The Sirens of Space (14 page)

“CAPTAIN COOK? He was here a minute ago, sir.
Why don’t you check Engineering? He was complaining about the mess
down there before I lost sight of him.”

“
Thank you—uh— ”

“
Atkins, sir. Crewman Technician
Atkins.”

“
Carry on, Mr. Atkins.”

“
Aye, sir.”

Slinging his duffel bag over his shoulder,
Jeremy Ashton started back toward the elevator once again. He was
hungry and tired, and his temper was worn to threadbare. The news
that there would be no ship of his own waiting for him at trip’s
end had not sent him off in the best frame of mind. He was still in
a foul mood when he caught the IshCom shuttle from Looking Glass.
En route, an ion storm put them five days behind schedule. Finding
nobody to meet him at the spaceport, and nobody in the captain’s
office when he finally did manage to find his new assignment,
seemed a fitting climax to a voyage that had seen an endless
succession of last straws. To be left stalking a phantom the width
and breadth of the ship had not helped his disposition.

Out the door and into the hallway he
stormed, his load growing heavier by the minute. Protocol demanded
that he report to the commanding officer before settling into his
quarters, but the captain was proving as elusive as a desert
mirage. Jeremy was starting to wonder if the skipper of this ship
might not be a mass hallucination. Everybody claimed to have just
seen him, but no matter where Jeremy turned, the captain had
already left. Perhaps this was some Eastern Fleet desk jockey’s
idea of a joke: assign a crew to a starship and see how long it
takes them to realize that they don’t have a commander. Or maybe it
was a loonie CentCom psychologist’s attempt to measure the human
animal’s capacity for mass self-delusion.

Whatever the explanation, Jeremy was out of
patience. He stopped near the portside artery to collect his
bearings. Crewmen passed on all sides, some leading freight dollies
loaded with equipment crates, others bulling past as he stood,
barely pausing for a hurried “’Scuse me, sir” before vanishing out
of earshot and beyond the range of a tongue-lashing.

Jeremy felt lost and disoriented. The ship’s
halls and walkways were more disjointed than on his old tracking
station. They ran this way and that with scarcely a reason, and the
circular arch of the radial corridors made getting around seem a
hopeless quest. The lack of hallway markings only added to his
confusion. Engineering was two levels down, he tried to remember.
Or was it three?

“
Damn starships ought to come with
maps,” he said. He turned the corner toward the main elevators and
immediately saw the ceiling twisting and falling away from his
face. The next thing he knew, his spinning head was fighting to
clear itself. He was sprawled on his back and looking up at the
ceiling panel, his bag on the deck floor near the wall. Scattered
on the floor was a host of program trays for the main computers, in
the middle of which was a young man shaking his head and raising
himself on his elbows to survey the damage.

“
Loller of a whack,” said the other
man, shaking his head to collect his wits. Jeremy couldn’t quite
place the accent. Its owner wore old, ragged sneakers and dark blue
fatigues without rank markings, obviously a tyro ensign or an eager
beaver desk jockey lieutenant out to earn his line badge before
curling up behind a desk for the rest of his life.

Jeremy was up in a flash. “What sort of
maniac dashes round corners without a hail of warning?” he
snapped.

Still muttering, he limped to his bag,
angrily kicking the trays to the side with his foot as he walked.
“I suppose you have good reasons for running around this ship like
a rut-mad bull.”

“
Nope,” came the terse reply. “Just
too dumb to know any better.”

Two redshirts, quickly coming to help,
ignored Jeremy and dashed to assist the young officer to his feet.
He waved them away with a laugh and rose under his own power.
Suddenly, the young man didn’t look as young as before. His eyes
blazed with curiosity about this testy newcomer, and a crisply
confident manner instantly transformed an otherwise disheveled
appearance into a commanding bearing. Jeremy had the distinct
sensation that he had just flushed his own career out the
sanitation airlock.

