We All Died at Breakaway Station (17 page)

“You and me both, baby,” he said, forcing a smile that he did not feel onto his face and turning to look at her as she sat in the co-pilot’s seat beside him.

“What made me do a stupid thing like this?”

“To be with me.”

“Then what made you do a stupid thing like this?”

“That, baby, is the question,” Hybeck said, forcing laughter. “And I don’t think there’s an answer to it.”

“There probably isn’t,” Naha said, and turned to look at one of the screens that still showed the position of the three starships.

“Are you hungry?” Hybeck asked. “I’ll dig something out if you are.”

“No, I couldn’t eat anything.”

“Mind if I do?”

“No, go ahead.”

Hybeck slipped out of his seat and went back to the scout ship’s small galley, dialed a couple of sandwiches and a glass of milk and carried them back to his seat.

After sitting down and taking a bite out of the first of the sandwiches, he said around his food, “Look, baby, we’re probably just as safe as they are on the ships. I wouldn’t be surprised if we aren’t a damned sight safer. A little scout like this is a lot harder for the Jillies to locate than big ships like those. Anyhow, if and when we see Jillies, we’re going to run like hell. The admiral wants us to.”

“I know,” Naha said, “but still…”

“Take it easy. This is going to be a vacation. Just you and me out here in the middle of an empty universe. Could you have asked for anything more?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know! Come on, relax. We’re going to be together for a long time.”

“Just give me a chance, Hy. I’ll be okay.”

Hybeck returned to his sandwich, finished the first, washed it down with milk, and proceeded with the second.

Really, he wasn’t too worried. Their job was a simple one. It could have been done with robots, if the
San Juan
had had any robot scouts left, which it hadn’t. So, Commander Hybeck and his lovely “co-pilot”‌—‌what a gas! When he had asked the admiral if he could take her with him, he had expected a flat refusal. But‌—‌the admiral had thought it over for a while, and finally told Hybeck that he supposed it was okay, if Miss Hengelo wanted to go with him. In this assignment it wasn’t really necessary that his co-pilot be a
real
co-pilot. And since he had volunteered, the admiral supposed that he could make a concession or two. Hybeck was going to have to spend a lot of time out there by himself‌—‌and a pretty woman might help a little. Maybe…

“Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat?” he asked when he had finished his second sandwich and the milk.

“Please, Hy, I’m just not hungry.”

“Well, I know what you need then,” he told her.

“What’s that?” she asked, looking out of the corner of her eye.

“A little shot of k’peck,” he said.

“No,” Naha answered hesitantly, “I don’t think I should.”

“Come on. We could both use something like that.”

“Where did you get any k’peck?”

“From Robertson, quartermaster’s mate. Little fat guy. You know him.”

“Oh, him,” Naha said. “I know the one you mean.”

“Doesn’t matter where I got it. How ’bout it?”

“Well,” Naha hesitated.

Hybeck rose, went back to where his clothing and personal articles were stored and dug a small flask out of his toilet kit. For a moment he held the yellow-green bottle up to the light and peered into its contents.

“Have you ever had any before?” Hybeck asked as he returned to the forward portion of the small craft.

“Yes,” Naha answered. “We used to use it on weekends when I was a kid.”

“I didn’t know they did things like that on Creon.”

“Oh, you don’t know much about Creon, do you?” Naha asked.

“No,” Hybeck admitted, sitting down. “Tell me about it.”

“About what, Creon or the week-ends?”

“Both.”

Naha smiled, or at least tried to. “Oh, Creon’s a big place. A whole planet.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Don’t expect everything to be the same all over the planet,” Naha said, seeming to gain some confidence as she spoke. “I mean, much of what you’ve heard about Creon is from the big Marcher city-states, and they’re pretty straitlaced there, but down in the Backwoods we’re not like the Marchers at all.”

“Backwoods?” Hybeck asked.

“The lower part of the Chartre continent. It was settled later than the Marcher states and by an entirely different kind of people. I’m from Fingray and we were founded by a group of Perganites out of Graccus.”

“Oh?” Hybeck asked.

