The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (88 page)

Sirens added to the prevailing racket and robot voices intoned, “Battle stations, battle stations.”

Suddenly everybody was grabbing for personal weapons and running like hell for assigned areas around the central core of the ship. Thirty seconds later the safety doors started closing, and if you got isolated in an outer compartment, that was tough, you stayed there until the All Clear went off and the doors opened. Or until an enemy missile whacked the hull, in which case you died of the explosion if it penetrated and the concussion if it didn’t.

Somehow O’Rourke got all our people to the designated inner compartments. Those who’d been showering were buck naked, but when you’re at war, you don’t worry about trivia like that.

I stayed on the bridge, not because I was useful but because nobody had sent me away, and I wanted to see what was happening. I strapped into the chair usually occupied by the celestial navigator, who’d taken off to a secure compartment on the other side of the core that contained a duplicate guidance system. That way there’d be somebody to maneuver the ship if the bridge got destroyed.

Seated in the commander’s chair, Marie donned one of those virtual-reality headpieces. I donned the navigator’s headset and listened to her issuing orders with the aplomb of a chef instructing a sous-chef exactly how to construct a chocolate soufflé. The delicate fingers that had played such tunes on my body were now resting on keypads that gave her the power to override any and all systems. Somebody’s voice said, “Real bastard, ain’t she?” in tones of pure admiration.

So I watched my first combat in space – hell, my first real combat anywhere – unfold in the monitor. Banks of lasers crisscrossed a big shadowbox, and when the bridge lights were doused, we were all projected into that virtual space. I don’t think I felt any fear at all, it was too exciting, and if an enemy FTLM suddenly materialized in the center of the
Zhukov
there was nothing to worry about anyway, because we’d all turn to quarks in a nanosecond. So I could get an almost esthetic delight out of the cloud-drenched planet, the red orb rising behind it, and the background of hard crystalline stars.

The one thing I couldn’t see was the alien ship – the bogey – that was causing all the upheaval. Then a blue circle appeared in the monitor, locating it for me. Columns of numbers that probably meant something to the Space Service types popped up along the margins of the image. A human voice said incredulously, “Velocity zero?” which I took to mean that the bogey had stopped moving.

Janesco’s voice reported that the lids were off the missile silos. He seemed to be waiting for Marie to say the modern equivalent of “You may fire when ready, Gridley,” but all she said was, “Deploy PBG,” meaning the particle beam generator.

“Ready.”

“Auto response on all systems.”

“Auto response.”

That meant the ship would respond to any detected hostile action without further command. At the same time I heard the main drive engines and even the dark energy generator revving up. Trying to apply what I knew of ground combat to space, I figured she was getting ready to dodge behind Paradiso, and if the bogey followed, hit him hard as he came into view. Sort of like defending a reverse slope in mountain warfare, where you let the other guy show up against the sky, then whack him. These were the thoughts going through my head at the exact moment when the image of Jesús Morales, big and holographically precise, appeared between the laser banks, blocking out the planet and the sun and everything else except the spatter of stars above him.

“Colonel,” he said, his voice somewhat gruff but perfectly audible, “we’re aboard an alien ship. Those guys from the Zoo came in and saved us. All of us, including the colonists. Do you copy?”

Contrary to what my wife Anna likes to say, I am never, or almost never, vulgar. But I do believe there were a lot of spotty underpants on the bridge of the
Zhukov
at that instant.

There was also a stunned silence, in the middle of which I heard my own voice – and yeah, I was a lieutenant and therefore the lowest life form present, but what the hell, Morales was my friend not theirs – say loudly into the navigator’s mike, “Jesús, we copy.”

“If I may,” said Marie icily, and I immediately stopped my runaway tongue by clamping it between my teeth.

“What do they propose to do with you?” she demanded.

“Send us to the
Zhukov
by shuttle. I think it’s meant to be a diplomatic gesture, now that the war’s over and we’re withdrawing from this sector of space. They’re thinking of peaceful trade and things like that in the future.”

