Cartwright's Cavaliers (The Revelations Cycle Book 1)

by Mark Wandrey

  “Ladies and gentlemen, please offer a warm welcome to the new director of the First Horseman Historical Museum, Jim Cartwright!”

  “Shit,” the old man grumbled and lowered the wrench. “Kinda fat for a merc, aren’t you?”

  “Kind of old and nasty for a caretaker, aren’t you?” Jim offered as rebuttal. The man looked at him and squinted. For a moment Jim wondered if he was about to get knocked senseless with the wrench. Then the man laughed, more like a cackle, and shook his head.

  “Yeah, you’re a Cartwright all right. Knew the last three, and you have the looks, if not the build.” Jim just shrugged helplessly. He looked at Jim with a critical eye. “Suppose you wanna move into the living quarters?”

  “You living there now?” Jim asked, not wanting to deprive an old man of his home.

  “Me? Shit, kid, I look like a high falutin’ rich man to you? I have a space down in the restoration department. Lived there since I retired from the Cavaliers.”

  “What do you do here…I didn’t get your name.”

  “Hargrave,” he said and offered a heavily-callused hand. “Ezekiel Hargrave. I’m the head of mechanical restorations. Glorified grease monkey, but I got me the gift of gears.” Jim shook the hand. Hargrave’s grip was firm but not too strong, and he smiled slightly for the first time as he looked his new boss in the eye. “Decided not to let the museum remain in trust, eh?”

  “You heard what happened to the company, right?”

  “Who hasn’t? Don’t worry about it. Things have been worse.”

  “Hargrave, the company is wrecked,” Jim said incredulously. “My mother cleaned us out.”

  Hargrave snorted. “You still have the name, right?” Jim nodded. “None of the other companies would bid on it?” Another nod. “We mercs look out for our own. Down, but not out. The first Cartwright started with a hell of a lot less than you have right now. He mortgaged his house and sold his Grammie’s wedding ring to get the company started.” Said like that, Jim didn’t feel as bad as he had when he first pulled up outside.

  “Well, Hargrave, how many personnel do we have.”

  “Six,” Hargrave said. Jim’s eyes bugged out. “Yeah, don’t seem like much, does it? But the museum itself is almost completely automated. One supervisor and a programming troubleshooter run it during the day. We have a janitor who keeps the toilets unclogged and mops up kids’ vomit. The rest of us maintain the exhibits and handle restoration of new acquisitions.”

  “You mind showing me around, Hargrave?”

  “Sure, boss.” Jim was struck by how quickly he went from being threatened with a wrench to being “boss.”

  “Just call me Jim, thanks.”

  “As you wish, Jim.”

  Hargrave took him through the remainder of the museum proper – displays of field-portable medical technology, chronologies of how bivouacs had evolved over the centuries, as well as personal infantry weapons. Several theaters were set up showing repeating features on the Cavaliers, starting with that first contract and ending with the Zeta VI campaign.

  Finally, they reached the end of the main exhibit where there was a small automated snack bar flanked by a door showing ‘authorized personnel only’ which opened automatically at Hargrave’s touch. Inside, a hallway led back into the old airport terminal, which now served as space for offices and other facilities. A hallway branched off with a sign proclaiming it, “Collections and Restoration.” Hargrave led Jim into that wing saying, “This is where I do most of my work.”

  The Collections and Restoration area proved far more extensive than it appeared. It had once been the east wing of the concourse, and now it was a cavernous warehouse with dozens of combat vehicles and transports.

  “This is amazing,” Jim said as he saw all the vehicles.

  “This is nothing.” Hargrave laughed. As they passed an area called, “Modern Warfare,” and moved into, “Earth’s Past,” it got even more interesting. Old tanks, Tri-Vs of soldiers in uniforms, cases full of guns, and even more aircraft suspended from the ceiling. A British Sopwith Camel hung next to an American Boeing F39 Orbital Shrike, the last fighter Earth ever produced.

  “How long has the family been collecting this?” Jim wondered.

