“I …” Shulkin said.
“Captain,” Maggs said, leaning in close as if he were whispering into Shulkin’s ear. “I believe the commander has given you an order. Your superior, sir. He’s a superior officer.”
“An … order,” Shulkin said. He swallowed—his whole neck distending and then relaxing, as if he were a snake who’d swallowed a poisoned rat. “Orders. You—you—”
He couldn’t seem to finish the thought. Instead, he looked down at his own hands.
Then he turned his pistol around, until he was holding it by the barrel. For a moment he stroked its shiny metal surface. Bullam thought he might put it in his mouth and blow his own head off.
“Sir,” Shulkin said. He handed the pistol to Lanoe, who took it and shoved it into a pouch on the front of his suit. “Sir. The bridge is yours.”
The marines flooded into the bridge then, swarming around Bullam, shoving her up against a wall, binding her hands with plastic that tore into her wrists. They shouted and fired a couple more shots as they secured the bridge crew, as they pulled the dagger out of Maggs’s unresisting hand, and someone smacked Shulkin across the temple with the butt of a rifle, which just made his eyes flutter and his nasty grin come back, made him cackle in mad joy, so they did it again, and again, but he wouldn’t stop laughing.
Chapter Seven
Valk did not have a head. He did not have a body, outside of the suit he’d worn since he was created. He didn’t have eyes—instead he had cameras built into the suit, cameras that allowed him three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision. He could see how crowded the wardroom had become. Bury and Ginger were there, close together right behind him. The marines who had not gone on the boarding mission and the three enlisted neddies were crowded around the room, perched wherever they could find space. Paniet floated directly in front of Valk, his legs tucked up into a zero-gravity lotus position.
“Are you sure everybody should be up here?” Valk asked. “Instead of, you know, at their battle stations?”
Paniet snorted. “As hilarious as I find the fact, ducky, I’m the ranking officer on this tub right now. Until Lieutenant Candless gets back, what I say goes. And I say everyone has a right to see this.”
“Okay,” Valk said. “Coming up on Caina now—we’re about ten thousand kilometers out, still, but we should be able to see them.”
On the main display the image of the protocomet expanded until white light washed out all the stars. Valk could see the new crater down there, its edges sharp and shiny. One of his copied selves was buried down there.
He found, with slight surprise, that the thought didn’t bother him.
“Look, there,” Bury said, pointing. He’d indicated a shadow moving across the surface, little more than a blip. Just big enough that they could make out its furry edges. A second, identical shadow moved into view just behind and to the left of the first.
“I really hope Lanoe’s transmission was accurate,” Paniet said. “Otherwise it’s the devil himself to pay.”
“Lanoe knows what he’s doing,” Valk said.
“You would think that,” Paniet replied. The engineer didn’t look at Valk directly. Instead he glanced up at a camera mounted in the ceiling. He must know that Valk could see through that one, too. Paniet gave the camera a wry look, his mouth twisted over to one side.
Valk had no idea what that was supposed to mean.
“I’ll step up the magnification,” Valk said.
On the main display the two shadows grew until actual details could be made out. The twin destroyers were revealed in all their wicked glory—long, thin ships so covered with guns and missile packs and thrusters that you couldn’t even see their viewports, or any sign at all that there were people onboard.
The cruiser was well inside the range of the destroyers’ missiles now, and drifting closer every second. Valk would never have dared to get so close if Lanoe hadn’t insisted it was safe. Still, he worked up a series of calculations as to how he would run for deep space if the destroyers showed any sign of aggression.
For the moment, at least, they were quiescent. “I’m scanning their guns … looks like all their weapons are cold. I’m pinging them now to establish a datalink. Getting good telemetry and sensor data. They’re making no attempt to keep me out of their systems.”
Paniet nodded. “Let’s all be good sports, now. Take us in closer, as a sign of good faith. Where’s Lieutenant Candless?”
“Inbound now, with my four cataphracts,” Valk said. He could hear his other selves whispering in the dark, feeding him data and logs of everything they’d done while they were away. Reminding him of the promise he’d made them, that as soon as they returned he would erase them, delete them thoroughly. “She said she wanted to stay outside until we were sure about this.”
“Understood,” Paniet said. “Distance?”
“We’re nine thousand kilometers out,” Valk told him. “Closing the gap.”
The cruiser’s engines powered up and Valk accelerated toward the protocomet, ramping up the power so gently that Paniet merely settled to the floor, rather than falling out of the air. The engineer didn’t seem surprised by the return of gravity. “Eight thousand kilometers,” Valk said. A minute ticked by. “Six.”
“Close enough,” Paniet told him. “Send a request to speak with the commander of one of them.”
“Which one?”
“It doesn’t matter. Surprise me, love,” Paniet said.
There was no delay in establishing the connection—the destroyers must have been waiting for the request. “They’re receiving,” Valk told the engineer.
Paniet nodded and jumped up to his feet. “My name is Hassan Paniet, a lieutenant of the Naval Engineering Division. I am the acting captain of the Hoplite-class cruiser in orbit above you. May I ask whom I am addressing?”
