“I’m restringing my guitar.”
“Alone?”
Theo only glared at him.
Martinez shook his head. “Still singing the Down Home Divorced Guy Blues? Amigo, you gotta change your tune.”
“I like my life just the way it is.”
“When’s the last time you got laid?”
“If you focus that fine investigative mind of yours on our dead friend’s problems, and not mine, we just might get out of here by midnight.”
“That long ago, eh?”
“I’m going to go see what I can find in the bedroom,” he said, ignoring Martinez’s leering grin at his choice of destination. “You take the kitchen.”
Martinez’s good-natured snort of laughter sounded behind him as he left.
“Nice work, Trenat.” Jorie laid both hands on the vehicle’s round plastic guidance wheel and, looking over her shoulder, offered the young ensign an appreciative smile along with her words. He had done very nice work locating a well-concealed storage area of land vehicles and using a combination of mechanical and technical skills to override a series of locks and security devices. All in under ten minutes. Hopefully, determining Danjay’s status and returning him and his critical T-MOD unit to the ship would go as smoothly.
Trenat all but beamed at her from the rear seat, most of his earlier unease gone. “This power pack,” he said, handing her a thin box slightly smaller than her hand, “will create an ignition sequence and activate the engine.”
She followed his instructions as to placement, tabbed on the power. The vehicle vibrated to life, a grumbling noise sounding from its front. “No aft propulsion?”
“No sir.”
No antigravs, either. Well, damn. When in Vekris, one must do as the Vekrisians do. She slipped off her headset, draping it around her neck, and studied the control panel with its round numbered gauges. Other gauges had symbols like those she saw on signs as they’d walked the short distance to A-1 Rental Cars. Danjay’s reports noted that the local language was similar to Vekran, which Jorie spoke along with three other galactic tongues. The two languages shared a similar alphabet—though not completely—which explained why many of the signs she saw didn’t made sense.
Herryck, rummaging through the vehicle’s small storage compartment on the control panel, produced a short paperbound book. “Aw-nortz Min-o-al,” she read in the tight glow of her wristbeam on her technosleeve.
Jorie leaned toward her. Herryck’s Vekran was, at best, rudimentary. “Ow-ner’s Min-u-al,” she corrected. She took the book, tapped on her wristbeam, and scanned the first few pages. It would be too much to ask, she supposed, that the entire universe be civilized enough—and considerate enough—to speak Alarsh. “Operating instructions for the vehicle’s pilot.” As the engine continued to chug quietly, she found a page depicting the gauges and read in silence for a few moments. “Okay, I think I have the basics.” She tapped off her wristbeam, then caught Trenat’s smile in the rectangular mirror over her head. “Never met a ship I couldn’t fly, Ensign. That’s what six years in the marines will teach you.”
The vehicle’s control stick was between the two front seats. She depressed the small buttons, eased it until it clicked once.
The vehicle lurched backward, crashing into the one parked behind it.
“Damn!” She shoved the stick forward and only missed a head-on impact with another parked vehicle because she grabbed the wheel and yanked it to the left.
Herryck bounced against the door. “Sir!”
“I got it, I got it. It’s okay.” Damn, damn. Give her a nice antigrav hopper any day.
Her feet played with the two pedals, the vehicle seesawing as it jerked toward the open gate.
“I think,” Herryck said, bracing herself with her right hand against the front control panel, “those are some kind of throttle and braking system. Sir.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant. I know that. I’m just trying to determine their sensitivity ranges.”
“Of course, sir.” Herryck’s head jerked back and forth, but whether she was nodding or reacting to the vehicle’s movement, Jorie didn’t know. “Good idea.”
By the time they exited onto the street, Jorie felt she had the nil-tech land vehicle under control. “Which direction?”
“We need to take a heading of two-four-oh-point-eight, sir.” Herryck glanced from her scanner over at the gauges in front of Jorie, none of which functioned as guidance or directional. “Oh.” She pulled her palm off the control panel and pointed out the window. “That way.”
