Cauldron of Ghosts (eARC)

by David Weber

  He turned to the two security people regarding the command deck hatch.

  “Go get Voigt and Ingraham. They’ll both be in Engineering. Put them in irons and drag them to the shuttle bay. If they give you any crap, you have my permission—no, I hereby order you—to use any level of force, including lethal force, to make them comply.”

  The two guards left immediately. They were hurrying, in fact. They both knew Voigt and Ingraham as well as anyone else in the crew. Brandt watched them go, then—belatedly—spotted the third figure standing at a hatch. He’d completely forgotten that the man—Arpino, his name was—had also been on the command deck. He’d come there as soon as the crisis began, and as his much as he would have liked to, Brandt hadn’t ordered him to leave. The captain’s superiors had made it clear that Arpino was to be given whatever latitude he wanted in carrying out his duties.

  Duties which…had never been specified.

  Brandt hadn’t liked those orders then, and he didn’t like them now. In fact, he’d already made up his mind that if Arpino gave him any grief over his decision to surrender, the man was going to suffer a serious accident.

  “You will be surrendering the ship, then,” Arpino said. It was a statement, not a question.

  “We don’t have any choice.”

  Brandt braced himself for an argument, but Arpino simply turned and left the command deck. Unsealing his jacket as he went.

  * * *

  The two guards found Voigt and Ingraham in Luigi Pirandello’s engineering section. No one outside the slave ship’s command deck had been privy to Brandt’s conversation with Bayano, but no one needed to have been to understand what the captain’s most likely options were. Voigt and Ingraham were both waving their hands around in a half-shouted “discussion” with three of their fellow engineering techs.

  The guards, who had their pulsers drawn, although not raised, interrupted the noisy conversation to inform them they were under arrest. Voigt threw up his hands in disgust and sat down on the deck. Ingraham just started screeching at them instead of her fellow techs.

  The senior guard, Janice Wendel, had had to put up with Ingraham for almost three years. That was more than enough, so she raised her pistol and shot Ingraham twice. Tried to, rather. Between her own anxiety, lack of experience in real combat, and habitual slackness when it came to putting in time on the firing range, she made a mess of it. The first hypersonic dart missed entirely and went ricocheting wildly around Engineering. Somehow, it failed to hit anyone else or to inflict damage on anything critical. The second was almost a hit, and Ingraham’s right ear disintegrated in an explosion of blood and all but vaporized tissue. The damage sent her staggering back against the bulkhead with her hand clapped to the mangled side of her head—still screeching, somehow.

  Wendel took three steps forward, brought the muzzle of the pulser to within five centimeters of Ingraham’s head, and fired again.

  At that range, she could hardly miss, and the entire top of the engineering tech’s skull exploded in a cloud of red, gray brain tissue, and tiny white fragments of bone.

  The woman was dead before she hit the deck.

  Wendel turned to face Voigt, who was staring up at her with his mouth open. She pointed the pulser at his head. The fact that her hand was shaking just made the situation even more terrifying for him.

  “I—am—not—carrying—you,” she ground out. “Get up, put your hands behind you, and start moving for the shuttle bay. Or I’ll shoot you dead, too.”

  He scrambled to his feet fast enough to have won the gold medal in that event, if any athletic competition had ever featured it, and put his hands behind him for the manacles.

  * * *

  Captain Bogunov did the captives-in-all-but-name the favor of transmitting the latest news through the com and the officers’ lounge. They didn’t need her to tell them that Prince Sundjata’s escape was virtually assured now that Bogey One had begun decelerating. The icons on the smart wall had already told them that, but she was able to confirm that Roldão Brandt had agreed to surrender his ship to the frigate.

  Zechariah felt a deep sadness. His last friend in the universe, Anastasia Chernevsky, would soon be gone, too.

  * * *

  In fact, she was already dead. Arpino had found her lying on her bunk and staring at the ceiling. She glanced at him when he entered the cabin and then looked back up at the ceiling. A moment later, she closed her eyes.

