“You mark my words: that blighter’s not to be trusted,” Spalding declared, stabbing a finger at me and still in a fit of high dungeon. “Why, if it were up to me he’d be sent back to that democratic hell he came from on the first ship to Capria and put us all out of our own misery it would.”
Or perhaps a nice penal colony on Tracto’s largest uninhabited continent, I wondered silently. For all his histrionics, I’d learned that when the Chief Engineer got all fired up like this, wiser men than I needed to take notes and listen. Now that’s not to say that the crazy old engineer was necessary right but instead that he always had a point.
“Perhaps a new job description would be in order,” I muttered, thinking that if a penal colony was a little excessive, ‘chief engine wiper’ one of our pirate corvettes as it was laid up in one of Tracto’s small belter repair bay’s might not be too far off.
“That’s up to you and her ladyship who put him there,” Spalding bit out.
My eyebrows rose but then I did my best to put the matter aside. Clearly Spalding had it out for whoever was in command of the engineering department on the Furious Phoenix.
“Forget the Phoenix for now,” I said, “what’s the word on the Parliamentary Power?”
“You’ll have to talk to Junior about that,” Spalding snarled, slapping a data slate against my chest and leaving it there for me to scramble to catch before it fell, “and tell him his main engine’s out of alignment with his secondaries!”
This time when he stomped off, leaving an opened-mouth Admiral behind him, I let him go.
“Well…that went well,” I said to an iron empty corridor, “I came to see how many ships I could pull for a new expeditionary fleet and…I actually know less now than I thought I did coming in.”
Shaking my head, I decided to go to the bridge. Maybe there I could actually get some work done.
Chapter 11: Center of Power
Laurent and I conferred in the bridge’s ready room, working on getting as many of the ships sorted for repairs as possible. Things would have gone smoother if I could have looped in our Chief Engineer…but then again, considering his somewhat colorful history, maybe not.
Having roughed out a preliminary plan, at least for what ships went where, I was finally ready to relax before diving into trying to come up with crews and navigators for the ships both those staying and those leaving Tracto.
Just putting skeleton crews on all of those ships for transit to a repair yard was going to cut our crews on everything else to the bone. Which was probably why, instead of calling another meeting—this time with a much more understandable, but probably somewhat less effective Engineer Officer than Commander Terrence Spalding, like I really should have—I fired up my desk panel and contacted the Communications Department instead.
“Com-Tech Bernard, Admiral,” said the man who appeared on my screen, seeming all business, “what can I do for you?”
“Get the Chief Engineering officer for the Phoenix on the horn, Bernard,” I instructed. Spalding had never actually answered my questions about our Imperial cruiser or the battleship she’d captured, so I figured ‘why not go straight to the horse’s mouth?' Also, if there was a potential Parliamentarian placed in a critical position—by Akantha or not—I wanted to know about it.
“I have Lieutenant Spalding on the horn, Admiral,” the Com-Tech informed me, breaking me out of my reverie.
“Lieutenant, he’s a Commander now,” I corrected pointedly. After all, I was the one who had promoted him, but by the time my eyes had followed my voice the Com-Tech was no longer on the screen. Instead, a young man in engineering work utilities looked out of the screen at me with a hostile gaze.
“Who is this,” the man demanded more brusquely than I was used to receiving lately, almost as if he thought he had larger and more important things to deal with right at the moment than a mere Admiral.
I lifted an eyebrow. “Admiral Montagne,” I said coolly, “and I’m looking for the Chief Engineer of the Phoenix,” I let my gaze visibly rake over what I could see of the man on the screen, “I presume you are he?”
At the words ‘Admiral’ and ‘Montagne,’ I learned that if I’d thought his first gaze was hostile then the look I was receiving now should have been powerful enough to strip paint of a bulkhead.
“This is T.T.,” the Engineer bit out in response, clearly thinking this borderline insolent response was an adequate reply.
