The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  They listened as the two soft-treading pairs of feet made their way up the stairs. Suss’ hand went for her repulsor, but then she drew it back—deep inside Undertown, cut off from all other help—if it came to a gun battle, there was no point to fighting. And how many might get caught in the crossfire?

  Dostchem walked calmly in, the other Capuchin behind her, and entered the apartment without offering any acknowledgement of the humans’ fear. Maybe she didn’t notice it, or maybe she just didn’t care.

  “This is Igor,” she said without preamble, gesturing over her shoulder. “All he knows is that you want to get into the StarMetal building. He doesn’t know why you want in, and he doesn’t want to know. He has a day job there—and he says he can get you in, for a price.”

  “Yeah,” Igor said, in a belligerent, basso profundo voice that seemed out of place coming from his slight frame. “Five thousand gelt, take or leave it. I don’t take no haggling from baldies.”

  Baldies? Spencer was a bit puzzled. Obviously it was an insulting term for humans, but all three of them had full heads of hair. Then it came to him. A Capuchin’s body was completely covered in sleek, elegant fur. Only their faces, palms, and the soles of their feet were bare. Humans must look like so many plucked chickens to them.

  “Three thousand,” Suss replied instantly. Spencer wanted to object, Igor had said no haggling. Then he decided to let it ride. Suss knew xenopsych far better than he ever would.

  “Six thousand,” Igor said. “And it’ll be seven if you keep it up. Take six or leave it.”

  “Then I’ll take nothing and you’ve had a wasted trip,” Suss said icily. “Except that there’ll be a recording of this conversation on your supervisor’s desk tomorrow morning, after we’re long gone. Or else take the forty-five hundred I’m willing to pay and you’re willing to take, and we’ll get on with it.”

  Igor looked from Dostchem to Suss and then back again, while Dostchem snorted in laughter. “Ah, hell, she warned me you were harder to browbeat than the local baldies. Okay, you got a deal. And call me Iggy. Everyone does.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Capture

  Tarwa Chu flexed her hand and reached apprehensively for the joystick. No tugboats available. No other craft of any type available to be pressed into towing service. In short, no help of any type at hand. Whether that was for real or the result of StarMetal seeing to it that no dared offer help almost didn’t matter. The Duncan was on her own.

  But Captain Spencer had said get the ship away. Not to try and get her away, but to do it. Preferably without melting the port of København. Which meant Tarwa could not lift the ship skyward from pierside, but instead must get the cruiser out to sea, somehow, before lifting.

  Preferably.

  There was a way to do it without any outside help. The approved procedure was even down in the book, though it had never been performed on a ship the size of the Duncan. She would have to sail the behemoth out of port by herself, using the attitude control thrusters to direct and power her craft as it wallowed through the water.

  She stared out at the simulator’s viewscreens, glanced at the empty stations around the simulator deck. For a full dress rehearsal, of course, she would need the whole bridge crew in here, but something told her it might be wise to make the first few attempts on her own, without company.

  Besides, the computer itself was going to be a bit balky on the first few tries as well. The simulations computer would do its best, but there was virtually no data on this sort of maneuvering. Chu sighed. An inexperienced helmswoman running an underprogrammed computer. Well, if she pulled it off, at least she would have the consolation of providing the key data on how it was done for the next poor damn sod got caught in this particular predicament.

  But time was short, and there was no point in delaying further. She grabbed the joystick and pressed it to starboard. The simulator fired the simulated port thrusters, the portside view of the pier exploded in a cloud of simulated steam, and the simulator’s cabin heeled hard over, knocking Tarwa over, sending her sliding into the portside bulkhead as the simulator compartment rolled over ninety degrees, sloshing the portside view underwater and providing a fine view of the noonday sky to starboard—which had suddenly become skyward.

