“Soltexon’s, I’m going to say,” Maggs told him. “Though don’t quote me.”
Lanoe resisted the urge to punch Maggs in the mouth. If he asked a question it meant he wanted a real answer. Though he knew this one might be more complicated than it sounded.
The polys were always at war with each other, over trade disputes or lawsuits or simply because one of them wanted to steal a random asteroid that happened to belong to a rival. Owning a dozen planets was never enough, of course, for the Boards of Directors that ran the big companies, and the only way they had to expand was to seize each other’s territory. Earth kept the balance of power by selective deployment of Naval assets. If one poly started getting too big, the Sector Wardens would send a carrier group or maybe just a battleship and a platoon of marines to bolster up that poly’s enemies.
As the wars never ended, that meant that the Navy could fight for DaoLink this year and Soltexon the next and be back to supporting DaoLink in an advisory capacity the year after that.
Lanoe had little use for the system. He had resigned his own commission rather than fight for the polys in their endless struggle over some scrap of sky no one actually wanted. He had very little faith in pilots who fought in such cavalier actions. The poly wars tended to be quick skirmish affairs, small conflicts played for small stakes. None of these new pilots understood anything about campaigning, or about sacrifice.
“Send me their service records,” he told Maggs. “Give me a reason to keep them on my ship.”
“Of course,” Maggs replied.
My ship, Lanoe thought. It looked like he’d already accepted command of this secret mission.
The two of them kicked their way out of the bay and into the cramped corridors beyond. Going was slow, as they had to constantly duck out of the way of the provisioning crews. Technicians in thinsuits were busy loading shells for the 75s, the big guns that stuck out from the Hoplite’s sides like the ridges of vertebrae, while workers in heavy environment suits brought onboard long fuel cartridges to feed the engines. Lanoe did a quick inventory in his head, just based on what he saw. It seemed to him they were going to have enough consumables to be out in the field for at least a year, if it came to that.
Admiral Varma had made this sound like a diplomatic mission. That she was sure it wasn’t a trap, or an ambush. Like any good warrior, though, she was preparing for the worst—the amount of stores being brought onboard made it look like the Hoplite was girding itself for a war.
Maggs led him to an elevator car that took them straight to the bridge—a comparatively large space right at the nose of the Hoplite, as far from the engines as you could get, in case anything blew up down there. Like the bridge of any space-going craft it was designed to be used in all kinds of gravity. Right now three thinsuited crew members were inside, one of them upside down from Lanoe’s perspective. They moved between workstations, bringing up countless display windows that cycled through diagnostic readouts and then flickered out as quickly as they’d manifested.
Maggs cleared his throat and the three of them came to attention, grabbing stanchions on the walls so they could face their new commander. The one who’d been upside down did a flip so she could face him directly. In space, where there was technically no such thing as “up” and “down,” the Navy had come up with a rule of thumb—whichever way your commanding officer’s head was pointed, that was the right way up.
“Relax,” Lanoe told them. “Which of you is the pilot?” he asked.
A youngish-looking woman nodded and pushed off the wall, coming forward. “Lieutenant Harbin, sir,” she said. “Looking forward to working with you.”
Lanoe looked past her, at a navigational display. It showed the map of wormspace that had been attached to the mysterious message—though looking at it even momentarily, he could tell that some of the informational tags had been stripped out. Interesting. Admiral Varma had given her people some of the new map but not all of it. Clearly her own people weren’t above suspicion.
“Looks kind of funny, doesn’t it, sir?” Harbin asked. She didn’t meet Lanoe’s eye as he glanced over at her—probably nervous about meeting her new CO. Well, he knew that feeling, having gone through several dozen commanding officers in his time.
“Funny?” he asked. He needed to get the measure of this Harbin—of everyone onboard, before he could trust them. Maybe not even then.
“It’s … well, that map is a lot more detailed than the one I’m used to.”
