This changed when Sula received a coded message from Lord Ivan Snow informing her that Tork’s coup was scheduled to take place in nine days. “We move a day ahead of Tork,” Sula told her crew. It gave them a goal to work toward, and Sula made lists of supplies to be acquired over the last days. Lady Koridun, pleased at the thought of finally ridding herself of Lord Arrun, offered to host a dinner for the Legion of Diligence on that day.
Lady Koridun was so utterly gleeful when she contemplated the slaughter of her suitor that Sula became supremely grateful that Koridun had never discovered who had killed her brother and cousins.
Thus it came as a surprise when the Legion took the ship, and not Sula. The announcement came at suppertime, when half those on the ship were sitting in the restaurant, staring in dull disappointment at the predictable meal from the buffet that had failed for weeks to provide anything like novelty. Sula shared one of the long tables with Giove and Vijana, and Lady Koridun sat with Ming Lin. Sula was surprised that Lord Arrun wasn’t sitting opposite Koridun, trying to make himself pleasant, or at least available. Then, over the public address system, came the voice of Fau-tan, Striver’s Lai-own captain.
“I regret to inform you,” said Fau-tan, “that Captain Safista of the Legion of Diligence tells me that Striver has been requisitioned by the government for emergency duty. The Legion is now in command of the ship, and we all, passengers and crew, are obliged to follow their instructions.”
Sula stared at Giove and Vijana while calculations spun through her head. Hide, an inner voice urged, find a place in the hold and stay there until . . . until what? There was no hiding place on Striver. Another voice told her to head for her cabin, find the pistol she’d secured there, and shoot the first member of the Legion she met.
“I’m sorry to have to say that our current course puts us in some danger from rebellious elements within this region of the empire,” Fau-tan continued. “Accordingly, we will be increasing our deceleration and will return to Zarafan as soon as we can safely do so. We will be going to two gravities’ deceleration starting at 25:01 and will continue at two gravities until 07:01 tomorrow, when we will take a break of a few hours in order to enjoy the first meal of the day. Please take steps to secure your families and yourselves in your beds before increased gravities begin.
“I apologize on behalf of your crew, and the On-dau Company, for this interruption in your schedule. Rest assured that these steps are all taken for your safety, and that the Legion of Diligence assures me that you will be able to resume your journey as soon as the current emergency is over.”
“Current emergency,” Sula repeated, her mind spinning. She’d seen nothing in the news broadcasts. She needed more information.
“My cabin,” she told the others, and rose from the meal she’d barely tasted.
Nothing concerning any emergency was mentioned on any news broadcasts. Giove, Vijana, Spence, and Macnamara were soon crowding the cabin, all needing to know what had just happened.
“I don’t think they’re going to arrest us,” Sula said. “They’d do that first, before they made any announcements. They don’t know who we are, and we shouldn’t give them any reason to suspect us. Whatever they’re doing, it’s got to be in reaction to something happening outside the ship.”
“Fleet Commander Chen!” Giove said, waving a hand. “She must have taken the Fourth Fleet! That’s why they’re turning us away from Harzapid!”
“If that’s the case,” Sula said, “she moved very early, for word to travel all the way to Zanshaa and orders to Safista to come back.”
“We don’t know what pressures she was under,” Vijana said. “Circumstances may have compelled her.”
Spence threw out her hands. “None of that matters. What do we do?”
“Exactly what we planned,” Sula said. “We’re going to have to move during the periods of normal gravity.”
Vijana shook his head. “I disagree,” he said. “Under high acceleration the Legion’s going to be confined to quarters, in their beds. That’s when we kill them.”
Sula was considering this when there was a knock on the cabin door. Sula called to ask who it was, halfway convinced it was time to reach for the pistol she’d hidden in her bags, but then she heard Lady Alana’s voice, and opened the door. Lady Alana shouldered her way into the small cabin, tall on her heels, chagrin radiating from her face. “They’ve taken my sidearm,” she said. “Came to my door, polite as you please, and asked me for it. They gave it to the purser, and they tell me it will be returned to me when we reach our destination.”
