by David Drake
"Best be me with the young lady, Dickie," said Belgeddes as he pulled his undershirt from beneath his waistband. "And it best be me with the little gun, Ms. Holly, because even if you're better than I think you are, I've got more of this kind of experience."
He tugged the undershirt upward, baring his belly and chest.
"Jesus Christ," Ran Colville said softly.
Much of the scar tissue smeared a bright pink across Belgeddes' pasty torso was of too general a nature to identify its cause, but the line of four dimples from right shoulder to right nipple were obviously bulletholes. It was amazing the man had survived.
Ran glanced back at Wanda. She touched her tongue to her lips but said nothing. Behind her, holographic pachyderms ground away at the Calicheman equivalent of mangrove roots.
"I'm sorry if I've distressed you young people," Begeddes said as he covered his ruined flesh again, "but I had to convince you that we're . . . experienced in this sort of thing. Otherwise you'll go off and get yourselves killed without doing a lick of good."
"And don't jump to the wrong conclusion about the scars, young fellow," Wade said to Ran. "Tom's the one who walked away from that one—"
"On Esmeralda, it was," Belgeddes murmured with a wry smile. "'Ought to be interesting,' Dickie says, and I go along with him because I always do, for my sins."
"—and there were twelve of the others," Wade continued without looking at his plump friend. He shook his head sadly. "Tom's a dab hand with a pistol, no one better. Give him a long gun, though, and the only way he could hit anything is to get close enough to swing it like a club."
Ran looked at the two passengers, and thought how much he wished Commander Kneale were alive—
And how much he wished Mohacks and Babanguida were still on board—
And how much he wished he was anyplace else himself than on the Empress of Earth—
And how much he wished he didn't have a sense of duty which would drive him to risks that Trident Starlines would never order, just to save a symbol of peace from the maw of war.
And realized that he didn't wish that last thing. He didn't wish not to be Ran Colville.
"All right," Wanda said decisively "If you gentlemen are in, I'm glad to have you. What about you, Ran? The company can't order—"
Ran put his hand on Wanda's velvet-clad elbow. "The company doesn't have to order this," he said. "I'm doing it for—it doesn't matter. I'm in."
I'm doing it for my Dad.
"Right," said Wanda. "First to the officers' section off Corridor Twelve. Ran's got a pistol and a rifle in his room; we'll get them. After that—well, we'll see how the Grantholmers deploy."
Wanda linked arms with Belgeddes, hugging close to the plump old man in a way that suddenly struck Ran as obscene—though he'd seen a score of similar couples on every passenger vessel he'd crewed. The women with boys half their age were equally common, but the women who cared about youth in that fashion also cared about their own physique.
The four of them walked briskly out into the main corridor. The pistol was in Wanda's pocket, not Belgeddes', though his left hand was near it also.
Wanda had the rank, which put her in charge so long as everybody agreed she was in charge. That was one of the problems with a scratch force of volunteers. They weren't doing this officially, none of them, and they sure as hell weren't an army.
Suddenly, as clear as Bifrost's sun on a glacial valley, Ran knew where he was going to look for reinforcements.
"Wanda," he said aloud, "I'd just attract attention in Corridor Twelve. I'm going down to Engineering Deck. The Grantholmers're probably holding our Cold Crew under guard until they get things organized. I'm going to do something about those guards.
"And then we'll see who organizes what . . ." Ran added. His voice trailed off as the eyes of his mind stared into sponge space.
* * *
Corridor 12 served two of the Empress's imperial suites as well as a score of ordinary First Class cabins. The end which abutted officers' country was buffered by the Prairie Lounge, a group of alcoves decorated in what an architect imagined was Calicheman fashion.
The segments of the Prairie Lounge held tables and chairs of hair-out cowhide and rough wood—sealed and stabilized with synthetic resins—with walls of porous concrete and the raw ends of rusticated stonework. Sprouting from pots were a mix of grasses and the broad-leafed plants which grew among them on the prairies.
The lounge missed the reality of Calicheman by not being filthy, the way settlements in that world of self-ruled egoists usually were; but it was still one of the lesser-used of the starliner's public spaces.
