Crisis Read online

  WITH THOUSANDS of ships spread over an area across which it can take months for a courier to deliver any message, any fleet needs rules to guide the conduct of its officers when acting independently. Traditionally these rules cover virtually every aspect of command decision and are referred to as the Articles of War.

  Articles of War

  Article VII

  Every person subject to this act who shall—

  (1) Traitorously hold Correspondence with or shall give Intelligence to the Enemy;

  (2) Or fail to make known to the proper authorities any information received from the Enemy;

  (3) Or shall relieve the Enemy with any supplies, shall suffer Death, or such other Punishment as is herein-after mentioned.

  A year after one of the elite brainship decoys confirmed the existence of a massive Syndicate fleet, it had still not appeared to contest the Alliance occupation of Khalia. During this time thousands of intelligence officers, clerks, analysts, and scouts worked to locate the home worlds of the Syndicate of Families. Slowly, carefully, data were sifted and patterns analyzed. Even as they worked, everyone knew the peace was deceptive and there would come a battle that would determine the fate of both human empires.

  The Fleet used this year to build and train. Thousands of ships were commissioned. Often they were manned by new recruits leavened with a few experienced officers. Slowly, frustratingly slowly, for Duane and his staff, these ships began to arrive at their forward bases on Target and nearby Khalia. Located only a few light-years apart, the planets were an almost-ideal base from which to strike out at the cluster suspected to contain the Syndicate.

  For many months tensions between the still-proud Khalian warriors and Fleet personnel erupted into sporadic violence. Neither side was ready to forget or forgive the atrocities perpetrated by the other. Even as a grudging mutual respect developed, some incident was needed to jell the union of former foes, Fleet propagandists waited, hoping for some event they could make into a symbol of unity between the races. When the incident did occur, it involved two most unexpected participants.

  IN THE DARKNESS of space two ships fought against a dozen. The two were cruisers–one of the Fleet, one a Khalian pirate–captained by two old enemies, Commander Sales and Captain Goodheart, who had finally found a foe greater than their own hatred–the Merchants, they who had suborned the barbarian Khalia, armed them with modern weapons, and given them spaceships for chariots. Now, the Khalian pirates fought with savage glee, able at last to strike at the humans who had betrayed their kind–and the human Fleet ship fought, with the zeal reserved for traitors to their species.

  But in the midst of all that zeal, a cold stab of reason came through to the Fleet signalman, who realized that this was his final battle, that there was almost no chance of his surviving. Though he could think of no finer way to die, he knew with an even more desperate longing that the people on the Terran planets must learn of the Syndicate nest they’d blundered into, and the merciless, instant tactics of the Merchants. So, even as he routed signals between ships, he opened a transmission channel, locked a dish to stay pointed toward Target no matter how the ship maneuvered, and stabbed a tachyon beam at the forward base, carrying the ship-to-ship signals, audio and video, on both Fleet and Khalian frequencies. If he had known the Merchants’ band, he would have fed their signals through, too–but the Fleet, as yet, could not even hear their enemies. He even redirected a few precious launches to send message torps speeding off in reserve.

  Then a Syndicate torpedo holed her defenses, and Goodheart’s ship became an expanding globe of light. Minutes later, Sales’s Fleet cruiser exploded, scattering debris thousands of miles around a globe of plasma, sending a furious wash of energy over the tachyon channel to Terra.

  One piece of that debris was a cigar-shaped cocoon, two meters long and a meter wide. It shot spinning end over end for a thousand miles and more, and surely would have convulsed its lone inhabitant with nausea, if needles had not stabbed into him just before the explosion, releasing chemicals that slowed his metabolism and sent him into the deepest of sleeps as a cryogenic unit froze him in seconds. On the pod floated, into darkness, bearing a wounded crewman who had been slapped into a freezing pod by the medics, to be thawed out when a hospital ship picked him up. But he was far from Terra now, far from the routes of Fleet ships, where none but Merchantmen came. His pod sailed on through the unending night, alone, unknown, unknowing.

  * * *

  On the station orbiting Target, a bored signalman sipped coffee and eyed the girlie cube that was waiting for the end of his shift. Nothing ever happened in an automated station. Why did they bother having a human on duty?

  The alarm sang.

  The signalman jarred upright in his chair, searching his banks of monitors and tallies. There–red flashing on Vertical Four! The system didn’t know what to do with a rogue signal, whether to waste permanent memory on it or not. The signalman hacked at his keyboard, finished the sequence, and pressed “execute” just before the buffer filled. The jewel on the tally glowed, showing that it was cutting, just in time. The signalman heaved a sigh of relief and settled back, keying in a stepped-down relay of the signal, and turned to his monitor to see just what kind of tachyon “fish” his energy net had caught.

  “Cannon Three is out!”

  “Screens overloading!”

  “Cut life-support to minimum and route power to screens!”

