First Casualty (9 page)

“We're in bad shape. Falling back fast as we can. Lighten what ships you got and pile troopers in. Launch them as fast as you fill them.”

“How many troopers do we have to load on each ship? You offloaded seven hundred fifty-eight.”

“The Second got bled plenty. I don't know what we've got now. The gear's not worth the lift, but the troopers are the brigade. Honey, you got to get them back. With them we can rebuild. Without them, we're all dead.”

“Ray, you okay?” The voice went soft, no more the transport commander's.

It was the softness that did it, took the lie from his mouth and let the truth out through clenched teeth. “No, friend.”

“I could lift the Friendship, drop it down close to you.”

“Probably on my head, girl. No, we evacuate by the numbers. You fill up a transport, you launch it away from their damn base. We'll make it,” he ordered. “Captain Santiago, you out there?”

“Yes, sir.”

'Turn those carriers around as soon as they get back. Pull drivers from A company. Tell them their ticket out is one trip forward. You having any trouble?”

“Nope. Few hotheads want to go up and show the rest of you how it's done, but I got them taking care of the wounded right now. When are you coming back, sir?”

“On the last carrier.”

“I'll be driving it.”

“And I'll be waiting for you,” Rita whispered.

Major Longknife couldn't turn his head anymore. He didn't have to. The vision of a battle bravely started and badly wreaked was etched behind his eyes, never to go away. For two hours he waited as the remnants of the 2nd Guard streamed past. He should have ordered the artillery silent when it was obvious there was no pursuit, but it slipped his pain-wracked mind.

When Santiago loomed over him, he didn't resist the pain spray. The battle was over. He'd lost this one big.

* * * *

Trevor Hascomb Crossinshield the Ninth stripped naked. He needed to meet the most powerful men on one hundred planets. They were in the sauna; he had exactly five minutes of their time. If he took less, it would be accorded a virtue to him. He could not take more.

Wrapping a towel around himself, he slipped his feet into sandals and padded noisily toward his business appointment. He opened the sauna door only enough to slip in. These men did not suffer cold interruptions. He took the appropriate supplicant's seat on the lowest of the four tiers of cedar shelves, next to the hot stones. When asked, he would ladle water on them for more steam. He would do whatever he was told.

The room was hot.
How can they take the heat?
Not born to this life—or wealth—Trevor doubted he could stand the heat of the highest tier. He would, however, find a place along the middle tiers most comfortable. Searching for the one who had invited him, Trevor risked a quick glance at the upper tier. Steam billowed and drifted there, hiding the men's faces. No, one was a woman. Her towel open, she stretched out languidly along the highest shelf, forcing men to either sit closer together or move to a lower bench. Was she a “companion” on display? The body was sculpted, expensive. Earned or...

For a moment, Trevor caught her eyes. There was cold fire there, but nothing for him. He felt like he'd been hacked, the entire contents of his mass storage reviewed and not found worth the effort to format. Trevor snapped his eyes down, locked them on a floor tile and awaited notice. The room was silent; here he would get no dropped scrap of information to sell.
Are my five minutes ticking away?
Desperate, he forced himself to quiet.

“How goes our little war?” a familiar voice spoke from a corner of the highest tier.

“Your war, Henry, not ours,” someone in the opposite corner dared to interrupt, and interrupting, to correct—and to challenge. Trevor held his tongue.

“Edward, when all of humanity groans in birth, of course we will be there. We raped her fair and square. The little bastard will fall right into our tender clutches. Of course it is ours.” The voice held a chuckle ... empty of mirth.

“Thank you, Henry. I love your poetry. But let us not forget, the colony planets are throwing their full weight behind their tin dictator. On several fronts their Red Banner fleets advance, spewing their songs of 'One Humanity, United together. The only coin the sweat of the worker. The only just pay what you've made with your own hands.'“

“And I do love your poetry too, Edward, even if it is all secondhand. Yes, they do press us here and there, but they are like any new entrepreneur with a penny vision. They overreach, and just moments before they might have realized a profit, they go bankrupt. That is when we step in with a takeover bid. There is nothing they plant that we cannot reap.”

Trevor risked a glance at his patron. Heat swirled around him. Beneath his words were fire, enough to cut down a dozen CEO's of transplanetary corporations. Still he leaned back against the wall, talking coolly, body frozen in a posture of good cheer. Not even a finger twitched.

“You put much at risk.”

“Because you were blind, Edward. People seeped out to the frontier like water under a dam. And you ignored them.”

“They paid their bills. Living off the interest made you fat, Henry, and left them nothing.”

