Mistworld

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Mistworld Page 13

by Nina M. Osier


  The Star Service had sent a whole battle group to Narsai. To the Sestus System, four cruisers. To each of the other Outworlds that the Commonwealth regarded as a potential threat, at least one ship that packed respectable firepower. But to Mortha? A quartet of raiders, flying escort duty for inbound passenger vessels. Only to Kesra and Mistworld did the authorities send less of the Commonwealth's military might, because with Kesra they simply didn't bother; and there was no point in sending conventional warships to Mistworld. From there, even the likes of Fleet Admiral Tanaka knew they would never come back.

  “Is the long-range comm still working?” Kane asked the question of his communications officer (well, that was one of her several titles) softly, because he wanted so desperately to shout. He was the senior captain in this ridiculous little fleet, at which the Morthans below were—incredibly, unbelievably, impossibly—shooting. So he had to stay calm, or at least manage to sound that way. “Or have they locked us out?” He would have done that right away, if he'd been on the ground. No, he'd have done it first. Before he let the enemy above know he had hostile intentions.

  “Still working, sir. But I still can't raise New Orient. Shall I try patching you through to Luna?"

  “Try Narsai,” Kane instructed. “The Aragon, Admiral Benedon's flagship. But first, put out a distress call on the broadest possible dispersion. Use all the power you can get that array to muster."

  “Sir?” Infuriatingly, Ensign Brimmerman hesitated.

  “Narsai's a hell of a lot closer than Terra!” the young captain explained, wondering as he did so if he'd been a damn fool to let his officers develop the questioning habit—to encourage them in it, even. Right now, standing off from Mortha to keep beyond the range of weapons (sweet gods, shore batteries) the mindfuckers down there weren't supposed to possess, was not the time! “And so far I haven't heard any reports of Benedon's ships having gen trouble. That's more than I can say for the Inner Worlds fleet!” He gripped the arms of his command chair, and glared at his pilot's back as the Fortunate shuddered. “What the hell? Have they got our range again?"

  “Yes, Captain,” the pilot answered miserably.

  “Take us out another thousand klicks.” Damn, that was some powerful battery! If he had a larger force under his command, Kane thought, he would drop deep into the atmosphere on Mortha's opposite hemisphere, out of that battery's reach. From there he would skim along at not far above treetop level, until he came to the source of the problem—and then he would solve it. But as things were, he could afford to risk none of his four tiny ships. Nor could he take them and run for open space, leaving rebellious Mortha to enjoy its triumph. To broadcast that triumph, no doubt, to everyone else in what used to be the Commonwealth.

  What still was the Commonwealth technically, of course. But that was the operative word: technically.

  “Distress call's away, sir. And I've got the Aragon for you.” Brimmerman, once she started to carry out an order, always did so with dispatch. “I've also got all three other captains. What shall I tell them?"

  Good officer. She knew he couldn't talk to them, and also talk to Benedon. Or Benedon's flag captain, or whoever was the highest ranking available officer on board that flagship right now. “Tell them to keep moving off as necessary, until we finally find out the maximum range of that damned battery. Get damage reports. And tell them help is on the way."

  He hoped that it was. He most sincerely hoped so. And he wished with all his soul that he could understand what the mindfuckers hoped to gain, by destroying four ships so small that their combined firepower couldn't possibly pose a serious threat to anything except Mortha's orbital infrastructure; which he, for one, had no interest in threatening. What sense would that make? The Commonwealth wanted no more mindfuckers moving freely among its nontelepathic citizens, but as far as Randall Kane knew no one wanted to harm Morthans who from now on would keep decently to their own world. And besides, there were a few million Humans down there with them. Full-blooded Humans, men who'd married Morthan women and settled on their wives’ home-world to live their lives and rear their families. Why should the Commonwealth want to harm them?