Lanoe nodded and moved over to the pilot’s position, grasping the back of the chair. “Mind if I have a look at the controls?” he asked. Before she could answer—protocol required her to say yes anyway—he activated her workstation and checked out the flight controls. They were all arranged properly, as far as he could tell. Everything according to Navy regulations. “Looks like you have it in hand,” he told her. “I’ve never flown anything bigger than a Peltast-class destroyer, myself.”
“The principles are the same,” she told him. “We just make wider turns.”
Lanoe nodded. He could work the helm himself if he needed to.
“We can be under way as soon as the loading is complete,” Harbin told him. “Though we’re still waiting on navigational orders.”
Lanoe had some thoughts on that. Varma would have told these people nothing about their destination. It was up to him to set the course. Well, a little detour wouldn’t hurt. He checked a wrist display and uploaded a set of coordinates.
Harbin watched as one of her displays updated. “Tuonela,” she said. “Yes, sir. Travel time will be approximately nineteen hours.”
He nodded. “Good. All right, ping me when we’re ready to move.” He nodded at the other two crew members—the copilot and the information officer—and headed back toward the elevator.
“What do you know about Harbin?” he asked, once the doors had shut.
Maggs rolled his shoulders. A kind of languid shrug. “She’s seen combat. At the battle of Tlaloc, in fact, and you know how hard fought that one was.”
Lanoe shook his head. “Tlaloc was after my time, but I’ll take your word for it. So she knows how to fly. That’s good.” He reached for the controls of the elevator. “One more stop, and then I think I’m done with you,” he said.
“Then by all means, let’s away,” Maggs replied.
Lanoe punched in a command to take them to the brig.
By the time they reached the level of the brig, the Hoplite’s provisioning was nearly complete, according to Maggs’s wrist display.
“You don’t like Harbin. You didn’t care for my description of the pilots onboard,” he said. “You can, of course, change out any of the crew you like,” he said. “If you can find enough campaigners who are as old as you are, then—by all means. Fleet Admiral Varma picked all these people for you herself, though. I imagine they’ll do.”
“How many marines onboard?” Lanoe asked, not even looking at Maggs.
“A complement of twenty. Sadly, not all of them are veterans—some are raw recruits, straight out of Ceres—but you know how it is. The triple-headed eagle tends to run through our ground-fighting friends at an appalling rate.” Most marines were drawn from the underclass of Earth society—the wretchedly poor, the undereducated, those mentally unfit for living in civilization. They tended to last no more than a few weeks once they reached actual combat.
“What about crew? How many people does it take to run a Hoplite?”
“Another fifteen,” Maggs told him. “The ship’s systems are largely automated, of course. Mostly the crew comprises gunners and engineering technicians. I have all their service records, if you’re interested.”
“I am. Send them to my address.”
Maggs tapped a few virtual keys on his wrist display. “Fueling’s done,” he said. “Supplies, consumables, all the little luxuries of shipboard life already onboard. Just the last of the ammunition to load, then. You must be quite excited! A whole new command just for you.”
You’ve got to admit, Maggsy, he has his reasons not to like you, his father’s voice said inside his head.
Maggs wrote it off to the traditional lack of accountability in taste, and so on.
“The prisoners,” Lanoe said. “The people you pulled off of Rishi when you came to collect me. Take me to them. Now.”
“Right this way,” Maggs said, and led Lanoe down a short corridor to the brig. Four marines with silvered helmets were stationed there, weapons at port arms.
Lanoe looked them over for a moment. “We’re shipping out very soon,” he told them. “Go and see to your bunks, make sure everything’s secured for gravity.”
It was impossible to tell if the marines glanced at each other to see if he was serious. He was giving them an order to abandon their post, despite the fact that there were prisoners onboard that needed to be guarded. Still, Lanoe was in charge. They did as they were told.
Lanoe went to the door of the sole occupied cell and brought up the display that showed its contents. The four prisoners were in there talking to each other, the Hellion quite animatedly. It might be impossible to pace in the absence of gravity, but the boy was making a go of it, kicking off one wall, then another.