Naha nodded with a smile on her lips. “I mean, my people were a different kind of Perganite, a little more conservative than most of them on Graccus. That’s why they migrated to Creon.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I’m beginning to understand you a little better.”

“Are you?”

“Tell me about the week-ends,” Hybeck said.

“You know something about Perganites, don’t you?”

“A little.”

“Well, I won’t give you a sermon,” Naha said, “because I don’t believe much of it myself, but the Tribalists on Cynthia are real puritans according to most Perganites.” Naha paused, apparently realizing that Hybeck wasn’t really interested in the fine points of Perganite beliefs. “Well,” she said, “on the week-ends all the unmarried boys and girls between fourteen and twenty standard would pair off and ride out into the real Backwoods and find ourselves little shelters that people had built years ago and we’d spend the night there and sip k’peck and make love in every way we could find.”

“That sounds like fun,” Hybeck said.

“I guess it was,” Naha admitted. “But I was a lot younger then and, well, life was just for kicks then.”

“What’s it for now?”

“I don’t know,” Naha said slowly, “but more than just a lot of sex play and drugs and trying to think of different ways to produce orgasm. There’s got to be more to life than that.”

“Maybe not.”

“I hope there is.”

There was silence for a long while before Hybeck spoke again. “Well, what about it now?”

Naha looked back at him with a softness in her eyes. “Now it would be okay. I want it now.”

“Good girl.”

Hybeck filled two cups with water and then carefully portioned a drop of the yellow-green liquid into each. The mild hallucinogenic/aphrodisiac mixed instantly with the water.

“Here you go, baby,” he said, handing her one of the cups, and then turning up his own and draining it.

Almost at once he began to feel its effects. A glow began swelling within him, giving him a feeling of wellbeing, brightening the colors of things around him, adding to them an iridescent sparkle, and ethereal quality that they could not have possessed before. And when he turned to look at Naha she seemed to have increased in beauty and sexual desirability, become the ultimate object of desire. She was not just a woman now, but a brown Aphrodite come to demand all that a man could give her.

Naha had emptied her cup, and now rose, a strange, exciting and excited smile on her face, and began unclasping her uniform blouse. “I love you, Hy,” she said, pulling off her blouse and attacking her slacks. “I want you, Hy.”

And as he tore off his own clothing and stepped forward to meet her, he looked at the scout ship’s forward tank, saw all the endless stars, and decided that right now he didn’t give a damn what was out there.

To say that a starship hung motionless in space is to speak meaningless words, if we are to believe Einstein and those who have followed him. All things in this space-time are relative to all other things. The tiny scout ship did not move in relationship to what?

The galaxy still moved, rotated on its axis, and all the stars within it moved relative to one another, as the galaxy itself moved in relation to other galaxies, as the entire universe continued to swell, to expand, to fill the evergrowing nothingness, as matter and energy continued their endless, eternal transmutations, growth and decay.

Yet, relative to this star or that star, the scout ship in which Hybeck and Naha dwelt was motionless. In relationship to the three surviving starships of Admiral Mothershed’s expedition, the scout ship grew more and more distant. And in relationship to a Jillie squadron, the scout ship grew nearer and nearer.

Admiral Mothershed had not been able to convince himself that the Jillies had completely given up their chase. Never before had human warships penetrated so deeply into Jillie space, and the Jillies, as well as he could comprehend their thoughts, would never accept such a thing lightly. They might, perhaps, have some inkling of why the humans had pushed their ships in this far. They might have guessed the purposes behind this daring excursion, might have suspected that Mothershed’s ships were reconnoitering for a planned attack, evening the odds so that men would know where Jillies dwelt, as Jillies knew where the home of mankind lay.

So, even though the
San Juan’s
scopes and scanners detected nothing in the depths of space behind them, the admiral was not totally convinced that they were not being followed. But he needed to know. How was there to know?

Simple. Leave a scout ship behind. Let a single scout fall behind the remainder of the fleet, wait in space, and see. Meanwhile the
San Juan, the Chicago,
the
Hastings
would move toward the Paladine at maximum pseudospeed.

