The Thirteenth Man

by J. L. Doty

  No one answered him. “We have to find the royal family. We can’t let them fall into Goutain’s hands. Roacka?”

  “I’m with ya, lad.”

  Dieter elbowed his way through the crowd of nobles. “I’m taking command, Cass.” He turned his back on Charlie, told Roacka, “Have your marines secure transport. We need to get off planet as soon as possible.”

  Roacka spoke carefully. “Your Lordship, I have orders from His Grace, Cesare, to take orders only from Commander Cass.”

  Nadama stepped up beside Dieter. “See here, Roacka—­”

  “Enough,” Telka shouted. The plump little woman’s eyes were puffy and red, her cheeks glistening with tears shed for her dead son. “Nadama, why were you not surprised by any of this? I think it’s clear you had something to do with it, so I, for one, will not be comfortable taking orders from any de Satarna.”

  She and Nadama faced off in what Charlie knew was an old argument. Charlie ignored them, turned to Pelletier. “I need two of your best ­people, armed.”

  “Right away, sir. But we’ll have an extraction team here in five minutes.”

  Charlie shook his head. “Too long.”

  Pelletier nodded, handed Charlie one of the little fake recording devices. “It hasn’t been used yet. When you find them, hole up someplace, scramble it, and we’ll send a team after you.”

  “You can’t go without us, little brother.” Charlie turned around as he shoved Pelletier’s device into his pocket, found Add and Ell standing behind him. Add said, “Someone has to come along to take care of you, since you’ll probably stumble and shoot yourself in the foot.”

  “You know, sister,” Ell said, “I could just shoot him in the foot now. Then he wouldn’t go running off and getting into trouble. He’d be so much easier to take care of that way.”

  Charlie growled, “Shoot me after we’ve got the royal family.”

  Add looked at Ell, one eyebrow raised skeptically. “I think he just wants another kiss from that princess.”

  Charlie, Roacka, the twins, and the two troopers headed back to the ducal gallery, moving cautiously. The great hall itself was filled with smoke, debris, and a number of bodies, but otherwise empty. The building shook again to a large explosion as they crossed the floor to the throne, leapfrogging in strictest military discipline. Charlie stepped over the body of the Syndonese officer behind the throne and through the private entrance there. He found a short, dark little passage that led to an anteroom not unlike that behind the ducal gallery. It was empty. Roacka was about to proceed on into the corridor beyond when Charlie had a sudden idea. “Wait.”

  As boys he and Arthur had taken great joy in exploring the servant’s passages throughout Cesare’s estates. And thinking back to the corridor where Del had kissed him, perhaps she’d done the same. Charlie turned to a wall covered in velvet drapes, pulled the drapes aside, and yes, he found a servant’s entrance. He opened the door carefully, stepped into the corridor beyond looking both ways; it was empty. Perhaps he was wrong.

  “Little brother.”

  Ell squatted down and examined the floor. She rubbed her fingers along a dark smear there, lifted them to her face, sniffed, and announced, “Blood.”

  They continued down the corridor, Ell leading them by tracking the occasional smear of blood. The trail led to a door about twenty meters down the corridor, labeled Maintenance Supplies. Charlie opened the door slowly . . . nothing. He stepped through, only to be assaulted by a raging storm of fists and claws and petticoats, and he went down with Del on top of him. Add saved him by plucking her off him as if she weighed nothing. Del struggled like a puppet for a moment, then realized who they were. “Oh, thank god it’s you.”

  Add let her down and turned to Ell. “Is that how they kiss? A rather violent form of affection, don’t you think?”

  They’d found Delilah with Martino and Adan, but no sign of Lucius. Blood streamed from Martino’s nose, the source of the smears they’d tracked.

  Del said, “The bloody drunken idiot fell down and bloodied his bloody drunken nose.”

  “There’s a large Syndonese strike force incoming, Commander. Someone gave them Turnlee’s encryption keys, so they’ve got access to the local command grid. They’ll be inside long distance bombardment range within the hour.”

