A Call to Duty

by David Weber

  “That’s all right,” Eigen said for all of them. “Please; lead on.”

  Henderson gestured to Flanders. “Commodore?”

  Flanders nodded and pushed off his handhold, sending himself floating aft after the three spacers. “Down past the lifts to the spin section modules we have another escape-pod cluster,” he said over his shoulder. “Aft of that is the hyper generator and its associated workshops.”

  The group followed. Settling in behind Eigen, Gill continued studying the design and equipment as they went, making mental notes of every detail.

  And idly dreaming of the shipyard he would someday be in charge of.

  “The shuttle from Saintonge has docked with Péridot,” Wanderer’s chief engineer called through the open bridge door. “Jalla? You get that?”

  “I got it,” Jalla called back, his own voice uncomfortably loud as it echoed from the clamp enclosure he had his face pressed against. Somewhere back there something was jammed.

  There it was. “Six centimeters farther back,” he ordered the man at the other end of the long crate. The other nodded and inserted the probe gingerly into the nearest gap.

  And with a click loud enough for Jalla to hear all the way at his end the clamp popped free. “That’s it,” Jalla said, pushing back from the enclosure with relief. Wanderer had just the one missile, and Guzarwan was pretty sure they would have to use it sometime tonight. It would be highly embarrassing, not to say probably fatal, if they couldn’t even get it out of its packing crate. “What are you all floating around for?” he growled at the other crewmen hovering around the cargo bay. “Get this thing out of its crate and into the launcher.” He craned his neck. “The launcher is ready, right?” he called.

  “Mostly, Chief,” a distant voice called back.

  “What the hell is mostly?” Jalla snarled. “Get it ready, or I’ll mostly kick your butt into next month. Move it.”

  He turned back to the crewmen scrambling over the crate. One single missile, paid for in blood, jealously hoarded for nearly six years against any temptation to spend it.

  Tonight that self-denial would end. Tonight, they would get to spend that missile.

  And in return, they would be leaving the system with warships. Warships loaded with all the missiles anyone could ever want.

  There was a loud thud as one of the men’s wrenches slipped off a bolt and bounced off the deck. “Watch it,” Jalla snapped. “You break it, I break you. Now, move it.”

  The disguised false-front compartments in the aft section of Wanderer’s shuttle were cramped and hot, with only a little ventilation and no light at all.

  Vachali hardly noticed. He was a professional, and he did whatever was necessary. Besides, he’d been in far worse settings throughout his violent life, facing far nastier enemies, and with far less reward beckoning from the other end of the tunnel.

  The wait was almost over. He was convinced of that. True, it had been over five hours since he and the others had closed themselves in their hidey-holes, just before the shuttle docked with Péridot and their great leader and pompous chatterjay Guzarwan headed in for the grand tour. And true, Vachali had been expecting to get the signal for the past hour. But it was surely almost time.

  And then, there it was: a small vibration on his wrist, silent and invisible.

  Time to go.

  The first step was to make sure that no one was loitering nearby in the shuttle’s cargo area. Vachali accomplished that with a slender fiber-op cable through an innocent-looking scratch in the door’s corner. It was barely possible that one of Péridot’s crewmen had wandered in, given that Guzarwan had deliberately left the shuttle’s hatch open to the docking port to show that he had nothing to hide. Unlikely, but still possible. And part of Vachali’s job was to ward off even unlikely events that could get him and his team killed.

  The area was clear. With Péridot’s transfer of ownership to the Cascans still going on, everyone aboard clearly had better things to do than poke around someone else’s shuttle.

  They would be regretting that lack of curiosity before the night was out.

  The hidden door was designed to open silently, and it did its job perfectly. Vachali floated out, making sure his concealed handgun was close at hand, and made his way to within view of the open hatch. From the passageways and compartments on the other side came the muted murmur of voices and machinery, but no one appeared to be nearby. Getting a grip on one of the handholds, he keyed his viber with the activation signal.

