Intrepid (32 page)

53

“Four minutes to close encounter,” the quartermaster said.

“Cut acceleration,” the captain ordered.

Kris went from near three hundred kilos to weighing nothing.

Vicky grabbed for the burp bag, held it clamped to her mouth for a while, then put it aside, still looking green.

The State Security colonel filled his bag. Gunny handed him another and it was half-filled before he finished.

Kris took in normal life out of the corner of her eye. She concentrated on the reports from the
Wasp
’s inertial platform.

“We are steady,” Sulwan reported.

“All hands,” the captain announced, “where you are is where you will stay. Do not even think of moving.” The inertial platform reported the
Wasp
steady to the tenth decimal place.

“Rotate Batteries 3 and 4 to minus thirty,” Kris ordered. The lasers on the bottom of the
Wasp
angled themselves down as far as they could. “Rotate ship up thirty.”

Now the
Wasp
herself nosed up 30 degrees, bringing the lower two batteries zero on to the approaching liner. When it came time to flip ship during the precious second fragments the
Tourin
was in range, the
Wasp
would only have to do 150 degrees.

The actual close encounter would happen too fast for human participation. Kris, Nelly, and Vicky had gone over and over the actual plans for that fleeting second. Those plans were laid into the computer. . . waiting.

When it came time to execute, only Nelly could do it fast enough. Nelly would fire the two lower batteries. Nelly would rotate the ship, using full power throughout the spin, as Sulwan had approved. Nelly would fire the top two lasers up the kilt of the departing liner.

Humans decided what to do, but Nelly would do it.

Except that Kris had a red button under her palm.

At the first sign that the plan had gone awry, Kris would mash the button. And Nelly would find she had no plans to execute. Probably, Nelly wouldn’t remember she’d ever had a plan. With Nelly, you could never tell.

No question, Kris would remember that there had been a plan and that she had aborted it for some reason. Or had tried to abort it. Could something pass from her eye, to her brain to her hand to the red button in anything like the time they had?

She would find out soon enough.

The distance to the
Tourin
now counted down at a mad pace. The millions of klicks passed in reasonable time. When the count reached hundreds of thousands, the numbers raced. The last five hundred thousand klicks passed in a breath.

Kris quit breathing as the count passed a hundred thousand.

If Kris had to call it, Batteries 3 and 4 fired at a range of thirty-five to thirty thousand klicks.

Then the ship began to flip like a mad dervish.

She fought dizziness but refused to close her eyes.

The
Wasp
steadied for less than a heartbeat. Lasers 1 and 2 fired.

The
Tourin
raced on, seeming untouched by their efforts, unmarred by the lasers’ caresses.

Kris’s eyes widened at the thought of total failure.

A spark shot out from the liner. A split second later, the ship seemed to twist off its long axis.

Then, in the blink of an eye there was nothing left of the liner and five thousand human beings but glowing dust cooling through red and yellow into violets and blue.

“Holy God,” someone whispered on the bridge.

Kris sat there.

“Well, I’m glad that’s over with,” came from the back of the bridge, no doubt the State Security colonel’s opinion.

From around Kris’s neck, a suddenly little girl’s voice asked, “Kris, did I just kill five thousand people?”

What could Kris tell her computer?

“I’m sorry, Kris,” Vicky said, reaching out to stroke Kris’s elbow. “But it’s not your fault. You did everything you could not to have this happen.”

“Did I?” Kris said, then mashed her commlink. “Everyone who’s been following this last evolution, save all your data. There will be an inquiry into it.”

“Whose?” Vicky asked.

“Mine,” Kris snapped. “Captain Drago, if you will, put one gee on this boat to help with saving data.”

“Sulwan, one gee if you please.”

Kris took on weight and stood. “Captain Drago. Captain Krätz, Jack.” Kris looked around and found faces missing. She tapped her commlink. “Colonel Cortez, Penny, and Abby, please report to my Tac Room. Professor mFumbo, you come, too.”

“Yes” and “As you wish” answered her commlink. “Why?” came on the bridge from Captain Drago.

“Because I am sick and tired of hearing that a Longknife did this or that or the other, all during the same supposed whatever. I’m tired of not knowing who did what to whom. This time, so help me God, I’m going to know just exactly what happened, and if Peterwald State Security wants to say one thing and Wardhaven intelligence patches together another story, at least I will know the truth. You understand me?”

It was Captain Krätz’s turn to step forward and face the fire in Kris’s eyes. “That assumes that, using the data we have, we can actually tell you what happened.”

