Clancy grinned at him. “Don’t be like that. We’re on the same team now. Buy you a drink?”
Ulysses studied the captain’s grizzled face, and didn’t detect any subterfuge there. “Sure.”
He followed Clancy to one of the three main elevators and they rode up to officers’ country. They went to the officers’ mess, which was nearly deserted at this hour.
Like most of the ship’s workspaces, the mess was more functional than luxurious. There were a few amenities, though: folding wooden tables and chairs here, rather than the metal-and-plastic ones in the crew’s mess; real china and silver—at least when they weren’t in free fall; and the serve-yourself drink and snack-food areas were generally better stocked. But it wasn’t much.
Clancy walked over to the drink area and bent down to reach a small refrigerator built in under the counter. The door was protected by a coded lock. Ulysses had seen it before and wondered about it. Clancy tapped in the code, opened the door, and took out a tall amber bottle. It was a very expensive brand of ale that Ulysses recognized as coming from the Duke’s private stock. He decided it would be better not to speculate how the captain got his.
Clancy held out the bottle to him.
Ulysses shook his head. “I’ll take some herbal tea. I don’t drink.”
Clancy raised an eyebrow. “Do tell?” He closed the fridge and unscrewed the top on the bottle. He took a swig, and looked over at the hot-water dispenser. “I’ll buy”—he grinned—“but you got to make it.”
Ulysses walked over and punched the button on the hot-water dispenser, put a cup under the spigot, and rummaged through the wooden box where the tea bags were kept.
Clancy watched him. “Don’t drink, huh?”
“Corrupts the body, and the mind.” He glanced at the captain. “No offense.”
“None taken. I’m pretty durned corrupted all right.” He raised the bottle to Ulysses, then took another swig.
Ulysses dropped a tea bag into his cup, and then looked back at Clancy. “What’s this all about, Captain?”
Clancy turned two chairs around to face each other, then sat down in one and put his feet up, legs crossed, in another. “Shop talk, I guess. You and me are pretty much in the same business now. Different ways of doing it is all. Both of us moving the Duke around, trying to keep his hide in one piece.”
Ulysses watched as the cup filled with steaming water. The scents of orange and cinnamon filled his nose. He took the cup and sat down at one of the empty tables near Clancy. “You just called him ‘Duke’.”
“So? He is one, ain’t he?”
“Yeah. But you called him, ‘Duke’.”
Clancy grinned. “You mean, instead of ‘Duck’?”
“Yeah.”
Clancy’s grin got even bigger. He made a show of looking around the empty room. “Well, he ain’t here, is he?”
Ulysses smiled and shook his head. “You should really show him more respect.”
“If I didn’t respect who he was, and what he could do, he wouldn’t still be on this ship.”
“Then why not—?”
“Kowtow to the big man, like the rest of you? Because he’s a giant walking ego who needs somebody to keep him in line. He knows that—part of him, anyway. That’s why he puts up with me.”
Ulysses sipped his tea. He was too discreet to say that Clancy was right.
“So,” said Clancy, “as one fellow in the same business to another, what do you think our chances are?”
“Of keeping the Duke safe?”
“Yeah, I reckon.”
He took a deep breath and considered. Finally he said, “My professional opinion is that the Duke is a dead man. It isn’t a question of if, but of when.”
The captain nodded. “That’s what I figured.”
“You? Same opinion? As a professional, of course.”
The captain held his bottle up to the light, and studied the little drops running through the condensation on the sides. “My brain says that, but my gut says different. Duke Sandoval, he’s harder to kill than a Chichibu cockroach. He won’t go down easy.”
“No,” agreed Ulysses, “he won’t.”
“But this big plan of his, I don’t see it ending pretty. Things are going to get messy.”
Ulysses nodded slowly. “Agreed. It all ends badly.” He took another sip of tea.
Clancy took two big swallows of his ale.
“So,” said Ulysses, “if that’s the way you feel, why are you letting us stay on this ship?”
