We All Died at Breakaway Station (20 page)

Okay, fellow, Hybeck said, you can thank your luck that you’re even alive after that. Now if you can just figure out which way home is, you’ve got it knocked. Well, almost, he thought. Running a ship in star drive was just about a full-time job for a computer, and once he got back under pseudospeed for real, it was going to keep him hopping, though he thought he could do it by using star drive for only short periods of time, and then going back into conventional sub-light drive to rest up and catch his breath. Yeah, he could do it‌—‌he’d done it in the Academy. It was a part of the training there, but it wasn’t much fun.

Rising, he went back to the small galley, drew himself a cup of coffee, and reminded himself to be grateful also that the grav units still worked. Free-fall he didn’t need!

After sitting the coffee cup back on the desk, he went to where Naha lay on the acceleration cot, her breasts rising and falling in normal sleep. Even with her hair gone‌—‌shaved off by the automedic‌—‌and her head swathed in plastiskin, she was still a beautiful thing. Why, he might even offer to take out a contract with her if they ever got back home. Well, he
might
.

Returning to the desk and sipping at his coffee, Hybeck decided that he had done just about as much as he could hope to do with a slide rule. If his figures weren’t right now, they never would be. He might as well go on and give it a try.

After slipping into a spacesuit, he cycled himself out of the ship’s crew cabin and went back into the airless engine room, and began making adjustments on the pseudospeed generators. Much of the preparation for star drive would have to be done from here since it had essentially been the computer’s job to start the pseudospeed generators and bring them up to potential.

It was a half hour later when he was satisfied with the rising power levels indicated by the meters of the star drive unit and returned to the cabin. Slipping out of the spacesuit, he gave the sleeping Naha a light kiss, and then seated himself in the pilot’s position.

Oh, man, he said to himself, gazing at the array of controls before him. Do I really know what I’m doing? Well, if I don’t, nobody else within a light-century does either. So get on with it!

He began making adjustments, channeling the rising potential into the converters, waiting as light after light came to life, indicating that all systems‌—‌or at least most of them‌—‌were Go.

Finally, with his palms wet with cold perspiration, Hybeck sat back, put his hand down on the final toggle, and hoped for the thousandth time that his figures were right, that the starship was really aimed in the direction of the Paladine.

He hit the toggle.

The universe flickered.

The tiny scout ship shuttled between universes and came back out into space-time a hundred and seven kilometers from its original position.

Here we go, baby!

The starship flickered faster and faster, covering one hundred and seven kilometers in each flicker, until it approached and then exceeded the speed at which light moves under true velocity.

God, I hope I’m going in the right direction, Hybeck thought, feeling sick at his stomach, and carefully adjusting this dial and that knob to maintain the proper flow of power through the proper components at the proper time. God, I hope so!

“Dammit! Why did it have to happen?” Absolom Bracer demanded angrily, rolling back and forth across the narrow confines of his cabin, the nearest he could come to pacing the floor.

“You knew it would happen,” Daniel Maxel said softly.

“Knew it?” Bracer stopped, looked at the
Iwo Jima’s
new captain. “I didn’t
know
it, Dan. I feared it, but I didn’t know it.”

“Is there any difference?”

“I fear a lot of things, but, hell, I don’t
know
that they’re going to happen.”

“Okay,” Maxel said. “Let’s don’t argue semantics.” Bracer forced something onto his face that was supposed to be a smile. He hoped that Maxel would know it.

“You’re almost right, though,” Bracer said after a few moments. “I should have known it would happen, sooner or later. I feared it enough to know it.”

“You knew how everyone felt about staying,” Maxel said. “Why, even Medawar was opposed to it in a way.”

“Roger’s against it too,” Bracer said flatly.

“I thought maybe he was.” Maxel paused. “But, still, you can’t really blame yourself. Davins knew what he was risking when he agreed.”

Bracer nodded, or rather did a thing as nearly like a nod as he could. “He should have been more careful, that’s all,” Maxel continued.

“Yes, he should have,” Bracer agreed, still knowing that most of the blame was his. He was the admiral now, and everything was his responsibility, one way or the other.

“But that doesn’t help much, does it?” Maxel asked. “That doesn’t help a damned bit, Dan.”