  “Back before they were mercs,” Hargrave said. “The Cartwright who fought in the American Revolution had a small museum in Virginia. That grew over the centuries until the Cavaliers were formed, at which point the trust was created. All through history, your family has grabbed bits and pieces.”

  Jim stopped where a massive Tri-V was running a panorama of warships, going from wooden-hulled man-of-wars to WWII battleships, and on to the stealth frigates and submersible carriers of the mid-twenty-first century. Just past that display was an incredibly massive gun turret with three barrels big enough to crawl into. A sign proclaimed them as being, “From the Battleship USS Missouri, BB-63. On permanent loan from the defaulted Smithsonian Museum.” There were many other guns, too, collected from ships of all kinds.

  “Hard to believe the family saved all this history.”

  “This? This is still nothing,” Hargrave chuckled. They’d reached a stretch of windows that had been part of the original concourse when it was built. He pulled Jim to a window and pointed at a series of hangars more than a mile away. “Those hangars are all full of preserved history. Over there we have the old Southwest Airlines maintenance buildings.” Jim could just make out the winged heart logo in faded paint. “We have ten of the old KX9 Phoenix drop ships. When the Cavaliers switched over to the Overlord, they sold all but ten of the Phoenix for scrap or to smaller merc companies. But that was twenty years ago. I don’t know that anyone is still using them. We planned to put one on display here, eventually.”

  Jim scratched his chins. “But why keep ten if only one is going to be displayed?” he asked.

  Hargrave shrugged and grinned. “I guess curators are kinda hoarders too. They played around with the idea of a living exhibit someday. Take a flight in a real dropship, or something like that.”

  “They still air-worthy?”

  “Oh, more or less,” Hargrave said. Now that he was getting used to Jim, he was becoming steadily more congenial. “They need maintenance, but they all dropped here from orbit before going into storage.” Jim nodded and thought he’d want to inspect them soon.

  “Are all those hangars full of that kind of stuff, too?” Jim asked and pointed to more of the huge buildings south of the ones Hargrave had indicated, and closer to the control tower. “What about those?”

  “In there? Oh, shuttles owned by the trust, planes, and a few thousand other unprocessed articles of merc history.”

  “Wow,” Jim said simply. “Anything really cool?”

  “Depends on what you consider cool, son. There’s some experimental stuff, some that is just historic, and others that are kind of dumb in my opinion. The trust governor picks up whatever he thinks is interesting.”

  “And who is that? Must be a pretty interesting person.”

  “I think he is,” Hargrave said, “since that person is me.” Jim regarded him with a growing feeling of respect. There was a lot more to this crazy old grease monkey than he’d originally let on.

  “What about those living quarters you mentioned?”

  “Oh, right,” Hargrave said and turned out of the restorations shops and down a hall. Jim had a mental map growing of the airport’s previous layout and as they descended some stairs and went down antiquated hallways, he knew they were passing under the main runways. “You can get there from the access road behind the airport too,” Hargrave said. “It’s all industrial buildings there – robotic factories, warehouses, some abandoned old-tech industry. Don’t go for a walk without a gun though. It’s also gang territory.”

  “The Startown security doesn’t patrol it?”

  “Not really. It’s rare that people venture out that way anymore. A few guards have been jumped and messed up, so they just avoid the area. Our perimeter defenses are
top notch, however. This place was built back before we were a backup field for the starport, way before the city of Pearland was leveled and turned into the landing and operations center of the starport. We’re technically still on the list of emergency alternate landing sites, but we haven’t been used for that purpose in twenty years or more. The landing system is fully automated and tied in to the starport’s main flight and approach control anyway. You ever want to jet up to orbit, we can get approval for that in a matter of minutes.”

  “Why would I want to go to space? Just to look around?”

  “Well, if you wanted to go to another star system or something, of course.”

  “Hargrave, booking transition is expensive as shit.” The old man nodded as they kept walking.

  “Sure, but why pay someone else when you have your own ship?”

  “Wait, what?” Jim said, stopping and staring in surprise. “The Bucephalus was sold in the bankruptcy! The Hussars took it.”

