The Long War

“He saw all the stars. All of them. He saw the whole fecking Galaxy, man, the Milky Way. From outside… Still in the nip he was, too.”

That was the trouble with combers, Joshua was concluding. They were just expert bullshitters. Maybe they spent too much time alone.

And the search for the trolls, Jansson and Sally went on and on…

Sally. Once, when they were tethered for the night at some equable world, he thought he smelled her. As if she had come and gone while he slept. In the light he searched the gondola, and the area on the ground around the twain, but found no sign of her presence. Just a dream, he thought. He resolved never to tell Helen about it.

55

“One of those troll creatures really messed up a couple of guys here, and folks really don’t like that, but you know what? When it saw me the damn thing rushed up to me, and danced around me like it was a friend!…”

So the Benjamin Franklin had got yet another call, to yet another dumb incident concerning trolls. As Mac remarked, “You wouldn’t think there’d be enough trolls left around to trigger all this trouble.”

The place was called Cracked Rock. Judging from the transmitted report, there was a mayor, but he was resident at some stepwise companion community, leaving the local sheriff, a Long Earth tyro, in charge. The unfortunately named Charles Kafka was new to the job, a refugee from the big city—hoping for a nice easy ride to pension age, by the sound of it, in some Old-West-nostalgia type small town. Now it had all gone wrong, and he was panicking.

Cracked Rock was a speck on an unprepossessing world some distance beyond the Corn Belt. Not many steps for the Franklin to travel from its last destination, but it seemed to take an age to cross a barren-looking copy of America before coming on the township’s lights, bright in the dusk, by the bank of a river. Now Maggie looked down on a tent city—there was no shame in that, many a flourishing city had started out as tents and shacks—with a church, unfinished by the look of it, dirt roads scraped across the surrounding landscape of sparse scrub. The sheriff’s office looked like the best-finished building in town.

As the twain descended, the sheriff himself came out to meet it, accompanied by a cocky-looking younger man—and a juvenile troll, in chains. Maggie wondered if they’d done something to the troll to stop it stepping away. A few more folk drifted in from the township for a look-see.

With Nathan Boss and a couple of midshipmen at her side, Maggie cut short the introductions and asked Sheriff Kafka to sum up what had happened.

“Well, Captain, some trolls were walking past the township, a band of ’em—they know enough not to go too close—but there were some boys who intercepted them, including Wayne here, just looking for some fun, you know how good ol’ boys are, but they picked on a little one and the trolls fought back, and this one,” he indicated the beast in the chains, “laid out Wayne’s brother. And then—”

Maggie had heard the same dumb story twenty times on this mission. Impatient, infuriated, she held up a hand. “You know what? I’ve had enough of this. Midshipman Santorini.”

“Captain?”

“Go back to the ship. Bring out Carl.”

Santorini wasn’t the type to argue. “Yes, Captain.”

They waited in silence in the gathering dusk, the five minutes it took Santorini to comply. When Carl arrived, accompanied by Santorini, he hooted softly at the young troll in the chains.

Maggie faced the cub. “Carl, I hereby appoint you to the crew of the Benjamin Franklin. For now, you’ve the rank of acting ensign. Santorini, make a note. XO, when we get back aboard, make it so.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“And, Nathan—give me your mission patch.”

The emblem of Operation Prodigal Son was an astronaut-type shield showing the dirigible hovering over a stylized chain of worlds. Nathan ripped the patch off his uniform, and Maggie used her own dog-tag chain to fix it to the troll’s arm. Carl hooted, apparently in pleasure.

“Nathan, try to tell him what we’ve done here. Although I think he knows already.”

Nathan deployed his troll-call—the townsfolk stared curiously at the instrument—and started murmuring to the troll about being part of the Franklin family.

Maggie stared around at the gawking hicks with distaste. “That, citizens, is what we think of trolls.”

Sheriff Kafka looked utterly out of his depth. “So what now? You want Wayne to give his testimony?”

“Hell, no. I want to hear the testimony of the troll.”

The hicks goggled as Nathan used the troll-call to converse carefully with the captive.