Prisoners of Tomorrow (65 page)

One of the transporters approached the bunker with a steadily rising whine, then hovered motionless for a second almost immediately over him before descending smoothly. Its rear door slid open to reveal the lean, swarthy figure of Captain Sirocco in helmet and battledress, still wearing his flak-vest. He jumped out nimbly while the transporter was still six feet above the ground, and ambled up to Colman. Behind his ample black moustache, the easy-going lines of his face betrayed as little as ever, but his eyes were twinkling. “Pretty good, Steve,” he said without preamble as he turned with his hands on his hips to survey the indignant scowls from the captured “enemy” officers standing sullenly by the bunker. “I don’t think we’ll get any Brownie points for it though. We broke just about every rule in the book.” Colman grunted. He hadn’t expected much else. Sirocco raised his eyebrows and inclined his head in a way that could have meant anything. “Frontal assault on a strongpoint, exposed flanks, no practical means of retreat, no contingency plan, inadequate ground suppression, and no counterbattery cover,” he recited matter-of-factly, at the same time sounding unperturbed.

“What about leaving your chin wide open?” Colman asked. “Isn’t there anything in the rules about that?”

“Depends who you are. For D Company all things are relative.”

“Ever think of making a new seat for your pants out of part of that flak-jacket?” Colman asked after a pause. “You’re probably gonna need it.”

“Ah, who gives a shit?” Sirocco looked up. “Anyhow, won’t be much longer before we find out.”

Colman’ followed his gaze. An armored VIP carrier bearing a general’s insignia on its nose was angling toward them. Colman shifted his M32 to the other shoulder and straightened up to watch. “Smarten it up,” he called to the rest of Third Platoon, who were smoking, talking, and lounging in groups by the stream and around the bunker. The cigarettes were ground out under the heavy soles of combat boots, the chattering died away, and the groups shuffled themselves into tidier ranks.

“On what did you base your analysis of the situational display, Sergeant?” Sirocco asked, speaking in a clipped, high-pitched voice mimicking the formal tones of Colonel Wesserman, who was General Portney’s aide. He injected a note of suspicion and accusation into the voice. “Was Corporal Swyley instrumental in the formulation of your tactical evaluation?” The question was bound to arise; the image analysis routines run at Brigade would have yielded nothing to justify the attack.

“No, sir,” Colman replied stiffly, keeping his eyes fixed straight ahead. “Corporal Swyley was manning the com-pack. He would not have been assigned to ELINT analysis. He’s color-blind.”

“Then how do you explain your extraordinary conclusions?”

“I suppose we just guessed lucky, sir.” Sirocco sighed. “I suppose I’ll have to put it in writing that I authorized the assault on my own initiative and without any substantiating data.” He cocked his head at Colman. “Happen to know anyone around here who makes a good pair of pants?”

Ahead of them the door of the VIP carrier opened to expose the rotund form of Colonel Wesserman. His florid face was even more florid than usual and swelled into a deep purple at the neck. He seemed to be choking with suppressed fury.

“I guess he doesn’t have a nose for the sweet smell of success,” Colman murmured as they watched.

Sirocco twirled one side of his moustache pensively for a second or two. “Success is like a fart,” he said. “Only your own smells nice.”

CHAPTER TWO

A sudden change in the colors and format of one of the displays being presented around him in the monitor room of the Drive Control Subcenter caught Bernard Fallows’s eye and dismissed other thoughts from his mind. The display was one of several associated with Number 5 Group of the Primary Fuel Delivery System and related to one of the batteries of enormous hydrogen-feed boost pumps located in the tail section of the vessel, five miles from where Fallows was sitting.

“What’s happening on Five-E, Horace?” he asked the empty room around him.

“Low-level trend projection,” the subcenter executive computer replied through a small grille set to one side of Fallow’s console. “Booster five-sub-three’s looking as if it’s going to start running hot again. Correlation integral sixty-seven, check function positive, expansion index eight-zero.”

“Reading at index six?”

