The Middle of Nowhere Read online

  “And I told the commander,” Brik put in, “that no apologies were necessary. The security of the vessel was compromised. He needed a place for a secure conversation and a believable cover story for getting there. Dressing me down in public for a dangerous EVA was highly appropriate. It was the best way to get me outside quickly.” To Korie, he said, “You can’t hurt my feelings, sir. I’m a Morthan. I don’t have feelings. Not like humans, anyway. I don’t allow personal to get in the way of purpose.”

  “Right,” agreed Korie. “Nevertheless, let’s get on with this.” Speaking mostly to Leen now, he said, “Here’s how I found it. I was doing the log and I asked HARLIE for his thoughts about the various incidents of Morthan sabotage. Had he done a time-and-motion study on the ones we’d found? Given the length of time Cinnabar was aboard the vessel, how many more could we expect to uncover? What did his analysis suggest?”

  “And—?”

  “He said it was inconclusive. He wasn’t willing to commit.”

  Leen frowned. “That’s not an appropriate reply. An intelligence engine of HARLIE’s rating should have an opinion on almost everything.”

  “That was my thought too.” Korie said. “When a HARLIE unit refuses to tell you something, that’s like a big red arrow. So I asked to see the raw data myself.”

  “And—?”

  “HARLIE dumped the raw data to my clipboard. So I could look at it at my leisure, he said. It was obvious he didn’t want to show it to me himself, but there was something he needed me to know. So I waited till the boat was powered down, came over here and locked myself in the lavatory. It didn’t take too long. HARLIE didn’t make it obvious, but it was there if you knew what to look for. We had too many booby traps. Too far apart. More than a few of them were of sufficient complexity to require significant preparation and installation time. Cinnabar didn’t have the time aboard to do it all.”

  “You needed HARLIE to tell you that?” asked Leen.

  “No. I needed HARLIE to prove it. HARLIE had come to the same conclusion, but he couldn’t figure out a safe way to tell me. He’s assumed even his integrity is compromised.”

  “And Brik? How did he figure out Cinnabar planted an imp?”

  “Easy. It was what I would have done,” Brik said. “I realized we had a problem when the docking tube came apart. We’d already detoxed it. That’s why I went EVA. I wore a simulated imp strapped to my chest to see if it could survive. It could. Your sighting, Crewman Gatineau, was the confirmation I needed.”

  None of them spoke for a moment, each of the men was lost in his own mordant thoughts. Finally, Leen sighed unhappily. “So we’ve got a second Morthan on the ship. We’ve had it here the whole time. And all of our detox efforts have been wasted.”

  “That’s right,” said Brik.

  They were all silent a moment longer as each considered the ramifications.

  “A Morthan on a starship,” Gatineau said. “Ouch.”

  “That’s pretty bad news all right,” said Korie, looking pointedly at Brik.

  “Yes,” Brik agreed dryly. “Especially if the Morthan is on your side.”

  Gatineau didn’t catch all the undertones of that exchange. He scratched his head. “But it’s not the same kind of Morthan, is it? It’s not a Tyger.”

  “It’s an imp,” said Brik. “Not an imp from your mythology, an imp from ours. This is not a cute, mischievous, little cherub with horns. This thing is an apprentice demon. It’s a hellish little bastard, a single-minded sabotage-machine, half a meter high. Very fast. Not particularly strong. And not particularly smart either—not by Morthan standards. By human standards . . . well, you wouldn’t want to play chess against it. It’s a kind of programmed intelligence. They do what they’re told. You give one a task and you turn it loose. They’re very good for suicide missions.” Brik added, “They’re also supposed to be fairly good eating.”

  “Better than rat?” asked Leen.

  “I wouldn’t know,” replied Brik coldly. “I don’t eat rat.”

  Korie ignored the exchange. Despite repeated requests on his part that the two of them learn to work together, Brik and Leen continued to snipe at each other. “So,” he said cautiously. “This imp was programmed to booby-trap the Star Wolf?”

  “Just in case Cinnabar failed.”

  “He must not have liked that thought.”

  “He was probably planning to eat it. It must have been programmed to go its own way as soon as it could. It had plenty of time aboard the Burke, and even longer aboard the Star Wolf. So, at this point, it probably knows Liberty ships as well as you or Chief Leen. Let’s assume it’s had time to explore everything it wants to aboard the ship. Let’s also assume that the only traps we’re finding are those it wants us to find. Including the sabotage of the docking tube. It’s possible that one was aimed at me. It’s also very possible that I was supposed to survive it.”

  Korie thought about that. “It’s given itself away then . . . deliberately.” And then he thought about that some more. “Okay. It wants us to know it’s here,” he added. “Why?”

  They all thought about that for a moment. Gatineau sipped at his coffee. The others had forgotten theirs. He was still wondering why he had been included in this meeting. He knew he wasn’t here by accident.

  “It’s bored?” suggested Leen. “It wants to play games with us.”

  Brik shook his head. “Morthans don’t play with their food.”

  Gatineau asked abruptly, “Can we open the ship to space?”

