The final lists had the first shuttle down as carrying the Ranger’s captain and senior officers, the major part of the crew, the hard core of the Milicorp contingent, and some people from Cyrene who were returning on official business. Those left at DSX-14 to await collection by a second shuttle would be the detainees — including the ones who were not planning to return, since there was no logical grounds whereby they could be separated out — a guard detachment, which included as many judged to potentially “friendly” as Callen had been able to have picked, and a skeleton crew under the Ranger’s second officer, who would be responsible for post-flight system checks and shutdown prior to handover of the ship to a service crew.
Callen’s rationale for remaining was that he had been specifically entrusted the task of bringing back Wade, and he would remain with his charge until delivery was completed. He had mulled for a long time over what to do about Krieg. He knew of no strong ties or affiliations that should bind Krieg to Earth, but then Krieg had never shown any emotional disposition or attachment toward anything. In the end, he had decided not to put Krieg in the compromising position of having to declare loyalty one way or the other. Callen would wait until the moment came for those returning to Cyrene to divide themselves from those who would remain on the satellite, and let Krieg choose for himself then.
The odds had thus been rendered as favorable as possible. The general feeling was that they could have been far worse. Callen was forced to agree with Shearer that betting high on the hand that gets dealt in life comes more easily when one has had a hand in stacking it.
Shearer sat with Wade and Lang at one of the tables in the detainees’ mess area. Around them, and back at the two bunking rooms, everyone was waiting with topcoats on and personal belongings packed, ready to go. There was little talk. Even those who had opted for Earth were tense now that it was plain that the moment had arrived. Without the constant sensation of power pulsing through the structure, felt more than heard, and the rest of the background to being under way that had become so familiar as to cease registering consciously, the ship seemed dead and still. The only sounds now were the humming of the ventilators and the whines and clunks of unseen machinery securing the docking latches and service umbilicals. There was no reason for delay. Shearer estimated that the first batch to be departing should already be assembling in the core zone of the ship, where the main lock was situated.
The signal to move would be when Callen appeared, accompanied by Osterman, which would mean the bridge had received confirmation of the shuttle’s departure. Earlier, Osterman had concealed caches of pistols and small arms at a number of strategic locations where the breakout groups would be able to retrieve them en route to their designated target areas. First priority was to seize the bridge and communications room before an alarm could be raised. Callen would head for it directly with a picked group, while Osterman led a second to subdue the remaining Milicorp detachment, some of whom he hoped could be induced into collaborating. Lang, meanwhile would lead a third group in a fast rush through to the satellite control center at the top end of the central cylinder, which it was vital to secure before word of trouble arrived. With those objectives attained, the way would be clear for Shearer, Wade, and a guard detail to escort everyone not wishing to return to Cyrene off the ship and onto the satellite to await later collection. At the same time, a technical squad commanded by the former mission ship officers would commence recharging the Ranger’s power banks and restocking with water and supplies for the return trip. They expected to have everybody reembarked and to be ready to detach in under an hour.
Never had Shearer known minutes to drag so slowly. He felt clammy, his stomach tight. Somebody farther along the table was drumming his fingers incessantly. Another somewhere behind clenched his teeth audibly every five seconds or so. Anticipating it got to be like listening to a dripping tap. Shearer wanted to scream at him to stop it. Wade caught his gaze and raised his eyebrows resignedly. Emner, who was nearby, leaned forward and murmured quietly.
“I take it, gentlemen, that this is where we part. Good luck to you all. Maybe, one day, I will see you again.” Wade nodded almost imperceptibly.
“Thanks,” Shearer whispered.
Footsteps sounded on the metal stairs a short distance along the corridor outside. Moments later, Osterman stepped in through the doorway, brandishing an automatic pistol, nodded curtly, and with a wave of his arm stood aside, holding the door. The lead squad, who had been waiting just inside, moved quickly and silently past him to follow Callen, also armed, who was visible beyond. Osterman’s group were already moving up behind, while Jeff Lang and the fast team closed in from the sides to group for the run into the satellite as soon as the way through the ship was clear. Perhaps thirty seconds passed. Then Lang’s voice came from the front in a low but commanding “Go!” and the waiting figures melted away into the corridor.
Everything seemed to be going quietly and smoothly. Surely if anything had gone wrong on the bridge they would have heard hints of it by now. Two of those who had gone ahead reappeared to station themselves inside the door, now carrying weapons. Shearer got up and moved forward to join them. One handed him a pocket two-way radio and a pistol. Shearer had no experience of using a gun. The whole idea was not to have to. It was intended primarily as a badge of authority.
Behind him, Wade addressed the eleven detainees who were left. “Okay, no surprise. This is it. There’s no time for speeches. We’re taking the Ranger back to Cyrene. Anyone can stay aboard who wishes to. Everybody else will be taken off the ship now. You’ll be collected from the satellite later. Please cooperate. Nobody wants to see any unpleasantness.”
