Lost in Transmission

Chapter seven. Starfall

Technically speaking, the pressure of Barnard's light on the photosail had begun to slow Newhope in the year 92, when its light finally became brighter than Sol's. In practice, though, this effect was negligible until year 98, when Newhope was well inside the Oort cloud; and it was quite minor until the very end of year 100, when they were finally inside the orbit of Gatewood, the outermost gas giant, some thirty-six light-minutes from the star itself.

Of course, there were no launching lasers—or rather, braking lasers—here at Barnard, and while a number of complex schemes had been floated before their departure, involving lasers shining away from Sol, bouncing off the sail in funny ways to brake it here at Barnard, the mission planners had finally decided on the simplest of solutions: carrying lots and lots of deutrelium for a really hard deceleration burn.

So Newhope screamed into the system at .06C—eighteen thousand kps—running tail-first with the fusion motors burning at medium power, supplementing the nav lasers in their effort to vaporize any debris in their path. Flitting—in a single crew shift!—past the orbits of giants Gatewood and Van de Kamp, the nearly hospitable Planet Two and the barren rock of Planet One. Disappointingly, only the latter was in a position to be seen clearly, and that for only a fraction of a second. By this time the braking effect of the light sail was not negligible, not even minor, but then, neither was the gravitational attraction of Barnard. The two balanced each other that first shift, and then on the second shift the braking effects began to dominate, began to slow Newhope's travel measurably, though still not nearly enough. The fusion motors still provided twenty times more braking than the sail, and then as the ship approached perihelion—or peribarnardion, as Robert insisted on calling it—the deutrelium valves were opened all the way, the throttle set at maximum, and in the safe cocoon of the ertial shields, Newhope decelerated at almost two hundred gravities.

The view through filtered portholes and simulated windows was staggering. Barnard was smaller than Sol, with a weaker surface gravity, and though its temperature was lower, and its energy output a lot lower, its surface was markedly more active: a riot of flares and sunspots and coronal anomalies. The space around it was lively with proton storms, prompting Robert to remark, “Eighty percent of our hull mass is given over to radiation shielding right now, and we're still getting an unhealthy dose. Even our clippers and frigates, when we build them, will need battleship plating in this system, or the crews will be down with cancer in no time.”

“Even our orbital colonies will need to be shielded,” Bascal added. “P2's trifling magnetic field isn't much of a defense. You have to remember how close it is to the star, snuggled right up against its meager warmth, only forty-five light-seconds away. We're lucky the atmosphere is so thick, or we'd die of radiation sickness right out on the surface.”

After that, some more dramatic words were spoken and recorded for posterity, but Conrad never did remember what they were, and never heard them played back or spoken of again.

And then, with alarming swiftness, Barnard was shrinking behind them. Or ahead of them, if you wanted to think in Newhope-centric terms, for the bow of the ship would remain pointed at Barnard for the foreseeable future, until orbital capture was complete.

“Information, can we have a graph of deutrelium consumption over time?” Conrad asked.

“Deutrelium consumption is constant,” Agnes protested.

Indeed, as Money Izolo had told Conrad many times, the flow rates were very tightly controlled for a given throttle setting, to minimize damaging thermal anomalies in the reactor. “Snaps,” he called them.

Conrad sighed. “Deutrelium stores, I mean. Give me a graph of the deutrelium level in the tanks. And talk to engineering: find out how much of our supply has decayed over the course of the journey. The stuff has a half-life, right?”

“It has two half-lives,” Robert said. “One for the deuterium and one for the helium-three.”

Conrad rolled his eyes. “My, isn't everyone a stickler today. Your precision is commendable, Robert, and my own lack of it an embarrassment to us all.”

