Fleet of the Damned (2 page)

Right. And if you believe that, my boy, there's some prime swamp land available at a dead bargain price on a Tahn prison planet.

Sten came slowly awake. He felt to one side and noted Lisa's absence. She was across the large main room of the houseboat, shuffling through her computer files for mail and phone calls.

"Bill," she muttered. "Bill, bill, bill, letter, bill, police union dues, letter… Clot! Knock it off, you guys. I've been on vacation."

"Anything for me?" Sten asked lazily. Since he had no home address—nor had he since he was seventeen—he had left word for everything to be forwarded to Lisa's place.

"Yeah. About fifty bleeping phone calls. All from the same guy."

Sten sat up, a nasty feeling growing slowly from his stomach to his throat.

"Who?"

"A Captain Hanks."

Sten walked over to her and bent over her shoulder, tapping the keys to bring up the file. There they were, all right: call after call from a Captain Hanks. And Lisa hadn't been exaggerating by much—there were nearly fifty of them.

Sten tapped the key that gave him Hanks's recorded message. He was a shrill, whiny man whose voice went from basic urgency to ten-alarm emergency. But the gist of it was that Sten was wanted immediately, if not sooner. As soon as he returned he was to consider any remainder of his leave canceled. He was to report to Imperial Flight Training.

"Drakh," Sten said.

He walked away from the computer and stared out the open window at the green waving forest, his brain churning. He felt Lisa gentle up behind him, her arms coming softly around his waist.

"I feel like crying," she said. "Funny. I don't think I ever have."

"It's easy," Sten said. "You just squint up your eyes and think about almost anything at all."

Sten did not report immediately as ordered. He and Lisa had a lot of good-byes to say.

CHAPTER THREE

T
he eternal emperor had definite ideas about a picnic.

A soft rain of five or ten minutes that ended just before the guests arrived added a sweetness to the air.

Said rain had been ordered and delivered.

He thought that a breeze with just a bit of an invigorating chill in it whetted appetites. As the day progressed, the breeze should become balmy, so the picnickers could loll under the shade trees to escape the warming sun.

Said gentle, shifting winds had also been ordered.

Last of all, the Eternal Emperor thought a barbecue the best form of all picnics, with each dish personally prepared by the host.

The Eternal Emperor scanned the vast picnic grounds of Arundel with growing disappointment as he added a final dash of this and splurt of that to his famous barbecue sauce. Meanwhile, all over the picnic grounds, fifty waldo cooks manning as many outdoor kitchen fires exactly copied his every dash and splurt.

Hundreds of years before, the Emperor's semi-annual barbecue had begun as a nonofficial event. He started it because he loved to cook, and to love to cook is to watch others enjoy what you have lovingly prepared. At first, only close friends were invited: perhaps 200 or so—a number he could easily handle with a few helpers. In fact, the Emperor believed there were many dishes that reached near perfection when prepared in quantities of this size: his barbecue sauce, for instance.

It was a simple event he could comfortably fit on a small shaded area of the fifty-five-kilometer grounds of his palace.

Then he had become aware of growing jealousy among the members of his court. Beings were irked because they felt they were not part of a nonexistent inner circle. His solution was to add to the guest list—which created a spreading circle of jealousy as far out as the most distant systems of his empire. The list grew to vast proportions.

Now, a minimum of 8,000 could be expected. There was no way the Emperor could personally prepare food in those proportions. The clotting thing was getting out of hand. It was in danger of becoming an official event—the likes of an Empire Day.

He had been tempted to end the whole thing. But the barbecue was one of the few social occasions he really enjoyed. The Eternal Emperor did not consider himself a good mixer.

The solution to the cooking was simple: He had a host of portable outdoor kitchens built and the waldo cooks to tend them. Every motion he made, they duplicated, down to the smallest molecule of spice dusted from his hands. The solution to the now-official social nature of the event, however, proved impossible. So the Eternal Emperor decided to take advantage of it.

He invited only the key people in his empire to Prime World, and he used any potential jealousy of the uninvited to his advantage. As he once told Mahoney, "It's a helluva way to flush 'em out of the bush."