“Insignificant.”

Fallows took in the rest of the information from the screen. The changes that the computers had detected were tiny—the merest beginnings of a trend which, if it continued at the present rate, wouldn’t approach anything serious for a month or more. With only another three months to go before the ship reached Chiron there was no cause for alarm since the rest of the pump-group had enough design margin to make up the difference even without the backup. But even so, there was little doubt that Merrick would insist on the primary’s being stripped down to have its bearings reground, alignment rechecked, and rotor rebalanced again. They had been through that routine twice already in the three months that the main drive had been firing. That meant another week of working in near-zero g and klutzing around in heavy-duty protective suits on the wrong side of the stern radiation shield. “Bloody pump,” Fallows muttered sourly.

“Since a pump is not an organic system, I presume the expression is an expletive,” Horace observed chattily.

“Aw, shuddup.” The computer returned obediently to its meditations.

Fallows sat back in his chair and cast a routine eye around the monitor room. Everything seemed to be running smoothly at the crew stations beyond the glass partition behind his console, and the other displays confirmed that all else was as it should be. The reserve tank to Number 2 vernier motor had been recharged after a slight course-correction earlier and was checking out at “Ready” again. All the fuel, coolant, primary and standby power, hydraulic, pneumatic, gas, oil, life-support, and instrumentation subsystems servicing the Drive Section were performing well within limits. Way back near the tail, the banks of gigantic fusion reactors were gobbling up the 35 million tons of hydrogen that had been magnetically ramscooped out of space throughout the twenty-year voyage and converting over two tons of its mass into energy every second to produce the awesome, 1.5-mile-diameter blast of radiation and reaction products that would have to burn for six months to slow the 140-million-ton mass of the
Mayflower II
down from its free-cruise velocity.

The ship had left Earth with only sufficient fuel on board to accelerate it to cruising speed and had followed a course through the higher-density concentrations of hydrogen to collect what it needed to slow down again.

Fallows glanced at the clock in the center of the console. Less than an hour before Walters was due to take over the watch. Then he would have two days to himself before coming back on duty. He closed his eyes for a moment and savored the thought.

Only three months to go! His children had often asked him why a young man in his prime would turn his back on everything familiar and exchange twenty years of his life for a one-way journey to Alpha Centauri. They had good reason, since their futures had been decided more than a little by his decision. Most of the
Mayflower II’
s
thirty thousand occupants were used to being asked that question. Fallows usually replied that he had grown disillusioned by the spectacle of the world steadily rearming itself toward the same level of insanity that had preceded the devastation of much of North America and Europe and the end of the Soviet empire in the brief holocaust of 2021, and that he had left it all behind to seek a new start somewhere else. It was one of the standard answers, given as much for self-reassurance as anything else. But in his private moments Fallows knew that he really didn’t believe it. He tried to pretend that he didn’t remember the real reason.

He had been born almost at the end of the Lean Years following the war, so he didn’t remember about that period, but his father had told him about the times when fifty million people lived amid shantytown squalor around the blackened and twisted skeletons of their cities and huddled in lines in the snow for their ration of soup and bread at government field-kitchens; about his mother laboring fifteen hours a day cutting boards for prefabricated houses to put two skimpy meals of beef broth and rice from the Chinese food ships on the table each day and to buy one pair of utility-brand pressed-paper shoes per person every six months; about his older brother killed in the fighting with the hordes that had come plundering from the Caribbean and from the south.

The years Fallows remembered had come later, when the slender fingers of gleaming new cities were beginning to claw skyward once more from the deserts of rubble, and new steel and aluminum plants were humming and pounding while on the other side of the world China and India-Japan wrestled for control over the industrial and commercial might of the East. Those had been stirring years, vibrant years, inspiring years. Fallows remembered the floodlit parades in Washington on the Fourth of July—the color and the splendor of the massed bands, the columns of marching soldiers with uniforms glittering and flags flying, the anthems and hymns rising on the voices of tens of thousands packed into Capitol Square, where the famous building had once stood. He remembered strutting into a high-school ball in his just acquired uniform of the American New Order Youth Corps and pretending haughtily not to notice the admiring looks following him wherever he went. How he had bragged to his envious friends after the first weekend of wargaming with the Army in the New Mexico desert . . . the exhilaration when America reestablished a permanently manned base on the Moon.

