Starfist: A World of Hurt (8 page)

"All right. Queue it over to me and I'll take a look when I get a moment."

Birkenstock leaned toward the projection and lowered his voice. "Soupy, I need to get out of the office; I'd rather walk it over."

Gullkarl surreptitiously glanced at a clock and saw he had enough time. "Can you come over now? I can't promise lunch, though."

"I'll let you know when I'm five minutes out."

"Make it six minutes. Come to the southwest entrance." That was how long it would take him to check with the lovely lieutenant commander and get from his office to the southwest entrance to the Heptagon to verify his visitor.

Hiram Birkenstock and Lieutenant Commander Soupy Gullkarl reached the guard station at the Heptagon's southwest entrance almost simultaneously. Rather than begin the verifications and other formalities involved in securing a visitor's pass for Birkenstock and admitting him through the guard station, Gullkarl came out.

"My meeting got canceled," he said sourly. "Let's go to lunch."

Sixty thousand people worked in the Heptagon and its immediate annexes, and a small city of shops and eateries had sprouted up around it to service them. Gullkarl steered them to a medium-size place that advertised a traditional Eastern European menu. Birkenstock let Gullkarl order for both of them, since he was unfamiliar with Eastern European cuisine, preferring traditional British himself.

They made small talk about seldom seen relatives while they waited for their meal, and even smaller talk while they ate. Only after the dishes were cleared away and they were enjoying a cup of real coffee did they get to their ostensible reason for meeting. Birkenstock popped a crystal into his reader and handed it to Gullkarl.

The navy officer read through the report and looked up at his cousin. "What's supposed to be of military interest in this?" he asked.

"Tarah, Tarah Shiskanova--she's the analyst who flagged it--thought she saw something."

He took the reader back and scanned the report beyond its what and where for the first time.

"Here it is," he handed it back, "the bit about acid."

Gullkarl studied the minor note for a long moment, wondering why on earth anyone would think the military would be interested. Then he blinked. Right. He'd heard something, a vague, whispered rumor. There was somebody out there using acid guns. He nodded and almost snorted. Right. An alien invasion. Absurd. Absolutely absurd. And that was being kind.
Everybody
knew there was no such thing as sentient aliens. Still, there was that whispered rumor.

"Can I have the crystal?" he asked, returning the reader. "I'll check it out."

Birkenstock nodded. "It's a copy." He popped the crystal and handed it over.

They chatted over a second cup of coffee, wrangled over who would pick up the check--Birkenstock won, he was certain he could charge it to his division as a military liaison expense--and went their separate ways, vowing to get together soon for another lunch. Maybe Gullkarl could come to dinner sometime and, yes, he could bring a lady friend.

Lieutenant Commander Stewart "Soupy" Gullkarl, fully aware of the pun, stewed over the report and what to do about it for two days before deciding to go upstairs with it. He didn't literally go upstairs--"upstairs" was the glass-walled office at the end of the row of desks of which his was one. Captain Wilma Arden occupied the glass-walled office. She sometimes mused over the irony that an office with walls she could see through in all directions was a career dead end.

She didn't realize it when Gullkarl rapped his knuckles on the frame of her open door, but her career was about to take a very dramatic change in direction and progression.

"Enter!" she called.

"Excuse me, ma'am," Gullkarl said as he took the seat she waved him toward. "Someone at Colonial Development passed a report to me and I can't figure out what to do with it." He gave her the crystal when she extended her hand.

Arden morphed the console out of her desktop and popped the crystal into it. "I don't see anything about orbital weaponry. Why would anyone give it to us?"

Gullkarl lifted his hands in embarrassment. "He didn't know who to queue it to. We're distant cousins, so he asked if I could direct him to the appropriate office."

"Hmm." She read through the reports again and this time noticed the bit about acid. She'd heard the rumor too. She looked up and swiveled her chair to look out the window toward...toward...She knew all the constellations and could name every major star she saw in the night sky, but she was no astrogator and had no idea what stars or constellations lurked invisibly in the daytime sky where she looked.

