The Caledonian Gambit: A Novel

by Dan Moren

  And then, as quickly as it had begun, it was over, and he was sent out of the booth to join the rest of the crew, including Eamon, who stood waiting with arms crossed. Gwen was right behind him, and Eli could see her closing her eyes as the air blew down on her. He gave Eamon a sidelong glance and saw him watching Gwen thoughtfully. It wasn’t a particularly lascivious look, as Eli had half-expected—rather, something more calculating.

  She’d been the last through the checkpoint so, once she cleared it, they set out down the corridor. It was at this point that Eli noticed they were being accompanied by two large containers on repulsor fields, pushed by burlier members of the work crew. They looked like standard cargo holders, probably filled with tools and supplies, but for some reason they only added to his uneasiness.

  A left turn took them into a hub from which a jetway stretched down to the ground. They formed up in pairs of two, with the two cargo containers leading the way, just in case the notoriously unreliable micro-repulsor fields decided to collapse and send a couple tons of heavy equipment blazing a bowling ball’s path right down the narrow corridor.

  At the bottom of the jetway a pair of transparent doors slid open to dump them out onto the tarmac itself. It was hotter here, in part from all the ship exhaust as well as the black pavement, which had absorbed the heat of the morning sun.

  On the blacktop sat a boxy transport, resting on four spindly landing struts. A large ramp, the breadth of two groundcars, gaped open like the maw of some hideous creature and the work crew made a beeline for it, pushing the cargo containers into the belly of the beast.

  It was a gentle push to the small of his back that made him realize he’d stopped, frozen in the heat wash of the ship, on the middle of the tarmac. Gwen had come up behind him and was directing him toward the ramp. Every cell in his body was humming the same litany of resistance, bombarding his brain with a thunderstorm of electrical signals directing him to turn tail and run faster than he’d ever run before. And weighed against that, the feeling of a woman’s hand on his back, telling him to move forward.

  It was a no-brainer: he got on the goddamned ship.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Illyrican transport ships were not designed for comfort, Eli decided once he could think again.

  He’d started to shake the second he set foot on the ship’s ramp, assuming that Eamon had meant for him to pilot the transport, but he was ushered into the rear passenger compartment like everybody else. The abject fear had given way to a slightly less nervous preoccupation as the crew began its pre-flight, readying the ship for takeoff.

  His mind had quickly burned itself out with worry and stress, so he had settled for a sort of dreamy detachment in which he could observe without actually being present. Likewise, his stomach had been abstracted into something else entirely and even the shudders that had racked his body relaxed, like the respite of a fever.

  Squirreled away in the back of the transport ship’s spacious main cabin, Eli managed to conceal most of his plight from his fellow passengers—except for Gwen, who had taken up a buffer seat between him and the rest of the work crew. She held his hand as it went from sweaty to clammy and back again, squeezing it every time he started to convulse.

  The benches were hard and the five-point restraints uncomfortable and chafing in all the wrong places, though they did have the notable upside of letting him slump over without making it obvious to the rest of the crew.

  It would be so much easier if I could just pass out. The thought had occurred to him more than once, but every time he approached the black threshold his brain apparently decided that he could handle just a little bit more stress. Or Gwen’s squeezing hand reminded him that he needed to stay upright. She was being awfully nice to him—perhaps it was just pity. Or maybe some sort of maternal instinct. Or maybe she actually liked him. It was possible, wasn’t it? I’m not such a bad guy—when I’m not about to throw up on your shoes.

  Besides the long benches that lined either side of the compartment, there wasn’t much going on in the transport as far as decor was concerned. To call it spartan would have been potentially unkind to the ancient warriors, who at least knew a good piece of art when they saw one. The Illyricans were about bare-bones necessity; not that Eli was surprised—after all, he’d ridden Illyrican transports more than a few times. His bunks in the academy and aboard the Venture had been nothing to write home about, and they’d been dissuaded from personalizing them in any way. Interchangeable cogs in a great clockwork war machine.

