"Nessler . . ." Mincio said. "That is, Captain Nessler says we're just going to launch one, ah, missile and run. Launch our pretend missile, that is. And hope the Peeps choose to give us a wide berth in case we might do better the next time."
Kapp snorted. "Right, the next time," she said caustically.
She caught herself with a cough. "That is, I think there's a damned good chance it'll work. It's quite, well, possible. Anyway, it's better than what happened to the cutters, and better than what those bastards'd do to us if they found us on Hope." She gave Mincio a lopsided grin. "Besides, it's our job, ain't it?"
"Yes," said Mincio, "it is."
It was the job of every decent human being to fight evil; people who destroyed lifeboats were evil. It was a simple equation.
Unfortunately, Mincio was too good a historian to believe that evil always lost.
Ajax shuddered in dynamic stasis. The planet rotated beneath while the cruiser's reaction thrusters lifted her nose before her impeller wedge carried her into a higher orbit. The Rienzi's impeller nodes were hot but the Peeps weren't underway yet. The "Manticoran" ship's wedge came up, boosting her clear of the planetary parking patterns at a leisurely two hundred gravities. Hopefully, it looked like the leisure of the totally confident rather than the concession to a less than fully reliable inertial compensator which it actually was.
Behind them, Rienzi began to move at last. She climbed away from the planet, following roughly in Ajax's wake, and Mincio licked her lips. By interstellar law, a system's territorial limit extended half a standard light-day from its primary. Technically, then, neither belligerent could attack the other within twelve light-hours of Air's primary . . . but Rienzi had already violated that law once, and every sensor Ajax boasted watched her carefully as she cracked on a few more gravities of acceleration.
"Hold the roof of the wedge towards her," Nessler said. His voice over the ship's address system sounded cool, almost bored. Mincio watched from her console on the other side of the bridge as his long, aristocratic fingers moved, then glanced at Kapp with a raised eyebrow.
"We're in energy range, Ma'am," the petty officer explained quietly, "but the bastards can't shoot through an impeller band. They want to try ambushing us again, they'll have to use sublight weapons that can maneuver after us."
Mincio nodded thanks and returned her attention to her own display.
"Captain, we're picking up radar and lidar!" Harpe announced sharply. "Looks like their fire control's trying to lock us up."
"In that case, you may launch the decoys, Bosun," Nessler said in the same disinterested tone. He touched another control.
The Ajax's hull twitched minutely, then rang again in a note that syncopated harmonics of the first. "Decoys away!" the Bosun reported from the Combat Information Center.
That armored citadel at the center of the ship was properly the First Officer's station during combat. Harpe was there instead of Mincio because Harpe knew what she was doing. Edith Mincio might as well have been on the ground for all the good she was now.
She could have stayed on Air when the pinnace lifted Kapp and the spacers back to the cruiser. She would have survived that way, but she wasn't sure she could have lived with herself afterward. It didn't matter now.
Twenty-one seconds to the expiration of the deadline. Twenty . . . nineteen . . . eighteen . . .
"Enemy is launching missiles!" reported Petty Officer Bowen, who manned the console nearest Mincio's. His voice was higher than it had been when he showed her how to adjust the scale of her display.
Two, six, eight, fifteen miniature starships, reaching for the Ajax's life with laser heads. . . .
Because the ships were still within easy optical range of one another, the decoys that mimicked the cruiser's electronic signature were of no defensive value: Peep missiles could guide on the visual image of their target. Nessler had kept the Ajax close instead of gaining maneuvering room before the deadline as a calculated risk. This way the missiles would be at the start of their acceleration curves and so more vulnerable to Ajax's point defense lasers.
If the lasers worked, that is.
"Engaging with lasers," reported a laconic female voice that Mincio didn't recognize. The buzz of high-energy oscillators added minute notes to the vibration of a cruiser underway with all her systems live. Five missiles, then five more, tore apart or diverged in vectors from the smooth curve they'd been following. Vaporized metal expanded behind the missiles at the point they went ballistic and therefore harmless. Two more disappeared, but they only had to get to within twenty or thirty thousand kilometers and the lasers weren't going to stop them all after all and . . .
