She smiled weakly at me. “You asked me what I wanted. I want you, Orion. I want to get off this damned dogshit of a life and run away and find some happy little world that the Commonwealth and the Hegemony have never even heard of and live a normal life there. With you.”
The look on her face. As if she expected to be hit. Cringing, almost. She had revealed herself to me knowing that there was nothing she could expect except to be hurt.
As gently as I could I took her in my arms and held her for a long, long silent time.
At last she disengaged a little and smiled up at me again. There were tears in her eyes. “Some soldier, huh? I ought to be popped back into a freezer and given a long course in discipline and loyalty, right?”
“You ought to be allowed to live a normal life,” I murmured.
“Yeah. Right.” She pushed entirely away from me and began to strip off her army brown undershirt. “Well, a normal life for us mutts is to follow orders, fight the enemy when we’re awake, train for the next fight when we’re in the freezer. Right?”
There was nothing that I could think of to say. As I watched, Frede stripped naked, stamped barefoot to the bunk and pulled down the top sheet.
“Well, I know my rights. I may be just a mutt, but I know my rights as a soldier. Get your gorgeous ass into bed, sir. It’s time for you to do your fucking duty.”
I made myself smile and say, “Aye, aye, sir.”
Next day the tension on the bridge was thick enough to chew on. We slowed out of superlight one last time, and Frede used the few seconds to snap panoramic views of the star fields around us. Once we were safely back in superlight, she checked our position, made a slight course correction and announced in a loud, brittle voice:
“Next stop, Zeta system.”
The others on the bridge said nothing, but I could see their bodies stiffen and they avoided looking me in the eye.
I ordered the message capsules sent out, one every four hours for the next twenty-four. Thirty hours from now we would slow to relativistic speed at the edge of the Zeta system. We would either be greeted warily as ambassadors under a flag of truce or blown out of existence in a few nanoseconds.
It was a tense thirty hours. The Hegemony could deduce the direction from which we were approaching Zeta by backtracking the message capsules as they appeared in normal space. Thus they could focus their defenses on the area where we would appear. What they could not do was to send us a message in return. I would have given a lot to hear either that they were willing to accept us as ambassadors or that they were waiting to destroy us if we should enter the Zeta system. It would have saved thirty hours’ sweat.
“Lightspeed in one minute,” the navigation computer announced.
“Still plenty of time to turn around, sir,” said Emon, the weapons officer. I glared at him, then saw he was trying to grin at me. It was supposed to be a joke.
“Forty-five seconds.”
“I wonder what it’s like to be a plasma cloud,” Magro, the comm officer, muttered, loud enough for everyone on the bridge to hear.
“Peaceful,” Frede said.
“Mind-expanding.”
“Just plain expanding.”
“Thirty seconds.”
I said, “Just in case you didn’t know, I’ve enjoyed serving with you.”
“We know, sir!”
“A mutt gets to sense when his commander’s having a good time.”
“You’ve got to be born to it. Sir.”
“Ten seconds.”
I glanced at Frede at the instant she happened to look at me. No words. Not even a smile. But we understood one another.
“Lightspeed,” said the computer.
All the screens on the bridge lit up to show a sky full of dazzling stars. And Hegemony dreadnoughts.
“COMMONWEALTH SHIP, YOU WILL ESTABLISH CIRCULAR ORBIT AT FIFTY ASTRONOMICAL UNITS FROM STAR ZETA AND STAND BY FOR BOARDING AND INSPECTION.”
They were not going to shoot first.
I punched the communications keyboard and answered, “We will comply with your instructions.”
They sent Skorpis warriors aboard to inspect us and disarm our ship’s weapon systems. Then they confiscated all our sidearms and assault rifles. I accompanied the boarding team as they went through the
“You will wait aboard your ship until further orders,” the chief of the Skorpis boarding party told me, after his team had finished.
We were standing at the main air-lock hatch. He towered over me by a full head, his shoulders so wide he would have to go through the hatch sideways. I hoped he would remember to duck his head. As it was, his furry skull was bare millimeters from the metal ribbing of our overhead.
“We are Commonwealth military personnel on a diplomatic mission,” I replied to him. “We will accept instructions from your superiors, not orders.”
His lip curled in what might have been the Skorpis equivalent of a smile. “Instructions, then.”
With that, he turned, ducked low, and went sideways through the air-lock hatch to return to his own ship.
I let out a breath of relief.
“I thought they were going to take our butter knives,” Jerron piped when I returned to the bridge.
“Makes you feel kind of naked,” said Emon, “without even a pistol.”
“We’re here to talk, not fight,” I reminded them.
“Yessir, I know. But I still feel naked.”
For two days we waited inside our ship as it swung in orbit out at the far end of the Zeta system. Prime, the capital planet, was far closer to the star Zeta. We were out in the cold and dark, the closest planet a gas giant almost as large as the one at Jilbert.
I wondered if the Old Ones inhabited that huge world, as they did Jilbert’s gas giant. But when I tried to probe for them with my mind I received only silence.
With little else to do, I called up the ship’s information system for data about the gas-giant worlds of the Zeta system. There were three of them. No native forms of life had been found on any of them, as far as the ship’s computer knew. Only the largest, the one closest to the star, bore an ocean of liquid water. The others were too cold for water to remain liquid, even under the pressure of their heavy gravity fields. I studied the information about Prime, instead, looking for all the details I could find about that gray, grim, rainswept world.
Then we received a message that we would be boarded again. I told the crew to spruce up and look snappy for the Skorpis. They complained loudly, their fears of instant annihilation long since forgotten, and grudgingly put on their best uniforms.
“Trying to impress the Skorpis is like trying to train a cat to fetch a stick,” one of the troopers grumbled.
This time, however, it was a human team that came through our air lock. Two male soldiers carrying sidearms and a young woman bearing a red sash across her tunic.
“I am Nella, of the Hegemony diplomatic corps. I am instructed by my superiors to bring your representative to Prime.”
I introduced myself and told her that I was the representative. She looked me over and I did the same to her. Nella was small, almost tiny, and seemed very young. I thought she must have been a very junior member of the diplomatic corps, an expendable, sent to fetch me by superiors who were still worried that I might be some sort of Commonwealth trick.