  Behind all the Terran words were the shrilling whistles of Khalian speech, but the signalman couldn’t comprehend them. He could understand, though, the huge explosion of light as the screen flickered to scale down sensitivity to cope with the glare–and he saw the silhouette of a corvette in front of the light ball. The signalman didn’t need a book to know it was a shape he’d never seen before, ever–and he didn’t need a translator to tell him what it meant when the Weasel whistles cut off as the light globe exploded. For a moment reverence for a gallant enemy touched his heart, shoving aside the hatred of Khalians brought by generations of war–then a pang of loss as he realized that whoever was fighting those Khalians was also fighting the Fleet ship that was sending the images.

  “Commander Sales!” a voice yelled from the screen, “they got Goodheart!”

  “Get them,” a deeper voice snarled.

  “Torpedo away!” a nasal voice snapped.

  The signalman hung on to the edge of his chair, watching, waiting, forgetting that this signal was at least hours, probably days, old, and the battle long ended.

  Then the silhouette of the corvette blew apart into debris, and the expanding light ball dimmed where it had been, while shouts of victory rattled around it.

  Then the whole screen erupted in a wash of light, dimmed instantly but cut by a hash of snow, and white noise roared with it.

  The signalman realized he was dripping with sweat. He watched the tally on the cube cutter, the jewel on Vertical Four . . .

  Both were out.

  The signalman sat back with a sigh. Whatever it was, it was over–and two gallant ships had died. He sat still for a moment in silent respect.

  Then he leaned forward, keyed the signal for HQ on Target, and said, “This is Station Two. Emergency. Route me to the adjutant.”

  * * *

  Another sentry received the signal, another sensor operator on a lonely vigil–but this one had fur and sharp teeth and was planetbound, on Barataria, the Khalian pirates’ nest. He was a Khalian communications operator, who knew which buttons to push but very little of what happened inside his console. He only knew that an unscheduled signal triggered the alarm, so he did as his detail prescribed–keyed in the recorder. As the light beam engraved the signal on the cube, the operator frowned at its trace on his screen, at the warble-a
nd-hash it made on his speaker. He pressed the call button for the officer of the watch and said, “Alert. Unscheduled transmission being received. It is scrambled–encoded with an unknown cipher. What shall I do?”

  “It is what?” the officer barked, astonished.

  “Scrambled. Shall I continue to record?”

  “Of course!” his superior snapped. “If it is scrambled; it is very likely to contain important information! Be sure it records completely . . .”

  A huge burst of static rasped through the speakers. The operator’s ears fairly rang with it–then seemed to echo in the sudden silence. “Transmission complete,” he informed the watch officer. “Procedure?”

  “Take the cube to the new Bards,” the watch officer said immediately. “They should have it on the screen within the hour.”

  But they didn’t–not for many an hour to come.

  “It is Sales’s cipher,” the Intelligence officer informed Throb, the Castellan–the ranking Khalian officer in Captain Goodheart’s absence. “We recognize its progressions–but we have not yet been able to assign it meanings.”

  “Not yet!” Throb screeched, exasperated. “That parasite has been plaguing us for two years! Why can you never break his code?”

  “We have, several times–but though he keeps the same encoding of the signal, he is continually changing the meaning assigned to any given wave form. By the time we break one, he has shifted to another. And in this instance, the majority of the signal is video–we cannot even say with certainty which mathematical structures are for scanning, and which for color vectors. He keeps shifting video systems.”

  “Then isolate the audio portion and break that code! But I must know what he spoke of, and quickly!”

  “We shall do it as promptly as we may, Lieutenant.”

  * * *

  But the Alliance did it quicker. They already knew Sales’s code, of course–they had the computer-enhanced image on the screen in minutes. The adjutant listened and watched for ninety seconds, then woke up the admiral. The admiral watched the whole recording, and woke up the CEO on Terra, sending the whole sequence as a squeezed signal. The CEO watched it, then called in the Cabinet, who watched in awed silence.

  The final burst of white noise accompanied the flare; the screen went dark, and the CEO turned to them all, seeking out each one’s gaze, one by one, as the impact of what they had seen diminished.

  “It will have to be edited down, of course,” ‘the minister of internal policy said at fast. “The broadcast nets will cut it themselves, if we don’t.”

  “No, they won’t,” the minister of communications said softly. “I’ll invoke the Public Safety Clause. They’ll show it intact. I think they would, anyway.”

  The CEO nodded. “Show it just the way it is. It speaks for itself.”

  * * *

  The commentators couldn’t allow that, of course–but they did keep the introduction brief. Everyone who was watching the news that night, on all the Terran and Khalian planets, sat silent in awe, feeling grief well up, as they watched the gallant Terran and Khalian ships, enemies turning against a greater enemy, fighting to the Iast without the slightest inclination to flee from a foe who fought in deadly silence, with no warning, no demand for surrender, no slightest offer of mercy. They watched, and saw a human come to the aid of a Khalian, fighting other humans . . .

  Merchant humans.

  The screen went blank, then lit again with the image of the two commentators.

  “But they were eriemies, Dave!” said Chester. “Sworn enemies! Captain Goodheart, sworn to destroy every Terran ship he could–and Commander Sales, sworn to destroy Goodheart!”

  “They died forsworn.” Chester nodded, frowning. “In the end, they realized who the real enemy was–and humans and Khalians joined forces against him.”

