Guardsmen of Tomorrow (3 page)

“Aye, aye, sir.”

As he left, the two Starlords were arguing in low but nova-hot tones.

Twenty-one hours later,
Indeterminacy
boosted for c and the jump to Kaden, the Anarchate capital, without even time enough for Hazzard to visit Cynthea, his portwife at Trib-altren. Though the
Indy
cast off from the station at almost the same moment as the
Victor
, the frigate, with far less mass to boost, accelerated more quickly. Within another hour, the
Indy
was tacking on nines to her ninety-nine percent of light speed, as the universe, crowded forward by the distortions of relativistic travel, took on the appearance of a ring of frosty light encircling the prow, and objective hours in the universe outside passed like minutes to the men and women crowded within the frigate’s steel and duraplast hull.

A vessel’s spacesails could ride the almost nonexistent currents of light, gravity, and magnetic flux, while her Cashimir cascade array boosted milli-G accelerations to accelerations measured in kilogravities. As the ship crowded
c
, a phantasm seeming to recede like Xeno’s Paradox the harder the ship boosted, space around the vessel turned strange, warped by the starship’s own pyramiding relativistic mass. A command from the bridge, and the trans-c primaries engaged, kicking her into highspace where they devoured light-years by the handful.

But star travel came with a cost. Each time a ship approached the pace of light before engaging her highspace drives, relativistic effects invoked the steadily mounting curse of minus-tau. Three minutes subjective at 99.9 percent of the speed of light translated as almost an hour objective; sixteen weeks on patrol at .95
c
saw the passage of over a year. C-duty, as it was called, carried c-men and of-ficers alike into the future, sundering the bonds of family and friends left behind.

It made for tighter bonding among the men and women serving aboard for, after accumulating a minus-tau of a scant few decades objective, they had few ties left to the planet-lubber populations of world surfaces. Others within the crew became family…

Greydon Hazzard, though, had no one aboard. As captain, he was expected to stand apart, to command without seeming to have favorites or cliques. It made for a painfully lonely life, one marked by periods of watch and watch… and the inexpressibly vast deeps of emptiness between the sundered suns.

“Tell me about your world, Cadlud. Tell me about your
people
.”

They sat in Hazzard’s day cabin, a tiny office aft of the gun decks. Or, rather, Hazzard sat behind his desk, while Cadlud squatted in a bulky huddle in the center of the deck. Irdikad were humanoid, more or less, if massive, blunt, and elephantine to human sensibilities. Each shoulder sprouted a heavy tentacle with a graceful, sinuous tip; a third grew from the face, above the inverted-V slash of a mouth and beneath the single, slit-pupiled eye. Most Irdikad wore ornate robes with patterns expressing individual tastes and artistry, but Cadlud generally went naked aboard ship.

Indeterminacy
‘s crew spaces were warmer than he was used to, and his species seemed never to have developed nudity taboos… quite possibly because their genitals were located in their central arm, and sex for them was the equivalent of a casual handshake.

“My people are my people,” the Irdikad said with stolid indifference. The tips of his tentacles twitched to some emotion beyond human ken. “There is little to zay.”

“Well… you could tell me why they’re interested in joining with the Orthodoxate.

The Doxies and their allies are all human, or human-derived. Some of them hate non-humans, have vowed to eradicate them across the Galaxy. Why would any nonhuman civilization join such an alliance as that?”

Cadlud stared at him for a long moment with that liquid, glittering eye. “Zur, many humans, they make miztaig. Think all Irdikad are zame,
think
zame. Not zo.”

“I know your culture is focused on the individual…”

“And that azzumes we have zingle, uniform culture. Not zo.”

“I remember.” His months as Naval attache to the Irdikad home world had been confusing at best, bewildering at worst. Each region, each continent, each valley seemed to have its own language, its own religion and gods, its own festivals, its own philosophies. “I remember too well! When I was there, no one paid attention to anyone else, and it was a miracle if anything got done. Seemed like an exercise in chaos theory as applied to social studies.”

A shrug, an enigmatic slight lift of all three tentacles. “It worgs. For us, anyway.”

“But why would your people embrace the Alliance? It doesn’t make any sense!”

