Double Spiral War Trilogy

by Warren Norwood

  Rasha’kean shook her head. “Millyus? Ah, I remember him. Rowlf Vilhelm Millyus. I’m surprised he stuck with the service.”

  “You remember him, Colonel?”

  “You bet I do. He was the slowest lump of spacemud in my platoon – and he was one of those tangled in their lines “

  “Right you are, Colonel. You got a good memory. He said that if you hadn’t gone bad, I should give you his best wishes.”

  “So,” Rasha’kean said slowly, “that whole snafu on the cliffs was just a test? I still ca’not believe it. Denoro, do you ken that I got called up before my legion commander and thoroughly brain-busted for that little test?”

  “Did you blame it on your troops?”

  “Of course not. What do you think I am, some kind of – You already ken that, didn’t you?”

  “Colonel,” Denoro said, “Millyus didn’t tell me that but he did say he respected you, and his respect told me more than a day full of details.”

  “This is a strange feelin’, to ken that you could dig up so much of my past. Do all senior sergeants have that kind of power?”

  “Haven’t you heard, Colonel? The senior sergeants run the Service. Without us the whole damn show would stop.”

  “Well, if I did not believe that before, I do now,” Rasha’kean said. “Maybe we should find us some whiskey and toast the senior sergeants.”

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  “You want me to what?” Sjean asked. What in the path of free electrons was Janette up to?

  “I want you to help find the alien, Xindella, and Ayne Wallen. Why is that so hard to comprehend?”

  “You’re fluxing right it is. After everything that’s happened and what you did to me? That’s the craziest thing I ever heard.”

  Janette felt a touch of pity for this woman but quickly pushed it aside. “Because,” she said slowly, “you don’t want the Ukes to have this weapon any more than Sci-Sec does.” In fact, I d say you don’t want anyone at all to have this weapon.”

  Sjean held her gaze steady on Inspector Janette. How did she know that? Or was she just guessing? Guessing, Sjean decided. No one but her parents and Caugust knew how much she hated the Wallen. “If that were true – and I’m not saying it is – why would I want to help you find it?”

  “Can t you answer that for yourself? Do you want them to have your Ultimate Weapon?”

  “It’s not mine,” Sjean said quickly. “It is a Drautzlab –“

  “You…designed it.” Janette let her anger bite through her words. “You supervised its construction. You’re the one who determined how to put Wallen’s equations into a practical piece of engineering. It is yours, whether you like it or not and because it’s yours, I think you have a certain obligation to see that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands again – no, more than an obligation, a duty, a moral duty.”

  Sjean laughed bitterly. As far as she could tell, there wasn’t much morality left in her world. ..

  “You think what I said was humorous?”

  “Very humorous, Inspector. I used that same moral argument on Caugust once, but –“

  “But what?”

  “Well, Inspector,” Sjean said with a slow shake of her head, “you can’t have me building a new. Wallen here and be out with you looking for the old one and its father at the same time. Which is more important to Sci-Sec?”

  “Neither. I had no intention of taking you anywhere – not yet – but I did hope you would be willing to spend some time giving us everything you know about Ayne Wallen, anything that might give us clues that would help us find him.

  “I’ve told you everything I know. What more do you want?” For a moment Sjean wished she were back in the hospital where the medics had shielded her from Janette.

  “Yes, you’ve told me everything you thought you knew, everything that your conscious mind remembered, but I’m hoping that your subconscious knows more – something that will help us find and capture Ayne Wallen – with the prototype”

  “My subconscious mi- Oh, no,” Sjean said when she realized what Janette meant. “You’re not going to use any of those brain-searching techniques on me. I’ve read about them and how they have driven people insane. You’re crazy if you think for a minute that I would let you-

  “Doctor,” Janette said firmly, “calm yourself. I don’t need your permission to brain-search you, but I want it. The people who suffered mental difficulties afterward were people who had resisted the techniques. That’s why I’m asking you to.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t need my permission?” Sjean felt a growing sense of panic that made her want to run from her office and hide somewhere. Could Janette really-

  “The law says you can be forced to submit to the process for the good of Sondak, but I don’t want to force you, Doctor Birkie. I want you to volunteer your help. If you do, I might get the information I’m looking for, and you will be none the worse for the experience. Can’t you see that this is the best way?”

