I had a feeling that I knew how the informant had come to die in a fight, but pushed it aside. Everyone else at that table had probably drawn the same conclusion. If anything, Vymander’s stock was rising.
“Vymander,” I asked, “do you think we can barter for the cargo?”
He looked unhappy. “They would probably take energy weapons,” he said, “but from what I have seen, we have barely enough for our own forces. I would say, no.”
“Then,” I asked, “are you recommending that we attack Gar and just take the cargo?”
“Yes, Captain. They have no defense worth mentioning against an orbiting ship. There are defenses at the port, but those are designed to defend against attacks by locals. Even with our limited capabilities, we should be able to win. There is also the added benefit of putting the new Strike Force under real fire in a battle we can’t lose.”
The way Vymander outlined his plan it sounded great. Of course, I had always enjoyed plays on a whiteboard showing the ballcarrier going all the way to the end zone, but I was realistic enough to know that it rarely happened the way it was diagrammed. I asked for other ideas. There were none. I decided Vymander’s plan was good enough to try. Perhaps Stuoronin had found us a gem.
“Ivengar, can this ship make a transit to Gar and then another to a world with a facility that can make the repairs?” I asked.
Ivengar had a terminal in front of him and I could see him working at the necessary computations before he said anything. When he was done, he said, “I won’t guarantee that she won’t blow, nor die in the black, but if you are willing to accept a small risk, I think it can be done.”
By now I knew Ivengar well enough to realize that the risk had to be more than “small” or he wouldn’t have mentioned it. Still, there was a stockpile of spare parts on Gar, virtually ours for the taking. There wasn’t much choice.
“Unless there are additional problems or suggestions, I’m going to accept Vymander’s recommendation.” I looked around the room. Nobody moved. “Then we are finished.”
“Excuse me, there’s one additional point.” It was Stuoronin, suddenly on his feet. The conversations that had started up stopped once again.
“I’m not arguing with Vymander’s plan,” he said. “It is the best chance we have. But, we need a different captain to carry it out.”
Suddenly, I was looking down the barrel of Stuoronin’s blaster.
“I am sorry, Danny a Troy,” he said, “but this command should not be yours. Not to carry out this plan and not to try a stupid run to the Inner Empire later.”
“I agree,” Vymander joined in. “We will sign on all officers and crew who are willing, so there is no reason for trouble.”
The bastards must have hatched their idea on Thjonarodni while they waited for the last boat. The past two days on the ship had given Vymander plenty of time to arrange his support under the guise of organizing his force. I’d heard nothing, suspected nothing, and it was far too late to head off their coup. Indeed, Stuoronin had done a wonderful job of recruiting Vymander. I wondered if Stuoronin would press the stud himself, or have his crew throw me out the airlock.
“Guards,” Stuoronin ordered, “collect the weapons from Captain Danny’s officers and hold them until they have changed allegiance.”
His words pulled my eyes to his face and away from his blaster. I just wanted to see if he would look me in the eye, a stupid thought but the only one I had. As he spoke, though, he had turned away from me toward the guards near the door, so he wasn’t even looking at me. Instead of his eyes, what I saw was his jaw drop in astonishment. I followed his gaze to see what had shaken him. One of his guards had been standing next to Angel, presumably with orders to cover Angel when Stuoronin pulled his blaster. A thin line of blood was trickling from that Srihani’s mouth. The cause was Angel’s dushuku, its hilt protruding from between the guard’s ribs. While we watched, the guard toppled to the floor. Angel had drawn his blaster.
From that moment, everything happened in a flash, although I seem to remember it as slow motion. Stuoronin shouted and swung around to fire at Angel. Angel’s beam flashed on his startled face before his blaster was aimed. Vymander hadn’t been frozen, however. At the edge of my vision, I saw him draw his weapon. I tried to pull my blaster out, but it seemed to stick in the holster. Angel saw Vymander move and pivoted but Vymander was too fast. Flame spurted along Angel’s side and he went down. Then, the room exploded with fire. Almost everyone had come armed and, now, they were just split seconds behind Angel and Vymander.
Finally, my blaster came free, but there was no way I was going to stand there like an idiot in that crossfire. I threw myself onto the floor, hoping the table would shield me. When I looked up, I saw one of Vymander’s guards. He was sitting against the wall, a blackened char at his left shoulder and pain on his face. He raised his blaster when he saw me. I fired once and the blaster went back down again.
The firefight seemed to last an hour, but it was really over in seconds. I pulled myself to my feet to see what the situation was. It was a mess. The air stank of ozone and burnt flesh. Every wall was tattooed with scorch marks. The back of my chair had multiple burn marks on it, mute evidence that I had ducked just in time. Stuoronin was dead. Vymander’s guards were all dead. Vymander was dead as well, although it took me a minute to find his body, half hidden by the conference table.
