Emile and the Dutchman (9 page)

That's theory. Now, in practice, if you actually took a few pounds of boron and bathed it in a stream of protons, you wouldn't hit every atom of boron; most of matter is space, and the nucleus of an atom is an awfully small target.

What you would get is a very hot mixture of very hot helium and very hot gaseous boron.

Hot gases. Very hot gases. And very hot gases are handy things to be pushing out the rear end of a rocket engine. In fact,
all
rocket designs—solid-fuel chemical, liquid chemical, NERVA, DUMBO, ion, fission bottle, transitional fission—are designed to do just that: produce some very hot gas.

At least in theory, a boron drive could do that very well.

And in practice, it seemed to work just fine, for the Xenos. Which bespoke a dangerously high level of technology, maybe even higher than ours. Possibly, whoever was using a boron drive hadn't worked out some of the tricks that we had—Gates, for example—but certainly they had made practicable one trick that we hadn't: boron drive.

The UNEG team should have Dropped it. They should have flown back through the Gate, leaving a small fusion bomb behind to destroy the Gate and seal the singularity. They
should
have. . . .

They didn't. Instead, they found a habitable planet and put the scout into orbit around it, then began hailing by radio and laser, trying to make contact.

Three years later, ten percent of the human race was dead. Just a tenth.

That wasn't much, of course.

Only two billion people.

". . . Now, as I understand it, Murphy's First Team picked up traces of boron. Which means either that this particular star is putting out weird quantities of the stuff, or—vastly more likely, given that a dogshit-simple spectrograph would pick up on that, in which case the word would go out to send for the astronomers, not the Service, and in which case nobody would be getting their peckers out of joint—"

"All that's classified information, Major."

"—there are Xenos in the system, or, last possibility, which would be too much to expect, there's someone else using a boron drive." The Dutchman smiled. "Questions, class?"

Vitelli nodded his head. "I see that you've been nosing around."

The Dutchman snickered. "I don't like to be kept in the dark, and after you've spent a couple of decades in the Service, you do tend to have some connections. When I tried to get in touch with my old buddy Rafe Murphy and found that some brainless security feeb had slapped a
top secret over his assignment on the
where board,
I got suspicious, and went on the earie. I do have connections; it didn't take all that long. The only thing I can't figure out is why
you
."

"Eh?"

"Why an ambassador? Why just the
Maggie?
Why not just call out the whole fucking fleet, and then blow the whole fucking Xeno homeworld into microscopic traces? That's why we have a fleet, after all—it's not
just
to put down local insurrections and give you Navy faggots a place to play drop-the-soap."

Visibly ignoring that last, Vitelli shook his head. "How do you know it's the Xeno homeworld, Major? It isn't the same system, after all. And how do you know the aliens are even Xenos—
the
Xenos? Remember, we never captured any of them in the Xeno War. Other than the fact that they're psi-neg, all we know about them is how their attack ships performed more than a hundred years ago."

"We took them then. Not easily. But we took the bastards. We can do it again."

"Only if necessary, Major."

There is and was a school of thought that says that all we ought to do, as we expand the globe of human habitation, is blow sapients into very small bits.

Retail killing is one thing; a lot of Contacts involve some of that. Doing a bit of slightly wholesale killing might be another, if we ever run into the Xenos again. But doing it on a grand wholesale really wouldn't put us in a good position, once we run into a really powerful alien race. They might think of it as a precedent we'd established.

Norfeldt blew smoke into the air. "So we open contact?"

"We try, Major. More precisely, you try."

* * *

Norfeldt looked over at me. "Well, Emmy?"

"You asking my opinion, or are you telling me?"

"I'm asking."

"Lieutenants don't have opinions."

"Then I'm telling you—cut out the bullshit." Norfeldt smiled. "Seriously, what do you think? Maybe we ought to take our chances with a court-martial instead?"

"Nah." Look, there's no point in failing to give out with a bit of bravado when it doesn't make any difference. The Dutchman wasn't seriously asking my opinion; that wasn't the way Norfeldt operated.

