Guardsmen of Tomorrow Read online

  “Thank you, Cadlud. I just hope the admiral thinks the same.”

  A launch took him from the Indy, now moored alongside the towering bulk of the station, across to one of the turreted tower complexes extending above the main body of the twelve-kilometer-wide facility.

  The Port Admiral’s office was decorated in Late Jingivid Imperial, all mirrors and black trim in a jarring cacophony of light and reflections. Admiral Dalim cy-Koenin was a blunt, bullet-headed man with a no-nonsense attitude and little patience for protocol. Hazzard wondered, in fact, how the man had managed to survive politically long enough to be awarded two stars. Cy-Koenin’s implants encased parts of his head and were visible on the backs of his hands and extending down each finger to the tip.

  Well, that, as much as anything else, explained his rank and considerable power.

  “You’re late” was the way he greeted Hazzard, as the office door dilated and the ship captain stepped between the Marine sentries and into cy-Koenin’s inner sanctum.

  “Yes, sir,” he replied. Hazzard was familiar enough with the ways of admirals to know that excuses were neither desired nor appropriate.

  Wall screens displayed deep space-not the view from Tribaltren, but someplace closer in toward the Galactic Core, teeming with orange suns and the mingled, softer glows of pale nebulae. The mirrors, black trim, and star projections made it difficult to see where the walls of the room really were. Hazzard wondered if he could even find the door again.

  Another man was in the room, reclining in a black synthliquid chair. Lean, hard, and angular, his face was faceted as though carved from obsidian. Both eyes were covered by a sensor array implant, and he was, if anything, more heavily intertwined with hardware than the Port Admiral. “Admiral,” cy-Koenin said, “this is the young man I was telling you about. Captain Hazzard, Admiral Starlord cy-Dennever.”

  Hazzard inclined his head, as courtesy required. “My lord.”

  Cy-Dennever looked him over coldly. “A noncy? My dear Dal, you are joking, I trust.”

  Noncy. Non-cybernetically augmented. That again…

  “I believe you will find me up to any task required of me, my lord.”

  He sniffed and continued to address cy-Koenin, pointedly ignoring Hazzard. “I specifically require a frigate captain capable of leading my in-system squadron and with a master’s understanding of the Ordiku Anarchate and the political situation there. A noncy simply will not do.”

  “Captain Hazzard is what’s available, Admiral,” cy-Koenin replied. “And he has personal knowledge of Kaden. Don’t you, Hazzard?”

  “Yes, sir. I was an assistant diplomatic naval attache to the Anarchate home world for a year. My steward is Irdikad, in fact.”

  Cy-Dennever gave him another look, harder this time. “And how long ago was this?”

  “Oh, about eight years subjective, my lord.”

  “How long objective? Things do change groundside while we’re on highspace approach. Or hadn’t you noticed?”

  Hazzard had to consult his PC. He’d minused some subjective with this latest deployment at Danibar. How much? Nearly two years, this time.

  “‘Nineteen years objective, sir.”

  “Nineteen years. Well, you’ll find the political situation within the Anarchate radically transformed. I’m not so sure you will be of any use to me.”

  “Their politics may have changed, my lord, but I doubt that the Irdikad have.

  They’re solitary, traditional, meticulous, a bit stuffy, even stubborn at times. They are also unflinchingly loyal.” He smiled. “Despite their interest in tradition-their recorded history goes back something like nine thousand years--they respect, you might even say revere, madness. Insanity is rare, but it’s granted a special status in their culture, maybe to avoid the problems of stagnation.”

  “Ahem, yes,” cy-Dennever said. “All very amusing, I’m sure. But the facts of the matter are that the Anarchate is now in negotiations with the P’aaseni Orthodoxate.

  The Ministry of Political Intelligence assures me that a decision by the Anarchate is imminent, perhaps within the next ten days, and that Orthodoxate ships will almost certainly deploy before then to, urn, convince the Irdikad to come along.”

  “The Irdikad volume is small, but strategically placed,” cy-Koenin added. “They have a fleet… a small one, true, but one capable of causing some considerable inconvenience should we extend our operations in that quarter. Lord cy-Dennever’s orders are to present a show of force at the Anarchate capital.”

