The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III (8 page)

“Granted, but everything we’ve found so far has been quite minor.”

“So far. Kerad tore out one bulkhead in my stateroom and moved it back a meter, God knows why. Then she decided she liked it better where it was and put it back. One of the members of the work crew that did the job reported it to Chief Engineer Wellingham, and his hair practically turned white on the spot. If the
Duncan
had fired her engines while that bulkhead was out of position, at the very least the captain’s cabin would have collapsed. No great loss if Kerad was in it—but nowadays it’s
me
there. What else have they done without logging it? And most of these modifications have taken place in officer’s country. What did they do in the cabin next to yours that we don’t know about? Is there a pressurized standpipe they banged into? An electrical cable they tapped into and then didn’t reinsulate properly?

“You’re right, it’s a close call as to whether or not we should do the work ourselves in orbit—but it seems to me the risks of landing the ship are known, and therefore controllable—whereas—”

“Whereas continuing to fly the ship when it’s full of random potential faults is possibly more dangerous, and an open-ended danger. Very well, I see your point.” Tallen nodded, seemingly satisfied.

“Good, but that’s practically a side issue,” Spencer said. “What about your taking the
Banquo?”

Tallen leaned back in his chair and thought for a long moment. He wanted to command, desperately. All his life he had dreamed of having his own ship. Even if it had to be a destroyer, and not a cruiser. But was he capable of it? Spencer was right, he did tend to underestimate himself—but suppose this time he
was
as unworthy as he felt? Goddammit, there was no way to know unless he took the chance—and took the lives of the
Banquo’s
three hundred crew into his hands. “Very well,” Tallen said at last. “I can’t refuse a direct order. But could we possibly make it on a trial basis? Maybe for ninety days? Make it a brevet promotion. Let me write out a letter of resignation right now, and date it for then. At the end of the ninety days, you can accept or reject my resignation as you see fit.”

Spencer smiled, pulled open a desk drawer, removed paper and pen, and shoved them across the desk. “Fair enough. Write it up the old-fashioned way, in long-hand. That way it will stay off all the computer systems until the ninety days are up and you come back in here to watch me tear it up.”

Tallen took up the pen, scribbled a few lines on it, dated it, signed it, and stamped his thumb down on the ID corner, leaving behind his thumbprint as proof he had written the document. Swallowing hard, he shoved the piece of paper back to Spencer.

“Thank you,” Spencer said, smiling. He pulled a flat box out of the same drawer, stood, and stepped around the desk drawer. “Please rise,” he said. Tallen got to his feet and stood at rigid attention as Spencer opened the box, removed the commander’s insignia, and pinned them to Tallen’ uniform. He removed the Lieutenant Commander’s insignia and pocketed them. “I’ll just hang on to these myself, in case you suddenly decide to resign the brevet promotion too,” Spencer said. “You’ll have to come to me for the tabs, and I can talk you out of it.” He drew himself up to full attention and saluted Tallen. “Congratulations—Commander. In ninety days we’ll have a proper promotion ceremony—but right now the
Banquo
is waiting for her new master.”

Tallen looked startled. “Sir?”

“My AID heard me issue a direct order,” he said, grinning. “And my guess is my AID is smart enough to act on that order. AID, have you done so?”

“The crew of the
Banquo
have been notified, a work crew is packing Commander Deyi’s belongings, and a gig is being fueled and readied to transfer the commander to his ship,” the AID announced in a rather self-satisfied tone of voice.

Spencer laughed. “I guess you’d better get moving, Commander. Do good things.”

Tallen found himself blushing for some reason. “Thank you, Sir,” he said, saluting as self-consciously as any academy midshipman. He turned and left the room, and Spencer thought that perhaps there was just a bit more bounce in the man’s step than when he came in.

Spencer smiled and sat back down, glad he had been able to give a good man something he had earned. He knew he had gained an ally today, and was glad of that too.

Once they got to Daltgeld, he was going to need all the friends he could get.

###

Suss looked up from her desk when Al returned to his cabin. She was wearing the practical-looking coveralls again. Al had concluded they represented her real preference in clothing. The somewhat dour businesswoman and the nearly sleazy courtesan never made an appearance when she and Al were alone.