Holly, Belgeddes, and—at a slight distance—Wade walked into the lounge. All three of them talked loudly though not directly in response to what the others said. They carried drink tumblers from the autobar just outside the Enchanted Forest.
Farther back in Corridor 12, a male passenger holding a toddler by either hand shouted at a cabin door, "Barbara! Barbara! Open the door, for God's sake!"
At the other end of the lounge, three men worked in loose uniforms which blurred like chameleon skin to take on neighboring colors. Instead of boots, they wore soft shoes which fit within the spacesuits they'd worn to board the starliner. Two of the men carried sub-machine guns. The third had a doorknocker, a stocked launcher for rocket-driven 15-cm impact grenades.
The soldiers' uniforms bore no national or unit markings, but the weapons were Grantholm issue.
"Halt!" ordered the soldier watching the backs of his fellows as they struggled with the locked door into officers' country. He pointed his submachine gun at the trio straggling into the lounge.
Holly giggled and threw herself into a chair. "C'mere, sweetie," she said, tugging at Belgeddes's arm. "Come to mama, cute l'il baby."
"Can I help you, gentlemen?" Wade said, walking forward with a deliberation more suggestive of drink than a stagger would have been. "I have great experience in construction methods and problems. I am the largest contractor, I say with no exaggeration, within a hundred kilometers of Point Easy."
"Get the hell out of here!" the guard snarled.
The other two Grantholmers held an electronic pick against the lockplate of the hatch to the continuation of Corridor 12. The pick was designed to duplicate the combination of simple locks like this one by sheer number-crunching. The coarse concrete surface of the panel caused alignment problems.
"If you can't get this fucking thing to work," snarled the soldier with the slung doorknocker, "I've got a trick that will!"
"My wife left me," Wade said, continuing to walk toward the trio of soldiers. "Me, the largest contractor within a hundred—"
"Get back, you stupid bastard!" the guard shouted. He stepped forward and brought his weapon around in an arc that slammed the side of the wire stock into Wade's head. The thin old man hurtled over a chair with a streak of blood bright against the white hair of his temple.
The pistol shots were so sharp and swift that the three of them together could have been the first whipcrack of a nearby thunderbolt.
One of the soldiers lurched against the closed door, hard enough to bloody his nose on the rough gray finish. His partner simply slumped, releasing the electronic pick as he fell. The bullet wound beneath either man's left ear, under the lip of the soldiers' tight-fitting helmets, looked like a blood blister rather than a hole.
The guard continued to rotate with the inertia of the force with which he'd struck Wade. He had a surprised expression and no right eye because of the bullet that had killed him an instant before his fellows died.
Wade got up from his flailing sprawl. He patted his left temple gingerly, looked at the blood on his fingertips, and grimaced.
"Told you Tom here was a dab hand with a pistol," he murmured to Holly as he bent to pick up the submachine gun with which he'd been clubbed.
The passenger fifty meters down the corridor screamed uncontrollably. He let go of his children's hands to find his room key, then
dropped the key when he tried to touch it to the lockplate. The toddlers gripped their father's trouser legs and added their high-pitched voices to his shrieks.
Holly opened the corridor hatch with her key. She grabbed one of the soldiers to drag him through. "We don't want them found any sooner than we can help it," she muttered in a voice pitched more for herself than for informing her companions.
Belgeddes dropped the pistol into his tunic pocket "A nice little weapon," he said conversationally as he took another soldier by the collar with both hands. "I'll keep it, if you don't mind."
The corpse Wanda Holly was dragging suddenly began to thrash like a pithed frog. She pulled it another half-meter forward to get the feet out of the hatchway.
Then, unexpectedly to herself though not to the old men, she knelt and vomited out the whole contents of her stomach.
* * *
Passengers pranced nervously up and down the corridors of the Empress of Earth, their eyes as wide as those of does separated from their herd. None of them really looked at Ran Colville, incongruous in white trousers and a jacket of pink and puce streaks.
