Kingdom's Swords

by David Sherman

  "Aye aye, Captain," the XO reluctantly conceded. He turned to the chief of the boat. "Chief, prepare a boarding party to consist of the captain and two volunteers."

  "Aye aye, sir, prepare boarding party! I volunteer," the chief, a grizzled old boatswain, added immediately.

  "XO," Commander Stanton laid a hand on his arm, "if I give the word, douse the Cambria immediately. Hank Tuit's captain of that vessel. I served under him as an ensign thirty years ago. If there's any chance he's still alive, I'm going to find out. I have score to settle with that old bastard." She grinned up at her executive officer. "I'll settle up with the navy afterward."

  The first blast shook the Cambria forcefully but did not damage any of her structure forward of the sternmost storage area. Minerva went into apoplexy, however, shutting off the damaged area and reporting damage loudly to "Brother Lordsday." When he did not respond, the system went dead again.

  Captain Tuit ordered everyone to remain suited until he was sure there would be no secondary blast from the propulsion unit. Then he saw the bolt that lanced out from the Banks's main battery. Again Minerva went wild, but after only a few seconds it was obvious there was no structural damage to the surviving part of the ship and her life support system was still functioning.

  "Did the bomb go off?" the navigator asked, a hand to his head where he had slammed it into his console. The hand came away bloody.

  "No, didn't you see that? We've been fired on by a navy ship! I've seen it often enough to know! A goddamned frigate! What the hell?" He was both wildly elated and deadly certain they would be next.

  Ambassador Franks, awkward in his spacesuit, staggered onto the bridge. "Captain, what is happening? Are we safe?" His voice sounded high and tinny over the suit's communication system.

  "I thought I told everyone to stay in place until I gave the word it was safe to unsuit?" Captain Tuit shouted. All he needed now was a damned civilian blundering around on his bridge.

  "Sorry, Captain, but I—"

  "Forget it," Tuit relented. He'd need all the help he could get in the next few minutes. "The ship is all right, but I've got to find out what happened to Conorado's team," he said. "Conorado! Jennifer! Bob! Come in!" he said into his throat mike. There was no answer.

  "Conorado's emergency transponder is functioning, Captain!" the navigator shouted. "It's down in what's left of Compartment Five!" Maybe that's all that's functioning, he thought. That there were no signals from the other two transponders was not encouraging. But he left these thoughts unsaid.

  "We can seal off Compartment Four and then go into Compartment Five and retrieve the, er, bring them back in..." Tuit's voice trailed off. He doubted anyone survived the first explosion, much less the second one. Tuit turned to Franks. "Mr. Ambassador, can you work the comm unit here? Sit down at the con and I'll show you. I'm leaving you in charge on the bridge, sir."

  "This is highly irregular, Captain!" Franks responded, but he eagerly sat in Tuit's command chair.

  "Mr. Ambassador," Tuit said dryly, "everything's ‘highly irregular’ about this voyage. I need you to keep in constant touch with us. I'm going to take all my crew to the fourth storage compartment, recover Captain Conorado, see if anybody survived the blast. You keep your eye on the viewscreen there. We might have visitors. Let me know if you see or hear anything. Don't be worried, this ship ain't gonna drift into anything, and if she does, there's not a goddamned thing anybody can do about it."

  "‘Visitors’?" Franks repeated, looking askance at Tuit.

  "Can't explain now, sir. You have the con." Tuit reseated his headpiece, gestured at his navigator, and then clomped off the bridge.

  Well, Ambassador Franks thought, I've got the con! "Steward!" he said to the empty air, "bring me a martini, please. Extra dry."

  Compartment Five was a shambles of ruined superstructure, loose cabling, and debris. All the ore and the entire hundred meters of the stern portion of the compartment was gone. "It's all out there." A crewman gestured toward the gaping hole that was now the "stern" of the Cambria. Tons of ore and other debris, mixed with what was left of the propulsion unit, floated in a long trail behind the ship. "Geez," another said, "that's gonna cost Sewall millions!"

  They located Conorado in a cargo supervisor's station, pinned under debris. He was unconscious but his suit had withstood the explosions. "Let's get him to the infirmary," Tuit ordered. "Give me a line. I'm going out there to see if I can find Jenny and Bob."

