Starfist - 12 - Firestorm

by Dan Cragg

  The knocking persisted. Staggering a little, Summers flung the door open to see a Marine colonel in dress reds standing on the threshold. “Mr. Preston Summers, late President of the Coalition of Independent Worlds?” the colonel asked.

  “The shame, er, I mean, the same!” Summers blinked and swayed slightly. “I am yer prishoner, sir,” he announced with drunken gravity.

  “Sir, I am Colonel Festus Grimaldi, General Alistair Cazombi’s judge advocate, and I have something here I wish you to sign. General Lyons has already signed. It is your army’s capitulation. May we go inside?” He paused and tilted his head to one side. “Wonderful music, sir. Handel, isn’t it?”

  Late that night Cazombi and Sturgeon sat sipping whiskey and smoking one of the Davidoffs General Lyons had given Cazombi.

  “Al, despite the president’s support, our asses are grass and the Confederation Congress is the lawn mower. You’ll never get away with letting Lyons and his men go like this, and you know sure as death Billie’s filed charges of mutiny against both of us. And there are those politicians in the Confederation Congress, sitting safe in session back on Earth, they’ll want your head for being so generous with these people.” Despite himself, Sturgeon had to laugh. “But by the Virgin’s hangnails, I’m glad to be along with you for that long, long slide down the razor blade of life!”

  “Getting yourself into hot water seems to run in your veins, Ted.” Cazombi chuckled. “In the future, if there is one, you’d be advised to pick your associates more carefully. But I’m not taking any more of this Darkside nonsense, this damned cloak of secrecy our government’s put over things. Lyons put the blame for this war on those bastards who engineered that massacre at Fort Seymour, but Ted, it was our own policy that led us into war; we set up the conditions, the secessionists only took advantage of them. Let me tell you now, Ted, nothing’s going to happen to you or me over any of this, let Billie scream all he wants to, let the fat cat congressmen holler for an investigation. The time is just right to clear the decks, my friend.”

  Cazombi drew on his cigar. “Ah, damned fine smokes, these!” He exhaled luxuriously. “I said earlier today we have bigger fish to fry.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “This is a printout of a back-channel message I got this morning from a friend of mine at the Heptigon, someone very high up in military intelligence. In view of what’s on this paper, Ted, everything else is on hold.” He grinned as he passed the slip to Sturgeon. “They aren’t going to pasteurize two old warhorses like us, Ted. They have one more mission for us to perform.”

  Carefully, Sturgeon unfolded the flimsy, eyeing Cazombi quizzically as he did. He spread the paper out on his knee, took a deep drag on his Davidoff, and squinting through the aromatic cloud of smoke wreathing his head, read the very short sentence written there.

  “The Skinks are back,” he said softly.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “Gentlemen,” Admiral Joseph K. C. B. Porter, Chairman of the Combined Chiefs, smiled broadly, “I give you”—he snatched the lid off the steaming dish dramatically,—“macaroni!”

  Porter’s luncheon guests eyed the steaming heap of greasy white macaroni suspiciously. “Dig in!” he chortled, serving himself a heap of the glutinous mass. “Steward, serve ’em up!” he commanded. He shoveled a spoonful of the stuff into his mouth. “Hmm, needs a bit of salt,” he murmured, reaching for a shaker. “Maybe some pepper as well. Steward, tell the cooks to add some salt, pepper, and butter to the next batch.”

  “Very good, sir,” the mess steward replied. “They aren’t very familiar with the recipe, sir.”

  Anders Aguinaldo, Commandant of the Marine Corps, used a fork to toy experimentally with the mess the steward had just deposited in the middle of his plate. He glanced sideways at the newly appointed army chief of staff, Frank Wanker, who was cautiously tasting the concoction. The army four-star grimaced slightly and winked at Aguinaldo. Luncheons in the chairman’s mess often consisted of meals of ancient, long-forgotten cuisine that for some reason Admiral Porter relished. So-called hot dogs were another favorite of his. Thank God they weren’t having any of those things this afternoon, Aguinaldo thought. God only knew what went into them. They tasted like sawdust to Aguinaldo.

  “Joe, do you think,” Aguinaldo ventured, “that this, er, macaroni might go down a bit better with, say, melted cheese?”