  Goutain’s plan had been to take Lucius and the Nine and their heirs as prisoners, use his hidden firepower to hold the planet long enough for a much larger force to arrive and secure his position. But Charlie’s sucker punch had worked. Darmczek had nailed the four warships without a fight, and got the troop carrier before it landed all its troops. The two hundred regulars that Charlie had at his command had outnumbered the Syndonese decisively. But when Goutain’s strike force arrived that situation would change.

  “I will not leave without my husband,” Adan screamed. They had yet to account for Lucius.

  “Mother, please,” Del pleaded. “Don’t you understand? If he has father he has the king. And if he kills father, then he has nothing. As long as he doesn’t have Martino, then he must keep father alive. But if he has Martino also, then father is a dead man. We have to do as Commander Cass says and evacuate before the Syndonese strike force arrives.”

  Adan screamed at Del, Del screamed at Adan, and Martino took a sip from a small flask. They were all standing in the royal apartments, trying to get Adan to see reason. Charlie turned to a marine medic and whispered, “I need a palm patch. A sedative. Three of them. Something that won’t react with alcohol,” he glanced knowingly at Martino, “but something that’ll put them down fast.”

  The marine grinned. He handed Charlie three small patches, started to explain, but Charlie growled, “I know how to use the damn things.”

  He selected one and slapped it hard between his palms to activate it. He was careful to keep the active surface away from his own skin as he marched up behind Adan, who was busy arguing with Del. He pressed the patch carefully against the side of Adan’s neck. It pulsed underneath his hand as she turned on him indignantly. “How dare you? You have no right . . .” She hesitated, then her eyes glazed over and Charlie caught her as she fell.

  He lowered her carefully to the floor. “Bag her up and get her out of here.”

  He turned toward Martino, who offered him a drink. Charlie smiled as he pressed the palm patch against Martino’s neck. Martino went down like his mother and Charlie turned to Del.

  She held her hands up and backed away from him. “Charlie, you don’t need to sedate me like that.” Their eyes met and she seemed to read his thoughts. She shrugged and laughed. “Then again, it’ll be easier for you if I am sedated. No chance I might turn hysterical at an inopportune moment, eh?” She curtsied. “Commander, I capitulate.”

  She rose and approached him confidently. He raised the palm patch toward her neck, but she caught his wrist. “No. I’m told it leaves a mark. And I’m so vain.”

  She turned to one side, swung a hip toward him, angled in a way that no one else could see. She started raising her skirts and petticoats, exposing first her leg, then her knee, then her thigh, and lastly some rather enticing undergarments. “I think I’d rather have it here,” she said. All he could say was something to the effect of “Uhh,” and while he stood there speechless she grabbed his wrist, pressed his hand with the palm patch against her bared thigh, and closed her fingers, forcing him to squeeze her skin in a most inappropriate way. “I like that much better, don’t you? Sometime I’ll have to show you . . . if it sca . . .” Her eyes glazed over and Charlie didn’t have the presence of mind to catch her as she fell. Thankfully, Ell stepped in and scooped up the princess effortlessly.

  With Delilah in her arms, she turned to Add, shaking her head sadly. “Little brother is involved in the strangest courtship ritual I’ve ever seen, sister.”

  Charlie strapped himself down in the acceleration seat in the shuttle
. “It’s gonna be close,” the pilot shouted as he firewalled the grav drive and lifted them straight up off the lawn. “Defender reports a big transition flare at the edge of the system.”

  They’d evacuated everyone of importance to their respective flagships, and though he’d tried repeatedly, Charlie couldn’t get an update on Cesare’s condition. After that Charlie had remained on planet with the marines to sweep the palace and its grounds. Still no Lucius, and no Theode either. It would be ironic if Charlie were killed trying to save the two ­people for whom he had no liking.

