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  One of the hull cameras was focused on his battered command, producing a panoramic view of the damage as they pulled away. The stern was a tangle of broken hull plates and mangled girders, with all sorts of wiring and conduit hanging out. Other parts of the ship were crumpled as well. Seeing the damage from the outside, he was amazed Sasquatch had retained any of its pressure integrity.

  He watched the cruiser rapidly shrink on the screen. When it disappeared, he was surprised to discover tears streaming down both cheeks.

  #

  Lisa had been difficult to live with before she learned her husband was alive and likely to stay that way. Some aboard, though, maintained they preferred that mopey, angry Lisa to the current one. To say that she was happy was to engage in British-class understatement. She was, in fact, giddy.

  “Are you sure you are all right?” Doctor Carr asked her after Sun-Ye Tsu found Lisa unconscious at her duty station. The doctor had been called in to give her a physical examination.

  “I’m fine, Doctor,” she said, perched on the edge of an examining table. As she answered his questions, she simultaneously performed the difficult feat of anchoring herself with one hand while holding the back of her medical gown closed with the other. “There’s nothing wrong with me, really!”

  “You’ve had a series of shocks this past week. A human mind can only take so much, you know.”

  She smiled at him and did not reply.

  “All right, you win. I’m certifying you as fit for duty. But if you notice yourself laughing uncontrollably, or weeping without reason, you get back here immediately. Understand?”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  With her release from medical, she returned to her cabin, climbed into her bunk and fastened the sleeping net. She was asleep in seconds. For the first time in days, her dreams were not peppered with nightmares. In fact, when she woke, she could not remember dreaming at all.

  Overhead the blue lights told her it was night. However, she was famished. Floating out of bed, she slipped into her shipsuit and slippers, and headed for the mess compartment. The mid-watch cook was on duty and served her a full meal, after which she chattered at him in something approaching free association mode until morning watch arrived.

  She reported for her regular shift after breakfast, unaware that she had missed the previous day’s duty. No one said anything about it. Instead, there was some quiet rearranging of schedules behind her back while Lisa slipped into her usual monitoring station.

  Several hours later, she was joined in her joyful mood by the rest of the crew. A cheer echoed through the ship as Yeovil reported they had all the survivors aboard. There were more cheers an hour later when an actinic point of violet lit up the firmament, expanding into a blue-white ball of incandescence, then down through the colors of the rainbow as the cloud cooled and faded. A recording of Taps echoed through the ship in honor of their dead colleagues whose bodies had just been purified in nuclear flame. No longer was there any possibility of their remains ending up on a Broan specimen table.

  Galahad remained on station for another five days as Yeovil gained velocity, climbing high above the plane in which Sabator’s planets orbited. Two of the Broan warships made halfhearted attempts to pursue, but quickly gave up when it became obvious the strange alien craft had the better pair of legs.

  On the fifth day, Yeovil crossed the critical limit. By this time the speed of light delay between the two cruisers was nearly three hours, making it difficult to keep the comm-lasers aligned. The last message from Yeovil signaled her intent to jump to superlight. Galahad acknowledged receipt, but the response likely found empty space when it arrived three hours later.

  Their mission at an end, if not successful, Galahad’s crew began making preparations for their own departure. As was the case for most spy missions, they were glad to be leaving. The constant tension associated with lurking in an enemy star system was debilitating, causing even the hardiest soul to cheer when the ship jumped to superlight. No one aboard would be sad to see Sabator’s yellow ball in the rear viewscreen.

  Lisa and Gerry Swenson were on duty in Monitoring as the ship made its final preparations to depart the system. There was little more to be learned and they wanted to get their data back for analysis. The panic evident in the Broan commands that flooded the airwaves in those first few minutes after their three craft were destroyed had largely died down. There were still plenty of intercepts. The eavesdropping computers recorded them all and served up the juiciest tidbits to their human masters.

  “Lisa?”

  Lisa was listening to a report by one of the ships that had been sent to pursue Yeovil. Upon reversing course, it was directed by traffic control to check whether anything remained of Sasquatch. The ship had just reported negative results after combing the region with sensors.

  Lisa pulled herself out of her reverie and swiveled in her seat. “What is it, Gerry?”

  “I’ve got something here. Can you listen in?”

  “Sure.”

  She keyed into the other monitoring station and listened to an intercept. The traffic control computers were ordering all ships to steer clear of the Gamma Stargate until priority traffic cleared the system. The message was delivered in the same unemotional voice traffic computers used for all orders. What was unusual about it was the request for acknowledgement. It also bore a priority routing code.

  Frowning, she reset the time mark and listened to it again.

  “Do we have a track on the ship this pertains to?” she asked. One thing their new software did for them was monitor the automated channels that told every ship in the sky the whereabouts of every other ship in the sky. It was a capability they could have used on any number of Q-Ship missions.

  “Here it is. It’s a small scout out of Karap-Vas. It seems to be in a hurry. If this isn’t in error, it says that it is accelerating at 3.5 gravities. Course is direct to the stargate. Estimated time to jump: two hours.”

