The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  “In closing, I will make one further statement. This prisoner is to arrive at Daltgeld intact and in good health. He will be fed and cared for. I will not hesitate to reconvene this court to try an alleged assailant. We will have justice, not blood. This court is now adjourned.”

  Allison Spencer stood, bringing everyone else in the room to their feet, standing at rigid attention. “At ease,” he said tiredly, and ducked out of the room through a convenient side door.

  ***

  He got from the wardroom to his office—now vacated by Deyi—without running into anyone. For that Spencer was thankful. He felt too young, too inexperienced, to play the part of judge and jury, and he didn’t want or need the congratulations of the crew over how good a job he had done.

  He closed the door of his office against the outside world and sat down behind his desk, thankful for the solitude. This was the only place he could truly be alone—Suss shared his cabin, if not his bed, and besides, the turmoil of turning Kerad’s Arabian Nights fantasy back into a normal stateroom was not conducive to quiet meditation.

  “You’ve got a visitor coming,” Spencer’s AID announced. “Commander Tallen Deyi’s AID is requesting—”

  “Granted.”

  “Very good, Sir,” the AID agreed.

  A knock came at the door. “Come,” Spencer said.

  Tallen came in, pulled up the visitor’s chair and sat down. “That was not a pleasant job. I’m glad I didn’t have to do it.”

  “But you should have,” Spencer said.

  “Sir?”

  “Knock off the sirs, Tallen. This is friend-to-friend, not commander and XO.” Spencer turned and punched up an exterior view on the wall screen. Daltgeld hovered in the far distance, even at high magnification. They had jumped three times to get here, but now they were in the Daltgeld system, albeit in the outer reaches. Daltgeld was still over two billion kilometers away, and it would still take some time to get there. “You should have gotten the Duncan. Not me. I’d never even heard of this task force until a month ago. You know the ships, know the men. But I came along and kicked you out from behind this desk.”

  Tallen cleared his throat and held his hands together in his lap, staring very intently at the way his fingers wrapped around each other. “Well, Sir—I mean, Al, you may be right. But they didn’t choose me. They chose you. They decided you were the more qualified commander—”

  “Just as Kerad was more qualified?” Spencer asked. “I’ve never commanded Navy men. I have to keep asking my AID what the most basic terms mean. I shouldn’t be here. I don’t want to be here. I got listed as a screw up dirtside, and they dumped me on you.” That was close enough to the truth for present discussion, anyway. “Kerad’s appointment was political, and so was mine. So don’t tell me I was chosen because I was more qualified.”

  Tallen looked up fiercely at the younger man. “All right, I won’t. But I will tell you that you are more qualified than I am. I couldn’t have conducted that trial, manipulated our departure schedule to keep the dirtside lawyers from giving Rockler a slap on the wrists and a kiss on the mouth. I would have let them take him away. As it is, his crew is seeing justice being done. You could see far enough ahead to know they needed that. I couldn’t.”

  “Nonsense. You’d have known what to do. And you deserve the chance to command. So I’m changing my plans. I’m bucking you up to Commander and giving you the Banquo.”

  Tallen sat up straight and looked at Spencer. “What about Tarwa Chu, the Banquo’s XO? Shouldn’t she get the job?”

  Spencer shook his head and grinned. “Tallen, you’ve got to stop thinking that way. Every time something good comes your way, you think of reasons it shouldn’t happen. I’m dispersing all of the Banquo’s officers, putting them on the Duncan, the Macduff, and the Lennox. Better for officer and enlisted morale than leaving the same officers in charge of a crew they couldn’t protect from Rockler. I’m bringing Chu over here to take your job. She doesn’t have your experience, but you’ll be able to keep an eye on her if need be. By all reports she’s a good officer—but she’d have trouble convincing the Banquo’s crew of that. After all, she had to sit there and follow Rockler’s orders. You were the one who stopped the mutiny, and had the nerve to arrest the mutineers and Rockler. They’ll trust you.”

