by Mel Keegan
“Captain Vaurien, Doctor Jazinsky, how nice to see you again.” She offered her hand, and they shook it. “It’s been a long time.”
“And now we’re counting every hour,” Vaurien said ruefully.
Bauer wore a smile as she offered the same hand to Travers and Marin. “Colonel Travers, Colonel Marin … Harrison told me the news. Michael Vidal was recovered from Hellgate. I’d already left Velcastra when you visited, just before the Chicago, and the battle.”
“What brings you here?” Marin was asking in a shrewd tone that told Travers he could guess.
She gestured over her shoulder, in the rough direction of Bahrain. “Harrison has asked me to take command of the Sark, in these interim weeks. When the war is done, and won, I’m out of the service and going home. Santorini, Pakrenne.” She gave Jazinsky an almost impish look. “I’ve come to long for peace and quiet, blue skies and green seas. But until we settle with the Terran Confederation I’ll be on the Sark with Patricia Haugen.”
“You’ll be safe there, all of you,” Vaurien assured her – he was looking at Quinn, too. “It’s over here, Mr. Quinn. When a battle group arrives to punish Omaru, they’ll fly into the same weapon that destroyed them at Velcastra. You’ve nothing to fear, and your family will be comfortable on the Sark.”
The man’s voice was deep, rich with the accent of Pakrenne, faint overtones of the ancestral Scandinavian coming through the pleasant slur of the contemporary Slingo. “I know, Captain, and I’m grateful for your concern. You’ll forgive me if I say I wish I was elsewhere, but the fact remains, this is the safest place outside Velcastra.”
“And I wanted them to go to Elstrom City and stay there,” Bauer said sharply.
“No.” Quinn made dismissive gestures. “Not while Shapiro is putting you on the front lines.”
“Front lines? Hardly, Mike,” she remonstrated. “As Captain Vaurien said, it’s over here. I’ll be quite safe.”
“Then so will we be,” Quinn said smoothly, with irrefutable logic.
She turned back to Vaurien’s group and spread her hands. “They’ve got me there. We’re on our way to the Sark directly. I came to the Wastrel first to meet Colonel Tarrant … President Tarrant.”
“He’s not president yet.” Jazinsky gestured toward the lock, and the lift. “Omaru will be declaring its sovereignty soon enough.”
“Come this way, General. Have you eaten? We set a good table,” Vaurien offered. “Colonel Tarrant has been told you’re aboard. He’ll join you shortly.”
“Excellent.” Bauer gave her husband an apologetic look. “I’ve a duty to do this, but you don’t. There must be far better things you can do on a ship like the Wastrel than sit listening to me talk politics for an hour.”
“That long?” Quinn’s lips compressed.
“You want me to be rude to the man?” Bauer dropped her voice. “Jesus, Michael, when the DeepSky Fleet switches gears and wakes up tomorrow as the Nine Worlds Commonwealth Fleet, Harrison and I’ll be taking our orders from a congress of civilian heads of government. Tarrant will be sitting at Robert Chandra Liang’s left hand while that idiot Prendergast from Jagreth will be on his right! Discourtesies won’t be forgotten.”
“But you said one minute ago,” Quinn argued – and it was clearly another round in an argument they had been having for some time – “you’re out of the service, you’re coming home.”
“After the handover,” Bauer’s tone was clipped. “You’re quite well aware Alexis is stepping down to do covert work and the Executive Officer on the Kiev – pardon me, the Sark – doesn’t quite have enough experience for us to dump a super-carrier into her lap and leave her to it. There’s a paucity of ranking officers with the experience and the nerve to step up to the plate. You want me to walk away?”
For a moment Quinn said nothing, and the answer was all too obvious – yes, I do. But at length he said, tautly and not giving any grant of approval to anything she had said, “You’ll do what you have to do, Kris, as usual. Captain Vaurien, I’m sure Colonel Tarrant will want some polite privacy to discuss sensitive matters. Perhaps the three of us can be somewhere else?”
“Of course,” Vaurien said smoothly. “Would you like to play a little? We have most of the new games. I’ll have dinner brought to you.” He glanced at the boys, saw their interest. “Ah! Compromise. It’s an art form. Come this way, Mr. Quinn.”
