The warrior's apprentice (18 page)

He dropped back for a quick word with Baz.

“Do me a favor, Commander Jesek, would you? Stick close to Elena and make sure she keeps her head down. She’s, uh, a little excited.”

“Absolutely, my lord,” Jesek nodded emphatically. “I’d follow her anywhere.”

“Um,” said Miles. That hadn’t been exactly what he’d meant to convey.

“My lord,” Baz added, then hesitated and lowered his voice. “This, ah, commander business—you didn’t mean that as a real promotion, did you? It was for show, right?” He jerked his head toward the mercenaries, now being counted off into assault groups by Thorne.

“It’s as real as the Dendarii Mercenaries,” Miles replied, not quite able to manage an outright lie to his leigeman.

Baz’s eyebrows lifted. “And what does that mean?”

“Well... My fa—a person I knew once said that meaning is what you bring to things, not what you take from them. He was talking about Vor, as it happened.” Miles paused, then added, “Carry on, Commander Jesek.”

Baz’s eyes glinted amusement. He came to attention and returned Miles an ironic, deliberate salute. “Yes, sir—Admiral Naismith.”

Miles, dogged by Bothari, returned to the mercenaries’ tactics room to monitor the battle channels alongside Auson and the communications officer. Daum remained posted in the control room with the engineering technician who was substituting for the dead pilot, to guide them into the docking station. Now Miles really did chew his nails. Auson clicked the plastic immobilizers on his arms together in a nervous tattoo, the limit of their motion. They caught each other, looking sideways simultaneously.

“What would you give to be out there, Shorty?”

Miles hadn’t realized his anguish was so transparent. He did not even bother to be offended by the nickname. “About fifteen centimeters of height, Captain Auson,” he replied, wistfully frank.

The breath of a genuine laugh escaped the mercenary officer, as if against his will. “Yeah.” His mouth twisted in agreement. “Oh, yeah...”

Miles watched, fascinated, as the communications officer began pulling in telemetry from the assault group’s battle armor. The holovid screen, split to display sixteen individuals’ readouts at once, was a confetti-like confusion. He framed a cautious remark, hoping to get more information without revealing his own ignorance.

“Very nice. You can see and hear what each of your men are seeing and hearing.” Miles wondered which information bits were the key ones. A trained person could tell at a glance, he was sure. “Where was it built? I’ve, ah—never seen this particular model.”

“Illyrica,” said Auson proudly. “The system came with the ship. One of the best you can buy.”

“Ah... Which one is Commander Bothari?”

“What was her suit number?”

“Six.”

“She’s at the upper right of the screen. See, there’s the suit number, keys for visual, audio, their suit-to-suit battle channels, our ship-to-suit battle channels—we can actually control the servos on any suit right from here.”

Both Miles and Bothari studied the display intently. “Wouldn’t that be a bit confusing for the individual, to be suddenly overridden?” Miles asked.

“Well, you don’t do that too often. It’s supposed to be for things like operating the suit medkits, pulling back the injured... To tell the truth, I’m not completely sold on that function. The one time I was on this end and tried to pull out a wounded man, his armor was so damaged by the blast that got him, it barely worked at all. I lost most of the telemetry—found out why, when we mopped up. His head had been blown off. I’d spent twenty frigging minutes walking a corpse back through the airlocks.”

“How often have you used the system?” Miles asked.

Auson cleared his throat. “Well, twice, actually.” Bothari snorted; Miles raised an eyebrow. “We were on that damned blockade duty so long,” Auson hastened to explain. “Everybody likes a bit of easy work, sure, but... Maybe we were on it too long.”

“That was my impression, too,” Miles agreed blandly. Auson shifted uncomfortably, and returned his attention to his tactics displays.

They were on the verge of docking. The assault groups were poised, ready. The RG 132 was maneuvering into a parallel bay, lagging behind; the Pelians had cannily instructed the warship to dock first, no doubt planning to pick off the unarmed freighter at their leisure. Miles wished desperately that he’d had some pre-arranged code by which to warn Mayhew, still manning the freighter alone, what was up. But without scrambled communications channels he risked tipping their hand to the listening Pelians. Hopefully, Thorne’s surprise attack would pull whatever troops were waiting away from the RG 132.

The moment’s silence seemed to stretch unbearably. Miles finally managed to pick out the medical readouts from the battle armor. Elena’s pulse rate was an easy 80 beats a minute. Jesek’s, beside her, was running about 110. Miles wondered what his own was. Something astronomical, by the feel of it.