  The rest of his team had apparently been as bored and impatient for action as he had. Ninety seconds later, all fifty were gathered behind him, just out of view from the hatchway.

  “Shora?” Vachali murmured, not because he needed to confirm the other’s readiness but because it was traditional to touch base with the second-team commander before going into action.

  “Team ready,” Shora confirmed.

  Vachali nodded, his eyes flicking across the stolid faces and coiled-spring-ready bodies. They were certainly a colorful lot. Eleven were in vac suits, with bright-orange stripes to make them more visible in marginal lighting. Twenty wore Republic of Haven naval uniforms. The other nineteen, plus Vachali himself, were dressed in Cascan Defense Force outfits. The EVA team members had their hip pouches in place; the uniformed men had their bulkier kit cases floating at their sides. “EVA teams: go,” he ordered.

  Silently, the vac-suited men split into two groups and headed for the shuttle’s two side airlocks. “Com team, with me,” he continued. “The rest in twos: thirty seconds apart or as conditions warrant. Labroo, you have my case.”

  A moment later Vachali, Shora, Mota, and two of the others were swimming their way down the passageway toward the cozy little interior nest that housed Péridot’s bridge, CIC, and—most important of all at the moment—the ship’s communications center.

  If all went by the plan, Péridot would soon be theirs. If all didn’t go by the plan . . . well, the ship would still be theirs. It would just cost a lot more blood.

  The tour had been fascinating, but by the time the group gathered in the lifts heading down into Péridot’s Alpha Spin section Gill was ready to call it a night. His eyes were tired, his throat was scratchy with the slightly lower humidity the Havenites maintained on their ships, and his head was crammed to overflowing with all the mental notes he’d taken over the past few hours.

  On top of that, his muscles were on the edge of a general all-over ache. People who’d never experienced zero-gee, he knew, usually had a mental picture of floating around like wingless angels in effortless bliss, when in fact it was at least as strenuous as travel through a normal gravity field. None of the weight, all of the inertia, as one of his instructors used to say. Gill was definitely looking forward to giving his upper body a break while his legs did all the transport work for a change.

  Earlier that afternoon, he’d hoped they could take one of the two narrow ladderways down to the wardroom, on the theory that you could learn a lot about a ship’s designer by how he put together his ladders. Now, he was more than content to take the lift.

  From what Captain Eigen had said on the shuttle that morning, Gill had expected the gathering in Péridot’s wardroom to be a much smaller affair than Commander Metzger’s description of the previous night’s dinner. He was therefore somewhat surprised to find the wardroom, if not packed to the bulkheads, nevertheless comfortably crowded. Something over half of them were officers, in a mixed group of Havenite and Cascan uniforms, while the other half were apparently the civilian delegates and their assistants.

  The size of the crowd had evidently taken Eigen by surprise, too. “Captain Henderson?” he murmured as their group filed out of the lift.

  “I’m afraid this is my doing,” Guzarwan spoke up before Henderson could reply. “It occurred to me that my earlier suggestion of limiting tonight’s gathering wasn’t very polite, not to mention highly undiplomatic. So I passed around a more general invitation this morning to the oth
er delegates and arranged to have your steward fly some extra provisions up from the surface. All at Ueshiba’s expense, of course.”

  “I already told you there was no need for that,” Henderson growled.

  “Yes, you did,” Guzarwan agreed. “But I beg you to indulge my government just this once. After all, if we’re going to be allies—” he inclined his head at Eigen “—it would best if we were also friends.” He gestured across the room, toward a short, balding man having an animated discussion with a few other men. “I did of course clear it with Ambassador Boulanger, who I assumed would inform both of you.”

  “Well, he didn’t,” Flanders said stiffly. “More importantly, as Péridot is now under Cascan command, the ambassador has no authority whatsoever aboard her. He had no business authorizing anything, let alone a gathering like this.”

  Guzarwan winced. “Yes, I see,” he said. “My apologies to you, Sir.” He turned to Henderson. “And especially to you, Captain Henderson. I was under the impression that, given all the RHN personnel aboard, that the transition was still ongoing.”

