Emile and the Dutchman (11 page)

"Captain . . . ?"

"Do what he says, man, and snap to it."

"Fire!"

This time, a real blast barely missed the Xeno battle-cruiser.

"And again." This time, the Dutchman dialed for one-hundredth power. With a-gigawatt-plus laser, that was enough for a sliding blast to score the bright surface of the battlecruiser, but not enough to burrow into the hull.

"Cross your fingers, Emmy, and get ready to roll us the hell out of the way."

A light lanced out from the Xeno battlecruiser; alarms clanged as it played across our hull, then died as I rolled the
Magellan
into a long turn.

"Damage report, dammit," Arnheim barked out.

An ensign looked up from his panel, astonishment written all over his white face. "None, sir. Absolutely none."

"What's our speed relative to the big boy?"

"We're separating at . . . a bit more than a klick-second, Captain."

"Mark, bring it down to zero.—If you don't mind, Major."

"Listen to the nice man, Emmy."

"You got it, Major."

That was a job more properly belonging to the computer, but I didn't know how to set up the program. It took me five minutes to wrestle the ship around and kill the relative speed between us and the cruiser.

And all the time, the Xeno ships lay still, in a loose formation around the Gate.

"Start the signal laser blinking, Emmy—and you can turn the helm over to Captain Arnheim."

The Dutchman slid the clip out of the wiregun, signaling to me to do the same with the Korriphila. Which I did, careful to work the slide and pump the round out of the chamber. Mimicking the Dutchman, I undipped my Fairbairn's sheath and pushed it slowly toward the floor, along with the now-empty automatic.

"Raise 'em, Emmy." Norfeldt held his hands over his head. Absurd, in the low gravity.

"Captain," the Dutchman said, "we surrender."

It was more than a week later that Vitelli came down to visit the three of us in the brig, causing me to miss a flush.

Yes—
three.
While Bar-El wasn't implicated in the mutiny, Captain Arnheim had ordered him jugged as a material witness, just to be on the safe side. I don't think Akiva particularly minded; he was up a bit in our ongoing poker game, although Norfeldt was the big winner.

As usual.

At the moment Vitelli tapped against the bars, I was looking down at a pair of red aces and three little hearts, debating whether to draw to my two aces or go for the flush. It's not one of my favorite decisions to make under the gun.

Norfeldt had raised before the draw. The Dutchman bluffed a lot; it could have meant anything from a five-card Yarborough up.

I'd just decided to go for the good hand when Vitelli's tapping interrupted.

"Good afternoon, gentleman." Vitelli's eyes were so shadowed that he looked like a racoon; the armpits of his zero-gee coverall were stained with sweat and white with salt. "I see you're adjusting nicely."

"Vacationing," the Dutchman said. "Now, what's your draw, Emmy?"

"Emile," I said, reflexively throwing away the three little hearts. It's hard to split aces; goes against the grain. "Three."

"Vacationing?" The ambassador raised an eyebrow.

"Vacationing. I take it things went well with the Xenos."

The ambassador started to open his mouth, and then closed it. I later found out that he knew then that these weren't exactly our Xenos—same species, different sub-species, different culture—but that the Sesss could be just as dangerous if handled wrongly. Think of them as Nungs, rather than Rhades—the differences may be important to them, but not to outsiders. To us, the main importance is that the Sesss
can
be reasoned with, from a position of reasonable power.

But he didn't say that.

What he said was: "I'm going to see if I can get you shot."

The Dutchman snorted. "I don't think it's going to work, but you're welcome to try."

I'd wanted to go over defensive strategy, but the Dutchman insisted that it wasn't necessary. Strategy is for the chickenshit at heart, he'd explained.

Norfeldt dealt me three cards. A jack, a ten, and a three—and the jack was the jack of hearts; if I'd gone for the flush, I would have gotten it.

"What do you mean?"

"We're fucking
heroes
, Dom baby—the kraut and I are going to get DSDs to go along with, mebbe, a slight reprimand. I'm going to see if I can get a DSD for the Hebe, too, but I doubt if—"

"Meaning no offense, Major," Akiva said, "but I'm not interested in a Distinguished Service Device. I don't need your medals, sir."

The Dutchman looked him over. "I could do with a bit less polite disdain, hear?" He turned back to Vitelli. "In any case, you don't shoot heroes."

"You—"

"It's a rule; look it up. The Thousand Worlds is going to be too busy putting us through tickertape parades to—"

"You're mutineers!" Vitelli hissed. "And cowards."

"We're Servicemen." The Dutchman smiled. "And what we did is we fucking made it possible for you to open contact with these semi-Xenos."

"You tried to bring
Magellan
into combat with their battlecruiser! All so that Captain Amheim would have to retreat back through the Gate." Unspoken:
All to save your miserable lives.

