Offices of the fleet provost marshal, Space Fleet
headquarters, city of Foundation, Terranova
“For God’s sake,” Michael muttered, “how much longer do we have to wait?”
“As long as it takes, sir,” Ferreira said. “The staff captain is extremely pissed, and I imagine she’s had a lot to say. Not that I blame her. It’s not every day she has to deal with a heavy cruiser’s entire complement of senior spacers.”
Michael laughed out loud. The crew of a conventional heavy cruiser included hundreds of senior spacers; he loved the idea of all of them lined up in front of some long-suffering staff captain, though he knew the staff captain would not see anything even remotely funny about the whole business.
Finally, the doors opened, and Chief Petty Officer Bienefelt emerged, leading a line of spacers out of the Fleet provost marshal’s offices. Michael could not help noticing that not one of them showed the smallest sign of remorse.
“All right, chief,” Michael said, shaking his head. “Tell me how it went.”
Bienefelt smiled, a smile of smug self-satisfaction. “Justice prevailed, sir, as it should. Charges of common assault were dismissed, though sadly we were all found guilty of a breach of the peace.” Bienefelt even managed to sound hurt.
“Well,” Michael snorted, “what a surprise, considering the patrol used a stun gun to stop you from beating the crap out of … what the hell was the useless jerk’s name?”
“Leading Spacer Rasmussen, sir. Off Ebonite, which wasn’t within a hundred light-years of Operation Opera. Useless, scum-sucking toe rag.”
“Yeah, him. And the damage?”
“Fine, stoppage of leave, loss of seniority, and we’ve had to kick the tin to pay for the damage to the bar.”
“Oh,” Michael said, “so you’re still a chief petty officer?” He shook his head despairingly. “That’s a fucking miracle. I think you got off lightly.”
“Maybe so, sir,” Bienefelt said, looking not in the least apologetic, “but let me tell you this. It was well worth it, not that Rasmussen would agree. The provost marshal threw the book at him, big-time. He’s screwed, and his mates, too. My spies inside the provost marshal’s office tell me they are on their way to Fleet Prison 8 as we speak.”
“Good.” Michael paused to look at Reckless’s crew. Excrew, he reminded himself. Reckless might be gone, but that did not diminish the fierce pride he had in all of them. “Well, boys and girls, I hope you’ve learned your lesson, though looking at you, I doubt it. I would buy you a beer to say a strictly unofficial thanks for standing up for Reckless and her sister dreadnoughts, but since you’re all confined to barracks, I can’t.”
“Short arms, deep pockets, sir,” Bienefelt shot back amid a soft chorus of boos and hisses. “Any excuse. Nothing changes.”
“Insubordinate rabble,” Michael said. “Give me a shout when they let you back into civilized society. The beers will be on me, though maybe we should try another bar. Now piss off. I’ve got work to do. Catch up with you later, Jayla.”
“Sir.”
Michael made his way through the labyrinthine corridors and drop tubes of Fleet headquarters. The place was huge, and his leg, for all the help given by the legbot, did not appreciate the workout. By the time he made it to his desk-cold-shouldered as usual by the rest of Warfare Division as he limped past-he could not have walked much farther.
He sat down, any enthusiasm generated by the unquestioning loyalty of Reckless’s crew evaporating fast. Updating the Fighting Instructions was important work, he knew, but only if Fleet continued the dreadnought experiment, something he had a feeling it would not. He had forced himself back to work when two pings in quick succession announced the arrival of priority mail.
His heart raced. The first message was from the Red Cross. With a silent prayer, he opened it. It was a vidmail, and it was from Anna. He breathed in sharply to steady himself and opened it.
After the usual Red Cross preamble-name, rank, serial number, followed by a certificate from the Hammers asserting the authenticity of the vidmail and giving her prisoner identity number-Anna’s face popped into his neuronics. For a moment she said nothing. She seemed tired: skin washed out to a dull beige, gray bags under her eyes, her face stretched taut across high cheekbones no longer dusted with pink. But her eyes were pure Anna: an extraordinary green, alive and alert. Michael forced himself to relax. Anna was as well as any Fed could be in Hammer captivity.