"Bar-El?"

"As long as I have written orders, Major," he said carefully.

"You know what the chances are, don't you?"

Bar-El nodded. "Yes, sir."

"And you don't give a rat's ass, do you?"

"With all due respect, that's not properly your concern, sir."

"Fuck you very much, jewboy." The Dutchman chuckled. "I can't remember being told to go to hell so nicely—two hours' fatigue, shithead. Okay, Emmy, what is it?"

I drew myself up straight and looked Vitelli in the eye.
"Ave, Imperator, nos—"

"Can the German—"

"That's Latin, Major."

"Shut up. Bar-El, you—"

"Wait." Vitelli spoke up.

"Shuddup, Dom. Do it my way, or forget it." The Dutchman got to his feet. "You and Emmy can finish up the barfing. C'mon, you ugly Jewish ape, we're gonna report to the provost. Call ahead, Dom: either they can slap the cuffs on me, or they can have orders for the Hebe cut by the time we get there. Emmy, if the little dago decides to go for the orders, we'll meet at the shuttle up to the
Maggie
in, say, two hours. If not, see if you can hire me a good civvie lawyer."

He beckoned Bar-El to his feet. "Your play, Dom. Oh, and make sure you bring that cute little . . . aide of yours aboard the
Maggie.
Gotta make sure there's something to distract me on the trip."

The two of them walked out of the room, Bar-El gently closing the door behind them.

Vitelli turned to me, his thin, dark face displaying the expression that I've always thought of as Chief Executive Officer Basic; Father always used it when he was negotiating with someone outside Mark Airways. It's every bit as stylized as a kabuki mask, sort of halfway between a deadpan stare and a lifted-eyebrow show of interest.

"You know this better than I do, Lieutenant von du Mark—"

"Emile, please." I smiled. Someone had to establish some sort of communication with the ambassador; once through the Gate, Norfeldt—and by concatenation, Bar-El and I—were going to be under his orders.

"Emile." He nodded. "You know this better than I do, Emile, but that man is . . . slime."

"You're too kind to him."

"Possibly, possibly." He returned my smile. "Would you like a cup of coffee?"

Someday, I may meet a pilot who doesn't drink coffee, but it won't be when I look in a mirror.

"Definitely," I said.

"Even if Janine wasn't as good an aide as she is, I'd keep her around just for her coffee." He reached over and pushed a button. "Two cups, Janine—make it three, if you care to join us."

"I just finished making it, Dominic," the slightly metallic voice answered from his desk. She was at the door in just a few seconds, a coffee tray easily balanced overhead on the palm of her right hand.

"Nicely done," I said as she smoothly set the heavily laden tray on the desk and then poured and handed the ambassador and me each a cup. I took a sip, then added cream and sugar until it looked like tan milk.

Way back when, I used to drink it black, being a purist at heart. Purity doesn't last around the Dutchman.

"Thank you," she said, smiling. "I put myself through college waiting tables at the Playboy Club, if you can believe that."

"I've swallowed larger improbabilities. Like the sun rising in the east."

"Mmm. Nice man."

"Business, Janine. You can seduce Lieutenant von du Mark some other time." His brow furrowed for a moment, and he gave the slightest of shrugs.

"En route?"

"No. You're not going."

She looked me straight in the eye. "Pity."

The tone of their exchange made me suspect that the Dutchman's loudly voiced suspicions were wrong; if the two of them were carrying on in private, they'd be more careful in public.

(Not that it makes any difference, but I later found out both that I was right and that Ambassador Vitelli's own preferences made Janine's prettiness irrelevant to him, except abstractly.)

"Tell me, how did that . . ." Vitelli's voice trailed off.

"Bastard? Son of a bitch?" I supplied. "Poor excuse for a human being?"

"...
ever
become an officer?" With long, aristocratic fingers, he smoothed down the front of his tunic, his hand pausing at the gold-and-green medallion resting against the center of his chest.

