He’d have to wait until he got control of his voice before he ordered that search.
“God, General, who could have done this?” a young sergeant asked.
Trouble paused to see if God would answer. He certainly had none.
It was an hour before the searchers turned up a couple of kids. They’d been messing around in what passed for woods on this planet. They saw it all.
Of the four, only one was in any shape to share what they’d seen.
“They were big,” she stammered.
“Big. Four eyes. Four of them,” he said, using four fingers to point at his own pair.
“And a beak,” another boy managed to add.
“Four legs. Four arms,” the other one went on. “Some had things like guns. Most had these long sharp metal things. They’d go right . . .” and the rest was lost to a shriek of mourning.
Trouble ordered troops of the second wave to begin collecting the bodies.
“General Longknife, I think most of these folks were Buddhist,” Trouble said, calling up to the ship. “I got lots of different stuff among my Savannah troops, but no Buddhists. There’s a whole lot of people down here needing to be buried and I don’t know exactly how to do it.”
“We’ll check among the cruisers,” Ray Longknife answered. “There’s bound to be some among their crews. Wardhaven has a thriving Buddhist community. At least I see them in the streets every lunar New Year.”
“I see lots of Irish in the street on St. Patrick’s Day. More in the pubs. I don’t know what many of them are the other 364 days of the year,” Trouble said, but left it to the bigger elephant.
Hard to think I’m an elephant here, now.
The search turned up no more living humans and no sign of those who had done this. With the situation well in hand, Trouble took the next longboat back up to the Astute.
“Is it as bad as it looks?” Ray Longknife asked as Trouble met with him, Rita, Becky and Crossie in the commodore’s day quarters.
“It’s worse. Down there, you can smell it. I got my crew wearing gas masks so they can breathe. And the bugs. I don’t know where that planet got so many bugs that love to chow down on human corruption.”
Rita and Becky looked to be turning green. Crossie was past green into white. He bolted for the head where the rest of them listened to him be explosively sick.
“That man needs to get out more,” Trouble said. “See what this is really all about.”
“Yeah,” Rita said. “We’ve sent all this back in a coded message to Savannah, with secondary addresses to the Command staff on Wardhaven, Pitts Hope, New Eden, and anyplace else that was thinking of loaning us a ship.”
“Earth, too,” came from the head, but was followed by more sounds of breakfast explosively exiting.
“So, if I may ask,” said Trouble, “what do we do now?”
“Gather our forces,” Ray said. “Rita, have you got anything back from the team you sent aboard the space station?”
“It’s shot up too bad to use. Whoever attacked the planet made Swiss cheese of the station. The central computer is shot to hell, but we did find some stuff in archives that we could read.”
She paused. Crossie, green as cheese himself, came to the door of the head to listen better.
“This is where Whitebred took his pirates. Somewhere along the line, the pirates got tired of his management style and offed him. They also split up. There’s another pirate hideout named Port Elgin out past that jump we saw the aliens taking.”
“Oh, shit,” Trouble said. “More dead bodies?”
“That remains to be seen. There’s also the mention of some Planet of Gold that the Big Fellows have.”
“Big Fellows?” Becky echoed.
“The one kid we found that was coherent,” Trouble said, “was sure the people who did this were ten feet tall and had four eyes, four arms and four legs. That sound familiar?”
“Oh, shit,” Crossie said, wiping his mouth.
“So,” Rita said, “we bury our dead. We wait for the rest of the ships to join us. Say in three, maybe five days. I’ve ordered comm to send the ships that were out on patrol to this planet’s coordinates. If they can jump here without going through Savannah, it will save time.”
“So we wait.” Trouble said.
“And then we go see.” Ray said.
34
Commodore Rita Nuu-Longknife put her crew through their paces. Drill, drill and more drill. They responded with grim determination.
They’d seen the pictures from LeMonte. The bodies shot had been bad. The bodies slit open, neck to groin were worse. The babies split through were unspeakable.
Maybe Rita should have censored the pictures.
But there was no way she could have kept the returning ground troops from spreading The Word among the stay-behind Sailors.
“How are we going to talk to the likes of the people that did this?” she shared with Becky Graven. The ambassador was the one person on board that she expected she could share her concerns with keeping this from getting out of hand and get a decent hearing.
Becky shook her head. “How do we talk to people who did that?” the diplomat answered.
“We’ve got to make peace?” Rita said.
“Yes, we have to, but on what terms? The only way they could have made this worse was to have roasted the humans on an open fire and eaten them.”
“Thank God they didn’t.” Rita said. She hadn’t thought of that.
“I don’t know what we’re dealing with,” the diplomat said. “I’ve been trained all my life to try to smooth over rough spots. Keep the peace. Find the middle ground. Where’s the middle ground with that?”
“Do you have any idea what our pirates did to them?” Rita asked.
“I heard about this Planet of Gold,” Becky said. “I haven’t heard anything about us going there?”
“There isn’t much in the database,” Rita admitted. “I think we’ll end up there.”
“If you say so.”
