Bruce Bethke - Maverick

“We wait. ” Slowly, painfully, Avery got up out of his chair and limped over to the autogalley. “Coffee, black,” he told the machine.

. Derec noticed the limp, and a reaction finally worked its way to his vocal cords. “You okay, Dad?” There was genuine concern in his voice.

Avery chuckled a little and slapped his dragging leg. “Yeah, I’m okay. Foot fell asleep, that’s all. ”

“Oh. ” Derec yawned. The autogalley chimed gently, and the serving door slid open to reveal the cup of coffee that Avery had ordered. Derec’s nose perked up at the rich, earthy scent. “Smells good,” he observed.

“You want some?”

. Derec thought it over. “Sure. With casein and two lumps of sugar. ”

“Decaf? You look like you could use some sleep. ”

. Derec rubbed the back of his neck and then studied the grit that had adhered to his fingers. “Nah. I’ve been in here three days; Ari’ll make me sleep on the couch anyway. Mayas well stay awake. ”

“Okay. ” Avery repeated Derec’s order to the autogalley. When the second steaming cup appeared, he picked it up and carefully carried it over to the work table.

The two of them sat quietly for a few minutes, sipping their cups of coffee, while the numbers danced and capered across Derec’s terminal display.

“I hate robotic coffee,” Avery said at last. Derec spoke without looking up. “Why?”

“Fresh-brewed coffee’s supposed to burn your tongue. That way you take a little more time, drink it a little slower. Robot-made coffee is served lukewarm, gets cold too fast. You have to gulp it down and get back to work. ”

“Oh. ” Derec took another sip and resumed staring into space.

“I could use some food,” Avery said after another long pause. “Anything you’re partial to?” He got up again and toddled over to the autogalley.

. Derec gave the matter his deepest available thought. “Snack food,” he decided, with some effort. “Crackers. Cheese. Something along those lines. ”

Avery leaned against the bulkhead, rested a hand on the autogalley’s control panel, and scrolled through the menu of preprogrammed selections. “Cheese is a pretty complex organic compound,” he said. “I’d hate to taste what this thing might come up with if it’s not specifically programmed for-ah, here we go. Magellanic fromage. Close enough for you?”

“Sure. ” Derec waved a hand in a noncommittal gesture. Avery gave the autogalley the order, and in a minute he returned to the table bearing a plate full of blue marbled paste and some little round white things that were either crackers or poker chips.

“Dig in, son. ” Avery smashed a chip into the mound of paste and stuffed the resulting accretion into his mouth. Derec picked up a dry cracker and began nibbling at it in an absentminded manner.

A half -dozen goo-covered crackers later, Avery took a slurp of coffee and turned to Derec. “Well, any lint yet?”

. Derec checked his terminal screen. “Nope. ”

Avery frowned. “I hate sitting through yaccs. I mean, I just feel like I should be doing something constructive with this time. ”

. Derec looked up and gave his father a bleary-eyed stare. “Such as?’’

“Oh, talking, maybe. Finding out the answers to some questions that have been bothering me for a long time. ”

. Derec yawned. “Okay. ” There was a long pause. “Anything in particular you wanted to talk about?”

Avery closed his eyes, stroked his whiskery chin, and thought it over. “Yes,” he decided. “This Aranimas fellow: Who is he, and why is he trying to kill you?”

. Derec shrugged. “You want the full story or the condensed version?”

“Depends. Where’s the yacc at?”

. Derec rubbed his eyes and checked the terminal one more time. “About twenty percent, I’d guess. ”

“That far already? Better condense it. ”

“Okay. ” Derec took a deep slug of his coffee and closed his eyes in thought. Just when Avery was starting to wonder if he should give the boy a little nudge to wake him up, Derec opened his eyes and began speaking in a low, raspy voice.

“Aranimas is an alien, from somewhere outside Settler space. You could call him a humanoid, depending on how loosely you define human, but when I finally got a close look at him, the first thing I thought of was a plucked condor with fisheyes. ”

. Derec took a nip of his cracker, chewed it thoughtfully, and swallowed. “His species call themselves the Erani. They’re a wonderfully simple people: vicious, brutal, and utterly without empathy. In a couple years you’ll be able to look up ‘cruel’ in the dictionary and see a picture of an Erani. You‘d get along great with them. ” Derec paused to sip his now-cold coffee.

Avery bristled at the boy’s cheap shot, but held his tongue.

“The Erani claim to control about two hundred worlds, but I think they must be counting every rock, asteroid, and moonlet in their solar system. That ship of his-did you happen to get a look at his ship before we jumped?” Avery shook his head. “Oh. Well, that ship of his appears to be one-of-a-kind, the first hyperdrive the Erani ever developed. I don’t know whether Aranimas built it or stole it, but the first thing he did when he got to human space was hijack a good Auroran hullto put it in. Wolruf tells me the Erani hyperdrive is fantastically unstable, and that being in the engine room of their ship is almost as dangerous as being on the wrong end of their guns. ”

Avery interrupted. “What is Wolruf, anyway? A genetically engineered dog or something? And how’d you hook up with it?”

“Her,” . Derec corrected. “No, Wolruf-that’s not her real name, by the way, that’s just as close as the human voice can pronounce it. I guess our mouths aren’t the right shape, or we don’t have the right ultrasonic frequency components in our speech and hearing to really get her name right

“Anyway, Wolruf was Aranimas’s navigator. She was basically a sort of indentured servant on board that ship; I counted at least four different species of intelligent aliens on board Aranimas’s ship, and they were all conquered subjects of the Erani. I suspect that if we humans ever have a real confrontation with the Erani, we’re going to find a lot of allies on their subject worlds. I met Wolruf when

“But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me put this story in linear order, okay?” Derec gave Avery a questioning stare; Avery didn’t respond, so Derec finished off the last of his coffee and caught his breath.

“Now, this whole thing starts with that asteroid you dumped me on after you wiped my memory. You remember that asteroid?”

Avery looked down. “I-I was insane then, Derec,” he said softly. “I’m not sure what I remember and what I hallucinated. ”

“Well, I was still trying to figure out your asteroid when Aranimas showed up and started shooting the thing to pieces. You see, there’s three things the Erani don’t have: a fleet of hyperdrive ships, a key to Perihelion, and a glimmer of understanding about robotics. They have a slave culture, you see, and since organic slaves are free for the taking, they’ve had no incentive to develop mechanical ones.

“On the other hand, while they don’t know a thing about robotics, they apparently know a lot more about hyperwave than we do. Aranimas was able to identify and track the hyperwave interference caused by a key to Perihelion. ”

. Derec abruptly realized that he’d been getting excited and lowered his voice. “That’s what brought him to the asteroid. Once there, I guess he saw all those robots and decided to do a little old-fashioned Erani slave-raiding. It’d never occurred to him that the robots would self-destruct instead of surrendering. Capturing me was just an accidental bonus.