Seed of Stars Read online

  The green light on the signal board registered "all stations manned." She punched out the time on the log keyboard. Good enough to satisfy Bruce, and Lindstrom, whose direct subordinate she was.

  A tap on the shoulder, and Brace's voice rapped: "Out!"

  She vacated the duty chair for the commander and stood next to Lindstrom. She watched him check the emergency manning time, heard him grant, and anticipated his next question by laying in front of him a copy of the MAYDAY call.

  "Wangituru," Brace muttered. "Another Excelsior Corporation job."

  Hoffman picked up the reference immediately. Bruce was not likely to forget what the Excelsior Corporation had tried to do to him over the necessary annihilation

  of the mutinied Athena, but she knew that would not prevent his doing his duty in this new situation.

  "Course maintained, sir," she said.

  Bruce flashed her a brief, sideways look. "Naturally, lieutenant. I don't expect anyone to exceed their orders." He consulted the screen captioned Wangituru. At the center of the screen a blip pulsed faintly. "Huh. Speed not estimated yet? De Witt?"

  "Linked with Maranne's crew, checking and recording."

  "Contact message?"

  "Sent, sir."

  "Are they—" nodding at the screen, "—still sending?"

  Hoffman pressed a switch, and a speaker relayed the static-battered message.

  Bruce grunted. "Deceleration standby?"

  "Activated, sir."

  "Course change?"

  "Coming through any second—"

  A green light winked over the speaker labeled "Astrogation Main." Han De Witt's voice gave the figures.

  Bruce spoke into the microphone which relayed his voice on all systems. "Deceleration coming up. Anyone with problems, speak now."

  Nobody spoke.

  Two seconds later, deceleration was on.

  Wangituru was a big, lumbering ore freighter, almost as big as Venturer Twelve, but possessing neither the Corps ship's complexity nor resources. Effectively, she was little more than a huge container fitted with the necessary propulsion units, with a minimum of space devoted to the comfort of her small crew. Unfortunate

  ly it had been in this area that one of the two meteors had made its ravaging impact. Still moving at a speed of two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers an hour, the two ships hung within two hundred meters of each other, their bulks balanced in the star-pitted blackness of space.

  There was a Corps saying, a saying which Bruce had turned into law for his own crew. "Get it right first time, because there's still plenty to go wrong." So, everything was right first time, under the coordination of Lieutenant Lee Ching.

  Kuznetsov and his engineers were ready with replacements for outer skin and girders long before the ship achieved line of sight contact with Wangituru. They had all that was needed and were ready to jet across with their gear to the injured ship, suited and waiting as courses were matched and speeds equalized. Kuznetsov's men were, as always, first away, scorning the comfort of spaceboats, and using the power units of their heavy suits to propel not only themselves but the necessary materials and gear across the gulf between the two ships.

  Han De Witt, the astrogator, was unhappy. Mindful of how this errand of mercy would upset their scheduled arrival at Kepler III, Commander Bruce had ordered that damaged astrogation gear should be taken out of Wangituru in banks and the equivalent put in from Venturer Twelve's precious stock of spares. The assumption was that later the damaged gear would be repaired and placed in Venturer Twelve's replacement stock, but De Witt was doubtful about the practicality of such a measure. However, he knew better than to argue. Lieutenant Maranne was in charge of the replacement operation. Her orders were clear; she was to see that the minimum necessary was done to enable the Wangituru to get back to Earth, nothing more. As usual, Brace's orders were ruthless and direct.

  This same ruthlessness was in evidence in the way in which the medical side of the operation was arranged, but here the guiding hand was that of Surgeon Lieutenant George Tamba Maseba. The lightly injured were to be treated on the spot, in cooperation with the Wangituru's Corps-trained sickbay orderly. The more seriously injured were divided into three categories. First were those who could be temporarily patched up and allowed to carry on aboard the ship until she reached Earth. Some of these would be fitted with limbs and organs from the replacement banks on Venturer Twelve and would, within a few weeks, be fit for light duties. Then there were those whose condition warranted mercy killing, and those who were already dead . . . these two latter classes had their own special importance.