  “Exactly. My squadron has firepower sufficient to convince the Irdikads that joining with the Doxies would not be in their best interests.”

  “I should think their best interests would be obvious,” Hazzard said. “The Orthodoxate is anthropocentric. Rather virulently so, in fact. The Irdikads would be reduced to slave status or worse.”

  “Obviously.” Cy-Dennever sniffed. “And obviously, too, the Doxies are on their best behavior until the Anarchate planetary defense batteries are safely in their hands.

  Remember, most Irdikad dealings have been with the Union so far. They are a simple people. To them, all humans are the same. Planetary genocide by what they consider to be an honorable and civilized species is probably utterly beyond their comprehension.”

  Hazzard held his peace at the patronizing nonsense of “a simple people.” The man acted like he was a few genes short of a full chromosome.

  If cy-Dennever represented Homo sapiens superioris, though, as his kind so often claimed, maybe he simply wasn’t done evolving yet.

  “The question of Anarchate neutrality is in the hands of the diplomats,” cy-Koenin said. “Your mission, Captain Hazzard, will be to take command of the in-system squadron, as a part of Admiral cy-Dennever’s diplomatic show of force.”

  Hazzard digested this. The in-system squadron would be the mission’s cutting edge, of course, patrolling within a few million kilometers of the Anarchate home world.

  Admiral cy-Dennever would have the heavies, the main squadron’s ship of the line out on the fringes of the Kaden system, accelerating back and forth at near-c so as to be ready for a near-immediate jump in-system at need. “Aye, sir,” he said.

  “It is vital, absolutely vital,” cy-Dennever put in, “that you not fire on Irdikad assets.

  Enemy vessels, of course… but under no circumstances will you fire on the locals, even if you are provoked.”

  “You’re saying, my lord, that we can’t shoot even if they shoot at us first?”

  “Well done! That is precisely what I am saying. These negotiations are too delicate, and too much is at stake to risk…” He stopped and looked at cy-Koenin. “Are you certain there are no augmented frigate captains available? I can’t be expected to trust a mere biological’s reflexes or instincts in a situation this precarious! He doesn’t even have the hardwiring to handle his ship properly! His vessel very nearly fouled mine during our approach a few hours ago!”

  Cy-Koenin glanced at Hazzard, then looked hard at cy-Dennever, saying nothing outwardly. Hazzard decided the two must have shifted to a telepathic exchange, one he was not privy to. Micro-radio transceivers implanted in their skulls allowed Starlords to converse privately, in much the same way that Hazzard could open a private channel to Par-doe when they both were on-line.

  At last, cy-Dennever sighed and looked away. “Very well. But you are responsible, sir, if this goes wrong!”

  “Of course, cy-Dennever,” cy-Koenin replied.

  “What ships will I command?” Hazzard asked.

  “Besides Indeterminacy,” cy-Koenin said, “there is Decider, a frigate of thirty-three guns, Captain-sixth Bellemew. The other vessels are smaller… Swift, twenty-seven; Fire Angel and Ferocious, both twenty-one; and Uriel, of eighteen guns. All five are already on-station or will be by the time you arrive. Four line battleships will be on blockade station out-system within two days objective. Admiral cy-Dennever’s Victor will bring that to five, under his flag. Your full opera
tional orders will be transmitted to your ship. You are clear for departure as soon as you complete taking on necessary stores and provisions.”

  “Aye, aye, my lord.”

  “Should be an easy deployment, Greydon,” cy-Koenin added, dropping into less formal speech. “The Irdikad aren’t hostile, and they won’t pick a fight with one of our line battle squadrons!”

  “Clarification,” cy-Dennever said. “They’re not hostile yet.”

  “Mm,” cy-Koenin said. “As always, minus-tau is against us. We need you at Kaden as quickly as possible. Assume one day for refit, five days for the trans-c jump to Kaden. You will have a three-day margin, some of which will be lost to minus-tau.”

  “Tau is of the essence, you might say,” cy-Dennever added, smirking at his own joke.

