The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  “Who are you?” Spencer asked again, this time with what he hoped was a tone of exaggerated—and threatening—patience.

  The newcomer shed her backpack. “Suss Nanahbuc. Your new live-in concubine. Santu, take over this cab and get us some speed. I want to get where we’re going.” Suss sighed and reached her hand out to Al. He took it and shook mechanically. “Nice to meet you, Spencer. Hold on just a second while I get out of this damn spy get-up.”

  Spencer watched Suss carefully, with the sinking feeling that he had just lost control of his life to this undersized secret agent.

  She leaned back in the bench seat facing him and started peeling off her outer garments. The ski mask came off first, and Spencer found himself vaguely disappointed by what it revealed. Spies and agents were supposed to be startlingly beautiful, or at least striking, and Suss was merely pretty, indeed rather ordinary-looking. She peeled off her black coveralls as well, revealing a modest business suit underneath, perfectly proper attire for a mid-level government bureaucrat. It made her look even more just an ordinary person.

  She seemed even smaller, once she was out of the commando garb. She wouldn’t even come up to Spencer’s shoulders if the two of them stood side-by-side. Her face was thin, her skin pale, her black hair snaked in a tight, prim bun at the top of her head. She wore little jewelry or makeup.

  But her eyes. They were eyes that had seen things, perhaps too many things in too short a time. They were big, almond-shaped eyes that told of almost pure-bred Asian stock reaching all the way back to ancient Earth, the irises dark blue, almost black. It would be hard to look into those eyes and not speak the truth. She undid the bun that held her hair in place and shook her head, letting her jet-black hair cascade down around her shoulders.

  “We should be at your front door in about two hours,” she announced as she pulled a brush out of her rucksack and ran it through her hair. “We have until from now until then for you to get your initial cover story straight. I am your mistress. After the Bremerton left orbit, you went off on a bender for a few hours, and then ended up at Lady Joy’s Happy House, where you sobered up to find me next to you. If anyone asks for proof that you’ve been with me, tell them I have a centimeterwide mole on my left buttock. The two of us—actually myself and a KT agent who resembles you—cut a pretty wide swath across the nightspots. You bought my contract off Lady Joy and yesterday registered me as your on-board personal assistant. We’ll be sharing a cabin aboard your cruiser, you lucky devil.”

  She flashed a dangerous smile and put her hairbrush away. She stuffed the blackout clothes into a side pocket of the rucksack, then did something with its zippers and straps, and turned it into a lady’s handbag, a bit oversized but no more remarkable for that. The mysterious intruder of two minutes before was transformed into an average-looking middle-class businesswoman.

  “You consider it a real asset that a hot-blooded temptress such as myself is capable of appearing so refined, dignified, and ordinary in public. Behind closed doors, however, it’s quite a different story. You getting all this?” she asked playfully.

  “Yeah, sure,” Al replied, feeling anything but sure. “But could you tell me what’ll really be going on?”

  “I’ll be the spy, and you’ll be the cover story—and the person who seems to be investigating the situation. You draw their fire, divert their attention, and I help you stay alive while I do the real investigating. Also, you are there with the naval task force if we Kona Tatsu superheroes need the backup. You will command the naval task force—”

  “But you will command me,” Al said sourly. “A puppet on your string.”

  She frowned and her face turned serious for the first time. “I will be your superior officer, yes. When was the last time you didn’t have a superior officer you had to obey? If it makes you feel any better, I could wave a bunch of military ID at you, showing me to hold a superior rank in the Navy—or the Guard for that matter. Then you’d have to decide whether or not my ID was forged—and whether or not a Kona Tatsu forgery has legal standing, as some courts have ruled. In the long run, none of that will matter, because you will accept my orders. Period. Or say hello to Penitence.”

  She looked at him straight in the eye and grinned. “That sound scary enough to convince you?”

  Al found himself forced to grin back. “Yeah, I guess so. I’ll follow orders. As if I had a choice.”