  Lieutenant Maseba was discussing the dead when he spoke to Piet Huygens in Venturer Twelve's Medic Center. Lieutenant Leela De Witt was standing by.

  "One thing about you, Huygens, you've got the right approach with corpses, so I'm handing that assignment to you. Caiola will be helping you, as usual. That sickbay orderly on Wangituru seems to know what he's doing. He didn't have enough soup to bag up all the bodies, so he diluted it and made enough, hoping that we'd be in time. As it happens, we are, with a few hours to spare."

  Caiola's gentle, dark brown eyes scanned his copy of the injured list, and pointed out a name which had the note "torso crushed" by the side of it. "I've packed the skinner, sir. We can never have enough spare skin."

  "Right," Maseba nodded. "But first I want you to concentrate on the list of priority organs, so that if Thunderguts suddenly decides to blast off, we're making the best of what time and material we've got. Leave big bones until last, though I can do with whole skulls for pieces. And be thorough about small bones, will you?"

  Caiola said: "What about Lieutenant Kibbee, sir?"

  "What about him?" the fluorotube over Maseba's desk flickered, and he glared at it, as though daring it to fail.

  "He'll want to do a proper space burial for the dead."

  "All right, if it keeps him happy," Maseba said. "Cooperate, but do your job first What he mumbles a few words over and pushes towards the nearest sun will be what I don't want for the replacement bank. Just wrap the remains up well, and see that they look reasonably anthropomorphic. Kibbee has imagination; he has to have."

  "Sir?"

  "Dammit, he has to have, and remain a priest, doesn't he?" Maseba said. "Primitive tribal rites..."

  A buzzer sounded. Maseba stabbed a pink-lined finger at the intercom. "Yes?"

  A gritty voice spoke. "Warrant Officer Panos here, sir. Spaceboat ready, all gear checked. Waiting for Lieutenant Huygens and Caiola. I'm coming over with your lot."

  "Right." Maseba switched off, and said a last word to Huygens and Caiola. "Oh, and make sure that they give you a decent room for dissection. I'll save the lives of what injured I can—but you'll be saving future lives. Remember that" He looked hard at Huygens, about whom he was never quite sure, and was pleased to see the tall blond youngster smile.

  "I always think of that, sir," said Huygens.

  Caiola was looking over the list again. "There's a note here, sir, about a Wangituru crewwoman named Shiu Fong Fong. It says—'Save her pretty face.'"

  "I will," Maseba said, "provided I can save her pretty guts."

  Piet Huygens had told the truth—that when he was in charge of dissections, he always thought of the future lives to be saved. Now, as he worked with Caiola in the twenty-five-degree warmth of the room assigned to them by Sikorski, the Wangituru's captain, he was for this time, at least, "all Corps," Medic Branch. He wore waterproof, stain-resistant whites, with a skullcap and overshoes of the same plastic.

  Palance, the sickbay orderly of the Wangituru, was assisting Caiola, working with grim determination at a task that Caiola took in his stride. Strange that Caiola, a mild man who wrote poetry in his off-duty periods, should do so well in this bloody job that he had earned himself the nickname of "Butcher" among the rest of the medical staff, particularly when huge, fearless sides of beef like Engineer Lieutenant Kuznetsov had been known to keel over at the shock of somet
hing like a cut finger. But then, inside the mind, where it really counted, weren't we all different? Take Mia, for...

  "Sir, this one is junk." Caiola leaned over a bench and wiped his red hands on a cloth.

  Huygens looked at him in surprise. "That was Van Horst, wasn't it? Junk, all of it?"

  "The lot. He was a drinker, but heavy. Been brewing the stuff up in secret, I imagine. If he hadn't been killed he'd have died on duty, or something. Liver like a piece of rotten leather, should have packed up weeks ago."

