Expendable - James Alan Gardner [15]
“Assaulting a superior officer.”
I contemplated the options. “Pity. I’d have to attack Prope instead of Harque. You could do Harque, though. A knee in the testicles would be appropriate, don’t you think?”
“Dislocating his shoulder would be better—I’d like the crew to admire my restraint.”
“Black both his eyes,” I suggested, “and the crew will pay you a bounty.”
“Where would I spend it? Melaquin?”
The joking died. We were ourselves again, in the night-lit corridor of a silent ship.
Still…I was appalled at the thought of dying stupidly.
“What’s the penalty for a primary offense?” I asked quietly, though I knew the answer.
“Banishment,” Yarrun replied. “There’s no other penalty possible.”
“The nearest exile world would be Mootikki, right?”
“It’s the only one in this sector.”
“Mootikki…. ninety percent ocean, and semi-sentient water spiders that eat anything with a pulse?”
Yarrun nodded. “That’s Mootikki.”
Pause.
“A cakewalk,” I said. “Wouldn’t faze the greenest cadet.”
“We’ve seen worse,” Yarrun agreed.
A long silence trickled by. My palms were sweat-moist behind me as I leaned them against the wall.
Yarrun finally spoke softly. “Are we going to do it, Festina?”
“The High Council is sending us to a planet that has killed who-knows-how-many teams already. They are providing us with no information, not even a standard AOR summary. They’ve put us under the command of a man who is clearly unstable, possibly senile, and certainly ignorant of the principles of exploration. To all appearances, they are dispatching us to die just to rid themselves of an embarrassment. What’s a few bruises compared to that?”
Yarrun, in a whisper: “We’ll need witnesses.”
I pointed to the door in front of us. “If we go for Prope and Harque while they’re in the infirmary, Dr. Veresian and the admiral will see everything.”
Another long silence. At last, Yarrun said, “We’ll just shoot them with stunners, won’t we?”
“Of course,” I replied. “We don’t really want to hurt anyone, do we?”
Weapons
Stunners were Landing weapons, intended to stop alien animals without killing them. They fired an invisible cone of hypersonic white noise, intended to disrupt electroneural activity for two and a half seconds. Sometimes, the shock stopped whatever was trying to eat you; sometimes, it didn’t. On a human, a single stunner blast caused about six hours of unconsciousness followed by a vicious bitch of a headache, but it did no true physical damage.
Every Explorer longed for a more powerful weapon now and then; but the matter was out of our hands. The League of Peoples utterly forbade lethal weapons of any kind on board starships, and as far as anyone knew, the ban had never been broken. No one could say how the League did it…although there were rumors that the races known to humans were merely the tip of the League iceberg, that there were far more advanced and mysterious creatures who simply hadn’t bothered to contact us. It was suggested that these creatures watched us invisibly, maybe even living amongst us without being seen: gaseous things or sentient patterns of radio waves, monitoring our actions or even our thoughts.
Certainly, the League seemed to pick up intentions clearly enough. After all, you can kill a person with almost anything, from laser drills to a plain old brick; but the League permitted such things to pass freely through their quarantine, because they weren’t intended as weapons. On the other hand, if you had murderous thoughts about strangling someone with your shoelace…. Well, if you had murderous thoughts at all, you’d never leave your home planet ever. Somehow, the League simply knew.
Always.
It was disturbing when you thought about it—like magic. Any sufficiently advanced technology, et cetera.
Our Assault
When I took my stunner from the locker in the Explorer equipment room, the butt felt oddly cold and metallic. I had seldom touched the pistol with my bare hand—on a Landing, we wore tightsuits covering our whole