“Nothing, Edward. One moment you speak of fleets pressing in on us. Another moment you call them nothing. You have ignored the frontier worlds too long. It is time to bring them back into the wide river of humanity, to let them grow wealthy and comfortable like Earth and her seven sisters, like Pitt's Hope and the other two score that came after. The colonies must be brought into the family, not by some foot-stamping messiah, but our way. Peacefully, profitably, comfortably. There is no profit in surprises. Left long enough on their own, anyone can dream up a surprise. Edward, we must eliminate surprises.”

“And so you play with a war, Henry. Brute force follows no laws, physical or economic. The hounds of war nip at any heel they choose, not just the one you want. You gamble.”

“When I gamble, Edward, the fix is already in. Mr. Crossinshield, the fix is in, is it not?”

“Yes, sir.” Trevor wasted no time on the gulp he desperately wanted. His button pushed, he spewed his contents in words too rapid to be interrupted. “We have multiple contacts in all major and minor theaters of operations on both the colonial and Earth sides. Information is being received, collated, and analyzed daily. If President Urm's Unity Movement cannot be properly guided, we have subcontractors in place to cancel him.”

The woman rolled over, propped herself on one elbow, and crossed her legs. “And there is no one to take his place among the collection of thieves with whom he has surrounded himself.” She grinned. There was no humor behind it, no evidence of any feeling at all. “Of course, some of those thieves are our thieves. Very good, Henry.”

Trevor's patron opened his lips in an empty smile and went through the motions of a thank-you before turning back to the man across the room. “You see, Edward, this is a restructuring, not war. A growth of franchises that will be handled delicately. Before the next annual reports are due, we will have closed out our wartime contracts profitably and plunged into the next economic expansion fueled by the unmet needs of the colonies on the credit we extend, to managers we select.”

“If you are right. If these puppets are truly yours and if they do not slip their strings and discover a life of their own,” the questioner growled. His face twisted in a grimace, and he threw up a hand. He knew none of these people of power could hear his words. He had lost.

“I am always right. Thank you, Mr. Crossinshield. It is a pleasure doing business with you. We must talk another time of expanding our relationship.”

Trevor stood. “Thank you, sir.”

He left. In the cool of the locker room, sweat poured off him that had nothing to do with the sauna. When he could, he walked unsteadily to the shower. Under the cooling spray, he regained himself.
The fix is in. We have agents everywhere. We know what is happening.
It was a comforting mantra.

Four

There was nothing worse than being beached. Abeeb men had shunned exile to the land for a thousand years, since the first one set sail in a wooden dhow to cross the blue waters off the east coast of Africa . Well, Uncle Dula had chosen to squat dirtside until this war blew over. Mattim could not. Uncle Dula had seniority and twenty years of good solid profits; he'd be one of the first captains recalled when peace came again. Captain Mattim Abeeb had no such track record.

He'd leaped at the offer: command of his own ship at thirty. He should have looked closer at what he was jumping into. The routes he drew were deep along the rim of human space. He watched prices paid for his cargos plummet as competing bidders were replaced by Unity monopolies one offer, take it or leave it. And profit was a dirty word, rapidly elevating into a crime. Mattim could only wonder what the storekeepers were paying for his cargos—and who pocketed the difference.

As profits went down, expenses went up. Corporate groused about the Westinghouse fire control he'd bought, but Mattim and crew had been glad for it when they needed it. Maybe that was why his crew, every one of them, had signed with him when the
Maggie D
had been contracted for conversion to a Navy cruiser. They knew as well as he that the Red Flag Line wanted its ships back on routes as soon as the war ended. With luck, Mattim would have the
Maggie
converted back and making money long before Uncle Dula got his recall letter.

Assuming the Navy hadn't messed up the
Maggie
too badly—and they lived through the war. Big assumptions.

Mattim studied his
Maggie D
; staring down past his feet, out through the viewing port imbedded in the floor of the station's corridor to where she lay at Pier 12. She took some getting used to.
Maggie
was not the ship he'd left three months ago.

The blocky freighter he'd commanded for five years was gone. About all that hadn't changed was the thick ice of the dust catcher at her bow. She was now an even five hundred meters long, fifty added to make room for the second reactor. In doubling the engines to twelve, the stern had gone from a rectangle to something like an oval.
Better make sure the engines balance,
he thought to himself.

The hull was the major change. The blocks of thousands of standard containers were replaced by a smooth teardrop, no different from any Navy cruiser. She glistened, metal and ice armor reflecting back the dim light. Amidships, a turret popped up, rotated, then retreated, leaving a smooth hull. Laser guns, ready to boil someone else's armor, were his new business.

