The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  “Yes, Sir, very good.”

  “That will be all, then, Commander. I can find my own way to my cabin.” Spencer stood up to leave, and Tallen rose hurriedly. He saluted and watched the captain depart, very much confused. He didn’t know quite what to make of it, but it seemed that the Duncan might actually have a real commander for a change.

  ###

  Allison Spencer closed the door on his new executive officer and breathed a sigh of relief. He had carried it off, at least so far. Eighteen hours after leaving the hospital, and here he was already, bluffing his way through the role of commanding his very own task force. He hadn’t even been prepared to change into his new uniform aboard the gig, let alone assume command today.

  The next challenge was seeing if he really had memorized the ship’s layout. So where was his cabin? He tried to picture its location in his head, but didn’t feel confident about it. He could ask someone—but that wouldn’t exactly give the image of command. Should he just try and fake it, hope he remembered all the twists and turns properly? No, it wouldn’t do for the new captain to go blundering into the women’s showers, either. Well, anything would be better than standing aimlessly in a hall for fear of looking foolish. At least he couldn’t get embarrassed in front of machinery. “AID,” he said at last, “How do I get to my cabin?”

  “I made a bet with Santu that you’d have to ask,” his AID replied with an excellent imitation of a chuckle. “Head back down the way you came, turn to port, go to the third intersection and turn—”

  “Hold it. I was in the Guard until this morning, remember? So, uh—which way is port?”

  The AID seemed to hesitate for a moment before replying. “Captain, I have the feeling this is going to be interesting for all of us. Turn left, go to the third intersection . . .”

  Captain Spencer followed the AID’s instructions, beet red and quite thoroughly aware of how embarrassed he could be in front of machinery.

  He located his cabin without any further ado, accepted the salute of the rather haggard-looking Marine on guard duty, and stepped through into his quarters.

  He had some vague idea of what to expect, but his jaw dropped nonetheless. Ornate, opulent, decadent—none of them went quite far enough. It would seem that Kerad had not had the time to strip her own cabin of its furnishings. The place was done up like something out of the Arabian Nights. The compartment’s bulkheads were lost behind elaborate wall hangings and tapestries. The deck was covered in layers of thick carpet and animal skins. There were no chairs, merely heaps of gaudily covered pillows scattered about the carpets. A meter-tall hookah had pride of place in the center of the room. The lights were dim and the air was thick with incense. Slow, seductive music came from somewhere, a haunting refrain that teased at Al, as if it were a song he had always loved and not heard in a long time.

  But Al scarcely noticed any of that. He was too busy staring at the bed—and the indecorously clad Suss, who was lounging luxuriously on it. The bed was circular, and at least five meters across. Covered in something that resembled angora bearskin, raised on a low dais in such a way that it reminded Al of a primitive sacrificial altar, it took up an entire corner of the huge compartment. Mirrors covered the two walls that formed the corner, and more mirrors covered the ceiling above it.

  Suss was doing a very credible job of living up—or perhaps down—to her surroundings. She was dressed in a sheer black negligee that hid nothing, a rope of perfect white pearls draped around her neck, and a bright red rose between her teeth. She tried her best sultry stare on Spencer—but then exploded in laughter, dropping the rose from between her teeth. “I’m sorry, Al,” she said at last, when she had recovered enough to speak, “but there I was, being discreetly escorted to the captain’s cabin by a most matronly looking rating who saw right through my demure little business suit to the painted harlot of a captain’s courtesan underneath. She knew what I was, and no doubt about it. And then the door opens and I see this ridiculous place—and Santu tells me that straight-laced, perfect gentleman Captain Spencer, who wouldn’t dream of consorting with that sort of woman, is on his way—I just had to make your entrance memorable.”

  She hopped down off the bed, looked at Spencer, and her face grew serious. “But you’re not laughing.” She reached over to pat him on the arm. “This hasn’t been an easy day, has it? Let me get out of my working clothes, and we’ll talk.”