  Leen shrugged. “We can do anything the captain orders. Or whoever’s acting captain,” he added, pointedly looking at Korie. To Brik, he said, “Will that kill it?”

  Brik shook his head. “How long will it take to get the entire crew into starsuits? Certainly long enough for the imp to figure out what’s about to happen. Do you think a creature that’s had nearly a month to prepare might have a secure chamber somewhere for just such an eventuality? Can you think of a way to get the entire crew into starsuits and off the vessel in less than fifteen seconds? Anything longer than that, you can assume the imp is back in its pod.” He added, “Can you think of a way to set up a plan, any plan, without alerting the imp that you’re planning something?”

  Gatineau sighed. “I see the problem.”

  “And if you open the ship to space, you lose the farm,” added Korie. “Lose your cash crops and you’re out of business. Again.”

  “I guess I still have a lot to learn.”

  “It’s worse than that,” added Brik. To Korie he said, “Chief Leen scanned those high-cycle fluctuators while we had them aboard. He read their memories into HARLIE. Everything. That means the imp most certainly has a copy of that information too. It’ll be looking for an opportunity to get that information into the hands of its masters.”

  “Stop trying to cheer me up,” said Korie. “I’m feeling bad enough already.”

  “It gets worse,” said Brik. “It only gets worse. Can you trust this ship now? Are you willing to trade parts of her to anyone else? You have nothing to trade? How do you know the imp won’t be in one of your trade boxes?”

  “We don’t have many options, do we?”

  “We can scuttle the ship.”

  “The admiral will like that.” Korie put his coffee-bulb aside. “I hate being wrong. I’d rather be clever.”

  “That’s how Cinnabar got killed.”

  “I know. So what do we do now?”

  No one answered him.

  Faslim-Arub

  When Korie’s twelve-month tour of duty aboard the 911 came to an end, Captain Fennelly grudgingly gave him a satisfactory recommendation and Korie applied for a six-month course of study at the War College before returning to space. He was immediately approved.

  Korie’s treatise, Working Toward a Theory of Conflict, was only one of more than three thousand documents submitted on the very same topic. Clearly, a significant percentage of the younger generation of starship officers were concerned about
the structure of the Fleet and the training available to its commanders. With varying degrees of insight, the authors considered the advisability of existent defense plans, the nature of interstellar war, and the prospects for an Allied success against a well-trained Morthan Armada using the current strategy books. Few were sanguine; most of the papers demonstrated significant concern; a few were genuinely alarmed. Several paralleled Korie’s reasoning.

  To Korie’s credit, his paper was one of the most clearly written; it was uncompromising in its examination of the strengths and weaknesses of both sides in the coming war; and it was clear in its conclusions that the old ways of fighting a war were going to prove woefully inappropriate. What set Korie’s paper apart from almost all of the rest was his detailed analysis of the psychology of war in space and his alternate proposals for offensive and defensive battle tactics based on misleading and confusing the enemy as to what kind of a ship he was up against and what its intentions really were.

  The admirals of the navy had long been aware of the deficiencies of the killer bee strategy; but the intelligence engines had predicted that swarming the enemy was the best way to overcome the problem of insufficient training for individual starship crews. After Korie’s work arrived at the War College (as well as the other treatises), the intelligence engines were asked to reconsider the problem and this time allow for the current status of Fleet morale and the overall level of training for command-level officers.

  The results were much closer to what Korie (and others) had suspected, and the War College immediately shifted to emergency status to develop new strategies as well as new training programs. Korie’s work ensured his immediate appointment. Even had he not applied to the War College he would have been assigned there.

  At the War College, strategic study groups were formed to pit their various strategies against each other. Later, after the results were evaluated, several new training programs were instituted, specifically designed to give starship commanders a sense of Morthan strategy and psychology as well as to harden them against possible Morthan tactics. This was the most challenging period of Korie’s leadership training and he went to bed (alone) exhausted and exhilarated every evening.

  At the end of six months, he was rotated out of the War College, and promoted to executive officer of the LS-1066. This too was a ship he had helped construct. He had led the team that laid her keel.

  Captain Margaret Faslim-Arub was candid with Korie. She did not expect him to serve aboard her vessel for very long; he was slated for a ship of his own. The next time they returned to Stardock, Korie would probably be promoted—perhaps within the next six months. The pace of production had been accelerated again, and the demand for qualified commanders had become critical.

  There was no question in Captain Faslim-Arub’s mind that Korie was well-qualified for command. She gave him the conn at every opportunity; the greatest gift she could give him would be a sense of comfort and familiarity at the helm of a starship. Korie appreciated not only the opportunities to learn, but the implied acknowledgment of his ability. It was a refreshing change after the passive-aggressive abuse of Jack Fennelly.

  He repaid her faith in him by working long hours in every section of the ship bringing each one up to spec and beyond. He upgraded the gardens, the meat tanks, the recyclers. He recalibrated the fluctuators and stabilized the singularity for a more accurate focus; he rebuilt the magnetic grapplers, and when he was through, he had boosted the ship’s top speed by five percent. He interviewed the HARLIE unit and, with its permission, made several minor modifications which amplified its confidence rating in itself by three percent. He redesigned a number of command procedures, shortening the time it took for the vessel to initiate its hyperstate envelope and collapse it as well. He designed combat drills and simulations based on his experiences at the War College.

