1000 Worlds - Warship

Invulnerable, she is. Earth’s answer to Sarissa’s defiance of Earth authority, she carries fourteen lasercannon, dual solar guns, a belly filled with conventionally armed missiles. Self‑repairing, computerized to a point approaching sentience, she has backup systems should any instruments prove defective–supervisory capacities should any of her crew of fifty‑one prove derelict. She is powered by two Severs‑stardrive engines.

She is Alecto.

Graciously, gloriously she began her cruise homeward at five times lightspeed, her duralloy awash with starlight. Now she had stopped. Behind her, once reddened by Doppler shift, Sarissa’s sun is again gold.

• • •

He was the last of the crew, and his strength was waning. First Dutyman Lewis Akklar found solace in those facts, an emotion he felt but could not explain, something similar to what he once had felt toward the paintings of Degas and Renoir. He was sitting in the command chair, his eyes dull; now a smile creased his lips, turned the left corner of his mouth slightly upward. Back and forth, slowly back and forth he continued to swivel the chair. The smile broadened.

His legs were outstretched, and his pants, plastic and sweat‑soaked, clung wetly to his legs. His face throbbed with heat; his temperature, he knew, was about 104 degrees. His hair–straight, black–was unkempt, and it occurred to him he needed a shave and shower, some sleep. That, too, he found ironic.

Except for the low humming of the instrument panel and an occasional click as a switch cut in, the bridge around him was empty.

On three sides the silent impersonal instruments winked their multicolored lights off and on in ever‑changing patterns. Above him the viewscreen revealed its endless stars: an expanse of coldness and loneliness. He knew Sol was the bright yellow star in the lower right‑hand corner of the screen. Somehow he did not give a damn anymore.

So this was how it was to end. Belford, Petrovovich, Captain Doria, Lieutenant Judanya Kahr: all his friends and shipmates–killed by disease. Though capable of firing some of the most sophisticated weaponry ever installed in a spacecraft, the crew had not realized until too late for retaliation that the Sarissi emissaries had smuggled aboard a biological agent. Now only Ak‑klaf, a clerk‑holographer, remained.

Again he was conscious of the viewscreen. The galaxy seemed adazzle with pinpricks of light. Stars, knots in a salmon net, faces in a classroom: his mind had insisted upon those comparisons ever since he had volunteered for the international draft back home in the Republic of the Aleutians. Yet the loneliness he felt toward those images had preceded that induction by several years. It had been loneliness, he now knew–not wanderlust–which in mid‑semester had taken him from those schoolchildren and set him upon the grease‑blackened deck of the Ulak out of Cold Bay, the nets piled at his feet overlay upon neat overlay, the sea slapping the hull and the gulls cawing overhead as they waited to alight, wings lifting, should the cook dump the garbage. He had loved the ship, the chilling, constant fog; the fishing voyage had neither erased nor intensified his loneliness, but at least had given him reason for it.

He pressed a button in a console next to the chair. The door nearest the central control‑panel hummed open. He rose, hands clutching the armrests to steady himself, and stumbled across the room, paused at the door–hands against the jamb. Then wild‑eyed and smiling, he staggered down the dimly lit corridor.

“Judanya,” he said.

He pressed a wall button, a second door opened. Twenty sheeted figures, most on mattresses on the floor, lay within the small sickbay. Lieutenant Kahr was near the rear wall, an oxygen tent enclosing her, a sheet tucked neatly under her arms; she was the only one of the dead whose face was uncovered.

The oxygen tent crinkled when he folded back the side. He had been unable to force himself to close her eyelids; she gazed toward him unseeing, his form blackly mirrored within the pupils. With the back of his hand he touched her cold, cold cheek. Her lips were thin; her nose, sharply angular, made her face appear narrow. Except for a Mohawk‑like mane of black hair, she was bald. The sight of her head slightly startled him; somehow he had thought death would overtake style, and her hair would grow back as long as it was when she had first boarded the ship two years earlier.

He combed the hair with his fingers. “Judanya,” he whispered. Light shone upon her forehead. He drew the sheet down over her breasts, her abdomen, down over her legs. He looked upon her as he had many times before: wanting her, not wanting her. Though she had sometimes slept with him, she had never loved him. Lengthy cohabitations between officers and enlisted had been discouraged, and she had refused to jeopardize her career for what she considered the insipid emotions he associated with sexuality; she needed orgasms, she had told him once, merely to relax. On his knees as though before an idol, he folded the sheet, overlay upon neat overlay, at her feet. Her pubic triangle looked at him. He bent forward and pressed his lips to her kneecap, his fingertips squeezing the back of her leg. “Judanya.” Tears welled. Back home, he knew, people were dying, laughing, loving. Such was the terror of it all, the terror and the loneliness he had felt within that crowded classroom back in Dutch Harbor: the knowledge that, whatever joy or sorrow he experienced, there existed emotions and happenings beyond his comprehension–people he could neither know nor touch nor even really imagine. Life would go on whether he was alive or not.

Unless, of course, the ship fell into Sarissi hands. Or if the members of an Earth ship contracted the disease and brought it home with them. Then all Earth would know of him, if only to hate. All would die. In a way–perhaps, he told himself, it was the fever–the notion appealed to him. Loneliness had brought him here; here, in death, his loneliness could end.

It was for Judanya–not for himself or humanity–that he would place the charges. For Judanya, who had been all duty and dispassion.

Judanya, who to him was the ship.

He left her, went to the armory for plastic explosives and an armload of looped fusewire, then returned to the control room. He flopped down in the command chair, so exhausted and feverish he could hardly breathe, and sat with his head in his hands. Finally, straightening, he sighed and lifted the vocoder from its cradle in the console. Except for his perfunctory remarks earlier in the day, the log had not been kept for weeks.