  “No, Commodore Flanders is correct,” Henderson said, his voice marginally less annoyed. It was, Gill reflected, hard to stay mad at a person who was so abjectly apologetic for his lapse of judgment. “We’ll let it pass this time. But in the future, bear in mind that it’s the captain who has final authority aboard his or her ship. Civilian diplomats and even the captain’s own superiors are required to clear all operations and orders.”

  “I understand, Sir,” Guzarwan said, ducking his head. “My apologies.”

  “Now that we’ve got that settled, can we get to the main reason we’re all here?” Eigen asked. “You said you would have information for us.”

  “And my research has indeed borne fruit,” Guzarwan confirmed. “Unfortunately, there’s still one piece that has yet to fall into place. Captain Jalla is crunching the data aboard Wanderer, though, and we should have the entire story within a very few minutes.”

  “Why is Jalla doing the research?” Eigen asked, gesturing toward the silent Kichloo. “I thought Mr. Kichloo was your analyst. If there’s still work to be done, why is he here instead of back aboard Wanderer doing it?”

  “Because I wanted him at my side when I present our findings,” Guzarwan said, some stressed patience creeping into his voice. “Besides, the remaining work is all computerized data-crunching, which Captain Jalla can oversee as well as Mr. Kichloo. It will be only a few minutes more, I assure you.”

  Flanders and Henderson looked at each other. “I suppose we can keep everyone entertained a little longer,” Henderson said, his eyes flicking over to the buffet the stewards had laid out. “But this had better be worth it.”

  “Trust me,” Guzarwan promised. “It will.”

  The trick to not looking like you were traveling in a bunch, Vachali had long ago learned, was simply to not travel in a bunch.

  There were risks to that approach, of course. In this case, if one of them was spotted and challenged by a genuine Havenite or Cascan, there would be no backup right at hand to help cajole, bluff, or shoot their way out of the situation. But with two ships’ worth of Havenites to draw on, plus an unknown number of Cascans being groomed for ship’s operations, the odds were that a few freshly unfamiliar faces wouldn’t even be noticed.

  Still, to be on the safe side, he made sure he and Mota traveled the axial passageways together. Mota was one of the best hackers in the business, but the kid was pathetically inept at cajoling, bluffing, or shooting.

  But as expected, neither of them rated even a second glance from anyone else in the passageways. Just as importantly, from the casual pace of the other crewmen and the equally casual tone of their conversations, it appeared that the watch was starting to wind down. Guzarwan had figured that would be the situation, but it wasn’t something Vachali had been willing to take on faith.

  There was no guard outside the communications room when he and Mota arrived. Shora, who’d led this particular intrusion, was already in place, floating outside the hatch and pretending to study his tablet. He waited until Vachali and Mota were ten seconds away, then popped open the hatch and floated inside.

  He was talking to the Cascan-uniformed man and woman in the compartment when Vachali arrived, closing the hatch behind him. “—down your system and route everything through the bridge while we’re running the tests,” Shora was saying to the clearly puzzled ratings. “The ensign will explain further—ah; here he is now.” He swivelled on his handhold toward Vachali, his free hand slipping momentarily beneath his tunic, then swivelled back again to face the two Cascans.

  Neither of them even had time to gasp before he shot them.

  Vachali looked over his shoulder, to see Mota’s anxious face peering in through the hatch viewport. He gestured the other in, and Mota popped the hatch. “Clear?” he asked, his nose wrinkling with the faint smell of ozone.

  “Clear,” Vachali assured him. He didn’t much care for the afterscent of shock rounds, either—the acrid smell of an honest lead-loaded 10-millimeter always seemed more manly, as well as more honest. But using darts that could deliver a lethal current surge from an air-propelled weapon was a hell of a lot quieter than even a silenced handgun. Quieter, really, than anything except a knife. And for the moment, silence was the name of the game. “How long?” he asked.

  “Not very,” Mota assured him as he maneuvered into an angled position above the two dead Cascans and got busy with the com board. “Everyone in place?”