  As commanding officer of the ground operations, through long habit he’d hustled everyone else off before jumping on the last boat out. But in the confusion there’d been a mistake: the last boat had already gone out with no room to spare. He and twenty marines had wasted precious minutes finding something to get them off planet. All they’d found was a mere shuttle, not a gunboat: no firepower, no powered shielding, no serious internal gravity compensation, able to drive at no more than about six gravities. It was a bad mistake, perhaps a fatal mistake.

  “They’re leapfrogging,” the pilot announced as he lifted the shuttle’s nose.

  Like everyone, the Syndonese were blind in transition. It would be suicide to enter Turnlee nearspace on transition drive. The gravitational distortions within the system would warp their heading into the nearest planet or asteroid, and blind, they’d have no way of knowing how to compensate, or even if they needed to compensate. Standard operating procedure was to down-­transit at the edge of the system, then spend hours, even days, driving inward on sublight drive. But the Syndonese were leapfrogging: down-­transit one ship at the edge of the system. That ship, no longer transition-­blind, immediately launched its navigational drones to extend its baseline, then uplinked accurate navigational data to the remaining ships in the strike force, who themselves continued with confidence into the heart of the system at transition velocities. At hundreds, even thousands of lights, such ships could cross the breadth of the system in minutes.

  “It’s a big strike force. I’ve got thirty, maybe forty transition wakes entering the system. Darmczek’s engaging them.”

  Charlie had a situation summary on the screen in front of him. Defender was already long gone with Cesare and the other VIPs aboard. Darmczek had left a small destroyer in orbit around Turnlee to pick them up, then had taken the rest of the flotilla outbound to take potshots at the incoming Syndonese: still in transition and temporarily blind, they were defenseless.

  “Big transition flare in near orbit, Commander. A Syndonese, close in, and he came out of transition shooting.”

  “We’re not going to make it out of here,” Charlie shouted. “Take us to ground now. Advise Darmczek and tell him to disengage and take care of himself.”

  The shuttle suddenly lurched badly and listed to port. Charlie didn’t need the pilot’s “They’re firing on us, sir,” to know what was happening.

  Charlie gripped the arms of his seat. The shuttle lurched again into a wild spin. The pilot managed to pull them out of it, but they were canted at an odd angle, and Charlie didn’t need readouts in front of him to know they were losing altitude in a sharply slanted dive with only a few hundred meters to a very hard landing. He braced for a crash, tried to think of something nice, like Del’s kiss maybe. It had been a nice kiss. And he did rather enjoy applying the palm patch to her thigh, and . . .

  He had no sense of time. He’d been in the dark so long that time no longer mattered. At least someone had shaved off his beard and cut off the matted, lice-­infested, shoulder-­length hair, though he still had about a two-­day growth of beard. Oh, but his face hurt. And his leg hurt, and his arm hurt, and his ribs hurt.

  First the arm, his left arm. He explored it carefully with his right hand. It was crudely splinted, so it must be broken. The realization struck him that he wore no manacles, and he was no longer on the chain with his comrades.

  He was lying on his side so he struggled to a sitting position. His right leg throbbed painfully. He found that the leg of his trousers had been torn away, and in the dark he could feel a line of crude stitches running up the calf about six inches long. Next he carefully explored his face. The right side was oddly misshapen, and he guessed that his cheek and the orbit of his eye had been shattered. Also surrounding the damage were a number of deep gashes that had been crudely stitched up.

  He needed to urinate badly and stood carefully, trying to put as little weight as possible on his right leg. He explored the limits of his cell by touch, and in the dark he had to forcibly remind himself that he wasn’t in a Syndonese prison camp. That was his past. Then again, perhaps it was also his future.

  His cell measured about three paces by two, with a locked door on one end, a cot on one side, and a bucket in the corner for sanitary facilities. He urinated in the bucket, returned to the cot and lay down.

  “Up with you.”

  They’d turned on the lights in his cell, and after the dark it was blinding. Four Syndonese uniforms entered his cell.

  “Up with you, I said.”

