The big-eyed man smiled. "Imagine that! And are you any better at it than you were at defending yourself just now?"
A low growl rumbled from the mercenary's throat. "Well, I do have more practice at washing than I do at getting beaten up."
Ranna and Carew shared a laugh. "Good. You have spirit," she said. Turning to Carew, she asked, "Will you help? It is for the good of the sibko!"
He sighed heavily. "Aff. We use your supplies and your scissors and your razor."
"Bargained well and done."
Phelan shook his head. "Why do I get the feeling the two of you would rather take me to whatever passes for a laundry on this ship and toss me into a washer?" As he saw an expression of enlightenment spread across their faces, he held up his hands. "Honest, I won't be any trouble. Let's just get this over and done with."
***
Phelan, dressed in the olive-green clothes Ranna had obtained for him while Carew cut his hair, ran his left hand over his clean-shaven face. Glad to have the beard gone. It made me look too old. Unbidden, the image of his father's bearded face came to him, along with an overwhelming sadness. How long have I been a captive? They must think me dead. I have to get word to them somehow. Why is there never a ComStar Acolyte around when you need one?
With his back against the rear wall of the turbolift, Phelan watched the numbers flash by as the box carried Ranna and him toward the nose of the ship. The number of decks, each marked with its own shield icon, surprised the mercenary. That's twenty decks serviced by this lift alone. To get onto the top dozen decks, it looks like you have to type a code sequence into that number pad. If the lifts on this ship function like those on other DropShips, and don't run the length of the ship to preclude breaching and atmosphere loss, then this one is really big. The thought that it might be larger than a Behemoth flashed through Phelan's mind, but he dismissed it immediately as impossible.
The elevator slowed to a stop. Ranna punched a number sequence into the keypad, and each stroke was answered by a melodic tone. The door slid open and she pulled Phelan out of the box. Leading the way down a corridor, Ranna moved so quickly that the Kell Hound had little time to study his surroundings. When she stopped finally, Ranna stood before a door painted with a shield showing another device. Central to it was the silhouette of a wolf's head that looked surprisingly like the Kell Hound crest and the belt buckle Tyra had made for him. Beneath it was a row of five red stars similar to the design of Ranna's earring. She stood at attention and Phelan aped her as the door opened.
"Come in, please." The speaker, a tall, slender man with closely cropped white hair, gestured them into the room hospitably but without enthusiasm. He was smiling slightly, but Phelan took no comfort in it. Something flickered over the older man's expression as his gaze swept over Phelan's swollen left eye and the patch of crusted blood on his ear, but he said nothing.
Phelan followed Ranna into the room, and the door whispered shut behind them. Right hand snapping up to her brow, Ranna stopped just inside the door and saluted the Khan. He returned her salute smartly, then smiled genuinely at her. "I trust you did not mind being asked to conduct this man here."
She shrugged, the gesture coming just stiffly enough to betray a gram of resentment. "As I am not required to perform my duties at this time, I must find new ways to serve."
The Khan accepted her explanation graciously and turned to Phelan. "You look both better and worse than when I last looked in on you."
Phelan smiled politely as his mind raced and tried in vain to match the Khan's voice with any of those that had interrogated him. "I'm clumsy."
The Khan arched a white eyebrow. "Then when Vlad placed himself on report for assaulting you, he was in error?"
Phelan's head came up and he studied the Khan carefully. Is this whole meeting going to be filled with testing and intrigue? What could I possibly tell him that his people have not already drugged out of me? "Were I not so clumsy, I would have either avoided setting him off or I would have avoided his fists."
The Khan's blue eyes narrowed, then his face brightened and he waved Phelan deeper into the suite with one hand. "Forgive me. You have had quite enough questioning in the past months, quiaff? And I keep you standing here in the foyer like some Point being reprimanded. Please come in and meet my other guest."
As he moved forward at his host's invitation, Phelan noted that the Khan's quarters seemed to fit the man perfectly. At first, Phelan thought the rooms sparsely furnished, but then he noticed that everything had been selected for quality, as though the Khan would fill his living space only with the finest. Phelan imagined that the decorations and furnishings were probably the victors of a long weeding-out process. He could easily see this man discarding something before bringing anything new into this place.
