The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (75 page)

“I wonder why,” I said. No I didn’t, because I was still biting my tongue.

Anyway, sarcasm wouldn’t have been welcomed, not even by me. I was too excited to see Morales alive, and I didn’t really give a rat’s ass what the Ladderites chose to do or not do.

But Marie wasn’t happy. “We have orders to return those people to a region under human control.”

“The aliens aren’t subject to our orders,” Morales pointed out.

“Quite so. Am I permitted to speak to their prophet?”

“He was an old man. He died during their flight from the impact area. For the first time they don’t have anybody with good strong ESP to lead them and they’re probably making bad, or at any rate uninformed, decisions.”

“Well, that’s their problem. Convey my agreement to the Z – to whoever’s in command there. We won’t fire on the shuttle, and Gannett will be waiting for the injured.”

She then issued three orders. First, she told Gannett and me to meet the shuttle and remove our people. Second, she told Janesco to maintain the auto response order but instruct the heavy weapons control computer not to fire on the shuttle. Third, she told all other personnel to remain at their battle stations.

Janesco was angry with her. His voice came down hoarse and tough from the Arctic Circle. “Commander, it’s a trick. Even that fool Schlacht would have known it’s a trick.”

“Of course it’s a trick,” she snapped. “But what trick? Will the shuttle blow up the instant it gets alongside the
Zhukov?
Have our people been infected with some lethal disease or parasite? Or is this essentially a diplomatic ploy, as Lieutenant Morales thinks?”

There was an impromptu staff meeting going on when I left the bridge. For the moment I was under Gannett’s command, and I’d hardly reached the airlock when he had me encased in an elastoplast suit like one he was wearing. Just in case the ploy was to get some deadly bug past the
Zhukov’s
defenses, we’d meet our guys in these rigs, breathing through electrostatic filters with little fans roaring in our ears. He’d also brought along six medbots that looked like enormous crabs, scuttling around on jointed legs and waving exaggeratedly long arms. While we waited, they brought in and stacked the basket litters I’d been planning to take on our aborted return to Paradiso.

The alien shuttle approached. The docking procedure was interesting. I hadn’t been able to figure how they could get a tight air seal when
Zhukov’s
airlock wasn’t configured to receive them. But the problem turned out to be no problem for our late enemies. While we watched through a port in the inner doors of the lock, they extruded a flexible tube – an umbilical, the doc called it – which expanded like the business end of a trumpet. We opened the outer airlock doors, and the trumpet entered and sealed itself to the bulkheads.

Then we opened our inner doors, they opened theirs at far end of the tube, air howled into the umbilical – higher pressure on our side – and a few minutes later here came Jesús Morales himself, staggering through the tube against the gale and looking thin and battered, but totally alive. The medbots had him suited up before I could touch him, but then we swapped a real abrazo through the plastic, and he joined in helping the walking injured aboard and laying the badly busted guys in the litters. In a few minutes everybody was wrapped up like party gifts and sprayed down with some kind of antiseptic gunk.

Gannett told me to close the inner airlock doors. As I turned to obey the order, I caught just a glimpse of the only Zoo denizens I ever saw. Something with a head vaguely like a seahorse – rather stiff, bluish, with mild bulging eyes and some sort of breathing apparatus on the end of its long snout – stared back at me while something else with many arms moved around in the background.

I had just stretched out my hand toward the button to close the doors when something ran under my arm and leaped into the umbilical. From inside the tube Cos turned and looked back at me with those large dark eyes, raised one small hand and waved and shouted, “They’re my people, Kohn! I have to save them!”

“Get that man back!” shouted Gannett. Instead I hit the button and the doors began to slide shut. I had an instantaneous flash of the end of the umbilical folding in upon itself and looking, in fact, exactly like a king-size navel.

“Sorry, sir,” I told the surgeon, “but you didn’t countermand your first order.”

Thought I was smart. Didn’t realize I’d just killed Cos, poor little bastard, or he’d killed himself, however you chose to look at it. My second unintended homicide of the trip.