  "Captain!" Minerva broke into the net. "I have a message for you from the captain of the CNSS Sergeant Major Richard Banks!"

  "Goddamn," one of the crew said, "they must've deciphered the password those bastards set on her!"

  "Good to have you back, Minerva," Tuit said to the computer. He did not feel ridiculous to be talking to a machine as if it were a person. At that particular moment he felt Minerva was human, and he was glad to have her back on line. "What's the message?"

  "Captain!" Franks's voice came up on Tuit's comm unit. "Somebody's knocking at the door!"

  "That's the message, Captain," Minerva answered.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The last thing Conorado remembered was Jennifer shouting "Fire!" and then the world went dark for him until he awoke in the Cambria's infirmary, Hank Tuit standing over him, peering down anxiously into his face.

  "Lew? Lew, can you hear me?"

  "Yeah. Hank, did we do it?"

  "You did it, old jarhead, you sure did it." Tuit's face broke into a broad smile.

  "Jennifer? Bob?"

  Another face appeared, a middle-aged female. "Hi, I'm Commander Stanton of the fast frigate CNSS Sergeant Major Richard Banks. How're you doing, Marine?"

  Conorado smiled back at her. "I've never been so glad to see a squid—excuse me, ma'am, I mean a sailor—in my life. What about Jennifer and Bob, Commander?" She said nothing. He turned to Tuit. "Hank?" An anxious note crept into Conorado's voice. He was beginning to have that old, bad feeling again, one he'd had many times before after a firefight.

  "Well," Captain Tuitt responded, "we're looking for them, Lew."

  The sinking feeling in the pit of Conorado's stomach took a turn for the worse: Tuit didn't look at him as he spoke. "Help me up, will you?" he asked. He groaned as Stanton and Tuit lifted him into a sitting position on the examination table.

  "Minerva says you're okay, Lew, just bruised and concussed," Tuit said, trying to sound bright and optimistic.

  "How long's it been since I went out?"

  "Some hours," Commander Stanton answered. "I have several rescue crews searching this entire quadrant for survivors. Those blasts were quite violent."

  "‘Blasts,’ did you say?"

  Commander Stanton explained the sequence of events. "The blast you set off is what knocked you into the cargo supervisor's kiosk and probably saved your life. It was our blast, unfortunately, that emptied the ore in Compartment Five that your bomb weakened. Your friends went with it."

  "My boy! My boy!" Ambassador Franks bustled into the infirmary, his arms outstretched toward Conorado. "I have never witnessed such bravery! Such ingenuity in a desperate spot! I'll see to it that the commandant—the President herself—knows what you and those two unfortunate souls—" He went silent at the angry glance Tuit gave him.

  Conorado looked at Tuit. "Hank, they're dead, aren't they?"

  "Yeah, most likely. Their emergency transponders are not working. Their suits were punctured. You know what that means. We're looking for what's left of them."

  Jennifer Lenfen dead? Killed volunteering for something dangerous in order to save others. And that engineer, Bob Storer, he had family. "They went out like Marines," Conorado muttered.

  "Captain, I am sorry," Franks said, "very sorry. But you are a hero, my boy. You and your friends, heroes. You saved all of us. I promise you," he held a finger up, "that the world is going to know about the sacrifices that were made on this voyage."

  "Folks, would you leave me alone for a while?" Conora
do asked. "I'm not feeling too chipper just now."

  They filed out of the infirmary. Franks returned to his suite to prepare for evacuation from the Cambria to the Banks, leaving Tuit and Stanton alone in the companionway.

  "Most of your cargo can be recovered," Stanton said. "All in all, you came through this in almost one piece."

  "How the devil did you get on to us like that?" Tuit asked.

  Stanton told him.

  "Hmm. Commander, seems you might have exceeded your orders a bit there, huh?" Tuit smiled.

  "Maybe. Fleet might try to get my ass, but you know something—that ambassador, Franks? I think he'll stick up for what I did."

  "Franks? Damnit, Commander, he'll have to stand in line, and I'm gonna be first on that one!" They both laughed. Tuit put his arm around Stanton's shoulder. "I know you, don't I? When we get back on the ground and all this is settled, can I buy you dinner?"

