He cursed the slowness of the transit times between Elber and Canuure. The information he had just read was weeks old. Whatever happened on Elber was out of his hands. He only had to hope that Galuud and Teeluur made it off planet before the shit hit the fan blade. Or something like that.
Once Phatie’s spies learned of this latest kink in the Decimation plan, he was sure to send for Inskaap. Time was running short and the Piru Togurd was honoring no past allegiances or commitments. Just this week alone seventy staff officers had been executed for one perceived failure or another. As the command ranks thinned out and the timid were replaced with the more hardened lunatics in the Domain’s military structure, Inskaap knew that sooner or later Phatie would turn his baleful eye on him.
He had managed to delay or misdirect a lot of really outrageous operations that had been started in this run up to war. A missed call here, a phony set of instructions there, the occasional lost coded message. His attempts to undermine the Piru Torgud and eventually bring about his downfall were beginning to stall as Phatie systematically murdered any person that posed a threat to his timetable.
That meant that Inskaap was also running out of time as well as co-conspirators.
Soon Phatie would consider his buildup complete enough to begin his march into oblivion. The total destruction of the Malguurian Domain was the only possible outcome in Inskaap’s way of thinking. Their weaponry was inadequate, their infrastructure was shaky, the command, control and communications element almost non-existent. But with a madman like Phatie at the stick and a military hellbent on starting a revenge war, his efforts to thwart the Decimation fell woefully short. He had no one to bring into his confidence. The few members of the council that were sympathetic to his cause were all dead. The businesses that Phatie depended on to manufacture his weapons and ships were completely convinced that Canuure had a chance to defeat the human horde. They were sadly mistaken.
The humans had an amazing capacity to create and an even more amazing capacity to destroy. They would take a couple of shots across the bow, turn the other cheek a few times when met with hostile situations, but in the end, once provoked, they were world killers. Without so much as a second thought the Second Fleet of Elber had loosed their tremendous firepower against the Domain. Sure, there had been warnings, attempts at reconciliation, proposals to share peaceful borders with them. But the ruling party and the less-than-adequate military commanders at the time ignored the offers. Their failure to reach a peaceful accord had cost the lives of over a billion souls. Even the Deliverer, He Who Casts No Shadow, could not soften the defeat, spare the innocent, nor intervene on behalf of the ignorant.
His communicator chimed. Inskaap looked at the device, afraid to pick it up. Was it Bale Phatie on the other end? Was his number up?
Phatie would not hesitate to send a few of his guards over to arrest him if his game was indeed finished. No, this wasn’t Phatie. He snatched the handset from the communicator and answered.
“Inskaap, here.”
“Colonel, are you busy? It’s Huuer Yaguud.”
He let out a sigh of relief. “Colonel Yaguud. What’s on your mind?”
“Listen, sir, something’s come up that I think you should be interested in. Can we meet for lunch?”
That meant Yaguud had some information he did not want to discuss on an open comm line. “Certainly, friend. Let’s say around two? The same place?”
“See you there,” Yaguud said and immediately broke the connection.
Inskaap started putting his code books away. He would have to leave soon in order to get there first, in order to dispose of any tails that Phatie might have watching or following him.
Ten minutes later he was headed to the car park.
Chapter 23
“On ya feets, human.”
Davi Yorn felt rough three-fingered hands on his upper arms. Two men, one on each arm. He still couldn’t see anything because of the black hood that was on his head. He offered little resistance when he was manhandled into a standing position. His legs refused to accept his weight at first and he sagged for a second. This slight stumble earned him a swift blow to his back.
“Stop ya stalling and get ya selve up,” a gravelly voice said in broken Elberese. Yorn straightened as much as possible and concentrated on getting some circulation back in his lower extremities. He heard the snick of a blade as the bindings were removed from his ankles. He spread his legs apart a fraction in anticipation of what was coming next.
He was shoved hard in the back and told, “Get back to tha terlit. I know youse got a full bladder. I doan wanna have clean up youse shit.”
He was propelled in the direction of the push. He had no idea who these men were and why he was where he was. Wherever that was. He shook his head slightly trying to clear his thinking. His thoughts were jumbled and he knew that a powerful drug was used to subdue him. He had no idea what kind of conveyance he was on, how long he had been out, and he didn’t know where he was going. There, he thought, that made more sense. After a few stumbling meters he was halted at a hatch. He could tell it was a hatch because he heard one of his escorts hit some kind of control panel. When the hatchway opened he could hear a slight whistle of air, surrounded by a much deeper basso thrumming sound. Okay then. He was on a ship of sorts.
The man on his right suddenly jerked the hood from his head. Yorn blinked and squinted enough to finally bring his vision back on-line. He was staring at a small lavatory compartment. The man on his left used his knife again to slit the bonds on his wrists. As he was shoved into the head, just before the hatch was closed behind him, he caught sight of one of his assailants.
A Varson.
“Do ya bizz and we git ya oude,” a tinny voice said from a small comm stack.
