“Something for your trouble?” Paul offered in the standard gesture of a tip.
Without a further word, the man stormed off and Paul slid the portal closed. He was surprised to realize he felt a little bad about the encounter. Offering a tip might have been just a bit too much.
He looked over at Ed, holding five glasses and staring at the bottle, now on the sideboard. He was about to tell him to get on with opening the bottle but realized, just in time, that a Marine lance-corporal would have no experience in extracting a cork.
He walked over to the sideboard, grabbed the corkscrew and opened the bottle. “Suppose I should have gone easier on the poor fool,” he muttered as he poured.
“Are you kidding me?” Sandy chuckled. “Even considering the room and the expensive booze, that was the highlight of the mission so far.” He nodded at the door. “I’ve had to serve under fools like that. It’s good to see one of ‘em put in their place for a change.”
Paul shrugged, raising the glass to take a drink. He looked up to see the four men, holding their glasses and staring at him. He shrugged a second time. “It’s ok,” he said. “One thing you learn if you drink enough of this stuff is that there’s no such thing as a bottle of wine that’s really worth more than a few hundred credits.
“The price difference is all in the marketing,” he insisted. He finally got a grip. He was probably ruining the moment for them, but then these were practical men, not given to gullibility. He could see from their expressions that they appreciated his honest explanation.
“So our plan for tonight,” he went on as they tried their drinks, “is to split up. I’ll do dinner in the Atrium, you lads split into pairs and pick a couple of first-class restaurants. Keep your ears open and spend some time at the bar. We probably won’t learn anything, but it never hurts to conduct a recon.”
“The four of us in first-class joints?” Ed looked dubious.
“Camouflage, Ed,” Paul replied. “It’s just another op, so put on an attitude the same way you’d put on a ghillie suit.” He waved his glass around, indicating the lavish suite. “I camouflage myself with foolishness like this on a daily basis.”
“Hell,” Sandy muttered. “I’d take this over a ghillie suit any day.”
“Speaking of camo…” Paul looked at the civilian clothing the four men had worn beneath their uniforms. “Purser’s office,” he ordered.
“Nin hao,” a cheery voice filled the room. “Purser’s office, Kyle speaking.”
“Nin hao, Kyle. This is Paul in the owner’s suite. I’d like four tailors sent up right away. I’m going to need my companions ready for dinner tonight.”
“Certainly, sir. Is there anything else you need?”
“No, that should be all, xiexie.” Paul broke the connection.
“What’s wrong with what we’re wearing?” Sandy demanded.
“Nothing at all if you think ‘first class’ means the falafel hut down on the promenade.” Paul drawled. “I need you to fit in on the upper decks. That means suits and it means some watches – nothing flashy, I think, something understated, discerning…”
“I understand the need for this… camouflage…” Ed assured him. “But what are we supposed to do with all this stuff when we get back to the 488? We don’t move in the kinds of circles where this stuff fits in.”
“Get your heads in the game, boys,” Paul advised. “Get comfortable in your camo and tell yourselves you’re officers. It’ll help if you can assume a persona you’re familiar with.”
He paused in thought for a few seconds then nodded to himself. “Help me pull Julius’ ass out of the fire and Hadrian himself will know your names. I wouldn’t be surprised if your next deployment sees you berthed up in officer country.”
By the time the Pulsar Intrepid broke umbilicals and slid away from the station, Paul had effected a surprising transformation in the four soldiers.
To their credit, they were highly intelligent and motivated individuals and they already possessed the confident swagger of men who’d learned to manage their fears.
It had really only required a few tweaks. Imperial Marines are among the most cosmopolitan citizens of the Imperium. Their deployments immerse them in an incredible variety of cultures. When they’d seen the fashionably exotic menus of the various shipboard restaurants, they realized they were probably more familiar with the food than most of the upper-class patrons.