“Well,” said Sula. “How very civilized.”
Vijana’s eyes darkened. “Civilization’s not for us any longer,” he said. “We’ll have to be the barbarians now.”
Corona never received another message from Zanshaa, but it was able to eavesdrop on news broadcasts, which denounced the Home Fleet Terrans with a completeness that told Martinez that the mutineers had got clean away. Two days later came the news of Foote’s destruction of seventeen ships, followed by official outrage and vows of vengeance. At the same time came the news that Lord Saïd had stepped aside—“temporarily”—as Lord Senior in order to recover the health he had lost in years of service to the empire. The Convocation duly elected Lady Gruum as Acting Lady Senior.
Lord Saïd, it seemed, still had too much prestige to be removed from office altogether. Martinez hoped that the new government wouldn’t kill him and then announce he’d died of age and illness. Still, they seemed to have given themselves that option.
Lady Gruum saw no need for deceit when it came to Lord Ivan Snow, head of the Investigative Service. The Inspector General, along with several of his aides, had been arrested and executed, for “conspiracy on behalf of the Terran criminals.”
Lord Chen hadn’t been mentioned in any news reports, nor had Vipsania’s husband, Oda Yoshitoshi. If they’d been arrested, it had been done very quietly. Whatever had happened, Chen hadn’t managed to send a message to Martinez or to his daughter, Terza.
One appointment gave Martinez wry amusement: Lady Tu-hon had been appointed to the Ministry of Right and Dominion, the department that provided civilian support to the Fleet. She was now in charge of the military, and of prosecuting the Terran criminals with warships and antimatter bombs—though if she had her way with tax policy, he wondered how exactly she intended to pay for the war she’d had such a hand in starting.
Perhaps Lord Minno would know. Lady Gruum’s banker, the Cree who participated in pump-and-dump schemes, had been appointed Minister of Finance. It was breathtaking to consider the sort of mischief he could do now that he was in charge of the government’s money.
Martinez wondered what he’d started with that bet he’d talked Minno into accepting.
The news seemed to have less censorship than usual, possibly as a result of disorganization in the new government, and the news was encouraging. The Terran squadrons in the Second Fleet at Magaria had also made a getaway, but they wouldn’t be turning up in Harzapid anytime soon. The direct route passed through Zanshaa, where the rebel squadrons would be destroyed by the Home Fleet. The alternative was a lengthy chain of wormholes, mostly in barren systems, that would take over half a year to traverse. Michi Chen couldn’t expect them to arrive anytime soon.
The Terran squadrons of the Third Fleet at Felarus were in a very different situation. They were on the far side of the wormhole map from Harzapid and had no hope of fleeing there unmolested. All routes led through either Zanshaa or Magaria. So Senior Squadron Commander Nguyen, the ranking Terran, simply sealed himself and his crews in their ships and announced that any Third Fleet warship departing the ring station without his permission would be fired on. Even though Nguyen would lose any fight that followed, the Third Fleet would be shattered, very likely along with Felarus’s ring. Nguyen had succeeded in neutralizing a force more than twice the size of his own. For this he had Martinez’s admiration, the more so because the Third Fleet was under the
command of Lord Pa Do-faq, formerly Martinez’s superior. Martinez knew that Do-faq was a first-rate commander, and he was grateful that Nguyen had kept him out of the fight.
The odds were bad enough as it was.
Chapter 20
Taking the ship from the Legion was going to be harder than Sula expected. Guards were placed in Command, in Engine Control, and at the entrance to the hold. Torminel in black uniforms prowled the corridors in pairs. Sula set her crew to finding out when the shifts changed, so that she could prepare her countercoup.
It was Pavel Ikuhara who found out the cause of the Legion’s strike, from Striver’s third lieutenant. “It was Captain Foote,” he said, during one of their meetings, this one in Ming Lin’s cabin. “His squadron attacked two others at Colamote and wiped them out. He’s running toward Harzapid, and the two squadrons we saw at Zarafan are moving to intercept.”