That took a little of the firestorm out of Kris’s sails. But not much. “We have the best instrumentation of any ship in space, between what Captain Drago has pirated from whoever is his employer and whatever the boffins have ripped off from their universities. Maybe you can’t tell me what I did and how it happened that five thousand lives were put to the torch. But I want you to face me, with your hands on the best information that these instruments can yield, and tell me that. You hear me.”

“Yes, we hear you,” Jack said, coming forward. “You’ve got a lot of people on this board you’ve set up. I understand the two captains. Maybe even the colonel. But me, Penny, and Abby?”

“You and Penny are trained criminal investigators. Abby’s the board’s secretary. That ought to make her job easier.”

Jack didn’t look like he liked what he’d heard. But he looked even less eager to argue with Kris at the moment.

“Now, if you will excuse me,” Kris said, “I have to talk to a father who pleaded for me to save his son’s life. Somewhere I’ve got to find the words to explain why I killed his boy.”

“Kris, that’s cruel,” Jack cut in. “Don’t do it.”

“When somebody makes you prince, you can gainsay me,” Kris shot back. “Until then, shut up.”

The bridge crew stood aside as Kris marched out.

54

The silence from Nelly was suffocating as Kris strode the passageways of the
Wasp
, trying to locate Prometheus’s stateroom. When Kris asked for the room assigned to him, Nelly told her, but she offered no directions, did none of the things that Kris had become used to getting from Nelly without asking.

Nelly’s voice was normal, but clearly, she was deep in calculating something. Examining something. Deciding something.

That, or maybe the Nelly Kris had known was gone.

Then it got worse.

Kris found the room, but the door was locked.

No one answered when she called inside. Nothing. Nada. No noise. She flagged down a boffin to make sure it was the right room, that the stranger from Xanadu had indeed been assigned it. The scientist snagged two Marines, who started working on the door.

Was it an accident that Gunny arrived before the door gave way?

And Gunny’s wide shoulders blocked Kris’s view of the room.

“You don’t need to go in there, ma’am. I know you seen dead and death enough. There’s nothing pretty about a man who hanged himself.”

Kris backed off, fighting the undignified urge to pound upon Gunny. She looked up at Gunny Brown’s dark, lined face. “You think he could have hanged himself if I hadn’t ordered one gee on the boat?” Kris asked, adding one more notch to her kills for today.

“Ma’am, a man who’s made up his mind can be bare-ass naked and kill himself. You ever seen a man bite off his tongue and bleed out in zero gee. It ain’t pretty.”

Gunny put his arm around Kris’s shoulder and turned her gently around. Kris had seen men do that to their grown sons and daughters. Father had never done that to her. “Now, Lieutenant, you done set yourself a real tough row to hoe. Why don’t you go face that jury, as close as you can get to peers, and let them give you what truth they can about this day.”

Kris started back.

KRIS, I CANNOT FIGURE IT OUT.

WHAT, NELLY?

WE DID EVERYTHING RIGHT, BUT WE KILLED ALL OF THOSE PEOPLE. I KILLED ALL OF THOSE PEOPLE.

IT’S WE, NELLY, YOU AND I. I TOLD YOU WHAT TO DO. YOU DID IT. YOU WERE ONLY FOLLOWING ORDERS.

YOU KNOW THAT IS NOT A VALID DEFENSE. AT LEAST NOT IF YOU LOSE.

I KNOW, NELLY, BUT YOU HAVE TO REALIZE, SOMETIMES, WHEN YOU DO EVERYTHING RIGHT, IT ALL GOES WRONG.

THAT DOES NOT COMPUTE. A + B IS SUPPOSED TO EQUAL C, AND IF A AND B ARE GOOD, HOW CAN C BE BAD?

NELLY, I DON’T KNOW. IT DOESN’T SEEM RIGHT. IT ISN’T FAIR, BUT SOMETIMES, THAT IS JUST THE WAY IT IS. YOU DO EVERYTHING, WANTING THE BEST FOR EVERYONE, AND IT JUST BLOWS UP IN YOUR FACE.

THAT CANNOT BE RIGHT. I TRIED AND TRIED AND TRIED TO CALCULATE ALL OF THAT, AND IT JUST DOES NOT COME OUT. IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME OR MY CIRCUITS?

NO, NELLY. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU. PROBABLY NOTHING WRONG WITH ME. IT’S JUST SOMETHING WE HUMANS HAVE FOUND OUT.

NOW I THINK I UNDERSTAND SOMETHING I HAVE READ.

WHAT IS THAT?

SOMETIMES SHIT HAPPENS.

YES, NELLY, SOMETIMES, NO MATTER HOW HARD YOU TRY, IT DOES.

Kris found herself facing the passageway to her staff room. Down that hall, through that door, were the men and women she’d given the job of measuring her soul, her conscience.