Yorn shook his wrists and once his fingers were flexible he reached up and removed the tape from his mouth. Instead of throwing it away or flushing it into the toilet with his waste, he kept the used tape, pasting it on his chest out of sight. Confident that he could function the rest of his parts, he slid down his pants and relieved his bladder. He did not see any towels or paper so he held off on his bowels.
Once he regained his footing he tried the little wash basin in the corner of the all-metal head. He tried the left tap and got nothing. The right one yielded a few spurts of tepid water and he quickly palmed some of the liquid and drank sparingly. Next he got handfuls of water and splashed some on his face and neck. He used the tail of his uniform shirt to dry himself. They had removed his boots, his belt, all of his rank insignia from his collar. He never wore watches or rings or jewelry so at least he had not been robbed of anything valuable or worth losing sleep over because some distant uncle had engraved his name on it or in it.
His captors seemed sufficiently lazy enough to let him languish in this little compartment for as long as he needed to do his necessaries. No banging on the door telling him his time was up, no squawks from the little comm stack telling him to hurry it up. That was good, it gave him time to think. He regarded himself in the scratched metal mirror above the washstand.
Judging by the growth of his beard he estimated he had been out for at least thirty-six hours. He needed a shave. As he was rubbing his face he reached his neck and found the injection site. An angry red blister slid around under his fingers. He hoped they’d used a sterile needle and he was sure they were not professional at this sort of thing because the spot on his neck showed that the syringe’s plunger was already in motion when it had entered his neck, some of the drug irrigating the flesh around the entrance point.
There was not too much more for him to go on. He would have to be careful and not sound too aware, maybe pretend he was still under the influence of the drug when they came to let him out. He hoped they were not going to tape his mouth closed again or render him blind with that hood.
He spent the next minute flexing his muscles, stretching his torso and getting his limbs prepared for the eventual fight with his captors. He would con
centrate on finding a weak spot, finding a way to the driver of this little boat and perhaps commandeer it. Or make his way aft and fuck up the engine if he could. He was already prepared mentally and he knew that no matter the outcome of this adventure, no matter if his resistance cost him his life, he had to put up a fight.
If this was some kind of revenge issue from the Varsons, some boiled over hatred from a dozen years ago, then that would be a different story.
That would mean war.
* * *
Bayliss. Fucking Bayliss. Galuud had wanted to get as far away from the humans as was physically possible considering his forced departure constraints, but Bayliss? Come on, man!
He bitched and moaned to himself all the way during his journey to this miserable rock. Bayliss was a hard rocky planet with no redeeming qualities except it was loaded with platinum, nickel, iron, aluminum, titanium and other ores valuable to the humans. They had been mining this planet for almost two hundred of their years, sending their bounty-laden ships to Elber, Canno, Wilkes, and other outposts. Some of the supertankers, huge military transport ships with enormous cargo-ferrying capacities even jumped directly from Bayliss to that planet they called Earth. Their home world. During the time he had spent on Elber he had taken the time to learn as much as he could about these creatures. Their habits, their weaknesses, their ambitions. Part of his knowledge about the humans centered on their expansion crusades that had been going on for almost a thousand of their years. And the Fringes, the dusty, gas-filled area of this arm of the galaxy that served as the boundary between their planet-hopping empire and the peaceful Domain of the Malguurians, the Varson Empire as they had referred to it, were not the only places these humans had their hooks into. He had heard they were also expanding out the other way, toward an asterism they called Monoceros, and the rich hydrogen fields some three-thousand of their light-years from Elber Prime.
But perhaps he protested too much. He was lucky to get off Elber when he did. Only the casual nature of the Port Authority document inspectors allowed him safe passage on a civilian boat to Bayliss. All he had to do was say the magic word “business” to the customs agents on the dock and he was waved through without so much as a second glance. The humans were getting lackadaisical. When he first got to Elber he was scared shitless that his hastily put-together human disguise would not stand up to the intense military scrutiny at the dock. But Inskaap had given him explicit instructions as to which gate to pass through, which agent to show his travel documents to, which hand to palm the credit notes in. Five years later just about anyone carrying anything for any purpose could enter and leave the planet without so much as a cursory glance.
And the once mighty Second Fleet had almost abandoned the skies around the planet, allowing small craft to enter and exit Elber sovereign space at will. That was how they got that captured officer Yorn off the rock. A small orbital flitter, a rendezvous with a jump ship and poof. No more Commander Yorn.
Ironically, Yorn was headed to Bayliss, too. The fate of the fake Yorn he’d hung out to dry back on Elber was not on Galuud’s “Things To Worry About” list. He had gotten himself out and that was all that mattered.
The seventeen-hour flight was coming to a close. The ship was full of tourists and business people and some of the passengers had young ones with them. A few times Galuud had to stare down some human kids that seemed to be developing an interest in him. He slept some, read some from his portable reader, walked the observation deck some. Mostly he stayed in his seat and tried to be as inconspicuous as possible. He declined the in-flight meals as a matter of course.
