Renegade

by Joel Shepherd

  Dale nodded. “They’re already helping in Assembly, they look good.” Dale could have said something about Erik’s last bit of flying, the Tek-to-thi intercept and escape in Argitori that was now legend among the marines, and among some of the spacers. But he wouldn’t, because it wasn’t a marine lieutenant’s place to comment on a commander’s flying any more than it was Erik’s place to offer opinions on ground combat ops. The turf would be respected, or the natural order of things would fall apart. But he didn’t need to say anything — Erik could see in his eyes what had changed. “Hey people!” Dale bellowed up the line. “The Major and the LC are in the queue! Someone get them their chow!” And in a quieter voice, “What are you having?”

  Outside Trace’s quarters they found Shahaim and Kaspowitz already waiting, not about to enter without Trace’s permission. Trace entered first, startling Lisbeth who was sleeping in the lower bunk. “Oh, are you having a meeting?” Blinking in the sudden light. “I’m sorry, I’ll go elsewhere, just give me a minute…”

  “No you stay,” said Erik. “Big family interests moving into Heuron, you know more about what the family’s up to these days than me.”

  Lisbeth blinked in confusion, searching bleary-eyed for her jacket, wearing only a light, Phoenix-issue undershirt. “We’re going to Heuron?”

  Erik handed her the jacket from beneath the bed netting, and sat beside her. “Yes we are. Do you know why?”

  Lisbeth pulled on pants, while Kaspowitz chivalrously looked elsewhere. Trace crawled into the far end of Lisbeth’s bunk and put her back to the wall, opening a stir fry container on her lap. “Well, I mean it’s a Fleet hub,” said Lisbeth, frowning. Trace offered her a sip of juice, which she accepted. “I mean we’ve had it for nearly thirty years, it’s far enough back from tavalai space to be safe but close enough to mount attacks from. And it’s close to sard space, and pretty close to alo too… and I just happen to know we’ve got a shitload of investment going on there. Shipworks and repair yards especially, perfect place for it with so much of Fleet there all the time. But we can’t go there, I mean, we’ll be spotted and…” And her eyes widened as she realised. “Oh no we won’t! Phoenix jumps so much faster than anyone else! They won’t know what happened yet!”

  “We’re still two real-time weeks away,” Kaspowitz confirmed, taking one of the wall seats while Shahaim took the other. “The fastest ship at Homeworld was Dragonfly, and even if they somehow got telepathic and guessed where we were going, they’d be two and a half weeks out, tops.”

  “Plus we’ve just demonstrated what happens when you try and string seven or eight jumps together back to back,” Shahaim added. “Things break.”

  “Right,” said Erik, cracking his own container, curried meat and veg. Chef had even slipped him a fresh papadam. He broke it and gave half to Trace. “But not too far off course are Carany, Nowa Polska and Chekov to name just three. Any of those could have had shanti-class carriers, or jupiter-class cruisers, any of which aren’t that much slower than us. And we’ve been delayed and off-course ourselves. Worst case scenario, if one of them got contacted by someone from Homeworld, then went straight to Heuron, how much gap would we have?”

  “I ran it,” Kaspowitz confirmed. “Worst case, two days.”

  “Well that’s not enough,” said Shahaim in alarm. “We go there pretending everything’s okay and not alarming everyone, we have to coast in from middle-beacon. That’s a two day run in that system. If we’re going to pull anything when we’re there, that’ll take a day or two at least, surely?”

  Erik nodded. “We’ll have to chance it. Hope they’re not that fast, hope there isn’t a ship sent to Heuron immediately. I mean they’d have to get lucky. Running a shanti-class halfway across human space without proper orders would take some balls.”

  “What are you planning to do in Heuron?” Lisbeth asked warily. Everyone looked at Erik. All with trepidation, save for Trace, who ate impassively, and sipped the juice Lisbeth held for her.

  “Well I’m pretty sure Supreme Commander Chankow is there,” said Erik, as offhandedly as he could manage. “Could ask him a few questions.”

  “You think he’ll tell you?” Lisbeth asked.

  “Depends how I ask him,” said Erik.

