Starhunt: A Star Wolf Novel (28 page)

(Do I dare question myself?) Puzzlement knits his brow. (I—I have to—it’s part of the process. But I’ve gone over the logic of every level a thousand times. I couldn’t have missed anything. Could I?)

Korie feels a sudden moment of fear, an icy sinking feeling
—(What if the wobbly doesn’t reappear?!!
That would prove that it was a ship—and that I’m right. But—what if it doesn’t reappear, then where is it? Good Lord—could his plan be even more complex than—? No, it couldn’t possibly be—nobody could possibly juggle that many levels—unless he’s trying to drive
all
of us mad—

(All of us—

(Me. He’s working on me. Remember that. Trying to drive
me
mad.

(Maybe it’s really working. Is this what madness feels like? My brain hurts. A lot. And what if he does reappear, then what? What if it really is a
wobbly
? Then maybe I really am
scatter-beamed. Oh, God—this is part of his plan too. The self-doubt. He really is trying to drive me crazy. And it’s working. I’m the only man on this ship who believes I’m sane, and even
I’m
having doubts.

(But it doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Because there’s nothing more that I can do. It’s all been done. The last piece is in place. But, oh, it’s such a fragile structure. Will it hold together for the twelve days it’ll take us to get home? Or will it fracture when the bogie reappears? Or tighten? So much depends on how I react. How
will
I react?

(I have to game this out. They’ll be looking for signs of madness, so I daren’t obsess about that bogie—but I still have to give them
some
kind of cue—because they’re going to be looking to me for a handle on how to react—and I need them to see that bogie as an enigma, not sure whether it really is there or not. They have to doubt it too—even if only a little. And as long as they see that I still believe in it, they’ll doubt. Just a little.

(Hm. I’ll have to keep a low profile, then, won’t I? Yes, the engine room is the right course. Who knows? If they’re right, and I
am
wrong, and it really is a wobbly, maybe I can source it. Hmp, that would be funny; the only person on the ship able to find the wobbly is the officer that it drove mad—because he’s the only one obsessive enough to look.)

But somehow, Korie is not amused.

(I can do a little to keep the structure maintained—but there are no major steps that I can take now without destroying the balance. Either it’s going to work, or it’s not . . . I wonder, though—if I had foreseen this possibility from the beginning, is there anything I could
have done differently? Better?—) He thinks a moment, rehearsing his recent decisions one more time. (No, I did what I had to. There wasn’t any better way.)

He rubs his forehead tiredly. The hardest part is going to be the waiting.

If you build a better mousetrap, you’ll catch a better mouse.

—SOLOMON SHORT

And then bogie reappears.

Quietly. Almost insignificantly. A faintly detected shimmer at the edges of probability.

Rogers spots the anomaly on his screens.

He frowns, he punches up double-check programs, then checks the accuracy of them. He orders up a system analysis for the entire sensory set.

The possibility remains. There is a . . . discrepancy.

Where the field should be blank, there is a matrix of eighty-one pixels that flickers with random points of light. Possibilities. The individual points are meaningless as data. It is the fact that they are occurring within a defined matrix that gives Rogers such concern.

He clenches his hands together, leans elbows on the console, leans his chin onto his hands and bites one knuckle pensively.

Should he tell them? And who? Korie? The captain? Barak? Leen? Maybe he should ask Jonesy—?

No. He has to figure this out for himself.

What if it isn’t there?

“I mean—they’ll think I’m as twitchy as Korie.”

But the screen before him continues to flicker.

He leans back in his chair uncomfortably—then, resolutely, leans forward again and completely repeats every scan and double-check he had previously performed. Unable to make a decision, he postpones for the moment the need to. He rationalizes, he tells himself he just wants to be certain.

Although he is certain enough already.

And he is not surprised when the results are the same as before. The instruments say that something is out there.

Except . . . maybe—

There’s one other thing to check. He orders up a simulation of the
Burlingame
’s stress-field ripple, then begins altering it, trying to see if he can make it match the pattern of the bogie.

He can, but—he doesn’t feel good about the match. It’s too
contrived.

“Maybe it’s a wobbly—and maybe it isn’t.” There. It’s said. “Maybe it’s a real bogie.”

