Then I got another vid call from Q. “What price?” the blank screen asked.
“I asked you to show me your power,” I said angrily. “You showed me your treachery!” I had not followed up on the Box Q lead I had from Brinker, wary of another trap; better that QYV did not know what information I had. When he was satisfied that I could not locate him, then I would follow up. I had time, and my position on QYV was no longer neutral.
“Never trust a pirate,” the Q voice said. “Sell it.”
“I don’t do business with your ilk!”
“Do not force my hand, Hubris. There is more than you know.”
“It is an empty hand!” I snapped, and disconnected.
A week later new orders came down: I was to command a platoon in a company of a battalion that had been placed on alert status. This meant space duty, possibly extended. It would separate me from Spirit.
I had little doubt that QYV had shown me his power again. I was angry, but I had no choice; I had to go where assigned.
My platoon was infantry, somewhat surly about being commanded by a Navy officer instead of an Army sergeant. It was a conflict that had smoldered for centuries, ever since the various military services of Earthly nations had merged with the exodus to space. Because ships were essential in space, the Navy dominated; the Army had been reduced to enlisted status. The several other military branches-Air Force, Marines, National Guard, and such— had simply faded out. One might have supposed that time would have eased the internecine rivalries, but that had not been the case.
This would be no pleasant tour. All three platoons were holding GI parties—that is, pointless and savage scouring of their barracks—as I arrived, preparatory for an inspection. I had never liked inspections; most of them were merely make-work, unpleasant exercises that irritated the men. My assumption of command at this moment was unfortunate; my men would forever associate me with it. I had to do something in a hurry to modify that association, or turn it to my advantage.
The sergeant in charge snapped to attention as I entered the barracks area. The men did not; they were on work detail. “Sir, Sergeant Fuller reporting.”
“At ease,” I said. “I am Lieutenant Hubris, your new commander.” I looked about, noting that a good half of the men were dusky in the Hispanic manner. Deliberately, I removed my hat and jacket and handed them to the sergeant, symbolically stripping myself of my rank. “What chicken shit is this?” I inquired loudly in Spanish.
My judgment was correct; half the laboring men paused and looked up, startled. The sergeant evidently did not speak Spanish, but he knew something was up. “You wish to talk to the men, sir?” he inquired respectfully.
“I do not see any men,” I continued in Spanish. “I see a bunch of scrubwomen. Did they enlist for this?” I was rolling up my sleeves.
Baffled, the sergeant did not reply. Some of the men were stifling grins. This was a good show!
“Well, might as well do my part in this foolishness,” I said. I picked up a brush, found a spot, and got down on my knees to scrub.
“Sir!” the sergeant protested.
“Hi, soldier, what’s your name?” I asked the man next to me.
“Rodriguez, sir,” he said, bemused.
“Hope, here. From Halfcal, the hard way. You?”
“Dominant Republic,” he said, smiling. “Same planet.”
“We’re neighbors!” I exclaimed. “We share sunshine.”
“Yes, sir. But you—an officer?”
“First refugee, then migrant, then enlisted, then officer. Each in its turn. I don’t know which is worst.” I looked down at my brush. “This isn’t so bad. Last time I was on this detail, I used a toothbrush. The sergeant seemed to think that was more effective.” There was a general chuckle; they knew about toothbrushes, and about sergeants.
“Sir,” the sergeant said worriedly. “Commander Hastings—”
“Oops! Have to put on the monkey suit,” I said. “Forgive me, neighbor; it’s guard-duty time.” I scrambled up and dived into my jacket and hat.
“Loco!” someone muttered admiringly.
When the martinet arrived, I was pretty much in order. The sergeant looked as if he had swallowed a scrub brush, and the men were scrubbing savagely. I had soap spots on my knees.
Lieutenant Commander Hastings glanced at the scene. “You seem to have a knack for discipline, Hubris,” he remarked.
“They’re good men, sir,” I said, straight-faced, in English.
Someone coughed.
This platoon was mine.
Next day the Cannon Dust weighed anchor and cast off from her mooring at the pier. Since the pier was a rotating cylinder, this sent the ship moving away from Leda at approximately thirty two feet per second. When she had suitable separation, she oriented and cut in her main drive. Naval vessels seldom bothered with gravity shields; those were too slow.
Perhaps I should mention one technical aspect: The Navy uses the most effective mode of propulsion, which is the CT drive. CT, of course, stands for contra-terrene matter, which might be described as the mirror image of normal matter. CT atoms have negatively charged nuclei surrounded by positrons, so their charges are opposite to those of normal matter. When CT encounters normal matter, the result is total conversion to energy, the most potent explosion known. I am not a physicist so can’t go into detail, but in general the drive consists of a magnetic chamber in which a rod of CT encounters a rod of normal matter, at a controlled rate, with the resulting energy directed to the rear of the ship. In short, one savagely powerful propulsive jet. The CT is fashioned in isolated space laboratories in which gravity shielding is employed to generate controlled black-hole conditions that allow manipulation of fundamental matter in a manner not possible otherwise. Blocks of CT substance are handled and stored magnetically, so that they never touch normal matter until the proper time. Only small amounts of CT fuel are kept on any given ship, to militate against unfortunate accidents, but a small amount of CT goes far. The power of the acceleration of a given ship is determined not by limitation of the fuel but by the capacity of the ship to withstand the rigors of high gee. I trust this makes this aspect clear; the average man prefers not to think too much about CT.
