Damn, what was I supposed to say to that? "I'm not exactly looking forward to it, ma'am . . . but I'll do what I'm told to do."

"What do you have to say about the idea of protecting patients from the man?"

"Well . . . Chief Garner is right. That sort of thing does happen. Not very often, thank God, but sometimes a doctor gets assigned to a duty station, and you wonder how he ever got through medical school. The nursing staff has to follow his orders . . . but they know when the physician in charge makes a bad call. And . . . well, I don't expect that there'll be mass casualties on the Haldane, ma'am. The crew and the Marine complement on board are all healthy. All we're likely to have are minor complaints and the odd case of accidental trauma, like Pollard."

"You're saying Dr. Kirchner can't do that much damage."

"I guess so, ma'am."

"And when we get to Abyssworld?"

That stopped me. As senior medical officer, Dr. Kirchner would be responsible for everyone on Haldane operating in a highly dangerous, extremely unforgiving environment . . . and he would be the biochemistry expert backing up our civilian specialists, Drs. Montgomery and Ortega.

"You know, Captain," Garner put in, "that if the cuttlewhales turn out to be intelligent . . . Dr. Kirchner might be lacking people skills, but the cuttlewhales aren't people."

It was a lame attempt at humor, and no one laughed.

"Okay," Summerlee said, arriving at a decision. "I'll have a private word with Dr. Kirchner about his . . . attitude. Carlyle . . . I'm dropping all charges against you."

The relief I felt was palpable, a warm flush from the head down. "Thank you, ma'am."

"I'm assigning you to First Section, where you'll serve as resident Corpsman. Understand?" The MSEP was divided into two sections, First and Second, with twenty-four Marines in each.

"Yes, ma'am." She was essentially pulling me out of sick bay and sticking me in with the Marines full-time. I wouldn't have a lot to do, but it would keep me out of Kirchner's sight.

"Chief? That means the other Corpsmen will be standing a watch-in-three. Is that okay?"

One of us always had to be in the sick bay, in case there was an emergency, like last night. Garner didn't stand watches, which meant the remaining four of us split up two night watches-1600 to 2400, and 2400 to 0800. That meant that we got a full night's sleep every other night. Taking a watch-in-three meant that the other Corpsmen would have to cover for me, basically working two nights, and getting off the third.

"Not a problem, Captain. I can stand watch in the sick bay, and we'll keep it simple."

"Very well. Anything else to discuss?"

"No, ma'am," Garner said.

"No, ma'am. Thank you."

"Don't thank me, Carlyle. If I have to invoke Article Ninety-two, I'm coming to you for validation. Understand me?"

"Yes, ma'am." I understood very well. Article 92 was the military regulation covering dereliction of duty, or of gross negligence or incompetence, requiring that someone be relieved of duty. If she had to relieve Dr. Kirchner, she would have me making a statement . . . and testifying later at his court-martial. It's never a good thing when an enlisted man has to give testimony against an officer, and that sort of thing can follow you throughout the rest of your career. There goes the guy who ruined Dr. Kirchner's medical career. . . .

Not good. Even if Kirchner got what he deserved, not good at all.

As with medicine, things were rarely clear-cut or obvious in legal military issues either, not when it was one guy's word against another's.

But then . . . well . . . maybe Kirchner was just having a bad day. Maybe his wife had left him . . . or he really, really hadn't wanted to leave Earth. Maybe the skipper would have that talk with him, and everything would get straightened out.

Yeah . . . maybe . . .

And maybe I was going to get promoted to admiral.

Chapter Ten.

Three days later, I was in the mess hall with Kari Harris. The viewalls were set to show a spring day on Earth, complete with mountain peaks reflected in a lake, a scene that seemed calculated to raise issues of nostalgia and homesickness. Outside, of course, there was still not a thing to see, as the bubble of tightly wrapped space containing the Haldane continued its faster-than-light slide into deep interstellar space.

There were no relativistic effects, of course; we weren't moving faster than light-just the volume of space within which Haldane was resting, and if that sounds counterintuitive to you, well, welcome to the club. How long the forty-two-light-year journey would last depended entirely on how much energy we put into the warp bubble. Theoretically, the amount of energy inside each cubic centimeter of hard vacuum was, if not infinite, then enough to seem infinite for all practical purposes. But there were engineering issues involved, not least of which was accurately calculating when it would be time to release the warp bubble and re-emerge in normal space-and that meant that the trip was going to take a couple of weeks.

Still, two weeks for forty-two light years? Three light years a day? That wasn't bad. Not bad at all.

"Kirchner," Kari told me, "is crazy."

"Is that an official diagnosis?" I asked, grinning.

She missed the sarcasm. "No, of course not. But he's acting . . . strange."

"Doing what?"

She frowned. "Well, he never leaves his office."

"He sleeps in there?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. He might go back to his quarters for a few hours some nights. But I know he's been there, locked in his office all night, each time I had the twenty-four to oh-eight-hundred watch. It kind of creeped me out, y'know?"

"Where does he eat?"

