by Chris Bunch
“We can begin immediately,” von Baldur said.
“To have Khelat at peace,” King Saleph said dreamily. “Something my father and my father’s father were unable to accomplish.
“Peace … and utter obliteration for those damned Shaoki!”
• • •
The hilltop was about the only relief in a sea of green.
King Saleph had insisted that someone from Star Risk must see the new root of the Khelat riches, and why the war was being fought.
As Lanchester had said, it was main.
M’chel Riss had agreed to be the Star Risk representative. Her escort was a Prince Wahfer, who looked like all self-respecting warrior-type princes should: tall, well muscled, curly hair with a thin mustache, wearing combat fatigues, a pistol, and an elaborately worked dagger.
He wore three rings, two too many to Riss’s sometimes puritanical thinking, and an old-fashioned be-jeweled watch on one wrist.
Wahfer had piloted his own lifter, without even a bodyguard, and they’d flown for about an hour east before setting down in this plantation.
The bush grew about two meters high and wide. Its leaf was broad and dark green.
The bushes stretched in neat rows to the horizon. Below were mobile irrigation pumps and automated weeders.
A tiny lifter with some sort of supervisor darted here and there, from pumps to robots, but there was nothing else to be seen.
“Quite impressive,” Riss said.
“Yes.” Wahfer walked to the edge of the hilltop and plucked one leaf.
“This, dried and crumbled, will sell in the Alliance for about half a credit.”
Riss tried to do the math about what the plantation was worth, failed, looked impressed.
“As far as I know,” Wahfer said, “with the exception of tea, coffee, and certain illegal drugs, main provides the most credits per kilo of any natural substance. Main will make Khelat very, very rich. Once this damned war is over and Shaoki is put in its proper place.”
“Which is?” M’chel asked.
“Their inhabitable worlds, for the most part, have more surface water than ours. Proper use of the land will mean creating plantations even vaster than the ones here.”
He frowned.
“You don’t look happy about that,” M’chel said.
“Truthfully, I am not,” he said. “Not that I am one of those absurd peace seekers. I think, like you do, war should be fought for its own rewards, a testing of a man … and woman’s … bravery and a system’s resolve.”
Riss didn’t argue with him.
“How long would this plantation have been here?” she asked, deliberately changing the subject.
“Oh, five or six years,” Wahfer said.
“And before that?”
The Prince shrugged. “Some sort of farming land. Probably there would have been a village or two or three for the farmers to live on. But since all land belongs to the king, when His Majesty determined the proper purpose for this property, the people would have been relocated.”
“To where?” M’chel asked.
Wahfer shrugged. “To a city … to another plot of earth … It matters not, now, does it?”
“Exactly as you’ll do to the Shaoki?”
Wahfer smiled, a killer’s smile.
“When the war is finished, I doubt if there shall be that many of them to relocate.”
• • •
“Since we have not had time to check for eavesdroppers,” von Baldur said, and nodded to Grok.
They were back in the suite at the Rafar Arms Hotel.
Grok turned on a random-noise generator and went back to sit down.
“So,” von Baldur said. “This is an initial briefing, since we have not handled a contract this large yet, and want to ensure we play our cards correctly. What are our goals?”
“To be considerably richer than before,” Goodnight said.
“Of course,” von Baldur said. “And the steps thereto?”
“We’ll need to get whatever prime intelligence the Khelat have on our enemies,” Jasmine said. Friedrich nodded.
“First on the Shaoki,” Riss said. “But certainly on how much of a myth or threat these bandits in the hills actually are.”
Again, a nod.
“I think we need to assess the troopies on our side,” Goodnight said. “I wonder if any of them are any good, and if not, let’s fire the bastards and steal the money for ourselves … and for the people we’re going to need to hire.”
“Correct,” von Baldur said.
“One other thing,” Riss said. “We should be figuring out some nice, spectacular things that’ll knock the socks they don’t seem to wear off our clients.”
“An excellent thought,” Friedrich said. “That will unquestionably make a demand for increased funding or expenses more palatable. With all that established,” he continued, “then it shall be time to launch an offensive or two against the Shaoki. Maybe that will be enough to produce peace.”
“Maybe,” Grok said skeptically. “But this is very close to a civil war in this cluster, and civil wars among you humans, I’ve read, generally aren’t over until things escalate to total butchery.”
“They can do that,” von Baldur said indifferently, “after we’re paid and gone. I have little interest in genocide.”
“It pays so shittily,” Goodnight said.
Riss smiled slightly.
“And one other goal, just to keep things open and aboveboard, for me at least, is finding out who was responsible for Lanchester’s death, and getting his ass on toast.”
SEVEN
There were almost six hundred of them, in full dress uniform of their commander’s design, in rigid rows.
“Your men parade well,” M’chel Riss told the CO, Joch Rohm, yet another man who rated himself a general. In the Alliance, command of half a thousand men might get someone a colonelcy. But this was mercenarying.
“Thank you, uh …” Rohm looked for rank tabs on Riss’s deliberately blank dark green coveralls.
