“Windemere,” she nodded. “Not to worry, it’s under control, but, first, there’s the small matter of my ship.”
“Your ship?” He glanced out the hangar bay door to where her fleet lay.
“The Imperial Exchequer thought to save money by taking the Sucker Punch under lease rather than paying for her outright,” she reminded him. The price assessed by Nordegg and Fischer had been astronomical, given the incredible potential represented by the source-directed wormhole generator she carried. By leasing her for research use, the Corps of Engineers would have access at a fraction of the cost.
“That lease explicitly states Nidaveller Station as the location of use,” she continued. Once they removed the broken pieces of the Sucker Punch from Nidaveller, the lease would end and Julia would be free to reclaim what remained of her ship.
Now, however, the ship was intact and most definitely not at Nidaveller. The lease was, technically, at an end.
“As the holder of a fifty percent share of this vessel, I hereby resume control and reserve the right to appoint her officers and crew,” she stated formally, wishing a silent blessing on the stingy administrators at the Exchequer.
Windemere opened his mouth, closed it, then repeated the procedure a second time.
Third time’s the charm…
“You can’t just take ownership of this vessel,” he spluttered. “You…
“Droits of Admiralty…” she cut him off with a voice usually reserved for issuing orders in combat, “… para nine-forty-two, second amendment. Any vessels seized at the outbreak of hostilities in the defense of Imperial territories or properties shall be treated as legitimate prizes of war and are not subject to seizure by the state.
“It’s already been ruled on by the prize courts, Vance, hence the modest lease payments that I’ve been using to buy the occasional coffee.”
“But…”
“But nothing.” She looked around the hangar as if to signal that this conversation was coming to an end. “The moment you passed beyond the warning beacons at Nidaveller, this ship reverted to me.” She allowed him a smile and a comradely thump on the back. “And you have my thanks for being so good as to bring her back to me.
“In fact,” she said in a suddenly lowered voice, leaning in closer, “I’m going to make you an offer you’d be wise to accept – one that solves most of your troubles in a single fit of decisiveness.”
Windemere darted another glance out the hangar door at the menace represented by Urbica’s fleet. “What’s your offer?”
“First things first,” she said, holding up a hand. “Do you, or any of your people really want to return to the Imperium, at this point?”
“Well, we…”
“Face it, Vance. You’re well and totally screwed. The project was going nowhere. The Corps of Engineers can barely figure out how to keep our own network of jump-gates running. What were the chances of sorting out an even more advanced alien version?”
Windemere’s shoulders dropped a fraction.
She shook her head. “Your project was pretty much set up to be an embarrassment to Imperial prestige. You were never going to survive that project. All Daffyd did was accelerate affairs a little bit and offer you a way out.”
“A way out? Surely you don’t suggest we stay here!”
She smiled, but in a way that made the man shiver. “Let me put it this way: if I put it to a vote, your crews would choose to stay. They don’t have massive funds and properties waiting for them back home. Out here, they can find apartments where they can stand up at a fraction of the price they’re used to.”
She caught Rodrigues’ eye for a heartbeat before looking back to Windemere. “And you brought the makings of a top-notch engineering firm. I know just the right client for your first contract, too. A product that every security and military force in the colonies will be drooling to buy.”
It had been a spur of the moment thought, but she knew it was the right thing to say. It promised riches to all concerned and gave them a vested interest in keeping Imperial influence at bay.
Or, rather, a second interest.
“It would certainly beat being liquidated to cover up knowledge of superior alien technology,” she reminded him.
He let out a deep sigh. “It seems the gun to my head isn’t the obvious one, after all.” He straightened his back and turned away from her fleet to face her. “You suggest we stay here. I assume you wish us to crew your vessel for the time being?”
He’d sounded a little bitter about who owned the Sucker Punch, but he’d at least described it as hers, so she chose not to take issue. “You’re authority is needed also,” she told him. “I want the rest of your ships to work with us as well. You’ll have to tell them to follow my orders.”