Ajax rang with a quick shock as a single bomb-pumped laser smashed at her sidewall. The over-aged, under-maintained Melungeon sidewall generators were no match for the power of a modern laser head, but the angle was bad. The laser smashed through the passive defenses and threadbare radiation shielding like a battering ram, but it was an ill-aimed ram that somehow missed her hull completely. Simultaneously the remaining Peep missiles failed, one in a low-order explosion instead of mere loss of guidance.
"Bosun, lock them up," Nessler ordered. "Radar and lidar both. I want a lock so hard you can give me a hull map."
"Aye, aye, Sir!"
Despite her own tension, Mincio recognized the glee in Harpe's reply and darted another glance at Kapp.
"Skipper wants the Bosun to hit 'em hard enough with our fire control to burn out their threat receivers, Ma'am," the petty officer whispered. "Don't know if it'll do any—"
"Number Four battery down!" a voice with a Melungeon accent said. "Five minute, five minute only say Ms. Lewis! We back in five minute!"
"Enemy launching—" said Bowen. His voice changed. "Holy shit! Those are people! They're throwing out bodies!"
"The crew tried to mutiny!" Nessler said, at last sounding excited. "They're throwing out mutineers!"
"Christ, that one's moving!" Bowen said. "They're alive!"
Mincio instinctively increased her display's magnification. She blinked at the bodies falling astern as Rienzi continued to accelerate away from them. The victims had been alive when they left the airlock without suits. It seemed very unlikely to Mincio that any of them were still alive by the time Bowen spoke. She felt a little nauseous at the thought, but this was war.
The countdown had reached zero without her noticing it. She reduced the magnification so that the drifting corpses were merely specks lost against the immensity of the Rienzi's hull.
"Enemy launching!" Bowen said once more.
"Stand by point def—" Nessler said, professionally calm again.
"They're abandoning ship!" Bowen screamed. "That's their boats! That's not missiles!"
"Do not fire!" Nessler said. "I repeat, do not fire point defense!"
Ajax continued to drive outward. On the optical screen the Rienzi lost detail as Ajax's enhancement program segued slowly from sharpening the image to creating it.
"Sir!" called Harpe. "Sir! Those weren't mutineers going out the lock, those were the officers! Those worthless dole-swilling bastards killed their officers when we locked them up rather than fight!"
"Yes," Nessler said. "I rather think they did."
Six smaller craft—pinnaces and cutters—and two great cargo lighters had left the Rienzi. As they braked away under reaction thrusters, fighting to clear the safety perimeter of their mother ship's impeller wedge, the cruiser's image started to swell, losing definition. Mincio thought something had gone wrong with her display.
Rienzi brightened into a plasma fireball. A front of stripped atoms swept inexorably across the fleeing light craft, catching them without even the protection of their own impeller wedges, buffeting them from their intended courses for a few moments before the boats' structures and all aboard them dissolved into hellfire.
The bubble of sun-hot destruction continued to expand. Air's upper atmosphere began to fluoresce in response.
"One of
the officers survived long enough to scuttle her," Nessler said. He sounded either awestruck or horrified; Mincio wasn't sure of her own emotions, either.
Bowen stood at his console. "Guess our buddies from the Imp have an escort to Hell, now," he said. He gave the optical screen a one-finger salute. "And a bloody good thing it is!"
Hope was a blue-gray jewel in the main optical screen. Because Ajax was in clockwise orbit, the planet's apparent rotation was very slow. The survivors of L'Imperieuse were drawn up in a double rank across the forward bulkhead.
Nessler handed the Melungeon petty officer her wages in currency—a mixture of League and Melungeon bills, the incidental fruits of the poker game that gained him the use of the cruiser. They exchanged salutes, which in the Melungeon's case meant the eye, ear, and mouth gesture that Mincio still found unsettling.