  Alarming clunks and thuds resounded from the sound system, as simulated shattered bits of pier and dock clattered down onto the Duncan. She clambered to her feet, grabbing at handholds, reached for the control panel and punched the reset button. Instantly, the deck rolled back to level and the viewscreens snapped back to an idyllic panorama of København Harbor.

  Fine, she thought. Maybe not quite so much thrust to move away from the pier. She was very glad indeed that she had made that run on her own. Chief Wellingham would have dropped dead from apoplexy if he had seen what she had done to his ship.

  She reached for the joystick and steeled herself to try it again.

  ###

  Blissfully unaware of the simulated havoc the acting commander was wreaking, Chief Wellingham was having a rather more satisfying time of it belowdecks. He stood in the forward weapons room, at the Duncan’s bow, double-checking the connections on his brand-new gravity-wave detector. The G-wave detector was not a particularly sleek piece of engineering, bulkier and heavier than he would have preferred, and its range was severely limited, but it worked, and that was the main thing.

  He decided to start at the bow of the ship and work aft, with the gain on the device cranked up to the maximum. There might be some more sophisticated and efficient search pattern he could run, some computer-planned path that would quarter the ship more perfectly and in less time, but at least the chief’s plan had the advantage of being straightforward, simple, and something he could start on right away.

  The chief had only one G-wave generator on which to calibrate the detector: the captured parasite itself. No doubt a properly designed and constructed laboratory-grade detector, designed and constructed for the purpose, could have spotted that little nightmare from halfway across the Daltgeld system. But Wellingham had been limited to the use of spare parts on hand, and the need to get something, anything, working immediately.

  He was able to spot the captive parasite at a range of about one hundred meters—considerably less than the internal diameter of the Duncan. In other words, if the chief walked his detector straight down the central axis of the ship, he could walk right past a parasite sticking to the inside of the hull—or even a parasite on a bulkhead halfway between the hull and the core. And the hundred-meter range assumed that all parasites would radiate G-waves as ferociously as the captive. Suppose they just had a little baby parasite aboard, barely trickling out any gravity-waves at all?

  Wellingham would have to puff and wheeze his way up and down companionways, back and forth through passages, ranging far and wide to be sure of covering the interior volume of the ship. That was one reason the chief had decided to make the first sweep himself—no one else knew the interior of the ship as well as he did. If someone had to crawl through the three-dee maze of the Duncan’s interior, it was going to have to be the chief.

  He was not looking forward to the exercise. His detector was a bulky, heavy thing, with the power supply and signal processing system jammed into a crude backpack arrangement with shoulder straps that were just a bit too tight for comfort. There was a hand-held detector wand attached to the pack by a thick cable. Wellingham had attached a tiny direction-pointing screen to the detector wand, and run the screen’s cable to the signal processor on the backpack.

  Still, Wellingham worried. Suppose, as seemed not impossible, the parasite could track the detector as it tracked the parasite, perhaps could “see” the detector at a range greater than 100 meters? Suppose it could move fast enough to stay clear of Wellingham as he prowled the ship? And once Wellingham did find the damn thing, how was he going to catch it? He was carrying a number of self-sealing sample holders, and a number of gadgets for pushing and prodding and scooping up the beastie,
including a spatula filched from the officer’s mess, but it all seemed a rather crude array of devices for dealing with something as strange as an electronic parasite.

  Of course, he wouldn’t even get to use that inadequate equipment unless and until he found the thing. Wellingham knew, even as he set out on a first survey of the ship, that it would take more than one officer with one detector to sweep the ship and insure it was clean. He had five of his best petty officers putting together four more of the same model detector, and he had two enlisted crew working with the computer to devise a coordinated search program, once there were five working detectors available. Wellingham intended to keep all five detectors running, searching the ship constantly, until they got the hell out of this damn system. Once they had the ship cleared of the parasites, Wellingham was determined she would stay cleared of them.

  Even if it was illogical to start the search single-handed, he was eager to get started immediately. It might be hours before the other detectors were working, and he felt the urgent need to do something now to battle the foe.

