The Middle of Nowhere Read online

  Something huge grabbed him from behind, wrapping one great arm around him, hooking under his armpits; they were moving impossibly forward against the wind, pulling up and up the tunnel toward the distant door. Gatineau gasped desperately for breath, but there was nothing to breathe. The air sucked out of his lungs and kept on sucking. I’m dying! This isn’t fair—

  Something slammed soundlessly, he felt it more than heard it. He gasped and choked and imagined his blood boiling, but there was just the faintest rush of air, and the sounds were coming back, and through his blurring vision, he saw that he and Brik were in an airlock, and the gauge was rising rapidly, slowing now as it approached half-normal pressure. That’s right. You can’t restore full pressure that fast. It’s dangerous. His ears popped painfully, again and again. He open and shut his mouth, giving his sinuses a chance to equalize the pressure. It didn’t help. He clapped his hands to his head and moaned, twisting and rolling, trying to make the pain go away.

  And then hands were grabbing him, pulling him out of the lock and onto a stretcher, tying him down. He could barely see. He didn’t recognize any faces, and he couldn’t hear anything anymore. Somebody was trying to tell him something; he couldn’t understand it. And then they were lifting him and carrying him. He was in gravity again. They were aboard the ship? He’d made it?

  “Where’s Commander Brik?” he asked. No one answered, or if they did, he couldn’t hear them. “Brik! Where’s Brik?” he shouted, stumbling the words out. He tried to pull himself erect in the stretcher as they carried him aftward, and just before someone pushed him down again, his last sight of the forward access bay was Brik turning away from him to stare thoughtfully at the airlock door and the space beyond.

  O’Hara

  The anteroom was bare and empty.

  The walls were featureless. Pale. Gray. No holos. No documents. No awards. No portraits. The dark gray carpet was hard and utilitarian. There were no chairs, no tables, no furniture of any kind. The room was merely a place to wait.

  Korie did not have to wait long. A soft chime rang and a door popped open in one wall. He stepped into Vice Admiral O’Hara’s office.

  The admiral’s office was almost as spartan as the anteroom. A desk in the middle. Two gray chairs, one on either side. The desk was clean, not even a nameplate. Clearly, the vice admiral was not a nest-maker. Either that or she wasn’t planning to stay very long; and that was a much more ominous thought.

  “Sit down, Commander,” the admiral said, entering the room through the opposite door and pointing toward a chair. Korie sat. He kept his face deliberately blank.

  The vice admiral sat down behind her desk and frowned at something on the flat display of her portable. It was angled so that Korie couldn’t see what it showed. She still hadn’t given him more than the most perfunctory glance.

  She grunted to herself; it was a soft, almost inaudible exhalation. She didn’t look happy. Her responsibilities were far-reaching. This station serviced over a thousand ships, with more coming online every week. Some of the new ships were arriving from worlds as far as five hundred light-years away.

  Admiral O’Hara tapped the keyboard with finality and a sour expression; then she closed the machine and turned her attention fully to Korie. She had the face of a Buddha, enigmatic, mysterious, and possibly dangerous. At the moment her expression was unreadable.

  “Thank you for seeing me, ma’am,” Korie offered.

  Her expression didn’t ease. “I’m afraid it isn’t good news.” She sat back slowly in her chair. Her movements were almost painful. She looked tired. For a moment she didn’t look at all like an officer of the Fleet; she was just another gray-haired Negro grandmother with a recalcitrant child.

  She interlinked her fingers beneath her chin, almost as if in prayer. She was evidently having trouble finding the right words. She sighed and let the bad news out. “The LS-1187 is not going to receive the bounty for the destruction of the Dragon Lord. I’m sorry.”

  “Excuse me—?” Korie started to protest. The hot flush of anger was already rising inside of him.

  “It’s going to the crew of the Burke,” the vice admiral continued, as if Korie hadn’t said a word. “Or, rather, their heirs. The Burke is being credited with the destruction of the Dragon Lord.”

