The Far Side (97 page)

“So we can offer a bonus of land,” Andie told Kurt, “but it’s one size for all.  Still, officers and sergeants are better paid then the enlisted men.  They will have to console themselves with that.  And sign an agreement that they won’t bitch if the Far Side door ever stops working.”

Andie glanced at Kris.  “You’ve been quieter than usual.”

“Andie, Melek -- please I don’t want to offend either of you.  Arvala is becoming a jig-saw puzzle, and those are something you’ve always loved, Andie.  I, on the other hand, haven’t got a clue.  I admired what Cadet Evans said about wanting to go into civil affairs.  Politics, even.  Except here in Arvala they should be very careful who they let participate in their politics.  An American emissary or spokesman, that’s one thing.”  She paused.  “I want my hands on the wheel, though.

“It’s not that I don’t want to be involved with Arvala -- I very much want to be.  It’s like everything else in my life just now.  I have no idea what it is I want to do.  I look at politics in America and I so much want to get involved and make things better.  Yet, I’m terribly afraid that the combinations of money, power and influence will corrode anyone’s morals.  I couldn’t bear it if I celebrated my sixtieth birthday scheming to become president using any means necessary.  Or the scheming of our other senators and representatives who only seem to care about money and re-election.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Kris,” Andie told her.  “There is work enough here for a hundred people like you.”

Kris smiled wanly.  “I keep hoping for a light to shine down on me and I’ll have a glowing moment where I realize what it is that I really want.”

She looked around, as if suddenly realizing something.  “Where’s Pete?  We sent him here right after Cadet Evans was abducted.”

Ezra coughed.  “He didn’t react as badly as that one guy from the government, but he couldn’t function in the daytime if the Big Moon was up.  He said he kept waiting for it to fall on his head.  Kris, he resigned and went home.  He said he’s always wanted to be a cop; that adventuring was a little rich for his blood.”

“I hope he at least starts at Norwich; he’d get a scholarship to finish if he wants it,” Kris said sadly.

Kris looked at her best friend in the world.  “Look, Andie, you have important work to do here; some day I’ll find something that will be as important to me as this is to you.  Melek, I’m sorry that I don’t want to make Arvala my life’s work like the rest of you; I think more of you and less of me because of it.  But it isn’t what I want to do.”

Melek nodded.  “Collum told me that he wouldn’t be surprised if you said something like that.  He thinks, and I agree, that you are capable of the grandest things!  And that it should be up to your heart what those things will be.  None of us care to try to keep you from that.”

Melek gestured around them.  “We have many problems besetting us.  I talked to the woman soldier; she told me a little about her home...”

“Oh my God!” Andie said with a laugh, “She’s recruiting here, too!”  That was good for a laugh from everyone.

“She has some very odd notions; someday I might like to talk to her about them.  She has, however, told me that her King will allow her and some of her associates to stay here and test out their flying machines.  She has already sent the one used to rescue Charles south again, to spy on Rangar.”

“And the B’Lugi?” Andie asked.

“Collum is more excited about that, than anything else.  Our ancestors must have been shielded from the worst effects of the catastrophe the B’Lugi suffered.  Now, however, he thinks we can join together to make common cause against the Tengri.  I know your King is reluctant to sell us the weapons we’d need, but Collum has asked me if he could meet with your King, and talk to him, face-to-face of our great need.

“In the meantime, the B’Lugi will come to Arvala and show us their marvelous ship and their weapons, such as they are.  The King has already found more than sufficient numbers of volunteers among the Sea Fighters who want to go east to fight against the Tengri, as they and their ancestors have vowed to do.

“We have a great many large tasks ahead of us, but we knew that already.  True, we didn’t know how many tasks or how great they were, but still, none of them is a task that we can’t handle.  We will focus on them as best we can until each is done.  As Collum once told me, Arvala is a great nation.  We can pat our heads and rub our stomachs at the same time.”

There was a sound of someone ascending to their perch, and all craned to see who it was.  Captain Milan nodded to Melek.  “Captain Melek!  Something strange just happened!”

“Strange how?” Melek asked.

“It is nearly dawn; one of the guards heard something and called his corporal.  Then other sounds were heard inside the fort.  Crashing sounds, like rocks hitting the ground.  We had no idea what was happening, Captain, none!  Still, I roused the garrison of the fort and after about five more minutes, the crashing stopped.

“Afterwards, one of the Tarin fighters reported that he saw something land in a watch fire.”

He pulled a sack off his back and displayed a rock with soot on in.

“A rock,” he told them.