Squaring his shoulders, Mattim marched to meet the officers and crew that had breathed this different life into his ship.

“
Sheffield
arriving” blared the moment his foot touched deck plates. He returned the ensign's smart salute, saluted the blue and green flag painted on the aft bulkhead, and turned to find himself being saluted by a three-striper who hadn't been there a second ago. “We've been expecting you, sir. I'm Commander Colin Ding, your exec. Would you like to inspect the ship?”

Without waiting for an answer, his XO turned and began said tour. He followed the woman of medium height, medium age and medium Asian appearance, wondering if it had all been issued to her. The
Margarita de Silva y Rodriguez Sheffield, Maggie
to him,
Sheffield
to the Navy, was big, one hundred meters at her widest. Plenty of room for fuel tanks and weapons—and redundancies. The Navy was big on redundancy.

And people. He now commanded two doctors. Abdul still ran the galley, though a freckle-faced ensign was in charge. All told, the crew was five hundred strong in dozens of specialties, though four hundred were green as hydroponic goo. The balance was an equal number of old hands from the
Maggie
and Navy types.

Yes, the XO showed him a lot. Fuel storage, food storage, people quarters—everything about running a ship. Nothing about running a warship.
Interesting.

“Let's drop down to engineering,” Mattim suggested.

“It's about time to knock off for chow, sir.”

“Ivan was never first in line. Let's see.”

Reluctantly, the exec led off. The power plants for the merchant cruisers were still a fleet-wide problem. Until somebody figured it out, the converted cruisers were more of a danger to themselves than the colonials and Mattim commanded nothing but an oversize hotel hitched to a space station.

As Mattim expected, Ivan was at his console. From the rumpled state of his uniform, he might have been there all night. “There.” Ivan stabbed at his board. “There. That's what killed Ramsey's Pride of Tulsa. A damn spike. These dirtside generators throw spikes!”

“Then how come we're still here?” the exec asked as if every day she was greeted with the announcement she should be dead.

“ 'Cause I'm keeping that piece of shit on its own circuits. The
Maggie’s
power plant can generate enough to handle both plasma containment bottles. The juice from that mud-ball power plant can feed the guns. They got those huge capacitors anyway. A spike or two won't faze them.”

Ding rubbed her chin. “Staff want the plants crossfed so damage to one won't bring down any system,” she said slowly.

Ivan shook his head violently and tapped his board. “That's the last telemetry out of the Tulsa 's engine room. That's what I just got from our own plant. Dirtside, they hitch four or eight reactors together. They can swallow a spike and not lose their magnetic fields around the plasma. With just two here, the hit's too hard. The field comes down and the demon's out of the bottle. How many Tulsas do those idiots want? Just 'cause General Fusion's got a war contract for a couple of thousand of 'em is no reason for me and mine to get blown to bits.”

The exec looked at Mattim. “I can pass it along to squadron staff, sir. In a month we may get something back.”

“In the meantime, those poor damn marines keep getting pulverized,” Ivan rumbled.

“Let's talk with the chief of gunnery over dinner.”

“The other engineers wanted to know how my tests went.” Ivan grinned. “I've been passing them my results live. Bet this talk happens on a lot of ships.”

A gray-haired wisp of a commander with Howard on his name tag entered the wardroom as they did. “Afternoon, Captain,” he said, extending his hand. “I'm Guns.”

“Got a question for you,” and the XO launched into Ivan's idea. Ivan hovered, listening, nodding his agreement. His wife Sandy, Mattim's Jump Master from the old
Maggie
, joined them.

Guns stared at the ceiling as Ding finished. It was a long minute before he nodded. “I like redundancy, but I can see why you don't want to crossfeed the second power plant into the containment loop. No power is better than wild plasma. If you set up a feed from the first plant to my guns, I'd be happy.”

“Let's think about this before we pass it along to the admiral's staff.” Mattim concluded the discussion. “I want to make sure you're all one hundred percent behind it.”

“Speaking of staff,” the XO put in, “we have an invitation to dinner from the chief of intelligence to go over the 'big picture.' You, Captain, me, anyone you want to bring along.”

Mattim mulled the thought. Information was power; that he'd learned at his mother's knee. Since getting tied in with the Navy, he'd yet to get any briefing that was better than a five-minute browse of the news channels. Supper would be a good place to take this guy's measure. Mattim raised an eyebrow at Guns.

“No, thank you, sir. This evening I want to go over Ivan's report. Make sure that second plant's output is within limits. I expect they will be. We design our guns to be forgiving.”

