The Voyage of the Star Wolf (16 page)

And then, flushed with emotion, he retreated from the Bridge before anyone could see how close to the edge he really was.

It didn't take four months to get home.

It took six and half.

But they made it.

They limped away from the site of the attack and nobody came after them. They were blind and they stayed blind by choice. Korie wouldn't risk opening another scanning lens. It would have been a beacon in the darkness for any marauders still patrolling.

So they chugged at sublight speed, building up velocity incrementally, accelerating for days, then weeks, toward a fraction of lightspeed that could be measured with less than three zeros between the decimal point and the digit.

The crew, what was left of them, worked without rest. Each of them had three jobs. Most of them worked out of the manuals. The oxygen-debt was enormous, and Korie had the entire inner hull converted to aeroponics. It worked, but even so they were too close to the margin. There were too many of them and just not enough growing plants.

As they ran low on rations, they began eating the Luna moss, and later the young ears of corn and carrots and potatoes. The winged beans that Korie had planted became a part of almost every meal. They replanted the crops as fast as they ate them. They weren't quite self-sufficient; but they'd expanded the window of their survival to allow them enough time to get home.

But it took so damned
long
. . .

The singularity had to be kept damped, so the mass-drivers couldn't be run at full-power, neither could the fuel cells be recharged to full capacity. That also meant no gravity and limited oxygen reprocessing. Despite HARLIE's profound internal monitoring, his reliability kept slipping for reasons neither Leen nor Korie could find. Korie suspected it was the side effect of his moral dilemma and wondered if this HARLIE unit was going to have to be wiped and reintegrated.

Worst of all, the hyperstate equipment refused to calibrate. They couldn't go into hyperstate until they'd restored system confidence to 85% or better, and with HARLIE functioning at less than 85%, they couldn't use him to do the job. They had to recalibrate each unit separately,
reintegrate the system manually, and hope for alignment. It took seven attempts before they hit 87%, and that still wasn't enough for Korie. He made them do it two more times before he accepted that 89% was the best he was going to get.

What it meant was
maybe
.

They
might
be able to inject into hyperstate. They
might
be able to steer the envelope. They
might
be able to maintain it safely. They
might
be able to get back to Stardock.

Korie thought about it, long and hard. He talked it over with Hodel and Leen and HARLIE, weighed the risks, considered the options, realized there were no other choices. They were just too far away from anywhere to attempt a return at less than superluminal velocities. Finally, he couldn't postpone the decision any longer. He gave the order.

They almost made it.

The hyperstate envelope wobbled like a bubble in a wind tunnel. It was barely controllable. They pointed it and pushed on it and they skated across the intervening space like an ice cube on a hot griddle; first this way and then that, course-correcting furiously, and all the while trying not to let the field collapse around them.

The hyperstate horizon went unstable two hours before they hit their target sphere. Chief Leen invented six new curses in less than half a second; then he collapsed the envelope.

The
LS-1187
crawled the rest of the way at sublight speeds. Neither Korie nor the chief felt lucky enough to try a second injection.

But they were home.

The Stardock was a deep-space installation, a small city of light lost between the stars. It was girders, globes, platforms, antennae, and work bays. It was fifteen thousand people and two thousand industrial repair robots. It was a safe harbor of warmth in the deepest night. If a captain had the coordinates, he could find it. Otherwise, it didn't exist.

It had always been a welcome port for the ships it served.

Except most of them hadn't come back.

The
LS-1187
came in to a near-empty nest. Most of the work-bays were empty and almost all of the city lights were out. There were no welcome messages or displays. There was only a quiet acknowledgment of the ship's return and a request for her commanding officer to report immediately to the vice-admiral's office.

Korie reported in grimly. He was briefed on the Marathon massacre and the state of the fleet. It was worse than he had thought.

Then he was given the bad news.

“The Fleet Review Board has determined that the
LS-1187
inadvertently allowed herself to be tracked by the
Dragon Lord
. The
LS-1187
had led the Morthan marauders directly to the convoy. If Captain Lowell survives, he'll be court-martialed. And . . .” said the vice-admiral, “based on the evidence of your ship's log, your own judgment is highly suspect as well.”

“I brought my ship home,” said Korie.

“You brought her home with self-inflicted wounds, with her torpedoes unfired and cannibalized for parts, with her artificial consciousness half-psychotic for having to maintain a fictitious reality for the crew—” The vice-admiral stopped herself. “I will not list the entire catalog of offenses. The important one is that you did most of this without authorization. Your captain was disabled, but you assumed the authority of command before it could be officially logged. You signed termination orders—”

“Ma'am,” Korie said, deliberately interrupting her. “This is inappropriate.”