“Just give him what he wants,” Xmary cut in with an authoritative voice. By now, everyone knew you didn't quibble with Xmary. You could disagree with her, bring her serious issues, even take the initiative to accomplish necessary things without asking her first. But any sort of nitpicking, any splitting of hairs or academic nose tweaking, and you would bring out the old party girl in her: judgmental, hypercritical, and impatient of needless posturing. “Don't be such a leak,” she had said to Agnes more than once, right here on the bridge. And to Robert: “Don't speak to me again until you've ingested a drug, mister. I don't care which one.” And to Conrad: “Plan on just shutting up for a while, all right? There's a plan for you.”

Bad enough if she said these things in command tones, but she generally managed to make them funny, which was worse. For the most serious cases she reserved the Ugly Hat, a punishment so lame and undignified that no one had risked it in decades. The Ugly Hat was a full meter tall, and composed of equal parts feather and sequin and madly flickering wellstone, like a blitterstaff that had spent the weekend in Gamboll City.

So without further comment, Conrad's requested graph appeared on the ceiling half a minute later.

“Engineering,” Conrad called down after that, “time to deutrelium depletion?”

“At current rates of consumption, sir?” Money returned.

“Obviously at current rates of consumption.”

“Because we want to leave some reserve in the tanks. Safety margins, yah? And inevitably there's ullage as well, the fraction we can't easily extract from the tanks and plumbing.”

“Money, not now,” Xmary warned. “Just tell us what we need to know.” He accepted the warning, and conferred for a few minutes with Robert in hushed intercom voices, and then went off by himself for a few minutes before coming back to the comm window and relating to Conrad that the burn was expected to last another eighteen hours, and that four tons of deutrelium—less than one percent of the original supply—would remain in usable form when they were done. They would need that fuel for in-system maneuvering, for transit to P2, for all the things that Newhope would be called upon to do once they had finally come to a halt. And since Newhope was the only transportation they had, at least for now, it would be called upon to do a great deal.

So the burn thundered on, barely felt in the ertially shielded and gravity-lasered confines of the crew quarters, terminating just as they passed the orbit of Gatewood on their way back out again. Newhope continued upward, not back toward Sol but in a direction only slightly bent from their original approach vector. Barnard's gravity was on their side, now, and though its light pressure was behind them, pressing on the sail and technically speeding them up, the tack on the sail (actually a dancing chorus of clear and silver patches, as the sail itself was immobile) allowed them to absorb the force in a lateral direction. This amounted to a minor deceleration, on the order of ten microgee.

“Now comes the frustrating part,” Xmary said to her bridge crew. “We go where we must, and not where we really want to.”

Strictly speaking, they had arrived. They had captured into Barnard orbit. But their orbit was cometary; they wouldn't reach aphelion—apoapsis, apobarnardian, whatever you wanted to call it: the high point of their orbit—for another ten years. They could, of course, burn up their remaining fuel and stop more or less dead, but this would be dangerous in the extreme, and wouldn't really help in the long run, because they'd need the sails to maneuver their way back to Planet Two anyway. And that would actually take longer. Instead, they would make a complete circuit around the star—a tight cometary ellipse, shedding speed all the while through the slow, steady push of the sail—and brake once more at the bottom. Twenty-two years from now.

“Back into storage?” Robert asked with a groan.

“You especially,” Xmary agreed. “I don't need two more decades of boredom and frustration building up in my astrogation team just when we're finally doing something tricky.”

Robert would have looked about as thrilled if she'd asked him to put on the Ugly Hat. But he nodded, and later that shift, Conrad personally escorted him to the fax machine at the forward inventory. “I just want to be there already,” Robert said to him as he stood by the print plate. “I want to run a position check and find that we've been there all along, that all this was a bad dream.”

Conrad could only shrug. “People used to say life was a journey, not a destination. My mother still says that, or anyway she did a hundred years ago. I'm not sure it's true anymore; people live forever and never seem to go much of anywhere. But we're different, Robert, or we ought to be. Once we're finished decelerating, we still have to unpack and make our way to the planet itself. And then we've got orbital colonies to set up, and then the first ground colonies, and then industry, and then agriculture and maybe even terraforming if we have the stomach for it. And the whole thing is going to take us hundreds of years even if we hustle, which I'm not sure we particularly need to. And even when we're finished with all of that, this place will never be like the Queendom. That's the whole point, isn't it? So why are you impatient? What, exactly, are you waiting for?”