Since my eyebrow was already lifted I decided that harsher measures were called for. “I am not used to repeating myself, Engineer” I said, putting a large measure of the frost I was currently feeling into my voice.
I could almost see his thoughts as fire flashed across the back of his eyes. “I’m listed as the Chief Engineer on the roster,” he replied clenching his jaw and then his face twisted, “and the Lady says I am, so I guess that makes me the Chief.”
“You don’t sound as if you’re happy with your current position,” I said, deciding I would happily fix that for him at my earliest convenience.
“Is that a threat?” he asked harshly.
“Moderate your tone, Officer; I won’t say it again,” I warned, my brows lowering.
He muttered something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like ‘Montagne’ and ducked his head which I decided to ignore—at least temporarily. After all, it was always important to give this sort enough rope to hang themselves with.
After re-mastering himself, the Engineer looked back up to meet and hold my gaze.
“I would be more than willing to change my current posting, Montagne,” he said, and from his choice of words it was obvious where his sympathies lay. Spalding had been right: this guy was one die hard Parliamentarian. Which begged the question of just how he’d ended up in command of the Phoenix’s Engineering Department?
“Then why not put in for a transfer, Parliament?” I shot right back at him, challenging the man to back up his political leanings..
The engineer looked at me in disbelief and then threw back his head and laughed. Not caring for anyone who laughed at me, my face hardened.
“You honestly don’t know, do you?” he blurted, a half laugh escaping his lips.
“I’m not used to being laughed at. Stabbed, shot at, sent up before a kangaroo court for a predetermined sentence, and threatened with torture, sure—but being the butt of a joke isn’t one of those things,” I said my lips peeling back.
After a second chuckle, the man looked back and me and grinned. “I’m not here because I want to be, Montagne,” he said with a grin that bordered on a smirk.
“Then why?” I demanded.
“The charitable version is that I’m a conscript,” he replied, shaking his head as if at my foolishness.
I just looked at him, struggling to keep from doing something rash—like ordering the Lancers onboard the Phoenix to clap him in irons and escort him down to the brig for an intense round of non-chemical interrogation.
“You were conscripted, and that’s the charitable version,” I said finally and then feeling like I was just playing Pete and re-Pete got in a boat and wanting to take back control of the conversation, at least in some small way, I latched onto the one sure fire way I knew to get an engineer’s dander up. “You know, my engineers over here took a look and they say your engines are out of alignment,” I said as blandly as I could manage.
The reaction to my little engineering jab, while successful in provoking a response, was more than I expected.
“My engines are out of alignment?” the Phoenix’s ‘conscripted’ Chief Engineer said scornfully, and then a look of dawning comprehension surfaced on his face. “Oh I get it, it’s from him. Well you know what? You can tell that meddling old busybody that I didn’t care for his lies when I was younger, and I sure as all the blazes am not interested in them now! You tell him to stuff his concern, and that these engines will be back in trim after I’m done straightening out the housings on the port secondary.”
I
paused as it dawned on me that I’d somehow become caught in the middle of an engineering feud, and I quickly blanked my face, “How exactly do you know my senior engineering staff, Mr…?” I asked in a leading voice.
“Spalding,” the man said flatly, “Terrance Tiberius Spalding. And I know your ‘senior engineering’ staff because the old fogey’s my father.”
The news was so unexpected I was nearly bowled with a coughing fit. The very man Spalding had warned me was a diehard Parliamentarian who we needed to get gone fast was in fact his…!
“You’re Spalding’s son?!” I managed to wheeze.
“I’m a Spalding,” Spalding Junior said bitterly, and it was no wonder my Chief Engineer had made that that offhand remark about telling ‘Junior’ his engines were misaligned right before he stormed off for the last time! “But yes.”
“I wasn’t aware he even had a son,” I finally managed.
“Why am I not surprised?” he replied tightly.
“So should I call you ‘Junior’ then?” I asked.