Wilma Arden was a navy captain. She wasn't supposed to wonder what to do, she was supposed to act like she knew exactly what to do--even if she hadn't the foggiest notion. She spun back to Gullkarl and slapped the palms of her hands on her desktop. "Thank you, Lieutenant Commander," she said firmly. "Your 'distant cousin' was right in referring this to the military, and you were right in bringing it to my attention. I'll take care of it from here."

"Yes ma'am." He stood, understanding that he was dismissed, and came to attention. "By your leave, ma'am?"

She nodded curtly, and he marched out of his commander's office, glad to have that crystal off his hands. A few minutes after he sat back at his desk, it occurred to him to wonder whether he'd promised cousin Himan he'd get back to him on the final disposition of the report. Then he shook his head. No, Birkenstock hadn't seemed to have any notion what the report was really about and had probably forgotten all about it.

He was right.

Commander Moon Happiness liked to think he had the best job in the We're Here!

navy--commander of the heavy cruiser
Goin'on,
We're Here!'s most advanced starship. Just then, though, he wasn't as happy about his command as he had been. Admiral of the Starry Heavens Sativa Orange, Chief of Naval Operations for We're Here!, had taken personal command of the mission to locate the current home port of the
Broken Missouri,
the pirate freighter that was hauling rare ores from the planet designated 43q15x17-32--at least Admiral Orange and Commander Moon had independently concluded that's what the unmarked-but-nonetheless-identified
Broken Missouri
was doing, though Moon kept to himself his opinion that she wasn't a pirate ship--and made the
Goin'on
his flagship for the mission.

Happiness was unhappy because Orange was unhappy. Not because he commiserated with Admiral Orange, but because the admiral was unhappy with
him.
Admiral Orange believed that the
Goin'on
should have already located the
Broken Missouri's
home port, and had made known his suspicion that her failure to do so was due to either dereliction or incompetence on the part of her commander. So Commander Happiness was justifiably concerned that instead of being promoted to captain, as he should be as commander of We're Here!'s most advanced warship, he might be relieved of his command, which would effectively terminate his career.

Admiral Orange, in expressing his displeasure with Happiness, said more than once that he had forgotten more about being a ship's commander than the
Goin'on's
current commander had learned. Which was true as far as it went. Unfortunately for the sake of accuracy, what Admiral Orange remembered was less than what Commander Happiness knew. One detail that Admiral Orange had forgotten was, once a starship jumped into Beamspace, it was impossible to follow.

When the
Goin'on
reported back to We're Here!, the admiral had come aboard with his primary staff and ordered the starship back to the Rock, which he called by its official designation. They'd only waited for nine days standard before the
Broken Missouri,
still cloaked, reappeared and headed for the planet. Admiral Orange wasn't impressed by the freighter's stealth capability or by the skill demonstrated by the
Goin'on's
crew in spotting it.

"Why didn't you pick her up earlier?" he growled when he realized the starship must have been in Space-3 for three or four days before she was detected.

They watched as the unmarked starship docked with the equally unmarked space station.

They waited while the freighter took on its cargo. They followed discreetly when the
Broken
Missouri
headed out-system for her jump into Beamspace. When she jumped, Admiral Orange waited with growing impatience for the
Goin'on
to follow. He finally demanded to know what the delay was.

Commander Happiness did his best to control his expression, but wasn't able to keep some astonishment from showing. "But, sir, we can't follow a ship in Beamspace!"

"Of course you can," Admiral Orange admonished Commander Happiness.

"Sir?" Happiness asked, confused. Everybody knew starships couldn't be tracked in Beamspace.

"It's simple. You enter Beamspace on the same trajectory your quarry enters it. That is how you find its destination."

Commander Happiness blinked. That wouldn't work, but he wasn't about to tell the only admiral of the starry heavens in the entire history of his world that he was thinking from the wrong end of his spinal column. "Yessir," he unhappily replied. He ordered his astrogator, Lieutenant Sunshine Stems'n'seeds, to plot the course.

"Aye aye, sir," replied Lieutenant Stems'n'seeds. "How far do you want us to jump?"