  Something about “in a hurry” triggered a stray thought in Lisa’s brain. It took her a moment to isolate it, and when she did, she felt a sudden chill. She wondered whether this was one of the symptoms Doctor Carr had warned her about. Then she put the thought out of her mind. It took up too much room and she needed the space to consider the other thought.

  Reaching down for the strap release, she snapped: “Get Sun-Ye down here to cover my station!”

  “Where are you going?” Gerry asked.

  “I have to see the captain. It’s important!”

  #

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The return to the Hideout System took seven days and the voyage from the outer reaches of the system to Brinks itself another five. When they arrived, they found Sutton between Hideout and Brinks, and the base on the night side of the moon.

  The base was not in darkness, however. On nights when Brinks was ‘full’ and in the sky, the surface of Sutton glowed in the light reflected off the gas giant. Brinks-glow, as the inhabitants called it, was some fifty times brighter than the light of a full moon on Earth. On the moon’s surface, operations continued on “silver” nights as though Hideout was still shining, which in a way, it was. From orbit, the reflected light caused Sutton to glow as though covered with a layer of new fallen snow. It reminded Mark of the night he and Lisa had ridden the bullet train to European H.Q. to receive their medals.

  At the end of its long journey, Yeovil spiraled down into its assigned parking orbit. On the bridge, Mark was once again seated at the tactical warfare station, with young Mr. Vladis displaced on the orders of Captain Sulieman. Mark watched the glittery moon pass beneath them until the cruiser shut down its engines and then turned to the console in front of him.

  For the first time since their arrival in the system, he could query the base computer directly. Sorting through the available options, he pulled up a list of the other ships in orbit or en route to or from the critical limit. Scanning the list, he looked for a particular name. It wasn’t there.
/>   “Any sign of her yet?”

  “Still no sign,” Mark said. The ‘her’ was Galahad, the third member of their ill-fated expedition.

  Mark was beginning to worry. Five days ago when they first arrived in the outer system, Mark sent an inquiry asking if Galahad had reported in. Due to speed of light delay, it took several hours to receive an answer. It was negative. That hadn’t surprised him. Galahad had stayed to watch Yeovil’s departure, so they were likely still en route.

  Yeovil, by virtue of being chased by the Broa, had been ready to jump the moment she crossed the critical limit. Galahad, on the other hand, had antennas and sensors to collect and stow. It would take several hours longer for her to prepare for interstellar flight. It was logical that she would return to base after her sister.

  That reasoning satisfied Mark for the first two days. When there was no sign of Lisa’s ship by the third, the first twinges of worry stirred. Now, at T plus five days, they were no longer twinges. The truth was that he missed his wife and was worried about her safety.

  Perhaps it was an overreaction to his close brush with death. While en route from Sabator, he kept the longing at bay by burying himself in work. There was the After Action report to be composed. This particular report, he suspected, would go up the line as far as Admiral N’Gomo on Earth, and he wanted it to withstand the criticism he knew was coming. He would have liked to compare notes with his predecessor, but Captain Darva was still fading in and out of consciousness, much to the worry of Dr. Hamjid.

  In writing the report, Mark tried to be restrained and objective in his criticisms of the planning that had gone into the mission. However, he quickly discovered that objectivity is the first casualty of nearly getting killed. Time and again, he had to go back and rewrite paragraphs that had seemed reasonable only minutes earlier.

  Much of his day was spent interviewing the other Sasquatch survivors, probing their memories in order to ensure he was factually accurate concerning events following the explosion.

  Most interviews took place in the Mess Compartment, the least crowded of all the spaces aboard Yeovil. The rescue had caused significant crowding aboard the cruiser. Luckily, this was less of a problem than it would have been in a comparable wet navy ship, say a submarine.

  With Yeovil in microgravity, there was no need to ‘hot bunk,’ the ancient and barbaric custom where two crewmen shared a single sleeping space in rotation. Ships in microgravity solve the problem by adding sleeping nets where needed, ‘hanging’ them on hooks magnetically attached to convenient bulkheads, decks, or overheads.

  Feeding everyone was not so easy. To solve the problem, Captain Sulieman adopted a system popular with cruise ships. He ordered the mess department to double up on meal times, establishing early and late seatings.

  Sasquatch’s survivors, most of whom were being carried as supernumeraries, ate early. Mark frequently found himself seated in a cluster of his former crewmates, and across the table from Susan Ahrendt.

  No matter what they discussed during the meal, afterwards, when small quantities of alcohol were consumed (by dispensation from Captain Sulieman), the conversation somehow turned to Lisa. Usually, it was Susan who initiated it, making Mark suspect that she was trying to get him to talk as a form of therapy.

  After a few well-chosen comments to get things started, Susan would fall silent and let him do most of the talking, occasionally uttering a monosyllable of encouragement or reaching out to give him a sympathetic pat to the back of his hand.

  Sometimes, Susan wasn’t available. As an unattached female on a ship where pairings had long since become more or less permanent, she had an active social life. When she was seated at the other end of the mess, laughing at the jokes of some Yeovil officer, Felicia Godwin took the duty of commiserating with Mark.

  She was available on the final night before making Sutton orbit, and for once they talked about something other than Mark’s growing worry about his wife.

