Emile and the Dutchman (2 page)

II

Magellan
was a
Cristoforo Colombo
class heavy cruiser, which was nice for us, not so nice for the Navy crew. Usually, the Navy prefers to stick Contact Service people on refurbished light cruisers, or heavily armed cruiser escorts, but maybe this assignment had come on unexpectedly, or maybe General Dupres' politicking for heavier escorts was having some effect on the Thousand Worlds Council.

Whatever the reason, I was grateful. Since Contact Service personnel are normally quarantined from the start of a mission—air, water, food, comp, and comm—
Magellan
's
size meant that we had to be given the whole second deck to ourselves. The elevator door was welded shut; the ladders to decks three and one were dogged from the other side.

Not a bad deal for us, but it must have been hell for the Navy crew; I'm sure they had to go to a full hot-bed system, including officers.

On the other hand, we had individual staterooms—suites, in fact; I even had a closet with a door—and the whole Rec Room to ourselves.

"Captain Aristotle McCaw, this is Emmy Mark, our new chauffeur." The Dutchman's voice echoed hollowly in the empty room.

The tall redhead turned from the chessboard, not noticing my wince at what was obviously to be the Dutchman's nickname for me.

"Lieutenant. Good to have you with us." McCaw nodded, his head bobbing on top of his long, skinny neck like an apple on a wire. He must have been a full two meters tall, weighing in at not much more than sixty kilos. I fancied I could see his ribs through his shirt.

Even sitting, his eyes were on the same level as the Dutchman's. "Briefing, Major?"

"In a minute, Ari." Norfeldt turned to me. "Ari's our comm officer; high psi rating. And he's good—when I can get him to pay attention to the real world. Which isn't often."

That may have been an exaggeration; on the other hand, the Dutchman may have been making the kind of allowances we all have to make for comm officers. Fewer than one man in ten million has a high enough psi rating to be useful as a Contact Service comm officer; we take what we can get.

Norfeldt pointed his uppermost chin at the captain sitting across the table from McCaw. The captain was waiting for the esper to move, like a leopard waiting for a gazelle to meander under its tree. "Kurt Buchholtz. Weapons and defense officer."

I wasn't exactly surprised. Buchholtz looked up at me, turning completely in his chair like a tank turret zeroing in on a target. There was a flash of discomfort in his face as he sized me up, then obviously decided that he could take me, if need be.

He was probably right; while I was a couple of centimeters taller, he outweighed me by a good ten kilos—not a gram of it fat.

"Never mess with Kurt, Emmy. He's not too bright, but he is good; did a bang-up job of covering my escape last time out—and even managed to get back aboard the scout before I hit the panic button, to take off to blow the Gate."

"A full ten seconds before, Al," Buchholtz said. "And I was hauling ass, at that—it didn't look like you were going to wait."

"You noticed? I'm pleasantly surprised." Norfeldt raised an eyebrow. "Any objections, shithead?"

"No." Buchholtz's placid expression didn't change. Names would never hurt him—I didn't want to try to find out if sticks and stones would really break his bones. "Not a one. It would have been called for. Tough assignment; solid Drop." He returned his attention to the board. I took a quick look. It looked to be the sort of complex jumble you get out a Bachiochi Sicilian, right before all hell breaks loose and the population of the board gets cut in half in twenty moves.

"Get some coffee, Emmy," the Dutchman said. "Intake mine half cream and with four lumps." He sat down at the table and fired his cigar back up, taking a moment to pretend to check out the board.

There's nothing in
Contact Service Rules, Regulations, and Proprieties
that specifically says that junior officers have to fix coffee for the Team Leader, but this wasn't the time or the place to go into that.

I went over to the coffee setup in the corner—the pot was an old-NASAF model, the kind that would survive an explosion that would blow
Magellan
to bits—and poured the Dutchman a cup, conscious of how the combination of
Magellan's
drive and spin made the hot black stream arc strangely. I dumped in some whitening powder—the label said "Dehydrated Stabilized Cream," but it didn't fool me—and enough sugar cubes to content the mounts of my father's entire polo club.

I poured a cup for myself, too. Black, of course.

I brought the coffee to the table, set the cups down, then sat down. The Dutchman took a swig of coffee and combined it with a mouthful of black cigar smoke. I guess he liked the taste; the smell had me wishing for a Paradram.