Now, four days after the discovery of the slaughter, Rita’s squadron was closing on the jump into deeper space. Joining up with her was the second squadron. When they jumped in, Rita had ordered them to meet her at the jump out, and then sent them the report of what they’d found on LeMonte
The second squadron had gone to full drill and double watches.
Now the squadrons hung before the jump. Rita had the four Astutes, the Patton, and five Rambles formed up on her. The captains from the Wardhaven cruisers Exeter, Northampton and Concord had already signaled her that they would conform to her orders. The other divisions, the Lion and Puma from Lorna Do and the Vampire and Fury from Pitt’s Hope might have questioned her right to command, but not a word had been raised. They fell in right behind her cruiser divisions. Nine transports came up the rear with troops and support elements for landing a reinforced division, or five regiments that could have formed a short corps if the last two regiments got time to get in some field exercises with the other three.
Rita sent a jump buoy through first. When it returned undamaged, she ordered the Northampton through and quickly followed with the Astute and her sisters.
The system was empty, though Matt reported that the sniffer found plenty of residual reaction mass with a significantly high sodium content. The trail led to the jump the information from LeMonte said would take them to Port Elgin.
Three jumps and three empty systems later, they did a very cautious approach to the jump that should take them to Port Elgin.
They jumped.
The system was empty.
The planet fourth from the system’s star was quiet. Deathly quiet.
35
Trouble swore.
He’d sworn that he never wanted to see the likes of LeMonte again.
Now he swore as he walked another dusty street of slaughter.
It was as if he was living the nightmare all over again.
He tapped his commlink. “Ray, Rita, Becky. Al
l of you. You’ve got to see this this time. You’ve got to smell it. Live it,” he spat.
“We’ll come down,” Major General Ray Longknife answered him, “but you got to give us some time, Trouble. We think we’ve found the wreckage of a space battle.”
“How bad of a battle?” Trouble asked, letting the distraction of murder above take his mind off of the murder below.
“Pretty bad,” Ray said. “Rita says most of the ships blew when their reactors lost containment, though there is some wreckage, more than she expected. At least some of it looks alien.”
“I’m glad to hear we got some of the bastards,” Trouble said.
“If we can trust the initial reads, it isn’t a lot.”
“Damn,” Trouble muttered.
“Have you found any survivors?” Ray asked.
“We’re looking for them, but you have to understand, these bodies have been dead for a lot longer. A couple of weeks. Maybe a month. Hard to tell, what with all these alien animals and stuff nibbling on the bodies.”
“I hear you. Pity any survivor who had to keep them company while they rotted.”
“My thoughts entirely. Listen, you can send me down the Buddhists who did the rites for the dead on LeMonte? I’m not burning a single funeral pyre until you see what I’m looking at.”
“We understand you, Trouble. I’ll talk to Rita. See if she can delegate the search for a while.”
“You think that will work? I don’t win a lot of arguments with Ruth.”
“If I tell her that I and Becky are going down, she’ll come with us. I don’t think she trusts me with Becky.”
“I wouldn’t trust any male with Becky,” Trouble said. Ruth had had a talk with him about being alone on a ship with the lovely ambassador. He’d pointed out that he’d be sharing the ship with a whole lot of men and women.
“You know what I mean,” his very pregnant wife had said.
“I know,” he said, not knowing anything at all, except that he’d better agree with her at the moment.
Three hours later, Trouble was at the water’s edge as the captain’s gig from the Astute beached itself.
“What’s that smell?” was Becky’s first question as she waded ashore in a green ship’s suit and army boots.
“The dead,” Trouble said.
“Oh.”
“Let’s make this quick,” Rita said. “I got a lost battle to examine and a battle of my own to plan.”
“We leaving here?” Trouble said.
“As soon as we can,” Ray said. “We’re going looking for that Planet of Gold.”
“I may have something for you,” Trouble said, and produced a wrist unit. “Most of those we should have found are gone, but this one was hidden in a burned-out bungalow. Our tech squad has gone over it. It belonged to the guy running this show, at least the one left behind. He has a lot of recordings of meetings, including the one where they went chasing off, howling for gold.”
“It mention anyone by the name of Black Bart?” Rita asked.
“Why?”
“We finally got a report from Savannah about that ship that tried to race in and out of the system cause ‘the aliens were coming’. It belonged to a pirate of the name of Black Bart. We think he discovered and raided two alien planets besides the Planet of Gold.”
“Shit,” Trouble said. “If they did there what the aliens did here . . .?” didn’t bear thinking about.
“That’s kind of what I’m thinking,” Rita said. “Pass what you’ve got up to Crossie. He’s working with the scientific brain trust we have on the Exeter and Northampton to see what they can make of it.”
They walked down the main street. It was a slow progress.
The visiting elephants had to pause to throw up. Even General Ray Longknife found the scene too much to take.
“We never did anything like this in the war. Not the Unity War. Not the planetary squabbling before Unity took over. This is inhuman,” the general muttered, half to himself, half to persuade himself.
“I was kind of thinking that,” Trouble said, “and don’t feel bad about the stomach problem. I had mine already, back on LeMonte.”