Bracer rolled back and forth across the deck, feeling the softness of the carpet yielding under the treads of his body cylinder. Maxel picked up the glass of brandy that sat on the table beside him, held it before the-light for a moment, peered into its liquid depths as if seeing something in it.

“You’re going to make an alcoholic out of me yet,” Maxel said lightly after a long silence.

“I doubt it, Dan. There’s not much left. One bottle after you’ve finished that one.”

“It’s just about shot,” Maxel said absently.

Silence again as Bracer rolled across the deck, as Maxel sipped the old Terran brandy.

“Dan, if we had it to do over again, I mean, if we could turn back the clock to a week ago and had our decision to make all over, would you still go along with me, knowing what you know now?”

“You ask the damndest questions, admiral.”

“I know.”

A long, pregnant silence filled the cabin.

“Yeah.” Maxel’s voice was faint “I would. I’d do exactly the same thing.”

“Do you mean that, Dan? Or are you just giving me moral support?” He thought about the last time he had asked for moral support, and how Roger had been unable to give it to him. Maybe Roger had been right. Roger was not emotionally involved in this like he was. Him and his mathematical odds.

But then again, he thought, the phrase coming awkwardly to his mind, Roger had said it himself; he didn’t think like a
real
man, and he had said that it was built into him to be unable to
tell
the captain‌—‌admiral now‌—‌what to do. He could only answer questions, follow orders, compute and program. Maybe the Earthside psychologists were right. Maybe Roger, in his own way, was as limited as Bracer, limited in fact by his own capabilities. Maybe a man, even a half-man like Absolom Bracer, could see things, even with all their emotional coloring, in a truer light than cold, efficient, logical Roger ever could. Maybe…

“A little of both,” Maxel was answering. “I agreed with you because I thought that you were right, Absolom. I still do. We can’t take any chances with the FTL link. We all know that, even if we’re scared to admit it.”

“Thanks, Dan.”

“I don’t need any thanks for doing what I think is the right thing.”

“I know that. That’s why I’m thanking you.”

Bracer lit an Adrianopolitan cigarette, inhaled deeply, looked enviously at the brandy Maxel was drinking and wished that the doctors had been able to provide him with more sturdy intestines.

“You’re from Creon, aren’t you, Dan?” he asked.

It was a rhetorical question. Bracer knew very well where Maxel had been born and raised.

Maxel answered anyway. “Yes, my family lived just outside of Rinehart.”

“The Winter Highlands.”

Maxel nodded.

“Beautiful country,” Bracer said. “When I was still just an ensign, back before this Goddamned war ever started, my ship put into Marshack for repairs. It was an old patrol ship, the
Friedrich Barbarossa”
He paused. “I heard that she was lost in the Salient. Destroyed. Maybe captured. I hope not. I hope the Jillies didn’t get their hands on her crew. But nobody ever knew what became of her.”

He rolled once across the cabin, then back, and went on as if he had not paused.

“Anyway, I had a week’s leave coming, so another fellow and I‌—‌a lieutenant named Tallu from Constantine, I believe‌—‌and a couple of enlisted girls went up into the highlands camping, out near Baldrock. We went through Rinehart on the way up, spent a few hours in a little bar there. I can’t remember its name. But Rinehart was a nice town, as well as I remember it.”

“I liked it,” Maxel said, deep in his own memories.

Bracer remembered the girls, Judith and Pata their names were, both sisters and from Carstairs‌—‌sisters if you consider family relationships the way they do on Carstairs. At first Bracer had paired off with Judith and Tallu with Pata, but after the first night they swapped and for the remainder of the outing Pata had slept in Bracer’s sleeping bag, soft and warm and exciting there beside him. She was small and dark like Eday Cyanta, like Donna. How like Donna she had been. In fact, he remembered with something like a smile in his mind, it was Donna’s resemblance to Pata that had first attracted him.

And he wondered where Pata was now, what had become of her in the long years that had passed since that week in the Winter Highlands. Was she still in the Force? Probably. If she was still alive. If the Jillies hadn’t taken her and left her a broken, bleeding thing as they had done with Donna. Donna, oh, Donna, why did they do that to you?

