A Company of Heroes Book Five: The Space Cadet

by Ron Miller

  She still had to get to the river, which lay on the other side of a broad, busy, brightly-lit road that separated the Transmoltus from the wharves. It would be difficult if not impossible to traverse it without someone noticing her, but she could think of nothing else to do. She hoped that, dressed as she was and with her cap pulled down as far as it could, that she would be mistaken for a boy. She was nearly successful, too.

  She had gotten as far as the last of the buildings and stood looking at the wide expanse of illuminated pavement that stretched between her and the water. She had arrived much later than she had originally planned—no thanks to Monkfish—and now the boulevard was not half as crowded or busy as she had hoped it would be. There were only a few wagons making late deliveries and a half dozen or so longshoremen and sailors wandering between taverns. All she had to do was cross a hundred feet of open space and she would be among the wharves, where any one of a score of ships might offer her escape. There was nothing for it but to be bold.

  She stood up straight, slung her bag over her shoulder and strode out into the boulevard, trying her best to impersonate a sailor-like swagger. She got about ten yards before someone called out, “Hey! You!”.

  The momentary pause as she was deciding whether to stop or to bolt saved her. It had only been a trio of drunken seamen who had called, as they staggered across the pavement toward her, each supporting the other. As they approached, the larger and more articulate of the trio said, “Hey there, mate! No reason t’be all lonely onna night like this!”

  Judikha pulled her collar up and tried to make a noncommital sound, but the drunk would have none of it.

  “Ain’t nothin’ weighin’ anchor ‘til th’ tide turns. Why don’t ye come on an’ pass th’ time wit’ us, eh, mate?”

  Seeing nothing for it but to comply, since a fuss would only draw attention to her, she turned and followed the men, who continued their wobbly way to their destination: a tavern near the end of the waterfront. She hung back and was perfectly happy to see that her new companions seemed content just to know she was there. They appeared to have no interest in examining her more closely. What she would do when she got into the place, she had no idea.

  The inside of the tavern was, she was infinitely grateful to see, dark, smokey, crowded and noisy, with all of its inhabitants even more pickled than her friends. No one gave them more than the briefest glance with eyes that obviously had enormous difficulty focusing in one direction simultaneously. She was even happier to see that the only vacancy was a small table in the darkest corner of the room. She elbowed her way ahead of the trio and took the chair that put her back to the crowd and what little light there was. The others took their own seats and immediately began calling for drinks to be brought to the table. The money they waved in their fists got the attention of the barkeep and there were soon glasses of foaming black ale in front of the quartet.

  “Well, that’s th’ end o’ that,” said the one who had paid for the beer.

  “The end o’ th’ cash, eh?”

  “Good thing we sail on th’ tide, then.”

  “That’s three hours fr’m now. Whatta we gonna do when these here beers’re gone?”

  “Wish we had jus’ a li’l more money.”

  “Jus’ enough f’r a few more little bitty beers.”

  “Yeah. Whatta we gonna do f’r three hours if we ain’t got no beer?”

  The trio sat in morose silence for a few minutes, dejectedly pondering the awful prospect of premature sobriety.

  “Wish we had some more money.”

  “If we was wasn’t so drunk an’ if we dint hafta get up an’ if we dint hafta leave this fine tavern an’ these here fine beers, we c’d c’lect th’ re-ward.”

  “Re-what?”

  “Re-ward.”

  “Re-ward f’r what?”

  “Re-ward f’r catchin’ th’ murderer.”

  “What murderer?”

  “Th’ kid what shot thother kid.”

  “I ain’t got no idea whatsoever ‘bout what yer talkin’ ‘bout.”

  Judikha did and she thought, what? what? what?

  “Some kid shot some other kid this afternoon, jus’ around th’ corner fr’m here.”

  Shot? Who got shot? Someone had shot at her, but they’d missed, obviously.

  “So what?”

  “There’s a re-ward, that’s what’s so what. A thousan’ crowns, that’s all.”

