They Also Serve: A Jump Universe Novel Part 1

THEY ALSO SERVE.

MIKE MOSCOE.

To those who put on the uniform and find that it never really comes off.

I would like to thank doctors Ilsa Bick, M.D., Dan Sageser, Pharm.D., and Robert Moscoe, Pharm.D., for their efforts to update my thirty-year-old cellular biology. The effort was theirs. The mistakes, of course, are mine.

ONE.

RAY LONGKNIFE PUSHED himself away from his desk and levered himself up with his canes. He scowled at his empty in-basket; now he could do the only thing he hated worse than pus.h.i.+ng paper-attend meetings. His scowl quirked into a half smile. Rita might be right; it could be a trap to kill him.

The newfound bureaucrat and the old soldier contended in Ray for a moment. His glance took in the office of Wardhaven's Minister of Science and Technology; he'd spent nearly every waking moment here for the past three months. The thick carpet, cold marble, and rich wallpaper were left over from the previous occupant, some Unity Party hack. Shadows on the wall showed where looted artwork had hung; Ray had immediately returned them. The blank walls and the canes Ray hobbled on were prices of a lost war. Ray's jaw clinched; he would win this peace.

On the desk were the only two objects in the office that were his. A double picture frame showed Rita in his arms on their wedding day. The other frame was empty; he'd fill it in a few months when the baby came. The second item was a lit plastic cube; suspended in it was the shrapnel removed from his spine. His mistakes that day had cost him his mobility and a lot of his people their lives. Ray knew the price of a lost battle. He'd pay any price to win the peace his daughter or son would grow up in. That he swore. For that little one, he'd be a bureaucrat.

"It's time to go." Ray turned to see his wife leaning against his office door, a hand on her stomach that had yet to show her pregnancy. Her words said one thing. Underlying them was a plea: Please don't.

Rita Nuu-Longknife was still the sharp s.h.i.+p driver that had caught his attention-and his heart. Why she'd fallen in love with an old warhorse was anybody's guess. Ray was glad she had. But today, the gallant, b.a.l.l.s-to-the-wall commander of an a.s.sault transport squadron contended with the frightened wife and mother-to-be. Ray knew the battle well. The wounded, frightened bureaucrat in him was ready to burrow into the carpet. The old warrior demanded he get back on the horse that threw him.

"They also serve who only go to meetings," Ray said, tossing her a grin, since both hands were too busy with canes to salute. "Besides, they asked for me," he said, letting that settle the matter.

"That's what worries me."

"I'm the man who killed President Urm. Was in all the papers." They both tasted the truth and the lie in that statement. "The spy wants me to take the measure of these folks. Somebody has to." That was the limit of modern communication; they did a poor job of measuring the human soul. Trust was built on the pressure of a handshake, the flinch of an eyelid, the quick glance away after a key statement. There were computer programs that purported to measure those things. Other programs guaranteed they'd take out of your transmission what you didn't want in. With your life on the line, you pressed the flesh. "It looks like a straight-up visit," he finished.

"If they're telling the truth. And if this oh so secret visit hasn't been leaked," Rita shot back.

He reached the door; Rita hugged him, burying her head in his chest. Her hair smelled of suns.h.i.+ne and spring, bringing back warm memories. He put his arms around her. It felt so much better to lean on her rather than sticks. They hugged, and for a brief moment the universe and its problems went away.

"You'll be careful," was m.u.f.fled against his chest.

Before Ray could answer, "We'll take d.a.m.n good care of him" came from the outer office. Ray glanced up. Captain Matt Abeeb, ivory teeth grinning against ebony skin, was already waiting. He had skippered the cruiser that changed the geography of human s.p.a.ce. Then he'd sailed the Sheffield for Earth's Society of Humanity and against Unity and had d.a.m.n near blown up Wardhaven. Now he worked for Ray, captain of the armed merchant scout Second Chance for Wardhaven's Ministry of Science and Technology. Peace had a logic, war its own crazy rationality. The transition between the two was patently insane.

Beside him stood Mary Rodrigo, the chief of Second Chance's security team. In civilian clothes today, she held herself rigid, as if still in the armored s.p.a.ce suit she'd worn the day she fought Ray's brigade. That day, the intelligence estimate said the 2nd Guard faced only a handful of raw recruits. Intelligence had been right-and dead wrong. Mary had only one platoon, a mixed bag of middle-aged ex-miners and tough, young street kids. They'd put up a fight that stopped the proud 2nd Guard in its tracks. Mary had guided the missile that put the shrapnel in Ray's back. After the war he'd hired them all. Over beers, he and Mary refought the battle; each time, Ray ended up shaking his head. He had been surprised good.