  Before she answered, Sjean looked up and saw Caugust standing the doorway. “Is it true? Can they really do that to me?” she asked in a quavering voice.

  “I’m afraid it is,” Caugust said. “They’ve already set up their equipment.”

  Janette wanted to slap his mouth for telling Birkie that.

  Sjean was terribly frightened. For a second everything went black. Her mind blinked, once, twice, turning itself on and off, detaching her from what was happening, making her numb. A distracted kind of panic tightened her chest. Then her mind blinked a third time, and she relaxed with a long sigh.

  Nothing to be afraid of. This had happened before. Many times. Many times. The last, when? She couldn’t remember. The first? A bright picture flashed through her mind.

  The party, Uncle Rusty’s party, a special, secret party. Sjean took her clothes off to go swimming. So did he. She squeezed her eyes shut when he took off his pants. It frightened her when Uncle Rusty made her look at him

  The picture darkened. Suddenly they were lying down. She bit her tongue when his body pressed down on her and then

  Her mind blinked rapidly, and she relaxed again. It was all right. Everything would be all right. Uncle Rusty had promised. Every time. Everything would be all right.

  “All right,” a hollow voice whispered. It sounded as if the words were coming from somewhere else, but Sjean knew it was her other voice speaking.

  “Do it as soon as you can,” her other voice said more loudly this time. “I don’t want to think about it. I can’t.”

  Maybe this is best, Sjean thought as Janette took her arm and led her out of the office like a lost child. If I don’t make it, then I don’t have to work on the Wallen anymore. I’ll be free of it, and Janette and Caugust and, and…everything.

  The hallway seemed strange to her, as though she had never seen it before yet the empty office they took her to looked vaguely familiar. It was; it was Ayne’s old office. But they had done something to it. There was something different – a bed where his desk had been, a bed with a stainless steel box over one end of it.

  Sjean was frightened. Her mind blinked again.

  Someone helped her up on the bed and spoke soothingly to her. Janette? No. Yes, but with a new voice. Janette with a new voice. How funny, she thought, as she felt a burning prick in her left shoulder.

  Then another voice spoke to her. It asked her questions she didn’t understand. Her other voice answered those questions, but she couldn’t make out the words. They were both so far away, so very far away, on the far side of a wall. Then both voices faded into dark silence.

  “She’s under,” Janette said to the technician. “You ask the questions. She seems more responsive to your voice.”

  For over an hour the technician asked questions and Dr. Birkie answered them. When Janette finally told him to stop, she had learned very little about Ayne Wallen that she didn’t already know. The only thing of any promise was that several times Wallen had mentioned to Dr. Birkie that he had a powe
rful friend on Nordeen, a woman he referred to as Barra.

  What Thel Janette had learned about Sjean Birkie, however, was enough to make her cry. But she couldn’t allow herself that freedom. Xindella’s auction was fast approaching, and if she didn’t find him soon, the whole galaxy could be at risk.

  14

  “STILL NO SIGNS OF ANY OTHER SHIPS in this system. Are you sure this is the one Delightful Childe told us to check?” Marsha asked for the second time.

  She and Lucky still had not decided exactly what they were going to do if they found Delightful Childe’s cousin and his star-buster. Lucky wanted to drop it into the nearest star or blast it into space junk. Marsha didn’t like either of those options, so they had decided to put off their decision until they actually had control of the thing. If they didn’t find it and the festbid went on as scheduled, they had also agreed to do their best to see that no one else got the weapon if the U.C.S. didn’t win the bid.