“Oritt Batygin here,” the reply came. The connection was audio only, the quality stepped down until the destroyer captain’s voice sounded tinny and distant. It was possible, on an open connection like this, to send signals that could kill or incapacitate anyone who listened to them—earworms and hypnodelic pulses. Valk wasn’t taking any chances. He’d intentionally kept the connection quality poor to rule out such things.
“Well, M. Batygin, it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Paniet said. “I’d like to say that you and your compatriots gave us quite a run for our money. You fought admirably and you have the respect of the Navy of Earth.”
Batygin laughed. “That’s very kind of you,” he replied. “And may I say, you got extremely lucky. There is no way you should have survived all we threw at you.”
“Oh, don’t I know it,” Paniet said. “There were times there when I started designing my own coffin in my head, because I was sure I would need one. Well. Glad we can put all of that behind us. I’m sure we’ll all be great friends from now on. Hmm?”
“That’s … one way of describing the current state of play,” Batygin responded.
“So let’s make it official,” Paniet told him. “Will you do the honors?”
“One moment,” Batygin said.
Paniet drew a finger across his throat. Valk muted the connection.
“This is the part,” Paniet said, “where we find out if Lanoe actually does live up to his legend.” He craned his head around and looked at the crowd gathered in the wardroom. “You all might take a moment to brace yourselves.”
On the display, the two destroyers moved closer together, pulling into a standard maneuvering formation. Then, almost in unison, they began to display a string of lights all along their lengths, from nose to engines. An unbroken line of white lamps.
“Back during basic training,” Paniet said, “I might have slept through the class on visual signaling. Can someone remind me what that means?”
It was Bury who answered. “A string of white lights means unconditional surrender,” the kid said.
A cheer went up in the wardroom, and great whoops of joy. Valk raised
one arm over his head and waved it in a simulacrum of jubilation.
Maggs’s hands were bound behind his back and someone pulled a sack over his helmet. He could see nothing, hear nothing but meaningless shouts as he was pushed down a corridor. He could feel himself flying, and had a vague sense of hard walls all around him, but couldn’t see anything but the little light that came through the sack. They could be throwing him headfirst down the longest corridor on the carrier and he would have no way of knowing until he collided with the far end.
He refused to scream. He refused to beg for mercy.
Mostly because he knew that with this bunch, that was likely to elicit nothing but peals of mocking laughter.
Maggsy, you’ve been in some hot water in your time, but—
Father, Maggs told the voice in his head, with all due filial respect, shut up or go to the devil. The choice is yours.
Rough hands caught him and shoved him sideways. He was moved now left, now straight, now right.
At one point, with no warning, a fist smashed into his midsection. Even through the layers of his suit he felt like he’d been hit with a hammer. The breath exploded out of him, fogging his helmet, and stars burst behind his eyes.
Eventually he was shoved through some kind of a hatch and then strapped down into a chair. He could hear other people being given the same treatment, though to his ears it sounded like they were having a gentler time of it. There was a long time when he was left with nothing but his thoughts.
He found very little consolation there.
He felt motion—the return of some measure of gravity. He must be on a vehicle of some kind, a ship. His destination, and his fate when he should arrive there, was as great and profound a mystery as the question of what lay outside the bound of the universe.
Even with the sack over his head, he endeavored to maintain the stiff upper lip. He had to admit—if only to himself—that he was not completely successful.
“Maggs,” someone said. Just a whisper. He thought perhaps it sounded like Ashlay Bullam. “Maggs. Can you speak?”
“It is the one faculty that remains mine to use,” he said, speaking as softly as she.
“What are they going to do to us? Where are we going?”
He spent a moment thinking of how to answer. He could be kind and lie, but that seemed entirely pointless, and it was unlikely a woman like Bullam would appreciate being cozened at this particular pass. He considered that what he was about to say might be his final words, and he pondered on some line of poesy, some grandiloquent oration that would cement his place in the annals of myth. Then he realized that there was no one there to record what he said. Even if there were, true eloquence would be utterly lost in the vacuous well that was the mind of the average Poor Bloody Marine.
No, in the end, he was forced to fall back on his least favorite rhetorical strategy. He settled on speaking the absolute, unvarnished truth.
“They’re going to take us somewhere undignified and then they’re going to execute us, one by one. We’re going to the firing squad,” he told her.
“M. Valk, are you receiving my transmission?”
Valk was more than capable of paying attention to more than one thing at a time. He partitioned a section of his consciousness to respond to Candless, who had granted him access to the sensors built into her suit.
“Yeah, I’ve got visual and audio,” he told her. It was a little odd, looking at things from her perspective, but nothing he hadn’t done before. Currently she was in the cockpit of her fighter, orbiting Caina just a few hundred meters from one of the destroyers. As he watched, she lowered her canopy and pushed her way out of her seat, gliding over toward the main hatch of the enemy ship. Former enemy ship, he reminded himself.
“It falls on me to perform an inspection of our new allies,” Candless told him. “Do me the favor, if you will, of scanning them for explosives or informational hazards.”