A somber gray carpet and warm maroon walls lent the room a studious air. Yellowish light shown down from recessed ceiling lamps, illuminating the glass and gray steel shelving and tables. The couch and pair of chairs looked comfortable but were not matched in either color or design. The shelves held a few mementoes and two or three holographic books, but Phelan could identify none of them.
The only decoration mounted on the walls hung over the couch. It was as large as his own chest, and Phelan recognized the emblem as similar to the shield emblazoned on the Khan's door. The only differences were that this one actually was a shield and there were no stars beneath the wolf's head. Instead of stars, Phelan saw a small square balanced on one point fixed to the shield. Moving closer to it, he made another startling discovery. Damn, that looks like it was pounded out of 'Mech armor!
Any further thought about what the device was or how it was constructed fled from Phelan's mind as the Khan's other guest turned from one of the shelves where he had been browsing. "Greetings, Phelan Kell. It does, indeed, appear that stories of your death were greatly exaggerated."
Despite the shock, the young mercenary immediately identified the man by the scarlet sash on his white robe. What in the seven hells is a ComStar Precentor doing here? Stunned; Phelan gaped at the white-haired old man, then recovered his poise. "Peace of Blake be with you, Precentor ..."
The Precentor adjusted the patch over his right eye, then squinted at the mercenary with his good one. "Yes, I can see it. You are a Kell."
Something in the way the Precentor spoke made Phelan uncomfortable. "You know my father?"
The Precentor hesitated for a moment, and Phelan sensed him swallowing whatever his first response would have been. "Know him? No, not really. In my capacity as Precentor Martial, I have studied him and I have grown to respect him greatly. I even met him long ago, but I doubt he would remember me or the meeting."
Phelan started to ask the ComStar official if he could get word of his survival back to his parents, but the Khan's entry into the room stopped him. Smiling politely, the Khan opened his arms to welcome his guests. "Allow me to perform formal introductions. Phelan Kell, this is Anastasius Focht, the Precentor Martial of your ComStar. Precentor, this is Phelan Kell."
The young mercenary acknowledged Focht with a nod of his head, then looked expectantly at the Khan. The Khan met Phelan's gaze. "And permit me to introduce myself. I am Ulric, Khan of the Wolves. You were taken by an advanced raiding party sent out by my clan, and brought here to my JumpShip, the Dire Wolf."
The news that he was on a JumpShip shocked the Kell Hound even more than his previous attempts at estimating the size of what he'd believed to be a DropShip. JumpShip! That's impossible! JumpShips are nothing more than a bridge module mounted on the body of a Kearny-Fuchida drive. Maybe they have a shuttle docking bay, and the Cu has those agrodecks, but that's it. A JumpShip with decks and facilities for lots of people. Oh, Phelan, this is decidedly worse than a little blizzard-stalking on Tharkad.
Phelan recovered himself quickly and wanted to offer the Khan his hand, but sensed that Ulric would have rejected the gesture more as a matter of form than from any distrust or dislike. "Sir, if I might, would it
be possible for me to communicate a message to my family that I am still alive? No, please, it need not contain any military intelligence—my interrogation and that first battle were enough to tell me you are invading the Periphery and consolidating it. I just don't want my parents to suffer."
Ulric shook his head, but Focht answered the question. "I regret, Herr Kell, that even with the Khan's permission, I could not transmit such a message. The Primus sent me as an envoy to these remarkable people. My mission is diplomatic in nature, and I cannot ferry messages back and forth, regardless of their content." The Precentor smiled and halfturned to the Khan. "The Khan has shown me battle-tapes of your encounter with their raiding party. As you have seen, their military technology and skill are impressive."
Focht's words smothered the hope in Phelan's heart. Bile burned in his throat as he nodded agreement with the Precentor's comment. "Impressive, indeed." His head came up. "I've never know of another organization in which a soldier would put himself on report for assault."
Ulric frowned. "If you damaged another's property, you would tell the owner, quineg?"
