After an hour of good cheer, Harry was eager for some quiet, and a free head. He decided the facilities by the hangar deck might be relatively unused and so he headed for the forward riser. In his semi-inebriated state, he began to work his way down, hand over hand so as not to drift free and knock himself out.
Two decks down, he heard one of the Marines talking to an American crewman. “Mutiny? Nah. It’s only mutiny if we failed to get him back – you wait and see. The admiral will growl at us, but he’s glad we went. And now we’ve got our ‘Arry back, our life expectancy just went up. You ever hear about his run-in with those Caradi pirates?”
“No.”
“Well I wasn’t there, mind you, but Major Kennedy told us about it when we came aboard…”
Harry drifted out of earshot, suddenly feeling very sober. They don’t realize how lucky we were against those pirates, he thought. They might have easily called my bluff and we’d be frozen corpses, floating in space between Khola and Cera.
He stepped out onto the grav plating and headed forward. Through the windows of the hangar, he could see Lothbrok, looking out at the light show of the forward compression wave. Forgetting his bladder for the moment, he entered the hangar and came to a stop by his friend, looking out the huge opening, protected only by the energy shielding.
“What troubles the Lord of Beringsburg?”
A dark laugh. “Beringsburg,” he said flatly. “You and I saved Caul’s ship not to mention Caul’s own hide when we fought the Dactari at Earth, and he gave me Beringsburg, a prize he offered to any man who might bring him a captured infiltrator from Bliekr’s faction.”
“So he rewarded you for the prisoner rather than for his rescue,” Harry shrugged. “It still raised you to Hauld status.”
“Our family could have rivaled Caul’s once, but we chose to support his father, Odin. My father borrowed heavily to field fifty-nine ships and, when they went missing twenty-five centuries ago, our house fell into ruin.”
Harry nodded. Lothbrok’s father had been among the missing Midgaard. They had taken refuge on Earth, forming the nucleus of Nordic mythology. Some of Lothbrok’s own relatives had played prominent roles in the Nordic conquests of Britain.
“Caul gave me a place in his household, but it hasn’t been easy. Being a common warrior when you were raised to lead a great house is a hard thing, Harry.” He remained motionless, staring out at the flowing lights as passing stars streaked by. “Beringsburg can barely support ten ships so that was all I received from the spoils of Bliekr’s faction.”
So that was the source of Lothbrok’s troubles. He was a hauld, but just barely. Harry knew that a hauld could easily lose his status if he failed to support the minimum fleet of ten ships. Any hauld could challenge his status and there had to be a few remaining haulds left from house Bliekr who would like to absorb Lothbrok’s small fleet.
“Caul is a good man, but he won’t involve himself in this,” Lothbrok stated darkly. “I’m a useful warrior to him, with or without the ten ships. There’s always some dirty work to be done.”
“But he wouldn’t want to lose the ships,” Harry began, then caught himself. “Whoever challenges would still be obligated to fight for him, seeing as he’s the leader.”
Lothbrok nodded. “And I end up standing watches on the bridge of the Ormen again.”
Harry realized this was more than just a future concern. “Your ships?”
“The Visund had a core breach and fell into the atmosphere of Weirfall eight days ago.” Lothbrok looked over at his Human friend.
“I have nine ships.”
Harry kept his face impassive. The last thing his friend would want was pity. “How much time do you have before someone will challenge you?”
“It might have happened already, if I hadn’t left to come after you. Valdemar will move against me at the next Althing. He’s the most powerful of Bliekr’s old haulds.” He looked back out at the haze. “Oaxes looked like a respectable place,” he mused. “Make a decent fief.”
Harry laughed. “Oh sure, they’re struggling to end thousands of years of occupation and they’ll be happy to simply bend the knee to a new alien?”
“Well, it was just a thought,” the Midgaard said dismissively.
