The Sirens of Space (7 page)

* * *

The Old Earth-vintage
chandeliers lit the tables with soft, diffuse light. The
table orbs glowed dimly, giving a gentle warmth to the room. The
rich texture of the wallpaper captured pastoral scenes from
Victorian England, of foxes and hounds, and gentry at play. It was
the Country Club, the finest restaurant on Ishtar Command, where
the gentry of the Eastern Fleet could come to relax in comfort and
spend their money at leisure.

In the hallway connecting the annex to the
main dining area, Henri looked nervously at Table Forty-seven,
where he had placed the three CosGuard officers almost two solar
hours ago, when the annex had been empty. But when the shift change
brought the dinner crowd, he had no choice but to begin seating
patrons wherever he had an available table. To his eternal
mortification, that meant seating men and women of refinement next
to common spacers.

Worse, he shuddered: they were starship
captains, probably freshly returned from deep space and ready to
shatter the Club’s reputation into a thousand tiny pieces.

Suddenly, Table Forty-seven erupted in
laughter, and Henri saw one of their number—the one with the
roguish eyes and the piercing laugh; he believed the name was
Tanana—slap his thigh. Throughout the annex, more than one head
turned toward the spacers, only to turn away with disdain.

By the time the next eruption came, this
time on the heels of a large and unmistakable belch, Henri could
stand it no longer. With a face as red as his jacket, he retired to
the service lounge. He would leave Maurice to greet their guests.
Maurice was an Earther, and Earthers were used to humiliation.

“Well, Fitz,
you sure drew
the brass ring on that one. Dream as they will, not everyone gets
to serve under Miriam Wright.”

“
You know, Fitz keeps plugging away,
but sooner or later he seems to hit the mark.”

Ignoring temptation, Brian Fitzgerald
stuffed another bite of dinner into his mouth. An unkempt mop of
graying hair sat atop his head, and mustard lined the corners of
his mouth. His eyes crackled with a blunt and practical
intelligence, and behind his hearty sense of humor his friends
found him the very essence of sturdy honesty. Like most Demetrians
he was strong and stocky, with a ready smile and an irreverence
born of hard times and working-class roots. His reputation, though,
came from his scrappiness as a battler, and the fact that his
starship was hardly the most graceful on the frontier. His
maneuvers were often compared to a Ceresian mutluk in heat, and
Fitz himself had to admit that he lacked the artistry of a
Jefferson McKinley Jones, DemCom’s senior wing commander.

But graceful or not, he got the job done, no
matter what the grading computers thought of his style. For now, he
was too hungry to match insults with Tanana and Chandler, his
friends from their days together at CosGuard Tech. And he was too
pleased at the duty rotation to feel like doing anything but
enjoying himself. Any duty that kept him away from “Whinin’ Winnie”
Weatherlee for another turn was a blessing. Besides, Looking Glass
never looked better. Not since the day that Admiral Clay turned it
over to Miriam Wright.

“
You think Fitz is of a mind to settle
down now?” Chandler asked with a wicked grin. “Now that he’ll have
a ring through his nose, I doubt he’ll want to be joining us for a
romp on the planet. I expect he’ll have little use for the girlies
of Ishtar, now that he’ll be taking orders from Commodore
Wright.”

“
Well, I wouldn’t want to infect her
base now, Tommy,” Fitz replied, able to resist no longer. As his
choking friends spat their last bite of lunch all over the table,
he smugly reached for a glass of wine. He often thought that good
food was wasted on line officers. The cuisine aboard the typical
starship made plasterboard seem tasty, and starships had the finest
galleys on any ships of the line. But he could usually coax his
taste buds back to life by the end of liberty, and Ishtar Command
boasted better chow than any starbase this side of New
Babylon.