Robert stared at him for a long moment, and finally said, “Paver's Boy, in subjective time I'm almost thirty years older than you.”

“Your choice,” Conrad said, shrugging. “I'd've spent even more time in storage if I thought I could get away with it.”

Robert waved a hand, impatient with that reply. “No, you're right. You're the one with the proper attitude, the immorbid attitude. And knowing you as I do, I can't for the life of me think where this wisdom of yours has come from. I've always believed in anarchy, in ad-hocracy and collectively half-assed solutions to the problems of life, but suddenly you make me wonder. Could it be that simply holding a position of authority—even petty authority—wakes up a little piece of us that knows how to lead? That knows what's right and proper. I've got my eye on you, young man. I'll be studying this.”

Then he turned and stepped and vanished through the fax's print plate.

The irony of it, of course, was that Conrad himself was burning with impatience. “Pretends,” he told the empty air. “The part that pretends to know what's right. Blue Robert, you nudist pirate chieftain, you know as well as I do: leadership is the art of lying.”

And yet . . .

It should be said that immorbid people gripe about time in much the same manner that Old Moderns once did about the distance of a telephone call or the altitude of an aircraft: with great conviction and very little practical consequence. Consider it a form of boasting, perhaps, or a vestige of the hunter-gatherer wiring which remained, in spite of everything, permanently baffled by the marvels of technology. In any case, for the vast majority of Newhope's crew, the time passed in no time at all.

Barnard's meager supply of asteroids—mostly the cosmic equivalent of coal—were nothing to write home about. Newhope did write home, of course, because the Queendom astronomers were squirming with curiosity, and were owed a favor or two for all the information they'd transmitted ahead to Newhope. But there were no minor terrestrial planets in these belts, nothing big enough that its own gravity would pull it into a spherical shape, as with Ceres in Sol system. In fact, only four asteroids were larger than two hundred kilometers across—all residents of the more populous inner belt, between the orbits of Van de Kamp and P2. These worldlets were egg-shaped and very dark, and Bascal, struggling for a name worthy of the journey that had brought him here, dubbed them the Four Horsemen: Bellum, Fames, Obitus, and Morbus.

The outer belt consisted mainly of rubble: irregular, sharp-edged chunks of carbonaceous chondrite and low-yield iron ore no more than a few kilometers wide. The total mass of the two belts together came to less than a tenth of Sol's own Asteroid Belt. Fortunately, in an energy sense, the outer belt was the easier one for them to get to, requiring less than half the fuel they'd need to reach the inner one.

So that was where Robert and Bertram steered them: to the outer belt, which they insisted on calling the Lutui Belt. Whether this was meant as a compliment to King Bascal or some sort of subtle dig in the ribs was neither clear nor specified. Nor asked, for that matter.

Newhope's first orbit carried her high up into the Oort cloud, but Barnard provided some fairly significant braking on the second pass, which dipped down into the upper reaches of the star's chromosphere, or middle atmosphere. How the ship—120 years old by now—rattled and groaned between her ertial shields! How she whined at the inconvenience, and sweated through the scorching heat! But she saw them through, riding the particle flux and magnetic disturbances as though she were born for them. Which of course, she was.

The density of the chromosphere was not all that much—about equivalent to the “vacuum” in low orbit above the Earth. But plowing through a quarter-million kilometers of it raised a substantial cumulative drag, shaving hundreds of kps off their speed. And then, of course, there were the photobraking effects from the pressure of Barnard's light on the sail. This was also significant, shaving off another fifty kps, which was enough—just barely—to lower their apogee down into the upper reaches of the Lutui Belt.