Therein lay the rub. The
Broken Missouri
could jump back into Space-3 anywhere from one light-year distant to twenty or more lights, and nobody had any way of knowing without being informed by someone privy to the freighter's astrogation plan. Even then, the vagaries of Beamspace were such that where a starship returned to Space-3 would vary to some extent from a true straight line. If that wasn't enough, when she made her jump back into Beamspace following the brief course correction for which she reentered Space-3, the
Broken Missouri
could jump in any direction. Again, there was no way for anybody to know--or even make an educated guess--without, again, access to her astrogation plan.

Commander Happiness was in a very bad position. No matter what he told his astrogator, he was going to be wrong. He swallowed, wondering if he'd be allowed to wear a spacesuit when he was keelhauled, and asked, "Sir, how far does the admiral want us to jump?"

The look that Admiral of the Starry Heavens Orange gave him was one that had sent many a staff officer scurrying back to quarters for a quick shower and change of undergarments. The voice in which he replied was cold enough to fracture continent-size ice sheets. "This is your ship, Captain. How far do you normally jump?"

How far the
Goin'on
jumped depended on how far she was going, how great the need for precision was, and whether she had any escort destroyers. Happiness glanced at the starchart to see where other gravity wells were relative to the evidently mineral-rich planet they had under observation and picked a destination midway between it and the next major gravity well that could have a negative impact on the starship's reentry into Space-3.

"Make it four point one lights," he ordered.

"Four point one lights. Aye aye, sir," Stems'n'seeds replied. "Jump in five minutes."

Happiness turned to Orange. "If the admiral will return to his cabin, sir."

"The admiral will remain on the bridge, Captain," Orange said in a barely less frigid voice.

He proceeded to strap himself into the Skipper's jump couch.

Commander Happiness unhappily looked about the bridge. The other jump couches were all occupied by officers and crew who actually had jobs to perform during the jump. He came to the sad conclusion that he was the only person present on the bridge whose presence wasn't vital during a jump, and headed for the executive officer's cabin, which he was sharing since Admiral Orange occupied his.

Ten minutes later, no worse for the experience of a jump than usual, Happiness emerged from his cabin, wondering why the officer-of-the-deck hadn't restored ship's gravity. He found out--and almost lost it--when he entered the bridge.

Essential crew were carefully selected for their ability to withstand the gut-wrenching effects of jumps. Admiral Orange hadn't made many jumps since he'd been assigned to planetside duty as deputy G1 of the previous CNO fifteen years earlier. The single jump the
Goin'on
had made between We're Here! and the vicinity of the Rock had, purely coincidentally, come as the admiral was taking a nap. This was the first jump he'd made while conscious in a decade and a half. That, combined with the null-g required during jumps, had a powerful effect on the admiral, and the entire contents of his upper digestive tract ejected themselves rather spectacularly into the close space of the bridge. That caused two of the bridge crew to eject theirs, and that in turn set off the regurgitative reflex in everybody else.

The air and effluvia scrubbers were working as hard as they could to clear both stench and floating globules from the bridge, but with the contents of six stomachs wafting about, it was going to take a while.

Happiness wasted no time. He picked up a comm unit and pressed the appropriate button. "Med, Captain. We have six class-one jump accidents on the bridge. Get appropriate personnel and equipment up here to deal with the situation. Do it now."

"Captain, Med," came the reply. "Six class-one jump accidents on the bridge, aye.

Appropriate personnel and equipment are on their way." The ship's surgeon managed to say all that without a hint of the incredulity she felt at the--in her experience--unprecedented event.

Nearly two hours standard later, all the members of the bridge crew were fully recovered.

Admiral Orange was still being attended to in his cabin.

There's not much for a starship's crew to do in Beamspace. Collisions with space debris were unlikely, as no debris was known to exist in Beamspace. Some astrophysicists believe space debris does exist in Beamspace and collisions with such debris is why infrequently a starship that enters Beamspace never returns to Space-3. So the loss of the bridge and its crew for two hours constituted no more than a minor annoyance. It had the beneficial side effect of giving the med section something to do. Once he ordered gravity restored, Commander Happiness put the rest of the crew to work on policing the starship and routine maintenance.