  Suss’ face fell, and she replied in a saddened voice. “As if any of us had a choice. I don’t call the tune I dance to, either, my friend.” She seemed lost in thought for a long moment, but then her expression brightened. “Never mind, ours not to reason why, and try not to think about the couplet’s second line. Santu, skip the run to Captain Spencer’s house, and call whoever you need to call to see to it that his luggage gets to his ship. Get us right to the spaceport and order transport to our ship. We’ve got a cruiser to catch.”

  She dug down into what was now her capacious handbag and pulled out a stack of record blocks and a reader. “Here,” she said, “get busy. The ships you’re taking over have not exactly been happy places. You’ve got a lot of homework to do if you want to get them back together again.”

  Chapter Four

  Tallen

  Lieutenant Commander Tallen Deyi was getting royally sick of all hell breaking loose. Piping aboard the latest politically appointed disaster of a captain on one hour’s notice was headache enough—but doing so while simultaneously tidying up after a goddamned mutiny on an auxiliary ship was aggravation above and beyond the call of duty.

  At least the mutiny was aboard one of the destroyers. If “mutiny” was the most accurate term. “Food riots” might be closer to the mark, given the slop the sailors aboard the Banquo had been forced to eat.

  Poor damn sods. With Lucius Rockler as commanding officer, it had probably come down between starvation and revolt. Even the Banquo’s Marines had taken part in the uprising—and if there was one bunch of perfectly devoted loyalists in the Pact, it was the goddamned Marines.

  Tallen stood up and crossed the bridge, ostensibly to look over the radarman’s shoulder to check the progress of the captain’s gig. He could have checked the gig’s position from the repeaters at his own station—or simply asked the radarman to report—but Tallen was feeling restless, edgy. He needed to prowl the bridge, pace back and forth a bit, triple-check all the routine procedures he had double-checked already.

  In the normal course of events, Tallen knew, it was terribly bad form to breathe down people’s necks that way. But he had worked with this bridge crew a long time. They knew why he was upset, and were equally nervy themselves—and would much rather have Tallen Deyi catch them out than the latest excuse for a captain.

  The poor old Duncan had been through four captains in the last three standard years, one simple-minded offspring of an inbred aristo after another. All of them a bit weak in the head and a bit weak in the chin as a result of most of their ancestors being first cousins or worse, all of them sent out on the strength of daddy’s influence and/or mommy’s money waved about in the right quarters, out to punch one of the aristo tickets that needed punching if sonnyboy were going to have any chance of snatching the family’s seat in the Senate.

  By all tradition and precedent, a Senator was supposed to have held a “major military command” before he could put on his ceremonial robes. The trouble was that Task Force 1307—all four ships of it—was one of the smallest “major” commands available, and had the added distinction of being assigned to a very secure interior cluster. It was small and unimportant enough that the High Command didn’t give a good goddam who sat in the Task Force Commander’s chair.

  A chair that, in any other Task Force, would have belonged to Tallen Deyi by now. He was stuck here, the permanent first officer, seemingly condemned forever to nursemaid the chuckle-headed spawn of politically correct, marginally incestuous marriages through their experience of “command.”

  And what type would this one, th
is Allison Spencer, be? Would he storm onto the bridge and issue a flurry of contradictory orders five minutes after he came aboard, the way Zephon had? Or vanish into his stateroom expecting a constant supply of girls and boys to be provided for his entertainment, as Senator Kerad’s darling baby girl had done?

  And, of course, it had been Miss Luinda Kerad—Captain Kerad (even if she was only nineteen years old) who had placed her extremely close friend Lucius Rockler in command of the Banquo. Tallen didn’t care one of his frequent goddams who did what to whom in private, or how they liked to do it. That didn’t matter. But when the Task Force Captain treated the ship’s complement like the staff of her private bordello and assigned some little corrupt bimbo boyfriend to command a warship—that was what wrecked ships and destroyed morale. What was the ancient maxim? “So long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.” Well, if there had been any horses aboard the Banquo, they would have been goddam petrified with fear.