  “This is the only system within two hundred parsecs that matched to within half a light year on the Oinaise curvecharts and our nav-holos. Since we couldn’t feed their data into Graycloud’s nav-computer, we had to assume that this was what he called Jamiliskey’s Star.”

  “Sounds pretty iffy to me,” Marsha said. “So how long do we stay here based on those shaky assumptions?”

  Lucky checked Graycloud’s bank of coordinated chronometers. “No more than three hundred ship’s hours. If Xindella is here, he’ll have to leave by then to make it to the festbid by the specified time-and so will we.”

  “And what if we don’t find him? What if we’re out here on a stray asteroid hunt? What then?”

  Lucky knew something was bothering her, but he was almost too tired to ask what. He also knew that until she talked about it, he wasn’t going to get much rest.

  “All right, Mars. What’s shorting your circuits now?”

  “Nothing,” she said, concentrating on the little nav-screens. She could feel him looking at her, but she covered her lie by refusing to meet his gaze.

  “Then why am I receiving all these tension signals from you? The three of us are partners in this, remember? Something’s bothering you, and you might as well get it out of your system.

  “Lucky, nothing is bothering – Uh-oh.”

  “See something?”

  “Yes, and I don’t like it.”

  “You want to be more specific?”

  “Look,” she said, pointing to her center screen. “Nav signals. Sondak-type. Eleven, fourteen, maybe fifteen of them entering the system behind us.”

  Lucky moved quickly to her side. “What the tensheiss are that many Sondak ships doing out here in the March Cluster? And why here? There’s nothing in this system worth fighting for.

  “Do you think they could know about Xindella?”

  “Impossible. Delightful Childe only knows because he and Xindella sometimes used Jamiliskey as a transfer point for illicit cargo. How would Sondak know about that?”

  “Don’t ask me,” she said with a worried frown. “Ask them. They’re braking, but they’re still closing on us awfully fast, and we’re smack between them and the sun.”

  Lucky shifted his gaze to the larger nav-screens, and suddenly he understood. “Ukes! They’re looking for Ukes. That‘s the only thing that makes any sense. Time to go,” he said, throwing himself into the nav-chair. “Get us out of here, Mars. We’ll head for Oina.”

  “And Xindella?” she asked as she opened the throttle on the meth-engines and increased the pressure in the Gouldrive.

  Lucky was calling up course coordinates for Oina on the nav-computer. “Damn Xindella. If he’s here, he’s going to have to get out, too. Either way I sure don’t want to get caught by some damn fleety asking a bunch of snoopy questions – especially if they’re expecting Ukes and looking for a fight.”

  Seven sets of coordinates rolled onto his screen and stopped. “Numbers up,” he said, throwing the input switch.

  “Drive temp fifty-percent,” Marsha responded.

  “Incoming message on a standard Sak channel. Think we should answer it?”

  “We’ll be ready to accelerate in three minutes and they’re still five or six hours out. Sure, answer it. Tell the damn Saks to go take a walk in space.”

  “Maybe I’d better find out what they want first. No reason to get them excited about us. What do you think?”

  “No harm, I guess,” Marsha said reluctantly, ‘‘but unless there’s a good reason not to, Graycloud’s going to be leaving here in short order.”

  Lucky flipped the channel open.

  “-is imperative that you identify yourself immediately to forestall hostile action on our part…Fleet Ship Rualt, calling unknown lightspeed freighter. Identify yourself. Repeat. Identify yourself. It is imperative that you identify yourself immediately to forestall –“

  “A loop,” Lucky said, closing the channel. “I’m going to send them the Oinaise registry information but nothing more.”

  “Two-fifteen to acceleration,” Marsha said. She didn’t care what Lucky sent them.

  “Easy, Mars. We’re all right. Besides, you said they were five hours away.”

  “Doesn’t matter. We’re leaving.”

  “Right,” Lucky said with a shake of his head. Whatever was bothering her hadn’t gone away just because the fleeties had shown up. He switched the registry signal to the Sondak channel and pushed the transmit button. As he looked up at the nav-screens, he realized they had waited too long. “Missiles, Mars,” he said as calmly as he could, “two of them on a true course for us.”