Clancy shrugged. “Nobody lives forever. My worst nightmare is to die old and in bed—that the day will come when me”—he glanced upward—“and this ship have to part company—by hook, or by crook—or I just can’t handle her no more. Whatever happens with the Duke, I reckon it’s going to be interesting.”
“I’d say so.”
“What about you? Man with your skills, he could find some rich guy who only thinks everybody is out to get him. Get set up real sweet.”
Ulysses grinned. “Well, I do want to live forever…”
Clancy held up the bottle. “Drink some of this; you won’t live forever, but you won’t care.”
Ulysses chuckled. “It’s like you said. It’s going to be interesting. Maybe I’ll come out on the other side, maybe not. If I’m as good as I think I am, I’ll survive. Can you understand that?”
“You ever see a rodeo, Paxton?”
“As a matter of a fact, I have.”
“Cowboy doesn’t prove nothing riding on a broke-down nag. Man wants to ride a bronco breathing fire, with blood in his eye and murder in his heart. Anything else just don’t count.”
“Well. I guess we’ll see who gets bucked off first.”
“We will at that.” He raised his bottle to Ulysses. “Toast.”
Ulysses raised his glass in return.
“To the ride,” said Clancy.
“And,” added Ulysses, “the inevitable fall at the end.”
Clancy laughed as bottle clinked against teacup. “I’ll drink to that.”
Just then the intership link on Clancy’s belt activated. “Bridge to Captain. The Duke wishes to speak with you.”
Clancy held the device to his ear. “Well then, put him through.”
“Clancy, we’ve run out of time. An incoming ship has just reported that Liao is in place on St. Andre. Get ready for immediate takeoff—and I need all the Gs you can muster getting us back to the JumpShip. It may already be too late.”
17
REFUGEES, MILITARY ACTION DISRUPT SHIPPING—Correspondents throughout Prefecture V are reporting disruptions in both passenger and cargo runs as refugees flee the advancing House Liao forces, and JumpShips are appropriated for military use by both sides in the conflict.
Yet JumpShip and DropShip captains aren’t complaining. “If there’s an invasion coming to a planet and you’re the only way out, you can pretty much name your own fare,” says freighter DropShip captain Kristen Witchey. JumpShip captains have also reaped enormous profits. “I’ve been paid to bump other ships for military transports,” reports JumpShip captain Lance Lake. “I’ve been paid to wait at a jump point for a priority vessel. If you’re willing to take risks—hauling into a combat zone, or jumping into pirate points—the rewards are almost unlimited.”
Responding to charges that ship owners are profiteering from the war, Lake just shrugs. “Business is business,” he says. “If you can’t pay, nobody says you have to go.”
—Stellar Associated News Services
St. Michael Station, St. Michael
St. Andre system
Prefecture V, The Republic
17 December 3134
For Erik, it was four days of agony as the liner made its way from the jump point to St. Andre. Along the way, he could do little except read faxed battle reports—all of them bad.
The liner didn’t have the kind of facilities he would have needed to assume proper command of the SwordSworn forces on the planet. He did
have limited ability to confer with Campaign Commander Justin Sortek and offer advice, but even Erik had to question its value, given his limited access to current intelligence.
Liao forces had appeared at the zenith jump point days earlier. Their DropShips immediately began high-G burns toward St. Andre. While SwordSworn forces had landed near the old Star League base on the polar continent of Ravensglade, House Liao had put down on the more populated desert continent of Georama and attacked the capital city of Jerome.
Fearing the attack was only a distraction, Sortek had been afraid to commit significant forces to the fight. The city fell in only two days. Now they were moving their forces to cut off ports of supply to Ravensglade. The freshly landed SwordSworn were short on fuel and food, having counted on the ready availability of local supply.
Erik’s pleas to the liner’s captain to shorten the trip, by increasing the acceleration beyond the standard one G, were ignored. In fact, only repeated insistence by Erik and other passengers kept him headed to the embattled planet at all. The captain was prepared to turn back, and still refused to land on the planet itself.