It was the careless tone that clued Harry in. Lothbrok was seriously thinking about seizing the planet to reverse his ebbing fortune. He might have something there, he realised. It may need some modification. “They may not like it if you call them a fief or refer to yourself as the lord of their world,” he began slowly. “But they’re going to need our help. After what we did to the garrison, you can bet the Republic is going to make an example of them.”
“Well I’m not going to just defend them without some sort of mutual obligation,” Lothbrok retorted.
“No,” Harry agreed. “They do have a historical precedence for this kind of thing – we just need to adjust it a bit. You become their ‘Warlord’ and they provide you with the cut of their taxes that would have gone to the Republic. They’re free to manage civil affairs as long as they hold up their end.”
“And they get exclusive access to the Weirfall market,” the Midgaard enthused, “rather than having to share the Ufanges market with competitors. It would go a long way toaward balancing their economy.” He caught the look of surprise on Harry’s face and grinned. “If you were raised to lead a major house in our society, you need to understand economics.”
“So that gives us operational ships, but we still need to arm them,” Harry scratched at the stubble on his face. “The Oaxians founded a colony on Tauhento, back before the Empire. I’d bet they’ll want a shot at independence too, as long as we can help Oaxes survive. They’re the number three producer of rail weaponry in the Republic,” he added mildly.
“Now we have a plan!” Lothbrok hammered Harry on the shoulder. “You can be the Warlord of Oaxes and I’ll go to Tauhento.”
“Me?” Harry tried to speak but his mind was too busy processing the concept to bother with conversation. I’m a naval officer, not a feudal lord. Then again... He stared out at the distortion. I know them better than anyone in the Alliance now.
“You’re practically an Oaxian yourself now,” said Lothbrok, as though reading his thoughts. “You carry the memories of some of their greatest heroes and you sure as Niflheim lit the hearth under them in that arena. Besides,” he spoke quietly, earnestly, “I want to know there’s someone I can trust on the other leg of this stool before I risk my neck on it.”
“You know,” Harry said before pausing, barely believing his own words, “I can almost see Towers going for this.”
“You speak in jest?” the Midgaard demanded. “Of course he will. It balances close to eighty percent of the Weirfall economy if we open up Oaxes and Tauhento to them.” He shook his head in mock disappointment. “I see I shall have to give you some lessons before we take you back to Oaxes.” His face darkened suddenly, an unwelcome thought re-asserting itself.
“And I have to find a way to survive the next Althing.”
Outpost
Petite Tortue Island, Caribbean
Tommy and Kale stood in the office, waiting for its occupant to return from the coffee pot outside. Gelna had seen more than enough of Earth as a prisoner of war and so he had decided not to join his comrades.
“This time wait till he sees us before flapping your gums,” Kale suggested.
“I assume you’re talking about me,” a man stood in the doorway, a steaming mug in his hand. He tilted his head slightly as he frowned at them. “I’m pretty sure you didn’t just sneak past me, so how long have you been hiding above the ceiling tiles?”
“Well,” Tommy began, “we’re actually being projected from orbit. No offense, but we’d rather not take the chance of getting infected…”
“Understandable,” the big man set his coffee on a stained desk blotter before dropping into his chair. “The last part, I mean. That first bit didn’t make a lick of sense.” He opened
a drawer to his right and began rooting through its contents.
“Well, it’s true.” Tommy was a little disconcerted by the man’s apparent nonchalance. “We’re being projected by a ship that we…” He stopped as he found himself looking down the barrel of a handgun.
“If you don’t start making some sense,” the man said with the air of someone who was merely offering friendly advice, “I’m gonna project you through that door.”
“We’re not really here,” Tommy insisted. “Look.” he waved a hand toward Kale who recoiled.
“Watch it, would you? I’m standing right next to you on the bridge. Nearly took an eye out.”
“Sorry, mate,” Tommy replied, then laughed. “Here, have a look at his legs,” he said to their host. Kale’s legs were in the middle of a chair.
“Huh!” The man dropped his pistol back in the drawer and shoved it closed. “Won’t be any use, will it?”