"That's the last one, Nessler," she said, then to be sure double-checked the database she'd created during the return from Air. The vessel's computers hadn't contained a crew list when the Manticorans took over. Mincio couldn't pretend that she thought anybody would use the records she was leaving behind, but she'd done what she could.
"Very good," Nessler said. To Mincio his smile looked forced. "Well, I suppose . . ."
"Excuse me, Sir," Harpe said. "We'd like to say something. Ah, the crew, that is."
Nessler raised an eyebrow. "Certainly, Bosun," he said. He caught Mincio's eye; she shrugged a reply of equal ignorance.
Harpe bent over the intercom pickup of the command console. "The crew of L'Imperieuse would like to thank the crew of the Colonel Arabi," she said, her voice booming into every compartment of the ship. "May you someday get officers as good as you deserve."
She straightened and faced the double rank of Manticoran spacers. "Hip-hip—" she cried.
"Hooray!"
"Hip-hip—"
"Hooray!"
"Hip-hip—"
"Hooray!"
From deep in the ship, permeating it, the throats of four hundred Melungeon spacers growled, "Urrah!" It was like the sound of the engines themselves.
"Time to board the pinnace, I believe," Nessler said. He'd swallowed twice before he could speak. Mincio blinked quickly, but in the end she had to dab her eyes with the back of her hand.
"I'd almost like to . . ." Nessler continued. "But then, a light cruiser wouldn't be much good to me back on Manticore, and she probably isn't up to the voyage anyway."
"Don't you say that about Ajax, Sir!" Dismore said. "She'd make it. She's got a heart, this old bitch has!"
"Dismore—" the bosun snarled in a tone all the more savage for the fact she didn't raise her voice.
"That's all right, Harpe," Nessler said, raising his hand slightly. "Yeoman Dismore is quite correct, you see. I misspoke."
One of the spacers began to whistle "God Save the Queen" as the Manticorans marched off the bridge. By the time they'd reached the pinnace that would take them to the ground they were all singing; every one of them, Edith Mincio included.
Because League officials in this region favored the Peeps, Hope's native population was loudly pro-Manticore. The party filling the streets of Kuepersburg had started before the pinnace touched down. It looked to be good for another six hours at least.
Mincio wasn't good for anything close to that. The only thing on her mind now was bed, but the Singh compound was the center of the festivities. She edged her way with a faint smile past people who wanted to drink her health. She hadn't taken an alcohol catalyzer, and anyway she was barely able to stand from fatigue.
Chances were there'd be a couple having a private party in her room. If Beresford was involved, "couple" was probably an understatement. Mincio hoped that by standing in the doorway looking wan, she might be able to speed the celebrants on their way.
The door was ajar; a light was on inside and she heard voices. Sighing, Mincio pushed the panel fully open.
The growler moved aside with grave dignity. Rovald jumped up from the bed on which she'd been sitting; deKyper started to rise from the room's only chair though Mincio waved her back quickly.
"Congratulations on your great victory, Ma'am!" Rovald said. The technician spoke with a little more than her normal animation, but there was a tinge of embarrassment in her voice also. "We didn't want to intrude during the celebrations, but we hope you'll have a moment to see what we achieved while you were gone."
She nodded toward the equipment she'd set up on the writing desk. DeKyper was standing despite Mincio's gesture. She squeezed against the bed so that Mincio had a better view. The growler wrapped its tail around its midsection and licked the old woman's hand.
"Yes, of course," Mincio said. Actually, this reminder of her real work had given her a second wind. She'd collapse shortly, perhaps literally collapse, but for the moment she was alert and a scholar again.
Gold probes as thin as spiderweb clamped the sharp-faceted "book" into the test equipment. The crystal was one of Rovald's reconstructed copies, not an original from deKyper's collection. Not only was it complete, its structure was unblemished down to the molecular level where the Alphanes had coded their information. Even apart from gross breakage, real artifacts all had some degree of surface crazing and internal microfractures.
