by David Weber
But according to Mota, who was the single bridge-crew survivor of the battle, all of the men who’d actually met their employers had died at Secour. Now, five years after the debacle, the interrogators still occasionally pulled Mota out of his cell for a chat, but they’d given up any real hope that their prisoner knew anything.
Fortunately for Llyn, Haven’s failure was his own golden opportunity.
No one hired pirates to steal a couple of heavy warships, not unless he had some pressing need for that kind of firepower. The Secour debacle wouldn’t have alleviated that need, and it had occurred to Llyn that the would-be warlord’s logical next step would be to look for a piratelike mercenary gang whose own ships could be used for whatever task he’d planned for his missing prizes.
Which, by a happy coincidence, was exactly the kind of mercenary gang Llyn wanted to hire.
And not just Llyn. Other agents were spread all across the civilized galaxy, trying their own approaches to the problem. Some were poking around dark corners of the Solarian League. Others were backtracking through the aftermath of unexplained military action. Still others were sifting through the records of the more legit merc groups, looking for defectors who might have gone into business for themselves.
Lying back on his bunk, closing his eyes, Llyn replayed the scene over again in his mind. Mota waking up abruptly to find an unknown person in his cell. Mota attempting to call for help, but already fading from the drug Llyn had administered in the man’s sleep. Mota falling into the hypnotic state where his memory would be more open to discovery.
The Havenites had already used drugs like this, of course. Their problem was that they hadn’t asked the right questions.
So Llyn had passed up all the obvious ones: name, age, home planet. He’d skipped the standard logistical stuff, too: the pirates’ home base, suppliers, previous jobs. The Havenites had asked all of those, and had gotten mostly useless answers for their trouble. Llyn’s hacker contact in Nouveau Paris had snagged him a copy of the official report, which he’d read thoroughly and tucked away for possible future reference.
Mota knew something important. Llyn was convinced of that. The trick was that the man didn’t know he knew it.
And so, he’d asked all the questions the Havenites hadn’t.
Who was with Guzarwan when he went to make the original deal?
What planets, systems, or cities did any of these men reference during the months of training and preparation for the job?
What odd or offhanded comment did any of these men make during prep?
What jokes did any of these men make during prep?
What vids did any of these men watch or comment on during prep?
What music did any of these men listen to during prep?
It was on that last one that Llyn finally hit the clue he’d been looking for. It seemed that Dhotrumi, Mota’s fellow system hacker, had taken to humming a particular tune, but only when Guzarwan barged into their work room to check on their progress. The tune seemed to annoy Guzarwan, and after a few repeats of that particular interplay Mota had asked Dhotrumi about it.
But Dhotrumi had merely given a wink and a knowing smile and assured Mota that it would become clear after they finished the job. Mota had accepted that explanation, and they’d gotten back to work.
A few months later, the job had gone sideways, Dhotrumi and Guzarwan and most of the rest of the pirates had been killed, and Mota himself suddenly had more pressing matters on his mind than a private joke between two dead men. The Havenites had grabbed him, hauled him back to his new four-by-four-meter home, and the tiny musical mystery had disappeared into the far reaches of his brain.
Until Llyn had arrived and dug it out.
The freighter Soleil Azur, with Llyn as one of its eight paying passengers, had left Haven on its great circle route around the various regional ports only a few hours after he slipped back out of the prison. The close timing was deliberate, of course—there was no way for Llyn to keep his nighttime prison incursion from eventually being discovered, and he needed to make sure he was off-world before the authorities could organize an investigation and search.
But those few hours had been enough. With the aid of a melody search engine and Haven’s vast cultural database, he’d been able to identify the tune as part of an old ballad called Bound for the Promised Land.
The title wasn’t especially helpful. But the first two lines were:
On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand and cast a wishful eye
To Canaan’s fair and happy land, where my possessions lie.
Canaan.
It was an obscure world, in a group of equally obscure systems loosely clustered between the Solarian League and the Haven Sector. But as with many out-of-the-way nations on pre-Diaspora Earth, and other star nations since that time, anonymity hadn’t translated to peace and quiet. Instead, living in the shadows had led to despotism and subjugation.
Canaan’s experience had been a particularly brutal one. The world had been taken over thirty T-years ago by a military junta, which had been itself overthrown by a popular movement secretly organized by one of its own generals, a man named Khetha. Once firmly in power, Khetha had proclaimed himself to be the Supreme Chosen One and settled into absolute rule.
Four years ago, that rule had come to a sudden and violent end. The people of Canaan had overthrown his government, and Khetha and a small group of his inner circle had beaten a hasty retreat off-planet.
For a couple of years afterward Khetha had tried playing the role of legitimate and wrongly-ousted government leader, first with a couple of League planets and then with Haven, hoping they would force the new Canaanite government to reinstate him.
But no one had been interested in assisting with his counter-coup. Eventually, Khetha and his entourage had given up the effort and settled down into an unobtrusive and sulking role as government-in-exile.
In Quechua City. Right in the middle of the Cascan capital.
The very next stop on Soleil Azur’s route.