  There was nothing to say, so nothing was. When the Gaul close the cabin door behind him, the bunk was already soaked with blood.

  The other Houdini participant on the ship, Joseph van Vleet, wasn’t in his cabin. But it took Arpino only three minutes to find him. By the very nature of the slave ship’s design, with the great bulk of its space sealed off, and with locks that van Vleet lacked the codes to open—there just weren’t many places to hide. The Gaul found him in the second utility cabinet he searched. Two seconds later, its contents were also becoming blood-soaked.

  That job done, Arpino went to his own cabin, laid down on the bunk, and gazed up at the overhead with his hands folded behind his head.

  There was nothing to do now but wait.

  * * *

  “All right, that’s it,” Captain Brandt announced. Luigi Pirandello’s velocity was exactly that of Denmark Vesey, and he nodded to his astrogator. “Kill the accel, and let’s get the hell down to the boat bay and find out if these…people intend to keep their word or not.”

  “Yes, Sir!”

  The astrogator shut down the slave ship’s impeller wedge and half-dashed off the command deck and down the passageway towards the boat bay. Brandt took a moment to exchange one last glance with Hinkle, and then the two of them followed somewhat more sedately. Even aboard a slave ship, there were traditions and appearances to maintain.

  The first of Luigi Pirandello’s personnel shuttles had already departed, and the flight engineer sealed the hatch behind the captain and his exec as soon as they were aboard. The copilot was peering back from the flight deck, and Brandt waved both hands in the traditional hand signal of the order to undock. That was all the flight crew needed, and the shovel had already detached her umbilicals and begun drifting out of the bay on maneuvering thrusters before the captain had settled into his own seat.

  He watched through the viewport as the boat bay moved away from him. Then they were out, the viewport filled with a field of stars, and he closed his eyes and waited to find out just how honest Tunni Bayano had really been.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Marcos Xiorro watched as his pinnace slid steadily closer to the waiting freighter. According to the manifest the slave ship’s captain had transmitted in obedience to Lieutenant Commander Bayano, there were almost five hundred slaves in its holds, and Xiorro wondered if the captain had informed those slaves that they were about to be rescued.

  Well, he thought. It won’t matter one way or the other and a few more minutes.

  In a way, he rather hoped the slaver captain hadn’t informed his cargo. This would be the very first slave ship the Royal Torch Navy had ever intercepted, and Xiorro was rather looking forward to going down in the history books as the officer who’d led the boarding party. Of course, the Marines were along to do any grunt work that might be necessary, but that wouldn’t detract one bit from the Navy’s glory, and Xiorro felt his lips twitch in a faint smile of amusement at his own vanity as he silently rehearsed the words he’d chosen.

  “The Navy’s here!” That was what he was going to say, because for the first time in galactic history, the navy doing the rescuing belonged to an entire star nation of ex-slaves. Those ex-slaves would never forget their gratitude to all the other navies which had rescued them and others like them over the decades and centuries, but the date was special. This was the day slaves rescued their own.

  * * *

  The Gaul named Arpino had never appeared on Luigi Pirandello’s crew list, and in the haste to evacuate the ship, neither of the two shutt
les’ flight crews realized that he wasn’t aboard the other one. Even if they’d known, they probably wouldn’t have worried too much, on the theory that anything that happened to somebody stupid enough to miss his assigned ride when the Torches found him was no more than he deserved.

  But Arpino hadn’t “missed” his assigned ride. He was exactly where he was supposed to be under the orders intended to ensure that no evidence of Anastasia Chernevsky’s or Joseph van Vleet’s deaths ever came to light. After all, the mere existence of their dead bodies might cause someone to wonder how two prominent Mesan scientists who had officially perished in an air car disaster had been discovered aboard a slave ship with heads shattered by pulser darts. For that matter, he couldn’t be certain that none of Luigi Pirandello’s crew people hadn’t heard Chernevsky or van Vleet’s names. So it would be as well to leave no loose ends, and he’d spent the half-dozen minutes since the personnel shuttles’ departure on the slave ship’s command deck, inputting a code no one except its captain and his executive officer was supposed to know.

