by Diann Read
Ten
Lujan Sergey shrugged off the wet weight of his coat, handed it to the servo that whirred up to him, and ran his free hand through hair grown gray but not thinner.
“Good morning, sir.” His executive officer offered a mug of hot shuk. “Still sleeting?”
“Just raining now. Thanks.” Lujan accepted the mug and took a sip as he turned toward his office. “Anything new, Jiron?”
“Just the usual message traffic, sir,” the captain said, “and this.” He picked up a metal box off his desktop. “A courier from the Isselan Embassy delivered it after you left last night.”
“Isselan?” Lujan raised an eyebrow and smiled beneath his mustache as he took the case. “What is it, explosives?”
“No, sir. Hobarth ran it through scan. Non-lethal contents.”
Lujan chuckled. “Thanks.”
On entering his office he activated lighting with a motion at the sensor and set down the mug to turn the strongbox in his hands. Its markings—PERSONAL FOR ADMIRAL LUJAN SERGEY, CHIEF COMMANDER, SPHERZAH—caught his eye first, but the place of origin held his attention.
He tried the latches. They gave at his touch; the cover fell open. He tipped the contents into his hand: two crystal pendants, an audicorder, a pair of ID tags dangling on their chain. The tags bore a flight surgeon’s symbol.
Her tags.
Light caught the image suspended in one pendant. He took it up to look more closely.
A wedding portrait. A young pilot in ceremonial grays holding a girl in pale blue in the circle of his arms.
“Darcie,” he whispered. His throat suddenly felt too tight for sound. He swallowed against the constriction and stood paralyzed, remembering.
Adriat, her homeworld, had been liberated less than a month when they married there. He still remembered the solemnity of her face as they kissed over the altar at the rite’s conclusion, how tightly she had held him on the dance floor later, and how quiet she had become when they were finally alone.
“Is it Berg?” he’d asked gently.
“No,” she said first. And then, “Yes—sort of.” She’d been widowed once already, and she said, “I’m so afraid of losing you, too!”
He remembered how she had gripped his hands through her labor with Tristan, closing her eyes to concentrate on her breathing as he coached her, and how he’d stroked the sweat from her face with a cloth as each spasm passed. He remembered how once, in a lull between contractions, she’d taken the cloth from his hand and reached up to mop sweat from his forehead, asking with a weak but mischievous smile, “How are you holding up, Luj?”
Issel fell a few weeks later. All the noncombatants, including Darcie, had been withdrawn to Topawa while the fighter squadrons deployed forward to Tohh. Lujan remembered cartons of rich Anchenken nutloaf called urdisch and audicorded letters with Tristan’s first babblings sent from Topawa.
He remembered how she’d come on emergency leave to Tohh after his injury in a flying mishap. By the time she arrived he’d been released from the hospital, though he still limped, and he’d needed her moral support more than her medical skill. A fellow pilot and good friend had been accused of attempted murder and treason, and he had been named the prosecution’s key witness. She hadn’t understood why he’d found it so hard to testify, but she’d accompanied him to the proceedings and mourned along with him when the court-martial found his friend guilty.
He’d only seen her once more after that. They’d had a few days together on Topawa before he began six months of basic Spherzah training on Kaleo and she accepted an assignment to a medical unit on Adriat. He remembered walking up the flightline with Tristan riding on his shoulders, and kissing her good-bye in the golden light of dawn before he boarded the transport.
He had received no audicorded letters or cartons of urdisch on Kaleo; Spherzah training demanded celibacy of the mind as well as of the body.
His first mission had taken his Spherzah team to Enach. They had penetrated the Dominion’s command station a few hours before the Unified Worlds launched its attack and had accomplished their mission as they’d been trained to. The battle that followed had been the final blow to the Dominion.
He had sent a message to Darcie four days later. He wanted to return to her on Adriat, but the Unified Worlds Command had required Spherzah as mediators and witnesses at the Accords. So she’d taken leave and booked passage for herself and Tristan on the next transport out of Aeire City.