Llyn hadn’t expected things to work out nearly so neatly. His plan had been to ride Soleil Azur to its first major port, get off, and wait for the next freighter heading in whatever direction his interrogation of Mota had indicated. It would have meant months of idleness waiting for freighters or perhaps an occasional passenger liner, plus more months of travel. But after the five T-years that had already been spent moving this operation forward, a few more months wouldn’t have made much of a difference.
Now, thanks to good luck and perhaps the only local government with the kind of “live and let live” cultural ethos that would let Khetha settle on its soil without also putting him under full-press official observation, Llyn was suddenly ahead of the game. Unexpectedly but gratifyingly ahead. The odds against his getaway ship just happening to be bound for his ultimate destination were so astronomical that they wouldn’t even have been worth the trouble to calculate.
Sometimes, he mused, the universe went out of its way to be helpful.
He smiled at the ceiling of his tiny cabin. Bound for Casca. Bound for the Promised Land.
I’m bound for the Promised Land…
The Promised Land wasn’t Casca, of course. From a born-and-bred Solarian’s point of view, Casca was little more than a fly speck on the back end of nowhere.
But it was on the road to that Promised Land. To a land of milk and honey.
To the Star Kingdom of Manticore.
Three worlds. A triple fly speck, from the League’s point of view.
Only the League was wrong. Five T-years ago, researchers from the megacorporation Axelrod of Terra had stumbled on the groundshattering possibility that there was a wormhole junction somewhere in the Manticore system. Axelrod had immediately launched a twin-pronged Black-Dagger-classified operation, with the researchers continuing to dig into the data while Llyn and his associates laid the groundwork for a move on the Star Kingdom should the junction prove to be real.
The l
ast report, which had arrived on Haven just prior to Llyn’s infiltration of Mota’s prison cell, had included new modeling that had raised the likelihood of the junction’s existence to nearly eighty percent.
Unless that tentative conclusion somehow went off the rails in the next couple of years, the men and women at the uppermost pinnacle of Axelrod’s power would make the decision to take over Manticore’s three worlds.
It wouldn’t be easy. The Star Kingdom boasted a far more powerful navy than a colony system that size had any business having. It would take an equally powerful force to win out over it; and, moreover, a force that couldn’t be traced back to Axelrod.
Such backtracking would come later, of course, after the junction’s existence had been announced. Fortunately, the machinery for muddying that particular puddle of water was already in motion. While Llyn hunted for a merc group to do the initial heavy lifting, other agents were quietly assessing various star nations with an eye toward bringing in one of them as Manticore’s “official” conquerors. Once the Manticoran military forces had been defeated, that nation would assume control of the Star Kingdom, more or less legitimately as far as the rest of the galaxy was concerned. When the wormhole junction was subsequently “discovered,” the figurehead government would call in Axelrod as “consultants,” and the future would be in Axelrod’s hands.
But the first crucial step along that path was Llyn’s.
Hiring a mercenary group was relatively easy. Hiring one that was willing to play fast and loose with established rules of warfare was tricky. Finding one he could hire without leaving any tracks behind was trickier still.
But that was fine. Tricky was Llyn’s specialty.
The intercom in his cabin gave a soft chime, signaling to the passengers and crew alike that the evening meal was ready in the ship’s mess room.
Llyn wrinkled his nose. The food aboard Soleil Azur was bland and uninspired, as was only to be expected from a no-nonsense working freighter. The passengers, mostly industrialists, low-level government officials, and high-level sales agents, were for the most part equally bland and uninteresting.
Nevertheless, Llyn had looked forward to their times together over the past few months of travel. He would eat with them, talk with them, and laugh with them.
But mostly, he would listen to them. Very, very closely.
Because knowledge was power. And one could never predict where and when those nuggets of power would be found.
Getting to his feet, snaring his dinner jacket from its hanger, Llyn headed out into the corridor.
CHAPTER FOUR
Damocles was settling into orbit over Casca when the roster of those who would be joining Captain Marcello in the first shuttle came through.
Tactical Officer Lisa Donnelly’s name was third on the list, right behind the captain himself and Executive Officer Susan Shiflett.
Lisa smiled, hoping the smile wasn’t big enough or gloating enough for the rest of the bridge crew to notice and resent. It wasn’t like anyone was getting cabin fever, after all—sixty-three days in hyper hadn’t exactly been a burden on the crew’s collective psyche. Certainly not when compared to the three and a half months it had taken Guardian to reach Secour on Lisa’s first trip outside Manticoran space.
But this trip was different. At Secour, Lisa and the rest of the crew had spent the entire time in orbit, never making it down to Marienbad proper. She’d never heard an official reason why none of the Manticoran contingent had been allowed ashore, but rumor had it that the local government had been so thoroughly outraged with the events that had taken place above their world that they’d issued a flat no-landing policy.
But here, things were going to be different. Here, she was going to actually walk in a foreign city under an alien sun.
And she was going to be one of the very first of those aboard Damocles to do so.
She could hardly wait.
It was a feeling that was probably shared all through the ship. Certainly it was being felt beside her. “Congratulations, Ma’am,” Chief Petty Officer MacNiven murmured from the helm station to her left.