He had also concluded that she would have slept with him if he had made approaches early on. Then it would have been part of her cover story, part of her job. It was too late for that now, though. The two of them knew each other. She could no longer see him as a chess piece in the game she was playing. Al Spencer had become a person to her—the sort of person whose self-respect would not permit him to go to bed with a woman for the sake of a KT cover story. By now she knew he did not expect sex from her as part of her job—and neither of them seemed prepared for the sort of commitment that would make sex a meaningful contact instead of a charade in the nude.

Or maybe he was still too confused about his own life, and had wholly misread what he thought was the unspoken understanding between the two of them.

The hell with it, he decided. Maybe all he had to do was reach over and undo the fastenings on that coverall, and the night would be one of wild passion for both of them. Maybe so. But he wasn’t ready for any such thing. He certainly hadn’t forgotten Bethany—or made anything but the first and smallest steps toward recovering from losing her.

It didn’t help matters any that her cover as his courtesan obviously required that they sleep in the same bed. They slept side by side, and did not touch.

But even having her close seemed a healing—though disturbing—presence to him. At least he knew he was confused. Maybe that was a start.

And maybe it was time to get his mind on other things. “Good evening,” he said cheerfully. “How’s the homework coming?”

She looked up at him and smiled. “Pretty well. I always like this part of the job—studying a new place, sifting through the facts, sitting and thinking. I was always one of those annoying girls in school who got perfect marks because they loved to study. Never gotten over it.”

“Somehow I have trouble imagining you as a school child,” Spencer said.

“And I had trouble imagining you as a captain or a judge of the law—but ya done good today, Cap’n. I was watching on the monitor system. I’m impressed.”

“Good. Well, if you’re impressed with my authority and ability at the moment, maybe this is a good time to ask you more about our mission.”

“I’m being sent in because KT agents have disappeared, and we presume they have been killed. You’re coming in as a cover—and as backup. The theory is that KT agents are very hard to kill, and anyone who could knock two or three of us off without getting caught is a pretty fierce character indeed. Until tonight, I didn’t know much more than that, so I couldn’t tell you more than that.

“The thing is, everyone knows that the KT takes care of its own. There are legends—untrue but believed—that we have bombed whole planets down to slag in order to be sure of getting the guy who killed a KT op. We don’t seek to play that image down; it’s very useful to us. We really do try our damnedest against anyone who targets us. Officially, we do so on the theory that anyone crazy enough to take on the KT must be assumed to be a serious threat to public safety and peace. In practice, yes, sure, there’s an element of revenge. We’re willing to go to extremes.”

“Such as turning the Navy upside down for your own convenience.”

“True,” Suss said blandly, not at all offended. “Though this task force wasn’t doing anything worthwhile. Anyway. The idea is to keep up the KT image, as a deterrent to anyone attacking us again. Everyone knows what we’re capable of. How dangerous we are. So anyone gunning for us had best be strongly advised to have a good reason—and a strong hope of success—before taking us on. Something big, important, something very risky that’s worth taking the risk for.”

“So what’s going on in the Daltgeld system that fits that bill?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. As Tallen would say, not a goddam thing. From all reports, everything is fine. No problems at all. No supercriminals at large, no revolt against the Pact imminent, nothing. Now that we’re in-system, we’re picking up local news feeds, the sort of in-system chit-chat that never gets on the intersystem newsgrid. Santu’s been listening, and confirms that nothing out of the ordinary is going on. The biggest news is that the StarMetal conglomerate appointed a new chairman about six months back. Guy by the name of Jameson. He’s supposed to be a very forward-thinking, progressive sort of man. Youthful, vigorous. I’ve been trying to pick up any recent video or speeches from him, but he hasn’t been in the public eye too much recently. And that’s about it.”

Spencer looked her in the eye, and saw she was playing with him just a bit. “Except?”

“Except—not much. But Santu and I are working on the theory that something
is
going on, something big, something hidden.”

“And?”

“Well, if you sweep a pebble under a rug, maybe it’ll go unnoticed. But if you try to sweep a boulder under that same rug, maybe you won’t see the boulder—but you will see the bulge over top of it. We’re looking for that bulge. The secondary or maybe tertiary effects of whatever it is. Something big and complicated is bound to leave effects. And we might have found them.”

