Toshi Springer paged through the images she'd just downloaded from the main telescope. "How's that coffee coming, David?"
The other grad student looked up from the antiquated old machine. "A watched pot never drips." He poured their cups and came back to his workstation. "You'll like this. My dad sent it along with the latest inquiry as to how my thesis was coming along."
Her eyebrows rose as she sipped. "This tastes like Hina coffee from Terranova."
Her friend smiled. "It is. Enjoy." In the dim, quiet hours at Philonea University's astronomy labs, when the downloads came in it was sometimes hard to stay alert and coffee was the drug of choice for most students and researchers.
She sipped again, savoring. "He can't be that upset with you if he's sending you good coffee."
David Nanmin smiled, a little twistedly. "He and my mom are still trying to convince me that if I want to 'do' astronomy then I shouldn't still be stuck doing real-time observation and that I'd be wonderful in the more lucrative 'warp-line studies.' That's why they send something as luxurious as that coffee, to make a point. My aunt Mai just told me that I'd make more money writing e-greeting cards."
She nodded. "Yup. And they don't realize that not only is every student who can connect the dots crowding warp research fields, you and I and the other telescope geeks just can't—or don't want to—wrap our heads around that particular brand."
Since all travel between star systems was by the warp lines discovered hundreds of years ago and allowing travel time to drop to days or weeks instead of years or centuries, "real sky" astronomy had been relegated to the university equivalent of the study of leeching as a viable medical treatment. The t-geeks would counter that argument with the one that people still needed to study stars that no one had found warp points to yet, among other things. This didn't give them any more status, however, and the tendency of some professors to get vehement about it made some people think of the tgeeks as raving loons.
It was the sort of thing that grad students in the bowels of "Fort Telescope"—as people referred to the building—fulminated on in the wee hours of the morning. Even with telescope platforms in the mid to outer Bellerophon System, people still ended up sitting in the offices in the middle of the night because of computer schedules, giving everyone plenty of time to think among the dusty old holograms of Bellerophon and other star systems surrounding it.
He reached out and held her hand. "You getting a hard time from your folks?"
"Not so bad. The problem is my unit."
"Yeah." His voice took on the fruity tones of a video announcement. "The Few, the Arrogant, the Weekend Warriors of the Reserve . . . present company excepted, of course. Do any of them even realize that if you want to get into Survey, this gives you an edge?"
Behind them, one of the old computers, flat-screen Orion-made, hiccupped and rebooted. Then the next one down the line did the same.
"My commanders understand. They know that you still need this as a solid foundation for Survey navigation. David, you're being a little hard on the guys. I mean Lieutenant McGee and Sergeant De Vega are not idiots."
He snorted. "Yes. I admit, that they're fine, and so is Katya, but the rest of them? Just because they haven't seen what a real war looks like doesn't make them experts in anything and it doesn't give them the right to swan around and sneer at you, because you're a t-geek and the best damned navigator they've got."
She just didn't know how much he felt for her. People could look down their noses at him but let them glance sideways at her and he wanted to rip their heads off. Her unit wasn't any different from the bulk of the reserves. They were maintained at full strength, not only through Terran space but through all the allied races.
The problem was that the most action that the reserves saw was on the practice range and in the old in-system training ships. Toshi's mother had fought the Tangri in the last war and her father had been chasing those pirates—more likely New Horde—before they married, so she'd grown up in a military family. More than some of these middle-class idiots who think they're wolves because they have the uniform on. David himself was a scholarship brat who'd won every award available, but he had the Red Lake quarter burr underlying his "midsea" accent, and an attitude to match.
It was proving to be a more dangerous universe than anyone had thought. Though only the Bugs had proven intractable when it came to negotiation, and since they tended to just devour any meat source without caring whether it could talk, they'd been ruthlessly squashed.
The bigger problem was the races that had the idea that losing the last war was just a fluke. Like the Tangri, for instance. They just could not see anyone else as anything but cattle, and kept trying to prove it. Of course every raid that a New Horde, supposedly a splinter group not controlled by their home world government, made had always been waved away as not a central-world responsibility. The last time, about fifteen years ago, they'd been smacked down pretty thoroughly by Fleet Admiral Remko. All good reasons to have not only the military on its toes but the reserves as well.
Of course, if you had forces at strength and full reserves but very little fighting going on then the soldiers tended to get weird ideas of what war was.