Was this meeting another surprise? Then, as now, he had no way of knowing. Ray shook off the thought. "How's the s.h.i.+p, Matt?" he asked without letting go of Rita.

"The yard folks did a d.a.m.n fine job of converting her back to a merchant s.h.i.+p. Well, half merchie, half guns.h.i.+p. Rita, when you see your papa next, tell him thanks for me?"

Rita rotated in Ray's arms. "Be glad to. Second Chance pa.s.s inspection?" she asked, one s.h.i.+p driver to another.

"We won't know for sure until we got s.p.a.ce under her keel, but she looks sweet."

"You dug the crew out of their favorite bars?" Ray asked.

"Bars weren't the problem," Mary explained with a laugh. "My number two, Ca.s.sie, used her sh.o.r.e leave to join a kind of skid row monastery. Getting her separated from her guitar dang near required surgery."

Rita broke from the clinch and stood aside to give Ray room for the swinging walk his legs and canes required. She took the time to brief him on things that hadn't reached his desk, reports that Matt was just as interested in. "Andy's search for boffins is getting interesting. Elie's set up a consortium with a batch of universities. They'll pay room and board if we'll let professors on sabbatical ride our scouts." That drew a laugh. As an ex-university professor herself, Ellie was bargaining the schools hard to get what Wardhaven would have paid for. Outfitting the scout s.h.i.+ps with science teams had been one of Rita and Ray's biggest headaches. For now, they were making due with a batch of recent grads Matt had commissioned as temporary merchant mids.h.i.+pmen. Before the war, people on the rim of human s.p.a.ce were barely able to educate their kids; science advancements came from the inner worlds. Wardhaven planned to change that, bringing those avid to push the edges of knowledge out to where humanity was straining at its leash.

Captain Andy Anderson had commanded the brigade Ray's troops failed to evict from a worthless piece of real estate only war made priceless. He and his drafted college professor, Ellie, had heard about Matt's return from a bad jump and come hunting for him after peace broke out. Ray hired both. Enemies they might have been, but Ray knew where their hearts were. While they started the job of exploring a very big galaxy, he and Rita and other powers-that-be on Wardhaven tried to sort out who was on their side-and who was still looking for a way to get even with Earth and her Society for Humanity.

In war, the enemy wore different uniforms. In peace, you found your friends where you could. Like at the meeting he was headed for? d.a.m.n! Life was easier in the infantry.

The elevator took them to the garage. Two limos waited. Ray's official car would whisk him and Matt out to the port. The other? "Dad sent his car to make sure I showed up for dinner. I'll stay with him and Mom while you're gone." Rita kissed him.

"I'll be back before you miss me," Ray promised.

That promise would haunt him in the months ahead.

Over the next several days, Matt's jumpmaster ran them out to the jump point with ease, a feat in itself, since jump points...o...b..ted several star systems at the same time. If you knew the right way to use the jumps, they took you to any one of them. If you didn't, you could get lost forever. Matt trusted his jumpmaster, as well he should; Sandy O'Malley was one of the reasons he was still alive. Ray watched from a bridge chair as Sandy goosed the s.h.i.+p's engines the tiny bit needed for the jump.

Then every light on the bridge died as the s.h.i.+p slammed into a five-gee acceleration.

"What's happening-" Someone's cry was cut short as acceleration crushed air from lungs.

Ray would have died right then, but Senior Pilot Rita had hammered into him that a good pa.s.senger never took his finger off his seat controls. Ray had a fraction of a second to switch his chair into high-gee mode before his back snapped.

Frozen in place, thoughts of Rita came. Rita, lecturing him on her s.h.i.+p's fusion engines. "Electricity binds the fusion plasma demons. They want out, but we trick them into making the very electricity that keeps them in by running the plasma through magnitohydrodynamic coils when it shoots out of the reactor and into the engines. Sneaky, aren't we?"

Ray had discovered the urge to kiss his pilot that day. As senior officer, he'd controlled himself. Now, waiting to die, he wished he had a more pa.s.sionate vision of his wife. But Rita was pa.s.sionate for her s.h.i.+p, and somewhere on Second Chance, Ray prayed an engineering officer was just as pa.s.sionately fighting to control the fusion before it was exhausted, creating no electricity to keep the final burst from blasting the s.h.i.+p to atoms.

In the dark, Ray felt the acceleration slow; the s.h.i.+p could not have exhausted its reaction ma.s.s this quickly. Something else was wrong. Beside Matt, his XO began tapping her board. A dim light reflected from her face as at least one control station came up. Without warning, the s.h.i.+p was in free fall. Ray sucked in a breath; waiting for the explosion. It never came.