“Does the opposition have anything like this?” asked Miles suddenly, an idea beginning to boil up in his mind. Perhaps he could be more than an impotent observer....

“The Pelians don’t. Some of the more advanced ships in our—in the Oseran fleet do. That pocket dreadnought of Captain Tung’s, for instance. Betan-built.” Auson emitted an envious sigh. “He’s got everything.”

Miles turned to the communications officer. “Are you picking up anything like that from the other side? Anybody waiting in the docking bay in battle armor?”

“It’s scrambled,” said the communications officer, “but I’d guess our reception committee to run about thirty individuals.” Bothari’s jaw tightened at this news.

“Thorne getting this?” asked Miles.

“Of course.”

“Are they picking up ours?”

“Only if they’re looking for it,” said the communications officer. “They shouldn’t be. We’re tight-beamed and scrambled too.”

“Two to one,” muttered Auson unhappily. “Nasty odds.”

“Let’s try and even it up,” said Miles. He turned to the communications officer. “Can you break their codes, get into their telemetry? You have the Oseran codes, don’t you?”

The communications officer looked suddenly thoughtful. “It doesn’t work exactly that way, but . . .” his sentence trailed off in his absorption with his equipment.

Auson’s eye lit. “You thinking of taking over their suits? Walking them into walls, having them shoot each other—” the light went out. “Ah, hell—they’ve all got manual overrides. The second they figure out what’s going on, they’ll cut us off. It was a nice idea, though.”

Miles grinned. “We won’t let them figure it out, then. We’ll be subtle. You think too much in terms of brute force, Trainee Auson. Now, brute force has never been my strong suit—”

“Got it!” the communications officer cried. The holovid plates threw up a second display beside the first. “There’s ten of them over there with full-feedback armor. The rest seem to be Pelians—their armor only has comm links. But there are the ten.”

“Ah! Beautiful! Here, Sergeant, take over our monitors.” Miles moved to the new station and stretched his fingers, like a concert pianist about to play. “Now, I’ll show you what I mean. What we want to do is simulate a lot of little, tiny suit malfunctions...” he zeroed in on one soldier. Medical telemetry—physiological support—there. “Observe.”
 
He pinpointed the reservoir from the man’s pilot relief tube, already half full. “Must be a nervous sort of fellow—” He set it to backwash at full power, and checked the audio transmitter. Savage swearing filled the air briefly, overridden by a snarl calling for radio silence. “Now, there is one distracted soldier. And there’s not a thing he can do about it until he gets somewhere he can take the suit off.”

Auson, beside him, choked with laughter. “You deviousminded little bastard! Yes, yes!” He pounded his feet, in lieu of his hands, and swung about in his own seat. He called up the readings from another soldier, pecking out the commands slowly with his few working fingertips.

“Remember,” cautioned Miles, “subtle.”

Auson, still cackling, muttered “Right.” He bent over his control panel. “There. There...” He sat up, grinning. “Every third servo command now operates on a half-second time lag, and his weapons will fire ten degrees to the right of where he aims them.”

“Very good,” Miles applauded. “We’d better save the rest until they’re in critical positions, not tip our hand with too much too soon.”

“Right.”

The ship was moving closer, closer to the docking station. The enemy troops were preparing to board through the normal flex tubes.

Suddenly, Thorne’s assault groups exploded from the dockside airlocks. Magnetic mines were hastily fired onto the station hull, where they flared like sparks burning holes in a rug. Thorne’s mercenaries jumped the gap and poured through. The enemy’s radio silence burst into shocked chaos.

Miles hummed over his readouts. An enemy officer turned her head to look over her shoulder, calling orders to her platoon; Miles promptly locked the helmet in its position of maximum torsion, and the Oseran’s head perforce with it. He picked out another soldier, in a corridor his own people had not yet reached, and locked his suit’s built-in heavy-duty plasma arc into full-on. Fire flared wildly from the man’s hand at his surprised reflexive recoil, spraying floor, ceiling, and comrades.

Miles paused to glance over to Elena’s readouts. A corridor was flowing past at high speed on the visual. It spun wildly as she used her suit’s jets to brake. The artificial gravity was evidently now shut down in the docking station. An automatic air seal had clanged shut, blocking the corridor. She stopped her spin, aimed, and blasted a hole in it with her plasma arc. She flung herself through it as, at the same moment, an enemy soldier on the other side did likewise. They met in a confused scrambling grapple, servos screaming at the overload demands.