“You think so?”

“Yes, ma'am. You are quoting rules at me. Let me quote one back at you. ‘The primary duty of
every
officer in the fleet is to act responsibly—even if that responsibility means acting beyond the scope of assigned authority.' My duty was to bring my ship and my crew home safely. I did so to the best of my ability, and I will not apologize for the steps I took. They were appropriate. I do not see how anyone else could have done different. Or better. If you can demonstrate to me now that there were better choices available, options that would have saved lives or reduced the damage or gotten us home quicker, I would appreciate being enlightened. If you cannot show me such options, then it is inappropriate to question the decisions I took under the circumstances.”

“I admire your spirit,” said the vice-admiral, grimly. “Certainly you survived where others didn't. That must count for something.”

“I'm still waiting to hear if there were alternatives to the decisions I made,” Korie said stiffly.

“That's not my job,” she replied, every bit as stiff. “There may not
have been any other choices for you. I give you credit for your imagination and creativity. I give you credit for bringing your ship home. Unfortunately, in this situation, it's not enough.”

“Other ships have gotten a hero's welcome for less.”

“The
LS-1187
is not another ship.”

“We have intelligence on the
Dragon Lord
, including close-range photographs, that no one else has been able to provide. Doesn't that count for something?”

“Unfortunately, as valuable as that information may prove to be, it still counts for very little in this situation. If anything, it works against you. The fleet has been savagely mauled, and the ship that betrayed the convoy also brought home stunning snapshots of the killers. The question is already being asked,
if you were that close, why didn't you put a torpedo into her
?”

“You know why we couldn't.”

“I do—but that's because I understand the mechanics of the situation. How many of them
out there
are going to understand? Understand something, Commander. While you've been isolated safely in space, crawling home for the past seven months, the rest of us have had to live with the aftermath of the terrible massacre. There's not a person at Stardock who hasn't lost someone close. We're all still in shock, we're only now starting to build a new resolve to fight back. The morale here is going to have to be rebuilt on hatred; we have nothing else to motivate our people except a rage for revenge. It's barely enough. Our people need a target. Because we can't get our hands on the Morthans right now, we're looking for targets we can blame—stupidity, foolishness, ignorance, careless mistakes. Do you understand what I'm telling you? Even if you had destroyed the
Dragon Lord
, it still wouldn't redeem you. The
LS-1187
is a pariah. Your ship, Commander Korie, led the Morthans to the convoy.”

“They could have followed anybody,” Korie argued. “There was no way any ship could have detected the
Dragon Lord
. She's—an incredible thing.”

“But it was
your
ship they followed. Somebody has to be blamed for the disaster. That's the way these things work. I feel sorry for you, for what you've been through—and for what you still have to endure. But the
LS-1187
and her crew are a political disaster area. No one is going to lift a finger for you.”

Korie didn't answer that. The impact of the vice-admiral's words was still sinking in. He felt it in his knees, in his stomach, in his throat, and
in the pit of fear at the bottom of his soul. Everything he'd ever lived for—he realized he now stood as a symbol of its betrayal. He felt as if he were teetering on the edge of a precipice. Did he have no chance to redeem himself?

“So, um”—for the first time, Korie felt abashed—“what's going to happen?”

“I'm not sure yet,” said the vice-admiral. “Nobody wants to make the decision. I don't either. You were handed to me and I was told to find a way to bury you. You know, you had a great future.” She met his gaze sadly. “I can tell you this. You can forget about getting a ship of your own. That's not going to happen.”

Korie felt as if he were falling, tumbling headlong into the abyss of damnation. His last chance had just been taken away from him. He couldn't swallow. He couldn't speak either. But somehow he managed to get the words out. “I understand. You'll have my resignation on your desk tomorrow morning.”

“Don't bother. I won't accept it.”

“Ma'am?”

“Commander, we still need you.”

“Ma'am, this isn't
fair
.” Korie could feel his frustration rising. “First, you tell me that we're the worst ship in the fleet, then you admit that nobody else could have done better, then you tell me that I'm not fit to be trusted with a ship, and now you say you won't release me.”

“Commander, I'm not interested in fair. If the universe were fair, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Now, listen to me. We need every qualified officer we have. And unfortunately, you more than demonstrated your competence when you brought back the
LS-1187
. I almost wish you hadn't. I don't know what to do with her—and I can't afford to scrap her. The same for you and your crew. The best thing I can think of is to fix you up and send you out again, doing something that will keep you out of sight and out of mind; it'll free another ship for something more important.”