His face hardened. “You can call me ‘T.T.,’ ‘Tiberius,’ or ‘Lieutenant Spalding’,” he said harshly.
“Uh huh,” I smirked unwilling to restrain myself, “it’s nice to see I’m not the only one with an aversion to the family name and upholding its tradition.”
“I am nothing like you, Montagne,” Tiberius Spalding hissed at me.
“Oh?” I mocked, this last just too good to be true. “Dislike your family tradition of royal service, possibly hate your father, and have an unhealthy need to shake your fist at the establishment? Seems a pretty close parallel to me—so long as you exchange the word ‘Royal’ for ‘Parliamentarian’,” I said scornfully—almost gleefully if I’m being honest. I know it was pretty petty of me but after getting verbally kicked around by the media and guys just like this chode right here for my family name, it felt really nice to be able to turn the tables on one of my former mockers.
“Smoke you, you blighter!” Tiberius, the Parliamentarian, all but yelled at me. “You know the other word for what you’re people have forced me into isn’t ‘conscription,’ it’s ‘slavery’!”
“Hogwash,” I sneered, “just be man enough to admit your faults are the same as mine and move on from it. There’s no need for dramatics.”
“Your own wife has taken, and keeps, war-slaves on the bridge of this ship. Yes, that’s right,” he said at the surprise and alarm that leaked onto my face, “she calls them ‘war-slaves’ right out in the open like that and there are a number of other ‘slaves’ that work on this ship—some of them even in engineering!”
“That’s…” I wanted to call it insane…but she was a barbaric one, my sweet wife. Even still, slavery was beyond the pale.
“I was captured when your ‘wife’,” he sure seemed to get a lot of satisfaction over using that last word, “sent over her Marine Lancers to pirate my last ship right out from under us while still in the space dock. And then I was held at gunpoint and informed the lives of my work-crews were contingent on my continual service that started with fixing up this ship’s cracked hyper-dish! So while the exact word hasn’t been used in my presence, its either involuntary conscription or out-and-out slavery like others of this crew currently suffer under!”
“I doubt this situation is as cut and dried as you are trying to make it,” I said evenly, my royal training kicking in as my back straightened. I could literally feel the weakness of my position but I couldn’t risk letting him know how badly this self-righteously delivered news had just shaken my world view of both Akantha and, to a lesser extent, myself. I’d never thought I was a person who could ever have the words ‘slave taker,’ even tangentially associated with his name.
“If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck then it’s probably just another Montagne ‘Tyrant of Cold Space’ that everyone and their brother’s been raving about all over the intergalactic Cosmic News Network,” Tiberius Spalding said savagely. “So that’s why no matter what you might try to say we are not alike in any way.”
“Whoever these so-called ‘slaves’ are, I’m certain that they won’t be such for much longer,” I said fervently. Forget the morality of the situation; the PR nightmare that would ensure if I or my Wife were suspected—much less proven—slave-takers. It would do more than cripple any chance I had of digging my way out from under the Tyrant label; it would sink my unification efforts cold, “I’m sure they’re more like prisoners or…or…indentured serv—,” I paused not liking the sound of indentured servant, “indents. Anyway men or women who’ve given the choice between a short term of service in exchange for their parole and accommodations out of a prison or penal colony.”
“You can keep your sophistry to yourself,” the Engineer said with satisfaction.
For the longest moment I didn’t know what to say and then I did. “Well you know what? You can say all the terrible things you like about me and my people. Call us all the bad names you can come up with, even,” I finally said, “but in the end when there are pirates on the border, or a droid invasion of the nearby Sectors, you don’t see Capria or the Sector Assembly getting up off their duffs and doing anything about it. Nope, it’s those ‘slave-taking Confederals and that Tyrant of theirs’ out putting paid to the threats to galactic peace.”
Young Spalding looked at me mulishly and snorted.