“How the hell did we ever get here, Dan?” he asked after a while, fighting against the rising tide of remembered agony. “Why didn’t we just stay up there in the Winter Highlands and let the rest of the damned universe blow itself up?” He laughed bitterly. “Tell me, Dan, why didn’t you ever go to the Academy?”

“I never wanted to be a spacer,” Maxel said, as if he too were battling old memories. “The only reason I ever got in is that I was drafted.”

“Drafted?”

Maxel nodded, smiled. “Creon joined the League after the war started.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Well, one of the rules for joining the League then was a minimum quota of men and women for the armed forces. There weren’t enough volunteers. We’re a damned independent lot on Creon, you know. So they started drafting, and they got me.”

“You’ve come a long way from spaceman recruit,” Bracer said, lighting another cigarette, remembering what he had read of Maxel’s records in the official files.

“Yeah, I guess I have at that.”

“You said you never wanted to be a spacer. What did you want to be?”

“An assassin,” he answered.

“Assassin?”

Maxel nodded. “Romance, excitement, blood and thunder, all that crap. Every kid on Creon wants to be an assassin when he grows up. I just never grew out of it.”

“You don’t seem the type.”

“What type wants to be an assassin?” Maxel asked, then paused. “You know, most of the rest of the Arm has the wrong idea about Creon’s assassins. I don’t know. I guess maybe it really is the wrong word. I mean,
assassin
doesn’t mean quite the same thing to us as it does to the rest of you.”

“I know. At least, I think I do.”

“It’s like this. Before the Jillies and the League and all, we never had the kind of government that most of the rest of you have now. On Creon we still had, I’m not sure, maybe a thousand city-states. No real central government. And somebody was always declaring war on somebody else‌—‌like it was in Italy during the First Renaissance on Earth‌—‌and, hell, there just weren’t enough regular, homegrown soldiers to go around. So there was the Guild of Assassins. Mercenaries, ah, itinerant gunmen, whatever the hell you want to call them. But, dammit we never went around shooting people in the back the way they say.”

“Yes,” Bracer said. “There have been a lot of unpleasant stories.”

“We were just hired soldiers, working under contract.”

“You were actually a member of the Guild then?”

Maxel nodded. “That’s why I was drafted. I had just gotten through the probation period and initiation. I was a full member of the Guild when Creon joined the League. Never had seen any real action though. Anyway, who did they draft first but the Guild? I guess it was the logical choice, since we were supposed to be professional soldiers. All except me, at least,
were
professionals. I was still just as green as a pipbark tree.”

Bracer smiled.

“That was an awfully long time ago,” Maxel said slowly, softly, sadly.

“I don’t guess anything ever works out like we expect it to,” Bracer said. “And not very often.”

And the words sounded again in Absolom Bracer’s mind: Not very often.

“Brothers, sisters, I bring truth to you from the stars.”

No one listened, no one seemed to care, except for a few who showed hatred. Perhaps some people cannot bear to hear the truth.

Ladislas Rusko was not a very pleasant sight to most people. He habitually went naked, a scarecrow of a man whose stomach and intestines had been surgically removed at his own request. He subsisted on liquid nourishment fed directly into his blood stream by a device of his own design that fitted into the cavity where his guts had been. This device, his “g-i box,” he called it, he used twice daily, upon rising in the morning and just before going to bed at night. His skin, though Rusko was predominantly Caucasian, was a dark, leathery brown from dyes and from constant exposure to the elements, both natural and contrived. There was no hair upon his head or face or body, for this too he had had removed. In short, Ladislas Rusko looked as much like a Jillie as it was possible for a human to look. This was his aim. He was the Jillieman, the new Messiah.

Now Ladislas Rusko walked slowly, carefully down the Boulevard of the Chairman in the heart of New Portsmouth, MidAmerica, on the homeworld. He carried, strapped across his shoulders, a simuleather sack only slightly darker than his own skin, and from this he took leaflets which he handed out to the people he met who would accept them. Few would, for most people had heard of the Jillieman and wanted to have nothing to do with him.

“Brothers, listen to me,” he would say every now and then, attempting to gain the attention of title passers-by. “I have something to tell you, something that can save us all.”