“I should get back to Ops.” Jazinsky was looking at her chrono. “There’s a bunch of work to finish, if we’re ever going to get out of here.” She gave Bauer a smile. “I’ll drop in for a snifter after dinner.”
“Please do.” Bauer produced a smile, though it was thin.
Vaurien was already moving. “This way, Mr. Quinn, and you boys, too … Neil, Curtis, if you’d be so kind…?”
In fact, Travers wanted only to check in on Vidal and then steer Marin back to their own quarters for a session of sheer sensual indulgence and a lot of sleep, but he pasted on a gracious expression, and Bauer was pleased to follow them back to the crew elevators. Vaurien led the others away aft, to the lounge fitted out by and for the tech gangs. It was not quite as elegant as the lounges ‘upstairs,’ but Ingersol’s people were inveterate players, and the veeree hookups were state of the art.
The lift had closed over when Bauer permitted herself a soft curse. “I’m sorry about that, gentlemen. Family politics.”
“Perfectly understandable,” Travers said smoothly. “Your husband has his perspective, and it’s a valid one. They want to go home as much as you do.”
“It won’t be long now,” Marin added as the lift rose swiftly. “Just a few months, surely.”
Her head tipped back and she worked her neck around as if the muscles there were tight. “I know it. So does he, but …” She hissed a sigh. “It’s been difficult for them, since the arrest warrant was issued for Harrison. Every close associate of his was under surveillance so tight, you could scarcely breathe. I knew it was only a matter of time before I was picked up, and the penalty for treason in time of war is a military firing squad.” Her throat bobbed as she swallowed. “After Vidal’s memorial we took the opportunity to slither away. Vanish. President Liang helped with a ship, the resources to disappear. Harrison asked me if I would take the Kiev for the duration, and obviously I agreed. What else would I tell him? Going right home to Pakrenne at this moment would be stupid beyond belief. We’d be there a day before I’d be picked up, and I might not even live long enough to come to trial! The same bullet is waiting for Harrison, if they can get their claws into him.”
“He knows.” Marin jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the Sark as the lift opened and Travers stepped out ahead of them. “He and Alexis are negotiating terms with the officers from across the blockade. There was mutiny on several vessels,” he added. “We’ll be transporting a few high ranking prisoners back to the Mercury. They can sit out the war in a place that’s so far off the map, no one even knows it exists.”
Her eyes were gimlet sharp. “You people are up to something. It’s so obvious, the hair stands up on the back of my neck, but I can’t get a word out of anyone, not even Harrison.” She looked from Marin to Travers and back, hoping.
But Travers only shook his head. “Sorry, General. It’s so classified, you need oxygen just to breathe on these levels.”
“But you two have the clearance,” she said sharply.
“We’re on the same assignment,” Marin said softly, “and that, General Bauer, is all we can say. Nobody understands security better than yourself. You wrangled Fleet Internal Affairs out here in the Deep Sky for – how long?”
“Far too long.” She took a breath, held it, let it out slowly. “I have a few enemies aboard the Kiev, you know. I was the officer in charge of the investigation after the incident.”
The explosion in the data core, where sixteen men and women were killed and many more injured. Travers’s pulse quickened as Roy Neville’s face swam out of his memory. Nevill
e had been the pet of Lorenzo Falk, the Kiev’s commander; he was implicated in the explosion – he might even have set the charges himself, and both he and Falk were sent to hell, or at least to Hellgate. The Intrepid. Save that Lorenzo Falk lived like a prince on the upper decks and Roy Neville was in his natural environment, terrorizing first-year rookies on the crewdeck.
“Ancient history, General,” Marin said easily as they strode along to the crew lounge where the table was laid for dinner and the aromas of several ethnic cuisines wafted from the ’chefs. “An ocean has passed under the bridge since then – and all of us are on the Confederacy’s most-wanted list! Only two of the old Kiev command corps declined the invitation to defect and keep their commissions in the service of the Commonwealth.”
“Which puts us all,” Travers added, “on the same page.” He was thinking of Resa Carson, Patricia Haugen, Brett Morrison. They were all perched precariously on the same limb.
