Cauldron of Ghosts

by David Weber

  It’d be pretty hard for him to do so, of course. Given that at that very moment he was playing solitaire on his own console.

  * * *

  While Bordás found her bookmark and resumed reading, other members of Balcescu Station’s personnel were busier. In Station Flight Control, Csilla Ferenc was discussing Prince Sundjata’s projected outbound vector with Tabitha Crowley, her astrogator, while Béla Harsányi monitored the newly arrived incoming freighter and András Kocsis oversaw Luigi Pirandello’s final preparations for getting underway.

  They weren’t all that busy, though. For three controllers to oversee the same number of ships was an easy workload, especially since the incoming ship was still eleven light-minutes out. For that matter, even Prince Sundjata wouldn’t be getting underway for over three hours yet, so there wasn’t that much rush.

  * * *

  Zachariah McBryde wasn’t sorry to be leaving Balcescu Station, even if the ship on which he found himself was an antiquated slave trader instead of the luxury liner upon which he’d made the first leg of his voyage from Mesa. Or even the rather less prepossessing general utility hauler which had delivered him to Balcescu in the first place. As depressing as he found the slave ship Prince Sundjata, it had at least the virtue that the slaves were kept in their quarters so he didn’t have to see them.

  Balcescu Station had been an active depot, but not one oriented toward visitors. To make things worse, their Gaul keepers had insisted that Zachariah and the other “special passengers” had to remain at all times in the restricted area of the station—restricted being a euphemism for that portion devoted to the slave trade. The only thing to do, for the three days he and his companions had spent there while waiting for their further transport, was to sit at a none-too-sturdy little table in a “bistro” with delusions of grandeur and drink coffee whose claims to being “gourmet” were even more delusional.

  And watch, as slaves were moved through the facility, either being shipped onto or from slave traders or being reassigned to new quarters. It was one thing to know in the abstract about the critical role genetic slavery played in the Alignment’s long-term plans. It was another to watch the concrete results parading back and forth in front of you. Try as one might, it was impossible for anyone with any imagination or empathy at all not to see those wretched creatures as one’s own kin. A fair distance removed, perhaps, but still kin.

  Coming on top of his depression at being separated from his entire family, the time he’d spent in Balcescu had left Zachariah in a very dark place. He was glad to be leaving.

  His only real regret was that Lisa Charteris was being shipped out on a different vessel, the Luigi Pirandello, scheduled to leave the station soon after Prince Sundjata. She was the last personal contact he had with his previous life. The one other project director he’d known slightly, Joseph van Vleet, would be leaving with her.

  That left him only the company of Stefka Juarez and Gail Weiss, both of whom he knew by name only. Juarez been the director of a project far removed from Zachariah’s concerns—he didn’t even precisely know what her field was; something to do with nanotech, he thought—and he’d met Gail Weiss for the first time when Marinescu had assembled the five of them as part of Houdini. He had no idea at all what her work had been.

  The two women had to share a cabin. Thankfully, Zachariah had one to himself. He been told that the voyage to the next destination, whose identity had not been revealed, would take several weeks. He figured on spending most of that time catching up on research papers and finishing a couple of long postponed projects of personal literary advancement. He hadn’t read Tolstoy’s War and Peace since he was a university student, and he’d never been able to do more than put a small dent in Natchaya Suramongkol’s eleven-volume magnum opus The Annals of Ayutthaya.

  The one other advantage to Prince Sundjata was that the cabins were so tiny he no longer had to share his accommodations with his Gaul keeper, A. Zhilov.

  No, two advantages. When their party of five reached Balcescu Station, three of the five Gauls who’d accompanied them had returned the next day to Mesa. From this point on, apparently, the people overseeing the Houdini evacuation had decided that only one Gaul keeper per ship was enough. So, S. Arpino would be going with Lisa and van Vleet on the Luigi Pirandello, while Zhilov would be hovering around Zachariah and the two women. With three of them to hover over, hopefully Zachariah would be spared the Gaul’s dour company at least most of the time.