  * * *

  “It is a lie!” Throb leaped up, naked claws poised over the man’s image on the screen. “All humans are enemies to all Khalians! The Merchants swore to aid us, and betrayed us! The Fleet slew us wholesale, gutted our planets!”

  “You have heard for yourself,” Serum said. He was older, beginning to gray around the muzzle. “We all heard the captain’s voice. The Merchants are the true enemy.”

  “It was altered!” Throb lifted his head as an even better explanation hit, widening his eyes. “It was a complete fabrication! It never happened, none of it! The captain still lives! It is only that the Terrans wish to make us think he is dead!”

  “What is, is.” Serum’s sorrow deepened to sternness. “Do not seek to deny what is real, or you will lead yourself and all your warriors into disaster.”

  “I deny nothing but a lie! I state only what is true, what must be true! Must it not, Globin? . . .Globin!”

  The pirate colony’s only human sat immobile, back bent, shoulders sagging, hands between his Iegs, head bowed.

  “Globin!” Throb shrilled. “Are you senseless? Do you not hear? Tell them it is a lie!”

  Slowly Globin lifted his head. His eyes were red; his face was gray; tears streamed down his cheeks.

  Throb stared at him as though he were seeing a ghost.

  “Let him be,” Serum said softly. “His god is dead.”

  * * *

  Globin–torso long, legs short and bowed, head two sizes too large for his ill-proportioned body. Eyes too huge through his bottle-glass spectacles, face a doughy mass, hair a black thatch, mouth almost lipless. Globin, the genius.

  Globin, the outcast.

  His fellow humans had heard his new name, given him by Goodheart’s Khalian pirates, and had twisted it to express their new hate. To them, he became–

  Goblin, the traitor.

  A traitor to all his race, to all that is right and good, for he helped the Khalian pirate prey upon human ships, helped the bloody Weasels shoot down Fleet ships.

  Georgie Desrick, the outcast.

  His playmates mocked his ugliness, his schoolmates parodied his clumsiness. His classmates scorned him for his bookishness, hated him for his exalting of the mind and complete disregard of the body.

  But what friends could he have, except books? When none would teach him the use of his body, because it was too great an effort for so slow a learner?

  “I swear, Georgie Desrick, I don’t know what you bother living for!”

  “Why don’t you just drop dead, Georgie Desrick?”

  The question was well asked–and its only answer was faith. Faith in his God, faith in humankind. Georgie Desrick clung to life by religion.

  Finally, his fellow junior officers, in spite and hatred, manufactured excuses, made him a scapegoat, and set him adrift in a lifeboat.

  And in the darkness and despair, faith at last wore out, and Georgie Desrick cursed both his race and his God.

  Then Goodheart saved him–Goodheart, seeking to cultivate a human traitor, though Globin couldn’t know that until it no longer mattered–for Goodheart was his friend, Goodheart was his teacher, Goodheart was his protector.

  Goodheart, was his god.

  Saved by Goodheart, nurtured by Goodheart, given a name by Goodheart, accepted by the pirates on Goodheart’s orders, Globin lived by Goodheart and for Goodheart, all for Goodheart…

  And Goodheart was dead.

  “No, Globin, no!”

  It was a furred paw that caught his hand, clawed fingers that twisted the knife from his grasp, a Khalian doctor that pressed the anesthetic spray against his arm ...

  No, not Khalian, he thought with groggy insight as he sank down into the depths of sedation. Not Khalian. Pirate. Goodheart’s pirate ...

  * * *

  “What use, Throb? The captain is dead! How can you aid his revenge?”

  “By finding his slayers!” Throb snarled as he stepped into the shuttle. “I cannot sit idle when my captain is dead, and his killers boasting in their guilt! You are Castellan in my absence, Serum!” And he slammed the hatch shut.

  Serum watched the little shuttle lift off; his
spirit ascending to the battlecruiser with Throb, knowing well how intolerable it was to sit and do nothing when every cell of his being cried out for vengeance.

  Light-years away Throb’s ship broke out of hyperspace and began to snoop, lying quietly while its sensors scanned the whole area and searched for stars that moved. When it found none, and no signals other than the background static of stars, it winked into hyperspace again and was gone, to emerge a few light-years farther along the course, moving steadily in toward that part of the sky from which the final transmission had come. Again it scanned the sky, lying still for an hour and receiving—nothing. So it jumped again, and again ...

  “It will take us months,” the helmsman estimated.

  “Assuming what?”

  “The top cruising speed of the captain’s ship, multiplied by the time elapsed since he left port.

  Throb nodded. “Then months it will be.”

  But it was only a day. Finally, when they broke out, there was radiation–the sub-light transmission of ships in conflict. Throb listened and recognized the battle as the one he had already watched, too many times. “Laggard light speed only now carries word of his doom! How long since the transmission was received on Barataria?”

  “Five days, Lieutenant.”

  “Then we are five light-days from the scene of the ambush, or less! Helm . . .”

  “Object in movement!” cried the sensor operator.

  Throb swung to the screen, staring. A pinpoint of light moved, only a little, but moved. “Bearing!”

  “Toward us–two degrees to starboard. Velocity is half Tau!”