  “Sure, but the trust has three more ships, all from the Cavaliers’ past history.” He ticked off on his fingers. “There’s the Prince Rupert, the first starship the Cavaliers owned. That’s an old KT-Class frigate. Retrofitted for human use, it sucked, but it was the first ship the company bought after it began to succeed. The Traveler, the ship right before we got the Bucephalus. Enterprise-class cruiser. Your grandfather had it commissioned from the Martian Shipyards based on our planet’s own cruisers. Nice ship. It’s the one I served on. The Cavaliers tried to sell her several times, but none of the other companies bit. Your old man considered converting it to a yacht, or a bulk hauler, but the costs were too high, so he transferred it to the trust about a year before he died. And finally there’s the Pale Rider.”

  “The family yacht?” Jim said, surprised this time. “Damn, I was wondering what had happened to it during the will’s execution. When it didn’t turn up in the list of assets I thought maybe my mother had stolen it or sold it off – no idea. Either way, I just kept my mouth shut.”

  “Well, you aren’t far off. Your mother did try to grab it. But as soon as she did, the trust’s historic clause went into effect. Every Cartwright controlling director has a line written into their will. Should certain assets of the family come into peril, they are immediately and irrevocably transferred to the trust in exchange for a compensation of one credit. There’s a lot more legal mumbo-jumbo, but all well-documented and iron-clad. Your ancestors spent a lot of credits getting that written up. Supposedly, the other Four Horsemen all did the same thing. Like I said, young man, the Cavaliers are down, but not out.” Hargrave gave a wink and resumed walking. Jim followed.

  “Do the judges and lawyers know about it?”

  “Some of it, but probably not all. Lawyers like money. They try to play hardball with one of us, the other Horsemen will make life difficult for them. All four of us have fallen on hard times at one time or another, and all survived. This is just the first time it’s been us. But we backed them up when it happened to them, so now they’ll be there for us. Jim, you have to know that, without the mercs, Earth would be too poor to afford a pot to piss in.”

  “Yeah,” Jim said, “we learned that in school.”

  “So you really think we, the mercs, would let the lawyers kill us that easily?”

  “Sure seemed that way during the bankruptcy.”

  “I can see that,” Hargrave said. “But it was just a chance to wet their beaks. Keep score, son. You might well have your chance to turn the tables someday. As for the rest of the mercs – trust me, they have our backs.”

  They finally came to the end of the seemingly endless corridor. Along the way, they’d passed two robots doing maintenance on lighting and electrical conduits. At the end was a doorway with another of those remote identification devices. Hargrave stopped short and took out a slate. He typed on it and waved it at the door.

  “New identification,” a computer voice spoke. Hargrave looked at Jim and gestured with his head to the door.

  “Oh,” Jim said, “Jim Cartwright.”

  “Identified Jim Cartwright, full access to residential quarters.” The door slid open.

  “Where are we?” Jim asked as they entered a small antechamber. On one side was an exit to more tunnels, and on the other was a manual doorway where stairs could be seen through a window. They stopped in front of an old-style elevator.

  “You’ll see,” Hargrave said and thumbed the control on the elevator. It opened instantly to reveal a plain elevator car. There were only three buttons: B, 1, and 2. Hargrave pressed 2, the doors closed, and they began to ascend. The back wall of the elevator was glass, and Jim turned to watch concrete slide by for several seconds. Then it gave way to metal walls, and a moment after that, bright afternoon Houston sunlight briefly blinded him. While his eyes adjusted, they continued moving swiftly upwards. He looked further past the windows going by and spotted the museum proper and what had once been the terminal buildings. Then he realized where he was.

  “The control tower,” he said. Hargrave nodded. A second later the elevator slowed and plunged into confinement again, then stopped with a ding that announced their arrival at the top.

  “Welcome home,” Hargrave said as the doors opened.