"Well, we've got another tough one coming," Norfeldt said.

Both men looked up, McCaw obviously irritated at being brought back to the real world, Bucholtz smiling evenly.

"I'll make it short," the Dutchman went on. "You can go over the reports later—I'll square it with the scout's computer—but leave the Pers records alone, Kurt; I'm tired of covering for you.

"In any case, scoop Theta Twelve, about a year ago, dropped a nucleus around an F9." Nerfeldt didn't tell us
what
F9 star it was; none of us needed to know. Maybe he didn't know, either. The acceleration algorithms for both our trip out and our return would be programmed into our scout's NAV computer; we didn't need to know them, either. There are lots more demanding tasks than going point-to-point in space. It's even easier than walking and chewing gum—it's like having someone else walk and chew gum.

"First Team went through via AlphaCee, built the Gate around the singularity on the other side, started the look, listen, and sniff.

"They found a live one, out at about two AUs—surface will be brighter than home; the dirtball's hotter, but tolerable. Atmosphere's decent—shirtsleeve temperatures over the northern continent."

"Damn." Buchholtz pursed his thin lips. "No armor?"

Norfeldt bit down hard on the end of his cigar, then spat a hunk of tobacco at the nearest bulkhead. It stuck.

"Am I telling this, or are you?" He didn't wait for an answer. "First did the pole-to-pole orbital sweep, got some good pictures. A lot of indigenous animal species; apparently one intelligent one. Erect, bipedal, vaguely amphibian. No abnormal neutrino emissions; no unusual synchrotron."

"Radio?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Not apparently. The star puts out a lot of RF and the dirtball's got a hot ionosphere; unlikely even the local equivalent of Marconi would think of RF as a good way to communicate. In any case, First didn't pick up on any radio. No promises, but the tech doesn't look too bad; maybe about middle, late Iron Age."

The Dutchman shrugged. Analogies between human history and any alien history were likely to be useless. "They've got small cities, but no evidence of warfare—any kind."

Buchholtz didn't look disappointed, which surprised me for just a moment. Then it occurred to me that he must have had faith in the Dutchman's description of the mission as a tough one.

Norfeldt puffed at his cigar. "So, Second Team went in. We know they made contact. There was no apparent trouble, no fatalities dirtside. The scout returned to AlphaCee intact, complete with crew—who were relatively intact."

"Relatively?" If I were an esper, I know that I would have heard Buchholtz inventorying the team's weapons.

The Dutchman shook his head. "That's the word. Don't know much more. Under psych testing on the AlphaCee side, three of the four Second Teamers turned up . . . changed."

"How?" I'm sure that McCaw didn't care; he was just asking out of a vague sense of obligation to participate.

"Don't know. As soon as their escort's computer latched onto the fact that the changes were beyond normal bounds—except for the Team Leader's—the skipper of the escort opened fire. A bit too quick on the trigger; I would have liked to know more. One hell of a lot more."

I started to speak, then changed my mind.

"Well, Emmy? What is it?"

"I . . . don't understand. Wouldn't the records of the psych test still be in the escort's computer?"

"Good question." The Dutchman nodded as he rose and stretched. "Got another one?"

"Sure." Buchholtz snorted. "How about this: Where the fuck are the records?"

"I don't know. I wasn't given them, and I wasn't given an explanation, either. It could be that somebody's bullshitting around with classification games—they are classified high—or there's some sort of snafu. Central loses more records than they like to admit." He shrugged. "So we get to play it by ear. Fun, eh?"

Buchholtz spread his hands. "I don't see the problem. All we have to do is blow the Gate on the other side, no? Looks like a clear Drop."

Norfeldt pulled his chair out, swung it around, then sat down assbackward, resting his forearms on the back of the chair. "No, Kurt. We don't Drop this one, unless we absolutely have to. You don't have to know why."

Norfeldt gave me a meaningful sideways glance. It takes tonnes of germanium, squeezed by a grabfield into a quantum black hole, to make the nucleus of a Gate, and the germanium is
not
recoverable; it comes out of the evaporating nucleus as random quanta, some locally, some through other singularities. "You got that, too, Emmy?"

I didn't have any objection. I didn't want my First Assignment to end in a Drop. "Yes, sir. But, if we have to . . ."

"Then we have to. Don't bother me with the obvious." The Dutchman paused. "One more thing. The escort ship, the one that blew up Second Team's scout?"