The carnage, unfortunately, wasn’t limited to the erstwhile usurpers. Angel was down with a burn through his abdomen, but at least he was alive. Angel could be patched up. Ivengar, however, could not be. He sat in his chair, head back and eyes wide, with a neat hole over his heart. Against one wall were four bodies, clearly cut down in a single sweep. They lay in a neat row, a continuous black and bloody char across all four. There were other bodies as well, but it was the survivors who worried me. I had no idea whose side they had fought on. I was glad to see Ruoni standing and unscathed.
“Ruoni,” I called, “I hadn’t expected such a heated discussion.”
He smiled, which figured. “What are your orders, Captain Danny?”
Orders? I was too busy being surprised at being alive to think of orders but, at least, I was being asked for them. Some things were obvious. “Get a couple of parties out to check the ship. I have no idea if Vymander planned a general mutiny, or was simply counting on the rest of the crew following once he and Stuoronin took over.”
“Probably the latter,” Ruoni commented, “since they didn’t have much time to organize. Still, it won’t hurt to make sure.” From the survivors in the room, we were able to form three groups. Two of them would scout through the ship and make certain that it remained under our control. The last group would go with me to the bridge, which we had to secure. I’d already taken that bridge once and wasn’t looking forward to doing it again, but I need not have worried. The crew there had no inkling of what had happened.
It proved to be much the same elsewhere in the ship. Ruoni encountered some resistance from members of Vymander’s strike force, but they were few in number and with their commander dead it didn’t last long. Otherwise, the crew seemed not to have been involved; either that or seeing the outcome of Vymander’s coup attempt, they were swimming with the tide. By the end of the day, I was able to meet with Ruoni in my cabin and hear that the mutiny was over.
“Of course,” he added, “we do need to decide if our plans should change. And there are some positions we need to fill.”
“I don’t see any reason to change our plans,” I told him. “I’m sure Vymander meant to follow his own recommendation and I don’t have a good alternative. How manageable are our losses?”
“The worst is Ivengar.” Ruoni made no attempt to disguise his grim look. “There’s no one else with his experience with the ship’s engines. There’s nothing we can do about it, though. You won’t find anyone to replace him on Thjonarodni. Stuoronin was our most experienced pilot, but I think his backups are adequate. Other than that, our Strike Force is
a bit depleted, but there’s no way of knowing how good any of them were to begin with. We could probably pick up replacements for those casualties, if you like.”
“No, forget it. If we can’t take Gar with what we have, a few more bodies won’t change it. And right now, the sooner we get started, the better.” I wanted to ask Ruoni why he had fought for me, but it didn’t seem to be the time for it.
Some hours later, after both the thrill of winning and the worst of the subsequent shakes had passed, I got around to checking on Jaenna. Angel had mentioned that he would keep an eye on her after we brought the full crew up from Thjonarodni. But Angel had been with me during the mutiny, and now he was stashed in Medical where our recently acquired doc was trying to patch the leaks. Stuoronin knew about Jaenna. Even if he hadn’t mentioned her to Vymander, his last remark to me about going to the Inner Empire made me worry that she could have been a target.
Once I’d thought about Jaenna, I couldn’t get my mind off her. I would never forgive myself, if I had pulled her away from Carvalho’s ship only to lose her in the uprising on the Flower. Her cabin was in the officer’s area close to mine. I’d never noticed that before because I had spent almost no time in my own.
The door to her cabin slid open. I stepped through to find an empty cabin. Then she stepped out from the little alcove that hid the wash basin and other necessities and saved me from asphyxiation. She still wore her formfitting gray shipsuit, but the great cloak had been hung from a hook. The passage to Thjonarodni had drained her too. She looked even thinner and younger than before.
“Danny! You surprised me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to. I was worried. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“I am quite safe, as you see. No one has been here.” She paused. “You haven’t been here, either, since we left Tetragrammaton.” There was an odd expression on her face. I wasn’t sure if it was meant as a reproach.
“I’m sorry again. I really had no time, and, from what I heard, you’ve been busy too.”
“Oh. I was thinking about all those things you said before, that you liked to talk to me, liked the way I look …” She stopped, frowning. “So that was all just to cheer me up—and now you aren’t interested in that.”
“Jaenna! That isn’t true and it’s not fair. Anyway, I’m here now.”
“You are here now,” she agreed. “I assumed you would get around to it, sooner or later.”
I didn’t understand. “Get around to what?”
“You saved my life, maybe more than that. I owe you for that. A very large debt,” was the answer.
“Jaenna, I did what I did because I wanted to. You needn’t worry about owing me anything.”
“I have to worry about it,” Jaenna said. “I have to pay my debts.”
Color me dense. “What does that mean?”
“Dannytroy,” she sighed, “you are strange. I don’t have a father who will pay my debt. Whatever you tell your crew, I know that. I do not belong to a tie that will pay my debt. I have only myself and there is only one coin available to me to pay my debts.”
