World Unknowable (Part 1)

in No Strange Land

I arrived early to meet Grisby and the others at Miller Field - but not early enough, apparently; they were ready to launch, and were waiting for me in the hangar, some-what less than patiently.

I started badly: After exchanging greetings with my traveling-companions, I tried to dazzle them with my Holmesian powers of deductive reasoning ... I asked, "Did Committee Nine order all these little cloak-and-dagger touches?" In the Terran Sphere of Influence, matters of war and defense were handled provincially by the House of Governors’ Committee IX, within which Subcommittee I - better known as Nine-Eye - handled intelli-gence services.

Grisby and a couple of the others gave me puzzled looks - which led me to suspect, incorrectly, that they were unfamiliar with the old phrase cloak and dagger. That wasn’t quite it. Grisby asked, "What did you just say?"

"We’re taking a civilian ship - or, anyway, it looks civilian - rather than an As-traCav ship," I replied. " ... We’re launching from an outta-the-way little commercial field rather than from a military installation ... None of you is in uniform- "

Anita Sayar silenced me with a glare that decidedly was neither dazzled nor puzzled. "Why don’t you say it a little louder?!" she hissed. "Why don’t you just send a mes-sage to the Sesh, and tell ’em we’re comin’?!"

I said, "I’m sorry."

Sayar shook her head. "Reporters." She said the word in the same tone of voice you might use to say venereal warts.

We boarded the ship. For the record, "we" means Master Warrant Ofcr. Five (W-5) Franco "Griz" Grisby, Terran Planetary Army (T.P.A.); Chief Petty Ofcr. (C.P.O., E-7) Anita Sayar, Astral Cavalry, ICE (Infiltration, Combat, Espionage) special forc-es; Warrant Ofcr. One (W-1) Tanya Vanderheim, T.P.A. "Gold Beret" special forces; Spe-cialist ("Speck," E-4) Mando Perez, T.P.A.; Senior C.P.O. (E-8) Alexander "Alex" Fong, As-tral Cavalry; and me.

The ship was the Harbinger. If, as I had tried to suggest, she was an AstraCav ship disguised to look like a civilian craft, the disguise was flawless - if I hadn’t known bet-ter, I would have sworn she was nothing more than a rickety, antique civilian cargo-tug. Her X-space injectors were brand-new. They looked out-of-place, comically so, on the old tub, like new window-shutters on a condemned house.

Quite frankly, I would, under any other circumstances, have refused to board the Harbinger ... but I knew that if the ship was unsafe, Grisby wouldn’t fly her. I trusted Griz ... I had been through a great deal with him - and the others - near the end of the d’Absu War. Only one battle ... but Operation Firestorm (a.k.a. the Battle of Farcry) does constitute "a great deal." We made it off that loathsome planet alive only by the skin of our proverbial teeth. Many other persons didn’t.

(If you’ve read my account of what happened on Farcry, and what happened later, on Elbanu, you might think these five persons and I would have emerged from those intensely traumatic experiences as friends ... but if you do think that, you’re intensely wrong. Like most combat-vets, Griz and co. preferred to avoid making more than a few friends. Combat has a way of taking your friends away from you. Why subject yourself to any more than your share of grief and sorrow?)