Mercenary

by Piers Anthony

  “To blow the whistle?” Spirit asked. We all laughed.

  “What would he tell them?” I asked after a moment. “About conjectures? Hearsay? Paranoia? Scuttlebutt?” I shook my head. “He would not stoop to that sort of thing. The admirals back home are not interested in sordid pirate gossip.”

  Rue nodded. “I guess Phist is more man than I figured, too. He’s making it all work out right.”

  “A man can be honest and gentle,” Spirit said, “and still be worthwhile. I married him for other reasons, but I would have chosen him for love, had I known.”

  Rue pondered, considering that. She had been learning a lot about gentle men recently. Then her gaze turned on me. “What will become of you, Hope?”

  “I’ll be court-martialed,” I said. “The responsibility is mine; my officers simply obeyed my orders. They are clean, but there’s not much question of my guilt. This has been a remarkably un-Navy campaign.”

  “But you didn’t do it! You’re a figurehead!”

  “All was done in my name. I take the credit—and the blame. I would not have it otherwise. The record shows that I have indeed pursued my mission beyond my authority and did indeed flee before the enemy for six days—”

  “But that was strategic!” she protested. “And you turned around and destroyed them when a conventional approach would have decimated your forces!”

  “But it looks like cowardice, and that is bad for the Navy image. Appearance is more important than reality at times. And I have certainly consorted with pirates.”

  “Such as my father—and me.”

  “I’m afraid so. So I will be found guilty of at least one count and probably stripped of my commission, or at least be reduced in rank.”

  “But you’ve done everything they wanted! You wiped out the pirates of the Belt with few losses, and freed the base—”

  “Captain Hubris has done more than they wanted,” Mondy said. “There’s the key.”

  The key. That reminded me of the one I carried, that QYV still wanted.

  “But if they didn’t really want the Belt cleaned up, why did they send him?” Roulette was still having trouble with the background.

  “They thought he would fail,” Mondy explained. “As he would have, had he insisted on planning strategy himself, as most commanders do. Hope has no special talent for that. He is intelligent and motivated, and his men are devoted to him—I’m sure Sergeant Smith has his hands full, now, keeping them in line—but he is no strategist.”

  “But—”

  “But the salient quality he does have does not show well on the standard tests,” Mondy continued. “Hope is a born leader, not by rhetoric or force of personality or ruthless application of power, but by his inordinate talent to grasp the true nature of men and thereby to inspire their loyalty. Thus he lacks the overt abilities of a conqueror but has established those abilities in his staff.”

  “He hasn’t shown much understanding of me!”

  Emerald laughed. “His talent fails when his emotion gets in the way. I was always able to fool him.”

  Rue’s eyes narrowed, then relaxed. “I told him I hated him—”

  “And he believed you,” Emerald said, nodding knowingly. It was as if I wasn’t there.

  “My father had it figured,” Rue said. “He had Hope picked out for me from the moment the fleet set out from Jupiter. God, I was angry!”

  “Your father sought the best possible match for you,” Mondy agreed. “He knew you would submit to no ordinary man either in body or emotion, but Hope has the ability—”

  “To conquer unruly women,” Rue concluded, glancing at Emerald. “But I still don’t see why Jupiter wanted the mission to fail. First they sent a man they thought couldn’t do the job. When he started doing it, they cut off his supplies. When he fled before the enemy, they let him be. But when he turned about and beat the pirates, they deposed him—right before final success. Why?”

  “They had to act when they did,” Mondy said. “The other pirates are expendable, but the Samoans control the drug trade.”

  “Which is why they must be destroyed,” Repro put in. “The drug trade is more insidious and damaging to our society than piracy itself. It does to the society what the drug does to me.”

  Now Rue focused on Repro. “My father said if he had wanted to destroy the true threat to piracy in the Belt, he’d have sent an assassin after you. But you’re the least effective officer in this bunch! You’re slowly dying!”

  “True,” Repro agreed. “I’m only a dreamer.”

  “Whose dream almost came true,” I murmured.

  “I still don’t get it,” Roulette said. “Why does Jupiter want the drug trade to continue?”

  “You see, many legitimate elements of the Jupiter society use those illegal drugs,” Mondy said. “They can’t afford to have their major source of supply cut off. So while public pressure required that the Marianas be punished for stepping on our base, it was never intended that piracy itself—particularly the Samoans—be extirpated from the Belt. Had Hope gone straight to the Marianas and liberated the base, or had he bungled the job, all would have been well. But when he forced their hand by succeeding too well, the powers that be acted.”

  “Seems to me there are worse pirates in Jupiter than in the Belt,” Rue muttered darkly, and I was surprised to see the others nod agreement. “But now my father will do the job, anyway. He has no truck with drugs.”

  “So it seems,” Mondy agreed. “The Jupiter authorities will be furious, but fortunately our fleet will be safely out of it before the final battle occurs. They will not be able to blame us for that.”