A light came on in my head. Low wattage maybe, but it came on. Jaenna was making an offer, plain as day. I looked at her more closely. The bright, green eyes were wider than I had ever seen them. When she moved her hands, there was a nervous flutter in her fingers. She was telling me one thing with her words, but her body was saying something else. Jaenna a Tyaromon absolutely did not want to bed down with Danny Troy. It was a payment she thought she owed me, if I wanted it, and she was going to carry it out with the same iron control she had used to face Carvalho.
I didn’t want that. I wanted her, yes, but not that way. (Who would I be kidding if I said otherwise?) Maybe in the not too distant past, I wouldn’t have cared but right then I found myself caring a lot.
“I admit,” she said, “that I don’t have much experience, no, I will not lie, I have no real experience so I can understand your lack of interest. But that does not mean I am … incapable. It has to be that way.” She said the last very softly.
“No, it does not have to be that way.” I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. I needed a face-saving way out for both of us. “Jaenna, where I come from, the way I was raised, it would be wrong, dishonorable, to pay a debt like that.” At that point, another lie set against my soul wasn’t going to make much difference. “It’s wrong if it’s not what you want and I know it’s not what you want.”
“Are you saying that just because you’re not interested?”
“No!”
Almost imperceptibly at first, Jaenna began to relax. “I will accept what you say,” she said with a solemnity that her face belied. “However,” and then her face became serious again, “I meant what I said about paying my way.”
“There is no need.”
“I need to for me,” she said vehemently. “I will not be kept as a pet. I will earn my way one way or another, Dannytroy. I only thought to do it the way I said because I thought that was what you would want and expect. If this is going to be a freebooter ship, well, I can handle a weapon.”
“Jaenna, don’t be ridiculous.”
“I am not being ridiculous!”
“Now, listen to me, Jaenna. The plan is to get you back to Kaaran. I think we should table this business of payment until we get there and I can talk to your father. Then we’ll work something out, and until then there is no need to do anything about it. Okay?”
“The discussion is tabled, then,” she agreed. I noticed she didn’t say “Okay.”
On my way out, just before the door closed behind me, I heard her say, “Thank you, Dannytroy.” I could have melted on the spot.
Chapter 11
The transit to Gar was an experience. One I would like to forget. At least, with a full crew it wasn’t necessary to do without sleep, but that was the only positive aspect of the trip. The Flower whined and bucked and in general moved about as smoothly as an original Volkswagen Beetle starting to lose its clutch. Without Ivengar, the engineering crew lacked anyone who really understood how the engines worked. They knew how to operate and service them, but only as long as the operations followed the book. When Ruoni had rigged the Flower to fly to Tetragrammaton it hadn’t been by the book.
Ivengar had masterminded that job and en route to Thjonarodni had managed to keep the power flowing smoothly in spite of the sometimes scary sound effects. On this transit, the power would surge or half die unexpectedly. Those unplanned surges led to energy and heat fluxes, which in turn caused expansion and contraction that made the whole ship groan. Helm screamed every time the ship failed to respond to commands and Navigation cursed as each episode required the course to be recalculated.
I took a trip to Engineering to find the new engineer in charge beside himself, moaning that he couldn’t possibly keep those engines operational. He got scant sympathy from me. There was no alternative to running the engines, a point I made multiple times. It wasn’t as though we could just pull over and call Triple A. After the fifth round of hearing how impossible the engines were, I came up with an alternative for him. Shut up or be shot. He shut up.
My other headache was the Strike Force. Whatever Vymander’s faults (like conspiracy, mutiny and general untrustworthiness), he had known how to organize the force. The lieutenants he had appointed had also been part of the mutiny, and none had survived. This deprived the force of the only people who knew how to control it. What was left was about three-quarters Thjonarodni natives. The remainder were drifters. The Thjonarodnar were enthusiastic, but had zero experience and skills. And as for the drifters, there wasn’t a spark of initiative in any of them. Anyone could learn to use a blaster, but that wasn’t enough to make squad leaders or commanders out of them. Angel would have been my logical choice to run the force and try to whip them into shape, but he was still stuck in Medical waiting for his gut to remember the mechanics of eating and pooping. There are some things no technology can hur
ry.
Caught in a bind, I settled the command on Sligo. He was a tough with experience in space warfare equal to mine; he had fought in one ship-to-ship battle with a freebooter. Unlike the drifters, Sligo hadn’t come aimlessly to Thjonarodni. He had been a Carrillacki agent, which probably meant assassin, and, with the conflict over, had been most anxious to leave before his role became public knowledge. Carrillacki apparently had cut him loose once his job was done. I appointed him the day two corpses appeared after an argument in the mess. He stopped the squabbling and restored some discipline to the force, but that seemed to be the limit of his talent. He was much too vague for my liking when we talked about the attack on Gar. Some concrete plans, even without x’s and o’s, would have been better than his assurance that he knew how to handle the force in an assault. I would gladly have sacked him, and replaced him with someone else, but there was no one else. With most of my waking hours taken up by emergencies on the bridge, or in the Engine Room, there was nothing to do except grit my teeth and hope that he knew what he was talking about.
My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire Page 14