The two nuclear missiles of the scout ship would be replaced with FTL probes. And should the scout ship sight Jillies following the fleet, it would launch a probe after the humans to inform them. Though a scout could never hope to catch up with the human ships, a probe which, robotically, could endure the warping of pseudospeeds far beyond the endurance of human flesh and bone and nerve tissue, could catch up, could inform Mothershed that he was still being followed.

The scout itself, hanging “motionless” in interstellar space, without its drive firing, could probably escape the notice of the Jillies, could probably make its way back to the Paladine in comparative safety. The scout would be safe, though the tedium would be great for its two-man crew, and the trip back home long.

So it was that Lieutenant Commander Hybeck and Lieutenant Hengelo lay in the scout, locked in embrace, in the euphoria of k’peck as the standard hours slipped by, and finally became standard days.

For three standard days the survivors of the fleet had grown more distant from the scout, and time had begun to grow heavy on the hands of its two occupants.

“The practice of
lDuran’traiel
concentration would relieve these anxieties from us,” Naha was saying, as Hybeck held the nearly empty flask of k’peck up to the light and wished that he had gotten two or three more of them from Robertson.

“Maybe it would,” he said, shifting himself so that his arm was more comfortable around her naked hip, and told himself for the thousandth time that scout ship acceleration cots had never been designed for sex.

“Of course it would, Hy,” Naha insisted. “Now if you’ll just let me explain to you how…”

An alarm sprang to life, filling the ship’s small cabin with a shrill chattering. “What’s that?” Naha cried.

“Scanners,” Hybeck said. “Sighted something.”

Leaping up, Hybeck dashed to the scopes and peered at their screens. Five tiny blips appeared, glowing phosphorescently against the blackness of the scope’s face.

“What is it, Hy?”

“Jillies, baby.”

“Are you sure?”

“Coming from that direction, they couldn’t be anything else.”

“Oh, God,” Naha sighed.

Hybeck turned, dashed to the rear of the cabin and began pulling his uniform from the ungraceful pile of clothing.

“We’d better get dressed, baby,” he said, pulling his pants on. “I wouldn’t want to meet ’em naked.”

“Hy, I’m scared.”

“Me too,” he said. “Unless they change course, they’ll pass within a few kilometers of us.”

“No!”

“I’d better start getting one of the probes ready,” he said, and within him he felt the ugly, sinking feeling of fear. If they didn’t notice the scout, they certainly would notice the radiation of the probe’s drive‌—‌but what else was there that he could do? Mothershed had to know.

A standard week after the decision and the subsequent reception of orders from CDC HQ for the hospital convoy to remain at Breakaway, the attempted mutiny took place aboard the
Pharsalus.

Admiral Bracer, still unaccustomed to the new braid on his shoulders, was just leaving the bridge, thumbing the hatch open, when the voice of Comm Officer Cyanta called: “Admiral, there’s an emergency signal from Captain Davins.”

“Put it on my console,” Bracer called back, spun around on the power treads of his body cylinder, and rolled back to the command console in the center of the starship’s bridge. When he reached it Davins’ image was already in the tank, the surviving portion of his face showing obvious agitation.

“Admiral,” Davins said breathlessly, “may I borrow a squad of your marines?”

“What is it, Chuck?” Bracer asked, his worst fears, or perhaps his second-worst fears, coming to the front of his mind.

“I think it’s mutiny, sir.”

“What?”

“Yes, sir. I think so.”

“What do you mean, captain, you think?”

“Well, it‌—‌” Davins’ face paled, then he turned away. For a moment all that Bracer could see in the tank was his back.

“Davins?” Bracer yelled. “What in hell is going on over there?”

Then he heard Davins’ voice: “What are you doing here? You’re all under…” The next sound was really two sounds in one, two frightening, disgusting sounds; the rasp of an energy pistol and a strangled groan. Davins’ back retreated from the tank, then vanished as the captain of the
Pharsalus
fell forward.

For a moment Bracer could see across the deck of his sister ship, could see the handful of crewmen who stood in the open hatch, weapons in their hands, gesturing. One weapon, held in the prosthetic hand of a big man dressed in engineering uniform, still glowed from its recent discharge.

“Over there!” the big engineer was saying. “Move. We’re taking over, and we’re going…”