This process took a lot of attention and a few more years of their precious youth. This time, more people were needed outside of storage, although the shifts and duty periods were by no means evenly distributed. The old grew older while the young remained as they were. At the start of the journey the crew's oldest member was just seventeen and a half years older than the youngest, but now—even discounting Bascal himself, and the stored passengers whose subjective experience of the journey was zero—that gap had widened by decades. Conrad learned an astrogation term to describe this: dispersion.

“Throw a handful of rocks on the floor,” Second Astrogation Officer Bertram Wang explained one day over beer and blintzes in the observation lounge, “and they'll skid to a halt at various distances: some at your feet, some coming to rest against a far obstacle. Most of them are just scattered in between, in a pattern we call ‘Gaussian distribution.' If we draw a graph of crew subjective ages—a histogram, it's called—I'll bet it follows this pattern. A bell curve, you know, with Bascal at one extreme, the median peak around twenty-seven years or so and, I dunno, Martin Liss at the tail end. Remember Martin?”

Indeed, Conrad remembered him well. Had even gotten him killed once, when Martin suffocated in a makeshift space suit during one of the more hazardous operations of the Children's Revolt. He was technically the ship's medical officer, but the job was so redundant that he'd been pulled out of storage only twice over the entire course of the journey. “Yeah. All right, let's try your graph.”

They did, and it came out much as Bert had predicted it would.

“But these aren't random events,” Conrad objected. “These are people with free will, making conscious choices. Pebbles that get up and walk around.”

“Yeah, well,” Bert replied with a shrug. “Choices are a stochastic phenomenon. Meaning you can apply statistics to them, which I'd call a fortunate thing, or else there would be no science of politics at all. Everyone would just—I dunno—guess what to do and hope it all worked out.”

Conrad laughed at that. “You're saying they don't?”

“Not always, no. If our dear king is clever as well as cracked, he'll keep some people around to check the math on his various plots and schemes.”

And here a prejudice showed through: implicit in any discussion of aging on Newhope was the observation that along with the alleged “seasoning,” it fostered a particular kind of craziness, which Xmary dubbed “decade fever.” At the far, peculiar end of the spectrum was King Bascal, yes, now 145 years old, with more than half that time spent in the company of two persons or fewer.

“I wouldn't talk like that too openly,” Conrad warned Bertram. “But you're not the only one worrying about it.”

Bascal, speaking to Conrad on an occasion some nine months later, was upbeat and expansive on the subject. “Ah, my old friend, or rather my young friend, my childhood chum who still has baby fat around the cheeks! There is so much more to life than you've yet guessed. It is such a rich and intricate process, of which you've tasted so little!”

“And how would you know that, exactly?” Conrad answered with rising irritation. “What have you tasted lately?”

“A fair question,” the king conceded. “To the untrained eye, I've been doddering around in a cellar for a century and a score now, probably—if not obviously—deranged. But in fact, my dear boyo, there's not just one of me bumbling around the ship. When I'm alone, I print dozens of copies of myself, each with a different work assignment. There has been, at times, a whole society of me, with its own social structure, differentiation of labor, and even a sort of service economy—necessary because I don't always agree with myself about who should do what. Especially when the work is unpleasant. One gets to know oneself very well indeed under these circumstances, and knowing oneself is the first step along the path to understanding others, and therefore what life is all about.

“In addition, laddie-oh, I've absorbed one thousand classics of written literature, in ten different languages. I've also watched at least half a million hours of television—all the classics of the Queendom, and of the societies which preceded it—and I have seen and read the major analyses of them as well, and even added my own voice to the body of criticism. You tease me for abandoning poetry—” In fact, Conrad had done no such thing. “—but there was a hubris to my early works which I now find inexcusable. Chief among the presumptions of youth is the spouting of platitudes, which are understood intellectually but which exist without experiential context, and are therefore not felt. Thus, in an information sense, they're meaningless: a repetition rather than a reformulation. As a poet I was an utter fraud, and have been atoning at length for that sin. When I know enough, when I've learned enough, the muse will visit again, and this time her gifts will not be abused.”

