by Mel Keegan
Murmurs raced around the auditorium. “Your own team?” Morrison echoed.
Now Vidal stood and stepped forward to the podium. “We know most of you are reluctant to fire on our own ships. You don’t want the duty, the responsibility or the consequences.” He was frowning at the XO. “Stand down your Tactical people, Pat. A team will be coming aboard to relieve you. Myself, Roark Hubler, Asako Rodman.”
“Rodman?” Pat Haugen echoed. “I don’t know the name.”
“I do.” Alec Tarrant’s voice was gruff. “A Freespacer. One of the heroes from the Battle of Ulrand. She flies for General Shapiro, and she’s one of the best tacticians in the business.”
Haugen’s hands spread wide in acceptance. “On your authority, then. And yes, my staff will be delighted to give you Tactical. Major … Colonel Vidal, I assume you’ve prepared a navtank data load?”
“It’s being done at this moment,” he told her.
No need to say the Wastrel was compiling it, that in the last hour a dozen probes had been fired into the region, each no larger than a fuel drum and too small to attract the attention of Fleet sensors, transmitting on frequencies too high, using Resalq encryption algorithms which human comm systems found impenetrable.
“So,” Rusch said in an odd tone, and she was frowning directly at Shapiro. “When, General? It’s the last question to be answered.”
His calm was almost surreal. Even Marin envied the façade of composure as Shapiro joined her at the lectern. The lights adjusted for him and he looked from face to face. “First, we take the navtank load, after which our support ship will withdraw from this area. Colonel Vidal’s Tac team will come aboard, and when they are satisfied the battle group is more than adequately accounted for, you may trigger your comm black out and scram the AI.
“As to the timing – Mr. Tarrant has actually returned the Omaru Militia to standby. The Kiev is in no further danger from colonial forces, though your crew can’t be made aware of this. The two officers remaining loyal to the Confederacy will be transferred to our support vessel. Be assured, they’ll be safe and accommodated to the same degree of comfort as I enjoy myself. If you’re in agreement, Colonel Rusch, I’d say … 120 minutes.”
She clicked over her chrono. “And we’re counting. All right, people. Monitor your departments. Any factor changes, any slightest detail shifts, we need to know about it immediately. The schedule is flexible; the success of this initiative is not. Doctor Hernandez, get your patients ready to transport. Feed them any story you like to get their cooperation. Colonel Vidal, place your Tac team on standby. They’re coming here on the Trofeo after Majors Gould and Watanabe have been transferred to our support ship. Doctor Hernandez, I’d rather the prisoners be sedated and shipped under Quarantine conditions to isolate them from any opportunity to take action, should they get an inkling of what’s actually happening.”
Hernandez was already moving. “You want the buggers in cryogen? I can tank ’em, no problem.”
“Colonel Vidal,” Rusch challenged, “can you transport two cryotanks aboard the Trofeo? Forgive me, I’m not terribly familiar with the craft.”
“Give me a moment.” Vidal touched his combug. “Perlman?”
The plane was on standby, and both Perlman and Fargo would be monitoring the Kiev’s general tech loop. Vidal’s call came in on the encrypted band. Marin listened intently as she said, “Yo.”
“You got space in the cargo locker to slide in two cryotanks?” Vidal asked baldly.
“With about a centimetre on each side, if I unload the emergency kit,” she told him tautly. “Who’s been hurt?”
“Prisoner transfer, the easy way. Set it up, Gill. I’ll get back to you.” Vidal clicked off the combug. “Doctor Hernandez, tank the pair of them and give us a hoy for transportation.”
The CMO was short, thickset, with blonde hair liberally shot through with silver, cut in a severe style that might have been chic but did nothing for her. The accent was not merely Borushek, but uptown Sark, Marin thought – the foothills, where the suburb of Carmichael petered out into a rural landscape. How old she was, he could not guess, but she walked with the kind of stiff gait suggesting biocyber joints, which might put her age at around a century – or had she been rebuilt after an accident, even military service?
“Give me fifteen minutes, Colonel,” she said to Rusch as she headed out. “And I’ll crank up the OR … I’ll tell my staff we’re testing systems, but if this thing does turn into a shooting party, at least we’ll be ready.”