“Thank you,” Lisa murmured back, noting with a mild twinge of guilt that MacNiven himself wasn’t on the list.
But that had been how Marcello had set this whole thing up. Commander Pappadakis, Damocles’s engineering officer, wanted to tear down Life Support Two, which had developed a minor scrubber glitch en route to Casca, and he was the sort who objected to the very notion of grass growing under his feet. He would be staying aboard to oversee the operation, which neatly covered the Regs requirement that a senior officer remain aboard at all times. With the legalities—along with plain simple common sense—satisfied, the captain had thrown the rest of the crew into a lottery, giving each of them an equal chance to be aboard the first shuttle to land on Cascan soil.
Lisa had always liked and respected Marcello as commanding officer. This kind of foresight and sense of fair play just made her like him a bit more.
“TO?”
Lisa straightened to attention and swiveled around. “Yes, Sir?”
Marcello was eyeing her, his lips curving with that faint smile that always made her feel like he was reading her mind and liking what he saw in there. “Don’t just sit there,” he admonished mildly. “You saw the list. Go get yourself ready to feel real gravity again.”
“Yes, Sir,” she said. “I was just waiting until Goldenrod made it to her final orbital attitude.”
“Goldenrod is perfectly capable of handling that herself,” Marcello said. “Go, Commander. That’s an order.”
“Yes, Sir,” she said, returning his smile. Unstrapping from her station, she grabbed the handhold on the back of her seat and launched herself through the bridge’s zero-gee toward the aft hatch.
“That’s full dress uniform,” Marcello called a reminder after her. “Let’s show the Cascans how it’s done.”
Twenty minutes later, the shuttle dropped away from Damocles and headed toward the blue-green planet below.
Packed to the gills with the best-dressed group of officers and ratings Lisa had ever seen outside of a parade ground. Dress uniforms, with buttons gleaming and impressive rows of “fruit salad” medal ribbons, as far as the eye could see.
Having served with most of these men and women for the past T-year or more, she’d had no idea that some of them cleaned up this good.
“I just hope they know how to behave themselves,” Captain Marcello murmured from the seat beside her.
Lisa smiled. For some officers she’d served with, appearance was everything, with style at the top of the list and results a distant second. Other officers barely cared that they even had formal wear. Marcello fell somewhere in the middle: perfectly able to cut a respectable profile if he needed to, but more focused on making sure his ship and crew functioned to their fullest abilities. “They will,” she assured him. “The XO and bosun beat it pretty bone-deep over the past few days.”
“Good,” Marcello said. “I have to say, I was a little concerned that the delay in our departure from Manticore would cause us to miss Soleil Azur. Glad we didn’t.”
Lisa felt her forehead crease. She knew perfectly well that Soleil Azur was still here. She’d been on Damocles’s bridge when CIC made contact with the Havenite freighter, confirmed it was indeed the ship that had brought Haven’s current pirate data to Casca, and relayed that information to the captain. For Marcello to bring that up now, barely ten hours later, seemed a bit odd.
Was the captain actually trying to make small talk? With her?
“Were we planning to meet with anyone aboard?” she asked, aware that the question wasn’t really small talk but not sure how she was supposed to continue her end of the conversation.
“I’m assuming not,” Marcello said. “Haven’s usual pattern has been to send just the data, without any analysts or couriers riding herd.” He cleared his throat. “Speaking of analysts, is there a reason why Townsend has brought a personal with
him?”
Lisa blinked. Personal computers were midway between the ubiquitous tablets that everyone aboard used and Damocles’s heavy-duty central net, with its slightly less ubiquitous collection of terminals scattered across the ship. Why Townsend would bother lugging something like that around on shore leave she couldn’t imagine. “No reason that I know of,” she told the captain. “In fact, no reason I can even think of.”
“There’s at least one,” he said, his voice going a little darker. “A couple of years ago, when Pegasus made its show-the-flag trip to Suchien, one of the ratings slipped a personal out of the ship and tried to sell it to one of the local computer companies.”
Lisa stared at him. “I never heard anything about that.”
“That’s because Cazenestro made sure the whole thing was hushed up,” Marcello told her. “The company was smart enough—or paranoid enough—to pass on the deal, even though it would have given them a nice leg up on their local competition. They also blew the whistle on him, and the CO and XO were waiting when he got back to his shuttle.”
“I assume he was charged with theft?”
“And a couple of other things,” Marcello said. “My point is we don’t want to see any Naval equipment try to grow legs here and now.”
“Yes, of course,” Lisa murmured, mentally pulling up everything she knew about Townsend.
There wasn’t a lot in there, she realized. Charles Townsend was a petty officer first class, who’d transferred aboard Damocles barely three months ago, right before they shipped out for Casca. By all accounts he worked well with superiors and subordinates alike. He had a somewhat raucous sense of humor, but he seemed to have it mostly under control and knew where the invisible lines were drawn.
The only exception to that rule—and the only black spot on Townsend’s record aboard Damocles—had come from a newly minted ensign who had written up Townsend six days into the voyage up for insulting him to his face. Unfortunately for the outraged junior officer, the XO’s subsequent investigation had concluded that what Townsend said and what the ensign heard were two entirely different things.