  Korie half-rose from his chair. “Admiral O’Hara! That’s not fair! You and I both know it. The entire crew of the Burke was killed by the Morthan assassin, Cinnabar. The ship’s intelligence engine had been dismantled. The ship was dead and waiting to be picked up. If we hadn’t been there, if we hadn’t taken action, the Morthan Solidarity would have captured the Burke and her stardrive intact. We prevented the Morthan Solidarity from capturing three fully functional ultrahigh-cycle envelope fluctuators. We did it! Not the Burke! We lost thirteen crew members—” Korie stopped himself abruptly. He realized he was getting shrill.

  The expression on Vice Admiral O’Hara’s face was impassive. Korie recognized the look. She would sit and listen and wait until he was through; she could be extraordinarily patient; but nothing Korie could say was going to change the decision. He could read that much in her eyes. He closed his mouth and sat back in his chair. “All right,” he said. “Why?”

  “The Burke destroyed the Dragon Lord, not the LS-1187.”

  “That’s not true.” Korie kept his voice steady.

  “That’s what the Admiralty Battle Review has decided—”

  “I’ll fight it. Their conclusions are wrong—”

  “You’ll lose.” There was something about the way she said it.

  “This isn’t fair,” Korie repeated. He had a sick feeling in his stomach. “Look, I know we have history. I know that you don’t like me very much. I know you don’t like the Star Wolf. And you and I both know the scuttlebutt—that my crew is incompetent, that Captain Lowell was criminally negligent and led the Morthan wolf pack directly to the Silk Road Convoy, that the ship itself is a jinx, a Jonah, a bad-luck hull, a place to put all the bad apples in the fleet, and so on and so on. Do you want to hear the whole litany? That’s just the first verse.”

  Korie didn’t wait for Admiral O’Hara’s polite refusal. He bulled onward. “Do you know how much that hurts? Not me—but the crew. Do you know the morale problem we have? Do you know how hard my people are working to overcome the bad name that’s been unfairly laid on them? They desperately need an acknowledgment. You can’t keep treating us like a stepchild. We’ve earned our name. We blooded the Morthans. The destruction of the Dragon Lord redeems the Star Wolf. I’m not arguing for myself. It’s my crew. They’ve earned the right to be proud of what they’ve done—”

  Vice Admiral O’Hara repeated herself quietly. “Mr. Korie, the decision stands. The Burke destroyed the Dragon Lord, not the LS-1187.”

  “You’re going to have a damn hard time convincing me of that. I was there.”

  Admiral O’Hara sighed. “I’m going to tell you something, Mr. Korie. This information is Double-Red Beta.”

  “I’m not cleared that high, ma’am.”

  “This is a need-to-know basis, and you need to know this. I’ll take the responsibility.” She took a breath and continued quietly. “The Burke was sent on a suicide mission. We didn’t expect her to come back.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “We were approached back-channel by an emissary who suggested that there was a coalition of dissident Morthan warlords willing to negotiate a truce. We didn’t believe it. Would you? Their fleet mauled us so badly, we’ll be playing hide-and-seek, hit-and-run games for the next five years while we try to get our strength back up. Why should they quit when they have us on the run? We knew it was a trap, even before the War College intelligence engines mulled it over.”

  “And you sent the Burke in anyway?”

  “The Morthans want the ultrahigh-cycle drive. The only ship they had big enough to bring home the Burke was the Dragon Lord. The Burke was booby-trapped. Not even her I.E. knew there were bombs aboard her or where th
ey were. Nobody knew. It was the trickiest part of the refit.”

  “But, surely her captain—?”

  “No, not even her captain.”

  “Uck.” Korie felt as if he’d been kicked in the gut. “You sent them out to be eaten.”

  “That’s right. And I’d make the same decision again for the opportunity to destroy an Armageddon-class warship. We crippled the Morthan fleet. Enough to slow down their advances into Allied domains. For the price of one ship, we saved at least a billion lives and untold production capability. Given those same odds, what would you have ordered?”

  Korie ignored the question. His interests were closer to home. “And the Star Wolf . . . ?”

  “The LS-1187 was a decoy. You weren’t expected to survive either. But you were onsite to keep the Morthans busy and distracted. You did that and the mission succeeded.”