Spencer was starting to get a little impatient. Suss was obviously enjoying the chance to string her story out. He couldn’t blame her for that, after all the work she put into the research. “Go on,” he said.

“Money. Property. A lot of both changing hands around here. This local conglomerate called StarMetal is spending like a drunken sailor, buying up half of this solar system. All of it done very hurriedly, very quietly, through dummy companies. Obviously they are trying to keep it out of sight—but they’ve been spending so fast they’ve left traces behind—if you’ve got an AID as good as Santu to spot the traces,” she said, patting Santu affectionately. “Add to that the fact that the KT suspects that StarMetal is closely allied with the Haiken Maru conglomerate. In fact, I don’t see how StarMetal could afford to spend what they are, unless someone as big as Haiken Maru were backing them.”

“And the Haiken Maru are suspected in half a dozen nasty little plots against the effort at a smooth succession, now that the High Secretary’s been murdered,” Spencer said thoughtfully. “Governor Windsor and that bastard Merikur are in over their heads dealing with one uprising that seems to have HM’s fingerprints all over it, if you want one man’s opinion—and there is some dirty little dust-up on Palaccio. Supposedly the HM failed in a very blatant assassination of a government official who was standing in their way.”

Suss looked up at him in surprise. “I’m impressed. Again. You do keep up on the news.”

“You forget, I was an intelligence officer up until the KT decided to change my life. I have my AID track the subjects that interest me—such as Merikur.”

There was an uncomfortable silence for a long moment before Suss went on.

“Anyway,” she said, “Santu and I can’t find any clear reason for their buying all this property. In their buying frenzy we have an event without a reason, and in the disappearance of the KT agents, we likewise have an inexplicable event. Both of them major efforts and risks taken with no clear motive, with one event linked to StarMetal. And the StarMetal building on Daltgeld should be a lot easier to find than two dead agents. The KT central files list a deep-cover agent inside StarMetal.”

Spencer nodded. “It’s a place to start.”

Suss nodded unhappily. “But it’s not enough. Odds are that I can’t dig out whatever it is that’s happening, burrowing around by myself. The bad guys would just stay hunkered down. We need to try and flush them out, force them into activity in the hopes that we can spot them. We have to throw a scare into them—”

“And give them a target. I know. That’s what I’m here for.” Al felt his heart beat a little faster. He was scared, and knew he had every right to be. He felt his right hand twitch, automatically reaching for the nonexistent feel-good button. There was still a big part of him that wanted to reach for that escape, turn away from the hazards of the world and hide inside that mindless pleasure. He reached up and felt the knotted scar at the back of his head. The feel-good button was madness, he knew that. But was it any saner to invite a unknown number of faceless killers to take potshots at him? “What’s the plan?” he asked in what passed for a steady voice.

“Once we land, I’ll head out into town, and start talking to anyone I can find. Customs agents, store clerks, doormen. Idle chit-chat from the captain’s popsie when she’s out on a shopping spree. All about how my big brave captain is here to ferret out some nasty bunch of greedy conglomerate moguls who are trying to betray the High Secretary, and how my man is going to save the Pact single-handed. We can safely assume that there will be at least one or two opposition agents positioned to pick up my chatter. It should be enough to get them stirred up. If we’re lucky, it will shake them up enough to make a mistake, panic, and go gunning for you and blow their cover. Then I have to get to them before they get to you.”

Spencer tried to laugh, but it didn’t come out right. “You make it seem very simple. As simple as living or dying. And I guess it comes down to one of those two.” He leaned over Suss’ desk and switched on a link to an external view camera. Daltgeld hung there, a challenge staring back at him. “We’ll be there in a few days.”

Chapter Six
McCain

Spencer watched through the bridge monitors as the mooring lines from the dock were made fast, and the last of the tow lines fell away. The
Duncan
rode at quayside, a huge cigar-shaped bulk rising half out the water, taking up an entire pier and blocking the access to another. The harbormaster wanted compensation for that blockage, claiming it was depriving him of the work he could have been doing on other ships—though there was no evidence of other ships in the vicinity needing repair. In other words, he wanted a bribe in return for insuring that everything ran smoothly.