*I can have the light.*
“All you need. It’ll just take a few days. Can you wait that long?” His answer was a shout of fierce joy.
Amber waited until the sound of Jack’s leaving had faded from the apartment and his warmth from the blankets before she got up. She would not sleep much more this night and there was no profit in tossing and turning. She dressed quickly, pulling on a dark blue jumpsuit and glove-soft leather boots. She had dreams of her own to pursue in the middle of the night. Raking a brush through her hair, she tied it back in a love knot and made a face at herself in the mirror. Soon, very soon, she’d show Jack what she could do. Then he would sooner leave his right arm behind than leave her.
Outside, the courtyards were half-illuminated by the security lights and she stayed in the shadows, working her way toward the training grounds. The closer she got, the harder her task got. New recruits swelled the facilities. Temporary dorms and lockers were being installed and Pepys had had a hundred acres of abandoned housing razed for a new obstacle course, just outside the wall of the old grounds.
Amber paused to catch her breath. The excitement of the deception set her pulse racing. It was a flaw in her, a fatal flaw, that she would always have to walk a tightrope, live on the edge, to have this feeling. Even loving Jack did not give it to her.
Excitement gave way to poignancy and she was standing there, hesitating, when a hand gripped her arm.
“Milady Amber. Out late, are you not?”
She looked up into the pasty white face of Vandover Baadluster. Her heart took a fluttering beat, then steadied.
“When I can’t sleep, I walk.”
“Understandable, but not wise,” the Minister of War said as he steered her away from the shadowed outside walls. “The new recruits are many, and a rowdy bunch. I’ve been told rape is just as distasteful to a one-man whore as it is to a virtuous woman. I suggest you not make yourself a target.”
His words took her breath away. She stood, momentarily speechless, feeling her nostrils flare in sudden hatred for the man. He sketched a bow. “Besides,” he said, “we suspect sabotage. We’ve been monitoring activity and tonight have set a trap for the unwary Knight.”
She kept her expression steady. “Sabotage?”
“There’s been an intruder. He’s been discreet and he knows the security systems well enough to bypass them, but there’s no denying there’s been unauthorized activity among the ranks. If we’re very lucky, he’s just an industrial spy gathering information on the armor for another manufacturer.”
“And if you’re not lucky?”
Baadluster pursed his thick lips. “Then we have a traitor on our hands. Commander Storm’s latest reports show the Thraks have regressed to projectile weapons, a strategy unwarranted unless the enemy has made an extensive study of the armor.”
A trap set for a traitor. Amber shivered as she realized she might have walked into it.
Vandover made a consoling noise at the back of his throat. “You have nothing to worry about, milady. But one would suggest a return to your apartment which is, undoubtedly, more secure.”
She tilted her face slightly as she looked up at him. He knew that she knew that he meant he could not make any recordings off the security monitors. “Thank you, Minister Baadluster, for your concern.”
“Not at all.” He touched her again, a fleeting gesture that stopped her in her tracks. The harsh dome of light accentuated his homely features even more, and his dark eyes were like burning embers. “You might reconsider the offer I made to you earlier. Commander Storm is in an awkward position, whether he acknowledges it or not. His friendship with St. Colin borders on treason itself and though we cannot associate him with the defection of Cadet Denaro, he does himself harm by thinking himself free of blame.”
“Jack was not even on Malthen when Denaro went AWOL.”
“No. But his induction of Denaro into the Knights borders on collusion. You are aware, are you not, that St. Colin had been ordered to turn the man over to Pepys for investigation of suspected treason? That the two of them instead buried the man as a recruit, knowing the emperor could not at the time afford the scandal such an investigation would cause. So that now, months later, Denaro has taken irreplaceable equipment and vanished. No, my soiled beauty. Your commander has not made wise choices in his career.”
“Jack doesn’t play your kind of politics!”
“No? Then what kind of politics does he play at? A Green Shirt perhaps? How do we know where he spent those seventeen years of his life?”
Anger made it difficult for her to breathe. She felt her eyes narrow. “Pepys has a fool for a Minister of War.”
He stepped close to her. She could feel his heat as if it were an open flame. Her Bythian tattoos telegraphed danger to her, but she stood her ground.
“You have one chance,” he told her, quietly but firmly. “And one chance only. And that chance is that Jack is as naïve as he is brave. Tell me. Tell me of who he sees and what he does so that I may guide him in the months ahead, because, webbed lady—” His stare pierced her as if he could see the faint markings on her skin beneath her clothing. “—I am no fool and neither is Pepys, and you know that. Confide in me or Jack will be so tangled in the schemes of others that there will be no possibility either of you can survive.”
She wished then, with all of her heart, that Hussiah had not taken from her the art of killing. If she had any way of shaping her thoughts into an arrow and aiming them into the core of Baadluster’s being, she would do it. Him she would kill with even less conscience than Jack killed Thraks.
Baadluster read her expression and took a step back. “One day, milady, we’ll meet again, and you will remember that I offered this opportunity to you, and that you refused it.”
“You give me nothing! I can’t spy on Jack.”
He bowed his head. “It is late. The grounds are secured. I suggest you return to your apartment. We have work to do here, and you are detaining us.”