  Now, he somehow seemed to have become the wrench that got thrown into those cogs. The more he thought about that analogy, the less he liked it, since he was fairly sure that it was the wrench that got chewed up by the gears and then spat out again.

  As his mind and eyes wandered, he thought he noticed Kelly’s scarred face watching him from across the aisle. But then the thought would drip, treacle-slow, from his brain, and he’d be back to thinking about how much the benches hurt his ass.

  Time went by in fits and spurts, like trying to get ketchup out of a bottle: sometimes it seemed like a minute stretched on for hours; other times he felt like he’d blinked and missed the better part of a day. The more cogent part of his mind, which had found a cozy place to hole up, knew that the entirety of the trip couldn’t be more than a few hours—the ship was just a short-range transport not suited for wormhole travel—but he couldn’t for the life of him tell how long had passed.

  He guessed then that it was somewhere near the middle of the trip when he saw Eamon unbuckle and float his way over. The cargo bay was zero-gee; humanity had only recently achieved any success with what was turning out to be not the science but the fine art of producing artificial gravity. As such, they hadn’t managed to make it cost-effective yet, especially on a ship this small. Larger capital ships—like Eli’s old stomping ground, the Venture—could use their immense bulk to help bolster the gravity field, but on a small transport like this one it would have increased the cost of construction by an order of magnitude. Not likely to win plaudits from the ever-efficient Illyrican military.

  Eamon pushed himself gracefully to the floor, hooking his feet under a bar provided for just such a purpose, and squatted down—as much was possible in the no-gravity environment—to rest at Eli’s eye level. Gwen released his hand casually, crossing her arms over her chest and looking studiously away from the two brothers.

  “What’s the matter, Lije?” His tone was curious, if not particularly concerned. “Space-sick?”

  Lots of people got space-sick, just as lots of people in the ages before them had gotten sea-sick, air-sick, car-sick, and probably even horseback-sick. Eli was about to muster a snort over the indignities of such a question—that a professional pilot like him would possibly be subject to the vagaries of a bout of space nausea—when he realized, somewhat to the dismay of the small fragment inside of him that still remembered what it was like to be a pilot, that he actually was space-sick.

  “It’s harder when I’m not flying,” he mumbled, the half-truth coming easily. After all, he’d been sick on the way to Fielding’s ship because the pilot had been greener than a crop of unripe space wheat. The transport ship pilot appeared to be competent enough, though, and it wasn’t as though there was a lot of turbulence once they’d broken atmo.

  “I’d have thought you’d all have armor-plated stomachs,” said Eamon, scratching at his beard. “Specially formulated and injected by the Illyrican Medical Corps.”

  “I must have played hooky that day.” Eli stared at his shoes and willed himself not to lose his cool. Eamon may have been a bastard, but he was still Eli’s older brother, and he realized—to his surprise—that still appeared to count for something. “I’ll be fine whenever we get where we’re going.”

  Subtle shadows shifted over Eamon’s face as his expression changed. He glanced over his shoulder and then back at Eli. “Listen,” he said, his voice taking on an altogether more serious tone, “when we get there, stay back
, all right? I know I dragged you into this and I appreciate you coming along, but it might get a little hairy.”

  Eli grunted, only partly from a wave of nausea that had rolled over him, and looked up at his brother. “I thought you said nobody would get hurt.”

  “I said nobody should get hurt. But there are a lot of variables where we’re going, and some of them are outside my control.”

  “Should.” “Should” covers a lot. For example, I should have known better. “I see. Speaking of which, where the hell are we going? This whole lot are like bloody gargoyles, just sitting and leering.”

  With a sigh, Eamon lowered his voice further, to the point that it was barely audible above the rhythmic thrumming of the ship’s engines. “There’s an Illyrican military installation on Aran, and they’re building something—something big. Something we can’t let them have.”