  He still didn’t know what the “A” stood for. Being honest, he didn’t care either. Zachariah had found the Gauls to be as entertaining and convivial as so many toadstools.

  “Leaving Balcescu Station in ten minutes.” That terse announcement came over the cabin’s com, and he recognized the ship’s captain’s voice. He wasn’t quite sure of the woman’s name—Bogdanov? Bogunov?—because he’d only heard it once. But she had a distinctive, gravelly voice.

  To Zachariah’s surprise, that announcement was followed by: “If any of the passengers want to join us on the command deck, feel free to do so. Just stay out of our way.”

  It took him no more than five seconds to decide that anything was better than staying in this claustrophobic small cabin. At least on the command deck he’d be able to see something. Probably not a lot, given the injunction to keep from getting underfoot, but at least there’d be displays. Prince Sundjata was a working vessel—a very working vessel—not a liner or a cruise ship. There weren’t going to be any observation decks or viewports. Which was fair enough, he supposed, if somewhat grumpily. After all, viewports really weren’t all that useful in space travel.

  * * *

  “Looks like we may lose at least one fish.” Commander Loren Damewood was monitoring Hali Sowle’s drone sensor platforms. The freighter had made turnover and begun decelerating towards Balcescu Station at its same steady hundred and seventy-six gravities eighteen minutes ago. She was still over eighty-two million kilometers out, her velocity up to 16,604 KPS, but it would be close to two more hours before she was in any position to . . . inconvenience the station’s inhabitants. Now he looked up from his displays with a grimace.

  “Bogey Two’s just brought her impellers up and gotten underway. She’s headed almost directly away from us, too. Looks like she’s pulling around a hundred seventy gravities, so she’s a little slower than we are, but she’s going to have an awful big head start. If any of the others pull out in the next hour or so, were going to lose at least one of them for sure. Unless we send both frigates after them, anyway.”

  Major Anichka Sydorenko glanced at her Havenite advisor, Lieutenant Commander Loriane Lansiquot. “I don’t like the thought of losing one of them, either,” she said. “But I think I like the thought of not keeping Geronimo close enough to cover Hali Sowle and the station if any surprises turned up even less.”

  Lansiquot nodded ever so slightly in approval.

  Damewood frowned. “Are you sure?”

  Sydorenko managed not to glare at him. Just before General Palane left for Manticore, she’d picked Sydorenko as the best prospect for quick advancement into the Royal Torch Navy’s command ranks. The posting had been gratifying, of course, but it also meant Anichka had to contend with what seemed like a small host of naval advisors. It wasn’t just Manticorans and Havenites, either. The BSC had detached Damewood for this mission to oversee the sensor platforms since they were of Beowulfan design and manufacture.

  She’d kept her army rank because the debate was still raging as to whether Torch should have a unitary military or divide into separate services. So far, the unitary position had held firm, because it had Palane’s backing. But now that she was absent and apparently would be for quite some time, those favoring a division were gaining ground. Secretary of War Jeremy X was wavering, apparently.

  Sydorenko agreed with Palane on the merits of the issue, but at the moment she’d have preferred a naval rank for personal reasons. Maybe the blasted foreign snots would be less patronizi
ng if they didn’t think they were dealing with an army grunt as well as a novice.

  Then again, maybe she was just being overly sensitive. Even if most people would’ve considered the phrase “overly sensitive Scrag” a galaxy-class oxymoron.

  Sydorenko decided to stick with Lansiquot’s advice. Loriane was a tac officer by training. Push come to shove, Damewood was just a tech geek.

  “We’ll stick with the plan,” she said. “The primary mission’s taking out the station, and just by the way keeping anybody with an onboard armament from taking out our ride home in the process. If a single ship gets away while we’re doing that, so be it. Anyway,” she showed her teeth for a moment, “it really won’t hurt for Mesa’s other scum suckers to know we’re serious. In fact, I sort of like the thought of letting as many of them as possible sweat while they wonder if we’re coming for them next.”

