The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  “You weren’t supposed to,” the new voice replied in childish tones. “Just dump them out and strip them. I don’t want them to have any nasty toys to play with here.”

  Spencer felt the guard setting the stretcher down, and then felt a pair of hands undoing the straps that held him to the stretcher. That accomplished, the bearers flipped the stretcher on its side and unceremoniously dumped him to the floor.

  It felt like he had landed on thick carpeting. Footsteps retreated and then returned. A moment later, a thudding noise alongside him told him Sisley had been dropped alongside him.

  Then they started to strip him, leaving the bonds on his hands and feet in place and cutting his clothes away, peeling back his garments in ribbons. But worse than the loss of his clothes was the loss of his equipment—especially his AID. He felt naked long before they got his pants, the moment they pulled the AID’s hip pouch off his belt.

  “Uncloak them,” the odd, simpering voice commanded. Rough hands reached down and stripped the black hood from his head. He blinked and stared up at the ceiling, dazzled by the sudden light.

  “And ungag them, you fools,” the same voice demanded querulously. “How can I question them if they can’t speak?”

  A hand came into view and reached behind Spencer’s head. It yanked the gag away roughly, and Spencer, still bound hand and foot, rolled over and levered himself up to a kneeling position. Sisley, likewise stripped, struggled to her knees alongside him.

  They were in an ornately appointed room, half-office, half-luxurious bedroom suite. The high, vaulted ceiling made the place seem even larger. The walls were huge viewscreens, each showing a jarringly different scene—one an underwater panorama, one a tropical forest, one a view of København as seen from the StarMetal building, and the last a slowing wheeling view of the stars, apparently a live transmission from some space installation or another.

  Wide, low, plush couches and chairs were scattered about, and a huge circular bed, reminiscent of the bed Kared had left behind on the Duncan, took up one whole end of the huge room. But the bed was rumpled, unmade, musty. The rest of the room was a full-blown mess. Food containers, dirty clothes, broken toys and gadgets were strewn about the place, together with a litter of what looked like official StarMetal papers. A strange, murky odor, half the locker-room smell of unwashed clothes, half the sickly sweet stench of meat gone bad, hovered over the room.

  A powered hoverchair floated a few centimeters off the ground in a darkened corner. Floating? Very strange. Spencer could hear no ground effect jets, and the papers about the room should have been blizzarding about if the chair was hovering on compressed air. It had to be floating on superconductor levitators over a specially built floor—a hideously expensive way of doing things.

  The occupant of the chair sat in darkened silhouette, framed by the wheeling stars of space in the viewscreen behind him. Spencer could not see the occupant’s face. Jameson, it had to be Jameson. The man in the chair sat unmoving, but there seemed to be some sort of movement around him. Perhaps it was some trick of the light, reflections from the star scene behind him, caught in some shiny decoration of his clothing.

  “Leave us,” Jameson said to the guards. “I believe I can handle these two alone. I don’t believe they have violent intentions—do you, Captain?” Jameson’s voiced trailed off into an odd little giggle as he asked the question.

  “No, I don’t,” Spencer said. What the hell was wrong with Jameson?

  The two guards backed out of the room, grateful for the chance to get out of that strange place.

  Jameson’s powerchair moved closer, sliding forward into the room. His head moved into the light, and Spencer heard Sisley draw her breath in, shocked by what she saw.

  Spencer stared at the figure in the chair, and could not pull his eyes away from the sight. Now he understood, understood more and better than anyone else ever could. They had known that the droplets, the parasites could control machinery—but there had been the mystery of who or what controlled the parasites. Now they knew.

  For it was not Jameson who controlled. Clearly, Jameson no longer controlled anything, including himself. The face of StarMetal’s chairman was grey, slack-jawed, idiotic, his eyes mad and wild.

  Spencer remembered from Suss’ briefing data that Jameson was supposed to be something of a boy wonder, only forty-five when he had reached the top position at StarMetal. But this ruined man was no hale and hearty youthful executive. He was old, rotting and decrepit, as if he had been helplessly aging for centuries.