Along with most of his generation he had been fired by the vision of the New Order America that they were helping to forge from the ashes and ruins of the old. Even stronger than what had gone before, morally and spiritually purer, and confident in the knowledge of its God-ordained mission, it would rise again as an impregnable sanctuary to preserve the legacy of Western culture from the corrosive flood of heathen decadence and affluent brashness sweeping across the far side of the globe. So the credo had run. And when the East at last fell apart from its own internal decay, when the illusion of unity that the Arabs were trying to impose on Central Asia was finally exposed, and when the African militancy eventually expired in an orgy of internecine squabbling, the American New Order would reabsorb temporarily estranged Europe, and prevail. That had been the quest.

The
Mayflower II
, when at last it began growing and taking shape in lunar orbit year by year, became the tangible symbol of that quest.

Although he had been only eight years old in 2040, he could remember clearly the excitement caused by the news that a signal had come in from a spacecraft called the
Kuan-yin,
which had been launched in 2020, just before the war broke out. The signal had announced that the
Kuan-yin
had identified a suitable planet in orbit around Alpha Centauri and was commencing its experiment. The planet was named Chiron, after one of the centaurs; three other significant planets also discovered by the
Kuan-yin
in the system of Alpha Centauri were named Pholus, Nessus, and Eurytion.

Ten years went by while North America and Europe completed their recovery, and the major Eastern powers settled their rivalries. At the end of that period New America extended from Alaska to Panama, Greater Europe had incorporated Russia, Estonia, Latvia, and the Ukraine as separate nations, and China had come to dominate an Eastern Asiatic Federation stretching from Pakistan to the Bering Strait. All three of the major powers had commenced programs to reexpand into space at more or less the same time, and since each claimed a legitimate interest in the colony on Chiron and mistrusted the other two, each embarked on the construction of a starship with the aim of getting there first to protect its own against interference from the others.

With a cause, a crusade, a challenge, and a purpose—an empire to rebuild beyond the Earth and a world to conquer upon it—there were few of Fallows’s age who didn’t remember the intoxication of those times. And with the
Mayflower II
growing in the lunar sky as a symbol of it all, the dream of flying with the ship and of being a part of the crusade to secure Chiron against the Infidel became for many the ultimate ambition. The lessons of discipline and self-sacrifice that had been learned during the Lean Years served to bring the
Mayflower II
to completion two years ahead of its nearest rival, and so it came about that Bernard Fallows at the age of twenty-eight had manfully shaken his father’s hand and kissed his tearful mother farewell before being blasted upward from a shuttle base in Arizona to join the lunar transporter that would bear him on the first stage of his crusade to carry the American New Order to the stars.

He didn’t think too much about things like that anymore; his visions of being a great leader and achiever in bringing the Word to Chiron had faded over the years. And instead . . . what? Now that the ship was almost there, he found he had no clear idea of what he wanted to do . . . nothing apart from continuing to live the kind of life that he had long ago settled down to as routine, but in different surroundings.

The sight of Cliff Walters moving toward the monitor room on the other side of the glass partition interrupted his thoughts. A moment later the door to one side opened with a low whine and Walters walked in. Fallows swung his chair round to face him and looked up in surprise. “Hi. You’re early. Still forty minutes to go.”

Walters slipped off his jacket and hung it in the closet by the door after taking a book from the inside pocket. Fallows frowned but made no comment.

“Logging on early,” Walters replied. “Merrick wants to talk to you for a minute before you go off duty. He told me to tell you to stop by the BCD. You can take off now and see him on the company’s time.” He moved over to the console and nodded at the array of screens. “How are we doing? Lots of wild and exciting things happening?”