  “Huh? Cheese? Oh, no, Anders, cheese won’t do.”

  “But Joe, I think Anders has a point there, cheese might do very well,” Wanker said.

  Admiral Porter glared at General Wanker and then turned to the messboy, “What do you say, steward?”

  “Cheese? Oh, no, sir! Definitely not, sir. Why, er, it’d just ruin the um, bouquet.” He knew from experience that it was not wise to disagree with Admiral Joseph K. C. B. Porter on culinary matters, about which the admiral considered himself an expert.

  “Well, there you have it, gentlemen. Ah, Anders, when does your new appointment take effect again?” He was referring to the president’s recent appointment of Aguinaldo as commander of the task force she created to deal with the Skinks.

  “A couple of weeks, sir.”

  “Well, shame you won’t be making these luncheons for a while, Anders. Eat up! Eat up!” Porter shoveled another mass of the macaroni into his mouth. “Perhaps some hot sauce?” he mused, reaching for a bottle of Tabasco with which he sprinkled his macaroni liberally. He tried another forkful of the pasta. Carefully, he sipped ice water, trying manfully not to scream at the searing pain on his tongue; he’d been a bit too liberal with the hot sauce. He wiped his lips with a napkin and coughed, a bit too hoarsely. “Gentlemen,” he squeaked, but his voice soon came back to its normal level, “what you are sampling here this afternoon is known as pasta secca, the dried pasta made from Triticum turgidum, variety durum or hard wheat. Taxonomists believe durum developed as a mutation of emmer around five or six thousand years B.C.” He paused to sip more ice water.

  “Macaroni,” he continued, “was a staple dish in households throughout the world until that goddamned food prohibition fad about 150 years ago, when the World Health Council banned it as an unhealthy food. Same time they banned tobacco, the goddamned fools. We’ve learned better since then, but in the course of time people forgot how to prepare macaroni and it just went out of style. Not tobacco though, thank God!”

  “Macaroni,” General Wanker turned the word over in his mouth, finding the word more palatable than the macaroni itself. “Sounds foreign to me, Joe. Where’s it come from?”

  “Italian,” Admiral Porter answered, now in his element, explaining the origin of arcane words. “In the Italian language it’s maccherone, which some lexicographers trace back to a Greek word, makaria, meaning ‘food of the blessed.’ Another possible origin”—he shrugged scholastically—“is from maccare, archaic Italian meaning ‘to knead.’” He smiled, “I prefer makaria, since I think we are blessed to have such a dish now in revival, if only in my mess here at the Heptigon. But who knows, maybe it’ll catch on again.”

  “Perhaps it will, sir,” General Wanker replied without conviction, “but too bad the CNO couldn’t join us this afternoon.” He winked at Aguinaldo.

  “We’ll get him another time.” Porter shrugged. “But now, gentlemen, I have a special surprise for you, a fruit dish for dessert, a delightful twentieth-century gelatin concoction called Jell-O! I got the recipe off a box in an exhibit at the National Museum!”

  A navy captain came into the mess at that point and leaned over Admiral Porter’s shoulder, whispering something and handing the admiral a sheet of flimsy. He then discreetly withdrew from the mess. “Excuse me a moment, would you?” Porter asked his guests, scanning the flimsy. “Jesus fucking Christ on a crutch!” he screamed, dropping his fork with a clatter and jumping to his feet.

  “Joe, what is it?” General Wanker asked, glancing nervously over at Aguinaldo as if to ask, Does he do this often? Porter’s face had gone brick red w
ith rage and his hands were shaking.

  “That goddamned fool!” he spluttered. “That fucking idiot! I’m getting him back here and I’m going to nail his balls to the shithouse door, I am!”

  “What is it?” Aguinaldo asked.

  With difficulty Porter gained control of himself. “Cazombi,” he rasped, shaking the flimsy at Aguinaldo, “has relieved General Jason Billie of command and taken over the army on Ravenette!”

  “Joe,” Aguinaldo said calmly, “maybe you’d better leave Cazombi’s balls alone until he’s won that war for you.” He’d been reading Ted Sturgeon’s back-channel messages so this event came as no surprise to him—delighted him, in fact. “May I see the message?”

