FIFTY-THREE
MARY FELL ASLEEP on the shuttle ride up; she was that tired.
They docked on the Patton rather than the space station to make sure there was no interference with the scientists. Mary quickly paid her respects to Captain Umboto and was granted permission to head for the Second Chance and her bunk.
Gladly, she went.
Maybe it was because she was so tired, or maybe it was because she’d shoved tanks around today and was just pure out of shove. Later, Mary would try to explain what she did that afternoon on the station, but she was never fully satisfied with any of her answers.
Anyway, a ship had just docked on High Petrograd and was unloading a stream of passengers. She paused to let them pass, leaning against a handy stanchion, and almost fell asleep listening to her breathing.
Suddenly, she was wide-awake and glaring.
There was a bigwig. So big that someone from Milassi’s own entourage was there, guiding the man in uniform.
Mary remembered that henchman. He was the one who had paid her not to go to the back room with the big man.
But it was the other guy who held her glower.
He wore the uniform of a full admiral. Only it wasn’t quite right for the Society of Humanity Navy. The color of his blues was a tad too bright, and the stripes of his rank were in a twisted weave rather than the straight lines of regular Navy.
Rather than a five-pointed star, his stripes ended in a starburst.
Mary used her commlink to snap a picture. Then snapped several more.
What is Admiral Whitebred doing here, of all places? she demanded of nothing, and got no answer.
Whitebred had been cashiered from the Society Navy for ordering the Sheffield, now the Second Chance, to relativity bomb Wardhaven back to the Stone Age, killing a billion humans in the process.
Mary had played her own small part in seeing that it didn’t happen. Whitebred had been whisked away shortly after to face a court-martial.
Mary had fond hopes of never seeing him again.
Now, her thoughts came quickly. Nothing good could come of the failed butcher of Wardhaven showing up on the arm of one of Milassi’s henchmen. As soon as the parade of disembarking passengers slowed down, Mary made a beeline for the Second Chance and Captain Abeeb.
“We got company,” she said, shoving her pictures under his nose.
“Him! In uniform again!” was Abeeb’s first answer.
“A full admiral, if those stripes mean anything. But the uniform is all wrong,” Mary pointed out.
“Computer,” Captain Abeeb said. “Capture Mary’s picture. Analyze the uniform. What Navy is that?”
“The color of the blues uniform and the weaving of the rank stripes appear to be appropriate for the Savannah Navy. However, no one in that Navy rose above the rank of captain in the recent war. President-for-life Milassi has been photographed wearing a Navy admiral’s uniform with the stripes of a full admiral.”
“Savannah Navy! Savannah doesn’t have a Navy,” Mary almost spat. “What kind of game is Milassi running?”
“Or Whitebred,” Captain Abeeb mused. “Wearing the same rank as Milassi. Whatever game either one of them thinks he’s playing, it predates the predicament you dropped in both their laps today.”
Captain Abeeb chuckled at the thought and shared a wide grin, showing his white teeth off against his ebony complexion. “Computer, connect me to Colonel Ray Longknife. He will want to know that the man who almost slaughtered his planet just arrived here and wears a uniform once more.”
The computer made the connection. Captain Umboto of the Patton was added, and Mary quickly brought them all up-to-date on what she’d just seen.
“Savannah Navy? They can’t have their own Navy anymore,” was Umboto’s immediate input. “We’re all just one big happy family in the Society of Humanity. Those local navies and armies are supposed to be vanishing away.”
“I’m still a colonel in the Wardhaven Army,” Colonel Ray Longknife pointed out. “Though I thought we were frozen in ranks and status.”
“Want to bet Whitebred’s rank was backdated to before they locked everyone in?” Mary said, making a sour face.
“What matters today is his employer or employers, as the case may be,” Captain Abeeb pointed out. “Just exactly who was giving him an extra paycheck when he ordered my ship to pound Wardhaven has never been identified. It leaves me to wonder if Milassi knows exactly who he has hired.”
“Yes,” Colonel Ray Longknife said. “I’m pretty sure Whitebred left the software in the Second Chance that caused the bad jump that almost killed us. We will definitely keep an eye out for him down here. Abeeb, you might want to have someone hang around the station A deck. No telling what else we might see.”
“I’ll do that,” Captain Abeeb said.
But as it turned out, he couldn’t.
A couple of dozen thugs showed up at the gangplank of both the Patton and the Second Chance. They made it clear to anyone who tried to leave that it wasn’t going to happen.
A few minutes later, the power from the station cut off, then communications went down. Water and sewer were the last to be cut off, but they were.
The two cruisers were totally isolated.
Captain Umboto reported this by radio to Colonel Ray Longknife just before jamming cut even that line of communications.
FIFTY-FOUR
“WE’RE UNDER SIEGE,” Colonel Longknife told Captain Trouble and FSO Graven at the same time. “Double the guard and close the gate.”
The night passed quietly, but by morning, the local employees couldn’t make it to work through the ring of cops around the embassy. Midmorning, the power was cut as well as the landlines.
The ambassador insisted on being driven to Savannah’s foreign ministry to demand services be restored, and quickly.