“A shooting party?” Travers echoed.
“A short one.” Marin pushed away from the bulkhead where he had been leaning and stepped aside to allow the Kiev’s CMO to pass by. She was coming up the aisle and he dropped his voice. “Confederate loyalists will be outnumbered about two hundred to one on any Fleet ship. There could be a handful of non-commissioned officers, maybe one or two of the junior officers, who’d love to make trouble. Twenty, maybe thirty people on the whole ship. If they try to get in the way someone, somewhere, is going to grab an opportunity for vengeance, even justice. In the end, it’s all the same.”
He was thinking about Sergeant Roy Neville, and Travers must have known it. Marin gave Hernandez a polite nod as she made her way to the door. Vidal was a pace behind her, and as he approached Marin heard him speaking over the comm in terse tones with Hubler and Rodman. They were on standby and Vidal himself was restless, unable to be still now.
“You okay, Mick?” Travers asked quietly.
“You mean, have I had my shots?” Vidal wore a pained look. “I’m fine. Or as fine as I ever get. Bill won’t want to stick anything sharp into me for at last three hours, and by then it’ll all be over.”
The assembly was breaking up, leaving Shapiro, Rusch and Tarrant standing by the lectern. Executive Officer Haugen lingered there for several moments, sharing a handy which Rusch examined closely. But as Marin, Travers and Vidal strode down to the podium Rusch nodded in agreement with Haugen’s work.
“We’re good,” she was saying.
“Alexis, just relax,” Shapiro advised. “If there were issues, we’d know about them by now. Michael?”
“Yes,” Vidal agreed. “Operations is identical on any carrier, Alexis. You know this as well as we do. Roark and Asako and I just spent the last two days in simulations. Nothing’s going to surprise us.”
“Something almost certainly will.” Shapiro sounded amused. “But you’re good enough to contain it when it happens.” He looked up at Travers and Marin. “You can escort Mr. Tarrant back to Trofeo. He should leave along with the cryotanks, and as soon as Hubler and Rodman have joined us, the Wastrel is at liberty to jump right back to Toshiko Szebek.”
The plan was designed to operate like clockwork. Marin took a breath, held it, let it out slowly. Travers glanced down at his chrono for the third time in ten minutes, and the blue eyes were sharp, hard. Here, now, the rank of colonel sat uncomfortably on his shoulders. Inside, he was still a soldier.
And this, Marin thought with deliberate pragmatism, might look and feel entirely civilized, but it was a battlefield, and blood would be shed.
Chapter Five
Super-Carrier Kiev,
Omaru blockade
Two young medical orderlies – white faced, wide eyed, grim – brought the cryogen tanks to the upper hangar level where maintenance and bench testing were performed. Each tank was crisscrossed with the blue and white lines denoting Quarantine restrictions, and they were comprehensively stickerized with red and yellow official labels authorizing transportation and storage of biohazard cargo.
At the private elevator, two decks above the hangar where the Trofeo stood waiting, Travers and Marin signed off for the tanks. A group of pilots and techs clustered four or five meters away and Marin heard the names of Gould and Watanabe. He heard the telltale remarks, Couldn’t happen to a nicer pair of bastards, and With any luck they’ll be in the lab with wires up the kazoo for the next five years. So the hard
line Confederate sympathizers were despised. For their politics, he wondered, or for the insufferable arrogance of people who thought of themselves as homeworlders to whom colonials were contemptible?
It made no matter. As he signed, and Travers countersigned the documentation, he glimpsed two faces under the thick armorglass plates. A man, a woman, both fair skinned, closer to young than not and suspended in the chill of cryogen. Had Hernandez told them they were being shipped out for treatment, and their lives depended on it? In a way, they did. A few meters away from Rusch’s private elevator was a gang of young conscripts who would likely have been delighted to put a bullet or a knife in Gould or Watanabe as soon as the lights went out.
“You guys.” The voice belonged to a man of Travers’s height, middle twenties, with red-blond hair and freckles. He spoke with the accent of Louverne and the unit badges on his fatigues identified him as a crew chief from the Gamma Company flightline. They called themselves the Gamma Hammers; the tattoo on his left cheek was a Thor hammer in flight, in shades of blue and silver. The name on his left breast was Tan, KJ. He cleared his throat and took a half step closer. “You guys are, uh, from Fleet Medical?”