But,
dammit!
That sounds like something Mr. Korie would say!

(I have to figure this out now—by myself. There isn’t anyone else I can check with first.)

Rogers is upset, frustrated. His nervousness shows; his hands are twitching. He feels almost close to tears. It isn’t fair! “We’re right back where we started.”

(What do they want me to do? No—that’s not the question. What
should
I do?) (I should tell the Captain.) (I should tell Korie too.) (Why?) (Because—uh—what if—?)

The wobbly could be a stress-field echo. The phase adapters could be magnifying the vibrations of the inherent velocity, or it could be another starcraft of roughly comparable size.
But what class?
The classification of a ship isn’t dependent on its size, but on its armament—

“That bastard!” Rogers says in frustration. “He’s got me thinking like him!” (And I won’t have it! I’ll show him! It’s only a bogie—I mean, wobbly! It isn’t there! Never has been!) He stabs the communicator button. “Jonesy? Rogers. Moby Dick off the port bow.”

“Eh?”

“Uh—” He hadn’t thought this far ahead. “Uh—it’s back. The bogie.”

“Huh? Are you certain?”

“Yes, of course. I checked it three times.”

“Have you told the captain yet?”

“Not yet. I thought we ought to put it on the grapevine first.”

“Yah, sure. Thanks.” Jonesy switches out.

Rogers touches another button. “Captain? This is Rogers. In the radec room. Uh—that bogie’s back.”

The captain’s reply is unintelligible.

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“Tell Mr. Leen. In the engine room. Tell him to check his Hilsen units. That’s probably all it is.”

“Yes, sir.” Rogers disconnects and contacts Leen. “Sir—Captain wants you to check your Hilsen units. It’s back.” And so on.

By the fifth call, the response is, “Yah, I already heard.”

So he stops calling. The news is spreading. The ripple is moving faster than the object that caused it.

There’s only one person who won’t have heard.

(Somebody’s got to tell him.)

“But I
won’t—
” Rogers considers it. “No, I won’t do it.” And then he thinks. (But it sure would bug Korie, wouldn’t it? To be told that his bogie was only a wobbly. Had been all along. And now there’s proof. Incontrovertible evidence!) “Like hell
I
won’t!” Punch, flick. “Mr. Korie? The wobbly is back. Huh? Oh, Rogers, sir. Yes, I checked. Yes, sir. You’re welcome.”

(But is the evidence
really
incontrovertible? After all, Korie isn’t
that
stupid. If he suspects something is out there, maybe he has good reason to—) (No, don’t be silly.)

He puts his elbows back on the console, folds his hands together, and leans his chin on them. Absentmindedly he begins chewing his knuckle again.

An eighty-one-pixel matrix of probability is flickering in front of him. Maybe there is something there, and maybe there isn’t. But there is no way he can tell from this board.

A man is known by the enemies he keeps,

—SOLOMON SHORT

Korie enters the engine room quietly. He ignores the sudden startled glances and moves politely, almost timidly, to the auxiliary monitor console and taps the man sitting there out of the seat. “It’s all right. There’s something a little more important than that.” Then, ignoring the man—and the rest of the engine room crew as well—he drops into the seat. He slips on a pair of earphones and clears the board.

On the other side of the engine room, Leen and his first assistant are standing, staring amazed at Korie. Leen starts to take a step forward, then stops himself. His eyes are troubled.

“Chief?” asks Beagle. “Aren’t you going to say something to—him ?”

“No. I don’t think so. The captain told me he might be coming down here. He’s—going to look for that wobbly. I guess we’d better let him.”

“I don’t think the guys are going to like it.”

“I don’t think they have much choice. Tell them to keep out of his way.”

“Yes, sir.”

Korie has an intense preoccupied expression on his face. His fingers move nimbly across the console. He is oblivious of the ship around him.

(There’s just one last calculation. He’s got to get close to us in time for unwarp. He’ll have to be right on top of us. So he’ll have to increase his speed for the next twelve, maybe thirteen days—until his echo fills our ‘sky.’ If he comes in too close too fast, we’ll stop, afraid to continue without checking the engines.

(Hmm.