Toshi smiled at David. "They think that each and every one of them is the new incarnation of 'Ian the Great' or a clone of 'Li Han, Terror of the Spaceways.' "
David covered his face with his hand, setting his cup down to wave the other at her. "You watch some of the kitschiest shows."
"And you aren't a fan of Khan the Merciless?"
He reeled back in his chair, both hands over his heart. "I'm hit! A palpable hit!"
She laughed, as he'd intended. "That'll show you." She set her empty cup down. "We should get back to this. There's another download coming up soon and we need to get this checked and cleared for the professor, first thing."
"Sure."
They turned back to their workstations just as they both rebooted again. They glanced over at each other. "Both of them going down together?" David said.
"Let me. . . ." Toshi trailed off as she began checking her system. "It seems to have overloaded."
"Mine too. Maybe we have a nova coming in?"
"Or something like it. I'm dropping in more filters." The signal took twenty minutes to get out to the distant telescope arrays; another twenty for the new download to come back.
"Look at this." Toshi indicated the glaringly bright point washing out the upper right-hand quadrant of the screen. "That's not a nova."
David scratched his head. "It's a flare of some kind, but what could cause that?"
She stared at the screen. "Well. I don't recognize it as a natural phenomenon . . . not coming out of Bufo like that."
"To be honest, I don't recognize it as anything I've seen before either."
"Weird idea I have, David."
"Yeah?"
She glanced sideways at him. "Could it be artificial?"
He stared at her. "Artificial?" For a long moment they looked at each other. Then he turned to his workstation. "No. It couldn't be. It's the wrong frequency for that nutbar hobbyist with his model rockets who was ruining all the downloads a few years ago. Besides, the police shut him down as a danger to in-system traffic. See?" He pointed out the comparison screens he'd pulled up. She started pulling up the last series on her own screen. "There's no obvious motion showing between the two arrays, so it has to be outside the system, whatever it is."
She looked up at David. "It's no frequency we would use." He turned away from his workstation, to stare at her as she continued. "It's too steady to be a weapon flare—there's no maneuvers scheduled for another three weeks."
"Why don't I bring up the spectrogram? Maybe that will tell us what it is. It could be a minor flare-up out of Bufo, there's always something happening in that nebula."
"If it's in the nebula it can't be artificial."
"Well, nothing could deal with the radiation."
"Right. But it's a hell of a lot further out than in-system, because it's on both downloads." She tried another couple of tests. "There's a parallax though, that puts the flare about . . . half a light year or so out."
They stared at the spectrum on her screen. "Toshi. That's . . . what the hell is that?"
She exhaled softly. "It's a drive flare."
"A what?" he asked with an uncomprehending look. Then the puzzlement cleared from his face, to be replaced by incredulity. "You mean . . . are you saying . . . a reaction drive?"
"Yes," she said softly.
"The hell it is," he said flatly. "Nobody's ever . . . And besides, it's not the same spectrum. There," he said as she pulled up another spectrogram. "It's not the same at all."
"Yes, it is." She pulled the pattern all the way to the violet end of the scale where it matched the downloaded image perfectly. "It's blue-shifted."
"Do we wake the professor?"
She clutched the edge of the desk. "Get him out of bed! If it's blue-shifted that means whatever it is, is coming here!"
"Professor! Professor Gerard! Question! Professor!" The media hounds swarmed the old lecture hall, bringing more excitement to the university since the North Tower burned down. They were ranked in the first rows of the seats, rising away from the dais with its ranked dignitaries for the press conference. The seats reserved for the military were empty as the reporters tried to get the jump on their competitors by starting things early. "Professor, is it true that another alien species has been disco—" "Professor Gerard, can you comment on—" "Chancellor—" "Professor Duane, your colleague believes—"
The chancellor, who had been trying to get some quiet, turned up the gain on her microphone until the feedback squeal cut through the avalanche of questions. Into the ringing silence after she'd cut it back, she said. "Thank you. Thank you, genteels." Her eye skimmed over the newsies, where it was caught by the folded tight ears and pained expressions on the faces of the sole Orion news crew in the room. Least Claw Showaath'sekakhu-jahr, and her team were all mavericks as far as Orion was concerned.