Mattim glanced at Ivan and Sandy. He was shaking his head; she was nodding firmly in agreement. “He's been living in that damn engine room. A night out is just what he needs. Let me run him through the shower and he'll even be presentable.” Ivan growled, but went when his wife pushed him toward their quarters.

Mattim laughed, as he often did with those two. “Tell.. .”

“Captain Whitebred,” Ding supplied.

“There will be four of us for dinner.”

* * * *

Colin Ding nervously brushed a hand down her black dress. In her thirty years growing up Navy and serving in the same, she'd never been to an “O” Club as classy as this one. Or been in the company of a man as impressive as Captain Whitebred.

“The admiral wanted a proper club for the squadron's senior officers. I knew if we left it to the accountants we'd have some run-down slop joint. So I told the admiral to leave it to me. With a bit of private negotiating, I cut a deal with the proprietor. With a war on, he knew which way to jump.” Horacio ... he'd asked her to call him Horacio . . . guided her into the club as he spoke, his hand gently on her elbow, his fingers occasionally brushing her breast.

The Monaco was spectacular. He'd described his negotiations at length the evening he'd entertained all the XO's of the converted cruisers. It had been quite a night. Captain Whitebred held her chair as she sat. Ivan did the same for his wife Sandy; Colin had to wonder at an organization that allowed people to marry and stay on the same ship. She'd heard a lot about how merchies ran ships. Damn loose. Captain Abeeb settled into his chair with a familiarity that brought a remark from Captain Whitebred. “You've been to the Monaco before?” “A few times on other people's expense accounts.” “I assure you, service has improved and there will be no gouging of poor sailors.” Colin wondered when the last “poor sailor” had passed through the door of this place. Sandy gave a tight smile. “In war, one must make do.” “A wise woman,” Whitebred laughed. “Just what a merchant ship would need in accounting.”

“I do the jump navigation, Captain.” Sandy hid her scowl behind a sip from the crystal water goblet before her.

“Well, let us not talk shop tonight.” Whitebred's broad smile took in all of them. “As the lady reminds us, there is a war on. Let us seize the moments life affords us and squeeze pleasure from them where we will.” Whitebred's smile settled on Colin. The words, smile, and gentle way his fingers caressed her hand sent shivers up her back. Abeeb's tight smile was downright puritanical. Whitebred is not in my chain of command, and you gave this sailor the night off.

The meal, ordered by Captain Whitebred beforehand, was scrumptious. Drawn from a dozen planets, including Peking duck from Earth, it was a sensuous delight for the eye and the taste buds. Horacio kept up a running description, most of which she couldn't pronounce, much less follow, though Abeeb traded him line for line. And Horacio's hand always returned to gently stroke her's. His smile was always open, offering her . . . what? What every man offered? Or something more?

Over dessert and brandy, the war came up. Though the two captains orchestrated this part of the conversation just as deftly as the earlier repartee, it was not long before Ivan threw down his napkin. “Why are we fighting? All the frontier wanted was decent prices for its raw materials, reasonable prices for the stuff they brought from the developed planets, and an interest rate on their debt that wasn't just short of usury.”

“Usury.” Horacio chuckled. “That's a term I haven't heard since college. And what is usury, commander?”

“Charging those poor folks an arm and a leg.”

“All that the market will bear, wouldn't you say?” Horacio smiled as he settled his napkin tidily in place.

“Damn right,” the engineer almost spat. His wife rested a hand on his arm, patted him as if to soothe.

“Come, come.” Horacio leaned forward. “And what would you charge them, Commander? Nothing has a fixed worth. Its value is what the market gives it. They want, need, the products of the developed planets so they can develop themselves. The raw materials they provide are nice, but hardly worth the value they think, what with transport costs. Every developed system has mines that are hardly played out. We buy from the frontier as a kindness. If we didn't, there would be no way they could pay for the machinery and goods they need from us.”

Ivan snorted. “You can't believe that. What kind of kindness drives people to war? And a costly one. For the war taxes we're paying, you could lower a lot of interest rates, forgive a lot of debts.”

Horacio shrugged. “If you pay the Dane geld, you always get the Dane back. Right, Colin?”

“That's what my dad taught me. The Navy's here to keep bandits honest.”

“That's what I told my friends in the corporate world when I asked for an appointment to the Navy. Rough times call for the tough to get going. And what we do in these harsh times will be remembered.” He patted her hand and winked.

As the engineer opened his mouth, Captain Abeeb pushed his chair back. “It's been a delightful meal, and a pleasant conversation, but, Captain, I've got some technical issues I want to talk* over with my engineer. If you'll excuse us.”

“You won't be taking Sandra with you?” Horacio asked as the Jump Master also stood.

“Sorry, I too must get back to the ship.”