  Charlie tried to sit up, but apparently he didn’t move fast enough. They lifted him to his feet, slammed him face-­on into a wall, cuffed his hands behind his back—­an excruciating process with a splinted arm—­then tossed him out of the cell. He landed on his side in the corridor. The sergeant in charge jammed the butt of a rifle with choking force into his throat. “You walk. We ain’t carrying you. We have to carry you, you pay for it.” Charlie struggled to his feet, and with him limping badly they marched away.

  It quickly became evident they were in the palace. Servants scurried out of their way as they marched to some unknown destination. They passed one wall blown away by explosives, but other than that he saw few signs of the recent fight. Then they entered halls he recognized; they were headed for the great throne room.

  The massive doors at the entrance to the hall still showed considerable damage, but with that one exception, the great hall appeared fully restored, and filled again with the nobility of the Realm. His guards halted him at the threshold while the sergeant marched forward. Charlie saw Lucius seated on his throne, Goutain standing at his right hand, Adsin at his left, and from that distance he could just hear the sergeant announce, “We brought the prisoner, Your Excellency.”

  Lucius looked to Goutain, who nodded his approval, so Lucius said, “Bring the man forward.”

  The sergeant hesitated and waited for Goutain to nod his approval, then he turned about and marched the length of the hall. He rejoined Charlie and the other three and hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Let’s go,” he growled, and spun about.

  There had been a noisy undercurrent to the crowd, the kind of buzz impossible to quiet when that many ­people assembled in one place. But a breathless, fearful silence descended upon them as Charlie and his guards crossed the threshold of the great doors and marched up the center of the hall. The only sounds were the thud of his guard’s boots on the floor, and the scrape of his own uneven, limping shuffle. They halted at the base of the dais, and his guards separated, flanking him.

  He noticed that Nadama, Band, and Telka sat in the ducal gallery, and it was clear they were not happy about the situation. Obviously, their ships had been unable to outrun the Syndonese strike force. He wondered how many others had been unable to do so, or were now just radioactive vapor somewhere between the stars.

  “Yes, Commander,” Goutain said, looking at the three seated in the ducal gallery. “You did not thwart me.”

  Charlie looked at Goutain, saw in his eyes that he was going to die, though not this moment. “Three of the Nine, and none of their heirs, and I don’t see Delilah or Martino. I’d say I thwarted you rather nicely.” Goutain flinched; he’d struck a nerve.

  The sergeant clubbed Charlie in the back with his rifle butt and he went down. He lay on the floor for a moment, gasping for breath and letting th
e pain recede. His guards pulled him back to his feet.

  “Your Majesty,” Goutain said.

  Lucius looked drawn and confused. “Yes, of course. Adsin, read the charges.”

  Adsin stepped forward, and he didn’t seem in the least perturbed that Goutain had taken charge. Charlie realized then that the little shit had probably double-­crossed Lucius as well. Adsin flourished some sort of document and read from it. “Commander Charles Cass, you have been charged with high treason, in that you did break the king’s law by conspiring to locate armed troops on the grounds of the Almsburg Palace, and that you did conspire to violate Turnlee nearspace with armed vessels without His Majesty’s permission. His Majesty, in council, has reviewed the matter in detail, and has found you guilty. You are hereby sentenced to death, and remanded to the custody of the Viceroy of Aagerbanne, the sentence to be carried out at his leisure and by any means he so chooses.”

  Goutain called, “Dr. Carallo, come forward.”

  A young Syndonese officer stepped out of the crowd, climbed a few steps toward the throne, halted, and saluted smartly.

  “I’m putting Dr. Carallo in charge of you, Cass. It’ll be his job to keep you alive, no matter how much pain and damage you suffer. And he’ll do a good job of that. You see, his recently deceased father was the commandant of one of the prison camps that you managed to survive. So Dr. Carallo knows firsthand the price of failing me. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

  “And what would I say?” Charlie asked, the words coming out distorted by the damage to his face. He had nothing to lose. Goutain was going to kill him no matter what, and not pleasantly. His one hope was to goad him into losing control and killing him quickly now. “That this is a farce? Everyone already knows it’s a farce: the ­people around me, your own men, this pathetic fool of a king—­”