The Dutchman shrugged.

"Major? Can I?"

"Go ahead, Emmy. But he won't understand. It took you a while, and you're not a piece of chickenshit Navy crud."

I turned to Vitelli. "Mr. Ambassador, we could have actually fired to damage the cruiser. But we didn't. That'll show up on the bridge tapes. Instead of going out and trying to get ourselves blasted, we announced to the Xenos or whatever they are that we could hurt them, but didn't.

"Different signals apply to different cultures, Ambassador. You should know that."

"They could easily have taken it as a call to combat!"

"Possible. They
did
take it as a warning shot, no? It said: we can hurt you, and we will if we decide to, but we choose not to, for now. That's how they took it, right?"

Vitelli pursed his lips. "Correct."

"And because they did, you were able to open communications with them."

Low-powered comm laser flickering from ship to ship, pulsing with the on-off beginnings of understanding between two very different species, each able to do immense damage to the other; each terrified of the damage; neither willing to accept the damage that the other could surely do . . .

"But how did you know that would work?"

The Dutchman could have said that our last contact with this species hadn't worked out the way it should have, and that the refreshing honesty of a battlecruiser firing what was clearly a series of warning shots would tend to suggest to any rational species that the owners of such power concealed even more.

Or he could have said that since what had been tried the last time we met the Xenos clearly hadn't worked, it was best to try
something
different.

But he didn't. All he said was: "Just a guess, Dom."

A few minutes later, the Dutchman reeled in the pot with two small pair.

A couple of months later, both of us picked up our DSDs.

And reprimands, of course. No big deal; the CS is always much more impressed with results than with ruffled Navy and ambassadorial feathers.

But as General Dupres was pinning Norfeldt's medal to what passed for the Dutchman's chest, I saw the two of them grinning at each other. Over the clangor of the band, I tried to listen to what the general was saying to Norfeldt. It sounded like: "This is the first time I've given an award to a major for being gutsy enough and dumb enough to stare down a whole alien species."

No. It couldn't have been that, it couldn't have been—I
know
that I heard the Dutchman's answer:

"Yes sir. The last time, I was a captain."

I didn't wait around to ask. The Dutchman wouldn't have answered.

Besides, I had a date.

Janine.

I

The four of us were playing poker in our quarters when the subject of cheating came up. The stakes were high: one quid ante, ten quid limit before the draw, twenty-five after.

Personally, I would have preferred to play for less, but that's another tradition: Contact Service officers
always
play for high stakes.

When the shit hit the fan, I was down about three months' pay.

The other two weren't so badly off. Donny N'Damo, the little comm officer, was about even, and Akiva Bar-El was up a trifle. The big winner, of course, was the Dutchman. Sitting across the table from me, he grinned at me as he held the deck of cards in his left hand, the fat index finger of his right hand making little circles near the pot.

He let out a cloud of cigar smoke in my direction, but the table sucked it up before it could get to me. One nice thing about playing poker in low-gee is that the table is connected to the outflow, which not only sucks the cards and chips down to its surface, but prevents poker smog from forming in the room.

"You're stalling, Emmy," the Dutchman said. "Bar-El checked. The bet's up to you."

I looked at my hand. Three kings. Not exactly a bad hand to be dealt; the trick was how to maximize the win.

Best to try a little bit of a sandbag. "I'll open for a tenth."

To my left, Donny N'Damo tossed his hand face down to the surface of the table. "Too much for me. I can't even beat Akiva."

Bar-El shook his head slowly. "You will
not
peep me, little man. Not again."

"Shut the fuck up, the both of you."
While I wished he'd use his toothbrush as often as he used profanity, the Dutchman rarely yelled; he saved it for special occasions.

Like this one.

I studied the robin's-egg-blue paint on the low ceiling. I didn't really want to be here.

The Dutchman started by letting his breath out in a low sigh. "N'Damo, you do not use your psychic abilities," he said, slamming his palm down, his Team Leader's ring hitting the table like a gunshot, "
which the goddam service trained you in,
to cheat other members of your Contact Team. You're a fucking valuable little spade, but you're
not
valuable enough to get away with that. Understood, shithead?"

Donny looked shocked. "I was just kidding, Major. Honest. I wouldn't, really—"

"Sure." Norfeldt snorted, "Sure."

I knew that Donny had been joking, but the Dutchman never gave anyone the benefit of the doubt. Ever.

"And you, Lieutenant Bar-El—"

"Sir."

"
Shuddup when I'm talking to you, jewboy.
You don't bully your teammates, you don't threaten your teammates. All of our lives can depend on how well N'Damo does his job. I don't repeat DON'T want him spooked."

