“Likewise,” William said. He didn’t recognize her accent, although he was fairly sure that she’d spent years on Tyre. “Although it’s just William, now. I’m retired.”
“I read your file,” the woman said. She held out a hand. “Tanya Barrington, Asher Dales.”
William studied her for a long moment as he shook her hand. She had a strong grip; indeed, she was stronger than she looked. He wondered, absently, what she made of him. He’d always been short and stubby, despite endless rejuvenation treatments; his hair, slowly starting to turn gray, was grim proof that he hadn’t been born on Tyre. And the long coat he wore over a basic shipsuit was proof he was hurting for money. He was too stubborn to look up some of his old friends for a loan.
And she looked at my file, William thought. That meant . . . what? A government? Or a corporation? Or merely someone with access to an information broker? It wouldn’t be hard to get a copy of his naval record, if someone had the money. Who is this woman?
Tanya reached into her pocket and produced a privacy generator. “I assume you don’t mind me using this . . . ?”
“Not at all,” William said. He hadn’t planned to record the conversation. “But we can go into a private room, if you wish.”
“That might be preferable,” Tanya said. “But we’re still going to have to use the generator.”
William nodded, signaling the bartender to make the arrangements. Tanya was young, then—young and a little naive. He found himself looking at her with new eyes as the bartender escorted them to a private meeting room. It was hard to be sure with people who’d had the standard genetic enhancements and suchlike, but he’d bet half his pension that Tanya wasn’t long out of her teens. She walked like a professional, which probably meant she had some qualifications, yet little actual experience. In hindsight, perhaps she hadn’t realized what a spacers’ bar was like before making arrangements to meet in one.
“Here we are,” he said, once the door was closed. The meeting room was very basic, but at least it was clean. He’d been in worse places. “What can I do for you?”
“To cut a long story short, we’d like to hire you,” Tanya said. “You come highly recommended.”
William narrowed his eyes. “Really?”
“Yes,” Tanya said. She reddened, slightly. “Perhaps I should explain.”
She took a breath, then began. “I was born on Asher Dales, a star system on the other side of the Gap,” she said. “It was a very simple world, really; my father, a spacer captain, only used it as a homeport because my mother had fallen in love with it. Anyway, as you can probably imagine, I was five when the Theocracy arrived. Asher Dales had nothing more than a handful of outdated orbital defense platforms, so the battle began and ended very quickly.”
“Ouch,” William said.
“My father managed to sneak a bunch of refugees off the planet, including myself,” Tanya continued. “We ran through the Gap and, eventually, made it to Tyre. There was”—she made a face—“some sort of deal between my father and ONI, which allowed my mother and me to gain permanent residency in exchange for service. I went into the local school system and, eventually, went into law.”
“And then your planet was liberated,” William said.
“Yes,” Tanya agreed. “My father played a major role in the liberation, landing with enough troops to prevent the Theocrats from tearing the world apart before it was too late. He was rewarded by being elected president.”
“I’m glad the story has a happy ending,” William said, sincerely. The cynic in him thought that the refugees would discover that their homeworld was nothing like the idealized one they remembered. “But what does this have to do with me?”
“We want . . . we need . . . to build a space defense force,” Tanya said. “And we need someone to command it.”
William lifted his eyebrows. “And you don’t have someone who can do it for you?”
Tanya shook her head. “No,” she said. “A handful of refugees did go into the navy, but the ones I contacted were unwilling to return home. Most of them have permanent residency rights on Tyre and aren’t willing to give them up. The others . . . don’t have the sort of experience we require. Our database search, when we widened it, turned up you.”
“I see,” William said. He was tempted. No, he was very tempted. He could have stayed on a command deck if he’d stayed in the navy. Leaving had been a mistake. And now there was a chance to start again. “What exactly do you want?”
Tanya looked back at him evenly. “In the short term, you will have considerable power to purchase starships, hire crews, and build a dedicated force,” she said. “In the long term, we will expect you to train crewmen from Asher Dales to serve on the ships.”