  Shahaim looked pale. Even Kaspowitz swallowed. “Oh fuck,” said Shahaim. “You want to kidnap Supreme Commander Chankow.”

  “Kidnap might be a bit strong,” said Erik. “Strongarm, threaten and blackmail are all on the cards.”

  “Erik, we don’t know if he even did anything!” Shahaim protested further. “He’s been on Heuron or at least well away from Homeworld! What happened to us was a rush job, a spur of the moment thing, probably cooked up by Fleet Admiral Anjo, and it all went wrong. The Supreme Commander probably had nothing to do with it!”

  “He might not have given Anjo direct instructions,” Erik said firmly. “But he’d have established a general understanding. No one, not even Fleet Admiral Anjo, has the greatest warship captain of the war assassinated unless he’s absolutely certain that his ultimate commander will back him.” He glanced at Trace. “What do you think? Is it doable?”

  “Sure,” said Trace around a mouthful. “But, few problems. First, Phoenix isn’t supposed to be anywhere near Heuron, we’re supposed to be at Homeworld. Got some explaining to do when we get there. Second, the Captain’s not supposed to be dead. We can’t just dress someone up as him cause they’re not that dumb and we’re not that lucky. Got some explaining to do for that as well… and for Commander Huang, who should logically be in command if the Captain’s not.” Erik grimaced. “Why fly Phoenix across human space without its Captain or Commander? Why’s the LC in charge, why are we damaged, etc? What the hell happened to us that could explain all that?

  “Fourth, we can’t let crew have liberty on station dock. They deserve it, but… no offence guys, but we can’t trust all the spacer crew. They’ll rat to someone and then we’re screwed. Got to jam internal coms too, standard secrecy provisions… not hard to do, but more explaining. Fifth, how do we get you,” looking at Erik, “to see the Supreme Commander? Or even close? And how do we pull off an escape? Because in actual fact, Erik, I don’t think it should be you at all. You’re Phoenix commander now, acting-captain really, and we don’t have another person aboard who can do that as well as you.”

  With a half-apologetic look at Shahaim. She didn’t protest.

  “Well then good luck getting close to Chankow without me,” Erik told her. “Because if our Captain and Commander are somehow missing, then the Lieutenant Commander is certainly answerable for that, and that’ll be the only context in which anyone from this ship will see the Supreme Commander outside of an interrogation in the brig.”

  “Well then we should snatch him at home,” said Trace. “Or some other way, because if we get the information we’re after, we’re going to have to go running across human space once more to spread the word, and that’s going to take the best starship jockey we’ve got.”

  “Trace, the security in Hoffen Station is ridiculous,” Erik insisted. “You’re not starting another firefight in the middle of a high security zone, I won’t allow it.”

  “And since when was it your job to tell me how to conduct combat operations?” Trace stared at him. Lisbeth leaned quietly back against the wall between them, to take herself out of the line of fire.

  “When did you become so damn eager to kill senior Fleet commanders?” Erik replied.

  “When they betrayed all the men and women who’d served under them,” Trace said coldly. “When they made it so that all the guys I’ve lost, that we’ve all lost, died for some fucking stinking lie.”

  Silence from the others. Erik held her gaze completely. “They didn’t die for a lie,” he told her. “They died to secure humanity’s place in the Spiral. They did that. They didn’t die for Fleet Admiral Anjo, or Supreme Commander Chankow. We make our own causes, Trace. And so does High Command, unfortunately.”

  Th
is time it was Trace who looked away first. Back down to her food, to continue eating. “There are still tavalai at Heuron,” she said. “Speaking of people who might help us.”

  “You know,” Shahaim said edgily, “I’m not sure I went through all that war against the tavalai just so I could join them now.”

  “Me neither,” said Erik. “But if that’s what it takes.”

  “And… then, what do we do with this information?” Lisbeth asked. “Say you find there’s some kind of conspiracy. I mean, clearly there is some kind of conspiracy, right? Who do you tell?”

  “Everyone,” said Trace. “We’re not in this alone. We’re one ship for now, but once people learn what’s happened, I mean if we get proof? We might even be the majority.”

  Erik nodded. “It’s not our problem, Lis. It’s Fleet HQ’s, when they decided to murder the Captain.”