  The damn Illyrican project that had started this whole wild goose chase to find Eamon—it was on Aran. Well, that makes sense. Nobody’s likely to stumble across it there.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Eamon shrugged. “Obvious, isn’t it? Just in case you did walk out that door last night, I didn’t want you going and telling anybody where I was headed.”

  A knee-jerk reaction to protest bubbled to the surface, but he pushed it down. The thought had certainly crossed his mind; that was the reason Fielding had brought him along in the first place, wasn’t it? Still, he couldn’t ignore the twinge of unease in his gut that had nothing to do with being space-sick. It turned out that when everybody lied to you, it made it a lot harder to believe anybody. That was one thing he missed about the military proper: They didn’t lie to you, they just didn’t tell you everything. The blue-green world of Sabaea was permanently anchored to that thought.

  “So this thing the Illyricans are building—what are you going to do about it?”

  His brother’s face went grim. “We’re going to make sure that they never get a chance to use it.”

  Eli opened his mouth to ask the first in a torrent of questions—What was it? How were they going to stop it? Was this going to be the Bloody Hundred all over again?—but Eamon glanced at the timepiece on his wrist, rose, and slapped Eli on the shoulder.

  “We’ll be docking in half an hour. Try to hold your stomach in check for at least that long, hey?” He unhooked his feet from the rail and pushed off back toward the other side of the compartment, where he swam his way toward Kelly, who, Eli noticed, was eyeing him with the same fascination that a kid armed with a magnifying glass gave an ant on a sunny day.

  Something warm and dry pressed into his left hand again, and he looked up to find Gwen’s eyes on him.

  “Everything all right?” she asked lightly, as though she hadn’t been seated mere inches away from the entire exchange.

  “Just rosy. Snug as a bug in a big old space-faring metal rug.”

  The cold metal of the bulkhead was the only thing behind him, but he rested his head on it anyway, feeling it leach away the heat at the point of contact. The designers hadn’t been too concerned with creature comforts or perhaps even basic safety requirements like headrests.

  Five minutes of distraction and mild daydreaming later, he suddenly felt the engine’s pitch change as the thrumming diminished and was accompanied with a sensation of being pushed backwards. They’re firing reverse thrusters. Early.

  He was probably the first to notice, attuned as he still was to the language of spacecraft, but he wasn’t the only one. Across the way, he saw Kelly and Eamon exchange a glance.

  Gwen squeezed his hand again and whispered to him. “Just relax. Everything will be okay.”

  He frowned at her suddenly calm demeanor. There was a look in her eyes that was slightly out of place—expectation. But before he could say anything there was a blurt from the ship’s intercom, followed by a static-tinged voice.

  “This is the flight deck. Apologies, folks, but we’ve been put on a brief hold. Aran Control has informed us that there’s a fast courier on the same vector and they’ve been given priority clearance. It’ll tack another ten minutes or so onto our arrival time. Sorry again for the delay. Flight deck out.”

  Across the compartment, Kelly’s face went set, as though he were gritting his teeth. Eamon, on the other hand, looked unnaturally relaxed, his long legs stretched out in front of him. But body language was one of those things that didn’t really change over the years; Eli could see this wasn’t part of the plan.

  Fast couriers usually carried VIPs. Sometimes just messages, but for a trip like the one from Caledonia to Aran it would only be used for the most sensitive communications, since it was expensive and, of course, quite a bit slower than intrasystem comms.

  Still, most fast couriers were small ships, and what there was of them was mostly engine. It probably wouldn’t, for example, be carrying a company of Illryican marines to ambush them; though all it would really take was one person to tip off the base’s existing complement of security.

  Regardless, it appeared that they weren’t about to be blown out of the blackness of space—after ten minutes of worrying, the ship’s engines fired up again and they resumed their course. Maybe the courier was just a routine thing. He took a deep breath. They’d passed the point where his choice mattered, unless he was going to try and make a break for the ship’s lifeboat—assuming it even had one. And that decision was only going to leave him worse off than he was now. Better to just stick it out and see what happened.