It had taken the Khan's attention himself to get her into the journalism training at all and that had been on Yowl, the first Alliance jointly settled world, hardly a prestigious school. The journalist was shorter than most females, her pelt a glossy, aristocratic sable with striking bright tawny gold flashes from her nose up either side of her head. She was the only surviving child of Great Claw Meerheeowa'rehfrak, and when she'd decided that professional curiosity was a virtue her father had publicly supported her. Of course, the human media had been fascinated with her and at least one pundit speculated that an Orion journalist—if she hadn't been so visible—would make an excellent spy for the Khanate. But that very visibility was, in part, her safety from those kinds of charges.
She, like her home planet, was outré enough that they often fixed the attention of the Terran media, especially since the Federation had an eye to promoting its own success stories.
Her crew were brown or golden-pelted, her camera-male a brindle, whose harness proclaimed his status as considerably higher than a simple minion. He tended to hover. Bodyguard, Toshi thought from where she stood next to David, behind the professors, the chancellor and the board of directors. Showaath and her crew were the only aliens in the hall, next to the mechanical feeds. The infection of human journalism was slow to spread.
It had been complete coincidence that she was even on Bellerophon, at the shipyards, covering the Orion deal for a new class of merchant ship and the emergency refit of an Orion carrier, when this had come up.
Toshi and David stood behind the dignitaries, him in his gray suit with the worn elbows, her in her full dress blacks—she'd had to run over to the apartment to grab them when the press conference was called. It had already been made very clear since last night that she was no longer a reservist. Everyone was already being called into active duty. It wasn't as though anyone expected the new aliens to be hostile, but it was certainly better to be prepared.
It bothered her that they both had to be there. The next downloads were coming in and that would give them more data. She checked the link in her ear—nothing useful yet. She didn't want to be standing here while suits discussed what to do with . . . Her thoughts ground to a halt as the door opened and the Fleet Admiral Waldeck himself and his staff entered and took places on the dais. He always did know how to make an entrance. The crowd of journalists murmured into their mics or directed bumble-cams higher, but showed admirable restraint, for once. That could have been because of Waldeck's presence. Even though he was all of 132, he still carried himself ramrod straight. Some of these very newsies used the term "martinet" when referring to him, but only the most extreme. Despite his white hair he was fit, though he carried the Waldeck beefiness.
"He hath a hungry look," David leaned over to whisper in her ear.
"Yes. 'But he is not lean and I fear him not,' " she misquoted back at him. "Shut up, someone might pick us up." She hid her smile behind her hand, before brushing it away over her chin as if scratching an itch. A staffer leaned over and handed Waldeck something and she just caught the discreet glance at Showaath. Nose plugs for his allergy. If she tried to get an in-depth story he didn't want to be sneezing all over her. Of course his antipathy for Orions was known if not, as he would put it, "bandied about" and Showaath was surely aware of it as well.
"Genteels," the chancellor said again, using the latest, squeakiest new, fashionable term for a group of mixed beings. "Thank you for being here on such short notice."
Professor Duane looked like hell, but then so did they all. It had been two days of intense analysis, calling in Professor Gerard and his students before they were sure enough of the data to inform the university. It had meant that no one went home and everyone even grudged the time for brief ablutions in the change-rooms off the gym. That and eating a lot of takeout. All other projects the telescope arrays had been booked for had been dropped and every extrasystemic platform had been brought to bear on the distant drive flares.
The chancellor had called Waldeck the same hour, not only getting through, but getting him out of bed, once she'd reassured herself that her particular set of weirdoes hadn't just gone off half-cocked.
"Thank you for coming. First of all, I would like to formally announce that, two days ago, Professor Duane's team detected a photon drive flare coming out of the Bufo Nebula." She held up her hand as the hubbub threatened to begin again. Toshi suppressed a smile to herself at hearing herself and David referred to as a "team." Makes us sound more legitimate and better funded. "We are certain that the flares—and I use the plural quite deliberately, are decelerating a number of sublight ships. How many, we cannot yet estimate."
"They are approximately point zero five light years away and, from the observations, appear to be three months away at the rate they are decelerating. At this point I will turn the floor over to Fleet Admiral Waldeck."
"Thank you, Chancellor Davenport."
". . . we will be calling in the fleet as a precautionary measure."
"Damned straight you will." First Space Lord Li Han of the Terran Republic Navy was not in the habit of addressing her media console in such tones. She rose from the chair by the window more abruptly than she'd intended. Like so many abrupt motions these days, it had a disagreeable way of reminding her of her 123 Standard years, even more than the pure white hair she saw in her mirror. It could have been worse, though. Here on Bowditch, the moon of Beaufort that served as the Terran Republic's capital, the gravity was only 0.5 standard Terran G—considerably less than half that of her native Hangchow. Her enjoyment of the sensation worried her, even though she knew it shouldn't. As far back as she could remember, people had been warning her that she was in chronic danger of becoming a bore on the subject of her own imagined inadequacies and unworthiness.