His limo was halted within a block of the embassy. Rough men in civilian clothes dragged him and his driver from their car and began beating them.
Gunny saw it from the front gate and sounded the alarm. Trouble was out of the basement in a flash and personally led the rescue party. The attackers fled before the relief column got to the ambassador, but the long walk back one block to the embassy saw them surrounded by a second mob that closed in while those in the back hurled rocks.
More Marines arrived. These, under Gunny, were in armor and had fixed bayonets. The surly crowd gave way.
The ambassador was unconscious when they got him to sick bay.
“Can we rush him to the nearest hospital?” FSO Graven asked Colonel Ray Longknife. She was now the chargé d’affaires.
“Do you think he’d get any farther headed for a hospital than he got headed for the ministry?”
She shook her head, and the ambassador stayed under the care of the embassy doctor in sick bay.
The crowd outside got noisier. Thugs with badges fell back to the other side of the street and seemed more intent on watching the show than doing anything about it.
Colonel Ray Longknife suggested Trouble deploy his troops in full battle gear.
The embassy Marines had no such equipment, but Trouble’s and Mary’s detachments had come fully equipped for battle . . . even if that hadn’t been considered a part of the plan.
Now the embassy Marines fell back from the fence as Marines in full battle rattle, bayonets fixed, took their places in the line.
The crowd took one look at them and fell silent. A lot of them seemed to suddenly remember it was suppertime and left.
“No doubt they’ll be back later tonight, very well lubricated,” Trouble told the colonel.
“No doubt.”
They did come back, with rocks to throw. But that didn’t work out as well as they thought it would. Several of the embassy Marines had recently acquired sling shots with a goodly supply of ball bearings.
Trouble deployed them on the embassy’s roof, under Lieutenant Dumont, who had some recent experience with unruly crowds.
Someone
threw a rock. A Marine returned fire with a ball bearing.
The mob might be drunk, but its individual members seemed educable. If someone near you threw something, someone near you stopped a fast, hard object.
And that someone might be you.
The mob thinned out a whole lot faster than the folks who had hired it expected.
Come midnight, it was even possible for a kid to make it in across the fence.
He looked in bad shape, but he insisted the Marines take him to “Momma Ruth” before they care for him.
Trouble came immediately.
He knelt beside the child. “Ruth is my wife. She’s safe on a cruiser in orbit.”
“That’s good that she’s safe,” the boy said. “Major Barbara says that I should warn you. They burned out her place.”
“Is she okay?” Trouble asked.
“Yes. Us kids got warnings from some of the people in the neighborhood that the crushers were coming. Major Barbara got everyone out before they got there. They ripped the place apart, then burned it. But we was lucky. Brother Scott got it worse.”
“What happened there?” Trouble asked, afraid for what he’d hear.
“They didn’t get warned. They beat them up real bad. They did horrible things to the nuns, Major Barbara says, but we don’t know it all. Then they burned them down, too.”
Trouble had been getting reports from the lookouts on the roof that there were a lot of fires burning in the city, but no sound of sirens or visuals of fire engines racing to do their duty.
Apparently, Milassi’s idea of duty was getting very narrow.
Trouble sent the kid to sick bay before returning to his place in the basement. Colonel Ray Longknife hadn’t left the command center since he got back from Milassi’s parade.
Trouble quickly brought Ray up to speed.
“Milassi has gone crazy,” Ray said. “He’s lashing out at anything he can, but it’s not going to do him any good. The dope crop is burned, and his employer can’t be happy about that.”
“How long before someone delivers that message?” the FSO asked.
“I don’t know,” Ray admitted. “But I have to wonder about this Admiral Whitebred. Did Milassi hire him for some job, or was he sent here by Milassi’s boss to do something?”
“It can’t be a response to us burning the drugs,” Becky pointed out. “That just happened.”
“Yes, but how will that play into this?” Ray asked no one in particular.
“We’re bound to find out.”
“Of course, what we find could be a howling mob coming over our fence,” Trouble said.
“Captain, may I suggest that you prepare for that while we prepare for other alternatives,” said Colonel Ray Longknife.
Trouble went to check his guards. He arranged for half his troops to get at least four hours’ sleep.
No doubt, tomorrow would be another long day full of creative leadership challenges.
FIFTY-FIVE
WHEN WORD CAME, it was from a surprising source for Savannah.
The noon news reported that President-for-Life Steffo Milassi had chosen now to take a vacation. While he was gone, war hero Admiral Horatio Whitebred would exercise executive powers.
Shortly after that announcement, the jamming of radio communications between the embassy and the cruisers switched off. As it turned out, the Second Chance had patched themselves into the station’s security cameras. They had full color coverage of Milassi as he arrived with his large entourage and was trundled around A deck to the liner that had just brought in Whitebred.
The ship wasn’t due to seal air locks until the following day, although the Second Chance intercepted several demands from the great man that they depart immediately.
That was mighty inconsiderate of him, seeing that throughout most of the day, shuttles were docking, and more of his henchmen were themselves making the journey across A deck to what looked more and more like the last ship out under the Milassi administration.