  She crossed to the side of the room, threw back one of the wall hangings, and vanished through the doorway behind it. Al Spencer found a pile of pillows at a comfortable height for sitting and collapsed down onto them. He unbuckled his AID and tossed it onto the next pile of pillows over. Suss reappeared, wearing a very practical-looking brown coverall. “I’m sorry,” she said, sitting close to him, but not too close. “Poor attempt at a joke.”

  Spencer smiled, feeling as if he hadn’t smiled enough in a long time. “No, a very good attempt at a joke. It was funny—this place is funny—and you looked very lovely. But things have been moving too fast. Here I am, supposedly running this ship, this whole task force—and I don’t even know port from starboard.”

  “So what did you do about it?”

  “Backpedalled, left the XO to get on with patching the ship up. He’s got enough problems without holding my hand. I’ve decided to take on the investigation of the Banquo mess while I’m learning the ropes. I did a hitch at the Judge Advocate’s office. It’s something I know about.”

  “So you delegated authority to the man best able to do the work and took on the responsibility for the nastiest assignment yourself,” Suss said. “That sounds like what a captain is supposed to do. Maybe you don’t know port and starboard yet, but it seems to me that you have enough common sense to fake it while you learn.”

  “And meanwhile I intend to stall on the Banquo business until we’re en route to Daltgeld.”

  Suss looked up, startled. “Why wait? You can’t wait. If the crew of the Banquo and the other ships don’t see justice done for what’s happened to them—”

  “There’ll be an explosion to make the Banquo mutiny look like a day at the beach. I know. But there’s no Navy presence to speak of on Daltgeld. I’ll be the highest-ranking officer in system. If I had to convene a court martial here, the regs say I’d have to hand it off to the fatbottoms back on-planet. And no doubt some of them are chummy with the Kareds, or the Rocklers. The fix would be in. Once we’re out of system, it’s legal for us to try the case ourselves, make sure no one has a chance to cock up the works.”

  Suss looked at Al with new respect. “And the file says you’re still a little disoriented, not quite back to your old self. Either the psych file is wrong, or you’re really going to be something once you get over—” Suss stopped and shifted uncomfortably. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t talk so lightly about what they did to you and your wife, like it’s a summer cold you’ll shake off.” She thought for a second, and blushed. “And there I was, prancing around in my skivvies just for a laugh. I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t mean to mock you.”

  Spencer shrugged. “It’s okay. I have to live with it. I’m used to people regarding that sort of thing very casually. Bethany and I had our marriage in a world where none of our peers, none of our acquaintances, had a real marriage. No one married because they loved each other and wanted to be together. I’m used to people assuming there was nothing real there between Bethany and myself.”

  Suss reached out a hand—but then drew it back. This man didn’t want or need physical contact right now. “I’m sorry,” she said at last.

  “Thank you,” Spencer said. “That counts for a lot.” He had known this woman for, what, twenty hours? Already she seemed an old friend. Was it just sheer chance that they got along, or had some KT psych computer calculated their personalities would mesh—or was Suss’ apparent kindness part of her act, a facet of the job she was doing? Never mind. None of that mattered. He needed someone he could talk to, someone who cared about him. Whatever the reasons
, however false or genuine it was, he needed her understanding.

  “You’re nice people,” Al said.

  “You say that as if you were surprised,” Suss replied.

  “I guess I am,” Spencer admitted. “I always thought KT operatives were supposed to be paranoi—” He stopped himself in mid-word. He realized he was about to put his foot in it. “Supposed to be, you know, dedicated, determined, humorless, driven,” he said, trying to recover as best he could.

  “What you were about to say is that Kona Tatsu ops are supposed to be paranoid sociopaths,” Suss said easily. “Some of us are, of course. Comes with the territory.”

  She stood up and selected another pile of pillows to slump down on. “It’s been a problem for intelligence agencies since the dawn of time. The personality-type best suited to fieldwork is also one of the most pathological, dangerous, and unstable personality types going.”