  Spencer could read in Jameson’s eyes that the old man’s mind was no longer his own to command. Spencer recognized the lost soul trapped there behind the madness. He had been this man, back in the Cernian’s feel-good palace.

  Spencer knew, knew at a glance, what had happened to Jameson. He remembered his own nightmare. His own soul drowning in feel-good voltage.

  His hand spasmed, jerking away from the imaginary button it had sought so long, and the knotted lump of scar on the back of his head throbbed in pain. Spencer knew, without having to think, that Jameson was captured by some monstrous alien numb-rig, a feel-good machine far more potent than the one that Spencer had worn.

  For Jameson wore a helmet, all of silver, on his head.

  The helmet. It had to be the helmet. No human, no race known to the Pact had made that thing. Helmet was the wrong word, a mere label that did not truly describe the nameless thing that had wrapped itself around Jameson’s skull, and clung to it lovingly. The helmet-thing’s surface roiled and rippled constantly, pulsating like some obscene metallic amoeba.

  Spencer had only seen that pattern of movement once before, but he would have recognized it anywhere, and understood, even had there been nothing else to see. But there was more, more and worse. For dozens of silver parasites, dozens of the sort of droplet that had crept aboard the Duncan, were slithering methodically up and down the powerchair, up and down Jameson’s body, merging with the helmet and breaking off from it, purposefully setting off on errands and returning.

  Jameson giggled again, and cocked his head to one side, making sure both his prisoners could get a good look at the monstrosity on his head.

  “Isn’t it a handsome thing?” he asked coquettishly.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Intruders

  Suss forced herself to hold still in the fetid darkness. It wasn’t easy. The dank and stinking mass of garbage on top of her seemed to be unusually full of pointed and angular objects, and she counted at least three separate streams of slimy fluid trickling down onto her body on various spots.

  Still, what security guard was going to search for an intruder under a pile of garbage? Suss knew she should be safe under here—as long as her nose and stomach held out.

  Dostchem had improvised it all, somehow, and now was steering the motorized garbage bin, just one more non-human menial laborer.

  Suss sighed philosophically. Dostchem was no doubt enjoying the chance to bury a KT agent in slop, but Suss told herself it was better being here with egg salad in her hair than being a handsome corpse in the morgue.

  God only knew how Dostchem had managed it all so quickly. No more than five minutes could have elapsed between Spencer being captured and Dostchem materializing three floors above, running a commandeered building-control console, from where she had fired the crowd gas into the office.

  After Dostchem and Suss had linked up, Dostchem had led Suss from the building control center straight to a huge cafeteria, back into the cafeteria’s trash room—and then had ordered Suss into the waiting garbage bin. Either Capuchins could move and think a lot faster than Suss had ever dreamed possible, or Dostchem had secured a lot of detailed knowledge of the StarMetal building from someone before she ever set foot in the place. Iggy, perhaps. It didn’t matter.

  The garbage bin’s wheels clumped and bumped for a second, then Suss could hear the muffled sound of electric doors sliding shut. A moment later, Suss felt the weight on top of her
lessen just a trifle. They must have made it to the freight elevator and were heading down. Good.

  The elevator clumped to a heavy stop and the doors opened. Suss felt the bin roll forward, turning once or twice before it came to a halt briefly and then moved on. Then the bin stopped again, there was a humming of hydraulics, and Suss felt the front end of the bin lifting itself up. The rear doors snapped open suddenly, and Suss came tumbling out in the midst of a malodorous heap. She picked herself up from the trash heap and found herself back in the gigantic sub-basement. “This is where we came in,” she said.

  “And where we get out,” Dostchem agreed. “I stopped at Iggy’s little compartment, and there was no sign of him. I’m not surprised, but that means we’re on our own. Can you find the manhole we came through?”

  Suss pulled her AID out of its pouch. “Santu can.”

  Dostchem nodded. “I thought as much. I knew I couldn’t find it on my own, let alone retrace our steps through the tunnel system.”