An hour out from the first jump gate, the four Marines were good to go, perfectly comfortable in the outfits they jokingly referred to as ‘urban ghillie suits’.
“Eyes and ears open, boys,” Paul told them as he opened the portal. He grinned. “And try to have some fun.”
Meet and Greet
Paul approached the elevator to Carbon. It was listed in the ship’s systems as the premiere restaurant so it was no surprise to see a reception desk in front of the elevator door.
A slightly harassed clerk looked up, forcing a smile. “Good evening, sir.” He gestured to his screen. “Do you have a reservation?”
Paul detected the slightest emphasis on ‘you’ and assumed he’d just missed a scene. “No,” he replied, giving the clerk time to take a deep breath and then stifle the exasperated sigh that threatened to escape. “But I’m in the owner’s suite.”
The clerk brightened. “Ah, well that puts you at the captain’s table.” He glanced down at the screen. “Will your companions be joining you?”
“No, they’re exploring other venues tonight.”
“Very good, sir.” The clerk pressed a button and the elevator door slid open. “Enjoy your meal… you might find four troublesome guests up there, so I apologize in advance for any disturbance.”
When the door opened again, Paul was only slightly surprised to find the same noble he’d insulted talking to the maître d’hôtel. It looked like he was being stonewalled.
He must have bulled his way past the clerk downstairs but getting on the elevator and getting a seat in a hot restaurant were two very different things.
Paul caught a whiff of expensive cologne. His cranial processor identified several designer pheromones in the scent - illegal on most core worlds due to their aphrodisiac properties. Somebody was taking full advantage of the lax statutes of the Gliesan system. He looked to his right, following the source of the scent.
Three Marine officers, a major and two lieutenants, were waiting near the elevator door, looking like they’d like nothing better than to leave. Their Identification, Friend or Foe transponders identified them as serving in 538 MEF – Kinsey’s unit.
It was a double opportunity. Paul did feel slightly bad for the earlier insult, but he also wanted a chance to talk to the three officers. If they were on their way to the Gliese system, he might learn something useful.
Paul briskly walked past the distracted maître d’, not looking around at the restaurant, but simply picking a spot and heading straight for it. If you looked lost, some employee would inevitably intercept you. Once he was in the middle of the seating area, he took a quick look around.
The captain’s table was easy enough to spot. It was more or less centrally located and it had a man in a brilliant white uniform, heavy with gold brocade and a sash of rank that bore decorations from previous service in the Imperial Navy.
Paul walked over and slid into the introduction chair on the captain’s left side. The chair was a common fixture on passenger liners, saving the captain from the need to stand and greet passengers. It was bad enough he had to eat with his ‘cargo’ but nobody expected his meal to get cold while he socialized.
“Good evening, Captain. My name is Paul Grimm…”
“Captain Harold Williams.” the captain nodded politely. “I’ve been expecting your party for dinner. Always a pleasure to have one of our owners aboard.”
“A pleasure for the owner, perhaps,” Paul grinned, “but less so for the crew, I’m sure.”
The captain laughed. “You’ve behaved yourself so far, and y
ou’ve been tipping the crew — which seems a foreign concept to most of our owners.” He waved to a seat on his right. “I believe I can tolerate your company for an hour or two.”
“Speaking of company, Captain,” Paul spoke in a slightly more confidential tone, “there’s a gentleman I gave inadvertent offense to — I mistook him for a baggage steward when he showed up outside my door — and he’s over at the ‘front of house’ talking to your maître d’ right now…”
“And you’d like to use my table to make amends?” The captain glared at him. “How many?”
“One noble gentleman,” he explained, the inflection on ‘gentleman’ making it clear he was a man of relatively limited means for his class, “and three companions.”
“The gentleman is welcome,” the captain offered grudgingly, “but his sycophants will have to dine elsewhere. I’ll not have them licking his bum at my table; it ain’t sanitary.”
“Oh, they’re not sycophants, Captain. They’re Marines.”