  * * *

  It took Zachariah a while to find his way to the command deck. He had to get directions from crew members on four separate occasions. The process was aggravating enough that he’d decided to complain to the captain when he reached the command deck. Would it be too much to ask them to place a few simple directional plaques at passage junctions?

  Eventually, though, he realized there was a method to the madness. Rebellions aboard slave trading ships weren’t unheard of, and sometimes the slaves even managed to circumvent the spacing mechanisms that usually kept them cowed. Not often, of course. Still, there was no reason to give a hand to even such a remote possibility by providing the slaves with signs telling them where to go to kill the crew and capture the ship.

  By the time he came onto the command deck, he saw that his two remaining companions had arrived before him. Juarez and Weiss were standing close to one of the bulkheads, watching the proceedings with considerable interest.

  A. Zhilov had arrived also, unfortunately. But by now, Zachariah was accustomed to that particular ghost at the banquet. He went over to stand beside them.

  Weiss and Juarez had apparently come to the same conclusion as he had about the scarcity of viewports, because their attention was fixed on the maneuvering plot near the center of the bridge. He doubted they could make much sense of it—he certainly couldn’t—but the icons and moving lights were a lot more interesting than the data being displayed on any of the control panels.

  “Wedge is nominal, Captain,” said one of the crew. The woman was doing something at her control panel, but Zachariah couldn’t tell what it was because her back was turned toward him.

  “Gravitic Two is acting up again,” said the crewman sitting just to her left. His console was angled sixty degrees away, though, so Zachariah could see his control board. Most of that was given over at the moment to gravitics data, he thought, but one of the panels was a radar display. “We really need to get that entire array replaced, or at least get it a full overhaul, Ma’am.”

  “Tell it to management, Davenport,” the captain replied with a snort. “I’ve been telling them about it long enough. Maybe you’ll have more luck!”

  Zachariah glanced around the command deck. In addition to the captain, the helmswoman at her station, and the two crewmembers he’d already seen, there were two more. One was obviously the com officer, but the other was working at a console in the far corner. He had rather strikingly colored hair—genuinely red, not the brick hues that normally came with the term “redhead.” Zachariah didn’t think it was artificially tinted, either.

  At the distance, Zachariah couldn’t really tell what the man’s station was. Probably something to do with the ship’s internal functions. Atmosphere, temperature, humidity, gravity, artificial light quality—some UV, but not too much—liquid water supply, that sort of thing. He thought that post was called environmental officer.

  Whatever that one control panel might be, radar or gravitics or whatever else, it was clearly monitoring Prince Sundjata’s progress as it accelerated away from Balcescu Station. Zachariah looked back and forth between that panel and the maneuvering plot until he was sure he knew which symbols in the plot indicated the ship and which the station. The Prince Sundjata was the green sphere with the circumpolar yellow band and Balcescu Station was represented by a bright lavender octahedron. He presumed that the green sphere with the equatorial orange band still resting alongside the station was the Luigi Pirandello.

  “Clearing Balcescu Station’s orbital space, Captain,” the first crewwoman—the astrogator, perhaps—announced. “We have onboard control.”

  “Put us on profile, then, Tabitha,” Captain Bogunov commanded.

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  Bogunov watched the maneuvering plot for another moment, then turned away and gave the three visitors a smile and nod.

  “And that’s it, folks. We’re off to—”

  Zhilov cleared his throat noisily. The captain gave him a sour glance.

  “To wherever we are going,” she finished.

  “Security must be maintained,” Juarez said. There was more than a trace of sarcasm in her tone, and she waved a finger around, indicating the bulkheads. “The gremlins who infest the reaches of interstellar space might be listening.”

  Zhilov glowered at her, but said nothing.

  * * *

  “Definitely going to lose Bogey Two,” Loren Damewood observed to no one in particular. Major Sydorenko gave him a somewhat more pointed glare—not that any of her glares could be considered blunt objects—and he shrugged. “Just saying,” he said.

  “If we do, we do,” she said rather more testily than she’d actually intended to. “First the station, then making sure we don’t lose our ride home again—those are the first two priorities. Everything else is a piss poor third. And speaking of priorities,” she added quite unnecessarily, “I want those frigates ready to launch at a moment’s notice.”