  Porter had crumpled the flimsy into a little ball, which he now tossed across the table to General Aguinaldo. “I was going to send you, Anders, instead of Billie,” Porter commented ruefully. What he didn’t say was that he had wanted to give Anders the command to get rid of him. “But Billie talked me into sending him instead,” he added.

  Carefully, Aguinaldo unrolled the flimsy. “Yes, Joe, but during the meeting with the president, when she asked why Cazombi had been sent to Ravenette, you covered that very nicely.” Aguinaldo smiled archly and read the message silently. Porter, to cover up having sent Cazombi to Ravenette as punishment for talking back to him, had told President Chang-Sturdevant he’d been sent there as a “steady hand” in a tumultuous situation. Aguinaldo noted that the message had not even been addressed to Admiral Porter, but to President Chang-Sturdevant; Porter was only an “information” addressee. “Well, I’ll tell you this, Joe.” Aguinaldo offered the flimsy to General Wanker to read. “Now that Cazombi’s in charge, the war is as good as over. Given the length of time it takes for messages to reach Earth from Ravenette, he may well have won the war by now and be on his way home as we speak.”

  “Hrumpf. Yes, that may well be true, as you say. But another war is about to start! Did you read that last sentence? Billie’s coming back here. He’s going to demand an investigation, a court of honor or some-such nonsense, Anders. You know Jason, he’ll raise as big a stink as he can over being relieved.” Porter was cooling down now.

  Aguinaldo shrugged. “Cazombi could hardly keep him there, Joe. But you can handle him. Joe, you might go a little easy on Cazombi. He’s got the president’s ear, you know.”

  Admiral Porter harrumphed a couple of times, shook himself, and resumed his seat. “Do you really think so, Anders? Hmmm. Yes, yes. Well, he doesn’t go into any detail on why he relieved Billie. Maybe we’d best wait until we see if he can end the war before I court-martial him. Um. Yes. Steward, the fruit dishes, please?”

  Aguinaldo leaned forward and tapped the table. “You know, Joe, I really do think that macaroni of yours could do with a little bit of cheese next time.”

  “Marcus, what General Cazombi did is unprecedented in my experience. What do you think happened out there?”

  Marcus Berentus, Cynthia Chang-Sturdevant’s Minister of War, shrugged. “Something unprecedented, ma’am.” He chuckled, gently kneading Chang-Sturdevant’s neck.

  “Marcus,” Chang-Sturdevant said, her voice dripping with sarcasm, “if Cazombi screws up the war on Ravenette, it’ll be the Congress with their hands wrapped around my neck, and they won’t be as gentle as you are, my dear, so please, take this seriously.”

  “Cazombi’s a tried combat commander, Suelee.” Only Chang-Sturdevant’s most intimate associates ever used her middle name. Marcus Berentus was one of those associates. “He would not have made such a move unless he was forced into it for the good of the army. We’ll just have to wait until Billie gets back here to explain—”

  “No. What we wait for is the next battle report. If he cracks the Coalition’s army on Ravenette, that puts a whole different light on this, this act of mutiny. That’s what it amounts to, right, Marcus? Mutiny?”

  “Well, my general counsel and the Ministry of Justice have looked into this, and there are justifications for military subordinates relieving their superiors—chief among them mental or physical disability preventing them from performing their duties. I should think one or both of those conditions prevailed when Cazombi took command of the army. But whatever happened, there will have to be an investigation, Suelee.” Berentus ran his thumbs down the muscles in the side of Chang-Sturdevant’s neck and under her shoulder blades. “How does that feel?”

  “Mmmm. When you’re done let me work on you for a while, Marcus.”

  Gently, Berentus rocked her head back and forth. “Promises, promises.” He chuckled. “Now it’s you who has got to get serious. But Suelee, you know Billie has friends in the Congress—”

  “That doesn’t surprise me. I’m already beginning to hate him. You know, when we met that time, before I sent him out there to Ravenette, well, there was something—he was just a bit too slick to be good, know what I mean?” She sighed. “Well, Marcus, when will General Billie get back here? A week, two weeks? That message is a week old and he departed sometime after it was sent. So he should arrive back here about the same time the next battle report comes from Cazombi.” She shook her head. “For all we know, Cazombi might already have won the war by the time we get that message. Anyway, I want a press release put out that General Billie has become a casualty and General Cazombi has taken over the army in his place. You get ready some kind of an award for Billie, the Presidential Legion of Honor, something vast and meaningless like that; you know, the kind of thing we give someone to avoid a scandal just before kicking him out to pasture. I do not want a scandal over this.”