  “Then you admit we had a part in that victory! We set traps too! Nakahari—”

  “The assassin found your bombs and disconnected them. Your intelligence engine has the complete record in a secure archive.”

  Korie felt the muscles in his jaw tightening. The same story, all over again. No matter what you do, it’s still not good enough. Frustration edged his voice. “Ancillary bounty?”

  O’Hara shook her head. “Hard to sell, right now. I’m not willing to make the effort.”

  Korie sat back in his chair, matching stares with the vice admiral. Knowing himself defeated.

  “Of course, you realize, this means that the LS-1187 can’t keep the name. There is no Star Wolf.”

  Korie looked up sharply. “Say again?”

  “A ship has to be blooded to earn a name. The Burke gets credit for killing the Dragon Lord. I’m sorry,” O’Hara said. “I really am.”

  He glared across the expanse of desk at her. “No, you are not,” he said. “You’re just saying that because it seems appropriate.”

  She lifted her hands off her desk, as if to indicate that this was not an avenue of discussion she wished to pursue. “I don’t blame you for feeling cheated.”

  “Cheated?” Korie stared at her. “That’s an understatement. The Admiralty is behaving abominably here.”

  “Be careful, Commander—” O’Hara said warningly.

  “Be careful? I should give you the same advice.” Korie leaned forward in his chair. “Do you realize the disastrous effect this will have on my crew? It’ll destroy them. Giving the bounty money to the heirs of the Burke—that’ll be hard enough to take. My people have families to support. They were counting on having something to send home. But taking away their name. Why don’t you just cut out their hearts? It’ll be faster.”

  “I have written a letter of commendation, and there are medals for bravery—”

  “No. That’s not enough. Keep your letter. Keep your medals.” Korie stood up. “No. I’m not going back to my crew and telling them that they didn’t earn their war paint. I’m not going to order them to clean the snarl off the front of the ship. We’re keeping the name.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “We earned it. We’re keeping it. The Star Wolf does have Morthan blood on her sword. We killed the Morthan assassin, Esker Cinnabar. We did that. He destroyed the Burke, we destroyed him. It. Whatever. We killed a ship-killer. We claim our name and the associated bounty.”

  O’Hara’s expression didn’t change, but she didn’t answer immediately. She was considering the import of Korie’s words. At last, she said, “It’s an interesting argument, and under other circumstances, I might even be willing to concede the point—it would be good for morale—but at the moment... the whole issue of a name is irrelevant. The ship is being decommissioned.”

  Now it was Korie’s turn. At first her words literally made no sense to him; simple noise. Then it sank in and he sat back down. He said slowly, “I beg your pardon?”

  “The most conservative position for us to take,” said O’Hara, “is to destroy the LS-1187—”

  “The Star Wolf,” Korie corrected her automatically.

  “Commander Korie, you had a Morthan assassin aboard your craft for a period of seventy-two hours. Everything about that ship is now suspect, and the effort it would require for us to certify that it’s clean—”

  Korie cut her off again. “—is commonly undertaken for other craft.”

  “Other craft are not the LS-1187,” the vice admiral snapped. “If we can booby-trap the Burke, a Morthan can booby-trap the LS-1187. We have only three decontamination crews working this entire station. We’re just beginning to learn the repertoire of tricks Morthans have cooked up when it comes to sabotage. It’s only been the last few hundred years they’ve had the military might to stand up to the Alliance; prior to that terrorism was their only means of striking at us, and I guarantee you they haven’t forgotten anything they learned during that time.”

  Jonathan Thomas Korie took a long, low, deep breath. “I’ll supervise the decontamination myself. I used to build liberty ships, remember? The Star Wolf is quarantined now. That’s standard procedure. She’ll stay that way until we’ve green-cleaned her three times.”

  “That’s an admirable gesture. The answer is still no. We need the parts.”

  “And what if there are booby traps in the modules . . .?”

  “It’s easier to detox individual pieces than the complex integrated systems of a whole ship. We really do need the parts.”

  “We need the ship more. We’ve lost over forty percent of our fighting strength in this arena. Do I have to list for you all the ships we’ve lost? Just in the last three months, the Aronica, the Stout, the Mitchell—you can’t afford to give up the Star Wolf.”