"Yes, Major." Bar-El's ugly face was as impassive as ever, but his jaw twitched.

"Now." The Dutchman said, still white-lipped. "It's up to me. I'll see your tenth and make it a quid."

It took me a moment to realize that he was dropping the subject and getting back to the game.

Bar-El looked at him for a long moment. "I fold," he said, dropping his cards face down on the hissing table.

"I don't," I said. "Reraise ten."

"Ten?"

"Ten." I pushed the chips into the pot, one by one.

"Call," The Dutchman said. "Cards?"

Time for a little cleverness. "I'll play these," I said. The chances of improving trips are poor; I had a better chance of the Dutchman thinking I was bluffing.

"Shit." The Dutchman snatched up the deck and dealt himself a card. Then he picked up his own hand and threw a card away before slipping the drawn card on top of the other four. Theoretically, you're supposed to discard before you draw, but the purpose of that is to make you decide before you see your new card or cards; it's not just ritual. Since the Dutchman had made his decision before picking up his new cards, I didn't complain, although I was wondering why he wasn't looking at his new hand.

Probably just a little ploy to rattle me.

"Your bet, Emmy," he said.

"Two quid." Never mind what you hear about not betting into a one-card draw—just don't bet heavily, most of the time.

Norfeldt pushed a stack of chips into the pot. "I'll raise twenty-five."

"Without looking?"

He smiled at me. "I kinda liked my hand before. Emmy. Hope it's still okay."

It was up to me.

I thought about it for a while. Norfeldt
hadn't
looked before betting into my allegedly pat hand. But he'd been bluffing me all night.

Damn.

I thought it out. Clearly, unless he was bluffing again, he'd started with two pair, or four of a kind—or the Dutchman was holding a kicker with trips. Dishonest plays would vary from absolute garbage, to a pair of aces and trash, to some sort of open-ended straight or four-flush, hoping I'd jump the wrong way.

I could forget about four of a kind. The Dutchman would have sandbagged with fours. Besides, you can waste a lot of mental sweat and lose a lot of folding money worrying about low-probability disasters.

Well . . . my trip kings left him with only two. honest winning possibilities: three aces, or some sort of back-in hand, both unlikely.

I didn't like it, but I wasn't going to be bluffed this time. Not with better than fifty quid in the pot; the odds said call.

"Call," I said, flipping my hand over. "With three kings."

Norfeldt scowled at me as he flipped over the card that he had just drawn. The scowl vanished; he smiled down at the queen of hearts.

Then he flipped over his other four cards, one by one. All hearts.

"Well, well." He smiled. "A nice semibluff, Emmy. If you dropped, I got the pot. And if you called, I still had one chance in—"

"Enough, Major." The light on the wall over the door turned amber. There were shouts in the corridor outside, the rustling sounds a crew of sailors pulling themselves along in low-gee make, like bugs in a pipe. Down in the hold, they'd be swarming frantically over our scout—as though they'd just gotten the word about an assignment that we'd been on for hundreds of hours.

I assembled the deck and handed it to the Dutchman. "Are you going to brief us on this one, Major, or do we play it by ear?"

I almost smiled. I sounded like Buchholtz, way back when.

The Dutchman eyed me momentarily. He wouldn't have taken that from N'Damo or Bar-El; I was more than a little curious about whether or not he'd take it from me.

"Fair enough." He stored the cards in their box and stashed his chips in their bag before shutting off the table. He settled back in his chair, folding his fingers over his ample belly.

"Actually," he said, "it looks like an easy one."

I snorted, and he pinned me with a glare.

Easy one? We were Third Team, this time. As usual. A Third Team goes into a stellar system only after a First Team reports a promising planet, but a Second Team hasn't resolved the question of whether or not it's safe.

The question isn't whether or not it's deadly to Servicemen; we're expendable. A permanent colony of thousands of men and women, billions of quid of equipment, and a lot of promise is somewhat less expendable.

The human race is
not
expendable.

Norfeldt smiled, a little. "Well, Emmy—"

"Emile."

"—it started out as a fairly standard contact. A gamma-series ramscoop dropped a hole around this dinky little Kl. First Team found an interesting planet close in, about half an AU."

I did a rapid mental calculation. "Sounds a bit hot. Maybe twenty percent more light than—"

"Asshole. I
wish
you wouldn't do that," Norfeldt said. "You telling this, or am I?"

"Sorry."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Sir."

"Better." The Dutchman pulled a cigar from his pocket, unwrapped it, and bit the end off, chewing contemplatively for a few moments before gently spitting the gobbet in a slow parabola toward the far wall, where it stuck. He wouldn't have been quite that sloppy aboard our scout, but the Dutchman always liked to leave something behind for the Navy files to clean up.