“Teufelhunden, huh?” The captain grunted. “Well, that’s different. Might even be interesting.” He waved to the entrance. “Why don’t you convey my respects to the four gentlemen and ask them to join us for dinner?”
The noble had a slight sheen of perspiration on his forehead as Paul approached. Obviously, the negotiation for a table was not going well and he was starting to lose face in front of the three Marines.
Paul put a hand on the man’s shoulder and the noble turned to look at him. Before he could react to the man who’d taken him for a servant, Paul launched into an apology. “Terribly sorry for the mistake earlier, old boy,” he whispered. “Imagine my mortification when I discovered who you really were.”
He raised his voice just enough for the maître d’ to also hear. “I’ve told the captain you’re out here and he asked me to convey his respects and offer an invitation to his table.”
He caught the look of surprise on the man’s face as he started turning his head toward the three officers by the door.
“Your three companions as well, of course,” Paul added.
The noble looked back at Paul, still somewhat flustered. “Well, sir,” he managed, gruffly, “damned decent of you!”
Though the maître d’ hadn’t even noticed Paul until now, he didn’t think to question the confident interloper. He simply nodded his assent and stepped out of the way, glad to be rid of the drama.
Paul waved the men toward the captain’s table before leaning close to the maître d’. “What the hell is his name?” he whispered.
A chuckle. “Paronius Thatcher,” he whispered back.
Paul grimaced. “Sounds like something you catch from untreated water…” He caught up with the party as they arrived in front of the captain.
He gestured toward the noble. “Captain, allow me to present Paronius Thatcher and his party.”
They were all waved to their seats by the captain, just in time for the first course.
A well-dressed couple was seated next to the major and the wife turned to him as the first course was being cleared. “Major, why are you called Marines? I mean, it’s not as though you have anything to do with water, right?”
The major smiled politely but, before he could reply, the captain jumped in.
“It’s an acronym, my dear,” he exclaimed with glee.
The major rolled his eyes, ever so slightly.
“An acronym?” she asked.
“Indeed.” The captain set down his fork and a steward immediately whisked the small plate away. “It stands for ‘My Ass Rides In Navy Equipment’.”
The Marines smiled politely at the chuckles. The major turned to the young woman. “Actually, ma’am, it traces back to a time before the Empire, when naval battles were still fought on water. We’ve always been needed on ships. If they get boarded, you don’t want those poor, delicate little sailors getting a chipped nail…”
“Very true,” the captain conceded amid the laughter. “Fifteen years in the service and I’ve never had a ruined manicure!”
As the laughter increased, the major nodded to the captain, raising his wine glass in an informal salute.
“So what takes you to Irricana?” Paul asked Paronius.
The noble set down an empty glass and it was filled almost instantly by an attentive steward. “We’re actually on our way home,” he explained. “We were trying to convince the empty heads at CentCom to authorize a planetary blockade.”
“Against who?” the captain asked, his eyes wide with surprise.
“Not against, captain,” he corrected earnestly, “for. We need to cordon off the Gliese-667 worlds.” He leaned forward to look over at the captain. “You see, the only way we can starve the insurgents of new recruits is to stop them getting off-world in the first place.”
“Starve may be the only accurate word in that sentence,” the captain growled. “You do realize that a blockade means absolutely no ships are allowed to cross the gravity threshold? Those worlds are primarily minerals exporters. Without the off-world customers, they won’t have the money to buy food, not that it would matter much, with none coming in…”
One of the lieutenants accompanying Paronius waved a dismissive hand. “Economic shipping would have to continue, of course, but…”
“Blockades don’t work that way,” the captain cut him off forcefully. “There are three inhabited worlds in the system, meaning we’d have close to five Billion square kilometers of orbital space to watch. D’you really expect the Navy to board and search every vessel trying to pass through that much space?”