Through the port I watched the shuttle seal itself up and drift away, hang a U and head back. It hadn’t blown up. And I may as well tell you now that after exhaustive tests Gannett found that our people hadn’t been infected with anything, either. If there had been a ploy, we never found out what it was, and personally I think Jesús probably had it right from the start. Our late enemies had been making a conciliatory gesture – that was all.

While Gannett and his bots were bedding everybody down in the now overflowing sickbay, I took off the plastic suit and returned to the bridge to report the successful recovery of our people. But nobody was interested in anything I had to say.

They were staring as if hypnotized at the monitor, at two converging blue circles, one marking the alien shuttle, the other marking the bogey. Marie sat in her commander’s chair like an alabaster statue. The two circles merged, and the slender fingers of her left hand, with the transparent lacquer on the nails, made a tiny movement, tapping the left keypad that gave her command of all our firepower.

My mouth, I think, formed the word don’t, but no sound came out, or none that I heard, anyway. Suddenly the
Zhukov
moved, the acceleration slamming me painfully against the deck. We began to slide behind what had become Planet Inferno, but not before the alien ship erupted in a huge fireball, its fragments flying out in that strangely leisured way that things seem to move in space.

The bridge came alive then, all the Space Service types cheering at once, because they’d just won the last battle of the Alien War. Which wasn’t all that hard, considering the other guys, poor bastards, hadn’t known that the war was still going on.

When Marie returned to the command suite, I was there waiting for her, somewhat bruised, a hen’s egg taking form on the back of my head. But thoroughly conscious, and in a state of cold rage.

“I had to do it,” she said quickly. “My orders contain a secret protocol obliging me to destroy any alien ship we encounter.”

I didn’t say anything. So she started arguing with what I hadn’t said.

“Suppose I’d accepted their terms, disobeyed my orders, gone back without the colonists – what would my enemies at HQ have said? That I’d failed at my mission, violated my instructions, consorted with our enemies and allowed them to kidnap our people. I’d have been court-martialed.”

I finally found my voice. “So to prevent that, you killed several thousand intelligent creatures, most of them human. Including Cos.”

“Pardon me if I don’t cry over him. He’d picked up our plans with that damned intuition of his and he was ready to, how do you say it, jaser – blab – to our enemies. You’re such a child, Robair. You haven’t yet learned to accept the difficult things that your choice of a military career entails. You’ve no idea what it’s like to be in command. You’ll toughen up in time.”

“Not to this extent.”

“Bah, what’s the use of arguing? You need to grow up, that’s all. You haven’t really understood much about the inner history of this voyage, have you? Not much at all. It was dismaying to my service when the Council of State insisted on putting a Security officer in charge. How could one of those dreary policemen understand our need to defeat the enemy and recover our honor? But of course that was the real point – he was supposed to keep the rest of us under control.

“Fortunately, Security HQ wanted to get rid of Schlacht, whose sexual peculiarities had become notorious, so they gave the job to him. Our intelligence people had very little trouble locating a young woman who, for excellent reasons, wanted to kill him. They armed her and put her aboard and I saw to her survival here. That little wretch Cos almost queered the whole thing – I never really forgave him for telling the General we had a stowaway. When I made you Security officer I assumed you’d arrest Cos and get him out of my hair. Well, you didn’t do what I expected, but in a way you did better. After our stowaway took her revenge, I was at a loss as to what to do with her, until you quite innocently solved that problem. And then Cos, while trying to save his fellow Ladderites, eliminated himself So you see, everything worked out perfectly.”

The minute that followed this speech was the longest and chilliest I’d experienced up to that time. Then I said, “If you don’t object, Ma’am, I think I’ll move back into my old quarters. When he gets out of sickbay, Morales can join me.”

“Suit yourself I hope you’ll be very happy together.”

I came to attention, saluted, did a right-about-face, and walked out. That was how my shipboard romance ended.

So, Jesús son of Jesús, now you know how the Zoo, by saving your father’s life and returning him to us, made it possible for him to meet and marry your mother a few years later and for you to be begotten and born. Remember the nameless creatures of that nameless ship with gratitude; for their atoms have long since been dispersed, and they’ve left no memorial behind except you.

