Mercenary's Star

by William H. Keith

  She loved him—admit it!—but how could that be possible when she found it so hard to trust him completely?

  Lori wanted to talk to him about it. Her fears were twisted and unreasoning, but it seemed that she was beginning to understand them. She looked at Grayson and felt a sudden surge of longing that took her completely by surprise. "Gray..."

  He looked up, the fatigue on his face startlirrg her.

  "I..." She stopped, flustered and confused. "How can I help?" she asked lamely.

  "You can help. Lieutenant, by going back to bed and getting some sleep. We've got a little hike in the morning, remember, all the way back to Fox Island. I want you rested and fresh."

  She dropped her eyes to hide her disappointment. Lieutenant! Perhaps, then, he no longer thought of her as anything more than his Executive Officer!

  "Perhaps I'd better." Lori stood and turned to go. She stopped in the doorway, caught suddenly by the thought, the hope that he might call to her, ask her what was wrong, offer to talk. Or...he might follow her back to her cabin. The thought sent a shiver of fear through her—what would she say?—but the thought warmed her, too, and she found herself willing him to come after her.

  Grayson remained at the table, one hand to his forehead as he read another dispatch, then used a stylus to enter a notation on his compad. He appeared to have forgotten her completely.

  Lieutenant, indeed! She whirled and strode from the room.

  * * * *

  The city of Regis was in flames.

  From where Nagumo stood at his office window, the fire seemed to engulf the entire city. He clasped his hands behind his back, lifted his chin, pursed his lips. The rebel Helgameyer had named many of her colleagues, professors here at the University, staff members, even Academicians on the government council. Altogether, there had been 117 names on the list she had helped compile. Troopers had arrested every person on the list that very night, and the executions had begun at dawn in the University courtyard. Chief Academician Haraldssen had been the first to die. Nagumo ruled the planet directly now, in the name of his Duke.

  The depth, the vehemence of the response of the citizens of Regis had caught Nagumo completely by surprise—and he was a man who did not like surprises. Instead of eliminating a handful of dissidents in a city already cowed by ten years of Combine occupation, the first volleys of the firing squads had been like the signal to open rebellion. It had started with the students. Armed with placards and banners, they had poured into the courtyard, chanting slogans and demanding freedom for those who had been taken during the night. The riot that had tumbled through the streets of Old Regis two days before was nothing compared to this.

  The firing squads had turned their weapons on the crowd, and now twenty students lay dead in the courtyard. In response, the mob had produced its own weapons, rocks and bottles at first, and then a scattering of handguns and sidearms. Though these might have been stolen, they were more likely provided by Verthandian miltiamen in the crowd.

  After that, the entire city had seemed to rise like some angered giant roused from sleep. Nagumo had sent in the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the Light Dragon Infantry, holding back the 1st Battalion to keep an eye on the Regis Blues. The Dragons had driven the mob out of the courtyard and into Prescott Square outside the University's front gates. And then Nagumo had ordered in the BattleMechs.

  As they had two nights before, the mob had scattered, but Nagumo's warriors were under orders not to hold back. Like demons, BattleMechs had swept down on scattering bands of rioters, spraying death and destruction in a random and bloody orgy. The gates of the University had been shattered when rioters had attempted to flee back into the University and the ‘Mechs had pursued them. To the twenty dead were added another two hundred more, as the ‘Mechs pumped missiles, machine gun fire, autocannon rounds, and laser bolts into the panicking mob.

  Elsewhere within the University walls, Nagumo's men had moved swiftly to exert full control over those government Academicians who had not already been arrested—"protective custody", he was calling it. They were in one of the conference rooms in this very building. Besides the Council of Academicians, 212 professors and teachers on the University Faculty had been "escorted to safety" and were under guard in the courtyard below. At the same time, the Regis Blues had been disarmed without incident, but only because their officers had been summoned to an urgent meeting and not been allowed to return to their men. Men and officers waited together now in a warehouse close beside the University. Nagumo still hadn't decided what to do about them.

