Emile and the Dutchman (8 page)

I

I wasn't surprised when the Dutchman slouched back in his chair as the ambassador and his aide walked into the briefing room, although the other two were. Three, if you include Ambassador Vitelli.

Maybe four, although I couldn't tell anything about the aide; she kept her smooth face impassive. Without a word, she crossed her long legs as she seated herself at the table at the front of the room, then opened her briefcase, removing a multisteno; she shrugged her shoulders to clear the hair away from her ears as she plugged in the earpiece, and then turned, either to face the ambassador or to give us the benefit of her profile.

Or both. It was a spectacular profile, at that—then again, I've always had a weakness for well-built redheads.

"Good afternoon, gentlemen," Vitelli said. "I am Ambassador Dominic Vitelli. This is Consul Janine Urdway, my secretary and aide."

I was on my feet, of course, and so were the new weapons and comm officers of our Team.

Vitelli looked at me. "You are?"

"First Lieutenant Emile von du Mark, pilot."

"You?"

"Second Lieutenant Akiva Bar-El," the huge, ugly man said. "Weapons officer." There was no particular expression on the flat face that sat above his bull neck. He was just answering a question, neither taking offense at Vitelli's brusque tones nor caring if Vitelli took offense.

Bar-El's voice was moderate and airy; there was nothing overt in his manner to offer a threat. In itself, that was almost threatening. He wasn't like Kurt Buchholtz—when he looked at someone, Akiva Bar-El wasn't deciding whether or not he could take them; he was deciding how.

"And you?"

"Second Lieutenant Donald Kiri N'Damo," the dark little man said. Donny was just a bit overweight, delicate, and nervous. "Comm officer." His fingers fluttered up to touch the tip of the psi symbol on his uniform blouse.

"And you are Major Alonzo Norfeldt?"

"Kinda," the Dutchman said. He puffed on his cigar thoughtfully. "But what I really am, right now, is bored stiff of chickenshit."

Vitelli raised an eyebrow as he glared at the Dutchman. "Your general ordered only you and Lieutenant von du Mark to report to me here."

"So?" Making no effort to get to his feet, the Dutchman eyed him coldly, blowing a foul cloud of smoke Vitelli's way. He settled farther back in his chair and propped his feet up on the desk. That he'd managed to get and keep mud on them on such a bright, clean day amazed me.

"You are AWOL, Major."

"Oh?" The Dutchman raised an eyebrow. "You mean I'm not here?"

"AWOL is defined, Major Norfeldt, as not being at the proper place, at the proper time,
in the proper uniform.
For one of you people, that means a full Class A uniform, complete with pistol and knife, both properly holstered—"

"Scabbarded."

"Excuse me?"

"Scabbarded, for the knife," the Dutchman said. "It isn't holstered, it's scabbarded. Or sheathed. You ex-Navy, Vitelli?"

"Ambassador Vitelli. And yes, I used to be a Naval officer, although I can't see as that's any of your concern, Major."

"Figures. Navy always bathes in chickenshit. You can fuck off, sailor boy."

* * *

It was interesting to watch Vitelli get himself under control; for a moment, I thought the little man was going to burst a blood vessel in his neck.

Finally, he shook his head slowly. "You'd like me to throw you in the brig, wouldn't you, Major?"

The Dutchman just shrugged.

"Why did you bring the other two without orders?"

Bar-El's brow wrinkled. "No orders?" The big Metzadan turned toward the Dutchman. Akiva Bar-El was probably the ugliest man I'd ever met; even at twenty-three, his ruddy face was deeply lined, his nose a broken fleshy lump, his scraggly blond hair thinning.

"Relax, jewboy, you had orders. From me. Okay?"

Bar-El thought about it for a long moment. "Yes, sir," he decided.

Donny just smiled, his bright white teeth standing out against his coffee-colored face. Donny was a full head shorter than me, and light-boned, almost like a bird. Where Bar-El was a big mass of flesh, Donny N'Damo was a little man with delicate features, almost effeminate in his movements.

"In any case, I thought . . . but it may be my eyes." Norfeldt furrowed his brow and dug two grimy fingers into his shirt pocket, pulling out a flimsy and handing it me. "Yours any better, Emmy?"