The Emperor sniffed his simmering sauce: Mmmm… Perfect. It was a concoction whose beginnings were so foul-looking and smelling that Marr and Senn, his Imperial caterers, refused to attend. They took a holiday in some distant place every time he threw a barbecue.

The original creation was born in a ten-gallon pot. He always made it many days in advance. He said it was to give it time to breathe. Marr and Senn substituted "breed," but the Emperor ignored that. The ten gallons of base sauce was used sort of like soughdough starter—all he had to do was to keep adding as many ingredients as there were beings to eat it.

He dipped a crust of hard bread into the sauce and nibbled. It was getting better. He looked around the picnic area again. All the fires were ready. The meat was stacked in coolers, ready for the spits. The side dishes were bubbling or chilling, and the beer was standing in barrels, ready to be tapped.

Where were the guests? He was beginning to realize that either some of the beings he had invited were terribly late or they had no intention of coming at all. Already, retainers were putting tarps on tables that would obviously not be used.

Clot them! What's a picnic without a few ants? He refused to have his good time spoiled. The sauce, he told himself. Concentrate on the sauce.

The secret to the sauce was the scrap meat. It had taken the Emperor years to convince his butchers what he meant by scrap. He did not want slices off the finest fillet. He needed garbage beef, so close to spoiling that the fat was turning yellow and rancid. The fact that he rubbed it well with garlic, rosemary, and salt and pepper did not lessen the smell. "If you're feeling squeamish," he always told Mahoney, "sniff the garlic on your hands."

A few more gravcars slid in. Guests hurried out, blinking at the smoke rising from the fires. The Emperor noticed that they were gathering in tiny groups and talking quickly in low voices. There were many glances in his direction. The gossip was so thick, he could smell it over the sauce.

The sauce meat was placed in ugly piles on racks that had been stanchioned over smoky fires—at this stage the recipe wanted little heat, but a great deal of smoke from hardwood chips. The Emperor liked hickory when he could get it. He constantly flipped the piles of meat so that the smoke flavor would penetrate. In this case, the chemistry of the near-spoiled scraps aided him: They were drying and porous and sucking at the air.

Then he—and his echoing waldoes—dumped the meat into the pot, filled it with water, and set it simmering with cloves of garlic and the following spices: three or more bay leaves, a cupped palm and a half of oregano, and a cupped palm of savory to counteract the bitterness of the oregano.

Then the sauce had to simmer a minimum of two hours, sometimes three, depending upon the amount of fat in the meat—the more fat, the longer the simmer. The picnic grounds smelled like a planet with an atmosphere composed mostly of sulfur.

The Emperor saw Tanz Sullamora arrive with an enormous retinue that easily took over two or three tables. Sullamora would be a booster. The merchant prince was not a man whose company the Emperor particularly enjoyed. He didn't like the fawning clot, but he needed him. The man's industrial influence was huge, and he had also had close connections with the Tahn, prior to the current difficulties. The Emperor hoped that when the current difficulties were settled, those connections could be reestablished.

The Eternal Emperor had experienced many difficulties in his life—not to mention in his reign—but the Tahn had to be high up there on the lost sleep list.

They were an impossible people from a warrior culture that had been steadily encroaching on his empire. A thousand or two years ago he could have easily solved the problem by launching his fleets in one massive raid. But over time the politics of his commercial empire had made this an impossibility, unless he were provoked—and the provocation would have to be costly. The Eternal Emperor could not strike the first blow.

A few months earlier he'd had the opportunity to begin building a diplomatic solution to his difficulties. But the opportunity had been lost through betrayal and blood.

Who was that young clot who had saved the Emperor's royal ass? Stregg? No, Sten. Yeah. Sten. The Eternal Emperor prided himself on remembering names and faces. He kept them logged by the hundreds of thousands in his mind. Stregg, he remembered, was a vicious drink that Sten had introduced him to. It was a good thing to remember the young man by.

While he was waiting for the meat to simmer to completion, he could drink many shots of Stregg and prepare the next part of the sauce at his leisure.