  She picked up one of the smaller and gaudier pillows within reach and hugged it to her chest. After a moment’s silence, she spoke again, her eyes focused somewhere far beyond the walls of Luinda Kerad’s fantasy world of a stateroom.

  “You need someone who can slip into a foreign society, blend in facelessly without being noticed, a loner willing to leave family and friends far behind, maybe leave them behind forever, someone with such absolute faith in himself that he can make life-or-death decisions instantly—and unfeeling enough that he can live with the consequences afterwards. It helps to be completely devoid of empathy, helps even more if you can’t really believe that other people have feelings—and the best way to manage that is to suppress your own feelings as well. It takes someone capable of getting up every morning and living a cover story—living a lie, trusting no one.

  “Talk to a psychologist, describe someone who lives like that, can function in life like that—and the shrink will tell you that person is in serious trouble. That person is a sociopath, a paranoid afraid of everything and unable to experience any of the fear he’s keeping locked deep inside. He either winds up locked in a rubber room somewhere, or locked inside his cover story, never opening up, forever incapable of most normal human feelings.”

  “You keep saying ‘he’,” Spencer said.

  Suss looked up and smiled unhappily. “Do I? Probably because I’m still trying to pretend it can’t happen to me. Every once in a while, I feel it all closing in, feel myself walling off my feelings, treating people like so many chess pieces to be sacrificed. That scares the living daylights out of me. There’s part of me that knows, absolutely knows that I’m going to end up with all the life drained out of me, a Kona Tatsu killing machine. I have to fight that.”

  She tossed her hug-pillow away, stood up, and shrugged broadly. “So I overcompensate, act as alive as I can—and dress up in filmy negligee for the sole purpose of shocking a perfect stranger, so he forms the wrong impression and assumes his operational partner is a complete slut and loon.” She crossed to the stateroom’s comm panel and switched on a view of the planet below, hanging silently alone in the emptiness of space. “We’re all crazy by now,” she half-whispered. “I wonder if there’s a completely sane person left in the Pact.

  “And if there isn’t,” she asked, still staring at the stars, “what does that say about the Pact?”

  Chapter Five

  Trial

  “Guilty.”

  Allison Spencer shoved his chair back from the table a bit and stared down at the man he had just convicted. In another world, a better world, Spencer thought, he would not have had to do this job himself. Someone else besides Lucius Rockler’s commander should have said that word to Lucius Rockler. It wasn’t right or proper for a commanding officer to preside at the court martial of an officer directly under his command.

  But far better a court martial here and now, under whatever circumstance, than the ordinary sailors seeing a loathsome pimple like Rockler get off scot-free for his crimes. “Lieutenant Commander Rockler, you have been found guilty by this summary court martial of diverting Navy property to your own use, of the theft of Navy property, and of the unauthorized sale of Navy property, each of these being a Class Three offense. This court commends the prosecuting officer for her capable presentation of the case against you. We have seen how food, medical supplies, and vital equipment intended for the use of the Banquo never actually left the planet’s surface, but were instead diverted to sale on the black market, to your considerable profit. It has also been proved that you purchased substitute foodstuff’s knowing that they were of inferior quality, that much of said food was spoiled, diseased and otherwise unwholesome, and that the quantity of food supplied to the crew was wholly inadequate to feed the crew. As the Banquo was in orbit at the time, and the crew isolated from any source of food besides ship’s stores, this amounted to the deliberate starvation of your own crew.

  “You have likewise been found guilty of three separate charges of grievous manslaughter, which is defined as doing deeds and things which cause the death of another, while knowing said deeds and things were likely to cause the death of another, to wit, causing the death by malnutrition of three men under your command by depriving them of nourishing foodstuffs, such food being stolen and sold by you as per the Class Three offenses previously mentioned. However, the court finds that while you stole the men’s food, knowing the consequences of such an act might include death, your actual motive was not murder, but larceny, and therefore you cannot be charged with premeditated murder. But, by finding you guilty of the deaths of men under your command, I am legally constrained to charge you formally with the further crime of criminal negligence in the performance of your duties.

