Guardsmen of Tomorrow Read Free Page B

against us. We need you at Kaden as quickly as possible. Assume one day for refit, five days for the trans-c jump to Kaden. You will have a three-day margin, some of which will be lost to minus-tau.”
    “Tau is of the essence, you might say,” cy-Dennever added, smirking at his own joke.
    “Admiral cy-Dennever will be there in Victor within five days more,” cy-Koenin went on, ignoring him. “It will be up to you to assess the situation when you arrive, and to report to Admiral cy-Farrol, currently in command of the Kaden Squadron. You will have dispatches and orders to deliver to him.”
    “Aye, my lord.”
    “Dismissed, Captain Hazzard. Inform me when your vessel is fit for space.”
    “Aye, aye, sir.”
    As he left, the two Starlords were arguing in low but nova-hot tones.
    Twenty-one hours later, Indeterminacy boosted for c and the jump to Kaden, the Anarchate capital, without even time enough for Hazzard to visit Cynthea, his portwife at Trib-altren. Though the Indy cast off from the station at almost the same moment as the Victor , the frigate, with far less mass to boost, accelerated more quickly. Within another hour, the Indy was tacking on nines to her ninety-nine percent of light speed, as the universe, crowded forward by the distortions of relativistic travel, took on the appearance of a ring of frosty light encircling the prow, and objective hours in the universe outside passed like minutes to the men and women crowded within the frigate’s steel and duraplast hull.
    A vessel’s spacesails could ride the almost nonexistent currents of light, gravity, and magnetic flux, while her Cashimir cascade array boosted milli-G accelerations to accelerations measured in kilogravities. As the ship crowded c , a phantasm seeming to recede like Xeno’s Paradox the harder the ship boosted, space around the vessel turned strange, warped by the starship’s own pyramiding relativistic mass. A command from the bridge, and the trans-c primaries engaged, kicking her into highspace where they devoured light-years by the handful.
    But star travel came with a cost. Each time a ship approached the pace of light before engaging her highspace drives, relativistic effects invoked the steadily mounting curse of minus-tau. Three minutes subjective at 99.9 percent of the speed of light translated as almost an hour objective; sixteen weeks on patrol at .95 c saw the passage of over a year. C-duty, as it was called, carried c-men and of-ficers alike into the future, sundering the bonds of family and friends left behind.
    It made for tighter bonding among the men and women serving aboard for, after accumulating a minus-tau of a scant few decades objective, they had few ties left to the planet-lubber populations of world surfaces. Others within the crew became family…
    Greydon Hazzard, though, had no one aboard. As captain, he was expected to stand apart, to command without seeming to have favorites or cliques. It made for a painfully lonely life, one marked by periods of watch and watch… and the inexpressibly vast deeps of emptiness between the sundered suns.
    “Tell me about your world, Cadlud. Tell me about your people .”
    They sat in Hazzard’s day cabin, a tiny office aft of the gun decks. Or, rather, Hazzard sat behind his desk, while Cadlud squatted in a bulky huddle in the center of the deck. Irdikad were humanoid, more or less, if massive, blunt, and elephantine to human sensibilities. Each shoulder sprouted a heavy tentacle with a graceful, sinuous tip; a third grew from the face, above the inverted-V slash of a mouth and beneath the single, slit-pupiled eye. Most Irdikad wore ornate robes with patterns expressing individual tastes and artistry, but Cadlud generally went naked aboard ship.
    Indeterminacy ‘s crew spaces were warmer than he was used to, and his species seemed never to have developed nudity taboos… quite possibly because their genitals were located in their central arm, and sex for them was the