  The top of the airport’s old control tower sat ten stories above the tarmac. Situated above a hangar, opposite the main terminal, the top was three stories of glass-walled rooms totaling just over 3,500 square feet. It had all been converted into a residence with three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a small gym with a countercurrent exercise pool and sauna. The kitchen, gym, and dining room were on the main floor, one level below the elevator’s exit. The floor where the elevator let out held a small foyer, a massive living room, two bedrooms, laundry, and some storage. The top floor, the biggest, held a bedroom which was more like a studio apartment as it not only had a small kitchen, but a huge bathroom with a Jacuzzi tub and dual shower heads. By the time the tour was over, Jim’s mouth hurt from smiling. The top floor – the studio – also had an all all-around balcony accessible on all four sides by sliding glass doors. All the glass was transmorphic so the walls could be made transparent, translucent, or be utilized as displays by accessing the controller through an authorized slate. A similar interface allowed him to control the whole building.

  “Roof’s a landing pad too,” Hargrave added, and showed him how to access it via a ladder that ran all the way from the basement via a dizzying climb of more than 200 feet to the roof. “Your dad looked at extending the elevator up there, but the landing pad is barely big enough for a four-person hopper as it is, so nothing was ever done. Most of the time, if you want to go anywhere, just go down to the ground floor and take off from the tarmac.”

  “This is incredible,” Jim said, standing in the sunken living room and looking out the huge bay window overlooking the rest of the airport, and the distant view of starships in their launch cradles. “And it’s all paid for?”

  “The facility has a 999-year lease for one credit a year. We have to pay for maintenance and upkeep, including keeping the port operational, but the main trust is self-funded. Even if interest rates went to shit, we’d have enough for about 250 years.” Hargrave chuckled and told Jim what the current balance was, leaving the younger man agog, at which point the older man laughed even harder. “Your family has dumped a lot of money into this over the last century, all tax deductible. It’s one hell of an insurance policy.”

  “So now I need to put the Cavaliers back together,” Jim said, and suddenly didn’t feel quite so elated anymore.

  “If you want to,” Hargrave said.

  “It’s what they wanted.”

  “It is,” Hargrave agreed, “but you aren’t a robot. What do you want?” Jim thought for a bit then shrugged.

  “I guess I’m not sure. This is a lot to take in.” Hargrave reached over and gently patted Jim on the shoulder.

  “Settle in here, take your time. But think on it. The trust will support you here indefinitely.” H
e reached into his coveralls and pulled out a UAAC – Universal Account Access Card – phonetically referred to as a “Yack.” Jim took it, noting that his name was already on it, and when he accessed his accounts through his pinlink, there it was. The old man was heading for the elevator.

  “Hargrave?” He glanced back. “You were expecting me all along, weren’t you?” The man just shrugged, but the twinkle in his eyes was unmistakable. “You scared the shit out of me with that wrench.”

  “A scare is good for you, from time to time.” He called the elevator and stepped in, speaking as the doors closed. “And who do you think sent that midget lawyer? Good touch, don’t you think?”

  The elevator door closed, and Jim shook his head in amusement. He went to the third floor suite and looked around. The view was stupendous. Just then the ground shook slightly and in the distance a huge starship began to claw its way toward orbit. He reached into a pocket and pulled something out – a stuffed toy. As fate would have it, this one was his favorite. Jim chuckled as he took it over and sat it on the windowsill facing the starport. The bright blue body and wings with multicolored mane and matching tail belied the ferocity of the little equine. Rainbow Dash didn’t take shit from anyone.

  “What do you think?” he asked it. Of course, the toy had no reply. He chuckled again, as if it had responded. “Okay, let’s see what fate brings. Shall we?” The sunlight caught the toy’s ancient plastic eyes just right, and they seemed to sparkle in anticipation.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 7

  The planet Slost was a nowhere assignment. Working for the Wathayat was a way to make your fortune, though it often meant boring, long-term assignments handling trades or moving freight. As a trading concern, it was what they did. And Slost, while an important part of the Wathayat’s operation, was not generally considered a desirable working station by anyone who ended up there. Afasha could not have agreed more.