The Odyssey and the Iliad (Kinsella Universe Book 7) Page 5

  “About that ‘serving under,’ sir. I mean no disrespect in that regard, but I have been approving compartment changes for, ah, romantic reasons.”

  “As captain of this ship, I have prerogatives that others do not. On the other hand, I have to live with everyone. This is a matter where the best judgment is to suspend judgment, absent a reason.”

  “Yes, sir. Normally, sir, there are age and chain-of-command strictures.”

  “I will log a waiver. So long as a relationship doesn’t affect the performance of their duty, I am blind to it. The unlimited age of consent is sixteen so long as the age difference is two years or less, so long as the relationship is consensual, I’m blind to it.

  “Relationships that aren’t consensual, that involve coercion or force are never acceptable.”

  “Lieutenant Kim has a new roommate. She -- impressed upon -- the young woman the importance of not rocking the boat. The force involved was trivial, and in my opinion, not out of line.”

  “That, Commander, is what Execs do. They look into the whys and wherefores and keep such disputes from rising to the attention of the captain.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Now get on those records -- we need a complete handle on who is aboard and what they have to offer.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I think you should make that, ‘Aye, aye, Captain.’”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  Commander Robinson was skillful, he realized. She kept things happening at a steady, measured pace and over the next few days everyone was kept occupied. The first round of elections was held and Trevor was mildly surprised when the officer cadets won runoff positions about ninety-two percent of the time. He had carefully distributed them, at least initially, and there had been only a little fratricide, where cadets ran against each other.

  He made a note to talk to Commander Robinson to try to dissuade too many cadets from moving in with each other. Gently dissuade.

  He felt that he was making considerable progress with his investigation of the malf, the coming together of his bridge crew, and the settling in of the rest of the passengers. The later experiments after the first mishap with the Miracle at Orleans told him it was reasonably safe to try to go to High Fan with just half. He’d sketched out some changes, where he could move some of the left-hand fans to the right side and give him more redundancy, but it was just pie-in-the-sky. He had reluctantly put the finger on a dozen young people, half of whom were now studying power engineering and the rest were studying propulsion engineering.

  He made a point that whenever duty required people to be in either the fan compartment or the reactor room, he was there as well. Fortunately about ninety-five percent of the tasks could be handled remotely, and most often by the computer. However, there was nothing better than laying your hands on the equipment to gain a better understanding of the field and the beasts under their command.

  He read a report on a food fight in one of the mess halls, and had decided it was a good sign, rather than a bad one. He’d been guilty of a few food fights in his day, and people who are laughing as they fling things about, don’t have malice in their hearts. He would issue a stern warning, he thought, delivered by himself personally. There wasn’t food to waste...

  Chapter 3 -- Found

  One of the officer cadets yelled over the intercom, “Ships detected coming off High Fan! Many ships!”

  Trevor pushed the intercom for ship-wide communication while his fingers were setting his station to repeat the sensor station’s data. “Now secure yourselves! I expect a jump to High Fan in the next few seconds!”

  His first thought was that the aliens out here were really sloppy. Their hallmark attack was usually three to five ships, all emerging from High Fan at the same instant. There had been one attack where nearly a hundred ships had emerged at the same instant. There were no attacks on record where a dozen smaller vessels emerged from High Fan over eight seconds.

  “Communications, just for the hell of it, transmit, ‘We come in peace. Take us to your leader.’”

  The ultimate “Hail Mary” play, but it was that or take his chances on High Fan. The first time one of them fired a missile, he’d be gone. One way or the other.

  “Weapons, Captain. Should I prepare to discharge the laser?”

  “Unless you can fire a dozen times in less than a second, I don’t think that would be wise.”

  He’d slaved the comm channels to his station as well. He nearly fell out of his seat when a male voice responded, “Identify yourself or we’ll destroy you!”

  “This is the Federation habitat Odyssey,” he replied. Hell of a thing to be decided so quickly!

  That silenced the speaker. “Say again, Odyssey.”

  “We were in the Grayhome system when it was destroyed. We went to High Fan and the fans malfed. One second we were there, then we were here.”

  Again there was silence, then a strange answer. “Malf? What is ‘malf?’”

  A feminine voice broke in. “It is Federation usage for a malfunction, Wing Commander.”

  “Enough! How did you get here, Odyssey?”

  “I already told you once. We experienced a fan malf. One second we were in Grayhome system, then we were here.”

  “Know you that each of our fighters are armed with two fifty-megaton nuclear weapons. As large as you are, two dozen of them will ruin your day. Prepare to be boarded.”

  “Look, I don’t know who you are, and honestly, I don’t care. The aliens attacked Grayhome system; they destroyed it. Nearly a hundred million men, women and children died there. I have almost fifteen thousand refugees from that calamity aboard, mostly female and mostly below the age of eighteen. We are not in the least interested in another fight.”

  “Aliens?” the male voice queried.

  Trevor added two and two. He was fifteen months travel by High Fan from the Federation. If these people had High Fan, the first they could hear of the war would be in ten months.