Half-hearing the question, Kell nodded. "Yes, but... Wait a minute, property!"
The calm on Ulric's face did not suggest that anything was out of the ordinary. "In capturing you, Vlad earned a claim on you. I exercised my prerogative as Khan." The growing look of horror on Phelan's face didn't alter Ulric's explanation in the least. He grabbed Phelan's right wrist and brought the corded bracelet into view. "Simply speaking, Phelan Kell, you belong to me."
15
Orbital Space, Thule, Rasalhague Province
Free Rasalhague Republic
7 March 3050
Tyra Miraborg glanced at the auxiliary monitor on her cockpit control monitor. It showed a small icon representing her Shilone fighter dead-center on the screen and slowly rotated a vector-graphic sphere around the craft. Three small triangles with identification tags appeared near her ship to mark the position of her wingman and the other two pilots in her flight. Further on along her line of flight, a large orb remained tantalizingly distant.
She smiled, barely feeling the added pressure of the neurohelmet's padding against the corners of her mouth. We'll be home soon enough. Back aboard the Bragi and off to another system. I should have known that joining an honor guard company would mean spending most of my time doing ceremonial things, but I didn't expect extended tours of duty guarding the Defense Minister as he toured the systems the Periphery pirates had attacked.
Anika Janssen's voice called to her through the speakers built into the helmet. "I've got nothing unusual, Kapten."
Tyra turned her head to the right and saw Anika's Shilone pull parallel to her own fighter craft. The wing shape of the craft made it one of the few AeroSpace Fighters suited to both atmospheric and deep-space combat. Shilone pilots, as a class, referred to their craft as "boomerangs."
"That, darlin'," one of Tyra's first flight instructors had told her, "is because Shilone pilots always come back after a mission."
Sure, and ComStar never loses a message. Tyra keyed her radio. "Roger that, Valkyrie Two. I'm clear. What about you, Ljungquist?"
"Clear as the day after a weekend off," laughed Sven Ljungquist. "Valkyrie Four reports no trouble. He's been watching our six. No one has crept up on us."
"Roger, three." Tyra touched a finger to the DropShip icon on her auxiliary screen. In an instant, the DropShip replaced her ship in the center of the screen, depositing the icons marking her flight down at eight o'clock on its scanner sphere. In addition to painting her screen with the Bragi's sensor data, the computer opened a direct line to the flight's home ship. "Valkyrie Flight reporting all clear."
"Roger, Valkyrie Leader. You should be home in time for supper." The male flight controller lowered his voice. "The food's not going to be anything like the meal I had two nights ago in Sovol, Tyra. You should have accepted my invitation."
Anika cut into the line before Tyra could answer. "Lqjtnant Tviet, would you mind sticking to business? We are in a hostile theatre of operations."
Tyra heard Tviet's acknowledgement of Anika's rebuke and the radio went dead. She thanked Anika silently, but the all-too-familiar feelings of regret and anger began to boil up within her again. She fought to keep her mind from wandering off on these unhappy tangents. You made your decision and that is that. You decided to decline Phelan's offer and sign on with this company because that made the most sense. You couldn't stay on Gunzburg, that's for certain.
A red light flared on her radio control panel, and she punched it automatically. As though reading Tyra's mind, Anika spoke with her friend over the private frequency they shared. "Tyra, you can't keep kicking yourself, because it's not your fault. What happens, happens."
Tyra nodded and glanced over at Anika's Shilone. "I know you're right, Nik. There's nothing I could have done about Phelan's death, even if I had signed on with the Kell Hounds. Phelan's unit didn't have aerospace cover, so I wouldn't even have been there."
"That's more like it." A mixture of relief and exasperation echoed through Anika's voice.
Tyra glanced again at the sensor scan from the Bragi, but it remained clear. Throughout this "public relations" tour, she had been hoping the pirates that killed Phelan would stage a raid so she could get a shot at revenge. That's stupid. Just the sort of thinking to get me killed.
Tyra keyed her mike. "Thanks, Nik. I'm back. When we hit the Bragi, remind me to give Tviet a lesson in the definition of the word nej."