  "O.K. Zip him up," Piet said. He glanced at the skin freezer. "You layered that stuff properly? You know how finicky Maseba is."

  Caiola answered with hurt dignity. "This is my second tour of duty with the senior medical officer, sir."

  So, thought Piet, screw you, Lieutenant Huygens, sir. He recognized that the reproof was deserved. He continued his examination of a pair of hands, and decided that they were perfect Checking the ligature labeling, he passed them over for placement in a fluid bag. As he did so he became aware that someone was standing by him.

  He looked up to see Kibbee, a lean, long-faced, rumpled man of thirty-five. Priest of the United Christian Church, Kibbee was a liberal to the extent of bang able to put up the right prayer for any one of a dozen religions at a moment's notice, and in the right language. For him, there was truly one God. Even the nonreligious members of the crew regarded him with some awe, because it was he who had said the last prayer for former World President Oharo, when that great and good man died in the geriatric unit on Earth's moon.

  "Hello, Piet" For Kibbee there were first names only, and he remembered the first name of every crew member.

  "Hello, Bill." Piet went on working.

  Kibbee sighed. "Burials?"

  "Soon." Piet looked at the priest with concern. "Look, we'll have them parceled up for you, all neat and ready. If this upsets you, don't come in; be sensible."

  Kibbee regarded Piet's red-spattered whites with a deep sadness. "As you are?"

  "If you like."

  Kibbee shook his head, and his gaze swept round the panorama of gory, scientific dismemberment. "God knows if you're doing right I don't" And he went out

  Caiola, working steadily with the skinner, remarked: "There's a good man. Why doesn't he leave things he doesn't understand to the experts?"

  Piet grunted: "Like God is an expert?"

  Caiola eyed his superior with a reproving glance. "You have it exactly, sir."

  For a while they worked in silence. Piet found himself thinking of that brief note by the side of the injured crewwoman's name—"save her pretty face." Someone, in the heat and anguish of disaster, had found a moment to write that Someone cared, someone needed someone else. The thought of the Chinese girl who at this moment was probably in the gentle hands of Maseba made him think of her pretty sister from across the water. Mia. His Mia. Mia, who loved him so completely that their desertion from the Corps was the only possible solution for her. It was a mad idea, without logic. But who wanted to be logical about such a love? A new life ...

  A voice from the old life called from near the door. He started, and his probing knife slipped a little. Lieutenant Hoffman, clad in blue overalls which clung to her handsome figure, addressed him coolly. "Could I have a word with you, Lieutenant Huygens?"

  A voice from the past, and one which Piet could well have done without. He walked over to the door. Caiola and Palance were hidden by a store locker, but near the door a pile of souped and bagged human limbs, arranged with the careful precision of expert butchery, lay awaiting transportation back to Venturer.

  Trudi Hoffman had been working hard; on approaching he could see sweat on the tough, Nordic features. Her blue eyes had the bite of a January frost.

  "Look," he said. "You're not supposed to be in here. Kibbee must have left the door unhooked. I've got a lot of work to do—"

  Her gaze roved over the heap of bloated plastic bags and their ghoulish contents, tiien came back to him with unshaken concentration. "As you're so good at avoiding me on Vee Twelve, I thought I'd run you down here."

  "There's a time limit to this job, you know. I don't want to take back useless—"

  "Piet!" Her voice cut him short. "We had a good thing going, you and I. We had it every way we wanted it, and it was good. Anything you asked of me, you had; anything I asked of you, I got Then it stopped. Why, Piet?"

  He stared at her. What she said was true. Their sexual appetites had been well-matched. She had given him complete satisfaction, or so he had thought until his first encounter with the magic of Mia. Then he had been able to recognize his relationship with Trudi for what it was, a shared interest in sexual athletics in which each played nothing more than the function of a satisfaction machine for the other. Sex with Ma was only part of a much greater whole, a welding together of two personalities such as he had never before experienced, a giving and a complete acceptance. Trudi could have no conception of such a relationship; indeed, she probably had no need of it

  "I can't talk now—"

  'To hell with that!" Her voice was a hiss. "I want to know. You're not making it with anyone else in the mess, I know that much, and you can't do without it this long!"

