Guardsmen of Tomorrow Read online

  Edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff

  GUARDSMEN

  OF

  TOMORROW

  2000

  DAW

  Guardsmen of Tomorrow

  Copyright © 2000 by Tekno Books and Larry Segriff.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover art by Bob Warner.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1169.

  DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Putnam Inc.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  Nearly all the designs and trade names in this book are registered trademarks. All that are still in commercial use are protected by United States and international trademark law.

  The quote at the beginning of “The Gemini Twins” is reprinted from Mythology, copyright 1942, by Edith Hamilton, with permission of Lit-tle, Brown and Company.

  First Printing November 2000

  Contents

  Introduction © 2000 by Larry Segriff.

  A Show of Force © 2000 by William H. Keith, Jr.

  Blindfold © 2000 by Robin Wayne Bailey.

  Wiping Out © 2000 by Robert J. Sawyer.

  Smart Weapon © 2000 by Paul Levinson.

  Procession to Var © 2000 by Andre Norton.

  The Gemini Twins © 2000 by Paul Dellinger.

  That Doggone Vnorpt © 2000 by Nathan Archer.

  The Silver Flame © 2000 by Josepha Shennan.

  Stardust © 2000 by Jean Rabe.

  Keeping Score © 2000 by Michael A. Stackpole.

  Alliances © 2000 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

  A Time to Dream © 2000 by Dean Wesley Smith.

  Endpoint Insurance © 2000 by Jane Lindskold.

  INTRODUCTION

  by Larry Segriff

  Adventure stories. FTL ships rocketing through space; the Space Guard keeping vessels safe from pirates; ray guns, BEMs, and damsels in distress. These are the stories I grew up on, and these are among the stories I still like to read.

  Robert Heinlein. Isaac Asimov. E. E. “Doc” Smith. And, of course, Andre Norton.

  These are some of the people whose work I devoured growing up-and, in Andre’s case, whose new books I eagerly look forward to.

  Space opera has changed a lot since the Golden Years of SF. The laws of science are followed more rigorously, for example (“modern” spaceships don’t bank when they turn), and the people in the stories tend to be more well-rounded, and even more flawed… more human, if you will. But the heart of space opera-the rousing sense of adventure, the strong pacing, the exotic settings, the larger-than-life issues-these haven’t changed. Or, if they’ve changed at all, they’ve only gotten better… as the stories in this anthology prove.

  So sit back, turn the page, and enjoy… but before you do, you might want to buckle your seat belt, ‘cause it’s going to be a wild ride.

  A SHOW OF FORCE

  by William H. Keith, Jr.

  William H. Keith is the author of over fifty novels, divided more or less equally between science fiction and military technothrillers. While most of his SF is written under his own name, he writes the military novels under a variety of pseudonyms.

  His most recent work is Europa Strike, third in a planned series of military science fiction novels written under the pseudonym Ian Douglas.

  Watch your helm, Mr. Sotheby,“ Captain Fifth-Rank Greydon Hazzard said quietly.

  ”Put a dent in that thing up ahead and they’re going to be taking it out of your pay for the next ten thousand years objective.“

  “Aye, sir. We’re at fifty-three meters per second, in approach.”

  Hazzard could sense the drift of the ship, the tug of gravity, the caress of the photon breeze, the shrill, insistent drag of the interlocking magnetic fields of planet, star, and galaxy. The frigate Indeterminacy was edging gently toward the orbital moorings, primary sails folded, her impetus coming now entirely from way sails and jigs, her secondary drive barely ticking over.

  Jacked into the virtual display of the shipnet, Hazzard was immersed in the data feed, with a crystalline, all-round view of the approach, just as though he were perched out on the fifty-meter thrust of the ship’s dorsal flying jib spar. The sprawl of Tribaltren Station spread across star-limned blackness dead ahead, the nearest bastions and field guide towers now just ten kilometers distant, dark and monolithic against the soft, liquid-light glow of the Milky Way.

