by J. L. Doty
Again the silence, no one willing to meet his eyes. “Someone answer me. Now. Or I’m leaving.”
He turned toward the hatch, and oddly, it was McGeahn who spoke. “Wait! Stay.”
He turned back and leaned against the bulkhead again. “I’m listening. Someone start talking.”
Again, McGeahn spoke. “How would you evaluate our present situation?”
York shook his head. “I wouldn’t. How would you?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and she looked to the others for help.
Frank came to her rescue. “The situation is deteriorating steadily. The civilians and crew are all carrying contraband arms. Sierka has armed the officers in the hope of keeping control. No one trusts or respects him. There’s no order, no discipline. He hasn’t even bothered to issue duty assignments for most of the crew, and—”
Temerek interrupted him. “Everyone’s seen the way you’ve got your marines operating, a nice well-oiled organization. We need responsible leadership. We need authority and discipline from the top down.”
York cut him off. “Sierka’s the top. Go talk to him.”
Temerek shook his head. “He’d never listen.”
“Maybe not. But that’s the only course you’ve got.”
“Please, York,” McGeahn pleaded. “We’re in a lot of trouble.”
“Yes,” York agreed. “If you’ve been in here hatching something, you’re damn right you’re in a lot of trouble.”
Maggie blurted out, “Sierka’s going to get us all killed.”
“As captain, that’s his prerogative.”
“Damn it, Ballin,” Frank demanded. “Help us here.”
“Help you do what? You don’t want me to help you. You want me to lead you in mutiny. Let’s spell it out. Mutiny is the word. You’re all talking about it, but not one of you has the guts to say it. And what the hell would that accomplish?”
Maggie shouted. “At least we won’t get killed by some stupid mistake.”
York shook his head. They didn’t understand, and he knew he couldn’t make them. “You bunch of idiots. You bloody, god damned idiots.” He sucked down his drink, swallowed the whole thing in a single gulp, looked at Maggie and Frank. “I thought you two were smarter than this.” He looked around the room one last time. “You’re all idiots.”
He tossed his empty glass at Frank—didn’t hear it shatter so he assumed Frank had caught it—and turned to the cabin door. Thring stood in the way, though he obviously had no intention of stopping York. But York grabbed him by the front of his church robes anyway, tossed him to one side. He palmed the lock on the hatch, stepped out into the corridor and slammed it behind him.
He got about five paces up the corridor when Soladin stepped out of Lady what’s-her-name’s cabin and they almost ran into one another.
“Ballin?” Soladin asked. “What are you doing here? This deck is off limits to you and your kind. Answer me. And stand at attention when you’re addressed by a superior.”
York clamped down on his anger and pulled his shoulders back.
“Answer my question.”
“What question was that, sir?”
“I asked you what you were doing here.”
“I was walking down the corridor, sir.”
Soladin’s eyes widened. “Don’t get smart with me.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“I’m putting you on report. Now get below decks immediately.”
“Yes, sir. Right away, sir.”
York went back to his cabin and got drunk.
Early the next morning he was badly hung over when Sierka ordered him up to his office, had him stand in front of his desk for more than an hour while he shouted at him. Then, when Sierka let him go, York went down to the ready room and shouted at Palevi and Yagell and Tathit and the marines for a while. It didn’t make him feel any better.
They floated York in on a grav stretcher, one arm, shoulder, and half his face blown away—the good half. The prosthetic eye with the scars radiating out from the socket was still intact, but the skin around it showed the pallor of death.
Alsa Yan leaned over him, shook her head sadly, mumbled something to one of her technicians about getting a body bag. The man left the examination room.
She peered into the side of York’s head, noted that a good portion of the skull had been torn away by shrapnel. A fair amount of his brain was missing, and she could see shredded neural wiring where the interface to the prosthetic eye had been. Her job now was to retrieve all the prosthetic parts that had been installed in York over the years so someone else might make use of them, then wrap what remained in a body bag so Telyekev could give it a decent burial in space.