  "Yes to both questions, Captain! Do you remember, oh, thirty years ago now, an ‘incident’ on St. Brendan's World? You commanded a transport then, the Oregon, and I was Officer of the Day in port at New Cobh. I was an ensign at the time."

  Tuit smacked his forehead. "Yes! There was a disturbance in a bar and you left your station to—"

  "Yes. And when I got to the place, I found our guys getting beat up by the local police, so the shore party and I—"

  "Waded into them! And you all wound up in the local jail! How could I have forgotten that?" He started to laugh.

  "Well, Captain, you chewed a big chunk out of my behind but you never made out a report. I really screwed up. Any other commander would've hung me out to dry. You saved my career by handling it yourself. I've never forgotten that."

  "Aw, hell, only what a good commander does when a good officer screws up. Besides, you were young, trying to prove yourself, and you had that goddamned nasty old chief bosun with you that night, what the hell was his name...?"

  Commander Stanton leaned over and kissed Tuit on the cheek. "I've wanted to do that for thirty years and say again, thanks."

  The old score was now settled.

  The survivors of the Cambria had not even disembarked from the Banks before orders arrived from the Ministry of Justice that all of them, passengers and crew, were to be confined at Luna Station until Confederation representatives could debrief them on the incident. The crew of the Banks was denied shore liberty and placed under the same restriction. That did not prevent the two old sailors, Tuit and Stanton, from having dinner the first night at Luna Station—and breakfast and lunch too.

  On the third day two very official-looking men assembled the Cambria survivors in a small theater on a sublevel of the station. "We are from the Ministry of Justice," one of them announced. "You do not need to know our names. This same briefing is being given right now to the crew of the Banks. Once we are done here today, your onward transportation will be ready to take you all home.

  "Now we want you to listen very carefully to what we have to say." The room was deathly silent. "You are to speak to no one about what happened on the Sewall Company's cargo ship, the SS Cambria. If asked, passengers, you will say something went wrong with the power plant. You don't know what, it happened so fast. Captain Tuit, you and your crew will say that your reactor malfunctioned. You lost four of your crew trying to save it. Since none of your engineers survived, nobody knows precisely what went wrong. Your computer logs have been adjusted. The propulsion unit blew up before the problem was fully diagnosed. If anyone presses you for information, the matter is under investigation by the Ministry of Interstellar Navigation and Commerce. You are unable to comment. Some of you will be asked by the press or even by relatives of the crew who died in the explosion. Refer any inquiries to the ministry."

  "What the hell about the five sonsabitches—" Tuit shouted.

  The speaker waved a hand. "They did not exist. I repeat, they did not exist. Your passenger manifest does not show them on board your vessel, Captain. Am I making myself clear?"

  A murmur went through the small group. "I am Ambassador Jamison Franks III, Inspector General—"

  "We know who you are, sir," the second man said coldly, unimpressed.

  "I am going to make a full report on this incident to my superiors, gentlemen. And I am going to single out Captain Lewis Conorado and two members of the crew for their courage and sacrifice—"

  "I appreciate what those people did, sir," the first man interrupted, "but there will be no report of any kind. I am sorry, truly, but that is the way it is going to be. This incident is a matter of Confederation security, and any of you who ignore what you have been told this afternoon will be subject to prosecution."

  "I will send a message to my superiors in the diplomatic service and we will see—"

  "Ambassador Franks, sit down! If you send any such message I will arrest you immediately."

  Franks sat down.

  "Now," the first man continued, "I have statements prepared for all of you to sign. By signing, you acknowledge that you understand what I have just told you and will keep your silence on this matter. Please step forward one at a time and we will be finished. Ambassador Franks, you first, please."

  Conorado was getting used to this sort of thing. He signed without comment. "There's someone here to see you, Captain," one of the men said.

  Two military policemen stepped into the theater. "Captain Lewis Conorado?" one, a gunnery sergeant, asked.

  Conorado knew what was coming next. "Yes, Gunny."

  "Captain, you are under arrest. Please come with us."