And if the words themselves made a certain amount of sense, albeit one of fatalism, they were delivered with a strange, plodding sort of mania, like the downhill slide of some immense glacier, cracking and grinding its way over any possible objection. One might as well argue with a storm, with the orbit of a planet or the slow rotation of the galaxy itself. That was decade fever. That was Bascal Edward. The two had become indistinguishable.

“I also converse with the ship, of course. By now, its outer personality is shaped primarily through its interactions with me. Not that you would know this, robophobe that you are. And if that social scene begins to feel barren, why, I simply create other personalities as needed. I once spent a decade raising a family of robots. They're in storage now, but I'll bring them out—I will!—when I have a palace to move them into. And of course there is neural sensorium, which is real enough when you've nothing better to compare it to. I have seen London and France, my boy, and more than my fair share of underpants as well.”

Conrad had no idea what that was supposed to mean, but it had an elderly sort of sound to it: wistful and boastful and vaguely, smugly superior. Not for the first time in his life, he wondered whether he and Bascal were still friends, whether they really knew each other at all. But Bascal certainly seemed to feel a bond, and since they couldn't avoid each other anyway, that pretty well decided the matter.

Robert and Agnes were not as bad, as insufferable, as fevered by the passage of time. But they had logged their share of solo hours, too, and of years in various too-small societies with bizarre, insular customs of their own. They still wore their uniforms—everyone did—but their own had mutated in strange, subtle ways: the shoulders too broad, the waist too narrow, the braids and insignia so bright that they actually glowed a little. And there was a hint of transparency to the fabric—perhaps an echo of their old nudist ways, though it looked more funerary than sultry. Sometimes Conrad would find them wandering around the ship like ghosts, together or separately, lost in thought and mumbling to themselves. Agnes had brightened the blue of her skin as well, and Robert had added a subtle pattern of tiger stripes to his that through some trick of the light was plainly visible through the corner of your eye, but could scarcely be seen at all when you looked right at it.

“I've spent my life steering this ship,” Robert would say sometimes, in an angry, almost accusatory sort of way. “Don't you tell me how to count beans, sonny. Your rank at this point is an absurd formality.”

Of course he said nice things, too, like, “You're a fine young man, Conrad. I always thought so. Follow your passions, and this long, long life of yours will ease by like a pleasant dream.”

Farther down on the decade fever scale, Brenda and Peter and Bertram and Money had racked up a couple of decades each, and didn't often let you forget it. Even Xmary was puffing herself up a bit, and Conrad, who lagged her by a good eight years, supposed that he himself was not immune. When the ordinary colonists came out of storage, what would they make of Newhope's crew? And of their child-king, yeah, who in their subjective time frame had only just been elected a few weeks before?

Well, maybe the move to larger environments—orbital colonies and finally domes on the planet herself—would do them all some good. After all, no one here was an expert in colonizing a new star. In this most crucial of senses, they would all be on equal footing. Not solid, but definitely equal.

But the problems were already starting as Conrad pulled out a few teams of people who, in their studies, had specialized in astronomy and geology, or matter programming and zero-gee construction. Where possible, he introduced them to the ship no more than five at a time, and for no more than seven days at a stretch. But still it amazed him how quickly they grew bored and frustrated, claustrophobic at the confines of Newhope, and cranky—very cranky—at being told what to do. On more than one occasion bitter arguments erupted, and Conrad had to remind himself that these children, many of them, were only a few years removed from their days of revolution, and weeks at best from the Queendom's training and reeducation camps.

So he gave them every possible benefit of the doubt. Until, inevitably, the first of the Barnard freakups occurred.