A disgusted note escaped Sula’s throat. “That idiot Jeremy Foote started the war early!” she said. “And those Zarafan squadrons aren’t just chasing him, they’re on our tail. They’re going to overrun us if we’re not careful.”
“Maybe not,” Ikuhara said. “Lord Arrun ordered an alteration of our course, so we’re going to miss the next wormhole transit altogether. We’ll do our whole deceleration in this system before our return to Zarafan.”
“When were we scheduled to transit the wormhole?”
“In nine days or so.”
“Then we have a deadline,” Sula said, and then she shook her head. “But why wait? We have a plan, don’t we?” She took a breath. “Let’s do it tomorrow.”
Sula assigned Vijana to lead Sidney, Rebecca Giove, and Ikuhara to the purser’s office to retrieve some of the party’s firearms. She and Ming Lin would approach those guarding the hold and put them out of the way, with Haz, Macnamara, Spence, and three others as backup once the guards were disposed of. She considered having them all advance on the guards at once, but then decided a mob of Terrans charging out of the elevator, or the stairs, would be more likely to convince the guards to call for help than a pair of nonthreatening Terran females.
Lady Koridun would be in the restaurant in the company of her suitor, who—now that his command of the ship had become routine—had resumed his relentless pursuit of the Koridun fortune. If an alarm was transmitted to Lord Arrun, Koridun would know, and she would try to alert Sula to the problem.
“Are we sure the purser’s office doesn’t have security cameras?” Vijana asked.
“We’ve not been inside,” Sula said, and then, “Oh, hell.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I just remembered there’s a security desk in Command.” Before the Legion had taken the ship, Sula had asked Lady Koridun to petition Striver’s captain for a tour of Command, and he’d been happy to grant the request of a prominent clan head. Sula and Giove had gone along and had kept the captain and officers occupied answering questions while Koridun had taken a series of photographs.
Sula got her comm unit and paged through the photos until she found one of the security desk, an unoccupied console brilliant with video feeds from elsewhere in the ship. “We didn’t pay much attention because the console was unoccupied,” she said, “and the officers seemed to be ignoring it. But you can bet there’s a Legion recruit sitting at that console now.”
“We’ll have to take Command first,” said Vijana. “We can’t hope to do anything else with those cameras looking at us.”
“Right,” said Sula. “We postpone our plan by one day.”
Damn.
In the end she decided to lead the Command storming party herself, and to make the attack toward the end of the midday break and shift change, when Striver was burning at one gee, but ten or fifteen minutes before gravities were scheduled to increase. Anyone not on duty would be getting to their couches for the next period of hard deceleration.
Command was key to the rest, and she had to make sure it was done right. She took eight of her eighteen recruits, including Macnamara and Sidney, the best shots; Ikuhara, who could control the ship once it was taken; and Ming Lin, who had experience in the war as a bomb delivery system. She took only eight because the whole party had only eight firearms.
Command rested between Striver’s crew and passenger sections, more or less in the middle of the habited sections of the ship. On the level above were the passenger entry port, a common room, and the purser’s office. Below were three levels of crew quarters. Leaving the elevator, visitors were presented with a bulkhead, and recessed into it a locked door, a camera, and a speaker. An airtight hatch would drop across the recess to seal the bulkhead in a decompression emergency, but normally the hatch was open.
She didn’t know what to expect when the elevator doors opened, because she hadn’t dared scout Command level since the Legion had taken the ship. The Legion was composed of professional paranoids, and someone sticking her head out to view whether the airtight hatch had been sealed, or whether the door was guarded, might have been considered worthy of an investigation.
So Sula had to prepare for everything. A bomb big enough to blow open the airtight hatch, a bomb necessarily large enough to damage a lot more than the hatch. Enough guns to take care of whatever guards might be standing around. And enough of a civilian appearance to seem innocent, at least to someone who wasn’t a member of the Legion.