“Are all of you there?”

“Seventeen of us from Beth platoon. My other people died. We have six injured.”

“We’ll be ready for you. What about the colonists?”

“The colonists have voted to join the Zoo – become another associated species – and not return to Terra. They seem to have a kind of natural belief in symbiosis, see it as an aspect of love. Also, they don’t trust their fellow humans.”

“I wonder why,” I said. No I didn’t, because I was still biting my tongue.

Anyway, sarcasm wouldn’t have been welcomed, not even by me. I was too excited to see Morales alive, and I didn’t really give a rat’s ass what the Ladderites chose to do or not do.

But Marie wasn’t happy. “We have orders to return those people to a region under human control.”

“The aliens aren’t subject to our orders,” Morales pointed out.

“Quite so. Am I permitted to speak to their prophet?”

“He was an old man. He died during their flight from the impact area. For the first time they don’t have anybody with good strong ESP to lead them and they’re probably making bad, or at any rate uninformed, decisions.”

“Well, that’s their problem. Convey my agreement to the Z – to whoever’s in command there. We won’t fire on the shuttle, and Gannett will be waiting for the injured.”

She then issued three orders. First, she told Gannett and me to meet the shuttle and remove our people. Second, she told Janesco to maintain the auto response order but instruct the heavy weapons control computer not to fire on the shuttle. Third, she told all other personnel to remain at their battle stations.

Janesco was angry with her. His voice came down hoarse and tough from the Arctic Circle. “Commander, it’s a trick. Even that fool Schlacht would have known it’s a trick.”

“Of course it’s a trick,” she snapped. “But what trick? Will the shuttle blow up the instant it gets alongside the
Zhukov?
Have our people been infected with some lethal disease or parasite? Or is this essentially a diplomatic ploy, as Lieutenant Morales thinks?”

There was an impromptu staff meeting going on when I left the bridge. For the moment I was under Gannett’s command, and I’d hardly reached the airlock when he had me encased in an elastoplast suit like one he was wearing. Just in case the ploy was to get some deadly bug past the
Zhukov’s
defenses, we’d meet our guys in these rigs, breathing through electrostatic filters with little fans roaring in our ears. He’d also brought along six medbots that looked like enormous crabs, scuttling around on jointed legs and waving exaggeratedly long arms. While we waited, they brought in and stacked the basket litters I’d been planning to take on our aborted return to Paradiso.

The alien shuttle approached. The docking procedure was interesting. I hadn’t been able to figure how they could get a tight air seal when
Zhukov’s
airlock wasn’t configured to receive them. But the problem turned out to be no problem for our late enemies. While we watched through a port in the inner doors of the lock, they extruded a flexible tube – an umbilical, the doc called it – which expanded like the business end of a trumpet. We opened the outer airlock doors, and the trumpet entered and sealed itself to the bulkheads.

Then we opened our inner doors, they opened theirs at far end of the tube, air howled into the umbilical – higher pressure on our side – and a few minutes later here came Jesús Morales himself, staggering through the tube against the gale and looking thin and battered, but totally alive. The medbots had him suited up before I could touch him, but then we swapped a real abrazo through the plastic, and he joined in helping the walking injured aboard and laying the badly busted guys in the litters. In a few minutes everybody was wrapped up like party gifts and sprayed down with some kind of antiseptic gunk.

Gannett told me to close the inner airlock doors. As I turned to obey the order, I caught just a glimpse of the only Zoo denizens I ever saw. Something with a head vaguely like a seahorse – rather stiff, bluish, with mild bulging eyes and some sort of breathing apparatus on the end of its long snout – stared back at me while something else with many arms moved around in the background.

I had just stretched out my hand toward the button to close the doors when something ran under my arm and leaped into the umbilical. From inside the tube Cos turned and looked back at me with those large dark eyes, raised one small hand and waved and shouted, “They’re my people, Kohn! I have to save them!”