Matt's XO activated more boards, bringing the s.h.i.+p up slowly without its central net. Ray missed most of their talk as he slipped a pain pill in to squelch the raw agony shooting up his back. He didn't miss Matt's first question. "Where are we?"

"Nowhere near human s.p.a.ce," Sandy answered.

"Communications, sir. We're getting a distress call."

"Put it through," Matt snapped. Someone else in trouble!

"This is the explorer s.h.i.+p Santa Maria. We're abandoning s.h.i.+p. Help-" was followed by static before the message repeated.

"Santa Maria!" Sandy breathed. "That was the first s.h.i.+p lost in a bad jump. Three hundred years ago!"

"Sir, I've got a first report on this system."

"Helm, on the main screen." A schematic appeared. Five rocky inner planets. Four outer gaseous ones. "We headed for any of those?" Matt asked.

"No, sir, we're headed out."

Ray spent a long hour twiddling his thumbs while good people did what they could to save his neck. He hated being a pa.s.senger, but Rita had burned him enough times for getting his fingers onto her board while she was carrying his brigade.

Matt's first call was to engineering. "Ivan, your engines having a bad day?" Matt's understatement brought a hint of smile to faces d.a.m.n close to panic.

"Looks that way, skipper. Engines maxed when ordered to stabilize for the jump. We got another problem, Matt. Before the computer shut down, it opened the s.p.a.cec.o.c.ks on all the fuel tanks. We slowed down because we ran out of fuel."

Two ways to die! Matt took in a deep breath-and went on. "Sandy, where are we?"

"Thirty thousand light-years from home, halfway across the galaxy."

"At least it's somewhere we've been before," Matt quipped.

"Not really, sir. We're halfway around the other side of the galaxy this time." Ray suppressed a s.h.i.+ver; he was a long way from Rita and the baby in a s.h.i.+p sabotaged to keep him there.

Matt rubbed his chin. "Any records on how we got here?" That was why Ray had hired this crew. In three hundred years of bad jumps, they were the first to come back. They had figured out the combination of power and s.h.i.+p's spin that made the jumps yield all kinds of results, not just the single target that mankind had settled for before. But to repeat a jump, you had to put the s.h.i.+p through it exactly the way you did before.

"We went through deaf, dumb, and blind, sir," Sandy answered. When Sandy started "siring" Matt, they were in deep trouble. They were a long way from home, had no record of how they'd gotten here, fuel tanks empty, and headed away from the nearest fuel source too d.a.m.n fast. Whoever planned this really wanted them dead. d.a.m.n that somebody to h.e.l.l, Ray snarled to himself, but kept his face poker straight. He'd commanded in tough situations before; he would not juggle Matt's elbow.

"Ivan, how bad is our plasma situation?"

"In six hours, Matt, I'm gonna start tapping the sewage plant for reaction ma.s.s." Not good. Life support could last a long time, but not if their water went into the reactors. Matt rubbed his short-cropped scalp briskly with both hands. He stopped suddenly. "Damage Control, we use reaction ma.s.s in battle to patch slashes in our ice armor."

"Yes, sir."

"Anybody ever melted armor to fill reaction tanks?"

"Now would be a great time to start," was his answer.

"Helm, plot a course for a gas bag. Mary, get the marines ready to peel armor."

"You bet, sir," came quickly.

Ray'd had enough of pa.s.senger status. "Got a spare suit for an old soldier?" he asked, breaking his silence.

"You want to cut ice?" Matt frowned in surprise.

Ray took a deep breath. "I know s.p.a.ce. Don't know s.h.i.+p driving. Captain Rodrigo, mind a broken-down civilian helping?"

"No problem, Colonel," came quickly.

Matt eyed him, doubt and concern balanced against Ray's confused status as pa.s.senger and boss, then turned back to his commlink. "All right, crew. Let's start hacking armor."

Ray blessed Mary for letting him work; exhausted, each night he fell into dreamless sleep. By the time the ice armor was down to frost, Matt had answers. "We've sliced and diced our net's code and found a present left over from the war."

"I knew you'd p.i.s.sed some folks off when I hired you, but this, bad?"

"Apparently Admiral Whitebred was gunning for us before we didn't annihilate your planet. He installed a bug to make sure we didn't survive our first jump without him. So this whole mess wasn't aimed at you."

"Unless the guys setting up this meeting knew about this little add-on to your netware. If Whitebred told somebody who told somebody..." Ray trailed off. "I want to talk to that guy."