  “The Federation has been attacked by what is presumed to be aliens. They drop three to five ships into a colonial system and then nuke the colony. A thousand gigaton bombs. Yours, sir, are pipsqueaks compared to those.” Trevor swallowed. He had recordings of what a planet looked like after it had been nuked by the aliens. He even had recordings of what had happened to Grayhome. He had no intention of ever playing those last to even one of his passengers.

  “You are going to be boarded. My ship will be set to auto destruct if anyone other than myself tries to approach it. If my ship auto destructs, the rest of my squadron will erase you scum from the universe.”

  Trevor blinked. There had long been rumors that some colonies had been founded well away from the Federation. None had ever been found, but the universe was a large place. Evidently they had hit the jackpot. Three hundred and eighty-seven light years away? Humanity was several millennia from getting out this far!

  “Look, we’re peaceful. We have no agenda, nothing hidden. Come aboard. Can I greet you at the hanger bay?”

  “If you wish. I will be aboard in ten minutes.”

  Trevor massaged his temples before he next spoke, this time on the intercom. “Lieutenant Kim, report to your quarters as fast as you can. Find a white ship suit, then report to the entrance to the hanger deck.”

  He saw Robin’s lip curl in distaste. Well, she’d be unhappier still if the worst happened -- he’d logged orders that Commander Robinson was to assume command if anything happened to him, and Robin was third. He seriously doubted if Robin expected that -- or wanted that.

  He met Lieutenant Kim at the hatch to the hanger bay, just as the outer doors were closing, and before the large bay had begun to pressurize. “You are an electronic warfare officer,” he told her. “We have no weapons, no weapons officers. Tell your trusty assistant to change forthwith.”

  “Why me, sir?”

  “You, Lieutenant, are very firm and certain in your opinions. You are not afraid to bring them up to me dire
ctly, if you think that’s important to the mission. That’s your job. Watch, observe, and later report. He called us ‘scum’ and they have nuclear weapons trained on the habitat -- they are not, in their hearts, friendly. Assume that if he even gets close to one of us, he’s trying to plant a bug. Assume he’s going to plant bugs wherever he goes. I’m taking him to the bridge conference room; it is off limits to everyone until further notice.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We are going to have to undergo a very thorough bug search, Lieutenant. I’m sure Commander Robinson knows the routine...”

  The hatch in front of them started to open and he closed his mouth. The environmental readouts for the hanger still showed almost nothing.

  A man of about thirty appeared wearing what Trevor would have called “street clothes.” How he’d exited his ship and crossed the hanger deck to the lock in street clothes was a mystery.

  “I’m Trevor Grimes, commanding the Odyssey.” He held out his hand to shake the others, but got a cold look from the man and no reciprocal motion.

  “It would appear, Captain Grimes, that we could destroy you and no one would notice the loss.”

  “Perhaps so. Perhaps your conscience is beneath notice as well.”

  “Tell me, Captain Grimes. I could turn, and go back through the lock, walk to my fighter and board. How would you fare as you stand, if you tried?”

  “I can’t breathe vacuum, or even an atmosphere as rarified as the hanger bay now contains. In four minutes, though, I could as well.”

  The man visibly sneered. “The technical name for one such as I is ‘bio-engineered being,’ ‘bing’ for short. I am adapted for performance in space. I can deal with hard vacuum and low temperatures without assistance for a few minutes. It comes in handy when you want to surprise people.”

  “I introduced myself, so you have the advantage of me,” Trevor told him, “Sir, if you would, please come with me.”

  Trevor walked over to the cab and sat down, and Lieutenant Kim sat down at once in the right front passenger seat, relegating their visitor to a seat in the back. He ensconced himself in the right rear seat, stiffly erect, trying to look like someone being chauffeured. Perhaps it was the plebian appearance of the vehicle that spoiled the look.

  Trevor went through the ship’s service ways until he reached the fan compartment. He stopped outside, hopped out and undid the compartment hatch. The man stepped up and followed Trevor inside, with Lieutenant Kim bringing up the rear.

  “It’s noisy,” Trevor told him, “we have just the fans on the right still operating. More than half of those on the left failed in the seconds after we went to High Fan at Grayhome.”

  The man walked over and looked at several of the fans. “How long did this take?” he said in the end.

  “It felt like they were exploding like popcorn; in reality everything happened in four seconds.”

  “And afterwards, you’d moved here?”

  “That’s right. I don’t have to explain this to you; it might give you clues to what happened that I haven’t been able to figure out. This is the second recorded occurrence of this malfunction. Since we survived we added a major data point. Our movement was along the velocity vector the failure propagated in. I wish you luck figuring it out.”

  “You are lying about that.”

  Trevor laughed. “You could blow this habitat to gas. Still, I’m going to say that you appear to be even less intelligent on further investigation than I first thought. You were bioengineered out of a horse? A donkey?”

  The man’s face suffused red and walked over to Trevor, bumping against his chest, forcing him back against the bulkhead. Trevor didn’t resist.

  “You and those like you are all the same! Even with us, it’s the same. You sneer, you laugh, and you see what you want to see. Yes, I’m a bing; I know what they call us: a bing is a human being with something missing.”

