Martin sat back and scratched his head. “Now what the hell does that mean?” he muttered to himself.
A Semiotic War
The Admiral was having a bad day.
“Damn your eyes, man, g-g-get your hands off me!” he croaked at his batman. Robard ignored him and carried on lifting; Kurtz’s frail body wasn’t capable of resisting as he sat the old man up and plumped up the pillows behind him. “I’ll have you taken out and shot!”
“Certainly, sir. Would that be before or after breakfast?”
The Admiral growled, deep in the back of his throat, then subsided into a rasping pant. “‘M’not well.
Not like I used to be. Dammit, I hate this!”
“You’re getting old, sir. Happens to us all.”
“Not that blas-asted Terran attache, dammit. He doesn’t get old. I remember him back on Lamprey.
Took lots of daguerreotypes of me standing by a hill of skulls we built in the public square of New Bokhara. Had to do something with the rebel prisoners, after all, no Jesus to make the quartermaster’s loaves go further, ha-ha. Said he’d hang me, but never got around to it, the bastard. Wry cove, that wet fish. Could have sworn he was a female impersonator. What d’ye think, Kurt? Is he a shirt-lifter?” Robard coughed and slid a bed table bearing cup of weak tea and a poached egg on toast in front of the Admiral. “The UN inspector is a lady, sir.”
Kurtz blinked his watery eyes in astonishment. “Why, bless my soul — what a surprise!” He reached for the teacup, but his hand was shaking so much he could barely lift it without slopping the contents. “I thought I knew that,” he accused.
“You probably did, sir. You’ll feel better after you’ve taken your medicine.”
“But if he’s a girl, and he was at First Lamprey, that means—” Kurtz looked puzzled. “Do you believe in angels, Robard?” he asked faintly.
“No, sir.”
“Well, that’s alright then, she must be a devil. Can deal with those, y’know. Where’s my briefing?”
“I’ll fetch it right after your breakfast, sir. Commodore Bauer said to tell you he’s looking after everything.”
“Jolly good.”
Kurtz concentrated on assaulting his egg. Presently, when he had accepted its surrender, Robard removed the table. “We’d better get you dressed and up, sir. Staff meeting in thirty minutes.” Thirty-five minutes later, the Admiral was ready to meet his staff in the huge conference room adjoining his suite. Donning a uniform and taking his medication seemed to have removed a decade from his shoulders; he shuffled into the room under his own power, leaning heavily on his canes, although Robard discreetly helped when the Admiral tried to return the assembled officers’ salute (and nearly caught a walking stick in one eye).
“Good evening, gentlemen,” began the Admiral. “I gather the rail packet has been me — I’m sorry. I gather the r-r — mail packet has been received. Lieutenant Kossov. What word of our dispatches?”
“Er—” Kossov looked green. “We have a problem, sir.”
“What do you mean, a problem?” demanded the Admiral. “We’re not supposed to have problems — that’s the enemy’s job!”
“There was a stack of twenty disks in the time capsule—”
“Don’t give me disks, give me answers! What word of the enemy?” Commodore Bauer leaned forward. “I think what the Lieutenant is trying to say,” he interrupted, “is that the dispatches were damaged.” Kossov eyed the Commodore with embarrassingly transparent gratitude.
“That’s exactly right, sir. The private mail was intact, for the most part, but there was damage to the time capsule at one side — a micrometeoroid impact — and three of the disks were fragmented. We’ve retrieved a partial copy of a tenth of our orders from the remaining disks, but most of what came through consists of supply manifests for the quartermaster and a suggested menu for the Emperor’s Birthday Commemoration Dinner. No details of the enemy, order of battle, force dispositions, diplomatic analysis, intelligence, or anything remotely useful. It’s all shattered.”
“I see.” The Admiral looked deceptively calm; Kossov quailed. “So our intelligence about the enemy disposition is absent. Ah, that-t makes life easier.” He turned to Bauer. “Then we shall have to proceed in accordance with Plan B in order to accomplish a successful attack! Every man shall do his duty, for right is on our side. I ex-expect you have incontingency plans for dealing with in-insurgents on the ground?
Good, very good. The Festival we shall meet in orbit and, having destroyed their ships, we shall work on the assumption that there is an aspiration to depose His Majesty among the rebels on the ground and their allies from the enemy camp! Commodore. You will supervise our approach to the target system.
Colonel von Ungern — Sternberg? Plans for the disposition of your marines and the re-re-reimposition of order once we arrive, if you please. Captain Mirsky, you will coordinate the, ah, la-la— maneuvers of the flotilla. Report to Midshipman Bauer if you please.”
The Admiral rose, shakily, and made no protest when Robard held him by one arm. “Diss-diss-missed!” he snapped and, turning, hobbled out of the room.
Procurator Muller was bored. Bored and, furthermore, somewhat annoyed. Apart from the evidence of misconduct over a weissbier back in New Prague, there wasn’t anything he could hang on the engineer.
Just the fact that he was a foreigner who espoused radical opinions liable to encourage moral turpitude among the lumpenproletariat — which put him in the company of roughly ninety percent of the population of the known universe. Admittedly, there had been the nonstandard plug-in from the man’s PA, but that wasn’t conclusive. Was it?
He’d spent nearly two months of his life getting this much information. Much of the time, he was bored to tears; the crew and officers wouldn’t speak to him — he was one of the Curator’s men, charged with the preservation of society, and, like all police posts, this attracted some degree of suspicion — and he had long since exhausted the small wardroom library. With no duties but covert surveillance of a suspect who knew he was under suspicion, there was little for him to occupy his time with except idle fantasies about his forthcoming meeting, when they arrived on Rochard’s World. But there were only a finite number of words he could think of to address his father with — and small consolation in imagining himself saying them.
However, one evening, it occurred to Vassily that there was another avenue he could follow in his exploration of the subject’s movements. Wasn’t Springfield spending an unhealthy amount of time in company with the foreign diplomat?
Now there was a shady case! Vassily’s nostrils flared whenever he thought about her. If she hadn’t had diplomatic papers, he’d have had her in an interrogation room in a trice. Springfield might be a radical, but Colonel Mansour wore trousers—enough to get her arrested for indecency on the streets of the capital, special credentials or no. The woman was a dangerous degenerate; obviously of depraved tastes, a male impersonator, probably an invert, and liable to corrupt anyone she came into contact with.
Indeed, her very presence on this warship was a threat to the moral hygiene of the crew! That the engineer spent much of his time with her was obvious (Vassily had seen the surveillance recordings of him slipping in and out of her cabin), and the question of where the incriminating evidence was kept seemed fairly clear-cut. Springfield was a dangerous anarchist spy, and she must be his evil scheming control; a secretive mistress of the art of diplomatic seduction, mad, bad, and dangerous to know.