After that, he didn’t know what was going to happen. They had some really serious decisions to make and right now they didn’t even know who was going to be making them. No one was really in charge of the fleet anymore.
“Just about time to go, Mr. Crawford.” He looked up to see Ensign Frichette standing by the hatch.
He nodded and stood up. A meeting had been called and it was being held on Starsong, the ship that was to have been the headquarters of this entire expedition. There had been a high concentration of nobles and other VIPs on that ship, and Citrone had slaughtered nearly all of them. Only the enlisted crew had been spared. Crawford wasn’t happy about going to this ship of the dead, but it had the best conference room in the fleet and it was centrally located in the cluster.
The conference room on Starsong was enormous. There was a main table, which could seat about thirty, and then there were rows of raised seats overlooking the table, which could handle at least a hundred more. Visual displays of various sizes and capabilities were scattered around so that everyone would get a clear view. In Crawford’s experience, rooms like this were mostly to gratify the egos of the people running the meetings. It was extremely rare for any real work to get done in one of them. Still, until a permanent base could be constructed, Starsong was going to be the center of government—assuming they could create one—for an entire star system. Perhaps it wasn’t all ego—beyond the hubris that sent out the whole expedition in the first place, of course.
As the head of gate construction he had a place at the main table. To Crawford’s left was Jinsup Sowell, head of manufacturing. Jin would be setting up the orbital factories which would supply those items needed for the rest of the operation—over and beyond what had been brought with the fleet. Crawford had worked with Jin before and respected his abilities. Beyond him was Lu Karrigan, in charge of mining. He and his asteroid prospectors would supply the raw materials to Jin’s factories. Next along the table was Tosh Briggs. This man would be in charge of constructing the orbital habitats used by the factory workers and terraformers. Crawford knew nothing about Briggs except he was here because of his political connections rather than any construction experience. He was some pet of Lord Allendale, the future governor of Landfall. Well, no matter, Crawford’s team would be working out in deep space a long, long way from the planet that was to be terraformed. None of his people would be living in whatever Briggs managed to build, so it was no concern to him.
He looked to his right and saw that he was sitting next to the head of the terraforming project. Regina Nassau would have attracted attention under almost any circumstances; she was tall, statuesque, and her blonde hair, so pale as to be almost white, was cut very short except for a long braid coming asymmetrically out of the left side of her scalp. Her face was pretty—from certain angles. From other angles it was…odd, he could not decide why. She wore colorful and very non-standard clothing as well as some amazing illuminated rings and necklaces. The whole effect was striking, but strange. Well, terraformers were notoriously eccentric—even more so than engineers. Even if her appearance had been more conventional, Nassau’s presence would have still attracted attention: she was the only department head who was a woman.
She saw him looking at her and turned and smiled. “Well, Mr. Crawford, I understand you went off and had an adventure on your own. That was hardly fair to the rest of us, y’know.”
“I’d gladly let someone else have that sort of adventure,” he said. He raised his cast-encased left arm slightly for emphasis. “And I would have been far happier if it had not ended so badly.”
Her smile vanished. “Yes, what a terrible tragedy. Life is so precious that to snuff it out so…so casually is scarcely imaginable.”
“Unfortunately,” he said carefully, “someone was able to imagine it—and do it.” She frowned and nodded.
Most of the other seats at the table were filled by the twenty surviving captains of the transport ships. Crawford had looked over their records beforehand in hopes of finding someone with the authority to take charge, but he’d been forced to admit that none of them fit the bill. Apparently, Carlina Citrone had made her murderous visits to the ships in the order of the importance of the people commanding them. The navy ships first and then the transport ships. The twenty captains still alive were all commoners with few, or no, connections to the nobility or anyone of importance. Captain Dumphries of Neshaminy been the last and least of the nobility.
Except for Petre Frichette, of course.
Crawford still wasn’t sure what to make of the young man. He might only have been an ensign, but socially he outranked everyone else in the room. He could be useful in establishing some sort of order out of the barely-restrained chaos that was threatening to engulf the fleet. But would the others accept someone so young and inexperienced in a role like that? Would Frichette even want it if it was offered?
“I think we’re ready to start,” whispered Frichette from the chair beyond Nassau.
Crawford hesitated. “So who should run this, do you think?” He asked it quietly, but most everyone heard him and turned to look his way. No one spoke.
“Well, you have seniority, sir,” said Frichette after a moment.
“Seniority? How do you figure that, Ensign?”
“You’ve been awake the longest of anyone here, sir.” The boy tried to restrain a grin, but he failed, gave in to it, and then smiled broadly. Crawford snorted and several other people laughed.
“It’s as good a way as any to decide,” said Lu Karrigan.
“Well, I don’t know,” said Tosh Briggs. “My patron is Lord Allandale, himself and…”
“And he’s four thousand light years away, Tosh,” said Regina Nassau. “We’re talking about the here and now and Mr. Crawford is more familiar with the situation than anyone else.”
Briggs scowled at her but didn’t argue.
“In any case,” continued Karrigan, “Chuck is in charge of building the gate. That’s what this whole thing is about when you come down to it. All the rest of us are just here to support that. You run the meeting, Chuck.”