An air-formed hologram quivered above the equipment. It was as fluidly regular as a waterfall and very nearly as beautiful.
"That's Alphane writing, Ma'am," Rovald said. "This is precisely the frequency the books were meant to be read at. I'm as sure as I can be."
Mincio bent for a closer look. The crystal was a uniform tawny color, but the projected hologram rippled with all the soft hues of a spring landscape. She could spend her life with the most powerful computers available on Manticore, studying the patterns and publishing weighty monographs on what they meant.
It was the life Mincio had always thought she wanted. She straightened but didn't speak.
"The frequency should be much higher," said deKyper sadly. "I'm sure of it. But it really doesn't matter."
The control pad contained a keyboard and dial switches as well as a multifunction display which for the moment acted as an oscilloscope. She rested her fingers at the edge of it while her free hand caressed the growler's skull. The beast rubbed close to her and rumbled affectionately.
"Ma'am," Rovald said. "I've calculated this frequency, not simply guessed at what it might possibly be. This is the base frequency common to all the books in your collection. When they were complete, that is."
Mincio thought of the tomes she had read in which the scholars of previous generations translated Alphane books to their own satisfaction. She would create her own translations while she taught students about the wonders of Alphane civilization. Later one of her own students might take her place in the comfortable life of Reader in Pre-Human Civilizations, producing other—inevitably different—translations.
Rovald and deKyper faced one another. Neither was angry, but they were as adamantly convinced of one another's error as it was possible for a professional and an amateur to be.
DeKyper sagged suddenly. "It doesn't matter," she repeated. "More Orloffs will come to Hope and will go to the other worlds. In a few generations the Alphanes will be only shards scattered in museums. Everyone but a handful of scholars will forget about the Alphanes, and we'll have lost our chance to understand how a star-traveling civilization vanishes. Until we vanish in turn."
Fireworks popped above Kuepersburg. A dribble of red light showed briefly through the bedroom's window. The hologram in the test rig danced with infinitely greater variety and an equal lack of meaning.
Mincio touched the old woman's hand in sympathy. She knew deKyper was right. Destruction didn't require strangers like Orloff and his ilk. Mincio herself had seen worlds where the growing human population broke up Alphane structures that were in the way of their own building projects. People would blithely destroy the past unless they had solid economic reasons to preserve it.
That would require either p
olitical will on the part of the Solarian League—a state which hadn't for centuries been able to zip its collective shoes—or mass tourism fueled by something ordinary humans could understand.
They couldn't understand a pattern of light quivering above a crystal. Edith Mincio could spend her life in study and she wouldn't understand it either, though she might be able to delude herself to the contrary.
"I'm very sorry," she said to deKyper.
"Say!" said Rovald. "Don't—"
The growler touched one of the pad's dials, a vernier control, moving it almost imperceptibly. The beast took its four-fingered hand away.
Instead of a cascade of light in the air above the Alphane book, figures walked: slim, scaly beings wearing ornaments and using tools.
The three humans looked at one another. None of them could speak.
Fireworks popped with dazzling splendor in the sky overhead.
A Whiff of Grapeshot
S. M. Stirling
AUTHOR'S NOTE: readers may be amused to learn that both the climax of this story and the archeological methods described therein are closely modeled on real events which took place in the Eastern Mediterranean in 1795.
The Committee of Public Safety of the People's Republic of Haven rarely met in full session. There were security reasons, for one thing; for another, since the purge of the Parnassian faction, the rivalries had gotten too savage. Two dozen men and women sat stiffly along the long table the new regime had inherited from the old Legislaturalist government. The room had a restrained elegance of dark wood and creamy panelling that spoke of that older era, as well. Say what you liked about the Hereditary Presidency and its elitist flunkies, they'd had good taste. Much good it had done them when the jaws of his trap closed on them.
Well, at least we're not shooting at each other, Chairman Robert Stanton Pierre thought wearily. Yet. There were times when he wondered who was worse, the profiteers who swarmed over the State like flies, or Cordelia Ransom and her grim incorruptibles.