This was the comfortable part of the voyage. We accelerated at gee for almost a full day, to almost two million miles per hour. Of course, this was a largely misleading figure in space. What it meant was that in just under two days at this velocity we could travel one Astronomical Unit; that is, the distance from the sun to the planet Earth. Our Earthly heritage remains with us in a number of incidental and archaic ways, but actually the AU is a fairly useful measurement for Solar System distances. Jupiter is just over five AU from the sun, and Saturn nine and a half, and Uranus nineteen. That did not mean that we could travel to Saturn in nine days, assuming we wanted to; Saturn was not aligned with Jupiter at the moment, so we would have to cross a fair secant to reach it. But it provides a notion of the scale.
As it turned out, it was no planet we traveled to. When Commander Hastings briefed the officers on our mission, it turned out to be the planetoid Chiron. Chiron is a tiny body about 150 miles in diameter, orbiting elliptically between Saturn and Uranus; in due course it intersects the orbits of each. It was colonized by both major planets and has had a savage history, as the representatives of each planet tried to assume full control. Violence was flaring again, and we were going there as part of a temporary United Planets peacekeeping force. This was supposed to be a routine operation, no actual combat, but in that volatile region, we had to be prepared for anything.
We traveled for a week in free-fall before spinning the ship for the remaining part of the month. Commander Hastings believed that it was good discipline to endure the rigors of null gee. He was a polished nugget of chicken manure; all agreed on that. We had frequent free-fall drills. We were, as I put it in Spanish (never in English!), the Chicken Express. By the time we went into deceleration, my men were ready for the kill, and
Commander Hastings was the leading candidate for the chicken ax. I kept them in line largely because of my talent and my Hispanic identity; I spotted the potential troublemakers early and persuaded them to keep the lid on. It was effective; I was, I discovered, an excellent leader of men. I was an officer and they were enlisted men, but we came to understand each other well enough and we had mutual respect. I made things as easy for them as I could; I could not do much, but I knew they appreciated the effort.
We also had indoctrination on our destination. It was my duty to absorb the often tedious detail of the holo tapes and digest it so that I could make it palatable, or at least intelligible to my men. Chiron was named after a famous centaur, the wisest of the herd. Indeed, the planetoid was shaped vaguely like that mythical creature, with a torso 60 miles in diameter and 140 miles long to the tip of the extended tail. This is what the “about 150-mile diameter” translated to. Its present population was about 600,000 people, four-fifths of them Uranian and one-fifth of them Saturnian. It had been under Saturnian domination for three centuries despite its Uranian majority; then when it swung close to Uranus it had been taken over by the empire of Titania, the Uranian moon, and held for another century. There had been a number of petitions for “enosis” or political amalgamation with the Uranian system. When this was denied, there were riots. Ninety-five percent of the Uranian-derived population wanted that unification with the mother planet. At last Chiron had been granted independence, but still the problems erupted, with the Saturnian minority insisting on partition, since they believed they were suffering discrimination. A terrorist campaign had started, and at one point there had almost been war between the parent cultures on Uranus and Saturn. Now the interplanetary peace force was supposed to cool things off.
I rephrased all this for my men, delivering summaries in English and Spanish. “Those people probably feel about the way we do,” I concluded, “after a month in space tasting chicken. All we want to do is get back to base and unify with our regular women: enosis.” That brought on an approving laugh, for the men were sick of the all-male condition of this mission, and of the long lines for the inadequate Company Tail. They knew that the officers were little better off in this respect; there was only one O-girl. She was less busy than the E-girls but also offered less variety. Things were rough all over.
The nominal entertainment facilities received heavy use, too. There were no feelies here, because Commander Chicken (surely Satan reserved a red-hot pitchfork for his posterior!) believed them to be effete, or worse: fun. But there were boxing gloves, pugil sticks, and an in-ship obstacle course racetrack. I shed my jacket when I could and played table tennis, chess, and pool with my men. I was not expert in any of these, but I made it a point to be an excellent loser. While I played, I talked with them, getting to know them better, and I encouraged positive interaction among them. This did not mean I tolerated indiscipline; I knew better than that. When I donned my silver bars, I meant business, and this was quickly apparent. No one, I knew, respected an easy officer. I had discovered this the hard way as an enlisted man, from Sergeant Smith. Tough but fair—when it counted.