"You're last in a very long line, Mr. Minister." Whoops! When Matt started Mr. Ministering Ray, he wanted something. "Right now I need a call from you as owner. As a general rule, all s.h.i.+ps answer all distress calls. This one is three hundred years old. It could be argued it can wait a bit. We need to find a way home. Still, a base in this system could help us. You've got the pregnant wife. Which do we do?"

"My wife was a s.h.i.+p driver, Matt. She'd never ignore a distress signal. h.e.l.l, she was sending one a few months back."

"Then, Mr. Minister, we head insystem."

After which we'll find the way home, Ray promised himself. Home before the baby came.

TWO.

NIKKI MULRONEY WAS hot and off balance helping Daga lug the heavy box she'd found. She had been their leader for as long as Nikki could remember. Daga was the adventurous one, the girl who had found more ways to get them all into trouble than the rest combined. She found stuff in the caves under the hills. Most of her finds were small, different-colored s.h.i.+ny things, that glowed in the dark. Daga had taken to stringing them on necklaces or wristbands and giving them to boys. Daga was a lot of fun...until recently.

The box Nikki and Daga now carried wasn't s.h.i.+ny, and it did not look like it would glow in the dark. It was heavy. Three feet long and maybe a foot and a half square on its ends, its covering felt like ceramics. Orange, it had been cold; now it warmed in the summer morning sun.

Nikki had no idea what it was; that was what they were here to find out. They struggled to the crest of a small hill, far from the tended fields of Hazel Dell. It was time for Emma and Willow to take their turn with the box.

"This is far enough. Put it down," Daga ordered. She was really bossy lately. But Nikki did what she was told, taking the moment to stretch her aching muscles and look back. You could see the houses of Hazel Dell, tiny in the distance. Women and men were at work, just specks, their tools invisible. The girls should have worked today. But last night Daga had whispered she'd found something new, something really big, and the four of them had slipped away before dawn and set out on this adventure.

As soon as Nikki got home tonight, her da would have something to say about her absence. Her ma would remind him that young girls had just as much right to see what was on the other side of a mountain as boys. "You're sounding like a big-city grump, dear. Nikki is thirteen. She'll plow many a row when she has kids of her own. Let her have her summers now." Which always left Nikki wondering what Ma had done when her three children were only a distant question mark. When asked, Ma always smiled and said, "Nothing you haven't done, dear."

Nikki turned back to her friends. Daga was feeling around the box. Emma and Willow stood aside as they usually did, waiting to see what Daga had gotten them into. Nikki knelt beside the box and started her own exploration. An area near the bottom sank under her pressure. A crack appeared around the middle of the box, hardly wide enough for a fingernail.

"Oh," came from all four girls. Daga inserted a thumbnail to force the box open; the nail bent. Nikki rummaged in her pouch for her knife, found it, and wedged it in the crack. The ceramic blade bent alarmingly; the crack did not widen. Even with all four girls' knives leveraging together, the crack stayed a crack.

"Must be a second catch," Daga said, feeling around the box again. "Where was that spot?" Nikki showed her.

They pressed it again. Nothing. They felt around. Nothing. They tried the same spot at each corner. The opposite far corner depressed when they tried it. "I did that before," Daga scowled as the crack widened to a half inch.

"Probably have to be pressed in order," Willow suggested. She was the logical one.

"Well, let's all lift a corner. Together, on my count," Daga said, and the others followed. At their pull, the box unfolded like a flower, struts and accordion parts expanding smoothly and fully. The girls stepped back.

"Think it's from the Landers?" Emma asked timidly.

"No," Daga insisted, rubbing her temples. Was she getting another of her headaches? "In school, the townies are all the time telling us how the Landers used everything they brought from the stars and we shouldn't be spreading out and messing up the whole planet. Why would they put something like this way out here?"

"It's from the little people," Emma breathed. Her grandda, the village storyteller, told wonderful tales of the "wee ones." Nikki was never sure whether they were about the little people of old Ireland on Earth or under the hills beyond Hazel Dell. Both were nothing but stories, Da insisted. Still, Daga kept finding things, and somebody had to make them. Da's answer to that was a snort and a "They're made that way." Ma's answer was a shrug. Nikki wondered what her folks would say about this find.

As usual, Daga recovered first from the surprise. "Hey, look." A thin square, about a foot on each side and a half inch thick, had risen from the box on two spinly legs. The square went from black to gray to crystal clear on one side in the s.p.a.ce of a breath. The other side stayed flat black.

"That's weird," Willow said.