Kaspar's Box

The captain of the tramp met him just inside the entranceway. He was not only old, he was perhaps the oldest man Maslovic had ever seen. Gray-haired, with a stringy, dirty gray beard, his skin had the look of ancient parchment and he stood slightly stooped in spite of a clear effort to look military himself. He wore a simple black flight jump suit that looked older and more wrinkled than he was, and some boots that had last been shined before the Great Silence.

"I'm Captain Murphy," the old man introduced himself.

"Sergeant Maslovic," the marine responded, looking around. "Sir, by authority of Combine Naval Code seventy-seven stroke six two I take command of your vessel. Where are your crew?"

The old man chuckled. "Crew? No crew. Don't need much of a crew for this scow, Sergeant. I have some passengers, though."

"We monitored three. Please have them come forward and then we can all go up to the Legal Officer."

"Well, now, we might need some help in transporting two of them, I think, although I'm not at all sure you'll understand why without diagrams."

"Sir?"

"This way, Sergeant."

Maslovic gestured for the guard to be posted at the airlock and the rest of the squad to fan out through the captive ship and begin to search and inventory it, then followed the old captain.

The ship stank. Body odor, oils and lubricants-it was hard to isolate the sources of the stenches, but it was not exactly a ship that would pass inspection in naval life.

The captain punched a panel and an interior hatch slid back, and Murphy gestured for the sergeant to enter.

"Sergeant, meet my passengers," the old man said with a trace of amusement in his tone.

Maslovic entered what was clearly ordinarily the captain's cabin and stopped. For a moment, he really did feel confused. Three women were inside, one in a reclining chair, one in the bed, and a third in a straight-backed utility chair bolted to the floor.

Maslovic had seen many colonial women before, but there was something odd about these. They were disproportionately fat, but not all over. Just in the…

He suddenly realized their condition and why Captain Murphy had been so apprehensive about them and yet amused to introduce them to him.

All three were hugely pregnant.

He suspected that these people would be going up to the cruiser. There was nobody here who could deal with them like this.

* * *

It was two kilometers long and looked like it had been assembled by a horde of drunken babies. Nonetheless, the Thermopylae was actually as functional as a socket wrench; in its time, its design fought wars, conquered rebellions, ran down smugglers and brought would-be dictators to heel. Its birth name was the CNC Thermopylae, the initials standing for "Combine Naval Cruiser." Its armament was and continued to be more than formidable; it could incinerate the average solid rock planet, vaporize a path ahead of it through the densest of asteroid belts, and its defensive shields could withstand blasts from a ship of equal or lesser capabilities.

It did not, however, have many light armaments; instead, it carried a series of externally docked fighter squadrons in what were known as "pods" and, in four equally spaced "hangars" around its midsection, it carried and could quickly launch a like number of destroyers, each with formidable weapons of their own, each with their own single abbreviated pod of defensive fighters. The destroyers could use a wormgate on their own, as could the cruiser; the fighters had no such equipment aboard and were dependent for interstellar travel on the bigger ships even as they were dependent on the smallest for the first line of defense.

For all that, they'd had relatively small human crews when the Great Silence came down and all the wormgates leading to the old Combine and Mother Earth suddenly became inactive. Most of the systems were fully automated; the only ones aboard the large vessels were those who had to make the command decisions that it was felt no machine should be permitted to make and those who represented the human race in its projection wherever that force was required. Ultimately, it was the lowest and least of them that proved essential to remain essentially human. It was discovered, by long and rueful experience, that you could make the perfect soldiers out of robotic arts but so could the other guys. Stalemate was not the objective of a military projection; so long as machines of equal capabilities faced off, though, that's what happened most of the time.

And that was why the pilots and the grunts, supported, of course, by the best in robotics, but not governed by them, remained.