After dinner, the three friends walked from
the restaurant down the central concourse toward Corridor C. Fitz
always marveled at the immensity of the spanning archways of
IshCom. A starship’s hexagonal hallways and corridors seemed
cramped by comparison. After endless months in space even the
illusory roominess of a starbase gave a feeling of freedom that
land dwellers—“groundtoads” in spacer’s jargon—could never
understand. Spaceflight freed Man from earthly bounds only to
impose others from which he could not escape. Few content with life
on land could comprehend existence inside the constraints that
space pressed upon the fragile hulls protecting spacers from the
blackness through which they sailed.

But today the three friends were not in a
philosophical mood. Neither space nor the Guard had much use for
philosophy, and they had more pressing concerns.

“
You sure, Fitz?” Tanana asked, his
wispy eyebrows raised in amazement.

“
Yeah, you guys go ahead without me. I
have other things to do.”

They neared the Corridor C pneumatic tube
station, the largest on the base, with shuttles to every corner of
the starbase.

“
Madame Tarneaux will be
disappointed,” Chandler said. The last time the three of them got
together, she’d kicked them out of her establishment for starting a
fight with a squad of drunken security guards. Fortunately,
CosGuard captains were her favorite customers—profitable to a
fault, thanks to regulations which frowned on commanders sleeping
with members of their own crews—and she’d promised them special
treatment the next time they called.

“
I’ve got other things on my mind,”
replied Fitz. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

After his friends left, he walked toward the
fountain in the middle of the concourse. The statue in the middle
was hardly worth the bother—the modernist school had such jagged
edges, reminding Fitz of the grotesque sculptures of the late
1900s—but running water held a magical fascination for him. He’d
spent half his adult life in enclosures where every drop was
captured and recycled, and crewmen had standing orders to hold
their bladders until they returned to ship. Now even the meager
abundance of a starbase fountain held him in thrall, returning him
to younger days along the Demetrian shores, where wind and water
were details of life that passed unnoticed and unappreciated.

After what seemed an eternity, he rose and
walked once more toward the tube, his footsteps lost amid the daily
shuffle of those who called the base home. He checked the screen
for destination listings and punched in the code for Z-Deck,
Northeast Quadrant. His ex-wife had recently moved to IshCom, and
he’d never seen her new quarters. Besides, it had been ages since
he’d seen their son.

* * *

Sitting back in
his chair,
Admiral Clay yawned. Official reports might be his last link with
the old days, he thought, but they were dry as Ishtar itself.
Often, the most interesting thing about them were the listings of
equipment malfunctions, and today was no exception. Clay was about
to deactivate his screen when a flashing yellow light caught his
eye, signaling an incoming Priority II report. His eyes widened
when he put the teaser on the screen; it was from the very
commander he’d spent the last hour putting out of his
mind.

The screen read:

CGC 587 <>

POSITION: Ishtar Orbit, 43-110901/a2

SPEC RPT CODE II cc:142-7920.4

“
Roscoe Cook,” he said, stunned by the
coincidence.

He was even more stunned by the report.

A half-hour
later, Clay
leaned back and looked up at the sterile paneling on the ceiling,
chuckling long and deep. For two years the government had tried to
cultivate contact with the aliens on a personal level, and for two
years their own people had bungled the job through clumsiness and
ineptitude. Now Cook had done it by accident. For the last week
he’d spent more time visiting the aliens on the ground than tending
his ship, and his insights into their psychology and culture looked
to be more valuable than anything Terra’s best diplomats had
gleaned from across the conference table. It was almost as if the
young Isitian had determined that the quickest way to advance in
the modern Guard was by rubbing CentCom’s nose in their own
directive about showing initiative in all dealings with non-human
civilizations. Inventiveness had worked for him in the past, and he
showed no signs of stopping. Clay was determined not to let that
kind of initiative pass unrewarded.

“
Roscoe Cook,” he marveled, “you lead
a charmed life.” Over the intercom, he told his secretary to
arrange a command staff meeting for 475 Hours the next
day.

“
And notify the base commanders as
well,” he added, with a self-satisfied smile. “We’ll be convening
the fleet Promotions Board.”