And so we arrived, ready for trouble. Chiron looked like a narrow punching bag, with its extended tail. It was a planet, for it orbited the sun, no bigger than a moonlet, as perhaps it had once been or would in future be. It was well domed, the domes spinning in the manner of Hidalgo’s or Leda’s, generating the necessary internal gee. This was the only way for these tiny bodies; they lacked the mass to have enough natural gravity for gravity-shielding to concentrate effectively. Actually there is nothing wrong with spin-gee, for ship or for planetoid. It’s just less even.
We docked near the ships from other regions. I recognized the emblems of several Uranian nations; they must have been summoned before us, since they had a longer voyage here. At present, as I understood it, Chiron was about the same distance from Saturn and Uranus, which was one reason for the current strife; neither side had a clear legal or geographical advantage.
We did not go on peacekeeping duty immediately; first we were treated to the standard background briefing, which repeated much of what we had already learned. Greek and Turkish were the official languages here; fortunately the long involvement of Titania had made English a language most Chironiotes comprehended. We would be able to get along.
For me and most of my men, the cultures of this planetoid were equally opaque; neither was remotely Hispanic. I instructed my men to avoid trouble whenever possible and to stay away from the local women until some were inspected and cleared for freelance Tail subcontracting. I reminded them that though venereal disease did not exist in the Jupiter region, other planets had different standards, and infection was possible. “Herpes,” I said firmly, “is line-of-duty-NO.”
We were assigned a segment in one of the Greek-Chironiote domes. My three sections were to take three eight-hour shifts, covering our beat around the clock. I would be keeping an eye on all three shifts, of course.
This seemed routine, but I was wary; something about it didn’t feel right. For one thing, QYV had evidently pulled another string to put me into this mission, replacing the lieutenant originally supposed to go. Maybe QYV was just trying to unsettle me, but maybe he had more in mind. I had foiled him when I recovered my sister; he might scheme more carefully this time. I worried peripherally about Juana and about Spirit, though I knew they could take care of themselves. It was the key I carried that QYV was after, not any of my associates.
Our first day on duty went without trouble. The Chironiotes were tolerant of our presence, and even friendly; they knew we were here on invitation, not as invaders, and they did not seem to want further bloodshed. In fact, they offered my men little gifts, which was a problem because we were not supposed to accept gratuities, but we realized that to decline might be to give offense. We solved that by giving back little gifts of our own, so that it became an exchange. We had little packets of Spanish candy, Toron, sealed in aluminum so there could be no question of contamination, and they liked these. It was the principle that was important: We were not taking without giving, and we were not being aloof.
Trouble came so suddenly and personally that it almost caught me off guard. I was walking through a shopping district, on the way from one station to another, admiring the olives, melons, grapes, and citrus fruits the local farm-domes produced, when I turned and saw a striking woman smiling up at me. “Will you come with me, officer?” she asked in accented English, giving a little shake to her low-slung décolletage.
“Thank you, no,” I said politely. “I am a member of the United Planets peace force. We are not permitted to mingle.” That was, of course, a euphemism. We were encouraged to mingle socially, but not sexually, and she was evidently of the latter type. Her garb and manner were like commercial advertisements.
“But, officer, I insist,” she said, taking my left arm firmly.
This was a more forward approach than I had anticipated. I pulled away from her. “I regret—no.”
She leaned into me. “Note the men on either side; they are armed,” she murmured. “Do not embarrass us with a scene. We wish only to talk.”
I glanced to right and left. Two men boxed me in, and each turned back a lapel to reveal the glint of steel. Firearms and other powered weapons were forbidden here, because of the social unrest and vulnerability of the domes to damage, but knives existed.
I had been trained to deal with knife attacks. I was sure I could handle these two men and get away. But I paused, for I did not want to make the scene the woman urged me to avoid; it would reflect adversely on my unit. An officer brawling? Some example! Also, I was curious what they wanted; this did not seem to be ordinary mischief. So I touched my alert button, signaling my platoon sergeant. The woman saw my motion and snatched away my communicator and dropped it to the floor and stepped on it. That would prevent my sergeant from tuning in on me. Then the armed men took my arms and hustled me into a nearby building. I did not resist.
The woman preceded me up an ancient-fashioned flight of stairs and through a solid fiber doorway. I felt the gee easing with the elevation; that’s a consequence of spin-gee. The door was simulated wood; there was no genuine wood here, as Chiron was too far out from the sun to farm trees effectively, though a few eucalyptus trees were grown for symbolic purpose. But wood-like fibers were manufactured and used freely, and so this was very like a wooden room.
I stepped into it, then reached back almost casually as if about to scratch myself and caught hold of the knife the man to my right had shown me. I whirled, assuming a knife fighter’s stance, facing the second man. He had had to fall back, to follow his companion through the doorway, and was at a momentary disadvantage. “Stand aside,” I told him.
Foolishly, he went for his own knife. I knew better than to bluff; I slashed at his moving arm, laying it open. Then, as the blood welled out, I caught the door with one foot and slammed it in his face.