For nearly twenty years now, objective, the Galactic Union had been in a standoff with the Grand Association of Humankind-a revolutionary jihad sweeping through vast sections of the Galaxy, tracking down and killing all cy-bernetically or genetically enhanced humans… and often nonhuman beings as well, for no better reason than that they were
different
. Four years ago objective, the Association had struck a formal alliance with the P’aaseni Orthodoxate, a very old human empire seeking to define what was truly human. The Alliance of the two, founded at the Treaty of Garth, promised real trouble for the beleaguered Galactic Union… and for every sentient species in a vast and war-torn Galaxy.

“My people, zur, have been here for a long, long time. Perhaps they grew bored.”

“What? You’d risk extinction because you’re bored? That’s crazy!”

“Yes?” The single eye watched him steadily, as if waiting for him to make his point.

“Remember that we have no government, as you use term. No rules. We use…

guidelines, only. And do what zeems best.”

Irdikad behavior seemed insane to humans more often than not, but it was consistent and it was sane within the context of their society… correction,
societies
. With a recorded history going back at least nine thousand years, Irdikad civilization was static, even stagnant, almost as though all the good, new ideas had long ago been thought of, acted upon, and forgotten. They were a study in contrasts. They prized originality and spontaneity, but during his entire tour on Kaden, Hazzard had seen little variance among the natives, save in their dress, which ranged from none at all to costumes of indescribably complex and bizarre design.
A herd of blandgroth
was how the Union Ambassador had described them, sheeplike followers of fashion, adopting the philosophy, the religion, the attitude of the moment. It was the same problem faced by human gangers in the big metroplexes, tattooing lightshow art onto their bodies, grafting on biomechanical prostheses, growing animal heads, downloading minds to fantasy bodies, all in the name of being
different
… and in the end, losing their individuality to a group where everyone was the same because everyone was bizarrely different.

The one truly distinct social group on Kaden was the military, which by definition required a measure of uniformity. The military…

Irdikad society also respected strength, an obvious outgrowth of a society where individualism ruled.

“Tell me about the Anarchate’s military, Cadlud.”

Again a shrug. “They are… crazy. And strong. And therefore respected. They control the planetary defense batteries and the Vleet, but you know this.”

“Yes. I remember.” The Union had long been courting the Anarchate, seeking to win their help against the Alliance. The military had been the world’s single loudest, most unified voice, and it had been dead set against
any
alliance, with anybody.

What had changed?

“I don’t believe anyone would risk extinction simply because they were bored, Cadlud,” Hazzard said at last. “There’s more to this. I just wish I knew what it was.”

“You would be zurprized, zur,” the Irdikad replied, “at how tedious
zameness
can be.”

At her best trans-c pseudovelocity,
Indeterminacy
crossed the nearly eight hundred light-years between Tribaltren and Kaden in five days, an extra-spatial time frame fortunately beyond the reach of Einstein and not subject to the grasp of minus-tau.

At a meticulously calculated moment, she dropped from highspace in a burst of blue-shifted photons and a crawling, twisting effect as local space momentarily assumed the topological characteristics of a Klein bottle. Hazzard, occupying the image virspace of the shipnet, grimaced at the crawl and wrench as the
Indy’s
acceleration field expanded, seizing hold of the space-time fabric as the familiar rules of physics once again took hold.

The literal bending of space at the field interface with the S-T continuum was not harmful of itself. All space is curved slightly-the effect is called gravity-and since the effect is uniform, the fact that a straight line isn’t is never noticed. When the effect is sharply localized, however, and moving quickly, there is some inevitable dislocation.

At low velocities, the deployment of the acceleration field was noticeable as a distinct queasiness; at high speeds, matter, from ship’s hull to electronic circuitry to human neurons, could be sharply disrupted and even destroyed.

Needless to say, the field was deployed slowly. As usual, as the nausea twisted in his stomach, Hazzard wondered if the jackrack crews were going to have to clean up his inert body.