What happened was that a fight sprang up between two of the newcomers. One girl was from the uprising in Calcutta, and the other from the sole revolutionary action on the surface of Mars, popularly known as the Chryse Feint. They started arguing about who knows what, and it came not only to blows, but to the Indian girl dragging the taller, thinner Martian to a maintenance airlock leading down to the unpressurized storage levels where the mass buffers and other equipment lived. There were security alerts all up and down the ship as the one girl—or woman, Conrad supposed—dragged the other down fourteen levels, past a dozen onlookers, most of whom tried to intercede in one way or another.

There wasn't much to the Indian woman, who weighed no more than Conrad had at age fifteen, nor was there any real power behind her jabs and thrusts. But she knew exactly where to hit—the inner curve of an elbow or knee, the base of the nose, the soft tissue of the ear.

When Conrad got there she was actually working the controls of the airlock, speaking voice commands and thumbing authentication circles, even rotating the locking wheel on the inner hatch itself. If she did not intend to murder the taller girl, she certainly made every effort to appear as if she did. Fortunately, it was no trivial matter to open the lock, especially with the white heat of rage slowing her down.

Conrad arrived at the same time as Ho and two of his heavies: Steve Grush and Andres Murillo.

“What's going on here?” Conrad and Ho asked at the same time.

“Help!” cried the Martian girl, whose name Conrad could not for the life of him remember. She was not technically a member of the crew, so her uniform bore no insignia, and looked like what it was: a prison coverall. The Indian girl—Geetha something—wore a shorter, broader version of the same garment, and looked no better in it.

“This shitnick Earther is trying to kill me!”

“It certainly looks that way,” Conrad agreed, though Geetha had stopped with the controls and was simply restraining the other girl.

“I was just scaring her,” she said flatly.

“Sure you were,” Ho chortled.

“Let go of her,” Conrad said, “and tell me what happened. Why are you doing this?”

“She was careless. She nearly burned my hand. She nearly burned it right off, and somebody has to show this Martian bitch some damn manners. You understand? Some damn, some goddamn manners.”

“I was nowhere near you! We weren't working together, and there is no way that telescope mirror would have burned you. The sunlight is too weak, you stupid twat! I could focus it right in your fucking retina for twenty fucking minutes, and you'd still be fine.”

Geetha let the other girl go, but promptly brandished a fist at Conrad. “You think you control me? You think you tell me what to do?”

“The chain of command thinks so, yes,” Conrad said. “And our lives depend on it. We can't have this kind of behavior going on. If you have a grievance, bring it to me. That's my job. If you feel you're in immediate danger, talk to Ho here, or just shout ‘Security!' at the nearest bulkhead. They'll break up your disputes, one way or another.”

“I fought people like you,” Geetha said through clenched teeth. “I fought to get people like you off my back. Out of my face, out of my fucking life. But here you are, like a big fat bag of pus. Chain of command my bleeding twat, fucker.”

There was a time, Conrad realized, when he and his brothers and sisters in arms had used such language, and worse. But perhaps he had matured, or the youthful fires within him had cooled, because he found it shocking now, and offensive, and flatly unnecessary. He resisted the urge to tell Geetha to watch her mouth. At this point, that would be counterproductive. What he did say was, “Compared to some of the ships we trained on, this one is fairly spacious. Maybe not as big as the habitats you grew up in, but not tiny, either. Still, there is nowhere to escape to.

“You can't even throw on a suit and go outside, because even though the radiation has finally died down, we're under maneuvering thrust half the time as we nudge, frugally, toward our target asteroid. You'd get lost, or slung to the end of your tether, or knocked in the head and burned. And there's no reason to go out anyway, if we use the fax machines wisely and judiciously, and treat each other with some minimum level of respect. I don't see a minimum level of respect here. Do you?”

“She started it,” both girls said.

And the Martian girl, finally free to do so, launched a punch at Geetha's stomach. Geetha launched a blow at the Martian girl's face and for good measure, a wild kick in Conrad's direction as well.