  It took Trevor a moment to parse that. Lieutenant Kim was quicker. “And I’m a Korean. You think you are disliked? The average Japanese thinks the only things a Korean is good for is a handy receptacle for sperm, or someone to wash his toilets.”

  The man turned to face her, her face very nearly in his. Both of them had flaring nostrils, both were clearly angry. Trevor made a mental note to look into harassment aboard the habitat.

  Lieutenant Kim twitched slightly forward; Trevor was stunned when the other backed up just a bit more than she moved forward.

  “Sir,” Trevor said in a controlled voice. “The reason we are out here in the middle of no place is I have fifteen thousand young people in my care. And I have not the courage to try to return to High Fan. Had you not answered our hail, I’d have tried anyway.

  “The first ship that experienced this malf survived, but they dropped from fan in seconds, still in the solar system. They cobbled together repairs and a few weeks later went to High Fan again, intending to return to Earth. No trace of their vessel has ever been found. The brain-dead fool who ordered that transition deserved to die; not so the two hundred and fifty others he took with him. It’s been a serious caution to my thinking.”

  The man shook himself, obviously trying to recover his composure. “I must return home to report. I will assign one of my junior officers to monitor you. You will treat her with more courtesy than you have treated me. I will return in a few weeks; we can’t tow a vessel this size. We will see what we can do.”

  “Your officer will not have unrestricted access to this habitat.”

  “We could enforce it; most of my ships will remain here.”

  “If you wish to establish any sort of peaceful, fruitful dialog, I suggest you reconsider.”

  “I will inform Senior Pilot Officer Makaa that she is to report any imposition.”

  Trevor wasn’t sure why the man smirked, but smirk he did. There was no request to see the bridge, none to see any of the rest of the habitat. Trevor took him back the hanger deck; it was disconcerting to see a woman almost a carbon copy of Lieutenant Kim waiting outside the lock. The red warning light was still glaring -- the hanger bay was again in vacuum.

  The man nodded at the woman, she saluted, and he left without having said a word a word to her.

  Trevor added two and two and got the unsurprising answer. “It must be nice to have an internal phone,” he told her.

  “Yes, that would be nice,” she told him. He thought the answer was slightly evasive. To Trevor’s surprise the woman didn’t move or speak for several more minutes; it was a little on the disconcerting side; then that was happening a lot in the last bit.

  She turned to him. “The Wing Commander is clear of your hanger. You may close and pressurize it.” Trevor nodded to Lieutenant Kim, who passed the word to the bridge.

  “My name is Senior Pilot Officer Makaa. Please note that my rank is part of my name. If you wish to avoid confusion, please use that form of address when referring to me. I am from the Union; what you know as ‘Koopianers.”

  Trevor filed that tidbit away, to be looked up in depth later. “As you wish.”

  “You will be wasting your time asking me for my parole,” she went on. Trevor managed not to react, but Lieutenant Kim had a surly expression on her face.

  “We are not like you -- and yet, to our infinite regret, we are just like you. Our society is not a homogenous whole, although that was what our ancestors anticipated.

  “We knew how the genome worked -- we had unlocked most of its secrets. There was a great deal of ‘extra’ DNA that apparently had no function -- except on occasion it caused problems. We eliminated the ‘extra’ over two generations, carefully, in measured steps. They made the mistake of not keeping ‘controls’ in our society... people unmodified. We found that the surplus DNA was a tabula rasa -- the blank slate where the genome modified itself. Yes, it was the source of a great many genetic disorders -- but it was where genetic brilliancies occurred as well. In fact, more of the latter than the former.

  “Now, it is amazing that even af
ter all this time, a great many don’t want modification for themselves or their children. Others of us have followed a different path. Our society, like yours, is filled with groups with competing interests.

  “In the last few years a particular group has unexpectedly risen to power. They are determined to cut our ties, both in the literal and genetic sense, with the human race.”

  “You left people behind,” Trevor said flatly.

  “I can’t legally confirm or deny that. However, you are clearly intelligent and can think for yourself. About six months ago our parliament held the most fraudulent vote in our history; they voted to destroy all our contacts with humanity. To terminate those contacts forever, in the most forever sort of fashion.”

  Trevor swallowed.

  “The Wing Commander belongs to that group. If this wasn’t such an extraordinary occurrence, we’d have fired on this habitat already.”

  “No disrespect intended, but if you’d kill that many children for no reason at all, you would have already parted company with the human race.”

  She looked at him coldly, “We are different, you and I. A great many things were revealed when the genome was unlocked. You think I picked up the phone and called my Wing Commander -- or he called me.

  “I’m a two-way telepath. He called me, mind-to-mind, and ordered me to come here. Aren’t you glad that telepathy is a double recessive and, at least at the moment, associated with lower fertility? You are wasting our time with ‘parole.’ I could draw you an accurate map of your bridge. I could draw an adequate picture of the command console. I know about that very long object that they will undoubtedly ask you about on their return, when the photography will have been examined closely.

  “I know Lieutenant Kim is fond of her honey.”

  Trevor saw the lieutenant blush deeply. He held the pilot’s eyes however.

  “And you are telling me this, because...?”