  The moorings about the station were crowded with other vessels, and there was heavy traffic in the approach and departure lanes. The steady wink of IFF netbeacons and shipboard running lights crawling across three dimensions would have been a bewildering tangle of confusion to any observer not equipped with an AI that could make sense of the chaos and feed it in manageable chunks to the bridge.

  “Approach Control signals we’re clear for Bay 12,” the comm officer of the watch announced. That would be Midshipman cy-Tomlin. Bright kid. Steady, with a streak of laziness that watch-and-watch for a few subjective months would cure. And of course, with the cy-enhancements, he was of the Chosen and destined to go far in Union service.

  “Very well. I see it.” Text and flickering symbols overlaid sections of Hazzard’s view of the sensory feedscape around the vessel. He could see the steadily incoming trickle of navigational data both from the Indy’s helm and from Tribaltren Station Approach Control, see the traffic sites of other ships in the moorings, see the readouts for all departments and decks of his own ship. All of that information played across his brain, instantly accessible, but his responsibility was the whole, not any given part. He held back, aware of the rhythm of ship operations, giving orders when needed, but letting his people do their jobs. Indy’s officer complement was a good one, well trained and experienced. Her crew, like most crews in the fleet, was a melage of gutter sweepings, metplex gangers, and pressed c-men, but. by the Goddess, they were his sweepings, gangers, and c-men, and he was proud of how they’d shaken out over the past three months subjective.

  He took a moment to check crew deployment on the Indy’s starboard foremast, a constellation of golden stars, each light representing in netgraphic clarity the position of a sailhandler maintaining the delicate set and trim of the 2,000-ton frigate’s spacesails. At the moment, only the fore-ways’Is were set, giving the ship just enough of a vector that she could maintain way.

  The image of Tommis Pardoe, Indeterminacy’s First Lieutenant, materialized to the right of Hazzard’s viewpoint. “A good deployment, First,” he said. “The new hands shaped up well.” Indy had been on blockade duty off Danibar, three months subjective pacing back and forth at near-c, which had translated to almost two years of tau minus.

  “Thank you, Captain.” He sounded worried.

  “Problem, First?”

  “Just wondering what the urgency is, sir. The dispatch calling us in to Tribaltren was still smoking when it came across the comm station. ‘Report immediately,’ it said. Where’s the war?”

  “All around us, Tom. We’ll find out in a few hours which particular part of the war is so urgent.”

  “I suppose so, sir. But it’s not like they don’t have plenty of assets right here in port.”

  His senior lieutenant had a point. Closer in to the mooring station roads, the ship traffic ahead resembled a swarm of angry stingflies, everything from service bugs, LO coasters, and single-sailed planetary luggers to huge three-decker first-rates.

  An alert klaxon sounded through the shipnet. “Bridge, port lookout! We have a collision alert. Incoming at port high at two-zero-three plus one nine!”

  Hazzard spun his point of view, looking off Indy’s p
ort beam. A ship moved athwart the blue-white crescent of Tribaltren IV.

  “Mass reading! Ninety-eight thousand tons, range 705 kilometers. It’s a first-rater… Goddess!”

  That last exclamation accompanied the deployment of a dozen sails, spreading across the first-rater’s yards. She was huge and blunt-prowed, a five-hundred-meter dagger shape carrying several square kilometers of mesh sail, a Galactic Union ship of the line. On Indeterminacy‘s sensory feeds, she was painted a patchwork red and black, with white trim highlighting the lines of sealed firing ports along her three gundecks. The G.U. flag materialized across her foreways’ls as their surface displays altered. A second emblem shimmered into visibility beneath the first, a family crest in red, gold, and black.

  “She’s the Victor, Captain,” Lieutenant Pardoe observed. “One-oh-two. Captain First-Rank Arren Sullivese, commanding. She’s flying Admiral Starlord cy-Dennever’s flag.”

  “She’s closing, Captain,” the helm watch called. “Oblique approach at one point one kilometer per second! Looks like she’s trying to cut us off at the moorings.”

  “Damn it,” cy-Tomlin said, “we have right-of-way.”

  Hazzard scowled, the expression safely hidden within the anonymity of the shipnet.