“Oh, I don't think so,” Ho said. And with that, he drew a gas pistol from a holster hidden in his uniform somewhere, aimed it at the two girls, and pulled the trigger twice. It went Pop! Pop!—a vaguely comical sound, except that a round, red hole appeared in the side of each girl's head, and the two of them collapsed to the deck in a tangle of limbs. There was an immediate pooling and spreading of blood.

“What did you do?” Conrad said, dumbfounded. “You shot them. You bastard.”

Ho was matter-of-fact. “Judgment call, sir. One of these girls was clearly irrational, and both were violent and presented a danger not only to themselves and each other but very clearly to you as well. I felt it would be better if they were both dead for a while. The ship has instructions to record all such incidents of violence, so we can show them the whole scene when they wake up, and maybe they'll think twice next time they feel the urge.”

Conrad looked from Ho to Steve to Andres, blinking. Something wet and warm ran down his forehead, and he wiped it away, then glanced down at himself and realized he was covered in tiny, bright spatters of blood. “Who . . . who authorized this? Who gave you permission to kill people?”

“It's implicit in my job description, sir. It has to be. If you feel this particular action was in error, take it up with the captain. She may see your side, in which case I'll receive a punishment, and I don't think the captain much likes me so that's probably what will happen. But I would do it again, sir. And I have backing from the King of Barnard himself, so if shove comes to push, I have some ability to push back. I'm not stupid, Mr. Mursk, and don't appreciate your treating me like I am.”

Conrad continued to gape in disbelief at these men from security. “Who said anything about your being stupid?”

“You've always thought so,” Ho replied. “It's no great secret. You can think what you like, sir, but don't come down here and try to do my job for me. You haven't got the stomach for it.”

At that, Steve Grush spoke up. “He is right, sir. He did the right thing under the circumstances.”

Conrad shook his head. “He could've used a tazzer. He could have put them both to sleep, or separated them and dragged them to the fax.”

“See, that's where you're stupid,” Ho said. “What's the difference, if I tazz them or if I brainshoot them? Either way they lose a period of consciousness. Either way, they wake up with a hole in the memory, and none in the skull. And the fact is, I don't have a tazzer with me right now, so I made a judgment call.”

Conrad straightened, and glared at the other man. “Don't enjoy your job too much, Ho—not under my command. I'll talk to the captain, but unless you hear differently, you are to stop carrying projectile weapons, or any other form of lethal force, onboard this ship. That applies to the people under your command as well. You will proceed to the aft inventory and request a tazzer, and you will keep said tazzer with you, fully charged, at all times. When you need to immobilize a person, that is the instrument of first choice, with your own body being the instrument of second choice if for some reason the tazzer fails to operate. Do I make myself clear?”

It was an effort to keep his voice from quavering. This was not a reaction of fear, although he and Ho had certainly had their run-ins in the past. But Conrad had just watched two people murdered right in front of him, the blood splattering in his face, and although the two could be revived by any fax machine, and probably would be within a couple of days, the sight of their murder wasn't something he could shake off so easily. His body was screaming, Fight or flee! Barf or faint, do something!

Ho seemed to sense this and was about to say something, probably along the lines of Conrad being soft, or a pussy, or needing to leave the hard decisions in the hands of someone capable. And once a thing like that was out in the open, on the record as it were, it would hang over them all for the rest of eternity. And that just wasn't acceptable, so Conrad held up a hand and jumped right in with, “I don't want to hear any argument about it, Ho. You're already in violation of any reasonable code of conduct. Throw insubordination on top of that, and it could be a long, long time before you come out of storage. Do I make myself clear?”

Ho just rolled his eyes. “Very clear, sir. Full of mystery you are not.”

Conrad straightened farther, staring down the three security officers. “That will be all, Mr. Ng. The three of you are dismissed. Send someone else to clean up this mess.”

The three did as they were told, shuffling out of the chamber and up the stairs, but they seemed more amused than upset by Conrad's reaction, and he guessed, wearily, that the matter was far from settled.