  One of the others whistled. “That’s an awful lot o’ beer.”

  “We couldn’t drink that much beer before we sail.”

  “Idiot. Wit’ that much money we wouldn’t have t’ sail.”

  “Gee.”

  “So what’s this kid look like?”

  “Get this: th’ kid’s a girl!”

  “A what?”

  Judikha, who had not been liking the direction the conversation had been taking, even if she barely understood it, had much the same question on her mind. What’s going on here?

  “A girl. A girl shot th’ kid.”

  “Yer crazy. Girls don’t shoot people.”

  That’s right! That’s right!

  “This one did. Shot this other kid right in th’ back o’ his head. Been a big stink about it.”

  “Yeah? Why dint ye say somethin’ before?”

  “We dint need no money before.”

  What’s this? What’s this? Only one of the gang had a gun so far as I know: Monkfish. That shot I heard, it could only have been him shooting at me...so what’s this all about? I didn’t shoot anyone. I’ve never even touched a gun in my whole life. It took no great effort to figure things out, though. It was patently obvious: Monkfish had shot at her and had instead hit one of the others. The big oaf. But what’s all this about her shooting someone? That was a fine touch she knew was beyond Glom’s dim creative abilities—she was sure Pomfret’s delicate hand had to have been behind that. The little weasel, he’d have the whole city after her now instead of a few cops. She had to get out of here before these drunks woke up to who she was and she could see no immediate way of doing that.

  “Hey! Why don’t ye take off yer hat an’ stay awhile?”

  Judikha muttered something unintelligible and squirmed further down into her chair.

  “Say,” said one of the others. “Say, it’s jus’ a kid!”

  “Kid nothin’, it’s a girl!”

  “Yer jokin’!”

  “I ain’t!”

  “Lemme see...”

  The man nearest Judikha reached across the table and pulled her cap. Dark hair cascaded to her shoulders. There was not much she could do then, since the truth was obvious.

  “Holy Musrum! He is a girl!”

  “Ain’t that th’ funniest damn thing? We wus jus’ talkin’ ‘bout a girl an’ here one is!” They all laughed at such a remarkable coincidence.

  “Whatcha dressed up like a boy fer?”

  “I—I—”

  “Goin’ t’ a party ‘r somethin’?”

  “Haw haw haw! She could be a party, boys!”

  She didn’t like the sound of that, either.

  “Maybe we could find somethin’ better t’ do wit’ th’ next three hours than get drunk.”

  “Whaddaya mean?”

  “I mean we got ourselves a girl.”

  “Well, yeah, but if we ain’t got no more money, I don’t wanna be sharin’ my beer wit’ no one else.”

  “It ain’t our beer I’m thinkin’ o’ sharin’.”

  “Oh. Well, but hey...if she don’t wanna, I ain’t so drunk nor so bad I’d wanna make her, you know what I mean? That ain’t right.”

  The other leaned over the table toward his companions. He pointed a finger squarely at the end of Judikha’s long nose as he said to them: “She’s gonna wanna all right, all right, ‘cause th’ only other thing she can look forward t’ doin’ f’r th’ next three hours is sittin’ in jail. An’ then after that, who knows? Th’ gallows mebbe?”

  There was a momentary silenc
e while his friends worked on this. Judikha didn’t take her eyes from the end of the finger. The nail, she noticed, was worn almost to the quick.

  “Wait a minute—you mean?” one of them finally said.

  “That’s zactly what I mean.”

  “She’s?”

  “She is.”

  “Will you fellows excuse me for a minute?” Judikha said, rising from her seat. “I gotta go pee.”

  “Well, hell, sure. Wouldn’t want t’ keep a lady fr’m peein’.”

  She left the table, as carefully as she would if the three men were kegs of high explosive, made her way through the crowd to the back of the room where a short corridor led to the toilet. There was no back door, as she’d hoped, so she entered the restroom, went directly to the window, opened it, clambered over the sill, dropped to the alley beyond and ran like hell.