He would never forget how he learned of their loss. The messenger might as well have been his older brother. Also a pilot, he wore the patches of Lujan’s old interceptor squadron and an atypically grim expression.
“Sean!” he said. “You look like you just flew into a field of space mines. What’s wrong?”
The taller man had taken him by the shoulders and pressed him backward to a bench. “Sit down, buddy,” he said, his tone oddly quiet. “I have to talk to you.”
Puzzled, Lujan yielded to the physical insistence to sit. “Look,” he said, “if this has anything to do with the negotiations, you know I can’t talk—”
“Blast it, just listen to me, will you?” Sean’s face showed strain. His hands tightened like twin vises on Lujan’s shoulders and he muttered, “I don’t even know how to tell you this.”
Studying his eyes, Lujan had felt bewilderment give way to premonition. He swallowed, but his voice stayed steady. “Just tell me, Sean.”
The older pilot turned his face away, and his grip produced pain. “Darcie and Tristan are—dead, Jink. Or worse.”
“What?” He had stiffened, staring at his friend. “That’s impossible! They’re supposed to dock in . . .” His voice trailed off when Sean shook his head. The hands gripping his shoulders never loosened and he’d seen shared pain in his friend’s eyes.
“Dead?” He could manage only a strangled whisper. “Are you sure? How?”
Sean released his shoulders at last and began to pace. “All I know is that a message came in through the Comm Center. A transmission from the Korot system—part of one, anyway; it was cut off. Something about masuk slavers and the transport being boarded.” He’d shrugged. “And then nothing. It just—broke off.”
“Slavers?” Lujan said. “In the Korot system?” His blood turned to ice water. “Have its planetary governments been contacted?”
“Yeah. There’s only one, on Ganwold, and they claim they don’t know anything about it.” Sean lowered his head. “I’m really sorry, buddy.”
Lujan couldn’t even nod. He’d just sat staring at nothing until the full weight of it washed over him. Then he’d slumped forward, elbows on his knees, and buried his face in his hands. “Slavers!” he whispered. “No!”
He’d led the team that searched the Korot system for missing personnel after sealing the Accords, but the year’s efforts had yielded nothing. At its end he’d put his seal to the required documents and tried to accept his loss. But night after night he had dreamed of Darcie running through a ship’s passage, panting and pale and clutching his son to her breast.
That had been twenty-five years ago.
He’d never stopped missing her.
He shifted the objects in his hands and raised the second holodisc to the light.
Tristan. About a year and a half old, perched on Lujan’s shoulders and gripping his hair. The image still made him smile.
Tristan will be a young man by now.
He set the holos and ID tags on his desk and examined the audicorder. His thumb found its play button.
“—stop playing ignorant,” said a male voice. The tone belonged to a practiced interrogator. “We know who you are. We’ve had these for several years. Do you know what they are?”
Short silence. A sharp slap.
Lujan recoiled as if he’d taken the blow himself.
The interrogator’s voice suggested threat. “Answer me, Tristan! Where is your mother? Why did she send you here?”
&n
bsp; “Sir.” A younger voice, anxious. “The drug’s disoriented him.”
“It’ll also break him, Captain. We need answers. Where is she, Tristan?”
“Sick . . . fr’m th’ coughing sickness. . . .”
Lujan knew the boy’s voice, despite the drug’s slur, despite the lost years. He had his mother’s Adriatish accent. “Tristan!” he whispered.
“Why did she send you here?” he heard. “Where is she?”
“Out there . . . man’ nights away. . . .”
Another slap, an audible catching of breath.
Lujan punched the ‘off’ button, locking his teeth.
Several moments lapsed before he could steel himself to reactivate the audicorder and hear the rest.
Comments meant originally for the Sector General followed the interrogation. Lujan played through them twice:
“Sir, I have included several articles for your examination which should be sufficient to prove the boy’s identity. At the time he was apprehended he had in his possession the enclosed ID tags and a Unified issue energy pistol manufactured circa thirty-two eighty Standard Years.
“The holodiscs have been in the possession of the Department of Security and Investigation since thirty-two ninety-one, when Lieutenant Dartmuth escaped our legionnaires after the transport on which she was a passenger entered the Korot system under the control of masuk slavers.”