“You want me to take orders from you?” No matter how screwed Windemere might be, he still had an ingrained attitude about women in the military. “What’s the date of your commission?”
She allowed herself to laugh. If this was going to be the linchpin of the man’s resistance then she’d already won. “Vance, what are the chances that a woman who’s reached the rank of Brigadier General in the Marines would have done so more quickly than a man with your kind of connections?”
She waved a hand dismissively. “Don’t trouble yourself over it. I’ve already checked. I’ve been in uniform forty percent longer than you.”
Windemere paused for the barest of moments before accepting the situation. Even an ingrained attitude had to take a back seat when facing an officer with a superior record. Everyone knew who Urbica was, while his own name was connected to very few combat actions.
“I place myself under your command,” he announced formally.
“Excellent. Let’s get underway.” Julia started toward the nearest riser.
Windemere thought to point out the small matter of the pulsar but decided against it. If she’d forgotten, he’d just be annoying her. If she already had the whole thing under control, as she’d indicated earlier, he’d simply look the fool.
“General on the bridge!” the sentry at the entry portal announced as they stepped through.
All eyes turned to look at them and Windemere felt a twinge of envy at the hopeful faces. They knew who Urbica was and they clearly felt she could help them. He couldn’t blame them. He felt the same sense of hope himself. She’d been on the ship for less than a centi-day and he’d already replaced his dread of returning home with a hope for a future in what appeared to be a fairly large colonial territory.
“I should notify the fleet,” he suggested.
She nodded.
“Open a channel to all our ships,” he ordered.
Five holographic captains appeared in the middle of the bridge.
“As senior officer, General Urbica of the Imperial Marines is now assuming command of our forces.” He turned to Julia. “General…”
“I relieve you, General Windemere.”
“I stand relieved.”
“Helm,” Julia called out, “confirm receipt of coordinates from my implant and pass them to the rest of the fleet.”
“Received and passing now, ma’am.” He turned to look at her. “But, ma’am, we’re still stranded by the pulsar.”
Julia looked at the holographic captains. One of them had muted the audio while talking to someone on his right. He turned back to find his new commanding officer staring at him and sheepishly unmuted.
“Apologies, ma’am. My chief engineer was trying to explain his escape plan and I didn’t want to clutter the channel.”
“Been a while since you’ve been in action, Captain?”
The hologram nodded. “Just guard duty, General.”
“Well, Captain, we’ll be seeing action soon enough so I’ll tell you, just this once, that you never mute your boss, ever.”
“Won’t happen again, General.”
“What was his idea?”
“Ma’am?” He frowned, then glanced to his side. “Oh, yes. Cables. Ship
’s cables with roller drums. Use the biggest ship to pull the second biggest forward, then the third and so-on until we slingshot the smallest gunboat out of the effect horizon. Then we slowly tow the whole fleet out.”
“Wouldn’t work,” she told him, “because you would have only had your own ship to work with. The rest of us are leaving and you’d still be sitting here, if you’d kept the channel muted.
“If I never see meatloaf again,” she said loudly, “I’ll die a happy man.”
Now everybody was looking at her again but, instead of hope, they showed mild confusion. A few consoles began to chime softly, announcing updated information.
“Hooy na ny!” the nav officer suddenly exclaimed, looking at his console. “The pulsar… it’s gone!”
“It was never there,” Julia corrected. “Daffyd had free run of this ship. He managed to program an emergency shutdown for all six ships and a sensor ghost to keep you from looking for his virus. It loaded onto the frigates and gunboats when you synched up for your last jump.”
“So that business about meatloaf was his code to return control?” Commander Pulver asked.
“It was,” she confirmed, “and, considering his sense of humor, I’m lucky it was just about meatloaf.”
“Comms, tie in the rest of our ships on the frequency I’m sending to your console.” She turned back to the holographic display, watching as nine more captains shimmered into view.