  Things seemed well in control, but Nagumo was not happy. He had seriously underestimated the public feeling of the Verthandians against their Combine guardians. It had been Duke Ricol's specific order that the University remain untouched, as evidence that Verthandian life, culture, and government continued unchanged under Kurita rule.

  In one night, Nagumo had swept away everything that remained of Verthandi's government, and the campus courtyard was choked with bodies and prisoners pinned in the merciless beams of the searchlights turned on them.

  Well, so be it. His Duke would remove him from command or else praise him for taking positive action. Nagumo was a fatalist about such matters. Events had slipped beyond his control, and now he could only attempt to ride them out as best he knew how. A planet-wide rebellion was too much for one man to deal with. But when Duke Ricol arrived, there would be peace in this city!

  * * * *

  Light years away, the spy waited in the shelter of a Galaport blast pit, this time searching the sky. This time, he wore the flowing robe and dress cloak of a moderately successful local trader, attired chosen to attract no more notice than had his earlier disguise as a Lieutenant of the Port Authority.

  Days before, a Draco courier had dropped out of hyperspace and beamed a coded message. It had impinged on the sensitive receiver hidden amid the clutter of satellite receiver antennae on the roofs of a middle-class residential area of Galaport. That message, when decoded, had brought the spy here.

  Something glittered in the deep blue of the cloudless sky, and the spy brought his electronic binoculars to his eyes. In moments, the glitter had steadied to a pulsing jet of white flame supporting the globular mass of a freighter DropShip. He read off the lettering visible along the craft's flank. Deimos, DropShip One of the freighter Invidious.

  He smiled to himself as the Deimos settled into a waiting cradle in clouds of dust and smoke. The target had arrived on schedule.

  28

  Renfred Tor matched his pace to the long-legged stride of the man who walked beside him. Salvor Steiner-Reese made Tor feel grubby and out of place, even on the streets of so egalitarian a town as Galaport. The Lyran Ambassador-at-Large was, as always, resplendent in scarlet trimmed with black. His elbow-length shoulder cloak was surely an inconvenience in Galatea's desert climate, but crisply immaculate nonetheless. The man was tall, powerfully built, autocratically handsome. His double-barrelled name openly proclaimed a much-publicized, if distant, relationship to the Archon of the Lyran Commonwealth.

  For his part. Tor looked the part of a tramp frieghter captain, his shipboard coveralls greasy and bare of either rank insignia or a ship ID path. He carried a battered trade samples case in one hand.

  "I'm afraid you don't understand. Captain Tor," the ambassador was saying. "There is simply no way the Commonwealth can involve itself in this matter!"

  "You’re right, Your Excellency, I don't understand. Jeri told me you'd at least be willing to listen!"

  "And listen I have, sir! For the past hour! What would you have me do...involve House Steiner in interstellar war with the Draconis Combine...and for what? A handful of starving rebels on a planet given to the Combine by treaty a decade ago? Good lord, man, what do you take me for?"

  Tor was not certain how to answer that one.

  He had a friend at the Lyran Government building in the capital, a girl named Jeri whom he always looked up when in the Galatean system. She was pretty
and fun. More important, she knew most of the important people in the stellar crossroads that was Galatea. She had put him in touch with "an old friend" at the Government embassy. Galatea, as a member of the Lyran Commonwealth, did not rate the exchange of diplomatic personnel usual between separate governments, but an Ambassador-at-Large such as Steiner-Reese helped tie distant, planetary governments to the Royal Court on Tharkad. If Tor were to have any hope at all of winning support for Grayson and the Legion, Steiner-Reese was the man to see.

  It looked as though the man was not willing to help.

  "Look, Your Excellency," Tor said. He hefted the briefcase he carried in his right hand. "Doesn't this interest you at all?"

  Tor had taken the precaution of withdrawing his own share of the metal deposited with the ComStar factor on Galatea. He believed the sight of all that lustrous gray metal might stir the imagination of the ambassador, and make Verthandi something more than an unfamiliar name.