“
I’ll just bet you’re Commander
Ashton.” The air of finality to his voice seemed to admit no
discussion of the matter, but Jeremy’s throat was too dry to utter
a sound.

“
Come on—help me deliver this crap and
I’ll give you the ten-credit tour. Then you can roll up your
sleeves and help us start putting some order into this mess we have
for a ship.”

“
And you’re— ”

“
That’s right. I’m Captain Cook.
Welcome aboard.”

Moments later, an amused Roscoe Cook was
still waiting for his open-mouthed first officer to extend a hand
to meet his own.

“…
and then,”
continued
Cook, leaning back in the oversized chair behind his cluttered
office desk, feet propped up and hands locked behind his head, “by
the simple inertial force of spending all that money for all those
weapons, both sides lost track of the whole point to the
competition, and sped past the point at which each was safe. Aside
from their relative technological advancement, you know, it was a
bit like the good old days of the Peloponesian Wars, in which
Athens and Sparta....”

Jeremy did not know quite what to make of
Captain Cook. The chronometer read 775 Hours. The captain had been
talking non-stop for the last hour, and it had been ages since
they’d stopped talking about the ship. Cook’s office was cluttered
with boxes and half-open crates, and the remnants of several days’
worth of galley leftovers. His desk was buried under mounds of
papers and folders, except for a small clearing to one side where
he propped his feet.

“
...and they kept piling weapon on top
of weapon, until finally one economy collapsed under its own
weight. Kind of like the beached whales of Old Earth, caught short
in the tide. But in the end it was all for the best. Probably quite
lucky, for us, you know. If they’d kept it up, we might not be here
today. And it’s one of the grandest ironies of history: the
technological spill-off from that arms race was what led to
gravitronic physics in the first place, a hundred years later. But
think of the dislocation and upheaval it caused at the time! It’s
as if New Babylon and Demeter....”

But for all the clutter, and despite a
maddening eagerness to turn the most meaningless small talk into a
graduate school seminar, Jeremy found Cook’s intellect intimidating
and mind the sharpest he’d ever encountered. In the back of his
mind, he seemed to remember hearing something about a hotshot
cruiser commander named Cook, though for the moment the specifics
escaped him. The young captain made Jeremy fidget in his chair like
a dull schoolboy who hadn’t done his homework. And he found the
most arresting feature about the captain to be his eyes—alert,
demanding, yet filled with a wry humor that Jeremy could never
quite follow. Even clad like a common laborer, the captain seemed
to fill the entire room, though he obscured more than he revealed
about the inner workings of his own personality.

“
Well, Mr. Ashton—what do you
think?”

Jeremy’s heart froze in his chest. So much
of the captain’s monologue had gone over his head that he’d allowed
his mind to wander. The barest trace of a smirk danced across
Cook’s lips, but he pretended not to notice his first officer’s
discomfiture.

“
Come now, Jeremy—we must pick a name
for the ship someday, and I’d rather let the crew start calling her
by name as soon as we can. `The Ship’ sounds too groundtoadish for
my tastes.

“
So, what are some good
names?”

* * *

“We are
going
home?”

Zatar smiled broadly and nodded. Seated on
the floor, he sat on his favorite pillow, the deep purple one with
the velvet lining. As G’ela jumped and clapped her hands, Blendisi
raced from the room, eager to summon the others. Zatar and Munshi
exchanged amused glances. G’ela was always so excitable, but all of
them would feel like dancing before too long. Soon, the whole group
was crowding into the gathering room, chattering like a herd of
nebbini, asking a dozen questions at once.

“
When are we—”

“
...how much space....”

“
Does G’Rishela know— ”

“
Do we have....”

“—
leaving?”

“
May we write home to—”

“
How soon—”

“—
time to pack?”

At last Zatar rose to his feet through the
crushing crowd and signaled silence. The jabbering continued for
several moments, but gradually faded until all were quiet at last.
Those who could find seats took them. Zatar looked to see his
pillow taken by a grinning Ml’lusha, who sought to placate him by a
coquettish arch of her smooth, soft neck. Zatar sniffed archly and
remained standing.