She activated a control set, placing icons above both Commander Pulver and herself. “I’m transferring my flag to the Sucker Punch,” she announced. “Captain Pulver will serve as fleet captain.”
She resisted the urge to laugh. Hale actually looked pleased to get rid of that particular headache.
“Confirm receipt of new coordinates and spool up. We jump out in ten millis.”
Blazing New Trails
“We’re gonna have to put a tracker on you!” a breathless voice announced.
Beam didn’t bother to take his gaze off the canyon below the landing platform. “I take it you’re ready to try the first patient?”
Daffyd walked over and sat next to him, legs dangling over the dizzying drop. “We are, and we have more than a few folks with experience in FMG but you’ve got the most experience at curing the ‘Gray Blues’ with it.”
“Me and Rob, you mean.”
“Well, yes,” Daffyd conceded, “but we’d like to hear ourselves think during the process so we’ve got Rob supervising the crew down in the workshop while they turn out the ceramic tubes and stuff ‘em with doses.”
The mine’s workshop was the kind of setup that could produce just about anything the miners would have needed. Extruding and baking ceramic tubing was a cinch.
“Why don’t any of these guys live back there,” Beam asked irrelevantly, nodding toward the tunnel. It led to the habitats where the original miners had lived and it got a lot of sunlight, far more than the cold tunnels below
“Too many ghosts, they tell me.” Daffyd tossed a pebble over the edge, watching it fade into the hazy distance below. “As an Irricanan, I prefer living underground anyway. C’mon.” He gave Beam a nudge. “Ava Klum’s your first customer, so let’s not keep her waiting.”
Beam slid back from the edge and jumped to his feet, fighting a growing bout of panic. For someone whose most valued skill was passing out FMG, he was sure getting tangled up with a lot of famous people.
He followed Daffyd back to the elevator that connected the habitat level with the mine proper and rode down, lost in his own thoughts. They walked to the room selected for dose storage and found that nobody was there yet.
He tried to imagine Ava, Roanoke’s foremost privateer leader, buzzed on FMG and the picture failed to form. The stern beauty he knew from her recruiting posters simply refused to take on the slightly slack look of a regular user.
He did manage to imagine one thing, though. “Daffyd…” he came out of the storage room to find the dragoon engineer across the passageway, sitting on the ledge of the outer gallery, feet pressed up against the heavy wire cage that hung outside the opening. “Can you grab a plate of wraps or something from the canteen?”
The man raised an eyebrow at Beam for a moment, then he broke into a wide grin. “Good man!” he enthused, swinging his legs around to the inside of the railing and standing. “Dotting the ‘I’s and crossing the thorns. I like how you think, young fella.” He ambled off just as footsteps began approaching from the up-slope passage.
Paul, Julia and Ava came into the relatively light area by the open gallery. Ava was flanked by two guards and her hands were restrained.
Beam took a deep breath. “Morning, ma’am.” He held up a ceramic tube filled with FMG. “I’m ready when you are…”
***
“It’s there to keep the, ummm…” Ava waved at the wire cage, frowning when the waving failed to call the name to mind. “You know,” she insisted, frowning again when Beam simply shrugged. “Oh, Wuh duh ma huh tah duh fong kwong duh wai shung… not… not-fur-nothings.”
Paul, the only other observer present, slowly clapped his hands. “Bravo, sis. Right on the first stumble.”
She giggled helplessly, which had sent shivers of terror up Beam’s spine the first time he’d heard her do it. This was Ava Klum, the warrior goddess of Roanoake. The shield that protected insignificant folk like himself from raiders, Grays and gods only knew what else.
He was slowly coming to grips with it. Everybody, even iconic leaders, needed a chance to step out of themselves and decompress from time to time. Still, he doubted she’d ever use the stuff again. She wasn’t the type to give up her self-control willingly and certainly not without a compelling reason.
Like the removal of a conditioned suicide reflex.