They were prepared for something like this. A couple seemed to be in a mild state of shock. Nothing happened for several seconds. Then Emner, smiling faintly to himself, got up and moved calmly toward the door. One by one, others began following. A woman called Jaynie, who had been at Linzava, and Ted, a steel erector from Revo base, who had become friendly with her during the voyage hung back, looking uncertainly at each other. Then they exchanged silent nods. Ted looked at Wade. “We’re staying,” he said.
Wade nodded. “Just remain here for now,” he told them.
Shearer and the man who had given him the pistol led the rest out into the corridor and up the stairway to the main inboard deck, where an armed trooper in Milicorp uniform ushered them on through to the core zone — one of Osterman’s defectors. A wider corridor and another stairwell brought them to the access ramp and lock antechamber. It had been secured by a rearguard from Jeff Lang’s squad, who had already gone through. Controlling the lock was one of the crucial parts. God, we’re going to pull it off! Shearer told himself.
This was where they were supposed to meet Osterman, bringing the Ranger’s second officer, crew members, and disarmed Milicorp remnants to join the others being taken through to the satellite. One of Lang’s rearguard confirmed that they hadn’t shown up yet. Shearer tried to raise Osterman on the radio but without success.
“We’ll wait here for them,” Wade said to Shearer, indicating himself and two of the company. “You go ahead with the others.”
The connecting ramp to the satellite was clear. A guide posted by Lang waved Shearer and his party on through a gallery crossing the main toroid into a second ramp leading to the central cylinder. They would deliver the stay-behinds to the control center, they had decided. The satellite crew there would know how best to accommodate them until a relief shuttle arrived. They came to the access shaft leading up to the end of the cylinder where the control center was located, and reached the entrance. Two more of Lang’s squad were posted outside. Leaving his charges with the guards, Shearer went inside to check on the situation.
Lang was there with the remaining few of his own squad... and nobody else. The room was empty, its monitor stations and control desks unmanned. He was looking bemused, staring out through one of the large, angled viewing panes at a shuttle that was in the process of pu
lling away from the far side of the toroid on reverse thrusters, evidently having just detached. As Shearer watched, it slowed to a halt, and then began sliding forward again and turning to cross in front of the dumpy silhouette of the robot freighter hanging in the background.
Just detached?
But the shuttle was supposed to have detached before Callen came down to the detainees’ quarters. His cue to leave the bridge was to have been a signal being received there from the satellite that the shuttle had departed. How could it be departing only now?
One of Lang’s troops looked up from a screen that he and another were operating. “Callen is back on the line now, Jeff.”
Lang turned from the window and moved over. Shearer came forward to join him. The expression on Callen’s face was just as bewildered as Lang’s. “It’s the same here,” he announced. “Nobody. The entire bridge area is deserted. Same for communications and the propulsion section. They’re all gone. Everybody.”
Something was very, very wrong.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Callen stood amid the empty crew stations on the Ranger’s bridge, facing the screen showing Lang and Shearer. Colonel Yannis had come with him to survey the bridge layout, and Wen Siyu was already bringing up screens of system information on the flight engineer’s console. Berger, the former first drive officer from the Tacoma, had joined them moments before to report that no Ranger or Milicorp personnel were present in the power and propulsion sections of the ship. Clearly, they had all left on the shuttle that Lang had just seen detaching.
So what did it mean? Other officers were arriving in the control center to take charge of servicing procedures for the Ranger and direct transfers from the satellite’s stocks of supplies. Callen waved Berger forward to liaise with them while his mind raced over the events of the past ten minutes.
He had arranged to be here, on the bridge, at the time the shuttle was supposed to have left carrying the allocation of passengers that he had helped draw up. And he had definitely heard the communications officer announce receipt of a signal from satellite control saying that the shuttle was detaching. At that point, Callen had left the bridge to collect Osterman and set the plan moving as arranged. The Ranger’s second officer and his skeleton staff who were supposed to have stayed had been here then. They must have left while Callen and Osterman were down at the detainees’ rooms on the lower decks, which meant that the shuttle hadn’t left at all at that time; it had waited for them. So there never had been any signal from satellite control. They had known the whole plan. It was a setup.
Who, then, had given them away? An informer planted among the detainees back at Revo? Could his own plant, Dolphin, in fact have been a double plant put there by the corporation? Betrayal by those one thought were closest was an accepted part of the way this insane game was played... But no, neither of those possibilities made sense. Every one of the group brought back from Revo — even those having no part in the escape plan — was still here now at DSX-14. An informer would have made sure to be separated out somehow by now, and have gone on the shuttle.
The only other answer was that the office in which he had conducted his interrogations, which was when he and Shearer had discussed and worked out the details, had been bugged. But one of the tasks that Krieg would have performed routinely, and which Callen had specifically made a point of checking with him, was to go over every inch....
And then Callen groaned. He looked around reflexively from one side of the bridge to the other, but he already knew it didn’t need verifying. Krieg wasn’t around anywhere.