“
As you may have heard, the
breakthroughs of the last several weeks have now reached an
impasse. The Terrans have agreed in principle to a moratorium on
settlements in the disputed region, but neither the duration, nor
the interim limits on scientific research in the area have been
agreed upon. And after the hard progress of the recent past,
tempers were beginning to flare anew.

“
Then, from the depths of nowhere,
came a solution. The Terrans suggested adjourning the talks to
permit both sides to gain perspective, and our Crutchtan friends
proposed resuming on Gr’Shuna.”

“
Of course the biggest surprise was
that both sides agreed at once,” Munshi added, “without exchanging
a single snarl.”

“
As for when,” Zatar continued, in the
grand manner of a senior procurator of the High Council, “that
depends upon how quickly we can pack, and how much regret we are
willing to leave behind.

“
For myself,” he added, his eyes
twinkling, “I would gladly leave my belongings behind, if we could
leave today.”

“
Meaning?” asked a voice from back
near the entrance archway.

“
Meaning that our ship is on its way,
and we can leave when it arrives, as long as takes you less than a
month to get ready.”

Zatar laughed aloud as the room quickly
emptied. The females of his species had endless fun at his gender’s
expense, and satirists had long immortalized the failings of men:
the lack of energy when there was work to do, the endless naps, the
stoic flatulence, the constant obsession with mating. But in their
own way, Zatar thought, women were every bit as amusing. They did
everything in flocks; and it took them forever to pack.

* * *

Jeremy shifted
uncomfortably in his chair. For the twentieth time in the
last ten minutes, his mind had gone blank. He knew that anything he
said was going to sound stupid. Better to say nothing, he
thought.

“
Well?”

Jeremy panicked, his resolve to stay
safely silent vanishing in a crisis of self-doubt. “How
about
Valiant
?” he blurted
without thinking. Instantly, he knew he had marked himself forever
a fool in the captain’s eyes: the
Valiant
was Commander Cosmo’s ship on the
old
Cosmic Avengers
adventure
series. His spine prickled with embarrassment, and he struggled to
keep his outward composure.

Cook sighed wearily. This exercise was
proving to be a major disappointment, he thought. They were no
closer to christening the ship than when they’d started, and all
they’d done was waste time that could have been spent helping make
the ship starworthy. For the twentieth time in the last ten
minutes, he consulted the computer console next to his desk.

“
Six merchant ships are named
Valiant
,” he said. “Three haulers, a
freighter, and two trading schooners—not to mention the thousand or
so pleasure boats.

“
Let’s give it another go.”

“Ramsey.”

“
Here.”

“
Steer.”

“
Here.”

“
Topolewski.”

“
Yo.”

From atop an empty packing crate in the
hangar bay, the tall, bearded greenshirt kept reading the names
from the duty roster until he reached the end. As each crewman’s
name was called, he stepped out of the larger group, and to the
yeoman’s left.

“
Zingerman.”

“
Here.”

“
All right, ye zoo animals,” he
bellowed in a mellifluous Demetrian brogue, looking out over the
assembly of new redshirts. “That ends the Low Watch assignments in
Engineering, Hangar Deck, and Life Support. I know we’re spread a
mite thin, but it’s the best we can do till the tyros show, so
let’s do the Skipper proud. The rest of ye—High Watch starts sooner
than I’d care to hear myself, so ye’d best be gettin your rest
while ye can.”

“
I hear the Skipper’s a tyro, too,
Chief,” called a voice from the back of the room. “D’ye think we’ve
a chance to get this tug moving afore the forests return to
Earth?”

Yeoman Chief Gregory Connors cut short the
laughter with a scowl to make the devil shake from the cold. His
full beard gave his face an animal fierceness that friends knew was
more bluff than bluster, but it always had the desired effect on
the redshirts.