“Miss Riss,” M’chel said. “However, we’re not running parades. Please dismiss your men, and have them fall out within the next half hour in patrolling uniform.”
“Uh … yes. Miss.”
• • •
It took an hour before the mercenary force was back on the parade ground. They didn’t look nearly as perfect — their field gear, for the most part, looked as if it had just been issued and never worn.
Riss walked down the ranks.
“You … Sergeant. Front and center.”
The noncom paled a little but doubled up to her.
“What are the five blocks in a patrol order?”
The man looked blank.
“Pull your team out and move them into the woods in open formation.”
“Yes … ma’am.”
Ten men and women obeyed, moving as if they’d barely learned their lessons from a book.
Riss watched them trot away.
“General, what’s the size of your marksmanship training team?”
“We don’t have one.”
“Communications training team?”
“We have technicians who could teach, I suppose.”
“What about ground-to-air light missile training.”
“I’m sure we could assemble some of my experts into a team.”
Riss nodded.
“How many hours do your men have in zero-G hand-to-hand?”
“That’s an area we haven’t been training on.”
“How many of your men have an instructor rating from the Alliance, or an equivalent?”
“I don’t have that figure handy, I’m afraid.”
“Guess, General.”
“Maybe a dozen … maybe two dozen.”
“How many men are experienced at in-space transfer under hostile conditions?”
“Well, my warriors have been more trained at hands-on, on-planet conventional warfare.”
“I see,
” Riss said. “If you’d step over here, away from your aides?”
The man obeyed.
“Your contract has another month to run,” Riss told him. “When it expires, it will not be renewed.”
“But … why?”
“This planet needs teachers, not more cannon fodder. General, I’ll give you a bit of advice. Mercenarying is primarily either instruction, techies, spaceship crews, or special ops these days. The local lads provide the blood and the charges. People who’re good at chucking spears around rate very low on the employment roster.
“That’s all.”
• • •
“Your troops,” von Baldur said smoothly to Prince Barab, “are somewhat lacking in basic intelligence toward the enemy.”
Barab looked as if he was about to lose his temper, changed his mind.
“Yes,” he said. “That is a criticism that’s been leveled before. That was one of the things the recently departed Alliance advisors were intending to help us with. The problem is that the Khelat are instinctive warriors, not particularly respecting the professions of espionage and such.
“I shall continue to have my staff search for any accumulated information about the Shaoki.”
Von Baldur made politeness, cut off, as Jasmine came in with a handful of microfiches.
“Anything?”
“Not much,” King admitted. “M’chel managed to find some reports about smuggling orbits into various of the Khelat worlds, if you want them.”
“Now, what would the Khelat want to worry about …” Friedrich changed his mind. “No. Ship them over. At this point a thin something is better than a fat nothing.”
• • •
“Colorful,” Chas Goodnight said, voice dripping with scorn.
He and Grok stood outside a ramshackle barracks. Behind them were one hundred of the king’s bodyguards that Goodnight had borrowed, calling the group a “potential teaching aid.”
“Aren’t they,” Grok agreed, without sarcasm, looking at the fifty men in a ragged formation. “The First Commandos, is that correct?”
“That’s what they call themselves.” Goodnight shook his head. “Are any two of them carrying the same weapon? That’ll make resupply interesting.
“Come to think,” he said, “are any of them carrying any less than three weapons? Not counting hideouts, sleeve guns, armpit daggers, and shit like that. I guess they need those just to show how baaaaaaad they are. And let’s not even talk about their uniforms or strong need for baths.”
Grok didn’t answer.
“A goddamned disgrace to mercenarying,” Chas grumbled. “Every damned unit we’ve looked at so far is either spit and stupidity or steel-teethed commandos. Disgusting.”
“You make a jest,” Grok said. “You think soldiering for hire is a calling for a high moral standing?”
Goodnight grunted, having temporarily lost his sense of humor.
The leader of the rabble ambled forward, and threw a most casual greeting that he might have intended as a salute at Charles.
“I am Captain Gorgio Pantakos, and we are at your service.”
Quite suddenly, Chas recognized him.
“I remember your name being Dedan a few years back, correct?”
Pantakos jolted.
“No. You are thinking of someone else.”
“Right,” Goodnight said. “Somebody who got involved in some little war and decided to settle things out by turning a bunch of the local yokels with flamethrowers loose on a medium-sized village. And there wasn’t an unfriendly troop within parsecs.”
“That wasn’t me,” Pantakos insisted.
“Yeh, it was,” Goodnight said flatly. “As if war wasn’t a shitty enough deal. I wanted to have a look at your team … which doesn’t seem to have accomplished anything, other than tearing up some bars and terrorizing whores.
“Now I have.
“Even without recognizing you, Dedan, I was pretty sure I was going to terminate your contracts, if I didn’t get reasons to change my mind. Of which there don’t seem to be any. This poor goddamned cluster’s got enough problems without sociopaths who can’t hold it under control.
“You and your crew are restricted to barracks, are to be disarmed immediately and transshipped back to whatever sewer the poor goddamned Khelat found you in.”
