The Sirens of Space (22 page)

“
Ninety?” The words had spurted out
before Jeremy had a chance to think; at the Academy, even his best
scores barely reached the nineties.

“
Oh, that shouldn’t be too difficult,
Mr. Ashton,” Cook smiled humorlessly. “You can always use
Mendelson’s score to boost the average. Already I’d give her about
a ninety-two, though the computer’s probably a little more
generous.”

He nodded toward the rookies. “And I’ll be
satisfied with a Level Two score of ninety from the others.

“
Actually,” he smirked, “it should
prove a rather close race. Carry on.” And he left the bridge, the
hatch door closing behind him with a soft whoosh.

“
That arrogant son of a bitch,”
snapped Talbert, as soon as Cook was out of earshot. But nobody
responded; not one of them even heard him. For the time being, each
was lost in his own private world.

Jeremy swivelled his chair to face the
system’s station. He pushed a green button to the left of his
center screen, activating the simulation computer to call up the
helmsman’s score from the last simulation. His heart sank when it
appeared on the screen.

It read: “Helm: 93.”

His heart pounding like a kettle drum,
Jeremy called up the score for the command chair. The image from
the screen burned indelibly into his memory.

“
Command Station,” read the screen.
“Simulation Score: Timing—100; Strategic Design—100;
Tactics—100.”

* * *

The classroom fell silent as the instructor,
a full commander, glared at the troublemaker. A plebe did not
belong in the same classroom as upperclassmen, thought the
commander—much less in an advanced class like Intra-solar Tactics.
He snatched the paper from the student’s desk and examined the
marks the young man had jotted down. Sure enough, it was exactly
correct, just like the last time. Just like every time. But this
time, the teacher smiled; this time he was ready. He’d always known
that this student was cheating. Finally, he’d be able to prove
it.

“
Stand up.”

Slowly, the young plebe rose to his
feet.

“
How did you know the
correct navigation plot before I even explained the problem?” the
commander snarled.

“
I just did,” the plebe
answered uneasily.

“
Explain it.”

“
I’m sorry, Professor. I
don’t know how to explain it. I’ve always been able to
tell.”

“
How?”

“
I don’t really know how.
I just do.”

“
All this from someone who
isn’t even taking Navigation.”

“
I passed out of
Navigation,” replied the student, a slight edge to his
voice.

Scowling, the commander returned to his desk
and put another problem on the holographic screen. One that wasn’t
in any of the textbooks they were using. One of his own devising.
And one that had an unexpected twist that would prove once and for
all that the student wasn’t as brilliant as all the other
professors kept saying. Soon, the image of an imaginary star system
appeared, with the mass and velocity of each planet marked on the
screen, just as on a real ship of the line. Glowering as he
returned to the young man’s side, the commander he barked his
command.

“
All right, Midshipman
Cook—set your course for Planet Two.”

“
Heading 810 by five
degrees north,” the plebe answered quietly, without hesitation; as
he did, the instructor laughed mockingly.

“
Hard when you haven’t
already gotten the answer, is it?”

“
Sir?”

“
Here is the correct
plot,” said the commander. Pushing a button on his controller, the
computer displayed a navigation on the map, arcing in the opposite
direction from the student’s chosen course, and using the
gravitational pull of the system’s primary planet to accelerate
toward the target planet.

“
Heading 250 is the
correct answer, Plebe. Swinging past the giant Planet Seven—which
gives us our best trajectory toward our destination. Now, do you
care to explain why you’re so far off, this time—when the problem
isn’t in one of our textbooks, and you couldn’t have stolen the
answer from the library’s computers?”

“
With due respect,
sir—that course is not optimal.”

“
I plotted in myself,
Plebe.”

“
And if the computer was
programmed along the same parameters,” the young man continued
quietly, “it would probably make the same mistake when you checked
it.”

“
What mistake?”

“
If you’ll reset the
controls and include the mass of the system’s sun in the
problem....”