  The conversation began innocently enough. “So, I suspect you will be happy to get back to Earth,” he said after taking a sip of coffee from a drinking bulb.

  “I guess so,” Susan said. Tonight it was her turn to be morose.

  “What’s wrong?” Mark asked.

  She opened her mouth to speak, and then closed it again. After fifteen seconds’ pause, she said, “I don’t know. Logically, I should be ecstatic to get out of these vacuum-packed coffins and back to blue sky and green hills. But I’m not.”

  “I repeat, what’s wrong?”

  She smiled wanly. “Can it be that I’m beginning to like life onboard ship, Mark? Maybe I’m scared to go back to all of that teeming randomness, where life isn’t regulated and people do pretty much anything they want.”

  “It sounds like you have become institutionalized.”

  “What is that?”

  “It happens when a convict spends too much time in prison. After awhile, he doesn’t want to leave.” Mark looked around and made an expansive gesture that took in most of the ship’s mess. “Lord knows, this qualifies as prison-like.”

  Susan laughed. “You know what Doctor Samuel Johnson said about ships and prisons.”

  “What?” he asked. In fact, he knew the quotation quite well, but wanted to get her to talking.

  She put on her best British accent and quoted, “Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.” For a moment, she sounded like Lisa.

  He suspected his chuckle didn’t fool her.

  They sat in silence for awhile, sipping from their bulbs. Finally, Susan seemed to come to a conclusion.

  “I’d like to ask you a favor.”

  “Sure, anything.”

  “Will you intercede with the Admiral for me?”

  “Intercede how?”

  “I know I’m scheduled to be shipped home now that we’ve botched our last mission. I don’t want to go. I want to stay out here.”

  “Why, for God’s sake?”

  “Sabator. It changed me.”

  “It changed all of us,” Mark replied. “What has that to do with staying beyond The Crab?”

  “As you well know, I wasn’t very happy when the Navy drafted me. I made my unhappiness known practically every day during training. If Trojan Horse hadn’t needed artists so badly, they would have kicked me out of the Academy. Hell, in normal times, they probably would have court-martialed me.

  “I was especially unhappy that first day in New Mexico. If Lee Pembroke hadn’t threatened me, I wouldn’t have signed their silly secrecy agreement. I’m glad I did. Trojan Horse allowed me to do something important with my life. Still, I didn’t feel very ‘Navy.’”

  Mark chuckled. “The same thing happened to both Lisa and me. For us it was thinking about how close we came to letting Sar-Say escape at Klys’kra’t. That is why we joined after Parliament decided to make a fight of it.”

  “I guess it was looking after all those injured people aboard Sasquatch for me,” Susan said. “I like the feeling I had, even when I thought we were all going to die. I want to feel that way again, and not by sitting in a chair back on Earth in front of a computer. Maybe I just want to take revenge on the Broa for trying to kill me.

  “Could you talk to the Admiral for me? I would like to be assigned to a ship, one that will take part in the attack when it comes.”

  Mark hesitated. He chose his words with care before answering. “I don’t think the fleet has much need for an artist, Susan.”

  He’d meant to break the tension. It didn’t work. She merely looked more forlorn. “That is why I need you to intercede for me. I’ll take anything. I just want to feel like I’m making a difference—personally. I don’t want to be one of those ‘They also serve who only sit and wait’ people any longer.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  #

  Admiral Landon stood when Mark Rykand was ushered into his office at Brinks Base. “Damned good to see you back, Commander. I read you
r report. It sounds like you had a close call.”

  Mark shrugged. “If you mean being aboard a hulk headed straight for an angry enemy world, then yes, I had a close call. Ravi Sulieman is the one to credit with our survival. If he hadn’t spent five days at max gees, we would have been vaporized.”

  Landon ushered Mark to a small conversation area, poured two drinks into low-gee glasses, and handed one to his guest. The liquid was amber and one sniff told Mark not all of the vacuum stills on Sutton were out of operation. He took a sip — the taste was vaguely reminiscent of brandy — and set the glass down, making sure the top was closed.

  “Sir, any word from Galahad yet?”

  “No. Should there be?”

  “They were going to depart Sabator shortly after we did. It’s been five days and they haven’t reported in. I’m afraid something has happened to them.”

  Landon frowned and keyed the intercom on his desk.

  “Masters!”

  “Yes, Admiral”

  “Call operations and have them flag TSNS Galahad. As soon as they report the outer system, I want a priority message sent to me and Commander Rykand.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The admiral sat back in his own chair and said, “Now tell me what happened. Forget the niceties you put in the report.”

  Mark reported what he had gleaned from Felicia Godwin.

  “You’re saying the Horse sucked energy out of your drive generators? How? By induction?”

  “That’s what Felicia theorized.”

  “Then what would have kept it from doing the same thing to a Broan cargo ship?”

  “It’s possible being inside the hull would isolate it, but superlight generators are not my area of expertise. You’ll have to ask an expert.”

  The admiral continued to ask probing questions: How it was that Mark ended up in command, the enemy’s tactics, the actions of the crew after the explosion. In the same vein, he asked:

  “How did the crew react when they realized General Order Seven was in effect?”