They went that way, this way, then that way again. Jorie noticed that Trenat had found some kind of safety webbing and flattened himself against the cushions of the rear seat.
“What do you think those colored lights on their structures mean?” Herryck asked as Jorie was forced to swerve, for the fifth time, to avoid impact with another vehicle whose driver was obviously not adept at the proper usage of airspace.
Jorie shrugged. “A religious custom. Wain mentioned that locals hang colored lights on their residences, even the foliage this time of the year. Nil-techs can be very supersti—hey!” A dark land vehicle appeared on her right, seemingly out of nowhere. Jorie pushed her foot down on the throttle, barely escaping being rammed broadside. There was a loud screeching noise, then the discordant blare of a horn. A pair of oncoming vehicles added their horns to the noise as she sped by them.
“Another religious custom,” she told Herryck, who sank down in her seat and planted her boots against the front console. “Their vehicles play music as they pass. And they’re blessing us.”
“Blessing us?”
Jorie nodded as she negotiated her vehicle between two others that seemed to want to travel at an unreasonably slow rate of speed. “They put one hand out the window, middle finger pointing upward. Wain’s reports stated many natives worship a god they believe lives in the sky. So I think that raised finger is a gesture of blessing.”
“How kind of them. We need to go that way again, sir.”
“I’m coming up to an intersection now. How much farther?”
“We should be within walking distance in a few minutes.”
“Praise be,” Trenat croaked from the rear seat.
Jorie snickered softly. “You’d never survive in the marines, Ensign.”
Martinez let out a low whistle as Theo led him and Liza into the bedroom. “Damn. Looks like some kind of minicomputer you’d find in a sci-fi flick. It was behind that dresser?”
“The dresser’s a fake.” Theo shoved the chest-high piece of furniture farther away from the wall. Liza moved in front of him, digital camera whirring. “Drawer fronts are glued on. Inside’s hollow.”
“Looks like Mr. Wayne didn’t want just anyone to find this,” Liza said, adjusting the camera’s telephoto, zooming in on the object on the floor. The blinking unit resembled an overlarge black metallic mouse pad with a thin lime-green monitor.
“Maybe it’s a new kind of laptop?” Martinez asked.
“Not sure,” Theo answered honestly. “The screen’s a strange color. And the keyboard”—if that’s what that long, dark area was—“doesn’t have keys.”
“Touch pad system?” Liza ventured.
Theo shook his head. “Maybe.” He knelt in front of the greenish-yellow screen, pointed to the symbols splattered across it. “That’s not ASCII and it’s not HTML. But it looks somewhat like both.”
Martinez squinted. “Hey, it’s all Greek to me.” He smacked Theo playfully on his shoulder. “Get it, Petrakos? Greek.”
“It’s not Greek. You know damn well I can speak—”
“I know, I know. I just thought it was a good line.”
“Suzanne can’t possibly love you for your personality.”
Martinez arched one eyebrow. “Actually, I’ll tell you what my little mamacita loves about me.”
“Spare me, amigo.” Theo shoved himself to his feet as Liza headed back to the living room to find a tech to dust
the unit for prints. “I put a call in to the techno squad. One of their geeks should be here in about,” he glanced at his watch, “thirty minutes to pick this up. Maybe there are e-mails or documents, an Internet trail. Something that will tell us what happened to Mr. Wayne out there.” Noises behind him made him turn toward the living room. The body snatchers had arrived with gurney and body bag.
“Come on.” He tapped Martinez on the arm. “Let’s go see what the ME can tell us.”
GAMES OF COMMAND
A Bantam Spectra Book / March 2007
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2002, 2007 by Linnea Sinclair Bernadino.
The characters and some scenes in this novel were originally part of Command Performance (NovelBooks, Inc., 2002) and several short stories that were part of the Alliance Command series.
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Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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eISBN: 978-0-553-90345-4
www.bantamdell.com
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