  For the first time in hours Marsha grinned. “Stupid Saks, shooting at an Oinaise trading ship at this range. Don’t those idiots know we’ll be hours gone before those missiles get here?”

  Lucky laughed suddenly.

  “It’s not that funny.”

  “Yes it is. This whole thing is funny. As much as I may have argued with them in the past, I learned that you don’t mess with a Fleet Gunner.”

  “Lucky, what are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you see, Mars?” he said with a delighted grin. “They’re just trying to scare us. There’s probably not a Gunner in the fleet who couldn’t tell you within twenty meters of where his missiles were going to hit and within fifteen seconds of when. They have no intention of hitting us.”

  “I doubt that. They just launched two more. If they didn’t want to hit us, why would they do that? And why would those missiles is accelerating like that?”

  “Spaced if I know,” Lucky said. His grin was gone as he leaned forward in the nav-chair. ‘“They’re sure coming faster than anything I’ve ever seen. Like I said before, Mars, it’s time to get out of here. I’m ready when you are.”

  “Meth’s on full power. Thirty seconds till Gouldrive.”

  “Inertial dampers on. Course set. Take us away, Mars.” There was a prolonged silence in the cabin as they watched the Gouldrive build to maximum thrust pressure. When Marsha said, “Go!” and started Graycloud acceleration, they both sighed in relief. Regardless of how far away the missiles were, neither of them liked being shot at.

  Ten minutes after they entered subspace, Marsha turned to Lucky with tears in her eyes. “You want to know what’s bothering me? Well, I’ll tell you. I’m bothering me. Lucky, I –“ the tears overflowed and rolled freely down her face – “I’m bothering me. I don’t know who I am anymore.”

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  According to Lieutenant Oska’s letter, Judoff had arranged for one hundred fifty thousand freetrading credits to take to this weapon auction she was so determined to attend. Frye shook his head. He would have bet the soles of his feet that most of that amount was government money, not hers.

  But worse than that, the date Oska gave for the auction was only one U. C. Standard day before the attack fleets departed for the first full-scale attacks against Sondak since the battle for Satterfield.

  This time Frye was determined to keep Judoff from robbing him of
vital ships. If she thought this auction was important enough for her to miss the departure, so much the better. He didn’t need her. But he did need her fleet.

  “AOCO,” he said, calling Melliman on his lapelcom, we’ve got work to do.”

  “Bad news from our friend?” Melliman asked as she entered his office.

  “Depends on how you look at it. Judoff’s auction is the day before fleet departure. What you and I have to do is find a way to make sure she can’t take her ships with her.”

  “What about Vice-Admiral Lotonoto and Meister Hadasaki? Couldn’t they help with this?”

  “Excellent idea, AOCO,” he said. “See if you can locate them, and try to set up a meeting within the next fifteen hours.”

  “Can do, sir,” she answered quickly.

  As she left his office, Frye thought again of how grateful he was that she had returned to serve at his side. If only Marsha had – He quickly cut off that thought, but he couldn’t get rid of Marsha so easily. His whole relationship with her from the days of her childhood had been a history of if onlys. She was a daughter without the strength and courage of her mother and he was a father who had failed his daughters in more ways than he cared to think about.

  Daughters. Plural. Two daughters, one happily off with her lightspeed trader, the other threatening him from somewhere beyond his knowledge and control, and both of them as much of a disappointment to him as he was to them. He might one day live up to Tuuneo’s estimation of him by becoming the best military commander in U.C.S. history, but he would never be able to live up to the expectations of his daughters. For the first time in his life he wondered which was more important – not to him, personally, he knew the answer to that – in the final summing up of his life. Which would count for more in the hereafter, what he did for the U.C.S. or what he did for his daughters? He knew the answer to that question, as well, and it sent a cold chill to the center of his bones.