Miles searched frantically for the enemy among the ten readouts, but he was a Pelian. Miles had no access to his suit. His heart pounded in his ears. There was another view of the fight between Elena and the Pelian on the screens; Miles had a dizzy sense of being in two places at once, as if his atman had left his body, then realized he was looking at them through another Oseran’s suit. The Oseran was raising his weapon to fire—he couldn’t miss—

Miles called up the man’s medkit and fired every drug in it into the man’s veins at once. The audio transmitted a shuddering gasp; the heartbeat readout jumped crazily and then registered fibrillation. Another figure— Baz?—in the Ariel’s armor rolled through the gash in the air seal, firing as he flew. The plasma washed over the Oseran, interrupting transmission.

“Son-of-a-bitch!” Auson screamed suddenly at Miles’s elbow. “Where in hell did he come from?”

Miles thought at first he was referring to the armored soldier, then followed the direction of Auson’s gaze to another screen, showing space opposite the docking station.

Looming up behind them was a large Oseran warship.

CHAPTER TWELVE

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Miles swore in frustration. Of course! Oseran fullfeedback space armor logically implied an Oseran monitor nearby. He should nave realized it instantly. Fool he was, to have simply assumed the enemy was being directed from inside the docking station. He ground his teeth in chagrin. He had totally forgotten, in the overwhelming excitement of the attack, in his particular terror for Elena, the first principle of larger commands: don’t get balled up in the little details. It was no consolation that Auson appeared to have forgotten it too.

The communications officer hastily abandoned the game of suit sabotage and returned to his proper post. “They’re calling for surrender, sir,” he reported.

Miles licked dry lips, and cleared his throat. “Ah— suggestions, Trainee Auson?”

Auson gave him a dirty look. “It’s that snob Tung. He’s from Earth, and never lets you forget it. He has four times our shielding and firepower, three times our acceleration, three times our crew, and thirty years experience. I don’t suppose you’d care to consider surrender?”

“You’re right,” Miles said after a moment. “I don’t care for it.”

The assault on the docking station was nearly over. Thorne and company were already moving into adjoining structures for the mopping-up. Victory swallowed so swiftly by defeat? Unbearable. Miles groped vainly in the pit of his inspiration for a better idea.

“It’s not very elegant,” he said at last, “but we’re at such incredibly short range, it’s at least possible—we could try to ram them.”

Auson mouthed the words: my ship... He found his voice. “My ship! The finest technology Illyrica will sell, and you want to use it for a frigging medieval battering ram? Shall we boil some oil and fling it at ‘em, while we’re at it? Throw a few rocks?” His voice went up an octave, and cracked.

“I bet they wouldn’t expect it,” offered Miles, a little quelled.

“I’ll strangle you with my bare hands—” Auson, trying to raise them, rediscovered the limits of his motion.

“Uh, Sergeant,” Miles called, retreating before the rapidly breathing mercenary captain.

Bothari uncoiled from his chair. His narrow eyes mapped Auson coldly, like a coroner planning his first cut.

“It’s got to be at least tried,” Miles reasoned.

“Not with my ship you don’t, you little—” Auson’s language sputtered into body language. His balance shifted to free one foot for a karate kick.

“My God! Look!” cried the communications officer.

The RG 132, torpid, massive, was rolling away from the docking station. Its normal space drives blared at full power, giving it the usual acceleration of an elephant swimming in molasses.

Auson dropped, unheeded, from Miles’s attention. “The RG 132, loaded, has four times the mass of that pocket dreadnought,” he breathed.

“Which is why it flies like a pig and costs a fortune in fuel to move!” yelled Auson. “That pilot officer of yours is crazy if he thinks he can outrun Tung—”

“Go, Arde! “ cried Miles, jumping up and down. “Perfect! You’ll pin him right up against that smelting unit—”

“He’s not—” began Auson. “Son-of-a-bitch! He is!”

Tung, like Auson, was apparently late in divining the bulk freighter’s true intentions. Verniers began to flare, to rotate the warship into position to thrust toward open space. The dreadnought got one shot off, which was absorbed with little visible effect in the freighter’s cargo area.

Then, almost in slow motion, with a kind of crazy majesty, the RG 132 lumbered into the warship—and kept going. The dreadnought was nudged into the huge smeltery. Projecting equipment and surface housings snapped and spun off in all directions.