Similar thoughts must have been haunting Bauer. She halted a few meters short of the lounge where Alec Tarrant had a glass of brandy in one hand, a cigar in the other, standing by the long armorglass ports with a magnificent view of Bahrain, the half-globe of Omaru, the tiny disk of Rashid in the distance and, further yet, the bright lamp of Shikoku, which was on the other side of Omaru’s warm yellow star.
“The last Fleet intelligence I was able to winkle out of the system before any access code I could beg, borrow or steal went dead as fried fish,” Bauer said softly, “was about the Avenger. The next generation super-carrier, the last great hope of the Terran Confederacy.” She looked from Marin to Travers and back. “She launched on time, did her shakedown between Mars and Darwin’s World. All the political pundits thought she’d be kept in reserve to defend the homeworlds –”
“Defend the homeworlds against what?” Marin demanded.
Her face was bleak. “Against us, Curtis. We won decisively at Ulrand and again at Velcastra. Word of the Battle of Velcastra has reached the homeworlds by Fleet courier … they know we have some ultimate weapon – not a doomsday weapon, because it’s directable, it doesn’t come right back and bite our heads off too. But we have it, and they know we have it.”
“But if we took the Shanghai,” Travers mused, “what intelligence does the government of Earth have that we couldn’t also take the Avenger?”
“It was Lai’a that took the Shanghai,” Marin said in a harsh whisper.
“But they don’t know the details.” Bauer sighed. “They don’t even know, yet, that the Chicago actually defected rather than being destroyed. At this moment she’s being referred to as the Elstrom, and she’s hidden in the radiation belts of Velcastra’s big blue gas giant, what’s it called?”
“Guanyu,” Travers supplied.
“My information,” Bauer went on very quietly, as if she feared she was overheard though the Wastrel was arguably the safest territory in the Deep Sky, “is that the Velcastran Secret Service is pegging Confederate agents trying to sneak out of the system. They’ve caught – or more likely shot to pieces – at least twenty in as many days, but the security curtain remains intact. The government of Earth can only believe the Chicago vanished along with its battle group, which is the reason those political pundits logicked their way to the assumption the Avenger would be held in the homeworlds, for the defense of Jupiter, Mars … Earth itself.”
Both Travers and Marin skipped a beat, and then Marin said, “They’ve deployed her, haven’t they?”
Bauer’s smartly coiffured head nodded slowly. “The last time any of my access codes actually worked, the Avenger was in the Middle Heavens and there was a thread of data – I stress, this was never confirmed before I lost my connections! – suggesting she was headed for Borushek.”
“Christ.” Travers’s eyes closed. “Did you get any inkling of when?”
“No.” Bauer rubbed her palms together, as if to force her mind into gear. “If it were just a case of distance and speed, she could be in the sky over the city of Sark in seven or ten days, barring mechanical problems. But it’s a safe bet she’ll hold off and observe the London battle group. She’s the last great hope of the Terran Confederation, as I said. If the London goes down –”
“It will. The last time Harrison called a briefing, the timing of Jagreth’s declaration of sovereignty was set for –” Marin glanced down at his chrono. “It should be just under 72 hours from now.” He gestured in some vague direction – like Travers, he had no real idea of where Jagreth lay in relation to this ship, this deck. “The London either backs off when the battle group plows into Jagreth’s minefields, or she’s history. And incidentally, please gods she should back off.”
“Unlikely.” Bauer drew herself up to her full height – a tall woman for unengineered human stock, Marin’s height, and a touch more since she was walking on elegant heels. “The command corps was replaced three days before the London was assigned to the Deep Sky.”
An odd chill rushed through Travers. “Did you get names?”
Her eyes were filled with shadows. “Colonel Tomas Carnairo de Carvalho. He’s not too far from retirement – well into his seventies – from a political family based in Lisbon and Brasilia. He has a son and a daughter in government, three grandchildren highly ranked in Fleet, and a massive fortune invested in construction contracts. My sources swear he personally received more than two billion credits from the construction of the Avenger, and the Carvalho family has gone from wealth to obscenity on Fleet construction, since Jardine Mayhew’s day.”