  Then she didn't know about Mia. That was good. But she would find out eventually; she would make it her business to find out And when she did. . . . He turned away from the icy blast of her gaze, and found himself staring at the result of his own butchery. What kind of woman could be so blind to the ordinary humanities that she should choose this scene and this background to demand a reasoned explanation of why he no longer wished to ride her? The dismembered dead, now destined to become so much stored material in the deep freeze banks of Venturer Twelve, meant nothing more to her than so many stacked engineering spares.

  Hers was the Corps disease, the danger that every woman member faced, but which struck especially at the officer class with its additional burden of tradition and responsibility. In the pursuit of such a career it was necessary to forswear love. Different women reacted in different ways; some became to all intents men, their womanness dried and hardened into something beyond masculinity. Others, like Trudi, became loveless tigresses, permanently in heat, demanding the constant mechanical satisfaction of off-duty copulation as a compensation for the love they could never have. He pitied her, but he lacked the moral courage to be frank with her.

  "I wanted to work, to study. I've been taking balancing hormone shots to cool me down. There's so much to learn, so little time..."

  "Liar!" Her voice was incredulous, scathing. "I don't believe you. You would never do that—it means too much to you. There's not an officer on this ship gives it to me the way you did. You must be getting your satisfaction somewhere; why not with me?" The glare went from her eyes, and she asked, in a voice which, by comparison, was tender: "Come and see me, please, when you're back on board?"

  He nodded, taking the chance to get rid of her. "Yeah, yeah, I'll do that. Now will you please go?"

  She stiffened, on the brink of yet further argument, then apparently realizing the futility, she turned abruptly and left Piet leaned against the locker for a moment and took off his skullcap to wipe the drenching sweat Palance approached.

  "Too hot for you, sir?"

  "No, no. I'm O.K. How are we doing?"

  "I figure we'll save all your lieutenant needs, sir."

  "Fine."

  Palance added his burden to the growing stack of plastic bags and went away. Piet put on his cap and glanced at the door. Even as he wondered if it was proof against further visitors, it opened.

  Mia stood there, tiny and neat in her blue coveralls, with the flash of her rank on the left shoulder, her hair dank with sweat. He backed into the angle of the locker, where Caiola and Palance could not see, and she thrust herself close to him.

  "Piet, love," she whispered. "They said you were working down here. We've finished up in Astrogation, and..."

  Her voice died in her throat It was, perhaps, not entirel
y credible that one of her race could ever be said to be wide-eyed, but she seemed so now, as she stared at the pile of plastic bags.

  Aixd because he knew, because he felt what she was feeling so deeply, his reply was deliberately harsh. "You aren't supposed to be in here, Mia. Do you hear me? For God's sake, girl, turn your eyes away!"

  She was weeping, the sobs shaking her small frame. "Those men ... oh, Piet, those poor, poor men!" She buried her face in his shoulder, seeking the comfort of physical contact against the horror that was beyond bearing.

  "Mia, love—Mia." Now he held his hand at the back of her small, neat head and smiled down at her. "We are all poor creatures. Perhaps in some respects these men are luckier than most—because in death they will live on."

  She looked up at him, her round doll-face seeking comfort from his own. "I think . . . perhaps I can understand. But I must still feel sorry for them, for what they have lost..."

  "Then go back to Vee Twelve and if you wish, make a paper shrine and burn a stick for them. But be happy for them."

  She nodded. "Ill try. And when you are back, and we are together again . . . then, will you take out the capsule?"

  The need of her had him in thrall. This was no cold-minded bitch who wanted him for mere physical relief; she needed him to fulfill her creative purpose,

  and she gave him a love that no other woman, not even his mother, had ever given him before. "Yes—the capsule," he said. A sudden, incredibly bright smile, and she was gone. He returned to his work.