“Get that man back!” shouted Gannett. Instead I hit the button and the doors began to slide shut. I had an instantaneous flash of the end of the umbilical folding in upon itself and looking, in fact, exactly like a king-size navel.

“Sorry, sir,” I told the surgeon, “but you didn’t countermand your first order.”

Thought I was smart. Didn’t realize I’d just killed Cos, poor little bastard, or he’d killed himself, however you chose to look at it. My second unintended homicide of the trip.

Through the port I watched the shuttle seal itself up and drift away, hang a U and head back. It hadn’t blown up. And I may as well tell you now that after exhaustive tests Gannett found that our people hadn’t been infected with anything, either. If there had been a ploy, we never found out what it was, and personally I think Jesús probably had it right from the start. Our late enemies had been making a conciliatory gesture – that was all.

While Gannett and his bots were bedding everybody down in the now overflowing sickbay, I took off the plastic suit and returned to the bridge to report the successful recovery of our people. But nobody was interested in anything I had to say.

They were staring as if hypnotized at the monitor, at two converging blue circles, one marking the alien shuttle, the other marking the bogey. Marie sat in her commander’s chair like an alabaster statue. The two circles merged, and the slender fingers of her left hand, with the transparent lacquer on the nails, made a tiny movement, tapping the left keypad that gave her command of all our firepower.

My mouth, I think, formed the word don’t, but no sound came out, or none that I heard, anyway. Suddenly the
Zhukov
moved, the acceleration slamming me painfully against the deck. We began to slide behind what had become Planet Inferno, but not before the alien ship erupted in a huge fireball, its fragments flying out in that strangely leisured way that things seem to move in space.

The bridge came alive then, all the Space Service types cheering at once, because they’d just won the last battle of the Alien War. Which wasn’t all that hard, considering the other guys, poor bastards, hadn’t known that the war was still going on.

When Marie returned to the command suite, I was there waiting for her, somewhat bruised, a hen’s egg taking form on the back of my head. But thoroughly conscious, and in a state of cold rage.

“I had to do it,” she said quickly. “My orders contain a secret protocol obliging me to destroy any alien ship we encounter.”

I didn’t say anything. So she started arguing with what I hadn’t said.

“Suppose I’d accepted their terms, disobeyed my orders, gone back without the colonists – what would my enemies at HQ have said? That I’d failed at my mission, violated my instructions, consorted with our enemies and allowed them to kidnap our people. I’d have been court-martialed.”

I finally found my voice. “So to prevent that, you killed several thousand intelligent creatures, most of them human. Including Cos.”

“Pardon me if I don’t cry over him. He’d picked up our plans with that damned intuition of his and he was ready to, how do you say it, jaser – blab – to our enemies. You’re such a child, Robair. You haven’t yet learned to accept the difficult things that your choice of a military career entails. You’ve no idea what it’s like to be in command. You’ll toughen up in time.”

“Not to this extent.”

“Bah, what’s the use of arguing? You need to grow up, that’s all. You haven’t really understood much about the inner history of this voyage, have you? Not much at all. It was dismaying to my service when the Council of State insisted on putting a Security officer in charge. How could one of those dreary policemen understand our need to defeat the enemy and recover our honor? But of course that was the real point – he was supposed to keep the rest of us under control.

“Fortunately, Security HQ wanted to get rid of Schlacht, whose sexual peculiarities had become notorious, so they gave the job to him. Our intelligence people had very little trouble locating a young woman who, for excellent reasons, wanted to kill him. They armed her and put her aboard and I saw to her survival here. That little wretch Cos almost queered the whole thing – I never really forgave him for telling the General we had a stowaway. When I made you Security officer I assumed you’d arrest Cos and get him out of my hair. Well, you didn’t do what I expected, but in a way you did better. After our stowaway took her revenge, I was at a loss as to what to do with her, until you quite innocently solved that problem. And then Cos, while trying to save his fellow Ladderites, eliminated himself So you see, everything worked out perfectly.”