She set to work with grim determination. The arm that had been blown away had been his real arm. The one that remained was a prosthetic. She was mildly surprised that both legs were prosthetics, and when she popped his chest cavity she found that all of his internal organs had been replaced, one by one, with biomachinery and organo-synths. She worked steadily for a good hour, and when she finished pulling all the borrowed parts from York, she turned back to the table and was surprised to see there were only a few scraps left. The arm and the shoulder and the side of his head that had been blown away were basically all that had been left of the real York Ballin. And now, without them, all that remained was a bit of tissue, a piece of bone, a smear of blood.
The technician held out the open body bag. “I’ll scrape him into it.”
Alsa looked at what was left of York, shook her head. “That’s not him. There’s nothing left of him.” She reached out, scraped the bits of tissue into a pan, turned toward the disposal can . . .”
York slammed awake, sat up in his grav bunk and screamed, gasped for air and gripped the upper side of his bunk as the deck gravity field almost pulled him out of it.
He caught his breath slowly. “A dream,” he said into the dark, trying to suck air into his lungs. “That god damned dream.”
He sat there trembling, beads of sweat dripping down his face, his chest, his arms. He lay back in the bunk and it took him quite a while to calm down. While he lay there he felt the ship make transition. Sierka had probably ordered it for some reason, and hadn’t bothered to take any of the normal and reasonable precautions. That feddie hunter-killer would probably put a warhead in their side now.
York rolled over, drifted back to sleep, hoping it would happen fast and clean.
Jewel Thaaline rolled out of her bunk, staggered across the deck toward her terminal. The alert klaxon wasn’t sounding; rather it was just the terminal chiming softly at her, so she had to force down her combat reflexes and the rush of adrenaline that threatened to flood through her. But still, none of her crew would be stupid enough to wake her if it weren’t important.
She hit the receive switch and Ducan Soe’s face appeared on the screen. He didn’t bother with any formalities. “We picked up a transition flare at extreme range, about ten light-years. Barely able to detect it—shouldn’t have been able to detect it at all, if the fool had been smart enough to dump a little velocity before down-transiting. What kind of idiot’s running that ship?”
Jewel tried to rub the sleep from her eyes and ignored Soe’s question. “Any other activity?”
Soe shook his head. “Nothing that we can detect. He’s just out in the middle of nowhere.”
Jewel thought for a moment. “He probably needs a nav fix. And we’d better be sublight when he up-transits or we won’t be able to track his new course.”
Soe grinned. “I’m ahead of you, Jewel. Tac’tac’ah’s powering us down now, bringing us down slow and careful. We’re just about ready to down-transit with almost no flare. I don’t think he’ll be able to fix on us at this range.”
“Excellent!” Jewel said. “As soon as you’re ready, go ahead and down-transit. I’m on my way up.”
She cut the link, then pulled on coveralls, shot out of her cabin and scrambled up the ladder to the bridge. Th
ey down-transited just as she was sitting down at her screens. An instant later the imper cruiser up-transited and started picking up speed.
“Did you get that?” Jewel asked.
Soe was crouched over his console, working feverishly at his screens. “Shit!” he growled. “We missed him.”
“Nothing?” Jewel pleaded.
Soe shook his head sadly. “I’ve got some data on his wake after he made transition, but that’s not accurate enough.”
The Pride’s bridge filled with silence, then Tac’tac’ah spoke. “Ma’am, I did happen to catch a fragment of a transmission. Maybe two transmissions, actually.”
“Yes,” Jewel growled. “What do you mean maybe?”
“One was that imper warship, clearly a transmission, heavily coded—nothing recognizable for us. The other was so faint I’m not sure it was a transmission. But if it was, it came from a system on a shallow diagonal from them, about six light-years from them, about eighteen from us, much too far out for us to receive it clearly.”
“Do we have any information on that system?”