The ‘Strong Fleet Policy’ speech whispered in the back of Travers’s mind as Marin said bitterly, “He’s not going to back off. He’s come to the Deep Sky to punish either Borushek or Jagreth, and the only thing that’ll stop him is a sudden … cessation in his own existence.”
“Nice way of putting it.” Bauer shrugged expansively. “He’ll take four thousand souls with him, because you can expect security to be so tight on the London, there’s zero chance of a mutiny such as you saw on several of the blockade ships, or a clean defection, such as we saw on the Chicago and the Kiev.”
“It’s going to be bloody.” A mild throb pulsed through Travers’s eyeballs and the bridge of his nose, and of a sudden he longed for fresh air, a blue sky, a cool breeze rustling in the limbs of a forest. Unbidden, images of the Three Rivers area of Darwin’s world rushed out of his memory – fall, when the aspen and maple, all genetically engineered for the terraforming process centuries before, were gold, russet, red, and the black spruce marched across the hills like dark chessmen, and the air began to smell crisp with the promise of winter. Absurdly, he felt a rush of something very like homesickness, but he knew it was a time he longed for rather than a place. He yearned for the simple days, before conscription, before reenlistment – before Harrison Shapiro’s gunship appeared on the lawns outside Mark Sherratt’s house. With an effort of will he set the past back into its place and made himself listen.
“Then, it’ll have to be bloody,” Kristyn Bauer said sadly. “They don’t call this a war for nothing, Neil. True, most of the fighting so far has been here at Omaru, but both sides took losses in the Battle of Ulrand. I read the casualty list. Fleet lost that one, but the Freespacers and the Ulrish themselves took a nasty beating. Liberty,” she added in a bleak tone, “never comes cheap.”
Marin stirred deliberately. “We’re grateful for the briefing, General. You’ll be wanting to bring President Tarrant up to speed on the same issues.”
“And Harrison, as soon as I can get my feet aboard the Sark.” She produced a faint, crooked smile. “I like the name.”
“And Colonel … President Tarrant is waiting for you.” Travers nodded toward the crew lounge, where Alec Tarrant had seen them now, and had poured himself a second brandy.
“I’ll catch up with you later, Neil, Curtis,” she told them. “If I don’t see you before the Wastrel leaves – good luck on this mission that’s so classified, even I can’t get a hint of what it’s all about!” She
gave them a nod, a smile, and walked on to meet Tarrant.
“Kristyn, it’s nice to see you again.” He set aside glass and cigar and took her hand. “It’s good of you to do this. I’ll get you and your family onto the Sark as soon as possible. I’ll be back on Omaru myself in a couple of hours. Damn, but it feels odd, doesn’t it? For years, we’ve lived in absolute bloody dread of the Kiev, and now – she goes where the Commonwealth sends her, and it’s up to you and me to make the right calls. Will you take a brandy?”
And before Tarrant touched down at some private field outside the still-smoking ruins of Hydralis, the Wastrel would be gone, Travers thought. He and Marin remained in the passage. The politics of command were not their concern, for which Neil was profoundly grateful. Bauer and Tarrant did not even notice when they made a discreet exit, heading aft.
“You want to look in on Mick?” Marin wondered.
“You don’t mind?” Travers thumbed for the elevator.
“After the mess he made of himself?” Marin stepped into the car and leaned against the brushed steel wall. “He’s either a maniac or a hero, and I can’t quite decide which.”
“Both.” Travers leaned on the wall beside him as the elevator went up, and aft. “You know the old saying.”
“You don’t have to be mad to be a hero –”
“But it helps,” Travers finished. “They say that on Jagreth?”
“I’ll show you a little of Jagreth, if we get the chance.” Marin tapped his chrono. “We should have been gone by now.”
“From Omaru?” He was right, but Travers only shrugged. “Things got complicated. They always do. There’s time. Even after the proclamation of sovereignty – 72 hours from now, is it? – there’ll still be a day, maybe two, before the battle group drops out at Jagreth … signal lag will buy us the time. Also, the London could be headed for Borushek. She’ll have to change course.”