  There was a chorus of acknowledgments from the rest of his team, scattered around the other control areas of the ship.

  “Okay,” Mota said. “Here we go.”

  He leaned in close to the keyboard, punching away like a berserk woodpecker. As he worked, Shora swivelled the chairs around, putting the corpses’ backs to the hatch so that even the small amount of blood staining their tunics wouldn’t be visible to anyone who glanced casually through the viewport. Vachali, for his part, stayed close to the hatch, his back blocking the view, while the scene was being set.

  For all his inexperience with guns and glib, Mota was definitely good at computers. Barely forty-five seconds later, he tapped a final key and nodded. “Bridge, CIC, and Alpha Spin are locked out of the intercom system,” he reported. “You’re good to go.”

  Vachali nodded. “Shora?”

  Shora had already pulled the headset off one of the Cascans and put it on. He nodded to Mota, and the tech tapped a key. “Attention, all personnel,” Shora said in a clipped, military tone and a pretty fair Havenite accent. “All RHN personnel returning to Saintonge are to report immediately to the RHN shuttle at Docking Port Three. I say again, immediately. All other nonessential RHN and CDF personnel are to report to Beta Spin for a special assembly with Commodore Flanders and Captain Henderson. Repeating—”

  He ran through the message again, then signaled Mota to key off. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s see if it works.”

  Two minutes ticked slowly by. Shora and Mota repositioned themselves to face the dead Cascans, feigning an animated conversation with the bodies, again for the benefit of any passersby. With the scene playing out, Vachali could now move out of the way of the viewport and into guard position out of sight beside the hatch. If the ploy didn’t work, the three of them and the other two loitering nearby would have to move immediately on the bridge and CIC. At that point, Guzarwan’s neat little hijacking would morph into a ship-wide running battle, with a toss-up as to whether they and the other teams scattered around the ship near the armory, engineering, and impeller rooms would be able to win the day.

  And then, the viber on Vachali’s wrist came to life, and he breathed a quiet sigh of relief. “They’re on the move,” he reported.

  “The Cascans seem pretty excited, too,” Shora confirmed, his voice sounding distracted as he concentrated on the spotter message coming through on his own viber.

  “Probably heard about all the extra food Guzarwan had brought u
p and figure they’re in for a treat,” Vachali said. Guzarwan had called it, all right, straight down the line. “Order Team Two to meet me at the Havenite shuttle and Team One to start moving to their Plan A positions. Mota, you have the uni-link relay system frozen?”

  “Completely,” Mota assured him.

  “Good,” Vachali said, pulling his uni-link out of his belt. “Open it up for mine—I need to let the chief know he’s on.”

  Mota nodded and busied himself with the board again. “You’re in.”

  “Teams are on the move,” Shora added, keying an acknowledgment signal into his viber. “They should be ready when you are. How long do you want Mota and me to hang here after they finish hacking the rest of the security system?”

  “Until the chief or Kichloo say otherwise,” Vachali said. “And stay on your toes. I’ll probably need you before this is over.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Movement,” Vachali’s voice came tersely over Guzarwan’s uni-link. “Prime.”

  “Understood,” Guzarwan said solemnly, carefully suppressing the grim smile that wanted to come out. Phase One was complete, and from Vachali’s report it sounded like the plan was exactly on track.

  Now, with the Havenites and Cascans heading like obedient sheep to the pens where their herders had sent them, it was time for Phase Two.

  “You have news?” Flanders asked as Guzarwan put away the uni-link.

  “Yes,” Guzarwan said, putting some darkness into his voice. “And I’m afraid it’s worse than I expected.” He turned, caught Boulanger’s eye from halfway across the Alpha Spin wardroom, and beckoned him over.

  “Well?” Flanders prompted.

  “I’ll be happy to share the full story with you in a few minutes,” Guzarwan said as Boulanger joined them. “But first, I need to have a private word with Captain Eigen and Ambassador Boulanger.”