William nodded, slowly. “How much have you done already?”
“Nothing beyond arranging a handful of meetings with shipyard owners,” Tanya said. She held out a datapad. “We do have all the licenses we need.”
“I hope so,” William said. He’d dealt with a handful of shipyard owners. The decent ones tended to be anal about paperwork, while the crooked ones expected massive bribes in exchange for keeping their mouths shut. He scanned the datapad and nodded. “Have you applied to the Commonwealth for a grant?”
“Yes,” Tanya said. “But we’ve been advised, purely off the record, that the odds of getting a grant are very low.”
“I see,” William said. He scanned the datapad, again. The licenses were indeed all in order, as were the credit notes from two different banks. For a planet that had only recently been liberated, Asher Dales had put together a quite impressive sum. “Well, we’ll have to discuss terms, of course . . .”
Tanya smiled. He smiled back. She knew he was hooked. The chance to build a small fighting force from scratch, even if it was tiny compared to the fleets that had waged titanic war for the last four years, was not one he could miss. And who knew? Given time, Asher Dales might grow into an economic powerhouse, one that could afford a bigger fleet . . . and he’d be in at the ground floor.
And I’ll be in space again, he told himself. That alone would make it worthwhile.
“I can sell you this heavy cruiser,” the dealer said, two days later. “She’s outdated, but . . .”
William glanced at the datapad, then shook his head. “Not a chance,” he said. He’d served on one of those starships, years ago. They weren’t bad designs, but they were high maintenance. “We need to focus on destroyers and corvettes.”
Tanya caught William’s arm as the dealer turned away. “I thought the bigger, the better.”
“Size isn’t everything,” William muttered back. “And that ship is really too large for our purpose. We won’t have the maintenance facilities to keep her going.”
He’d done a little research during the brief period between signing contracts and taking a shuttle to the scrapyard. Asher Dales didn’t have any space-based maintenance facilities. Anything larger than a light cruiser would be in real trouble if she suffered a catastrophic systems failure. And there was no guarantee of getting help from the Commonwealth either. William disliked politics intensely, but he’d studied it enough to be sure that the Commonwealth would not be accepting new members anytime soon.
And besides, we need numbers, not firepower, he thought. Our foes are not going to be flying in battleships and superdreadnoughts, but destroyers and frigates.
“I have four destroyers here,” the dealer said, reluctantly. “But they’re quite old.”
“They look suitable,” William said. They weren’t modern ships—the navy wouldn’t be selling modern ships outside the Commonwealth—but they were suitable. Besides, they were also relatively easy to keep running. He’d seen similar ships survive and prosper despite the best efforts of their pirate crews. “We will, of course, have to go over them in cynical detail.”
“Sir!” The dealer sounded offended. “They have CAB certificates.”
“So they do,” William agreed, lightly. He took th
e proffered datapad without looking at it. “But we have to go over them anyway.”
“I’ll arrange a shuttle,” the dealer said. “Is there anything else you need?”
“Weapons and a sizable number of spare parts,” William said. “And at least one bulk freighter, armed.”
The dealer’s face fell. “Sir, they’ve been tightening up laws on armed freighters,” he said slowly. “The government doesn’t want . . .”
“Then a freighter with weapons mounts,” William said. That wasn’t good news. Despite the navy’s best efforts, far too many freighters traveled without escort . . . and too many of them never came home. Piracy had been on the upswing even before the end of the war. Too many escort ships had had to be reassigned to the battle line. “Someone isn’t thinking clearly.”
“No, sir,” the dealer said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
William grinned at Tanya. “I’ll have to check out the ships,” he said as the dealer hurried off. “Do you want to come with me or stay here?”
“I’ll come,” Tanya said. “It might be interesting.”
The dealer returned. “This way,” he called. “The shuttle’s at the docks.”
