If the evidence was a little too insistent, they might just be persuaded to believe it and to take ‘corrective’ action. The colonies wouldn’t last long if that ever happened.
And that was where Daffyd came into the picture.
He looked over at Daffyd. “The old gang came out here with you?”
“With the Imperial Corps of Engineers hot on our heels.”
“Why’d you come out here, of all places?”
Daffyd grimaced. “Got orders to lay down arms and disband the unit. You ask me, the next step would have been a round of arrests.”
Paul nodded. “Anybody who was connected to the Sucker Punch. They finally realized they weren’t going to figure out the engines so they’re moving into damage control mode.”
“Including the supposed inventor,” Daffyd said, the picture of injured dignity. “Had me cooped up on Mictlan for weeks before 1GD came.”
“Putting you in prison is like putting a goat in a pen made of breadsticks.” Paul won a look of approval from Elsa with that. He shuddered. “Still, a super-max like Mictlan… Purgatory!”
“More like purge-atory,” Daffyd corrected. “One bite of the meatloaf and you’re in for one hells of a ride.”
“Those engineers…” Paul ventured. “What kind of assets did they bring with them?”
“LHV carrier, Navy variant, so no ground assault, just ship destroyer squadrons; Hasty Ferrets; Iron Hands, that kind of stuff.” He frowned. “Three heavy gunboats and two frigates that may have seen action with Montgomery himself, for all I know, but those boys at Nidaveller must have given ’em a good overhaul ’cause they’re better than new now.”
Paul nodded, his idea crystalizing quickly now. “So, they’d look like a respectable Imperial force to the casual observer, then.” His moderately foolhardy idea was turning into an almost-clever one.
“And who are we trying to impress?”
Elsa snorted. “The most casual observers in the universe, that’s who.”
Paul inclined his head in salute. “Would you consider working with us, Elsa? We have some re-purposed Maegi passing through, every now and then. It would help if they could check in with you and compare notes.”
She paused for a moment. “I’m not saying no,” she hedged. “I’ll pass on what I hear about the Grays, but you need to let the dragoons help us if we hear the Serps are getting ready for a raid.” Her lips drew tight. “We don’t much fancy waking up with Serp eggs in our bellies.”
“Done,” Paul said, “but I’ll need to borrow your old friend for a few weeks. Turns out he may be key to our exit strategy.” He looked to Daffyd. “If we can pull this off, we might just be able to save the colonies from annihilation.”
Daffyd finished his coffee. “Well, I did have a haircut booked but what the hells.” He stood. “Always wanted a ponytail…”
Paul took a deep breath as they left the small café, remembering too late the sewer smell of the alleyways at this level.
“So what’s your clever scheme,” Daffyd asked, “or would that spoil the showmanship of the whole thing?”
Paul shook his head, as much in an attempt to clear the smell as to negate Daffyd’s suggestion. “Oh, I’ll tell you,” he assured him, “and you can probably help refine the whole thing. It’s just that there’s still a complication we need to sort out if we want our chances of success to reach an acceptable level. I’d forgotten about it until I stepped out into this stink…”
Daffyd pointed to the left. “Quickest way topside,” he advised, leading the way. “So what’s the hitch?”
“A lot of folks have been nabbed over the years and their brains tinkered with. They’re compelled to keep the civil war between the colonies going. If anyone tries to interfere with that, they’re programmed to kill themselves.”
Daffyd stopped and turned to face Paul, one eyebrow raised. “Nabbed by the Grays?”
Paul stepped back, having nearly run into him. He nodded.
Daffyd grinned. “I really don’t know what you’d do without me,” he declared. “Here you are, bigtime inspector for The Eye, and I find the cure the same day I learn of the disease itself!”
Paul knew his slack-jawed expression was doing little for the reputation of The Eye, but he couldn’t help it. “A cure?” he finally managed.
“Sure as death and taxes,” Daffyd boomed cheerfully. “Have ’em spark a tube, ride the lazy Susan, y’know… For My Glaucoma…”
Paul shook himself free of his mental block. “FMG? How do you know this?” he demanded.