  She got about fifteen yards before there was a flash of light from somewhere inside her head and everything went black.

  -II-

  She awoke feeling as though her head had been fastened by a railroad spike to the hard wooden board on which it lay. It wasn’t, she was pleased to discover, though that news hardly seemed worth the agony it cost to find out. She fell back to her original position and surveyed what she could from there. It was no prison cell she was in, she was both happy and puzzled to discover. In fact, it appeared to be, if anything, the interior of a ship, of all things. She’d never been in one before, but all the evidence seemed to point pretty conclusively in that direction. What was she doing in a ship? And what were all those other bodies doing here? Even more disturbing than the realization that she was on board a ship were the half dozen or so other unconscious figures with whom she shared the room. They were piled around her exactly as though someone had been throwing sacks of meal. The snoring—to her infinite relief—at least reassured her that she had not awakened in some sort of morgue.

  There was a single, small round window about four feet above the floor—one of the several clues that had led her to conclude she was on a ship—and a dim, grey light shone through it. It must only just be dawn, she decided. She lay still for another hour, allowing her seismic headache to abate to a manageable thudding, while the light became a less dim grey. Finally, deciding that there would be only one way to get answers to her questions, she struggled to her feet, using the curved wall next to her for support. She felt the back of her head, where the pain seemed to have found its focus, and her fingers came away with sticky, crusty blood. She must have been attacked only a few hours ago.

  There was a door in the opposite wall and, making her way to it by gingerly stepping around and over the bodies, she discovered that it was unlocked. Beyond was a corridor at the far end of which were steps leading upward. It was a matter of some difficulty to reach them—the gentle rolling of the ship was considerably more than her dazed condition was really up to handling. Fortunately, the waves of nausea helped distract her. She finally reached the open air where, beneath a leaden sky, from which a grey drizzle drifted, was the iron deck of a steamer—a freighter, she supposed, from the absence of superstructure. All that rose above the deck were a couple of low deckhouses, a pair of masts and a tall funnel from which poured billows of greasy black smoke.

  The truth of her situation was not half as staggering as was the sheer irony of it.

  Holy Musrum! I’ve been shanghaied!

  It would not be the last time.

  -II-

  Judikha jumped ship at the first opportunity, which proved to be the small Londeacan port town of Spolkeen-on-the-sea. This lay at the head of the estuary that formed the mouth of the Spolkeen River. The town was unprepossessing enough, but it had the indisputable advantage of being on an entirely different continent than Blavek. The week it had taken the Honorable Euphonium L. Phlemko, Jr. to make the journey had not been particularly unpleasant—certainly far less so than she’d had any right to expect. She worked along with the others who had been unfortunate enough to have attracted the attention of the same press gang that had abducted her and who were all too absorbed in their own miserable lot to pay her any particular attention. Neither did the regular crew—the few there were—take any special notice of the girl. Which rather puzzled Judikha. Surely female crew members could not be so common that they would take her presence so much for granted? Not that she was complaining, mind you. She did what she was asked and that was pretty much the end of it.

  Spolkeen’s sole reason for existence was as the railhead for the great manufacturing centers near the capital, Toth, which lay some two hundred miles inland. There was little of interest other than endless blocks of warehouses, the rail yard with its crowd of steaming locomotives and the usual crowd of shops, rooming houses, chandlers and gin mills. It didn’t seem strikingly different than the Transmoltus, which disappointed Judikha since she’d had higher expectations for her first visit to a foreign country.

