach me to read too? Once… After, I mean…”

“Of course!” I answered him. “Personally, if at all possible.”

“Then I can stand it, I guess,” Nestor replied with a scowl. “Until forever, if I have to.” Then suddenly he was hugging me. It went on for several long minutes, until finally the little black-and-white bunny slave pulled away and began claw-grooming his fur back into shape. “I have to go get the captain’s dinner,” he explained. “He’s always cross when it’s late.”

“Yes,” I replied, re-energizing the lift. “That’s how things have to be, for now. But someday…”

Nestor smiled; it was the first time I could ever remember seeing him do that. “Someday,” he agreed as the door slid open on the galley deck. “Thank you, sir! This is the first good someday I’ve ever had.” Then he squeezed me one last time and was gone.

10

The first thing a Graves Registration unit always does upon arrival at a former battlefield is to examine and document everything. While keeping records is important in its own right, the delay was also vital to our success and safety. The fighting had left precisely one million, one-hundred and seventy-two thousand, four hundred and twelve bits of detectable debris floating about in the immediate vicinity of Zombie Station. Many of them carried quite a high relative vector, and it’d be some time before the Sweeper could gather up all the ferrous bits. While we’d always have to consult the computer in order to determine where we might work on any given day in relative safety, at first we were pretty much shipbound anyway. So we manned the sensors and did the best job we could.

It was never wise to place much trust in Imperial war-bulletins, but in this case they were the only clue we had as to what’d taken place during the recent battle. According to them, they’d brought in their main line-of-battle ships and blasted Zombie’s turrets into scrap metal over a period of many days, losing a heavy cruiser to a direct engine-room hit and explosion in the process. Then they’d boarded with their own marines, expecting a fierce hand-to-hand battle. However, everyone was already dead by their own hand, choosing a painless death over a hopeless battle against an enemy who didn’t believe in taking prisoners. No one actually believed this, of course—the Imperials had made the same claim the
last
time they’d taken the Station. But it was the only version of the story we had so far, and everything we could see from space backed it up. An unusually high percentage of the orbital debris was ferrous, and the largest chunks were obviously pieces of what appeared to be a cruiser-sized warship; indeed, an intact turret assembly made a near pass every six hours and sixteen minutes. The Station’s heavy guns were oriented every which-way, wherever they’d been pointed at the moment they’d been knocked out. Zombie’s fortress wasn’t generating even a trickle of power, though Chief Engineer Lancrest’s first job would be to get it limping along at least well enough to generate light and gravity and a basic level of environmental services. We’d be working aboard the Station for weeks, and we’d finish twice as fast if we didn’t have to spend the whole time suited up.

Once we had our photos and such, and long before anyone so much as boarded the Station proper, our work began. The first thing we did was broadcast a ‘recovery blip’, a coded signal that any even halfway-functional combat suit would reply to. In seconds we learned that there were almost a hundred dead Royal servicemen floating in nearby space, and with another signal that the Imperials released to us after the Armistice was signed we learned that there were another three hundred enemy dead, most of these presumably from the exploded cruiser. (The Imperials didn’t care much about their fallen warriors so long as they didn’t end up someplace where the odor was a concern; our concern for mere dead bones was considered effete. They were perfectly willing to let us collect their dead for them so long as it didn’t cost them anything, however, and for our part we treated their men as honorably as our own.) It was fortunate that most still had functional jetpacks; when Lieutenant Jeffries and I ordered the suits to home in on
Beechwood
the majority responded instantly. It still wasn’t safe outside the hull, so we just sort of piled them up at the base of the Sweeper, where the magnetic fields would hold them in place. Four of them exploded during the trip, as improperly secured grenades or damaged blast-rifle magazines or who knew what were set off by the application of vector. It was sad, but better that it happened at a distance rather than up-close and personal. We’d bring the rest in one by one inside armored capsules for the Rabbits to process and deep-freeze as time allowed; it wasn’t like the vacuum could damage them any further.

When space finally cleared out a little we were able to go EVA ourselves. I assigned Devin’s squad the always-dicey task of running down the rest of the floating dead, plus the dozens upon dozens of major body parts. It was among the most dangerous work of all, combining all the perils of working and maneuvering in vacuum with the risks of dealing with damaged ordnance. But someone had to do it, and Devin and his bunnies seemed honored to have been chosen. Given the magnitude of the task I allotted him all but two of our one-man power-sleds and all but three of the pressurized longer-ranged units. Even granted the lion’s share of the equipment and assuming every one of his Rabbits put in sixteen-hour days, I still expected Devin to be the last of us to finish.  I also expected at least one of his ten Rabbits to die as well, based on past statistics. They had to know, but still they were grateful for my trust.