The Sirens of Space (13 page)

* * *

Striding into
the command
center, Admiral Clay cast a stern glance from the monitor screens
on the left to the radio controls on the right. He was pleased to
see the room well-disciplined and tightly controlled. Every
technician was seated and focused on the instruments, and there was
none of the mindless chatter that often made the Command Deck seem
so chaotic. Every voice was either asking or answering a question;
a crewman sat at every screen. Everyone in the Cosmic Guard knew
just how deadly a pirate raid could be, and the coded security
announcement calling him to the bridge had made clear that another
attack was underway. The admiral didn’t like the turn things were
taking the last few weeks; he didn’t like it one bit.

“
Admiral on the deck!” announced the
officer of the day, a dark, pretty lieutenant commander whose name
Clay couldn’t remember.

“
Situation?”

“
Brigantines moved to attack a lone
freighter along the Ishtar Spike, Admiral. Fortunately, the
freighter was sticking right to the middle of the shipping lanes.
We had a squadron of escorts patrolling the affected sector. They
scrambled and put the bandits to flight.”

“
The freighter?”

“
It was hauling a train of six cargo
trailers. The pilot decoupled almost at once and took flight. But
the pirates didn’t seem interested in the cargo—they started after
the freighter. The escorts arrived before they could close. Now
they’re helping the freighter recouple with its cargo.”

“
They took after the naked freighter?”
Clay squinted.

“
Yes, sir.”

“
But the situation is under
control?”

“
Yes, sir.”

“
All right, Commander—carry
on.”

Clay left the Command Deck and walked down
the wide corridor toward his office. Guards from the Security
Office snapped to attention as he passed, but he was too
preoccupied to nod an acknowledgment, as he usually did when young
Cozzies tried to impress him. This was the seventh pirate attack
they’d seen in the last three months, he thought. All against lone
freighters.

He decided to issue another advisory, this
time strongly advising against solitary travel, and urging all
commercial shipping to form into convoys before entering
interstellar skies. He knew he’d get resistence: the shippers
always resisted advisories, and usually ignored them. It delayed
their delivery schedules and added to their costs. But he knew he’d
never be able to make a mandatory directive stick: the threat was
still too amorphous, too random, too unfocused. He’d be overruled
by Central Command by the end of the day, if he tried to impose
another Convoy Directive. Just like he was at the outset of this
latest round of attacks.

Arriving at his office, he strode into his
private chambers and locked the door behind him. Gazing at a
picture of himself as a young skipper, he smiled sadly before
taking a seat and beginning to write out his notes for the report
he’d file later in the day. He’d spent his youth battling pirates,
he reflected. He’d chased them away from Demeter and cleared the
shipping lanes all the way to Central Terra, but they never really
disappeared. The past few months it seemed that they’d returned as
bold as ever, raiding ships closer and closer to base, harassing
the lanes from Ishtar all the way to the frontier.

Briefly, he thought about scheduling a
command conference for the next day, to discuss their options.
Maybe a simple redeployment would give them more assets to use
along the commercial corridors. With the aliens behaving
themselves, they certainly could spare some ships from the
frontier. But he dismissed the idea as soon as it formed in his
head.

They’ll just think I’m an old granny, the
admiral chuckled. Attacks had always tended to come in streaks, and
whenever pirates got bored, they’d take to buzzing convoys, just to
amuse themselves. Still, he thought, it had been nearly a year
since they’d seen Chadbourne Wilkes and his band of cutthroats.
Wilkes was not often given to lying low, and he was hardly the type
to retire quietly. Clay couldn’t avoid thinking that while the
raids were doing no real harm, they seemed a lot like an enemy
probing for weakness.

Finally giving it up, he decided that
everyone else was probably right, and he really was just an old
granny. He quickly sent along his advisory, and turned his
attention to resolving the logistics snafu that kept routing half
of their food from Looking Glass back to the Hodges Binary, and
most of their replacement parts back to Central Command.

* * *

The gentle tapping
at the
open door caught her attention, and Janet looked up from the dark
blue duffel bag and disorganized piles of clothing on her bed.
Instantly, Cook knew he was in trouble. Janet’s eyes blazed with
cold fury, making the hair on his neck prickle with embarrassment.
But he had rehearsed his speech and there was nowhere else to turn.
Tentatively, since admittance had not really been given, he stepped
into the anteroom of her cabin.

“
Lieutenant,” he began. He was not
prepared for what awaited him.

Like a coiled spring freed of its
constraints, Janet stepped to the table beside her bed and
retrieved a cream-colored piece of crumpled paper in her left hand.
Before Cook realized what was happening, she charged toward him,
tossed the paper in his face, and returned to her bed to continue
packing her bag.

“
I suppose this is your doing,” she
said archly, not even looking up from her task. “Not that I’m
surprised. It seems I never have had much of a choice in the
matter, whenever you’re concerned.”

Cook looked at the paper. They were orders,
transferring her to his new command. What remained of his stomach
left him, but he had the presence of mind to close the door behind
him.

“
Mendelson,” he began, already on the
defensive and looking quite uncomfortable.

“
Save it, Captain,” she said sharply,
looking him squarely in the eye.

“
I’m afraid I’ve bungled this thing
quite badly, Lieutenant. I told headquarters I needed to get your
approval first, but I can see they paid no attention to me. I’ll
have your orders changed at once.”

Janet’s eyes narrowed hatefully.
“Starship assignments rarely come more than once. I’d be a fool to
turn this one down—as you probably already realized. So once again
you have me at a disadvantage, s
ir
,” she smiled bitterly, almost hissing the
last word. “But we both know it’s easier to transfer to a starship
from another starship. Don’t count on having me stay on your new
ship for very long. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of
packing to do. I don’t want to be late for my new assignment. I
hear the commanding officer there is rather full of
himself.”