(He could attack us then. We’d be just as vulnerable.

(But it’s to his advantage to kill us as close to our base as possible—except that then he has to turn around and run all the way home—with the possibility that some of our boys will be hot on his tail. So in that case, if he wanted to be cautious, he would want us to unwarp far from base, and would try to force us to stop. He could close with us
before
we’re within range of home.

(And that would do it, all right. Whenever he wants us to stop, he need only move in close. As long as we’re convinced he’s a wobbly—as long as he can mask his true nature—it’ll work.

(Do we have a countermove? Yes, but it’s the same countermove as if we go all the way home. Either way. I wonder if I should arm my weapon now—

(No, I can’t. I can’t risk it going off prematurely. I’ll just have to watch the size of the bogie.

(I think he’s going to take us all the way. That’s his . . . style. Yes. But, then again—if his plan is calculated against an alpha-matrix, then he’s got to know I won’t go completely mad without also figuring that the paranoid possibility just might be true. After all, paranoids often have
real
enemies too. In that case, he might very well assume
that I might figure his plan out even down to a sense of his style. And in that case, it would very well behoove him to
change
his style at some point. To catch me unawares. Is that possible?

(He’s got to have figured that I would be in exactly this position—surrounded by a hostile crew and trying to outthink him and them simultaneously. I have to do something that he can’t predict. But, of course, the beauty of his plan is that he’s already limited my options. I
can’t
really do anything because I have no control over the crew any more.

(Of course, he thinks the alpha-matrix on this ship is the captain. He doesn’t realize that we have a captain who is still very much in charge and that the alpha he devalued was only the first officer. And that’s a variable in the psychonomic equation that’s in my favor. He has to gauge the state of this ship by its external behavior. He must think that the captain was replaced by a nervous crew. And now we have a nervous first officer beating a hasty retreat for home, neither he nor his crew certain whether or not they’ve just committed mutiny. Yes, of course, that’s what it must look like. So maybe the actuality of that situation is in our favor. We still have a captain, and the crew isn’t so demoralized—

(Or is it? Just what kind of situation
are
we in?) Korie considers it glumly. (We’re not that far from where he wants us to be, after all. What little error his misperception might cause, it’s not enough to be decisive in our favor. We’re still in very big trouble.

(But he can’t possibly know how I plan to fight him—because he doesn’t know the internal psychonomy here, only the external one, so—

(Except, he’s got to be an alpha-matrix himself. Only another alpha could have structured this plan. Only an alpha could perceive it.

(But do they have alphas on the other side?

(And if they don’t, then who—or
what?
—am I fighting?

And then Korie stops suddenly, completely. Almost paralyzed. His hands grip the console.

(
This isn’t just a test of a new weapon, is it?
It’s a test of minds. Mine against his. This war is going to be won by the side with the best psychonometrics. He’s never been after this ship at all—that’s
never really
been the goal. They need to find out how to neutralize an alpha! That’s his real object!)

“Sir—? Are you all right?”

Korie looks up. A nameless crewman is looking down at him, a worried expression on his face. “Can I get you something?”

“Uh—no, it’s all right. Uh, thank you for asking. You—you’re uh, Fowles, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well.” Korie doesn’t know what else to say. He looks bemused for a moment. Then, offering an explanation, “I was uh—just thinking—about the uh, wobbly. You know.”

“Yes, sir. I hope you find the source.”

“Yes. That would certainly answer a lot of questions, wouldn’t it?” Korie even allows himself a small, gentle smile.

“Yes, sir.” Fowles nods quickly, encouraging this—the
good
side of Korie—that he sees. “I’ll leave you now, sir.”

“I’ll be fine here—oh, uh, Fowles. On second thought, if you do get anywhere near the galley, or even a sidebar, I could use a cup of coffee. But there isn’t any rush.”

“Yes, Mr. Korie. I’ll take care of it.” And he’s gone.

(Now what the hell did that mean?) Korie rests his chin on one hand for a moment and stares off into space. (I’ll bet he’s trying to humor me. Hah! Primitive psychonometrics! Still, it’s a good sign. It’s a forerunner of sympathy, and sympathy is the first step toward empathy. Maybe, just maybe—)