Orphans
Christopher Stasheff
IN THE DARKNESS of space two ships fought against a dozen. The two were cruisers–one of the Fleet, one a Khalian pirate–captained by two old enemies, Commander Sales and Captain Goodheart, who had finally found a foe greater than their own hatred–the Merchants, they who had suborned the barbarian Khalia, armed them with modern weapons, and given them spaceships for chariots. Now, the Khalian pirates fought with savage glee, able at last to strike at the humans who had betrayed their kind–and the human Fleet ship fought, with the zeal reserved for traitors to their species.
But in the midst of all that zeal, a cold stab of reason came through to the Fleet signalman, who realized that this was his final battle, that there was almost no chance of his surviving. Though he could think of no finer way to die, he knew with an even more desperate longing that the people on the Terran planets must learn of the Syndicate nest they’d blundered into, and the merciless, instant tactics of the Merchants. So, even as he routed signals between ships, he opened a transmission channel, locked a dish to stay pointed toward Target no matter how the ship maneuvered, and stabbed a tachyon beam at the forward base, carrying the ship-to-ship signals, audio and video, on both Fleet and Khalian frequencies. If he had known the Merchants’ band, he would have fed their signals through, too–but the Fleet, as yet, could not even hear their enemies. He even redirected a few precious launches to send message torps speeding off in reserve.
Then a Syndicate torpedo holed her defenses, and Goodheart’s ship became an expanding globe of light. Minutes later, Sales’s Fleet cruiser exploded, scattering debris thousands of miles around a globe of plasma, sending a furious wash of energy over the tachyon channel to Terra.
One piece of that debris was a cigar-shaped cocoon, two meters long and a meter wide. It shot spinning end over end for a thousand miles and more, and surely would have convulsed its lone inhabitant with nausea, if needles had not stabbed into him just before the explosion, releasing chemicals that slowed his metabolism and sent him into the deepest of sleeps as a cryogenic unit froze him in seconds. On the pod floated, into darkness, bearing a wounded crewman who had been slapped into a freezing pod by the medics, to be thawed out when a hospital ship picked him up. But he was far from Terra now, far from the routes of Fleet ships, where none but Merchantmen came. His pod sailed on through the unending night, alone, unknown, unknowing.
On the station orbiting Target, a bored signalman sipped coffee and eyed the girlie cube that was waiting for the end of his shift. Nothing ever happened in an automated station. Why did they bother having a human on duty?
The alarm sang.
The signalman jarred upright in his chair, searching his banks of monitors and tallies. There–red flashing on Vertical Four! The system didn’t know what to do with a rogue signal, whether to waste permanent memory on it or not. The signalman hacked at his keyboard, finished the sequence, and pressed “execute” just before the buffer filled. The jewel on the tally glowed, showing that it was cutting, just in time. The signalman heaved a sigh of relief and settled back, keying in a stepped-down relay of the signal, and turned to his monitor to see just what kind of tachyon “fish” his energy net had caught.
“Cannon Three is out!”
“Screens overloading!”
“Cut life-support to minimum and route power to screens!”
Behind all the Terran words were the shrilling whistles of Khalian speech, but the signalman couldn’t comprehend them. He could understand, though, the huge explosion of light as the screen flickered to scale down sensitivity to cope with the glare–and he saw the silhouette of a corvette in front of the light ball. The signalman didn’t need a book to know it was a shape he’d never seen before, ever–and he didn’t need a translator to tell him what it meant when the Weasel whistles cut off as the light globe exploded. For a moment reverence for a gallant enemy touched his heart, shoving aside the hatred of Khalians brought by generations of war–then a pang of loss as he realized that whoever was fighting those Khalians was also fighting the Fleet ship that was sending the images.
“Commander Sales!” a voice yelled from the screen, “they got Goodheart!”
“Get them,” a deeper voice snarled.
“Torpedo away!” a nasal voice snapped.
The signalman hung on to the edge of his chair, watching, waiting, forgetting that this signal was at least hours, probably days, old, and the battle long ended.
Then the silhouette of the corvette blew apart into debris, and the expanding light ball dimmed where it had been, while shouts of victory rattled around it.
Then the whole screen erupted in a wash of light, dimmed instantly but cut by a hash of snow, and white noise roared with it.
The signalman realized he was dripping with sweat. He watched the tally on the cube cutter, the jewel on Vertical Four . . .
Both were out.
The signalman sat back with a sigh. Whatever it was, it was over–and two gallant ships had died. He sat still for a moment in silent respect.
Then he leaned forward, keyed the signal for HQ on Target, and said, “This is Station Two. Emergency. Route me to the adjutant.”
Another sentry received the signal, another sensor operator on a lonely vigil–but this one had fur and sharp teeth and was planetbound, on Barataria, the Khalian pirates’ nest. He was a Khalian communications operator, who knew which buttons to push but very little of what happened inside his console. He only knew that an unscheduled signal triggered the alarm, so he did as his detail prescribed–keyed in the recorder. As the light beam engraved the signal on the cube, the operator frowned at its trace on his screen, at the warble-and-hash it made on his speaker. He pressed the call button for the officer of the watch and said, “Alert. Unscheduled transmission being received. It is scrambled–encoded with an unknown cipher. What shall I do?”
“It is what?” the officer barked, astonished.
“Scrambled. Shall I continue to record?”
“Of course!” his superior snapped. “If it is scrambled; it is very likely to contain important information! Be sure it records completely . . .”
A huge burst of static rasped through the speakers. The operator’s ears fairly rang with it–then seemed to echo in the sudden silence. “Transmission complete,” he informed the watch officer. “Procedure?”
“Take the cube to the new Bards,” the watch officer said immediately. “They should have it on the screen within the hour.”
But they didn’t–not for many an hour to come.
“It is Sales’s cipher,” the Intelligence officer informed Throb, the Castellan–the ranking Khalian officer in Captain Goodheart’s absence. “We recognize its progressions–but we have not yet been able to assign it meanings.”
“Not yet!” Throb screeched, exasperated. “That parasite has been plaguing us for two years! Why can you never break his code?”
“We have, several times–but though he keeps the same encoding of the signal, he is continually changing the meaning assigned to any given wave form. By the time we break one, he has shifted to another. And in this instance, the majority of the signal is video–we cannot even say with certainty which mathematical structures are for scanning, and which for color vectors. He keeps shifting video systems.”
“Then isolate the audio portion and break that code! But I must know what he spoke of, and quickly!”
“We shall do it as promptly as we may, Lieutenant.”
But the Alliance did it quicker. They already knew Sales’s code, of course–they had the computer-enhanced image on the screen in minutes. The adjutant listened and watched for ninety seconds, then woke up the admiral. The admiral watched the whole recording, and woke up the CEO on Terra, sending the whole sequence as a squeezed signal. The CEO watched it, then called in the Cabinet, who watched in awed silence.