HEADQUARTERS

Thousand Worlds Contact Service

New Berne, Suisse

SPECIAL ORDERS NUMBER 11938
DATED:04/23/43

EXTRACT

*************

19. MAJOR ALONZO NORFELDT TWCS 298373 Tm Ldr Con Tm 377 and FIRST LIEUTENANT (brvt fr 2LT; prmnt stat pndng) EMILE VON DU MARK TWCS 687657 pit & exec dsgnte Tm 377 are rcl CS Off Schl (PG) and detached Con Tm 377. NORFELDT dtld TDY Tm Ldr Spec Con Tm 377(a). VON DU MARK confirmed 1LT and dtld TDY pit & exec Spec Con Tm 377(a). SECOND LIEUTENANT DONALD N'DAMO TWCS 949873 Comm Off Tm 377 and SECOND LIEUTENANT AKIVA BAR-EL TWCS (prov.) 973267(M) Weap Off Tm 377 auth ninety days UNSUPERVISED TRAINING STATUS, not chg as lve.

Spec Con Tm 377(a) will rpt soonest repeat
SOONEST
by avlble trans Rm 2119 DFR Building New Anna purp brfing
in re
ASSIGNMENT 7983, to which Spec Con Tm 377(a) herewith assgned. After compltn brfing, Spec Con Tm 377(a) will rpt via Mil TP abd TWS
Magellan
and place selves under orders AMBASSADOR DOMINIC VITELLI TWDFR as per Section 23 CONSERVRULREGPROP.

By order Cmdnt, with the concurrence of CM Nav Ops, all CONSERVRULREGPROP and NAVREG requiring nonintercourse suspended duration of ASSIGNMENT 7983.

Spec Con Tm 377(a) auth TPV, TPubV, Mil TP. Offs not auth civ clthing en route. Delay-en-route leave not repeat NOT auth. When tvling by Mil TP, Spec Con Tm 377(a) priority status AAB1, upgradeable to AAA1 upon dmnd.

Copy of this extract is to become permanent part of all mentioned offs Pers files.

*************

BY COMMAND OF GENERAL DUPRES

Anthony Snow, Major General, TWCS

Adjutant

I hadn't seen the orders before. When the messenger had brought the four of us out of a practice survival drop—an easy one; just Thule—the Dutchman had grabbed and pocketed all the copies. Under normal circumstances, he didn't exactly encourage his subordinates to question him, but for the last few days he'd been even more closemouthed than usual.

I nodded; it figured. "So this is why you had me fly us over."

Normal procedure would have been to voucher two seats on some airways, but the Dutchman had flashed the orders and our priority at a TP clerk and gotten us use of a Falcon, one of my favorite long-range birds.

"I thought you'd enjoy the hop." He shrugged, then blew a particularly foul cloud of smoke my way.

Right. I'd enjoyed flying the Falcon, of course, but that wasn't why the Dutchman had ordered it out at Alton. With our priority, we could have bumped almost anyone off a liner, but, even at AAA1, our orders would have gotten us only
two
tickets. He wanted N'Damo and Bar-El in on this, despite the fact that they weren't supposed to be.

But why did he want them in on it? And
what
did he want them in on? In between the refresher classes at Alton, Norfeldt had spent little time in his quarters—but he'd been spending a lot of time on secure phones. Maybe he'd heard something in the wind?

"See, Dom," the Dutchman said, tapping the flimsy with a dirty fingernail. "After completion of barfing—"

"Briefing," I put in. "Briefing."

"Shuddup, Emmy, I can read good, good as you. —After we finish upchucking, Dom baby, Emmy and I have to report to you aboard the
Maggie.
Then we're under your orders. Not now. So start the fucking briefing, okay?"

"I see." Vitelli stood silently for a moment, controlling himself with increasing ease. He had decided that the Dutchman wanted to have him lose his temper, although I didn't know if he'd figured out why. "You can include Bar-El on your special team. Not N'Damo. You won't need an esper officer for this assignment."

"Damn." The Dutchman looked disappointed.

"Well?"

"Deal, Dom." The Dutchman dug out his wallet and handed Donny a card after scribbling a phone code on it. "N'Damo, you go on back to Alton, VOCO. You with the chest—yeah, you; Urdway, isn't it?—you go with him to Receiving and get his ticket punched."

"But, Major—" Donny looked disappointed, the damn fool.

"You're out of this one. Be grateful for small favors." Norfeldt jerked his thumb toward the door. "Enjoy the vacation. See you in a few months, peeper."

At Vitelli's nod, Janine Urdway rose and preceded Donny through the door.

The Dutchman waited until the door had closed behind Donny and the girl. "Nice stuff, Dom. You tapping it on a regular basis, or is it an only-when-you've-been-a-good-boy kind of thing?"

Vitelli ignored him. "If you'll shut your filthy mouth, we can begin the briefing.