“Go ahead and laugh,” I shrugged, “when my wife was in the middle of assaulting the Omicron—a major pirate black station—your Parliament, in cahoots with our beloved King James, ordered a mass mutiny and withdrawal. That order stranded my people to fight the pirates while they pulled out with our only ship, and a good portion of the marines they’d supposedly sent to help us. Then while they bugged out and took me back to Central for trial, my people continued fighting for their lives until they’d overcome all pirate resistance.”
“Must not have been that difficult then,” Tiberius said easily.
“On the way to prison at Central you hear the darnedest things,” I said, feeling the embers starting to light inside me, “such as Operations ‘Rounding Error’ and ‘Budget Balancer/’ and how my own father—a man I never knew until he shot me in the neck and left me for dead—had become Parliament’s roving troubleshooter. Assassinating those elected leaders that hewed too closely to the royalist cause and were foolish enough to leave our planet as well as their personal privateer. Raiding independent shipping in order to balance our planetary budget and pay for all those social welfare programs the royalists were too ‘corrupt’ to pay for.”
“You Montagnes really will say or do anything, won’t you?” the Engineer said, shaking his head at me as if with pity.
“Read my fax,” I said, typing a few buttons, “then we’ll talk again." And then, before I could stop myself I hit send, forwarding the files to his terminal before closing the connection.
I took a few deep breaths, wondering just what exactly I thought I was doing, handing out classified information like it was party favors and to someone who it was clear would be actively working against my interests if only he could figure out how.
I guess the notion that Spalding—that undyingly loyal bastion—had produced such a rabidly Parliamentarian son was a little hard to take in. That, and the fact that there were slaves on the Phoenix.
In retrospect, it was that last that probably hit the hardest.
Yes, I decided forcefully, something is going to have to be done.
Chapter 12: The Emancipation Proclamation
“What in the blazes is going on over on the Phoenix, Mr. Laurent?” I demanded, pounding the table in my briefing room.
“Sir?” he looked at me with surprise. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“There will be no slaves in my fleet, Captain,” I declared, standing up and thrusting my index finger down on the table.
“Uh…” my Flag Captain looked to be at a complete and utter loss, “slaves?”
“I have firsthand repor
ts from an unreliable source that my wife is taking slaves and forcing them to work onboard our ships, and I will have none of it, do you understand me?” I demanded, thumping the table repeatedly with my finger for emphasis.
“Well…quite…I mean, of course, sir,” Laurent flailed, and it was obvious that declarations of anti-slavery intent had been just about the last possible thing he could have imagined having to deal with when walking into this room.
“Excellent. Then I’m putting you in charge of sweeping this problem under the rug and getting rid of it before it blows up in our faces like a poorly-timed plasma grenade!” I barked.
“But, sir…what do you want me to do about it,” Laurent said and then his face flushed, “I mean specifically?”
“Pardon them, execute them,” I paused, “by all that’s holy, shove them out of an airlock or set them free if that’s what they deserve. Murphy knows I can’t imagine what would possess Akantha to enslave people, but I’m fairly certain they couldn’t have been acting the boy-scout troop at the time. No,” I said decisively, “this Fleet—and more importantly, this Admiral—will not tolerate slavery within its ranks, no matter what the cost. Get it done, Captain, and report back when you’re finished.”
Captain Laurent reached up and started scratching his right cheek with all four fingers of his right hand. “An unreliable source, you say?” he asked cautiously.
I waved his questions as well as his caution as far away from me as I could manage with a simple hand gesture. “I can’t reveal my sources at this time other than to say that while he had every reason to lie, the eagerness with which he lambasted me for being the husband of a slave taker could not be faked. And no, I won’t tell you who he is,” I flared.
“Have you possibly broached the subject with her ladyship yet?” he asked after a short pause.
“No I have not! And I’m not about to—at least not while she is down on the surface,” I snapped, “by the Space Gods if I have to issue an Emancipation Proclamation and sign it with my own blood, that’s what I’ll do. Do you understand me?”
Spineward Sectors 6: Admiral's Spine Page 13