  "Frankly, Captain, no. Vanadium is a common enough element Not here on Galatea, perhaps, but common enough elsewhere. There are hundreds of worlds within the Commonwealth, and most, sir, have adequate reserves of that metal."

  "According to my man on Verthandi, Your Excellency, the Dracos have been mining like crazy in the southern desert. The planet was an agricultural backwater...until they came. Now they enslave the people and send them to work in the mines. Why?"

  "Not for vanadium, certainly."

  "No, sir. Not for vanadium. But possibly...for something else?"

  "Like what?"

  "I don't know."

  "Oh, come now, Captain..."

  "Please, sir, listen! In his message to me, Captain Carlyle described some of what he learned about Verthandi's history. The world was shaped thousands of years ago by a collision with an asteroid, an asteroid that struck near Verthandi's north pole. The impact created a vast basin that is now filled with jungle and sea. It must have hurled molten chunks of dense matter for thousands of kilometers into secondary impacts in the southern desert."

  "So?"

  "Your Excellency, vanadium is common there. If vanadium, why not other metals, too? Chromium. Titanium. Niobium. Tungsten. Osmium. Perhaps in abundance. Perhaps in dense masses close to the surface, where MinerMechs can dig them out. Elements needed by industries on worlds clear across the Commonwealth."

  "You're asking me to believe that the natives of this world were just sitting on all this...this wealth, and were farming instead?"

  "Oh, they were making use of the stuff. Grayson's message told about a local AgroMech plant that was started in a fracture cavern in the floor of that old impact crater. By and large, though, the original colonists were farmers fleeing persecution. They founded industry enough to support their own needs, but never bothered developing the mineral reserves further. They didn't need to."

  "An interesting possibility, Captain, but not one that would lead me to support an attack on the Kurita forces there!"

  "I'm not saying you need an attack! But fleet maneuvers, possibly. You could arrange it with the Galatean Military Charge d'Affaires."

  "You don't know what you’re talking about, sir." Steiner-Reese was becoming progressively more undiplomatic by the moment, and Renfred Tor knew that he'd failed in his mission.

  * * * *

  The three men following Tor and the Lyran Ambassador were neither close enough to hear the conversation nor to see the despair in Tor's face. They knew only that Arvid would pay them 5,000 CBs apiece to murder the freighter captain, Renfred Tor. The presence of the ambassador was a plus. His death would make the double murder look like the work of political terrorists.

  The leader of the three nodded to the others, and each drew a lean, black Calaveri 10 mm automatic pistol from beneath the folds of his cloak. There were three sharp snicks as the assassins chambered their rounds, then they quickened their pace and closed on their unsuspecting targets.

  * * * *

  "I guess I've wasted your time, then," Tor said.

  "Not at all, not at all," the ambassador said. "I appreciate your problem, and I'm sorry I could not be of help. But don't hesitate to call on me some—"

  He was interrupted by the sound of running feet close behind them. Tor and Steiner-Reese spun around, and saw three others rushing them from across the street. Their pursuers were bringing their pistols up into line with Tor's chest.

  "No!" the ambassador shouted, but the first pair of gunshots drowned out the sound. Tor was holding his briefcase in front of him like a shield, but the twin, 10 mm slugs tore easily through the fragile plastic, hurling the freighter captain backward into a whitewashed wall. Three more shots followed as Tor lurched down onto the pavement, the face of his briefcase fragmenting with each ruthless impact.

  "What are you doing?" the Ambassador shouted. By that time, three pistols were swinging around and up to point at him. As five shots roared out in rapid succession. Steiner-Reese instinctively felt for his chest, expecting to encounter blood. Instead, he clutched at a body still miraculously whole.

  At the same moment, one of the thugs was flailing backwards into the street in a spray of blood. A second slumped to the pavement, his pistol a meter away from stiff fingers, which continued to spasm against the ferrocrete. The third clutched his suddenly bloody arm and shrieked agony. A sixth shot cracked, and his shriek changed to a harsh gargle as the man flopped onto the street between his two comrades.

