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- Chapter 6
stones on a side table; one of pewter spaceship pieces on a gaming table, the
only one that he'd actually play games with. Dykstra had had a collection of
chess sets, until the Belt blew up his house.
The Phinons had him in one hell of a chess match right now. The raids
happening on the trans-Hague
Limit assets were little pawn thrusts. The ships congregating out in deep
space, leaving hyperspace but not reentering that had to be where the real
strategy was shaping up.
And Dykstra's going the Phinons one better? Was the old genius really that
good, or were the Phinons employing a gambit?
It had taken Dykstra only two months to go from thinking FTL travel was
impossible to duplicating the
Phinon drive. Less than two months after that he'd come up with tremendous
improvements.
Had the Phinons maybe wanted it to be this easy?
Although he'd cracked open the chess book, Knoedler had yet to read a line
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
from it. The Tchaikovsky had ceased playing.
What kind of a chess game is this? They can see my pieces, but theirs are
invisible. They can see my possible moves, but theirs I can't consider until
after they've made them.
Colonel Knoedler was a marvelous chess player. Against weaker opponents, he'd
readily exchange pieces, simplifying things until he could put together an
elegant checkmate. The few times he played someone of equal caliber, or more
likely, had gotten careless and fallen into a perilous situation, he'd play
for complications, trusting that his wit and skill would ultimately carry him
through if he just had time enough to pick away at his competition.
In this situation, I most definitely need to play for complications.
Dykstra had already argued to the staff that once the first FTL ship was
ready, they should take it deep into the Oort cloud and gather information on
the aliens. But would any information gathered be more valuable to the Patrol
than the knowledge that humanity had developed its own FTL capability would be
to the Phinons? And God forbid that Dykstra was right, and the Phinons did not
know how to build sublight drives that worked within Hague Limits, and they
captured our first ship and reverse engineered their way to that technology.
There would be another meeting with the staff tomorrow. Knoedler knew he would
argue vociferously to keep the new ship close to home.
But something else was nagging him about that new drive Dykstra had invented.
It could become a major piece in an earlier puzzle the colonel had been
working on.
But, oh, "our new buddies," the Belt, won't like this at all.
Although the BDF and the System Patrol had agreed to a cease-fire while the
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- Chapter 6
Phinon problem was assessed, the Patrol had not revealed the existence of any
of the new technology they'd already developed.
Knoedler put down the chess book finally and went to his bookshelf. He took an
old Bible out and returned to his chair. He opened it to I Kings, then flipped
pages backwards all the way into II Samuel before he found what he was looking
for.
And then, several times, he read the story of David and Goliath.
* * *
Mare Tranquilitatis
, the Sea of Tranquility, was perhaps the most appropriate place in the Solar
System to put a cemetery. Here lay thousands upon thousands of men and women
who'd died in space in the service of the System Patrol. Black crosses, stars
of David, symbols from other faiths, and plain rectangular markers for those
who'd had no religious convictions, spread out in perfect alignment all the
way to the horizon no matter which way one looked from the landing field in
the center of the cemetery.
Among those buried here were genuine heroes of the 21st century, men and women
whose names were household words, but their markers were no different from
those of the lowly belowdecks cannon fodder that had met their ends in their
bunks.
Which was why Sammi would have needed a map to find again the spot where
Steve's marker was placed. There wasn't any body buried there in his case, of
course there hadn't been one to return to her.
She'd thought about what Dykstra had said to her the day before, and knew he
was right she was working much too hard, and she hadn't allowed herself a
genuine catharsis since that night he'd shown up at her apartment to tell her
what had really happened to Steve. So she'd taken this morning off to visit
the cemetery, her only time back since she'd watched his marker being
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