  It didn’t take long for someone of Judikha’s specialized training and ability to find both food and money enough for halfway decent lodging. It embarrassed her to do this, since she had thought she had put that part of her life well behind her, so we shall not dwell overmuch upon the methods she used to survive those first weeks in Londeac other than to say that she survived them quite comfortably, at least by her own rather Spartan standards. She ate regularly without grocer or restauranteur ever noticing the missing food and she found a shelter in a corner of an abandoned warehouse, to which she was scrupulously careful to let no one follow her. This was all well and good, of course, but she was all too acutely aware that it was getting her nowhere. She was no better off than she had been as one of the Fox’s minions—it was as though all her years in school had been wiped from existence...and she resented that bitterly. Judikha might have had many fine qualities but she did carry a grudge.

  It was not many weeks after her arrival in Spolkeen that things changed, and not entirely for the better. She was making her circuitous way back to her hiding place when a dark figure stepped from a shadowy doorway and said in a soft voice, “Hey, kid, hold up a minute.”

  Her immediate instinct was to bolt, but an even stronger instinct for caution held her back. Perhaps it was the voice itself, which was not that of an outraged storekeeper, a pedestrian suddenly noticing he was short a wallet or the gruff order of a policeman. She paused, balanced on the balls of her feet and silent.

  “There’s someone who’d like to meet you,” the man said. She hardly listened to him as she appraised her chances. The man was huge and in spite of his gentle voice was obviously canny in the ways of the street. His face was as hard as a paving stone, which it somewhat resembled, and his hands were like buckets of gristle and bone. She could all too easily visualize one of them pounding her head into a pulp with a single blow, so she was careful to answer politely.

  “Who?”

  “You’ll see. It ain’t the cops, which is all you gotta know.”

  She was pretty sure he was telling the truth: this man obviously had never had anything to do with the police, at least not on the right side of the law. Given that he was not threatening her with either jail or a beating—she had neither enemies nor friends in the city—she could not imagine what harm could come in seeing who had tendered her the mysterious invitation.

  She shrugged and said, “Lead on.”

  The man turned on his heels and walked off. Even with her long legs, Judikha had to hurry to follow. She had half expected him to guide her on the same kind of labyrinthine path she had been using to hide her den—being more than a little certain that this was no legal enterprise she was becoming involved in—and was not a little surprised to find herself being led, if not into the best part of town, at least directly down a busy commercial street at the end of which stood a solid-looking, three-story stone building. It was in the heart of the Mostazan district and she was surrounded by a bustling mob of colorfully-dressed people in their traditional robes and turbans, as busy as an ant colony, all speaking their g
uttural native tongue.

  Her guide plowed through the crowd like a torpedo ram through a harbor of pleasure craft, leaving Judikha to follow in his wake. The building proved to be a general emporium. Although the lettering on the broad glass window was entirely in Mostazan, the shop clearly dealt in every sort of goods, from bolts of fabric to hardware to canned and preserved foods. She looked longingly at the rows of fat sausages before following the man into the store. They wove their way through aisles separating tables and shelves piled high with merchandise that made Judikha’s fingers itch to a curtained doorway in the rear. Here, a flight of narrow stairs led to the second floor, where they ended at a heavy, windowless door. The man gave a complicated series of raps—which revealed that the door was made of metal—and it immediately swung open. Her guide, instead of going through the door, stepped aside and gestured for her to enter. Judikha only hesitated a moment before stepping over the threshold.

  The door shut behind her with the ponderous finality of a bank vault being sealed. Judikha blinked her eyes in disbelief at the chamber in which she now found herself. In stark contrast to the store below, the room was crowded with a lavish and ostentatious luxury. Chairs, tables and other furniture of rare antiquity, precious carpets and drapes, carved paneling of rare woods, together with glass, silver, crystal and fine paintings gave every indication to Judikha that she was in one of the most expensively appointed homes in the city.

  She was not alone in the room, as she had at first thought, though she could not be blamed for this misperception. The gnome-like creature behind the vast, intricately-carved desk might have easily been mistaken by anyone for one of the more elaborate decorations. It was not until it stood that Judikha, attracted by the motion, realized she was in the presence of her host...or hostess, she immediately corrected herself. I should have known who it would be from the moment I was asked to come here.