Commodore (23 page)

Well, then
Javelin
must be doing her job very well indeed!

I smiled for an instant at the thought, then caught myself mid-stream. It wasn't that I needed to fear being seen; the respirator took care of that. But the emotion didn't fit in well with my overall mood. I'd failed here, I had to remind myself severely. Failed utterly, at a massive cost in lives lost. If
Javelin
was having a particularly good cruise, well... That was no credit to me. Even if I
had
pinned down the main battle fleet for her.

Then our cart was swinging off the taxiway and onto one of the smallest, most remote and decrepit hardpoints I'd ever seen. There were weeds growing four feet tall out of the cracks in the pavement, tough and healthy enough that they'd survived exposure to multiple Field landings, and the cracks they emerged from were so long and wide that I was surprised the surface was still capable of serving its intended purpose. But it did, I supposed. And if one was severely short of capital, well... One made do with what one could afford.

I knew the plan well—we all did. Heinrich was supposed to ring the intercom at the airlock and identify himself as the CleanAire representative who'd been called. Then Captain Gaines would open the big clamshell cargo doors, and we'd roll aboard cart and all. A few minutes later the ship's legal cargo—damaged and worn-out Imperial ship-drive parts being returned home for servicing—would arrive and be loaded. Because these were 'rush' items, we'd be inspected and cleared almost immediately. Then we'd up ship and no one would think twice about us Rabbit-techs.

And so everything went, for a time. Heinrich made the initial contact, the doors opened, we drove in...

...and immediately, I knew that something was terribly wrong. It wasn't the ship itself, even though it was a retired Imperial Navy fast-courier vessel. Smugglers loved the things to no end and you found them all over civilized space, even though they were poorly-designed deathtraps in my book. The vessels were designed to operate without an engineering staff—all the readouts were either monitored by the ship's computer or glommed onto the pilot's board. This was no way to run a safe vessel—an engineer made his decisions based as much on the "feel" of a ship's Field as anything else, and that was only strong enough to monitor back in Engineering proper, right next to the control rods. This wasn't merely my prejudice as a qualified engineer showing through—the safety record of ships rigged like this one was poor enough that they could only be certified for freight, not passengers. If a captain wanted to take his chances on a black hole suddenly imploding out of nowhere in the location where his drive had just been, that was all well and good. But he was
not
going to be able to risk any other lives besides his own. Or not legally, at least.

No, it wasn't the ship. It was her
captain
that bothered me, though for the life of me I couldn't say exactly why. He was a perfectly-average appearing individual of perhaps fifty-five or sixty years of age, all smiles at the prospect of making good money for what looked like a very simple and easy piece of work. Or maybe that very averageness was what'd set off my alarm bells after all—I'd once jokingly mentioned to the Yan brothers that the next time we met they'd have to introduce themselves all over again because I expected they'd be getting plastic surgery pretty frequently in their line of work. "Not at all," Yan Ho had replied for them both. "Because you can always tell right away when someone's had their face altered. It's a dead giveaway that something's not as advertised." And then he'd gone on to tell me about some of the telltales—unnatural curves to the eyebrows, tight-stretched skin, coloration that doesn't look quite right when examined carefully... Sure enough this smuggler had once had a good bit of work done on his face, I decided as we Rabbits trooped deeper and deeper into the ship. But he was a
smuggler
, after all—it was the one thing we knew for certain about him, the very reason we'd hired him. I was willing to bet that he wasn't exactly the only member of his profession ever to undergo such a procedure. And yet the alarm bells rang and rang and rang—there was
something
about this man! My nose wriggled impotently under the respirator mask. Somehow I was sure that one good sniff would resolve everything for me. I might as well have wished for the moon.

Then, just as the smuggler swung open the cleverly-concealed door to his most secret of cargo holds, I had an idea. The captain had lived aboard this ship for weeks if not months or longer, and what was ship-stink if not the built-up and accumulated body odors of the crew? "Excuse me, Master," I said to Heinrich, keeping my head low and submissive. "Please?"

Heinrich, playing the part of an Imperial Master, placed his hands on his hips. "What now, you hare-brained fool?"