Buchholtz nodded.
"Magellan?"

"Right."

III

Even if I live to be a hundred—unlikely, given my line of work—I'll never get used to Gate travel. Back at the Academy, they used to explain that the nausea most people feel when they fly through a Gate is purely psychosomatic. They'll point to studies showing that blindfolded psi-negs can't even tell that they have gone through a Gate.

Which may be true, but it is nonsense. You can feed me chock-full, blindfold me and then put me in an absolute-direction trainer, then spin it like a top, and I won't even get queasy. But Gates are different. Humans weren't meant to be squeezed through to the other side of the singularity left behind when a quantum black hole evaporates.

It's just not natural.

Now, it's not that I'm afraid of collision. While it's theoretically possible that one ship entering the Gate could bump into another leaving it—the three-space projection of the singularity may be infinitely thin, but the ship isn't infinitely short and it is always traveling at finite speed—a simple protocol prevents that from actually happening. Outbound vessels—relative to either of the AlphaCeeGates—use the Gates only during the first three-quarters of even-numbered hours; inbound vessels travel via Gate only during the first three-quarters of odd-numbered hours That leaves fifteen minutes cushion, which is more than enough, by a factor of about a million to one.

So it isn't fear. Maybe there is something to the psychosomatic argument, though. Knowing that an error of less than a thousandth of a degree in angle of insertion or a couple of centimeters per second too much or too little speed means that you'll end up coming out of some other singularity than the one you aimed for—probably one inside a stellar-mass black hole, almost certainly one at an energy level that'll fry you or freeze you—Well, that isn't good for the digestion. To make a long story short, I never looked at the screen as we approached AlphaCeeGate and
Magellan
released us, our scout's computer putting us into precisely the right insertion flight. It's just as well that the ship flies itself through the Gate: the Dutchman's the worst pilot I've ever seen wearing wings, and I was occupied.

"Occupied" is the nice way of putting it. The truth is that I had my eyes closed, vomiting up food that I must have swallowed in my childhood. My early childhood.

"You about done puking your guts out?" The Dutchman's hands were confident and sure as he ripped the sickbag's tapes from my cheeks, sealed the bag and pitched it into the open oubliette, then replaced the bag with a fresh one. "C'mon, Emmy—we're through already. Take a look at a new sky."

Cautiously, I pried an eye open, then looked at the screen in front of my couch. Stars, that was all.

I couldn't immediately make out any familiar constellations, but that wasn't unexpected. For one thing, the stars are a lot brighter when you're looking out of a scout's monitor than they are when you're looking out of a thick atmosphere; it sort of confuses the issue.

For another, in the two and a half centuries we've been sending point-five-one-cee ramscoops out to seed alien suns with the makings of Gates, some of the ships have gotten far from home. A lot of the familiar stars in our sky, the ones Papa used to point out to me at home in Graz or visiting cousins in Sao Paolo—Alpha Centauri B, Beta Hydri, Delta Pavonis, Epsilon Eridani—are just about as dinky as old Sol; they only look bright close up.

Hell, two of the three brightest, Sirius, and Arcturus, aren't all
that
far off. And in less than a hundred years, we'll have probes out past Canopus.

But the sky isn't just distorted; once you leave the filter of Earth's atmosphere, better than ten times as many stars become visible.

Which is why it's easy to feel lost when you're looking out at an alien sky. A globe with a radius of just 125 or so light-years may only be an amazingly small speck of the galaxy, but that's the wrong way to look at it. Imagine a cube one light-year on each edge; you could fit more than eight million of them inside the rough globe of our ramscoop exploration, without one cube even coming close to touching another.

"What do you think, Emmy?" The Dutchman's wide face smiled knowingly. "Don't you feel somehow different, being under another sky, looking out at a view that no more than ten other humans have ever seen?"

I looked him in the eye and answered honestly: "Not really."

Norfeldt laughed, clapping a hand to my shoulder. "Like I said, krauthead, just maybe you got possibilities." He leaned over my panel and punched a strobing square button, then sat back in his couch, pulled a fresh cigar—well, a new one, anyway—out of his pocket, turned his ashtray up to a loud hiss, then lit the cigar.

He clasped his hands over his ample belly. At least he was wearing clothes that once could have been called a uniform. "Kurt, Ari—break out the poker table. We got two weeks till we hit dirt."