So Krieg had had his own line back to Milicorp corporate all along. And Krieg knew that Callen had evidence of the complicity between Milicorp and Interworld in engineering the plague on Amaranth and was prepared to use it. Even if the present fracas were to be resolved without a public scandal, the continuing existence of such a threat would never be tolerated. And now Callen, and everyone else he might have talked to among the renegade group from Cyrene, had been isolated on an abandoned satellite in high orbit above Earth. The implication was now glaringly obvious: None of them would be allowed to come down from it alive. But exactly how was something like that supposed to be effected? Callen asked himself.
And then he remembered Milicorp’s orbiting bombardment platform, Marduk.
In the Opcon room on Marduk’s Control Deck, a communications officer turned from a console and nodded to Rath Borland, who was standing with the Commander and a retinue of Milicorp staff officers. Borland moved over, and the operator directed him to one of the screens. “Code word Shellfish received, signed X-Man,” he read. Borland nodded. X-Man was the designation given to Krieg in his concealed role as Borland’s agent on the Tacoma mission. The message meant that all had gone according to plan, and the shuttle had detached from DSX-14. Temperamentally Krieg was not suited to step into the place of someone like, Callen but his services to the corporation would stand him in good stead.
Borland turned to the group of figures in olive green uniforms lavish with medal ribbons and braid, and shiny Sam Browne belts, standing a short distance apart from the Milicorp officers. “The objective is cleared,” he told them.
The delegation of senior military staff was from one of the newer states that had emerged from the turmoil in central Asia. Impressed by Marduk’s recent performance in helping subdue the insurrection in Tiwa Jaku, they had prevailed upon their government to consider contracting for similar support services and had come up on a preliminary assessment visit. They were already clients of a little-publicized department of Milicorp that nobody talked about very much, that dealt in techniques and training for countersubversion and “extreme” methods of interrogation.
A confidential directive delivered from the top level in Milicorp had called for elimination of the threat that X-Man had reported Callen as representing, along with everyone that Callen might have divulged his information to. It wasn’t a time for half-measures or squeamishness; the stakes were too high. And the obvious time and place to do it was right now, while they were all together and in a situation that had been rendered free of complications.
Borland’s arranging of the timing such that the military delegation would have the bonus of witnessing the operation had been deliberate. Although it was guaranteed to provoke bilious reactions when word reached the right quarters in the Milicorp-Interworld stratosphere, he expected to come through unscathed, and thereafter to be invulnerable. For once Callen was removed, Borland could well find himself the next in line to be set up as a sacrificial victim. So he was taking out insurance, just as Callen had sought to take out insurance. The difference, however, was that Borland would be able to threaten exposure if anything untoward were to happen to him. He felt reasonably secure against any risk of being compromised by the Asiatics in his turn. For one thing, they had no motivation to see him brought down; on the contrary, he had a solid record of dealing dependably with them, which it was in their interests to perpetuate. And for another, nobody would be likely to mess with a person commanding the kind of firepower he did, while he was still around.
“At which point will you send in the backup?” the leader of the delegation asked. He was a heavily built general with a smooth head and a cruel face. By backup, he meant the two military shuttles standing by in lower orbit, carrying assault troops with heavy equipment.
“We’ll give them three passes,” Borland replied. The general nodded, his expression conveying reluctant acceptance. Borland knew he would rather that he and his party got a chance to see Marduk’s long-range X-ray laser weapon in action.
Borland had prepared for two eventualities. According to the information from X-Man, the renegade group intended to make its break for Cyrene as soon as restocking of the Ranger was complete, which they hoped to accomplish in under an hour. If they adhered to that plan, they would be taken out as soon as Marduk was in a position to fire. This could vary from immediately the Ranger cleared the satellite to a maximum of twenty minutes
later, depending on where Marduk was in its orbit, since for part of the time they would be in mutual eclipse with Earth between them. This gave the target no chance of getting out of range. Even if they were to forgo the normal practice of running on conventional drives to the H-point — involving relative gravitational field intensities and done to maximize economic operation — which for a vessel the size of the Ranger would be about a day out, technical considerations following from standard operating procedures precluded an early enough escape into Heim space. After engine shutdown and recharging, the Ranger would need over an hour of running on conventional drive to build up suitable field conditions again before a transfer could be initiated, and this was well within Marduk’s window of opportunity.
The other possibility was that the renegades would realize their situation, refuse to expose themselves to fire from Marduk, and stay put. Borland would allow three passes of Marduk through its optimum targeting position. If the Ranger had still made no move by that time, the backup force would be sent in. Either way there would be no survivors.
The official story would be that the Ranger, an armed interstellar vessel, had been seized by mutineers thought to be intending to take up a piratical existence among the Terran colony worlds. However, prompt action by the ship’s Milicorp contingent succeeded in evacuating the crew and the satellite staff before they could be made hostages. The ship posed a danger to everything in the vicinity of Earth, not to mention the havoc that could ensue elsewhere if it disappeared into Heim space. Mindful of its responsibility as possessor of the only means presently available to thwart such a the threat, Milicorp had issued several warnings. When they went unheeded, the corporation had taken it upon itself to initiate appropriate action. There was little likelihood of other accounts appearing later that would refute this version of the story. Communications from both the Ranger and DSX-14 had been disabled.
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