"No need."

"You're refusing duty?"

"No." Norfeldt ground his cigar out on the seat of the chair next to him, then unwrapped and lit another cigar. "Not at all. Instead of telling me, let me tell you." The Dutchman leaned back in his chair. "As I understand it, a couple of months ago, a ramscoop dropped a new Gate around a star. . . ."

* * *

There is no such thing as a perfect vacuum. Which is both a problem and an advantage.

The advantage is that it makes ramscoops possible.

If a ramscoop could think, it would think of the one atom of hydrogen per cubic centimeter it finds in interstellar space as fuel. As the robot probe cruises between stars, its grabfield scoops up the thin traces of hydrogen.

Granted, a grabfield has trouble getting hold of hydrogen; at the ramscoop's top speed of just better than half the speed of light, it's lucky to pick up ten percent of the atoms that enter the mouth of the scoop.

Which is why the mouth of a ramscoop's grabfield is more than five thousand klicks across, dwarfing the small center that is solid matter. Deceptively huge, the probe travels so quickly that enough free hydrogen is scooped up by the grabfield, gathered together to be fused, to power both the probe's transitional fusion engines and the Level 2 grabfield generators that scoop up more hydrogen, to power . . .

But there is no such thing as a perfect vacuum.

As the probe crashes through empty space, it's bombarded by the hydrogen nuclei that the grabfield has missed. In another context, we call being bombarded by hydrogen nuclei—protons—radiation.

Very hard radiation.

Which is why no humans ride ramscoops.

Which is why we wait for the robot probe's limited, redundant mechanical mind to steer it toward an interesting star, one that just might have a planet that just might be habitable. It drops off one of its Gateseeds, quantum black holes, prevented from evaporating by a Level 3 grabfield. With its limited supplies of hydrogen, the Gateseed brakes, steering itself toward the star, then eases itself gently into orbit where the gravity gradient is exactly as far away from flat space as Outbound AlphaCeeGate's is from Alpha Centauri A.

And then the Gateseed shuts itself off. With the grabfield dead, the quantum black hole inside evaporates, destroying the Gateseed, but leaving behind a naked singularity, a hole in space.

Or, to be more accurate, a two-dimensional projection on three dimensions of a five-dimensional hole in the hypersurface of four-space:

The core of a Gate.

"... a First Team went through, via Outbound Alpha-CeeGate . . ."

Forget for a moment the fact that all Contact Service Teams consist of highly trained, extremely dedicated professionals. Forget that they fly an unusually heavily fueled scout, with an extra deetee tank. Forget all the technology that goes into keeping air in, the vacuum out, and the scout moving.

Forget all that. Just think of a First Team—either a Contact Service First Team, or an old United Nations Exploration Group, which was part of the UN Navy—as a pair of hands, linked to a set of ears, eyes, and a nose. They fly through, and then the hands proceed to build a Gate on the other side of the hole. They do that very carefully, because if the Gate doesn't work, nobody is going home. Ever.

Then the ears listen. They listen for any regular or quasiregular sound on the twenty-one-centimeter band. They listen for any regular or irregular emissions of neutrons or neutrinos, protons or positrons—anything.

And the eyes look. They take constant parallax shots of the sky around them, looking for planets. If there are any that might be habitable, they take up an orbit around them and take pictures.

And the nose sniffs. Space isn't a vacuum, after all. It isn't done with a nose, after all, but it's still sniffing. The Team shuts off its scout's drive and waits for its ever-so-light effluvium to be washed away by light pressure. And then it extends sensitive probes into the vacuum and . . . smells. Usually, there's only the heavy background of hydrogen with the light trace of helium and the almost imperceptible background of heavier elements that mark an active star. There's almost never anything else to smell, not in quantity.

More than one hundred and fifty years ago, before there was a separate Contact Service, a UNEG Team smelled something else: boron.

Which they shouldn't have. Not in free space, not in any quantity. Boron, after all, while a light element, is by no means as common as hydrogen or helium.

What they did smell was a warning; a hint that someone had taken the idea of a boron fusion-fission drive, and made it work.

You take an atom of boron-11—the isotope of boron with the extra neutron—and plop a proton squarely in its nucleus. It goes into a long series of changes—no Krebs cycle or Stellar Phoenix, granted, but long enough, long enough—that ends up in four helium-4 atoms.

Now, while all the protons and neutrons add up to the same total before and after, there is some extra energy left over—five and a third million electron volts per atom of helium—which comes out as heat, giving you very hot helium; hot fast-moving,
not
hot radioactive.