Chief Innay answered her. “It’s the Anachron system, ma’am. One inhabited planet settled by agro-croppers. They’re way out on the fringes, but still officially part of the Directorate, so there’s a small garrison there.”
There were any number of possibilities, but they were all irrelevant. The Anachron System was their only chance. “Mr. Tac’tac’ah, set course for that system. Maybe this game isn’t over yet.”
When Cinesstar down-transited for a nav fix, they picked up a distress signal from H.M.S. Dumayia, an imperial hunter-killer assigned the mission of raiding Syndonese commercial shipping lanes.
Dumayia had torpedoed a convoy twelve days ago, but taken considerable damage from the convoy’s escorts. She limped into the nearest solar system with a habitable planet, and her crew just barely managed to abandon ship before she disintegrated around them.
Fifty-two survivors had crammed themselves into a small boat meant to carry no more than twenty passengers, then crashed on the planet’s surface: seven more crewmembers dead.
Shortly after down-transiting into Anachron farspace York got orders to put together a rescue mission. Dumayia’s crew had dug in about four hundred kilometers from Pare de’San, a coastal city with an estimated population of fifty thousand. Dumayia’s captain, a woman named Straegga, reported that the garrison on Anachron IV had nothing of any danger beyond artillery and a few atmospheric fighters. And a long rang scan survey taken during their nav fix showed no feddie warships in the vicinity to hinder them. With fire support from Cinesstar’s batteries, there was nothing to stop them from dropping a gunboat to the surface of the planet to rescue the Dumayia crew. Simple, easy.
York and Palevi had been called up to Sierka’s office to brief him, Soladin, Armbruster and Rame on the rescue plan. “I’ll take twenty marines in one boat,” York told them, “and I recommend you hold Cinesstar at ten thousand kilometers. The only danger to us will be the atmospheric fighters, and Cinesstar can easily track an airborne target at that range. With that kind of fire support as a threat, I doubt the Syndonese’ll try anything. And that way there’ll be no need to unduly endanger the ship.”
Sierka nodded and gave him an oily smile. “Excellent advice, Lieutenant. But take all three boats, and all of your marines. We won’t need you up here, and you’ll have all of your people as backup in case anything does happen.”
York frowned. “But sir—”
“No, Lieutenant.” Sierka waved a hand in polite dismissal. “I won’t hear of anything else. You marines deserve some consideration here. In fact, it’s an order. I won’t hear any argument on the matter.”
A few minutes later York and Palevi found themselves alone in the lift. Before giving the lift their destination, Palevi growled, “I don’t like it, Cap’em.”
York shook his head. “We shouldn’t be stopping at all, not with half the royal family on board.”
Palevi grabbed York’s arm, a horrible breach of military etiquette, but one York could forgive under the circumstances. “What’s that bastard got up his sleeve, Cap’em?”
“I don’t know,” York lied, and he couldn’t look Palevi in the eyes. “But I’m not taking any chances. Load those boats to the gills with everything we’ve got. Full combat armor, and all the rations and fire power we can carry. Also anything that’ll help us hold a perimeter as long as we can.”
Palevi looked at him narrowly, then as understanding hit him he nodded slowly. “We could just kill ‘im, sir.”
York shook his head. “We’re marines, Sergeant. We obey orders.”
Palevi looked at him, then slowly his face broke into a grin, but it was that nasty grin that York hadn’t seen for a long time. “You’re right, sir. We obey orders.”
When York and Palevi started shouting orders at everyone to load everything they could on the boats, the loading took on a solemn air as all of the marines slowly came to the realization something really wrong was about to happen. The drop really called for light combat harness, but York couldn’t fit two hundred and thirty-seven combat troops, plus their equipment and full combat armor, in three assault boats without first stuffing most of the marines in their armor. For appearances sake, York and Palevi and a squad of twenty marines had their armor loaded separately on Two, and made the drop in light harness on One.