William took his chair and scanned the datapad as the shuttle undocked. The dealer had been telling the truth, unsurprisingly. All four destroyers had been checked before they’d been placed in long-term storage. William was mildly surprised they hadn’t been broken down for recycling or simply sold for scrap; they were intact ships. They were worth more intact, if they could find a buyer. Besides, the navy had probably considered purchasing them for live-fire targets.
Tanya nudged his arm. “Did you manage to recruit crew?”
“A handful,” William said. He’d reached out to a couple of old friends specifically, but the others had been contacted through recruitment agencies. “I’ll have to interview them over the next few days.”
He frowned as the shuttle docked with the first destroyer. That wasn’t going to be easy, at least until he had a few trustworthy assistants to help with the hiring. He knew what to look for in naval crew, that wouldn’t be a problem, but engineering and support staff were going to be a headache. Anyone who hadn’t been snapped up by one of the bigger corporations was likely to have serious problems. An alcoholic, perhaps. William had no interest in hiring someone who might be more dangerous to his friends than his enemies.
The gravity shimmered slightly as the hatch opened. William felt his frown deepen. A mismatched gravity field or a sign of something far worse? He’d have to find out before they authorized the purchase . . .
“Let’s go,” he said. “Come on.”
The dealer remained in the shuttle, to William’s private relief, as they entered and inspected the destroyer. She was a small thing, only five decks; her energy weapons and missile tubes were active but outdated. William checked the computers, looking for obvious problems, then worked his way through the engineering section. Everything appeared to be outdated, but serviceable. There didn’t seem to be any reason to reject the destroyer out of hand, but he’d have to make sure the life support, drives, and shields were checked and rechecked before money changed hands. Too much could go wrong too quickly for him to be willing to take chances with vital systems.
“It seems serviceable,” he said finally, triggering the privacy generator. The dealer could easily use the destroyer’s datanet to spy on his customers. “We will have to get a complete inspection team out here, but otherwise it looks good.”
“And you have to check out the others,” Tanya said ruefully. “I should have stayed behind, shouldn’t I?”
William shrugged. “You need to know what you’re buying,” he said. “And you could easily get conned if you didn’t know what to look for.”
“I’ll leave it in your capable hands,” Tanya said. “If the four destroyers and the freighter are what you think we need, we’ll buy them.”
“As you wish,” William said. “We’ll also need to purchase a vast number of spare parts. A shortage at the worst possible time could doom us.”
“I understand,” Tanya said. Her lips thinned. “We do have to hurry, though. Have you seen the news reports?”
“Yeah,” William sighed. He’d seen the reports and heard the rumors. “The navy could be withdrawn from Theocratic Space.”
“And then Asher Dales will be unprotected,” Tanya said. Her voice was very quiet, as if she didn’t fully trust the privacy generator. “We need to get the ships in place before it’s too late.”
“We will,” William assured her. “We’ll make sure of it.”
He took one last look around the destroyer as they made their way to the airlock. The dealer might be a sleazebag, but he knew his ships. It wouldn’t take long to get the destroyer ready for space, once money had changed hands and she had a crew. They could reach Asher Dales in three weeks, if they pushed the drives hard . . .
“We might even be able to start sharing information with other worlds,” he added thoughtfully. “The more pirates we can kill, the better.”
“More will come,” Tanya said.
William shook his head. “Pirates are basically cowards,” he said. “They don’t want to risk their ships and crew when it can be avoided. You just have to take out a few of them to make the others look elsewhere.”
And if someone had made it clear to the Theocracy that they couldn’t win the war, he added privately, the entire war might never have been fought.
CHAPTER FOUR
* * *
AHURA MAZDA
Kat had seen devastation before. She’d watched, helplessly, as enemy starships bombarded entire planets; she’d stared in horror as Hebrides had been turned into a radioactive wasteland. And yet, the crater in the ground where Government House had been was somehow worse. The hopes and dreams of an entire planet had died with Admiral Junayd.
She looked at General Winters, trying to keep her feelings under control. “There was a forcefield.”