“What’s going to happen to them?” Lanoe asked.
“The three humans, you mean? It’s rather a bother,” Maggs told him. “They know too much to just be set free, so they’ll have to be detained. I’m to take them to a holding facility on the moon.”
“For how long?”
“Until whatever secrets they were privy to are no longer secret,” Maggs said. He watched them through the display. On the journey from Rishi he’d read all their service records, learned a little about them. He felt distinctly sorry for them—though not so much he would actually try to help them. “Of course, they could just volunteer to have their memories cleaned. I doubt any of them will go for that option.”
Lanoe put a hand against the door of the cell. Selective memory erasure was an imprecise procedure. Depending on how carefully it was done, they might walk away just not being able to remember a few days of incarceration—or they could end up unable to remember their own names, or even how to feed themselves. Nobody would take that risk if they didn’t have to. “So they could be locked up for years,” he said. He shook his head and turned to face Maggs again. “I was told I could pick my own crew for this mission.”
“Of course.”
“Then I want the three of them.”
“Really? Very compassionate of you, I suppose. A waste of bunks, though. I suppose Candless, at least, has a decent service record. Though you know what they say about flight instructors.” Maggs lowered his voice and tilted his head forward. “Afraid to fight.”
Lanoe snorted. It almost sounded like a laugh. “Not her.”
“And then, the other two—they’re just cadets. They’ll be underfoot the whole time.”
“I choose my own crew,” Lanoe said. Then he hit the virtual key that opened the door. As it slid open, Maggs was buffeted by the noise of shouted questions coming from inside. The Hellion came swarming toward the door as if he might attack, but Candless grabbed his leg and pulled him back.
“Lanoe?” she asked. “Lanoe—are you all right? We didn’t know—”
“Sure,” Lanoe told her. “Come on out of there. I’ve worked out the conditions of your release. It’s … complicated. I’ll explain once we’re under way. Bury, Ginger—you two just got a brevet promotion.”
“What?” the redheaded girl asked. Maggs had always thought she looked like a dough-brained fool, but she seemed especially gormless just then. “What does that mean?”
“Call it early graduation.” Lanoe tapped some keys on his wrist display. “You’re now both officially ensigns, under my command. And my protection.”
Lanoe gave Maggs a distinct look just then. Maggs made a point of not noticing.
“Come on, we’re getting ready for a burn,” Lanoe told the three of them. “Go find somewhere out of the way and stay there until I have a chance to talk to you,” he said.
Bury, the Hellion, seemed intent on demanding more information then and there, but Candless merely grabbed his arm and pulled him along like the unruly student he was. They all disappeared into the elevator. Which just left one prisoner to account for.
Tannis Valk was curled into a ball at the far end of the cell, one foot anchored under a bench to keep him from floating away. He—it—looked up as Maggs and Lanoe stepped inside.
“Hey, Lanoe,” the machine said. “Is it time?”
It was Maggs whom Lanoe addressed, however. “What’s the plan for Valk?” he asked.
Maggs had been privy to the scans that had been run on Valk after he was brought onboard. He knew exactly what Valk really was. It made him shudder to think that they had once fought side by side.
“My orders,” he said, glancing down at the black polarized helmet, “are to bring this thing in to be properly disposed of.”
“You’re going to erase him,” Lanoe said.
“Well, yes. Of course. That’s the law.”
There were no viewports anywhere in the brig. No windows through which one could look down and see the scarred face of dear old planet Earth. Not as if anyone could forget what the Universal Suffrage had done down there.
The law was unyielding as iron. No drone, no computer, no machine would ever again be allowed to be smarter than a common house cat. Nor would they be allowed to use a weapon of any kind.
Valk, the thing that called itself Tannis Valk, broke every one of the Synthetic Instrumentality prohibitions. It would therefore be destroyed as soon and as thoroughly as possible. There wasn’t much to discuss there. No legal loopholes, no wiggle room whatsoever.