Impassively, but with grim satisfaction, she
watched Cook squirm in discomfort as he searched for a response to
break the tension. Finally conceding defeat, he lowered his eyes
and withdrew in silence, leaving Janet all alone. Her face, smooth
and pretty even in anger, softened as the rage left her. She felt
darkly triumphant, but victory brought her no joy.

Slowly, she looked around the room. Piles of
clothing were everywhere. Everything she owned in the Universe was
scattered on tables and chairs in the small chamber that had been
her home for the past cosmic half-year. Her breathing became
shallow and rapid and she felt her throat tighten. She’d sacrificed
everything she knew to be part of the Cosmic Guard—her friends, her
home, her family. Now that her career was rocketing toward the
heavens, she felt cheated and misused. It had once been her fondest
dream to draw duty on a starship; why, she wondered, when it was
finally coming true, did she feel that her life was falling
apart?

Her eyes caught sight of a pale green lump,
sticking out of one of the boxes on the floor, the one she had
designated for trash. She reached inside and drew out a small
stuffed animal, a gift from a friend in better times. It was a
grubnush in caricature, a small, bear-like creature that lived in
the forests of her native New Babylon. Blinking back tears, she
looked at its comical face and thought of moonlit walks through
endless gardens, and carnival vendors and ferris wheels. Slowly the
realization fell upon her that the soft mass of cloth and matting
still held too many memories for her to abandon, no matter how
bitter she felt today. Frustrated and furious, she flung the toy
animal against the wall. It thudded softly and fell to the floor,
and silence filled the room again.

Janet fell forward onto the bed, her head
buried amid the piles of clothes, and closed her eyes. Her body
ached with loneliness. A tear left her eyelid and trickled down the
side of her face, and she began to cry.

* * *

His goodbyes
almost
finished, Cook headed down Corridor A, past the elevators and down
the walkway. He gave the security door his clearance code, and the
door opened with a rush of air. He stepped through the gate and
onto the deserted bridge.

Unnoticed when the bridge was in use,
a buzz cracked the stillness, as power coursed through the powerful
electric brain that controlled the ship even in dry dock. The
viewing screens were blank now, black rectangles in the shadows of
the ship’s darkened command center. Over the last cosmic year they
had shown him much, as the ship explored unknown star systems,
chased pirate raiders across the heavens, and slipped through the
cold beauty of space like a dream on wings. Casting a glance from
one side to the other, Cook smiled sadly, for the bridge had been
his home for what seemed to be a lifetime. He hated to get mawkish
over material goods, but the
Constantine
was hardly a trinket he could
discard without a second thought. The ship had sustained him,
nurtured him; he had mastered his craft on this bridge, and leaving
for good was harder than he would have predicted in the giddy rush
of promotion. For all the trappings of command, he concluded, at
heart he was just a sentimentalist. It was yet another drawback to
being an Isitian.

“
Everyone’s asking for you
at the party, son. Uncle Neil’s making his usual fool of himself,
practicing his Roscoe imitations, and your mother is waiting to
serve dessert.”

Roscoe smiled, but said nothing. The brook
trickled over the shallow rocks, and a small squirrelline chattered
noisily in the trees overhead.

“
Is something
wrong?”

“
No, Dad. Everything’s
fine.”

The father stepped onto a sturdy-looking
rock overlooking the water, and sat down. “You know how proud of
you I am, Roscoe. I’ve probably never told you, but you have been a
constant amazement since before you could talk. There is no hope
I’ve ever had for you that you haven’t fulfilled. I wanted you to
know that, before you leave.”

“
Dad,” said the young man,
after a long silence. “Mom has barely spoken to me for the last two
weeks, and Grandpa Tom is getting old. I’m afraid that—
”

“
That he’ll be dead before
you return?”

Roscoe nodded and looked away.

“
That’s a possibility
every time you depart after a visit. And not just with your
grandfather, but with everyone you leave, for however short a time.
It can be hard to say goodbye, but you can’t live your whole life
being afraid of seeing someone for the last time.

“
You have many gifts,
Roscoe. You have to master them. But most of all, you have to live
the life you choose for yourself. Your talents can take you
anywhere you want—they can open the Universe for you to examine.
And the Space Institute on Earth is the finest school for space
studies in all of Terra.”

“
Better than New Alex
Tech?” Roscoe said mischievously.

His father laughed. “I’ll deny saying it—and
who’d believe the word of a Lyceum man anyway? But yes. And simply
visiting Earth will be an education in itself.

“
Now, let’s get back to
the house, Scooter. Your mother will skin both of us alive if we
make everyone wait much longer.”

Laughing, the two of them raced up the hill
and through the woods. As always, the son won the race; but these
days, he won even when his father tried his best. When Roscoe
returned to the party his good spirits had returned. And he didn’t
even wince when the guests, taking his father’s lead, all began
using the hated nickname of his boyhood.

Cook had
one
final task to complete before leaving the ship. The weight of
memories held him down, and Cook sat silently for several minutes.
Then, he made his last entry into the ship’s log.

cc: 142-8355.7

FILE: Log

ACCESS: Command.

SECURITY: Standard

OPERATIONAL STATUS: Normal

LOCATION: SB 114, Ishtar Command

Having received orders on cc:142-8100
effecting transfer to new assignment, I hereby relinquish command
to Lt Cmdr LaRue.

Capt R Cook

He copied his last entry into his personal
diary and placed the disk into his duffel bag. Quietly, Cook
gathered his belongings and took the private elevator to the hangar
deck, where a single security guard stood watch over the mooring
lock. Misty-eyed and alone, he left the ship.

***~~~***