"I-I-I..." I stuttered in apparent fear. "I have to use the bathroom before I go in there."

Heinrich's lips flattened in pretended anger, but his eyes were questioning. He knew I wouldn't deviate from the plan without good reason, and yet... Finally he turned to the others. "Did any of you other idiots drink too much water against orders?"

Tentatively Nestor raised his hand. "I... I'm sorry, sir."

Heinrich cuffed him, hard. The he shoved the small Rabbit in my general direction. "We'll have words about this later!" he declared. "And that's a promise." Then he turned to the smuggler. "I'm sorry, Captain Gaines. Where were you planning to water the livestock?"

He frowned too, then pointed down a companionway. "Make a left at the bottom," he instructed. "You'll run right into it. And hurry! We don't have much time!"

"Thank you sir! I gushed. "Oh so very, very much!" Then I raced off in that direction, Nestor close at my heels.

45

My aide and I went down the companionway as directed, then broke to the left. Instead of seeking out the head, however, I continued on down the corridor, hunting for an air filter. If I was correct about ship-stink, then the filter should've long ago captured the scent of "Captain Gaines". But it wasn't to be, however—I didn't make it ten feet down the corridor before Nestor grabbed at me and dragged me to a silent stop. His eyes were wide open and he was trembling like a leaf—I hadn't seen him so terrified since… Well, since I'd hauled him out from alongside the bloody corpse of a man I'd just murdered. "Sir!" he whispered in tones so low only a Rabbit could hear them clearly. "What are we going to do? What
can
we do?"

My own eyes widened—it'd been so long since I'd seen Nestor behave like an abused slave that I no longer thought it possible. "Are you all right?" I demanded.

"Oh, sir!" he wept, burying his face in my shoulder. "I don't know what's going to happen now!"

"What do you mean?" I demanded, pushing him away far less gently than I'd have preferred. But there was so little time. "What's wrong?"

Nestor blinked. "Didn't you recognize him?" he hissed.

"No," I replied, keeping my voice as steady and calm as possible. Fear can be at least as contagious among Rabbits as humans, and seeing Nestor in such a state, well… I had to admit that my knees were starting to knock a little too. "Recognize who?"

"That so-called captain!" he sobbed, pressing his face into my shoulder again. "He's Lieutenant Jeffries! And such an awful, terrible Master
he
was!"

At Nestor's words my own mind went 'click' as well. You can change a man's face, yes. But it takes far more to alter the cadence of his speech or the way he stands and walks and moves. Jeffries had always reminded me a bit of a rooster, the way he strutted about with his eyes eternally darting left and right, and this smuggler had exactly the same foible. Nestor's unblocked nose had done the trick for him; indeed, the lieutenant's scent had carried so much power and had brought so many nightmares back to the surface that he'd reverted to the powerless, hopelessly-abused cabin-boy he'd been during his former acquaintance with "Captain Gaines".

"Nestor," I said firmly. "Snap out of it. I need you now like I've never needed you before."

"He's going to betray us!" Nestor half-wailed—if he grew much louder his voice would carry all the way back to the smuggler's hole. "He'll sell you to the Imperials and then take me and… and…"

I knew
exactly
what Nestor's "and" was, and it repulsed me as much now as it had then. So I reached back, grabbed a handful of air, and punched my friend in the face. "Snap out of it!" I demanded. "You've got to! Or by god that might just be exactly what happens!"

My fist struck home, hard. It shouldn't have—Nestor's number-one hobby was hand-to-hand combat and normally he was as slippery as an eel. "Ow!" he complained, pulling back and looking up at me. "What was
that
for?"

He still seemed fuzzy-headed, so I played dirty by kicking at his right knee. Instinctively he pivoted inside the stroke and countered with a series of stinging jabs to my chin. "Quit that!" he demanded. "No one ever beats up on me again, sir! Not even…" Then his eyes widened again, and this time I could see that he was back. "Oh my!" he whispered. "Sir, I'm so…"

"We all have our demons," I replied. "And heaven knows you’ve got better reason for them than most. You were practically a child." Then I shook my head. "But that's not important right now. The big question is, what are we going to do about Jeffries?"

