Starhunt: A Star Wolf Novel (26 page)

Korie drinks from his mug, neglects to make a face this time. He needs liquid to continue talking more than he needs to feign a gesture of camaraderie.

“But the point is this, Chief. That bogie
is
out there. And he did not attack us when we were vulnerable, when we were unwarping. So what does that suggest? It says to me that he
can’t
attack us. I don’t believe any more that he stopped because he had engine trouble. No, he stopped because it was part of a larger plan. Because he didn’t think he could destroy us. And that’s because
my
plan worked. If I made this ship look and act aggressive enough, the enemy would assume we really were a K-class vessel, and stay away from us. And the tactic worked, the enemy ship believed it, and he ran. And he had to convince us that he really wasn’t there because he couldn’t confront a K-class ship head on. He believed us when we acted like a K-class ship. Now, the question is, are we going to believe him when he acts like he isn’t a ship at all? Crazy, isn’t it? We’re both a couple of goddamned liars, aren’t we? But that’s how war is fought. With lies, with pretense. With calculations and manipulations, and that’s why captains don’t have to be captains, but good psychonomists—not to work their skills on their crew,
but the enemy—only, if you have such a tool at your disposal, why shouldn’t you use it on your own crew too? After all, that’s part of making them battle-ready, isn’t it?—and if the alternative is killing them—hell, the navy isn’t in the business of teaching men how to make nice anyway. That’s the secret of a fighting force. You have to give them energy to power their emotions. You have to have someone to hate, and if you can’t hate an unseen enemy, you hate your old man, and you hate him with a passion, and if he’s a sharp old man, then at the right moment, there’ll be a—a relationship of grudging respect for each other, and then all that angry energy will be channeled into destroying the enemy. It’s a beautiful relationship, a commander and his crew, Leen—like riding a stallion, naked in the wind, it’s almost an act of love—yes, I know what that sounds like too, that’s another part of the price of being an alpha-matrix. You know where all of your pieces are, and you recognize them. So what? I got the job done, didn’t I? The other ship ran from us, didn’t he? The question—the question is this: Why is he pretending to be our wobbly? Oh, yes, I suspected
that
from the very beginning, I know this ship’s patterns, Chief. I know your engine room as well as you do, and I know about flux-wobblies and all the other kinds. I suspected that it was our wobbly, except that I know what our wobbly looks like—and his was too goddamned
good
. His simulation was
too
perfect. It didn’t have the jagged beta-flux edge-ripple that occurs once every thirty-three megacycles, and that was the giveaway. Chief, I looked at that wobbly long and hard, I stared at that screen. You saw me.
Something
was wrong with that wobbly, I sensed it somehow, but I didn’t know how I knew, or what it was I was sensing, but there was something about it that just didn’t look right. I had to trust my hunch, so I kept looking for the thing that my subconscious mind had recognized, but my conscious mind hadn’t yet focused on and identified; I didn’t
even know it was a simulated echo, Chief. I just knew there was something very peculiar about a wobbly that clean, that perfect, that familiar . . . so I started examining each separate function of it. Privately, because I didn’t want anyone else to know what I was doing or what I suspected. But it was when I looked for the beta-flux edge-ripple that I knew. Because the ninth-order harmonics produced by that ripple are very distinctive second-level modifiers. And when I looked, Chief, I couldn’t find the ripple. It wasn’t there.”

Leen’s voice is a whisper. Very calm, very scared. “Sir? When we replaced the system, sir—when we rebuilt and jury-rigged and cannibalized, that’s when it disappeared, sir.” Leen is almost afraid to say it aloud. “I know that edge-ripple, sir. Believe me, I know that ripple. It always looked to me like the skyline of Tamarinth, and I know when we juried and patched those phase adapters, I had to retune, and I looked for that ripple—it was almost an old friend by then, sir—but it was gone. So I knew then that it had been sourcing in one of the units we crabbed. I used to use that ripple for fine-tuning because it was so steady, so I know when it disappeared, sir.”