  “I’m not talking about whose responsibility it is,” Lisbeth said anxiously. “I mean this isn’t really about fairness, is it? You all agreed to go and risk your lives in a war while most of us sat safely at home and applauded from a distance. No one military is in the fairness business. You’re in the protection business. What if you find information that would start a civil war if it got out?”

  Silence for a moment.

  Trace swallowed her food, and washed it down with some juice. “I don’t know what kind of civil war it would be. Worlders versus Spacers. Pretty hard to win a war from the bottom of a gravity well, against people at the top of one.”

  “Not everyone in space is a Spacer,” said Lisbeth. “Debogande Inc employs thousands of them. Well, millions, actually. Half of all Spacer manpower has Worlder origins, if not actual citizenship.”

  “She’s right,” Erik conceded. “You’re one yourself, Trace. And I would be one, if my family didn’t have Spacer citizenship for life.”

  “Fleet don’t count,” said Trace, unconvinced. “Most of Fleet aren’t political beyond the war. About half of my marines are Worlders like me, but the whole Spacer/Worlder thing just doesn’t interest them.”

  “You think it might start interesting them?” Lisbeth replied. “If it was revealed that Fleet’s leaders are plotting to crush any attempts at Worlder political activism? Like, I don’t know, say if the Worlders were recruiting Captain Pantillo to their cause? Imagine a Spacer as popular as him, known to Spacers everywhere, elected to Spacer Congress? What if he was given senior leadership… and quite likely he would have been. He could have made an argument for increased Worlder Congress powers that could have brought lots of Spacer Congress with him.”

  Erik gazed at her, reconsidering the notion that maybe he was the Debogande most suited to politics. “Lis, did you talk about this much with Mother or Father?” She looked suddenly evasive. “What did they say?”

  “Well you know Mother. She doesn’t like to talk politics at home. Dad’s the talker, but he says that’s only because he doesn’t know anything.”

  “Still more than most people,” said Erik. “What did he say?”

  Lisbeth sighed. “He said there was talk in Congress that the Family were employing too many Worlders. Spacer Congress of course. And taking lots of Worlder investment. Which he said is nuts, it’s only about… oh, twenty-seven percent of total investment? Worlders put their money in Worlder things, mostly. But sure, we’ve been recruiting heavily with Worlders because they’re ninety percent of the human population and that’s where the talent is. And we pay well for good talent, and it’s a way to get a leg up on those companies that won’t do it…” She shrugged. “It’s good business, that’s all.”

  “I hear lots of stories about how Worlders don’t adjust to Spacer life,” Shahaim added. “High attrition rate, you spend thousands training them but they don’t last more than a few years. Go back home to sunlight and beaches.”

  “Well yes it’s a problem,” Lisbeth agreed. “But we’ve been working on this fancy psych-program to predict those who won’t make the transition. And Cora’s been helping set up a model for new internships, we’re taking lots of graduates in their mid-study break, find them work for six months, see who likes it and who doesn’t.”

  “I wonder if anyone’s done any studies on where those peoples’ loyalties lie after five or ten years,” Erik murmured. Toying with his food. “I mean during the war, anyone living in space is patriotic for Spacer Congress and Fleet because they know tavalai or sard could hit them anytime. And so much of the economy is Fleet-based, so all their jobs kind of depend on it. But now there’s peace… I wonder how the Spacer Congress support base would hold up if Spacer industries kept employing Worlders? Who more and more kept their old loyalties?”

  “Exactly,” Lisbeth agreed. “What if they’ve looked at those trends and reckoned that in twenty or thirty years, Spacer Congress won’t have the numbers to keep Worlder Congress from an equal, democratic say? Parity between Congresses?”

  “Over Fleet’s dead body,” Kaspowitz muttered. “That’s what they said in the Academy the whole time I was there. Humanity’s killer demographics — we let Worlders take control, we wipe ourselves out.”

  Erik’s uplink blinked, and he held a finger to his ear — the universal signal to let others know he was uplinked. “This is the LC?”

  “Sir… we’ve got an issue down in ceta-b. You’d better come and see.”