  “This court further rules that it has heard sufficient evidence already to rule on this further charge without recourse to a second court martial to consider a charge of criminal negligence. This court hereby finds you guilty of the additional charge, and hereby sentences you to death for it, as provided for in the Code of Military Justice.”

  An excited whisper of voices rippled through the wardroom, which had been pressed into service as a courtroom. Lucius Rockler, a wispy little man who seemed wholly out of place in a uniform, stood at rigid attention, visibly struggling to keep his knees from buckling.

  Al Spencer forced himself to continue. By the book, absolutely by the book, he told himself. Rockler must be granted every right to which he was entitled. The crew must know that this was justice, not a witch hunt, not revenge.

  Or was he, Spencer, merely afraid to cause this miserable man’s immediate death? “I must now speak not only to you, Lucius Rockler, but to the entire crew and officer corps of this task force. Enough of you knew to start with why we waited until departure from our last station to begin this trial that it can be no secret to any of you by now. Let me violate one of the greatest taboos and speak the truth, out loud, and in the open: The Pact has more than its share of corruption. We have evidence that friends and relations of the accused had already started efforts to suborn a planetside trial.” Spencer did not mention that the planetside KT had provided that evidence, at Suss’ request. “The evidence of judicial tampering will be entered into the permanent record of this trial.

  “I decided to try this case myself so as to keep Lucius Rockler from escaping justice. Not to prevent his escaping punishment, but justice. I had no personal knowledge of the accused man I have now found guilty, and no firsthand knowledge of the events leading to charges being brought. For these reasons, I felt it possible for me to serve as judge over him, in spite of the fact that I am his direct commanding officer. I have endeavored to conduct a fair and honest trial, and I believe I have done so.

  “But having found Lucius Rockler guilty, and having passed sentence upon him, I cannot and must not order that sentence carried out. So as to insure that the sentence was rendered justly and fairly, the law says it must be put before a review board. This is done to prevent spaceside courts martial from degenerating into vendettas, judicial murders.

  “Naval
regulations and admiralty law are most clear on this point. Under the given circumstances, it is illegal for me to carry out the sentence of death against Lucius Rockler, or to order others to carry it out. There are no doubt plenty of mess hall lawyers who have found a supposed loophole, wherein, for example, I might declare us in a state of emergency, or declare that we would be out of contact with superior authority for a long enough period of time that I could carry out sentence.

  “But I refuse to take that course, for an excellent reason: it would dishonor this command by involving it in an abuse of process far worse than the ones contemplated by Lucius Rockler’s friends. If his punishment is to mean anything, it must be carried out in the name of justice, not vengeance. His punishment must be impersonal, imposed not out of hatred, but for his violation of objective criteria—that is to say, the law. To further insure this, Naval Regulations require that an officer convicted under these circumstances be surrendered to outside authority at the first possible instant.

  “Immediately upon our arrival at Daltgeld, Lucius Rockler will be transported planetside and incarcerated at Government House there. His incarceration will be kept secret, and I might add the Rockler family is quite unknown in the Daltgeld system. He will remain in Government House until such time as another Navy unit calls at Daltgeld. They will carry him aboard for eventual transport to a major naval base. Upon his arrival at such a base, a review board will be constituted. They will examine the record of this proceeding in secret. Given the conclusive nature of the evidence, it will be impossible for them to overturn his conviction. Nor, I believe, will they find any mitigating circumstance that would prevent them from carrying out the sentence of this court. As the review will be secret, and carried out at a location convenient to the Navy, no crony of Rockler will have the chance to manipulate the proceedings. It will take time, but my sentence will be carried out. Until such time as it is, Lucius Rockler can look forward to little more than being shuttled from one prison to another.” And Suss and the KT will make certain of that, Spencer told himself. “Perhaps it would satisfy some ancient urge to pull out a repulsor and blast this man on the spot. But we dare not proceed that way, lest it be you or me in the dock next time, with our enemies convening a kangaroo court for the sole purpose of judicial murder. We deny ourselves vengeance in self-defense.