Amber turned on her heel and left as swiftly as she could without making it apparent she was fleeing him. She only had the satisfaction of knowing that Baadluster’s trap would be empty tonight for it had been meant for her, and he himself had told her of it.
Later, in the cold bed, she curled up in the silken caftan she’d brought out of Bythia, and, feeling her skin crawl with mystic patterns, she cursed herself for having lost the ability to kill. Not only that, but as the patterns continued to fade, they took the last of her psychic talents with them. Soon she would have nothing left… nothing to bind her to Jack and Bogie. No weapon of her own to help them fight in their struggles to live. She had only her wiles left. And the clandestine training as a Dominion Knight.
Pepys was awake when Baadluster returned empty-handed. The emperor sat in his easy chair, sipping tea from a fine bone cup that was reputed to be over one thousand years old, and he did not refrain from a mocking smile even though Baadluster gave him a look indicating he wished, among other things, to smash that ancient cup.
“No quarry?”
“No. But we know there is trouble. Even Lassaday admits it, and Lassaday is Storm’s man, as loyal a soldier as the commander has.”
“There’s no indication that the commander is involved.”
“No.”
“Good. Then let it be.”
Baadluster glared at him. “Let it be? I have been reduced to catching spies and then you say, let it be?”
“The strike at Klaktut is far more important.” Pepys put the teacup down and mopped his upper lip.
This brought a halt to Baadluster’s ill-tempered pacing. The minister locked gazes with the emperor. “Then I can return to strategic planning.”
“Of a certainty. After you place a call to Queen Tricatada.”
Baadluster protested angrily, “We are winning, Pepys. You cannot throw it all away by telling the Queen we plan to hit one of her major nests!”
“No. No, I don’t plan to tell her what w
e’re doing.” Pepys stood and smoothed down his clothes, preparing for a morning of judgment hearings. “With her embassies and consulates shut down, our network of information is greatly hampered. It appears that we both are under attack from a third party, and I’d like to know what she knows of that.”
“A Thrak would never tell you.”
“No.” Pepys smiled. “Like anything else, Baadluster—it’s what they don’t say and how they don’t say it that’s really important. Go put in the call. When it’s completed, come and get me from the chambers.”
Vandover made a sardonic bow as Pepys left the room.
Chapter 27
The Rusty Bolt had changed little through the years of Jack’s acquaintance with under-Malthen, except perhaps to get mangier. A sallow faced lump of a man smelling of ratt sidled through the privacy curtain and looked at Jack, the whites of his eyes gone yellow like a hard user with his liver about to give out.
Showing rotting teeth, the man said, “I’m supposed to say ‘Ballard sent me.’ ” He put his hand palm up on the table and Jack pressed a hundred credit disk into it. The man looked at it, then pushed a small circuit card across the table. “That’s for Amber. Ballard said she ordered it.”
“Talk. I haven’t a lot of time.”
The man shrugged and his rotting teeth showed wider. “Neither have I, man. Ballard says you’re supposed to hear about what happened to Washburn Industries.”
“So tell me.”
“Gone. Pulverized. Enemy incoming hit it, and internal explosives did the rest. I was supposed to be on shift, but I took a long lunch break… about two days earlier.” The man shrugged.
“So if you weren’t there, how do you know?”
“I wasn’t there when it happened, man, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t there. I got my scooter back in commission and reported back to work. Like, I was the first one to find the ashes. I got there even before the firemen. They had to come from half a continent away. Too hot otherwise.”
Jack stared. The man had to be dead in his boots… and he knew it.
Another shrug. “Either this way or th’ ratt. I prefer th’ ratt.”
“So would I.”
The informant nodded.
“How did you get out? They must have cordoned off the area pretty damn quick.”
“So fast I blinked and missed it. And then Washburn came in. Never saw him leave though. Heard he killed himself when they found his son’s body in th’ lower silos. His son’s supposed to have been th’ one let the shields down for the Thraks.”
“Is that what you think?”
“No way. That kid was so straight, he was a real pain in the ass. Besides, I know better. I saw it.”
“Saw?”
“That’s right. It evidently hung around, scouted us before it left. I saw it planing over the Wide Windy… that’s a desert area outside the defense state.”
This was what had been hinted to Jack. He pushed a drawing over the table. “Like this?”
The sallow-faced man looked at it for a split second and shook his head.
Jack pulled another sheet from his short-jacket pocket. “Or this?”
Blackened nails tapped the second picture. “That’s her.” The man sniffled and rubbed at his nose. “Gotta go, all right?”
Jack nodded. The man stood. Jack hesitated and then pressed a second credit disk into his palm.
He looked at it. “Five hundred credits?”
“You earned it.” That was enough money to buy enough ratt to O.D. The two men looked at each other levelly.
The second broke contact first, unable to meet the rainwater blue gaze holding him. “Thanks, man,” he mumbled. “I mean it.” He wove his way out of the Rusty Bolt and Jack watched him go.