  “What is it?”

  “Our chah'nas prisoner sir. He’s dead.”

  * * *

  Erik stood in the doorway of the chah'nas’s quarters, arms folded, and stared in disbelief at the mess. The prisoner was on the floor beside the bunk, arms sprawled. There wasn’t a lot left of his head, and both the bunk and the wall behind were splattered with blood and brain.

  Erik turned and looked at Sergeant Ong, Echo’s Third Squad leader, who’d been stuck with this duty. “Sergeant. How the fuck?”

  Ong looked unhappy. “I’m sorry sir, we…”

  “You think I want a fucking apology? How does an apology help me?” Ong looked more unhappy. Trace leaned on the outside of the doorway, offering her Sergeant no assistance. “How? The fuck?”

  “The tavalai sir. Chis. Said he needed a walk.”

  “He’s been shot in the leg.”

  “Crutches sir. It’s not too bad, the Corpsman let him go with Private Cowell as escort. He must have learned we had a chah'nas aboard, he… he caught Private Cowell unawares outside this room. Got his gun, hit the door, shot the prisoner. He’s strong sir. Probably military training, not just a scientist.”

  “Sergeant, you’ve been fighting tavalai for what? Twelve years?” He glanced at Trace.

  “Thirteen,” she said.

  “You know they’re strong. You know most of their civvies in hostile territory have at least basic military training, some of them advanced. You also know they’ll lie about it when asked. None of this occurred to you?”

  “No excuses sir,” said Ong. “Private Cowell was not properly warned to take suitable precautions, it’s my fault. I take full responsibility.”

  “You’re damn right,” said Erik. “And maybe my fault too for forgetting that Phoenix marines are great at killing stuff and shit at guarding it. Go, get. The Major will deal with you later.”

  He left. Erik gave Trace a brief glance in case he’d overdone it. Her unconcern told him he hadn’t. She peered in the doorway. “Aggressive little linguist, isn’t he?”

  Erik swore, strode to the neighbouring quarters and opened the door. There seated on the bunk was Chis, wounded leg out before him. A marine stood opposite, rifled pointed at the tavalai’s chest.

  “Why?” Erik demanded of the tavalai.

  Chis blinked at him, slow and remorseless. “Why do you think?”

  Erik pointed at the room next door. “He didn’t do anything to you. He’s from a ship called the Tek-to-thi. We captured him in a completely separate operation in Argitori System. Nothing to do with what happened to you and your friends here.”

  “If you say so,
” said Chis. “Will I be punished?”

  “Do you care?”

  “Not especially,” the tavalai said coldly.

  22

  Heuron was an M-class star, sedate and golden yellow. To humans it was remarkable, because it reminded them of the home they’d lost a thousand years before. A similar sized sun, four rocky inner planets, then some big gas giants in the middle orbits. For Fleet, the giants were where the action was, big lunar systems with lots of mining and settlements.

  But fifteen thousand years before, the fourth and last of the rocky inner worlds had been settled by the tavalai. It was pretty and green, but tavalai were picky, and found the atmosphere too thin, and the gravity too low. Many tavalai born on Apilai, as they called it, migrated to more exciting worlds in the tavalai heartland, and Apilai’s population never rose above a hundred million. Having won the system from the tavalai in battle thirty-two years earlier, humans had already doubled that, identifying the system as strategic, and moving huge transports with infrastructure spending and incentives for settlers. Humans found Apilai nearly perfect, and the Colonial Administration, which answered to both Spacer and Worlder Congresses, happily reported that in another twenty years with reproduction incentives and birthing tanks, Apilai population would hit the full half-billion.

  Fleet were not entirely thrilled, because large Worlder populations forced Fleet to play a more defensive role, and increased Worlder political clout in that strategic system. But evacuating a hundred million tavalai who did not want to leave was not an option either, and nor was allowing those tavalai to remain the majority population on Apilai. Further, Heuron was such a strategic system that Fleet were going to be here in large numbers anyway, in which case the big Apilai population did not force any particular strategic realignment. And limited though Spacer-Worlder financial transactions were, a big Worlder economy in Heuron did add clout to system finances, and depth to local industry and talent production.