The day of Sula’s strike, she waited until the crew and the Legion had changed shifts, then assembled her storming party in the passenger quarters. All were dressed inconspicuously except for Lady Alana Haz, who had decided to wear viridian Fleet undress. She loomed above everyone in her tall heels, which she seemed to view as part of her uniform.
Sula’s eight stepped into the elevator, and a tsunami of adrenaline jolted Sula the second the elevator doors closed. It took a fierce act of will to simply stand there, and not leap or bounce or shriek. She shuddered as a sudden chill swept her body. She could feel gooseflesh prickling her skin, and her teeth wanted to chatter. She reached for the pistol in her pocket and gripped it in a fist of iron.
The doors opened, and Sula found herself looking at a Torminel guard at a range of perhaps three paces. The Torminel was viewing her with polite attention.
“Excuse me,” Sula said, and took a single step to the left, unmasking Sidney with a drawn weapon. Sidney shot the guard multiple times with a pistol equipped with a homemade sound suppressor that he’d brought with him in a sample case. The noise was surprisingly loud, and in the elevator deafening, but the sound was so distorted it was not immediately recognizable as a gunshot.
The Torminel collapsed. “Ming,” Sula said, and Ming Lin ran out of the elevator toward the door.
The airtight hatch, thankfully, was open. No hidden guard opened fire from ambush. Ming Lin slapped a container of Spence’s pain relief gel on the Command door, secured it with tape, and readied the preinstalled detonator. The rest of the party took positions on either side of the recessed door, hands over their ears, and Ming Lin triggered the detonator mechanism, stepped out of the recess, and flattened herself against the wall.
“Three,” she said, “two—”
The explosion came before she could say “one,” homemade detonators not being known for their reliability. There was a second crash as the door, blown off its hinges, smashed into something in Command. Sula drew her gun and ran for the door through the acid reek of explosive. The adrenaline that burned through her veins rejoiced that she was finally in motion.
The Command crew were staring either at the door, which had flown across the room and crushed a video display, or at the empty doorframe. The design of the room was elegant, a white diamond-checked floor with pale green walls and elegantly styled instrument consoles. Sula saw Striver’s Daimong first officer in his white uniform jacket, a Legion recruit sitting at the security station, a Legion officer rising from a chair, and other crew members sitting at their stations. Nobody was reaching for a weapon, and Sula realized they didn’t realize
they were being attacked—they thought the explosion was the result of some kind of horrific malfunction . . .
Sula pointed her pistol at the Legion officer and began to fire. She wasn’t the only one: within two seconds half a dozen pistols began to bark. Crew members froze at their stations or dived for cover.
The two black-clad Torminel sagged dead in their chairs, astonishment fading from their large nocturnal eyes. Sula’s ears rang in the sudden silence. The air stank of propellant and explosive and blood. Adrenaline urged Sula to keep pulling the trigger, but she pointed the pistol at the ceiling and forced herself to calmly survey the room.
“Everyone stand away from your consoles, please,” she said. “I am Caroline the Lady Sula and Striver is now under Fleet command.”
She realized that she wasn’t exactly recognizable in her disguise, and so she drew off the dark wig and threw it on the deck, revealing her pale blond hair cut short. The crew rose to their feet, hands raised. They seemed more interested in her gun than in her hair, and Sula decided she may as well leave the contact lenses in her eyes.
“Whoever’s handling signals, just step to the wall.” She didn’t want anyone sending out a distress call or a message to Lord Arrun. “All hand comms on the floor, and push them toward me. If you have a sleeve display, I want you to take off your jacket.”
She turned toward Ikuhara and saw that Ming Lin and Alana Haz were very sensibly collecting the equipment belts from the dead Torminel, which included their pistols, restraints, stun batons, and comm units. Vijana was dragging the door guard into the room. Sidney loaded his pipe, lit it, and inhaled. Apparently he’d decided that no one had the authority to tell him not to.
“I’m leaving you in charge here,” Sula told Ikuhara. “Close the airtight hatch once we’re gone, and don’t open it unless you hear from one of us.”
The Accidental War Page 34