“Well, as long as it’s just the meeting,” grumbled Briggs. There were no further objections, so Crawford took a deep breath and swiveled his chair so he could face as many people as possible.
“Okay, then. You all know what’s happened. We’ve been handed one hell of a mess and we have to decide how to deal with it.”
“I still can’t understand how this could have happened,” said Briggs interrupting immediately. “I mean who was in charge of security? How did this Citrone woman get into the expedition? Why wasn’t anyone watching out for something like this? Someone back home is going to have to answer for this disaster!”
“Yeah, but who?” said one of the ship captains. “Half the leaders of Andera have their fingers in this project!”
“Well, she was on a navy ship,” said another. “It’s the navy’s problem, I say!”
Several others voiced their opinions and suddenly it became quite loud in the large room. Crawford let it go for a few seconds and then stood up and called for quiet. “Gentlemen,” he nodded toward Regina, “and ladies, those are certainly important questions, but I submit that they are questions which can wait until later. Right now we have to decide what we are going to do next and how.”
“Absolutely right,” said Jinsup Sowell. “There will be plenty of time later to place blame—and I’m sure there will be plenty to go around. But Charles is right: our main task is to figure out what we do now.”
“Well, what can we do?” asked Briggs. “The expedition is wrecked! You can’t expect us to try and carry on with no naval escort and all the nobles dead!” Every face turned toward Briggs and the man seemed to shrink in on himself. “How can we?” he squeaked.
“Are you seriously suggesting we abandon our mission?” asked Crawford in amazement.
“I don’t see how we can do anything else! Let’s turn around and go home!” Crawford winced
and all the ship officers were shaking their heads and muttering. Hadn’t Briggs read any of the briefing materials?
“I’m afraid that’s not possible, Mr. Briggs,” said one of the captains. Crawford thought it was Captain Jervis of the Gillingham.
“Why not?”
“Simple physics, sir. We used forty-five perent of our reaction mass accelerating to our present velocity. We’ll use another forty-five percent canceling out that vector. With the ten percent we’d have left, it would take us over ninety years to get home. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to spend that much time in cold-sleep.”
Briggs turned pale. “No, no, of course not. But couldn’t we stop and get more reaction mass?”
“We’d have to drop out of hyper to do that anyway. Might as well drop out where we planned and build our gate and get home in two years instead of ten.”
“Can we do that?”
“Yes we can,” said Crawford forcefully. “Our gate construction team and all the supporting crews are fully intact. We can still build the gate on schedule and link up with the one on the other side of the Rift.” He paused and looked around. “The question is: will we be allowed to?”
“What do you mean, sir? Allowed by who?”
“By whoever was behind the sabotage. Citrone’s attack was carefully planned and not some random terrorism. There is more to this than we know, I’m sure. She didn’t simply kill everyone. In fact, she only killed those people whose cold-sleep capsules could not have the timers reset. She was resetting those that she could to a time about five months from now. What do you suppose is going to happen five months from now?”
Silence met his question. Everyone was frowning and thinking; no one liked the obvious conclusions.
“She’s expecting something to happen in the next five months,” said Petre Frichette. “She’s expecting help.”
“Help? From where?” demanded Briggs.
“There are two possibilities,” said Crawford. “One is that she has allies among the fleet personnel. There could be additional saboteurs here—however, I don’t think that’s too likely,” he added quickly, seeing the looks of dismay on the faces of the people around him.
“Why not?”
“Well, it seems to me, she would have revived them first thing to help her out. As far as we can tell, she did all of her murderous work alone. If she had allies, why not get them awake and helping her? And even if there were additional traitors, I don’t see how that fits in with the five-month revival delay.”
“What’s the other possibility?” asked Lu Karrigan.
“She’s expecting help to arrive from across the Rift.”
Some of the people nodded, they’d already figured that out. As he’d expected, Tosh Briggs wasn’t one of them.
“Across the Rift? But… but…”
“We made it across. Others have, too. There’s no reason someone else could not send ships across.”
“To do what?”
“Hijack our gate would be my guess.”
“Hijack? How?”
“Well, if even a small force of warships—with a lot of soldiers aboard—were here waiting for us when we all woke up, and all our leaders were dead and they had guns pointed at our heads, they could force us to build the gate—for them. Then they hook it into a gate they’ve built at their end and they have a route across the Rift at a bargain price.”
“My God… But who…?”
“Good question and I have no answer to that. And it’s all speculation anyway, I could be completely wrong. Maybe there isn’t anyone coming. Maybe this was just a plot to wreck the project. Maybe Citrone was planning to kill all of us in the end and was just resetting the timers on some to give her more time to wreck all the cold-sleep capsules. We just don’t know.”
“Well then maybe we should find out, Mr. Crawford,” said another of the captains. “Has the traitor been questioned yet?”
“No, my doctor says she is still pretty weak and in no shape to…”
“The traitorous bitch doesn’t deserve any consideration, sir!” snarled another officer. “Not after what she did! My son was a rating on Indomitable and she murdered him! Question her now—and don’t be gentle!”