“I’ve seen enough,” Rita said. “Becky?”
“It’s going to be hard finding a peace after the likes of this. It’s going to be hard finding a path to peace with the kind of animals that can do this,” the diplomat said, her words hardened steel, and sharp to boot.
Rita nodded. “Trouble, you may deploy your burial details. You have no more than twenty-four hours. I’m taking the fleet out of orbit then. I want to get on the trail of the people who did this before it gets any colder.”
“Aye, aye, ma’am,” and Trouble turned to do the last thing he could do for these people.
36
Rita came awake. She fought the urge to claw her way into Ray’s chest.
The waking nightmare of decaying ghosts demanding she remember them had her chest pounding and sweat pouring off of her.
With an effort, she slowed her breathing and forced the hammering of her heart to quiet.
“You awake?” Ray said beside her.
“Something like that.”
“Was the nightmare bad?”
“How have you lived with them? If I’d known, I would have been . . .” Rita ran out of words. What could anyone do for someone to make this sort of thing better?
“My wars were bad, but not like this,” Ray said, rolling over to face her. His fingers made circles around her breasts, then narrowed the circle to end up nipping at her hardening nipples.
“Please don’t,” she said. “The dead are too close at the moment.”
“Sometimes the only way you can drive away the dead is to celebrate life.”
“I don’t feel much like celebrating.”
“I know what you mean,” Ray said, but he didn’t roll away from her.
“Was this what you were going through when I, ah, did what I did?”
“When you damn near raped me to get pregnant with little Alex?” had a grin attached to it.
“I guess I did rather refuse to let you wallow in your self-pity. But this isn’t self-pity.”
“Isn’t it? Isn’t it all about you?”
“I thought it was about them.”
“They’re dead, love. We’ve said prayers at their pyres. All we can do for them, we’ve done. The rest is about us.”
“So, what do we do?”
“We get on with our lives. We do what we have to do.”
“And what, General Longknife, would you say that is?”
“A lot of things,” his hands were back, circling her breasts. “We celebrate that we’re not dead yet. And we tell those bastards that they do not treat humans like that.”
“Well,” Rita said, “let’s celebrate being not dead yet. Then we’ll go talk to the bastards.”
And they were not even late for breakfast.
Crossie was there, with some boffins borrowed from the Northampton. Included was a slip of a gal with the soft and sharp-clawed moniker of Kat.
“We’re sure we know where the Planet of Gold is,” Kat said while Crossie was taking a deep breath to start what would be a long lecture carefully nuanced and with many caveats.
“How many jumps?” Rita asked.
“Five.”
“Any idea how many human ships were destroyed here? Or alien ships?” Rita shot back, rapid fire.
“Eight to ten humans,” Kat said. “Maybe two aliens.”
“That lopsided,” Ray said.
“It looks that way,” Crossie got in fast. “I have no explanation why we did so poorly.”
“Maybe the pirates didn’t drill so much or maintain their lasers very well,” Kat snuck in.
“I tend to agree with you, Kat,” Rita said. She paused for only a moment, then went on. “Is there any reason for us not to head out?”
From the next table over, Trouble put in his two cents. “We’ve finished burying the dead. I’m ready to ma
ke some of them four eyed bastards ready for the undertaker’s fine trade.”
“Then let’s get this fleet underway.”
Four jumps later, the squadron was at a halt before the jump that would likely bring them to the Planet of Gold.
“There’s been traffic here,” Matt reported from the Northampton. “Sniffer finds plenty of reaction mass left behind. More salt than there should be.”
“May I have the honor of leading the jump?” Captain Izzy Umboto of the Patton requested.
“Please do.”
The Patton drifted up to the jump, then nudged itself through.
Rita had the Astute right behind her. “Put us through,” she ordered the jump master.
The stars wavered, and then came back different.
“There’s a planet third from this sun,” Sensors reported. “And I make out a whole lot of reactors in orbit around it. None of the reactors conform to anything we’ve built in human space.”
Rita grinned. “So, bastards. Will you run or will you fight?”
37
The answer to Rita’s question hung in the balance for a long hour as her fleet followed her through the jump, then formed on her Astute as she set a fleet acceleration of one gee toward the third planet.
Each report from Sensors was the same. “They remain in orbit, ma’am. Reactors are active, but no reaction to our presence.
As the second hour flowed into the third, Rita decided that their intention was to wait for her in orbit.
Or maybe strike out at her as she came into orbit.
“We’ll be braking,” she muttered to Ray as he stood beside her command chair. “They’ll have a shot up our vulnerable fantail at our jets and reactors.”
“That sounds bad.”
“That is bad. That’s what the humans had at Port Elgin. So how come it didn’t work all that well for them there?”
Ray raised an eyebrow at the question.
“That really was a question, General. I’d really like to know.”
“Well, it didn’t work for the pirates there. I’m sure that my brilliant commodore can figure out how to make it not work for these bastards this time, either.”
Rita Longknife--Enemy in Sight Page 15