“We found the planet where the Grays are processing their subjects,” Daffyd told him, his voice suddenly growing dark. “A Fool’s Hope ship, the Pony Express, was there with a couple of real stoners for loadmasters. They were so goofed on FMG, their brains couldn’t wash.”
“Yeah, well, that means you can prevent it if you’re already stoned but…”
“We rounded up the crew and un-washed them with a few grams each,” Daffyd cut him off. “They’re fine now.”
Paul slumped back against the front window of a machinist shop, oblivious to the scents wafting from a sewage module a few feet away. “We can cure my sister,” he muttered.
“Sister?” Now it was Daffyd’s turn to gape. “Paul, do you mean to say…”
Paul grabbed Daffyd by the arm. “Where did that ship go?” His face was only inches from Daffyd’s.
“We cut ’em loose.” Daffyd leaned back a bit, alarmed by his friend’s intensity. “They’ll be back on the route to Irricana by now, I’d imagine. They went through a hells of a shock but that doesn’t mean they don’t still have bills to pay.”
“And I know how they pay them,” Paul said darkly. “I was a cop on the Rim,” he reminded the engineer. “I’ve seen how much FMG they bring in.” He straightened, giving Daffyd some breathing space. “We need that ship. I want to talk to those loadmasters and I need that cargo.”
He gestured for Daffyd to lead on. “Let’s get topside before we do anything else.” He fell in behind the dragoon engineer. “Where do we find the Rope a Dope? We’re going to need their help.”
“I can just call them and they’ll have a shuttle here in less than a centi,” Daffyd called over his shoulder.
Paul brought his eyebrows back in line. “They’re here, in orbit? Isn’t that a little risky?”
“Bah…” Daffyd waved off the concern. “Even if General Windbag manages to get a grip on his current predicament, he’ll be thinking of where I and the dragoons will head next. He wouldn’t dream of us coming back to the city where he actually captured me.”
He cast a grin over his shoulder as he turned a corner. “It’s elegantly stupid, if I do say so myself.”
Paul inclined his head. “I’d say you have an extra word in that description, somewhere…”
They found one of Elsa’s brothers at the shuttle pad standing watch over a knee-high storage cube marked ‘coffee’. He picked it up and followed them up the ramp of a waiting shuttle, setting it on the floor before giving the engineer a guarded nod. “If you don’t return,” he warned, “you’d better be dead.” He left without a further word.
Daffyd watched him disappear in the crowd as the shuttle ramp lifted. A fatalistic shrug. “He’s a little protective of his sister.”
“Maybe he’s suspicious,” Paul offered. “I mean, how does an average, ordinary guy rate an impressive woman like Elsa?”
Daffyd beamed, clearly taking it for a compliment, as intended, rather than the insult it could have been. “I do think she may be a little sweet on me…”
Stepping out of the shuttle was like a homecoming. Hangar crew, pilots and techs crowded them the moment they stepped off the ramp. Paul was buffeted about by slaps on the back as the cheerful dragoons welcomed him ‘home’.
Paul had always been somewhat insular and it was a little overwhelming to have a large group treat him so warmly. He was even more surprised, though, by the realization that he actually care
d a great deal about these lunatics. His voice almost faltered when he asked Eddie, one of the three squadron commanders, where Dmitry was.
“Up on the bridge,” Liang answered before Eddie could. “We take it in three shifts. Old Hendricksen got left behind at Home World along with a handful of bridge officers.”
“Had to make it look like we were all present and accounted for,” Eddie explained. “Big standing-down ceremony at the Hamtramck shipyard. Supposed to hand in our weapons and sign amnesties.” He glared at Paul. “Can you believe that? Amnesties… as if we’d done anything illegal!
“Hendricksen went over to the ceremony on the station, along with the boys who had strong attachments in the Imperium, but it was just to keep CENTCOM off their guard. The rest of us jumped through the Kowalski gate for Nidaveller.”