  * * * *

  On board the flagship Aragon, Lita Benedon scowled at the viewscreen that was showing her an “AUDIO TRANSMISSION ONLY” sign. She hated not being able to see the face of the person with whom she was conversing. She also hated getting dragged into other commanders’ fights, but this was the sort of communication that she knew she could get court martialed for ignoring. “Lieutenant Kane.” She deliberately used the young officer's rank, not his title as captain of a Star Service vessel (no matter how small). “What can I do for you today?"

  “You can send some backup to Mortha, ma'am! PDQ!” The voice, a baritone that in agitated moments like this one obviously rose toward tenor, uttered blunt words that barely missed crossing the border into discourtesy. “I don't know how the hell they managed to build a shore battery without importing anything suspicious enough to get Security's attention, but they've got one now. And they're trying it out on my raider group!"

  Benedon sat up straight. She was in her quarters, since for convenience she'd put her vessels on MinTar/Narsai time; and that made it evening now. Early evening, nearly time for her steward to bring in her solitary supper. She'd been lounging in a chair in her day cabin, and she'd been anything else but eager to accept this call from a kid-captain (of a raider, for gods’ sake!) who was several weeks’ worth of top speed transit time away. And who, by rights, ought to be somebody else's problem, anyhow.

  But now she demanded tensely, “How many of you are there, Captain?” “Captain"; no longer “lieutenant.” “What else is in Mortha orbit?"

  “Four of us, ma'am. I'm the senior officer. Right now there's not a thing in temporary orbit. Comm satellites, solar arrays, and so on, the gunners down there have managed to miss so far—and all the commercial traffic moved off before this started. Including the liner we escorted in from Rancourt, with what I was told would be our last load of mindfuckers from the Inner Worlds. It finished shuttling and ‘porting its passengers down, and then left orbit, about an hour ago."

  Smart kid. Even under fire, he was taking the time to give his superior officer all the information she needed to make a decent decision. Although Benedon still didn't know how dispatching backup now, with all that travel time between the worlds that her ships and his orbited, was supposed to accomplish anything to help him in the short run ... and when you were getting shot at, the short run was all that really mattered.

  “You get out of there, Mr. Kane.” Benedon made up her mind in the way she'd always done it. Acting on instinct, guided by gut-impulse without wasting time on conscious reasoning. “Sounds to me as if we're done with the damn mindfuckers and their planet. I'll talk to Admiral Tanaka about that shore battery, because the Defense Ministry may want to do something about it; it could present a future threat. But for now, there's nothing in that system to justify risking even a raider-sized crew. I say let the mindfuckers have it, and welcome!"

  * * * *

  That's not the right answer. I'm not sure how I know it, but I do just the same. Randall Kane shook his head unhappily as he said, “Aye, ma'am. Thank you, I'll do that. Kane out,” and then told Ensign Brimmerman to get him the other captains again. We need to stay here. We need to keep an eye on these people. And if we don't, they're going to make us sorry later on.

  But he had his orders, and no good reason (no reason at all, actually) to call Luna after all and try to get different and more agreeable ones from Fleet Admiral Tanaka's staff. So he would do as he'd been told, and gather up his little apology for a battle group and take it out of the system. Head back to New Orient, where he and the others were currently based. And let Mortha, from now on, be somebody else's problem.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but never did get the words out. He felt his body tingling, as a suspiciously familiar warmth washed through every one of its cells. He tried, then, to screa
m instead of speak; because he'd heard just enough about the Mistworlders’ capture of Narsai to realize what must be happening.

  That was no shore battery down there. That was a grounded starship—a grounded alien starship. One filled with those disembodied things from the skies of Mistworld, who could reach out with their bizarre teleportation devices and snatch a defenseless corporeal being like Randall Kane out of his very command chair. Without warning, through fully charged shields, and at a range that would have defeated a standard Commonwealth teleporter's best efforts.

  He'd never been this scared in his life.

  * * *

  Chapter 16

  Lita Benedon finished her meal, and then sat cradling a wine glass between both hands. Staring, through her day cabin's viewport (the largest on the ship, and even it had armor that a call to alert would deploy instantly), at the beautiful planet below.