There was a three-man team from the Grantholm commando in the Embarkation Hall. Ran scuttled past the soldiers to a drop shaft. Four passengers, caught on the wrong deck as Ran had been, lurched from their stasis at the edge of the hall and followed him into the shaft. All of them hunched as if to draw their heads within their shoulders, turtle-like.
A Grantholm submachine gun followed the movements, but the soldiers didn't deign to speak. They were in the Embarkation Hall and other key points as an earnest of intent. The fifty or so troops in the commando couldn't control thousands of people directly. So long as the passengers were trying to get to their rooms, the Grantholmers had no need to act.
In the shaft, as in the corridors and other spaces, the cloying machine voice repeated, "All passengers must return to their cabins at once." Bridge had dropped the request to avoid Corridor 4, because by now the Grantholmers had penetrated the Empress of Earth like snake venom in a victim's bloodstream.
"Oh my god, my god," a woman in the drop shaft gasped into her hands. "I'm going to be raped, I'm going to be raped!"
"For god's sake, Frances, shut up!" snarled the man beside her. "They'll have better things to do than poke you, whoever they are."
Ran's lips tightened. It would be easy to forget that the husband was under as much strain as his wife, so that he wasn't responsible for his words either.
The passengers got off in couples on Decks B and A, scuttling quickly toward their cabins. Ran hadn't seen any of the bombast and disbelief he'd have expected among people whose wealth was implied by the feet they were traveling First Class on the Empress. The Grantholm troops looked like exactly what they were: merciless killers. So long as passengers realized that, the loss of life in the operation could be very low.
Not that the government of Grantholm really cared how many neutral civilians died, so long as they got their war-winning prize.
The Stewards' Pantry and quarters were on Deck 1, beneath the passenger spaces but above the holds and the Engineering Deck, 4. Ran got off the drop shaft nervously, aware that if he'd been planning the assault, there would be at least one Grantholm team here before him.
Instead, a dozen stewards waited in the receiving area around the lift and drop shafts, chatting tensely and listening to their transceivers. They jumped to attention when Ran appeared, recognizing him despite his civilian jacket There were no soldiers present
The Grantholm planners hadn't served as officers on passenger liners. They didn't know that the stewards were the people most likely to face a passenger emergency, and that they therefore had to be equipped for one.
"What are your orders from the bridge?" Ran demanded sharply. Every time he focused on a steward, the steward's eyes clicked off in the direction of Ran's ear or a corner of the moldings.
"Get moving," Ran ordered. "Check all the corridors, all the public spaces. When you find passengers, guide them to their cabins. Carry them if you've got to!"
He paused, glaring around the foyer. More faces peered out of the pantry beyond. Some ducked back, but a few joined those Ran was lecturing.
"Nobody needs to be hurt at all if we just get the passengers out of the way till things settle down," Ran continued more gently. "That's our job, the safety of the passengers. Let's do it."
He nodded toward the lift shafts. After a moment's hesitation, one steward and then the whole mass of her fellows moved to the shafts. They disappeared upward toward their duties.
Ran walked into the pantry. A few more brown-uniformed stewards pressed themselves against the freestanding consoles and smooth equipment lockers. All told, the shirkers on Deck 1 amounted to less than ten percent of the three hundred-plus stewards aboard the Empress of Earth.
"Go on," Ran said tiredly. He poked his thumb back over his shoulder toward the lift shafts. "You heard me. Get the passengers to cover and then we can sit on our hands."
The Chief Steward was a thin, puritanical-looking man named Medchen. The voyage to date had taught Ran that Medchen was a greater crook than Mohacks and Babanguida together, and that he lacked the ratings' genuine willingness to do their duty—or a long ways beyond it if someone had the guts to lead them in the right direction.
The Chief Steward stood in front of his alcove at the far end of the long room. "My duty post is here, Mr. Colville," he said, "and you have no authority over me anyway. Besides, you're out of uniform."
"And going to be more so," Ran agreed in a mild voice. "Get me a steward's uniform. One of yours ought to do—"
He smiled at Medchen. It wasn't a nice expression.
