The Sirens of Space (6 page)

He still remembered his tour of duty
on the
Fuller
, and every
mistake Commander Fletcher had made. Jeremy was resolved to repeat
none of them. He would have the finest ship and the proudest crew
in the whole fleet, whatever its class. No sweat-shopping the crew,
or bullying them at captain’s mast. A crew returned respect for
respect, and arbitrary cruelty had no place on board a CosGuard
vessel. Else, he thought, they were little better than the
pirates.

The control room door was open; the station
was maintaining condition green today. Jeremy passed the redshirted
security guard on duty, who snapped to attention as soon as the
commander rounded the bend in the hallway. Moments later, Jeremy
stood looking over Huslander’s shoulder, reading the aliens’
short, routine transmission.

“
An inspection transit?” groaned
Huslander. “That’s the second one this month.”

“
That’s their right under the
Agreement, Chief,” Jeremy rejoined. He logged the request in the
main computer and relayed the message to Starbase 117.

When CosGuard and the Consortium space fleet
agreed on the dimensions and location of the Neutral Zone, each
thought it prudent to insist upon verification, to make sure that
the other lived up to its promises. So the Agreement allowed each
side a limited number of crossovers—or “Inspection Transits,” in
the language of Command Order 142-00437—to the end of the extended
buffer zone, so that both sides could assure themselves of the
other’s compliance. The Consortium made many more requests than
CosGuard, mostly because all the violations seemed to occur on
Terra’s side of the border.

Soon, a reply came from the starbase.
Everyone knew what it would be: the Crutchtans were still below
their monthly limit of three. But protocol was protocol.

“
REQUEST
APPROVED,
” read the message on the computer
screen.

“
Shit,” Huslander muttered in
disgust.

Jeremy laughed as he broadcast the approval
across the Zone. Everyone on the border would bitch now, because
all stations had to monitor the alien ship as long as it remained
in sensor range, plotting its position and reporting hourly to the
starbase. This turn of events would break up the monotony, but it
meant more work for everybody. And it seemed that the one thing
worse than having nothing to do was being forced to stop doing
it.

SHE GLISTENED IN THE BLACKNESS, her outer
hull shining brilliantly in the sunlight, the dock supports chafing
at her sides.

Dwarfed by the creation that had cost
four years of their lives and more than one trillion credits, the
workmen who had given her life hovered around her arching curves.
Agleam to the edge of glowing, the heat shields still needed
polishing; tested to the twelfth level of redundancy, the hatches
and outlets required more rechecking and the power systems awaited
reconfirmation; and even though her massive computers and internal
relays had been cleared once a week for as long as anyone could
remember, the engineers insisted on one last glitch run before
approving her systems as starworthy. Large black figures started to
appear on her face; before the giant vessel could leave the dock,
her registry markings would need time to set. Now known as
Challenger Prototype Number 3
, when
she left at last for Ishtar she would be “
CGS 2001
.” Sometime after the dock crew began to
work on the next formless mass, someone else would name
her.

All around, the stars burned like
many-colored embers in the heavens. Below, the quiet blue planet
turned silently, as it had for billions of years before its newest
masters dreamed of its existence. There was only the blackness, and
the stars, and the ship; and beneath it all, the tranquil world
spun timelessly, as if tomorrow and yesterday were all the
same.

* * *

“This is Demeter
Command
Traffic Control, do you copy?”

“
Roger, Demeter Command, this is
Transport Ten Sixty-seven, repeat, CGT One-Zero-Six-Seven,
requesting departure clearance to Ishtar Command. Manifest is
DCIC-321J16-CGSF-1017/T1067, Code Blue; will you
confirm?”

“
Affirmative, Ten-Sixty-seven. You are
cleared from Loading Dock Twelve on venture route D-17, vector two
to flight path I-3 en route to Ishtar Command, cc: 142-7919.7. Do
you acknowledge?”

“
Roger, Demeter Command, we are
departing...but, Charlie?”

“
Yeah, Sam...what is it?”

“
What are you sending us off with? My
computer comes back gibberish every time I try to check the
manifest. And my orders say we’re being escorted all the way to
Ishtar. What’s going on here?”

“
Well, it is Code Blue.”

“
Charlie....”

“
Okay, okay. Wait a second, I’ll
check.”

“
This stuff must be solid ultrynium.
The tractor’s at full power already and we’re not even moving yet.
It feels like I’m pulling a neutron star, and I can’t even see all
the way to the end of the train.”

“
Most of it’s the usual—food,
equipment. Probably some inflatable broads for the redshirts. You
know the bit. But you have a dozen frigates right from the store,
four to a box.

“
And be careful with the last three in
Section Two—they’re brand new starships, fresh from the
mint.”

“
The new model? The
Challengers
?”

“
You got it.”

“
Why the hell are they sending’em by
transport train? Why not have the engineers putz’em over to IshCom
and check’em out along the way?”

“
Well, what’s even dumber is that two
of them are coming right back here after shakedown. But who are we
to question thousands of years of military tradition? Why do
something right if you can fuck it up—eh, Sammy? Just don’t
break’em, hear? Clay’ll have your butt.”

“
Roger that. See you next month,
Charlie.”

“
Smooth sailing, buddy. And if you
make it over to the planet, don’t bring back the Flu.”

“
You got it, pal—and I’ve got my
shots. Over and out.”

“HELLO, ADMIRAL,” said Georgina Dyer, Admiral
Clay’s personal secretary, looking up from her desk.

“
Any news today?” barked a gruff voice
with the barest hint of a Zarathustran accent.