  “Twitchy, are we?” Colonel Donald Toussaint observed. He was all but lounging on a nearby console seat and had a smug smile on his face. The smile of a brass hat along for the ride because this was the RTN’s first real engagement and he wanted a ringside seat.

  Advisers, counselors, consultants—a damn commissar, even. All Anichka needed to put her completely on edge was—

  “Some coffee, Ma’am?”

  She turned her head to see her orderly Jeff Gomez holding out a cup for her. The liquid in it looked as black and thick as lava.

  “Strong,” he added, smiling. “Just the way you like it.”

  She managed—barely—not to snarl at him. But she declined the coffee.

  Chapter 43

  “All right, we’re close enough,” Ganny said. “So go charge, or whatever you call it. And the frigates can tally ho.”

  She’d had the com on, so her statements were heard throughout the ship. Waiting in the assault shuttles in the bays which had once housed humble cargo shuttles—but the Hali Sowle’s innocence was far behind her—some of the Marines frowned. Ganny’s pronouncement was decidedly un-military, bordered on the disrespectful, and made light of an upcoming deed of heroism and martial glory.

  Most of them smiled, though, and a few laughed out loud. By now, they were accustomed to Ganny.

  For her part, Lieutenant Colonel Kabweza maintained a straight face, as befitted her dignity as the commander of the operation. She did chuckle about it later, though.

  On the command deck, Major Sydorenko kept a straight face, too, even though Ganny had just grossly violated several millennia of protocol. She was the lawful commander of Hali Sowle, and as such still the traditional “Mistress after God,” but she certainly wasn’t the military commander of the expedition. She could give whatever orders she liked aboard her own ship, and Sydorenko’s ignorance of how to run a starship was great enough that she wouldn’t have attempted to overrule Ganny there even if she’d had the authority to do so. But the major was supposed to issue any and all military orders. Orders which included niggling little things like when to launch the attack.

  Fortunately for Ganny—or maybe th
e other way around, given the old woman’s pugnacious nature—Sydorenko was amused, not offended. Due to her own lineage, she wasn’t much given to genuflecting at the altar of protocol. Scrags might have been “super” soldiers in general, but that did not run to blind obedience. In fact, they’d been notoriously insubordinate. There were drawbacks to telling someone they were a superior breed. That being so, why should they tamely accept the orders of someone who was clearly their inferior?

  Besides, despite the casual nature of her comment, Ganny was a stone cold professional, and “we’re close enough” translated to “we’ve reached the ops plan’s carefully calculated and specified range.” And a very tense time they’d had of it over the last couple of hours. They’d been in-system for just over five hours; Hali Sowle’s velocity relative to Balcescu Station was down to a mere 4,280 KPS; and the range was barely eight million kilometers. Most of them had been privately nervous that something would go wrong at the last minute, and that nervousness probably helped explain those smiles and chuckles.

  Still . . .

  Colonel Toussaint cleared his throat. “I believe Anichka’s supposed to give that order, Ganny.”

  Ganny waved her hand. “Fine, fine. Give it, then.”

  Sadly, military propriety took another hit.

  “You heard the Old Lady,” Sydorenko’s voice came over every listening com. “Let us now do unto others as they have wet dreams of doing unto us.”

  * * *

  It was sadly undramatic in many ways.

  Hali Sowle was fitted with a pair of shuttle bays, one at each end of her main hull. Back in the carefree days when she’d been an innocent smuggler, spreading her wares across the galaxy with a fine disregard for customs duties and import fees, each of those bays had housed three standard heavy lift cargo shuttles. She still had one cargo shuttle, but that was mainly for show. Or, more precisely, to maintain her innocent façade by chauffeuring members of her crew and/or cargo items to and from orbital freight platforms or planetary facilities. It would never do to use her other small craft for that sort of operation. No one was likely to mistake a Manticoran Mk 19 Condor Owl heavy assault shuttle for an item on a civilian freighter’s normal equipment list.