Lanoe pulled himself along the floor of the cell to bring himself down to the level of the AI. “I’m sorry about this, big guy,” he said.
“It’s what I want. You know that,” Valk told him.
“Sure.” Lanoe pressed a recessed key set under Valk’s collar ring. The AI’s helmet melted and flowed away, revealing nothing underneath. No face. No head. The empty suit didn’t exactly collapse, not in microgravity, but it definitely sagged. Lanoe picked it up, folded it over his arm, and kicked out of the cell.
“I’ll take that,” Maggs told him. He’d been given very specific orders not to let anyone else handle the suit. Just in case.
“I don’t think so,” Lanoe told him.
“I’m afraid I must insist.”
Yet Lanoe still didn’t hand over the suit.
He’s up to something, Maggs heard his father say. Watch him, Maggsy.
“Commander,” Maggs said, putting a little steel in his voice.
“I have a policy, Maggs. One I’ve always tried to hold to, no matter how much it annoyed me.”
Maggs couldn’t help himself. “Wash once a month, whether you need it or not?”
He expected an outburst. Maybe even violence. Instead, Lanoe gave him a rather nasty smile.
“I keep my friends close,” Lanoe said. “And I keep my enemies where I can see their hands.”
Then he grabbed Maggs and swung him around, tossing him into the detaining cell. Maggs tried to kick back out of the room but before he could, the door slammed shut in his face. He pounded on it, shouting Lanoe’s name, over and over.
Even though he knew it wouldn’t do any good.
A few minutes later he started to feel heavy and he sank to the floor. “No,” he said, aloud. “No! You can’t do this! I’m an officer! I am the son of an admiral!”
He knew what the sudden onset of gravity meant. It meant the Hoplite was moving. Heading off on its secret mission. With him locked up in its belly.
Chapter Twelve
Go, go! Come on! Let’s go!” Sergeant Ehta shouted, waving her arm over the edge of the trench. Her marines clambered over the top, not nearly as fast as sh
e would like—they never did. Thiess-Gruppe shells were falling all around their position, turning the night sky a dull and vicious red. Overhead, the last of the poly’s air support was held back by a wing of Navy carrier scouts, which was the only reason her unit was still alive, but over the lip of the trench she could see the sparkling reports of particle rifles as TG ground troops swept through the ruins of the city.
She grabbed a broken piece of rebar and hauled herself up, shouting at her people to keep moving, to keep shooting. Not two meters away from her a lucky particle shot cut through Forster’s silver helmet, lighting it up from the inside. She blinked away the dazzling light, only to see the dead man’s skull burning, an afterimage seared into her retinas. She squinted hard and peered through the darkness to see her men and women leaping over anti-armor barriers and diving into cover in the shell of an old house. She tried to give them suppressing fire with her heavy recoilless rifle, each of her rounds throwing dirt and debris high into the air to screen the advance. As usual, she had no idea if it worked or not.
She jumped down into the flooded basement of the shattered house and looked for her people. Mestlez and Binah were down there already, crouching behind a pile of unrecognizable debris. Anselm tumbled down after her, nearly landing on top of her. She slapped him on the back and he crawled away, holding his rifle high to keep it out of the water.
An artillery shell hit the ground right outside their refuge, and a flurry of broken fibercrete and shattered glass pelted down on top of them. White, wet powder stuck to their suits and made them look like things dug up out of a grave.
She counted heads. Three of her people were missing, not including Forster. She knew where that Poor Bloody Marine was, dead on his face twenty meters back. She pinged cryptabs and saw that the missing were Rudoff, Banks, and Hutchens. She worked her wrist display, trying to get a fix on their locations. Rudoff and Banks showed up right away. No vital signs and their suits weren’t moving at all. Both of them still back in the trench. They must have died before they could even get over the top. Hutchens didn’t show up anywhere, which either meant his equipment had a fault—and it would hardly be the first time—or he’d been obliterated by a direct hit from a shell, so utterly removed from existence that his transponders didn’t even register.
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