  “Admiral cy-Dennever will be there in Victor within five days more,” cy-Koenin went on, ignoring him. “It will be up to you to assess the situation when you arrive, and to report to Admiral cy-Farrol, currently in command of the Kaden Squadron. You will have dispatches and orders to deliver to him.”

  “Aye, my lord.”

  “Dismissed, Captain Hazzard. Inform me when your vessel is fit for space.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  As he left, the two Starlords were arguing in low but nova-hot tones.

  Twenty-one hours later, Indeterminacy boosted for c and the jump to Kaden, the Anarchate capital, without even time enough for Hazzard to visit Cynthea, his portwife at Trib-altren. Though the Indy cast off from the station at almost the same moment as the Victor, the frigate, with far less mass to boost, accelerated more quickly. Within another hour, the Indy was tacking on nines to her ninety-nine percent of light speed, as the universe, crowded forward by the distortions of relativistic travel, took on the appearance of a ring of frosty light encircling the prow, and objective hours in the universe outside passed like minutes to the men and women crowded within the frigate’s steel and duraplast hull.

  A vessel’s spacesails could ride the almost nonexistent currents of light, gravity, and magnetic flux, while her Cashimir cascade array boosted milli-G accelerations to accelerations measured in kilogravities. As the ship crowded c, a phantasm seeming to recede like Xeno’s Paradox the harder the ship boosted, space around the vessel turned strange, warped by the starship’s own pyramiding relativistic mass. A command from the bridge, and the trans-c primaries engaged, kicking her into highspace where they devoured light-years by the handful.

  But star travel came with a cost. Each time a ship approached the pace of light before engaging her highspace drives, relativistic effects invoked the steadily mounting curse of minus-tau. Three minutes subjective at 99.9 percent of the speed of light translated as almost an hour objective; sixteen weeks on patrol at .95 c saw the passage of over a year. C-duty, as it was called, carried c-men and of-ficers alike into the future, sundering the bonds of family and friends left behind.

  It made for tighter bonding among the men and women serving aboard for, after accumulating a minus-tau of a scant few decades objective, they had few ties left to the planet-lubber populations of world surfaces. Others within the crew became family…

  Greydon Hazzard, though, had no one aboard. As captain, he was expected to stand apart, to command without seeming to have favorites or cliques. It made for a painfully lonely life, one marked by periods of watch and watch… and the inexpressibly vast deeps of emptiness between the sundered suns.

  “Tell me about your world, Cadlud. Tell me about your people.”

  They sat in Hazzard’s day cabin, a tiny office aft of the gun decks. Or, rather, Hazzard sat behind his desk, while Cadlud squatted in a bulky huddle in the center of the deck. Irdikad were humanoid, more or less, if massive, blunt, and elephantine to human sensibilities. Each shoulder sprouted a heavy tentacle with a graceful, sinuous tip; a third grew from the face, above the inverted-V slash of a mouth and beneath the single, slit-pupiled eye. Most Irdikad wore ornate robes with patterns expressing individual tastes and artistry, but Cadlud generally went naked aboard ship.

  Indeterminacy‘s crew spaces were warmer than he was used to, and his species seemed never to have developed nudity taboos… quite possibly because their genitals were located in their central arm, and sex for them was the equivalent of a casual handshake.

  “My people are my people,” the Irdikad said with stolid indifference. The tips of his tentacles twitched to some emotion beyond human ken. “There is little to zay.”

  “Well… you could tell me why they’re interested in joining with the Orthodoxate.

  The Doxies and their allies are all human, or human-derived. Some of them hate non-humans, have vowed to eradicate them across the Galaxy. Why would any nonhuman civilization join such an alliance as that?”

  Cadlud stared at him for a long moment with that liquid, glittering eye. “Zur, many humans, they make miztaig. Think all Irdikad are zame, think zame. Not zo.”

  “I know your culture is focused on the individual…”

  “And that azzumes we have zingle, uniform culture. Not zo.”

  “I remember.” His months as Naval attache to the Irdikad home world had been confusing at best, bewildering at worst. Each region, each continent, each valley seemed to have its own language, its own religion and gods, its own festivals, its own philosophies. “I remember too well! When I was there, no one paid attention to anyone else, and it was a miracle if anything got done. Seemed like an exercise in chaos theory as applied to social studies.”