“What makes you say so?” Travers passed back the handy he had just signed. Hernandez’s people withdrew hastily.
“Well –” Tan gestured at the tanks. “It’s Fleet Medical or Deep Sky Quarantine. Isn’t it? They, uh, they’re toxic?”
“They could be … dangerous,” Marin said carefully. “They’re tanked for their own safety as well as yours.” This much was true. “Don’t sweat the details, Sergeant. They’ll be off the Kiev in five minutes and you won’t see them again.”
In the back ranks someone muttered, “Good riddance to homeworlds horseshit.”
The remark made Travers chuckle richly. “They weren’t popular?” He was holding the combug into his ear, like Marin listening to Perlman from the Trofeo. She and Fargo were unloading the lockers of emergency equipment to make space, and Fargo had just apologized for not doing it sooner. The Wastrel had kept them both busy, fleshing out the navtank load with fresh data siphoned from the Kiev’s own systems, using access codes provided by XO Haugen herself. The datastream had to be covert until the AI was scrammed.
“Popular?” Tan barked a bitter laugh. “They were the kind of bastards you’d like to see step on a fragmentation mine with both feet.”
“Well, they’re gone now,” Marin assured him. And then, on a whim, “I gather you’d rather be anywhere else in the universe.”
“Than here?” Tan looked around at his companions, most of whom were from the Gamma Hammers. Three pilots lurked behind the flight crew, surly, brooding, silent. “Well, fuck, like, how can you tell?”
“Given the choice,” Marin mused as they waited for the OK from Perlman and Fargo, “would you go home? Or would you take an opportunity to change sides and chase the Confederacy right out of the Deep Sky? Fight,” he added, “for the freedom of your home.”
The whole group clammed up so fast and so tight, they might have been hit by a stun gas grenade, like an anti-conscription riot in Elstrom or Westminster. He saw mutinous expressions on every face from the lowliest tech in the flight crew to the most senior pilot, but no one was about to say a syllable – not to officers they believed were from Fleet. The wrong word, here, and the price could be flogging and demotion.
Into the rude silence Judith Fargo’s voice whispered into Marin’s ear, “Come on down.”
“On our way,” Travers said quietly, and brought the Arago sled alive under the second of the pair of tanks.
The lift swallowed them with no space to spare, and Marin glared at his own reflection in the mirrored wall opposite. He looked like an officer from Fleet Internal Affairs, he thought: the masklike face, the flawless jacket showing just the faint bulge of a sidearm, the silver-gray combug visible in his left ear, and the utter absence of any visible ID allied to the almost arrogant air of assurance as he stalked around the carrier as if he owned it.
“Don’t take it personally,” Travers said, as if he had read every thought in Marin’s head. “We are on Fleet business. Nine Worlds Commonwealth Fleet, on assignment from Harrison Shapiro’s office. Those kids? They can smell special ops at fifty paces. They don’t know what’s going on, but they sure as hell know something is.”
“Remind me,” Marin said with acid humor, “when we get out of this job, never to set foot on another Fleet ship as long as I live.”
“I’ll remind you,” Travers pledged.
The elevator glided to a stop on silken smooth Aragos, and the icy lower deck air prickled Marin’s skin and sinuses as he thumbed on the sled. The repulsion hummed under the bulk of the cryogen tanks. He had only to guide it as he and Travers stepped out into the silent passageway into which spilled the harsh blue lighting and the tang of ozone from the hangar itself.
The Trofeo was powered up, ready to go. Perlman and Fargo were waiting by the plane – jackets on and zipped, hands stuffed into pockets. The emergency gear was stacked in a corner on top of a pile of tool chests, and the under-deck cargo lockers were empty, hatches off.
They were just big enough for the cryotanks. Marin gave Perlman a grin as he and Travers coaxed the second into place and set the sled to lock itself into position. “You’re lucky – one more centimeter, and they wouldn’t have fit.”