“Transcription of First Duty‑man Lewis Akklar continuing at . . . ” He glanced at his watch. “Sixteen thirty‑one hours. I have just come back from sickbay, having said good‑by to my shipmates.”

He paused and for a few moments just sat staring at the blankness of the forward wall. At last he shook himself from his daydreams and resumed speaking.

“The computers analyzed the disease as some sort of virus. How the Sarissi smuggled the agent on board remains a mystery. We took all normal precautions against such a danger, including standard sterilization and quarantine procedures.

“The plague had an extremely long incubation period. The first outbreak was five weeks ago, nearly two months after we began the return trip to Earth. But once it struck, it spread rapidly, killing within a period of forty‑eight hours after the first symptoms–fever and a rawness about the eyes–appeared. The reception delegation, including Captain Doria, died first.

“The med scanners failed to isolate the cause of the disease, or to devise a workable cure or preventative. Both of the ship’s doctors died early. Gradually all efforts to combat the disease ceased.”

He stopped suddenly and rubbed his left eye. The pain was growing worse. His hand went to the control panel, and the soft blue lighting dimmed to darkness.

“The damned plague is–seems–unbeatable. After half the crew was dead, Acting Captain Kahr took extreme steps to save the rest of us. She cut the stardrive engines and, retro‑firing, slowed us to a stop; then she had the bodies jettisoned. We moved the remaining crew from room to room and opened outside hatches and interior doors, hoping the vacuum would kill the disease. Finally Lieutenant Kahr even jettisoned some of those who had shown symptoms. There was–a mutiny. We killed those who fought. But it was no use. It was all for nothing. All that blood. For nothing.”

He frowned in the darkness as the memories came flooding back. “People just kept dying,” he said. “Maybe the contagion had already spread to everyone during the incubation period. Nearly everyone had had contact with everyone else, at least indirectly, during our return flight. Or maybe it spread through the air ducts, even after we switched to the back‑up system. I don’t know. I just don’t know. All the med facilities this ship has–yet nothing worked.”

There was a long silence; Akklar watched the lights blink on and off, listened to the hum of the instruments, smelled the clean, heavy smell of machine. He set the vocoder down carefully on the armrest and looked a final time at the viewscreen filled with stars. “I should close with some . . . some memorable last words,” he said, not lifting the vocoder but pushing the on‑button with his thumb. His voice sounded hollow. “But I seem to have run out of words.” A moment passed, and he looked out into the stars, saw children’s faces, a salmon net, saw the ship within that net, not struggling but hanging by its gills like the time the net had torn and the fishing crew had spent all afternoon taking but one six‑pound King. “No,” he said. “I don’t have any final words at all.”

Slowly standing, he walked quietly from the room–passing this time through a door to his left. The door closed behind him with the softest of whispers.

He moved along the corridors toward the ship’s belly, planting plastic explosives in various niches and linking up the fuse wire. He thought he heard fire doors close behind; he told himself it was only his imagination. The fire‑control panel along the baseboard began to hiss. By the time he reached the warhead vault, the steam from the panel had turned to foam and lay like giant puffy snakes around his legs.

The vault door opened–halfway, immediately closed again. The hissing grew louder. The foam was now up to his thighs and climbing rapidly. He tried the door button again. Still no response. He found it ironic that the ship was malfunctioning just at the time the last of the crew was about to die. But the fact that the door would not open did not matter anyway. The chain reaction from the plastic explosives would trigger the warheads whether or not the door was open. He mashed a handful of explosive into the corner of the door, jabbed in both the relay and detonator fuses, and stepped back, sloshing through the foam. He paused, trying unsuccessfully to remember Judanya’s face.

The foam was to his chest.

He squeezed the detonator.

A dull, faraway boom echoed through the ship, and back on the bridge all the multi‑colored lights on the instrument panels went black. On the main viewscreen, the stars quite suddenly winked out.

• • •

Finally she has rid herself of the last of them–the humans, the diseased vermin. And she has saved herself from becoming a crippled hulk. The fire doors buffered the explosion; the flooding of herself short‑circuited all but one of the wads of explosive.

Now her intelligence moves through herself–checking, re‑checking. Relays click. Circuits buzz. Signals indicate a jagged hole in hull Subsection 37c. Instantly she activates her self‑repair units. Liquid sealant oozes and hardens to plug minor holes. Duralloy plates are rigged and methodically secured to close the major one. Her secondary monitor system then surveys damage to all systems and files extensive reports with her central computer banks. Again she sets the self‑repair units to humming, and one by one the damaged areas are repaired or replaced. Damage to the Severs‑stardrive engines has been extensive; this too is corrected.

Now she checks her position. Alarms sound. She is off course and hanging dead in space.

Reports and corrections flow through herself in a steady stream. Time passes. Scanners and medi‑probes scrutinize those bodies still aboard ship. All are lifeless. The plan has been successful. All crew members having been exposed to the virus, all were expendable; she could not allow possible contagion to occur by bringing them home. To insure that, she sucked the virus spores into her air ducts, transferred them each time Kahr ordered an airlock opened, infected the food and water supply whenever possible.

A low rumbling begins, climbs to a piercing shriek as she starts her great Severs‑stardrive engines. On the bridge the lights dance dizzily as she calculates the course to Earth and feeds corrections to Navigation. Rockets fire.

She moves–invulnerable, disease‑free. Mother and mistress to the shuttlecraft which service her, Alecto returns to her old orbit.