  Narsai. Katy Romanova's world no longer, and Benedon had managed to get rid of the former Fleet Admiral and local heiress without turning the other woman into a martyr! Which deprived the Narsatian loyalists of what could easily have become a key rallying point. Benedon knew she'd done well, so far, with this assignment. This chance to make her career, which carried with it an equal opportunity to break that career off at her current rank. She wasn't young any longer. Not even for a rear admiral, especially one still “of the lower half."

  Dammit all, I'm not a diplomat! Bringing that kid, that Farren Kourdakov, back from New Orient seemed like a good idea at the time—to both of us, and to my superiors. But I'm not sure he's going to work out well for us over the long run. He's too young for the kind of power Paré's giving him. This latest nonsense, arranging to assassinate the old council boss instead of just peacefully deposing him as the other councilors were already prepared to do, so Farren the Self-Perceived Almighty can have a seat of his own—now, instead of in a few years. It's begging for the locals to get a bellyful and do something permanent about him.

  But maybe that's the best thing that could happen, now that I think about it! Maybe letting the dratted Narsatians clean up the mess for us is the best way to get rid of it. Without anyone back at Fleet Command able to look at me, or at Paré either, as a good place to ditch the blame.

  Benedon liked that idea. She downed the last swallow of her wine (the finest possible local vintage, sent up from the Terran Embassy by shuttle boat along with steaks from the best of Narsai's meat producers, and one of its rare but incredible native game fish), and she activated her comm. “Benedon to bridge. Get me Ambassador Paré."

  The comm wasn't malfunctioning. She was sure it wasn't. But from the connection's other end, all she could hear was silence.

  “Benedon to engineering. I can't get through to the bridge. What's going on?” Again, nothing.

  “Benedon to sickbay. Is the comm system working down there?"

  Nothing. “Benedon to all hands. Can anyone on this ship hear me? What the hell's happening?"

  * * * *

  The battle group's smaller vessels had few gens, or none, among their crews. So keeping those smaller vessels unaware of what was happening aboard the larger ones—the dreadnought/flagship, and the cruisers—was paramount to success, for the desperate Humans who'd just turned their designers’ cleverness to their own advantage.

  Marigold Tar's bright orange gen-mark showed plainly against her olive-brown forehead, but it neither enhanced nor marred her otherwise ordinary face. The engineering technician, who like many other lower deck gens was called “Tar” in fond memory of the nickname once given to sailors from the island nation called England, stood now at the auxiliary bridge's operations panel. Her mouth was curved into a wide, infinitely satisfied smile as she announced to the other gens in the compartment, “We've done it. They're all dead, every last one except that asshole of an admiral. She's got a separate air system serving her suite—her suite, if you please!—and it's always on line. Doesn't have to be activated on purpose, like the segregated systems for the bridge, flag bridge, engineering, and sickbay. And she probably doesn't have a clue about what's going on outside her little private world, because no matter where she calls out to she's getting no answer. Comm's working fine, but everyone on the other end's pretty quiet—because except for us, they all just happen to be a little bit dead!"

  The others, half a dozen nervous gens out of the hundred or so who lived and worked aboard the Aragon, tittered at the lame joke because right now they desperately needed to laugh at something. They'd carried out the plan flawlessly, but now they were standing at their various stations and looking to Marigold (or Mari, as she preferred to be called by her peers) to find out what in the universe they were going to do next. What they were going to do with freedom, now that they had it—however temporarily.

  “Rachel Kane got away to Mistworld. People like us are welcome there. So Mistworld's where we're going,” Mari told them, glad she'd kept that part to herself until now. On those other faces (some of them well-nigh identical, although none of these gens was a true clone) she saw varying shades of alarm and astonishment; but not, to her vast relief, resistance. “It's time now to risk talking to the others. I'm going to open a channel to the other ships, and hope they're on schedule, too."

  “What about Benedon?” someone asked, in a voice so low and hesitant that ears less sharp than the gengineered Mari's wouldn't have caught the question.

  “What about the bitch? I've shut down her air system. And turned off her heat, too, and sealed her in. Let her suffocate or freeze, whichever comes first, and good riddance. She's not worth the risk we'd be running, to go in there and kill her faster."