  Captain Tor stood up slowly, still clutching the shattered briefcase, the smoking barrel of a 9 mm automatic pistol protruding from underneath. He had drawn the weapon from some concealed spot in the case.

  "Captain Tor! But how...?"

  Tor snapped the safety on his pistol and then tucked the weapon away. Picking apart some of the fragments of his briefcase, he exposed the dull gray lining of vanadium. Steiner-Reese could see the deep pits in the soft metal where the attackers' slugs had expended their energy.

  "Vanadium's not all that dense," Tor explained, "but it was heavy enough to stop those bullets. Knocked me silly, though. I almost couldn't get my gun clear."

  For Steiner-Reese, it had all happened so fast that his heart was still racing. "Good lord, man, they were trying to kill us! I must apologize. They must be terrorists, out to get me..."

  Tor looked thoughtful. "I don't think so, sir." He shifted the case under one arm, took the ambassador's arm with his free hand and began steering the man down the street "If they'd been terrorists, they'd have gone after you first, sir. No way they could mistake me for you. No, Your Excellency, they were gunning for me. I guess you were a bonus for them."

  "But why?"

  "Why do you think? It could be someone's afraid the Commonwealth will discover just how valuable Verthandi is. They were afraid I would get help from you." The words had come to Tor unbidden, an inspiration.

  The ambassador nodded. "I'm beginning to believe you, Renfred. Will you come back with me to the embassy?"

  "Certainly, sir." They began hurrying down the street Galatea's constabulary would be along eventually to investigate the gunshots, though such attacks were relatively common in the less civilized parts of Galaport. Tor had no wish to be detained for questioning. "I am going to need a new samples case, though," he said.

  * * * *

  Grayson studied the screen of the palm-sized electronic instrument in his hand. "No listening devices that I can see," he said. "The 'TronicsTechs can take care of the mines."

  Sergeant Ramage nodded and pointed northward. "I've got a small army checking out the caves. Funny. They took all the equipment, of course, but they didn't blow the place afterward."

  "Maybe they figure to use it themselves sometime."

  The Gray Death, with its entourage of rebel soldiers and ‘Mechs, had returned to Fox Island. Most waited at an encampment a few kilometers away in the jungle, but Grayson had detailed Techs and the sharpest of the rebel trainees to check out the old camp. In the meantime, Lori and McCall had taken their ‘Mechs up the Basi
n Rim Road to search for listening devices or booby traps.

  It was beginning to look like Nagumo's people had done a halfhearted job here, once they'd finished with the assault itself. They'd burned the Ericksson mansion to the ground, of course, and leveled most of the barns, warehouses, and other structures as well. They'd taken all the electronics equipment, machine tools, electronics parts, computers, the pair of ‘Mech simulators—anything that could be moved—and the rest they'd destroyed. Nagumo's forces had stripped the island of everything. Everything, that is, except the one thing the Gray Death needed the most.

  A secret and unexpected site for an advance base camp.

  The surprising thing was that the enemy forces had not been more thorough. Grayson had expected the electronics and machinery to be gone, but he'd also expected to find the cave dynamited, the island stripped bare of trees, the ground scorched. They had probably been in a hurry, he decided. From the reports he'd been getting, Nagumo's forces were being stretched tighter and tighter. The units that had staged this raid must have had to return to Regis as soon as they knew that the rebel column was beyond their reach to the south.

  The place had been mined. The Dracos had sown both antipersonnel mines and anti- ‘Mech mines sown throughout the area, but the hand scanners his search team held were giving plenty of warning of the devices.

  Khaled approached from the direction of the mansion. "We found them," he said, eyes dark and grave. "In the house?"

  The Mech Warrior nodded. "Identification will be a problem."

  Grayson turned and stared at the jungle, working to keep his feelings from showing. According to the muster books, eighteen of his own people had been at Fox Island when the raiders struck. Some might have been taken prisoner. Yorulis had been shot. The rest the Dracos had left in the burning house. Sixty-five rebels had been here as well. How many of them were still alive? Just counting the bodies left in the mansion would be a harrowing chore.