The liner departed on schedule, apparently stuffed to the gills with loot and looters.
Izzy was heard to darkly mutter about the need for the Patton to have some target practice, but the liner got away without any of the justice, poetic or otherwise, that it so dearly deserved.
That left Savannah to pick up the pieces of his ten-year Reich.
Old habits die hard, though, and the State Security Special Police were just as heavy-handed with their brutality as they had ever been.
Ms. Becky Graven, by right of her being the chargé d’affaires, demanded to see the admiral. He met with her, but at a place of his choosing.
That place was the burned-out experimental drug farm.
There he gave her a cock-and-bull story that the plants were part of a pharmacological effort to get a new cure for cancer, heart disease, and the common cold.
“I will personally see to it that the criminals who did this are prosecuted to the full extent of the law and that what few plants survived are propagated with care.”
He didn’t seem to be all that concerned that the planet around him was going to hell in a handbasket.
Becky returned fuming and used words that weren’t at all diplomatic.
Colonel Ray Longknife turned to Trouble. “Then it seems that it’s up to us to do what we can to restore peace and order to this member of the Society of Humanity before the arrival of the senators. Becky, when are they due here?”
“Tomorrow originally,” she said, “but we’ve got more time. It seems the senators were delayed on New Amsterdam. They’ve got some very entertaining, ah, entertainment the senators felt they needed to closely examine, if you know what I mean.”
“Did Milassi have anything to do with New Amsterdam ending up on their agenda?” Ray asked.
“He may have. Who knows? But one of my contacts says that Milassi did ask them to delay a bit. That message went out right after the fire at the farm and before Whitebred arrived.”
“And, no doubt, they were happy to accommodate him.”
“So I’m told,” Becky said.
“For now, we have as much of a free hand as we may choose to take,” Colonel Ray Longknife said with a tight grin. “Becky, can you get some interplanetary messages sent?”
“I think I can. What do you have in mind?”
“One of the toughest bunch of infantry that I ever had the misfortune to be on the wrong side of in a war was the light infantry from Lorna Do. Their roots go back to Scotland on Old Earth, as does their fondness for the kilt. Ladies from Hell, they call themselves, and I’m not one to gainsay them. Can you get off a message, as an official of the Society of Humanity, asking Lorna Do for the use of several of their battalions for peacekeeping purposes here on Savannah?”
“That usually requires authorization from way above my pay grade,” Becky said.
“If we’re going to keep this place from tearing itself apart, we need to move fast. All of us need to ratchet up our games to way above what they pay us,” Ray said.
Becky ran her tongue along her teeth for a moment. “Hell, I didn’t really want to do this job until I retired. Colonel Ray Longknife, you will have your request out just as fast as I can get to the comm center. What Lorna Do will do with the request is anybody’s guess.”
“And that may well depend on what I say in my message to another old broken-down warhorse.”
They left together to get their messages off.
That night, Colonel Ray Longknife stood on the embassy roof and watched as more fires broke out throughout the city. Which of them were set by thugs with badges and which were to settle age-old feuds was impossible to say from this distance.
What was clear was that if someone didn’t stop it, there might not be much of a city here in a week or two.
Trouble joined him on the roof.
“You getting a breath of air?” the colonel asked.
“It was a bit thick down in the basement.”
“No doubt we must ask Becky fo
r permission to air the place out.”
“Do you think we could do it tomorrow without getting a boatload of bugs?” the Marine said.
Ray made a face. “Nope. This place must be thick with the things.”
“But we haven’t had any more jamming since the liner pulled out. Could the guy running Milassi’s electronic gear have bugged out, too?”
Ray shrugged. “Toward the last, they were leaving with not much more than the shirts on their backs. We’ll have to wait a few days and see.”
Trouble made a point of surveying the horizon. There were at least a dozen fires standing out in the night. “If we wait too long, there might not be anything to see.”
“Yes, there is that. Captain, I would like to talk to you about a mission for tomorrow.”
“What kind?” Trouble asked, with a big grin he failed to suppress.
Ray suspected that the Marine was desperate to get outside these walls. He weighed the risks versus benefits and found it good.
“It will involve getting up early tomorrow morning, but I think you’ll love the idea.”
“Getting up early, enjoying the morning air. I’m already loving it.”
“Then let me tell you what I have in mind.”
Trouble’s grin grew wider and wider.
FIFTY-SIX
THE MORNING WAS getting hot early, but at least Trouble’s Marines had shade on their side of the street. Though the thugs were hunkered down, lying about the veranda of their headquarters, the sun was streaming in low and heating up where they sat.
And they were drinking—lots.
Though they were officially State Security Special Police, they were universally known as crushers or black boots. And as such, they were hated.
None of the police here were any great shakes, but these guys were the worst.
So Colonel Ray Longknife suggested that Trouble and his Marines take them off the streets.
It had started early in the morning, though it need not have. Trouble and his Marines from the Patton arrived outside their headquarters at first light to find Savannah’s best sleeping it off. He secured the gates to the parking lot with chains, locks, and just in case someone was slow to get the message, some nice explosives to back up the lock.
To Do or Die (A Jump Universe Novel) Page 27