  Now he sat calmly, watching the screen which showed the interior of the brightly lit boat bay. He watched the Torch pinnace slide into it on skillfully metered bursts from its thrusters. It was a tricky maneuver, with no boat bay personnel ready to assist with the bay’s docking tractors, but the pilot of that pinnace clearly knew what he was doing.

  The pinnace came to a halt, hovering within no more than four or five centimeters of exactly the right position, and Seleven Arpino entered the last digit of the code he wasn’t supposed to know.

  * * *

  Zachariah McBryde lunged to his feet in disbelief. He felt Zhilov behind him, knew the Gaul had stabbed an instinctive hand towards his pulser, but he couldn’t look away from the smart wall where Luigi Pirandello had just exploded.

  For instants which felt like eons he simply couldn’t process the data. His thoughts skittered like a man on slick ice, unable to grasp what had just happened. It was insane! Brandt had surrendered his ship—he’d taken all of his people off aboard its shuttles. Why in God’s name had he done that if he’d intended to set a scuttling charge behind him?! He’d put all of his people into what amounted to a shooting gallery for the Torch frigate, and the destruction of Denmark Vesey’s pinnace and all its personnel was guaranteed to—

  Then he knew. It was the only possible answer, and he started to whirl accusingly toward Zhilov in a triumph of reflex over rationality. The last thing he needed to do was to confront Zhilov. If the Gaul decided that Zachariah’s rage represented a threat to his own ability to control the situation, he wouldn’t hesitate an instant before killing the scientist where he stood. But before Zachariah could turn, he froze again, eyes sick as the inevitable happened.

  Roldão Brandt never had the opportunity to protest his people’s innocence. It probably wouldn’t have mattered if he had—not with five hundred slaves and the twenty-seven Royal Torch Navy and Marine personnel dead in a blossom of nuclear fire.

  Two million kilometers was too great a range for energy weapons, but the crimson icons of missiles streaked towards the helpless personnel shuttles. It took thirty-three seconds for them to reach their targets—thirty-three seconds in which Zachariah could not look away from the smart wall. Thirty-three seconds that ended in the obliteration of every remaining man and woman who’d been aboard Luigi Pirandello.

  “Oh my God! Oh my God! Omigod! Omigod-omigod-omigod!”

  It was Stefka Juarez, a corner of Zachariah’s mind realized, starting to shake off its paralysis. The woman stood to his right, one fist pressed against her mouth, eyes wide with horror.

  “They fired!” she blurted. “They fired! And now—” she turned slowly, like a woman in a nightmare, to face Zhilov “—now they’re going to fire on us!”

  Zachariah shook himself. That was ridiculous! Prince Sundjata was less than two and a half minutes from the hyper limit. They were that close to escaping—in fact, they’d all begun to relax with the knowledge that they were going to live after all. That was what had made the destruction of Luigi Pirandello so shocking, so paralyzing.

  But Zachariah was a physicist. He wasn’t a weapons expert like Gail Weiss, but he could solve simple intercept problems, and he’d solve this one long since. Even if Denmark Vesey really had mounted the multidrive missiles Weiss had assured them couldn’t possibly be fitted into a frigate’s hull, and even if those missiles were capable of sustaining a thousand gravities of acceleration indefinitely, it would still take them over an hour to reach Prince Sundjata at this range.

  Whatever her field might have been, it was obvious that Juarez was no physicist. Or, if she was, that her brain had been totally jellied by panic, because she lowered her hand from her mouth to point a shaking index finger at Zhilov.

  “You bastard!” she hissed. “You fucking bastard! You killed all of us! You’ve—you’ve—!”

  Words failed her, and she flung herself at the Gaul.

  Whether Luigi Pirandello’s destruction had surprised him as much as anyone else, or whether it was the sheer insanity of Juarez’ reaction, Zhilov’s response was slow. His pulser cleared the holster, but before he could aim or fire, she was upon him. Most members of the Onion had received at least some rudimentary martial arts training in their youth, but any training Juarez might have received was decidedly not in evidence as she went for the Gaul’s eyes with daggered fingernails. He got his left forearm up barely in time to block her first, frenzied strike, and her body slammed into his, pending his right arm—and the pulser—between them, as her other hand came up and eluded his block.

