Jack Chalker - Priam's Lens

“Makes my point,” the chief insisted. “You’d have to be insane to volunteer for something with odds like that.”

“You might be right, Chief. Whether they have any surprises for such a move is what we’re up here to find out. I want as thorough a scan of the entire outer skin as possible.”

Harker did not consider himself insane, but he did feel that his own personal curiosity was probably going to get him killed anyway. There was no way that the Odysseus was simply going to fire up and jump out of here into oblivion and never reveal its secret, at least to him.

The chief sighed. “Aye, sir.” But he hadn’t changed his mind one bit. He knew, or at least suspected, that Harker had already put such a plan to his superiors and that it was likely to be approved. It was too bad. He liked the young fellow.

“Don’t worry, Chief,” Harker consoled. “I think, for some twisted reason, that they want somebody independent to be on their tail, able to bring in a third force if need be. They signaled that by all going in so nicely to a dive where everybody from criminals to Navy cops would undoubtedly be hanging out, and deliberately asking for the top of the Most Wanted list as if he were just another captain likely to be sitting in one of the booths drinking.” Was he fooling them? Or was he their insurance policy against this character?

The command console computer for base security had news.

“The ship’s been several places before this, picking up cargo and possibly passengers,” the CCC informed Harker. “We’ve had enough traffic come in or pass through now that we’ve gotten something of a pattern, although not anything we can use. It’s impossible to say what they have on that ship by now, let alone who and how many. They’ve been dropping empty containers and picking up full ones with private loads all along until here.”

“Those look like stock containers. I could see the usual corporate symbols on them when we did the full scan.”

“Irrelevant. All of them are rented on a one hundred percent of value insurance raring, which means they are effectively purchased. While commerce has been going on apparently normally, they have in actuality picked up only containers that dummy corporations controlled by Melcouri family members own or control. I tried to masquerade as a normal commercial trader in the shipping manifests and log in one of our own containers. It was refused with a `not in service’ return. I can see no reason why they are still here.”

“Unless somebody’s still missing,” Harker suggested. “That, or they really are waiting for the Dutchman to show up.

“The latter is unlikely, but the former, either someone or something missing, is probable. They have laid in port almost two weeks now, and that costs money in anybody’s book. They are fully fueled and serviced, fully provisioned for a small army, and they have taken on nothing more. The only person to come back and forth is the loadmaster, Alexander Karas. He is the opera singer’s great-grandson and a native of Helena, although he was far too young to remember anything about it. His actions seem routine, and the company is paying its bills properly, so it is difficult to see what more they could want.”

“Anything on the Dutchman?”

“It is unlikely that our real Dutchman has anything to do with this, but, no, there have been no reports of activity by his raider at any point since the Odysseus left port after taking itself out of actual service over a subjective two and a half months ago. This is not, however, considered unusual, since he’s often waited as long as six months subjective between actions.”

“Did you plot any reports of his movements from the last attack?”

“Yes, we thought of that. It is impossible to divine much, but it does seem that he emerged out of Occupied Space. The last three attacks were almost in a straight line, then one back again almost to the Occupied lines. It has long been thought that he hides out in there. Why not? If he does not come near any Titan ship or land on any Titan world, he has an enormous area to hide in, an area we could never properly search.”

“You’re sure that they won’t just pull up stakes fast and light out of here before we can do anything?”

“They cannot so much as alter the Odysseus’s orbit a fraction of an arc second without my permission, and that of about a dozen other computers linked into this base and, of course, the harbormaster. You are not a pilot of large vessels. This is quite out of the question.”

“I am a combat security officer,” Harker responded needlessly, particularly to this computer. He was licensed to fly shuttles if need be, and other light craft, but he wouldn’t have the first thought of how to run a ship like his own frigate, let alone the Odysseus. Just getting into that module and interfacing with the ship wasn’t enough; it was a symbiotic relationship, a captain and his or her ship, just as it was between a combat soldier and the combat e-suit. He was, in fact, spending several hours a day inside this new one they’d created especially for him and for this mission. He had to have complete trust in that computer and be totally relaxed in order to fuse with it to make the kind of split-second decisions that might be required. His old suit wouldn’t do. That was designed to go into a war situation and fight. It took a very special design to allow itself to be effectively glued to the outside of a spaceship and then have everything in it and of it survive intact. This had been done before; everybody was sure of that. Trouble was, nobody could find the reports of anybody who’d done it and then returned to file a mission statement.

“Have you got all the readings you need?” Harker asked the chief.

“Yes, sir. More than enough, I think.”

“Then let’s get back down.”

“I still think you’re nuts, beggin’ your pardon, sir. I know they say it’s been done, but I’d want to meet the bloke what done it before I’d take that ride.”

“Fortunately, you don’t have to take that ride,” he responded. But I do, damn it!

Everybody told him he was crazy to do it, but higher-ups didn’t seem too hellbent on keeping him from trying, and a ton of money was being spent making sure he’d survive. He wondered what would happen if he did chicken out of it, or simply accepted that it was a damn fool thing to do?

But, of course, there was always a volunteer somewhere. Somebody who thought he or she was immortal.

The big e-suit was an adaptation of the standard combat suit. A kind of self-contained little ecosystem, providing for all human needs for an extended period of time, lots of flexibility, lots of tools, lots of data, you name it. Theoretically, you could live a long time in one of these even if you were clinging to a bit of crust on molten lava, walking the vacuum of a dead world, under pressures that would crush diamonds, or immersed in corrosive liquids and gases. It manufactured its own food in the form of nutrient bars from a tiny energy-to-matter converter combined with recycled material from the body that combat soldiers preferred not to think about too much. Water loss was virtually nil. About the only sure thing you couldn’t do in it was screw.

At its heart was the bio-interface: a connection between human and machine so nearly absolute that you almost became one with it, with actual suit operational functions and data I/O at the speed of thought.

It looked imposing but was actually pretty comfortable, and it could twist, bend, and contort as fast as a human body could. At its base was a material created in the depths of space and in a few secret laboratories that so far hadn’t ever been duplicated by anybody outside Confederacy Forces and the Science and Technology Branch. Few knew that it was actually grown in great tanks, then activated with a power plant that was made to do just that job for a very long time. Like the human inside, every device, every bit of data, memory, everything was a part of the suit’s genetic programming as determined by the lab boys.