Melek was gentle.  “Yes, we see it is a rock, Captain Milan.”

“It fell from the sky.  Several soldiers swear they saw dralka flying very high in the night sky, Captain Melek.  No one has ever seen dralka flying at night before.”

Andie examined the rock and passed it to Kris, who passed it on to Kurt.

Kurt smiled slightly.  “We found out back in the Blitz that high altitude night bombing wasn’t accurate -- and not at all decisive, even when we bombed Germany and Japan to rubble.  Welcome to the Blitz, Melek.”

“Blitz?” I don’t know that word.”

“It means lightning,” Andie told him.  “An enemy attacked an ally of ours by dropping bombs on their cities.  It was a very terrible war, Melek, and millions of people died.  It raged all around our world for six years.”

“Each side targeted the common people of the other side; the idea was to drive them to surrender, without having to invade.  Instead, it mostly served to stiffen the resolve of those bombed,” Kurt told them.

“And your people did this too?” Melek asked, stunned.

“Yes,” Kris told him.  “We didn’t start it, but when your enemy is killing your civilians by the thousands, the millions of survivors demanded revenge.  And they got it.  War is not a good thing if you can avoid it, Melek.”

“For what it’s worth,” Andie added, “it is likely that if our enemies had won, they would have put the entire world in chains.  They were the last major country to use slaves.  We crushed them.”

Melek nodded.  “Once, we were a peaceful people.  To be sure we had soldiers to keep the peace in our towns, but we were the strongest nation of all those we knew.  Then the Tengri came.  A few at first, then more and more.”  He dropped his voice.  “The Tengri always talked of their own ‘ancient enemies, the people of the sea.’  That had to have been the B’Lugi.”

“Probably,” Kris said.  “What we need to hold onto at the moment is how each of us are doing today, not what we did in the past.  All of us learn from our mistakes and don’t do the same things today we did before -- either as individuals or nations.”

* * *

The meeting broke up and a while later Andie hugged Kris before they went to their respective beds.  “Are you feeling okay, Kris?”

Kris shrugged.  “I should feel okay, right?  I’m on top of the world -- several worlds, really.  Andie -- I met someone.”

Andie grinned.  “I knew you would.  Who is he?”

“He’s a she, Andie.  And twice my age.”

Andie blinked.  “I guess I’m not in much position to complain, am I?”

“She’s older than Linda; not as old as my mother.”

Andie shuddered.  “Well, that’s good.”

“She wants me to go into politics.  I can’t do that, Andie.  Not like she wants.  It’s like politicians at home have gone through some sort of state change, like ice to water to steam.  They seem divorced from the concerns of everyday people.  They deal with sums of money that are staggering and that has to be a terrible temptation.  The US budget is a couple of trillion dollars a year.  Divert just a half percent into your pocket and you’re talking a couple of billion dollars.  I looked up Seattle’s budget -- it’s in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”

“Someone has to be able to break the logjam,” Andie told her stoutly.  “If anyone can, it’s you.”

“Andie, I’m not exactly sure you’re not stealing.”

“Me?”  Andie’s jaw dropped.  “Do I look like I’m stealing?  Am I not living in a cave?”

“Not like that, Andie.  Not like that.  You are getting money by being in a position to buy copper on Earth and trade it here to the Arvalans and they give you gold, silver and platinum for it.  I keep trying to tell myself that this is how markets work.  You deliver copper to the Arvalans and they’re happy, they give you gold and silver and you’re happy.  Somehow when I think about it, it still seems lopsided and unfair.”

“Well, Melek agrees with you.  I haven’t studied that much economics, but the fact is that at the end of the day both of us are happy with what we have as opposed to what we had.  I may not know much about economics, but I do know that in any trade both parties stand to profit.  This isn’t a bad thing.  I do not steal, Kris.  I swear.”

Kris shrugged.  “It’s going to cause inflation here on Arvala.  All of a sudden there is a lot more copper available than ever before.  While as much gold as they’re trading you is just a drop in the bucket on Earth.”

“I know that.  I’m working with Collum all the time to try to keep a handle on it.”  She laughed.  “And I asked Danei about what they use for currency.  Copper is really uncommon on their continent -- they’ve been mining it for a couple of thousand years and a lot of what those mines have produced has been lost.  They’d be willing to trade two or three times as much gold for copper as the Arvalans.”

“That’s a long ways away.”