  All of which left Tallen so cynical he found himself wondering, not if the new captain was going to be worse than the last, but how much worse, and in what way the newie would be worse. None of them ever got any better.

  “Captain’s gig coming alongside, Sir.”

  “Very good. I’m on my way to the ceremonial dock. Alert the sideboys and order the engineer to activate the revolving door on the captain’s cabin. We’ve got another customer.”

  The comm operator grinned at that, and knew enough not to relay the order. Tallen departed the bridge and made his way below. He had about ten minutes to reach the main hatchway, rigged for the captain’s boarding ceremony it had seen far too often in recent times.

  Tallen wasn’t sure he was ready to endure this particular charade quite so soon. Kerad had only made her hurried departure into ignominy the week before, the ink still wet on her resignation of commission. The High Secretary’s assassination two weeks before had shaken up a lot of people. It had inspired the men of the Banquo in their revolt, and that in turn had inspired Kerad’s sudden resignation “for reasons of health.”

  She had been smart to quit: the Judge Advocate General’s office could not touch a member of a senatorial family, once he or she was out of the military. Tallen was not happy that she had eluded military justice, scurried back to the protection of her family—but at least Lucius Rockler was safely in the brig here on the Duncan.

  And then the signal from Sector HQ that the replacement captain would be coming aboard in one hour. God, they loved to jerk you around! There was no time at all to sweep Kerad’s disasters under the rug.

  Tallen ducked into his office long enough to switch into dress whites, and made it to the main hatch with two minutes to spare.

  The gig warped in, docked itself, the air locks cycled—and a scarecrow in a captain’s uniform stepped aboard the Duncan. Tallen tried not to do a double-take as he saw his new commanding officer for the first time. Tall, very young, gaunt, emaciated, with something about him suggesting a sudden, recent loss. This was a man who had been hurt, badly injured somehow, and not yet completely recovered. The man’s face was still youthful—but there was something very old in his boyish eyes. His brand-new naval uniform fit him, but he seemed not to fit the uniform. That much Tallen understood: the man had been in the Guard until not so long ago.

  “Duncan on board!” the lead sideboy announced, and Allison Spencer was piped aboard in the old, old, ceremony lost in the mists of time, back when navies sailed the blue oceans of water, and the sky and the stars were mere aids to navigation. Spencer came aboard and saluted everything he was supposed to salute, moving a bit mechanically, with the air of a man who doesn’t quite feel he’s earned the honors he was being accorded.

  Tallen knew the captain had brought along a “personal assistant,” honoring another age-old tradition, and was surprised to see that she did follow him off the gig.

  Tallen was pleasantly surprised. At least Captain Spencer knew that courtesans had no place in military protocol. It wasn’t much to make a first impression with, just a suggestion that Spencer had just a hint of decorum, but maybe the horses wouldn’t get quite so frightened this time out.

  Tallen stepped forward and saluted his new superior. “Lieutenant Commander Tallen Deyi, commanding, Sir. Welcome aboard.”

  “I relieve you, Sir,” Spencer said, returning the salute and talking in subdued tones. “What I’d like to do first off is talk to you. Could we go to your office, please?”

  Goddam. The office section was clear across the ship, and there was no use trying to snow this captain by walking him around the worst of it. They’d have to walk straight through officer’s country—and maintenance hadn’t even made a dent in cleaning up the mess. Nothing for it but to put the best possible face on it. “Of course, Sir. If you would come this way.”

  The officers’ cabins had been the focal point of Kerad’s little empire of self-indulgence. She had kicked out all the line officers and assigned their cabins to a whole gaggle of “special assistants,” none of whom had lost any time in redoing their cabins and the surrounding corridors. Then, when it suddenly became time to leave there was a panic to recover as much of that splendid loot as possible.

  Tallen Deyi led Captain Spencer down the corridors, offering no explanation for anything—and sweating bullets because Spencer asked for none.

  Fabulous tapestries, gorgeous paintings, sculpture that could only be described as prurient, period furniture that would have been at home in a palace—or perhaps a fancy bordello. Worse, perhaps, were the blank spots where it was obvious a painting, a fixture, an ornament was missing. Red-flocked wallpaper hung in ribbons from the bulkheads where it had been torn out to get at some particularly expensive piece.