All the way down York stayed in touch with Straegga. Apparently, on and off for most of the three days they’d been down, the feddies had shelled them with surface artillery and made regular bombing runs with their fighters. But under threat of retaliation from Cinesstar all hostilities had come to a stop and they’d grounded the fighters.
On approach to the Dumayia crew York had the assault boats make a high altitude mapping run over Pare de’San and the forest between the city and the downed crew. And when One touched down at the edge of their camp he sent Two and Three on an expanding reconnaissance spiral around them.
York stepped out of One’s hatch, barked over his shoulder at Palevi, “Secure the perimeter, Sergeant. And have all three boats set up a four hundred meter electronic perimeter watch.”
Straegga and another officer approached York, and the Dumayia crew gathered behind them. Straegga was a small woman, with short, blond hair, which, like her face and her torn uniform, was streaked with dirt. The officer next to her and the crew gathering behind her were in no better shape. She walked with a limp, but she had a big smile on her face. Most of them carried a weapon of some kind, and not far away the bombed out hulk of their small shuttle was a smoking ruin.
York saluted her smartly, but, as per drop zone etiquette, he did not drop his guard by snapping to any kind of attention. “Ma’am,” he said, “I’m Lieutenant Ballin, acting captain-of-marines.”
She reached out, shook his hand gladly. “Lieutenant, we’re glad to see you.” She looked at the marines spreading out into the forest around them. “And I appreciate your caution.”
She introduced the officer next to her. “This is my number one, Lieutenant Jakobee.”
York shook the young man’s hand, and Jakobee said, “Ballin! Haven’t I heard that name before?”
York shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”
Mec Notay shouted from one’s hatch. “Cap’em. You better come and take a look at this.”
Straegga’s eyes narrowed as she caught the strain in Notay’s voice. She followed close on York’s heels as he turned and walked to the boat, stepped up through the hatch into the interior. Notay sat at the small command console used for coordinating assault troops. Straegga frowned oddly when she saw the sixty marines lined up in the boat in full armor, and as she and York leaned over Notay’s shoulder her frown deepened.
Notay had the output of their telemetry tap to Cinesstar on one of the screens, and it showed the cruiser accelerating at full sublight drive away from the planet. A few seconds later the screen filled with snow for a moment, then went blank. Notay touched a f
ew switches on her console, shook her head and glanced over her shoulder at York. “Cinesstar cut our telemetry feed. I guess Sierka finally got rid of us, eh cap’em?”
Straegga could read the screens as well as York, and her jaw dropped as she looked at him angrily. York keyed his implants. “This is Ballin. Full alert status. Seal ‘em up and unload. We’re on our own, and as soon as those feddies realize that, they’re gonna hit us. Palevi, use your own discretion at setting up perimeter defenses.”
Straegga reached up and grabbed his arm angrily. “Lieutenant,” she shouted. “What in hell is going on?”
York owed her the truth. “I’ll explain fully after I’ve had a chance to set up our perimeter defense.”
Straegga let go of his arm, leaned back against a bulkhead and ran the dirty fingers of one hand through her dirty hair.
“Commander,” York said softly. “It’s a good guess we’re going to be under fire shortly, and I have work to do.”
She looked at him, blinked her eyes, took a moment to orient herself. “Certainly, Lieutenant. I guess this is your show, eh?”
They dug in, literally. The boats were equipped with heavy diggers that could move a lot of earth in a short amount of time, as well as other heavy equipment for establishing an emergency perimeter. In less than two hours they cut a hundred-yard wide swath of trees in a full circle around them, then mined it heavily.
They also dug four large pits for command bunkers, roofed them over with logs from the trees they’d cut from the perimeter, then covered them with about four meters of earth. They set up portable artillery all around the perimeter, as well as electronic counter measures, and they protected everything with electronic camouflage and shielding mesh. York was standing in the middle of the command center, watching the sun settle toward the horizon and wondering what he might have missed, when the first artillery barrage came in.