Korie looks haggard for a moment. “I know that,” he says quickly. “I know that. I double-checked our own signal, I compared a simulated wobbly projection against the simulated echo the bogie was putting it out, and when I realized that the beta-flux ripple was gone, and that our harmonic structure would be altered because of that, it was the clue I needed. Don’t you see, Chief? I realized that there were certain key harmonics that he would never be able to duplicate, because he couldn’t perceive them at his distance, and therefore he wouldn’t be able to simulate them accurately. And I looked at those harmonics in our field, and then I looked for them in the wobbly, and they weren’t there.
Now do you believe me? Check the memory if you don’t.” Korie sags back in his chair, gasping for breath. The intensity of this argument has almost exhausted him.

Leen’s expression is that of a man who has been bludgeoned.

Korie looks across at Leen, waiting. His mind is racing, examining everything he has just said, wondering if he left anything out; he holds the moment up to the light and looks for secret messages. He looks into Leen’s face and gradually it comes to him that the man across the table is almost in a state of shock.

(The question is,) Korie thinks, (is he in shock because he can’t assimilate what I’ve told him about the psychonomy of this ship, or is he in shock because of the ninth-order harmonic gap? It’s so obvious. In retrospect, it’s inevitable. You must follow the logic to the end. But does Leen see it too? But what
does
Leen think—? Or does it seem to him that such a tiny fact, such insignificant one, is not enough to justify my actions? Or is he trying to determine another explanation for the harmonic gap? I’ll bet he thinks up a good one. It’s amazing what leaps of rationalization the human mind will make to avoid seeing the obvious. But he’s not an alpha-matrix, and perhaps it’s not obvious to him. The real question, my dear Mr. Korie, remains . . . why didn’t the bogie attack us?

(All right, we’ve established that we’ve convinced the other guy we’re a K-class ogre. Just as I’ve convinced my crew
I’m
a K-class ogre—damn me, but I thought it might work. I thought I could turn that into eventual grudging loyalty. That was a miscalculation. Wasn’t it? Anyway, if we’re convincing him that we’re too big to fight, then maybe his best game
is
to convince us he’s not there—because if we’re really as big a ship as we’re pretending to be, then the only time we’re vulnerable is when we
don’t believe
that he’s there.

(Of course!

(That’s the game! The boy who cried wolf. That captain—that other captain—he’s very smart.

(Oh, yes—I see what he’s done now. He’s made his ship a part of the environment of this psychonomy. Lordy, but that’s clever! The bastard! He’s trying to drive me mad. He’s given me just enough of a hint to convince me that he’s real, but not enough to convince the crew. He knows that the men won’t be sharp enough to see what I see, and because their perceptions won’t jibe with what I’m telling them, they’ll get twitchy. Oh, yes, it’s so obvious what he’s doing, so subtle. . . . When two of your information sources contradict each other, you get anxious, nervous—upset. Sooner or later, one of the sources has to be devalued. That captain knows it. He’s playing this game to turn my crew against me. That’s been part of his plan all along. And it’s working. He’s made my crew and me into enemies. Oh, God, if only I could make them see what he’s done to us. But that’s the beauty of his plan. If they had the ability to perceive the relationships, the game wouldn’t work. So he knows how vulnerable we are to this . . . this gambit. Lord, I want to write this one up. It is deliciously, calculatedly clever. A trap, a beautiful trap, and we’ve fallen into it. We
are
vulnerable now, and I’m scared as hell.)

Korie lowers his head into his hands, not knowing, not caring whether Leen is still there or not. There is pale stubble on his cheeks and it scruffs against his palms.