She dismissed the thought and considered Cyrus Waldeck instead. If she knew the Rim Federation Navy admiral, he would do everything necessary to make sure that people felt safe and not inclined to do anything rash.
"Query? Action required?" The unit's dulcet tones were reminiscent of an ancient entertainment program.
"Yes, unit off." It shut itself off, cutting off Waldeck's description of his intentions regarding the new aliens.
Li didn't indulge in the practice of naming the control system in her office, though her secretary did address it so. Peeves? Jeeves? Something like that. It seemed an immoderation.
She was not in the habit of saying "why now?" or "why me?" either. Things would happen as they would and she had no intention of applying a petty desire to inconvenience her to an insensate universe, though if she remembered correctly her grandfather on New Tibet had insisted that if anything the universe was actually working toward a benevolence of some kind.
She allowed herself a grin at the recollection. With advancing age, she found herself remembering him more and more, in a kind of rediscovery. Her family on Hangchow hadn't exactly emphasized that element of her ancestry—not too surprising, considering the history of Chinese-Tibetan relations on Old Terra, at least as far back as the eighth century when the Tibetan Empire (every dog has his day, as the saying goes) had cut Tang Dynasty China off from its central Asian provinces and the horses and horsemen that went with them, and set its decline in motion.
The thought of horses brought her back to her earlier glum reflections, for no reason other than a nickname—a stupid nickname, inasmuch as the Tangri didn't really resemble horses in the least. Be that as it might, the Horse Heads were at it again and they weren't going to stop no matter what. And then there was the "ReNurturers" lobby group. They'd formed as a response to the faction arguing the necessity of wiping out the Horse Heads completely. "The Tangri Problem" they called it. It was something that Li herself had considered and was still considering with less and less reluctance. It was the old capital-punishment argument. That particular murderer isn't going to kill anyone else. How could she, in good conscience weigh the continuing deaths of her own—and she had to consider all Allied species her own on some level—against the genocide of another species?
It was the thought of genocide that made the ReNurturers' argument compelling. Foster Tangri young to other races. Have them raised outside their own culture. Retain everything possible of their culture but excise the rabid xenophobia. That raised a whole nest of other problems. For example, who would ever agree to parent such children in the first place? And on and on.
Wouldn't it be less paternalistic to just apply the Final Solution to the whole mess? It was a resolution less dangerous to Terrans in the long run. She hated pirates with a vengeance and the source of that piracy was the New Hordes. Li tried hard not to hate, but in this case found it impossible. It was vileness. It was evil. If someone—and she didn't care what shape that someone had—if someone was prepared to hurt you, to kill you or your children, your family, then they'd stepped outside of the definition of sentient and placed themselves in the realm of monster. They'd made the choice to become monsters and thus had lost the argument that they did not deserve the treatment meted out to fiends.
And now there was a whole new problem landing on her desk out of Bellerophon dragging everyone's attention away.
Her eyes strayed to the night sky outside the window and sought the great purplish-blue globe of Beaufort—the birthplace of Fiona MacTaggart, whose murder had ignited the Fringe Revolution. She spared the always-inspiring sight a moment's reflection, then sat down at her desk, manually pulling up the files she'd been studying.
No doubt about it, it's a colossus. A beautiful colossus, if you're into that kind of firepower. Of course the purists and Orions would make the arguments for smaller ships, preferably fighters. And of course the disadvantages of reaction drives were too obvious for discussion. In terms of sheer speed and strength, however . . .
It could be necessary that they have something on the same order of size the next time the Horse Heads came boiling out of their space. She massaged her temples. And we'll have to see how many of these ships we need if the new aliens prove hostile.
Genji Yoshinaka had put this moment off as long as possible.
It hadn't been hard to delay the inevitable. First, there had been the long period of physical therapy. Dr. Mendez and his team had knitted Ian Trevayne's new body and his brain together with consummate skill. Indeed, their work had been beyond criticism. But fine-tuning those links into the smoothly functioning gestalt of old had taken time. Overlapping with that had been an intensive reeducation covering eight Standard decades of history and all the social and technological changes that implied even in this era when lengthened life spans had moderated the pace of change. So there had been little or no opportunity for sightseeing.