  “They’ll try, though!” she said. “They’ll crucify Hope!”

  Mondy shrugged. “Hope always knew that—as did we all, including Phist. Phist more than any of us! Now it is Hope Hubris’s turn, and Phist, ironically, will achieve honor for delivering Hope into their hands.”

  “And so Hope tried to void our marriage before he got canned.”

  “He gave you that last chance, knowing you would have been better off with your father, in the Belt, though he knew we still needed you for the alliance.”

  Rue turned to me. “Hope, I have a gift for you.”

  Mondy stood up. “We’ll be leaving now.”

  “No!” Rue said sharply. “All of you were witnesses to my rape; you must be witness to this, too.”

  Mondy sat down again. “None of us liked what we had to do then. We are not of your culture.”

  “But I am joining yours.” Rue took my hands in hers. “For you, Hope. My tears.”

  I was startled. “Your what? You never cry, Rue—” Actually, I had felt her tears during the wedding rape, but those had been of frustration, not grief or love.

  “I never had reason before.” Already they were starting, brimming at her beautiful eyes as if the tide had risen in her body, overflowing to her cheeks, and down to her mouth and chin.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, hesitating to take her into my arms; she was not necessarily partial to open gestures of affection. “I haven’t really voided our relationship; I’ll never do that without your consent.”

  “You raped me and won my body,” she said through her tears. “But you never conquered me. I swore no man would do that. I knew I could take or leave any man, and never love him. But you—”

  Now I took her in my arms. “I never required your love, Rue.”

  “Well, you got it.” And she sobbed into my shoulder. “You tamed the shrew, you monster.”

  Mondy stood again. “Congratulations,” he said to us both, and led the way out.

  Yes, we made love, and she was able to respond without even token violence. I would never have to hit her again. She had indeed given me a rare gift.

  Yet what would I have for her when I was stripped of my rank and perhaps my freedom? She still would be better off returning to the Belt. But she could not—and I knew that if she could, she would not. The loyalty of a pantheress is no
t easy to obtain—or to end.

  We were well on our way back to Jupiter when the final battle was fought. We were able to follow it only approximately, by monitoring erratic news reports from the Belt. I reconstruct here in minutes what we learned piecemeal in the course of many hours. The rest of us had no notion of Emerald’s strategy, and she refused to tell; she wanted it to be a surprise. Well, it was certainly an adequate distraction for the occasion.

  The fleet of Samoa was ensconced within the shelter of a great, curving, cup-shaped cloud of debris from a defunct comet or fragment of an ancient supernova. They had mined the cloud, using a camouflaged variety of mine that looked exactly like space refuse; it was impossible to tell with the equipment available in the field which chunks of rock were natural and which were mines. Any ship attempting to pass through this region would contact a mine; if the explosion did not hole it, the attention attracted by the detonation would set it up for a shot from the battleship at the fringe of the cloud. A ship inside the cloud would be practically invisible; the dust and debris interfered with radar. But an explosion emitted radiation that penetrated the rocks and was readily detectable from nearby. Thus the cloud was considered impassable, and the ships in the cup were secure from any flank or rear attack.

  With that protection, the Samoans needed to cover only the region of space in front of their fleet. It was like the pincushion defense without any planetoid for the pins to anchor to; thus it was more versatile. Since this was the only feasible channel through the Belt leading to their main base, they seemed secure. The Solomons fleet could not occupy the Samoan base without traveling this channel, and the cloud-backed Samoan fleet guarded it. But the Solomons could not afford to ignore the base; Samoa was far from the Solomons’ home region, and the moment Straight departed for home, as he had to do before long, the Samoans would come out and take over whatever they wanted. More frustrating to us, they would continue their drug trade, the worst of the pirate activities in the Belt.

  Oh, I realize that some people would question that, suggesting that the slave trade was worse. But slavery was limited, with very specialized markets, while drugs penetrated to the heart of the leading governments of the Solar System, corrupting them— as our present situation showed. The power of the drug trade was much greater than showed in the Belt; the Samoans were only the visible projection of it. Only now was I coming to appreciate the sinister magnitude of that business. Even the Jupiter Navy danced to its tune!

  So now we watched, hoping Straight could do what we could not. Oh, there would be an outcry in private circles if he managed it, but what could they do? Court-martial him? He was technically a pirate, beyond their jurisdiction. No, they would have to deal with him, his way; a new power was forming in the Belt. Straight would probably obtain the legitimacy he craved. Provided he took out Samoa.

  Would Emerald’s strategy work without Emerald there to oversee it? A battle was not something one set up and let fall, like a row of dominoes; proper implementation was critical. Could Straight provide the proper tactics? I was not at all easy.

  The Solomons fleet came straight down the channel, decelerated, and drifted just beyond combat range. It seemed that Straight was hoping the Samoans would come forward to fight, deserting their cloud-cup rear protection. That, of course, was foolish. The Samoans had an excellent defensive position, their guns covering the full breadth of the channel, and they were surely stocked for a siege. Straight, with his makeshift fleet and skeletal crews, could not wait them out; he had to win quickly, or give it up. He could not even restock at the Jupiter base, for the alliance was off and the commander there was no longer permitted to associate with pirates.