  Didn’t think you brought me along out of the goodness of your heart, Suss thought uncharitably. “Santu, inertial tracker mode. Where is the cover we came through?”

  “Turn forty-five degrees to your right, and proceed a hundred meters,” Santu said. “Then another left and a right. I’ll tell you when to turn.”

  “Let’s go, then,” Suss said.

  Santu led them back toward the manhole. Five minutes later, they were down in the tunnels, slogging through that sewage-filled pipe. Suss almost felt revenged on Dostchem for being dumped in garbage. Dostchem was getting her dainty fur dirty all over again.

  Getting out through the tunnels seemed to take a lot less time than getting in. Both Suss and Dostchem had packed portable lights, and without Iggy along, making them travel in the dark, neither of them were shy about keeping their path well-lit. Maybe light raised the risk of capture somehow, but by that time they were both much more interested in speed than stealth. Santu led them confidently through every twist and turn of the labyrinth, and in far less time than Suss would have expected, they were back out on the street, clear of StarMetal, under the clean skies of dawn.

  Dostchem wanted to rest a moment, but Suss wanted to get more distance between herself and StarMetal. She led the rapidly tiring Capuchin on a fast dogtrot that brought them most of the way back toward Undertown in short order.

  Finally, Suss took pity and called a rest break. She ducked down an alley and found a tumble-down shack with the door unlocked. Suss went inside first and looked around. Nothing there but a few packing cases and some dust. No windows. With the door shut, no one would know they were in there—unless they took a sniff. Both of them were more than a bit overripe.

  She gestured for Dostchem to follow her in and sat down wearily on one of the packing crates. She felt her body start to tremble as she allowed herself the luxury of reacting to the disaster.

  Her friend, Al Spencer, the one real friend she had allowed herself to have, had been captured. More than that, the captain had been captured. The Navy took a dim view of having its commanding officers kidnapped. That StarMetal would be willing to let it get that far told Suss just how high the stakes were.

  Dostchem followed her in and found a packing case of her own to sit on. The Capuchin put her head between her knees and curled her tail up on the back of her head, the very image of a tired being trying to block out the world.

  The Navy wasn’t going to be much help right now, Suss thought, trying to focus her mind. Was the Duncan still even on the planet? Al had ordered her to orbit as soon as possible. If the ship were already in space, they would lose valuable time returning a combat team to København. And then lose more time searching for Captain Spencer. It would take the full complement of the Duncan’s Marines to search the huge StarMetal building in any reasonable length of time. No, wait, dammit, weren’t most of Duncan’s marines still aboard the Banquo to guard against a second mutiny?

  Was there even any guarantee that Al was still in the StarMetal building? Suppose the StarMetal cops actively resisted the marines’ search? There was a thought to bring her up short. Good God, would StarMetal be willing to go as far as a full-scale battle with Pact Marines?

  No sense speculating that far. “Santu, what’s the location of the Duncan, and where are her marines?” Suss subvocalized.

  “According to the harbormaster’s UHF feed, Duncan is headed for deep water right, almost clear of the harbor. All but twenty of her marines are on detached duty, sitting on the Banquo. And if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, forget it. Banquo doesn’t have any reentry vehicle that could land any size force, even if she wasn’t in the wrong orbit. A captain’s gig could carry five marines and their armament, tops. The gigs are the closest thing we’ve got to assault boats—but they’re too small. Forget it. It won’t work.”

  Suss sometimes suspected that Santu spoke in a confusing tangle of negatives on purpose when the AID wanted to steer Suss away from something. Certainly, the AID was hard to follow whenever she tried to talk Suss out of an idea. But be that as it may, the marines couldn’t help. She’d have to find some other way . . . Find. Wait a second. Dostchem. Dostchem had known where Suss had been. “Dostchem. How did you know I was still on Sisley’s floor?”

  The Capuchin, slumped down in exhaustion, looked up at Suss warily. “I put a tracetab on you before we left my apartment. It seemed a prudent precaution. And it saved me. Without you and your AID, I could not have escaped.”