Instead, the passengers would be unloaded at a station on St. Michael, the planet’s only moon, and left to find their own transportation to the planet’s surface.
For Erik and Clayhatchee, at least, that shouldn’t be a problem. The SwordSworn had a shuttle available, and promised that it would be waiting.
St. Michael Station was little more than an outpost on the moon’s airless surface, with no more than a few thousand permanent inhabitants at the best of times. Now it was a ghost town, with most of the inhabitants having retreated to the greater security of the planet’s surface. The harbormaster at the little spaceport was one of the diehards who simply refused to leave.
He met the arriving passengers at the end of the airlock tunnel. He was a small man, round-faced, bearded, and balding on top. “Welcome to St. Michael,” he said, his hand out. “Ten-C-Bill landing fee from each of you, please.”
Erik looked around the terminal, which was deserted except for half a dozen cats stalking the corners, or napping on the empty waiting-room chairs—probably somebody’s solution to the rodent problems stations like this sometimes suffered. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Not kidding,” said the harbormaster. “Business is slow, and I have to pay my salary somehow. I’d hate to have to lay myself off.”
Erik stepped forward. The floors had strips of a sticky material that made it easier to walk in the reduced gravity. He pulled out his wallet, and produced a five-hundred-C-Bill note—enough to cover everyone. He kept his voice low. “I’m supposed to be meeting a SwordSworn shuttle. Are they here?”
He shook his head. “You’re the only arriving ship today, other than some suborbital hoppers. Helium-3 miners coming in from the boonies for supplies, you know.”
Erik sighed and looked at Clayhatchee.
Clayhatchee shrugged. “I’ll go see if I can get a call through to our headquarters, and find out what’s happening.” He headed off to find a vidphone booth.
“Look,” one of the passengers said, stepping forward. It was the businessman Erik had played poker with only a few days before. “We need to get down to the surface. Are there any shuttles running?”
The harbormaster shook his head. “All the scheduled service to the surface was through the spaceport in Jerome. When the capital fell, the shuttles stopped coming. There’s one on the pad out there that came in last week and needed minor repairs. But there’s no crew to fly it. The flight crew rotated home on another flight, and, obviously, they aren’t sending anybody to pick it up.”
The businessman’s eyes were wide with concern. “So what are we supposed to do?”
The harbormaster shrugged. “You could stay here. Lots of rooms here at fifty Cs per night. Or you could hope that there’s an unscheduled ship through. Or you could get back on that pretty liner of yours and leave. Me, I’d go for the last choice. Not much left here, not much chance of getting to St. Andre anytime soon, and, from what I hear, the ugly is just starting down there.”
The businessman scowled. “That ‘ugly’ is home for a lot of us, sir.”
The harbormaster shrugged. “What do I know? I’m from Tybalt myself. Do what you want to. I just know we’re tracking a bunch of incoming plasma flares that look like Liao reinforcements.”
Erik grimaced at this bit of news. Intelligence already had SwordSworn forces slightly outnumbered.
Clayhatchee returned, leaned in, and whispered to Erik. “Commander, our transport should be here within twenty minutes. They’re sending a landing craft for us. Plenty of room for all these people, if you want to be generous.”
He glanced at Elsa, standing among the assembled passengers in the terminal. She was talking with the would-be merc from the poker table, and he felt a little pang of jealousy. Damn it, why isn’t she back on the liner?
He turned his back to the group and whispered to Clayhatchee. “We’re not running a spaceline, Lieutenant, so I’d like to keep that quiet. Anyway, most of them are going to be from Georama. We’d be taking them into a combat zone, on the wrong side of the lines. Better they sit this one out here, or, better yet, on some other planet.”
“Yes sir.”
One by one, the passengers began to return to the ship, until finally about half of them were gone. The rest were determined to stick it out on St. Michael in hopes of getting home. He noticed the two businesspeople among those who stayed, but at some point, Elsa had disappeared. So had the merc, which ordinarily would have amused Erik. But he remembered the two of them talking, and looking a little too friendly.