  “I don’t want it,” Tallen said flatly. “I just got through saying I’m not up to the job of commanding a ship.”

  “And I just got through telling you you’re wrong. Besides, I’m not offering you the Banquo. I’m ordering you to take her. I need an experienced officer riding herd on the three destroyers. Your fitness reports make it clear that the Duncan needs some serious work done. We can get it done fast if she makes planetfall at Daltgeld, leaving the three destroyers in orbit.”

  “Planetfall?”

  Spencer winced inside, knowing how flimsy it sounded. But such were the consequences of moving around capital ships and whole task forces as covers for KT agents. The entire purpose of this operation was to get Suss to Daltgeld, and to get her in contact with her fellow operatives. If, as seemed possible, the local KT talent was having trouble using electronic communications, then Suss would have to be in direct, physical contact with them—which meant getting her down to the surface and keeping her there. So long as the Duncan remained in orbit, her cover as the captain’s courtesan, posing as Spencer’s putative personal assistant, didn’t provide any particularly convincing reason for her shuttling back and forth to the planet. She might travel on the captain’s arm, or else go on shopping sprees—but neither of those activities allowed an agent much freedom of movement, or could be kept up indefinitely.

  Which meant a Warlord-class cruiser, all one million metric tons of it, with one thousand crew aboard, would have to be coaxed down out of the sky and into a repair yard for the convenience of one forty-five-kilo secret agent.

  “Yes, we’re making planetfall for repairs. Do you have objections?” Spencer asked, a bit sharply.

  Tallen started to speak, hesitated, and then decided to launch in directly. “Al—Sir—with all due respect, I have to say that this is a case where your lack of naval experience might get you into trouble. Getting a ship the size of the Duncan down out of orbit is no minor matter. We’d have to do a water landing and tow her in. Those are expensive procedures, and not without a certain amount of risk both to the Duncan and to any landscape she might have to overfly. A ship this size is very rough to handle in atmosphere. It’s dangerous.”

  “So is flying a ship when an uncertain number of unlogged repairs and pilferages have been performed on her,” Spencer said, trying to sound convincing. “We still don’t know what Kerad’s cronies took with them, what bulkheads they might have weakened by punching doors through them, what of the equipment that has been left behind is low-grade junk they installed instead of proper military spec gear. Those clowns were running this ship for six standard months. Who knows how much damage they might have done?”

  “Granted, but everything we’ve found so far has been quite minor.”

  “So far. Kerad tore out one bulkhead in my stateroom and moved it back a meter, God knows why. Then she decided she liked it better where it was and put it back. One of the members of the work crew that did the job reported it to Chief Engineer Wellingham, and his hair practically turned white on the spot. If the Duncan had fired her engines while that bulkhead was out of position, at the very least the captain’s cabin would have collapsed. No great loss if Kerad was in it—but nowadays it’s me there. What else have they done without logging it? And most of these modifications have taken place in officer’s country. What did they do in the cabin next to yours that we don’t know about? Is there a pressurized standpipe they banged into? An electrical cable they tapped into and then didn’t reinsulate properly?

  “You’re right, it’s a close call as to whether or not we should do the work ourselves in orbit—but it seems to me the risks of landing the ship are known, and therefore contro
llable—whereas—”

  “Whereas continuing to fly the ship when it’s full of random potential faults is possibly more dangerous, and an open-ended danger. Very well, I see your point.” Tallen nodded, seemingly satisfied.

  “Good, but that’s practically a side issue,” Spencer said. “What about your taking the Banquo?”