His eyes widening, the commander pressed the
button to recalculate the parameters. A sinking feeling in the pit
of his stomach told him that he’d been so intent on using the giant
planet that he completely forgot to enter the region’s dominant
gravity well into the governing equations. His heart sank when the
navigation plot revealed the corrected optimal heading.

Heading 810, by five degrees north.

“
Your heading would be
best in open space, with no nearby star,” offered the
plebe.

His face softening, the commander
nodded.

“
It’s almost like a melody
I can hear,” the young man whispered, squinting as he tried to
explain. “All the vectors and gravity wells are kind of like notes
and swells that pop into my head whenever I look at the stars. I
just follow the melody...and that’s the course to take.”

“
Thank you, Midshipman.
Please take your seat.”

* * *

“I still
don’t understand
him.”

“
Welcome to the club,
Jeremy.”

Jeremy sipped his cold drink and placed it
back on the coaster, then looked at Janet. The Officers’ Lounge was
almost empty; a junior engineer in the small study beyond the bend
was their only company. Jeremy looked up at the observation screen
looming over their booth. It showed eastward, toward Looking Glass
and alien skies. There was a pensive, reflective gloss to his eyes
that Janet had never seen before.

“
He expects us to perform with machine
tool precision, but he’s never around. Never even lets us know what
he wants from us. How are we supposed to live up to his standards
if he doesn’t care enough to show us how to do things his
way?”

Janet laughed; she had a merry laugh,
Jeremy thought, like a young lady swept up in the excitement of her
first dance. “The Weapons Officer on the
Constantine
asked him that. Right in front of
everyone on the bridge, sort of like Talbert did today...before
Cook assigned him to laundry detail for a week. You know what he
said?”

Jeremy shook his head.

“
Skipper told him that he was a
concert pianist and we were his keys, and that he refused to
practice on an instrument that wasn’t properly tuned.”

They both laughed, and Jeremy noticed
Janet’s eyes brighten whenever she mentioned the captain. He felt
something more than curiosity eating away his insides, but he was
too much of a gentleman to ask any personal questions.

“
You know, Jeremy—well, you were there
before Cook’s time, so there’s no way you could know. But my first
year at the Academy was just after he graduated. He was still a
tangible presence on the campus, and I don’t mean merely that his
name was carved on all the award plaques. He was reflected
everywhere that year: in the lectures of the professors, in the
hallways and classrooms. Even in the eyes of the upperclassmen, and
the way they approached their drills and studies. Nothing that he
touched was unaffected. And I don’t mean that he was universally
admired or respected. He left as much bitterness in his wake as
anything else. But he affected everyone there quite deeply. They
either loved him or they hated him, and both with equal
passion.

“
Yet, by the time I left, he’d all but
faded from memory. You still see his name plastered all over the
grounds, if you know where to look. But the plebes who were there
when I was a senior only vaguely recall the name. Today they know
him only as the midshipman who still holds all the records. They
don’t have the slightest idea how he’d come to leave his mark, or
how he changed the whole tenor of instruction there. Not the
slightest idea. The cold record doesn’t give any sense of what he
was—what he is. You don’t get that until you meet him in the
flesh.”

Jeremy smiled glumly.

“
For instance,” continued Janet, “you
remember the Morgan Simulator—the standard aptitude test they give
to all the plebes. You know, the test for multi-dimensional
tactical conception?”

Jeremy nodded. “It’s a humbling experience.
The best score in my class was seventy-five out of two hundred. As
I recall, the record was eighty-four, set by Commodore Jones when
he was a plebe, a few years earlier.”

“
I came within five points of old
Jefferson McKinley Jones—and the old record,” said Janet, “and was
the star of my class.”

The corners of Jeremy’s mouth turned up
weakly. “I came in twelfth.” He didn’t mention his score; though
well above the average score of fifty, it was not very
impressive.

“
Do you know what the current record
is—set by none other than Roscoe Andrew Cook?”