* * *

“Admiral Weatherlee!”
exclaimed the young lieutenant. “Is something
wrong?”

Contempt filled the admiral’s face, and the
young officer sensed that it would be better for his career to say
nothing more. Weatherlee stormed past, almost running into his
office door before it opened to admit the admiral to the one place
on the base where he could find the solitude to ride out the
disgust welling inside him.

Winthrop Weatherlee had seen this day
coming for the last week, but knew he was powerless to stop it.
Ever since notifying IshCom that the
Challengers
were on the way, he’d smelled the
foul odor of another promotion for Roscoe Cook. Now, thanks to the
damn aliens, the admiral was again powerless to do anything. He
walked to his desk and poured himself a stiff drink of Demetrian
rum. The soothing music he had piped into all administrative
offices in his command was now grating on his nerves. To make
matters worse, the tune that had just begun was an Isitian melody.
He plopped heavily into his chair and sat for several minutes,
seething with outrage. His heavy jowls pulsed with anger and his
eyes burned with cold fury.

Weatherlee’s teeth could grind ultrynium
whenever he thought of the arrogant young blowhard. Despite his
laziness as an administrator, Cook never lacked for friends in high
places, though the stars alone knew why. Isitian smugness oozed
from his every pore, and the fool never did have any sense when it
came to dealing with the aliens. The obnoxious Isitian personified
everything that Weatherlee found infuriating about that miserable
planet—quoting books nobody read anymore, peppering conversations
with pointless parables, and though never so uncouth as to voice it
aloud, posturing as the poster boy for the Isitian boast of the
best educational system in all of Terra.

Weatherlee turned to his desk console to
write. Writing always helped when he felt outraged; it gave him
something to do. But today what enraged him was knowing that he
might never get the chance to set things right. He dashed off a
half-dozen blistering and long overdue memos to subordinates, as
well as two or three letters to friends in Covington. Venting his
frustrations in a constructive fashion always made him feel better,
even if it didn’t really solve the underlying problem.

After an hour, he buzzed his receptionist
and told the young man to order something from the officer’s mess
and schedule a staff meeting for later in the day. There was lots
to do, he told the lad, and it promised to be a long day. From the
tone of the admiral’s voice, the receptionist knew that it would be
a long day for all of them.

Peering through the open library door,
Weatherlee saw the young midshipman sitting at a table. Charts and
textbooks were strewn everywhere, apparently at random, and the boy
looked lost in thought. Commodore Weatherlee paused before he
stepped inside, and he closed the door behind him. He knew he’d
embarrassed the young man that afternoon, backing him into a corner
and teasing him about his home planet. But the tactics seminar the
commodore had come to attend was more than a mere formality before
his elevation to admiral. He really did need a live opponent for
the simulator, to show that he’d mastered this last hurdle. And
he’d actually intended the invitation as a compliment to the
boy—who, the commodore sensed, was something of a loner. Just like
another lonely midshipmen he remembered from his own past.

“
Preparing for our contest
tomorrow, I see,” he said cheerfully. Walking down the aisle from
the entrance, Weatherlee came to sit on the table, four feet away
from the young man who’d be his opponent on the simulator the
following day.

The boy looked up; to Weatherlee’s
astonishment, the lad did not bolt to his feet, as any other
academy student would have done. Few would have been aware that
libraries were one of the few places on campus where most protocols
of deference did not apply; even fewer would have dared to remain
seated when a superior officer popped in, unannounced. For an
instant, Weatherlee thought he saw a flash of disdain cross the
young man’s face, but he dismissed the thought at once. Midshipmen
did not treat commodores with contempt, he sneered inwardly;
especially not commodores who were already admiral-designates. The
lad’s reply came like a blow to the commodore’s stomach.

“
Not really,” yawned the
student, leaning back in his chair. “I’m tutoring a friend in
Advanced Navigation, and needed to unravel the textbooks they’re
using in class before I try to explain it to her.”