There were many possibilities, but the Emperor liked using ten or more large onions, garlic-cloves—always use too much garlic—chili peppers, green peppers, more oregano and savory, and Worcestershire sauce. He had once tried to explain to Mahoney how Worcestershire was made, but the big Irishman had gagged when told that the process started with well-rotted anchovies.

He sautéed all that in clarified butter. Then he dumped the mixture into another pot and set it to bubbling with a dozen quartered tomatoes, a cup of tomato paste, four green peppers, and a two-fingered pinch of dry mustard.

A healthy glug or three of very dry red wine went into the pot. Then he added the finishing touch. He stirred in the smoky starter sauce that he had prepared in advance, raised the heat, and simmered ten minutes. The sauce was done.

He drank some more Stregg.

Two of his cooks speared an enormous side of beef on a spit and set it rotating over the fire. Meanwhile, a pig's carcass was being quartered and set turning. It was time to start the barbecue.

By now, the Emperor realized that all the guests who were coming were there. A quick glance at the tables showed that a full two-thirds of his invitation list were busy elsewhere.

The Emperor decided to check the list later. He would remember the names.

He got out his brush and started sopping the roasting meat with sauce. The fire flared with the rich drippings. A smoky perfume filled the air all over the picnic grounds as the waldo cooks followed his motions. Usually, this was the time when the Emperor would settle back for a lazy basting: a beer for him, a brush of sauce for the meat.

It was also a time when he pretended great indifference to the rapturous faces of his guests. His mood blackened as he saw the sea of faces tight and worried.

What were the Tahn doing, anyway? Intelligence was zilch. Mercury Corps had never been the same since he had promoted Mahoney.

"Clotting Mahoney," he said aloud. "Where the hell is he when I need him?"

The voice came from just behind him. "Fetching you a beer, Your Highness."

It was Major General Ian Mahoney, commanding general, First Guards Division. He clutched two mugs overflowing with foam.

"What the clot are you doing here? You weren't invited."

"Arranged some leave, sir. Perks of being your own CG. Thought you wouldn't mind."

"Hell, no. If you're gonna sneak up on a man, I always say, do it with beer."

CHAPTER FOUR

M
ahoney wiped the last of the sauce off his plate with the thick stub of garlic bread, bit into the bread, and sighed. He took a deep honk of beer and then squeegeed the plate with the rest of the bread. He popped it down and settled back.

The Eternal Emperor, who'd barely touched his own plate, was watching him with great interest.

"Well?" he said.

"Heaven," Mahoney said. He took another sip of beer. "Excuse me. Heaven, sir."

The Emperor took a small bite from his own plate, frowning. "Maybe a bit too much cumin this time."

Mahoney gave a deep belch. He looked at the Emperor inquiringly, and the man passed his nearly full plate over to Mahoney, who shoveled in a mouthful of satisfying proportions.

"No. Not too much cumin," the Emperor said. He leaned his chair back to catch the last warm light of the sun. The Eternal Emperor appeared to be a man much younger than Mahoney. Midthirties, perhaps. Heavily muscled—like an ancient decathlon champion. He let the sun soak in, waiting to hear Mahoney's
real
purpose.

Finally, Mahoney took one more swig of beer, wiped his lips, straightened his tunic, and sat up in near attention in his seat.

"Your Majesty," he said, "I respectfully request permission to deploy the First Guards in the Fringe Worlds."

"Really," the Eternal Emperor said. "The Fringe Worlds? I suppose you're worrying about the Tahn."

Mahoney just looked at his boss. By now, he occasionally knew when he was being toyed with.

"Yes, sir. The Tahn."

The Eternal Emperor could not help sweeping the picnic grounds with his eyes. The few guests who had bothered to show had left early, and the waiter bots were already cleaning up. In half an hour the area would be pristine—all broad lawns and rare azaleas.

The Eternal Emperor pointed to one of the flowering bushes.

"You know how many years I worked on those, Mahoney?"

"No, sir."

"Too many. The things love dry climates. Aussie deserts, that kind of drakh."

"Aussie, Your Majesty?"

"Never mind. Point is, I hate clotting flowers. Can't eat the SOBs. What's the damned use of them? I say."

"Exactly, sir. What's the use of them?"