Paronius’ party was silent. Paul noticed that Paronius himself looked slightly surprised, as though nobody had bothered to explain the simple facts to him. How could the major traveling with him not grasp the logistical impracticality of a blockade? He certainly didn’t seem like an idiot.
“Simple mathematics,” Paul observed. “That much space takes thousands of ships to police, and that’s just for a complete shutdown. Anything tries to leave atmo… they destroy it.”
He leaned back, lifting his wine glass and gazing into the red liquid. “If you intend to board and search every single vessel…” He shook his head. “I’m afraid we’d have to strip every squadron on the Rim to get enough ships.” He looked back at Paronius.
“The Grand Senate would doubtless deem it too costly, assuming CentCom bothered to pass the suggestion along. Wage cost alone would cripple the plan. I doubt the Gliese-667 system could afford to pay a single squadron, let alone several entire fleets.”
He could see, out of the corner of his eye, a furtive glance from the major.
His implants let him read others like a book. Paronius’ heart-rate was fifteen percent above baseline and his face was growing darker by the minute but, though he usually found a confused noble unremarkable, this seemed a bit much.
Then the elements fell into place.
Paul resisted the urge to look over at the major. Whatever his official mission, the Marine officer was the real purpose for Paronius Thatcher’s voyage to home-world. Thatcher was simply too clueless to have been sent for any serious reason.
He was just window dressing.
Governor Balthazar must have been politely ignoring Paronius’ insistence on a blockade, writing it off as his idiot-brother’s typical nonsense.
But if Balthazar needed to coordinate something delicate, something he didn’t want picked up by Imperial monitors, he’d have to communicate via the old-fashioned Mark I data-storage-unit.
In this case, the major’s head.
Suddenly, a barely aristocratic dimwit with a half-baked idea would be just the ticket. His ill-advised plan provided the perfect cover. The major could spend a few hours watching the blockade plan being laughed out of CentCom and then he’d be free to meet with co-conspirators on home-world.
Paul was still no closer to identifying what they were up to, but he was at least starting to build the order-of-battle – military parlance for a chart identifyi
ng the enemy’s structure.
Paronius wouldn’t be sent off to home-world without the governor’s blessing, so Balthazar was involved. The major was almost certainly a go-between – he doubted the two junior officers would be trusted with information that could get senior officials executed.
He stored the facial patterns of the major and his two lieutenants in his cranial implant. When the ship crossed threshold at the Sumpter wormhole station, he’d be able to pull a real-time data query on them before the event horizon normalized.
“A bad business,” Captain Williams insisted, “starving your civilians. Especially when it has no effect on the secessionists. Creates resentment…”
“It would only be until we stopped them,” Paronius countered weakly.
Williams shook his head. “When you outlaw travel, only the outlaws will travel and you’ll have a damn sight more folks turning to the cause if you interfere with their livelihoods.”
“But we have to make an example,” the young lieutenant insisted, gamely coming to Paronius’ defense.
“Hardly the example you want to make.” The captain shook his head before leaning far forward to point at the hapless aristocrat. “It’s folk like your young Miss Urbica who’re making the right kind of example.”
Thatcher recoiled, both from the pointing hand and from the name invoked. “Her father needs to reel her in,” he declared. “It’s unseemly, staying in uniform so long after her demobilization option, and in a combat role? Ridiculous — she’s just a wisp of a girl with a Zhan-Dark complex!”
It was a common enough insult in the Imperium. Women who showed too much independence were labeled with it, even though nobody had any idea of its origins.
Any man who felt he was being upstaged by a woman was almost sure to use it, and Paul couldn’t help but feel the comment meant Thatcher felt inadequate where young Miss Urbica was concerned.
The aristocratic young woman leaned toward the major. “She’s a Marine, isn’t she?” She clearly didn’t care for Paronius Thatcher’s views and wanted to keep him squirming.
Rebels and Patriots (Imperium Cicernus Book 3) Page 4