  The quarters they put Conorado up in at Camp Darby, a military installation on the outskirts of Fargo, were comfortable but not luxurious. He was on his own recognizance and free to roam the post but otherwise considered under arrest of quarters until the trial was over.

  A young navy lieutenant, Aldo Heintges, had been assigned as Conorado's counsel. Heintges had reddish-brown hair and boyish freckles on his face. He reminded Conorado of Lance Corporal Dean. Their first meeting, on the eve of the trial, went well.

  "Captain," Heintges explained when they met, "this trial is being conducted by the civil authority. But since its subject remains so highly classified, the court's venue has been established here at Camp Darby. Otherwise we'd all be going downtown. And also because the subject is so highly classified, it won't be a jury trial. There'll be one judge sitting on the bench and he will hear our arguments."

  "Yes, and that's why the trial's taking place in the comm facility: high security, no windows, no crowds. I'm thankful for one thing though: since all this is so hush-hush, I won't have an MP escort everywhere I go. Do you know the judge?"

  "By reputation. His name is Stefan Epstein. He's a no-nonsense type of guy, hard but fair. You may remember the war crimes tribunals after the revolution on Munhango? That was a highly emotionally charged trial, and Epstein was the chief judge of the tribunal. He proceeded strictly on the basis of facts and hard evidence, and while the panel's decisions displeased those who wanted hangings, they stood up to judicial review. It'll be just him, and no jury."

  "Goddamn, Lieutenant, no jury? I saw the list of witnesses the other side's calling. Hoxey's whole staff, the entire damned shift is going to be called as witnesses against me!"

  "One thing, Captain. You and I are going to spend a lot of time together in the coming days and we're going to get to know each other very well. Please call me Aldo?"

  "Call me Lew." They shook hands across the table in the tiny office Heintges had been given to work out of.

  "To answer your question, Lew, you've got to remember that her shift is now in rotation, so all those people are available. Now, I talked to General Cazombi and Agent Nast. They've been subpoenaed as witnesses for the defense, and they're here. You'll see them tomorrow. Anyway, I think on cross-examination Hoxey's witnesses will turn out to be good ones for you. Also, I have the sworn statements the judge advocate took from your men back at Camp Ellis. I'll introduce those on your behalf and the ju
dge will consider them. Captain, look. You did the right thing. I think I can get this whole mess tossed out."

  "Damn," Conorado muttered, "the bitch tried to get her hands on Owen, our mascot, to—to—vivisect him!" He shook his head. "Who's Hoxey's lawyer?"

  "A pair of prize assholes, Lew. They're Bureau of Human Habitability Exploration and Investigation lawyers. Hoc Vinces is the lead lawyer and his partner is a woman named Drellia Fortescue. They hate the military, as do a lot of the people who inhabit BHHEI." He smiled. "That's just another reason we refer to them as ‘Behind.’"

  "Well, some of them aren't that bad, Aldo. Hoxey's husband, for instance. Strange match there." He shook his head.

  "I get that impression too, but beware of these shysters. They'll pull every legal trick in the book to make you look bad. They're good at that. I've never gone up against them myself, but I know them by reputation. You're better off without a jury trial because Epstein won't be swayed by any theatrics or legal maneuvers." He paused a moment. "Look, Lew, I've got to tell you this. You are entitled to your own consul. I was appointed by the navy to defend you, and I want to, but you can pick anyone you'd like to do the job. I'm not a prize trial lawyer. Oh, I've done plenty of court-martials, but I went into the navy as soon as I passed my bar exams. This'll be my first time in a civil court on a criminal case. You need to know that."

  "I 'preciate that, Aldo. I've sat on general courts-martial boards."

  "If you pick a civilian counsel, you'll have to pay—"

  "Yes. But I can pick anybody, can't I? I mean, I don't have to pick a lawyer, even."

  "Yes, but I strongly advise you, pick a good lawyer."

  "Aldo, I've got a lawyer and I think he's a good one—you. But I want someone else on my side when we go into court."

  Heintges blushed. "Thanks, Lew. I got myself a damned fine client, if you want to know. So who you got in mind to join us?"

  "Name's Hank Tuit."

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  "What kind of monsters did this?"