  Mari thought with pride (and a certain childlike glee) about how easy it had been to shut down the whole ship's air system, after flooding all the decks with a lethal CO2 concentration, and leave things that way for just long enough to kill every single unsuspecting and therefore unprotected wildling Human on board. (Every one of them but Lita Benedon, that was.) The gens, meanwhile, simply held their breaths. As they were quite capable of doing for considerably longer periods, without damage, thanks to enhancements in their cardiopulmonary systems that hadn't been available when the fabled Rachel Kane—Mari's inspiration, as well as that of so many other rebel gen leaders—was designed. Since Kane had been made in an HR Solutions lab, and then decanted from the artificial womb that nurtured her from zygote to full-term infant, a full standard year ahead of any of the Aragon's current complement of “tars."

  Yes, the others were ready. The battle group's largest, heaviest, and best-armed ships, all of them, left Narsai orbit without a word to Narsai Control—not to mention without giving warning to the rest of what had been Lita Benedon's command—and headed, at maximum safe speed, toward open space.

  * * * *

  Maddy Romanova, Councilor Romanova, swallowed as hard as she could. She stood on the threshold of the familiar little house once more; and, instead of trying not to think about what had happened here a scant two hours earlier, she stared at the places where each of her grandparents had died. She could feel another pair of eyes, Farren's eyes, on her back. She knew that armed guards (who weren't Aline and Noel of the now partly traitorous Narsai Militia, but ground troops from the Terran Embassy's security contingent) stood behind her husband, waiting to see the young couple inside for the night.

  Had anyone ever locked this door? She supposed it must have a locking mechanism, since Mum had lived elsewhere for so long and since Linc wasn't a native-born Narsatian. Maddy herself had grown up accustomed to locks, on Kesra. But on Narsai people didn't use them, because they didn't need them. Except in a few areas, parts of the planet where there were visitors in great enough numbers to change how the local residents behaved; and parts that hosted small expatriate colonies.

  Well, tonight this house was going to be locked, and that was for certain. Locked against this pair of watchdogs that Farren hadn't just accepted, but actually invited to accompany them home after the meeting.

&nbs
p; Her husband. She called him that, as was proper, but they'd been through no nuptial ceremony—and wouldn't until Maddy, the younger partner, reached her eighteenth birthday. Yet not only did custom allow them to sleep together; they were overdue to begin that part of their new relationship. So telling him he couldn't come home with her tonight hadn't looked like a viable option, especially when she otherwise couldn't come home at all. A thirteen-year-old, even in this society, couldn't set up housekeeping by herself.

  After tonight, would she have to choose where she would live? With Tena and Kyle, her new in-laws? With Johnnie and Reen, at the Farmstead? Or did she dare to ask if the widowed Doctor Cab had room at her flat, and if the Commissioner of Medicine would be willing to let a young cousin share the place?

  Maddy decided that thinking beyond tonight was pointless. She stepped into the living room at last, and Farren came inside after her. The boy turned, and secured the door behind them.

  After that he reached out, gripped her shoulders in hands that were a lot bigger than they looked, and pulled her toward him. This definitely was not the first time he'd kissed a girl.

  Something about that realization, reasonable though it was—he was older by five years, and he'd been living on a libertine Inner World through much of his adolescence—revolted her. Or maybe it only woke her up, and let her feel revulsion that was already there. In any case, she gagged before the kiss had time to grow intimate. She reached up, pressed her palms flat against his chest, and pushed hard enough and suddenly enough to break his hold on her. “No!” she said, or rather gasped. “Don't. I don't want you to touch me!"

  “That's too bad, Mads. You're my wife, and I'll touch you as much as I want. Whenever I want; however I want.” After staring at her for a moment in astonishment, Farren started to smile. A slow, thoughtful, ugly smile, that lit his brown Romanov eyes with a warmth that wasn't comforting, and with an interest that reminded the girl of her father watching a Kesran ulupod while it struggled to breathe in the bottom of a boat.

 

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