Action calling for reaction, after an aching moment the smeltery heaved back. A wave of motion passed down its adjoining structures, like a giant’s game of crack-the-whip. Smashed edges of the dreadnought were caught up on the smeltery, thoroughly entangled. Gaudy chemical fires gouted here and there into the vacuum.

The RG 132 drifted off. Miles stood before the tactics room screen and stared in stunned fascination as half the freighter’s outer hull delaminated and peeled into space.

The RG 132 was the final detail to be mopped up in the capture of the metals refinery. Thorne’s commandos smoked the last of the Oserans out of their crippled ship, and cleared the outlying structures of resisters and refugees. The wounded were sorted from the dead, prisoners taken under guard, booby traps detected and deactivated, atmosphere restored in key areas. Then, at last, the manpower and shuttles could be spared to warp the old freighter into the docking station.

A smudged figure in a pressure suit stumbled out of the flex tube into the loading bay.

“They’re bent! They’re bent!” cried Mayhew to Miles, pulling off his helmet. His hair stuck out in all directions, plastered by dried sweat.

Baz and Elena strode up to him, looking, with their helmets off, like a pair of dark knights after the tournament. Elena’s hug pulled the pilot off his feet; from Mayhew’s suffused look, Miles guessed she was still having a little trouble with her servos. “It was great, Arde!’ she laughed.

“Congratulations,” added Baz. “That was the most remarkable tactical maneuver I’ve ever seen. Beautifully calculated trajectory—your impact point was perfect. You hung him up royally, but without structural damage—I’ve just been over it—with a few repairs, we’ve captured ourselves a working dreadnought!’

Beautiful?” said Mayhew. “Calculated? You’re as crazy as he is—” he pointed at Miles. “As for damage— look at it!” He waved over his shoulder in the direction of the RG 132.

“Baz says they have the equipment to rig some sort of hull repairs at this station,” Miles soothed. “It’ll delay us here for a few more weeks, which I don’t like any more than you do, but it can be done. God help us if anybody asks us to pay for it, of course, but with luck I should be able to commandeer—”

“You don’t understand!” Mayhew waved his arms in the air. “They’re bent. The Necklin rods.”

The body of the jump drive, as the pilot and his viral control circuitry was its nervous system, was the pair of Necklin field generator rods that ran from one end of the ship to the other. They were manufactured, Miles recalled, to tolerances of better than one part in a million.

“Are you sure?” said Baz. “The housings—”

“You can stand in the housings and look up the rods and see the warp. Actually see it! They look like skis!” Mayhew wailed.

Baz let his breath trickle out in a hiss between his teeth.

Miles, although he thought he already knew the answer, turned to the engineer. “Any chance of repairing?”

Baz and Mayhew both gave Miles much the same look.

“By God, you’d try, wouldn’t you?” said Mayhew. “I can see you down there now, with a sledgehammer—”

Jesek shook his head regretfully. “No, my lord. My understanding is the Felicians aren’t up to jump ship production on either the biotech or the engineering side. Replacement rods would have to be imported—Beta Colony would be closest—but they don’t manufacture this model any more. They would have to be specially made, and shipped, and—well, I estimate it would take a year and cost several times the original value of the RG 132.”

“Ah,” said Miles. He stared rather blankly through the plexiports at his shattered ship.

“Couldn’t we take the Ariel?” began Elena. “Break through the blockade, and—” she stopped, and flushed slightly. “Oh. Sorry.”

The murdered pilot’s ghost breathed a cold laugh in Miles’s ear. “A pilot without a ship,” he muttered under his breath, “a ship without a pilot, cargo not delivered, no money, no way home...” He turned curiously to Mayhew. “Why did you do it, Arde? You could have just surrendered peaceably. You’re Betan, they’d have to have treated you all right...”

Mayhew looked around the docking bay, not meeting Miles’s eyes. “Seemed to me that dreadnought was about to blow you all into the next dimension.”

“True. So?”

“So—well—it didn’t seem to me a, a right and proper Armsman ought to be sitting on his ass while that was going on. The ship itself was the only weapon I had. So I aimed it, and—” he mimed a trigger with his finger, and fired it.

He then inhaled, and added with more heat, “But you never warned me, never briefed—I swear if you ever pull a trick like that again, I’ll, I’ll—”

A ghostly smiled tinged Bothari’s lips. “Welcome to my lord’s service—Armsman.”