Shake it off. You’ve got no claim, no prospects, and, ultimately, no interest. His heart, however, didn’t respond well to logic. At least she’s safe.
The military landing craft arrived as promised. By that time, Erik had bribed a maintenance woman to take them out to meet it in a pressurized buggy. Halfway there, the buggy stopped. The woman driving the little vehicle activated controls extending a manipulator arm, which reached down and grabbed a recessed tie-down lug in the pavement. “Ship taking off,” she explained, pointing at the liner. “Back blast could blow us away like a leaf if we aren’t careful.”
Erik watched, curious. The landing had been more than a shade terrifying, but, with the pitching and odd acceleration, he wasn’t sure how it had been done. The liner was a winged aerodyne—not normally capable of vertical takeoff or landing. Evidently, St. Michael’s low gravity and lack of atmosphere made some unorthodox maneuvering possible.
The ship lifted off on maneuvering thrusters alone, its full power only slightly more than was necessary to get the ship off the apron. Then the nose began to pitch up; as it did, the ship started sliding forward. He tried to imagine the ship doing something like this in reverse, and was just as happy he’d been blissfully unaware of the landing procedure.
As the ship picked up speed, the main drive ignited. True to the maintenance woman’s prediction, the buggy shuddered violently, and actually seemed to slide sideways on its wire-mesh wheels.
The liner shot upward. Even at low throttle, the local gravity could do little to impede the ship’s fusion drive. Erik watched the ship grow smaller against the black sky. “Bye, Elsa,” he said quietly. “It’s been interesting.”
The continent of Ravensglade was located entirely above St. Andre’s arctic circle. It was relentlessly flat, frozen for six months of the year, plagued with gnats for at least four of the rest. Except for gnat season, the wind ripped constantly across the land like an unseen demon, tearing at anything not tied down.
Though the land was flat, it wasn’t level. The whole continent seemed to tilt, almost imperceptibly, like a table with one leg slightly longer than the others. Near sea level, and occasionally lower in the south, the land rose slowly in the north until it met the ocean in a nearly unbroken line of hundred-and-fifty-meter cliffs. It was along the inlets, bays, and narrow beaches below th
ese cliffs that most of the permanent settlements on the continent were located.
The inland wastes were temporary home to miners, prospectors, and oil workers, who scratched what wealth they could out of the land, hurriedly returned to Georama to spend it, then trudged back to Ravensglade to make more. The towns along the coast offered them a few mild vices, a place to pick up supplies, and were ports for the ships and hovercraft that connected the continent with civilization’s more respectable outposts.
It was also above these cliffs where the old Star League had elected to build a base that still stood, a monument to the quality of its engineering, and a magnet for any power attempting to establish military dominion over the region. The Capellan Confederation, the Blakists, House Davion, Devlin Stone—all had fought over it, or occupied it.
The complex was vast, and distributed in a radially symmetrical arrangement of hardened barracks, hangars, landing pads, shops, command centers, and a hospital. All were connected underground by a network of tunnels—some of them big enough to accommodate armor and ’Mechs. Along the east and north sides, vast runways for aerodyne DropShips bordered the grounds.
In the last fifty years, the base had fallen into disuse. It now stood on the plains like a ghost city—a training center for some of St. Andre’s few remaining elite military units, and home to oil companies and miners who appropriated some of the shops and barracks along its north edge.
It seemed, thought Erik Sandoval-Groell as he strode along the perimeter in a newly requisitioned Hatchetman, that battle was to come to the base once again. The place was empty and desolate—the low, fortified buildings as ugly as they were sturdy. In the distance, clusters of oil derricks jutted, and flames emitted from their tops, making them look like black candles as they burned off waste gases. It didn’t look like anything worth fighting for. It didn’t look like anything worth dying for.
Justin Sortek’s smaller Arbalest trotted into his field of vision on the right. “Not much to look at, is it, Commander?”
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