“It is, but remember back on Earth they used to ship gold from China, the Philippines and North and South America back to Spain and later England.  They didn’t even make a pretense of trading fairly for it with the natives.  They used to fill those ships in Europe with cheap trade goods, send the ship halfway around the world -- about as far as the B’Lugi are, in fact, and get back ships filled with gold.  It was a good deal for them.  I’m giving value for value received.  I am not stealing.”

“I’m sorry I said it,” Kris told her friend.

“I know.  You’re a little stressed out, Kris.  Did Pete’s leaving bother you?”

Kris looked startled.  “You know, everyone thinks I was chasing him.  I saw someone who wanted something so much -- but he couldn’t afford it.  There was nothing he could do to afford it, as long as he was where he was.  I saw a way to get him the money.  In a way, Andie, it’s like what you are doing for the Arvalans.  You saw what they dreamed about and you’re going about bringing those dreams to fruition.  I’m disappointed that Pete didn’t stick it out, but I’m not really bothered.  It was always his choice what he did.”

“I’m not sure that’s such a great analogy.  If Collum and Melek told me to take a hike I’d be pretty broken up.  I’m not sure what I would do.  I’d throw a temper tantrum at least,” Andie said.

The both smiled at each other.  “Maybe not, but I think you understand,” Andie went on.

Andie regarded Kris briefly and said, “I do understand being confused about what you want to be.  I don’t understand about your relationship with an older woman, because you were never like that.”

Kris laughed bitterly.  “Like what?  I found out I was sucker for gentle seduction.  I can hardly wait until my mother figures out I’m seeing someone and who it is.  My father will deal with it okay, but not my mother.”

“What are you going to do?” Andie finally asked.

“I am still going to try to rescue people.  I have now become ultra, ultra cautious.  I am still going to help you and Arvala in any way I can be useful.  I’m going to stay at Norwich and take more classes in government and politics than I would have thought possible six months ago.  I am going to try to keep my personal life from overwhelming my college experience.”

“Well, it worked for me,” Andie joked.  “Look where I am now!”

Chapter 37 :: The
Ultimate Rescue

Kris Boyle was sitting at the study desk in her dorm room when a knock came on her door.  She was tempted to run and hide in the bathroom.  Her fellow cadets virtually never called on her; Ezra was back on Arvala.  Ergo, it was Kurt or someone he’d sent with news of another rescue that needed to be made.  None of the rescues had been the close scrapes that SG-1 was forever getting into, but they had, all too often involved her personal survival and once, the survival of the planet.  She’d had enough.  Now she understood why Ezra and Kurt were reluctant to be put into the position where you had to do what had to be done.

Both men, though, stepped resolutely to the plate when called upon and hadn’t flinched.  With a sigh, she went to the door and opened it.

Erica Mirableu beamed at her.  “How are you doing, Kris?”

“Fine,” Kris said nervously.

“I almost never see you any more, outside of class.  And then it’s just to nod hello.  Are you okay?”

“It’s been almost a month since we got Charles Evans back; I’m fine.  I hear he is too.”

Erica laughed heartily.  “You got him back, and then let him go again!”

Kris nodded.  “I’m due back at the rookery in two weeks; Danei Korei’s ship will be there for a final goodbye before they head east.  God!  Can you imagine fourteen or fifteen thousand miles in a sailing ship, against the wind?  Nearly five months.”

“And they have a dozen ships looking for them.”

Kris grinned.  “Danei is one clever woman.  The Tengri are looking too far to the east -- and she’s an explorer after all.  She’s going to steer a hundred and fifty miles west of Rangar’s Island, and keep going south another eight hundred miles.  They’ve known how to measure latitude well enough, but longitude has always been tricky.

“Now she has a half dozen good clocks and all of her officers have watches that Andie bought them.  By the time they get back home, they’ll have the longitude business down pat.  On Arvala, telling your longitude is a piece of cake, as the sun rises and sets at the same time every day.  You just need an accurate timepiece.”

Erica gestured at the empty bed.  “Can I visit for a bit?”

Kris nodded and her former roommate sat down.  Erica had stayed in their original room; this suite had been empty and General Briggs had installed Kris in it, with the intention of finding a bodyguard to go in the other room.  So far, there had been no takers.

Erica grinned.  “My grades are back up, so I thought I’d come and celebrate.”  She gestured at the books in front of Kris.  “How did you manage it?  I mean, you have to be even more distracted than I was.”

“Clean living mostly, plus I just naturally do well at studying.  Nothing like Andie, though.  It was amazing how much of what we learned in our history and science classes that she remembered on Arvala.”

Erica nodded.  “I have an admission to make.”

“What sort of an admission?” Kris asked.