Auson and Thorne appeared at the other end of the docking bay. “Ah, there he is, with the whole Inner Circle,” said Auson. They bore down upon Miles.

Thorne saluted. “I have the final totals now, sir.”

“Um—yes, go ahead, Trainee Thorne.” Miles pulled himself to attentiveness.

“On our side, two dead, five injured. Injuries not too serious but for one bad plasma burn—she’ll be needing a pretty complete facial regeneration when we get to proper medical facilities—”

Miles’s stomach contracted. “Names?”

“Dead, Deveraux and Kim. The head burn was Elli— uh, Trainee Quinn.”

“Go on.”

“The enemy’s total personnel were 60 from the Triumph, Captain Tung’s ship—twenty commandos, the rest technical support—and 86 Pelians of whom 40 were military personnel and the rest techs sent to re-start the refinery. Twelve dead, 26 injured moderate-to-severe, and a dozen or so minor injuries.

“Equipment losses, two suits of space armor damaged beyond repair, five repairable. And the damages to the RG 132, I guess— “ Thorne glanced up through the plexiports; Mayhew sighed mournfully.

“We captured, in addition to the refinery itself and the Triumph, two Pelian inner-system personnel carriers, ten station shuttles, eight two-man personal flitters, and those two empty ore tows hanging out beyond the crew’s quarters. Uh—one Pelian armed courier appears to have—uh— gotten away.” Thorne’s litany trailed off; the lieutenant appeared to be watching Miles’s face anxiously for his reaction to this last bit of news.

“I see.” Miles wondered how much more he could absorb. He was growing numb. “Go on.”

“On the bright side—”

There’s a bright side? thought Miles.

“—we’ve found a little help for our personnel shortage problem. We freed 23 Felician prisoners—a few military types, but mostly refinery techs kept working at gunpoint until their Pelian replacements could arrive. A couple of them are a little messed up—”

“How so?” Miles began, then held up a hand. “Later. I’ll—I’ll be making a complete inspection.”

“Yes, sir. The rest are able to help out. Major Daum’s pretty happy.”

“Has he been able to get in contact with his command yet?”

“No, sir.”

Miles rubbed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, and squeezed his eyes shut, to contain the throbbing in his head.

A patrol of Thorne’s weary commandos marched past, moving a batch of prisoners to a more secure location. Miles’s eye was drawn to a squat Eurasian of about fifty in torn Oseran grey-and-whites. In spite of his battered and discolored face and painful limp, he maintained a hard-edged alertness. That one looks like he could walk through walls without space armor, Miles thought.

The Eurasian stopped abruptly. “Auson!” he cried. “I thought you were dead!” He towed his captors toward Miles’s group; Miles gave the anxious guard a nod of permission.

Auson cleared his throat. “Hello, Tung.”

“How did they take your ship without—” the prisoner began, and stopped, as he assimilated Thorne’s armor, Auson’s—in light of his immobilized arms, decorative— sidearm, their lack of guards. His expression of amazement changed to hot disgust. He struggled for words. “I might have known,” he choked at last. “I might have known. Oser was right to keep you two clowns as far away from the real combat as possible. Only the comedy team of Auson and Thorne could have captured themselves.”

Auson’s lips curled back in a snarl. Thorne flashed a thin, razor-edged smile. “Hold your tongue, Tung,” it called, and added in an aside to Miles, “If you knew how many years I’ve been waiting to say that—”

Tung’s face flushed a dark bronze-purple, and he shouted back, “Sit on it, Thorne! You’re equipped for it—”

They both lunged forward simultaneously. Tung’s guards clubbed him to his knees; Auson and Miles grabbed Thorne’s arms. Miles was lifted off his feet, but between them they managed to check the Betan hermaphrodite.

Miles intervened. “May I point out, Captain Tung, that the—ah—comedy team has just captured you?”

“If half my commandos hadn’t been trapped by that sprung bulkhead—” Tung began hotly.

Auson straightened, and smirked. Thorne stopped flexing on its feet. United at last, thought Miles, by the common enemy... Miles breathed a small. “Ha!”, as he spotted his opportunity to finally put the disbelieving and suspicious Auson in the palm of his hand.

“Who the hell is that little mutant?” Tung muttered to his guard.

Miles stepped forward. “In fact, you have done so well, Trainee Thorne, that I have no hesitation in confirming you in your brevet command. Congratulations, Captain Thorne.”