He pulled his lighter from his pocket, fired it up, and puffed the cigar to life, blowing smoke my way.

"So," he said, "First Team got into the orange-peel orbit, did the photo-sweep. Things look to be not that bad. Three decent-sized landmasses. The two smaller ones—'bout the size of Australia—hug the equator, but the most northern looks like it might be okay. Dirtball's about three-quarters seas, alternates between heavy vegetation and desert on land. Some animal life, but no sign of civilization. Laser spectroscopy picked up some metals—iron—looks like good hematite—bauxite, and maybe some silver, gold, etc."

He looked pointedly at me. That last had to mean germanium, but the Dutchman couldn't say that in front of Bar-El or N'Damo. Comm officers can never qualify for the Three Monkeys, and the Metzadan had never fully taken to conditioning. They would never have been told that germanium is the only element a grabfield can get enough of a grip on to squeeze into a quantum black hole, the core of a Gate.

I didn't know how much of the stuff went into the making of a gate. Tonnes, certainly, presumably tens of tonnes, possibly thousands. I might have figured it out—I'm not particularly weak in math—but most of what's known about barrier physics, transitional mechanics, and five-space rift topology is tightly wrapped in a high-security blanket.

Norfeldt blew another cloud of cigar smoke my way. "So, Second Team went in." He sat back, silent.

I was about to set myself up as the straight man—as usual—when Donny saved me the trouble.

"They didn't come back?"

"Very good guess. No, they didn't come back. Therefore, no report. Any further dumbass questions?"

I shrugged. "I don't see what you're so worried about, Major. There's only three possibilities. One"—I held up a polite finger—"Second Team blew it, somehow or other. Accident, equipment failure, the pilot slammed the scout into a tree, something. Two"—another finger—"there's some sort of serious problem. We find it, we duck it, and we get out alive. Blow the Gate on our way home."

"And three?"

"Easy. We screw up, and die. Is there a fourth?"

He had that smile on his face. Again.

"You're a good kid. Emmy, but you're still green as all hell." It was one of the few times that I'd heard a patient tone in the Dutchman's voice. He took his cigar out of his mouth and tapped the soggy end against the gold oak leaves on his collar. "I'd like to dip these suckers in silver someday, Emmy. Or maybe even get myself a nice silver chicken. Forgetting the bullshit First Team Stuff, how many contacts have I run?"

"Eight, that I know of, if you don't count—"

"Precisely. And how many were Drops?"

That wasn't his fault. Luck of the draw. Norfeldt was a drunkard, a smoker, and a boor—but he was also the best Contact Team Leader that there was. Period. "Hey, that isn't your fault, Major—"

"Don't you fucking dare try to comfort me, you little Prussian asshole!
Pfah
." More work for the Navy files. "Say that I'm unlucky. Maybe the powers-that-be'll decide I'm too unlucky to ever get promoted." He tapped at the spot on his uniform where General Dupres had pinned his DSD. "I got a trunkful of medals; I'd like a fucking
promotion.
I can't afford to keep losing contacts, not even if they're legitimate Drops."

Donny N'Damo started. "But—"

"Shuddup, suntan. So, we're going to take your fourth option, Lieutenant von du Mark. If this is a Drop, we do not drop it. We either fix the fucking problem, or we come up with a recommendation to fix it. Understood, Mister?"

He'd said it. It hung in the air. In the back of my mind, I was already composing a memorandum to General Dupres.

Subject: CONSERVRULREGPROP, Gross and Indecent Violation of by Major Alonzo Norfeldt, TWCS. It has come to the attention of the below-signing officer that . . .

The Dutchman would be broken out of the service, maybe; riffed, at best.

And then I thought about it a bit more. About getting a new Team Leader, someone with a bit more civilization than the Dutchman. But maybe a little slower, maybe a bit more obedient to the rules, some Regulation Charley asshole who was more interested in seeing that the job was done by the numbers than that it worked. Somebody without the brains or balls to play roll-the-dice on
Magellan
's bridge. I looked over at Bar-El's ugly face. He was smiling.

It wouldn't have been convenient to have a different Team Leader on that Xeno operation
, his smile seemed to say.

Right. We would have done things by the numbers, properly, and been properly blown into small bits.

"Well?" The Dutchman raised an eyebrow. "What's it gonna be, N'Damo?"

"I just peep, Major. I don't . . . get involved in anything else."

"Emmy?"

"Emile." I threw up my hands. "Shit, Major. I don't like it, but count me in."

In triumph, he turned to Bar-El. "Well?" The Dutchman had probably read Bar-El's smile the way I had:

Wrongly.

Bar-El opened his mouth, then closed it, and shook his head. "I suggest that you find an appropriate excuse to keep me aboard
De Gama,
Major. I'm not going with you."