And yet, now that she and Nelly had had this little talk, Kris didn’t feel so in need of anyone else’s approval. Somehow, in facing Nelly’s first pangs of conscience, she had found her own measurement of right and wrong.

Did she really want to hear what these people had to say?

Unbidden, a question floated to the top of her mind.
What would Grampa Ray do?
Yes, what would King Raymond feel about the death of a few thousand people? It probably would cool the war someone was trying to start. That was good. The five thousand was sadly unavoidable.

Greenfeld State Security certainly agreed with him.

But that way lay madness and easy choices that would take Kris. . . Kris really didn’t know or want to know where that would take her.

She had urged Grampa Ray to accept the kingship. Asked him to help her generation make it through the tough times ahead. He had said it was time for them to make their own mistakes.

Had he really been dodging the crown for another reason? Did he know how burned and blackened his own soul was? Had he chased the easy decisions as deep as he wanted to go and now hoped to retire to some quiet life that demanded nothing more from him than choosing to golf or sail today.

What had Kris done?

Kris had started the day just trying to save Vicky’s dad’s life and avoid a war. That had taken her to demanding to know why five thousand innocents should die for that one life.

Now she was wondering if her great-grandfather had his head on straight enough to rule 150 or so planets.

All Kris wanted to do was go to bed and pull a pillow over her head. Instead, she marched down the hall to face a panel of her chosen judges.

Kris slipped into the staff room and settled into the seat closest to the door. Heads turned as she came in, took her in and her choice of seating, and went back to talking over what they were studying. Maybe their conversation was lower. Maybe their backs were more turned to her. But she was left alone, a ghost at her own funeral.

But Kris was never one to do nothing. NELLY, HAVE YOU LOOKED AT THE VIDEOS FROM THE BOFFINS’ TAKE?

NO, KRIS.

WHY NOT?

BECAUSE CHIEF BENI DOWNLOADED IT ALL TO A STAND-ALONE SYSTEM THAT HE HAS COMPLETE CONTROL OF. THAT SYSTEM IS WHAT EVERYONE THERE IS LOOKING AT.

So they didn’t trust Kris, or Nelly, or both of them. They’d grabbed a copy of the data raw and unedited and were using it for their own study. Interesting. Would that hold up in a court? In a court like Vicky hinted Greenfeld had?

Well, girl, you wanted a full court. Why are you so surprised that the people you have around you know how to give you a full and honest court just like you asked for?

Kris folded her hand and wished Tommy had been in her life long enough to teach her how to pray. When she had gotten them into messes like this, praying seemed to help him feel better.

Jack glanced her way. “You said we’d have an hour to look this stuff over. You know, in any normal investigation, this would take a couple of months.”

“Yes, but you only have an hour,” Kris answered back.

“Any chance you could go talk some more with that fellow from Xanadu?” Colonel Cortez asked.

“Not much of one. He hanged himself.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the colonel said.

“So am I,” Kris agreed.

The women and men at that end of the room continued their quiet discussion for a few more minutes, hunching over screens on the wall or flimsies that sailors or scientists rushed in to them.

Finally, Colonel Cortez stepped away from the screen, stretched, and said, “Those pictures pretty much settle it for me. What about you?” There were general nods from the others.

Colonel Cortez turned formally to Kris. “Lieutenant Longknife, if you will take your seat.” With an open hand, he directed her to the middle seat on the long side of the table. He himself took the same seat across from her. Captains Drago and Krätz sat on either side of him. Jack and Penny took the chairs at Drago’s elbows. Abby sat at Krätz’s side with a full court-recording suite in front of her.

Where had Abby gotten all that gear?
Kris wondered, then answered her own question.
Of course, I’ve got a judge aboard for civil cases. She’d have a recording set.

Kris had wanted the
Wasp
outfitted for every eventuality that might arise beyond the rim of human space. She’d brought a judge. She’d brought a court.

Just what all do I have aboard?
Kris suspected she was about to find out.

Colonel Cortez cleared his throat. “By a strange quirk of fate, my date of rank is a week earlier than Captain Krätz’s. . .”

“And lots earlier than mine,” Drago put in.

“So I am presiding over this Court of Inquiry. While our findings have been expedited, it is the opinion of this court that more time would not result in a different decision. . . and would leave findings open to questions of data manipulation. I want that entered into the record as a challenge to anyone who attempts to reopen this matter and review our decision.”

For an infantry officer, Cortez seems in full control of the global reality of the situation,
Kris thought, but said nothing and schooled her face to an unremarkable mask.