Galuud ducked his head and looked out of the thick window, blast shutters opened for the first time since leaving Elber Prime. Off in the distance he could see the tiny F-class star the humans called Brophy-21. He paused to wonder how they decided on the star names, a question that up until this very minute he had failed to ask anyone after more than five years in their presence. It had hardly seemed important before. Then the ship made a small course correction and the planet itself slid across his line of sight. Some of the passengers clapped, some let out mild exclamations of joy or amazement, he couldn’t be sure which. A couple of children tried to squeeze into his row for a better look but he shooed them away.
Bayliss hung in the void like a scorched piece of green charcoal dotted with murky oceans. From this distance the planet was nothing more than an ugly marble with thin bands of wispy clouds encircling its equator and fanning out into gray tendrils at the higher latitudes. They were approaching from the dark side and the dirty-fingernail terminator increased in size and dimension until the lighted area was almost as pronounced as the shadow. A tiny spark of light near the equator came into view next and with another course maneuver the ship shuddered toward the left and the sparkling Port Authority dock.
It took another thirty minutes for the ship to align itself with the lower tiers of the port and suddenly with a groan of heavy mass being stripped of its inertia the ship came to a stop. The hissing of escaping gas and heat penetrated the hull as the Higgs Field bled away and finally a huge bump shook the transport when it contacted the waiting docking collar.
Galuud stood and looked around the cabin. He spied the compartment that held his bags and as soon as the kids settled down in his row he made for the stowage locker and was determined to be one of the first passengers off the gangplank.
He had things to do and people to see.
* * *
“The ship is standing by, captain,” Admiral Paine said. “Admiral Geoff has decided to carry on with the planned festivities on Bayliss. You and your crew will proceed as ordered.”
Uri Haad was alone with his boss in Paine’s office and the rest of his sequestered men and women were still in the building under heavy guard. As more of the intricate nightmare revealed itself the security measures were increased accordingly. Lieutenant Commander Tims had sent detachments to each of their respective dwellings and retrieved their personal items and packaged them for transport after a thorough inspection for listening devices or explosives. The hidden recording equipment had been found in his quarters in the BOQ and also over in Building Seven where Max and her son had been.
“Well, under the circumstances, I think that’s the prudent thing to do, sir. Getting off Elber right now sounds right to me.”
“Good. I think we have enough resources in place to find the agents behind this. A plan of this complexity had to have been years in the making, Uri. They even went to the trouble of surgically altering Varsons to look human. Insinuating them into normal human activities. Hell, one of those guys even worked on the base!”
The Nova Haven medical examiner had sent the admiral the autopsy reports on the two men found murdered in Queentown and even though he was surprised at the findings, Haad had not been upset by them. It just locked into place another piece of this tantalizing puzzle.
“And now we’re sure the Varson Empire is guilty of these crimes against the Fleet. Now I know why the Christi was targeted, why Yorn was taken. Revenge. Pure and simple,” Paine said.
Paine stood and walked to the window. His uniform shirt was blindingly white in the afternoon glare of light streaming into the room. Over his shoulder he said, “You know this comes at a bad time for the Second and the Third. We’ve just ordered over half of our blockade ships out of the Fringes and forwarded them to the Loop. To hunt down those worms. It’ll take weeks to countermand those orders, resupply the vessels and head them back toward Varson space.”
Haad joined him at the window. “Has Admiral Geoff given any thought to resurrecting the First Fleet? He could recall those ships from Canno and Wilkes and have some help out in the Fringes in a matter of days, not weeks.”
“It was discussed. Those old tubs in the First are not exactly what I would call help, captain. Most of the First is awaiting salvage bids and the few ships that are combat ready would not make the grade in today’s Navy. Remember, the First out of Elber was organized over
sixty years ago. Hell, half of that original armada is rusting away at museums and the other half is being used for target practice for the Second out near Bayliss. I hope we haven’t been caught with our pants down on this thing.”
“Okay, admiral, I grant you we have some scrap in the First. I know it, you know it. But do the Varson know it?”
Paine turned around and faced Haad. “Say that again, captain,” he said.
For the next hour they discussed strategy. Then Paine went upstairs and later hauled Haad up to the sixth floor and they discussed strategy with Admiral Geoff. Then Geoff called in Coni Berger and Captain Fraze, her staff lap dog. It took a lot of convincing but after a while even Berger was agreeable.
By the time Haad made it back to his waiting crew and exit plans were finalized, there was a new sense of excitement permeating the NAVFLT Headquarters building.
Chapter 24
The attraction between Sergeant Ken Royal and Lieutenant Maxine Hansen was instantaneous. Since the first time he had entered the conference room, since they had talked during dinner — a hasty affair at the Officer’s Mess last night arranged by Admiral Paine — until just a few minutes ago when he had returned to the group in the headquarters building, she had thought of nothing else but him.
The Belt Loop_Book 2_Revenge of the Varson Page 14