share in the grace of the true-form, as God had commanded in Matthew 26:26, and drank of the blood, all of it, which was shed for the remission of sins as commanded in Matthew 26:27-28.
Chapter 10
(2436-7 A.D.)
When Major Yankee Clandeboye tried to organize an expedition to Hssin he discovered just how many naval officers he had alienated. He had full authority to mount such an expedition, but it took more than authority; it took cooperation. Whatever request he made was referred to some other naval department. Clearly Admiral Jenkins was not cooperating.
From the scuttlebutt he learned that Admiral Jenkins, in command of the Eighth Fleet based at Wunderland, had been involved in a running internecine war with General Fry for years, a covert war involving character assassination by secret ballot, redirected supplies, gerrymandering, reluctance to share ideas and innovations, officer sidelining-and an overt war over budgets and weapons procurement. They had policy quarrels, philosophical differences, and they belonged to competing power blocs. A sort of simmering truce had been in place since their last open conflict during the invasion of Down.
One informant thought it was funny. “He actually enjoys his little wars. Keeps about six or seven fronts going at the same time. He once tried to have Buford Early court-martialed. Didn’t succeed but sure kept the volcanoes puffing.”
“Admiral Jenkins did that?” Yankee was incredulous.
“No. General Fry.”
“And the ARM just lets my boss get away with it?”
“What can they do? Fry has goldskin roots. The goldskins and ARM collaborate reluctantly. You know, Belter and flatlander rivalry.”
“And I thought I was unpopular!”
The higher authorities of the ARM had done their best to keep such disputes compartmentalized. Yet the very structure of the Amalgamated Regional Militia exacerbated such conflicts. The ARM had never been designed to wage war against the kzin or mediate between alien races. For 350 years it had shaped itself to find and suppress military technologies rather than to use them. The ARM’S military response to the kzinti had been hastily cobbled together out of the wrong pieces of bureaucracy.
Yankee’s men suggested that they bypass Jenkins and go back to Sol and pick up a ship. Besides the fact that this option put a ten-light-year (thirty-day) dogleg detour into the Hssin trip, it wasn’t the kind of failure that Clandeboye had the courage to pass on to Fry to fix-the old game player had doubtless moved him into this hotseat quite deliberately.
He was left crawling from rumor factory to rumor factory, grasping at wild stories for some kind of lever into his problem. Perhaps, he thought ironically, he could lay charges of mutiny against Jenkins. Good idea; bad odds. It was in such a mood that he accepted Brobding Shaeffer’s invitation to dinner at Tiamat’s Star Well. Brobding was always a good source of gossip.
The Star Well was more formal than Yankee liked, complete with a flatland headwaiter with black suit and oyster-sized turquoise jacket buttons who actually escorted him to the Shaeffer table on one of the tiers overlooking the well. His eyes fell off the rim-down to the beginning of the universe. It was vaguely disconcerting to know that a structural failure in the “skin” would suck him through the floor into an even better view of the stars. If you hadn’t noticed that Tiamat was rotating, its motion was brilliantly obvious here; the constellation of Pavo was just slipping across the bottom of the well. He recognized Peacock from his days as starstruck navigator. Binary giants, period 11.7 days. Minds were filled with such useless detail.
True to form, Brobding Shaeffer immediately began to pass on the latest gossip-while Yankee was still standing. He was ensconced in a cushioned crescent overlooking the well, his lips happily assaulting his nose in a pincers maneuver, long arm happily around a young lady. “I just got it straight from the ISC Adjunct that Sourface Jenkins considers your mission to be a direct violation of Eighth Fleet territory. A pointed insult. He was raving at 3D soccer last night that a mutineer has been given sweeping authority in his bailiwick.”
“And here I thought he was happy,” Yankee said sarcastically. “The last time we talked, he was grinning like a kzin.”
“Sit down. Meet Chloe.” Shaeffer turned to Chloe and jerked a thumb at his friend. “That’s Yankee. He’s a mutineer.”
Yankee sat down. “Knock it off.”
“That sounds like a real adventure!” exclaimed Chloe with the skill of a young woman who has read about how to get a man talking. There was an artificial spring to her loose black curls. She was either a naive twenty-year-old on her first date or else a very sophisticated sixteen-year-old pretending to be twenty Brobding could be trusted to date underage girls or to get caught in his spacesuit without underpants or to drink too much in Tigertown. The girl, and she was a girl, continued to stare at Yankee. She actually batted her eyes. “Well?”
“Just another war story,” grumbled Yankee.
“Tell us. I’ve never asked you what happened,” said Brobding. “I’m too polite.”
“That’s what I like about you.”
“Aren’t you going to tell us?” Chloe sighed. “Please, I’m a navy brat and I like war stories.”
“What can I bribe you with?” she flirted.
“A ship, sweetheart.” He smiled kindly and she chewed her lip.
That was when Brobding announced happily that he had brought in a kzin mechanic from Aarku to sham some of the black art of gravitic drive maintenance. “I’ll be taking him back with me to Procyon.”
“I hope you have a rage-proof cage,” mused Yankee.
“Don’t need one. He lost his legs in the war. That’s the deal; he helps us. We grow him a new pair of legs.”
“Are you sure he’s going to buy that? Kzin wear their wounds proudly.”
Brobding grinned. “They’re not all the same. This one would be humiliated to ask a kzin for legs. He’d never do it-even though he wants legs now more than life. He’s old. But he reasons that humans have no honor-so he can ask us. He comes from Ch’Aakin. We’ll send him back home once Brozik’s boys are through pumping his brains.”
Yankee remembered that Ch’Aakin was a neighbor of Procyon-nine light years. It was a lousy M2 star, not worth a gold-plated lead napoleon. The crashlanders had tried to take it during the war-it was too near for comfort-but Ch’Aakin had turned into a bloodbath and one of the defeats the navy didn’t like to talk about.
The next evening Yankee was invited to the naval mess for dinner. There he had to endure a different kind of formality. The gray bulkhead walls were decorated with stiffly mounted brass portholes salvaged off the bottom of Earth’s Pacific, and, at the head of the main table, a coral encrusted propeller from some ancient pursuit plane which had overshot its mother carrier. These were flatlanders, importing their ties to Earth. The officers were seated by rank, their placeholders Chinese ivory military weapons.
Yankee had hoped it might be an informal gathering to break down whatever obstacles were impeding an unorthodox intelligence mission. Instead it was an ambush.
The Clandeboye articles” had not been published in major datamags. Nevertheless they had been widely circulated and frequently condemned. Often the critics had read only other reviews. His dinner critics were ruthless. They wanted to prove to him that he was wrong, that the UNSN patrols had a vise grip on kzinti space.
Every single man at the dinner had combat experience from the ferocious thirteen-year offensive that had followed the Battle of Wunderland. An average of four percent of their ships had been destroyed on every mission. These were the hardened survivors, some of them brilliant combat officers, some of them just lucky men. None of them had a good reason to discount kzinti strength, yet all of them did.
It chilled him. This was the core of the navy that would have to repel the next kzinti attack. The hyperdrive performed some strange perversion on men’s minds. It gave them the illusion that they commanded space. Yankee remembered Vice Commander Yoni Marshall’s parable about the fleas who rode first class on Earth’s