"He's got a small food nanufactory in there."

"Okay, maybe he's simply behind on his record keeping. Catching up on the backlog, y'know?" Still, acute insomnia could be an important symptom-a problem with the thalamus, perhaps.

"Elliot, I really think something is wrong with the guy. The way he rants about you . . . it's really scary."

"About me!"

"Yeah. He goes on about how enlisted people shouldn't question a doctor's decisions . . . how you were committing mutiny by disobeying orders, that kind of stuff."

I felt a bit of a chill at that. It's never good to attract the unswerving attention of the brass, especially when that attention is negative.

But I really didn't want to get drawn into the discussion. The truth was, I didn't want to believe that there was something mentally wrong with Kirchner. In some ways, I think we're still in the Dark Ages when it comes to psychological pathology. I mean, we can reach inside the brain and switch off the pain receptors. We can image the zona fasciculate of the human adrenal glands and actually watch it cranking out cortisol in response to emotional stress. But we're damned near helpless when the patient starts hearing voices or screaming that he's being chased by alien demons with big black eyes who are working for the government.

Was there anything I should do about it? Was there anything I could do?

The easiest, of course, was simply to stay out of the man's way.

The next afternoon, though, I was in the Marine squad bay, hanging out with a number of the Marines. The ship was packed with them, of course. Worse, though, it was packed with bored Marines. You could only link in to training or entertainment sims for so many hours each day, and after that the principle form of recreation became an age-old art form devised by and for enlisted personnel-the bull session.

"Hell, I know what Kirchner's problem is," Corporal Benjamin Hutchison declared. "He's a back-to-Earth neo-Ludd and he's afraid of pissing off the Qesh!"

"How do you figure neo-Ludd? Sergeant Tomacek said. "He's a fuckin' doctor fer Chrissakes! They're all about high tech!"

Predictably, I suppose, the principle topic of conversation and scuttlebutt was Dr. Kirchner, after I'd been assigned to spend my duty hours with the Marines in their natural habitat. How they knew what they knew about the situation was beyond me; I hadn't said anything about it, other than admit that the captain had let me off after a . . . misunderstanding with the good doctor. Either one of the other Corpsmen had blabbed, or the Marines were simply demonstrating the reality of psychic powers and reading someone's mind-mine, Chief Garner's, or the skipper's.

Whatever it was, every one of them knew what had happened-and almost happened-to Pollard. The four Marines who'd helped me get Pollard back to sick bay would have told the others about my being put on report, of course, and why. But unless Chief Garner or the captain had said something about Kirchner's apparent incompetence-and that was starkly and absolutely unthinkable-they were guessing, or they were reading between the lines.

They'd tried to draw me out, of course, but so far I'd gotten away with declaring ignorance-or suggesting that it was best that I not say.

That didn't stop the speculation, however.

"Sure," Private Wiseman said. "The back-to-Earthers say we have no business being in space, but not all of them are neo-Ludd. I think most of 'em are just afraid of the Qesh . . . or the Raggies."

"Fuck, the Jackers are our bosom buddies now," Sergeant Dalton growled. He grinned at me. "Ain't that right, Doc?"

"So they say," I replied. Jacker was Marine slang for the Qesh, drawn from their societal code of JKRS on their entry in the Encyclopedia Galactica.

"Hell, I don't trust 'em," Staff Sergeant Thomason said. "Or the Raggies either, for that matter."

The Brocs had told us about the broader political picture in our Galaxy when we'd first met them, and we'd learned more from the Encyclopedia Galactica. We knew that the Galactic Empire-more properly the R'agch'lgh Collective, though that was a lot harder to pronounce-had been in the process of falling apart for at least the past twenty thousand years.

Twenty thousand years? Gods, all of human civilization fit neatly into less than half of that span!

The R'agch'lgh Collective, the "Raggies," had been running things in the Galaxy for a long, long time. A million years? More? We're still not sure. We haven't found an EG entry for them, though we've looked. But we do know that about fifty thousand years ago, they made contact with some seven-legged armored centaurs known as the Qesh and collectivized them, brought them into their empire, making them one of their sources of military muscle. When things began turning pear-shaped for the Collective, though, somewhere along about the time that the last major ice age was ending on Earth, the Qesh appear to have cast off the imperial yoke and set up in business for themselves. Predarians, the news nets called them back home, meaning a predator species wandering the Galaxy looking for easy pickings.

We first encountered the Qesh sixty-one years ago at a star called Gamma Ophiuchi, eighty-four light years away, where they figured we were up next on their easy pickings list. Last year, we fought them to a standstill at Bloodstar, and hashed out a treaty of sorts: we promise not to be a nuisance to them, and they promise not to strip-mine our worlds down to bedrock.

No one knew how long that treaty was going to hold. Most likely, it would last just about exactly as long as it was convenient for the Qesh not to step on us. They were centuries ahead of us in technology; if and when they decided that we were in their way, it probably wouldn't take all that much effort on their part to correct matters. We'd seen them destroy planets by slamming rocks into them at close to the speed of light.