  Dostchem seemed to be throwing up side issues as well. “Never mind that. You had no way of knowing that I would be your ticket out. You must have put tracetabs on all of us.”

  Dostchem nodded glumly. “I did. But even without one, I could tell you what you’re about to ask. I did not wish to tell you while we were in the building, for fear you would act like the foolhardy human you are and try for a rescue. When the cops arrested the others, I managed to slip away. But I overheard the guards say where they were taking Captain Spencer and Mannerling. They were taking them to Chairman Jameson’s office. But what good does it do for us to know that? We cannot go get them. It is impossible. It is just us two alone, against everything StarMetal can throw at us. And they control this planet.”

  Suss felt a wave of excitement reenergizing her. She stood up, feeling very much like a foolhardy human. To hell with the marines. She would make the bust-out, do the pickup. She would rescue Al.

  It would even be legal. The captain of a Pact warship had been taken prisoner, and that was license for her to do practically anything short of melting the city. But to hell with rights and official justification. She was going to do this, Suss going in for Al Spencer and Sisley Mannerling. Never mind the KT or the Navy or the Pact.

  Which was not to say that she was not above using the Navy. She had no legal authority as far as the Navy was concerned, but with any luck the Duncan was too busy to worry about that just now—especially if she threw the captain’s name around. “Santu,” she said aloud. “Give me a secure voicelink to the Duncan. And thanks for reminding me of the captain’s gig.”

  “I don’t think you’re welcome,” Santu said warily. “Voicelink open.”

  “Captain’s aide calling Duncan on captain’s behalf.”

  “This is Duncan.”

  Suss recognized the voice. It was Lieutenant Peroni, the daywatch comm officer. Good. Peroni had never struck Suss as being overly bright. “I am making a priority-three call. The captain is in immediate danger and I require ship’s facilities in going to his assistance. Patch me through to the auxiliary vehicles officer.”

  “Understood. Stand by for aux vee.”

  Good, Peroni hadn’t cleared the contact with Chu, as per regulations. Probably Chu was plenty busy right now, anyway.

  There was a brief pause, and a new voice came on the line, young and nervous. “This is Ensign Shoemaker, aux vehicles. I have acknowledgment that this is a priority-three call. How can I help you?”

  “It’s the cap
tain. He has been detained by local authorities. Launch the captain’s gig and have it home in on my AID code beacon at my approximate present location. I will move from here to the closest open space, so track the beacon in real time. The gig is to land and collect two persons before proceeding to rescue captain. We have the gear here needed to locate him. I need the gig fully fueled and all weapons unlocked, and full medical kit. One pilot, no other crew, as we will need the crew spaces to make pickup. Acknowledge,” she said, trying to sound crisp and military, hoping Shoemaker’s conditioned reflexes would make him obey the order.

  There was another long pause, and then the nervous young voice spoke again. “I have acknowledged the order and logged it. We will launch gig in five minutes as per instructions. ETA your present location, ten minutes.”

  “Thank you, Duncan.” Suss said, her heart pounding.

  She had gotten away with it.

  ###

  Ensign George Shoemaker sat and stared at the intercom box for a long moment. Was that the captain’s aide or his AID that he had just spoken with? Shoemaker had never heard either one’s voice. Shoemaker decided the voice sounded too sure, too authoritative, to be a mere captain’s doxie. It must have been the AID, then. But what difference if it was human or machine? Neither had any more authority to order him about than the messboys—or the toasters—in the galley.

  On the other hand the orders were issued on behalf of the captain—they wanted the gig to go rescue the captain, somehow. But it was Captain Spencer himself who had ordered the ship buttoned up. Shoemaker had heard through the grapevine that the parasite thing had been caught—but no one had ever bothered to tell a mere ensign, what, exactly, the parasite was. With the parasite caught, was the danger now passed? Was the captain now effectively countermanding his own order by calling for the gig? If so, why pass his orders through his civilian bedmate or his AID? And how the hell had the captain been captured—and by whom?