"Damned if I know." Once I'd figured out how to work the CS system without leaving an obvious audit trail, I'd tried to break into the Dutchman's Personnel records, but without any luck. Pers records are tough. "But I do know how he gets away with it, Ambassador."

"Oh?"

"There's an unwritten law in the Contact Service, Ambassador. It goes like this: 'if you're good enough, you can get away with anything.' The Dutchman thinks he's the best officer that the Service has ever had, and that he can, therefore, get away with anything. The minor reason he puts on the show is to prove that to himself. And to everyone else, maybe."

I wasn't sure about the last. I don't think the Dutchman ever gave a damn about what anyone else thought.

Janine raised an eyebrow. "
Minor
reason? What's the major reason?"

I smiled at her, making a mental note to have some flowers sent to her. Red roses might be a bit much—orchids, perhaps? I've always liked beautiful women, and I've a particular affection for anyone who will throw me that kind of straight line.

"Because he
is
a bastard, of course."

"Of course."

II

I caught up with Bar-El and the Dutchman at the New Anna shuttle pad.

A quick glance at the lift board showed me that it was another two hours until the next personnel shuttle up to
Magellan,
although there was a cargo shuttle taking off in a few minutes.

Norfeldt waved me to a seat. "Take a load off, Emmy. Bet five quid you didn't get her phone code."

"Done. But that was a sucker bet, Major." I pulled the slip of paper out of my pocket and waved it, just out of reach. "If I didn't have her number, I wouldn't have bet."

The Dutchman nodded as he reached for his wallet. "Good point. I'll take it off you later, at poker."

I ignored the attempted distraction. "What are you really up to, Major?"

The Dutchman eyed me slyly.
"
Moi?
Nothing in particular, Emmy. Just getting ready to be the sacrificial lamb." He took a deep breath. "I'm going to get myself and my special team the hell on
Magellan,
and we're going to take a ride out via SolGate to AlphaCeeGate and then the new Gate—for once not being locked up as though we're contagious—after which, you, the big Hebe, and I are going to climb into our scout, and peacefully go out to meet the Xenos, and then get our asses fried to a crisp, which will prove to the TW Council and the Navy beyond a doubt that there's no way to open communication with the Xenos, which will trigger a second Xeno War that humanity just might win, and will at least attempt to cover humanity's collective butt when we
do
run into some superior civilization." He leaned back against the wall. "Why do you ask?"

"Just curious." I looked over at Bar-El. "You're going along with this?"

"I . . . don't make those kinds of decisions, Lieutenant." Bar-El shook his head. "Not my department, sir."

"Second lieutenants don't sir first johns, jewboy." The Dutchman spat. "And you don't try to mess with Bar-El's head, Emmy. He's only provisional—his oath is to Metzada, not the Thousand Worlds. As long as he obeys orders and doesn't make any trouble, his paychecks and/or his Service life insurance goes to paying Metzada's trade deficit."

"Correct, Lieutenant." Bar-El nodded slowly. "I wouldn't want there to be any misunderstanding."

"Understood."

"Two hours to liftoff." The Dutchman stood, pulling a deck of cards out of his tunic pocket. "Let's get aboard, see if there's some money around. At least we don't get isolated on this one, thank God."

"Huh?"

The Dutchman handed the flimsy back to me. "Reread the orders, Emmy. Looks like Dom didn't want to either leave us alone for the voyage out or get locked in with us—suspending of nonintercourse rules doesn't mean you get to bed the girl. All it means is that we're human, for once."

III

There may be places where a Service officer is made to feel less at home than in a Navy battlecruiser's wardroom, but, if so, I don't want to know about them.

Part of it is prejudice. Perhaps on both sides: we tend to think of the Navy as a bunch of pasty-faced, soft-bellied, effete automatons; they think we're crude and rude past understanding or forgiveness.

Mmm . . . maybe that isn't prejudice, after all.