“
I don’t think I want to
know.”

Janet leaned forward, as if sharing a dark
secret. “His score was one hundred seventy-three.” She laughed as
Jeremy’s eyebrows shot toward the ceiling.

“
His instructor didn’t believe it,
either. She was so sure Cook was cheating that they retested him,
with the rest of the class invited to watch, to help detect any
sign of fraud. The second time around, his score was
one-ninety-one. And you know what he said to the instructor then,
while he was still strapped into the simulator and the rest of the
class was busy checking for a glitch on the computer?”

Jeremy shook his head.

“
He said, in that delicious accent of
his: ‘Shall I try it again? I think I’m starting to get the hang of
this thing.’” Janet laughed brightly, her eyes shining like
emeralds. “And you know why he’s so tough on navigators—why,
despite ourselves, we’ll probably come to feel sorrier for Talbert
than we will for ourselves?”

Janet didn’t wait for an answer.

“
It’s because every ship that he
commands will have at least two navigators. And one of them will be
the greatest navigator in the history of the Cosmic
Guard.”

Janet mistook the look in Jeremy’s eyes for
disbelief.

“
You think I’m exaggerating? Well,
remember his order to me, to shave six points off Talbert’s
navigation arc as we approached the enemy ship? He wasn’t guessing,
Jeremy. Check the computer record and you’ll find that we exceeded
the optimum approach by exactly six degrees.”

Now quite subdued, Jeremy shook his head.
“Talbert’s mighty fast with the figures, and Cook was wandering
around the bridge like a gypsy. There was no way he could— ”

“
Don’t you understand, Jeremy?” Janet
interrupted, a distant sparkle lighting her eyes. “He doesn’t need
the computer. He knows exactly the right navigation plot before it
could ever show on a screen. He sees it all in his head. And he
does it without even thinking about it.”

Slowly, Janet circled the edge of her glass
with her finger. “And sometimes, he forgets that we can’t.”

Jeremy was silent. He sipped his drink and
his eyes drifted once more to the viewer, letting his soul wander
among the stars. Life in the heavens was often cruel, and often
lonely. Friendships bonded men and women together, in the sky as on
the ground, helping the days pass as pleasantly as the surroundings
allowed, and it was a CosGuard tradition to make the best of
things. But wherever fate led them, and whatever came in its wake,
it would be hard having a genius in the family.

THE PRESIDENT WILL SEE you now, Miss
Yang.”

An overstuffed briefcase in one arm, and a
thick file folder in the other, Suzie Yang eased past the
receptionist, a matronly woman too busy being important to open the
large oak door leading into the East Office for a mere staff aide.
Hitting the door latch with her elbow, Suzie edged the door open
and guided it the rest of the way with her forearm. Inside, she
closed the door with her foot.

“
Miss Yang!” Tossing some papers into
a large pile on his work stand, Mikos Sarkisian, president of the
Terran League sprang from behind his desk. “Here, let me help
you.”

He took the briefcase and escorted his
petite director of communications to the oversized visitor’s chair
in front of the president’s desk. The young woman plopped down,
amazed that she had dropped the folder on her way from the North
Wing only twice. The president put the briefcase on the edge of his
desk. Outside, the sun shined gloriously in the cloudless sky.
Through the window, Suzie could see the green leaves swaying in the
breeze, and the sights and smells of the Presidential Gardens still
haunted her senses. It was not the kind of day she wanted to spend
inside, but she didn’t have a choice in the matter.

“
You wanted to see me, Mr.
President?”

“
Mrs. Dalrymple,” said the president,
pressing the button on the intercom. “Could you please bring us
some tea?” Sarkisian sat on the front of his desk. He wore a ragged
old coat, with patches on the sleeves. Suzie thought the president
looked more like a professor than like a politician, and often
wondered whether it was an image he tried to cultivate. His desk,
after all, was immaculate—every item was in its place, and his
in-basket was empty.