"Roger."
Tyra saw something new appear on the scanner screen. Four small red triangles appeared at the outer edge of the DropShip's scan. Her combat computer brought the secondary monitor up and started flashing the different silhouettes and performance profiles for all aerospace fighters and shuttlecraft that matched the incoming data. The computer alternated between the Stuka and the Corsair models but could not make a final decision.
Tyra touched the icon representing her ship, and the scanning computer shifted back over to her own instrumentation. It cut down the range of the scan, but gave her combat capability which, all of a sudden, seemed a good thing. She keyed her radio to the DropShip's control frequency, but patched her flight's tactical channel into the feed.
"Valkyrie flight here, Bragi. We have four UAC on the screen." She looked at the monitor again. "They're coming in on a vector that might have looked to you like our heat shadows, but I've got them on my instruments. Please confirm."
Tyra increased vector thrust on the right side of her ship, moving it to the left and away from Anika's craft. She watched as one of the four ships following her flight aped her maneuver. Whoever they are, they're good! It takes some tight flying to pass yourself off as the IR shadow of an aerospace fighter traveling through a helium cloud.
Tviet's voice answered Tyra's call, but gone was the cockiness of their earlier communication. "Ah, roger, Valflight. We're getting some jammed transmission from Thule itself.
We don't know what it was, but chances are it has something to do with hostile actions on the planet."
"Roger, Bragi. Do we engage the people on our tails? I have them about a hundred myriameters behind us."
"Negative, Valflight. We are clear to the JumpShip at the nadir point. Just watch them."
Tviet's words came slowly, with pauses between them that told Tyra the controller was getting lots of input from sources other than her ship. She glanced at the auxiliary monitor and saw the four unidentified aerospace craft split formation and pick up speed. Here they come! "Be advised, Bragi, we are under attack and moving to engage. Valkyrie Two form up on me. Three and Four hang together and take the pair vectored at 256 degrees and closing. Luck."
"Skill," countered Ljungquist.
Tyra kicked her thrusters in and vectored their output to pull her through a tight turn that stood her ship on its left wing-tip. While in space she didn't have to worry about friction and air turbulence, but inertia still affected her and her craft.
Her flightsuit pressurized itself to prevent blood from draining from her head as she pulled four gees coming around, but she knew that even the suit would not keep her from blacking out if she maneuvered too quickly.
Set on her new course—racing back through the space she had just patrolled—Tyra brought each of her combat systems up. The computer drew a picture of the Shilone on her primary monitor and illuminated each weapon as it came on line. "Forward long range missile launcher, check," Tyra mumbled to herself. "Forward heavy laser, check. Wingmounted medium lasers, check and check, and aft arc shortrange missile launcher loaded and ready." A red crosshair painted itself on her helmet's faceplate and tracked with her right eye as she looked around. The armrests of her chair slowly rotated ninety degrees, presenting the trigger buttons for all her weapons. Keep the crosshairs on the target, in space or on the sensor display, and poof, it's gone.
Like the ground-pounding BattleMechs, AeroSpace Fighters relied on a holographic display of sensor data. Though 'Mech pilots had only to orient themselves within a twodimensional battlefield, fighter pilots had to deal with enemies in a full three-dimensional theatre. That meant their holographic displays formed a bowl with the area toward which the fighter's nose pointed as the center. When a gold ring flashed around the whole display, it told the pilot that the computer had gotten a lock-on to a target in the aft arc.
Tyra's computer still could not decide if the ships she and Anika were hurtling toward were Corsairs or Stukas, which was disturbing. The Stuka was a heavily armored fighter boasting all the weapons she had, but more of them. The Corsair, while lighter in weapons and armor, had superior handling capabilities that made it an elusive enemy. Still, if I can get into its arc, it's vulnerable.
"Is your computer schizing out on you?" Anika asked, apparently having the same problem with hers.
Tyra tried to answer confidently. "Yeah, something has definitely addled its little silicon brain." She felt a shiver course up her spine. "Figure on Stukas but pray for Corsairs."
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