“Not without a magazine in it,” Kale muttered.
“Yeah, well, it makes it too heavy,” the big man replied with an easy grin. “I mostly just use it when we pretend I’m a private detective and the wife… Umm…” He scratched the side of his head. “Maybe we should get back to why two ghosts are standing here?”
“Wait a minute.” Kale looked over at Tommy. “D’you know who this is?” His voice was incredulous. “This is Frank Bender; the guy who built the first response fleet.”
“One of the guys,” Frank corrected. “Pretty sure there was an entire army of workers involved.”
“Yeah, but you were running the show and you started putting ships into orbit months ahead of schedule.” Kale looked back at Tommy. “You wouldn’t have been more than ten back then, so you might not remember, but we got to Mars just weeks before the Dactari were going to launch their ‘shake & bake’ invasion.”
The Dactari had decided against the risk of sending a full fleet to subdue Earth. All of their existing military forces were already in use on internal security operations. Stripping away units would have left them vulnerable to the separatists that had plagued the Republic as well as the empire it had replaced.
They had decided to send a smaller force to seize Mars. Once established there, they would clone their invasion troops and manufacture the weapons needed. Their intelligence estimates had lodged a firm belief in Dactari thinking – the Humans had only a handful of crude intra-solar vessels powered by rockets. They could never hope to pose a threat to the operation on Mars.
Designs for advanced vessels had existed for years at DARPA but the economic reality of building such ships was beyond any one country. The presence of a hostile force in the solar system had changed that equation.
“Look, guys,” Frank held up a hand. “It’s not that hard to beat a military schedule when you’re used to building commercial vessels. There’s none of the usual bullshit where some casino manager is telling you that the carpet needs to be redone because the pattern doesn’t look right when you walk in from the promenade.” He grinned. “I love working for the military. As long as the crew doesn’t fall out when you turn, they don’t give a damn about how it all looks.”
“We caught ‘em just in time,” Kale insisted. “If you hadn’t beat the schedule, we would have been the newest subject world of the Dactari Republic.”
“And the Dactari would be dying of plague along with us.” Frank leaned back in his chair and grinned. “Who knows, we might have wiped them out entirely. The cure doesn’t work on them like it does on us.”
“So you’re working on the cure here?” Tommy asked.
“Oh yeah.” Frank nodded. “Some of the researchers who caused it are the ones who make the cure. This is a government facility that does R&D and prototype production on new warships, but we had a cop suddenly show up here with his family and a handful of scientists about two years ago. The scientists were trying to reverse engineer Midgaard longevity and they pretty much succeeded.”
“So that’s where they got their hands on the organelles,” Tommy said.
“Huh?”
“The bacteria we found in the plague victims are a variant of an organelle belonging to the race that built our ship,” Tommy explained. “Somehow, the Midgaard must have gotten their hands on it.”
“So the Midgaard didn’t come by it naturally?” Frank looked down at his coffee, picking it up and taking a long sip of the hot liquid. He set it down with a satisfied sigh. “There’s a problem with our vaccine, a two percent chance of the retrovirus mutating in your body and attacking the bacterial phase of the inoculation.
“They’ve set up a lab here, where it’s relatively secure – rot monkeys can’t swim or operate boats – and we’ve been taking shuttles out to whatever enclaves we can find to inoculate them.”
“Then this is ground zero for the cure,” Tommy said quietly.
“And for rebuilding our defenses.” Frank’s voice grew serious. “We’ve built three new Hussar class ships so far and two more are almost ready to lift off the graving docks.” His pride was obvious as he talked. “They can dance circles around any other ship we’ve ever built, and they’re all assembled by retrained plague survivors.
“When we find a group that’s too small to make it on their own, we usually bring ‘em back here.” He waved a hand at the window behind them. “That building out there has one of the world’s largest collections of Dactari training capsules. Half the pods we captured at Mars are in there. We take anyone older than fifteen and give ‘em a job. There’s a sixteen-year-old girl here that’s made some amazing break throughs in the field of pitch drives.”