  A shrug, an enigmatic slight lift of all three tentacles. “It worgs. For us, anyway.”

  “But why would your people embrace the Alliance? It doesn’t make any sense!”

  For nearly twenty years now, objective, the Galactic Union had been in a standoff with the Grand Association of Humankind-a revolutionary jihad sweeping through vast sections of the Galaxy, tracking down and killing all cy-bernetically or genetically enhanced humans… and often nonhuman beings as well, for no better reason than that they were different. Four years ago objective, the Association had struck a formal alliance with the P’aaseni Orthodoxate, a very old human empire seeking to define what was truly human. The Alliance of the two, founded at the Treaty of Garth, promised real trouble for the beleaguered Galactic Union… and for every sentient species in a vast and war-torn Galaxy.

  “My people, zur, have been here for a long, long time. Perhaps they grew bored.”

  “What? You’d risk extinction because you’re bored? That’s crazy!”

  “Yes?” The single eye watched him steadily, as if waiting for him to make his point.

  “Remember that we have no government, as you use term. No rules. We use…

  guidelines, only. And do what zeems best.”

  Irdikad behavior seemed insane to humans more often than not, but it was consistent and it was sane within the context of their society… correction, societies. With a recorded history going back at least nine thousand years, Irdikad civilization was static, even stagnant, almost as though all the good, new ideas had long ago been thought of, acted upon, and forgotten. They were a study in contrasts. They prized originality and spontaneity, but during his entire tour on Kaden, Hazzard had seen little variance among the natives, save in their dress, which ranged from none at all to costumes of indescribably complex and bizarre design. A herd of blandgroth was how the Union Ambassador had described them, sheeplike followers of fashion, adopting the philosophy, the religion, the attitude of the moment. It was the same problem faced by human gangers in the big metroplexes, tattooing lightshow art onto their bodies, grafting on biomechanical prostheses, growing animal heads, downloading minds to fantasy bodies, all in the name of being different… and in the end, losing their individuality to a group where everyone was the same because everyone was bizarrely different.

  The one truly distinct social group on Kaden was the military, which by definition required a measure of uniformity. The military…

  Irdikad society also respec
ted strength, an obvious outgrowth of a society where individualism ruled.

  “Tell me about the Anarchate’s military, Cadlud.”

  Again a shrug. “They are… crazy. And strong. And therefore respected. They control the planetary defense batteries and the Vleet, but you know this.”

  “Yes. I remember.” The Union had long been courting the Anarchate, seeking to win their help against the Alliance. The military had been the world’s single loudest, most unified voice, and it had been dead set against any alliance, with anybody.

  What had changed?

  “I don’t believe anyone would risk extinction simply because they were bored, Cadlud,” Hazzard said at last. “There’s more to this. I just wish I knew what it was.”

  “You would be zurprized, zur,” the Irdikad replied, “at how tedious zameness can be.”

  At her best trans-c pseudovelocity, Indeterminacy crossed the nearly eight hundred light-years between Tribaltren and Kaden in five days, an extra-spatial time frame fortunately beyond the reach of Einstein and not subject to the grasp of minus-tau.

  At a meticulously calculated moment, she dropped from highspace in a burst of blue-shifted photons and a crawling, twisting effect as local space momentarily assumed the topological characteristics of a Klein bottle. Hazzard, occupying the image virspace of the shipnet, grimaced at the crawl and wrench as the Indy’s acceleration field expanded, seizing hold of the space-time fabric as the familiar rules of physics once again took hold.

  The literal bending of space at the field interface with the S-T continuum was not harmful of itself. All space is curved slightly-the effect is called gravity-and since the effect is uniform, the fact that a straight line isn’t is never noticed. When the effect is sharply localized, however, and moving quickly, there is some inevitable dislocation.

  At low velocities, the deployment of the acceleration field was noticeable as a distinct queasiness; at high speeds, matter, from ship’s hull to electronic circuitry to human neurons, could be sharply disrupted and even destroyed.