Pantakos/Dedan flushed, and, perhaps thinking he could still intimidate, moved his hand to a heavy service blaster, worn crossdraw.
It was an incorrect response.
Goodnight touched his cheek, went bester. Before Pantakos’s hand touched the butt of his blaster, Goodnight had it in his own grip. He twisted, and the bone snapped.
Goodnight came out of bester in time to hear Pantakos yelp in agony.
Goodnight spun him about and kicked him hard in the butt. Pantakos stumbled forward, fell on his face in front of his formation.
One man reached for his gun, froze seeing Grok leveling down on him and the bodyguards unslinging their blast rifles.
“As I have read from ancient Earth, you are a daisy if you do not,” the alien growled.
No one moved for a long moment, then the group turned, started back inside.
No one bothered, until Goodnight shouted, to pick up the moaning Pantakos from the dirt.
“What the hell was that about being a daisy?” Goodnight asked.
“I read about some Earth gunman named Doc Earp saying it at a battle called the KO Corral.”
“Find a leetle more macho line next time, all right?” Goodnight said.
“I cannot believe,” Grok said, without replying to Chas’s insult, eyes never leaving the retreating motlies, “that you have just turned moral on me, Chas.”
“Sorry,” Goodnight said. “I didn’t sleep very well last night. I won’t disappoint you again.”
• • •
“I mean no insult, lady,” the man in the oil-stained boilersuit said. “But you’re evaluating my team’s performance?”
Jasmine King could have, possibly should have, lost her temper. Instead, she found it funny.
They were in the cramped, rather littered office in a monstrous hangar, almost full of small patrol ships with various crimps or parts of their skin missing, and women and men with tools bustling about.
“You mean someone who looks like I do can’t know anything about technicals?”
Jasmine wore a dark-colored, skintight coverall, slash-cut high boots, and a stylishly small pistol, carried in a shiny rig that matched her outfit.
“Oh, no. Oh, dear no,” the stubby man said, coloring. “That’d be dumb thinking, just to start with. What I meant was, well, us techies are generally at the shitty — sorry for the language — end of the stick when it comes to everything. And, uh, you, uh …” his voice trailed off.
“I’m not sure I believe you, Mr. Ells,” Jasmine said, grinning. “But I’ll accept what you say. For the moment.
“My team, as you might have heard, will be overseeing the freelance military people in the Khelat System. Which includes your Maintenance and Operations Section.”
“I hope, to be frank, that you’re better than the Khelat,” Ells said. “Because they’ve got the damndest assortment of for-hire idiots soldiering for them that I’ve ever seen…. And then there’ll be nobody in other slots where there should be someone.”
“Such as?”
“Those half-wits that call themselves commandos just for openers, who shouldn’t be allowed a kid’s knife, for fear they’ll cut themselves.”
“They’re gone.”
Ells eyes rounded.
“That’s a good start. Now, what about hiring some pilots? The Khelat, may they be forever blessed, think that all it takes to push a starship around is to be a member of royalty.”
“I’ve seen the scrap heap,” King said.
“They can wreck ‘em faster than we can fix ‘em, and that’s the pure truth.”
“That’s something we’ll have to look at.”
“I d
on’t know if we’re gonna run out of princes or TAC ships first,” Ells said. “By the way, did you notice that the easy way to tell a prince — other than he’s got more jewels than anybody — is he generally speaks Alliance instead of Khelat?”
“I’ve noticed that,” Jasmine said. “And wondered why.”
“I’m not real sure,” Ells said. “But I think it makes them superior to the other swine they’re ordering around. And nobody’s wising them up to the fact that makes the silly bastards strangers in their own land.”
He shook his head.
“I’ve gone through your people’s fiches, and also the maintenance records,” King said, changing the subject. “I figure you’re putting in, each, about sixty hours per local week. You need more time off.”
“Sixty hours is what’s on the clock, about right,” Ells said. “They get pissy when we bill what we really do.”
“That’ll change,” King said. “From now on, straight time bills … or we can flip you all to salary.”
“Salary,” the man said in wonderment. “Just like the sojer boys and girls what wear the pretty suits with all the rank. My, my. I’ll have to talk to my people.”
“Get back to me,” King said. “Now, a question, or maybe the start of questions. What’s your biggest complaint about the Khelat?”
“Well, they’re likable enough. But they’re rock stubborn. And, well, I can’t say they’re lazy. But they seem to have the opinion that some god decided they didn’t have to work. Especially not when it comes to manual labor.
“Which is why my team’s so damned big. We’re supposed to be training them to do their own wrenching, their own electronics design and such…. But we’re the boys and girls who do the work, most times. And if there’s any kind of error, and one of us is anywhere close, it’s our fault.
“They’re brave enough, I suppose. As long as things are going their way, and then it’s fanny bar the door and get out from under the bugout.
“Or so I’ve been told. I keep myself away from what should be called the front lines. Not that there’s been a whole lot of real fighting in the year I’ve been on this contract.”
Jasmine nodded slowly.
“I just wanted to show up, introduce myself, and give you a new indent number for anything you need…. And I’m a hell of a system analyst, I should warn you.”