  “—And the Silverstein, and the McConnell. We’ve lost more than you know. At least the Dupree is still online. Unless you know something I don’t. I can’t afford to lose any more ships. That’s what you’re asking. We’ve got mounting intelligence that suggests a Morthan strike on the Taalamar system is imminent. I’ve got to get every ship out of here that I can. I’ve got thirteen liberty ships berthed on the T-spar, including the LS-1187, immobilized due to lack of parts. If we cannibalize, we can put eleven of them back online in the next ten days. Even if I wanted to—which I don’t—I can’t.”

  Korie began unpinning his officer’s insignia.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Quitting. I can do more for the war effort as a private citizen.”

  “I won’t accept your resignation. If you try to resign, I’ll bring you up on charges of dereliction.”

  “You’ll lose me either way. I’ll testify that I can’t accept the orders of my superiors because they’re contrary to the war effort. Even if I lose, I win. You end up with egg on your face.”

  “Stop it, Jon. I need your skills—”

  “You have a funny way of showing it.” He tossed the diamond-shaped buttons2 onto her desk. They bounced once and came to rest in front of the admiral, sitting like an accusation between them.

  “My ship has earned a name. My crew has earned a reward. I’ve earned my captain’s stars. Where are they? The last time I tried to resign, you made the case to me that the kindest thing that could be done for the crew of the Star Wolf would be to leave them together, because the stink they carried with them would make their service unbearable on any other ship. Well, you were right—you still are. But now the crew of the Star Wolf has a reason to be proud of their service. Scatter them to the other ships and all you’ll accomplish will be to spread ninety-three dissatisfied, demoralized men and women throughout the fleet. Bad for them, bad for the ships they get sent to.”

  “I admire your loyalty to your crew, Commander. It’s the stuff that great captains are made of. Unfortunately, decommissioning your ship is still the best of my limited options. Your crew will survive; they’ve already demonstrated their proficiency in that arena. But no decontam crew we have available wants to touch the LS-1187 . . . so as far as I’m concerned, she’s junk. Her only value is scrap and spa
re parts. Damn it, Jon, you had a Morthan assassin aboard your ship! Now put your buttons back on and I’ll find you a slot as a second officer on a battle-cruiser. That’s the best I can do.”

  “It’s not good enough. I won’t be bought off, Admiral.” Korie’s voice was low and controlled. “I’m a battle-Captain. That’s what you need right now. That’s what this war needs now. I want to do my job. I want to do what I was trained to do. I am tired of having my career and my crew and my ship treated as shit. We have the ninth best efficiency rating in the fleet over the last six-month period. I will stand our operations record against that of any ship under your command. If you refuse us decontamination, then let us do it ourselves and prove our starworthiness without your help. I’ve lost my wife and my children and the captaincy I fairly earned and now you’re threatening to take away the only thing I have left—my ability to fight the Morthan Solidarity. I won’t cooperate with that. And I won’t be polite about it. If you can give us nothing else, at least give us back our pride. Acknowledge our worthiness. Let us do our job.”

  “Listen up, Commander.” Admiral O’Hara was suddenly angry. She let her frustration and fury show. “There’s a war on. I have a lot more to worry about than hand-holding a bunch of spoiled children who are crying because they didn’t get their cookie. I’ve got I.E. projections with an eighty-five percent confidence rating that a Morthan fleet is massing for an advance into this sector. Where’s your loyalty, Jon?”

  Korie heard the admiral’s words as if from a distance. He knew she was right; but at the same time, he also knew she was wrong. There’s more to logistics than ships. He found to his surprise that he was completely calm. What he was about to do was career suicide. If it didn’t work, Vice Admiral O’Hara would have him facing a three-star competency hearing; and even if it did, she’d still never trust him again. She’d certainly never give him a captaincy, not even of the Star Wolf. And yet, even as he weighed the arguments in his head, he still couldn’t see himself not doing it. He didn’t want to serve on a battle-cruiser; battle-cruisers weren’t going to win this war. They were too valuable to risk. The lighter, smaller starcruisers were the key to victory.