  Unfortunately for Korie . . . the LS-1066 was assigned a rigorous set of duties that kept her away from Stardock—as well as from his family—for nearly eighteen months. She ferried colonists, mail, cargo, military supplies, and once even a high-ranking ambassador. She participated in three sets of war games, twice playing the part of the enemy. As frustrating as it was to have his promotion delayed, the experience was still invaluable to Korie; he learned about the exigencies of command in a variety of situations—but he missed his wife and children too. He ached to see them again. Their letters weren’t enough to ease the loneliness. He filled his days with as much work as he could so he could fall asleep quickly at night.

  At last the LS-1066 was ordered back to Stardock for the installation of a set of prototype ultrahigh-cycle fluctuators, which would boost her top speed by a factor of two, giving her a theoretical maximum realized velocity of twenty-three hundred C, and a practical maximum realized velocity two thousand times the speed of light.

  Korie delayed his own transfer to supervise the installation of the new fluctuators. He wanted to lay his own hands on the machinery, fit the modules into place himself, calibrate each separate assembly, install the redesigned singularity grapples, check the housings, tune the cables, and make the coffee. He wanted to learn everything he could about the new high-cycle fluctuators; this was the weapon that could win the war and he wanted to be the expert.

  Three test cruises were scheduled. On the first one, the LS-1066 travelled to a star system nearly six light years distant in a single day of ship time. On the second cruise, the starship went to a deep rift observation post, twenty-three light years distant. It took four days of ship time. The third mission would be across the rift and back; the ship would be gone for four months.

  Korie wanted to make the leap; he wanted to pin a black rift-crossing ribbon to his chest; but except for two all-too-brief leaves, he hadn’t been home in nearly two years. There would be other missions. It wouldn’t be fair to Carol for him to take another four months away, if he didn’t absolutely need to.

  Korie took three months of accumulated leave to spend with his wife and two sons. At first, neither of the boys recognized him—they cried and fought when he tried to pick them up. They resented it when he came home with them and went into the bedroom with their mommy.

  But he persevered; he threw himself into the process of being a good father with the same enthusiasm and dedication he had demonstrated in the construction, maintenance, and running of a starship. Very soon his boys began to recognize that having a dad in the house created a joyous new dimension in their lives; they began to worship him.

  Jon Korie was a loving father; he enjoyed parenting. He woke up early every morning and made breakfast for Carol and the boys. He woke them gently and, tucking one under each arm, carried them into the bathroom for a morning bath. He washed the boys with industrial thoroughness, he dried them with equal precision; he supervised the brushing of their teeth as if each tooth had to be individually detoxed, and he brushed their hair with exquisitely tender care and a ruler-straight part. Had it been possible to perform a white-glove inspection on the children, both his sons would have passed with highest ratings. He picked out their clothes and helped them dress until they insisted they were big enough to do it without his help.

  But if there was a quality of military precision to the way he applied himself to the task of caring for his children, there was also an equal quality of pure uncompromised affection. During the day, he always made time to play with them, to give them piggy-back rides or swimming lessons or simply a silly-scrimmage in the park. They had tickle-fests and water-fights and endless games of chucklebelly. He was a god to them.

  Korie took his sons on outings and picnics; they went to concerts, plays, and exhibitions where Jon Korie pointed out each and every aspect of the displays until his children began to yawn in boredom.

  It did not escape Carol Korie’s perceptive eye that there was a manic quality to her husband’s attentiveness—as if he were trying to compress a lifetime of parenting into a single visit home, as if he knew something about the shape of the future.


  In the evenings, he tucked his children into bed, he brushed their unruly hair back away from their eyes, he listened thoughtfully to their prayers, and then he hugged and kissed each one goodnight. And somehow even after all of that, at the end of the day he still had the energy and dedication to make himself one hundred percent available to his wife.

  Carol understood what he was doing. Jon Korie was creating the experience for himself of a family; he was giving himself a lifetime’s worth of memories, so he would have something to take with him when he journeyed out again. More important... he was trying to leave a part of himself behind, so that if, by some terrible chance, he did not return, his children would still know they had had a real father.

  The Conversation

  “We can’t even scuttle the ship,” Korie said. “Once we start moving crew members off, even one boatload at a time, the imp will know she’s being abandoned. What do we do with dead ships? We break them up, open them to space, use them for target practice. The imp won’t let that happen. If it thinks it’s going to die, it’s going to take us with it. Something probably goes ka-blooie before the first crew member gets out the airlock. Certainly before the last.”

  “Not only that,” said Leen, “where do you evacuate the crew to? And how can you be certain the imp doesn’t find a way to come with?”

  “To Stardock—?” asked Gatineau, hoping to be helpful. “Decontam?”

  None of the three glanced at him, but Korie’s brow furrowed at the thought. “The imp needs this ship, and it needs this crew . . .”