“Got it.” Twelve people in suits were floating just outside the destroyer. The entire crew of the ship. “I’m showing the captain, the pilot, and ten gunners,” Valk said. He pinged their cryptabs—small data plaques on the fronts of their suits that contained their service records and vital statistics. “All but a couple of them have Navy records,” he told her. “Two of the gunners are just Centrocor militia.”
“Explosives?” she asked. “Informational hazards? Or did you forget?”
Candless appreciated precision and thoroughness. She and Valk had never got along, but he’d developed a real respect for her. “No, I already did the scan. I would have told you if I found anything. Promise.”
One of the destroyer’s crew—the captain—moved forward on tiny puffs of gas from his suit jets. He lifted his hands in a gesture of peace, but Valk could feel Candless edging her hand down toward the sidearm she kept at her hip.
“Rhys Batygin,” he said, introducing himself. Valk had already gotten the name from the man’s cryptab. “Let me be the first to welcome you aboard, Lieutenant.”
“I imagine you might wish it was under different circumstances,” she said.
Batygin laughed. “I’m still alive. I haven’t been put down like a mad dog. I’d say things are working out for me and my brother.”
“One might be forgiven,” Candless said, “for expecting a more bitter reaction. Even a vengeful one.”
“Of course,” Batygin told her. “Yet I think you’ll find us good losers. Really, we aren’t much concerned with who commands us—Centrocor, the Navy.” He fluttered one hand dismissively. “It’s flying and fighting we love, not politics.”
Hellfire, Valk thought. Officers sure do like to talk fancy to each other.
Tannis Valk, the man whose memories Valk carried, had never been a big believer in putting on airs.
There was something wrong with the man’s eyes. Valk checked his biometrics. “You should know this guy is scared,” Valk told Candless. “He’s trying to hide it, but his heart rate is really high, and he’s sweating profusely. The drugs in his system probably aren’t helping. He’s terrified of what you’re going to do to him. What in the devil’s name did Lanoe get up to over on the carrier?”
Candless did not answer his question. “I’ll need to take a look inside,” she said to the Batygin. “I would apologize for violating your privacy, if the necessity wasn’t manifestly obvious.”
“I understand. Please, be my guest,” Batygin told her.
Candless jetted over to the main hatch and wriggled inside. For a moment Valk could see nothing but a shadowy bulkhead and the edge of a hatch—the airlock was a tight enough squeeze that Candless’s cameras were pressed up against the walls. She cycled the lock and moved inside, into the ship.
“This’ll be interesting,” Valk told her. “I’ve never seen the inside of a Peltast-class destroyer before.”
“I doubt it will impress you,” Candless said. The airlock was located near the aft end of the ship, back in the engine shielding. She glanced quickly at the engineering section, which amounted to a single cramped workstation. “Valk, I’m relying on you here. If there are any booby traps you’re likely to notice them before I do. In fact, I’m only likely to notice them at all if I trigger them. Please keep your eyes open.” She paused for a moment. “I meant that metaphorically, of course.”
“Got it,” Valk said.
She moved forward through a narrow corridor lined with utilitarian bunks—six of them in total. Although the destroyer was a hundred meters long, so much of its mass was taken up by overpowered engines and piles of ship-to-ship guns and weapon systems that there wasn’t a lot of room left for the crew. There was no wardroom, or any kind of common space. Only half the crew could sleep at a given time, so they would have to do it in shifts. “Hotbedding,” they called it. Valk remembered the practice—with no fondness whatsoever—from his own days as a pilot.
“Are you seeing anything that should concern me?” Candless asked.
“Only that I don’t ever want to crew one
of these things,” Valk said. “Back at Niraya, we had a Peryton-class fighter tender. Twenty meters long and it was roomier than this.” Missions aboard destroyers could last for months. You would have to really like your fellow crew members or life on the ship would quickly get hellish.
“Be glad,” Candless said, “that you don’t have to experience the smell.”
Valk activated a spectroscopic analyzer on the front of Candless’s suit. “I see what you mean. Lots of butyric acid and thioalcohols in the air.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Body odor,” he told her.
“Quite.” Candless moved forward through a passageway so narrow she had to go headfirst. It passed through a rank of canister-shaped gunnery pods—basically armored workstations where a gunner could operate several weapons systems simultaneously. The positions took up a huge amount of space, and they seemed completely unnecessary to Valk. Computers could run the guns much better than human beings, and take up a lot less room. The same law that forbade his very existence prohibited any computerized system to have access to weaponry, though, so the destroyer’s crew had to operate all the guns manually.
Up near the front of the destroyer the passageway widened a little and split off in two directions. There was no actual bridge. Instead there were a pair of awkwardly shaped workstations, separated by more of the armored pods. “One of those is for the pilot,” Valk guessed. “Where does everybody else sit?”
“The captain of the ship is also the information officer and the navigator,” Candless replied. “It takes a rather focused and talented person to captain a destroyer.”
“Or one who’s high on speed all the time,” Valk pointed out.
Candless did not favor that with a reply. Instead she sighed and poked her head into the pilot’s position. Took a quick look through the viewport, a narrow slit of carbonglas that currently showed a huge number of stars and one edge of Caina.
“There’s nothing here. This was a pointless exercise, of course,” she said.
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