“I told my father about why I no longer had the famous roommate.  For the first time in my life, I left him speechless.  He said I was a big fat idiot -- exactly what did I want to do in my life?  To join the French army?  That’s his biggest insult; he thinks the French army is a bunch of over-dressed clowns.”

“Leaving out the very real risk you’d get killed,” Kris said levelly.  “We had four people in Siran-ista at the radio listening post, and we sent three cadets and nine guards.  We lost one of the people at Siran-ista and had a cadet kidnapped.  A few days later two Americans and an Israeli were killed in a dralka attack that killed nearly two hundred others in the area.

“He might think you are a big fat idiot, but you’re a living big fat idiot.  I’ve seen too much of the alternative, Erica -- you’re the one who has it right.”

Erica nodded.  “Still, he made me think.  And he’s right; now that I’ve been at Norwich I’d never dream of joining the French army.  Ever.  But I am contemplating what I want to do after Norwich.  Tell me, you’re close to General Briggs.  What if I went to him and told him I’d like to serve in Arvala after I graduate?”

Kris grinned.  “He’s always looking for good people.”

“Is it true, we’re not going to open any more Far Side doors?”

“At least not for a while.  We’re still evaluating it.  Probably we’ll resume but it’s going to be miles underground or out in space.  Just you, the other researchers and your friendly nuclear auto-destruct, just like on Stargate.”

“I don’t think I’d like that as much as a place like Arvala,” Erica said dryly.  “Not to mention the idea of being on a planet where nuclear weapons are a couple of hundred years in the future -- that’s a big plus!”

“You have to watch out for assumptions like that,” Kris told her soberly.  “The Tengri and their three enemies in the east did in fifteen hundred years what took western civilization eighteen hundred years.  If their technology accelerates like ours did -- particularly if any theory leaks through the Far Side door to them -- it could be a hundred or a hundred and fifty years before they have nuclear weapons.”

Erica looked at Kris for a moment, making Kris a little uncomfortable.  Erica looked like she was contemplating something unpleasant.  In a way, it was.  Unpleasant to someone who was proud of not normally asking for help.

“Would you talk to General Briggs for me?  For when I graduate?  And tell him good things about me?”

Kris chuckled.  “That would be a waste of time.  Right now, no matter what you hear, Andie Schulz is in charge there and Kurt Sandusky is her right hand man.  I will talk to both of them, Erica, I promise.”

“Isn’t General Briggs supporting them?”

“Aye, that he is.  I’ll talk to him, if you like, but he can give you a pat on the back and say ‘Sure, go ahead!’ and if Andie or Kurt say no, you’ll stay here.  If General Briggs says no, and Andie says yes, unless you have some sort of arrangement with the General, you’ll go.  Andie is the ultimate trump card when it comes to Arvala.”

“Thanks, Kris.  I appreciate this.”

“Don’t thank me.  A lot of the Spaniards who went to the New World died there.  Arvala is going to be a dangerous place for a very long time.”  Kris paused.  “Erica, just before I got to Arvala to meet with the B’Lugi and get Charles Evans back, more than a thousand dralka attacked the area around the rookery, as I said before, killing a lot of people, including two Americans and an Israeli.

“That night, while we sleepless earthlings were talking about things in the middle of our afternoon, shortly before dawn their time, the dralka carried out a nighttime bombing raid against the Arvalan fort there.”

“What?” Erica sat up straight, her voice incredulous.

“It’s true.  Kurt says that the Arvalans are now going to face the Blitz.  The dralka evidently found a way to take off in the dark, shortly before dawn, and they homed in on the campfires in the Arvalan fort, and dropped rocks from five thousand feet.  True, they got exactly one rock into a fire, and missed all the people, but if it becomes a regular thing, life there will go up a notch in danger.  It was one thing when the dralka were only a risk down low.  Flying at five thousand feet -- they’re going to be hard to hit with firearms.”

Erica shook her head.  “I didn’t want to go out with you anymore because my grades were in trouble.  Now they’re not.  I still can’t afford the long term distraction, but I was never afraid, Kris.  Not ever.”

“And you’re right to be upset with me, but think how I’d feel if you got killed because you didn’t understand the risks?  You will need to study as hard as you can about Arvala, Erica.”

“I will -- but there’s not much available here.”

“I can fix that, I promise,” Kris told her.  She made a note to call Andie and see to it that some sort of better materials were prepared.  The study guide that Charles Evans was given had been useful, but incomplete.  They needed it to be complete.  After a few more minutes of gossip and chitchat, Erica left.