But the inevitable cannot be delayed forever, which is why it is called the inevitable. Now Trevayne stood on the grounds of Government House, staring aghast at the statue-crowned column flanking Andrew Prescott's, while Yoshinaka shriveled with embarrassment.
"I tried to talk them out of it," he finally wailed, breaking the silence.
Trevayne didn't hear him. He was in a temporary state of shock, seeing nothing but the pedestal of the column, with its carved inscription in quotation marks. Finally, he turned to Yoshinaka with an et tu, Brute? look.
"You actually let them—".
"I told them you never said that!" Yoshinaka protested. "But they wouldn't listen. Somehow, everyone had become firmly convinced that at the Second Battle of Zephrain, when the Republicans—the rebels, I meant to say—were first detected entering this system, you sent it out as a signal to the fleet. I told them over and over that they were confusing you with Admiral Togo, at the Battle of Tsushima."
"Lord Nelson, at the Battle of Trafalgar," Trevayne corrected automatically. "Togo stole it from him."
"All right, all right! I'm not going to get into that old argument again. And—" a flash of uncharacteristic acerbity "—it's your own fault, you know, for naming your flagship after your hero Horatio Nelson. Somebody must have looked him up in history, and unearthed that signal to the fleet, and associated it with you, and . . . well, one thing just led to another."
Trevayne didn't argue, for he had turned back to the column with its inscribed "quotation." He shook his head slowly.
" 'Terra expects that every man will do his duty,' " he recited numbly. "So that's what I'm remembered for nowadays!" He shook his head again. "Bloody hell!"
"Not just for that," said Yoshinaka with renewed gentleness, smiling inwardly at those last two words, so quintessentially Trevayne. At that moment, there was no question in his mind, on any level, as to who this man really was.
Such certainty didn't always come easily.
Granted, the long-legged, six-foot-three body that held Ian Trevayne's mind was recognizably his—as it must have appeared when he had been in the Academy. His clean-shaven face was less weathered than the fifty-odd-year-old version Yoshinaka remembered so well. But by now he had spent enough time outside for the rays of Zephrain A to have brought out some color, in collaboration with the genes bequeathed by a late-twentieth-century Jamaican immigrant to England. His dark coloring was the only visible sign of that legacy, for his features were those of northwestern Europe—but they hadn't settled into harshness, nor his voice into roughness. And of course he had all his brown-black hair.
And yet he didn't move like a youth of twenty. Oh, there was none of the advancing stiffness of middle age. But neither was there any of the residual awkwardness of postadolescence. Once the brain had meshed its gears with the body, the reflexes taught by five decades of experience had taken control of those supple young muscles and joints. The effect was subtle, but odd. So was the fact that the clear, youthful voice spoke as an experienced and mature man speaks. Likewise, the young face was set in lines that were not young—the lines of a man who knows who he is, in a way no young man can know.
Also, there was the matter of clothes. In his capacity as governor-general of the Rim, an office to which he had appointed himself after creating it, Trevayne had always indulged his flair for understatedly elegant civilian attire—one of the many unexpected facets of his personality. But now, his fashion sense hopelessly adrift after eight decades of dizzying change in styles, he had put himself in the hands of a tailor. The tailor had been unable to mentally edit out his legendary patron's youthful appearance, and Trevayne now unwittingly projected a look that, while hardly "flashy," was certainly not in keeping with his old sartorial persona.
It all added to the difficulty of knowing just how to react to him. The absence of his beard didn't help either.
Trevayne himself was thinking of that beard at that moment, and he unconsciously rubbed his smooth jaw as he gazed up at the bronze statue surmounting the column. He knew everyone had been expecting him to grow it back. He hadn't, for two reasons. One was apprehension that it would probably come out as the thin, patchy horror that was all most college boys could achieve. The other was that during his long cryogenic sleep beards had passed into the realm of the old-fashioned, verging on archaic. People who had known him in his previous life found it surprising that that concerned him—but on a certain level it did. Cultivating an image of crusty conservatism was one thing, but he'd be damned and roasting in hell before he'd appear quaint.
He shook himself. "Well, it can't be helped now, can it? There's nothing more futile than trying to correct legend. After a while, one comes to the realization that the windmill is winning. Let's go and—"
"Admiral!"