“It’ll get pretty damned crowded here if you keep that up,” Kale muttered.
“Not really,” Frank grinned. “Most of the folks we bring back get other training. We make ‘em into steelworkers, electricians, computer programmers – whatever we need to take a plant or a mine on the other side of the world and get it running again.” He started to raise his mug again and stopped halfway. “Oh yeah, anyone we send back out also gets the memories of a couple of special forces operators that work security here.”
“You’re colonizing the planet.” Tommy thought of his sister and aunt on Guernsey. “I know of a couple of recruits you could use. Especially my half-sister, Deirdre Kennedy. She was half-way through a masters at…”
“Any relation to Dr. Jan Kennedy?” Frank cut in, an eyebrow raised inquisitively.
Tommy’s mouth was still open from his interrupted sentence, and it just stayed that way as he stared down at the big man. Finally, he got it working again. “What?”
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes’. Dr. Kennedy managed to get a tissue sample from a Midgaard subject during their ride back here from Khooler or something like that…”
“Khola,” Tommy supplied numbly.
“Yeah, sure. Anyway, she identified the underlying mechanism that lets the Midgaard live for thousands of years.” He grimaced. “The scientists that showed up here had gotten their grubby little paws on her work and, next thing you know, the dead are strolling around snacking on the living.” He leaned over his desk in alarm. “You all right?”
Tommy was now sitting on the floor in the middle of a filing cabinet. “She’s my step-mum. I left the Völund before they came back to Earth. It would kill her to learn she was the cause of the plague.”
“Hey, Alfred Nobel was probably horrified at what his explosives were used for but he put his money to good use by starting the Nobel Prize,” Frank offered, still leaning over his desk.
“Actually, he owned several munitions and weapons factories,” Kale amended. “He didn’t come up with the idea for the prize until his brother died and a French paper printed an obituary for Alfred by mistake. They say it made him rethink everything.”
“Yeah, well… really?” Frank sat back in his chair.
“Called him the ‘merchant of death’.”
“Thanks, guys,” Tommy muttered. “You’re a big help.”
“Look,” Kale began
in a matter of fact tone. “It’s hypocritical to call him that. He sold a ton of weapons, sure, but there had to be customers too. Democratically elected governments were buying his weapons hand over fist. Ordinary citizens, who are ultimately responsible for the actions of their elected leaders, were pointing fingers at Nobel and blaming him for all the deaths, but the blood is ultimately on their hands.”
“And he did leave a lasting legacy, giving recognition to those who advance the human condition,” Frank added. “So why don’t you come out of that filing cabinet and, ummm… have a nice stand? Do you have any chairs on your ship?”
“It’s not like she created the plague,” Kale was looking at the books on Frank’s shelves. “She made a discovery and someone else used it to let the genie out of the bottle. If it’s anyone’s fault, then it’s the researchers that showed up here and it sounds like they’re working to fix the problem as best they can.”
Tommy got back to his feet. “Well, our family doesn’t have a large personal fortune to hand over, but I do have a sister who might make a good addition to your staff. And our aunt is a retired nurse.”
“We’re always interested in bringing in new folks who’ve had useful training. They tend to pick up more from the pods than someone who’s had no relevant experience to compare it to.” Frank cocked his head at Tommy. “What was your sister doing her masters in?”
“Physics. After her long trip on the Völund, she became fascinated with propulsion systems.” He grinned. “Wanted to be able to come visit her brother without spending the better part of a year in transit.” His grin faded slightly and his gaze seemed to pass right through Frank for a moment. “There might be one other thing we can do before we have to leave. Keeva, can you provide a scan of the planet’s surface, showing the current locations of infected and uninfected humans?”
Frank looked behind himself, then back to Kale with an unspoken question on his face.
The Orphan Alliance (The Black Ships Book 3) Page 5