Lujan couldn’t suppress a slight smile. Escaped. That’s Darcie all right.
“According to your orders, sir, we have pin-pointed the woman’s location via reconnaissance drones and will continue surveillance. We are standing by for further orders.
“This is Brigadier General Jules François, Commander, Ganwold Forty-Second Defense Squadron, concluding this report on the tenth day of the eighth month, thirty-three-oh-seven Standard Years.”
Barely a standard month ago!
Lujan checked the dispatch date on the metal box: 27/8/3307. Two weeks ago.
More recent than that—only one week ago—he had received that unusual message from Nemec about the boy called Tristan accompanying the Sector General on his inspection tour. It had to be his Tristan. He could have been transported from Ganwold to Issel II very easily in the last standard month.
When the audicorder shut itself off, Lujan set it down and moved to the diaphametal wall behind his desk. He leaned against it to gaze out over the lights of Ramiscal City. The glacier-jagged mountains rose beyond, pink in the pre-dawn light. His mind kept shifting back to Darcie. “She’s on Ganwold,” he whispered. “Sick. . . . But thirty-two ninety-one?”
The puzzle provided its own solution: “Timewarp!” he said aloud. “It must have been. No wonder we couldn’t find them!”
He glanced back at the articles on the desktop and his hand tightened into a fist. “No demands. Blast it, Mordan, what do you want?”
He already suspected the answer.
* *
“There’s a greater threat in this than to my family alone,” Lujan said.
He sat in conference with the World Governor of Sostis and the Triune, the three executives of the Unified Worlds Assembly. As civilians with ambassador rank, the four hundred sixty Assembly members under the Triune represented the major cultures of the nine Unified Worlds at the highest level of interplanetary administration.
Though Lujan sat on the Defense Directorate, which came under the Assembly’s jurisdiction and included the top military commanders from each member world, the nature of the Spherzah kept his forces separate from that chain of command; he answered only to the Triune.
Pite Hanesson of Mythos glanced across at his counterparts and kept his arms folded over his chest. “In what way, Admiral?”
“It may have been intended as a provocation.”
Hanesson raised an eyebrow. “To what? Surely not to war!”
“Perhaps not directly,” Lujan said, “but that can’t be ruled out. Hostages have been at the origin of many conflicts.”
Hanesson looked skeptical. “I don’t understand why . . .”
The other members of the Triune moved uneasily in their chairs, and Kedar Gisha, Governor of Sostis, reached out her hand to touch his arm. “Pite, you’re too young to remember the Enach Accords, or how Sostis and Tohh were lost during the Great War. Mordan Renier sold them out to the Dominion.”
“I’ve studied history,” said Hanesson. Of Lujan he asked, “What evidence is there to suggest that Issel may be—preparing for war?”
“We’ve seen several significant indications in the past few months,” Lujan said, “including upgrades in the Isselan space fleet’s order of battle.” He opened his folder and removed several plasticine image sheets, which he passed around to his counterparts. “At the Secret level, Kaleo Sector sources have in the last two weeks observed eleven war ships—two spacecraft carriers, three frigates, and six destroyers—in space docks at Issel and Adriat for apparent refitting. And message traffic from Yan has reported the delivery of fourteen training craft to the piloting academy at Aeire City. A major expansion was completed there last month which will allow classes to be increased by fifty percent.
“Last week, Sostish sources also noted shifts from Issel’s machine and light industries to support increases in the military area—the second time this has occurred within the last eight months,” Lujan emphasized. “The spacecraft plant at Sanabria is capable of rolling out a fighter every three days or commissioning a battleship through space dock in less than six months.” He glanced around the table. “Issel has five of these plants and Adriat has two. Lately they’ve been operating non-stop.
“They’re producing newly developed munitions as well as spacecraft. We haven’t been able to determine yet what they are, but I consider it a matter of importance.