I think, though, that we put each other on, at least a bit. Sitting at the first officer's table, I decided that under normal circumstances, this assortment of ensigns, j.g.s, and full lieutenants wouldn't wear
that
much cologne; after just a couple of weeks, it'd surely foul
Magellan's
air conditioning.

But I did say it goes both ways.

"More roast?" Ferret-faced Lieutenant Hardesty smiled with patently false geniality, dabbing at the corners of his mouth with his napkin. "You seem to be dreadfully hungry, Lieutenant von du Mark, almost to the point of . . . oh, never mind." Since Commander Bender was on watch, the head of the table had gone to Hardesty, along with the obligation to try to make me uncomfortable under the guise of being a good host.

There really isn't a lot of precedent for social protocol between Navy and CS people aboard a Navy ship, but we were improvising just fine, thank you, to the credit of both services.

"Why, thank you, my dear Hardesty," I said, lifting my plate to accept his unintended offer to carve. "If you would, a bit of well-done? Blood-rare beef is so . . . dreadfully, dreadfully barbaric. Wouldn't you say?" Since the Navy was going to treat me like something that crawled out from the gutter, I had two options: either be sloppy enough to nauseate them, or even more after-
you
-my-dear-Alphonse than they were.

Now, while I can be messy, the Dutchman was holding up the Service's dignity from that end: over at the captain's table—as senior CS officer present, his status was with-but-after Captain Arnheim and the ambassador—puffing on a cigar, the Dutchman was hacking away a piece of roast with one of the spare Fairbairn knives. Not his own knife; you use your own assault knife
only
on something living you want to make dead in a hurry.

With a shadow of a scowl, Hardesty took up the carving knife and started slicing.

I guess I just could have let it all slide. Akiva Bar-El didn't care. He just eyed me soberly, with perhaps a hint of amusement, while he continued putting away enough calories to power a small city. Occasionally he'd let himself go enough to shake his head and mutter something suspiciously like
goyisher kopf,
but nobody chose to acknowledge that. Safer? Not really; the big man wasn't in the service to take offense at a few words and end up cashiered for fighting. But he didn't find it necessary to advertise that fact, and I didn't see any need to point it out to the Navy folks.

Hardesty finished slicing, and stacked enough beef on my plate to feed two Akiva Bar-Els.

I wielded my silverware deftly enough to make Mother proud, and nibbled at a forkful. "I say, Hardesty, that's most generous of you. Allow me to return the favor." I picked up the platter of lyonnaise potatoes that Hardesty had been glancing at—apparently he liked lyonnaise potatoes, but was exercising admirable restraint. I stopped myself. "No, no, I'm dreadfully sorry. My apologies," I said, helping myself to a heap.

Sitting next to me, Ensign Rodriguez' plate contained only a politeness helping, which he'd barely touched. "Oh, I see you've finished yours. Ensign. Please," I said, plopping some onto his plate.

I took a mouthful and washed it down with a long drink of water. "When one leads such a . . . sedentary life, it must be difficult to keep in shape." I eyed Rodriguez' waistline, which, to be fair, sported only a tiny potbelly. "Very difficult."

Physical fitness is another bone of contention between Service and Navy personnel, as though we need one. Now, the Navy folks do try to stay in reasonable physical condition—TLGA, transient low-gee aesthenia, is a chronic danger—but they don't have to stay in top shape the way Service people do. Nor are they encouraged to display the kind of arrogant cockiness that comes with CS khakis.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Captain Arnheim repressing a grin, and then giving out the tiniest of sighs. I've always found Navy ship commanders to be a different sort than regular officers and files. I guess it's that they have to exercise a bit of independent judgment, be able to think for themselves. That's the way ship command had worked for millennia; by the time you can send home for orders, you'd better have made the right decision anyway.

Although I do have to wonder how four stripes can turn a humorless automaton like Lieutenant Commander Bender into someone like Captain Arnheim. What do they do to them? Drugs? Electric shock? Tell them they don't have to play drop-the-soap anymore? I guess that makes ship commanders sort of kindred spirits to CS men, although I'm sure they'd deny it and I'd definitely rather not be quoted as admitting that.