"Sean!" Trevayne turned with a smile toward the broad steps leading up to Government House's colonnaded façade, between the two projecting wings. Sean Remko, trailed by a bevy of staffers, was descending. He advanced with a smile of his own, as the staffers hung back with a mixture of awe and curiosity, not unmixed with a sense of incongruity at the deference with which Fleet Admiral Remko, something of a legend himself at a hundred and forty-five Standard years, addressed a man who looked like a college student with expensive tastes in clothes.
But then, they had never clawed their way up out of the New Detroit slums by sheer guts and ability, and finally met a commanding officer who genuinely didn't give a damn how they talked . . .
"I've been meaning to come see you, Admiral," he rumbled. Trevayne made no demur at the title; he really was a fleet admiral, carried on the Rim Federation's inactive list for the last eighty years by special act of Parliament. "But there's a crisis on, and—"
"Think nothing of it, Sean. Unlike some of us, you're still on the active list, and your duties have to come first. Besides, I haven't exactly been very accessible myself lately. So much to learn—"
"And so much money to decide how to spend!" Remko grinned in his now almost all-white beard. (Age had not diminished his lifelong indifference to fashion.)
Trevayne winced with something resembling embarrassment. As a member of one of the Terran Federation Navy's centuries-old "dynasties" of career officers, he had always been financially upper middle class—comfortable but not wealthy. But the same act of Parliament which had kept his quick-frozen self on a full tax-exempt pension had also made his life support the charge of a grateful Rim government. So for eighty years he had had no expenses and an income which his trustees had invested very wisely. Not the least of the surprises awaiting him had been the fact that he, individually, was a major economic force in the Rim Federation.
Of course, the Rim Federation itself had been an even greater surprise. . . .
"Yes," he heard himself saying. "And so many changes. So many political changes . . ."
Remko understood, with the perceptiveness that no one ever expected. But then the inarticulateness that everyone did expect closed over him as always.
"Well, you know . . ." He gave a vague gesture that somehow encompassed the Rim systems, connected to the Terran Federation only by a single warp chain running through the Republic, now open only by grace of the treaty that had ended the rebellion, despite the heroic best efforts of Ian Trevayne to blast it open. "I suppose . . . well, it sort of had to be this way. Especially what with . . . well, you know, the Pan-Sentient Union."
"Yes, I suppose so," Trevayne replied absently. It was strange. The proposed amalgamation of the Terran Federation with the Khanate of Orion had been the proximate cause of the Fringe Worlds' secession, and formation of the "Terran Republic." So arguably the Pan-Sentient Union of today was what he, Trevayne, had been fighting for all along.
So, he asked himself, not for the first time, why don't I feel like it was?
Of course, I'm evidently not the only one who feels that way. His lips quirked upward at the thought of the Rim Federation, which considered itself part of the Terran Federation—complete with a figurehead governor-general appointed from Terra—but not part of the Pan-Sentient Union to which the Terran Federation belonged. It would take a lawyer to figure that one out, he thought.
A lawyer like Miriam . . .
He shied away from the thought.
"Yes," he said briskly. "In some ways, the Terran Republic had been the least difficult thing for me to accept." He smiled at Yoshinaka. "I know, Genji-san: you've been valiantly trying to remember to call them 'the rebels' out of deference to my feelings. But that isn't necessary anymore. I can't waste this . . . second life that's been granted to me, fighting a war that ended eighty years ago. And, to be honest, I was always able to understand the Fringe Worlds' grievances." He gave another smile, at the sight of his two old subordinates' expressions. "Oh, of course I could never publicly admit that I did, in those days. In fact, I couldn't even admit it to myself. Not after . . ." He could go no further, and he no longer saw his listeners. They understood. They knew he was seeing the wife and daughters who had died at the rebels' hands . . . and, worse, the son who had died at his own hands after joining the rebellion.
They wondered if he had accepted the existence of the Terran Republic as fully as he claimed. He himself wondered the same thing.
"So, Sean," he said, changing the subject to everyone's relief, "what brings you to Government House? I believe you mentioned a 'crisis.' "
"That might have been a little too strong. But . . . I know you've had a lot on your mind, so you may not have heard about sighting in the Bellerophon System."
"Actually, I have. I've tried to keep abreast of current events while catching up on eighty years of old news. I haven't always succeeded, mind you. But this was hard to miss. A fleet of sublight interstellar ships . . .!"
"Yes," Yoshinaka chimed in. "Using photon drives, according to the scientific consensus. That's a first, even though it's been a theoretical possibility for some time."