Winters looked grim. “The blast went off inside the forcefield,” he said. “The post-battle assessment teams are already looking at the evidence, but it seems to me as though the forcefield actually trapped the blast and made matters worse.”
“Fuck,” Kat said. She could smell death on the air. “How did they even get a bomb past the security sensors?”
“I don’t know,” Winters said. “But I can guess.”
Kat could guess too. Treason. Admiral Junayd had insisted on building up his own security forces as quickly as possible, pointing out that they’d work better with the local population than the Commonwealth Marines. Kat had reluctantly backed him, knowing that there would come a time, sooner rather than later, when the Commonwealth would have to hand the planet over to the provisional government. But all it took was a single traitor in a position of power to set the effort back years. It wouldn’t even have to be a high-ranking traitor. A lone man in command of the sensors could let a bomb into the compound with minimal effort.
And he probably died in the blast, Kat thought. Did he even know what he was smuggling in?
She gritted her teeth as the wind blew stronger. The recruits had been tested—repeatedly—under lie detectors, and none of them had been working for the insurgents . . . not directly. But they hadn’t been angels either. Admiral Junayd had been willing to accept a certain level of moral flexibility in exchange for loyalty. The troops hadn’t committed atrocities on a regular basis, thankfully, but they’d had no qualms about smuggling or shaking prisoners down for funds. One of the smugglers had probably thought he was slipping drugs into Government House. This time, he’d been wrong.
Her heart clenched, just for a second. She’d never liked Admiral Junayd, and she hadn’t wanted to trust him, but she’d come to believe that he meant well . . . that he had meant well for his people. There had been a certain amount of personal enrichment in there too. ONI had kept careful track of how Admiral Junayd had been rigging the provisional government to support his pri
macy, but by and large, he’d done a decent job. And he hadn’t joined the factions that blamed the Commonwealth for the chaos.
He would be missed.
She allowed her eyes to sweep the blast zone as the recovery crews went to work, pulling out bodies and stacking them like cordwood by the side of the road. Marines followed, their eyes sweeping the streets for signs of trouble. The entire area had gone into lockdown, with the civilian population warned to stay inside and off the streets, but Kat was grimly aware that they could still be attacked at any moment. Captain Akbar Rosslyn, the commander of her close-protection detail, had made that very clear to her. If there was anyone on the planet more hated than Admiral Junayd, it was Kat. The insurgents would spend their men like water if there was a chance of killing her.
Perhaps we should use me as bait, Kat thought morbidly.
She snorted at the thought, then turned her attention to the bodies. There were fewer than she’d expected, unsurprisingly. The blast would have destroyed the forcefield generator, of course, but there would have been a microsecond delay between the generator’s destruction and the forcefield actually failing. Winters had been right. The blast would have been trapped, with nowhere to go. It was a minor miracle that so many bodies had survived intact. Admiral Junayd’s corpse might never be recovered.
Winters checked his datapad. “Intelligence states that no less than seventeen groups have already claimed responsibility for the blast,” he said. “So far, no actual confirmation.”
Kat wasn’t surprised. “Perhaps they’ll go to war over it,” she said. The insurgent factions hated each other almost as much as they hated the occupiers. She sometimes thought that the only thing keeping them from actually winning was that they spent half their time trying to take out their rivals instead of the common foe. “Do we have any solid leads?”
“Not yet,” Winters said. “Perhaps not ever.”
Kat nodded, sourly. In one sense, it simply didn’t matter. The damage had been done. Government House was gone, the heart of the provisional government had been wiped out . . . and the occupiers had been made to look like weak fools, unable even to protect their collaborators. She didn’t have to wonder how many others would start to edge away from the provisional government. She knew. Everyone would be reassessing their position, and some . . . some would start developing ties to the insurgents. It was hard to blame them too. They could hardly be expected to commit suicide for a government that couldn’t even protect them.
Debt of Honor (The Embers of War) Page 4