  He switched on the detector and began his first sweep.

  ###

  Iggy grew increasingly nervous as they got near the StarMetal Building. He led them through the sorts of fetid back streets and alleys and shortcuts that Spencer had expected him to know, threading their way across the city’s sprawling bulk. They made for a strange group of travelers moving through the cloud-swept night. The two Capuchins, Iggy and Dostchem, leading Suss, Sisley, and Spencer across the underbelly of København, toward the StarMetal building.

  StarMetal’s towering pyramid was the tallest structure in the city—on the planet, for that matter—and easily visible from most parts of town. Spencer was able to estimate how close they were coming to it by watching it grow taller on the horizon. He was glad of the landmark—without it, he would have completely lost his sense of direction in the labyrinth of back streets Iggy favored.

  Spencer judged them to be perhaps as much as a half-kilometer from StarMetal Plaza when Iggy ducked into one last alley, up to a nondescript building and an unmarked door. Iggy paused in front of the door and gestured for the others to cluster around close enough for him to whisper.

  “Okay, here’s th’ plan,” he said. “The whole downtown area is nothin’ but tunnels for this and tunnels for that. Sewers, walkways, cargoways, ventilation, you name it. And for every underground passageway in use, there’s another one they abandoned a hundert’ years ago. No one has them all mapped, but I know enough of them t’get us where we’re going. I’m going to take you to StarMetal by an underground route. I think we oughta be able to sidestep building security by coming up underneath their goons.”

  “That’ll do fine for getting us inside,” Dostchem objected, “but what about internal security? Surely, they have motion sensors, infrared detectors, that sort of thing.”

  “Wouldn’t do them any good if they did,” Sisley said. “The building never shuts down—it’s a systemwide business, don’t forget. The headquarters building is staffed around the clock, always busy.”

  “Which I coulda told you, Dostchem, and you shoulda figured out on yer own,” Iggy agreed irritably. “Anyway, if today was just another day around here, I could guarantee this route would work—but you Navy clowns have th’ StarMetal goons so worked up they might have sonic guards across everything down to the ratholes. So this might be a little risky.”

  Iggy flicked his tail in the air in a gesture of dismissal and went on. “I figure you knew this was chancy—but if you want to back out, now’s the time. I’m not going down there to have you bozos wetting your pants and running ’cuz yer scared of th’ dark. We don’t give up and run until I say so. No second-guessing from out-of-towners. Got that?”

  No one spoke, and Iggy snorted in disgust. “So you’re all a bunch a’ heroes, I guess. Let’s go.” He turned toward the door and produced what looked like a skeleton key. Then it was down into a further maze of doorways, passageways, tunnels and stairwells.

  Spencer couldn’t help but remember his exit from the KT hospital. That trip had been a lot like this—except the KT seemed to keep its secret passages a bit cleaner than Iggy did. More than once Spencer thought he recognized a few smells he’d just as soon have been unable to identify.

  On and down they went, shifting direction so often that Spencer was completely turned around, feeling certain that he would be unable to retrace his steps. He began to worry that Iggy planned to get them thoroughly lost and then abandon them—a much safer way for Iggy to earn his money than by leading the humans right into the enemy headquarters. It could easily take them days or weeks to get out of here—or it might take forever, if Iggy had a few nasty friends lying in wait around the next corner.

  Spencer shrugged off the fear. If it came to that, he had told his AID to switch on its inertial backtracker, and no doubt Suss had told Santu the same thing. They ought to be able to retrace their steps. And no doubt Iggy knew that military-issue AIDs would include a backtracking system. Besides no matter how ferocious Iggy’s hypothetical henchmen might be, Spencer and Suss were both well-trained, well-armed fighters—and Iggy knew that, too. So maybe they were safe after all.

  Safe from their friends, at least.