“For the purpose of this investigation, the court has relied heavily on the Ultra High Density Optical Scanner of the scientific task force aboard the
Wasp
, as recorded by the Super High Speed Visual Spectrum Recorder. These were brought aboard by the scientists to record the fine details of stellar events.”

Cortez paused and studied some handwritten notes in front of him. “Here I must ask a question of an unusual witness. Lieutenant Longknife, can your personal computer bear witness?”

“I believe so. Nelly, you understand that you must tell the truth as you see it, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

“I understand the oath, Kris. Colonel Cortez, I promise that I will do that.”

Kris would not have been surprised if Nelly had called upon God to bear witness to her truthfulness, but the computer left it at that.

“Miss Nelly,” Cortez said, “were you aware of the advanced scanner and visual recorder being on board and did you review any of their data during the close encounter with the liner
Tourin
?”

There was only a slight pause before Nelly spoke. “I have in storage the
Wasp
’s full inventory. As such, I know these items. They are listed by name with no further information about their capabilities. I have no information about their mounting or of any data they acquired. The
Wasp
’s central computer had no feed from them and, as such, I had access to no input from them. Put another way, sir, I knew these devices were aboard. I did not know they were active, and I saw nothing from them during the close encounter with the liner
Tourin
.”

“Thank you, Miss Nelly,” the colonel said. “That resolved the only matter left unanswered for the board. Lieutenant Longknife, may I direct your attention to the wall behind you.”

Kris turned in her chair. She found herself staring at a stern view of the
Tourin
. It filled the wall behind her in spectacular detail.

“This is photo 34,215 of the pictures provided to this court,” Cortez said, and now Kris could spot that number up in the left-hand corner. Below it was a notation: RANGE, 20,412.

“The photos before this one show only the approaching ship or the blurred image of it as the
Wasp
flipped ship. This photo is the first one that interests the court. Lieutenant, could you describe in your own words what you see in it based upon your plan of attack to damage the liner while causing as little harm as possible to its passengers and crew.”

Kris wanted to say,
Not fair. You’ve had an hour to look at this picture. And besides, you can’t make me my own prosecutor
.

But the picture drew her. She stood, taking it in and knowing exactly what she was seeing.

The undamaged engines showed large white dots of plasma shooting from the huge mouths of rockets. It was easy to spot the two, no three engines that had been sliced off. Plasma shot out from the tiny holes at the end of the containment field. Two other engines showed a skew of white fire where the sides of the engines had been lopped off. Kris described that to the board.

“Is that the damage you had aimed for?” Captain Krätz asked.

“Basically, yes. I’d hoped to cut all five of them off like we did the first three, maybe nick the four inner ones a bit, but this was what we aimed for, and I think this falls within our desired results.”

“Do you see anything else?” Captain Drago asked.

“I don’t think so. Nelly, do you see anything?”

“It is hard to tell from a single picture, Kris, but note the occlusion of the stars to the right of the motors. The ship could be heeling over to the right. I would need further pictures to establish a trend.”

“This is the next photos, 34,216,” Cortez said. The range notation was 22,619. It showed the same damage to the engines. It was hard to tell if it showed more heel.

“And photo 34,219.” Jumping ahead three pictures, and at a range of 29,239, it was still hard for Kris to decide if the ship was heeling or if it was just a function of camera angle.

“Nelly, did you have any visual on the
Tourin
during the close encounter?” Colonel Cortez asked.

“I was getting pictures at about half the pace of these, but the resolution was much worse. Does the court have one of the ship’s visuals?”

“Yes we do,” Cortez said. On the short wall facing Kris, a stern view of the liner appeared. The glare from the working engines showed as a single large dot.

“So you had no way to gauge the damage Pulse Lasers 3 and 4 had done,” Captain Krätz said.

“That is correct, sir,” Nelly said. “At that instant, I was operating on the assumption that our first two lasers had missed, and the only hope we had was the second two.”

“Thank you, Nelly,” Cortez said. “Lieutenant Longknife, did you have similar assumptions?”

“Colonel Cortez, I had no assumptions at the time. It was happening too fast for me to observe, review, or make a revision to anything I’d planned.”

“That does not surprise me. Let’s see the next picture.” Photo 34,220 had a range notation of 31,445. Three more engines had been cut away from the left-hand lower engine grouping.

There was no evidence that Battery 1 had hit the
Tourin.

“And the next picture,” Cortez said.

The
Tourin
was tearing itself apart.

“Here we see that Battery 1 did not miss,” Captain Drago took over the narrative, “but rather sliced through the damaged area left by Batteries 3 and 4. Meeting no resistance, it was free to penetrate into the power plant and even to the reactor area. The result is catastrophic.”