“Paul,” Liang cut in, “what about the General? Where is she?”
Silence replaced the babble. Every face was riveted on Paul as they waited for news of their leader.
These were people who’d need to know the full plan, but where to start?
“She’s a commodore out here,” he began. “Elected to lead a fleet of colonial privateers.”
That took a bit of explaining, though nobody was terribly surprised to hear they’d seized a Gray cruiser within hours of waking up on one of their prison ships, especially seeing as they had help from a privateer ship. The business of electing officers was a little harder for them to swallow.
“How does that even work?” a red-vested ordnance specialist demanded. “Sounds like anarchy to me.”
“Well, it’s not like they stop in the middle of combat to elect a replacement for a dead officer.” Paul chuckled. “The guy under him just steps in, the same way he would in the Navy or on this ship. If he does a good enough job, they confirm him with a quick vote and elect a replacement for him, but not until after the fight is done.”
He glanced at Liang, Eddie and Daffyd. “Let’s get to the bridge and have a chat with Dmitry. I’ve got a problem you boys can help solve.”
Liang raised an eyebrow. “You’ve got some shenanigans in mind?”
A shrug. “The usual,” Paul replied, “a little light-hearted piracy, maybe provoke a full-on war with the Grays…”
How to Ride an Landslide
“Facility Manager Fall has a point,” Julia shouted to be heard over the drone of voices in the main chamber. Dozens of arguments had broken out and hundreds of angry voices echoed off the rock walls and ceiling of the huge chamber.
She’d decided to wait them out but then young Caleb, the legal owner of the mine, and, in fact, the entire planet, stepped up onto the platform to join her. She leaned in to hear him.
“…used to spend a lot of time down here, before the raiders came and killed everyone else,” he shouted. “I think I can shut them up for you.”
She waved a hand at the angry crowd, handing them over to him.
Caleb took a deep breath and then started to whistle. The tone was somewhere in the mid-range and he began modifying it, up and down until he found some point of harmonic resonance with the rock. Once he zeroed in on the right tone, he put more breath into it and the effect grew dramatically.
The shouting faded and faces began turning to the rock faces, apprehension evident on most of them at this unnerving sound.
When the crowd had become entirely silent, Caleb stopped whistling and the effect died out in a matter of heartbeats. “You are all guests in my home,” he spoke into the sudden silence. “You will oblige me by not acting like animals.” He nodded to Julia.
“You all let Mr. Fall have his say, now the commodore has the floor.”
“Thank you, Caleb.” She looked around the chamber. “As I was trying to say, Mr. Fall has a point. We’re almost out of real Purists, so the Grays are bound to catch on if we keep imitating them.”
She held up her hand to calm the shouts that erupted at this admission. “And racing off to the colony worlds to warn everybody and organize a defense sounds good, until you realize that a lot of the defenders might just blow their own heads off when you need them the most. We still have the small matter of a brainwashed population to deal with.”
“And what progress have we made on that front?” Burke, Fall’s former executive officer, demanded. “We’re stuck here like rats but Fall, at least, has a plan.”
“Captain... Mr. Fall,” Julia retorted, deliberately reminding the assembly that the man had been so incompetent as to be relieved of his command by a majority vote, “is right that we have to do something.”
That muddied the waters nicely. The Fall faction was primed for a frontal engagement, typical of the man himself.
Julia was going to come at them sideways.
“There might come a time to rally the colonies and fight a Gray invasion but they probably won’t invade until they’ve figured out we’ve been playing them for fools.” She gave them a few minutes to work that one through. “The moment we leave here to follow the Fall Plan, the clock starts ticking. Our people will talk and the Grays will hear what we’ve been doing.”
You’ll never diffuse an angry mob with reason. It was one of the first rules of crowd control taught at the twenty-nine moons. You needed to shock them enough to derail them. In the Imperium, that usually meant small arms fire. Shoot a few ringleaders and the rest can be counted on to find a new way to use their free time.
Julia didn’t want to shoot this particular mob, seeing as they were her responsibility. But she had news that might be enough to postpone the problem.