“
All’s quiet on the frontier,” she
replied, “and the day’s reports are waiting for you at your desk.
The ship rotations were posted at Zero Hour on all command boards,
as you ordered, and I printed a copy for your review. And the new
starships are finally on their way. Admiral Weatherlee says they’ll
arrive in eight or ten days at the latest.

“
Oh, and Admiral Pendleton wants to
talk to you when you get the chance, about some proposed new
Central Command directive. Apparently they want all ships to
transmit their weekly reports to their home base instead of
flagging their position and heading, and filing the rest when they
dock, like they all do now. He’d like your opinion.”

The admiral grunted an acknowledgment of
sorts, but said nothing beyond the usual.

“
Thank you, Mrs. Dyer. I’ll be in my
office.”

The door closed with a rush of air. The
admiral stalked over the blue carpeting to his oversized desk on
the far side of the room and sat down in a soft, padded chair.

Tall and vigorous, Fleet Admiral Porter Clay
was an intimidating figure, even to his close friends. His white,
thinning hair added a look of distinction to the alert eyes and
ruggedly handsome features that found themselves at the center of
the Cosmic Guard’s most taxing controversy in two centuries. His
sharp baritone voice no longer barked commands to crewmen whose
most important concern—aside from staying on the good side of the
best, if most demanding skipper of his day—was clearing pirates
from the trading corridors of eastern Terra. He had risen to
command whole fleets rather than single ships, and the safety of
the entire frontier now rested in his powerful, oversized
hands.

But there were times, and they came often
these days, when he longed for the simplicity of earlier
days—before aliens and diplomats started complicating his life;
before frontier politicians began calling for his head; before
marching demonstrators burned him in effigy. He longed for the
times when his hardest problems involved checking the flight
manifests of freight haulers caught outside approved shipping
lanes, and when the only excitement a ship’s skipper was likely to
have was chasing after pirate raiding parties or rescuing ships
trapped in interstellar squalls. Most of all, he missed the days
when Central Command forgot about the Eastern Fleet for months at a
time and let him run his command as it should be run: with no
interference, and without the current abundance of addle-brained
experimentation.

These days, CentCom was forever finding new
ways to complicate life on the frontier, he thought angrily. The
desk jockeys running things obviously did not understand the
realities of space exploration. Like this latest bit of nonsense:
how could a starship in deep space spend the stationary hours
needed to transmit across fifty parsecs or more? And they wouldn’t
just be solar hours. It would take two full cosmic hours to
broadcast a typical report on a low frequency band across the
distances ships traveled on a typical mission. If they broadcast
often enough, they might as well give the aliens their code book,
for all the good it would do. It was lame-brained from the charts
to the docks, and he simply would not stand for it.

Today, though, he had bigger problems
on his mind. Now that the first
Challengers
were on their way, they needed crews
and, more importantly, new captains to command them. He’d put off
convening the promotions board for as long as he could, but was
running out of time. No matter how much squawking Winthrop
Weatherlee would put them through, they had to decide whom to
promote. And that meant problems—political problems, that had no
place in making command decisions.

What frustrated Clay more than
anything was that Weatherlee—Old Blunderbutt they called him in the
back rooms of the Eastern Fleet—had him in a corner this time. As
much as Clay hated to admit it, he’d have to pass over his best
cruiser commander once again. Weatherlee, the admiral in charge of
Demeter Command, had raised hell all the way back to Covington
when the last set of promotions had come through, even after they
struck the young Isitian from the list. Now, with the peace talks
still moving at a snail’s pace, the conciliatory stance Clay had
taken with the Crutchtans had the frontier politicians calling for
his head more loudly than ever. Even in a less forbidding climate,
Weatherlee would never stand for giving one of the
Challengers
to a commander he wanted
blackballed, not without a nasty fight. Once again, Clay couldn’t
afford the heat; and once again, the talented young officer’s
career—whose progress through the ranks was becoming as interesting
to Clay as to his own Demetrian rival— would find itself
stalled.

What galled the admiral most was the utter
pointlessness of Weatherlee’s feud. Ornery as he was, Old
Blunderbutt had never before shown the visceral dislike he aimed at
this particular blueshirt. From the start, Weatherlee had sought to
block the young man’s rise through the ranks, all the more so after
it became obvious that the lad was the most promising officer in
the fleet. Now, each new demonstration of brilliance by the young
Isitian forced Weatherlee to reach further and further to justify
himself. The Demetrian nearly shot through the roof when the young
man’s promotion to full commander came through in the aftermath of
the Hawkins Massacre; when prejudice joined with real or imagined
personal grievance, thought Clay, the result was
uncontrollable.

Yet for all of Weatherlee’s shortcomings,
the Demetrian was an able backroom politician with well-placed
friends, both in and out of the command structure. Though Clay was
often hailed as the bravest line commander of his generation, in
his heart he knew he was just the smartest, and now was not the
time to mount an assault. For now, the matter would sit: the best
cruiser commander Clay had ever seen would remain blackballed by a
vindictive superior. With all of Terra raging over firestorms that
the frontier politicians fanned for their own partisan advantage,
there was nothing anyone could do. Even a fleet admiral’s hands
were tied by politics, from time to time, and once again he would
bow to the inevitable.

But not first thing in the morning, the
admiral thought. He relaxed into the soft cushions of his chair,
remembering what it was like to be a young, promising skipper with
his whole future before him, and wondering whether the fleet
commanders of his youth had Weatherlees of their own to contend
with. Perhaps the headaches always came with the job, he sighed.
The gentle hiss of the ventilator dulled his senses and brought a
deceptive peace to his troubled mind. He turned to his console; it
was 375 Hours, and the available weekly reports should be in by
now. He would make his decisions later. It was time to learn how
his men and women spent their time for the last ten days. He turned
the screen to the priority index; he would worry about Weatherlee
some other time.