The Thrakian ship he’d put aside immediately. The second drawing was a fairly accurate computer rendition of the unknown that had gotten Opus. So whatever had happened at Washburn Industries was known, only Jack hadn’t been told about it. He was staging Operation Nest short of rifles and grenades, plagued with inexplicable back orders, and he wasn’t going to be told the truth. Storm didn’t have to worry about Baadluster or anyone else getting his hooks on the informer—he wasn’t going to last any longer than it took him to get another load of ratt.
On the other hand, it was better than the lingering death that had been facing him.
Jack pushed his dirty glass aside, got up, and left the bar.
He traced the last of the tattooing over Amber’s soft skin. She lay quietly under his touch, her eyes closed, not immediately responding to the news that he was leaving in the morning, news that no one had known for sure until an hour ago. Her pupils moved slightly beneath the transparent blue veining as she responded to his caress. Even there, he thought. That snakeskin bastard had touched her even there.
“How can you go, knowing that?” she asked, finally.
“I have to go. With Washburn dead, our backing in the Congress is very tentative. We have a ‘probationary’ war. It’s the one thing I agree on with Baadluster and Pepys. I have to show how effective we can be against the Thraks.”
She arched her back as he drew his fingers down across her stomach, her loins and then her thighs. “You’re being very effective right here and now,” she murmured.
He slapped the flat of her stomach lightly. “You’re upset.”
“Of course, I am! Every time I take a deep breath, you’re being taken away from me. And, dammit, Jack, you’re making it harder to follow.”
He smiled at her as he lowered his body over hers, pinning her to the bed, and she gasped a moment in pleasure, then thrashed her head to one side. “Don’t you change the subject.”
He began to move, very slowly, inside her. “I’m not,” he said softly. “You are. I was talking sex.”
He watched her bite her lip as he prolonged his movement.
“How can you go to war if you’re not even sure who the real enemy is?”
He entered her again, deeply, and she took an intense breath. He kissed her. “I think,” he said into her ear, biting her earlobe gently, “that this is a poor time to be discussing it. At the moment, I only care about who my lover is.”
Amber sighed. He could feel the anger dissipate from the silken body cradling him. She wrapped her arms about his shoulders. “Who am I,” she answered, “to disrupt peace negotiations?” And she pulled him closer.
Two weeks in hypnosleep with subliminal isometrics. No cold sleep this trip out. The engagement was too important. Cold sleep made them sluggish. Dull. Occasionally you’d find your best man was susceptible to cold sleep fever. No. Jack was taking no chances with any of his three ships this time. He was even going to allow himself to be put under after one last computer simulation. Operation Nest was too important to allow anything to interfere.
He ran the simulation through and sat, the illumination of the screen playing upon his face as he watched. Three thousand troops, though only five hundred of them were seasoned, but it was enough, and his Wings spearheaded the drops. Hit and run. A devastating blow to a major Warrior crèche. It worked. It was perfect. Jack sat back unhappily. Nothing in life was ever perfect.
Amber was the one with the psychic ability, but he’d never been one to discount the feelings he had from time to time. He couldn’t put his finger on it. Maybe it was the unidentifieds that showed up from time to time, though he saw no way the assault on Klaktut could be tipped off. They would come out of hyperdrive, so close that a hair’s miscalculation would mean disaster—turn the corner and they were there. The Thraks wouldn’t even have a chance to react.
He sat back in the chair, searching through the meager memories Bogie had been able to give back to him. He found one and held on to it for a moment: his father, looking out the screened-in porch, while a field full of crops was being destroyed by clouds of hail. “It’s like this, son,” he’d said, and pulled Jack close. “You do all you can. Right fertilizers. Mineral balance. Natural herbicides. And then
you plant and watch it grow. But sometimes, no matter how much good you do, something bad happens.”
“What is it, Dad?”
“Flood maybe. Or brush fire. Or a plague of insects you can’t possibly fend off. We call it an Act of God. Watch for it, Jack. It’ll happen to you someday. All you can do is withstand it and get ready to start over.”
An Act of God. Jack watched the computer simulation and wondered if it was too late to program one in and study the contingencies.
Unfortunately, there was no telling what kind of Act it would be.
Chapter 28
Jack stood wearily in the hallway. He’d not even been given a chance to bathe or get out of his armor. The stink of war and death hung palpably about him. Bogie throbbed against his shoulders and he thought, not for the first time, that soon there would not be room for the two of them inside the white armor. He carried his helmet in the crook of his left arm and his shoulder wound pulsed, a reminder that he had not completely healed. He looked down at the aide.
“Last time I was here, I spoke in appeal to a joint session of Congress. What’s it called this time?”
The young man flicked a scornful glance at him, then looked back at the doorway for a signal. “It’s called a Congressional Hearing,” he said, briefly.
“Ah.” Jack rocked back on his heels in fatigue. He dared not close his eyes. If he did, the nightmare might overwhelm him.
“Retreat! Retreat! Make your rendezvous point at all costs. Those Needlers are losing their asses coming in for you!” Jack cleared his throat, knowing his hoarseness made his commands bleed out over the com lines. Around him, the sky was rimmed with laser fire, an aurora borealis of war, and around him lay armor laden corpses that would never rise again.
A total rout. If he had not known better, he would think that the Thraks had known they were coming.
Alien Salute Page 17