  There they waited for a day in seeming indecision. Straight made some feints, but these were unsuccessful. The Samoans, though their fleet was as strong as Straight’s, were too canny to budge. They were forcing him to attack their prepared position and suffer ruinous losses, or to retreat and suffer similarly.

  Then news of another fleet came. The remnants of the other pirate bands were sending their ships to support the Samoans, and in two days these would come down the channel behind the Solomons’ fleet. That was trouble indeed; Straight would have to commence withdrawal immediately if he was to avoid being caught in the middle. Obviously things had started to go wrong the moment Emerald was disassociated from the effort.

  Our fleet’s night came, and I slept, holding Rue’s hand. I still had much joy in her final gift to me—the gift of her tears, her unrestrained emotion—but I feared for her father, and for her if she lost him to battle just when she was losing me to Navy discipline. She had given herself at last to me, but at what cost to herself and her band?

  I dreamed, in that special fashion I sometimes do when under stress. Rue and I were in space, in the Belt—an impossibly crowded section. We were perched on boulders, carrying pugil sticks. All around us were other members of our crew, each person riding a rock and bearing a pugil stick. Sergeant Smith, and Shrapnel, and Juana, and Brinker, and all the other Hispanics and Saxons and just plain, good people. We waved cheerily to each other, but no one deserted his rock.

  Then something floated toward us, huge and cylindrical. It was a spaceship—a cruiser! There is no good reason for spaceships to be rounded or cylindrical, apart from the convenience of construction, since there is no atmospheric friction in space, but the Navy somehow never felt free to deviate far from the streamlined form. The cruiser nudged so close to my rock I could touch it; and, indeed, I did touch it, reaching out with the padded end of my pugil stick to shove the huge hull away. Of course, the mass of the cruiser was much greater than mine, even including the rock I perched on and braced against; all I accomplished was to shove my platform away. I retreated from the cruiser, waving my stick, and now I saw that on the hull were hundreds of other people, each with a similar stick, and all of them waved cheerily back at me. We seemed to be having one big, crazy party in space, the rockworms and the hullnuts pushing each other away. Odd game!

  But now I was drifting away also from Rue. She stood on her stone, gesturing helplessly, proffering respect and love but unable to reach me or draw me back. I knew, with the certainty that only a dream provides, that neither of us could leave our rocks, lest some horrendous disaster occur. We were bound to go with our pieces of real estate, wherever that might be.

  “Rue!” I cried.

  “Hope!” she cried back. The vacuum of space was all about us, yet our voices carried.

  “I’m worried about you!”

  “My garden is waste!”

  “Thank you for your tears!” I called. But our boulders were rotating, and hers had turned to face her away from me, or maybe mine had spun, and we were lost to each other. And now I cried, inheriting her tears.

  I woke, and she woke, and we hugged each other. We were together after all. Still I felt the premonition of the dream, and the chill of outer space seeped through my bones. This lovely girl, not yet out of her teens, would surely be lost to me, and I could do nothing to prevent it.

  There was a knock. I recognized the touch of my sister and called her in. “It’s happening,” she said. “Turn on your vid.” She did it for me, then sat down on the edge of the bunk. There was plenty of room, this being the outsize nuptial bed. Now it reminded me of a space boulder.

  A Jupiter-Network news spot was in progress. Of course, reception was poor, this being several light-minutes distant from the source, but we were used to that. “...activity behind the Samoan battleship,” the announcer was saying.

  Emerald arrived. “Hear that, Worry? They did it!”

  “Did what?” Rue demanded, not bothering to cover herself.

  “Sneaked through that cloud with a cruiser,” Emerald explained. “Fired point-blank into the Samoan battleship, taking it out. Now the cruiser commands the field. Those lesser Samoan ships are pointed the wrong way; they’re sitting ducks!”

  “Through the cloud?” I asked. “Your plan, did it include setting me
n on space boulders with pugil sticks?”

  “Oh, you found out!” she said, annoyed.

  “I think I was there,” I said.

  “Where?” Rue asked.

  “You were there, too.”

  “That’s nice. Does this mean my father’s all right?”

  “He’s in control,” Emerald assured her. “My plan was to infiltrate the mined cloud by moving very slowly, matching the velocity of its internal currents and posting men on every rock in the path of the ship. It didn’t matter whether any given rock was natural or a mine; none were allowed to touch. So the cruiser did what the enemy thought was impossible: It ambushed their battleship from behind.”

  “God, I’m glad to hear that!” Rue said. “But what will the drug merchandisers do now?”

  “First they’ll have Hope’s head,” Spirit said, taking my free hand. “Then they’ll set about developing other avenues of supply. But now it will be much harder for them to operate.”