Not for the first time, Kris felt a pang.  It was one thing to be confused about what to do with the rest of your life, but this was ridiculous.  All through school she’d had a friend, Andie Schulz, who was there for her, all of the time.  Now, they were separated by distances so vast that the mind couldn’t comprehend them.  Not just the physical distance, but Andie had achieved her heart’s desire: everyone on Arvala thought she was the smartest person on the planet.  Would they have thought that about her if they’d gone to Caltech?

By all accounts there were a lot of smart people at Caltech.  Maybe.  But Andie had a way of overcoming obstacles, and had had it all of her life, so that you couldn’t be sure.

She was still thinking about it, when there was another knock on her door.  Two in one day!  This one had to be a rescue!

She opened the door and saw a woman a few years older than she was, a woman who looked like someone Kris knew, but no matter how hard she tried dredging her memory, she couldn’t remember her.

The woman nodded to her.  “My name is Kathy Sharp.  You know my brother, Pete.”

Kris sighed with relief.  Yes, she was familiar in a family way, but no, she’d never met the woman.  “Yes.  What can I do for you, Miss Sharp?  Last I heard you were on the Boston police force.”

“That lasted six weeks until my partner handed me two hundred dollar bills and told me it was my part of the take.”  She shook her head.  “No one in the Sharp family has ever been on the take.  I objected and was washed out before my rookie year had hardly begun.”

Kris shrugged.  “The police are like that, I understand.”

“Some are; Sharps aren’t,” the woman said flatly.

“Let me get down to it, Miss Boyle.  Were you trying to mess with my big brother’s head?”

“No, of course not.” Kris replied.  “I told him that every time he asked.”

The woman nodded.  “He said he just about had never met a woman where there was zero chemistry between him and her.  Now he’s heard you’re gay.”

“I’ve been in bed with someone else exactly once in my life.  It was a woman.  It never happened before and it hasn’t happened since.  If she was here, just now, I freely admit I’d be tempted.  No one else has ever tempted me.”

“And with Pete?”

“When I saw him the first time, he was like a kid in a candy store, looking around Norwich for all he was worth.  I could see it in his eyes: this is where he wanted to be.  The next thing I learned about him was that he was having difficulty making ends meet well enough to go to community college.  Miss Sharp, I’m filthy rich.  And besides, there is Arvala.”

“That’s the place on other side of the sky, right?  Pete went there and came back shaking like a leaf.”

“It’s not a place for claustrophobics,” Kris explained.  “Their Big Moon, when it’s up in the day time, covers about two-thirds of the sky.  It feels like there’s a huge hammer waiting to fall on your head.  Most people can adjust; Pete was the second who couldn’t.”

“And what about Arvala?  What’s that got to do with this?”

“I’m honored there.  If I were to go out and find, say, a ton of copper scrap, the nice people on Arvala would cheerfully trade me two tons of gold for it, because I have the inside track.  You could probably only score about a half ton of gold.”

“I don’t follow.”

“The elemental abundances of the metals are different there.  There, copper is scarcer than gold is here.  A lot scarcer.  I paid for a scholarship here for Pete.  It cost about seventeen pounds of copper.  About
fifty bucks of copper that I traded for a quarter million in gold.”

“You’re not shitting me are you?”

“Whatever for?” Kris replied.

The woman shook her head.  “You got me.  I just didn’t want Pete getting hurt.”

“Usually with my friends, my screw-ups are sins of omission rather than commission,” Kris told her.

“Yeah.  Pete said I should look you up.  He says you’re a hard ass, which I have trouble believing, but you’re fair.  The fact is that my police career is pretty much over.  Boston has black-listed me in New England.  I expect if they get a records request, they’ll do it elsewhere.  Pete says that if I have a death wish, you’re in the market for a bodyguard.”

“I am in the market for a bodyguard.  You have to know my experiences with policeman haven’t gone well.  My parents and my friend’s experiences were far, far worse.  I don’t like cops.”

“Not even Pete?”

“Pete was okay,” Kris told her.  “The police captain from Chicago was okay.  The chief in Seattle...” Kris waved her hands helplessly.  “My feeling is that he’s not.

“Did Pete tell you what being with me is like?”

“He said the government told him not to talk about it.”

Kris sighed.  “He should know they aren’t serious -- they’re just looking to cover their asses.  The first trip I took him on, we were two miles away from a nuclear explosion.  In spite of how bad that sounds, it was actually better than an hour earlier when I put him in the garage of a home at the main breaker box.  Things went south and I told him to not come back in the house, but to open the garage door and head out.