"—though I guess I'll rip the back out if it comes down to cases."
Ran tossed his borrowed civilian tunic onto the narrow shelf of a console. It slipped to the deck as a spill of pink and puce.
Medchen stepped into his alcove and lifted out the fresh uniform hanging behind the open door. He waited till Ran had stripped off his white trousers, then handed it to him.
"What do you hear from the bridge?" Ran asked conversationally as he changed clothes.
"Two minutes ago," Medchen said, "Captain Kanawa announced that a group of armed men had entered the bridge and ordered him to stop speaking. There hasn't been anything since then, except the AI yammering."
"I'll need a food cart—"Ran said as he straightened.
Medchen nodded toward a rack near the pantry entrance. The carts were stored vertically in collapsed form. Ran jerked one down and extended it. A web of cross-braced wires joined the tray to the static repulsion plate that floated just above the decking.
"I have my own unopened dinner in my office," the Chief Steward volunteered unexpectedly, nodding toward his alcove. "Do you want that too?"
"Yes," Ran said, "I do."
He'd thought he'd have to get that from the Galley off Corridor 3, on the opposite side of the deck. Also, he'd thought Medchen was going to be a problem . . . though it appeared he was wrong in that expectation.
The Chief Steward stepped into his alcove and came out again with covered plates and a setting of flatware, still wrapped in its napkin. The Grantholm attack must have occurred just as he sat down to dinner.
"Right," Ran said. He kept his voice unnaturally calm. "Now, some stun-gas projectors. I want about six."
Medchen pointed. "Locker Four," he said, "beside you. There's a gross of them."
Ran opened the locker. Boxes of nerve-numbing gas, each projector about the size of a knife hilt, were stacked on the bottom of the cubicle. Medical supplies filled the shelves on top.
The gas—actually an aerosol—was skin absorbed. It numbed motor nerves without affecting the autonomic nervous system. The humans it struck went instantly catatonic, whether they were drunk, furious, or mad as hatters at the moment they received the dose, but it had no long-term side effects.
That last point was desirable when the target was a cook with a cleaver.
It was absolutely necessary when the problem involved, say, a passenger trying to strangle his wife.
Ran took the six projectors he'd decided on when he made his plan. It was tempting to grab more now that he saw the dozen full boxes, but he restrained himself Quantities of equipment weren't going to turn this hijacking around. Luck and guile would have to do.
He looked back at the Chief Steward. "One thing, Medchen," he said. "I hope you're not thinking of reporting this to our friends from Grantholm?"
Medchen shook his head slightly. "No, Mr. Colville," he said. "I'm not going to say anything about it to anybody."
"That's good," said Ran softly. "Because if you did—you can't be sure that they'd kill me, Medchen. And you can be very sure that I'd come back and kill you if I was still alive."
The Chief Steward nodded. "Yes, Mr. Colville," he said. "I'm well aware of that."
His smile was as hard and tight as a wrinkle on a walnut's shell. "But I hope they do kill you, Mr. Colville," he added.
As Ran slid his cart out of the pantry, it occurred to him that while Medchen was certainly a bastard, he wasn't at all a stupid bastard. . . .
* * *
Rural landscapes from central North America shimmered silently from the walls as Wade dragged the third corpse into Ran Colville's cabin. He was panting slightly. Belgeddes sphinctered the panel closed behind him. Wanda Holly took Ran's pistol from the drawer which she'd opened with the same master chip that had unlocked the cabin.
Wade undipped the sling of the dead soldier's submachine gun. "Now, little lady," he said as he examined the weapon, "this is going to get—"
"Call her 'lieutenant,' Dickie," Belgeddes said as he took the pistol from Wanda's hand. "Not 'little lady,' you know."
"You can have the other submachine gun if you want it," Wanda said to Belgeddes. As she spoke, she switched on Ran's console. "You—you're a better shot than I am."
"Now, Lieutenant," Wade resumed, "this is going to get very unpleasant, I'm afraid. Perhaps—"
"Not for me, good lady," Belgeddes said as he compared the two identical pistols with a broad grin. "These suit me very well."