  Victor had been on normal approach, her velocity a bit high for that approach corridor. As soon as her helm AIs had identified a collision danger with the frigate Indeterminacy, though, Victor’s captain had crowded on more sail, hoping to pass the Indy’s prow, rather than slowing in order to pass astern.

  Technically, Victor should back down and allow the Indeterminacy to proceed; vessels to port and zenith always had right-of-way over ships to starboard and nadir.

  However…

  “You feel big enough to argue with him, Tomlin?” Hazzard said gently.

  “Maneuvering! Back full!” In any case, Victor was the burdened vessel right now… burdened with too much mass and too much speed in a claustrophobically narrow volume of space. First-raters had all the maneuvering finesse of a Thaldessian bloaterslug, especially when compared to the nimble sail-handling elegance of a frigate. It made more sense for the tiny Indeterminacy to defer to the drifting mountain of the Victor. “Bring us to zero closure with the station!”

  “Maneuvering back full, aye, sir!”

  “Spread more sail! Deploy main tops’ls, port, starboard, and dorsal!”

  “Loosing main tops’ls, aye!”

  Like all trihull lightjammers, Indy possessed three sets of masts and field-guide spars, canted out and forward from port, starboard, and dorsal fairings, mizzen and main masts astern of the gundecks, foremasts well forward, nine masts in all, not counting the trinity of bowsprits reaching far out ahead of her prow dome.

  Sails unfurled, popping taut under the snap of static fields. Their leading faces shimmered, then went mirror-silver as their trailing surfaces dulled to black, perfectly reflecting the star-misted black of space and the red-brown, black, and gray battlements of Tribaltren Station ahead. As yards pivoted, the reflective surfaces of the sails caught the light of Tribaltren’s sun, as the mesh beneath the adaptive surface display grabbed hold of the local magnetic fields. The total energy striking the sails from forward was equivalent to less than a ten-thousandth of a gravity, and yet…

  “Drive room! Emergency maneuvering! Cut in the main drive!”

  Vector drive fields amplified any acceleration, however minute, drawing on the literally inexhaustible energy of quantum space through a singularity-induced Cashimir cascade to augment the ship’s vector or, as in this case, to arrest Indeterminacy’s forward momentum. Since everything within the field was affected uniformly, there was no sensation of deceleration as the Indy slowed sharply. A two-thousand-ton vessel moving with a relative closure rate of over fifty meters per second could not stop on the proverbial tenth-credit piece. Still, the Indeterminacy slowed rapidly as the Victor loomed huge to port.

  “Incoming signal from Approach Control,” cy-Tomlin said.

  “I should think so. Let’s hear it.”

  “ ‘Slow to full stop and yield to incoming traffic.’”

  “Already in hand. Mid. Acknowledge.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Too little and too scrabbing late,” Pardoe muttered. ‘’What are those people playing at over there?“

  Hazzard didn’t know if he was complaining about Approach Control’s tardiness or the heels-in maneuver Victor was attempting to pull off. The Victor was still two kilometers off Indy’s port beam, but through the magnification inherent in the ship optical sensory feed, the immense vessel loomed like a passing cliff face, with sponsons, barbettes, field projector arrays, and fairings turning hull metal into a landscape of faceted surfaces and complex topographies, with masts like forest giants, with gun ports grinning down her gundeck modules like bared teeth.

  “Now,” Pardoe said, “just so long as he doesn’t-”

  A shudder rolled through the Indeterminacy, a long, crunching lurch that seemed to rack the brain and twist the stomach. For a jarring few seconds. Hazzard’s linkfeed was interrupted; he was plunged into blackness and, for just an instant, was back on his jackrack, hot, drenched with sweat, as other command deck personnel shouted and screamed in the echoing close darkness around him.

  Then the feed came back on-line. Still queasy-he hated field interface transits-he scanned the cascade of data on his visual field. There were reports of disorientation, jacker shock, and obvious confusion… but no damage, thank the Goddess, and no link dissociations.

  “Damn them!” cy-Tomlin’s voice said.