46

That question, unfortunately, answered itself. "Are you two about finished down there?" the ex-first lieutenant of HMS
Beechwood
demanded.

"Not quite yet," my aide replied. "We've… Made a bit of a mess, and we're cleaning up."

"Good try, Nestor," "Captain Gaines" replied. "But not quite good enough. I've already got the rest of your crew locked up, you see. That's a complete dead end down there—it leads nowhere and offers you nothing in the way of leverage; no one knows this ship better than I do. Two squads of fully-armed Imperial marines will be guarding my main cargo when it arrives in about… Oh, say five or ten minutes now. My worst-case scenario is that they'll be absolutely thrilled to death when I tell them who I've got trapped down in my ship's head." There was a long pause. "What's
your
worst-case scenario, snotty? Or should I call you Commodore Birkenhead these days?"

My lip curled in mixed rage and revulsion. I'd always hated being called "snotty", moreso by this man than any other. "You'll call me Commodore Birkenhead
sir
, Lieutenant!" I replied. "Your commission is still active, if only in the deserter's section."

"Heh!" Jeffries replied. "You've done well for yourself, as I always knew you would if you got out of Zombie Station alive. Which, I'll add as a fellow professional, was a damned slick piece of work! I offered you a junior partnership at the time, you may recall. My respect was sincere then, and is even moreso now. Who knows where we might've gone together? I haven't done too terribly badly myself, considering that I began with nothing but a lifeboat and a borrowed Imperial uniform. As opposed to a Royal Heir bloodbrother and the whole House of Marcus standing behind me, that is."

"I always figured you'd make it out too," I replied, a bit grudgingly. "You're many things, Lieutenant. But you're neither stupid nor prone to panic."

There was a brief silence as both sides thought things through. "Your friends are locked in my secret hold," Jeffries said after a time. "And, I assure you, they'll not remain alive one second longer than I wish. They could easily already have been dead, but they're not. Do you understand me?"

"Yes," I replied. "You want to see if I can offer you a better deal than the Imperials."

"You were never one of the stupid ones either, David." He was practically purring now. "There's a healthy streak of ruthlessness in you as well. What a pity that we never teamed up before now!" There was another short pause. "Come on up the companionway, and let's talk some serious business. Bring Nestor with you, but stay at least twenty feet away. I've got an Imperial blaster just like yours, and we both know perfectly well what a mess it can make when set to full power, wide dispersion."

47

I looked at Nestor—he seemed to be at least somewhat steady on his feet once more. Then, as casually as I could manage, I climbed the steps and faced my former nemesis. His true identity was so obvious now that I had to shake my head in wonder that I'd ever been deceived at all. "How'd you get the ship?" I asked him. "Win the former captain's trust and then murder him in his sleep?"

"That's exactly how you'd have done it if fate had landed you in my place, isn't it?" he replied with a little shrug. "Beyond that, I don't care to discuss the matter. And keep in mind that we've very little time."

I nodded and looked down at the blaster, which he held calm and steady. That was why I found it so difficult to deal with Lieutenant Jeffries, I decided. He was absolutely correct in that we weren't all that different, deep down inside. We understood what made the wheels of the universe turn, and were fully capable of jamming them up and making them grind one upon the other when it suited our own wants and needs. In a tight situation where he could be trusted, there'd be few men I'd rather have on my side than the quick-thinking lieutenant. But that was the difference between us, right there. While I admittedly had far more blood on my hands than he did, at least I'd killed for what I believed in my heart to be a worthwhile and noble goal. Lieutenant Jeffries cared only about himself—he was a pure, true sociopath. The man would turn his back and run away from anything, the moment he considered it advantageous to do so.

So I'd just have to make that work in my favor then, wouldn't I?

"James is going to win the war," I began. "With or without me."

Jeffries grinned. "Why do you think you're still alive, snotty?"

I nodded back. "Then you understand that your role in my capture and execution could never be kept a secret by a defeated Empire, and that James
would
hunt you down and kill you if it took him all eternity."