But I think it's true. "Precedent is no excuse for failure" is something I would have expected Captain Arnheim to understand.

In any case, it was easy to figure why none of the officers at my table was choosing to take overt offense at my occasional veiled insults: they were under orders to avoid incidents, and you don't take offense at what a dead man says. The assumption they were making was that the Dutchman and I, once we hit the new system, were going to button ourselves into our scout and go out and get blown away by the locals, which would allow
Magellan
to Gate back and pick up the rest of the Fleet—in effect, using the Dutchman and me as a tripwire.

I sipped more of the water, wondering if Janine had known that that was the plan, or if Vitelli had kept her in the dark. Perhaps even the light bit of flirting was intended to distract me from thinking things through; you don't want the Judas goat chewing through the rope.

No complaints, mind; the universe is a nasty place.

My head said there wasn't anything to worry about, not more than usual. The Dutchman wasn't worried; his consumption of booze was up—which, by the way, is the difference between a heavy drinker like Norfeldt and an alcoholic like my Aunt Gertel.

There had to be some sort of fix in, but what? There was always one possibility: there wasn't any trick to it at all, and this was going to be both Norfeldt's and my last assignment.

One of the reasons they teach you martial arts at the Academy is for the mental discipline. Now, I was no expert, but I could reach in and find the quiet center, just abaft of my solar plexus.

Unfortunately, my quiet center was just as fucking scared as the rest of me.

But damned if I'd let the Navy know that. "Allow me to pour you some more water, Lieutenant Chang," I said, picking up the water pitcher and pouring slowly, careful of the Coriolis effect. My hand was steady as a rock.

Not my gut; just my hand.

Enough of this,
I decided. It was about time that Norfeldt and I had a face-to-face. Right after supper.

But first, a bit of diversion. "Hardesty, Hardesty . . . damn me, but that name does sound familiar. We used to have a gardener named Hardesty, but he was arrested for molesting little girls. I'm
sure
you're not related. . . ."

I found the Dutchman in the armory. He had kicked the Marine armorer out, and was busy checking the action on a Korriphila 10mm pistol, of all things. I could have understood it if it was the forty-four Magnum—that was part security blanket for the fat man—but the Dutchman's often gone on about how if you put decent loads in an automatic, it's more likely to jam than fire right.

I disagree—for my taste, the Korriphila Ten Thousand is the best conventional pistol made, a hair better than the Ruger Ultra Blackhawk II, which is a revolver, not an automatic—but my preference is just a lay opinion; I don't have the Dutchman's knowledge of or interest in single-shot slugthrowers. I prefer automatic weapons—wireguns, miniguns, whatever—anything where you hose instead of aim. Aiming means you can miss; hosing is a lot more accurate, in the long run.

Norfeldt opened a box of 10mm Glaser Safety Slugs and began to thumb them into a clip.

"Why the Glasers?"

He pretended not to hear the question.

Again: I'm no armorer. One thing I
do
know, though, is that loading an automatic with the old-fashioned Glaser Safety Slugs that the Dutchman prefers for revolvers isn't a good idea—while Glasers have great stopping power and create enough
Sturm and Drang
to scare to death whoever they don't hit, the oversized charges can jam up the action after only three, maybe four rounds.

If your preference is for semiexotic ammunition, much better to use Geco-BATs or Expandos—or Penetrators, if you're either planning on shooting through walls or more concerned with the size of the hole you blast through the target than with stopping power.

"Major . . ." I didn't bother trying to keep the reproach out of my voice. "What are you doing? If I'm not being nosy, sir."

"You're being nosy." He set the clip down on the table in front of him, then picked up the empty pistol, working the slide. "But pull up a chair, kid. I'm checking out some weaponry—what does it look like?" He followed his own advice, lowering his bulk into a too-small chair.

"Weaponry? You think we're going to get in close enough so that a pistol is going to do any good ?" A pistol isn't a silly weapon for intership warfare—it's not that
good.