  “As you were, Mid,” Pardoe warned. But his own voice was barely under control.

  Victor had popped her drive field to further slow her lumbering mass just as she cut across the Indy’s bow. Vector drive fields worked on the fabric of space-time, a true space drive; a kind of curdling of bent space rippled along the interface between the inside of a deployed VDF and what lay outside. Though not dangerous if encountered at low speeds, it was disorienting and could damage delicate electronics. At high relative velocities, it could generate disruption enough to shred the largest vessel into scattered debris.

  “Signal, Victor to Indeterminacy.” Cy-Tomlin reported. “Ware our wake!”

  “The bastards did that on purpose!” Sotheby said.

  “I very much doubt that, Lieutenant,” he replied. “They were already moving too fast, and spreading that extra sail moved them faster. They had to drag their fields to decelerate in time.” Still, it did seem to be a calculated insult. As Indy came to a near-dead stop, Victor drifted across her bow a scant half kilometer distant, making for Mooring Bay 16. Cooling vanes like squared-off wings, the vast reach of her sails, shimmering as they fought to slow the behemoth, and the deadly complexity of the first-rater’s aft maneuvering drive Venturis passed slowly, a moving mountain.

  Indeterminacy rocked and shuddered again with the passing of the big ship’s wake, and then the way ahead was clear once more.

  Hazzard let out a slow breath. Things could have worked out much worse. “Let’s have the extra sail in now, Mr. Par-doe. Set sail for ahead, maneuvering dead slow.”

  “Furling all main tops’ls, Captain. Set sail for ahead, maneuver dead slow.”

  “What do you think, Captain?” Pardoe said on their private link. “Was Sullivese trying to be flashy for the admiral’s benefit? Or was he just being incompetent?”

  “Arren is not incompetent,” Hazzard replied, a bit more sharply than he’d intended.

  Sometimes, Pardoe spoke his mind a little too freely. “Maybe they’re just in a hurry.”

  “Aye, sir. And maybe some cyberenhanced Starlords think they’re just a rung or two higher up the Darwin ladder than the rest of us.”

  Hazzard said nothing. Pardoe’s bitter aside had struck just a little too close abeam.

  Their blockade deployment at Danibar had been cut short by the arrival of dispatches requiring Indeterminacy to make for Tribaltren St
ation with all due haste and for Greydon Haz/ard to report to the Port Admiral’s office immediately upon docking. With so many other vessels available within a few days’ travel of Tribaltren, why had the Indy been called in?

  Immediately, fortunately, was a flexible term in the Galactic Union Navy, however.

  There was the routine of seeing to it that the ship was safely docked, of course.

  Most of the minutiae could be properly left to his First Lieutenant, but there were reports to electronically sign and a grumpy Port Disbursement Officer to cajole into giving an upcheck to the purser’s request for new condenser tubes for the galley’s stasis units.

  And, perhaps more immediate, he needed to get presentable first. One did not visit a two-star admiral in shipboard skins. When he chose to make himself visible on the shipnet, of course, his icon could take on any appearance he chose… which meant in uniform. When he came fully awake on the jackrack, however, the crisp and spotless Navy blacks were gone. In their place were gray skins soaked with sweat, and all the usual accoutrements for waste absorption, cooling, and nutrient tubes. A jackrack technician helped him unplug, took his helmet with its forest of electronic feeds and cables, and stood by as he swung his feet onto the steel grillwork of the deck.

  Forty minutes later, freshly showered with the last of this deciyear’s personal water ration, Hazzard was clad in his one decent set of dress black-and-golds, complete with shoulder half-cloak, visored cap, medals and decorations, and his personal computer woven into the left arm of his jacket, from shoulder to wrist, in closely worked patterns of what looked like liquid gold.

  “You loog good, zur,” Cadlud, his steward remarked, brushing his uniform with a static cleaner. The Irdikad hovered over him as it worked, its single eye in an elephantine head studying his uniform in minute inspection as all three tentacles twitched the fall of his cloak into perfect line. “Zhip-zhape ond sqvared avay.”