“They’ll strip your bones in a heartbeat,” she declared. “Have you dead before you finish falling down and there’s a few folks around here I’d like to shove out through that door over there.” She started to look toward a door next to the gallery but got distracted by the sight of the empty plate.
“Say,” she mused, “could’ve sworn that had sandwiches on it, not two millis ago.” She gave Beam an accusing glance. “You eat those?”
“Um…” Beam looked over to Paul, caught the laughter in the cop’s eyes.
“Stay with the patient,” he suggested as he stood up and stretched. “I’ll go refill the plate.”
“Bring back some of those little dumplings,” she called out as he walked away. She turned to Beam. “I could eat every damn dumpling in this whole damn base.
“So, what’s her name?”
“Ma’am?”
“The girl you couldn’t get the time of day from so you decided to run off and be a spacer.” Ava giggled again. “I’d have thought that was obvious. You wouldn’t be the first guy to run away and join a crew to forget about a woman… or to impress her.”
She nodded. “Your ears are red. So you haven’t given up on her, huh?”
Beam sighed. “I don’t know. I think I care a lot less about all that now. The longer I’m away from Roanoke the less important it seems.”
“Thank the gods for that,” she said with a glance down the hall where her brother had gone in search of food. “Mooning after some girl isn’t going to impress her, but a confident swagger might have an impact.”
“And if it doesn’t,” Beam added, surprised at what he was admitting, “I really don’t think I care all that much.”
“What did I miss?”
Paul’s sudden reappearance caught Beam by surprise. He’d been so focused on the conversation that he’d missed the approaching footsteps. He took an eggroll with a nod of thanks.
“We just found out that Beam is interesting,” Ava said around a mouthful of eggroll. “Not to me, in particular, of course. Nothing personal,” she mumbled hastily. “But then, I’m not really looking for romance.”
She scarfed down three more eggrolls. As she swallowed the third, she seemed to remember where she�
�d left off and reached over to put a hand on Beam’s shoulder. “If anyone tells you that hunting down the raiders who killed your husband and skinning them alive won’t leave a scar on your psyche, don’t you believe them!”
“Um…” Beam replied thoughtfully.
“Alright, huffie…” Paul pulled out a knife and cut her hands free, “… let’s see if the cure worked.”
Before anyone could even form the phrase ‘so what do we do next?’, Ava grabbed the Nuttall special from his holster, flipped off the safety and pointed the weapon at her temple.
“Whoa!” Paul urged, one hand held out toward Ava, palm facing her. “That wasn’t what I had in mind.”
Ava shrugged and handed the weapon back. “Well at least we know I’m cured, seeing as how my head is still in one piece.”
“What the hells are you two playing at?” Beam demanded. He reached under his jacket and pulled out a vastly cheaper handgun and brandished it. “I was going to ‘accidentally’ drop this unloaded weapon as part of the test.”
Paul reddened. “Yeah, that sounds like a much better plan.”
“Well…” Beam had been ready to launch into an angry tirade but Paul’s admission had taken the edge off, “no more coming down here with loaded weapons, and the two of you have to keep quiet about the test; otherwise, it’s too easy to cheat.
“Matter of fact,” he mused, “let’s ship ‘em all up to the Sucker Punch after each cure so word doesn’t get out.”
Paul nodded, approval evident on his face. “Good plan. C’mon, sis. You’re in no shape to keep a secret right now.”
Ava stood, turned to Beam and gave him a slightly exaggerated nod. “Thanks for this.” she said. “If there’s anything you need, you let me know.”
By the Numbers
Julia slid down the grav-free column of space that connected the command deck to the hangar. The captains of the combined fleet were gathered in a rough circle on the forward inertial trap, safe enough as long as the Sucker Punch wasn’t conducting flight operations. They’d pulled cargo containers over to provide makeshift seats and she noticed that not all of the Imperial captains were keeping to themselves.
The Gray Matter (Rebels and Patriots Book 3) Page 11