Trevayne nodded. The photon-drive concept involved the total conversion of mass to propulsive energy with near-total efficiency. The process was not controllable enough to be used as a power source that would revolutionize the economy, but it was the ultimate reaction drive. Only . . . nobody had used reaction drives since the invention of inertia-canceling drive fields which, in addition to their sundry advantages in the areas of maneuverability and survivability, required energy but no reaction mass. Granted, such reactionless drives had a upper limit on the velocity they could attain: 11.7 percent c for a long time, later increased incrementally, and now upped to about 50 percent c under certain circumstances by the new "phased gravitic drive" he had been avidly reading about. It was called the "Desai Drive," he had been delighted to read, recalling his old subordinate Sonja Desai—a brilliant woman, if not exactly a "people person."
Reaction drives—loosely, "rockets"—could in theory accelerate up to the very edge of Einstein's Wall, given enough time and reaction mass. But that was their sole advantage. And when the warp points that made interstellar travel practical were separated by merely interplanetary distances, who needed that kind of velocity?
The answer, it now appeared, was: someone who didn't know about warp points but had a compelling reason for wanting to cross interstellar space.
"Then you may have also heard," Remko continued, "that we're sending a task force to Bellerophon. Just a precautionary measure, of course, and just to make sure there's an impressive Rim Federation presence there when whoever-it-is arrives, so there'll be no doubt about who Bellerophon belongs to. For the same reason they want me, as senior officer of the Rim Navy, to command it." Remko's embarrassment had built up visibly, and now it spilled over as he blurted, "They ought to have put you in command, Admiral! I mean . . . after all . . . ."
"Oh, rot, Sean! I'm not even on active duty. And I'm still desperately trying to catch up on eighty years of advances in military technology. And besides . . ." Trevayne gestured eloquently at the midshipman's body he wore.
"Your legal age is a hundred and thirty-one Standard years, Admiral," Yoshinaka pointed out mischievously.
"And you used to accuse me of having a strange sense of humor!" Trevayne snorted. "But all nonsense aside, Sean, I envy you. You'll be present at our first contact with a newly discovered race."
"Right. And," Remko added in his invincibly prosaic way, "it'll be good to see Cyrus Waldeck again. He's in command at Bellerophon, you see, and I'll be assuming command from him when I . . . Admiral, are you all right?"
"Quite all right, Sean," Trevayne gasped as he brought his coughing fit under control. "Ah . . . did I understand you to say, 'Cyrus Waldeck'?"
"Sure. You remember him, don't you? Well, after the war, he went back to the Federation . . . the Terran Federation, I mean. But now he's on detached duty with the Rim Navy. Confidentially, he told me he likes it out here better than in the Pan-Sentient Union, with all those Orion officers. He never could quite get used to them . . . and besides, he's allergic to their fur."
"Yes," Trevayne deadpanned, "I can see how that might impose a certain social handicap. And yes, of course I remember him. He was your flag captain at Zapata." Only a short while ago, in Trevayne's memory. "But now I gather he . . . has no problems about serving here in the Rim, under you?"
"Oh, no." Remko looked mildly puzzled. "He really likes the people out here; I think he looks on them as a bunch of Fringers who stayed loyal to the Federation. And as for us . . ." Remko chuckled and unconsciously paraphrased a pre-space Terran politician. "He may be a Corporate Worlder, but he's our Corporate Worlder!"
"I see," said Trevayne as those fresh—to him—memories came crowding back in.
Cyrus Waldeck belonged to a family of magnates whose insensate greed had played a leading role in driving the Fringe Worlds into desperate rebellion. Trevayne had recognized his competence, but had indulged in just a little unworthy chuckling at the thought of him serving under someone with Sean Remko's background. And, as he had hoped, they had succeeded in turning their mutual loathing outward, turning on the rebels the hatred that Navy discipline had prevented them from releasing any other way.
I always thought personal issues were more stubborn than political ones, he thought bleakly. But evidently even loathing and hatred can be worn away by the slow erosion of eight decades. . . . Decades that never existed for me. I can only stare at what seem to be sudden changes in the landscape.
"Well, Sean," he said aloud, "I'm glad the whole business has worked out so well for both of you. And don't mind me. It seems everyone I used to know is either dead or changed. Only to be expected, of course." His eyes strayed to Government House, but only for a moment. His face cleared and he extended his hand. "Good luck, Sean. And give Cyrus my best."