  “You won’t, certainly not if Cazombi beats Lyons. And if he does conclude this war, I’m going to recommend you appoint him Chairman of the Combined Chiefs, retire that old windbag Porter.”

  “Marcus,” Chang-Sturdevant murmured sleepily as he kneaded her right shoulder blade, “you took the words right out of my mouth. Yes,”—she sat up—“that’s a damned good idea! With Cazombi the chairman and Aguinaldo in charge of the anti-Skink task force, we’ll boil those damned lizards alive in their own teacups!”

  “But if he screws up?”

  “Promote him anyway. But then, my love, I’ll need your firm hands to put my cervical vertebrae back together again after the Congress hangs me.”

  The headlines in the morning edition of the Fargo Dispatch two weeks later screamed, LYONS SURRENDERS! BILLIE CLUBBED! Below was an interview with General Jason Billie along with Cazombi’s latest dispatch from Ravenette containing the liberal surrender terms he’d given the Coalition forces.

  “That bastard went to the media!” Chang-Sturdevant exclaimed. She had already known about the surrender terms and had approved them. She also knew why Cazombi had relieved Billie, and approved of that. Immediately after his arrival back on Earth, Billie had been presented with the Legion of Honor and ordered to retire. The reason given for coming back home early was ill health.

  “He was put on the retired list and told to keep his mouth shut in public.” Marcus Berentus shook his head. “Now this.”

  “The Senate Armed Services Committee is calling for a full investigation.” Chang-Sturdevant sighed. “And they’ll have it. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “Send Billie to Darkside?” Berentus chuckled.

  “I’ve had enough of that, Marcus. No, we’ll just have to tough this one out. I want you to ensure that General Cazombi has all the help he needs to prepare his testimony. He can call whomever he needs as witnesses and I want your ministry to see that’s done. I’ll have the attorney general appoint a legal team to assist him. After he’s had a chance to explain his actions, this whole thing will blow over. Dammit, you’d think Billie would be smart enough to figure that out! He’s going to destroy himself over this. Good heavens, Marcus, just based on Cazombi’s report, we should have given Billie a court-martial, not decorated him!”

  “They’ll also be looking into whether Cazombi had the authority to give the Coalition forces such libera
l surrender terms. Or you the authority to approve them without the consent of the Senate.”

  Chang-Sturdevant grimaced. “I know, I know, but Marcus, I know of a precedent: Cazombi is U. S. Grant to my Abe Lincoln. That ought to take care of the military end of things, and I’ll handle the political end. Since the attack on Fort Seymour was a setup in the first place, those who did that are the only ones who deserve to be punished, and I think Preston Summers is just the man to do that. Let them wash their own laundry.”

  She paused for a long moment. “And on top of everything else, Marcus, we have to share the responsibility for what happened. You know what I mean about that.” She got up and poured herself another dollop of Scotch from the bar. She held the glass to the light and admired the amber fluid. “Lagavulin,” she murmured. “The only Scotch I’ve ever been able to drink without a mixer to kill the taste.” She saluted Berentus and sipped the whiskey. “I have a decision to make, Marcus, and I’ll need your advice.”

  “You have it, Suelee. But don’t tell me you’re thinking of resigning again.”

  “Umm, maybe later, but right now, Marcus, I have to decide something very big.” She finished the whiskey in one gulp and smiled as it warmed its way down into her stomach. “I think the time has finally come to tell everyone about the Skinks.”

  “And why might that be?”

  “Ah, yes, you haven’t seen this yet. Be a dear and get my comp for me.”

  Berentus stepped around Chang-Sturdevant’s chair to her desk to retrieve her personal comp, then handed it to her. She fiddled with it for a moment, then handed it to him.

  “Read this.”

  Berentus gave her a curious look before taking the comp and beginning to read.

  OFFICE OF THE PLANETARY ADMINISTRATOR HAULOVER