Crawford rocked back in the face of such anger. He hadn’t thought of that aspect to the situation. Of course there would be survivors with close ties to some of the dead. Maybe they needed a few more guards on Citrone…
“Well, I don’t know, the doctor says that…”
“Chuck, how can we make any sensible decisions unless we know what’s really threatening us?” asked Lu Karrigan. More voices rose up in agreement. Crawford looked around nervously.
“If she dies under interrogation, we won’t learn anything…”
“If you won’t do it, then I will!” shouted the angry father. Others volunteered their help. This was getting out of hand…
“All right! All right! We’ll question her!” he exclaimed. “Let’s adjourn the meeting for now. I’ll go talk to her and then we can meet again.”
“If you need any help ‘persuading’ her, let me know,” said someone.
“That won’t be necessary, thank you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go talk to Miss Citrone.”
* * * * *
The sound of angry voices woke Carlina. She had been drifting in and out of sleep for…how long? She didn’t know. It seemed like days, but she wasn’t sure. She could vaguely remember her last fight. She had been blazing away with a laser pistol in each hand and then, suddenly, she was flying through the air; there had been a heavy impact and then blackness. Since then, there were only a confusing jumble of her brushes with consciousness. People hovering over her, images of what was obviously a sick bay, medical equipment too close for comfort… And clinging like a shadow, the knowledge that she was a prisoner. She had not planned on being taken alive, but they had taken her down so quickly that she’d been unable to arrange a glorious—or even an inglorious—death. Part of her was relieved. This was never supposed to be a suicide mission, and she had not wanted to die. If things had worked, she would have been found by the relief squadron safe and sound. If it didn’t work, well, it hadn’t and now the enemy had her.
The voices were getting closer and angrier. It was hard to concentrate, but she forced herself to pay attention.
“Charles, I can’t allow this!” snapped a woman’s voice. It sounded strangely familiar. “My patient is in no condition to be questioned—and I will not release her!”
“I’m sorry, Giselle,” said a male voice. “I don’t have any choice. If I don’t talk to her, there’s going to be a lynch mob coming in here—and they won’t have any mercy at all.”
There was another outburst from the woman and then the argument moved into the room where Carlina was laying. The woman, the doctor, looked vaguely familiar, and she immediately recognized the man: Charles Crawford. She should have expected it.
“All right!” snapped the woman. “I can’t stop you from doing whatever you are going to do, but I insist being allowed to monitor her condition.”
“Fine, Giselle, I want you to stay. Now, what sort of shape is she in and do you have anything you can give her to make this any easier?”
Carlina tensed. He was going to question her. She'd had some training in resisting interrogation, but what if they used torture? She started moving her arms and legs to see if she could fight them, but they felt like lead. Heavy and clumsy, like they didn’t even belong to her. The slight effort left her sweating and gasping. Damn, what was wrong with her?
“She’s lightly sedated,” said the doctor. “I don’t really have anything here that’s like an interrogation drug, but I do have stronger sedatives. Those might make her babble. But Charles, I don’t want risk anything too strong.”
“All right, let me just talk to her for a bit and see how cooperative she’s going to be.” Crawford came toward the bed and pulled up a chair. He was a broad, stocky man, obviously from some high-gravi
ty world. A thick neck supported a large head with a dark mop of hair, starting to thin on top and graying at the temples. His face would have been almost attractive if the situation were different. He was smiling faintly and Carlina noticed the cast on his arm. If only she’d broken his neck instead!
“Well, Miss Citrone, we meet again,” he said. “First time I’ve felt safe being within arm’s reach of you.”
“I wish… I wish I’d killed you when I had the chance.” Her voice came out as a gravelly rasp and she had to clear her throat before she could go on.
“That certainly would have simplified your life, but I’m just as glad that you did not succeed. We need to talk.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
“Really? Well, I suggest you reconsider. Your actions have made a lot of people very angry. I’m willing to forgive a broken arm, but there are people out there with dead sons and daughters, cousins and uncles who aren’t in such a good mood. The only thing keeping you alive is the fact that we need some answers from you. If you don’t provide some, I can’t stop them from coming in here and getting a lot rougher than I intend.”
Carlina hesitated. All the time she was killing those people, she’d forced herself not to think about the fact that they were people; that they had families and friends who would grieve for them. She’d treated them like frozen slabs of meat. It was the only way to stay sane and get the job done. But that little self-deception wasn’t going to work anymore. Still, she had a duty to carry out and Crawford was still the enemy. “If I tell you what you want, then you’ll just kill me anyway.”
“I can’t make any promises about your eventual fate—you’ve murdered nine thousand of our people, after all—but if you cooperate now, I’ll do my best to keep the lynch mob away and see you get a fair hearing.”
“Fair? From the Protector’s thugs?”
“Well, less painful if not fair. Miss Citrone, if you can’t give me something to appease them, then there will be no restraining them at all.” The doctor stirred uneasily, but said nothing. “They’ll come in here and start breaking your bones—one by one. They’re angry, girl! Do you want that to happen?”
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