Dalton had directed his snide remark at me because I'd had a hand in making that treaty possible. During a Marine reconnaissance of Bloodworld-Gliese 581 IV-I'd saved the life of one of the Jacker warriors, and that had turned out to be a big deal in their warrior-oriented culture.

Glad I could help, fellas. . . . but it was a good deed thin enough that we couldn't count on it to make the agreement last. Nor could we count on Qesh good will. Especially now, since the red dwarf star known as GJ 1214 was located in the constellation in Earth's sky known as Ophiuchus.

The same constellation that held two other stars-Gamma and Eta Ophiuchi.

Did the Qesh consider that part of the sky to be their sovereign territory? Hell if I knew. All of our encounters with them had been in that general part of the sky-Gamma Oph, Psi Serpentis, Eta Ophiuchi, HD 147513 in Scorpio, and Gliese 581 in Libra. The presumption was that they'd been coming out of that corner of the sky, each strike closer to us than the one before. Gliese 581 was only twenty light years from Sol, practically chiming our front door by Galactic standards.

"Okay, so it's like Wiseman here says," Hutchison went on. "Maybe Kirchner isn't neo-Ludd, but he could be scared shitless that we're gonna bump into the Qesh out here. GJ 1214 isn't all that far from Eta Oph."

"Yeah," Thomason said, "but you're forgetting that the Qesh aren't at Eta Oph anymore. They travel about as a fleet."

"Right," I said. "Last we saw, the Predarian fleet was at Bloodstar. That's a long, long way from here. No way they're going to notice little ole us."

"Yeah?" Wiseman said. "And how do we know what they can do?"

"Bullshit," Dalton said. "Spotting us out here is like spotting one particular grain of sand somewhere along a twenty-kilometer beach."

"It's worse than that," Thomason added. "With us tucked into our own private little universe right now, it's spotting one particular grain of sand that isn't there."

"We have to come out of our hole and play sometime," Hutchison pointed out. "What then?"

"I think the real question," I said, "is what happened to Murdock Base? Was it knocked out by the local natives, whatever they are? Or was it the Qesh?"

"If it was the Qesh," Corporal Masserotti said, "then they're not traveling in a single fleet anymore."

Lance Corporal Gerald Colby said, "We know the Qesh send out scouting parties, raiders, that sort of thing. They could have left someone at Abyssworld, easy."

"Yeah," Wiseman said. "Yeah, that makes sense. Maybe Kirchner is afraid that we're going to run into the Qesh at Abyssworld."

"So what if we do?" Thomason said. "We've had a research station on Abyssworld for . . . what? Nine years, now. Even the Qesh wouldn't have a problem with us visiting our own outpost, for God's sake."

"There you go, assuming that they're going to think like us," Hutchison said.

"Yeah," Wiseman said. "If they're alien, they're not going to think like we do. That's what the word means, right? It's like they're insane!"

"What do you think, Doc?" Thomason asked. "You're the expert on aliens!"

"I think that even the most alien life form we run into is going to act in a way that is logical for it. It'll be a logic based on its evolutionary history, its psychology, its physiology, and the way it looks at the universe around it. We may not understand that logic at first, but there will be logic."

"Well, that's just what I said, right?" Wiseman said. "If we don't understand the logic, they're gonna be acting crazy . . . at least so far as we're concerned."

"Doesn't mean we can't understand them," I pointed out. "But it's never going to be easy."

In fact, there's a whole science devoted to how aliens think-xenoepistemology, the study of how nonhuman intelligences obtain and organize knowledge. There were expert AI systems, including one called Ludwig, resident in Haldane's Net, designed to figure out just what an alien means when it says, "Good morning." We had a long way to go in the field, though. We still didn't always understand the Brocs, and we'd been communicating with them for 128 years.

Eventually the conversation shifted, as it always did in this kind of free-wheeling bull session, to other topics-to women and sex, to hot liberty ports, to no-shit-there-I-was stories, to what each of them planned on doing when they got out of the service.

I got up and left the group, sending a call to Chief Garner in sick bay. It was almost 1700. "Hey, Chief. It's Carlyle. You have some extra duty for me?"

"That's a negative, Carlyle. You're off the hook."

In fact, he hadn't assigned me anything since I'd moved in with the Marines. "How are things with Dr. Kirchner?"

"No problems." His mental voice sounded a bit tight, though. I wondered if things were as smooth down in sick bay as he was making them out to be. Hell, if there was a problem, Garner wouldn't tell me about it, not and risk adding to the scuttlebutt flying through the ship.

"Okay, Chief. Thanks. I'll check in tomorrow."

"Tell you what, E-Car," he said. "We're going to record it that you've done your time, okay?"

"Fine with me. What gives?"

"Let's just say . . . let's just say that we don't want to have you hanging around in sick bay where Dr. Kirchner will see you. He's still bent out of shape about you disobeying orders, and he thinks you got let off too light. Out of sight, out of mind, okay?"

"Okay, Chief. Thanks."