  The ship’s retro thrusters kicked on again and the engine sound went to a consistent rumble, the vibrations shuddering through the hull. Without armrests to grip, Eli’s right hand clawed into the bench next to his thigh, while his left seized Gwen’s in a vise.

  Against all logic, Eli felt the pressure around him increase, as though he were submerged in some sort of deep-sea diving vessel instead of a space ship. His chest heaved with the attempt to drag out another breath and the unpleasant sensation of cold sweat dripped into his eyes. Just at the moment that he felt he couldn’t take another second, that his chest was on the verge of caving in and his head exploding, there was a solid jounce from the ship as its landing struts hit rocky ground. The roar of the engines dropped into a low whine as the pilot powered them down, followed by the all-too-familiar noises of a ship making port: humming and buzzing as various systems were turned off or, in some cases, back on again. The lights in the cabin, dimmed for the duration of the journey, snapped back on full as the umbilical docking connection was made.

  A symphony of clicks sounded as the rest of the work crew unbuckled their restraints. Eli glanced around, then fumbled at his own with shaky hands. The plastic fastener kept slipping through his grip, though, until finally Gwen took it from him and punched the red button, letting the belts zip back into the recesses from which they’d come.

  With a grunt, Eli pulled himself to a standing position, waving away Gwen when she moved to help him. “I’ve got it.” Show her you can move on your own two feet, he thought as he lurched astern toward the airlock. Assuming, of course, that you can actually move on your own two feet. He stumbled, but thanks to the moon’s slightly lower gravity managed to grab hold of an overhead railing before toppling headfirst into one of the equipment crates, themselves being unfastened by a quartet of the work crew, including Kelly. The scarred man’s face darkened as he looked up at Eli, then turned quickly back to the container’s restraints.

  “What’s in those things?” he muttered to Gwen as they shuffled past.

  The red-haired woman glanced at the crates, then back at Eli and shook her head. “If you don’t already know, you probably don’t want to.”

  A feeling that was decidedly unlike jelly was beginning to return to Eli’s legs and he was moving more assuredly as they hung a left from the main cabin and into the short foyer that led to the airlock. The big round door there was still closed while the seal was established.

  Aran did have a slight atmosphere, but its low con
centration and high methane content meant that it wasn’t fit for humans. During his training, Eli had briefly visited an outpost on a remote moon of Illyrica with an atmosphere of much the same composition. His overriding impression of that installation had been that, no matter how many scrubbers they ran the air through, it never quite managed to excise a faint tang of the pungent gas. It was kind of like working next door to a cattle farm while pretending it wasn’t there.

  The airlock door began to roll open, accompanied by the faint hiss of pressures equalizing and the high-pitched squeal of servomotors. The blue-suited work crew began to file into the small antechamber which terminated in another similar door on the opposite wall. This door too began to roll open as they approached, wafting in a gust of the base’s air supply, which teased Eli’s own nostrils with memories of his time on that Illyrican outpost. Several of the other crewmembers wrinkled their noses in disgust with a few waving hands under them. It would only be a matter of time though, Eli knew—the air filters might never manage to get rid of the smell, but the human nose was pretty good at adapting when necessary; inside fifteen minutes most wouldn’t even notice it anymore.

  The second airlock door let them into a bare compartment with the decided look of pre-fabrication couture. Most Illyrican bases were cut from roughly the same mold, Eli had quickly discovered in his brief tour of Imperial facilities. This particular module was large and square, probably model 8/A1179 (Airlock Compartment), assembled with an industrial welder and a screwdriver (included). There were a few stacks of cargo containers lining the walls, not unlike the ones that were now floating out of the airlock behind them.

  A square pressure door on the other side of the compartment groaned open and three people strode purposefully to meet them. One was a tall, thin man, dressed in a jumpsuit like the one Eli and the work crew wore. Eli’s heart jumped at the second man, who wore a crimson Illryican military uniform, a pistol on his belt, and frown creases on his forehead. The third was a woman in a white lab coat with frizzy brown hair that was pulled back in a loose ponytail.