  Tallen leaned back in his chair and thought for a long moment. He wanted to command, desperately. All his life he had dreamed of having his own ship. Even if it had to be a destroyer, and not a cruiser. But was he capable of it? Spencer was right, he did tend to underestimate himself—but suppose this time he was as unworthy as he felt? Goddammit, there was no way to know unless he took the chance—and took the lives of the Banquo’s three hundred crew into his hands. “Very well,” Tallen said at last. “I can’t refuse a direct order. But could we possibly make it on a trial basis? Maybe for ninety days? Make it a brevet promotion. Let me write out a letter of resignation right now, and date it for then. At the end of the ninety days, you can accept or reject my resignation as you see fit.”

  Spencer smiled, pulled open a desk drawer, removed paper and pen, and shoved them across the desk. “Fair enough. Write it up the old-fashioned way, in long-hand. That way it will stay off all the computer systems until the ninety days are up and you come back in here to watch me tear it up.”

  Tallen took up the pen, scribbled a few lines on it, dated it, signed it, and stamped his thumb down on the ID corner, leaving behind his thumbprint as proof he had written the document. Swallowing hard, he shoved the piece of paper back to Spencer.

  “Thank you,” Spencer said, smiling. He pulled a flat box out of the same drawer, stood, and stepped around the desk drawer. “Please rise,” he said. Tallen got to his feet and stood at rigid attention as Spencer opened the box, removed the commander’s insignia, and pinned them to Tallen’ uniform. He removed the Lieutenant Commander’s insignia and pocketed them. “I’ll just hang on to these myself, in case you suddenly decide to resign the brevet promotion too,” Spencer said. “You’ll have to come to me for the tabs, and I can talk you out of it.” He drew himself up to full attention and saluted Tallen. “Congratulations—Commander. In ninety days we’ll have a proper promotion ceremony—but right now the Banquo is waiting for her new master.”

  Tallen looked startled. “Sir?”

  “My AID heard me issue a direct order,” he said, grinning. “And my guess is my AID is smart enough to act on that order. AID, have you done so?”

  “The crew of the Banquo have been notified, a work crew is packing Commander Deyi’s belongings, and a gig is being fueled and readied to transfer the commander to his ship,” the AID announced in a rather self-satisfied tone of voice.

  Spencer laughed. “I guess you’d better get moving, Commander. Do good things.”

  Tallen found himself blushing for some reason. “Thank you, Sir,” he said, saluting as self-consciously as any academy midshipman. He turned and left the room, and Spencer thought that perhaps there was just a bit more bounce in the man’s step than when he came in.

  Spencer smiled and sat back down, glad he had been able to give a good man something he had earned. He knew he had gained an ally today, and was glad of that too.

  Once they got to Daltgeld, he was going to need all the friends he could get.

  ###

  Suss looked up from her desk when Al returned to his cabin. She was wearing the practical-looking coveralls again. Al had concluded they represented her real preference in clothing. The somewhat dour businesswoman and the nearly sleazy courtesan never made an appearance when she and Al were alone.

  He had also concluded that she would have slept with him if he had made approaches early on. Then it would have been part of her cover story, part of her job. It was too late for that now, though. The two of them knew each other. She could no longer see him as a chess piece in the game she was playing. Al Spencer had become a person to her—the sort of person whose self-respect would not permit him to go to bed with a woman for the sake of a KT cover story. By now she knew he did not expect sex from her as part of her job—and neither of them seemed prepared for the sort of commitment that would make sex a meaningful contact instead of a charade in the nude.

  Or maybe he was still too confused about his own life, and had wholly misread what he thought was the unspoken understanding between the two of them.

  The hell with it, he decided. Maybe all he had to do was reach over and undo the fastenings on that coverall, and the night would be one of wild passion for both of them. Maybe so. But he wasn’t ready for any such thing. He certainly hadn’t forgotten Bethany—or made anything but the first and smallest steps toward recovering from losing her.

  It didn’t help matters any that her cover as his courtesan obviously required that they sleep in the same bed. They slept side by side, and did not touch.

  But even having her close seemed a healing—though disturbing—presence to him. At least he knew he was confused. Maybe that was a start.

  And maybe it was time to get his mind on other things. “Good evening,” he said cheerfully. “How’s the homework coming?”