  They kept up with Iggy as best they could, though he didn’t make it easy. He refused to allow any of the others to carry a light, and used his own very sparingly, with the predictable result that everyone banged into walls and bounced their heads against unseen obstacles. Iggy led them in and out of every imaginable sort of tunnel, taking them through a half-dozen doors, access hatches, and manholes, up and down endless ladders, most of which were more rust than metal. Twice they stepped through holes that appeared to have been smashed open with a sledgehammer.

  They walked briefly through what appeared to be a long-abandoned sewer pipe. Iggy made sure they all rolled up their pants before they entered it. The sewer was just small enough to force Spencer to crouch down almost double. He immediately developed a painful crick in his back, which was made worse when a rusty pipe caught him right between the shoulder blades. He tried to concentrate on the pain in his back as a way to avoid thinking about the thick ankle-deep brownish-black goo they were walking through. Every step through it seemed to release a new and more foul odor, redolent of every sort of death and decay.

  It was some consolation that Dostchem liked the trip far less than Spencer did. She had shed her robes and set out in worker’s coveralls. But she stayed barefoot, and the slimy refuse in the sewer was congealing on her ankle fur. She complained bitterly to Iggy, and was rewarded with a highly creative suggestion as to where she could put the muck.

  At last they came to another manhole and climbed out; emerging into a large sub-basement, a cavernous room that receded into the darkness, seeming to stretch out forever in all directions, fading into the echoing gloom. The huge room was empty, but for the supporting pillars that held up the massive building above. “We’re inside th’ StarMetal building now,” Iggy announced. “The tunnel we were in was supposed to be a flood drain, but they never had a flood and it just got forgotten. Now, there’s a janitor’s closet over this way—you guys can hose down a little there.”

  “Igor, are you sure this is a wise moment to take the time to clean up?” Dostchem asked.

  “Hells’ bells, lady, you were the one bitchin’ about the stink. I don’t give a good goddamn if you’re clean—I just thought you wouldn’t want the security guards upstairs wondering what it is that smells like festering rotten eggs. So c’mon.”

  Iggy led them through a forest of supporting pillars until they could see the wall of the massive room looming up out of the darkness. They turned toward the right and followed the wall until they came upon a door in a rather ramshackle wooden wall.

  Iggy opened the door and led them into a small corner area of the sub-basement that someone had taken the trouble to finish off a bit. By the looks of things, the builder hadn’t taken the trouble
to get company approval for the job beforehand.

  The materials used had the look of being scrounged rather than allocated. The sub-basement’s sancrete foundation material was covered over with what looked like kitchen flooring, shopworn pseudowood paneling was glued down over the sub-basement walls. A bedraggled, presumably pilfered light fixture dangled on a long cord from the far-off ceiling. A couch purloined from somewhere or other was backed into a corner, and showed evidence of serving frequent duty as a bed. Other odds and ends of furniture were scattered about the room. A small food cooler sat in one corner, and a fairly sophisticated three-dee box sat opposite the couch.

  The same improvisational spirit that had inspired the room’s builder in the first place had led him her or it to try his hand at plumbing as well. Iggy pulled back a curtain in one corner of the room to reveal a small chemical toilet and a crude shower, really nothing more than a garden hose carefully strung up with wire. A drain channel was cut into the sancrete below it to draw the water away from the rest of the cubbyhole. It occurred to Spencer that the water must end up in the sewer pipe they had just come out of.

  He looked around at the little compartment. It was obviously a very enterprising being’s attempt to shirk work. Down here, where no boss would ever dream of looking, the owner had jury-rigged a nice little place to hide from the job, get cleaned up, grab a snack, and catch forty winks.

  Spencer wondered how their guide came to know about this little hidey-hole. Was this Iggy’s place? Was he embarrassed to admit that he was nothing more than a junk-cadging, work-shirking menial instead of a big-time operator? If this place was not his, how had he known about it, and how else would he know the owner would not show up and object?