After we returned to Terra, I read Marie’s report. It was a fine work of fiction. It told how the aliens had already slaughtered the colonists when we arrived, and in revenge we then engaged and destroyed their ship. The public loved it. The news of our belated victory over an enemy who’d beat us handily in the war sent a thrill all across the far-flung outposts of humanity. The
Zhukov’s
Space Service officers loyally supported their commander’s version of events, and were duly rewarded a few years later when the Council of State made her the first woman Commandant of the service. She died quite recently, and her ashes lie entombed in Paris at the Invalides, near the dust of Napoleon.

Morales and I turned in reports to Security HQ giving the facts, which of course were ignored because we were only lieutenants. Though we didn’t stay so for long. We were both promoted to captain on the basis of our service in “the epic voyage of the
Zhukov”
(as the Council called it) – “a mission to save humanity that became a mission to avenge humanity.” That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Words are so much handier than realities. Meanwhile, all that your Papa and I really had done and endured vanished into the category of non-events.

There was another and fatal epilogue to this story. Nobody knows for sure the reason for the outbreak of the Second Alien War, but personally I’ve always believed the creatures of the Zoo were seeking revenge for the treacherous destruction of their ship. By then the Trans-Aran Wormhole had been discovered and mapped, and there was that terrible battle near the exit where we lost so many ships and so many thousands of our best people, including your father, who was commanding a landing party aboard the old Sun-Tzu when an FTLM vaporized it.

That was how I learned that regardless of our smarts or our rank, we’re all the serfs and peons of history. But I also decided that I didn’t have to surrender my soul, as Marie had done. I decided to knuckle under when I had to, but keep a lifelong obligation to tell the truth whenever that became possible. It’s possible now, and I’m laying it on you, hoping that in the future when great power comes into your hands, you’ll know how not to use it.

In my new condition of humility, I also started to look up my old enlisted people – my fellow peons, you might say. I began meeting annually with O’Rourke and Chu and as many of our people as wanted and were able to come. Like veterans everywhere, we met to lift some brews together and reminisce, and I learned a lot from talking with them. Once when he was drunk, O’Rourke told me in a friendly way that he’d always regarded me as “a *#%& fool, but a *#%& fool with possibilities.” I thought that was a real compliment, coming from such a fathomless well of cynicism.

Chu admitted to me that sometimes he wished he’d followed his family tradition and become a pirate instead of a soldier. “The danger’s the same,” he said, “but the profits are much greater. Like you, I must have some ethics squirreled away somewhere.” He looked embarrassed saying that, and I think he must have been drunk, too, at the time.

I was able to follow the lives of some of our guys long after the old
Zhukov
had gone to Europa to be scrapped. One of the wildest of our douches quit the service and succumbed to respectability. She’s now married to a Councilor of State – and I won’t tell you his name, so don’t ask. Another quit and got rich running a brothel in the capital at New Angkor.

Our baffling genius Soza told me that the events on Paradiso had scared him so badly, he’d finally realized that hiding from responsibility in the enlisted service was even more dangerous than living in the real world outside it. So, instead of re-upping when his tour was over, he quit and worked his way through a minor college, won a scholarship to a major medical school, and the last I heard of him was a neurosurgeon doing great work on reconstructing damaged spinal cords. There always are some people who beat the odds, right?

Still, most of our guys remained simple soldiers. I found talking with them something of a chore because they totally lacked the ability to generalize – they never summed up, they just remembered with numbing precision exactly this place or that place, exactly what words exactly what person had said and when he or she had said them. “D’you remember, sir,” one said, “when we went into O-1, how we come around that corner with the little white house with the blue sign about twenty booties painted on it? Wasn’t that a laugh?”

They often spoke about Marie. “You remember, sir, when we got back to the ship and the commander herself told us how great we were?” said another guy. “I was covered with blood and puke, and yet she shook my hand anyhow and said I was a hero. Gawd, that was amazing. And now she’s a big wheel, I seen her last week in the feelies. Think about that. Gawd, I’ll never forget her.”