“Nah.” Perlman made scornful noises. “I know these tanks too well. My uncle has one. He uses it to carry perishable produce to market across two continents, in a rattletrap old Marshall SkyVan. I spent my teens humping one of these guys in and out of that damn’ van for him. Blueberries and orchids,” she added lucidly.
“Blueberries and orchids.” Travers touched his combug. “Mick.”
And Vidal: “Right where we ought to be.”
“Be with you in five,” Travers told him. “Have Alec Tarrant ready to leave.”
“Will do.” Vidal clicked off.
The Hammers flight crew had dispersed, leaving the private passage empty, quiet. Marin stepped back into the elevator without a word. Travers thumbed for Deck 2 and glanced at his chrono. Marin did not even have to look. They were at 98 minutes, and counting. In his ear, a sweet chime over the comm invited him to switch up to the security band and, as he did, he heard Richard Vaurien.
“Your navdeck load is complete. No surprises, except we’re seeing ten warships on the blockade, not twelve.”
“Thank the Omaru Squadron for that,” Marin told him. “The Trofeo’s coming back with cargo. Cryogen tanks. Two, in the cargo lockers ... Confederate officers who won’t be causing trouble.”
“Tanks?” Vaurien echoed. “Neat. Hubler and Rodman are waiting.”
“Copy, and standby,” Marin said crisply.
As he spoke the elevator opened, and the first faces he saw belonged to Vidal and Tarrant. Without a word Alec Tarrant stepped in, but Vidal hung back with Shapiro and Rusch. Shapiro looked merely pensive but Rusch was tense. She had never been the soldier, and the astrophysicist was far out of her comfort zone.
“I’d really much rather stay aboard,” Tarrant said, as if it were the end of a heated discussion.
Shapiro was immovable. “I meant what I said, Alec – the danger is minimal, but you’re about to be the President of Omaru. Any risk to you is unacceptable, and no matter what we do, there’ll be … hostile acts.”
“You think ‘hostile acts’ give me a scare after the last three years in Hydralis, under the blockade?” Tarrant scoffed.
Shapiro searched for a chuckle and almost found one. “Then, you were the commander of the resistance forces. In a week they’ll be calling you ‘Mister President.’ You belong as far away from any potential bloodshed as we can get you.” He looked at Travers and Marin. “Go.”
The elevator closed and Tarrant swore softly at his reflection in the mirrored wall. “You know, I think I’d rather be the commander of the Hydralis Militia.” He gave the younger men a grim smile. “Do you ever think
back on the few days you spent with us?”
“I try not to,” Travers said honestly.
“You were badly injured, both of you, I know,” Tarrant allowed. “Like so many of us.”
The silence was electric, and endured until they walked into the chill, windy hangar where the hot bluster of the Trofeo’s engines had taken a few degrees off the cold. There, Tarrant turned back to them, offered his hand, and they shook it.
“If I don’t see you again before your classified expedition leaves, gentlemen … you take with you the hopes of the Deep Sky.”
He was privy to at least a little of the Zunshu data of necessity, though he knew a lot less than Robert Chandra Liang. He might know about Lai’a; Marin was uncertain, and said only,
“If you know any good luck chants, say them for us. This little party on the blockade –? Trust us, Colonel.”
“I do.” Tarrant hesitated for a moment as if he wanted to say so much but could find no words. He stepped away toward the plane and at the boarding ramp he waved, and then was gone.
In Marin’s ear, Perlman’s voice was a husky whisper distorted by savage encryption: “Back in ten minutes, if Hubler and Rodman are ready to leave.”
A siren wailed and spinners cast red and amber light across the hangar, making Marin and Travers retreat to the armordoors. Travers leaned both palms there, watching through the transparency as the Trofeo lifted, turned inside its own length and nosed out. Marin leaned both shoulders on the wall by the door and listened to the Kiev’s own loop instead.
The ship’s business was absolutely routine. The only particle of excitement would be a rumor beginning to circulate right now, that the two least-respected officers had been taken off under a cloud of secrecy, locked into Quarantine caskets. Hernandez’s department would soon be fielding scores of calls from people with whom Gould and Watanabe had worked: what was the contagion, was it airborne, was it treatable, who should come in for shots, and how soon?