  Zhilov bellowed in pain as his right eye erupted in blood. Then he got a knee up, slamming it into her belly. She bounced away from him, whooping for breath as she folded up, but she never got a chance to recover the wind which had been knocked so brutally out of her. Before she could even begin to straighten, the pulser rose. It whined and a three-dart burst hit her on the crown of her head, pulverizing her skull instantly.

  It was all one mad whirl of motion and insanity, of violence and blood, and yet even as it exploded about Zachariah, it all seemed to be happening in slow motion. He watched Juarez stagger backward, watched that pulser rise, watched the woman’s head explode…and realized the pulser was still rising, still swinging.

  Swinging towards him.

  He didn’t know what Zhilov was thinking. For that matter, he didn’t know if Zhilov was thinking, and there wasn’t time to ponder the Gaul’s motives. Maybe he was simply reacting to the suddenness of the attack, the pain in his ruptured eye. Or perhaps he was reacting to…neutralize his two remaining charges before they took advantage of his weakened position to escape the certainty of death he represented if anything like this day’s events should occur again. Or maybe he was reacting to something else entirely.

  It didn’t matter. Zacharias saw that pulser coming, knew he was going to die, then saw the weapon go bouncing upward as Gail Weiss’ right foot left the deck in a powerful snap kick which landed perfectly on the Gaul’s gun hand.

  The pulser went flying. Zhilov’s left arm lashed out, his forearm hammering Weiss across the side of the head. She went down—unconscious or dead; Zachariah didn’t know—and then he was moving, as well.

  Zhilov was badly off-center, unbalanced, half blind as he fought to regain the center he’d lost, and Zachariah knew that if he did, he and Weiss would be as dead as Juarez. It didn’t matter what had started the explosion of violence. What mattered was that whether by instinct or intent, Zhilov meant to kill all of them.

  Zachariah McBryde was a scientist, not a trained security man like his brother had been. For Zachariah, “martial arts” had been no more than an exercise form, never something he’d intended or expected to actually need. But as Zhilov twisted back towards him, he felt himself moving forward, driving into the Gaul. Zhilov was favoring his right hand—obviously Weiss’ kick had done significant damage to it—but his left arm was scything inward, and his left hand
flexed strangely. The organic laminate blade which emerged suddenly from the back of his left hand projected almost eight centimeters beyond the knuckles and swept toward Zachariah’s throat.

  The scientist’s right arm thrust vertically upwards like a sword, hammering into the inside of Zhilov’s left forearm, blocking the blade’s strike. And then Zachariah’s left hand went for the Gaul’s good eye and his right knee slammed forward in a vicious strike to Zhilov’s groin.

  The Gaul blocked part of its force, but not all of it, and he jackknifed forward. Both of Zachariah’s hands cupped Zhilov’s head and he jerked downward with all the strength of his back as his knee came up again.

  He was trying to drive his kneecap into the Gaul’s face, but he missed his mark as Zhilov threw himself forward, trying to knock Zachariah from his feet.

  Unfortunately for Zhilov, that meant Zachariah’s knee caught him squarely in the throat, instead.

  The Gaul went down, both hands clutching at his throat. The impact knocked Zachariah off his feet, as well, and he rolled frantically as he heard Zhilov’s hacking, coughing fight to breathe. He doubted very much that he could have done enough damage to crush the other man’s larynx, and if he hadn’t, if the far better trained Gaul regained his breath, got back to his feet…

  Zachariah’s hand came down on something angular. It closed instinctively, and as he slammed into a bulkhead and rolled back up onto one knee, three meters from his opponent, he discovered the angular something was Zhilov’s pulser.

  His hand rose as the Gaul shook himself and started to shove back upright—still hacking, still coughing—only to freeze. His gory face was expressionless, but his good eye widened in sudden awareness.