“We have an Imperial unit in the neighborhood,” she told them. “And they’re looking for us.” Calling Daffyd a unit might be stretching things, but she was reasonably certain he hadn’t come alone.
It was like waving a red flag in front of a Roanokan taurus. The chamber erupted in fear and anger. Nobody here was keen on being annexed by the Imperium, regardless of what benefits a Navy presence might convey on the colonies.
She looked at Caleb and gave a slight shake of her head. Better to let them carry on for a while, imagine all the terrible things that would happen under the boot-heels of the Imperium. She knew she wouldn’t need his help to quiet them again. They were afraid before, but there had been little cohesion.
Now she was the focus of their fears, the bearer of terrible tidings.
She waited until the ruckus was starting to die down before raising a hand. The crowd didn’t settle entirely but they were mostly quiet.
“That unit,” she said patiently, having tolerated their outburst, “is the 1st Gliessan Dragoons, not the Imperial Navy or Marines.”
Well, that was a different matter entirely. There were even a few cheers. The colonies knew of 1GD from news brought in by the Fools’ Hope ships carrying immigrants from the Imperium. 1GD was as much a threat to CentCom as they were to the Grays. They were formed by Julia herself, welding numerous Sector Defense Force units together in a series of battles along the Rim.
Their officers were promoted or dismissed based entirely on their own competence rather than their ancestry. They were an aggressive unit and fiercely loyal to their general, who happened to be fighting for the colonies.
Julia almost felt the moment needed some clever phrase to sum up this turn in the debate, but she decided to just leave. The crews were excitedly chattering about what they could accomplish with 1GD at their side. Reasonable expectations were trotted out and were promptly trampled by wild exaggerations.
They were still an irrational mob, but at least now they were a mob willing to wait it out for a few more days.
The Pressgang
Beam lurched through the starboard bridge hatch. “Is it the Grays again?” He grimaced as his stomach tried to leap out of his throat. Being knocked out of a distortion envelope once was more than enough for a lifetime. Having it happen twice on his first voyage as a loadmaster was making him remember his job at Soylent Orange in a much more favorable light.
He waved a medi-kit. �
��Twenty tubes packed with FMG,” he gasped. “Spark up, fellas. This time, let’s kill them all and steal their gods-damned ship…”
“Ain’t no Grays in sight,” Captain Marco Stanic cut him off. He waved at the nav holo. “Just an old derelict passenger liner.” He shook his head. “Poor bastards are probably either brainwashed or dead by now.”
Stanic turned to Beam, fishing out a light gray ceramic tube and waving it at him. “Thanks for making the effort, but we’re all carrying the ones you gave out day before yesterday.”
“Oh,” Beam temporized, ears turning a little red. “Yeah, Cap’n.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I forgot is all; I mean, it’s not like you’d be, ummm… partaking of the stuff or anything…”
Stanic chuckled. “Keep packing those ‘ready doses’,” he told him. “Might find a good market, once word gets around that…”
“Captain!” the sensor officer nearly shouted. “That ship!”
Stanic turned to see a horde of attack craft boiling out of the supposed derelict and his face went white. “Wo de ma,” he breathed. “Hichefs, Khlens… it is the goucaode Grays after all.
He fished in his pocket for a lighter, eyes riveted on the display. “You’d better pass those out to any passengers who don’t already…”
“Pony Express, this is the Rope a Dope, 1st Gliessan Dragoons. Stand by to receive our boarding party.”
The signal cut off without waiting for a confirmation.
“Oh, thank the Gods,” Stanic whispered as the thwunk of an airlock capture sounded just aft of the bridge hatch.
Rob stepped through the port bridge hatch, chain-lighting a second tube of FMG and tossing the first to the deck. “Sons’f’bitches are gonna get a good size-nine-wide suppository this time,” the secondary loadmaster declared. “Wash my brain, will they? Well, it’s dirty as hell and I aim to keep it that way.”
The Gray Matter (Rebels and Patriots Book 3) Page 9
