Conrad looked from Ho to Steve to Andres, blinking. Something wet and warm ran down his forehead, and he wiped it away, then glanced down at himself and realized he was covered in tiny, bright spatters of blood. “Who . . . who authorized this? Who gave you permission to kill people?”
“It's implicit in my job description, sir. It has to be. If you feel this particular action was in error, take it up with the captain. She may see your side, in which case I'll receive a punishment, and I don't think the captain much likes me so that's probably what will happen. But I would do it again, sir. And I have backing from the King of Barnard himself, so if shove comes to push, I have some ability to push back. I'm not stupid, Mr. Mursk, and don't appreciate your treating me like I am.”
Conrad continued to gape in disbelief at these men from security. “Who said anything about your being stupid?”
“You've always thought so,” Ho replied. “It's no great secret. You can think what you like, sir, but don't come down here and try to do my job for me. You haven't got the stomach for it.”
At that, Steve Grush spoke up. “He is right, sir. He did the right thing under the circumstances.”
Conrad shook his head. “He could've used a tazzer. He could have put them both to sleep, or separated them and dragged them to the fax.”
“See, that's where you're stupid,” Ho said. “What's the difference, if I tazz them or if I brainshoot them? Either way they lose a period of consciousness. Either way, they wake up with a hole in the memory, and none in the skull. And the fact is, I don't have a tazzer with me right now, so I made a judgment call.”
Conrad straightened, and glared at the other man. “Don't enjoy your job too much, Ho—not under my command. I'll talk to the captain, but unless you hear differently, you are to stop carrying projectile weapons, or any other form of lethal force, onboard this ship. That applies to the people under your command as well. You will proceed to the aft inventory and request a tazzer, and you will keep said tazzer with you, fully charged, at all times. When you need to immobilize a person, that is the instrument of first choice, with your own body being the instrument of second choice if for some reason the tazzer fails to operate. Do I make myself clear?”
It was an effort to keep his voice from quavering. This was not a reaction of fear, although he and Ho had certainly had their run-ins in the past. But Conrad had just watched two people murdered right in front of him, the blood splattering in his face, and although the two could be revived by any fax machine, and probably would be within a couple of days, the sight of their murder wasn't something he could shake off so easily. His body was screaming, Fight or flee! Barf or faint, do something!
Ho seemed to sense this and was about to say something, probably along the lines of Conrad being soft, or a pussy, or needing to leave the hard decisions in the hands of someone capable. And once a thing like that was out in the open, on the record as it were, it would hang over them all for the rest of eternity. And that just wasn't acceptable, so Conrad held up a hand and jumped right in with, “I don't want to hear any argument about it, Ho. You're already in violation of any reasonable code of conduct. Throw insubordination on top of that, and it could be a long, long time before you come out of storage. Do I make myself clear?”
Ho just rolled his eyes. “Very clear, sir. Full of mystery you are not.”
Conrad straightened farther, staring down the three security officers. “That will be all, Mr. Ng. The three of you are dismissed. Send someone else to clean up this mess.”
The three did as they were told, shuffling out of the chamber and up the stairs, but they seemed more amused than upset by Conrad's reaction, and he guessed, wearily, that the matter was far from settled.
Chapter eight.
The unpacking
The target asteroid was nameless and would remain so, both because it was a minor body—smaller than Newhope—and because it was about to be destroyed. Or rather, reshaped and reborn. They pulled up alongside it on August 1 of the year Barnard 123, or Queendom 416, or—according to Robert, in a particularly pedantic mood—2680 by the old Christian calendar.
“Well,” Conrad said, cracking his knuckles, “it's finally time to unpack.”
But when he turned to Xmary, sitting beside him on the bridge, her face was misty rather than exultant.
“What's the matter? Cap'n?”
The corners of her lips twitched up for a moment, and then sank once more. “My ship,” she said sadly. “My beautiful ship. In a few minutes, we'll split open her belly, pull out her entrails, and feast upon her corpse.”
Robert looked back at them, clearly about to say something, but Conrad headed him off. On matters of crew morale, Conrad had clear jurisdiction, and concerning the emotional well-being of Xiomara Li Weng in particular, it was as close to absolute as these things ever got.
“It's not as bad as all that, ma'am. We're not pulling out Newhope's entrails, just, maybe, pumping her stomach. And, you know, going through her pockets. She'll never be the same, it's true: the clean, needle lines of her shape will be broken up a bit. To my mind, she's spreading her wings. Or perhaps she's a stork with four thousand babies to deliver, plus whole communities for them to live in, and infrastructure to support them. But Newhope, my dear, will live on. For a long time, I think.”
But Xmary was shaking her head. “She won't be aerodynamic, Conrad. She won't be properly equipped. She won't ply the starways ever again—not without a major overhaul, or unless we strip her down even farther. From starship to tugboat, in one vicious cut.” She dropped her voice to a murmur, so that only Conrad could hear her—although technically, the wellstone around them was more than capable of picking up her voice, amplifying and recording it, and since the fundamental programming had been laid down by Queendom engineers, one had to assume it was doing exactly that. But barring the unlikely return of said starship into the hands of said Queendom engineers, this mattered little.
It should also be noted that in the Queendom, belief in far-future “quantum archaeologists” was widespread and unshakable. People generally agreed, for whatever reason, that their actions, their imprints, their electromagnetic ghosts would be open to future scrutiny, even where the events themselves took place in the absence of witnesses. Information persists, people were fond of saying. This was a reasonable supposition, and in many ways provably true, for such archaeologists already existed in small numbers. But for the most part the belief sprang from the same irrational roots as the urban and rural and faery myths of earlier ages. And the queen's subjects could not know of the terrible changes in store for Sol and her planets—changes that would crush a great deal of this information completely out of the observable universe.
Be that as it may, the conversation was as private as it could reasonably be in a programmable environment, in a quantum universe, with live human beings all around. And so the two of them spoke and thought and emoted without artifice, without any thought of audience or posterity. Such exchanges are, when preserved, the rare treasures of quantum archaeology.