  Tallen breathed a sigh of relief when they turned the corner into the duty offices. Here, at least, some semblance of normal military appearance remained. “My office is just this way, Sir,” he said, the relief in his voice obvious. Quite automatically, he led Spencer straight to what Tallen regarded as “his” work place—and too late realized that the brass plate on the door said captain.

  Spencer turned and smiled at Tallen. “Your office, Commander?”

  “Ah, in the interim, Sir. All the datanodes and operational files are here—It seemed more practical in the absence—”

  “I understand,” Spencer said gently, and swung open the door. It was obvious at first glance that Tallen had been occupying this office for quite some time. His commission, proudly framed, hung on the wall. The closet door was ajar, and it was clear that the uniforms inside were meant to fit a burly man, and not the former female captain. A photo of Tallen and his parents sat on the desk.

  “It’s been a long interim, hasn’t it?” Spencer asked innocently.

  Damn and double goddam. How the hell could he explain that Kerad hadn’t set foot in the duty offices during her whole tour of duty, that Tallen had been forced to move in here, where all the ops files were?

  Spencer gestured Tallen inside and shut the hatch. “What else am I going to find on this ship, Deyi?”

  Tallen stiffened and stood at full attention. “Would the Captain wish to examine the rest of his command?” Deyi asked, dreading the ordeal he was inviting. The Duncan was in sad shape, and no one knew it better than Deyi.

  “No, thank you, Commander.” Spencer sat in the visitor’s chair and indicated that Deyi should take the chair behind the desk. “I think I’ve seen enough. It looks like you have your hands full without disrupting everything for some candy-ass inspection. You’ve got most of Duncan’s Marines aboard the Banquo, don’t you?”

  Tallen swallowed nervously. This captain seemed to have done his homework. “Yes, Sir.”

  “And no doubt you’re short-handed in other ways. Probably you have the whole commissary section doing ship’s inventory, counting to see how many of the spoons Kerad and her entourage took with her.”

  How the hell had he known that? “Sir?”

  “Kerad’s brot
her was in the Guard, Commander,” Captain Spencer said. “Assigned to my section for a while. I know the family tendencies. My guess is that his kid sister and her toadies left carrying everything that wasn’t bolted down—and a few things that were, by the look of officer’s country. And you’ve been busy trying to deal with more pressing matters than repairing the wallpaper. Like quelling a mutiny.

  “Relax, Tallen. I know none of this fiasco is your fault—even if it is technically your responsibility. I’ll lay odds that I could find discrepancies in every section of this ship that could get you court martialed for dereliction of duty if I looked right now. Fortunately, I haven’t seen a thing so far. It just so happens I wanted to see if I had the ship’s layout memorized and walked to this office with my eyes shut.”

  Tallen opened his mouth as if to speak, but then thought better of it.

  “So I’ll make a deal with you,” Spencer went on. “We are to boost and head for Daltgeld within forty hours. Concentrate between now and then on making sure the task force is ready for the jump. Once we’re on station orbiting Daltgeld, we can worry about setting the cosmetic things to rights. And the Daltgeld shipyards will be better able to help us get shipshape. Once we’re at Daltgeld, you’ve got one week to turn this flying casino back into a Pact cruiser. I’ll stay out of your hair while you do it. I’ll be busy enough in the meantime learning my own job. Bend and break whatever rules you need to bend getting this ship put back together. Then I’ll take that inspection, when you’ve had a fair chance to put things right. And if this ship isn’t in order by then there’ll be hell to pay.”

  “Very good, Sir.”

  “Excellent. Effective immediately, you will resume your duties as executive officer. You will continue to use this office until you have some semblance of control over the task force. You know this command and I don’t. I will leave the ship in your hands while I deal with the question of the unpleasantness aboard the Banquo. Settling that will be my first priority. Will you see to it that the appropriate logs and other documents are in my cabin within half an hour?”