“You can start,” a disembodied voice said. “You have one minute.”
A shiver ran up Michael’s spine. The accent was pure unadulterated Hammer. The flattened vowels, chopped syllables, and staccato delivery triggered a feeling of sick dread and a flood of memories he had worked long and hard to bury.
Anna stared directly into the holocam. “Michael,” she said, her voice steady and controlled, “I don’t have long. As you can see, I’m okay. I had some splinter damage to my right leg, but nothing serious. The Hammer medics did a good job, it’s healing well, and I now have a wound stripe. I’m not allowed to tell you where we are, but we are all safe. The loss of the ship was heartbreaking and probably the most … uh”-blinking, Anna’s eyes filled with tears-“ah, shit … it was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever been through. I really didn’t think I’d make it. Now I know how you felt when your ship went. It was horrible. Anyway, we did the interrogation thing, I told the bastar-”
“Watch it,” the unseen Hammer growled.
“Sorry,” Anna said, sounding anything but. “We’re in a prison camp; I can’t say where. It’s basic but enough to get by. We’re out of the rain, we get fed, and the Hammers have done the right thing by us so far. There are prisoners from other ships in this camp, so there is no shortage of advice on how to survive. The senior officer is a four-ringer. She doesn’t take any shit from anyone, so discipline is tight. If I behave, I’m allowed one of these messages a month, so I’ll talk to you again. You can vidmail me whenever you like. Haven’t had any from you yet, so I don’t know if we’ll get them, but don’t let that stop you from trying. Okay, have to go. Love you. Bye.”
Anna’s face vanished, and that was it. Michael did not know what to think; his mind seethed, a mess of mixed emotions: relief, anger, longing, and frustration, all overlaid by a blanket of raw hatred of all things Hammer. The rush of emotion triggered by Anna’s vidmail was so strong, he had to force himself to push her out of his mind.
Ten minutes later, he was back in control enough to open the second message. “About bloody time,” he said as he scanned it a second time to make sure he had read it right. After waiting what seemed like a lifetime, he was to get his chance to present his account of Operation Opera to the board of inquiry.
Back in his cabin that evening, Michael watched Anna’s vidmail so many times that he could recite it word for word. He could not get enough of her. He watched it one more time; something nagged at him, and for the life of him, he could not put a finger on it. Becoming more and more frustrated, he watched it over and over again. He still did not get it, but there was something there. Problem was, his subconscious knew what it was but refused to let it out into the open. Michael gave up.
He would have another go at it after he had taken a shower and grabbed something to eat.
Shortly before midnight, it came to him. When it did, Anna’s ingenuity left him stunned. Throughout her vidmail she blinked, but never both eyes at once. It took him a long time to understand what she was saying, but once he worked it out, it turned out to be simple. An almost imperceptible twitch of her left eyelid meant 0, a twitch of her right meant 1, generating numbers between 0 and 9. Reversing things produced numbers between 0 and 15, which wasn’t helpful; Anna was always one to keep things simple.
So, thirty-two twitches gave him a sequence of binary numbers: 0001 0000 0101 0000 0101 0010 0000 1001. He shook his head in disbelief. Only a love-struck idiot would have picked it, and he was one of those; Michael was sure he was the one person in all of humanspace who would have spotted what she was doing. One of the fancier pattern recognition AIs might have cracked it, but who would have bothered?
He had a new problem. Converting the string of binary numbers to base 10 was the obvious next step; that gave him 10505209. But the longer he looked at it, the less sense it made. He was baffled. What the hell did it mean? After hours of trying, he gave up. He was getting nowhere. It was time to get some expert help, he decided.
He commed the duty intelligence officer.