  She looked up at him and smiled. “Pretty well. I always like this part of the job—studying a new place, sifting through the facts, sitting and thinking. I was always one of those annoying girls in school who got perfect marks because they loved to study. Never gotten over it.”

  “Somehow I have trouble imagining you as a school child,” Spencer said.

  “And I had trouble imagining you as a captain or a judge of the law—but ya done good today, Cap’n. I was watching on the monitor system. I’m impressed.”

  “Good. Well, if you’re impressed with my authority and ability at the moment, maybe this is a good time to ask you more about our mission.”

  “I’m being sent in because KT agents have disappeared, and we presume they have been killed. You’re coming in as a cover—and as backup. The theory is that KT agents are very hard to kill, and anyone who could knock two or three of us off without getting caught is a pretty fierce character indeed. Until tonight, I didn’t know much more than that, so I couldn’t tell you more than that.

  “The thing is, everyone knows that the KT takes care of its own. There are legends—untrue but believed—that we have bombed whole planets down to slag in order to be sure of getting the guy who killed a KT op. We don’t seek to play that image down; it’s very useful to us. We really do try our damnedest against anyone who targets us. Officially, we do so on the theory that anyone crazy enough to take on the KT must be assumed to be a serious threat to public safety and peace. In practice, yes, sure, there’s an element of revenge. We’re willing to go to extremes.”

  “Such as turning the Navy upside down for your own convenience.”

  “True,” Suss said blandly, not at all offended. “Though this task force wasn’t doing anything worthwhile. Anyway. The idea is to keep up the KT image, as a deterrent to anyone attacking us again. Everyone knows what we’re capable of. How dangerous we are. So anyone gunning for us had best be strongly advised to have a good reason—and a strong hope of success—before taking us on. Something big, important, something very risky that’s worth taking the risk for.”

  “So what’s going on in the Daltgeld system that fits that bill?”

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. As Tallen would say, not a goddam thing. From all reports, everything is fine. No problems at all. No supercriminals at large, no revolt against the Pact imminent, nothing. Now that we’re in-system, we’re picking up local news feeds, the sort of in-system chit-chat that never gets on the intersystem newsgrid. Santu’s been listening, and confirms that nothing out of the ordinary is going on. The biggest news is that the StarMetal conglomerate appointed a new chairman about six months back. Guy by the name of Jameson. He’s supposed to be a very forward-thinking, progressive sort of man. Youthful, vigorous. I’ve been trying to pick up any recent video or speeches from him, but he hasn’t b
een in the public eye too much recently. And that’s about it.”

  Spencer looked her in the eye, and saw she was playing with him just a bit. “Except?”

  “Except—not much. But Santu and I are working on the theory that something is going on, something big, something hidden.”

  “And?”

  “Well, if you sweep a pebble under a rug, maybe it’ll go unnoticed. But if you try to sweep a boulder under that same rug, maybe you won’t see the boulder—but you will see the bulge over top of it. We’re looking for that bulge. The secondary or maybe tertiary effects of whatever it is. Something big and complicated is bound to leave effects. And we might have found them.”

  Spencer was starting to get a little impatient. Suss was obviously enjoying the chance to string her story out. He couldn’t blame her for that, after all the work she put into the research. “Go on,” he said.

  “Money. Property. A lot of both changing hands around here. This local conglomerate called StarMetal is spending like a drunken sailor, buying up half of this solar system. All of it done very hurriedly, very quietly, through dummy companies. Obviously they are trying to keep it out of sight—but they’ve been spending so fast they’ve left traces behind—if you’ve got an AID as good as Santu to spot the traces,” she said, patting Santu affectionately. “Add to that the fact that the KT suspects that StarMetal is closely allied with the Haiken Maru conglomerate. In fact, I don’t see how StarMetal could afford to spend what they are, unless someone as big as Haiken Maru were backing them.”