“Most recently, we’ve received notification from the planetary governor of Adriat that they’re going to conduct military exercises in that system next month. They’re supposed to run for about three weeks. That’s the normal time frame for Adriat’s training, but the expected number of participants is unusually large. They’re including divisions from Issel, Saede, Na Shiv, and three Bacalli worlds.”
“Bacalli?” Kun Reng-Tan of Kaleo straightened in his chair. “Then those reports of talks between Issel and the Bacal Belt are true?”
“Yes.” Lujan placed a sealed pouch on the table. “Spherzah Intelligence has acquired a copy of their Cooperation Pact. Among other things, it provides for the sale of Isselan weapon systems to three worlds in the Bacal Belt and for admission of Bacalli candidates into Issel Sector military colleges.”
“But what’s the pay-off?” asked Alois Ashforth of Jonica. “The Bacalli worlds can barely even feed their own populations!”
“That’s what we need to find out.” Lujan paused, then said, “I know Sector General Renier. When he and the Na Shivish hold-outs were finally forced to the Enach Accords, he vowed that he’d someday regain what he’d lost. He knows he can’t gain that objective with anything less than force of arms. Even five years ago that would have been impossible, but today the Issel Sector’s military capability rivals our own.”
Hanesson still appeared doubtful, but a glance at the expressions of Gisha, Kun, and Ashforth evidently made him think better of what he’d seemed about to say. Instead he asked, “What are you going to do, Admiral?”
“With your approval,” —Lujan addressed them all— “I’m sending a Spherzah surveillance ship into the Issel system. There’s too much we don’t know.”
“No rescue operations?” asked Hanesson.
Lujan fixed a gaze on him like blue ice. “No,” he said. “That’s exactly what Mordan wants us to try. It would be all the excuse he’d need to initiate hostilities.”
* *
The depiction onscreen made one feel that one stood on the bridge of a ship, observing the orbits of Issel and her two moons in real time from within the system. Commodore of the Spherzah Cerise Chesney tr
aced the ingress route through narrowed eyes and slapped the folder of Mission Plan 891 against her leg. “Well, Jink, it looks like we’ll get to see how good Sentinel’s new cloaking system really is.”
“More chance for that than you may want,” Lujan said with a grim smile. “Even orbiting in the moon’s radar shadow, you’re going to be avoiding three watchdog satellites. Their ephemerides are given in the mission folder.”
“Nice.” Chesney tossed back her shoulder-length honey blonde hair, then furrowed her brow. “Why does the Command Post on Issel II bounce all of its comms off the other moon, anyway? That just seems to be asking for interception.”
Lujan said, “It’s used as a relay for intersystem transmissions to avoid interference from surface mining and shipping comms. The facilities on Issel I will be your major source but you’ll also receive messages from our people on the primary and on Issel II.”
Chesney favored him with an inquiring look.
“Most of them are already in place; we’ve had deep cover agents in the Issel system for some time,” Lujan said. “Your call sign will be Echo. You’ll receive the code specs and secured frequencies at your pre-mission brief. Any questions?”
She hesitated, studying him for a moment before she said, “Only one, Jink. What about Tristan?”
The Chief Commander of the Spherzah lowered his gaze, though he knew he couldn’t conceal the raw emotion in it. Not from Chesney. He drew a deep breath before he said, “Tristan’s not in danger. Not yet. Any attempt to rescue him at this point would only jeopardize both him and Darcie, and probably trigger the conflict we’re trying to prevent.”
“But if the situation should change?”
Lujan looked at her directly. “The mission plan assigns a Spherzah combat company to your ship. We also have our own people on the inside. If it should become necessary, Ches, use your own judgment and capabilities.”
Eleven
Retro rockets vaporized the ice layering the landing pad as the ship-to-surface shuttle touched down. Encircling lights shot luminous pillars through eruptions of steam, obliterating visibility from the passenger hold.
As clouds of vapor dispersed, an enclosed passenger carrier grumbled up to the craft, backwards, and crewmen wearing insulated coveralls and gloves connected a boarding tube between shuttle and vehicle. Still shaky from the descent, Tristan shoved himself out of his acceleration seat and followed Larielle and the governor.