I shook my head. "Now, if you want to talk about jury-rigging something on the scout so we can get some decent free-space use out of the weapons turret—"

He snorted. "There are three very large marines on watch on either side of the launching-bay lock. The orders are that everyone except the guards—particularly CS personnel—stays on this side."

He slammed the clip into the pistol's butt with a solid
chunk.
One of the Korriphila's flaws is that the cartridges are held slantwise in the clip—it can only hold seven of the oversize rounds, giving you a maximum of eight if you carry one chambered.

"You seem to be forgetting that this isn't a regular contact, Major. We're not supposed to decide whether or not it's safe to open contact with the Xenos—we open contact with them, period."

Norfeldt shook his head, several of his chins waggling in syncopation. "You'll grow up someday, Emmy—if you're lucky. There's lots of ways to communicate. Think about it for a moment. Way back when the original UNEG team tried to open contact with the Xenos, what did they do?"

"Any reason to believe that they got creative?"

"No."

"Then it'd be like our own First Team operations; doctrine hasn't changed." I shrugged. "Standard doctrine is to take up an orbit and signal. Radio, message laser, blinking lights."

"Right. And what happened next?"

* * *

I tried to visualize it. Back then, there had been only one level of Gate, all deep in their gravity wells like Old SolGate. That was before we destroyed Old SolGate and put the present SolGate high in the gravity well, leaving the only path from Outside to Earth via the high-and-low AlphaCeeGates.

Well, that isn't strictly true. It is, at least theoretically, possible to travel from any Gradient One Gate to where new SolGate swings in orbit, somewhere—never mind exactly where—about halfway between the orbits
of Jupiter and Saturn. You'd have to hit the alien Gate just at the right angle, at just the right speed, of
course.

But, even so, you can't repeal the law of conservation of energy—it's not safe to travel through shortspace from a Gradient One Gate to a Gradient Two gate. Moving suddenly from deep in a gravity well to high up in another gravity well would cause you to lose energy; the Gradient Two Gates—new SolGate and Inbound AlphaCeeGate—are both high in their respective star's gravity wells. There's no effective direct route from any star to Sol except via Alpha.

Transfer from, say, Ophiucus A's tightly orbiting Gradient One Gate to New SolGate and it'll loose energy, freezing the vessel and all its occupants solid. Make the mistake of transferring from OphiGate to one of the even more tightly orbiting trapGates inside the orbit of Mercury, and the reappearing energy will fry you in microseconds, long before Sol does.

It had been simpler back then. The UNEG team had just cruised through Old SolGate to the new Gate, not needing to transfer via the fraternal-twin AlphaCeeGates.

They had looked at the new system, and listened and sniffed . . . and found something.

And then they had signaled. Peaceably—it would be impossible for a culture sufficiently advanced to be a danger to see a small scout as a threat. Stripped of its deetee tanks, the scout wasn't much larger than the first space
shuttle—which wasn't the
Columbia,
by the way: it
was the
Enterprise
; look it up—and couldn't have been mistaken for a warship.

So why had the Xenos attacked?

I looked over at the Dutchman. "I don't know, dammit."

"You're right."

"Huh?"

"You
don't
know," Norfeldt said. "And neither do I. But my guess is that they did something a lot like what that Vitelli is going to order the two or three of us to do."

"I think—"

"
Shut up
." I'd seen the Dutchman hostile before, but it was always . . . casual. Until now: now, his nostrils flared and his face grew beet-red.

"
I'll do the thinking around here, shithead.
You just obey orders like the good little boche you are, and keep your fucking mouth shut. We've got another two weeks until we hit the Xeno system—homeworld or not—and I want you in shape by then. You've been on vacation for too long. From now on, it's one full shift of workouts with Bar-El, every day—half in the low-gee gym, half in the skin gym. I've given him your training schedule. Just do it, don't think about it—that's an order, Lieutenant."

He looked at me. "I can't hear you, Mister."

"Aye, aye, sir. One question, though?"