(There has to be a way out of this, I know it, there has to be—Damn that clever bastard! What a poker player he must be! All right—let me see—first, I must put aside my panic and think. What’s his next move? What’re my options? I think—we have three. We
stay, we search, or we go home. He must have figured that if his plan worked, we would be startled by his not being there, and we would of course drift for a while, while a new hypothesis—and a new order of relationships—sorted itself out. Whatever we do when we stop drifting, he’ll know how we sorted. If we search, that demonstrates that the gambit didn’t work. Or hasn’t worked yet. No, he’s not going to rabbit, not yet. He’s got to have thought this out—he’s got to know exactly what he’s doing. If his plan
was
to drive a psychonomic wedge between myself and my crew, then he can’t be puzzled by our drifting. That’s proof that it worked. So, he’s got to have something more in store. . . . We still have our three options, but we have to remember that he has had seventeen hours of information about this ship’s mental condition. If we search, he knows that all he has to do is stay low, and we’ll destroy ourselves, and he can just move in for the kill. I wonder if he knows about the drills? But how could he? Our stress-field ripple? Would our drills have an effect on that? If he did know, then that would be one more reason to lay low. Because if we start running new drills now, and he can sense them, then he has two choices: One, attack us during a drill, which is when we’re most likely to be confused about what is happening. We wouldn’t be able to tell which is a real ship and which is the drill—so no more drills, none at all, we’re too vulnerable. So now we’ve limited him to the other option—he attacks us, and we don’t believe he’s real any more. In that case, he’s won before he ever attacks. He’s got us. He wins. In fact, he’s already there. That’s got to be his goal—but if it is, then
when
does he attack us? We’re already vulnerable now. What is he waiting for? If I could game it out, I could drill—no, no I couldn’t. Any more drills and the crew would be certain I’ve phased out. But we can’t stop having drills, can we? We have to
rehearse every possible encounter as the situation keeps changing. That’s part of being a good captain. And all of this predicated on the possibility that the enemy
actually
has put into the field a generator-mask that allows one ship to simulate the echo of another.) Korie wipes his forehead. (I mean, if this is a field test of a new tactic, it could paralyze our fleet—
we’ve got to know the answer here.
It all depends on me. Dammit, the behavior of that wobbly fits
all
the projections of how a ship equipped with a generator mask might behave, and its behavior-set matches the psychonometric predictions too. And it’s up to me to figure out the answer. Lord, God—why is this responsibility dumped on me? There isn’t anyone I can turn to for advice. Or strength—Damn it, it’s hard being superman. That’s the joke, of course, but it’s
so
true, so frustratingly true. I probably look like a madman, and I am. The super-ape is always a misfit in the company of lesser apes. These are not my people. Damn, I hope the alpha-matrix development program pans out, I’m so goddamned lonely—)

“What should I do?” he asks aloud. But there is no one here to answer him. The burden is his and his alone, and he is suddenly, terribly, and even almost wonderfully, thrillingly afraid.

(I think we go home. Yes, we go home. We let him think he’s convinced us. Except, we stay on alert all the way home, always looking for that moment when the wobbly appears again. And when it does, naturally we ignore it. And then it closes on us. Right, and we ignore it. We have to. Because if we chase it, it isn’t going to be there. It’ll
never
be there if we chase it. That’s the plan. So we can’t chase it. We pay no attention to it. And—and—and then what—? It follows us right back to base, and then he unwarps when we do. And we don’t look for him because we don’t believe he’s there. And that’s when he strikes.)

Korie stops a moment, stunned. “Of course! Of course! Yes of course! That’s it! That has to be it! If you have an advantage, you play it—”

He is breathing heavily now. The realization has hit him like an explosion, and it’s still hitting him—wave after physical wave, cold chills of realization, sweep through his body. The terror of the moment is exquisite—a bizarre mix of admiration, anger, and frustration. The moment when checkmate is obvious . . . and inevitable.

(It’s flawless. Such a perfect plan. Elegant. Stylish. I wish I’d thought of it. And we’re doomed, because it’ll
work.
I’ll never be able to convince the crew to go on alert at unwarp. They won’t buy it. They won’t believe it. My God, what a psychological coup for those bastards. Blowing up a K-class cruiser—or what they
believe
to be a K-class cruiser—in front of a billion witnesses! The navy won’t be able to cover it up. In fact, K-class or not, the navy will have to publicly admit that we
were
a K-class ship because to do otherwise would clue the enemy in to the fact that the area
isn’t
as heavily defended as we’re pretending it is. It’s a good trap, a tight one. Almost inescapable.

(Eh? What was that?
Almost—?

(I wonder—maybe our only hope
is
to go on as if his plan has worked and the crew really does distrust me. All the way home. And then—and then—what? How do I convince the crew to buy this plan—
any
plan—without also convincing them that I’ve looped off?)

Korie puts his head back into his hands and sighs. There are two flagships on the chessboard in front of him.

Korie stops. Finally. He stops completely and just exhales. The sound is like that of a man dying. But not quite. Abstractedly, he picks up his cup and finishes the coffee in it, never even noticing the taste or temperature.