The
Indy
had emerged with the same velocity she’d carried upon entering highspace, a fraction of a percent below light speed itself. At Hazzard’s command, sails unfurled, snapping into place, shimmering with the field effect distortions twisting time and space. The sensory feedscape showed the universe turned strange, with all of the sky compressed into a cold ring of light ahead of the ship as she plunged forward into darkness. As always, the computers handling sensory input corrected the image, eliminating the visual distortion effects of near-c travel.

Now, with a saner sky, an orange beacon glowed dead ahead. Here, light-centuries above the Galactic Plane, the Galaxy was a vast pinwheel of pale, pale silver-white light viewed not quite edge-on. The result was a sky divided in twain, to one side a vast, softly glowing wall of stars spread out in a distinctly spiral panorama, the Galactic Core in the far distance, swollen and gold-hued, a fuzz of myriad suns rising above the dark blots and smears of nebulae; opposite, the sky was empty, save for the scattered, solitary stars here at the Verge… and the inconceivably distant smudges of radiance representing other galaxies adrift on the Ocean of Ultimate Night.

Closer, much closer at hand, an orange sun glowed cool and ancient, and worlds shone in darkness. Kaden was the second world of four, tucked in close enough to the K4 primary that it enjoyed cool but not frigid climes along its equator.

Indeterminacy
had emerged nearly half a light-hour from Kaden. Dumping velocity in space-twisting torrents of bleed-off energy, the frigate dropped toward the orange-lit world, six hundred million kilometers distant.

Through the magnification of the sensory inputs, ice caps gleamed in the orange light, together encompassing nearly half of the world’s rugged surface. Hazzard opened a display showing a computer-generated image of the world, slowly rotating, as the actual planet swiftly grew from an isolated point of light to a tiny crescent, to a living world, a scimitar of white and silver and orange bowed away from its sun, with three small moons in attendance.

Indy’s
sensor arrays were also sampling the flood of electronic and laser signals crisscrossing the system, noting the time-lagged positions and vectors of spacecraft, identifying threats.

Out-system, in the comet-haunted deeps two light-days out, were the four ships of the line of the Union show of force, led by the old seventy-five-gun
Trimirage
, keeping blockade station as they awaited the arrival of the
Victor
. Their field-distortion wakes, generated as they cruised close to
c
, were distinctly visible against the night as crisp, blue cones of light in line-ahead formation.

Blockading a star system required careful timing and reliance on the physics of highspace. Clearly, it was impossible to englobe an entire planetary system in order to intercept vessels that might leave at any time, on any heading. By having a blockading squadron cruise back and forth at near-c velocities, however, the ships were able to drop into highspace with a few minutes’ warning and reappear within seconds anywhere in-system they needed to be. The problem, of course, was that the light informing the blockade that enemy units were in motion in-system took hours or days to reach the blockade station. That was why light-rates-frigates and lesser craft-were used in-system to provide early warning and to carry information out to the battle line at trans-c velocities. Even at usual planetary velocities, they could accelerate to
c
within an hour or so. Larger vessels, the big ships of the line, took a lot longer to reach near-c, and so were vulnerable to intercepts by the blockading squadron.

There were numerous vessels in-system, close by Kaden itself. “I’ve got radio transmissions, Captain,” cy-Tomlin announced. “Military bands, VHP through UHF.” Hazzard could see the transmission point sources on his panorama. Four showed friendly IFF signatures, and the data tags beside each vessel identified them further as
Decider, Swift, Fire Angel
, and
Ferocious
. Close beside them were other targets, six of them, these showing red on
Indeterminacy^
visual display. At Hazzard’s triggering thought, schematics of each vessel appeared to one side, together with lists of stats showing mass, acceleration, vector data, and range. The situation unfolding there was… make it twenty minutes old, now, as
Indy
closed with them. Thanks to the speed-of-light time lag, they were looking that far into the past, watching the maneuvers unfold with bewildering apparent speed. Fortunately, their absolute velocities were low enough that they didn’t appear to be moving anywhere fast.

“Six hostiles, Captain,” Lieutenant Pardoe announced, as additional schematics drew themselves on the feedscape- ornate hulls, curved masts, triple gundecks set far back on the spine. “They look like P’aaseni. Two ships of the line… seventy-twos or seventy-fives, four frigates.”